Markers Day Quotes

As I set out each day, I felt like a young child again. One who hadn't yet learned the rules of manmade time; the rules of clocks and calendars, of weekdays and weekends. Except the primitive markers of day and night, time lay ahead of me in a continuous, undefined mass.

Sometimes people call folks here at the Simple Way saints. Usually they either want to applaud our lives and live vicariously through us, or they want to write us off as superhuman and create a safe distance. One of my favorite quotes, written on my wall here in bold black marker, is from Dorothy Day: "Don't call us saints; we don't want to be dismissed that easily

Day wouldn’t have understood the concept of immortal cells or HLA markers coming from anyone, accent or not—he’d only gone to school for four years of his life, and he’d never studied science. The only kind of cell he’d heard of was the kind Zakariyya was living in out at Hagerstown. So he did what he’d always done when he didn’t understand something a doctor said: he nodded and said yes.

His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.

We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called "sewery." We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

I had not until then fully realized that I was odd, that there was anything strange about growing up with a single-parent genius. I thought all homes had equations scrawled with disc-marker across all the cabinets and walls, and clean laundry in the freezer, and defrosting chicken in the tool drawer. I thought everyone read a book a day and listened to hours of ancient music.

Do you ever feel lost?” The question hangs between us, intimate, awkward only on my end. He doesn’t scoff as Tactus and Fitchner would, or scratch his balls like Sevro, or chuckle like Cassius might have, or purr as Victra would. I’m not sure what Mustang might have done. But Roque, despite his Color and all the things that make him different, slowly slides a marker into the book and sets it on the nightstand beside the four-poster, taking his time and allowing an answer to evolve between us. Movements thoughtful and organic, like Dancer’s were before he died. There’s a stillness in him, vast and majestic, the same stillness I remember in my father. “Quinn once told me a story.” He waits for me to moan a grievance at the mention of a story, and when I don’t, his tone sinks into deeper gravity. “Once, in the days of Old Earth, there were two pigeons who were greatly in love. In those days, they raised such animals to carry messages across great distances. These two were born in the same cage, raised by the same man, and sold on the same day to different men on the eve of a great war. “The pigeons suffered apart from each other, each incomplete without their lover. Far and wide their masters took them, and the pigeons feared they would never again find each other, for they began to see how vast the world was, and how terrible the things in it. For months and months, they carried messages for their masters, flying over battle lines, through the air over men who killed one another for land. When the war ended, the pigeons were set free by their masters. But neither knew where to go, neither knew what to do, so each flew home. And there they found each other again, as they were always destined to return home and find, instead of the past, their future.

But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you're left with, at the end of the day, is this: a stretch of freshly turned dirt, a handful of seeds scratched into the surface, and a marker to remember where they went. It is at the same time an incredibly brave and an incredibly simple thing to do, entrusting your seeds to the earth and waiting for them to rise up out of the ground to meet you.

Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.

Here are the words that have brought me to a new understanding. Here are the words that will bind us forever. From this day forward, I will speak your name with gratitude, knowing it is the mantra of my soul. I will let you go, knowing we are eternal. We were born to walk this world in intersecting lines. We are circles and signposts and parallels. I have left markers for you at every turn. Look for me in everything that catches your breath. Let the simple miracle of your own presence overwhelm you. For you are beautiful, in ways that can't be described. And we are love at its most inexplicable. With these words, I am one with divinity. With these words, I am one with you.

White is an identity marker for the deracinated people who have no religion.

This is all I have to give you—me.” He lifts his shoulders and his vulnerability rips away a little piece of my heart. “A book with blank pages, weathered edges, and eraser marks, that’s what I am. I need you to paint my future, write my story in permanent marker, just like the mark you left on my heart the day we met.

If there is one lesson I wish to bestow upon you, one shred of wisdom I have gained from my living, dying days, it is this: let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers.

According to scientists at the University of Oregon, people who exercised in a 100-degree room for ten days, for example, increased their fitness performance markers significantly more than a group who did the exact same workout in an air-conditioned room. The hot exercise caused “inexplicable changes to the heart’s left ventricle.” This can improve the heart’s health and efficiency. Hot exercise also activates “heat shock proteins” and “BDNF.” The former are inflammation fighters linked to living longer, while the latter is a chemical that promotes the survival and growth of neurons. BDNF might be protective against depression and Alzheimer’s, according to the NIH.

We seem normal only to those who don't know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on an early dinner date would be; "And how are you crazy?" The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don't care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with. We make mistakes, too, because are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal state of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn't exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently - the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the "not overly wrong" person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition. Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not "normal." We should learn to accommodate ourselves to "wrongness", striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and our partners.

Eventually Porter developed a routine and would bring in two to 10 decision memos for him to sign each day. Trump liked signing. It meant he was doing things, and he had an up-and-down penmanship that looked authoritative in black Magic Marker.

I wish there was some personal marker of time, so we didn't have to rely upon days and weeks and months and years. Because each of us has our own unit of measurement, our own relativity. Spaces between loves. Spaces between destinations. Spaces between deaths. Insightful, p.194

More importantly, I didn’t know then that one day I would genuinely be free. That freedom came out of a thousand small steps of obedience, most of which I took during the waiting or limbo time. The more I learned to lean into Him on a daily basis and simply live out my faith in the everyday elements, the more I was prepared for the bigger steps when they arrived. Not only that, I was given the gift of living my life fully in the present, rather than being fixated and frustrated over some distant time or hope. In the crossroads called limbo, you do arrive at mile markers. You become more mature. More healed. Less surprised by or resistant to or unprepared for the good things God is giving you in the ordinary. Your challenge is to begin to embrace the waiting times as part of the overall journey. Limbo is a key part of the healing process! As you are faithful daily, He is working in you powerfully, and it all counts. Every single moment!

In the Old South, biscuits and cornbread were markers of status. Biscuits needed folding and beating. That's for people with time on their hands or help in the house. Cornbread is mixed, poured, and cooked - so easy, so cheap, and so good. Man of the people that I am, I will take a fresh piece of cornbread over a biscuit any day.

There are those people who believe that life can be lived rationally, that we are in control of our deepest, most powerful emotions, that we can perhaps even escape the deep markers from the early days, the crucial days, where we learn it all. Those people are called crazy. In reality I was playing a part, doing what I imagined I was supposed to do.

I'm grateful for the marker days, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries that remind us to not let the difficult overcome the good.

Without their regular feasts, the faithful are unstrung from the calendar, awash in a sea of days that are all the same.

There are perhaps millions who are sitting on the couch saying, “I’m gonna…” They’ll do it when their finances are perfect, when their children are perfectly grown and stable, when they’ve achieved seniority on the job or some other life marker. Your life will never be perfect. Parts of it will be, at times. You will always be juggling and adjusting in some area of your life. Step away from the couch sitters who are awaiting the single perfect day to begin living their dream. You can choose to live your dream every day if you just take the first step.

This section of Scripture reminds me of the rows of white crosses along the wind-swept hills of Normandy. We’re free today because, in June 1944, during the three-month battle of Normandy, nearly fifty-three thousand “nobodies” paid the ultimate price to defeat Nazi tyranny. No fewer than 9, 387 grave markers overlook Omaha Beach, many of them bearing the names of men who died during the first hours of the invasion called D-day. Beneath every white marker lies a person of significance because each one had an impact on the rest of history; each one made a difference. It’s a very moving place to be. Visitors to that patch of land near Colleville-sur Mer, France, frequently weep quietly because there the real heroes of the war are silently honored.

It'd been years since Neil stood in the same room as Kevin [...]. Everything about him was different. Everything was the same, from his dark hair and green eyes to the black number two tattooed onto his left cheekbone. Neil saw that number and wanted to retch. Kevin had that number back then, too, but he'd been too young to have it done permanently. Instead he and his adopted brother Riko Moriyama wrote the numbers one and two on their faces with markers, tracing them over and over anytime they started to fade. Neil didn't understand it then, but Kevin and Riko were aiming for the stars. They were going to be famous, they promised him.

Osborn’s theory had great impact, and company leaders took up brainstorming with enthusiasm. To this day, it’s common for anyone who spends time in corporate America to find himself occasionally cooped up with colleagues in a room full of whiteboards, markers, and a preternaturally peppy facilitator encouraging everyone to free-associate. There’s only one problem with Osborn’s breakthrough idea: group brainstorming doesn’t actually work.

In the unrelenting chase of what is “best,” many of us can unknowingly allow our lives to become defined by materialism. Materialism isn’t simply about loving certain logos or buying nice stuff; rather, it’s a value system that defines our goals and attention and how we spend our days. And it can leave us not just exhausted but unmoored. Pursuing materialistic goals, like high-status careers and money, causes us to invest our time and energy into things that take time away from investing in our social connections, a habit that can make us feel isolated over time. Ironically, the more isolated we feel, the more likely we are to pursue materialistic goals that we hope, even subconsciously, will draw people to us. Acquiring status markers, we believe, will make us worthy of the human connection we crave. It’s a vicious cycle: some people may become materialistic not because they love money more but because they have underdeveloped connections. Instead of attaching to people, they attach to material goods and status markers to fill the void and to try to get the emotional security they’re lacking. But this approach can backfire and undermine the very relationships we’re trying to foster. In fact, people who prioritize materialistic goals tend to have weaker, more transactional relationships: you do for me, I do for you.

Right above my head, on the shelf made out of sockets and switches, is the hospital's kind reminder of my impermanence. A whiteboard that says Lenni Petersson in red marker with a smudge near the final n. The thing about whiteboards is that they're so easily wiped clean. They're designed to be used again and again and again for the names of the unlucky few who find themselves in the May Ward. One day, in just the briefest stroke of a dry whiteboard eraser, I'll be gone.

What the world needs now are signposts of what's ahead, markers for the new world just around the corner. The world does not need heroes; the world does not need more messiah complexes. The world does not need Christians who want to ride in on a white horse to save the day. What the world needs are witnesses. Nothing more and nothing less. The earth needs people who can bear witness to the ways in which the world has already changed through the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

There are subtle markers that delineate space, as well as clothing, language, social codes, and behaviors that indicate someone might be an insider. I often make immediate judgy assumptions based on what other skiers are wearing, or how they carry their gear. If you look at the symbolism and the cultural clues about who is welcome—the athletes, the ads—they’re largely white. When you show up to ski, you’re facing everyday systemic racism, as well as the factors specific to these towns.

Right above my head, on the shelf made out of sockets and switches, is the hospital’s kind reminder of my impermanence. A whiteboard that says Lenni Pettersson in red marker with a smudge near the final n. The thing about whiteboards is that they’re so easily wiped clean. They’re designed to be used again and again and again for the names of the unlucky few who find themselves in the May Ward. One day, in just the briefest stroke of a dry whiteboard eraser, I’ll be gone. A new patient with skinny arms and big eyes will take my place.

You can’t put the book you just finished behind you because you still want to live it. You have a terrible book hangover, and it lasts three days. Ibuprofen does nothing for it. You’re sad because whatever you read next can’t possibly be as good as the book you just finished. You despair because nothing you read can possibly be as good, ever again. You finish an amazing series and need to grieve that it’s over. You need to mourn the loss of a beloved character. You wonder why these events have no cultural markers, because you definitely need one.

I take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of NMN every morning, along with 1 gram of resveratrol (shaken into my homemade yogurt) and 1 gram of metformin.7 • I take a daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg of aspirin. • I strive to keep my sugar, bread, and pasta intake as low as possible. I gave up desserts at age 40, though I do steal tastes. • I try to skip one meal a day or at least make it really small. My busy schedule almost always means that I miss lunch most days of the week. • Every few months, a phlebotomist comes to my home to draw my blood, which I have analyzed for dozens of biomarkers. When my levels of various markers are not optimal, I moderate them with food or exercise. • I try to take a lot of steps each day and walk upstairs, and I go to the gym most weekends with my son, Ben; we lift weights, jog a bit, and hang out in the sauna before dunking in an ice-cold pool. • I eat a lot of plants and try to avoid eating other mammals, even though they do taste good. If I work out, I will eat meat. • I don’t smoke. I try to avoid microwaved plastic, excessive UV exposure, X-rays, and CT scans. • I try to stay on the cool side during the day and when I sleep at night. • I aim to keep my body weight or BMI in the optimal range for healthspan, which for me is 23 to 25.

We won’t know what needs to happen at mile twenty-two until we get there. Some people delight in this, but most spend too much energy feeling anxious about a mile marker they haven’t yet arrived at. Does that sound like you? Usually the things we worry about the most don’t happen anyway. We fear there will be disaster only to find balloons when we arrive.

THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD" "Or ever the knightly years were gone      With the old world to the grave, I was a king in Babylon      And you were a Christian slave,"         —W.E. Henley. His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations. I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his given name, and he called the marker "Bullseyes." Charlie explained, a little nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since looking on at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother.

I would be unfair to myself if I said I did not try. I did, even if desultorily. But desire is a curious thing. If it does not exist it does not exist and there is nothing you can do to conjure it up. Worse still, as I discovered, when desire begins to sink, like a capsizing ship it takes down a lot with it.   In our case it took down the conversation, the laughter, the sharing, the concern, the dreams and nearly - the most important thing, the most important thing - and nearly the affection too. Soon my sinking desire had taken everything else down with it to the floor of the sea, and only affection remained like the bobbing hand of a drowning man, poised perilously between life and death.   More than once she tried to seize the moment and open up the issue. She did it with a hard face and a soft face; she did it when I was idling on the terrace and when I was in the thick of my works; first thing in the morning and last thing at night.   We need to talk. Yes. Do you want to talk? Sure. What's happening? I don't know. Is there someone else? No. Is it something I did? Oh no. Then what the hell's happening? I don't know. Is there anything you want to talk to me about? I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? I don't know. That's what I mean - I don't know. Toc toc toc.   All the while I tried to save that bobbing hand - of affection - from vanishing. I felt somehow that if it drowned there would not be a single pointer on the wide stormy surface to show me where our great love had once stood. That bobbing hand of affection was a marker, a buoy, holding out the hope that one day we could salvage the sunken ship. If it drowned, our coordinates would be completely lost and we would not know where to even begin looking.   Even in my weird state, it was an image of such desolation that it made my heart lurch wildly.   ***   For a long time, with her immense pride in herself - in us - she did not turn to anyone for help. Not friends, not family. For simply too long she imagined this was a passing phase, but then, as the weeks rolled by, through slow accretion the awful truth began to settle on her. By then she had run through all the plays of a relationship: withdrawal, sulking, anger, seduction, inquisition, affection, threat.   Logic, love, lust. Now the epitaph was beginning to creep up on her. Acceptance. 

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential

His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential. And

At a farewell dinner, the editors gave [S.R. Nathan] a porcelain bowl. For the day before he joined us, the PM had told him: "Nathan, I am giving you The Straits Times. It has 140 years of history. It's like a bowl of china. You break it, I can piece it together, but it will never be the same." I was struck by the way the PM made his point – he knew the value and place of The Straits Times in Singapore's past, present and future.

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead... ...When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin. It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus... ...Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.

WHAT WE CALL LOVE is actually a deep interweaving of beings. The emotion we feel is actually a marker that the other person or thing has become part of ourselves; we are no longer separate from the other. This explains why losing someone or something we love hurts so much. It is not just “as if” something has been torn from us. When we enter love, a part of ourselves merges with the other and when we lose love, a part of ourselves is torn away.

Writing is the way I process the world. When I was given the opportunity to write this book, whatever God was up there said, You got your dream. I said, Actually I was hoping for a lighter topic, and God was like, Ha! Ha! You thought you got to choose. This was the topic I was given. If something else had happened to me, I would have written about that, too. When I get worked up over what happened, I tell myself, you are a pair of eyes. I'm a civilian who's been randomly selected to receive an all-access pass to the court system. Feelings will include invasion, shame, isolation, cruelty. My job is to observe , feel, document, report. What am I learning and seeing that other people can't see? What doorways does my suffering lead to? People sometimes day, I can't imagine. How do I make them imagine? I write to show how victims are treated at this moment in time, to record the temperature of our culture. This is a marker...

….two slate-colored gravestones settled at a slant into the lower corner of the field beside the lane. She could not read the names engraved on them, but she knew what they were. Joseph Watson, 1820-1891, and James Watson, son of Joseph and Hannah Watson, 1844-1863. The grave of Hannah Watson lay beside her husband’s and because she had died last, she had no marker, unless the pine tree growing there might count as one. To-morrow two men would drive up and leave a basket of flowers and a flag for Joseph because he had fought in the Civil War, and for James because he had died on his way home from it, but they would not have anything for Hannah because she had only identified her son James one hot summer day on the platform of North Derwich Station, and raised all the food her husband ate for twenty years as he sat in a chair in her kitchen, and done washings for Mrs. Hale to buy monuments for them at the end. But the flowers would die in the boxes; even if Jen found time to go down and set out the pansy plants in the ground, stray cows were sure to eat them off before the summer was over; and the Forrest children would take the flags to play with. Nothing would interfere with the tree.

The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done, I stand above my father’s grave with rage, often, often before I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one who cannot visit me, who tore his page out: I come back for more, I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn O ho alas alas When will indifference come, I moan & rave I’d like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart the mouldering grave clothes ha then Henry will heft the ax once more, his final card, and fell it on the start.

No, you have been brought up with the lies that books have told you, and granted they are far more comforting and aesthetically pleasing than the truth. I will not rip the illusion from you. Keep it, hold it, love it, let it give solace on dark days. Let the truth die a noble death, with no marker, no troubadours singing its songs, no glorious parades or the trotting out of its many lustrous icons on saint days. Let the truth die with the man who holds it. If there was anything I learned while teaching, it is that truth is overrated. The lies are just as, if not more, beautiful and poetic. And after centuries, if the lies have survived, they become the truth, as such.

October first it was, fifteen past eight. For twenty minutes my heart was ringing, my soul was singing. Because he was typing on the other side. Just the hi, and hahaha. Silly, meaningless conversation, he didn’t even remember. That was my happiest twenty minutes. I stepped out of my house, got a haircut, I thought he’d like. After three days when my face was fine, I scrolled through his page, looked for the things he liked. Then I made a list of things to do, French class, swimming class, aerobics, and a road trip on November nineteen. On October first, fifteen past eight. My heart was ringing, my soul was singing because he wasn’t just typing on the other side. He was writing on my heart with a permanent marker, in pink.

Fusing heaven to earth, the Big Horn Mountains stood before him. A few clouds swirled around the highest peaks, furthering the illusion of a wall reaching forever upward. His eyes watered from the glare of the sun against snow, but he could not look away. Nothing in Glass’s twenty years on the plains had prepared him for such mountains. Captain Henry had spoken often of the enormity of the Rockies, but Glass assumed his stories were infused with the standard dose of campfire embellishment. In actuality, Glass thought, Henry’s portrait had been woefully inadequate. Henry was a straightforward man, and his descriptions focused on the mountains as obstacles, barriers to be surmounted in the drive to connect a stream of commerce between east and west. Missing entirely from Henry’s description had been any hint of the devout strength that flowed into Glass at the sight of the massive peaks. […] His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.

Being a good parent is hard. There's a lot of trial and error. In my case, quite a lot of the latter. ... And one thing you're never lacking once you become a parent is people criticizing you. Because children aren't just children these days, you know, you're identity markers. No one knows quite how that happened. Ten thousand year of sexual experience, and suddenly my generation decides that we're going to carry you out of the maternity ward as though you were the Champions League Cup. As though we were the first people in the history of the world who figured out how reproduction works. We don't even need to be 'good' parents any more, I think. That's passed now. We make do with 'not horible' by this point. ... And of the few ways we can convince ourselves that we're actually decent as parents is by making other people seem like bad parents. And we can be pretty damn creative when it comes down to it. If it isn't the food or the toys or the fact that the child sometimes has to stay at nursery until quarter past three in the afternoon then it's the non-organic plastic in whatever the hell piece of furniture that hasn't been given some certificate by some department in Brussels. 'Oh? YOu let your child play with THAT? Ah, well, me personally, I would rather my child didn't get brain cancer ... but it's nice that everyone can raise their children in their own way, isn't it?' That's how we bring each other down.

Knowing Chris was getting married, his fellow Team members decided that they had to send him off with a proper SEAL bachelor party. That meant getting him drunk, of course. It also meant writing all over him with permanent markers-an indelible celebration, to be sure. Fortunately, they liked him, so his face wasn’t marked up-not by them, at least; he’d torn his eyebrow and scratched his lip during training. Under his clothes, he looked quite the sight. And the words wouldn’t come off no matter how he, or I scrubbed. I pretended to be horrified, but honestly, that didn’t bother me much. I was just happy to have him with me, and very excited to be spending the rest of my life with the man I loved. It’s funny, the things you get obsessed about. Days before the wedding, I spent forty-five minutes picking out exactly the right shape of lipstick, splurging on expensive cosmetics-then forgot to take it with me the morning of the wedding. My poor sister and mom had to run to Walgreens for a substitute; they came back with five different shades, not one of which matched the one I’d picked out. Did it matter? Not at all, although I still remember the vivid marks the lipstick made when I kissed him on the cheek-marking my man. Lipstick, location, time of day-none of that mattered in the end. What did matter were our families and friends, who came in for the ceremony. Chris liked my parents, and vice versa. I truly loved his mom and dad. I have a photo from that day taped near my work area. My aunt took it. It’s become my favorite picture, an accidental shot that captured us perfectly. We stand together, beaming, with an American flag in the background. Chris is handsome and beaming; I’m beaming at him, practically glowing in my white gown. We look so young, happy, and unworried about what was to come. It’s that courage about facing the unknown, the unshakable confidence that we’d do it together, that makes the picture so precious to me. It’s a quality many wedding photos possess. Most couples struggle to make those visions realities. We would have our struggles as well.

He found that when the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team—once described as the national team of French Canada—got knocked out of the playoffs early between 1951 and 1992, Quebecois males aged fifteen to thirty-four became more likely to kill themselves. Robert Fernquist, a sociologist at the University of Central Missouri, went further. He studied thirty American metropolitan areas with professional sports teams from 1971 to 1990 and showed that fewer suicides occurred in cities whose teams made the playoffs more often. Routinely reaching the playoffs could reduce suicides by about twenty each year in a metropolitan area the size of Boston or Atlanta, said Fernquist. These saved lives were the converse of the mythical Brazilians throwing themselves off apartment blocks. Later, Fernquist investigated another link between sports and suicide: he looked at the suicide rate in American cities after a local sports team moved to another town. It turned out that some of the fans abandoned by their team killed themselves. This happened in New York in 1957 when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams left, in Cleveland in 1995–1996 when the Browns football team moved to Baltimore, and in Houston in 1997–1998 when the Oilers football team departed. In each case the suicide rate was 10 percent to 14 percent higher in the two months around the team’s departure than in the same months of the previous year. Each move probably helped prompt a handful of suicides. Fernquist wrote, “The sudden change brought about due to the geographic relocations of pro sports teams does appear to, at least for a short time, make highly identified fans drastically change the way they view the normative order in society.” Clearly none of these people killed themselves just because they lost their team. Rather, they were very troubled individuals for whom this sporting disappointment was too much to bear. Perhaps the most famous recent case of a man who found he could not live without sports was the Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. He shot himself in February 2005, four days after writing a note in black marker with the title, “Football Season Is Over”:

Nope- it was not! Ava and her girls that day went, and they cut a class at some point in the day and broke into my baby. Then Ava- ‘Rubbed one out!’ that means that she masturbated, and squirted her lady- juices all over the inside of my car. Yes- and I mean it went all over. It was on my seat on the dash, on the floor, and Ava smeared what creaminess that was on her two fingers on the windows, and driver’s side vent. As her clan, sisters pissed all over the carpet on the floor, and took their dumps on the seat, and left their thongs behind. Alison, she wrote a note on her undies saying- ‘Now you have some pairs to wear!’ It was so nasty! Plus- the outside was covered and wrapped with toilet paper as well as littered with Ava and her sisters used feminine products. What is wrong with these girls? What did I do to deserve this one? Likewise, the other kids thought it was the most humorous thing, which they ever witnessed at the end of the school day. When I discovered it- You know, I was utterly sick to my stomach. I think I screamed so loudly it echoed throughout the land, and started to cry and ran while being pushed around bouncing around off their bodies, I cannot remember- I was so upset, and then the kids were all around me kicking, and pushing me from one place to another. I was just like a hacky sack for them, until I passed out, and dropped to the hard ground. That gave them time for them to spit on me, and dump things like glue in my hair or whatever that shit was. Then what gets me is that she signed her name- Ava on the dashboard with a black permanent sharpie marker, and It reads, ‘Suck on this- Nevaeh- lick, what I gave you all up!’ and she drew a heart, with a line through it also. She wanted me to know because there was not a thing I could do about it. Depressed- to say that her juicy sprays were more yellowish, and a thick sticky white, then clear on my blue and white cloth seats. Yet, Hope had the car towed and cleaned for me inside and out, she could not believe what kids do these days. Therefore, that was the first time that I drove my car to school and the last. That whole thing cost me a lot. I guess it is back to the bus. That is what everyone wants is it not. This completely sucked; I have a car that I cannot drive anywhere other than at home or have locked up in the barn- with the other rust bucket car.

The Civil War that I rarely thought about had ended more than a century ago, yet in 1979, I knew the seeds of hatred were still fertile back home, the anger and prejudice still alive. I remember my heart growing a bit colder that day, my vision clearer, the proof of man's capacity to do horrible, wicked things in what my own eyes had seen. Hate unchecked knows so bounds, and when it rises up it must be confronted and rejected or it will spread like an endless cancer. I had not yet thought about why there were no markers of the atrocities committed on our land, in our city. Why no slave ship markers? Why no plantation histories told through the eyes of the enslaved Africans who worked them? That would come to me later.

Aged garlic extract 600 mg one to three times a day. Aged garlic extract is used to protect the heart and blood vessels, and is reported to help decrease oxidative stress markers, including those related to blood sugar regulation problems. Aged garlic has also been reported to reduce liver enzymes and fatty liver, as well as decrease the formation of advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which are implicated in various health problems, such as heart disease, kidney problems, and cancer.

To this day, scientists know of only two layers of sediment 'broadly distributed across several continents that exhibit coeval abundance peaks in a comprehensive assemblage of cosmic impact markers, including nanodiamonds, high-temperature quenched spherules, high-temperature melt-glass, carbon spherules, iridium and aciniform carbon.' These layers are found at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary 65 million years ago, when it has long been agreed that a gigantic cosmic impact in the Gulf of Mexico caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,800 years ago.

When he got out of the car to do his business, my mother stared straight ahead. But I turned to watch. There was always something wild and charismatically uncaring about my father’s demeanor in these moments, some mysterious abandonment of his frowning and cogitative state that already meant a lot to me, even though at that age I understood almost nothing about him. Paulie had long ago stopped whispering 'perv' to me for observing him as he relieved himself. She of course, kept her head n her novels. I remember that it was cold that day, and windy but that the sky had been cut from the crackling blue gem field of a late midwestern April. Outside the car, as other families sped past my father stepped to the leeward side of the open door then leaning back from the waist and at the same time forward the ankles. His penis poked out from his zipper for this part, Bernie always stood up at the rear window. My father paused fo a moment rocking slightly while a few indistinct words played on his lips. Then just before his stream stared he tiled back his head as if there were a code written in the sky that allowed the event to begin. This was the moment I waited for, the movement seemed to be a marker of his own private devotion as though despite his unshakable atheism and despite his sour, entirely analytic approach to every affair of life, he nonetheless felt the need to acknowledge the heavens in the regard to this particular function of the body. I don't know perhaps I sensed that he simply enjoyed it in a deep way that I did. It was possible I already recognized that the eye narrowing depth of his physical delight in that moment was relative to that paucity of other delights in his life. But in any case the prayerful uplifting of his cranium always seemed to democratize him for me, to make him for a few minutes at least, a regular man. Bernie let out a bark. ‘’Is he done?’’ asked my mother. I opened my window. ‘’Almost.’’ In fact he was still in the midst. My father peed like a horse. His urine lowed in one great sweeping dream that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly, a single, winking arc of shimmering clarity that endured for a prodigious interval and then disappeared in an instant, as though the outflow were a solid object—and arch of glittering ice or a thick band of silver—and not (as it actually approximated) a parabolic, dynamically averaged graph of the interesting functions of gravity, air resistance, and initial velocity on a non-viscous fluid, produced and exhibited by a man who’d just consumed more than a gallon of midwestern beer. The flow was as clear as water. When it struck the edge of the gravel shoulder, the sound was like a bed-sheet being ripped. Beneath this high reverberation, he let out a protracted appreciative whistle that culminated in a tunneled gasp, his lips flapping at the close like a trumpeters. In the tiny topsoil, a gap appeared, a wisp entirely unashamed. Bernie bumped about in the cargo bay. My father moved up close to peer through the windshield, zipping his trousers and smiling through the glass at my mother. I realized that the yellow that should have been in his urine was unmistakable now in his eyes. ‘’Thank goodness,’’ my mother said when the car door closed again. ‘’I was getting a little bored in here.

Steve drove us to the airstrip at the ranger station. One of the young rangers there immediately began to bend his ear about a wildlife issue. I took Robert off to pee on a bush before we had to get on the plane. It was just a tiny little prop plane and there would be no restroom until we got to Cairns. When we came back, all the general talk meant that there wasn’t much time left for us to say good-bye. Bindi pressed a note into Steve’s hand and said, “Don’t read this until we’re gone.” I gave Steve a big hug and a kiss. Then I kissed him again. I wanted to warn him to be careful about diving. It was my same old fear and discomfort with all his underwater adventures. A few days earlier, as Steve stepped off a dinghy, his boot had gotten tangled in a rope. “Watch out for that rope,” I said. He shot me a look that said, I’ve just caught forty-nine crocodiles in three weeks, and you’re thinking I’m going to fall over a rope? I laughed sheepishly. It seemed absurd to caution Steve about being careful. Steve was his usual enthusiastic self as we climbed into the plane. We knew we would see each other in less than two weeks. I would head back to the zoo, get some work done, and leave for Tasmania. Steve would do his filming trip. Then we would all be together again. We had arrived at a remarkable place in our relationship. Our trip to Lakefield had been one of the most special months of my entire life. The kids had a great time. We were all in the same place together, not only physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We were all there. The pilot fired up the plane. Robert had a seat belt on and couldn’t see out the window. I couldn’t lift him up without unbuckling him, so he wasn’t able to see his daddy waving good-bye. But Bindi had a clear view of Steve, who had parked his Ute just outside the gable markers and was standing on top of it, legs wide apart, a big smile on his face, waving his hands over his head. I could see Bindi’s note in one of his hands. He had read it and was acknowledging it to Bindi. She waved frantically out the window. As the plane picked up speed, we swept past him and then we were into the sky.

I wish there was some personal marker of time, so we didn't have to rely upon days and weeks and months and years. Because each of us has our own unit of measurement, our own relativity. Spaces between loves. Spaces between destinations. Spaces between deaths. Invisibility, p.194

(Many prospective dieters sign up for a weight-loss program on the day they experience the negative somatic marker of being unable to secure their car seat belts.)

Before we left the chapel, I caught up with my grandfather to make one final plea. “Grandpa,” I said, “we can’t bury Dad’s ashes.” “That’s not your decision to make.” He started to walk away, but I grabbed his sleeve, knowing it would be my last chance. “Wasn’t it his?” I asked. “He wanted to be cremated because he didn’t want to be buried. Please, let us take his ashes out to Montauk.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that I’d made a critical mistake. My grandfather realized it, too. He associated Montauk with my father’s frivolous hobbies, such as boating and fishing, activities that had distracted him from the serious business of real estate. “Montauk,” he repeated, almost smiling. “That’s not going to happen. Get in the car.” Sunlight glinted off the marble and granite grave markers as our grandfather, his light blue eyes squinting beneath his enormous eyebrows at the brightness of the day, explained that the tombstone, which was already inscribed with his mother’s and father’s names, would be removed temporarily so my father’s name and dates could be added. As he spoke, he spread his hands wide, like a used-car salesman, bouncing on the balls of his feet, almost jaunty, knowing he was in the presence of a rube. My grandfather followed the letter of the law and then did what he wanted. After my father was cremated, they put his ashes into a metal box and buried them in the ground.

A blank piece of paper is a new day. A paint brush is a new adventure, a marker is a new journey. What will you do with yours?

Working on a shoestring, which in my case is more often a matter of circumstance than of choice, never appeared to me as a cornerstone for aesthetics, and Dogme-type stuff just bores me. So it’s rather in order to bring some comfort to young filmmakers in need that I mention these few technical details: The material for La Jetee was created with a Pentax 24x36, and the only “cinema” part (the blinking of the eyes) with an Arriflex 35mm film camera, borrowed for one hour. Sans Soleil was entirely shot with a 16mm Beaulieu silent film camera (not one sync take within the whole film), with 100-foot reels – 2'44" autonomy! –and a small cassette recorder (not even a Walkman; they didn’t exist yet). The only “sophisticated” device – given the time – was the spectre image synthesizer, also borrowed for a few days. This is to say that the basic tools for these two films were literally available to anyone. No silly boasting here, just the conviction that today, with the advent of computer and small DV cameras (unintentional homage to Dziga Vertov), would-be directors need no longer submit their fate to the unpredictability of producers or the arthritis of televisions, and that by following their whims or passions, they perhaps see one day their tinkering elevated to DVD status by honorable men.

. Someone wrote: ‘Who is the most beautiful girl in school?’ in permanent marker in the boys’ bathrooms outside the geography classes and within a few days, ‘Holly Lawson’ was written around it in a bunch of other pens by hundreds of different people! (Someone also wrote ‘Jennifer Hunds’ in small, neat handwriting near the bottom, but everyone knows that was written by Kyle Williams who has had a crush on her since Kindergarten, so that doesn’t count.)

Despite the ubiquity of government-organized trans pageants in the Philippines, trans people themselves are not politically recognized. We are culturally visible but legally erased. To this day, trans Filipinas have M gender markers on their documents and cannot change their names in court. We don't have robust antidiscrimination protections. No amount of pageant glory can make up for the fact that our government still doesn't see and treat trans people as full citizens able to participate in society as we truly are. In a country of over 100 million people, only a few dozen certified endocrinologists offer gender-affirming care. Growing up, I relied on other trans people to find hormones, figuring out the right dosages through hearsay, transitioning entirely without proper medical supervision. There was no other choice back then - and for many today, DIY is still the only option. My community is littered with stories of injections gone horribly wrong. Even worse, when someone dies from an overdose or an unsupervised medical treatment, it's shrugged off as a sad fact of life. 'That's what happens,' the emergency techs will say, our lives stripped of value by the very institutions that ought to care for us. I will never forget when one of my Garcia clan sisters succumbed to death from a botched medical procedure, a victim of all the intersecting forces trans Filipinas have to navigate to get treatment.

If you wait till the white man leaves and ask about that space, the space between white and black folks in South Carolina, the black folks say, “Oh, it ain’t nothing. Such-and-so is my friend. I’ve known him forty years. We all get along here.” Only at night, when they get home, when the lights are down and all the churchin’ is done and the singing is over and the TV is off and the wine is flowing and tongues are working freely, only within the safety of home and family does the talk change, and then the buzz is no longer a buzz. It’s a roaring cyclone of fury laced with distaste and four hundred years of pent-up bitterness. There is not a single marker for James Brown in this place, they say. No spot to commemorate his birth, no building named after him, no school, no library, no statue, no nothing. And even when they do name something after him, or celebrate him in the state legislature or some such thing, it doesn’t matter. They smile about it during the day, but at night they cuss that thing so hard it’ll curl up on its own and crawl away like a snake. There’s not even a marker at the spot where the greatest soul singer this country ever knew came from. Why would they put one there? They hate him.

I came across an Etruscan word, saeculum, which is a concept, or marker, of a temporal interval. Generally speaking, it is the span of time lived by the oldest person present. The day will come…when the last person to have fought in Vietnam will die. . . .Who will remember when . . . a car had to be cranked to start or when the clank of an ice delivery man carrying fifty-pound block in tongs brought merriment to the afternoon? I wonder, then, what would be my saeculum. Or whom. I wonder what young nephew or niece’s child, siphoned through the tunnel of time, would see a faded photograph of me and search their memories for my name. I think he was some sort of great-uncle, she or he will say. I don’t remember exactly. Look at his clothes!

I’ll be voting, but I’m not about to vote yes. That Teenup man you’re all trying to save is just another money-sucking teacher as far as I’m concerned.” “And you’re just an old fart who doesn’t know his head from his butt,” I said. “You get off my porch!” he roared. Lexie grabbed my hand and got me away from there as fast as she could, before I said anything more. I didn’t mean any disrespect to Mr. Geezer, but he didn’t have the right to talk about T that way. I lost my head—and my tongue—after he said those awful things. I don’t know anything about it, but somehow Mr. Geezer woke up the next morning with his house and car gift-wrapped in VOTE YES flyers. He even had SAVE MR. TERUPT written in huge black letters across his garage door. From what I understand, it was written in washable marker, but it was still there several days later. That’s what I call karma!

A toxic choice produces the opposite effect: The acetyl markers reduce and the methyl markers increase, causing us to have less peace.

The prime minister was provoked by what he considered to be unfriendly or inept coverage, or both, over many months. He concluded that the editors had lost control of the newsroom. . .What was probably the last straw for him was coverage of Israeli president Chaim Herzog's visit. When the Foreign Ministry announced the visit, fury flared across the Causeway. The Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, recalled his high commissioner to Singapore and demanded the visit be cancelled. For Singapore to do so after the visit was announced would inflict serious damage on its sovereignty. Demonstrations erupted in many parts of Malaysia, and at the Malaysian end of the Causeway more than 100 demonstrators tried to stop a Singapore-bound train. Singapore flags were burnt. There were threats to cut off the water supply from Johor. Malaysia saw the visit as an insult. It did not recognise Israel, and had expected Singapore to be sensitive to its feelings. Singapore, however, could not refuse the Israeli request for its head of state to make a stopover visit in Singapore, the tail end of his three-week tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the Philippines, the first visit to this part of the world by an Israeli leader. Singapore could hardly forget the crucial assistance Israel had provided the Singapore Armed Forces in the early days of independence, when other friendly countries like Egypt and India had declined to help. What angered Lee Kuan Yew was our coverage of the Malaysian reactions to the visit. He felt it was grossly inadequate. . .Coverage in the Malaysian English press was restrained, but in their Malay press, Singapore was condemned in inflammatory language, and accused of being Israel's Trojan horse in Southeast Asia. A threat to target Singapore Airlines was prominently reported. . .And by depriving Singaporeans of the full flavour of what the Malaysian Malay media was reporting, an opportunity was lost to educate them about the harsh reality of life in the region, with two large Muslim-majority neighbours.

In universities and pharmaceutical labs around the world, computer scientists and computational biologists are designing algorithms to sift through billions of gene sequences, looking for links between certain genetic markers and diseases. The goal is to help us sidestep the diseases we're most likely to contract and to provide each one of us with a cabinet of personalized medicines. Each one should include just the right dosage and the ideal mix of molecules for our bodies. Between these two branches of research, genetic and behavioral, we're being parsed, inside and out. Even the language of the two fields is similar. In a nod to geneticists, Dishman and his team are working to catalog what they call our "behavioral markers." The math is also about the same. Whether they're scrutinizing our strands of DNA or our nightly trips to the bathroom, statisticians are searching for norms, correlations, and anomalies. Dishman prefers his behavioral approach, in part because the market's less crowded. "There are a zillion people looking at biology," he says, "and too few looking at behavior." His gadgets also have an edge because they can provide basic alerts from day one. The technology indicating whether a person gets out of bed, for example, isn't much more complicated than the sensor that automatically opens a supermarket door. But that nugget of information is valuable. Once we start installing these sensors, and the electronics companies get their foot in the door, the experts can start refining the analysis from simple alerts to sophisticated predictions-perhaps preparing us for the onset of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's.

In universities and pharmaceutical labs around the world, computer scientists and computational biologists are designing algorithms to sift through billions of gene sequences, looking for links between certain genetic markers and diseases. The goal is to help us sidestep the diseases we're most likely to contract and to provide each one of us with a cabinet of personalized medicines. Each one should include just the right dosage and the ideal mix of molecules for our bodies. Between these two branches of research, genetic and behavioral, we're being parsed, inside and out. Even the language of the two fields is similar. In a nod to geneticists, Dishman and his team are working to catalog what they call our "behavioral markers." The math is also about the same. Whether they're scrutinizing our strands of DNA or our nightly trips to the bathroom, statisticians are searching for norms, correlations, and anomalies. Dishman prefers his behavioral approach, in part because the market's less crowded. "There are a zillion people looking at biology," he says, "and too few looking at behavior." His gadgets also have an edge because they can provide basic alerts from day one. The technology indicating whether a person gets out of bed, for example, isn't much more complicated than the sensor that automatically opens a supermarket door. But that nugget of information is valuable. Once we start installing these sensors, and the electronics companies get their foot in the door, the experts can start refining the analysis from simple alerts to sophisticated predictions-perhaps preparing us for the onset of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's.

Each word that she left behind is precious, including the simple three I rediscovered a few days after Marina’s memorial service. Her long-forgotten note, scrawled with a dry-erase marker on the back of a BB&N book slip and left on my desk when she was visiting from college, simply read, “Marina was here!” Marina was here. Yes, she was, in so many ways. And with an exclamation point. My hope is that through this book and Marina’s many legacies, we may all still hear her and be inspired by how she used her fleeting time to be passionately, vibrantly, fully here. —Beth McNamara August 2014

If times or ages are mentioned in any activity, please take that as a guideline only. Children will learn the activity as it comes naturally to them. A thirty minute activity may take your child forty minutes. If the suggested age is four, but you have a three year old that can grasp the concepts do not let the recommendations hinder you. This information has not been provided for all activities. This is for a couple of reasons. One being that some of these activities span broader age ranges. The other is that while I find that sometimes it is useful to have an idea of where to start your child, it is better to look at your child in terms of ability and readiness rather than number of years. If times are included, they are meant for assistance in planning your day only. They are not in any way intended to be a marker for your child’s success. The activities have been divided up into the instructional areas of language, mathematics, sensory development and practical life skills. Many of these activities can serve as crossovers, allowing you to introduce multiple concepts at once. Some subjects such as cultural studies or science are included in practical life skills, since at this age that is primarily what those subjects encompass. Where applicable, additional skill areas have been included

Some of these results were predictable, but others took me totally by surprise. Here’s what happened to various blood markers prior to and immediately after my fast:           PRE-FAST      POST-FAST      Total cholesterol      295      195      LDL-C      216      131      HDL-C      61      50      Triglycerides      90      68      LDL-P      2889      1664      Small LDL-P      1446      587      Lp(a)      441      143      Fasting insulin      13.9      10.0      hsCRP      1.6      .94   Most of those numbers are related to cardiovascular health, including advanced cholesterol tests.

There, in the “Early Days” section, is a photo the company sent to customers who purchased the flower deal. All fifteen Groupon employees, with Mason front and center, are standing behind a white poster board sporting a message inked in black marker: “We’re sorry!! —your friends [at] Groupon.” “The response we got back was, ‘Holy shit, there’s actually real people at that company,

Except for the primitive markers of day and night, time lay ahead of me in continuous, undefined mass.

Like the Victorian English with their poetic embellishments of ‘thou’ and ‘wert’ and ‘e’en’, so the Hadrianic circle wrote in Aeolic dialect for a refined effect; it was a marker of inclusion in the inner circle. This uneasy juxtaposition of enthusiasm for an idealised ‘ancient’ civilisation and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for its present-day descendants has its echoes in the problems that the American and European Grand Tourists had with Italy, whose geography and ancient remains they loved – were it not for the drawback of its current inhabitants. Second-century elite culture and nineteenth-century romanticism were both heavily vested in a nostalgic golden past.

Greetings. There is a body buried on your property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady’s name is Rita Jones. You’ve seen this missing school-teacher’s face on the news, I’m sure. In her jeans pocket you’ll find a slip of paper with a phone number on it. You have one day to call that number. If I have not heard from you by 8:00 P.M. tomorrow (5/17), the Charlotte Police Department will receive an anonymous phone call. I’ll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on Andrew Thomas’s lakefront property, how he killed her, and where the murder weapon can be found in his house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing from your kitchen.) I hope for your sake I don’t have to make that call. I’ve placed a property marker on the grave site. Just walk along the shoreline toward the southern boundary of your property and you’ll find it. I strongly advise against going to the police, as I am always watching you.

The early Iditarod dogs were tough and hearty and so were the people who ran these teams. The first races took many days/weeks. During these early Iditarod runs, there were no headlights, no booties except the rare hand-sewn seal-skin bootie, no reflective trail markers (spruce boughs if anything), no quick-change runners, and no pre-race drop-bags assigned to each checkpoint. The mushers that ran were experts in survivalist arctic living and elite dog-men; many times these individuals were the trail-breakers as Iditarod was a trail and not a highway at that time. I remember air dropping dog food to the mushers at Poorman, they were snowshoeing in front of their teams. Mushers camped ang rested at night. The dogs were more trap-line dogs than anything. Today's Iditarod dogs are trained better and selected for more speed. (From the foreword by Terry O. Adkins)

The rewilding of our body and brain usually goes something like this: On the first day stress and health markers improve, but we are still adjusting to the discomfort of nature. We’re thinking about how it sucks to be cold, missing our phone, and still focusing on the anxieties we left behind—what’s happening at work and whether we closed the garage door. By day two our mind is settling and awareness is heightening. We’re caring less about what we left behind and are beginning to notice the sights, smells, and sounds around us. Then day three hits. Now our senses are completely dialed in and we can reach a fully meditative mode of feeling connected to nature. The discomfort isn’t so bad. It has, in fact, shifted to a welcome sensation that signals a calmness and feeling of life satisfaction.

And so, with all that on the table, what do I do? • I take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of NMN every morning, along with 1 gram of resveratrol (shaken into my homemade yogurt) and 1 gram of metformin.7 • I take a daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg of aspirin. • I strive to keep my sugar, bread, and pasta intake as low as possible. I gave up desserts at age 40, though I do steal tastes. • I try to skip one meal a day or at least make it really small. My busy schedule almost always means that I miss lunch most days of the week. • Every few months, a phlebotomist comes to my home to draw my blood, which I have analyzed for dozens of biomarkers. When my levels of various markers are not optimal, I moderate them with food or exercise. • I try to take a lot of steps each day and walk upstairs, and I go to the gym

CONAN: Standing there, watching her, I felt like a damn monster—a guy covered in tattoos, each one a marker of past fights and darker days. My exterior might have been tough, but it was nothing compared to the ugliness trying to claw its way out of my heart. My childhood had left me jaded and untrusting. I had always put on a good front, acting like the easygoing golden retriever who didn’t take life too seriously. But ever since I was a kid, I’d known life mostly sucked. So why not live in the moment? If life had taught me one thing, it was that none of us were guaranteed a tomorrow.

Taxus—wait.” But he was gone. In his absence, I tried to piece the shattered mirror of my memories back together. I remembered impressions—colors and smells and sounds. The names were harder to recount, like working an atrophied muscle. Strained, they came. Opal. Nya. Dimia. Erik. Tyrn. Aunt. Half sisters. Father. Uncle. Then, on a day or a night without marker, I remembered a walk through the wood. A nameday. An old rhyme. Yellow girl, soft and clean. Yellow girl, plain—unseen. Yellow girl, overlooked. Yellow girl, won’t be Queen. Ione. I’d joined my cousin Ione in town. Followed her to my father’s house. Left early… And met two highwaymen on the forest road.

Once You’re in Keto, How Can You Keep It Going Without Fasting? The short answer is: Eat a boatload of fat (~1.5 to 2.5 g per kilogram of body weight), next-to-no carbs, and moderate protein (1 to 1.5 g per kilogram of body weight) each day. We’ll look at Dom’s typical meals and day in a minute, but a few critical notes first: High protein and low fat doesn’t work. Your liver will convert excess amino acids into glucose and shut down ketogenesis. Fat as 70 to 85% of calories is required. This doesn’t mean you always have to eat rib eye steaks. A chicken breast by itself will kick you out of ketosis, but a chicken breast cut up into a green leafy salad with a lot of olive oil, feta cheese, and some Bulletproof Coffee (for example) can keep you in ketosis. One of the challenges of keto is the amount of fat one needs to consume to maintain it. Roughly 70 to 80% of your total calories need to come from fat. Rather than trying to incorporate fat bombs into all meals (one does get tired of fatty steak, eggs, and cheese over and over again), Dom will both drink fat between meals (e.g., coconut milk—not water—in coffee) and add in supplemental “ice cream,” detailed on page 29. Dom noticed that dairy can cause lipid profile issues (e.g., can spike LDL) and has started to minimize things like cream and cheese. I experienced the same. It’s easy to eat a disgusting amount of cheese to stay in keto. Consider coconut milk (Aroy-D Pure Coconut Milk) instead. Dom doesn’t worry about elevated LDL as long as other blood markers aren’t out of whack (high CRP, low HDL, etc.). From Dom: “The thing that I focus on most is triglycerides. If your triglycerides are elevated, that means your body is just not adapting to the ketogenic diet. Some people’s triglycerides are elevated even when their calories are restricted. That’s a sign that the ketogenic diet is not for you. . . . It’s not a one-size-fits-all diet.

He had given her fifty boxes of tea. Now, they would be the tally of days she would live without him, the last one a marker at the end of the paved road from which she would have to step alone onto an untamped path.

When the Vedic people reached the north-west of the subcontinent, they found other people there besides the local Dravidians. One group that they mention was the Paṇi, who were traders with possible links to the Phoenicians, whose name in Latin was Poeni.31 These Paṇi would have spoken Phoenician, a Semitic language that originated in Syria and Palestine (or ‘Canaan’) related to Hebrew and Aramaic, and which was written from right to left. There are Aramaic stone markers in Taxila and Afghanistan; Emperor Ashoka also wrote his Prakrit edicts in the Aramaic script in this region, since Aramaic was the official language of the Achaemenid Empire that covered present-day Iran and Afghanistan.

Has nobody not told you, Brian, that you've got this kind of gleeful preoccupation with the future? I wouldn't even mind, but you don't even have a fuckin' future, I don't have a future. Nobody has a future. The party's over. Take a look around you man, it's all breaking up. Are you not familiar with the book of Revelations of St. John, the final book of the Bible prophesying the apocalypse?... He forced everyone to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead so that no one shall be able to buy or sell unless he has the mark, which is the name of the beast, or the number of his name, and the number of the beast is 6-6-6... What can such a specific prophecy mean? What is the mark? Well the mark, Brian, is the barcode, the ubiquitous barcode that you'll find on every bog roll and packet of johnnies and every poxy pork pie, and every fuckin' barcode is divided into two parts by three markers, and those three markers are always represented by the number 6. 6-6-6! Now what does it say? No one shall be able to buy or sell without that mark. And now what they're planning to do in order to eradicate all credit card fraud and in order to precipitate a totally cashless society, what they're planning to do, what they've already tested on the American troops, they're going to subcutaneously laser tattoo that mark onto your right hand, or onto your forehead. They're going to replace plastic with flesh. Fact! In the same book of Revelations when the seven seals are broken open on the day of judgment and the seven angels blow the trumpets, when the third angel blows her bugle, wormwood will fall from the sky, wormwood will poison a third part of all the waters and a third part of all the land and many many many people will die! Now do you know what the Russian translation for wormwood is?... Chernobyl! Fact. On August the 18th, 1999, the planets of our solar system are gonna line up into the shape of a cross... They're gonna line up in the signs of Aquarius, Leo, Taurus, and Scorpio, which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the apocalypse, as mentioned in the book of Daniel, another fuckin' fact! Do you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Brian, the game is up!

I take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of NMN every morning, along with 1 gram of resveratrol (shaken into my homemade yogurt) and 1 gram of metformin.7 • I take a daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg of aspirin. • I strive to keep my sugar, bread, and pasta intake as low as possible. I gave up desserts at age 40, though I do steal tastes. • I try to skip one meal a day or at least make it really small. My busy schedule almost always means that I miss lunch most days of the week. • Every few months, a phlebotomist comes to my home to draw my blood, which I have analyzed for dozens of biomarkers. When my levels of various markers are not optimal, I moderate them with food or exercise. • I try to take a lot of steps each day and walk upstairs, and I go to the gym most weekends with my son, Ben; we lift weights, jog a bit, and hang out in the sauna before dunking in an ice-cold pool.

So there we were, not sleeping yet spent, occupying some in-between restful affection state, full of possibility. I sat up in bed next to him, inhaling the odors of the day- river mud, the musk of hotel soap, and then the scent of him, the marker of his personal chemistry, and then my own. It's a fragrance that burrowed into the fibers of our sheets. I eased close to him and kissed his shut lids. I was thinking that I was lucky.

take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of NMN every morning, along with 1 gram of resveratrol (shaken into my homemade yogurt) and 1 gram of metformin.7 • I take a daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg of aspirin. • I strive to keep my sugar, bread, and pasta intake as low as possible. I gave up desserts at age 40, though I do steal tastes. • I try to skip one meal a day or at least make it really small. My busy schedule almost always means that I miss lunch most days of the week. • Every few months, a phlebotomist comes to my home to draw my blood, which I have analyzed for dozens of biomarkers. When my levels of various markers are not optimal, I moderate them with food or exercise. • I try to take a lot of steps each day and walk upstairs, and I go to the gym most weekends with my son, Ben; we lift weights, jog a bit, and hang out in the sauna before dunking in an ice-cold pool. • I eat a lot of plants and try to avoid eating other mammals, even though they do taste good. If I work out, I will eat meat. • I don’t smoke. I try to avoid microwaved plastic, excessive UV exposure, X-rays, and CT scans. • I try to stay on the cool side during the day and when I sleep at night. • I aim to keep my body weight or BMI in the optimal range for healthspan, which for me is 23 to 25. About fifty times a day I’m asked about supplements.

We need to have markers that remind us of what God is doing in our lives and how God is leading us to cross a particular line and never go back.

I traced a line, my finger hovering over the paint, up over the wall, into these lands—the lands of the Spring Court. Again, no markers, but it was filled with touches of spring: trees in bloom, fickle storms, young animals … At least I was to live out my days in one of the more moderate courts, weather-wise. A small consolation. I looked northward and stepped back again. The six other courts of Prythian occupied a patchwork of territories. Autumn, Summer, and Winter were easy enough to pick out. Then above them, two glowing courts: the southernmost one a softer, redder palate, the Dawn Court; above, in bright gold and yellow and blue, the Day Court. And above that, perched in a frozen mountainous spread of darkness and stars, the sprawling, massive territory of the Night Court.

Their hope was that, one day, lawmakers would understand that racist systems would not be dismantled with righteous words alone—the governor’s pessimism was a marker of privilege that they could not afford. They had to be optimistic that things could change; the alternative was far too bleak. For them, continuing the fight was not some glib turn of phrase. Optimism was their American hope, their defense mechanism, a way of survival.

To travel from place to place is to travel through time, and in every place the quality of time is different. Here, now it seemed to stretch in all directions. And I felt I understood why the Prophet Muhammad had ordained the observance of prayer five times a day' to act as markers for the faithful to lead them through the desert of eternity.

A Roman city was founded by Etruscan rite (Etrusco ritu). At a designated day (by augury), a cow and a bull were harnessed to a plow. A furrow was cut within which the city would lay. Generally, we can say that this originally cut furrow is the pomerium. Boundary markers, cippi, delineated the pomerium. The historian Tacitus (Ann. 12.23) recorded that the emperor Claudius extended the pomerium. Cippi support this claim, while such archaeological proof does not exist for the extensions by Augustus, Nero, and Trajan, which Aulus Gellius mentioned.

BUSTER You may have heard the myth that higher-protein diets lead to kidney dysfunction. The data tell us otherwise. A meta-analysis conducted by prominent protein researcher Stu Philips looked at higher-protein (HP) diets (≥ 1.5 g/kg body weight or ≥ 20% energy intake or ≥ 100 g/day) and their effects on kidney function. The indicator known as glomerular filtration rate (GFR) reflects any change in the efficiency of kidney function. When compared with normal- or lower-protein (≥ 5% less energy intake from protein/day) diets, HP diet interventions did not significantly elevate GFR relative to diets containing lower amounts of protein. Researchers concluded that HP intake does not negatively influence renal function in healthy adults.2 A systematic review of randomized controlled trials and epidemiologic studies conducted by Van Elswyk et al. found that HP intake (≥ 20% but < 35% of energy or ≥ 10% higher than a comparison intake) had little to no effect on blood markers of kidney function (e.g., blood pressure) when compared with groups following US RDA recommendations (0.8 g/kg or 10–15% of energy).

Those two markers—V-J Day and the Kennedy Assassination—bracket an era variously known as “Pax Americana,” “Good Times,” the “Best Years,” “Happy Days,” and the “American High.

Göbekli Tepe is one such place where we can see the ancient influence of animism. Located in present day eastern Turkey, Göbekli Tepe was, as best as we can discern, an ancient ceremonial site, indeed one of the oldest ever discovered.2 It’s filled with towering statues of animals and is constructed in alignment with certain stellar markers indicating a culture that in all likelihood was transitioning from hunter/gatherer toward urbanization, bringing the spirits of animals, the land, and the sky with them.

Ezekiel 39:9–16 (HCSB): “Now on that day I will give Gog a burial place there in Israel—the Valley of the Travelers east of the Sea. It will block those who travel through, for Gog and all his hordes will be buried there. So it will be called the Valley of Hamon-gog. The house of Israel will spend seven months burying them in order to cleanse the land. All the people of the land will bury them and their fame will spread on the day I display My glory.” This is the declaration of the Lord GOD. “They will appoint men on a full-time basis to pass through the land and bury the invaders who remain on the surface of the ground, in order to cleanse it. They will make their search at the end of the seven months. When they pass through the land and one of them sees a human bone, he will set up a marker next to it until the buriers have buried it in the Valley of Hamon-gog. There will even be a city named Hamonah there. So they will cleanse the land.

Trimethylglycine (TMG), also known as betaine, increases the biosynthesis of creatine[310]. Taking 2.5-5 grams of betaine a day, divided into two doses, has been shown to help fat loss and subjective markers of fatigue during exercise[311],[312],[313]. However, the total performance enhancing effects of betaine, or glycine for that matter, are still significantly lower than creatine[314]. Thus, although glycine is a contributor to creatine synthesis, it’s still important to take creatine.