...a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it... - Thomas Pynchon

"consider," replies the geomancer, " — adam and eve ate fruit from a tree, and were enlighten'd. the buddha sat beneath a tree, and he was enlighten'd. newton, also sitting beneath a tree, was hit by a falling apple, — and he was enlighten'd. a quick overview would suggest trees produce enlightenment. trees are not the problem. the forest is not an agent of darkness. but it may be your visto is."

Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming - just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again.

Everybody here drove around like a dedicated loser, expecting moment to moment to get into an accident. Doc could relate to this — it was like the beach, where you lived in a climate of unquestioning hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always expecting to be sold out — but he didn't have to enjoy that either, especially.