After a week’s hiatus — well, for me, anyway — the following reported for duty at the regular Corner Booth: John T., Lindsay, Ferne, Don, John L., Dean, Alex, and myself — Tomek. We began by discussing characters and story ideas, and debated whether a good premise trumps (lower case “t”) good story execution. That said, we did stray into politics, but miraculously veered off before disaster. That did get us on to fraud and scams, however, and after we took detailed notes on a nice stock scam Alex described, we got on to mental health and suicide, and why people kill themselves — and why they sometimes don’t. (That prompted old memories of this film called The End.) We got a bit morbid at this point and contemplated death, but were saved from complete nihilism by a comment from Dean to the effect of having a “near-life experience.” We did manage to inject some social commentary about the crumbling communities across this country, which reminded me of this recent article (Alex: take note). All in all, it was good to be surrounded by friends, and a good time was had by all.