He’s just a classic scapegoat, told people things they didn’t want to hear. There’s never any percentage in being ahead of your time. - Jonathan Lethem

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

The Hippie Parents weren't for all their distraction and funk, for their love triangles and LPs and antiwar demonstrations, illiterates...You'd find the books in the downstairs bathroom, or on their bedside tables, or maybe see them unwrapped at holidays as gifts, a cherished revelation passed from one to another, shared like a joint...

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interweave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement demolishing workmen periodically wrench open into daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances.

Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.