Novels, suicide notes and memoirs all have one thing in common: they’re all fictions. Novels, obviously. Memoirs, while promising the truth of a life, are still inherently fictional by virtue of what’s excluded and what’s amplified. Memoirs are the manipulative presentation of one’s life for public consumption. The mundane and the embarrassing are

Danny said it took at least twenty minutes of chasing the rooster in circles until the geometry lined up.

Danny had a parrot named Fucker. And besides dealers and hookers, Danny only had two visitors to his house—his mother and his parole officer. The parrot didn’t have many words or sentences to blurt out, because neither did Danny. So his parole officer would drop in, or his mother might bring him a casserole, and Fucker would say one of two things:

The minute you get into your dope is the minute you stop progressing in the progressive world. No need for new clothes, new music, new hair styles. Drugs are beautiful in the way they create a singularly focused mind.

William Eggleston once said that his entire body of work was an attempt to write a novel. I think my entire body of work is a suicide note.

I walked home with my deliquescing cock in my work pants, pretty much having forgotten I may have impregnated a very young girl, wondering what the fuck it was going to take to make me feel whole again, now that I knew it wasn’t sex. Enter drugs.

I’m obnoxiously fastidious about language, particularly the way people speak, and I have very little patience for vocalized pauses such as um and like. Fung could compete on the international stage when it came to vocal filler.

What I love about drug addicts, one of many things, is that they don’t care about the news. News is an abstraction.

The door opened and a woman in her late forties came out. She had permed hair, a linen jacket, printed skirt; her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. So, it’s one of these offices, I thought. An office without a secondary exit. I liked secondary exits. The suffering needn’t meet the suffering in the anteroom of suffering.