You might want to know about me if you're going to be reading my website. Not the important stuff, like my favorite color (it’s black, like my dead heart) or my favorite food (anything that can be deep fried, allowed to cool on a bed of paper towels, and then deep

I refuse to shop there again until I am out of Pepsi, or am in desperate need of pants.

I wanted to express to him what he could do with his insights into my performance (that expression involving several of my favorite words, along with some vigorous and graphic hand gestures), but I decided that since we were in a high-culture atmosphere that I shouldn’t go ghetto on him.

I close my eyes
she's somehow closer now

Under the command of President Bush's two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.

Far from deferring to state or local officials, FEMA asserted its authority to make things worse, said Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, south of New Orleans. When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them away, he said. Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA, Mr. Broussard said.

I was walking around Stanley Park, talking with my homegirl about everything. Then she asks me, apropos of nothing, if I’d ever been in a fight. Es is cool, but she’s a private schooler/Ivy Leaguer, and I doubt that she’s ever slugged it out with anybody, so maybe she wanted to live vicariously through her friend who grew up in the barrio.

This wasn't just a song being sung, but a story being told, full of specific, writerly details. Early on the narrator brings the girl a gift of a flowerlike herb called goldenrod, placing the season as late summer. By early spring, she succumbs to the cancer that's invaded her bones, and on the day she dies, a cardinal crashes into her hospital window.

Just a few months ago, this ranch was known as Camp Thunderbird, the headquarters of a paramilitary group that promised to use force to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking across the border with Mexico. Now, in a turnabout, the 70-acre property about two miles from the border is being given to two immigrants whom the group caught trying to enter the United States illegally.

I’m worried that if I start with the reflection that I’ll trap myself in the past when the past is past and it is the future that I need to get through. Why start with the nostalgia so soon after the events for which I will probably become too nostalgic?