"One of the mottos of The Work is, 'Who would you be without your story?'"

Uh-oh! Richard's back from his New Age-ish retreat and either has or doesn't have a story to tell.

In the evenings I would hang out in the hotel bar, where, sneaking off for meat meals, I’d buy drinks for lustful, neurotic divorcees in my age range. One or more of them would come into focus as favorites of mine and we’d go to bed together, perhaps renting a separate room in order to eliminate the roommate problem. We would bare our souls by longingly telling every bit of personal information about ourselves. As a couple or in a group we’d explore Los Angeles by night and drive into the desert during free daytime hours. At school’s end we would exchange contact information, but I’d be wary of getting entangled with my former bedmates. Either I wouldn’t want to see them again and would have to fend off their emails and phone calls, or I’d want to turn my life over to one of them and would have to figure out how to persuade her to move to Austin.

So, really, what happened?