“So listen -- one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice it's original height.”

“Don’t cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole?Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are youlistening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. Solisten - one way to lower the flag to half mast is just to lower theflag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole.You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me?You understand what I mean, Mario?”

“How come she never got sad?”She did get sad, Booboo. She got sad in her way instead of yours andmine. She got sad, I’m pretty sure.”Hal?”You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front bythe portcullis here after it happened? Do you remember that? And itgoes to half-mast every year at Convocation? Remember the flag, Boo?”Hey Hal?”Don’t cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole?Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are youlistening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. Solisten - one way to lower the flag to half mast is just to lower theflag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole.You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me?You understand what I mean, Mario?”Hal?”She’s plenty sad, I bet.”

“(Where do they get these giant flags? What happens to them when there's no campaign? Where do they go? Where do you even store flags that size? Or is there maybe just one, which McCain2000's advance team has to take down afterward and hurtle with to the next THM to get it put up before McCain and the cameras arrive? Do Gore and the Shrub and all the other candidates each have their own giant flag?)”

“Deluded or not, it's still a lucky way to live. Even though it's temporary. It may well be that the lower-ranked little kids at E.T.A. are proportionally happier than the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small children) know it's more invigorating to want than to have, it seems. Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion.”

“Okay, you know, is it weird to get so depressed watching a children’s Christmas special— Oh, wait, I shouldn’t say that. I mean, that’s not a good word. It’s not just “sadness,” the way one feels sad at a film or a funeral. It’s more of a plummeting quality. Or the way, you know, the way that light gets in winter just before dusk, or the way she is with me. All right, at the height of lovemaking, you know, the very height, when she’s starting to climax, and she’s really responding to you now, you know, her eyes widening in that way that’s both, you know, surprise and recognition, which not a woman alive could fake or feign if you really look intently at her, really see her. And I don’t know, this moment has this piercing sadness to it, of the loss of her in her eyes. And as her eyes, you know, widen to their widest point and as she begins to climax and arch her back, they close. You know, shut, the eyes do. And I can tell that she’s closed her eyes to shut me out. You know, I become like an intruder. And behind those closed lids, you know, her eyes are now rolled all the way around and staring intently inward into some void where l, who sent them, can’t follow.”

“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts [...] That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on [...] That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused [...] That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer [...] That loneliness is not a function of solitude [...] That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt [...] That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness [...] That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating [...] That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused [...]That it is permissible to want [...]That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.”