Somebody Passed Away Quotes

If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning. They're right. It does. However much you beg it to stop. It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember. It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life... All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom. Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor. Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks. And then the world turns... And somebody falls off... And oh God it's such a long way down. Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller... Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible. We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth. Trying to measure how far we have to fall. No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives... Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold. "Time's a great healer." "At least it was quick." "The world keeps turning." Oh Alec— Alec's dead.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents.

Discipline" is a difficult word for most of us. It conjures up images of somebody standing over you with a stick, telling you that you're wrong. But self-discipline is different. It's the skill of seeing through the hollow shouting of your own impulses and piercing their secret. They have no power over you. It's all a show, a deception. Your urges scream and bluster at you; they cajole; they coax; they threaten; but they really carry no stick at all. You give in out of habit. You give in because you never really bother to look beyond the threat. It is all empty back there. There is only one way to learn this lesson, though. The words on this page won't do it. But look within and watch the stuff coming up-restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain-just watch it come up and don't get involved. Much to your surprise, it will simply go away. It rises, it passes away. As simple as that. There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience.

I wandered over across the hall where they were showing a short movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I'd actually gotten a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have gotten her pregnant. I also told her once that I had inoperable cancer and would soon be passed away and gone, eternally. But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.

I focused on the passing houses filled with couples who’d somehow survived this teenage craziness of ‘he likes her but she likes him and he likes somebody else, you just can’t win.’ How did they do it? How did they end up in their golden, warm and cozy living rooms with their 2.3 children and dogs and cats? Because getting from where I was to where they were seemed millions of light years away.

Everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them-- learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it--phshhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away.

The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.

Smith, I met you right here, under the bleachers, and I kissed you. On the drive home, you looked out through the rain at a red light and told me it was the first time in a long time that it felt right. It's so stupid how my dad makes students work for free at the concession stand as a form of detention, isn't it, Rory? You looked miserable, and that was before you even saw me kiss Smith right in front of you. I know you saw, because I knew you were there, watching the same way you watch from your bedroom window, turning away every time somebody looks. Jealousy is a funny thing. We spend so much of high school consumed by it, hating that another person has something we don't, wishing we could taste what it's like to be them. To take that feeling out of your hands for a second and pass it to someone else in relief. So, I guess that's why it felt like I meant it.

If you love somebody deeply and you lose that relationship - whether through death, rejection or separation - you will feel pain. That pain is called grief. Grief is a normal emotional reaction to any significant loss, whether a loved one, a job or a limb. There's no way to avoid or get rid of it - it's just there. And, once accepted, it will pass in its own time. Unfortunately, many of us refuse to accept grief. We will do anything rather than feel it. We may bury ourselves in work, drink heavily, throw ourselves into a new relationship 'on the rebound' or numb ourselves with prescribed medications. But no matter how hard we try to push grief away, deep down inside it's still there. And eventually it will be back. It's like holding a football underwater. As long as you keep holding it down, it stays beneath the surface. But eventually your arm gets tired and the moment you release your grip, the ball leaps straight up out of the water.

These days, there are so few pure country people left on the concession roads that we may be in need of a new category of membership, much as sons and daughters of veterans are now allowed to join the Legion. A few simple questions could be asked, a small fee paid and (assuming that the answers are correct) you could be granted the status of an "almost local." Here are some of the questions you might be asked: Do you have just one suit for weddings and funerals? Do you save plastic buckets? Do you leave your car doors unlocked at all times? Do you have an inside dog and an outside dog? Has your outside dog never been to town? When you pass a neighbour in the car, do you wave from the elbow or do you merely raise one finger from the steering wheel? Do you have trouble keeping the car or truck going in a straight line because you are looking at crops or livestock? Do you sometimes find yourself sitting in the car in the middle of a dirt road chatting with a neighbour out the window while other cars take the ditch to get around you? Can you tell whose tractor is going by without looking out the window? Can people recognize you from three hundred yards away by the way you walk or the tilt of your hat? If somebody honks their horn at you, do you automatically smile and wave? Do most of your conversations open with some observation about the weather? Is your most important news source the store in the village? Have you had surgery in the local hospital? If you hear about a death or a fire in the community, does the woman in your house immediately start making sandwiches or a cake? Do you sometimes find yourself referring to a farm in the neighbourhood by the name of someone who owned it more than twenty-five years ago? If you answered yes to all of the above questions, consider it official: you are a local.

This time Elizabeth Ann didn't answer, because she herself didn't know what the matter was. But I do, and I'll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up. Of course, she didn't really know that till she did come to be grown up, but she had her first dim notion of it in that moment, and it made her feel the way you do when you're learning to skate and somebody pulls away the chair you've been leaning on and says, "Now, go it alone!

I BELIEVE THAT we know much more about God than we admit that we know, than perhaps we altogether know that we know. God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference. Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness—a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. But he also speaks to us about ourselves, about what he wants us to do and what he wants us to become; and this is the area where I believe that we know so much more about him than we admit even to ourselves, where people hear God speak even if they do not believe in him. A face comes toward us down the street. Do we raise our eyes or do we keep them lowered, passing by in silence? Somebody says something about somebody else, and what he says happens to be not only cruel but also funny, and everybody laughs. Do we laugh too, or do we speak the truth? When a friend has hurt us, do we take pleasure in hating him, because hate has its pleasures as well as love, or do we try to build back some flimsy little bridge? Sometimes when we are alone, thoughts come swarming into our heads like bees—some of them destructive, ugly, self-defeating thoughts, some of them creative and glad. Which thoughts do we choose to think then, as much as we have the choice? Will we be brave today or a coward today? Not in some big way probably but in some little foolish way, yet brave still. Will we be honest today or a liar? Just some little pint-sized honesty, but honest still. Will we be a friend or cold as ice today? All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance—not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us differently, are be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs…press on toward the goal.

No,” said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with his usually careless and unemphatic speech—”there’s debts we can’t pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by. While I’ve been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing — it’s too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said about a man’s turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to somebody else. I wanted to pass for childless once, Nancy — I shall pass for childless now against my wish.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora In to the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize S

The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes trigered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble. killing five, and sending a long-haul transport truck over a precipice where it skimmed a power line, ploughed a channel down the lountainside, and then exploded on a viaduct below. He pused one of the nets into the evil-smelling hole and then pulled it our again, and then he drew a breath and held the trigger down with both his thumbs and thrust the lighted wand against the sopping fabric, praying that the flame would catch, prayting that the fire woul d send up smoke and burn away the nets so that the scale of the destruction would be visable from overhead, so that somebody would see it, somebody would notice, so that somebody would care, and as the fre began to blaze and crackle up the ancient trees around him, Tony prayed that somebody would come put it out.

The way you see the change in a person you've been away from for a long time, where somebody who sees him every day, day in, day out, wouldn't notice because the change is gradual. All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished since I was last through this country, things like, for example a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car, then hooting its electric whistle and moving on down the spoiled land to deposit another hatch. Or things like five thousand houses punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, so fresh from the factory theyre still linked together like sausages, a sign saying NEST IN THE WEST HOMES NO DWN. PAYMENT FOR VETS, a playground down the hill from the houses, behind a checker-wire fence and another sign that read ST. LUKE'S SCHOOL FOR BOYS there were five thousand kids in green corduroy pants and white shirts under green pullover sweaters playing crack-the-whip across an acre of crushed gravel. The line popped and twisted and jerked like a snake, and every crack popped a little kid off the end, sent him rolling up against the fence like a tumbleweed. Every crack. And it was always the same little kid, over and over. All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by those guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. They ate and went to bed. The only one they noticed was the little kid at the end of the whip. He'd always be so scuffed and bruised that he'd show up out of place wherever he went. He wasn't able to open up and laugh either. It's a hard thing to laugh if you can feel the pressure of those beams coming from every new car that passes, or every new house you pass.

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

The Magic of Goulash “The trip down the aisle [on a bus or train, during his travels] was where all the stakes were. Because as I’m going down that aisle, I’ve got to look for an empty seat next to somebody who seems interesting. Somebody I can trust, somebody who might be able to trust me. The stakes are high because I know that at the end of that ride, wherever it was going, that person had to invite me to their home. Because I had no money to spend night after night in a hotel.” The clincher question Cal used to get free room and board around Europe as a poor traveler was: “Can you tell me: How do you make the perfect goulash?” He would purposefully sit down next to grandmas, who would then pour out their souls. After a few minutes of passionate pantomiming, people would come from around the train to help translate, no matter the country. Cal never had to worry about where he was spending the night. “During [one dinner party a grandma threw in Hungary to feed me goulash,] one of the neighbors says, ‘Have you ever tasted apricot brandy? Because nobody makes apricot brandy like my father. He lives a half an hour away. You’ve got to come to taste the apricot brandy.’ That weekend, we’re tasting apricot brandy, having a great time. Another party starts, another neighbor comes over to me. ‘Have you ever been to Kiskunhalas, the paprika capital of the world? You cannot leave Hungary without visiting Kiskunhalas.’ Now we’re off to Kiskunhalas. I’m telling you, a single question about goulash could get me 6 weeks of lodging and meals, and that’s how I got passed around the world. 10 years. 10 years.

God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference. Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness—a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. But he also speaks to us about ourselves, about what he wants us to do and what he wants us to become; and this is the area where I believe that we know so much more about him than we admit even to ourselves, where people hear God speak even if they do not believe in him. A face comes toward us down the street. Do we raise our eyes or do we keep them lowered, passing by in silence? Somebody says something about somebody else, and what he says happens to be not only cruel but also funny, and everybody laughs. Do we laugh too, or do we speak the truth? When a friend has hurt us, do we take pleasure in hating him, because hate has its pleasures as well as love, or do we try to build back some flimsy little bridge? Sometimes when we are alone, thoughts come swarming into our heads like bees—some of them destructive, ugly, self-defeating thoughts, some of them creative and glad. Which thoughts do we choose to think then, as much as we have the choice? Will we be brave today or a coward today? Not in some big way probably but in some little foolish way, yet brave still. Will we be honest today or a liar? Just some little pint-sized honesty, but honest still. Will we be a friend or cold as ice today? All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance—not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us differently, are be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs…press on toward the goal.

Toward the end of the three weeks, I have lunch with a representative from the foundation. She wants to know what could be done to make the girls more “confident.” I rattle on, about girl-only classrooms, giving them room away from the boys, time to talk, permission to question and complain without being afraid of being seen as whiners, complainers, bad girls, tough girls. But I know that all of them, boys and girls both, are still only partly formed, soft as Playdoh. They are like golems — their bodies in full flower and everything else a work-in-progress. I don’t dare say there are essential gender differences here, though I wonder more and more. “But girls have so many more role models now,” the foundation representative says. She is a petite, elegant, beautiful woman in a black suit, perfectly coifed. More role models. Which ones, I wonder? An increasingly impossible physical ideal? A clear-cut choice between career and family? They’ve seen their mothers suffer from trying to do both. They know all about the “second shift” of endless work. When I was 15, my role models were burning bras, marching in the street, starting clinics, passing laws and getting arrested. Role models now are selling diet books and making music videos. The simple fact is, I don’t know. I don’t know how to help them. I know that I have to keep checking my watch during lunch and rush off to make the final bell for sixth period, and that all of these children who are almost grown have spent their entire lives ruled by a clock and the demands of strangers. They have grown up in a fragmented and chaotic place over which they have no control. I know they’ve rarely thought about the possibility of getting out; they don’t see any place to get out to, anywhere to go not ruled by bureaucratic entanglements and someone else’s schedule and somebody else’s plans. If girls are somehow wired toward pliancy, then the helpless role of student in the shadow of the institution is the worst place they can be. If we want to teach them independence, the first thing to do would be to give it to them.

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly. I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It must, it must be a wrong number, somebody wanted the Information Booth or-! It must have been audible outside, with all I had the slide partly closed. One of the redcaps passing by turned, looked over, then started coming across toward where I was. To get rid of him I picked up the receiver, put it to my ear. 'You'd better come out now, time's up,' a flat, deadly voice said. 'They're calling your train, but you're not getting on that one - or any other.' 'Wh-where are talking from?' 'The next booth to yours,' the voice jeered. 'You forgot the glass inserts only reach halfway down.' The connection broke and a man's looming figure was shadowing the glass in front of my eyes, before I could even get the receiver back on the hook. I dropped it full-length, tensed my right arm to pound it through his face as soon as I shoved the glass aside. He had a revolver-bore for a top vest-button, trained on me. Two more had shown up behind him, from which direction I hadn't noticed. It was very dark in the booth now, their collective silhouettes shut out all the daylight. The station and all its friendly bustle was blotted out, had receded into the far background, a thousand miles away for all the help it could give me. I slapped the glass wearily aside, came slowly out. One of them flashed a badge - maybe Crow had loaned him his for the occasion. 'You're being arrested for putting slugs in that phone. It won't do any good to raise your voice and shriek for help, try to tell people different. But suit yourself.' I knew that as well as he; heads turned to stare after us by the dozens as they started with me in their midst through the station's main-level. But not one in all that crowd would have dared interfere with what they mistook for a legitimate arrest in the line of duty. The one with the badge kept it conspicuously tilted in his upturned palm, at sight of which the frozen onlookers slowly parted, made way for us through their midst. I was being led to my doom in full view of scores of people. ("Graves For The Living")

Flynn lived in a shiny glass apartment tower on the water in Melbourne. The building looked like hundreds of mirrors reflecting the bright blue sky. He lived at the top of the high-rise. Kope and I stepped off the elevator and looked down the hall at Flynn’s door. We’d been silent. Nodding to each other, we sent our hearing into the apartment. With a quiet gasp, I yanked my auditory sense back to normal. Flynn was busy with company at the moment. Very busy. Kope made a low sound and closed his eyes, shaking his head as if to clear away the sounds he’d heard. My face heated and I shifted from foot to foot, fighting back the nervous smile that always wanted to surface at inappropriate times. I found a small sitting area around the corner with glass walls overlooking the city. We sat, taking in the view. When my stupid urge to smile finally settled, I braved another look at Kope and pointed to myself, using my new, limited sign-language skills to tell him I’d listen. Given the new information about his inclination for lust, it was only fair. I quickly looked away, embarrassed by the crassness of the situation. I wasn’t going to listen the whole time. I’d just pop in for a quick check. Ten minutes passed. Still busy. Half an hour passed. Busy. Forty-five minutes passed. I shook my head to let Kope know they were still at it. He fidgeted and paced, out of his normal, calm comfort zone. An hour and ten minutes passed, and I took a turn at stretching my legs. I was getting hungry. I thought we’d be through with our talk by this time. We could interrupt Flynn, but I didn’t want him to freak out in front of somebody. We needed his guest to leave so we could talk alone. At the hour and a half mark, Kope checked his watch and looked at me. I sent my hearing into the room. Oh, they weren’t in the bedroom anymore. Finally! I wiggled my hearing around until it hit the sound of running water. A shower. This was a good sign. But wait . . . nope. I shook my head, eyes wide. Was this normal? Kope did something uncharacteristic then. He grinned, giving a little huff through his nose. This elicited a small giggle from me and I pressed both hands over my mouth. It was too late, though. At this point, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I could feel the crazy, unfortunate amusement rising. I jumped up and ran as spritely as I could to the stairwell with Kope on my heels. We sprinted down several flights before I fell back against the wall, laughter bubbling out. It went on and on, only getting worse when Kope joined in with his deep chuckling, a joyful rumble.

Sophie?” He knocked, though not that hard, then decided she wasn’t going hear anything less than a regiment of charging dragoons over Kit’s racket. He pushed the door open to find half of Sophie’s candles lit and the lady pacing the room with Kit in her arms. “He won’t settle,” she said. “He isn’t wet; he isn’t hungry; he isn’t in want of cuddling. I think he’s sickening for something.” Sophie looked to be sickening. Her complexion was pale even by candlelight, her green eyes were underscored by shadows, and her voice held a brittle, anxious quality. “Babies can be colicky.” Vim laid the back of his hand on the child’s forehead. This resulted in a sudden cessation of Kit’s bellowing. “Ah, we have his attention. What ails you, young sir? You’ve woken the watch and disturbed my lady’s sleep.” “Keep talking,” Sophie said softly. “This is the first time he’s quieted in more than an hour.” Vim’s gaze went to the clock on her mantel. It was a quarter past midnight, meaning Sophie had gotten very little rest. “Give him to me, Sophie. Get off your feet, and I’ll have a talk with My Lord Baby.” She looked reluctant but passed the baby over. When the infant started whimpering, Vim began a circuit of the room. “None of your whining, Kit. Father Christmas will hear of it, and you’ll have a bad reputation from your very first Christmas. Do you know Miss Sophie made Christmas bread today? That’s why the house bore such lovely scents—despite your various efforts to put a different fragrance in the air.” He went on like that, speaking softly, rubbing the child’s back and hoping the slight warmth he’d detected was just a matter of the child’s determined upset, not inchoate sickness. Sophie would fret herself into an early grave if the boy stopped thriving. “Listen,” Vim said, speaking very quietly against the baby’s ear. “You are worrying your mama Sophie. You’re too young to start that nonsense, not even old enough to join the navy. Go to sleep, my man. Sooner rather than later.” The child did not go to sleep. He whimpered and whined, and by two in the morning, his nose was running most unattractively. Sophie would not go to sleep either, and Vim would not leave her alone with the baby. “This is my fault,” Sophie said, her gaze following Vim as he made yet another circuit with the child. “I was the one who had to go to the mews, and I should never have taken Kit with me.” “Nonsense. He loved the outing, and you needed the fresh air.” The baby wasn’t even slurping on his fist, which alarmed Vim more than a possible low fever. And that nose… Vim surreptitiously used a hankie to tend to it, but Sophie got to her feet and came toward them. “He’s ill,” she said, frowning at the child. “He misses his mother and I took him out in the middle of a blizzard and now he’s ill.” Vim put his free arm around her, hating the misery in her tone. “He has a runny nose, Sophie. Nobody died of a runny nose.” Her expression went from wan to stricken. “He could die?” She scooted away from Vim. “This is what people mean when they say somebody took a chill, isn’t it? It starts with congestion, then a fever, then he becomes weak and delirious…” “He’s not weak or delirious, Sophie. Calm down.

Stark Electric Jesus Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide

You going to finish beating yourself up soon? Because I've got a lot of work to catch up on, seeing as I had to go to Italy to help wipe your blood off the street. You getting yourself shot really put a crimp in my schedule." David turned back toward Tyler. "Did you use that same tone when you suggested that fucker DeMorney get an X ray?" "Probably. It's the one I use when somebody's being annoyingly stupid." The raw edges in David's stomach smoothed away, and the first glint of humor sparked into his eyes. "I'd take a swing at you over that, but you're bigger than me." "Younger, too." "Bastard. Now that I think of it, I could take you down, but I'll give you a break because Sophia's heading this way. I'd hate for her to have to watch her future stepfather kick your ass." "In your dreams." "I'm going to go sulk in the caves." He started off, pausing as he passed Tyler. "Thanks

Did these two actors, both quite conservative, see the parallels between Norton and studio moguls like Sam Goldwyn? Did Norton’s private police force suggest to these men who began as extras the incipient fascism of the system they had endured? In Brennan’s case, the answer is probably yes. Years later, reminiscing about the Hollywood studio system, he told a television director that the studio guard was among “the feared men in Hollywood.” Walter remembered the day he arrived in his car for work on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a David O. Selznick production. “What’s your name?” the studio guard asked. “Do you have a pass to drive on?” Walter said, “My name is Walter Brennan. If Mr. Selznick asks where I am, tell him I’m at the beach.” The guard asked, “Which beach?” Walter replied, “Just the beach,” and drove away. Sounding like the Colonel, Brennan told a reporter, “My weakness is talking about how I’m always going to punch somebody in the nose.” Sometimes he did take a swing and even cussed out “some overbearing studio hireling who picks on extras or on one of Brennan’s friends of the hard luck days.

Point being: we’ll never have a harmonious, kind and functional society without extensive inner work being done by many or most of us on a regular basis. And this is where the neo-monastic institutions would be of help: At major transit stations and periods of crisis in life, people would be supported to do the hard work that inner integration requires. Seriously. It’s hard work. It takes time, effort and resources. I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago. There was a terrifying emptiness in my heart that had somehow snuck up upon me during sleep. There was a kind of inner storm cloud, a chaos I couldn’t grasp or even see the beginning or the end of. In my mind lingered the memory of a strangely violent dream in which I had been stopped from calling an ambulance after somebody had been struck down. I felt deeply disoriented; drifting in an imageless field. Everything around me felt unreal somehow, and I feared that madness might creep up on me, as it has on others in my family. Yet, the experience was eerily familiar. I sensed how this confusion had made itself known earlier, in waking states, as a subtle tinge on the fringe of my awareness. I spent a good portion of the following day away from writing and studies, meditating and exploring what appeared to be an old wound that had opened in my mind. Today, a few days later, my mind is clear and open as a cloudless sky, the love of life resting softly in my chest. I cherish these peaceful moments, as I know they too will pass, sooner or later.

When you feel comfortable with yourself you will confidentially speak with any individual you need. A major indication of somebody who is comfortable with their very own self is the capacity to keep in touch. The more confident somebody is, in himself (or the less he needs to cover up), the more outlandish he will keep away from eye to eye contact. More often than not, the individual in question won't see him/herself as a beneficiary who is trusting that other people will pass judgment, instead he considers himself to be the one others need to pull in or the person who is attempting to make sense of those he is conversing with.

But the laws of the schools were aimed at something distant and vague. What did it mean to, as our elders told us, “grow up and be somebody”? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline? To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant always packing an extra number 2 pencil and working quietly. Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses—certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, to practice writing between the lines, copying the directions legibly, memorizing theorems extracted from the world they were created to represent. All of it felt so distant to me. I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom? The question was never answered. I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them. Some years after I’d left school, after I’d dropped out of college, I heard a few lines from Nas that struck me: Ecstasy, coke, you say it’s love, it is poison Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison That was exactly how I felt back then. I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why—for us and only us—is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is not a hyperbolic concern. When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, and while I couldn’t crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.

I think everybody needs a father of sorts. Somebody that they can talk to or lean on or cry on his shoulder once in a while. And I don’t know who that person would be in my brother’s case, after my father passed away. There was no one alive that would be an adequate substitute. If he was looking to me for guidance, he didn’t see any, and so he went on his own.

You do seem to get on well with her, but I have an advantage, my lord. One you will never be able to compete with.” “An advantage?” “Yes.” Emmie said, feeling a little sorry for him, because he really would not be able to argue the point much further. “I am a female, you see. A girl. Well, a grown woman, but I was a girl, as Bronwyn is.” “You are a female?” The earl looked her up and down, and Emmie felt herself blushing. It was a thorough and thoroughly dispassionate perusal. “Why so you are, but how does this make yours the better guidance?” “There are certain things, my lord…” Emmie felt her blush deepening but refused to capitulate to embarrassment. “Things a lady knows a gentleman will not, things somebody must pass along to a little girl in due course if she’s to manage in this life.” “Things.” The earl’s brow knit. “Things like childbirth, perhaps?” Emmie swallowed, resenting his bluntness even while she admired him for it. “Well, yes. I doubt you’ve given birth, my lord.” “Have you?” he countered, peering down at her. “That is not the point.” “So no advantage to you there, particularly as I have attended a birth or two in my time, and I doubt you’ve managed that either.” “Why on earth would…?” Emmie’s mouth snapped shut before she could ask the obvious, rude, burning question. “I was a soldier,” he said gently. “And war is very hard on soldiers, but even harder on women and children, Miss Farnum. A woman giving birth in a war zone is generally willing to accept the assistance of whomever is to hand, regardless of standing, gender, or even what uniform he wears.” “So you’ve a little experience, but you aren’t going to tell me you’re familiar with the details of a lady’s bodily… well, that is to say. Well.” “Her menses?” The earl looked amused again. “You might have some greater degree of familiarity than I. I will grant that much, but as a man with five sisters, I am far more knowledgeable and sympathetic regarding female lunation than I had ever aspired to be. And surely, these matters you raise—childbirth and courses—they are a ways off for Miss Winnie?” “Bronwyn,” Emmie muttered. Standing so close to him, she could catch the earl’s scent, and it managed to combine both elegance and barbarism. It was spicy rather than floral, but also fresh, like meadows and breezes and cold, fast-running streams. “She answers to Winnie,” he said, “and she got away from you.” “She did.

Whilst passing by the lane where the nests of concubines rested, I saw a little temple. Somebody lit the lamp in prayer. I couldn't decide to bow down to the temple or not to stop there and walk away. Never heard if odalisques have gods too... if yes,are they as pure as ours?

Seeing the value of publication shown by Röntgen’s disclosure, he wrote three articles for the Electrical Review in 1896 describing what it felt like to stick your head in an x-ray beam. The effects were odd. “For instance,” he first wrote, “I find there is a tendency to sleep and I find that time seems to pass quickly.” He speculated that he had discovered an electrical sleep aid, much safer than narcotics. In his next article for 1896, after having spent a lot of time being x-rayed, he observed “painful irritation of the skin, inflammation, and the appearance of blisters … , and in some spots there were open wounds.” In his final article of 1896, published on December 1, he advised staying away from x-rays, “… so it may not happen to somebody else. There are real dangers of Röntgen radiation.

To be an original human, you must die to all labels. This death brings the real vitality in life. Now one may ask, how can one achieve it? And there is the problem of the so-called modern humans. They all want somebody to tell them, how to achieve something. Here is a fact, calculus can be taught, quantum physics can be taught, molecular biology can be taught, but not freedom of mind. And why do you need a path in the first place? If there is a bottle labeled poison, on the shelf, you don't just bring it down and drink the poison to know whether it will kill you. Likewise, once you really see the poisonous implications of the socio-culturally passed on labels, you simply tear them apart - throw them away as far as possible. Does one need to deceive oneself, to understand self-deception! If not, then why do you deceive yourself, by conforming to the social labels, be it a religious label, a non-religious label, a nationalist label, an intellectual label, or a gender label. You are a human - that's it.

The mixture of displeasure and relief is so overpowering my mind. I knew that I would pick to have that pleasure if he kept being so passionate and felt right. I look down the tunneling hallway my eyes feel like kaleidoscopes, yet I can figure there are kids with sparklers and the firecrackers the sounds are going off within all the colors I see. He has to hold me with my back against the walls or I am sure I would fall, I see Justen feeling the left of a rail of the stairs, walking over the entryway into their room feather down that hallway, up above me, me like they’re going to slip away any second, and share the rest of the night cuddling in bed. Is tonight the night I follow him to his room and crawl in with him, or isn’t tonight the night, maybe hold back until tomorrow? That kept running through my head. Tonight, or tomorrow? Tomorrow I’ll wake up and be the same, regardless if I am in his bed or not. This earth will look the same, and everything will feel and taste and smell the same. What am I rushing it for, he’s going to love me the same if not more is, I hold out? Maybe play that three-date rule. My throat gets taut, just thinking about what we could be doing right now, also I have to think about what Ray and Justen are doing, and my eyes start to tingle in ire, and all I can think at that moment is that it’s all Ray’s fault, that my sis has gone home broken-hearted. Yet I don’t want her spending the night here anyway, with him of all boys. It’s funny how you can go from love to hate in seconds. Half an hour later the party starts to wind down. Inside, everyone is just about passed out, at this point, I need to find a place to crash too. Then I thought, should I, or shouldn’t I? My sis is one of those shy ones around cute boys, and those are the ones you have to worry about because they are freaks between the sheets. I can see that somebody pulled the drooping icicle lights off the wall there getting crouched on by the others passing by. They are getting tangled up in my feet, as I move. There twanging and shorting out from the broken blabs, in sparks lighting up the grime corners, like cups and broken beer bottles. You have to be careful like I see a lot of girls with flip-flops on or barefoot running around not a good idea. I think that I’m feeling better now until I move away from the walls, but I’m starting to feel more like the girl I should be around all my friends. ‘There’s always tomorrow,’ Jenny walked up to me and said before going up to her bed when I told her about Ray, yet she seemed not suppressed and I ran the phrase over and over in my head like a chant: There’s always tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow. So that is what I went with thinking… I am going to be with him tomorrow night. I see myself in the ornate hall mirror in the makeup that I replayed, thinking- ‘God Marcel loves this face.’ Every time I put on makeup it reminds me of my mom, I used to watch me bowed over her vanity, getting ready for dates with my father-daughter dates-and it calms me down.

Song" Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree. All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away Beside which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined. The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything. The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks. The head called to the body. The body to the head. They missed each other. The missing grew large between them, Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills. Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder, Sang long and low until the morning light came up over The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped…. The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after The night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit. The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats. She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming Made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn, And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling Like the feeling of the stones gouging the soft undersides Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles At the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take These things away so that the girl would not see them. They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat. They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke…. But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job, Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark. What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know Was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them, Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen, Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song, The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call. Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness. Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song. (• BOA Editions; 1st edition 1995)

Why should I side with you? Why should I care if you win?” The phouka raked fingers through his hair. “You have seen one of them, one of their forms. That is what seeks domination over every natural thing in this place. We of the Seelie Court are capricious, and not always well-disposed toward humankind. But would you hand this city over to the likes of what you saw tonight? That is the Unseelie Court. If we fall, every park, every boulevard tree, every grassy lawn would be their dwelling place.” Eddi sighed. “It’s not just for you, it’s for the entire seven-country metro area. Couldn’t we just let them have St. Paul?” The phouka made a disgusted noise. “All right. What if they did take over? Would we all be eaten in our beds?” He shook his head. “There are places,” he began slowly, “that belong to them. Have you ever passed through some small town, surrounded by fertile country and fed by commerce, that seemed to be rotting away even as you watched? Where the houses and the people were faded, and all the storefronts stood empty?” Eddi remembered a few. “Or a city whose new buildings looked tawdry, whose old ones were ramshackle, where the streets were grimy and the wind was never fresh, where money passed from hand to hand yet benefited no one?” His words were quicker now. “This city is alive with the best magic of mortal folk. The very light off the skyscrapers and the lakes vibrate with it. If the Unseelie Court takes up residence here, this will be a place where people fear their neighbors, where life drains the living until art and wit are luxuries, where any pleasant thing must be imported and soon loses its savor.” He fell silent, as if embarrassed by his own eloquence. Eddi rubbed her hands over her face, trying to rub away her confusion, her anger, her fear. Finally she asked the only question she had left. “Can’t you get somebody else?” The phouka began to laugh weakly. “Oh, go to bed, Eddi McCandry. You could befuddle a stone. Go to bed, and sleep soundly, and tempt me not into some foolish flap of the tongue.

She watches him till he disappears, feeling lighter now because the big black car has gone and a big blackness that was sitting on her has gone too. Then she wanders down the other side of the koppie, pausing here and there to look at a rock or a leaf, to her own house, or the house she thinks of as her own. By the time she comes in through the back door, a hundred and thirty-three minutes and twenty-two seconds have passed since she ran away. Four cars, including the long dark one, have departed, a single new one has arrived. The telephone has rung eighteen times, the doorbell twice, on one occasion because somebody has sent flowers that improbably turn up all the way out here. Twenty-two cups of tea, six mugs of coffee, three glasses of cool drink and six brandy-and-Cokes have been consumed. The three toilets downstairs, unused to such traffic, have between them been flushed twenty-seven times, carrying away nine point eight litres of urine, five point two litres of shit, one stomachful of regurgitated food, and five millilitres of sperm. Numbers go on and on, but what does mathematics help? In any human life there is really only one of everything.

Serch." Why did he always sound like the one who'd been left, who'd been denied? His fingers brushed Serch's forearm, though, and it damn near took him out. His belly pulled tight and heat crashed over his head like a fucking wave, rocking him and weakening his limbs. "Don't do this," German begged softly. "Gram is gone. It's just you and me now." He clasped Serch's shoulder. "I don't want to fight." All Serch had was the fight, otherwise, he'd be empty, hollowed out by the pain with no one to pass it off to. "Serch." German's whole fucking palm rested on Serch's face. It just sat there, warm and enticing. The best touch a beggar like him could ever hope to have. "I love you." His soul shook. His heart broke all over again. Serch spun away from him, giving German his back as he leaned against the doorframe, head bowed. "Please." That shaky voice sounded close, too close to Serch. "Please." "Fuck your love." Serch faced him with a snarl, chest heaving as he gave up on attempting to control himself. "You love me, German? You kiss me and tell me you want me, and then the instant I turn my back you move across the fucking country with somebody else. You love me? You stay away for years and only speak to me once, once--" He held up a finger. "On the phone." His brother's mouth opened and closed, but Serch refused to let him talk. "I've had birthdays without you. I've taken care of Gram without you. I had to watch her die..." His voice disappeared then, and he had to swallow and swallow before finishing. "Without you." "I'm sorry." "Don't tell me that shit!" Serch exploded. "Tell me how I can stop wanting you, because I do. Tell me how I can stop feeling your body against mine, because I do. Your cries, your taste. I still get off on them." He grabbed the front of his own t-shirt, fisting it, tugging on it. "Tell me how to stop missing you, because I've been lonely since the day you left. And I'm alone now, even with your breath incinerating my skin." "I miss you, too." Fuck! Somebody moved. Somebody must have moved because they were on each other, the press of their bodies so fucking good Serch's eyes watered. German was in his embrace, arms at his nape, fingers gripping his hair. Parted lips on his.

Today, I’ve passed my brother’s lesson on to my kids and taught them to stick up for themselves and each other. “If someone is threatening to hurt you, and they’re bigger than you, pick up something and knock them in the head with it. Your problems will be gone.” That may sound like a violent message, but stopping a bully is different than being a bully. The real message is: You are somebody. You matter. And no one is allowed to take away your right to your property, your right to your safety, or your right to be yourself. Those are things that should be defended.

that he sit down in the kitchen and have some rolls and milk, which he accepted gratefully. His feeling of weakness and dizziness was rapidly disappearing. “Is that old farmhouse down the road deserted?” he asked, pointing in the direction where he had spent the night. “Yes, ’tis,” she replied. “The old folks passed away and nobody wants the place.” “Anybody been using it since they left?” Frank asked casually. The woman laughed. “That tumble-down place? Who’d want to stay there?” “Tramps might—or somebody looking for a hideout.

Only love can dispel hate From Satsang with Giten on Buddha, November 12, 2015, in Stockholm Buddha says: SPEAK OR ACT WITH AN IMPURE MINDAND TROUBLE WILL FOLLOW YOUAS THE WHEEL FOLLOWS THE OX THAT DRIVES THE CART When Buddha uses the concept "impure mind", he means mind. Mind is impure, and no-mind is pure. SPEAK OR ACT WITH AN IMPURE MIND means to speak or act from the mind. AND TROUBLE WILL FOLLOW YOU means that misery and suffering is the result of the mind, because the mind means unawareness. Mind will bring trouble and suffering as certain AS THE WHEEL FOLLOWS THE OX THAT DRIVES THE CART. WE ARE WHAT WE THINK ALL THAT WE ARE ARISES WITH OUR THOUGHTS SPEAK OR ACT WITH A PURE MIND AND HAPPINESS WILL FOLLOW YOU AS YOUR SHADOW, UNSHAKABLE When Buddha says "pure mind", he means no-mind, awareness. Happiness will follow you if you have a pure mind or no-mind. Suffering is a result of mind, of unawareness, happiness is a result of no-mind, of awareness. Happiness cannot be searched for directly, happiness can only be found if you do not search it directly. On the contrary, you have to search for awareness. When awareness comes, happiness comes of its own accord. "LOOK HOW HE ABUSED ME AND BEAT ME, HOW HE THREW ME DOWN AND ROBBED ME" LIVE WITH SUCH THOUGHTS AND YOU LIVE IN HATE "LOOK HOW HE ABUSED ME AND BEAT ME HOW HE THREW ME DOWN AND ROBBED ME" ABANDON SUCH THOUGHTS AND LIVE IN LOVE Fear and hate exists in the past and the future, love exists in the moment, in the here and now. Love exists in the present moment. Fear and hate has a reference in the past. Somebody has abused you in the past, and you are carrying it like a wound. Fear and hate is a limitation. If you hate somebody, you also create a hate in the heart of that person towards you. The world lives in fear, hate, destructiveness and violence. Hate creates hell on earth, love creates a paradise on earth. True love comes from your inner being. It is spontaneously welling up of joy, which has nothing to do with the past or the future. True love is in the moment. IN THIS WORLDHATE NEVER YET DISPELLED HATE ONLY LOVE DISPELS HATE THIS IS THE LAW ANCIENT AND INEXHAUSTIBLE Hate never dispels hate, darkness cannot dispel darkness. Only love can dispel hate. The eternal law is that only love dispels hate, only light dispels darkness. Bring light into a room and the darkness disappears by itself. How can you bring light into your own being? Through becoming silent, aware, awake and conscious. That is how to bring the light in. The moment you are aware and awake, hate will not be found. It is not possible to hate somebody with awareness. You can only hate somebody in unawareness. When you are conscious, hate disappears, when you are not conscious, then hate is there. Love and hate, light and darkness, cannot exist together, because hate is the absence of love, darkness is the absence of light. YOU TOO SHALL PASS AWAY KNOWING THIS, HOW CAN YOU QUARREL We waste our life in quarreling, in conflict, when life is so short. Use your whole energy for awareness and meditation. Then you can become a light. Meditation will make you awake, because you will discover your inner being. Meditation brings an awakening. For the first time you will feel the truth of your own being.

What has put that look on your face, Sophie?” “What look?” She laid the child in the cradle where Vim had set it near the hearth. “Like you just lost your best friend.” “I was thinking of fostering Kit.” And just like that, she was blinking back tears. She tugged the blankets up around the baby, who immediately set about kicking them away. “Naughty baby,” she whispered. “You’ll catch a chill.” “Sophie?” A large male hand landed on her shoulder. “Sophie, look at me.” She shook her head and tried again to secure Kit’s blankets. “My dear, you are crying.” Another hand settled on the opposite shoulder, and now the kindness was palpable in his voice. Vim turned her gently into his embrace and wrapped both arms around her. It wasn’t a careful, tentative hug. It was a secure embrace. He wasn’t offering her a fleeting little squeeze to buck her up, he was holding her, his chin propped on her crown, the entire solid length of his body available to her for warmth and support. Which had the disastrous effect of turning a trickle of tears into a deluge. “I can’t keep him.” She managed four words around the lump in her throat. “To think of him being passed again into the keeping of strangers… I can’t…” “Hush.” He held a hanky up to her nose, one laden with the bergamot scent she already associated with him. For long minutes, Sophie struggled to regain her equilibrium while Vim stroked his hand slowly over her back. “Babies do this,” Vim said quietly. “They wear you out physically and pluck at your heartstrings and coo and babble and wend their way into your heart, and there’s nothing you can do stop it. Nobody is asking you to give the child up now.” “They won’t have to ask. In my position, I can’t be keeping somebody else’s castoff—” She stopped, hating the hysterical note that had crept into her voice and hating that she might have just prompted the man to whom she was clinging to ask her what exactly her position was. “Kit is not a castoff. He’s yours, and you’re keeping him. Maybe you will foster him elsewhere for a time, but he’ll always be yours too.” She didn’t quite follow the words rumbling out of him. She focused instead on the feel of his arms around her, offering support and security while she parted company temporarily with her dignity. “You are tired, and that baby has knocked you off your pins, Sophie Windham. You’re borrowing trouble if you try to sort out anything more complicated right now than what you’ll serve him for dinner.” She’d grown up with five brothers, and she’d watched her papa in action any number of times. She knew exactly what Vim was up to, but she took the bait anyway. “He loved the apples.” This time when Vim offered her his handkerchief, she took it, stepping back even as a final sigh shuddered through her. “He

Lara Jean?” I open my eyes. I’m not dreaming, and this is real. This is a nightmare. Peter Kavinsky is holding my letter in his hand. It’s my handwriting, my envelope, my everything. “How--how did you get that?” “It came in the mail yesterday.” Peter sighs. Gruffly he says, “Listen, it’s no big deal; I just hope you’re not going around telling people--” “It came in the mail? To your house?” “Yeah.” I feel faint. I actually feel faint. Please let me faint right now, because if I faint I will no longer be here, in this moment. It will be like in movies when a girl passes out from the horror of it all and the fighting happens while she is asleep and she wakes up in a hospital bed with a bruise or two, but she’s missed all the bad stuff. I wish that was my life instead of this. I can feel myself start to sweat. Rapidly I say, “You should know that I wrote that letter a really long time ago.” “Okay.” “Like, years ago. Years and years ago. I don’t even remember what I said.” Up close, your face wasn’t so much handsome as beautiful. “Seriously, that letter’s from middle school. I don’t even know who would have sent it. Can I see it?” I reach for the letter, trying to stay calm and not sound desperate. Just casual cool. He hesitates and then grins his perfect Peter grin. “Nah, I want to keep it. I never got a letter like this before.” I leap forward, and quick like a cat I snatch it out of his hand. Peter laughs and throws up his hands in surrender. “All right, fine, have it. Geez.” “Thanks.” I start to back away from him. The paper is shaking in my hand. “Wait.” He hesitates. “Listen, I didn’t mean to steal your first kiss or whatever. I mean, that wasn’t my intention--” I laugh, a forced and fake laugh that sounds crazy even to my own ears. People turn around and look at us. “Apology accepted! Ancient history!” And then I bolt. I run faster than I’ve ever run. All the way to the girls’ locker room. How did this even happen? I sink to the floor. I’ve had the going-to-school-naked dream before. I’ve had the going-to-school-naked-forgot-to-study-for-an-exam-in-a-class-I-never-signed-up-for combo, the naked-exam-somebody-trying-to-kill-me combo. This is all that times infinity. And then, because there’s nothing left for me to do, I take the letter out of the envelope and I read it.

There will be somebody to carry on the work of the Lord; and so long as the work goes on, what matter who does it？ God buries the workmen, but the devil himself cannot bury the work. The work is everlasting, though the workmen die. We pass away, as star by star grows dim; but the eternal light is never fading. God shall have the victory. His Son shall come in his glory. His Spirit shall be poured out among the people; and though it be neither this man, nor that, nor the other, God will find the man to the world’s end who will carry on his cause, and give him the glory.