Ups Freight Quotes

The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

The world must be all fucked up,’ he said then, ‘when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.’ That was the last thing he was heard to say.

i am standing upon the seashore. a ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. she is an object of beauty and strength. i stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other. then someone at my side says: "there, she is gone!" "gone where?" gone from my sight. that is all. she is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port. her diminished size is in me, not in her. and just at the moment when someone at my side says: "there, she is gone!" there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "here she comes!" and that is dying.

As Vice President of Acquisitions, Mr. Lang,” she asked. “Just what is it you are supposing to acquire?” At the very most, are you seeking a compliment in return? Of course, you are! Men are always hoping for what they seldom get.” With that, she reached up to kiss him on the cheek—the freight train of doom had passed him by on a parallel track. Doubt is good. It keeps the doors open to proof of promise. Is that why she had changed into that incredibly tantalizing little blue-black dress driving the Whaler bar crowd toward a frenzy?

Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters.

The world must be all fucked up,” he said then,“when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.

There’s nothing as unstoppable as a freight train full of fuck-yeah. If you’ve ever known what it’s like to be in your groove, and are having trouble finding your way right now, think back to your attitude and what your priorities were when you were totally lit up about life, and use them to help give you the clarity and the kick in the rear end you need now.

Okay,” I mumble, completely bemused, bewildered, and shell-shocked. He leans over my desk. What now? I am caught in his hypnotic gaze. “Love doing business with you, Mrs. Grey.” He leans in closer as I sit paralyzed, and he plants a soft tender kiss on my lips. “Laters baby,” he murmurs. He stands abruptly, winks at me, and leaves. I lay my head on my desk, feeling like I’ve been run over by a freight train – the freight train that is my beloved husband. He has to be the most frustrating, annoying, contrary man on the planet. I sit up and frantically rub my eyes. What have I just agreed to?

The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight

What is dying? I am standing on the seashore. A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object and I stand watching her Till at last she fades from the horizon, And someone at my side says, “She is gone!” Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all; She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her, And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination. The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her; And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone”, There are others who are watching her coming, And other voices take up a glad shout, “There she comes” – and that is dying.

With the energy he had conserved yesterday letting her dress him, he had written a note and pinned it in his pocket. IF FOUND DEAD SHIP EXPRESS COLLECT TO COLEMAN PARRUM, CORINTH, GEORGIA. Under this he had continued: COLEMAN SELL MY BELONGINGS AND PAY THE FREIGHT ON ME & THE UNDERTAKER. ANYTHING LEFT OVER YOU CAN KEEP. YOURS TRULY T. C. TANNER. P.S. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. DON’T LET THEM TALK YOU INTO COMING UP HERE. ITS NO KIND OF PLACE.

I used to pray you know, pray to God that He would somehow stop it. All the nights of listening to my mother scream and things breaking. Of holding my brother and sister and listening to them cry and begging me to stop it.' My voice is slow and steady like a freight train at night. 'I was too young, and we were always told that they'd put us in foster homes where people would rape us if we ever said anything. So we explained away the bruises and my mom wore big sunglasses whenever she left the house. And we invented car accidents if the bruising was too bad to cover with make-up.

The memory of what I had and what I lost, the knowledge that I may never have it again, hits me like a freight train. That’s the thing with grief. It’s fickle and selfish. It doesn’t follow any rules, and shows up when you least expect it. One limb at a time, I slowly peel myself away, retreat to the bathroom, and shed my tears in private.

But Jordan’s violin was especially deadly. It screeched like a frightened owl. Mr. Graisha glared at her, snapping his baton up and down, side to side, fighting to keep all twenty-three students playing in unison. It was a losing battle. He glanced up at the clock and then waved both arms as if he needed to stop a freight train.

There’s something illicit about it, just the two of us up here. Something reckless. Perhaps it’s being on top of the world with the steep drop beneath us—invisible but very much there—adding a frisson of excitement, making everything feel slightly freighted with danger. Or that we’re cloaked by darkness. That anything could happen up here and no one would know.

What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem to obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like?

Farrell had seen pure white drunkenness before, but not often enough to recognize it at sight. He knew the thing itself, however--the freight train rattling and lurching comically from hilarity to slobbering sorrow, picking up speed as it passed through wild, aimless anger straight on into wild sickness; and then, running smoothly and almost silently now, into a dark place of shaking and sweating and crying, and out again with no warning to where a dazzling snowy light made everything very still.

Kale's body was the warmest I'd ever felt it. Normally his hands were freezing, but as he caressed the hem of my shirt, his thumb grazed my skin, sending sparks of heat up and down my spine. I'd never felt this way before-so alive that every inch of my body was so sensitive the mere thought of Kale's touch excited me. My need for Kale was so urgent it slammed through me like a freight train.

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep. Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. 'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it—illness, syndrome, condition—can be almost equally pejorative in their discreet way. We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy. In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation defines energy/matter as behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle, which suggests that it is both, and posits that it is our human limitation to be unable to see both at the same time. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wavelike question. A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness. Physicists gain certain insights from understanding energy as a wave, and other insights from understanding it as a particle, and use quantum mechanics to reconcile the information they have gleaned. Similarly, we have to examine illness and identity, understand that observation will usually happen in one domain or the other, and come up with a syncretic mechanics. We need a vocabulary in which the two concepts are not opposites, but compatible aspects of a condition. The problem is to change how we assess the value of individuals and of lives, to reach for a more ecumenical take on healthy. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ―All I know is what I have words for.‖ The absence of words is the absence of intimacy; these experiences are starved for language.

It just happens. Even when almost everyone who showed you how to do things showed you wrong, and screwed you up, and left; even when you have promised yourself fifteen different sets of sheets and in freight trains and on sidewalks, staring up at the stars, that you will do it different from all the people who have done it wrong and hurt you, still you do it the same. Still you do the same shit to everybody else that they have done to you. I know it must be possible to keep promises. There must be people who say things and mean then and who can make the words turn real. But I've never met one. I keep trying to be something I'm not even sure exists. I've promised myself so many times that I won't be like so many people, and I still do it anyway. I still make people cry, and laugh at them, and I know as soon as everyone really sees me they'll all leave again and I'll be left with the noise not being able to sleep.

Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars.

WE TRAVEL with such velocity these days that the most we can do is to remember a few place names. The freight of metaphysical speculation will have to catch up with us by slow train, if it catches up with us at all.

Once in a while there was a volcanic outburst into the consciousness, when some new idea, the solution to a problem, burbled up flecked with the detritus of its birth - pride, rage, ambition, prejudice, all the freight of human creativity.

And there was somewhere inside me the thought: By Jove! this is the deuce of an adventure - something you read about; and it is my first voyage as second mate - and I am only twenty - and here I am lasting it out as well as any of these men, and keeping my chaps up to the mark. I was pleased. I would not have given up the experience for worlds. I had moments of exultation. Whenever the old dismantled craft pitched heavily with her counter high in the air, she seemed to me to throw up, like an appeal, like a defiance, like a cry to the clouds without mercy, the words written on her stern: Judea, London. Do or Die. O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting around the world a lot of coal for a freight - to me she was the endeavor, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her.

This is the beginning of your life in America,” Julio said. “We'll take a freight train from Sunnyside and go to nowhere.” “I would like to go to California,” I said. “I have two brothers there—but I don't know if I could find them.” “All roads go to California and all travelers wind up in Los Angeles,” Julio said. “But not this traveler. I have lived there too long. I know that state too damn well….” “What do you mean?” I asked. Suddenly he became sad and said: “It is hard to be a Filipino in California.

But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summons thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or,—as is more thy nature,—be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life!—that have made thee feeble to will and to do!—that will leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!

With the fate of Roe v. Wade now hanging in the balance, I'm calling for a special 'pro-life tax.' If the fervent prayers of the religious right are answered and abortion is banned, let's take it a step further. All good Christians should legally be required to pony up; share the financial burden of raising an unwanted child. That's right: put your money where your Bible is. I'm not just talking about paying for food and shelter or even a college education. All those who advocate for driving a stake through the heart of a woman's right to choose must help bear the financial burden of that child's upbringing. They must be legally as well as morally bound to provide the child brought into this world at their insistence with decent clothes to wear; a toy to play with; a bicycle to ride -- even if they don't consider these things 'necessities.' Pro-lifers must be required to provide each child with all those things they would consider 'necessary' for their own children. Once the kid is out of the womb, don't wash your hands and declare 'Mission Accomplished!' It doesn't end there. If you insist that every pregnancy be carried to term, then you'd better be willing to pay the freight for the biological parents who can't afford to. And -- like the good Christians that you are -- should do so without complaint.

Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink of a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opned our mouths and they heard the accent? The truth is, we had no simple answers. Being rattled around in freight trains, open trucks, and ratty ocean-liners, we ended up being a puzzle even to ourselves. At first, that was hard to take; then we got used to the idea. We began to savor it, to enjoy it. Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.

In photographs taken from the sky, cities resembled circuit boards. It was no surprise, really, that there were sparky misfirings, dangerous connections. Even traffic, Alice concluded, set up a kind of static in the air, let loose vibrations and uncontainable agitation. Freighted with more than they could absorb, with city intentions, citizens moved in designs of inexplicable purpose.

Sources do not speak for themselves, graciously yielding up facts to the patient researcher, who approaches the evidence with his or her mind a tabula rasa cleared of personal views and preferences. Historians select material from archives and libraries with their minds freighted with preconceptions of various kinds, including hypotheses they wish to test, questions they want to answer, ideas about topics and issues they want to explore and understand.

Like here it was that I entered that stage when a child overcomes naivite enough to realize an adult's emotional reaction as somethimes freakish for its inconsistencies, so can, on his own reasoning canvas, paint those early pale colors of judgement, resulting from initial moments of ability to critically examine life's perplexities, in tentative little brain-engine stirrings, before they faded to quickly join that train of remembered experience carrying signals indicating existence which itself far outweighs traction effort by thinking's soon slipping drivers to effectively resist any slack-action advantage, for starting so necessitates continual cuts on the hauler - performed as if governed lifelong by the tagwork of a student-green foreman who, crushed under on rushing time always building against his excessive load of emotional contents, is forever a lost ball in the high weeds of personal developments - until, with ever changing emphasis through a whole series of grades of consciousness (leading up from root-beginnings of obscure childish inconscious soul within a world), early lack - for what child sustains logic? - reaches a point of late fossilization, resultant of repeated wrong moves in endless switching of dark significances crammed inside the cranium, where, through such hindering habits, there no longer is the flexibility for thought transfer and unloading of dead freight that a standard gauge would afford and thus, as Faustian Destiny dictates, is an inept mink, limited, being in existence firmly tracked just above the constant "T" biased ballast supporting wherever space yearnings lead the worn rails of civilized comprehension, so henceforth is restricted to mere pickups and setouts of drab distortion, while traveling wearily along its familiar Western Thinking right-of-way. But choo-choo nonsense aside, ...

One of the problems with understanding what is meant by hell is that this tiny word has been forced to carry so much freight. Over the centuries it has picked up meanings often far removed from what was originally intended in the Bible. Hell has become a catchall word for however we imagine eternal punishment in the afterlife. But the Bible doesn’t talk near as much about the afterlife as we have imagined. A surprising thing about the Old Testament is its almost total disinterest in the afterlife. We think of heaven and hell as being the stock-in-trade of religion, but this was not the case with the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures. While the pagan religions of the Gentiles made elaborate speculations about the nature of the afterlife (this was a specialty with the Egyptians and Babylonians), the Hebrews were conspicuous in having almost no afterlife theology. For the Hebrews, death was Sheol, the grave, the underworld, the abode of the dead. The Hebrew Scriptures are fundamentally concerned with this life.

The wind rose, whipping at Gregori's solid form, lashing his body,ripping at the waves of black hair so that it streamed around his face. His expression was impassive, the pale silver eyes cold and merciless, unblinking and fixed on his prey. The attack came from sky and ground simultaneously; slivers of sharpened wood shot through the air on the wild winds,aimed directly at Gregori. The wolves leapt for him,eyes glowing hotly in the night. The army of the dead moved relentlessly forward, pressing toward Gregori's lone figure. His hands moved, a complicated pattern drected at the approaching army;then he was whirling, a flowing wind of motion beautiful to the eye,so fast that he blurred. Yelps and howls accompanied bodies flying through the air. Wolves landed to lie motionless at his feet. His expression never changed. There was no hint of anger or emotion,no sign of fear,no break in concentration. He simply acted as the need arose. The skeletons were mowed down by a wall of flame, an orange-red conflagration that rose in the night sky and danced furiously for a brief moment. The army withered into ashes, leaving only a pile of blackened dust that spewed across the street in the ferocious onslaught of the wind. Savannah felt Gregori wince, the pain that sliced though him just before he shut out all sensation.She whirled to face him and saw a sharpened stake portruding from his right shoulder. Even as she saw it, Gregori jerked it free.Blood gushed,spraying the area around him.Just as quickly it stopped,as if cut off midstream. The winds rose to a thunderous pitch, a whirling gale of debris above their heads like the funnel cloud of a tornado. The black cloud spun faster and paster,threatening to suck everything and everyone up into its center where the malevolent red eye stared at them with hatred. The tourists screamed in fear,and even the guide grabbed for a lamppost to hang on grimly.Gregori stood alone,the winds assaulting him,tearing at him, reaching for him.As the whirling column threatened him from above, sounding like the roar of a freight train, he merely clapped his hands, then waved to send a backdraft slamming into the dark entity.The vampire screamed his rage. The thick black cloud sucked in on itself with an audible soumd, hovering in the air, waiting, watching, silent. Evil.No one moved.No one dared to breathe. Suddenly the churning black entity gathered itself and streamed across the night sky,racing away from the hunter over the French Quarter and toward the swamp.Gregori launched himself into the air,shape-shifting as he did so,ducking the bolts of white-hot energy and slashing stakes flying in the turbulant air.

As explained by Garcia, “Essentially, the Grateful Dead audience is acting out their version of ‘How much freedom is there left in America to go for a wild ride?’ What’s left is you can follow the Grateful Dead on the road. You can’t be locked up for that yet. So it’s an adventure. And an adventure is essential. It’s part of what it means to find yourself in America. It’s kind of like the war-stories America, just like Neal Cassady on the road. It’s hard to join the circus, and you can’t hop the freights anymore, so you chase the Grateful Dead around. You have your adventures, when your car breaks down in Des Moines and you need to hitchhike some place and a guy picks you up and he’s a Deadhead. You can have your tires blown out in some weird town, and you get hell from strangers. These are your ‘war stories.’ You can have something that lasts through your life, the times you took chances. I think that’s essential in anybody’s life, and it’s harder and harder to do in America. If we’re providing some margin of that possibility, then that’s great. We’re one of the last adventures in America.

What if she doesn’t worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women’s shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem so obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like? But if she is not careful she will end up: raped, pregnant, impossible to control, or merely what is now called fat. The teenage girl knows this. Everyone is telling her to be careful. She learns that making her body into her landscape to tame is preferable to any kind of wildness

Let him get out on the front lines. Let him bring one slow freight through a snowstorm in the Rockies; let him drive one rivet to hold his apartment roof over his head. Let him keep his own electric light burning through one quiet, cosy winter evening when mist is freezing to the wires. Let him make, from seed to table, just one slice of bread, and we will hear no more from him about the human right to security. No man’s security is any greater than his own self-reliance. If every man and woman worth living did not stand up to the job of living, did not take risk and danger and exhaustion beyond exhaustion and go on fighting for one thin hope of victory in the certainty of death, there would not be a human being alive today.

Oh the Beat generation was just a phrase I used in the 1951 written manuscript of On the Road to describe guys like Moriarty who run around the country in cars looking for odd jobs, girlfriends, kicks. It was thereafter picked up by West Coast Leftist groups and turned into a meaning like “Beat mutiny” and “Beat insurrection” and all that nonsense; they just wanted some youth movement to grab on to for their own political and social purposes. I had nothing to do with any of that. I was a football player, a scholarship college student, a merchant seaman, a railroad brakeman on road freights, a script synopsizer, a secretary … And Moriarty-Cassady was an actual cowboy on Dave Uhl’s ranch in New Raymer, Colorado … What kind of beatnik is that?”[22]

He’d been toting it, and checking it, and packing and unpacking, all the way since fate was on the river - that’s how long - the Big River” - Fate Marable and his riverboat caliope (Cleo seemed to recall), who hadastonished the landings between New Orleans and St. Louis with the wild, harsh, skirling Gypsy music, and left there, echoing in the young and restless even as it dies off round the bed; to linger with them thereafter, in the pelting roar of November midnights and the clickety-clack of lonesome valley freights, until they up one night and go after it in a battered bus, following the telephone wires that make a zigzag music staff against the evening sky - some variation of that basic beginning could be told for everyone who jazz has touched and altered.

In early 2016, Amazon was given a license by the Federal Maritime Commission to implement ocean freight services as an Ocean Transportation Intermediary. So, Amazon can now ship others’ goods. This new service, dubbed Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), won’t do much directly for individual consumers. But it will allow Amazon’s Chinese partners to more easily and cost-effectively get their products across the Pacific in containers. Want to bet how long it will take Amazon to dominate the oceanic transport business? 67 The market to ship stuff (mostly) across the Pacific is a $ 350 billion business, but a low-margin one. Shippers charge $ 1,300 to ship a forty-foot container holding up to 10,000 units of product (13 cents per unit, or just under $ 10 to deliver a flatscreen TV). It’s a down-and-dirty business, unless you’re Amazon. The biggest component of that cost comes from labor: unloading and loading the ships and the paperwork. Amazon can deploy hardware (robotics) and software to reduce these costs. Combined with the company’s fledgling aircraft fleet, this could prove another huge business for Amazon. 68 Between drones, 757/ 767s, tractor trailers, trans-Pacific shipping, and retired military generals (no joke) who oversaw the world’s most complex logistics operations (try supplying submarines and aircraft carriers that don’t surface or dock more than once every six months), Amazon is building the most robust logistics infrastructure in history. If you’re like me, this can only leave you in awe: I can’t even make sure I have Gatorade in the fridge when I need it.

Jackson. Wait.” He didn’t turn to face me when I finally reached him. Staring at his back, I scrambled for something to say. Why hadn’t I thought this through? In the end, watching him not even turn to face me, anger won out. “What the fuck, Jackson?” “Go back to your fiancée.” With a growl, I gripped his shoulder, forcing him to turn and then shoving him back into the wall. His eyes looked like they were holding back their own storm, daring me to push one more time. I was about to push a whole lot harder if it meant getting something out of him. “Talk to me.” I wanted it to be a command, but it came out as more of a plea. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes. When he opened them, I almost stepped back from how angry they were. “What do you want me to say? You’re not gay,” he sneered, beginning to back me up with each word. “You would never. Which I found pretty damn shocking since you loved being deep inside me, spilling your cum. Fucking me—a man—like a desperate fucking freight train.” He threw my words I’d stupidly sputtered to his brother back in my face. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Fuck you,” Jackson growled before bumping my shoulder to walk past me. Digging my hands in my hair, frustration rose inside me, pulling me under, drowning me. I was losing control and I couldn’t breathe because of it. “I’M SORRY, OKAY?” I shouted. “I fucked up. I panicked. This is all new to me—liking a guy. Fooling around with you when I’m engaged. I can’t just talk about it. I fucking panicked and I’m sorry. So fucking sorry.” He let my apology linger, and I held my breath waiting. “Okay.” Okay? Okay? Was he fucking kidding me? I spilled my guts and it was okay? “No. It’s not fucking okay. This isn’t okay.” A fiery burn built behind my eyes, stinging my nose, but I wasn’t going to stop because he finally turned back to me. “I miss you. You won’t touch me, or kiss me, or sit with me, or hold me. Nothing. And I fucking miss you.” I choked on the last few words praying he wouldn’t turn away. It was the most honest I’d been with him—with myself—about my feelings for him. My heart thundered, and hands trembled from how nervous I was. Nervous that the words felt so right coming from my lips. Nervous about what it really meant, that I left Carina behind, so I could chase Jackson down and plead with him to not leave me. “Can we please go back? Can you please forgive me?” It wasn’t just about sex and exploring. Right there in the stairwell, getting lost in him, begging him to stay and care, it hit me. I was falling in love with him. With a man. I was falling in love with Jackson. While my fiancée sat upstairs, I realized I was falling in love with my best friend.

The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

for you?" Robbie asked me quietly. "Good!" I blurted, my heart slamming against my rib cage. It's…it's good." " Good," he replied. My palms were totally slick by now. My pulse a rushing freight train. What was going on here? This was how I felt around Cameron, not Robbie. This was all totally wrong. It's just the slow dance, KJ. It's just because it's your first slow dance. Don't get all carried away. " Okay, here comes the twirl thing," Robbie announced. " Let's try it." He pulled me closer and my breath caught, then he spun me away and I almost lost my balance, but he pulled me back in, slung by his arm around my back, and dipped me, never letting me fall. By the time I stood up again, the whole room was reeling and the people on the screen were kissing passionately and Robbie was holding me, his breath short and quick, his face ever so close to mine. " How was that?" he asked. "That was…that…was" Just the dance. Just the slow dance. Cameron was the guy I liked. Cameron, Cameron, Cameron. "Perfect.

Dear Mr. Vermylen: Your company has been one of our good customers for fourteen years. Naturally, we are very grateful for your patronage and are eager to give you the speedy, efficient service you deserve. However, we regret to say that it isn’t possible for us to do that when your trucks bring us a large shipment late in the afternoon, as they did on November 10. Why? Because many other customers make late afternoon deliveries also. Naturally, that causes congestion. That means your trucks are held up unavoidably at the pier and sometimes even your freight is delayed. That’s bad, but it can be avoided. If you make your deliveries at the pier in the morning when possible, your trucks will be able to keep moving, your freight will get immediate attention, and our workers will get home early at night to enjoy a dinner of the delicious macaroni and noodles that you manufacture. Regardless of when your shipments arrive, we shall always cheerfully do all in our power to serve you promptly. You are busy. Please don’t trouble to answer this note.

In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave, Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall, Carpenters hammered under the shaded window, Wind troubled the window curtains all night long, A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding, Their freights covered, as usual. The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram Slid slowly forth. Hearing the milkman’s chop, His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink, I rose from bed, lit a cigarette, And walked to the window. The stony street Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand, The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience. The winter sky’s pure capital Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes. Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls, Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer. A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair From underseas, kindled the looking-glass, Distinguished the dresser and the white wall. The bird called tentatively, whistled, called, Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so, O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail Of early morning, the mystery of beginning Again and again, while History is unforgiven.

What if she doesn’t worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women’s shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem so obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like? But if she is not careful she will end up: raped, pregnant, impossible to control, or merely what is now called fat. The teenage girl knows this. Everyone is telling her to be careful. She learns that making her body into her landscape to tame is preferable to any kind of wildness. Dieting is being careful, and checking into a hunger camp offers the ultimate in care.

Simple Twist Of Fate" They sat together in the park As the evening sky grew dark She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones It was then he felt alone and wished that he'd gone straight And watched out for a simple twist of fate. They walked alone by the old canal A little confused I remember well And stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burning bright He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train Moving with a simple twist of fate. A saxophone someplace far off played As she was walking on by the arcade As the light bust through a-beat-up shade where he was waking up She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate And forgot about a simple twist of fate. He woke up the room was bare He didn't see her anywhere He told himself he didn't care pushed the window open wide Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate Brought on by a simple twist of fate. He hears the ticking of the clocks And walks along with a parrot that talks Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailers all come in Maybe she'll pick him out again how long must he wait One more time for a simple twist of fate. People tell me it's a sin To know and feel too much within I still believe she was my twin but I lost the ring She was born in spring but I was born too late Blame it on a simple twist of fate. Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks (1975)

To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time—often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore;—to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization—taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier—there is the untold fate of La Prouse;—universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand.

From Theoretical Elevators: Volume Two, by James Fulton. To believe in silence. As we did when we lived in bubbles. Sentient insofar as we knew it was warm: Silence provided that warmth. The womb. Ants have it easy for speaking in chemicals. Food. Flight. Follow. Nouns and verbs only, and never in concert. There are no mistakes for there is no sentence save the one nature imposes (mortality). You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming towards departure. You cannot find the words, the words will not allow you to find them in time for the departure. Nothing is allowed to pass between you and your companion. It is late, a seat awaits. That the words are simple and true is only half the battle. The train is leaving. The train is always leaving and you have not found your words. Remember the train, and that thing between you and your words. An elevator is a train. The perfect train terminates at Heaven. The perfect elevator waits while its human freight tries to grab through the muck and find the words. In the black box, this messy business of human communication is reduced to excreted chemicals, understood by the soul’s receptors and translated into true speech.

The Camera Eye (38) sealed signed and delivered all over Tours you can smell lindens in bloom it’s hot my uniform sticks the OD chafes me under the chin only four days ago AWOL crawling under the freight cars at the station of St. Pierre-des-Corps waiting in the buvette for the MP on guard to look away from the door so’s I could slink out with a cigarette (and my heart) in my mouth then in a tiny box of a hotel room changing the date on that old movement order but today my discharge sealed signed and delivered sends off sparks in my pocket like a romancandle I walk past the headquarters of the SOS Hay sojer your tunic’s unbuttoned (f—k you buddy) and down the lindenshaded street to the bathhouse that has a court with flowers in the middle of it the hot water gushes green out of brass swanheads into the whitemetal tub I strip myself naked soap myself all over with the sour pink soap slide into the warm deepgreen tub through the white curtain in the window a finger of afternoon sunlight lengthens on the ceiling towel’s dry and warm smells of steam in the suitcase I’ve got a suit of civvies I borrowed from a fellow I know the buck private in the rear rank of Uncle Sam’s Medical Corps (serial number . . . never could remember the number anyway I dropped it in the Loire) goes down the drain with a gurgle and hiss and having amply tipped and gotten the eye from the fat woman who swept up the towels I step out into the lindensmell of a July afternoon and stroll up to the café where at the little tables outside only officers may set their whipcord behinds and order a drink of cognac unservable to those in uniform while waiting for the train to Paris and sit down firmly in long pants in the iron chair an anonymous civilian

The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

Ryder’s heart beats madly against my ear as we cling to each other, holding on for dear life. Adrenaline races through my veins, making my breath come in short gasps. I can feel Ryder’s fingers in my hair, his nails digging into my scalp as he presses me tightly against his body, his muscles bunched and rigid. I know I’m supposed to hate him, but all I can think right now is how glad I am he’s here--glad that I’m not alone. I’ve never been so scared in all my life, but I know it would be worse without him. It’s over in a matter of seconds. The freight-train roar quiets, the rain returning with a vengeance. I don’t need Jim Cantore to tell me it’s a rain-wrapped tornado. I’ve watched enough Storm Chasers to recognize it, even from my little hidey-hole under the stairs. If we had been outside, we probably wouldn’t have seen it coming, not till it was too late. Ryder releases his grip on my head, and I pull away slightly, peering up at him. His deep brown eyes are slightly wild-looking, but otherwise he looks okay. His face isn’t a shade of green, at least. I lean back against him, my head resting on his shoulder now. We’re still holding hands, our fingers intertwined. Somehow, it doesn’t seem at all weird. It just feels…safe. Neither of us says a word, not till the sirens are silenced a few minutes later. “I guess we should give it a few minutes,” I say, my voice slightly hoarse. “You know, just to make sure that’s it. No point in going out just to climb right back in.” He nods. “Besides, it’s perfectly comfortable in here.” “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” “Okay, let me rephrase. It’s not uncomfortable.” I swallow hard. “I hope it’s not bad out there. I’m afraid of what we’re going to find.” “No matter how bad it is, we’re fine; the dogs and cats are fine. That’s what matters, Jemma. Anything else is replaceable.” “You sound like my dad, you know that? Have you been studying at the Bradley Cafferty School of Platitudes or something?” “Your dad’s a smart guy,” he says with a shrug.

Railways, by days and by night. The flowers in the cuttings with their sooty blossoms, the birds on the wires with their sooty voices, they are their friends and long remember them. And we also stand still, with astonished eyes, when-already from the far distant distance- there's the cry of promise. And we stand, with hair streaming, when it's there like thunder and as though it had rolled round heaven knows what worlds. And we're still standing, with sooty cheeks, when-already from the far distant distance-it cries. Cries, far, far away. Cries. Really it was nothing. Or everything. Like us. And they beat, beyond the windows of prisons, sweet dangerous, promising rhythms. You are all ears then, poor prisoner, all hearing, for the clattering, oncoming trains in the night and their cry and their whistle shiver the soft dark of your cell with pain and desire. Or they crash bellowing over the bed, when at night you're harboring fever. And your veins, the moon-blue, vibrate and take up the song, the song of the freight trains: Under way-under way-under way- And your ear's an abyss, that swallows the world. Under way. But ever and again you are spat out at stations, abandoned to farewell and departure. And the stations raise up their pale signboards like brows beside your dark road. And they have names, those furrowed-brown signs, names, which are the world: bed, they mean, hunger and women. Ulla or Carola. And frozen feet and tears. And they mean tobacco, the stations, or lipstick or schnapps. Or God or bread. And the pale brows of the stations, the signboards, have names, that mean: women. You are yourself a railway track, rusty, stained, silver, shiny, beautiful and uncertain. And you are divided into sections and bound between stations. And they have signboards whereon is written women, or murder, or moon. And then that is the world. You are a railway- rumbled over, cried over- you are the track- on you everything happens and makes you rust blind and silver bright. You are human, your brain giraffe-lonely somewhere above on your endless neck. And no one quite knows your heart.

Ryder! What’s taking you so long?” “I’m on my way!” he yells back. It feels like forever before he pushes open the door and ducks inside. Then I see why it took him so long. He’s somehow got the three cats tucked under one arm and the cake plate clutched in the other hand. No spare for a flashlight or lantern--so he accomplished this all in the dark. “Here,” he says, handing off the cake to me before releasing Kirk, Spock, and Sulu into the crate and latching the door. “Seriously, Ryder? You brought the cake?” He shrugs. “I was hungry.” Hmm, I guess all that kissing worked up his appetite. For cake. I’m not sure if I should be offended or not. On the plus side, he doesn’t look like he’s about to puke. So we’re making progress as far as his fear of storms goes. I guess that’s something. “Did you happen to bring a fork?” I ask, setting the plate on the makeshift tabletop. He produces two from his pocket, holding them up triumphantly. So we eat cake while the sirens blare. Actually, it doesn’t sound that bad out there. Still, the fact that we’re so calm--that Ryder’s so calm--should tell you how routine this is getting. As long as we don’t hear that awful freight-train sound, we’re good. “What happened to the cake?” he asks between bites. “It looks like someone mutilated it while I was gone.” “Sorry,” I mutter. “Guess I did some stress bingeing. You realize you’re not wearing a shirt, right?” He glances down and shrugs, his cheeks flushing ever so slightly. “Sorry ’bout that.” It might seem silly that he’s apologizing, but at Magnolia Landing, you don’t come to the table unless you’re fully dressed. It’s one of Laura Grace’s most unbendable rules--you dress for meals, even breakfast. Not that this counts as a meal, and I’m not sure you could call this plywood-on-top-of-a-crate thing a “table.” But still… By the time the sirens shut off, we’ve completely cleaned the plate, even scraping off the hardened frosting with our fingers. “That was quick,” I say, setting aside the now-empty plate. Ryder nods. “I guess we should give it a minute or two. You know, make sure it’s not coming back on.” So we wait. Silently. Ryder can’t even meet my eyes, and all I want to do is stare at his lips. This is crazy. I mean, what do we do now--now that the sirens are off and the cake is gone? Apparently, the answer is pretend like nothing happened.

some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time—often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore;—to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization—taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier—there is the untold fate of La Prouse;—universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man—such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge. I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth. As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained.

Thanks to our discussion in the last chapter, we can also agree that character is a product of perseverance: “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Rom. 5:3–4). I don’t know how that idea strikes you, but it sounds a little backward to me. I would expect that a person with character would find it easier to persevere through difficult circumstances. That makes sense. But how does perseverance produce character? When I look at the world around me, it seems to me that most things actually decay over time rather than grow stronger. The longer we live in our home, the more I see spots that need a paint touch-up. The longer I drive my car, the more I find I need to take it in for tune-ups and repairs. And the longer I live, the more I realize my body isn’t what it used to be! But maybe this process of perseverance leading to character works differently. Surely God is the X-factor. When you add God to the equation, persistence over time builds up character and strength instead of taking it away. Consider, if you will, the snowball. Left by itself, it doesn’t amount to much. It’s just a little round chunk of white frozen water. Yet place that snowball at the top of a steep hill on a snowy day, and things begin to change. If you invest some time rolling that snowball across the ground so it picks up snow and grows into a larger ball, you begin to create something big and heavy. If you invest even more time and energy (this is where perseverance comes in), you might get that ball rolling down the hill. And the longer it rolls, the faster it goes, the bigger it gets. Now you’ve got something powerful. This is a force to be reckoned with. This is when people start running for cover. Your little snowball suddenly becomes a runaway freight train! I believe that equation of suffering, which produces perseverance, which produces character, works in a similar fashion. Our willingness to trust and rely on the Lord in a time of trouble invites His power to work in our lives. The more we trust and depend on Him, the easier it becomes. As the Lord says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). Pretty soon our perseverance enables the Lord to add character to our “snowball”—and the more we persevere, the stronger we grow. We find ourselves rolling downhill toward a godly life. It still might be a bumpy ride, but the size and momentum of our snowball just about guarantees that as long as we are pursuing God’s will for our lives, nothing will stop us.

They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit—a unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. It also said that the same treatment would be meted out to all the partisans unless, by a given date, they submitted and gave up their arms to the representatives of General Vitsyn’s army corps. Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn’s investigating and punitive squads. His own sentence of death had been allegedly commuted; instead of hanging him, they had cut off his arm and leg in order to send him into the camp and strike terror among the partisans. They had carried him as far as the outposts of the camp, where they had put him down and ordered him to crawl, urging him on by shooting into the air. He could barely move his lips. To make out his almost unintelligible stammering, the crowd around him bent low. He was saying: “Be on your guard, comrades. He has broken through.” “Patrols have gone out in strength. There’s a big battle going on. We’ll hold him.” “There’s a gap. He wants to surprise you. I know. ... I can’t go on, men. I am spitting blood. I’ll die in a moment.” “Rest a bit. Keep quiet.—Can’t you see it’s bad for him, you heartless beasts!” The man started again: “He went to work on me, the devil. He said: You will bathe in your own blood until you tell me who you are. And how was I to tell him, a deserter is just what I am? I was running from him to you.” “You keep saying ‘he.’ Who was it that got to work on you?” “Let me just get my breath. ... I’ll tell you. Hetman, Bekeshin. Colonel, Strese. Vitsyn’s men. You don’t know out here what it’s like. The whole town is groaning. They boil people alive. They cut strips out of them. They take you by the scruff of the neck and push you inside, you don’t know where you are, it’s pitch black. You grope about—you are in a cage, inside a freight car. There are more than forty people in the cage, all in their underclothes. From time to time they open the door and grab whoever comes first—out he goes. As you grab a chicken to cut its throat. I swear to God. Some they hang, some they shoot, some they question. They beat you to shreds, they put salt on the wounds, they pour boiling water on you. When you vomit or relieve yourself they make you eat it. As for children and women—O God!” The unfortunate was at his last gasp. He cried out and died without finishing the sentence. Somehow they all knew it at once and took off their caps and crossed themselves. That night, the news of a far more terrible incident flew around the camp. Pamphil had been in the crowd surrounding the dying man. He had seen him, heard his words, and read the threatening inscription on the board. His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faces distorted by pain, and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish—to forestall their future sufferings and to end his own—he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys for the two small girls and the boy, who had been his favorite. The astonishing thing was that he did not kill himself immediately afterward.

If Fred tells you a chicken can pull a freight train, your job is to hook ’em up.

3824A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the black hours of the four-and-twenty. Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves guiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful end. Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when they stop, backing when they back. Red hot embers showering out upon the ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths too: at least they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their lips. Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white characters. An earthquake accompanied with thunder and lightning, going up express to London.

keeping the first station busy, and it’s similar to first-in, first-out scheduling. But of course, now everyone knows that you don’t release work based on the availability of the first station. Instead, it should be based on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.” I just stare at him blankly. He continues, “Because of how Mark was releasing work, inventory kept piling up in front of our bottleneck, and jobs were never finished on time. Every day was an emergency. For years, we were awarded Best Customer of the Year from our air freight shipment company, because we were overnighting thousands of pounds of finished goods to angry customers almost every week.” He pauses and then says emphatically, “Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.” He continues, “In our case, our bottleneck was a heat treat oven, just like in Goldratt’s novel, The Goal. We also had paint-curing booths that later became constraints, too. By the time we froze the release of all new jobs, you couldn’t even see the bottleneck work centers because they were surrounded by huge piles of inventory. Even from up here!” Despite myself, I laugh with him. It’s obvious in hindsight, but I can imagine that to Mark, it was anything but obvious. “Look, thanks for the history lesson. But I learned most of this already in business school. I don’t see how this could possibly be relevant to managing IT Operations. IT is not like running a factory.” “Oh, really?” he turns to me, frowning intensely. “Let me guess. You’re going to say that IT is pure knowledge work, and so therefore, all your work is like that of an artisan. Therefore, there’s no place for standardization, documented work procedures, and all that high-falutin’ ‘rigor and discipline’ that you claimed to hold so near and dear.” I frown. I can’t figure out if he’s trying to convince me of something I already believe or trying to get me to accept an absurd conclusion. “If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you’re wrong.

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: “There, she is gone!” There are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: “Here she comes!” And that is dying.

Before the cotton crash, though, the Delta’s main problem was that black people had begun to migrate to the North to work in factories. The main transportation routes out of the Delta led straight north. The Illinois Central Railroad, which was by far the most powerful economic actor in Mississippi, had bought the Delta’s main rail system in 1892; its passengers and freight hooked up in Memphis with the main Illinois Central line, which ran from New Orleans to Chicago, paralleling the route of U.S. Highway 51. U.S. Highway 61, paralleling the Mississippi River, passed through Clarksdale; U.S. 49, running diagonally northwest through the Delta from Jackson, Mississippi, met 61 on the outskirts of Clarksdale.

A large wave now approaches the base of the cliff, and a gigantic bua tree, covered with fragrant blossoms, springs up from Avaiki (nether world) to receive on its far-reaching branches human spirits, who are mysteriously impelled to cluster on its limbs. When at length the mystic tree is covered with human spirits, it goes down with its living freight to the nether world. Akaanga, the slave of fearful Miru, mistress of the invisible world, infallibly catches all these unhappy spirits in his net and laves them to and fro in a lake. In these waters the captive ghosts exhaust themselves by wriggling about like fishes, in the vain hope of escape. The net is pulled up, and the half-drowned spirits enter into the presence of dread Miru, who is ugliness personified. The secret of Miru’s power over her intended victims is the ‘kava’ root (Piper mythisticum). A

Their era was ending when Jim Clyman got to Independence in ’44 and found Bill Sublette, who had first taken wagons up the Platte Valley in 1830, now taking invalids to Brown’s Hole for a summer’s outing. It was twenty-one years since Jim had first gone up the Missouri, forty years since Lewis and Clark wintered at the Mandan villages, thirty-three years since Wilson Hunt led the Astorians westward, twenty years since Clyman with Smith and Fitzpatrick crossed South Pass, eighteen years since Ashley, in the Wasatch Mountains, sold his fur company to Smith, Sublette, and Jackson. Thirty-two years ago Robert McKnight had been imprisoned by the Spanish for taking goods to Santa Fe. Twenty-three years ago William Becknell had defied the prohibition and returned from Santa Fe in triumph. Eighteen years ago the Patties had got to San Diego by the Gila route and Jed Smith had blazed the desert trail to San Bernardino Valley; fourteen years ago Ewing Young, with Kit Carson, had come over the San Bernardino Mountains, making for the San Joaquin. There had been a trading post at the mouth of Laramie Creek for just ten years. Bent’s Fort was fifteen years old. Now the streams were trapped out, and even if beaver should come back, the price of plews would never rise again. There were two or three thousand Americans in Oregon, a couple of hundred in California, and in Independence hundreds of wagons were yoking up. Bill Sublette and Black Harris were guiding movers. Carson and Fitzpatrick were completing the education of John Charles Frémont. Forty years since Lewis and Clark. Think back to that blank paper with some names sketched in, the Wind River peaks, the Tetons, the Picketwire River, the Siskidee, names which, mostly, the mountain men sketched in — something under a million square miles, the fundamental watershed, a thousand mountain men scalped in this wilderness, the deserts crossed, the trails blazed and packed down, the mountains made known, the caravans carrying freight to Santa Fe, Bill Bowen selling his place to go to Oregon, half a dozen wagonwrights setting up at Independence … and, far off, like a fly buzzing against a screen, Joe Meek’s cousin, Mr. Polk, preparing war. Whose country was it? III Pillar of Cloud ALL through February Congress debated the resolution to terminate the joint occupancy of Oregon, and by its deliberation, Polk thought, informed the British that we were irresolute.

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

I hear the wind howlin' and roarin' like a freight train, and I know old Wally could be in for his last days. But I just kept my head down and prayed. Well, that tornado ripped me right up from the earth and sent me heavenbound, and I was swirled amongst the trees and the cows and houses and every imaginable thing. I held onto my banjo for dear life, and I began to sing and play and make the most of this terrible ride I found myself on. I suppose that tornado was soothed by my tune, because it soon slowed down, lowering me back to earth until I landed here.

I steered us across a bridge that had been made from an old freight car, a common practice in our part of the world, and pulled up to a number of strands of barbed wire with a steel sign affixed, which read KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY, followed by TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I slowed the truck to a stop and looked at the shiners riding shotgun. “Feel like doing something unlawful?” She cracked the passenger door open and climbed out. “Always, and all ways.

I was speeding with the train toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of it as a dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proofing building that is going up to-day. On freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on lumber-rafters, among the fireman and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of the year somewhere, is human nature in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the strain. As I awoke to all this undealized heroic life around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began to fill my soul.

Sullivan was quoted as saying. “We took the fight to them and it’s over.” It certainly felt over, Rye thought as he stared into the fire. There was no mention of Gig in the news story, and he wondered if Lem Brand had lied about getting his brother out of jail. He slept uneasily again, repeating over and over in his mind what he’d say to Early if he came back (Look, I don’t want any trouble for Gig and me . . . ). In the morning, another skiff of snow had fallen, like sugar onto a biscuit. After breakfast, Rye swept Mrs. Ricci’s steps and walked downtown along the old hobo highway. It was rare to walk the trail and see no one, but with so many men in jail or wintered up, Rye felt alone in the world. He emerged in the fuel and freight yards east of downtown, then walked the tenderloin into the center of downtown and eventually to the building where Fred Moore had a small office on the second floor, and where Rye took off his bowler and asked to see his old lawyer. Fred came out of his office in shirtsleeves. He clapped Rye on the shoulder

Gertrude Chandler Warner discovered when she was teaching that many readers who like an exciting story could find no books that were both easy and fun to read. She decided to try to meet this need, and her first book, The Boxcar Children, quickly proved she had succeeded. Miss Warner drew on her own experiences to write the mystery. As a child she spent hours watching trains go by on the tracks opposite her family home. She often dreamed about what it would be like to set up housekeeping in a caboose or freight car--the situation the Alden children find themselves in. When Miss Warner received requests for more adventures involving Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny Alden, she began additional stories. In each, she chose a special setting and introduced unusual or eccentric characters who liked the unpredictable. While the mystery element is central to each of Miss Warner’s books, she never thought of them as strictly juvenile mysteries. She liked to stress the Aldens’ independence and resourcefulness and their solid New England devotion to using up and making do. The Aldens go about most of their adventures with as little adult supervision as possible--something else that delights young readers. Miss Warner lived in Putnam, Connecticut, until her death in 1979. During her lifetime, she received hundreds of letters from girls and boys telling her how much they liked her books.

true love ain’t the passenger train that pulls up at the station so that you can board when it’s time. It’s the freight train that ploughs into you when you least expect it. That’s how it was for me at any rate. There’s just no getting over something like that, and if you find someone who makes you feel that way, you hold onto her forever.

Lesson: make sure new customers pay at least half of their order up front, or run a credit check. Ship smaller orders in the beginning, even if it makes your freight costs less efficient. #3

and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs. The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America. We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received. Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work. Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it. I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay. Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing. Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have

PART1: To say Sean felt stressed was a huge understatement. Give him a cliff to scale or a bar brawl to break up. Hell, give him a freight train to try to outrun, anything but having to pull off being the best man for his brother Finn’s wedding—including but not limited to keeping said brother from losing his collective shit. It’s not like Sean didn’t understand. Getting married was a big deal. Okay, so he didn’t fully understand, not really, but he wanted to. He really did. And how funny was that? Sean O’Riley, younger brother, hook-up king extraordinaire, was suddenly tired of the game and found himself aching for his own forever after. “We almost there?” Finn asked him from the backseat of the vehicle Sean was driving. “Yep.” “And you double checked on our reservations?” “Yep.” “No, I’m serious, man,” Finn said. “Remember when you took me to Vegas and when we got there, every hotel was booked and we had to stay at the Magic-O motel?” “Man, a guy screws up one time . . .” “We had a stripper pole in our rooms, Sean.” Sean sighed. “Okay, but to be fair, that was back when I was still in my stupid phase. I promise you that we have reservations—no stripper poles. I even double and triple checked, just like you asked me a hundred and one times. Pru, I hope you realize you’re marrying a nag.” Pru, Finn’s fiancée, laughed from the shotgun position. “Hey, one of us has to be the nag in this relationship, and it isn’t me.” Sean held up a palm and Pru leaned over the console to give him a high-five. “Just so you know,” Sean said to Finn, “I didn’t pick this place, your woman did.” “True story,” Pru said. “The B&B’s closed to the public this entire weekend. Sean booked the whole place for our bachelor/bachelorette party weekend extravaganza.” “I superheroed this thing,” Sean said. Finn snorted and let loose of a small smile because they both knew that for most of Sean’s childhood, that’s what he’d aspired to be, a superhero—sans tights though. Tights had never been Sean’s thing, especially after suffering through them for two seasons in high school football before he’d mercifully cracked his clavicle.

DRAGONFLY   As my feet take hold of the floor I cling to her lips with the kind of intensity that shakes her entire body with a paralyzing calm. She carefully pushes my shorts down around my thighs while holding on to these lips that have proved perfection to her love. Easing the edge of her skintight shirt up around her frail torso with a steady rise the lower portion of my body eases into hers, she struggling to get her arms around my neck and chest after lifting her shirt over.   Her leg rises up underneath my arm, holding her up as her other leg follows. Like a steady freight crane I carefully move her onto the bed as she holds on to me, falling into her with all of my love. Moving across the surface of her entire body in the way that a dragonfly wets its tail above still water I lie down beside her with one hand moving across her chest. Wishing only to free her I seize her lips with an upward nudge of passion that educes a sort of ethereal beauty as we lie within the soothe of each other’s company. Reaching again for her lips I lean in to kiss her with my pelvis and upper body against hers as our legs intertwine. Aroused beneath my waist comes the part of me that does protrude, causing an effluxion of vitality to commove down my entire vessel in a slow whisper that moves over my entire body towards my legs and toes.

I have not "cowboy camped" in a long time. When you cowboy camp, you do not set up a tent. Your roof is the stars, and you are cradled by the wind. Insects crawl over you in the night. They pause on the bridge of your nose. They check their watches. They are running late. They hurry down your cheeks, muttering to themselves. They don't think of you, of your heavy human worries. They have their own lives.

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Many financial analysts will find Emerson and Emery more interesting and appealing stocks than the other two—primarily, perhaps, because of their better “market action,” and secondarily because of their faster recent growth in earnings. Under our principles of conservative investment the first is not a valid reason for selection—that is something for the speculators to play around with. The second has validity, but within limits. Can the past growth and the presumably good prospects of Emery Air Freight justify a price more than 60 times its recent earnings?1 Our answer would be: Maybe for someone who has made an in-depth study of the possibilities of this company and come up with exceptionally firm and optimistic conclusions. But not for the careful investor who wants to be reasonably sure in advance that he is not committing the typical Wall Street error of overenthusiasm for good performance in earnings and in the stock market.* The same cautionary statements seem called for in the case of Emerson Electric, with a special reference to the market’s current valuation of over a billion dollars for the intangible, or earning-power, factor here. We should add that the “electronics industry,” once a fair-haired child of the stock market, has in general fallen on disastrous days. Emerson is an outstanding exception, but it will have to continue to be such an exception for a great many years in the future before the 1970 closing price will have been fully justified by its subsequent performance. By contrast, both ELTRA at 27 and Emhart at 33 have the earmarks of companies with sufficient value behind their price to constitute reasonably protected investments. Here the investor can, if he wishes, consider himself basically a part owner of these businesses, at a cost corresponding to what the

[Wholehearted faith] gets complicated on the days when I'm not sure I believe in God—or at least any version of God like the one I grew up with. Even the word "allegiance" takes on a bitter tinge, loaded with cultural freight and political baggage. And the language of utter devotion is bedeviled by uncertainty and skepticism.

In a short time the boys arrived at the waterfront. At least half a dozen freighters were tied up at the long piers that extended like fingers into the waters of Barmet Bay. In front of one vessel huge piles of freight were stacked on the dock in the glare of floodlights. The ship’s cranes were busily swinging more cargo onto the pier. “Must be a rush job,” Frank commented as he parked the car. The boys walked over to watch. There was a cool breeze from the sea and the tangy smell of salt water in the air.

Follow-up Call (Script) Seller: “Hello Mr. Prospect, my name is Tom Freese, and I’m the regional manager for KnowledgeWare in Kansas City. I wanted to contact you about the CASE application development seminar we are hosting at IBM’s Regional Headquarters on August 26. Do you remember receiving the invitation we sent you? (Pause for a response) “Frankly, we are expecting a record turnout—over one hundred people, including development managers from Sprint, Hallmark Cards, Pepsi Co., Yellow Freight, Kansas Power & Light, the Federal Reserve Bank, Northwest Mutual Life, American Family Life, St. Luke’s Hospital, Anheuser-Busch, MasterCard, American Express, Worldspan, and United Airlines, just to name a few. “I wanted to follow up because we haven’t yet received an RSVP from your company, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t get left out.” Granted, this was a highly positioned approach, but it was also 100 percent accurate. I wanted prospects to know that IBM was endorsing this event. I also wanted to let them know that I expected “everyone else” to participate. I accomplished this by rattling off an impressive list of marquee company names that we were “expected” to attend. Most importantly, I wanted to make sure that they didn’t get left out.

Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.

I kissed him in a sweet, comforting way…” “And?” “It exploded. The man kisses like a freight train. It was totally a shoved-against-the-wall, panty-melting kiss.” Blair held a hand up. “Stop. I think I had a mini orgasm.

Fae of the match,” she said and I flinched in surprise as her voice rang out over the whole stadium. “Goes to Geraldine Grus.” I could finally let my smile free as I looked around to see Geraldine leaping out of her spot in the line up, her eyes glimmering with emotion. “Oh sweet onion balls!” she gasped as she rushed towards us. “Congratulations!” I said enthusiastically as I placed the medal over her head. She crushed me in an embrace, lifting me clean off of my feet as she celebrated. Darcy wrapped her arms around us too and we laughed as Geraldine descended into happy tears. “And congratulations to the winners of the match: Starlight Academy!” Nova added loudly when we didn’t seem likely to break free of Geraldine any time soon. The crowd from Starlight went crazy, their applause deafening as the team jumped up and down in ecstatic celebration. A low growl caught my attention and I glanced to my right where Darius stood almost close enough to touch. His jaw was locked tight, his spine rigid and his eyes burning with rage. I looked away from him quickly, though I couldn’t help but feel glad that this was upsetting him. Poor little Darius lost his favourite game. Imagine how bad you’d feel if someone tried to drown you though? Not that I’m bitter at all... Nova passed Darcy a bunch of flowers and gave me a medal on a green ribbon as the Starlight Airstriker stepped up to claim them. The guy pulled both of us into an exuberant hug as he claimed his prizes and I couldn’t help but feel a bit pleased for the team as we worked our way through the line, handing over flowers and medals to each of them as they approached. I imagined beating a team filled with the Celestial Heirs was something that none of them would ever forget. I could feel heat radiating off of Darius beside me as he fought to maintain his composure while the line worked its way past us but I didn’t look his way again. The last Starlight player to approach us was the Captain, Quentin. He smiled widely as he accepted the flowers from Darcy, tossing her a wink. As I placed the medal around his neck he pulled me into a tight hug, his hand skimming my ass less than accidentally. I pushed him off with a laugh, his excitement infectious in a way that made me think he was a Siren but it didn’t feel invasive like the way it always did with Max. Maybe because he wasn’t trying to force any emotions onto me, just sharing his own. “Why don’t you two girls come back and party with us at Starlight tonight?” he offered and I didn’t miss his suggestive tone. “Why don’t you fuck off while you’ve still got some teeth left?” Darius said before we could respond. I frowned at him but his gaze was locked on Quentin. To my surprise, Quentin laughed tauntingly. “And to think, we were worried about facing off against the Celestial Heirs,” he said, aiming his comments at me and Darcy. “Turns out they really aren’t that impressive after all. It would be a shame if Solaria ended up in their loser hands. Maybe the two of you should reconsider the idea of taking up your crown?” I laughed at his brazen behaviour, wondering how much more it would take for Darius to snap. “Yeah,” I replied jokingly. “Maybe we should take our crowns back after all.” Darcy laughed too, flicking her long hair. “Oh yeah,” she agreed. “I think a crown would suit me actually.” Quentin yelled out in surprise as a shot of heated energy slammed into him like a freight train and he was catapulted halfway across the pitch before falling into a heap on the ground. Before I could react in any way, I found a severely pissed off Dragon Shifter snarling in my face. My breath caught in my lungs and I blinked up at him as he growled at me. Seth moved in on Darcy beside me, his face set with the same enraged scowl while the other two drew close behind them. “Do you want to say that again?” Darius asked, his voice low, the threat in it sending a tremor right through my core. (tory)

He thought of the youngsters he had brought up the river. He had not meant to come to care about them. Just fulfil a contract, have a bit of an adventure in the process, maybe draw a chart that would carry his name into history. And then return to running freight on the river on his beloved liveship. He hadn't wanted his life to change this much. Alise. Well, perhaps he had. He sighed, feeling selfish that while others paid a serious price, he had gained a woman who loved him. A woman who was giving up everything to be with him. Hest had made it real for him today. So tall and grand a man, dressed so finely, speaking so genteelly. He had begged her to come back to him. And she had turned her back on all that, for him.. She was waiting for him now, back on his liveship. He walked faster.

Eddie Grace's buick Got four bullet holes in the side Charley Delisle is sittin' at the top Of an avocado tree Mrs Storm will stab you with a steak knife If you step on her lawn I got a half a pack of lucky strikes man So come along with me Let's fill our pockets With macadamia nuts And go over to Bobby Goodmanson's And jump off the roof Hilda plays strip poker When her mama's across the street Joey Navinsky says she put Her tongue in his mouth Dicky Faulkner's got a switchblade And some gooseneck risers That eucalyptus is a hunchback There's a wind down from the south So let me tie you up with kite string I'll show you the scabs on my knee Watch out for the broken glass Put your shoes and socks on And come along with me Let's follow that fire truck I think your house is burning down Then go down to the hobo jungle And kill some rattlesnakes with a trowel And we'll break all the windows In the old Anderson place We'll steal a bunch of boysenberrys And smear 'em on your face I'll get a dollar from my mama's purse Buy that skull and crossbones ring And you can wear it round your neck On an old piece of string Then we'll spit on Ronnie Arnold And flip him the bird Slash the tires on the school bus Now don't say a word I'll take a rusty nail Scratch your initials in my arm I'll show you how to sneak up on the roof Of the drugstore I'll take the spokes from your wheelchair And a magpie's wings And I'll tie 'em to your shoulders And your feet I'll steal a hacksaw from my dad Cut the braces off your legs And we'll bury them tonight Out in the cornfield Just put a church key in your pocket We'll hop that freight train in the hall We'll slide all the way down the drain To New Orleans in the fall

You recorded the good and bad experiences, and you use them to prejudge everything thrown against you. Then you’re using those experiences, constantly trying and predict and change the future. As you get older, the sum of preferences you’ve accumulated is very, very large. These habitual reactions end up as runaway freight trains controlling your mood. We should control our own moods. Why don’t we study how to control our moods? What a masterful thing it would be if you could say, “Right now I would like to be in the curious state,” and then you can genuinely get yourself into the curious state. Or say, “I want to be in a mourning state. I’m mourning a loved one, and I want to grieve for them. I really want to feel that. I don’t want to be distracted by a computer programming problem due tomorrow.

Miss Taggart, it is not my place to call you, but nobody else will,” said the voice that came on the wire, this time; the voice sounded young and too calm. “In another day or two, a disaster’s going to happen here the like of which they’ve never seen, and they won’t be able to hide it any longer, only it will be too late by then, and maybe it’s too late already.” “What is it? Who are you?” “One of your employees of the Minnesota Division, Miss Taggart. In another day or two, the trains will stop running out of here—and you know what that means, at the height of the harvest. At the height of the biggest harvest we’ve ever had. They’ll stop, because we have no cars. The harvest freight cars have not been sent to us this year.” “What did you say?” She felt as if minutes went by between the words of the unnatural voice that did not sound like her own. “The cars have not been sent. Fifteen thousand should have been here by now. As far as I could learn, about eight thousand cars is all we got. I’ve been calling Division Headquarters for a week. They’ve been telling me not to worry. Last time, they told me to mind my own damn business. Every shed, silo, elevator, warehouse, garage and dance hall along the track is filled with wheat. At the Sherman elevators, there’s a line of farmers’ trucks and wagons two miles long, waiting on the road. At Lakewood Station, the square is packed solid and has been for three nights. They keep telling us it’s only temporary, the cars are coming and we’ll catch up. We won’t. There aren’t any cars coming. I’ve called everyone I could. I know, by the way they answer. They know, and not one of them wants to admit it. They’re scared, scared to move or speak or ask or answer. All they’re thinking of is who will be blamed when that harvest rots here around the stations—and not of who’s going to move it. Maybe nobody can, now. Maybe there’s nothing you can do about it, either. But I thought you’re the only person left who’d want to know and that somebody had to tell you.

Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to control—three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota. An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the freight cars held in the service of Kip’s Ma. But by that time, it was too late. Ma’s freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket. In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives—and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night. Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smoldering piles—a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins—and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt; they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him. The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

a summation more wasted days, gored days, evaporated days. more squandered days, days pissed away, days slapped around, mutilated. the problem is that the days add up to a life, my life. I sit here 73 years old knowing I have been badly fooled, picking at my teeth with a toothpick which breaks. dying should come easy: like a freight train you don’t hear when your back is turned.

How long until the ghosts catch up to me? Until they crowd around me, shouting away anything wonderful in my world. Until they grab my ankles and attempt to drag me underground, back into the darkness.

Melanie builds the world around her as she goes. This is mostly countryside, with fields on all sides. Rectangular fields, mostly, or at least with roughly squared-off edges. But they’re overgrown with weeds to the grown-ups’ shoulder height, whatever crops they were once planted with swallowed up long ago. Where the fields meet the road, there are ragged hedges or crumbling walls, and the surface they’re walking on is a faded black carpet pitted with holes, some of them big enough for her to fall into. A landscape of decay – but still gloriously and heart-stoppingly beautiful. The sky overhead is a bright blue bowl of almost infinite size, given depth by a massive bank of pure white cloud at the limit of vision that goes up and up and up like a tower. Birds and insects are everywhere, some of them familiar to her now from the field where they stopped that morning. The sun warms her skin, pouring energy down on to the world out of that upturned bowl – it makes flowers grow on the land, Melanie knows, and algae in the sea; starts food chains all over the place. A million smells freight the complicated air.

As you get older, the sum of preferences you’ve accumulated is very, very large. These habitual reactions end up as runaway freight trains controlling your mood. We should control our own moods.

The world must be all fucked up, when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

Conceptually, this was an approach borrowed more from the world of freight movers than communications experts. Think of each message as if it were a large house and ask yourself how you would move that house across the country from, say, Boston to Los Angeles. Theoretically, you could move the whole structure in one piece. House movers do it over shorter distances all the time—slowly and carefully. However, it’s more efficient to disassemble the structure if you can, load the pieces onto trucks, and drive those trucks over the nation’s interstate highway system—another kind of distributed network. Not every truck will take the same route; some drivers might go through Chicago and some through Nashville. If a driver learns that the road is bad around Kansas City, for example, he may take an alternate route. As long as each driver has clear instructions telling him where to deliver his load and he is told to take the fastest way he can find, chances are that all the pieces will arrive at their destination in L.A. and the house can be reassembled on a new site. In some cases the last truck to leave Boston might be the first to arrive in L.A., but if each piece of the house carries a label indicating its place in the overall structure, the order of arrival doesn’t matter. The rebuilders can find the right parts and put them together in the right places. In

depression most of my life.” He sighs, his eyes unfocused as if looking at something that only exists in his mind. “It’s wanting the next new thing, bigger, better, faster. It’s never leaving your bed. It’s crying, it’s yelling, it’s deafening silence. It’s refusing to look at yourself because it’s easier to blame those around you. It’s not eating. It’s pigging out. It’s drinking, it’s recklessness, and it’s apathy. Depression doesn’t have just one face; it wears many masks…it hits you like a freight train and sneaks up on you like the setting sun. There is no conclusive list of symptoms because everyone is different. Every catalyst or chemical imbalance is different. Depression is an equal opportunity bitch. Probably the only thing that truly binds us together as

He’s a freakn’ beast. Naomi watched in rapt fascination as player number forty-four scored yet another goal. Like an implacable freight train, he plowed through the opposition’s defense as if they didn’t exist, using his size, and surprising speed, to bowl them over. At the end of his shift, he went to sit his turn on the bench, but her fascination in the game didn’t waver. Her attention ended up snagged by player sixty-nine. Smaller in stature than the behemoth, he absorbed her just as completely with his feline grace as he twisted and moved around the floor. He almost danced as he ran, his stick held high and usually cradling the ball.

What surprised him was the temerity of the wolves didn’t have his alpha spouting off a rant and promising to rain destruction. If one ignored Hayder, those present in the boardroom were calm, so calm Leo had yet to move from his spot on the couch where he read an actual paperback book— tree killer. The lack of any kind of vengeance-fueled emotion irritated Hayder even more. “Why aren’t you more perturbed?” Did no one understand the calamity? Arabella was gone! Fingers still texting, Arik peered up from his cell phone. “I am actually very upset, but since you’re already roaring, I figure I’ll save my voice for later when we accost the stupid dogs and give them payback for their effrontery.” Arik’s cold smile promised death. “I want to kill them,” Hayder growled. “Rip them apart. Stomp on them. Make them wish they were the load their mother swallowed.” “Dude, that was a visual no one needed. But I’ll forgive it because you’re upset. I’ll make sure to save you a few curs when we find them so you can work on your anger issues.” A thump on his back almost sent him staggering as Leo consoled him. “So kind of you,” was his sarcastic reply. “I know. All part of my calming personality.” Calming to Leo perhaps. Anyone else watching the big man crack his knuckles would have probably swallowed in fear and wet themselves, especially if they knew to expect a visit from the granite-hard fist. Leo liked to fight old school, bare knuckled and with the force of a freight train behind it. Sure glad he’s on our side.