A self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of personal improvement books too. Some might even say it’s true of religion books. But some others might say that those who say that should be pinned to the ground and bled dry with the slow slice of a blade across their throats. So it’s wisest simply to note a divergence of views on the subcategory and move on swiftly.

The idea itself is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.

It is something that can be borne endlessly, provided it is never acknowledged.

We are playing a waiting game. The older man waits for the younger to age, the younger man waits for the older man to die. It is a game both will inevitable win.

They engage in a degree of sound suppression, but muscular grunting, fleshly impact, traumatized respiration, and hydraulic suction nonetheless remain audible.

Such things happen ofte, although not nearly as often as they don’t happen

It is an explosive transformation, the supportive stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.

It does not occur to you, naïve as you are, that it is she who needs reassurance

Each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the readers as a form of self-help Textbooks, those whores, are particularity explicit in acknowledging this.

All of them know what will happen next, if not the precise form it will take. They watch now in horrified fascination, like seals on a rock observing a great white reaching beneath one of their own, just a short swim away.

You refuse to cry out, denying your torturer satisfaction, and ensuring thereby that the punishment you receive is prolonged.

People spouting idealism are best avoided. These idealist tend to congregate around universities. There they find an amendable environment of you, impressionable, malcontented, and ambitious individuals, individuals who, were they legends of yore instead of still pimply and poor-personal-hygiene-sporting men and women in contemporary Asia, would be dashing off to slay dragons and triumph over genies, individuals, in other words. Who give corporeal form to the term “sucker”.

These “Noble” institutions thought it may be, your university is exquisitely attuned to money. A small payment and exam invigilators are willing to overlook neighborly cheating. More and someone else can be sat in your seat to write your paper. More still and no wiring is needed, blank exam books becoming miraculously, a first-class result.

You know you are not an isolated and impoverished individual, weak prey for the societally strong, punishable with a slap for being involved through no fault of your own in an accident between your bicycle and a car. No, you are part of something larger, something righteous. Something that is, if called upon be, utterly ferocious.

I’ve already helped you more than anyone could reasonably have expected that I would.

These suggestions strike you as scripted and uncompelling.

Many skills, as every entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a lifetime of doing. And where moneymaking is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.

He would likely be proud of it, if he were the sort of man who was proud of such things. But he is too practical for that.

You do not know much about woman, but you know a fair bit about sales, and it is apparent to you that this is a case when you must let your customer seek you out, lest your devalue your product completely.

You respond by falling silent, waiting for the pause to grow uncomfortable enough for him to glance in your direction. You would then meeting his gaze, holding his eyes until he flicked them floorward and increases the curvature of his spine, gestures which, among teams of humans as among packs of dogs, signifying one mammal’s submissions to another.

You are surprised and unsuprised, surprised because you permitted yourself to hope it might be othewise.

The yearning for another chance at youth tempts us all, I am enough to hold fast to the truth that time doesn’t work this way

They make politics a game, diverting public attention rather than focusing it. But that suits them perfectly. Diversion is, after all, what you seek.

Two related categories of actor have long understood this. Bureaucrats, who wear state uniforms while. Secretly backing their private interests. And bankers, who wear private uniforms while secretly being backed by the state.

There is usually more money to be had from supplicants who seek to challenge the status quo than from those who seek merely to maintain it.

Without being conscious of it, you have allowed yourself to become fond of him not for the content of his character but for the fidelity of his echo.

We’re all information, all of us, whether readers or writers, you or I. The DNA in our cells, the bioelectric currents in our nerves, the chemical emotions in our brains, the configurations of atoms within us and of subatomic particles within them, the galaxies and whirling constellations we perceive not only when looking outward but also when looking in, it’s all, every last bit and byte of it, information.

Poisonous chemicals and biological toxins seeping into it like an adulterant into a heroin junkies collapsing vein.

With borrowed funds, a business can invest, gain leverage, and leverage is a pair of wings. Leverage is flight. Leverage is a way for small to be big and big to be huge, a glorious abstraction, the promise of tomorrow today, yes, a liberation from time, the resounding triumph of human will over dreary, chronology-shackled physical reality. To leverage is to be immortal.

Of late, you have had the impression of merely going through the motions of your life, of rising, shaving, bathing, dressing, coming to work, attending meetings, taking phone calls, returning home, eating, shitting, lying in bed, all out of habit, for no real purpose, like the functioning of some legacy water meter, cut off from the billion system, whose measurements swirl by unrecorded.

It seems not improbably that in the race between death and destitution, you can look forward to the former emerging victorious.

Overlaid on her diminishing form, flickering inside it, is a taller, stronger, more zestful entity, happy in the moment, and able yet to dance in the moistness of an eye.

You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverser, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made a younger generation an older one.

You are a gifted bluffer, inscrutable, as steady with a bad hand as with a bountiful one.

It is easy to skim money of you. You do not begrudge him this. You would do the same. You have done the same. It is a poor person’s right. Instead you are grateful for his help, for his refusal to sever you from your few remaining possessions by force.