Don't Litter Quotes

I'm placing you under arrest for murder, conspiracy to commit murder and, I don't know, possibly littering.

Alec tugged at the front of Max’s sailor suit. “That’s a lot of ribbons there, buddy.” Max nodded sadly. “Too much ribbons.” “What happened to your sweater?” “That’s a fine question, Alexander. Allow me to unfold to you the tale. Max rolled his sweater in the cat litter,” Magnus related. “So he could ‘look like Daddy.’ Thus he must wear the sailor suit of shame. I don’t make the rules. Oh, wait, yes, I do.” He waved a reproving finger at Max, who laughed again and tried to grab for the glitter of rings.

In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors—or somebody else’s friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially.

I saw her, once. “She passed through our village, through fields littered with dead soldiers after her forces overwhelmed the nation of Dumor. Her other Elites followed and then rows of white-robed Inquisitors, wielding the white-and-silver banners of the White Wolf. Where they went, the sky dimmed and the ground cracked—the clouds gathered behind the army as if a creature alive, black and churning in fury. As if the goddess of Death herself had come. “She paused to look down at one of our dying soldiers. He trembled on the ground, but his eyes stayed on her. He spat something at her. She only stared back at him. I don’t know what he saw in her expression, but his muscles tightened, his legs pushing against the dirt as he tried in vain to get away from her. Then the man started to scream. It is a sound I shall never forget as long as I live. She nodded to her Rainmaker, and he descended from his horse to plunge a sword through the dying soldier. Her face did not change at all. She simply rode on. “I never saw her again. But even now, as an old man, I remember her as clearly as if she were standing before me. She was ice personified. There was once a time when darkness shrouded the world, and the darkness had a queen.” —A witness’s account of Queen Adelina’s siege on the nation of Dumor The Village of Pon-de-Terre 28 Marzien, 1402

The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an addiction and illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life. Eating disorders provide a little drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm and Drang. And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with the mirror, when you are having the most interesting sado-machistic affair with your own image?

But her attention was on the prince across from her, who seemed utterly ignored by his father and his own court, shoved down near the end with her and Aedion. He ate so beautifully, she thought, watching him cut into his roast chicken. Not a drop moved out of place, not a scrap fell on the table. She had decent manners, while Aedion was hopeless, his plate littered with bones and crumbs scattered everywhere, even some on her own dress. She’d kicked him for it, but his attention was too focused on the royals down the table. So both she and the Crown Prince were to be ignored, then. She looked at the boy again, who was around her age, she supposed. His skin was from the winter, his blue-black hair neatly trimmed; his sapphire eyes lifted from his plate to meet hers. “You eat like a fine lady,” she told him. His lips thinned and color stained his ivory cheeks. Across from her, Quinn, her uncle’s Captain of the Guard, choked on his water. The prince glanced at his father—still busy with her uncle—before replying. Not for approval, but in fear. “I eat like a prince,” Dorian said quietly. “You do not need to cut your bread with a fork and knife,” she said. A faint pounding started in her head, followed by a flickering warmth, but she ignored it. The hall was hot, as they’d shut all the windows for some reason. “Here in the North,” she went on as the prince’s knife and fork remained where they were on his dinner roll, “you need not be so formal. We don’t put on airs.” Hen, one of Quinn’s men, coughed pointedly from a few seats down. She could almost hear him saying, Says the little lady with her hair pressed into careful curls and wearing her new dress that she threatened to skin us over if we got dirty. She gave Hen an equally pointed look, then returned her attention to the foreign prince. He’d already looked down at his food again, as if he expected to be neglected for the rest of the night. And he looked lonely enough that she said, “If you like, you could be my friend.” Not one of the men around them said anything, or coughed. Dorian lifted his chin. “I have a friend. He is to be Lord of Anielle someday, and the fiercest warrior in the land.

There are things spies often carry with them: pocket litter, fake IDs, and the occasional weapon-slash-camera-slash-hair accessory. But the heaviest things, I think, are the secrets. They can drown you if you let them. As I sat inside Sublevel Two that day, I knew the one I held was so heavy I might never see the surface again.

I’m placing you under arrest for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder and, I don’t know, possibly littering.

PLEASE DON’T LITTER. SPAY AND NEUTER YOUR CRITTER!

How could I not fall in love with him," she asked. And on the tail end of her words, her bedroom door flew open and closed just as fast. Jen bent over, panting heavily as she looked up at Sally. "Hey Sally girl. Who we falling in love with?" Jen asked breathlessly. "Jen, what's wrong?" Sally paused and then decided on a better question. "What have you done now?" Jen stood up and took two deep breaths. Seeming to have regained her wind, she spoke quickly. "First off, I've changed my mind. I don't want you to name your first born after me." Sally interrupted. "Thank goodness for that," she muttered. "I want you to name your entire freaking litter after me," Jen growled. "Do you know what I've been through?" Jen's arms were flinging around as she glared at Sally. "I did that little strip tease to try and keep things from escalating with the rest of the pack and Decebel was beyond pissed. I had to sneak out of the gathering room and make a run for it. I've been running through the freaking forest trying to throw him off by changing back and forth so that I could place my clothes that I carried in my freaking muzzle. CARRIED IN MY MUZZLE SALLY! I put them in different places to throw off him off my scent." Jen went over to Sally's window and was trying to judge the danger of using it as an exit.

There aren't any rules to running away from your problems. No checklist of things to cross off. No instructions. Eeny, meeny, pick a path and go. That's how my dad does it anyway because apparently there's no age limit to running away, either. He wakes up one day, packs the car with everything we own, and we hit the road. Watch all the pretty colors go by until he finds a town harmless enough to hide in. But his problems always find us. Sometimes quicker than others. Sometimes one month and sometimes six. There's no rule when it comes to that, either. Not about how long it takes for the problems to catch up with us. Just that they will—that much is a given. And then it's time to run again to a new town, a new home, and a new school for me. But if there aren't any rules, I wonder why it feels the same every time. Feels like I leave behind a little bit of who I was in each house we've left empty. Scattering pieces of me in towns all over the place. A trail of crumbs dotting the map from everywhere we've left to everywhere we go. And they don't make any pictures when I connect dots. They are random like the stars littering the sky at night.

The most helpful advice I can give you is to work hard. Take it or leave it. But if you leave it, make sure you recycle it–don’t litter. There’s a tip!

Some of the pained tension bled from Castor's face as he watched Lore stoop to pick up stray Duane Reade Bags fluttering along the sidewalk like aimless ghosts. "What?" she asked, defensive. "I don't like litter." She would always take care of the neighborhood that had taken care of her.

Sure, okay, I'll pick up some cat litter. Anything else?" "Watch your back, G." Then she hung up. Hero paused in her sobbing to look at me quizzically. "Why does your mom want cat litter? You guys don't even have a cat." "She uses it for..." I searched my brain madly, but all I could come up with was "teaching." "She uses cat litter to teach English?" I nodded. "She's kind of unconventional in her methods." Hero frowned. "But how does she use it?" The girl was relentless when she fixated on something. "Um, when their papers are really bad, she gives them a little bag of cat litter. It's her way of telling them their writing is crap." I laughed. "She's kooky.

You're in trouble. Do you expect me to just walk away?" "I wouldn't hold it against you if you did." "In know you wouldn't. That's only one of the reasons I'm crazy about you. I've got a million more." "Just a million?" "Okay, a million plus one—your cat." She giggled. "You're bonding with Saladin?" "Somebody has to protect that cat from your cousin Ian. And I feed him. The cat. Not Ian. He's on his own. Anyway, if that doesn't get me Perfect Boyfriend status, I don't know what will." "Emptying the litter box?" "Hey. I have my limits." Amy laughed. She had the phone pressed to her ear so tightly it burned. She closed her eyes, picturing his face... Ian's crisp voice broke in. "All right, lovebirds, let's move on. No offense, but I believe Amy and Dan might need a short course in style and class." "Is this the nonoffensive part?" Dan asked. "I can't wait until you really insult us." "Let's deal with reality, shall we? You don't just walk into an auction house in your jeans and backpacks. You have to blend in. And that's going to be hard." Ian sniffed. "Considering that you're Americans." "What are you talking about, dude?" Dan asked. "This is my best SpongeBob T-shirt.

Odd, don’t you think? We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us – but these creatures we shall carefully rear.

You want proof evolution is for real, don’t waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship’s cargo hold. Only the survivors got to breed, and they’ve been improving with every new litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn’t be the first island they took over.

As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore.

Well, you’re part of the human fabric of experience. You don’t have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don’t have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum, but I have songs like “Chemo Limo,” or “Ode to Divorce”—I wrote that when I was 18. And I remember having people come up to me and be like, “You totally described what it feels like to get divorced!” As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn’t. Gogol didn’t. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Did Camus? Our own selves are limitless.And our capacity for empathy is giant. That’s why we’re able to feel sympathy for, you know, a dog who has a puppy in its litter that died; we can feel for that, and write about that. I’ve never seen that, I just see things sometimes in my mind’s eye.I guess it sounds sort of hippie, and probably is, but I do feel that we’re all part of the experience. So in that way, I guess you don’t have to compartmentalize. You could just kind of let it all be.

I’ve always wanted to send a message in a bottle, with my message saying something like, “Don’t litter.

For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite. Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, even on the hottest days of the summer months. This part of the state is demographically notable in other aspects, as well. The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to give birth to as many children as they can support--which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation. Not coincidentally, Utah County is a stronghold not only of Mormonism but also Mormon Fundamentalism.

We don't live our lives with this much order and control. To represent them in death like this is a lie. A proper cemetary should have big, gnarled trees among crumbling angel's and weathered tombstones arranged haphazardly. The grass should be littered with clover and worn down to dirt in places. Not like the manicured, rootless sod in this place.

It's one small mercy that here in prison we don't see anyone we don't choose to see. In this way, prison is beautifully unlike real life. In real life, people from your past litter your life like cockroaches, popping out of crevices and scuttling across the dark.

You don't run when things get a little bumpy. That's not how life works. You stick. If you care about people, you stick." I swallow the lump that's making it hard to breathe. "I'm not very good glue." "No, you're more like two-sided tape, only one side is covered in cat litter.

But my poor Saul, there’s no help for you, you’re heading straight for it. What about all those marvelous people we know, aged about fifty or sixty? Well, there are a few of them…marvelous, mature, wise people. Real people, the phrase is, radiating serenity. And how did they get to be that way? Well, we know, don’t we? Every blood one of them’s got a history of emotional crime, oh the sad bleeding corpses that litter the road to maturity of the wise, serene man or woman of fifty-odd! You simply don’t get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you’ve been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

I don't know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone. It addresses England as well as Spain, Italy as well as France, Germany as well as Ireland, the republics that harbour slaves as well as empires that have serfs. Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind's wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Miserables knocks at the door and says, 'Open up, I am here for you.

I am BETTER everyday because I don't allow BITTER people a chance to LITTER my thought factory with their toxic MATTER. I am a SETTER, a goal GETTER&the MASTER of my game

A sign by the highway said DON’T LITTER, KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. ‘OK, I the will,’ I replied cheerfully

The two-man crew of the patrol boat does not speak English. Rachel exploits this as best she can, while still dumping life jackets in the water. “What? I don’t understand what you’re saying? Do you speak English?” They confirm in their native tongue that they obviously do not. Rachel must be putting on a theatrical display, because the small boat rocks while she talks. “I don’t need these life jackets anymore,” she says, in her thickest Italian accent. “The colors are all wrong for me. I mean, look at this orange. Ew, right?” Galen rolls his eyes. I try not to giggle. “And this green? Hideous!” she continues. The men get more irate when she doesn’t stop littering their domain. “Hey, what the…Don’t touch me! I have a foot injury, you jerk!” Galen and I slink below the surface. “We knew that might happen,” he says.

The water from a 2-inch downpour, for example—more than 54,000 gallons per acre—is captured almost entirely by an oak forest’s leaf litter and the organic humus it creates. Litter and humus don’t hold this water indefinitely, but they do corral it on-site just long enough for it to seep into the ground, replenishing the water table on which so many of us depend. In areas with no leaf litter, the same 2-inch rainstorm causes a flood.

Is it true?” I ask him. “Is what true?” His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams. “That you still love me,” I say, breathless. “I need to know.” Alex nods. He reaches out and touches my face—barely skimming my cheekbone and brushing away a bit of my hair. “It’s true.” “But . . . I’ve changed,” I say. “And you’ve changed.” “That’s true too,” he says quietly. I look at the scar on his face, stretching from his left eye to his jawline, and something hitches in my chest. “So what now?” I ask him. The light is too bright; the day feels as though it’s merging into dream. “Do you love me?” Alex asks. And I could cry; I could press my face into his chest and breathe in, and pretend that nothing has changed, that everything will be perfect and whole and healed again. But I can’t. I know I can’t. “I never stopped.” I look away from him. I look at Grace, and the high grass littered with the wounded and the dead. I think of Julian, and his clear blue eyes, his patience and goodness. I think of all the fighting we’ve done, and all the fighting we have yet to do. I take a deep breath. “But it’s more complicated than that.” Alex reaches out and places his hands on my shoulders. “I’m not going to run away again,” he says. “I don’t want you to,” I tell him. His fingers find my cheek, and I rest for a second against his palm, letting the pain of the past few months flow out of me, letting him turn my head toward his. Then he bends down and kisses me: light and perfect, his lips just barely meeting mine, a kiss that promises renewal.

Last year in the region where we live part of the year there were violent windstorms, whole forests were leveled, two- and three-hundred-year-old trees torn up by the roots and tossed aside, houses sliced almost in half by the once-sheltering giants flung down through their roofs. Yesterday another storm, powerful but less so, took down no trees. The ground, though, is littered with leaves, as though autumn had arrived, but the leaves are still green, still alive, many torn away in clumps, with the twigs still intact that attached them to their branches. There’s something disconsolate about them—the desiccated leaves of autumn always appear to have found the place to which they’ve been destined, but these don’t seem to grasp what’s happened to them: they lie on the ground at awkward angles, like things wounded that haven’t completely given in to death and don’t know yet they must.

Have you noticed how many of these stories have kings who wanted sons? I don’t know what’s up with that. You’d think no royal family ever had boys—like Greece was littered with kings standing on the side of the road holding cardboard signs that read: WILL WORK FOR SONS PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME HOW TO HAVE BOY CHILDREN.

Babies! That’s all it’s about. Who ever knew the world would be all about babies?” Samantha shouts. “Every time I see a baby, I swear, I want to throw up,” Miranda says. “I did throw up once.” I nod eagerly. “I saw a filthy bib, and that was it.” “Why don’t these people just get cats and a litter box?” Samantha asks.

As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance. For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith. Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basis of our faith, for that is supplied by the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself. Even if there were no arguments in defense of the faith, our faith would still have its firm foundation. The more I learn, the more desperately ignorant I feel. Further study only serves to open up to one's consciousness all the endless vistas of knowledge, even in one's own field, about which one knows absolutely nothing. Don't let your doubts just sit there: pursue them and keep after them until you drive them into the ground. We should be cautious, indeed, about thinking that we have come upon the decisive disproof of our faith. It is pretty unlikely that we have found the irrefutable objection. The history of philosophy is littered with the wrecks of such objections. Given the confidence that the Holy Spirit inspires, we should esteem lightly the arguments and objections that generate our doubts. These, then, are some of the obstacles to answered prayer: sin in our lives, wrong motives, lack of faith, lack of earnestness, lack of perseverance, lack of accordance with God’s will. If any of those obstacles hinders our prayers, then we cannot claim with confidence Jesus’ promise, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it”. And so I was led to what was for me a radical new insight into the will of God, namely, that God’s will for our lives can include failure. In other words, God’s will may be that you fail, and He may lead you into failure! For there are things that God has to teach you through failure that He could never teach you through success. So many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is and always will be the true priority for every human being — that is, learning to know God in Christ. My greatest fear is that I should some day stand before the Lord and see all my works go up in smoke like so much “wood, hay, and stubble”. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge of God. People tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God—which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfilment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God.

Ma was isolated and alone. Under those circumstances people behave differently. Kya made a soft groan. “Please don't talk to me about isolation. No one has to tell me how it changes a person. I have lived it. I am isolation," Kya whispered with a slight edge. "I forgive Ma for leaving. But I don't understand why she didn't come back- why she abandoned me. You probably don't remember, but after she walked away, you told me that a she-fox will sometimes leave her kits if she's starving or under some other extreme stress. The kits die- as they probably would have anyway- but the vixen lives to breed again when conditions are better, when she can raise a new litter to maturity. "I've read a lot about this since. In nature- out yonder where the crawdads sing- these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother's number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn't be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive- way back yonder.

There's a small moment in this chapter when Bella wants to practice fighting techniques with Emmett, but Edward won't let her. Emmett is here? Hi Emmett! Hey Emmett, according to Google Maps, you live 2,931 miles away from me. If I don't make any stops for food or fuel, and sit on a pile of absorbent kitty litter, I can make the trip in 48 hours. So I can be there by Sunday or Monday. Oh…hey, did you know Monday is Valentine's Day? That's super weird, right? Didn't plan that at all. I swear. OK, see you then! Anyway, Bella wants to practice with Emmett but Edward says no. Huh? Not only does Edward refuse to teach his wife basic self-defense, but she can't even learn some tips from The Pain Maker? Why? I dare you to explain this. I double wolf dare you.

Read. You should read Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and listen to Coltrane, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Son House, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Nick Drake, Bobbie Gentry, George Jones, Jimmy Reed, Odetta, Funkadelic, and Woody Guthrie. Drive across America. Ride trains. Fly to countries beyond your comfort zone. Try different things. Join hands across the water. Different foods. New tasks. Different menus and tastes. Talk with the guy who’s working in construction on your block, who’s working on the highway you’re traveling on. Speak with your neighbors. Get to know them. Practice civil disobedience. Try new resistance. Be part of the solution, not the problem. Don’t litter the earth, it’s the only one you have, learn to love her. Care for her. Learn another language. Trust your friends with kindness. You will need them one day. You will need earth one day. Do not fear death. There are worse things than death. Do not fear the reaper. Lie in the sunshine but from time to time let the neon light your way. ZZ Top, Jefferson Airplane, Spirit. Get a haircut. Dye your hair pink or blue. Do it for you. Wear eyeliner. Your eyes are the windows to your soul. Show them off. Wear a feather in your cap. Run around like the Mad Hatter. Perhaps he had the answer. Visit the desert. Go to the zoo. Go to a county fair. Ride the Ferris wheel. Ride a horse. Pet a pig. Ride a donkey. Protest against war. Put a peace symbol on your automobile. Drive a Volkswagen. Slow down for skateboarders. They might have the answers. Eat gingerbread men. Pray to the moon and the stars. God is out there somewhere. Don’t worry. You’ll find out where soon enough. Dance. Even if you don’t know how to dance. Read The Four Agreements. Read the Bible. Read the Bhagavad Gita. Join nothing. It won’t help. No games, no church, no religion, no yellow-brick road, no way to Oz. Wear beads. Watch a caterpillar in the sun.

Believe it or not, you can have a relationship electrified by sexual tension if you want it. You can be married to one person and keep the burning fires of lust alive. You don’t have to have an open marriage or litter your home with several partners. And you don’t have to endure a sexless marriage where you feel dead inside. Plenty of couples have done it—they’ve kept the flames of romantic desire lit.

That’s just the way life is. It can be exquisite, cruel, frequently wacky, but above all utterly, utterly random. Those twin imposters in the bell-fringed jester hats, Justice and Fairness—they aren’t constants of the natural order like entropy or the periodic table. They’re completely alien notions to the way things happen out there in the human rain forest. Justice and Fairness are the things we’re supposed to contribute back to the world for giving us the gift of life—not birthrights we should expect and demand every second of the day. What do you say we drop the intellectual cowardice? There is no fate, and there is no safety net. I’m not saying God doesn’t exist. I believe in God. But he’s not a micromanager, so stop asking Him to drop the crisis in Rwanda and help you find your wallet. Life is a long, lonely journey down a day-in-day-out lard-trail of dropped tacos. Mop it up, not for yourself, but for the guy behind you who’s too busy trying not to drop his own tacos to make sure he doesn’t slip and fall on your mistakes. So don’t speed and weave in traffic; other people have babies in their cars. Don’t litter. Don’t begrudge the poor because they have a fucking food stamp. Don’t be rude to overwhelmed minimum-wage sales clerks, especially teenagers—they have that job because they don’t have a clue. You didn’t either at that age. Be understanding with them. Share your clues. Remember that your sense of humor is inversely proportional to your intolerance. Stop and think on Veterans Day. And don’t forget to vote. That is, unless you send money to TV preachers, have more than a passing interest in alien abduction or recentlypurchased a fish on a wall plaque that sings ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ In that case, the polls are a scary place! Under every ballot box is a trapdoor chute to an extraterrestrial escape pod filled with dental tools and squeaking, masturbating little green men from the Devil Star. In conclusion, Class of Ninety-seven, keep your chins up, grab your mops and get in the game. You don’t have to make a pile of money or change society. Just clean up after yourselves without complaining. And, above all, please stop and appreciate the days when the tacos don’t fall, and give heartfelt thanks to whomever you pray to….

Hard work is far more valuable than talent. The world is littered with brilliant, talented, lazy nobodies. Almost the entire workforce of Starbucks is populated by a bunch of geniuses that “nobody gets, man.” If you have talent and you don’t have the stones to get up every day and perfect that talent, accept criticism, look at yourself honestly, suck on the hard lozenge of failure, and try to constantly and consistently improve, well then, you don’t have shit.

When they hear I teach first grade, they invariably picture my kids like a litter of puppies in a pet store window, cute and nearly brainless. Let me tell you. My kids are brilliant. Never underestimate children. I don't teach to their minds. Or their hearts. I teach to their spirits, and not one child has failed me. Ever. I mind-boggle them by reminding them they are made from the remnants of star-dusted constellations. When I tell them this their eyes sparkle to prove it.

I would walk round that beautiful, unspoilt little island, with its population of under a hundred and where there isn’t a single tarmac road, thinking about how he would truly sound. Perhaps the quietness of the island helped me do so. ‘Everybody thinks he’s French,’ I said to myself as I walked across the great stones that littered the beach at Rushy Bay, or stomped over the tussocky grass of Heathy Hill, with its famous dwarf pansies. ‘The only reason people think Poirot is French is because of his accent,’ I muttered. ‘But he’s Belgian, and I know that French-speaking Belgians don’t sound French, not a bit of it.’" "I also was well aware of Brian Eastman’s advice to me before I left for Bryher: ‘Don’t forget, he may have an accent, but the audience must be able to understand exactly what he’s saying.’ There was my problem in a nutshell." "To help me, I managed to get hold of a set of Belgian Walloon and French radio recordings from the BBC. Poirot came from Liège in Belgium and would have spoken Belgian French, the language of 30 per cent of the country’s population, rather than Walloon, which is very much closer to the ordinary French language. To these I added recordings of English-language stations broadcasting from Belgium, as well as English-language programmes from Paris. My principal concern was to give my Poirot a voice that would ring true, and which would also be the voice of the man I heard in my head when I read his stories. I listened for hours, and then gradually started mixing Walloon Belgian with French, while at the same time slowly relocating the sound of his voice in my body, moving it from my chest to my head, making it sound a little more high-pitched, and yes, a little more fastidious. After several weeks, I finally began to believe that I’d captured it: this was what Poirot would have sounded like if I’d met him in the flesh. This was how he would have spoken to me – with that characteristic little bow as we shook hands, and that little nod of the head to the left as he removed his perfectly brushed grey Homburg hat. The more I heard his voice in my head, and added to my own list of his personal characteristics, the more determined I became never to compromise in my portrayal of Poirot.

Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don't claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I'm in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life's joys, pains, confusions. We're all in the same boat.

Well,’ said Crowley, who’d been thinking about this until his head ached, ‘haven’t you ever wondered about it all? You know – your people and my people, Heaven and Hell, good and evil, all that sort of thing? I mean, why?’ ‘As I recall,’ said the angel, stiffly, ‘there was the rebellion and—’ ‘Ah, yes. And why did it happen, eh? I mean, it didn’t have to, did it?’ said Crowley, a manic look in his eye. ‘Anyone who could build a universe in six days isn’t going to let a little thing like that happen. Unless they want it to, of course.’ ‘Oh, come on. Be sensible,’ said Aziraphale, doubtfully. ‘That’s not good advice,’ said Crowley. ‘That’s not good advice at all. If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying “THIS IS IT!”?’ ‘I don’t remember any neon.’ ‘Metaphorically, I mean. I mean, why do that if you really don’t want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it’s all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you’ve built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can’t be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire. And don’t bother to answer. If we could understand, we wouldn’t be us. Because it’s all – all—’ INEFFABLE, said the figure feeding the ducks. ‘Yeah. Right. Thanks.’ They watched the tall stranger carefully dispose of the empty bag in a litter bin, and stalk away across the grass. Then Crowley shook his head. ‘What was I saying?’ he said. ‘Don’t know,’ said Aziraphale. ‘Nothing very important, I think.

Marjory Gengler (white American) to Mark Mathabane (black South African) in the late 1970s-- Marjory: Why don't blacks fight to change the system [apartheid] that so dehumanizes them? Mark's Response, from his memoirs: I told her [Marjory] about the sophistication of apartheid machinery, the battery of Draconian laws used to buttress it, the abject poverty in which a majority of blacks were sunk, leaving them with little energy and will to agitate for their rights. I told her about the indoctrination that took place in black schools under the guise of Bantu Education, the self-hatred that resulted from being constantly told that you are less than human and being treated that way. I told her of the anger and hatred pent-up inside millions of blacks, destroying their minds. I would have gone on to tell Marjory about the suffering of wives without husbands and children without fathers in impoverished tribal reserves, about the high infant mortality rate among blacks in a country that exported food, and which in 1987 gave the world its first heart transplant. I would have told them about the ragged black boys and girls of seven, eight and nine years who constantly left their homes because of hunger and a disintegrating family life and were making it on their own; by begging along the thoroughfares of Johannesburg; by sleeping in scrapped cars, gutters and in abandoned buildings; by bathing in the diseased Jukskei River; and by eating out of trash cans, sucking festering sores and stealing rotting produce from the Indian traders on First Avenue. I would have told her about how these orphans of the streets, some of them my friends--their physical, intellectual and emotional growth dwarfed and stunted--had grown up to become prostitutes, unwed mothers and tsotsis, littering the ghetto streets with illegitimate children and corpses. I would have told her all this, but I didn't; I feared she would not believe me; I feared upsetting her.

and drew her strength directly from our magickal Oklahoma earth. “U-we-tsi-a-ge-ya, it seems I need help at the lavender booth. I simply cannot believe how busy we are.” Grandma had barely spoken when a nun hurried up. “Zoey, Sister Mary Angela could use your help filling out cat adoption forms.” “I’ll help you, Grandma Redbird,” Shaylin said. “I love the smell of lavender.” “Oh, honey, that would be so sweet of you. First, could you run to my car and get into the trunk. There is another box of lavender soaps and sachets tucked back there. Looks like I’m going to sell out completely,” Grandma said happily. “Sure thing.” Shaylin caught the keys Grandma tossed to her and hurried toward the main exit of the school grounds which led to the parking lot, as well as the tree-lined road that joined Utica Street. “And I’ll call my momma. She said just let her know if we get too busy over here. She and the PTA moms will be back here in a sec,” said Stevie Rae. “Grandma, do you mind if I give Street Cats a hand? I’ve been dying to check out their new litter of kittens.” “Go on, u-we-tsi-a-ge-ya. I think Sister Mary Angela has been missing your company.” “Thanks, Grandma.” I smiled at her. Then I turned to Stevie Rae. “Okay, if your mom’s group is coming back, I’m gonna go help the nuns.” “Yeah, no problem.” Stevie Rae, shielding her eyes and peering through the crowd, added, “I see her now, and she’s got Mrs. Rowland and Mrs. Wilson with her.” “Don’t worry. We can handle this,” Shaunee said. “’Kay,” I said, grinning at both of them. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I left the cookie booth and noticed Aphrodite, clutching her big purple Queenies cup, was right on my heels. “I thought you didn’t want a lecture from the nuns.” “Better than a lecture from PTA moms.” She shuddered. “Plus, I like cats more than people.” I shrugged. “Okay, whatever.” We’d only gotten partway to the Street Cats tent when Aphrodite slowed way down. “Seriously. Effing. Pathetic.” She was muttering around her straw, narrowing her eyes, and glaring. I followed her gaze and joined her frown. “Yeah, no matter how many times I see them together, I still don’t get it.” Aphrodite and I had stopped to watch Shaunee’s ex-Twin BFF, Erin, hang all over Dallas. “I really thought she was better than that.” “Apparently not,” Aphrodite said. “Eeew,” I said, looking away from their way too public display of locked lips. “I’m telling you, there’s not enough booze in Tulsa to make watching those two suck face okay.” She made a gagging sound, which changed to a snort and a laugh. “Check out the wimple, twelve o’clock.” Sure enough, there was a nun I vaguely recognized as Sister Emily (one of the more uptight of the nuns) descending on the too-busy-with-their-tongues-to-notice couple. “She looks serious,” I said. “You know, a nun may very well be the direct opposite of an aphrodisiac. This should be entertaining. Let’s watch.” “Zoey! Over here!” I looked from the train wreck about to happen to see Sister Mary Angela waving me over to her.

About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto. The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance. The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one-twentieth of the speed of light—not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head. Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal…it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air. I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with

So when you guys get married and she squeezes out a litter of brats for you, you're going to have to come up with a better meet-cute than that. I don't think the kids will want to hear that you held mommy's hair while she puked up pills. I'm no expert but I could see that scarring a kid. You know, maybe pep it up. You two locked eyes at a Blockbuster video and you were fucking done for. Then they'll ask what the fuck a Blockbuster is and you can move on to other subjects." "Frate," Edison said, brows raised like he thought the man was out of his fucking mind. Which he was, so it was a valid thought. "Who the fuck did you trade your balls into for the information about what a meet-cute is? First fucking Cyrus with his Michael Bublé, now this fuck with his rom-com comments? We're a sad excuse for bikers at this point.

I don’t really like tiny dogs. I can get to know and respect individual small dogs, but as a concept, they generally bum me out. I guess it’s because I know human beings had a hand in their breeding and I believe that to be wrong. Let dogs fuck each other (or not, if you spay/neuter them), and stay out of the way. Don’t decide which dogs should fuck each other so that you can wind up with a litter of miserable, shivering little abominations that will fit in a cereal bowl when fully grown. Plus, do you watch the dogs fuck each other and/or assist them? Psychos. Do you punish them if they refuse? Anyway, it’s clear my issue is with the dog breeders themselves more than their cursed progeny, but I can’t help but be reminded of their origin when I hear some yappy little shitbox barking at the heavens, knowing deep inside God has forgotten about it.

If your taste, and therefore the taste buds of your soul, have grown accustomed to the flavor of bitterness—and consuming it to the last drop, your playful spirit has run completely dry—do this, and you’ll discover the highly sought but rarely found fountain of youth. Push far out from the populated shore, then stretch out over the side of your canoe, and peer down into the deep deep waters. When the shark begins to emerge within your reflection, don’t be afraid, let it completely devour your big head, as you have also taught the beast to consume others. Fear not! You will no longer need it on your odyssey. The humiliating disfiguration will kill you but it won’t hurt you. Rather, it will make space for your heart to turtlehead as an old, wise, and happy sage with an insatiable thirst for the drunkenness of good spirits, that can be found in every home, temple, and tavern that litters the shore, and brings cheer and love of life to the rigid bitter bones.

You probably don’t remember, but after she walked away, you told me that a she-fox will sometimes leave her kits if she’s starving or under some other extreme stress. The kits die—as they probably would have anyway—but the vixen lives to breed again when conditions are better, when she can raise a new litter to maturity. “I’ve read a lot about this since. In nature—out yonder where the crawdads sing—these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother’s number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive—way back yonder.

This fundamental lack of connectedness allows people to act in trivial but incredibly selfish ways. Rachel Yehuda pointed to littering as the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. “It’s a horrible thing to see because it sort of encapsulates this idea that you’re in it alone, that there isn’t a shared ethos of trying to protect something shared,” she told me. “It’s the embodiment of every man for himself. It’s the opposite of the military.” In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors—or somebody else’s friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially.

What is there about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?” Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it’d burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It’s a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you’re a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.” Montag stood looking in now at this queer house, made strange by the hour of the night, by murmuring neighbor voices, by littered glass, and there on the floor, their covers torn off and spilled out like swan feathers, the incredible books that looked so silly and really not worth bothering with, for these were nothing but black type and yellowed paper and raveled binding. Mildred, of course. She

When we came out of the cookhouse, we found the boy's father, the Indian man who had been grazing the horses in the pasture, waiting for us. He wanted someone to tell his troubles to. He looked about guardedly, afraid that the Señora might overhear him. 'Take a look at me' he said. I don't even know how old I am. When I was young, the Señor brought me here. He promised to pay me and give me a plot of my own. 'Look at my clothes' he said, pointing to the patches covering his body. 'I can't remember how many years I've been wearing them. I have no others. I live in a mud hut with my wife and sons. They all work for the Señor like me. They don't go to school. They don't know how to read or write; they don't even speak Spanish. We work for the master, raise his cattle and work his fields. We only get rice and plantains to eat. Nobody takes care of us when we are sick. The women here have their babies in these filthy huts.' 'Why don't you eat meat or at least milk the cows?' I asked. 'We aren't allowed to slaughter a cow. And the milk goes to the calves. We can't even have chicken or pork - only if an animal gets sick and dies. Once I raised a pig in my yard' he went on. 'She had a litter of three. When the Señor came back he told the foreman to shoot them. That's the only time we ever had good meat.' 'I don't mind working for the Señor but I want him to keep his promise. I want a piece of land of my own so I can grow rice and yucca and raise a few chickens and pigs. That's all.' 'Doesn't he pay you anything?' Kevin asked. 'He says he pays us but he uses our money to buy our food. We never get any cash. Kind sirs, maybe you can help me to persuade the master . Just one little plot is all I want. The master has land, much land.' We were shocked by his tale. Marcus took out a notebook and pen. 'What's his name?'. He wrote down the name. The man didn't know the address. He only knew that the Señor lived in La Paz. Marcus was infuriated. 'When I find the owner of the ranch, I'll spit right in his eye. What a lousy bastard! I mean, it's really incredible'. 'That's just the way things are,' Karl said. 'It's sad but there's nothing we can do about it.

A text comes from Wallace. An actual text too, not a message through the forum app. I gave him my number awhile back, before Halloween, but not because I wanted him to call me or anything. I wrote it on the edge of our conversation paper in homeroom and slid it over to him because sometimes I see something and think, Wallace would laugh at that, I should send him a picture of it, but the messaging app is terrible with pictures and texting is way better. So he texts me now, and it’s a picture. A regular sweet potato pie. Beneath the picture, he says, I really like sweet potato pie. I text back, Yeah, so do I. Then he sends me a picture of his face, frowning, and says, No, you don’t understand. Then another picture, closer, just his eyes. I REALLY like sweet potato pie. A series of pictures comes in several-second intervals. The first is a triangular slice of pie in Wallace’s hand. Then Wallace holding that slice up to his face—it’s soft enough to start collapsing between his fingers. The next one has him stuffing the slice into his mouth, and in the final one it’s all the way in, his cheeks are puffed out like a chipmunk’s, and he’s letting his eyes roll back like it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. I purse my lips to keep my laugh in, but my parents are fine-tuned to the slightest hint of amusement from me, and they both look up. “What’s so funny, Eggs?” Dad says. “Nothing,” I reply. Nothing makes a joke less funny than someone wanting in on it, especially parents. Wow, I say to Wallace. You really like sweet potato pie. He sends one more picture, this one with him embracing the pie pan, gazing lovingly at it. We’re to be married in the spring. An actual laugh escapes me. I really hope Wallace is having a better Thanksgiving than I am. It seems like he is. I take a picture of myself pouting and send it to him, saying, Aw, the cutest of cute couples. ... Another picture from Wallace waits for me. In this one, an empty pie pan littered withcrumbs sits on the floor beside a large knife. Wallace kneels next to it with morecrumbs on his sweater, expression horrified. NOOOO WHAT HAVE I DONE MY LOVE OUR MARRIAGE ’TIS ALL FOR NAUGHT I text back: Oh no!! Not sweet potato bride! Another picture comes: Wallace sprawled on the floor beside the pie pan, one arm thrown over his eyes. Let me only be accused of loving her too much. Wallace is definitely having a better Thanksgiving than me.

Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature's tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well. What makes the difference? In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict [WK82]. A broken window. One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality. The "Broken Window Theory" has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.

Echad is first mentioned in the garden. It says a man and a woman, when they join together, become echad, or “one.” But that word echad is more explosive with meaning than just one flesh. It can literally mean to fuse together at the deepest part of our beings. Two becoming one, completely glued together, completely meshing. I still remember one of the hardest conversations I have had with Alyssa. We were just starting to date again, and were sitting in the car after a wonderful date night. We knew marriage was a possibility on the horizon, and I felt like I finally had to share things in my past that would affect her if we got married. I was incredibly nervous, as well as terrified of rejection or hurt, but I realized that if intimacy were to grow, I had to get vulnerable. For marriage to be what it truly is—two people becoming one in mind, body, soul, and spirit—I had to be honest. I remember sharing with her many things, but specifically some details of my sexual past. My teenage years were littered with me almost worshiping sexual fulfillment in pornography, partying, and girls. And I say worship, because that was where I got my worth, value, and purpose as well as what I most lived for (which is what the definition of worship is). I had to apologize and ask forgiveness from Alyssa for things I had done before I even knew her because of echad—one form of complete and utter intimacy. Because of that beauty, mystery, and power, God created it to function best in a man and a woman coming together for life and constantly echading or fusing together. I needed forgiveness because I had betrayed echad. I had betrayed oneness. I had betrayed intimacy. And if I wasn’t honest about it, it’d be a little part of my life or heart that Alyssa didn’t know—thus blocking echad. But something really peculiar happened in that moment. With the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, Alyssa forgave me. She heard all that I was and am, and still wanted to walk this journey with me. I still remember the tenderness in her voice as she spoke truth and forgiveness over me. In that moment I was exposed and known, and yet because of Alyssa’s grace, I was at the same time loved. And that is where intimacy is found—to be fully loved and to be fully known. To be fully loved, but not fully known will always allow us to buy the lie that “if they only knew the real me, they wouldn’t want me anymore.” And to be fully known but not fully loved feels sharp, painful, at a level of rejection that hurts so bad. But to be fully known and at the same time fully loved, now that is intimacy. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Intimacy is certainly romantic in some aspects, but at its deepest level, it’s much more than that. It can be experienced with friends and family, not just spouses and loved ones.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my word. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

It may not have been very big, she said, but everyone will notice that it’s missing. How could they not? One might as well overlook a bare patch of earth on the crest of a snow-covered mountain. And her eyes rolled forward as she tried to peer down her long snout at the small, dark hole above her nostril. Eragon laughed and splashed a handful of water at her. Then, to soothe her injured pride, he said, “No one will notice, Saphira. Trust me. Besides, even if they do, they’ll take it for a battle wound and consider you all the more fearsome because of it.” You think so? She returned to examining herself in the lake. The water and her scales reflected off each other in a dazzling array of rainbow-hued flecks. What if a soldier stabs me there? The blade would go right through me. Perhaps I should ask the dwarves to make a metal plate to cover the area until the scale regrows. “That would look exceedingly ridiculous.” It would? “Mm-hmm.” He nodded, on the verge of laughing again. She sniffed. There’s no need to make fun of me. How would you like it if the fur on your head started falling out, or you lost one of those silly little nubs you call teeth? I would end up having to comfort you, no doubt. “No doubt,” he agreed easily. “But then, teeth don’t grow back.” He pushed himself off the rock and made his way up the shore to where he had left his boots, stepping carefully to avoid hurting his feet on the stones and branches that littered the water’s edge. Saphira followed him, the soft earth squishing between her talons. You could cast a spell to protect just that spot, she said as he pulled on his boots. “I could. Do you want me to?” I do.

Honestly, sir,” I said, “I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss.” We had excused ourselves to speak privately for a moment, leaving poor Charlie politely rocking on his heels in the foyer. The office was warm and smelled of sage and witch hazel, and the desk was littered with bits of twine and herbs where Jackaby had been preparing fresh wards. Douglas had burrowed into a nest of old receipts on the bookshelf behind us and was sound asleep with his bill tucked back into his wing. I had given up trying to get him to stop napping on the paperwork. “You’re the one who told me that I shouldn’t have to choose between profession and romance,” I said. “I’m not the one making a fuss. I don’t care the least bit about your little foray into . . . romance.” Jackaby pushed the word out of his mouth as though it had been reluctantly clinging to the back of his throat. “If anything, I am concerned that you are choosing to make precisely the choice that I told you you should not make!” “What? Wait a moment. Are you . . . jealous?” “Don’t be asinine! I am not jealous! I am merely . . . protective. And perhaps troubled by your lack of fidelity to your position.” “That is literally the definition of jealous, sir. Oh, for goodness’ sake. I’m not choosing Charlie over you! I’m not going to suddenly stop being your assistant just because I spend time working on another case!” “You might!” he blurted out. He sank down into the chair at his desk. “You just might.” “Why are you acting like this?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because things change. Because people change. Because . . . because Charlie Barker is going to propose,” he said. He let his hand drop and looked me in the eyes. “Marriage,” he added. “To you.” I blinked. “I miss a social cue or two from time to time, but even I’m not thick enough to believe all that was about analyzing bloodstains together. He has the ring. It’s in his breast pocket right now. He’s attached an absurd level of emotional investment to the thing—I’m surprised it hasn’t burned a hole right through the front of his jacket, the way its aura is glowing. He’s nervous about it. He’s going to propose. Soon, I would guess.” I blinked. The air in front of me wavered like a mirage, and in another moment Jenny had rematerialized. “And if he does,” she said softly, “it will be Abigail’s decision to face, not yours. There are worse fates than to receive a proposal from a handsome young suitor.” She added, turning to me with a grin, “Charlie is a good man.” “Yes, fine! But she has such prodigious potential!” Jackaby lamented. “Having feelings is one thing—I can grudgingly tolerate feelings—but actually getting married? The next thing you know they’ll be wanting to do something rash, like live together ! Miss Rook, you have started something here that I am loath to see you leave unfinished. You’ve started becoming someone here whom I truly want to meet when she is done. Choosing to leave everything you have here to go be a good man’s wife would be such a wretched waste of that promise.” He faltered, looking to Jenny, and then to the floorboards. “On the other hand, you should never have chosen to work for me in the first place. It remains one of your most ill-conceived and reckless decisions to date—and that is saying something, because you also chose to blow up a dragon once.” He sighed. “Jenny is right. You could make a real life with that young man, and you shouldn’t throw that away just to hang about with a fractious bastard and a belligerent duck.” He sagged until his forehead was resting on his desk.

He opened the door after letting me pound on it for almost five minutes. His truck was in the carport. I knew he was here. He pulled the door open and walked back inside without looking at me or saying a word. I followed him in, and he dropped onto a sofa I’d never seen before. His face was scruffy. I’d never seen him anything but clean-shaven. Not even in pictures. He had bags under his eyes. He’d aged ten years in three days. The apartment was a mess. The boxes were gone. It looked like he had finally unpacked. But laundry was piled up in a basket so full it spilled out onto the floor. Empty food containers littered the kitchen countertops. The coffee table was full of empty beer bottles. His bed was unmade. The place smelled stagnant and dank. A vicious urge to take care of him took hold. The velociraptor tapped its talon on the floor. Josh wasn’t okay. Nobody was okay. And that was what made me not okay. “Hey,” I said, standing in front of him. He didn’t look at me. “Oh, so you’re talking to me now,” he said bitterly, taking a long pull on a beer. “Great. What do you want?” The coldness of his tone took me aback, but I kept my face still. “You haven’t been to the hospital.” His bloodshot eyes dragged up to mine. “Why would I? He’s not there. He’s fucking gone.” I stared at him. He shook his head and looked away from me. “So what do you want? You wanted to see if I’m okay? I’m not fucking okay. My best friend is brain-dead. The woman I love won’t even fucking speak to me.” He picked up a beer cap from the coffee table and threw it hard across the room. My OCD winced. “I’m doing this for you,” I whispered. “Well, don’t,” he snapped. “None of this is for me. Not any of it. I need you, and you abandoned me. Just go. Get out.” I wanted to climb into his lap. Tell him how much I missed him and that I wouldn’t leave him again. I wanted to make love to him and never be away from him ever again in my life—and clean his fucking apartment. But instead, I just stood there. “No. I’m not leaving. We need to talk about what’s happening at the hospital.” He glared up at me. “There’s only one thing I want to talk about. I want to talk about how you and I can be in love with each other and you won’t be with me. Or how you can stand not seeing me or speaking to me for weeks. That’s what I want to talk about, Kristen.” My chin quivered. I turned and went to the kitchen and grabbed a trash bag from under the sink. I started tossing take-out containers and beer bottles. I spoke over my shoulder. “Get up. Go take a shower. Shave. Or don’t if that’s the look you’re going for. But I need you to get your shit together.” My hands were shaking. I wasn’t feeling well. I’d been light-headed and slightly overheated since I went to Josh’s fire station looking for him. But I focused on my task, shoving trash into my bag. “If Brandon is going to be able to donate his organs, he needs to come off life support within the next few days. His parents won’t do it, and Sloan doesn’t get a say. You need to go talk to them.” Hands came up under my elbows, and his touch radiated through me. “Kristen, stop.” I spun on him. “Fuck you, Josh! You need help, and I need to help you!” And then as fast as the anger surged, the sorrow took over. The chains on my mood swing snapped, and feelings broke through my walls like water breaching a crevice in a dam. I began to cry. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. The strength that drove me through my days just wasn’t available to me when it came to Josh. I dropped the trash bag at his feet and put my hands over my face and sobbed. He wrapped his arms around me, and I completely lost it.

Cansrel could sit with Fire and do something no one else could: give her lessons to improve the skill of her mind. They could communicate without saying a word, they could touch each other from opposite ends of the house. Fire’s true father was like her—was, in fact, the only person in the world like her. He always asked the same question when he first arrived: “My darling monster girl! Was anyone mean to you while I was gone?” Mean? Children threw stones at her in the road. She was tripped sometimes, slapped, taunted. People who liked her hugged her, but they hugged her too hard and were too free with their hands. And still, Fire learned very young to answer no to his question—to lie, and to guard her mind from him so he wouldn’t know she was lying. This was the beginning of another of her confusions, that she would want his visits so much but fall immediately to lying once he came. When she was four she had a dog she’d chosen from a litter born in Brocker’s stables. She chose him, and Brocker let her have him, because the dog had three functional legs and one that dragged, and would never be any use as a worker. He was inky gray and had bright eyes. Fire called him Twy, which was short for Twilight. Twy was a happy, slightly brainless fellow with no idea he was missing something other dogs had. He was excitable, he jumped around a lot, and had a tendency on occasion to nip his favorite people. And nothing worked him into a greater frenzy of excitement, anxiety, joy, and terror than the presence of Cansrel. One day in the garden Cansrel burst upon Fire and Twy unexpectedly. In confusion, Twy leapt against Fire and bit her more than nipped her, so hard that she cried out. Cansrel ran to her, dropped to his knees, and took her into his arms, letting her fingers bleed all over his shirt. “Fire! Are you all right?” She clung to him, because for just a moment Twy had scared her. But then, as her own mind cleared, she saw and felt Twy throwing himself against a pitch of sharp stone, over and over. “Stop, Father! Stop it!” Cansrel pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on the dog. Fire shrieked and grabbed at him. “Don’t hurt him, Father, please! Can’t you feel that he didn’t mean it?

Why, he asked, do all of our policing efforts have to be so reactive, so negative, and so after the fact? What if, instead of just focusing on catching criminals—and serving up ever harsher punishments—after they committed the crime, the police devoted significant resources and effort to eliminating criminal behavior before it happens? To quote Tony Blair, what if they could be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime?3 Out of these questions came the novel idea for Positive Tickets, a program whereby police, instead of focusing on catching young people perpetrating crimes, would focus on catching youth doing something good—something as simple as throwing litter away in a bin rather than on the ground, wearing a helmet while riding their bike, skateboarding in the designated area, or getting to school on time—and would give them a ticket for positive behavior. The ticket, of course, wouldn’t carry a fine like a parking ticket but instead would be redeemable for some kind of small reward, like free entry to the movies or to an event at a local youth center—wholesome activities that also had the bonus of keeping the young people off the streets and out of trouble. So how well did Richmond’s unconventional effort to reimagine policing work? Amazingly well, as it turned out. It took some time, but they invested in the approach as a long-term strategy, and after a decade the Positive Tickets system had reduced recidivism from 60 percent to 8 percent. You might not think of a police department as a place where you would expect to see Essentialism at work, but in fact Ward’s system of Positive Tickets is a lesson in the practice of effortless execution. The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in. The Nonessentialist operates under the false logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground. The way of the Essentialist is different. Instead of trying to accomplish it all—and all at once—and flaring out, the Essentialist starts small and celebrates progress. Instead of going for the big, flashy wins that don’t really matter, the Essentialist pursues small and simple wins in areas that are essential.

BUYING OFF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS Where are the environmentalists? For fifty years, they’ve been carrying on about overpopulation; promoting family planning, birth control, abortion; and saying old people have a “duty to die and get out of the way”—in Colorado’s Democratic Governor Richard Lamm’s words. In 1971, Oregon governor and environmentalist Tom McCall told a CBS interviewer, “Come visit us again. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” How about another 30 million people coming here to live? The Sierra Club began sounding the alarm over the country’s expanding population in 1965—the very year Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act passed65—and in 1978, adopted a resolution expressly asking Congress to “conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration laws.” For a while, the Club talked about almost nothing else. “It is obvious,” the Club said two years later, “that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate,” even more than “the number of children per family.”66 Over the next three decades, America took in tens of millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens alike. But, suddenly, about ten years ago, the Sierra Club realized to its embarrassment that importing multiple millions of polluting, fire-setting, littering immigrants is actually fantastic for the environment! The advantages of overpopulation dawned on the Sierra Club right after it received a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum with the express stipulation that—as he told the Los Angeles Times—“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”67 It would be as if someone offered the Catholic Church $100 million to be pro-abortion. But the Sierra Club said: Sure! Did you bring the check? Obviously, there’s no longer any reason to listen to them on anything. They want us to get all excited about some widening of a road that’s going to disturb a sandfly, but the Sierra Club is totally copasetic with our national parks being turned into garbage dumps. Not only did the Sierra Club never again say another word against immigration, but, in 2004, it went the extra mile, denouncing three actual environmentalists running for the Club’s board, by claiming they were racists who opposed mass immigration. The three “white supremacists” were Dick Lamm, the three-time Democratic governor of Colorado; Frank Morris, former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation; and Cornell professor David Pimentel, who created the first ecology course at the university in 1957 and had no particular interest in immigration.68 But they couldn’t be bought off, so they were called racists.

There is no fault that can’t be corrected [in natural wine] with one powder or another; no feature that can’t be engineered from a bottle, box, or bag. Wine too tannic? Fine it with Ovo-Pure (powdered egg whites), isinglass (granulate from fish bladders), gelatin (often derived from cow bones and pigskins), or if it’s a white, strip out pesky proteins that cause haziness with Puri-Bent (bentonite clay, the ingredient in kitty litter). Not tannic enough? Replace $1,000 barrels with a bag of oak chips (small wood nuggets toasted for flavor), “tank planks” (long oak staves), oak dust (what it sounds like), or a few drops of liquid oak tannin (pick between “mocha” and “vanilla”). Or simulate the texture of barrel-aged wines with powdered tannin, then double what you charge. (““Typically, the $8 to $12 bottle can be brought up to $15 to $20 per bottle because it gives you more of a barrel quality. . . . You’re dressing it up,” a sales rep explained.) Wine too thin? Build fullness in the mouth with gum arabic (an ingredient also found in frosting and watercolor paint). Too frothy? Add a few drops of antifoaming agent (food-grade silicone oil). Cut acidity with potassium carbonate (a white salt) or calcium carbonate (chalk). Crank it up again with a bag of tartaric acid (aka cream of tartar). Increase alcohol by mixing the pressed grape must with sugary grape concentrate, or just add sugar. Decrease alcohol with ConeTech’s spinning cone, or Vinovation’s reverse-osmosis machine, or water. Fake an aged Bordeaux with Lesaffre’s yeast and yeast derivative. Boost “fresh butter” and “honey” aromas by ordering the CY3079 designer yeast from a catalog, or go for “cherry-cola” with the Rhône 2226. Or just ask the “Yeast Whisperer,” a man with thick sideburns at the Lallemand stand, for the best yeast to meet your “stylistic goals.” (For a Sauvignon Blanc with citrus aromas, use the Uvaferm SVG. For pear and melon, do Lalvin Ba11. For passion fruit, add Vitilevure Elixir.) Kill off microbes with Velcorin (just be careful, because it’s toxic). And preserve the whole thing with sulfur dioxide. When it’s all over, if you still don’t like the wine, just add a few drops of Mega Purple—thick grape-juice concentrate that’s been called a “magical potion.” It can plump up a wine, make it sweeter on the finish, add richer color, cover up greenness, mask the horsey stink of Brett, and make fruit flavors pop. No one will admit to using it, but it ends up in an estimated 25 million bottles of red each year. “Virtually everyone is using it,” the president of a Monterey County winery confided to Wines and Vines magazine. “In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that.

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal. The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments. If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, tourists, and various passers-through begin to clog the Strip, aggressively vying for the precious few available parking spaces, not to mention tables at Pamela's, a retro diner that serves the best hotcakes in Pittsburgh. On weekends, street vendors crowd the sidewalks, selling beaded necklaces, used CDs, bandanas in exotic colors, cheap, plastic running shoes, and Steelers paraphernalia by the ton. It's a loud, jostling, carnivalesque experience and one of the best things about Pittsburgh. There's even a bakery called Bruno's that sells only biscotti- at least fifteen different varieties daily. Bruno used to be an accountant until he retired from Mellon Bank at the age of sixty-five to bake biscotti full-time. There's a little hand-scrawled sign in the front of window that says, GET IN HERE! You can't pass it without smiling. It's a little after eight when Chloe and I finish up at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company where, in addition to the prosciutto, soppressata, both hot and sweet sausages, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, and imported Parmigiano Reggiano, all essential ingredients for pizza rustica, I've also picked up a couple of cans of San Marzano tomatoes, which I happily note are thirty-nine cents cheaper here than in New York.

Didn’t you ever notice that whatever you wanted or whatever you set out to do, Cora wanted to do it too?” Noah asked. “She wasn’t like that.” “She was, Mer. And it’s okay to admit it. One of the hardest things about Cora dying is that everyone wants to erase her—the real Cora. They talk about her as though she were perfect. She wasn’t. ‘Don’t talk ill of the dead,’ people say. But if we aren’t truthful about who our loved ones were, then we aren’t really remembering them. We’re creating someone who didn’t exist. Cora loved you. She loved me. But what she did was not okay. And I’m pissed off about it.” Mercedes reeled back, stunned. “Geez, Noah. Tell me how you really feel. She still deserves our compassion,” she rebuked. He nodded. “Everyone deserves compassion. And I know suicide isn’t always a conscious act. Most of the time it’s sheer desperation. It’s a moment of weakness that we can’t come back from. But regardless of illness or weakness, if we don’t own our actions and don’t demand that others own theirs, then what’s the point? We might as well give up now. We have to expect better of ourselves. We have to. I expect more of my patients, and when I expect more—lovingly, patiently—they tend to rise to that expectation. Maybe not all the way up, but they rise. They improve because I believe they can, and I believe they must. My mom was sick. But she didn’t try hard enough to get better. She found a way to cope—and that’s important—but she never varied from it. Life has to be more than coping. It has to be.” Mercedes nodded slowly, her eyes clinging to his impassioned face. She’d struck a nerve, and he wasn’t finished. “I know it’s not something we’re supposed to say. We’re supposed to be all-loving and all-compassionate all the time. But sometimes the things we aren’t supposed to say are the truths that keep us sane, that tether us to reality, that help us move the hell on! I know some of my colleagues would be shocked to hear it. But pressure—whether it’s the pressure of society, or the pressure of responsibility, or the pressure that comes with being loved and being needed—isn’t always a bad thing. You’ve heard the cliché about pressure and diamonds. It’s a cliché because it’s true. Pressure sometimes begets beautiful things.” Mercedes was silent, studying his handsome face, his tight shoulders, and his clenched fists. He was weary, that much was obvious, but he wasn’t wrong. “Begets?” she asked, a twinkle in her eye. He rolled his eyes. “You know damn well what beget means.” “In the Bible, beget means to give birth to. I wouldn’t mind giving birth to a diamond,” she mused. “You ruin all my best lectures.” There was silence from the kitchen. Silence was not good. “Gia?” Noah called. “What, Daddy?” she answered sweetly. “Are you pooping in your new princess panties?” “No. Poopin’ in box.” “What box?” His voice rose in horror. “Kitty box.” Noah was on his feet, racing toward the kitchen. Mercedes followed. Gia was naked—her Cinderella panties abandoned in the middle of the floor—and perched above the new litter box. “No!” Noah roared in horror, scooping her up and marching to the toilet. “Maybe it won’t be a turd, Noah. Maybe Gia will beget a diamond,” Mercedes chirped, trying not to laugh. “I blame you, Mer!” he called from the bathroom. “She was almost potty-trained, and now she wants to be a cat!

The PEOPLE, SCHOOL, EVERYONE, and EVERYTHING is so FAKE AND GAY.' 'I shrieked, at the top of my voice fingers outspread and frozen in fear, unlike ever before in my young life; being the gentle, sweet, and shy girl that I am.' 'Besides always too timid to have a voice, to stand up for me, and forced not to, by masters.' Amidst my thoughts racing ridiculously, 'I feel that it is all just another way for the 'SOCIETY' to make me feel inferior, they think, they are so 'SUPERIOR' to me, and who I am to them.' 'Nonetheless, every day of my life, I have felt like I have been drowning in a pool, with weights attached to my ankles.' 'Like, of course, there is no way for me to escape the chains that are holding me down.' 'The one and only person, that holds the key to my freedom: WILL NEVER LET ME GO! It's like there is within me, and has been deep inside me!' 'I now live in this small dull town for too damn long. It is an UNSYMPATHETIC, obscure, lonely, totally depressed, and depressing place, for any teenage girl to be, most definitely if you're a girl like me.' 'All these streets surrounding me are covered with filth, and born in the hills of middle western Pennsylvania mentalities of slow-talking and deep heritages, and beliefs, that don't operate me as a soul lost and lingering within the streets and halls.' 'My old town was ultimately left behind when the municipality neighboring made the alterations to the main roads; just to save five minutes of commuting, through this countryside village. Now my town sits on one side of that highway.' 'Just like a dead carcass to the rest of the world, which rushes by. What is sullen about this is that it is a historic town, with some immeasurable old monuments, and landmarks.' 'However, the others I see downright neglect what is here, just like me, it seems. Other than me, no one cares. Yet I care about all the little things.' 'I am so attached to all these trivial things as if they are a part of me. It disheartens me to see anything go away from me.' 'It's a community where the litter blows and bisects the road, like the tumble-wheats of the yore of times past.' 'Furthermore, if you do not look where you are going, you will fall in our trip, in one of the many potholes or heaved up bumps in the pavement, or have an evacuated structure masonry descending on your head.' 'Merely one foolproof way of simplifying the appearance of this ghost town.' 'There are still some reminders of the glory days when you glance around.' 'Like the town clock, that is evaporated black that has chipped enamel; it seems that it is always missing a few light bulbs.' 'The timepiece only has time pointing hands on the one side, and it nevermore shows the right time of day.' 'The same can be assumed for the neon signs on the mom-and-pop shops, which flicker at night as if they're in agonizing PAIN.' 'Why? To me is a question that is asked frequently.' 'It is all over negligence!' 'I get the sense and feeling most of the time, as they must prepare when looking around here at night.' 'The streetlamps do not all work, as they should. The glass in them is cracked.' 'The parking meters are always jammed, or just completely broken off their posts altogether.' 'The same can be said, for the town sign that titles this area. It is not even here anymore, as it should be now moved to the town square or shortage of a park.

I’m Captain Florida, the state history pimp Gatherin’ more data than a DEA blimp West Palm, Tampa Bay, Miami-Dade Cruisin’ the coasts till Johnny Vegas gets laid Developer ho’s, and the politician bitches Smackin’ ’em down, while I’m takin’ lots of pictures Hurricanes, sinkholes, natural disaster ’Scuse me while I kick back, with my View-Master (S:) I’m Captain Florida, obscure facts are all legit (C:) I’m Coleman, the sidekick, with a big bong hit (S:) I’m Captain Florida, staying literate (C:) Coleman sees a book and says, “Fuck that shit” Ain’t never been caught, slippin’ nooses down the Keys Got more buoyancy than Elián González Knockin’ off the parasites, and takin’ all their moola Recruiting my apostles for the Church of Don Shula I’m an old-school gangster with a psycho ex-wife Molly Packin’ Glocks, a shotgun and my 7-Eleven coffee Trippin’ the theme parks, the malls, the time-shares Bustin’ my rhymes through all the red-tide scares (S:) I’m the surge in the storms, don’t believe the hype (C:) I’m his stoned number two, where’d I put my hash pipe? (S:) Florida, no appointments and a tank of gas (C:) Tequila, no employment and a bag of grass Think you’ve seen it all? I beg to differ Mosquitoes like bats and a peg-leg stripper The scammers, the schemers, the real estate liars Birthday-party clowns in a meth-lab fire But dig us, don’t diss us, pay a visit, don’t be late And statistics always lie, so ignore the murder rate Beaches, palm trees and golfing is our curse Our residents won’t bite, but a few will shoot first Everglades, orange groves, alligators, Buffett Scarface, Hemingway, an Andrew Jackson to suck it Solarcaine, Rogaine, eight balls of cocaine See the hall of fame for the criminally insane Artifacts, folklore, roadside attractions Crackers, Haitians, Cuban-exile factions The early-bird specials, drivin’ like molasses Condo-meeting fistfights in cataract glasses (S:) I’m the native tourist, with the rants that can’t be beat (C:) Serge, I think I put my shoes on the wrong feet (S:) A stack of old postcards in another dingy room (C:) A cold Bud forty and a magic mushroom Can’t stop, turnpike, keep ridin’ like the wind Gotta make a detour for a souvenir pin But if you like to litter, you’re just liable to get hurt Do ya like the MAC-10 under my tropical shirt? I just keep meeting jerks, I’m a human land-filler But it’s totally unfair, this term “serial killer” The police never rest, always breakin’ in my pad But sunshine is my bling, and I’m hangin’ like a chad (S:) Serge has got to roll and drop the mike on this rap . . . (C:) Coleman’s climbin’ in the tub, to take a little nap . . . (S:) . . . Disappearin’ in the swamp—and goin’ tangent, tangent, tangent . . . (C:) He’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (Fade-out) (S:) I’m goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (C:) Fuck goin’ platinum, he’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (S:) . . . Wikipedia all up and down your ass . . . (C:) Wikity-Wikity-Wikity . . .

According to this multi-layered curriculum theory, we end up with a curriculum written and handed down, taught by different teachers with their own techniques and backgrounds, littered with unconscious bias, and then tested in ways that have been proven to favor some students over others.

Volunteering refers to the opportunities in life that has no monetary rewards.  Rebekah was willing to provide water for Abraham’s servant and his camels. He had ten camels. Think of the effort of drawing water for ten camels. They are animals that drink a lot of water yet this did not stop her. Opportunities for voluntary work are littered all over the country and you may need to volunteer like Rachel for you to be noticed. Don’t be money conscious, be God conscious.

For every five of our dialysis patients, one will die within the year. Yet we often don’t bother spending the time it takes to have conversations about what patients would want their care to be like at the end of their lives. Since dialysis can be a life-saving treatment in many circumstances, we develop a false sense that sudden bouts of illness serious enough to land our dialysis patients in the hospital are temporary when, truth is, dialysis cannot change the reality that the path of kidney failure is a continuous one toward death. A path that is littered with sudden illnesses and setbacks, and recovery is never back to the level of function that the person enjoyed before.

The experiment takes place in a social setting created by and according to the standards of neurotypical people. That will inherently affect the results. Analysis of video recordings shows that the researchers don’t pick up on certain non-verbal signals displayed by the autistic children4. This causes the children to doubt themselves and adjust their answers. Children with autism are often taught not to trust their own feelings, so I’m not surprised they say what the researcher appears to want to hear. The interpretation of the results is littered with neurotypical assumptions as well. But a researcher who thinks that someone who doesn’t answer questions according to neurotypical standards has a problem, is the one with a lack of understanding, in my opinion.

All knowing Mother," he said, with his head bowed. "I'm sorry human beings are such a blight, I'm sorry we litter your earth and choke the fish in your oceans with plastic grocery sacks. We have been given incomprehensible beauty on this earth, but we don't see it. We walk around angry and blind and ungrateful. I wish we were better, our dumb human race, but I don't have much hope that we ever will be. The best I can do today is say: Thank you for this world of miracles. We will try to be more grateful. And less ridiculous.

Liam eventually added, "I don't want a war, but if it comes, yes; I want to see it." My first impulse was to tell him, "no, he didn't want to see it," It was wrong of me to say though. He did want to see it. I think many people who haven't seen a war want to. It's not right to tell them they don't. What they don't want and don't know is that they don't want to have seen it. I know because I've seen bits and pieces of several. I watched from a hilltop as a Roman legion met Picts. I tended some of the wounded out of Gettysburg. I even managed to screw up and go down the hill to drag French knights out of the mud at Agincor and I know I don't want to see another war. But I don't even want to have seen the ones I have been to. Here in Karvalen, I have seen a small war. More like a few major engagements in a larger campaign I suppose. Even so, the dead littered the battlefield like corn after a hailstorm. Wounded screamed their agony or cried in despair, those with the strength left. Some lay in pools of their own juices and gasped in short quick breaths. Fearing the last one would come all too soon. The mud was dirt and blood. The smell of guts and feces was thick in the sunshine and birds pecked at sightless eyes. That was victory. I stared at my son and wondered how I could explain it. How could I make his sixteen year old mind comprehend.

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short span of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short span of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

Chapter 2 After stopping for a hot breakfast, Dad and I were ready to hit the mountain and now our anticipation was really building. My heart was beating a little faster and my eyes were alert watching the headlights paint a mountain picture in front of us. We pulled off the highway and made our way up a narrow two-lane road that ran through a little old mining town. About a half mile past the last house, we came to our turn. The road was pretty quiet on this Saturday morning. We only passed two or three trucks on our way to the dirt road. “Here we go!” Dad said, turning the wheel. The blacktop was behind us and we were now on a well-packed gravel road. It started by winding right, then left, and then back right again. It was like riding a rollercoaster up the mountain. We finally came to the end of the gravel and now we were heading up a true back country mountain road. The road was littered with huge rocks Dad had to swerve around and plenty of big gullies where rain had washed the road away. The truck growled in low gear as we crawled our way up the mountain, heading to our camp. I could feel butterflies of excitement building in my stomach with each turn. I rolled down my window to get some fresh air and the crisp mountain breeze instantly sent chills down my back. “Whoa, it’s pretty cold out,” “The truck thermometer says its thirty-six degrees. That sure is a change from the sixty-five degrees we had yesterday at home. But don’t you worry, that Colorado sun always warms it up around noon,” Dad explained. That last half hour seemed to take forever because we could only manage about five or ten miles per hour on the steep, rugged road. The last thing we wanted to do, after all the hours we spent on the journey to elk camp, was get a flat tire or bust a shock. Dad patiently and expertly guided the truck through the obstacle course as we kept climbing up, up, up. Finally we leveled off and I could tell we had reached the top. We made our way around the back side of the mountain and headed down a dead-end road to a grassy field where we have camped before. “I sure hope no one is in our spot.” “I’m not worried. There are plenty of areas to pitch a tent,” Dad replied. “That’s true, but I really like our old spot. It’s flat, which is perfect for the tent, it’s

Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I started writing this book, I tried not to do it. I preferred it to stay tucked away in the back of my mind. But I do think about Thailand sometimes. Usually late at night, when I've been awake long enough to see the curtain patterns through the darkness and the shapes of the books on my shelves. At those times I make an effort to remember sitting in the glade with the shadow of the clock-hand branch lying across the ferns, smoking my cigarette. I choose this moment because it was the last time I could pinpoint that I was me being myself. Being normal, with nothing much going through my head apart from how pretty the island was, and how quiet. It isn't that from then on every second in Thailand was bad. Good things happened. Loads of good things. And mundane things, too: washing my face in the morning, swimming, fixing some food, whatever. But in retrospect, all those instances are colored by what was going on around them. Sometimes it feels to me that I walked into the glade and lit the cigarette, and someone else came along and finished it. Finished it, stubbed it out, flicked it into the bushes, then went to find Etienne and Françoise. It's a cop-out, because it's another thing that distances me from what happened, but that's how it feels. This other person did things I wouldn't do. It wasn't just our morals that were at odds, there were little character differences, too. The cigarette butt - the other guy flicked it into the bushes. I'd have done something else. Buried it maybe. I hate littering, let alone littering in a protected Marine park. It's hard to explain. I don't believe in possession or the supernatural. I know that in real terms it was me who flicked the cigarette butt. Fuck it. I've been relying on an idea that these things would become clear to me as I wrote them down, but it isn't turning out that way.

People who are exactly like other people probably don’t exist. But people who seem like most other people litter our lives, and we don’t usually seek their company because they are boring. Readers don’t read novels in order to experience the boredom they often experience in life. They want to meet interesting people, extraordinary people, preferably people different from anyone they’ve met before in or out of fiction.

Don't make me find your granny and force her to eat the kitty litter," he mumbled without opening his eyes. "Her dentures aren't strong enough for that and she'll break 'em on the granules while trying to choke the shit down.

Instead of the old punishing puritanical moralisms about dropping litter on the street, we need a new and enjoyable animism that children would be the first to understand. “Don’t throw that candy wrapper on the street”—not because it’s dirty or bad manners; not because it’s wrong; not because “what if everybody did that?”—but instead “because your candy wrapper doesn’t want to lie around in the gutter or be stepped on; it wants to be in the trash basket along with all its friends.” When things are not properly buried, cremated or composted, could their souls remain as haunting and poisoning ghosts endangering the community, especially the most vulnerable, the children? Pollution is not only chemical and radioactive. There is psychological pollution, too.

Then Annabeth was running along beside him, reaching out her hand. ‘Thank the gods!’ she called. ‘For months and months we couldn’t see you! Are you all right?’ Percy remembered what Juno had said – for months he has been slumbering, but now he is awake. The goddess had intentionally kept him hidden, but why? ‘Are you real?’ he asked Annabeth. He wanted so much to believe it that he felt like Hannibal the elephant was standing on his chest. But her face began to dissolve. She cried, ‘Stay put! It’ll be easier for Tyson to find you! Stay where you are!’ Then she was gone. The images accelerated. He saw a huge ship in a dry dock, workers scrambling to finish the hull, a guy with a blowtorch welding a bronze dragon figurehead to the prow. He saw the war god stalking towards him in the surf, a sword in his hands. The scene shifted. Percy stood on the Field of Mars, looking up at the Berkeley Hills. Golden grass rippled, and a face appeared in the landscape – a sleeping woman, her features formed from shadows and folds in the terrain. Her eyes remained closed, but her voice spoke in Percy’s mind: So this is the demigod who destroyed my son Kronos. You don’t look like much, Percy Jackson, but you’re valuable to me. Come north. Meet Alcyoneus. Juno can play her little games with Greeks and Romans, but in the end, you will be my pawn. You will be the key to the gods’ defeat. Percy’s vision turned dark. He stood in a theatre-sized version of the camp’s headquarters – a principia with walls of ice and freezing mist hanging in the air. The floor was littered with skeletons in Roman armour and Imperial gold weapons encrusted with frost. In the back of the room sat an enormous shadowy figure. His skin glinted with gold and silver, as

Litter by Maisie Aletha Smikle You want me not Am inedible left to rot Am unusable to you And treasure to someone new Am litter Don't use me for batter Or to make fried fritter Am just matter that doesn’t matter Rejected unwanted misplaced I have a place It's no disgrace However where am placed is a disgrace On the beach in the market or on the street Where you meet to play shop and eat I should be out of sight In a bin anchored tight Or some where Where I can rest in piece And not be tossed about from place to place Littering everywhere like heaps of fallen snow I can be recycled too And use to make things brand new Bury burn or reuse just choose Don't misuse or abuse And dump me where I don't belong Left for the winds and rain to take me along Wherever it goes Like am your foe Treat Earth kindly Place me in a bin where I belong Even litter has a place It's no disgrace

I studied the wings, the arm around my waist. 'Please don't drop me. And please don't-' We shot into the sky, fast as a shooting star. Before my yelp finished echoing, the city had yawned wide beneath us. Rhys's hand slid under my knees while the other wrapped around my back and ribs, and we flapped up, up, up into the star-freckled night, into the liquid dark and singing wind. The city lights dropped away until Velaris was a rippling velvet blanket littered with jewels, until the music no longer reached even our pointed ears. The air was chill, but no wind other than a gentle breeze brushed my face- even as we soared with magnificent precision for the House of Wind. Rhys' body was hard and warm against mine, a solid force of nature crafted and honed for this. Even the smell of him reminded me of the wind- rain and salt and something citrus-y I couldn't name. We swerved into an updraft, rising so fast it was instinct to clutch his black tunic as my stomach clenched. I scowled at the soft laugh that ticked my ear. 'I expected more screaming from you. I must not be trying hard enough.' 'Do not,' I hissed, focusing on the approaching tiara of lights in the eternal wall of the mountain. With the sky wheeling overhead and the lights shooting past below, up and down became mirrors- until we were sailing through a sea of stars. Something tight in my chest eased a fraction of its grip.

Life is a game of chance, each passing day becomes another flip of the coin. Nothing is unique. Everything I’ve experienced even for the first time has been identified and photographed a million times, the curve of a woman’s hips, the tropical sunset, the tower on the hill, a close up of a celebrity, captured by minds similar to mine and littered in the annexes of the psyches of people I don’t know. I am an understudy in my own life, I don’t know what will happen and in my mind anything can happen at anytime. I am an emotional fossil, i have picked apart every fibre of my thoughts, feelings and emotions apart with caliper and forceps, as i ponder sometimes with great anxiety over my looming and inexorable future. That doom follows me like a hovering presence outside the windows and hallways of my life, i don’t have a map of where i am heading or master key to open doors or gateways to my success- i am still even on the sunniest days, feeling around in the dark. You cannot study me, you are bound to fail for somedays you will feel as if you are peeping through a keyhole at my life. You know you don’t know everything, for i have hallways you cannot unlock, attics and stairways you cannot access and even when you stare through that keyhole, you aren’t sure if you are looking in or looking out. My mind and feelings have built up over time like a strong fortress, my love life remaining but the only, for some, psychological entryway.

I'm living in the same house as someone who views secrets as personal pets, to be fed, cosseted, and possibly bred to produce litters of little secrets. Kindly don't add new ones to the kennel.

We all have a history littered with scars. I don’t look at this mark and think of the time I almost died. I look at it and remember against all the odds, I lived.

Despite the ubiquity of government-organized trans pageants in the Philippines, trans people themselves are not politically recognized. We are culturally visible but legally erased. To this day, trans Filipinas have M gender markers on their documents and cannot change their names in court. We don't have robust antidiscrimination protections. No amount of pageant glory can make up for the fact that our government still doesn't see and treat trans people as full citizens able to participate in society as we truly are. In a country of over 100 million people, only a few dozen certified endocrinologists offer gender-affirming care. Growing up, I relied on other trans people to find hormones, figuring out the right dosages through hearsay, transitioning entirely without proper medical supervision. There was no other choice back then - and for many today, DIY is still the only option. My community is littered with stories of injections gone horribly wrong. Even worse, when someone dies from an overdose or an unsupervised medical treatment, it's shrugged off as a sad fact of life. 'That's what happens,' the emergency techs will say, our lives stripped of value by the very institutions that ought to care for us. I will never forget when one of my Garcia clan sisters succumbed to death from a botched medical procedure, a victim of all the intersecting forces trans Filipinas have to navigate to get treatment.

When your chicks first arrive, prepare a special place for them in the hen house. Depending on how many chicks you have, this can be a large cardboard box or a set of boards to partition the hen house floor. Cover the floor with least 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) of wood shavings, rice hulls, sand, or straw. Don’t use cedar shavings, fine sawdust, or treated wood chips. Cover the floor with newspapers the first day so the chicks will eat the feed and not the litter.

You get up, eat, sleep, use the litter box, eat, sleep, chase ghosts and laser pointers, and eat again. Is that the secret to happiness? Don’t think about anything, just live in the present?

The lights went back to the green of safety—but she stood trembling, unable to move. That’s how it works for the travel of one’s body, she thought, but what have they done to the traffic of the soul? They have set the signals in reverse—and the road is safe when the lights are the red of evil—but when the lights are the green of virtue, promising that yours is the right-of-way, you venture forth and are ground by the wheels. All over the world, she thought—those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don’t know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence—and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk.

The past is littered with holes of regrets so don’t retrace your steps or you might fall in.

you are back in your grandmother’s attic looking at photographs of people you don’t know, ladies in floral print dresses, wearing feathered and veiled hats; men with cigarettes, leaning against automobiles, thumbs through their belt loops; an empty railroad depot, the tracks heading away to a landscape of bare trees, the rail yard littered with handcarts and piles of sooty snow, and you hear your mother calling you to lunch, but you are curious about this missing snapshot, the four triangular corner mounts forming a dark rectangle. Who removed the photo from the album and why? And who is the purloined ghost? And at that moment you realize that secrets lie all around you, that the world is so much larger than you had imagined, and that you are a part of it, and that this is a world of loss, and that all of these people whose names are penned on the borders of the photographs, whose smiles and shadows have been preserved, these people named Eustache and Marie, Walter, Pamille, Theona, Grace, Emma, Cousin Butchie, Big Fred, Little Fred, that all of them were tillers in the garden where the flower of you now blooms.

She’s not to blame for any of this. These were my actions. I caused all of this. I didn’t commit murder but I did cheat. I did throw away what we had, carelessly like a piece of litter into a trash can I was passing. I can’t leave this earth with her blaming herself for everything that happened. She is the only one who defended me through all of this. The only one who truly believed me. The last person on earth who loves me, aside from my mom. “Sarah… none of this was your fault. You were a wonderful wife. You worked hard and were the only person who believed me and defended me. You loved me during my darkest times. You did everything you could for me and my career. I don’t blame you for anything. You have nothing to apologize for.

A little bit of the niceness sort of oozed off him when he looked in the back of the pickup and saw Donna icing down the narwhal, and he got a funny expression like a man who has just stepped in something and is afraid to look down and see what it might be, and then he wanted to know if it was a stolen narwhal and I am afraid I lied and said that narwhal had been a voluntary surrender and then I was a little bit nervous because I could feel it going bad so I spun him a story about a friend who hadn’t gotten his narwhal spayed and now there was a litter but he’d found good homes except for this one and I don’t think he believed me on account of that being a monumentally stupid story but he also didn’t want to call one of the Platinum Leadership Council people a liar to their face, just in case I was looking to die myself and leave them money for a black-light jellyfish tank, which was what they were currently trying to fund according to the newsletters that they occasionally sent out to the house.

want to be alone. + But what if I’m alone forever? - But I just said that’s what I wanted? I can’t imagine doing this again, this whole relationship thing, this whole marriage thing. But isn’t that exactly the type of sentiment the Vows section of the New York Times is littered with? - I don’t think I care about being alone forever. + But the devil you know, et cetera and so forth.

Xavier chuckled. “Yeah, that was all on me… ‘Please, please. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.’” He mocked my voice. “Wrapping your legs around me so you could get more of my cum… Kitten, if you want a litter, I’ll be happy to get started now.