Bender's Game Quotes

Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever.

On the surface, there is something peculiar about turning a portion of one's happiness over to a collection of ballplayers, and perhaps more peculiar still is concerning oneself about ball games played decades before one's birth.

It can feel so lonely, to see strangers out in the day, shopping, on a day that is not a good one. On this one: the day I returned from the emergency room after having a fit about wanting to remove my mouth. Not an easy day to look at people in their vivid clothes, in their shining hair, pointing and smiling at colorful woven sweaters. I wanted to erase them all. But I also wanted to be them all, and I could not erase them and want to be them at the same time. At home, Joseph was nicer to me than usual and we played a silent game of Parcheesi for an hour in the slanted box of remaining sunlight on the carpet. Dad came by and brought me a pillow. Mom went to take a nap. Joseph won. I went to bed early. I woke up the same.

My mouth- always so active, alert- could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I'd use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the county. All the while, listening to my mother talk about carpentry, or spanking the bottle of catsup. It was a good game for me, because even though it did command some of my attention, it also distracted me from the much louder and more difficult influence of the mood of the food maker, which ran the gamut. I could be half aware of the conversation, cutting up the meat, and the rest of the time I was driving truck routes through the highways of America, truck beds full of yellow onions. When I went to the supermarket with my mother I double-checked all my answers, and by the time I was twelve, I could distinguish an orange slice from California from an orange slice from Florida in under five seconds because California's was rounder-tasting, due to the desert ground and the clear tangy water of far-flung irrigation.

I did Barbie’s dream as a one-off thing, but I found it haunting me; I kept having an image in my head of Martin Tenbones getting killed in real New York. Still, that would’ve been the end of it...except, by a wild coincidence, a short time later I received a postcard from Jonathan Carroll. He wrote that he’d been following my graphic novel Signal to Noise—which was being serialized in The Face magazine at the time—and he was finding a number of very scary similarities between my story and his as yet unpublished novel, A Child Across the Sky. He concluded, “We’re like two radio sets tuned to the same goofy channel.” I wrote back and said, “I think you’re right. What’s more, I abandoned a whole storyline after reading Bones of the Moon, but I keep thinking I ought to return to it.” Jonathan then sent me a wonderful letter with this advice: “Go to it, man. Ezra Pound said that every story has already been written. The purpose of a good writer is to write it new. I would very much like to see a Gaiman approach to that kind of story.” With that encouragement, I began creating A Game of You.

The late-morning sunlight was discovering 24-karat gold in Ronnie’s hair, which was in the kind of multidimensional tangle predicted by chaos theory, like a foam of whipped Mobius loops.

If my life is a house,” she said, “you haven’t even gotten to the living room.

Ze kunnen die night king beter niet al teveel dialoog geven. Naar mijn gevoel werkt het als karakter beter als hij een vrij bescheiden reportoire heeft. Een paar goede oneliners, meer hoeft het niet te zijn.

Raucous laughter drew my attention and I looked into the far corner, spotting Roxy Vega clambering up onto the table while two of her powerless little friends watched excitedly. She still had her uniform on and I wondered how long they’d been here, hiding themselves with that spell. It was a pretty clever way to avoid the Hell Week chaos going on back at the House even if they were being stupid by staying out after curfew. But then I could hardly talk on that front “Far be it for you to not go through with the... for me to not to go through to do the daring...” Roxy was slurring and she stumbled, almost falling from the table even though she was only wearing flat pumps. The guy leapt up and caught her waist to steady her and my gut lurched irritably as his hand skimmed her ass. I bit my tongue, turning away from them as I crossed the room in search of my drinks. I didn’t think I’d seen her that wasted before and a Tuesday evening in The Orb seemed like an odd venue to choose for a bender. But that was her business. “I only came up with that dare because I didn’t think you’d actually lose!” the girl protested. “I am not usually one for losing, Sofia,” Roxy agreed. “But I will never back out of a dare and you ordered a strip show.” I paused a few meters from the ice chiller, fighting against the urge to look back over to them again. Roxy Vega might have been the most irritatingly rude and stubborn girl I’d ever met but she was fucking hot. And with the stupid games we played together while I was tutoring her in her fire magic I had to admit that I’d imagined her stripping for me more than once. The guy muttered something in Spanish and the tone of it made me think she’d started to pull her clothes off. I fought the urge to turn with clenched teeth then continued my mission for beer, deciding to skip the food in favour of sleep. I snagged a six pack from the chiller and turned back, meaning to head for the exit. Of course my goddamn dick wasn’t going to let me leave without looking over at Roxy again, it didn’t care that I had to get rid of her or that she irritated me more than any woman ever born. Her blazer already lay in a heap on the floor and she was fumbling with the buttons on her shirt, her inebriation obviously slowing her down. But the way she was swaying her hips and tossing her long, black hair still made her look sexy as hell. Her pleated skirt fell to her mid thigh, giving me a look at several inches of bare flesh between it and the top of her knee length socks, but the elevated angle of looking up at her on the table made it seem like her bronzed legs went on forever. “Why don’t you do another dare?” the boy protested. “Go for a run in The Wailing Wood?” “Don’t be crazy,” Sofia objected. “There could be a Nymph out there!” (Darius POV)

Die lui tegenwoordig in de literaire wereld snappen er niks van. Je stapt niet een game binnen en begint dan tegen een level 80 te mauwen, in je noobshirt, dat zijn harnas zo hard is. Eerst dertig jaar farmen en als dat niet bevalt ga je maar naar een andere game, Jezus! En wil je eindbaas Benders met dat armetierige stokzwaardje te lijf gaan?

Sometimes we’d go into the local saloons and challenge the house. When that didn’t work, we’d challenge each other. Those saloons were friendly places, as long as we stayed away from guys who were on a bender and those involved in poker games. The men, while drinking, sang, and Johnny and I joined in whenever we could. I still remember the words from a song we were all fond of singing—in our flat, off-key voices. Judging from the words, I’d say it was composed before its time. “If I was a millionaire and had a lot of coin, I would plant a row of coke plantations, and grow Heroyn, I would have Camel cigarettes growin’ on my trees, I’d build a castle of morphine and live there at my ease. I would have forty thousand hop layouts, each one inlaid with pearls. I’d invite each old time fighter to bring along his girl. And everyone who had a habit, I’d have them leaping like a rabbit, Down at the fighters’ jubilee! Down at the fighters’ jubilee! Down on the Isle of H. M. and C. H. stands for heroyn, M. stands for morph, C. for cokoloro—to blow your head off. Autos and airships and big sirloin steaks, Each old time fighter would own his own lake. We’ll build castles in the air, And all feel like millionaires, Down at the fighters’ jubilee!” We had laughs singing that song in unison. In later years, however, just thinking about it filled me with a tremendous sadness, since the tragedy of hard drugs eventually destroyed my younger brother Johnny.

said Chericola got a ball club that couldn’t whip the Little Sisters of the Poor. I said if the entire town turned out for every game it couldn’t support a hopscotch team. I said you’re on some kind of religious bender and I’m stumbling around like a goddam zombie wondering what’s going on.

It was a badly kept secret in foreign policy circles that Mohammed bin Salman—MBS—had a cocaine problem and could disappear for days or longer on benders, or on long and frightening (at least for other passengers) trips on his yacht. He also spent hours every day planted in front of a screen playing video games. Like Trump, he was often described as a petulant child.