She told me there was very little chance of a remorse because there has to be a reparation first.

Two dudes were talking Summer jobs on the bus platform one guy said he delivered pizzas and had heard of someone who was held up and dropped his pizza and ran and the other guy said they're supposed to do that and not have any money on them either but the first guy said he had heard if a guy who got held up and told the crook to take the pizza but the crook wanted cash and didn't believe the delivery boy and gave him the shank the second guy said he wouldn't deliver pizza for two reasons first because it was too much like IT you get dispatched and the bosses have always got you on the end of the phone and he preferred independence and freedom and smokes second because it's dangerous even though he couldn't care less about sketchy back alleys or shivs or big tips he said he didn't want to mess with dudes who were crazier than he was apparently he had the same policy about girls and sex.

Summer arrived on cat's feet Spring had already overflowed its banks and Summer merely crested carrying trees and stirring the silt whether it also had nine lives I'm not sure but even after an early frost and leaf drop the humidity returned a few times so that's got to be a few lives right there but who's counting and it's too early yet for an Indian Summer but then there's the phenomenon of false Fall to consider a near cousin to a false Spring and when it got cold again the squirrels shivered their acorns so many diamonds as they sang Well I'll be damned Here comes your ghost again But that's not unusual It's just that the moon is full And you happened to call a sure sign was probably the tomatoes whose stalks had browned but the garden still produced pumpkins and there were a few cucumbers still so all was well and all will be well until the cold takes Summer's last life and we desce...

It made sense after Nuremberg to put away a few Nazis during his hour a day in the yard Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess continued to goose step into his 90s and some called his exercise the Spandau ballet it was fitting that Hitler's architect Albert Speer should have been held in an artless hell also appropriate that Wiesbaden should have hosted an American base given it had been Goring's spa as well as Dostoevsky's and Nietzsche's too less safe was Eichmann's extradition from Argentina but Peron would never have surrendered him and anyway justice was served goose stepping to the end.

None of us were given the rules but most of us figured out the important ones along the way You don't tug on superman's cape You don't spit into the wind You don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger And you don't mess around with Jim or drink his Kool-Aid either You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away And know when to run You never count your money When you're sittin' at the table there were more rules too but I never learned them and none of my friends did either.

When you're a man and pull your hair behind your ears and tie it in a ponytail that's called a compromise when you want talk when it's over they call that bargaining which is part of grieving when you look people in the eye when you're walking that's bold or daring no matter how you are appealing when you ask yourself what makes a metal it's the ability to be flattened into sheets and drawn into wires as every jeweller knows when you are walking in the wildflowers try not to remember you don't find roses growing on stalks of clover however much you like the tune when you wear slippers don't trip on the frills or be caught sporting mutton sleeves or poodle wrists or mules and when you drive don't forget to make a deal I can't remember which is ritzier Buick or Chevrolet but Cadillac is the best and everything else is bargaining to get more for your money than the next guy paid stand...

Falling like angels cast out of a place in the past perhaps heaven or whatever it was no doubt some serious hell should we call ourselves Gabriel appearing to some latter day Daniel in some feverish dream revealing specifics beyond the tablets the fine print of the Commandments consoling him with the 11th edict Do not fuss and keep your own counsel the way a lawyer would to a client who couldn't afford to pay it is doubtful that Daniel feared the visions or the night Lucifer had not yet been invented Milton had not yet penned that portrait of pride and Satan was also far from Daniel and when Gabriel came to Muhammad he said he was reciting from a book so for all of us Christian and Muslim and Jew the back story was written first and read later rewritten to the best of the recollection of prophet whether friend or foe and repeated thereafter to help us trade places with the prophets and hear the words they heard for ourselves that's the...

I woke up and I wasn't yet sure if it was a dream or no I was on the sidewalk of a main street and the house that was facing me was in the Cape Cod style the construction: ship lap and it was pained white as was the gapped picket fence grinning like an English girl I used to know there was the narrowest strip of garden between the wrap around veranda and the fence and in it were growing hollyhocks and sunflowers and sweetpeas in another life it would have been somebody's grandmother's house but now it was a dentist's office without parking in the rear crickets were singing under the porch or maybe it was the hydro wires humming we were told about that in the old days I don't think anybody had ever seen a cricket but a lady I know said the cricket is her totem and the ant and the frog her spirit helpers and a teddy to bear witness and God knows what taboo kept her from singing but her wavy brown hair made a storm on a her brow ...

I got my driver's licence at Legoland driving a bumper car made of oversized lego it was only good for a week but I was free later there would be the mandatory hill start on a black iced street and the parallel park where you weren't necessarily allowed to use the what are bumpers for excuse and driving downtown with one ways and bus lanes and all manner of hell and I was free that time too but driver's ed left its mark you see my instructor used to drive one of those London double deckers with a self-changing gear box made by the Birmingham Small Arms Company BSA for short which my instructor told me was short for Bloody Sore Ass he told me of his proficiency in shifting gears knowing by the sound of the engine when to step it up and when I practised racing shifts accidentally without the cluth in a Toyota Hilux stressing the engine's capacity or power or torque I wasn't sure it was wise to shift without engagi...

For those of us made with Dewey decimal brains and card catalogue hands books are shelved from left to right top to bottom end of story full stop but books have ever been in different shapes and sizes so what to do if you're a librarian with limited space who would prefer that nobody touch a book or misshelve or mislay or fail to return part of the collection you can put them in special collections with limited hours and restricted access and hand out cotton gloves and forbid pen and ink and the cracking of spines which you can justify for manuscripts and books of a certain age but for the rest there are the stacks usually open access and always jam packed for such spaces books have been shelved in a variety of ways all on shelves of the same height with larger books slid in spines up shelf marks face up to the front but in earlier times books were shelved by size largest and tallest on the bottom shortest and smallest on the top b...