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[...] Named Bussy, Mr. Vince or Vincent Bussy, who wore a Kmart parka with a hood with a fake fur fringe, [...] Bussy one week thereafter gone so abruptly that his umbrella remained hanging from the Pod's communal coattrack for almost a quarter until someone finally took it down.
he gets fired cus his wife tells his boss that Bussy said the boss could be a truly evil person if he grew a somewhat larger set of balls
(someone at a tech company gets fired, and something similar happens? something very Lynchian - if possible - remains? use the same style of putting it after a comma, at the end of a long sentence in which this character is introduced by name in the first place)
[...] except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn't connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he'd taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment's the condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler's Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver's knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds's current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver's queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine's awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso 'Losses Through Theft of Service' and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver—a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns' very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated—wouldn't simply speed away with Sylvanshine's money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds's counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor [...]
this whole scene (when Claude is vastly overthinking the whole getting-food-via-cab scenario) is incredible. the sentence just goes on and on. ends at the end of the chapter, with him having to take a breather on the airport tarmac (basically a panic attack)
It is this boy who dons the bright-orange bandolier and shepherds the lower grades' kids through the crosswalk outside school. [...]
this is the really eager boy (young Stecyk) whom everyone hates. inspiration for some intern: everyone hates him because he works really hard and is always (or appears to be) kind and helpful and has no sense of irony and is thus either the world's most passively passive-aggressive asshole or really that saintly and eager. someone who has obliterated the self to appease the other, which strikes all "others" as highly suspect and thus makes them uneasy or even aggressive
A teacher whose homeroom the boy suggests a charted reorganization of the coat hooks and boot boxes lining one wall so that the coat and galoshes of the student whose desk is nearest the door would themselves be nearest the door, and the second nearest's second-nearest, and so on [...]
same intern as note1619: suggests efficiency in lunchtime seating arrangements, completely missing the whole social aspect (or trying to make it into an efficiency thing) and ofc everyone hates him
[...] and there it was again, the snatch of forced air-music that Sylvanshine couldn't place but made him want to leave his seat and go chase something on foot in the company of all the children in the neighborhood, all of whom come boiling out of their respective front doors and hotfooting it up the street holding currency aloft, and before he could think, Sylvanshine said, 'Bizarre as this sounds, can either of you every so often hear--?'
'Mister Squishee,' now said the agent to his right in a baritone that didn't go with his body at all. 'Fourteen Mister Squishee iterant-route frozen confection S corp out of East Peoria trucks seized together with office facilities, receivables, and equity holdings of four out of the seven members of the family who owned what the Region's counsel convinced the Seventh Circuit was de facto a privately held S corp,' Bondurant said. 'Disgruntled employee, falsified depreciation schedules for everything from freezers to trucks like this here--'
- the almost tragedy of requisitioning Mister Squishee ice cream trucks (and i believe the brand is related to Mister Squishy in the oblivion story) as IRS vehicles. something similar for the tech company? either they buy up some sort of symbol of the past (like banks, post office, manufacturing companies) or they get something seized by the IRS idk
or a reference to Square taking over the San Francisco Chronicle building, and someone seeing that as a symbol of tech eating the world (in a good way)
also the way they just call it an S corp (that's their primary way of classifying the world) is great. need to find something similar for people in MC's job. or Sean's job. classifying people he sees in the car next to him based on their customer profiles
[...] the expression in Cheryl Ann's eyes, which without ever once again thinking about it Tom Bondurant has never forgotten, was one of blank terminal sadness, not so much that of a pheasant in a dog's jaws as of a person who's about to transfer something he knows in advance he can never get sufficient return on. [...]
Bondurant reminiscing about his relationship
I like the use of the ROI metaphor for love - use something similar to describe relationship between either MC and his wife or some other character's relationship
For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat. The worst thing was that one degree could lead to the next if he worried about it too much, if he was too afraid that a single sweat would get worse and tried too hard to control or avoid it. The fear of it could bring it on. He did not truly begin to suffer until he understood this fact, an understanding he came to slowly at first and then all of an awful sudden.
[...] He would mentally repeat this to himself over and over. Franklin Roosevelt was right, but it didn't help--knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn't make the fear go away. In fact, he started to think that thinking of the speech's line so much just made him all the more afraid of the fear itself. That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird. [...]
this is so good
[...] as long as he's screaming and trying to beat himself unconscious against the wall of the room, they're going to keep him in that little room, and as long as he's in that little room, he's going to be screaming, because the whole problem is that he's a claustrophobic. He's a living example of how there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there's going to be some ridiculous foul-up and someone's going to be in living hell.
an ep of Twilight Zone (maybe). not sure how to use this but it's kinda funny
[...] Lane Dean, whose slacks have ridden up so far he'd have to go into a stall in a men's room to extract them, feels like running out into the fields in the heat and running in circles and flapping his arms.
Lane Dean's smoke break, just standing outside with two of his colleagues who are kind of ignoring him. I love this