A Commonplace Book

"The knife cut through the apple like a knife cutting through an apple."

Welcome aboard, gee, it's a fabulous or-gy
That you just dropped in on, my friend--
We can't recall just how it start-ted,
But there's only one way it can end!
The behaviour is bestial, hardly Marie-Celestial,
But you'll fit right in with the crowd,
If you jettison all of those prob-lems,
And keep it hysterically loud!

Proverbs for Paranoids
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. (p.237)
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. (p.241)
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. (p.251)
4. You hide, they seek. (page 262)
5. Paranoids are not Paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations. (p.292)

Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The serpent that announces, "the World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally re-turning," is to be delivered into a a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.

There once was a thing called a V-2,
To pilot which you did not need to--
You just pushed a button,
And it would leave nuttin'
But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.

Mondaugen's Law:
Personal Density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.
    Temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "delta-t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your personal. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even — as Slothrop now — what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment....

Her hair has been combed or styled in a way that makes it look like a certain cut of meat.