The Handy Thing About Being

The Rest Of Sitka's Homicides Are So-called Crimes Of Passion, Which Is A Shorthand Way Of Expressing The Mathematical Product Of Alcohol And Firearms.

The Truth Of Some Promises Is Not As Important As Whether Or Not You Can Believe In Them, With All Your Heart.

All Literature, Highbrow Or Low, From The Aeneid Onward, Is Fan Fiction....through Parody And Pastiche, Allusion And Homage, Retelling And Reimagining The Stories That Were Told Before Us And That We Have Come Of Age Loving--amateurs--we Proceed, Seeking Out The Blank Places In The Map That Our Favorite Writers, In Their Greatness And Negligence, Have Left For Us, Hoping To Pass On To Our Own Readers--should We Be Lucky Enough To Find Any--some Of The Pleasure That We Ourselves Have Taken In The Stuff That We Love: To Get In On The Game. All Novels Are Sequels; Influence Is Bliss.

The Thing That Strikes Me Now When I Think About The Wilderness Of Childhood Is The Incredible Degree Of Freedom My Parents Gave Me To Adventure There. A Very Grave, Very Significant Shift In Our Idea Of Childhood Has Occurred Since Then. The Wilderness Of Childhood Is Gone; The Days Of Adventure Are Past. The Land Ruled By Children, To Which A Kid Might Exile Himself For At Least Some Portion Of Every Day From The Neighboring Kingdom Of Adulthood, Has In Large Part Been Taken Over, Co-opted, Colonized, And Finally Absorbed By The Neighbors.

I Knew That I Shouldn’t Have, But I Did It All The Same; And There You Have My Epitaph, Or One Of Them, Because My Grave Is Going To Require A Monument Inscribed On All Four Sides With Rueful Mottoes, In Small Characters, Set Close Together.