• Wait for a time in your life when things are happening too quickly, when whatever you attempt works out beautifully, and everything is falling all around and on top of you (don’t worry, it’ll come.) • Accept all offers because protesting amounts to sitting on the fence: you’re out of the game. • Make your choices and then sail before the head wind, making your way between the sea mines at this critical time when, among other things, you desperately need, yet once again, to be subtly reassured of your own worth. • Send the self-satisfied packing, along with all the other warped minds who insinuate that the problem stems from your childhood, that one day you’ll pay through the nose for your stupid mistakes and that try as you might, life won’t be any picnic. • Leaf point-blank through an Ameri-can short story writer’s work. Bang. (This time, you’re ready: inspiration and a sawed-off shotgun are lying in wait, chuckling; to your great amazement, they pose an infinitely more impending threat than recently was the case when everything was going terribly wrong. But fortunately, you lucky devil, this woman writer is solid as a rock.) • Bang, then. Just barely bat an eyelid and take it all in without flinching (maybe you’re being watched): a total unknown from Wisconsin cuts to pieces – schlik your life – schlak in twenty lines, makes mincemeat of your up until then legitimate and sometimes fêted aspirations, expresses umpteen times better what you sporadically wear yourself out trying to put into words since those poems you gave your mother back in third grade. • Stay calm. (You’re jealous, poor fool.) • Be bold and brazen for a moment. • Pace back and forth humming the melody that’s haunted you since childhood. • Later, reread the passage that blows you away. • Go ahead, be thunderstruck, but don’t feel embarrassed this time because: 1) well, no one sees you wincing, and few people really give a damn, you’ll have to accept it; 2) because; 3) fuck, what should it matter that you’re being observed and judged and made fun of, anyway? • If you discover a why? hiding deep in your gut or down in the basement when you go get a bottle of red wine, shoot, massacre everyone in sight, take no prisoners, shit, just shoot! Otherwise it’ll get to you and there’ll be no way out.