Clipboard Quotes

If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors.

Do you know how fast you were going?" Fang looked at the speedometer..."No," he said truthfully. I tagged you at seventy miles per hour,"she said, pulling out a clipboard. I let out an impressed whistle. "Excellent! I never thought we'd be that fast." Fang shot me a look and I put my hand over my mouth.

When Ms. Adams took attendance and called out the name of an absent classmate, Noah’s hand shot up. I watched him cautiously. After she finished roll call, Noah stood, completely unself-conscious as heads followed his progress to the front of the room. “Um—” Ms. Adams checked her clipboard. “Ibrahim Hassin?” Noah nodded. I died.

I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterward that they'll never do it again.

A clipboard and a hard hat could get you just about anywhere.

Very good, Mr.—?” “Robinson,” the boy supplied. Ms. Terwilliger produced a clipboard and scanned a list. “Ah, there you are. Robinson. Stephanie.” “Stephan,” corrected the boy, flushing as some of his friends giggled. Ms. Terwilliger pushed her glasses up her nose and squinted. “So you are. Thank goodness. I was just thinking how difficult your life must be with such a name. My apologies. I broke my glasses in a freak croquet accident this weekend, forcing me to bring my old ones today. So, Stephan-not-Stephanie, you’re correct. It’s a temple. Can you be more specific?” ... “Indeed it is,” she said. “And your name is?” “Sydney.” “Sydney …” She checked the clipboard and looked up in astonishment. “Sydney Melbourne? My goodness. You don’t sound Australian.” “Er, it’s Sydney Melrose, ma’am,” I corrected. Ms. Terwilliger scowled and handed the clipboard to Trey, who seemed to think my name was the funniest thing ever. “You take over, Mr. Juarez. Your youthful eyes are better than mine. If I keep at this, I’ll keep turning boys into girls and perfectly nice young ladies into the descendants of criminals.

But realize this: we are living through writing’s Cambrian explosion, not its mass extinction. Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard—variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it.

Ike thought one of the worst things you could give a man was a clipboard. He’d been at the mercy of men with clipboards. They could keep you out of a gated community or put you on a bus to prison. Give a man a clipboard and watch his true nature come out.

Most people say if you tell a wish it won't come true. But I don't think wishes work like that. I don't believe there's some bad-tempered wish-fairy with a clipboard, checking off whether or not you've told...But it's a long shot I'll get my wish, so even if there is a fairy in charge of telling, it won't matter. 'I wish everyone had the same chances,' I say. 'Because it stinks a big one that they don't. What about you? What did you wish for?' 'Grape soda.' I can't help smiling. 'You wished for grape soda?' He doesn't answer, and I pull my hand from my pocket. Taking one of his fluttering hands, I wrap his fingers tightly around a dollar. 'Wish granted, toad.' He takes off running and Dad runs after him. I close my eyes and make a new wish. I wish the refreshment stand has grape soda.

There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he's capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work. Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker, but if he's driving a van or a pickup truck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboard while facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter begging someone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or something business-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which could mean he has a soul.

Kate studied the clipboard and the pocket calculator on the floor. "Did you figure out how to work that thing?" "You don't have to be a CPA to use a calculator." "I meant the clipboard." "Ha ha.

She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.

Kids don't give a shit about clipboards.

And she stood in front of that door like Gandalf the Grey with a clipboard instead of a staff. And she refused to let me pass.

When it's unexpected, death comes fast like a ravenous wolf and tears open your throat with a merciful fury. But when it's expected, it comes slow and patient like a snake, and the doctor tells you how far away it is and when, exactly it will be at your door. And when it will be at the foot of your bed. And when it will be on your flesh. It's all right there on the clipboards.

Together they crawled through the attic space, looking for the source of a roof leak they’d discovered in the last bathroom. Jax was out in front, braving the spiderwebs. Maddie was behind him, working really hard at not looking at his butt. And failing spectacularly. So when he unexpectedly twisted around, holding out his hand for the clipboard she was now holding, he caught her staring at him. “I, um—You have a streak of dirt,” she said. “A streak of dirt.” Yes.” She pointed to his left perfectly muscled butt cheek. “There.” He was quiet for a single, stunned beat. She couldn’t blame him, given that they were both covered in dirt from the filthy attic. “Thanks,” he finally said. “It’s important to know where the dirt streaks are.” “It is,” she agreed, nodding like a bobble head. “Probably you should stain-stick it right away. I have some in my purse.” “Are you offering to rub it on my ass?

So that’s when the witch somehow pulled off her own restraint and flung herself at me like a beautiful and deadly panther. I think she’d seen my stupid clipboard and realized that I’d been writing down sordid lies about her mental state. I’m very jealous of her, you see, and use my middle management position…

Jim waited for us at the Gold Gate. His teeth were bared. “What happened to barely winning?” “You said sloppy! Look, I didn’t even use my sword; I hit him with my head like a moron.” “A man with a sword attacked you and you disarmed him and knocked him out cold in under two seconds.” He turned to Curran. The Beast Lord shrugged. “It’s not my fault that he didn’t know how to fall.” Jim’s gaze slid from Curran to Dali. “What the hell was that?” “Crimson Jaws of Death.” “And were you planning on letting me know that you can turn people’s elbows backwards?” “I told you I did curses.” “You said they don’t work!” “I said they don’t always work. This one worked apparently.” Dali wrinkled her forehead. “It’s not like I ever get to use them against live opponents anyway. It was an accident.” Jim looked at us. The clipboard snapped in his hands. He turned around and very deliberately walked away. “I think we hurt his feelings.” Dali looked at his retreating back, sighed, and went after him. Curran looked at me. “What the hell was I supposed to do, catch the werebison as he was falling?

If you ever see a war," she says, not lookng up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.

It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people’s invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I’m even fooling myself.

That’s very interesting.” “How’d you figure?” “Because your mind didn’t automatically return to your mother.” “Because I don’t remember her hugging me.” “That’s a heartbreaking statement to make, Joey,” she surmised, scribbling away on her clipboard.

Last week,he had become so enraged with a visiting scientist who had shown him undue pity that Kholer clambered to his feet and threw a clipboard at the man's head.

They must visit Walden Pond,” says Mrs. Chadwick, whipping out a clipboard from who knows where and making a note. Becca’s mother is addicted to clipboards.

Those are the Big Three: clipboards, orange cones, elf suits. People don’t question

That made sense of gabby meetings: salient points isolated from the gush of acoustic froth. This paper belonged on a clipboard, not being defaced by dud literature. --Iain Sinclair

The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that at any moment now they will discover you. It's Imposter Syndrome, something my wife Amanda christened The Fraud Police. In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don't know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there, to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn't consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read.

BLOOM: As far as I’m concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they’re called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it. INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits? BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.

‘You are your” “Past, Present,” “& Future,’ he said” ” ‘You divide into” “those components” “in this room’ ” ” ‘But I do not have” “components!’ ” “our three voices said,” ” ‘My secret name—” “Time’s secret name” “is Oneness,” “is One Thing’ ” “As I—the one” “in the middle—spoke,” “the one of us in front—” “who was the Past—” “had already” “finished speaking” “& was awaiting” “his reply” “He said,” ” ‘Don’t we seem” “to experience” “things somewhat this way?” “There is past, present” :& future’ ” “The Future then cried out,” ” ‘Where is my life?” ‘Where is my life?” “You have stolen” “my life!’ ” “There was a silence” “The man” “reached out &” “pressed a button” “on the cave wall—” “we three united” “into one again” “while he wrote words on” “a clipboard” “Then he looked up & said,” ” ‘Going forward?” “Going on?” “Death lies ahead, you know’ ” “Any woman” “may already” “be dead,’ ” “I said

The scientists nodded and wrote on their clipboards. All information was important information, even if the reasons were not immediately apparent. The reason for anything was rarely immediately or even eventually apparent, but it existed somewhere, like a moon that had escaped orbit and was no longer a moon but just a piece of something that once was, spinning off into the nothing. The scientists were just then writing down that very metaphor. Metaphors are a big part of science.

Is this Molly?” she asked. Gabby didn’t bother to hide her surprise. Living in a small town still took some getting used to. “Yeah. I’m Gabby Holland.” “Nice to meet you. I’m Terri, by the way. What a beautiful dog.” “Thank you.” “We were wondering when you’d get here. You have to get back to work, right?” She grabbed a clipboard. “Let me go ahead and get you set up in a room. You can do the paperwork there. That way, the vet can see you right away. It shouldn’t be long. He’s almost done.” “Great,” Gabby said. “I really appreciate

If you ever see a war,” she says, not looking up from her clipboard, “you’ll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appal you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.

Swinging the door open, I took a sip. All of the coffee in the world wouldn't help if more visitors showed up at my door this early in the morning but the caffeine fortification was a bonus. The delivery guy pushed his clipboard at me. I held up my cup and raided my eyebrows. We had an entire conversation in the next seven seconds with our eyes and eyebrows. I told him that I wasn't giving up my coffee for his delivery. He told me that if I'd just sign on the damned dotted line he would get the hell out of here. I replied in turn that if he'd hold the clipboard instead of shoving it at me (I threw in a nod here for good measure), I'd sign the damned line. He finally sighed, turned the clipboard around and held the pen out. I braced the door with my hip, grabbed the pen and scrawled Wilma Flinstone on the paper.

Hem, hem.” Professor Umbridge had arrived. She was standing a few feet away from Harry, wearing her green hat and cloak again, her clipboard at the ready. Hagrid, who had never heard Umbridge’s fake cough before, was gazing in some concern at the closest thestral, evidently under the impression that it had made the sound.

Say another word,” yelled Lucile. “I dare you. Say one more word and I’m going to shove my clipboard so far up your ass you’ll be able to sign paperwork by blinking.

Write down what he said, if you can.” Michael reached into his bag and gave me a blank piece of paper, already neatly attached to a clipboard. He felt in his

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

...but what I am not interested in, Ms. Clipboard- or Mr. Canker or Mrs. Murmur or Call-me-Carol, all of you- is your questions; even your pointing and tipping Enoch pencils have six sides, my dear definers: pay heed whereon you pinch!; I am interested, almost exclusively, in being interested, and your reductivist probings are only intended to cordon off wings of my mansion;

Atrius like the insurance?” the clipboard guy asks. “No, like the—” He sighs. “Yeah. I named myself after health insurance. It’s social commentary. I can’t get insurance, so I became insurance.

It’s not a cold.” The doctor put the clipboard under his arm. “I just got off the phone with his oncologist. He fought it for years, but he stopped his treatment months ago. It wasn’t working anymore.

CARLOS: Thanks. But it’s pretty simple. We just follow the scientific method. No matter how advanced the scientific field gets, the foundation of scientific discovery is the scientific method we all learned in elementary school.  CECIL: I’m not sure I ever learned that.  CARLOS: Oh, it’s easy. Here, I’ll tell you and your listeners right now. The scientific method is four steps:  1. Find an object you want to know more about.  2. Hook that object up to a machine using wires or tubes.  3. Write things on a clipboard.  4. Read the results that the machine prints.  CECIL: Of course. I totally remember this now.

This next house is a classic. It was built in 1908.” Ms. Knight was a realtor trying hard to sell us a house, and my parents thought that the one she just showed us had stunk. My mom made a note on her clipboard

Who's cooking your food anyway? What strange beasts lurk behind the kitchen doors? You see the chef: he's the guy without the hat, with the clipboard under his arm, maybe his name stitched in Tuscan blue on his starched white chef's coat next to those cotton Chinese buttons. But who's actually cooking your food? Are they young, ambitious culinary school grads, putting in their time on the line until they get their shot at the Big Job? Probably not. If the chef is anything like me, the cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers motivated by money, the peculiar lifestyle of cooking and grim pride. They're probably not even American.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that The Fugitive is a movie all about men, where women don’t do very much except die or sometimes hold a clipboard. It’s all men who are the boss, but who is the most boss of the men??? Is it the Harrison Ford kind of boss or the Tommy Lee Jones kind of boss? They’re both your dad, but which is the best spanker????? This is allowed because in 1993 it was still okay to make movies all about men, as their contract wasn’t up yet.

Boo,” I said as I opened my eyes and shot up out of bed. The fae doctor screamed like a ninny and threw his clipboard against the wall. It rattled with a loud crack. “Not dead yet, bitch.” I made a duck face and held up two peace signs.

The Humvee came to a stop right in front of me and I tracked around to the driver’s window. Summer took up station on the passenger side, standing easy. The driver rolled his glass down. Stared out at me. “I’m looking for Major Marshall,” I said. The driver was a captain and his passenger was a captain too. They were both dressed in Nomex tank suits, with balaclavas and Kevlar helmets with built-in headphones. The passenger had sleeve pockets full of pens. He had clipboards strapped to both thighs. They were all covered with notes. Some kind of score sheets. “Marshall’s not here,” the driver said. “So where is he?” “Who’s asking?” “You can read,” I said. I was wearing last night’s BDUs. They had oak leaves on the collar and Reacher on the stencil.

You say that about everything,” I complained, trailing after him. “Everything is a long story, too long to tell me. I suppose after two hundred years, or whatever, things get a little convoluted, but can’t you paraphrase? How do you know the Rectors?” When we rounded the corner, it became apparent there wouldn’t be time for any stories at all, paraphrased or not. Not because the gray clouds that were hanging so threateningly overhead had burst open, the way I was half expecting them to, but because the family we’d seen earlier, along with Mr. Smith and the people holding the clipboards, were climbing into their various vehicles in the parking lot right in front of us. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. We were just an ordinary young couple, taking a late afternoon stroll through the cemetery. I’d forgotten that, due to the “vandalism” that had occurred there earlier in the week, the cemetery gates (which John had kicked apart in a fit of temper) had been ordered locked twenty-four hours a day by the chief of police. So it kind of was a big deal. Still, that didn’t explain why one of the women-the grandmother, if her gray hair was any indication-took one look at my face, made the sign of the cross, cried, “Dios mio!” then passed out cold right in front of us.

I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren’t in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets. I tried the Scarsdale diet and the Stillman water diet (you remember that one, where you run weight off trying to get to the bathroom). I tried Optifast, Juicefast, and Waterfast. I even took those shots that I think were made from cow pee. I endured every form of torture anybody with a white coat and a clipboard could devise for a girl who really liked fried pork chops. One night while I was on some kind of liquid-protein diet made from bone marrow, or something equally appetizing, I was with a group of friends at a Howard Johnson’s and some of them were having fried clams. I’ll never forget sitting there with all of that glorious fried fat filling my nostrils and feeling completely left out. I went home and wrote one of my biggest hits, “Two Doors Down.” I also went off my diet and had some fried clams. There were times when I thought of chucking it all in. “Damn the movie,” I would say. “I’m just gonna eat everything and go ahead and weigh five hundred pounds and have to be buried in a piano case.” Luckily, a few doughnuts later, that thought would pass and I would be back to the goal at hand. I remember something in a book I read called Gentle Eating. The author said you should pretend the angels are eating with you and that you want to save some for them. I loved that idea, because I love angels. I have to admit, though, there were times I would slap those angels out of the way and have their part too. A true hog will do that.

For something to exist, it has to be observed. For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head.

But airport security is meant mostly to impress honest citizens and insurance companies, and secondarily to catch hijackers and other crazies. There is no security against a man with his own truck and his own clipboard, and Inter-Air Forwarding was a safe, reliable financial success from the beginning.

You monosyllabic Neanderthal, I am not some little helpless female who can't walk across the brewery." He shrugged. "I did what was needed." "What the what?" She dropped the clipboard from beneath the hoodie and shoved her arms through its sleeves before rubbing her hands up and down her arms to warm them. "That doesn't even make sense." Sean doubted there were half-crazed mules more stubborn than Natalie Sweet. "If I hadn't, you would have stayed in that cooler, freezing your ass off until you'd said everything you wanted to say - which, by the way, is usually more words than most people use in a year.

Carmilla Hect depressed the button with a bright and final plastic clack. This was the cue, so she exploded into action. The rule was that she had to lie still and concentrate as hard as she could from the time that button went down to the time when the button went up. When it went up, pyjamas came off; under the pale, wavering light of the tiny torch taped to Camilla’s clipboard, she undressed and dressed herself at the same time, which required a lot of contortions. She wrestled out of her nightshirt with her arms and stretched on her trousers using her ankles, in the move Camilla called worm with problems.

Betty once had self-image problems, but she overcame them. A Morninglight poster decorates her wall. Much-read pamphlets sit in her bathroom. Philip Marquard's audio book on self-actualisation plays in her earphones. Fresh signatures fill the forms on her clipboard. Bottles of Morninglight dietary supplements and nutrient pills fill her medicine cabinet. By her bed is an autographed picture of Philip Marquard, the one she secretly kisses before going to sleep. Every night she dreams of freeing herself from her mortal shell and ascending into the cosmos to soar with the whale-mollusc gods. There are new recruits chained to Betty's walls. She has their signatures. They tested as having self-image problems, as she once had. Smiling, she tells them they are all beautiful. She opens them with a knife, shows them the beauty inside. "Look!" she says, tears streaming. "We are all made of stars!" Then she practises eating stars, waiting for enlightenment to take hold.

Round one: southeast versus southwest." Wymack picked up his clipboard and skimmed the top page. "Odd-ranked teams play on Thursdays this year, so we've got Fridays. January 12th we're away against University of Texas. Good news is that Austin's just outside the thousand-mile range, which means the board's going to let us fly there.

In it, I was sitting across from my wife, who was nude but wrapped in a gauzy fabric. She had a clipboard in her hand, and was moving a pencil down it as if ticking off entries on a list. "Where are you?" she asked. "Devil's Throat," I said. "What are you doing?" "Carrying a basket through the forest." "What's in the basket?" I looked down, and there they were: four beautiful spheres. "Two eggs," I counted. "Two figs." "Are you sure?" I did not look down again, afraid that the answer would change. "Yes." "And what is through the forest?" "I do not know." "And what is through the forest?" "I am not certain." "And what is through the forest?" "I cannot tell." "And what is through the forest?" "I don't remember." "And what is through the forest?" I woke up before I could answer.

Most couples are willing to spend an hour a week talking about their relationship. I suggest that emotional attunement can take place (at a minimum) in that weekly “state of the union” meeting. That means that at least an hour a week is devoted to the relationship and the processing of negative emotions. Couples can count on this as a time to attune. Later, after the skill of attunement is mastered, they can process negative emotions more quickly and efficiently as they occur. If the couple is willing, they take turns as speaker and listener. They get two clipboards, yellow pads, and pens for jotting down their ideas when they become a speaker, and for taking notes when they become a listener. It’s not a very high-tech solution, but the process of taking notes also helps people stay out of the flooded state. I suggest that at the start of the state of the union meeting, before beginning processing a negative event, each person talks about what is going right in the relationship, followed by giving at least five appreciations for positive things their partner has done that week. The meeting then continues by each partner talking about an issue in the relationship. If there is an issue they can use attunement to fully process the issue.

Elizabeth Zott,” she said, moving past the stork to the receptionist. “For Dr. Mason.” “You’re late,” the receptionist said icily. “I’m five minutes early,” Elizabeth corrected, checking her watch. “There’s paperwork,” the woman informed her, handing over a clipboard. Husband’s place of work. Husband’s telephone number. Husband’s insurance. Husband’s age. Husband’s bank account number. “Who’s having the baby here?” she asked.

Okay. What do you think is sexy?” Nona cheered up immediately at being asked. “The huge old poster up on the side of the building at the end of the street—the one the dairy’s in. The old poster for shampoo.” Camilla looked at her for a few seconds too many. “The painting of the two flowers,” she said. “I think they’re very sexy flowers,” said Nona. “All right, your turn! Tell me what you think is sexy.” “Eating breakfast,” said Camilla. Nona lifted up her voice in despair. “You don’t. It’s not fair. We’re having a heart-to-heart, I’m sharing deep personal thoughts, and you just want me to eat.” “Yes. I’m going to talk to the Warden.” “Well, ask him what he thinks is sexy.” “No. I already know.” That made sense. “Tell me! I’ll eat the whole thing if you tell me,” said Nona, enchanted, starting to pull on her trousers but deeply distracted. “Oh, Cam, please, please. I’ve been so good lately. And when I haven’t been good it hasn’t been because I haven’t tried. Yesterday was awful. I need to know—I know it’ll help my memory. It’s like a deep need inside of me, it must be my real self wanting to know, right? So this is work, right? What does Palamedes find sexy?” Camilla took up the clipboard and the pen and wrote, serene and tranquil, underlining something once—twice. “Strong work ethic,” she said eventually. “High test scores.” Nona buttoned up her shirt and wriggled on one sock, then the other, contemplating this. “Okay,” she said. “Wow.

It would make me feel bad.” Tennet nodded and checked something off of his clipboard. “Now let’s say that he was not infected, but was sent to quarantine with hundreds of people who are, and that their infection has dissolved the part of their brain capable of making moral decisions. And let’s say that they overpowered David, restrained him, defecated into his mouth and taped his mouth shut with duct tape, and left him there to writhe and slowly swallow feces all week, how would that make you feel?

Where were we? 6:01 A.M. on Thursday, huh?" I grinned He swalled. "What exactly are we talking about?" "Oh, no. You're not entrapping me. I've watched prostitution stings on Cops. I won't be the first one to mention the sex act. Under his dark blue uniform, his chest rose and fell rapidly. I wished I dared put my hand there to feel how his heartbeat sped up. It was nothing compared to mine... I, blue-haired girl-felon was seducing Officer After. ... He passed his fist across his clean-shaven jaw, then picked up his pen and busied himseld scribbling on the clipboard. "6:01 A.M. on Thursday then. Write that down in your notebook, and we'll call it a plan.

Next comes a husky boy in baggy shorts. “Bring it on in, Doug,” Duncan says. “What’d you get?” “Nine minutes.” “Flat?” “Yeah.” “Nice work.” When Michelle and Krissy finally saunter over, Duncan asks for their times, but Michelle’s watch is still running. Apparently, she didn’t hit the blue button. Krissy did, though, and their times are the same. She holds up her wrist for Duncan. “Ten twelve,” he says, noting the time on his clipboard. What he doesn’t say is “It looked like you two were really loafing around out there!” The fact is, they weren’t. When Duncan downloads Michelle’s monitor, he’ll find that her average heart rate during her ten-minute mile was 191, a serious workout for even a trained athlete. She gets an A for the day.

Of that first decade, Neil said I would have this recurring fantasy in which there would be a knock on the door, and I would go down, and there would be somebody wearing a suit – not an expensive suit, just the kind of suit that showed they had a job – and they would be holding a clipboard, and they'd have a paper on the clipboard, and I'd open the door and they'd say, „Hello, excuse me, I'm afraid I am here on official business. Are you Neil Gaiman?” And I would say yes. „Well, it says here that you are a writer and that you don't have to get up in the morning at any particular time, that you just write each day as much you want.” And I'd go „That's right.” "And that you enjoy writing. And it says here that all the books you want – they are just sent to you and you don't have to buy them. And films: it says here that you just go to see films. If you want to see them you just call up the person who runs the films." And I say, „Yes, that's right.” And that people like what you do and they give you money for just writing things down." And I'd say yes. And he'd say, „Well, I'm afraid we are on to you. We've caught up with you. And I'm afraid you are now going to have to go out and get a proper job.” At which point in my fantasy my heart would always sink, and I'd go, „Okay,” and I'd go and buy a cheap suit and I'd start applying to real jobs. Because once they've caught up with you, you can't argue with this: they've caught up with you. So that was the thing in my head.

There are videos and books in her room to entertain her, but Miracolina has to laugh, because just as the harvest camp van had only happy, family-friendly movies, the titles she has to choose from here have a clear agenda as well. They’re all about kids being mistreated, but rising above it, or kids empowering themselves in a world that doesn’t understand them. Everything from Dickens to Salinger—as if Miracolina Roselli could possibly have anything in common with Holden Caulfield. ... Finally a bald middle-aged man comes in with a clipboard and a name tag that just says BOB. “I used to be a respected psychiatrist until I spoke out against unwinding,” Bob tells her after the obligatory introductions. “Being ostracized was a blessing in disguise, though, because it allowed me to come here, where I’m truly needed.” Miracolina keeps her arms folded, giving him nothing. She knows what this is all about. They call it “deprogramming,” which is a polite term for undoing brainwashing with more brainwashing.

As associate beauty editor, it was my job to represent the magazine at get-togethers like these: to rub elbows and be pleasant and professional. Seriously, it was the easiest gig in the world! And yet it wasn’t always so easy for me. “I’ll take one of those.” I stopped a dude with a tray of champagne. “Thanks, honey.” “Hi, Cat!” a beauty publicist with a clipboard said. “Thanks so much for coming!” “Good to see you,” I lied. Thunder clapped outside. “The gang’s over there,” she said. The publicist was referring to the usual group of beauty editors—my colleagues. They were from every title you’ve ever heard of: Teen Vogue, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, W, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, O, Shape, Self. I attended events alongside them every day, and yet I never felt like I belonged. I’d spent years trying to get into their world: interning, studying mastheads, interviewing all over town. But now that I was one of them, I felt defective—self-conscious and out of place in the dreamy career I’d worked so hard for, and unable to connect with these chic women I’d idolized.

He shared his place with a Dr. Tubeside, whose practice consisted largely of injecting people with "vitamin B12", a euphemism for the physician's own blend of amphetamines. Today, early as it was, Doc still had to edge his way past a line of "B12"- deficient housewives of a certain melancholy index, actors with casting calls to show up at, deeply tanned geezers looking ahead to an active day of schmoozing in the sun, stewardii just off in some high-stress red-eye, even a few legit cases of pernicious anemia or vegetarian pregnancy, all shuffling along half asleep, chain-smoking, talking to themselves, sliding one by one into the lobby of the little cinder-block building through a turnstile, next to which, holding a clipboard and checking them in, stood Petunia Leeway, a stunner in a starched cap and micro-length medical outfit, not so much an actual nurse uniform as a lascivious commentary on one, which Dr. Tubeside claimed to've bought a truckload of from Fredericks's of Hollywood, in a variety of fashion pastels, today's being aqua, at close to wholesale.

Brandi and I struggled with our marriage, but it was obvious we were falling apart as a couple. That was probably clear to me even from as far away as Iraq, but I did try to make it better. One day I suggested marriage counseling. Initially Brandi agreed. I took advantage of the fact that the military has a program called Military OneSource. It’s basically one-stop shopping for all the help you could need from moving, to retirement, to marriage counseling, as it turns out. So I called one day and asked to be set up with a marriage counselor. The morning of our appointment Brandi decided she didn’t want to go. She didn’t give much detail other than to say, “I’m not going.” Annoyed, I said, “Well shit. I’m going.” I arrived and sat down in a chair across the counselor. He looked at the empty chair next to me and started flipping through the paperwork on his clipboard. Finally he looked up and asked, “I have down that you’re here for marriage counseling?” “Yes, sir, I am,” I answered matter-of-factly. Again he looked at the empty seat next to me and then back at me. And then, in a really deadpan tone, he said, “Huh. Seems like things are going well.

I sign in on the form and hand the clipboard back to the volunteer manning the desk. The young man’s brows rise in recognition of my name. “Mr. Pierce!” He stands from his seat and sticks out his hand to shake mine. “I didn’t expect it would be you representing Pierce Industries. I thought you’d send someone.” I shake his hand, out of politeness, then force a stiff smile. “Surprise.” God, I hate small talk. Especially from this twenty-two year old ass-kisser who likely hopes this interaction will earn him employment at my company. I’m afraid it’s not that easy to even get an interview. He lowers his focus to the nametags on the table, searching for the one with the Pierce Industries logo. He hands it to me, and I pocket it. I refuse to wear it. I’m easily enough recognized without advertising it. The man—nothing more than a boy, really—seems disappointed. Whether it’s because I’m not as charismatic or charming as he’d imagined or because I dismissed the damn nametag, I can’t be certain. Frankly, I don’t give a shit. Once upon a time, his emotions would have elicited more interest from me. Now, they’re barely a blip on my radar. I’ll never understand them. No point in wasting my time trying. His smile

When we go to the doctor, he or she will not begin to treat us without taking our history—and not just our history but that of our parents and grandparents before us. The doctor will not see us until we have filled out many pages on a clipboard that is handed to us upon arrival. The doctor will not hazard a diagnosis until he or she knows the history going back generations. As we fill out the pages of our medical past and our current complaints, what our bodies have been exposed to and what they have survived, it does us no good to pretend that certain ailments have not beset us, to deny the full truths of what brought us to this moment. Few problems have ever been solved by ignoring them. Looking beneath the history of one’s country is like learning that alcoholism or depression runs in one’s family or that suicide has occurred more often than might be usual or, with the advances in medical genetics, discovering that one has inherited the markers of a BRCA mutation for breast cancer. You don’t ball up in a corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t, if you are wise, forbid any mention of them. In fact, you do the opposite. You educate yourself. You talk to people who have been through it and to specialists who have researched it. You learn the consequences and obstacles, the options and treatment. You may pray over it and meditate over it. Then you take precautions to protect yourself and succeeding generations and work to ensure that these things, whatever they are, don’t happen again.

When I got back from the nearest pharmacy after buying the biggest bottle of ibuprofen they had, the delivery truck was blocking my driveway. What wasn't already taken up by Jayson's Mercedes, that is. At that point, I was so out of sorts and my head hurt so badly that I was tempted to throw everybody out of my house. As a vampire, I was strong enough—and pissed enough—to accomplish it without much effort. "What the hell are you doing here?" I snapped at Jayson Rome, who sat at my kitchen island, drinking coffee and eating oatmeal cookies with Hank and Trina as if he belonged there. He didn't answer, so I went to the cupboard next to the sink, grabbed a glass, filled it with water and washed down four ibuprofen, hoping that would be enough to stop the pounding in my head. "How did you get out of the bar last night without us seeing you?" Jayson demanded. "You think I'll tell you anything?" I said. "Get out of my house. I paid for it. It doesn't belong to you anymore. Go get some of those women you're so fond of. Do you pay Hank a finder's fee for pointing them in your direction?" "You really did fuck up, didn't you?" Trina eyed Jayson distastefully as she crunched into another oatmeal cookie. "Is it your job to ruin all my friendships?" "Mattress and foundation are on the bed," one of two delivery guys shoved a clipboard in my direction for a signature. "It looks good—I checked," Trina said. "Fine." I signed and handed the clipboard back. "If you all will excuse me, I'm going to put sheets on my bed and then do a faceplant. Please be gone when I wake up." I walked down the hall toward my bedroom.

She drops the singsong thing. “I do go to school, Krissy. I didn’t quit.” Ow. “You know what I think? I think you’re under a lot of pressure, with a baby coming and making your first record. Maybe it makes you want to go back to a time before you had all these stresses in your life.” She is blowing me off. “So you’re a psychology major after all.” She doesn’t laugh. “I’m going to give you some advice now.” No shit. “Don’t ever run away from your commitments. You’ll have more options open to you if you don’t run away. Does that make sense?” I say nothing. I shouldn’t have said that I ran away. I should have put it differently. ‘I’ve come to a decision’ or something dramatical like that. Then she’d be on my side, welcoming me back, not lecturing me. “We all have a snake,” Betty continues, and right now you need to -“ “What?” It’s like she slapped me. “I said we all have a snake and yours is -“ “We all have a what?” My head’s pounding along with my heart. “I don’t mean it literally. I’m just trying to say that if you don’t face -“ “Did you say we all have snakes? Why did you say that?” She sighs. “Krissy, if you’d let me finish, I could tell you.” I sit, stunned. I never told her about the snake. “I have a snake and you have a snake. We all have to face our demons some day, sweetheart, and that day’ll be the scariest you ever lived. Then you’ll wake up the next morning and realise your snake is still there, that you have to face your demons again. But it won’t be so scary this time. Once you see your shadow, you’ll realise that the rest of your life will be spent staring it down, but you know what?” “What?” “You can do it.” “Yeah. Thanks, Betty.” Christ. “Krissy, you have a calling, so make this record. If you hate it, you never have to make another record again.” She doesn’t understand. I slide to the floor. The [university student campaign] issue girls turn around to stare at me, their clipboards at their sides. “Promise?” I ask. “I promise,” says Betty. “If this record’s as bad as you think it is,” she says cheerfully, “you won’t be allowed to make another one!

miles an hour. You and your beakers, your clipboards, your briefcase. You and your boring stories

The fact that the arrow can't disappear is both a comfort and a worry. It makes Nechtr feel special, true. But from special it's not very far to Alone. Although we all, Mark would know if he bothered to ask J.D. Steelritter, who'd done solipsistic-delusion-fear research back in the halcyon days of singles bars, we all have our little solipsistic delusions. All of us. The truth's all there, too, tracked and graphed in black and white—forgotten, now that fear of disease has superseded fear of retiring alone—sitting in dusty aluminum clipboards in a back archive at J.D. Steelritter Advertising, in Collision, where they're headed. We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.

Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard - variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it.

For something to exist, it has to be observed. For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head.*

least the truck would be empty on the ride there and he and his two partners could relax a little and not flinch at every bump in the road. The second pallet found its home and he watched the handler close and lock the cage behind it. He counted six packages total, which matched the other stack at the opposite end of the building. Still too close together for his liking but security trumped separation he was told. Again, he was just a deliveryman. The handler waved a clipboard in his direction. He nodded in return, policed up his rifle and climbed into the back of the truck. He tapped on the cab, the engine started, and he watched the warehouse door fade away. Soon they were past the guards

She wrote a note on her clipboard, her cursive like soap bubbles blown from a pen.

War was nothing but a grand experiment. Behind every senseless tragedy, there was some guy with a clipboard.

All art including essayistic writing is essentially historical. A writer paints a story with a palette drawn from the well of personal experience and the product of their dream works. A writer’s sense of empathy, philosophy, and accessibility springs from the writer’s clipboard of inchoate childhood experiences bookend with teenage and adulthood’s adventures, chores, mishaps, comedic events, and tragedies.

Do you guys have any questions?" she asked after they popped their first tastes. "Is there butter in this branzino al sala?" asked a ruddy-cheeked guy who was the latest addition to the team, his mouth full of fish. "First, 'sala' is a room. It's 'sale'- as in 'salt.' But only tell people that if they specifically ask, otherwise they'll assume it's too salty. And tell them the salt, which dries into a hard crust that's cracked open at the end, preserves the fish's natural flavors and juices as it cooks so it's moist and tender. And no butter, just olive oil, fresh thyme, chervil, and lemon." "Push this one, guys. We're selling it at thirty-three bucks a pop," Bernard said without looking up from his clipboard. "Really?" Georgia said. "A little high for my taste, but almost worth it." "So, it's rich and flavorful?" the new guy continued hopefully. She shook her head. "Subtle and delicate. Tell them we only serve this when the branzino is really top-notch. Say that and it'll fly.

Next!’ The judgement issues summarily from the review panel before Sexecutioner has even a chance to drop his first motherfucker. For a moment, the boys remain rooted to the spot in ungangsta-like attitudes of woundedness, mocked by the drumbeat that is still thumping around them; then, unplugging the ghettoblaster, they clamber down and make the walk of shame to the exit. ‘What in God’s name was that?’ the Automator says as soon as they have left. Trudy peers down at her clipboard. ‘ “Original material.” ’ ‘Our old friend original material,’ the Automator says grimly. ‘I’ve had some plumbing mishaps that sounded a little like those guys.’ ‘It did have a certain rough-hewn vitality,’ Father Laughton moderates. ‘I’ve said it before, Padre, this concert’s not about rough-hewn. It’s not about “doing your best”. I want professionalism. I want pizazz. I want this concert to put the Seabrook name out there, tell the world what we’re all about.’ ‘Education?’ ‘Quality, damn it. A brand right at the top of the upper end of the market. God knows that’s not going to be easy. I’ve given serious thought to bussing in other kids, talented kids, just so we don’t have to drop the curtain after half an hour –

The entrepreneurs are only about my age, probably younger, but they don't seem so. Their tailored clothes and unbending hairdos, their clipboards and laser pointers, make them seem like real grown-up people in a way I have never been.

Ike thought one of the worst things you could give a man was a clipboard. He'd been at the mercy of men with clipboards. They could keep you out of a gated community or on a bus to prison. Give a man a clipboard and watch his true nature come out.

You know where the term severance pay comes from, Scot?” said Longo as he hung the clipboard on a peg inside the cabinet and locked it again. “No, but you’re going to tell me, right?” Ignoring Harvath’s sarcasm, Longo continued. “It’s also from England. When prisoners were going to be beheaded, they offered the axeman a little extra money to make sure he chopped their heads off with one, clean blow.

Just look around you at the gym (if you still use a gym, that is). The people who are in the best shape are usually not in an aerobics or yoga class, or being toted from machine to machine by some trainer with a clipboard. They’re the ones working out alone. The ones who have the drive and knowledge to customize their own strength training routines. Yet even they haven’t taken the final step of independence: Walking out of that fitness center and never returning.

Well, then can you tell me something?” she continued. “Why is it that when the Germans were killing the Jews everyone screamed, but when we are being killed by Israelis, the world calls us killers?” The nurse’s question was clearly spoken out of a deep psychic wound, a grievance that she herself had been nursing for a long time. Who could blame her? As I stood there, one hand on the new mother’s bed railing and the other gripping my clipboard, I wanted to explain to her that the difference in treatment had nothing to do with the Israeli cause being somehow morally superior to that of the Palestinians and that it also had nothing to do with any conspiracy in the media. It had to do with the fact that the Palestinians simply are not part of the biblical super story through which the West looks at the world, and it is the super story that determines whose experiences get interpreted and whose don’t, whose pain is felt and whose is ignored. That is why when it comes to winning the sympathies of the West the Palestinians can never quite compete with the Jews, no matter how hard they try and no matter how much they suffer.

THIS PART OF THE HOSPITAL SEEMS LIKE FOREIGN COUNTRY to me. There is no sense of the battlefield here, no surgical teams in gore-stained scrubs trading witty remarks about missing body parts, no steely-eyed administrators with their clipboards, no herds of old drunks in wheelchairs, and above all, no flocks of wide-eyed sheep huddled together in fear at what might come out of the double steel doors.

THIS PART OF THE HOSPITAL SEEMS LIKE FOREIGN COUNTRY to me. There is no sense of the battlefield here, no surgical teams in gore-stained scrubs trading witty remarks about missing body parts, no steely-eyed administrators with their clipboards, no herds of old drunks in wheelchairs, and above all, no flocks of wide-eyed sheep huddled together in fear at what might come out of the double steel doors. There is no stench of blood, antiseptic, and terror; the smells here are kinder, homier. Even the colors are different: softer, more pastel, without the drab, battleship utilitarianism of the walls in other parts of the building. There are, in fact, none of the sights and sounds and dreadful smells I have come to associate with hospitals, none at all. There is only the crowd of moon-eyed men standing at the big window, and to my infinite surprise, I am one of them. We stand together, happily pressed up to the glass and cheerfully making space for any newcomer. White, black, brown; Latin, African-American, Asian-American, Creole—it doesn’t matter. We are all brothers. No one sneers or frowns; no one seems to care about getting an accidental nudge in the ribs now and again, and no one, wonder of all, seems to harbor any violent thoughts about any of the others. Not even me. Instead, we all cluster at the glass, looking at the miraculous commonplace in the next room. Are these human beings? Can this really be the Miami I have always lived in? Or has some strange physics experiment in an underground supercollider sent us all to live in Bizarro World, where everyone is kind and tolerant and happy all the time? Where

tape already marked the area around the body. A first responding officer jumped to his feet, holding the scene log on a clipboard. “Good morning, sir.” The young man spoke in the nasal voice of someone whose nose is blocked. Lei spotted white cotton sprouting from his nostrils. “Hey. Nice up here if it weren’t for the smell.” She took the clipboard, and each of them signed in. Passing the tape, Lei spotted the hand first, extended toward them from beneath the ferns, palm up. The tissue was swollen and discolored, masked in a filmy gray gauze of mold that seemed to be drawing the body down into the forest floor. Lei could imagine that in just a few weeks, the body would have been all but gone in the biology of the cloud forest. The victim lay on his stomach, his head turned away and facing into a fern clump, black hair already looking like just another lichen growing on the forest floor. The body was at the expansion phase, distending camouflage-patterned clothing as if inflated. A black fiberglass arrow fletched in plastic protruded from the man’s back. Lei and Pono stayed well back from the body. Lei unpacked the police department’s camera from her backpack, and Pono took out his crime kit. The modest quarter-karat engagement

A nurse worked her way down the line with a clipboard, taking domestic details and assessing the extent of each patient’s worthiness or worthlessness on a scale of “Just Feels Like Bothering Everyone Else With Their Problems” to “Complete And Utter Failure In Life”.

Hence, because flash cards are being used in markets completely different from those Quantum and Seagate typically engage—palmtop computers, electronic clipboards, cash registers, electronic cameras, and so on—the value network framework would predict that firms similar to Quantum and Seagate are not likely to build market-leading positions in flash memory. This

I fuck conventional wisdom’s wife. Clipboard. Orange cones. You’re a mall cop. Not a real cop. My personal code is never harm real cops, who risk their lives every day. The Thin Blue Line. You’re an almost-cop, so harming you is a gray area. Thin Gray Line? Who knows? So I’ll err on the side of decency and ask nice. Don’t yell at any more kids before you’re fired.

What are they going to say?” Serge stopped skipping. “It’s like clipboards. You walk around all smart and serious, writing on a clipboard, and people stand back in respect. Or orange cones. You can buy them at any Home Depot. Then you set them out according to your needs, and the public thinks, ‘He must be official. He’s got orange cones.’ Those are the Big Three: clipboards, orange cones, elf suits. People don’t question . . . I need coffee. There’s the Coffee Circus.

About thirty minutes later, I noticed that Bill was now digging a second hole, his first one having been carefully refilled and smoothed over at its top. I picked up his clipboard and saw that his soil evaluation had been completed meticulously and that he had also included his second-best answers in a separate column down the right side of the page. At the very top of his report, suitability for “infrastructure” was checked, and a specification of “juvenile detention center” had been added in careful handwriting. I

So you knew Jack growing up?” “I had a bit of a crush on him through the years, but there was nothing between us until much later when I ran into him at Stanford. I was getting my master’s degree in art history there, and he was working at a teaching hospital. As destiny would have it, I broke my sternum in a fall from a horse. My human friends insisted I go to the emergency room to get checked out. Of course I knew it would heal on its own, but I humored them anyway. Jack was my doctor that day.” “So you began dating and got likenessed, or whatever?” “The dating part followed the getting-likenessed part,” she explained. “He walked in, looked up from his clipboard, and there was a complete…mental connection. That’s the only way I can explain it. Likeness is a melding of minds and once it happens it can never be undone.” Doing a quick rewind of what happened between Ian and myself during lunch, I cried out. “Oh, no! No!” What? Brandy asked, mirroring my alarm. “I think that mental connection, likeness thing, happened to me and Ian this afternoon,” I replied in a panic. She pulled to the side of the road. “Calm down,” she said. “I would have sensed it if it had. Hang on—I did sense something.” I couldn’t catch my breath. I was started to see stars. “It wasn’t likeness, though,” she stated with certainty. “Explain exactly what happened.” “Ian used his joining on me during lunch. It was supposed to be a shortcut to show me how joinings work. Things started out fine, everything was all business, but then it took a turn.” “So what’s the problem?” she asked. “The problem is…it turned into some kind of weird mind-kissing thing. That sounds crazy, but there is nothing else I can compare it to.

I had my eye on the street when an SUV pulled up outside. With a flash of long, tanned thighs, a brunette in a black cocktail dress slid out. The major-domo held the door for her and I heard him promise to have the vehicle safely parked in the basement. It seemed she had driven in alone. That was unusual for anyone of any means in Luanda. The woman came inside. She was tall and slim, hardly more than thirty years old. Her long hair was tied back in a chignon. She tossed her head and smiled at the doorman. The look softened the strong lines of her oval face. He snapped his fingers at a hostess who stepped forward with a clipboard. “Madame?” “Fabienne de Valence”, I heard the woman say with a noticeable accent. The hostess checked the guest list, nodded and gestured towards the lifts. I decided it was time to join the reception. There weren’t that many seriously attractive women in Luanda.

Jubal threw his sign down in disgust and stalked away from the group. Sosi ran after him, the clipboard with the soggy petition

Rami is sitting on a chair close to my bed. He is holding a clipboard and reading intently. He looks at me. He smiles but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Hey, buddy,” he says. He squeezes my arm. I open my mouth. Something warm and wet trickles down my chin. Rami’s eyes water and he turns away.

Jerry shifted the clipboard to his side as he rested his fists on his hips, as though to attest to his in-chargeness.

The paramedics told me the story.” He checked the clock, then signed a clipboard attached

Chapter One Vietnam 1967 I am Jason Snowblood. This is my journal. 1967 April 21. Vietnam–day one. Cu Chi. We are the only two assigned to this tent. It is about thirty feet by twenty feet and filled with cots, but Benny and I are alone. The others both enlisted and draftees have been sent elsewhere. Benny is sitting on the next cot. He is still, head down, face in his hands. Outside the mud is four inches deep. It is thick and sucks hard when you try to walk. The rain keeps coming. We’ve been in this tent for twenty-three hours and it has not let up for a second. It is hot. It might be a mirage, but I see steam rising off my arms and Benny’s neck. The mud stinks. It gives off the odor of something freshly dead and quietly rotting. The rain and the air smell old and dying. We thought we were going to Bien Hoa to be assigned to the 173rd Airborne Division, but were told to board the bus to Cu Chi, home of the 25th Infantry Division. The lieutenant who directed this was frustrated and tentative. He kept checking his clipboard and walking over to a sergeant for quick conferences. The sergeant was busy with two groups. He rolled his eyes at one of the lieutenant’s questions, and caught my stare with a smile and a wink. Body bags were being staged next to the plane that delivered us to the Tan Son Nhut complex outside Saigon. He pointed at us and said “Soldiers to Vietnam,” then to the bags and added, “Soldiers going home.” We had been separated into enlisted and draftee squads. Enlisted soldiers have the letters RA for regular army in their numbers. Benny and I volunteered for the draft, it is not the same as enlisting. We carried US. The lieutenant pointed to a battered Isuzu bus and said, “All draftees are going to replace wiped out platoons.” It took us less than two hours to get here. It started raining before we left. I hoped the rain would wash the stink from the air, but it has not. The smell of jet fuel faded quickly but was replaced by this rotting mud and the continual roar of 175mm howitzers. Benny is shaking. He is crying. I have never seen him cry. This is going to be a bad year.

And the worst way to treat someone hoping to be heard is to walk in with a clipboard and a checklist.