Sitting at this same desk, shuffling these same papers, reaching over occasionally to the same old Stella to plunker out "Jesse James" or "Στην Ανατολή", I find myself marking the closure of another year, another anniversary in this history, another moment of reflection in the swift spasmodic rush of nonlinear time. It's amazing how recently it seems that my last gennethlia passed. I was thirty, now I'm twenty-nine. The lilac- and apple-bound cellarholes I inhabited all those years as I worked up my skin's capability to blister under sunlight, my flesh's acceptance of al-kohol, my blood-sugar's marginal & fleeting stabilities; from the perspective of this desk in this office in this library I feel now nothing but an overwhelming and endless flow of gratitude toward each and every one of those windowless spaces.