Gear Down And Disappear Quotes

Mickey D’s, Mickey D’s!” Jason chanted. He was bouncing up and down in his seat. The gravely competent professional who had taken Mr. Galen’s vitals (Rob right beside him, holding the First In Bag with its airway management gear and cardiac meds) had disappeared. With his blond hair flopping in his eyes, Jason looked like

fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. (A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and double-breasted suits for men. Halley’s Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.) When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. What happened to Atari is typical in this respect. And look how Coleco Industries handled the Cabbage Patch Kids. Those homely dolls hit the market in 1983 and started to take off. Coleco’s strategy was to milk the kids for all they were worth. Hundreds of Cabbage Patch novelties flooded the toy stores. Pens, pencils, crayon boxes, games, clothing. Two years later, Coleco racked up sales of $776 million and profits of $83 million. Then the bottom dropped out of the Cabbage Patch Kids. By 1988 Coleco went into Chapter 11. Coleco died, but the kids live on. Acquired by Hasbro in 1989, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now being handled conservatively. Today they’re doing quite well.

GROW THE ACTION HABIT Practice these key points: 1. Be an activationist. Be someone who does things. Be a doer, not a don’t-er. 2. Don’t wait until conditions are perfect. They never will be. Expect future obstacles and difficulties and solve them as they arise. 3. Remember, ideas alone won’t bring success. Ideas have value only when you act upon them. 4. Use action to cure fear and gain confidence. Do what you fear, and fear disappears. Just try it and see. 5. Start your mental engine mechanically. Don’t wait for the spirit to move you. Take action, dig in, and you move the spirit. 6. Think in terms of now. Tomorrow, next week, later, and similar words often are synonymous with the failure word, never. Be an “I’m starting right now” kind of person. 7. Get down to business—pronto. Don’t waste time getting ready to act. Start acting instead. 8. Seize the initiative. Be a crusader. Pick up the ball and run. Be a volunteer. Show that you have the ability and ambition to do. Get in gear and go!

I jogged along the deck to the stern, tracking the shipwreck as it disappeared beneath our wake. Then, just as I was starting to wonder if we’d need climbing gear to get onto the island, its steep cliffs sloped down to meet us. We rounded a headland to enter a rocky half-moon bay. In the distance I saw a little harbor bobbing with colorful fishing boats, and beyond it a town set into a green bowl of land. A patchwork of sheep-speckled fields spread across hills that rose away to meet a high ridge, where a wall of clouds stood like a cotton parapet. It was dramatic and beautiful, unlike any place I’d seen. I felt a little thrill of adventure as we chugged into the bay, as if I were sighting land where maps had noted only a sweep of undistinguished blue.

Dead leaves scatter, caught and swirling in smoky exhaust. Now the hiss of hydraulic brakes, the ticking blinker, the whine of straining gears as the bus disappears down the city hill like some mechanical land-whale sounding in a concrete sea. A young soldier stands alone on the curb. She thumbs her earbuds in, cranks her music up, slings her service pack on and walks the empty morning sidewalk toward home. Passing a pawnshop, she spots her reflection in the glass and stops to look—Taller, broader, her hair shorter than before—she isn’t sure who she is, who she has become. All she knows for sure is she isn’t who she was when she left. Nobody is, and nobody ever will be. The streets are quiet, even for the early hour. A digital clock on an unfinished bank building behind her blinks mindlessly, the red numbers reversed in the glass. She’s turning to read the time when she’s caught by the flash. A bright magnesium burn in the corner of the gray sky. Bright and then brighter. Then the heat hits. She stiffens, her skin crawling with searing pain. Weightless now, she’s floating above the blinding street, a garbage can suspended beside her, its contents already aflame. When she hits

A snowball unexpectedly and painfully pounded hard into the back of my head. “Ow!” Putting my hand back there, rubbing the sore spot, I spun around and could hardly believe my eyes. My irksome brother was standing on the deck, a huge cocky grin plastered on his irritatingly handsome face. Why had I gotten stuck with the red hair and freckles like Mom while he had not a freckle in sight and had inherited Dad’s dark hair? I tried to take consolation in the fact that he wouldn’t hold on to that beautiful thick hair forever. Eventually, hopefully, it would start to disappear like Dad’s was now doing. “You’re building a snowman? What are you, like, two years old?” he taunted. I was stunned. My brain wouldn’t function, no words would come forth. Because standing right beside him, grinning as well, was . . . Brad Connor. “You’re one to talk,” I finally tossed back at him when my brain kicked into gear. “Throwing snowballs. What are you, like, one?” Okay, so maybe my brain was still in lock-down mode. It was trying to putter along, but it obviously wasn’t warmed up yet. “God, Kate, your comebacks are sharp enough to . . . well, heck, I guess they aren’t sharp.

Still, he pulled firmly at the door, knowing how it swelled and stuck in wet weather. He might have wished to see their faces once more. The face that met him was under a fireman’s helmet, lit by a flashlight held low and expertly angled. The light caught the silver needles of rain, in the air, off the rim of the black hat. It showed him a mouth and a chin and the broad shoulders under the wet rain gear without blinding him or turning the man himself into a grotesque. “I only wanted to warn you,” the man said. He moved the flashlight across his body, to the shrubs beside the steps and then to the grass and then to the weeping willow at the edge of the yard, beside the house. The streetlights were out. Following the moving beam of white light, John Keane saw the grass of his small lawn stir like a rising wave and the roots of the tree—thin as an arm, bent here and there like an elbow—breaking through. The fireman moved the light until it caught the base of the tree where a wider swath of dirt was opening like a mouth, an unhinged jaw filled with broken roots and dirt, and then it closed up again, as if with a breath. “We were driving by and saw it,” the fireman said. “That tree’s gonna fall. It’ll probably fall straight back, but you might want to get your family downstairs. Keep them to this side of the house.” He felt the wind and the rain on his bare ankles, against the hems of his thin pajama pants. He looked beyond the young fireman. In the street, there was no sign of the fire truck or car that had brought him. No coach, either. “Yes,” he said, thinking himself foolish, in his thin pajamas. “Thank you.” “There are trees down all over,” the man added. He raised his chin and in the darkness his eyes seemed as black and wet as his coat. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty. “Take care of your family,” he said, and turned, using his flashlight to get himself down the three steps that led to the door. Squinting against the rain, John Keane watched him cross the path to the sidewalk, the circle of white light leading him, first to the right and then across the street where he might have disappeared altogether, leaving only the pale beam of his flashlight and a flashing reflection of two streaks of silver on his back, and then, as he apparently rounded the opposite corner, not even that.

When I am mentally healthy, I am integrated and woven into the world to such an extent that my body and my feelings remain largely hidden from me. They disappear in the practical flow of my daily life because I am already geared to my situation, seamlessly living through the medium of my body without explicitly reflecting on it. In this state of everydayness, there is no separation between self and world; the world appears spontaneously to me as something that I understand, that I belong to, and am 'at home' in. It shows up as real, secure, and reliable, and others show up for me as equally real, secure, and reliable. In this state, I have what Laing calls "ontological security". Secure in my being, I can pre-reflectively move through the world, handle various situations, and affectively involve myself in the lives of others. From the perspective of existential therapy, psychopathology begins to emerge when this embodied connection breaks down, shattering my sense of self. Without the unified bond of being-in-the-world to integrate and hold my identity together, I feel as if I am losing myself, as if I am becoming nothing. Existentialists usually refer to this uncanny dissolution of the self in terms of 'anxiety' or Angst.

am gearing up to do the transport,” George said. “Have you looked out at the street lately?” Joanna hadn’t, but now she did—she turned and looked. To her amazement, on both sides of the street behind her stood two unbroken lines of officers, some in uniform, some not. The lines stretched from the house next door to the Beasleys’ and from the one across the street down the hill and all the way around the next curve, where they finally disappeared from sight. The officers close enough for Joanna to see were standing at ease. They had assembled throughout the night in solemn silence. Speaking in hushed tones, they had organized themselves at a distance that was far enough away from the crime scene so as not to interfere. Now, in the welcome cool before dawn, they simply stood and waited. “Who are they?” Joanna wanted to know. “Where did these people come from?” “I have no idea,” George answered, “but those guys didn’t come here to watch my van drive down the street. They came to pay their respects to a fellow fallen officer, and we’re going to let them do it.