A Story and a Picture

She didn’t know why she did it, but it’s working, so she’s glad she did. It came over her like a fever, and maybe it was a fever. Maybe the mushrooms that she was growing weren’t the kind that you were supposed to eat, no matter what the box said. Maybe someone poured something into the terra cotta planter at a party, and it changed everything. She ate the sandwich, and then she felt hot. She went outside and found a tree with stringy, supple bark, which she tore off….

Here’s the absolute best thing about modern life – the thing that makes living now better than living before. It’s a portable music player thing. I put thousands of songs on my iPod, and I walk around with headphones in. Lots of people do. But I play my songs in whatever order they want to be played. They shuffle, like a deck of cards – or like Vegas, with hundreds and hundreds of cards. In Vegas, sometimes, the exact right card comes up and you get your 3 of a…

The beginning of the trip, with the streamers and the champagne and the leis and the smiling staff – that was wonderful, like I was in a movie. Everybody was so happy. Maybe my mistake was watching the land disappear behind us, or following cruise ship disasters on the Internet. In the expanse of charcoal blue water, under the blue sky, with only a thin horizon line to separate the two tones, all I could feel was an impending sense of doom. Bilbo Baggins could commiserate, I’m sure, and I…

I really, really liked having money. Past tense. It alienated me from a lot of the people that I love, and it made everything so, so easy. When you have to spread your money over dozens of bank accounts, and talk to investors and accountants and philanthropy experts and charity cases and hangers-on and family members that are suddenly in dire straits, it’s easy to feel very well-liked and wanted. Your phone rings constantly and there are people around, constantly. It dawns on you that what they want is your…

I feel bad for all the people born pretty. You come into the world, and people expect everything from you. Maybe you have big beautiful blue eyes, or a speckle of freckles across your nose, so light they’re almost pink. Those poor souls born with perfect symmetry and piano-playing fingers and blessed with preternatural thinness – those folks were born with winning lottery tickets, and now fate wants to know what you would do with the money. The world really belongs to the ugly ducklings. Born with a blank check…

I met Nina at her work. She worked in one of those cafes where the baristas are allowed to be mean, and wear whatever they wanted as long as they had one of those half aprons on. I googled what she had on her t-shirts. Sometimes it was a band that (of course) I had never heard of. I downloaded their discography and listened to it through headphones on my couch, trying to imagine her listening to the music. The picture I had of her was romantic and probably incorrect…