thomas mcguane, panama

       I was beginning to sense that the night had written a check that daylight couldn't cash.


       Cousin Donald Singer at the Greyhound freight office said Cuban Victorian was anything the termites wouldn't eat.


       "let me ask you something. Would you consider seeing a psychiatrist?"
       "Not at all."
       "Why?"
       "They are disease profiteers."
       "You need help."
       "I"m doing fine."
       "As what?"
       "An angler on the sea of God's mysteries."

nothing but blue skies/tom mcguane*

On the other hand, he remembered his first joke and there was a connection. He'd heard it from his Brooklyn-born barber when he was a kid. Somebody put an orange in a robin's nest and when the young birds came back, one said to the other, "Look at the orange Mama laid." In the barber's accent, it sounded the same as "orange marmalade." There was a time when I thought that was a really fine joke.


"What are you doing today?"
"I'm going to see Gracie."
"Gracie," Phil said as his face helplessly darkened. "What's she doing back in town?"
"How the hell should I know? What's Smokie doing in Montana? What's June doing on a Buick lot?"
"What's my wife doing fucking the doctor?"
"And so on. Exactly."

nothing but blue skies/thomas mcguane
*not sure what the handsome fellow would think about me calling him tom

coyotes

« They’d left Bill’s house after a coyote breakfast, which Bill defined as ‘a piss and a look around’. »

« Several coyotes returning from a hunt came downhill, and he stepped aside to let them pass, thinking that if they had anything to say to him, surely they would've stopped. »

THOMAS MCGUANE « THE CADENCE OF GRASS »