Bafflement

Mystified and stunned that I wrote Finding Flopsie. Doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, Flopsie is a triumph of storytelling. It glides effortlessly from UCLA to Laguna Beach, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, and Pasadena, then a daring chase to Singapore, Bali, Sydney, the Outback, Christmas Island, and a remote mountaintop in Central Java, nothing but grim obstacles and uncertainty, never sure of success.

 

Shaking my head, stumped by another masterpiece, Partners.

 

And then Escape!

 

Someday sooner or later, if I live that long, there will be another novel, working title Mister Blank. I asked a Bible scholar to help me find the fable of Jezebel, his nemesis. On such thin filaments of story, something compelling and astounding will emerge. When I began Escape! all I knew was its locale, a creaky space colony in solar orbit.

 

Yesterday, a neighbor asked me if I wanted her to drive me to a doctor. I said no, because if they got hold of me they'd never let me go. I don't want a stent or a pacemaker or poison. I don't care if I die in my sleep or collapse somewhere on the gravel road. My last breath will be a coda, to be reprised in the history of human affairs and hardboiled adult tales, a legacy unlike any other. I'll live forever in my video lectures on liberty and the rule of law, a new constitution to secure both, perhaps to be amplified at a future crossroads when the fake regime of worthless paper and hollow pretense implodes.

 

Baffled by how much I achieved, how far I traveled in life.

 

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