The following can also be found in the book Chicago Stories 1996. Click here to learn more, and to download a free electronic copy.

Every time I listen to the song "Seether," I jump around in my apartment and play air guitar and knock shit over and feel like a rock star.

Whenever I go into a public bathroom and they have one of those hot-air hand dryers with instructions on them and someone has scratched out #1 so it reads, "Push Butt," I laugh each and every time.

I came this close about nine months ago to having sex with a man.

I got drunk at Smart Bar once and convinced a guy I met that not only had I sold my novel, but last week the movie deal went through, and I was now currently worth 1.25 million dollars, and the movie was going to star Bridget Fonda and it was going to come out in about a year and a half.

I had sex with my ex-girlfriend after she got married to the guy she dumped me for. And...it wasn't that good.

Maybe the best live show I have ever seen was Bon Jovi, St. Louis Arena, 1987, with special guests Cinderella.

I own nine different videotapes of pornography.

Every time I go to a party, I steal something inconsequential from the bathroom, like a bar of soap or a box of Band-Aids. I have done this at every party I've attended since 1988.

My freshman year in college, in my first relationship ever, I dated someone else at the same time for about a month, and one night I actually fooled around with my girlfriend in her dorm room, ran across the street and had sex with the other girl in her dorm room, then ran back across and had sex with my girlfriend in her dorm room.

The real reason that I haven't shot any new photographs, which was my major in college, since 1991, is that I'm deathly afraid of being a failure in that field.

The reason I switched from playing piano in the jazz band in high school to playing trumpet was so that I could pick up girls.

I agree with some of the things Rush Limbaugh says.

Sometimes, to this very day, I will sit in my apartment and have uncontrollable fits of crying, that can last up to 45 minutes. I have had this problem since I was in third grade.

If I had my choice, I would choose to be born retarded.

In the four times I have been in a fistfight since I was born, I have experienced such a rush and a thrill and a high from the fight that my entire body has started shaking and I've had to leave and be by myself for hours before I can calm down again.

I have had a tongue up inside my anus. And, I have done the same to another.

I had a chance to go to Europe while I was in college, and I turned it down because I have a paralyzing fear of being outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law.

When I lived in Wicker Park, I shared my apartment with this girl that was so psychotic that one night I actually, seriously considered how hard it would be to kill her. Then I realized I had no idea how to get rid of a dead body, so I forgot the whole thing.

I would have sex with the actress who played Blossom in a second. Oh, I'm sorry, I've told all kinds of people that.

I have seen the movie Blue Velvet at least three hundred times.

There's a deep tiny part of me that sincerely believes that Liz Phair would grow to love me if she could just meet me and get to know me.

I have a living, breathing contempt for about 90 percent of humanity.

I used to work at an advertising agency, and when I got fired about two months ago, the shame of it overwhelmed me so much that I almost moved back to my parents' house.

I've pretty much given up the idea that I will ever get married, or have children. The thought of this causes a depression in me that is so vast that sometimes I feel I will never recover.

I am now in a point in my smoking history that sometimes, if it's very early in the morning and it's extremely cold outside, I will cough up blood.

I cried when Robert Mapplethorpe died.

I no longer remember how to write in cursive.

Sometimes, when I'm riding the Red Line, we will be cruising up between Fullerton and Belmont and the Brown Line will be running right alongside us, right at the same exact speed, and I will look across at them and experience a moment of lucidity that approaches the closest I've ever gotten to the sublime, and it is in these moments that I think that Chicago, 1996, is the greatest city that has ever existed in the history of the world, that I am experiencing monumental history by being here, and that I think I might die if I ever had to leave this town.

When I get really drunk, I like to turn up my Walkman so loud that my ears hurt, so that I can drown out the voice in my head which is constantly telling me about cool new things to write about and great ideas for my novel and inspirations for my next photography project. Turning up my Walkman never works, but I believe that I have already made myself partially deaf at the age of 26 because of the process.

I tell you these things not to shock and not as a form of self-therapy, but because I believe they make for a good story, and ultimately, that is what I am here to do -- to tell a story, to entertain, to inform, to spur thought. I hope I have done that tonight.