I'd like to tell you that I'd seen it coming, Jaabo's love for the opium pipe and all that, but I hadn't, although I should have--Nosferatu being a tad more acute than your average goat farmer--and the only thing I can think of that might have lulled me to sleep was, well--Wizards?

Hell, Wizards, even the bad ones--who thinks of them in connection with something so street-level low-rent as dope?

They've got magic to play with!

Yet here Jaabo…

"Red's Blues Club," one of my paintings in progress

The mingling of pork fat dripping on hot coals,…

I looked at Duklus as Jaabo talked of power, and his face was unreadable now, and I wondered what thoughts were churning inside him, because churning was surely what they were doing as Jaabo kept on with his story.

It was the tone Jaabo used, almost off-hand in a smooth, deep, rich voice, this notwithstanding the hisses and clicks of the language--and this smoothness and depth bespoke what I'd call a proprietership of the knowledge of power, shared now by a teacher…

Alice orders chicken with gruyere Comté wrapped in ham cured in Bayonne, mustard and tarragon sauce with pilau rice, and I go for steak and frites. The waitresses weave between tables with a certain grace, and it occurs to me that maybe this is what they do between ballet performances.

When the food is delivered, we eat in silence and I consider Alice’s place in my life and how her wisdom is the bulwark that has so often in the past prevented me from rushing headlong over the cliff…

This week he comes in and, once he settles into his usual spot, the oldest of the geezers at the adjacent tables turns to greet him, forgoing any salutation and just asking point blank how he’s doing.

He returns the lack of smalltalk, smiles and says he’s fine, and shoots the senior’s inquiry right back at him.

The old-timer says he figures he’s doing fine for 94.

He suddenly realizes that the old guy’s younger buddies have probably put him up to breaking the ice; that…

Many people said it on hearing that I regularly rode pillion but while the prospect, for example, of six hundred kilometres from Amsterdam to Berlin was daunting I saw it as adventure, since my only responsibility was to sit still..

The man responsible for that said he could never contemplate the pain of childbirth.…

The old folks always loved to tell the story of grandpa Ali’s brother who wrestled a mountain lion to death one night while protecting his flock in the hills of Lebanon. The fact or fiction didn’t matter because the pride was in his strength of resolve and character and my Jiddo (grandfather) seemed to have that same undisciplined…

That’s you.

That’s not me… that’s you.

Uuh-uuh, that’s you and that’s me.

No, that’s me and that’s you.…

Jaabo laughed, as if he'd seen the flash in my eyes, and began:

"Power," he said, "is held by the man who can take the world and shape it to his own desires. And whereas the same might be said of ice ages, earthquakes, tornados, a man must take hold of other men's minds to achieve the ends power mandates.

"All men," he went on, "are possessed of hopes, dreams, and fears--constituents, with will, that make up the psyche--and each man's psyche is shaped in turn by all the living…

When were about 50 miles from home,  Buddy turned to me and said, “Did ya hear that Hostess Twinkies is goin’ bankrupt?  I’m sure gonna miss those little yellow cakes with the creamy white filling.”

Neither of us was much lookin' forward to gettin’ home.

“No matter how low I’m feelin’ Frank, whenever I bite into a Twinkie, I feel like the world’s a friendlier place.”

As Buddy was talkin’, I  just looked in the rearview mirror and…

NGOs put ‘exposure’ high on the agenda when introducing strangers to projects they want funds for; I mean, when they take you to districts where shelling has brought people and buildings to their knees.

Exposure is just another word for orientation to extremes where the people had nothing even before a quarter of a million dollarsworth of  hits came in - nothing that compares to fresh water at the turn of a tap, or a lavatory that flushes.

The question is, what would the poor…

This guy Charon was starting to get on my tits. He's just a boat driver for fuck's sake, he rows this boat across the river Styx, and it's not exactly a transatlantic liner believe me, and gets me to the other side.

"I don't do return fairs," he growled, .."this is the boat to Hades, once across, never to return."…

1992 - When I was ten years old my father bought my sister and me Sega and while I thought it was the best invention in the world it didn't keep me from jumping ramps with my friends' dirt bike (since my father thought girls should only ride ten-speeds),  swimming into the deluges that developed after heavy rains, catching tadpoles and crawdaddies just because, making mazes in the sand to race frogs - see which one could make it to the other side, or hunting squirrels and…

Okay, so this power that seemed to have gotten us all in a stew--once again, what was it?

Duklus blinked and stared into space for a moment, then smiled, a sort of frustrated sheepish production I thought, as if he should have had answers that rolled off the tongue, and with a wry gesture he gave the floor up to Jaabo, whose own expression, ghosted like much else about him, said, Who else to tell it, my man?

Who else indeed but the Magic Man, right? And as he turned to…

She wanted him to be in her life because he was the first guy she met that made her feel like a woman who was loved.

All he wanted was to get into her pants and inside of her so his need for physical stimulation could be satisfied.

She wanted the baby that she carried inside of her to be a part of their lives because it was the love child that represented the special relationship she believed he and she had.

He had fathered a child and believed it made him a man because…

That I did not wake any as I walked among them was a credit to my skill, or perhaps it was my desperation. The women lay in chairs and on the floor and under the table, covered in quilts, sleeping in their clothes, tousled hair and soft breathing coming from everywhere, and you could have mistaken it for a sleepover. I stepped in and around them, firewalking, searching for the fluid in a bottle that could be hidden anywhere. Rooms to check downstairs in the dark, then upstairs, feeling my…

Re-reading the previous bit of narration I'm struck by the phrase "the mere mention of which made his tongue hard"--slangese that is rather at odds with the generally solemn tone and word choices I've used to bring the story along to this point.

The phrase evokes notions of sexual arousal, and in turn paints an almost proverbially cartoonish picture of greed, and thereby implicitly stands as ironic comment on this whole adventure--a far cry from the previous solemnity surely, and even…

Through the glass wall of the elevator I watch the atrium floor fall away.  It's intimidating, the twenty storeys stretched above and below, layers of brightly lit but empty hallways, rectangular offices, lonely desks and long solemn conference tables surrounded by ghosts because it's now well after 5 PM and the living have evacuated for home. 

As the elevator rises higher I pretend to be in New York City visiting my some-day publisher, but this is not only for fun -- it's an…

In yet another novel I will never write, a tired mother of five never wears sweatpants to church.  She never steps into the vestibule because the youngest one, who is riding on her hip, is screaming again.  As she stands at the door, in the chill, she never devotedly listens to a priest from Burma deliver an unintelligible homily.  The children, who are each two years apart, never sit in the pew with their father, quietly attentive in their noticeably worn clothing, and never cause all the…