Random Thoughts From A Funny Book

Society, as a rule, did not trouble anyone pushing a shopping cart.  The further a cart was taken from the store where it belonged, the more deference was paid to the possibly unstable individual who had taken charge of it.

Deceit had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into decrepitude.

What if she were a homeless person and lived here?  Annabel had never gone in for the fad of caring for the homeless, although Alice said there was a great deal to learn from them in the way of resourcefulness.  They would come into Green Palms, the local nursing home, at lunchtime and pretend to be visitors helping their loved ones eat lunch and instead would eat the lunch themselves.

He felt as resourceful as the Cub Scout he had once been.  He hoped all his cub mates were dead, the little bastards.  They were always going on camping trips and catching chipmunks under pots and setting fire to them with white gas. They were always hanging around canals and shooting arrows into manatees, pretending they were whales.  Once they’d even captured a Key deer by lobbing baseball bats and stunning it.

But when they moved Steve to a private school he became a kind of heavy-metal Bartleby (he preferred Black Sabbath).

They were unaccountable, shadowy figures, practically bearded in Alice’s imagination, bearing peculiar half-priced gifts like peppermint foot cream or battery-operated lights you clipped onto books or socket-wrench sets.  She’d never heard of an effective or efficient godparent.

She walked quickly, sometimes breaking into a run, through the gullies and over the rocks, past the strange growths, all living their starved, difficult lives. Everything had hooks or thorns.  Everything was saw-edged and spiny-pointed. Everything was defensive and fierce and determined to live.

The idea that there was some spirit out there who paid for teeth—what was it constructing anyway? What was its problem?

Her father, over the years, had gotten progressively smaller.  He was shrinking fast, though he’d been holding at jockey size for the last month or so.