Here's A Little Tip For

The Smell Of The Sea Swept Over The Wall And In Through The Empty Window-hole, Wide And Wild With A Million Intoxicating Secrets. I Don't Trust That Smell. It Hooks Us Somewhere Deeper Than Reason Or Civilization, In The Fragments Of Our Cells That Rocked In Oceans Before We Had Minds, And It Pulls Till We Follow Mindlessly As Rutting Animals....it Lures Us To Leap Off High Cliffs, Fling Ourselves On Towering Waves, Leaves Behind Everyone We Love And Face Into Thousands Of Miles Of Open Water For The Sake Of What Might Be On The Far Shore.

I Am Not Good At Noticing When I'm Happy, Except In Retrospect. My Gift, Or Fatal Flaw, Is For Nostalgia. I Have Sometimes Been Accused Of Demanding Perfection, Of Rejecting Heart's Desires As Soon As I Get Close Enough That The Mysterious Impressionistic Gloss Disperses Into Plain Solid Dots, But The Truth Is Less Simplistic Than That. I Know Very Well That Perfection Is Made Up Of Frayed, Off-struck Mundanities. I Suppose You Could Say My Real Weakness Is A Kind Of Long-sightedness: Usually It Is Only At A Distance, And Much Too Late, That I Can See The Pattern.

If You Rewrite A Paragraph Fifty Times And Forty-nine Of Them Are Terrible, That's Fine; You Only Need To Get It Right Once.

What I Warn You To Remember Is That I Am A Detective. Our Relationship With Truth Is Fundamental But Cracked, Refracting Confusingly Like Fragmented Glass. It Is The Core Of Our Careers, The Endgame Of Every Move We Make, And We Pursue It With Strategies Painstakingly Constructed Of Lies And Concealment And Every Variation On Deception.

Now Death Is Uncool, Old-fashioned. To My Mind The Defining Characteristic Of Our Era Is Spin, Everything Tailored To Vanishing Point By Market Research, Brands And Bands Manufactured To Precise Specifications; We Are So Used To Things Transmuting Into Whatever We Would Like Them To Be That It Comes As A Profound Outrage To Encounter Death, Stubbornly Unspinnable, Only And Immutably Itself.