I like driving because I get to listen to an album in a bunch of different places

I just remembered that in high school I had a crush on a girl named Alexa Laser

My mother picked me up from the airport in Baltimore. We got to talking, and she asked me what I wanted out of life.

I had an immediate answer: “the god damn truth”

I am in Virginia and it is strange

EARTH SUCKS

. . . but at least I know all the best people!!!!!!!

Man, what if you had a bunch of money, like more money than you’d ever need in a single lifetime, and you didn’t do anything good with it and were boring as hell?

Uh, I guess that’s most rich people.

:———/

When Jack and I were moving to California last summer, I had us purposely drive the truck two hours out of the way so we could visit Marfa, Texas for fifteen minutes

I think this was the last time I ever smiled. (Hey! That was a pretty good joke.)

I just found this picture again. John McCauley! I like that guy. I gave him that T-shirt for Christmas at a Deer Tick show in Providence a few winters ago. They played in Boston the next night, which was New Year’s Eve, and I went to that as well. Dude wore it on stage.

I can’t remember where this was taken . . . somewhere in Nashville. My friend Carrie sent it to me and said he’d worn it at a show there too.

The week after I graduated from high school I started hanging out with a girl named Madeleine. She was my friend’s girlfriend’s twin sister. I liked her immediately. I had never met anyone like her before. It was easy being around Madeleine. She was so smart and so funny. She was sweet to me during a time when hardly anyone else was.

She had spent a year in Syracuse for school but had recently returned to Virginia because it made her sad to be up there, and to be alive at all.

I used to go to Old Town Manassas and visit her at the little gift shop where she worked. I remember stopping in one day and asking her if she liked to walk around at night. She said she did. I told her I went out after midnight—after the moon was way up in the sky. I invited her to come with me and she said yes.

That night we drove to the street where I grew up and parked by a cornfield. We walked all the way down Old Church Road till we got to the stop sign by Bristow Road.

I had a big black marker with me for some reason. I handed it to Madeleine.

“What do you wish you could stop more than anything else?” she said.

“Time,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

She walked over to the sign and I followed. I bent down and she stepped on my knee to reach it. With the marker in her hand she wrote down the thing we both wished we could stop more than anything else.