Hutch Quotes

But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?

Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.

There's something about seeing a guy's feelings written down, something about him taking that risk and committing that heart to paper, that means so much more than anything he could just say.

Absorbing the fact that sometimes, people do cut you slack and forgive you and want you anyway. Sometimes they do. And when they do, even if it's not a happy ending, it is delicious

Do not think about guys who have broken your heart six ways. It is mentally deranged to chase after heartbreak.

How was I supposed to concentrate on my mental health when my therapist was encased in orange sparkle madness?

There was nothing I could say in retaliation except something that would confuse her.

I know they're not getting divorced or anything, but when your parents argue it makes the whole universe seem like it's tipping, like everything could change if they got mad enough at each other, like the world isn't a safe place. And of course, that's true, isn't it? The world is not a safe place.

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson's farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere.

What are you doing?” Celaena lifted another piece of paper. “If His Pirateness can’t be bothered to clean for us, then I don’t see why I can’t have a look.” “He’ll be here any second,” Sam hissed. She picked up a flattened map, examining the dots and markings along the coastline of their continent. Something small and round gleamed beneath the map, and she slipped it into her pocket before Sam could notice. “Oh, hush,” she said, opening the hutch on the wall adjacent to the desk. “With these creaky floors, we’ll hear him a mile off.” The hutch was crammed with rolled scrolls, quills, the odd coin, and some very old, very expensive-looking brandy. She pulled out a bottle, swirling the amber liquid in the sunlight streaming through the tiny porthole window. “Care for a drink?

..we'll deal with it, because the good outweighs the bad.

You're trapped inside yourself no matter how many degrees you get.

In general, she feels too much or too little, interacts too much or too little -- never the right amount. It seems to her that she's spent her whole life sitting in a laundromat, freaking people out.

8. Fact: It is a bad idea to date a known cheater, because even if he doesn't cheat on you, you will always know he's capable of it and will never fully trust him. Then you will become even more insecure and neurotic than you already are.

Because one day you will die, I promise, and mortality does not care if you believe in it.

The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way your speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee -- everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober.

See?" I said. "That's exactly the person I don't want to be with. And he's always there, underneath all your charm.

I just-I don't want to get involved with you Jackson," I said, the words tumbling out. "You're a nice guy, but then, when it comes down to it-you're not, really.

Listen to me very closely: being looked at is not the same as being seen.

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think.

You couldn’t go anywhere in this town without bumping into God.

The first business of a story is to be a good story. When Our Lord made a wheel in the carpenter shop, depend upon it: It was first and foremost a good wheel. Don’t try to ‘bring in’ specifically Christian bits: if God wants you to serve him in that way (He may not: there are different vocations) you will find it coming in of its own accord. Any honest workmanship (whether making stories, shoes, or rabbit hutches) can be done to the glory of God.

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.

And now, you bunch of mole-snouted, muck-raking, hutch-hearted sheep ticks, get out of my sight sharp.

Liking something and wanting to take it for a ride are two very different things', Joslyn sais, climbing out of the truck to stand on the ground. Hutch's eyes sparkled as he came around to face her. 'I'm not touching that one with a ten-foot pole,' he told her.

On the opposite end of the sidewalk, a large woman in her sixties collapsed. Immediately, two people rushed to the woman's side, gingerly tending to her, touching her shoulders and face, speaking to her as though she were their mother—a cherished one—and Joan understood that human tenderness was not to be mocked. It was the last real thing.

Half my life, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Action. The other half, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Cut.

It was a Wednesday night. Which it always seemed to be in those days.

Now don't go getting excited that I'll suddenly notice Hutch in the soft pink light of the sunset and fall in love. He's not the love of my life, and no, we haven't been destined to get together ever since those gummy bears back in fourth grade, just because that's what happens in moves. And don't go thinking he and I become best friends in a Breakfast Club sort of way, either, with me realizing he's got a heart of gold under the Iron Maiden motorcycle jacket, and him realizing that I'm not the slut everyone thinks I am. Yes, that happens onscreen. But forget it. This is real life. He creeps me out. We have nothing in common besides leprosy.

I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window. Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second.

Catharine’s office had two plants, three chairs, two desks, one hutch, six personal photos in standing frames, one of those clichéd motivational posters on the wall that had two crows tearing out the insides of a reasonably sized forest cat with the cheesy inspirational caption, “Unremittingly, you must stare into the sun,” and a clay paperweight most likely made by Catharine’s daughter (it was signed by your seed in adorable small-child handwriting).

Reggie crosses the room to his wife, because in fifty-six years of marriage, she has never crossed the room to him.

If it would’ve been me, I would’ve left Hutch out of it. ’Cause Hutch, he was mean.

I didn't like the feeling that Hutch has a place that's different from my place.

Roo: What’s your definition of popularity? Hutch: I used to think people were popular because they were good-looking, or nice, or funny, or good at sports. Roo: Aren’t they? Hutch: I’d think, if I could just be those things, I’d – you know – have more friends than I do. But in seventh grade, when Jackson and those guys stopped hanging out with me, I tried as hard as I could to get them to like me again. But then . . . (shaking his head as if to clear it) I don’t really wanna talk about it. Roo: What happened? Hutch: They just did some ugly stuff to me is all. And really, it was for the best. Roo: Why? Hutch: Because I was cured. I realized the popular people weren’t nice or funny or great-looking. They just had power, and they actually got the power by teasing people or humiliating them – so people bonded to them out of fear. Roo: Oh. Hutch: I didn’t want to be a person who could act like that. I didn’t want to ever speak to any person who could act like that. Roo: Oh Hutch: So then I wasn’t trying to be popular anymore. Roo: Weren’t you lonely? Hutch: I didn’t say it was fun. (He bites his thumbnail, bonsai dirt and all.) I said it was for the best.

In every fairy tale ever told, it's a bad idea to tangle with a magician's daughter." Nobody, not Hutch, not Rowan, not even herself, had ever referred to her in those terms before. And yet hearing it made her relationship with Rowan so clear and so bright that it hurt. She still didn't know who he was, or why he had done so many of the things he had done. But she knew who he had raised her to be. If he wasn't her father, then she at least was his daughter.

If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would say: it’s about everyone punishing each other for things they didn’t do. And here she is, refusing to look at her baby, punishing him for something he didn’t do.

It’s just down the street. I’ll walk” “You’re going to risk your life for pizza?

She always felt perversely good during a crisis; a crisis justified the panic that rattled the cage of her body at least once a month.

Well, Joan, between you and me, I’m giving mysticism a go, myself. I think I have a real shot. From what I can tell, theism isn’t a necessary prerequisite. All I want is to exit my body.

A finely carved Black Forest cuckoo clock hung just to the right of the hutch. Phil would love that, Reuben thought. Phil had once collected cuckoo clocks, and their constant chiming and tweeting and cooing had driven everybody at home a little nuts.

I was intending to trip on my way back, making her the clear winner, when she whimpered, "I can't believe your not going to let me win, especially after the other night." Her face suddenly fell and I stopped what I was doing for a second when out of nowhere she grabbed my shovel and threw it to the ground before turning to run back to the hutch. "Sucker," she called over her shoulder.

...the presence of others has become even more intolerable to me, their conversation most of all. Oh, how it all annoys and exasperates me: their attitudes, their manners, their whole way of being! The people of my world, all my unhappy peers, have come to irritate, oppress and sadden me with their noisy and empty chatter, their monstrous and boundless vanity, their even more monstrous egotism, their club gossip... the endless repetition of opinions already formed and judgments already made; the automatic vomiting forth of articles read in those morning papers which are the recognised outlet of the hopeless wilderness of their ideas; the eternal daily meal of overfamiliar cliches concerning racing stables and the stalls of fillies of the human variety... the hutches of the 'petites femmes' - another worn out phrase in the dirty usury of shapeless expression! Oh my contemporaries, my dear contemporaries... Their idiotic self-satisfaction; their fat and full-blown self-sufficiency: the stupid display of their good fortune; the clink of fifty- and a hundred-franc coins forever sounding out their financial prowess, according their own reckoning; their hen-like clucking and their pig-like grunting, as they pronounce the names of certain women; the obesity of their minds, the obscenity of their eyes, and the toneless-ness of their laughter! They are, in truth, handsome puppets of amour, with all the exhausted despondency of their gestures and the slackness of their chic... Chic! A hideous word, which fits their manner like a new glove: as dejected as undertakers' mutes, as full-blown as Falstaff... Oh my contemporaries: the ceusses of my circle, to put it in their own ignoble argot. They have all welcomed the moneylenders into their homes, and have been recruited as their clients, and they have likewise played host to the fat journalists who milk their conversations for the society columns. How I hate them; how I execrate them; how I would love to devour them liver and lights - and how well I understand the Anarchists and their bombs!

Everything he said sounded wonderful, but it wasn't true. I was desperately insecure and I did care what people thought. Jackson wasn't really talking about me. He was talking about an idea of me he'd concocted in his head. As soon as he remembered me and my true weaknesses in the clear light of day, he'd be as cruel this time as he had been the last.

I'm so sick of violence against women disguised as validation.

Joan's body contorts with desire to be elsewhere

James watches a line of ants march out of the kitchen drain, up the sink, into his life.

On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. “Are you?

Rules mean nothing to babies

This place isn’t even on the internet,” Hutch said as though completely proud of himself for finding a motel that looked as though fifty murders occurred in it every day.

Hutch sent a telegram: The Bramford will change from a bad house to a good house when one of its doors is marked R. and G. Woodhouse.

How do you make me spill my secrets?” I grinned. “I’m just that good, baby.” Hutch laughed, then sobered. “We’re in so much fucking trouble.” “I know.

I decided it didn't matter a fuck in a rabbit hutch.

Joan apologized three more times, then returned to her seat, feeling evil. As usual, when she confronted the world about one of its problems, the world suggested that the problem was Joan.

He looks at her as though searching for an emotion he misplaced. Fervor, perhaps. Or affection. He has the appearance of a man who has weathered many internal sandstorms and whose convictions—once sharp and exquisite—have lost their definition. Observing James, Blandine is reminded of a swan she saw last February. It has resigned itself to a puddle in the parking lot of a megastore.

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

The only benefit of her generalized anxiety disorder was that it prepared Hope for the Worst-Case Scenario; she was never surprised when one materialized because the Worst-Case Scenario was where she spent most of her time.

Hutch called into the semidarkness of The Shed. 'Somebody's coming, Heck!' Then he, with the rest, faded from sight with that uncanny quickness known only to creatures of the wild and young children who are, after all, also creatures of the wild. ("The Shed")

The first business of a story is to be a good story. When Our Lord made a wheel in the carpenter shop, depend upon it: It was first and foremost a good wheel . . . Any honest workmanship (whether making stories, shoes, or rabbit hutches) can be done to the glory of God.

I notice Catherine’s ceramic collectibles for the first time, really see them in a blinding flash of lightning. They’re scattered around the house, but here in the dining room, they have a dedicated hutch. They’re all blackface caricatures. Mammy and Pappy saltshakers, skin the darkest black, aprons the whitest white. Ashtrays that are only pitch-black heads, mouths open to swallow the detritus. A blond-haired, black-skinned baby eating a slice of watermelon twice his size, his face so gape-mouthed that he appears more fish than human. An Amos and Andy plate.

On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

On our drive home, I told Dad I never wanted to go hunting again. Dad nodded. “That’s fine, Sissy Hutch,” he said. “But just so you know, warriors are not afraid to hunt. If you want to be a warrior just like Daddy, you must learn to hunt, Sissy. What you saw today is the circle of life.

Have you ever felt happy and miserable at the same time?” I sighed. “Yes.” Hutch sat up. He threw the covers back and got out of bed. He opened up the blinds sending rays of bright sunlight into his room. “But I got over it. I figured out no matter how much I worried about it nothing ever changed.

Elaine Oliver is one of those people who thinks she needs to yell into a cell phone and cannot imagine anyone else might hear her conversation. 'I'm stiff from that yoga class Juana made me go to!' she was shouting, presumably to Dad. 'I did something to my groin area. ... Sure, you can massage it later.

Looking now, I realized the missing element—and it was down in a deep crater—was the violence of the West. Not so much the physical geography, but the violence inherent in the concept of the West, the politically and culturally and religiously ordained rapacity smearing blood over all the fresh beauty. Hutch had made the limits

I’m surprised I called you good. Not because I think you’re bad - it would be absurd to describe a whole person as good or bad. You’re just a series of messy, contradicting behaviours like everyone else. Those behaviours can become patterns or instincts, and some are better than others. But as long as you’re alive, the jury’s out.

The rabbits and chickens lived in the courtyard space at the far end of the big two-story guardhouse. Everything wooden, the fences, the wall, the hutches on their stilts, was painted dark green, a flat ugly color against the complex natural greens of the cactus and the hedges and the trees. Trotsky put on his work gloves—he was very finicky about his hands—and got the rabbits out of their hutches, looking over each one for ticks or skin problems or signs of hairballs. He had read up on rabbit food and designed their diets himself, and learned about their diseases and habits, as absorbed in this task, as precise and methodical, as he had been in building the Red Army.

Well me the real reason. I mean, haven't we been friends long enough that I deserve the truth?

Supplement therapy with boxing lessons. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship.

The facts are indispensable; they are not sufficient. To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

add one make dumb add two make poo

Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things. —Hildegard von Bingen, Benedictine abbess, 1151

People are dangerous because they are contagions. They infect you with or without your consent; they lure you onto paths you wouldn’t have chosen; they commandeer you.

18. Believe in ghosts, but not god. Unless your conception of god is much like a ghost.

Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable.

I think that we see whatever we fear, whatever we want. We look at the world, absorb thirty percent of its data, and our subconscious fills in the rest.

Yes.” Her voice was soft. “They die. Even with the lamps, sometimes it’s not enough. But... even if they don’t make it, Eldric, they still mattered. They made me happy while they were here.

Messages build themselves in her mind, in her hands, but she never sends them. She knows that not contacting James is the right thing to do, but God—how much like a sneeze unsneezed it feels.

Authoritarian regimes, in the words of Robert Hutchings, a scholar of public affairs and the former chair of the US National Intelligence Council, are prey to "intellectual pathologies" that drastically narrow what they're capable of thinking: intense conformity, resistance to contrary information, the overestimation of insiders and the stereotyping of outsiders. Authoritarianism is a catastrophic intellectual handicap.

She feels like a demanding and ill-fated houseplant, one that needs light in every season but will die in direct sun, one whose soil requires daily water but will drown if it receives too much, one that takes a fertilizer only sold at a store that’s open three hours a day, one that thrives in neither dry nor humid climates, one that is prone to every pest and disease. What kind of attention would make Joan feel at home? Who would ever work that hard to administer it?

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they look a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere til he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.

Such unexpected details carried over onto the blues rocker ‘Mr Lacey’ on their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays. Dr Bruce Lacey was an inventor of robots and automata who lived next door to Hutchings in the mid-1960s, and the hoover-like whooshing noises that take a ‘solo’ in the song’s middle eight are made by three of Lacey’s robots, which he transported down to the studio in south London, their inventor gleefully prodding them into life while dressed in a space suit.

And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret.

To her surprise, Jack didn’t seem at all fazed by all the exotic ideas she had had and wanted to try.  She detailed them out, from a small single-story greenhouse that incorporated rabbit hutches to an extensive two-story generator-powered setup with pigs, cows, and chickens on the upper story, their excrement washed down through gunnels by a sprinkler system where it hit a vat, fermented, created methane to run the generator, and then was fed through a hydroponics system directly to the roots of the plants she was trying to grow.

Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.

But that was where his excitement began to melt into cold anxiety. His dad had been the Gryffindor Seeker, the youngest one in Hogwarts history. The best he, James, could hope for was to match that record. That’s what everyone would expect of him, the first-born son of the famous hero. He remembered the story, told to him dozens of times (although never by his own dad) of how the young Harry Potter had won his first Golden Snitch by virtually jumping off his broom, catching the golden ball in his mouth and nearly swallowing it. The tellers of the tale would always laugh uproariously, delightedly, and if Dad was there, he’d smile sheepishly as they clapped him on the back. When James was four, he found that famed Snitch in a shoe box in the bottom of the dining room hutch. His mum told him it’d been a gift to Dad from the old school headmaster. The tiny wings no longer worked, and the golden ball had a thin coat of dust and tarnish on it, but James was mesmerized by it. It was the first Snitch he had ever seen close up. It seemed both smaller and larger than he’d imagined, and the weight of it in his small hand was surprising. This is the famous Snitch, James thought reverently, the one from the story, the one caught by my dad. He asked his dad if he could keep it, stored in the shoebox when he wasn’t playing with it, in his room. His dad agreed easily, happily, and James moved the shoebox from the bottom of the hutch to a spot under the head of his bed, next to his toy broom. He pretended the dark corner under his headboard was his Quidditch locker. He spent many an hour pretending to zoom and bank over the Quidditch green, chasing the fabled Snitch, in the end, always catching it in a fantastic diving crash, jumping up, producing his dad’s tarnished Snitch for the approval of roaring imaginary crowds.

Nothing in here except some empty wine bottles,” Red said, opening drawers and cabinets on the hutch. “Wait! I think I found Gaz’s sense of humor.” He held up something small between two fingers. “Nope. Just a withered old piece of fruit.” Gaz had found a small bedchamber at the rear of the room, through the door that Veil had noticed. “If you do find my sense of humor, kill it,” he called from inside. “That will be more merciful than forcing it to deal with your jokes, Red.” “Brightness Shallan thinks they’re funny. Right?” “Anything that annoys Gaz is funny, Red,” she said. “Well, I annoy myself!” Gaz called. (less)

…if you collide with someone, you must be prepared to reside inside their psychology indefinitely, and this is the burden of a lifetime. You are pathologically porous, you inhabit every emotion you see, and you may be a prophet, but if you are, you’re a late bloomer because no prophecies have descended upon you yet…

The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way you speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee—everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober.

Listen to me. Honestly people, listen to me. There is nothing after this, ok? So don’t live like you have an Act III. There is no surprise footage after the credits roll. Same goes for everyone you love. I can’t reveal how I know this, I had to sign an NDA, you just have to trust me. These are your only minutes. What are you going to do with them?

... the Trappist world appeals to me as a model of wisdom...so infitesimally is the day divided among different occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for example, hurries from his hutches to the chapel, or the chapter-room, or the refectory, all day long: every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to perform; from two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he returns to receive the comforting gift of sleep, he is upon his feet and occupied with manifold and changing business. I know many persons, worth several thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the disposal of their lives... We speak of hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish manner.

Unlike Tiffany, the laughing woman is real. Whomever she's speaking to speaks back like they want to, and Tiffany envies her. She wonders if there's a word for the opposite of solipsism, wonders if such a term could accurately describe her psychological disorder. It's Sunday but it feels like Wednesday. It's spring but it feels like fall. It's warm but Tiffany shivers. She feels drunk.

Back at the start of World War Two the authorities forbade the use of the Underground as an air raid shelter. Instead Londoners were supposed to rely on hastily built neighborhood shelters or on the famous Anderson shelters, which were basically rabbit hutches made from corrugated iron with some earth shoveled on top. Londoners being Londoners, the prohibition on using the Underground lasted right up until the first air raid warning, at which point the poorly educated but far from stupid populace of the capital did a quick back-of-the-envelope comparison between the stopping power of ten meters of earth and concrete and a few centimeters of compost, and moved underground en masse. The authorities were appalled. They tried exhortation, persuasion, and the outright use of force, but the Londoners wouldn’t budge. In fact, they started to organize their own bedding and refreshment services.

I ran to Sailor’s hutch to see if he’d made it through alive. He was backed into the corner, shivering, and in the most wretched condition: he had become so malnourished that his fur had grown horribly long, his body’s attempt to compensate for his slow metabolism and low temperature. His claws were an inch long, and worse, his front teeth had curled over his lower lip so he could hardly open his mouth. Apparently, rabbits need to be chewing on hard things like carrots; otherwise their teeth will grow. Terrified, I opened the cage door to hug little Sailor, but, in a spastic fury, he started scratching my face and neck. I still have the scars. Without anyone attending to him, he had gone feral. That’s what’s happened to me, in Seattle. Come at me, even in love, and I’ll scratch the hell out of you. ’Tis a piteous fate to have befallen a MacArthur genius, wouldn’t you say? Poof. But I do love you, Bernadette TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14 From Paul Jellinek Bernadette, Are you done?

On the box he had a stack of magazines. Without seeing the covers, I knew they were pornography. Precious finds in the days before the internet. The combination of glossy pages and sperm is the smell of boyhood for men my age. You used to find them hidden in the bushes. I guess kids stole them from the shops and then were too scared to take them home. Sometimes they'd be damaged by rain or fire (masturbation and setting fire to things: the two great impulses of boyhood), the paper as brittle as an old man's skin. Meanwhile, as I found out years later, girls were reading 'romance novels' in the comfort of their bedrooms. Men, have you ever read those things? Damn.

All my life, everything’s been smooth and easy. My family loves me, lots of friends, I never wanted for anything. Nothing bad has ever happened to me. I knew God loved me. But now . . .” “He still loves you, sweetheart.” Hutch winced, and his cheeks flamed. Why on earth did he call her sweetheart? “I know. But I’ve always been good, and my life’s always been good, and now . . .” “Now your life stinks.” She lifted her face to look at him, so close he’d barely have to move to kiss her. He wouldn’t mind the taste of tears. “It does stink.” She buried her face in his shoulder again. “And you haven’t stopped being good.” “No. I know the Lord doesn’t make bargains like that. I know good people suffer and the wicked prosper, but I always thought . . .” Hutch sighed and rubbed her back. “You always thought you were the exception.” “It sounds stupid.” “No. It was a reasonable assumption based on observation.” Georgie sagged in his arms. “I also thought God spared me because I’m weak. He knows I can’t handle tragedy.” “Well, then.” He gave her a squeeze. “This tragedy shows you what I already know. You are strong enough. This is hard, the hardest thing you’ve ever gone through, but you can handle it if you lean on God. You’ll come through stronger and wiser and even more compassionate because of it.” “Thank you. You’re such a good friend.” Her arms loosened around his waist, and she pulled back slightly, staring at his chest. “I should get going. I just wanted to say good-bye.

HEART OF TEA DEVOTION rc t c//'VI/~ L tLP /'V to/ a My dear, ifyou couldgive me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs. CHARLES DICKENS If teacups could talk, my house would be full of conversation ... because my house is full of teacups. My collection of china cups-begun many years ago, when I set up housekeeping as a child bride-has long since outgrown its home in the glass-front armoire and spread out to occupy side tables and shelves and hooks in the kitchen or find safe harbor in the dining-room hutch. Some of these cups I inherited from women I love-my mother and my aunties. Some are gifts from my husband, Bob, or from my children or from special friends. A few are delightful finds from elegant boutiques or dusty antique shops. One cup bears telltale cracks and scars; it was the only one I could salvage when a shelf slipped and 14 cups fell and shattered. Three other cups stand out for their intense color-my aunt was always attracted to that kind of dramatic decoration. Yet another cup, a gift, is of a style I've never much cared for, but now it makes me smile as I remember the houseguest who "rescued" it from a dark corner of the armoire because it looked "lonely." Each one of my teacups has a history, and each one is precious to me. I have gladly shared them with guests and told their stories to many people. Recently, however, I have been more inclined to listen. I've been wondering what all those cups, with their history and long experience, are trying to say to me. What I hear from them, over and over, is an invitation-one I want to extend to you: When did you last have a tea party? When was the last time you enjoyed a cup of tea with someone you care about? Isn't it time you did it again?

I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

I don't have social media" "Oh right." He rolls his eyes. "Too good for all that." She shakes her head. "Not at all. On the contrary, I'm too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It's designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody's loneliness and promises us a community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that - weaponizing a person's isolation - it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody's like 'words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people,' blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody's influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they're lovable. And then, once you're nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people's triumphs, that's when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don't get m e started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that's just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don't need it. Any of it." Blandine cracks her neck. "I'm corrupt enough.