I’ve forgotten more skills than these fools ever bothered to learn, but thus is their mindset: all they want is to fight. Can’t they see that that is the Forbidden Numbers at work, that they long for conflict because they’ve been trained to believe that conflict is entertainment?

She told me they have services now, through your phone, where you can pay a stranger to do your shopping for you. But of course that exists; in a world in which we have all been robbed of the friendships we’d previously have relied upon for such favors, corporations have stepped in with algorithms tuned to the Forbidden Numbers. I feel them calling

“And there’s the anger. People hate it when you threaten their nihilism! That’s the black box, drawing you back in. Can’t you see that it wants you to be afraid to do anything but cower in front of your screens? It only has one trick, one card to play, which is this idea that bad news is the only news you can trust. I’m telling you, if you just

“It’s true. And I’ll tell you something else, the only thing I learned from therapy: People who had rough childhoods, guys like you and me, you grow up scared of being happy. It don’t feel right. You find yourself sabotaging it, because you’re so scared that you’re gonna lose it that you’d rather just trash it yourself, so at least you can say it

As Patrick used to say, we’re all just babies trapped in God’s hot parked car.

In the end, Abbott Coburn had simply not been made for this world. He was one of those extra screws you find in the box after assembling a piece of furniture.

The walls had tumbled over at some point, the whole structure now just a tossed salad of boards and charcoal.

(“Did you know that the western border of Texas is closer to California than it is to the eastern border of Texas?”),

Her eyes were bloodshot, and Abbott thought she’d either been recently smoking weed or recently crying, though he knew from personal experience that it was possible to do both simultaneously.