Harris Sockel

I never “came out” of “the closet.” And by that, I mean there was no single point in time when I decided to Be Myself. Instead, I just sort of… expanded.

When your mom loses her job, you realize all those years of turning you into you — waking up at 3 a.m. to clean your vomit, fielding existential crises, driving you home from high school ragers — aren’t things she can line-item on a resume. 

We can only be bored after we’ve been everything else. We can only be bored after we’ve wanted to fuck one another and kill one another, after we’ve been monumentally silent and pitifully loud.

These are the friends who greet you with an it’s-been-too-damn-long hug. The friends who knew you before you had sex, before you had a title and a desk and a commute.

Read that book no one asked you to read. It’s not on a single top ten list. It will not give you any talking points at parties. Nothing to flaunt on the subway. You are boring and it doesn’t matter.

I want to hug you again, hug you into a puddle, hug you into a tear, hug you into a gravity missile, hug you into a biscuit, hug you into a pile of cake crumbs on the kitchen floor.

Jesus saves.

10. Go ahead and eat a space heater.

It was the first thing he asked me in the interview: “You can get salad, right?”

Email spam might be the last refuge for shameless heteronormativity in our great wide e-fucked world.

I was krumping to the beat of Mr. Coffee.

In the summer of 2005, there were no hot dogs in a Super Fresh in suburban Philadelphia that had not been touched by an eighteen-year-old who really liked penises.

5. Ignore them. Wonder why they don’t notice you ignoring them.

For some reason, my iPhone asks if I would like to connect to a network called “HOME” whenever I am in one of Manhattan’s most expensive neighborhoods.

Have you ever been inside an ad agency? If you haven’t, you should, if only to realize you are not as cool as you think.

Social media ninja. Certified foodie. Dancer like no one’s watching.

September 2009 and I am on the toilet in Starbucks thinking of prepositions for a lesson on prepositions.

Fine, flossy pubic hairs that, when found on a shower wall, cause one to think, “Our existence is evanescent and soft. We are flickering lights on a dock at night.”