Learn to get just drunk enough in the morning that you have a headache by lunch time and cannot possibly eat a thing when the other wives invite you over for mediocre sandwiches and pilfered bottles of sweating cola.

He undressed for bed that night feeling reluctant to examine himself in the mirror. He couldn’t even muster the courage to look down at his own torso and thighs. Who knew what he might find? Some new bulge or wrinkle to prove how quickly he was closing in on his own death? Switching off the light he began to pull on his pajamas in the dark wondering how much Noreen’s intrusion into his life had caused these morbid, almost shameful thoughts.

In contrast to Kandinsky’s intricate articulation (in both theory and practice) of the spiritual purpose of form, de Kooning’s work is an interesting anomaly.  It is curious that de Kooning, in this period of artistic uninhibitedness, is regarded by more than one critic as evoking a sort of vacancy in his work, a deliberate descent into visual paradox, an emptiness and a void. 

There is a Zen story in which a student’s teacher has taught the student, “When drinking tea, just drink tea,” yet the student comes across the teacher in the act of reading a newspaper while drinking tea. The teacher says, “When drinking tea and reading the newspaper, just drink tea and read the newspaper.”

A small concerto of dueling horns was sounding off more regularly now from various sections back in the drive-thru lane, and he’d likely have joined in if he wasn’t literally next to the checkout window and would have to look the cashier in the face once she reappeared. The young mom in his rearview mirror was back at it with her obstinate passenger, who appeared to be exploring the outer limits of her patience with the click-unclick game the mom was clearly losing.

When I was a little younger than you, I never wanted children. The crying! The soured-milk smell. And oh! Never being able to finish a sentence with my friends before a little one would yell, “Momma.” Not to mention getting fat. I don’t think I was exactly selfish; instead, I was gonna be a model.

The Canada geese, emboldened by their sheer numbers, increased their territorialism. Competing with the local raccoons, they looted and toppled trash cans in the park and surrounding neighborhood.