Nice guys occasionally do win.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

From my doorside seat, I hear the fights, the secret phone conversations, and the everyday normalcy that gives away so much about a person. Simon was, for a long time, “the Brown-Haired Smoker.” I keep a notebook next to the door, in the cardboard box.

It’s funny how your mind will create an image of a person and how wrong your mind almost always is.

But if done correctly, stripping can be the ultimate foreplay, a sexual seduction that can wipe clear any rational thoughts and leave a man totally and utterly at your mercy.

Disappointment in others is tough. But disappointment in yourself is far worse.

He doesn’t know why he loves her. But does anyone know why they love? We don’t love people for their traits – traits are common. We love them for their unique ability to tug at our soul, to connect to us in a way that no other person can. Love is unexplainable, unpredictable, and often unreasonable. It doesn’t make sense, and doesn’t care to explain to us its thought process.

Then he drove home, to an expectant wife and a warm dinner. And he realized, with shock, that he felt no guilt. That the fantasies he’d been harboring his entire life had finally been satisfied without any negative side effects.

The second pile is for FedEx. I couldn’t bear the thought of another man in brown picking up my packages.

I’ve taken those drugs, and I don’t want the life they would bring. To have a free body but a caged mind? To stumble through the world in a zombielike state, never feeling anything, never conscious enough to really know anyone? I’d rather live my life as it is. Where I experience everything, even the horrific fantasies of my psychotic mind.