TheStoneset Times

The room above McCormack's smells faintly of pencil shavings and old coffee. Two chairs, a desk, a single window facing west. On the wall: a piece of granite, hand-engraved with seven words that are not new but feel new^are old but feel like today.

The granite was set Sunday morning, in the presence of two witnesses and a notary. By Monday afternoon, the man who set it — its founder, 26, a psychiatry resident at UCSD Medical Center — was seeing his first patients.

The line on the granite reads: "Never throw a stone and hide your hand."

"It's not a slogan," the founder said, by appointment, in his office Tuesday. "It's not a marketing line. It's a rule. It's the only one we have. Everything else follows from it."

The "we" is, for now, mostly aspirational. The founder runs the practice alone, with a part-time secretary and an answering service. He filed the corporate name — Stoneset, Inc. — with the State of California on February 14. He paid the filing fee in cash, in a single envelope, and walked out.

What is Stoneset? Asked directly, the founder's first answer is brief: "A practice." Pressed, he expands.

"It's a clinical practice, first. People come here with crises, with things they can't carry by themselves. We help them carry it. But it's also a company — meaning, there are rules about how we behave, what we publish, what we make, who we partner with. The rules are the brand. The brand is the rules."

Asked what those rules are, he reached for a typewritten sheet on his desk. "Stand. Don't pose. Show the hand. Pay in full. Hold, never hurl. Sign it. Drop once. Receipts over volume. Take the work seriously, never ourselves. For permanent use — or don't make it. Open hand, or no hand at all."

Ten lines. He read them as if reading a grocery list.

"They're not aspirational. They're operational. We do all of them. If we can't do one of them, we don't do the thing."

The reporter asked whether this was sustainable. The founder smiled — the first time in forty minutes. "Probably not. That's part of why it's worth doing."

The granite, by the way, weighs 217 pounds. It is bolted to the floor. The bolts go through the floor of the apartment below — McCormack himself signed the variance, in pencil, on a butcher's paper receipt. "He told me it was for permanent use," McCormack said by phone. "I figure either he's serious or he'll move it himself."

The founder said he had no plans to move it. He said he had no plans, in fact, to do anything other than what the granite said.

The office, called Stoneset (Clinical) by the inside of its single door, opens Mondays through Thursdays, by appointment. Friday mornings are for what the founder called "the Ledger" — a hand-bound book in which he records every decision the practice makes that affects another person. He showed the book. It is bound in bone-colored cloth, the pages numbered, each entry signed in his hand and dated. There is no public copy.

"There should be," he allowed. "We'll figure that out."

The first entry, dated February 14, 1979, reads simply: "Filed. Stoneset · Inc. — for permanent use. — STSET."