Sam Lipsyte

It's hard to fuck your girlfriend when she's fucked up and you're not. It's harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.

Why do you think posers pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real. And they know their very desire for it disqualifies them.

I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

Oh, do you, Milo? You__e so selfish. You don__ see the bigger picture._ __hat__ the bigger picture?_ __ou__e still here looking for handouts. Who__ going to take care of me?_ ____ on my knees here, Mom. Not for me, for my family. For my wife. For a beautiful grandson you have totally ignored._ __e__ kind of a brat. I__l be in his life when he gets a little impulse control._ __e__ not even four._ __ have needs. I__ tired of this child-worshipping culture. You__e just a slave to it, Milo._ ____ only trying to be a decent dad._ __on__ waste your time. It__ not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven__ sake, the system__ rigged for white men and you still can__ tap in._ __ou__e right, Mom. What can I say? But still, it would mean a lot to me if you made a little more of an effort with Bernie._ __ernie schmernie. This is my decade._ __kay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way.

I was also one of those people who hadn__ caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody__ cousin__ gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.

So, yes, I should have just surrendered, cinched the entitled scion her little pouch of entitlements, put in my calls to the name shufflers, done my duty. I thought about that moment later on. Maybe I got extratuned to the concept of bitchhood once I became Purdy__, though I must confess I__e always found such usage of the term for female dogs distasteful. My mother was a second-wave feminist. I wasn__ comfortable saying __unt_ until I was twenty-three, at which point, admittedly, I couldn__ hold back for a time.

They weren__ like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.

You said you were having a dream._ __t__ true, I did._ __as it the one where you__e inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it__ not a girl, it__ really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?_ __he . . . no, I don__ think so._ __ get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around.

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

Yes,_ said Cooley. __hat is the question, as the Bard might say._ __he Bard?_ __hat__ so funny?_ said Cooley. __othing, sir,_ I said. __ just didn__ know people still used that term._ __ell, I__ a people, Burke. Am I not?_ __f course._ __f you prick me, do I not bleed, you scat-gobbling, mother-rimming prick?_ Occasionally Dean Cooley reverted to a vocabulary more suited to his marine years, but some maintained it was only when he felt threatened, or stretched for time. __es, sir,_ I said.

She liked reality shows the best, and then the shows that purported to be about reality.

You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.

We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.

Fuck,_ said Bernie. __uckwinky eyeballhead._ __o, Bernie. We don__ use those words._ __hich words?_ __ou know which words._ __ou used them, Daddy._ __ made a mistake. I am sorry I said that word. It isn__ helping with our problem._ __hat__ our problem?_ __here may be no school today._ __hat__ okay,_ said Bernie. __t__l be okay._ We weren__ sure where he had picked up that becalming phrase, probably from us, as we tried to talk ourselves out of the awful lucidity certain days afforded. The whole mirthless dwindle of things would suddenly pull into focus, the crabbed, moneyless exhaustion that stood in for our lives, and Maura and I would both start the chatter, the cheap pep: It__ okay, it__ going to be okay, we__l get through this. When Bernie repeated these bromides, he sounded seventy years old. It broke your heart, as did about forty-three percent of the things Bernie said and did. About twenty-seven percent of the things he said and did made you want to scream and banish him to his childproofed room, or do much more heinous and ingenious things, just so he__ get the point, whatever the point could be with an almost-four-year-old, but still, to bury him alive and then save him at the last minute, or tell him that the state had passed a law against ice cream and he would go to prison if he even thought about it, because they now had the technology to detect illegal mint-chocolate-chip cogitation, had, in fact, the chips for it, seemed, if not conducive to his development, at least on some level deserved. Thirty percent of what Bernie said and did was either on the bubble or else utterly inscrutable, just the jolts and stutters of a factory-fresh brain working out the kinks.

We__ been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming through wires beneath and behind me, or on the night waves above. I wasn__ quite sure how they traveled. Or how much they got out anymore.

How much I'd always envied the tight life of voles. The hidey hole was happiness.

I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge.

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.