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hardware-store candles, or do you use the one for nonemergency candle recreation and the other for emergencies? Are you handy with a splitting maul? Do you favor acetoneor nonacetone nail-polish remover? How often will you mop? If you were offered a lecture about Descartes or about Alexander the Great, which would you take?
    Have you ever seen blue hills? Does the word Sioux do anything odd to you? Does good leather comfort you or are you indifferent to it or do you in fact find leather morally offensive? Would you like to live in a neighborhood where children would ask you out to play stickball with them? Do you know the function for a parabola? Do you own a soldering iron? If you found a healthy infant in a basket on your doorstep, or anywhere else, say in the bulrushes if I have the phrase right, and no one claimed him, do you think the law allows you to keep him, if you want him? Have you heard, and do you credit, the speculation that the impending wars will be over not oil but water and that they will dwarf the present wars? Do you realize that the reason diurnal animals except us are not crazy is that they drink water whenever possible all day and go to bed at dusk?
    Have I told you I have a friend who wrote in a book “Indians loved crowbars” and “They ate fat young dogs”? May I ask you if you have a friend as clever as mine, and may I say that I hope you do, butthat I know you do not? Have you ever heard of the sexual practice of setting a person’s buttocks on fire and quickly spanking out the fire? Would setting a person’s buttocks on fire and spanking out the fire constitute, in your view, a violation of antisodomy laws or otherwise be regarded an unnatural act? Do you think it might be sanctioned or proscribed in the Bible? Have you been able to read the entire Bible?
    What are three basic things you need to be content in life? Would you rate yourself as more tired than you used to be or as a person who still has all the getup-and-go that it takes? When offered meat or poultry with a stuffing or dressing, do you first taste the meat or the dressing? Do you favor a hemline above or below the knee? Has your position with respect to birders changed over the years or remained the same? If right now you were on your deathbed but not feeling too bad and could have some one thing brought to you, what would it be? Do you like flannel? Is there a location or locale on earth you consistently think of as preferable to the one you are usually in? If asked to draw a circle, will you freehand it or effect a compass with the tools at hand? When you trap a rat in a spring trap, do you feel triumphant or bad? Have you ever knelt down andsaid to the rat, aloud or not, “It was a mistake, I regret what I have done to you, I wish you could now go on about your business, it’s just that your eating my shit was at the time pissing me off, but now I see that you just had to do it, and what really kills me is how clean and innocent you look”?
    Have we gone on like this long enough?
     
    DOES INTEGRITY LIE IN failure? Do you recall the last time that you really had fun? If I told you that if I had a wounded blue jay that was content to convalesce under my care in a nice cage with pine bark in the floor of it, and that caring for this bird, and this bird’s tolerance of me as I did so, in his nice fragrant cage, was all I needed to be content, would you think me a little off? Would you likewise take a dim view—isn’t that a nice conceit?—of me if I predict that were the bird to not convalesce to the point that it could be released, but instead were to live apparently happily in the cage until I found it one day on its side, departed, looking up sideways with that terrible glazed eye birds get, that I would be then more devastated than a child? If I told you that I intended to take this shovel,and this fresh bottle of whiskey, and go out and bury my blue jay and never be heard of again, and I invited you to come along,