He taught me that deep familiarity, deep love for an ecology, is something that can be expressed through one’s creative work, and that this work can travel beyond the hyper locality of its origin, and invoke in the reader a universally shared experience that crosses the very borders that Hemingway traversed, finding purchase in the hearts and minds of those in some distant land.

I don’t always call it self-isolation, or self-quarantine. I call it “independence” and “self-sufficiency”, when in reality my underlying fear may be that, like the defective car, anyone who is too close, too near to me, is bound to get hurt, bound to get let down in the biggest of ways when the crack in my frame eventually expresses itself in its fullest form.

And I choose to understand that the words “choose” or “choice”, are a poor choice of words to convey what I’m trying to, because I don’t believe we have the ability to choose or make choices in the way we think we do, but due to either a failure of the English language or my own limits as a user of it, I choose to understand that I have less choice in everything I do, think, and say than I feel like I do, for I am a product of my genes and my environment and my biology, and I choose not to take too much pride in the “good” parts of me, nor to lament too harshly the “bad” parts of me, for I chose neither.