This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment. - Jonathan Lethem

How’s it feel to be a worthless jumbo diddly-ass puppetool?

For Cicero, censure of a blatant racist or homophobe was not only useless but fatally boring. The power residing in such accusations was best wielded at random, against the most avowedly sympathetic and correct colleague or student. Cicero routinely dropped a casual “But of course, you realize you’re a racist” into friendly interactions. The less evidence on hand, the more destabilizing the result.

blow the sixty bucks on a movie on Shattuck, on a bucket of fake-buttered popcorn and a shoe-box-size carton of Whoppers or Junior Mints. Cradling the bucket or carton he’d slip into the darkness, washed over by the phantasms of some sex comedy played by American actors a quarter-century younger than himself, who were meant to be taken for adults. This would make it permissible to die. Desirable, even.