forty-niner and his daughter clementine. oh my darlin, oh my darlin.
clementine clemen-
oah. you don't want to look in there.
oh my darlin clementine, you are lost now gone forever, dreadful sorry clementine.
have you any machines?
but i do want to eat from a machine. vended food contains all the necessary nutrients for survival. taste damn good too, by golly. and plus, on any given evening, the machine that last night gave you cheetos might dispense instead.  doritos. yohos. oreos. tosquitos . or lorna doones.
i can't hear you. i'm using the scrambler.
what?
your car?
are you sure? this looks like my car. are there pecan pies in the back seat?
my car looks just like this. but this is yours, your car?
of course. what's in the trunk?
you don't even know what's in your own trunk.
you know what? i think you're afraid to find out.
it's all right i don't blame you for being afraid.
oh well. i guess you're right. it's better not to look.
beautiful evening. you can almost see the stars.
oh dear, what a shame.
j. frank parnell.
what line of work you in?
rock'n'roller, eh!? i used to be a musician myself, college days. of course it was folk songs and protest songs back then. we shall overcome, we shall overcome.
did you ever feel as if your mind had started to erode?
ever been to utah?
i go to utah every year. friend of mine, was a designer of the mx missile race track basing mode. a hundred thousand miles of railroad track on a big loop through utah, arizona, and nevada. bombs were going to hide in locomotive sheds. that way the red team would never know exactly where they were. i still go out to utah, just to think about the way things might have been.
radiation, yes indeed! you hear the most outrageous lies about it. half-baked goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody its bad for you. pernicious nonsense! everybody could stand a hundred chest x-rays a year. they ought to have 'em too. when they canceled the project it almost did me in. one day my mind was literally a-burst. the next day nothing. swept away.  but i showed them. i had a lobotomy in the end.
not at all. a friend of mine had one. designer of the neutron bomb. ever hear of the neutron bomb? destroys people. leaves buildings standing. it fits in a suit case. it's so small no one knows it's there until blammo. eyes melt skin explodes everybody dead. it's so immoral working on the thing can drive you mad. that's what happened to this friend of mine. so he had a lobotomy. now he's well again.
chevy malibu.
didn't i tell you? i can't tell you what i do. i'm classified.
what do you mean?
why should i feel funny? the two hemispheres are fundamentally at odds. hemisphere, hemisphere. you know it's strange. i do feel funny.