18.

Agnus: Performing at the Un-Club, she promises to insult everyone, and orients the human race as a speck within the vast cosmos. She complains about her parents locking her out of the house and someone stealing her parakeet, nevertheless. A TV voice intones "suburbia" and Agnus describes how everything in her grandparents' house seems like trash. The voice says "these are the days of our lives" and Agnus responds that her life is like a soap opera. She describes the last "really deep conversation" between her and her father as occurring via messages about the nature of science and truth on their T-shirts. She continues her tirade, complaining that breathing the air is dangerous, and how she'll have to cut down on breathing. Agnus begins a candlelight service and describes how in reading Will by G. Gordon Liddy, which she found at IHOP, she learned to hold her hand over a candle and not mind it. She says that she doesn't mind being born when Elvis was fat, that Ozzy Osbourne ingested a bat's head, or that she was born around the time of Watergate. She further does not mind "truth in advertising," the death of the avant-garde, that her goldfish perished when placed in tap water, that teen suicide is up, or that the boy she liked last year overdosed. She says she must not feel, that like Liddy, she must hold her hand over the candle that is life and not mind it. She holds her hand over a candle for a moment, then shouts, "I mind it!" Then there's intermission...

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