Hogan Quotes

Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

Red", I write "is the color of life. It's blood, passion, rage. It's menstrual flow and after birth. Beginnings and violent end. Red is the color of love. Beating hearts and hungry lips. Roses, Valentines, cherries. Red is the color of shame. Crimson cheeks and spilled blood. Broken hearts, opened veins. A burning desire to return to white.

Her grandmother had once told her that one could blame ugliness on one's genes and ignorance on one's education, but there was absolutely no excuse whatsoever for being dull.

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.

the wonderful thing about books was that they were films that played inside your head.

There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless.

If you never get sadness, how do you know what happy is like?” she asked.

tears have a purpose. they are what we carry of the ocean, and perhaps we must become the sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.

In this world, Daisy, we are tiny. We can’t always win and we can’t always be happy. But the one thing that we can always do is try.

Sometimes the most difficult decision is to not martyr yourself for someone, but instead to choose to live for them. Because of them.

He was not a tall man, but he was wide. His face was the color and texture of old leather boots, and he was completely bald except for a gray walrus mustache that would have made Hulk Hogan jealous. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, even though it was chilly and wet. His arms were densely tattooed in style I didn’t recognize.

Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do.

If you could live anywhere in the world where would you live ” “Right here ” Enzo replies. “In your arms.

HOGAN-No, I wouldn't think it, but my motto in life is never trust anyone too far, not even myself.

As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round.

Time for the lovely cup of tea

dress for yourself, and marry for love.

Common decency, good manners, kindness and hard work were treated as peculiarities

Nothing can unman you like an un-man.

There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger.

Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional character.

If you never get sadness, how do you know what happy is like?’ she asked. ‘And by the way, everybody dies.

Nothing wrong doesn’t make him Mr Right.

It was too early for gin and lime, and too hot for tea.

Even if a thing is doomed—there is that moment of absurd hope that is worth the fall, that is worth everything.

Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery that we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future.

Perhaps it was the word "God" that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah. I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon.

We can’t always win and we can’t always be happy. But the one thing that we can always do is try.

Sometimes there is a wellspring or river of something beautiful and possible in the tenderest sense that comes to and from the most broken of children, and I was one of these, and whatever is was, I can't name, I can only thank. Perhaps it is the water of life that saves us, after all.

As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I've seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans.

There are moments..., which usually come at the most inconvenient of times, such as crisis, when you look at someone and realize that it will hurt you to be without them.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is how many people you can get to agree with you.

A hush is a dangerous thing. Silence is solid and dependable, but a hush is expectant, like a pregnant pause; it invites mischief, like a loose thread begging to be pulled.

Perhaps he had seen her as a challenge. Or a novelty.

When the music ends for someone you love you don't stop dancing. You dance for them as well.

...even if the older mind lives by remembering, the young mind lives by forgetting.

Don't look so stiff and concerned, bucko. Word from the wise, sometimes there's no better place to hide than in the open, and no better way to disappear than to stand out." "That doesn't make any sense." "Sure it does. Hogan wrote it years and years ago - you do know who Hogan is right?

We give more economic aid to multinational corporations to increase their profits than we do to all the countries in the world combined.

Marriages, like dreams, didn't just happen; you had to do some work to get there

What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it.

The measure of a country’s prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation.

Henry. She could never trust a man who shared his name with a vacuum cleaner.

But he, that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose. Anne Brontë

I longed to be a flowering branch, the sea in its rocking, an unguessed world. Even now it seems so much as if the body was only the desire of the planet, as if it could turn itself into the universe both together, the same,

When words fail, the hammer drops, living can never be its own excuse.

I think of that word, power, and what it means. It means you feed your people, you help the world. I never understood what else there was to it

The real ceremony begins where the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world.

John Hay, in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: 'There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.' Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or a heart coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body.... Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them. Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating....It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking their innermost secrets into her listening ears. Over the years I’ve envisioned that woman’s silence, a hearing full and open enough that the world told her its stories. The green leaves turned toward her, whispering tales of soft breezes and the murmurs of leaf against leaf.

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion.

Guy keeps the heart of a vampire he killed as a pet in his basement armory. He's plenty crazy. But that's okay. I'm a little crazy too.

The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is the character of the individual walking the path.

All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one.

The only people who lawyer up faster than dirty cops are dirty lawyers.

I believe history is a circle, made by men who don't learn from their mistakes.

I have learned that feat is the mother of fearlessness, and the beginning of possibility." spoken by Paul Hogan and recounted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that there are always men who like to feel a natural superiority which is not dependent on accomplish­ment and does not need to be proved.

The Tomorrow Man theory. It’s pretty basic. Today, right here, you are who you are. Tomorrow, you will be who you will be. Each and every night, we lie down to die, and each morning we arise, reborn. Now, those who are in good spirits, with strong mental health, they look out for their Tomorrow Man. They eat right today, they drink right today, they go to sleep early today–all so that Tomorrow Man, when he awakes in his bed reborn as Today Man, thanks Yesterday Man. He looks upon him fondly as a child might a good parent. He knows that someone–himself–was looking out for him. He feels cared for, and respected. Loved, in a word. And now he has a legacy to pass on to his subsequent selves…. But those who are in a bad way, with poor mental health, they constantly leave these messes for Tomorrow Man to clean up. They eat whatever the hell they want, drink like the night will never end, and then fall asleep to forget. They don’t respect Tomorrow Man because they don’t think through the fact that Tomorrow Man will be them. So then they wake up, new Today Man, groaning at the disrespect Yesterday Man showed them. Wondering why does that guy–myself–keep punishing me? But they never learn and instead come to settle for that behavior, eventually learning to ask and expect nothing of themselves. They pass along these same bad habits tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and it becomes psychologically genetic, like a curse. Looking at you now, Maven, I can see exactly where you fall on this spectrum. You are a man constantly trying to fix today what Yesterday Man did to you. You make up your bed, you clean those dirty dishes from the night before, and pledge not to start drinking until six, thinking that’s the way to keep an even keel. But in reality you’re always playing catch-up. I know this because I’ve been there. The thing is–you can’t fix the mistakes of Yesterday. Yesterday Man is dead, he’s gone forever, and blame and atonement aren’t worth a damn. What you can do is help yourself today. Eat a vegetable. Read a book. Cut that hair of yours. Leave Tomorrow Man something more than a headache and a jam-packed colon. Do for Tomorrow Man what you would have wanted Yesterday Man to do for you.

The Fallen It was the night a comet with its silver tail fell through darkness to earth's eroded field, the night I found the wolf, starved in metal trap, teeth broken from pain's hard bite, its belly swollen with unborn young. In our astronomy the Great Wolf lived in the sky. It was the mother of all women and howled her daughter's names into the winds of night. But the new people, whatever stepped inside their shadow, they would kill, whatever crossed their path, they came to fear. In their science, Wolf as not the mother. Wolf was not wind. They did not learn healing from her song. In their stories Wolf was the devil, falling down an empty, shrinking universe, God's Lucifer with yellow eyes that had seen their failings and knew that they could kill the earth, that they would kill each other. That night I threw the fallen stone back to sky and falling stars and watched it all come down to ruined earth again. Sky would not take back what it had done. That night, sky was a wilderness so close the eerie light of heaven and storming hands of sun reached down the swollen belly and dried up nipples of a hungry world. That night, I saw the trapper's shadow and it had four legs.

We can’t always win and we can’t always be happy. But the one thing that we can always do is try. There will always be Baylee-Trashcan Johnsons”—a twitch of a smile crossed Daisy’s face—“ and you can’t change that. But you can change how she makes you feel.

Humans colonizing and conquering others have a propensity for this, for burning behind them what they cannot possess or control, as if their conflicts are not with themselves and their own way of being, but with the land itself.

Not only are there before and after, but there are also beginnings and returns. Not only is there the creation of the humans, formed of corn or clay, with a breath of wind or a god, but there are mythic destinies. Sometimes myth is formed by the body and what happens to it, especially in the realm of pain, depth, and birth. Phantoms of generations past are in our bodies. These explain us to ourselves.

Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest.

Once when I was younger I went out and sat under the sky and looked up and asked it to take me back. What I should have done was gone to the swamp and bog and ask them to bring me back because, if anything is, mud and marsh are the origins of life. Now i think of the storm that made chaos, that the storm opened a door. It tried to make over a world the way it wanted it to be. At school I learned that storms create life, that lightning, with its nitrogen, is a beginning; bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It's into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time.

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others.

Not only does free trade have nothing to do with democracy, but in most cases throughout history the two have been inimical. Free trade prospered only at the expense of democracy and the freedom of the majority.

We are happy to let children spend hours merrily slaughtering, maiming and motherfucking in front of their computer screens, and yet baulk at them attending the funeral of a dearly loved grandparent in case it upsets them. I think we are teaching them to be afraid of the wrong things.

Love. She was aware that, to some people, this would be a warm-fuzzy type of feeling. For her, it was pure, unadulterated terror.

hulkamanias runnin wild brother

There are so many beginnings.

Christmases are never the same. They change from year to year, and they are never really perfect, no matter how hard we try to force them to be so. What is perfect is the miracle in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago and the love of God that continues to burst through the chaos of human imperfection; Christmas is finding the Christ Child radiant beneath the daily grime of life.

If you can’t outplay them, outwork them.

She wanted excitement; a life less lifeless.

The spirit of Italy has taken over my soul. I'm relaxed, happy, warm. It's as if i'm part of the earth, not just standing out it.

The man by my side is my opposite and my reflection. The dark to my light. The light to my dark. And everything in between. But I'm not sure either of us could survive the heartbreak of being together yet being apart. Love is not enough.

Dreary beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God and in the fate of this complication, to join together this man, Saint Anthony’ –she tapped the top of his urn –‘and this woman, The Lady of the Flowers’ –gesturing towards the photograph with an upturned palm –‘in holy macaroni which is the honourable estate. Saint Anthony takes The Lady of the Flowers to be the lawful wedding wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, richer or poorer, to love and to perish with death now you start. And it still rhymes,’ she added proudly to herself. She paused again, long enough this time for it to be almost uncomfortable, but no doubt with the intention of underscoring the sanctity of the occasion. ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, funky to punky. We know Major Tom’s a monkey. We can be heroes just for today.

So why go out as a question mark when you can go out as an exclamation point instead?

We fit the pieces of our life together in a pattern, but there is no image on the puzzlebox to guide us.

Together they were sacrosanct.

it was times like these when a man in a desperate situation must take whatever madness is offered to escape the darker madness in which he finds himself trapped.

Apply reason and evidence to the problems around you. Reach conclusions, then test them. See if your deductions stand up to testing. Only then will you know real truth.

Most stories are not about people but about life, an addiction like the rest of them that destroys you even as you love it, but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

We make our own rules and lose by them.

The fact that some religious fanatics might support a theory doesn't invalidate it, anymore than the concurrence of UFO abduction cults invalidates the notion of extra-terrestrial life.

If you're in your 20s now, by the time you're 75, you'll be able to live 'til you're 150. By the time you're 150 you'll be able to live 'til you're 300. See you at your 1000th birthday party!

There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.

I know that the best time to see them is in that perfect hour before sunset when the sun sinks low on the horizon like a ripe peach and sends shafts of gold bursting through the trees. The "in between," I call it. No longer day, not yet night; some other place and time when magic hangs in the air and the light plays tricks on the eye. You might easily miss the flash of violet and emerald, but I- according to my teacher, Mrs. Hogan- am "a curiously observant child." I see their misty forms among the flowers and leaves. I know my patience will be rewarded if I watch and listen, if I believe.

Perhaps there are events and things that work as a doorway into a mythical world, the world of first people, all the way back to the creation of the universe and the small quickenings of earth, the first stirrings of human beings at the beginnings of time. Our elders believe this to be so, that it is possible to wind a way backwards to the start of things, and in doing so find a form of sacred reason, different from ordinary reason, that is linked to forces of nature. In this kind of mind, like in the feather, is the power of sky and thunder and sun, and many have had alliances and partnerships with it, a way of thought older than measured time, less primitive than the rational present. Others have tried for centuries to understand the world by science and intellect but have not yet done so, not yet understood animals, finite earth, or even their own minds and behavior. The more they seek to learn the world, the closer they come to the spiritual, the magical origins of creation. There is a still place, a gap between the worlds, spoken by the tribal knowings of thousands of years. In it are silent flyings that stand aside from human struggles and the designs of our own makings. At times, when we are silent enough, still enough, we take a step into such mystery, the place of spirit, and mystery, we must remember, by its very nature does not wish to be known.

Surrounded by stone, this body of mine is seen in the dim light for what it is, fragile and brief. The water closes, seamless, around me. My foot with it's blue-green veins is vulnerable beside this rock-hard world that wants to someday take me in. Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves.

Oh, don't get me started! I love fantasy, I read it for pleasure, even after all these years. Pat McKillip, Ursula Le Guin and John Crowley are probably my favorite writers in the field, in addition to all the writers in the Endicott Studio group - but there are many others I also admire. In children's fantasy, I'm particularly keen on Philip Pullman, Donna Jo Napoli, David Almond and Jane Yolen - though my favorite novels recently were Midori Snyder's Hannah's Garden, Holly Black's Tithe, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. I read a lot of mainstream fiction as well - I particularly love Alice Hoffman, A.S. Byatt, Sara Maitland, Sarah Waters, Sebastian Faulks, and Elizabeth Knox. There's also a great deal of magical fiction by Native American authors being published these days - Louise Erdrich's Antelope Wife, Alfredo Vea Jr.'s Maravilla, Linda Hogan's Power, and Susan Power's Grass Dancer are a few recent favorites. I'm a big fan of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope - I re-read Jane Austen's novels in particular every year.Other fantasists say they read Tolkien every year, but for me it's Austen. I adore biographies, particularly biographies of artists and writers (and particularly those written by Michael Holroyd). And I love books that explore the philosophical side of art, such as Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life, or David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous. (from a 2002 interview)

What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the culture's knowledge and language don't go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures where people still live within the kinship circles of animals and human beings there is a connection with animals, not only as food, but as 'powers,' a word which can be taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities. I've found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge that is held deep and strong, knowledge about the natural laws of Earth, from the beginning of creation, and the magnificent terrestrial intelligence still at work, an intelligence now newly called ecology by the Western science that tells us what our oldest tribal stories maintain--the human animal is a relatively new creation here; animal and plant presences were here before us; and we are truly the younger sisters and brothers of the other animal species, not quite as well developed as we thought we were. It is through our relationships with animals and plants that we maintain a way of living, a cultural ethics shaped from an ancient understanding of the world, and this is remembered in stories that are the deepest reflections of our shared lives on Earth. That we held, and still hold, treaties with the animals and plant species is a known part of tribal culture. The relationship between human people and animals is still alive and resonant in the world, the ancient tellings carried on by a constellation of stories, songs, and ceremonies, all shaped by lived knowledge of the world and its many interwoven, unending relationships. These stories and ceremonies keep open the bridge between one kind of intelligence and another, one species and another. (from her essay "First People")

The problem with the politicians of both parties in the US is that neither of them have a real agenda except to feather their own nests. They both have their hands deep in corporate pockets. All the rest is sleight of hand and distraction to keep the public occupied with trivia, divided against each other, and thinking their vote matters.

I've been good at this world, the one that hits you when you are born and makes you cry right from the start, so that crying is your first language. I've learned what I was supposed to learn, bu now it comes to me that in doing so I've unlearned other things. I've lost my sense; I cannot sense things. Yes, we are a shambles. And maybe Ama found the way; she found it when all the paths were washed away by rivers from the sky, when all the buildings were blown down by the breath of a God. For just one day, that one day, she found a way out of that shambles, a way around it. And it's this I want to find. But now she has no path back, no way to return even if she wanted to be here in this America. She will always live away from this world, in something of a twilight that is not one thing or the other, one time or the next. She lives in a point, a small point, between two weighted things and it is always rocking this scale, back and forth.

They jabbered amongst themselves in a bizarre jibberish that sounded like Spanish gone wrong: maybe gringo Spanglish, some kind of Espanahuatl that I hadn’t decoded yet, or a dialect of Spanmayan, Zapotecnish, Spanotomi, Mixtecnish, or some other new native language; or Japanish, Spanorean or…I’m getting carried away. You need a talent for picking up new words and grammars these days-it’s become an obsession with me, someday I’ll probably write a book about it, but in what language?

[T]he old stories of human relationships with animals can't be discounted. They are not primitive; they are primal. They reflect insights that came from considerable and elaborate systems of knowledge, intellectual traditions and ways of living that were tried, tested, and found true over many thousands of years and on all continents. But perhaps the truest story is with the animals themselves because we have found our exemplary ways through them, both in the older world and in the present time, both physically and spiritually. According to the traditions of the Seneca animal society, there were medicine animals in ancient times that entered into relationships with people. The animals themselves taught ceremonies that were to be performed in their names, saying they would provide help for humans if this relationship was kept. We have followed them, not only in the way the early European voyagers and prenavigators did, by following the migrations of whales in order to know their location, or by releasing birds from cages on their sailing vessels and following them towards land, but in ways more subtle and even more sustaining. In a discussion of the Wolf Dance of the Northwest, artists Bill Holm and William Reid said that 'It is often done by a woman or a group of women. The dance is supposed to come from the wolves. There are different versions of its origin and different songs, but the words say something like, 'Your name is widely known among the wolves. You are honored by the wolves.' In another recent account, a Northern Cheyenne ceremonialist said that after years spent recovering from removals and genocide, indigenous peoples are learning their lost songs back from the wolves who retained them during the grief-filled times, as thought the wolves, even though threatened in their own numbers, have had compassion for the people.... It seems we have always found our way across unknown lands, physical and spiritual, with the assistance of the animals. Our cultures are shaped around them and we are judged by the ways in which we treat them. For us, the animals are understood to be our equals. They are still our teachers. They are our helpers and healers. They have been our guardians and we have been theirs. We have asked for, and sometimes been given, if we've lived well enough, carefully enough, their extraordinary powers of endurance and vision, which we have added to our own knowledge, powers and gifts when we are not strong enough for the tasks required of us. We have deep obligations to them. Without other animals, we are made less. (from her essay "First People")

I have to smile when newspapers--so predictable in their attempt to explain the behaviour of those transgressing social norms or the workings of the deviant mind--speak of the 'double life' led by this furtive criminal or that. In fact the reverse is true. It is normal people who have a 'double life'. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had--the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can't have something the more you desire it, you are never happy.

She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab an unshriveled and thickened with age. She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts, Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the way)-round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together by Dr. Verghese Verghese. Kochu Maria couldn't stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook's job (seventy-five rupees a month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. But a Touchable, upper-caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far. Kochu Maria hadn't yet made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk Hogan addict. She hadn't yet seen a television set...

if they label you soft, feather weight and white-livered, if the locker room tosses back its sweaty head, and laughs at how quiet your hands stay, if they come to trample the dandelions roaring in your throat, you tell them that you were forged inside of a woman who had to survive fifteen different species of disaster to bring you here, and you didn’t come to piss on trees. you ain’t nobody’s thick-necked pitbull boy, don’t need to prove yourself worthy of this inheritance of street-corner logic, this blood legend, this index of catcalls, “three hundred ways to turn a woman into a three course meal”, this legacy of shame, and man, and pillage, and man, and rape, and man. you boy. you won’t be some girl’s slit wrists dazzling the bathtub, won’t be some girl’s, “i didn’t ask for it but he gave it to me anyway”, the torn skirt panting behind the bedroom door, some father’s excuse to polish his gun. if they say, “take what you want”, you tell them you already have everything you need; you come from scabbed knuckles and women who never stopped swinging, you come men who drank away their life savings, and men who raised daughters alone. you come from love you gotta put your back into, elbow-grease loving like slow-dancing on dirty linoleum, you come from that house of worship. boy, i dare you to hold something like that. love whatever feels most like your grandmother’s cooking. love whatever music looks best on your feet. whatever woman beckons your blood to the boiling point, you treat her like she is the god of your pulse, you treat her like you would want your father to treat me: i dare you to be that much man one day. that you would give up your seat on the train to the invisible women, juggling babies and groceries. that you would hold doors, and say thank-you, and understand that women know they are beautiful without you having to yell it at them from across the street. the day i hear you call a woman a “bitch” is the day i dig my own grave. see how you feel writing that eulogy. and if you are ever left with your love’s skin trembling under your nails, if there is ever a powder-blue heart left for dead on your doorstep, and too many places in this city that remind you of her tears, be gentle when you drape the remains of your lives in burial cloth. don’t think yourself mighty enough to turn her into a poem, or a song, or some other sweetness to soften the blow, boy, i dare you to break like that. you look too much like your mother not t