Black House

Ka is a friend to evil as well as good. It embraces both.

RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.

The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money.

What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone.

The mad King, the bad King, the sad King. Ring-a-ding-ding, all hail the King!

The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river -- it's in the pores of the place -- but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It's a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches. This is the kind of place you don't come to unless you've been here before and all your other options are pretty much foreclosed. It's a place where men who left their families two decades before now lie on narrow beds with pee-stained mattresses, coughing and smoking cigarettes.

She’s looking at him with something like wonder. “Why do you weep, Jack?” “The past,” he says. “Isn’t that always what does it?” And thinks of his mother, sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette, and listening while the radio plays “Crazy Arms.” Yes, it’s always the past. That’s where the hurt is, all you can’t get over.

Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday's T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early -- it's summer vacation, after all -- and Tyler can't seem to make him understand that every day is important, especially those filled with warmth and sunlight and no particular responsibilities. It's as if there's some little voice deep inside him, warning him not to waste a minute, not a single one, because time is short.

Do you see this heart-stopping beauty? Look closely, because in a moment your heart will stop.

Every step outside one’s own door invites the world (perhaps even the universe),

For those of us who are not members of a biker gang or the Marine Corps, solidarity means little more than the compassionate impulse that leads us to comfort a bereft friend; for Beezer and his merry band, solidarity is the assurance that someone's always got your back.

the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind men of us all.

by the side of a road and drove off. Whenever the careering grandkids

In the brain of a madman only the fuming present exists, with its endless shouting urges, paranoid speculations, and grandiose assumptions.