The Scarlet Ruse

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I have learned that the countless paths that one traverses in one’s life are all equal. Oppressors and oppressed meet at the end, and the only thing that prevails is that life was altogether too short for both.

- Don Juan as quoted by Castaneda

Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer!

- Dwight D. Eisenhower [at a Cabinet meeting]

Chapter One

After seven years of bickering and fussing, the Fort Lauderdamndale city fathers, on a hot Tuesday in late August, killed off a life style and turned me into a vagrant.

“Permanent habitation aboard all watercraft within the city limits is prohibited.”

And that ordinance included everything and everybody from the Alabama Tiger aboard his plush ‘Bama Gal, running the world’s longest floating houseparty, all the way down to the shackiest little old pontoon cottage snugged into the backwater mangroves.

It included Meyer, the hairy economist, living comfortably aboard his dumpy little cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes, low in the water with the weight of financial tomes and journals in five languages and chess texts and problems in seven.

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