Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance.

Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. ... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.

There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition claims that a moderate beer drinker - whatever that means - swallows 11 percent of his dietary protein needs, 12 percent of the carbohydrates, 9 percent of essential phosphorus, 7 percent of his riboflavin, and 5 percent of niacin. Should he go on to immoderate beer drinking, he becomes a walking vitamin pill.

No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.

The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

To extract the fullest flavor of our drinking house, we needed to spend serious evening time there, slowly coming to know the bartender and the regulars, their joys and sorrows.