Some quotes from Sam Lipsyte's "The Ask"; my review of that book is found here.

We all loved Horace, his clownish pronouncements. He was a white kid from Armonk who had learned to speak and feel from a half-dozen VHS tapes in his father's garage. Besides, here at our desks with our turkey wraps, I did not disagree. But I let him have it. It was my duty. We were in what they call a university setting. A bastion of, et cetera.

Vargina was a miracle, and that's maybe the only time I have used the word sincerely. Her mother had named her the word her name resembled. A sympathetic nurse added the "r."

She liked reality shows the best, and then the shows that purported to be about reality.

So, yes, I should have just surrendered, cinched the entitled scion her little pouch of entitlements, put in my calls to the name shufflers, done my duty. I thought about that moment later on. Maybe I got extratuned to the concept of bitchhood once I became Purdy's, though I must confess I've always found such usage of the term for female dogs distasteful. My mother was a second-wave feminist. I wasn't comfortable saying "cunt" until I was twenty-three, at which point, admittedly, I couldn't hold back for a time.

Home beckoned, but so did a coconut flake. I was due back an hour ago, felt the admonishing telephonic pulses in my jeans, but instead crossed the avenue to the doughnut shop. There was a high school boy behind the counter, maybe saving up for the video game where you gut and flay everybody in the doughnut shop and gain doughnut life points. He wielded his tongs with affecting delicacy.

My phone pulsed again. There were two messages, one from a number I recognized: the Mediocre development suite. The other was a text from Maura: How's the donut, Fat Heart? Find a job yet? Buy milk for Bern. Also p. towels. The bile was a good sign. It's when they stop trying to destroy you, my mother once said, that you should really start to worry.

He was the kind of man you could picture barking into a field phone, sending thousands to slaughter, or perhaps ordering the mass dozing of homes. People often called him War Crimes. By people, I mean Horace and I. By often, I mean twice.

"Yes," said Cooley. "That is the question, as the Bard might say." "The Bard?" "What's so funny?" said Cooley. "Nothing, sir," I said. "I just didn't know people still used that term." "Well, I'm a people, Burke. Am I not?" "Of course." "If you prick me, do I not bleed, you scat-gobbling, mother-rimming prick?" Occasionally Dean Cooley reverted to a vocabulary more suited to his marine years, but some maintained it was only when he felt threatened, or stretched for time. "Yes, sir," I said.

"I mean," I said now, "I used to know him." "Well, that's just swell," said Cooley, rose, petted his mustache with a kind of cunnidigital ardor.

I missed out on a nice little nest egg. A nest latte.

We were stuck between meanings. Or we were the last dribbles of something. It was hard to figure. The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively marketed nachos.

My own hard work made me rich. I knew when to cash out during all that interweb crap. Not many did." Interweb, webnet, interpipe--the joke had begun to grate. If they flubbed it and winked, what? I was tired of the semantic evasions, mine included. I was tired of many things. I had been keeping a list, got tired of the list.

"Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show."

"Dude," he said into his phone, "I just know I'm going to bag this old biddy. She's got to be good for some serious paper heroin . . . Yes, I mean money . . . Dude, I don't know if that's the latest slang, it's my slang. We all have our own nowadays . . .

"I'm talking about our homeland, honey," I said, poured more wine, gulped it, flusher now, warm with that feeling of wanting a feeling that maybe had already fled. Where had the feeling gone? It wasn't in the wine. It wasn't in the pork chops Maura tonged from the broiler. "America," I said, "that run-down demented old pimp. Can't keep his bitches in line. No juice. He's lost his diamond fangs, drinks Tango from a paper bag. A gummy coot in the pool hall. The wolves, those juveniles, they taunt him."

"Oh, do you, Milo? You're so selfish. You don't see the bigger picture." "What's the bigger picture?" "You're still here looking for handouts. Who's going to take care of me?" "I'm on my knees here, Mom. Not for me, for my family. For my wife. For a beautiful grandson you have totally ignored." "He's kind of a brat. I'll be in his life when he gets a little impulse control." "He's not even four." "I have needs. I'm tired of this child-worshipping culture. You're just a slave to it, Milo." "I'm only trying to be a decent dad." "Don't waste your time. It's not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven's sake, the system's rigged for white men and you still can't tap in." "You're right, Mom. What can I say? But still, it would mean a lot to me if you made a little more of an effort with Bernie." "Bernie schmernie. This is my decade." "Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way."

What kinds of joints do you think surround death houses? Ever been to Texas, those prison towns? Forget the poor dinguses waiting for the strap and needle. Nobody's doing good. No Michelin stars in those counties.

We'd been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming through wires beneath and behind me, or on the night waves above. I wasn't quite sure how they traveled. Or how much they got out anymore.

Lee was my father's lawyer, a mensch. But he's been very sick. Cancer. Pancreatic." "That's one of the worst. A killer." "Yes, the ones that kill you are definitely the worst.

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

Executive officers, up since dawn for their Ashtanga sessions, might pay for pricier, socially conscious salads at the vegan buffets, but this was where the action was, and I, who should have been Tupperwaring couscous from Queens, who could just barely afford this go-goo for the regular folk, these lumpy lumpen lunches, reveled in them, or at least the idea of them. Because the sad fact was I always balked at the last minute, a dumpling, some knurled pouch of gristle, spooned above my tray.

You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.

One night in the House of Drinking and Smoking we were victims of what I would later call a home invasion. I didn't know the term then. I think I learned it later, from a rap song, or a movie based loosely on a newspaper columnist's fear of a rap song. Probably they thought we'd be out, which was funny, because we were never out.

They wore ski masks, but we could tell by their hands that one was black and two were white.

I was also one of those people who hadn't caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody's cousin's gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.

But of course I had to go to my Everglades on her a few too many times, and she called me out. Sent me packing." "Everglades?" "Yeah, you know, because my name is Florida. When I do something shitty, something swampy and wrong, I call that going to my Everglades. Stupid, I guess."

"Were you actually a student at the college?" "Of course not." "Oh." "What, all these years you thought I was in college with you? Do you remember what I was like? How did you square that?" "I never could." "I mean, did you ever see me even reading a book?" "All the time," I said. "You were always reading." "I was, wasn't I?" said Michael Florida. "Now I remember. I mean, I remember reading. I can't remember a goddamn thing I read."

"Fuck," said Bernie. "Fuckwinky eyeballhead." "No, Bernie. We don't use those words." "Which words?" "You know which words." "You used them, Daddy." "I made a mistake. I am sorry I said that word. It isn't helping with our problem." "What's our problem?" "There may be no school today." "That's okay," said Bernie. "It'll be okay." We weren't sure where he had picked up that becalming phrase, probably from us, as we tried to talk ourselves out of the awful lucidity certain days afforded. The whole mirthless dwindle of things would suddenly pull into focus, the crabbed, moneyless exhaustion that stood in for our lives, and Maura and I would both start the chatter, the cheap pep: It's okay, it's going to be okay, we'll get through this. When Bernie repeated these bromides, he sounded seventy years old. It broke your heart, as did about forty-three percent of the things Bernie said and did. About twenty-seven percent of the things he said and did made you want to scream and banish him to his childproofed room, or do much more heinous and ingenious things, just so he'd get the point, whatever the point could be with an almost-four-year-old, but still, to bury him alive and then save him at the last minute, or tell him that the state had passed a law against ice cream and he would go to prison if he even thought about it, because they now had the technology to detect illegal mint-chocolate-chip cogitation, had, in fact, the chips for it, seemed, if not conducive to his development, at least on some level deserved. Thirty percent of what Bernie said and did was either on the bubble or else utterly inscrutable, just the jolts and stutters of a factory-fresh brain working out the kinks.

I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

They weren't like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.

"You're growing up. All you need to remember is that nothing changes. New technology, new markets, global interconnectivity, doesn't matter. It's still the rulers and the ruled. The fleecers and the fleeced." "Which are you?" "I'm a piece of expensive equipment. You, too. Maybe not so expensive.

"We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons."

"You can take them off," I said, "your . . . things." Don's eyes went tight. "I'm real grateful." "Sarcasm," I said. "What I was raised on. It's stupid but you can trust it. It's just there to hurt people. Nothing more."

"You said you were having a dream." "It's true, I did." "Was it the one where you're inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it's not a girl, it's really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?" "The . . . no, I don't think so." "I get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around."