Another Bullshit Night In Suck City
Nick Flynn

Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft.

Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

We catch them on the way down, Joy says. Next stop, the morgue.

He thinks:
This will be my prison novel. My Dostoyevsky. My Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn will be green with envy when he reads this shit.

In 1878 Benjamin Disraeli said: You are not listening now, but one day you will hear me.

[on college]
The carpenter, who recently moved out on his wife and two kids so he can sit outside a tent in the state park under a kerosene lamp each night and kill a bucket of beer in peace, just looks at me and rolls his eyes when I mention that I'm thinking of not going. Don't be an asshole, he tells me, you have your whole life to work.

I swiped the tree after reading a self-help book that said not to make any life changes after a major trauma, to keep doing what you'd always done.

...I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression.

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