Schadenfreude Is So Nutritious.

I Like Texting As Much As The Next Kidult - And Embrace It As Yet More Evidence, Along With Email, That We Live Now In The Post-aural Age, When An Unsolicited Phone Call Is, Thankfully, Becoming More And More Understood To Be An Unspeakable Social Solecism, Tantamount To An Impertinent Invasion Of Privacy.

Death, The Real Simile For Disease - For When We Are Ill, Do We Not Always Feel Like We Are Dying, Even If It's Only A Little? - Remains, Despite Our Secularism, The Most Metaphoricised Phenomenon Of All.

A Short Story Is A Shard, A Sliver, A Vignette. It's A Biopsy On The Human Condition But It Doesn't Have This Capacity To Think Autonomously For Itself.

A Creative Life Cannot Be Sustained By Approval, Any More Than It Can Be Destroyed By Criticism.

So Heedless Have We Become Of Our Own Image That Second-hand Mobile Phones Now Invariably Come With A Sim Card Chock-full Of Discarded Intimacies.