The Steiner-Rand hierarchy of acceptance
+3. Reverence
+2. Gratitude
+1. Acceptance
+0. Indifference
–1. Resignation
–2. Resentment
–3. Bitterness

For unknown reasons, they were willing participants in their own spiritual and psychological extermination.

Our neighbor ran a small extermination business from a remodeled garage behind his house. Some weekends we’d sneak in, fascinated by a wall display of such mounted horrors as a freakish two-headed moth with a 12-inch wingspan. Later I discovered that every exterminator had one of these as part of their standard franchise package, fabricated by XYZ Pest Museum in Silver City, NM.

Which is less unthinkable—the idea of returning to the beginning, and having to live through it all once more, or being at the end, and never doing it again?

A vulgar preference for the novel over the good.

A summer day in the late sixties. The rusted 409 is up on blocks next to the driveway. Dad is out back drinking and rage-mowing under a blackening sky. It feels like something bad is about to happen. Within a few months you’ll be hitching to LA. You think you’ll be able to outrun your sadness, but in this life you can’t outrun anything.

I know where this is going.

Business exigencies gradually transform the physical environment into an implausible pastiche.