The Whole House Seemed To Exhale A

I Took Comfort, As A Kid, In Knowing That Things Had Always Been As Awful And As Wonderful As They Were Now, That The World Was Always On The Edge Of Total Destruction.

. . .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

That Evening I Rode Downtown On An Unaccountably Empty Bus, Sitting In The Last Row. At The Front I Saw A Thin Cloud Of Smoke Rising Around The Driver’s Head. ‘hey, Bus Driver,’ I Said. ‘can I Smoke?’ ‘may I,’ Said The Bus Driver. ‘i Love You,’ I Said.

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.

Rueful, Bittersweet, Funny, Written With Tenderness And Bite, Merrill Feitell's Stories, Like So Many Classic Short Stories, Are Made From The Plain And Painful Stuff Of This World, And Haunted By The Possibility, And The Impossibility, Of A Better One.