Drive Movie Quotes

Remember this. The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact. So don't fuck with us.

I want it all, Emily. I want to spend my nights holding hands with you,” he breathed the words into her ear. “I want the all-day texting.” He kissed her temple and caressed her cheek. “I want the laughing and the forehead kisses.” He softly ran his lips over her forehead. “I want the date nights, the movie watching, and the breakfast making.” He dragged his hands through her hair, his teeth tugging gently at her bottom lip. “I want the late-night drives, the sunset watching, the screaming, the yelling, and the crying.” Still kissing her, he smiled against her mouth. “I know I’ll definitely want the make up sex that comes after the screaming and the crying. In want the good, the bad and e in between. All of it is what's going to make us amazing together,

If someone called me chubby, it would no longer be something that kept me up late at night. Being called fat is not like being called stupid or unfunny, which is the worst thing you could ever say to me. Do I envy Jennifer Hudson for being able to lose all that weight and look smokin’ hot? Of course, yes. Do I sometimes look at Gisele Bundchen and wonder how awesome life would be if I never had to wear Spanx? Duh, of course. That’s kind of the point of Gisele Bundchen. And maybe I will, once or twice, for a very short period of time. But on the list of things I want to do in my lifetime, that’s not near the top. I mean, it’s not near the bottom either. I’d say it’s right above “Learn to drive a vespa,” but several notches below “film a chase scene for a movie.

It's strange how we always want other people to feel what we feel. It must be a basic human drive. Misery loves company, right? Or when you see a movie that you love, don't you want to drag all your friends to see it as well? Because it's only good the second time if it's the first time for somebody else—as if their experience somehow resonates inside of you.

Imagine this: You’re driving. The sky’s bright. You look great. In a word, in a phrase, it’s a movie, you’re the star. so smile for the camera, it’s your big scene, you know your lines. I’m the director. I’m in a helicopter. I have a megaphone and you play along, because you want to die for love, you always have. Imagine this: You’re pulling the car over. Somebody’s waiting. You’re going to die in your best friend’s arms. And you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down, you’ve memorized it, it’s all you know. I say the phrases that keep it all going, and everybody plays along. Imagine: Someone’s pulling a gun, and you’re jumping into the middle of it. You didn’t think you’d feel this way. There’s a gun in your hand. It feels hot. It feels oily. I’m the director and i’m screaming at you, I’m waving my arms in the sky, and everyone’s watching, everyone’s curious, everyone’s holding their breath. 'Planet of Love

Look back. Look back at me." Richard Armitage spoke this line in the movie North and South as he watched Miss Hale drive away in a carriage.

You learn to appreciate the fact that what drives you is very different from what you’re told should make you happy. You learn that it’s okay to prefer your personal idea of heaven (live-tweeting zombie movies from under a blanket of kittens) rather than someone else’s idea that fame/fortune/parties are the pinnacle we should all reach for. And there’s something surprisingly freeing about that.

Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.

A rap at the back door made her jump, and she peered through the window for a long time before she eased open the door a crack. She left the security chain on. 'What do you want, Richard?' Richard Morrell's police cruiser was parked in the drive. He hadn't flashed any lights or howled any sirens, so she supposed it wasn't an emergency, exactly. But she knew him well enough to know he didn't pay social visits, at least not to the Glass House. 'Good question,' Richard said. 'I guess I want a nice girl who can cook, likes action movies, and looks good in short skirts. But I'll settle for you taking the chain off the door and letting me in.

Faster is fatal, slower is safe.

I climb behind the steering wheel... I drive off immediately without once looking back; it's a long journey but it leads to freedom.

That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.

I seem finally to have stopped worrying about Elinor, and age. She seems now to be perfectly normal -- about twenty-five, a witty control freak. I like her but I can see how she would drive you mad. She's just the sort of person you'd want to get drunk, just to make her giggling and silly.

It was true love, Ted. I looked over, saw this guy, and I totally lost my mind. I know he's loud and in-your-face, but whenever I look at him I feel a little weak-kneed. And when I drive him - forget about it. He's fast and wild and a little unruly, and I can feel his throaty rumbles all through my body when I bury that gas pedal. That beast has forever ruined me for all other vehicles.

One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company --- they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing...

In a society that is essentially designed to organize, direct, and gratify mass impulses, what is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? Religion? Art? Nature? No, the church has turned religion into standardized public spectacle, and the museum has done the same for art. The Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls have been looked at so much that they've become effete, sucked empty by too many stupid eyes. What is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? How about a cold chicken bone on a paper plate at midnight, how about a lurid lipstick lengthening or shortening at your command, how about a Styrofoam nest abandoned by a 'bird' you've never known, how about a pair of windshield wipers pursuing one another futilely while you drive home alone through a downpour, how about something beneath a seat touched by your shoe at the movies, how about worn pencils, cute forks, fat little radios, boxes of bow ties, and bubbles on the side of a bathtub? Yes, these are the things, these kite strings and olive oil cans and Valentine hearts stuffed with nougat, that form the bond between the autistic vision and the experiential world, it is to show these things in their true mysterious light that is the purpose of the moon.

I’ll always remember the drive home as a movie montage, and I knew I was in one. Each detail was vividly bright. I knew I’d need the memories one day.

She reflected that the Mad Max movies had been skillfully edited to erase the actual tedium of driving through outback Australia.

I want to take you to movies and hang out and go for drives and sit you on my lap like this whenever I want. And when we’re ready, we’ll take a long drive down to the inlet and to my family’s boathouse, and I’ll go slow with you.

Boys and men have a natural, biological sex drive, you see, but when girls and women express sexuality, it’s because they’ve been led astray by music videos or vampire movies or something. Never

This was the Mecca of the American Dream, the world that everyone wanted. A world of sleek young women (allied with Slenderella to be so) in shorts and halters, driving 400-horsepower station wagons to air-conditioned, music-serenaded supermarkets of baby-sitter corporations and culture condensed into Great Books discussion groups. A life of barbecues by the swimming pool and drive in movies open all year. It did't appeal to me. Fuck health insurance plans and life insurance. They wanted to live without leaving the womb. It made me more alive to play a game without rules against society, and I was prepared to play it to the end. A tremor almost sexual passed through me as I anticipated the comming robbery.

But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed. When I am blasting “More and More” by Blood Sweat & Tears at seven on a Sunday morning while cleaning the kitchen and fucking up your mom’s frittata recipe. When I bring a half dozen gross, mangled kittens home to foster for a few nights and they shit everywhere and pee on your side of the bed. When I go “grocery shopping” and come back with only a bag of Fritos and five pounds of pork tenderloin. When I’m sick and stumbling around the crib with half a roll of toilet paper shoved in each nostril. When I beg you fourteen times to read something I’ve written, then get mad when you tell me what you don’t like about it and I call you an uneducated idiot piece of shit. Lovebird city.

She’s in every place I visit, in all the love songs I listen to. She’s in the chocolate-cherry ice cream I eat and the 2000s movies I watch and the Jeep I still drive and the thunderstorms outside my window and the quotes I read about love and pain and beauty and heartache.

Wanting to be a movie star....answering an ad at ten or eleven. You made your mother drive you to Hollywood.

Agee wrote “like someone who had not just viewed the movie but been in it — out with it, as if it were a girl; drinking with it; driving in the night with it.

The most unbelievable scene in any action movie was the part where Tom Cruise jammed the thumb drive into the slot and it slid in on the first try.

I’m kind of hoping it will end like this. You made me happy. Very happy. But…you deserve everything. Wife, kids, a white picket fence.” “And I’ll have all of it. With you.” “You know that can’t happen with me.” “Then it can’t happen with anyone. There won’t be a next Rosie. And there won’t be another story like ours. This is it, Rose LeBlanc. And this is us. If there is no you, then there is no me.” “You know, I always hated Romeo and Juliet . The play. The movie. The very idea. It was tragic, all right. Tragically stupid. I mean, they were what? Thirteen? Sixteen? What a waste of life, to kill yourself because your family wouldn’t let you get hitched. But Romeo and Juliet were right. I was the next eleven years killing myself slowly while I grieved for you. Then you came back, and I still thought it was just a fascination. But now that I know…” “Now that I know that it can only ever be you, you’re going to get better for me so Earth won’t explode. Can you do that, Sirius? I promise not to leave this room until you get out. Not even for a shower. Not even to get you your chocolate chip cookies. I’ll get someone to drive all the way to New York and bring them for you.” “I love you.” Rosie’s tears curtained her vision. “I love you, Baby LeBlanc,” I said. “So fucking much. You taught me how to love. How well did I do?” “A-plus,” she whispered. “You aced it. Can you promise me something?” “Anything.” “ Live .” “Not without you.” “And have kids. Lots of them. They’re fun.” “Rosie…” “I’m not afraid. I got what I wanted from this life. You .” “Rosie.” “I love you, Earth. You were good to me.” “Rose!” Her eyes closed, the door opened, the sound on her monitor went off, and my heart disintegrated. Piece. By piece. By piece.

There it was, a sign above a shop that said 221B BAKER STREET. My mouth hung open. I looked around at the ordinary street and the white-painted buildings, looking clean in the morning rain. Where were the fog, the streetlights, the gray atmosphere? The horses pulling carriages, bringing troubled clients to Watson and Holmes? I had to admit I had been impressed with Big Ben and all, but for a kid who had devoured the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, this was really something. I was on Baker Street, driving by the rooms of Holmes and Watson! I sort of wished it were all in black and white and gray, like in the movies.

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching? The highway's edges may not be postcard perfect. But for a century, children's early understanding of how cities and nature fit together was gained from the backseat: the empty farmhouse at the edge of the subdivision; the variety of architecture, here and there; the woods and fields and water beyond the seamy edges--all that was and still is available to the eye. This was the landscape that we watched as children. It was our drive-by movie.

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state.

It is a quintessential example of the whirling kinetics that drive a Keaton film, in which not just the medium but the human body- the permutations of the sinews, the shock of the limbs -seems infinitely elastic, an unruly instument to be wilded with a cheeky kind of grace.

On day one of the drive, I saw my first dome sky. The world was so flat that I could see the level horizon all around me and the sky looked like a dome. Skies like that will give you perspective when nothing else will. The second day, a tumbleweed blew across the interstate. I’m in a western movie, I said to myself, laughing. I found it so much easier to laugh now that this weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

There were always eyes. A little tailor on his way home from a movie. A waitress in a drive-in. A butcher-boy on a bicycle. A room clerk with a wet pointed nose. A detective’s wife who was alert, too alert. Whose eyes saw too much. There were always eyes but they didn’t see. He had proved it.

MADDY’S TRUTHS Make room for who you are by knowing who you’re not. Smile all the time, at everyone, without exception: when you’re happy it will be contagious, and when you’re angry it will drive the person you’re mad at bonkers. Blow-dry before lipstick. Counters before sweeping. Water before dinner. To hell with what everyone thinks about your life, but you should know what you think about it. Don’t stay out past one a.m.—nobody is proud of the stories born later than that. Plans contingent on perfection fail. It’s dangerous to fight who you are. The stupidest thing you can do is believe your own bullshit, but you probably will every once in a while. Flowery perfume smells like a cover-up. Don’t have a room your kids can’t play in or a couch your kids can’t sit on; it’s their house too. If you don’t know what to say, say, “I don’t know what to say.” If you mess up, say, “I messed up.” If you need help, say, “I need help.” Never count on any one thing. Don’t confuse wanting to have sex and rent movies with someone for wanting to marry him. Never buy button-fly jeans—they aren’t flattering on anyone ever.

But where will this mania for entertainment end? What will people do when they get tired of television? When they get tired of movies? We already know the answer—they go into participatory activities: sports, theme parks, amusement rides, roller coasters. Structured fun, planned thrills. And what will they do when they tire of theme parks and planned thrills? Sooner or later, the artifice becomes too noticeable. They begin to realize that an amusement park is really a kind of jail, in which you pay to be an inmate. ‘This artifice will drive them to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that exists for its own sake and assumes its own shape. But of course, nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume its own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic.

Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better, that tomorrow will be better than the day before. But it's not true. Cities collapse. Populations expand. Environments decay. People get ruder. You can't go to a movie without getting in a fight with the guy in the third row who won't shut up. Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Irradiated corn. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Bomb blasts, and body counts. Terror in the streets, on camera, in your living room. Aids and Ebola and Hepatitis B and you can't touch anyone because you're afraid you'll catch something besides love and nothing tastes as good anymore and Christopher Reeve is [dead] and love is statistically false. Pocket nukes and subway anthrax. You grow up frustrated, you live confused, you age frightened, you die alone. Safe terrain moves from your city to your block to your yard to your home to your living room to the bedroom and all you want is to be allowed to live without somebody breaking in to steal your tv and shove an ice-pick in your ear. That sound like a better world to you? That sound to you like a promise kept?

erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

You smell really good, but it isn’t your usual scent.” He didn’t put the car in drive but instead just looked at me. “My usual scent?

I look around me, man . . . I’m trying to do what I’ve always done, to protect people, to keep them safe from the monsters—only I’m pretty sure I’m one of them. I can’t figure out where I could have . . . what else I might have done . . .” I swallowed. “I’m lost. I know every step I took to get here, and I’m still lost.” “Harry . . .” “And my friends,” I said. “Even Thomas . . . I was stuck out on that island of the damned for a year. A year, Michael, and they only showed up a handful of times. Just Murphy and Thomas, maybe half a dozen times in more than a year. It’s just a goddamned boat ride away, forty minutes. People drive farther than that to go to the movies. They know what I’m turning into. They don’t want to watch it happening to me.

Have you ever had a lyric from a really crappy song or advertising jingle get stuck in your head? Something that just won't go away, no matter how much you don't want it to be there? Imagine if, instead of a silly piece of music, it was an image. Imagine that image was something you found disturbing; say, rivers of rich burgundy blood gushing from slashes in your forearms. What if, instead of this being a fleeting, irritating image, it took hold in your mind. It would be there on waking, it would push itself into your thoughts while you were watching television, driving, sitting at your desk. What if, gradually, your mind became your own personal continuously screening horror movie, starring yourself. What would you do? Would you feel compelled to act on these thoughts? Do you think, if you did, it would help? Would you think yourself mad? Would you tell anyone?

Kermit: Hey, Fozzie, I want you to turn left if you come to a fork in the road. Fozzie: Yes sir, turn left at the fork in the road. [drives past a giant fork] Fozzie: Kermit! Kermit: I don't believe that.

Part of the human experience is to confront temptation. No one escapes. It is omnipresent. It is both externally driven and internally prompted. It is like the enemy that attacks from all sides. It boldly assaults us in television shows, movies, billboards, and newspapers in the name of entertainment or free speech. It walks down our streets and sits in our offices in the name of fashion. It drives our roads in the name of style. It represents itself as political correctness or business necessity. It claims moral sanction under the guise of free choice. On occasion it roars like thunder; on others it whispers in subtle, soothing tones. With chameleon-like skill it camouflages its ever-present nature, but it is there--always there.

It’s strange how we always want other people to feel what we feel. It must be a basic human drive. Misery loves company, right? Or when you see a movie that you love, don’t you want to drag all your friends to see it as well? Because it’s only good the second time if it’s the first time for somebody else—as if their experience somehow resonates inside of you. The power of shared experiences. Maybe it’s a way to remind ourselves that on some level we’re all connected.

I picture a heart lying down on the floor of the torso, pulling up the blankets over its head, thinking this pain will go on forever (even though it won’t). The heart is watching Lifetime movies and wishing, and missing all the good parts of her that she has forgotten. The heart is so tired of beating herself up, she wants to stop it still, but also she wants the blood to return, wants to bring in the thrill and wind of the ride, the fast pull of life driving underneath her.

A couple of days after the last time I saw him, I got a typically well-written postcard. He said that after he kissed me goodbye at LAX he was driving away and turned on the radio. Elvis was singing "It's Now or Never." In my personal religion, a faith cobbled together out of pop songs and books and movies, there is nothing closer to a sign from God than Elvis Presley telling you "tomorrow will be too late" at precisely the moment you drop off a girl you're not sure you want to drop off. Sitting on the stairs to my apartment, I read that card and wept. It said he heard the song and thought about running after me. But he didn't. And just as well--those mixed-faith marriages hardly ever work. An Elvis song coming out of the radio wasn't a sign from God to him, it was just another one of those corny pop tunes he could live without.

Look, people go on and on about how size isn’t everything, and how the bigger they are, the harder they fall, but the people who say that probably haven’t ever faced down a charging demon-bear so big it should have been on a drive-in movie screen.

I am memorializing the just-barely-adults (mostly boys, mostly less privileged) who have died fighting wars that for the most part were not their own... the families who have had to go on without them... those who gave their life to this country by standing for our freedoms in non-wars--struggles-- struggles about race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, contraception and abortion rights, the environment, eradication of global disease and world hunger, the right to collectively bargain and unionize... who paid the ultimate price through their civil disobedience, protest, collective action, or just by living in a way that was so challenging to others that they were executed for it... the ones from whom we stole this land and those whose lives we stole to build it... those who were just trying to go to school, pray, shop, watch a movie, be, when they were gunned down in a country that loves its guns far more than its people... those who were killed for driving while black, walking while black, talking while black, sleeping while black. On Decoration Day we are decorated with their blood and their memory

I had never been to a drive-in before, but I'd loved it after the first movie - the big screen set up at one end of a field, the cars parked in slightly crooked rows, the speakers you could hang over the window of your car, the way they always played double features.

He slowed to a walk. As he approached her he was surprised at just how pretty she was. She looked a little like Maureen O'Hara in those old pirate movies. His writer's mind kicked in and he thought, This woman could break my heart. I could crash and burn on this woman. I could lose this woman, drink heavily, write profound poems, and die in the gutter of turberculosis over this woman. This was not an unusual reaction for Tommy. He had it often, mostly with girls who worked the drive-through windows at fast-food places. He would drive off with the smell of fries in his car and the bitter taste of unrequited love on his tongue. It was usually good for at least one short story.

I see your face in my mind as I drive away 'Cause none of us thought it was gonna end that way. People are people, and sometimes we change our minds. But it's killing me to see you go after all this time. Music starts playin' like the end of a sad movie. It's the kinda ending you don't really wanna see. 'Cause it's tragedy and it'll only bring you down. Now I don't know what to be without you around. And we know it's never simple, never easy, Never a clean break. No one here to save me. You're the only thing I know like the back of my hand. And I can't breathe without you But I have to.

Scott goes to the computer and loads a chart that says something about global warming. Scott says, "See?" Judy says, "I don't think global warming is important, people shouldn't need to use global warming as an excuse to stop being wasteful." Scott says, "How can you not believe this?" Judy says, "There has been golf ball-sized hail storms and hurricanes for a long time, it didn't just start all of the sudden. In the movie Al Gore drives in an SUV." Scott leaves to have a cigarette. Cory says, "Al Gore owns his own farm." Judy stares at the TV. Judy thinks, "No one in this room cares about global warming, this is ridiculous, we are all smoking cigarettes and eating cheese, how can any one of us care about voting? No one in this room cares about anything.

Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what a fine and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his breakfast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the blondwood table's surface trembling with sunlight and the man's hand steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evaluating the scene, and thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming performance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we first saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider – as I did, setting there at the breakfast nook – that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way, and at the same time still another facet or part of me realizing that from this perspective my own basic problem was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s quality and probable effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and affixing postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene), planning to drop it in a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds sufficient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steering wheel and instantly kill me. Self-loathing is not the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it instant’ (175-176)

The fire alarm went off. Fire engines came racing; we all rushed out on the gravel drive, everyone thinking it was us. In fact, one of the elderly residents of Saltram had left a pan on the oven in her flat. Apparently this happens all the time. The tenant in question is appearing as an extra -- playing one of the cooks.

The second I get into a car and we start driving, I imagine a fatal crash to the last detail. When I’m in the liquor store, I imagine a robbery by the time the cashier tells me the total. Every plane ride is an 8-hour movie in my head of me planning what I would say to the stranger on my right if the pilot announced the plane was crashing. I always imagine these scenarios. Family dying. Earthquakes. The earth suddenly falling because gravity left the party. It’s exhausting. Yesterday someone was afraid of me. I was bicycling with Austin and we saw a dead deer on the road. It was so large. Austin nearly fell off his bike when he saw it. Then he looked over at me confused. He asked why I didn't react to it. I told him it was because I’d already imagined one six miles back. There are always two worlds playing in my head at once: what’s in front of me and what could be.

I had a dream about you last night... I think I've realized why drive-in theatres are going extinct; you can't yell at the guy in front to sit down.

Drive it like you're in a Fast and the Furious movie.

Driving down there and barging into an ER wearing a horror movie-inspired mask wasn’t the move.

Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: choose your music carefully. Avoid Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World", from the Polaroid or Kodak or whichever commercial, and the songs "Turn Around" and "Sunrise, Sunset" and - there are thousands more. Avoid Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," and this one, Eric Clapton's song about his son. Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" sneaked up on me one time. The music doesn't have to be sentimental. Springsteen can be dangerous. John and Yoko. Bjork. Dylan. I become overwhelmed when I hear Nirvana. I want to scream like Kurt Cobain. I want to scream at him. Music isn't all that does it. There are millions of treacherous moments. Driving along Highway 1, I will see a peeling wave. Or I will reach the fork where two roads meet near Rancho Nicasio, where we veered to the left in carpool. A shooting star on a still night at the crest of Olema Hill. With friends, I hear a good joke - one that Nic would appreciate. The kids do something funny or endearing. A story. A worn sweater. A movie. Feeling wind and looking up, riding my bike. A million moments.

I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time. Novels and movies don’t quite capture it; journalism doesn’t; photography, dance, painting, and theater don’t; molecular biology and quantum physics certainly don’t either. We haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them. And until we find a way to document them, we will not understand them.

Gustavo Tiberius speaking." “It’s so weird you do that, man,” Casey said, sounding amused. “Every time I call.” “It’s polite,” Gus said. “Just because you kids these days don’t have proper phone etiquette.” “Oh boy, there’s the Grumpy Gus I know. You miss me?” Gus was well aware the others could hear the conversation loud and clear. He was also aware he had a reputation to maintain. “Hadn’t really thought about it.” “Really.” “Yes.” “Gus.” “Casey.” “I miss you.” “I miss you too,” Gus mumbled into the phone, blushing fiercely. “Yeah? How much?” Gus was in hell. “A lot,” he said truthfully. “There have been allegations made against my person of pining and moping. False allegations, mind you, but allegations nonetheless.” “I know what you mean,” Casey said. “The guys were saying the same thing about me.” Gus smiled. “How embarrassing for you.” “Completely. You have no idea.” “They’re going to get you packed up this week?” “Ah, yeah. Sure. Something like that.” “Casey.” “Yes, Gustavo.” “You’re being cagey.” “I have no idea what you mean. Hey, that’s a nice Hawaiian shirt you’ve got on. Pink? I don’t think I’ve seen you in that color before.” Gus shrugged. “Pastor Tommy had a shitload of them. I think I could wear one every day for the rest of the year and not repeat. I think he may have had a bit of a….” Gus trailed off when his hand started shaking. Then, “How did you know what I was wearing?” There was a knock on the window to the Emporium. Gus looked up. Standing on the sidewalk was Casey. He was wearing bright green skinny jeans and a white and red shirt that proclaimed him to be a member of the 1987 Pasadena Bulldogs Women’s Softball team. He looked ridiculous. And like the greatest thing Gus had ever seen. Casey wiggled his eyebrows at Gus. “Hey, man.” “Hi,” Gus croaked. “Come over here, but stay on the phone, okay?” Gus didn’t even argue, unable to take his eyes off Casey. He hadn’t expected him for another week, but here he was on a pretty Saturday afternoon, standing outside the Emporium like it was no big deal. Gus went to the window, and Casey smiled that lazy smile. He said, “Hi.” Gus said, “Hi.” “So, I’ve spent the last two days driving back,” Casey said. “Tried to make it a surprise, you know?” “I’m very surprised,” Gus managed to say, about ten seconds away from busting through the glass just so he could hug Casey close. The smile widened. “Good. I’ve had some time to think about things, man. About a lot of things. And I came to this realization as I drove past Weed, California. Gus. It was called Weed, California. It was a sign.” Gus didn’t even try to stop the eye roll. “Oh my god.” “Right? Kismet. Because right when I entered Weed, California, I was thinking about you and it hit me. Gus, it hit me.” “What did?” Casey put his hand up against the glass. Gus did the same on his side. “Hey, Gus?” “Yeah?” “I’m going to ask you a question, okay?” Gustavo’s throat felt very dry. “Okay.” “What was the Oscar winner for Best Song in 1984?” Automatically, Gus answered, “Stevie Wonder for the movie The Woman in Red. The song was ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You.’” It was fine, of course. Because he knew answers to all those things. He didn’t know why Casey wanted to— And then he could barely breathe. Casey’s smile wobbled a little bit. “Okay?” Gus blinked the burn away. He nodded as best he could. And Casey said, “Yeah, man. I love you too.” Gus didn’t even care that he dropped his phone then. All that mattered was getting as close to Casey as humanely possible. He threw open the door to the Emporium and suddenly found himself with an armful of hipster. Casey laughed wetly into his neck and Gus just held on as hard as he could. He thought that it was possible that he might never be in a position to let go. For some reason, that didn’t bother him in the slightest.

On the wall in the living room, not far from Hinman’s body, were the words POLITICAL PIGGY, printed in the victim’s own blood. Whiteley also told Buckles that they had arrested a suspect in connection with the murder, one Robert “Bobby” Beausoleil, a young hippie musician. He had been driving a car that belonged to Hinman, there was blood on his shirt and trousers, and a knife had been found hidden in the tire well of the vehicle. The arrest had occurred on August 6; therefore he had been in custody at the time of the Tate homicides. However, it was possible that he hadn’t been the only one involved in the Hinman murder. Beausoleil had been living at Spahn’s Ranch, an old movie ranch near the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth, with a bunch of other hippies. It was an odd group, their leader, a guy named Charlie, apparently having convinced them that he was Jesus Christ. Buckles, Whiteley would later recall, lost interest when he mentioned hippies. “Naw,” he replied,

So I began, feeling as if I was some elf in a Grim fairy tale climbing the corporate ladder of darkest whimsy, yet somewhere at the top lies the treasure of a pure maiden’s heart. Therefore it was my duty to do whatever it might take to win that pure maiden’s heart by returning that treasure to her hand. By the way, Spicoli, in the movie Fast Times at Ridge Mont High, said that people on ludes shouldn’t drive, that being shortly after crashing a car while he was high on ludes. Therefore, I will say this in advance, people still half drunk and stoned probably shouldn’t climb trees either.

...tell me again about how you used to watch movies in a car. It sounded so cool to me. And so, on one of the last nights of that summer, my parents decided to re-create a drive-in movie in our driveway.

What a wonderful world that was, and how remote it seems now. It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I grew up in a world in which everything was like that: shopping malls, TV dinners, TV itself, supermarkets, freeways, air conditioning, drive-in movies, 3D movies, transistor radios, backyard barbecues, air travel as a commonplace—all were brand-new and marvelously exciting. It is amazing we didn’t choke to death on all the novelty and wonder in our lives. I remember once my father brought home a device that you plugged in and, with an enormous amount of noise and energy, it turned ice cubes into shaved ice, and we got excited about that. We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too. —

I was sorting stamps in the slotted drawer at the post office when Garnelle Fielding came in to send a little package to Wilbur. She said she’d gone and signed up for the WAFS, and her mother and daddy drove her down to Sweetwater to take a test at Avenger Field, where the government was training hundreds and hundreds of women to be pilots. Trouble was, she didn’t pass her physical because they said she was too short and too thin for the service. Her mother rushed her to a doctor in Toullange the next day and tried to get him to write her a letter so she could join the navy instead, but he wouldn’t do it. He told her the service was no place for a girl, and she’d be better off to wait home for someone brave to come marry her. Garnelle hung around until four o’clock when my hours were up, then walked with me to my house. “You should have seen my mother,” she said. “Better yet, you should have heard her. She fussed and fumed the whole way home about how women in her family had fought in every war this country has ever had, right up from loading muskets in the Revolution to she herself driving a staff car in North Carolina during the Great War. I tell you, she would have made a better recruiter than any of those movie star speeches I’ve ever heard. My mother doesn’t sell kisses in a low-cut basque. She preaches pure patriotism like an evangelist in a tent revival. If she’d had a tambourine, we could have stopped the car and held a meeting.” We laughed. “I’m still mad, though,” she said.

Remember this,” Tyler said. "The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. "We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact,” Tyler said. "So don’t fuck with us.

In 1994, several students and I interviewed a ninety-five-year-old woman for an oral history project. She told us that as a teenager she went to the movies to learn the right way to kiss, and after the movie she and her boyfriend would drive to the local lovers’ lane to try out the new techniques. Overhearing, the woman sitting next to her in the nursing home lounge exclaimed: “Oh, my goodness, I always thought I was so bad for doing that!

Before I met Tommy, I would not have day-tripped to the spot where James Dean died. There would have been too many critical voices in my head telling me how dumb and pointless such a trip would be. Tommy, though, made me realize I could drive to James Dean’s crash site for the simple reason that I felt like doing it. He made me realize that doing such things was the whole point of being young. This was not an attitude that came easily to me, but I could say or do anything around Tommy and he wouldn’t judge me. How could he? He was the weirdest person I’d ever met—but lovably weird. Around Tommy I could be who I wanted to be—and to me that felt like freedom.

Why do you want to talk about ugly things?" she said. ... "We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are looking only at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you." She would never tell him. Why did this drive him so crazy? "It wasn't real sex was it?" he asked. "In the movies. It was only acting. Wasn't it?" "But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.

I wanted to be a sex goddess. And you can laugh all you want to. The joke is on me, whether you laugh or not. I wanted to be one -- one of them. They used to laugh at Marilyn when she said she didn't want to be a sex-goddess, she wanted to be a human being. And now they laugh at me when I say, "I don't want to be a human being; I want to be a sex-goddess." That shows you right there that something has changed, doesn't it? Rita, Ava, Lana, Marlene, Marilyn -- I wanted to be one of them. I remember the morning my friend came in and told us that Marilyn had died. And all the boys were stunned, rigid, literally, as they realized what had left us. I mean, if the world couldn't support Marilyn Monroe, then wasn't something desperately wrong? And we spent the rest of the goddamned sixties finding out what it was. We were all living together, me and these three gay boys that adopted me when I ran away, in this loft on East Fifth Street, before it became dropout heaven -- before anyone ever said "dropout" -- way back when "commune" was still a verb? We were all -- old-movie buffs, sex-mad -- you know, the early sixties. And then my friend, this sweet little queen, he came in and he passed out tranquilizers to everyone, and told us all to sit down, and we thought he was just going to tell us there was a Mae West double feature on somewhere -- and he said -- he said -- "Marilyn Monroe died last" -- and all the boys were stunned -- but I -- I felt something sudden and cold in my solar plexus, and I knew then what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the next one. I wanted to be the next one to stand radiant and perfected before the race of man, to shed the luminosity of my beloved countenance over the struggles and aspirations of my pitiful subjects. I wanted to give meaning to my own time, to be the unattainable luring love that drives men on, the angle of light, the golden flower, the best of the universe made womankind, the living sacrifice, the end! Shit!

It’s been three years and eight months since I’ve seen her last. I need to move on. I know I do. But Amy, she’s all of my daydreams. Not a moment goes by when I don’t think to myself, “Fuck, do I love her.” She’s in every place I visit, in all the love songs I listen to. She’s in the chocolate-cherry ice cream I eat and the 2000s movies I watch and the Jeep I still drive and the thunderstorms outside my window and the quotes I read about love and pain and beauty and heartache. She’s ruined summer for me.

The Tower is not a sacred monument, and no taboo can forbid a commonplace life to develop there, but there can be no question, nonetheless, of a trivial phenomenon here; the installation of a restaurant on the Tower, for instance ... The Eiffel Tower is a comfortable object, and moreover, it is in this that it its an object wither very old (analogous, for instance, to the Circus) or very modern (analogous to certain American institutions such as the drive-in movie, in which one can simultaneously enjoy the film, the car, the food, and the freshness of the night air). Further, by affording its visitor a whole polyphony of pleasures, from technological wonder to haute cuisine, including the panorama, the Tower ultimately reunites with the essential function of all major human sites: autarchy; the Tower can live on itself: one can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there, as on an ocean liner (another mythic object that sets children dreaming), one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of a world.

When I grow up I wanna be famous I wanna be a star I wanna be in movies When I grow up I wanna see the world Drive nice cars I wanna have groupies When I grow up Be on TV People know me Be on magazines When I grow up Fresh and clean Number one chick When I step out on the scene

I love everything about life,” Breitbart says, his voice growing louder now. “Familial love, parental love, spousal love, lust. I love beauty, I love fashion, I love art, I love music, I love food, I love plays, I love drama, I love poetry, I love movies. There are very few things I don’t have an interest in. I love being alive.” He’s gesturing widely, at the window, at the pouring, driving rain. “But even with all these loves,” he says, “you’re born with a set of limitations: your genetic legacy, your time, your place, your family. I could have been born a Rockefeller, but I wasn’t. I could have been born into a family living in a remote tribe where I thought God was a blue elephant, but I wasn’t. You’re born into this reality: that life is full of dangers, it’s an uncertain place. Events occur—you have an accident, someone shoots you, you develop an illness. All sorts of things happen. You have to respond.

We drove all the way out Colonial Drive, past the movie theaters and the bookstores that I had been driving to and past my whole life. But this drive was different and better because it occurred during calculus, because it occurred with Ben and Radar, because it occurred on our way to where I believed I would find her.

He said that for those who hadn't been to California, what it was most like was an enchanted island. The spitting image. Just like in the movies, but better. People live in houses, not apartment buildings, he said, and then he embarked on a comparison of houses (one-story, at most two-story), and four- or five-story buildings where the elevator is broken one day and out of order the next. The only way buildings compared favorably to houses was in terms of proximity. A neighborhood of buildings makes distances shorter, he said. Everything is closer. You can go walking to buy groceries or you can walk to your local tavern (here he winked at Reverend Foster), or the local church you belong to, or a museum. In other words, you don't need to drive. You don't even need a car. And here he recited a list of statistics on fatal car accidents in a county of Detroit and a county of Los Angeles. And that's even considering that cars are made in Detroit, he said, not Los Angeles.

Of course, this isn’t a movie and that’s not the life of a digital nomad. The reality is less glamorous. Working in a hammock for more than a few minutes will make your neck and wrists ache. It’ll be too hot to be productive, you’ll end up with sand in your laptop no matter what you do and there won’t be any wifi nearby anyway.

Individually and collectively, we will have to be the resistance—offering daily, bold, defiant pushback against all that feels wrong here. This pushback will come as we loudly and unapologetically speak truth where truth is not welcome. It will come as we connect with one another on social media and in faith communities and in our neighborhoods, and as we work together to demand accountability from our elected officials and pastoral leaders. It will come in the small things: in the art we create and the conversations we have and the quiet gestures of compassion that are barely visible. It will come in the way we fully celebrate daily life: having dinner with friends, driving through the countryside, playing in the yard with our children, laughing at a movie we love. It will come as we use the shared resources of our experience and our talents and our numbers to ensure that our children inherit a world worth being here for. It will come as we transform our grief into goodness.

I don’t like veering around from one thing to another—one day the analyst, the next day the dancer, the next day the movies, and so on. I know it’s sheer desperation that provokes this. And I know it’s because I am ineffective that causes it. So it’s no reproach. I’m responsible. But what to do? What, what, what? It drives me nuts.

What isn’t scary can do you in. Snacking doesn’t intimidate anybody. Neither does watching TV. Or sitting in a movie with a large drink and so much popcorn that it comes in a tub. Driving to work and parking in the garage doesn’t upset any applecarts, but riding your bike and asking for a place to lock it up just might. Suggesting to your boyfriend that you’d like to go to the soup-and-salad place instead of the he-man chuck-wagon could be awkward…[but] you are committed to living fully. You are going to take care of you, no matter who suggests that you’re selfish or full of yourself. Living well will give you the emotional energy you need to fulfill your destiny.

Sometimes your gaze alone scares me. Sometimes I've never seen you before. I no longer know what you're doing here, in this popular seaside resort, in this dull, crowded season, where you are even more alone than in your regional capital. The better to kill you, perhaps, or to drive you away, I don't know. I sometimes manage to feel I've never seen you before. That I don't know you, to the point of horror. That I have no idea why you're here, what you want from me, or what will become of you. Becoming is the only subject we never, ever broach. You must not know what you're doing here either, with this woman who is already old, mad with writing. Maybe this is just normal, maybe it's the same all over; it's nothing, you came simply because you were desperate, as you are every day of your life. And also during certain summers at certain times of day or night when the sun quits the sky and slips into the sea, every evening, always, you cannot help wanting to die. This I know. I see the two of us lost in similar natures. I can sometimes be overwhelmed by tenderness for the kind of people we are. Unstable, they say, a bit nutty. 'People who never go to the movies, or the theater, or parties.' Leftists are like that, you know, they have no clue how to enjoy life. Cannes makes them sick and so do the grand hotels of Morocco. Movies and theaters, it's all the same.

I may not have known much about my future-- my college choice or degree, my someday job and city, boys I'd love and lose. But I knew who'd be beside me. Chalk it up to too many movies, too many TV finales that flashed forward, but I saw these girls as clearly as I saw the moon overhead. Beyond college, beyond even our twenties. I'd drive across state lines to get to them, to soothe small disappointments and big heartbreaks. I'd come crawling home to them when I got lost, to guide off their stars. I'd be their witness to diplomas received, vows spoken to partners, oaths taken for office. And when the rest of the decisions felt like a tightrope, precarious with no back-stepping allowed-- well, I had a net.

You went there?” “Yes—Dallas. Uncle Harry and Aunt Tess lived there for a while. There’s nothing to do but go to the movies and you can’t walk anywhere, people have to drive you. Also they have rattlesnakes, and the death penalty, which I think is primitive and unethical in ninety-eight per cent of cases. But it’ll probably be better for her there.” “Why?

Wouldn't it be cool to be single in a bygone area? I take a girl to a drive-in movie, we go have a cheeseburger and a malt at the diner, and then we make out under the stars in my old-timey convertible. Granted, this might have been tough in the fifties given my brown skin tone and racial tensions at the time, but in my fantasy, racial harmony is also part of the deal.

It wasn't even about fear - it was about being smart. Anyone who'd ever seen a scary movie knew to skip the corn maze, just like we knew not to venture down into a basement or up into an attic, to drive past hitchhikers and heed the warnings of toothless old men at gas stations. If you watched enough horrible things happen on-screen, you could figure out how to avoid them in real life.

It was all a beautiful illusion until the movie began. Up to this point, we had only seen a few unedited scenes at Hal’s house on his home projector, so none of us really knew what to expect. Eight minutes from the start of the film, with nothing happening on the screen but driving and jazz music, it was clear to the audience and to us that our collective world had already begun to show cracks.

Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. The public prefers a tidy finale. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. It generates tension. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. It feels good. We REALLY like it when things come together. What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction. In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. The completed problems are, well, complete, so we forget them and move on. They later called this the 'Zeigarnik effect,' and it has influenced the study of many things, from advertising campaigns to coping with the suicide of loved ones to dysphoric rumination of past conflicts.

But I was stuck--stuck in a delicious, glorious, beautiful, inescapable La Brea tar pit of romance with a rough, rugged, impossibly tender cowboy. As soon as I’d have any thoughts of escaping to Chicago to avoid my parents’ problems, within seconds I’d shoot myself down. Something major would have to happen to pry me out of his arms. Marlboro Man filled my daydreams, filled my thoughts, my time, my heart, my mind. When I was with him, I was able to forget about my parents’ marital problems. On our drives together, preparing our dinners, watching our VHS action movies, all of those unhappy things disappeared from view. This became a crutch for me, an addictive drug of escape. Ten seconds in Marlboro Man’s pickup, and I saw only goodness and light. And the occasional bra-and-panty-wearing grandma mowing her yard.

My vivid imagination, in conjunction with a Type Triple A, drive-it-to-the-ground personality, means that I conjure up all sorts of dire and dreadful scenarios for any given set of actual facts. The less probable the outcome, the more likely I am to come up with it, and I am fully capable of fancying an array of potential scenarios ranging from the mundane to everything that you find in a Bruce Willis movie.

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out. . . . Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions.

What’s not to love about being expertly lit and drunk at two in the afternoon? But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed.

Hey--if you guys are goin’ to the movie, c-c-c-can you drive me to the mall?” he yelled. “Sure, Mike,” Marlboro Man said. “We’ll drive you to the mall. It’ll cost you ten bucks, though.” And as the three of us made our way outside to Marlboro Man’s diesel pickup, I had to bite my lip to keep myself from articulating the only seven words in the English language that were in my vocabulary at that moment: God help me--I love that man.

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth. Sure, it’s possible to randomly challenge the conventions of your field and luckily find a breakthrough. It’s far more likely, though, that you will design a great Web site or direct a powerful movie or lead a breakthrough product development if you understand the status quo better than anyone else. Beginner’s luck is dramatically overrated. Emotional

The sound was still off. In the movie, the girl and the woman had gotten into a car and were driving somewhere. They were still arguing. I watched their mouths without anu sound coming out. And the more I watched them, the more I thought that that's exactly how most people are. They move their mouths, but nothing important comes out. They just talk and talk and talk. That's what Cat Poop wants me to do: talk. But like I keep telling him, there's nothing to say. "Suicide Notes

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

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

love is sharing a banana split. and letting you have the last spring roll. it’s reminding me that i need to wake up early tomorrow. and staying up until i fall asleep. love is driving me to the airport. bringing takeout when you pick me up. love is grabbing your hand on a roller coaster. or during a scary movie. love is asking if you need a jacket. it’s feeling sad for me when i’m sad. love is knowing your favorite pizza toppings. love is surprise notes. love is being honest. love is showing up. love is all of it.

Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and the profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive.

Like a lot of lawyers in the party, my father combined uncritical devotion to the imaginary Soviet Union in his head with a passion for rights and the Constitution straight out of the ACLU charter. If you want to be cynical about it, you could say their commitment to civil liberties was just a self-serving tactic, but I think it was more that their minds ran on parallel tracks and they believed what they believed while they were believing it. They were like Christians who put their faith in both miracles and surgery.

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick. The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15). Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own. We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us. The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution. We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time. The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts. We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence. We are indeed in relationship to all that is.

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. In the movies there is always one with red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away. I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. In the movies there is always one with red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all the away. He power is her own. She will not give it away. I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.

I imagined each experience going on in that city, the world that was taking up my chest and throat, and I wanted to experience all of them. For every person sitting on a roof top staring at the stars, every person driving out to the desert with their lover and a mattress in the back of their pickup, every adrenalin shot of stepping on a stage or movie set, every hand and breath casting music into the night, every kiss that felt like the first, every breath stealing glance, every dance, every burst of camera light, everything – I wanted to do it all. I was a moment chaser.

You know how old you have to be before you stop wanting to fuck strangers?’ said Arthur. ‘Dead, that’s how old. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t go away. You put all this energy into suppressing it and telling yourself it’s worth it because of what you get in exchange, and then one day someone brushes up against you and you’re fourteen years old again and all you want to do is go to a drive-in movie and fuck her brains out in the back seat. But you don’t do it because you’re not going to be that kind of person, so you go home, and there’s your wife, and she wears socks to bed.

Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and the profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive. To many Americans it was a mosaic that scared the shit out of them

One of Carl Jung’s notable contributions was to articulate the character of the shadow archetype: it is what the self is and includes, but denies and represses. Though it is repressed, the shadow will be heard and is invariably projected in harmful and perhaps insidious ways. Our mistreatment of animals for food is far and away our greatest cultural shadow. Our collective guilt drives us not only to hide the violence we eat but also to act it out: in our aggressive lifestyle, in movies, books, games, and other media, and in the violence we inflict both directly and indirectly on each other.

You’re different.” “Different how?” “I talk to you,” he replied. “And I like talking to you. That’s rare for me.” My shoulders relaxed just a little, and he nuzzled my ear again, making me tremble. “And I want it to be special,” he continued. “I want to take you to movies and hang out and go for drives and sit you on my lap like this whenever I want. And when we’re ready, we’ll take a long drive down to the inlet and to my family’s boathouse, and I’ll go slow with you.” His whisper caressed my ear, sending chills down my body. “Taking my time where no one can interrupt us. Taking all night.

So in the long run, it didn't matter at all if you had bee good or not. The girls in high school who had "gone all the way" had not wound up living in back alleys in shame and disgrace, like she thought they would; they wound up happy or unhappily married, just like the rest of them. So all the struggle to stay pure, the fear of being touched, the fear of driving a boy mad with passion by any gesture, and the ultimate fear - getting pregnant - all that wasted energy was for nothing. Now, movie stars were having children out of wedlock by the dozen and naming them names like Moonbeam or Sunfeather.

the club had provided for music was a lone pianist who had no idea what kind of piece might accompany such an exotic dance. Bloom thought a moment, hummed a tune, then plinked it out on the keyboard one note at a time: Over the next century this tune and its variations would be deployed in a succession of mostly cheesy movies, typically as an accompaniment to the sinuous emergence of a cobra from a basket. It would also drive the schoolyard lyric, “And they wear no pants in the southern part of France.” Bloom regretted his failure to copyright the tune. The royalties would have run into the millions.

Checking out shoes when looking for Lesbians is an elimination device, a negative marker. Lesbians wear sensible shoes whenever possible. Irene and I have learned to pass right by a woman who looks like a Lesbian from head to ankle, but wears flimsy shoes with pointed toes and heels. She is sure to mention a husband by her second sentence. So, what does a Lesbian look like? Well, we saw two old women drive into a campground in a large motorhome. One dog and no men accompanied them. These are Lesbian-positive clues. We seldom see old women in campgrounds unless they are accompanied by old men. They walked the dog, each wearing a long “ladies” winter coat and lipstick. We casually intercepted them. “Nice dog,” says Irene. The dog growled. We mentioned the movie about nuclear war on TV the night before. “They should go to Russia. Show it to the Communists,” they angrily replied. We walked on. If they were Lesbians, I did not want to know. “Not Lesbians,” pronounced my expert. “There are Lesbians who wear ‘ladies’ coats and Lesbians who wear lipstick. There are even Lesbians who prefer nuclear war to “Godless Communism”; but Lesbians would not let their dog growl at a woman without correcting it.

Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's been exalted, from the Bible through Homer and Virgil right down to Humbert Hemingway. Have you ever heard of a John Wayne movie being censored? did you ever see them take war books off the bookstands? They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. Look at the rules! You can have sex if you're married, and you have to marry a person of the opposite gender, the same color and religion, an age close to your own, of the right social and economic background, even the right height, for God's sake, or else everybody gets up in arms, they disinherit you or threaten not to come to the wedding or they make nasty cracks behind your back. Or worse, if you cross color or gender lines. And once you're married, you're supposed to do only certain things when you make love: the others all have nasty names. When after all, sex itself, in itself, is harmless, and aggression is harmful. Sex never hurt anyone.

Remember this. The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact. So don't fuck with us.

She was coming over to my place and instead of us hanging with my knucklehead boys—me smoking, her bored out of her skull—we were seeing movies. Driving out to different places to eat. Even caught a play at the Crossroads and I took her picture with some bigwig black playwrights, pictures where she’s smiling so much you’d think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge. We were a couple again. Visiting each other’s family on the weekends. Eating breakfast at diners hours before anybody else was up, rummaging through the New Brunswick library together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money. A nice rhythm we had going.

system,” he explained to Time. “We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guys can’t do.” Apple’s first integrated foray into the digital hub strategy was video. With FireWire, you could get your video onto your Mac, and with iMovie you could edit it into a masterpiece. Then what? You’d want to burn some DVDs so you and your friends could watch it on a TV. “So we spent a lot of time working with the drive manufacturers to get a consumer drive that could burn a DVD,” he said. “We were the first to ever ship that.” As usual Jobs focused on making the product as simple as possible for the user,

Leaving Forever My son can look me level in the eyes now, and does, hard, when I tell him he cannot watch chainsaw murders at the midnight movie, that he must bend his mind to Biology, under this roof, in the clear light of a Tensor lamp. Outside, his friends throb with horsepower under the moon. He stands close, milk sour on his breath, gauging the heat of my conviction, eye-whites pink from his new contacts. He can see me better than before. And I can see myself in those insolent eyes, mostly head in the pupil's curve, closed in by the contours of his unwrinkled flesh. At the window he waves a thin arm and his buddies squall away in a glare of tail lights. I reach out my arm to his shoulder, but he shrugs free and shows me my father's narrow eyes, the trembling hand at my throat, the hard wall at the back of my skull, the raised fist framed in the bedroom window I had climbed through at three A.M. "If you hit me I'll leave forever," I said. But everything was fine in a few days, fine. "I would have come back," I said, "false teeth and all." Now, twice a year after the long drive, in the yellow light of the front porch, I breathe in my father's whiskey, ask for a shot, and see myself distorted in his thick glasses, the two of us grinning, as he holds me with both hands at arm's length.

They really haven’t told you anything about the future, have they? This is my phone.” “A phone. You use it as a phone. You carry around a device that’s the size of a deck of cards and is more powerful than a Cray supercomputer, and you use it as a phone?” “I also play games on it, and watch a movie occasionally.” “You can watch movies on that?” “Not many. I mean, I only have a sixteen-gig memory card in it.” Phillip muttered, almost to himself, “My Commodore has sixty-four kilobytes of memory and a floppy drive that stores one hundred and seventy K. You can double that, but you have to cut a notch in the disk.” Then, loud and clear, Phillip said, “I kind of hate you right now.

She seemed nice, but she was most likely one of those American women whose knowledge of Africa was based largely on movies and National Geographic and thirdhand information from someone who knew someone who had been to somewhere on the continent, usually Kenya or South Africa. Whenever Jende met such women (at Liomi’s school; at Marcus Garvey Park; in the livery cab he used to drive), they often said something like, oh my God, I saw this really crazy show about such-and-such in Africa. Or, my cousin/friend/neighbor used to date an African man, and he was a really nice guy. Or, even worse, if they asked him where in Africa he was from and he said Cameroon, they proceeded to tell him that a friend’s daughter once went to Tanzania or Uganda. This comment used to irk him until Winston gave him the perfect response: Tell them your friend’s uncle lives in Toronto. Which was what he now did every time someone mentioned some other African country in response to him saying he was from Cameroon. Oh yeah, he would say in response to something said about Senegal, I watched a show the other day about San Antonio. Or, one day I hope to visit Montreal. Or, I hear Miami is a nice city. And every time he did this, he cracked up inside as the Americans’ faces scrunched up in confusion because they couldn’t understand what Toronto/San Antonio/Montreal/Miami had to do with New York.

The sun was just dipping below the western horizon when we pulled up to our little house on the prairie. Despite the obvious turmoil I knew was swarming in the periphery, I couldn’t help but instantly smile when I saw our little home. Home, I thought to myself--a strange response, considering I’d never spent a night there. But, being back there, I felt the heartbeat of our love affair that had started on that very ranch, the drives we’d taken, the dinners we’d cooked, the nights we’d spent watching submarine movies on his old leather couch, which Marlboro Man had already moved to our new little house so we’d be able to enjoy it immediately. Poor couch. It must have been awfully lonely without us.

To discover why canned laughter is so effective, we first need to understand the nature of yet another potent weapon of influence: the principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct. The principle applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes correct behavior. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it. Whether the question is what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theater, how fast to drive on a certain stretch of highway, or how to eat the chicken at a dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important in defining the answer.

As it baked, the blessed casserole smelled just like it did when I was a child, which was likely the last time I’d eaten it. I marveled that the scent of a specific dish could remain in one’s consciousness for over two decades. Except for the dark brown hair and the crumbling marriage, I’d officially become my mother. Marlboro Man, happy to have something warm to eat, declared it the best thing he’d ever eaten. I looked at the mess in the kitchen and felt like moving. Marlboro Man and I watched movies that night. Our TV satellite hadn’t been hooked up yet, so he’d transported his movie collection and VCR from his old house. And I didn’t have to get up and drive home when they were over, because I already was home.

Cam looked away, laughing under his breath. "Okay. How about Wednesday?" "This Wednesday?" "Nope." "The following Wednesday?" "Yep." Counting the days down, I ended up frowning. "Wait. That's the Wednesday before Thanksgiving." "It is." I stared at him. "Cam, arn't you going home?" "I am." "When? After the movies, in the middle of the night, or Thanksgiving morning?" He shook his head. "See, the drive-in movie theater is just outside of my hometown. About ten miles out." I leaned back against the couch, confused."I don't understand." Cam finished the hot chocolate and twisted toward me. He scooted over so only a handful of inches seperated us. "If you go on this date with me, you're going to have to go home with me.

Driving home that night, I felt so much better. I was no longer a freak of nature--the kind of freak that spends every waking hour with a man for months on end but has some sort of bizarre mental defect that prevents her from articulating her feelings for him--the kind of freak that allows the man to express his love time after time but gives nothing in return. I felt good about it, too, that I’d had the uncharacteristic boldness to tell him I loved him before he’d had a chance to say it to me first that night. I wanted to say I love you, not I love you, too. I knew there was a reason I liked submarine movies. I had no idea where our relationship was headed. But I did know that I meant what I’d said. I slept like a baby that night.

What would the world be like if women stopped being women—shut the tea-and-sympathy shop, closed down the love store, gave up the slave religion? Could the world go on without romantic love, all iron fist, no velvet glove? The Germans thought Nietzsche was great, and look what it got them. And yet, in the end, nobody loves a victim, even—especially—the other victims. “Down among the women,” as Fay Weldon wrote, back when she still was one. “What a place to be!” Now she writes books telling women to fake orgasms because nature has designed them to hardly ever have them and why make a man feel bad about something that isn’t his fault? In other words, practice the slave religion; just don’t believe in it yourself. But why would anyone do that if they can buy their own shoes?

personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is

And then Vane’s violet eye turns black. I stumble back. He advances on me. “Vane,” Bash says. Vane grabs me by the back of the neck and drives me into the island, bending me over the counter, forcing my face to the cool stone. I huff out a breath as he presses against my ass and leans over me, his voice at my ear. “Do you want to know what I do to pretty little girls like you?” His voice is rough and rumbling, the kind of voice you only hear in horror movies coming out of the throats of monsters. The terror slithers up my back, across my shoulders. I can’t stop the whimper from coming out of my throat. “Vane,” Bash says again. Vane is hard at my ass, digging into me and my heart leaps, tangling with the pulsing terror. I’m scared out of my mind and turned on more than I should be and I don’t know what that says about me.

Six horses died in a tractor-trailer fire. There. That's the hard part. I wanted to tell you straight away so we could grieve together. So many sad things, that's just one on a long recent list that loops and elongates in the chest, in the diaphragm, in the alveoli. What is it they say, heartsick or downhearted? I picture a heart lying down on the floor of the torso, pulling up the blankets over its head, thinking the pain will go on forever (even though it won't). The heart is watching Lifetime movies and wishing, and missing all the good parts of her that she has forgotten. The heart is so tired of beating herself up, she wants to stop it still, but also she wants the blood to return, wants to bring in the thrill and wind of the ride, the fast pull of life driving underneath her. What the heart wants? The heart wants her horses back.

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company.

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This

Maybe I’m not cut out for monogamy,” G. had said to me early on. “Maybe I should just live in a room by myself and have girlfriends.” Another woman might have said, “Now, where did I put my coat?” Being a madly infatuated rationalist who had read her Simone de Beauvoir, I took a deep breath and carefully and calmly explained that of course he had to make up his own mind about how he wanted to live, and that I understood fidelity wasn’t for everyone, that some people could be perfectly happy without it, but I wanted to give my whole self in love and I couldn’t do that if I was being compared to other women on a daily basis (which I was) or if our relationship was only tentative and provisional (which it was). “Sweetie!” he said when I finished. “I love it that you can say how you feel without getting angry at me.” That other woman would have slammed the door behind her before he’d finished speaking. They say philanderers are attractive to women because of the thrill of the chase—you want to be the one to capture and tame that wild quarry. But what if a deeper truth is that women fall for such men because they want to be those men? Autonomous, in charge, making their own rules. Imagine that room G. spoke of, in which the women would come and go—is there not something attractive about it? Rain tapping softly on the tin ceiling, a desk, a lamp, a bed. A woman dashes up the narrow stairs, her raincoat flaring, her wet face lifted up like a flower. And then, the next day—maybe even the same day—different footsteps, another expectant face. I had to admit, it was an exciting scenario. You wouldn’t want to be one of the women trooping up and down the staircase, but you might want to be the man who lived in the room.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

When she finally reached it, she bent forward and looked through the peephole. Jay was grinning back at her from outside. Her heart leaped for a completely different reason. She set aside her crutches and quickly unbolted the door to open it. "What took you so long?" Her knee was bent and her ankle pulled up off the ground. She balanced against the doorjamb. "What d'you think, dumbass?" she retorted smartly, keeping her voice down so she wouldn't alert her parents. "You scared the crap out of me, by the way. My parents are already in bed, and I was all alone down here." "Good!" he exclaimed as he reached in and grabbed her around the waist, dragging her up against him and wrapping his arms around her. She giggled while he held her there, enjoying everything about the feel of him against her. "What are you doing here? I thought I wouldn't see you till tomorrow." "I wanted to show you something!" He beamed at her, and his enthusiasm reached out to capture her in its grip. She couldn't help smiling back excitedly. "What is it?" she asked breathlessly. He didn't release her; he just turned, still holding her gently in his arms, so that she could see out into the driveway. The first thing she noticed was the officer in his car, alert now as he kept a watchful eye on the two of them. Violet realized that it was late, already past eleven, and from the look on his face, she thought he must have been hoping for a quiet, uneventful evening out there. And then she saw the car. It was beautiful and sleek, painted a glossy black that, even in the dark, reflected the light like a polished mirror. Violet recognized the Acura insignia on the front of the hood, and even though she could tell it wasn't brand-new, it looked like it had been well taken care of. "Whose is it?" she asked admiringly. It was way better than her crappy little Honda. Jay grinned again, his face glowing with enthusiasm. "It's mine. I got it tonight. That's why I had to go. My mom had the night off, and I wanted to get it before..." He smiled down at her. "I didn't want to borrow your car to take you to the dance." "Really?" she breathed. "How...? I didn't even know you were..." She couldn't seem to find the right words; she was envious and excited for him all at the same time. "I know right?" he answered, as if she'd actually asked coherent questions. "I've been saving for...for forever, really. What do you think?" Violet smiled at him, thinking that he was entirely too perfect for her. "I think it's beautiful," she said with more meaning than he understood. And then she glanced back at the car. "I had no idea that you were getting a car. I love it, Jay," she insisted, wrapping her arms around his neck as he hoisted her up, cradling her like a small child." "I'd offer to take you for a test-drive, but I'm afraid that Supercop over there would probably Taser me with his stun gun. So you'll have to wait until tomorrow," he said, and without waiting for an invitation he carried her inside, dead bolting the door behind him. He settled down on the couch, where she'd been sitting by herself just moments before, without letting her go. There was a movie on the television, but neither of them paid any attention to it as Jay reclined, stretching out and drawing her down into the circle of his arms. They spent the rest of the night like that, cradled together, their bodies fitting each other perfectly, as they kissed and whispered and laughed quietly in the darkness. At some point Violet was aware that she was drifting into sleep, as her thoughts turned dreamlike, becoming disjointed and fuzzy and hard to hold on to. She didn't fight it; she enjoyed the lazy, drifting feeling, along with the warmth created by the cocoon of Jay's body wrapped protectively around her. It was the safest she'd felt in days...maybe weeks... And for the first time since she'd been chased by the man in the woods, her dreams were free from monsters.

Why don't you ask me up for a drink?" "A drink? There's not much of a variety, but you're welcome." "It's nice to be asked occasionally." Before he could tuck his hand safely in his pocket, she took it, threaded their fingers together. "You have free time now and again yourself," she said easily. "I wonder if you've heard of the concept of dates. Dinner, movies, drives?" "I've some experience with them," He glanced at his pickup as they turned his quarters. "It you've a yen for a drive, you can climb up into the lorry, but I'd need to shovel it out first." She huffed out a breath. "That, Donnelly, wasn't the most romantic of invitations." "Secondhand lorries aren't particularly romantic, and I've forgotten where I parked my glass coach." "If that's another princess crack-" She broke off,set her teeth. Patience, she reminded herself. She wasn't going to spoil things with an argument. "Never mind.We'll forget the drive." She opened the door herself. "And move straight to dinner.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew that the main house was about a quarter mile up the drive. I could leave my car here and walk it. See what’s what. But what would be the point? I hadn’t been up here in six years. The retreat probably sold the land, and the new owner probably craved privacy. That might explain all this. Still it didn’t feel right. What would be the harm, I thought, in going up and knocking on the door of the main house? Then again, the thick chain and no trespassing signs were not exactly welcome mats. I was still trying to decide what to do when a Kraftboro police cruiser pulled up next to me. Two officers got out. One was short and stocky with bloated gym muscles. The other was tall and thin with slicked-back hair and the small mustache of a guy in a silent movie. Both wore aviator sunglasses, so you couldn’t see their eyes. Short and Stocky hitched up his pants a bit and said, “Can I help you?” They both gave me hard stares. Or at least I think they were hard stares. I mean, I couldn’t see their eyes. “I

Our relationship quickly grew. I was living in Long Beach at the time; Chris was in San Diego. Conservatively speaking, that’s a two-hour drive. But Chris drove it often. He’d get off work, hop in his pickup, and be at my condo before dark. And not just on the weekends: he often rose before the sun to get to work in Coronado Beach. We’d go out to eat, maybe take in a movie, play miniature golf, bowl, see friends--the usual date stuff. But our most fun was just hanging out together. I pinned a picture of Chris up near my desk. (It’s the profile picture on his Facebook page, if you’re interested.) Under it, I taped a quote that went along the lines of: Life is not about the number of breaths you take; it’s the moments that take your breath away. Chris was all about those breathtaking moments--riding broncs in the rodeo, jumping out of planes. He worked hard and played hard--but was just as likely to relax completely, sitting comfortably on the couch with a beer or whatever as he took it easy. It was a paradox; I loved both sides.

The Lord’s Plan It was getting so Norbert stopped pretending that they were going to do anything else. He didn’t warm her up. No candy for Betty. No love talk, no pretense. They didn’t go to the soda fountain or for a scenic drive or to a movie on the days it changed and they didn’t even listen to the radio once he stopped the car. He just got down to business. And this was not all right with Betty, although she was fine about jumping into the backseat with him. One night, she managed to slow him down, it was going well, and in fact she was becoming very hot and happy, when the car door opened and Norbert shot right out. He had been squeezed up against the door, his head pressed to the window as he labored away above. The door had unfortunately opened as he withdrew from her and thrust himself up between her breasts. He skidded off her body and flailed his way belly down onto the slick road. Betty thought the latch had popped by itself until someone outside said, “Could I have a minute of your time to tell you about the Lord’s plan for your soul?

Waste of what?” “Of you! It seems degrading. Forgive me for saying that. I’ve seen those African movies. The lion makes a kill and then clever animals come in and grab something and run. You’re so bright, Trav, and so intuitive about people. And you have … the gift of tenderness. And sympathy. You could be almost anything.” “Of course!” I said, springing to my feet and beginning to pace back and forth through the lounge. “Why didn’t I think of that! Here I am, wasting the golden years on this lousy barge, getting all mixed up with lame-duck women when I could be out there seeking and striving. Who am I to keep from putting my shoulder to the wheel? Why am I not thinking about an estate and how to protect it? Gad, woman, I could be writing a million dollars a year in life insurance. I should be pulling a big oar in the flagship of life. Maybe it isn’t too late yet! Find the little woman, and go for the whole bit. Kiwanis, P.T.A., fund drives, cookouts, a clean desk, and vote the straight ticket, yessiree bob. Then when I become a senior citizen, I can look back upon …

Many potential readers will skip the shopping cart or cash-out clerk because they have seen so many disasters reported in the news that they’ve acquired a panic mentality when they think of them. “Disasters scare me to death!” they cry. “I don’t want to read about them!” But really, how can a picture hurt you? Better that each serve as a Hallmark card that greets your fitful fevers with reason and uncurtains your valor. Then, so gospeled, you may see that defeating a disaster is as innocently easy as deciding to go out to dinner. Remove the dread that bars your doors of perception, and you will enjoy a banquet of treats that will make the difference between suffering and safety. You will enter a brave new world that will erase your panic, and release you from the grip of terror, and relieve you of the deadening effects of indifference —and you will find that switch of initiative that will energize your intelligence, empower your imagination, and rouse your sense of vigilance in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. Indeed, just thinking about a disaster is one of the best things you can do —because it allows you to imagine how you would respond in a way that is free of pain and destruction. Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Wit­ness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing. Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.

The best entrepreneurs don’t just follow Moore’s Law; they anticipate it. Consider Reed Hastings, the cofounder and CEO of Netflix. When he started Netflix, his long-term vision was to provide television on demand, delivered via the Internet. But back in 1997, the technology simply wasn’t ready for his vision—remember, this was during the era of dial-up Internet access. One hour of high-definition video requires transmitting 40 GB of compressed data (over 400 GB without compression). A standard 28.8K modem from that era would have taken over four months to transmit a single episode of Stranger Things. However, there was a technological innovation that would allow Netflix to get partway to Hastings’s ultimate vision—the DVD. Hastings realized that movie DVDs, then selling for around $ 20, were both compact and durable. This made them perfect for running a movie-rental-by-mail business. Hastings has said that he got the idea from a computer science class in which one of the assignments was to calculate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes driving across the country! This was truly a case of technological innovation enabling business model innovation. Blockbuster Video had built a successful business around buying VHS tapes for around $ 100 and renting them out from physical stores, but the bulky, expensive, fragile tapes would never have supported a rental-by-mail business.

Outlawing drugs in order to solve drug problems is much like outlawing sex in order to win the war against AIDS. We recognize that people will continue to have sex for nonreproductive reasons despite the laws and mores. Therefore, we try to make sexual practices as safe as possible in order to minimize the spread of the AIDS viruses. In a similar way, we continually try to make our drinking water, foods, and even our pharmaceutical medicines safer. The ubiquity of chemical intoxicants in our lives is undeniable evidence of the continuing universal need for safer medicines with such applications. While use may not always be for an approved medical purpose, or prudent, or even legal, it is fulfilling the relentless drive we all have to change the way we feel, to alter our behavior and consciousness, and, yes, to intoxicate ourselves. We must recognize that intoxicants are medicines, treatments for the human condition. Then we must make them as safe and risk free and as healthy as possible. Dream with me for a moment. What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe intoxicants? I mean drugs that delivered the same effects as our most popular ones but never caused dependency, disease, dysfunction, or death. Imagine an alcohol-type substance that never caused addiction, liver disease, hangovers, impaired driving, or workplace problems. Would you care to inhale a perfumed mist that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco but as harmless as clean air? How would you like a pain-killer as effective as morphine but safer than aspirin, a mood enhancer that dissolves on your tongue and is more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine, a tranquilizer less addicting than Valium and more relaxing than a martini, or a safe sleeping pill that allows you to choose to dream or not? Perhaps you would like to munch on a user friendly hallucinogen that is as brief and benign as a good movie? This is not science fiction. As described in the following pages, there are such intoxicants available right now that are far safer than the ones we currently use. If smokers can switch from tobacco cigarettes to nicotine gum, why can’t crack users chew a cocaine gum that has already been tested on animals and found to be relatively safe? Even safer substances may be just around the corner. But we must begin by recognizing that there is a legitimate place in our society for intoxication. Then we must join together in building new, perfectly safe intoxicants for a world that will be ready to discard the old ones like the junk they really are. This book is your guide to that future. It is a field guide to that silent spring of intoxicants and all the animals and peoples who have sipped its waters. We can no more stop the flow than we can prevent ourselves from drinking. But, by cleaning up the waters we can leave the morass that has been the endless war on drugs and step onto the shores of a healthy tomorrow. Use this book to find the way.

Is this a date? Are you on a date with him? And who the hell’s car is this?” Before I can answer, Genevieve makes a move toward me, which I dodge. I run behind the pillar. “Don’t be such a baby, Lara Jean,” she says. “Just accept that you lose and I win!” I peek from behind the pillar, and John is giving me a look--a look that says, Get in. Quickly I nod. Then he throws open the passenger door, and I run for it, as fast as I can. I’ve barely got the door closed before he’s driving off, Peter and Gen in our dust. I turn back to look. Peter is staring after us, his mouth open. He’s jealous, and I’m glad. “Thanks for the save,” I say, still trying to catch my breath. My heart is pounding in my chest so hard. John is looking straight ahead, a broad smile on his face. “Anytime.” We stop at a stoplight, and he turns his head and looks at me, and then we’re looking at each other, laughing like crazy, and I’m breathless again. “Did you see the looks on their faces?” John gasps, dropping his head on the steering wheel. “It was classic!” “Like a movie!” He grins at me, jubilant, blue eyes alight. “Just like a movie,” I agree, leaning my head back against the seat and opening my eyes wide up at the moon, so wide it hurts. I’m in a red Mustang convertible sitting next to a boy in uniform, and the night air feels like cool satin on my skin, and all the stars are out, and I’m happy. The way John is still grinning to himself, I know he is too. We got to play make-believe for the night.

We did the dishes and talked--about the cattle business, about my job back in L.A., about his local small town, about family. Then we adjourned to the sofa to watch an action movie, pausing occasionally to remind each other once again of the reason God invented lips. Curiously, though, while sexy and smoldering, Marlboro Man kept his heavy breathing to a minimum. This surprised me. He was not only masculine and manly, he lived in the middle of nowhere--one might expect that because of the dearth of women within a twenty-mile range, he’d be more susceptible than most to getting lost in a heated moment. But he wasn’t. He was a gentleman through and through--a sizzling specimen of a gentleman who was singlehandedly introducing me to a whole new universe of animal attraction, but a gentleman, nonetheless. And though my mercury was rising rapidly, his didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He walked me to my car as the final credits rolled, offering to follow me all the way home if I wanted. “Oh, no,” I said. “I can get home, no problem.” I’d lived in L.A. for years; it’s not like driving alone at night bothered me. I started my car and watched him walk back toward his front door, admiring every last thing about him. He turned around and waved, and as he walked inside I felt, more than ever, that I was in big trouble. What was I doing? Why was I here? I was getting ready to move to Chicago--home of the Cubs and Michigan Avenue and the Elevated Train. Why had I allowed myself to stick my toe in this water? And why did the water have to feel so, so good?

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

Being raised evangelical in the Midwest gave me a personal experience of the phenomenon called “religious fundamentalism.” A story illustrates. When I was a boy in high school, I was interested in a girl from our church. It was an evangelical church, although some might have called it a bit fundamentalist—taking a hard line on cultural issues. But I took a chance and invited her to a movie, which was certainly frowned upon back then in our church culture (though my own parents snuck us out to Walt Disney movies at the drive-in, where we were unlikely to be spotted). I chose The Sound of Music, thinking it was “safe.” Who could object to Julie Andrews, I confidently thought? I was wrong. As we left the house, my girlfriend’s father stood in the doorway, blocking our exit, and said to his daughter, “If you go to this film, you’ll be trampling on everything that we’ve taught you to believe.” She fled downstairs to her bedroom in tears. We missed the movie, and the evening was a disaster. A year later, the fundamentalist father watched The Sound of Music on his television—and liked it. Fundamentalism is essentially a revolt against modernity. It is a reaction usually based on profound fear and defensiveness against “losing the faith.” My girlfriend’s father instinctively knew that his religion should make him different than the world. That is a fair religious point, and to be honest, there is much about modernity that deserves some revolting against. But I wish he had chosen to break with America at the point of its materialism, racism, poverty, or violence. Instead, he chose Julie Andrews.

Kenilworth, Mountainside, Scotch Plains, Dunellen... they themselves seemed far from Jersey: names out of Waverley novels, promising vistas of castles, highland waterfalls, and meadows dotted with flocks of grazing sheep. But the signboards lied, the books had lied, the Times had lied; the land here was one vast and charmless suburb, and as the bus passed through it, speeding west across the state, Freirs saw before him only the flat grey monotony of highway, broken from time to time by gas stations, roadhouses, and shopping malls that stretched away like deserts. The bus was warm, and the ride was beginning to give him a headache. He could feel the backs of his thighs sweating through his chinos. Easing himself farther into the seat, he pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The scenery disappointed him, yet it was still an improvement over what they'd just come through. Back there, on the fringes of the city, every work of man seemed to have been given over to the automobile, in an endless line of showrooms and repair shops for mufflers, fenders, carburetors, ignitions, tires, brakes. Now at last he could make out hills in the distance and extended zones of green, though here and there the nearness of some larger town or development meant a length of highway lined by construction, billboards touting banks or amusement parks, and drive-in theaters, themselves immense blank billboards, their signs proclaiming horror movies, "family pictures," soft-core porn. A speedway announced that next Wednesday was ladies' night. Food stands offered pizzaburgers, chicken in the basket, fish 'n' chips.

I’d better go,” Marlboro Man said, leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I still grasped the diamond ring in my warm, sweaty hand. “I don’t want Mike to burst a blood vessel.” He laughed out loud, clearly enjoying it all. I tried to speak but couldn’t. I’d been rendered totally mute. Nothing could have prepared me for those ten minutes of my life. The last thing I remember, I’d awakened at eleven. Moments later, I was hiding in my bathroom, trying, in all my early-morning ugliness, to avoid being seen by Marlboro Man, who’d dropped by unexpectedly. Now I was standing on the front porch, a diamond ring in my hand. It was all completely surreal. Marlboro Man turned to leave. “You can give me your answer later,” he said, grinning, his Wranglers waving good-bye to me in the bright noonday sun. But then it all came flashing across my line of sight. The boots in the bar, the icy blue-green eyes, the starched shirt, the Wranglers…the first date, the long talks, my breakdown in his kitchen, the movies, the nights on his porch, the kisses, the long drives, the hugs…the all-encompassing, mind-numbing passion I felt. It played frame by frame in my mind in a steady stream. “Hey,” I said, walking toward him and effortlessly sliding the ring on my finger. I wrapped my arms around his neck as his arms, instinctively, wrapped around my waist and raised me off the ground in our all-too-familiar pose. “Yep,” I said effortlessly. He smiled and hugged me tightly. Mike, once again, laid on the horn, oblivious to what had just happened. Marlboro Man said nothing more. He simply kissed me, smiled, then drove my brother to the mall.

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities. For decades, we have been fascinated by the idea that we can use computers to help educate people. What connects these science fiction narratives is that they all imagined computers might eventually emulate what we view as intelligence. Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality. In 1962, the checkers master Robert Nealey played the game against an IBM 7094 computer, and the computer beat him. A few years prior, in 1957, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt created Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, a computer simulation of a collection of neurons and synapses trained to perform certain tasks. In the decades following such innovations in early AI, we had the computation power to tackle systems only as complex as the brain of an earthworm or insect. We also had limited techniques and data to train these networks. The technology has come a long way in the ensuing decades, driving some of the most common products and apps today, from the recommendation engines on movie streaming services to voice-controlled personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. AI has gotten so good at mimicking human behavior that oftentimes we cannot distinguish between human and machine responses. Meanwhile, not only has the computation power developed enough to tackle systems approaching the complexity of the human brain, but there have been significant breakthroughs in structuring and training these neural networks.

Write your routine, Ronan. Now. While I watch. I want to see it." 7:45 A.M.: The most important meal of the day. 8:00 A.M.: Feed animals. 9:30 A.M.: Repair barns or house. 12:00 P.M.: Lunch @ that weird gas station. 1:30 P.M.: Ronan Lynch's marvelous dream emporium. "What does this one mean, Ronan?" It meant practice makes perfect. It meant ten thousand hours to mastery, if at first you don't succeed, there is no try only do. Ronan had spent hours over the last year dreaming ever more complex and precise objects into being, culminating in an intricate security system that rendered the Barns largely impossible to find unless you knew exactly where you were going. After Cambridge, though, it felt like all the fun had run out of the game. "I don't ask what you do at work, Declan." 6:00 P.M.: Drive around. 7:15 P.M.: Nuke some dinner, yo. 7:30 P.M.: Movie time. 11:00 P.M.: Text Parrish. Adam's most recent text had said simply: $4200. It was the amount Ronan had to send to cover the dorm room repairs. *11:30 P.M.: Go to bed. *Saturday/Sunday: Church/DC *Monday: Laundry & Grocery *Tuesday: Text or call Gansey These last items were in Declan's handwriting, his addendums subtly suggesting all the components of a fulfilling grown-up life Ronan had missed when crafting it. They only served to depress Ronan more. Look how you can predict the next forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, look how you can predict the rest of your life. The entire word routine depressed Ronan. The sameness. Fuck everything. Gansey texted: Declan told me to tell you to get out of bed. Ronan texted back: why He watched the morning light move over the varied black-gray shapes in his bedroom. Shelves of model cars; an open Uilleann pipes case; an old scuffed desk with a stuffed whale on it; a metal tree with wondrously intricate branches; heaps of laundry curled around beet-read wood shavings. Gansey texted back: don't make me get on a plane I'm currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon

I hung up the phone after saying good night to Marlboro Man, this isolated cowboy who hadn’t had the slightest probably picking up the phone to say “I miss you.” I shuddered at the thought of how long I’d gone without it. And judging from the electrical charges searing through every cell of my body, I realized just how fundamental a human need it really is. It was as fundamental a human need, I would learn, as having a sense of direction in the dark. I suddenly realized I was lost on the long dirt road, more lost than I’d ever been before. The more twists and turns I took in my attempt to find my bearings, the worse my situation became. It was almost midnight, and it was cold, and each intersection looked like the same one repeating over and over. I found myself struck with an illogical and indescribable panic--the kind that causes you to truly believe you’ll never, ever escape from where you are, even though you almost always will. As I drove, I remembered every horror movie I’d ever watched that had taken place in a rural setting. Children of the Corn. The children of the corn were lurking out there in the tall grass, I just knew it. Friday the 13th. Sure, it had taken place at a summer camp, but the same thing could happen on a cattle ranch. And The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Oh no. I was dead. Leatherface was coming--or even worse, his freaky, emaciated, misanthropic brother. I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel.

July 8, 2013 Review of Bargain with the Devil Author: Gloria Gravitt Moulder My interest in the death of Margaret Mitchell was sparked as a young child growing up in Georgia. I was born in 1953, 4 years after her death. Older relatives, neighbors and friends would sit around discussing her death as I was growing up and with the inquisitive mind of a young child; I found what they were saying interesting enough to listen in. They talked about how the taxi cab driver, Hugh Gravitt, (some of which knew him as this was a small southern town where everyone knew everyone) was not a drinker because of his health and how the newspaper articles had written he was drunk and speeding when it wasn’t true. I overheard many things about how the media was wrong regarding the circumstances of her death. Some speculated she committed suicide; others suspected her husband pushed her in front of the car Mr. Gravitt was driving. All commented that both Margaret and John were drunk and jaywalking across Peachtree Street. I read the book (Gone with the Wind) when I was 13 and went to see the movie in 1969 at the Fox theatre with friends. I cannot relate how this impacted me. I became interested in all I heard as a child again and over the years have read many articles on the subject of Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh. I never believed the stories about Hugh Gravitt being at fault in her death as a result of all those conversations I had overheard by my elders as a child. Gloria Gravitt Moulder, the daughter of Hugh Gravitt, has written the perfect book called “Bargain with the Devil” with facts derived from her own father on his death bed. I could not put this book down; I read it in one day. It has confirmed everything I heard from people who suspected in the few years after Margaret Mitchell’s death what actually happened. Thank you Mrs. Moulder, for your courage in bringing your father’s version to light after all his suffering from 1949 to his death. Also, for confirming my beliefs in what I heard growing up as this was only suspicion until I read about your father’s version. Kathy Whiten 621 Brighton Drive Lawrenceville, GA 30043 404-516-0623

When Musk took delivery of his F1, CNN was there to cover it. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor,” he told the camera sheepishly, “and now obviously, I’ve got a million-dollar car… it’s just a moment in my life.” While other McLaren F1 owners around the world—the sultan of Brunei, Wyclef Jean, and Jay Leno, among others—could comfortably afford it, Musk’s purchase had put a sizable dent in his bank account. And unlike other owners, Musk drove the car to work—and declined to insure it. As Musk drove Thiel up Sand Hill Road in the F1, the car was the subject of their chat. “It was like this Hitchcock movie,” Thiel remembered, “where we’re talking about the car for fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be preparing for the meeting—and we’re talking about the car.” During their ride, Thiel looked at Musk and reportedly asked, “So, what can this thing do?” “Watch this,” Musk replied, flooring the accelerator and simultaneously initiating a lane change on Sand Hill Road. In retrospect, Musk admitted that he was outmatched by the F1. “I didn’t really know how to drive the car,” he recalled. “There’s no stability systems. No traction control. And the car gets so much power that you can break the wheels free at even fifty miles an hour.” Thiel recalls the car in front of them coming fast into view—then Musk swerving to avoid it. The McLaren hit an embankment, was tossed into the air—“like a discus,” Musk remembered——then slammed violently into the ground. “The people that saw it happen thought we were going to die,” he recalled. Thiel had not worn a seat belt, but astonishingly, neither he nor Musk were hurt. Musk’s “work of art” had not fared as well, having now taken a distinctly cubist turn. Post-near-death experience, Thiel dusted himself off on the side of the road and hitchhiked to the Sequoia offices, where he was joined by Musk a short while later. X.com’s CEO, Bill Harris, was also waiting at the Sequoia office, and he recalled that both Thiel and Musk were late but offered no explanation for their delay. “They never told me,” Harris said. “We just had the meeting.” Reflecting on it, Musk found humor in the experience: “I think it’s safe to say Peter wouldn’t be driving with me again.” Thiel wrung some levity out of the moment, too. “I’d achieved lift-off with Elon,” he joked, “but not in a rocket.

Have you talked about how many children you’d like to have?” “Yes, sir,” Marlboro Man said. “And?” Father Johnson prodded. “I’d like to have six or so,” Marlboro Man answered, a virile smile spreading across his face. “And what about Ree?” Father Johnson asked. “Well, she says she’d like to have one,” Marlboro Man said, looking at me and touching my knee. “But I’m workin’ on her.” Father Johnson wrinkled his brow. “How do you and Ree resolve conflict?” “Well…,” Marlboro Man replied. “To tell you the truth, we haven’t really had much conflict to speak of. We get along pretty darn well.” Father Johnson looked over his glasses. “I’m sure you can think of something.” He wanted some dirt. Marlboro Man tapped his boot on the sterile floor of Father Johnson’s study and looked His Excellence straight in the eye. “Well, she fell off her horse once when we went riding together,” he began. “And that upset her a little bit. And a while back, I dragged her to a fire with me and it got a little dicey…” Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. It was the largest “conflict” we’d had, and it had lasted fewer than twelve hours. Father Johnson looked at me. “How did you deal with that, Ree?” I froze. “Uh…uh…” I tapped my Donald Pliner mule on the floor. “I told him how I felt. And after that it was fine.” I hated every minute of this. I didn’t want to be examined. I didn’t want my relationship with Marlboro Man to be dissected with generic, one-size-fits-all questions. I just wanted to drive around in his pickup and look at pastures and curl up on the couch with him and watch movies. That had been going just fine for us--that was the nature of our relationship. But Father Johnson’s questioning was making me feel defensive, as if we were somehow neglecting our responsibility to each other if we weren’t spending every day in deep, contemplative thought about the minutiae of a future together. Didn’t a lot of that stuff just come naturally over time? Did it really serve a purpose to figure it out now? But Father Johnson’s interrogation continued: “What do you want for your children?” “Have you talked about budgetary matters?” “What role do your parents play in your life?” “Have you discussed your political preferences? Your stances on important issues? Your faith? Your religion?” And my personal favorite: “What are you both going to do, long term, to nurture each other’s creativity?” I didn’t have an answer for him there. But deep down, I knew that, somehow, gravy would come into play.

Sylphid was beginning to play professionally, and she was subbing as second harpist in the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. She was called pretty regularly, once or twice a week, and she’d also got a job playing at a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties on Friday night. Ira would drive her from the Village up to the restaurant with her harp and then go and pick her and the harp up when she finished. He had the station wagon, and he’d pull up in front of the house and go inside and have to carry it down the stairs. The harp is in its felt cover, and Ira puts one hand on the column and one hand in the sound hole at the back and he lifts it up, lays the harp on a mattress they keep in the station wagon, and drives Sylphid and the harp uptown to the restaurant. At the restaurant he takes the harp out of the car and, big radio star that he is, he carries it inside. At ten-thirty, when the restaurant is finished serving dinner and Sylphid’s ready to come back to the Village, he goes around to pick her up and the whole operation is repeated. Every Friday. He hated the physical imposition that it was—those things weigh about eighty pounds—but he did it. I remember that in the hospital, when he had cracked up, he said to me, ‘She married me to carry her daughter’s harp! That’s why the woman married me! To haul that fucking harp!’ “On those Friday night trips, Ira found he could talk to Sylphid in ways he couldn’t when Eve was around. He’d ask her about being a movie star’s child. He’d say to her, ‘When you were a little girl, when did it dawn on you that something was up, that this wasn’t the way everyone grew up?’ She told him it was when the tour buses went up and down their street in Beverly Hills. She said she never saw her parents’ movies until she was a teenager. Her parents were trying to keep her normal and so they downplayed those movies around the house. Even the rich kid’s life in Beverly Hills with the other movie stars’ kids seemed normal enough until the tour buses stopped in front of her house and she could hear the tour guide saying, ‘This is Carlton Pennington’s house, where he lives with his wife, Eve Frame.’ “She told him about the production that birthday parties were for the movie stars’ kids—clowns, magicians, ponies, puppet shows, and every child attended by a nanny in a white nurse’s uniform. At the dining table, behind every child would be a nanny. The Penningtons had their own screening room and they ran movies. Kids would come over. Fifteen, twenty kids.

The only thing I knew about pickups was this: growing up, I always inwardly mocked the couples I saw who drove around in them. The girl would be sitting in the middle seat right next to the boy, and the boy’s right arm would be around her shoulders, and his left arm would be on the wheel. I’m not sure why, but there was something about my golf course upbringing that had always caused me to recoil at this sight. Why is she sitting in the middle seat? I’d wonder. Why is it important that they press against each other as they drive down the road? Can’t they wait until they get home? I looked at it as a sign of weakness--something pitiable. They need to get a life may have even crossed my mind once or twice, as if their specific brand of public affection was somehow directly harming me. But that’s what happens to people who, by virtue of the geography of their childhood, are deprived of the opportunity to ride in pickup trucks. They become really, really judgmental about otherwise benign things. Still, every now and then, as Marlboro Man showed me the beauty of the country in his white Ford F250, I couldn’t help but wonder…had he been one of those boys in high school? I knew he’d had a serious girlfriend back in his teenage years. Julie. A beautiful girl and the love of his adolescent life, in the same way Kev had been mine. And I wondered: had Julie scooched over to the middle seat when Marlboro Man picked her up every Friday night? Had he hooked his right arm around her neck, and had she then reached her left hand up and clasped his right hand with hers? Had they then dragged Main in this position? Our hometowns had been only forty miles apart; maybe he’d brought her to my city to see a movie. Was it remotely possible I’d actually seen Marlboro Man and Julie riding around in his pickup, sitting side by side? Was it possible this man, this beautiful, miraculous, perfect man who’d dropped so magically into my life, had actually been one of the innocent recipients of my intolerant, shallow pickup-related condemnation? And if he had done it, was it something he’d merely grown out of? How come I wasn’t riding around in his middle seat? Was I supposed to initiate this? Was this expected of me? Because I probably should know early on. But wouldn’t he have gestured in that direction if he’d wanted me to move over and sit next to him? Maybe, just maybe, he’d liked those girls better than he liked me. Maybe they’d had a closeness that warranted their riding side by side in a pickup, a closeness that he and I just don’t share? Please don’t let that be the reason. I don’t like that reason. I had to ask him. I had to know.

Of course, no china--however intricate and inviting--was as seductive as my fiancé, my future husband, who continued to eat me alive with one glance from his icy-blue eyes. Who greeted me not at the door of his house when I arrived almost every night of the week, but at my car. Who welcomed me not with a pat on the arm or even a hug but with an all-enveloping, all-encompassing embrace. Whose good-night kisses began the moment I arrived, not hours later when it was time to go home. We were already playing house, what with my almost daily trips to the ranch and our five o’clock suppers and our lazy movie nights on his thirty-year-old leather couch, the same one his parents had bought when they were a newly married couple. We’d already watched enough movies together to last a lifetime. Giant with James Dean, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Reservoir Dogs, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, All Quiet on the Western Front, and, more than a handful of times, Gone With the Wind. I was continually surprised by the assortment of movies Marlboro Man loved to watch--his taste was surprisingly eclectic--and I loved discovering more and more about him through the VHS collection in his living room. He actually owned The Philadelphia Story. With Marlboro Man, surprises lurked around every corner. We were already a married couple--well, except for the whole “sleepover thing” and the fact that we hadn’t actually gotten hitched yet. We stayed in, like any married couple over the age of sixty, and continued to get to know everything about each other completely outside the realm of parties, dates, and gatherings. All of that was way too far away, anyway--a minimum hour-and-a-half drive to the nearest big city--and besides that, Marlboro Man was a fish out of water in a busy, crowded bar. As for me, I’d been there, done that--a thousand and one times. Going out and panting the town red was unnecessary and completely out of context for the kind of life we’d be building together. This was what we brought each other, I realized. He showed me a slower pace, and permission to be comfortable in the absence of exciting plans on the horizon. I gave him, I realized, something different. Different from the girls he’d dated before--girls who actually knew a thing or two about country life. Different from his mom, who’d also grown up on a ranch. Different from all of his female cousins, who knew how to saddle and ride and who were born with their boots on. As the youngest son in a family of three boys, maybe he looked forward to experiencing life with someone who’d see the country with fresh eyes. Someone who’d appreciate how miraculously countercultural, how strange and set apart it all really is. Someone who couldn’t ride to save her life. Who didn’t know north from south, or east from west. If that defined his criteria for a life partner, I was definitely the woman for the job.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

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

When I swung open the door, there he was: Marlboro Man, wearing Wranglers and a crisp white shirt and boots. And a sweet, heart-melting smile. What are you doing here? I thought. You’re supposed to be in the shower. You’re supposed to be with the sex kitten. “Hey,” he said, wasting no time in stepping through the door and winding his arms around my waist. My arms couldn’t help but drape over his strong shoulders; my lips couldn’t help but find his. He felt soft, warm, safe…and our first kiss turned into a third, and a sixth, and a seventh. It was the same kiss as the night before, when the phone call alerting him to the fire had come. My eyes remained tightly closed as I savored every second, trying to reconcile the present with the horror movie I’d imagined just moments earlier. I had no idea what was going on. At that point, I didn’t even care. “Ummmmm!!! I’m t-t-t-ttellin’!” Mike teased from the top of the stairs, just before running down and embracing Marlboro Man in a bear hug. “Hi, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, politely patting him on the back. “Mike?” I said, smiling and blinking my eyes. “Will you excuse us for a couple of minutes?” Mike obliged, giggling and oooo-ing as he walked toward the kitchen. Marlboro Man picked me up and brought my eyes to the level of his. Smiling, he said, “I’ve been trying to call you this afternoon.” “You have?” I said. I hadn’t even heard the phone ring. “I, um…I sort of took a nine-hour nap.” Marlboro Man chuckled. Oh, that chuckle. I needed it badly that night. He set my feet back down on the floor. “So…,” he teased. “You still cranky?” “Nope,” I finally answered, smiling. So, who is that woman in your house? So…what did you do all day? “Did you ever get any sleep?” So, who is that woman in your house? “Well,” he began. “I had to help Tim with something this morning, then I crashed on the couch for a few hours…it felt pretty good.” Who was the woman? What’s her name? What’s her cup size? He continued. “I would’ve slept all day, but Katie and her family showed up in the middle of my nap,” he said. “I forgot they were staying at my house tonight.” Katie. His cousin Katie. The one with the two young kids, who had probably just gone to bed when I’d called earlier. “Oh…really?” I said, my chest relaxing with a long, quiet exhale. “Yeah…but it’s a little crowded over there,” he said. “I thought I’d come over here and take you to a movie.” I smiled, stroking his back with my hand. “A movie sounds perfect.” The busty, bronze mystery girl slowly faded into oblivion. Mike came barreling out of the kitchen, where he’d been listening to every word. “Hey--if you guys are goin’ to the movie, c-c-c-can you drive me to the mall?” he yelled. “Sure, Mike,” Marlboro Man said. “We’ll drive you to the mall. It’ll cost you ten bucks, though.” And as the three of us made our way outside to Marlboro Man’s diesel pickup, I had to bite my lip to keep myself from articulating the only seven words in the English language that were in my vocabulary at that moment: God help me--I love that man.

Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!” I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened. We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks. I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back. “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?” …Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo… “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know. “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.” …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip… “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy. “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—” Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street. “—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished. “What?” “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.” “Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…” What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth? “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied. It would have to do. …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd… I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.

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

We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.

He removed his hand from his worn, pleasantly snug jeans…and it held something small. Holy Lord, I said to myself. What in the name of kingdom come is going on here? His face wore a sweet, sweet smile. I stood there completely frozen. “Um…what?” I asked. I could formulate no words but these. He didn’t respond immediately. Instead he took my left hand in his, opened up my fingers, and placed a diamond ring onto my palm, which was, by now, beginning to sweat. “I said,” he closed my hand tightly around the ring. “I want you to marry me.” He paused for a moment. “If you need time to think about it, I’ll understand.” His hands were still wrapped around my knuckles. He touched his forehead to mine, and the ligaments of my knees turned to spaghetti. Marry you? My mind raced a mile a minute. Ten miles a second. I had three million thoughts all at once, and my heart thumped wildly in my chest. Marry you? But then I’d have to cut my hair short. Married women have short hair, and they get it fixed at the beauty shop. Marry you? But then I’d have to make casseroles. Marry you? But then I’d have to wear yellow rubber gloves to do the dishes. Marry you? As in, move out to the country and actually live with you? In your house? In the country? But I…I…I don’t live in the country. I don’t know how. I can’t ride a horse. I’m scared of spiders. I forced myself to speak again. “Um…what?” I repeated, a touch of frantic urgency to my voice. “You heard me,” Marlboro Man said, still smiling. He knew this would catch me by surprise. Just then my brother Mike laid on the horn again. He leaned out of the window and yelled at the top of his lungs, “C’mon! I am gonna b-b-be late for lunch!” Mike didn’t like being late. Marlboro Man laughed. “Be right there, Mike!” I would have laughed, too, at the hilarious scene playing out before my eyes. A ring. A proposal. My developmentally disabled and highly impatient brother Mike, waiting for Marlboro Man to drive him to the mall. The horn of the diesel pickup. Normally, I would have laughed. But this time I was way, way too stunned. “I’d better go,” Marlboro Man said, leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I still grasped the diamond ring in my warm, sweaty hand. “I don’t want Mike to burst a blood vessel.” He laughed out loud, clearly enjoying it all. I tried to speak but couldn’t. I’d been rendered totally mute. Nothing could have prepared me for those ten minutes of my life. The last thing I remember, I’d awakened at eleven. Moments later, I was hiding in my bathroom, trying, in all my early-morning ugliness, to avoid being seen by Marlboro Man, who’d dropped by unexpectedly. Now I was standing on the front porch, a diamond ring in my hand. It was all completely surreal. Marlboro Man turned to leave. “You can give me your answer later,” he said, grinning, his Wranglers waving good-bye to me in the bright noonday sun. But then it all came flashing across my line of sight. The boots in the bar, the icy blue-green eyes, the starched shirt, the Wranglers…the first date, the long talks, my breakdown in his kitchen, the movies, the nights on his porch, the kisses, the long drives, the hugs…the all-encompassing, mind-numbing passion I felt. It played frame by frame in my mind in a steady stream. “Hey,” I said, walking toward him and effortlessly sliding the ring on my finger. I wrapped my arms around his neck as his arms, instinctively, wrapped around my waist and raised me off the ground in our all-too-familiar pose. “Yep,” I said effortlessly. He smiled and hugged me tightly. Mike, once again, laid on the horn, oblivious to what had just happened. Marlboro Man said nothing more. He simply kissed me, smiled, then drove my brother to the mall.

An incidental victim of Sanjay Gandhi’s family planning drive was the great popular singer Kishore Kumar. Other film stars and musicians agreed to perform in a programme to raise money for sterilization, but Kishore refused. As a consequence, his songs were banned from Vividh Bharati, the AIR channel that exclusively broadcast film music. The Film Censor Board was instructed to hold up the release of movies in which Kishore acted or sang. Sanjay’s men also warned record companies against selling Kishore’s songs. It was an act of petty vindictiveness in keeping with the times.

Although King Abdullah allowed limited press liberalization, his successor, King Salman, has reversed that trend. Charmed by rock concerts, women driving, and new movie theaters, some have overlooked the fact that under King Salman freedom of speech and freedom of the press has declined.

Traffic was light, but Tommy was nevertheless driving at his standard speed of twenty miles below the legal limit. I wondered, sometimes, what drivers on the freeways of Greater Los Angeles thought when they passed Tommy. Expecting to see some centenarian crypt keeper behind the wheel, they instead saw a Cro-Magnon profile, wild black hair, and Blade Runner sunglasses

A project, business, charity, movie, piece of art—none of that takes shape unless it’s backed by someone who’s deeply passionate about it. It’s that investment of passion that drives the success of any business. Am I right?

The drive to convert people's minds and hearts has caused more grief, more suffering, more loss of life than any desire for property, riches, or even the necessities of survival.

Paradoxically, the musical Merrily is both very faithful yet rather untrue to its source. To repeat: in the musical, we lose a substantial piece of information about why the hero is so determined to achieve financial independence: to protect himself from the kind of beating he took during his first marriage. No one, we almost hear him cry, will ever own me again! But the musical also improved on that hero, trading the somewhat high-strung Richard Niles for the more fascinating Franklin Shepard, a wonder boy on whom everyone needs to project his or her fantasies. He’s a savior, yes—but of no redemptive power whatsoever, because he’s too self-absorbed to relate to others. Is that why he gave up the very creative vocation of composer for the bureaucratic post of movie producer? Like so many Sondheim shows, Merrily We Roll Along raises more questions than it answers. But raising questions is the theatre’s mandate. It may be that we’re never going to know what drives Franklin Shepard, just as we never quite understand the Franklin Shepards we meet in life. The better we know them, the more they confuse us. One Merrily lyric runs, “It started out like a song.” It always does, doesn’t it?

A good philosophy should be a constant background noise, an ambiance that one can detect behind everything you do and say. A good philosophy is just as present when you’re driving to work or watching a movie as it’s at church. It’s just as present when you’re shopping for clothes or riding the bus as it’s during meditation. It gives you a reason for most things that happen to you, and gives you a reaction to them, as well.

Charlie’s kisses, were, I suppose, in The Book of Kisses. But they’d be in the chapter called Devouring. There was biting and gnawing and teeth-banging in them, an urgent air of mouth-to-mouth combat, wild and violent and driving to an end that was out of reach, and known to be, but only the more pressing for that. And pressing was a big part of it. She pulled me against her in a mime of movie stars, but the three-dimensionality of our bodies made a bumping mockery of blending, elbows and knees proving extra to the parts required and noses on standby with an abashed air of being in the way. Of course, I was lost from the first moment, in a whirl carousel of taste touch sight smell, and sounds (all s’s – squelch,

Any asshole can fall in love on a private beach in a tropical locale, surrounded by lush flora and adorable fauna, shining suns and chirping birds. Give me ten uninterrupted minutes without some ding-dong demanding something or subtweeting me or making me do work and I could fall in love with my worst fucking enemy. Seriously. What’s not to love about being expertly lit and drunk at two in the afternoon? But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed. When I am blasting “More and More” by Blood Sweat & Tears at seven on a Sunday morning while cleaning the kitchen and fucking up your mom’s frittata recipe. When I bring a half dozen gross, mangled kittens home to foster for a few nights and they shit everywhere and pee on your side of the bed. When I go “grocery shopping” and come back with only a bag of Fritos and five pounds of pork tenderloin. When I’m sick and stumbling around the crib with half a roll of toilet paper shoved in each nostril. When I beg you fourteen times to read something I’ve written, then get mad when you tell me what you don’t like about it and I call you an uneducated idiot piece of shit. Lovebird city.

Playdates are tense because I am desperate for him to connect and play and have fun with other kids. But he usually asks to leave as soon as we get there or doesn't engage whatsoever, and I drive home in tears, demoralized. In the car after one such afternoon I ask him what he wants to be when he grows up and he replies: "A stranger. A stranger who sits alone in a movie theater eating popcorn and no one talks to them.

It’s up to you to navigate the obstacles and the difficulties and constantly drive toward success despite all odds against you. The best stories, movies, and inspiring real-life accounts always have major hardships followed by great triumphs. Why would your story be any different?

She thinks we’re dragging it away from her like it’s some Angelina Jolie movie, trying to replace it with a different baby so she can overact and cry for the last two-thirds of the film.

She took me to the pasture and let me milk a mammoth brown cow. She taught me how to drive a tractor. We rode horses through the woods. We smoked weed on the roof and pointed out clouds that looked like penises. We fed tiny chunks of raw chicken to her brother’s Venus flytrap. We fucked each other with fresh-picked ears of corn. We built a fire under a billion stars and told ghost stories. We took bets to see how many cigarette butts the rooster would eat. We let the goats hop on top of our backs and nibble our hair. We built an altar of stones, sticks and berries at the top of a hill, and when we hummed a family of deer came to us, licking our palms and nuzzling our cheeks. We bathed in streams and made bread from scratch. We pulled ticks and leeches off each other’s backs. We wrote rap songs about farm life and smoking meth. We stayed up a whole night watching movies about vampires and warlocks. We left clumps of hair, string and silver buttons for a family of crows. When it stormed for three days and we lost power, I rocked her gently in the dark and told her I loved her.

It’s very difficult to quantify these things entirely. Exactly how much money constitutes being “extremely wealthy”? What position do you hold in what company? Exactly how many children, grandchildren are you going to have? The mind works with images and emotions regarding these instances. A far better strategy for longer term goals is to create a picture or movie in your mind about what these things would look like. How do you look and feel once you have achieved these things? What are you wearing? What car are you driving? How does your posture now look?

718 A vivid memory of mine is a 1979 viewing of a late night rerun of the ABC TV movie Hot Rod (a.k.a. Rebel of the Road). It’s the story of an outcast rodder, his struggles with a corrupt small-town police force, and an eventual drag strip showdown with an Olds 4-4-2 sponsored by the Munn’s Root Beer company. At the beginning of the flick, the hero drives a 1965 Coronet sedan, presumably an A990. After the cops force him off the road, totaling the Dodge, he swaps the Hemi into a 1941 Willys. You probably remember the movie now. But has anyone noticed that he steals a replacement Hemi out of an AMC Matador cop car? I sure did! It stands as yet another tribute to the mythical legacy of Hemi-powered cop cars on TV and in the movies.

I have no naive notions of good and evil. While Kentucky is not the deep south, there is enough of that type of outlaw mentality in the rural areas that Hollywood movies based on corrupt backwoods cops have some credibility. Making someone disappear in the country is actually far easier to do than in a place like New Jersey. Lots of heavily wooded areas and farms to dispose of a body, should one happen to need to. The look in his eyes had scared me. There was clearly something behind them, something I didn’t want to ever see in the full light of day. Things of nightmares. There are places, dark damp hidden places, where things like that dwell, and to look upon them would drive a person mad with fear.

To a highly literate and mechanized culture the movie appeared as a world of triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy. It was at this moment of the movie that cubism occurred, and it has been described by E. H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion) as “the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture — that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas.” For cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the “point of view” or facet of perspective illusion. Instead of the specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradiction or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures that “drives home the message” by involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise in painting, not in illusion. In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that the sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, “The medium is the message” quite naturally.

Does the new idea lead anywhere? Does it inspire others to produce useful science or important art? Does it become part of a worldview? Clearly Einstein’s relativity theory and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon satisfy all of these criteria. Their creative drives became inspirations and their personas the stuff of which movies are made and novels written. Their great works, spun during the most intensely creative period of their lives, were at first spurned, then accorded accolades, then incorporated into the intellectual milieu that they themselves had spawned, and finally superseded. But they cannot ever be forgotten, because they are now part of the very rock on which all of science and art will be forever built.

That’s when David spoke up. He said he lived close to Hornsby, and it would be no trouble and his pleasure to drive me home. Everyone except me was thrilled to have the problem solved. I had become suddenly exhausted. I did not think I could manage to make conversation with a strange albeit handsome man on what would be an hour’s drive, all the way home from Newtown to Hornsby. If you are a fellow introvert you will understand. We’re all the rage these days. Movie stars regularly describe themselves as introverted while being charismatic on talk shows.

I’ve considered that maybe I’m broken inside. Maybe my heart doesn’t work, or it’s very small like that green asshole in the Christmas movie. Jim Carey played him… The Grinch! Thank you. That was gonna drive me crazy.

There are signs with big letters saying CHILDREN LIVE HERE—SLOW DOWN! and when we arrive at a four-way intersection, there’s a smiling crossing guard in a neon safety vest, waving us through. Everything is so perfectly detailed, it feels like we’re driving through a movie set.

A part of me was hoping he would grab a license plate from his glove compartment that read Grenade instead of Sissy like in that movie Urban Cowboy—I loved that movie—and kiss me all sweaty-lipped like John Travolta did Deborah Winger.

Oh, you should. It’s like a movie for your ears. You could listen on your drive down to see me. Which is when again?

My Sex Bucket List: I want you to talk dirty to me Try a new position every time we have sex (I want to do doggy style first) (we need a kama sutra book) I want you to be more vocal while we have sex; not just at the end I want you to cum in my mouth I want to cum in your mouth I want a facial I want you to cum on my breasts I want to have sex in the shower I want to try 69 I want to try bondage or handcuffs, but I want you to be the one tied up I want to be spanked I want to see if you like your gooch being licked Give you head while you drive You play with my pussy while you drive Sex in the pool Sex in the rain Sex on the island in the kitchen Sex in your office on your desk during business hours Sex outside under the stars Sex in one of the cars Go to a sex club Have sex in front of an audience I want to be choked (maybe) I want to use sex toys with you Sex in a penthouse suite against the window overlooking the city. Sex in an airplane I want to try anal/butt plugs Watch porn together Recreate a sex scene from a movie Masturbate in front of each other Have sex in front of a mirror I want you to finger me in a restaurant while we’re out for dinner Go to EverTwo14 Make a sex tape

Pride of the Yankees invented the visual grammar of the baseball film, discovering and employing editing techniques to turn a movie star with little baseball experience into a reasonable facsimile of one of the most talented players of all time. In later years, these techniques were used to make actors as disparate as John Cusack (Eight Men Out), Rosie O’Donnell (A League of Their Own), and Bernie Mac (Mr. 3000) look like they’re zinging line drives all over the field.

The notion that Hollywood is fifty percent for the almighty dollar, and fifty percent for ideas that challenge and take root and bear fruit—that’s just fucking rubbish. The almighty dollar drives Hollywood.” Twenty years later, with audience members increasingly interested only in expensive big-spectacle movies, the studios need movies they know people will show up for. In that environment, Fincher says, “Who wants to take a risk? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?

SINCE I HAVE MY LIFE BEFORE ME” By Brooke Bronkowski I’ll live my life to the fullest. I’ll be happy. I’ll brighten up. I will be more joyful than I have ever been. I will be kind to others. I will loosen up. I will tell others about Christ. I will go on adventures and change the world. I will be bold and not change who I really am. I will have no troubles but instead help others with their troubles. You see, I’ll be one of those people who live to be history makers at a young age. Oh, I’ll have moments, good and bad, but I will wipe away the bad and only remember the good. In fact that’s all I remember, just good moments, nothing in between, just living my life to the fullest. I’ll be one of those people who go somewhere with a mission, an awesome plan, a world-changing plan, and nothing will hold me back. I’ll set an example for others, I will pray for direction. I have my life before me. I will give others the joy I have and God will give me more joy. I will do everything God tells me to do. I will follow the footsteps of God. I will do my best!!! During her freshman year in high school, Brooke was in a car accident while driving to the movies. Her life on earth ended when she was just fourteen, but her impact didn’t. Nearly fifteen hundred people attended Brooke’s memorial service. People from her public high school read poems she had written about her love for God. Everyone spoke of her example and her joy. I shared the gospel and invited those who wanted to know Jesus to come up and give their lives to Him. There must have been at least two hundred students on their knees at the front of the church praying for salvation. Ushers gave a Bible to each of them. They were Bibles that Brooke had kept in her garage, hoping to give out to all of her unsaved friends. In one day, Brooke led more people to the Lord than most ever will. In her brief fourteen years on earth, Brooke was faithful to Christ. Her short life was not wasted.

I should say that it was only for me that Marxism seemed over. Surely, I would tell G. at least once a week, it had to count for something that every single self-described Marxist state had turned into an economically backward dictatorship. Irrelevant, he would reply. The real Marxists weren’t the Leninists and Stalinists and Maoists—or the Trotskyists either, those bloodthirsty romantics—but libertarian anarchist-socialists, people like Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, scholarly believers in true workers’ control who had labored in obscurity for most of the twentieth century, enjoyed a late-afternoon moment in the sun after 1968 when they were discovered by the New Left, and had now once again fallen back into the shadows of history, existing mostly as tiny stars in the vast night sky of the Internet, archived on blogs with names like Diary of a Council Communist and Break Their Haughty Power. They were all men. The group itself was mostly men. This was, as Marxists used to say, no accident. There was something about Marxist theory that just did not appeal to women. G. and I spent a lot of time discussing the possible reasons for this. Was it that women don’t allow themselves to engage in abstract speculation, as he thought? That Marxism is incompatible with feminism, as I sometimes suspected? Or perhaps the problem was not Marxism but Marxists: in its heyday men had kept a lock on it as they did on everything they considered important; now, in its decline, Marxism had become one of those obsessive lonely-guy hobbies, like collecting stamps or 78s. Maybe, like collecting, it was related, through subterranean psychological pathways, to sexual perversions, most of which seemed to be male as well. You never hear about a female foot fetishist, or a woman like the high-school history teacher of a friend of mine who kept dated bottles of his own urine on a closet shelf. Perhaps women’s need for speculation is satisfied by the intense curiosity they bring to daily life, the way their collecting masquerades as fashion and domesticity—instead of old records, shoes and ceramic mixing bowls—and their perversity can be satisfied simply by enacting the highly artificial role of Woman, by becoming, as it were, fetishizers of their own feet.

Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Wit­ness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing. Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.

It was the drive-in restaurant, a product of the Great Depression’s crimp on the free-wheeling lifestyle that had grown up around movie-happy Hollywood. Drive-ins sprouted in city parking lots and spread along highways and canyon drives.

Into that strange scene came my future mentors in the hamburger business, the McDonald brothers, Maurice and Richard, a pair of transplanted New Englanders. Maurice had moved out to California in about 1926 and got a job handling props in one of the movie studios. Richard joined him after he was graduated from West High School in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1927. Mac and Dick worked together in the studio, moving scenery, setting up lights, driving trucks, and so forth until 1932, when they decided to go into business for themselves. They bought a run-down movie theater in Glendora. It provided a very sparse living,

He made his job descriptions sound like a steady upward spiral toward success. Of his days as movie usher and popcornmaker he said, “I was in Los Angeles working in the theater business for about a year. . . . I was working for the National General Corporation, which was a multinational conglomerate. They both own theaters and motion production companies. My long-range interest at the time was hopefully to get into screenwriting, so I worked for the theater in the corporation with the hope of getting into screenwriting. The theater I worked at was within about a mile’s drive of Universal Studios, where National General did a lot of their filming. So I was close to where I was trying to break into it.

So he repeated the same made-up crap he had lived on then, about bubblegum machines and Cadillacs with fins, and endless sunshine, and drive-in movies and waitresses on roller skates, and cheeseburgers and cold Coca-Cola in green glass bottles, and baseball on AM radio, out of Kansas City, static and all.

Look at this. Do you know what this says?” “Travis and Etty, surrounded by little glittery hearts?” he answers. “No, it says we are safe. We need to do something that is unsafe.” The frown on Travis’s face makes me think he isn’t getting it. “The best love stories have action… adventure!” I argue. Also, action usually raises tension. And tension usually equals a good argument. So, that’s it. That’s my answer. We go to the Congo; we stumble upon some drug lords and bam− if that’s not conflict I don’t know what is. Except, I can’t go the Congo because I have to work tomorrow. But the theory is still valid. “I would suggest skydiving, but I know because of the height issue that’s out,” I put my finger to my mouth in concentration. “Because that’s the only reason why that wouldn’t be a good idea,” Travis says. “Should we go to the casino and bet it all on red?” I ask. “Have you forgotten you’re still taking overtime shifts to pay off the inflatable day of fun?” Travis argues. “I’ve got it!” I exclaim, shooting my arms up in victory. “Let’s go drive down to the docks and see if we can witness a crime.” “Where are ‘the docks’?” Travis says, smiling indulgently at my new idea. “I’ve heard people say that in movies,” I say, shrugging. “I was hoping you would know where it is.

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We continued our drive, not making any permanent decisions that day about where we’d live. We’d been engaged less than twenty-four hours, after all; there was no huge rush. When we finally returned to his house, we curled up on his couch and watched a movie. Gone With the Wind, of all things. He was a fan. And as I lay there that afternoon and watched the South crumble around Scarlett O’Hara’s knees for what had to have been the 304th time in my life, I touched the arms that held me so sweetly and securely…and I sighed contentedly, wondering how on earth I’d ever found this person. When he walked me to my car late that afternoon, minutes after Scarlett had declared that tomorrow is another day, Marlboro Man rested his hands lightly on my waist. He caressed my rib cage up and down, touching his forehead to mine and closing his eyes--as if he were recording the moment in his memory. And it tickled like crazy, his fingertips on my ribs, but I didn’t care; I was engaged to this man, I told myself, and there’ll likely be much rib caressing in the future. I needed to toughen up, to be able to withstand such displays of romance without my knees buckling beneath me and without my forgetting my mother’s maiden name and who my first grade teacher had been. Otherwise I had lots of years of trouble--and decreased productivity--ahead. So I stood there and took it, closing my eyes as well and trying with all my might to will away the ticklish sensations. They had no place here. Begone, Satan! Ree, hold strong. My mind won, and we stood there and continued to thumb our nose at the reality that we were two separate bodies…and the western sun behind us changed from yellow to orange to pink to a brilliant, impossible red--the same color as the ever-burning fire between us. On the drive home, my whole torso felt warm. Like when you’ve awakened from the most glorious dream you’ve ever had, and you’re still half-in, half-out, and you still feel the dream and it’s still real. I forced myself to think, to look around me, to take it all in. One day, I told myself as I drove down that rural country road, I’m going to be driving down a road like this to run to the grocery store in town…or pick up the mail on the highway…or take my kids to cell lessons.

Pasquale considered his friend’s face. It had such an open quality, was such a clearly American face, like Dee’s face, like Michael Deane’s face. He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality—that openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

I’ll write you a note a day,” Peter says suddenly, with gusto. “That’ll drive her ass crazy.” I write down, Peter will write Lara Jean one note every day. Peter leans in. “Write down that you have to go to some parties with me. And write down no rom coms.” “Who said anything about rom coms? Not every girl wants to watch rom coms.” “I can just tell that you’re the kind of girl who does.” I’m annoyed that he has this perception of me, and even more annoyed that he’s right. I write, NO DUMB ACTION MOVIES. “Then what does that leave us with?” Peter demands. “Superhero movies, horror movies, period films, documentaries, foreign films--” Peter makes a face, grabs the pen and paper from me, and writes down, NO FOREIGN FILMS. He also writes, Lara Jean will make Peter’s picture her phone wallpaper. “And vice versa!” I say. I point my phone at him. “Smile.” Peter smiles, and ugh, it’s annoying how handsome he is. Then he reaches for his phone and I stop him. “Not right now. My hair looks sweaty and gross.” “Good point,” he says, and I want to punch him. “Can you also write down that under no circumstances can either of us tell anyone the truth?” I ask him. “The first rule of Fight Club,” Peter says knowingly. “I’ve never seen that movie.” “Of course you haven’t,” he says, and I make a face at him. Also: mental note, watch Fight Club.