Ice Cubes Quotes

Yesterday i carved your name into the surface of an ice cube then held it against my chest til it melted into my aching pores today i cried so hard the neighbors knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to borrow some sugar.

She was so cold, she probably farted ice cubes.

I was nervous. Like an ice cube, I just froze up. Then I melted in some strange guy’s drink.

How do I know I can trust you?' she said finally. 'That's the thing about trust.' He crunched an ice cube between his teeth. 'You don't know.

Is that how you're going to take me? Scare me into voluntarily coming aboard, then steal my Ice Cube?" "It's always cubes with you," noted Foaly, somewhat randomly. "What's wrong with a nice sphere?

Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers.

We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.

When this ice cube melts, I’m going to make love to you so slow, everyone in this hotel is going to know my name. It won’t be play. It’s going to be dead serious.

I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like – the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you. It isn´t an outside sort of cold; it´s a cold that gets into your bones and into your blood and it feels like your heart itself is beating out the cold in hard bursts through your entire body, and you suddenly remember that you have a body because you can´t ignore it anymore. You feel like an ice cube. You feel like you´re naked and have fallen through thin ice on a lake and are drowning in the ice water underneath. You can´t breathe.

So what don't you get?" "The way people talk and act like they're crazy in love, and then, ding, suddenly they're not. It's like it was all just pretend. Like it's just a game." He crunched on an ice cube. "Well, sometimes it is just a game." "Then how are you supposed to believe someone when it isn't?

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.

Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.

I used to jog but the ice cubes kept falling out of my glass.

Today I wondered why my eyelashes aren't thick enough and why my feet aren't small enough. Then it hit me. Why do we take these insignificant things like millimeters on lashes and shoeboxes and then try to fit ourselves into those stupid molds? Why do I take the beauty that is me, and measure it up to a shoe size? A length of hair on my eyes? Am I not the more wonderful creation, far more great than those stupid things? Why do we take ourselves and desecrate ourselves daily? Pushing ourselves into cubicles because we think we are supposed to fit into them? Are we ice cubes? And suddenly I just don't understand the inadequacies anymore! Because they're not even inadequacies, at all! I will laugh and be beautiful.

Why are they doing that?” his mother said, frowning at her grandsons. The boys were sorting the casserole into piles on their plates. “Doing what?” Eve asked. “Why aren’t they eating their food?” “They don’t like it when things touch,” Eve said. “What things?” his mother asked. “Their food. They don’t like it when different foods touch or mix together.” “How do you serve dinner, in ice cube trays?

Maybe if i just lie under the sun long enough I will melt like an ice cube and all my sadness will evaporate into the air so i can start again.

I hid Mrs. Frozenwater’s body in the ice cube trays in my freezer. Better to keep her there than let her memory thaw out and evaporate. Scotch on the rocks, anyone?


HAVE YOU EVER BITTEN REDHOT ICE CUBE? THAT'S CURRY.

She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.

I've never been jealous of an ice cube before.

Be cool. Be cool and act cool. Be chill, act chill, be ice. You’re an ice cube. Just be cool.

You'll need to do a better job, Annabelle. No more dates like the first one tonight." "Agreed. And no more making me sit through your Power Matches introductions, either. As you so wisely pointed out, helping Portia Powers isn't in my best interests." "Then why are you still trying to talk me into seeing Melanie again?" "Hunger makes me weird." "You got rid of the last one in fourteen minutes. Well done. I'm rewarding you by letting you sit in on all the introductions from now on." She nearly choked on an ice cube. "What are you talking about?" "Exactly what I said.

There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.

I love like a lawnmower in the desert. I love like a solar-powered lunar vehicle. I love like a wind-powered kite factory. Some might even say I love like an ice cube in an oven, but I’d vehemently disagree. It’s not an ice cube, it’s an ice sculpture—of your heart, and it’s melting at this very moment.

Where did he go!” he bellowed, gloved hands clenching. “I had him in a snare that would take Alexander the Great a lifetime to untwist, and he did it in a week!” Al took a step, pinwheeling as his booted heel found an ice cube.

A noise came from the phone that resembled the sound of a howler monkey having an ice cube inserted into its rectum

My shrinking ice cubes looked like the victim of global warming, missing only a tiny polar bear waving a withe flag.

I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved it's special power of deflection, it's ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings. I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feeling of ease and courage it gave me.

I knew I would never be a tough girl. And yet the phrase, with its implied contradiction, articulated everything I wanted for myself. To be a girl, an inherently vulnerable position. And yet, unafraid.

The patch was thin, so you’d think it would melt first, but physics doesn’t work that way. Before the temperature could get up to the patch’s melting point of 1530°C, everything that could melt at a lower temperature had to melt first. And the melting point of the smelter walls was 1450°C. So, even though the patch was thin and the smelter was thick, the bottom of the smelter would give out before the patch got anywhere near its melting point. Don’t believe me? Put ice water in a saucepan and cook it. The water temperature will stay at 0°C until the last ice cube melts.

Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from 25 to 31 degrees. All the action happens at 32 degrees.

What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods.

I’m going that way too. I live in Crouch End. Do you want to share a black cab?’ Black cabs were an extravagance that Neve couldn’t afford, not this far away from payday, but that wasn’t the reason why she declined. ‘No, thank you. I’m perfectly all right with catching the tube.’ ‘OK, tube it is,’ Max agreed, because he was quite obviously emotionally tone deaf and couldn’t sense the huge ‘kindly bugger off’ vibes that Neve was sure she was emitting. ‘You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?’ ‘You apologised, why would I still be mad at you?’ ‘One day we’ll laugh about this. When little Tommy asks how we met, I’ll say, “Well, son, I threw an ice cube at your mother, then slapped her arse, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.

My bones are like cubes of ice clinking together, chilling me to my core.

When it whoops, those rooms get as cold as a frigid woman with an ice cube up her works.

Put ice water in a saucepan and cook it. The water temperature will stay at 0°C until the last ice cube melts.

I wish there was a way that 1988 Ice Cube could be introduced to 2014 Ice Cube. He would be as astounded as a motherfucker.

Men are little boys, she would have said as she lifted her glass. Don’t stir or you’ll bruise the ice cubes.

His heart's as cold as an ice cube!' -- Peter Parker thought.

I know you're scared," she said, smoothing an ice cube over her blistering fingers, "but you gotta grab hold of yourself. Every time you give in to your fears, you're lettin' that man win. And every time you do that, he gets stronger while you get weaker. Givin' into your fears will rob you blind. You'll end up a prisoner to that man for the rest of your life.

There’s this feeling I get when I watch people kiss. I become a different form of matter. Like they’re water, and I’m an ice cube. Like I’m the most alone person in the entire world.

I think reading is important in any form. I think a person who's trying to learn to like reading should start off reading about a topic they are interested in, or a person they are interested in.

Extremely useful in the winter,' said Mr Wonka, rushing on. 'Hot ice cream warms you up no end in freezing weather. I also make hot ice cubes for putting in hot drinks. Hot ice cubes make hot drinks hotter.

You will laugh at me-silly village girl-for staring at an ice cube like this. You will laugh, but this was the first time I had seen water made solid. It was beautiful-because if this could be done, then perhaps it could be done to everything else that was always escaping and running away and vanishing into sand or mist.

All the men added together made the solid world-- they were the marbles in the jar, and women were whatever sand or water or air claimed the space left between them. That's how I saw things as a young woman, that was my women's studies. Now I've come to know that women are like vodka poured over men, who melt away like ice cubes.

I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. Buying myself a drink in the smaller warrens below, in all their ethnic variety (and willingness to keep odd and late hours, and provide plentiful ice cubes, and free matchbooks in contrast to English parsimony in these matters), I felt the same thing in a different way. The balance between the macro and the micro, the heroic scale and the human scale, has never since ceased to fascinate and charm me. Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think—made me think for many years—that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

I think the worst thing you can do about a situation is nothing.

Truth is the ultimate power. When the truth comes around, all the lies have to run and hide.

She wept for her hardheadedness, and for a world that couldn’t just let her be both, a woman in love and a woman with a career, without flares of guilt and self-doubt seeping in and wrecking havoc. No one she knew had balanced both. There was either work or love. Wanting both felt like a huge ask, it felt like wishing for hot ice cream or a bitter sugar cube.

For some parents, having children meant full absolution from any future mistakes. My father wouldn't permit himself to be wrong. He shifted the blame of misplaced scissors, rising interest rates, and iceless ice cube trays all unto Riegel and me.

She imagined vodka poured over ice and all the cubes that had been frosted turning clean and collapsing in the glass and the ice cracking, like a spine in the hands of a confident osteopath.

I dreamed you a field of running horses, Selah. For you, Bianca, a balloon the size of the sky, my body a kite you can throw into the air. Pull me by string and horse. Tell me everything won't end in death. That everything doesn't end with February. Dead wildflowers wrapped around a crying baby's throat. I've slowed my heartbeat to three beats a minute. I've redrawn the clouds into birds, a fox chasing them into the mountains. I'm going to move my hand today. I vomit ice cubes. There's a ghost next to me. Get up, Dad. (Light Boxes)

All over Atlanta that fall, in the blue twilights, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing 'Downtown', and sat down to wait. Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness.

That beautiful glass of lemonade, so cold it made the glass sweat? It was colored water at room temperature, in a glass that had been sprayed with Scotch Guard, and misted with glycerin, so the “sweat” didn’t run down the glass before the photograph was taken. And the ice cubes were acrylic.

He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

Hardy had long since come to terms with having an abusive father, but never in all the years that he had been abused had he encountered such sympathy. Miracle's reaction so warmed him, he wound his arms around her waist and pulled her close, melting into her compassion like an ice cube on hot pavement.

Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room is cold and you can see your breath. It is currently twenty-five degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up. Twenty-six degrees. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you. Twenty-nine degrees. Thirty. Thirty-one. Still, nothing has happened. Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a huge change.

Theirs was the Norway of witchcraft, storytelling, and incest, not minimalist furniture and the Nobel Peace Prize. Rural

Check yo self befo you wreck yo self

A brick could be used to cool your drink, like a large ice cube.


It's as though we had asked to have ice cubes in our wine, like, "Ick, who are you?

(the same person who had told me I might feel better if I threw some ice cubes against a tree);

But in the freezer portion, a tray of ice cubes beckoned me.

Bloodies are the centerpiece of the Sunday Brunch--they are also, perhaps, the #1 Prep mixed drink..... 1. Place ice cubes in a large glass 2. Pour in two fingers of vodka 3. Fill glass almost to top with V-8 4. Season with: 2 drops Tabasco, 4 drops Worcestershire, 1/2 tsp. horseradish, 1 tsp. lime juice 5. Add wedge of lime, stir and drink 6. Repeat as needed

I felt the sun before I saw it. I was dislodging a stubborn ice clump when suddenly my vision snapped off and a sizzling feeling filled my skin. In another instant I could see again, and the landscape—the frozen fjord, the mountains behind the school—caught like a candlewick and exploded around me in a blaze of white fire. The dogs fell still and my throat choked shut, and then they were howling and I was laughing, and in another minute the day was over and the sun sank back down as if it had never been. My ecstasy was illogical, uncontrollable; I felt as if I’d been slipped a drug, and could no more control its chemical effects than I could force the sun to resurface.

We have no use for gods, holy books, heaven, hell, souls, salvations, sin, prayer, creed, doctrine or dogma, as these things are about as influential to us as an ice-cube on the surface of the sun.

What a wonderful world that was, and how remote it seems now. It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I grew up in a world in which everything was like that: shopping malls, TV dinners, TV itself, supermarkets, freeways, air conditioning, drive-in movies, 3D movies, transistor radios, backyard barbecues, air travel as a commonplace—all were brand-new and marvelously exciting. It is amazing we didn’t choke to death on all the novelty and wonder in our lives. I remember once my father brought home a device that you plugged in and, with an enormous amount of noise and energy, it turned ice cubes into shaved ice, and we got excited about that. We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too. —

She didn’t remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she’d gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn’t remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a glass of something with ice cubes that clinked and caught the light. She remembered the drink but not her mother’s face. She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family.

From a physics perspective, the form of matter movement known as life has no more meaning than any other movement of matter. You can’t find any new physical laws in life, so from my standpoint, the death of a person and the melting of an ice cube are essentially the same thing. Dr. Chen, you tend to overthink things. You should learn to look at life from the perspective of the ultimate law of the universe. You’ll feel much better if you do.

We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously, that only we fashion supplication into courtesy, that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartener feels on his mother's retreating. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd and stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.

Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as The Gentlemen Who Like To Rap. Our oeuvre stretches from the old school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythyms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern reader may be familiar with 'Ass-N-Titties' by DJ Assault, perhaps the seminal work of the genre

The sound of crickets, the feel of warm dried grass on the soles of his feet and the scent of baked earth pleased him. The big thick glass was icy in his hands. When he set it down, the tinkle of the ice cubes sounded personal.

Why is there no saxophone-flavored toothpaste? Or music that can successfully fight Gingivitis? Next time, why not try pouring hot duck soup in ice-cube trays and freezing it so you can serve it in glasses at your birthday party?

Although I pride myself on being able to handle my liquor, due to the absence of ice cubes and their diluting effects on the alcohol, one of these can be enough for me to ask the waiter if he would discreetly remind me of my own name.

Listen, and you hear creation. It is in the sound of passing sirens; distant music; church bells; cell phones; lawn mowers and snow blowers; basketballs and bicycles; waves on breakers; hammers and saws; the creak and crackle of melting ice cubes; even the bark of a dog, a wolf changed by millennia of selective breeding by humans; or the purr of a cat, the descendant of one of just five African wildcats that humans have been selectively breeding for ten thousand years.

It's water from beneath the mountain, and its full of of the taste of bones and rocks. She's bought five cases of bottled to keep from having to serve this, even in ice-cube format. There's something awful about it. It feels full of ghosts

Let's get it over with, so I can stop wondering. How many have there been?" Lauren stared at him."How many what?" "Lovers," he clarified bitterly. She could hardly believe her ears. After treating her as if her standards of morality were childish, after acting as if promiscuity was a virtue, after telling her how man preferred experienced women, he was jealous. Because now he cared. Lauren didn't know whether to hit him, burst out laughing or hug him. Instead she decided to exact just a tiny bit of revenge for all the misery and uncertainty he had put her through. Turning,she walked over to the bar and reached for a bottle of white wine. "Why should the number make any difference?" she asked innocently. "You told me in Harbor Springs that men don't prize virginity anymore, that they don't expect or want a woman to be inexperienced.Right?" "Right," he said grimly, glowering at the ice cubes in his glass. "You also said," she continued, biting back a smile, "that women have the same physical desires men have,and that we have the right to satisfy them with whomever we wish.You were very emphatic about that-" "Lauren," he warned in a low voice, "I asked you a simple question. I don't care what the answer is, I just want an answer so I can stop wondering. Tell me how many there were. Tell me if you liked the, if you didn't give a damn abou them,or if you did it to get even with me.Just tell me.I won't hold it against you." Like hell you wouldn't! Lauren thought happily as she struggled to uncork the bottle of wine. "Of course you won't hold it against me," she said lightly. "You specifically said-" "I know what I said," he snapped tersely. "Now,how many?" She flicked a glance in his direction, implying that she was bewildered by his tone. "Only one." Angry regret flared in his eyes,and his body tensed as if he had just felt a physical blow. "Did you...care about him?" "I thought I loved him at the time," Lauren said brightly, twisting the corkscrew deeper into the cork. "All right.Let's forget him," Nick said curtly. He finally noticed her efforts with the wine bottle and walked over to help her. "Are you going to be able to forget him?" Lauren asked, admiring the ease with which he managed the stubborn cork. "I will...after a while." "What do you mean,after a while? You said there was nothing promiscuous about a woman satisfying her biological-" "I know what I said,dammit!" "Then why do you look so angry? You didn't lie to me,did you?" "I didn't lie," he said, slamming the bottle onto the bar and reaching for a glass from the cabinet. "I believed it at the time." "Why?" she goaded. "Because it was convenient to believe it," he bit out. "I was not in love with you then." Lauren loved him more at that moment than ever. "Would you like me to tell you about him?" "No," he said coldly. Her eyes twinkled, but she backed a cautious step out of his reach. "You would have approved of him. He was tall, dark, and handsome, like you. Very elegant,sophisticated and experienced. He wore down my resistence in two days,and-" "Dammit, stop it!" Nick grated in genuine fury. "His name is John." Nick braced both hands on the liguor cabinet,his back to her. "I do not want to hear this!" "John Nicholas Sinclair," Lauren clarified.

No, no, no! The best way to win a boy's heart is to brew a love potion out of rainbows and sunsets that make two lovers sprout wings and fly to a magical castle in the sky, where they get married and eat clouds with spoons, and use stars as ice cubes in their moonlight punch, forever and ever and ever!

I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?” I replied: “London.” “Can you spell that please?” I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said. “Country?” “England.” “Can you spell that?” I spelled England. She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?” I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested. I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. “It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute. “I beg your pardon?” “You can have ‘London, France.’ ” “Seriously?” She nodded. “Well, why not?” So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?” “That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.” “Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

Demi-glace. There are a lot of ways to make demi-glace, but I recommend you simply take your already reduced meat stock, add some red wine, toss in some shallots and fresh thyme and a bay leaf and peppercorns, and slowly, slowly simmer it and reduce it again until it coats a spoon. Strain. Freeze this stuff in an ice-cube tray, pop out a cube or two as needed, and you are in business — you can rule the world. And remember, when making a sauce with demi-glace, don't forget to monter au beurre. Chervil,

Did I piss you off somehow? Because I’m having some trouble figuring you out.” Crank shrugged and looked out the window again, then said, “I’m not an easy guy to figure out.” “I’m not interested enough to try. It’s just that last night you were all, stay the hell away, and this morning you were friendly, and now I’m sitting in a car with an ice cube. I don’t do moody.” “I didn’t ask you to,” he responded. “Are you always such a dickhead?” His eyes widened, and he looked over at me. Then he smirked and laughed out loud. We were still sitting at a red light, so I glared at him. “You’re actually really hot,” he said. The smirk on his face widened a little. “You’re actually really an ass,” I replied.

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie. I remember how much I used to stutter. I remember the first time I saw television. Lucille Ball was taking ballet lessons. I remember Aunt Cleora who lived in Hollywood. Every year for Christmas she sent my brother and me a joint present of one book. I remember a very poor boy who had to wear his sister's blouse to school. I remember shower curtains with angel fish on them. I remember very old people when I was very young. Their houses smelled funny. I remember daydreams of being a singer all alone on a big stage with no scenery, just one spotlight on me, singing my heart out, and moving my audience to total tears of love and affection. I remember waking up somewhere once and there was a horse staring me in the face. I remember saying "thank you" in reply to "thank you" and then the other person doesn't know what to say. I remember how embarrassed I was when other children cried. I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died. I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off.

Planck understood that Clausius was not simply stating the obvious, but something of deep significance. Heat, the transfer of energy from A to B due to a temperature difference, explained such everyday occurrences as a hot cup of coffee getting cold and an ice cube in a glass of water melting. But left undisturbed, the reverse never happened. Why not? The law of conservation of energy did not forbid a cup of coffee from getting hotter and the surrounding air colder, or the glass of water becoming warmer and the ice cooler. It did not outlaw heat flowing from a cold to a hot body spontaneously. Yet something was preventing this from happening. Clausius discovered that something and called it entropy. It lay at the heart of why some processes occur in nature and others do not.

Help you?” he said without looking up. I glanced at Meg, silently double-checking that we were in the right building. She nodded. “We’re here to surrender,” I told the guard. Surely this would make him look up. But no. He could not have acted less interested in us. I was reminded of the guest entrance to Mount Olympus, through the lobby of the Empire State Building. Normally, I never went that way, but I knew Zeus hired the most unimpressible, disinterested beings he could find to guard the desk as a way to discourage visitors. I wondered if Nero had intentionally done the same thing here. “I’m Apollo,” I continued. “And this is Meg. I believe we’re expected? As in…hard deadline at sunset or the city burns?” The guard took a deep breath, as if it pained him to move. Keeping one finger in his novel, he picked up a pen and slapped it on the counter next to the sign-in book. “Names. IDs.” “You need our IDs to take us prisoner?” I asked. The guard turned the page in his book and kept reading. With a sigh, I pulled out my New York State junior driver’s license. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that I’d have to show it one last time, just to complete my humiliation. I slid it across the counter. Then I signed the logbook for both of us. Name(s): Lester (Apollo) and Meg. Here to see: Nero. Business: Surrender. Time in: 7:16 p.m. Time out: Probably never. Since Meg was a minor, I didn’t expect her to have an ID, but she removed her gold scimitar rings and placed them next to my license. I stifled the urge to shout, Are you insane? But Meg gave them up as if she’d done this a million times before. The guard took the rings and examined them without comment. He held up my license and compared it to my face. His eyes were the color of decade-old ice cubes. He seemed to decide that, tragically, I looked as bad in real life as I did in my license photo. He handed it back, along with Meg’s rings. “Elevator nine to your right,” he announced. I almost thanked him. Then I thought better of it.

What a skeletal wreck of man this is. Translucent flesh and feeble bones, the kind of temple where the whores and villains try to tempt the holistic domes. Running rampid with free thought to free form, and the free and clear. When the matters at hand are shelled out like lint at a laundry mat to sift and focus on the bigger, better, now. We all have a little sin that needs venting, virtues for the rending and laws and systems and stems are ripped from the branches of office, do you know where your post entails? Do you serve a purpose, or purposely serve? When in doubt inside your atavistic allure, the value of a summer spent, and a winter earned. For the rest of us, there is always Sunday. The day of the week the reeks of rest, but all we do is catch our breath, so we can wade naked in the bloody pool, and place our hand on the big, black book. To watch the knives zigzag between our aching fingers. A vacation is a countdown, T minus your life and counting, time to drag your tongue across the sugar cube, and hope you get a taste. WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS FOR? WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON? SHUT UP! I can go on and on but lets move on, shall we? Say, your me, and I’m you, and they all watch the things we do, and like a smack of spite they threw me down the stairs, haven’t felt like this in years. The great magnet of malicious magnanimous refuse, let me go, and punch me into the dead spout again. That’s where you go when there’s no one else around, it’s just you, and there was never anyone to begin with, now was there? Sanctimonious pretentious dastardly bastards with their thumb on the pulse, and a finger on the trigger. CLASSIFIED MY ASS! THAT’S A FUCKING SECRET, AND YOU KNOW IT! Government is another way to say better…than…you. It’s like ice but no pick, a murder charge that won’t stick, it’s like a whole other world where you can smell the food, but you can’t touch the silverware. Huh, what luck. Fascism you can vote for. Humph, isn’t that sweet? And we’re all gonna die some day, because that’s the American way, and I’ve drunk too much, and said too little, when your gaffer taped in the middle, say a prayer, say a face, get your self together and see what’s happening. SHUT UP! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! I’m sorry, I could go on and on but their times to move on so, remember: you’re a wreck, an accident. Forget the freak, your just nature. Keep the gun oiled, and the temple cleaned shit snort, and blaspheme, let the heads cool, and the engine run. Because in the end, everything we do, is just everything we’ve done.

It would have been helpful if there was a Mayo Clinic chapter about the topic of "leaving." Man, I would have read that chapter over and over -- leaving your wailing baby in the morning without wanting to slit your wrists; leaving your desk even though you are only a half hour away from completing something that would feel so good to wrap up; leaving the building so no one notices that you are actually leaving. I was much more interested in honing that skill than learning how to puree apples and carrots to freeze in ice-cube trays (not that I ever did that either). As long as I was a full-time working mother with a clock to punch or a train to catch -- as I would be for eight more years -- I never figured out how to leave with grace or with so-called conviction.

Bond ordered a double gin and tonic and one whole green lime. When the drink came he cut the lime in half, dropped the two squeezed halves into the long glass, almost filled the glass with ice cubes and then poured in the tonic. He took the drink out on to the balcony, and sat and looked out across the spectacular view. He thought how wonderful it was to be away from headquarters, and from London, and from hospitals, and to be here, at this moment, doing what he was doing and knowing, as all his senses told him, that he was on a good tough case again.

We peeled out with a screech, Ice Cube bumping from the brand-new speakers she’d proudly installed herself. Naperville is a relatively wealthy and predominantly Republican suburb a little over an hour outside of Chicago, and I knew I was in trouble the minute I saw how many churches we were driving past as we exited the tollway. Seriously, it was like church, church, Burger King that whole families actually sit down and eat dinner in, church, church, Walmart, church. We saw at least 137 churches in a two-mile stretch, and that was only after I’d actually started counting them.

She deigned to asked me how ice queens reproduce. I grinned, and her mother looked horrified. “We procreate by way of ice cubes, of course. We put them in our nests and let them incubate for the period of about four months, and when the temperature is right, we put them out to roost and let them flake off into billions of snowflakes, rather like tadpoles breaking in droves from their eggs. And that, child,” I said, with a simulacrum of glee, “is how winter is born.” “Does it hurt?” “No more than the approach of Monday does to most of the world. It is a natural process, you understand, but it is dreadful hard work.

You know what Mrs. Shure, the librarian, told me?” “What’s that, Theo?” his father asked. “God does not make junk.” Ted stared into his tumbler, the dwindling ice cubes sloshing at the bottom of the glass. His fidget finger tapped at the glass. Knocking the ice against the wall of the tumbler and turning his face upward, Ted looked at Theo. “Therefore, I am not junk,” said Theo. “Yuh.” “And I came from you. You are not junk either, Dad. Just because you didn’t shoot a gun in France or just because you didn’t become an engineer, doesn’t mean you are any less than any other man. Dad, both you and I have made mistakes, but we are not junk.

Test-taking ranked among Coriolanus's greatest talents, and he felt the familiar rush of excitement as he opened the cover of his booklet. He loved the challenge, and his obsessive nature meant almost instant absorption into the mental obstacle course. Three hours later, sweat-soaked, exhausted, and happy, he handed in his booklet and went to the mess hall for ice. He sat in the strip of shade his barrack provided, rubbing the cubes over his body and reviewing the questions in his head. The ache of losing his university career returned briefly, but he pushed it away with thoughts of becoming a legendary military leader like his father. Maybe this had been his destiny all along.

This is what you remember about him: not much, but then you have been assiduous in your forgetting. His red sweater, v-neck, cashmere; the clink of ice-cubes in a glass. He is shadow and voice, but you cannot recall his face. He is behind a closed door, in a forbidden room. He is asleep in his armchair, he is asleep in the driveway, asleep in your sandpit, face down, snoring but not harmless, even then. He is shouting, he is whispering, he is close but also remote as if at the end of a long hallway and you cannot hear him. His words never make any sense, he speaks some other language. His hands sometimes spin away from him like windmills, like pinwheels and Catherine wheels, snapping like firecrackers. There must be pain, but you cannot feel it. Your skin bruises like apples.

I'd thought about this for a long time. "That bank loses that much money in bad loans every  month. They make that much money in interest every day. They're a big bank. The money I  took was small change to them. No depositor was hurt." She shook her head. "I still can't approve of it. I don't think it's right." I felt my face go remote, still. I crossed my arms and felt cold. She spread her hands. "It doesn't change the fact that I still love you. I've missed you terribly.  I've missed your phone calls, and I've missed your body in bed next to me. I don't know what  to do about this. My loving you goes way beyond my disapproval of your theft." I uncrossed my arms and reached across the table for her. She leaned forward and we kissed  until the candle burned a hole in my shirt. Then we laughed and I held an ice cube to the  burn and the food came and everything was all right.

I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential. If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees. When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event

Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slab water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--- the genetic chains prove labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

NEUTRINOS | The neutrino (meaning “little neutral one”) has no electrical charge and almost no mass. A fundamental particle, neutrinos are copiously produced in nuclear reactions and hardly ever interact with matter. As you read this, one hundred billion of them pass through every square centimeter of your body every second, but only a few will ever jostle even one of your atoms in your lifetime. The only way to detect neutrinos, then, is to force-feed them lots of atoms with which to interact. This is the idea behind IceCube, a giant neutrino detector located at the South Pole. Hot water bores holes in the ice, into which cables carrying light detectors are lowered. Then the water freezes around them. When neutrinos jostle an atom in the ice, these detectors see a characteristic flash of light. By this clever technique, IceCube transforms an entire cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a dedicated neutrino detector. Even more amazing, some of the neutrinos IceCube detected will have hit Earth at the North Pole and traveled all the way through the planet without interacting with a single atom before they enter the cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole.

Johnny, be a dear and bring me a vodka soda with lots of lemons.” She sits back at the piano bench and starts to play “When I Fall in Love.” John starts toward me and I point at him. “Stop right there, John Ambrose McClaren. Do you have my name?” “No! I swear I don’t. I have--I’m not saying who I have.” He pauses. “Wait a minute. Do you have mine?” I shake my head, innocent as a little lost lamb. He still looks suspicious, so I busy myself with making Stormy’s drink. I know just how she likes it. I drop in three ice cubes, an eight-second pour of vodka, and a splash of soda water. Then I squeeze three lemon slices and drop them in the glass. “Here,” I say, holding out the glass. “You can put it on the table,” he says. “John! I’m telling you, I don’t have your name!” He shakes his head. “Table.” I set the glass back down. “I can’t believe you don’t believe me. I feel like I remember you being a trusting kind of person who sees the good in people.” Sober as a judge, John says, “Just…stay on your side of the table.” Shoot. How am I supposed to take him out if he makes me stay ten feet away all night? Airily I say, “Fine by me. I don’t know if I believe you, either, so! I mean, this is a pretty big coincidence, you showing up here.” “Stormy guilted me into coming!” I snap my head in Stormy’s direction. She’s still playing the piano, looking over at us with a big smile. Mr. Morales sidles up to the bar and says, “May I have this dance, Lara Jean?” “You may,” I say. To John I warn, “Don’t you dare come close to me.” He throws his hands out like he’s warding me off. “Don’t you come close to me!

STUFFIN’ MUFFINS Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 4 ounces salted butter (1 stick, 8 Tablespoons, ¼ pound) ½ cup finely chopped onion (you can buy this chopped or chop it yourself) ½ cup finely chopped celery ½ cup chopped apple (core, but do not peel before chopping) 1 teaspoon powdered sage 1 teaspoon powdered thyme 1 teaspoon ground oregano 8 cups herb stuffing (the kind in cubes that you buy in the grocery store—you can also use plain bread cubes and add a quarter-teaspoon more of ground sage, thyme, and oregano) 3 eggs, beaten (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon black pepper (freshly ground is best) 2 ounces (½ stick, 4 Tablespoons, pound) melted butter ¼ to ½ cup chicken broth (I used Swanson’s) Hannah’s 1st Note: I used a Fuji apple this time. I’ve also used Granny Smith apples, or Gala apples. Before you start, find a 12-cup muffin pan. Spray the inside of the cups with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray OR line them with cupcake papers. Get out a 10-inch or larger frying pan. Cut the stick of butter in 4 to 8 pieces and drop them inside. Put the pan over MEDIUM heat on the stovetop to melt the butter. Once the butter has melted, add the chopped onions. Give them a stir. Add the chopped celery. Stir it in. Add the chopped apple and stir that in. Sprinkle in the ground sage, thyme, and oregano. Sauté this mixture for 5 minutes. Then pull the frying pan off the heat and onto a cold burner. In a large mixing bowl, combine the 8 cups of herb stuffing. (If the boxed stuffing you bought has a separate herb packet, just sprinkle it over the top of the mixture in your frying pan. That way you’ll be sure to put it in!) Pour the beaten eggs over the top of the herb stuffing and mix them in. Sprinkle on the salt and the pepper. Mix them in. Pour the melted butter over the top and mix it in. Add the mixture from your frying pan on top of that. Stir it all up together. Measure out ¼ cup of chicken broth. Wash your hands. (Mixing the stuffing is going to be a lot easier if you use your impeccably clean hands to mix it.) Pour the ¼ cup of chicken broth over the top of your bowl. Mix everything with your hands. Feel the resulting mixture. It should be softened, but not wet. If you think it’s so dry that your muffins might fall apart after you bake them, mix in another ¼ cup of chicken broth. Once your Stuffin’ Muffin mixture is thoroughly combined, move the bowl close to the muffin pan you’ve prepared, and go wash your hands again. Use an ice cream scoop to fill your muffin cups. If you don’t have an ice cream scoop, use a large spoon. Mound the tops of the muffins by hand. (Your hands are still impeccably clean, aren’t they?) Bake the Stuffin’ Muffins at 350 degrees F. for 25 minutes. Yield: One dozen standard-sized muffins that can be served hot, warm, or at room temperature. Hannah’s 2nd Note: These muffins are a great accompaniment to pork, ham, chicken, turkey, duck, beef, or . . . well . . . practically anything! If there are any left over, you can reheat them in the microwave to serve the next day. Hannah’s 3rd Note: I’m beginning to think that Andrea can actually make Stuffin’ Muffins. It’s only April now, so she’s got seven months to practice.

Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors. Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said. There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect. But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe. Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man. Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate. But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.