"I almost attacked him on the spot. I just had no idea where to begin hitting. He's much larger than he was a week ago."

[...] an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was [...]

[...] In the girls' faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist. For some reason I see these girls also older, pale television ghosts flickering behind the originals: middle-aged women, with bright-red fingernails and deeply tanned, hard, seamed faces, sprayed hair shaped by the professional fingers of men with French names; and eyes, eyes that will stare without pity or doubt over salted tequila rims at the glare of the summer sun off the country club pool. [...] The boys [...] I see so many calm, impassive, and cheerful faces, faces at peace, for now and always, with the context of their own appearance and being, that sort of long-term peace and smooth acquaintance with invariable destiny that renders the faces bloodlessly pastable onto cut-outs of corporate directors in oak-lined boardrooms, professors with plaid ties and leather patches at the elbows of their sport jackets, doctors on bright putting greens with heavy gold shock-resistant watches at their wrists and tiny beepers at their belts [...]

[...] as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d'oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva on it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin's nose, and stayed there. And the friends were blasted into silence, and the rest of the hors d'oeuvre in my mouth turned to ice, adhered forever to my palate, and the Beatles sang, "Guess you know it's true," and Janet stopped all life processes, virtually killed with horror, which she out of a compassion not of this earth tried to hide by smiling, and she began to look in her purse for a Kleenex, with the obscenely flesh-and-bone-colored glob of chewed food on the end of her hose, and I watched it all through the large end of a telescope, and then the world ceased mercifully to be, and I became infinitely small and infinitely dense, a tiny black star twinkling negatively amid a crumple of empty suit and shoes. This was my taste of hell at twenty. The month following that night is an irretrievable blank in my memory, an expletive deleted. That portion of my brain is cooked smooth.

[...] The eyes were bright green, but bright and still soft, somehow, plant-green as opposed to emerald green, so that he still looked like a human being, and not a product of technology, as so many green-eyed people in my opinion do. Look like products of technology. [...]

heterosexual singles bars I'd attended during the first desolate Lenoreless years after my hegira to Cleveland

"[...] I have to get all prepared to talk Hegelian sublation with Nervous Roy Keller, which will be a bitch, because Nervous Roy is far too nervous to assimilate any but the most clearly presented information. Clear presentation is not Hegel's strength."

talk Hegelian sublation

"Looks like Gramma screwed up, unless perhaps the guy was dropped from a helicopter into this exact position; that's one possibility Dr. W never fathomed. I guess there wre no helicopters back in his day. Technology does affect interpretation, after all, doesn't it?"