Fluorescent Quotes

The real frienship is like fluorescence, it shines better when everything has darken.

The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.

I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?

Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

I start to grab it so I can it pass it to him. He reaches for it at the same time. Our fingers touch, and the moment they do the fluorescent lights overhead flicker and then fizzle out. Everyone moans, even though we can all still see. There's enough light from outside filtering in, just not enough for us to really focus on the finer details. Nick's fingers stroke mine lightly, so lightly that I'm almost not sure the touch is real. My insides flicker like the art room lights. They do not, however, fizzle. I turn my head to look him in the eye. He leans over and whispers, "It will be hard to be just your friend.

I walked over, my eyes scanning Luna Blu, my house, and Dave's. But it was the building behind them, that empty hotel, that had the tiniest light, provided by one word, written in fluorescent paint. Maybe it wasn't what was once there, in real life. But in this one, it said it all: STAY.

Red was ruby, green was fluorescent, yellow was simply incandescent. Color was life. Color was everything. Color, you see, was the universal sign of magic.

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that I was covered in blood. The second thing I noticed was that this didn’t bother me the way it should have. I didn’t feel the urge to scream or speak, to beg for help, or even to wonder where I was. Those instincts were dead, and I was calm as my wet fingers slid up the tiled wall, groping for a light switch. I found one without even having to stand. Four lights slammed on above me, one after the other, illuminating the dead body on the floor just a few feet away. My mind processed the facts first. Male. Heavy. He was lying face down in a wide, red puddle that spread out from beneath him. The tips of his curly black hair were wet with it. There was something in his hand. The fluorescent lights in the white room flickered and buzzed and hummed. I moved to get a better view of the body. His eyes were closed. He could have been asleep, really, if it weren’t for the blood. There was so much of it. And by one of his hands it was smeared into a weird pattern. No. Not a pattern. Words. PLAY ME. My gaze flicked to his hand. His fist was curled around a small tape recorder. I moved his fingers—still warm—and pressed play. A male voice started to speak. "Do I have your attention?" the voice said. I knew that voice. But I couldn’t believe I was hearing it.

All three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars. ''And all these are worlds,'' said Hagen. ''Or else,'' said Clements with a yawn, ''a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.

high school guys only appear hot to high school girls. its something to do with the fluorescent lighting in the classrooms, i think. They're actually really skinny and spotty, and they have giant feet

Petey, when I undress you with my eyes, I get blinded by that fluorescent orange crab-trap you call your bush and immediately dress you again. And where the hell does anyone get hair that color anyway? What exactly did your mom screw to have you, huh? Carrots? Or pumpkins? Maybe a traffic cone? Is your dad a traffic cone, Petey?

Her eyes have this way of swallowing up the grimy fluorescent light of the train and transforming it into something new. Right now, when she looks at August: stars. The goddamn Milky Way.

Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified video game.

Then she opened her eyes, Veronika did not think 'this must be heaven'. Heaven would never use a fluorescent tube to light a room, and the pain - which started a fraction of a second later - was typical of the Earth. Ah, that Earth pain - unique, unmistakable.

The closest you will ever come to seeing vampires burnt by daylight is by inviting a group of Danes for a hygge dinner and then placing them under a 5,000K fluorescent light tube. At first, they will squint, trying to examine the torture device you have placed in the ceiling. Then, as dinner begins, observe how they will move uncomfortably around in their chairs, compulsively scratching and trying to suppress twitches.

Like a bitch in heat, I seem to attract a coterie of policemen and sanitation officials. The world will someday get me on some ludicrous pretext; I simply await the day that they drag me to some air-conditioned dungeon and leave me there beneath the fluorescent lights and soundproofed ceiling to pay the price for scorning all that they hold dear within their little latex hearts.

We want a house, a car, a fancy f*cking vacation, and prestige. So what do we do? We go to school and we get jobs we hate to pay for the things we want. We deal with people we don't like and waste years of our lives sitting in stark fluorescent-lit rooms and listening to coworkers who bore us so we can pay for a small amount of precious time to enjoy what makes us happy, to achieve a fraction of our lives just feeling as if it was all worth it. We sacrifice to earn.

Aaron’s fingers found my chin, tilting my face up to meet his gaze. “Hey.” The blue in his eyes shone under the fluorescent light illuminating the terminal, snatching all my attention. “There you are.

She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor. The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground. One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.

the usual graffiti on the wall. JRH WAS HERE. NICK LOVES CASS. Visitors leaving the worst parts of themselves behind in fluorescent paint.

Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it.

Except spending a morning with Quinn was like being exposed to sunlight after an entire lifetime beneath fluorescent lights. I’m not sure, now, that I can be happy with less.

It was like staring into the face of a familiar stranger. You know, that person you see in a crowd and swear you know, but you really don't? Now she was me - the familiar stranger. She had my eyes. They were the same hazel color that could never decide whether it wanted to be green or brown, but my eyes had never been that big and round. Or had they? She had my hair - long and straight and almost as dark as my grandma’s had been before hers had begun to turn silver. The stranger had my high cheekbones, long, strong nose, and wide mouth - more features from my grandma and her Cherokee ancestors. But my face had never been that pale. I’d always been olive-ish, much darker skinned than anyone else in my family. But maybe it wasn’t that my skin was suddenly so white ... maybe it just looked pale in comparison to the dark blue outline of the crescent moon that was perfectly positioned in the middle of my forehead. Or maybe it was the horrid fluorescent lighting. I hoped it was the lighting. I stared at the exotic-looking tattoo. Mixed with my strong Cherokee features it seemed to brand me with a mark of wildness ... as if I belonged to ancient times when the world was bigger ... more barbaric. From this day on my life would never be the same. And for a moment — just an instant—I forgot about the horror of not belonging and felt a shocking burst of pleasure, while deep inside of me the blood of my grandmother’s people rejoiced.

It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn't want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn't want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them.

my head is full of black space and light blue fluorescent shapes imploding

If you haven't noticed yet, working sucks. Unless you are a racecar driver or an astronaut or Beyonce, working is completely and utterly devoid of awesome. It is hard, it lasts all day, the lighting is generally fluorescent, and, apparently, drinking at your desk is frowned upon. If you ever needed to ruin someone's fun, I mean really poop a party, just move things to the workplace. Fun terminated.

I always find grocery stores surreal. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, wide aisles tempting me to run, vivid ads tugging my gaze this way and that. It seems so far removed from actually eating. Sometimes I have a strange impulse to climb shelves or rip open packaging and taste everything. But I mustn't succumb to pooka mischief.

A few weeks later, I’m in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Chelsea awaiting the start of the official Mensa test. I’m sitting next to a guy who’s doing a series of elaborate neck stretches, like we’re about to engage in a vigorous rugby match. He’s neatly laid out four types of gum on his Formica desk: Juicy Fruit, Wrigley Spearmint, Big Red, and Eclipse. I hate this guy. I hope to God he’s not a genius.

High school guys only appear hot to high school girls. It’s something to do with the fluorescent lighting in the classrooms, I think.

The fluorescent hums steady above them, as if the scene is a dream the light is having.

I don’t get why people are always trying to escape.” “Really?” said Kate. “Take a look around.” In the distance beyond August’s window, the nothing gave way to something—a town, if it could be called a town. It was more like a huddle of ramshackle structures, buildings gathered like fighters with their backs together, looking out on the night. The whole thing had a starved dog look about it. Fluorescent lights cut glaring beams through the darkness. “I guess it’s different for me,” he said, his voice taut. “One moment I didn’t exist and the next I did, and I spend every day scared I’ll just stop beingagain, and every time I slip, every time I go dark, it’s harder to come back. It’s all I can do to stay where I am. Who I am.” “Wow, August,” she said softly. “Way to kill the mood.

The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we're fracturing under the weight of it.

They both carried a million cracks beneath the skin. Even under the stark light of the fluorescents, it was hard to see which of them was more broken. But for the first time, she felt like she had to vanquish her mental illness not for herself but for someone else. Because she was broken with him, and if she fixed herself, maybe she could make him a little less broken, too.

I am light now, or on the side of light—: light-head, light-trophied. Light-wracked and light-gone. The sweet maize in fluorescence—: an eruption of light, or its feast, from the stalk of my lover’s throat. And I, light-eater, light-loving.

From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.

I make out a schoolbus...glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.

A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labor fifty hours to spend one hour reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your family budget around that—you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb—a 43,000-fold leap in affordability in two centuries. And the progress wasn’t finished: Nordhaus published his article before LED bulbs flooded the market. Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage.

Alex, drunk or sober, made no distinction between the hours of day and night, nor did the operations he knew so well, for there was no night and day where his work was concerned. There was only the flat light of fluorescent tubes in offices that never closed.

Honey ahhhm home !” Grant clattered through the door in fluorescent yellow football shorts with a terrible American accent and a cheesy grin, which froze when he saw Dumbledore, “Oh, sorry... tea party, is it?

My goofiest-sounding secret is that I also believe in magic. Sometimes I call it God and sometimes I call it light, and I believe in it because every now and then I read a really good book or hear a really good song or have a really good conversation with a friend and they seem to have some kind of shine to them. The list I keep of these moments in the back of my journal is comprised less of times when I was laughing or smiling and more of times when I felt like I could feel the colors in my eyes deepening from the display before me. Times in which I felt I was witnessing an all-encompassing representation of life driven by an understanding that, coincidence or not, our existence is a peculiar thing, and perhaps the greatest way to honor it is to just be human. To be happy AND sad, and everything else. And yeah, living is a pain, and I say I hate everyone and everything, and I don’t exude much enthusiasm when sandwiched between fluorescent lighting and vinyl flooring for seven hours straight, and I will probably mumble a bunch about how much I wish I could sleep forever the next time I have to wake up at 6 AM. But make no mistake about it: I really do like living. I really, truly do.

Dauntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room. Jeanine stands a few steps away. The scratches on her face show through hastily applied makeup. She doesn’t look at me. Four cameras dangle from the ceiling, one at each corner of the table. I sit down first, wipe my hands off on my pants, and then lie down. The table is cold. Frigid, seeping into my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, because that is what will happen to my body when all the life leaves it; it will become cold and heavy, heavier than I have ever been. As for the rest of me, I am not sure. Some people believe that I will go nowhere, and maybe they’re right, but maybe they’re not. Such speculations are no longer useful to me anyway. Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switches on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing. And then rising from within me is a single thought: I don’t want to die. All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all of this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. But no. No, no. Burning and boiling inside me is the desire to live. I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to! Jeanine steps forward with a syringe full of purple serum. Her glasses reflect the fluorescent light above us, so I can barely see her eyes. Every part of my body chants it in unison. Live, live, live. I thought that in order to give my life in exchange for Will’s, in exchange for my parents’, that I needed to die, but I was wrong; I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live. Jeanine holds my head steady with one hand and inserts the needle into my neck with the other. I’m not done! I shout in my head, and not at Jeanine. I am not done here! She presses the plunger down. Peter leans forward and looks into my eyes. “The serum will go into effect in one minute,” he says. “Be brave, Tris.” The words startle me, because that is exactly what Tobias said when he put me under my first simulation. My heart begins to race. Why would Peter tell me to be brave? Why would he offer any kind words at all? All the muscles in my body relax at once. A heavy, liquid feeling fills my limbs. If this is death, it isn’t so bad. My eyes stay open, but my head drops to the side. I try to close my eyes, but I can’t—I can’t move. Then the heart monitor stops beeping.

Life, too, wasn't the harsh beam of a fluorescent bulb, on or off. It was a dimmer switch, a candlewick burning down to the quick fading and fading away.

The blinding glare of the ceiling's fluorescent lamps does not penetrate to the bottom of the sea trench in which she sleeps.

All I can think is: I need air. The rest of my thoughts are a blur of radio static and fluorescent lights and lab coats and steel tables and surgical knives

Ronan wasn’t exactly sure why he was angry. Although Gansey had done nothing to invoke his ire, he was definitely part of the problem. Currently, he propped his cell between ear and shoulder as he eyed a pair of plastic plates printed with smiling tomatoes. His unbuttoned collar revealed a good bit of his collarbone. No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. Ordinarily, he was so polished that it was bearable, though, because he was clearly not the same species as Ronan’s rough-and-ready family. But tonight, under the fluorescent lights of Dollar City, Gansey’s hair was scuffed and his cargo shorts were a greasy ruin from mucking over the Pig. He was barelegged and sockless in his Top-Siders and very clearly a real human, an attainable human, and this, somehow, made Ronan want to smash his fist through a wall.

Technology has allowed...our society to separate itself from the sights and the sounds of killing.... It must be easy to kill from a roomful of fluorescent lights and wash-and-wear shirts.

Arthur McKnight had raised a 10M round on the idea that skaters, boarders and cyclists were hot to film themselves acting out Feartoshred’s dares: catapult over a creek or a river, surf the Big Island at dawn wearing a fluorescent tee and ski goggles.

Grasping the doorknob, Tengo turned around one last time and was shocked to see a single tear running down from his father's eye. It shone a dull silver color under the ceiling's fluorescent light. To release that tear, his father must have squeezed every bit of strength from what little emotion he still had left.

The rule of thumb is: the lower the temperature of the light, the more hygge. A camera flash is around 5,500 Kelvin (K), fluorescent tubes are 5,000K, incandescent lamps 3,000K, while sunsets and wood and candle flames are about 1,800K. That is your hygge sweet spot.

I don’t want them because they don’t have a caterpillar tattoo on their shoulder.” Xav clutches my face with both hands. “I don’t want them because they’re not the only ones who get me in a world of fucking idiots.” He gives a breathy laugh, the garage’s fluorescent lights 

I hear myself laughing, screeching, cackling. The world is red hot and pulsing. On fire [...] I stroll down the corridor and the flickering fluorescents celebrate my passing, humming in praise. I spin, bow and hum along. Bloody footprints trail; bloody fingers smear the walls.

Floyd poured us each a cup and we headed back to the floor, the squad room, a sea of desks with computers and fluorescent lighting where A-type personalities killed themselves trying to find out who killed someone else.

And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets with radiations which would be instantly lethal to all earthly forms of life. For millions of kilometers around extended great veils of gas and dust, fluorescing in countless colors as the blasts of ultraviolet tore through them. It was a star against which Earth’s pale sun would have been as feeble as a glowworm at noon.

Am I a Stalinist? A Capitalist? A Bourgeois Stinker? A rotten Red? No I’m a fairy with purple wings and white halo translucent as an onion ring in the transsexual fluorescent light of Kiev Restaurant after a hard day’s work

Ode to Algebra Thrust into this dingy classroom we die like lampless moths locked into the desolation of fluorescent lights and metal desks. Ten minutes until the bell rings. What use is the quadratic formula in our daily lives? Can we use it to unlock the secrets in the hearts of those we love? Five minutes until the bell rings. Cruel Algebra teacher, won't you let us go?

It’s amazing to think where adventure can lead when you trust your crazy ideas, when you’re bold enough to look at only what lies ahead of you. I don’t want the normal life. I don’t want to go to college because it’s the next practical step, just to join the pack, just to follow a leader. I don’t want to sit inside a room under fluorescent lights and study and read and memorize other people’s ideas about the world. I want to form my own ideas. I want to experience the world with my own eyes. I’m not going to follow my old friends to avoid the effort of making new ones. I don’t want to settle for any job just to get a paycheck, just to pay rent, just to need furniture and cable and more bills and be tied down with routine and monotony. I don’t want to own things because they’ll eventually start to own me. Most importantly, I don’t want to be told who I am or who I should be. I want to find myself—the bits and pieces that are scattered in places and in people waiting to meet me. If I fall down, I’ll learn how to pick myself up again. You need to fall apart once in a while before you understand how you best fit together.

After just a week in the hospital, I felt I’d left America for another country. My world was a land of fluorescent lights where day and night were the same, and where more than half the citizens spoke Spanish. When they spoke English it wasn’t what I expected in the land of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn’t trickled down to this zip code. Three

Mamá's headlights lit up the yellow fluorescent lines of the road. They were curvy and it seemed like they were being traced out of nothingness by the invisible hand of God - like God was bored, drawing hills and lines with a highlighter.

Then, at a meeting, Petal Bear. Thin, moist, hot. Winked at him. . . . Grey eyes close together, curly hair the color of oak. The fluorescent light made her as pale as candle wax. Her eyelids gleamed with some dusky unguent. A metallic thread in her rose sweater. These faint sparks cast a shimmer on her like a spill of light. She smiled, the pearl-tinted lips wet with cider. . . . As she spoke she changed in some provocative way, seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional moment.

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?

He wore a fluorescent green T-shirt with a large picture of Malcolm Ericson from Stage Dive on the front, and a matching fluorescent pink hat. “Mal for President” had been embroidered on the hat. Guess he really loved the drummer from Stage Dive. A lot.

There was a rumor—a joke? Hard to tell at the DAR—that the fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible. Cooper didn’t know about that, but they did make everyone look two weeks dead.

my life had devolved into a fluorescent haze of desktop Outlook/Internet Explorer/Excel screens by day followed by laptop Chrome/Facebook/Netflix nights.

And in the evening concealed fluorescent tubes light the room so evenly that it is no longer illuminated, it is a pool of luminosity.

The evil still went on, but now it went on in the hard, soulless glare of parking-lot fluorescents, of neon tubing, of hundred-watt bulbs by the billions.

he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?

I invited him over and he stayed forever. I feed him all my bread, the old peppers turned to mush & fluorescent mold, the chicken thighs unthawed & boneless. He ask for more so I give him my left leg. He ask for more & I give him my lungs & lips. More still, and there goes my bladder. He eats it all, all of me, eats the whole damn house, & I live forever in him or maybe it's the other way around. I swallowed. I swallowed him whole & didn't even notice him thrashing inside me.

Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn’t make them any less hideous. They’re always just a little too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It’s always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights - another constant, those lights - humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn’t much in the way of cheerful conversation. And there’s always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.

I’ve always felt safer at night. You can be much more forgiving of yourself, not to mention the world and everyone in it, when your shortcomings aren’t threatened by the brazen light of day. And by shortcomings, I mean damage. The scars are still there, but at least they're easier to hide. I never understood why they shine a fluorescent spotlight in the faces of alleged culprits in old movies to get them to tell the truth. Put me to bed and turn off the lights. I’ll tell you everything. I’ll be who you want me to be, I’ll be honest. I’ll be who I want to be, I’ll be braver. Just don’t ignore me. I really do want to be stronger, sweeter, less afraid all the time. Maybe it’s a within-the-womb thing, but it’s safer in the dark. What they should really warn you about is the light.

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, A luminous sphere of plasma Held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, Waiting to be released back into the sky, Waiting to go back in the reverse Direction from which I came, Traveling through a warm tunnel of light, And out into a cold, dark abyss Where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, Just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, And the magnetic dust that carries my Heart and spirit will lift us back To congregate and shine With the stars. Home again, In the fluorescent Kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by My soul’s true name. And my heart, It will flicker again, With every memory from its many Lifetimes, And with every wish Made by a child. SONG OF THE STAR by Suzy Kassem

But if I were this thing, my mind a thousand times smaller than my wings, if my fluorescent blue flutter finally stumbled into the soft aqua throats of the blossoms, if I lost my hunger for anything else— I’d do the same. I’d fasten myself to the touch of the flower. So what if the milky rims of my wings no longer stupefied the sky? If I could bind myself to this moment, to the slow snare of its scent, what would it matter if I became just the flutter of page in a text someone turns to examine me in the wrong color?

Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?" Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to. "Malaysia?" "The stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the thread-tension." "Oh." "Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highlighters, in a really nasty fluorescent shade." "Are you joking?" "Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?" "Yes." She never did call him "Colin," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique." "How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?" "Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law.

He stayed under the fluorescent street light until the sounds of traffic and nightlife faded into silence, and only then did he look up into the night sky, the way he usually did when he was looking for answers.

(wizards, even failed wizards, have in addition to rods and cones in their eyeballs the tiny octagons that enable them to see into the far octarine, the basic colour of which all other colours are merely pale shadows impinging on normal four-dimensional space. It is said to be a sort of fluorescent greenish-yellow purple).

In my yellow room, Sunflowers with purple eyes stands out on a yellow background. They bath their stems in a yellow pot, on a yellow table. In a corner of the painting, the signature of the painter: Vincent. And the yellow sun that passes through the yellow curtains of my room floods all this fluorescence with gold. And in the morning upon awakening, from my bed, I imagin that all this smells very good. Oh yes! He loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from holland. Those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul That abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth. When two of us were together in arles, both of us mad and at constant war over the beauty of color, me, i loved the color red, Where to find a perfect vermilion? He traced with his most yellow brush on the wall, Suddenly turned violet. Je suis saint esprit Je suis sain d'espri. Paul gauguin, 1894.

Please note, you future dead persons, whenever you shut off a fluorescent bulb or a cathode ray tube and see a residual photon-green glow, that glow is trapped human ectoplasm. Ghosts are forever being snared in lightbulbs.

How can I tell McDermott that this is a very disjointed time of my life and that I notice the walls have been painted a bright, almost painful white and under the glare of the fluorescent lights they seem to pulse and glow.

Let me explain before another word is written: I have never once asked a cat, "So tell me what's up, Charlie?" and Charlie says, "Jeez Jackson, thanks for asking. A little annoyed by the fluorescent lights, and will you please check out this tiny piece-of-junk pan I have to crap in but, hey, I still got my legs, you know? Can't complain, pal.

On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription - this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. I’d finished writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with one stone and all that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her and and went out. The next time I saw her, she was on TV. That’s how you identify the dead here in Derry - no walking down a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked PRIVATE and look at a TV screen and say yep or nope.

Thrust into this dingy classroom we die like lampless moths locked into the desolation of fluorescent lights and metal desks. Ten minutes until the bell rings. What use is the quadratic formula in our daily lives? Can we use it to unlock the secrets in the hearts of those we love? Five minutes until the bell rings. Cruel Algebra teacher, won’t you let us go?

What does it matter what it’s called?” she continues. “You’ve got your restrooms and your food. Your fluorescent lights and your plastic chairs. Crappy coffee. Strawberry-jam sandwiches. It’s all pointless—assuming you try to find a point to it.

Finally,’ I said. ‘Something we agree on.’ ‘I bet we agree on a lot.’ He plucked a mangled maple-nut donut out and sat back, examining it in the fluorescent light. ‘Such as?’ ‘All the important stuff,’ Gus said. ‘The chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere, whether the world needs six Pirates of the Caribbean movies, that White Russians should only be drunk you’re already sure you’re going to vomit anyway.

But he could not call the doctors at the leprosarium. They would return him to Louisiana. They would treat him and train him and counsel him. They would put him back into life as if his illness were all that mattered, as if wisdom were only skin deep, as if grief and remorse and horror were nothing but illusions, tricks done with mirrors, irrelevant to chrome and porcelain and clean, white, stiff hospital sheets and fluorescent lights.

He motions to the glue brush. "Can I have some?" I start to grab it so I can pass it to him. He reaches for it at the same time. Our fingers touch, and the moment they do the fluorescent lights overhead flicker and then fizzle out. Everyone moans, even though we can all still see. There's enough light from the outside filtering in, just not enough for us to really focus on the finer details. Nick's fingers stroke mine lightly, so lightly that I'm almost not sure the touch is real. My insides flicker like the art room lights. They do not, however, fizzle. I turn my head to look him in the eye. He leans over and whispers, "It will be hard to be just your friend." The lights come back on. "Just a little brownout." The art teacher smiles and holds out her arms. "Welcome to Maine, Zara. Land of a million power failures." Nick's breath touches my ear. "I heard you didn't drive to school. I'll bring you home after cross-country,okay?" "Okay," I say, trying to be all calm, but what I really want to do is leap up and do a happy dance all over the art room. Nick is driving me home.

And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud Madden me back to an afternoon I carry in me not like a wound but like a will against a wound Give me again enough man to be the child choosing my own annihilations To make of this severed limb a wand to conjure a weapon to shatter dark matter of the dirt daubers' nests galaxies of glass Whacking glints bash-dancing on the cellar's fire I am the sound the sun would make if the sun could make a sound and the gasp of rot stabbed from the compost's lumpen living death is me O my life my war in a jar I shake you and shake you and may the best ant win For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things and I will ride this tantrum back to God until my fixed self, my fluorescent self my grief–nibbling, unbewildered, wall–to–wall self withers in me like a salted slug

It was strange to Alex that the smell of books was always the same. The ancient documents in the climate-controlled stacks and glass cases of Beinecke. The research rooms at Sterling. The changeable library of Lethe House. They all had the same scent as the fluorescent-lit reading rooms full of cheap paperbacks she’d lived in as a kid.

You worked too hard to get here to let it go because some business-y bullshit bums you out. If you focus on becoming great at what you do (which we will talk about more specifically later in this book, and which I heartily encourage), if you keep your mind open to learning and seek out new challenges and opportunities and are kind to people in the process, no one and nothing can slow you down—especially not something as frivolous as the corporate-culture nonsense conducted under those fluorescent lights. And,

I wasn't sad after my father kissed the streetcar. If anything, it was a relief. Much as I missed him, his dying gave me an excuse to feel the way I already felt. Which was the way I felt right now, under the laundry room fluorescents: hollow, pissed off, wanting to be wherever I wasn't. Until I got there. Then I wanted to be somewhere else.

And yes, he battled the daily commute to work and spent a lot of his days under fluorescent office lights, but at least his livelihood didn't hang by a thread on the whim of a weather pattern. At least he wasn't driven to such fear and despair by the blank skies that there was even a chance the wrong end of a gun might look like the right answer.

Two boys on fluorescent bikes with extravagant ape-hanger handlebars were doing wheelies in the parking lot, weaving in and out of each other’s paths with a dexterity that suggested a solid background in video gaming and possible high-paying futures as air-traffic controllers . . . if they managed to stay away from coke and car accidents, that was.

For ten years Dublin’s been changing faster than our minds can handle. The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we’re fracturing under the weight of it.

The store is also lit to the point of painfulness by a ceiling loaded with more fluorescent bulbs than a landing mothership. Shielding my headachey eyes, I make my consumer choices, then head to the counter, where the clerk is wearing sunglasses. I pay the clerk with a five-dollar bill on which I have felt-penned the words: I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK AGES.

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, a luminous sphere of plasma held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, waiting to be released back into the sky, where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, and the magnetic dust that carries my heart and spirit will lift us back to congregate and shine with the stars. Home again, in the fluorescent kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by my soul’s true name.

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened? Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one’s relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand.

was now on my own. I wasn’t a kid anymore, but I felt ill-equipped for the fluorescent, bureaucratic world of adulthood.

He doesn’t know how many seconds pass, but the pain in his head, like a long line of fluorescent tubes exploding, is unbearable.

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone.

I am almost inclined to coin a word and call the appearance fluorescence, from fluor-spar, as the analogous term opalescence is derived from the name of a mineral.

This is where we die, I thought, stripped of any fleck of the festive. Dying is bureaucratic and fluorescent.

We walked through a small hallwayinto an institutional tiled room with harsh fluorescent light. It felt old, dingy, clinical, and completelyempty

And beyond, our mother lay like a deathbed princess under fluorescent lights.

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone.

Fluorescent overhead lighting would be a frightening choice, although acceptable if you keep the switch in the “off” position—or if the bulbs are all burnt out.

fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible.

And all these are worlds,” said Hagen. “Or else,” said Clements with a yawn, “a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.

In each room the soul-sucking fluorescent light coated everything in a film of sickness,

Mind genius, call it formless substance, thought waves filling its canvas. Fluorescent radiance tasting the color you see. Imagination of a giant is what I'm destined to be. Color coded thoughts, pay attention to its silver lining. It's master-minding. I've discovered my minds frequency is like treasure finding, diamond mining, Kings & Majesties at the round table dining.

Thank you, Department Stores, for the flickering fluorescent lights, dingy yellow wall paint, and adjustable mirrors in the dressing room where I try on bathing suits. You are why I drink.

1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.

There was a tiny silence, only the soft hum of the fluorescence. I thought of her in the cold ruined house, with night birds keening above her and rain gentle all around, dying of breathing

His name was Nikola Tesla, and his inventions included the induction motor, the electrical-power distribution system, fluorescent and neon lights, wireless communication, remote control, and robotics.

In Strike’s opinion, the logo resembled shards of fluorescent glass randomly thrown together and he was equally unenamored of the official mascots, which looked to him like a pair of cycloptic molars.

A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners.

Now the room has the contours and atmosphere of all rooms in which people stay awake talking. The fluorescent light is grainy, staring. The clutter on the kitchen table—ketchup bottle, sagging butter dish, tin of Nestlé Quik, the rowdy crudded ashtray—the world is narrowed into these, a little universe that the eyes return to again and again. Now it begins, the sorting and testing of words. Remember that words are not symbols of other words. There are words which, when tinkered with, become honest representatives of the cresting blood, the fine living net of nerves. Define rain. Or even joy. It can be done.

The evil still went on, but now it went on in the hard, soulless glare of parking-lot fluorescents, of neon tubing, of hundred-watt bulbs by the billions. Generals planned strategic air strikes beneath the no-nonsense glow of alternating current, and it was all out of control, like a kid’s soapbox racer going downhill with no brakes: I was following my orders. Yes, that was true, patently true. We were all soldiers, simply following what was written on our walking papers. But where were the orders coming from, ultimately? Take me to your leader. But where is his office? I was just following orders. The people elected me. But who elected the people?

She sits naked in the bathtub – a soupy mixture of water and milk, saffron and incense – she looks at the misty valley lit up with fluorescent lights. The Ganges at dusk. Lighted lamps floating away, gently, carrying secret sins.

there’s no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where, with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene.

I simply await the day that they drag me to some air-conditioned dungeon and leave me there beneath the fluorescent lights and soundproofed ceiling to pay the price for scorning all that they hold dear within their little latex hearts.

Isn't that always the way adult life begins? You think you'll become something different, something new. At first, you swim violently against the tide, your body straining until your muscles give out, until you can't push any harder, until you stop fighting and float, letting the water take you back to shore, where the rest of the world is already at the office, typing on their computers beneath fluorescent lights, toiling away in the glare of permanent productive daylight.

Triton’s trident, they put the Royals on trial! But as much as Galen would love to throw that in their faces, he won’t. This is his one chance, however small it is, to turn things around for him and Emma. And he’s not about to toss that chance to sea with both hands. Rachel has pulled more chairs out to accommodate the gathering. The table they circle is shinier than Emma’s lip gloss. Unlike the human meetings Galen has attended with Rachel to sell his underwater finds, there is no paperwork on the table, no cups of coffee, no cell phones. Also unlike human meetings, most participants are either dressed in bathing suits or bathrobes. Leave it to Rachel’s creative hospitality. It is a sight Galen will never forget, seeing the elderly council of Archives sit uncomfortably in human chairs. If the situation weren’t so dire, he’d have to laugh. Especially since Tandel’s bathrobe has the human symbol of peace all over it in fluorescent colors. “Thank you for coming,” Galen says. He takes his place next to Grom, who sits at the head of the table. Appropriately, Antonis sits at the head of the other end, accompanied by Rayna and Toraf. Emma is at Galen’s left side. He doesn’t need to look at her to know she’s scowling at him.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

If there was ever a time when she had some control over her working life, she'd decided, she wouldn't work under fluorescent lights. Was there some way she could work outside? She didn't see how - she had an indoor skill set - but the thought was appealing.

Time seemed to drag with dreamlike slowness, like a knife through cold honey, and the room took on a surreal golden sheen as if I was looking through that same jar of honey. Maybe at that moment, the sun shone just right though the grimy windows, but the woman, the shelves, the jars, everything in the room appeared in tones of gold and sepia, except for the painting behind the counter. From behind the shopkeeper's head, a fluorescent Mary and Jesus glared at me, their cartoon-like faces reproaching me for being there.

The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.

Knowledge is power and at the end of the day, our health, the health of our children, the health of our community, and the health of Mother Earth is our responsibility. Therefore, it is imperative that we understand the human and environmental affects of the products that we buy.

surprisingly dramatic glow some minerals gave off when illuminated with ultraviolet light, or “black light.” In daylight, for instance, the mineral fluorite is a drab, chalky color; in a dark room under UV light, though, fluorite glows a brilliant blue; the mineral calcite shines bright red; and aragonite gives off a neon green. If you’ve ever stepped into a teenager’s cavelike room decorated with black-light posters (less common now than they were in the 1970s, when my three sons were growing up), you’ve seen another version of UV fluorescence in action.

It was one of the rare mornings when Dad was around. He’d gotten up early to go cycling, and he was sweaty, standing at the counter in his goony fluorescent racing pants, drinking green juice of his own making. His shirt was off, and he had a black heart-rate monitor strapped across his chest, plus some shoulder brace he invented, which is supposedly good for his back because it pulls his shoulders into alignment when he’s at the computer. “Good morning to you, too,” he said disapprovingly. I must have made some kind of face. But I’m sorry, it’s weird to come down and

Jesus had an affinity for prisoners. He had been one, after all. He must have often felt anxiety and isolation in jail, but He identified with the prisoners. He made a point of befriending the worst and most hated, because His message was that no one was beyond reach of divine love, despite society's way of stating the opposite. God, what a nut. Finally we stood outside an inner gate, showed our IDs to the guards, and got our hands stamped with fluorescent ink. "You don't glow, you don't go," said one cheerful, pockmarked guard, which was the best spiritual advice I'd had in a long time.

Disintegration: literally, the loss of integrity. But if the mind can be described as one’s subjective experience of the brain, then what is the self but vagrant fluorescings of neural constellations, individual states of consciousness determined by mercurial configurations of amplitude and alliance?

In the cafeteria line I took a knife and fork. Ivan handed me another knife and another fork. I stared at the two knives and two forks. At the salad bar, Ivan put lettuce and tomatoes in a bowl and topped them with dressing. I also put some things in a bowl but at the end it wasn’t a salad, it was just a lot of random things in a bowl. At the soda fountain, Diet Coke seethed over my wrist. We found two empty seats at the opposite end of a table from four football players. The football players’ trays resembled futuristic cities, with glasses of milk and Gatorade shooting out like white and fluorescent skyscrapers.

That we have iodine in our thyroid glands proves that our bodies were fashioned from supernova material. The iron in our blood came from the cores of two previous star generations. The Sun gives off a bit of peculiar yellow light from fluorescing sodium vapor, an element inherited from its father, the type O or B blue star.

Sunday night is my personal weekly Halloween. I walk along slowly and drag my fingertips along the bars of chocolate. Goddamn, you sexy little squares. Dark, milk, white, I do not discriminate. I eat it all. Those fluorescent sour candies that only obnoxious little boys like. I suck candy apples clean. If an envelope seal is sweet, I’ll lick it twice. Growing up, I was that kid who would easily get lured into a van with the promise of a lollipop. Sometimes, I let the retail seduction last for twenty minutes, ignoring Marco and feeling up the merchandise, but I’m so tired of male voices. “Five bags of marshmallows,” Marco says in a resigned tone. “Wine. And a can of cat food.” “Cat food is low carb.” He makes no move to scan anything, so I scan each item myself and unroll a few notes from my tips. “Your job involves selling things. Sell them. Change, please.” “I just don’t know why you do this to yourself.” Marco looks at the register with a moral dilemma in his eyes. “Every week you come and do this.” He hesitates and looks over his shoulder where his sugar book sits under a layer of dust. He knows not to try to slip it into my bag with my purchases. “I don’t know why you care, dude. Just serve me. I don’t need your help.” He’s not entirely wrong about my being an addict. I would lick a line of icing sugar off this counter right now if no one were around. I would walk into a cane plantation and bite right in... “Give me my change or I swear to God …” I squeeze my eyes shut and try to tamp down my temper. “Just treat me like any other customer.” He gives me a few coins’ change and bags my sweet, spongy drugs.

What does it matter what it's called?" she continues. "You've got your restrooms and your food. Your fluorescent lights and your plastic chairs. Crappy coffee. Strawberry-jam sandwiches. It's all pointless--assuming you try to find a point to it. We're coming from somewhere, heading somewhere else. That's all you need to know, right?

Today he was reading the research of a team from University, who had recorded a zinc flash at the precise instant a sperm fertilized an egg. A rush of calcium at that moment caused zinc to be released from the egg. As the zinc burst out, it attached itself to small, fluorescent molecules: the spark that was picked up by camera microscopes.

Did you know that embryologists have recently captured the moment of conception via fluorescence microscopy? What they discovered is that at the exact moment a sperm penetrates an egg, the egg releases billions of zinc atoms that emit light. Sparks fly, literally! That miracle of conception is a microcosm that mirrors God's first four words.

Without Aldo, Regan felt an uneasiness, a restlessness, something close to recklessness or, perhaps, far beyond it. She felt a vibrating sense of blankness, like the buzz of a fluorescent sign. Closed, open, vacancy, no vacancy. She felt like a door swinging open and shut, things coming and going, and she was merely the operator saying, Hold please.

Today he was reading the research of a team from Northwestern University, who had recorded a zinc flash at the precise instant a sperm fertilized an egg. A rush of calcium at that moment caused zinc to be released from the egg. As the zinc burst out, it attached itself to small, fluorescent molecules: the spark that was picked up by camera microscopes.

God, please let this not be our last dance...

I feel pretty sure I know why the dinosaurs went extinct. They were waiting for Sam to pick out a cell phone case.

Where was I going and why did my body keep pulling me back from it?

Playing a character will divert you from your path / Pretend / And you will only create limitations

kitchenette, tidy but cast in a sickly glow by the fluorescent bulbs. Dennis looked about fifty, with gold-rimmed glasses and a professorial goatee, and overgrown salt-and-pepper hair. He wore scrubs, pale blue, and boat shoes. He seemed at once kind and exhausted, defeated and determined, with one of those expressive, guileless faces that told you everything

Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame.

She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs - young adulthood reduced to "YA," mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.

Spending one’s final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said good-bye or “It’s okay” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.

Because radium can be mixed with other elements to make them glow in the dark, clock makers used it to create fluorescent numbers on watch faces and hired young women to perform the delicate task of painting them. In the watch factories of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois, the Radium Girls were trained to lick the tips of their brushes into a fine point before dipping them into pots of radium paint. When the jaws and skeletons of the first girls began to rot and disintegrate, their employers suggested they were suffering from syphilis. A successful lawsuit revealed that their managers had understood the risks of working with radium and get done everything they could to conceal the truth from their employees. It was the first time the public learned the hazards of ingesting radioactive material. The

I am a ghost town, my body still exists among the remnants and relics, but no one lives here anymore. The locals moved out with the post office. The shelves at the corner store stand as tombstones marking the prices of items that once waited for hands to toss them in their basket. Spiders and the remains of their kills fill the fluorescent lights. The crows don’t even stop on the wires when they fly over.

The fluorescents wash him out, but on this occasion his neurosis is full bleed, and he tells me he does not like hospitals, because they smell like urine and synthetic gardenias, and also he is terrified of dying, and theoretically so am I, but theoretically, what if I'm not, though saying this out loud is ungenerous, and so I tell him, yes, living is definitely what I want to keep on doing, it has been great so far.

Reacher was led through the door on the left and onward to an interview room. Which had no windows. Just four blank walls, and a table bolted to the floor, with two chairs on one side and one on the other. The room had not been designed by the dining room guy. That was clear. There was no blond wood or carpet. Just scuffed white paint on cinder block, and a cracked concrete floor, and a fluorescent bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling.

Oh,” I said, and my eyes pop open to the fluorescent light of Deborah’s office, and no matter how hard I try to push it away and find a way not to believe it, the things I saw do not change. Even in the harsh and ugly light of the office the picture is the same, and even worse, I now see Deb and Jackie staring at me uncertainly, as if they had been watching me urinate on a busy street. “Oh, um,” I say. “It’s, you know. I just thought of something.

As lighting manufacturers developed new, more energy-efficient technologies, such as LEDs and fluorescents, suddenly a light bulb was not just a light bulb anymore. But no one told us light-bulb buyers. “People don’t know they should be looking for three thousand degrees Kelvin, or what we call warm light, so instead they come home with four thousand or five thousand degrees Kelvin, which is cool light.” This information is printed on packages, but most people don’t know to look for it.

Visual over-stimulation is a distraction from concentration and evokes the same sort of reactions as over-stimulation from noise. But the source might surprise you. Even fussy clothing moving around can be a visual distraction, or too many people in the room, or too many machines with moving parts. For those who work outside, a windy day is a triple-threat—with sound, sight, and touch all being affected. Cars moving, lights, signs, crowds, all this visual chaos can exhaust the AS person. Back in the office, too many computer screens, especially older ones with TV-style monitors, and sickly, flickering, unnatural fluorescent lighting were both high on the trigger list. The trouble with fluorescent light is threefold: Cool-white and energy-efficient fluorescent lights are the most commonly used in public buildings. They do not include the color blue, “the most important part for humans,” in their spectrum. In addition to not having the psychological benefits of daylight, they give off toxins and are linked to depression, depersonalization, aggression, vertigo, anxiety, stress, cancer, and many other forms of ill health. It’s true. There’s an EPA report to prove it (Edwards and Torcellini 2002). Flickering fluorescent lights, which can trigger epileptic seizures, cause strong reactions in AS individuals, including headaches, confusion, and an inability to concentrate. Even flickering that is not obvious to others can be perceived by some on the spectrum.

cafeteria, his heels clicking hollowly. Above, the fluorescents embedded in their long fixtures like inverted ice-cube trays threw a hard, shadowless light. There were more bodies. A man and a woman with their clothes off and holes in their heads. They screwed, Starkey thought, and then he shot her, and then he shot himself. Love among the viruses. The pistol, an army-issue .45, was still clutched in his hand. The tile floor was spotted with blood and gray stuff that looked like oatmeal.

I feel intensely. I smell mold and bad food before others. I hear fluorescent lights. Clothing hurts, noises invade, colors take my breath away. My daily reality is governed by too much sensation and not enough sensation. Patterns are soothing because they create order in what feels like chaos. Sometimes I shut down and I lose language. Other times I get overloaded and act it out in ways that get me in trouble. My world is intense, rich, real, sometimes painful and definitely different. Understand

A.J. walks over to the crime section. He looks across the spines, which are, for the most part, black and red with all capitalized fonts in silvers and whites. An occasional burst of fluorescence breaks up the monotony. A.J. thinks how similar everything in the crime genre looks. Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.

One night, he left Stephen and me in the arcade and rushed off to a – this hurt my feelings – “real” game. That night, he missed a foul shot by two feet and made the mistake of admitting to the other players that his arms were tired from throwing miniature balls at a shortened hoop all afternoon. They laughed and laughed. ‘In the second overtime,’ Joel told me, ‘when the opposing team fouled me with four seconds left and gave me the opportunity to shoot from the line for the game, they looked mighty smug as they took their positions along the key. Oh, Pop-A-Shot guy, I could hear them thinking to their smug selves. He’ll never make a foul shot. He plays baby games. Wa-wa-wa, little Pop-A-Shot baby, would you like a zwieback biscuit? But you know what? I made those shots, and those songs of bitches had to wipe their smug grins off their smug faces and go home thinking that maybe Pop-A-Shot wasn’t such a baby game after all.” I think Pop-A-Shot’s a baby game. That’s why I love it. Unlike the game of basketball itself, Pop-A-Shot has no standard socially redeeming value whatsoever. Pop-A-Shot is not about teamwork or getting along or working together. Pop-A-Shot is not about getting exercise or fresh air. It takes place in fluorescent-lit bowling alleys or darkened bars. It costs money. At the end of a game, one does not swig Gatorade. One sips bourbon or margaritas or munches cupcakes. Unless one is playing the Super Shot version at the ESPN Zone in Times Square, in which case, one orders the greatest appetizer ever invented on this continent – a plate of cheeseburgers.

The main floor of Penn Station, early, the first commuters arriving, leaving, the man outstretched on his coat, wide circles of survivors forming. He's half in, half out of his clothes, being kissed and cardio-shocked, though he was likely dead before he landed. This goes on for minutes, minutes more, until the medics unhook the vanished heart, move him onto the cot and cover him with the snow-depth of a sheet and wheel him the fluorescent length of the hall through gray freight doors that open on their own and close at will.

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone.Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened? Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one’s relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand.

Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a shelter, worthy of Kubla Khan's Xanadu dome; Plushy and swanky, with posh hanky panky that affluent Yankees can really call home. Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a shelter, a push-button palace, fluorescent repose; Electric devices for facing a crisis with frozen fruit ices and cinema shows. Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a shelter all chromium kitchens and rubber-tiled dorms; With waterproof portals to echo the chortles of weatherproof mortals in hydrogen storms. What a great come-to-glory emporium! To enjoy a deluxe moratorium, Where nuclear heat can beguile the elite in a creme-de-la-creme crematorium.

Once underneath the dark, cold concrete of the garage with its bleak fluorescent light, I lean against the wall and put my head in my hands. What was I thinking? Unbidden and unwelcome tears pool in my eyes. Why am I crying? I sink to the ground, angry at myself for this senseless reaction. Drawing up my knees, I fold in on myself. I want to make myself as small as possible. Perhaps this nonsensical pain will be smaller the smaller I am. Placing my head on my knees, I let the irrational tears fall unrestrained. I am crying over the loss of something I never had. How ridiculous. Mourning something that never was—my dashed hopes, my dashed dreams, and my soured expectations.

In 1976, while involved in research at the New York Public Library, I stumbled upon a strange text entitled Return of the Dove which claimed that there was a man not born of this planet who landed as a baby in the mountains of Croatia in 1856. Raised by “earth parents,” an avatar had arrived for the sole purpose of inaugurating the New Age. By providing humans with a veritable cornucopia of inventions, he had created, in essence, the technological backbone of the modern era.1 His name was Nikola Tesla, and his inventions included the induction motor, the electrical-power distribution system, fluorescent and neon lights, wireless communication, remote control, and robotics.

I was working from home at the time and sometimes indulged in a little wander around my yard, a hard reset before I got back to work. Today, however, I had ignored the nice weather and instead put my head on my desk, forehead pressed to the Formica and arms covering my skull. I had joked with one of my yoga-loving co-workers that I was developing a series of poses that we could do at our desks. A head-in-hands slump over galleys called "Drudge's Hunch". The arms overhead seated stretch called "Fluorescent Salutation". The hand out position used to catch the fire door so it didn't slam and bother everyone. That was "Worrier's Pose". My current pose was called "Nuclear Fallout".

It was one of the rare mornings when Dad was around. He’d gotten up early to go cycling, and he was sweaty, standing at the counter in his goony fluorescent racing pants, drinking green juice of his own making. His shirt was off, and he had a black heart-rate monitor strapped across his chest, plus some shoulder brace he invented, which is supposedly good for his back because it pulls his shoulders into alignment when he’s at the computer. “Good morning to you, too,” he said disapprovingly. I must have made some kind of face. But I’m sorry, it’s weird to come down and see your Dad wearing a bra, even if it is for his posture. Mom came in from the pantry covered with spaghetti pots. “Hello, Buzzy!

I arrive, by a snow-covered path, at a kind of chateau. The room I enter by is covered all over with several inches of snow - even on the furniture and the ceiling. Shining in through the window are fierce, fluorescent advertisements in blue and red. I walk through the huge rooms secretively. I once lived here. Voices come near. I feel worried, since these are important men and I have no right to be here. But their voices change, their eyes change too, and suddenly they become mental defectives. The mansion is an asylum and indeed a nurse is stretched out on a long table in the peristyle. I wake up, retaining an exact impression of having once been mad myself in this very place, in a previous life.

Instead of a steakhouse or a barbecue pit they ate in chilly fluorescent silence in a rest-stop facility run by a third-best national chain. Reacher got a cheeseburger in a paper wrapper and coffee in a foam cup. Chang got a salad, in a plastic container as big as a basketball, with a clear lid at the top, and a white bowl underneath. She was stressed and maybe a little tired from driving, but even so she was good company. She put her hair behind her shoulders and turned attacking her salad into a shared misadventure, with widened eyes and about six different kinds of half-smiles, ranging from rueful and self-effacing to amused anticipation, as Reacher picked up his burger and tried to take a bite.

Now, back to Sapporo-ya. The place is deep enough below street level that the windows let in no natural light; harsh fluorescent lamps made everyone look ill. The walls are greenish-yellow. If you are directing a modern adaptation of The Divine Comedy, shoot the purgatory scenes here. The waitress set down my hiyashi chūka goma dare (sesame sauce). It was in every way the opposite of its surroundings: colorful, artfully presented, sweated over. The tangle of yellow noodles was served in a shallow blue-and-white bowl and topped with daikon, pickled ginger, roast pork, bamboo shoots, tomato, shredded nori, cucumber, bean sprouts, half a hard-boiled egg, and Japanese mustard. It was almost too pretty to ruin by tossing it together with chopsticks.

There aren't many classrooms in the school basement. Most of the space is for storage and utilities. As far as student use goes, the darkroom is down there, along with yearbook and the school paper. Places that either don't require much light or are used by students so happy to be there that they don't care. The only illumination comes from the fluorescents overhead and what filters in from the hallway through the glass upper half of the doors. It usually takes me about ten minutes in French to lose my focus completely. This time,it took less.We were learning the past imperfect tense, which, as well as being completely incomprehensible in practice, in theory describes a state where every action was either left incomplete, unfulfilled, or repeated over and over.

His cell-phone rang. Dominic fumbled for it on the nightstand next to the couch, the dim lights not helping his endeavour. He had piercing, generic, banal fluorescent lights on his face all the time at work and at University, it was so bad it made him loathe even natural sunlight. Lucky this apartment’s living room light had a dimmer. He flipped open his phone and said hello. ‘Hey Dom, how you doin’?’ a voice boomed. It was Ben. They proceeded to talk about the upcoming exams, which were deceptively close as it was week 10 at the moment. Yes, they would be alright. Yes, they would meet up afterwards. No, he hadn’t studied more than Ben had. As he clapped the phone closed after the genial conversation reached its natural nadir, he had forgotten most of what had been said

...     “Ignatius, was you wearing that cap when you spoke to the insurance man?”     “Of course I was. That office was improperly heated. I don’t know how the employees of that company manage to stay alive exposing themselves to that chill day after day. And then there are those fluorescent tubes baking their brains out and blinding them. I did not like the office at all. I tried to explain the inadequacies of the place to the personnel manager, but he seemed rather uninterested. He was ultimately very hostile.” Ignatius let out a monstrous belch. “However, I told you that it would be like this. I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it.”     “Lord, babe, you gotta look up.”     “Look up?” Ignatius repeated savagely. “Who has been sowing that unnatural garbage into your mind?” ...

This is me, this is who I am. This is Sasha Stone, who would have graduated as valedictorian and gone to Oberlin, who would have been on a dark stage in a few years, wearing black, unable to see the audience because of stage lights but feeling them there, their eyes on her though an entire orchestra was onstage. Sasha Stone always garnered the attention. Sasha Stone stood out in a sea of stars. But somehow I am here, not on a darkened stage but in a badly lit room with flickering fluorescents that hum to match the mechanical hearts of my audience members. I am here, with a harsh line down the middle of my face to match the one on my chest, a line that—should I ever make any stage—could never be covered by makeup. The light would seek it out. Illuminate it. All imperfections glare in the spotlight.

He took a trip ... up to ... Elliott's house, his mansion rather. Awful place, twelve bedrooms and swimming pool and media hall and five car garage, but cheap and shoddy all the same, like the one next door and next door to that. A row of Ikea houses, such wealthy mediocrity. His very own son. His big, bald son. Who could believe it. The bigness, the baldness, the stupidity. In a house designed to bore the daylight out of visitors, no character at all, all blonde wood and fluorescent lighting and clean white machinery. Not to mention his brand new wife, number three, a clean white machine herself. Up from the cookie cutter and into Elliott's life, she might as well have jumped out of the microwave, her skin orange, her teeth pearly white. A trophy wife. But why the word "trophy"? Something to shoot on a safari.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said good-bye or “It’s okay” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.

NATO Special Forces put a lot of emphasis on endurance in selection and training. They have guys running fifty miles carrying everything including the kitchen sink. They keep them awake and hiking over appalling terrain for a week at a time. Therefore NATO elite troops tended to be small whippy guys, built like marathon runners. But this Bulgarian was huge. He was at least as big as me. Maybe even bigger. Maybe six-six, maybe two-fifty. He had a shaved head. He had a big square face that would be somewhere between brutally plain and reasonably good-looking depending on the light. At that point the fluorescent tube on the ceiling of his cell wasn’t doing him any favors. He looked tired. He had piercing eyes set deep and close together in hooded sockets. He was a few years older than me, somewhere in his early thirties. He had huge hands. He was wearing brand-new woodland BDUs, no name, no rank, no unit.

Walking along the tables, my spirits sank even lower. Almost all the better fiddles, the ones made by professionals, were antiqued copies. Even the winning violin was a fake. I walked to the end of the room, where the cellos were lined up. They, too, were all antiqued, except for mine. With its orange-red varnish and crisp, unworn edges, it stood out like a Girl Scout at the Adult Film Awards. What had happened? Gone was any originality, any sense of style. The fluorescent lighting cast a harsh, cold glare, making the sad attempts at artificial aging look even more lifeless. I felt sick at heart. Thirty years ago, when the school opened, we had viewed copying with a visceral contempt—the great Babylonian captivity of violin making. We were the young Americans, the first of a new school of making in the New World, and we saw it as our mission to restore our craft to its former glory, when the idea of copying didn’t even exist.

Chigurh took a twenty-five cent piece from his pocket and flipped it spinning into the bluish glare of the fluorescent lights overhead. He caught it and slapped it onto the back of his forearm just above the bloody wrappings. Call it, he said. Call it? Yes. For what? Just call it. Well I need to know what it is we're callin here. How would that change anything? The man looked at Chigurh's eyes for the first time. Blue as lapis. At once glistening and totally opaque. Like wet stones. You need to call it, Chigurh said. I cant call it for you. It wouldnt be fair. It wouldnt even be right. Just call it. I didnt put nothin up. Yes you did. You've been putting it up your whole life. You just didnt know it. You know what the date is on this coin? No. It's nineteen fifty-eight. It's been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it's here. And I'm here. And I've got my hand over it. And it's either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it.

Oh no. Not this again. It’s the clothing dream. I’ve been having it for fifty years. Aisle after aisle, closetful after closetful, metal rack after metal rack of clothing, stretching into the distance under the glare of the fluorescent tubing – as gaudy and ornate and confusing, and finally as glum and oppressive, as the dreams of a long-time opium smoker. Why am I compelled to riffle through these outfits, tangling up the hangers, tripping on the ribbons, snagging myself on a hook or button while feathers and sequins and fake pearls drop to the floor like ants from a burning tree? What is the occasion? Who do I need to impress? ___________ There’s a smell of stale underarms. Everything’s been worn before. Nothing fits. Too small, too big, too magenta. These flounces, hoops, ruffles, wired collars, cut-velvet capes – none of these disguises is mine. How old am I in this dream? Do I have tits? Whose life am I living? Whose life am I failing to live?

And the lights are everywhere. They are so pervasive in modern life we’ve stopped seeing them. In turning them off, it’s hard to know where to begin. There are house lights and garage lights, fluorescent lights and halogen lights. There are streetlights and stoplights, headlights, taillights, dashboard lights, and billboard lights. There are night-lights to stand sentinel against the dark of our rooms and hallways, and reading lights for feeding our addiction to words and images and information, even in the middle of the night. There are warning lights and safety lights, and the lights of our cell phones and televisions and computer screens. No wonder our larger towns and cities are so bright you can see them from space. Nor does that urban and suburban light stay put. It seeps into the nearby plains and hills and mountains, casting shadows from trees and telephone poles. It throws off the rhythms of insects and animals and confuses the migrations of birds.

I’ve something to show you in here,” he murmurs and opens the door. The harsh light of the fluorescents illuminates the impressive motor launch in the dock, bobbing gently on the dark water. There’s a row boat beside it. “Come.” Christian takes my hand and leads me up the wooden stairs. Opening the door at the top, he steps aside to let me in. My mouth drops to the floor. The attic is unrecognizable. The room is filled with flowers... there are flowers everywhere. Someone has created a magical bower of beautiful wild meadow flowers mixed with glowing fairy lights and miniature lanterns that glow soft and pale round the room. My face whips round to meet his, and he’s gazing at me, his expression unreadable. He shrugs. “You wanted hearts and flowers,” he murmurs. I blink at him, not quite believing what I’m seeing. “You have my heart.” And he waves toward the room. “And here are the flowers,” I whisper, completing his sentence. “Christian, it’s lovely.” I can’t think of what else to say. My heart is in my mouth as tears prick my eyes.

As the rhetoric and power structures of old dissolve, from monarchy to capitalism to the space between a vocalized phrase and its indefinable mental inclination, this urge becomes heightened. And eventually, this conflict absorbs and finds its home within that foundation from whence it is borne, and from where its impact will fractal into every other component of power and being; the place where this dysphoria and this exchange occurs, now that we have unloosed the stop from our pressured throats, of the place it occurs, of the place it will be fought, of the place where it matters most- the mind. Because Mind as we know it and matter itself are no longer so perceptually separate. You are reading these words right now, but how? The voice is no longer an element confined in expression to the physical body. I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands. Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons. We don’t need nukes. We have the internet.

Two men enter the room, one old and mustached and the other young and tawny-headed, wearing sweats and a worn T-shirt. He looks like Silas, actually—god, what am I, obsessed? But there really is something of the woodsman in the younger man’s face, with his full lips, his slightly curled hair that turns like tendrils around his ears . . . I look away before studying him too closely. “All right, ladies, are we ready?” the older man says enthusiastically. There’s a loud rustling of paper as well flip the enormous sketchbooks on our easels until we find blank sheets. I draw a few soft lines on my page, unsure what— Non-Silas rips off his T-shirt, revealing lightly defined muscles on his pale chest. I raise an eyebrow just as he tugs at the waist of the sweatpants. They drop to the floor in a fluid, sweeping motion. There’s nothing underneath them. At all. My charcoal slips through my suddenly sweaty fingers. Non-Silas steps out of the puddle of his clothes and moves to the center of the room, fluorescent lights reflecting off his slick abdomen. He’s smiling as though he isn’t naked, smiling as though I didn’t somehow manage to get the seat closest to him. As if I can’t see . . . um . . . everything only a few feet from my face, making my mind clumsily spiral. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment; he looks like Silas in the face, and because of that I keep wondering if he looks akin to Silas everywhere else. “All right, ladies, this will be a seven-minute pose. Ready?” the older man says, positioning himself behind the other empty easel. The roomful of housewives nod in one hungry motion. I quiver. “Go!” the older man says, starting the stopwatch. Non-Silas poses, something reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David, only instead of marble eyes looking into nothingness, non-Silas is staring almost straight at me. Draw. I’m supposed to be drawing. I grab a new piece of charcoal from the bottom of the easel and begin hastily making lines in my sketchbook. I can’t not look at him, or he’ll think I’m not drawing him. I glance hurriedly, trying to avoid the region my eyes continuously return to. I start to feel fluttery. How long has it been? Surely it’s been seven minutes. I try to add some tone to my drawing’s chest. I wonder what Silas’s chest looks like . . . Stop! Stop stop stop stop stop—” “Right, then!” the older man says as his stopwatch beeps loudly and the scratchy sound of charcoal on paper ends. Thank you, sir, thank you—” “Annnnd next pose!” Non-Silas turns his head away, till all I can see is his wren-colored hair and his side, including a side view of . . . how many times am I going to have to draw this man’s area? What’s worse is that he looks even more like Silas now that I can’t see his eyes. Just like Silas, I bet. My eyes linger longer than necessary now that non-Silas isn’t staring straight at me. By the end of class, I’ve drawn eight mediocre pictures of him, each one with a large white void in the crotch area. The housewives compare drawings with ravenous looks in their eyes as non-Silas tugs his pants back on and leaves the room, nodding politely. I picture him naked again. I sprint from the class, abandoning my sketches—how could I explain them to Scarlett or Silas? Stop thinking of Silas, stop thinking of Silas.

Today, the 4-billion-year-old regime of natural selection is facing a completely different challenge. In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living beings. They break the laws of natural selection with impunity, unbridled even by an organism’s original characteristics. Eduardo Kac, a Brazilian bio-artist, decided in 2000 to create a new work of art: a fluorescent green rabbit. Kac contacted a French laboratory and offered it a fee to engineer a radiant bunny according to his specifications. The French scientists took a run-of-the-mill white rabbit embryo, implanted in its DNA a gene taken from a green fluorescent jellyfish, and voilà! One green fluorescent rabbit for le monsieur. Kac named the rabbit Alba. It is impossible to explain the existence of Alba through the laws of natural selection. She is the product of intelligent design. She is also a harbinger of things to come. If the potential Alba signifies is realised in full – and if humankind doesn’t annihilate itself meanwhile – the Scientific Revolution might prove itself far greater than a mere historical revolution. It may turn out to be the most important biological revolution since the appearance of life on earth. After 4 billion years of natural selection, Alba stands at the dawn of a new cosmic era, in which life will be ruled by intelligent design. If this happens, the whole of human history up to that point might, with hindsight, be reinterpreted as a process of experimentation and apprenticeship that revolutionised the game of life. Such a process should be understood from a cosmic perspective of billions of years, rather than from a human perspective of millennia. Biologists the world over are locked in battle with the intelligent-design movement, which opposes the teaching of Darwinian evolution in schools and claims that biological complexity proves there must be a creator who thought out all biological details in advance. The biologists are right about the past, but the proponents of intelligent design might, ironically, be right about the future. At the time of writing, the replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering (cyborgs are beings that combine organic with non-organic parts) or the engineering of in-organic life.

Then I looked up. I didn't notice that your ears stick out, just a little, so you look like a pixie sometimes, or an elf. I didn't notice that the corners of you mouth always seem like they're trying to smile, while the rest of your mouth wants to pout. I didn't notice the little bump on your nose, near the bridge but slightly to the right-the bump I'd trace with my finger over and over, not soon enough. I didn't notice your long hands and rough finger-tips, or the dozens-is it hundreds?-of bracelets on your left wrist, made of busted guitar strings. I noticed your eyes, because they looked wet; maybe it was a trick of the light-the fluorescent and neon lights falling over your face from the bodega next door. But I didn't think about love, and I didn't see right down to your heart. But I must have stared-did I?-because there was your spirit, right there before me, and when you found my eyes I knew I'd pulled that spirit back from someplace amazing, not Greenpoint, not the summer sidewalk in front of Fish's bar, smelling of old alcohol and piss. But it must have been a trick of the light, because when you stood up, you were smiling, and your bright eyes looked alive and right there, with me, on Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, Earth.

After a series of promotions—store manager at twenty-two, regional manager at twenty-four, director at twenty-seven—I was a fast-track career man, a personage of sorts. If I worked really hard, and if everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, then I could be a vice president by thirty-two, a senior vice president by thirty-five or forty, and a C-level executive—CFO, COO, CEO—by forty-five or fifty, followed of course by the golden parachute. I’d have it made then! I’d just have to be miserable for a few more years, to drudge through the corporate politics and bureaucracy I knew so well. Just keep climbing and don't look down. Misery, of course, encourages others to pull up a chair and stay a while. And so, five years ago, I convinced my best friend Ryan to join me on the ladder, even showed him the first rung. The ascent is exhilarating to rookies. They see limitless potential and endless possibilities, allured by the promise of bigger paychecks and sophisticated titles. What’s not to like? He too climbed the ladder, maneuvering each step with lapidary precision, becoming one of the top salespeople—and later, top sales managers—in the entire company.10 And now here we are, submerged in fluorescent light, young and ostensibly successful. A few years ago, a mentor of mine, a successful businessman named Karl, said to me, “You shouldn’t ask a man who earns twenty thousand dollars a year how to make a hundred thousand.” Perhaps this apothegm holds true for discontented men and happiness, as well. All these guys I emulate—the men I most want to be like, the VPs and executives—aren’t happy. In fact, they’re miserable.  Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people, but their careers have changed them, altered them physically and emotionally: they explode with anger over insignificant inconveniences; they are overweight and out of shape; they scowl with furrowed brows and complain constantly as if the world is conspiring against them, or they feign sham optimism which fools no one; they are on their second or third or fourth(!) marriages; and they almost all seem lonely. Utterly alone in a sea of yes-men and women. Don’t even get me started on their health issues.  I’m talking serious health issues: obesity, gout, cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, you name it. These guys are plagued with every ailment associated with stress and anxiety. Some even wear it as a morbid badge of honor, as if it’s noble or courageous or something. A coworker, a good friend of mine on a similar trajectory, recently had his first heart attack—at age thirty.  But I’m the exception, right?

I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands. Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons.

Korie: Ray’s daughter, Rachel, and I were best friends, and they were going to Phil’s house for dinner one night. They invited me to go along. I still remembered Willie from camp, so needless to say, I was just dying to go. I begged my parents to let me go with them. They said yes! I even remember what I wore at Willie’s house-a black top with fluorescent green earrings. Don’t judge…it was the eighties. When Rachel and I got to the Robertsons’ house, the first thing Phil said to us was: “Have you met my boys, Jason Silas and Willie Jess? They’ll make good husbands someday. They’re good hunters and fisherman.” I was so nervous. I couldn’t believe this was happening. The other thing I remember about walking in their home was that Phil and Kay had a sign on the door that said, “Honeymoon in progress.” Phil and Kay have never been shy about their honeymooning…another thing that shocked me about their family. Once we had eaten, Willie took us back to his room, which was actually the laundry room. He made us laugh the whole time. He would stick his thumb in his mouth and pretend that he was blowing up his muscles. He did acupressure tricks and showed us our pressure points. This was all very impressive to a couple of fifth-grade girls. After a while, I decided I was going to try to really impress Korie. I started punching the tiles on the ceiling of the laundry room, which was a trick one of my buddies taught me. I’d rear back and just punch my fist through the ceiling and busted tile would fall over onto the floor. I’m sure she was really impressed.

His world turned on its head for the second time at precisely ten eighteen p.m. He’d been taken into custody a little under ninety minutes earlier, but that had nothing to do with it. They did the job efficiently, boxing him in, two in front and two behind. Four men, swift and grim, clearly plainclothes law enforcement officers. One of the men in front of him stepped close, said something. He shook his head. ‘Non parlo Croato. Solo Italiano.’ The man nodded as if unsurprised, tipped his head: come with us. He followed the front pair to the unmarked saloon parked up on the kerb ahead. Before he got in the back he glimpsed the glitter of light off the restless water of the bay, the masts of the boats shifting in the embrace of the marina at the bottom of the hill. He glanced at his watch. Five past nine. Fifty-five minutes to go. * The room was a cliché: ivory linoleum curling at the edges, dusty fluorescent lighting strips with one bulb flickering like an eyelid with a tic, cheap wooden tabletop with metal legs bolted to the floor. The smell was of tobacco and sour sweat. He sat facing the door, alone. After seventeen minutes, at nine forty-four by the clock on the wall, the door opened. A woman came in, dark-haired, with glasses like an owl’s eyes. Two of the men who had picked him up followed her in. One seated himself in the chair. The other leaned against the wall, arms folded. She stood across the table from him, his passport grasped loosely between her fingertips like a soiled rag. Without introduction she said, her Italian accented but fluent, ‘Alberto Manta, of Lugano, Switzerland. Arrived in Zagreb on September second. Checked in at Hotel Neboder here in Rijeka the same day.

I smoothed my hospital gown and tucked my hair behind my ears. I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know it was you until now, I said. He gave me the same warm look of recognition that he’d been giving me since I was nine—but exhausted, like a warrior who has risked everything to get home, half-dead on the doorstep. Now it was unbearable that he should be lying untouched except by needles and tubes. I opened the circular doors and carefully held his hand and foot. If he died he would die forever; I would never see another Kubelko Bondy. See, this is what we do, I began, we exist in time. That’s what living is; you’re doing it right now as much as anyone. I could tell he was deciding. He was feeling it out and had come to no conclusions yet. The warm, dark place he had come from versus this bright, beepy, dry world. Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works. And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added: And it’s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal. It was like talking someone off a ledge. Of course, there’s no “right” choice. If you choose death I won’t be mad. I’ve wanted to choose it myself a few times. His giant black eyes strained upward, toward the beckoning fluorescent lights. You know what? Forget what I just said. You’re already a part of this. You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living. That is when you get to die. Not now.

As it happened, the child’s mother was a radiologist. The tumor looked malignant—the mother had already studied the scans, and now she sat in a plastic chair, under fluorescent light, devastated. “Now, Claire,” the surgeon began, softly. “Is it as bad as it looks?” the mother interrupted. “Do you think it’s cancer?” “I don’t know. What I do know—and I know you know these things, too—is that your life is about to—it already has changed. This is going to be a long haul, you understand? You have got to be there for each other, but you also have to get your rest when you need it. This kind of illness can either bring you together, or it can tear you apart. Now more than ever, you have to be there for each other. I don’t want either of you staying up all night at the bedside or never leaving the hospital. Okay?” He went on to describe the planned operation, the likely outcomes and possibilities, what decisions needed to be made now, what decisions they should start thinking about but didn’t need to decide on immediately, and what sorts of decisions they should not worry about at all yet. By the end of the conversation, the family was not at ease, but they seemed able to face the future. I had watched the parents’ faces—at first wan, dull, almost otherworldly—sharpen and focus. And as I sat there, I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context. In the actual situations where one encounters these questions, it becomes a necessarily philosophical and biological exercise. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation. While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact. In addition, to the patient and family, the brain surgery is

In any case my slow progress toward Denoon was The Kiss in reverse. He looked better the closer I got. His jaws looked bluer, although this may have been the result of seeing him more directly under the peculiar fluorescent doughnut that lit that part of the room. His superfices were good. The whites of his eyes were models of whiteness. He was smiling at Kgosetlemang—the event was to be considered over with, clearly—and I could tell that his gingivae were as good as mine, which is saying a lot. I attend to my gums. People in the bush don’t always attend to their oral hygiene, not to mention other niceties. There was no sign of that here. I of course am fanatical about my gums because my idea of what the movie I Wake Up Screaming is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she’s had to get dentures. I have very long-range anxieties.

In the nursery there is just one window, a small rectangle carved high in the wall. Some mornings the sun reaches through on its way to noon and fills the room with light. The faces of the newborns become so bright that the nurse can’t stand to look at them. The sun passes quickly, but in the minutes before the room returns to bare fluorescence, everything inside insists so baldly on its life that she must look at her shoes in embarrassment.

Come on, move it,” someone said behind me. I felt hands on my back. I hate being touched. The crowd moved forward, propelling me through two wide doors and into the terminal. This was worse. The waiting room was smaller, more crowded, and the smell of smoke, onions and French fries was stronger. Harsh fluorescent lights hurt my eyes, and sounds bounced off the low ceilings, so loud they struck me with physical force. I saw a corner approximately ten feet away. I pushed through the crowd, holding my breath so that I would not inhale the air. At last I reached the corner. I squashed

Resting his elbows on a wooden rail, he eagerly breathed in the cool, salty air. It took a few minutes for Fra Armando to notice how odd the southward rushing waters looked. The twilight-colored river had turned to blood. The Friar followed the dizzying rush of lenticular red cells, the size of loaves of bread, the amoeba-like gliding of the white cells, transparent enough to show their darkened nuclei, the snaking spiral worms that must have been malaria germs, the unusual fluorescence of lymph, the currents of glucose and protein. Fascinated and deathly tired, the Friar suddenly sensed that everything was alive, that everything lives, and that the universe does not at all operate like clockwork. Instead, it is a malleable architecture like the human body, a temple of skin, a basilica of scratches, a cenotaph of snot, with no right angles or durable materials, where the person creates his dreams, thoughts, and illusions, his time and his language like a cell secretes a hair or the crystal horn of a nail. And still, the least important cell in the universal body receives, through angel hormones and neural visions, the imperious commandments of God.

You say only one of us will come out on top,” Solo said, and then his eyes flicked to me. They seemed to be more golden than brown under the fluorescent lights, but the devilry I’d seen in them last night was still there. “It just so happens, being on top is my favorite position.” Then he winked at me—fucking winked, that asshole—and I jerked back like I’d been slapped, turning back to face the front, because was he kidding with that shit? Could he be more obvious? “No one wants to hear about your sex life, fucker,” Utah called out, causing a low chuckle to filter across the room. “I’m not talking about my sex life,” Solo replied. “In that case, I don’t care who comes out on top.” Sweet God almighty… Like I needed that thought in my head. Or that visual.

Ninety feet directly beneath the center courtyard café in the middle of the Pentagon—previously known as the Ground Zero Cafe, because when the bomb dropped that was where it would most likely detonate—there is a deep subbasement office with ferroconcrete walls and a filtered air supply, accessible by discreet elevators and staircases from all five wings of the main building. It was designed as a deep command bunker back when the worst threats were raids by long-range Luftwaffe bombers bearing conventional explosives. Obsolescent since the morning of July 16, 1945—it won’t withstand a direct ground burst from an atom bomb, much less more modern munitions—it still possesses certain uses. Being deep underground and equidistant from all the other wings, it was well suited as a switch for SCAN, the Army’s automatic switched communications system, and later for AUTOVON. AUTOVON led to ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, and the secure exchange in the basement played host to one of the first IMPs—Interface Message Processors—outside of academia. By the early 1980s a lack of rackspace led the DoD to relocate their hardened exchanges to a site closer to the 1950s-sized mainframe halls. And it was then that the empty bunker was taken over by a shadowy affiliate of the National Security Agency, tasked with waging occult warfare against the enemies of the nation. The past six months have brought some changes. There is a pentagonal main room inside the bunker, and within it there is a ceremonial maze, inscribed in blood and silver that glows with a soft fluorescence, converging on a dais at the heart of the design. The labyrinth takes the shape of a pentacle aligned with the building overhead: at each corner stands a motionless sentinel clad head to toe in occlusive silver fabric. Robed in black and crimson silk and shod in slippers of disturbingly pale leather, the Deputy Director paces her way through the maze. In her left hand she bears a jewel-capped scepter carved from the femur of a dead pope, and in her right hand she bears a gold-plated chalice made from a skull that once served Josef Stalin as an ashtray. As she walks she recites a prayer of allegiance and propitiation, its cadences and grammar those of a variant dialect of Old Enochian.

It’s green. Not a nice subdued British Racing, more Kawasaki Racing. A bilious shade of lime, bordering on fluorescent.

I love pink, every shade of it, from orangey hues like peach and coral to the vivid fluorescent hot pinks and into the purply orchids. Pink can be delicate or bold, sexy or innocent or happy.

Entombed in fluorescents

Once, while leaving a nightclub, a famous musician plucked twenty young girls off the dance floor and had them sit in a room next to his recording studio until five in the morning. He took their phones, made them sign NDAs, and put them all together, out of the way, to wait till he was done playing his new album for some friends. Then they would all party, he said. A guy I know was there, and as he was leaving, he saw the girls crowded together. He said the room looked like the DMV. I pictured the girls exhausted, with no internet or cameras or texts to distract themselves. A little drunk. I saw their push-up bras, their curls falling flat under the fluorescent lights. Why do you think they waited in that room, Steve? Maybe many years from now, maybe next week, those girls will suddenly feel upset at something and not know why. Where is this reaction coming from? They really won’t know, they won’t be able to place it, but it will be because of the way they let themselves sit in that room. The way they put on their makeup and dressed themselves up. They’ll feel small and blame no one but themselves. I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect. I was those girls in that room, waiting, trading my body and measuring my self-worth in a value system that revolves around men and their desire.

She would’ve preferred to have been anywhere else but a Walmart—it felt equal parts dystopian and apocalyptic, like this was the last big-box department store operating in the end times. Those who haunted the aisles and shelves were a motley mix: camo-clad doomsday preppers with their ass cracks showing; old white men who wore cowboy hats because apparently that was still a thing here in upstate PA; chunky girls with too-tight glitter-script spandex swallowed by hungry, hungry butt cheeks, their hair teased higher than the Tower of Babel; shuffling housewives haunted by the ghosts of regret; pock-cheeked teenagers in their Walmart vests, pushing a mop over mysterious spills. Fluorescent lights buzzed and snapped above. Somewhere, a baby wailed.

The nicest building in Patrice’s life was Lena’s Food Market off Fond Du Lac Avenue. It had shopping carts, bright fluorescent lights, and a buffed linoleum floor. Her white friends called it the ghetto grocery store, but it was one of the better markets on the North Side. And at Lena’s, Patrice never felt her existence questioned. She tried not to go to parts of the city where she did. Patrice lived four miles away from the shore of Lake Michigan: an hour on foot, a half hour by bus, fifteen minutes by car. She had never been.