"So I sat at the desk every night, learning less biology, dreaming the dream over and over, until one night I looked at my respectable -- nevertheless Woolworth -- slacks, and realized that the freight trains no longer slowed down at Rock Camp. There was always the bus, but in all three times I collected enough pop bottles for a ticket to where the train slowed down, the pool balls would break in my ears, and quarters would slip away into slots of time and chance.
'You can't see the angles,' Chester said to me one day after he ran the table in less than a minute.
I was in the tenth grade and didn't give two shits for his advice. All I knew was all my quarters were gone, there were no more pop bottles along the Pike, and Chicago was still a thousand miles away. I just leaned on my stick: I was sheared and I knew it."
-- Breece D'J Pancake, "The Salvation of Me"
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