Not being the macho type of person, I decided to make sure that I wasperceived as being completely cowed at the earliest possible moment,helped consid...rably by my experience a couple of years ago when I usedself hypnosis to give up smoking. I realised that I was being fedmessages, often subliminal, to wipe my memories and replace withdifferent ones, so every moment I was awake, every day, I concentrated ontelling myself to remember everything the moment I saw Fiona Jacobson.It was something I. The question was always when to step back and let them get on with it.And Chaos, that dribbling old grandfather, really wasn’t helping anybody. Meanwhile, Gaia sulked. It wasn’t the Earth Mother’s idea to let People loose on her unspoiled playground. In her view, it could only lead to disaster. And it always took such a long time to nurse her garden back to health. Left alone, the gods knew how much trouble Man could cause.Fed up, some of the younger gods decided it was time they took a hand. A. I also had a tiny bit of empathy my father did not have. I still had my share of one-night stands and short relationships like my father did, but much fewer and farther between. Looking back, I always felt slightly guilty for the women I had used.When Doug passed away a couple of years back, I just quit cold turkey and decided to stay single. My motivation to do much of anything kind of went out the window after that.After getting ready, I dressed back into some comfortable sweats and stumbled. All that there was to know was that Karl-Heinz was a very unhappy man growing bitter all alone. Silke threw herself deeper into her work, but there came a time when the hollowness inside of her caught up to her, no matter how hard she tried to outrun or forestall it. The emptiness just took the wind out of her sails. She kept up to her schedules and cranked out more designs, but nothing gave her any satisfaction anymore. She was only going through the motions and she knew it. Though the men.