everybody knows too much about everything to know anything. And somehow that turns into everyone thinking everything is probably the opposite of what it is, or maybe not the opposite, but something else anyway. Everything you always thought is always proved wrong so the only way to act is against whatever you think.

oil companies are nationalities. This plane oughta say EXXON on the side instead of U. S. Navy

The navy is like a socialist country. Efficiency isn't part of the jargon.

You see a lot of jargon junkies in the navy. Usually means they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. The rallying cry is If you can’t dazzle ‘em with genius, baffle ‘em with bullshit.

I'll be like in that movie, that one where all the people walk around recitin' the books they memorized after all the books were burned. Form a retreat, a cult of over-specialized cold warriors like me. Recite the blue pubs, the yellow pubs, the red pubs, the black pubs. Muttering men keeping the data alive.

Stories are a kind of theme park of mortality. Deadnyland.

That's what they tell you noise is, random energy, chaotic energy . . . It's the stuff that's not data, that's not information, that's not REAL. A thing that's what it's NOT and not what it IS. Noise is chaos. But chaos is continuity. . . . There are stories in the noise.