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I have seen things I never wished to see, and every night I hear the ocean. If it seems passing strange for a short man to sport such a lofty tone, consider that the other venues of pleasure are closed to me. I stand four foot eight in honest shoes—though hydraulic insoles and good posture get me t…

After my wife left me, I took a Mediterranean cruise by myself. It was unseasonably cold and I hardly left my cabin, even for meals. I had never been on a cruise before, but I thought that countering the dramatic change of Hannah’s departure with another dramatic change—i.e., being at sea—was a goo…

It was unreal, that existence. After the army, I had landed at a Pasadena hedge fund called Sempiternal Analytix. It was as weird as the war. Psychopaths in office casual, USC pennants on the wall. All the guys talked fast, used nouns as verbs, verbs as nouns. Surface the spend. Table the thrash. T…

My father lives all the way in Taiwan now, where he chairs the welding department at Fuxing Normal University. Taiwan seems random for a white guy named Cal Felix from Peekskill, New York, but a plush gig is a plush gig. He has a driver, a Beemer, a Taoist dietitian. He has a brutalist townhouse, i…

My paper was on René Magritte. Lately I’d been captivated by any work of art that contained a work of art within it. A play within a play, a book within a book, a painting that depicted another, smaller painting. I had never paid attention to such things before. Was the interior work of art less “r…