Flame Monroe Quotes

Listen Noah, I've had two helpings of flaming bitch this morning. Satan himself wouldn't fuck with me right now...

PREFACE A New Look at the Legacy of Albert Einstein Genius. Absent-minded professor. The father of relativity. The mythical figure of Albert Einstein—hair flaming in the wind, sockless, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, puffing on his pipe, oblivious to his surroundings—is etched indelibly on our minds. “A pop icon on a par with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he stares enigmatically from postcards, magazine covers, T-shirts, and larger-than-life posters. A Beverly Hills agent markets his image for television commercials. He would have hated it all,” writes biographer Denis Brian. Einstein is among the greatest scientists of all time, a towering figure who ranks alongside Isaac Newton for his contributions. Not surprisingly, Time magazine voted him the Person of the Century. Many historians have placed him among the hundred most influential people of the last thousand years.

That’s not what I meant!” Georgia, face flamed in fifty shades of red, finally found the strength to chime in. “I said Kline wants to have anal sex.” I laughed at that. “Every man wants to have anal sex. They have goddamn weekly meetings about it like Weight Watchers to see if they’ve reached their goal. Like a motherfucking weigh-in. But that’s not what you said.

I have come to believe that our culture’s popular understanding of these difficult doctrines is often a caricature of what the Bible actually teaches and what mature Christian theology has historically proclaimed. To Laugh At, To Live By What do I mean by a caricature? A caricature is a cartoonlike drawing of a real person, place, or thing. You’ve probably seen them at street fairs, drawings of popular figures like President Obama, Marilyn Monroe, or your aunt Cindy. Caricatures exaggerate some features, distort some features, and oversimplify some features. The result is a humorous cartoon. In one sense, a caricature bears a striking resemblance to the real thing. That picture really does look like President Obama, Marilyn Monroe, or your aunt Cindy. Features unique to the real person are included and even emphasized, so you can tell it’s a cartoon of that person and not someone else. But in another sense, the caricature looks nothing like the real thing. Salient features have been distorted, oversimplified, or blown way out of proportion. President Obama’s ears are way too big. Aunt Cindy’s grin is way too wide. And Marilyn Monroe . . . well, you get the picture. A caricature would never pass for a photograph. If you were to take your driver’s license, remove the photo, and replace it with a caricature, the police officer pulling you over would either laugh . . . or arrest you. Placed next to a photograph, a caricature looks like a humorous, or even hideous, distortion of the real thing. Similarly, our popular caricatures of these tough doctrines do include features of the original. One doesn’t have to look too far in the biblical story to find that hell has flames, holy war has fighting, and judgment brings us face-to-face with God. But in the caricatures, these features are severely exaggerated, distorted, and oversimplified, resulting in a not-so-humorous cartoon that looks nothing like the original. All we have to do is start asking questions: Where do the flames come from, and what are they doing? Who is doing the fighting, and how are they winning? Why does God judge the world, and what basis does he use for judgment? Questions like these help us quickly realize that our popular caricatures of tough biblical doctrines are like cartoons: good for us to laugh at, but not to live by. But the caricature does help us with something important: it draws our attention to parts of God’s story where our understanding is off. If the caricature makes God look like a sadistic torturer, a coldhearted judge, or a greedy génocidaire, it probably means there are details we need to take a closer look at. The caricatures can alert us to parts of the picture where our vision is distorted.

am not a man, Diarmid.”“What do you mean? You look like a man, that’s for sure.”“I’m a seraph,”Michael responded calmly. “Some people call us angels. I’m an archangel.”Diarmid stared at Michael blankly. Apparently he had never heard of such a thing. Joni gripped my arm tightly. We were probably even more stunned by Michael’s announcement than Diarmid was perplexed. “It means I’m a messenger,”Michael continued. “I’m an ambassador, carrying out my master’s will. I am one of God’s messengers.”Diarmid raised his eyebrows. “Which one? There are so many gods. Every visitor or tradesman who visits our clan seems to claim different gods. I can’t keep them straight.”“Surely you are familiar with the Great Tree. The Tree of the Spirit Bull?”Michael’s inquiry was met with a grin of satisfaction and an open-mouthed, “Ahh.”His previous bewilderment was immediately replaced with an air of confidence. “I know this one,”Diarmid said resolutely. “The great branch. Taranus. The White Bull. The Creator. From his branch, Hu-Esus, the ideal man who will one day emerge from the tree and guide us all to perfection. And Beli, the Great Flame. A fire that burns still in man, guiding him back to the tree. Together, united in one trunk, all rooted in Ana-Earth, but extending its reach upward toward the skies.”“Indeed,”Michael responded with a smile. “Ceridwen has taught you well. That is the God whom I represent.”“One? But that’s three gods. Taranus, Hu-Esus, and Beli.”“Distinctly three, yes. But together, unified by a single trunk. They are ever distinct, ever inseparable. A unity. I serve all three, even as I serve the one. Together this God is known as All Father, the creator of the world. The One who made you and me. The animals. The forest around us. All of it.

Fame is like a sequin-covered suit of armor that provides a holographic cover for actual me; most people, whether their opinion is positive or negative, are content to deal with the avatar, leaving me as tender as crabmeat within. Really, it’s an amplification of what happens if you’re not famous. I don’t imagine that we are often interacting on the pure frequency of essential nature; we usually have a preexisting set of conditions and coordinates that we project on to people we meet or circumstances we encounter. This is not just a psychological notion. Robert Lanza, in his concept-smashing book Biocentrism explains that our perception of all physical external phenomena is in fact an internal reconstruction, elaborating on the results of experiments in quantum physics, that particles behave differently when under observation—itself a universe-shattering piece of information—so that, and forgive my inelegant comprehension of the quantum world, electrons fired out of a tiny little cannon, when unobserved, make a pattern that reveals they have behaved as “a wave,” but when observed, the kinky little bastards behave as “particles.” That’s a bit fucking mad if you ask me. That’s like finding out that when you go out your dog stands up on its hind legs, lights a fag, and starts making phone calls. Or turns into a cloud. Lanza describes how our conception of a candle as a yellow flame burning on a wick is a kind of mentally constructed illusion. He says an unobserved candle would have no intrinsic “brightness” or “yellowness,” that these qualities require an interaction with consciousness. The bastard. A flame, he explains, is a hot gas. Like any light source, it emits photons, which are tiny packets of electromagnetic energy. Which means electrical and magnetic impulses. Lanza points out that we know from our simple, sexy everyday lives that electricity and magnetic energy have no visual properties. There is nothing inherently visual about a flame until the electromagnetic impulses—if measuring, between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest—hit the cells in our retinas, at the back of the eye. This makes a complex matrix of neurons fire in our brains, and we subjectively perceive this as “yellow brightness” occurring in the external world. Other creatures would see gray. At most we can conclude, says Lanza, that there is a stream of electromagnetic energy that, if denied correlation with human consciousness, is impossible to conceptualize. So when Elton John said Marilyn Monroe lived her life “like a candle in the wind,” he was probably bloody right, and if he wasn’t we’ll never know. We apply reality from within. The world is our perception of the world. So what other people think of you, famous or not, is an independent construct taking place in their brain, and we shouldn’t worry too much about it.

I think it's pretty common for teenagers to fantasize about dying young. We knew that time would force us into sacrifices - we wanted to flame out before making the choices that would determine who we became. When you were an adult, all the promises of your life was foreclosed upon, every day just a series of compromises mitigated by little pleasures that distracted you from your former wildness, from your truth. Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedgwick, Janis Joplin. They got to be beautiful forever. And wasn't that the ultimate feminine achievement - to be too gorgeous, too fucked up, too talented and sad and vulnerable to survive, like some kind of freak orchid with a two-minute lifespan? Who else could we look up to? Being young doesn't seem like enough of an excuse - we egged each other on, committed, together, to these poisonous theories, until we reached a point where disagreement would have meant a betrayal of our friendship. How could we have been so wrong and so stupid?