Taupe is grayish brown. Mauve is kind of a dusky pinky purple. Mauvais sounds like a color.

Kind of a bright-all-night, false dawn of streetlight on snow.

“Every poem is a description of its own creation . . . a kind of hologram of the mental condition at that moment.”

Success is a kind of failure.

Youth is a kind of genius.

Not-suffering is a kind of suffering.

Oral History

I read somewhere that people don’t mind a long wait for the elevator as long as there’s a mirror in the lobby.

I read that scientists don’t know why some girls’ ponytails bounce up and down and other girls’ swing from side to side.

I read in a blog comment “I feel that hot chicks just like going to public events to be hot” and on some level I kind of agree.

I once read that rich people have to invent new names because the good names get “stolen” by poor people.

I read that the atlas moth is born without a mouth and has one week to mate before it dies of starvation.

I read about a brain-imaging study that showed a dead fish could recognize human emotions.

I read that plants can “hear” themselves being eaten.

I read that Pisces dislike “the past coming back to haunt.”

I spend a lot of time waiting around for something wonderful to happen.

I often feel that I’m waiting for an unexpected life-changing force to come from nowhere—but how can it if I expect it?

I feel most myself—most trapped in my self—when I’m bored.

I experience boredom as a kind of luxurious misery.

I read that geologically speaking we are “marooned in time,” nothing interesting happening for eternity, as far as we’re concerned, on either side.

I asked my parents if they think I look like them and they said no.

Genealogy (Such Deep Creases)

I’ve known all my life that my father’s Uncle Joe was killed by his wife.

It was almost a novelty story—a murder in the family!

At twelve or thirteen, I learned she was a serial killer—Joe the third husband she poisoned with arsenic.

He was twenty-six when he died of kidney failure. A handsome, hero pilot, back home safe from the war.

She brought him fresh juice every day in the hospital.

I was in my thirties when I found out Joe’s mother—my father’s grandmother—my great-grandmother—was “never the same.”

Joe was her favorite. Her life was ruined by grief.

This woman, my great-grandmother, her name was Geneva. I had forgotten.

I have a black-and-white photo of Geneva wearing pants, about to ride in a bucket into Carlsbad Caverns.

When our lives overlapped, for five or six years, she seemed already dead, still and silent.

I was forty when I learned there was no suspicion of murder until the wife’s young daughter started getting sick too. A life insurance scam.