Category: how to win the lottery

her first puppet was a bird, a hand puppet with feathers and sequins, nothing like sabbath’s idea of a puppet. he explained that puppets were not for children; puppets did not say, “i am innocent and good.” they said the opposite. “i will play with you,” they said, “however i like.” she stood corrected, but that didn’t mean that, as a puppetmaker, she ever really stopped looking for the happiness that she’d known at seven, when she still had a mom and a dad and a childhood.

during the day, i’d run around attending to organizational duties. at night, i’d go to mcdonald’s, where i’d buy a small soda and sit and read until closing time at eleven. rode my bike home. made about a dozen phone calls to people on the club’s contact list. i avoided going home for fear of vaporizing in isolation.

ah shake off rents, he can go and kill himself with drugs. some fucking friends i have. spud, second prize, begbie, matty, tommy: these punters spell l-i-m-i-t-e-d. an extremely limited company.

“the boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway.”

“for some time now i’ve had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game.” “interesting. how so?” “what terrorists gain, novelists lose. the degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. the danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.”

“whole problem ’th you folks’s generation,” isaiah opined, “nothing personal, is you believed in your revolution, put your lives right out there for it—but you sure didn’t understand much about the tube. minute the tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative america, el deado meato, just like th’ indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars—it was way too cheap. . . .”