Trash Will Always Be Trash Quotes

...the first sign of civilization is always trash.

When you say too much about anything important, it always ends up sounding more trivial than it is. Words trash it.

It's funny how the people who know the least about you, always have the most to say.

When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.

That’s nice of you, but it’s not necessary to loan me a car.” “I loan you cars all the time.” “And I almost always destroy them or lose them. I have terrible luck with cars.” “Working at Rangeman is a high-stress job, and you’re one of our few sources of comic relief. I give you a car and my men start a pool on how long it will take you to trash it. You’re a line item in my budget under entertainment.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

Writer's block — so what? Write something bad. Just throw it in the trash can when you're done, you're always improving. That kind of writing is like doing a bunch of push-ups. Every individual push-up is not the important thing. On Tuesday you're going to think, "Is it really important that I do it today?" No, but the collective impact is. If you write every day, you will improve.

IT’S A TRUTH universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up. But it’s not just the junky stuff they’ll get rid of. People can be thrown away too, like last night’s trash left out on sidewalks or pushed to the edge of wherever all broken things go. What those rich people don’t always know is that broken and forgotten neighborhoods were first built out of love.

Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos. There are 7 people in my house. We each have different genders. I cut my hair over the bathroom sink and everything I own has a hole in it. There is a banner in our living room that says “Love Cats Hate Capitalism.” We sit around the kitchen table and argue about the compost pile and Karl Marx and the necessity of violence when The Rev comes. Whatever the fuck The Rev means. Every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout “Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth!” I want us to spend the next 80 years together eating Doritos and riding bikes. I want to be Oscar the Grouch. I want him and his girlfriend to be Bert and Ernie. I want us to live on Sesame Street and I will park my trash can on their front stoop and we will be friends every day. If I ever seem grouchy it’s just because I am a little afraid of all that fun. There is a river running through this city I know as well as my own name. It’s the first place I’ve ever called home. I don’t think its poetry to say I’m in love with the water. I don’t think it’s poetry to say I’m in love with the train tracks. I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say I see God in the skyline. There is always cold beer asking to be slurped on back porches. There are always crushed packs of Marlboro’s in my back pockets. I have been wearing the same patched-up shorts for 10 days. Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos.

...en route to the final destination, which was always to get trashed, wasted, hammered, crunked up, bombed, wrecked, sloshed, fried, flapjacked, fucked-up, or get plainlong fucked, laid, drained, get some ass, get some head, some skull, a lube job, get your oil changed, get some brown sugar, quiff, goo, pussy...

The Frays had never been a religiously observant family, but Clary loved Fifth Avenue at Christmas time. The air smelled like sweet roasted chestnuts, and the window displays sparkled with silver and blue, green and red. This year there were fat round crystal snowflakes attached to each lamppost, sending back the winter sunlight in shafts of gold. Not to mention the huge tree at Rockefeller Center. It threw its shadow across them as she and Simon draped themselves over the gate at the side of the skating rink, watching tourists fall down as they tried to navigate the ice. Clary had a hot chocolate wrapped in her hands, the warmth spreading through her body. She felt almost normal—this, coming to Fifth to see the window displays and the tree, had been a winter tradition for her and Simon for as long as she could remember. “Feels like old times, doesn’t it?” he said, echoing her thoughts as he propped his chin on his folded arms. She chanced a sideways look at him. He was wearing a black topcoat and scarf that emphasized the winter pallor of his skin. His eyes were shadowed, indicating that he hadn’t fed on blood recently. He looked like what he was—a hungry, tired vampire. Well, she thought. Almost like old times. “More people to buy presents for,” she said. “Plus, the always traumatic what-to-buy-someone-for-the-first-Christmas-after-you’ve-started-dating question.” “What to get the Shadowhunter who has everything,” Simon said with a grin. “Jace mostly likes weapons,” Clary sighed. “He likes books, but they have a huge library at the Institute. He likes classical music …” She brightened. Simon was a musician; even though his band was terrible, and was always changing their name—currently they were Lethal Soufflé—he did have training. “What would you give someone who likes to play the piano?” “A piano.” “Simon.” “A really huge metronome that could also double as a weapon?” Clary sighed, exasperated. “Sheet music. Rachmaninoff is tough stuff, but he likes a challenge.” “Now you’re talking. I’m going to see if there’s a music store around here.” Clary, done with her hot chocolate, tossed the cup into a nearby trash can and pulled her phone out. “What about you? What are you giving Isabelle?” “I have absolutely no idea,” Simon said. They had started heading toward the avenue, where a steady stream of pedestrians gawking at the windows clogged the streets. “Oh, come on. Isabelle’s easy.” “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.” Simon’s brows drew together. “I think. I’m not sure. We haven’t discussed it. The relationship, I mean.” “You really have to DTR, Simon.” “What?” “Define the relationship. What it is, where it’s going. Are you boyfriend and girlfriend, just having fun, ‘it’s complicated,’ or what? When’s she going to tell her parents? Are you allowed to see other people?” Simon blanched. “What? Seriously?” “Seriously. In the meantime—perfume!” Clary grabbed Simon by the back of his coat and hauled him into a cosmetics store that had once been a bank. It was massive on the inside, with rows of gleaming bottles everywhere. “And something unusual,” she said, heading for the fragrance area. “Isabelle isn’t going to want to smell like everyone else. She’s going to want to smell like figs, or vetiver, or—” “Figs? Figs have a smell?” Simon looked horrified; Clary was about to laugh at him when her phone buzzed. It was her mother. where are you? It’s an emergency.

A simple pecking order has always characterized mankind's relationship to waste: The wealthy throw out what they do not want, the poor scavenge what they can, and whatever remains is left to rot.

I always wanted this - to come to restaurants that raise their own cows and mortgage bottles of wine. But, it makes me feel insecure - reminds me that I'm really just poor, white trash with a good job.

I like your body and your face and your hair and your skin, and I like how you’re always warmer than me, and how you never sit still except when you’re really trying to concentrate on what someone’s saying, and I like how you always fix things without being asked. You’re the only one of us who will actually take out the trash before it’s spilling over. And every time you’re doing anything—going to the store or doing laundry or making yourself breakfast—you’ll always ask if anyone else needs anything, and I like how I know when you’re about to text me from the other side of the room because you make this really specific face.

All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The

If you can't do what you long to do, go do something else. Go walk the dog, go pick up every bit of trash on the street outside your home, go walk the dog again, go bake a peach cobbler, go paint some pebbles with brightly colored nail polish and put them in a pile. You might think it's procrastiantion, but - with the right intention - it isn't; it's motion. And any motion whatsoever beats inertia, because inspiration will always be drawn to motion.

He had one of those typical piece of shit days. The grind always. At least this time he had the guys to stay away from the bar and not drive home to the wife and kid drunk. He got home and immediately everything pissed him off. Sometimes the way his wife looked at him made him want to kill himself. The way she all of a sudden appeared like a total stranger. The vacancy in her eyes, it was bad. He took his son's favourite plastic mug, the one with the picture of Magic Johnson, and threw it into the trash. He felt better but not much.

The most powerful superhero of all, the one everyone wishes they were, is Mistress Cleanasyougo. At the end of every day she folds her clothes. She never leaves scissors on the table, pens with no ink are thrown in the trash, wet towels are always hung up, dishes are washed directly after dinner and nothing is left unsaid.

Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The lowest trash always have the option of taking refuge in patriotism.

Flies can be sitting in a garden and completely ignore the beautiful flowers around them. Instead they'll go right for the rotting banana peel or piece of trash. Bees, on the other hand, could be sitting in a room full of trash and find the tiniest speck of fruit or honey to land on. Don't be a fly. Become a bee and stay a bee. Look for the good in every circumstance, even the most horrible and disgusting places. There's always some honey to land on.

If you're always trying to impress me, how come you don't take out the trash?” The look on his face was priceless. He blurted out in undisguised bewilderment, “That would impress you?

Nice vest, Sophie,” said Luca, straight off the bat. “I can barely see you.” “Luca.” I tore my attention away from Nic for the amount of time needed to throw his brother a contemptuous glare. “A pleasure, as always.” […] “Ignore Luca. That’s just his bad attempt at trash-talking you,” Nic cut in, sending his brother a glare on my behalf. “And my way of pointing out that she’s small,” Luca added. “Thanks, Sherlock. I know I’m small.” “Just making sure.” “Do you even have a brain-to-mouth filter?” I asked. “I try not to overuse it,” he returned blithely. “Clearly.” “Don’t cry about it, Day-Glo.

An hour ago, I would have sworn that a man's body wouldn't fit in a standard trash bag, and that even if it did, it'd be too heavy to lift." "Pieces always fit better than the whole," he said. "And a corpse weighs less after you drain the blood." "Spoken like a true psychopath.

Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift--rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting.

It’s knowing the world might be a trash fire, but it’s less trash when there are people to help navigate the darkness. Friendship is messy. Hard. Infuriating. Awesome. Fragile. Durable. Impossible. Worth it. Always worth it.

DON’T GOSSIP. One time I trashed an entrepreneur I had invested in to another investor. Later that day I was supposed to have dinner with the first entrepreneur. By that time, just four hours later, he had heard I trashed him. He never trusted me again. People always hear. And if they don’t hear, they feel, because word gets around. And you can’t predict this. And it’s another way of living a double life.

When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.40

Stories of unity tamp down our discontents and mask even our most palpable divisions. And when these divisions are class based, as they almost always are, a pronounced form of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are.

STEVE CARELL IS NICE BUT IT IS SCARY It has been said many times, but it is true: Steve Carell is a very nice guy. His niceness manifests itself mostly in the fact that he never complains. You could screw up a handful of takes outside in 104-degree smog-choked Panorama City heat, and Steve Carell’s final words before collapsing of heat stroke would be a friendly and hopeful “Hey, you think you have that shot yet?” I’ve always found Steve gentlemanly and private, like a Jane Austen character. The one notable thing about Steve’s niceness is that he is also very smart, and that kind of niceness has always made me nervous. When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things. Steve could never be as funny as he is, or as darkly observational an actor, without having an extremely acute sense of human flaws. As a result, I’m always trying to impress him, in the hope that he’ll go home and tell his wife, Nancy, “Mindy was so funny and cool on set today. She just gets it.” Getting Steve to talk shit was one of the most difficult seven-year challenges, but I was determined to do it. A circle of actors could be in a fun, excoriating conversation about, say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and you’d shoot Steve an encouraging look that said, “Hey, come over here; we’ve made a space for you! We’re trashing Dominique Strauss-Kahn to build cast rapport!” and the best he might offer is “Wow. If all they say about him is true, that is nuts,” and then politely excuse himself to go to his trailer. That’s it. That’s all you’d get. Can you believe that? He just would not engage. That is some willpower there. I, on the other hand, hear someone briefly mentioning Rainn, and I’ll immediately launch into “Oh my god, Rainn’s so horrible.” But Carell is just one of those infuriating, classy Jane Austen guys. Later I would privately theorize that he never involved himself in gossip because—and I am 99 percent sure of this—he is secretly Perez Hilton.

Clary, if tomorrow morning we got crushed to death in a trash compactor, it would still be worth it, for all the time we had. Every minute we spend together is worth a lifetime. And I would always, always choose you.' She squinted at him suspiciously. 'That's lovely, but--- a trash compactor? Simon and Isabelle made you watch Star Wars again, didn't they?' 'No one makes me do anything,' Jace said, which meant yes.

I'll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that's not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.' Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don't do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always. The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can't just watch. They can't just appreciate. They can't just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist's job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific." - Ian Malcolm

Xander shoots his empty can into a trash bin. “‘Love is the death of duty.’” He quotes Game of Thrones again. “I always figured you’d eventually break the rules for someone you love. I just thought it’d be for Banks.

I hate superheroes. I always hated superheroes. From the time I was a little kid, I could believe in a 50-foot gorilla trashing New York City before I could believe a guy would put on long tights and bat ears and go and fight crime. Like, the fantasy never made sense to me, on a basic level.

We're not the madwomen in the attic – they get lots of play, one way or another. We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation … not a soul registers that we are furious.

Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want.

Good people who are always silent for bad people to gain freedom and do their worsts are the most dangerous wastes the world ever has.

Even for an inbred clan deep in the swamp, she thought they might well be considered a peculiar bunch, but then the family always had run to eccentricity.

When I dreamed about becoming a fantasy adventurer, I was always a max-level character with epic gear. Look at me. I’m wearing vendor trash.

Prosperity is always built on slave labor. Ask any Ameri-can't. Or Bulgari-can. Yes, we can, eat from a trash can...

There’s always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women. And I see how men are encouraged to talk trash about women in order to become famous and powerful.

That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound. It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us. Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkably assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now posses. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith. Why? The truth is plain: We were not born to be niggers.

that’s the only place you find fairy tales, Hirianthial. In books. In the real world, there’s always someone who has to clean the kitchen and take out the trash. There’s always politics. There’s always someone who wants to get ahead and doesn’t care who they squash on their way up.

Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story. The

Early on, Zinkoff's mother impressed upon her son the etiquette of throwing up: That is, do not throw up at random, but throw up into something, preferably a toilet or bucket. Since toilets or buckets are not always handy, Zinkoff has learned to reach for the nearest container. Thus, at one time or another he has thrown up into soup bowls, flowerpots, wastebaskets, trash bins, shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown's hat. But never his father's mailbag.

I've done so many things that I could never take back. It's just... I don't deserve any salvation!" "I don't give a shit about how you see yourself. But Anzai was willing to take a beating to save you. Even if you think of yourself as trash... it doesn't always mean others will see you in the same light.

Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name—that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple—she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.

It's always easier to pretend you know something than it is to learn about it. It's always easier to be cute than it is to be rigorous. It is easier to talk trash than it is to practice the humility of the serious student.

Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed. But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonymity--confession without penance, truth without consequences--it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another. Those who leave such evidence can scarcely complain if strangers come along afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyeurs, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others. But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire.

May I just say that on his explosive album and in all the press that surrounded it, Justin neglected to mention the several times he’d cheated on me? There’s always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women. And I see how men are encouraged to talk trash about women in order to become famous and powerful. But I was shattered.

Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always. “The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch. They can’t just appreciate. They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.” He sighed,

There are dark sides of every fandom. The pockets filled with a certain kind of nostalgia where everything is sacred and shouldn't be tampered with. Where new things are always trash, or judged too harshly, or not up to some unknown holy standard. Where new people with new ideas can't touch an old sinking ship even if it'll repair it---make it better than before.

One thing I’d learned out in the world was that nobody’s so different. We all buy toilet paper, contemplate the ply. Request help at self-checkout because something always fucking goes wrong, doesn’t scan. We all spend too much money at Target, stand there in the parking lot going through the receipt, brow furrowed. We forget to take our vitamins, to take out the trash. We microwave leftovers. Set our alarms. Waste time on the internet. Forget our passwords. We worshipped gods of our choosing.

Everybody concocts their own truth, then they fight over whose truth is superior. So first, you must trash all this nonsense. Make love the driver of all truth, and whether there is consensus of knowledge or not, there'll always be consensus of heart.

Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

Recycling is better--I won't write "good"--for the environment. But without economics--without supply and demand of raw materials--recycling is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in glorifying garbage. No doubt it's better than throwing something into an incinerator, and worse than fixing something that can be refurbished. It's what you do if you can't bear to see something landfilled. Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place. (269)

O.K., then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain’t hep it. But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shall we say, of the most respectable... Ha ha, wow, the mind was amazing, always cranking out these—

Your girlfriend's sibling or parents might be totally nuts, but always defend them. Always. All a girl wants to do is to get along with her family and if you are on the side of making it easy, you will be loved eternally. It might be easier to condemn them - especially if she's doing that already - but, remarkably, even if they are murderers, she will find the good in them, especially if you start trashing them.

It doesn't feel like teasing when you go out of your way to make me feel like garbage for liking what I like. I already have to defend it enough with my parents, and with my friends. Like, I get it, ha ha, sometimes there are shirtless men on the covers. But what I'll never understand is why people are so quick to trash this one thing that's always been for women first. They won't let us have this one thing that makes us happy. Nope, if you like romance novels, you have zero taste or you're a lonely spinster.

She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

But it's all a matter of taste, you say. It's true that among the perfumes reckoned good or great, there are some that will move you more than others, and some that will leave you entirely cold or even sickened, because either they won't say what you're longing to hear or they say what you never want to hear again. All the same, when considering perfume as an art, it's possible to appreciate when something is done exceptionally well. If you've tried several perfumes, you know things can go wrong. Many compositions smell great in the first few minutes, then fade rapidly to a murmur or an unpleasant twang you can never quite wash off. Some seem to attack with what feels like an icepick in the eye. Others smell nice for an hour in the middle but boring at start and finish. Some veer uncomfortably sweet, and some fall to pieces, with various parts hanging there in the air but not really cooperating in any useful way. Some never get around to being much of anything at all. The way you can love a person for one quality despite myriad faults, you can sometimes love a perfume for one particular moment or effect, even if the rest is trash. Yet in the thousands of perfumes that exist, some express their ideas seamlessly and eloquently from top to bottom and give a beautiful view from any angle. A rare subset of them always seem to have something new and interesting to say, even if you encounter them daily. Those are the greats. By these criteria, one can certainly admire a perfume without necessarily loving it. Love, of course, is personal (but best when deserved).

Marriage is not a frozen tableau, however. It is always moving, even if the participants don’t sense its motion.

Past shouldn't always be treasured, because Present and Future become trashed.

Whenever he was around, I always forgot to breathe-Diamond Anderson, One Man's Trash

My mind had no answers. It was limp and dulled, useless as my missing fingers. One thought came clear: I must do something. I could not stand by while a horror was loosed upon the world. I had the thought that I should find my sister’s workroom. Perhaps there would be something there to help me, some antidote, some great drug of reversal. It was not far, a hall off her bedchamber separated by a curtain. I had never seen another witch’s craft room before, and I walked its shelves expecting I do not know what, a hundred grisly things, kraken livers, dragons’ teeth, the flayed skin of giants. But all I saw were herbs, and rudimentary ones at that: poisons, poppies, a few healing roots. I had no doubt my sister could work plenty with them, for her will had always been strong. But she was lazy, and here was the proof. Those few simples were old and weak as dead leaves. They had been collected haphazardly, some in bud, some already withered, cut with any knife at any time of day. I understood something then. My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch. Her crumbling trash could not help me. And my own herbs from Aiaia would not be enough, strong as they were. The monster was bound to Crete, and whatever would be done, Crete must guide me.

Whose fault is that? I wanted to lash out. You’re the one who threw Rose away like trash. You should have left her in that café in Provence. The words burned at my lips, aching to come out, but I bit them down. My aunt was so thin a breeze could blow her away, finally looking like the invalid she’d always claimed she was. A husband and two sons dead. She’d lost so much.

Brutality is boring. Over and over, hell night after hell night, the same old dumb, tedious, bestial routine: making men crawl; making men groan, hanging men from the bars; shoving men; slapping men; freezing men in the showers; running men into walls; displaying shackled fathers to their sons and sons to their fathers. And if it turned out that you'd been given the wrong man, when you were done making his life unforgettably small and nasty, you allowed him to be your janitor and pick up the other prisoners' trash. There was always another prisoner, and another. Faceless men under hoods: you stripped them of their clothes, you stripped them of their pride. There wasn't much more you could take away from them, but people are inventive: one night some soldiers took a razor to one of Saddam's former general in Tier 1A and shaved off his eyebrows. He was an old man. "He looked like a grandfather and seemed like a nice guy," Sabrina Harman said, and she had tried to console him, telling him he looked younger and slipping him a few cigarettes. Then she had to make him stand at attention facing a boom box blasting the rapper Eminem, singing about raping his mother, or committing arson, or sneering at suicides, something like that⁠—these were some of the best-selling songs in American history. "Eminem is pretty much torture all in himself, and if one person's getting tortured, everybody is, because that music's horrible," Harman said. The general maintained his bearing against the onslaught of noise. "He looked so sad," Harman said. "I felt so bad for the guy." In fact, she said, "Out of everything I saw, that's the worst." This seems implausible, or at least illogical, until you think about it. The MI block was a place where a dead guy was just a dead guy. And a guy hanging from a window frame or a guy forced to drag his nakedness over a wet concrete floor⁠—well, how could you relate to that, except maybe to take a picture? But a man who kept his chin up while you blasted him with rape anthems, and old man shorn of his eyebrows whose very presence made you think of his grandkids--you could let that get to you, especially if you had to share in his punishment: "Slut, you think I won't choke no whore / til the vocal cords don't work in her throat no more!..." or whatever the song was.

the older man put one hand on Joe’s shoulder, his expression serious as he focused his attention on Joe. “Son, a good woman is hard to find and a priceless treasure. Never forget God’s gift to you or His grace, and always turn to Him in times of hardship. Be her friend, her biggest fan and supporter, and always, always take out the trash, and if you want brownie points, offer to do the dishes.

(From the Introduction by Cornell West) For King, dissent did not mean disloyalty—in fact, dissent was a high form of patriotism. When he said that the US government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” he was not trashing America. He was telling the painful truth about a country he loved. King was never anti-American; he was always anti-injustice in America and anywhere else.

Does anyone ever recognize themselves when they look back? When they see who they used to be at some point in their life, or do the things that you remember always feel like something unknown, strange? Does the caterpillar know it will become a butterfly? Do maggots suspect that at some stage they'll grow wings and once they are flying, would they recognize themselves when looking at a maggot in the trash?

I reached for you,” I told her. “In my head, all these years. Even after you dumped me like trash and I couldn’t fall out of love with you no matter how much I drank and snorted, my brain reached for you always.

The face of a woman people see as a prize, have always see as a prize. They only care about the surface until what's underneath inconveniences them, and then they drop me like yesterday's trash. Or, worse, try to change me.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?

They plant little seeds of poison, whispering to everyone, idealizing them to their face, and then insulting them behind their backs. “Insulting” doesn’t really even capture the subtlety of a psychopath’s gossip. Instead of overtly trashing people, psychopaths paint themselves as victims. Someone is always wronging them in one way or another. So instead of being a backstabbing gossiper, they come across as a sympathetic victim of everyone else’s bad behavior.

First semester, I learned that Jack Rogers sandals, so revered in college, screamed, “My small liberal arts school will always be the center of the universe!” I’d found a new axis, so into the trash went my gold, silver, and white pairs.

Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn’t mean you’ve recycled anything, and it doesn’t make you a better, greener person: it just means you’ve outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it’s overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there’s always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place.

In company, Charles Sheridan always spoke contemptuously of television. “By Jove,” he would say, “I don’t see how anyone can look at that trash. It must be a year since I’ve turned our set on.” Now his wife could hear him laughing uproariously.

I looked at her and she looked at me and we weren’t walking. We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like the extremely blue or extremely big of flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything. What interested me about the Duke’s eyes was the complexity of the color- she always said they looked like the bottom of trash-can bins, a swirl of green and brown and yellow but she was underselling herself she always undersold herself. Christ it was hard to unthink

Whether or not we subscribe to any particular religion or philosophy, it would be hard to deny that knowing our cosmic destiny must have some impact on how we think about our existence, or even how we live our lives. If we want to know whether what we do here ultimately matters, the first thing we ask is: how will it come out in the end? If we find the answer to that question, it leads immediately to the next: what does this mean for us now? Do we still have to take the trash out next Tuesday if the universe is going to die someday? I’ve done my own scouring of theological and philosophical texts, and while I learned many fascinating things from my studies, unfortunately the meaning of existence wasn’t one of them. I may just not have been cut out for it. The questions and answers that have always drawn me in most strongly are the ones that can be answered with scientific observation, mathematics, and physical evidence. As appealing as it sometimes seemed to have the whole story and meaning of life written down for me once and for all in a book, I knew I would only ever really be able to accept the kind of truth I could rederive mathematically.

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.

It is midnight in the hard part of town. The mask is itching like it always does. The ragged end of my cape is soaking in a puddle of something I don't want to guess about. I'm crouched behind a kicked-in aluminum trash can. It stinks of rotted meat and drunkard's piss - and I feel right at home. (from Nothing to Lose)

Everyone's unique. No two people are alike. Be proud of that. If someone says something against you, screw them. They don't know what it's like to be you. If they did, they would never trash talk you. And, do the same with others. You don't know what a person's going through. If someone's having a rough day, and lashes out, forgive them. Give them a shoulder to cry on, a person to put their faith in. And always, always, stay loyal to your friends. Get yourself some, and never lose them. These are the people that are going to be with you through thick and thin, no matter what. Sure, you'll fight, you'll bitch, all friend groups do. But, the important thing to do is: forgive, and move on. And most importantly, love God. He is our Creator, and if you don't believe in him, that's ok. I'm saddened by the fact that you don't, but it's ok. I can just pray for you, and hope that He shows himself to you later on. You may ask, "How can there be a God that lets all this bad stuff happen? How can he just sit and watch and do nothing?" Well, I don't have all of the answers. But, I do know that He is greatly saddened by all of the evil in the world, yet He still loves each and every one of us. And, when you feel like nobody loves you, or maybe you just don't love yourself, know: He is there for you. He loves you, and he will never stop loving you.

A ghetto has tall buildings and empty lots, trash all over the street and city noise. Here the houses are two stories; the houses have trees in front and everyone has a yard. I always told Tracy she was wrong, but now I think Tracy was right. The ghetto looks different in different places, but if you live there, it makes you feel the same.

Like, I get it, ha ha, sometimes there are shirtless men on the covers. But what I’ll never understand is why people are so quick to trash this one thing that’s always been for women first. They won’t let us have this one thing that isn’t hurting anyone and makes us happy. Nope, if you like romance novels, you have zero taste or you’re a lonely spinster.

Then one night a report about breast cancer came on the news, all about mammograms and early detection, women talking about finding a lump in their breast. We were making dinner. We always turned the television off when we sat down to eat but we could watch it while we were cooking. That was the rule. “I have one of those,” she said to the television set. “You had a mammogram?” She shook her head. She wasn’t looking at me. “A lump.” I had been cutting up a head of broccoli and I put down the knife and washed my hands. “What did you do about it?” “I didn’t do anything about it.” “What did the doctor say?” She looked at me then. “The whole thing scared me to death.” “So what happened?” My brain insisted on hearing it in the past tense, I had a lump in my breast once. I couldn’t understand that this was something that was happening. “I thought I’d wait for you to come home,” she said. “You’re always so good at figuring things out.” “I’ve been home three months.” But she had found the lump a year before, and taped a gauze square over it when it started to leak. When I looked at her again I could actually see a disruption in the pattern of her dress. That’s how big it was. Once we started making the hopeless rounds of oncologist appointments, the past broke away. All the things I’d thought about myself before—I am an actress, I am not an actress, I was in love, I was betrayed—disintegrated into nothing. I made bowls of Cream of Wheat she wouldn’t eat and then scraped them into the trash once they turned cold. I managed the schedule of people who wanted to come and see her, her two sons and two daughters—one of those daughters my mother—my father, my brothers, all my cousins, all her friends. I made sure no one stayed too long. I sat by her bed and read to her.

On the cover that leaned against the dirty couch, John and Yoko pressed together for a kiss they would never finish. People were always trashing Yoko Ono, blaming her for breaking up the Beatles, but Josie knew they were just jealous that John preferred Yoko to some bloated megaband. Nobody ever loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list.

He was an extremely intelligent boy-slash-man from a working- to middle-class family—from what, if he got drunk enough, he called trash—and those two biographical coordinates have always worked on me the way a handsome face never could. His weekly emails to the staff were small masterpieces chiseled out of wit, both anarchic and dry, and what I suspected was creeping intellectual boredom.

When he lifted the cover of one of the trash cans, before emptying the contents of his own pail into it, he was always astonished by its neatness and order. His own trash was the most indecent collection in the entire building. Repugnant and despicable. There was no resemblance between it and the honest, day-to-day trash of the other tenants. That had a solid, respectable appearance, and his did not.

Montrose could have simply forbidden him to read such things. Atticus knew other sons whose fathers had done that, who’d thrown their comic books and Amazing Stories collections into the trash. But Montrose, with limited exceptions, didn’t believe in book-banning. He always insisted he just wanted Atticus to think about what he read, rather than imbibing it mindlessly, and Atticus, if he were being honest, had to admit that was a reasonable goal.

Linc didn't know if it was his imagination, but the streets seemed to have gotten older and dirtier - more so, surely, then was possible in the time that had gone by. What he remembered as the center of where the action was, and where all of life happened had turned into tired and shabby remnants of an age that was running down. Had the store fronts always been so grubby with their cloudy windows, half hearted displays, the paint around the doors dulled and peeling like the once-high hopes of some forgotten opening day long ago? Had trash always stunk like this, piled in alleys and strewn along the gutters? Above it all, high-rental buildings that had once thrust proudly toward the sky crumbled silently amid the winds, the rain, and the corrosive fames eating into them. They had degenerated into cheap hotels and apartments while business fled the cities for manicured office parks by the interstates. But the people no longer stopped to gaze at these buildings, in any case. The figures on the sidewalks hurried on, avoiding each other's eyes, enwrapped in their own isolation. Even those who stood or walked together aimed words at each other from behind facades that had become so second nature that even they themselves now mistook them for the persons atrophying within. A city of brooding shells, inhabited by beings who hid inside shells.

Kalugin fell asleep and had a dream: He’s sitting in some bushes and a policeman is walking by. Kalugin woke up, scratched around his mouth, and fell asleep again, and again he had a dream: He’s walking by the bushes, and in the bushes sits a policeman, hiding. Kalugin woke up, placed a newspaper under his head to keep his drool from drowning the pillow, and fell asleep again. And again he had a dream: He’s sitting in the bushes and a policeman is walking by. Kalugin woke up, changed the newspaper, lay down and fell asleep. And when he fell asleep he had the dream again: He’s walking by the bushes and in the bushes sits a policeman. Kalugin woke up and decided not to go to sleep again, but he fell asleep right away and had a dream: He’s sitting behind the policeman and a bush is walking by. Kalugin screamed and thrashed in his bed, but now he couldn’t wake up. Kalugin slept four days and four nights in a row, and on the fifth day he woke up so skinny that he had to tie his boots to his legs with twine so they wouldn’t slip off. They didn’t recognize him at the bakery where he always bought millet bread and they slipped him half-rye. The sanitary commission, making its rounds from apartment to apartment, set eyes on Kalugin and, deeming him unsanitary, ordered the co-op management to throw him out with the trash. Kalugin was folded in half and they threw him out, like trash.

Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written.* He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles—misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description—all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two—during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss—and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states—Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken—so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like army worms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west. Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there—in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies—they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them “fierce craving boys” with “a feeling of having been cheated.” Freebooters, armed and drunk—a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight … looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama’s grave. Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn’t stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean—the end of the road.

The train station—busy, swarming with people, luggage, porters, taxi drivers and limousine chauffeurs—a giant honeycomb, with worker bees flying in and out, carrying the trash, which covers the entire floor, in and out of the building. Only the honey has been consumed by the selected few, and nothing but the mucus remains. The line—a monstrous larva—the line stretches from the information window and extends almost out of the door. A human worm—hundreds of legs and hands, twisting and breathing disease. What was I thinking? This is just a city like any other, a city with its inhabitants, always busy, from the morning until the nighttime, always itching for a fight, always ready to chew me up and spit me out. A stripped and ragged bone, tossed aside when I can no longer feed its hungry belly. The belly of a beast—a human beast—merciless, yet placatory on the surface. I light a cigarette, spit on the floor, and walk towards the daylight.

But this is what I also thought as I watched the waves of trash crash over the cracked and broken road: that for the rest of us, Arizona would always be one of our places now. It would be on the list of things we own in our heads. Don’t we all have this list? It’s like, everything that secretly belongs to us—a favorite color, or springtime, or a house we don’t live in anymore. We all gained Arizona by coming here, but for the people who already lived here, we could only take something away.

I could not help weeping with him - not over my own fate which, however clearly laid out, was just as sad as his, but over the injustices, the iniquities, and the crimes to which the exploited poor are always and everywhere subjected to, by a mob of scoundrels and trash who deck themselves out in many-colored robes, in helmet and plumed hats, in gold and silver embroideries, and take themselves titles of majesty, holiness, eminence, lordship, in order to fleece, bleed, and slaughter the poor.

There is exactly enough of me that is aware of that to make me into someone vaguely normal. Like a guy who takes the trash out and buys replacement hand mixes parts online and usually does not show up to work hungover anymore. The part of me who knows this is how I have to be is always in conflict. He is in conflict with the bigger, stronger, louder part of me who does nothing but hover over the normal me, 24/7, reminding me that I could be at a Red Dirt concert somewhere at that exact moment.

Above all, we must stop declaring what is patently untrue, that Americans, through some rare good fortune, escaped the burden of class that prevailed in the mother country of England. Far more than we choose to acknowledge, our relentless class system evolved out of recurring agrarian notions regarding the character and potential of the land, the value of labor, and critical concepts of breeding. Embarrassing lower-class populations have always been numerous, and have always been seen on the North American continent as waste people.

We’re the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lolloping Labrador, and not a soul registers that we are furious. We’re completely invisible. I thought it wasn’t true, or not true of me, but I’ve learned I am no different at all. The question now is how to work it, how to

The last scene showed a cavernous room in a subbasement filled with hundreds of black trash bags, the building’s daily detritus. Standing in front of the bags were five guys in work clothes. Their job, their mission, their goal was to toss these bags into waiting trash trucks. The camera focused on one of the men. The narrator asked, “What’s your job?” The answer to anyone watching was painfully obvious. But the guy smiled and said to the camera, “Our job is to make sure that tomorrow morning when people from all over the world come to this wonderful building, it shines, it is clean, and it looks great.” His job was to drag bags, but he knew his purpose. He didn’t feel he was just a trash hauler. His work was vital, and his purpose blended into the purpose of the building’s most senior management eighty floors above. Their purpose was to make sure that this masterpiece of a building always welcomed and awed visitors, as it had done on opening day, May 1, 1931. The building management can only achieve their purpose if everyone on the team believes in it as strongly as the smiling guy in the subbasement.

She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn't. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk, just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go, too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to. Takumi

I reached for you,” I told her. “In my head, all these years. Even after you dumped me like trash and I couldn’t fall out of love with you no matter how much I drank and snorted, my brain reached for you always.” She remained frozen, not faltering as she stared at me. “When nothing gave me a reason to get out of bed, my friends were falling in love, making babies, and I felt so alone…” I choked on the tears in my throat I wouldn’t let loose. “What do you think was the only thing that made me keep breathing?” My tone hardened as I clenched my jaw. “In my brain, I reached for you. I never stopped reaching for you.

bottle. Before setting out to his burrow, he always stashed his other meager possessions. He was more willing to lose those than his sleeping spot. Wrong always packed in and packed out. His bottle, invariably empty by the morn, went out with him. He also collected any other trash he found in the ice plant. He kept his home, such as it was, neatly maintained. Keeping low so as to minimize the chance of being seen, Wrong sidled into his space. He unrolled his bedding, an old sleeping bag, and then settled on top of it. A sigh of contentment escaped his mouth, but even that was muted. Wrong was glad he didn’t snore, or at least he

YOU CAN ALWAYS GET THERE FROM HERE A traveler returned to the country from which he had started many years before. When he stepped from the boat, he noticed how different everything was. There were once many buildings, but now there were few and each of them needed repair. In the park where he played as a child, dust-filled shafts of sunlight struck the tawny leaves of trees and withered hedges. Empty trash bags littered the grass. The air was heavy. He sat on one of the benches and explained to the woman next to him that he’d been away a long time, then asked her what season had he come back to. She replied that it was the only one left, the one they all had agreed on.

He knew it was always a first sign that your generation had passed the torch of relevancy if it couldn’t understand the music of the younger one. Still, deep in his heart, he was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Rap just sucked, plain and simple, and Val listening to it was a lot like Val driving this car, trying to hold on to something that had never been all that worthwhile in the first place. They stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and tossed their lids in the trash on the way out the door, sipped their coffee leaning against the spoiler attached to the trunk of the sports car. Val said, ‘We went out last night, asked around like you said.’ Jimmy tapped his fist into Val’s. ‘Thanks, man.’ Val tapped back. ‘It ain’t just ’cause you did two years for me, Jim. Ain’t

Our delight in each other did not happen because he is the perfect man, or because he “loves me like Christ loves the church,” or because he is “sensitive to all my needs.” It didn’t happen because he takes the trash out, or cleans up after himself, or has always made a good living, providing me with all the things most women take for granted. It didn’t happen because he is a strong spiritual leader and always does the right thing. It happened and continues to happen because of the choices I make every day. I never have a chip on my shoulder, no matter how offended I have a right to be—and I do have reasons to be offended regularly. Every day, I remember to view myself as the woman God gave this man. This mind-set helps me be just that: a gift, a playmate, his helper.

The next day, I went into my dad’s shop, where he was boring barrels for duck calls. “Hey, you want to hear my duck call?” I asked him. I was a little bit nervous because I’d never blown a call in front of him before. “Yeah, let me hear it,” he said. I blew on the duck call. “You sound like a gadwall,” he said. A gadwall hen sounds like a mallard hen, except her cadence is a little shorter and sounds scratchier. But they’re pretty close. I didn’t know if he was complimenting me or criticizing me! “Hey, look on the bright side,” he said. “If the sperm count had been lower, you might have come out as a shoveler.” Shovelers are pretty much trash ducks and aren’t very good to eat. But after Phil told me I sounded like a gadwall, I’ve always had a special place for them in my heart.

I reached for you," I told her. "In my head, all these years. Even after you dumped me like trash and I couldn't fall out of love with you no matter how much I drank and snorted, my brain reached for you always." She remained frozen, not faltering as she stared at me. "When nothing gave me a reason to get out of bed, my friends were falling in love, making babies, and I felt so alone..." I choked on the tears in my throat I wouldn't let loose. "What do you think was the only thing that made me keep breathing?" My tone hardened as I clenched my jaw. "In my brain, I reached for you. I never stopped reaching for you." And she let her brother tell my family that, not only did I not love her, but I passed her around for my friends to abuse like she was nothing. When she was everything.

Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife’s edge. We’re a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there’s a dial tone, and your front yard isn’t underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there’s no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating.

I’ve spent all this bloody time trying to work through my shit. I thought I was ready.” “Ready for what?” “For you. I don’t want you to tie yourself to a man who wakes you up screaming every other night. How the hell can I ask you to devote the rest of your life to me—to start a family with me, to one day have kids with me—when I can’t even control my own damn brain?” He takes a deep breath, shaking his head. “I can’t ask that of you. It’s completely unfair.” “Are you done?” I ask. He cuts me a glare. I sigh. “Matt, I don’t want to demean your emotions, or anything. But the soldier denying himself relationships because of his PTSD is, like, so overdone.” He snorts. “Yeah?” “Yeah. Like, if I saw it in a script, I’d toss the whole thing into the trash. It’s a cliché. And not even a good one. It always annoys the audience.” “Why?” “Cause it’s ridiculous, you dipshit.

Question number four: I read somewhere that you were an actor before you became an author. CC: That sounded more like a judgement than a question. MG: It was. Usually people pick a career in medicine or business to fall back on. With your chosen professions, it's like you decided to sail upstream without a paddle or a canoe. CC: Well, performing and writing have always been the same thing to me. You get to be a storyteller in both fields, and at the end of the day, I suppose a storyteller is what I consider myself the most. MG: Well, la-di-da. I know what you mean, though. I was an actress myself back in the golden days of Hollywood - you know, before all this streaming trash. CC: Would I recognize your work? MG: Did you ever see the film Gone with the Wind? CC: Of course! MG: I supplied the wind. CC: [A beat of silence.} How much longer is this interview going to take?

He heard a dresser drawer slide shut in the bedroom. She came out dressed all in black, as she almost always did, and carrying the three pieces of a plate that had fallen off the bed the night before; it was a light shade of blue, and sticky with pomegranate juice. He heard her dropping it into the kitchen trash can before she wandered past him into the living room. She stood in front of his sofa, running her fingers through her hair to test for dampness, her expression a little blank when he glanced up at her, and it seemed to him later that she’d been considering something, perhaps making up her mind. But then, he played the morning back so many times that the tape was ruined—later it seemed possible that she’d simply been thinking about the weather, and later still he was even willing to consider the possibility that she hadn’t stood in front of the sofa at all—had merely paused there, perhaps, for an instant that the stretched-out reel extended into a moment, a scene, and finally a major plot point. Later he was certain that the first few playbacks of that last morning were reasonably accurate, but after a few too many nights of lying awake and considering things, the quality began to erode. In retrospect the sequence of events is a little hazy, images running into each other and becoming slightly confused: she’s across the room, she’s kissing him for a third time—and why doesn’t he look up and kiss her? Her last kiss lands on his head—and putting on her shoes; does she kiss him before she puts on her shoes, or afterward? He can’t swear to it one way or the other. Later on he examined his memory for signs until every detail seemed ominous, but eventually he had to conclude that there was nothing strange about her that day. It was a morning like any other, exquisitely ordinary in every respect.

There were icons of the Magdalen on the walls and paintings in the Western manner, all kitsch, trash. Mary M., Lucas thought, half hypnotized by the chanting in the room beside him; Mary Moe, Jane Doe, the girl from Migdal in Galilee turned hooker in the big city. The original whore with the heart of gold. Used to be a nice Jewish girl, and the next thing you know, she's fucking the buckos of the Tenth Legion Fratensis, fucking the pilgrims who'd made their sacrifice at the Temple and were ready to party, the odd priest and Levite on the sly. "Maybe she was smart and funny. Certainly always on the lookout for the right guy to take her out of the life. Like a lot of whores, she tended towards religion. So along comes Jesus Christ, Mr. Right with a Vengeance, Mr. All Right Now! Fixes on her his hot, crazy eyes and she's all, Anything, I'll do anything. I'll wash your feet with my hair. You don't even have to fuck me.

The cars and trucks that passed this way threw their trash out into the forest without pause, faster than the gleaners could pick them up and find new uses for them. The waste had always struck Maceo as a disgusting mystery, but now, it made sense. The indestructible plastic bottles and wrappers that rained on the ground were not merely trash, but seeds—diabolical harbingers of the alien ecology of metal and plastic and advertising that had already swallowed the coast. It was a hostile invader that no one else seemed to want to fight. The dead-eyed souvenir-hawkers at Coba sold the products the signs foretold; beside the road to the ruins of the once-sacred ceremonial city, a looming image of golden arches promised a still-greater ritual awaiting them in Valladolid—the devouring of machine-made ghost-food. Maceo could not read the words on the billboards, but he knew that they sought to infect their victims with the virus of desire.

I’m really enjoying my solitude after feeling trapped by my family, friends and boyfriend. Just then I feel like making a resolution. A new year began six months ago but I feel like the time for change is now. No more whining about my pathetic life. I am going to change my life this very minute. Feeling as empowered as I felt when I read The Secret, I turn to reenter the hall. I know what I’ll do! Instead of listing all the things I’m going to do from this moment on, I’m going to list all the things I’m never going to do! I’ve always been unconventional (too unconventional if you ask my parents but I’ll save that account for later). I mentally begin to make my list of nevers. -I am never going to marry for money like Natasha just did. -I am never going to doubt my abilities again. -I am never going to… as I try to decide exactly what to resolve I spot an older lady wearing a bright red velvet churidar kurta. Yuck! I immediately know what my next resolution will be; I will never wear velvet. Even if it does become the most fashionable fabric ever (a highly unlikely phenomenon) I am quite enjoying my resolution making and am deciding what to resolve next when I notice Az and Raghav holding hands and smiling at each other. In that moment I know what my biggest resolve should be. -I will never have feelings for my best friend’s boyfriend. Or for any friend’s boyfriend, for that matter. That’s four resolutions down. Six more to go? Why not? It is 2012, after all. If the world really does end this year, at least I’ll go down knowing I completed ten resolutions. I don’t need to look too far to find my next resolution. Standing a few centimetres away, looking extremely uncomfortable as Rags and Az get more oblivious of his existence, is Deepak. -I will never stay in a relationship with someone I don’t love, I vow. Looking for inspiration for my next five resolutions, I try to observe everyone in the room. What catches my eye next is my cousin Mishka giggling uncontrollably while failing miserably at walking in a straight line. Why do people get completely trashed in public? It’s just so embarrassing and totally not worth it when you’re nursing a hangover the next day. I recoil as memories of a not so long ago night come rushing back to me. I still don’t know exactly what happened that night but the fragments that I do remember go something like this; dropping my Blackberry in the loo, picking it up and wiping it with my new Mango dress, falling flat on my face in the middle of the club twice, breaking my Nine West heels, kissing an ugly stranger (Az insists he was a drug dealer but I think she just says that to freak me out) at the bar and throwing up on the Bandra-Worli sea link from Az’s car. -I will never put myself in an embarrassing situation like that again. Ever. I usually vow to never drink so much when I’m lying in bed with a hangover the next day (just like 99% of the world) but this time I’m going to stick to my resolution. What should my next resolution be?

She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away...

Young developing leaves on normal trees are often tinged red thanks to a kind of sun block in their delicate tissue. This is anthocyanin, which blocks ultraviolet rays to protect the little leaves. As the leaves grow, the anthocyanin is broken down with the help of an enzyme. A few beeches or maples deviate from the norm because they lack this enzyme. They cannot get rid of the red color, and they retain it even in their mature leaves. Therefore, their leaves strongly reflect red light and waste a considerable portion of the light’s energy. Of course, they still have the blue tones in the spectrum for photosynthesis, but they are not achieving the same levels of photosynthesis as their green-leaved relatives. These red trees keep appearing in Nature, but they never get established and always disappear again. Humans, however, love anything that is different, and so we seek out red varieties and propagate them. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure is one way to describe this behavior, which might stop if people knew more about the trees’ circumstances.

It was Spring, and yet it wasn't. It was not the land I had once roamed in centuries past, or even visited almost a year ago. The sun was mild, the day clear, distant dogwoods and lilacs still in eternal bloom. Distant- because on the estate, nothing bloomed at all. The pink roses that had once climbed the pale stone walls of the sweeping manor house were nothing but tangled webs of thorns. The fountains had gone dry, the hedges untrimmed and shapeless. The house itself had looked better the day after Amarantha's cronies had trashed it. Not for any visible signs of destruction, but for the general quiet. The lack of life. Though the great oak doors were undeniably worse for wear. Deep, long claw marks had been slashed down them. Standing on the top step of the marble staircase that led to those front doors, I surveyed the brutal gashes. My money was on Tamlin having inflicted them after Feyre had duped him and his court. But Tamlin's temper had always been his downfall. Any bad day could have produced those gouge marks. Perhaps today would produce more of them.

1. The first step is to take a trash bag and pick up all the trash. Throw it away into the bag. Take large trash items like boxes and stack them together and place the trash bag with it. Do not take the trash out. 2. Next gather all of the dishes and place them in your sink or on your counter. Do not do the dishes. 3. Take a laundry basket and pick up all the clothes and shoes. Place the laundry basket next to the trash pile. Do not do the laundry. 4. Next pick a space in the room like a corner or a desk and put all the items there that have a place back in their place. Then put the items that have no place in a pile. Move to the next space and repeat until all things are back in their spots. 5. Now you will have a pile of things that do not have a place. It will be easier now that the space is clear to tackle this category. You may choose to get rid of some items that have no place and are contributing to clutter. For important things, you can find them a permanent place. 6. Take out your trash to the bin; throw laundry into the wash or laundry room. Now your space is livable. I always save the dishes for another day.

Barnaby Fanning was the lone offspring of a marriage between two of New Orleans’ finest families. Growing up in a Garden District mansion so iconic it was a stop on all the tours, the future heir to sugar and cotton fortunes both, his adolescence spent at debutante balls during the season and trips abroad during the summer: it was the stuff of true Southern gentlemen. But Bucky always refused the first table at a restaurant. He carried a pocket calculator so he could tip a strict twelve percent. When his father nudged him out of the nest after graduating Vanderbilt (straight Cs), Bucky fluttered only as far as the carriage house because no other address would suit. He sported head-to-toe Prada bought on quarterly pilgrimages to Neiman Marcus in Dallas, paid for by Granny Charbonneau. At the slightest perceived insult, Bucky would fly into rages, becoming so red-faced and spitty in the process that even those on the receiving end of his invective grew concerned for his health. During the holidays, Bucky would stand over the trash and drop in Christmas cards unopened while keeping mental score of who’d sent them. He never accepted a dinner invitation without first asking who else would be there. Bucky Fanning had never been known to write a thank-you note.

But I don't know anyone who has an easy life forever. Everyone I know gets their heart broken sometime, by something. The question is not, will my life be easy or will my heart break? But rather, when my heart breaks, will I choose to grow? Sometimes in the moments of the most searing pain, we think we don't have a choice. But we do. It's in those moments that we make the most important choice: grow or give up. It's easy to want to give up under the weight of what we're carrying. It seems sometimes like the only possible choice. But there's always, always, always another choice, and transformation is waiting for us just beyond that choice. This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us. An oyster, a sliver of moon, one new bud on a black branch, a perfect tender shoot of asparagus, fighting up through the dirt for the spring sun. New life and new beauty are all around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be seen. I'm coming to think there are at least two kinds of pain. There's the anxiety and fear I felt when we couldn't sell our house. And then there's the sadness I felt when I lost the baby or when my grandma passed away. Very different kinds of pain. The first kind, I think, is the king that invites us to grow. The second kind is the kind that invites us to mourn. God's not trying to teach me a lesson through my grandma's death. I wasn't supposed to love her less so the loss hurt less acutely, I'm not supposed to feel less strongly about the horror of death and dying. When we lose someone we love, when a dear friend moves away, when illness invades, it's right to mourn. It's right to feel deep, wrenching sadness. But then there's the other kind of pain, that first kind. My friend Brian says that the heart of all human conflict is the phrase "I'm not getting what I want." When you're totally honest about the pain, what's at the center? Could it be that you're not getting what you want? You're getting an invitation to grow, I think, as unwelcome as it may be. It's sloppy theology to think that all suffering is good for us, or that it's a result of sin. All suffering can be used for good, over time, after mourning and healing, by God's graciousness. But sometimes it's just plain loss, not because you needed to grow, not because life or God or anything is teaching you any kind of lesson. The trick is knowing the difference between the two.

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know.

Most of us will. We’ll choose knowledge no matter what, we’ll maim ourselves in the process, we’ll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We’ll spy relentlessly on the dead: we’ll open their letters, we’ll read their journals, we’ll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us—who’ve left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we’d supposed. But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonymity—confession without penance, truth without consequences—it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another. Those who leave such evidence can scarcely complain if strangers come along afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We’re voyeurs, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we’ve found it? We’re all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others. But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire.

On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk. “Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?” I shook my head. “It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding. “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me. “Orgasm,” my mother whispered. “Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said. “That warm fuzzy feeling.” “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.” “For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.” “Men don’t attach as easily. They’re more rational,” my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, “We just want you to be careful.” “He means use a rubber.” “And take these.” My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills. “Gross,” was all I could say. “And your father has cancer,” my mother said. I said nothing. “Prostate isn’t like breast,” my father said, turning away. “They do surgery, and you move on.” “The man always dies first,” my mother whispered.

I think one of the reasons my family survived its difficult times and is so close today is because we are always laughing at one another’s faults and mistakes, and despite whatever injustices are done, we have a good time doing it. We aren’t afraid to poke fun at one another and no one ever takes it personal for long. My brothers and I are highly competitive and world-class trash-talkers, and if you ever walk in while we are playing cards or dominoes--just like our games with Granny and Pa--you probably would think someone is fixing to die. Our neighbor, who was about my parents’ age, came over to our house once looking for my mom. She found my brothers and me playing the card game hearts. She offered to be the fourth. But about midway through the second hand, we looked up and she had tears streaming down her face. She threw her cards in the middle of the table, declared she didn’t want to play anymore, and left the house. We were a bit miffed about it and didn’t realize until later that our trash talking had led to her emotional exit. Another time, I brought a girl from high school down to my parents’ house for supper and cards because she told me she was quite the spades player. Halfway through the game, she was crying hysterically. Her sister later stood nose to nose with me and gave me quite the tongue-lashing. I came to realize that our banter was a bit extreme to people outside of our family. Maybe that is one of the reasons I married a woman who couldn’t care less about winning or losing any game.

I take her to the rocks that Zeke, Shauna, and I go to sometimes, late at night. Tris and I sit on a flat stone suspended over the water, and the spray soaks my shoes, but it’s not so cold that I mind. Like all initiates, she’s too focused on the aptitude test, and I’m struggling with talking to her about it. I thought that when I spilled one secret, the rest would come tumbling after, but openness is a habit you form over time, and not a switch you flip whenever you want to, I’m finding. “These are things I don’t tell people, you know. Not even my friends.” I watch the dark, murky water and the things it carries--pieces of trash, discarded clothing, floating bottles like small boats setting out on a journey. “My result was as expected. Abnegation.” “Oh.” She frowns. “But you chose Dauntless anyway?” “Out of necessity.” “Why did you have to leave?” I look away, not sure I can give voice to my reasons, because admitting them makes me a faction traitor, makes me feel like a coward. “You had to get away from your dad,” she says. “Is that why you don’t want to be a Dauntless leader? Because if you were, you might have to see him again?” I shrug. “That, and I’ve always felt that I don’t quite belong among the Dauntless. Not the way they are now, anyway.” It’s not quite the truth. I’m not sure this is the moment to tell her what I know about Max and Jeanine and the attack--selfishly, I want to keep this moment to myself, just for a little while. “But…you’re incredible,” she says. I raise my eyebrows at her. She seems embarrassed. “I mean, by Dauntless standards. Four fears is unheard of. How could you not belong here?

The next day, I went into my dad’s shop, where he was boring barrels for duck calls. “Hey, you want to hear my duck call?” I asked him. I was a little bit nervous because I’d never blown a call in front of him before. “Yeah, let me hear it,” he said. I blew on the duck call. “You sound like a gadwall,” he said. A gadwall hen sounds like a mallard hen, except her cadence is a little shorter and sounds scratchier. But they’re pretty close. I didn’t know if he was complimenting me or criticizing me! “Hey, look on the bright side,” he said. “If the sperm count had been lower, you might have come out as a shoveler.” Shovelers are pretty much trash ducks and aren’t very good to eat. But after Phil told me I sounded like a gadwall, I’ve always had a special place for them in my heart. Several years later, I actually invented the first gadwall drake call. Gadwalls are unique in that the hen very rarely makes a sound. One day, we were working the ducks, and I had a mallard hen call in one hand and our six-in-one whistle in the other because we were working pintails. I blew the hen call and then the whistle. One time, I blew them at the same time and stopped. That sounds like a gadwall drake, I thought to myself. I started blowing them simultaneously so my dad could hear them. “Hey, you might be onto something,” he said. “Why don’t we try that? We’ll get the gadwall decoys and try it on ’em. If it gets them into the decoys, we’ll figure out a way to build them.” It was amazing how many gadwalls responded to my drake call. We ended up building the call, and no one has successfully duplicated it. It isn’t the prettiest of duck calls, but it’s effective.

Dear Borrowed Time, Why do you tease me? It seems like you give me a teeny weenie bit of light for a moment, and then, within the blink of an eye, you blow the light out in less than a second. Then I am left in the dark without a trace of light. What have I done for you to hate me so much? After all, and truth be told, I didn’t ask to be here. You put me here. Do you enjoy my suffering? It seems like you do because every step I take is difficult. You never spare me grace or a grain of mercy. Why do I have to be the one who borrows time as opposed to having time given to me fairly? When I look around, I see people enjoying life and the time that is given to them. It doesn’t seem like they are on borrowed time, but I notice I am. One would say, no, you have the same amount of time, just like everyone else. No, that is not true. The time that is given to me ticks by quickly and runs out faster than it ticks. Borrowed time, have you noticed that I was treated like trash as I was dumped here and there, or wherever they could place me? Did you notice that I didn’t stay in a home long because I was on borrowed time? Time wasn’t given to me because I was never given the ‘time’ to get to know anyone. I guess not, because I was and still am on borrowed time. I am sitting in a tree looking at the clock. The long hand never lends its hand to spare me more time. Instead, it takes more time away than it gives. The short hand always short-changed me on time and my life as well. And the second hand, oh, it is the worst!. It is a make-it-or-break-it moment. As it quickly ticks ... ticks ... ticks ... it slams the door in my face faster than it opened. Borrowed time, I want to be treated as fairly as anyone else. I hope one day you will favor me. If not, I have to continue to live on borrowed time until my time runs out completely. Time is never on my side.

The rest of the house was perfectly in order, as it always is, thanks to my system. It doesn’t have a name—I just call it my system. Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple: Fewer dishes. They can’t pile up if you don’t have them. This is the main thing, but also: Stop moving things around. How much time do you spend moving objects to and from? Before you move something far from where it lives, remember you’re eventually going to have to carry it back to its place—is it really worth it? Can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t read it. And if you are carrying an object, make sure to pick up anything that might need to go in the same direction. This is called carpooling. Putting new soap in the bathroom? Maybe wait until the towels in the dryer are done and carry the towels and soap together. Maybe put the soap on the dryer until then. And maybe don’t fold the towels until the next time you have to use the restroom. When the time comes, see if you can put away the soap and fold towels while you’re on the toilet, since your hands are free. Before you wipe, use the toilet paper to blot excess oil from your face. Dinnertime: skip the plate. Just put the pan on a hot pad on the table. Plates are an extra step you can do for guests to make them feel like they’re at a restaurant. Does the pan need to be washed? Not if you only eat savory things out of it.

Sam Underwater, everything is quiet. Tranquil. Like heaven is all around you, caressing your body, pulling you into its embrace. Deeper and deeper, it pulls at your legs until they beg to be released. I hold my water-resistant camera in front of me and take multiple pictures of the cold depths of the ocean. Its beauty never fails to mesmerize me. But I can’t stay for too long; sooner or later, that urge to breathe always pulls me back to the surface toward the dark sky littered with a million flickering lights … back into the noise of swooshing water and rushing wind. The shore is mostly deserted, except for a few beer cans, party cups, and some clothes and trash lying scattered all around. The only other person there is Nate Wilson … the most handsome guy at school and so much more than that. He’s sitting on a few rocks near the edge of the beach with a girl by his side. I can’t stop watching. Their hands touch briefly, but then the wave overtakes me and blocks my view. When the water lowers, I shake my head, but the waves keep picking up. Still, I hold up my camera and take a few pictures. Right as he turns his head toward me, I dive underwater again. Here, there are no boys, no girls, and no secret touches. Just me and the water, and all the beautiful creatures below that need to meet my camera. A single picture says more than words ever will. No matter how powerful they are. Nate People say it only takes a few minutes for your life to be destroyed. I never believed them … until today. With just the snap of a finger, a stupid decision and a simple push, I marked my own fate. My body grows colder and colder the longer I stay in the water. It consumes me whole as I stray farther and farther away from myself. From reality. I’m so damn dizzy, but I can’t collapse here. Not now, not in the middle of the ocean. I take a deep breath and peel my eyes open, forcing myself to go. That’s when I spot her … the girl and her camera. FLASH. I cover my eyes with my hand. Salty seawater enters my nostrils and mouth as I struggle to swim. When I open my eyes again, the girl is gone; swallowed by the same waves that drag me back to the shore. As my feet sink into the sand and the water creeps up against my toes, I stop and turn around, clutching the long red hairs in my hand as though they’re my last lifeline. This is now the place where not only my life changed forever. But hers too.

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The word “empath” jumped up in my awareness a few years after I had already been in the States. When I first came across it, it felt so woo-woo and new-agey that the “normal” part of me balked at it. It was hard enough to own being a Highly Sensitive Person, words that had research backing them. But this empath thing, this was taking it even a step further. It veered off into ambiguous, questionable territory. In fact, when I had first stumbled across the word online, trying to find a way to understand a part of my sensitivity that being an HSP didn’t quite encapsulate, I hadn’t even thought that it could possibly have anything to do with me. But the more I listened to other people’s stories, the more I followed the breadcrumbs, the more it started feeling that although the words that people used to describe their empath experiences were foreign, what they were talking about was essentially my own experience. It was just that some of these people connected that experience to belief systems I didn’t always resonate with while some others wrapped up the word in explanations that felt like the making up of a false story. But slowly, I could see that at the heart of it, beyond the cloak of words, beyond the different interpretations that people gave, our experiences felt similar. Like these so-called empaths, I often felt flooded with other people’s feelings. Their curiosity, worry and frustration jumped out at me. This often made me feel like I was walking through emotional minefields or collecting new feelings like you would collect scraps of paper. Going back to India after moving to the States, each time, I was stuck by how much all the little daily interactions, packed tightly in one day, which were part of my parents’ Delhi household, affected me energetically. Living in suburban America, I had often found the quiet too much. Then, I had thought nostalgically about India. Weeks could pass here without anyone so much as ringing the bell to our house. But it seemed like I had conveniently forgotten the other side of the story, forgotten how overstimulating Delhi had always been for me. There was, of course, the familiar sensory overload all around -- the continuous honking of horns, the laborers working noisily in the house next door, the continuous ringing of the bell as different people came and went -- the dhobi taking the clothes for ironing, the koodawalla come to pick up the daily trash, the delivery boy delivering groceries from the neighborhood kiraana store. But apart from these interruptions, inconveniences and overstimulations, there was also something more. In Delhi, every day, more lives touched mine in a day than they did in weeks in America. Going back, I could see, clearly for the first time, how much this sensory overload cost me and how much other people’s feelings leaked into mine, so much so that I almost felt them in my body. I could see that the koodawalla, the one I had always liked, the one from some kind of a “lower caste,” had changed in these past few years. He was angry now, unlike the calm resignation, almost acceptance he had carried inside him before. His anger seemed to jump out at me, as if he thought I was part of a whole tribe of people who had kept people like him down for years, who had relegated him to this lower caste, who had only given him the permission to do “dirty,” degrading work, like collecting the trash.

The word “empath” jumped up in my awareness a few years after I had already been in the States. When I first came across it, it felt so woo-woo and new-agey that the “normal” part of me balked at it. It was hard enough to own being a Highly Sensitive Person, words that had research backing them. But this empath thing, this was taking it even a step further. It veered off into ambiguous, questionable territory.  In fact, when I had first stumbled across the word online, trying to find a way to understand a part of my sensitivity that being an HSP didn’t quite encapsulate, I hadn’t even thought that it could possibly have anything to do with me. But the more I listened to other people’s stories, the more I followed the breadcrumbs, the more it started feeling that although the words that people used to describe their empath experiences were foreign, what they were talking about was essentially my own experience. It was just that some of these people connected that experience to belief systems I didn’t always resonate with while some others wrapped up the word in explanations that felt like the making up of a false story. But slowly, I could see that at the heart of it, beyond the cloak of words, beyond the different interpretations that people gave, our experiences felt similar. Like these so-called empaths, I often felt flooded with other people’s feelings. Their curiosity, worry and frustration jumped out at me. This often made me feel like I was walking through emotional minefields or collecting new feelings like you would collect scraps of paper. Going back to India after moving to the States, each time, I was stuck by how much all the little daily interactions, packed tightly in one day, which were part of my parents’ Delhi household, affected me energetically. Living in suburban America, I had often found the quiet too much. Then, I had thought nostalgically about India. Weeks could pass here without anyone so much as ringing the bell to our house. But it seemed like I had conveniently forgotten the other side of the story, forgotten how overstimulating Delhi had always been for me.  There was, of course, the familiar sensory overload all around -- the continuous honking of horns, the laborers working noisily in the house next door, the continuous ringing of the bell as different people came and went -- the dhobi taking the clothes for ironing, the koodawalla come to pick up the daily trash, the delivery boy delivering groceries from the neighborhood kiraana store. But apart from these interruptions, inconveniences and overstimulations, there was also something more. In Delhi, every day, more lives touched mine in a day than they did in weeks in America. Going back, I could see, clearly for the first time, how much this sensory overload cost me and how much other people’s feelings leaked into mine, so much so that I almost felt them in my body. I could see that the koodawalla, the one I had always liked, the one from some kind of a “lower caste,” had changed in these past few years. He was angry now, unlike the calm resignation, almost acceptance he had carried inside him before. His anger seemed to jump out at me, as if he thought I was part of a whole tribe of people who had kept people like him down for years, who had relegated him to this lower caste, who had only given him the permission to do “dirty,” degrading work, like collecting the trash.

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.

The jellycrusts, scorning the protection of travelling within armoured trucks, walked in the dry lands in ragged groups, pushing or dragging their belongings in carts or sledges. Their skins were concealed by thick, insulating gel once manufactured for military use. Since then, the jellycrusts had bought up all the remaining stocks of the stuff, slapping it on their own integrement, where it accumulated the dust and debris of the desert lands; hence their nickname. It reminded Leila of certain larval creatures who once lived in freshwater streams, and which perhaps still did somewhere, who attached stones and water rubbish to their skins, making a shell to live in. The jellycrusts could look like that: frightening, peeling, gaunt creatures. She used to wonder whether they ever washed it all off and started again from a clear skin. Did they make love? It was not a pleasant image. The gel had a strange smell, rather like a room that had been locked up too long; a wooden room beaten by sunheat, rotted by rain, stale and with the promise of hidden corruption. Jellycrusts always wore bulky, colourless clothes, quasi-military in appearance, heavily adorned with totemic ornaments, constructed from the desert trash.

The overarching concept of the MacOS was the “desktop metaphor,” and it subsumed any number of lesser (and frequently conflicting, or at least mixed) metaphors. Under a GUI, a file (frequently called “document”) is metaphrased as a window on the screen (which is called a “desktop”). The window is almost always too small to contain the document and so you “move around,” or, more pretentiously, “navigate” in the document by “clicking and dragging” the “thumb” on the “scroll bar.” When you “type” (using a keyboard) or “draw” (using a “mouse”) into the “window” or use pull-down “menus” and “dialog boxes” to manipulate its contents, the results of your labors get stored (at least in theory) in a “file,” and later you can pull the same information back up into another “window.” When you don’t want it anymore, you “drag” it into the “trash.” There is massively promiscuous metaphor-mixing going on here,

He told me I was pretty. That I was what all men wanted. I believed him. But then like the man before him, he put his hands on me.” I sit up straighter, my eyes going to David once again. He fixes his tie, his eyes on his desk. “Told me that I was a worthless whore.” David clears his throat. “Elli, this isn’t the assignment.” “Why? Why is it that the woman is always the whore?” she goes on, ignoring him. “Shouldn’t he be accountable for making me wet? For turning me on.” “Elli?” he snaps, jumping to his feet. “He had no problem fucking me, but when he found out I’d fucked another man, I was worthless. Used-up trash.

I’m always going to have memories of them because they were a huge part of my life. But these letters are not my memories of them. They aren’t ones I want to know or keep in any capacity. One by one, I rip them into tiny shreds without reading them. I’m content with the direction in which my life is headed, and I know if I obsess over the past, that obsession will only serve to anchor me in a place I am more than ready to move on from. I toss all the torn pieces of their history into my bathroom trash can. When I look up, I’m met with my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I’m starting to look happy again. Truly happy. It’s a beautiful thing.

I believe that we shocked each other by how swiftly we went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of the most mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived. But it was vital to my survival to have a one bedroom of my own i saw the aprtment almost as a sanatorium a hospice clinci for my own recovery I painted the walls in the warmest colors i could find and bought myself flowers every week as if i were visiting myself in the hospital is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty why are you studying Italian so that just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again and is actually successful this time? ciao comes from if you must know it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval venetians as an intimate salutation Sono il Suo Schiavo meaning i am your slave. om Naamah Shivaya meaning I honor the divinity that resides whin me. I wanted to experience both , I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence the dual glories of a human life I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos the singular balance of the good and he beautiful I'd been missing both during these last hard years because both pleasure and devotion require a stress free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety , As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion. four feet on the ground a head full of foliage looking at the world through the heart. it was more than I wanted to toughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. same guatemalan musicians are always playing id rather be a sparrow than a snail on their bamboo windpipes oh how i want italian to open itself up to me i havent felt so starved for comprehension since then dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontanana dolce sitl nuovo Dante wrote his divine comedy in terza rima triple rhyme a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating here times every five lines. lamor che move il sole e laltre stelle we are the masters of bel far niente larte darrangiarsi The reply in italy to you deserve a break today would probably be yeah no duh that's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon to go over to your house and sleep with your wife, I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch i peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all,)I put some olives on the plate too and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the fromagerie down the street tend two slices of pink oily salmon for dessert a lovely peach which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm form the roman sunlight for the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing finally when i had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal i went and sat in apatch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bit of it with my fingers while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian happiness inhabited my every molecule. I am inspired by the regal self assurance of this town so grounded and rounded so amused and monumental knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history i would like to be like rome when i am an old lady. I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in

She’s always been an angry drunk. Senior year of high school, she got trashed and punched her ex-boyfriend in the face for not having any gum.

The other mystery nobody cared to solve was Jip. I’d found him, too, not lying on top of her as usual but under the sheet, curled up against her cold belly. Did he have the same junk in his veins she did, I’ll never know. Accident or no accident, the question of my life. As part of my cleanup before calling 911, I’d picked up his hard little body that was curled like a cinnamon roll and wrapped it in the ratty striped towel he always dragged around the house. Pretending that rag was me, I assumed. Then later, with so much else going on, I forgot about him. The little towel bundle turned up outside, on the black-bagged trash pile. This fierce tiny being that never stopped loving her, nor wanting me for dinner. I took him around to the back and buried him behind the tool shed. The one goodbye that was left up to me.

The trashing, demeaning, humiliating, and labeling of other believers is horrifying and grieves God. A call to truth, which we must issue, is always to be done with gentleness, humility, and dignity, for we are calling one made in God’s image. Opinions are not to govern character, no matter how strongly we hold them. Issues are not to govern character no matter how biblical they are. Character is to be rooted and grounded in likeness to Christ so that when we express our thoughts, we manifest his character and none other.

Truth be told, slaves in Jamaica have more ranking among themself than massa. In this place two thing matter more than most, how dark a nigger you be and where the white man choose to put you. One have all to do with the other. From highest to lowest, this be how things go. The number one prime nigger who would never get sell is the head of the house slaves. That position so hoity-toity that in some house is a white woman who be that nigger. The head house nigger get charge with so much that she downright run the house, and everybody including the massa do what she say. Homer careful not to cross the line, though. Position can make a negro girl forget herself and there is always the cowhide, the cat-o’-nine and the buckshot to remind her of her place. After she, there be the house slaves who work the rooms and the grounds and the gardens. Sometimes is the prime pretty niggers or the mulatto, quadroon or mustee that work there. Then you have the cooks who the backra trust the most, because the cook know that if the mistress get sick after a meal there goin’ be a whipping or a hanging before the cock even crow. Other house slaves be cleaning and dusting and shining and manservanting and womanservanting and taking care of backra pickneys. After the house slaves come the artisan niggermens, like the blacksmith, the bricklayer, the tanner, the silversmith, niggers who skilled with they hands, followed by the stable boys, coachmen and carters. Next is the field niggers, headed by the Johnny-jumpers who be the right hand and left hand of the slave-drivers. They do most of the whipping and kicking but when the estate running right they have nothing to do, so they whip and kick harder. After Johnny-jumper come the Great Slave Gang, the most expensive slaves, the one who they buy for the long years of hard work. The mens and the womens strapping and handsome like a prime horse. Most be Ashanti, what the white man call Coromantee, but they not easy to control so they get punish plenty for they spiritedness. But a dead Coromantee man can set an estate back up to three hundred pounds so they careful not to kill too much. After that is the Petit Gang, the makeup of plain common nigger. Some cost less than one hundred pounds and they work the other fields, like the ratoon or the tobacco that some planters grown on the side. Other nigger look down ’pon them mens as worthless and them womens as good for rutting, not breeding. On some estate even the pickneys work, mostly in the trash gang to pick up rubbish on the estate or to carry water for the field slaves to drink, or to get firewood. That be the negroes.

Agreeing with the Johnson's views means you either have to accept living a wasteful life, or change. ... It's always easier to oppose change than to propose it. Picking up trash on the beach makes us feel good. Admitting we lead wasteful lives that need to change--not so much.

There Is No Intimacy Not just physically, but you also find them emotionally distant from you. Even when they are with you, their mind doesn’t seem to be. They have also lost interest in sex and always make excuses like being tired, not in the mood, had chili beef in the office and feeling bloated, etc. They Never Put Their Phone Down If they seem to be stuck with their phone all the time and even taking it with them when taking the trash or going for a bath, it is a sure tell sign that there is something in that phone they don’t want you to know about.

-But I hate crying! I feel like it's all I do these days. I’m like a spoiled little kid, always blubbering about something. I wish I was stronger. I wish I could just take it all in stride like you do. -No, you don’t. Crying doesn’t mean you’re weak. I just think you feel things deeper than most.

For me, Louisiana has always been a haunted place. I believe the specters of slaves and Houma and Atakapa Indians and pirates and Confederate soldiers and Acadian farmers and plantation belles are still out there in the mist. I believe their story has never been adequately told and they will never rest until it is. I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind-numbing, on a level with telling fond tales about one’s rapist.

Mike was the next one down. He landed in the garbage, clambered out, and joined me at the side of the pile. “Why do our escapes always have to be so disgusting?” he griped, flicking a wad of ancient chewing gum off his sleeve. “Sewer lines! Trash chutes! Tunnels full of skeletons! Why can’t we ever escape through something pleasant, like a room full of puppies?” “Where are we going to find a room full of puppies?” I asked as Zoe dropped down into the trash pile. “An evil dog-breeding operation, maybe?

I always thought Diana was such trash and got what she deserved. She was Lady Diana before she was Princess Diana so she knew the racket. She knew that royal marriages have nothing to do with love. You marry a man and you stand beside him on public occasions and you wave and for that you never have a financial worry until the day you die.

A lot of people died,” Ithan growled. “Children died.” “And more will soon die in this war,” Aidas countered coolly. “Hel’s armies shall strike at your command, Bryce Quinlan.” The words dropped like a bomb. “Bullshit,” Ruhn said, face crinkling as he snarled. “You’re waiting for the right moment when we’re all at war with each other, so you’ll be able to find a way into this world at last.” “Not at all,” Aidas said. “I already know the way into this world.” He pointed with a paw to Bryce and inclined his head. “Through my lovely Bryce and the Horn on her back.” Hunt suppressed a growl at the word my as all of them looked to her. Her eyes remained fixed on Aidas, her lips a thin line. The Prince of the Chasm said, “It’s your choice in the end. It has always been your choice.” Bryce shook her head. “Allow me to get this straight: You’re here to convince me to rebel against the Asteri in front of all these people? And what—sign up with Ophion? No, thank you.” Aidas only chuckled. “You should have looked more carefully at the cats picking through the trash in the alley of Ink Street this morning. Should have picked a more discreet location to discuss the rebellion with Fury Axtar.” Bryce hissed, but said nothing as Aidas went on, “But yes—by all means, turn rebel. Help Ophion, if you need some authority to answer to. I can tell you before you undoubtedly ask, I have no information about the connection between Danika Fendyr and Sofie Renast.” Bryce growled, “I don’t even know any Ophion rebels.” Aidas stretched out his front paws, back arching. “That’s not true.” Hunt stilled as the demon yawned. “There’s one right behind you.” Bryce whirled, Hunt with her, lightning poised to strike. Cormac Donnall stood in the doorway, shadows fading from his shoulders. “Hello, Agent Silverbow,” Aidas crooned, then vanished.

The father in Jesus’ story ran toward the son too. When the father found out the son wasn’t lost anymore, he celebrated in ways I couldn’t when I found my trashed truck. I think I know why. There was no shame. The father wasn’t thinking about how badly the son had messed up. The son wasn’t thinking about it either. They both knew the son had steered his life right off a cliff, but somehow they got past the shame of the failure and got to the celebration of being together once again. Do lots of that. Find your way back to the people you’ve loved and who have loved you. Figure out who you’ve broken your rhythm with. Don’t let the misunderstanding decide your future. If you lost your way with God, let Him close the distance between you and start the celebration again. We’re all in the same truck when it comes to our need for love and acceptance and forgiveness.

It was a lot of fun in the beginning, going on tour in the UK, then going to Spain and getting thrown in jail for trashing the hotel… that made the Sunday papers! My dad always read the News Of The World and he saw the story about this wild Scottish punk band, and shouts to my mum, ‘What’s the name of that band our Karl’s in?’ ‘The Exploited,’ she replied. ‘Bloody hell! He’s in jail! It’s here in the paper!’ My parents had a fit; I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall at that moment.

They’re always worried about how us brown people are getting radicalized, but nobody talks about how it happens to white people more than it happens to us. It’s really crazy.” “No kidding. Some people are just trash, and they find other trash and start to form a landfill. The internet makes it easier.

...Worse, the thought of having to be grateful to some committee somewhere because they liked the way I'd stamped a Native face on "universal problems," otherwise known as problems legible to white folks, instead of stories that mattered to our people and arose from the land, the way Dad had always wanted-all of it was too much. I threw the acceptance letter in the trash and stopped writing again.

There’s always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women. And I see how men are encouraged to talk trash about women in order to become famous and powerful. But I was shattered.

They were very independent people. They’d always had their own interests, done their own things, but Claire always felt reassured when Paul was close by. Lightbulbs would be changed. Faults would be cleared from the security system. The remote control would be deciphered. Trash would be taken out. Clothes would be folded. Batteries would be charged. Big spoons and little spoons would never mingle in the silverware drawer.

always talk about?” “I’d like that,” said Rattles. “Imagine a five-star restaurant where we could eat tasty little insects all day long. Except for mosquitoes, of course!” he added, glancing quickly at Munchy. Munchy laughed. “I’d like a soda fountain where we garden creatures could order sugar-water shakes and other yummy treats!” she chimed. “I’d like a park,” said Wiggly. “A beautiful park with a maze of fun tunnels to wiggle through.” Munchy’s eyes lit up. “Oh, that would be so much fun! What would you like, Snarky?” Snarky rolled his eyes. “That’s all fool’s talk,” he replied. “Garden folk like us can’t have towns, no matter how badly we want them.” Wiggly sighed. “But if we could have a town, what would you want in it?” he pressed. “A store, I suppose,” Snarky answered after a moment. “A store where I could sell pretty pebbles to customers.” Everyone knew that Snarky’s favorite hobby was collecting shiny pebbles. “That’s a great idea!” Wiggly told him. He sighed again. All of his friends had had great ideas. “There has to be some way…” he began slowly. “To build a town?” asked Munchy, finishing his thought. Wiggly grinned at her. “Exactly! We, the creatures of the garden, are going to build a town!” he declared suddenly. Snarky rolled his eyes and muttered some comment about how impossible that was going to be, but no one paid attention. They were determined to follow through with Wiggly’s plan. And so they did. Over the next several weeks, the garden friends collected trash that they found

Those of us troubled by language about the “extermination” of Canaanite populations may find some comfort in the fact that scholars and archaeologists doubt the early skirmishes of Israel’s history actually resulted in genocide. It was common for warring tribes in ancient Mesopotamia to refer to decisive victories as “complete annihilation” or “total destruction,” even when their enemies lived to fight another day. (The Moabites, for example, claimed in an extrabiblical text that after their victory in a battle against an Israelite army, the nation of Israel “utterly perished for always,” which obviously isn’t the case. And even in Scripture itself, stories of conflicts with Canaanite tribes persist through the book of Judges and into Israel’s monarchy, which would suggest Joshua’s armies did not in fact wipe them from the face of the earth, at least not in a literal sense.)9 Theologian Paul Copan called it “the language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.”10 Pastor and author of The Skeletons in God’s Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler, dubbed it “ancient trash talk.”11

But Druid had warned me the previous night that I should choose my words wisely around other people when it came to monsters. I had always thought that my definition of “cute” was a bit different from everyone else’s, but in fact it was vastly different. However, since I couldn’t tell firsthand just what about my perceptions was so unusual, I didn’t quite know how to choose my words wisely…

Jeffrey ran to his car parked outside Mr Roslan's block, not wanting to lose sight of the young man and remembering Faizal's number plate. He found the black Nissan and pursued it from two or three cars away. It had started to drizzle and he almost lost him a few times along the Bukit Timah and Kranji Expressways, but kept a close eye on the back of Faizal's car. For twenty minutes they drove like an invisible convoy, before Faizal turned off the highway into the Lim Chu Kang area. Keeping his distance, Jeffrey saw Faizal stop his car by the main gate of Pusara Abadi, the Muslim cemetery ground. Jeffrey swerved to the side and waited until he saw Faizal getting out of the car empty-handed and entering the cemetery. Then, getting out of his car he pried open the Nissan's boot with an Allan key that he always carried in his pocket. Inside was a black trash bag and a long machete, well-worn and used, crusted along its edges with a dark stain. It was soil, not blood, as he lifted his finger to taste it. Jeffrey put the machete back, closed the boot and went closer into the burial grounds, the long weeds brushing the sides of his trousers. Faizal stood in a far corner of the cemetery. Jeffrey stopped, crouched behind a large tombstone and watched. A darker, smaller man appeared next to Faizal. They talked for a few minutes; several crumpled dollar notes were exchanged. Faizal patted the man's back. The man departed. Then Faizal walked back to his car. Jeffrey continued to watch. Faizal returned with the machete. Taking his time, he hacked away at the overgrown scrub around a blue minaret tombstone. Slow and lethargic like a landscape gardenener, he pulled up the weeds and threw them into a pile at the side. Jeffrey waited until Faizal cleared the vegetation and left the grounds, before inching forward. On the minaret tombstone, he saw the engraved name, 'Rubianah binte Bakar' - she had died eight years ago.

Bad Trash ( I Don't Like the Sound of That) Runs in the family R u n s in the f a m i l y- No, that's an atrocity you won't hear from me I don't like the sound of that Not lyin' in a mouse trap- I'm a mofo' sassy cat I don't clean no d i r t y rat No, not my reality Said not M Y reality- Don't shine shit in front of me and call it my reality! I don't like the sound of that Cruel intentions get tires flat I say what will shine for me I say what will bleed for me I call out the trash to me Bad trash always dies for me Clawed out my own reality The top from the back alley I don't run in the family I run far from the alley Calling all my sour soulmates- Recovering a l l e y c a ts You all clean up so good now No bad, bad trash, just LoVe pats! No bad trash, just LoVe pats

The fashion blogger who spent hours putting together the perfect outfit and the volunteer who spent her free time cleaning up trash from the parks. The social media star who was glued to her phone but was always there for her friends. The introvert who lived her life in the public eye online. The calm and the chaos, the silence and the storm. The calm to my chaos, the silence to my storm.

You won’t gun me unless I give you cause.” “What brought you to that conclusion?” the sheriff said. “Your father was a history professor and a congressman. You were born with the burden of gentility, Sheriff: You either obey the restraints that are imposed on a gentleman or you accept the role of a hypocrite. The great gift of being born white trash is that no matter what you do, it’s always a step up.

What I’m saying, Felicity, is that we aren’t just fucking. The moment you let me sink into your pussy, you became mine. Your orgasms, your mouth, your fucking soul. You handed yourself over to me whether you like it or not. So whatever makes you think I’d give a fuck about anyone else when I have you...” He grabs my cheeks in his hands and forces my stare to focus only on him—the center of the universe. “You have been, are, and always will be the only person on this entire planet to ever matter to me. Something I apparently need to prove more than I already have. Toss the condoms in the trash for all I care because I can guarantee using them was not worth it compared to having you.

nor did I pay attention to the curious stares people sent our way. I hadn’t been spotted with a woman on my arm in over a year. By tomorrow morning, the city would be abuzz about the date I’d brought, but I couldn’t care less. From the moment Stella had stepped into her living room wearing that damn dress, every other thought had crumbled into dust. A soft flame of resentment burned in my chest. I hated the hold she had on me, but still, I couldn’t stop looking at her. A turn of my head in the car ride over. A last-minute flight to a far-flung country to keep myself away. Scattered weeks and months when I’d thrown myself into work to forget her. No matter what I did, something always drew me back—the gentle lilt of her voice, the scent of fresh florals and greenery. A turquoise ring that burned a hole in my pocket long after I’d vowed to toss it in the trash. It wasn’t love. But it was maddening.

piece by piece i crumble to the floor and wait for you to sweep me up and throw me away like you always do - one man’s trash is another man’s treasure

They give a lot of lip service to ‘diversity’ and open-mindedness—and most of them follow through—but there’s always this little, loudmouthed subset telling you how to behave and what to say. It starts out ‘all for one, and one for all,’ but by the end, somebody’s drawing lines in the sand, telling you to choose a side. You can’t be gay or bi or trans if you don’t vote a certain way, act a certain way, follow some ridiculous set of rules. They all want you to be a round little peg in a round fucking hole. They want you to pick a box and a label so they know just where to put you, rather than accepting that we’re all separate, unique people, and that our stories are all valid, no matter whether we fit in the box or not.

God, I hate that she can do that," Charlotte said and then flushed. "Do what? Dance?" "No, just... fit in. It's always been so easy for her." "Imogen doesn't fit in, Charlie. She doesn't give a fuck, and it looks like the same thing." Reeve had a mouthful of beer to steady his nerves. "You're not made to fit in. You're too powerful, and everyone is always going to be jealous of that.

Yeah.” I nod. “Wanna bet on it?” He groans. “God, I fucking love you.” “The winner gets to trash Ry’s new car,” I murmur, making D laugh. “If I win, you have to marry us, that way you can never leave.” He grins. “Fuck, you always play the high stakes,” I mutter. “Just ‘cause you’re dying doesn’t mean you get to ask for weird shit.” “Course it does,” he whispers, but his face is paler now. Fear blasts through me as I lean down and press my lips to his. “Don’t fucking die, and I’ll marry you all, I’ll even wear a fucking dress and everything.” “Deal,” he mumbles.

And you were always nothing but slime, Henry Wallace. Fancy trash

The idea of America as “the world’s best hope” came much later. Historic memory has camouflaged the less noble origins of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We all know what imagery springs to mind when patriots of our day seek confirmation that their country is and was always an “exceptional” place: modest Pilgrims taught to plant by generous Indians; Virginia Cavaliers entertaining guests at their refined estates along the James River. Because of how history is taught, Americans tend to associate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation rather than class division. And

You can’t help but admire the sense of smell the wealthy possess. Even at the edges of a foul, trash-infested city, they always find a way to hunt down the last patches of pristine territory and claim them as their own. At

He winked before stepping out of the line. My eyes drank him in as he strode to a nearby trash barrel, tossed his pancake inside and kept going. I spotted his Maserati—as always double-parked—and watched him disappear behind the wheel. That was the second time my fake husband, who forced me to marry him, walked out on me. It was also the second time he took my heart with him. But it was the first time I realized that I would never have it back. He owned it, clutched it in his iron fist. And sometimes, I knew, he squeezed too hard.

She looked at me for a long time and then pulled an old envelope out of the trash and drew a pear on it. “This is how your body is shaped. See? Teeny tiny on top and not so tiny on the bottom.” Then she explained the illusion created by wearing dark colors on the bottom and bright colors on top. When I see other women with this color combination I check to see if they’re a pear too and they always are—two pears can’t fool each other.

Some people have become so critical-minded that no matter what is done for them, it’s not right. They never see the good their spouses are doing. They’ve forgotten the reasons they fell in love. It’s because they’re magnifying the wrong things. If you struggle in this area, make a list of the qualities you like about your spouse. Write down the good things your spouse does. He may not be a great communicator, but he’s a hard worker. Write it down. She may have some weaknesses, but she’s a great mother. She’s smart. She’s fun. Put that on your list and go over it every day. Start focusing on those good qualities. Your entire outlook is poisoned when you operate out of a critical spirit. You won’t communicate properly. You won’t want to do things together. It will affect you in every area. You have to make a shift. Start appreciating that person’s strengths and learn to downplay the weaknesses. Everyone has faults and habits that can get on your nerves. The key is to recognize what you are magnifying. You are magnifying the wrong thing when you let the critical spirit take over. That’s when you’ll start complaining that the wrong egg was fried. There are relationships today where two good people are married. They have great potential, but a critical spirit is driving them apart. When you are critical you start nagging: “You never take out the trash. You never talk to me. You’re always late.” People respond to praise more than they respond to criticism. The next time you want your husband to mow the lawn, instead of nagging, “Why don’t you ever mow the lawn, you lazy thing?” say instead, “Did I ever tell you that when you mow the lawn you look really good out there, and when your muscles bulge out of your shirt and that sweat drips down your face you look so handsome and attractive?” You praise him like that, and he’ll mow the lawn every day! People respond to praise.

Preventing Separation Anxiety We wish our dogs could be with us all day, every day, but it’s not possible, and puppies do need to learn to spend time alone. A dog who can never be left home alone without destroying the house may be suffering from separation anxiety. Teach your Lab to feel safe and comfortable at home alone while she’s still a puppy, even if you’re home all day. Your life or job situation may change someday, and you’re heading off future trauma by teaching this lesson now, when she is young. Your puppy’s not yet mature enough to have the run of an entire house or yard, so confine her in her crate or pen when you’re gone. What you might think is separation anxiety might really be simple puppy mischief. When you’re not there to supervise, she’s free to indulge her curiosity and entertain herself in doggie ways. She knows she can’t dump the trash and eat the kitty litter in front of you, but when you’re gone, she makes her own rules. Teach your puppy not to rely on your constant attention every minute you’re at home. Set up her crate, pen, or wherever she can stay when you’re gone, and practice leaving her in it for short rests during the day. She’ll learn to feel safe there, chewing on her toy and listening to household noises. She’ll also realize that being in her pen doesn’t always mean she’s going to be left for long periods. Deafening quiet could unnerve your puppy, so when you leave, turn on the radio or television so the house still has signs of activities she’d hear when you’re home. Background noise also blocks out scary sounds from outdoors, so she won’t react to unknown terrors. HAPPY PUPPY Exercise your puppy before you leave her alone at home. Take her for a walk, practice obedience, or play a game. Then give her a chance to settle down and relax so she won’t still be excited when you put her in her pen. She’ll quickly learn that the rustle of keys followed by you picking up your briefcase or purse, getting your jacket out of the closet, or picking up your books all mean one awful thing: you’re going, and she’s staying. While you’re teaching her to spend time alone, occasionally go through your leaving routine without actually leaving. Pick everything up, fiddle with it so she can see you’re doing so, put it all back down, and go back to what you were doing. Don’t make a fuss over your puppy when you come and go. Put her in her pen and do something else for a few minutes before you leave. Then just leave. Big good-byes and lots of farewell petting just rev her up and upset her. When you come home, ignore her while you put down your things and get settled. Then greet her calmly and take her outside for a break.

So we, God’s servants, go, our Master’s invitation in our hands, out to the highways and hedges. We walk through squalid refugee camps in Syria, fetid open-air trash dumps in Mozambique, drug-infested smoky brothels in Bangkok. We go because deep in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and out on the dusty plains of Iraq, there are people whom God wants to come to His feast. There are people hidden away in small villages in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan who belong at God’s table. There are women in Somalia; street kids in Portland, Oregon; girls in northern Nigeria; and men in Chechnya and a thousand other places who belong in God’s house. God sees them, every one of them, people drawing water from open wells, drinking tea in mud houses, scheming evil in dark camps, hiding from violence in rough caves. He knows their names and faces and voices and laughter and tears. He knows their fears and dreams and joys and sorrows. He was there when they were born, when they fell down, and when they got up—and He wants to share the blessings of all He has with them. This is the heart of God—generous, loving, kind, patient—always ready to bless. He’s prepared His table from the foundations of the earth, and there is still room.

Some people have a perpetual problem. They always have a sad song. If you allow them, they’ll use you as a trash can to dump all their garbage in. You spend an hour with them and you feel like you’ve run a marathon. They’re energy suckers. You leave them feeling drained and worn out. You cannot continue to deal with them day after day if you expect to reach your highest potential. You won’t lift off. You won’t thrust forward into the good things God has in store if you’re weighted down, letting people dump their loads on you. They’ll make you discouraged and drain your energy. It’s hard enough just to keep yourself cheered up. You’re not responsible for their happiness. Sure, there are times when we need to sow a seed and have a listening ear and take time to love people back into wholeness. But that should be for a season and not an ongoing drama. You shouldn’t spend every day listening to friends complain about their spouses or their neighbors. If you do, your life will be like an episode of Guiding Light, Jersey Shore, and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills all put together. You have enough drama in your life without listening to everyone else’s drama. You can’t allow someone to put that negativity in you day after day if you expect to soar. You need to evaluate the people you’re spending time with. Are they lifters and encouragers? Do they make you feel better? Do you leave their company feeling inspired and happier, or are they dragging you down, making you feel drained, and sapping your energy?

Covered with snow on a clear day, the houses looked cheery and well cared for. They also looked empty. Dusty thought about empty houses in little towns like this all over the world, with men going and gone and no women left inside. Houses without housewives. No cooking and cleaning, no humming and apron-wearing wives and mothers like in the old sitcoms. No rushing minivans driven by lithe women in yoga pants whose children were well behaved and spoke Mandarin. No soap-opera-addicted, overweight, neglectful trailer trash with a dozen kids running around screaming, their mouths always stained with Kool-Aid. Every man in Huntsville remembered another life, expecting to come home every day to find someone there. All the empty houses sat. No one numbered the silent days.

Coosawhatchie, South Carolina December 25, 1861 My Dear Daughter: Having distributed such poor Christmas gifts as I had to those around me, I have been looking for something for you. Trifles even are hard to get these war times, and you must not therefore expect more. I have sent you what I thought most useful in your separation from me and hope it will be of some service. Though stigmatized as “vile dross,” it has never been a drug with me. That you may never want for it, restrict your wants to your necessities. Yet how little will it purchase! But see how God provides for our pleasure in every way. To compensate for such “trash,” I send you some sweet violets that I gathered for you this morning while covered with dense white frost, whose crystals glittered in the bright sun like diamonds, and formed a brooch of rare beauty and sweetness which could not be fabricated by the expenditure of a world of money. May God guard and preserve you for me, my dear daughter! Among the calamities of war, the hardest to bear, perhaps, is the separation of families and friends. Yet all must be endured to accomplish our independence and maintain our self-government. In my absence from you I have thought of you very often and regretted I could do nothing for your comfort. Your old home, if not destroyed by our enemies, has been so desecrated that I cannot bear to think of it. I should have preferred it to have been wiped from the earth, its beautiful hill sunk, and its sacred trees buried rather than to have been degraded by the presence of those who revel in the ill they do for their own selfish purposes. I pray for a better spirit and that the hearts of our enemies may be changed. In your homeless condition I hope you make yourself contented and useful. Occupy yourself in aiding those more helpless than yourself. Think always of your father. R.E. Lee

Deeply ambivalent also is the image of fire in carnival. It is a fire that simultaneously destroys and renews the world. In European carnivals there was almost always a special structure (usually a vehicle adorned with all possible sorts of gaudy carnival trash) called "hell," and at the close of carnival this "hell" was triumphantly set on fire (sometimes this carnival "hell" was ambivalently linked with a horn of plenty). Characteristic is the ritual of "moccoli" in Roman carnival: each participant in the carnival carried a lighted candle ("a candle stub"), and each tried to put out another's candle with the cry "Sia ammazzato!" ("Death to thee!"). In his famous description of Roman carnival (in Italienische Reise)h Goethe, striving to uncover the deeper meaning behind carnival images, relates a profoundly symbolic little scene: during "moccoli" a boy puts out his father's candle with the cheerful carnival cry: "Sia ammazzato il Signore Padre!" [that is, "death to thee, Signor Father!"]

Commentators, journalists, and, on exceptionally clear days, their audiences are beginning to wonder why it is that with fatal environmental problems bearing down upon us, with global warming threatening agriculture and our minimal ability to feed ourselves, the rich and powerful aren’t more actively attempting to remedy the situation. Worse, why do they so often seem to want to do just the opposite of what is required? This question is easy to answer if we understand the psychology of the capitalist. Easy and disturbing. The logic of capitalism acknowledges that there will be destructive consequences for its activities. Economists even have a name for it: negative externality. This is also known as “externalizing cost” when it comes time for somebody other than the perpetrator to pay for the damage. It is a secular form of what the generals call “collateral damage,” which means that the wrong person got blown up. Or, as one might say, “We didn’t mean to pollute the river with coal ash. We were only pursuing private prosperity and personal happiness. In the meantime, we’re glad to have someone else pay to fix it.” But what do you do when it’s not a river - when it’s a whole world that has been trashed? Are taxpayers going to have to pay for a new planet? So the oligarchs and their minions, the so-called 1 percent, aren’t missing anything. They’re not stupid. If they choose to do nothing about looming global catastrophe, it is because they don’t want to do anything. And they do not want to do anything because the threat of destruction is, frankly, not persuasive to them. Those who benefit from capitalism understand that it has always depended on suffering, and they have confidence that if someone is to suffer it won’t be them. “Let the songbirds suffer in my place,” they say. “Or those fucking - what do they call ‘em - manatees. There’s only about ten of them left anyway. And, we admit, the miscellaneous poor will suffer, here and in those faraway countries, but why shouldn’t they suffer? Look at them! They’re rather good at it. Besides, the humans could use a little downsizing.” Pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim!

One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch. Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.

Women are secretive about the bad things that happen in their lives and that’s what kills the society. They always want to be seen good, successful and happy.

Cause shes looking like class , An I'm looking like trash She says she's got no love for a scrub like me . An I say " that's okay love" That's fine by me , "no need to worry" My heart had always been filled with tragedy .

If it comes all scratched and dented, then no matter what you do, unless you buff and polish it, it always looks brand new. That’s why my love looks like it belongs in the trash. My love also looks like garbage so no thief will steal it away from you.

During the bus ride, our only sustenance was stuff we’d scored from vending machines—a bag of chips, a sleeve of cookies, a bottle of soda. I ate the food. Sam wolfed down the wrappers and the plastic bottle. “Do you always eat trash?” I’d asked, more curious than disgusted. “You think what’s inside the packaging is any better?” He had a point. Some of those ingredients sounded as deadly as the monsters.

Quattro" Only for a piece of broken glass I will be there waiting For it Always Taken to another place Where I see it happen Bear witness to a spectacular Spectacle One day we'll be up as gods on high That praise the beats of undeniable bliss And kiss the stars of harmony gone blind But all of this could be averted All of this could be unearthed We could go get gowns, spread loss And force invisible lines and flaws Take our time, and hurry up to die Save it all or try, try, try To be free, to be us To be something real to us Catered affairs, daytime nightmares Standing on chairs three nights straight County fairs, I said "who cares?" And what he wears ain't that great Freight train antics, slick camera tricks Forty licks and I'm alright Late night comics, black and white flicks White trash hicks on TV tonight, alright Living with weak CD compilations Driving downtown again Pop culture confrontations Eye rolling people spend Forgotten dates, old dinner plates Rush the gates and we'll let you in What she hates is how he waits And fifty states are wrong again Limousine got no time for you Limousine got no time for you Dollar bills soaked up red wine for you Dollar bills soaked up red, white and blue Living with weak CD compilations Driving downtown again Pop culture confrontations Eye rolling people spend Forgotten dates, old dinner plates Rush the gates and we'll let you in What she hates is how he waits And fifty states are wrong again

THE TRAVELER’S VADE MECUM, LINE #7671: “IT IS NO SECRET HERE” Dirt, wrote a British anthropologist, is matter out of place. Drop a grape from bowl to table and we call it dirty. Drop a grape to the floor and it is trash. Bowl, table: these are ordering agents, ways to tell the functional from fallen. Skin, tendon: these are ordering agents. You want to kiss my mouth, but not the teeth inside my mouth. You want to hold my hand, but not the blood within that hand. There is a truth in you, but it won’t be the dirty truth until it tumbles into the air between us. In this city, there is always a long walk home in 7 a.m. light, high heels stabbing the subway grates. A walk home past gutters littered with the non sequitur of chicken bones, wings that once held a dream of flight.

Always leave the other guys believing they had negotiated the better deal. And let them feel their support was essential.

Someone replies: Brazil’s always been “the world’s trash can.” Nothing is controlled here and the Bolivians know it. If it were a European country, they’d be afraid to walk down the street and get caught in a “razzia.” Someone replies: There are illegal immigrants all over the world my friend. What about the millions of illegal Brazilians in the US, who even commit petty crimes? He who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones!

We trudge along the uneven streets until Alex, who’s running ahead, directs us to a pile of good trash. It looks like someone was evicted—the contents of their whole apartment have been dumped on the street to be picked over, just as ours will be one day soon. Black plastic bags are piled into treasure mounds studded with bulky items too big for the bags. We are early, and most of the bags are still tied so we know the pickings are good, but we aren’t the only lookers. Other people are passing by, hoping for good finds, and some grab specialty items, like electronics or materials that they can resell, but we recognize the ones who are like us, whole families here to look for necessities they would otherwise go without. They are our primary competition, so we quickly divide and conquer to get the best stuff. I spot potential around the corner and hurry toward a box of books. Up close, they turn out to be old books with leather bindings. Mom has taught us all to read. Sometimes she makes us read to her for long stretches without stopping. I can’t always follow the story, but I like how it calms her. I want all of the books, but we need to save room in the cart for practical items, so I settle for one.

We trudge along the uneven streets until Alex, who’s running ahead, directs us to a pile of good trash. It looks like someone was evicted—the contents of their whole apartment have been dumped on the street to be picked over, just as ours will be one day soon. Black plastic bags are piled into treasure mounds studded with bulky items too big for the bags. We are early, and most of the bags are still tied so we know the pickings are good, but we aren’t the only lookers. Other people are passing by, hoping for good finds, and some grab specialty items, like electronics or materials that they can resell, but we recognize the ones who are like us, whole families here to look for necessities they would otherwise go without. They are our primary competition, so we quickly divide and conquer to get the best stuff. I spot potential around the corner and hurry toward a box of books. Up close, they turn out to be old books with leather bindings. Mom has taught us all to read. Sometimes she makes us read to her for long stretches without stopping. I can’t always follow the story, but I like how it calms her. I want all of the books, but we need to save room in the cart for practical items, so I settle for one…I know better than to get too excited about any find, and we never get attached. We went through this back in January, and a few months before that. When we move again, we will leave our treasures behind. The book in the cart might prove interesting or be so mildewed that it’s unreadable, but the one thing I know for sure is that I won’t get to keep it.

That was the price of freedom, for freedom always carries a fee. ‘Give us your trash, and we shall make treasure,’ they said atop skulls of infants and thieves.

Oh! Trash!” he cried. “Words, it’s the mechanics again! It’s tiring at first to speak—and then it’s caught by the Others, the savage Others! The poor Me—and Magne is a Me whereas you are a pig, a miscreant Other— the poor Me—there’re maybe 500 of us total on this foul earthly globe!— why can’t they communicate together without straining their larynx!” Nigeot agreed with Kmôhoûn. “And then everything’s…mechanics, effort, on this dung pile of a planet! You have to get dressed and undressed. You can never stay in a state, you always have to change states! Idiots, pigs that we are! You’re comfortable in bed, aren’t you? Oh well, crack! You have to get up! You’re okay when you’re up? Oh well! Bang, bing, bang! You have to go to bed! Get dressed, get undressed! Trash! Mechanics! We lost our fur, our hair, rubbing against it and scraping it with these damn costumes! Look at the monkeys! A lot prettier than us; they look better and have no mechanics to wear. Mechanics, you know, is everything that is against thinking and good old lassitude: movement, stupid moving of arms, arduous stupidity of being a well raised human, no revolt against the stupidities tolerated by the cowardly mob, who’s happy to tyrannize itself when it’s already pestered by the padishahs. Yes, look at the monkeys, the pretty monkeys! No mechanics to wear, lucky devils, good old monkeys! Nothing to do but chuck water on themselves whenever they feel like it!... And when they’re ready! Oh! Real world! Pile of crap where you have to work, even just to button up your shirt! Oh! When will we be in a higher world where they won’t have these appalling paws? Nothing but little things to fly in the warm blue—warm! You know? Little… mechanics… oh! bing! bang! No mechanics—infamy! —little feathery things like the little… things that chuck turds on our heads from up in the trees and after cry out tweet! tweet! in the air, the… what do you call them, the… birds, totally, yes!” And this Mongol who spouted his Polynesian or Gabonese opinions was originally from Saint Etienne, a city that was so busy it was like industrial epilepsy! But, in fact, it was very simple! He was “tired from birth,” as one of my friends used to say who felt the same way, but had nothing to do with Saint Etienne.

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.