I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on.

Honesty was a tough customer… Once you started allowing yourself some honesty, it couldn’t easily be contained or limited to one part of your life. It was like poison ivy or a bossy houseguest. Once it was there, you couldn’t tell it what to do. You had to really fight to keep it from taking over.

The police can’t use clubs or gas or dogs. I suppose they will have to use poison ivy.

The anxiety was like poison ivy. It took nothing to set off that mental itch-a chance remark, remembering an event from the day before-but once it started I found it impossible to stop the cycle. My thoughts twisted in a circle, my pulse hammered, I couldn’t concentrate.

I don’t know when it started – this thing – bit it’s growing, muffling me, suffocating me like poison ivy. I grew into it. It grew into me. We blurred at the edges, became an amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.