Introduction

"Salas has lived his entire life in the ring and he still packs the Equalizer" - Andrew Vachss

Life is a boxing match from beginning to end. You're born in your mother's pain and your excruciating need to breathe. Then you bump along from crisis to crisis, day after day, month after month, year after year, trying to find some moments of joy in the grind of surviving. This will suffice, if you aren't afraid and have the confidence to face the facts that surround you, the reality in eyesight. If you do, then you will have the heart to love.        Let me give you an example. Once, when I was about twelve, a few months after my mother died and I was conscious of the transience of personal existence, I was running with my friends over some streetcar tracks and we were all shouting with joy, and I stopped and pointed down the empty street and said, "Look! Enjoy this! We'll never experience this again!"        Life is in living and capturing the precious, beautiful, ugly, never-to-occur-again moment. This is how I have lived my life. This is why I write.

- Floyd Salas