Did he say who he was?" asked Scott. "I asked him," said Ariel. "He sort of laughed and said he was between names. - Tim Powers

Now she was giving him a worried look. “Say something sane.”
He smiled bleakly, his eyes on the cars ahead. “You and I are not normal people.”
“Huh.” She shook her head. “That’s not sane, that’s just true.”

Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error.

In the early eighties, savvy Japanese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they’d been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he’d tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchisement is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog’s leg.