Sell My Car Quotes

I mean, I knew I wasn't a nice person, but what did I do in my past life to deserve this? I must have hit a bus full of nuns while driving a stolen car on my way to selling drugs to schoolchildren!

One of the secrets of life is to find joy in the journey." But Grandma, you weren't on *this* journey. It was just crazy--" Grandma held up her hand. "You have six brothers. You got to spend a whole day in the car with them. You're all healthy, well fed, happy... Someday, when you're a little older, I'll bet you'd give anything to be back in that van of yours with all of your brothers, smelly diapers and all." I mulled that over. Well what about Dad?" I pointed out. "He didn't find any joy in the journey. He was yelling at trees." Grandma sat back, "Your father and mother are masters at finding joy in the journey." I didn't understand. Grandma continued, "Do you really think your parents would have had seven kids if they couldn't find joy in the journey?... I would be willing to wager that he'll be laughing about this trip on Monday morning with his friends at work." Grandma took my hands into hers. "There are a lot of people in this life that will try to convince you that they're selling something that will bring you joy. The simple fact of the matter is that *things* don't bring you joy. You have to find joy in life experience. And if you take along somebody you love, then that journey is going to be all the more enjoyable. I can promise you right now that both good and bad things are going to happen to you in your life. Good and bad things happen to everybody. Some people are good at finding the miserable things in life, and some are good at finding the joy. No matter what happens to you, what you remember is up to you.

So sell the Hummer, buy a Dodge, and move into a trailer. (Wulf) Oh, yeah, right. Remember when I traded the Hummer for an Alpha Romeo last year? You burned the car and bought me a new Hummer and threatened to lock me in my room with a hooker if I ever did it again. And as for the perks…Have you bothered to look around this place? We have a heated indoor pool, a theater with surround sound, two cooks, three maids, and a pool guy I get to boss around, not to mention all kinds of other fun toys. I’m not about to leave Disneyland. It’s the only good part in this arrangement. I mean, hell, if my life has to suck there’s no way I’m going to live in the Mini-Winni. Which knowing you, you’d make me park out front anyway with armed guards standing watch in case I get a hangnail. (Chris)

In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn't blond, I wasn't tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. (I'll sell my car," I warn the actor playing Julian's dealer. "Whatever it takes.") This was slightly less true of Blair's character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group-- jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. "Be good to her," Julian tells Clay. "She really deserves it." The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.

I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free. Character building, my father said. Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh. Still, it was better than jail. I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't.

I drive my car to supermarket, The way I take is superhigh, A superlot is where I park it, And Super Suds are what I buy. Supersalesmen sell me tonic - Super-Tone-O, for Relief. The planes I ride are supersonic. In trains, I like the Super Chief. Supercilious men and women Call me superficial - me, Who so superbly learned to swim in Supercolossality. Superphosphate-fed foods feed me; Superservice keeps me new. Who would dare to supersede me, Super-super-superwho?

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

You've passed like three stores that sell batteries," she says. "We need to get one now in case it's too late on our way back." “You don’t need a battery. Your battery is fine,” I say. I avoid looking over at her but I can see her watching me, waiting for more explanation. I don’t immediately respond. I flick the blinker on and turn onto my grandparent’s street. When I pull into their driveway, I turn the car off and tell her the truth. What harm could it do at this point? “I unhooked your battery cable before you tried to leave today.” I don’t wait for her reaction as I get out of the car and slam the door. I’m not sure why I slam the car door. I’m not mad at her, I’m just frustrated. Frustrated that she doubts me after all this time. “You what!?” she yells. When she gets out of the car, she slams her door intentionally. I keep walking, shielding the wind and snow with my jacket until I reach the front door. She rushes after me. I almost walk inside without knocking but remember how it feels, so I knock. “I said I unhooked your battery cable. How else was I going to convince you to ride with me?” "That's real mature, Will.

Why are places to eat called coffee shops?” I ask him. “Well, coffee’s the most important thing they sell because most of us need it to keep us going, like gas in the car.” Ma only drinks water and milk and juice like me, I wonder what keeps her going. “What do kids have?” “Ah, kids are just full of beans.” Baked beans keep me going all right but green beans are my enemy food.

I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.' I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills. "Come on," said Stephen. "It's beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas." We crammed into Burns's small car, and went back to our hotel. ("The Chamois")

I sell BMWs—I’m not sure if your mom told you?” No matter how good Alton was at selling stuff, he had nothing on my mom selling me on a new suitor. “They’re great cars. Sexy, stylish. Every man would love to drive one.” I watched as he arranged his face in a very practiced smolder. “Don’t say it,” I offered. “Just don’t say it.” “You remind me of a BMW.” “You said it.” I patted the bar in front of him. “Let me go get your tab.

It’s not the drug that causes the junkie it’s the laws that causes the junkie because of course the drug laws means that he can’t go and get help because he is afraid of being arrested. He also can’t have a normal life because the war on drugs has made drugs so expensive and has made drug contracts unenforceable which means they can only be enforced through criminal violence. It becomes so profitable to sell drugs to addicts that the drug dealers have every incentive to get people addicted by offering free samples and to concentrate their drug to the highest possible dose to provoke the greatest amount of addiction as possible. Overall it is a completely staggering and completely satanic human calamity. It is the new gulag and in some ways much more brutal than the soviet gulag. In the soviet gulags there was not a huge prison rape problem and in this situation your life could be destroyed through no fault of your own through sometimes, no involvement of your own and the people who end up in the drug culture are walled off and separated as a whole and thrown into this demonic, incredibly dangerous, underworld were the quality of the drugs can’t be verified. Were contracts can’t be enforced except through breaking peoples kneecaps and the price of drugs would often led them to a life of crime. People say “well, I became a drug addict and I lost my house, family, and my job and all that.” It’s not because you became a drug addict but, because there is a war on drugs which meant that you had to pay so much for the drugs that you lost your house because you couldn't go and find help or substitutes and ended up losing your job. It’s all nonsense. The government can’t keep drugs out of prisons for heaven’s sakes. The war on drugs is not designed to be won. Its designed to continue so that the government can get the profits of drug running both directly through the CIA and other drug runners that are affiliated or through bribes and having the power of terrorizing the population. To frame someone for murder is pretty hard but to palm a packet of cocaine and say that you found it in their car is pretty damn easy and the government loves having that power." -Stefan Molyneux

I'd gotten my first glimpse of Elizabeth DeVille. She'd had her hair in a pony-tail that stuck up off the side of her head, and she'd been wearing short red shorts and a light blue tank top with a whale on it. “You like whales?” I'd asked her when I finished with the car. Her face had gone all soft and pretty, making me feel more like one-hundred-and-three than the twenty-three I was, and she'd shrugged. “Yeah, but not a lot more than any other animal. I just like saving things.

Emily nodded. “We’re considering putting you on the cover.” “Why does he need to be half naked?” Drew asked. “Muscle cars, muscles on men… It sells magazines,” the makeup girl mused, still dabbing that sponge around my eye. Drew appeared silently at my side, crossing his arms over his chest. “He’s with me.” The girl straightened, and her surprised expression bounced between us. “You’re together?” “Yeah, so forget about it,” he quipped. I burst out laughing. “Go get some coffee, Forrester. You’re cranky.” “I’m not bringing you any,” he said as he walked away. “Thanks!” I called after him. “I can still admire your muscles,” the girl told me. “I heard that!” Drew yelled.

Rebuffed from his fine feelings, Milkman matched her cold tone. "You loved those white folks that much?" "Love?" she asked. "Love?" "Well, what are you taking care of their dogs for?" "Do you know why she killed herself? She couldn't stand to see the place go to ruin. She couldn't live without servants and money and what it could buy. Every cent was gone and the taxes took whatever came in. She had to let the upstairs maids go, then the cook, then the dog trainer, then the yardman, then the chauffeur, then the car, then the woman who washed once a week. Then she started selling bits and pieces––land, jewels, furniture. The last few years we ate out of the garden. Finally she couldn't take it anymore. The thought of having no help, no money––well, she couldn't take that. She had to let everything go." "But she didn't let you go." Milkman had no trouble letting his words snarl. "No, she didn't let me go. She killed herself." "And you still loyal." "You don't listen to people. Your ear is on your head, but it's not connected to your brain. I said she killed herself rather than do the work I'd been doing all my life!" Circe stood up, and the dogs too. "Do you hear me? She saw the work I did all her days and died, you hear me, died rather than live like me. Now, what do you suppose she thought I was! If the way I lived and the work I did was so hateful to her she killed herself to keep from having to do it, and you think I stay on here because I loved her, then you have about as much sense as a fart!

Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.

Some people put more thought into what kind of car to buy than what kind of mate to marry. I think that's foolish, because when I'm not duck farming, I'm a bicycle salesman. Well, I actually only have one bicycle to sell, and I stole it, which is what makes it so profitable.

My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.

Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live. Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved. Exactly a year from now, I vowed, I would sit outside at night wherever I was, somewhere in Europe, or in America, and turn my face to Egypt, as Moslems do when they pray and face Mecca, and remember this very night, and how I had thought these things and made this vow. You're beginning to sound like Elsa and her silly seders, I said to myself, mimicking my father's humour. On my way home I thought of what the others were doing. I wanted to walk in, find the smaller living room still lit, the Beethoven still playing, with Abdou still cleaning the dining room, and, on closing the front door, suddenly hear someone say, "We were just waiting for you, we're thinking of going to the Royal." "But we've already seen that film," I would say. "What difference does it make. We'll see it again." And before we had time to argue, we would all rush downstairs, where my father would be waiting in a car that was no longer really ours, and, feeling the slight chill of a late April night, would huddle together with the windows shut, bicker as usual about who got to sit where, rub our hands, turn the radio to a French broadcast, and then speed to the Corniche, thinking that all this was as it always was, that nothing ever really changed, that the people enjoying their first stroll on the Corniche after fasting, or the woman selling tickets at the Royal, or the man who would watch our car in the side alley outside the theatre, or our neighbours across the hall, or the drizzle that was sure to greet us after the movie at midnight would never, ever know, nor even guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.

I’m a good husband and I’ve done my best to support you, Yara, but you know I have to work. I have bills to pay, this entire family to worry about. Between the mortgage, our cars, and providing for the girls, it’s too much. And it’s not like your job pays anything significant.” He wiped his fingers with a napkin and looked at her. “What do you want me to do, quit my job so you can travel the world and take pretty pictures?

We wait, the clock in the hall ticks, Serena lights another cigarette, I get into the car. It’s a Saturday morning, it’s a September, we still have a car. Other people have had to sell theirs. My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.

I was sorting stamps in the slotted drawer at the post office when Garnelle Fielding came in to send a little package to Wilbur. She said she’d gone and signed up for the WAFS, and her mother and daddy drove her down to Sweetwater to take a test at Avenger Field, where the government was training hundreds and hundreds of women to be pilots. Trouble was, she didn’t pass her physical because they said she was too short and too thin for the service. Her mother rushed her to a doctor in Toullange the next day and tried to get him to write her a letter so she could join the navy instead, but he wouldn’t do it. He told her the service was no place for a girl, and she’d be better off to wait home for someone brave to come marry her. Garnelle hung around until four o’clock when my hours were up, then walked with me to my house. “You should have seen my mother,” she said. “Better yet, you should have heard her. She fussed and fumed the whole way home about how women in her family had fought in every war this country has ever had, right up from loading muskets in the Revolution to she herself driving a staff car in North Carolina during the Great War. I tell you, she would have made a better recruiter than any of those movie star speeches I’ve ever heard. My mother doesn’t sell kisses in a low-cut basque. She preaches pure patriotism like an evangelist in a tent revival. If she’d had a tambourine, we could have stopped the car and held a meeting.” We laughed. “I’m still mad, though,” she said.

Asia is rising against me. I haven't got a chinaman's chance. I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources cousist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & V anzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don't really want to go to war. America it's them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I'd better get right down to the job. It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

You’re more interested, finally, in living life again in your writing than in making money. Now, let’s understand—writers do like money; artists, contrary to popular belief, do like to eat. It’s only that money isn’t the driving force. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. Think of it. Employers pay salaries for time. That is the basic commodity that human beings have that is valuable. We exchange our time in life for money. Writers stay with the first step—their time—and feel it is valuable even before they get money for it. They hold on to it and aren’t so eager to sell it. It’s like inheriting land from your family. It’s always been in your family: they have always owned it. Someone comes along and wants to buy it. Writers, if they are smart, won’t sell too much of it. They know once it’s sold, they might be able to buy a second car, but there will be no place they can go to sit still, no place to dream on. So it is good to be a little dumb when you want to write. You carry that slow person inside you who needs time; it keeps you from selling it all away. That person will need a place to go and will demand to stare into rain puddles in the rain, usually with no hat on, and to feel the drops on her scalp.

I knew how easily it could happen, the past at hand, like the helpless cognitive slip of an optical illusion. The tone of a day linked to some particular item: my mother's chiffon scarf, the humidity of a cut pumpkin. Certain patterns of shade. Even the flash of sunlight on the hood of a white car could cause a momentary ripple in me, allowing a slim space of return. I'd seen old Yardley slickers—the makeup now just a waxy crumble—sell for almost one hundred dollars on the Internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it—to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.

This is textbook Bad Idea. We're driving with a stranger, no one knows where we are, and we have no way of getting in touch with anyone. This is exactly how people become statistics." "Exactly?" I asked, thinking of all the bizarre twists and turns that had led us to this place. Ben ceded the point with a sideways shrug. "Maybe not exactly. But still..." He let it go, and the cab eventually stopped at the edge of a remote, forested area. Sage got out and paid. "Everybody out!" Ben looked at me, one eyebrow raised. He was leaving the choice to me. I gave his knee a quick squeeze before I opened the door and we piled out of the car. Sage waited for the cab to drive away, then ducked onto a forest path, clearly assuming we'd follow. The path through the thick foliage was stunning in the moonlight, and I automatically released my camera from its bag. "I wish you wouldn't," Sage said without turning around. "You know I'm not one for visitors." "I'll refrain from selling the pictures to Travel and Leisure, then," I said, already snapping away. "Besides, I need something to take my mind off my feet." My shoes were still on the beach, where I'd kicked them off to dance. "Hey, I offered to carry you," Sage offered. "No, thank you." I suppose I should have been able to move swiftly and silently without my shoes, but I only managed to stab myself on something with every other footfall, giving me a sideways, hopping gait. Every few minutes Sage would hold out his arms, offering to carry me again. I grimaced and denied him each time. After what felt like about ten miles, even the photos weren't distracting enough. "How much farther?" I asked. "We're here." There was nothing in front of us but more trees. "Wow," Ben said, and I followed his eyes upward to see that several of the tree trunks were actually stilts supporting a beautifully hidden wood-and-glass cabin, set high among the branches. I was immediately charmed. "You live in a tree house," I said. I aimed my camera the façade, answering Sage's objection before he even said it. "For me, not for Architectural Digest." "Thank you," Sage said.

When thousands of cars slowly edge their way through London, we call that a traffic jam, but it doesn’t create some great Londonian consciousness that hovers high above Piccadilly and says to itself, ‘Blimey, I feel jammed!’ When millions of people sell billions of shares, we call that an economic crisis, but no great Wall Street spirit grumbles, ‘Shit, I feel I am in crisis.’ When trillions of water molecules coalesce in the sky we call that a cloud, but no cloud consciousness emerges to announce, ‘I feel rainy.’ How is it, then, that when billions of electric signals move around in my brain, a mind emerges that feels ‘I am furious!’? As of 2016, we have absolutely no idea. Hence if this discussion

On problems finding female ancestors,of any background, remember "I cannot put gas in my car without a note from my husband. The Car, the house, and everything else I think that I own is in his name. When I die, I cannot decide who will receive my personal effects. If he dies first I may be allowed to stay in my own home, or may be given a certain number of days to vacate the premises. Any real estate I inherit from my husband is not mine to sell of devise in a will. All the money I earn belongs to my husband. I cannot operate or engage in business in my own name. If my ancestor is enslaved, I cannot marry, may not be allowed to raise my own children, join a church, travel freely, own property or testify against those who harm me.

and drew her strength directly from our magickal Oklahoma earth. “U-we-tsi-a-ge-ya, it seems I need help at the lavender booth. I simply cannot believe how busy we are.” Grandma had barely spoken when a nun hurried up. “Zoey, Sister Mary Angela could use your help filling out cat adoption forms.” “I’ll help you, Grandma Redbird,” Shaylin said. “I love the smell of lavender.” “Oh, honey, that would be so sweet of you. First, could you run to my car and get into the trunk. There is another box of lavender soaps and sachets tucked back there. Looks like I’m going to sell out completely,” Grandma said happily. “Sure thing.” Shaylin caught the keys Grandma tossed to her and hurried toward the main exit of the school grounds which led to the parking lot, as well as the tree-lined road that joined Utica Street. “And I’ll call my momma. She said just let her know if we get too busy over here. She and the PTA moms will be back here in a sec,” said Stevie Rae. “Grandma, do you mind if I give Street Cats a hand? I’ve been dying to check out their new litter of kittens.” “Go on, u-we-tsi-a-ge-ya. I think Sister Mary Angela has been missing your company.” “Thanks, Grandma.” I smiled at her. Then I turned to Stevie Rae. “Okay, if your mom’s group is coming back, I’m gonna go help the nuns.” “Yeah, no problem.” Stevie Rae, shielding her eyes and peering through the crowd, added, “I see her now, and she’s got Mrs. Rowland and Mrs. Wilson with her.” “Don’t worry. We can handle this,” Shaunee said. “’Kay,” I said, grinning at both of them. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I left the cookie booth and noticed Aphrodite, clutching her big purple Queenies cup, was right on my heels. “I thought you didn’t want a lecture from the nuns.” “Better than a lecture from PTA moms.” She shuddered. “Plus, I like cats more than people.” I shrugged. “Okay, whatever.” We’d only gotten partway to the Street Cats tent when Aphrodite slowed way down. “Seriously. Effing. Pathetic.” She was muttering around her straw, narrowing her eyes, and glaring. I followed her gaze and joined her frown. “Yeah, no matter how many times I see them together, I still don’t get it.” Aphrodite and I had stopped to watch Shaunee’s ex-Twin BFF, Erin, hang all over Dallas. “I really thought she was better than that.” “Apparently not,” Aphrodite said. “Eeew,” I said, looking away from their way too public display of locked lips. “I’m telling you, there’s not enough booze in Tulsa to make watching those two suck face okay.” She made a gagging sound, which changed to a snort and a laugh. “Check out the wimple, twelve o’clock.” Sure enough, there was a nun I vaguely recognized as Sister Emily (one of the more uptight of the nuns) descending on the too-busy-with-their-tongues-to-notice couple. “She looks serious,” I said. “You know, a nun may very well be the direct opposite of an aphrodisiac. This should be entertaining. Let’s watch.” “Zoey! Over here!” I looked from the train wreck about to happen to see Sister Mary Angela waving me over to her.

I would've given up without her - not on you, never on you, but on myself. I suppose I can tell you this now, but I wasn't a very good student. I wasn't smart enough to just get by. I wasn't focused enough in class. I rarely passed exams. I skipped assignments. I was constantly on academic probation. Not that your grandmother would ever know, but at the time, I was thinking of doing what you were later accused of doing: selling all my belongings, sticking out my thumb, and hitchhiking to California to be with the other hippies who had dropped out and tuned in. Everything changed when I met your mother. She made me want things that I had never dreamed of wanting: a steady job, a reliable car, a mortgage, a family. You figured out a long time ago that you got your wanderlust from me. I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: That restless feeling dissolves like butter.

Very important words!” Wasp said. “But you’ll never hear them!” “Okay,” I agreed. “You can’t make us!” Tempest said. “Even though your fate depends on it!” A hint of doubt crept into my cranium. Was it possible—? No, surely not. If I fell for their tricks, I’d most likely get the Gray Sisters’ hot take on which facial products were perfect for my skin undertones. “Not buying it,” I said. “Not selling!” Wasp shrieked. “Too important, these lines! We would only tell you if you threatened us with terrible things!” “I will not resort to threatening you—” “He’s threatening us!” Tempest flailed. She slammed Wasp on the back so hard the communal eyeball popped right out of her socket. Wasp snatched it—and with a terrible show of fumbling, intentionally chucked it over her shoulder, right into my lap. I screamed. The sisters screamed, too. Anger, now bereft of guidance, swerved all over the road, sending my stomach into my esophagus. “He’s stolen our eye!” cried Tempest. “We can’t see!” “I have not!” I yelped. “It’s disgusting!” Meg whooped with pleasure. “THIS. IS. SO. COOL!” “Get it off!” I squirmed and tilted my hips, hoping the eye would roll away, but it stayed stubbornly in my lap, staring up at me with the accusatory glare of a dead catfish. Meg did not help. Clearly, she didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with the coolness of us dying in a faster-than-light car crash. “He will crush our eye,” Anger cried, “if we don’t recite our verses!” “I will not!” “We will all die!” Wasp said. “He is crazy!” “I AM NOT!” “Fine, you win!” Tempest howled. She drew herself up and recited as if performing for the people in Connecticut ten miles away: “A dare reveals the path that was unknown!” Anger chimed in: “And bears destruction; lion, snake-entwined!” Wasp concluded: “Or else the princeps never be o’erthrown!” Meg clapped. I stared at the Gray Sisters in disbelief. “That wasn’t doggerel. That was terza rima! You just gave us the next stanza of our actual prophecy!

You’re too goddamned fat,” he said. I took a defiant drag on my cigarette and willed myself not to cry. The remark made me dizzy. For the past four years, Ma and Grandma had played by the rule: never to mention my weight. Now my jeans and sweatshirt were folded in a helpless pile beside me and there was only a thin sheet of paper between my rolls of dimply flesh and this detestable old man. My heart raced with fear and nicotine and Pepsi. My whole body shook, dripped sweat. “Any trouble with your period?” he asked. “No.” “What?” “No trouble,” I managed, louder. He nodded in the direction of his stand-up scale. The backs of my legs made little sucking sounds as they unglued themselves from the plastic upholstery. He brought the sliding metal bar down tight against my scalp and fiddled with the cylinder in front of my face. “Five-five and a half,” he said. “Two hundred . . . fifty-seven.” The tears leaking from my eyes made stains on the paper gown. I nodded or shook my head abruptly at each of his questions, coughed on command for his stethoscope, and took his pamphlets on diet, smoking, heart murmur. He signed the form. At the door, his hand on the knob, he turned back and waited until I met his eye. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “My wife died four Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you—you don’t want to do this to yourself.” “Eat shit,” I said. He paused for a moment, as if considering my comment. Then he opened the door to the waiting room and announced to my mother and someone else who’d arrived that at the rate I was going, I could expect to die before I was forty years old. “She’s too fat and she smokes,” I heard him say just before the hall rang out with the sound of my slamming his office door. I was wheezing wildly by the time I reached the final landing. On the turnpike on the way home, Ma said, “I could stand to cut down, too, you know. It wouldn’t hurt me one bit. We could go on a diet together? Do they still sell that Metrecal stuff?” “I’ve been humiliated enough for one fucking decade,” I said. “You say one more thing to me and I’ll jump out of this car and smash my head under someone’s wheels.

I think sexy is a grown-up word to describe a person who’s confident that she is already exactly who she was made to be. A sexy woman knows herself and she likes the way she looks, thinks, and feels. She doesn’t try to change to match anybody else. She’s a good friend to herself—kind and patient. And she knows how to use her words to tell people she trusts about what’s going on inside of her—her fears and anger, love, dreams, mistakes, and needs. When she’s angry, she expresses her anger in healthy ways. When she’s joyful, she does the same thing. She doesn’t hide her true self because she’s not ashamed. She knows she’s just human—exactly how God made her and that’s good enough. She’s brave enough to be honest and kind enough to accept others when they’re honest. When two people are sexy enough to be brave and kind with each other, that’s love. Sexy is more about how you feel than how you look. Real sexy is letting your true self come out of hiding and find love in safe places. That kind of sexy is good, really good, because we all want and need love more than anything else. “Fake sexy is different. It’s just more hiding. Real sexy is taking off all your costumes and being yourself. Fake sexy is just wearing another costume. Lots of people are selling fake sexy costumes. Companies know that people want to be sexy so badly because people want love. They know that love can’t be sold, so they have big meetings in boardrooms and they say, ‘How can we convince people to buy our stuff? I know! We’ll promise them that this stuff will make them sexy!’ Then they make up what sexy means so they can sell it. Those commercials you see are stories they’ve written to convince us that sexy is the car or mascara or hair spray or diet they’re selling. We feel bad, because we don’t have what they have or look how they look. That’s what they want. They want us to feel bad, so we’ll buy more. It almost always works. We buy their stuff and wear it and drive it and shake our hips the way they tell us to—but that doesn’t get us love, because none of that is real sexiness. People are even more hidden underneath fake sexiness, and the one thing you can’t do if you want to be loved is hide. You can’t buy sexy, you have to become sexy through a lifetime of learning to love who God made you to be and learning who God made someone else to be.” My

Declan Lynch was a liar. He'd been a liar his entire life. Lies came to him fluidly, easily, instinctively. What does your father do for a living? He sells high-end sports cars in the summer, life insurance in the winter. He's an anesthesiologist. He does financial consulting for divorcees. He does advertising work for international companies in English-speaking markets. He's in the FBI. Where did he meet your mother? They were on yearbook together in high school. They were set up by friends. She took his picture at the county fair, said she wanted to keep his smile forever. Why can't Ronan come to a sleepover? He sleepwalks. Once he walked out to the road and my father had to convince a trucker who'd stopped before hitting him he was really his son. How did your mother die? Brain bleed. Rare. Genetic. Passes from mother to daughter, which is the only good thing, 'cause she only had sons. How are you doing? Fine. Good. Great. At a certain point, the truth felt worse. Truth was a closed-casket funeral attended by its estranged living relatives, Lies, Safety, Secrets. He lied to everyone. He lied to his lovers, his friends, his brothers. Well. More often he simply didn't tell his brothers the truth.

Emma, calm down. I had to know-" I point my finger in his face, almost touching his eyeball. "It's one thing for me to give your permission to look into it. But I'm pretty sure looking into it without my consent is illegal. In fact, I'm pretty sure everything that woman does is illegal. Do you even know what the Mafia is, Galen?" His eyebrows lift in surprise. "She told you who she is? I mean, who she used to be?" I nod. "While you were checking in with Grom. Once in the Mob, always in the Mob, if you ask me. How else would she get all her money? But I guess you wouldn't care about that, since she buys you houses and cars and fake IDs." I snatch my wrist away and turn back toward our hotel. At least, I hope it's our hotel. Galen laughs. "Emma, it's not Rachel's money; it's mine." I whirl on him. "You are a fish. You don't have a job. And I don't think Syrena currency has any of our presidents on it." Now "our" means I'm human again. I wish I could make up my mind. He crosses his arms. "I earn it another way. Walk to the Gulfarium with me, and I'll tell you how." The temptation divides me like a cleaver. I'm one part hissy fit and one part swoon. I have a right to be mad, to press charges, to cut Rachel's hair while she's sleeping. But do I really want to risk the chance that she keeps a gun under her pillow? Do I want to miss the opportunity to scrunch my toes in the sand and listen to Galen's rich voice tell me how a fish came to be wealthy? Nope, I don't. Taking care to ram my shoulder into him, I march past him and hopefully in the right direction. When he catches up to me, his grin threatens the rest of my hissy fit side, so I turn away, fixing my glare on the waves. "I sell stuff to humans," he says. I glance at him. He's looking at me, his expression every bit as expectant as I feel. I hate this little game of ours. Maybe because I'm no good at it. He won't tell me more unless I ask. Curiosity is one of my most incurable flaws-and Galen knows it. Still, I already gave up a perfectly good tantrum for him, so I feel like he owes me. Never mind that he saved my life today. That was so two hours ago. I lift my chin. "Rachel says I'm a millionaire," he says, his little knowing smirk scrubbing my nerves like a Brillo pad. "But for me, it's not about the money. Like you, I have a soft spot for history." Crap, crap, crap. How can he already know me this well? I must be as readable as the alphabet. What's the use? He's going to win, every time.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences. I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express. Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.

My editor insists that I clarify that there isn’t actually a $25 bill hidden in this book, which is sort of ridiculous to have to explain, because there’s no such thing as a $25 bill. If you bought this book thinking you were going to find a $25 bill inside then I think you really just paid for a worthwhile lesson, and that lesson is, don’t sell your cow for magic beans. There was another book that explained this same concept many years ago, but I think my cribbed example is much more exciting. It’s like the Fifty Shades of Grey version of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” But with fewer anal beads, or beanstalks. 2. “Concoctulary” is a word that I just made up for words that you have to invent because they didn’t yet exist. It’s a portmanteau of “concocted” and “vocabulary.” I was going to call it an “imaginary” (as a portmanteau of “imagined” and “dictionary”) but turns out that the word “imaginary” was already concoctularied, which is actually fine because “concoctulary” sounds sort of unintentionally dirty and is also great fun to say. Try it for yourself. Con-COC-chew-lary. It sings. 3. My mental illness is not your mental illness. Even if we have the exact same diagnosis we will likely experience it in profoundly different ways. This book is my unique perspective on my personal path so far. It is not a textbook. If it were it would probably cost a lot more money and have significantly less profanity or stories about strangers sending you unexpected vaginas in the mail. As it is with all stories, fast cars, wild bears, mental illness, and even life, only one truth remains: your mileage may vary.

But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy there more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

Lucid Motors was started under the name Atieva (which stood for “advanced technologies in electric vehicle applications” and was pronounced “ah-tee-va”) in Mountain View in 2008 (or December 31, 2007, to be precise) by Bernard Tse, who was a vice president at Tesla before it launched the Roadster. Hong Kong–born Tse had studied engineering at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Grace. In the early 1980s, the couple had started a computer manufacturing company called Wyse, which at its peak in the early 1990s registered sales of more than $480 million a year. Tse joined Tesla’s board of directors in 2003 at the request of his close friend Martin Eberhard, the company’s original CEO, who sought Tse’s expertise in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. Tse would eventually step off the board to lead a division called the Tesla Energy Group. The group planned to make electric power trains for other manufacturers, who needed them for their electric car programs. Tse, who didn’t respond to my requests to be interviewed, left Tesla around the time of Eberhard’s departure and decided to start Atieva, his own electric car company. Atieva’s plan was to start by focusing on the power train, with the aim of eventually producing a car. The company pitched itself to investors as a power train supplier and won deals to power some city buses in China, through which it could further develop and improve its technology. Within a few years, the company had raised about $40 million, much of it from the Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Venrock, and employed thirty people, mostly power train engineers, in the United States, as well as the same number of factory workers in Asia. By 2014, it was ready to start work on a sedan, which it planned to sell in the United States and China. That year, it raised about $200 million from Chinese investors, according to sources close to the company.

I am assured that this is a true story. A man calls up his computer helpline complaining that the cupholder on his personal computer has snapped off, and he wants to know how to get it fixed. “Cupholder?” says the computer helpline person, puzzled. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m confused. Did you buy this cupholder at a computer show or receive it as a special promotion?” “No, it came as part of the standard equipment on my computer.” “But our computers don’t come with cupholders.” “Well, pardon me, friend, but they do,” says the man a little hotly. “I’m looking at mine right now. You push a button on the base of the unit and it slides right out.” The man, it transpired, had been using the CD drawer on his computer to hold his coffee cup. I bring this up here by way of introducing our topic this week: cupholders. Cupholders are taking over the world. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of cupholders in automotive circles these days. The New York Times recently ran a long article in which it tested a dozen family cars. It rated each of them for ten important features, among them engine size, trunk space, handling, quality of suspension, and, yes, number of cupholders. A car dealer acquaintance of ours tells us that they are one of the first things people remark on, ask about, or play with when they come to look at a car. People buy cars on the basis of cupholders. Nearly all car advertisements note the number of cupholders prominently in the text. Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. The largest Caravan holds seven passengers. Now you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist, or even wide awake, to work out that that is 2.43 cupholders per passenger. Why, you may reasonably wonder, would each passenger in a vehicle need 2.43 cupholders? Good question. Americans, it is true, consume positively staggering volumes of fluids. One of our local gas stations, I am reliably informed, sells a flavored confection called a Slurpee in containers up to 60 ounces in size. But even if every member of the family had a Slurpee and a personal bottle of

I was driving home one afternoon during this period when I rolled past a woman putting household objects and furniture out in her front yard. I figured it was a garage sale or she was termite bombing. As I moved past her house an object I saw stopped me. Dragged me into the present. A chair. The chair? The orange Danish modern chair that I broke and that subsequently broke up my marriage appeared to be sitting on her front lawn. “Impossible,” I thought. That was destroyed, thrown out, gone. I stopped my car abruptly in the street, opened my car door, and ran up into her yard. She was pulling more stuff out of her house. I said, “Hi. Hey, are you selling this stuff?” “Just take whatever you want. I’m leaving,” she said, going angrily about her business. “Where did you get this chair? I used to have one exactly like it. I’ve never seen another one.” “I found it,” she said. “Take it.” I inspected the chair. It had been carefully rebuilt, put back together. It was the chair. “Did you find this on the street up on the hill around the corner?” “Yeah,” she said. “Why?” “This chair destroyed my marriage.” She looked at me with a dark, stressed gaze for a second like she was looking through me at something burning in the distance and said, “Mine, too.” I didn’t ask any questions. Synchronicity was upon us. The causality was there, it was explainable, but the meaning of the object before us was at once unique and shared. It was some kind of black magic that sent my thoughts back to the garage wizard who kept Jung’s curtains locked up. What had he unleashed on this world, my world, her world, with this chair? “We have to take it out of circulation.” “Yes,” she said, catatonically, like how I felt. Then this stranger and I proceeded to destroy the chair with our hands and our feet until it was unfixable. We took a breath and looked down at the scattered chair shards. “Thanks,” she said. A horn honked. I turned to see my car, door open, sitting in the middle of the street, running. Someone needed to get by. “Good luck with everything,” I said, then walked back to my car and drove away, strangely relieved. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw her making a pile of culprit pieces.

Collateral Capacity or Net Worth? If young Bill Gates had knocked on your door asking you to invest $10,000 in his new company, Microsoft, could you get your hands on the money? Collateral capacity is access to capital. Your net worth is irrelevant if you can’t access any of the money. Collateral capacity is my favorite wealth concept. It’s almost like having a Golden Goose! Collateral can help a borrower secure loans. It gives the lender the assurance that if the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender can repossess the collateral. For example, car loans are secured by cars, and mortgages are secured by homes. Your collateral capacity helps you to avoid or minimize unnecessary wealth transfers where possible, and accumulate an increasing pool of capital providing accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding. It is the amount of money that you can access through collateralizing a loan against your money, allowing your money to continue earning interest and working for you. It’s very important to understand that accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding are the key components of collateral capacity. It’s one thing to look good on paper, but when times get tough, assets that you can’t touch or can’t convert easily to cash, will do you little good. Three things affect your collateral capacity: ① The first is contributions into savings and investment accounts that you can access. It would be wise to keep feeding your Golden Goose. Often the lure of higher return potential also brings with it lack of liquidity. Make sure you maintain a good balance between long-term accounts and accounts that provide immediate liquidity and access. ② Second is the growth on the money from interest earned on the money you have in your account. Some assets earn compound interest and grow every year. Others either appreciate or depreciate. Some accounts could be worth a great deal but you have to sell or close them to access the money. That would be like killing your Golden Goose. Having access to money to make it through downtimes is an important factor in sustaining long-term growth. ③ Third is the reduction of any liens you may have against these accounts. As you pay off liens against your collateral positions, your collateral capacity will increase allowing you to access more capital in the future. The goose never quit laying golden eggs – uninterrupted compounding. Years ago, shortly after starting my first business, I laughed at a banker that told me I needed at least $25,000 in my business account in order to borrow $10,000. My business owner friends thought that was ridiculously funny too. We didn’t understand collateral capacity and quite a few other things about money.

Breanne, I'm asking you nicely to please reconsider. Mom and Dad are coming to the game. They have a suite reserved and Mom is expecting you." Jayson almost sounded as if he were begging. I wasn't buying it. "Take Belinda or one of those other women," I huffed. "I don't do much in the leather department. I'm a vegetarian, remember?" "Mom loves that about you." "I'm sure she does. Her son, however, finds me grossly inadequate and walks away whenever he gets a chance. As much as I like your mother, I don't feel good about stringing her along. I'm just a front for you—admit it." "Bree, I'll invite Hank to come, too. I promise one of us will be with you." "Sure. That sounds so comfortable," I said. "Your mother will wonder what the hell is going on when Hank pays more attention than you do. Frankly, I don't want anything from either of you." Jayson was still trying to convince me to go to the basketball game the following evening, and he'd shown up at my front door to do it. I'd been grumpy ever since I'd come back after saving Teeg San Gerxon's ass. Sure, it would put the Campiaan Alliance in chaos, but for a blink, or maybe half a blink—I'd considered saving Stellan and his brothers and leaving Teeg behind to be flayed and swallowed by a sandstorm that had destroyed most of Thelik. "What can I possible do to convince you to come? Donate to Mercy Crossings or some other charity? What?" He'd arrived at my front door as if he'd been invited. I made him stand at the door instead of inviting him in. "Give Trina a raise. That car she's driving really needs to be retired." "What?" Jayson almost shouted. "Okay, the price just went up. Buy her a new car." Did I realize he'd take the bait? No. "All right. I agree, that piece of crap needs to go to the salvage yard. I'll buy her a new car." "A good one. She doesn't want a TinyCar, I know that much." "You think I'd let anybody out of the driveway in one of those things? I saw yours and almost gagged." "But since I'm nobody important to you, I can drive whatever the hell I want," I pointed out. "Besides, I got my car from a vending machine. Put in a dollar and it dropped out. It was too bad, too—I wanted a soda." The corners of Jayson's mouth threatened to turn up. Schooling his face, he said, "I never pegged you for an extortionist," instead. "I never pegged you for an asshole, either, but disappointment abounds. Sell that Mercedes you have and buy four decent cars with the proceeds. See? Everybody's happy." "That's a Mercedes McLaren," Jayson howled. "Then buy eight decent cars." "If you weren't so smart and my mother didn't like you so much," Jayson threatened. "You'd what? Have one of those bigger, taller, better-endowed women beat me up? Jayson Rome, feel free to bring anybody you want against me. They won't last ten seconds." "You'll come to the game? I still plan to invite Hank. I usually sit courtside, but since Dad's coming and bringing Mom," Jayson didn't finish. "Just don't make an ass out of yourself this time." I shut the door in his face before he could sputter a reply.

Show me." He looks at her, his eyes darker than the air. "If you draw me a map I think I'll understand better." "Do you have paper?" She looks over the empty sweep of the car's interior. "I don't have anything to write with." He holds up his hands, side to side as if they were hinged. "That's okay. You can just use my hands." She smiles, a little confused. He leans forward and the streetlight gives him yellow-brown cat eyes. A car rolling down the street toward them fills the interior with light, then an aftermath of prickling black waves. "All right." She takes his hands, runs her finger along one edge. "Is this what you mean? Like, if the ocean was here on the side and these knuckles are mountains and here on the back it's Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West L.A., West Hollywood, and X marks the spot." She traces her fingertips over the backs of his hands, her other hand pressing into the soft pads of his palm. "This is where we are- X." "Right now? In this car?" He leans back; his eyes are black marble, dark lamps. She holds his gaze a moment, hears a rush of pulse in her ears like ocean surf. Her breath goes high and tight and shallow; she hopes he can't see her clearly in the car- her translucent skin so vulnerable to the slightest emotion. He turns her hands over, palms up, and says, "Now you." He draws one finger down one side of her palm and says, "This is the Tigris River Valley. In this section there's the desert, and in this point it's plains. The Euphrates runs along there. This is Baghdad here. And here is Tahrir Square." He touches the center of her palm. "At the foot of the Jumhurriya Bridge. The center of everything. All the main streets run out from this spot. In this direction and that direction, there are wide busy sidewalks and apartments piled up on top of shops, men in business suits, women with strollers, street vendors selling kabobs, eggs, fruit drinks. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. And there's this one street...." He holds her palm cradled in one hand and traces his finger up along the inside of her arm to the inner crease of her elbow, then up to her shoulder. Everywhere he touches her it feels like it must be glowing, as if he were drawing warm butter all over her skin. "It just goes and goes, all the way from Baghdad to Paris." He circles her shoulder. "And here"- he touches the inner crease of her elbow-"is the home of the Nile crocodile with the beautiful speaking voice. And here"- his fingers return to her shoulder, dip along their clavicle-"is the dangerous singing forest." "The dangerous singing forest?" she whispers. He frowns and looks thoughtful. "Or is that in Madagascar?" His hand slips behind her neck and he inches toward her on the seat. "There's a savanna. Chameleons like emeralds and limes and saffron and rubies. Red cinnamon trees filled with lemurs." "I've always wanted to see Madagascar," she murmurs: his breath is on her face. Their foreheads touch. His hand rises to her face and she can feel that he's trembling and she realizes that she's trembling too. "I'll take you," he whispers.

have to sell my soul to some power-hungry supervisor the minute I get to work, and then five minutes later I have to turn around and sell it again to some numb-nuts who’s mad at the world because he didn’t have any better sense than to get drunk out of his skull and total his car. Half the time I have to work ten hours a day without overtime.

Hellooo.” The ferry captain shot a thumb at her Jeep. “Gonna get it off ?” “Oh.” She laughed. “Sorry.” Releasing Nicole, she ran back onto the ferry and slid behind the wheel. By the time she revved the engine, Nicole was in the passenger’s seat, sliding a hand over the timeworn dashboard. “I am paying you for this.” Charlotte shot her a startled look and inched forward. “For this car? You are not.” “You wouldn’t have bought it if it weren’t for my book, and you won’t take money for that.” “Because it’s your book. I’m just along for the ride.” She laughed at her own words. “Can you believe, this is the first car I’ve ever owned?” She eased it onto the dock. “Is it real or what?” “Totally real,” Nicole said, though momentarily wary. “Safe on the highway?” “It got me here.” Charlotte waved at the captain. “Thank you!” Still crawling along, she drove carefully off the pier. When she was on firm ground, she stopped, angled sideways in the seat, and addressed the first of the ghosts. “I’m sorry about your dad, Nicki. I wanted to be there. I just couldn’t.” Seeming suddenly older, Nicole smiled sadly. “You were probably better off. There were people all over the place. I didn’t have time to think.” “A heart attack?” “Massive.” “No history of heart problems?” “None.” “That’s scary. How’s Angie?” Nicole’s mother. Charlotte had phoned her, too, and though Angie had said all the right words—Yes, a tragedy, he loved you, too, you’re a darling to call—she had sounded distracted. “Bad,” Nicole confirmed. “They were so in love. And he loved Quinnipeague. His parents bought the house when he was little. He actually proposed to Mom here. They always said that if I’d been a boy, they’d have named me Quinn. She can’t bear to come now. That’s why she’s selling. She can’t even come to pack up. This place was so him.” “Woo-hoo,” came a holler that instantly lifted the mood. “Look who’s here!” A stocky woman, whose apron covered a T-shirt and shorts, was trotting down the stairs from the lower deck of the Chowder House. Dorey Jewett had taken over from her father midway through Charlotte’s summers here and had brought the place up to par with the best of city restaurants. She had the gleaming skin of one who worked over steam, but the creases by her eyes, as much from smiling as from squinting over the harbor, suggested she was nearing sixty. “Missy here

Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, before the difficult days come, and the years draw near when you say, “I have no pleasure in them.” —Ecclesiastes 12:1 (NKJV) I was making rounds at the veterans hospital where I work, when an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair pointed his cane to a sign on a bulletin board. “Look, hon,” he said to his wife, “they’re having an old-fashioned Easter egg hunt on Saturday. It says here that the kids can compete in a bunny-hop sack race for prizes.” He barely came up for air. “Remember when we used to have those Easter egg hunts on our farm? The kids would color eggs at our kitchen table and get dye all over everything.” Just then, his wife noticed the smell of popcorn in the air. Volunteers sell it for a bargain price—fifty cents a sack. The veteran didn’t miss a beat. “Remember when we used to have movie night and you would pop corn? We’ve got to start doing that again, hon. I love popcorn. Movies too.” As I took in this amazingly joyful man, I thought of things I used to be able to do before neurofibromatosis took over my body. It was nothing to run a couple of miles; I walked everywhere. Instead of rejoicing in the past, I too often complain about my restrictions. Rather than marvel how I always used to walk downtown, shopping, I complain about having to use a handicap placard on my car so I can park close to the mall, which I complain about as well. But today, with all my heart, I want to be like that veteran and remember my yesterdays with joy. Help me, dear Lord, to recall the past with pleasure. —Roberta Messner Digging Deeper: Eph 4:29; Phil 2:14

The man just stared at her. “Or we still sell the Samoas, the Peanut Butter Sandwiches, the Shortbreads and the Tagalongs. I don’t want to pressure sell, but all your neighbors have placed orders. The Asseltas next door? They bought thirty boxes, and with a little help I can land first place in my troop and win a hundred-dollar gift certificate to the American Girl doll store—” “Go.” “I’m sorry. Did you say—” “Go.” There was no give in his voice. “Now.” “Right, okay.” Ema raised her hands in mock surrender and quickly moved out of sight. I fell back for a second, relieved. I was also impressed as all get-out. Talk about quick thinking. Ema was safe. Now it was my turn. I took another glance out the window. The man with the shaved head stood by the garage door. He opened it, and whoever was driving pulled the car in. The man with the shaved head kept doing the head pivot, like a surveillance camera, and then suddenly he jerked to the left and zeroed right in on me. I

By age thirty, I was living a life that most people only dream of living. But it’s a strange phenomenon. When you’re caught in the whirlwind, it begins to feel commonplace. Suddenly, you begin to forget all the years of walking through the kitchen to play the wedding. You forget the people throwing quarters at you on some makeshift stage. It all becomes a distant memory. You feel elevated. People treat you differently. Now that you can afford things, you seem to get a lot of things for free. The guitar strings that I used to buy—free. The guitar itself—free. Clothes, sneakers, tennis rackets—you name it, we were being offered it. Now that we had a best-selling album and were a household name, everyone wanted us to use their brand of whatever. It was crazy. The money wasn’t bad either after all those years of eating every other day and sleeping four to a room. I remember when we got our first big royalty check. The business manager that we had used for years called John and I and said, “Come see me, I have a check for you both.” When John and I went to see him, he handed us both an envelope. I opened mine first and looked inside. When I saw the amount, I said, “Oh, this can’t be for us.” I asked, John, “How much is yours?” He said, “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. How much is yours?” I said, “Two hundred and fifty thousand.” All we could do was laugh. This was crazy money to us. When we started out I remember thinking, if I could make $50,000 at this I’ll be happy. Now, it looked like we were going to make a little bit more. I didn’t spend elaborately when we started making money. But I did have my little splurges. For instance, I bought a Jaguar. I remember the Jaguar salesman warning me, “Now are you sure you want to buy this car? I don’t want you spending all your money.” Eventually,

with you, as your date?” Liam asks me. “Yes,” I say quietly. “I’m so sorry. What can I do for you in return?” “Well, since you offered,” Liam responds, “I would like some information.” “Information?” I ask with a frown. “Yes,” Liam says. “Remember all those deep, dark secrets I said I’d extract from you? Well, if you share them with us, then I’ll be your date for your sister’s wedding.” This is probably the worst thing he could have requested. My mouth feels suddenly very dry. “Um. Isn’t there anything else you might want? Maybe I could dedicate my next book to you?” He laughs lightly. “You’re going to do that anyway once I get your sight back.” I rack my brain, searching for something I could give him. “I’ll have my publisher put out a press release,” I offer, “or maybe schedule an event, like a book launch. We can publicly declare that you’re the hero who helped the semi-famous blind author Winter Rose to see. Even if it doesn’t work, and I can’t see, I’ll pretend like I can, and you’ll probably get tons of research grants and stuff.” “I’m pretty sure that you’re going to do that anyway,” Liam tells me, “because it’s a good story that will sell books.” “Okay,” I mumble, getting desperate. “How about I name a character after you?” “That would be nice,” Liam says. “I’ll take all of the above, but I’ll still need one additional thing to sweeten the pot. Information.” “Why?” I moan in protest. “Because I’m curious,” he answers in a good-natured way. “Come on. It can’t be that bad. Tell me your deepest, darkest secrets.” I sigh. “Are you sure?” “Yes.” “Really? Right here. Right now? In front of Owen?” “Yeah, why not?” Liam says cheerfully. “He’s been telling us way more than we need to know for a while.” “I want to hear, too,” Owen chimes in.  “Entertain us, storyteller!” I spend a moment gathering my composure. I smooth my hands over my legs, and look around uneasily. Taking a deep breath, I try to mentally prepare myself for what I’m about to say to two complete strangers. “Well... three years ago, I was raped.” A hush falls over the car. I can feel the men looking

What topics fascinate me? Do I want to earn a degree or certificate? What would be fun, interesting, profitable, healthy, and/or beneficial for me to learn? What institutions or teachers do I want to learn from? What steps can I take today to propel me toward these goals? — My possessions: What types of possessions do I want or need in order to fulfill my divine function? What objects would make my life easier, safer, or more enjoyable? What types of furniture, clothing, cars, recreational vehicles, jewelry, equipment, toys, or other possessions have I always wanted? What possessions are weighing me down? What would I like to get rid of? Do I have anything I’d like to sell, donate, barter, or trade? When you’ve answered these questions for yourself, you’ll be well on the way to setting healthy goals that will enrich and enhance your life!

I don’t know what’s been up with him lately, but it wasn’t my place to ask. Kyle doesn’t work, but he keeps a nice car and plenty of cash. I just assumed he was selling drugs, but it was never confirmed.

Tell me, who is this Walmart?” I ask Claire. “They’re one of the most evil corporations on earth,” she tells me. “They exploit immigrants, sell poisonous junk food, and destroy small businesses. It’s ridiculous. They think they can just show up here, write a check, and get whomever they want to do their bidding…” I interrupt her. “What is check?” “It’s, like, money.” At this point I am running. I run so fast both of my shoes fall off. Eventually, after several blocks of screaming and waving my arms in the air, I catch up to these wonderful Walmart people. They open their door and I leap inside car before they have time to change their mind.

GM will provide CarPlay or Android Car for no additional cost. Although this might cause some drivers to shun MyLink, GM believes that ultimately giving buyers the choice will help it sell more cars, said Saejin Park, the company's director of innovation and portfolio planning. Mark Boyadjis, senior analyst for infotainment at IHS Automotive, said the decision doesn't necessarily mean the death of MyLink, Ford's Sync and other systems. The automakers' systems have specific information about the car that Apple or Google can't duplicate - engine diagnostics, heating and air conditioning controls or even the ability to set up service appointments with dealerships, Boyadjis said.

The next afternoon I left work to find that my car had been broken into and ransacked — but that not one thing had been stolen. I was so insulted that I left a note on the window that read: Dear Scumbag Thieves, If you go to the trouble of tossing my car, you could at least steal a lousy pair of sunglasses. The next day I discovered a gift card lying on the driver’s seat with this message: Here’s $500. It’s the best we can do until the holidays. P.S. Get some decent tires, why don’t you. We couldn’t sell these desperate maypops if we did steal them.

Does he still live in Tampa?” Sylvan asked. “This male who hurt you?” “Yes, he works at his father’s car dealership selling—” Then she realized why he was asking. “Stop it, Sylvan—I didn’t tell you this so you could…could go after him or something. I told you because…because… Oh hell, I don’t know why I told you. But you can’t do anything about it.” “If I was your bonded mate it would be my duty to call him out and kill him in combat. To—” “Well you’re not,” she cut him off. “So promise me you won’t go after him. I just want to forget it—to try and put it behind me again.” He took a deep breath and then let out a long, low sigh that sounded almost like a growl. “All right,” he said at last. “I swear not to kill him.” “Thank

Would you buy a used car from your occupier? For the first six months of the intifada, Ehud Gol was the official Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. Every day he had to go before the world’s press and defend Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But in the spring of 1988, Gol was made the Israeli Consul General in Rio de Janeiro and he had to sell his car before he left the country. Practically the first place he went was to a Palestinian car dealer in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “Intifada or no intifada, this was business,” Gol explained to me. “The car dealer even came down to the Foreign Ministry and we went over all the papers in my office. There I was, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, and this guy, whose son was probably out throwing stones, was ready to buy from me—and it was a used car!” A Palestinian teacher I knew was driving from Ramallah to Jerusalem one afternoon when he saw a colleague of his from Bir Zeit University and offered to give him a lift. “This fellow came from a small village near Ramallah,” said my teacher friend. “The whole way into Jersualem he was talking to me about the intifada and how it had changed his village, how everyone was involved, and how the local committees of the uprising were running the village and they were getting rid of all the collaborators. He was really enthusiastic, and I was really impressed. As we got close to Jerusalem, I asked him where he wanted to be dropped off and he said, ‘The Hebrew University.’ I was really surprised, so I said, ‘What are you going there for?’ and he said, ‘I teach an Arabic class there.’ It simply didn’t occur to him that there was any contradiction between enthusiasm for the intifada and where he was going.

Granny was a huge fan of The Price Is Right, hosted by Bob Barker. She had an amazing memory for grocery-store prices and always nailed the answers. One day when she was in her eighties, Granny announced, “I’m going to California to be on The Price Is Right. I’m going to win it. No problem.” Granny talked my Uncle Harold into driving her to California, walker and all, and the family gathered around our television to watch Granny compete live on the country’s largest game show. And Granny did it! First, she won a Ford Mustang automobile. Then when it came time to guess the value of the showcase, she won that too. She came home with a truckload of appliances and not one but two cars. She had to sell one car to pay the sales taxes, but she was a winner, and she’d done what she said she was going to do. For the rest of her life, Granny slept with a signed photo of Bob Barker right next to her bed.

32  "The doctor said he would have me on my feet in two weeks." "And did he?" "Yes, I had to sell the car to pay the bill.

The Cats in the City Location: an Arab city. Time: the age of defeat. The twenty-first century. General atmosphere: “fancy” neighborhoods. Expensive houses painted in tombstone colors. Beautiful and well-maintained gardens. Flowers that no one dares to smell. Imported cars. Imported devices. Imported clothes. Imported foods. Endless consumer shops for anything and everything. Between every other restaurant, there are shops selling cosmetics and souvenirs. Between every other consumer market, There is a worship place. All consumer shops are built skillfully On the scab of the same old wound; A wound that can flood the city with blood and death With the slightest fingernail scratch. As I walk farther from the city, The consumer shops vanish. The lights are suddenly dimmed. The cheering and the hustle and bustle of the consumers go silent. I see myself in total darkness. I am alone hearing nothing but the sounds of my footsteps, And the meows of hungry stray street cats, Covered with the ashes of daily existence. A thin and hungry cat approaches me, She meows in despair and starvation, Begging me for her bite of the day (or the week?) I throw her a small piece of my sandwich. She picks it up and runs away To celebrate her temporary gains! She leaves me alone wondering in darkness: What reflects the reality of this city more The 'fancy' neighborhoods I saw earlier, Or the starving cats in the darkness? June 8, 2014

He grumbled something. And grumbled and grumbled. “What’s that, sweetheart?” she asked. “I said, you’ve gone from the nun wannabe prude who wouldn’t have a date in twelve years to a crazy woman who plans to take off in a Winnebago with an old man none of us knows and live in sin, and all he has to recommend him is that he’s the friend of some Presbyterian minister! And you expect me to sell this idea to my brothers?” She couldn’t help it, she burst into laughter. “Nun wannabe prude? I guess I’ll have to live with that, though it sounds pathetic. And George isn’t just a friend of a minister, Aiden. As it turns out, he’s an ordained minister, as well. Presbyterian.” Aiden checked his rearview mirror, turned on his signal and pulled onto the freeway’s shoulder. He put the car in Park and turned toward Maureen. He looked at her for a long moment. And then he said, “Who are you and what have you done with my mother?” *

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. “What’s been the most upsetting thing you’ve had to read about yourself?” “Well, those pictures the other day of my supposed cellulite upset me a lot actually. It really hurt me. It was too painful, too personal. It’s my body everyone was talking about, not just my face. I felt invaded because they put the cameras deliberately onto my legs.” Diana’s relationship with the paparazzi was obviously complex. She professed to hate them: “I know most of the paparazzi and their number plates. They think I am stupid but I know where they are. I’ve had ten years practice. I would support an antistalking bill tomorrow.” Then she took me to the window and started showing me the various media cars, vans, and motorbikes lurking outside. But when I asked why she doesn’t go out of one of the ten other more discreet exits, she exposed her contrary side: “I want to go out the front like anyone else. Why should I change my life for them?” “Because it would make your life easier?” I said. William was equally upset by the constant prying lenses: “Why do they have to chase my mother around so much? It’s unfair on her.” I was torn between genuine concern for the young man protecting his mum so gallantly, and a sense of foreboding for him that one day it would be him, not his mother, who would be chased just as aggressively. How do you explain to a thirteen-year-old boy that he sells papers and therefor he’s a valuable commodity to photographers and editors like me?

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If my husband tells me one more time that he needs to rest because he “worked all day,” I will throw all of his clothes on the front lawn, kick his car into neutral and watch it roll away and I’ll sell all of his precious sports stuff on eBay for a dollar. And then I’ll kill him. He seriously doesn’t get it! Yes, he worked all day, but he worked with English speaking, potty trained, fully capable adults. He didn’t have to change their diapers, give them naps and clean their lunch from the wall. He didn’t have to count to 10 to calm himself, he didn’t have to watch Barney 303,243,243 times, and he didn’t have to pop his boob out 6 times to feed a hungry baby and I KNOW he didn’t have peanut butter and jelly crust for lunch. He DID get TWO 15-minute breaks to “stroll,” an hour break to hit the gym, and a 1 hour train ride home to read or nap. So maybe I don’t get a paycheck, maybe I stay in my sweatpants most of the day, maybe I only shower every 2 or 3 days, maybe I get to “play” with our kids all day … I still work a hell of a lot harder in one hour than he does all day. So take your paycheck, stick it in the bank and let me go get a freakin’ pedicure once a month without hearing you say “Maybe if you got a job … and had your own money.” Ouch.

These mods made significant improvements to the cars – enough so that I changed my mind (another procedure altogether) every time I thought of selling the damn thing and buying a Toyota. I hope you benefit from this and preserve your ailing finances! Good luck!

Losing people I cared so much about and very nearly losing my dream of working for myself was devastating. To make ends meet, I even had to borrow $ 4,000 from my dad until we could sell our second car. I had come to a fork in the road: Should I put on a tie and take a job on Wall Street? That was not the life I wanted. On the other hand, I had a wife and two young children to support. I realized I was facing one of life’s big turning points and my choices would have big implications for me and for my family’s future.

I’ve got a broken milking machine I can’t afford to fix, and I’ve already had to fire my farm hand! My wife had to quit the farm and take a job in town! I won’t let you do this to me, Hooper! It would be an insult to all my farming ancestors if I sold my goods to you at these rotten prices! I swear I’ll sell this farm before I do it! Farmer Ben’s outburst had been so loud that some of the cubs were left holding their hands over their ears. But Ed Hooper hadn’t so much as flinched. “Well, what you do with your farm is none of my business,” said Hooper. “It darn sure isn’t!” yelled Ben. “Because your business is robbery! You’re nothin’ but an old-fashioned highway robber! You put a supermarket out on the highway and use it to rob folks!” Hooper’s smug little smile got bigger. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Ben,” he said. “But I can get my farm goods elsewhere. I’ll be on my way now. Have a nice day, Ben.” Hooper turned to leave, but happened to glance back and see Farmer Ben reaching for a pitchfork stuck in the ground. “Have a nice day?” Ben cried. “Don’t you dare tell me to have a nice day!” And with that, Farmer Ben raised his pitchfork and chased Ed Hooper into the cow pasture. Hooper dashed across the pasture toward his shiny new car. He reached the car safely, but not before stepping in three cow pies.

The kidnapper who was negotiating with Julie seemed extremely perplexed by her persistent questions, and he kept asking for time to think. That slowed everything down, but he never got angry with Julie. Answering questions gave him the illusion that he had control of the negotiation. By constantly asking questions and making minuscule offers, Julie drove the ransom down to $16,500. When they came to that number, the kidnappers demanded she get it to them immediately. “How can I do that when I have to sell my cars and trucks?” she asked. Always buying more time. We were starting to grin because success was within reach; we were really close to a ransom that the family could afford.

This spread between replacement value and liquidation value may be high for real property—often as much as 10 to 20 percent. For instance, I buy a $100,000 painting and pay $7,000 more in sales taxes, for a total of $107,000. The next day I change my mind and sell it for the same price of $100,000, paying $10,000 in commissions, for net proceeds of $90,000. The spread was $90,000 to $107,000, a difference of $17,000 or 17 percent of the “base” price of $100,000. This is what is lost in a round of buying and selling. It’s that way with houses, cars, art, and jewelry. In contrast, the cost to trade listed securities is typically only a small fraction of a percent—which, along with their liquidity, makes them more appealing stores of wealth.

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I was walking all along just going for a walk outside after the party, I just felt good, I didn’t know if I wanted to sing, dance, and or cry; I was that happy getting to be with Marcel, so I went to my spot in the old car in the junkyard. I have to jump the face and rip my tank top or something like that yet it worth it, to see my dream car, sitting there I not a girlie girl but I love this cute thing it's sex looking like me. I found this old car at colleen’s junkyard it like right next door, I freak’n loved this old piece of crap, I even had sex with myself in the back seat, I took the old hood ornament off myself and keep it, my dad said it was off of Neveah’s dad's car, yet it was given to my mom and that why it just sitting outside for all the kids like me to rip the parts off of and sell on eBay. My stepmom hated Kristen, my real mother, so that is why the car ended up where it’s at, it was passed down yet the step-monster made sure I would never have it. My stepdad said the emblem is of a 1950 Nash that I found, little did I know it doesn’t go on that car yet, I think it’s a good fit, I was getting the car on my eighteenth birthday- I freaked up and had to die, just like me in the graveyard we both are retreating away. My stepdads had the 1950 Nash which he said was the first real sports car and it’s all steel, so I put it back on without him knowing that I did, funny maybe that's why I passed doing something like that… it was like it was meant for that car, or so he said and I did also. There is an old fender off what likes to be some old ford over there too that is rusty red, I am not sure of the year it’s too damn old for me to know. I remember right my dad said that grand-ma Nevaeh went to school in something like a 1965 Cadillac Deville convertible, yet, I don’t see that she had like nothing, I don’t know what that thing is. Like with these old cars, don't think you have a seat belt, you just cracked your head off the dash of the Nash and then they wiped it off, and sold it to some other poor ass hole.

Mrs. E. K. Shields, of Saginaw, Michigan, was driven to despair—even to the brink of suicide—before she learned to live just till bedtime. “In 1937, I lost my husband,” Mrs. Shields said as she told me her story. “I was very depressed—and almost penniless. I wrote my former employer, Mr. Leon Roach, of the Roach-Fowler Company of Kansas City, and got my old job back. I had formerly made my living selling World Books to rural and town school boards. I had sold my car two years previously when my husband became ill; but I managed to scrape together enough money to put a down payment on a used car and started out to sell books again. “I had thought that getting back on the road would help relieve my depression; but driving alone and eating alone was almost more than I could take. Some of the territory was not very productive, and I found it hard to make those car payments, small as they were. “In the spring of 1938, I was working out of Versailles, Missouri. The schools were poor, the roads bad; I was so lonely and discouraged that at one time I even considered suicide. It seemed that success was impossible. I had nothing to live for. I dreaded getting up each morning and facing life. I was afraid of everything: afraid I could not meet the car payments; afraid I could not pay my room rent; afraid I would not have enough to eat. I was afraid my health was failing and I had no money for a doctor. All that kept me from suicide were the thoughts that my sister would be deeply grieved, and that I did not have enough money to pay my funeral expenses. “Then one day I read an article that lifted me out of my despondence and gave me the courage to go on living. I shall never cease to be grateful for one inspiring sentence in that article. It said: ‘Every day is a new life to a wise man.’ I typed that sentence out and pasted it on the windshield of my car, where I saw it every minute I was driving. I found it wasn’t so hard to live only one day at a time. I learned to forget the yesterdays and to not think of the tomorrows. Each morning I said to myself, ‘Today is a new life.

Did you know that credit cards automatically give you amazing consumer protection? Here are a few examples you might not know about: ■ Automatic warranty doubling: Most cards extend the warranty on your purchases. So if you buy an iPhone and it breaks after Apple’s warranty expires, your credit card will still cover it up to an additional year. This is true for nearly every credit card for nearly every purchase, automatically. ■ Car rental insurance: If you rent a car, don’t let them sell you on getting the extra collision insurance. It’s completely worthless! You already have coverage through your existing car insurance, plus your credit card will usually back you up to $50,000. ■ Trip-cancellation insurance: If you book tickets for a vacation and then get sick and can’t travel, your airline will charge you hefty fees to rebook your ticket. Just call your credit card and ask for the trip-cancellation insurance to kick in, and they’ll cover those change fees—usually between $3,000 to $10,000 per trip. ■ Concierge services: When I couldn’t find LA Philharmonic tickets, I called my credit card and asked the concierge to try to find some. He called me back in two days with tickets. They charged me (a lot, actually), but he was able to get them when nobody else could.

Do you know why I could never sell this car?” said Viridios. “There’s something about it that makes you long for a place that never existed. I can see it in my mind, every time I get behind the wheel. There’s a coastal highway that goes on for a thousand miles through deserts, forests, and mountains, sprawling cities, towns full of Spanish architecture, beaches full of happy people, and wonderful music that sounds like an orchestra and a barbershop quartet at the same time. It’s like some fantastic version of the Republic, in a mythical land where it’s always summer. Maybe it really exists, somewhere out West, like the lost kingdom of Prester John.

Latent Needs The larger and more significant portion of the market is comprised of prospects who do have needs for your product or service, but haven’t yet recognized those needs. In QBS, we say that these prospects have latent needs. Latent needs are needs that do exist but haven’t yet surfaced as problems or desires. Prospects with latent needs fail to recognize that they are no longer satisfied with the status quo. As an example, suppose you and I were standing beside your car when suddenly we noticed that one of your tires was worn down to the cords. Instantly, you would have a need for new tires. The question is, did you have a need for new tires yesterday? Sure you did. The tread on your tire didn’t wear itself down overnight. But until you actually recognized the existence of a problem, your need for new tires was latent. It existed, although you were not aware of it at the time. This is essentially what happened when Brent called me. I absolutely had a need for septic tank improvement products, but my need was a latent need. Salespeople encounter prospects with latent needs all the time—especially prospects who say things like: “I don’t need life insurance because I’m not planning to die any time soon.” Or, “We don’t have time to evaluate new technology, because we’re too busy putting out fires.” Here’s my personal favorite: “We can’t afford sales training right now, because sales have been slow.

Court was adjourned. As I was led to the police car, I briefly recognized the scent and colour of a summer’s evening. From the darkness of my moving prison, I rediscovered, one by one – as if arising from the depths of my weariness – all the familiar sounds of the city that I loved, and that particular moment of the day when I had sometimes felt happy. The shouts of the newspaper sellers in the calm night air, the last few birds in the town square, the people selling sandwiches, the creaking of the trams along the high bends of the city and the slight breeze from above before night suddenly falls over the port – to me, all these things merged to form the journey of a blind man, a journey I’d known so well before going to prison. Yes, this was the time of day when, a very long time ago, I had felt happy. A time when I could look forward to a night of peaceful sleep, devoid of dreams. But now, all that had changed; as I waited for the new day to dawn, I found myself back in my cell. It was as if the familiar paths etched in the summer skies could just as easily lead to prison as to innocent sleep.

That was the start of a lot of the practices and philosophies that still prevail at Wal-Mart today. I was always looking for offbeat suppliers or sources. I started driving over to Tennessee to some fellows I found who would give me special buys at prices way below what Ben Franklin was charging me. One I remember was Wright Merchandising Co. in Union City, which would sell to small businesses like mine at good wholesale prices. I’d work in the store all day, then take off around closing and drive that windy road over to the Mississippi River ferry at Cottonwood Point, Missouri, and then into Tennessee with an old homemade trailer hitched to my car. I’d stuff that car and trailer with whatever I could get good deals on—usually on softlines: ladies’ panties and nylons, men’s shirts—and I’d bring them back, price them low, and just blow that stuff out the store.

Von Neumann enjoyed driving very much but had never passed a test. At Mariette’s suggestion, he bribed a driving examiner. This did nothing to improve his driving. He sped along crowded roads as if they were many-body problems to be negotiated by calculating the best route through on the fly. He often failed, and an intersection in Princeton was soon christened ‘von Neumann corner’ on account of the many accidents he had there. Bored on open roads, he slowed down. When conversation faltered, he would sing; swaying and rocking the steering wheel from side to side with him. The couple would buy a new car every year, usually because von Neumann had totalled the previous one. His vehicle of choice was a Cadillac, ‘because’, he explained whenever anyone asked, ‘no one would sell me a tank’. Miraculously, he escaped largely unscathed from these smash-ups, often returning with the unlikeliest of explanations. ‘I was proceeding down the road,’ begins one fabulous excuse. ‘The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path. Boom!

I know the adolescent phenomenon of staring wistfully out of a rainy car window and pretending you're in an Avril Lavigne music video doesn't belong exclusively to lesbians, but I'm talking about the collective energy of this experience. Lesbians are the energy of staring wistfully out of a rainy car window and pretending you're in an Avril Lavigne music video, personified. And that's because yearning is an inherent part of the queer female experience. And I'm not talking about, like, the 2018 awards cycle, when Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga essentially performed yearning to sell their movie. I'm also not talking about Sally Rooney's Normal People, which is about a heterosexual couple who, for reasons unbeknownst, cannot be together because one plays football and the other one... reads books? Straight people, someone needs to tell you this once and for all. You are allowed to be together. You have always been allowed to be together. Romeo and Juliet is essentially hetero fanfic about what it's like to be gay. Your parents hate each other-who cares! For people who experience same-sex attraction, sometimes yearning is all we have. For me, yearning used to be everything-so much so that it damaged the relationships in my adult life. But before I had yearning, I existed in the Thirst Vacuum-a space that was so dark, so desolate, I couldn't yearn for anyone at all.

I’ll tell you frankly, Spencer Cotterell and his mother can be difficult. There’s no hiding the fact that his spiteful nature is well known and he’s become even more bitter since he failed the army medical. As for his mother, she’s a cunning woman who likes to get her own way.’ ‘I’ve been unhappy myself since Philip died,’ she said quietly, ‘but I don’t take it out on other people or try to cheat them. I shall do nothing to provoke his family but I don’t need to think about selling the cottage and car to them. I shan’t change my mind.’ She wasn’t telling him anything about her possible complication, not if she didn’t have to. But if what she was beginning to suspect was true, she would definitely need somewhere to live. ‘Is that all?’ ‘An old lady who was living at a village called Honeyfield died a couple of months ago. This Miss Thorburn was a close friend of Miss Gordon – the lady who left Philip the house in Malmesbury – and left everything she owned to her. I didn’t trouble Philip at the time, because he was involved at Verdun and had enough on his mind, and Miss Gordon seemed in excellent health. But her unexpected death meant that Philip inherited everything that Miss Gordon owned, which now,

Here’s an example from the test Marty and his students developed to distinguish optimists from pessimists: Imagine: You can’t get all the work done that others expect of you. Now imagine one major cause for this event. What leaps to mind? After you read that hypothetical scenario, you write down your response, and then, after you’re offered more scenarios, your responses are rated for how temporary (versus permanent) and how specific (versus pervasive) they are. If you’re a pessimist, you might say, I screw up everything. Or: I’m a loser. These explanations are all permanent; there’s not much you can do to change them. They’re also pervasive; they’re likely to influence lots of life situations, not just your job performance. Permanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem logical to give up. If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist, you might say, I mismanaged my time. Or: I didn’t work efficiently because of distractions. These explanations are all temporary and specific; their “fixability” motivates you to start clearing them away as problems. Using this test, Marty confirmed that, compared to optimists, pessimists are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. What’s more, optimists fare better in domains not directly related to mental health. For instance, optimistic undergraduates tend to earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out of school. Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists. Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages. A one-year field study of MetLife insurance agents found that optimists are twice as likely to stay in their jobs, and that they sell about 25 percent more insurance than their pessimistic colleagues. Likewise, studies of salespeople in telecommunications, real estate, office products, car sales, banking, and other industries have shown that optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent.

I was standing by the car when two police officers showed up in the alley, very interested in me and the BMW in an alley where car traffic was not allowed at all, sitting there with a Belgian plate tag in the middle of the coffeeshop district, with me, the Hungarian guy, leaning to it smoking a cigarette, obviously waiting for something to happen. They began to examine my IDs and started searching the car. They were looking for drugs, apparently. I had been dealing with them for a few minutes when Adam showed up at the end of the alley. I was the only one looking that way, seeing Adam walking to turn into the alley; the two officers were too busy to notice what I had witnessed. The moment Adam looked up and noticed the officers around me, the moment he was about to turn right towards us into the alley, he made a 180-degree turn, the way a bad kid would do when playing hide and seek. Catching his steps the way Mr. Bean or Benny Hill would do—I could almost hear the music too—was both very funny and very concerning. He was too stupid to be a criminal; he was such a lame criminal that he didn't even think of walking past the alley's entrance like nothing happened instead of turning around and acting so suspiciously and obviously being in the wrong. I began to wonder how the coffeeshop business would work out with this guy if he was suddenly on cocaine all the time before we even opened the club? How would not he get me in trouble when there would be kilograms of marijuana and tons of cash flying around? How could I ever quit this job even if we could manage to run the place and get rich over the next 2-3 years? How would I ever get rid of this embarrassing, childish, dangerously silly criminal guy? By some miracle, in the car—which was used by these junkies and was usually full of smoking accessories—the cops didn't find a cigarette paper either, although they were very, very thorough. Belgian BMW wagon with a Hungarian guy, in an alley in the area full of marijuana clubs. They were sure they had me now, that they would be rewarded for such a catch. But there was nothing in the car. I was able to show them Rachel's Belgian registration and everything, explaining that she was my girlfriend who was in Belgium at that time and we were both working for a company selling smoking accessories; I gave them my business card. I apologized for parking there and even driving into that alley with the car. They fined me regardless. Before we started dealing with the marijuana behalf my name, we were collecting fines attributed to Adam on my name. Talk about being cheap. Apparently, he had started growing a lot of marijuana without my knowledge in a place he did not want me to find out about. As I was driving back to Urgell, we were both very silent. I was calm but he was anxious and I could almost hear the gears spinning in his mind. Perhaps at the same moment, we both realized that if I got arrested for any reason and ended up in jail, Adam could keep the 33% profit of the coffeeshop which I had signed up for and which belonged to me. ‘Thinking quickly. Acting quicker.’ Never quick enough. The sneaker. Adam was usually very slow, whether he was high or low.

This is kinda cool,” Mike said. “There’s a satisfying sort of rhythm to it once you get the hang of it.” “That’s why people enjoy it,” I said. “It’s very relaxing. Almost meditative. And then of course there’s the sense of accomplishment from making something with your hands.” “I could see that.” “I’ve always thought it was sad that boys in this country aren’t encouraged to do handicrafts more, because they can be very therapeutic. But we’ve developed this ridiculous idea that the hearth arts are feminizing and anything feminine is inherently weak, which prevents men from pursuing them.” “Like how the girls all took home ec and the boys took shop class,” Mike said. “Exactly,” I said. “Although they’ve done away with home ec and shop at most schools these days. But you still see it in scouting. Boy Scouts learn wilderness survival skills, while in Girl Scouts it’s often more about cooking and sewing and selling cookies.” Mike frowned at his yarn. “It never even occurred to me when I was a kid to ask my mom to teach me how to knit. I remember she taught my sister, or she tried to, anyway. I learned how to change the oil in my dad’s car instead, which isn’t nearly as much fun.” “It’s arguably a bit more useful I suppose.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

Know the Competition I had a wonderful experience purchasing a luxury car. I was looking at three different brands. I have owned all three at different times in my life so I knew each fairly well. I had studied the market and knew most of the features of the competing models. However, this particular sales guy knew every detail about every car I was considering and so served me wonderfully in my purchase. He never once used his knowledge to speak poorly of the competition. On the contrary, he told me where each model was better than the car I was considering. Wow. I found myself starting to trust this guy because he was being honest and transparent. He stood firm that his car was the car I should buy because of its particular features and quality, but he brought great information about his competitors to the discussion. It was a really classy way to handle a sales role. A really sad part of my wonderful car purchase was that I was on a competitor’s lot the next day and the sales guy there knew less about the car he was selling than my guy knew about the same car. In

This brings me to my system. I still have the diary I wrote when I graduated from Hartwick, in which I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn’t want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn’t want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I didn’t want to do any sort of custom work, such as building homes, because each one requires the same amount of work. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.

If someone steals your car because of me, I’m going to have to sell a kidney to pay you back.” The corner of his mouth lifted, amused. “It’s just a thing, Molly. Not worth a kidney.” “Don’t tell Killian that,” I warned. “Pretty sure he thinks it’s a bigger deal than most internal organs.” He leaned in, bringing our faces close together, our bodies following suit. My gaze dropped to his lips for just a second. Okay, maybe five seconds. Possibly a good ten seconds. “We’ll keep that just between you and me.” His head dipped down and he pressed a slow-burning, heart-stopping, over-too-quick kiss on my lips. “Goodnight, Molly the Maverick.” Then he stepped back and jogged the distance to his car while I was left internally flailing as I fell and fell and fell down an endless well of uncharted territory. I stepped inside my building and went straight up to my studio. If ever there had been a reason to paint, a gentle kiss by a man like Ezra Baptiste was it. So, paint I did.

It's barely 8:00 a.m., but my train mates waste little time in breaking out the picnic material. But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy three more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

I do recommend that most people sell the car with the most debt on it. A good rule of thumb on items (except the house) is this: if you can’t be debt-free on it (not counting the home) in eighteen to twenty months, sell it. If you have a car or a boat that you can’t pay off in eighteen to twenty months, sell it. It is just a car; dynamite the logjam! I used to love my car, too, but I found keeping that huge debt while trying to get out of debt was like running a race wearing ankle weights. Get a Total Money Makeover, so later you can drive anything you want and pay cash for it. When it comes to that debt-ridden item, you may have to make the decision to live like no one else; but remember, later you will be living, or driving, like no one else.

Gazing down on this mess is like looking into the pit of Mordor. So many lost souls! These glorified car salesmen, these people whose jobs involve coercion and manipulation, whose lives revolve around making their numbers. Every month, every quarter, every year: sell, sell, sell! These are the people who took the Internet, one of the most wonderful and profound inventions of all time, and polluted it with advertising and turned it into a way to sell stuff. No wonder these zombies need to take a week off in San Francisco once a year, with some Deepak Chopra and maybe an eight ball of coke and a Canadian hooker to make the whole thing seem worthwhile.

I was autographing books at one of those little rattan tables in the bookstore when I found myself looking into the saddest eyes I had ever seen. “The doctor wanted me to buy something that would make me laugh,” she said. I hesitated about signing the book. It would have taken corrective surgery to make that woman laugh. “Is it a big problem?” I asked. The whole line of people was eavesdropping. “Yes. My daughter is getting married.” The line cheered. “Is she twelve or something?” “She’s twenty-four,” said the woman, biting her lip. “And he’s a wonderful man. It’s just that she could have stayed home a few more years.” The woman behind her looked wistful. “We’ve moved three times, and our son keeps finding us. Some women have all the luck.” Isn’t it curious how some mothers don’t know when they’ve done a good job or when it’s basically finished? They figure the longer the kids hang around, the better parents they are. I guess it all depends on how you regard children in the first place. How do you regard yours? Are they like an appliance? The more you have, the more status you command? They’re under warranty to perform at your whim for the first 18 years; then, when they start costing money, you get rid of them? Are they like a used car? You maintain it for years, and when you’re ready to sell it to someone else, you feel a great responsibility to keep it running or it reflects on you? (That’s why some parents never let their children marry good friends.) Are they like an endowment policy? You invest in them for 18 or 20 years, and then for the next 20 years they return dividends that support you in your declining years or they suffer from terminal guilt? Are they like a finely gilded mirror that reflects the image of its owner in every way? On the day the owner looks in and sees a flaw, a crack, a distortion, one tiny idea or attitude that is different from his own, he casts it aside and declares himself a failure? I see children as kites. You spend a lifetime trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you’re both breathless...they crash...you add a longer tail...they hit the rooftop...you pluck them out of the spout. You patch and comfort, adjust and teach. You watch them lifted by the wind and assure them that someday they’ll fly. Finally they are airborne, but they need more string so you keep letting it out. With each twist of the ball of twine there is a sadness that goes with the joy, because the kite becomes more distant, and somehow you know it won’t be long before that beautiful creature will snap the lifeline that bound you together and soar as it was meant to soar—free and alone. Only then do you know that you did your job.

Instagram is now a breeding ground for scammers on the search for unsuspecting users whom they will sell their game and flaunt their huge profits from cryptocurrency. I thought I’d struck a gold mine. I ended up messaging this broker and she went on this long spiel about Bitcoin mining and how it’s profitable, I gave it a long thought plus the strategy they used produced eye-watering returns of 50 percent per month. I was initially skeptical so a few months later I decided to invest and sent them $150 as a test, a month later I was sent back $50 along with another $30 of my profit. Shocked in disbelief I sent hundreds of dollars, then thousands, it didn't take long until I started telling friends and family who even sent more money. One of my best mates sold his car for $11,000 and put all that money in, and it disappeared. All up, my friends and I lost over $100,000 to this scam, which caused me immense stress and embarrassment plus some of my friends decided not to talk to me anymore. It was like my integrity just vanished suddenly, because I’d convinced my friends, I’d shown them my profits and I was actively promoting it, almost like a salesman for her. I tried to go to the police, who said we’d only lost $100,000. They know people who have lost millions, and this shattered every hope I had of recovering my money or tracing these criminals. I found Hackathon Tech Solution with the help of our new intern who referred me to give hackers a try, I’m really glad I listened. With the support of Hackathon Tech Solutions and my Assets recovered I was able to return to investing but only in Stocks now, I stayed away from cryptocurrencies after the scam experience. We often can’t avoid the negative patterns financially but if it’s a wrong investment at the hands of scammers Hackathon Tech Solution has you covered. Don’t hesitate to reach out to info@ hackathon tech solution . com, if you fall victim to this online Bitcoin or cryptocurrency scam. Their website is https:// h a c k a t h o n t e c h s o l u t i o n s.com & WhatsApp is +31 6 47999256

Instagram is now a breeding ground for scammers on the search for unsuspecting users whom they will sell their game and flaunt their huge profits from cryptocurrency. I thought I’d struck a gold mine. I ended up messaging this broker and she went on this long spiel about Bitcoin mining and how it’s profitable, I gave it a long thought plus the strategy they used produced eye-watering returns of 50 percent per month. I was initially skeptical so a few months later I decided to invest and sent them $150 as a test, a month later I was sent back $50 along with another $30 of my profit. Shocked in disbelief I sent hundreds of dollars, then thousands, it didn't take long until I started telling friends and family who even sent more money. One of my best mates sold his car for $11,000 and put all that money in, and it disappeared. All up, my friends and I lost over $100,000 to this scam, which caused me immense stress and embarrassment plus some of my friends decided not to talk to me anymore. It was like my integrity just vanished suddenly, because I’d convinced my friends, I’d shown them my profits and I was actively promoting it, almost like a salesman for her. I tried to go to the police, who said we’d only lost $100,000. They know people who have lost millions, and this shattered every hope I had of recovering my money or tracing these criminals. I found Hackathon Tech Solution with the help of our new intern who referred me to give hackers a try, I’m really glad I listened. With the support of Hackathon Tech Solutions and my Assets recovered I was able to return to investing but only in Stocks now, I stayed away from cryptocurrencies after the scam experience. We often can’t avoid the negative patterns financially but if it’s a wrong investment at the hands of scammers Hackathon Tech Solution has you covered. Don’t hesitate to reach out to info@ hackathon tech solution . com, if you fall victim to this online Bitcoin or cryptocurrency scam. WhatsApp is +31 6 47999256

Instagram is now a breeding ground for scammers on the search for unsuspecting users whom they will sell their game and flaunt their huge profits from cryptocurrency. I thought I’d struck a gold mine. I ended up messaging this broker and she went on this long spiel about Bitcoin mining and how it’s profitable, I gave it a long thought plus the strategy they used produced eye-watering returns of 50 percent per month. I was initially skeptical so a few months later I decided to invest and sent them $150 as a test, a month later I was sent back $50 along with another $30 of my profit. Shocked in disbelief I sent hundreds of dollars, then thousands, it didn't take long until I started telling friends and family who even sent more money. One of my best mates sold his car for $11,000 and put all that money in, and it disappeared. All up, my friends and I lost over $100,000 to this scam, which caused me immense stress and embarrassment plus some of my friends decided not to talk to me anymore. It was like my integrity just vanished suddenly, because I’d convinced my friends, I’d shown them my profits and I was actively promoting it, almost like a salesman for her. I tried to go to the police, who said we’d only lost $100,000. They know people who have lost millions, and this shattered every hope I had of recovering my money or tracing these criminals. I found Hackathon Tech Solution with the help of our new intern who referred me to give hackers a try, I’m really glad I listened. With the support of Hackathon Tech Solutions and my Assets recovered I was able to return to investing but only in Stocks now, I stayed away from cryptocurrencies after the scam experience. We often can’t avoid the negative patterns financially but if it’s a wrong investment at the hands of scammers Hackathon Tech Solution has you covered. Don’t hesitate to reach out to info@ hackathon tech solution . com, if you fall victim to this online Bitcoin or cryptocurrency scam. Their WhatsApp is +31 6 47999256

Instagram is now a breeding ground for scammers on the search for unsuspecting users whom they will sell their game and flaunt their huge profits from cryptocurrency. I thought I’d struck a gold mine. I ended up messaging this broker and she went on this long spiel about Bitcoin mining and how it’s profitable, I gave it a long thought plus the strategy they used produced eye-watering returns of 50 percent per month. I was initially skeptical so a few months later I decided to invest and sent them $150 as a test, a month later I was sent back $50 along with another $30 of my profit. Shocked in disbelief I sent hundreds of dollars, then thousands, it didn't take long until I started telling friends and family who even sent more money. One of my best mates sold his car for $11,000 and put all that money in, and it disappeared. All up, my friends and I lost over $100,000 to this scam, which caused me immense stress and embarrassment plus some of my friends decided not to talk to me anymore. It was like my integrity just vanished suddenly, because I’d convinced my friends, I’d shown them my profits and I was actively promoting it, almost like a salesman for her. I tried to go to the police, who said we’d only lost $100,000. They know people who have lost millions, and this shattered every hope I had of recovering my money or tracing these criminals. I found Hackathon Tech Solution with the help of our new intern who referred me to give hackers a try, I’m really glad I listened. With the support of Hackathon Tech Solutions and my Assets recovered I was able to return to investing but only in Stocks now, I stayed away from cryptocurrencies after the scam experience. We often can’t avoid the negative patterns financially but if it’s a wrong investment at the hands of scammers Hackathon Tech Solution has you covered. Don’t hesitate to reach out to info@ hackathon tech solution . com, if you fall victim to this online Bitcoin or cryptocurrency scam. Their WhatsApp is +31 6 47999256

Then there’s my absolute favorite. The car I searched for years to find: the Talbot Lago Grand Sport. I’ve spent more hours on that baby than all the others combined. It’s my one true love. The one I’ll never sell. The only thing I feel the slightest sentimentality about is my cars. Only machinery gives me that impulse to care and nurture. It’s the only time I can be patient and careful. When I’m driving, I actually feel calm. And even just a little bit happy. The wind blows in my face. Speeding by on an open road, everything looks clean and bright. I don’t see the little details—the cracks and grime and ugliness. Not until I stop and I’m walking again.

I was supposed to pick up my brother, Jace, from some party he was stuck at, but I’d been at work. I’d texted Randy to see if he could pick Jace up, but he didn’t answer. So, I called Sarah and she said she would, and on their way home, a drunk driver slammed into them from the side. She died on impact. I blamed myself for asking her to pick up Jace. Jace blamed himself for being at the party. Randy blamed himself for losing his baby sister. All three of us had dealt with the lost of Sarah differently. I’d drowned myself in my music and my studies. Jace had gone on to use drugs and sell them, trying to stop himself from remembering what it had been like in that car. He’d watched her die but never spoke of it. And Randy… He had pretty much become a wild guy who would try anything once.