How the f**k did I get here? I thought. If I was going to be completely sober for the rest of my life, if I couldn't even have one drink at the end of a long and brittle day, then the life I lived needed to be a life from which I did not seek escape.

He'd always considered politics a coward's game, and hated that he was forced to play it.

From the short story Crocodile Shoes: She is at that age, the age where all the wrong things seem somehow to stick--fat, the groove between her eyebrows--while everything else--job security, marital happiness, dreams--seem to slip effortlessly away.