She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

...I dabble in causes and effects.

Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.

The storm dropped a house on her head.

What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

Notice, notice; let noticing take the place of screaming.

I like to think Im a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.