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Notes From The Closet

I’m also a fag. Which means that I regard my accomplishments and abilities and virtues with considerable irony. Not because I think any less of myself in the abstract, but because I know how little my accomplishments and abilities and virtues protect me from self-doubt.

Trying To Remember

What Marvin Knows

Marvin had been watching the car, a red Ford Escort, drive by his house for perhaps twenty minutes. It was driven by a young fellow, probably one of the local college students.

Toshi

I hospitalized an obsessive-compulsive depressive who had been trying to kill himself for four years. Fifty times he’d removed his head from the noose to check the lock on the door, change the color of his socks, tie a better knot.

Tumbleweed

A thousand stars, a billion. Thundering silence. It’s Tom who reaches over. He puts his hand on my chest and says, “I wish we had more grass,” and leaves it there. Till I curl up beside him.

When You Get To A Fork In The Road, You Take It

“Here, take this and get out of my sight already,” he’d yell, pushing money into my shirts and pants. I learned to keep my opinions to myself. I also wore clothes with lots of pockets.

Living The Writer’s Life

If you make effort, beings seen and unseen will help. There are angels cheering for us when we lift our pens, because they know we want to do it. In this torrential moment we have decided to change the energy of the world. We are going to write down what we think.

Whirlwind Romances

An eclipse, a single gardenia and an avocado, a fine blue Cadillac

Wild Mind

An Interview With Natalie Goldberg

Wild mind is the huge place where we really live. We are always listening to what I call “monkey mind,” which is constantly saying, “I can’t write, I don’t know how, I don’t want to.” But there’s this huge mind that’s available to all of us, where all things — animals, rocks, us — are interconnected and interpenetrated. This is what we have to connect with in order to write.

Homecoming

A tiny duckling, a bullethole in the ceiling, chocolate chip cookies and bomb craters