Cars are all jammed up all along the road and a light turns red and someone honks. In every one of those cars there is a story or a hundred stories. For every light on in al of those huge city buildings there is a story. No one knows what I am about to face and no one knows my story and neither do I right then.

People are secretive when they have secrets.

It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this acutally happens, and it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it makes you realize there's absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning away.

The favorite game of temperamental people is Try to Guess Why I’m Ticked Off. (Contestant number one, Why do YOU think he’s pissed off? Why, I’m not sure, Bob, but I’m going to go with ‘Because I Left the Faucet Dripping.’ BEEP. I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. The correct answer is: ‘Because You Happen to Exist.’)

You wouldn't match Melanie and me up, and if we hadn't gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if we'd have matched us up either. I'm not sure why we even stuck, except that we each probably find the other to be entertaining...Besides I feel like it was a personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie's world, though I think she felt the same for me.

Anyway, madness and genius. They're the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow.

Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.