And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.

Swiftly, painlessly, and old.

In my sleep. And I don’t think about it. It’ll be what it’ll be.

I don’t know. Probably Alice, maybe. But we were contemporaries, Alice Munro. I think it was probably most in poetry. I was of that age to get influenced. After a while, you don’t get influenced because your brain has turned to cement.

That human beings will follow their stupid and greedy side, rather than their smart side, and go down the plughole. We’re circling the rim.

At what age? It’s been a long path. I’ll stick with Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. (“Someday I’d like to try a book like that,” I said to myself, “only with a female narrator. It would of course be quite different.”)

Well, probably this big sack of poetry.

By members of a human race who have managed to avoid annihilating their entire species and can thus still do some reading, and remembering.

Getting too involved in too many things. It eats your brain.