Like so many other homages to the genealogy of man, Hepworth’s message takes a positive course. We are all the same! her sculptures cry. This would be a sound and valuable sentiment, perfectly expressed, if we were all shaped like great big heaping blocks of bronze.

Percy was a smart bastard. He had been on this kick about who learned more—the righteous or the sinners, but he refused to judge by morals, so he had set up some pyramid scheme of amoral experience, and based his theories on biological faults. Did, for instance, a person prone to drinking, experience more than a sober biology? He would ask, but he wouldn’t let me answer, sort of like the question served as a springboard into the metaphysical. Of course the drunkard experiences drunkenness and he also experiences the pangs of soberness, just like the sober person, only to a degree much higher than the always sober person.

You called your grandmamma, who talked to you for an hour telling you all about the family tree you never cared about until right now. Apparently you’re a quarter English, a quarter German and half Polish. That’s something! Being white is nothing; being European nearly just as bad. But being from Poland: now that’s specific, that’s somewhere.

Creepy Craig volunteers to pilot the van on the way there under the agreement Drop-Dead-Zed will take his place on the return and slips a GT Pro disguised as slurpy in the cup-holder. Cruising down 36 I realize it’s my first time out of Bro-Town in two weeks and spring is for real. I’ve been wearing shorts for a while but in Colorado winter lurks waiting to suckerpunch you.

The person everyone started worrying about was Robert Tandy. He was a good employee, but something changed. His behavior had become quite puzzling, especially considering how self-destructive it seemed. What no one knew was that Rob was being set up. The true mastermind behind his trouble was me, Basil Marx.

You had to be aggressive. Not “shoot up the office” aggressive, but there’s a happy medium. Tandy was too nice and too good. He was my chief competition for every sale, bonus or word of praise from Advertising Editor Frederick Brewster. I needed him out and I wasn’t about to kill him. I watch Court TV. They always catch you. What I could do was capitalize on everyone’s paranoia.