Books are a girl's best friend.

If you have time to read one book every two years: Pick ‘Things the grandchildren should know’ by Mark Oliver Everett (definitely my favorite of those last six months, with 'Walden' and 'Je suis simplement ce que je suis' by Thoreau). This book’s got it all.

INNOCENCE : One thing I should tell you is that, as a little kid, I had a very hard time with the realization that inanimate objects didn’t have feelings and thoughts. I would run it through my head over and over but I just couldn’t grasp that the bathroom cabinet, for example, didn’t have feeling and wasn’t thinking something at that very moment. I tried to think of it as wood and metal and nothing more, but it just didn’t make sense to me. I remember being on the verge of tears, standing there in the bathroom, as my mom tried to make me understand that the bathroom cabinet wasn’t going to be hurt if I closed it too hard. I thought of the bathroom cabinet as one of my many friends. Maybe I was confused because I thought of my father as a piece of furniture.

ADVENTURE : I felt like such a lost cause, with nothing going for myself. Something suddenly snapped at inside me : since I’m such a lost cause, what do I have to lose? Before I just give up and die, I need to at least try to do something and I need to get the fuck out of this suburban wasteland.

NEUROSIS : Historically speaking, if I was in a room and there was someone in that room who could make my life an utter hell on earth, I would find that person, hope they would engage me in conversation, feel like I’d found the lost piece to my puzzle, see pictures in my head of us waking up together, our children, our adjoining burial plots fifty years down the line and I’d truly believe that it was all for the best. For some reason, God made the women I’m attracted to crazy. But since I don’t believe in God, then I guess it’s just a fact of life that probably has more than a little to do with my upbringing...If she looked like she had been sprung from the county mental hospital, I was all over it.

HiHiHiHi : I eventually got over my fear of flying just in time to develop a fear of catching people’s germs while flying.

COSMOS : Everyone wanted to go down to the beach during the day, and stare at the stars in the sky at night. I noticed that I seemed more bored with these activities than the others. I realized that people probably liked to look at the vast horizon of the beach and the endless sky at night because it took them out of they daily routine and reminded them about bigger things. But I never seem to stop thinking about these bigger things.

TOM WAITS : I record my parts on two tracks of the cassette tape and leave the other two tracks for Tom to fill. I send the tape to him with detailed instructions of what I want him to do. He ignores my instructions completely, accidentally erases my lead vocal track and sends me back a tape of him stomping on his bathroom floor, yelling and crying like a baby. You don’t tell Tom Waits what to do. It’s great. He’s very apologetic for erasing my vocal and offers to do yard work at my house to make up for it. I, of course, am thrilled by the whole thing. Tom Waits erased my vocal.