Love Is

Coffee and grapefruit juice in the morning

A double espresso

Fizzy water

Whiskey at night after a long day

A bottle of Guinness while cooking with mi esposa 

Homemade meals, especially salmon and asparagus and roasted red potatoes

Lox on a bagel

The Sound and the Fury, The Master and Margarita, The Obscene Bird of Night, Belfast Confetti, Vilnius Poker, The Color of Summer, Written on the Body, Three Trapped Tigers, Finnegans Wake, 2666, Senselessness

Much of the poetry of Ana Akhmatova, Anne Carson, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Maurice Riordan, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Cesar Vallejo, Nicanor Parra, Vicente Huidobro, Mina Loy, Philip Larkin, and E. E. Cummings

About 1/5 of the poems of Frank O'Hara

All the books of Kurt Vonnegut

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Women and Factotum by Bukowski and not giving a damn that I still love Bukowski when my academic cohort would tell that doing so is wrong

The beguiling madness of Antonin Artaud

All the books in English of Sergei Dovlatov and the hope that more will be translated

Shane MacGowan’s banshee wail

Drunkenly singing along to "Left of the Dial" by The Replacements

Standing in front of a room of bored college freshman and thinking: “Okay, get ready, goddamnit”

Pizza

The Melvins song “Boris” and Tom Waits’ “Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Twa Corbies” as done by Boiled in Lead

The Mekons

Writing a book I never imagined anyone would want to read and then publishing it and hearing nice things from people, even if it embarrasses me

Writing another book that I can’t imagine will ever become anything

Editing old poems and realizing that I am the shit

Making lists

Grindcore

Jazz

The Boredoms

Used bookstores

Chicago, save for the times I hate Chicago 

New Orleans

Vancouver

Mexico City

Chiapas 

Paris

Lisbon

Taipei

Tunis

London

Bar hopping on 95th street in Oak Lawn, IL with my friends and my brother  

Walking down Central Park West during a frigid January in NYC with mi esposa and thinking of John Coltrane

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Calvary and The Guard and the presence Brendon Gleeson brings to films

David Thewlis doing the best acting possible in Naked

The opening credits sequence of Twin Peaks

Quoting The Big Lebowski and annoying people in the process

Much of the sketches of Monty Python, Mr. Show, and SCTV

The Third Man, which gets better with each viewing

The Butthole Surfers

Breaking Bad

Miller’s Crossing

After Hours

Bongwater (the band, not the actual water)

The later poems of W. B. Yeats

Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome”

Reign in Blood by Slayer

“Whiskey in the Jar” as done by Thin Lizzy

Italian food, Japanese food, Thai food, Mexican food, Indian food

Eating dinner with mi esposa

Taking long walks with mi esposa

Drinking with mi esposa

Watching shitty movies on cable with mi esposa

Reading books with mi esposa

Sleeping next to mi esposa

Throwing a ball and my perfect dog running for it, barking in anticipation, never tiring of this