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It’s Okay If You’re a Loser and Five People Read Your Writing
Because the work is about integrity, how you impact one person.
Why does everybody have to die? Because everyone does.
It’s 2001, and it’s months before a taxi barrels down the Lower East Side and I’m convinced I’m having a heart attack because too much cocaine, and I wander out of a cab and a boy from the college I used to go to waves me down. Would I like to go to a fancy party five flights up? I’m with Katie and she’s the kind of blonde that sets your heart on pause. And we ride the elevator and I walk into the den of Republican wolves and I lap lines and flush a baggie down the toilet and there goes the flood and was that Felicia Sullivan, and there we go into the hallway, down the hall, into the elevator, and onto the street, and let’s go to Happy Ending because that’s the bar everyone went to before tourists ruined New York. Ruined everything.
But we’re not there yet.
I’m in a graduate school surrounded by kids straight out of college. Kids who don’t have to work for a living while I’m clocking in at a full-time job. Kids who quote obscure 13th century poets while I talk about Cheever and Bret Easton Ellis. And we’re on a lawn in Morningside Heights, it’s orientation for the smart set. I don’t fit in. I’m not as…