ed Boca,
remembering a snippet of John Stuart Mill.

Too busy was Boca replanning the structure of the
Colosseum so it might better accommodate his label, his
notion, his re-christened version of the ideal verbal escort
to accompany that ancient edifice.

And write Boca did. Titles fell increasingly from his pen.

"The Barking Tree."

"The Leaking River."

These were but two. Boca thought he would improve on
Tolkein's efforts, at least in the direction of title. After all,
to send a work into the reader's lap without proper
introduction was like trying to get acquainted without the
proper introduction.

Maybe Boca had a point.

"Assembly without Hope" and "Nirvana without End"
touched on his mystical stage. He dropped this and
proceeded into the area of historiography. And afterwards,
dry epistemology would see him concentrate his efforts.
These forums were indeed worthy of his attention. Too
long had they been neglected. All were in need of good,
metaphoric dusting by title.

At last word, Boca was inching toward Kant's, "Critique of
Pure Reason".

"That one, in particular, has a poor ring", he was heard to
say.

On they came. Precise. Hard-hitting, or so he thought.
They made the mind's eye swell with the promise of more
and more. Indeed, that "eye" could get bloodshot reading
all of Boca's interception.

But the "more" in the sense of the follow-up, the "delivery"
or accompaniment of pages never came.

Nowhere was there to be found the Hemingway to follow
the "Moveable Feast".

Or "The Edible Woman".

Even the promise of thrillers for a scary submarine epic like
"Three Eggs on my Plate" never materialized.

Nothing. Just titles. More, then more and increasingly
more of them. Annoyingly so. Scraps of paper decorating
a table without an intended victim ever coming close.

It was as if so many salesgirls had left price tags off
matching merchandise. That's all that remained. Just the
stickers forlornly, white and detached, staring up from their
adhesiveness.

More than just a little tacky.

A woman given to comparison confronted Boca.

"Imagine a zoo where the curators had all the animal
names, but they were not paired with their owners. That's
your stuff. Everything in a weird isolation."

Boca could not be Borca and not even Carl Sagan could
rescue him. No large bottles floating in forma