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Chapter 19 - Juula turns Del on to Pilcrows and Text Geography

                

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete

"All right, buckle up. Here's a copy and paste job from the internet: '100 Best First Lines from Novels'." 
Best first lines from novels
"We'll take out the graphics and leave only the words. Only plain text. Now look carefully and tell me what you see?"
Del looked long and hard and failing to see anything meaningful, was afraid that his bruised ego would be tempted to transform her into a paramecium or a postcard of the Matterhorn.
But instead he held strong and steady and was even shot through with a pertinent thought regarding such awful transformations: Luckily for us, God had a good attention span! We love to say 'it's a crazy world,' but actually, it's not crazy at all. It works. A beautiful Estonian girl doesn’t turn into a flower pot or a boxing glove on a sudden divine whim. God was…
"Del, hello? Del?"
"Oh... Nothing, comes to mind, Juula. I mean I see words of course..."
"All right, but looking a little closer, what else is there?"
"Numbers, punctuation marks and symbols?"
"Perfect... and they're very important. But now watch." She clicked the 'show non-printing symbols' toggle and looked at him expectantly.
"Ah yes, I've seen this done a few times. The paragraph marks and the little dots between words".
"Exactly right! Okay, those paragraph symbols... what are they called?"
Del knew they had a proper name, but he also knew that it wasn't among the bazillion mostly foolish things cluttering his memory banks. Nonetheless to keep the atmosphere sweet and to revel in Juula's smile which made his toes curl - he invented 'candidate names.'
"Dingus?"
"No."
"Doodad, doohickey?"
"No, no."
"Wait, I have it... Thingamabob?"
"Silly! It's a pilcrow."
"Pilcrow! Sounds like a gland... 'I'm taking Vitamin E supplements for my Pilcrow'."
"Del, are you paying attention?"
"Yes... a pilcrow... Wait a second, let me look at them."
Del chastised himself. Why did everything have to be a damned joke?! God not only had a long attention span, but he had created a world in which the best possible fun was honest success in serious endeavors. AND NOT COMMENTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY!
Whoa! Heavy! Chill bro!
No! Along with generating millions of dolts and perverts, our culture had churned out endless varieties of Daffy Ducks and Goofies. And he was one of them.
Damn it, Del!!! Never mind the low-budget psycho-theology and stay focused!! Pilcrows... why was Juula, pointing them out to him?!
He examined the screen and for a few seconds, was like the stark naked Arnold Schwarzenegger in the second Terminator movie, when he had electronically 'sized up' the people he needed to steal clothes and a Harley Davidson from. Et voilà!
"I have it Juula, I think I have it! There's a pilcrow before and after every paragraph."
"Yes! Like every river has a 'headwater' and a 'mouth' - a starting point and a place where it spills into an ocean or a lake, every paragraph has a pilcrow before and a pilcrow after."
"It's like the geography of a page."




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