“It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue strips. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie.”

“Me, while I'm heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83, or 455 miles an hour, or true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back in Dulles. Nine out of ten times, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. The other time, it's a vibrating dildo.Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it's even a man. It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.A dildo.Never your dildo.Never say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required the evacuating of your baggage.”

“Three weeks and I hadn't slept. Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body-experience. My doctor said, "Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. Find out what's actually wrong. Listen to your body."I just wanted to sleep. I wanted little blue Amytal Sodium capsules, 200-milligram-sized. I wanted red-and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules, lipstick-red Seconal.”

“It was like seeing someone who wore a striped tie or parted his hair on the left — a detail, but not a telling one.”

“I found Waldo. He was in a strip club. He was hard to spot, because he’d already stripped off his red and white striped sweater and was all sweaty.”

“At the last minute, I couldn't wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on someone's front stoop.”

“Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”