Trout Fishing in America

I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.

Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I'm not, she said.

He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again.

He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

I thought about it for awhile, hiding it from the rest of my mind. But I didn't ruin my birthday by secretly thinking about it too hard

USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE. MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED.

You're not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.

Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning to cool off in the manner of eternity and office girls were returning like penguins from Montgomery Street.

After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.

I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.

The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves.

I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.

The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.

One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock.

We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink.

he was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.

I walked home past the glass whiskers of the houses, reflecting the downward rushing waterfalls of night.

My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle.

The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout.

Hello, sir. Yes...Uh-huh...Yes...You say that you want to bury your aunt with a Christmas tree in her coffin? Uh-huh...She wanted it that way...I'll see what I can do for you, sir. Oh, you have the measurements of the coffin with you? Very good...We have our coffin-sized Christmas trees right over here, sir.

He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammels and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas.