Death, But Not For You, Gunslinger. Never

Best Not To Look Back. Best To Believe There Will Be Happily Ever Afters All The Way Around - And So There May Be; Who Is To Say There Will Not Be Such Endings? Not All Boats Which Sail Away Into Darkness Never Find The Sun Again, Or The Hand Of Another Child; If Life Teaches Anything At All, It Teachers That There Are So Many Happy Endings That The Man Who Believes There Is No God Needs His Rationality Called Into Serious Question.

As A Species We're Fundamentally Insane.

The Idea That The Creative Endeavor And Mind-altering Substances Are Entwined Is One Of The Great Pop-intellectual Myths Of Our Time. Substance Abusing Writers Are Just Substance Abusers — Common Garden Variety Drunks And Druggies, In Other Words. Any Claims That The Drugs And Alcohol Are Necessary To Dull A Finer Sensibility Are Just The Usual Self-serving Bullshit. I've Heard Alcoholic Snowplow Drivers Make The Same Claim, That They Drink To Still The Demons.

There Is No Idea Dump, No Story Central, No Island Of The Buried Bestsellers; Good Stories Seem To Come Quite Literally From Nowhere, Sailing At You Right Out Of The Empty Sky.

But Writers Invite Ghosts, Maybe; Along With Actors And Artists, They Are The Only Totally Accepted Mediums Of Our Society. They Make Worlds That Never Were, Populate Them With People Who Never Existed, And Then Invite Us To Join Them In Their Fantasies. And We Do It, Don't We? Yes. We Pay To Do It.