“...for I have read about oceanic feelings, but I know about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean... and I have heard about the thousand points of light, but I have seen that they provide no warmth, no canopying glow ...”

“-So how about you?, I said: what do you do, if you don't mind my asking; -Not at all, he said: I'm into mitosis;-Aren't we all, I said;-”

“...but now, though, because I have still not gotten there, I feel as if distance- as if distance itself-has developed a density, a viscosity, and that I am pushing against it, that I am fighting distance's density; so I press the pedal, and the car surges, and I attempt to push to the terminus of distance, and when this does not happen and I am still not there I feel as if the tenacity of time will smother me- that I will be smothered by the atrocity of distance, by the painful failure of simultaneity; and I struggle to keep the gas pedal within civilized limits, and I go astride cars and around cars, and I am doused in the unthought thought: Please let me get to him quickly;”

“or is that too straightforward a statement, have I been insuffi­ciently artful in encoding my sentiments...in camouflaging them for esthetic effect. well, too fucking bad...my life has convinced me of few things, but the absoluteness of the negative is one of them... light bends, it diffracts, it scatters, but darkness fucking endures... it is what remains when the strayed-in rays and scintillas have long disappeared... it is the fundament, the ground... and I am one who can tell you this: behold my black body..”

“...when I read to her, her quietness, her peacefulness, was what I sought to hear, and it echoed in me as if in an expanding cavern, and often left me trembling with love; and so, then and there, after taking a final gulp of my decaf, I decided to indulge in even more self-pampering: I lifted my legs down from the chair, and, with lightness and celerity, stole upstairs...”

“...and I was thinking of what it would be like to have such a wound, to lift up the bottom of my shirt at school and have bandages to show, white brushstrokes on belly, when a horrendous force Huhhh catapulted me forward and my neck whipped back and I crumbled down to the pavement and my entire face began to cry;”

“...but what I am not interested in, Ms. Clipboard- or Mr. Canker or Mrs. Murmur or Call-me-Carol, all of you- is your questions; even your pointing and tipping Enoch pencils have six sides, my dear definers: pay heed whereon you pinch!; I am interested, almost exclusively, in being interested, and your reductivist probings are only intended to cordon off wings of my mansion;”