Plug Out Quotes

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.

Get some money, buy a red coffeepot, move out. Find a new place to plug it in.

If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

What do you do with all this bank, Josie? Be a lot easier if you just lifted your skirt.” “The only reason I’d lift my skirt is to pull out my pistol and plug you in the head.

I brought music." I pull my iPhone and ear buds out of my bra and plug them in my ears. "What else do you have in there?

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

When we first started out I had a really big issue and a lot of my loved ones had a really big issue with the fact that I was totally in pain up there and there was a time when I tried to hurt myself off stage, but I got over that. Like, you should never want to hurt yourself. You should love yourself. Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself and become a new person and I think that that is going to be a lot of what the next record is about, not to plug it or anything. Like, it's going to talk about dying and coming back to become what you totally want to become. We are all becoming what we want to become.

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The first psycho therapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.

We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.

Did you ever, when you were little, endure your parents’ warnings, then wait for them to leave the room, pry loose protective covers and consider inserting some metal object into an electrical outlet? Did you wonder if for once you might light up the room? When you were big enough to cross the street on your own, did you ever wait for a signal, hear the frenzied approach of a fire truck and feel like stepping out in front of it? Did you wonder just how far that rocket ride might take you? When you were almost grown, did you ever sit in a bubble bath, perspiration pooling, notice a blow dryer plugged in within easy reach, and think about dropping it into the water? Did you wonder if the expected rush might somehow fail you? And now, do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?

Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... "Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, "What did I say? What did I say?" "What did I say?" asked Ivan indignantly.

The largest one laughed. Until Natalya's glass shard plugged his jugular. Regin aimed and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked as bullets sprayed. It was shredding their torsos like cheese, halving their bodies. "Let's do this! Rock out with your cocks out!

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that has nothing to do with you, This storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.

You will not be able to stay home, brother./You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out./You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,/Skip out for beer during commercials,/Because the revolution will not be televised.

Here’s something about Mom: she’s bad with annoyances, but great in a crisis. If a waiter doesn’t refill her water after she’s asked three times, or she forgets her dark glasses when the sun comes out, look out! But when it comes to something truly bad happening, Mom plugs into this supreme calm.

Mira, I'm about to be naked," Blue said as he whipped off his belt and tossed it on the floor. "So watch out. Well, in my underwear." "I've seen you in your bathing suit," Mira said. "It's the same thing." "It is not the same thing," Blue said. "When it's accompanied by seventies porn music, it's an X-rated strip show." Blue yanked off his shirt. "Freddie, you're kind of slow on the uptake. Eine kleine porn music, please." Freddie scrunched his forehead in distaste. "I don't want to plug my guitar in just so I can play some bow-chicka-wow-wow accompaniment to your strip show. Mira laughed. "Bow-chicka-what was that, Freddie?

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

All America loses when any person is denied or forced out of a job because of sexual orientation. Being gay, the last time I thought about it, seemed to have nothing to do with the ability to read a balance book, fix a broken bone, or change a spark plug.

I pull my iPod out of my backpack and plug it in. It's the first thing I do every time I get in it, like a ritual. Music soothes the soul; at least it helps soothe mine.

I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrow for I am not a poem. I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspired but empty and weary from drinking too much at all times and I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speak for I don’t speak much at all and my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too much or not at all and never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am not a poem but an elegy at my best but unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that, but others are not.

Nothing can fill you up,” she stated. “Nope,” he agreed again. “You won’t let it.” “Barrel’s got a hole in the bottom, buddy, everything leaks out no matter how much you pour in.” She was silent a moment then she whispered, “Right.” She turned to the door and his hand gripped his bourbon so hard he had to focus everything on loosening his grip or the glass would shatter. Before she opened it, she turned back. “You don’t know, Cal, you have no idea. You’ve shut yourself up for so long in this fucking house with your tragic memories, you have no idea what’s about to walk out your door. Kate, Keira and me, we could have plugged that hole. We could have filled you so full, you’d be bursting. We would have loved that chance. We’d have given it everything we had, no matter the time that slid by, graduations, weddings, grandbabies, you’d have been a part of us and we’d have given everything we had to keep you so full, you’d be bursting.” Cal didn’t reply. “Joe,” she whispered, “you let me walk out this door, you’ll lose your chance.” Cal didn’t move. Vi waited. Cal stayed seated.

Look, why don’t you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?” He gestured Arthur toward a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus. “It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus,” explained the old man

When you are young and healthy, you believe you will live forever. You do not worry about losing any of your capabilities. People tell you “the world is your oyster,” “the sky is the limit,” and so on. And you are willing to delay gratification—to invest years, for example, in gaining skills and resources for a brighter future. You seek to plug into bigger streams of knowledge and information. You widen your networks of friends and connections, instead of hanging out with your mother. When horizons are measured in decades, which might as well be infinity to human beings, you most desire all that stuff at the top of Maslow’s pyramid—achievement, creativity, and other attributes of “self-actualization.” But as your horizons contract—when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain—your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you.

Once or twice a week I would set my alarm for six A.M. so I could get up and plug in Hot Stix...I would study the curls in the mirror, impressed with both the appliance and my newfound ability to use it. Then, without fail, at the last second before leaving for school, I would ask myself, "Am I supposed to brush it out or leave it?" Why could I never remember" That feeling of "I'm pretty sure this next step is wrong, but I'm just gonna do it anyway" is part of the same set of instincts that makes me such a great cook.

I bite my fingernails till they look like disease, pull strips of my skin away. Get Daddy's razor out cabinet. Cut cut cut arm wrist, not trying to die, trying to plug myself back in. (111)

I noticed how utterly indifferent the passengers were to what they were doing, namely, flying through the air. A glance out of the window would have revealed furrowed fields of cloud stained smoke-blue and violet as night and morning changed shifts –- but how were they passing time in First, Business and Coach? Crosswords. In-flight movies. Computer games. E-mail. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses –- and what do you do? Complain about the dwarf cutlery. Plug your ears. Blind you eyes. Discuss Julia Roberts’s hair. Ah, me. Sometimes I think my work is done.

It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?

These growth hormones, where can I get a bunch of them? Is there some way that, with electricity, you could stimulate your own growth hormones? Plug yourself in for five minutes, there'd be a little jolt, but you'd get used to it. It wouldn't be bad at all; in fact, you'd get to enjoy it, probably. Then away you'd go, and youth wouldn't be wasted on the young anymore. You'd be 25, with a 95-year-old mind. Granddad would start breaking into liquor stores and staying out late. Hope we have it soon!

People plug in to you, and when they’re gone, you stop working for a while. You have to reconfigure yourself, rework your wiring, so you can get out of bed in the morning.

I needed to plug that hole in my head where the marbles were pouring out.

It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o’clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down. If you tried to pull out the plug there was an alarming crackling sound and sparks flew between the outlet and the plug, preventing the circuit from being broken.

An international power supply is the device which means it doesn't matter what country you're in, or even if you know what country you're in (more of a problem than you might suspect) - you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least, Microsoft calls it that because it hasn't got it yet. In the Mac world we've had it for so long we didn't even think of giving it a name.

There’s no one else for me in this world, nobody but you. If I was driving and saw you on the side of the road? You better believe I’d rip out a spark plug or two if it meant getting to spend even five minutes in your presence.

Robot Boy Mr. an Mrs. Smith had a wonderful life. They were a normal, happy husband and wife. One day they got news that made Mr. Smith glad. Mrs. Smith would would be a mom which would make him the dad! But something was wrong with their bundle of joy. It wasn't human at all, it was a robot boy! He wasn't warm and cuddly and he didn't have skin. Instead there was a cold, thin layer of tin. There were wires and tubes sticking out of his head. He just lay there and stared, not living or dead. The only time he seemed alive at all was with a long extension cord plugged into the wall. Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor, "What have you done to my boy? He's not flesh and blood, he's aluminum alloy!" The doctor said gently, "What I'm going to say will sound pretty wild. But you're not the father of this strange looking child. You see, there still is some question about the child's gender, but we think that its father is a microwave blender." The Smith's lives were now filled with misery and strife. Mrs. Smith hated her husband, and he hated his wife. He never forgave her unholy alliance: a sexual encounter with a kitchen appliance. And Robot Boy grew to be a young man. Though he was often mistaken for a garbage can.

The Quitter When you're lost in the Wild, and you're scared as a child, And Death looks you bang in the eye, And you're sore as a boil, it's according to Hoyle To cock your revolver and . . . die. But the Code of a Man says: "Fight all you can," And self-dissolution is barred. In hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow... It's the hell-served-for-breakfast that's hard. "You're sick of the game!" Well, now, that's a shame. You're young and you're brave and you're bright. "You've had a raw deal!" I know — but don't squeal, Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight. It's the plugging away that will win you the day, So don't be a piker, old pard! Just draw on your grit; it's so easy to quit: It's the keeping-your-chin-up that's hard. It's easy to cry that you're beaten — and die; It's easy to crawfish and crawl; But to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight — Why, that's the best game of them all! And though you come out of each gruelling bout, All broken and beaten and scarred, Just have one more try — it's dead easy to die, It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.

the human body has no way to detect a lack of oxygen. You just plug along until you pass out.

In the outside world, he told me, there was no real silence. Not the fake silence you get when you plug your ears so you hear nothing but your heart, but real out-of-doors silence.

It’s one thing when you plug into a socket in the wall and electrons flow,” said Bob Kahn. “It’s another thing when you have to figure out, for every electron, which direction it takes.

You know, it sounds like you guys didn’t really think this all the way through. You plugged us into an equation and predicted outcomes. Well, I got news for you, nimrod. In this equation of yours, we’re variables. We’re going to vary. What you sick jerks don’t seem to get is that I’m an actual person. She’s real too. She’s a person. All of us are! And I’m done jumping through your hoops. You can tell yourselves that you’re doing all this to save the world, but really you’re just a bunch of psycho puppet-masters who probably didn’t date enough in high school.

And it was exactly like having flu that time because I wanted it to stop, like you can just pull the plug of a computer out of the wall if it crashes, because I wanted to go to sleep so that I wouldn't have to think because the only thing I could think was how much it hurt because there was no room for anything else in my head, but I couldn't go to sleep and I just had to sit there and there was nothing to do except to wait and hurt.

I enjoy having breakfast in bed. I like waking up to the smell of bacon, sue me. And since I don’t have a butler, I have to do it myself. So, most nights before I go to bed, I will lay six strips of bacon out on my George Foreman grill. Then I go to sleep. When I wake up, I plug in the grill. I go back to sleep again. Then I wake up to the smell of crackling bacon. It is delicious, it’s good for me, it’s the perfect way to start the day.

I think dismissing female pain as overly familiar or somehow out-of-date--twice-told, thrice-told, 1,001-nights-told--masks deeper accusations: that suffering women are playing victim, going weak, or choosing self-indulgence over bravery. I think dismissing wounds offers a convenient excuse: no need to struggle with the listening or telling anymore. Plug it up. Like somehow our task is to inhabit the jaded aftermath of terminal self-awareness once the story of all pain has already been told.

I'm eclectic,' she said to the HDs once and I could see them trying to work out where she plugged in.

My threshold for human contact had worn painfully thin. I felt like a car that had been running its lights too long on battery alone. I felt fresh out of charge, and as though I needed to plug in for days before I could have one more conversation with one more human being.

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it’s only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean. Because the numinous is everywhere, we need to be reminded of it. We live among wonders. Superhuman cyborgs, we plug into cell phones connecting us to one another and to a constantly updated planetary database, an exo-memory that allows us to fit our complete cultural archive into a jacket pocket. We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen — the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass. We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn’t we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in — and we made Superman, after all.

Shh!" said Ford. "It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand, alright? Or sugar. Fine white sand, and/or sugar. Anything. Doesn't matter. Sugar's fine. And when it's full, you pull the plug out... are you listening?" "I'm listening." "You pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see, out of the plughole. "Clever." "That's not the clever bit. This is the clever bit, I remember now that this is the clever bit. The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the projector... backwards!" "Backwards?" "Yes. Threading it backwards is definitely the clever bit. So then, you just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral upwards out of the plughole and fill the bath. See?" "And that's how the Universe began is it?" said Arthur. "No," said Ford, "but it's a marvelous way to relax.

This week in live current events: your eyes. All power can be dangerous: Direct or alternating, you, socket to me. Plugged in and the grid is humming, this electricity, molecule-deep desire: particular friction, a charge strong enough to stop a heart or start it again; volt, re-volt-- I shudder, I stutter, I start to life. I've got my ion you, copper-top, so watch how you conduct yourself. Here's today's newsflash: a battery of rolling blackouts in California, sudden, like lightning kisses: sudden, whitehot darkness and you're here, fumbling for that small switch with an urgent surge strong enough to kill lesser machines. Static makes hair raise, makes things cling, makes things rise like a gathering storm charging outside our darkened house and here I am: tempest, pouring out mouthfulls of tsunami on the ground, I've got that rain-soaked kite, that drenched key. You know what it's for, circuit-breaker, you know how to kiss until it's hertz.

... I succeeded at math, at least by the usual evaluation criteria: grades. Yet while I might have earned top marks in geometry and algebra, I was merely following memorized rules, plugging in numbers and dutifully crunching out answers by rote, with no real grasp of the significance of what I was doing or its usefulness in solving real-world problems. Worse, I knew the depth of my own ignorance, and I lived in fear that my lack of comprehension would be discovered and I would be exposed as an academic fraud -- psychologists call this "imposter syndrome".

We see only that which we are. I like to think of it in terms of energy. Imagine having a hundred different electrical outlets on your chest. Each outlet represents a different quality. The qualities we acknowledge and embrace have cover plates over them. They are safe: no electricity runs through them. But the qualities that are not okay with us, which we have not yet owned, do have a charge. So when others come along who act out one of these qualities they plug right into us. For example, if we deny or are uncomfortable with our anger, we will attract angry people into our lives. We will suppress our own angry feelings and judge people whom we see as angry. Since we lie to ourselves about our own internal feelings, the only way we can find them is to see them in others. Other people mirror back our hidden emotions and feelings, which allows us to recognize and reclaim them.

Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a run-away milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day Invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest-stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s French fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye. But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn’t crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren’t random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha’s blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time’s great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid’s head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn’t fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower. And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

there are two types of codes, ciphers, and true codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation.

You don't know, Cal, you have no idea. You've shut yourself up for so long in this fucking house with your tragic memories, you have no idea what's about to walk out your door. Kate, Keira and me, we could have plugged that hole. We could have filled you so full,you'd be bursting. We would have loved that chance. We'd have given it everything we had.

I'm not entirely sure there is a formula for this,' I say. But I wish there were. I would have followed it, plugging in all my data for x and all of Ethan's for y. And I would have worked out the results before involving my emotions, and I wouldn't feel as I feel now--like I've been dumped for real by an imaginary guy.

When I look in the fridge, I see groceries, but I don't see food. My stomach growls; but there is no appetite. Appetite and hunger are different. Appetite is the mental prompting that kicks the auto-response into drive so you actually reach out, take the food, put it in your mouth, chew, and swallow. I learned this in my first psychology course. Eating isn't just a physical need; it starts in the mind, generating hunger, which then should trigger the body to ingest food. I have no sparks between these plugs.

Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox from birth or dressing up a dog to look like a fox. Or hiring David Attenbrorough, who probably knows a few foxes well enough to ask a favour.

He was the thing the world had suffered from most in her four billion years of existence: a stupid man with power. When the lights of the universe went out one day, standing over the plug, having pulled it despite all warnings, would be a man like Deputy Kelby.

You know, Chase, one of these days you're going to need me. You might need help changing a tire, or you can't figure out a gas pump, or, damn," she smacked her forehead, "you bought the wrong brand of spark plugs and need me to get you different ones, and you'll be sorry you were such a prick to me and didn't become my friend.

I've got data incoming. Do you want me to transfer it to my portable unit?" "No, you stay here, finish the runs. I shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. When you're done with this, I want you to go find a hammer." Peabody had taken out her memo book, nearly plugged in the order, when she stopped, frowned up at Eve. "Sir? A hammer?" "That's right. A really big, heavy hammer. Then you take it into my office and beat that fucking useless excuse for a data spitter on my desk to dust." "Ah." Because she was a wise woman, Peabody cleared her throat rather than loosen the chuckle. "As an alternate to that action, Lieutenant, I could call maintenance.

Time — how it expands to fill the spaces you create; how it makes meagre experiences seem never-ending. Whenever he heard people talk about the ravages of time, about how it robbed and deprived, Justin always smiled; because for him, time was an accomplice, plugging the gaps and fleshing out morsels of memory so he would have something substantial to hang on to. That way, however little he had seen or felt, he would always feel as if he had more: a life far richer than the truth.

Some of the very same people who deny the reality of climate change being caused by our energy choices are the same people who say, ‘We want you to fix this,’ ” she said. “So on the one hand they say mankind is too small to impact Mother Nature—that forces of nature are much stronger than the impacts of man. Yet they somehow turn around and say, ‘OK, governments: put a plug in—engineer something, dredge something, dig out, blow up, modify.’ They don’t think man is too weak to engineer a fix, but they somehow say we’re not responsible for the cause.

The fact that Cincinnati thought I resembled him in any way sickened me. It made me want to run and hide. When I was a child in Detroit and terrors chased me, I would run to my hiding spot, a crawl space under the front porch of the boardinghouse we lived in. I’d wedge my small body into the cool brown earth and lie there, escaping the ugliness that was inevitably going on above me. I’d plug my ears with my fingers and hum to block out the remnants of Mother’s toxic tongue or sharp backhand. It became a habit, humming, and a decade later, I was still doing it. Life had turned cold again, the safety of the cocoon under the porch was gone, and lying in the dirt had become a metaphor for my life.

TV came relatively late to the King household, and I’m glad. I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit. This might not be important. On the other hand, if you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

Oh, I think my new slave is a wanton little slut. Aren’t you?” “No, I’m a good boy,” he moaned as he pushed his ass back on my hand. “I’m not a whore!” “You’re my whore,” I growled and fucked him with my fingers as I picked up the flogger someone had left on the table. I started spanking him hard with it. “Does my boy want to come?” “Yes,” he hissed and jumped when I slapped him with the toy again. “Please, master? I’ll do anything you want.” “You’ll do it whether I let you come or not!” I pulled my fingers free and walked over to the wall of toys. I grabbed a large butt plug and quickly pushed it into his ass. Then, before he could even get used to the size of it, I slapped the flogger against it. “Admit you’re a dirty slut.” “No! I’m a good boy,” Shely cried out again. “Please don’t breach my ass! I’ve never been with a man before.

The oil and gas industry—left to its own devices—will mindlessly follow its own nature. It will make tons of money. It will corrode and corrupt and sabotage democratic governance. It will screw up and—in the end—fatally injure the whole freaking planet. And yes, it will also provide oil and gas along the way! And jobs for the workers who produce those things for it. The end-times battle that we’re engaged in now is to figure out how to get along without oil and gas—and we’re plugging away but still a ways off from that—and, in the meantime, commit to a whole new level of constraint and regulatory protection against this singularly destructive industry to minimize its potential harms.

President Truman had a little sign on his desk. I’ve always admired its philosophy. It read: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. I’ve envied certain people, too, the great majority of my colleagues whose sole mission in life is to attain the goal of mediocrity. They sail into a safe harbor, button up and conveniently and quietly sort their paper clips, avoiding responsibility and decisions. I can’t explain, Nicole, why I was singled out and am unable to avoid conflict, but I can’t run or plug my ears or close my eyes or turn my back. I often envy those who can.

Brandon,” Marc said. “Say something so she can hear you.” “You’re in deep shit, Kayli,” Brandon said. “Can he hear me?” I asked Marc. “I can hear you,” Brandon said in my ear, a little fuzzy, like he was standing in another room with the door closed, but I could make out what he was saying. “Just wait until I get a hold of you.” “Raven,” I pretended to plea. “Brandon said he was going to hurt me.” “I’ll kill him,” he said. He jammed his own ear plug into his noggin. “Corey? Yeah. Hit your brother once for me. No, in the dick. No, he won’t hit you back. I promise.” “Cut it out, you guys,” Marc said. “How come I can’t hear Corey?” I asked. “I get Corey,” Raven said. “You get Brandon.” “I want to switch.” “I said stop,” Marc barked at us. Stone, C. L. (2014-02-24). Thief: The Scarab Beetle Series: #1 (The Academy Scarab Beetle Series) (Kindle Locations 5192-5200). Arcato Publishing. Kindle Edition.

There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odor of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and all the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odors of different herbs whose names he did not know that hung in bunches from the ceiling, with long ropes of garlic, away now from the copper-penny, red wine and garlic, horse sweat and man sweat died in the clothing (acrid and gray the man sweat, sweet and sickly the dried brushed-off lather of horse sweat, of the men at the table, Robert Jordan breathed deeply of the clear night air of the mountains that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream.

He'd seen this babe before--her many counterparts, that is. He knew her kin, distant and near. All her mamas, sisters, aunts, cousins and what have you. And he knew the name was Lowdown with a capital L. He wasn't at all surprised to find her in a setup like this. Not after encountering her as a warden's sister-in-law, the assistant treasurer of a country bank, and a supervisor of paroles. This babe got around. She was the original square-plug-in-a-round-hole kid. But she never changed any. She had that good old Lowdown blood in her, and the right guy could bring it out.

He was reminded of TV ads for plug-in air fresheners where some woman would stick the little plastic thing in a socket and animated fumes would waft out and everyone would lift their faces, close their eyes, breathe in deeply and go ‘Aaaaaah’. Like they were taking some kind of drug rather than inhaling chemicals.

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that -- well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been -- or, more precisely, being about to be -- hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap -- the crater -- that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers.

Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one's daily life three lipstick cases with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven pence three farthings in loose change and the mandatory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phyrne's bag the last time Dot had turned it out.

Lately, in this city I love, this neighborhood I love, all I seem to notice are the intrusions. Hot Air. Reeking garbage. Lunatic neighbors...I am inventing filters. Air filters. Stinking garbage filters. Lunatic-neighbor filters... Sometimes I imagine plugging a big air conditioner to the front of my head so I can block the rest of the world out. That's not right.

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. “Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

He lifted his gaze to hers. "I have a lot of other things I should be doing, but I'm here." He stared into her eyes for several heartbeats before he returned his attention to the big box. "I've tried to stay away. After you threw me out of the house, I thought it was probably for the best. You're a distraction, and I don't need a distraction right now." He handed the screwdriver back to her and ripped the box open with his big hands. "I've got tapes I need to review, and plays I need to go over in my head before today's practice, yet here I am. Putting baby furniture together for you because I can't get you out of my head. I plug in a tape, and all I do is think about you." He peeled back the cardboard and reached for the instruction sheet that had fallen to the floor. "But the thing is, Adele, I'm not really sure whether you want me to be here or not." His polo shirt pulled out of the waistband of his Levi's and slid up the tan muscles of his back. He straightened and looked at her over the top of the instructions. "I don't know what you want.

The Doper's Dream Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in To a bubblin' hookah so high, When all of a sudden some Arab jinni Jump up just a-winkin' his eye. 'I'm here to obey all your wishes,' he told me. As for words I was trying to grope. 'Good buddy,' I cried, 'you could surely oblige me By turning me on to some dope!' With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand, And we flew down the sky in a flash, And the first thing I saw in the land where he took me Was a whole solid mountain of hash! All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills, Whur the Romilar River flowed by, To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow, So pretty that I wanted to cry. All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion, Mourning glories woven into their hair, Bringin' great big handfuls of snowy cocaine, All their dope they were eager to share. We we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin', In the flowering Panama Red, Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea, And those brownies so kind to your head. Now I could've passed that good time forever, And I really was fixing to stay, But you know that jinni turned out, t'be a narco man, And he busted me right whur I lay. And he took me back to a cold, cold world 'N' now m'prison's whurever I be... And I dream of the days back in Doperland And I wonder, will I ever go free?

I hate to undermine the worth of talent. Unquestionably, talent exists. It’s no myth or hokum. Your talent tells you that you’re cut out for something. It points you towards what you can do effortlessly and what your potential career could be. However, talent isn’t everything. Knowledge and growth don’t come easily. You have to be willing to put in the hours and the effort, sometimes even without visible progress, because one day, unexpectedly, the results will flower. But without that work, it’s unlikely to happen. Eventually, hard work is not just about plugging away at something. It’s thinking intelligently about what you want to achieve, the goals you’re setting yourself, how you’re improving and how you can incorporate all of this into the list of things that will help you scale that peak.

But I had this idea also that you don't take so wide a stance that it makes a human llife impossible, nor try to bring together irreconcilables that destroy you, but try out what of human you can live with first. And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condidtion as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched.

Reasercher 101, I do not long for the old, unreachable days. When I'm plugged in I can go anywhere, do and learn anything. Today, for instance, I visited a tiny library in Portugal. I learned how the Shakers weave baskets and I discovered my best friend in middle school loves blood-orange sorbet. Okay, I also learned that a certain pop star actually believes she's a fairy, an honest-to-goodness fairy from the fey people, but my point is access. Access to information. I don't even have to look out my window to see what the eather is like. I can have the weather delivered every morning to my phone. What could be better? Sincerely, Wife 22 Wife 22, Getting caught in the rain? All the best, Researcher 101

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit. This might not be important. On the other hand, if you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

Since the greatest room for each person's growth is in the areas of his greatest strength, you should focus your training time and money on educating him about his strengths and figuring out ways to build on these strengths rather than on remedially trying to plug his 'skill gaps.' You will find that this one shift in emphasis will pay huge dividends. In one fell swoop you will sidestep three potential pitfalls to building a strengths-based organization: the 'I don't have the skills and knowledge I need' problem, the 'I don't know what I'm best at' problem, and the 'my manager doesn't know what I'm best at' problem.

E L James, Party Games you’re looking kind of smug inserting that god damn anal plug giving me your kinky love after writing Fifty Shades you’re acting like some kind of renegade giving me your kinky love sit me on a dildo and spin me right around chain me up and hang me upside down giving me your kinky love god damn you E L James making me into some kind of party game giving me your kinky love put me in a dream and wheel in the Fucking Machine god damn you E L James spank a hand on my bum see how much I can cum god damn you E L James stand me up and sit me down lay me out and roll me about god damn you E L James BDSM electro impulses up my brainstem god damn you E L James cast me in a submissive role-play with my genitals on display god damn you E L James suspend me high in the air slap me around like I don’t care god damn you E L James take that whip off the shelf make me forget myself god damn you E L James Why are you wearing oven mittens? branding iron your name written inner goddess don’t keep in hidden god damn you E L James holy crap my mind has snapped to forget one thing that I have heard I’m never going to use the safe-word god damn you E L James By R.M.Romarney

Here’s something about Mom: she’s bad with annoyances, but great in a crisis. If a waiter doesn’t refill her water after she’s asked three times, or she forgets her dark glasses when the sun comes out, look out! But when it comes to something truly bad happening, Mom plugs into this supreme calm. I think she got it from all those years half living at Children’s because of me. I’m just saying, when things are bad, there’s nobody better to have in your corner than Mom.

A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …” “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step.

Today there is a movement to require any device to use less than half a watt in standby mode. It’s the power that keeps your television tuner, or microwave oven, or coffeemaker’s clock running. With billions of appliances, we can easily waste hundreds of billions of watt-hours. This is sometimes called the “no-load” power loss or, what I prefer, the “vampire” loss. Each plugged-in plug has two prongs that are like the fangs of a vampire, sucking our electrical life’s blood out of us all. Bah, ha, ha, ha, ha … It seems like an important problem to address, and we have, to some extent. Having vampires suck half a watt instead of 10 or 15 watts represents great progress. Nevertheless, how about if it were a tenth of that half? We could have billions of kilowatt-hours available to us for free, without any other decisions about nuclear plants or wind-turbine sites.

The next day, when I came home from the library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm. “Ma,” I asked. “Where did you get the money for the record player?” “I had it saved,” she lied. My father lived well, had a large house and an expensive imported car, wanted for little, and gave nothing. My mother lived on welfare in a slum and sold her blood to the Red Cross to get me a record player. “Education is everything, Johnny,” she said, as she headed for the refrigerator to get me food. “You get smart like regular people and you don’t have to live like this no more.” She and I were not hugging types, but I put my hand on her shoulder as she washed the dishes with her back to me and she said, in best Brooklynese, “So go and enjoy, already.” My father always said I was my mother’s son and I was proud of that. On her good days, she was a good and noble thing to be a part of. That evening, I plugged in the red record player and placed it by the window. My mother and I took the kitchen chairs out to the porch and listened to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony from beginning to end, as we watched the oil-stained waters of the Mad River roll by. It was a good night, another good night, one of many that have blessed my life.

You open your eyes and you know the person lying next to you is your spouse because of your past experiences together. You hear barking outside your door, and you know it’s your dog wanting to go out. There’s a pain in your back, and you remember it’s the same pain you felt yesterday. You associate your outer, familiar world with who you think you are, by remembering yourself in this dimension, this particular time and space. Our Routines: Plugging into Our Past Self What do most of us do each morning after we’ve been plugged into our reality by these sensory reminders of who we are, where we are, and so forth? Well, we remain plugged into this past self by following a highly routine, unconscious set of automatic behaviors. For example, you probably wake up on the same side of the bed, slip into your robe the same way as always, look into the mirror to remember who you are, and shower following an automatic routine. Then you groom yourself to look like everyone expects you to look, and brush your teeth in your usual memorized fashion. You drink coffee out of your favorite mug and eat your customary

I'm sorry," she whispers. "You're sorry? You've been dating Toph for the last month,and you're sorry?" "It just happened.I meant to tell you, I wanted to tell you-" "But you lost control over your mouth? Because it's easy,Bridge. Talking is easy. Look at me! I'm talking right-" "You know it wasn't that easy! I didn't mean for it to happen,it just did-" "Oh,you didn't mean to wreck my life? It just 'happened'?" Bridge stands up from behind her drums. It's impossible,but she's taller than me now. "What do you mean,wreck your life?" "Don't play dumb,you know exactly what I mean. How could you do this to me?" "Do what? It's not like you were dating!" I scream in frustration. "We certainly won't be now!" She sneers. "It's kind of hard to date someone who's not interested in you." "LIAR!" "What,you ditch us for Paris and expect us to put our lives on hold for you?" My jaw drops. "I didn't ditch you. They sent me away." "Ooo,yeah.To Paris.Meanwhile,I'm stuck here in Shitlanta, Georgia, at the same shitty school,doing shitty babysitting jobs-" "If babysitting my brother is so shitty, why do you do it?" "I didn't meant-" "Because you want to turn him against me, too? Well.Congratulations, Bridge. It worked. My brother loves you and hates me. So you're welcome to move in when I leave again,because that's what you want, right? My life?" She shakes with fury. "Go to hell." "Take my life.You can have it. Just watch out for the part where my BEST FRIEND SCREWS ME OVER!" I knock over a cymbal stand,and the brass hits the stage with an earsplitting crash that reverberates through the bowling alley. Matt calls my name.Has he been calling it this entire time? He grabs my arm and leads me around the electrical cords and plugs and onto the floor and away,away,away. Everyone in the bowling alley is staring at me.

It’s our bad luck to have teachers in this world, but since we’re stuck with them, the best we can do is hope to get a brand-new one instead of a mean old fart. New teachers don’t know the rules, so you can get away with things the old-timers would squash you for. That was my theory. So I was feeling pretty excited to start fifth grade, since I was getting a rookie teacher—a guy named Mr. Terupt. Right away, I put him to the test. If the bathroom pass is free, all you have to do is take it and go. This year, the bathrooms were right across the hall. It’s always been an easy way to get out of doing work. I can be really sneaky like that. I take the pass all the time and the teachers never notice. And like I said, Mr. Terupt was a rookie, so I knew he wasn’t going to catch me. Once you’re in the bathroom, it’s mess-around time. All the other teachers on our floor were women, so you didn’t have to worry about them barging in on you. Grab the bars to the stalls and swing. Try to touch your feet to the ceiling. Swing hard. If someone’s in the stall, it’s really funny to swing and kick his door in, especially if he’s a younger kid. If you scare him bad enough, he might pee on himself a little. That’s funny. Or if your buddy’s using the urinal, you can push him from behind and flush it at the same time. Then he might get a little wet. That’s pretty funny, too. Some kids like to plug the toilets with big wads of toilet paper, but I don’t suggest you try doing that. You can get in big trouble. My older brother told me his friend got caught and he had to scrub the toilets with a toothbrush. He said the principal made him brush his teeth with that toothbrush afterward, too. Mrs. Williams is pretty tough, but I don’t think she’d give out that kind of punishment. I don’t want to find out, either. When I came back into the classroom after my fourth or fifth trip, Mr. Terupt looked at me and said, “Boy, Peter, I’m gonna have to call you Mr. Peebody, or better yet, Peter the Pee-er. You do more peein’ than a dog walking by a mile of fire hydrants.

The Quitter When you're lost in the Wild, and you're scared as a child, And Death looks you bang in the eye, And you're sore as a boil, it's according to Hoyle To cock your revolver and . . . die. But the Code of a Man says: "Fight all you can," And self-dissolution is barred. In hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow . . . It's the hell-served-for-breakfast that's hard. "You're sick of the game!" Well, now, that's a shame. You're young and you're brave and you're bright. "You've had a raw deal!" I know -- but don't squeal, Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight. It's the plugging away that will win you the day, So don't be a piker, old pard! Just draw on your grit; it's so easy to quit: It's the keeping-your-chin-up that's hard. It's easy to cry that you're beaten -- and die; It's easy to crawfish and crawl; But to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight -- Why, that's the best game of them all! And though you come out of each gruelling bout, All broken and beaten and scarred, Just have one more try -- it's dead easy to die, It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.

Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on the day the last victim at Pingfang died, the day the last train arrived at Auschwitz, the day the last Cherokee walked out of Georgia. And we know that the inhabitants of those distant worlds, if they are watching, will see those moments, in time, as they stream from here to there at the speed of light. It is not possible to capture all of those photons, to erase all of those images. They are our permanent record, the testimony of our existence, the story that we tell the future. Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe. For far too long, historians, and all of us, have acted as exploiters of the dead. But the past is not dead. It is with us. Everywhere we walk, we are bombarded by fields of Bohm-Kirino particles that will let us see the past like looking through a window. The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.

heart bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells, a condition known as sludging of the brain. Ebola attacks the lining of the eyeball, and the eyeballs may fill up with blood: you may go blind. Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. The blood runs from your eyes down your cheeks and refuses to coagulate. You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one whole side of the body is paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles whey being squeezed out of curds. The blood has been stripped of its clotting factors. If you put the runny Ebola blood in a test tube and look at it, you see that the blood is destroyed. Its red cells are broken and dead. The blood looks as if it has been buzzed in an electric blender. Ebola kills a great deal of tissue while the host is still alive. It triggers a creeping, spotty necrosis that spreads through all the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then it cracks apart. The cracks run across the liver and deep inside it, and the liver completely dies and goes putrid. The kidneys become jammed with blood clots and dead cells, and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen turns into a single huge, hard blood clot the size of a

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The first psycho therapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book. "It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest. It's the boy from my dreams. The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life. I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey. I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed. Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade. "You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it. I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother. I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, though it's pretty clear no other table would have me. He buries his smile and returns to the book.Allowing a few minutes to pass,not nearly enough time for me to get a grip on myself,when he looks up and says, "Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganer roaming the halls,playing king of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask?" I clear the lump from my throat, push the words past my lips when I say, "No one's ever accused me of being shy." A statement that,while steeped in truth, stands at direct odds with the way I feel now,sitting so close to him. "So I guess it's your twin-or doppelganer,as you say." I keep my voice light, as though I'm not at all affected by his presence,but the trill note at the end gives me away.Every part of me now vibrating with the most intense surge of energy-like I've been plugged into the wall and switched on-and it's all I can do to keep from grabbing hold of his shirt, demanding to know if he dreamed the dreams too. He nods,allowing an easy,cool smile to widen his lips. "We're identical," he says. "As I'm sure you've guessed. Though it's easy enough to tell us apart. For one thing,he keeps his hair short.For another-" "The eyes-" I blurt,regretting the words the instant they're out.From the look on his face,he has no idea what I'm talking about. "Yours are...kinder." My cheeks burn so hot I force myself to look away,as words of reproach stampede my brain. Why am I acting like such an inept loser? Why do I insist on embarrassing myself-in front of him-of all people? I have to pull it together.I have to remember who I am-what I am-and what I was born to do.Which is basically to crush him and his kind-or,at the very least,to temper the damage they do.

What did we talk about? I don't remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn't want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn't want to stop talking. You will think we talked of revolution but we didn't. Nor did we talk of our own souls. Nor of sewing. Nor of babies. Nor of departmental intrigue. It was political if by politics you mean the laboratory talk that characters in bad movies are perpetually trying to convey (unsuccessfully) when they Wrinkle Their Wee Brows and say (valiantly--dutifully--after all, they didn't write it) "But, Doctor, doesn't that violate Finagle's Constant?" I staggered to the bathroom, released floods of tea, and returned to the kitchen to talk. It was professional talk. It left my grey-faced and with such concentration that I began to develop a headache. We talked about Mary Ann Evans' loss of faith, about Emily Brontë's isolation, about Charlotte Brontë's blinding cloud, about the split in Virginia Woolf's head and the split in her economic condition. We talked about Lady Murasaki, who wrote in a form that no respectable man would touch, Hroswit, a little name whose plays "may perhaps amuse myself," Miss Austen, who had no more expression in society than a firescreen or a poker. They did not all write letters, write memoirs, or go on the stage. Sappho--only an ambiguous, somewhat disagreeable name. Corinna? The teacher of Pindar. Olive Schriener, growing up on the veldt, wrote on book, married happily, and ever wrote another. Kate Chopin wrote a scandalous book and never wrote another. (Jean has written nothing.). There was M-ry Sh-ll-y who wrote you know what and Ch-rl-tt- P-rk-ns G-lm-an, who wrote one superb horror study and lots of sludge (was it sludge?) and Ph-ll-s Wh--tl-y who was black and wrote eighteenth century odes (but it was the eighteenth century) and Mrs. -nn R-dcl-ff- S-thw-rth and Mrs. G--rg- Sh-ld-n and (Miss?) G--rg-tt- H-y-r and B-rb-r- C-rtl-nd and the legion of those, who writing, write not, like the dead Miss B--l-y of the poem who was seduced into bad practices (fudging her endings) and hanged herself in her garter. The sun was going down. I was blind and stiff. It's at this point that the computer (which has run amok and eaten Los Angeles) is defeated by some scientifically transcendent version of pulling the plug; the furniture stood around unknowing (though we had just pulled out the plug) and Lady, who got restless when people talked at suck length because she couldn't understand it, stuck her head out from under the couch, looking for things to herd. We had talked for six hours, from one in the afternoon until seven; I had at that moment an impression of our act of creation so strong, so sharp, so extraordinarily vivid, that I could not believe all our talking hadn't led to something more tangible--mightn't you expect at least a little blue pyramid sitting in the middle of the floor?

The reality is that Facebook has been so successful, it’s actually running out of humans on the planet. Ponder the numbers: there are about three billion people on the Internet, where the latter is broadly defined as any sort of networked data, texts, browser, social media, whatever. Of these people, six hundred million are Chinese, and therefore effectively unreachable by Facebook. In Russia, thanks to Vkontakte and other copycat social networks, Facebook’s share of the country’s ninety million Internet users is also small, though it may yet win that fight. That leaves about 2.35 billion people ripe for the Facebook plucking. While Facebook seems ubiquitous to the plugged-in, chattering classes, its usage is not universal among even entrenched Internet users. In the United States, for example, by far the company’s most established and sticky market, only three-quarters of Internet users are actively on FB. That ratio of FB to Internet user is worse in other countries, so even full FB saturation in a given market doesn’t imply total Facebook adoption. Let’s (very) optimistically assume full US-level penetration for any market. Without China and Russia, and taking a 25 percent haircut of people who’ll never join or stay (as is the case in the United States), that leaves around 1.8 billion potential Facebook users globally. That’s it. In the first quarter of 2015, Facebook announced it had 1.44 billion users. Based on its public 2014 numbers, FB is growing at around 13 percent a year, and that pace is slowing. Even assuming it maintains that growth into 2016, that means it’s got one year of user growth left in it, and then that’s it: Facebook has run out of humans on the Internet. The company can solve this by either making more humans (hard even for Facebook), or connecting what humans there are left on the planet. This is why Internet.org exists, a vaguely public-spirited, and somewhat controversial, campaign by Facebook to wire all of India with free Internet, with regions like Brazil and Africa soon to follow. In early 2014 Facebook acquired a British aerospace firm, Ascenta, which specialized in solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. Facebook plans on flying a Wi-Fi-enabled air force of such craft over the developing world, giving them Internet. Just picture ultralight carbon-fiber aircraft buzzing over African savannas constantly, while locals check their Facebook feeds as they watch over their herds.

We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a tongue that's based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages." "Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says. "Yeah. I guess 'deep structure' and 'infrastructure' mean the same thing. Anyway, we can access those parts of the brain under the right conditions. Glossolalia -- speaking in tongues -- is the output side of it, where the deep linguistic structures hook into our tongues and speak, bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone's known that for some time." "You're saying there's an input side, too?" Ng says. "Exactly. It works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears -- or eyes -- can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine." "In that situation, the people who own the computer are helpless," Ng says. "Right. Because they access the machine at a higher level, which has now been overridden. In the same sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs into the deep structures of our brain, we can't get him out -- because we can't even control our own brain at such a basic level.

Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there was silence. Then he frowned and said, “Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn’t seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn’t use it. I wondered if there was a way I could check. “I went to the ship’s medical bay and plugged myself into the encephalographic screen. I went through every major screening test on both my heads—all the tests I had to go through under Government medical officers before my nomination for presidency could be properly ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing unexpected at least. They showed that I was clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn’t have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started inventing further tests, completely at random. Nothing. Then I tried superimposing the results from one head on top of the results from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because I’d given it all up as nothing more than an attack of paranoia. Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?” Ford nodded. “And there it was,” said Zaphod, “clear as day. A whole section in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all the synapses and electronically traumatized those two lumps of cerebellum.” Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white. “Somebody did that to you?” whispered Ford. “Yeah.” “But have you any idea who? Or why?” “Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was.” “You know? How do you know?” “Because they left their initials burned into the cauterized synapses. They left them there for me to see.” Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl. “Initials? Burned into your brain?” “Yeah.” “Well, what were they, for God’s sake?” Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment. Then he looked away. “Z.B.,” he said quietly. At that moment a steel shutter slammed down behind them and gas started to pour into the chamber. “I’ll tell you about it later,” choked Zaphod as all three passed out.