The tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive, no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular through his dark glasses, perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst, staggering, it almost appeared, against one another, yet struggling like dying voluptuaries in a vision to maintain some final attitude of potency, or of a collective desolate fecundity, the Consul thought distantly, seemed to be reviewed and interpreted by a person walking at his side suffering for him and saying: "Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend: alas, that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange!

- Reading Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry on a plane to Houston while tuning out the aggressive conversations of two men in the window and aisle seats fighting over the model sitting in the middle, while perched on a curb at the corner of Taft and Clay, while leaning back in a car with the windows down under a Montrose oak, watching a bird struggling to pick up a twig twice its size and fly off to somewhere safer than the middle of the street. Touch this tree! Alas that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange!

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