Mother’s attention to lettuce and other uncooked food struck Father as not only gratuitous, smug asceticism, but also willful self-destructiveness.

Yes, my father was an oral man, a primary type, who could not resist a smoke, a vowel, a puff, a sentence, a sweet, a scotch, a song, a smooch.

Plato, Buddha, Christ – what brings these men to the far future to witness the end of the world?

“O Princess Dulcinea, mistress of this captive heart!  Thou has done me grievous harm in bidding me farewell and reproving me with the harsh affliction of commanding that I not appear before thy sublime beauty.  May it please thee, Señora, to recall this thy subject heart, which suffers countless trials for the sake of thy love.”

He strung these together with other foolish remarks, all in the manner his books had taught him and imitating their language as much as he could.

Meanwhile Don Quixote so far is about a LARPer who bases his life choices on bad fantasy novels and complains about getting friendzoned.  It was published in the early 1600s.  Human nature is eternal

“He’s an ignorant blatherskate,” I said bitterly.

He lay a firm hand on my shoulder, letting me know I’d said enough.

Possible causes Encounter with spirit of hanged person or flower spirit.

Of course Farhad would be updogged sooner or later. If anyone is going to be on the receiving end of updog, it’s Farhad.

And then, each with a single golden peeper trained on me, the dogs allowed their tongues to carelessly loll from the corner of their mouths, as if to say: “You see!  One can be great; and amusing!”

I made a list of titles near Charlie’s desk: “Freud and Cocaine,” “Werewolf and Vampire in Romania,” “Escape from the CIA,” “A Lycanthropy Reader,” “Mind Food and Smart Pills.”

Charlie’s heavily stylized shorthand (it’s no accident that Ainoha, Felix’s wife, wonders of the Professor, “how you could sleep with a man with such bad handwriting”) was often indecipherable even to assistants who had worked with him for years, and as for the sentences that had been typed, they were typically fragments (“army of deserters,” “mad for sanity”) or mystically oblique pronouncements such as “History has a way of happening a little later than you think” or “In Russia you always have to buy the horse twice.”  Sometimes they contained no more than a single word.  (“Deungulate.”)