Murky again; the same murk that covers them covers me; the murk of this dreary dream world we float around in. (101)
“We’re all dreaming,” Arctor said. If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. He wondered how much of the insanity of the day—his insanity—had been real, or just induced as a contact lunacy, by the situation.
You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you’re a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? He asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows. (29)
The straights, he thought, live in their fortified huge apartment complexes guarded by their guards, ready to open fire on any and every doper who scales the wall with an empty pillow-case to rip off their piano and electric clock and razor and stereo that they haven’t paid for anyhow, so he can get his fix, get the shit that if he doesn’t he maybe dies, outright flat-out dies, of the pain and shock of withdrawal. But, he thought, when you’re living inside looking safely out, and your wall is electrified and your guard is armed, why think about that?
“If your were a diabetic, and you didn’t have money for a hit of insulin, would you steal to get the money? Or just die?” (28)
Make it? Make what? The team? The chick? Make good? Make out? Make sense? Make money? Make time? Define your terms. The Latin for ‘make’ is facere, which always reminds me of fuckere, which is Latin for ‘to fuck,’ and I haven’t been getting it on worth jack shit lately.
