Before My Death I Hope To Obtain

My Mother, Poor Fish, Wanting To Be Happy, Beaten Two Or Three Times A Week, Telling Me To Be Happy: "henry, Smile! Why Don't You Ever Smile?" And Then She Would Smile, To Show Me How, And It Was The Saddest Smile I Ever Saw

... To Die On A Kitchen Floor At 7 O'clock In The Morning While Other People Are Frying Eggs Is Not So Rough Unless It Happens To You.

I Felt Like Crying But Nothing Came Out. It Was Just A Sort Of Sad Sickness, Sick Sad, When You Can't Feel Any Worse. I Think You Know It. I Think Everybody Knows It Now And Then. But I Think I Have Known It Pretty Often, Too Often.

I Like To Change Liquor Stores Frequently Because The Clerks Got To Know Your Habits If You Went In Night And Day And Bought Huge Quantities. I Could Feel Them Wondering Why I Wasn't Dead Yet And It Made Me Uncomfortable. They Probably Weren't Thinking Any Such Thing, But Then A Man Gets Paranoid When He Has 300 Hangovers A Year.

Hell, I'd Even Failed With Women. Three Wives. Nothing Really Wrong Each Time. It All Got Destroyed By Petty Bickering. Railing About Nothing. Getting Pissed-off Over Anything And Everything. Day By Day, Year By Year, Grinding. Instead Of Helping Each Other You Just Sliced Away, Picked At This Or That. Goading. Endless Goading. It Became A Cheap Contest. And Once You Got Into It, It Became Habitual. You Couldn't Seem To Get Out. You Almost Didn't Want To Get Out. And Then You Did Get Out. All The Way.