We’ve got to get these wagons ­unloaded. The channel, tubing, I beam, pipe, rod, conduit, connectors, the milled bombs, the forged doohickeys—I forget what they’re called, are those bells?

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than 

The other horse traders are over there in the 7-Eleven. These horses are jittery and I don’t know how long I can hold them. That piebald one there—or is that a paint? It’s a Holstein for all I know, and 

All along the watchtower—which he had never been on before and now that he was on it could not imagine what it was, or what it looked like, or what he looked like on the watchtower, other than the way he usually looked

I am a student of low-affect living edged with self-deprecating irony. I am a character of lower-affect living a bit on edge with Mr. Irony, a self-deprecating therapist. A therapist of self-deprecation