Paper Trails

Just finished Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage -- an anthology of newspaper columns by Pete Dexter. Is he good. (Yes, he is.) How could you put down a column that starts like this: "The last I'd heard of Low Gear and Minus, one of them had shot the other one in the leg, trying to kill a pig that they'd raised from a baby in their backyard in Florida. 'That scream,' Low Gear had said later, 'it sounded so human.'"

Hysterical! And they're all good.

This is what he says about writing:
"It is a fact of life, I think, that some of us are born with talent and some of us are born with shit for brains. Maturity comes into it later, when nou try to figure out which way you are.
"From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head's all misshapen and pointy, and you say, 'Son, you were born with talent.'
"And there are other days, often the following day, after you have read those three pages, when you say, 'Son, you were born with shit for brains.'"