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I know that the most popular hotel paintings are: beach after everyone is dead, beige interpretation of the rage of a cat, squares going wild, a rose’s period.
Somehow I feel more alone here with my family than I ever did in our long succession of isolated apartments.
watched everything, swimming with the sensation of learning what I liked.
He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about “moral choices the Transformers are forced to make.” At no point did I interrupt him to say, “But Dad, they’re cars.” This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.
Some of the lambs are being silent . . . and some of the lambs are being so loud they are breaking the sound barrier.
God is a cop with a monkey sidekick, and the monkey sidekick is mankind.
I have many friends, and am well-loved across America.”
When the patriarch of your family is a priest, it can be difficult to tell what is church and what is not.
Lightning was sunlight played backwards, and moms hated it.
Dads didn’t care about lightning, because lightning was on the cover of all their favorite albums.
he would very quickly die of treat deficiency,
It looked like the place where Smokey the Bear went to cheat on his wife.
Cornish hens are on sale at the market across town, and “you know how crispy their little bodies get.”
I had never been happier in my life. I still remember the look of bewilderment my father directed at me as I whispered “thank you” to my parents and then buried my face in the cat’s fur. “What the hell,” he said under his breath, and then set about installing batteries in that empty part of its belly where the uterus had been scooped out.
Her sister, maybe, in Michigan.
“You’re telling me you’ve never been to Erzgebirge-Palace?” she asks, incredulous. “Dot Com? It’s famous!”
By instinct I understood that the most interesting one is the information angel,
He refers to all athletes by their first names, as if they are his sons.
I have what you might call an overdeveloped sense of the significance of objects,
“It tastes like being thrown through a window.”
“Now listen to me very much,”
You get a gift on Easter too—a trash can that looks like a tree, to throw all your sins into.
If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.
The unrepeating fingerprints fall all around me,
The best way to write poetry, in my experience, is to first fail spectacularly at singing.
But you can’t always sing in a soundproof room.
When you cannot pinpoint a pain in your body, the whole world seems to throb with it.
Why could I never do it? Because I sang down into myself, because I was a writer.
At this point, I consider myself on an anthropological mission, much like Margaret Mead. I have discovered that this makes almost anything bearable—it would have been such a salvation in my childhood to think I had been sent on a mission to notice.
They tasted like the second dimension,
I hope that you can see all twelve of my gray hairs from up there and are reminded that witches exist.
he is bursting out of his outlines.
LATE THAT SAME AFTERNOON, we went to pick him up from jail—not a scary place at all, just a square place piled with paperwork.
He looked just the same only more so,
When I saw that word “marianismo” for the first time, I put it in my pocket. It was exact change in the form of a concept and I knew I would need it someday.
a pizza is by its very definition made out of choices.
When the men walked in on these low susurrating conversations, they looked unnerved, as if they suspected us of trying to decide something in their absence.
Mom had instructed us never to interact with them because they were “a family of drug dealers, whose daughter calls me a bitch whenever she sees me.”
the girls kept very still and somehow folded themselves tinier and tinier, like those notes we passed in class that told you who you were going to marry.
girls pressing books into each other’s hands with millennial urgency.
I did not have the right clothes, I did not have the right information,
We never could control what comes out of our mouths, which means that most of the time we say stupid things and then sometimes something beautiful pops out, whole, intact, and sweet, like a piece of fruit in reverse.
It’s always strange to encounter words like “trinity” and “mercy” and “infinite” outside the dictionary of the church. Seeing them in the wild is like seeing a teacher outside of school, dressed in normal clothes.
He laughs, and it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in ages that is set loose from theology and participating in the world.
We called it Last Rites, but the Eastern Orthodox had a similar ritual called The Office at the Parting of the Soul from the Body When a Man Has Suffered for a Long Time, and I liked that better, because I liked words.
the spotlight of personhood shone on him,
I know everything about you, I see everything about you, looking at you is just like looking in a mirror. When I stared back at him, it was not to be defiant, but to insist that I was not simply the image of everything he hated about himself and was powerless to change, that my face was distinct from his, was mine.
I don’t have a house either, and I don’t know that I ever will, and a house seems like the ultimate acre to me, the place where you can finally live a real life.
When I was a child, I always hated being used in my father’s sermons, shrunk to a symbol to illustrate some larger lesson, flattened out to give other people comfort or instruction or even a laugh. It did some violence to my third dimension;
all this is an attempt to fit him in the glass box of a good sentence so everyone can see what he means. But it won’t work, the words can’t hold him, and I am glad.
