“Eventually my dad got home from work and set his briefcase down.'So. How was practice?' he asked'It was good. Why? Did you hear it wasn't?' I said, trying to keep my cool.'Son, no offense, but you play Little League. It's not the Yankees. I don't get daily reports about who's hitting the shit out of the ball”

“One day I was on a walk with him and my dog, Angus, who was sniffing around in a bush outside a neighbor’s house. My dad turned to me and said, “Look at the dog’s asshole.”“What? Why?”“You can tell by the dilation of his asshole that he’s going to shit soon. See. There it goes.”It was at that moment, as my dog emptied his bowels in my neighbor’s yard and my dad stood there proudly watching his prediction come true, that I realized how wise, even prophetic, he really is.”

“That woman was sexy. . . . Out of your league? Son, let women figure out why they won't screw you. Don't do it for them.”

“I don't give a shit how it happened, the window is broken... Wait, why is there syrup everywhere? Okay, you know what? Now I give a shit how it happened, Let's hear it.”

“My instructor was a skinny guy in his midtwenties who had a shaved head that was always peeling from sunburns and who could only have smelled more like marijuana if he'd been made of it. The training vehicle was a mid- '80s tan Nissan that had working breaks on the passenger side; He often got his jollies slamming them on for no reason and then between wheezing laughs saying 'You were all like 'I'm in control of the car' and then I hit the brakes and shit and you were all like 'whaaaat?”

“My mind was quickly consumed with thoughts of my girlfriend and all the good times we had had, like one of those cheesy montages ni eighties movies, when the angsty protagonist envisions himself and his ex holding hands on the beach, feeding a small puppy, getting into some kind of zany wrestling match with whipped cream. I interrupted my cliché memories by saying aloud: "Ugh, I'm feeling pretty low about this whole thing.""You just gotta try to put it out of your head," he said, folding the paper halfway down to look at me."I know, it's just hard. I mean, I still have stuff at her place. What am I going to do about that? I still have a TV...," I said."Fuck the TV. Leave the TV. Cut your ties.""It's a fifteen-hundred-dollar TV," I insisted."Go get that fucking TV.”

“Even though I grew up two hours south, I had rarely ventured to Los Angeles. I soon learned that my dad wasn't totally off base when he said, "Los Angeles is like San Diego's older, uglier sister that has herpes." . . . "Remember. Family," he said. "Also, how do I get back to I-5? I hate this fucking city.”