Preemptive
It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you s...
In the scope of the universe, and the arc of justice, my life is of little consequence.
He smiled. What’s going on? Why does something have to be going on? Maybe I just missed you. He gave me an uncharacteristically streetwise look. I had a feeling I knew where he’d picked it up. Yeah, I...
He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn’t want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naïve sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not s...
Death catches everyone eventually, and I had never harbored any illusions about its ability to catch me. That it had hesitated so long to do so seemed born more of a desire to mock me than of any real...
But she was also uneasy. She remembered when she’d been in college and had come across the Nietzsche quote: Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
Between her hand over my heart and her hips at my crotch, she might as well have been administering a polygraph.
You might find yourself passing a lone octogenarian, his shoulders bent with the weight of age, his slippers shuffling along the cobblestones, his passage as timeless and resolute as the ancient city...
Mono no aware, the sadness of being human,
But the truth was, his apology meant nothing to her. In her mind, behavior was the truth, not words.
Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls,...
What was that Churchill saying? Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. That’s what this felt like.
We found a cab. I got in first and she slid in behind me. She told the driver to take us to 3-3-5 Shibuya-ku, south side of Roppongi-dori. I smiled. Tantra? I asked. She looked at me, perhaps a little...
The teeming scene in front of the station made familiar Tokyo look deserted by comparison. The street stretching out before me between rows of crumbling low-rises and slumped office buildings looked l...
The second guy moved the gun, trying to track me, the movements overlarge and shaking. Then, maybe because he saw the cool bead I was drawing on him, his nerve broke. He started shooting in a spray-an...
Sometimes I go to her Facebook page. It’s silly, I know. Pathetic. And every time I do, I promise myself next time I’ll be stronger. I don’t even know what impels me. Why are the most painful memories...
It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America’s oil addiction is a sickness that’s killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work.
If you knew at the outset what you understood at the end, would you make the same choices, take the same risks, accept the same sacrifices? No. No one would. You can’t appreciate the weight of that bu...
If there’s one lesson I learned early on during the decades I’ve spent in this business, it’s that of all the qualities that distinguish a hard target from everyone else, among the most important is s...