Jeffrey Ellinger

6. You write lists for the internet.

1. Las Malas Amistades – “Apocaliptica”

In heaven they must sift out hunger and slavery and war, and absolutely there cannot be Twitter or James Franco.

I wanted us to pass gas when we were old and gray, when we could no longer control our gas. But I ruined that. I ruin everything. My God, my gas.

Be reminded, for the last time, there is no money in writing, at least not in your brand. Hopefully get a job in marketing. Non-profit work if available. Call this your career.

Academic Coercion – This, I recall, was referring to the factory farming of short stories, their proliferation within MFA schools because of their palatability for grading

But what if? What if someone spent years praying that God would send someone they could “get dressed up for and daydream about?” What if they never came?

If you choose me you’re left with a poor decaying sack of water and meat and bones.

“Here’s a man who lived. He thought so much. Then he died.”

You don’t go on anymore first dates, that’s great. Yet you often catch yourself in moments of deep sorrow for those who do. You sense their pain in poorly-lit bars across the city like the phantom pains of a lost limb.

24. I hope they didn’t spend much time naming the movie Heist

79. Always makes me nervous to see small children carrying even smaller children

40. If you’re a writer married to another writer I hope at least your divorce is amicable

The line about Falcor is good.

This next part reminds of Royal Tenenbaums when Owen Wilson’s character says, “We all know that Custer died at Little Big Horn. But what my book presupposes is, maybe he didn’t?”

But all tragedies are terrible. Don’t be redundant. Worse yet, don’t use clichés to inject emotion into a think piece about a tragedy. There’s plenty there intrinsically.

Because we are each unique little apples, each one a special pear. We are not specks of dust in an infinite darkness doing awful things to one another and coating those things with lies.

And so here I am looking at another blank piece of paper. In it, I see the totality of everything I have ever done