From Harrison:

James Harrison decided to do something unpredictable. He was a cautious, routine-loving sort of person by nature, and spontaneity came to him only with some trepidation. He couldn’t really say what prompted him now, had anyone bothered to ask. A distant discomfort perhaps, the sort of existential itch he hadn’t felt since his college years, when he’d gone off to Appalachian State to study music, rather than stay close to home and study something practical, like business, like his mother wanted him to.  What were his options? He could travel, go somewhere he ordinarily never went, but his Nissan truck needed an oil change, and he was afraid to venture too far afield. Or he could go to an unfamiliar restaurant, but he was picky about what he ate and hated the thought of foreign hands all over his food. Or he could even go to a bar and strike up a conversation with a stranger, maybe even a woman. This last possibility intrigued as much as it frightened him. He was generally not a hit with women. He had never known how to talk to them, at least not on what he considered their own level. Sure, he could bore them with the liner notes to his psyche; but who would want to follow along, especially when the tracks were so shapeless and interminable? After all, what did he really have to offer? Flattery and a decent-sized paycheck.

He settled on a sort of middle ground. He went to his local Barnes & Noble. He had never been much of a reader, he found fiction too hard to get into, his mind was too practical, too bottom-line oriented. The majority of the books on his shelves gathered dust. He had one whole shelf for Tai Chi books and a shelf for computer-related books, some of which he actually consulted. The Tai Chi was more of an ideal, something he was always meaning to get into but never found the time for.

(Though, for awhile, he had done Bhagwa, a little-known but highly esteemed Oriental art of mental focus. The group met once a week in a basement underneath a women’s clothing store. There were maybe eight regular members. Their guru, a former exotic dancer with a handlebar moustache named Randall, encouraged them to wear white robes, perhaps so they’d be more easily mistaken for karate students. Their “practice” consisted in getting into a circle and moving clockwise, all the while concentrating on a red builder’s brick laying in the middle of the dusty floor. Every third circuit, the group, in unison, would exclaim “Bhagwa!” It was the signal of their enlightenment. The continuous motion and the focused meditation were said to induce a trance-like state of altered consciousness, although the most Harrison ever felt, after about the thirtieth or fortieth circuit, was a mild case of vertigo.)