As I sat on the edge of the meadow, I wondered if I'd been wasting my life. Yeah, I know, everybody thinks that. But not a day goes by when I don't leave projects undone, conversations unhad, stories untold.

And even now, there's so much I could do, but instead I stare at the horizon. I imagine butterflies, and wonder what simple lives they must have. No-- not simple, meaningless. Though I suppose the two are one and the same. After all, it's easy to get through a day when there's nothing you want to accomplish.

I lament the wasted...

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Pleasure. Burn. They're the only two words on the whole page - in the whole book if he was honest - that he had read and actually remembered. The rest was a jumble of names, bad descriptions, inplausible mixes of action and consequence.

Pleasure, the word just rolled off the tongue, almost like a cat unfurling itself and stretching lazily, purring as it spots some new distraction.

Burn, more akin to an explosion, though with the same purring quality, it flooded into his ears a lot more passionately than pleasure did, filled his mind with images, tortorous landscapes with dark...

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Dispossessed

All he had to his name was this park bench, and not even that.

As he sat and gazed off into the distance, he contemplated his fate. He'd lost his job, then his home, then his family. Nothing was left to him, not even his body that lay six feet under rotting in a pauper's grave. His spirit sat on the bench that the shelter had dedicated to his memory. Suicide had not ended his suffering. Dispossessed of everything he had held dear, he contemplated getting his life back.

His ex-wife stood looking at the bench, at his name...

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"Wait, so he hit you?"

We had been over the story several times by now, as Carl sat down bringing a fresh round of amber colored liquid in pint glasses.

I ignored his question as I tried to figure out if this was another IPA or something different.

"Yes," I said, snapping back to reality.

"Damn dude, that fucking sucks," Carl said taking a sip of his beer.

I shook my head in agreement. Took a sip. It was the IPA. Damn that is a good beer.

"Yeah, he just snapped after I told him he was being an asshole...

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One person shouldn't be able to change your life forever. I think we all know people who have been affected outside of their control - torture, rape, molestation... it's a little fucked up to put love in the same category, isn't it?

Maybe the crucial difference is that it's a sweet anguish. That's why I feel sick to my stomach, I can't sleep at night, my conscious is fixated on one person and one event. It makes me smile when I don't feel like crying. This seems like such a high school thing. Aren't those the cuts that make the...

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Taste was one of those things that was meant to be very personal, and yet everyone seemed to recognise bad taste.

The joke may have been ill-timed, but she maintained that it wasn't in "bad taste" - soon finding herself in the minority (one, in fact).

Fine. Fine, fine, fine - he would've laughed, if he'd been there. Then again, him not being there was the entire point.

He would've laughed at that, too.

It was a nice, warm day, and that was ridiculous - funerals were meant to be full of rain and the dark and thunder and the...

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I think it's number nine. Eight maybe. All I know is my face is slightly tingled.

"Another," she asks as she walks past me.

I give an affirming nod. She has to know I am nearing my limit, but I have learned to play this off well.

"You had the Green Line, right?"

I nod again.

The Cubs are on, and they are losing. Nothing new there.

A couple sits in the corner talking about important couple things.

Two friends sit the right of me, discussing how much their lives and the Cubs suck.

The glass ends up in front...

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Gigantic. It's not a word you use to describe a penis. It's too bulky. Women want softer words. More exotic words. Words that whisper and moan.

Never start with sex either. You start in the middle of things and the audience has nowhere to go. I recommend a bus stop. You get a conversation going. Maybe about how yellow the daisies are lately or why the bees are dying.

Of course you'll think the audience will get impatient. Get to the hard core sex already! But they won't. Anticipation and all. I once wrote a story that had fourteen pages...

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"Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh god. I think there's something underneath the bed."

Jacob sighed, rolling over and twisting the blankets in an infuriating fashion. "Anna, you're twenty-five years old. Don't you think you're a little old for this?" Of course, he would say that.

Anna twisted the blankets right back. Blankets were protection. Blankets were life. If she were covered with the blankets and Jacob were not, the rules dictated that Jacob would be eaten and Anna would be spared. Everyone knew that. But Jacob wouldn't let this go without a quarrel.

"Jesus, Anna! I'm cold! It's...

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I was walking to grandma's when I spotted the yellow box with a question mark on it. I liked it so much that I leaned against it and stuck a little red thing in my chest. Unfortunately, the little red thing was poisonous and I died. My eyeballs fell out and my skin ripped open and I bled everywhere. Then my body shrunk so that I looked like a voodoo doll. I am still standing against the yellow box with a question mark on it.

bruno went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to buy mashed potatoes and figs. He only had...

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