Fell Sans Quotes

Once at a record store in San Francisco, over a thousand kids showed up. They pushed forward and broke a window. A big piece of glass fell on top of this girl. And the girl's throat was slit. She just got slit. And I remember there was blood everywhere. Oh God, so much blood. And she grabbed her throat and was bleeding and everyone just ignored her. Why? Because I was there and they wanted to grab at me and get my autograph. I wonder whatever happened to that girl.

Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. "I am alone, alone, alone," he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said, "We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn't for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You'll be surprised at the way time passes.

I wanted to be able to tell you the exact moment I fell in love with you. But I can't do that." "You can't?" A pin could have dropped in the grass and it would have been heard in that moment as everyone grew perfectly silent to listen for his reply. "No, I can't. Because every single moment I've spent with you is that moment, Lori.

A quick check on the platoon showed everyone more or less enjoying the flight. "Whatever it is you're eating, Ressk, swallow it before we land," [said Staff Sergeant Kerr]. "No problem, Staff." "More like whoever he's eating," Binti muttered beside him. "You ought to count your fingers," he suggested. "You're too serley stupid to notice one missing." "Maybe you ought to gren sa talamec to." "That's enough, people." When the Confederation first started integrating the di'Taykan and the Krai into what was predominantly a human military system, xenopsychologists among the elder races expected a number of problems. For the most part, those expectations fell short. After having dealt with the Mictok and the H'san, none of the younger races - all bipedal mammals - had any difficulty with each other's appearance. Cultural differences were absorbed into the prevailing military culture and the remaining problems were dealt with in the age-old military tradition of learning to say "up yours" in the other races' languages. The "us against them" mentality of war made for strange bedfellows.

I fell in love with you when you crashed into my fence post and chased after my chickens and fell down in the mud with the pigs. I fell in love with you when you taught everyone in town to line dance. I fell in love with you when you put Mo’s feelings before your own and stayed with her for as long as she needed you.” One fat tear slid down her cheek as he said, “And, most of all, I fell in love with you when you showed me that it was safe to love again. I keep falling in love with you again and again. Just like I’m falling right this second.

Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away.

The Stadium Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators. At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghosts of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.

Doc fell in to a car convoy, moving slowly, single lane through the fog. He figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit, he'd take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets. He knew that at Rosecrans, the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia,he'd lose the fog, unless it was spreading tonight, and settled in region wide... Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he'd have to just keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody. Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait. For whatever would happen. For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the fog to burn off, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.

Because the first time they met... Y-da: "You know, Y-naga-san, the more makeup you put on, the more you look like a guy in drag. So I'm going to call you F-mio!" Y-naga: "I-I like this person!" The moment she fell in love.

Sala called for more drink and Sweep brought four rums, saying they were on the house. We thanked him and sat for another half hour, saying nothing. Down on the waterfront I could hear the slow clang of a ship’s bell as it eased against the pier, and somewhere in the city a motorcycle roared through the narrow streets, sending its echo up the hill to Calle O’Leary. Voices rose and fell in the house next door and the raucous sound of a jukebox came from a bar down the street. Sounds of a San Juan night, drifting across the city through layers of humid air; sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing in the long Caribbean night.

I put on my thickest red flannel nightie and dove into bed. Mercifully, SanJuanna had taken the chill off the sheets with a warming pan. I intended to lie there for a while and take stock of my life. That's what you do at the end of the century, don't you? I think I actually fell asleep right away and only dreamed I was taking stock.

It was one of the worst winters in Texas and Western history, when cattle perished like flies in great blizzards and snow fell on San Francisco and LA.

Night must fall. It fell hard tonight in Downtown Oakland, like a lead blanket. Started to sink in. What happened today. Slowly at first, like a dull ache. Then like a midnight jackhammer excavating my brain. That ordeal with the cops was a distraction that insulated me. Numbed me to the cold reality. But when I hit San Pablo driving past Phil’s place, a sensation started welling up from my gut—washing over me—pea-green nausea topped with a dollop of white rage. I gripped the wheel, composed myself.

I circled among the narrow, San Franciscan streets of Mt. Adams until night fell, then dropped down St. Martin's to Paradrome and up to Ida, where I parked beneath an arching willow some three houses down from Tray Leach's home. I'd bought five styrofoam cups full of coffee at a little grocery on St. Regis, and, as I sat there watching the western sky go purple and then deep blue, I flipped the plastic lid off one of them. It was bad, bitter coffee. But I was feeling numb and disoriented after Cornell Street and I had to keep alert all night long.

Karl Marx famously belittled religion as an “opiate for the masses,” a drug that the spread of worldwide socialism would one day make undesirable. Obama’s aside in San Francisco about “bitter” Americans clinging to belief in God out of economic frustration was nothing more than a restatement of Marx’s view of religion. Like Marx, Obama views traditional religion as a temporary opiate for the poor, confused, and jobless—a drug that will dissipate, he hopes, as the federal government assumes more God-like powers, and his new morality of abortion, subsidized contraception, and gay marriage gains adherents. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Obama said, warming to his theme in San Francisco. “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. [...] Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all. Yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. “Vengeance ! Vengeance” was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard. And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. [...] Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands.

I'll tell you God's truth.' His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. 'I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.'     He looked at me sideways – and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase 'educated at Oxford', or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.     'What part of the Middle West?' I inquired casually.     'San Francisco.'     'I see.

UPON LEAVING MEXICO, THE OLMSTEDS RODE STRAIGHT TO SAN Antonio and "prepared for more rapid travel," shedding "useless weight" for their journey out of Texas. Having spent more than four months traversing the state, they exited it in three weeks, via Houston and Beaumont. By the time they neared Louisiana, "the hot, soggy breath of the approaching summer was extremely depressing." This was particularly so for John, who'd set off for Texas with "the hope of invigorating weakened lungs." Instead, the "abominable diet, and the fatigue" had "served to null the fresh benefits of pure air and stimulating travel." While slogging through a swampy plan near Beaumont, John fell from the saddle "in faint exhaustion," lying facedown on the ground for half an hour, "hardly breathing, and unable to speak.

I’m sorry,” she said, wishing she could say something more meaningful. “I’m not. If he’d been a good uncle, I’d have stayed in Boston. Never would have found my way to San Francisco,” he said. Camille knew where the rest of his story led and grinned. “And you never would have rescued my father from a pickpocket,” she added. He started to laugh, a quiet, almost personal chuckle, like he was thinking about some funny memory. Camille caught the bug of laughter and wanted to join in. “What is it?” she asked. “Your father didn’t need a rescuer. He caught the pickpocket himself,” Oscar answered, a hand on his abdomen from all his laughter. “And then he invited him inside for dinner.” Her smile fell flat. She stared at him, trying to comprehend what he’d just said. “You?” she asked, dumbfounded. “You were the pickpocket?” Oscar nodded, scratching the back of his head. “Yeah. I wasn’t very good at it.” Her father could have had him arrested or shooed him away without thinking twice. But he’d invited Oscar inside. He gave him work, food…a real chance. “Why didn’t he tell me?” she asked, feeling like she’d been duped once again. All the lies her father had woven to cover up his secrets had become so frayed, Camille wondered if she had truly known him at all. “To give me a clean slate with everyone. Even you.” Oscar moved toward her in cautious, deliberate steps. “We’re alone. We should talk.” The pantry was cramped and dismal despite the oil lamp, and Camille had a sudden urge to flee. “About what?” she asked, her ears burning. She still reeled with the knowledge that the pickpocket story hadn’t been real, just like her mother’s story hadn’t been real. Oscar stopped within a few inches from her and reached a hand around her waist. “About our night together, Camille,” he answered, his dimples forming. “There’s a lot to say.

On the slope of Long’s Peak in Colorado lies the ruin of a gigantic tree. Naturalists tell us that it stood for some four hundred years. It was a seedling when Columbus landed at San Salvador, and half grown when the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth. During the course of its long life it was struck by lightning fourteen times, and the innumerable avalanches and storms of four centuries thundered past it. It survived them all. In the end, however, an army of beetles attacked the tree and leveled it to the ground. The insects ate their way through the bark and gradually destroyed the inner strength of the tree by their tiny but incessant attacks. A forest giant which age had not withered, nor lightning blasted, nor storms subdued, fell at last before beetles so small that a man could crush them between his forefinger and his thumb. Aren’t we all like that battling giant of the forest? Don’t we manage somehow to survive the rare storms and avalanches and lightning blasts of life, only to let our hearts be eaten out by little beetles of worry—little beetles that could be crushed between a finger and a thumb?

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels. He started inventing new words. This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn’t help themselves. They were always inventing new words. Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok. To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing. A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink. They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking. People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking. With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing. In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok. Baby had always been popular with people on the Internet, which was a wonderful place to deny climate change, willfully misinterpret the Bible, and denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now that Baby had coined nonsense neologisms, he had become more than popular. He had become quotable.

SILVER CITY IS NO PLACE FOR AMATEURS I left Colorado Springs the next morning and got back in the fucking car for another day of driving for the Tour of the Gila. I’d never driven in snow before, but I made it to Santa Fe and then Albuquerque in the afternoon, careful to dodge all the tumbleweeds on the highway in New Mexico. I hadn’t known that those existed outside of cartoons. Already exhausted when I got off the interstate, I was surprised when my GPS said “48 miles remaining, 1.5 hours’ drive time”—I was sure that couldn’t be right. Then I saw the steep climbs, bumpy cattle guards, and dangerous descents on the road into Silver City. I drove as fast as I could, sliding my poor car around hairpins in the dark. I made it to the host house, fell asleep, and found two flat tires when I went outside to unpack the car in the morning. They probably weren’t meant for drifting. My luck didn’t improve when the race started. I got a flat tire when I went off the road to dodge a crash, and I chased for over an hour to get back to the field. Between the dry air and altitude, I got a major nosebleed. My car was parked at the base of the finishing climb, and I got there several minutes behind the field, my new white Cannondale and all my clothes covered in blood. The course turned right to go up the climb, and I turned left, climbed into my car, and got the hell out of there. I might have made the time cut, but for the second time in two weeks, I opted to climb in the car instead. I got out of that town like I was about to turn into a pumpkin, and made it back to San Diego nine hours later. If there wasn’t a Pacific Ocean to stop me, I’d have driven another day, just to get farther from Gila.

A Tale of Two Parking Requirements The impact of parking requirements becomes clearer when we compare the parking requirements of San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco limits off-street parking, while LA requires it. Take, for example, the different parking requirements for concert halls. For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, fifty times more parking than San Francisco allows as its maximum. Thus the San Francisco Symphony built its home, Louise Davies Hall, without a parking garage, while Disney Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, did not open until seven years after its parking garage was built. Disney Hall's six-level, 2,188-space underground garage cost $110 million to build (about $50,000 per space). Financially troubled Los Angeles County, which built the garage, went into debt to finance it, expecting that parking revenues would repay the borrowed money. But the garage was completed in 1996, and Disney Hall—which suffered from a budget less grand than its vision—became knotted in delays and didn't open until late 2003. During the seven years in between, parking revenue fell far short of debt payments (few people park in an underground structure if there is nothing above it) and the county, by that point nearly bankrupt, had to subsidize the garage even as it laid employees off. The money spent on parking shifted Disney Hall's design toward drivers and away from pedestrians. The presence of a six-story subterranean garage means most concert patrons arrive from underneath the hall, rather than from the sidewalk. The hall's designers clearly understood this, and so while the hall has a fairly impressive street entrance, its more magisterial gateway is an "escalator cascade" that flows up from the parking structure and ends in the foyer. This has profound implications for street life. A concertgoer can now drive to Disney Hall, park beneath it, ride up into it, see a show, and then reverse the whole process—and never set foot on a sidewalk in downtown LA. The full experience of an iconic Los Angeles building begins and ends in its parking garage, not in the city itself. Visitors to downtown San Francisco have a different experience. When a concert or theater performance lets out in San Francisco, people stream onto the sidewalks, strolling past the restaurants, bars, bookstores, and flower shops that are open and well-lit. For those who have driven, it is a long walk to the car, which is probably in a public facility unattached to any specific restaurant or shop. The presence of open shops and people on the street encourages other people to be out as well. People want to be on streets with other people on them, and they avoid streets that are empty, because empty streets are eerie and menacing at night. Although the absence of parking requirements does not guarantee a vibrant area, their presence certainly inhibits it. "The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages," Jane Jacobs argued in 1961, "the duller and deader it becomes ... and there is nothing more repellent than a dead downtown.

The bus was going at a vertiginous speed. Night fell. Through the fogged-up windows the riders thrown against one another, as the bus shook along, saw fantastic landscapes unfold looking nothing like those of Parisian boulevards.…When Pearl White woke up, the bus had as if run aground on a deserted field. Thousands of empty cans were the only presence in these in-decipherable lands." [From, Homme sans tête]

For four years she had been cobbling together odds and ends, just in order to put on the table something that resembled food. But now, thanks to Angelo and his black market contacts, she was cooking with real ingredients, and in the sort of quantities she had previously only dreamed of. A whole fresh tuna, a wicker basket of San Marzano tomatoes, a crate of anchovies, great handfuls of parsley... Dozens of new potatoes, still encrusted with the black volcanic earth of Campania, their flesh golden as egg yolks... A pale wheel of parmesan, big as a truck tire... A sack full of bloodred watermelons... An armful of mint, its leaves so dark green they were almost black... All afternoon and all evening she chopped and baked, and by the time darkness fell she had pulled together a feast that even she was proud of.

Oh, my goodness! Megan Maureen McClare—you did, didn’t you?” Her mother’s jaw fell. “Uh-oh.” Alli’s voice squeaked with a nervous giggle, fingertips pressed to her lips as if to restrain further damage. She peeked at Meg out of the corner of her eyes, brows puckered in repentance. “Was I supposed to keep that a secret?” Meg laughed and hugged her tightly. “Not really, Al, so don’t worry. Not only will I have to adjust to this new me, but everyone else will too.” She glanced up at her mother with her usual sweet smile, although she was certain it lacked the timidity to which everyone was accustomed. “Please forgive me, Mother. I know a lady hopping aboard a motorbike with a near stranger is not the most dignified of scenarios. But Paris does something to you—it dares you, entices you, liberates you in ways I never expected.” “Sweet thunderation, Megs, you really and truly got on a motorbike with a complete stranger?” Cassie’s sagging jaw matched Meg’s mother’s. “Not exactly a stranger,” Alli piped up, eager to redeem herself, “a friend of the Rousseaus named Pierre.” She glanced at Meg with a sudden gleam of mischief in her eyes. “Apparently he was one of several smitten young men who asked Megs to marry him.” “What?” Uncle Logan was on his feet in a heartbeat, face ruddy with shock. “Megan Maureen, you best tell me there is nothing going on here, young lady—” “Nothing is going on, Uncle Logan, truly.” Meg offered a conciliatory smile, her gaze darting to where Bram was actually frowning—a most infrequent occurrence—before she returned to her uncle. “Pierre is Dr. Rousseau’s colleague’s son, and a dear friend of the Rousseaus, but I assure you, he and I are only friends.” “So, tell us, Bug,” Bram said, hunkering down on the table with a fold of arms, the lazy bent of his smile at odds with the slight narrowing of his eyes. “Exactly how many hearts did you break in Paris?” “More than I ever have, I can tell you that,” Alli said with a wink, shimmying in to prop her chin in her hand. “So tell us about riding the motorbike, Megs—was it exciting?” Meg’s gaze flitted to Alli with a mischievous grin that made her feel alive, as if she were coming out of the shadows for the very first time. “Oh, yes, very much so! The wind in your face while your hair whips behind you, free and unfettered.” She stole a glance at Bram, wishing his disapproval didn’t bother her so. “And I didn’t ‘break’ any hearts,” she said softly, “just the mold of who the old Meg used to be.

Before Congress instituted the federal income tax in 1913, following the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, America’s tax burden fell disproportionately on the poor. High taxes were levied on widely consumed products such as alcohol and tobacco. Urban property was taxed at a higher rate than farms and estates. “From top to bottom, American society before the income tax was a picture of inequality, and taxes made it worse,” writes Isaac William Martin, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego.

Reports of “Gold! Gold! Gold!” soon reached the U.S. Army officers who had remained in California after the war. It fell to William Tecumseh Sherman to report back to Washington that upwards of $50,000 per day in gold was being dug out of the riverbeds. Some accounts had the average man earning $20 per day working shovel and pan, nearly fifteen to twenty times a laborer’s daily wage in the East. To corroborate his report, Sherman purchased two hundred ounces of local gold to send along to his superiors back east. “I have no hesitation in saying that there is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin river,” wrote Sherman, to offset the cost of “war with Mexico a hundred times over.” If this wasn’t advertisement enough, he continued, “no capital is required to obtain this gold. . . . Many frequently pick out gold out of crevices of rock with their butcher knives in pieces from one to six ounces.” The Californians were picking up gold pieces weighing over a third of a pound.

San Francisco was the poster child for growing America. Brash, striving and never satisfied, it embodied the spirit of a nation feeling its oats. From President Teddy Roosevelt to the newest immigrant to land on its shores, America was in vigorous pursuit of greatness. Always bold, often blundering, and seldom tactful, America was reaching for the brass ring with both hands.

In hundreds of lectures around the world, I’ve done most of the scary, tragic, embarrassing things that terrify people. I’ve been heckled by drunken crowds in a Boston bar. I’ve lectured to empty seats, and a bored janitor, in New York City. I’ve had a laptop crash in a Moscow auditorium; a microphone die at a keynote speech in San Jose; and I’ve watched helplessly as the Parisian executives who hired me fell asleep in the conference room while I was speaking. The secret to coping with these events is to realize everyone forgets about them after they happen — except for one person: me. No one else really cares that much.

When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I’d seen on the Via del Corso. Jeans for the people. Cheese and bread and wine for the people. Umbrellas for the people, because rain fell and fell that week.

Nobody without a mastery of the Burmese language and cultural background could hope to reach out to the people of Burma. Therefore the modern educated felt too diffident to suggest the reassessment and reform of accepted values. The scholars of the old school on the other hand were too close to traditional institutions to be able to judge them objectively. Fielding Hall was one of those Englishmen who fell in love with Burma and the Burmese, of whom he had a romantic and in some ways simplistic vision. Nevertheless his observations on Burmese society were often shrewd and he noted a phenomenon which must surely lie at the basis of the failure for a true renaissance to take place under colonial rule. He remarked of monarchical Burma that there was no noble or leisured class between the king and the villagers. Consequently, the monarch had to recruit as his ministers men from the villages who, for all their natural capacity, did not have the ‘breadth of view, the knowledge of other countries, of other thoughts, that come to those who have wealth and leisure’. The situation had not changed radically under British rule.

The Buddhist view of world history tells that when society fell from its original state of purity into moral and social chaos a king was elected to restore peace and justice. The ruler was known by three titles: Mahasammata, ‘because he is named ruler by the unanimous consent of the people’; Khattiya; ‘because he has dominion over agricultural land’; and Raja, ‘because he wins the people to affection through observance of the dhamma (virtue, justice, the law)’. The agreement by which their first monarch undertakes to rule righteously in return for a portion of the rice crop represents the Buddhist version of government by social contract. The Mahasammata follows the general pattern of Indic kingship in South-east Asia. This has been criticized as antithetical to the idea of the modern state because it promotes a personalized form of monarchy lacking the continuity inherent in the western abstraction of the king as possessed of both a body politic and a body natural. However, because the Mahasammata was chosen by popular consent and required to govern in accordance with just laws, the concept of government elective and sub lege is not alien to traditional Burmese thought. The

The first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the Old Quad. I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery. All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith, Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic. Passing out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years, but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling that could well be music from another planet. The radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky. The city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from angles, darkening the corners of things. You would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel safe or comfortable there. I looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky, ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow descent back into town.

he was so focused on watching where Presley went that she almost didn’t see the man he was with until they stopped beneath a security light, their backs to her. She first noticed the other man then, and was shocked at his size. Then her gaze moved to the thick bush of curly hair pulled into a pony tail at the back of his neck, and she wondered how he ever got something that unruly washed and dried. It wasn’t until he turned sideways that she got a momentary glimpse of his profile. As she did, a strange, anxious feeling skittered through her belly, then quickly disappeared. The stranger didn’t matter. He couldn’t matter. It was time to make her move. She had to stop Presley now, before he went any farther. She reached toward the glove box for her handgun and taser, slipped the taser in her pocket and was reaching for the door latch when the big man turned and faced her. For a full fifteen or twenty seconds, Cat had a clear and unfettered view of his face, and in those seconds, the world fell out from under her. She didn’t know that she started moaning, or that she’d broken out in a cold sweat. All she knew was that she was no longer in her car in a San Antonio parking lot but back in her childhood home, trying to run from the intruder who’d come out of their bathroom. She was screaming for her father when the intruder’s arm slid around her chest and lifted her off her feet. She saw the strange geometric designs on his arm, then on the side of his face, as the cold slash of steel from his knife suddenly slid against her throat. The coppery scent of her own blood was thick in her nose as he dropped her to the floor, leaving her to watch as he slammed the same knife into her father over and over again. She tried to scream, but the sounds wouldn’t come. The last things she saw before everything went black were the look of sorrow on her father’s face and the demon who’d killed them running out the front door.

• While a female flight attendant was serving food from the meal cart, a female passenger thrust a small bundle of trash toward her. “Take this,” the passenger demanded. Realizing that the trash was actually a used baby diaper, the attendant instructed the passenger to take it to the lavatory herself and dispose of it. “No,” the passenger replied. “You take it!” The attendant explained that she couldn’t dispose of the dirty diaper because she was serving food—handling the diaper would be unsanitary. But that wasn’t a good enough answer for the passenger. Angered by her refusal, the passenger hurled the diaper at the flight attendant. It struck her square in the head, depositing chunks of baby dung that clung like peanut butter to her hair. The two women ended up wrestling on the floor. They had to be separated by passengers. • Passengers on a flight from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico, were stunned by the actions of one deranged passenger. He walked to the rear of the plane, then charged up the aisle, slapping passengers’ heads along the way. Next, he kicked a pregnant flight attendant, who immediately fell to the ground. As if that weren’t enough, he bit a young boy on the arm. At this point the man was restrained and handcuffed by crew members. He was arrested upon arrival. • When bad weather closed the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for several hours, departing planes were stuck on the ground for the duration. One frustrated passenger, a young woman, walked up to a female flight attendant and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to do this.” The passenger then punched the flight attendant in the face, breaking her nose in the process. • A flight attendant returning to work after a double-mastectomy and a struggle with multiple sclerosis had a run-in with a disgruntled passenger. One of the last to board the plane, the passenger became enraged when there was no room in the overhead bin above his seat. He snatched the bags from the compartment, threw them to the floor and put his own bag in the space he had created. After hearing angry cries from passengers, the flight attendant appeared from the galley to see what the fuss was all about. When the passengers explained what happened, she turned to the offending passenger. “Sir, you can’t do that,” she said. The passenger stood up, cocked his arm and broke her jaw with one punch. • For some inexplicable reason, a passenger began throwing peanuts at a man across the aisle. The man was sitting with his wife, minding his own business. When the first peanut hit him in the face, he ignored it. After the second peanut struck him, he looked up to see who had thrown it. He threw a harsh glance at the perpetrator, expecting him to cease immediately. When a third peanut hit him in the eye, he’d had enough. “Do that again,” he warned, “and I’ll punch your lights out.” But the peanut-tossing passenger couldn’t resist. He tossed a salted Planter’s one last time. The victim got out of his seat and triple-punched the peanut-tosser so hard that witnesses heard his jaw break. The plane was diverted to the closest airport and the peanut-tosser was kicked off. • During a full flight between New York and London, a passenger noticed that the sleeping man in the window seat looked a bit pale. Sensing that something was wrong yet not wanting to wake him, the concerned passenger alerted flight attendants who soon determined that the sleeping man was dead. Apparently, he had died a few hours earlier because his body was already cold. Horrified by the prospect of sitting next to a dead man, the passenger demanded another seat. But the flight was completely full; every seat was occupied. Finally, one flight attendant had an inspiration. She approached a uniformed military officer who agreed to sit next to the dead man for the duration of the flight.

When he returned to Florida in the early part of 1939, Hemingway took his boat the Pilar across the Straits of Florida to Havana, where he checked into the Hotel Ambos Mundos. Shortly thereafter, Martha joined him in Cuba and they first rented, and later in 1940, purchased their home for $12,500. Located 10 miles to the east of Havana, in the small town of San Francisco de Paula, they settled into what they called Finca Vigía, the Lookout Farm. On November 20, 1940, after a difficult divorce from Pauline, Ernest and Martha got married. Even though Cuba had become their home, they still took editorial assignments overseas, including one in China that Martha had for Collier’s magazine. Returning to Cuba just prior to the outbreak of World War II, he convinced the Cuban government to outfit his boat with armaments, with which he intended to ambush German submarines. As the war progressed, Hemingway went to London as a war correspondent, where he met Mary Welsh. His infatuation prompted him to propose to her, which of course did not sit well with Martha. Hemingway was present at the liberation of Paris and attended a party hosted by Sylvia Beach. He, incidentally, also renewed a friendship with Gertrude Stein. Becoming a famous war correspondence he covered the Battle of the Bulge, however he then spent the rest of the war on the sidelines hospitalized with pneumonia. Even so, Ernest was awarded the Bronze Star for bravery. Once again, Hemingway fell in lust, this time with a 19-year-old girl, Adriana Ivancich. This so-called platonic, wink, wink, love affair was the essence of his novel Across the River and Into the Trees, which he wrote in Cuba.

Diego Repertory Theatre, which was in its first year. I fell in with that group, at first helping backstage and then getting cast in plays. It eventually became one of San Diego’s premier theater

Before entering politics, Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild six times between 1947 and 1960. Holden was vice president of the Guild during Reagan’s third term in 1949, when mainland China fell to Communism, and growing tensions led to the Korean War. The two men formed a close bond. On March 4, 1952, Holden was best man and Ardis Ankerson was matron of honor at the wedding of Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis at Little Brown Church in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles.

Traders travelled thousands of miles from one side of the continent to another without molestation. The tribal wars from which the European pirates claimed to deliver the people were mere sham-fights; it was a great battle when half-a-dozen men were killed. It was on a peasantry in many respects superior to the serfs in large areas of Europe, that the slave-trade fell. Tribal life was broken up and millions of detribalised Africans were let loose upon each other. The unceasing destruction of crops led to cannibalism; the captive women became concubines and degraded the status of the wife. Tribes had to supply slaves or be sold as slaves themselves.

Once settled, I loved New York, Boston, San Francisco, every place I lived, but what widened the aperture was where I traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. Unhooked from the South, in each country I now had fantasies that I could upend my life and live there forever. I wrote six books of poetry and a field guide, The Discovery of Poetry.

They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilisation had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all, yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. “Vengeance! Vengeance!” was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard.

I was on my freshman spring break, and my family was living in Honolulu again, so Domenic and I had reconvened there. Both of us had, like everyone who grew up on surf mags, dreamed since childhood of surfing Honolua Bay. But it was odd, in a way, that we were here, waiting on waves, since we had both quit surfing years before. It happened when I turned sixteen. It wasn’t a clean break, or even a conscious decision. I just let other things get in the way: car, money to keep car running, jobs to make money to keep car running. The same thing happened with Domenic. I got a job pumping gas at a Gulf station on Ventura Boulevard, in Woodland Hills, for an irascible Iranian named Nasir. It was the first job I had that wasn’t devoted exclusively to the purpose of paying for a surfboard. Domenic also worked for Nasir. We both got old Ford Econoline vans, surf vehicles par excellence, but we rarely had time to surf. Then we both fell under the spell of Jack Kerouac and decided we needed to see America coast-to-coast. I got a job working graveyard shifts—more hours, more money—at a grubby little twenty-four-hour station on a rough corner out in the flatlands of the San Fernando Valley. It was a place where Chicano low riders would try to steal gas at 5 a.m.—Hey, let’s rip off the little gringo. I got a second job parking cars at a restaurant, taking “whites” (some kind of speed—ten pills for a dollar) to stay awake. The restaurant’s patrons were suburban mobsters, good tippers, but my boss was a Chinese guy who thought we should stand at attention between customers. He badgered and finally fired me for reading and slouching. Domenic was also stacking up money. When the school year ended, we pooled our savings, quit our gas station jobs, said good-bye (I assume) to our parents, and set off, zigzagging east, in Domenic’s van. We were sixteen, and we didn’t even take our boards.

Beach sands are home to a multitude of other creatures, above and below sea level. Besides the obvious visible ones—clams, crabs, birds, plants—they also shelter all kinds of nematodes, flatworms, bacteria, and other organisms so small they live on the surface of individual sand grains. Despite their tiny size, many of these creatures play an important role in the ecosystem, breaking down organic matter and providing food for other creatures, including fish.43 Dumping thousands of tons of imported sand on top of these organisms can be lethal to them. A 2016 University of California study found the population of marine worms and other invertebrates on San Diego beaches fell by half after a beach nourishment project.44 Another recent study in South Carolina found major drops in populations of bugs, worms, and other organisms living on the ocean floor in areas that had been dredged for beach nourishment.

There used to be an enormous and fine barn at Bicho Raro, capable of housing two hundred bales of hay, twelve horses, a small tractor, and twenty-four barn swallows. The siding had been amber brown and the roof was gloriously red. It was, in fact, the very barn Pete was scavenging for the dance floor’s boards. Shortly after it had been built, the wind nudged it, as it nudged all things in the San Luis Valley. Nothing happened, because the barn was very securely built. The wind nudged it for all that week, and still nothing happened. The wind nudged it for ninety-nine weeks in a row, and still nothing happened; the barn did not budge. But on the one hundredth week, the wind nudged the barn and the barn fell onto itself. It was not that the one hundredth week of nudging was any stronger than the previous weeks. It was not even that the one hundredth week of nudging was what had actually knocked the barn over. The ninety-nine weeks of nudging were what had truly done the job, but the one hundredth was the one around to take the credit. We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.

Clinton launched “Operation Gatekeeper” in the same year, its mission to regain control of “the borders,” particularly the San Diego–Tijuana border, at that point the busiest land crossing in the world. New miles of fencing were built. Hundreds of new agents were trained. The budget of the Border Patrol, which fell under the INS, was doubled. Though the Clinton administration declared victory, the policy was considered a failure.

She fell for you once, she can damn well easily do it again.