Like Hemingway

I got drunk in the hotel room and considered leaving several times. I actually decided to leave but by that point I was too drunk to drive. So I spent a few days in the hotel. My mother didn’t know I was coming, I could leave at any moment, and she would be none the wiser. I drank coffee and wrote in the mornings and afternoons, and then drank bourbon and wrote in the evenings and nights. I wrote to find the answer but drank to avoid it, and they fed off one another like a snake eating its own tail...

The Secular Bar Mitzvah Of Robert Oppenheimer – Novel Excerpt

At Harvard they all wondered what was it like to have a mind like his. The ones who knew him well enough to know what he could do, the ones who had seen him in action. Like the week in which he had learned to read and speak basic Sanskrit. And the several months afterward in which he had memorized the Mahabharata and began threading it effortlessly into his conversation. They didn’t say so aloud. They didn’t like to admit it publicly that Robert Oppenheimer was so uncanny and they were so merely human. He didn’t seem to be capable of forgetting things. He remembered everything he ever read, everything he ever picked up in a seminar or a lecture hall or in conversation.

Water Bully

...Listen to the narrator of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”: “He sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite warm and comfortable. He was not shivering, and it even seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest and trunk.” With paradox, there isn’t a need for matches. You discover that “freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.”

Imperfect Manikin

“We have one more stop before home, Robbie.” This was the time. She was ready. It was such a relief to have the words in her head and to know that the time was right. Like the galleon under the waves, the secret will be revealed. Their table was private and should the child become emotional there were no others close by. “Robbie there’s something I want you to know.” He looked up from his Coke. “That your Da and I want you to know. Both of us.” It was so easy, why hadn’t she done this years before? “A secret we kept from you when you were small. Now that you’re grown, well growing…” The words stopped, dammed up in her vocal cords. Her face flushed. She struggled to breath in and exhaled his name, “Robbie, Robbie…”