During the quarantine, I pass in and out of not liking myself.  I search for things to soften the light.  You need to understand this for what it is, a broken-down apartment on the Pacific Coast Highway. I have to get there.  It’s important to me.   Most of us are children of sentimentality as we lie beside a lost love on the highway, waiting for her or him to come back to us.  Come back, come back, we say, in the sift of our dreams.

Cheap blue sunglasses give my face a cinematic look and I’m barefoot.  Yeah, I’m sitting here on the sidewalk in front of the 7-Eleven on a blistering afternoon in Austin, Texas waiting for a bus to crash into the store.  This particular 7-Eleven gives off vibes like that because several years ago Charles Whitman shot a man coming out the door carrying a cherry Slurpee. …