Q: You have a love-hate relationship with the reader. Calling them Mouth Breathers.

A: Bottom Feeders.

Some tasty fish live on the bottom. And all shellfish.

Q: Ground mullet are bony.

A: They don't taste like mullet, either. Whiting. David brought them by the house when he was shrimping with Flynn.

We were staying with Granny Brown.

I had been fired from my job as head porter at the department store in North Carolina for stealing six rolls of toilet paper.

I got a job as a technical writer. A college-degree job.

It was a quantum leap up, from laborer.

I had a profession.

Q: That's like saying substitute teacher is a profession.

A: It is, if that's what you do.

If you're good at it.

It isn't your fault you can't get on permanent.

Q: That's the funniest thing I ever heard.

A: Larry knew a guy who worked as a laborer in a scrap yard and they offered him a 25¢ an hour raise and he said he wanted access to the books. Like they were inviting him to be a partner.

Q: They would have wanted him to supervise someone for that extra 25¢ an hour.

A: Brother Dave says if you recommend filter-tip Picayunes to anyone, "that's where the first seeds of fanaticism are sown."

Q: Lotta crazies out there. In fact, you could argue that the lunatic-fringe is the mainstream. If you aren't a wing-nut you are weird.

A: Some of these organization have patriotic-sounding names. Like the old Attorney General's subversive organizations list. If you go by the name alone you'd think they were Mom's apple pie.

Q: Yea, but if you have an institutional memory you remember.

A: I think the institutional memory of the culture went down the memory hole.

They wake to a brand new day, every day. Like a duck.

Q: Like a duck.

A: I heard a social scientist talking about proximity on the radio, and it was Dr. Bottosto's old lecture on propinquity.

Q: I remember you driving to the junior college in Lake Worth and back, listening to WSWN, Belle Glade, that was radio evangelists and conservative politics.

A: On the way up, I listened to classical music on the FM station out of Palm Beach. They must have had an AM station, too.

I drove the beach road up, A1A, and took Military Trail home.

Dead raised in Miracle Valley, Arizona. Abstract art is a Communist plot.

Mel Tillis is from Pahokee. They played country music.

Palm Beach County was rural, then. Except for the east coast.

Some real shitkickers. Pahokee, Belle Glade, Clewiston. Plant City, Bean City.

Delray Beach was rural, when I was growing up. Farms, dairies, woods, freshwater and saltwater fishing.

Q: Spearfishing.

A: Body-surfing.

The keys an hour away. The Everglades an hour away.