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Realism

For about ten months I worked at a radio-antenna factory in the tiny town of Hays, Kansas. The factory workforce was comprised mainly of the inexperienced, the handicapped, the socially discarded, the desperate, the just-out-of-jail, and the fallen-to-the-bottom-of-the-ladder, with a handful of cheerful, non-English-speaking Mexicans thrown in.

Second Chances

For love, life, laughter

Sunbeams

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

Philip Roth

Jane

Once, while passing notes during a chemistry lecture, Jane and I decided we would each write on a piece of paper what articles of clothing we had not taken off on our last date. When we unfolded each other’s notes, we had both written the same thing: socks.

I’ll Count These As My Candles

This morning I lay under a mosquito net and whispered with my wife as pigeons scratched and cooed on our corrugated-tin roof. Cocks crowed, mangy dogs barked in adjacent fields, and a grandmother with a tattered dress and a beatific, nine-toothed smile swept fallen mango leaves from the ground just outside our door. The ecstatic drumbeats from an all-night Vodou fête had stopped.

The Life Of Alice Peters, As Told By Herself, The Blessed Alice Peters

Please don’t interpret this record as an indication that I lack modesty. Rather I wish to provide documentation that my life was holy, that I deserve to be canonized, and that my grave must become a shrine where the devout will gather with wheelchairs and crutches to hold candlelight vigils, chant in fourteen different languages, and pray for a disembodied me, in full glory and shining robes, to come and heal their hearts. Because after abandoning my body, this earthly inconvenience, I will grow in reputation as the patron saint of heartache.

Laughter

A high-school reunion, a knock-knock joke, a laughing game