I left my computer and knelt by his chair. Jimmy, Fay, and Ramon were close at hand.

Chen: “Do you know what OCD is?”

Atom: “That’s obsessive-compulsive disorder. Guilty.”

Chen: “That’s a dead man on the computer. There’s no life in a machine. Go hiking and walking and running. Get outdoors in the sunshine.”

That’s small-d dowsing, something I never even got close to learning.

Big-D Body Dowsing measures gross motor movements, easily noticed by anyone except a quadriplegic or corpse.

There’s a Rabbinical school is Israel where a student has to drive a needle as forcefully as possible into the Talmud, and, without opening the book, know what letter of what word of what sentence of what paragraph of what page it points to, and start reciting to the class word for word from there.

My close friends Jack and Jill (not their real names) “experienced” an acrimonious divorce.

Jack died from cancer of the right lung.

Jill died from cancer of the left lung.

They were matching book ends when they croaked last year.

Yep, they puffed on cancer sticks, but “who” made them “do” that in the first place?

Aren’t we all prisoners of Yezidi magical circles?

Aren’t we all captives of the Matrix?

“The problem is that at any time in history, nobody recognizes structural evil because it is legal.”

“Alexander Graham Bell called the larynx ‘the guardhouse of the lungs.’”