Moonlight Mile

I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus they suck the life right out of a party.

My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It’s not an attractive sound, that. It’s high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing. Or maybe I will. Maybe I do. Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost can’t be replaced. I love my burdens.

The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear - that something could happen to her at any moment, something I'd be helpless to stop - had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest.

My blessings outweigh my regrets.

After my daughter was born, I’d considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off.

It's odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy's mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.

Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost can’t be replaced. I love my burdens.

She had the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap.

All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That's all gone around here, my friend.

I'd like to say I found a sublime beauty in it all, but I didn't. And yet. And yet, this life we'd built filled our car

The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in.

That little girl, I adore her, but she’s an anarchist. She wakes us up whenever she feels like it, she thinks high-energy at seven in the morning is a positive, sometimes she screams for no reason, she decides on a second-to-second basis which foods she’ll eat and which she’ll fight you over, she puts her hands and face into truly disgusting places, and she’s attached to our hips for at least another fourteen years, if we’re lucky enough for a college we can’t afford to take her off our hands.

Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It’s like a homepage without a scroll button?

You're just pissed off. And when you're pissed off, you lash out.

Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock.

searched for reasons not to blow my brains out. I came up with two or three dozen real fast, but I still wasn’t certain I could listen to many more conversations between Brandon and one of his “bras.

because you symbolize his cockeyed

have been this other one they call Spartak.

Charming as he was, you never felt fully comfortable with the guy, because he never seemed fully comfortable with himself.

Yeah, well, it’s not like the old days.” I bit into my lobster roll. Maybe the best lobster roll in Boston, which made it, arguably, the best lobster roll in the world. “It’s

After I left Brandon, I met Dominique at the Neptune Oyster in the North End.

conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority.

I just notice people sometimes mistake their life choices for their moral ones.

Goddamn embarrassing what a civilian you've become, man.