She pressed the rest of her clothes into my hands and said, "Don't do anything weird with them."

"I was going to shellac them into a dining set and serve a four-course meal in them," I said, "but if you're gonna get all squeamish about it, I guess I'll just hold them for you.

You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.

People are strange . . .

Where's your will to be weird?

Perhaps it's understandable to be more jaded on one's second exposure to something strange.

There is a beautiful consistency about Buzzard; he is a porcupine among men, with his quills always flared. If he won a new car with a raffle ticket bought in his name by some momentary girlfriend, he would recognize it at once as a trick to con him out of a license fee. He would denounce the girl as a hired slut, beat up the raffle sponsor, and trade off the car for five hundred Seconals and a gold-handled cattle prod.