My dad is retired—or was. Is it that they need the money? I fantasize about a heretofore unknown gambling problem, hush funds, love children. My mom sells my old comic books and De La Soul cassingles on eBay. She doesn’t know I know. Every so often I’ll think about stuff I loved in my youth, and a search inevitably brings up her dealer name.

I amp the bidding when it seems safe. You could say I’m looking out for her. But how is it that her four grown kids have neglected their parents’ financial needs?

I go to bed with a nagging sense of guilt, though this is how I usually go to bed.

I’m forever reading about people who get so incensed at a book that they fling it across the room. This always seemed to me journalistic boilerplate, like those ten-minute standing ovations you read about at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, for the first time in my life, I fling a book across the room. The six-hundred-page bulk of The Truculáta leaves a dent in the wall, which I attempt to conceal by moving the lamp.