Drugs Don't Love You Quotes

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together. In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page: I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me. Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page. Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND… I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too.

Chapter 1. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion...no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yeah. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.' Uh, no let me start this over. 'Chapter 1. He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles...'. Ah, corny, too corny for my taste. Can we ... can we try and make it more profound? 'Chapter 1. He adored New York City. For him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in...' No, that's going to be too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here. 'Chapter 1. He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage...' Too angry, I don't want to be angry. 'Chapter 1. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.' I love this. 'New York was his town, and it always would be.

Wanting to Die Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic. In this way, heavy and thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole. I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body. Still-born, they don't always die, but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile. To thrust all that life under your tongue!— that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say, and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison. Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

Please don’t go. Just stay, talk to me, we can work this out. I know we can. I would never cheat on you – I swear to you. Just believe me, please. I love you so much. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. And I know I’ve screwed up with the drugs, but I would never cheat on you. You’re my best friend. You’re my everything.

Is it love, obsession, infatuation? You don't know. You think of a strange and beautiful word you read about once, Limerance, a psychological term, meaning an obsessive love, a state that's almost like a drug. Need like a wolf paces the perimeter of your world, back and forth, back and forth, never letting up. ...You're appalled by the new appetites within you, kicking their feet and clawing to get out.

Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you're good seems like a zero-sum game; I'm not even sure those actions would still qualify as 'good,' since they'd merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in--a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever--one has to assume that you can't be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I'm certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It's not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they're not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more 'diabolical' in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I couldn't complain. I don't make the fucking rules.

You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it led to pleasure.You experienced it today and found peace.That's why I'm telling you:Don't get used to it,because it's very easy to become habituated:it's a very powerful drug.It's in our daily lives,in our hidden sufferings,in the sacrifices we make,blaming love for the destruction of our dreams.Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it's seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or se-denial.Or cowardice.However much we may reject it,we human human beings always find a way of being with pain,of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.

If you feel too much, there’s still a place for you here. If you feel too much, don’t go. It this world is too painful, stop and rest. It’s okay to stop and rest. If you need a break, it’s okay to say you need a break. This life –it’s not a contest, not a race, not a performance, not a thing that you win. It’s okay to slow down. You are here for more than grades, more than a job, more than a promotion, more than keeping up, more than getting by.This life is not about status or opinion or appearance. You don’t have to fake it. You do not have to fake it. Other people feel this way too. If your heart is broken, it’s okay to say your heart is broken. If you feel stuck, it’s okay to say you feel stuck. If you can’t let go, it’s okay to say you can’t let go.You are not alone in these places. Other people feel how you feel. You are more than just your pain. You are more than wounds, more than drugs, more than death and silence.There is still some time to be surprised. There is still some time to ask for help. There is still some time to start again. There is still some time for love to find you. It’s not too late. You’re not alone. It’s okay –whatever you need and however long it takes- its okay. It’s okay. If you feel too much, there’s still a place for you here. If you feel too much, don’t go. There is still some time.

How he could be a good user of LSD," I asked, "And know about the spiritual dimension - all that sort of thing - and still be a crook? I don't understand." "Then it's time you did. Psychedelic drugs don't change you - they don't change you character - unless you want to be changed. They enable change; they can't impose it...

Listen. You can be anything you want to be. Be careful. It's a spell. It's magic. Listen to the words. You can be anything, you can do anything, you can be anything, you can do anything. Listen to the magic. You are anything . . . everyone, anyone. Whatever you want. I'm showing you. So long as you stay yourself inside, you can eat dirt and it'll taste good because it's you that's eating it. You can even lick their arses if you have to. You listen to them, teachers, parents, politicians. They're always saying, if you steal you're a thief, if you sleep around you're a slut, if you take drugs you're a junkie. They want to get inside your head and control you with their fear. Maybe you think your mum and dad love you but if you do the wrong things they'll try and turn you into dirt. It's your punishment for being you. Don't play their game. Nothing can touch you; you stay beautiful. I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed, What about you? When's it going to be your turn?

You look drugged within an inch of your life," Neil said, "and when you're not medicated you're drinking and dusting. When they finally take your medicine away, who are you going to hurt, really?" Andrew laughed. "I'm remembering why I don't like you." "I'm surprised you forgot." "I didn't," Andrew said. "I just got distracted for a moment there.

I hope I’ll be able to come home, someday. But there are things I need to do first. I just want you to know I love you and Mom, and I’m not doing any of this to hurt you.” “We love you, too, Jake, and if it’s drugs, or whatever it is, we don’t care. We’ll get you right again. Like I said, you’re confused.” “No, Dad. I’m peculiar.

Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.

Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product [...] The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics [...] It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!

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

Loving you has been worse than an addiction to drugs. At least I don't have the drugs c r a w l i n g into my bed at night.

And you’re in love?” “Ma, we’ve never even kissed.” “And that has anything to do with it?” “Okay, fine. Yes, I think so. But don’t tell anyone. Don’t even repeat it to yourself.” “Why?” “Because it’s humiliating.” “Sweetheart, love is humiliating. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?” “Who would have told me that?” “Do you know the word humiliate comes from the Latin root humus , which means ‘earth’? That’s how love is supposed to feel.” “Like hummus?” “Like earth. It ground s you. All this nonsense about love being a drug, making you feel high, that’s not real. It should hold you like the earth.” “Wow, Ma.” “What? I have a heart, don’t I?

A man worth being with is one… That never lies to you Is kind to people that have hurt him A person that respects another’s life That has manners and shows people respect That goes out of his way to help people That feels every person, no matter how difficult, deserves compassion Who believes you are the most beautiful person he has ever met Who brags about your accomplishments with pride Who talks to you about anything and everything because no bad news will make him love you less That is a peacemaker That will see you through illness Who keeps his promises Who doesn’t blame others, but finds the good in them That raises you up and motivates you to reach for the stars That doesn’t need fame, money or anything materialistic to be happy That is gentle and patient with children Who won’t let you lie to yourself; he tells you what you need to hear, in order to help you grow Who lives what he says he believes in Who doesn’t hold a grudge or hold onto the past Who doesn’t ask his family members to deliberately hurt people that have hurt him Who will run with your dreams That makes you laugh at the world and yourself Who forgives and is quick to apologize Who doesn’t betray you by having inappropriate conversations with other women Who doesn’t react when he is angry, decides when he is sad or keep promises he doesn’t plan to keep Who takes his children’s spiritual life very seriously and teaches by example Who never seeks revenge or would ever put another person down Who communicates to solve problems Who doesn’t play games or passive aggressively ignores people to hurt them Who is real and doesn’t pretend to be something he is not Who has the power to free you from yourself through his positive outlook Who has a deep respect for women and treats them like a daughter of God Who doesn’t have an ego or believes he is better than anyone Who is labeled constantly by people as the nicest person they have ever met Who works hard to provide for the family Who doesn’t feel the need to drink alcohol to have a good time, smoke or do drugs Who doesn't have to hang out a bar with his friends, but would rather spend his time with his family Who is morally free from sin Who sees your potential to be great Who doesn't think a woman's place has to be in the home; he supports your life mission, where ever that takes you Who is a gentleman Who is honest and lives with integrity Who never discusses your private business with anyone Who will protect his family Who forgives, forgets, repairs and restores When you find a man that possesses these traits then all the little things you don’t have in common don’t matter. This is the type of man worth being grateful for.

Pretty When You Cry" All the pretty stars shine for you, my love. Am I that girl that you dream of? All those little times you said that I'm your girl. You make me feel like your whole world. I'll wait for you, babe, It's all I do, babe, Don't come through, babe, You never do. Because I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. All those special times I spent with you, my love, They don't mean shit compared to all your drugs. But I don't really mind I've got much more than that. Like my memories, I don't need that. I'll wait for you, babe, You don't come through, babe, You never do, babe, That's just what you do. Because I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. Don't say you need me when You leave and you leave again. I'm stronger than all my men, Except for you. Don't say you need me here, You leave us, you're leaving, I can't do it, I can't do it, But you do it well. 'Cause I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. Pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. Pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry. I'm pretty when I cry.

They say when you fall in love in love with someone that person becomes like a drug,an addiction you don't want to live without.

That's what I don't like about college, by the way. It's like a lot of people don't believe these years really count, so you're allowed to experiment with... whatever. There's such a casual view about things like sex and drinking and even drugs. I know that sounds really old-fashioned, but I just don't get it...to be honest, I'm kind of disappointed in those two people I heard about, and I don't want to sit there trying to pretend that I'm not. I know I shouldn't judge,...but still, what was the point? Shouldn't you save things like that for someone you love? So that it really means something?" - Savannah

I don't know how to describe the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns without making it sound like a cartoon or a drug trip or a cartoon of a drug trip. The only thing I can say is that it is one of those dear places that make you love the world.

You know this girl. Her hair is neither long nor short nor light nor dark. She parts it precisely in the middle. She sits precisely in the middle of the classroom, and when she used to ride the school bus, she sat precisely in the middle of that, too. She joins clubs, but is never the president of them. Sometimes she is the secretary; usually, just a member. When asked, she has been known to paints sets for the school play. She always has a date to the dance, but is never anyone’s first choice. In point of fact, she’s nobody’s first choice for anything. Her best friend became her best friend when another girl moved away. She has a group of girls she eats lunch with every day, but God, how they bore her. Sometimes, when she can’t stand it anymore, she eats in the library instead. Truth be told, she prefers books to people, and the librarian always seems happy to see her. She knows there are other people who have it worse—she isn’t poor or ugly or friendless or teased. Of course, she’s also aware that the reason no one teases is because no one ever notices her. This isn’t to say she doesn’t have qualities. She is pretty, maybe, if anyone would bother to look. And she gets good enough grades. And she doesn’t drink and drive. And she says NO to drugs. And she is always where she says she will be. And she calls when she’s going to be late. And she feels a little, just a little, dead inside. She thinks, You think you know me, but you don’t. She thinks, None of you has any idea about all the things in my heart. She thinks, None of you has any idea how really and truly beautiful I am. She thinks, See me. See me. See me. Sometimes she thinks she will scream. Sometimes she imagines sticking her head in an oven. But she doesn’t. She just writes it all down in her journal and waits. She is waiting for someone to see.

I don't know what happened, but I do know this. It's not going anywhere. When you light up it waits for you to come down. You have to confront whatever's bothering you and look it straight in the eye. It's alright to forgive yourself, and it's okay to fight back, because if you don't kick the shit out of it, then it kicks you. It's a dog world, but you can control it, if you want to. A lot of people are going to try to make you feel like shit, but that doesn't mean you are. You are who you decide to be. I hope you're the kind of person that fights, because that's the only way to win.

I have learned to quit speeding through life, always trying to do too many things too quickly, without taking the time to enjoy each day’s doings. I think I always thought of real living as being high. I don’t mean on drugs – I mean real living was falling in love, or when I got my first job, or when I was able to help somebody, . . . In between the highs I was impatient – you know how it is – life seemed so Daily. Now I love the dailiness. I enjoy washing dishes, I enjoy cooking, I see my father’s roses out the kitchen window. I like picking beans. I notice everything – birdsongs, the clouds, the sound of wind, the glory of sunshine after two weeks of rain.

The old sound was alcoholic. The tradition was finally broken. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. Ultra sonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Hey, don't be afraid. You'd better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All diffrent kinds of plastic- pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, nonattached plastic. - Lou Reed (1965-1968)

I don't like the way people cherish the ghetto, as if it’s some royal palace, or kingdom. I also don't like the way people treat each other in the ghetto. It is really hard to find love, trust, and respect. You don't find too many people that want to do better for themselves in the ghetto because so many people seem to be satisfied with where they're at.

Because think how we'll feel in the morning. Think how much worse it will be pretending that we don't mean anything to each other in front of everyone else after we've spent the night together, even if all we do is sleep. It's like having just a little bit of a drug - it only makes you want more.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. [from, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming]

We love you, too, Jake, and if it's drugs or whatever it is, we don't care. We'll get you right again. Like I said your confused." "No, dad. I'm peculiar." Then I hung up the phone, using a language I didn't know I knew, I ordered the hollow to stand. Obedient as a shadow, it did.

Until you've got your mouth full of cocaine, you don't know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tire. You're on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers.

Anytime I talk about my work informally, I inevitably encounter someone who wants to know why addicts become addicts. They use words like “will” and “choice,” and they end by saying, “Don’t you think there’s more to it than the brain?” They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they’re really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they’ve made. They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives. I understand this impulse. I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself. I don’t want to be dismissed the way that Nana was once dismissed. I know that it’s easier to say Their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs, easier to write all addicts off as bad and weak-willed people, than it is to look closely at the nature of their suffering. I do it too, sometimes. I judge. I walk around with my chest puffed out, making sure hat everyone knows about my Harvard and Stanford degrees, as if those things encapsulate me, and when I do so, I give in to the same facile, lazy thinking that characterizes those who think of addicts as horrible people. It’s just that I’m standing on the other side of the moat. What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.

Ridin'" [Lana Del Rey] I want to be your object, of your affection Give me all your time, touch, money, and attention [Lana Del Rey] I want to be your object, of your affection Give me all your time, touch, money, and attention Pick me up after school, you can be my baby Maybe we could go somewhere, get a little crazy He’s rich and I’m wishin’, um, he could be my Mister Yum Delicious to the maximum, chew him up like bubble gum Mama’s pretty party favor, he says I’m his favorite flavor [Hook] Uh, uh, catch me ridin’ like a bitch Got the six forty-five, catch me ridin’ with my bitch Uh, long hair, Lana, that’s my bitch Uh, You can tell by the swagger and the lips, uh Uh, uh, catch me ridin’ like a bitch Got the six forty-five, catch me ridin’ with my bitch Uh, long hair, Lana, that’s my bitch Uh, You can tell by the swagger and the lips, uh [Lana Del Rey] You say that I am flawless, true perfection So give me all your drugs, props, money, and connections Pick me up after school, actin’ kinda shady You’re the coolest kid in town, I’m your little lady Your sick and I’m kissin’ him, magical musician, how I’m Drivin’ at the cinema, lovin’ him and lickin’ him He’s my love, the life saver Don’t step on my bad behavior Uh, uh, catch me ridin’ like a bitch Got the six forty-five, catch me ridin’ with my bitch Uh, long hair, Lana, that’s my bitch Uh, You can tell by the swagger and the lips, uh Uh, uh, catch me ridin’ like a bitch Got the six forty-five, catch me ridin’ with my bitch Uh, long hair, Lana, that’s my bitch Uh, You can tell by the swagger and the lips, uh [A$AP Rocky] Swervin’, swervin’, gettin’ all them dimes Tell her I be doin’, I be swaggin’ to my prime This ain’t all the time, it happens all the time That’s a big contradiction, get your money on your mind What, what, tell her I be on a chase Chasin’ for that paper and you see me on that race What, what, tell her I be goin’ first I be gon’ first and they put me in a herse, oh One big room, full of bad bitches, no One big room and it’s full of mad bitches Lana, Lana, tell them what it is Tell ‘em that you doin’ it, you mean to do it big I said, one big room, full of bad bitches, no it’s One big room and it’s full of mad bitches, I said Lana, Lana, tell them what it is Tell ‘em when you do it that you only do it big Uh, uh, catch me ridin’ like a bitch Got the six forty-five, catch me ridin’ with my bitch Uh, long hair, Lana, that’s my bitch Uh, You can tell by the swagger and the lips, uh Uh, uh, catch me ridin’ like a bitch Got the six forty-five, catch me ridin’ with my bitch Uh, long hair, Lana, that’s my bitch Uh, You can tell by the swagger and the lips, uh

Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief. You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.

I’m still not sure what I ever did to inspire that need, that love in them both. I’m not honest and steady like Trev or bright and burning like Mina. I’m just me, with dirt underneath my fingernails and a weakness for love and drugs. Somehow, though, I’ve managed to tie us all in knots, and I don’t know how we can break free. “We

When John left the band, I resented him for not being my friend and for abandoning our musical comradeship. But all the time that he was out of the band and going through his anguish, I prayed for him constantly. From going to meetings I'd learned that one of the reasons that alcoholics get loaded is because they harbor resentments. One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life-to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It's a paradox, but it works. You sit there and pray for the person you can't stand to get everything on earth that you would want for yourself, and one day you're like 'I don't feel anything bad toward this person.

There's a reason they call it falling in love–because of the way it tips you ass over teakettle and then shakes your life up, hard. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing like it. No better drug. No adventure more fantastic. But it changes things. It changes you.

Real friends … don’t give you heroin and cocaine.” He took a step closer. “And they don’t stand by and do nothing if they think one of their buddies is doing drugs.

You don't wait for love to happen to you. You go out there and feel the breeze and sniff the air! The fragrance of love will come wafting towards you in no time!

Nicotine, in fact, is an unusual drug because it does very little except trigger compulsive use. According to researcher Roland R. Griffiths, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “When you give people nicotine for the first time, most people don’t like it. It’s different from many other addictive drugs, for which most people say they enjoy the first experience and would try it again.” Nicotine doesn’t make you high like marijuana or intoxicated like alcohol or wired up like speed. Some people say it makes them feel more relaxed or more alert, but really, the main thing it does is relieve cravings for itself. It’s the perfect circle. The only point of smoking cigarettes is to get addicted so one can experience the pleasure of relieving the unpleasant feeling of craving, like a man who carries around a rock all day because it feels so good when he puts it down.

For all the alcoholics and addicts out there, you are loved, stopped being so stubborn and come in from the cold. Wherever you are, there is a brighter light in your sight. Move towards it every day, and keep moving towards it. Even the worst and strongest addiction is a choice—a choice not to fight, to give up, to indulge the impulse, or instead to accept the hands offered you to help, even from strangers, even from the state. Don’t hate those who gave up on you, it wasn’t their fault, you just wore them down. Show them they were wrong about you. Your troubles are meant to mold you into something better, not destroy you, so FIGHT! Another day comes for the better if you’re standing in the right spot for it to hit you. Find the right spot and stay there until it does.

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore. "By telling you my life's story. "See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like: TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS! or BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS! "Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday. "I am tomorrow.

These are lines from my asteroid-impact novel, Regolith: Just because there are no laws against stupidity doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be punished. I haven’t faced rejection this brutal since I was single. He smelled trouble like a fart in the shower. If this was a kiss of gratitude, then she must have been very grateful. Not since Bush and Cheney have so few spent so much so fast for so long for so little. As a nympho for mind-fucks, Lisa took to politics like a pig to mud. She began paying men compliments as if she expected a receipt. Like the Aerosmith song, his get-up-and-go just got-up-and-went. “You couldn’t beat the crap out of a dirty diaper!” He embraced his only daughter as if she was deploying to Iraq. She was hotter than a Class 4 solar flare! If sex was a weapon, then Monique possessed WMD I haven’t felt this alive since I lost my virginity. He once read that 95% of women fake organism, and the rest are gay. Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but ugly is universal. Why do wives fart, but not girlfriends? Adultery is sex that is wrong, but not necessarily bad. The dinosaurs stayed drugged out, drooling like Jonas Brothers fans. Silence filled the room like tear gas. The told him a fraction of the truth and hoped it would take just a fraction of the time. Happiness is the best cosmetic, He was a whale of a catch, and there were a lot of fish in the sea eager to nibble on his bait. Cheap hookers are less buck for the bang, Men cannot fall in love with women they don’t find attractive, and women cannot fall in love with men they do not respect. During sex, men want feedback while women expect mind-reading. Cooper looked like a cow about to be tipped over. His father warned him to never do anything he couldn’t justify on Oprah. The poor are not free -- they’re just not enslaved. Only those with money are free. Sperm wasn’t something he would choose on a menu, but it still tasted better than asparagus. The crater looked alive, like Godzilla was about to leap out and mess up Tokyo. Bush follows the Bible until it gets to Jesus. When Bush talks to God, it’s prayer; when God talks to Bush, it’s policy. Cheney called the new Miss America a traitor – apparently she wished for world peace. Cheney was so unpopular that Bush almost replaced him when running for re-election, changing his campaign slogan to, ‘Ain’t Got Dick.’ Bush fought a war on poverty – and the poor lost. Bush thinks we should strengthen the dollar by making it two-ply. Hurricane Katrina got rid of so many Democratic voters that Republicans have started calling her Kathleen Harris. America and Iraq fought a war and Iran won. Bush hasn’t choked this much since his last pretzel. Some wars are unpopular; the rest are victorious. So many conservatives hate the GOP that they are thinking of changing their name to the Dixie Chicks. If Saddam had any WMD, he would have used them when we invaded. If Bush had any brains, he would have used them when we invaded. It’s hard for Bush to win hearts and minds since he has neither. In Iraq, you are a coward if you leave and a fool if you stay. Bush believes it’s not a sin to kill Muslims since they are going to Hell anyway. And, with Bush’s help, soon. In Iraq, those who make their constitution subservient to their religion are called Muslims. In America they’re called Republicans. With great power comes great responsibility – unless you’re Republican.

The year was 1987, but it might as well have been the Summer of Love: I was twenty, had hair down to my shoulders, and was dressed like an Indian rickshaw driver. For those charged with enforcing our nation’s drug laws, it would have been only prudent to subject my luggage to special scrutiny. Happily, I had nothing to hide. “Where are you coming from?” the officer asked, glancing skeptically at my backpack. “India, Nepal, Thailand…” I said. “Did you take any drugs while you were over there?” As it happens, I had. The temptation to lie was obvious—why speak to a customs officer about my recent drug use? But there was no real reason not to tell the truth, apart from the risk that it would lead to an even more thorough search of my luggage (and perhaps of my person) than had already commenced. “Yes,” I said. The officer stopped searching my bag and looked up. “Which drugs did you take? “I smoked pot a few times… And I tried opium in India.” “Opium?” “Yes.” “Opium or heroin? “It was opium.” “You don’t hear much about opium these days.” “I know. It was the first time I’d ever tried it.” “Are you carrying any drugs with you now?” “No.” The officer eyed me warily for a moment and then returned to searching my bag. Given the nature of our conversation, I reconciled myself to being there for a very long time. I was, therefore, as patient as a tree. Which was a good thing, because the officer was now examining my belongings as though any one item—a toothbrush, a book, a flashlight, a bit of nylon cord—might reveal the deepest secrets of the universe. “What is opium like?” he asked after a time. And I told him. In fact, over the next ten minutes, I told this lawman almost everything I knew about the use of mind-altering substances. Eventually he completed his search and closed my luggage. One thing was perfectly obvious at the end of our encounter: We both felt very good about it.

I kept going deeper and deeper into this world of repetition...The sad thing is, people don't want to believe that the person they're in love with is out of his mind, drinking and using, so if you give them even half an excuse, they're going to want to believe it. A girl with no prior exposure to the disease had to be blissfully unaware of the nefarious tricks of the dope fiend. That's how I was able to get high all summer and autumn and pretend like it wasn't happening. I was saying, 'I'm sick.' I was deteriorating physically and emotionally. Jaime was tolerant, and it did speak well of her character, because she was not the type to abandon ship during a crisis. She didn't consider backing off or bowing out, she was just there, which I can't say about everybody. I don't know if I could say it even about myself.

What's going on between us?" I don't know. I rubbed my hand over my face before glancing at Echo. A hint of her cleavage peeked from her shirt. Damn, she was sexy as hell. I wanted her, badly. Would one night be enough, even if she gave it to me? Echo already felt like a heavy drug. The kind I avoided on purpose—crack, heroin, meth. The ones that screwed with your mind, crept into your blood and left you powerless, helpless. If she gave her body to me, would i be able to let go or would i be sucked into that black veil, hooks embedded into my skin, sentenced to death by the emotion i reserved for my brothers-love? "I want you." "Do you? Really? Because these scars are sexy." How did she see her self? "I don't give a fuck about your scars." She stalked toward me, hips swaying side to side, eyes hardened with anger. Echo pushed her body agaist mine, parts of her fitting perfectly into parts of me. I swore under my breath, fighting for control over my body. "How are you going to react when we 're this close and you take off my shirt? Are you still going to want me when you see red and white lines? Are you going to flinch each time you accidentally touch my arms and feel the raised skin? How about when i touch you?" She pulled away from me, leaving my body cold after experiencing her warmth. "Or will you forbid that? Will you tell me how to dress or what i'm allowed to take off?" Her anger only fed mine. "For the last time I don't give a fuck about your scars." "Liar. Because the only way anyone will ever be okay with me is if they love me. Really love me enough to not care that I’m damaged. You don't love people. You have sex with them. So how could you want to be with me?" She'd summed me up perfectly. I didn't love people-only my brothers. Echo deserved more. Better than me. One shot. Take it or go home. Kiss her and risk an attachment or leave her and watch some other guy enjoy what could have been mine.

Early in her public career a friend had asked Hirsi Ali, ‘Don’t you realise how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?’ As she recounted her response in her autobiography, ‘Explosive? In a country where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practised, where men cry on TV and naked people walk on the beach and the pope is joked about on national TV? Where the famous author Gerard Reve is renowned for having fantasized about making love with a donkey, an animal he used as a metaphor for God? Surely nothing I could say would be seen as anything close to “explosive” in such a context.

People who live with ADHD are at high risk of addiction, especially adolescents, because of their poorly functioning frontal lobes. Years ago, when the illness was less well understood, doctors and parents were reluctant to give these vulnerable children addictive drugs such as Ritalin and amphetamine. It sounded reasonable: don’t give addictive substances to people at risk for addiction. But rigorous testing showed unambiguously that adolescents who were treated with stimulant drugs were less likely to develop addictions. In fact, those who started the drug at the youngest age and took the highest doses were the least likely to develop problems with illicit drugs. Here’s why: if you strengthen the dopamine control circuit, it’s a lot easier to make wise decisions. On the other hand, if effective treatment is withheld, the weakness of the control circuit is not corrected. The desire circuit acts unopposed, increasing the likelihood of high-risk, pleasure-seeking behavior.

All you need do is refrain from smoking, drinking and the use of drugs. Eat only wholesome,low-fat foods, with the emphasis on vegetables, grains and fish. Seek work. Work hard. Show up on time. Do more than is expected. Think of ways to make the job efficient. Don't complain. Shave, bathe and wear clean clothes. Be cheerful. Don't gamble. Live within your means. Save. And then, when you have all this in balance, study things of substance. Read to satisfy your curiosity. Don't father children out of wedlock or bear them as a single mother. Exercise. You will find that you will be promoted - perhaps not knighted, but promoted. Is that doesn't happen, look quietly for a better position. Find a husband or a wife whom you love and who has the same good habits. Invest. Assume a mortgage if you must. Teach your children the virtues. And then, having become the means of production, you will own your share of the means of production, and if you do those things, all of which are within your power, you will live your own lives." They looked at him as if he were an armadillo that has just spoken to them in Chinese. Not having assimilated a single phrase, they all got up and went to the bus.

I don't want to ruin your life," Leonard said in a gentler tone. "You're not ruining it." "The drugs just slow the process down. But the end's inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off?" He jabbed at his head with his index finger. "It's cutting me up, and I can't turn it off. Madeleine, listen to me. Listen. I'm not going to get better.

Tell me what to do." His warm breath tickled my ear. "Relax." "Please, Noah, I don't want to do this wrong. Tell me how to make you feel good." He shifted so that his body rested beside mine, his leg and arm still draped over me. I felt small under his warmth and strength. His chocolate-brown eyes softened. "Being with you feels good. Touching you-"he tucked a curl behind my ear"-feels good. I have never wanted anyone like I want you. There's nothing you can do wrong when just breathing makes everything right." His hand framed my face and his tone was edget with husky authority. "I want you, but only if you want me." I kissed him back, allowing my arms to wrap around him. His fingers gently massaged my neck, releasing the tension, erasing my unease. The kiss became a drug and i craved more with every touch. Our bodies twined so tightly to one another, i had no idea where i began and he ended. Noah felt strong and warm and muscular and safe and he smelled, oh, God, delicious. I couldn't stop kissing him if my life depend it upon it: his lips, his neck, his chest, and Noah seemed as hungry as me. We rolled and we touched and we shed unwanted clothes. I moaned and he moaned and my mind and soul and body stood on the edge of pure ecstasy. And i waited. I waited for that moment of pausing for protection and the burning pain my friends described, but Noah never stopped and the pain never came, not even when i whispered his name and praise God several times in a row. Both of us gasped for air while kissing each other softly and i struggled to comprehend i was still a virgin. He shifted off of me and tugged me close to him. My entire body became lazily warm, happy and sated. I listened to his heartbeat and closed my eyes, enjoying the relaxing pull of his hand in my hair. "Noah," i whispered. "I thought..." we were going to make love. He tipped my chin, forcing me to look at him. "We have forever to work up to that, Echo. Let's enjoy every step of the way." My mind drifted this way and that. Mostly between focusing on his heart, his touch and the sweetest word i had ever heard: forever. One clear thought forced my eyes open. "You 're putting me to sleep." "So?" he asked a little too innocently. I swallowed. "I'll have nightmares." "Then we 'll have an excuse to do this again.

Brace yourselves, girls: Soda is liquid Satan. It is the devil. It is garbage. There is nothing in soda that should be put into your body. For starters, soda’s high levels of phosphorous can increase calcium loss from the body, as can its sodium and caffeine. [Cousens, Conscious Eating, 475] You know what this means—bone loss, which may lead to osteoporosis. And the last time we checked, sugar, found in soda by the boatload, does not make you skinny! Now don’t go patting yourself on the back if you drink diet soda. That stuff is even worse. Aspartame (an ingredient commonly found in diet sodas and other sugar-free foods) has been blamed for a slew of scary maladies, like arthritis, birth defects, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes.2 When methyl alcohol, a component of aspartame, enters your body, it turns into formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is toxic and carcinogenic (cancer-causing). 3 Laboratory scientists use formaldehyde as a disinfectant or preservative. They don’t fucking drink it. Perhaps you have a lumpy ass because you are preserving your fat cells with diet soda. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has received more complaints about aspartame than any other ingredient to date.4 Want more bad news? When aspartame is paired with carbs, it causes your brain to slow down its production of serotonin.5 A healthy level of serotonin is needed to be happy and well balanced. So drinking soda can make you fat, sick, and unhappy.

It's beyond everything what's being done in the district, according to what this doctor tells me. He's a very intelligent fellow. And as I've told you before, I tell you again; it's not right for you not to go to the meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business. If decent people won't go into it, of course it's bound to go all wrong. We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no schools, not district nurses, nor midwives, nor drug-stores ---nothing [...] How can you think it a matter of no importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert...dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don't help them because to your mind it's of no importance." And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so undeveloped that you can't see all that you can do , or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever IT is, to do it.

Hanging on to it a little, are you? … There’s a trick to letting it go, in case you’re interested… You can’t try. Trying is a struggle and doing is an act. You can’t witness the act of trying, but you can see the results of doing. Trying brings on stress because not only do you have the problem, but now you have all this frustration with it not going away just because you want it to. It’s kind of like being told not to think of pink elephants- impossible. What you have to do is stop. You say to yourself, this is over for now. I’m done for now. Take your mind to another place and concentrate on that peaceful place. Deep breaths. Go limp. Put your mind in another state. It takes practice, but it gets easier, over time… My gramma used to say, you can only feel one feeling at a time. For example, you can’t feel trust and fear together. If you want to trust but you’re afraid, fear is still in charge. If you trusted, there wouldn’t be fear. She also used to say you have to listen to what you feel- feeling fear could be warning, right? ... Don’t make love to your problems- they’ll never give you back the satisfaction you give them. And, your troubles aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, but that doesn’t mean writing them down won’t help you get a fix on ‘em. And, God respects you when you work, but he loves you when you dance… she also used to say, ‘if Jesus walked the earth today, he wouldn’t be hanging out with Billy Graham. He’d be found with the drug addicts and prostitutes and the like.

Nor did I grasp the capacity of love's absence to destroy, that my lack of love for myself made my own life unbearable. You take someone whose life experiences have taught them they're worthless, string them out on drugs, and you have one miserable person. How could I have given what I didn't have? It's hard to value another life when you view your own as dispensable, hard to understand how you can have so great an effect on someone else when you don't think you matter.

THERE IS STILL SOME TIME If you feel too much, there’s still a place for you here. If you feel too much, don’t go. If this world is too painful, stop and rest. It’s okay to stop and rest. If you need a break, it’s okay to say you need a break. This life—it’s not a contest, not a race, not a performance, not a thing that you win. It’s okay to slow down. You are here for more than grades, more than a job, more than a promotion, more than keeping up, more than getting by. This life is not about status or opinion or appearance. You don’t have to fake it. You do not have to fake it. Other people feel this way too. If your heart is broken, it’s okay to say your heart is broken. If you feel stuck, it’s okay to say you feel stuck. If you can’t let go, it’s okay to say you can’t let go. You are not alone in these places. Other people feel how you feel. You are more than just your pain. You are more than wounds, more than drugs, more than death and silence. There is still some time to be surprised. There is still some time to ask for help. There is still some time to start again. There is still some time for love to find you. It’s not too late. You’re not alone. It’s okay—whatever you need and however long it takes—it’s okay. It’s okay. If you feel too much, there’s still a place for you here. If you feel too much, don’t go. There is still some time.

If you genuinely care about someone, you won’t let them ruin themselves. It’s as simple as that. Don’t use your ‘supportive friend’ excuse to justify your ignorance. If someone in your life is living a self-destructive lifestyle, don’t encourage them. Don’t stand on the sidelines and watch. Do something. Tell them they’re worth more than that. That they’re bigger than what they’re facing. Tell them there are better ways to heal. Better ways to grow. Tell them they can be friends with better people.Tell them there’s no escape from reality but it only gets better if you face it. Tell them they’re killing themselves slowly by intaking drugs. Tell them you love them and don’t want them to get hurt. Tell them that you care. Do. Everything. You. Can. Because even if they may not listen, at least you’ll know you tried.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")

You’re not creating the ripple of love; you’re creating the vacuum of shit. I want to describe both sides of how I felt, but it’s important to know that in the end all the romantic glorification of dope fiendery amounts to nothing but a hole of shit. It has to appear enticing, because that’s why God or the universe, creative intelligence or whatever you want to call it, put that energy here. It’s a learning tool, and you can either kill yourself with it or you can turn yourself into a free person with it. I don’t think drug addiction is inherently useless, but it’s a rough row to hoe.

I don't know what to tell you. A statement is easy, and here it is: Be yourself. Try to matter. Be a good friend. Love freely, even if you are likely--almost guaranteed--to be hurt, betrayed. Do what you were created to do. You'll know what this is, because it is what you keep creeping up to, peering at, dreaming of. Do it. If you don't, you'll be punching clocks and eating time doing precisely what you shouldn't, and you'll become mean and you'll seek to punish any and all who appear the slightest bit happy, the slightest bit comfortable in their own skin, the slightest bit smart. Cruelty is a drug, as well, and it's all around us. Don't imbibe. "Try to matter. Try to care. And never be afraid to admit that you just don't know, you just don't fucking know how you're going to make it. That's when the help--the human and the divine help--shows up." --Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom/1982/

our national obsession with sex (and if you don’t think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest. I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port?

Things I've Learned in 18 Years of Life   1) True love is not something found, rather [sic] something encountered. You can’t go out and look for it. The person you marry and the person you love could easily be two different people. So have a beautiful life while waiting for God to bring along your once-in-a-lifetime love. Don't allow yourself to settle for anything less than them. Stop worrying about who you're going to marry because God's already on the front porch watching your grandchildren play.   2) God WILL give you more than you can handle, so you can learn to lean on him in times of need. He won't tempt you more than you can handle, though. So don't lose hope. Hope anchors the soul.   3) Remember who you are and where you came from. Remember that you are not from this earth. You are a child of heaven, you're invaluable, you are beautiful. Carry yourself that way.   4) Don't put your faith in humanity, humanity is inherently flawed. We are all imperfect people created and loved by a perfect God. Perfect. So put your faith in Him.   5) I fail daily, and that is why I succeed.   6) Time passes, and nothing and everything changes. Don't live life half asleep. Don't drag your soul through the days. Feel everything you do. Be there physically and mentally. Do things that make you feel this way as well.   7) Live for beauty. We all need beauty, get it where you can find it. Clothing, paintings, sculptures, music, tattoos, nature, literature, makeup. It's all art and it's what makes us human. Same as feeling the things we do. Stay human.   8) If someone makes you think, keep them. If someone makes you feel, keep them.   9) There is nothing the human brain cannot do. You can change anything about yourself that you want to. Fight for it. It's all a mental game.   10) God didn’t break our chains for us to be bound again. Alcohol, drugs, depression, addiction, toxic relationships, monotony and repetition, they bind us. Break those chains. Destroy your past and give yourself new life like God has given you.   11) This is your life. Your struggle, your happiness, your sorrow, and your success. You do not need to justify yourself to anyone. You owe no one an explanation for the choices that you make and the position you are in. In the same vein, respect yourself by not comparing your journey to anyone else's.   12) There is no wrong way to feel.   13) Knowledge is everywhere, keep your eyes open. Look at how diverse and wonderful this world is. Are you going to miss out on beautiful people, places, experiences, and ideas because you are close-minded? I sure hope not.   14) Selfless actions always benefit you more than the recipient.   15) There is really no room for regret in this life. Everything happens for a reason. If you can't find that reason, accept there is one and move on.   16) There is room, however, for guilt. Resolve everything when it first comes up. That's not only having integrity, but also taking care of your emotional well-being.   17) If the question is ‘Am I strong enough for this?’ The answer is always, ‘Yes, but not on your own.’   18) Mental health and sanity above all.   19) We love because He first loved us. The capacity to love is the ultimate gift, the ultimate passion, euphoria, and satisfaction. We have all of that because He first loved us. If you think about it in those terms, it is easy to love Him. Just by thinking of how much He loves us.   20) From destruction comes creation. Beauty will rise from the ashes.   21) Many things can cause depression. Such as knowing you aren't becoming the person you have the potential to become. Choose happiness and change. The sooner the better, and the easier.   22) Half of happiness is as simple as eating right and exercising. You are one big chemical reaction. So are your emotions. Give your body the right reactants to work with and you'll be satisfied with the products.

they’re selling is not real sex. It lacks connection, respect, and vulnerability, which is what makes sex sexy. “This kind of porn is sold by people who are like drug dealers. They sell a product that fills people with a rush that feels like joy for a short while but then becomes a killer of real joy. Over time people prefer the rush of drugs to the real joy of life. Many who start watching porn very young will get hooked on the rush. Eventually they will find it hard to enjoy real sex with real human beings. “Trying to learn about sex from porn is like trying to learn about the mountains by sniffing one of those air fresheners they sell at the gas station. When you finally get to the real mountains and breathe in that pure, wild air—you might be confused. You might wish it smelled like that fake, manufactured air-freshener version. “We don’t want you to stay away from porn while you’re young because sex is bad. We want you to stay away from porn because real sex—with humanity and vulnerability and love—is indescribably good. We don’t want fake sex ruining

Look at you Infidelity”, shaking his head in frustration. “I’m not sure if your choice of drug is passion, the thrill of the affair or the man himself, but there is a void you are trying to have us fulfill in your life and you are hooked! The secrets, the lies, the lame attempts to quit sleeping around…the isolation; don’t you get it? YOU LOVE INFIDELITY!" - Loving Infidelity

Nicolas sat very still just watching her. What he wanted to do was yank her back into the boat and weld their mouths together. Their bodies. He craved her like he would a drug. He made himself breath. In and out. He could read the desperation in her eyes, the fear. Not of him, for him. The tight coil in his belly began to relax. Not giving her time to argue or think, he simply caught her small wrists and lifted her into the boat. “We’re adults, remember? Now that we know it can happen, we’ll be more careful.” He managed a quick, teasing grin. “Until we don’t want to be careful.” Dahlia swallowed hard. She had courage, he had to give her that. Respect for her grew with every moment in her company. She didn’t back away from him, but held her ground. They were both standing up, and she had a long way to look up. “It could happen, Nicolas. You’ve never seen what pure energy can do, but I have. I generate heat when it happens and fires start. People get hurt.” “Have you ever made love to someone, Dahlia?” His voice was so low she had to strain to hear him. She felt the surge of darkness, of danger, something lethal and deadly emanating from him. “No, I’ve never wanted to get that close to anyone.” “Until now.” He wanted to hear her say it. At least give him that much. He needed that much. “Until now,” she agreed. Nicolas stepped away from her, sank back into position. “Thanks for not pushing me into the water. You must have thought about it.” “Don’t give me too much credit.” She made her way to the motor. “I wasn’t certain if I shoved, you’d fall.

The porn kids come across on the internet, is misogynistic poison. We have to explain that to them so they don't think sex is about violence. Sex is a wonderful and exciting thing about being human. It is natural to be curious about sex and when we are curious about things, we turn to the internet for information. But here's the problem with using the internet to learn about sex: you cannot know who is doing the teaching. There are people who have taken sex and sucked all the life out of it to package it and sell it on the internet. What they’re selling is not real sex. It lacks connection, respect, and vulnerability, which is what makes sex sexy. This kind of porn is sold by people who are like drug dealers. They sell a product that fills people with a rush that feels like joy for a short while but then becomes a killer of real joy. Over time people prefer the rush of drugs to the real joy of life. Many who start watching porn very young will get hooked on the rush. Eventually, they will find it hard to enjoy real sex with real human beings. Trying to learn about sex from porn is like trying to learn about the mountains by sniffing one of those air fresheners they sell at the gas station. When you finally get to the real mountains and breathe in that pure, wild air—you might be confused. You might wish it smelled like that fake, manufactured air freshener version. We don’t want you to stay away from porn while you’re young because sex is bad. We want you to stay away from porn because real sex—with humanity and vulnerability and love—is indescribably good. We don’t want fake sex ruining real sex for you.

So... Dell had been a good boy with bad friends. I knew this – I used to be one of them. I’d always known Dell would disappear one day; he was too decent, too golden. This place never tainted that, and I don’t know why. He made me feel dirty. Dark and corrupt. It hadn’t always that way, and I don’t know when it changed... but I felt it now. I only knew I couldn’t hold onto him tight enough to stop those long legs carrying him away somewhere better. A day’ll come when everybody’s had you and nobody wants you anymore... As Dell drove Erin away in their rent-a-car from the Holiday Inn into the early evening traffic, I felt the walls closing in, the world swelling around me, and I knew that day had finally come. Tomorrow, I leave Paradise. It’s true. Shanise was right. I turned away as the car disappeared up the slushy street. That was the last time I saw them alive.

I chose people who made me feel anxious and insecure and re-created my childhood circumstances of getting erratic attention. I gravitated toward people who were either physically or emotionally unavailable to subconsciously ensure I was getting a constant hit from my “internal drug cabinet.” Instead of heroin or cocaine, I used to be addicted to cortisol and adrenaline (which turns into dopamine! Yay!). That drove me to pick people who couldn’t give me safety or stability, which caused those chemicals to go buck wild on my brain. You live in London? Yes, please. You work until three A.M., and when you are available, you’re super tired, so every time we have the chance to connect, your eyes are half closed? Sure, let’s move in together. One day you tell me you’re in love with me, but then you disappear and go on a week-long bender on Long Island? Absolutely. You travel for four months at a time in places that have horrible cell service? Don’t mind if I do marry ya.

Woman lost (skin deep) like a damn fine thread in the fire Woman of the world caught up in your black machinations I was a woman who cried alone at night, who gave it all away when she saw the good heart of the man inside Woman caught standing up; her open parts are broken - Someone's armour broke right through, it was you, you For some reason I've been thinking about you, your light Today, you poured out all the tension, the ego underground Hibernating inside my heart. I was so close to it, to the flicker Of love in a lonely street and I turned my head and walked Away from the flame in your arms. As I put away the fun in A house of fight I came across you and a mechanism in My brain shifted chemically, walls caved in like the cadence In your words and I was lost in the darkness. Even now in Middle age I remember when desire was a popular drug And everyone was selling it but I don't live to explore to be Able to illuminate the proof of my existence, live to burn Vicariously though the diamond mouth of sleeping stars. From so much love, pictures of death arrived in black and White photographs and you're perfect, you always were - Illusions have no flaws; they're dangerous beings, smoke. Could I take the moon back and still live with my great Expectations of nostalgia, laughter, tears and suffering - But they are all a part of me not the people of the stars, Long dead videotape, the past has stained the symphony Of my soul (like the wind through the trees) throughout Me finding myself, my two left feet as a female poet The warning was there of the noise of eternity, signs That said, don't anger the sea, you have an ally in her. When men grow cold listen to their stories and bask in The glory of their genuine deaths, their winters, put Them away so you can read them like the newspaper. Once in a while you can go back to where you stood In youth with your afternoon tea, the sun of God in our Eyes - I am that kind of woman who lives in the past

Don’t say, just listen. When we got together, we became a unit. How you move is how I move, how I hustle, is how you hustle, and how you getcha money is how I get my money. What you go through, nigga I feel, and I’m not into allowing myself to hurt. If you wanna be the king of this drug shit, then it’s only right as your queen that I make it happen. Letting me handle this little situation isn’t gonna make you any less of a king then you already are. I can only add to you bae. I would never take from you.

you might think that treatments like group therapy after breast cancer would now be standard. Guess again. Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine. Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don’t believe in them; they can’t bring themselves to base treatment decisions on a rumored phantom like attachment. The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.

I wish someone had told me that love isn't torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn't know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn't know it was supposed to ... I didn't know it was supposed to be peace. And you know what? Even if i did know that, I don't know that I would have been ready to welcome it or value it. I wanted drugs and sex and angst. That's what I wanted.

In the long run, there is no running from your pain. You can try to numb yourself with slow, self-sabotaging methods—excessive eating, drinking, and drugs—or you can end it through suicide. But in the end, these methods don’t heal anything. While I’m reminded here in Spirit that I’m much more than my wounds, being here doesn’t heal the wounds I ran away from. I can gain understanding about how and why the wounds were created, but when I choose another physical body in another physical life, the same wounds will be front and center. Spirited life rejuvenates me, gives me greater perspective and strengthens my power to love myself with the wounds; but I have wounds that can only be worked out in physical form. I’ll strive to remember and bring this fresh perspective back into a new physical life, but I’ll still be subject to the veil of forgetfulness. We choose the physical circumstances that will remind us of what needs to be healed. Everything is orchestrated to provide us with what we need. During my life review, I saw that I’d had countless opportunities to heal the wounds, but because I’d been so afraid of change, I hadn’t even entertained them as possibilities. If I’d acted on the opportunities, I could have taken Physical Bill to his full potential. Instead, I’m now focused on creating another physical life and having to do it over again. Irene: Isn’t reincarnation

If you were in a drug store," said Stahr "-having a prescription filled-" "You mean a chemist?" Boxley asked. "If you were in a chemist's," conceded Stahr, "and you were getting a prescription for some member of your family who was very sick-" "-Very ill?" queried Boxley. "Very ill. Then whatever caught your attention through the window, whatever distracted you and held you would probably be material for pictures." "A murder outside the window, you mean." "There you go," said Stahr smiling. "It might be a spider working on the pane." "Of course-I see." "I'm afraid you don't, Mr. Boxley. You see it for your medium but not for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders on us.

What happens when you hit your daughter. First, she will bond to you out of fear, mistakenly thinking she has done something wrong, and if she can just manage to not do it again or somehow please you, you might not hit her or anyone else anymore. She will even think you will love her properly if she can earn your approval. She won't realize this is impossible. Then she will either do that with every man she comes within 100 feet of for the rest of her life or until she learns not to - this will take much doing - or she will despise them with such vehemence that she can barely stomach one around. Sometimes she will do a combination of both of those things, working herself into a pattern of push and pull - I love you, I hate you, I need you, I don't need anyone - that will drive her a little crazy. She won't understand at first, if ever, why she only attracts other masochists. Whatever numbing agent she's picked for herself - she will probably try drugs, drink too much alcohol, starve herself or binge and purge, maybe cut herself, act out sexually - in fact, she may do all of those things - that continues to help kill her spirit and dulls her enough to keep her participating in living like a maniac will be consumed to varying degrees depending on need. She will be more likely to commit suicide than if you hadn't abused her. She will give herself away and will mistake admiration and infatuation and sometimes even abuse for love.

Where are the decent women, where are our good daughters, where are our future wives, All i see are whores with tattoos, they smoke do hard drugs and care-less, and if you correct them they insult you, where are our future mothers, where are the women with standards, where are the women with good character and good hearts, where are the women that hide their body from men, Real women are mothers to their kids,wives to their husbands, daughters to their mothers. Real women are strong & independent,Women, stop being a girlfriend that gives boyfriends "wife" privileges! Women: Please set great examples for your daughters & don't let them see you allow nonsense w/your man! Teach them to know their worth. ‪#‎Daniel_Friday_Danzor‬ ‪#‎Women‬

This one girl here, Devon, she’s from Detroit. She’s brand-new too. One day I was about to leave to the grocery store, which is like a ten-minute walk away. She asked me to pick up a sandwich for her (which was kind of annoying), so I was like, “Why don’t you come with me?” She was like, “I can’t, ’cause I can’t walk very far.” I was like, “It’s not even ten minutes. Come on, don’t be lazy—if anything it’ll be a mini workout.” She was like, “Ever since I got shot, it hurts when I walk uphill.” (The walk on the way back is pretty much all on an incline.) I asked her why she got shot. I thought . . . Detroit? Ghetto, right? Probably domestic abuse, or a drug-related thing. She goes, “I got in a fight over a parking space, and the guy shot me in both of my knees.

I loved to observe people.. I watched love and life play out in a million ways, but one of the best things I learned was this: You don't outrun pain.. I saw men and women in those barrooms all trying to outrun something, some pain in their life- and man, they had pain... I saw them all trying to bury that pain in booze, sex, drugs, anger, and I saw it all before I was able to indulge in many of those behaviors myself. I saw that no one outran their suffering; they only piled new pain upon their original pain.. I saw the pain pile up into insurmountable mountains, and I saw the price people paid who buried all that pain, and along with it their hope, joy, and chance at happiness. All because they were trying to outrun the pain rather than walk through it and heal.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about loving and helping an addict, which most people who haven’t been through it don’t understand, is this: every day the cycle continues is your new worst day. When looked at from the outside it seems endless, the same thing over and over again; but when you’re living it, it’s like being a hamster on a wheel. Every day there’s the chronic anxiety of waiting for news, the horrible rush when it turns out to be bad, the overwhelming sense of déjà vu – and the knowledge that, despite your best efforts, you’ll probably be here again. Even so-called good days are not without their drawbacks. You enjoy them as much as you can, but in the back of your mind there’s the lurking fear that tomorrow you could be back to square one again, or worse. For me, this was life with Amy. If I was stopped by someone in the street and they asked how Amy was doing, I knew they wouldn’t understand if I told them what was going on. I’d learned that it’s nearly impossible to explain how this could keep happening. I’d imagined that, as they offered sympathy, they’d be wondering, How can her family let this carry on? Or, Why didn’t they lock her up until she was clean? But unless an addict wants to quit, they’ll find a way to get drugs, and as soon as they leave the rehab facility they’ll pick up where they left off. Long before Amy was an addict, no one could tell her what to do. Once she became an addict, that stubbornness just got worse. There were times when she wanted to be clean, but the times when she didn’t outnumbered them.

You are not in love with Rinaldo Damiani whose hair smells like Sunday morning in the sun, you do not even know him, he doesn’t know you. You can rest your hands on the scars of his shoulders and long to rid him of every breath of pain and still, you will not be in love with him, because this isn’t love. Love is a home and a mortgage and the promise of permanence; love is measured and paced, and this, the too-hasty sprint of your pulse, that’s drugs. You know drugs, don’t you, Charlotte? Euphoria can be bottled, it can be smoked, it will dissolve on your tongue and burn through the vacant cavity of your empty fucking chest. His hands on you, that can be preserved, it can be painted, it can be committed to the canvas of your imagination, and it can stay in the vaults of your private longings, your little reveries, your twisted dreams.

So Callie is a rake." She blushed. "I don't think so." Silence fell between them as he watched the wash of pink across her cheeks. He lifted her wounded arm in his hand, placing a soft kiss on the back of her hand. She breathed deeply at the feel of his lips on her skin, so warm and soft, and her eyes flew to his, intently focused on her. He held her gaze, and she felt a shock of liquid heat as his tongue circled one of her knuckles. He registered her surprise, smiling against her and turning her hand palm up, then setting his tongue and lips to work on the soft, sensitive spot at its center. Her breath quickened, and she closed her eyes to the sensation, unable to watch the erotic movement of his mouth across her skin. He lifted his lips from her hand and, when she opened her eyes again, it was to find him watching her, a wicked smile on his lips. Reaching out, he traced one finger along the line of her jaw, sending a shiver through her. When he spoke, his voice was thick and liquid, and it sent a shock of heat down her spine. "I shouldn't give up on that part of her just yet, Empress." She caught her breath at the endearment, which brought with it a hazy memory from long ago. He chased the vision away with the vivid present as he clasped her chin, bringing her face closer to his. "You forget, I've met the women several times... In carriages..." His lips hovered just above hers, sending a tremor of anticipation through her, "And in theatres..." She tried to close the distance between them and he pulled back just enough to drive her slightly mad. "And in bedchambers. In fact," he added, his words a caress along the sensitive skin of her lips, "I rather like the rakish side of her." And then he settled his lips upon hers, and she was lost. She was consumed by the softness of his mouth, the gentleness of the caress- so very different than the kisses they had shared before. This kiss consumed her, made her forget herself, their surroundings, everything but the magnificent pressure of his lips on hers. His thumb stroked her jaw as his mouth ate at hers, sending waves of pulsing pleasure through her. She gasped at the feeling, and he took advantage of her open lips to plunder her mouth with deep, drugging kisses that made her dizzy. She reached for him, her anchor in a sea of sensuality, wrapping her arms around his neck and plunging her fingers into his heavy, soft hair. He made a deep, satisfied sound at the feeling of her wrapped around him, and traced a path across her cheek and down the column of her throat with soft, moist kisses that sent explosions of pleasure through her.

Killing somebody is not so strange here. Whether it is with poison, drugs or a gunshot, every person you meet is a potential murderer or an accomplice. I’m no different. I’ve worked for them for years. I had a goal and threw away any morale to get what I wanted. This world is cruel, Drew. I’d like to believe it's just and fair, and the bad guys are the exception, but it's only a petty lie. People won't be good to you just because you're good to them. And if you want something, you have to be ready to give up something else. You have to be determined. Determined enough to live sacrificing ideals, pity, hope. I understand you cannot accept it. Deep down I’m happy you don't. Because the world you're looking at, despite everything you went through, is still clean. You still believe in justice. You're not like me. My world is dirty. I hate to disappoint you, but the truth is that your Shallie died because of people… like me.

Don't listen to Hassan i Sabbah," they will tell you. "He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immortality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?" At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction—and history is fiction—I must say this: "Bring together state of news—Inquire onward from state to doer—Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer—I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine—Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit—Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens—Stay out of the Garden of Delights—It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo—Throw back their ersatz Immortality—It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store—Flush their drug kicks down the drain—They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs—learn to make it without any chemical corn—All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.

I’m really enjoying my solitude after feeling trapped by my family, friends and boyfriend. Just then I feel like making a resolution. A new year began six months ago but I feel like the time for change is now. No more whining about my pathetic life. I am going to change my life this very minute. Feeling as empowered as I felt when I read The Secret, I turn to reenter the hall. I know what I’ll do! Instead of listing all the things I’m going to do from this moment on, I’m going to list all the things I’m never going to do! I’ve always been unconventional (too unconventional if you ask my parents but I’ll save that account for later). I mentally begin to make my list of nevers. -I am never going to marry for money like Natasha just did. -I am never going to doubt my abilities again. -I am never going to… as I try to decide exactly what to resolve I spot an older lady wearing a bright red velvet churidar kurta. Yuck! I immediately know what my next resolution will be; I will never wear velvet. Even if it does become the most fashionable fabric ever (a highly unlikely phenomenon) I am quite enjoying my resolution making and am deciding what to resolve next when I notice Az and Raghav holding hands and smiling at each other. In that moment I know what my biggest resolve should be. -I will never have feelings for my best friend’s boyfriend. Or for any friend’s boyfriend, for that matter. That’s four resolutions down. Six more to go? Why not? It is 2012, after all. If the world really does end this year, at least I’ll go down knowing I completed ten resolutions. I don’t need to look too far to find my next resolution. Standing a few centimetres away, looking extremely uncomfortable as Rags and Az get more oblivious of his existence, is Deepak. -I will never stay in a relationship with someone I don’t love, I vow. Looking for inspiration for my next five resolutions, I try to observe everyone in the room. What catches my eye next is my cousin Mishka giggling uncontrollably while failing miserably at walking in a straight line. Why do people get completely trashed in public? It’s just so embarrassing and totally not worth it when you’re nursing a hangover the next day. I recoil as memories of a not so long ago night come rushing back to me. I still don’t know exactly what happened that night but the fragments that I do remember go something like this; dropping my Blackberry in the loo, picking it up and wiping it with my new Mango dress, falling flat on my face in the middle of the club twice, breaking my Nine West heels, kissing an ugly stranger (Az insists he was a drug dealer but I think she just says that to freak me out) at the bar and throwing up on the Bandra-Worli sea link from Az’s car. -I will never put myself in an embarrassing situation like that again. Ever. I usually vow to never drink so much when I’m lying in bed with a hangover the next day (just like 99% of the world) but this time I’m going to stick to my resolution. What should my next resolution be?

You Westerners, he continued, 'you come here and tell us about Jesus. You can stay for a year or two, and your conscience will feel good, and then you can go away. Your Jesus will call you to other work back home. It's true some of you can raise a lot of money on behalf of us underprivileged people. But you'll still be living in your nice houses with your refrigerators and servants and we'll still be living here. What you are doing really has nothing to do with us. You'll go home anyhow, sooner or later.' This kind of conversation took place many times; it was an indictment of those evangelists who flew into Hong Kong, sang sweet songs about the love of Jesus on stage and on Hong Kong television, then jumped back into their planes and flew away again. 'Fine', said Ah Ping to me savagely one day, 'fine for them, fine for us too, we wouldn't mind believing in Jesus too if we could get into a plane and fly away round the world like them. They can sing about love very nicely, but what do they know about us? They don't touch us - they know nothing.

Sweetheart, you have to get some sleep. The doctor said you needed to rest, that your body was still flushing that drug out of your system.” Eli said nothing for a moment. “You called me ‘sweetheart.’” “I did?” “Did you mean it? Cause here’s the thing, sugar. You turned my world upside down. I’ve never been so scared in my life as when I realized Scarlett Group had taken you. I was afraid I wouldn’t have the chance to tell you how much I love you.” “Oh, Eli.” Tears filled her eyes. Her handsome Navy SEAL loved her enough that he was laying his heart on the line without having a clue she felt the same way about him.. An act of courage from the man staring at her with a wary gaze. “We haven’t known each other long. If it’s too soon for you to know how you feel about me, I’ll wait. Just know you own my heart, Brenna. I want to marry you and someday watch you rock my children.” She laid her hand over his mouth, stemming the tidal wave of words. “Eli, you don’t have to wait.” “I don’t?” “I’m a romance writer, my love. Happy endings are my stock in trade. Without you in my life, I wouldn’t have a happy ending because I love you, too, Eli. And, yes, I will marry you.” “Soon?” “The sooner, the better.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop complaining about Hollywood values. It's Oscar time again, which means two things: (1) I've got to get waxed, and (2) talk-radio hosts and conservative columnists will trot out their annual complaints about Hollywood: We're too liberal; we're out of touch with the Heartland; our facial muscles have been deadened with chicken botulism; and we make them feel fat. To these people, I say: Shut up and eat your popcorn. And stop bitching about one of the few American products--movies---that people all over the world still want to buy. Last year, Hollywood set a new box-office record: $16 billion worldwide. Not bad for a bunch of socialists. You never see Hollywood begging Washington for a handout, like corn farmers, or the auto industry, or the entire state of Alaska. What makes it even more inappropriate for conservatives to slam Hollywood is that they more than anybody lose their shit over any D-lister who leans right to the point that they actually run them for office. Sony Bono? Fred Thompson? And let'snot forget that the modern conservative messiah is a guy who costarred with a chimp. That's right, Dick Cheney. I'm not trying to say that when celebrities are conservative they're almost always lame, but if Stephen Baldwin killed himself and Bo Derrick with a car bomb, the headline the next day would be "Two Die in Car Bombing." The truth is that the vast majority of Hollywood talent is liberal, because most stars adhere to an ideology that jibes with their core principles of taking drugs and getting laid. The liebral stars that the right is always demonizing--Sean Penn and Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin and Tim Robbins, and all the other members of my biweekly cocaine orgy--they're just people with opinions. None of them hold elective office, and liberals aren't begging them to run. Because we live in the real world, where actors do acting, and politicians do...nothing. We progressives love our stars, but we know better than to elect them. We make the movies here, so we know a well-kept trade secret: The people on that screen are only pretending to be geniuses, astronauts, and cowboys. So please don't hat eon us. And please don't ruin the Oscars. Because honestly, we're just like you: We work hard all year long, and the Oscars are really just our prom night. The tuxedos are scratchy, the limousines are rented, and we go home with eighteen-year-old girls.

The next morning I showed up at dad’s house at eight, with a hangover. All my brothers’ trucks were parked in front. What are they all doing here? When I opened the front door, Dad, Alan, Jase, and Willie looked at me. They were sitting around the living room, waiting. No one smiled, and the air felt really heavy. I looked to my left, where Mom was usually working in the kitchen, but this time she was still, leaning over the counter and looking at me too. Dad spoke first. “Son, are you ready to change?” Everything else seemed to go silent and fade away, and all I heard was my dad’s voice. “I just want you to know we’ve come to a decision as a family. You’ve got two choices. You keep doing what you’re doing--maybe you’ll live through it--but we don’t want nothin’ to do with you. Somebody can drop you off at the highway, and then you’ll be on your own. You can go live your life; we’ll pray for you and hope that you come back one day. And good luck to you in this world.” He paused for a second then went on, a little quieter. “Your other choice is that you can join this family and follow God. You know what we stand for. We’re not going to let you visit our home while you’re carrying on like this. You give it all up, give up all those friends, and those drugs, and come home. Those are your two choices.” I struggled to breathe, my head down and my chest tight. No matter what happened, I knew I would never forget this moment. My breath left me in a rush, and I fell to my knees in front of them all and started crying. “Dad, what took y’all so long?” I burst out. I felt broken, and I began to tell them about the sorry and dangerous road I’d been traveling down. I could see my brothers’ eyes starting to fill with tears too. I didn’t dare look at my mom’s face although I could feel her presence behind me. I knew she’d already been through the hell of addiction with her own mother, with my dad, with her brother-in-law Si, and with my oldest brother, Alan. And now me, her baby. I remembered the letters she’d been writing to me over the last few months, reaching out with words of love from her heart and from the heart of the Lord. Suddenly, I felt guilty. “Dad, I don’t deserve to come back. I’ve been horrible. Let me tell you some more.” “No, son,” he answered. “You’ve told me enough.” I’ve seen my dad cry maybe three times, and that was one of them. To see my dad that upset hit me right in the gut. He took me by my shoulders and said, “I want you to know that God loves you, and we love you, but you just can’t live like that anymore.” “I know. I want to come back home,” I said. I realized my dad understood. He’d been down this road before and come back home. He, too, had been lost and then found. By this time my brothers were crying, and they got around me, and we were on our knees, crying. I prayed out loud to God, “Thank You for getting me out of this because I am done living the way I’ve been living.” “My prodigal son has returned,” Dad said, with tears of joy streaming down his face. It was the best day of my life. I could finally look over at my mom, and she was hanging on to the counter for dear life, crying, and shaking with happiness. A little later I felt I had to go use the bathroom. My stomach was a mess from the stress and the emotions. But when I was in the bathroom with the door shut, my dad thought I might be in there doing one last hit of something or drinking one last drop, so he got up, came over, and started banging on the bathroom door. Before I could do anything, he kicked in the door. All he saw was me sitting on the pot and looking up at him while I about had a heart attack. It was not our finest moment. That afternoon after my brothers had left, we went into town and packed up and moved my stuff out of my apartment. “Hey bro,” I said to my roommate. “I’m changing my life. I’ll see ya later.” I meant it.

- “Do you know the difference between us and them.... We are awake. We sense the truth: that something is deeply wrong with the world.... Deep down, they know it too. The feeling ebbs and flows. Some events cover it up for a time: you fall in love, you get a new job, you win the game. You think that’s all you needed, that the feeling will go away, but it doesn’t. It returns, again and again. Our species has become exceedingly adept at covering up the feeling. We work ourselves to death. We buy things. We go to parties and ball games. We laugh, shout, and cheer—and worse, we fight, and argue, and say things we don’t mean. Alcohol and drugs quiet the most acute episodes. But we are constantly keeping the beast at bay. Underneath it all, our subconscious is crying out for help. For a solution—a cure for the root problem. We’re all suffering from the same thing.” - “Which is?” - “We’ve been told that it’s simply the human condition. But that’s not true. Our problem is really very simple: the world is not as it seems.” - “Then what is it?” - “Science gives you one answer. Religious texts offer countless others. But the human population is slowly tiring of those answers. They are starting not to believe. They are awakening—and that awakening will soon tear the world apart. It will be a catastrophe with no equal.

I’m going to ignore the fact you just said I looked like a drug dealer.” I narrow my eyes on him. “Bro,” he laughs, “you and I both know you look like you belong on the other side of the law.” He shakes his head, looking me over. “That’s why—I have to say—I was surprised to see your girlfriend. She couldn’t be more opposite of you if she tried. Does she even have her ears pierced?” he questions with a smile. “I’m not going to tell you again. You don’t need to know anything about Sophie.” “You gonna marry her?” “Yes,” I state immediately. “Jesus, you’ve known her for what—a day?” “A few months, but I knew the moment I saw her,” I tell him, watching his eyes widen. “Why am I just learning about her then?” “First, there is not one damn reason for you to know about her. Second, I know you bitches love to sit around and gossip like a bunch of women in a knitting club, but unlike you f**kers, my business is my business.” “Does Mom know her?” He smirks, and he knows she doesn’t. If my mom knew about Sophie, the phone chain would have been activated, and everyone and their mothers would know about her. That’s why she will meet Sophie as soon as I get back into town; it would be f**ked up to introduce Sophie to my mom after I’ve already married her and knocked her up. “She’ll be meeting her soon enough.” I shrug. “You are so f**ked.” He laughs, and I couldn’t agree more.

Tell me, M. Antoine,’ said Harriet, as their taxi rolled along the Esplanade. ‘You who are a person of great experience, is love, in your opinion, a matter of the first importance?’ ‘It is, alas! of a great importance, mademoiselle, but of the first importance, no!’ ‘What is of the first importance?’ ‘Mademoiselle, I tell you frankly that to have a healthy mind in a healthy body is the greatest gift of le bon Dieu, and when I see so many people who have clean blood and strong bodies spoiling themselves and distorting their brains with drugs and drink and foolishness, it makes me angry. They should leave that to the people who cannot help themselves because to them life is without hope.’ Harriet hardly knew what to reply; the words were spoken with such personal and tragic significance. Rather fortunately, Antoine did not wait. ‘L’amour! These ladies come and dance and excite themselves and want love and think it is happiness. And they tell me about their sorrows—me—and they have no sorrows at all, only that they are silly and selfish and lazy. Their husbands are unfaithful and their lovers run away and what do they say? Do they say, I have two hands, two feet, all my faculties, I will make a life for myself? No. They say, Give me cocaine, give me the cocktail, give me the thrill, give me my gigolo, give me l’amo-o-ur! Like a mouton bleating in a field. If they knew! Harriet laughed. ‘You’re right, M. Antoine. I don’t believe l’amour matters so terribly, after all.

Dear PrettyKitty29, Hi, my name is Liam Brody. From the looks of your charming website, you've heard of me. Believe it or not, I've heard of you too. I was recently tipped off about your little gossip community. I probably shouldn't call it little. You are one of the busiest gossip communities on the Internet. Congratulations. I'm always impressed with people who manage to stay indoors so much. You must have a sufficient amount of Vitamin D. I noticed that you seem to have an odd and probably unwarranted agenda against me. Almost every bitter post about me is put up by lovely you. I also noticed that your hatred has spread successfully among your users. Wow. What an influence you have on gossip hungry teens and housewives. Again, congratulations. I apologize for dating models, PrettyKitty29. I just think they're more attractive than other people. Some people steal, some people do drugs, some people sell them. I date models. It could probably be worse. I could be someone who makes bribes. Speaking of those, I was emailing you to let you know that despite the sarcasm throughout this email, I find your strangely influential website interesting and am willing to make a substantial payment to you if you stop posting negative stories and put a few nice ones instead. I don't know what a gossip community moderator gets paid, but I'm sure that regardless, you could use a few extra bucks. It would pay for food delivery, movies On Demand, and other indoor pleasures that I'm sure you partake in. Please let me know. Best, Liam Brody.

Variations on a tired, old theme Here’s another example of addict manipulation that plagues parents. The phone rings. It’s the addict. He says he has a job. You’re thrilled. But you’re also apprehensive. Because you know he hasn’t simply called to tell you good news. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Then comes the zinger you knew would be coming. The request. He says everybody at this company wears business suits and ties, none of which he has. He says if you can’t wire him $1800 right away, he won’t be able to take the job. The implications are clear. Suddenly, you’ve become the deciding factor as to whether or not the addict will be able to take the job. Have a future. Have a life. You’ve got that old, familiar sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. This is not the child you gladly would have financed in any way possible to get him started in life. This is the child who has been strung out on drugs for years and has shown absolutely no interest in such things as having a conventional job. He has also, if you remember correctly, come to you quite a few times with variations on this same tired, old story. One variation called for a car so he could get to work. (Why is it that addicts are always being offered jobs in the middle of nowhere that can’t be reached by public transportation?) Another variation called for the money to purchase a round-trip airline ticket to interview for a job three thousand miles away. Being presented with what amounts to a no-choice request, the question is: Are you going to contribute in what you know is probably another scam, or are you going to say sorry and hang up? To step out of the role of banker/victim/rescuer, you have to quit the job of banker/victim/rescuer. You have to change the coda. You have to forget all the stipulations there are to being a parent. You have to harden your heart and tell yourself parenthood no longer applies to you—not while your child is addicted. Not an easy thing to do. P.S. You know in your heart there is no job starting on Monday. But even if there is, it’s hardly your responsibility if the addict goes well dressed, badly dressed, or undressed. Facing the unfaceable: The situation may never change In summary, you had a child and that child became an addict. Your love for the child didn’t vanish. But you’ve had to wean yourself away from the person your child has become through his or her drugs and/ or alcohol abuse. Your journey with the addicted child has led you through various stages of pain, grief, and despair and into new phases of strength, acceptance, and healing. There’s a good chance that you might not be as healthy-minded as you are today had it not been for the tribulations with the addict. But you’ll never know. The one thing you do know is that you wouldn’t volunteer to go through it again, even with all the awareness you’ve gained. You would never have sacrificed your child just so that you could become a better, stronger person. But this is the way it has turned out. You’re doing okay with it, almost twenty-four hours a day. It’s just the odd few minutes that are hard to get through, like the ones in the middle of the night when you awaken to find that the grief hasn’t really gone away—it’s just under smart, new management. Or when you’re walking along a street or in a mall and you see someone who reminds you of your addicted child, but isn’t a substance abuser, and you feel that void in your heart. You ache for what might have been with your child, the happy life, the fulfilled career. And you ache for the events that never took place—the high school graduation, the engagement party, the wedding, the grandkids. These are the celebrations of life that you’ll probably never get to enjoy. Although you never know. DON’T LET    YOUR KIDS  KILL  YOU  A Guide for Parents of Drug and Alcohol Addicted Children PART 2

I said to myself, This is going to be quick. I also thought: I’ll take the epidural now! Because the contractions were starting to demonstrate what the pain of birth is all about. The obstetrician came in. I smiled, ready for my shot. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said. “Your platelets are really, really low.” “Okay,” I said. I knew what platelets were-blood cells whose job it is to stop bleeding-but I had no idea why that was significant. “So, my epidural?” “You can’t have any medications.” “Come again?” “No drugs, no medications,” she said. “No epidural. I’ve called around to different anesthesiologists, and no one will touch you.” “No epidural?” “Nothing.” There are girls from third-world countries who do it with no drugs, I reminded myself. My mother elected for natural childbirth. How bad can it be? I got this. It started to hurt. I thought to myself, I am not going to cuss. Hell no! I am about to be a mother. I am bringing our baby into a positive environment and must be a good role model. Wow! The contractions built up quickly. My pristine vision of perfect, calm, quiet childbirth disappeared. A banshee snuck into the room and took over my body. Arrrgggh!!! No cursing! There was a rocking chair in the birth room. I went over and sat in it and began moving back and forth. Chris put on a CD by Enya that we’d brought to listen to: peaceful, pleasant music. I took a deep breath. Jeez, Louise! That one was a monster! Then, a breather. I’m doing goooooood! Breathe. Breathe… Wow! Then I said some other things. The banshee had a mind of her own. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I apologized to the nurses as I recovered from the surge of the contraction. “It’s okay,” said Chris. The pain surged again. Dang! Jiminy! And other things. Chris would watch the monitor. Suddenly he’d turn to look at me. “What?” I asked. “That was a strong one.” “Uh-huh.” The funny thing is, the stronger the contractions were on the monitor, the less they seemed to hurt. Maybe when things are really bad you focus more on being tough. Or perhaps my brain’s pain mechanism simply went on strike when the agony got too much.

Taking control of the situation There are a great many parents—as I’ve learned by attending endless parent support group meetings— who had the same high hopes for their families as I. If you’re such a parent, then you probably know that it isn’t just the child who can be out of control, but also the parent. Possibly you are also aware that continuous reacting on your part is useless as well as extremely hazardous to your health and well-being. The most ruinous thing you can do is to allow the situation to continue on its present destructive course. Here are some simple steps you can take to deactivate the negativity so rampant in your family dynamics. Please note that it takes courage and determination to carry this off successfully. Cut off all funds to the addict. Holding onto the purse strings with an iron fist will have immediate results, as well as repercussions. (Keep an eye on family valuables. In fact, lock them away.) Cut off all privileges accorded to your addicts— such as use of the family car or having their friends in your house. Carry out all threats you make. The fastest way to lose credibility with addicted children is to become a “softie” at the last minute. Refuse to rescue your addicts when they get into legal jams. Don’t pay their fines or their bail. Get yourself into a support group such as Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, Parents Anonymous, or Tough Love as fast as you can. Attempt to get your addicted kids into rehabs. If they’re underage you can sign them in. Adult admission is done on a voluntary basis, so you may be out of luck. Drugs erase any trace of conscience. Be aware that many of today’s drugged youths will think nothing of injuring or even murdering their parents for money. If you suspect that your child could resort to this level of violence, get in touch with the police. If you’re a single parent there will be one voice, but if you’re married there’ll be two. It’s important to merge those two voices so that a single, clear message reaches the addict. If you can work with your partner as a team to institute these simple steps when dealing with the addict, you’ll have done yourself and your family a great service. If, however, you entertain the notion that you were responsible for your child’s addictions in the first place, chances are you won’t be effective in enforcing these guidelines. That’s what the next chapter is all about. Note 1. Drug abuse and alcoholism are officially listed in The International Classification of Diseases, 4th edition, 9th revision, the World Health Organization’s directory on diseases.

I glanced over and saw Wyatt glaring at me. Journey’s “Lovin’ Touchin’, Squeezin’” was playing on the radio. “What?” I asked. “You secretly hate me, don’t you.” He gestured toward the radio. “You can’t stand the thought of me taking a much needed nap and leaving you to drive without conversation. You’re torturing me with this sappy stuff.” “It’s Journey. I love this song.” Wyatt mumbled something under his breath, picked up the CD case, and started looking through it. He paused with a choked noise, his eyes growing huge. “You’re joking, Sam. Justin Bieber? What are you, a twelve-year old girl?” There’s gonna be one less lonely girl, I sang in my head. That was a great song. How could he not like that song? Still, I squirmed a bit in embarrassment. “A twelve-year old girl gave me that CD,” I lied. “For my birthday.” Wyatt snorted. “It’s a good thing you’re a terrible liar. Otherwise, I’d be horrified at the thought that a demon has been hanging out with a bunch of giggling pre-teens.” He continued to thumb through the CDs. “Air Supply Greatest Hits? No, no, I’m wrong here. It’s an Air Supply cover band in Spanish.” He waved the offending CD in my face. “Sam, what on earth are you thinking? How did you even get this thing?” “Some tenant left it behind,” I told him. “We evicted him, and there were all these CDs. Most were in Spanish, but I’ve got a Barry Manilow in there, too. That one’s in English.” Wyatt looked at me a moment, and with the fastest movement I’ve ever seen, rolled down the window and tossed the case of CDs out onto the highway. It barely hit the road before a semi plowed over it. I was pissed. “You asshole. I liked those CDs. I don’t come over to your house and trash your video games, or drive over your controllers. If you think that will make me listen to that Dubstep crap for the next two hours, then you better fucking think again.” “I’m sorry Sam, but it’s past time for a musical intervention here. You can’t keep listening to this stuff. It wasn’t even remotely good when it was popular, and it certainly hasn’t gained anything over time. You need to pull yourself together and try to expand your musical interests a bit. You’re on a downward spiral, and if you keep this up, you’ll find yourself friendless, living in a box in a back alley, stinking of your own excrement, and covered in track marks.” I looked at him in surprise. I had no idea Air Supply led to lack of bowel control and hard core drug usage. I wondered if it was something subliminal, a kind of compulsion programmed into the lyrics. Was Russell Hitchcock a sorcerer? He didn’t look that menacing to me, but sorcerers were pretty sneaky. Even so, I was sure Justin Bieber was okay. As soon as we hit a rest stop, I was ordering a replacement from my iPhone.

Christopher entered the room, having to bend his head to pass through the small medieval doorway. Straightening, he surveyed their surroundings briefly before his piercing gaze found Beatrix. He stared at her with the barely suppressed wrath of a man to whom entirely too much had happened. Beatrix wished she were a swooning sort of female. It seemed the only appropriate response to the situation. Unfortunately, no matter how she tried to summon a swoon, her mind remained intractably conscious. “I’m so sorry,” she croaked. No reply. Christopher approached her slowly, as if he thought she might try to bolt again. Reaching her, he took her upper arms in a hard grip that allowed no chance of escape. “Tell me why you did it,” he said, his voice low and vibrant with…hatred? Fury? “No, damn you, don’t cry. Was it a game? Was it only to help Prudence?” Beatrix looked away with a wretched sob. “No, it wasn’t a game…Pru showed me your letter, and she said she wasn’t going to answer it. And I had to. I felt as if it had been written for me. It was only supposed to be once. But then you wrote back, and I let myself answer just once more…and then one more time, and another…” “How much of it was the truth?” “All of it,” Beatrix burst out. “Except for signing Pru’s name. The rest of it was real. If you believe nothing else, please believe that.” Christopher was quiet for a long moment. He had begun to breathe heavily. “Why did you stop?” She sensed how difficult it was for him to ask. But God help her, it was infinitely worse to have to answer. “Because it hurt too much. The words meant too much.” She forced herself to go on, even though she was crying. “I fell in love with you, and I knew I could never have you. I couldn’t pretend to be Pru any longer. I loved you so much, and I couldn’t--” Her words were abruptly smothered. He was kissing her, she realized dazedly. What did it mean? What did he want? What…but her thoughts dissolved, and she stopped trying to make sense of anything. His arms had closed around her, one hand gripping the back of her neck. Shaken to her soul, she molded against him. Taking her sobs into his mouth, he licked deep, his kiss strong and savage. It had to be a dream, and yet her senses insisted it was real, the scent and warmth and toughness of him engulfing her. He pulled her even more tightly against him, making it difficult to breathe. She didn’t care. The pleasure of the kiss suffused her, drugged her, and when he pulled his head back, she protested with a bewildered moan. Christopher forced her to look back at him. “Loved?” he asked hoarsely. “Past tense?” “Present tense,” she managed to say. “You told me to find you.” “I didn’t mean to send you that note.” “But you did. You wanted me.” “Yes.” More tears escaped her stinging eyes. He bent and pressed his mouth to them, tasting the salt of grief. Those gray eyes looked into hers, no longer bright as hellfrost, but soft as smoke. “I love you, Beatrix.” Maybe she was capable of swooning after all.

The Pitjantjatjara and Pintupi don’t wash with water—for one thing because there isn’t much water in the desert, but for another because they don’t want to bother the Rainbow Serpent, the all-powerful creator god who lives around the water holes. Instead they use ashes from their fires to wash themselves, and it doesn’t deodorize them. The thing that fascinated me most was that they have absolutely no possessions. This is connected to the fact that they don’t believe in tomorrow; there is only today. For example, it is very rare to find a kangaroo in the desert. When they find one, they have food to eat, which is a big deal for them. But after they kill and cook the kangaroo, they can never finish it: there’s always lots of meat left. But since they’re always moving from place to place, when they wake up the next morning, they don’t take the meat with them. They just leave everything—the next day is the next day. Ulay and I separated, because among the Aborigines, the men stay with men and the women with women. The two sexes only make love during nights with a full moon, then they separate again. This creates total harmony—they don’t get a chance to bother each other! My main job with the women was watching them present their dreams. Every morning we would go to a field somewhere, and in hierarchical order, starting with the oldest women and moving down to the youngest, they would show us, using a stick to make drawings in the dirt, what they’d dreamed the night before. Each woman would then assign the rest of us roles to act out the dream as they interpreted it. They all had dreams; they all had to show them—dreams playing all day long! As spring turned to summer, the heat would rise to 50 degrees Celsius or more—130-plus degrees Fahrenheit. It’s like a hot wall. If you just stand up and walk a few paces, your heart feels like it’s going to hammer through your chest. You can’t. There are very few trees; there’s very little shade of any kind. So you literally have to be motionless for long periods of time. You function before sunrise and after sunset—that’s it. To stay motionless during the day, you have to slow down everything: your breathing, even your heartbeat. I also want to mention that Aboriginals are the only people I know who don’t take drugs of any kind. Even tea is much too strong a stimulant for them. That’s why they don’t have any kind of resistance to alcohol—it completely wipes out their memory. In the beginning, there were flies everywhere. I was covered with them—in my nose, in my mouth, all over my body. It was impossible to chase them away. Then after three months, I woke up one morning without a single fly on me. It was then that I understood that the flies had been drawn to me because I was something strange and different: as I became one with my surroundings, I lost my attraction.

Quieting the internal strife frees the spirit. Leonard is constantly refining his techniques for getting high. Drugs don’t work anymore. Neither does public acclaim or the music industry or Scientology (which he once was into), but yoga, fasting, and his writing help. So does Suzanne. The process is ongoing and more profound as the years pass. You can see it on his face. Refining. Always refining. And that’s why I search out Leonard. Why I love the man. Leonard knows a lot about searching, and I’m trying to become better at it myself. He turned me onto it. My brother crystallized it when he took me aside one day and said: “You don’t like yourself very much. That’s why you run around. You’re afraid if you slow down you’ll find out there’s nothing to you … but there is.

Ah! The camel! Charming boy, to boot! Stick out your tongue, my friend. That’s three francs! We’re going to have us a purge, my dear child, with a sublime corrosive of vitriol and dog crap.” He stared at me, searching for something that he could not find. His eyes looked angry and then confused. “Veuly! Veuly—or rather Agénor Biscaillou! You don’t know what it’s like to be a doctor! I didn’t want to be a doctor! What I got, paddlings when I was a kid, wallops to crush my skull! My father had his own ideas: he loved drugs! He wanted to make me fill people full of them—a philanthropist, I tell you—a f…lippin philanthropist! How did I get my degree? A mystery! I learned nothing at all. An old imbecile named Froin— not you, Doctor Peskyass! Not you! No! A lousy psychiatrist, that idiot Froin, paid for my school to look the other… to be generous! Ah! The stupid oaf! My father loved it—not me! And I was so bored in Paris, in that f…lippin Latin Quarter where you can’t give people a good thrashing without going to the clink! “I started liking medicine only when I found out that a Doctor had the right to f… mess with his patients, to push them to the edge, even to poison them a little without a sound from anyone—not the half-dead or their stupid relatives—and this swine Froin who always paid—this gave him gloves, for the fattening!—and who forced me to be with the lunatics, the goddamn lunatics! They don’t consume enough poisonous chemical products—the freaks! Too bad! I still gave a lot of eleven o’clock broths to those brain cripples, those human wrecks, those degenerates turning back into animals! And I did it ever so subtly; no one ever suspected a thing, Froin least of all, the smiling, meek, hydrocephalic hypocrite!” The Director did not bat an eyelid. He whispered to me: “You see, he’s completely gone! The boy was so close and affectionate to me when he still had some common sense!

Don’t you find it ironic at all, that television pushes beer (alcohol, the number two killer drug in the world) down our throats twenty-four hours a day, with beautiful half-naked women and the promise of ‘freedom and infinite sex appeal’, while also maintaining a division of their corporate empire called ‘Standards and Practices’? Exactly what Standards are you practising. I’ve even seen these commercials during ‘in depth’ reports on the war against drugs.

Dad had gone ballistic when Ruby got suspended from school for smoking, but not Nora. Her mother had picked Ruby up from the principal’s office and driven her to the state park at the tip of the island. She’d dragged Ruby down to the secluded patch of beach that overlooked Haro Strait and the distant glitter of downtown Victoria. It had been exactly three in the afternoon, and the gray whales had been migrating past them in a spouting, splashing row. Nora had been wearing her good dress, the one she saved for parent–teacher conferences, but she had plopped down cross-legged on the sand. Ruby had stood there, waiting to be bawled out, her chin stuck out, her arms crossed. Instead, Nora had reached into her pocket and pulled out the joint that had been found in Ruby’s locker. Amazingly, she had put it in her mouth and lit up, taking a deep toke, then she had held it out to Ruby. Stunned, Ruby had sat down by her mother and taken the joint. They’d smoked the whole damn thing together, and all the while, neither of them had spoken. Gradually, night had fallen; across the water, the sparkling white city lights had come on. Her mother had chosen that minute to say what she’d come to say. “Do you notice anything different about Victoria?” Ruby had found it difficult to focus. “It looks farther away,” she had said, giggling. “It is farther away. That’s the thing about drugs. When you use them, everything you want in life is farther away.” Nora had turned to her. “How cool is it to do something that anyone with a match can do? Cool is becoming an astronaut…or a comedian…or a scientist who cures cancer. Lopez Island is exactly what you think it is—a tiny blip on a map. But the world is out there, Ruby, even if you haven’t seen it. Don’t throw your chances away. We don’t get as many of them as we need. Right now you can go anywhere, be anyone, do anything. You can become so damned famous that they’ll have a parade for you when you come home for your high-school reunion…or you can keep screwing up and failing your classes and you can snip away the ends of your choices until finally you end up with that crowd who hangs out at Zeke’s Diner, smoking cigarettes and talking about high-school football games that ended twenty years ago.” She had stood up and brushed off her dress, then looked down at Ruby. “It’s your choice. Your life. I’m your mother, not your warden.” Ruby remembered that she’d been shaking as she’d stood up. That’s how deeply her mother’s words had reached. Very softly, she’d said, “I love you, Mom.

Look at me,” I said, “living the dream, on TV, doing what I love, and still drawn in by drugs and bad choices, living in this painful place. I don’t even have my youth to blame.” I knew, at forty-one, I was emotionally and mentally stunted, though I didn’t say that aloud. I was still a child in my head, rebelling against my mom, saying fuck the world, making bad choices, hiding from what I didn’t want to face. And I was still teetering. “I’m not out of the woods, and it can all disappear if I keep at it,” I told them. “You don’t get too many chances when you look like me.

Crush approached the table. “Let me tell you a little something about love. Maybe I haven’t been around as long as you, but I’ve lived a full life. We all want love. It’s in our nature to need someone who’s there for us. I get where you’re coming from, because I was destructive. I lost the only woman I’ll ever love, and that’s a fact. But I got Raven, and I got friends who I never thought would stick around this long. Love comes in different forms. Don’t get fixated on the one that everyone’s chasing, or you’ll never see what you’ve already got. Look around. You think the chuckleheads you work with are just temporary? You marked your skin to show unity, and you’re willing to lay down your life for the other. That’s love. It’s a different kind of love. You can’t pick and choose what fate deals you.” He leaned in and took the shot, sinking the ball. “Once you figure all that shit out, you won’t need the drugs anymore.

I have confidence in the driver, and in life. When you have confidence you don't worry so much. Trust fights fear.

Do you have a family history of psychosis? You shouldn’t be experimenting around with drugs. Do you have a family history of alcohol addiction? You might be predisposed to alcohol addiction, so maybe you don’t mess around as much with alcohol. Do you have a family addiction to gambling? Well, let’s either assume that hereditary doesn’t exist, which is obviously not true because it’s very likely that you look like your parents, or it’s very likely that you have some similar mannerisms to them.

If you must try drugs, try to do it after you do all the other cool, bad ass things. And if you must try drugs, realize they are dangerous. Get the testing kits, do a lot of research, be very careful. Don’t take anyone’s word for anything. Have all the safeties in place.

A faint smile touched his lips. “How militant you’re being. What if I don’t choose to stay? Will I be chained to your wrist like a diplomat’s briefcase?” “If necessary.” She blinked back tears of anger and exhaustion. “I’ll do anything I can to keep you here. It’s stupid of you to even think of leaving me when you love me. And you do love me. Why don’t you admit it?” “I love you,” he said obediently. “You’re so damned frightened that I’m going to be hurt—” She stopped and tried to steady her voice. “Well, if you don’t stay with me, I’ll get Penny and Mac to give me the most dangerous assignments they can dredge up. Beirut, investigative reporting, drug running.” The smile disappeared from Jordan’s face. “The hell you will.

Christine's heart is thumping wildly. She lets herself be led (her aunt means her nothing but good) into a tiled and mirrored room full of warmth and sweetly scented with mild floral soap and sprayed perfumes; an electrical apparatus roars like a mountain storm in the adjoining room. The hairdresser, a brisk, snub-nosed Frenchwoman, is given all sorts of instructions, little of which Christine understands or cares to. A new desire has come over her to give herself up, to submit and let herself be surprised. She allows herself to be seated in the comfortable barber's chair and her aunt disappears. She leans back gently, and, eyes closed in a luxurious stupor, senses a mechanical clattering, cold steel on her neck, and the easy incomprehensible chatter of the cheerful hairdresser; she breathes in clouds of fragrance and lets aromatic balms and clever fingers run over her hair and neck. Just don't open your eyes, she thinks. If you do, it might go away. Don't question anything, just savor this Sundayish feeling of sitting back for once, of being waited on instead of waiting on other people. Just let our hands fall into your lap, let good things happen to you, let it come, savor it, this rare swoon of lying back and being ministered to, this strange voluptuous feeling you haven't experienced in years, in decades. Eyes closed, feeling the fragrant warmth enveloping her, she remembers the last time: she's a child, in bed, she had a fever for days, but now it's over and her mother brings some sweet white almond milk, her father and her brother are sitting by her bed, everyone's taking care of her, everyone's doing things for her, they're all gentle and nice. In the next room the canary is singing mischievously, the bed is soft and warm, there's no need to go to school, everything's being done for her, there are toys on the bed, though she's too pleasantly lulled to play with them; no, it's better to close her eyes and really feel, deep down, the idleness, the being waited on. It's been decades since she thought of this lovely languor from her childhood, but suddenly it's back: her skin, her temples bathed in warmth are doing the remembering. A few times the brisk salonist asks some question like, 'Would you like it shorter?' But she answers only, 'Whatever you think,' and deliberately avoids the mirror held up to her. Best not to disturb the wonderful irresponsibility of letting things happen to you, this detachment from doing or wanting anything. Though it would be tempting to give someone an order just once, for the first time in your life, to make some imperious demand, to call for such and such. Now fragrance from a shiny bottle streams over her hair, a razor blade tickles her gently and delicately, her head feels suddenly strangely light and the skin of her neck cool and bare. She wants to look in the mirror, but keeping her eyes closed in prolonging the numb dreamy feeling so pleasantly. Meanwhile a second young woman has slipped beside her like a sylph to do her nails while the other is waving her hair. She submits to it all without resistance, almost without surprise, and makes no protest when, after an introductory 'Vous etes un peu pale, Mademoiselle,' the busy salonist, employing all manner of pencils and crayons, reddens her lips, reinforces the arches of her eyebrows, and touches up the color of her cheeks. She's aware of it all and, in her pleasant detached stupor, unaware of it too: drugged by the humid, fragrance-laden air, she hardly knows if all this happening to her or to some other, brand-new self. It's all dreamily disjointed, not quite real, and she's a little afraid of suddenly falling out of the dream.

You may feel sexual energy moving through your entire body in waves during meditation (or at any time— even unprovoked), filling in and activating the lower energy centers with desire. And since imagination is in you all the time and is part of who you are, for reasons other than having sex, you should harness it. There's a big difference between having an "erotic life" and having a "sex life." Having sex or an orgasm isn't even half of what erotic energy means to be energized. It can potentially decrease the energy released by sexual activity. When you don't use orgasm to disburse sexual energy, it builds up and eventually transforms into creative expression and makes you do something you may not have had the ability or boldness to do before. The trick is to harness the emotion instead of allowing it to control your actions or turn you into a slave to your sex drive. I do not suggest you repress or resist sexual urges— that action is fear-based or guilt-driven, which serves no other useful purpose than to cause frustration that slows spiritual advancement. Instead, channel your strength and infuse it into all you do. Your mission to work and life can be inspired, and your family and friendships can be positively influenced as you interact from a love-filled heart that is activated by sexual energy. It can bring bliss, creativity, and joy from grocery shopping to writing a blog post, as it invites you to enjoy the present moment. It's like being drunk or drugged under the influence of sexual energy; it can inspire you to take risks and do things you wouldn't otherwise do. It can lessen the fear that you might feel in a business venture or some other opportunity to take the next step. Before you can channel strong sexual energy to other beneficial pursuits, the energy in your personal space and body must be able to hold and flow in. This can be done as you connect in the present moment to your sacred heart center, without being distracted by the mind's constant chatter. When you feel sexual energy stirring inside you, stay in an awareness space, and feel it as it flows through your body. Note how it pulsates, and give you a sense of strength. Contain it simply and enable it to revitalize and heal the body, lift depression, open blockages, dissolve sexual hang-ups, and spark new ideas. As you hold this powerful presence, you can start by using thought or intention to direct the energy toward some creative endeavor. Ultimately the energy is inside you and can be activated without another person's influence. Yet tantric exploration, practicing heart connection, or sending / receiving energy with another person can increase this energy flow even more and bring euphoric pleasure to the whole body and emotions.

Drinkers at social events will tell you they don’t need to drink. But, when the next bit of anxiety comes up, they grab another glass. Smokers will tell you they enjoy lighting up. They’ll tell you they feel better right after a cigarette. And nearly all of them will tell you they really want to quit—they’re just not quite ready yet. Workaholics will tell you they enjoy what they do, or at least feel a sense of purpose, while stretching themselves to the breaking point. They’ll tell you they have to do it. Some will even admit that it makes them feel important. They’ll promise to get control of their schedules… as soon as the next project is done. Compulsive shoppers love to hit the stores. They call it “stress management” or “retail therapy.” For a few hours, they’ll say, everything is perfect. After they get the goodies home, though, some will tell you they feel empty or even disgusted. They’d love a simpler life—but only if they first can buy the best of everything. People who misuse prescription drugs will tell you the pills ease their pain. The pain from a surgery or disease was so extreme that they got prescribed a medication, and soon they had to take more and more to keep the pain away. They’ll say they hate being constantly constipated and forgetting where they are, but it’s the only way they believe they can function and feel normal.

I remember the time on the school bus back before anyone could drive, Jenny bet me a dollar, to put my hand down her jeans to prove she wears thong undies. Saying that I am such a baby, for not knowing, that’s how that all started, she felt like she had to teach me everything. Anyways back then I was still where Mickey Mouse Briefs and did even think about what was underneath. She beat me to feel that she was not a virgin, that she was all open and smooth, unlike me at the time. I didn’t even shave my legs yet. So, I did, I went for it. The rush here was touching a girl inappropriately, with everyone looking, and hoping the driver didn’t see. I’ll never forget Danny Hover looking over the site with Andrea Doeskin smelling, like little perv’s, and Shy saying- ‘Oh my God’- snickering at the fact, from the set accordingly. Yeah, it’s that kind of rush I get, over and over being with them. Just like Jenny got Liv fixed up with Dilco, it’s all about the rush in the end. Jenny can be a hell of a lot of fun, and it’s that fun that keeps me coming back for more, the same way Liv and Maddie do, and other girls keep trying to be like us, it’s all about the craziness. I don’t know why but when I am with them- I want to be so naughty! I remember Marcel smacking my butt, just to be cute, every time he would see me in the hallways of a school. -Yeah, he’s weird, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him as I was- well… doing me. Yet Ray’s photo was looking at me on my nightstand. ~*~ In my bed, I snap the bright light off when I hear my little sis coming down the hall, everyone goes back to being fuzzy, like I’m not looking at my room but only at a blurry photo of my room that was taken with a shaky hand incorrectly and nothing match up with the real thing. My sis went into the bathroom next door to tinkle, so I snapped on my nightlight, and then that light modifies everything, so it looks somewhat ordinary again. If my sis sees my light on from the crack at the bottom of my door, she will come bursting in. I have learned to keep it as dark as I can when I hear her coming run down the hallway. I love her, yet I want my privacy. All at once it comes back to me, like a hangover rush all my blood starts going back up into my head: the party, my sis getting laid, the argument with Ray, falling to Marcel, all the sex, all the drinking, and drugs, it’s all thumping hard in my brain, like my covered button was a few moments ago, on cam. I am still lying here uncovered, with everything still out in the open. ‘Kellie!’ My door swings open, hammering the door handle against my wall, and sis comes bolting across my room, jumping in my bed, pacing over my textbook's notebooks, love notes, and pills of dirty tops and bottoms and discarded jeans, I panic thinking my Victoria’s Secret Heritage Pink nighty way over there on the floor, where I thought it off and left it the night before. Yet it’s not liked my sis has not seen me naked before… but is wired when this happens. Something is not right, something seems very wrong and oggie; something skirts the edges of my memory, but then it is gone as my head pounds and sis is bouncing on my bed on top of me, throwing her arms and legs around my nude torso. Saying- ‘So what are you going to show me today?’ I am thinking to myself- girl you already got it down, doing what you’re doing now, I don’t need to teach you anything. Kellie- she is so hot… (Oh God not in that way, she’s- my sis.) She is like a little furnace with her worth coming from her tiny body. It’s not too long before her nighty rides up, and I can see it all in my face like she wants to be just like me, and then she starts asking her questions.

Good music is being released less and less. People need it less often. I’m not talking about the melody, the beat, but the lyrics. From my perspective, every song is a story performed by the artist. When was the last time you listened attentively to modern songs’ lyrics? People used to say that music is spiritual nourishment, it is like food for the soul, but if you look at our reality, you’ll see that people started focusing only on physical needs. Modern songs prioritize body over soul. It is because eighty percent of successful and influential labels release tracks that put parties, drugs, and sex as the main priorities of modern life. Seems like all the songs about love have already been sung and the greatest compliments that can be addressed to people are related to their physical characteristics. It feels like singers and songwriters are referring to some piece of meat, instead of a living person. The problem is that good, soulful songs are not to the taste of today's audience. Therefore, many genuinely talented artists are underrated and ignored because they are not following the rules that are dictated by commercial corporations, labels. I don’t know, maybe I’m too conservative.

it reminded me of my mom. She wasn’t a bad person at all, and I don’t think she ever meant to be mean. Difficult yes, but not mean. She just wanted attention and love. But she never seemed to get what she needed, or it wasn’t enough, and so the drinking and then the drugs kind of numbed that, I guess. But she hated herself for it. That was the worst part—the guilt. She felt so bad about what she was doing to both of us that she needed to numb more. It was a vicious cycle, like you said.” “It’s a terrible place to be.” James looked out at the water. “Sometimes I think people who have problems like that are operating at a higher frequency than the rest of us. It definitely has its perils.” “What do you mean?” “People like your mom feel things more sharply. Life is hard when you’re like that—there are lots of pointy edges to run into. If you don’t have a thick skin, even little bumps can hurt like hell. I think that’s why people use. They’re trying to protect themselves from the pain.

To avoid being with yourself, you need to take something to numb you, to take your mind away from yourself. Perhaps some alcohol is going to help. Perhaps some drugs will help. Perhaps eating — just eat, eat, eat. The self-abuse can get much worse. There are people who really feel self-hatred. They are self-destructive, killing themselves little by little, because they don’t have the courage to kill themselves fast. If

Dr Winstock, it should be noted, claims he has never taken MDMA, LSD, or any other narcotic himself. He asserts he was drawn to the field after observing the behaviour of his friends when he was a university student. ‘I LOVE YOU MAN. NO, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. I LOVE YOU.’ The cognitive impacts proved too profound to ignore. ‘We need to communicate that the vast majority of people’s lives haven’t been ruined by drugs,’ he says. ‘It’s about when you take them, and what you take. There are 101 things that drugs do for different people at different times. We should be aware of which ones are the most harmful, or most desired. Frankly, most people won’t want crack or PCP if they can get other things. If you have LSD, MDMA, cocaine and cannabis, you don’t really need anything else.

I said that our up-high father had made my life better. Once, I said, I used to drink like the Pirahãs. I had many women (exaggerating somewhat here), and I was unhappy. Then the up-high father came into my heart and made me happy and made my life better. I gave no thought to whether all these new concepts, metaphors, and names that I was inventing on the fly were actually intelligible to the Pirahãs. They made sense to me. This night, I decided to tell them something very personal about myself—something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirahãs how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story. When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter. This was unexpected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like “Praise God!”with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them. “Why are you laughing?” I asked. “She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves,” they answered. They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I had loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirahãs to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences. This was a setback for my missionary objectives. Days went by after this in which I thought long and hard about my purpose among the Pirahãs.

God’s Word   “Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.” Joshua 1:8   Dear Heavenly Father, thank You for the Book of Joshua. This verse is especially important because You are telling us how important it is not to forget You. Lord so many times Your people disappointed You by taking Your love and forgetting it. So many times You showed Your people miracles and they forgot and got distracted with other people in the world who were worshipping statues and engraved images. Lord help me keep Your rules at the front of my mind so You stay full in my heart.   Lord in these times thousands of years later the same problems are all around me. Now everyone gets tattoos of images of worship so they can be worshipped. So many people are distracted by music, drugs and being popular that it shows me that it is all a false god and leads to destruction. Lord help me be an example for many that Your laws are meant for good. Lord help me be an example that praising You is courageous in a world so full of pressure to be popular. Lord help me be an example that being who You want me to be is all that matters, in Jesus name, amen.   “Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness.” Joshua 24:14   Dear Heavenly Father, I thank You that I understand that to fear You is wisdom. Lord I now know that You don’t force Yourself on anyone but that You do demand that I chose to either honor You or dishonor You.   Lord to fear You is to have respect for You as my creator. Lord when I remind myself every moment that You are the LORD, and that I am to be Your faithful servant, I know that I am protected and blessed. Lord

So how do you teach your kids Awareness – to trust in themselves, to love without judging, to expect health without having to manipulate their bodies with drugs, to expect and accept abundance, not eternal struggle? Simply put: you can’t – unless you have that Awareness yourself. In that case, you don’t have to “do” anything – just be yourself.

all right,” said Bianca. “But, one hears things, you know. Mum says―wait, you might fancy blokes? Drugged up for two days and I miss all the juicy bits. Did the Quin introduce you to the joys of the love that dare not speak its name?

If they’re beautiful I don’t much mind if they’re not true. It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to your sense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty to become a Roman Catholic, I should have liked to see her converted in a crown of paper flowers, but she’s hopelessly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament; you will believe anything if you have the religious turn of mind, and if you haven’t it doesn’t matter what beliefs were instilled into you, you will grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and the morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer.” This

Dr. Susan Forward has written extensively in this area and lists the types of toxic personalities.   The verbal abusers demoralize and diminish another person’s self-esteem. Controllers use fear, obligation, guilt, or financial control to manipulate other’s behavior. “If you really love me, you’ll ...” Active punishers come right out and threaten, “If you don’t do [blank], then you will suffer.” Passive punishers freeze others out with the silent treatment. Inadequate humans are needy types who focus on their own problems and demand attention and constant care. Physical abusers are incapable of controlling their deep seated rage and lash out. Sexual abusers destroy any safety in a relationship. Addicts of all types: drugs, gambling, alcoholics; come complete with huge denial, mood swings, chaos, and financial peril.   Listen

He wrapped his arms around her. “Have I told you today how happy I am that you gave up the good fight and moved back in with me?” “Not today,” she said, sucking in his sex-and-sin scent. “But last night you mentioned it quite a few times.” She’d tried for six weeks to live by herself in the apartment over Gracie’s garage, thinking she needed to experience life on her own before living with Mitch. She’d hated every minute of it. When she’d taken to sneaking into the farmhouse and crawling into bed with him in the middle of the night, he’d finally put his foot down. She sighed. Contentment had her curling deeper into his embrace. She didn’t care if it was wrong: Mitch and this farmhouse made her happy. “Maddie,” he said, his voice catching in a way that had her lifting her chin. “You know I love you.” “I know. I love you too.” His fingers brushed a lock of hair behind her chin. “Come with me.” He clasped her hand and led her into the bedroom before motioning her to the bed. She sat, and he walked over to the antique dresser and took a box out of the dresser. He walked back to the bed and sat down next to her. “I wanted to give this to you tonight, but then I saw you standing in the doorway and I knew I couldn’t wait.” Maddie looked at the box, it was wooden, etched with an intricate fleur-de-lis design on it and words in another language. “What is it?” “It was my grandmother’s. They bought it on their honeymoon. It’s French. It says, ‘There is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved.’” “It’s beautiful.” That he would give her something so treasured brought the threat of tears to her eyes. He handed it to her. “Open it.” She took the box and suddenly her heart started to pound. She lifted the lid and gasped, blinking as her vision blurred. Mitch grasped her left hand. “I know it’s only been three months, but in my family, meeting the night your car breaks down is a sign of a long, happy marriage.” Maddie couldn’t take her eyes off the ring. It was a gorgeous, simple platinum band with two small emerald stones flanking what had to be a three-carat rectangular diamond. She looked at Mitch. “Maddie Donovan, will you please marry me?” “Yes.” She kissed him, a soft, slow, drugging kiss filled with hope and promises. There was no hesitation. Not a seed of worry or shred of doubt. Her heart belonged to only one man, and he was right in front of her. “It would be my honor.” He slipped the ring on her finger. “My grandma would be thrilled that you have her ring.” “It’s hers?” It sparkled in the sunlight. It looked important on her hand. “It’s been in the family vault since she died. My mom sent it a couple of weeks ago. She’s been a little pushy about the whole thing. I think she’s worried I’ll do something to screw it up and she’ll lose the best daughter-in-law ever.” Maddie laughed. “I love her, too.” He ran his finger over the platinum band. “I changed the side stones to emeralds because they match your eyes. Do you think I made the right choice?” She put her hands on the sides of his face. “It is the most gorgeous ring I have ever laid eyes on. I love it. I love you. You know I’d take you with a plastic ring from Wal-Mart.” “I know.” She kissed him. “But I’m not going to lie: this is a kick-ass ring.” He grinned. “You know, I think that’s what my grandma used to say.” “She was obviously a smart woman.” “For the record, don’t even think about running.” Mitch pushed her back on the bed and captured her beneath him. “I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth and bring you back where you belong.” She reached for him, this man who’d been her salvation. “I will run down the aisle to meet you.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. I mentioned I’d been in contact with her mother. “Oh crikey, that sounds dangerous!” “She’s a feisty woman, isn’t she?” William giggled. “Granny’s great fun after a few gin and tonics.” “Sh, William,” Diana said, giggling too. “My mother’s been a tremendous source of support to me. She never talks publicly; she’s just there for me.” “And what about William’s other granny?” “I have enormous respect for the Queen; she has been so supportive, you know. People don’t see that side of her, but I do all the time. She’s an amazing person.” “Has she been good over the divorce?” “Yes, very. I just want it over now so I can get on with my life. I’m worried about the attacks I will get afterward.” “What attacks?” “I just worry that people will try and knock me down once I am out on my own.” This seemed unduly paranoid. People adored her. I asked William how he was enjoying Eton. “Oh, it’s great, thanks.” “Do you think the press bother you much?” “Not the British press, actually. Though the European media can be quite annoying. They sit on the riverbank watching me rowing with their cameras, waiting for me to fall in! There are photographers everywhere if I go out. Normally loads of Japanese tourists taking pictures. All saying “Where’s Prince William?’ when I’m standing right next to them.” “How are the other boys with you?” “Very nice. Though a boy was expelled this week for taking ecstasy and snuff. Drugs are everywhere, and I think they’re stupid. I never get tempted.” “Does matron take any?” laughed Diana. “No, Mummy, it gives her hallucinations.” “What, like imagining you’re going to be king?” I said. They both giggled again. “Is it true you’ve got Pamela Anderson posters on your bedroom wall?” “No! And not Cindy Crawford, either. They did both come to tea at the palace, though, and were very nice.” William had been photographed the previous week at a party at the Hammersmith Palais, where he was mobbed by young girls. I asked him if he’d had fun. “Everyone in the press said I was snogging these girls, but I wasn’t,” he insisted. Diana laughed. “One said you stuck your tongue down her throat, William. Did you?” “No, I did not. Stop it, Mummy, please. It’s embarrassing.” He’d gone puce. It was a very funny exchange, with a flushed William finally insisting: “I won’t go to any more public parties; it was crazy. People wouldn’t leave me alone.” Diana laughed again. “All the girls love a nice prince.” I turned to more serious matters. “Do you think Charles will become king one day?” “I think he thinks he will,” replied Diana, “but I think he would be happier living in Tuscany or Provence, to be honest.” “And how are you these days--someone told me you’ve stopped seeing therapists?” “I have, yes. I stopped when I realized they needed more therapy than I did. I feel stronger now, but I am under so much pressure all the time. People don’t know what it’s like to be in the public eye, they really don’t.

Geneva from California, please For readers and especially the owner or author of this site please don't see my message to people here as a spam or anything wrong. I'm trying to share my testimony to whom it may concern and i really want to express how happy i'm.I got my ex back with the help of a very powerful spell caster named Priest Ajigar, i never believed in love spell casting, others who may be reading my testimony right now might be having this doubt if this is real, even if your ex is with another lover he can still help. I want to seriously advice that if you find out that your relationship is not as stable as it used to be or you already broke up with your partner at the moment and you have tried all possible ways to get your ex back? Priest Ajigar is known for using pure spell and he does not do dark or black magic. Here is his email: priestajigarspells @ live . com contact for those who are really tired and want a quick solution to their marriage issues, relationship, fertility problem, financial problems, your partner is a drug addict, are you looking for a medical herbs to cure your illness? Priest Ajigar is genuine and he has powerful spell caster that can put an end to all the problems that gives you sleepless night no matter how the situation is.

All these years I was miserable because I was the one who had been dumped, left, thrown over for a city and a drug he couldn't resist. I remembered his face clearly, his nostrils flared and his lips in a sneer. "Go," he had said, "I don't want you here. Go back to school or whatever. Go now." I didn't remember the pirouettes or the swing or the Chinese waiter, but I clearly remembered his disgust. For thirty years I had wiggled the loose tooth of his disdain. For thirty years I had berated myself for not staying and putting up with it--trying to help him even though he was done with me. And for thirty years I knew I was the one whose heart was broken. I had only that minuscule speck of comfort. I had loved him more than he had loved me. It was my only talent. What would it mean if all these years I'd gotten it wrong?

You’re European, aren’t you? Wealthy, and very, very arrogant. He found himself smiling at her teasing. He never smiled. Not for six hundred years or more. All of those things. He waited for her laughter again, needing it with the same craving an addict felt for a drug. When it came, it was low and amused, as caressing as the touch of fingers on his skin. I’m an American. Oil and water, don’t you think? He had a fix on her now, a direction. She would not get away from him. American women can be trained with the right methods. He drawled it deliberately, anticipating her reaction. You really are arrogant. He loved the sound of her laughter, savored it, took it into his body. He felt her drowsiness, her yawn. So much the better. He sent her a light mental push, very delicate, wanting her to sleep so he could examine her. Knock it off! Her reaction was a quick withdrawal, hurt, suspicion. She retreated, slamming up a mind block so swiftly, he was astonished at how adept she was, how strong for one so young, strong for a human. And she was human. He was certain of it. He knew without looking that he had exactly five hours till sunrise. Not that he couldn’t take the early or late sunlight. He tested her block, careful not to alarm her. A faint smile touched his well-cut mouth. She was strong, but not nearly strong enough.

My colleague Sylvia Boorstein tells of Phil, a Buddhist practitioner in New York who had worked with loving-kindness practice for years. One evening on a small side street in SoHo, a disheveled man with a scraggly beard and dirty blond hair accosted Phil, pointed a gun at him, and demanded his money. Phil was carrying more than six hundred dollars in his wallet and he handed it all over. The mugger shook his gun and demanded more. Stalling for time, Phil gave him his credit cards and then the whole wallet. Looking dazed and high on some drug, the mugger said, “I’m gonna shoot you.” Phil responded, “No, wait, here’s my watch—it’s an expensive one.” Disoriented, the mugger took the watch, waved the gun, and said again, “I’m gonna shoot you.” Somehow Phil managed to look at him with loving-kindness and said, “You don’t have to shoot me. You did good. Look, you got nearly seven hundred dollars; you got credit cards and an expensive watch. You don’t have to shoot me. You did really good.” The mugger, confused, lowered the gun slowly. “I did good?” he asked. “You did really good. Go and tell your friends, you did good.” Dazed, the mugger wandered off, saying softly to himself, “I did good.” Whenever our goodness is seen, it is a blessing.

He needn’t have worried. ‘Before long I found myself swimming like a parcel of Escher lizards through the lines of a purple jigsaw of increasing and then decreasing size. “What the hell’s going on?” I asked, crying with laughter. “You’re tripping,” said Joan, with a new vocabulary already. Tripping? Me? … “Are you tripping?” I asked Joan. She nodded lovingly. “We all are,” George said. “Everyone is.”’ As the effects of the double dose peaked, it proved too much for Taylor, who was assailed by disturbing visions and dark thoughts. Harrison, with enough experience to spot the warning signs, and the calmness – despite tripping himself – to provide reassurance, talked Taylor back from his descent into misery. ‘Derek, create and preserve the image of your choice,’ Harrison told him. ‘It’s up to you. The thing is to see what you want to see. Do you want to create something nice? Then look into the fire and see something nice.’ The intervention worked, and much of the remainder of Taylor’s trip was filled with talking, laughter and visions. He and Joan bonded over the shared experience, and led a singalong on Epstein’s grand piano. Late into the night Taylor was cornered by Harrison, who reiterated his words of wisdom: ‘Derek, I love ya. I just want you to know that. I love ya and it’s going to be OK. Create and preserve the image of your choice. Don’t forget, Derek. Gandhi said that. Pick your own trips.

But that part of his life is over, so let him see his child, Tricey. If he was never a decorated husband to me or decorated lover to you, he was always a decorated father. Don’t take that from him.”  

bitterness and anger. Taking control of the situation There are a great many parents—as I’ve learned by attending endless parent support group meetings— who had the same high hopes for their families as I. If you’re such a parent, then you probably know that it isn’t just the child who can be out of control, but also the parent. Possibly you are also aware that continuous reacting on your part is useless as well as extremely hazardous to your health and well-being. The most ruinous thing you can do is to allow the situation to continue on its present destructive course. Here are some simple steps you can take to deactivate the negativity so rampant in your family dynamics. Please note that it takes courage and determination to carry this off successfully. Cut off all funds to the addict. Holding onto the purse strings with an iron fist will have immediate results, as well as repercussions. (Keep an eye on family valuables. In fact, lock them away.) Cut off all privileges accorded to your addicts— such as use of the family car or having their friends in your house. Carry out all threats you make. The fastest way to lose credibility with addicted children is to become a “softie” at the last minute. Refuse to rescue your addicts when they get into legal jams. Don’t pay their fines or their bail. Get yourself into a support group such as Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, Parents Anonymous, or Tough Love as fast as you can. Attempt to get your addicted kids into rehabs. If they’re underage you can sign them in. Adult admission is done on a voluntary basis, so you may be out of luck. Drugs erase any trace of conscience. Be aware that many of today’s drugged youths will think nothing of injuring or even murdering their parents for money. If you suspect that your child could resort

I don’t know. The older Ariana gets, the more I feel bad for purposely keeping her father out of her life. You can’t pay my father to want a relationship with me, so who am I to purposely keep that away from Ariana?” “True.

When you enable someone, you prolong them from hitting their bottom. They stop trying to do for themselves what you have taken over doing for them. When you constantly finance their habit by letting them live in your house, sending them money, or whatever, you are prolonging them from hitting their bottom. When someone is on a destructive path with drugs, most make a decision to change their life because they run out of financial resources and a place to live. You can let them know you love them, and you will be for them when they are ready to change, but don't continue to enable them and keep them from hitting their bottom. Never stop praying for them, and let them know you will take them to detox when they are ready to change, as well as treatment if necessary. Praying for the families who are struggling, suffering, who feel helpless because they are dealing with an active addict in their family. It's not easy, but you have to let go if you want to see them get better. I also want to encourage you to get involved in a support group with others dealing with what you are going through right now.

For that is the curious quality of the discotheque after you have gone there a long time: in the midst of all the lights, and music, the bodies, the dancing, the drugs, you are stiller than still within, and though you go through the motions of dancing you are thinking a thousand disparate things. You find yourself listening to the lyrics, and you wonder what these people around you are doing. They seemed crazed to you. You stand there on a floor moving your hips, wondering if there is such a thing as love, and conscious for the very first time that it is three-twenty-five and the night only half-over. You put the popper to your nostril, you put a hand out to lightly touch the sweaty, rigid stomach of the man dancing next to you, your own chest is streaming with sweat in that hot room, and you are thinking, as grave as a judge: What will I do with my life? What can any man do with his life? And you finally don’t know where to rest your eyes. You don’t know where to look, as you dance. You have been expelled from the communion of the saints.

Not On Drugs" Shiny, happy, see my world in new colours? Higher fire, fly my rocket through universe? I'm up with the kites in a dream so blue I live in the sky, you come here too I'm queen of the clouds, make my wish come true I sing to the night, let me sing to you Baby, listen please I'm not on drugs, I'm not on drugs, I'm just in love Baby, don't you see? I'm not on drugs, I'm not on drugs, I'm just in love You're high enough for me Lighter, brighter, pick the biggest stars I find And I'm trip, trip, tripping in my empire state of mind I'm up with the kites in a dream so blue I live in the sky, you can live here too I'm queen of the clouds, make my wish come true I sing to the night, let me sing to you Baby, listen please I'm not on drugs, I'm not on drugs, I'm just in love Baby, don't you see? I'm not on drugs, I'm not on drugs, I'm just in love You're high enough for me HIIIIGH! HIIIIGH! HIIIIGH! High HIIIIGH! You're high enough for me... Baby, listen please I'm not on drugs, I'm not on drugs, I'm just in love Baby, don't you see? I'm not on drugs, I'm not on drugs, I'm just in love You're high enough for me You're high enough for me You're high enough for me

Dear friends and enemies, Season’s greetings! It’s me, Serge! Don’t you just hate these form letters people stuff in Christmas cards? Nothing screams “you’re close to my heart” like a once-a-year Xerox. Plus, all the lame jazz that’s going on in their lives. “Had a great time in Memphis.” “Bobby lost his retainer down a storm drain.” “I think the neighbors are dealing drugs.” But this letter is different. You are special to me. I’m just forced to use a copy machine and gloves because of advancements in forensics. I love those TV shows! Has a whole year already flown by? Much to report! Let’s get to it! Number one: I ended a war. You guessed correct, the War on Christmas! When I first heard about it, I said to Coleman, “That’s just not right! We must enlist!” I rushed to the front lines, running downtown yelling “Merry Christmas” at everyone I saw. And they’re all saying “Merry Christmas” back. Hmmm. That’s odd: Nobody’s stopping us from saying “Merry Christmas.” Then I did some research, and it turns out the real war is against people saying “Happy holidays.” The nerve: trying to be inclusive. So, everyone … Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Good times! Soul Train! Purple mountain majesties! The Pompatus of Love! There. War over. And just before it became a quagmire. Next: Decline of Florida Roundup. —They tore down the Big Bamboo Lounge near Orlando. Where was everybody on that one? —Remember the old “Big Daddy’s” lounges around Florida with the logo of that bearded guy? They’re now Flannery’s or something. —They closed 20,000 Leagues. And opened Buzz Lightyear. I offered to bring my own submarine. Okay, actually threatened, but they only wanted to discuss it in the security office. I’ve been doing a lot of running lately at theme parks. —Here’s a warm-and-fuzzy. Anyone who grew up down here knows this one, and everyone else won’t have any idea what I’m talking about: that schoolyard rumor of the girl bitten by a rattlesnake on the Steeplechase at Pirate’s World (now condos). I’ve started dropping it into all conversations with mixed results. —In John Mellencamp’s megahit “Pink Houses,” the guy compliments his wife’s beauty by saying her face could “stop a clock.” Doesn’t that mean she was butt ugly? Nothing to do with Florida. Just been bugging me. Good news alert! I’ve decided to become a children’s author! Instilling state pride in the youngest residents may be the only way to save the future. The book’s almost finished. I’ve only completed the first page, but the rest just flows after that. It’s called Shrimp Boat Surprise. Coleman asked what the title meant, and I said life is like sailing on one big, happy shrimp boat. He asked what the surprise was, and I said you grow up and learn that life bones you up the ass ten ways to Tuesday. He started reading and asked if a children’s book should have the word “motherfucker” eight times on the first page. I say, absolutely. They’re little kids, after all. If you want a lesson to stick, you have to hammer it home through repetition…In advance: Happy New Year! (Unlike 2008—ouch!)

Following Jesus requires precision and exacting care about how you use your time; what you read or watch or talk about; where you seek spiritual, mental, or emotional consolation; where you find pleasure; and how you amuse yourself. It takes patience, chiefly with yourself, as you try to make your way, and fail, and try again and again and again. It can be very tempting to cry out, “I will never be able to love, to forgive, to get off drugs to be free from fear . . .” Take heart! Jesus sympathizes with your weaknesses and challenges. He knows every temptation you face. He has experienced them all himself, so he is filled with compassion and mercy for you. Are you tired of walking on the road that leads to life? Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Don’t worry when your strength or endurance, wisdom or understanding run out. Jesus has sent the Holy Spirit to give you energy, patience, and self-control so that you can keep following him. If the road seems too hard, remember that Jesus wants to give you everything you need. He enjoys providing all the precision and endurance and faith you lack. And if you think you have strayed so far off the road that return is impossible, remember the father who ran, eagerly and joyfully, to welcome his prodigal child home. God the Father is on the lookout, too, waiting for you! He is on your side. He is by your side. He will always help you along the way.

The names of your informers, what backstabbing campaigns you’re embarking on, where you store your guns, your drugs, your money, the location of your hideout, the interchangeable lists of your friends and enemies, your contacts, the fences, your escape plans—all things you need to keep to yourself, and you will reveal every one if you are in love. Love is the Ultimate Informer because of the conviction it inspires that your love is eternal and immutable—you can no more imagine the end of your love than you can imagine the end of your own head. And because love is nothing without intimacy, and intimacy is nothing without sharing, and sharing is nothing without honesty, you must inevitably spill the beans, every last bean, because dishonesty in intimacy is unworkable and will slowly poison your precious love. When it ends—and it will end (even the most risk-embracing gambler wouldn’t touch those odds)—he or she, the love object, has your secrets. And can use them. And if the relationship ends acrimoniously, he or she will use them, viciously and maliciously—will use them against you. Furthermore, it is highly probable that the secrets you reveal when your soul has all its clothes off will be the cause of the end of love. Your intimate revelations will be the flame that lights the fuse that ignites the dynamite that blows your love to kingdom come. No, you say. She understands my violent ways. She understands that the end justifies the means. Think about this. Being in love is a process of idealization. Now ask yourself, how long can a woman be expected to idealize a man who held his foot on the head of a drowning man? Not too long, believe me. And cold nights in front of the fire, when you get up and slice off another piece of cheese, you don’t think she’s dwelling on that moment of unflinching honesty when you revealed sawing off the feet of your enemy? Well, she is. If a man could be counted on to dispose of his partner the moment the relationship is over, this chapter wouldn’t be necessary. But he can’t be counted on for that. Hope of reconciliation keeps many an ex alive who should be at the bottom of a deep gorge. So, lawbreakers, whoever you are, you need to keep your secrets for your survival, to keep your enemies at bay and your body out of the justice system. Sadly—and this is the lonely responsibility we all have to accept—the only way to do this is to stay single. If you need sexual relief, go to a hooker. If you need an intimate embrace, go to your mother. If you need a bed warmer during cold winter months, get a dog that is not a Chihuahua or a Pekingese. But know this: to give up your secrets is to give up your security, your freedom, your life. The truth will kill your love, then it will kill you. It’s rotten, I know. But so is the sound of the judge’s gavel pounding a mahogany desk.

You can’t put two people in that kind of trap without at least one of them trying to gnaw off their leg in an effort to get free.” Ian blinked. “Marriage isn’t a trap.” “I wasn’t talking about marriage.” The truth hit him between the eyes. “You think love is a trap?” “Don’t you?” Roxanne set down her chopsticks and picked them up again, obviously agitated. “It’s the only emotion that makes people experience a false high, better than any drug on the market. Two people in love believe in miracles. They believe that all they need is love to conquer the world. It’s all a lie.

Most things we learn are easier to apply in a material form, as when following a certain decision or task, when thinking rationally about ourselves and our life. Everything becomes messed up when are trying to understand what makes us who we are, and that's why love exists, to pushes us there. Emotions are very powerful, I believe up to five thousand times more than the mind - there are actual scientific studies on the topic. In other words, our brain is nothing compared to the heart. The heart has an intelligence of its own. But it is indeed connected to the rest of us, including our mind. So what this means is that our emotions are far more powerful than our reason. You know, like when a grasshopper gets his head chopped off by a female after sex - he knows he is going to die, but he sill can't help himself. A large majority of us is like that. We think we are superior to animals, but only in the amount of problems. Nonetheless, when you look at someone very smart doing something very stupid, you wonder what the hell is happening, and that's when we enter the fields of spirituality and psychology. Psychology can answer pretty much most of our behaviors - as we either move towards pleasure or pain, to avoid one and obtain more of the other. When both get mixed it all becomes complicated, but it does happen, in families, relationships, and so on. The extreme of this is altruism, when a person literally sacrifices his life to save another. You can start by Jesus, but you don't need to go so far. There are many examples everywhere, like the fireman that tries to save a guy that attempted to commit suicide by setting his house on fire. The fireman may know the other man did it on purpose, but he still risks his life to save him. The same with the exorcist, who faces the devil to save someone who actually accepted to be possessed or did some crazy ritual to get more knowledge, power, sex, and whatsoever; the exorcist knows he is risking his life and mental health to save an ignorant soul, and yet he still does it. The same with the father who runs after the son who is consuming drugs. He knows that his son or one of his companions may kill him out of anger but he still can't help himself. The same occurs with the police officer, when risking getting a bullet from the person to whom he is pointing a gun with no desire to shoot it. So what about love? It's a similar relation. Many times we are programmed to behave in a certain way and we can't help ourselves. Life, however, is more complex than that, which can be a good thing, like when we are cheated by someone who was already no good in our life. He or she did us a very good favor, even if we can't see it right then. The same when someone dies. Well, yeah, this one sounds bad, but people don't just die for no reason, even though it may seem so, not when they are texting while driving or drunk or high on weed. And what about when we lose our job and our partner starts fighting about money? That's also a blessing, as otherwise we would never know that that's all he or she cared about. There are countless ways to look at it. And yet, many times we have strong feelings for someone who is simply mentally sick. Is this love or insanity? I don't really know. I know as much as the grasshopper that gets his head chopped by a female for thousands of years and is not yet extinct by reason.

Most things we learn are easier to apply in a material form, as when following a certain decision or task, when thinking rationally about ourselves and our life. Everything becomes messed up when are trying to understand what makes us who we are, and that's why love exists, to pushes us there. Emotions are very powerful, I believe up to five thousand times more than the mind - there are actual scientific studies on the topic. In other words, our brain is nothing compared to the heart. The heart has an intelligence of its own. But it is indeed connected to the rest of us, including our mind. So what this means is that our emotions are far more powerful than our reason. You know, like when a praying mantis gets his head chopped off by a female after sex - he knows he is going to die, but he sill can't help himself. A large majority of us is like that. We think we are superior to animals, but only in the amount of problems. Nonetheless, when you look at someone very smart doing something very stupid, you wonder what the hell is happening, and that's when we enter the fields of spirituality and psychology. Psychology can answer pretty much most of our behaviors - as we either move towards pleasure or pain, to avoid one and obtain more of the other. When both get mixed it all becomes complicated, but it does happen, in families, relationships, and so on. The extreme of this is altruism, when a person literally sacrifices his life to save another. You can start by Jesus, but you don't need to go so far. There are many examples everywhere, like the fireman that tries to save a guy that attempted to commit suicide by setting his house on fire. The fireman may know the other man did it on purpose, but he still risks his life to save him. The same with the exorcist, who faces the devil to save someone who actually accepted to be possessed or did some crazy ritual to get more knowledge, power, sex, and whatsoever; the exorcist knows he is risking his life and mental health to save an ignorant soul, and yet he still does it. The same with the father who runs after the son who is consuming drugs. He knows that his son or one of his companions may kill him out of anger but he still can't help himself. The same occurs with the police officer, when risking getting a bullet from the person to whom he is pointing a gun with no desire to shoot it. So what about love? It's a similar relation. Many times we are programmed to behave in a certain way and we can't help ourselves. Life, however, is more complex than that, which can be a good thing, like when we are cheated by someone who was already no good in our life. He or she did us a very good favor, even if we can't see it right then. The same when someone dies. Well, yeah, this one sounds bad, but people don't just die for no reason, even though it may seem so, not when they are texting while driving or drunk or high on weed. And what about when we lose our job and our partner starts fighting about money? That's also a blessing, as otherwise we would never know that that's all he or she cared about. There are countless ways to look at it. And yet, many times we have strong feelings for someone who is simply mentally sick. Is this love or insanity? I don't really know. I know as much as the praying mantis that gets his head chopped by a female for thousands of years and is not yet extinct by reason.

Don't date just to escape the "Im Single" status. Don't marry just to tick off a checklist. Life is NOT a grocery list. Find yourself first, then find someone who can accommodate the talents, the vision and the ambitions in your heart, someone who can be the enabler for you to emerge into your greatness. Find someone who believes in you, supports and encourages you even when the world laughs at your guts. But first, find yourself because it is far more important to be the right person than it is to date/marry the right person. Become a person of value. Don't go looking for a good woman until you've become a good man. And ladies, don't go looking for a good man till you've become a good woman. If you want a loving, honest, faithful, supportive and rich partner; first become what you are looking for. You must meet the requirements of your own requirements! Leaders, vision bearers and dream chasers look for character, commitment, vision, grit, faith, etc...but ordinary people look for coca-cola bottle shape kinder girl, a six pack kinder guy and a heavy bank balance...but dear men, it's her character that will raise your children not her beauty. It is character that makes a great wife. Dear ladies, It is character that makes a great Dad/husband not a car or a big wallet. Take note good people, you don't need to die to go to hell...misalignment of core values/purpose In your relationship/marriage is the beginning of your own hell right here on earth. In my humble opinion, misalignment of core values is worst than cheating. Yes, both are evil but cheating is a lesser evil compared to misalignment of core values. Trust me, you don't want to test this theory, you may not come out alive. So, leave the girl/boy down the road to a boy/girl down the road. Leave slay queens to slay kings. Leave party queens to party kings. Leave nyaope boys to nyaope girls, drug addicts to drug addicts, leave weed girls to weed boys, playboys to playgirls..,,AND legacy builders to legacy builders!

Mr. Winterborne, I should leave you to rest now--” “Talk to me.” She hesitated. “If you wish. What shall we talk about?” He wanted to ask her if he’d been permanently blinded. If anyone had said anything to him about it, he’d been too drugged to remember. But he couldn’t bring himself to give voice to the question. He was too afraid of the answer. And there was no way to stop thinking about it while he was alone in this quiet room. He needed distraction and comfort. He needed her. “Shall I tell you about orchids?” she asked in the silence. She continued without waiting for an answer, adjusting her position more comfortably. “The word comes from Greek mythology. Orchis was the son of a satyr and a nymph. During a feast to celebrate Bacchus, Orchis drank too much wine and tried to force his attentions on a priestess. Bacchus was very displeased, and reacted by having Orchis torn to pieces. The pieces were scattered far and wide, and wherever one landed, an orchid grew.” Pausing, she leaned away for a few seconds, reaching for something. Something soft and delicate touched his cracked lips…She was applying salve with a fingertip. “Most people don’t know that vanilla is the fruit of an orchid vine. We keep one in a glasshouse on the estate--it’s so long that it grows sideways on the wall. When one of the flowers is full grown, it opens in the morning, and if it isn’t pollinated, it closes in the evening, never to open again. The white blossoms, and the vanilla pods within them, have the sweetest scent in the world…” As her gentle voice continued, Rhys had the sensation of floating, the red tide of fever easing. How strange and lovely it was to lie here half dozing in her arms, possibly even better than fucking…but that thought led to the indecent question of what it might be like with her…how she might lie quietly beneath him while he devoured all that petal softness and vanilla sweetness…and slowly he fell asleep in Lady Helen’s arms.

All you need do is refrain from smoking, drinking, and the use of drugs. Eat only wholesome, low-fat foods, with the emphasis on vegetables, grains, and fish. Seek work. Work hard. Show up on time. Do more than is expected. Think of ways to make the job efficient. Don’t complain. Shave, bathe, and wear clean clothes. Be cheerful. Don’t gamble. Live within your means. Save. And then, when you have all this in balance, study things of substance. Read to satisfy your curiosity. Don’t father children out of wedlock or bear them as a single mother. Exercise. You will find that you will be promoted—perhaps not knighted, but promoted. If that doesn’t happen, look quietly for a better position. Find a husband or a wife whom you love and who has the same good habits. Invest. Assume a mortgage if you must. Teach your children the virtues. And then, having become the means of production, you will own your share of the means of production, and if you do these things, all of which are entirely within your power, you will own your lives.

Who?” “Bill Judd Jr.” “Oh, noooo.” Round, Swedish oooo’s. “Miz Sweet, when we were going through Judd Sr.’s office, we found some invoices on your computer, for chemicals that were apparently used in an ethanol plant out in South Dakota…” “I heard about it on TV. That was the same one? The one where they were making drugs?” “Yes, it was,” Virgil said. “Oh, nooo.” The sound was driving him crazy; she sounded like a bad comedian. “Who in town knew about the ethanol plant?” She turned her face to one side and put a hand to her lips. “Well, the Judds, of course.” “Both of them?” Virgil asked. “Well…Junior set it up, but Senior knew about it.” He pressed. “Are you sure about that?” “Well, yes. He signed the checks.” “Did you see him signing the checks?” Virgil asked. “No, but I saw the checks. It was his signature…” “Do you remember the bank?” She shook her head. “No, no, I don’t.” She frowned. “I’m not even sure that the bank name was on the checks.” “Did you ever talk to Junior about that?” “No. It wasn’t my business,” she said. “They wanted to keep it quiet, because, you know, when ethanol started, it sounded a little like the Jerusalem artichoke thing. The Judds were involved in that, of course.” “So how quiet did they keep it?” Virgil asked. “Who else knew? Did you tell anybody?” He saw it coming, the noooo. “Oh, noooo…Junior told me, don’t talk about this, because of my father. So, I didn’t.” “Not to anybody?” Her eyes drifted. She was thinking, which meant that she had. “It’s possible…my sister, I might have told. I think there might have been some word around town.” “It’s really important that you remember…” She put her hand to her temple, as though she were going to move a paper clip with telekinesis, and said, “I might have mentioned it at bridge. At our bridge club. That a plant was being built, and some local people were involved.” “All right,” Virgil said. “So who was at the bridge club?” “Well, let me see, there would have been nine or ten of us…” She listed them; he only recognized one of the names. WHEN HE WAS DONE with Sweet, he strolled up the hill to the newspaper office. He pushed in, and found Williamson behind the business counter, talking to a woman customer. Williamson looked past the woman and snapped, “What do you want?” “I have a question, when you’re free.” “Wait.” Williamson was wearing a T-shirt and had sweat stains under his arms, as though he’d been lifting rocks. “Take just a minute.” The customer was trying to dump her Beanie Baby collection locally—ten years too late, in Virgil’s opinion—and wanted the cheapest possible advertisement. She got twenty words for six dollars, looking back and forth between Virgil and Williamson, and after writing a check for the amount, said to Virgil, “I’d love to hear your question.” Virgil looked at her over his sunglasses and grinned: “I’d love to have you, but I’m afraid it’s gotta be private, for the moment.” “Shoot.” She looked at Williamson, who shrugged, and she said, “Oh, well.” WHEN SHE’D GONE out the door, Williamson said, “I’m working. You can ask me out back.” “You still pissed about the search?

Don't believe everything you hear on TV," she snapped. "The middle and upper classes are terrified about the anger of the poor. There have been plenty of advertisements about what to do in times of unrest; how to call the police to report people, how to barricade your door, board over your storefront quickly, hide from the drug-crazed violence of the lower classes. Hah! When was the last time anyone came into my neighborhood, huh? No one comes down here. They are all scared. They think we're huddled on the street corners ready to attack. They imagine that we walk by their grocery stores with rocks in our fists, ready to smash in the windows and loot the shelves. They have nightmares of us raping them, kidnapping their children, stealing all their money.

No, you didn't, and I've gone to great lengths on your recommendation to change my bad habits." "Oh, That was to develop your will, you see, and to give your instincts a refresher course. And we can say that habit itself--any unconscious, compulsive ritual--is negative. But specific activities-smoking, drinking, taking drugs, eating sweets, or asking silly questions are bad and good; every action has its price, and its pleasures. Recognizing both sides, you become realistic and responsible for your actions. And only then can you make the warrior's free choice--to do or not to do. There is a saying when you sit, sit. When you stand, stand. Whatever you do don’t wobble. Once you make your choice do it with all your spirit. Don’t be like the evangelist that thought about praying while making love to his wife and making love to his wife while praying

I haven’t made anyone my hyena to call yet, Kane, did you remember that? One of the things I learned from the Mother of All Darkness was how to break the bonds between vampires and their servants. I could just take you from Asher, bind you to me, and thanks to the ardeur I would be your exception, Kane. You’d fuck me, because you’d crave me like a drug.” “No . . . lies.” “Oh, I’m not lying. Why tell a lie when the truth is so much more terrible?” “Bitch.” “Oh, Kane, you can do better than that.” “He’ll never . . . top you . . . again if you hurt me.” “Narcissus is going to kill Asher if he can, so he won’t be topping, or fucking, anyone.” “He loves Asher.” “You know, I think he does, but Asher never loves the people who love him the most; he always chases the ones who don’t want him, haven’t you figured that out yet?” “He loves me enough to . . . do this.” I nodded. “Yes, he does, because in you he’s finally found someone more problematic, more jealous, more of a shit, than he is—it’s only taken him six, seven hundred years to find someone who exemplifies his own worst traits. He’ll keep you close, Kane, I don’t know why, but he sees something in you he wants.” Kane swallowed, and his eyes were able to look at mine again. I got up still nude and left him lying on the floor with my towel curled up beside him. “You and Asher deserve each other, Kane, you really do.

I don't write gloom for the sake of it, I do it because it's real. When you're down, cut open and vulnerable, it's not going to be Michelle Pfeifer who drops down onto the hood of your car with diamonds stashed in her vagina, it's going to be a sociopath. When you're stuck in monotony and feeling trapped, there will be no dashing prince to save you, there will be a serial killer, or a drug dealer; a psycho. Lame impalas are picked off first. There's a greater social lesson in that than "love will set you free".

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.

Hi.” Sarah says and lifts her hand to wiggle her fingers. She’s grinning, the goofy grin of a woman on some serious painkillers. “Aww, you came to see me.” I can’t move yet. I’m paralyzed with overwhelming relief and love and fear. “They said you were shot.” “Well, I was grazed, really,” Sarah says with a giggle. “It’s just a flesh wound.” “Whatever, Monty Python." I’m left with the woman of my dreams. And she’s whole and healthy and she’s going to be okay. “Hi there, handsome,” she says with that goofy smile. “Hi.” I sit on the bed at her hip and drag my fingers down her flawless cheek. “You just took about ten years off my life.” “It’s only a flesh wound,” she says again in that horrible British accent, making me smile at her. “God, baby,” I inhale deeply and bury my face in her neck, breathing her in. “God, if it had been two inches to the right—” “I know,” she assures me and plunges her fingers in my hair, holding on tight. “I know. But it wasn’t. And I’m okay.” She shifts on the bed and hisses in pain. “But it burns like a mother ducker.” I pull back and grin. “Ducker?” “Auto correct of the mouth. I have to have it turned on because I have a five-year-old.” She smirks. “You’re hot.” “You’re drunk.” “Really good drugs for this flesh wound.” “Your British accent is horrible.” “There’s no need to insult me,” she says with a frown. “I’ve been shot for godsake. You’re supposed to baby me and pamper me and bend to my will.” “I’ve been bending to your will since day one.” “As if.” She rolls her eyes, then closes them and moans softly. “Do you need more medicine?” “Nah.” She smiles, but her eyes are still closed. “I’m just sleepy.” “Sweetheart, I need you to stay awake for a minute, okay?” “Okay.” But she doesn’t open her eyes. I lean in and kiss her forehead, her cheek, her lips. “Wake up, baby.” “Okay,” she repeats and forces her eyes open. “There you are.” “Here I am.” I swallow and look at her perfect lips, then into her amazing eyes. Why have I been such a stubborn ass? Why couldn’t I admit before how much I love her? God, I almost lost her. “I love you, Sarah.” “Wow. These drugs are good. I just dreamed that you said you love me.” I grin again and kiss her cheek. “I did. I love you so much. For those few moments that I thought I might lose you…it was agony, Sarah. I didn’t want another minute to go by without telling you that I love you because I realize how short life can be, and we shouldn’t waste it.” “This is a very serious conversation for someone on hard narcotics,” she says, but she cups my face in her hands and looks deeply into my eyes. “But I love you too, handsome. I love you so much that it hurts, and let me tell you, that’s a lot.” “It sounds like a lot,” I reply and lean my forehead on hers. “Don’t ever scare me like this again.” “Scared me too,” she admits softly. “I just found you.” “You’re stuck with me, baby.” “Good. I love you, too. Both of you.” “Both of us?” “There are two of you right now.” She giggles softly. “And I think I’m going to pass out.” “Go ahead. I have you, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.

You are everything to me, Quinn. Today I figured that out, and I’m sorry it took me so fucking long about it, but… when it’s all said and done, you’re kind of who I’ve been running from my entire damned life, because not having you—not loving you—made me hurt so much inside. All this time I’ve been trying to fill this hole inside of me, fucking around, drugs and shit, when what I should have done was just come home—and find you,” Rafe whispered into the tight space between their faces, the slice of air and shared breath that’d become their world. “I’m shit. I know that. I’m fucking nothing… especially compared to you. I kissed you because I need you. Because I finally fucking figured out—today of all shitty days for you—that I need you, and I don’t want to let you go.

With that, I follow my little chem partner out of the room and down the hall. “Stop following me,” she snaps, looking over her shoulder to check how many people are watching us walk down the hall together. As if I’m el diablo himself. “Wear long sleeves on Saturday night,” I tell her, knowing full well she’s reaching the end of her sanity rope. I usually don’t try to get under the skin of white chicks, but this one is fun to rattle. This one, the most popular and coveted one of all, actually cares. “It gets pretty cold on the back of my motorcycle.” “Listen, Alex,” she says, whipping herself around and tossing that sun-kissed hair over her shoulder. She faces me with clear eyes made of ice. “I don’t date guys in gangs, and I don’t use drugs.” “I don’t date guys in gangs, either,” I say, stepping closer to her. “And I’m no user.” “Yeah, right. I’m surprised you’re not in rehab or juvie boot camp.” “You think you know me?” “I know enough.” She folds her arms across her chest, but then looks down as if she realizes her stance makes her chichis stand out, and drops her hands to her sides. I’m doing my best not to focus on those chichis as I take a step forward. “Did you report me to Aguirre?” She takes a step back. “What if I did?” “Mujer, you’re afraid of me.” It’s not a question. I just want to hear from her own lips what her reason is. “Most people at this school are scared that if they look at you wrong, you’ll gun them down.” “Then my gun should be smokin’ by now, shouldn’t it? Why aren’t you runnin’ away from the badass Mexicano, huh?” “Give me half a chance, I will.” I’ve had enough of dancing around this little bitch. It’s time to fluff up those feathers to make sure I end up with the upper hand. I close the distance between us and whisper in her ear, “Face the facts. Your life is too perfect. You probably lie awake at night, fantasizing about spicin’ up all that lily whiteness you live in.” But damn it, I get a whiff of vanilla from her perfume or lotion. It reminds me of cookies. I love cookies, so this is not good at all. “Gettin’ near the fire, chica, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get burned.

Wrath let his head fall back as if he were utterly exhausted. “Why are you doing this.” Abruptly, she thought of what he’d said to her when her needing had hit and he’d found her trying to get at the drugs. In a voice that cracked, she replied, “Because I love you. And you either don’t want to acknowledge it, or you can’t see that far into the future, but this really, totally matters to you. I’m telling you, Wrath, this is the kind of stuff that people never get over. And like I said, you want to quit? Fine. That’s your choice. But I’ll be good and g*dd*mned if I’m going to let someone take it away from you.” He brought his jaw back to level. “You don’t get it, leelan. It’s over.” “Not if I have anything to do with it.” There was a long moment . . . and then he reached out and crushed her to him, holding her so tightly she could feel her very bones bend. “I’m not strong enough for this,” he whispered in her ear—like he didn’t want anyone to hear that coming out of his mouth. Ever. Running her hands up his powerful back, she held him just as hard. “But I am.” -Wrath & Beth

Despite the light tone Baltsaros was using, Jon could hear that the captain was breathing heavily, and it sharpened his arousal. When Tom’s hot mouth slid over the sensitive head of his cock, Jon let out a full-throated moan. He was so turned on that he didn’t think he would last very long. His cock slid slowly down the back of Tom’s tongue, impossibly far, the muscles of the kneeling man’s throat enveloping him as his lips tightened to reverse the thrust. With a gasp, he pushed on the back of Tom’s head, wanting to feel the long, smooth plunge again once more before he had to pull away, lest he climax. When he heard the creak of the bed, he opened his eyes and saw that Baltsaros was coming towards him. There was a familiar smell in the air, and when the captain pressed his mouth to his, Jon breathed in a lungful of the drug char. Tom had stopped moving, realizing how far Jon had already come in his pleasure. As the drug started swirling through his veins, Baltsaros nodded, and Tom resumed gorging himself on Jon’s cock. Baltsaros and Tom. Tom and Baltsaros. They worked effortlessly as a team, even in this. The drug would work to offset Jon’s climax while enhancing his pleasure; this time, however, Jon didn’t feel as dazed as the first time, and he was glad for it. Experimentally, he pushed on the back of Tom’s head when his cock was in the bigger man’s throat and held him there. Tom obediently stayed put, unable to breathe and shuddering slightly as Jon rocked his hips minutely to feel the head of his cock sliding down the back of the bigger man’s throat. He threw his head back and Baltsaros put his arms around him, pinching his nipples and slowly kissing the side of his neck. When Jon finally released Tom, the other man collapsed back on the carpet, coughing and wiping his mouth; however, there was a smile on the big man’s face, and his eyes were wide with desire as he came back up onto his knees. “You weren’t kidding,” Jon said to Baltsaros, amazed at Tom’s eagerness. The captain chuckled and slid his hands down to Jon’s stiff, wet cock to stroke him. “I don’t ‘kid’ about much, my love,” said the captain in his ear. “You know what I would really like to see? I want to watch you fuck him.

Do you ever think about makin’ love to me?” He slides off a sock before I even answer his question. “Yes,” she answers. “Do you think about making love with me?” I lie awake most nights, fantasizing about sleeping next to her…loving her. “Right now, muñeca, makin’ love to you is the only thing on my mind.” I check my watch. I’ve got to go soon. Drug dealers don’t give a shit about your personal life. I can’t be late, but I want Brittany so damn bad. “Your coat’s next. You sure you want to keep goin’?” I slip off my other sock. The only things preventing me from being naked are my jeans and briefs. “Yes, I want to keep going.” She smiles wide, her beautiful pink lips glistening in the light. “Turn off the lights before I…take my coat off.” I turn off the shop lights, watching as she stands on the blanket and unbuttons her coat with trembling fingers. I’m in a trance, especially when she looks at me with those clear eyes shining with desire. As she opens her coat slowly, my eyes are fixed on the present inside. She walks toward me, then trips on a discarded shoe. I catch her, then place her on the soft blanket and settle atop her. “Thanks for breaking my fall,” she says breathlessly. I brush a strand of hair from her face, then move beside her. When she wraps her arms around my neck, all I want to do is protect this girl for the rest of my life. I ease her jacket open and lean away. A pink lace bra stares back at me. Nothing else. “Como un ángel,” I whisper. “Is our game over?” she asks nervously. “It’s definitely over, querida. ’Cause what we’re gonna do next is no game.

Wriggling out of his grasp she braced herself on his shoulders and tried to stand. Next thing she knew, he had her around the legs and took her down to the mattress in some sort of super-fast ninja move. She screamed and laughed, and he was laughing every bit as hard as he came down on top of her. And, oh God, his laughter was a sweet and sexy rumble that lit her up inside. “You fight dirty, Easy,” she said around her chuckles. “I haven’t had this much fun in so long.” She caressed his face with her fingers. “Me neither. Between overloading on classes and my epilepsy, I often feel like a little old lady trapped in the body of a twenty-year-old. All I need is some cats.” “Cats are awesome,” he said. “When I was a kid, I used to sneak stray cats into the house, just for a night or two. I’d keep them in my room and bring up bowls of milk and cans of tuna for them.” “Aw, you were a sweet little boy, weren’t you?” she asked, loving how he was opening up to her. The closeness, the sharing, the way his big body was lying on her legs and hips, leading him to prop his head up on her lower stomach—both her heart and her body reacted. “Maybe for about five minutes.” He winked. “Mostly, I was a hell-raiser. Growing up, we didn’t live in the best neighborhood. Drug dealers on the corner, gang activity trying to pull in even the younger kids, crack house one block over. All that. Trouble wasn’t hard to find.” He shrugged. “Army straightened me out, though.” “Well, we lived in a nice neighborhood growing up and here my father was the freaking drug dealer on the corner. Or close enough, anyway.” Jenna stared at the ceiling and shook her head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get serious.” His thumb stroked along her side, sliding the cotton of her borrowed shirt against her skin in a way that almost tickled. “Don’t apologize. Our histories are what they are, you know?” She nodded and gave him a little smile. “Yeah.” Shifting off her, Easy stretched out alongside her and propped his head up on his arm. “I’m thirty, Jenna,” he said out of nowhere. And he was telling her this because? He thought their age difference was too great? He thought she was too young? He was worried she would think he was too old? Probably D) all of the above. Thing was, all she saw when she looked at Easy was a guy she really freaking liked. One who’d saved her life, helped make her sister safe, and gave her a sense of security she hadn’t felt in years. He was hot as hell, easy to talk to, and one of the kindest guys she’d ever known. Maybe some of that was because he was older. Who knew? “And I need to know this because?” she asked, resting her head on her arm. The muscles of his shoulders lifted into a shrug, but his face was contemplative. “Because there’s clearly something going on between us.” Heat rushed across her body. She held up a hand, and he laced his fingers between hers. “When I look at you, I don’t see a bunch of differences, Easy.” “What do you see then?” Warmth flooded into Jenna’s cheeks, and she chuckled. He’d said that she was beautiful, after all, so why couldn’t she give him a compliment in return? “A really hot guy I’d like to get to know more.” A smug smile slipped onto his face, and she might’ve rolled her eyes if it weren’t so damn sexy. “Really hot, huh?” “Well, kinda hot, anyway.” “Nuh-uh,” he said, tugging her hand to his chest. “Can’t take it back now.” Cheeks burning and big smile threatening, she rolled onto her side to face him. They lay there, side by side, her chest almost touching his, looking at each other. Tension and desire and anticipation crackled in the space between them, making it hard to breathe. “What do you see when you look at me?” she whispered, half-afraid to ask but even more curious to hear what he’d say. Did he mostly see someone who was too young for him? Or a needy girl he had to save and babysit?

Miss Minton, what on earth made you let a young girl travel up the Amazon and spend weeks living with savages? What made you do it? The British consul thinks that you must all have been drugged.” “Perhaps. Yes, perhaps we were drugged. Not by the things the Xanti smoked--none of us touched them--but by…peace…by happiness. By a different sense of time.” “I don’t think you have explained why you let Maia--” Miss Minton interrupted him. “I will explain. At least I will try to. You see, I have looked after some truly dreadful children in my time, and it was easy not to get fond of them. After all, a governess is not a mother. But Maia…well, I’m afraid I grew to love her. And that meant I began to think what I would do if she were my child.” “And you would let her--” began Mr. Murray. But Miss Minton stopped him. “I would let her…have adventures. I would let her…choose her path. It would be hard…it was hard…but I would do it. Oh, not completely, of course. Some things have to go on. Cleaning one’s teeth, arithmetic. But Maia fell in love with the Amazon. It happens. The place was for her--and the people. Of course there was some danger, but there is danger everywhere. Two years ago, in this school, there was an outbreak of typhus, and three girls died. Children are knocked down and killed by horses every week, here in these streets--” She broke off, gathering her thoughts. “When she was traveling and exploring…and finding her songs, Maia wasn’t just happy, she was…herself. I think something broke in Maia when her parents died, and out there it was healed. Perhaps I’m mad--and the professor, too--but I think children must lead big lives…if it is in them to do so. And it is in Maia.” The old lawyer was silent, rolling his silver pencil over and over between his fingers. “You would take her back to Brazil?” “Yes.” “To live among savages?” “No. To explore and discover and look for giant sloths and new melodies and flowers that only blossom once every twenty years. Not to find them necessarily, but to look--” She broke off, remembering what they had planned, the four of them, as they sailed up the Agarapi. To build a proper House of Rest near the Carters’ old bungalow and live there in the rainy season, studying hard so that if Maia wanted to go to music college later, or Finn to train as a doctor, they would be prepared. And in the dry weather, to set off and explore. Mr. Murray had risen to his feet. He walked over to the window and stood with his back to her, looking out at the square. “It’s impossible. It’s madness.” There was a long pause. “Or is it?” the old man said.

Most people do look at drug addicts in moral terms. “It’s your own fault,” they’ll say. “Drugs are bad, and you shouldn’t have done what you did.” If my own kid hadn’t become a drug addict, I might not get it either. Some close to me still don’t.

Fear of the Lord The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise. —PSALM 111:10     The motto of the wisdom teachers is that the fear of the LORD (showing holy respect and reverence for God and shunning evil) is the starting point and essence of wisdom. When you have a fear of the LORD, you express that respect by submission to His will. • “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”—Job 28:28 NASB • “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”—Proverbs 9:10 NASB • “The fear of the LORD is the instruction for wisdom, and before honor comes humility.”—Proverbs 15:33 NASB • “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person.” —Ecclesiastes 12:13 NASB Wisdom is not acquired by a mechanical formula, but through a right relationship with God. It seems that following God’s principles and commandments should be the obvious conclusion of our thankfulness for all He has done for us. In today’s church world, many people have lost the concept of fearing God. The soft side of Christianity has preached only the “love of God.” We haven’t balanced the scale by teaching the other side, His justice and judgment—fear, anger, wrath, obedience, and punishment. Just because some pastors don’t teach it from their pulpits doesn’t make it less a reality. As with involvement with drugs, alcohol, lust, and envy, we must respect the consequences of our actions, or we will be destroyed by them. Our safeguard to resist these life destroyers is to have a proper respect for God. Then we will be obedient to His precepts and stay away from the fire of temptation. God lights the way for our paths, but we must be willing to follow His lighted path.

You got kids who act loony and take drugs left and right. They pretend they hate their parents who gave them everything in the world. These kids grow up, and their kids stick earrings in private places and get tattoos all over their bodies and don’t know whether to act like boys or girls. They think they love everybody. The truth is they love nobody, including themselves.

My God!” Sophia sat back, her eyes wide with horror. “It’s a drug! He’s drugging her and she doesn’t even know it.” Here we go. “It’s common knowledge that we’re genetic traders—the fact that we have more than one means to attract a mate of an entirely different species should come as no surprise,” he pointed out. “You…you cold blooded bastard.” Sophia shook her head. “Poor Liv—she has no idea what he’s doing to her.” “It wouldn’t matter even if she did,” Sylvan explained patiently, ignoring her insults. “The mating scent is too strong to fight, even with advanced warning. Stronger species than yours have tried and they have all failed. With very few exceptions.” He closed his eyes briefly thinking of Feenah, of her pure white hair and pale crystal eyes. I’m sorry, Sylvan… “It’s not right. You’re not fighting fair.” Sophia’s words pushed back the painful memory and Sylvan opened his eyes again to see the look of despair and anger on her lovely face. She looked almost on the brink of tears. Wonderful—she was even more upset and irrational than he had thought she would be. He supposed he ought to feel irritated. Instead, the illogical urge to hold and comfort her came over him so strongly that he had to sit back and cross his arms over his chest to keep from reaching for her. “I believe you humans have a saying that covers this—‘All’s fair in love and war.’ Is that right?” he said softly. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean—” Sylvan leaned forward again and took her soft, small hands between his own larger ones. “You must understand, Sophia—Baird isn’t trying to trick your sister into anything. He’s simply using every power at his disposal to keep her. Because he needs her—he loves her. She is the only woman in the entire universe for him and the bond that will form between them will be one of undying love and devotion.” “Maybe for him.” She looked down as though mesmerized by the sight of her own small hands being engulfed in his much larger ones. “But not for Liv. He’s going to trick her into having bonding sex with him —whatever that is—and then she’ll spend the rest of her life hating him once she finds out how he did it.” She looked up at Sylvan. “You don’t know her like I do—she hates being lied to. Her last boyfriend cheated on her and then lied about it and she dumped him and never looked back. If she knew what Baird was doing to her…” “It’s not as though it’s a conscious choice on his part,” Sylvan tried to explain. “It’s the way our bodies react chemically to our chosen mates. We can’t turn it off, even if we try. Sometimes it comes even when it’s not wanted. We have a saying for it—‘The blood knows what the mind does not wish to see.’” Lifting a hand, he cupped her cheek and brushed away the single tear that had escaped her wide green eyes with his thumb. “It cannot be helped.” Sophia

We must not fall into the typical shadow defense of our culture’s scientific complex which is to think that to name something means we have some control over it. I’ve heard many, many people say something like, “that’s my money complex—but, I’m doing better at it,” or “that’s my critical mother—but I’m doing better than I used to.” This approach is missing the point of healing and transformation. It is simply causing a new inner battle on a different level. It continues to split us against ourselves, rather than helping us find wholeness and solidity. This error reflects a cultural complex which is that we are taught to live our lives according to the ways of Mars, the god of war and not the ways of Eros, the god of love and relationships. Our society teaches us that war is the way. We declare war on poverty, drugs, cancer, our weight, in fact on whatever symptoms are giving us the most trouble. We declare war on ourselves in this process. And, as far as I can see in my lifetime we rarely, if ever, win these wars. Why don’t we ever win some of these wars, we might wonder? Well, let me suggest an answer on the personal level, because as you know, Jung thought that in today’s world that’s where change must start. Most of the complexes that really trouble us come from problems in Eros, those related to love and relationships. They are wounds of the lack of love, the lack of understanding and personal concern, the lack of affirmation in childhood, and these events founded our complexes. Even wounds of fate, like my mother’s death when I was a child, which was a trauma, brought a wound of Eros because one of its major sources was lost, I was abandoned. Abuse is a betrayal of Eros. There are, of course, many more than I have named. The point I want to make is that you cannot heal wounds to Eros with the techniques of Mars: aggression, suppression and control. Yet that is what we try to do. We want to overcome, defeat our complexes.

LORD, This world is a broken, painful place for my son to navigate as he grows. He’ll experience physical illness and injuries. Trusted friends and family may betray his confidence. The dreams he holds for the future may crumble. Goals he works hard to achieve can end in failure. He may find himself lonely, broke, sick, or disappointed. As he looks for ways to relieve his pain or find distraction from his troubles, he may end up looking in all the wrong places. Keep my son from the trap of addiction as he seeks comfort in this world. The pleasures of food, alcohol, sex, entertainment, drugs, and money can offer a temporary diversion from the pain in his heart. But these same pleasures can become a trap that steals his freedom to live in your peace and righteousness. Don’t let my son’s heart become enslaved to anything or anyone but you. Let him find his greatest satisfaction in your presence. Give him discernment to identify temptations that come his way. May he have strength to “flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart” (2 Tim. 2: 22). Surround my son with believers who will encourage him to walk in your ways. Give him humility to ask for help if he’s overtaken by any sin. Open my eyes to see any areas of bondage that are developing in his life. Show me the boundaries to set to guard him from temptations that may be too hard to resist. Show my son that you are his true comfort. You offer a future of perfect peace and love with you. Your plans for him are good and perfect. You are his one true, faithful friend. You are the source of everything he needs. You hold the answers to all of his questions. Let my son live in your freedom. Keep his eyes on you. May he offer his life fully to you and obey you with all his heart. Amen.

Live like there is no tommorow cause tommorow is never promised. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. God does not judge us on our fathers sins. Father son and holy spirit I hold you nearest. To be a mother you need to actually be there and represent what a mother is. You don’t get to be the mother if you show up after the kids are already grown up. She’s like all those animals at the end of the story who show up to eat the Little Red Hen’s bread. The train crawls out of the Tapachula station. From here on, he thinks, nothing bad can happen. People come here to prosper. You have nothing here. What have you accomplished? You can't live through or claim there your children if you weren't there for them. The garden is a metaphor of opposites man women good evil up down everything has a opposite. God had already planned my destiny before I was created. Treat others how they treat you or how you want to be treated. My kids are my world and I will protect them from your evil manipulative narcissistic ways. Forgive but never forget. Knowledge is power. You don't own me. I only owe my servitude to the family I created and God. Love thy father who art in heaven. Your only Australian if you live in Australia. If you live in America your American stop trying to get freinds and likes based on where other people think your from. Don't blow your own trumpet. A bad worker blames his tools. No worries mate she'll be right. Couldn't hand a man a grander spanner The game was a fizzer. I wouldn't piss on them even if they were on fire. If you think I'm bad you should see my sister. She gives me cupcakes for my birthday. Happy birthday man whore. She's like that white girl at the gangbang party Your mother and father would be proud lol. narcissistic siblings keep score and feel compelled to outplay a sibling. They often triangulate in the family, playing two against one. Children reared in narcissistic homes rarely feel connected to one another as adults which is a good thing. Suck a big black cock casey. And mum try too lol and dad I'm not even gonna bother keep paying that child support mum and keep it for yourself and your drugs and alcohole dad Lord knows

of her robe. ‘Please, Beatriz, don’t apologise. I understand how upsetting it must be to tell me this. But try and remember that you’re describing a stranger to me, whether good or bad. I can’t feel love for her, because I never knew her,’ I comforted her softly. ‘Well, I will now tell you that my husband and I decided we had to confront Cristina and warn her that unless she stopped taking drugs and stealing from us, we would have

There is considerable physical evidence compared to other emotions (pleasure, sadness, anger), and hormonal activity becomes very strong when you feel love. When you fall in love, the brain secretes various chemicals, including pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin. Just hugging a loved one or simply looking at a picture of a lover releases a hormone called oxytocin in the body, acting as a painkiller for headaches. Biochemically, phenylethylamine [18] secreted by the brain limbic system works, which is a kind of natural amphetamine, a stimulant. It's because phenylethylamine is the first step, but other hormones work, which are hormones such as adrenaline, dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin, and serotonin that are used in stimulants. The expression "love is a drug" is actually the opposite because drugs imitate love. However, the secretion of phenylethylamine has a shelf life, so it generally does not exceed two years. There are individual differences in this, so many of them are over in three months, and in some cases, it lasts up to three years. If two sparks fly at the same time and one person finishes at three months, and the other goes for two years and three years, tragedy will occur from then on. In other words, after that period, the brain, which had been exhausted by drugs, will regain its grip. Link to bean pods off. From this point on, love ends the chemistry phase and moves on to the sociology phase. Some say that the two-and-a-half years are meant to build and strengthen ties and intimacy with the other, and that the couple who don't become a parrot couple will sink in a moment of excitement and fall into ennui. At this time, the secretion of phenylethylamine decreases, but [19] oxytocin is actively secreted, resulting in comfort with each other. Link

One thing leads to another in this world, Flamen, and we human beings get dragged along like—like dead leaves spinning in the wake of a skimmer. Diablo was saying a while back how you fine down your principles so that a machine can handle them, and pretty soon the person using the machine comes to imagine that this is how it’s always been— there never was a subtler way of thinking. That’s some of where it’s at, but it’s not all by any means. Take the fine expensive home you live in, with its automatic defenses and its mines sown under the lawn like daffodil-bulbs. You shut yourself up behind armor-plate, you shut your mind too. You advertise Guardian traps on your show, don’t you—those steel bands spiked like an Iron Maiden? What’s the mentality of someone who’s prepared to come home from visiting neighbors and find a corpse hung up in the doorway? I say he’s already insane when he commits himself to that course of action, and you don’t have to wait for him to lose his marbles under an overdose of Ladromide before he stops thinking as a responsible mature person ought to! And what’s the reason that’s advanced for acting this way?” He rounded on Reedeth. “You know! You probably have it dinned into you a dozen times a day at your work! ‘Be an individual!’” Conroy contrived to make the slogan sound obscene. “And what’s this been twisted into? The biggest Big Lie in history! It’s no use making your life so private you refuse to learn from other people’s experience—you just get stuck in a groove of mistakes you need never have made. We have more knowledge available at the turn of a switch than ever before, we can bring any part of the world into our own homes, and what do we do with it? Half the time we advertise goods people can’t afford, and anyhow they’ve got the color and hold controls adrift because the pretty patterns are fun to look at when you’ve bolted and barred your mind with drugs. Split! Divide! Separate! Shut your eyes and maybe it’ll go away! “We mine our gardens, we close our frontiers, we barricade our cities with Macnamara lines to shut off black from white, we divide, divide, divide!” A stamp emphasized each repetition of the word. “It gets into our families, goddamn it, it gets into our very love-making! Christ, do you know I had a girl student last year who thought she was having an affair with a boy back home and all they’d ever done was sit in front of the comweb and masturbate at each other? Twenty miles apart! They’d never even kissed! We’re going insane, our whole blasted species—we’re heading for screaming ochlophobia! Another couple of generations and husbands will be afraid to be alone in the same room with their wives, mothers will be afraid of their babies, if there are any babies!

How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow) 1. Appreciate happiness when it is there 2. Sip, don’t gulp. 3. Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more. 4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics. 5. Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers. 6. Kurt Vonnegut was right. “Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.” 7. Listen more than you talk. 8. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful. 9. Be aware that you are breathing. 10. Wherever you are, at any moment, try to find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind. 11. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you. 12. Go for a run. Then do some yoga. 13. Shower before noon. 14. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself. 15. Be kind. 16. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim. 17. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction. 18. Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like Snow Queen in Frozen. 19. Don’t’ worry about things that probably won’t happen. 20. Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.) 21. Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and “walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet”. 22. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls. 23. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it is hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication. 24. Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through. 25. Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end. 26. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people. 27. Listen to what Hamlet – literature’s most famous depressive – told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” 28. If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point. 29. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful. 30. Jules Verne wrote of the “Living Infinite”. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a “sea”. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive. 31. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life. 32. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects. 33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or ups and down. At your lowest and your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.

Make love to me." He laced his fingers with hers and rocked slowly in and out. Pleasure replaced the pain as they moved together, finding their own lovely rhythm. She loved this. Not just the sex, but the intimacy. Having him on top of her. This special dance they engaged in that was just between them. He looked into her eyes. "You're incredible." And now they belonged to each other. His pace quickened and she let herself go. Her joy came in waves, like it had earlier, but this time it was different. She was lost in this moment, lost in Enrique. How could anything feel so amazing? Her heart beat so loudly, she was certain he could hear it. Blood coursed through her body; she was on fire as he rubbed her clit. Pleasure prickled through her veins. Over and over again. "Come on, baby. Don't stop!" he said. She didn't want to stop. She wanted to feel this great every day for the rest of her life. He was like a drug, and she was addicted. He gazed deep into her eyes. Her body throbbed as she cried out. Her thighs quivered as he pressed closer. Finally, she broke into a million pieces. "Enrique!

See I grew pessimistic. Unsure if reading the book would make any difference. For her. For the Justice. To prevail. Law. Order. Females like psychopaths and criminals. Fairy tales and vampires. Bad guys. Not the good guys. They are attracted to the bad guys. Using good guys. „Being smarter.” Until: caught. They enjoy using and hurting good people. It is not only their way of living. Killing. They have no inner control or conscience influenced by society. They allow themselves to be happy without any restraint, associating with bad people and engaging in unlawful activities. Bad people / Psychopath females Them and their owners. The Sin. The Crime. The Knowledge. The Secret. The Wisdom. The Snake. The Apple. Adam. Paradise. Hell. This is how they often end up in jail or dead, or occasionally getting splashed with acid, riding wheelchairs, usually due to their involvement with drug-dealing boyfriends. Getting: „surprised.” No one gets „acid” in his/her face for no reason. This is an honest book. Do you want me to say a name, an example or add a list? „Say her name.” ... ? OKAY. I will not add any other examples, or names, to the list, as I choose to mention, point out the story of: Breonna Taylor as both the beginning and end of the list. I do not want to spend time searching for more instances, ladies, as my intention is not to defend or advocate for individuals who have engaged in wrongdoing, regardless of their gender. I am not trying to save the lives of criminals anymore. I have no girlfriend/abuser. To save. From herself. I don't believe it is productive to compile a list of examples or names of females who were involved in criminal activities or found themselves in dangerous situations. Beds. Doing so would be a futile use of time. „The problem is, that women, they have/got all the pussies.” – Serbian proverb Perhaps the police used excessive force. Perhaps. Alright. I don't doubt it. I don't agree either. It was a dangerous guy. Warrants. Danger. Dangerous situation. Lawful enter or not. ... These bodycam videos don't show you the level of adrenaline you have in such situations. "Kill or be killed." The officers want to get home tonight as well to see their loved ones. I wouldn't call that "trigger-happy." But I think it fits to call the criminals: cowardly. Using live body shield: their girlfriends. In general. Hiding. Behind girls. Just like: Adam Maraudin. And so many more.

- Can you keep secrets? - Yesss. - We are going to make one of the biggest coffeeshops in Barcelona with my boss, Adam. - Realllllly? - This Adam guy is kind of my friend and kind of my boss, but I don't trust him; he is a bad guy. “Bad to the bone.” His father is an even darker figure. I am pretty sure that both have killed before, hired to kill people. - I am from Buenos Airessss. - I understand honey but you don’t know this kind of people, these f…g desert roses. - There are Jewish people in Argentina too. - I am sure, baby, but these are not regular Jewish people, not regular Israeli people. These people are dark. Hocus-pocus. Criminal minds. Do you understand? - I guessss. - There are a lot of criminals in this town. They will try to take our club away, just like the Camorra is taking away other people's clubs. Just like that. Do you understand? - Yessss. - I know them; they are one of my clients. If there is anyone in the world who could make a deal with them, it would be me and Adam. He cannot cross me and I cannot cross him either. I would never do that. I am not sure about him though what is on his mind, I can tell there is something he is orchestrating I just don’t know what exactly, but he is as fishy as Sabrina. The problem is that only my ex-girlfriend knows about my signature on the non-profit organization, which is the base of the coffeeshop, the marijuana grow and the smoker club. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - We are talking about millions of Euros monthly cashflow. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - By telling you everything now, you are becoming my trusted; your life is in danger too if they manage to find a gap between us. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - I'm not sure what they're up to. They owe me already more money than anyone in this town would murder for. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - Now you know about it, too. Sabrina didn't care; she didn't think I would make it happen. She doesn’t know about the place. Only you know about it and us. But she will figure it out somehow; she will try to take your position, slipping between the criminals. Do you know how to play chess? - Not really. - OK then. Imagine this as a throne, these chairs you are sitting on top of. OK. No one can remove you from this throne being my girlfriend, no one can stand between us. No one can take the club away from us. They have no chance. Understand? - Yesss. - As long as you stick with me, she cannot do anything; no one can mess with us. Do you understand? - Yesss. - Everyone in the world would try to take your place, being my girlfriend, and they will try to push you out from this position, which only me I can give you, with Love. They will tell you lies about me and about themselves who’s club is it. Do you understand? - Yes. But why? - Because Rachel and Tom, the other two founding members of the club, Golan, I signed up with, are Adam's puppets. I don't trust any one of them. If they kill me, they never have to pay me what they owe me already, plus they can keep the 33% of the club which belongs to me. 100% Adam would keep. Do you understand now? - Yessss. - We will pull all the trash out and remodel the place without any permit, under the rug, in secret. - I sssseeee. (Eye. See.)

I still don't know to this day how she managed to climb the 94 stairs; she was dying from an overdose. The gate at the bottom of the stairwell did not make a sound when she entered the building, being so ill and alone. It was odd. Where could she have been? Almost as if she had been dropped off at my doorstep like a package silently by a (Polish) giant. She was pale and could barely open the door with her keys. When she entered, she fell into my arms; she was drunk and high, her legs buckling so that she couldn't stand. I tried to figure out what she had taken and what she had drunk, but she could barely talk; her eyes were rolling back in her skull. She was crying with her head in the toilet bowl, unable to stop the cramps running through her insides and her entire body shaking. - What did you drink? - Two … beers. - I am not your father. What did you take? Where have you been? - Beers and tequila - she mumbled, saliva drooling out of her mouth and her head hanging down like she was dead already. Then I asked her what else she had taken. She still wouldn't answer, so I repeated. - Answer me Martina, who gave it to you?! - I shouted. - Where have you been?! But she didn't answer, and her condition was critical, so I had to rush her to the hospital in my arms as she was about to lose consciousness. I had to grab her and take her to the closest hospital across Parallel, two blocks away. This was the first time I had taken her to the hospital since she'd split her chin by falling off my bicycle allegedly before, although it wasn't the last. Interestingly, whenever she got involved with a new group of criminals, she wound up in the hospital both times, and both times I took her there. She had no energy to lift her head out of the toilet bowl. As soon as I entered the hospital with her, the staff and I had to put her in a wheelchair. They took her inside and 20 minutes later when I was sitting by her bed, she already felt better with an IV dripping slowly into her vein, but she was unable to move; she was lying in her hospital bed, barely able to open her eyes to look at me. She was between life and death, or between real life and just a dream. I remembered less than a year earlier she was so full of life and happy and healthy when I put her up on that set of chairs that night when we took off the 'for sale' sign. The doctors told me after she fell asleep that they wanted to rinse her stomach, but she didn't authorize that. I was not fully aware that she was on drugs time to time or all the time and with what kind of people she was associated with. She almost only showed up at home in September 2014 when she overdosed. I was in love and worried for her so much, so I filled out the forms while they treated her in the hospital. I prayed to God to save her, asking for Him to show her the Truth. All I had was a prayer—50/50 if it worked. And I remembered that two years before, I had prayed for the life of our kitten Sabrina was playing with, making friends. This time, however, I had to rush to the hospital, not the vet, with my 20-year-old girlfriend who would soon be 21 in October 2014. And I felt like Sabrina, trying to make friends again but by the wrong people was the reason why I, an atheist, was praying for a puppy or a kitten or a bunny's life this time again. I didn't know that lies and secrets were eating away at her from deep inside once in a while as well, it wasn't just the drugs that were killing her insides like cancer. Just like her brother's intestines silently began to consume him and her, unbeknownst to them, but I could almost sense it like a dog if I could not see it, smell it inside them like X-ray. They were unaware of what my eyes had seen, as I watched their vibrations and faces silently change.