How is that each book is harder to write than the one before? How many pages are wasted, pushed to a corner of the desk with edges lifted by the breeze of my passing? How much vodka will it take. How many packets of headband kush, ribbons and clouds and tarry-sweet fogs, and words that dissolve in the vapor? How many tantrums. Long walks. Floods and droughts and lightless Sundays. Trickles from the wrist, gouts from the jugular. How many small rebellions, diversions, mutinies, revolts? Teeth...