Man Makes Plans . . . And

It Never Takes Longer Than A Few Minutes, When They Get Together, For Everyone To Revert To The State Of Nature, Like A Party Marooned By A Shipwreck. That's What A Family Is. Also The Storm At Sea, The Ship, And The Unknown Shore. And The Hats And The Whiskey Stills That You Make Out Of Bamboo And Coconuts. And The Fire That You Light To Keep Away The Beasts.

The Rest Of Sitka's Homicides Are So-called Crimes Of Passion, Which Is A Shorthand Way Of Expressing The Mathematical Product Of Alcohol And Firearms.

When I First Decided I Wanted To Be A Writer, When I Was 10, 11 Years Old, The Books That I Loved Obviously And Openly Fit That Description: They Came With Maps And Glossaries And Timelines - Books Like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I Imagined That's What Being A Writer Was: You Invented A World, And You Did It In A Very Detailed Way, And You Told Stories That Were Set In That World.

The True Magic Of This Broken World Lay In The Ability Of The Things It Contained To Vanish, To Become So Thoroughly Lost, That They Might Never Have Existed In The First Place.

We Are Accustomed To Repeating The Cliché, And To Believing, That 'our Most Precious Resource Is Our Children.' But We Have Plenty Of Children To Go Around, God Knows, And As With Doritos, We Can Always Make More. The True Scarcity We Face Is Practicing Adults, Of People Who Know How Marginal, How Fragile, How Finite Their Lives And Their Stories And Their Ambitions Really Are But Who Find Value In This Knowledge, Even A Sense Of Strange Comfort, Because They Know Their Condition Is Universal, Is Shared.