Infinite Jesticulating

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it

In the bathroom his throat suddenly closed and he wept hard for two or three seconds before the weeping stopped abruptly and he could not get it to start again.

'What's an insomniac?' 'Someone who rooms with you, kid, that's for sure.'

Which he was sure an unpleasant-fact specialist like Randi would point out had implications that were not good.

'You're wearing that bow tie, after all. Isn't that rather an invitation to a young sir?'

'Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other. We countenance each other from either side of some unbridgeable difference on this issue. Let's lie very quietly and ponder this.'

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.

A lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material.

He wants his bib ironed and laid out by the tray at the ready, and he wants the living room's teleputer booted and warmed up and the evening's entertainment cartridges already selected and arranged and lined up in the dock ready for remote insertion into the viewer's drive.

It's funny what you don't recall.

'Boo, I kicked a kid's ass is all. End of story. I don't think it's good to rehash it when I've kicked somebody's ass. It's like a dignity thing.

E.T.A. is abundantly, embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design.

People who know Hal gets regularly covertly high: - Michael Pemulis (also gets high) - Jim Struck (also gets high) - Bridget C. Boone (also gets high) - Jim Troeltsch (also gets high) - Trevor Axford (also gets high) - Ted Schacht (occasionally gets high in a medicinal or touristic way) - Ortho 'The Darkness' Stice (occasionally gets high in a medicinal or touristic way) People who might know Hal gets regularly covertly high: - Kyle D. Coyle (possibly knows) - Tall Paul Shaw (possibly knows) - Frannie Unwin (remote possibility they know) - Bernadette Longley (not impossible that they know) - Unpleasant K. Freer (might have their suspicions) - Orin Incandenza (mysteriously, even long-distance, seems to know more than he's coming right out and saying, unless Hal's reading more into some of the phone-comments than are there) People who Hal has gotten covertly high with: - Michael Pemulis

My eyes are closed; the room is silent. 'I cannot make myself understood, now'.

'Are you asleep?' 'Booboo, we've been over this. I can't be asleep if we're talking.'

To say nothing of the arresting image of the idolatrous West's most famous and self-congratulating idol, the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some type of enormous adult-design diaper, a hilariously apposite image popular in the news photos of so many international journals.

- Soda - Oreos - Bread - Sandwich meat - Mayonnaise - Tomatoes - M&M's - Almost Home cookies - Ice cream - A Pepperidge Farm frozen chocolate cake - Four cans of canned chocolate frosting to be eaten with a large spoon