Billiards

As long as we all start bands, the Velvet Underground will never die. Long live Gawker.

The motions

Riding a bicycle is like having sex with one's whereabouts.

Good to be home, baby.

Muscle memory

Scars tissue, but so do triumphs. The slope of yesterday's hill has been coded into the fibers of our hips.

As long as the waters flow

Do we know anything about Maria Strehinsky, the only woman who seems to be doing much of anything on the Atlantic's masthead? Because this trick of constantly hiring female writers to tell hard, politically incorrect truths about gender roles has been feeling a little -- how to say? -- Cowboys and Indians.

Covalence

A few months ago I took a great big breath of friendship and submerged. Now I'm underwater, wondering which way is up and savoring the tiny precious explosions of new energy in my capillaries every time a bond snaps.

Trajectory

My brain has declined with me; my thoughts are wetter, warmer, softer, weaker. But I can still remember that brief arc above the clouds when I was 20, breaking into clean crisp air and seeing every system laid out by the light of the stars.

Keep your lamps

I still keep time by my 2005 earthquake, like the seventh city of Troy. But the candles I lit then to stay alive, which I've kept, are burning out one by one.

How to make money in America

Step 1: Coil the odds as short as you can.
Step 2: Roll the dice.

Immortal beloved

I just can't get over this slightly autistic Photoshop experiment and its promise of a new, strange universe beyond our own. (With more lens flare.)

The laws of motion

These days I'm a machine, obediently crunching through deductions while I spin off into space in the last direction I was pushed. A closed system.

Darwinian socialism

The guy who sits next to me at work just stopped in for the first time after his son's birth, and looking at his familiar face I felt this sudden rush of warmth -- a desire to do favors for this friend and his family.

It's a gift from my ancestors, sowed in my heart: one, two, ten thousand moments of reciprocal kindness in a long, long line.

On the job

Even these days, being part of a newspaper's big voltron body requires a close acquaintance with caprice. We tear through the day on a few dozen slapdash decisions whose outcomes are probably worth tens of thousands of dollars to the beneficiaries or the victims.

2007

My resolution is to use fewer parentheses. Apology defeats the purpose of the offbeat.