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He was making up for it now, even if only to himself, because he still felt impelled to put on a good face for the world, it seemed bad manners to do otherwise. 'If you can't say something nice.', his mother had tutored him, 'then don't say anything at all.'
The hair was real. Crystal had no idea who it had once belonged to. She'd worried it might have come from a corpse but her hairdresser said, 'Nah, from a temple in India. The women shave their heads for some kind of religious thing and the monks sell it.'
That's how Crystal referred to it - 'Got your head stuck in a book again, Harry?' It would be funny if his head did actually get stuck in a book.
Her heart wasn't shattered, just cracked, although cracked was bad enough.
"Are you Mrs Bragg?' Reggie asked.
"Maybe," the woman said. Well, you either are or you aren't. Reggie thought. You're not Schrodinger's cat.
What do you call a nest of lesbians? A dyke eyrie.
"Great,' she said, so he knew she wasn't listening. An increasing number of people, Jackson had noticed lately, were not listening to him.
Dogs, you know, stay by their master's side after they've died. Fido, Hachiko, Ruswrap, Old Shep, Squeak, Spot. There was a list on Wikipedia.
I am the repository of useless knowledge.
Jackson had never really seen the point of existential angst. if you didn't like something you changed it and if you couldn't change it you sucked it up and soldiered on, one foot after the other. ('Remind me not to come to you for therapy,' Julia said.)
This was better, Jackson thought, all he had to do was utilize the lyrics from country songs, they contained better advice than anything he could conjure up himself. Best to avoid Hank, though - 'I'm so lonesome I could cry. I'll never get out of this world alive. I don't care if tomorrow never comes. Poor old Hank, not good mental fodder of a man who had just tried to jump off a cliff.
'Diaeresis - the two little dots above the "e", its not an umlaut.
Reggie thought if a day would ever goes by when she is not disappointed in people.
"Jesus Christ, Crystal,' he said, dropping the baseball bat and pulling off his shoes, prepare to jump in and save Tommy. So he could kill him later.
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