Inspiration Point (work that responds to our weekly writing cue)

Defective detectives.

I was shocked if not surprised at the death of Mahoney. I learned about it last week. The last time I saw him, he didn't look good although he was always too closely resembling (in his own words) either a "young Peter Lorre or an old Orson Welles". One thing he had was a hand that was perfect for holding a glass of beer no matter what size. We used to drink together when we were young and have the most confounding of conversations which always made sense to us but were threatening/infuriating/hilarious to others. I dug his massive vocabulary and he dug mine. We didn't get a chance to use them as much as we would have liked, so when we got together, we jazzed it up. We often talked of baked otters and black out shades and redundant ethnic quips. I've been trying for the last couple of days to write something about Mahoney when I came to inspiration point and tried to imagine the kind of conversation/ observation/dissertationwe would have shared on the available topic had we had another chance to kick it around and chop it up. I'm gonna name this "piece" Mahoney's Office after him and bid my bud adieu.

The devilish labyrinth that Daedalus devised.

A few years ago, the United States sent a mechanism to Mars. The landing was perfect but something went wrong with communications. We never received any signals back from the machine. I tried to imagine what was going on with that mechanism and realized it had a lot to do with the fears that most of us have....alone.....not doing the job......self-disappointed......misunderstood....far, far from home....not as good as we thought we were etc.