"I’ve seen a ton on the facebooks about “thanking veterans for their service.” As a veteran let me just be very straightforward and honest with you. We didn’t “serve our country”; we don’t actually serve our brothers/sisters or our neighbors. We serve the interests of Capital. We never risked our lives or spent months on deployment away from our family and friends so they can have this abstract concept called “freedom”. We served big oil; big coal; Coca-Cola; Kellogg, Brown, and Root and all the other big Capital interests who don’t know a fucking thing about sacrifice. These people will never have to deal with the loss of a loved one or the physical and/or psychological scars that those who “serve”, and their families, have to deal with for the rest of their lives. The most patriotic thing someone can do is to tell truth to power and dedicate yourself to building power to overthrow these sociopathic assholes. I served with some of the most real and genuine people I’ve ever met. You’ll never see solidarity like the kind of solidarity you experience when your life depends on the person next to you. But most of us didn’t join for that; we joined because we were fucking poor and didn’t have many other options."

"People get really irritated by mental illness. ‘Just fucking get it together! Suck it up, man!’ I had a breakdown, and a spiritual friend came to visit me in the psych ward. And they said, ‘You need to get out of here. Because this is the story you’re telling yourself. You know, Patch Adams has this great work-group camp where you can learn how to really celebrate life.’ It’s something people are so powerless over, and so often they want to make it your fault. It’s nobody fault. I started thinking of suicide when I was 10 years old—I can’t believe that that’s somebody’s fault. Like, ‘Oh, you’re just an attention getter.’ Mental illness isn’t seen as an illness, it’s seen as a choice…. I have a joke about how people don’t talk about mental illness the way they do other regular illnesses. ‘Well, apparently Jeff has cancer. Uh, I have cancer. We all have cancer. You go to chemotherapy you get it taken care of, am I right? You get back to work.’ Or: ‘I was dating this chick, and three months in, she tells me that she wears glasses, and she’s been wearing contact lenses all this time. She needs help seeing. I was like, listen, I’m not into all that Western medicine shit. If you want to see, then work at it. Figure out how not to be so myopic. You know?’"

"Reality depresses me. I need to find fantasy worlds and escape in them."

"The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."