Monkey Room Quotes

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

How do you know, when you think blue — when you say blue — that you are talking about the same blue as anyone else? You cannot get a grip on blue. Blue is the sky, the sea, a god’s eye, a devil’s tail, a birth, a strangulation, a virgin’s cloak, a monkey’s ass. It’s a butterfly, a bird, a spicy joke, the saddest song, the brightest day. Blue is sly, slick, it slides into the room sideways, a slippery trickster. This is a story about the color blue, and like blue, there’s nothing true about it. Blue is beauty, not truth. ‘True blue’ is a ruse, a rhyme; it’s there, then it’s not. Blue is a deeply sneaky color.

I got home from the FBi that day, put on my pajamas got a pint of Chunky Monkey, and watched 'The Notebook'. Five times. Everyone left me alone. I suspect they were a little afraid of me. I went up to my room and listened to Taylor Swift's 'White Horse' on replay, knowing she was the only person in the world who could relate.

People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not- so grotesquely- resemble human beings.

Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. That's the only reason for time. To squeeze you. Crush you. To tie you up in knots and make you fucking miserable.

Medea? Don’t worry. Satara’s rooms are far enough away that you won’t be subjected to the sounds of wild monkey sex. (Stryker) Ew! You were right, Mum. I should have allowed you to cut his throat. Get me out of here as quickly as possible. (Stryker)

The living room is a monument to my impulsive spending habits. I've got more than two hundred DVDs, including cinematic greats such as Monkey Bone, Corkey Romano, and A Night at the Roxbury, leading me to believe not only do I have awful taste in films, but I also have a Chris Kattan fixation. What I don't have is $4000 earing intrest in a money market account.

What the monkey!” My dad slammed through my door and burst into my room wearing nothing but his bathrobe. We all looked up at him in surprise. “You tell us,” I said. “Oh.” My dad actually looked sheepish. “It’s one o’clock in the morning and I was going to tell you to shut the monkey up and go to bed. I didn’t realize what was going on in here.” “What’s going on in here?” Cameron asked suspiciously. “Maturity.” My dad backed out of the room and closed the door.

What were you thinking,sending that rabid monkey child to my school?" I shouted into my communicator. "Beg pardon?" Raquel asked. "Jack.My school.The girls' locker room. Ring any bells? If Carlee hadn't sworn to my ogre of a gym teacher that Jack was neither my boyfriend nor my brother, I probably would have been suspended!" "Your gym teacher is an ogre?" "Focus!If I get suspended,my grades take a hit. If my grades take a hit, I might not get into Georgetown. And I will get into Georgetown." "I'm pleased to see you finally taking ownership of your education. And I'm sorry about Jack;I asked him to contact you discreetly." "That boy wouldn't know discreet if it tap--danced on his stupid blond head." "Still,if this discreet were tap dancing,it wouldn't be very discreet,now, would it?

Your monkey was looking under the stall doors in the ladies' room,' I told Diesel. 'That's my boy,' Diesel said.

I sneak into your room when you are asleep, Merry-monkey. I’ve been doing it for weeks now, since the end of summer. You’re so pretty when you’re asleep. Last night, I pinched your nose shut until you opened your little mouth

A place that proves if you get enough talented people in a room, one or two are bound to offer some helpful advice. Kind if like monkeys with typewriters.

The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail. Call no man happy till he dies, there's no milk at the bottom of the pail. God builds a church and the devil builds a chapel, like the thistles that are growing 'round the trunk of a tree. All the good in the world you could put inside a thimble, and still have room for you and me. If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always coming roaring back again. Misery's the river of the world, misery's the river of the world. Everybody row, everybody row; misery's the river of the world.

The animal is making quite a mess,” the butler droned. “Are you referring to the monkey, or to my nephew?” Fennington drawled, strolling into the room. “Hm. How long did you lurk outside the room waiting forthat opportunity?” Bennett asked

Love, son, is not manifest in the gift of gadgets or coddling foods or rooms of one’s own. Love shows itself in discipline and example and sacrifice—even giving up one’s life.

Imagine you're evil. Not misunderstood. Not sad. But evil. Imagine you've got a heart that spends all day wanting more. Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity. Imagine you're like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers. Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria. Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey. Imagine you're evil and you don't do any of those things, but you're like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what's going on and you say nothing's going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English. Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you're disgusted, because you don't like meanness. But you don't do anything or tell anyone. Imagine how much you've got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it. Suddenly evil isn't punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it's all that stuff you've left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.

Um, I don’t know.” “That’s not the answer I was hoping for. I was looking for something more along the lines of: ‘Why yes, Brody, I’d love to spend the weekend at your house having copious amounts of crazy, sweaty monkey sex.’” Silence

The receptionists were jaw-droppingly hot. I’m talking “got lost on the way to New York Fashion Week” hot. They took our names and escorted us into a conference room. Then

The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton.

Life is like living in a room full of dynamite with a monkey running around with a blowtorch. It’s not a matter of if, but just when.

Oh.” My dad actually looked sheepish. “It’s one o’clock in the morning and I was going to tell you to shut the monkey up and go to bed. I didn’t realise what was going on in here.” “What’s going on in here?” Cameron asked suspiciously. “Maturity.” My dad backed out of the room and closed the door.

And attention, men! Don’t despair! There is plenty of stuff in here for you too. Since I have spent the majority of my life in rooms filled with men I feel like I know you well. I love you. I love the shit out of you. I think this book will speak to men in a bunch of different ways. I should also point out that there is a secret code in each chapter and if you figure it out it unlocks the next level and you get better weapons to fight the zombie quarterbacks on the Pegasus Bridge. So get cracking, you task-oriented monkey brains.

God is love, yes. I didn’t have time to say crick crack, monkey break he back for a piece of pomerac, and boom, the room gone.

Edmond Locard ordered all the local organ grinders and their simian employees brought to his laboratory. A number of the monkeys, perhaps concerned about an infringement of their civil rights, resisted fingerprinting and had to be restrained. The organ grinders were more cooperative. When the burglarizing beast had been identified, his companion’s rooms were searched and there the missing items were found.

THE TWINS WERE eighteen months old now, walking (and standing and staring and screaming and sitting) just like other children more or less their age, and Andy found herself increasingly preoccupied with those baby scrapbooks her brother’s wife had sent when they were born. Andy had gotten Janny’s to the six-month mark—the last photo was of her sitting up in the baby bath with her fingers in her mouth. Richie’s and Michael’s—not even birth pictures. Birth pictures of the twins existed, but they reminded Andy more of mug shots than of baby photos, naked in incubators, little skinny limbs and odd heads, no hair except where it shouldn’t be, on arms and back, like monkeys. She had stuffed the scrapbooks onto the upper shelf in the closet in Richie and Michael’s room, and every time she slid open that door, she would see their spines, white, pink, and blue, the silliest objects in her very modern house, ready to get thrown out.

It hit me who they were talking about. Mrs. Neville. My Mrs. Neville. The teacher who’d said I should enter the short-story contest this year. Good-bye, she’d said as I’d left her room on the first day of summer. Not see you next year or see you in September, but a firm and final good-bye. She must’ve known she was dying, as she sat behind that desk in summer’s light, and she had known that for her there would be no new class of grinning young monkeys in September.

man who has one pet monkey might be viewed as charmingly eccentric. But a man who has made his home into a monkey house, with scores of chattering chimpanzees capering through the rooms, will have lost credibility with the mental-health authorities.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

All around the smell of that necro-smoke, that nether-weed. And up and at the hedonist impulse, rejoice, rejoice, in the disconnect my pretty things, fly monkeys, fly! The hip chick in the back, her legs uncrossed to let in air and let out pretention as the lights are down and it’s not necessary, nor should it be even with the lights up, all around faces, turned away and yet minds knowing, knowing there is a presence, a power about the room, the charge is different than it was before this small chick came in. Rejoice, simpatico, rejoice. It’s her night. A night of the explosion. Pow—bang-ka-boom and yet it’s whispered and yet it’s heard through the walls at 3 A.M. by attentive ears and hands clenching in the frustration of being unsolicited by the owner of this spectacle. A woman’s sigh of ecstasy, and his tears at being not the cause.

We will need to stay over two nights in a hotel on our trip home.” Momentarily alarmed, I glanced at Ren. “Okay. Umm, I was thinking that maybe this time if you don’t mind, we could check out one of those bigger hotels. You know, something that has more people around. With elevators and rooms that lock. Or even better, a nice high-rise hotel in a big city. Far, far, far away from the jungle?” Mr. Kadam chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do.” I graced Mr. Kadam with a beatific smile. “Good! Could we please go now? I can’t wait to take a shower.” I opened the door to the passenger side then turned and hissed in a whisper aimed at Ren, “In my nice, upper-floor, inaccessible-to-tigers hotel room.” He just looked at me with his innocent, blue-eyed tiger face again. I smiled wickedly at him and hopped in the Jeep, slamming the door behind me. My tiger just calmly trotted over to the back where Mr. Kadam was loading the last of his supplies and leapt up into the back seat. He leaned in the front, and before I could push him away, he gave me a big, wet, slobbery tiger kiss right on my face. I sputtered, “Ren! That is so disgusting!” I used my T-shirt to swipe the tiger saliva from my nose and cheek and turned to yell at him some more. He was already lying down in the back seat with his mouth hanging open, as if he were laughing. Before I could really lay into him, Mr. Kadam, who was the happiest I’d ever seen him, got into the Jeep, and we started the bumpy journey back to a civilized road. Mr. Kadam wanted to ask me questions. I knew he was itching for information, but I was still fuming at Ren, so I lied. I asked him if he could hold off for a while so I could sleep. I yawned big for dramatic effect, and he immediately agreed to let me have some peace, which made me feel guilty. I really liked Mr. Kadam, and I hated lying to people. I excused my actions by mentally blaming Ren for this uncharacteristic behavior. Convincing myself that it was his fault was easy. I turned to the side and closed my eyes. I slept for a while, and when I woke up, Mr. Kadam handed me a soda, a sandwich, and a banana. I raised my eyebrow at the banana and thought of several good monkey jokes I could annoy Ren with, but I kept quiet for Mr. Kadam’s sake.

virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation. At the end of the day, I was still a virgin, all alone in a dark room, humping a lubed-up robot. So I got rid of the ACHD and went back to spanking the monkey the old-fashioned way. I

Y’all ever seen that 'monkeys typing in a room for eternity would eventually create the works of Shakespeare' quote? Well, one time Drew got high and stated, 'Wait, that happened already. We’re monkeys, and space is eternity, and we typed, and it happened.' He insisted we put it in the book.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn't a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I had never before. Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn't truly understood the world's vastness--hadn't even understood how vast a mile could be--until each mile was beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the strange intimacy I'd come to have with the trail, the way the piñon pines and monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt familiar and known, though I'd never passed them or crossed them before.

So, did you see that community center I was talking about?” “What? Where?” “We walked right past it, just before that grocery store. I mentioned it on the way to the city? You just drop in and take classes. They’ve got all sorts of stuff. I bet you can get a student rate, even.” “But I’m not a student—” “You’re young enough that they’ll assume—” “—and how am I supposed to find the time to take dance classes, now that I’m the dessert?” “I’m starting to really regret using that metaphor,” Silas says, grinning. “And let me explain something, Rosie.” He takes a swig of the coffee and presses his lips together, searching for words. “I’m from a long, long, long, long line of woodsmen. My brothers are all supertalented. They all built their own rooms. For god’s sake, Lucas built a freaking wooden hot tub in his bedroom with wooden monkeys pouring water into it.” “Monkeys?” “Don’t ask. Anyway, I can do some woodworking. I know my way around the forest, I can handle an ax better than most, I can make a tree grow where nothing else will, I can live off berries and hunt for my food, and I’ve known about the Fenris since I could crawl. I’m a woodsman, for all intents and purposes. But that doesn’t mean I live for it any more than the fact that you’re good at hunting means you have to live for that. So maybe breaking out of the hunting lifestyle for a few hours here and there will help you figure out if it’s really for you or not.” I shake my head, confused as to why he’d even think that was possible. “I can’t just not hunt, Silas. So yeah, I take a few random classes, and what if I decide that I hate hunting and want to quit? That doesn’t mean I can. I owe Scarlett my life, and if she wants to cash in by having me spend my life hunting beside her, so be it. It’d kill her if she ever thought I wanted to quit.” “Rosie,” Silas says quietly. “I’m not suggesting you drop your sister like a bad habit and take up intense ballet training.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled 'Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced though the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars--young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded--who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd) monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicioius jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

The odors of the laboratory animals, dogs, monkeys, mice, spin me back into memories, and it is difficult to know whether I am experiencing a new sensation or recalling the past. It is impossible to tell what proportion is memory and what exists here and now- so that a strange compound is formed of memory and reality; past and present; response to stimuli stored in my brain centers, and response to stimuli in this room. It's as if all the things I've learned have fused into a crystal universe spinning before me so that I can see all the facets of it reflected in gorgeous bursts of light.

Heilner went on: "Yes, things were certainly different then. Who knows anything about things like that around here? All these bores and cowards who grind away and work their fingers to the bone and don't realize that there's something higher than the Hebrew alphabet. You're no different." Hans kept silent. This Heilner fellow certainly was a strange one. A romantic, a poet. As everyone knew, he worked hardly at all and still he knew quite a bit, he knew how to give good answers, and at the same time despised his learning. “We're reading Homer," he went on in the same mocking tone, "as though the Odyssey were a cookbook. Two verses an hour and then the whole thing is masticated word by word and inspected until you're ready to throw up. But at the end of the hour the professor will say: 'Notice how nicely the poet has turned this phrase! This has afforded you an insight into the secret of poetic creativity!' Just like a little icing around the aorists and particles so you won't choke on them completely. I don't have any use for that kind of Homer. Anyway, what does all this old Greek stuff matter to us? If one of us ever tried to live a little like a Greek, he'd be out on his tail. And our room is called 'Hellas'! Pure mockery! Why isn't it called 'wastepaper basket' or 'monkey cage' or 'sweatshop'? All this classical stuff is a big fake.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn’t truly understood the world’s vastness—hadn’t even understood how vast a mile could be—until each mile was beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the strange intimacy I’d come to have with the trail, the way the piñon pines and monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt familiar and known, though I’d never passed them or crossed them before.

What could be more subtle, for instance, than the instinct which had prompted her to hang on the walls of her drawing-room three paintings, all by Douanier Rousseau? Her guests, on coming into this room, were put at ease by the presence of pictures, and ‘modern’ pictures at that, which they could recognize at first sight. Faced by the work of Seurat, of Matisse, even of Renoir, who knows but that they might hesitate, the name of the artist not rising immediately to their lips? But at the sight of those fantastic foliages, those mouthing monkeys, there could arise no doubt; even the most uncultured could murmur: ‘What gorgeous Rousseaus you have here. I always think it is so wonderful that they were painted by a common customs official – abroad, of course.’ And buoyed up by a feeling of intellectual adequacy, they would thereafter really enjoy themselves.

Although Lasaraleen had said she was dying to hear Aravis's story, she showed no sign of really wanting to hear it at all. She was, in fact, much better at talking than at listening. She insisted on Aravis having a long and luxurious bath (Calormene baths are famous) and then dressing her up in the finest clothes before she would let her explain anything. The fuss she made about choosing the dresses nearly drove Aravis mad. She remembered now that Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming. You will guess that each thought the other silly. But when at last they were both seated after a meal (it was chiefly of the whipped cream and jelly and fruit and ice sort) in a beautiful pillared room (which Aravis would have liked better if Lasaraleen's spoiled pet monkey hadn't been climbing about it all the time) Lasaraleen at last asked her why she was running away from home.

Ellie goes back to the kitchen . . . and screams bloody murder. “Nooooooo!” Adrenaline spikes through me and I dart to the kitchen, ready to fight. Until I see the cause of her screaming. “Bosco, noooooo!” It’s the rodent-dog. He got into the kitchen, somehow managed to hoist himself up onto the counter, and is in the process of demolishing his fourth pie. Fucking Christ, it’s impressive how fast he ate them. That a mutt his size could even eat that many. His stomach bulges with his ill-gotten gains—like a snake that ingested a monkey. A big one. “Thieving little bastard!” I yell. Ellie scoops him off the counter and I point my finger in his face. “Bad dog.” The little twat just snarls back. Ellie tosses the mongrel on the steps that lead up to the apartment and slams the door. Then we both turn and assess the damage. Two apple and a cherry are completely devoured, he nibbled at the edge of a peach and apple crumb and left tiny paw-prints in two lemon meringues. “We’re going to have re-bake all seven,” Ellie says. I fold my arms across my chest. “Looks that way.” “It’ll take hours,” she says. “Yeah.” “But we have to. There isn’t any other choice.” Silence follows. Heavy, meaningful silence. I glance sideways at Ellie, and she’s already peeking over at me. “Or . . . is there?” she asks slyly. I look at what remains of the damaged pastries, considering all the options. “If we slice off the chewed bits . . .” “And smooth out the meringue . . .” “Put the licked ones in the oven to dry out . . .” “Are you two out of your motherfucking minds?” I swing around to find Marty standing in the alley doorway behind us. Eavesdropping and horrified. Ellie tries to cover for us. But she’s bad at it. “Marty! When did you get here? We weren’t gonna do anything wrong.” Covert ops are not in her future. “Not anything wrong?” he mimics, stomping into the room. “Like getting us shut down by the goddamn health department? Like feeding people dog-drool pies—have you no couth?” “It was just a thought,” Ellie swears—starting to laugh. “A momentary lapse in judgment,” I say, backing her up. “We’re just really tired and—” “And you’ve been in this kitchen too long.” He points to the door. “Out you go.” When we don’t move, he goes for the broom. “Go on—get!” Ellie grabs her knapsack and I guide her out the back door as Marty sweeps at us like we’re vermin

read about five monkeys once that were placed in a room with a banana at the top of a set of stairs. As one monkey attempted to climb the stairs, all of the monkeys were sprayed with jets of cold water. A second monkey made an attempt and again the monkeys were sprayed. No more monkeys attempted to climb the stairs. One of the monkeys was then removed from the room and replaced with a new monkey. The new monkey saw the banana and started to climb the stairs but, to its surprise, it was attacked by the other monkeys. Another of the original monkeys was replaced and the newcomer was also attacked when he attempted to climb the stairs. The previous newcomer took part in the punishment with enthusiasm. A third replacement monkey headed for the stairs and was attacked as well. Half of the monkeys that attacked him had no idea why. After replacing the fourth and fifth original monkeys, none had ever been sprayed with cold water but every single one of them stayed the fuck away from the stairs. Being here longer than me doesn't automatically make your adherence to a rule, or the rule itself, right. It makes you the fifth replacement monkey. The one with the weird red arse and the first to point and screech when anyone approaches the stairs. I would be the sixth monkey, at home in bed trying to come up with a viable excuse not to spend another fruitless day locked in a room with five neurotic monkeys.

I was going to make a confession. Then I remembered I don't make them very well. We still need to see the monkeys." "You don't really think I'm going to let a provocative statement like that slip by,do you?" "Well...I thought the best way to discourage you was to agree to go out with you-to some place like this, which I thought would bore you to distraction-then be as obnoxious as possible." "Have you been obnoxious?" His tone was mild and entirely too serious. "I thought you've been behaving very naturally." "Ouch." Shelby rubbed at the figurative wound under her heart. "In any case, I get the distinct impression that I haven't discouraged you at all." "Really?" Reaching for more popcorn, he leaned close and spoke gently in her ear "How did you come by that?" "Oh-" She cleared her throat. "Just a hunch." He found that tiny show of nerves very rewarding. Yes, the puzzle was coming together, piece by careful piece. It was the way he'd always structured his life. "Odd.And not once since we've been here have I mentioned that I'd like to find a small, dim room and make love to you,over and over." Warily, Shelby slid her eyes to his. "I'd just as soon you didn't. "All right." Alan slipped an arm around her waist. "I won't mention it while we're here." A smile tugged at her mouth, but she shook her head. "It's not going to come to that, Alan.It can't." "We have a fundamental disagreement." He paused on a bridge. Beneath them, swans floated haughtily. "Because to my way of thinking it has to.

I am glad when we enter the conference room that Chihiro made sure I wasn’t late to the meeting. Not only does my appearance cut short several whispered confabs in the corners of the room (confirming her suspicion that people would have used my lateness as a chance to talk about me), but I also get to take my favorite seat: at the far end of the table next to my favorite monkey. I’ve never quite understood how the monkeys got here. The fresco on the ceiling of this room –originally the formal dining room- is modeled on the one in the formal dining room at La Civetta. It depicts a lemon-covered pergola in a garden. An assortment of birds –doves, sparrows, and long-tailed peacocks – roost on the wooden struts. In the original fresco, fat cupids also frolic amidst the greenery, their chubby feet dangling precariously from their perches. In one corner a plaster foot even protrudes from the frescoed surface. In this New York version of the fresco, there are monkeys instead of cupids: monkeys peering out between leafy branches and monkeys dangling by their tails from the wooden slats of the pergola. If you look carefully (and I have had ample opportunity through long and tedious budget reviews to examine every inch of the palatial room), you can even find a few monkeys that have climbed down from the pergola and found their way into the formal dining room to perform rude and unspeakable acts... My favorite monkey, though, is the little one who peers out from behind the leafy fronds of an aspidistra, making an obscene gesture I have seen only on the streets of Italy. I always sit right next to him. He gives me some relief for the sentiments I am unable to express in the course of department meetings.

The front door swung open and a gust of wind rushed inside. Boots scuffled along the floor, and Camille turned to see what pig had shown up at Daphne’s so early in the day. Her heart thumped as the door slammed. Stuart McGreenery tucked his arched captain’s hat under his arm and pulled off his white gloves. “A charming establishment,” he said. He turned up his nose, and sniffed the air. “Is that desperation I smell?” Oscar threw his fork and knife on the table and kicked back his chair. “Did you decide to join us for breakfast?” McGreenery lunged forward and Oscar rose to his feet. “I came to see what you know about the hole in the hull of my ship, you insolent whelp,” McGreenery said. Oscar’s cheek twitched with pleasure. “Why not just have me escorted down to it with a knife in my back?” Camille stood and inserted herself between the two men. Daphne sat in the corner of the parlor rolling cigars, her wide eyes darting from McGreenery to Oscar. “We heard the explosion,” Camille said. “What makes you think we had anything to do with it?” McGreenery retreated one small step and stared down the slope of his nose at her. This time he kept his icy stare level with her eyes. “Because it was not an accident. The explosion was set in a deliberate attempt to keep me from departing for Port Adelaide.” Camille tried to subdue the shake of her knees. “We certainly didn’t see it. Oscar and I were in our room.” McGreenery cocked his head. “I heard you were sharing a room.” He glanced at Oscar. “I doubt William would be fond of that.” “You don’t have the right to even speak his name,” Oscar said, strangling each word. McGreenery gracefully removed the hat out from under his arm and slipped it back on. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing will stop me from reaching the stone, least of all a little girl and her trained monkey.” Camille rushed forward, ready to smack McGreenery across the cheek. Oscar grabbed her around the waist and held her back. McGreenery bowed slightly, grinning with pleasure, and then whisked out the front door. She shrugged out form Oscar’s grasp and watched through the windows as McGreenery sauntered down the street toward the Stealth, where she could hear the echo of repairs already under way. “One day that prick is going to get what he deserves,” Oscar muttered. “I just hope I’m the one who gets to give it to him.

I still remember a small story from the Pañca Tantra which I was told as a small child. One rainy day, a monkey was sitting on a tree branch getting completely drenched. Right opposite on another branch of the same tree there was a small sparrow sitting in its hanging nest. Normally a sparrow builds its nest on the edge of a branch so it can hang down and swing around gently in the breeze. It has a nice cabin inside with an upper chamber, a reception room, a bedroom down below and even a delivery room if it is going to give birth to little ones. Oh yes, you should see and admire a sparrow’s nest sometime. It was warm and cozy inside its nest and the sparrow peeped out and, seeing the poor monkey, said, “Oh, my dear friend, I am so small; I don’t even have hands like you, only a small beak. But with only that I built a nice house, expecting this rainy day. Even if the rain continues for days, I will be warm inside. I heard Darwin saying that you are the forefather of human beings, so why don’t you use your brain? Build a nice, small hut somewhere to protect yourself during the rain.” You should have seen the face of that monkey. It was terrible! “Oh, you little devil! How dare you try to advise me? Because you are warm and cozy in your nest you are teasing me. Wait, you will see where you are!” The monkey proceeded to tear the nest to pieces, and the poor bird had to fly out and get drenched like the monkey. This is a story I was told when I was quite young and I still remember it. Sometimes we come across such monkeys, and if you advise them they take it as an insult. They think you are proud of your position. If you sense even a little of that tendency in somebody, stay away. He or she will have to learn by experience. By giving advice to such people, you will only lose your peace of mind. Is there any other category you can think of? Patañjali groups all individuals in these four ways: the happy, the unhappy, the virtuous and the wicked. So have these four attitudes: friendliness, compassion, gladness and indifference. These four keys should always be with you in your pocket. If you use the right key with the right person you will retain your peace. Nothing in the world can upset you then. Remember, our goal is to keep a serene mind. From the very beginning of Patañjali’s Sūtras we are reminded of that. And this sūtra will help us a lot.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities

Zemurray was not a man to be ignored or insulted. He had come to that particular meeting with a weapon of mass destruction: a bagful of proxies from other United Fruit shareholders that gave him majority control of the company and the authority to act as he saw fit. He left the room, fetched the bag, came back in, and flung it on the table, saying: “You’re fired. Can you understand that, Mr. Chairman?” He turned to the board and said: “You’ve been fucking up this business long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.

Life aboard ship was like living in paradise for my agile friend and he could have continued this way forever if he hadn't discovered a splendid new game. When the stevedores were loading or discharging the ship, Peanut would hop onto the edge of the hatch and urinate down on them. Oh what great fun he had, never thinking that they would object to what he was doing. At first they would try to catch him but he was far too agile for them. Not that I understood what they were saying but I knew enough to know that the stevedores were shouting Bassa swearwords at him. Frustrated they would flip him the bird as they climbed down into the hold, foiled again. What a wonderful time Peanut had! His safest refuge was on top of the Wheel House, where the stevedores couldn’t go. Sometimes as a place of last resort he would dive through the open porthole into my state room. He didn’t like the Engine Room, as an alternate route to safety, since it was too hot and noisy. Besides the engineers didn’t much like a monkey messing with their things and who knows what trouble he could get into down there? Peanut, was wonderful entertainment when visitors came aboard. The Pan American flight attendants, they were called stewardesses back then, thought him adorable. I always had roasted peanuts for them to feed him, which he would pick and chew apart, littering the deck. The stewardess’s that came for my famous pizza parties always tried to pick him up and cuddle with him. Monkeys are unpredictable so I cautioned them to be careful but being such a cute little guy they seldom were. Ear rings were a favorite piece of jewelry to tug on, causing the ladies to scream. Most often he would let go but the wings above their pockets was another matter. Peanut would yank and pull on the insignia until it was his. I knew where he usually hid his loot and so could return their stuff but some of the stewardesses flew home without their wings.

At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how “presidential” the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the “presidential” silverback’s name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, stuffing something that might have been the last of a Big Stick Popsicle or a Chiquita banana in my mouth. Then she became disconsolate, crying and apologizing for having spoken her mind and my having been born. “Some of my best friends are monkeys,” she said accidentally. It was my turn to laugh. I understood where she was coming from. This whole city’s a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America’s deeds and misdeeds. Slavery? Manifest Destiny? Laverne & Shirley? Standing by idly while Germany tried to kill every Jew in Europe? Why some of my best friends are the Museum of African Art, the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And furthermore, I’ll have you know, my sister’s daughter is married to an orangutan.

In reality, though, it usually worked like this: A female candidate who will buzzkill your weekly happy hour? “Cultural fit.” A soft-spoken Indian or Chinese engineer, quietly competent but incapable of the hard-charging egotism that Americans almost universally wear like they do blue jeans? “Cultural fit.” Self-taught kid from some crappy college you’ve never heard of, without that glib sheen of effortless superiority you get out of Harvard or Stanford? “Cultural fit.” And so it goes. Shaffer’s machine-gun questioning and imperiousness had rattled me. I suspected that I had failed to pass his bar, and I needed to clear my head. The day had been nothing but a series of interrogations inside small, gray, rotten-smelling rooms. The Guantánamo vibe was fatiguing. Despite the NSA-level security on checking in and the way we were handed off like booby-trapped hot potatoes that no one could drop, nobody appeared for the next interview. Wining and dining evidently not in the offing, I wandered off and tried to find something to eat.

We talked for a while about the difficulty he and others had had trying to make a movie of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Part of the difficulty was that while Hollywood is fine with violence toward people and cars and buildings, they don’t want to make a movie where the principal and intended victims are private or industrial property. Peacock cursed the various producers and directors. He had written several drafts of scripts for the movie and even had one in his room at that moment. The movie had almost been made a dozen times, with actors from Jack Nicholson to Matthew McConaughey cast as Hayduke.

oh Lord have mercy, that can’t be right. Monkey diapers? Monkey diapers? You got a monkey wearing diapers you went to the wrong delivery room.” They

The intruder shifted his weight and pulled the knife back, aiming at Gabriel’s chest. The moonlight glinted off the sharp blade and Gabriel found himself backed up against a wall. There was no escape. Gabriel was going to have to bear the pain of a knife through his chest. He could do it. He would wait until the knife entered his flesh and then he’d snap the Ashman’s neck in half. Yeah. That was a good plan. Just as the knife came toward Gabriel, the Ashman grunted and pulled back, taking a few wobbly steps before falling to the floor. Nate stood to the side, his hands on a large sword jutting from the Ashman’s back. He yanked out the sword, leaving the stranger’s body limp. Nate stepped toward the Ashman’s body, looking him over timidly. Without warning, the intruder rolled over and pulled himself up off the floor. Nate jumped back, lifted the sword in defense, and made a loud noise that sounded something like, “Arrrhh!” Still clutching the bloody knife, the Ashman looked back and forth between Nate and Gabriel. Seeing he was outnumbered, he turned and ran back through the destruction of the living room.Jumping out of the gaping hole from the missing living room window, the Ashman disappeared into the storm A moment passed as Gabriel and Nate stared after their attacker, both of them out of breath. Still badly bleeding, Gabriel turned to Nate and looked at the weapon he held. The sword was oversized, extra shiny and had a very ornate handle. “I don’t remember ever seeing that sword in our arsenal before.” Hunched over and trying to catch his breath, Nate said, “That’s because it’s from my arsenal.” “So, you just had that,” Gabriel nodded at the weapon, “laying around?” Nate righted himself and shrugged. “I’m a Zelda fan.” “Ah.” Gabriel nodded. “And the noise you just made?” “That was my battle cry.” “Really?” Gabriel winced as he took a step forward. “It sounded more like the cry of a wounded animal. A cat, maybe. Or a small monkey.” “Shut up.” Nate looked at Gabriel’s bleeding torso. “Are you okay?

It was made of the same material as the main head and was every bit as disgusting. It was as if a room full of monkeys had been fed prunes and let loose.

And that is the real elephant in the room. The monkey in my wrench. The worm in my candy bar...

I suppose if one takes into account the lack of an ethics committee to oversee my dad’s childrearing methodologies, the experiments started innocently enough. In the early part of the twentieth century, the behaviorists Watson and Rayner, in an attempt to prove that fear was a learned behavior, exposed nine-month-old “Little Albert” to neutral stimuli like white rats, monkeys, and sheaves of burned newsprint. Initially, the baby test subject was unperturbed by the series of simians, rodents, and flames, but after Watson repeatedly paired the rats with unconscionably loud noises, over time “Little Albert” developed a fear not only of white rats but of all things furry. When I was seven months, Pops placed objects like toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon campaign buttons, and a copy of The Economist in my bassinet, but instead of conditioning me with a deafening clang, I learned to be afraid of the presented stimuli because they were accompanied by him taking out the family .38 Special and firing several window-rattling rounds into the ceiling, while shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!” loud enough to make himself heard over the quadraphonic console stereo blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in the living room. To this day I’ve never been able to sit through even the most mundane TV crime drama, I have a strange affinity for Neil Young, and whenever I have trouble sleeping, I don’t listen to recorded rainstorms or crashing waves but to the Watergate tapes.

One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were “euthanized” as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized.

There’s a complicated system allowing agents to express preferences about offices and assignments that all FBI agents must follow. It would take too long to go through the whole thing here, but the FBI does have a very comprehensive approach to soliciting agents’ desires and then determining how best to deploy them. The only problem is that they totally ignore the system. If you ask the average FBI agent, he’ll tell you that the way the Bureau assigns people is that they’ve got a monkey in a room who throws a dart with your name on it at a U.S. map on the wall.

You’re a little bit whipped,” Sam says from behind me. I turn around and scowl at him. “I am not.” “Yes, you are. I think it’s cute.” He grins at me as he balances himself in the doorway, dangling from the overhang like a monkey. “You have a crush.” “I do not have a crush,” I say. “Oh, you totally have a crush,” he sings out. I can’t let him tease me like that, so I chase him out of Matt’s old room and down the hallway into the living room. He jumps over the back of the couch, and I go over it after him. I catch him around the waist and knock him to the floor. He’s wiry and quick, and I don’t remember him being quite as strong as he is now, but I pin him to the floor anyway. I must be getting old because it’s harder to hold him down than it used to be. A lot harder. Sam’s a collegiate athlete, and he’s even being scouted by a couple of pro teams, so he’s in peak physical shape all the time. Unlike me. Thankfully, I have size on my side. A knock sounds at the door. I yell, “Come in!” without letting Sam up. He grunts and shoves at me, but I sit on him. The door opens and a man walks in carrying a box. I freeze, because he looks familiar. “Get off me, you big fucker,” Sam says. The man raises his brow at us and looks back at Friday, who is dragging a suitcase. I let Sam up, and he swipes the hair back from his brow. He’s sweating. I’m not. But I also wasn’t the one trying to scramble up from the floor.

Be this as it may, I make a rule of entering a monkey as speedily as possible after hoisting my pendant; and if a reform takes place in the table of ratings, I would recommend a corner for the "ship's monkey," which should be borne on the books for "full allowance of victuals," excepting only the grog; for I have observed that a small quantity of tipple very soon upsets him; and although there are few things in nature more ridiculous than a monkey half-seas over, yet the reasons against permitting such pranks are obvious and numerous. When Lord Melville, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to my great surprise and delight, put into my hands a commission for a ship going to the South American station, a quarter of the world I had long desired to visit, my first thought was, "Where now shall I manage to find a merry rascal of a monkey?" Of course, I did not give audible expression to this thought in the First Lord's room; but, on coming down-stairs, I had a talk about it in the hall with my friend, the late Mr. Nutland, the porter, who laughed, and said,— "Why, sir, you may buy a wilderness of monkeys at Exeter 'Change." "True! true!" and off I hurried in a Hackney coach. Mr. Cross, not only agreed to spare me one of his choicest and funniest animals, but readily offered his help to convey him to the ship. "Lord, sir!" said he, "there is not an animal in the whole world so wild or fierce that we can't carry about as innocent as a lamb; only trust to me, sir, and your monkey shall be delivered on board your ship in Portsmouth Harbour as safely as if he were your best chronometer going down by mail in charge of the master.

the only way to tame the monkey mind, to truly glimpse impermanence and defeat our habitual tendency toward clinging, was to meditate—and I had absolutely no intention of following their advice. Meditation struck me as the distillation of everything that sucked hardest about the granola lifestyle. I pictured myself seated in an unbearable cross-legged position (my disavowal of yoga having left me less limber than I would have liked) in a room that smelled like feet, with a group of smug “practitioners” ringing bells, ogling crystals, intoning om, and attempting to float off into some sort of cosmic goo. My attitude was summed up nicely by Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock, who said, “Meditation is a waste of time, like learning French or kissing after sex.” Compounding my resistance was my extremely limited attention span. (Another of the many reasons I went into TV.) I assumed there was no way my particular mind—whirring at best, at worst a whirlwind—could ever stop thinking.

It was as if a room full of monkeys had been fed prunes and let loose. I

Francisco listens as they tell of hunting parties patrolling the town with festive glee, having a grand old time enacting this obvious solution to the Filipino question. Of those who were caught and beaten bloody or stripped naked and taunted with monkey calls or thrown over the bridge or all of the above. Of the Chinese grocer and a few other store owners who ushered fleeing Filipinos in from the street so they could hide in their rafters or back rooms while most of the town drew curtains closed and locked doors until the early morning, when the police gently dispersed the remaining “vigilantes” as if they were rambunctious children who’d gotten a bit out of hand.

People thought I was bad, but Kavi didn’t give two fucks who he put a bullet in. That nigga was a loose cannon. Charmaine and her grease monkey ass son better chill before we make room in Tal’s grave for they ass. The Muslims always say may yo’ grave be spacious, and ion know if they ass into Islam, but we can practice the spacious part in a couple of hours.

Was there a moment you realized you could control how you interpreted things? I think one problem people have is not recognizing they can control how they interpret and respond to a situation. I think everyone knows it’s possible. There’s a great Osho lecture, titled “The Attraction for Drugs Is Spiritual.” He talks about why do people do drugs (everything from alcohol to psychedelics to cannabis). They’re doing it to control their mental state. They’re doing it to control how they react. Some people drink because it helps them not care as much, or they’re potheads because they can zone out, or they do psychedelics to feel very present or connected to nature. The attraction of drugs is spiritual. All of society does this to some extent. People chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasms—any of these states people strive for are people trying to get out of their own heads. They’re trying to get away from the voice in their heads—the overdeveloped sense of self. At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature and the world for what it is, and appreciate it very much as a child would. [4] The first thing to realize is you can observe your mental state. Meditation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state. The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control madperson. You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation. You realize, “Oh, I don’t want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?” Awareness alone calms you down. [4] Insight meditation lets you run your brain in debug mode until you realize you’re just a subroutine in a larger program. I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn’t always work. In the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in “debugging mode” as much as possible. When I’m talking to someone, or when I’m engaged in a group activity, it’s almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle. If I’m by myself, like just this morning, I’m brushing my teeth and I start thinking forward to a podcast. I started going through this little fantasy where I imagined Shane asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy- answering them. Then, I caught myself. I put my brain in debug mode and just watched every little instruction go by. I said, “Why am I fantasy-future planning? Why can’t I just stand here and brush my teeth?” It’s the awareness my brain was running off in the future and planning some fantasy scenario out of ego. I was like, “Well, do I really care if I embarrass myself? Who cares? I’m going to die anyway. This is all going to go to zero, and I won’t remember anything, so this is pointless.” Then, I shut down, and I went back to brushing my teeth. I was noticing how good the toothbrush was and how good it felt. Then the next moment, I’m off to thinking something else. I have to look at my brain again and say, “Do I really need to solve this problem right now?” Ninety-five percent of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don’t need to tackle in that exact moment. If the brain is like a muscle, I’ll be better off resting it, being at peace. When a particular problem arises, I’ll immerse myself in it. Right now as we’re talking, I’d rather dedicate myself to being completely lost in the conversation and to being 100 percent focused on this as opposed to thinking about “Oh, when I brushed my teeth, did I do it the right way?

On my next book tour the theme was monkeys, and on the latest one it was items men shove inside themselves and later have to go to the emergency room to have extracted. This started when an ER nurse told me about a patient she’d seen earlier in the week who had pushed a dildo too far up his ass. The door had shut behind it, so he’d tried fishing it out with a coat hanger. When that proved the wrong tool for the job, he’d snipped it with wire cutters, then gone after both the dildo and the cut-off hanger with a sturdier, fresh hanger. You hear this from doctors and nurses all the time: their patients shove light bulbs inside themselves, shampoo bottles, pool balls…and they always concoct some incredible story to explain their predicament. “I tripped” is a big one. And, OK, I’m pretty clumsy. I trip all the time, but never have I gotten back on my feet with a pepper grinder up my ass, not even a little bit. I’m pretty sure I could tumble down all the stairs in the Empire State Building—naked, with a greased-up rolling pin in each hand and a box of candles around my neck—and still end up in the lobby with an empty rectum. Another common excuse is “I accidentally sat on it.” Implied is that you were naked at the time and this can of air freshener that just happened to be coated with Vaseline went all the way up inside

I’ve plenty of scope,” returned Monkey. “It’s the kind of doctoring that appeals to me. I’ll tell you what I feel about doctoring—if it won’t bore you—you see, everyone wants to specialize now, or nearly everybody who has the brains for it. They sit in their consulting rooms like so many spiders; they diagnose, and, if necessary, they operate, and then they say good-bye and send in their bill. Well, it’s necessary to have people like that, I suppose, but that’s not my idea of doctoring. I mean it doesn’t appeal to me personally. My idea of doctoring is to get to know your patients, to help their minds as well as their bodies.

One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were euthanized as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized.

The Project Elects assured us that dropping the monkey into the volcano was important. They scribbled impatiently on the blackboard in the demonstration room. They drew a picture of the monkey peeking out of the capsule’s small window and smiling. They drew themselves standing on the tarmac and smiling. They drew a picture of us having wild sex with each other in the locker room and smiling. Look, they said, everybody’s happy. And if our own happiness wasn’t enough to make us put the monkey in the capsule, they reminded us that we were replaceable, that we were, in fact, desirable only in the sense that we were so totally capable of being replaced, that we were all a bunch of yo-yos, that we were lucky to know there even was a monkey.

Notes on a Candy Cane Tree" What did I think about before you touched my thigh? Let me say this: I’m going to touch you until my fingers fall off. If my fingers don’t fall off, I will hold your hand even if it’s sweaty. And let me say this: You are lovelier than clouds that look like lovely things. I have only loved a few times and the last time was when you rubbed my neck under the monkey bars. We weren’t much younger than we are now. I still have the same haircut. You still have only one dimple. It’s on your left cheek and it looks like you fell on a pebble. I love that it looks like you fell on a pebble. Let me say this: You taste like candy canes. There was a candy cane tree in my old neighborhood. My neighbor hung candy canes on the branches of the willow and I snatched them in the middle of the night. It was December when I rode my bike the quickest, like I was going somewhere to meet you. I like you more than the candy cane tree. Let me say this: I am uncomfortable in my own skin, so I hold your face. I hold your face and your hips but mostly your face. You have a lovely face. Let me say this: I love you like monsters like scaring little kids. I make a list of words I can use to diagram your body: petite, mellifluous, comely, milk, necessary. Please, forgive the humming; you see I rarely taste candy canes in March. When I don’t taste you I taste sweat. Not good sweat, mind you, sweaty sweat from the men’s locker room. Sometimes I taste pizza, but that’s only because I loved pizza first. Let me say this: My love for pizza was fleeting. I was young and naive and thought that extra toppings meant something. These are fine days because they end with you. Let me just say this: I’m going to kiss you until my lips fall off. If my lips don’t fall off, I will kiss up your spine until I run out of spine. Then I’ll start over. — Gregory Sherl, [PANK] Magazine 4.09 / September 2009

To say that Grayson’s little brothers are loud is like saying jet engines are kind of noisy. They sounded like a troop of howler monkeys as they raced down the hallway toward his room.

He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You can’t cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys—it will cause a riot.)

He promised. It was the only way he could get his hand back. And he stood there miserably while Helene went down to the ladies' dressing room for the present While he waited, a lot of people congratulated him on being such a fine actor. But congratulations never made him happy. He just wanted to get away.

Discharging cargo in the ports along the coast of South Africa went faster than loading it, but from Durban up to Dar es Salaam, hoping to save a little time not to mention port costs, we frequently did both at the same time, in these quaint little harbors along the coast, By now some of these ports had become old hat to me and so I volunteered to stay aboard. This way I could make some overtime pay by covering for some of the other mates, who wanted to go ashore. When we finally got to Dar es Salaam and I was informed that we would be there for a few days, I took advantage of the situation and finally went ashore. One of my favorite places in this British owned, colonial town was the “New Africa Hotel.“ It had an open air courtyard in the middle of the building, with wild monkeys swinging through the trees making loud blood curdling noises. Although the rooms were not air-conditioned, they were open to a constant breeze coming in off the Indian Ocean. In the 1950’s, all of the beds had mosquito netting to keep the pesky winged vampires out and to prevent getting malaria; which most of us got anyway.

We went to classes. The teachers didn’t quite know what to do with us. It wasn’t exactly kosher what we were doing–but then punishing the “apes” by sending them down the hall to the Principal’s Office within full view of all the other classrooms would only compound the problem. So they shrugged and started the school day. Within minutes of “home room”, Chris and I were sitting in our respective classrooms, working multiplication problems like good little monkeys. I remember suffering a lot throughout the day, horribly burdened by a growing realization. “What kind of a world is this,” I thought, “if you can’t go to school dressed up like a gorilla?” The question haunts me to his very day.

Poetry is the insurrectionist’s artform. It is the soft hammer. A countervailing wind of new song must ruffle the waves of orthodoxy, loosen the hold of old beliefs and clear out the clogged sloughs of dogma to make room for fresh acts of the imagination.

Its lounge hall was already full of wet outer garments, and from a room on the left came a noise suggestive of a monkey-house.

She’s saved from a response by Ted rushing back into the room, nearly tripping over Harry Markus in the doorway, catching himself and whirling around and shaking a rolled-up newspaper at the man as if he’s a bad dog. “Ya’ll ain’t talkin’ ‘bout this,” he says. He shakes his head at Creed, then at Veronica, then he fixes Harry Markus with a remarkably nasty scowl. “We don’t talk about this crazy stuff, Peter’s weird friends, we don’t talk about all that shit.” “His weird friend’s daughter is sitting at the dinner table,” says Creed, “so I guess we do.” Veronica watches, terribly amused, as Ted barrels ahead. “Benny Lewis was nothin’ but trouble. I told Peter, I said ‘that boy has got too many sci-fi ideas’ and then I said ‘and those NASA folks are bad news, they’re stealin’ our tax dollars to send monkeys to space and open wormholes for aliens’.”  “That’s exactly what my dad did at NASA,” Veronica says. 

Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks?” Be careful with the answer. It’s as important as every word from Scheherazade’s mouth that saved her life. And everybody’s got an answer. A god who listens is like your best friend, who lets you tell him about all the people you don’t like. A god who speaks is like your best teacher, who tells Brandon Goff he has to leave the room if he’s going to call people falafel monkeys. A god who listens is your mom who lets you sit in a kitchen and tell her stories about castles in the mountains. A god who speaks is your dad who calls on the phone with advice for your life in America. There are gods all over the world who just want you to express yourself. Look inside and find whatever you think you are and that’s all it takes to be good. And there are gods who are so alien to us, with minds so clear, the only thing to do would be to sit at their feet and wait for them to speak, to tell us what is good. A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything. I don’t have an answer for you. This is the kind of thing you live your whole life thinking about probably. Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love.

At length the queen gave birth to the loveliest creature that ever was seen. Without delay the hawthorn was fastened on her head, and at the same instant, wonderful to relate! she turned into a little monkey, and jumped and ran and capered about the room —a perfect monkey and no mistake! At this metamorphosis all the ladies uttered horrible cries, and the queen, more alarmed than any one, thought she should die of despair.

It was after breakfast, and I went into the dining-room to clear away the remains of Father's kippers. The sun came slanting in through the window and touched the mantelpiece, where the monkey's skull used to lie. I placed a damp log on the recently lighted fire. A soft hissing sound came and a frantic woodlouse rushed about the smoking bark. I rescued it with a teaspoon, although I had no fondness for woodlice. It was a pity to let it burn—and there it was, squirming on the damp tea-spoon, grey and rather horrible. With one hand I pushed up the window and with the other placed it on the sill, where it crawled about leaving a small wet trail of tea among the winged sycamore-seeds that had lodged there. The air was sharp and wintry, and the street very still. The only people to be seen were a few pale women with black string bags. Under the gate a dried leaf rustled very gently. I thought, 'It's minutes like this that seem to last so long.

A god who listens is like your best friend, who lets you tell him about all the people you don’t like. A god who speaks is like your best teacher, who tells Brandon Goff he has to leave the room if he’s going to call people falafel monkeys.