Said to me by very attractive woman: “Oh, I like your last name!”

My reply, which was not said aloud: “Well, you know – it could be yours, after we get married. I’ll give you a wedding night you’ ll never forget.

Which is good, because you’ll probably be testifying about it in court.”

And people say I’m a cynic.

— It’s you fault, you know. You talked me out of my childhood dream.

— I did?

— My dream of learning French, inventing a time machine, and becoming best friends with Napoleon. Maybe it was crazy – maybe it would never have worked, but now it’s too late and  I’ll never know. That’s why I’m a bitter, hollow shell of a man.

— Napoleon was kind of an asshole anyway.

Colophon: James Joyce hated quotation marks, preferring the initial dash style for spoken dialogue as used here. Publishers of first editions of his works sometimes refused to respect his wishes and used the standard style instead, leaving him a bitter, hollow shell of a man.

He grabbed his lower lip and scrunched it up between his fingers, then spent several minutes rubbing it back and forth on his gums, enjoying the sensation of alternate compression and expansion as the rubbery wet flesh folded itself into little hills and crevasses.

Greg went to the abandoned velodrome near his house most mornings. He went in the back door behind the fence, and rode his bike around the track for a half hour or so.

He always wondered why it wasn’t used, since the track was in pretty good shape, and why there would be a velodrome there anyway. When he asked older folks around the neighborhood about it, most of them had no idea it was there. One day, Greg went to go riding and found the door had been chained shut and padlocked. Three days later, it burned down late at night. He never did find out what that was all about.

Gary was upset about the government and thought it had too much influence over people’s lives. Fran thought that while the ultimate authority of the government does derive from force, the effective result of governmental mandate is collective activity that benefits all members of society.

Gary thought about that for a while and decided that, while she had a point, individual moral principles should determine what circumscribes people actions. Then they had sex.

I walked out the back door. It was raining very slightly. A car bumped softly into the wooden fence around the yard. The driver jumped out of the car and cursed. He threw a chicken over the fence, jumped back in the car, and drove off. The chicken ran 10 feet, clucked, and sat down.