Clementine said this to me earlier this evening at the Sidetrack, where we were taking advantage of the MarkMaynard.com two-for-one burger deal and discussing the absurdity of human existence. Maybe it just struck me because she used the word “shall,” but I thought that it was profound. We’d been talking about the head of the dusty, yet fierce, old bear that was hanging precariously over her. She asked me if it was likely to fall on her, and I told her that, over the two decades that I’d been eating at the Sidetrack, I’d never seen it fall on anyone before. She seemed to take some comfort in that, and dug into her fries as we continued to talk of taxidermy and other things. At some point I noted that the person who had stuffed the head of the bear, and swapped its real eyes out for glass ones, was probably long dead himself. She thought about it for a moment, I guess reflecting on the transience of life, and then offered the above quote.