Totally Tired Quotes

I'm tired of waiting by the phone, and second-guessing what a guy says and trusting someone not to hurt me. Again. I've been storming the relationship castle for fifteen years, and I still don't have my prince. I've got a bunch of battle scars from the field and I want to go home and nurse my wounds. I don't want to fight anymore.

Anyway GONE. My goal in writing GONE To creep you out. To make you stay up all night reading then roll into school tired the next day so that you totally blow the big test and end up dropping out of school. GONE. Imagine a world where every adult vanishes in an instant.

To be honest, it was pretty hard to leave. I desperately wanted to turn around, and tell him everything would be okay. That I adore him and I trust him and that I'll stand by him while he goes through this tough time. But I'm just too tired. I'm thirty years old. I'm tired of relationships that are always painful. I'm tired of hurting. I'm tired of waiting by the phone, and second-guessing what a guy says and trusting someone not to hurt me. Again. I've been storming the relationship castle for fifteen years, and I still don't have my prince. I've got a bunch of battle scars from the field and I want to go home and nurse my wounds. I don't want to fight anymore.

Wait Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don't go too early. You're tired. But everyone's tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

You could have let that thing flatten me, but you didn't. Why?” “I could ask you the same question.” She was too tired to edit her mouth. “You're my master. I couldn't let that thing kill another trapper, even if I think he's a total asshat.” Harper looked at her for a long time then cracked a toothy grin. “And you're one mouthy bitch, but you're my apprentice. I don't need the reputation that my people die because I don't protect them.” That was fair.

No, I’m done! I’m tired, I’m sweaty, I’m in agony, and why do I feel like I need to shit?” “It’s totally natural to feel that way,” said Grace in a placatory, calming voice. “Some women even have one during labor.” “What?” The word dripped with horror. “Women can shit when they’re in labor? Tell me that won’t happen to me! Don’t you let me shit, Grace!

Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them. Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food. He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something. The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone. The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Getting dumped is never really about getting dumped.' 'What is it about, then?' I ask. 'It's about every rejection you've ever experienced in your entire life. It's about the kids at school who called you names. And the parent who never came back. And the girls who wouldn't dance with you at the disco. And the school girlfriend who wanted to be single when she went to uni. And any criticism at work. When someone says they don't want to be with you, you feel the pain of every single one of those times in life where you felt like you weren't good enough. You live through all of it again.' 'I don't know how to get over it, Mum,' I say. 'At this point I'm so tired of myself. I don't know how to let go of her.' 'You don't let go once. That's your first mistake. You say goodbye over a lifetime. You might not have thought about her for ten years, then you'll hear a song or you'll walk past somewhere you once went together - something will come to the surface that you'd totally forgotten about. And you say another goodbye. You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times.' 'Does it get easier?' 'Much,' she says.

This is an ode to all of those that have never asked for one. A thank you in words to all of those that do not do what they do so well for the thanking. This is to the mothers. This is to the ones who match our first scream with their loudest scream; who harmonize in our shared pain and joy and terrified wonder when life begins. This is to the mothers. To the ones who stay up late and wake up early and always know the distance between their soft humming song and our tired ears. To the lips that find their way to our foreheads and know, somehow always know, if too much heat is living in our skin. To the hands that spread the jam on the bread and the mesmerizing patient removal of the crust we just cannot stomach. This is to the mothers. To the ones who shout the loudest and fight the hardest and sacrifice the most to keep the smiles glued to our faces and the magic spinning through our days. To the pride they have for us that cannot fit inside after all they have endured. To the leaking of it out their eyes and onto the backs of their hands, to the trails of makeup left behind as they smile through those tears and somehow always manage a laugh. This is to the patience and perseverance and unyielding promise that at any moment they would give up their lives to protect ours. This is to the mothers. To the single mom’s working four jobs to put the cheese in the mac and the apple back into the juice so their children, like birds in a nest, can find food in their mouths and pillows under their heads. To the dreams put on hold and the complete and total rearrangement of all priority. This is to the stay-at-home moms and those that find the energy to go to work every day; to the widows and the happily married. To the young mothers and those that deal with the unexpected announcement of a new arrival far later than they ever anticipated. This is to the mothers. This is to the sack lunches and sleepover parties, to the soccer games and oranges slices at halftime. This is to the hot chocolate after snowy walks and the arguing with the umpire at the little league game. To the frosting ofbirthday cakes and the candles that are always lit on time; to the Easter egg hunts, the slip-n-slides and the iced tea on summer days. This is to the ones that show us the way to finding our own way. To the cutting of the cord, quite literally the first time and even more painfully and metaphorically the second time around. To the mothers who become grandmothers and great-grandmothers and if time is gentle enough, live to see the children of their children have children of their own. To the love. My goodness to the love that never stops and comes from somewhere only mothers have seen and know the secret location of. To the love that grows stronger as their hands grow weaker and the spread of jam becomes slower and the Easter eggs get easier to find and sack lunches no longer need making. This is to the way the tears look falling from the smile lines around their eyes and the mascara that just might always be smeared with the remains of their pride for all they have created. This is to the mothers.

In Tibetan there’s an interesting word: ye tang che. The ye part means “totally, completely,” and the rest of it means “exhausted.” Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say “totally fed up.” It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.

Last night he spent an hour and a half lying on the floor of his room, because he was too tired to complete the journey from his en suite back to his bed. There was the en suite, behind him, and there was the bed, in front of him, both well within view, but somehow it was impossible to move either forward or backward, only downward, onto the floor, until his body was arranged motionless on the carpet. Well, here I am on the floor, he thought. Is life so much worse here than it would be on the bed, or even in a totally different location? No, life is exactly the same. Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head. I might as well be lying here, breathing the vile dust of the carpet into my lungs, gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body, because it’s essentially the same as every other possible experience.

He smiled down at the baby, and kissed him on the head. "I give you my blessing, Leo. First male great-grandchild! I have a feeling you are special, like Hazel was. You are more than a regular baby, eh? You will carry on for me. You will see her someday. Tell her hello for me." "Bisabuelo," Ezperanza said, a little more insistently. "yes, yes." Sammy chuckled. "El viejo loco rambles on. I am tired, Ezperanza. You are right. But I'll rest soon. It's been a good life. Raise him well, nieta." The scene faded. Leo was standing on the deck of the Argo II, holding Hazel's hand. The sun had gone down, and the ship was lit only by bronze lanterns. Hazel's eyes were puffy from crying. What they'd seen was too much. The whole ocean heaved under them, and now for the first time Leo felt as if they were totally adrift. "Hello, Hazel Levesque," he said, his voice gravelly.

There is something incredibly attractive and inviting about people who stop pointing fingers and posing and pretending to be totally good and totally right, and instead start taking themselves less seriously and openly and freely admit that they are not yet what they should be.

Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.

Intensive mothering is the ultimate female Olympics: We are all in powerful competition with each other, in constant danger of being trumped by the mom down the street, or in the magazine we're reading. The competition isn't just over who's a good mother--it's over who's the best. We compete with each other; we compete with ourselves. The best mothers always put their kids' needs before their own, period. The best mothers are the main caregivers. For the best mothers, their kids are the center of the universe. The best mothers always smile. They always understand. They are never tired. They never lose their temper. They never say, "Go to the neighbor's house and play while Mommy has a beer." Their love for their children is boundless, unflagging, flawless, total. Mothers today cannot just respond to their kids' needs, they must predict them--and with the telepathic accuracy of Houdini. They must memorize verbatim the books of all the child-care experts and know which approaches are developmentally appropriate at different ages. They are supposed to treat their two-year-olds with "respect." If mothers screw up and fail to do this on any given day, they should apologize to their kids, because any misstep leads to permanent psychological and/or physical damage. Anyone who questions whether this is the best and the necessary way to raise kids is an insensitive, ignorant brute. This is just common sense, right?

She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate

Well, golly gee, I’m so sorry that you had to answer an awkward question at lunch. That must have been so inconvenient. Much more inconvenient than getting hit in the face with a tampon flying out of your locker.” When he grins, I totally lose it. All the frustration and hurt comes rolling out of me. I’m tired of playing the good, calm girl. I rise up on my knees, reach over and hit him across the top of his head. “Fuck,” he curses. “What the hell was that for?” “That’s for being an asshole!” I hit him again,

Sam Keen points out that Zen masters spend years to reach an enlightenment that every natural child already knows—the total incarnation of sleeping when you’re tired and eating when you’re hungry. What irony that this state of Zen-like bliss is programmatically and systematically destroyed.

Sleep and I do not have a good relationship. We have never been good friends. I am constantly chasing sleep and then pushing it away. A good night's sleep is my white whale. Like Ahab, I am also a total drama queen about it. I love to talk about how little sleep I get. I brag about it, as if it is a true indication of how hard I work. But I truly suffer at night. Bedtime is fraught with fear and disappointment. When it is just me alone with my restless body and mind, I feel like the whole world is asleep and gone. It's very lonely. I am tired of being tired and talking about how tired I am.

Emerson abandoned irony for blunt and passionate speech. 'This war has been a monumental blunder from the start! Britain is not solely responsible, but by God, gentlemen, she must share the blame, and she will pay a heavy price: the best of her young men, future scholars and scientists and statesmen, and ordinary, decent men who might have led ordinary, decent lives. And how will it end, when you tire of your game of soldiers? A few boundaries redrawn, a few transitory political advantages, in exchange for an entire continent laid waste and a million graves! What I do may be of minor importance in the total accumulation of knowledge, but at least I don't have blood on my hands.

We just communicated that we’re in a fight because you kissed me to get rid of some women you’re too tired to entertain.” “Halle,” he says softly. “The only person I want to entertain is you. You and your dramatics keep me totally occupied. I kissed you because I’m a really big fan of kissing you. Some might say obsessed. It’s the first thing I thought about doing when I got off the ice. Being here listening to you create imaginary conflict is going to get me into an actual conflict with Faulkner, but it’s worth it.

Honestly, death took on a totally different meaning for me in the past years.....I don't feel the fear or trepidation about death that I used to feel. I felt tired of living.

Use the same tired cry-laughing smiley for everything like a total wank?” “Is that a wank thing to do?” “Absolutely it is.

I'm tired of pretending I'm not a total bitchin rock star from Mars.

V smiled, his eyes a little shiny as if he too were choked up. "Don't worry, I'm covered. So, I guess you're back, true?" "And ready to rock and roll." "Really." "For sure. I'm thinking about a future in contracting. Wanted to see how this bathroom was put together. Excellent tile work. You should check it." "How about I carry you back to bed?" "I want to look at the sink pipes next." Respect and affection clearly drove V's cool smirk. "At least let me help you up." "Nah, I can do it." With a groan, Butch gave the vertical move a shot, but then eased back down onto the tile. Turned out his head was a little overwhelming. But if they left him here long enough-a week, maybe ten days? "Come on, cop. Cry uncle here and let me help." Butch was suddenly too tired to front. As he went totally limp, he was aware of Marissa staring at him and thought, man, could he look any weaker? Shit, the only saving grace was there wasn't a cold breeze on his butt. Which suggested the hospital gown had stayed closed. Thank you, God.

We communicate,” I argue. “We just communicated that we’re in a fight because you kissed me to get rid of some women you’re too tired to entertain.” “Halle,” he says softly. “The only person I want to entertain is you. You and your dramatics keep me totally occupied. I kissed you because I’m a really big fan of kissing you. Some might say obsessed. It’s the first thing I thought about doing when I got off the ice. Being here listening to you create imaginary conflict is going to get me into an actual conflict with Faulkner, but it’s worth it.” “An obsession sounds pretty dramatic if you ask me.

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu’s left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary.

All I can figure is that my parents were either totally laid back or totally tired. I’m guessing that it was more of the latter, but either way, there really were some good lessons from that level of independence.

Because I tried all those voice options, of course. Haven’t you?” She looked at him expectantly, as if scrolling through all the language and voice options in the GPS was a total must. “Frankly? It didn’t occur to me. I stuck with the first one.” She rolled her eyes. “There’s one in Klingon. I used to have it on when I drove my geekier friends to the yearly Star Trek conventions in Vegas. They’d translate for me.” He wasn’t sure which part of her statement was more disturbing to him: the friends that spoke Klingon, or the yearly visits to Star Trek conventions. Or that she had geekier friends. Finally he opted for one. “You have friends that speak Klingon?” She shook her head. “No. Not fluently, no. It helped a lot that from LA to Vegas is for the most part a straight line. You really don’t want to get lost in the Mojave Desert with a handful of bickering Klingons and Vulcans who can achieve global domination with a laptop but can’t figure out how to change a tire on the car.

The moon had grown tired of her antics and pulled the clouds back over its face, leaving Sarah in total darkness once more.

If we both weren’t so tired, I’d totally nail him right now.

If being lazy was an Olympic sport, I would totally win the bronze.

Lastly, because you are a superhero, you are really good at putting together a good team. You can look around the room and notice the other superheroes because they are the ones noticing you. The friends you meet over forty are really juicy. They are highly emulsified and full of flavor. Now that you’re starting to have a sense of who you are, you know better what kind of friend you want and need. My peers are crushing it right now and it’s totally amazing and energizing to watch. I have made friends with older women whom I have admired for years who let me learn from their experience. I drink from their life well. They tell me about hormones and vacation spots and neck cream. I am interested in people who swim in the deep end. I want to have conversations about real things with people who have experienced real things. I’m tired of talking about movies and gossiping about friends. Life is crunchy and complicated and all the more delicious.

Many peoples practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was *right*, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it... If they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn't like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were *able* to give it up. They didn't say to themselves, 'Well, we've got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because its the *right* way to live.' For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, 'This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.' They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don't even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is the one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam--those who vanished. But it's not going to be this easy for the Takers. It's going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they're doing is *right*... Giving it up would mean that all along they'd been *wrong*. It would mean they'd *never* known how to rule the world. It would mean relinquishing their pretensions to godhood.... It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods.

Let's never, never, never, forget these three things: An easy fun life is totally achievable. A plan and many steps may be needed. No matter how tired and deep in the mud we are, let's make sure we take one little step forward every day.

The men believe that activity results from frustration and frustration results from never being able to get what you want. The perpetual out-of-reach. The men frantically scurry about with great schemes and much noise to try and reach the out-of-reach. Each tries to be the first or richest or strongest or most potent. Each compares himself to the others and each is always inadequate; less than first, not yet rich enough, or strong enough, or potent enough. None of this leads to happiness, but then the men do not look approvingly at happiness. None of this leads to contentment but then the men care nothing for contentment. They fill their heads with inflated notions of total control and empire and strength and sexual conquest. They fill their bodies with meat and drugs and dirty air. And they rush about in a frenzy making messes and ugliness and fear everywhere. And when they tire they sit with each other and lament and blabber how little they are appreciated and how hard they try and how nothing ever works out quite as they plan.

In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. Now matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run.The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved can’t control its amount or quality. You might find the amount isn’t enough and you want to increase it, or you might try to be frugal and make it last longer, but in neither case do things work out that easily. Talent has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to, and once it dries up, that’s it. Of course, certain poets and rock singers whose genius went out in a blaze of glory—people like Schubert and Mozart, whose dramatic early deaths turned them into legends—have a certain appeal, but for the vast majority of us this isn’t the model we follow. If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you’ll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else. … After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed of the writer of fiction—at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, or two years. … Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the limits of what you’re able to do. Almost imperceptibly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee results will come. In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower. This sort of daily training was indispensable to him. … Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would definitely have been different.

Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become interesting. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again; their memories are what give them the need for other hands. The desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a little and listen: music of hair, music of pain, music of looms weaving our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

As I lay there, trying to swallow a loud, obnoxious yawn, I remembered something he’d said when we first met, about life being too short. I imagined he had firsthand experience with shortened lives while he was serving. That mentality came from experience. I got that now. Could even understand it, but there was something I didn’t understand. “Why?” I asked. There was a beat. “Why what?” Jax sounded tired, and I should shut up or point out that I was now tired and could sleep, so he could leave. But I didn’t. “Why are you here? You don’t know me and . . .” I trailed off, because there really wasn’t anything left to say. A minute went by, and he hadn’t answered my question, and then I think another minute ticked on, and I was okay with him not answering because maybe he didn’t even know. Or maybe he was just bored and that was why he was here. But then he moved. Jax pressed against my back, and the next breath I took got stuck in my throat. My eyes shot open. The sheet and blanket were between us, but they felt like nothing. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Getting comfortable.” He dropped an arm over my waist, and my entire body jerked against his. “It’s time to sleep I think.” “But—” “You can’t sleep when you talk,” he remarked. “You don’t need to be all up on me,” I pointed out. His answering chuckle stirred the hair along the back of my neck. “Honey, I’m not all up on you.” I freaking begged to differ on that point. I started to wiggle away, but the arm around my waist tightened, holding me in place. “You’re not going anywhere,” he announced casually, as if he wasn’t holding me prisoner in the bed. Okay. The whole prisoner thing might be melodramatic, but he wasn’t letting me up. Not when he was getting all kinds of comfy behind me. Oh my God, this was spooning. Total spooning. I was spooning with an honorary member of the Hot Guy Brigade. Did I wake up in a parallel universe? “Sleep,” he demanded, as if the one word carried that much power. “Go to sleep, Calla.” This time his voice was softer, quieter. “Yeah, it doesn’t work that way, Jax. You have a nice voice, but it doesn’t hold the power to make me sleep on your command.” He chuckled. I rolled my eyes, but the most ridiculous thing ever was the fact that after a couple of minutes, my eyes stayed shut. I . . . I actually settled in against him. With his front pressed to my back, his long legs cradling mine, and his arm snug around my waist, I actually did feel safe. More than that, I felt something else—something I hadn’t felt in years. I felt cared for . . . cherished. Which was the epitome of dumb, because I barely knew him, but feeling that, recognizing what the warm, buzzing feeling was, I fell right asleep.

Nocturnă Uitarea venea... a venit. O lacrimă cade jos, totul tace, Lampa obosită a clipit, Orice obiect atins şopteşte: lasă-mă-n pace... De-acum... Auzi, ploaia plânge pe drum Pe un adânc tumult, Pe urma unui mic pantof într-un parc de demult... Adorm... ascult... Afară, la fereastră, toamna a spus: - Of! Nocturne Oblivion comes . . . came. A tear falls; total silence, The tired lamp twinkles, Every touched thing whispers, let me alone. Now... Listen, outside the rain sheds its tears ― A serious dispute centers on A scrap of a small shoe in an old park . . . I sleep . . . I listen . . . Outside a window, autumn says: Oh!

I'm jittery.It's like the animatronic band from Chuck E. Cheese is throwing a jamboree in my stomach. I've always hated Chuck E. Cheese. Why am I thinking about Chuck E. Cheese? I don't know why I'm nervous.I'm just seeing my mom again. And Seany.And Bridge! Bridge said she'd come. St. Clair's connecting flight to San Francisco doesn't leave for another three hours,so we board the train that runs between terminals,and he walks me to the arrivals area.We've been quiet since we got off the plane. I guess we're tired. We reach the security checkpoint,and he can't go any farther. Stupid TSA regulations.I wish I could introduce him to my family.The Chuck E. Cheese band kicks it up a notch,which is weird, because I'm not nervous about leaving him. I'll see him again in two weeks. "All right,Banana.Suppose this is goodbye." He grips the straps of his backpack,and I do the same. This is the moment we're supposed to hug. For some reason,I can't do it. "Tell your mom hi for me. I mean, I know I don't know her. She just sounds really nice. And I hope she's okay." He smiles softly. "Thanks.I'll tell her." "Call me?" "Yeah,whatever. You'll be so busy with Bridge and what's-his-name that you'll forget all about your English mate, St. Clair." "Ha! So you are English!" I poke him in the stomach. He grabs my hand and we wrestle, laughing. "I claim....no...nationality." I break free. "Whatever,I totally caught you. Ow!" A gray-haired man in sunglasses bumps his red plaid suitcase into my legs. "Hey,you! Apologize!" St. Clair says,but the guy is already too far away to hear. I rub my shins. "It's okay, we're in the way. I should go." Time to hug again. Why can't we do it? Finally, I step forward and put my arms around him. He's stiff,and it's awkward, especially with our backpacks in the way.I smell his hair again. Oh heavens. We pull apart. "Have fun at the show tonight" he says. "I will.Have a good flight." "Thanks." He bites his thumbnail,and then I'm through security and riding down the escalator. I look back one last time. St. Clair jumps up and down, waving at me.I burst into laughter, and his face lights up.The escalator slides down. He's lost from view. I swallow hard and turn around.And then-there they are.Mom has a gigantic smile, and Seany is jumping and waving, just like St. Clair.

Still keeping a tight grip on my neck, Darren dragged me back into the woods, and I knew instantly he was taking me past the perimeter. I fought and kicked against him, but I had already tired myself out from the chase. Once I felt the sharp tick at the back of my head, I could tell Darren had felt it, too, and then he threw me as hard as he could into the woods, and I stumbled and rolled on the ground. I knew I only had about five seconds, and Darren wasn’t going to let me back into the safe zone. I stayed low on the ground, knowing once the volts hit me I was going to crash. Better to already be low than to fall from standing up. And then I felt it. The sharp current cut through my veins like shards of glass, and I screamed in total agony as it felt like my body was being ripped apart. I writhed in pain, thinking that my head was going to split open as my muscles and limbs convulsed under the current. It was, without a doubt, the most painful thing I had ever experienced, and my body quickly shut down, needing only a few seconds to welcome the numb blackness that claimed me.

Many of you reading this are convinced that you could become wealthy if you could get out of debt. The problem now is that you are feeling more and more trapped by the debt. I have great news! I have a foolproof, but very difficult, method for getting out of debt. Most people won’t do it because they are average, but not you. You have already figured out that if you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else. You are sick and tired of being sick and tired, so you are willing to pay the price for greatness. This is the toughest of all the Baby Steps to your Total Money Makeover. It is so hard, but it is so worth it. This step requires the most effort, the most sacrifice, and is where all your broke friends and relatives will make fun of you (or join you).

The measuring rod, the unit of information, is something called a bit (for binary digit). It is an answer - either yes or no- to an unambiguous question... The information content of the human brain expressed in bits is probably comparable to the total number of connections among the neurons- about a hundred trillion, 10^14 bits. If written out in English, say, that information would fill some twenty million volumes, as many as in the world's largest libraries. The equivalent of twenty million books is inside the heads of every one of us... When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library... The great libraries of the world contain millions of volumes, the equivalent of about 10^14 bits of information in words, and perhaps 10^15 bits in pictures. This is ten thousand times more than in our brains. If I finish a book a week, I will only read a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read... Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. p224-233

To pray in the midst of the mundane is simply and strongly to assert that this dull and tiring day is holy and its simple labors are the stuff of God's saving presence for me now. To pray simply because it is prayer time is no small act of immersion in the God who is willing to wait for us to be conscious, to be ready, to be willing to become new in life. Prayer, Benedictine spirituality demonstrates, is not a matter of mood. To pray only when we feel like it is more to seek consolation than to risk conversion. To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms. To pray only when it is convenient is to make the God-life a very low priority in a list of better opportunities. To pray only when it feels good is to court total emptiness when we most need to be filled. The hard fact is that nobody finds time for prayer. The time must be taken. There will always be something more pressing to do, something more important to be about than the apparently fruitless, empty act of prayer. But when that attitude takes over, we have begun the last trip down a very short road because, without prayer, the energy for the rest of life runs down. The fuel runs out. We become our own worst enemies: we call ourselves too tired and too busy to pray when, in reality, we are too tired and too busy not to pray. Eventually, the burdens of the day wear us down and we no longer remember why we decided to do what we're doing: work for this project, marry this woman, have these children, minister in this place. And if I cannot remember why I decided to do this, I cannot figure out how I can go on with it. I am tired and the vision just gets dimmer and dimmer.

But this is the brilliant truth that outshines the lie: God is totally used to dealing with human imperfection. He has always worked in and through people who struggle and sin, people who try and then have to try again and then maybe try one more time. He gets it. He is just waiting for us supergirls to say, “This is who I am. You know my stuff. If you can use me, God, I’m yours.” And the craziest thing of all is that he will.

Oh, do you, Milo? You’re so selfish. You don’t see the bigger picture.” “What’s the bigger picture?” “You’re still here looking for handouts. Who’s going to take care of me?” “I’m on my knees here, Mom. Not for me, for my family. For my wife. For a beautiful grandson you have totally ignored.” “He’s kind of a brat. I’ll be in his life when he gets a little impulse control.” “He’s not even four.” “I have needs. I’m tired of this child-worshipping culture. You’re just a slave to it, Milo.” “I’m only trying to be a decent dad.” “Don’t waste your time. It’s not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven’s sake, the system’s rigged for white men and you still can’t tap in.” “You’re right, Mom. What can I say? But still, it would mean a lot to me if you made a little more of an effort with Bernie.” “Bernie schmernie. This is my decade.” “Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way.

The Sinsar Dubh popped up on my radar, and it was moving straight toward us. At an extremely high rate of speed. I whipped the Viper around, tires smoking on the pavement. There was nothing else I could do. Barrons looked at me sharply. “What? Do you sense it?” Oh, how ironic, he thought I’d turned us toward it. “No,” I lied, “I just realized I forgot my spear tonight. I left it back at the bookstore. Can you believe it? I never forget my spear. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t. I was talking to my dad while I was getting dressed and I totally spaced it.” I worked the pedals, ripping through the gears. He didn’t even try to pat me down. He just said, “Liar.” I sped up, pasting a blushing, uncomfortable look on my face. “All right, Barrons. You got me. But I do need to go back to the bookstore. It’s . . . well . . . it’s personal.” The bloody, stupid Sinsar Dubh was gaining on me. I was being chased by the thing I was supposed to be chasing. There was something very wrong with that. “It’s . . . a woman thing . . . you know.” “No, I don’t know, Ms. Lane. Why don’t you enlighten me?” A stream of pubs whizzed by. I was grateful it was too cold for much pedestrian traffic. If I had to slow down, the Book would gain on me, and I already had a headache the size of Texas that was threatening to absorb New Mexico and Oklahoma. “It’s that time. You know. Of the month.” I swallowed a moan of pain. “That time?” he echoed softly. “You mean time to stop at one of the multiple convenience stores we just whizzed past so you can buy tampons? Is that what you’re telling me?” I was going to throw up. It was too close. Saliva was pooling in my mouth. How far behind me was it? Two blocks? Less? “Yes,” I cried. “That’s it! But I use a special kind and they don’t carry it.” “I can smell you, Ms. Lane,” he said, even more softly. “The only blood on you is from your veins, not your womb.” My head whipped to the left and I stared at him. Okay, that was one of the more disturbing things he’d ever said to me. “Ahhh!” I cried, letting go of both the wheel and the gearshift to clutch my head. The Viper ran up on the sidewalk and took out two newspaper stands and a streetlamp before crashing to a stop against a fire hydrant. And the blasted, idiotic Book was still coming. I began foaming at the mouth, wondering what would happen if it passed within a few feet of me. Would I die? Would my head really explode?

At this point...my body's so worn out that the important stuff just kind of washes past me. But I'll tell you what. I'll never look at home the same way again. I'll never look at education the same way again. That's what's been missing here, the whole way, from Kampala to Juba. It's education. How are you supposed to want something if you've never seen it? And we totally take that for granted. I do, anyway. So, yeah, let's give it another day, but not much more than that. 'Cause I'm tired.

Experiential versus the God eye! Possessing ‘ego vision’, a person’s view through her/his physical eyes is quite versatile; able to discern wide and varied vistas over huge distances or scrutinizing the minutest of details. Ego’s very nature: capable of relatively expansive, detailed, and yet individualistic perspective is crucial. Separating itself out from the God Force, ego extracts infinite unique experiences, integral to humanity’s process of spiritualizing matter. Incarnating on the earth, achieving individualism is therefore critical for attainment of divinity. Individualism may cause momentary estrangement from the God Self. However, this person has forgotten that they are everything in the mirror, the ‘sliver’ and the ‘ball of light’,” continues Kuan Yin. During this complex passage Lena was inundated by infinite rapid-fire visuals: emanations from the God Mind. “Further and unfortunately, wrong assumptions are made about suffering. Some individuals even believe that it is required, that suffering brings one closer to salvation. Quite the contrary,” disputes Kuan Yin, “the God Force likes to play. Therefore, if all individuals could unite creating a real sense of community many problems could be healed. The God Force is separate and not separate, whole and not whole at the same time. Really, it is not ‘sliceable’, not reducible. Even when it is sliced into individual energies, it does not diminish the total God Force or the power of the individual. Each of you has the potential for the God Force potency. However, no individual can overcome the God Force. There is a misinterpretation, (by some) that Satan is as powerful as God. Limited energy cannot live on its own. Every experience must exist and yet they (the limiting forces) can never exist on their own. Limited energy, then, is the experience of the absence of the God Force. Therefore, there is no need to fear it. Those choosing such experiences have a need to understand how it feels to believe evil powers exist. Again, I say those who pursue this route are taking it too personally. They believe the story they’ve made up about themselves. It is similar to a person going into an ice cream store and only choosing one flavor from many. Preoccupied with tasting that flavor for a very long time, they are probably quite sick and tired of it. Still, they don’t want to believe there are any other flavors available. The ‘agreement’, then, is to continue to believe in that particular flavor. Here’s where reincarnation and its opportunity for experiencing a vast array of perspectives, “agreements”, enters in. Another life offers another opportunity, a chance to ‘switch flavors’ so to speak. Taking oneself too personally, however, can cause a soul to get caught up, stuck in redundancy: in a particular (and perhaps unfortunate) flavor. In such instances, the individual is forgetting one has the ability to choose his or her flavors, lives,” contends Kuan Yin.

Bailey gaped. “Son of a bitch. We totally need to dig out the tire iron.” Aspen dug her nails into the arms of the chair. “And also the claymore.” Corbin’s brow furrowed. “You have a claymore?” “You don’t?” asked Bailey. His frown deepened. “No.” “Huh,” said the mamba. “Well that’s weird.” “No, Bailey, it’s not. I’d say most people don’t own a claymore,” he told her. “That’s a problem they should rectify. Swords often come in handy. As do bullwhips.” “You have a bullwhip?” “You don’t?” “No.” “Weird.

What did she say?" Lauren breathed. "She told me to check the oil," Nick replied imperturbably. Despite his outward attitude of total indifference, Lauren couldn't believe that as a younger man he'd been so vulnerable. Surely having his own mother treat him as if he didn't exist must have hurt him terribly. "Is that all she said?" she asked tightly. Unaware that Lauren was not sharing his ironic humor in the story,he said, "No-I think she asked me to check the air in her tires too." Lauren had kept her voice neutral, but inwardly she felt ill. Tears stung her eyes, and she turned her face up to the purpling sky to hide them,pretending to watch the lacy clouds drifting over the moon. "Lauren?" His voice sounded curt. "Hmmmm?" she asked,staring steadfastly at the moon. Leaning forward,he caught her chin and turned her face toward his. He looked at her brimming eyes in stunned disbelief. "You're crying!" he said incredulously. Lauren waved a dismissing hand at him. "Don't pay any attention to that-I cry at movies too.

Yet I also felt, for the first time, truly and sincerely pissed. It was enough already. Enough! I’d reached that point that comes in the life of most anxiety sufferers when, fed up by the constant waking torture, dejected and buckled but not yet crushed, they at last turn to their anxiety, to themselves, and say, “Listen here: Fuck you. Fuck you! I am sick and fucking tired of this bullshit. I refuse to let you win. I am not going to take it anymore. You are ruining my fucking life and you MUST FUCKING DIE!” Unfortunately, this approach rarely solves the problem. Anxiety doesn’t bend to absolutism. You have to take a subtler, more reasoned approach. But that doesn’t mean anger is totally unhelpful. Being pissed off is a strong cocktail for the will. It stiffens the spine. It strengthens resolve. It makes a person less willing to run away from the anxiety and more willing to walk into it, which you’re going to have to do, ultimately, if you don’t want to end up a complete agoraphobic. Anger breeds defiance, and defiance is inspiriting. It’s good to refuse to give in to anxiety. You just have to know how much you can take.

Some women can cry prettily, with dainty little feminine tears and elegant noises of distress, but I am not one of those women. I cry the same way I eat: messily, loudly, and with total abandon. I am unruly in emotion and appetite. I’ve spent so much of my adult life trying to not be unruly, to be smaller, more contained, more acceptable, but underneath it all I’m still myself. All the passions and desires and tempestuous needs, all the wants and hurts and sorrows, all the ugly and wonderful things. I am just unruly, peculiar me, and I’m so tired of pretending otherwise.

You’re like a Boy Scout, huh?” It’s my attempt at flirting—probably only slightly less effective than Dirty Dancing’s “I carried a watermelon.” He does the mouth-quirk thing again. “Not even close.” There’s a bad-boy edge in the way he says it—a heavy hint of the forbidden—that gets my heart pounding and my jaw eager to drop. To cover my reaction, I nod vigorously. “Right, me neither . . . Never been a—” Too vigorously. So vigorously that my elbow slips in the flour on the counter and I almost knock myself unconscious. But Logan’s not only big and brawny—he’s quick. Fast enough to catch me by the arm and waist to steady me before I bash the side of my head against the butcher block. “Are you all right, Ellie?” He leans down, looking at me intently—a look I’ll see in my dreams tonight . . . assuming I can sleep. And, wow, Logan has great eyelashes. Thick and lengthy and midnight black. I bet they’re not the only part of him that’s thick and lengthy. My gaze darts down to his promised land, where his pants are just tight enough to confirm my suspicions—this bodyguard may have a service revolver in his pocket, but he’s got a magnum in his pants. Yum. “Yeah, I’m good.” I sigh. “Just . . . you know . . . tired. But I’m cool . . . totally cool.” And I shake it off, like I actually am

The only rule of witchcraft that really matters is “know thyself.” Through knowing what’s going on inside of us, we can learn to manage these things and then apply these skills to the way we manipulate external energetic forces. Sounds so simple, but in practice it’s loads of work. Totally worth it, though. A simple self check-in practice consisting of regularly pausing for a few moments before beginning any new activity helps. Ask yourself: • How am I feeling? Am I hungry? Tired? In pain? • What am I thinking? Are my thoughts swirling? • What do I need to accomplish this next activity? • Is this in my own best interest? If not, how I can make it so?

(Tania Unsworth) writes of a time when she was a “girl of eleven, with a flashlight under the covers, devouring The Chronicles of Narnia”—when there was a complete immersion in the world of the novel, when one connected with a book’s protagonist and experienced the world through the eyes of the “other” in a powerful, beautiful way. There was an intensity to reading then, a kind of total involvement in story that is hard to reproduce as an adult. I know too much now about tired plots and clichés. I am always comparing one thing to another, recognizing devices, identifying styles. No matter how good or bad I find something, I’m always aware of my response, slightly detached, consciously enjoying or not enjoying.

She cleared her throat but still her voice came out much too huskily. “Are you all right? I didn’t see you there. I didn’t mean to kick you.” He was looking at her, examining her, and he smiled crookedly. “You look good in the morning, Al.” Her hair was stringy, her eyes were tired and puffy, and she had on absolutely no makeup. “I look like hell.” “Whoa, that’s pretty harsh language for you.” “You look like hell, too.” “Hell is an improvement for me,” he told her. “In fact, I consider it a compliment. See, shit’s my usual look. On really bad days, I look like total shit. So, yeah, hell is a big step up for me.” His smile made his eyes crinkle. “So, thank you very much.” Alessandra couldn’t keep from smiling back.

At that time, a number of myths were created by the young people of the smoking carriages and forests of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the hungry for the thirst of lysergic acid, who were too tired of the suffering they grew up in and needed to take refuge in dreams. In these children's universe there were unbelievable stories about places in the mountains that women sought to retreat to, places where people were united by music and love for a mutual spiritual growth. For Aunt Jeanine, who had grown up with the image of her father, an amputee due to the war, feeding on such stories was like a haven, one she would later try to turn into her home. And one of those stories, one particular one, stood in her memory until the last stage of her life, when she passed away at eighty-one, burned with fire. (...) At that time, kid, they said that if we searched enough, we would find a place where the world wouldn't end. Men would never know what hell of a place that was, totally unconquerable! A place where the dirty hands of men would never arrive. A place men would never know about . Don't you think I could find it? To have my body disappearing in the woods, as I saw happening to kids in Japan, in that forest that swallows them to its core. Flesh turned to powder, my essence disappearing in the middle of life. They said that, when you die at a place, you'll stay at that place forever. That was why everyone was afraid to go to war. They weren't afraid of dying, kid, they were afraid of dying there.

To escape the throngs, we decided to see the new Neil Degrasse Tyson planetarium show, Dark Universe. It costs more than two movie tickets and is less than thirty minutes long, but still I want to go back and see it again, preferably as soon as possible. It was more visually stunning than any Hollywood special effect I’d ever seen, making our smallness as individuals both staggering and - strangely - rather comforting. Only five percent of the universe consists of ordinary matter, Neil tells us. That includes all matter - you, and me, and the body of Michael Brown, and Mork’s rainbow suspenders, and the letters I wrote all summer, and the air conditioner I put out on the curb on Christmas Day because I was tired of looking at it and being reminded of the person who had installed it, and my sad dying computer that sounds like a swarm of bees when it gets too hot, and the fields of Point Reyes, and this year’s blossoms which are dust now, and the drafts of my book, and Israeli tanks, and the untaxed cigarettes that Eric Garner sold, and my father’s ill-fitting leg brace that did not accomplish what he’d hoped for in terms of restoring mobility, and the Denver airport, and haunting sperm whales that sleep vertically, and the water they sleep in, and Mars and Jupiter and all of the stars we see and all of the ones we don’t. That’s all regular matter, just five percent. A quarter is “dark matter,” which is invisible and detectable only by gravitational pull, and a whopping 70 percent of the universe is made up of “dark energy,” described as a cosmic antigravity, as yet totally unknowable. It’s basically all mystery out there - all of it, with just this one sliver of knowable, livable, finite light and life. And did I mention the effects were really cool? After seeing something like that it’s hard to stay mad at anyone, even yourself.

Wait" Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

You have something to say to me, Cassidy, say it. Or shut the fuck up.” “All right,” Jules said. “I will.” He took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Okay, see, I, well, I love you. Very, very much, and . . .” Where to go from here . . .? Except, his plain-spoken words earned him not just a glance but Max’s sudden full and complete attention. Which was a little alarming. But it was the genuine concern in Max’s eyes that truly caught Jules off-guard. Max actually thought . . . Jules laughed his surprise. “Oh! No, not like that. I meant it, you know, in a totally platonic, non-gay way.” Jules saw comprehension and relief on Max’s face. The man was tired if he was letting such basic emotions show. “Sorry.” Max even smiled. “I just . . .” He let out a burst of air. “I mean, talk about making things even more complicated . . .” It was amazing. Max hadn’t recoiled in horror at the idea. His concern had been for Jules, about potentially hurting his tender feelings. And even now, he wasn’t trying to turn it all into a bad joke. And he claimed they weren’t friends. Jules felt his throat tighten. “You can’t know,” he told his friend quietly, “how much I appreciate your acceptance and respect.” “My father was born in India,” Max told him, “in 1930. His mother was white—American. His father was not just Indian, but lower caste. The intolerance he experienced both there and later, even in America, made him a . . . very bitter, very hard, very, very unhappy man.” He glanced at Jules again. “I know personality plays into it, and maybe you’re just stronger than he was, but . . . People get knocked down all the time. They can either stay there, wallow in it, or . . . Do what you’ve done—what you do. So yeah. I respect you more than you know.” Holy shit. Weeping was probably a bad idea, so Jules grabbed onto the alternative. He made a joke. “I wasn’t aware that you even had a father. I mean, rumors going around the office have you arriving via flying saucer—” “I would prefer not to listen to aimless chatter all night long,” Max interrupted him. “So if you’ve made your point . . .?” Ouch. “Okay,” Jules said. “I’m so not going to wallow in that. Because I do have a point. See, I said what I said because I thought I’d take the talk-to-an-eight-year-old approach with you. You know, tell you how much I love you and how great you are in part one of the speech—” “Speech.” Max echoed. “Because part two is heavily loaded with the silent-but-implied ‘you are such a freaking idiot.’” “Ah, Christ,” Max muttered. “So, I love you,” Jules said again, “in a totally buddy-movie way, and I just want to say that I also really love working for you, and I hope to God you’ll come back so I can work for you again. See, I love the fact that you’re my leader not because you were appointed by some suit, but because you earned very square inch of that gorgeous corner office. I love you because you’re not just smart, you’re open-minded—you’re willing to talk to people who have a different point of view, and when they speak, you’re willing to listen. Like right now, for instance. You’re listening, right?” “No.” “Liar.” Jules kept going. “You know, the fact that so many people would sell their grandmother to become a part of your team is not an accident. Sir, you’re beyond special—and your little speech to me before just clinched it. You scare us to death because we’re afraid we won’t be able to live up to your high standards. But your back is strong, you always somehow manage to carry us with you even when we falter. “Some people don’t see that; they don’t really get you—all they know is they would charge into hell without hesitation if you gave the order to go. But see, what I know is that you’d be right there, out in front—they’d have to run to keep up with you. You never flinch. You never hesitate. You never rest.

Carrie could not remember how long it was since some other person had cherished her. Had said, 'You look tired.' And, 'How about a little rest?' She had spent too many years being strong, looking after others and their problems...The day progressed, and through her window Carrie watched the weather and was glad she did not have to be out in it. Snow showers came and went; the sky was grey. From time to time she heard the faint keening of wind, whining around the old house. It was all rather cosy. She remembered as a child being ill, and in bed, and the awareness of others getting on with the business of day-to-day life without herself having to participate in any sort of way. Telephones rang, and someone else hurried to answer the call. Footsteps came and went; from behind the closed door, voices called and answered. Doors opened and shut. Towards noon, there came smells of cooking. Onions frying, or perhaps a pot of soup on the boil. The luxuries of self-indulgence, idleness, and total irresponsibility were all things that Carrie had long forgotten.

Unfortunately, sitting rests the parts of the body that don’t need much of it while working the parts that desperately do. Specifically, it disengages the lower extremities while utilizing the spine. (This is in sharp contrast to squatting, which disengages the spine while utilizing the lower extremities.) Because sitting positions the spine vertically, it provides no rest or relief from the gravitational forces that compress it. Without a periodic therapeutic reprieve through the day, the relentless load overwhelms the entire structure, joints and muscles alike. To maintain an erect seated posture, some muscle groups in the back have to continually contract. Since this requires a great deal of energy, the muscles quickly become fatigued. (That is why slumping is more comfortable: It takes less energy to maintain.) When the muscles tire, you rely on the backrest more and your muscles less. The less you rely on your muscles, the weaker and more dysfunctional they become. The weaker and more dysfunctional they become, the more you rely on the backrest. The more you rely on the backrest, the more you tend to slump. The more you slump, the more pronounced the debilitating C-shaped curvature becomes. This weakens the muscles in your back even further, which causes them to overload the joints they serve. Sitting in chairs affects even the areas seemingly at rest (particularly the hips and knees). Because sitting keeps the joints static for long periods, the muscles that serve them become fixed in a short, tight position. When at last you do get up and move, the muscles impose more stress on these joints, thereby increasing their susceptibility to wear and tear. The prolonged stasis also prevents the joints from being lubricated with nourishing synovial fluid. Once depleted, the hips and knees, like the spine, deteriorate and erode. Is it any wonder that the areas most traumatized by sitting, namely, the lower back, hips, and knees, are also the most arthritic and disabled areas of the body in the world today? The real mystery is why so few people have made the connection between prolonged sitting and the epidemic of chronic pain. In fact, they need only look to their own bodies for an abundance of evidence.

Boris looked at me. Then he ran both hands through his hair and said: “You’re a blackout drunk, Potter, you know that?... you know, like—oh, that time we went to the play pit at McDonald’s, the kid pit, and you are so drunk on the puffy thing the lady called the cops on you, and I got you out of there fast, standing in Wal Mart half an hour pretending to look at school pencils and then back on the bus, back to the bus stop, and that night you don’t remember any of it? Not one thing? ‘McDonald’s, Boris? What McDonald’s?’ Or,” he said, sniffling lavishly, talking over me, “or, that day you are totalled, wrecked, and make me go with you for ‘walk in the desert’? Okay, we go for a walk. Fine. Only you are so drunk you can barely walk and it is a hundred and five degrees. And you get tired of walking and lay yourself down in the sand. And ask me that I leave you to die. ‘Leave me, Boris, leave me.’ Remember that?... You were unhappy. Drank yourself unconscious all the time... I did plenty of stupid things. Stupider than you! But me,” he said, toying with a cigarette, “I was trying to have fun and be happy. You wanted to be dead. It’s different.

Practice. That’s all it is. If you practice enough, you can sense things. You know where the open ice will be.” Watching the three men interact I could not help but notice the banality of genius. It occurred to me that Carbon did not have any superpowers beyond the boring and total efficiency of the enterprise. People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will, followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest, winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.

By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained. -- Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation. While, on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed -- I mean the attachment of the People.

The very first dram Ronan had ever been truly proud of, truly euphoric over, had been a copy. It had been in high school. Ronan wasn't good at surviving high school and he wasn't good at surviving friendship, and so while his friend Gansey's back was turned, he'd stolen Gansey's car. It was a beautiful car. A 1973 bright orange Camaro with stripes right up its hood and straight down its ass. Ronan had wanted to drive it for months, despite Gansey forbidding it. Maybe because of him forbidding it. Within hours of stealing it, Ronan had totaled it. Gansey hadn't wanted him to drive it because he thought he'd grind the clutch, or curb it, or burn out the tires, or maybe, maybe blow the engine. And here Ronan had totaled it. Ronan had loved Richard C. Gansey III far more than he loved himself at that point, and he hadn't known how he was ever going to face him when he returned from out of town. And then, Joseph Kavinsky had taught him to dream a copy. Before that, all of Ronan's dreams--that he knew about, Matthew didn't count--had been accidents and knickknacks, the bizarre and the useless. When he'd successfully copied a car, an entire car, he'd been out of his mind with glee. The dreamt car had been perfect down to the last detail. Exactly like the original. The pinnacle of dreaming. Now a copy was the least impressive thing to him. He could copy anything he put his mind to. That just made him a very ethereal photocopier. A one-man 3-D printer. The dreams he was proud of now were the dreams that were originals. Dreams that couldn't exist in any other way. Dreams that took full advantage of the impossibility of dreamspace in a way that was cunning or lovely or effective or all of the above. The sundogs. Lindenmere. Dreams that had to be dreams. In the past, all his good dreams like this were gifts from Lindenmere or accidents rather than things he had consciously constructed. He was beginning to realize, after listening to Bryde, that this was because he'd been thinking too small. His consciousness was slowly becoming the shape of the concrete, waking world, and it was shrinking all his dreams to the probable. He needed to start realizing that possible and impossible didn't mean the same thing for him as they did for other people. He needed to break himself of the habit of rules, of doubts, of physics. His "what if" had grown so tame. "You are made of dreams and this world is not for you." He would not let the nightwash take him and Matthew. He would not let this world kill him slowly. He deserved a place here, too. He woke.

Help,’ Jo moaned. ‘I think I’m in a coma.’ It was seven o’clock. The library walls were scrubbed clean and Allie’s neck and shoulders ached whenever she even thought about raising her arms as she sat on the dust sheet next to Jo. ‘Do your arms hurt?’ Allie asked, rubbing her shoulders. ‘God yes.’ ‘Then you’re not in a coma.’ Gingerly Allie stretched out her legs. ‘Jesus. What have I got myself into? Rachel has a swimming pool and horses. Horses, Jo. I could be floating in a pool and petting soft pony noses if I were still at her house.’ ‘Here.’ Jo turned to face her. ‘My nose is soft. You can pet it.’ Allie stroked her nose tiredly. ‘Wow. This is just like being at Rachel’s. Where’s the pool?’ ‘No pool,’ Jo said. ‘Showers.’ ‘Sucks.’ ‘Totally.’ ‘Are you two just going to lie there complaining? Or are you coming to dinner?’ Allie looked up to see Carter standing above them, studying them doubtfully. ‘Jo’s in a coma,’ Allie informed him. ‘She no longer needs food.’ ‘Wait. Did you say food? I think I’m actually awake.’ Jo scrambled to her feet. ‘My God,’ Allie said mildly. ‘It’s a miracle.’ ‘You’ve only been doing this one day, Sheridan.’ Carter reached down to pull her up. ‘You can’t be tired already.’ ‘Everything hurts,’ she said. ‘Shoulders, arms, back …’ ‘Legs, feet, head …’ Jo offered helpfully. ‘Ankles. Shins. Name a body part,’ Allie said. ‘It hurts.’ Carter didn’t look impressed. ‘Food will ease your pain.’ He steered them towards the dining hall. ‘He’s very wise,’ Allie told Jo. ‘Clearly,’ Jo replied.

I’m Sushi K and I’m here to say I like to rap in a different way Look out Number One in every city Sushi K rap has all most pretty My special talking of remarkable words Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd My hair is big as a galaxy Cause I attain greater technology [...] I like to rap about sweetened romance My fond ambition is of your pants So here is of special remarkable way Of this fellow raps named Sushi K The Nipponese talking phenomenon Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific Prosperity Sphere, to be specific [...] Sarariman on subway listen For Sushi K like nuclear fission Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro He my always big-time hero His mutant rap burn down whole block Start investing now Sushi K stock It on Nikkei stock exchange Waxes; other rappers wane Best investment, make my day Corporation Sushi K [...] Coming to America now Rappers trying to start a row Say “Stay in Japan, please, listen! We can’t handle competition!” U.S. rappers booing and hissin’ Ask for rap protectionism They afraid of Sushi K Cause their audience go away He got chill financial backin’ Give those U.S. rappers a smackin’ Sushi K concert machine Fast efficient super clean Run like clockwork in a watch Kick old rappers in the crotch [...] He learn English total immersion English/Japanese be mergin’ Into super combination So can have fans in every nation Hong Kong they speak English, too Yearn of rappers just like you Anglophones who live down under Sooner later start to wonder When they get they own rap star Tired of rappers from afar [...] So I will get big radio traffic When you look at demographic Sushi K research statistic Make big future look ballistic Speed of Sushi K growth stock Put U.S. rappers into shock

This reaction to the work was obviously a misunderstanding. It ignores the fact that the future Buddha was also of noble origins, that he was the son of a king and heir to the throne and had been raised with the expectation that one day he would inherit the crown. He had been taught martial arts and the art of government, and having reached the right age, he had married and had a son. All of these things would be more typical of the physical and mental formation of a future samurai than of a seminarian ready to take holy orders. A man like Julius Evola was particularly suitable to dispel such a misconception. He did so on two fronts in his Doctrine: on the one hand, he did not cease to recall the origins of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, who was destined to the throne of Kapilavastu: on the other hand, he attempted to demonstrate that Buddhist asceticism is not a cowardly resignation before life's vicissitudes, but rather a struggle of a spiritual kind, which is not any less heroic than the struggle of a knight on the battlefield. As Buddha himself said (Mahavagga, 2.15): 'It is better to die fighting than to live as one vanquished.' This resolution is in accord with Evola's ideal of overcoming natural resistances in order to achieve the Awakening through meditation; it should he noted, however, that the warrior terminology is contained in the oldest writings of Buddhism, which are those that best reflect the living teaching of the master. Evola works tirelessly in his hook to erase the Western view of a languid and dull doctrine that in fact was originally regarded as aristocratic and reserved for real 'champions.' After Schopenhauer, the unfounded idea arose in Western culture that Buddhism involved a renunciation of the world and the adoption of a passive attitude: 'Let things go their way; who cares anyway.' Since in this inferior world 'everything is evil,' the wise person is the one who, like Simeon the Stylite, withdraws, if not to the top of a pillar; at least to an isolated place of meditation. Moreover, the most widespread view of Buddhists is that of monks dressed in orange robes, begging for their food; people suppose that the only activity these monks are devoted to is reciting memorized texts, since they shun prayers; thus, their religion appears to an outsider as a form of atheism. Evola successfully demonstrates that this view is profoundly distorted by a series of prejudices. Passivity? Inaction? On the contrary, Buddha never tired of exhorting his disciples to 'work toward victory'; he himself, at the end of his life, said with pride: katam karaniyam, 'done is what needed to he done!' Pessimism? It is true that Buddha, picking up a formula of Brahmanism, the religion in which he had been raised prior to his departure from Kapilavastu, affirmed that everything on earth is 'suffering.' But he also clarified for us that this is the case because we are always yearning to reap concrete benefits from our actions. For example, warriors risk their lives because they long for the pleasure of victory and for the spoils, and yet in the end they are always disappointed: the pillaging is never enough and what has been gained is quickly squandered. Also, the taste of victory soon fades away. But if one becomes aware of this state of affairs (this is one aspect of the Awakening), the pessimism is dispelled since reality is what it is, neither good nor bad in itself; reality is inscribed in Becoming, which cannot be interrupted. Thus, one must live and act with the awareness that the only thing that matters is each and every moment. Thus, duty (dhamma) is claimed to be the only valid reference point: 'Do your duty,' that is. 'let your every action he totally disinterested.

Business leadership is based on two elements: vision and technical competence. Top people in a given industry always embody at least one of those two elements. Sometimes, but rarely, they embody both of them. Simply put, vision is the ability to see what other people don’t. It’s a Ford executive named Lee Iacocca realizing that a market existed for an automobile that was both a racing car and a street vehicle—and coming up with the Mustang. It’s Steven Jobs realizing that computers needed to be sold in a single box, like a television sets, instead of piece by piece. About one hundred years ago, Walter Chrysler was a plant manager for a locomotive company. Then he decided to go into the car business, which was a hot new industry at the time. The trouble was, Walter Chrysler didn’t know a lot about cars, except that they were beginning to outnumber horses on the public roadways. To remedy this problem, Chrysler bought one of the Model T Fords that were becoming so popular. To learn how it worked, he took it apart and put it back together. Then, just to be sure he understood everything, he repeated this. Then, to be absolutely certain he knew what made a car work, he took it apart and put it together forty-eight more times, for a grand total of fifty. By the time he was finished, Chrysler not only had a vision of thousands of cars on American highways, he also had the mechanical details of those cars engraved in his consciousness. Perhaps you’ve seen the play called The Music Man. It’s about a fast-talking man who arrives in a small town with the intention of hugely upgrading a marching band. However, he can’t play any instruments, doesn’t know how to lead a band, and doesn’t really have any musical skills whatsoever. The Music Man is a comedy, but it’s not totally unrealistic. Some managers in the computer industry don’t know how to format a document. Some automobile executives could not change a tire. There was once even a vice president who couldn’t spell potato. It’s not a good idea to lack the fundamental technical skills of your industry, and it’s really not a good idea to get caught lacking them. So let’s see what you can do to avoid those problems.

Rebellion's demand is unity; historical revolution's demand is totality. The former starts from a negative supported by an affirmative, the latter from absolute negation and is condemned to every aspect of slavery in order to fabricate an affirmative that is dismissed until the end of time. One is creative, the other nihilist. The first is dedicated to creation so as to exist more and more completely; the second is forced to produce results in order to negate more and more completely. The historical revolution is always obliged to act in the hope, which is invariably disappointed, of one day really existing. Even unanimous consent will not suffice to create its existence. "Obey," said Frederick the Great to his subjects; but when he died, his words were: "I am tired of ruling slaves." To escape this absurd destiny, the revolution is and will be condemned to renounce, not only its own principles, but nihilism as well as purely historical values in order to rediscover the creative source of rebellion. Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history. Undoubtedly, it has nothing but scorn for the formal and mystifying morality to be found in bourgeois society. But its folly has been to extend this scorn to every moral demand. At the very sources of its inspiration and in its most profound transports is to be found a rule that is not formal but that nevertheless can serve as a guide. Rebellion, in fact, says— and will say more and more explicitly— that revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date in the eyes of a world reduced to acquiescence, but in terms of the obscure existence that is already made manifest in the act of insurrection. This rule is neither formal nor subject to history, it is what can be best described by examining it in its pure state—in artistic creation. Before doing so, let us only note that to the "I rebel, therefore we exist" and the "We are alone" of metaphysical rebellion, rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

Well, first of all,” he began, “I really…I really like you.” He looked into my eyes in a seeming effort to transmit the true meaning of each word straight into my psyche. All muscle tone disappeared from my body. Marlboro Man was so willing to put himself out there, so unafraid to put forth his true feelings. I simply wasn’t used to this. I was used to head games, tactics, apathy, aloofness. When it came to love and romance, I’d developed a rock-solid tolerance for mediocrity. And here, in two short weeks, Marlboro Man had blown it all to kingdom come. There was nothing mediocre about Marlboro Man. He had more to say; he didn’t even pause to wait for a response. That, in his universe, was what a real man did. “And…” He hesitated. I listened. His voice was serious. Focused. “And I just flat don’t want you to leave,” he declared, holding me close, resting his chin on my cheek, speaking directly into my ear. I paused. Took a breath. “Well--” I began. He interrupted. “I know we’ve just been doing this for two weeks, and I know you’ve already made your plans, and I know we don’t know what the future holds, but…” He looked at me and cupped my face in his hand, his other hand on my arm. “I know,” I agreed, trying to muster some trite response. “I--” He broke in again. He had some things to say. “If I didn’t have the ranch, it’d be one thing,” he said. My pulse quickened. “But I…my life is here.” “I know,” I said again. “I wouldn’t…” He continued, “I don’t want to get in the middle of your plans. I just…” He paused, then kissed me on the cheek. “I don’t want you to go.” I was tongue-tied as usual. This was so strange for me, so foreign--that I could feel so strongly for someone I’d known for such a short time. To talk about our future would be premature; but to totally dismiss that we’d happened upon something special wouldn’t be right, either. Something extraordinary had occurred between us--that fact was indisputable. It was the timing that left so much to be desired. We were both bleary eyed, tired. Falling asleep standing up in each other’s arms. Nothing more could be said that night; nothing could be resolved. He knew it, I knew it; so we settled on a long, lasting kiss and an all-encompassing hug before he turned around and walked away. Starting his diesel pickup. Driving down my parents’ street. Driving back to his ranch.

My phone rang at midnight, just as I was clearing my bed of the scissors and magazines and glue. It was Marlboro Man, who’d just returned to his home after processing 250 head of cattle in the dark of night. He just wanted to say good night. I would forever love that about him. “What’ve you been doing tonight?” he asked. His voice was scratchy. He sounded spent. “Oh, I just finished up my homework assignment,” I answered, rubbing my eyes and glancing at the collage on my bed. “Oh…good job,” he said. “I’ve got to go get some sleep so I can get over there and get after it in the morning…” His voice drifted off. Poor Marlboro Man--I felt so sorry for him. He had cows on one side, Father Johnson on the other, a wedding in less than a week, and a three-week vacation in another continent. The last thing he needed to do was flip through old issues of Seventeen magazine for pictures of lip gloss and Sun-In. The last thing he needed to deal with was Elmer’s glue. My mind raced, and my heart spoke up. “Hey, listen…,” I said, suddenly thinking of a brilliant idea. “I have an idea. Just sleep in tomorrow morning--you’re so tired…” “Nah, that’s okay,” he said. “I need to do the--” “I’ll do your collage for you!” I interrupted. It seemed like the perfect solution. Marlboro Man chuckled. “Ha--no way. I do my own homework around here.” “No, seriously!” I insisted. “I’ll do it--I have all the stuff here and I’m totally in the zone right now. I can whip it out in less than an hour, then we can both sleep till at least eight.” As if he’d ever slept till eight in his life. “Nah…I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning…” “But…but…,” I tried again. “Then I can sleep till at least eight.” “Good night…” Marlboro Man trailed off, probably asleep with his ear to the receiver. I made the command decision to ignore his protest and spent the next hour making his collage. I poured my whole heart and soul into it, delving deep and pulling out all the stops, marveling as I worked at how well I actually knew myself, and occasionally cracking up at the fact that I was doing Marlboro Man’s premarital homework for him--homework that was mandatory if we were to be married by this Episcopal priest. But on the outside chance Marlboro Man’s tired body was to accidentally oversleep, at least he wouldn’t have to walk in the door of Father Johnson’s study empty-handed.

You want to kiss her, right?” “What?” I have lost track of our conversation. I was thinking about how if Kit called me her friend, then I would have multiplied my number of them by a factor of two. And then I considered the word flirting, how it sounds like fluttering, which is what butterflies do. Which of course looped me back to chaos theory and my realization that I’d like to have more information to provide Kit on the topic. “Do. You. Want. To. Kiss. Her?” Miney asks again. “Yes, of course I do. Who wouldn’t want to kiss Kit?” “I don’t want to kiss Kit,” Miney says, doing that thing where she imitates me and how I answer rhetorical questions. Though her intention is to mock rather than to educate, it’s actually been a rather informative technique to demonstrate my tendency toward taking people too literally. “Mom doesn’t want to kiss Kit. I don’t know about Dad, but I doubt it.” My father doesn’t look up. His face is buried in a book about the mating patterns of migratory birds. It’s too bad our scholarly interests have never overlapped. Breakfast would be so much more interesting if we could discuss our work. “So if you want to kiss Kit, that means you want her to see you like a real guy,” Miney says, and points at me with her cup of coffee. She’s drinking it black. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with Miney. Maybe she’s just tired. “I am a real guy.” How come even my own sister sees me as something not quite human? Something other. “I have a penis.” “And just when I think we’ve made progress you go and mention your penis.” “What? Fact: I have a penis. That makes me a guy. Though technically there are some trans people who have penises but self-identify as girls.” “Please stop saying that word.” “What word? Penis?” “Yes.” “Do you prefer member? Shlong? Wang? Johnson?” I ask. “Dongle, perhaps?” “I would prefer we not discuss your man parts at all.” “Wait, should I text Kit immediately and clarify that I do in fact have man parts?” I pick up my phone and start typing. “Dear Kit. Just to be clear. I have a penis.” “Oh my God. Do not text her. Seriously, stop.” Miney puts her coffee down hard. She’ll climb over the table and tackle me if she has to. “Ha! Totally got you!” I smile, as proud as I was the other day for my that’s what she said joke. “Who are you?” Miney asks, but she’s grinning too. I’ll admit it takes a second—something about the disconnect between her confused tone and her happy face—and I almost, almost say out loud: Duh, I’m Little D. Instead I let her rhetorical question hang, just like I’m supposed to

The modifications of the family structure by this state of affairs is important. The couple feels isolated, surrounded by children who cost them a great deal in many ways. Sometimes they live in harassing conditions. Work in the factory which increases nervous tension has replaced the more natural work in the fields which was perhaps more tiring physically and less remunerative. In seeking a means to reduce financial insecurity, the couple has created moral and affective insecurity. The woman is constantly in constantly in contact with other man and thus less dependent on her husband. She is in a situation where she can become deeply attached to another. The husband's insecurity can incite him to become jealous and aggressive, and the wife feeling this developing possessiveness may in turn become aggressive. The couple becomes a little universe of growing tension and latent hostility. The spirit of this new family is no longer conservative; the pater familias no longer exists, even the ties between parents and children are totally different. There is either a complete abdication of all authority and even of responsibility, or relations within the family may often take on a more fraternal, supple manner.

It wasn’t the pain that bothered him most. It would pass; he would heal. It wasn’t the constant humiliation, the total loss of dignity, the unwanted invasions of his body... those tortures were familiar now too. He was as accustomed to shame and degradation as he was to his shackles and cage. What hurt most were the memories of flying, fierce and proud and free. And the knowledge that his future contained only endless towns full of rubes eager to hand over their money to Davenport. In the musty darkness of his cage, with the sounds of the engine, creaking springs, and rolling tires as camouflage, Tenrael wept.

mechanic like his brother Zach to see that her hatchback was borderline totaled. Even if the front bumper hadn’t been half-smashed to pieces by the white farm fence she’d slid into, her bald tires weren’t

I drove to the bar Theodosha had called from and parked on the street. The bar was a gray, dismal place, ensconced like a broken matchbox under a dying oak tree, its only indication of gaiety a neon beer sign that flickered in one window. She was at a table in back, the glow of the jukebox lighting her face and the deep blackness of her hair. She tipped a collins glass to her mouth, her eyes locked on mine. “Let me take you home,” I said. “No, thanks,” she replied. “Getting swacked?” “Merchie and I had another fight. He says he can’t take my pretensions anymore. I love the word ‘pretensions.’” “That doesn’t mean you have to get drunk,” I said. “You’re right. I can get drunk for any reason I choose,” she replied, and took another hit from the glass. Then she added incongruously, “You once asked Merchie what he was doing in Afghanistan. The answer is he wasn’t in Afghanistan. He was in one of those other God-forsaken Stone Age countries to the north, helping build American airbases to protect American oil interests. Merchie says they’re going to make a fortune. All for the red, white, and blue.” “Who is they?” But her eyes were empty now, her concentration and anger temporarily spent. I glanced at the surroundings, the dour men sitting at the bar, a black woman sleeping with her head on a table, a parolee putting moves on a twenty-year-old junkie and mother of two children who was waiting for her connection. These were the people we cycled in and out of the system for decades, without beneficial influence or purpose of any kind that was detectable. “Let’s clear up one thing. Your old man came looking for trouble at the club today. I didn’t start it,” I said. “Go to a meeting, Dave. You’re a drag,” she said. “Give your guff to Merchie,” I said, and got up to leave. “I would. Except he’s probably banging his newest flop in the hay. And the saddest thing is I can’t blame him.” “I think I’m going to ease on out of this. Take care of yourself, kiddo,” I said. “Fuck that ‘kiddo’ stuff. I loved you and you were too stupid to know it.” I walked back outside into a misting rain and the clean smell of the night. I walked past a house where people were fighting behind the shades. I heard doors slamming, the sound of either a car backfiring or gunshots on another street, a siren wailing in the distance. On the corner I saw an expensive automobile pull to the curb and a black kid emerge from the darkness, wearing a skintight bandanna on his head. The driver of the car, a white man, exchanged money for something in the black kid’s hand. Welcome to the twenty-first century, I thought. I opened my truck door, then noticed the sag on the frame and glanced at the right rear tire. It was totally flat, the steel rim buried deep in the folds of collapsed rubber. I dropped the tailgate, pulled the jack and lug wrench out of the toolbox that was arc-welded to the bed of the truck, and fitted the jack under the frame. Just as I had pumped the flat tire clear of the puddle it rested in, I heard footsteps crunch on the gravel behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a short, thick billy club whip through the air. Just before it exploded across the side of my head, my eyes seemed to close like a camera lens on a haystack that smelled of damp-rot and unwashed hair and old shoes. I was sure as I slipped into unconsciousness that I was inside an ephemeral dream from which I would soon awake.

We all struggle at times with the fear that we may be our own worst enemy. Even if we put on a bold face for the world, we often inwardly hear a chorus of voices expressing regret, shame, doubt, and loneliness. No matter how tired we are of this gloomy self-talk, it never seems to go away. If only we could swap out this pessimistic, defeated spirit for one that is victorious over life’s fray! This is a common feeling that most of us have had at one time or another. In spiritual terminology, the longing we’re experiencing is to “die to ourselves.” This total surrender of the selfish “I” means letting go of the ego that overwhelms us with its anxieties, allowing it to be replaced by our real selves, the true identity that lies at the heart of each of us.

It’s easier to be impressive to strangers than it is to be consistently kind behind the scenes. It’s easier to show up and be a hit for an hour than it is to get down on the floor with your kids when you’re so tired your eyes are screaming and bone-dry. It’s easier to be charming on a conference call than it is to traverse the distance between you and your spouse, the distance you created. Sometimes being brave is being quiet. Being brave is getting off the drug of performance. For me, being brave is trusting that what my God is asking of me, what my family and community is asking from me, is totally different than what our culture says I should do. Sometimes, brave looks boring, and that’s totally, absolutely, okay.

Sharon did have house guests to keep her company, though. Abigail Folger, the heiress to the Folger Coffee Company and her boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski, were also living at Cielo Drive. On the evening of August 8, 1969, Sharon made phone calls to her sister and her friend to cancel plans she had made, saying that she was tired and would spend the night in with another friend, Jay Sebring. The foursome, Sharon, Jay, Abigail, and Wojciech, ate at a local Mexican restaurant before returning to Sharon’s home at Cielo Drive. At 11.30 pm, Manson took his follower and right-hand man Tex Watson to one side and explained to him what he had to do. For the good of the family, Manson said, Tex had to lead the others to Cielo Drive to “totally destroy everyone in that house” and steal whatever they could. It’s unclear whether Manson even knew who was now living in that particular house, but he must have known they were rich and that they would serve as an example to the rest of the world that no one was safe. Manson rounded up Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and new follower Linda Kasabian. Dressed in black, the girls grabbed their knives and jumped into the car with Tex. Manson rested at Spahn Ranch, waiting for news from 10050 Cielo Drive. When the group arrived at the house, Tex climbed a telephone pole and snipped the wire. It was only now that the group had arrived that Tex told the girls exactly what they were there to do. If the girls were shocked, they didn’t show it, and they dutifully followed Tex’s lead in what came next. Steve Parent, an 18-year-old friend of the caretaker at Cielo Drive, was the first to be murdered. Parent was leaving the property in his car, having just visited his friend, when Tex shot him four times. Tex then entered the house through an open window and told the girls to follow him inside. New follower Kasabian was terrified and unable to help, so Tex told her to go back to the car and keep watch. In the sitting room of the house, Tex woke Wojciech who had fallen asleep on the couch, and Susan ventured upstairs where she found Abigail reading in bed. Abigail saw Susan but wasn’t alarmed at first. It wasn’t unusual for strangers to be in the house. But when Susan brandished a large knife and told Abigail, Sharon, and Jay to go with her downstairs, the group were terrified. Tex tied a rope around Wojciech’s throat, threw it over a beam in the house, and tied it around Sharon’s throat. Tex demanded money and grew furious when no one produced any, then he shot Jay in the stomach. As Sharon and Abigail screamed in terror, Tex stabbed Jay, over and over again. Realizing that no one was going to escape alive if he didn’t do something, Wojciech tried to break free, causing Susan to attack him with a knife. Wojciech was able to overpower Susan, so Tex shot him twice then battered him with the handle of his gun. Incredibly, Wojciech still managed to escape the house, but Tex caught up with him on the lawn and ended his life with a knife. Abigail also broke free of Patricia, but she caught her and stabbed her repeatedly. Tex finally ended Abigail’s life with his knife. Sharon was the only person still alive in the house; she pleaded for her life and the life of her unborn child. As Sharon begged, Susan Atkin’s began stabbing her, being sure to stab her directly through her pregnant stomach. Later, Susan said she “got sick of listening to her so I stabbed her and then I just stabbed her and she fell and I stabbed her again, just kept stabbing and stabbing.” The group almost left without writing the bloody graffiti Manson had explicitly told them to leave behind. Susan went back into the house and used a towel to write “PIG” on the front door of 10500 Cielo Drive in the victims’ blood.

The next morning I would be returned to camp with the others who hadn’t made the grade. I was totally dejected. That night in those woods, warm and dry under my shelter, blisters attended to, dry socks on, and out of the wind and rain, I learnt an enduring lesson: warm and dry doesn’t mean fulfilled and happy. Only a few hours earlier I had been longing to be warm and dry and safe. Yet lying there, knowing that my buddies were starting out on a grueling night march without me, was pure agony. Never has anyone wanted to be cold, wet and tired as much as I did right then. And never have the comforts of shelter and food meant so little to me. You see, being dry and warm in life, but with no purpose, is no consolation for being in the heat of the arena in pursuit of your goals. Don’t get me wrong, warm and dry is great as a reward ‘afterwards’, and we should all regularly enjoy some time chilling, doing ‘nothing’ - but if all you do is ‘nothing’, you will find it a very hollow existence. (So yes, I went back on the next Selection course and went through those 11 months of SAS hell again - and I passed. I was cold, wet and exhausted throughout, so that now, when I relax, I feel that huge sense of pride for having endured.) Once you commit to your goal, don’t get swayed by the temporary lure of creature comforts and easy feelings - instead, keep focused, and remember the pain never lasts for ever, but the pride in having followed your calling will.

! I’m majorly frustrated! I don’t know if I should quit the team, confront my teammates, or just keep quiet so I don’t make things worse. I really don’t want to give up my dream of making varsity! What would you do?? —Cheerless Cheerleader * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Dear Cheerless Cheerleader, Hon . . . I think you’re kidding yourself if you think you made the cheerleading team based on your awesome moves. My reliable source on the team told me your tryout routine was HOR-REN-DOUS. She said she couldn’t tell if you were trying to dance or going into convulsions! Your backflips were BACKFLOPS, your cartwheels were FLAT TIRES, and your dismount was totally DISGUSTING! Get the picture? You were chosen for one reason, and one reason alone—you look like a sturdy ogre who can carry a lot of weight! It’s been a long tradition for cheerleading captains to hand-pick strong, ugly girls for the bottom of the pyramid. Didn’t you know that?? Quit taking everything so personally! Just accept that the bottom is where you belong, sweetie! You should hold your green, Shrek-looking head high that someone actually wants you for something. Bet that doesn’t happen often! Yay you! Sincerely, Miss Know-It-All P.S. My source wants you to stop dancing. She says you’re giving the squad NIGHT TERRORS! * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

As Steve glided along the edge of the overhanging leaves, every now and then a golden orb spiderweb would clutch at my hair, the thick, yellow, sticky webbing covering my head, the boat, and the torch. Steve was oblivious to anything but the crocodiles. Some of them allowed us to get close. Steve could gauge a croc’s total size based on the length of its head. My heart kept pounding, and I tried to do everything right. He showed me how to hold the spotlight right under my chin, so that I could look directly over the beam and pick up the eye-shine of the crocs. I was tired, yet adrenaline surged through my veins. “Look, look, look,” Steve whispered excitedly, “there’s another one.” There was something strange about this one, only a single red eye reflected. Perhaps the other one had been shot out, Steve suggested. “He’s big,” he whispered. “Maybe fifteen feet.” We edged closer. The engine coughed and suddenly ground to a stop. Steve leaned over the back of the dinghy, reaching in up to his shoulder in the water, to clear the weeds from around the propeller. The single red eye blinked out. The big croc had submerged. Submerged where? I thought. Steve finally cleared the weeds and yanked the ignition cord, but the engine refused to turn over. I am in the middle of nowhere. It’s nighttime. I am surrounded by crocodiles. The boat motor won’t start. Steve will be snatched and eaten by One-Eye right off the back of the boat. Then I’ll be alone. But after some gentle persuasion (some of it verbal, and not so gentle), the engine finally started. The heat hadn’t really broken when we got back to camp. It was still well over ninety degrees. The insects that had been attracted to my spotlight were stuck and struggling in the sweat running down my back. “How about a quick tub?” Steve said. That was Australian for bath. Somehow, the words “bath” and “crocodile” refused to go together in my mind.

Once I began to look for the flâneuse, I spotted her everywhere. I caught her standing on street corners in New York and coming through doorways in Kyoto, sipping coffee at café tables in Paris, at the foot of a bridge in Venice, or riding the ferry in Hong Kong. She is going somewhere or coming from somewhere; she is saturated with in-betweenness. She may be a writer, or she may be an artist, or she may be a secretary or an au pair. She may be unemployed. She may be unemployable. She may be a wife or a mother, or she may be totally free. She may take the bus or the train when she's tired. But mostly, she goes on foot. She gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind facades, penetrating into secret courtyards. I found her using cities as performance spaces or as hiding places; as places to seek fame and fortune or anonymity; as places to liberate herself from oppression or to help those who are oppressed; as places to declare her independence; as places to change the world or be changed by it.

Energy: One –You’re tired, lethargic, you can’t go on. Five –You’re bursting with energy, and feel completely invigorated, you’re ready to take on the world. Mood: One –You’re feeling really low, and totally bummed out. Five –You’re elated, everything’s possible. Tension: One –You’re tightly wound and stressed out over your current problem/ stressor. Five –You’re loose, calm, and relaxed. Problem Solvability: One –Your self-talk sounds like, “I’m stuck. I’m going to be here forever. It’s insurmountable.” Five –Your self-talk sounds like, “I got this. Slam dunk. This is totally solvable.

Tired of Explaining Real Facts,” “Totally Exceptional Radical Feminist,” or “Tirelessly Explaining Reality to Fools.” Nonetheless, the acronym continues to be used to smear feminists who insist on fighting for rights for women and girls.

Leeda looked straight out of Martha’s Vineyard---all perfect cheekbones and alabaster skin with a smattering of sun-induced freckles and clothes that were totally season-appropriate. Even loose and sloppy like she was today, she looked like the kind of loose and sloppy you saw in People magazine when they caught a celebrity all tired and mussed up at the airport. Birdie, on the other hand, was curved and rosy and Renoir soft. She looked like the milk-fed farm girl that she was. The two were second cousins but nothing alike. Leeda was straight up and down, and Birdie was as gentle and easy as the rain. Leeda had grown up wearing mostly white and exceeding everyone as the glossiest, the smilingest, and the most southern of the southern belles in Bridgewater. Birdie had grown up with dirt under her fingernails, homeschooled on the orchard, her feet planted in the earth. Before Judge Miller Abbott sentenced Murphy to time on the orchard picking peaches that summer, Murphy had pegged Leeda for uptight and Birdie for weak. But their time together---picking peaches, sweating in the dorms at night, cooling off in the lake---had been like living the fable of her life. The lesson being that when you think you know more than you do, you end up looking like an idiot.

AND SO WE have the vicious cycle of under-eating. We start by eating less and lose some weight. As a result, our metabolism slows and hunger increases. We start to regain weight. We double our efforts by eating even less. A bit more weight comes off, but again, total energy expenditure decreases and hunger increases. We start regaining weight. So we redouble our efforts by eating even less. This cycle continues until it is intolerable. We are cold, tired, hungry and obsessing about calories. Worst of all, the weight always comes back on. At some point, we go back to our old way of eating. Since metabolism has slowed so much, even resuming the old way of eating causes quick weight gain, up to and even a little past the original point. We are doing exactly what our hormones are influencing us to do.

Addiction gradually turns you into a zombie. Zombies don’t have free will. Once again, this result isn’t total but statistical. You become more like a zombie, more of the time, than you otherwise would be. There’s no need to believe in some myth of perfect people who are completely free of addictions. They don’t exist. You’re not going to become perfect or perfectly free, no matter how many self-help books you read or how many addictive services you quit. There’s no such thing as perfectly free will. Our brains are constantly changing their ways to adapt to a changing environment. It’s hard work, and brains get tired! Sometimes they take a break, zone out, and run on autopilot. But that’s different from being driven by hidden manipulators

Learn to predict the obstacles that you’ll constantly face and work through them. If you know that in the evening you’re likely to feel too tired to go for a jog, plan it for the morning instead. If you know that you have dinner plans that will likely sabotage your diet, adjust your total daily calories accordingly or/and go for a longer jog.

to exercise, great. But we’re not going to push you. Until you shift over to a fat- and ketone-burning metabolism and get access to the tank, you’re likely to be tired. You should feel your energy level rise as your body adjusts. If you find yourself wanting to go for a walk, go dancing, take a yoga class, or lift weights—we’re all for it. But don’t make yourself miserable.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

I remember crying my eyes out on our honeymoon. I was so tired, for all the wrong reasons totally.

W.A.C. Bennett grew tired of the company’s obstinance. In August 1961, after rumors of a potential takeover had circulated within the province for months, Bennett introduced the Power Development Act into the legislature in order to confiscate BC Electric for C$111.0 million. The bill passed unanimously, allowing the government to seize control of the utility. The move was highly controversial, sparking an uproar within the business press, with some overly dramatic papers even labeling Bennett a dictator. In an unfortunate coincidence, the head of British Columbia Power and BC Electric, A.E. “Dal” Grauer, had passed away a few days earlier, and his funeral transpired on the very same day the government took over the company he had led.184 In addition to taking BC Electric, the bill offered to buy the rest of BC Power for C$68.6 million, with interest accruing on this amount until the offer expired at the end of July 1963. Combined with the C$111.0 million paid for BC Electric, this offer would result in a total payment for all of BC Power’s operations of C$179.6 million—or the equivalent of C$38.00 per share. Bennett justified this price by highlighting that the proposal was a premium to the C$34.75 price the shares sold for the day before the expropriation.185 While the combined price of C$38.00 per share was reasonable, the valuation for the constituent parts was peculiar. The C$111.0 million price for BC Electric matched its paid-in capital but ignored the other C$28.6 million of common book equity. And this amount sidestepped the debate over whether book value was even an appropriate methodology for the utility in the first place. The C$68.6 million price for the rest of BC Power’s assets was even odder since these remnant assets generated no income and were carried on the balance sheet at only C$4.0 million. This was a clear overpayment for the holding company’s assets, proposed to entice it into consenting to the BC Electric takeover.186 Predictably, BC Power did not stand idly by. After preliminary attempts to negotiate a higher price were thwarted, the company took action in the Supreme Court of British Columbia on November 13, 1961. BC Power sought rulings on the validity of the initial Act, the right to additional compensation, and the convertibility feature of debentures issued by BC Electric (more on this last point in the next section).187 While the parties awaited trial, the government took additional steps to further entrench the takeover. At the end of March 1962—nearly eight months after the original seizure—the British Columbia legislature passed two new statutes. The first was the province’s amendment of the Power Development Act, which paid an additional C$60.8 million to BC Power for BC Electric and eliminated the offer for the rest of the parent company’s assets. Table 1 shows that the amendment didn’t significantly alter the total compensation. But the new consideration was a more realistic number for BC Electric and solved for the peculiar offer for the remaining assets, which BC Power would now have to sell themselves.

When you said ‘Yes’ to Me, you gave up the right to be like everyone else. That is why you draw experiences to yourself that will cleanse yourself of that which does not fit who you are. Over and over, again and again, until I make you see that the past no longer works, I challenge you and tempt you, every day, with your past, so that you may see that the past is ultimate delusion. When you said ‘Yes’ to Me, you gave Me your body, your thoughts, your actions. When they don’t suit the new you, the uncomfortableness is unbearable. It is so EVERY time until you realise this fully; then, and only then, will you completely give up desire. For this is the only way man will learn. Very seldom does he learn by quiet reminders. Man’s desires and pitfalls are placed there, so that I may do My work. When you give up totally, then the temptations will fade. I will never give up on you. Every slip will become harder to bear and less easy to remedy. You will tire of your foolishness because I love you – and whether or not completely aware of it, you did say ‘Yes’.