Boomer Petway, had used the turkey to trick the bride, Ellen Cherry Charles, into marrying him. At least, that was what Ellen Cherry was thinking at that moment, less than a week after the wedding, thinking, as she watched the turkey suck the thawing countryside into its windshield and blow it out its rearview mirror, that she’d been tricked. Less than a week after the wedding, that probably was not an excellent indicator of impending decades of marital bliss.
MOCKINGBIRDS ARE THE TRUE ARTISTS of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere,
“Sometimes when he looks down at us like that, I feel like he wants to eat the flower right outen my buttonhole.” “Uh-huh,” his wife, Patsy, replied. “Makes me feel like he wants to chew the elastic outta my underpants.” Verlin Charles did not appreciate Patsy Charles’s interpretation of the preacher’s voracious stare, and he told her so.
Boomer appeared to be counting cows. The cows that were stuck like gnats to the fly strip of the horizon. When he counted up to a certain number, he smiled. Thought Ellen Cherry, I will probably never really know how many little faraway cows it takes to make my husband smile
Exactly how an almost exclusively Caucasian lower-middle-class residential community of nineteen thousand supported itself, how it paid for its green shutters, power mowers, and ubiquitous American flags, is a question fit to occupy a demographer for a useless month or so, but it is not, thankfully, a concern of ours.
the teenager at whom he’d directed his inquiry was too shy to respond. The young fellow seized the opportunity to examine his boots. Likely need new soles by summer.
Ellen Cherry was as mystified as the fly that wasted a day following a plastic horse. What had Queen Jezebel done to earn the distinction as our all-time treacherous slut? In the Bitch Hall of Fame, Jezebel had a room of her own; nay, an entire wing.
A person can’t make a career out of somebody else’s invective. Only recently, an observer had called him a hydrocephalic lummox, and he hadn’t even bothered to look it up
“Gentlemen, I apologize,” she said. “My husband is a complete idiot.” They nodded. “But you’ve got to admit, he’s a hill of fun.”
on bar stools, the two patrons were frescoing their tonsils with the Bavarian brush
The inanimate world appears static, “dead,” to humans only because of our neuromuscular chauvinism.
“imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings.” “Huh?” “Quite so. The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans’ insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.”
Dirty Sock wasn’t exactly Zen, there was just too much polyester in him for that,
Is it mere coincidence that the most representative Parisian dance is called the cancan? Or that the famed French film festival is held at a place called Cannes? Yes, of course it is, but no matter:
Tin habitually broadcasts extra electrons, and those superfluous particles create a barrier against acids in the foodstuff that would otherwise corrode the can, slowly weakening it from within, the way political convictions weaken morality and religious convictions weaken the mind.
Speaking of the roast turkey, wherever they stopped it, coast to coast, onlookers had invariably inquired, “What’re you selling?” “Who do you represent?” “What company are you doing this for? Armour’s?” “Are we on TV?” It was a sad commentary, but people simply could not accept that the giant entrée was not an advertising gimmick, a promotional stunt. “They don’t get it,” complained Boomer. “Can’t they comprehend that not ever’thing’s done for a paycheck? That sometimes you just make a thing ’cause you wanna see how it’ll turn out, ’cause you have a feeling in your gut that it oughta be made
Like a deceased Italian mama damned to make pasta for the demons in hell, the minister’s wife pulled strands of death spaghetti from a wheezy old organ.
His third mistake was in trusting that even if he didn’t understand the situation, his leaders did. His first—and worst—mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do.
property
What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people’s decisions for them
true freedom was an internal condition not subject to the vagaries of politics. Freedom could not be owned. Therefore, it could not be appropriated. Or controlled. It could, however, be relinquished. The Wyoming sailor had surrendered his soul long before he sacrificed his body
In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever.
He didn’t see any angels, but he knew they were hanging around. Jerusalem was where it all went down, man. It was connected to heaven like Spanish Harlem was connected to Puerto Rico.