Then she reached lower and started to ease my pants down. I stopped her so I could get my shoes and socks off first. Pants-pooled-at-the-ankles is too helpless a posture for me.
The room was large, and largely empty. The pace would pick up later in the evening. For now, the action comprised just a few lonely souls. They seemed lost in the expanse of the room, their play joyle...
The months and days are the travelers of eternity. —Bashō
Sometimes, you have to remind yourself the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Sometimes you need the anesthesia. Because what you learn about yourself when fear finally overtakes you isn’t pretty. You understand that the person you thought of as yourself, your immutable, indivi...
Shoganai, I said. Literally, There is no way of doing it. Yes, he said, nodding. Elsewhere they have Cest la vie, or That’s life.
She laughed. Good. You still haven’t told me what you were afraid of. I thought for a moment. Drowsiness was settling on me like a blanket. Of getting involved. Like you said, I haven’t been with some...
Relax, he said again, probably reading my thoughts from my expression. I’ll get you the other file. I considered telling him what would happen if he didn’t, but recognized that doing so would have bee...
Rain shook his head. I don’t like meetings generally. I especially don’t like ones that are unnecessary and proposed by someone else.
People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there’s just what you can do, and what you can’t.
Pardon me, but the drop-down menu of my mind just offered up so many enticing possibilities that for a moment my brain froze.
On the other stage, there was a girl who looked like a mix of Japanese and something Mediterranean or Latin. A good mix. She had that silky, almost shimmering black hair so many modern Japanese women...
My speed and strength were still good. Endurance likewise. Recovery times weren’t what they once were, but a steady diet of liquid amino acids for the muscles, glucosamine for the joints, and Cognamin...
My mother had tried to raise me as a Catholic, but war had deracinated whatever meager plantings her efforts had achieved. No God ever would have stood silent spectator to what I saw in Vietnam. To wh...
Murakami liked to fight. Hell, Pride wasn’t enough for him. He needed more. And it wasn’t the money. Pride, with promotions and pay-per-view, would pay a lot more, to the winners and losers. No. It wa...
Men who have survived close-quarters killing know that humans are possessed of a deep-seated, innate reluctance to kill their own species. I believe there are evolutionary explanations for the existen...
Maybe democracies, maybe all cultures, had life cycles, the same as the humans who comprised them. And maybe there were things cultures could do to extend their lives—the equivalent of exercise and ea...
It was only later that I came to learn how dangerous it is to allow yourself to be seduced by that first attractive theory. If you don’t keep testing for alternatives, you might wind up satisfying you...
It was fascinating, how people could be so reluctant to recognize blackmail, how eager they could be to convince themselves it was something else, even something fundamentally mutually cooperative. An...
In the movies, they always make sure the hero kills only in self-defense, typically in the instant before the bad guy gets the drop on him. Even in that film Miyamoto had mentioned, Dirty Harry, Clint...