A Brief Interlude

The day before we set fire to the clinic, Joan explained to me the importance of friends.
"Friends," she said, "are like onions. Some are sweet, some stink, and some make you cry. And some taste good in stew. Here, tie these fuses together."
I tried not to question things like this. Especially the part about stew.
Joan was the kind of girl who braked for squirrels, but spit in people's coffee at work. We worked at a cafe, as waitresses. People were dicks, the manager was a dick. It was like an international convention of assholes met at our little cafe every day at twelve noon to eat lunch and bitch.
This is the way people work. The basic equation. They walk in. They sigh. They sit down at a table. It is a table that is identical to every other table in the whole restaurant. He is dissatisfied. He asks to move. You move him. He doesn't complain, but he still sighs. He looks at the menu. He complains about the absence of corned beef hash. You say that you can get the cook to rustle it up for him. He sighs. He agrees. He eats the corned beef hash, sighs, and leaves a quarter tip.
These are the people that make up our society. They run our hospitals, get our kids out of jail, sell our houses. You loathe these people. I loathe these people. In fact, those people loathe themselves. So they take it out on all of us 'little people' to feel superior.
Which is fine. People are like onions, anyway.