Chaos Movie Quotes

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

people had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. nobody realized how boring it would become. with the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. on a roller coaster. at a movie. still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. you know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. the test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. and because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. real elation. real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention. the laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.

Possibilities I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here to many things I've also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.

It does not matter. You train your soldiers to kill using video games. They blow enough people up on their computer and it becomes easier for them to kill with a real weapon. Why do you think your government funds so many war and terrorism movies? Hollywood does your dirty work for you. Had 9/11 happened twenty years earlier, the country would have been in chaos, but people have seen enough bad things on their television screen to prepare them for just about anything. We do not really need to talk about government conspiracies.

When you’re in the wild, there’s nothing to hide behind. No bars or credit cards or movie theatres or cell phones or credentials or security. You’re just alone with yourself. You look around and lose yourself in the mountains, rivers, forests or tundra, but you can see nothing except for the chaos in your own mind. It is fucking terrifying and peaceful at the same time.

Not antisocial, just wanted some peace Yes, I have a low tolerance for superficialities Quiet on the outside but my mind's a chaos Music, movies, poetry, and cosmos What makes life worth living? Yes, I do love overthinking Alone but never lonely My mind's perpetually busy of things, not everyone might comprehend I usually do not follow the trend Not a snob, more of a wallflower a loner who celebrates solitude like no other.

I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.

Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

We deal with so many nightmares on a regular basis. When I’m watching a horror movie, there’s a pattern, a sense of control in them. I’m just an observer, not having to deal with any of the repercussions. It’s a nice dream to think monsters play by the rules, that they’ve got a pattern you can unlock and follow. Real life’s messy, and the chaos leaves you devastated in the wake.

People will love people no matter what terrible shit they do.   We forgive people, even when they don’t ask for forgiveness.   When there is no atonement, no penance.   Why do we love people? Why do we forgive evil? Stupidity— Shallowness— the darkest motives. We forgive because we are attached, we have known them a long time, we have put them into the category of family or friend. We want to have sex with them. Because they entertain us.   We even forgive child molesters if they make good movies.   The unspeakable truth is that we need written laws that have mystic origins— with weapons to keep them upheld.   Because we are too forgiving of our friends and family. We take their side, even when we know they are wrong, and lying.   The world would collapse into chaos without law not because we are savage beasts, but because we are so forgiving.

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

The tide slackens and the swells lay down flat. In the barely perceptible distance, a chaos of whale blows hatches the horizon, dozens of towering white fountains. So much energy is being expended that from a distance the disruption looks vaguely industrial. Then, trying to fix the image in my mind, I write ‘looks like a scene from a war movie.’ The simile seems so right and yet it’s alarming how easily it comes to me, how estranged of the sea’s daily business I am that an image of war seems easier to visualize than burst of cetacean breath erupting randomly and rapturously into the air as the great mammals feast their way through the bay.

There have been moments when writing this book has made me hopeful, but almost always I’ve felt rage or despair. You’ve been stealing those pleasures. Hope? Yes, but also rage and despair. Stealing? Not giving anything in return. Rage and despair are pleasures? The guiltiest. Why do you think New York magazine’s doomsday article about global warming went viral? People were suddenly ravenous for climate science? No, we were ravenous for a vivid description of our apocalypse. We’re drawn to it the same way we’re drawn to horror movies, car accidents, and the chaos of the current administration. And don’t pretend that the bleakest scenarios aren’t your favorite parts to write. I’m not pretending.

…He needed to find some little poor kids to playfully spray with a hose, while he was helping out at a charity carwash for the handicapped or something.  Maybe rent a wet dog for the afternoon, and get it to shake its head in slow motion, while he laughed like some douchebag asshole and tried to lightheartedly block the soapy droplets with his hands or one of the little wheelchair kids or something.  Women loved that shit if movies were to be believed.  They ate it up. Sadly, he had no idea how to go about doing any of that though.  None of the pet shops had been open to the idea of him using their puppies as a prop in a seduction fantasy, and all of the schools for the disabled he called had refused to give him an hourly rate on renting their students.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better. This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him. She used to say, “The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.” Caged inside too many laws. By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn’t real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture. The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

Those are very rational thoughts for a ten-year-old.” “What can I say? I was ten going on thirty.” “A grown-up mind in a child’s body?” “Exactly.” “How did the rest of your family take it?” “You see, when you say the word ‘family’ I think of my co-stars. My family is whoever I’m working with at the time. Or better said, ‘with whomever I’m working.’ We become a unit. It’s like, when you’re doing a movie nothing else matters in the world, just the movie and the team making the movie. You become immersed in your work, in the minds and hearts of the other actors around you. The cameramen, Make-up, Hair, the electricians . . . everybody. You are one pulsing heartbeat.” “I was referring to your father. Your brother.” I could feel my insides coil at the word “brother.” I felt sick, nauseous like I hadn’t eaten all day. That empty yet bilious feeling, coming up like vomit. “My brother is not ‘family.’ And my father?” I could feel my

There is one chief work that defines and centers all of human history. It is God’s work of salvation. History is the history of redemption. It is a grand narrative that shapes all of life and meaning. Redemption is the center, guiding and governing all the details. There is not chaos; there is nothing random. God has bent His bow. He has taken aim, and the arrow of His purposes and intentions will hit squarely on the mark. Not only does redemption give shape and meaning to human history, redemption gives shape and meaning to individual lives. The movie playing out on the big screen has not been left to chance. God governs history and moves it along toward His desired end and purpose as surely as the sun rises. The short clip, playing out on the small screen, has not been left to chance, either. God’s purposes for His people, the individual purposes for His individual people, will come to pass. We can have confidence in God’s work of redemption.

I didn’t get the time to tell you, or to hold you, or get there to holding you without any awkwardness. It breaks my heart, not a little but a lot, to see how things have turned out and once upon a time i would try to set them right, but now i know there is no point, in trying or in hoping, because it is how it is, and not much can be done, or should be done, but i still wanted to tell you, maybe one of these days I will, maybe I won’t but I wanted to tell you that I wanted those things with you. Meeting you for coffee on a rainy day, in a cafe somewhere between our homes. Spending the evening sitting by the sea, looking at the waves, listening to the noise and chaos of the city around us. Talking a walk with you in that park where we met the second time. Watching a movie with you. Having you over, coming over to yours. Going out to bars, birthday celebrations. Fighting sometimes, crazy loving the next. I wanted these things, and a few more. Oh god, i really wanted them with you.

Kruchina was an archaic word for grief, found mostly in the old folk songs and poems. Kruchina grief was not regular sadness or disappointment with everyday troubles, but rather the existential sorrow about a woman’s lot that never goes away, not even at the happiest of moments.    Masha remembered this song from one of the movies of her youth, when all the movies and books were about the war and patriotism, about the great sacrifice for the future. German soldiers were burning a Russian village. The children screamed, the helpless grandmas and grandpas shrieked, the animals and fowl scattered for their lives. A young German soldier broke into the last izba standing and found two women huddled on a bench. Except for a single candle, the house was dark and it was hard to see what was in the shadowy corner: a trunk or a cradle.    Before the soldiers could reload their guns, the women began to sing “Kruchina.” In the middle of this chaos, time stopped. The soldiers listened as the voices washed over their round helmets and tense shoulders, crept into their machine guns, and spread through their stiffened veins and cold stomachs, like mother’s milk.    Sveta might not have even seen the movie, but she and Masha always sang “Kruchina” when their hearts, one or both, were in the wrong place.

«It's not easy to believe.» «I» she told him, «I can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.» «Really?» «I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in "War of the Worlds". I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kind of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.»

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe." "Really?" "I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in this universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath. Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud.

On a gray afternoon I sit in a silent room and contemplate din. In the street a single car passes - a rapid bass vowel - and then it is quiet again. So what is this uproar, this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static I keep hearing? This echo chamber spooling out spirals of chaos? An unmistakable noise as clearly mine as fingerprint or twist of DNA: the thrum of regret, of memory, of defeat, of mutability, of bitter fear, made up of shame and ambition and anger and vanity and wishing. The soundtrack of a movie of the future, an anticipatory ribbon of scenes long dreaded, of daydreams without a prayer of materializing. Or else: the replay of unforgotten conversations, humiliating, awkward, indelible. Mainly it is the buzz of the inescapably mundane, the little daily voice that insists and insists: right now, not now, too late, too soon, why not, better not, turn it on, turn it off, notice this, notice that, be sure to take care of, remember not to. The nonstop chatter that gossips, worries, envies, invokes, yearns, condemns, self-condemns.

It was at that moment Stephanie became acutely aware of the paradox of the police wife. She must be humble and grateful; she had a role to play for Jason and his profession. Although what she was feeling inside was contrary to what was expected, in a way she belonged to society as a movie star belongs to their fans. She stood for hours shaking hands and hugging well-wishers, hearing generic statements that were meant to ease her pain but couldn’t, making decisions to appease the people who wanted to grieve with her, and all the while the line of mourners kept getting longer. Stephanie wasn’t ungrateful. She was numb. When you live your life simply and are suddenly thrown into the spotlight, it becomes difficult to manage, understand, and cope. Being the center of attention because of a death brings a chaos that most people will never experience. Stephanie shared her husband, her grief, and her family with the public at the most private moment of her life. She knew that it was her responsibility as the wife of a public servant. For that, they thanked her.

Frankie spun around, and couldn’t believe his tired eyes. Standing there – like a cowboy in the old Western movies Frankie’s dad often fell asleep in front of – was none other than Drew Bird. The Guard With The Scar had moved next to the Close-But-Not-Close-Enough-Emperor, and Frankie saw him translate Drew’s question. The toffee-toothed figure on the stage grinned as he replied. ‘He wants to know what game you suggest,’ said Ping, her voice weak. Instantly, Drew Bird produced the old dirty bottle from behind his back; the exact one that had been tossed into the South China Sea on behalf of Alfie Fish, found by Oscar Bugg on a war-torn Japanese beach in 1945, and then brought to Frankie Fish in Australia by the mystery-hunting Texan twins – and then half-filled with river water just days earlier. If Drew was feeling nervous, he certainly didn’t show it. Arms folded, head tilted to one side, Drew asked his next question, which made Frankie gasp in shock. ‘Do you know anything about bottle-flipping, Close-But-Not-Quite-Emperor dude?

Stanley Kubrick asserted total control over his vision, demanding take after take and looking into every last detail. But he also had a sense of how to use chaos, and he clearly enjoyed the bumper car ride that is filmmaking. In his work Kubrick brought together order and madness, mastery and wild defiance, fulfilling a key dream of cinema, to show human energy at its most dangerous and exciting while also presenting a supremely organized world. And so he changed what movies look like.

There was never a woman who I wanted to be. The movies didn’t show any women worth emulating. Just lumps and mounds, colors and shapes. Heaps of flesh you could make into chaos.

Jack, R U alrite? That was the first text I got from Tom, my best friend. I peeked out from under the comforter to read it, then wrapped the blanket around my head again without replying. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with him right now. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with anyone. I just wanted to lie in the dark and pretend I didn’t exist. The cell phone buzzed again. I sighed. I made a little hole, just large enough for my eye, and stared angrily at the phone. I wanted it to realize what it was doing was wrong. That I wanted to be left alone. The phone stared back at me, a small notification light flashing on the top of the device. I picked it up and looked again. R U there? I heard U askd Jasmine 2 the dance! R U crazy??? D: )-:< I wished I was crazy. That would have made everything so much simpler. When I retreated back into my cave this time, I tried putting my pillow on my head too, hoping that it would stop the sound of the phone from cutting into my solitude. I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and tried to wish everything back to normal. That works sometimes in the movies, right? BUZZ BUZZ. “Agh!” I jumped slightly as the phone somehow buzzed even louder this time (how did it do that?) and the pillow flew off my head. Sunlight shone in through the window, blinding me. I squinted and waited for my room to blur into focus. The white walls, my posters of awesome superheroes, my laptop, my guitar… I grumbled as I leaned over and looked at my phone screen again. Wat abt HOLLY? UR GRLFRND? Ppl are sayn she is very upset! I threw the phone down on my bed. It bounced twice and ended up balancing on the edge of the mattress. I didn’t blame Holly. I was also very upset. A few weeks ago, my life had been pretty much perfect. I had the hottest girl in school as my girlfriend, I was a star player on the football team, I had a band that was definitely going to be famous someday soon, and it was all going my way. Now it was all gone, swirling towards disaster. Actually, disaster was a while back. Now things were definitely swirling towards complete chaos. My life was destroyed and I was hiding in my bed. That doesn’t happen in the movies. My phone buzzed again.

As Ben Stein proclaims in his must-watch movie, Expelled, a strong case can be made that the Holocaust was a direct result of Darwinism. Darwin even tells us that: the dark races at some point will be overcome by the more evolved ones. I’m sure glad the Rev. Martin Luther

All the experts proved what we’ve all known all along. That they are full of shit. They all got it so wrong they needed cover and when they saw something, no matter how asinine, it became gospel to cover their abject failure. Still, the left wouldn’t feel sorry for itself for long. First it picked up the Russian spy story and started pushing it to every devastated reporter who would listen. Then it did everything it had told us the Trump supporters would do if Hillary won. Think about it. For weeks leading up to the election, we had been hearing about all the horrible things Donald Trump would force his supporters to do if he lost. DJT wouldn’t accept the defeat they were all so sure was coming. The editorial boards at the New York Times and the Washington Post both ran many articles warning us about the chaos that was about to ensue. According to popular opinion, Trump supporters were going to riot in the streets, refuse to accept the results of the election, and begin some kind of underground coup against the duly elected president, Hillary Clinton. They would start a second civil war. The streets would become absolute anarchy. And when things didn’t go the way the Democrats had wanted them to go, what happened? Let’s see. They held riots in the streets. (Check.) They refused to accept the results of the election, cooking up one of the strangest spy-movie stories I’ve ever heard in order to maintain their collective delusion. (Check.) Then they formed an underground group of online keyboard warriors called “the Resistance,” dedicated to taking down my father one stupid hashtag at a time. Prominent journalists, liberal activists, and actors have all identified themselves as proud members of “the Resistance” on Twitter. When I’m attacked by an outraged mob online, their voices are usually among the loudest. (And Check.)

With respect to space and time, books are like a wall of resistance against a world that demands everything we have to give. Reading a book allows you to travel through space and time to other places, to see the world from other perspectives and walk in another’s shoes for a bit. Stories create possibilities for our limited vantages to be cracked open, affording new views and different experiences. Reading forces us to slow down. In the fast paced world we live, time is accelerating and we feel we have less of it. Our focus shifts second by second. We flip through our friends’ updates on Facebook or Instagram, quickly to get the story. We get impatient when a song or a movie takes too long to download. We read on our devices, take a pause and check our email, check our texts. Our concentration is spent in bursts and the sense of chaos builds. And we are in a time of chaos. Each one of us can feel it. The pressure and the speed often feel relentless.

Books have the power to transport us, to allow us to escape to another time and place, just by reading some words on a page or screen. That's the closest thing to magic I know. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that art matters. In times of strife, we turn to stories---books, movies, dance, the visual arts. Stories and creativity help make meaning out chaos and fear. They make us human.

And you’ll find that the whole thing is made of parts. What if you allowed yourself a glass of wine with dinner, or curled up on the sofa and read, or watched a stupid movie, as a reward? What if you instructed your wife, or your husband, to say “good job” after you fixed whatever you fixed? Would that motivate you? The people from whom you want thanks might not be very proficient in offering it, to begin with, but that shouldn’t stop you. People can learn, even if they are very unskilled at the beginning.

That little voice—that’s the voice of someone once burnt and twice shy. So, you could say, very carefully, “Really. I might not do it very well, and I might not be great company, but I will do something nice for you. I promise.” A little careful kindness goes a long way, and judicious reward is a powerful motivator. Then you could take that small bit of yourself by the hand and do the damn dishes. And then you better not go clean the bathroom and forget about the coffee or the movie or the beer or it will be even harder to call those forgotten parts of yourself forth from the nooks and crannies of the underworld.

that that which feeds something like the soul—the vestigial soul—is missing, and perhaps as a result of this, he is inconsolable. Life, any kind of life, any small portion of any day in life, is unbearable for him. The little things of life others enjoy—choosing a new pair of sneakers, eating fancy donuts, going to see the opening of a superhero movie—are so baldly insignificant he can’t find pleasure in them. The more annoying details of living—getting stuck in traffic, making conversation with some stranger on the plane—are intolerable. Ordinary life or extraordinary life, neither holds meaning; he’s tried them both.

Anyway. To answer your question, no. I don’t regret not having children. They absolutely terrify me.” That makes me laugh. “Kids scare you?” “Their sole purpose is to grow up and replace us. We’re breeding our replacements. Have you ever thought of that?” “You’ve been watching too many alien movies.” “My sister has six of the little monsters. Six.” He shudders. “Visiting her house is like descending into Dante’s seventh circle of hell. Half a dozen violent, miniature tyrants going around smashing things and screaming like a bunch of Vikings on crack. It’s total chaos. She’s forty-two but she looks a hundred and two.

Anyway. To answer your question, no. I don’t regret not having children. They absolutely terrify me.” That makes me laugh. “Kids scare you?” “Their sole purpose is to grow up and replace us. We’re breeding our replacements. Have you ever thought of that?” “You’ve been watching too many alien movies.” “My sister has six of the little monsters. Six.” He shudders. “Visiting her house is like descending into Dante’s seventh circle of hell. Half a dozen violent, miniature tyrants going around smashing things and screaming like a bunch of Vikings on crack. It’s total chaos. She’s forty-two but she looks a hundred and two. If I hadn’t gotten a vasectomy in my twenties, watching her raise those future criminals would’ve definitely sent me running to the doctor.

A powerful and easy habit Friday planning is simple. Some people enjoy fancy planners, high-end pens, and washi tape. Some people like to make this session a treat, with a favorite beverage appropriate for the time of day, or a soaring movie soundtrack. All of those things are great; none of them are necessary. I use a notebook or a planner, and cross-reference with my calendar. Notes in an electronic calendar can work too. The tool doesn’t matter. What matters is that you do it.

Think of it this way. I’m like the end of the movie.” “The end of what movie?” “You know how in the movies there’s always this person who wishes they were super successful, and then they get everything they thought they ever wanted. The fame, the money. All of it. Time passes, and they realize it’s not enough and long for the simple life when they did art for art’s sake. When there were no pressures or fake people. They give it all up and go back to being ordinary.” I flash him my coyest smile. “I just skipped all the fame, fortune, and chaos part and went straight to the ending where I dance for the fun of it.” Tyler runs his hands over my hair and then cradles the back of my head. “The end of the movie, huh? There’s one thing missing from your plotline, you know that?” “What?” “A romantic interest.

Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.12

And I want her to have more. I want her to have kids and me and a life. Drinks with her girls or making movies, or I don’t know and I don’t give a fuck, just as long as she’s the kind of woman who needs it and goes after it and gets it. I wanna get pissed and I wanna be challenged and I wanna be surprised and I want my balls busted and I want my mind blown and I wanna laugh a lot. I want it all, Dad. I want what you got, but I want it my way and I want it to be all mine.

[People consistently embrace] any excuse to divide between "us" and "them" - and showing distrust, even hostility, toward those in the out-group. During lunch breaks on the set of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, for instance, extras spontaneously separated into tables according to whether they played chimpanzees or gorillas.

Unfortunately, death isn’t always the peaceful slipping away that movies depict it to be – often it’s prolonged and very unpleasant. The sensory chaos of bodily functions shutting down or going awry. The gasping. The look of panic as people cling desperately to their final moments. Sometimes family members turn away or run out of the room to spare themselves from having such a confronting scene seared into their brains as the final memory of their loved ones. That’s why it’s so important to have someone like me there. Someone who won’t look away, no matter how harrowing it gets.

Marcus studied those NASA pictures for hours, the gorgeous Hasselblad pictures of men on the moon and the pictures of Jupiter’s turbulence. Since Newton’s laws apply everywhere, Marcus programmed a computer with a system of fluid equations. To capture Jovian weather meant writing rules for a mass of dense hydrogen and helium, resembling an unlit star. The planet spins fast, each day flashing by in ten earth hours. The spin produces a strong Coriolis force, the sidelong force that shoves against a person walking across a merry-go–round, and the Coriolis force drives the spot. Where Lorenz used his tiny model of the earth’s weather to print crude lines on rolled paper, Marcus used far greater computer power to assemble striking color images. First he made contour plots. He could barely see what was going on. Then he made slides, and then he assembled the images into an animated movie. It was a revelation. In brilliant blues, reds, and yellows, a checkerboard pattern of rotating vortices coalesces into an oval with an uncanny resemblance to the Great Red Spot in NASA’s animated film of the real thing. “You see this large-scale spot, happy as a clam amid the small-scale chaotic flow, and the chaotic flow is soaking up energy like a sponge,” he said. “You see these little tiny filamentary structures in a background sea of chaos.” The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.

Mandelbrot found his most enthusiastic acceptance among applied scientists working with oil or rock or metals, particularly in corporate research centers. By the middle of the 1980s, vast numbers of scientists at Exxon’s huge research facility, for example, worked on fractal problems. At General Electric, fractals became an organizing principle in the study of polymers and also—though this work was conducted secretly—in problems of nuclear reactor safety. In Hollywood, fractals found their most whimsical application in the creation of phenomenally realistic landscapes, earthly and extraterrestrial, in special effects for movies.

ORIGIN OF HOLLYWOOD On ride the masked men, wrapped in white sheets, bearing white crosses, torches held high: mounted avengers of the virtue of ladies and the honor of gentlemen strike fear into Negroes hungering for damsels’ white flesh. At the height of a wave of lynchings, D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation sings a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan. This is Hollywood’s first blockbuster and the greatest box office success ever for a silent movie. It is also the first film to ever open at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson gives it a standing ovation. Applauding it, he applauds himself: freedom’s famous flag-bearer wrote most of the texts that accompany the epic images. The president’s words explain that the emancipation of the slaves was “a veritable overthrow of Civilization in the South, the white South under the heel of the black South.” Ever since, chaos reigns because blacks are “men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.” But the president lights the lamp of hope: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan.” And even Jesus himself comes down from heaven at the end of the movie to give his blessing.

Cultural power? Rock stars and movie idols are drug-addled losers with personal lives of Mogadishu-levels of chaos.