Trailer Park Quotes

He looked like those paintings of baby angels - what do you call them, hubbubs? No cherubs. That's it. He looked like a cherub who'd turned middle-aged in a trailer park.

Lula had Eminem cranked up. He was rapping about trailer park girls and how they go round the outside, and I was wondering what the heck that meant. I'm a white girl from Trenton. I don't know these things. I need a rap cheat sheet.

A tornado is the ultimate coffee grinder. Just add water, and you’ll wake the whole trailer park.

You'd give up all this for me?" "Sure. In a heartbeat." "I couldn't let you do that." "The hell you couldn't. I'd go live in a trailer park in the middle of the Mississippi swamps if it meant I could be with you and give this a shot.

She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. 'These silly dreams you have when you're young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going ot make a life in Las Vegas? How long would that little Eden have lasted? Maybe they'd be on their second trailer park, second kid, but it would have hit them sooner or later - life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything -because that's what growing older is.

He shook his head. "You didn't do anything. It'd be like blaming a tornado for ripping through a trailer park. The tornado's just minding its own business. It can't help what it is." A tornado. Something that destroyed everything in its path. A natural disaster. Me.

But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.

The TV said you should ignore bullies and they would stop harassing you. In practice this worked about half the time. The other half, you ended up with two tall boys shadowing you through a trailer park, their fingers taking little nips at your clothes, like dogs.

A floorboard cracked; knuckles tapped once on the open door. Adam looked up to see Niall Lynch standing in the doorway. No, it was Ronan, face lit bright on one side, in stark shadow on the other, looking powerful and at ease with his thumbs tucked in the pockets of his jeans, leather bracelets looped over his wrist, feet bare. He wordlessly crossed the floor and sat beside Adam on the mattress. When he held out his hand, Adam put the model into it. “This old thing,” Ronan said. He turned the front tyre, and again the music played out of it. They sat like that for a few minutes, as Ronan examined the car and turned each wheel to play a different tune. Adam watched how intently Ronan studied the seams, his eyelashes low over his light eyes. Ronan let out a breath, put the model down on the bed beside him, and kissed Adam. Once, when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the scraggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy gray sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain travelling across the vast dry field towards him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him. That was this kiss. They kissed again. Adam felt it in more than his lips. Ronan sat back, his eyes closed, swallowing. Adam watched his chest rise and fall, his eyebrows furrow. He felt as bright and dreamy and imaginary as the light through the window. He did not understand anything. It was a long moment before Ronan opened his eyes, and when he did, his expression was complicated. He stood up. He was still looking at Adam, and Adam was looking back, but neither said anything. Probably Ronan wanted something from him, but Adam didn’t know what to say. He was a magician, Persephone had said, and his magic was making connections between disparate things. Only now he was too full of white, fuzzy light to make any sort of logical connections. He knew that of all the options in the world, Ronan Lynch was the most difficult version of any of them. He knew that Ronan was not a thing to be experimented with. He knew his mouth still felt warm. He knew he had started his entire time at Aglionby certain that all he wanted to do was get as far away from this state and everything in it as possible. He was pretty sure he had just been Ronan’s first kiss. “I’m gonna go downstairs,” Ronan said.

But if I have to deal with another stupid elf and their mystic crap I swear I'm going to shoot them all in their stupid inbred hick faces and burn their trailer park down.

Lifetimes are the product of a million little decisions. Made well, the life will be one of character and productivity and substance. Made poorly, the life will be one of excuses and trailer parks and probationary periods.

Look at the huge success of Fifty Shades of Grey. The girl in the book lets a rich guy beat her and ritually rape her, and she likes it! She finds it erotic! But imagine if Christian Grey wasn't a billionaire. Imagine if he lived in a dirty old trailer down by the river. Then that story wouldn't be a sexy romance novel, but an episode of CSI.

If you're one of those delusional 2nd Amendment types who believes you and your trailer park 'militia' might need to take on the Army, the Navy, the 101st Airborne and SEAL Team 6; not only should you be denied the right to bear arms -- but the right to your belt & shoelaces as well ... 'cause you're stark, ravin' batshit!!!

Do you know what keeps poor people down, Mr. Parrish? It’s not a lack of income. It’s a poverty of imagination. The trailer park dreams of the suburbs, and the suburbs dreams of the city, the city dreams of the stars, so on and so forth. The poor can imagine the throne, but not being kingly. Poverty of imagination.

What the hell is this? Station after station, talk, talk, talk about the devil and the liberal democrats, what??? They still looking for communists? I dont believe this shit. Give me an amen and thank you jesus...whats with these people? This whole world is one big trailer park. They hate everybody. If theyre not hanging 'gays' they are hanging 'feminists', oh thank god for an 'off' button. Krist, my heart is pounding. Where am I? This cant be the same country I spent my entire life in.

I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park.

Might as well,” she spit. “You know what it feels like, being friends with you guys? Do you have any idea how it sounds when you talk about how crappy this town is and how you’d rather die than end up saddled with a baby, living in a trailer park, broke as hell? Every time you say that, you’re describing my life. A life I’m actually okay with—I’m sure as hell a lot happier than either of you.

There is no sense in trying to be good, hoping to find myself back in God's grace, when Nick's skin makes heaven seem like a flooded trailer park.

If I were stepping down from the bus at the rich end of town instead of the trailer park, I wouldn’t have to watch every word I said to make sure it wasn’t slang for an orgasm.

All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—some people were having no luck at all. The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison.

Yeah, I knew," he finally said, his voice soft. "I always knew I'd do whatever it took. Living in a trailer park, running in a pack of barefoot kids . . . my whole life was already set out for me, and I sure as hell didn't like the looks of it. So I always knew I'd take my chance when I got it. And if it didn't come, I'd make something happen.

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

Now that’s just racist stereotyping,” Tanya sniffed. “I’m offended.” “You can file a complaint with the Trailer Park Elf Defamation League

And each year, more gunters called it quits, concluding that Halliday had indeed made the egg impossible to find. And another year went by. And another. Then, on the evening of February 11, 2045, an avatar’s name appeared at the top of the Scoreboard, for the whole world to see. After five long years, the Copper Key had finally been found, by an eighteen-year-old kid living in a trailer park on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. That kid was me. Dozens of books, cartoons, movies, and miniseries have attempted to tell the story of everything that happened next, but every single one of them got it wrong. So I want to set the record straight, once and for all.

I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?

The whole island was exactly what a kid growing up in some trailer park--say some dump like Tecumseh Lake, Georgia--would dream about. This kid would turn out all the lights in the trailer while her mom was at work. She'd lie down flat on her back, on the matted-down orange shag carpet in the living room. The carpet smelling like somebody stepped in a dog pile. The orange melted black in spots from cigarette burns. The ceiling was water-stained. she'd fold her arms across her chest, and she could picture life in this kind of place. It would be that time--late at night--when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open. The fish skeleton. From the first time she held a crayon, that's what she'd draw.

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

Once, when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the scraggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy gray sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain travelling across the vast dry field towards him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him. That was this kiss.

Trailer park residents rarely raised a fuss about a neighbor’s eviction, whether that person was a known drug addict or not. Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.

Being afraid's not always bad." he said gently. "It can keep you moving forward. It can help you get things done." The silence between us was different than any silence I'd known before, full and warm and waiting. "What are you afraid of?" I dared to ask. There was a flicker of surprise in his eyes, as if it were something he'd never been asked before. For a moment I thought he wouldn't answer. But he let out a slow breath, and his gaze left mine to sweep across the trailer park. "Staying here." he finally said. "Staying until I'm not fit to belong anywhere else." "Where do you want to belong?" I half whispered. His expression changed with quicksilver speed, amusement dancing in his eyes. "Anywhere they don't want me.

Come over and climb on Daddy, baby.

She never thought she would ever be in a position where she didn’t know who her baby daddy was. Might as well move into the redneck trailer park in the woods. Oh wait, they’d firebombed it.

yet. I’m starting to think that if the Internet is the CB radio of the nineties, then the home computer is the trailer park of the soul, a dangerous tool in the hands of idiots. Eventually self-imposed fascism will destroy man as he convinces himself he doesn’t have to think anymore. SEPTEMBER

If the door’s shut, don’t come knockin,” is one of the first rules of trailer park livin. Sure, I heard “Matthew McConaughey’s staying in the park” many times, but after a few waves and head-high howdys, everyone always respected my privacy, because for the most part everyone honored trailer park rules.

He wordlessly crossed the floor and sat beside Adam on the mattress. When he held out his hand, Adam put the model into it. “This old thing,” Ronan said. He turned the front tyre, and again the music played out of it. They sat like that for a few minutes, as Ronan examined the car and turned each wheel to play a different tune. Adam watched how intently Ronan studied the seams, his eyelashes low over his light eyes. Ronan let out a breath, put the model down on the bed beside him, and kissed Adam. Once, when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the scraggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy gray sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain travelling across the vast dry field towards him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him. That was this kiss. They kissed again. Adam felt it in more than his lips. Ronan sat back, his eyes closed, swallowing. Adam watched his chest rise and fall, his eyebrows furrow. He felt as bright and dreamy and imaginary as the light through the window. He did not understand anything. It was a long moment before Ronan opened his eyes, and when he did, his expression was complicated. He stood up. He was still looking at Adam, and Adam was looking back, but neither said anything. Probably Ronan wanted something from him, but Adam didn’t know what to say. He was a magician, Persephone had said, and his magic was making connections between disparate things. Only now he was too full of white, fuzzy light to make any sort of logical connections. He knew that of all the options in the world, Ronan Lynch was the most difficult version of any of them. He knew that Ronan was not a thing to be experimented with. He knew his mouth still felt warm. He knew he had started his entire time at Aglionby certain that all he wanted to do was get as far away from this state and everything in it as possible. He was pretty sure he had just been Ronan’s first kiss.

Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn’t care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you.

The Bible says love your neighbor, not have nasty diarrhea of the mouth about your neighbor.

People won’t see you as just another woman any more, but as a white woman who hangs with brownies, and you’ll lose a bit of your privilege, you should still check it, though, have you heard the expression, check your privilege, babe? Courtney replied that seeing as Yazz is the daughter of a professor and a very well-known theatre director, she’s hardly underprivileged herself, whereas she, Courtney, comes from a really poor community where it’s normal to be working in a factory at sixteen and have your first child as a single mother at seventeen, and that her father’s farm is effectively owned by the bank Yes but I’m black, Courts, which makes me more oppressed than anyone who isn’t, except Waris who is the most oppressed of all of them (although don’t tell her that) In five categories, black, Muslim, female, poor, hijab bed She’s the only one Yazz can’t tell to check her privilege Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? Is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? Is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality Yazz doesn’t know what to say, when did Court read Roxane Gay - who’s amaaaazing? Was this a student outwitting the master moment? #whitegirltrumpsblackgirl

Fitz called after him, "We'll see how far you get without me. Enjoy it Aidan, your nosedive to the discount rack, playing second-rate concert halls, being yesterday's news. That's all this will get you--that and your Catswallow trailer park bride." An old temper surged through Aidan, moving angrily at him. "Aidan, don't!" she shouted. Grabbing a shoulder, Aidan spun him about, landing a solid punch to his jaw, knocking the record-producing mogul onto the pavement. "Get it straight," he said, jerking his lapel. "She's from New Jersey.

And she was aware of something else in the eyes of the mask he was wearing, something beyond the cold, lizardlike sheen of evil, something deeper ... and almost human. She remembered seeing the same thing in the eyes of Uncle Tommy the night he’d crushed her flowers, back in the Kansas trailer park seven years ago; it was something wandering and longing, forever locked away from the light and maddened like a tiger in a dark cage. It was dumb arrogance and bastard pride, stupidity and rage stoked to atomic power. But it was something of a little boy, too, wailing and lost.

Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience—this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. “For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.” This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economic disturbances—the postwar housing shortage, say—profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.

They were Chinese vampires. They were discovered during renovation work at the Bok Kai Temple in Old Sacramento. One of the priests there told his brother about them. The brother's whatever the Chinese version of mobbed up is. Alex here thinks he's using them to distract the Nortenos and the Black Dragons long enough to take over the marijuana trade in Sacramento using the stuff they're making in a bunch of grow houses in Elk Grove." Ted stared at me. "And will the Chinese vampires be joined by legions of Korean werewolves who have been cooking meth in trailer parks in Truckee? "No. The werewolves are refusing to get involved. Trust me, I've tried to talk them into helping. They'll have nothing to do with it.

Journey fans stole my drugs!

Just remember, it’s always darkest right before it goes pitch black.

I know. But guess what? You have to get through it to get past it. There’s no bridge over it.

The solutions to my problems can be found in the songs she sends. I just have to hit the right note.

Maybe handling her memory every day for five years had made it fade, like the mortal thing it was.

like Adam because he does the right thing whether or not anyone is watching, without a promise of praise or reward.

There is such a thing as a pretty trailer park, you know. Diane

She told her daughter to never marry for money, the price is too high. But, don't hang out at the trailer park while you're looking.

She told her daughter to never marry for money, the price is too high. But, don't hang out at the trailer park while you're waiting.

The river that ran by my Oklahoma trailer park was filthy with washed-off sins.

There was even a trailer park. A nice one with carriage lamps and gravel lanes, granted, but a trailer park is a trailer park.

I grew up in a trailer park in Panama City. I’ve dug in the seats of my car for spare change to pay for hamburgers at McDonald’s.

some of them might have been awakened by the sound of the truck engine going past their units, but it isn’t unheard of for people to arrive or leave a trailer park in the middle of the night.

Her hair was totally Indian Woolworth perfume clerk. You know - sweet but dumb - she'll marry her way out of the trailer park some day soon. But the dress was early '60s Aeroflot stewardess - you know - that really sad blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo caps. And such make-up! Perfect '70s Mary Quant, with these little PVC floral appliqué earrings that looked like antiskid bathtub stickers from a gay Hollywood tub circa 1956. She really caught the sadness - she was the hippest person there. Totally.' TRACEY, 27

The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn’t surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake.

She looked at me like I was suddenly her whole world. I felt that look sear right into my heart. Ain’t no one ever looked up on me with such grace, with such trust before, and I felt humbled that she chose to gift it to me … All anyone ever saw when they looked at me was the white trash ex-gang member from the Heighter-famed trailer park across town. But not her. Fuck knows why, but Pix only ever saw more.

Life isn't working out? Okay. Pack the car with as many books as you can carry, bring a guitar and an old keyboard, fill your empty pages with lyrics and stories. Read the books, the ones you always wondered about. Swallow your pride and because you can't do anything else, hold a job or maintain a relationship with another human being, move to a tiny trailer at the edge of the world and just get on with it. Write.

Hi Clara. I thought you would need someone to walk with today, so here I am.” Sorin, her friend that lived in the trailer park around the corner beamed at her from the sidewalk. Maybe not the best looking, but he was a sweet boy, and someone that Clara considered a friend. And like her, he didn't fit in at school either. His strange obsession with science fiction books and obscure poetry may have been the catalyst for that reputation.

Since I’m a man of my word, I don’t show up at her door. I do end up driving over to the trailer park with my SUV. Parking, I crawl into the backseat, play tunes on my phone, and doze as close to my woman as I can manage without breaking my promise.

It was overwhelming for a girl who’d been raised in a trailer park in Cumby, Texas. (Go Trojans!) I took another hit of oxygen and got dizzy. Then I stumbled and fell. Then I hit my head on the clicky ball thing and the desk and collapsed onto the floor

I had a friend who got pregnant at age 14 and wasn’t quite sure who the father was. Her paternity test went a little something like this: “If it comes out black, its Darwin’s and if it comes out white its Ray’s.” This is how things were done in the trailer park.

Let that be a sobering lesson to us all. When the world is full of nothing but trailer parks crammed with ill-educated nitwits chugging beer and scratching their asses, the meatheads in charge will have won.' He paused. 'On the other hand, a planet full of mewling pro-education social justice warriors will, if left alone, establish a utopian model civilization with no conflict, no inequality, and no room at all for sociopathic billionaires sucking blood from the tits of the poor - and if that ever happens, why, it'd be cancelled after the first three seasons

WARNING: This novel deals with undead and crazy murderous cannibalistic people. There are no depictions of ponies gaily prancing across pastures as cute bunnies nibble on carrots contained herein. BUT there are numerous depictions of violence, murder, blood, mayhem, and yes, even gore.

Hadn’t he spoken to the trees? Of course, the entire trailer park and its surroundings might be razed to make way for something even mortal-uglier, the living earth sleeping fitfully under concrete. He might well decide it wasn’t worth the effort, or the heartbreak when such careful work was undone.

If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things.

they were family. They had a deal, him and Ian. They’d had it since they were kids growing up in the same low-rent trailer park with exactly two ways out—prison or the US military. Ian had stayed in the Army and Alex had gotten out the minute they would pay for his college. The friendship had survived years and distance.

I’ll tell you what that was, Journal. That was divine intervention. Angel Alvarez was a solid buck fifty of Valtrex-and-crystal-meth-fueled trailer-park scrapper. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I would have been liquefied on impact had I not been blessed with a guardian angel who wasn’t above tripping a bitch, not even a bitch named Angel.

Empathy is the curse of the new age man.

I think it’s different for everyone, but all of us ignore warning signs and information to seek out the truth with our own eyes, or to hold on to hope where there is none.

Salvation Amy from Flat Hill, Kansas. Just a trailer-park girl with a bunch of stupid dreams that would never come true.

Being offended has replaced baseball as our greatest national pastime.

So she settled for the truth. “I think you a man.” “Is that an insult?” “No.” Anything male is dragged around by its breeches, and she holds the string attached to them.

Not everything is a deal, she was surprised to learn. Some people do things without expecting anything back.

He had met someone who seemed to like both talking to him and having sex with him, and he wasn’t sure which he was enjoying more.

In the darkened trailer, Kelly was frightened, but she was reassured at the no-nonsense way Sarah talked about weapons. And Kelly was beginning to see that Sarah didn’t let anything stop her, she just went and did it. This whole attitude of not letting other people stop you, of believing that you could do what you wanted, was something she found herself imitating.

Why does he remember shit like this? If only he could cleanse his brain of the useless knowledge clogging it up. Gaining speed after turning onto the highway that runs out to Aunt Jeanne’s trailer park, Cameron rolls down all the windows and lights a cigarette, which he never does anymore, only when he feels like garbage; and this morning he feels like hot, steaming garbage.

Gloriana, being royal isn’t about the wealth you possess, the crown on your head, the fine clothes you wear, or the castle you live in. It’s about the loyalty in your heart for your people, the knowledge in your head to aid them in times of trouble, and the depth of your soul to weather any storm.” Kimbra Swain. Fairy Tales Of A Trailer Park Queen: Boxset (Kindle Locations 3327-3329). Crimson Sun Press.

But all of that is mostly invisible to me, an enchanting landscape painted on a see-through curtain in front of a stage where scenes of unspeakable horror play out. I can go for weeks without even seeing the beach, kept busy by emergency calls: fights, stabbings, shootings, burglaries, robberies, rapes, drunks, domestics, suicides. I spend more time in run-down housing projects and trailer parks than I do admiring sunsets. But they don’t pay me to enjoy the view

Detective Jeremy Fisk of the NYPD Intelligence Division hated upstate New York. Hated the whole idea of it. Even though he had lived all over the world during his childhood, he had spent most of his adult life in New York City and had the passion of the convert for his adopted home. And as a confirmed New Yorker, he despised upstate on principle. Upstate was hillbillies and trailer parks and suicidal deer that plunged heedlessly into the headlights of your car, forcing you to swerve into the nearest ditch.

I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother’s death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren’t there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he’d spotted in the mall.

Introductory paragraph incorporating the thesis: After a challenging childhood marked by adversity, Adam Parrish has become a successful freshman at Harvard University. In the past, he had spent his time doubting himself, fearing he would become like his father, obsessing that others could see his trailer-park roots, and idealizing wealth, but now he has built a new future where no one has to know where he's come from. Before becoming a self-actualized young man at Harvard, Adam had been deeply fascinated by the concept of the ley lines and also supernaturally entangled with one of the uncanny forests located along one, but he has now focused on the real world, using only the ghost of magic to fleece other students with parlor trick tarot card readings. He hasn't felt like himself for months, but he is going to be just fine. Followed by three paragraphs with information that supports the thesis. First: Adam understands that suffering is often transient, even when it feels permanent. This too shall pass, etc. Although college seems like a lifetime, it is only four years. Four years is only a lifetime if one is a guinea pig. Second paragraph, building on the first point: Magic has not always been good for Adam. During high school, he frequently immersed himself in it as a form of avoidance. Deep down, he fears that he is prone to it as his father is prone to abuse, and that it will eventually make him unsuitable for society. By depriving himself of magic, he forces himself to become someone valuable to the unmagic world, i.e. the Crying Club. Third paragraph, with the most persuasive point: Harvard is a place Ronan Lynch cannot be, because he cannot survive there, either physically or socially. Without such hard barriers, Adam will surely continue to return to Ronan Lynch again and again, and thus fall back in with bad habits. He will never achieve the life of financial security and recognition he planned. Thesis restated, bringing together all the information to prove it: Although life is unbearable now, and Adam Parrish seems to have lost everything important to him in the present by pursuing the things important to him in the past, he will be fine. Concluding paragraph describing what the reader just learned and why it is important for them to have learned it: He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine.

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"? Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear. The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately.

I always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges now that they were gone. I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I’d grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the driveway was as thin as an old man’s hair combed across an age-spotted scalp, and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the little toolshed. We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had “cleaned” it by dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind the shed, and leaving them there to rust. “Think of it as found art,” my mother had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.

THIS SCENE WAS REPEATED IN every previously uninhabited nook, elbow, spit, lot, and underpass throughout the foreclosed and abandoned suburbs and exurbs and trailer parks of America, now squatted by the millions who had walked out on mortgages, been foreclosed upon, or simply could no longer afford a fixed address. They were all lumped together by the media into a category called 'subprimes,' a less descriptive label, perhaps, than 'homeless,' but one that in this era of raw, rapacious capitalism gave all the information anyone needed: the credit rating of the men, women, and children who inhabited these Ryanvilles was subprime.

AT THE SAME TIME Empire was dying, a new and very different kind of company town was thriving seventy miles to the south. In many ways, it felt like the opposite of Empire. Rather than offering middle-class stability, this village was populated by members of the “precariat”: temporary laborers doing short-term jobs in exchange for low wages. More specifically, its citizens were hundreds of itinerant workers living in RVs, trailers, vans, and even a few tents. Early each fall, they began filling the mobile home parks surrounding Fernley. Linda didn’t know it yet, but she would soon be joining them. Many were in their sixties and seventies, approaching or well into traditional retirement age. Most had traveled hundreds of miles—and undergone the routine indignities of criminal background checks and pee-in-a-cup drug tests—for the chance to earn $11.50 per hour plus overtime at temporary warehouse jobs. They planned to stay through early winter, despite the fact that most of their homes on wheels weren’t designed to support life in subzero temperatures. Their employer was Amazon.com.

I will believe anything about deer. Deer, in my opinion, are rats with antlers, roaches with split hooves, denizens of the dark primeval suburbs. Deer intensely suggest New Jersey. One of the densest concentrations of wild deer in the United States inhabits the part of New Jersey that, as it happens, I inhabit, too. Deer like people. They like to be near people. They like beanfields, head lettuce, and anybody’s apples. They like hibiscus, begonias, impatiens, azaleas, rhododendrons, boxwood, and wandering Jews. I once saw a buck with a big eight-point rocking-chair rack looking magnificent as he stood between two tractor-trailers in the Frito-Lay parking lot in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Deer use the sidewalks in the heart of Princeton.

Burrack was a wide place in the road. They shot through it and on the other side was a combination café, store, and gas station. There was an old Ford wagon and a dust-streaked Olds with a horse trailer behind it in the dirt parking lot. The horse stared out at them as Poke wheeled the Connie in. “This looks like just the ticket,” Lloyd said. Poke agreed. He reached into the back for

At first we only knew a few things: we wanted to make content we would have watched when we were younger, and we wanted to end our episodes with a dance party. Spontaneous dance parties are important in my life. I have one in the makeup trailer almost every afternoon on Parks and Recreation. Dancing is the great equalizer. It gets people out of their heads and into their bodies. I think if you can dance and be free and not embarrassed you can rule the world.

In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey Butane in my veins and I'm out to cut the junkie With the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose Kill the headlights and put it in neutral Stock car flamin' with a loser in the cruise control Baby's in Reno with the Vitamin D Got a couple of couches, sleep on the love seat Someone came in sayin' I'm insane to complain About a shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt Don't believe everything that you breathe You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve So shave your face with some mace in the dark Savin' all your food stamps and burnin' down the trailer park Yo, cut it Soy un perdedor I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Double barrel buckshot) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? Forces of evil on a bozo nightmare Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber 'Cause one's got a weasel and the other's got a flag One's on the pole, shove the other in a bag With the rerun shows and the cocaine nose-job The daytime crap of the folksinger slob He hung himself with a guitar string A slab of turkey neck and it's hangin' from a pigeon wing You can't write if you can't relate Trade the cash for the beef, for the body, for the hate And my time is a piece of wax fallin' on a termite That's chokin' on the splinters Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Get crazy with the cheese whiz) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Drive-by body pierce) Yo, bring it on down I'm a driver, I'm a winner Things are gonna change, I can feel it Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (I can't believe you) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Sprechen sie Deutsche, baby) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Know what I'm sayin'?)

Ronan let out a breath, put the model down on the bed beside him, and kissed Adam. Once, when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the scraggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy gray sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain traveling across the vast dry field toward him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding on the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him. That was this kiss. They kissed again. Adam felt it in more than his lips. Ronan sat back, his eyes closed, swallowing. Adam watched his chest rise and fall, his eyebrows furrow. He felt as bright and dreamy and imaginary as the light through the window. He did not understand anything. It was a long moment before Ronan opened his eyes, and when he did, his expression was complicated. He stood up. He was still looking at Adam, and Adam was looking back, but neither said anything. Probably Ronan wanted something from him, but Adam didn't know what to say. He was a magician, Persephone had said, and his magic was making connections between disparate things. Only now he was too full of white, fuzzy light to make any sort of logical connections. He knew that of all the options in the world, Ronan Lynch was the most difficult version of any of them. He knew that Ronan was not a thing to be experimented with. He knew his mouth still felt warm. He knew that he had started his entire time at Aglionby certain all he wanted to do was get as far away from this state and everything in it as possible. He was pretty sure he had just been Ronan's first kiss. "I'm gonna go downstairs," Ronan said.

Our trailer was a hot spot—people were drawn to it, and that made me proud. I took in a lot of kids over the years, some of whom became like family. I made breakfast for all. My famous waffles. My boys would just let me know how many friends were coming, and I’d get to making stacks of them. Kids in the park knew they could come to me with anything. I saw myself in some of them, and I wanted to support them with an open heart, lots of food and love. Like what had been done for me in my early life. Not everyone was as lucky as my boys—they knew that, and we’d make sure we helped others when they needed it.

One day the Galloways got a little more excitement than we were prepared for. We moved around a lot and at this point we were living in a trailer park in Auburn, Alabama. Hoss and I were out in the front yard on our regular patrol while my older sister Jennifer and younger sister Sara were playing by themselves. Sara was three years old and I guess she decided she wanted to go for a ride. My dad’s blue truck was out in front of the house and apparently he’d forgotten about the parking brake. The truck was in gear as Sara managed to pull the door open and muscle herself up into the cab. As she climbed in and got situated she kicked the truck out of gear with her tiny sneakered foot. The truck started rolling down the driveway toward a ditch. Jennifer started screaming. Faster than a speeding bullet I leapt into action! I ran toward her, blue cape flying in the wind behind me. I reached the truck. I grabbed on to the door frame of the open passenger side of the truck. I told Sara everything would be okay, and I stuck my heels down in the mud and pulled back with all my might. The mud was spewing from either side of my firmly planted boots as I started to slide along with the truck. I never lost my grip and I am convinced I was able to slow the roll down enough for Mom and Dad to come running out of the house. Dad jumped up into the truck and was able to throw the brake to stop the truck while Mom scooped up Sara. Super Noah saved the day. At least I wanted to believe that.

It took the sun a long while to come over the mountains and until it did my vision was bound to the few gray yards around the trailer. It was day but not day, dim but not night, a fugue of half-thoughts and disconnected images, pulsing with power beyond easy meaning—a crow flapping, glowing black against the gray—a shadow like a man crouched with a knife—parking lots aching with pink blur—so overwhelmed by thought I’d have to sit back, set down the pen, set down my coffee, and it goes on—glass towers gleaming out of gray cityscapes, blinding silver—an old man with a red guitar—the booming flame of rockets trailing smoke—a girl’s face, her freckled cheek downy with fine hairs, fleshy lips spread in a smile over crooked teeth. I sink in reverie—and what, what does it mean?—then scrape a few more lines with my pen. Nothing even approximate. Another failure.

It was when they determined that I had been born dead That my life became easier to understand. For a long time, I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them, Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’s ear, Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen. I spent my life in hotels: some looked like mansions, Some more like trailer parks, or pathways toward A future I tried to point to, but how could I point, With nothing but a hand no hand ever matched, With fingers that melted into words that no one read. I rehearsed names that others taught me: Caravaggio, Robert Brandom, Judith, Amber, Emmanuelle Cat. I got hungry the way only the dead get hungry, The hunger that launches a thousand dirty wars, But I never took part in the wars, because no one lets A dead man into their covert discussions. So I drifted from loft to cellar, ageless like a ghost, And America became my compass, and Europe became The way that dead folks talk, in short, who cares, There’s nothing to say because nobody listens, There’s no radio for the dead and the pillows seem Like sand. Let me explain: when you’re alive, As I understand it, pillows cushion the head, the way A lover might soothe the heart. The way it works for me, In contrast, is everything is sand. Beds are sand, The women I profess to love are sand, the sound of music In the darkest night is sand, and whatever I have to say Is sand. This is not, for example, a political poem, Because the dead have no politics. They might have A hunger, but nothing you’ve ever known Could begin to assuage it.

Here,” he said abruptly. “Turn here.” A rutted path ran up a little rise toward a beige trailer. “This is Grover's place.” The trailer sat exposed on a treeless hill. A perfectly ordered woodpile stood in the yard to the left. Each log seemed to have been cut to an identical length, and they were piled in a crisscross fashion, with each layer running perpendicular to the one below and above. A small patch of earth to the right of his stoop had been cleared of brush and raked smooth. Two lawn chairs sat evenly spaced against the skirting of the trailer. There were no junk cars, no engine parts, no kids' bicycles — just Grover's old Buick parked in a spot marked off by a frame of fist-sized rocks arranged in a perfect rectangle. Dan glanced over at me. The twinkle was back in his eye. “Goddamn reservation Indian,” he muttered. “Lost his culture.” Then he sat back and let out a long rolling laugh that seemed, like prairie thunder, to come from the beginning of time.

A visible cloud of steam rose from a long wide pipe protruding from the roof of a large concrete factory-like building nearby, and the air all around was filled with the intensely savory scent of barbecue potato chips, a flavor being manufactured in quantity for one of Southern's vendors. Grace knew that the barbecue scent came from a massive vat of liquefied compounds, which could be cooled and then poured into hundreds of fifty-five-gallon drums in the morning, carefully sealed, loaded onto tractor-trailers, and shipped out, to be warehoused for as long as two years and then, eventually, utilized in the industrial production of billions of pounds of highly processed potato-based snack foods. She knew what she smelled was a by-product from the manufacture of a highly concentrated chemical. Nevertheless, the scent evoked picnics in the park, bag lunches in elementary school lunchrooms shared over laughter with her dearest friends, long-buried feelings from childhood that rose from her heart.

Several days later I decided to go on a good long jog, trusting that Chip would not leave Drake again. As I was on my way back I saw Chip coming down the road in his truck with the trailer on it. He rolled up to me with his window down and said, “Baby, you’re doing so good. I’m heading to work now. I’ve got to go.” I looked in the back, thinking, Of course, he’s got Drake. But I didn’t see a car seat. “Chip, where’s Drake?” she said, and I was like, “Oh, shoot!” She took off without a word and ran like lightning all the way back to the house as I turned the truck around. She got there faster on foot than I did in my truck. I sure hope no one from Child Protective Services reads this book. They can’t come after me retroactively, can they? Chip promised it would never happen again. So the third time I attempted to take a run, I went running down Third Street and made it all the way home. I walked in, and Chip and Drake were gone. I thought, Oh, good. Finally he remembered to take the baby. But then I noticed his car was still parked out front. I looked around and couldn’t find them anywhere. Moments later, Chip pulled up on his four-wheeler--with Drake bungee-strapped to the handlebars in his car seat. “Chip!” I screamed, “What in the heck are you doing?” “Oh, he was crying, and I’d always heard my mom say she would drive me around the neighborhood when I was a baby, and it made me feel better,” Chip said. “He loved it. He fell right to sleep.” “He didn’t love it, Chip. He probably fell asleep because the wind in his face made it impossible to breathe.” I didn’t go for another run for the whole first year of Drake’s life, and I took him to the shop with me every single day. Some people might see that as a burden, but I have to admit I loved it. Having him in that BabyBjörn was the best feeling in the world. Drake was a shop baby. He would come home every night smelling like candles. We had friends who owned a barbecue joint, and their baby always came home smelling like a rack of ribs. I liked Drake’s smell a whole lot better.

I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.