As his senses aged and became less acute, they also became less convincing.

Which is less unthinkable—the idea of returning to the beginning, and having to live through it all once more, or being at the end, and never doing it again?

All I can trust right now is this chair, bobbing between glaciers somewhere in the black North Atlantic.

We spent the next two decades holed up on the Cape in a drafty pink ranch house where I slammed out hundreds of short stories for low-paying sci-fi pulps. As it turns out, financial ruin and amphetamines make for a powerful muse. For a time we had a side line raising mushrooms in our basement, but it never paid off. That period finally ended when a collection of my writing marketed under the title The Unsound Mind of L. Rand Steiner met with modest success.

Listen—I never really made it out of there. The kids gave up on me long ago. Ann and I no longer speak. There’s a bad feeling lodged deep in my chest. The last time we spoke my son looked me in the eye and said well, Dad, it’s been weird. I didn’t know if he was saying goodbye, and was afraid to ask.

Shoveling wet, heavy snow in a rage, wind roaring in your ears, you find yourself hoping for a heart attack and thinking, how fucked up is that?

Could you be a little less oracular? It’s irritating AF.

Standing at the back window, sipping coffee and watching the traffic light change colors in the rain. Your world is coming back to you. Soon it will all be too much—but for now you’re grateful.

Looking for the few right words that will fix everything.
Maybe next time.

Realization: you’ll never get those days back again.
Realization: you don’t want to.

She said, if you could kindly refrain from dropping objects where and when they cease to be of interest, it would greatly improve the lives of those around you.

If lost, see where it leads.

It is the theory which decides what we can observe.—AE

Pity, that is to say, empathy tinged with ridicule.

He wanted so badly, just once, to know the right thing to do.