“Well,” Ella might say. “That’s a nice speech. How long have you been practicing?”

So here’s a good example.

What she means is “I’m going to cut your balls off, Saul, you cross me. I’m going to light a little bomb, saying, ‘How long have you been practicing?’ meaning ‘Whatever you’ve learned, whatever you say here now way back out on this nowhere plateau in the pouring rain, sleet, and snow, on this fool’s mission, whatever idiocy comes to you because of some idea or thought of yours after all this trouble and torment, well, I’m going to belittle it.’” If there’s some small complaint from Saul, well, that complaint must be, by definition, some long-suffering grievance; and if Saul has a long-suffering grievance, Saul should’ve voiced it sooner; and if Saul didn’t voice it sooner, Saul should at least have prayed on it and resolved it; and if Saul didn’t say it or pray it or resolve it on his own, and didn’t write it down in some little journal in his heart and lock it away, secretly hoping Ella would come along and find the little book and pick the lock and read it out, well then, Saul must have been withholding thoughts from her, ideas, notions. Which makes Saul a rotten fucker. A bad man. A poor example of a husband. That’s what she means by “How long have you been practicing?” She’s not asking. She doesn’t understand ideas sometimes arise suddenly. Can’t we entertain that possibility? That I, your average man, can have a lightning bolt of insight that maybe no other person in the world has ever had before me? And say it when it comes? Without any lead-in? No practicing at all, no speechifying, just the idea popping into my head and dropping out of my mouth the way a bird lays an egg, like All Creation was made, pure and good? But for Ella, no. She has no ideas come to her like that. So they can’t for anyone else, either. Can’t see beyond her blinders. Can’t see herself, same reason. That’s it, the curse of all lower animals: narcissism. Incapable of self-reflection. Far as we’ve come, the flaw’s still in us. Not too much to boast about after a couple million years.

The trouble with Dan is he’s weak. Fine in cities, population centers. Nothing a Ruger couldn’t fix.

“Some people are alive simply because it’s illegal to kill them.” I saw that on a bumper sticker.

The trouble with mule drivers is they won’t shut up. Nothing a cliff in the clouds couldn’t fix. A little fog and slope and good timing. Mule drivers are fat. They have inferiority issues.

Someone must be willing to break the law.

The law is man-made.