Waking, After All, Was An Almost Natal

Vanity Is A Weakness. I Know This. It's A Shallow Dependence On The Exterior Self, On How One Looks Instead Of What One Is. I Know This Well... Vanity And Dishonesty May Be Vices, But They're Also The First Forms Of Protection I Ever Knew.

It Had Occurred To Sean Once - On A Bender About Ten Years Before With Some Buddies, Sean And A Bloodstream Full Of Bourbon Turning Philosophical - That Maybe They Had Gotten In That Car. All Three Of Them. And What They Now Thought Of As Their Life Was Just A Dream State. That All Three Of Them Were, In Reality, Still Eleven-year-old Boys Trapped In Some Cellar, Imagining What They'd Become If They Ever Escaped And Grew Up.

The Ornament Of Beauty, Shakespeare Wrote, Is Suspect. And He Was Right. But Beauty Itself, Unadorned And Unaffected, Is Sacred, I Think, Worthy Of Our Awe And Our Loyalty.

You've Learned That Every Good Lie Is Threaded With Truth And Every Accepted Truth Leaks Lies.

There Are So Many More Important Things To Worry About Than How You're Perceived By Strangers.