So this is what it's like when love leaves, and one is disappointed that the body and mind continue to exist, exacting payment from each other, engaging in stale rituals of desire, and it would seem the best use of one's time is not to stand for hours outside her darkened house, drenched and chilled, blinking into the slanting rain. So this is what it's like to have to practice amiability and learn to say the orchard looks grand this evening as the sun slips behind scumbled clouds and the pears, mellowed to a golden-green, glow like flames among the boughs. It is now one claims there is comfort in the constancy of nature, in the wind's way of snatching dogwood blossoms from their branches, scattering them in the dirt, in the slug's sure, slow arrival to nowhere. It is now one makes a show of praise for the lilac that strains so hard to win attention to its sweet inscrutability, when one admires instead the lowly gouge, adze, rasp, hammer-- fire-forged, blunt-syllabled things, unthought-of until a need exists: a groove chiseled to a fixed width, a roof sloped just so. It is now one knows what it is to envy the rivet, wrench, vise -- whatever works unburdened by memory and sight, while high above the damp fields flocks of swallows roil and dip, and streams churn, thick with leaping salmon, and the bee advances on the rose. Chris Forhan, "Gouge, Adze, Rasp, Hammer"

Young Sluggo was under the same log as the slender salamander. A slug is a shell-less mollusc and this wouldn't be complete without a word from wikipedia, ...the shell-less condition has arisen many times in the evolutionary past, and because of this, the various different taxonomic families of slugs, even just of land slugs, are not closely related to one another, despite a superficial similarity in the overall form of the body. and...Sluggo is Nancy's age and is a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks. There are strips that appear to place Sluggo as Nancy's boyfriend. He is portrayed as lazy, and his favorite pastime seems to be napping.