-7-
"Say you are paused at the
drive-through at MacDonald's, and you have to turn the radio down,
so you can say "Quarter Pound with Cheese" to a dead-looking speaker
set there. On the radio . . ."
"It is, once again, Science
Friday. This Friday we are talking with people who have trained very
large radio receivers on outer space in order to pick up signals from
advanced civilizations out there."
"That's lunacy for you."
"Say you meet someone at
the chips and dip on an outside excursion, and exchange a remark or
two. This person is quite enchanting. But your relationship in fact
becomes strangely restricted . . . like you are embarrassed to be
meeting in this way."
"So you walk off holding
the food and eat it facing a wall, which has framed prints of--what?"
"How many times do you see
a person and think "I wish I were that person.""
"Never."
"Once, recently."
"I identify with very old
people. I always want to step up to them and whisper in their ear:
lucky it's reversible!"
"Everybody is most comfortable
being themselves; they are really the only person they can manage
to be you know."
"It's a great truth that:
Suffering makes people humble. They end up thanking God more than
they did before. Which is a good thing, an opportunity you might say.
Thanking God."
"That is a great truth--if
it is a truth at all. Ha!"
"I break into the same cold
sweat over issues large and small."
"This talk lacks direction.
But of course . . ."
"With our sweep-around heads
and searchlight eyes we comb back and forth picking up the . . . invisible
energy fields, the pockets and black holes of fear and shapes of hopes,
plus . . ."
"What happens when nothing
you say isn't something you said before, and then said before uncountable
times."
"A character in a play has
their lines. They change the play, change the day, but the character
only has the same lines. There's hell for you."
"The first time you notice
that you are repeating yourself is not, unfortunately, the first time
you have . . . repeated yourself. Which means--"
"Dreadful!"
"You might as well just not
try to get back. I mean for awhile I though of trying to go back."
"It's closing in."
"What is?"
"The state of nonnegotiable
finitude."
"Remember that summer we
played Hearts. Was that despair? Now are we playing with a, dare I
say it?--full deck! Waiter! Some absinthe. That's the memory-loss
potion right? Ah, here comes the waiter. Death, it turns out, is not
an event, but the place where events stop. The place where people
get to after there is no more life for them. How simple!"'
"How terrifying."
