My youthful awkwardnesses lingered well into adulthood, particularly in matters of romance and in the realms of emotional constipation and self-protective indecision. I expected that emotional cud to feed my mental gnashings all the way to D.C.

(I don't know that "all the way to D.C." means anything outside of my head. It's a reference to the gospel song "Long Walk to D.C.," which I know from the Staple Singers recording.

I like to allow for the cosmetic appeal of connections between words, incongruous words that merely sound right when mashed together but that nevertheless produce new and legitimate meanings.

What do you think about conversations of the 12th century? What do you think people talked about on what would later become the continent of North America?

I met a man who enjoyed describing his desk. Every detail, down to the favorite place to put the bottled water.

I am stronger from my losses. Wins weaken the spirit, but fortify the ego.

Stand back, gentlemen. The telephone is about to ring like you've never heard it ring before.

Conversations go nowhere good when they contain the phrases "In my country we do this differently" or "This is America".

I mention the closure of a store not out of nostalgia for the place that closed but in anticipation of what might come next.

I would not object to the privatization of most municipal services. For-profit toilets would make for an entertaining competitive space, with aggressive television and radio commercials imploring customers to "Come, use my shitter."

Fill your idle ears with the sounds that already surround you. There is more in the air than you realize.

Does data weigh anything? Data accumulates at terrabytes per second, yet the weight of our planet remains the same. Data does require the weight of earth to increase, though, since storage materials weigh on the surface of earth. Data itself, like human thought, weighs nothing. The overhead of storage materials, however, gives lie to the notion that data is weightless.

A garbage can stuffed with dead rats would be looked upon with sinister danger and trepidation by neighbors and strangers alike. How to score this thing? How to politicize a trash can filled with dead rodents?

I dreamed the subway station was in my bedroom window. The station was surrounded by elderly tourists who liked to take the train from this station because it was well-lit and loud as hell. I had to push my way through the crowd of tourists to get my jacket and satchel off a bench.

secrets arise from barcodes, unexploded pockets, un-opened mailboxes on rural routes and sparsely populated pages of decades-old telephone books before there were phone numbers, before dial tones, before busy signals.