It Is Always So Simple, And So

I Do Have A Collection Of Mid-century, Small-press Science Fiction And Fantasy Hardcovers That Is My Most Focused And Dedicated Collection. Everything Else I Tend More To Acquire Or Amass Than Collect. I Have Vinyl Records I Listen To All The Time When I Work. But I Don’t Collect Records. I Just Buy Records Where The Price Seems Right And It’s Music I Actually Listen To.

I Smoked And Looked Down At The Bottom Of Pittsburgh For A Little While, Watching The Kids Playing Tiny Baseball, The Distant Figures Of Dogs Snatching At A Little Passing Car, A Miniature Housewife On Her Back Porch Shaking Out A Snippet Of Red Rug, And I Made A Sudden, Frightened Vow Never To Become That Small, And To Devote Myself To Getting Bigger And Bigger And Bigger.

Nothing That Had Ever Happened To Him, Not The Shooting Of Oyster, Or The Piteous Muttering Expiration Of John Wesley Shannenhouse, Or The Death Of His Father, Or Internment Of His Mother And Grandfather, Not Even The Drowning Of His Beloved Brother, Had Ever Broken His Heart Quite As Terribly As The Realization, When He Was Halfway To The Rimed Zinc Hatch Of The German Station, That He Was Hauling A Corpse Behind Him

. . .i Really Ought To Have Recognized It For What It Was And, Perhaps, To Have Stopped Right There - For It Was Nostalgia, And What Inspires Nostalgia Has Been Dead A Long Time

My Heart Was Simultaneously Broken And Filled With Lust, I Was Exhausted, And I Loved Every Minute Of It. It Was Strange And Elating To Find Myself For Once The Weaker.