#reading

Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I've been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this.

Sorry to trouble you but it looked like someone was using a telephoto lens to take pictures through your windows from the street. If it was someone you know, then sorry for the misunderstanding, if not, though, I got the make/model/license of their vehicle.

Brian (from next door) and his phone number

You don't really need a telephoto lens because we have giant windows in front with no curtains. Sometimes I pause before coming inside and watch Harris and Sam innocently going about their business. Harris mutely explaining something to Sam, or lifting Sam into the air. I feel such tenderness toward them. Try to remember this feeling, I say to myself. They are the same people up close as they are from here.

We all immediately knew which neighbor Brian was. The FBI neighbor. If there's one thing we've learned from Brian it's that being in the FBI is not a secret like the CIA. He wears his (bulletproof?) FBI vest with the letters FBI on it way more than could possibly be required. It's like if someone on the Dodgers wore his uniform to water the lawn. All the neighbors would be like, We get it, dude, you're on the Dodgers.

So the first thing Harris did after I read the note aloud was scoff that of course the FBI neighbor had "caught" someone with a "telephoto lens." And the second thing Harris did was nothing. He was busy and didn't think it was worth pursuing.

"It's a little creepy, though, right?"

"People take pictures of everything these days," he said, walking out of the room.

"Do you think I should call him, though?"

But Harris didn't hear me.

— All Fours by Miranda July

1 SUMMER OF LOVE

I was driving through the pitch black Virginia night, down the perfectly flat blacktop that was once a railroad track, across that high bridge over the ravine, thinking about the details of how one night I was going to drive off it. I was sure I'd never live to the age of eighteen, so I never bothered making any plans for the future. Eighteen had come and gone a year ago, but I was still breathing. And things were only getting worse.

The summer of 1982. That disgusting, sticky, humid weather where your back soaks through your shirt just from taking a short drive. By midsummer everything was a mess. My sister Liz's boyfriend flipped out in our kitchen one night and attacked me with a butcher knife. Soon after, Liz tried to kill herself for the first of many times. Swallowed a bunch of pills. Her heart stopped the moment we got her to the hospital, but they were able to revive her.

Pretty soon after that, Liz and my mom went out of town to visit relatives and I found my father's dead body lying there sideways on my parents' bed, fully dressed in his usual shirt and tie, with his feet almost on the floor, like he just sat down to die at fifty-one. I tried to learn CPR from the 911 operator on the phone, carrying my father's already-stiff body across the bedroom floor. It was weird touching him. That was the first time we had any physical contact that I could remember, other than the occasional cigarette burn on my arm while squeezing by him in the hallway.

I figured driving off the bridge might be the best way to deal with the crushing, lost, and empty feeling of being me. A dramatic way to go, of course. I was a kid. Later in life it would usually be a gun I imagined using on myself. Not quite as dramatic as driving off a bridge in your hometown. You can chart my development this way. In more recent years I would think about pills most often. That dramatic stuff is for kids. I'm mature now.

At the end of the summer, which I had already started referring to as The Summer of Love, I drove my gold '71 Chevy Nova away from home for the first time. I had bought the car that I called 'Old Gold', complete with a stop sign used in place of its rusted-out floorboard, for a hundred bucks from my hot, blonde cousin Jennifer, who years later would die on the plane that hit The Pentagon, September 11, 2001. She was a flight attendant. Sent a postcard from Dulles airport that morning that read 'Ain't Life Grand?' in big letters on the front.

My father worked at The Pentagon back around the time I was born. If I believed in curses, I'd have to wonder if the plane hit the part of the building where my father's office once was. But I don't believe in curses. Life is full of ups and downs. There have been some extremes in my life's case but, considering I had no plan, and very little of the kind of self-esteem you need to get by in this world, things could be worse. I'm just wandering through here, seeing what happens.

I don't know what happens when you die and I don't expect to find out until I die. Probably nothing, but you never know. For now, I'm still alive, and I've come to realize that some of the most horrible moments of my life have led to some of the best, so I'm not one for eating up people's melodrama. Just another day to me.

— Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett