A cat is pursuing an insect across a wooden floor. He, the cat, is torn between the desire to eat the insect, which is his ultimate aim, and the desire to prolong the chase.

Your therapist’s office is large, comfortable, and clean. There’s a couch, but only in the waiting room, which is much larger than the consulting room, which is where the therapy takes place and which contains only chairs. Your therapist sits in a wheeled office chair, and you sit in an armchair. There’s another armchair that remains empty—presumably it is used for couples therapy. You often imagine that whomever you are talking about in therapy—you’re always talking about somebody or other, and the complexities of their interface with you—is sitting there, nodding as you speak.

The very fastidious man cleans his apartment before he leaves on a trip.

This is what I carry in my left front pocket. It’s small, strong, and effective, and more secure than a back-pocket wallet. When I need to spend cash, I move the clip to the corner of the card pile. Then I accept my change, reorganize the bills, and replace the clip. I keep my two most-used cards on the outside of the stack and can slide them out without loosening the clip.

For one thing, it is always delightful to bring a device not associated with the home into the home, for domestic use. It’s like having a whiteboard in your living room, or a forklift in the garage. When I'm working, and get up for a glass of water, I feel like I’m actually taking a "break" from "work." There used to be a water cooler at my actual job, as well, but during the budget cuts five years ago our now-deposed department chairman had it removed, in an attempt to appease the budget gods. He also stopped serving coffee at meetings. We have a new chair now, and the coffee's back, but not the water cooler, and so my house feels more like my office these days than my office.

Life is composed of three-quarter-inch square matrices of what used to be whole grain oats, but now includes “corn flour, whole wheat flour, and rice flour.” Original Life has a mild, sweet flavor and a fine crunchiness that gives way, in the mouth, to a kind of gritty paste. (That sounds gross but it’s actually delightful. I mean, everything turns to paste in your mouth.) My favorite part of any box of Life has always been the bottom, where the last few fully intact units of cereal reside in a debris dune of sugar crystals and World—Trade-Center-ruins-like broken lattice.

Now the walk is getting annoying again. The guys driving farm machinery and dump trucks on Game Farm don’t give a rat’s ass that you are a helpless soft pink animal and will not move over to give you space. And those ag school professors are eager to get home to their woodstoves and presidential biographies and may not notice you there in the gloom of the posted experimental forest. Turn right, with relief, onto Route 366, and pass through Varna.

I shared my cabin with M, S, and a bunch of sexually advanced, tanned, handsome, not very smart boys who allied themselves with the male counselors and spent the week engaged in apparently successful romantic conquests. A cabinmate I’ll call W, because I have no memory of his name, and the W stands for “Whatever,” spent the week passively tormenting the rest of us and boasting about his exploits with the prettiest girl in the camp. The torments consisted of challenging us to perform unpleasant acts, like sniffing a pair of old underwear someone had found in a closet or confessing our innermost thoughts.