More Advice

Don’t trust anyone without elaborate tattoos. They must have reason to avoid externalizing their inmost soul and symbology, their feelings for family, commitment, serpents, and dolphins. Certainly don’t accept candy from such a person without first asking what in life makes them most proud, and what, besides the present transaction, most ashamed, when last they wept, and twenty seven further questions of increasing intimacy, all while staring into one another’s eyes, until you’ve both forgotten the candy in burgeoning love. If love doesn’t burgeon, and you do take the candy, at least it won’t be from a strange person. As to taking brandy from a strange Saint Bernard, this may not always be excused as a special case, if, as you observe, any life is more or less an avalanche, tumbling and then pinning you under chance accretions, towering, constricting, stifling your every breath, unless fast enough a fat, fatherly paw breaks through, scratching your face, and a fat head fills the light, too busy snuffling and worrying for your life to lock eyes and answer increasingly intimate questions, but standing guard, unflagging, unreasonable, as if in penance for having romped alone in the moonlit heights over pure, unmarked snow, godlike and giddy with the glinting stillness and the sureness of setting off, this pounce, or the next, the irrevocable, echoing slide.