11/22/63

passages from the novel:

 It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd.

      — Norman Mailer

      If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples.

      — Japanese proverb

      Dancing is life.

      For Zelda

      Hey, honey, welcome to the party.

  I have never been what you’d call a crying man.

      My ex-wife said that my “nonexistent emotional gradient” was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point). Christy said she supposed she could forgive me not crying at her father’s funeral; I had only known him for six years and couldn’t understand what a wonderful, giving man he had been (a Mustang convertible as a high school graduation present, for instance). But then, when I didn’t cry at my own parents’ funerals — they died just two years apart, Dad of stomach cancer and Mom of a thunderclap heart attack while walking on a Florida beach — she began to understand the nonexistent gradient thing. I was “unable to feel my feelings,” in AA-speak.

      “I have never seen you shed tears,” she said, speaking in the flat tones people use when they are expressing the absolute final deal-breaker in a relationship. “Even when you told me I had to go to rehab or you were leaving.” This conversation happened about six weeks before she packed her things, drove them across town, and moved in with Mel Thompson. “Boy meets girl on the AA campus”—that’s another saying they have in those meetings.