Twain appealed that writers must write what they know, but I understood in fresh youth that writers craft fragile inventions whereby our limited insight, however varied and aged, permits fact and fiction coexistence—such as prosthetic limbs amend and represent reality—and therefore I cannot recommend the reader proceed further before thoroughly grasping this:
Strong coffee is not synonymous with dark coffee, and the next person who says
‘expresso’ is getting it brewed into their nostrils.
At sixteen primal years of age, words like ‘macrocosmic,’ ‘chiastic,’ and ‘self-referential’ began filtering into my vernacular. It seemed that words in all their rich variety were made to be learned, absorbed, and spoken for the