Russ Song Quotes

You know it’s a bad sign when the theme song from Titanic describes your relationship.

No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests. Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware. In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature.

If there’s no game, what’s the point? Why are we all even here?” Mattie groans. “What’s happening?” “It’s my new low-key vibe,” Robbie explains, without really explaining. “The days of drunk Jenga are behind me. Plus, we all know how that ended last time.” “Russ and Aurora fucked, and Henry ran down Maple Avenue naked. Two beautiful things that wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t stay true to yourself, Rob. Nate and Stassie, you and Lols… it happened at your parties. Where there were games! Hen and Halle, too! You’re the invisible string, brother. Why are you holding out on the rest of us?” “Does he always talk like this? Like if he just keeps going people will believe what he says? Because I’m almost one hundred percent confident that’s not what invisible string theory is about. Me and Halle listen to the song about it every single work shift.” “Yes,” multiple people say at once. “When he’s really drunk he likes to reimagine things to suit whatever he’s trying to do,” Robbie adds. “You don’t need a drinking game to have a good time, Mattie.

Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Song of Solomon 8:6