Sol Luckman

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger__ bleeding to death beside the road, most people won__ stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you__e got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.

Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it__ a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.

Worry wasn__ an emotion to which he was particularly accustomed__nd it worried him.

Unhealthy behavior is actually common among doctors, who tend to know a lot about medicine but very little about health.

The biggest question, transcending physics and the realm of how he was able to do the extraordinary things he did, remained firmly rooted in the realm of metaphysics and begged an answer to why he could do these things.

I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing__s if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it__ the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.

He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn__ inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that __pirit,_ however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences__hich, though he might suppress them, he couldn__ altogether erase from memory.

Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposedlimitations.

Over the years most of my peers had come to hate me__ never understood why. I guess I was just different and, like dogs, they could smell it. So I never had many friends.

The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.

Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a __oom lens effect,_ in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

Well, enough of this introspection. It__ depressing, quite frankly.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn__ the opposite equally true?

Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn__ it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words.

Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be.

I am, as it were, the created creating__ paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

I just want to live my own life instead of everyone else__ version of it.

Life is too short to waste being a productive member of society.