"At 6 a.m. every Wednesday I sat on the curb in the dark and waited for the garbage man to come. He’d bring me broken squirt guns and calculators. I could hear him slowly make his way through our neighborhood via the diesel engine that sounded like an alligator gargling with liquid metal and the loud hydraulic arms that squashed everything to a pancake inside the green machine. The boy who lived next door to me had a huge number of Transformers. It was my belief that he had far too many toys, so I stole what I needed and he never noticed. Stealing was wrong, of course, duh, but it was also a necessary evil, and there was something exciting and freaky about it like leaping through glass without getting sliced up. My thievery was less wrong because the boy who lived next door was a spoiled brat and he needed to share, and so, as the revolutionaries would say—and pardon if this is disrespectful—by any means necessary. Stealing’s an interesting substitute for something, though I’m not sure of what. It filled a hole in my chest."