another writer who had a big influence on his way of thinking about things was r.d. laing. he got turned on to him from sigrid - the one he still wanted to fuck. laing's basic idea was that insanity didn't originate with the individual but with the group - mostly and primarily the family group. the group in order to function had to create a fiction for itself. often this fiction would begin to break down, usually when one of the members of the group stopped going along with it. this person was then designated as being insane and sent to doctors in order to be fixed. the doctors would go along with this fiction, because the doctors are part of the fiction, and treat this "sick" person with drugs and other things such as shock. this sounded familiar.
    he was this person who didn't go along with the family fiction - that mom was ok, among other things - like their family was just like the families on tv - or was supposed to be like the families on tv because, on the surface, they were just like the families on tv. it's the person who is designated as insane who is usually actually acting based on the reality of the situation. the family does not want to or cannot see the reality of what is going on if it doesn't support the fiction. this person is then told that they are imagining things. an example laing uses is of girl who was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. the doctors were told that there was something wrong with her because she believed her family were listening in on her phone conversations. as it turned out her family were listening in on her phone conversations because she was schizophrenic and had to be monitored. and around it goes - all in knots, which was the title of one of his books, a more poetic study of people's entanglements.
    robert grew up with a great distrust of the group - any group. it started with his family. to them he was always the baby of the family. he didn't know anything. anything he said or might have wanted to say was not to be believed because it was a product of his over-active imagination. so he learned to be quiet. then they wondered why he was withdrawn. he was never told or taught anything either. he was always being taken care of. when he graduated high school he had no idea how to live out in the outside world. he didn't even know how one went about opening a bank account or finding a place to live - especially sice he could never afford the big houses in his neighborhood, or even his town and the towns surrounding it. he wasn't even sure how to shop for food. he was like the gardener in "being there". part of this was that he was pretty much out and out lazy. he learned that he could get by with the minimum amount of effort and he saw no reason to expend more than that for anything. he didn't want much. if he had a place to live and food to eat he was pretty much happy. also after watching tv of the 60s and all the racial riots and learning about ghettos - no one had told him about ghettos, he had thought that everyone lived much like he did - he felt guilty for what he did have. what right did he have to all that he had? - even though none of it was his, as was often pointed out to him.  besides none of it made him very happy beyond his basic needs met happiness. did it make anyone who had it happy? he didn't see too many people who were happy around him. they all acted happy. but that was part of the fiction. he learned early on to distrust smiles.
    many suburban middle-class kids like him grew up feeling the same way - having the same realizations. they were educated by what came through the tv and the music and movies. this was their beyond zebra education. this was what they weren't being told. dylan, the stones, beatles, hendrix, zappa, airplane, dead, doors, etc. became their teachers. they heard and saw what was going on on the college campuses. many had older brother or sisters there and would hear about it first hand. not him. his brother and sisters were pretty straight. he was the only freak in the family. the kids became hippies in part, he thought, because they saw how their parents felt about others not in their class or race who didn't have the things they had. so what if they rejected those things? what if they went around dressed like bums, long hair, torn clothes? would their parents still love them? did they love them to begin with? the answer in many cases was, no. when robert did start working as a landscaper his family often wondered when he was going to get a real job. landscaping was something you did to work your way though college. you didn't raise a family doing that. they were concerned that he intended to. but he thought, millions of people raise famlies making what he made.
    but still he distrusted groups. even groups of his peers. even groups of freaks. he saw many of the same workings and fictions he'd seen in his family and around the neighborhood and in town. he remembered that discussion about hippies in sociology class. yeah, this guy was the coolest because he had the longest hair. everybody followed him. but he went along with it anyway. he really wanted to be part of a group - a group of his own kind, whoever they might be. he just didn't know how to go about it. most groups seemed to not want anything to do with him anyway - even the hippies. what others thought of him was very important as it was to any teen-ager. but he tried to be too cool for school - and not just school school but all the social schools within the actual school. he remembers when he started growing his hair out along with everyone else. he had curly hair. at first that wasn't cool. he used to comb it out while it was drying to make it straight. but any time it rained or got too humid it would curl up again. this happened when he first went out - though they really didn't go anywhere - with his first girlfriend, sarah. his friend with the playboys liked her friend and robert was told that she liked him. he and his friend went over to her house to meet the two of them. on the way over it was drizzling. his hair curled up. he thought he looked like a total jerk. while his friend and the other girl started making out on the couch, robert just sat there not saying anything, not doing anything. eventually he and the girl he was with went for a walk. he took her back over to his house where they sat out in the backyard. finally she asked, "are you going to kiss me, or what?" so he did. about a month later they were fucking.
    this was another time he stayed out all night. it was also during spring break and her parents weren't home. his weren't either - just his sister and his grandmother who was supposed to be watching them and cooking for them and stuff. his sister went ballistic when he got home the next day. they got into a fight which they did a lot since they were kids. she ended up hitting him with her hairbrush as he ran into his room and locked the door. that was the first time they had gotten physical since he was in middle school and he once pushed her and she fell back easily against the wall. they both realized that he was now bigger than she was. she could no longer beat him up. she had a temper that matched his own. he's heard stories that she has a thing with pots and pans with her ducking husband. he believes it. beneath the middle-class old world reserve his whole family could explode at any second. again the fiction. the calm they portrayed was the calm of a loaded mousetrap.
    but soon after all this it became cool to have curly hair. robert wanted to look like jim morrison, whereas before he used to curse his genes because he couldn't look like brian jones. one day, when he thought his hair was long enough, he parted it down the middle. was it long enough, or did he look like an idiot? after a couple of times he finally went to school like that. expecting the worst from all the people who he felt thought he was an idiot anyway, no one said anything. he was in. in his senior year he was finally cool. a few years after, one of his soon-to-be-wife's friends - the one who would be his best man - told him that back in high school he used to think that robert was one of the cooler people in school. he thought that robert was stoned all the time. if he only knew. what came across as being stoned was actually robert's social paranoia. he slunk through the halls hugging the wall afraid to make eye contact with anyone. he hid behind this i-don't-give-a-shit charlie brown facade. but that was what being cool was.
    and by then he really didn't give a shit. he rarely studied. in fact he never took books home. he shared his locker with ann's friend - the one who blew her brain out - so she wouldn't have to walk so far to where her locker was. he kept his books on the top shelf while she had to keep hers on the bottom. she was mad because his books never moved while she always had to dig hers out. still he managed to pass - except for english.
    where he went to school he was in what was called college prep. you were expected to go to college. they only prepared you for more school. he had no plans to go to college. he didn't apply to any. he probably wouldn't have gotten in anyway - he got minimum grades for his minimum efforts. he didn't know what he was going to do. be a hippie freak was all he could come up with. after all, wasn't there a revolution going on? wasn't all this capitalist bullshit going to fall away or be blown up? he thought so. he believed in all the poetic lyrics of the songs he was listening to. of course, he didn't participate in any of it. he didn't storm the barricades. but out in the suburbs what barricades were there? they lived in the promised land. any barricades there might have been were to keep others from getting in. this was literally true. once during all the riots there was a national guard exercise. a bunch of guardsmen were posted along the border that faced the nearest city. they wanted to see how fast they could be deployed in case the uppity niggers got it into their heads to come over and burn down all these big white houses. the same niggers who were allowed to be maids and gardeners as long as they left town by nightfall. no wonder they hate us, robert thought. i'd hate us too.
    there were no blacks in his hometown during this time. once a black girl showed up at school for awhile. where the hell did she come from? she didn't stay long. they had problems enough with catholics and jews. his mother's stated attitude was that she wouldn't mind blacks in the neighborhood as long as they kept up the yard. when his next older sister - the one with the hairbrush - married a catholic and became a catholic to do so, his brother's comment was, at least he's not italian. he was pretty much surrounded by this his whole life. when he was working landscaping, the dirty jobs were nigger work. he soon found that he was the company nigger. he didn't mind. that meant that the other guys pretty much left him alone. he wasn't one of them. for one, he was married. he didn't go out drinking with them afterward. he never liked drinking too much. but he was there when a joint was going around. one day they spent a whole afternoon stoned and catching fall leaves in their mouths. once in awhile they did include him. one day they had off because it had been raining in the morning but cleared up in the afternoon after they'd been sent home, they all did peyote together. he'd never done peyote before or since. it was nice. as well as drinking, they were into quaaludes too. robert didn't like downs. he tried some once and spent the whole time not being able to stand up. what fun was that? he liked active drugs - drugs that made him feel alive not dead. and acid was the most alive drug of them all.
    he smoked pot but wasn't a regular stoner. he'd usually smoke when somebody else had some. he never bought pot for himself. he didn't like a steady diet of it. he got lost in the haze. he got stupid. once in awhile was ok by him. he smoked with kathy and silas. that got them going on all their crazy ideas and heavy discussions. pot leads to heavy discussions - or maybe what only seem like heavy discussions because you're stoned. pot makes you try and want to figure everything out - even when there might not be anything to figure out.
    once kathy and robert had her husband, silas, going on about the story of pipette. it was something that had just popped out and they had made up and he happened to walk in on. but he swore that he knew what they were talking about and kept trying to figure it out. the more they kept going on about it out of their heads, the more he kept going, yeah yeah yeah. when something's funny, being stoned makes it even funnier. and this was really funny. kathy was in tears as robert very matter-of-factly laid out the story of pipette. oh, you mean poupon? her husband said. no, not poupon - pipette. and he'd go on some more. oh you mean puck? no, not puck. pipette. ponce de loen? no. they finally had to let him know that they'd been making it up. he couldn't believe it at first. he was so sure he knew who they were talking about. you had to know silas to really know why this was so funny. he is a very serious and ardent scholar and has a wealth of facts about almost everything at his fingertips. he really felt that he should have known who they were talking about and that made it all the more easier to lead him on.
    before then it was with sigrid and her friend, meg - the locker girl. meg was a serious pothead. they'd hang out at her house. if her parents were home, they go for a drive and toke up. for a little while lou, joined them. but she was a buzzkill. sigrid and meg informed her not to come around anymore. this was soon after high school - after robert and sigrid graduated anyway. meg was two years behind them. the same class as his debbi. meg was seriously into music too. but pot and music go together. they'd hang out and bullshit the night away. once her brother was with them and he entertained them with a light show using a flashlight and the over head extension lamp above the kitchen table. it was great. but then they were stoned.
    robert took her to led zeppelin a couple of times at the garden. the first time when they came out for an encore the two of them rushed down along with everyone else toward the stage. they got to just one side of it. but people were pushing the other way too. the crowd buckled just where they were standing. robert was carried several feet but landed on his feet but on top of bodies of people who were knocked down. one of those people was meg. he saw her white coat on the bottom of the pile. he went into superman mode and picked up and threw people off of her thinking, how am i going to explain to her mother if she's dead?  he finally got down to her and grabbed her and pulled her out. she was limp. he started pushing to get them out. a big guy behind them yelled, quit pushing. robert yelled back, i think my girlfriend's hurt. the guy then turned around and cleared the way for them to get next to the barricades and some air. the cops behind the barricades were standing around with their mouths hanging open - nyc cops! this was an out and out riot. robert finally got her out and she began walking a little bit. he didn't let go of her all the way back to port authority where he had parked. she was ok though.
    one of the summers he took sigrid to see grand funk railroad at shea stadium. they were the first band to play there since the beatles. she had a thing for mark farner and his bare chest. no riots there. but on the subway back there was some guy who climbed outside the back of the car to ride. it wasn't the first time he taken some girl to a concert to have her drooling for the guy on-stage. meg kinda had a thing for robert plant - his voice, at least. she came out to be gay awhile later though. but he took sarah to see the doors out at the old world fair grounds. they played with soft machine and the who - pre-tommy. she had the hots for morrison. they went to another concert there with the chamber brothers, joplin and hendrix. he took debbi once to winterland to see black sabbath. she put her coat over her head the whole time. it was too loud for her. he never made it to woodstock, though it was only about 100 miles away. it was on, then it was off, then it was on again - several times. it was going to be here, then there. the ny state police said no way. the summer before was the police riots in chicago. robert thought that this was going to turn into another riot too, so he stayed home and watched it on tv like he watched most of everything else in the world.

    but back to where we were which is about the shows kathy and robert were doing.
    the next show, maybe, was, project secret. he doesn't remember too much about this show. it was at the workshop again.  he listens to the tape and it's not giving him too much information. a bunch of the usual looped montage nonsense, probably with some more animation. it says on the box something about solo pieces. so maybe they each had their own part. the dj wasn't part of it. it could have been in front of a sit down audience again. he spoke too soon about that. the whole wanting the audience to participate thing came later. he knows that's where they ended up. there's something about the portland idiot. yeah, he drew large cartoons that he held up while the tape narrated them. or maybe they were on slides. there's a beep once in awhile. a signal to change the slide? here's the sound track. we'll let you imagine the cartoons.

    the portland idiot
    quos deus vult perdere prius dementat
    for those of you not up on your latin that means, those whom a god wishes to destroy he first drives mad.
    just a bit paranoid, don't you think?
    (beep)
    paranoia is the first stage of madness.
    i thought it was the first stage of sanity.
    that depends upon whose side your on.
    (beep)
    what are the sides?
    us and them.
    who's us?
    not them.
    who's them?
    not us.
    [something unintelligible - the tape is rather degraded]
    (beep)
    everyone is suspect!
    sure, if one side doesn't suspect you then the other side will. there's no way around it.
    what if you refuse to get involved in all that?
    then they both suspect you.
    (beep)
    meanwhile on a distant island...
    i don't believe anything you're telling me.
    why should you?
    (beep)
    i should believe in something, shouldn't i?
    such as?
    woooosh...
    (beep)
    such as...
    well, gee - i guess you're right.
    right about what?
    that i shouldn't believe in anything.
    (beep)
    i never said that.
    you did too.
    did not.
    did too.
    did not.
    did too.
    did not.
    (beep)
    out in the void...
    i only asked what you thought you should believe in.
    i don't know, what do you believe in?
    everything. aggha, now let go of my nose!
    (beep)
    how can you believe in everything?
    i don't know, i just do it.
    but what about everything that contradicts each other?
    (beep)
    i believe [unintelligible]
    oh.
    (beep)
    but actually, i found that nothing actually covered it.
    covered what?
    bird poop.
    (beep)
    oh yeah?  well, i found that everything is nothing but contradictions.
    yahoo! me too.
    so what?
    (beep)
    so what what?
    ba-zoop zipeedooo!
    (beep)
    meanwhile...
    the hippos disguise themselves as secret agents hoping therefore to be invited to lots of parties.
    (beep)
    so?
    so what?
    (beep)
    ha-ha-ha-ha...
    so, this is it? the big deal? the point of it all?
    what is?
    (beep)
    this.
    this what?
    this.
    huh?
    nevermind.
    (beep)
    zero population. no think. no think. just follow where all the other monkeys go. right left. right left. some fun. if you need a low paying job, or even if you don't need one. something congratulates itself.
    (beep)
    people.
    (beep)
    mom! come back! mommy!
    (beep)
    most of the time, i'm bored.
    so what else is new? i'm also broke.
    (beep)
    and now, back to the show!

    some sort of synthesizer whooshing white noise and echoed voice for awhile.

    so what he remembers and thinks this show was about was that there was a plan by those who concoct such plans to set up a big computer network to control everybody and project secret was supposed to secretly sabotage this plan and turn the network back against them. this was a number of years before the internet, at least the public internet. he gets none of that from listening to the tape though. you probably had to be there.
    maybe he wasn't there.
    maybe he was somebody else.
    maybe he's somebody else now.
    who is writing this thing anyway?

    and he now remembers the guy who was the best man at his wedding. he was one of debbi's group. he was smart. they all were tripping once and he left to go home to do his calculus homework. he liked a challenge. once the two of them were walking in the woods. they were talking and somehow figured out how time travel could work. they tried to go back over what they had been saying to find out how they got there but couldn't remember. it had something to do with mirrors and light and shrinking space. they were always talking about something. usually his best man was telling him about how physics worked. he explained to him about negative space and stuff like that. robert and family were back home visiting once, maybe it was when his mother was dying, and the two of them went to a local bar. they were talking and talking and soon the bar was closing. meg and some of her queer friends were there and they invited them back to their house - unless you're afraid to, one of her friends lisped - yes, lisped. he obviously didn't know about all the strange men who picked him up hitch-hiking. so they went. he and his best man went to the living room while the rest hung out in the kitchen and bitched and moaned about how terrible it was being queer. the two of them just continued on as usual. at some point the guy whose house it was came in and said, why don't you join us? they looked in and saw how depressed everyone was and declined. it was a little while after this that meg blew her brain out. robert had been writing to her but then stopped for awhile. he had stopped writing everyone for some reason. when he decided to write people again he began his letter to her with, are you still alive? with her it was a reasonable question to ask. unfortunately her mother wrote back to say that she wasn't. oops. he hoped that she hadn't opened the letter and had read it.
    sigrid and he used to write about meg and what it all meant. robert had a dream about her once. he was at a party at her house, which she never had parties, and she invited him up to her room and kept saying, i'm ok. he woke up feeling that she had actually come to him in his dream. she seemed happy. he was only in her room once. this was when he and his wife and son were moving to california and they had stopped by to say good-bye. she brought him up there to give him a small ceramic urn and also give him one hell of a kiss that made him think, what? he still has the urn. it has nightmare's ashes in it. he thought that was fitting. sigrid gave him a kiss like that once too the last time he saw her - she lives in canada now. he was dropping her off at her house on one of his trips back east that he made driving a car and art stuff for an art professor at the college where he was working who lived in nyc for the summer and they were standing in her driveway when - what? oh, you kiss me like that now when i gotta go? thanks. he can taste that kiss even now. but what the hell was meg, a lesbian, giving him a fuck me kiss for? he still doesn't know.
    women...
    for a time he was split between hanging out with meg and sigrid and hanging out with debbi's friends. he once brought meg and sigrid over to his soon-to-be-wife's house. they were stoned. they were obviously stoned because when they walked in everybody started a long weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewish you a merry christmas we wish you a merry christmas we wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year, and then ignored them. he never brought them back.
    groups...

    so, what else is missing before he moves on?
    he once was in love with a girl named connie in middle school. there was a dance coming up and his friend told him he should call her and see if she was coming. he did. she said she was. he hung up. he didn't even tell her who he was. at the dance she was dancing with some of her girlfriends. his friend pushed him toward her, ask her to dance, he said. he did. she danced with him. he then snuck back into the shadows. he named his new pet beagle after her. his one friend, the guy who pushed him into all this, lived in town. robert's family lived up on what was called the escarpment. it's where the falls used to be a long time ago. he and his friend went skateboarding together. this was back when a skateboard was a metal wheeled roller-skate nailed onto a board of plywood. if you hit a pebble you were toast.
    in a different middle school - his family, he should mention, had moved to upper new york state near niagara falls when he was in 7th grade and then back to new jersey and eventually back to his hometown but first to a different town where they rented a house while he was in 8th grade while their new house was being built - there was a sadie hawkin's dance - where the girls ask the guys. a girl came up to him, being pushed by her friends, and asked him. he said, yes. he got sick the night of the dance. he threw up. but by the time she came he felt a little better so he went. soon after they got there he got sick again. after puking in the boy's room awhile he had to come out and ask her to take him home. she avoided him after that.
    his sister was really pissed that they moved. it was her senior year and she was going to have to spend it and graduate in some school way out in hell instead of with her friends she had grown up with. robert didn't really have any friends so he didn't miss much. this was the school where middle and high school kids went together. their father had been transferred to the home office for a year. in the rented house in new jersey they had moved into a jewish neighborhood. at xmass their window was the only one with a tree. all the others had candles.  this is strange, robert thought, but kind of neat. everybody else laughed about it. it wasn't too hard to find your house, ha ha ha. at school some of the boys started calling him jew boy along with the usual faggot and stuff. he told them he was english, which was partially true - he was also huguenot french - from what was to become belgium - and some german. no you're not, they said, english don't have curly hair and big noses. he didn't know whether they did or not. he also didn't know that these were supposedly trademark jewish characteristics. all he knew about jews was that they had different holidays. and he wondered, what was the big deal if he was jewish? his neighbors seemed nice enough to him, though they ignored them for the most part. in fact, the girl next-door was kinda cute. she didn't seem to have a big nose. did he? this was also the first school he went to where there were blacks. the whites and blacks seemed to stay away from each other. he saw no reason to be the one to change it. he knew he wasn't going to be here long. he had no interest in being friends with anyone. and as usual, it seemed to work vice versa.
    two of his relatives had done genealogies of each of his parents' families. a woman who was a cousin or something of his mother did one of the hand family. she went backwards down each of the family lines that led into it. they used to own slaves. there was one distant relative who was hanged in the boston commons for taking part in a massacre of a village of old men, women and children of some indians who were fighting on our side during the french indian wars. the warriors came back and were kind of pissed and demanded revenge. they got it. there was this other guy who was part of a delegation to the colonial capital of connecticut to petition to be allowed into the colony. while they were going that way anyway, they brought along goodwife so-and-so in for a witch trial. but the one thing robert remembers everyone in the family talking about was how a granddaughter off one of the lines that led to them had married cornelius vanderbilt. la-dee-da. the family fiction lives on. weren't they something?
    the other relative was a distant relative in his father's family, but of his father's generation. he went back to the first ferry to come to america and worked forward to the present to see and tell how far and wide these ferrys had spread themselves. in one way it was good he did it that way, otherwise our own particular bunch of ferrys wouldn't have been included if he did the way the woman in his mother's family had done it. he was the one who also traced at least the name, which then may have been spelled ferret - pronounced ferry in french - back to the mid-1500s in what was then the spanish netherlands, now belgium. they were huguenots then and split for england soon after the st. bartholomew's day massacre. then from there to the colonies. in this family those who led down to robert and his father were the youngest sons. his father was the youngest son and so was robert. robert paul and his "legitimate" first born son were the first to break the pattern. the ferrys, mostly the first born sons, had also spread with the frontier across the west. there were ferrys with the original mormons. there were ferrys in the gold rush. there were fucking ferrys everywhere. maybe brian ferry is one of the ferrys who stayed in england.
    big deal.
    but it's nice to know.

    he's trying to think of the most embarrassing thing he might have to say about himself. he can think of a few but either he won't do it or it's just too much information. he's mentioned a few embarrassing things so far, hasn't he? he once hit his wife and he cheated on her, he spanked his kids, he dumped girlfriends because they wouldn't put out? did he tell the one about how in 8th grade in the middle of that jewish neighborhood he'd put on his sister's underwear and stockings while she was away at college? he can't remember if he masturbated in them too or not. he thinks he just walked around the house. does it make a difference? in 7th grade as well as tracing pictures of naked women, he also wrote sex stories - as much as he knew about sex then - but he wrote them from the woman's point of view. hmm.. what does all that mean? he doesn't much care. but thinking about it he did envy his two sisters. he thought they had it easy. all they had to do was to get married and then stay home all day. he, on the other hand, was expected to go out and work. he didn't like that at all. when he was married and working those god awful printing jobs he once suggested that maybe his wife might want to go out and work and he'd stay home. she laughed. she said he couldn't run the house. he thought, how hard can it be? you push a vaccuum around, throw some clothes in the machines, make sure the kids don't kill each other or themselves, go to the store, cook dinner, write a few checks. it wasn't like they were living in his parents' big fancy house and all that involved, white gloves and all that. but most important of it all you were working by and for yourself. there wasn't somebody yelling at you all day because you didn't do everything just so. he'd do all the nigger/woman's work in the world to get away from that. her comeback was that she couldn't make as much money working as he did - though this whole discussion probably started with her bitching about how little money he was making to begin with. when they were divorced and she did go out to work she ended up with a job paying way more than he ever got. she runs the computer systems for the county. she started out as a part-time library page. she fucking loves work, and she's good at it. she gets along with people, she's great at schmoozing. she can do the whole thing. he didn't get it, why was he the one out banging his head against a wall because he had a dick between his legs? but since she made out like housework was so very important and only she knew how to do it, he started bitching about when everything wasn't just so. that's what finally pushed everything over the edge. the day he yelled at her because the woodstove wasn't lit when he got up was the same day she said she wanted a divorce. he found out soon afterward that she was right. he didn't know how to do these things for himself.
    remember that beagle, connie? he used to get her into a corner and kick her.
    how's that?
    but that's all you get - for now.
    now, let's hear yours. and don't give us that fiction about how you don't have any.
    you're human, aren't you?
    but, oh yeah, robert is insane. he's even got a proper diagnosis and medications.
    he gets checks from the state.
    that explains it.
    don't worry about it. your secret's safe.
    he's got what he wants now. he won't tell anyone about what he's seen you do in his imagination.
    who'd believe him anyway?
    go on with your business as usual.
    light another cigarette - learn to forget...