Crossword-Solution: BOOTLEGGER 10 letters, 17 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 14

Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed — the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father…

If [a man] spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his …

The Mania Speaks You clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil. I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein? Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER? I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed was a shredded sweater and a police warning? You should be legend by now. Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline. I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon. Preened you in the dark, hammered lul…