I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.

remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.