For some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me."

All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.

For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

Wow. This makes grand central look like a bus stop in Buttfuck Nebraska.

The turtle couldn't help us.

A dimwit thinks nothing is funny unless it's mean.