(no subject)

It's the humility of people with one another that impresses me most. There's so few and such partial exceptions: our virtually hardwired condescension to children, walls built by the career-conscious and New Yorkers, the insensibility of narcissists. Other people are a humiliation. We really don't know what what we've done and are amounts to, next to what they do and are. Until things get specialized, itemized--arguments, garments, evidences of obsession, jokes, cliches--our judgement is reserved, or rather intact but provisional, a student's unspoken answer she knows is wrong. What will the others say, how are they organized, what are they up to, what are they? It's not just canny guardedness among the strange, not just our picking up new hive orders for how to be. We get small out there because all the objections are raised at once to our integrity: every second at sea, for a boat, is assault from all over. However good our ideas about what we are, they're based on ifs and maybes, and anyone else's life, before elaborate rules are drawn up between you re. what never to mention and look at, represents another reading based on possibly better takes on possibly nearly identical facts.

Bush and Osama in sweaters in malls.

Card houses don't fraternize; when we do, it helps to be costumed or drunk.