It’d been 5 days since the assembly fuck-up. The house was like a morgue. Nobody’d talked to nobody. I worked as much overtime as they threw at me just to stay away.

Mickey turned and raised his eyebrows to him. “She smokes.” He inhaled from the depths of his belly, smiling, closing his eyes. “Smell that? What you think she does with those ashes?”

On a urine-stained olive green cot in the back room of Rosalda’s Cantina in Ciudad Juarez, I came to. Blacked out. Again. A smell I couldn’t quite put a finger on. Rank breath, a muffled gurgle and what felt like whiskers. I hope not our hostess, or worse, one of her chicas.

Here it comes, kid. For some time upcoming, you'll pass those places and moments when things were shiny and wonderful but the patina of betrayal will be right there to make each one bittersweet. Sonofabitch, I hate this part.

She wanted to be lusted after, to be prey to the kind of men who fetishized her. She understood that kind of power over men. Her husband was not susceptible to that sort of control and, she imagined he might not be even if his eyes functioned.

The tree loved the woman but even more than the woman
The tree loved the idea of being in love.
What the tree didn't know
Because trees were long on roots but fucking short on brains
Was that woman only loved two things:
Herself and immediate gratification.

Captain Jason Blue had been floating in space for nearly ten hours. He was going to asphyxiate in his suit in a matter of minutes.

“I just don't want to lose what little bit of myself I still have pursuing something that will only leave me with nothing in the end."

When someone tells a lie like this for so long to so many people, the lie becomes a habit and habits become addiction.

Intense self indulgence is rarely very different from intense self destruction. It’s just a slower version of it. Unless you’re in Vegas and then the two are roughly equivalent.