“Yeah, I said it. What?!” some writers will come at you, bam! pugnaciously engage you, grab your shirt front. Make the job easy for the reader? Not interested, these types will say, I am making a statement with my art, doing something that’s never been done. It’s a matter of style, I suppose, how one goes about it.

Style is somewhat random, like finding yourself in the apartment you moved into when you were nineteen. “Is this a fucking dream?” you might wonder, eyes wandering over the detritus of almost forty randomly dreamed years. Everyone else you know has moved a number of times since then, many into fine houses they now own and will pass on to their children some day. An AARP eligible adult still living in the apartment he rented while dropping in and out of college is suspect. “What do we suspect?” she asked suspiciously.

“Wake up!” the voice yells as a train rumbles through, making the floor of this old apartment shudder.

Random, like I said. And an argument can be made, and sometimes is, that this entire enterprise, the time spent here searching for meaning between being born and moving on, is a somewhat random sequence of events, some pleasant, some not. We are ants, a friend’s father told me once. Crawling over the earth, trying to make the best of our short time here. Some thinking they would like to do something good for the world, some actually doing good things, whenever they can.

Randomness itself random. Randomly picking random thoughts, random. The pickled randomness of a randomly plucked random thought? Randomly pickled, no doubt.