The things you love too much perish” — After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 78. The composer goes on: “You have to treat everything with irony, especial… - William T. Vollmann

What unlikely things we are, of course, with our voluntary locomotions, and our body heat which keeps our fat from congealing until death! — and how natural the inevitable downward course! (For it seems a wonder that our fleshly contraptions can endure an hour). — How natural, then, the Zombie.
[“The Blue Yonder”]

Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.

But on Thursday only the committed regulars are there, and they do what they do on Thursday, delving into pagan rituals of worship to the amber gods that let you see to the lurching anger that spins you round and round at the center of things beyond lines and angles and the very floorboards become crazy under your feet so that the floor goes YAAAWW up again down again and suddenly tunk! it hits you on the forehead and your nose bleeds and you cling to it so that you don’t begin to slip down it and fetch up against the wall where you were dancing before with all the women in your life who have now vanished and left you alone here and the swaying candelabra are like careening galaxies burning into the back of your head; you don’t dare to roll over on your back and look straight into all those stars or you will be blinded; and from the cool floor and the smell of your own puke you gain more and more understanding of the universe.