I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes "good" from "bad" luck.

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.