Isolation was no longer an option as the strip malls and subdivisions began to pop up around the homestead like so many ugly mushrooms.

"The old neighborhood's been overrun by developers and every other kind of douche bag," chirped Benny as we sat at the bar that was scheduled for demolition a week hence.

High school was over and suddenly the summer seemed to stretch into infinity.

She raised her glass and toasted all the other beautiful losers of the world.

Stupidity was a disease and that year it spread like wildfire.

We watched the city burning below and knew we would be blamed since the bosses we worked for always managed to escape condemnation.

Humanity was nothing more than a ragged bunch of apes with a lot of fancy toys.

The peep shows had become souvenir shops and the pimps now hustled photo ops with plush Disney characters.

Bad cops and worse women were Dave's downfall.

The American dream had become just that.

They found her wandering on the fringes of the city with a dead look in her eyes and an empty gun in her hand.

The coffee was that much better because we were drinking it around a campfire as the sun burned away the mist on the mountainside on a June morning.

It seemed like farce until it became fact.

I could still make out those fearsome eyes staring out from the ripped and faded photograph.

Frank no longer spent his days in the bars as he had become too busy writing about all the time he spent in bars.

Trembling with anticipation, she waited with the sheets pulled over her head.

A dull roar kept up outside that day as the entire block emerged en masse to spruce up their yards.

After she lost her job Isabelle began to look for any excuse to dress up and was often seen wearing a mink stole while taking out the trash.

Inundated with information, drenched in data, we were drowning in a social media sea.

Lance only felt comfortable within the confines of a simulacrum so he moved to Las Vegas and got a job at a wax museum.

Finding love was nothing more than psychological warfare for the pair and they had spent many a year in the trenches perfecting their strategies.

Violence was our candy.

Her list of abandoned and forgotten projects grew steadily year by year.

Believing it wouldn't be long before they broke down his door Dave spent his day destroying evidence.

He felt truly at home in the cramped old library surrounded by the smell of moldering books and titles recalling a different era.

"Whether I was willing to admit it or not we were slowly drifting apart like Arctic Sea ice in summer," he told me through his tears.

He crossed the country on horseback, a price on his head and a target on his back, just to spit on his enemy's grave.

Twenty-eight days later I stepped out into the blinding light of the outside world and headed to the corner where I knew I could score.

We had some good times in the Badlands.

Her memory was a tumbledown mansion to which she had retreated years ago.

Like a prisoner who made his escape using only a spoon to dig his way out of his cell, I chipped away at my workload hoping to leave the office before midnight.