Hardware Store Quotes

Also, I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can’t improve on duct tape.

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

It was ironic, really - you want to die because you can't be bothered to go on living - but then you're expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops. And if you've managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.

...Where does she get her supplies?" Winston held his gaze. Blinked. Licked his lips. Opened his mouth. Hesitated. Swallowed. Coughed. Finally responded, "The hardware store?" "The hardware store?" "Yes." Winston's head bobbed. "That's where she gets her stuff." "Is that code for something?" "No? Just the hardware store." ... "Any specific hardware store?" Asked Adrian. "Hmmm." Winston seemed to consider this. Then, "Nope. She likes them all.

Reading well adds to our life—not in the way a tool from the hardware store adds to our life, for a tool does us no good once lost or broken, but in the way a friendship adds to our life, altering us forever.

I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't; I didn't know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn't want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I'd made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that.

What Do Women Want?" I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what's underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment from its hanger like I'm choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, it'll be the goddamned dress they bury me in.

You were going to the hardware store for milk again,” said Dr. Mahjoub.

I’m going to love her in all the quiet ways, the slow ways, the loud and obnoxious ways. My heart has been moving steadily in that direction since she fell down the steps of a hardware store, right into my arms.

Children of Maeve reproducing with children of Titania wasn’t like apples mixing with oranges—it was more like apples mixing with cheese graters, or rainbows with hardware stores.

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

H is for Hardware store: I'd rather go to the hardware store than the opera. And I like the opera.

Well did you call the hypothetical hardware store and buy a theoretical chainsaw?-- Pam to Jessica, True Blood

man who goes to a hardware store to buy a power drill doesn’t really need a drill—he needs holes. He

Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him. He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs-you know the type. And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face. On the follow-through of the last swing, though, the handle of the ax snaps in a spray of splinters. You now have a broken ax. So, after a long night of looking for a place to dump the man and his head, you take a trip into town with your ax. You go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the broken handle as barbecue sauce. You walk out with a brand-new handle for your ax. The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your garage until the spring when, on one rainy morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the blade. Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store. They sell you a brand-new head for your ax. As soon as you get home, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded earlier. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed-trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life. You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same ax that beheaded me!” IS HE RIGHT?

But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others—one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.

I’ve always judged places and times by how lonely they felt. The entire Midwest, for example, strikes me as horrifically lonely, Indiana more so than Wisconsin and Wisconsin more so than Ohio or Illinois. Coasts are dependably less lonely than inland areas while the warmer latitudes are noticeably less lonely than the colder ones. Hardware stores feel lonely while bookstores do not. Mornings are lonelier than afternoons, while the hours before dawn can be devastating. Vienna is lonelier than Paris or London, while Los Angeles is lonelier than San Francisco or Boston. The Atlantic Ocean is lonelier than the Pacific while the Caribbean is not lonely at all...

But who's ever safe? Down below us are the kind of people who walk armed into churches and movie theaters and through libraries, blast fevers into federal buildings, and build bombs out of things they bought cheap at a hardware store. What kind of myth is it, that people like them are keeping the rest of us safe?

One thing I have in abundance here are bags. They’re not much different from kitchen trash bags, though I’m sure they cost $50,000 because of NASA… Also, I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can’t improve on duct tape.

But had it been the wine? Maybe it was something else. I was no math expert, but this was an intoxicating equation: Hot Guy with Mysterious Past + Way With Pretty Words x Chivalry at Beach / His Aloofness at Coffee Shop (Immunity to My Face & Flirty Efforts) + Innuendo at Hardware Store x Honest Confession about OCD Struggles —> Curiosity + Arousal (Belly Flutters + Pulse Quickening)=ATTACKISS.

Other girls carried tasers or pepper spray for safety. Rosa had bought herself a stapler in a hardware store on the corner of Baltic and Clinton Streets. Her thinking was simple. An electric shock is nasty but leaves no marks. With her method, though, she could put two or three staples into any attacker’s body. Then he’d have to stop and decide whether to tangle with her or start getting the staples out of his skin.

Soul has been demoted to a new-age spiritual fantasy or a missionary's booty, and nature has been treated , at best, as a postcard or a vacation backdrop or, more commonly, as a hardware store or refuse heap. Too many of us lack intimacy with the natural world and with our souls, and consequently we are doing untold damage to both.

He could not elucidate it any further for her, and they drove on to the big hardware store. It had only a few customers, and very few assistants. They left the baby in the car and went through to the gardening department, and searched some time for an assistant

Turns out faerie-proofing a person required a length of chain that one could find in any hardware store...

I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can’t improve on duct tape.

When he left the hardware store with the order inside his suitcase, he felt that all moments of happiness, large and small, deserved to be projected into a town square.

He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customers' families and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote 'cancer' after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word 'cancer' and wrote 'dead' there. "And I say thank God when they're dead," the salesman said; "that's one less to remember.

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...

There is a moral sturdiness to (hardware store owner) Charley that isn't advertised or boasted about, but is obvious to all who know him and quickly discerned by those who don't. Our country has lately been afflicted with television preachers and pundits who focus on our families while neglecting theirs. How vainglorious these critics seem, how vacuous and shallow they appear when placed alongside a man of Charley's stature.

It’s not my responsibility to get to the bottom of why my mom’s so unhappy. Nor is it on me to teach my dad how to parent. I love them and I forgive them, but I don’t go to the hardware store looking for orange juice and I don’t expect them to give me things they don’t have. I give myself permission not to spend time with them.

She and Neal had decorated that house together. They'd gone to the hardware store every weekend for a year to argue about paint. Georgie would always choose the most saturated color on the card. "You can't always pick the bottom color," Neal would say. "But the bottom color makes all the other colors look dull." "You're looking at them wrong." "How is that possible?

In a hardware store, a man only had to drop the barest hint about his project and dudes started pouring out of the aisles touting their best advice. This was a ritual that saved men from having to actually ask for help while also making other men feel useful.

I waited in vain for someone like me to stand up and say that the only thing those of us who don't believe in god have to believe is in other people and that New York City is the best place there ever was for a godless person to practice her moral code. I think it has to do with the crowded sidewalks and subways. Walking to and from the hardware store requires the push and pull of selfishness and selflessness, taking turns between getting out of someone's way and them getting out of yours, waiting for a dog to move, helping a stroller up steps, protecting the eyes from runaway umbrellas. Walking in New York is a battle of the wills, a balance of aggression and kindness. I'm not saying it's always easy. The occasional "Watch where you're going, bitch" can, I admit, put a crimp in one's day. But I believe all that choreography has made me a better person. The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens, and I kept whispering under my breath "we the people, we the people" over and over again, reminding myself we're all in this together and they had as much right - exactly as much right - as I to be in the muggy underground on their way to wherever they were on their way to.

They had pulled me from the hemorrhaging, dying body of my mother and turned me over to the care of the man who was not my father. He had taken me home to their tiny apartment above the old hardware store and done what little he knew to take care of me. It took less than six weeks for him to realize his mistake. Maybe even less than six hours, but he never abandoned me. He clung to me as though I was the last remnant of some great and powerful love. And that gave me hope that maybe my mother was really something else and not just some girl who got knocked up by a guy whose name she didn’t even know. She was something special, someone worthy of a man’s loyalty and devotion. --Rocky Evans

I have to go.' 'Just be careful about your expectations..' 'I want her to apologize.' 'Sweetheart,' Jean said, 'your mother is never going to apologize... Go see her if you need to. But remember who she is. Going to your mother for understanding is like going to the hardware store for bread.

local man who ran a hardware store in nearby Belleville,

Remember that rabbit-proof fencing you told me about? You get that at a hardware store or is it special order?

You can't get milk from a hardware store. So stop asking for something that can't be given. And look for what is offered.

You can’t get milk from a hardware store. So stop asking for something that can’t be given. And look for what is offered. She saw the fork of food, and the thin lips that rarely smiled at them, blowing on it.

obsessed with the phrase. “It’s hard to explain the commercial uses to a five-year-old. We bought some after a rainstorm at the local hardware store one time, and it stunk up the car. She’s never forgotten.” He edged closer and rubbed her cheek with his thumb, igniting forest fires in the dark woods of her

I guess getting out of homelessness doesn’t happen all at once, either. We were lucky. Some people live in their cars for years. I’m not looking on the bright side. It was pretty scary. And stinky. But my parents took care of us the best they could. After a month, my dad got a part-time job at a hardware store. My mom picked up some extra waitressing shifts, and my dad kept singing for tips. Every time his fishing sign got wet, I made him a new one. Slowly they started saving money, bit by bit, to pay for a rental deposit on an apartment. It was sort of like getting over a cold. Sometimes you feel like you’ll never stop coughing. Other times you’re sure tomorrow is the day you’ll definitely be well.

I imagined, the Main Street of small-town America. I instead found ghost towns. My footsteps echoed down small-town Main Streets. On one, a pharmacist left a note in the window of her store. She had enjoyed serving the town, she wrote, but couldn’t hang on anymore and she hoped they’d understand why she was leaving like all the rest. She left no forwarding address. Walmart was often the only place to buy most of life’s essentials in these heartland towns. Strolling their Walmarts, I imagined its aisles haunted by the ghosts of store owners who once sustained small-town America. On one aisle was the departed local grocer, down another the former hardware store owner, next to that, the woman’s clothier or that long-gone pharmacist.

Now that we know that Spring Roll is a girl, we should probably think about setting up her room. Gabriel kept his eyes on the road as he drove the Volvo one Saturday morning in May. We should also talk about names. That sounds good. Maybe you should think about what you want and we can go shopping. Julia turned to look at him. Now? I said I'd take you to lunch, and we can do that. But afterward, we need to start thinking about Spring Roll's room. We want it to be attractive, but functional. Something comfortable for you and for her, but not juvenile. She's a baby, Gabriel. Her stuff is going to be juvenile. You know what I mean. I want it to be elegant and not look like a preschool. Good grief. Julia fought a grin as she began imagining what the Professor would design. (Argyle patterns, dark wood, and chocolate brown leather immediately came to mind.) He cleared his throat. I might have done some searching on the Internet. Oh, really? From where? Restoration Hardware? Of course not. He bristled. Their things wouldn't be appropriate for a baby's room. So where then? He gazed at her triumphantly. Pottery Barn Kids. Julia groaned. We've become yuppies. Gabriel stared at her in mock horror. Why do you say that? We're driving a Volvo and talking about shopping at Pottery Barn. First of all, Volvos have an excellent safety rating and they're more attractive than a minivan. Secondly, Pottery Barn's furniture happens to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing. I'd like to take you to one their stores so you can see for yourself. As long as we get Thai food first. Now it was Gabriel's turn to roll his eyes. Fine. But we're ordering takeout and taking it to the park for a picnic. And I'm having Indian food, instead. If I see another plate of pad Thai, I'm going to lose it. Julia burst into peals of laughter.

Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this: In Dwayne's part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people caught in between. Criminals would point guns at people and say, "Give me all your money," and the people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, "Stop" or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on. In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn't want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the difference between right and wrong. · Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew the airplane to someplace else.

At the end of the piece, Reverend Alban rose and approached the lectern again. He placed his fingertips together. “I didn’t know Mrs. Whitshank,” he said, “and therefore I don’t have the memories that the rest of you have. But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others—one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.

Anyone who enters the room affects it. Leaves an impression upon it even if it is unintentional. Quietly opening the door lets a soft draft rustle over the objects inside. A tree might topple. A doll might lose its hat. An entire building might crumble. An ill-placed step might crush the hardware store. A sleeve could catch on the top of a castle, sending a princess tumbling to the ground below. It is a fragile place.

Wedged in the foot-wide space between the hardware store and the beauty parlor was a tiny body, aimed out at the sidewalk. As if she were just sitting and waiting for us, brown eyes wide open. I recognized the wild curls. But the grin was gone. Natalie Keene’s lips caved in around her gums in a small circle. She looked like a plastic baby doll, the kind with a built-in hole for bottle feedings. Natalie had no teeth now.

Since she was a scrappy little Hampden girl whose father owned one of those hardware stores where you walk in off the street and say, ‘Oh, my God! I’m so sorry! I seem to be in somebody’s basement!’ Shovels and rakes and wheelbarrows crowded up close together, coils of rope and lengths of chain hanging down from this really low ceiling you could practically bump your head on, and a tabby cat sound asleep on a sack of grass seed.

They steered south. Gordita Beach emerged from the haze, gently flaking away in the salt breezes, the ramshackle town in a spill of weather-beaten colors, like paint chips at some out-of-the-way hardware store, and the hillside up to Dunecrest, which Doc had always thought of, especially after nights of excess, as steep, a grade everybody sooner or later wiped their clutch trying to get up and out of town on, looking from out here strangely flat, hardly there at all.

dashed across streets without looking, they got horsing around in the lake and suddenly realized they had floated far past their depth on their rubber rafts and had to paddle back, they fell off monkey-bars on their asses and out of trees on their heads. Now, standing here in the fading drizzle in front of a Trustworthy Hardware Store that had been a pawnshop in 1958 (Frati Brothers, Ben recalled, the double windows always full of pistols and rifles and straight-razors and guitars hung up by their necks like exotic animals), it occurred to him that kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world. Miracles both bright and dark were to be taken into consideration, oh yes, most certainly, but they by no means stopped the world. A sudden upheaval of beauty or terror at ten did not preclude an extra cheesedog or two for lunch at noon.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.

china plate by a pool of its own wax. A standard household item, a few cents at the hardware store, but it felt as bright as the sun. Croselli said, “You.” Reacher said nothing. Croselli had shed his jacket and pulled down his tie, but his shirt was still wet. He said, “I was expecting Hemingway. What are you tonight, her knight in shining armor? Is she sending a boy to do a man’s job?” Is he armed? Reacher had asked. Not in the city, Hemingway had said. He can’t afford to be. Not

—I've always liked hardware stores. All the glues and the garbage pails and the adzes and insect zappers. Makes you feel good. Some people think hardware stores are testaments to decay. Proofs that the creation exists to unmake itself, that everything's heading drainward. Negative. Just take a look, and all those stores are arguing precisely the opposite - that the world can be made better, significantly better, in, like, endless numbers of ways. They're seriously optimistic places—

Lifting a sabre-saw, feeling the heft of it, Mickelsson recognized his hand as his father's hand. They were the same size and shape and had much the same freckled redness; the only real difference was that his father's hand had always been barked, scabbed, cracked, and calloused, always at least one fingernail discolored by some mishap. He remembered a chest his uncle and father had let him help them make when he was seven or so, a pine chest longer and deeper than a coffin, no nails or screws, just wooden pegs, locust. It had served as a windowseat through most of his childhood; later they'd used it to hold cow-feed. In the bright, pleasant-smelling hardware store, the discovery that his father and uncle, all those years, had been playing, enjoying themselves—making art, in a way—came over Mickelsson like an awakening. He felt an extravagant inclination to pity himself. What foolishness his life was, in comparison to theirs! But the likeness of his hand to his father's hand distracted him, made him feel, almost unwillingly, a surge of joy.

Another memory comes, not of the final time I saw Ligeia but a week before she disappeared, something mundane yet vivid. The mystery of memory. There's surely some scientific explanation for why the brain decides Don't let go of this. I've read novels and cannot recall a single character's name and yet I remember a red bicycle glanced once in a hardware-store window, a mole on a stranger's chin, a kitchen match lying beside a hearth. These remain, as does Ligeia reaching into her locker, a book crooked in her arm sliding free.

I personally have seen flamingos throughout the state of Utah perched proudly on lawns and in the gravel gardens of trailer courts. These flamingos, of course, are not Phoenicopterus ruber, but pink, plastic flamingos that can easily be purchased at any hardware store. It is curious that we need to create an environment foreign from our own. In 1985, over 450,000 plastic flamingos were purchased in the United States. And the number is rising. Pink flamingos teetering on suburban lawns - our unnatural link to the natural world.

He had decided before the accident not to chase them anymore, but the circumstances of the accident made him fear for Lilia's safety. he would never bring her in, not anymore; all he wanted now was to watch over her. Michaela had been reading his notes for years, but his notes were only part of it: the other part was the way he woke up at night in his bed in Montreal and knew where Lilia was, the way he could glance at a map of the United Staes and realize with absolute, inexplicable certainty that she was in West Virginia, the way he tried to ignore his terrifying clairvoyance and forget where she was and couldn't, the way he knew where she was but had to keep driving south to check, the horror of always being right: he saw her face in the crowd on Sunset Boulevard, he stepped into a hardware store in St. Louis at the moment she stepped out of the deli across the street, he stood on a corner in a run-down neighborhood in Chicago and watched her emerge from an apartment building down the block. After each sighting he returned north more depleted, more frightened, less intact.

Tell you what,” A.J. offered. “I’ve got some errands to run today. We’ll hijack the truck and pick up a new one together.” “You askin’ me on a date?” Chester asked wolfishly. “I suppose I am.” “You buyin’ or am I?” “If you’re talking about the wheelbarrow, I am,” Devlin interjected. “But what about food? If it’s a date, ya need food.” “Probably not a lot of that at the local hardware store,” A.J. said with a grin. “Considering your days of eating nails are over with.” “Well, I’ll pay for lunch if we go to the Pick a’ the Chicken.” “Okay, but you should know, I don’t kiss on the first date.” “Neither do I.

You know what else I haven’t seen? Home stores. I’ve not passed the equivalent of Restoration Hardware or Crate and Barrel or Pottery Barn, so I get the feeling that no one’s killing themselves working double shifts so they can consume stuff to make their homes Pinterest-perfect. Maybe the Roman message is to not let your stuff own you.

I have this example of what I call the “hardware store hammer”: A woman is in a hardware store and picks up a hammer. When she is checking out, the shop owner says, “What are you going to use this hammer for?” And she says, “My husband told me to buy a hammer. We’re putting up some pictures in the kitchen.” The owner might say, “Okay. But this is a professional carpenter’s hammer. For your purpose, that one over there would do just fine, and it’s a third the price.” That’s the difference between a relationship and a transaction. If you have a concern that other people do well for themselves, then I think you want this level of honesty. But our society might be losing that.

Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience, combining sleek hardware with an easy-to-use digital bookstore. “We are going to hire our way to having the talent,” he told his executives in that meeting. “I absolutely know it’s very hard. We’ll learn how to do it.

The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of "individual choices." The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available "common" spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities. By way of illustration, let's take a familiar scenario: Walmart or some other megastore decides to open one of its facilities in a municipality. Developers are happy, politicians welcome the new investment, and consumers are pleased at finding a wide variety of goods at lower prices. But what are the social impacts? Locally owned and operated small businesses cannot compete with the marketing behemoth and must close. People lose their jobs or must find new work for lower pay. Neighborhoods are stripped of the familiar hardware store, pharmacy, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all — why bother, when you can order online? No wonder international surveys show a rise in loneliness. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as lonely has doubled from 20 to 40 percent since the 1980s, the New York Times reported in 2016. Alarmed by the health ravages, Britain has even found it necessary to appoint a minister of loneliness. Describing the systemic founts of loneliness, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: "Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase." It is easy to miss the point that what Dr. Murthy calls "our twenty-first-century world" is no abstract entity, but the concrete manifestation of a particular socioeconomic system, a distinct worldview, and a way of life.

Twelve-step programs are rife with mottoes that people repeat solemnly as if rhyming, repetition, and puns are the equivalent of wisdom. Nothing changes if nothing changes. Come for the vanity, stay for the sanity. If you hang around the hardware store, you’re going to eventually buy a hammer. If I may, I’d like to pitch a few more twelve-step slogans to the worldwide fellowship: Hogs log, get out and jog! (IT HAS TO MAKE SENSE? Oh, okay—I thought wisdom was more about rhyming!) If I’m not calling, I’m stalling, and that leads to bawling and hauling. Drugs and ass got me here, but free coffee gave me a ride home. Booze is dumb and I’m no dummy! So how do I reconcile my atheist hypocrisy while still attending these groups? My favorite twelve-step slogan is Take what you want and leave the rest. This one slogan is how I’m able to rationalize my attendance and constant rule-breaking. And,

Here are some of the things I learned while living in New York: That you shouldn’t interpret direct and efficient communication as rudeness. That a sidewalk operates by the same rules as a highway: if you walk slow, walk in the right lane, and if you have to stop, pull over. I learned that once the late June sunshine hits the streets, pretty girls in summer dresses come out of the woodwork. I also learned that summer brings with it the inescapable smell of marinating garbage and human urine. In the city, you can get weed delivered to your front door by a hipster on a bicycle or pick up a screwdriver in the dead of the night at a twenty-four-hour hardware store. I learned that the city has resilience like no other city during natural (or man-made) disasters, and that the people of New York generally coexist peacefully, which is impressive, considering there are 27,352 people per square mile.

Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”? It could be as simple as “Take the Hawaii vacation,” “Handle situation with customer X,” “Resolve college situation with Susan,” “Clarify new divisional management structure,” “Implement new investment strategy,” or “Research options for dealing with Manuel’s reading issue.” All clear? Great. Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now? Would you call or text someone? Write an e-mail? Take pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Surf the Web for data? Buy nails at the hardware store? Talk about it face-to-face with your partner, your assistant, your attorney, or your boss? What? Got the answer to that?

REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve in 1955. REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell. RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple’s stores. JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs’s Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee. JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar. DAN’L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT. MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, a father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director. PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone business. LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs’s father figure. JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN. Worked with Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer at Apple in 1997. MIKE SCOTT. Brought in by Markkula to be Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs.

Thus, no matter where you live in New York City, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar (where you write your order on a pad outside as you walk by), a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen (beer and sandwiches delivered at any hour to your door), a flower shop, an undertaker's parlor, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a haberdasher, a tailor, a drug-store, a garage, a tearoom, a saloon, a hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop. Every block or two, in most residential sections of New York, is a little main street. A man starts for work in the morning and before he has gone two hundred yards he has completed half a dozen missions: bought a paper, left a pair of shoes to be soled, picked up a pack of cigarettes, ordered a bottle of whiskey to be dispatched in the opposite direction against his home-coming, written a message to the unseen forces of the wood cellar, and notified the dry cleaner that a pair of trousers awaits call. Homeward bound eight hours later, he buys a bunch of pussy willows, a Mazda bulb, a drink, a shine-- all between the corner where he steps off the bus and his apartment.

To understand hardware and software (as applied to the human brain) perform the following meditation. Sit in a room where you will not be disturbed for a half hour and begin thinking, “I am sitting in this room doing this exercize because . . .“ and list as many of the “causes” as you can think of. For instance, you are doing this exercize because, obviously, you read about it in this book. Why did you buy this book? Did somebody recommend it? How did that person come into your life? If you just picked the book up in a store, why did you happen to be in just that store on just that day? Why do you read books of this sort — on psychology, consciousness, evolution etc.? How did you get interested in those fields? Who turned you on, and how long ago? What factors in your childhood inclined you to be interested in these subjects later? Why are you doing this exercize in this room and not elsewhere? Why did you buy or rent this house or apartment? Why are you in this city and not another? Why on this continent and not another? Why are you here at all — that is, how did your parents meet? Did they consciously decide to have a child, do you happen to know, or were you an accident? What cities were they born in? If in different cities, why did they move in space-time so that their paths would intersect? Why is this planet capable of supporting life, and why did it produce the kind of life that would dream up an exercize of this sort? Repeat this exercize a few days later, trying to ask and answer fifty questions you didn’t think of the first time. (Note that you cannot ever ask all possible questions.) Avoid all metaphysical speculations (e.g., karma, reincarnation, “destiny” etc.). The point of the exercize will be mind-blowing enough without introducing “occult” theories, and it will be more startling if you carefully avoid such overtly “mystical” speculations.

-- What a fool I was. "Want To Be a Little Off-Beat?" Here's ten ways, the article said. A lilac door was one. So off I tripped to the nearest hardware store to assert my unique individuality with the same tin of paint as two million other dimwits. Conned into idiocy. My mind is full of trivialities. At lunch Ian said Duncan's piece of cake is miles bigger than mine -- it's not fair, and I roared that they should quit bothering me with trivialities. So when they're at school, do I settle down with the plays of Sophocles? I do not. I think about the color of my front door. That's being unfair to myself. I took that course, Ancient Greek Drama, last winter. Yeh, I took it all right. Young academic generously giving up his Thursday evenings in the cause of adult education. Mrs. MacAindra, I don't think you've got quite the right slant on Clytemnestra. Why not? The king sacrificed their youngest daughter for success in war-- what's the queen supposed to do, shout for joy? That's not quite the point we're discussing, is it? She murdered her husband, Mrs. MacAindra, (Oh God, don't you think I know that? The poor bitch.) Yeh well I guess you must know, Dr. Thorne. Sorry. Oh, that's fine -- I always try to encourage people to express themselves. -- Young twerp. Let somebody try killing one of his daughters. But still, he had his Ph.D. What do I have? Grade Eleven. My own fault....

The creative imitator looks at products or services from the viewpoint of the customer. IBM’s personal computer is practically indistinguishable from the Apple in its technical features, but IBM from the beginning offered the customer programs and software. Apple maintained traditional computer distribution through specialty stores. IBM—in a radical break with its own traditions—developed all kinds of distribution channels, specialty stores, major retailers like Sears, Roebuck, its own retail stores, and so on. It made it easy for the consumer to buy and it made it easy for the consumer to use the product. These, rather than hardware features, were the “innovations” that gave IBM the personal computer market.

When we talk about finding or having found our soul mate (if we do), we do not believe ourselves to be immersed in the capitalist economy. But this is an even more important terrain for capitalism than the convenience store where we buy a soda and candy bar or the stock exchange floor where companies are financed. The idea of the soul mate plays a crucial role in the promulgation of consumption. If I believe that a perfect commodity exists in the romantic field, this changes my relationship to all commodities. Commodities become more attractive insofar as each one stands in for the perfect partner. Though a hammer at the hardware store most likely cannot function as my soul mate, I will find more pleasure in purchasing it with the idea of an ideal commodity informing the purchase, and this is what the soul mate provides. That is to say, the idea of the soul mate underwrites all consumption within the capitalist universe. The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement. This is why the idea of the soul mate has such importance for capitalism. The subject experiences itself as lacking whenever it desires, and no object can fill this lack. But the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack. No such complement exists outside of ideological fantasies, but capitalism requires subjects who invest themselves in such fantasies.

I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.”“Did you catch many?” I asked.“Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.”“Why is that?” I asked.“Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.

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

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

I thought we were meeting by the field house,” I call out as I make my way over. He doesn’t even turn around. “Nah, I’m pretty sure I said the parking lot.” “You definitely said the field house,” I argue. Why can’t he ever just admit that he’s wrong? “Geez, field house, parking lot. What difference does it make?” Mason asks. “Give it a rest, why don’t you.” I shoot him a glare. “Oh, hey, Mason. Remember when your hair was long and everyone thought you were a girl?” Ryder chuckles as he releases a perfect spiral in Mason’s direction. “She’s got you there.” “Hey, whose side are you on, anyway?” Mason catches the ball and cradles it against his chest, then launches it toward Ben. I just stand there watching as they continue to toss it back and forth between the three of them. Haven’t they had enough football for one day? I pull out my cell to check the time. “We should probably get going.” “I guess,” Ryder says with an exaggerated sigh, like I’m putting him out or something. Which is particularly annoying since he’s the one who insisted on going with me. Ben jogs up beside me, the football tucked beneath his arm. “Where are you two off to? Whoa, you’re sweaty.” I fold my arms across my damp chest. “Hey, southern girls don’t sweat. We glow.” Ben snorts at that. “Says who?” “Says Ryder’s mom,” I say with a grin. It’s one of Laura Grace’s favorite sayings--one that always makes Ryder wince. “The hardware store,” Ryder answers, snatching the ball back from Ben. “Gotta pick up some things for the storm--sandbags and stuff like that. Y’all want to come?” “Nah, I think I’ll pass.” Mason wrinkles his nose. “Pretty sure I don’t want to be cooped up in the truck with Jemma glowing like she is right now.” “Everybody thought you and Morgan were identical twin girls,” I say with a smirk. “Remember, Mason? Isn’t that just so cute?” “I’ll go,” Ben chimes in. “If you’re getting sandbags, you’ll need some help carrying them out to the truck.” “Thanks, Ben. See, someone’s a gentleman.” “Don’t look now, Ryder, but your one-woman fan club is over there.” Mason tips his head toward the school building in the distance. “I think she’s scented you out. Quick. You better run.” I glance over my shoulder to find Rosie standing on the sidewalk by the building’s double doors, looking around hopefully. “Hey!” Mason calls out, waving both arms above his head. “He’s over here.” Ryder’s cheeks turn beet-red. He just stares at the ground, his jaw working furiously. “C’mon, man,” Ben says, throwing an elbow into Mason’s side. “Don’t be a dick.” He grabs the football and heads toward Ryder’s Durango. “We better get going. The hardware store probably closes at six.” Silently, Ryder and I hurry after him and hop inside the truck--Ben up front, me in the backseat. We don’t look back to see if Rosie’s following.

So,” I cleared my throat, unable to tolerate his moans of pleasure and praise any longer, “uh, what are your plans for the weekend?” “The weekend?” He sounded a bit dazed. “Yes. This weekend. What do you have planned? Planning on busting up any parties?” I asked lightly, not wanting him to know that I was unaccountably breathless. I moved to his other knee and discarded the towel. “Ha. No. Not unless those wankers down the hall give me a reason to.” Removing his arms from his face, Bryan’s voice was thick, gravelly as he responded, “I, uh, have some furniture to assemble.” “Really?” Surprised, I stilled and stared at the line of his jaw. The creases around his mouth—when he held perfectly still—made him look mature and distinguished. Actually, they made him even more classically handsome, if that was even possible. “Yes. Really. Two IKEA bookshelves.” I slid my hands lower, behind his ankle, waiting for him to continue. When he didn’t, I prompted, “That’s it?” “No.” He sighed, hesitated, then added, “I need to stop by the hardware store. The tap in my bathroom is leaking and one of the drawer handles in the kitchen is missing a screw. I just repainted the guest room, so I have to take the excess paint cans to the chemical disposal place; it’s only open on Saturdays before noon. And then I promised my mam I’d take her to dinner.” My mouth parted slightly because the oddest thing happened as he rattled off his list of chores. It turned me on. Even more so than running my palms over his luscious legs. That’s right. His list of adult tasks made my heart flutter. I rolled my lips between my teeth, not wanting to blurt that I also needed to go to the hardware store over the weekend. As a treat to myself, I was planning to organize Patrick’s closet and wanted to install shelves above the clothes rack. Truly, Sean’s penchant for buying my son designer suits and ties was completely out of hand. Without some reorganization, I would run out of space. That’s right. Organizing closets was something I loved to do. I couldn’t get enough of those home and garden shows, especially Tiny Houses, because I adored clever uses for small spaces. I was just freaky enough to admit my passion for storage and organization. But back to Bryan and his moans of pleasure, adult chores, and luscious legs. I would not think about Bryan Leech adulting. I would not think about him walking into the hardware store in his sensible shoes and plain gray T-shirt—that would of course pull tightly over his impressive pectoral muscles—and then peruse the aisles for . . . a screw. I. Would. Not. Ignoring the spark of kinship, I set to work on his knee, again counting to distract myself. It worked until he volunteered, “I’d like to install some shelves in my closet, but that’ll have to wait until next weekend. Honestly, I’ve been putting it off. I’d do just about anything to get someone to help me organize my closet.” He chuckled. I’d like to organize your closet. I fought a groan, biting my lip as I removed my hands, turned from his body, and rinsed them under the faucet. “We’re, uh, finished for today.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Walk down a hallway, end up in a ballroom, double glass doors to a subway station, third exit on the left goes to a hardware store that sells only hammers. No screwdrivers, no chisels, not even any nails—just hammers. You’d be surprised how many problems you can solve with a hammer if you really put your mind to it.

I thought I’d been getting along fine with the weekend visits and occasional summer sleepovers, but suddenly I was aware of all I’d missed, the little intimate everyday things that amounted to a real relationship. I remembered Dad tucking me in at night when I was little, sitting next to me on the couch watching TV, taking me to the hardware store with him to buy some small item he needed and, afterward, stopping off to get an ice cream cone. Despite everything everyone said about spending “quality time” with kids, I realized that it was “quantity time” that was more important. I never cared what I did with my dad, I just wanted to be with him for as much time as possible.

Don’t go to the hardware store for milk.

Outside, Julie locked up the house and she and Sam climbed into her truck. She realized she had no idea whatsoever where to find the hardware store, so she grabbed her GPS from the glove compartment and snapped it into the dash mount. She searched, and found the only hardware store for miles around. She figured it had to be the one Gloria had mentioned. The town of Dupont was so small that Julie assumed it probably had only one of every kind of store.

Communication is at the root of all business strengths—and weaknesses. When things go wrong and employees become upset, whether at a restaurant, a law firm, a hardware store, a university, or a major corporation, nine times out of ten the justifiable complaint is, “We need to communicate more effectively.” I admit that for many years, I didn’t really know what this meant. I had no problem standing up in front of a group to give a talk. I thought I was a pretty good communicator, but then it dawned on me: communicating has as much to do with context as it does content. That’s called setting the table. Understanding who needs to know what, when people need to know it, and why, and then presenting that information in an entirely comprehensible way is a sine qua non of great leadership. Clear, timely communication is the key to applying constant, gentle pressure. To illustrate the point, I teach our managers about the “lily pad” theory. Imagine a pond filled with lily pads and a frog perched serenely atop each one. For the fun of it, a little boy tosses a small pebble into the water, which breaks the surface of the pond but causes just a tiny ripple. The frogs barely notice, and don’t budge. Enjoying himself, the boy next tosses a larger stone into the center of the pond, sending stronger ripples that cause all of the lily pads to rock and tilt. Some frogs jump off their lily pads, while others cling to avoid falling off. But the ripples affect them all. Not content, the boy then hurls a huge rock, which creates a wave that knocks each and every frog into the water. Some frogs are frightened. All are angry (assuming that frogs get angry). If only the frogs had had some warning about the impending rock toss, each one could have timed its jump so that the wave would have had no serious impact. Grasping the lily pad theory and training yourself and your managers to implement it prevents many, if not all, communication problems.

This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0. High intelligence requires both lots of hardware (made of atoms) and lots of software (made of bits). The fact that most of our human hardware is added after birth (through growth) is useful, since our ultimate size isn’t limited by the width of our mom’s birth canal. In the same way, the fact that most of our human software is added after birth (through learning) is useful, since our ultimate intelligence isn’t limited by how much information can be transmitted to us at conception via our DNA, 1.0-style. I weigh about twenty-five times more than when I was born, and the synaptic connections that link the neurons in my brain can store about a hundred thousand times more information than the DNA that I was born with. Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download. So it’s physically impossible for an infant to be born speaking perfect English and ready to ace her college entrance exams: there’s no way the information could have been preloaded into her brain, since the main information module she got from her parents (her DNA) lacks sufficient information-storage capacity.

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Well what would you have us do, Jason? Swan into a hardware store without any cash and say “give us your best rack or we’ll set the adorable button-nosed robots on you for bunny-boiler death by cuddling?" Jared Thomas in Red Gods Sing

As I prepare for my marathon qualifier, I continue to run on Wednesdays with the regular group. We continue to navigate a path near Shorter’s house. His name still comes up frequently, as it has since I arrived in town. We’ll be running along the foothills or perhaps finishing up a workout back atop Mapleton Hill. Someone will say they saw Shorter at the liquor store and he was as warm and friendly as can be. Someone else will say he saw Shorter somewhere else, perhaps at McGuckin Hardware, and Frank couldn’t have been more of a jerk. Before I met with him, I’d come to see him the way many in Boulder see him: mysterious and difficult, a seemingly selfish man on a mockable crusade to win a gold medal to match the gold medal he already has. I’d grown certain that he was a miserable soul locked away in his house, the lonely long-distance runner stewing in demons of his own design.

and Santa and his sleigh rested on the lawn in front of the hardware store, each reindeer wearing a tool belt.

The next day, we dropped my mom at her part-time waitress job. Before she got out of the car, she looked at my dad and said, “We have to apply for assistance, Tom.” “We’ll be back on our feet before they deal with all the paperwork,” he said. “Still.” “Plus we probably make too much money to qualify for help.” “Still.” They looked at each other for a few long seconds. Finally my dad nodded. We went to an office called Social Services to find out about help. My dad filled out lots of forms while Robin and I sat on hard orange chairs. Then we went to three hardware stores, where my dad put in applications for work. My dad grumbled about all the gas we used up. To cheer him up, I said maybe we could feed the car water instead. He laughed a little then. “Not having enough work is tough work,” my dad told my mom when she joined us in the car after her shift. He took a deep breath and blew it out hard, like he was facing a birthday cake with too many candles. “Dad?” I said. “I’m kind of hungry.” “Me too, buddy,” he said. “Me too.” “Almost forgot,” my mom said, reaching into her tote bag. “I grabbed some of the bagels that the chef was about to throw out.” She pulled out a white paper sack. “They’re pretty stale, though. And they’re pumpernickel.

There was a picture of Votto standing by his pool, smiling, the sun in his eyes—Life is beautiful. Joe looked at the picture. Then he went out to a hardware store and picked up a new hammer.

getting ready to go to the hardware store, I walked outside and found several bird skeletons on the way to my car. Four were laid out in a perfect line, each around half a foot apart.

At that moment, Irish realized the man was Nathan Harris, the guy they’d seen in the hardware store. The one who’d had an issue with Randy having it all.

I’ll fix it. I recently learned from an expert.” I reassured them and slipped off to call the nearest hardware store for supplies just as my cell rang. “Hey, Adrian. How’s it goin’?” “Busy with work, the usual.” He sounded tired. “How’s it going back home?” “Oh, y’know, the usual family bickering. I had no idea how much work went into one wedding; the prep is intense.” “Wait, what?!” He yelped. “Wedding? You’re getting married? That’s all a bit sudden!” “Oh, come on, Adrian!” I laughed. “Not me. I’m helping with my Mom’s work. Jeez, don’t marry me off so easily.” “You scared the crap outta me,” he grumbled awkwardly.

Remember the wisdom of Dallas Willard: “The true social activist is the person who lives as an apprentice of Jesus in his or her ordinary relationships.” It means living with a kingdom mind and heart in our marriages, with our parents and our children, with our coworkers, our neighbors and the guy at the hardware store who is blocking the aisle.

Anyone anywhere can order one online, brand new from Amazon or any major hardware store—Home Depot, Lowes, etc. Or used ones from an even longer list of sites—Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay. There were also forums like Quora and Pinterest where people sell things to one another directly.

when this particular mood strikes me, I tend to wind up at a store. Target. Best Buy. Sometimes a hardware store. Never a grocery store. I need clean, contrasting colors. Sharp red on white tile. Order. The reds and whites bring a sense of calm that I cannot explain, and gliding amongst the little people scurrying around, living their frantic, sweaty lives, brings me back.

I feel like I landed in a Hallmark movie or something. Scenic mountains, small town, snowstorm, rescued by the handsome stranger who also happens to have the local hardware store.

What Do Women Want?” Kim Addonizio I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what’s underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I’m the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment from its hanger like I’m choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin, it’ll be the goddamned dress they bury me in.

Department stores in particular had difficulty surviving the onslaught of low-price competitors. Their inability to adapt to changing consumer tastes and the emergence of new retail channels that targeted specific market segments—the so-called category killers in hardware, toys, and furniture—deeply eroded their market share. While in the 1960s and 1970s most clothing was sold in full-service department stores, by 1990 such stores accounted for only 29 percent of sales.

To better gain economies of scale, higher sales and lower costs, shops everywhere have ballooned into tremendous warehouses. They are staffed by young people who have less knowledge about hardware than I do, and who roam the aisles looking for places to hide from their most voracious and vicious customer; the Boomer on a mission to buy hardware.

On both weekdays and weekends, Boomers descend on hardware stores to fill trolleys with paints, rugs, lawn ornaments, plants, light-fixtures and other gee-gaws to improve their already palatial homes. They move like predatory marauders, ready to snatch those red-hot deals off the central aisle stands.