His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts — his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like … - Jonathan Lethem

I'm always serious. That's the tragedy of my life.

blow the sixty bucks on a movie on Shattuck, on a bucket of fake-buttered popcorn and a shoe-box-size carton of Whoppers or Junior Mints. Cradling the bucket or carton he’d slip into the darkness, washed over by the phantasms of some sex comedy played by American actors a quarter-century younger than himself, who were meant to be taken for adults. This would make it permissible to die. Desirable, even.

So I took my phone to a bakery and coffee shop called Some Crust and read Elena Ferrante at an outdoor table and hoped for some amusing college student to hit on me. I got hit on by amusing senior citizens instead. Perhaps they, like the Klan, had been lately emboldened.