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There's a note in my mailbox informing yours, truly I'm to meet representatives of President Dance's this afternoon. It matches the usual criteria: sparse on details; suggestive of larger elements; delivered on the day of the meeting. You learn a cast of faces in your department, earn their names as appropriate, listen for rumors about them and listen to the rumors they share themselves.  I won't pretend like I'm too good for this place. Nor will I play shoeshine-boy to some disgruntled egomaniac if he tries persuading me one of us is possessed by some practitioner of the dark arts hiding in another dimension. I do my job. And I am very good at it.  I know they'll offer me work of some kind. It could be a single assignment or the dawn of a new career. The singles are generally safe to accept with practically zero vetting. I've been asked to review tribunal decisions made in Tequistan. I've been asked to make predictions on scores of renewable-futures. An...

Here comes Chinaski, they said among themselves, heads  lowered to the table in a strange attempt at secrecy.  There he was, reasonably well-dressed, no trace  of the cemetery nor lapse in hygiene nor  angst nor impatience incurred from his being  aroused from (supposedly) eternal slumber.  Trim beard. Even step. Dancing eyes  with small, resilient magic.  He moved with a keen dexterity that if found in a true storybook  would protect him against the annoying ruminations  of the interlopers,  his hands investigating his pockets for various items of value.  They recircumvented as he approached the waiter,  the restaurant. Good afternoon, my man, he said. I wonder  if I could get a table? And of course he could. The place  had a policy: No fucking around at the expense of honored guests;  stock the necessary furniture, the appropriate refreshments;  if it means setting a fire to get rid of stupid people...

Throughout my 20s I wasn't single,  I was abjectly alone. I'd been fortunate  enough in my teens to persuade a few girls  to let me in their mouths, and beneath  their shirts, but even to date my longest  relationship has been about two months,  and I mostly do simple human things to preserve  my at-risk sanity and it more-or-less  goes according to plan.  I'll be 40 in a couple months and I pray thanks  to the tiny god that watches over my life  that I'm not a stranger to the fairer sex completely.  Depending on the light of any ephemeral moment,  I am: Well-groomed and relatively fashionable (I wear  glasses and shave most every day) or I am awkwardly,  slovenly taking the scenic route to the grave.  And I'd like to think my situation was more respectable, that  a woman cooed and purred when I returned to her,  or at this point I could make some serious attempt  at surrender. But the lustful...

I don't pretend to be a devout Buddhist  in any sense of it. I routinely imbibe  such things as tobacco, alcohol, marijuana,  drink copious amounts of caffeine, consume  all sorts of animals and products made  from animal by-products, and  I think about sex roughly two-hundred  times before any given sunfall.  I don't pretend to be a devout Buddhist.  But as far as concerns of metta bhavana  and harmony go, I think my stars  and my effort and my heart  are in alignment. I think I've done  better than average with the dirt and blessings  of existence.  I don't pretend to be a devout Buddhist.  I don't have any misgivings about the  absolute nature of mortality. And my  own ishvara feels neither shame nor  deficit for the eclectic freedoms I proffer  to its feet, to its power.  I used to consider Albert Camus as close to a father  as anything he might be compared to. Vonnegut...

Speaking of the apartment in Amenia:  my mother freely let go of the deposit  on account that Amanda left a ton  of her shit in the living room, and somehow  I was equally responsible for that and  never mind how I didn't spend three  hours in there during the ten months  we lived together.  And to think I ever made an effort  to get a laugh out of that greedy  shitbag when I dropped off the  rent in person! 

Time and space are constantly affording new opportunities to each other.  Just a year ago I was living in an ugly place called Amenia, drinking  myself to death, working at a Tractor Supply to pay the rent and  car insurance, and boycotting any personal temptation to write.  I lived with this squat demimonde of a person named Amanda whom  I was originally pleased to be moving in with on account of her  being friendly to weedsmokers and being outright desperate myself  to move out of my mother's trailer in Dover Plains for the fifth  time in about as many years.  The first week I was there, I met Amanda's boyfriend,  a demure guy about my age (we were both slightly younger than her)  who didn't say much but according to Amanda was a childhood friend.  A couple weeks later, there was another guy, definitely taller, darker  than the boyfriend, who Amanda introduced as a friend.  He didn't say much either. But I'm sure he...