Fire Hose Quotes

We made love like two coiled up fire hoses. When there’s no fire in the romance, why not act like a couple of sleeping snakes?

Ew.' 'Yeah,' Claire said. 'I need a shower.' 'I don't think a shower's going to cut it. Maybe fire hoses, and those brushes they use on elephants.' Eve stepped back and offered Shane a hand up as he finally got untangled. 'Speaking of elephants, you sounded like a herd of something coming down the stairs,' he said. 'What the hell are your shoes made of? Hooves?

Everything he does is fast,” Brogan said. “He pees fast. It’s like a fire hose—three seconds and out. He’s authentically in a hurry.

These are things that only dogs and women understand because we tap into the pain directly, we connect to pain directly from its source, and so it is at once brilliant and brutal and clear, like white-hot metal spraying out of a fire hose, we can appreciate the aesthetic while taking the worst of it straight in the face. Men, on the other hand, are all filters and deflectors and timed release.

Dear Trixie, Will you come to Memphis with me? A) Yes B) No C) I'd go anywhere with you because you fuck like a goddamn fire hose. D) You're an asshole and I never want to see you again. Circle ONLY ONE and give it back to me when you're done eating. Love, J

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

I try to ignore the fact that he's sprawled out next to me in all his birthday suit glory right now which totally confuses the hell out of me. What am I supposed to be doing? Should I grab onto it with both hands like a fire hose?

These days, after drinking from the internet's fire hose for thirty years, I've begun to feel more of those negative effects. I don't know if it's my age, or the fact that the internet is no longer plugged into the wall and now travels with me everywhere I go, but I find myself thinking of that Wordsworth poem that begins, "The world is too much with us; late and soon.

Jesus said his Father's House has many rooms. In this metaphor I like to imagine the Presbyterians hanging out in the library, the Baptists running the kitchen, the Anglicans setting the table, the Anabaptists washing feet with the hose in the backyard, the Lutherans making liturgy for the laundry, the Methodists stocking the fire in the hearth, the Catholics keeping the family history, the Pentecostals throwing open all the windows and doors to let more people in.

Please, please, please Mr. Fireman? Can I play with your hose?" -Sammy Mauger

Feelings were splattered around the household with the intensity of a spraying fire hose.

Reader, do you remember that ridiculous movie Volcano, the one with Tommy Lee Jones? Do you remember how they stopped eruption in the middle of downtown Los Angeles? They diverted it with cement roadblocks and pointed fire hoses at it, and rerouted the lava to the ocean, and everything was fine? Sweet reader, that is not how lava works. Anyone can tell you that. Here is the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant, but it won’t. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can. My heart is closer to Dante’s Peak of Dante’s Peak. My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.

Paper Matches My aunts washed dishes while the uncles squirted each other on the lawn with garden hoses. Why are we in here, I said, and they are out there? That’s the way it is, said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one. I have the rages that small animals have, being small, being animal. Written on me was a message, “At Your Service,” like a book of paper matches. One by one we were taken out and struck. We come bearing supper, our heads on fire.

We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, “I have a dream.” We don’t want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it—who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don’t want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don’t want to destroy segregation.

Just accept you’re drinking from the fire hose and open wide.

Mr. Firefighter Derek, please douse my friend’s fiery hole with your fire hose. Nobody likes a burnt burger.

Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds, and sharks.

You've got to shake your fists at lightning now, you've got to roar like forest fire You've got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky They're going to aim the hoses on you, show 'em you won't expire Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die Come on now, you've got to try, if you're feeling contempt, well then you tell it If you're tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal

For the briefest instant, his brain was the only thing that reacted. Mistake, thought his brain. Then the mouthful of water, mixed with what remained of the almond toffee crunch, fire hosed out of his mouth, arced across the table and hit Mary Turlington just above her bosom.

It inspired me to diversify my portfolio of attachments, so to speak, partly so I wouldn't overwhelm any one person with the fire hose of my 'undelivered discourse,' but also to protect myself from leaning to heavily on a buttress that couldn't and shouldn't sustain my full weight.

I want you to imagine for a minute,” she begins. “I know it’s going to be hard for both of you, but just imagine—that literally nothing was made for you. Your parents were denied a house because of their skin color, your grandparents were sprayed with fire hoses and ripped apart by dogs in the streets, your great-grandparents were housemaids and mammies and barely paid entertainers, and your great-great-grandparents were slaves. Every movie in your life is majority Black, all the characters in your favorite books have been cast darker in the movie adaptation for no reason, and every mistake you make is because of your skin color and because of “your background” and because of the music you listen to. You are the only white kids at a school of five hundred Blacks, and every Black person at that school asks you to weigh in on what it’s like to be white, or what white people think about this or that. It’s not fun.

Poe barely contained the burst of laughter at the look he gave, like a man having a fire hose shoved up his rectum. When

The big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake. That the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism.... Governments led by liberal democrats passed laws which changed the air I breathe for the better. Okay I'm for them and not for the party that is as we speak plotting to abolish the E.P.A. And I don't need to pretend that both sides have a point here, and I don't care what left or right commentators say about it. I only care what climate scientists say about it. Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King speaks on that wall in the capital and he didn't say "Remember folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point too." No, he said, "I had a dream and they had a nightmare." This isn't Team Edward & Team Jacob. Liberals like the ones on that field must stand up and be counted and not pretend that we're as mean or greedy or shortsighted or plain batched as they are. And if that is too polarizing for you and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right ... Try Church.

Some indoor play gyms are ok. As long as they hose them down or light them on fire once every few years.

These days, after drinking from the internet's fire hose for thirty years, I've begun to feel more of those negative effects. I don't know if it's my age, or the fact that the internet is no longer plugged into the wall and now travels with me everywhere I go, but I find myself thinking of that Wordsworth poem that begins, "The world is too much with us; late and soon.” What does it say that I can't imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped my machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me? My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you're living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means.

This is the staff sergeant coming out," Kelly told Hagan quietly. "I'm used to it." Hagan looked him up and down, narrowing his eyes. "You come like a fire hose when he gives you an order, don't you?" "Only if he tells me to," Kelly countered with a smirk.

It started to rain suddenly and ferociously as they pulled up in front of Rose’s house. A mist covered the truck. It was as if a fire hose had opened up on the dusty, dry earthen roads. The smell of moist earth and damp, pungent flowering trees gave off the last bit of heat from the former Carolina summer sun of a few minutes ago. Now cooled suddenly by the rainwater, an immediate fog to rose off the hot metal of the truck and the soil. It was impossible to see more than a few feet in the formidable rain and sudden fog. Rose pulled Carmen to her and wrapped herself around her, one hand playing around through her T as she kissed her, one hand pushing gently at her pants.

What many Americans heard about Jews they got from Henry Ford, operating out of a Michigan base less than three hundred miles from Indianapolis. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was a fire hose of anti-Semitism and reached a peak circulation of nearly one million readers.

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

You should have seen the costumes for the last few prom themes: Pimps and their srteet ho's; CEOs and their office ho's; GI Joes and their combat ho's; Gardeners and their garden hose;Firemen and their fire hose... If you ask me, a 'masquerade' theme isn't flattering for anyones features, nor does it define the apppropriate gender roles very clearly.

Blast ignorant people with high-powered streams of information and wisdom, but only when fire hoses are not readily available.

The news coverage was as controlled and accurate as a fire hose wielded by a preschooler.

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, who’d once said, “When you see your competitor drowning, grab a fire hose and put it in his mouth.

Six-Pack didn't despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddy's boy, and she agreed with Ketchum's assessment that Bush would be as worthless as wet crap in even the smallest crisis. If a fight broke out between two small dogs, for example, Ketchum claimed that Bush would call the fire department and ask them to bring a hose; then the president would position himself at a safe distance from the dogfight, and wait for the firemen to show up. The part Pam liked best about this assessment was that Ketchum said the president would instantly look self-important, and would appear to be actively involved--that is, once the firefighters and their hose arrived, and provided there was anything remaining of the mess the two dogs might have made of each other in the interim.

One of the radio stations sometimes played the theme to the Andy Griffith Show...The song was a tiny, quiet piece of America carved out of the rest. No fire hoses, no need for the National Guard.

Mockingbird sometimes found it hard to believe this was the same man she’d married; he looked like a different person now—as if someone had put a fire hose up his ass and inflated him with meringue.

I have seen how in our history, people of color have been enslaved by “Bible-quoting” Christians. When slavery was finally threatened with being relegated to the dustbins of history in America, it was that section of this country known as “the Bible Belt” that rose to defend the enslavement of black people in the bloodiest war of American history. When slavery finally died as a legal option on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Antietam and Appomattox, the Christians of the Bible Belt, once again quoting their scriptures for justification, instituted laws of segregation with the full support of the federal government. When those segregation laws finally began to fall in the 1950s and 1960s, I watched the Bible being quoted to justify the use of lead pipes, police dogs, fire hoses and even the bombing of black churches in which little girls in their Easter finery were killed—all in an attempt to preserve “white supremacy.” I notice that even today the political party in America that most claims to represent what is called “the Christian vote” is still working to impede the political process for black people, to make voting so difficult as to prevent them from casting their ballot.

There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings.

Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that’s possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it. A well-known journalist recently told me that following a breaking story on Twitter gives him the sense that he’s receiving lots of information, but that in his experience, waiting until the next morning to read the article about the story in the Washington Post almost always leaves him more informed. Unless you’re a breaking news reporter, it’s usually counterproductive to expose yourself to the fire hose of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that spews through the internet in response to noteworthy events.

Irish grabbed her hand and kept the water directed at the wall. His voice cam across her radio. "Hannah. Wait. What do you see?" She stared. She saw fire. A lot of fire. But then a pattern started to emerge. "A message?" She guessed. Then she looked mroe closelt. "A star? What does that mean?" "That's not a star," said Irish. "But it's definitely a message." "It's not a star?" He let go of the hose, the water streaked across the flames on the floor. "No," he said. "That's a pentagram.

Not much different from the morgue. Smaller,” she noted, scanning the steel worktables, the gullies on the sides, the hoses and tubes and tools. “I guess he got some of his knowledge of anatomy working here. Might have had some of his early practice sessions on corpses.” “Charming thought.” “Yeah, well, being as they were already dead—hopefully—it probably didn’t upset them too much. Oh, and FYI? When my time comes, I don’t want the preservatives and the stylist. You can just build a big fire, slide me in. Then you can throw yourself on the pyre to show your wild grief and constant devotion.” “I’ll make a note of it.

We called it “making a way out of no way.” So when we were standing in protest facing police dogs and fire hoses, we knew without any doubt that somebody who was greater than us all would make a way out of no way and protect the defenders of the truth.

The crew of the Argo II assembled at the rail and cut the grappling lines. Piper brought out her new horn of plenty and, on Percy’s direction, willed it to spew Diet Coke, which came out with the strength of a fire hose, dousing the enemy deck. Percy thought it would take hours, but the ship sank remarkably fast, filling with Diet Coke and seawater. “Dionysus,” Percy called, holding up Chrysaor’s golden mask. “Or Bacchus—whatever. You made this victory possible, even if you weren’t here. Your enemies trembled at your name…or your Diet Coke, or something. So, yeah, thank you.” The words were hard to get out, but Percy managed not to gag. “We give this ship to you as tribute. We hope you like it.” “Six million in gold,” Leo muttered. “He’d better like it.

I’ve been focusing on my career. I’ve had no time. That’s why I wanted to go out this weekend. I’ve been storing that shit up like a sexual camel. At this point I’d probably just walk into the bar, blow my load all over the room like a fire hose, and walk out.

I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention's resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.

I laughed right along with her, but inside I was dying. There were certain things that you just didn’t joke about; it was simply bad luck. It was like pissing in the fate god’s eye. If you did it long enough, he was certain to piss right back at you. And his urine stream was like a fucking fire hose. But

Song of myself Now I will do nothing but listen, To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals, I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice, I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following, Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night, Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals, The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick, The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence, The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters, The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights, The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars, The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two, (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.) I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,) I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears, It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.

If I were there, I’d turn the fire department hose on the entire street, which was probably why it was a good thing that I didn’t work with the general public.

Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930  Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

Comparing the bioavailability of all other oral vitamin C delivery with your oral liposomal delivery is like comparing a squirt gun to a fire hose. Not only am I convinced that the efficacy of Lypo-Spheric(tm) Vitamin C far surpasses any traditional oral vitamin C supplement, but my recent personal experience with it suggests that it may sometimes be better than IV injection.

That means real love understands, acknowledges and accepts all flaws. It endures all changes. It puts its feelings aside for the wellbeing of something or someone else. That's love. Love is kind means that no matter how many times you mess up, how many times you fall down, it’ll always be right there to lift you up and to pick you up. That's love. It's not going to curse you nor beat you for your mistakes or because it doesn't agree, no it will always, and I mean always, lift you up because that is what it was made to do. Loving somebody is more than just a feeling, or an action or even a thought. It’s a lifestyle, a decision; an emotion that has made up its mine to give and keep on giving. To feel and keep on feeling. To love and keep on loving. You see, the thought, the feeling, the action of love, real love, and true love always operates as one. Real love can’t be shaken, it can’t be broken. It will always stand firm, solid. And it will never, ever waiver. Real love will take a bullet for you with no questions. It will trade places with you on your death bed, with no reasoning’s. Real love will walk through a fire, flesh burning, just to get the hose on the other side so that you don't get burned too. And you know why...because love has always been something that’s bigger than you and I. It has a mind of its own and when it loves, it loves and it wants nothing more than to see the person that it loves safe, happy.

Clarisse’s friends were all laughing, and I was trying to find the strength I’d used to fight the Minotaur, but it just wasn’t there. “Like he’s ‘Big Three’ material,” Clarisse said as she pushed me toward one of the toilets. “Yeah, right. Minotaur probably fell over laughing, he was so stupid looking.” Her friends snickered. Annabeth stood in the corner, watching through her fingers. Clarisse bent me over on my knees and started pushing my head toward the toilet bowl. It reeked like rusted pipes and, well, like what goes into toilets. I strained to keep my head up. I was looking at the scummy water, thinking, I will not go into that. I won’t. Then something happened. I felt a tug in the pit of my stomach. I heard the plumbing rumble, the pipes shudder. Clarisse’s grip on my hair loosened. Water shot out of the toilet, making an arc straight over my head, and the next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the bathroom tiles with Clarisse screaming behind me. I turned just as water blasted out of the toilet again, hitting Clarisse straight in the face so hard it pushed her down onto her butt. The water stayed on her like the spray from a fire hose, pushing her backward into a shower stall. She struggled, gasping, and her friends started coming toward her. But then the other toilets exploded, too, and six more streams of toilet water blasted them back. The showers acted up, too, and together all the fixtures sprayed the camouflage girls right out of the bathroom, spinning them around like pieces of garbage being washed away. As soon as they were out the door, I felt the tug in my gut lessen, and the water shut off as quickly as it had started. The entire bathroom was flooded. Annabeth hadn’t been spared. She was dripping wet, but she hadn’t been pushed out the door. She was standing in exactly the same place, staring at me in shock.

The guys and I were waiting around our patrol cars when a fireman walked toward us. He removed his helmet. “What’s up, hose dragger?” Jones asked. “Your momma’s risk factor for STDs,” the fire captain replied as he stopped in front of Essex.

Just as successful in work and marriage was Harvey, William Tew’s oldest son. After working for his father in the family business for seventeen years, in 1870 Harvey established a rubber factory with his brother- in- law Benjamin F. Goodrich. The story goes that the pair came up with the idea after large fires swept through Jamestown, which still consisted mainly of wooden buildings, sometimes wiping out entire neighborhoods. In winter, the fire brigade was repeatedly rendered powerless when the water froze in its leather hoses. The discovery that water stayed liquid in rubber hoses made the fortunes of Harvey and his brother- in- law and formed the basis of a company that would grow into one of the world’s largest tire producers.

After one raid set London’s Natural History Museum on fire, water from firemen’s hoses caused seeds in its collection to germinate, among them those from an ancient Persian silk tree, or mimosa—Albizia julibrissin. The seeds were said to be 147 years old.

Also, consider—to bleed out through a bite, there must be the bite first and then a sucking action. Surely, it would also leave a bruise, circular, where the mouth applied suction. A creature would bite and lick or suck, but even so, to drain such a quantity of blood from the large veins . . . and if the arteries were bitten, why, no animal could consume so much blood quickly or so cleanly. An artery would bleed like a fire hose. In either situation, consuming blood and leaving either no suction marks or a bloodless scene would be impossible.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.

A book can’t give you the experience of how to direct a photo shoot. “Now tell the model to lift the left hand three inches.” But you can learn this in one minute by watching a professional photographer do it. There is no substitute for watching mastery in action. This is the new college. The difference is, you don’t just drink from the fire hose; you come to the resource with specific questions in mind based on your experiments. This is a much more effective way to approach new material than “beginner-intermediate-advanced.” Let curiosity and inspiration guide your exploration.

National coverage of Lewis’s falling-out with SNCC over Black Power was rooted in a white perspective. White Power had been acceptable since Jamestown. Now even the hint of Black Power was denounced as un-American. Citing the Times headline LEWIS QUITS S.N.C.C.; SHUNS BLACK POWER, Good observed, “The headline’s partial truths fitted the rationale of a white society that had tolerated racial injustice for a century, yet denounced ‘black power’ in a day. At the same time, some in the society were paying sentimental homage to the good old days when Negroes faced fire hoses and police dogs with beatific smiles.

You want the truth? Whether you’re the senior executive or the sales manager or play both roles, hear me clearly as if I was shouting this while turning red with veins bulging from my neck: When you’re blasted with over 200 emails per day; trapped in meetings that keep you from your primary job; constantly handed (or grabbing for) the fire hose to deal with crises; buried either writing, reading, or scrambling for reports; and have almost zero control of your calendar, you are not leading anyone anywhere. Furthermore, you have exactly the sales culture you deserve—the one you’ve created, whether by design or neglect.

The only way to truly stop a pandemic, it has been suggested, is to stamp it out at its source.2380 Once it starts, as noted the editorial board of the journal of the Canadian Medical Association, “School closure, quarantine, travel restrictions and so on are unlikely to be more effective than a garden hose in a forest fire.

Other animals are exceptionally good at identifying and reacting to predators, rivals and friends. They never act as if they believe that rivers or trees are inhabited by spirits who are watching. In all these ways, other animals continually demonstrate their working knowledge that they live in a world brimming with other minds as well as their knowledge of those minds' boundaries. their understanding seems more acute, pragmatic, and frankly, better than ours at distinguishing real from fake. So, I wonder, do humans really have a better developed Theory of Mind than other animals? ...Children talk to dolls for years, half believing or firmly believing that the doll hears and feels and is a worthy confidante. Many adults pray to statues, fervently believing that they're listening. ...All of this indicates a common human inability to distinguish conscious minds from inanimate objects, and evidence from nonsense. Children often talk to a fully imaginary friends whom they believe listens and has thoughts. Monotheism might be the adult version. ...In the world's most technologically advanced, most informed societies, a majority people take it for granted that disembodied spirits are watching, judging, and acting on them. Most leaders of modern nations trust that a Sky-God can be asked to protect their nation during disasters and conflicts with other nations. All of this is theory of mind gone wild, like an unguided fire hose spraying the whole universe with presumed consciousness. Humans' "superior" Theory of Mind is in part pathology. The oft repeated line "humans are rational beings" is probably our most half-true assertion about ourselves. There is in nature an overriding sanity and often in humankind an undermining insanity. We, among all animals, are most frequently irrational, distortional, delusional, and worried. Yet, I also wonder, is our pathological ability to generate false beliefs...also the very root of human creativity?

New Rule: If you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it seems that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts; the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There's a difference between a mad man and a madman. Now, getting more than two hundred thousand people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope, and what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August--although it weight the same. But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just top giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan, and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that, and found our there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is "dominated" by people on the right who believe Obama's a socialist, and by people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin...all of them. It's now official Republican dogma, like "Tax cuts pay for themselves" and "Gay men just haven't met the right woman." As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded--but thinking Bush is a war criminal? That's the opinion of Major General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib. Republicans keep staking out a position that is farther and farther right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which now is not the middle anymore. That's the reason health-care reform is so watered down--it's Bob Dole's old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade--it was the first President Bush's plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it's a hoax. But it's not--I know because I've lived in L.A. since '83, and there's been a change in the city: I can see it now. All of us who live out here have had that experience: "Oh, look, there's a mountain there." Governments, led my liberal Democrats, passed laws that changed the air I breathe. For the better. I'm for them, and not the party that is plotting to abolish the EPA. I don't need to pretend both sides have a point here, and I don't care what left or right commentators say about it, I can only what climate scientists say about it. Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point, too." No, he said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare. This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend we're as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit at them. And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today -- with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be. [January 3, 2008]

Here’s what happens when a single mom meets New York City’s hottest fireman… “Then…seductively…as if he received instruction not from the FDNY’s training school but at Chippendale’s…he slowly inches each suspender off his bare shoulders.” “You must know that exhilarating feeling of a man’s body on top of yours, all that power and muscle pressing you into the bed, the glorious taste of his tongue in your mouth, the manly scent that washes over you and makes you want to melt underneath him.” “Let’s not forget about his nine inches of shapely fireman hose dangling so close in front of my face the scent launches me into a blissful fever.” “Every place he touches contradicts his chosen profession, because instead of putting out a fire he surely starts one.” “I’m so darn helpless in the arms of this powerful, young, ripped personification of New York’s Bravest that I feel myself about to erupt in the most earth shattering explosion since Mount Vesuvius last announced her presence.” “I wonder if he could be enticed to show us a few maneuvers on the brass pole.” “He orchestrates his own personal opera, inspiring high notes with kisses and licks along my elongated nipples, and deep moans with hands that caress my belly.” “We are drawn uncontrollably to each other and have no power to resist, only the tremendous desire to experience everything in its most intense form.

I love a man in uniform. And he's got a big hose. I'm getting hot just looking at it." "I can hear you," Sam called out. "This is an office. Please keep the discussion to a PG level." "How about you keep your dirty R-rated thoughts to yourself," Daisy retorted. "We're looking at a picture of a firefighter holding a hose on the street to cool people off on a hot summer day. In my innocence, I can't even imagine what you were thinking." "I thought you were using a metaphor," Sam said. "But clearly I shouldn't assume..." Layla glanced down at the picture. The firefighter was bare chested save for the suspenders holding up his fireman pants, which were unzipped in a way that suggested he wasn't on his way to a fire. "That's... some hose." "I can still hear you." "He's jealous," Daisy whispered. "He wishes he could have a big hose that makes women wet.

With extraordinary bravery, civil rights leaders, activists, and progressive clergy launched boycotts, marches, and sit-ins protesting the Jim Crow system. They endured fire hoses, police dogs, bombings, and beatings by white mobs, as well as by the police. Once again, federal troops were sent to the South to provide protection for blacks attempting to exercise their civil rights, and the violent reaction of white racists was met with horror in the North. The dramatic high point of the Civil Rights Movement occurred in 1963. The Southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students demonstrating peacefully at one lunch counter to the largest mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the twentieth century. Between autumn 1961 and the spring of 1963, twenty thousand men, women, and children had been arrested. In 1963 alone, another fifteen thousand were imprisoned, and one thousand desegregation protests occurred across the region, in more than one hundred cities.32

Far from erupting all over them, clinging like Greek fire for a moment, then leaping away to safety, Sir Mordred sized up his prey in the leisurely manner of a much older cat, taking all the time necessary to unsheathe his claws, blow on them, adjust for windage and elevation, and finally reach out to draw them daintily down Nicholas’ left leg from calf to ankle, like a bear marking a tree. And he looked upon his work, saw that it was good—four neat slits in the red hose, and scratched skin showing through—and he sat back, deeply content, and said, “Rao.

So you’re just gonna run from me? We’re not going to talk about this?” I whirled on him and yanked my arm down. “No, we’re not. There’s nothing to talk about. I’m single, we’re not a thing. You knew that from the beginning.” The pain rippled across his face. I’d never seen him like this. I’d never seen him worked up before about anything. He was always so laid back, and all I could think was that I’d managed to hurt this sweet man. It gutted me. I couldn’t keep looking at him. I made to move past him to the ladies’ room, desperate to hide from the damage I caused, but he blocked my way. “How can you act like today didn’t happen, Kristen?” “Josh, I don’t want to argue with you. Move,” I said, glaring at him. His jaw set and I pushed past him. Then he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder like I was a fire hose. Hooting and cheering erupted in the bar. “Josh! Put me down!” I struggled uselessly against his grip. He had seventy-five pounds on me, and he was on a mission. I wasn’t going anywhere. His arms locked like a cage. “You’re not running from me anymore,” he said. “You’re talking to me.

From another corner of neuroscience, we’re learning about a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Though there are more than fifty neurotransmitters (that we know of), scientists studying substance problems have given dopamine much of their attention. The brain’s reward system and pleasure centers—the areas most impacted by substance use and compulsive behaviors—have a high concentration of dopamine. Some brains have more of it than others, and some people have a capacity to enjoy a range of experiences more than others, owing to a combination of genetics and environment. The thing about dopamine is that it makes us feel really good. We tend to want more of it. It is naturally generated through ordinary, pleasurable activities like eating and sex, and it is the brain’s way of rewarding us—or nature’s way of rewarding the brain—for activities necessary to our survival, individually or as a species. It is the “mechanism by which ‘instinct’ is manifest.” Our brains arrange for dopamine levels to rise in anticipation and spike during a pleasurable activity to make sure we do it again. It helps focus our attention on all the cues that contributed to our exposure to whatever felt good (these eventually become triggers to use, as we explain later). Drugs and alcohol (and certain behaviors) turn on a gushing fire hose of dopamine in the brain, and we feel good, even euphoric. Dopamine produced by these artificial means, however, throws our pleasure and reward systems out of whack immediately. Flooding the brain repeatedly with dopamine has long-term effects and creates what’s known as tolerance—when we lose our ability to produce or absorb our own dopamine and need more and more of it artificially just to feel okay. Specifically, the brain compensates for the flood of dopamine by decreasing its own production of it or by desensitizing itself to the neurotransmitter by reducing the number of dopamine receptors, or both. The brain is just trying to keep a balance. The problem with the brain’s reduction in natural dopamine production is that when you take the substance or behavior out of the picture, there’s not enough dopamine in the brain to make you feel good. Without enough dopamine, there is no interest or pleasure. Then not only does the brain lose the pleasure associated with using, it might not be able to enjoy a sunset or a back rub, either. A lowered level of dopamine, combined with people’s longing for the rush of dopamine they got from using substances, contributes to “craving” states. Cravings are a physiological process associated with the brain’s struggle to regain its normal dopamine balance, and they can influence a decision to keep using a substance even when a person is experiencing negative consequences that matter to him and a strong desire to change. Depending on the length of time and quantities a person has been using, these craving states can be quite uncomfortable and compelling. The dopamine system can and does recover, starting as soon as we stop flooding it. But it takes time, and in the time between shutting off the artificial supply of dopamine and the brain’s rebuilding its natural resources, people tend to feel worse (before they feel better). On a deep, instinctual level, their brains are telling them that by stopping using, something is missing; something is wrong. This is a huge factor in relapse, despite good intentions and effort to change. Knowing this can help you and your loved one make it across this gap in brain reward systems.

It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short-circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, and so on; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned twelve cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slowdowns in factories; killed by poisoning 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy;

I suppose we were worn down and shivering. Three a.m. is a mean spirited hour. I suppose we were drenched, with the cold hose water trickling in at our collars and settling down at the tail of our shirts. Without doubt the heavy brass couplings felt moulded from metal-ice. Probably the open roar of the pumps drowned the petulant buzz of the raiders above, and certainly the ubiquitous fire-glow made an orange stage-set of the streets. Black water would have puddled the city alleys and I suppose our hands and faces were black as the water. Black with hacking about among the burnt-up rafters. These things were an every-night nonentity. They happened and they were not forgotten because they were not even remembered.

Any idea what started it?” “No obvious point of origin, but Perry Horne will be out later and he can tell us more.” Joe unzipped his jacket a little way and palmed sweat from his throat. “I don’t need a fire marshal to tell you it wasn’t an accident, though.” Peck sighed and stiffened his jaw. The fire chief nodded, started toward the ruin. Peck followed. They skirted the yard where dry grass ticked, then crossed to the house’s eastern face, intact but damaged. The ground was soupy from the hoses’ spray. Peck stepped around the deeper puddles where the sky was reflected dull. A child’s soft toy stared at him with stitches for eyes. “You might want to ready yourself,” Joe said. Heat drove off the building and kinked the air and Peck felt his shirt latch to his back.

Taylor held a finger up to Val and Kate. “Hold that thought for a second while I get this.” As she headed into the living room, she overheard Kate mumble to Val, “Hold what thought? I haven’t understood a word she’s said yet.” Taylor unlocked her front door and opened it. Before she could react, Jason barreled right in, all fired up. “Where have you been?? I tried calling you—is your cell phone off? I need you to tell me who the hell I can sue. I just met with Marty—we got back the mock-ups for the new publicity posters the studio’s going to use to promote Inferno .” Jason stormed into the kitchen, so engrossed in his rant he didn’t notice Valerie and Kate. He opened Taylor’s fridge and helped himself to a bottled water. “And get this,” he fumed angrily, “the dumbasses who designed the posters have me pictured in this scene where I’m putting out a fire with all these other firemen. But if you look at the poster from the side, the water from the hose of one of the other firefighters looks like it’s shooting right out of my crotch. And the best part is, they want to put this poster over the theater entrance for the premiere. I can just see it—” He gestured grandly to the air. “ ‘Come see Inferno! Get pissed on by Jason Andrews!’” With that, he threw Taylor a wink. “It should be right up your alley.” Finished with his rant, Jason took a sip of water. Then he finally noticed Kate and Val. He smiled charmingly. “Oh. People. Hello.” Kate and Val sat in silence at the table. They stared at the sight of this god, this ideal man of modern time, standing before them in all his glory.

While the overall systems of heterosexism and ableism are still with us, they have adapted in limited ways. These adaptations are held up as reassurance to those who fought long and hard for a particular change that equality has now been achieved. These milestones—such as the recognition of same-sex marriage, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 9, the election of Barack Obama—are, of course, significant and worthy of celebration. But systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the simple passage of legislation. Advances are also tenuous, as we can see in recent challenges to the rights of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex) people. Systems of oppression are not completely inflexible. But they are far less flexible than popular ideology would acknowledge, and the collective impact of the inequitable distribution of resources continues across history. COLOR-BLIND RACISM What is termed color-blind racism is an example of racism’s ability to adapt to cultural changes.3 According to this ideology, if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism. The idea is based on a line from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time of King’s speech, it was much more socially acceptable for white people to admit to their racial prejudices and belief in white racial superiority. But many white people had never witnessed the kind of violence to which blacks were subjected. Because the struggle for civil rights was televised, whites across the nation watched in horror as black men, women, and children were attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during peaceful protests and beaten and dragged away from lunch counters.

So what really happened, and what became of them? The basement entry, while dangerous, wasn’t quite as dramatic as modern myth would have you believe. The pressure suppression pool drainage valves couldn’t be reached because most watertight basement corridors and surrounding rooms were full of water. The solution required a team of highly trained firemen wearing respirators and rubber suits to charge their fire engines and the Chemical Troops’ protective armoured vehicles into a loading bay beneath the reactor. There, they placed four special, ultra-long hoses into the water before retreating to the safety of Bryukhanov’s bunker beneath the administration building. After three hours of almost zero water movement, the dejected firemen came to the crushing realisation that one of the armoured vehicles must have driven over and severed their hoses. A fresh team brought twenty new hoses and re-entered the reactor building. They emerged an hour later, feeling exhausted and nauseous but triumphant; the replacement hoses were in place, the remaining radioactive water could finally be drained.201

Suddenly there was someone banging on the sliding glass door behind me; at this stage it was a contest of wills and I refused to even turn around and look. Then he was back banging on the front door. I finally excused myself from the conversation and went to the door to get rid of this guy. He was a passing motorist trying to tell me that the shrubs along my backyard wall were in flames! Suddenly this guy was elevated in status from annoying pest to welcome guest! Clearly, he was on my side: “Get the hose going — I'll call the fire department!” Together we kept the burning shrubbery from setting my whole house on fire. How did he go from pest to welcome guest so quickly? Because he had something to tell me that I instantly recognized as of urgent importance and of great value and benefit to me. In case you had illusions to the contrary, no one is sitting around hoping and praying that he will receive your sales letter. When it arrives, it is most likely an unwelcome pest. How do you earn your welcome as a guest? By immediately saying something that is recognized by the recipient as important and valuable and beneficial.

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

Grabbing my hair and pulling it to the point my skull throbs, I rock back and forth while insanity threatens to destroy my mind completely. Father finally did what Lachlan started. Destroyed my spirit. The angel is gone. The monster has come and killed her. Lachlan Sipping his whiskey, Shon gazes with a bored expression at the one-way mirror as Arson lights the match, grazing the skin of his victim with it as the man convulses in fear. “Show off,” he mutters, and on instinct, I slap the back of his head. He rubs it, spilling the drink. “The fuck? We are wasting time, Lachlan. Tell him to speed up. You know if you let him, he can play for hours.” All in good time, we don’t need just a name. He is saving him for a different kind of information that we write down as Sociopath types furiously on his computer, searching for the location and everything else using FBI databases. “Bingo!” Sociopath mutters, picking up the laptop and showing the screen to me. “It’s seven hours away from New York, in a deserted location in the woods. The land belongs to some guy who is presumed dead and the man accrued the right to build shelters for abused women. They actually live there as a place of new hope or something.” Indeed, the center is advertised as such and has a bunch of stupid reviews about it. Even the approval of a social worker, but then it doesn’t surprise me. Pastor knows how to be convincing. “Kids,” I mutter, fisting my hands. “Most of them probably have kids. He continues to do his fucked-up shit.” And all these years, he has been under my radar. I throw the chair and it bounces off the wall, but no one says anything as they feel the same. “Shon, order a plane. Jaxon—” “Yeah, my brothers will be there with us. But listen, the FBI—” he starts, and I nod. He takes a beat and quickly sends a message to someone on his phone while I bark into the microphone. “Arson, enough with the bullshit. Kill him already.” He is of no use to us anyway. Arson looks at the wall and shrugs. Then pours gas on his victim and lights up the match simultaneously, stepping aside as the man screams and thrashes on the chair, and the smell of burning flesh can be sensed even here. Arson jogs to a hose, splashing water over him. The room is designed security wise for this kind of torture, since fire is one of the first things I taught. After all, I’d learned the hard way how to fight with it. “On the plane, we can adjust the plan. Let’s get moving.” They spring into action as I go to my room to get a specific folder to give to Levi before I go, when Sociopath’s hand stops me, bumping my shoulder. “Is this a suicide mission for you?” he asks, and I smile, although it lacks any humor. My friend knows everything. Instead of answering his question, I grip his shoulder tight, and confide, “Valencia is entrusted to you.” We both know that if I want to destroy Pastor, I have to die with him. This revenge has been twenty-three years in the making, and I never envisioned a different future. This path always leads to death one way or another, and the only reason I valued my life was because I had to kill him. Valencia will be forever free from the evils that destroyed her life. I’ll make sure of it. Once upon a time, there was an angel. Who made the monster’s heart bleed.

He began, “There is absolutely no doubt in the mind of a very overwhelming number of Americans, that the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Britain in defending itself. “Now, what I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand new in the thoughts of everybody in this room, I think—get rid of the silly, foolish, old dollar sign. “Well, let me give you an illustration,” he said, and then deployed an analogy that distilled his idea into something both familiar and easy to grasp, something that would resonate with the quotidian experience of countless Americans. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have got a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away: but, my Heaven, if he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have got to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, ‘I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it any more, it’s all smashed up.’ “He says ‘How many feet of it were there?’ “I tell him, ‘There were 150 feet of it.’ “He says, ‘All right, I will replace it.’ ” That became the kernel of an act introduced in Congress soon afterward, numbered H.R. 1776 and titled “A Bill Further to Promote the Defense of the United States, and for Other Purposes,” soon to receive its lasting byname, the Lend-Lease Act. Central to the proposal was the idea that it was in the best interests of the United States to provide Britain, or any ally, with all the aid it needed, whether it could pay or not.

As Sam came to a panting stop, a jet of orange flame burst from a high window. Several dozen kids were standing, watching. A crowd that struck Sam as very strange, until he realized why it was strange: there were no adults, just kids. “Is anyone in there?” Astrid called out. No one answered. “It could spread,” Sam said. “There’s no 911,” someone pointed out. “If it spreads, it could burn down half the town.” “You see a fireman anywhere?” A helpless shrug. The day care shared a wall with the hardware store, and both were only a narrow alley away from the burning building. Sam figured they had time to get the kids out of the day care if they acted fast, but the hardware store was something they could not afford to lose. There had to be forty kids just standing there gawking. No one seemed about to start doing anything. “Great,” Sam said. He grabbed two kids he sort of knew. “You guys, go to the day care. Tell them to get the littles out of there.” The kids stared at him without moving. “Now. Go. Do it!” he said, and they took off running. Sam pointed at two other kids. “You and you. Go into the hardware store, get the longest hose you can find. Get a spray nozzle, too. I think there’s a spigot in that alley. Start spraying water on the side of the hardware store and up on the roof.” These two also stared blankly. “Dudes: Not tomorrow. Now. Now. Go! Quinn? You better go with them. We want to wet down the hardware—that’s where the wind will take the fire next.” Quinn hesitated. People were not getting this. How could they not see that they had to do something, not just stand around? Sam pushed to the front of the crowd and in a loud voice said, “Hey, listen up, this isn’t the Disney Channel. We can’t just watch this happen. There are no adults. There’s no fire department. We are the fire department.” Edilio was there. He said, “Sam’s right. What do you need, Sam? I’m with you.” “Okay. Quinn? The hoses from the hardware store. Edilio? Let’s get the big hoses from the fire station, hook ’em up to the hydrant.” “They’ll be heavy. I’ll need some strong guys.” “You, you, you, you.” Sam grabbed each person’s shoulder, shaking each one, pushing them into motion. “Come on. You. You. Let’s go!

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad shouted a FORCE battle cry and charged through the dust storm to intercept the Shrike before it covered the final thirty meters to where Sol Weintraub crouched next to Brawne Lamia. The Shrike paused, its head swiveling frictionlessly, red eyes gleaming. Kassad armed his assault rifle and moved down the slope with reckless speed. The Shrike shifted. Kassad saw its movement through time as a slow blur, noting even as he watched the Shrike that movement in the valley had ceased, sand hung motionless in the air, and the light from the glowing Tombs had taken on a thick, amberish quality. Kassad’s skinsuit was somehow shifting with the Shrike, following it through its movements through time. The creature’s head snapped up, attentive now, and its four arms extended like blades from a knife, fingers snapping open in sharp greeting. Kassad skidded to a halt ten meters from the thing and activated the assault rifle, slagging the sand beneath the Shrike in a full-power wide-beam burst. The Shrike glowed as its carapace and steel-sculpture legs reflected the hellish light beneath and around it. Then the three meters of monster began to sink as the sand bubbled into a lake of molten glass beneath it. Kassad shouted in triumph as he stepped closer, playing the widebeam on the Shrike and ground the way he had sprayed his friends with stolen irrigation hoses in the Tharsis slums as a boy. The Shrike sank. Its arms splayed at the sand and rock, trying to find purchase. Sparks flew. It shifted, time running backward like a reversed holie, but Kassad shifted with it, realizing that Moneta was helping him, her suit slaved to his but guiding him through time, and then he was spraying the creature again with concentrated heat greater than the surface of a sun, melting sand beneath it, and watching the rocks around it burst into flame. Sinking in this cauldron of flame and molten rock, the Shrike threw back its head, opened its wide crevasse of a mouth, and bellowed. Kassad almost stopped firing in his shock at hearing noise from the thing. The Shrike’s scream resounded like a dragon’s roar mixed with the blast of a fusion rocket. The screech set Kassad’s teeth on edge, vibrated from the cliff walls, and tumbled suspended dust to the ground. Kassad switched to high-velocity solid shot and fired ten thousand microfléchettes at the creature’s face.

Then I heard it--the voice over the CB radio. “You’re on fire! You’re on fire!” The voice repeated, this time with more urgency, “Charlie! Get out! You’re on fire!” I sat there, frozen, unable to process the reality of what I’d just heard. “Oh, shit!” sweet little Charlie yelled, grabbing his door handle. “We’ve got to get out, darlin’--get outta here!” He opened his door, swung his feeble knees around, and let gravity pull him out of the pickup; I, in turn, did the same. Covering my head instinctively as I ditched, I darted away from the vehicle, running smack-dab into Marlboro Man’s brother, Tim, in the process. He was spraying the side of Charlie’s pickup, which, by now, was engulfed in flames. I kept running until I was sure I was out of the path of danger. “Ree! Where’d you come from?!?” Tim yelled, barely taking his eyes off the fire on the truck, which, by then, was almost extinguished. Tim hadn’t known I was on the scene. “You okay?” he yelled, glancing over to make sure I wasn’t on fire, too. A cowboy rushed to Charlie’s aid on the other side of the truck. He was fine, too, bless his heart. By now Marlboro Man had become aware of the commotion, not because he’d seen it happen through the smoke, but because his hose had reached the end of its slack and Charlie’s truck was no longer following behind. Another spray truck had already rushed over to Marlboro Man’s spot and resumed chasing the fire--the same fire that might have gobbled up a rickety, old spray truck, an equally rickety man named Charlie, and me. Luckily Tim had been nearby when a wind gust blew the flames over Charlie’s truck, and had acted quickly. The fire on the truck was out by now, and Marlboro Man rushed over, grabbed my shoulders, and looked me over--trying, in all the confusion, to make sure I was in one piece. And I was. Physically, I was perfectly fine. My nervous system, on the other hand, was a shambles. “You okay?” he shouted over the crackling sounds of the fire. All I could do was nod and bite my lip to keep from losing it. Can I go home now? was the only thing going through my mind. That, and I want my mommy. The fire was farther away by now, but it seemed to be growing in intensity. Even I could tell the wind had picked up. Marlboro Man and Tim looked at each other…and burst out in nervous laughter--the kind of laugh you laugh when you almost fall but don’t; when your car almost goes off a cliff but comes to a stop right at the edge; when your winning team almost misses the winning pass but doesn’t; or when your fiancée and a local cowboy are almost burned alive…but aren’t. I might have laughed, too, if I could muster any breath.

Instead of a trail of fire roaring through, hose people get small candles steadily lighting the way home until death do they part, and only the young are stupid enough to think that those two old people, him gimping, her squinting, are not in love.

In Avoca, Pennsylvania, an Austrian American was accused of criticizing the Red Cross. A group of vigilantes tied him up, hoisted him thirty feet in the air, and blasted him with water from a fire hose for a full hour.

I know it’s like drinking from a fire-hose.

Not sure if you intend to stay with your meal plan, but I highly suggest you have something for lunch other than that second bottle of wine.” He could shove his suggestion up his fire hose. “I’m not in the mood for a lecture, thank you.

Shrinks say that arson is a masculine sexual metaphor; that setting the fire is the arousal phase, the blaze itself is the consummation, and the hoses putting out the blaze are the release. It may be true, because almost all arsonists are male, and half of them are teenage boys.

I think sometimes I feel like I have to run in with the fire hose and the helmet on and save these people. But sometimes the lesson really is: That person can walk down the stairs and out the door themselves. Do I really need to put myself through that emotional experience? Is this of service? Or is this just my ego finding and deriving self-esteem by rescuing somebody?

FIND CORROBORATING EVIDENCE Are you dealing with a pebble or a boulder? How expensive, risky, time-consuming, or controversial is the change you’re asking people to make? How can you provide more proof? Like interventionists, by making sure people hear from multiple sources saying similar things? What similar but independent sources can you call on to help provide more evidence? How can you concentrate them close in time? Making sure people hear from multiple others in a short period? For larger-scale change, should you use a fire hose or a sprinkler? Concentrate scarce resources or spread them out?

First Officer William Warms had given the order. It is almost certain there would have been no fire drill if Captain Robert Wilmott had been in full command. Warms’s order directly contradicted a policy the master of the Morro Castle first instituted on June 16, 1934. On that day—in violation of the seaworthy certificate issued by the government’s Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection, and at the risk of endangering the lives of everybody on board—Captain Wilmott had banned all further fire drills. His order could lay him open to prosecution, imprisonment, and the certain loss of his master’s license. Confronted by the classic dilemma of the company man, Wilmott had acted in what he believed to be the Ward Line’s best interests. The basis for his decision was simple. In May 1934, during a fire drill, a woman passenger had fallen on a deck wet down by a leaking joint connection between a fire hose and its hydrant. She fractured an ankle and hired a good lawyer, and the Ward Line settled out of court for twenty-five thousand dollars. Captain Wilmott, after a visit to the shipping line office, ordered the Morro Castledeck fire hydrants capped and sealed; 2100 feet of fire hose was locked away, along with nozzles, outlets, and wrenches for each length of hose. Whether the captain received positive instructions from an executive of the Ward Line, or whether he acted independently, is not known, nor is it important. What is known is that as a result of Wilmott’s order, the pride of the American merchant marine, one of the fastest and most luxurious liners afloat, became from that moment on, a floating fire hazard in all but its cargo holds. If a fire started in any of the passenger areas, the only pieces of equipment readily available to fight it were seventy-three half-gallon portable fire extinguishers and twenty-one carbon tetrachloride extinguishers.

On a street around the corner from my coauthor’s house the parents have organized themselves into what they call “the little block that can.” Social relations are deliberately cultivated among the families living on this block. There are benches and picnic tables outside several of the homes where parents and kids of all ages gather. The children have learned to relate to all the adults on this street as attachment figures, surrogate aunts and uncles. Once a year the street is shut off to traffic for what, in effect, is a village festival. There are games, food is served, music is played from loudspeakers. The local fire department drives up with a red engine and children frolic in the spray of the fire hose.

It was impossible to drink from Twitter’s fire hose of anger and suffering—of news and opinions selected for my perusal precisely because they weren’t the norm, which was what made them especially compelling—without starting to approach the rest of life as if they were the norm, which meant being constantly braced for confrontation or disaster, or harboring a nebulous sense of foreboding.

Years ago, I represented a client, a firefighter/paramedic, in an administrative trial after he had been terminated for allegedly providing patient care that was below the department’s established standards. One central issue was the ongoing, on-the-job training firefighters/paramedics receive. Throughout the trial, senior officers of the department, including the Chief himself, preached and bloviated on and on about how the department is committed to providing only the best patient care and how their paramedics are held to a higher standard; how they are committed to serving the community with the highest level of blah, blah, blah. On cross examination, however, I asked each of them about how many hours a day each provider spends drilling or practicing firefighting technique and equipment. Each of them answered proudly that every firefighter/EMT and firefighter/paramedic, regardless of assignment, spends at least three hours each day practicing firefighting skills and/or rehearsing the use of various firefighting equipment; hoses, ladders, saws, and other firefighter equipment. Ok, that’s great. Through testimony, we determined that, based on a 10-shift work month, each firefighter/paramedic, regardless of assignment, spends at least 30 hours per month drilling, practicing, and/or rehearsing firefighting skills & equipment. That’s at a minimum of 360 hours per year of ongoing, on-the-job firefighter training. Outstanding. When the smoke is showing and the flames are roiling, they will be ready. They all displayed the same proud grin at how well trained their people are. For each of them, however, that smug grin quickly turned when I then asked about the number of hours per day each firefighter/paramedic spends drilling on or practicing patient care related techniques, skills, and tools. Every one of them squirmed as they responded with the truth that the department only offers three hours of patient care related education per month. That’s roughly a maximum of 36 hours of paramedic training for the entire year. It got worse when further testimony showed that patient care related calls account for more than 80 percent of their call volume and fire related calls less than 20 percent, I could see each of them deflate on the witness stand when I asked how they could truthfully say they were committed to providing the best patient care when barely 10 percent of their training addresses patient care, which constitutes over 80 percent of your department’s calls. The answers were more disjointed and nonsensical than a White House press briefing. Of course, across America the 10:1 ratio of ongoing firefighting training to EMS training is pretty consistent, which begs the question: Don’t they get it? Excellence is the product of practice. How can any rational person look at a 10:1 training ratio and declare themselves committed to the highest level of care? How can an agency neglect training on the most significant aspect of the business and then be surprised when issues of negligence and liability arise? Once again, it seems that old-school culture leaves EMS stuck in the mud and the law is not going to wait for agencies to figure out that living in the past compromises the future.

We had won 3-1, not that I’d contributed anything beyond cheering from the bench. I wondered if I would ever get to play. I knew how the fire hoses in the glass cases at school felt. They sat behind glass for year after year, a part of the school, but never used. They sat and waited for the day when someone would follow the instructions, “In case of fire, break glass,” but would that day ever come?

finally I say            all right, it is improbable, all right, there is no God. And then as if I’m focusing a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up. It’s the attention, maybe, to what isn’t            there that makes the notion flare like a forest fire until I have to spend the afternoon dragging the hose to put it out. . . .

she spat a single word. A long, guttural, twisting word that evoked frozen Germanic winters. The trigger to the spell she’d been weaving for days. The toxic miasma above our heads exploded with a peal of thunder and her spite-fueled power crashed down on Cesar, one man alone in a torrent of death. The paper cut on his bicep ripped open, as if someone had taken pliers to his skin and given it one brutal, wrenching tug. Blood gushed from the wound as he screamed, flowing faster than it should have, and even faster by the second. He collapsed to his knees, shrieking, and a scarlet torrent blasted from the wound like the spray from a fire hose and splashed across the arcade wall. His skin turned ashen and taut, his fingers and toes curling, crumpling. Bones cracked as his limbs folded in on themselves and the flesh on his skull stretched taut like a mummified corpse. Jennifer’s death curse slowly crushed his body like a juice box, squeezing every drop of blood from every last ragged vein. What collapsed to the floor when the spell was done, gray and bloodless and small as a child, didn’t look human anymore. “That’s what you get for fuckin’ with a witch,” Jennifer said. “My momma taught me that trick.

His eyes bulged. “How the hell…who are you people?” “She’s the right hand of a demon prince,” I told him, “and I’m her boyfriend. Probably should have found that out before you blasted me with a fire hose, huh?” “He did what?” Caitlin said. “Aw, it’s okay.” I gave Jablonski a shove, getting him moving up the corrugated metal stairs.

Is there a problem? I mean, I wasn't expecting you, or anyone, tonight." Drew held out a hand to help her from the car, snatching it back when she got out on her own. "There is a problem." "What?" He tensed. "Did M.J. come back? Is he giving you trouble?" "I can handle my brother." Tyler moved closer. Drew stepped back, his eyes suddenly wary. Sighing she grabbed the front of his t-shirt, the fingers of her other hand threading through his thick, dark hair. Soft. She remembered the feel like it was yesterday. Her hope had been that he would as eager as she was. The attraction was still there, it was time to do something about it. Apparently he wasn't going to make this easy. So she did what she had all those years ago when he wouldn't make the first move—she kissed him first. Prime rib to a starving man. Ten years without even a taste, Drew couldn't help but devour her. The kiss was primal, out of control. Mouths seeking the angle after angle, tongues duelings. And the way Tyler tasted. Sweet and spicy and utterly delicious. In his dreams, he imagined this differently. Slower. He would show her how a man kissed as opposed to the boy he had been. One touch of her lips on his and all those grand plans flew out the window along with any common sense he ever possessed. Tyler was in his arms. Familiar yet new. He needed her and he was never letting go. Drew's hands went under the hem of her shirt slowly sliding up her smooth, hot skin. He could feel the erotic combination of vulnerability and strength in the subtle muscles of her back. She had filled out, they both had. He wanted to spend days discovering all the differences then start all over again, just in case he missed something the first time. The kiss was neverending though the desperation, instead of lessening, scaled higher. He could lift her into his arms, carry her into the house, rip every scrap of clothing from her delicious body and fuck for hours. Fuck. Well, fuck. The word wasn't exactly a bucket of cold water, the desperate heat running through his veins needed more than that. But it did lift the haze. If he didn't stop this right now, there would be no turning back. "Tyler." The word sounded foreign, all guttural. His voice was hoarse with passion and his body was calling every swear word known to man. Why are you stopping? Beautiful woman. Willing. Her hands all over you. Right now she was reaching between his legs. The first caress was almost his undoing. It felt so good, so right. No could touch him like Tyler. The sexual haze enveloped him again. Don't fight it, his body urged. Feel her lips on your jaw, your neck. God. Her teeth biting your earlobe. That alone brought him close to going over the top. Damn his good intentions. Talking was way overrated. Pulling her in until their bodies were flush and he could feel every long, luscious inch of her—plastered against him. Drew was going in for another kiss when her words did what his own reasoning couldn't. It wasn't a bucket of cold water, it was a fire hose—turned on full blast. "Fuck me, Drew. Right here, up against my car. Let's get this thing done, once and for all.