Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well. Pens scratch. Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. And grade every simile and...
A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, Its wings are like cellophane, and I say, I was just thinking that, but Jonah says, Just thinking w...
A Titus Andronicus catalog of threats beat at the door. They haunt my nightmares still.
With zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke—Have you heard the news about Schrödinger’s Cat? It died today; wait—it didn’t, did, didn’t, did …; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond; on Gilm...
Clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.
Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn't sound like very powerful magic to me.
We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for.
We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants.
We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.
We - by whom I mean anyone over sixty - commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators,...
Uncle Norm says, ‘Pity is a form of abuse.
Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It’s long since filled up the plain, and now it’s creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaimin...
Tumbado en el fondo de la canoa, veía balancearse las nubes. Las almas surcan las eras como las nubes los cielos, y aunque las nubes cambien continuamente de forma, color y tamaño, una nube siempre es...
Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever.
This morn I awoke to the laments of fallen angels.
The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’...
The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need, says Ian. The lie that we live in a democratic state. And the most weaselly lie of all, that there is no cla...
The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.
The best way to work with dementia is to act as if the person you knew is still inside the wreckage. If you're wrong, and the person you know is gone, then no damage is done but the standards of care...
That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an U...