Amid an American landscape come two poignant novellas of young men in search of relevance, love ... and a good round of golf. Introducing Salted with Salt - Solomon Cross, unsure of what path to follow in life, is embarking on a road trip to visit two of his college friends. He is the detached observer. Yet as his journey unfolds, bits and pieces of himself are slowly revealed as he becomes both the story and the storyteller. "'You should tell it like it is. Anything else is false kindness, which leaves little room for improvement.' That was my father's opinion. He had an unshakable faith in God, but he thought that Man was inherently evil. As for me I knew all good things come from above, and I was standing still to receive. This hidden truth remained immutable in the shifting shadows. It gave me a chance to start looking around. Not with my mind's eye, but with something else in illusive apexes of clarity." And from The Altar of Silence, a story of lost youth and lessons that have yet to be learned - John, Jim and Ray are three friends who have known each other since rooming together in college. Jim is the surfer-the perennial teenager who goes from job to job and woman to woman; John is the solid married man with a wife, kids, and a mortgage; then there's Ray, the one with the terrible past that threatens to ruin the man he could become. "It's bad when you become rational about your vices. And for every intense moment in your life there's payback with interest." I sat in a cemetery once after taking some acid. All I sensed was the silence and the dark. Because there were no spirits there. Just my own, alone. I realized how silly speech was because it never bridges misunderstandings and how senseless it was in the unsaid."