……….All my life the useless, smooth, and lavish have given me pleasure. So I am here, seated in this tufted chair, in my finest worsted suit, like a man on a sinking ship. I get up and, in the mirror on the mantle, butter my hair.
……….Is all this fuss simply an elaborate garish mask?
……….How pitiful if true. It isn’t. I just like the crowding in of ornature, despite my long-lost Mormon ancestors, from whom I did inherit: Obscene utopianism, the belief that Christ and Lucifer were brothers, and yes—exodus, the West. That’s all in my blood. My people were massacred on the flatlands, chased from their tents and shot.