A famous newscaster indicates to you Iraqi war tourist sites. The country is once again, as Bono would say, falling into the arms of America. Or is it the arms of America that are falling into Iraq?

There is nothing for it but to deny the existence of your muse and just get to work.

I don’t need to tell you that you’ve already passed the anniversary of your own death in some future hold-out in the mountains. But so what.

It is difficult to realize how rote and programmatic your love-life may once have been.

Feelings of high human longing will invade your senses just before an elite team of Navy SEALs storm your mountain compound and eliminate you with, like, extreme prejudice?

Trudging under your pack, blissed out from the final ascent, you’d walk amongst the long tables, the contented tourists eating their bretzels and weissewurst and drinking the helles beer while taking in the stupidly magnificent vistas of the triumphant Austrian mountain desolation that seems to hang, somehow, over their heads.