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Todd was HIV positive when I met him.
What?
Todd was HIV positive when I met him, he repeated.
And it wasn't... a deal-breaker? I felt ashamed even as I said it.
Amanda... it wasn't a question of deal-breaking. I was in love with him.

I've yet to ask the Internet for tampons, but I've asked for just about everything else.

People always want something from you, he said. Your time. Your love. Your money. For you to agree with them and their politics, their point of view. And you can't ever give them what they want. But you –
Thats's a dreary worldview.
Let me finish, clown. You can't ever give people what they want. But you can give them something else. You can give them empathy. You can give them understanding. And that's a lot, and enough to give.

I thought about the men in my life, the ones who'd let me into their heads and hearts. Most of them didn't have a hard time in certain departments of asking, but when it came to their emotional needs, it was a mess. They could ask for a raise, but they couldn't ask for a hug.

I asked everybody to wish me luck as I started my ten-hour writing day. Ksenia, a Russian author I know on Twitter, offered me an encouraging bowl of virtual borscht. It's a daily joke.

Which is how I arrived, six hours later, at the doorstep of Felix and Michelle. In the moment my finger touched the buzzer, I started to worry that perhaps I was taking this whole Twitter-crowdsourcing thing too far. (...) What if these people were axe murderers?

Axe murderers don't follow me on Twitter, I reassured myself.

But think about what the neighbors say about certain killers, I argued back, as they're being interviewed by the local news. "They seemed so normal."

Nobody ever poured you a Scotch and said, "So, hey, Neil, how the hell are you really doing?" No girlfriends ever asked what was truly going on? That's utterly impossible. I'm sure they were asking but you weren't hearing them.

Maybe, said Neil.

Maybe you just weren't ready to be asked, I said.

Or maybe, he said, I found the person I could answer.

So we threw up our hands and paid for everything ourselves: our web designers, our forum, our emailing list costs. The label asked for access to the mailing list, but I said no. I didn't trust them with my fans' email addresses. They were more than addresses; they were relationships.

Tightening the net is not the same thing as expanding it. If you spread your net too far, too fast, it stretches too thin and it breaks; or it stretches too wide to be able to catch anything.

It tightens when two people meet in line at one of my shows, fall in love, and come to a singing line after a concert three years later, asking me to Sharpie a swelling, pregnant belly.

However, the label thought that we could somehow be megalaunched into the echelon of indie bands that were blowing up and selling tons of records out of the gate around that time: The Hives, The Shins, The Vines, The Strokes. We couldn't: we were too cult-y, our name wasn't short enough, and we didn't actually feel hip or destined for hipness.

Other bands pissed off clubs because they would trash the dressing room and steal liquor from the stockroom. We pissed off clubs because the half-naked marching band outside the venue would elicit noise complaints, or because someone would leave a glittery cage of trained mynah birds in the hallway, thus blocking the bar-backs' path to the ice machine.

The politician Tip O'Neill once said something along these lines:
If you want to make someone your real friend, ask them for a favor.

When things were particularly bad and she was going through boy trouble or something, I'd text,
Everything's going to be okay. Everything exists.
One day, while I was on tour in Europe, I got a text from Casey saying,
Everything is gone.