beliefs
1. Intro
"In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly." On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous
"All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be." The Screwtape Letters
"We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find." How to Read and Why
2. The old man who will not laugh is a fool
Constellations We bathe our stars in light until only the brightest ones shine the others awash in dreams and fervor that nights imbue in the young cloaked in anonymity high on what-might-be, distrusted by the old as we court sleep knowing daylight comes to disrobe the mirage and fewer choices remain to create a constellation worth living
To see for yourself, see his belief that , described by his poem: Intro
"Age increases experience even as it narrows one's possible reactions to it. Iron tracks have. been laid down and long traveled. To deviate would require a crash."
"The old man who will not laugh is a fool." The Last Novel
"I've always thought that adults were bad at acting like adults" Love me Tender
"Life is cauterized and then the camera pans left onto that which still breathes, photosynthesizes, or sounds." Pig Years
"Turn forty and suddenly you’re too old to die tragically young, but at least you still have a chance of dying fascinatingly old." 300 Arguments
"On writing: I suspect it's a bit like fucking which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory" Trust
3. Incentives drive populations
They came over on a boat. It wasn't official. There was no dreaming where they came from, and who wants to live in a place without dreams.
But the dreams were finite? When they arrived one less, no less, nobody had any to share. Having a piece of the pie was their dream and there was no dream without pie.
So they ate. That was the only way.
At least, that’s what he thought.
"But the author is most ashamed to occupy his readers for so long with people of low class, knowing from experience how reluctantly they make acquaintance with the lower estate." Dead Souls
"Along similar lines I have this theory that all the leering and coveting and jacking off that happens in front of screens has turned them into libidinal tunnels." Rejection
"My town is a factory for the production of human babies." Earthlings
"When the price of wheat was high, opium production went down. When the price of wheat was low, opium production went up." Missionaries
"In our 708th year together, we started an elaborate game of tag that involved hundreds of people and lasted for over twelve years." A Short Stay in Hell
"Once he had tried to get fired by recommending suicide in his column. All that Shrike had said was: “Remember, please, that your job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose.” Miss Lonelyhearts
"With the currency ticker restored to normal function, the yen showed renewed strength, advancing against the dollar in microdecimal increments every sextillionth of a second. This was good. This was fine and right. It thrilled him to think in zeptoseconds and to watch the numbers in their unrelenting run. The stock ticker was also good. He watched the major issues breeze by and felt purified in nameless ways to see prices spiral into lubricious plunge. Yes, the effect on him was sexual, cunnilingual in partic-ular, and he let his head fall back and opened his mouth to the sky and rain." Cosmopolis
4. We have lost our myths
Low-Level Drumbeats Hiding in moments furtively dodging Low-level drumbeats Caught in the throat gulping and laughing grasping and clasping Built up a shell rather than meaning for a future still dastardly vague Found presence more real than fugues of tomorrow Unheeded all callings Danced towards the falling Furtively dodging that steady drumbeat relentlessly chipping away Never had children so no other options an end to my choices one end to this life. Now lonely with silence this drumbeat beats louder relentlessly chipping away. Embrace me distract me drown out that drumbeat Please help me fade into our now For if it does catch me and life did mean something a story I missed or a beauty I've fled on a path I've not taken a risk I've forsaken Oh God what a shame I would be. I want to believe and I want to find me for I think it could be... But now i must flee that drumbeat is here finally chipping away, finally chipping away.
"Unless [religion] can be proven to me... that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art." Lolita
"What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it…!" Dead Souls
"The power of freedom is invincible and terrible. That is what I want to be able to say one day, not kill yourselves, or have faith, because those phrases are part of one's inner being from the first second of life onwards, but simply: free yourselves. Free yourselves. Slay with a simple look the men who are the masters of the act of looking." Les Geants
"But you don't need anything. You have everything," I tell him / Rip looks at me. "No. I don't. / "What?" / "No. I don't." / There's a pause and then I ask, "oh, shit, Rip, what don't you have?" / "I don't have anything to lose." Less Than Zero
"All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." The road
"These early myths help the psyche to participate without a sense of guilt or fright in the necessary act of life." The Power of Myth
5. We are our bodies.
One day walking, his friend lost his arm. Machete. They replaced it and it was no big deal. Then came the wood-chipper, the two legs and the other arm. Bad beat. Three more new parts.
People still recognized him. Face. But the arms were slightly different shades and one leg shorter than the left. He no longer played basketball with any confidence and had an itch on a left toe which didn't make the cut.
Other than that he said he felt himself.
Then came the head. Golf. Knocked clean off into the rough. They scrapped his mismatched body and scraped his brain into another. The only bright side to the previous soul's nail-gun-in-head mistake.
He never played golf again. But that's not the reason nobody recognized him. No, now he wore the new face. He had to explain it to others and remind them of his memories before they would call him by his name.
He said he felt fine, mostly. Just different tastes, moods, allergies than before. And, his sexy memories failed to get a rise.
So he stuck to writing.
When he got older, his memory was shot. He forgot what had been what or who had been who. Should have cared more, possibly.
Friends kept calling him by his name because they thought he shared their past.
But who was in that name? Mr. Roberts hoped whoever judged him would know in the end.
"This is my claim, he said. No man is here for his own cause but rather for the cause of this land that reclaims him. It speaks for him and so it is a prophecy and not a thing said at all. He is spoken for." Blood Meridian
"When a bullet hits a person you hear it. It’s an unmistakable sound you never forget, like a kind of wet slap. Your mate next to you falls face down in the sand, sand that tastes as bitter as ash." Zinky Boys
"His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation." Pale Fire
"One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work." Interviews with Francis Bacon
"And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped." Hiroshima
"There’s a certain purity to this being who’s unable to speak, he thinks, as his finger traces the outline of her shoulder, arm, hips, legs, until it reaches her feet." Tender is the flesh
6. The loneliest thing in the world is only being able to see from our own eyes
Plea To A Writer I do not need to understand you Your truth is not mine, your words not my master. Just let me ride your letters seduce your words and take your work as a mistress into my bedroom where colours hazes grin melt into childlike fantasy, where ecstasy constructs our truth. Just give me your beat to blow my numbness aside so we can give birth to a world hidden away from billboards, posts, feeds, pings that weaponize language that bastardize meaning that blaspheme our only tool. In return, I promise to dive into your finite fold it in my hands and raise her so that she is me and we are new As you now take mine and make him yours
"You look unhappy," [mom] says more quietly this time. She touches her hair, bleached, blondish, again. / "You do too," I say, hoping she won't say anything else." Less Than Zero
"I'd begun to understand also, that this wasn't a trait peculiar just to Josie, that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passersby - as they might in a store window, and that such display needn't be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.” Klara and the Sun
"To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone." Tokyo Ueno Station
"Dozens of books, cartoons, movies, and miniseries have attempted to tell the story of everything that happened next, but every single one of them got it wrong. So, I want to set the record straight, once and for all." Ready Player One
"“Don’t you see it? This life, this fucking life, all around you? Don’t you see that people live, that they live, that they eat, and so on? That they’re happy? Don’t you see that whoever wrote ‘the earth is blue like an orange’ is either a madman or an idiot? But no, you tell yourselves, he’s a genius—he dismantled reality in two words. It detaches from reality. It has a childish charm. No maturity. Whatever you want. But me, I need systems, or else I go mad. Either the earth is orange, or the orange is blue. But in the system where we use words, the earth is blue and oranges are orange. I’ve reached a point where I can’t stand deviations anymore. Do you understand? I struggle too much to grasp reality." The Interrogation
7. Moderation within moderation
His son did all the right things. He rarely quarreled, succeeded in sports, and even had a girlfriend. Then he grew up, got a good job, populated his house with travel-Polaroids.
His son had him over for dinner often. His son was a good man, who cooked while the granddaughters played and his daughter-in-law made conversation.
Mr. Roberts, himself, told stories.
Like that time he got mugged in Mombasa. Spent the next three weeks in a flophouse with a whore on the pretense of waiting for a new passport. Tried to get her out. Failed. Hid in the back of an ambulance next to a shipment. Got caught. Lost the shuffle. Bought a way out. Then sank into a depression for a year before meeting his son's mother who brought him to life with "Why not?"
But the stories would never land. So he would drink and they would smile, gracefully.
His son would drive him home and tell him life was good.
He guessed he should be proud.
"An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do. Said Dylan Thomas." The Last Novel
"Always drinking! Wasting his time with idiotic friends, spending his money on high-priced whores, and morbidly interested in the stupidest things imaginable, like what cousin this or that baron had married, and how many legitimate and illegitimate children they had. I never understood his need for all that farkakteh small talk. He once spent half an hour explaining the many advantages of having a small Pekinese versus a Great Dane, and he was still going on about it when I got up and left. This, from the same person who made countless contributions to group, ergodic, and operator theory, and published thirty-two major papers in less than three years." The Maniac
"'Rich people don’t eat garbage,' the lawyer said a bit testily. 'Rich people know how to live.' He picked up another ant and held it up for inspection. 'If life isn’t about hunting down every strange pleasure and tasting it, then what is it about?'" Missionaries
"How long am I here, in tight trouser and panting? And lost at sea? No, saliva pouring out of my mouth a surf lapping at my cheek. Flat out, hot feelings. Yes this office room brighter than ever, powder falling from the walls, is all that I've absorbed into myself spat out? Mercy. All the smokes are smoked. God is on the edge of a knife, the cutting blade" Dark Neighborhood
8. Time is finite
Time burned their wings Choice ruthlessly humanized him Closure had had left him smaller, left friends who never became lovers lovers who lost themselves. She never wanted to leave their dream where unsummoned cities fell in a blink where reverie mingled with sex, glance, and touch where time felt unsullied by action. But, time burned their wings so no choice became some choice and choices had to be made leaving them standing and staring down binary paths unclear and unknowing hoping for love, not fear, but no longer knowing the difference.
"I suppose every real intimacy includes its end — and not as a concept either, not as a realization or focus, not a third thing upon which two people might focus their gazes instead of directly at each other — like art, like children. No, the end inhabits every authentic act and word, and the final silence that so pains love is the same silence that sustains love. In other words, the knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and neither is knowledge" Zero at the Bone
"If you are not too long, I will wait here for all my life." The Importance of Being Ernest
"Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty / Youth's a stuff will not endure -Shakespeare." The Last Novel
"It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time. Quoth Grace Paley." The Last Novel
"But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape." A Visit From the Goon Squad
"So this is it—what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty." A Visit From the Goon Squad
"My other teacher, after I asked him a contrived question about nothing, paused and very kindly said, The thing to remember is that I only have about thirty-five, forty years left to live." 300 Arguments
"The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between." Demon Copperhead
9. No sentimentality in simplicity
He knew a fisherman.
The fisherman told him that it was a hard life. Not too much money, Posiedon a tough boss, and then the only choices:
One, be alone. Not too bad. Fishing and drinking, drinking and eating. But, man isn't meant to be alone for too long.
Or two, find a woman and have children. But then you love them so much. Hate when they're hungry, can't pay when they're sick, feel shame when you cannot provide. Then they become fishermen, or marry one. For there aren't many other choices around here.
Then the fisherman whispered the secret to life. Make money, get money, however you can. Sweat and toil. Be a Gaudin. Invest and grow that money. Then, learn to swim and become a sometimes fishermen because that is the life. Blue seas, tasty fish, few whales.
That is when Mr. Roberts decided to move to Denmark to become a poet.
"Once I moved about like the wind I. Now I surrender to you and that is all. Said Geronimo." The Last Novel
"Nature, being unsentimental, accommodates the reality that some sows eat their young," Pig Years
"I know, but it taught me a simple human truth that I learned very early on, which is that you can dance even with the devil knocking at your door." The Maniac
"All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets." Demon Copperhead
"We finished up, and as we prepared to leave, I asked Tahseen what he thought would happen to the little girl. He looked her over slowly, considering the question, and then said, “She will marry a man who beats her, and have children who cannot read.” Missionaries
"The moonlight made it look as if all the houses had sunk to the bottom of a lake." Tokyo Ueno Station
"I was relieved that he left, of course, but at the same time I thought what a thing of sin poverty was, that there could be nothing more sinful than forcing a small child to lie." Tokyo Ueno Station
10. Action, the world learning about itself
Screwtape Weapons
Love
makes the grotesque kind.
it
humanizes cruelty
familiarizes monsters
impregnates emptiness
obliterates apathy
Go bring forth such power
family
obsession
extermination
grace
Stop hiding behind
Uppers and Downers,
momentary oblivion
sated by
getaway dreams and
dying ambitions
Well, here’s to the next one
may it dull your pain"To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted" On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous
"[Duke Ellington] had plenty of time—he always had plenty of time until he was about to run out of time, until a week before the premiere of whatever it was he’d been trying to write. A deadline was his inspiration, never having enough time was his muse." But Beautiful
"As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel" The Screwtape Letters
"He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act."
"that I almost understand how this comes about. If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight by which she had never once seen your face,—if you had done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and angry?" Great Expectations
11. Melodies are our scaffolding
His father loved jazz because of the way his mother danced because of the way her grandfather found freedom against all odds because that was how their village had done until the heathens had ended the Holy See.
He was more into EDM. Sweat, darkness, the chemical rush.
His mother loved drinking because of the way her father drank with his grandmother because who could blame her.
He loved drinking too.
His daughter never came out with him. She had sex with gringos who wore glasses and whose idea of a great weekend was making twenty different moles from scratch.
Maybe he had lost the refrain.
"She’d lived a thousand years in the songs she had sung, songs of bruised women and the men they loved." But Beautiful
"Perhaps he had always been too various to be known, but it seems to me more likely—to paraphrase something from those notebooks—that the truth is finer and that the only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking." in light of what we know
"But it didn’t happen; the pointers, who already knew these songs, clapped and screeched their approval, and the adults seemed intrigued, attuned to double meanings and hidden layers, which were easy to find." A Visit From the Goon Squad
"So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true." The road
"Its not so much marriage that ties couples together as the shared occupation of property. A house or a flat can be as beguiling a trap as a wedding certificate; sometimes more so. Property announces a way of life, with a subtle insistence on that way of life continuing. Property also demands constant attention and maintenance: it's like a physical manifestation of the marriage that exists within it". The Only Story
12. Who doesn't love a good siren?
Life of the party always giving because you wanted because I needed to be wanted to clarify: not asked for to clarify: not needed all would have been fun without me (Selfishly unconvinced) You always found me diving into the high fleeing into the warmth found between the well-thought-out, so I could take your hand in binding camaraderie up to great heights, what a gas! We made time shine That must be worth something, although I don't remember much at all... but don’t be sad it’s not so bad for I get to imagine All those times I was beautiful?
"His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die." Blood Meridian
"I'm greedy for life; and I'm greedy as an artist. I'm greedy for what I hope chance can give me far beyond anything that I can calculate logically. And it's partly my greed that has made me what's called live by chance - greed for food, for drink, for being with the people one likes, for the excitement of things happening. So the same thing applies to one's work. I nevertheless, when I cross the road do look both ways. Because, with the greed for life, I don't play it in the way that I also want to be killed, as some people do. Because life is short and, while I can move and see and feel, I want life to go on existing." Interviews with Francis Bacon
"I didn't do it for the money, says my friend who appeared in a pornographic film. I did it for the shame." 300 Arguments
"Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair." A Short Stay in Hell
13. niches are big worlds
When he was a boy, a raggedy one at that, he thought he had many friends. Until that birthday.
He invited many, but only one showed. They waited for more, bounced balls, traded cards, but nobody more came. His mom drove them to the waterpark. A long, fidgety drive trapped within four doors and a shame both boys could recognize. The chutes, splashes, chlorine failed to wash it away.
For many years, he couldn't decide whether to try harder or stop trying. So he did both. Tried to make everyone want to hang out with him and never held another birthday. Somehow both efforts failed.
The memories of children, existential.
Then college. A new beginning. Good looks and alcohol helped turn a desperate boy into a people pleaser into a Manic Pixie. But the ignominy carried on. When he lingered around too long, people felt it in their bones. So he left the country.
Far from home, he found his own. People who jetted away from stories.
He started dating. He restarted celebrating birthdays. He figured girlfriends had to come to his big day and would invariably bring friends, so the days wouldn't be bad. But a fear of being alone on your birthday wasn't a great basis for a relationship.
If only two more people had come that day, he would have spared others a lot of pain.
"Online you can meet people, hang out, hook up, meet your soulmate, but it’s not a community. In a real community bonds are hard to dissolve and antagonisms must be sustained, there’s continuity, and unavoidable neighbors." Rejection
"Theres a certain joy that comes from doing things you didn't think yourself capable of" Love me Tender
"Or are you gonna stay ... and play ... in L.A." Less Than Zero
"That is the art world, approximately 10,000 souls—a mere hamlet!—restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities." The Painted Word
"In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter." Great Expectations
"The fewer words spoken, the easier it is to believe your standing on common ground." The Gate
14. No love is the same.
Vampire That look before we met, mischievous desire, rebellion unbridled by the gravity that created our world, exuberantly unfurling to awaken me with a dream that I consumed through our soft days and haloed murmurs feeding on your light in this grey world where sneaky smiles are devoured pillars of light are trite and faith is amiss. And hope is what I miss when I add up who I am kneeling at the altar of today, but don't forgive me, for it seems to be my nature to fall in love with that I cannot be and rare are days I pray, "Let me never rise again."
"Desire is a push and pull or tempt, thwart, pain, repeat and never the capture of its object" Lolita
"Apparently she’s not hot enough to fuck twice, but their friendship meant little enough to risk fucking once." Rejection
"And he knew how to manipulate me - I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for that." My year of rest and relaxation
"while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was, not"' Mrs Bridge
"Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one." The Power of Myth
"Well, it’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love. That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth. Satan is God’s lover—" The Power of Myth
"This would get us clean. Now Dori had reason. It’s simple, I said, think of the baby. It was not simple. Dori had never troubled to hide any part of her using. To her mind, it was all about love: sucking an oxy to crush and split exactly in half with me. Saving every patch she shot, for me to lick the leftovers. Now she got wily on me, only ever shooting up after I’d left the house. Sweet thing, that was Dori trying to be good. I might have been doing some version of the same." Demon Copperhead
"I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you." This is How You Lose the Time War
"It seems odd to me now that after so long I still focus on a time so brief as to be but a fraction of an instant in the time I will be here, but so powerfully has that instant rooted into me that I hold onto it with a hopeless desperation." A Short Stay in Hell
"He missed Elise and wanted to talk to her, tell her she was beautiful, lie, cheat on her, live with her in middling matrimony, having dinner parties and asking what the doctor's said." Cosmopolis
"A couple is music, whether abstract or melodic, tonal or atonal, but it is always music. At times a couple is found in the most splendid fragment of a refrain, and this affords a glimpse of things that no other person or collective can ever make out. Because shared life, which is normally made up of inertia and repetition, will suddenly melt the two together into a single body - without either of them losing their individuality - and this gives rise to unique, visionary states, states in which the couple become a mutant creature, a species apart, neither animal nor mineral nor vegetable - but not all three either - and in that moment the visions experienced by the couple are as unprecedented as they are invincible. Then, like at the ends of certain recorded songs, when the music fades away but at the same time the chords become unusually powerful, all the banalities and little details of years past emerge in the memory, and you then wonder what beautiful kind of trash, what submerged zenith, there was in all of that. (Trash love)". The Book of All Loves
novels
Blood Meridian
Texas libertines relentless search for oblivion in the myth of violence
He saw a Texas church of false prophets - blood and guts in the mud next to drink - the Glantons leaving as heroes - Indians slaughtered - scalps all looking the same - red-rocked gunpowder devil - sons became fathers - saviors became horrors - ferries taken, women raped, downstream flush - the locusts of 1850 Texas - buffalo killing fields - a continued cruelty of boyhood - the last dance - the bear hug - the wanderer.
- He thought it was better than Moby Dick or Paradise Lost. Better at recognizing the agonizing baselessness of manifested destiny. Better at holding morality aside. And, some of it was true.
- The kid became the father of the man just by watching. The judge never changed from the seven-foot child-raping devil of dance. The war would gone on forever. Red rocks, red suns, red hands, red arms, red holes.
- One day he too would give himself up to the judge's embrace, but not today.
Quotes
"Whatever creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." There are few true metaphors
"Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth" Capitalism is the steady drip that will destroy us
"The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate" Theory of Melody (September 28th, 2026)
"some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellow." De-humanizing leads to atrocity. (April 27th, 2026)
"This is my claim, he said. No man is here for his own cause but rather for the cause of this land that reclaims him. It speaks for him and so it is a prophecy and not a thing said at all. He is spoken for." We are our bodies.
"His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die." Who doesn't love a good siren?
"Man's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not" Have empathy before justice (February 9th, 2026)
Lolita
Fancy prose attracts us to the splendor of cruelty
He tried to judge it all... Humbert's early unfulfilled desires - poor attempts to pacify the devil - the golden haze of the nymphet by the pool - the sleeping pills that smooth over marriages - the crash (not lightning) - the Persians at the Enchanted Huntress - gifts and rapes and trades - jealousy and boredom and throbbing - a sardonic fatherhood - the tennis court grace and detective pursuit - a hospital escape and a dumb Rita - the pleas in from the one-armed hovel - the pedo death wrestle. For Lolita, what moves you will be ruined.
- He looked up the definition of a nymph: "the immature stage of insects with incomplete metamorphosis (hemimetabolous development). The nymph usually resembles the adult in form except for undeveloped wings."
- Like a child ravaged into a half-human that is fated to birth to a stillborn. Like the ephemeral beauty that only exists on account of its impending expiration.
- But, he couldn't look away from the goddamn sadism couched in fancy words. He hoped that didn't matter.
Quotes
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." Greatness, without acceptance (March 2nd, 2026)
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." Aesthetics is reason enough for life (December 15th, 2025)
"In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl”—that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood." Simplifications are powerful (September 22nd, 2025)
"Desire is a push and pull or tempt, thwart, pain, repeat and never the capture of its object" No love is the same.
"and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and 'oh, no,' Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered.” Dark, Twisted Beautiful Fantasy (June 15th, 2026)
"She was like a musician who may be an odious vulgarian in ordinary life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will hear a false note in music with diabolical accuracy of judgment." We are our stereotype
"his house had just burned down—possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins." There is meaning in the unknown
"Unless [religion] can be proven to me... that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art." We have lost our myths
"Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes." the narcissism of therapy
Dead Souls
The gloriously petty absurdity of small towns and dead souls
He followed Chichikov's britzca into the provincial town of N. to gather the souls in a snuff-box: the lapdog of a failed dreamer - the hen mistress trader - a restless hound of the great carouser - our beloved magic pixie girl - the crudely endowed bear with voracious appetite - the suspicious scarecrow spiraled alone - meaningless bureaucrats - a false love - and on to the next town.
- Poshluck - The irony that obvious absurdity results in communal desire. For example, an ad insinuating that a type of beer will bring you lovers.
- Thank God there would be no hagiographic second volume. No take-backs to this dive into the fetid core of man's hypocrisy. No resurrection of the dead souls...
- While these digressions continued, the author sat wondering how many beliefs he would have to specify to avoid hypocrisy.
Quotes
"What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it…!" We have lost our myths
"The fair-haired man was one of those people in whose character there is at first sight a certain obstinacy. Before you can open your mouth, they are already prepared to argue and, it seems, will never agree to anything that is clearly contrary to their way of thinking...; but it always ends up that there is a certain softness in their character, that they will agree precisely to what they had rejected, will call a stupid thing smart, and will then go off dancing their best to another man’s tune—in short, starts out well, ends in hell." We are our stereotype
"But he came out just as the saying goes: ‘Not like mother, not like father, but like Roger the lodger.’" Cliches are cliches for a reason (October 6th, 2025)
"But the author is most ashamed to occupy his readers for so long with people of low class, knowing from experience how reluctantly they make acquaintance with the lower estate." Incentives drive populations
"...as long as it is news, he will not fail to pass it on to some other mortal, even if it is precisely with the purpose of saying: “See what a lie they’re spreading!” and the other mortal will gladly incline his ear, though afterwards he himself will say: “Yes, that is a perfectly banal lie, not worthy of any attention!” and thereupon he will set out at once to look for a third mortal, so that, having told him, they can both exclaim with noble indignation: “What a banal lie!” And it will not fail to make the rounds…” The Evil of Distraction (November 24th, 2025)
"My whole life has been like a violent storm or a ship amidst the waves at the will of the winds. I am a man, Your Excellency!” Theory of Melody (September 28th, 2026)
On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous
Language as fragile grace that fades observation into identity
He felt the Monarch butterflies from north to south - Isolation of immigration crispy from trauma - the beatings for beatings - the self of love cocaine sex hatred, power in sorry - the farmhand - the Buffalo lemmings off cliffs and apocryphal monkeys - the kindness of a grandfather, power of acceptance.
- He saw the strength of quiet colours that hogtied lightness. He had never felt the power of submission, to framing another's love and becoming salve to the traumas that survive generations.
- And he thought... Fuck Purdue and the randomness of dodging addiction due only to a simple fear of needles.
Quotes
"To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted" Action, the world learning about itself
"In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly." Intro
"That’s what I wanted—not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger." There is fucking, and there is sex. (January 5th, 2026)
"Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey." We are what we risk (December 1st, 2025)
"I thought of the window again, how everything seemed like a window, even the air between us." the incompleteness of knowing oneself (June 8th, 2026)
"Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears." De-humanizing leads to atrocity. (April 27th, 2026)
"Everything good is always somewhere else, you said after a while, and changed the channel." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
Zero at the Bone
God is poetry is life, the grasping tension between your reality and truth, or your reality and beauty
He recognized a home in the whispers of dead snakes in West Texas - a father fallen into a psychosis, surgical hits between the ribs - a sister who finds salvation in near death - a cancer chair - foxholes in heaven - the submission of I as the window before the snow, death, and poetry.
- He wondered, do you feel a raindrop? That one out of the one hundred quadrillion that just dropped? Where are you? Should we write them all down.
- He asked, what if poetry is the essence of not only displaying but capturing the divine? Our unreal tension, between time (new vs. future), between possibilities (string theory), between presence (outside vs. inside).
- He then tried to capture her, if only for himself.
Quotes
"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than one's self is real." Jump into (September 29th, 2025)love (September 29th, 2025)
"Age increases experience even as it narrows one's possible reactions to it. Iron tracks have. been laid down and long traveled. To deviate would require a crash." The old man who will not laugh is a fool
"There is something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God - Virginia Woolf" We are what we risk (December 1st, 2025)
"It is better to say 'I am suffering,' writes Simone Weil, 'than to say, 'this landscape is ugly'" some people aren't beautiful (April 13th, 2026)
"The word 'God' becomes necessary when there is an intense feeling of presence and oneness in opposite, an awe that cannot let go of contradictory elements, of an otherness in which I am truly 'I' - Robert Duncan" We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"I suppose every real intimacy includes its end — and not as a concept either, not as a realization or focus, not a third thing upon which two people might focus their gazes instead of directly at each other — like art, like children. No, the end inhabits every authentic act and word, and the final silence that so pains love is the same silence that sustains love. In other words, the knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and neither is knowledge" Time is finite
Zinky Boys
The humanity behind the numbers is incomprehensible
He strained to hear the Soviet whispers - Zinc coffins - 18yo shooting straight - The illicit make-up kits - nurse's hate - opium escape - a mother's death - hospitality beaten with sticks and stones - idealistic, lied-to boys - in the trenches - the leading caller - women for sex - death of self - heroes because it must be worth something - wild children - legless sappers - Widows - Nurses needing mission - self-hate - victims of a mistake - alone with grief - needing a purpose - now criminals - pen knife night - the letters.
- He understood war creates its own language where survival elicits laughter and going home necessitates atrocity. The nurses care for the dead. Friends mow down villages for justice. Sanity is called cowardly. Psychopaths are glorified as the strong.
- The comrades have always been good at repression. He saw the same stories today.
- He counted: 15 minutes to close the eyes, 100k sent and 50k casualties, 0 prisoners taken, 18-20 year old recruits, $270 a month to fight, 1 month leave, 3-0-0 equals wounded, 18,000 for a Makarov pistol, 40kg for mountain operations - year of medical supplies: 1945 - 2 punctuation mistakes - 40' heat - 120 shells a minute - 2,500 rubles a gravestone - countless rain drops to cleanse the dead.
- But, why were we still making the movies so sexy?
- Why couldn’t the Afghan people see us as we saw ourselves?
Quotes
"They fought because they put their faith in us." Truth is relative, and important (May 25th, 2026)
"When a bullet hits a person you hear it. It’s an unmistakable sound you never forget, like a kind of wet slap. Your mate next to you falls face down in the sand, sand that tastes as bitter as ash." We are our bodies.
"Everyone thinks of us like that: mouths full of blood, and we want to talk.’" Have empathy before justice (February 9th, 2026)
"And it dawns on us that nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves. We’ve come to believe the message, drummed into us for so long, that we are superlative in every way, the finest, the most just, the most honest." the incompleteness of knowing oneself (June 8th, 2026)
"One time, our column was going through a kishlak when the leading vehicle broke down. The driver got out and lifted the bonnet — and a boy, about ten years old, rushed out and stabbed him in the back, just where the heart is. The soldier fell over the motor. We turned that boy into a sieve. If we’d been ordered to, we’d have turned the whole village to dust."
"No, the schools need heroes, but all I can remember is what we destroyed and how we killed. And yet, we did build things for the locals, and give them presents. It was all mixed up together and I still can’t separate the good from the bad. I’m scared of such memories, I run away from them." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"I went to visit one once. A captain came up to me. ‘Miss, would you take off your cap? I haven’t seen a woman for a whole year.’ All the men came out of the trenches, just to have a look at my long hair." Boys fight the wars (May 4th, 2026)
Les Geants
Looking aghast at a fucking cacophony of noise, ads, slogans trying to euthanize consciousness, who needs Big Brother?
He thought it all went by in a blur: Free yourselves! - Design Dehumanized - Hyperpolis, Tranquility - Dumbo - Mall's Bombardment of INFORMATION, ADVERTISEMENT, PROHIBITED, YOU NEED - Abstraction as a ghost - Audio, Video Recordings - Words that took their revenge - Cities did burst - Language dictated thought - Machines drank electricity and petrol from the gulf station - Guards - Slave Girl - Fire, Silence, Colour.
- He noticed that every step he walked involved billboards, labels, songs, screaming, ads, slogans, neon signs raining down on him, stealing a small space in his mind. Every time he opened a screen his thoughts were hijacked by these associations. Once these words were read, they became a part of his reality. But how could he NOT read the words everywhere, how could he NOT hear the jingles and still have friends?
- He dreaded the system of it all. The constant assault by modern society that tore him away from himself and violently bathed him with the soft promise of consumerism. How much work had gone into selling each other promises of glory in the purchase of better, more quickly toasted bread. The choices wore him down down down into a sad numbness.
- He needed to build his own ship to sail through the siren songs of buzzing, squawking, GREETINGS, WARM WISHES, else Penelope would be hidden forever.
Quotes
"For those who are hungry there is BREAD, FRUIT, DELIGHT, FUTURE, for those dying of obesity there is the word SLIMMING, for those who are dying of loneliness there is the word LOVE, for those who are dying of desire there is the word YOUTH, for those who dream of being men there is IMPALA, POWER, SABRE-GASH, TOBACCO, for those who dream of being women there is CONTOUR, SEDUCTIVE, ETERNITY, BEAUTY, for those who dream of being intelligent there is MENSA, for those who dream of muscles there is BODYBUILD, for those who dream of being rich there is MANPOWER, or GILLETTE SILVER PLATINUM, for those who dream of the sun there is MOROCCO, INDIA, MEXICO, for those who, if they could, would call for help, there is S.O.S., S.O.S., S.O.S. There are so many words everywhere! Thousands and thousands of words. There is a word for every second of life, a word for each gesture, for each nervous twitch. When will this tumult ever subside? " The Evil of Distraction (November 24th, 2025)
"People take their own light around with them: they have hollowed out a little room inside reality, and installed in it their 100-watt light bulb. The light is yellow. They know no other light, neither the white light of the sun nor the black light of the night. Human words flutter across the room, just like moths."
"The power of freedom is invincible and terrible. That is what I want to be able to say one day, not kill yourselves, or have faith, because those phrases are part of one's inner being from the first second of life onwards, but simply: free yourselves. Free yourselves. Slay with a simple look the men who are the masters of the act of looking." We have lost our myths
But Beautiful
The Bellevue insanity of making a life in jazz through an ugly world
He heard duke's car rumbling across country every night for a gig - Pres's soft tenor against Hawk's horn bellowing gently fade into takeout - Pres's head smashed by Army - Monk's silence in jail - Bud's head cracked by 25 - Mingus's angry outbursts - Chet's heroin submission - Art chatting over the jailhouse on a sunny day - Jazz munching on itself.
- He pictured soul-shooting eight hour riffs where each musician had to earn their bread every other night creating new melodies. How these melodies then arose through drafts, racism, heroin, alcoholism, and beatings. A singular obsession with the moment expressing a yearning that drove many of the greats to jail or mental hospitals.
- He bought the records and listened to the heydays of intermingling: Pres on Soft Tenor, Hawk with BigBellied Sax, Duke on Horn, Monk playing Piano, Bud created Pulka Dots and Moonbeans, Ben playing Sax, and Mingus on the Base.
- He wondered, Now that we substitute content for art how can we grieve as a nation?
Quotes
"[Duke Ellington] had plenty of time—he always had plenty of time until he was about to run out of time, until a week before the premiere of whatever it was he’d been trying to write. A deadline was his inspiration, never having enough time was his muse." Action, the world learning about itself
"Young’s face had been so empty of self-respect and pride, devoid of anything except hurt, that Ryan suddenly wondered if even the abject obedience of slaves was a form of protest, of defiance. He felt ugly and for that reason he hated Young more than ever. He felt something similar with women: when they began to cry, that was when the urge to hit was strongest." some people aren't beautiful (April 13th, 2026)
"Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he'd never seen one before". Zen vs. Ambition (January 12th, 2026)
"In June, Laurie arranges an interview with the head psychiatrist of the hospital whose methadone program Art is enrolled in. The history of modern jazz is a history of musicians ending up in rooms like this; the whiteness of the walls and coats like a denial of the dim, nocturnal world of the music." We are what we risk (December 1st, 2025)
"You can’t improvise on nothin, man, he’d said, shaking his head at the shambles around him. You gotta improvise on somethin." Fugued beauty
"Even talking was becoming difficult. His tongue lay in his mouth like an old man’s dick." Dark, Twisted (June 15th, 2026)Beautiful (June 15th, 2026) Fantasy (June 15th, 2026)
"She’d lived a thousand years in the songs she had sung, songs of bruised women and the men they loved." Melodies are our scaffolding
The Importance of Being Ernest
Honesty is such a drag.
He laughed at the Pseudoname vs. Imaginary - the temporary obsession with a girl - the country life of escape - the hot ward is taken - the irony in Earnestness itself.
- He recognized his own enjoyment in the elaborate melodies he created with other similarly bored individuals simply to pass the time. That left him empty. But maybe, just maybe, he could find some balance of retaining truth while enjoying the music of false speech.
- Sigh. Hard to do when you talk too much.
Quotes
"If you are not too long, I will wait here for all my life." Time is finite
"The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusements in life. I happen to be serious about Bunburying. What on earth you are serious about I haven't got the remotest idea. About everything, I should fancy. You have such an absolutely trivial nature." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"True. In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing." Aesthetics is reason enough for life (December 15th, 2025)
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete possibility." Beauty in honesty (June 1st, 2026)
"I don't know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane. No sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself." We are our stereotype
The Screwtape Letters
Jocular epistolary manual on turning humanity's proclivity for extremities into the path to hell.
He agreed that society too often sees pain and ugliness as the "true reality" and that hatred is seen as the soul of society and people. He felt childish understanding the world as love as his good intentions did seem to result in the Devil's work. Selfish.
- He hated when people weaponize things taken at face value, the easiest corruption of all.
- He hoped his redemptions would be enough...
Quotes
"All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be." Intro
"Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment" Fear will be the end of our society (February 16th, 2026)
"He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a ‘deeper’, ‘spiritual’ world within him which they cannot understand. You see the idea — the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together."
"As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel" Action, the world learning about itself
in light of what we know
The failed mathematical detachment from rage
He was inspired by the tale of two Muslim exiles split by 9/11 – derivations and repressions – love of life in Kabul through Dari – mixing the order of retelling – the dots we connect – the wife lost long ago – dictaphone – there is a lot friends don’t talk about – the long gust – passion for math – naïveté in Afghanistan – the world of favors – other loves – quiet aristocratic rage and desire and cruelty – the attraction of looking down upon – ease of wealth – together in Afghanistan – chess and spies – credit default swaps – memoirs as defense – the UN bar – kinship and patronage – engineered smiles – slipped off the wheel – psychiatric hospital – spies – detachment – moved in with baby names – terminations – friends impregnate – rape – escape.
- He realized he too rarely spoke of what mattered. Instead, buried himself in conversations upon that already had guidrails. The easier in which to fit in. The easier which to not reflect. The art of conversation turned performative.
- Maybe its because he wanted to avoid tha trap of fear. We are the worst when we live in fear. Fear after 9/11 caused more people to drive and thus more roadside highway deaths than the attack itself.
- Or maybe its because the 20 decisions in our life that make up our true being are the only things worth talking about
- He too had gotten idealistic in Kisumu. Why had that turn to naiveté?
Quotes
"Zafar would say that no one is the author of his own life. He may be right. But though I have thought otherwise, I now believe that for some of us, it is essential to keep intact the illusion that authorship is possible. This means a heroic life. How it is writ, small or large, is another matter, but it must be a life tested and strained and overcome. I have never had such a life." Magic Pixie Girl
"That’s what maps mysteriously do: They obliterate information to provide some information at all." Simplifications are powerful (September 22nd, 2025)
"Perhaps he had always been too various to be known, but it seems to me more likely—to paraphrase something from those notebooks—that the truth is finer and that the only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking." Melodies are our scaffolding
"When people say that religion is only a crutch, I have to wonder what the only means, for I can’t imagine anyone would dispute that a crutch allows us to carry on the business of living, half hobbling but better than without it, while taking the weight off the wound to aid the process of healing. I know that it is invoked only as a metaphor, but it seems to me that metaphors are never only anything." the incompleteness of knowing oneself (June 8th, 2026)
"Or are we to side with the fund managers behind those absurd advertisements for investment funds, where they glorify their track record in bold while hiding in small print the reality that past performance is no guide to the future and that nothing’s quite so insecure as a security? Can making half the print small save the whole thing from its inherent contradiction?" Capitalism is the steady drip that will destroy us
"You can’t say sorry and offer an explanation, said Zafar. What’s an explanation supposed to do, other than make you feel better?" Have empathy before justice (February 9th, 2026)
Pale Fire
The insanity of mirroring bad poetry.
He marveled at Shade and book capture - Commentary as the story - The waxwing slain - book capture vs. the Shadians - the great beaver neighbor - the clarity of footnotes - the paradise of Zembla - the exile - the wife's editing - the iron curtain rebellion - the high tower cloak and dagger - the duplicate kings - the actor royalists - the missed birthday invite - Canadian-stock ghost stories - The hound in chase - The daughter - parachutes - Motorcourts - The shot heard round academia.
- He just enjoyed the intrigue of it all. The secondary delight in its rebuke of Barthe's writerly interpretation, and simultaneously, of the ideal reader, which sent the critics into wild masturbation: historical, homosexual, feminist, religious, communist, French, psychiatric, Cold War-era, musical, postmodern, suicidal, Shakespearian, autobiographical, authorial, etc. brought a wry grin.
- Either way, he didn't think Nabokov would read much fan fiction.
- “Sure, sure,” said Shade. “One can harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas. Oh, sure.” Art elevates while content passes the time
Quotes
"Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality"
"I reread Pale Fire more carefully. I liked it better when expecting less." Beauty in honesty (June 1st, 2026)
"His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation." We are our bodies.
"as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night." Fugued beauty
"how curious that our rationality feels satisfied when we plump for the first explanation, though, actually, the scientific and the supernatural, the miracle of the muscle and the miracle of the mind, are both inexplicable as are all the ways of Our Lord." There is meaning in the unknown
"she used to call me 'an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of a genius.'" Cliches are cliches for a reason (October 6th, 2025)
Rejection
Absurdly rational tragedy of socially alienated men
He finally understood the narrow-shouldered feminist who can't get laid - the codependent girlfriend upstaged by a younger Asian woman - the shame of Ahegao being different from embarrassment - the futility of the tech-optimized bro - the reality entertainment of botgate by the sexually frustrated - that metaphors are poor guides for outcasts - and that sometimes self-reference goes too far.
- He re-read the marvelous passages of insane angst powered by the literal logic of the perverted. It was rational how the truly alienated continue the hellish fall into the deep without an understanding of people.
- They had so much fun telling others what was best and then acting the other way. A true national pastime.
- He looked in the mirror and felt glad he was handsome.
Quotes
"Here finally Kant perceives the true rift between them: Julian doesn’t know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible. You can’t own it or laugh it off, only try to bail it out in sloshing bucketfuls, drenching yourself in the process. Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition," Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"More grating is the pretense that she could feel shame of any kind, that she is not flaunting the very glamour she pretends to disparage, the glamour of getting everything without sacrifice—and that she doesn’t know exactly what effect this has on men." Social media is a game (November 10th, 2025)
"Apparently she’s not hot enough to fuck twice, but their friendship meant little enough to risk fucking once."No love is the same.
"Online you can meet people, hang out, hook up, meet your soulmate, but it’s not a community. In a real community bonds are hard to dissolve and antagonisms must be sustained, there’s continuity, and unavoidable neighbors." niches are big worlds
"Along similar lines I have this theory that all the leering and coveting and jacking off that happens in front of screens has turned them into libidinal tunnels." Incentives drive populations
"So I guess I mean I think I feel like I want you to look, like, alarmed by the size of my cock. And also sort of disgusted, like it’s made of shit, but also you want it so bad that it makes you a bit brainless . . . um, do you know what an ahegao is?" De-humanizing leads to atrocity. (April 27th, 2026)
"She tells an anecdote about the worst person she’s ever dated—terrible brown teeth, crippling coke habit, nasty toenails. She even caught something from him; still he threw her away like a piece of trash. He was my rock bottom, she says, and you think, Wish I was rock bottom." One mans trash...
"Back then I’d thought social justice drama was a college phenomenon, but here I learned everyone was doing it, politicizing in bad faith what were obviously just bad manners." Bad manners is just bad manners
The Last Novel
Author facing a lonely depth, armed with ephemeral fragments trying to find a raison d’être not to jump out the fire escape.
He saw himself in the loneliness - authorial pettiness - loss of reason - essence mattering over truth - and the calls to answering machines simply to connect to late acquaintances.
- He knows that we forget the humanity of art, the possibility of pettiness of criticism, or the human greatness that always disappoints because even our own memories are fragments, both old and new, and we have to make an approximation. But far too often the human behind each fact is simplified to a plaque.
- He felt bittersweet that when you lose your intellect (you will) and your memory (you will) all you have is love's embers.
- He hoped one day he would be popular enough to sell out and avoid being alone.
Quotes
"Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty / Youth's a stuff will not endure -Shakespeare." Time is finite
"The noblest title in the world is that of having been born a Frenchman, said Napoleon. Born in Corsica — of Italian ancestry." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"There is no such thing as abstract art, said Picasso. You always have to start somewhere or other." Art is True
"People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort. Said Eliot." Writing is easier than truly reading
"An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do. Said Dylan Thomas." Moderation within moderation
"I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live! Said Chekhov, late along." Beauty in honesty (June 1st, 2026)
"If God had not created breasts, I would not have become a painter. Renoir once unseriously announced." Aesthetics is reason enough for life (December 15th, 2025)
"There are so many ways of earning a living, and most of them are failures. Wrote Gertrude Stein." Systems, circumventing humanity
"It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time. Quoth Grace Paley." Time is finite
"Matthew Arnold’s of philistine, ca. 1869: A person who believes his greatness is proved by being rich." Do less; save the world (March 16th, 2026)
"Once I moved about like the wind I. Now I surrender to you and that is all. Said Geronimo." No sentimentality in simplicity
"The measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him. Wittgenstein once told someone." We are what we risk (December 1st, 2025)
"A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead. Said Samuel Butler." Life is absurd, but worth living (January 26th, 2026)
"The old man who will not laugh is a fool." The old man who will not laugh is a fool
A Visit From the Goon Squad
The melody of entanglements
He felt it was all real. The sasha klepto wall - the golden Bennie - the pit, Lou, and triangle - the Safari structuralism - old Lou, old Lover, step-son - Scott in the Park - the burbs - the selling of the General - Kitty Star - swimming mistake - the beauty of rock silences - the concert, promoted into reality.
- He forgot often because memory itself is refracted, in a story without redemption, because authenticity itself is perception. He felt lost in the impossible fragmentation of time, as the world decays and moves on.
- He wondered how much of what was popular was truly liked verses a simple enjoyment of communal experiences.
Quotes
"Structural Resentment: The adolescent daughter of a twice-divorced male will be unable to tolerate the presence of his new girlfriend, and will do everything in her limited power to distract him from said girlfriend’s presence, her own nascent sexuality being her chief weapon." Have empathy before justice (February 9th, 2026)
"Bennie felt it too. Power is like that; everyone feels it at once." There is meaning in the unknown
"Good, they’ll forgive you, they won’t desert you, and the question is, which one is really “you,” the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?" Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"But it didn’t happen; the pointers, who already knew these songs, clapped and screeched their approval, and the adults seemed intrigued, attuned to double meanings and hidden layers, which were easy to find." Melodies are our scaffolding
"But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape." Time is finite
"So this is it—what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty." Time is finite
"Betrayal Bonding, Dr. Beet called this, and like the Will to Divulge, it was on the list of no-no’s." New words for old things (September 5th, 2025)
Interviews with Francis Bacon
The tension between rationality and zen creating beauty at Kairus
He went and saw the three bodies of a crucifixion - the pope - Valesquez Pope Innocent - anti story - body as meat (photographs) - the brutality of fact (crucifiction) - the figurative allows innovation opposed to abstraction - open mouths - accidents and flow as art - embracing randomness as truth - painting responsibility to aura, and thought what makes a figure?
- He thought the paintings weren't that far off.
Quotes
"One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work." We are our bodies.
"I think that you can make, very much as in abstract painting, involuntary marks on the canvas which may suggest much deeper ways by which you can trap the fact you are obsessed by." the incompleteness of knowing oneself (June 8th, 2026)
"I'm greedy for life; and I'm greedy as an artist. I'm greedy for what I hope chance can give me far beyond anything that I can calculate logically. And it's partly my greed that has made me what's called live by chance - greed for food, for drink, for being with the people one likes, for the excitement of things happening. So the same thing applies to one's work. I nevertheless, when I cross the road do look both ways. Because, with the greed for life, I don't play it in the way that I also want to be killed, as some people do. Because life is short and, while I can move and see and feel, I want life to go on existing." Who doesn't love a good siren?
"I do think that, if you can find a person totally without belief, but totally dedicated to futility, then you will find the more exciting person." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"You'd prefer to torment yourself? Yes, I would, because, if I was in hell I would always feel I had a chance of escaping. I'd always be sure that I'd be able to escape." Fear will be the end of our society (February 16th, 2026)
Love me Tender
Joyously melancholy ode to freedom.
He fell in love with the fearless lesbian rejects/loses son - spirals towards homelessness - kept alight by swimming and fucking.
- He wondered if it was right that the courts award caretakers, not free spirits or that there comes a point that it is just too late in childhood lost.
- Maybe irrelevantly, our society has become so advanced and single you can constantly fuck and pleasure to a roof over your head. People are lonely.
- He wondered if anyone else ever found themselves playing a character of themselves?
Quotes
"The sex hasn't changed either, licking, fingering, ass fucking, all very nice and polite. I get what I give, more or less, A learning plateau. One thing that has been changing is my mentality. Before, I wanted everything to go smoothly, now I've realized that nobody owes anybody anything." There is fucking, and there is sex. (January 5th, 2026)
"Theres a certain joy that comes from doing things you didn't think yourself capable of"niches are big worlds
"Love is a choice and a hobby - a temporal way of life that shrinks the world" Jump into (September 29th, 2025)love (September 29th, 2025)
"I've always thought that adults were bad at acting like adults" The old man who will not laugh is a fool
Less Than Zero
The loss of not caring in LA.
He thought it was hard to remember when nothing matters, in an oblivion of: arriving home - driving in LA - visiting friends - buying Coke, Meth, whatever - lending money - trying to find friends - prostitution, death, rape.
- He wondered how people go around nonchalantly with the fear of knowing how dead others may be.
Quotes
"What's wrong?" and I say, "Nothing," and Blair says, "You look pale," and I shrug and we say goodbye and she gets into her car and drives away." Taking things literally is the easy way out
"But you don't need anything. You have everything," I tell him / Rip looks at me. "No. I don't. / "What?" / "No. I don't." / There's a pause and then I ask, "oh, shit, Rip, what don't you have?" / "I don't have anything to lose." We have lost our myths
"Or are you gonna stay ... and play ... in L.A." niches are big worlds
"Wonder if he's for sale." De-humanizing leads to atrocity. (April 27th, 2026)
"You look unhappy," [mom] says more quietly this time. She touches her hair, bleached, blondish, again. / "You do too," I say, hoping she won't say anything else." The loneliest thing in the world is only being able to see from our own eyes
"Julien gives great head. And is dead." There is fucking, and there is sex (January 5th, 2026)
"I wanted very badly for the director to say the name. The director opened his mouth and said, "I forgot."" Dark, Twisted Beautiful Fantasy (June 15th, 2026)
"It's Christmas morning and I'm high on coke." Truth is relative, and important (May 25th, 2026)
My year of rest and relaxation
Fanatically obliterating time to find life
He was jealous of the desire for quiet - time and sleep for rebirth - only friend, a codependent, disliked trying to hard - loony psychiatrist - being used by man as a way to detach - art gallery, dark humor - not sleep, but non-rememberance seductive - locks up, used by Art - sublime end.
- He was caught up too much in trying to get people to like him. He didn't have the beauty that lends the mysticism to escapism. If only all of life could be a morning routine.
- What you lose yourself in matters, doesn't it?
Quotes
"And he knew how to manipulate me - I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for that." No love is the same.
"Reva, however, studied Cosmo and watched Sex and the City. She was competitive about beauty and “life wisdom.” Her envy was very self-righteous. Compared to me, she was “underprivileged.” And according to her terms, she was right: I looked like a model, had money I hadn’t earned, wore real designer clothing, had majored in art history, so I was “cultured.” Reva, on the other hand, came from Long Island, was an 8 out of 10 but called herself “a New York three,” and had majored in economics." Aesthetics is reason enough for life (December 15th, 2025)
"I thought of Trevor and all his drips and splats on my belly and back. When we’d had sex at his place, he’d finish and instantly rush out and back in with a roll of paper towels, hold the little trash can out for me as I wiped myself off. “These sheets…” Trevor never once came inside of me, not even when I was on the pill. His favorite thing was to fuck my mouth while I lay on my back pretending to be asleep, as if I wouldn’t notice his penis slamming into the back of my throat." There is fucking, and there is sex (January 5th, 2026)
"I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"die young and leave a beautiful corpse ” - saying originated from a guy who likes fucking corpses - (horrendously misquoted)" There are few true metaphors
The road
Broken father carries flicker of humanity through apocryphal desolation
He wanted to avoid the viciously shortened cycles of hope death fear boredom wet cold where dreams seduce with the siren songs of a previous world and man searches for meaning. World from north to south - dads fight to mother's suicide - broken ships of hope - ideas of justice to practicality of being trespassed against - dark grey murky ocean - "Are we going to die?"
- The old man calloused to keep this flame alive by raising a boy that is ritual for all of us. But, he didn't know if he would ever have a child.
- Oh well, if the world ends, bring a fucking tarp.
Quotes
"So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true." Melodies are our scaffolding
"All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." We have lost our myths
"He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he." Children bring love into the world (November 3rd, 2025)
"All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain." Jump into love (September 29th, 2025)
"He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it." Have empathy before justice (February 9th, 2026)
"He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget." Fear drives memory (November 17th, 2025)
Mrs Bridge
Ritualized time killing in suburban rituals.
He thought it might end that way, "What have I missed?" Suburban housewife locked within proprietary who wants so much to explore, but can't, as she doesn't even understand her own fear.
- Not diving into arguments, leaving things to "she will grow out of it" prevented understanding and tragically cut off from everyone her assurance that time would make it okay
- Cleanliness as an antiseptic and form of control (whatever is yours, body, mind, house)
- She hopes for mild mannered children that would not embarrass. Easy to ridicule, but is it that different than my need of falling into conformity - or the conformity of any moral judgments. The quiet laughter to fit-in. Fear will be the end of our society (February 16th, 2026)
- The father doesn't have propriety - treats the others as humans even with his own flaws, a tad abusive - workaholic, but does not express the fear that always surprises Ms. Bridge who can never connect.
- Giving a gift basket, wearing white gloves, as charity - missing the point. Kinship isn't necessary, but recognition of shared humanity is. Pig Years
- Ritualized time killing in suburban rituals: Lost time, Country clubs, Reciprocated dinners, soccer leagues, Spanish lessons, clean houses, summer in Europe, guest towels.
Quotes
"while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was, not"' No love is the same.
"Isn't that nice; first babies are so often premature" Cliches are cliches for a reason (October 6th, 2025)
"Suburbia, where "men are seldom seen in the light of day""
The Power of Myth
Myths are our truths
He missed the inward journey - The outward hunting and becoming a man - The rituals that embed meaning in ourselves - Sin greatly - The mother as hero - Love from the Troubadours 12th century - Tristan and Isolde.
- Stories create us in the rhythm of the moon, to deny it is to lose our wealth.
- He thought nobody cared anymore.
Quotes
"All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional." Pseudo Intellectualism is so Psuedo (December 29th, 2025)
"These early myths help the psyche to participate without a sense of guilt or fright in the necessary act of life." We have lost our myths
"People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive." Life is absurd, but worth living (January 26th, 2026)
"Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one." No love is the same.
"The five main virtues of the medieval knight might be brought in here. One is temperance, another is courage, another is love, another is loyalty, and another is courtesy." Bad manners is just bad manners
"You’ve got the same body, with the same organs and energies, that Cro-Magnon man had thirty thousand years ago. Living a human life in New York City or living a human life in the caves, you go through the same stages of childhood, coming to sexual maturity, transformation of the dependency of childhood into the responsibility of manhood or womanhood"
"The god of death is at the same time the lord of sex." We are (December 8th, 2025)the (December 8th, 2025) sum (December 8th, 2025)of (December 8th, 2025) our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"think it was Nietzsche who said, “Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.”" Greatness, without acceptance (March 2nd, 2026)
"Well, it’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love. That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth. Satan is God’s lover—" No love is the same.
Earthlings
Dissociation brutalized by rigidness uses logic (magic) to fill her belly
He was struck by Piyyut from Popinpobopia - cousin love - estrangement - Miss Neanderthal - after class posture to tampon grooming - wasn't she lucky? - survive whatever it takes - skull fucking numbness - magic witch revenge - illicit remains and caught - adults looking in - baby factory pressure - dissociative cabin escape - why not eat it all?
- He wondered why logic without feeling actualizes boring hellholes, and how many people just find it easier to accept the accepted.
- It was hard being an alien but at least they were united by their hunger.
Quotes
"It’s really hard to put into words things that are just a little bit not okay." Tempered emotion over logic
"My town is a factory for the production of human babies." Incentives drive populations
"Well, you see, my mouth was destroyed recently. So I can’t taste anything, and it doesn’t belong to me anymore. But everywhere else is still okay. My hands and feet and belly button are all still mine, so I want to touch you with them." some people aren't beautiful (April 13th, 2026)
"But at least once you were able to buy food for yourself, you didn't need to worry about being thrown away."
"People can easily pass judgment on others when they're protected by their own normality" Groups of people are scary. (September 1st, 2025)
"I clinched my fists. That was the magical power I had recently learned. By gripping my thumbs, I could make darkness inside my hands. If I did it well, I could make darkness inside my hands so black that it was almost the color of outer space." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"If we kissed we could go inside the skin." There is fucking, and there is sex (January 5th, 2026)
"Look, Tomoya. Do it a lot and make a family, then once the relationship has cooled, you play around outside the marriage. That’s the way it is for lots of couples, isn’t it? Playing around is a man’s reward. Your father has had his fair share, haven’t you dear?" New words for old things (September 5th, 2025)
"We prepared three Man dishes" Cliches are cliches for a reason (October 6th, 2025)
Pig Years
Love of fecundity: from birth to death, from pigs to bacon, from winter to harvest.
He felt nostalgic in the vision of people seen as animals - judged on action and utility - devoid of intention - cute pigs who grow, love, and then nonchalantly feed to their neighbors' death.
- He felt beauty in Sisyphean seasonal repetition. The kindness in culling weeds and pigs for just-enough-to-enjoy harvests because life distanced from the land itself leads to dereliction (the Amish community, priests who live like pigs).
- He thought maybe that would be a good place to write.
Quotes
"Most of the commune members never remember me, due to either old age or more pressing spiritual concerns." Do less; save the world (March 16th, 2026)
"While the procreative sex is happening, they play at mounting one another, and other boars sit, as dogs, and respectfully watch. Some carry streaks of white smeared onto their hams, the semen of other juvenile boars practicing at sex." There is fucking, and there is sex. (January 5th, 2026)
"Nature, being unsentimental, accommodates the reality that some sows eat their young," No sentimentality in simplicity
"I find myself yearning for the sweetness of children, their small personhood and imaginations, and their accompaniment through life . I assign them the same unknowing goodness as I do the animals ." Children bring love into the world (November 3rd, 2025)
"Looking for a country white,” the poster says, to eventually move onto her family’s plot of land with her. She likes cooking, hiking, gardening, fishing, and camping. You need not like all those things, just some. Most important, you can’t be lazy. I put my fingers around the edges of the moose picture, rip it off, and put it in my pocket because I want it and the country white part makes me sad, that she wrote that while also using something as humble as a field mouse to represent herself in some way." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"Faith in the continuance of things, of reaping and sowing, is necessarily invoked over and over again. Life is conjured and cut short."
"Life is cauterized and then the camera pans left onto that which still breathes, photosynthesizes, or sounds." The old man who will not laugh is a fool
300 Arguments
A lifetime of quotes composing a dissociative surrealism of self-perception.
He saw that disease made her a stranger while motherhood and writing gave a purpose.
- He realized like a good poem, "there ain't much to summarize."
Quotes
"I didn't do it for the money, says my friend who appeared in a pornographic film. I did it for the shame." Who doesn't love a good siren?
"I'd like to meet someone whose passage through life has been continuous, whose life has happened to an essential self, and not been just a series of lives happening to a series of selves."
"What’s more exciting than an affair? Knowing the other’s willingness to have an affair." Jealousy, the only unfun sin (September 15th, 2025)
"My other teacher, after I asked him a contrived question about nothing, paused and very kindly said, The thing to remember is that I only have about thirty-five, forty years left to live." Time is finite
"The first beautiful songs you hear tend to stay beautiful because better than beauty, which is everywhere, is the memory of first discovering beauty." Aesthetics is reason enough for life (December 15th, 2025)
"To call a piece of writing a fragment, or to say it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer."
"It’s impossible to fail if one doesn’t know how the end should look. And it’s impossible to succeed. But it’s possible to enjoy." Zen vs. Ambition (January 12th, 2026)
"Lack of effort poorly conceals lack of ability." Cliches are cliches for a reason (October 6th, 2025)
"I used to pursue the usual things—sex, drugs, rough neighborhoods—in order to enjoy the feeling of wasting my life, of tempting danger. Motherhood has finally satisfied that hunger. It’s a self-obliteration that never stops and that no one notices." Children bring love into the world (November 3rd, 2025)
"Turn forty and suddenly you’re too old to die tragically young, but at least you still have a chance of dying fascinatingly old." The old man who will not laugh is a fool
The Maniac
The creative destruction of a genius
He admired Johnny for dreaming of a logical world, being destroyed by Gödel’s incompleteness, and finding solace in American idealism empowered through the optimization of creative destruction (atom bomb, game theory, MANIAC computer).
- He found no qualms about making life smaller to live something solvable. For we humans accept, build, and move on in the same random brilliance as Move 37 vs. Move 78.
- And he laughed, because perhaps true genius is the lionization of the rich so that true genius doesn't have to get their hands dirty worrying about the pedestrian worries of being rich.
Quotes
"Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider." Capitalism is the steady drip that will destroy us
"You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man)". Writing is easier than truly reading
"I know, but it taught me a simple human truth that I learned very early on, which is that you can dance even with the devil knocking at your door." No sentimentality in simplicity
"And human beings are not the perfect poker players that we envisioned. They can be highly irrational, driven and swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions. And while this sparks off the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us, it is also a mercy, a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"This otherworldly capacity to see into the heart of things, or—if viewed from its opposing angle—this characteristic shortsightedness, which allowed him to think in nothing but fundamentals, was not merely the key to his particular genius but also the explanation for his almost childlike moral blindness." Greatness, without acceptance (March 2nd, 2026).
"Always drinking! Wasting his time with idiotic friends, spending his money on high-priced whores, and morbidly interested in the stupidest things imaginable, like what cousin this or that baron had married, and how many legitimate and illegitimate children they had. I never understood his need for all that farkakteh small talk. He once spent half an hour explaining the many advantages of having a small Pekinese versus a Great Dane, and he was still going on about it when I got up and left. This, from the same person who made countless contributions to group, ergodic, and operator theory, and published thirty-two major papers in less than three years." Moderation within moderation
Demon Copperhead
The hero's journey of Appalachia
He empathized with the frail, iced love in desperation - foster system to football star - brotherhood in goals and objectives - Ghost dad - the one nice family had it all - injury - opioid addiction - no good stoner - washed out waterfall - grades and Catch-22 - stealing in the gas station - grandmother, family - coal - coach - a teacher - the sea.
- The survival is the beauty. The absurdity is that society pretends it's all a matter of choices.
- He appreciated that life goes on.
Quotes
"But I kept my mouth shut. It’s safer knowing more about people than they know about you." Writing is easier than truly reading
"All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets." No sentimentality in simplicity
"The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between." Time is finite
"He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant."
"She’d been saving this, because the first time you do it with somebody, they say it’s the best you’ll ever feel in your life. Like having Jesus all up in your blood." Dark, Twisted Beautiful Fantasy (June 15th, 2026)
"This would get us clean. Now Dori had reason. It’s simple, I said, think of the baby. It was not simple. Dori had never troubled to hide any part of her using. To her mind, it was all about love: sucking an oxy to crush and split exactly in half with me. Saving every patch she shot, for me to lick the leftovers. Now she got wily on me, only ever shooting up after I’d left the house. Sweet thing, that was Dori trying to be good. I might have been doing some version of the same." No love is the same.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Screamers and Laughers make Vegas interesting
He went along for the ride: Gonzo journalism - bat car with partner in crime and without hitchhiker - Beverly Hills red convertible - Airport pickup - dirty bar - road dirt hell - bathtub - fake police - police convention - couldn't stop turning back just move move move.
- There was a dream layered onto some reality, but is this reality more interesting, or just more anxious. He thought that it felt cheaper but perhaps the truth is in the unreality of not truly understanding tire pressure. Tuning out and dropping seems to be one answer, but what existed then?
- He decided to avoid mescaline for a bit.
Quotes
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." Truth is relative, and important (May 25th, 2026)
"I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident." Greatness, without acceptance (March 2nd, 2026)
"On writing: I suspect it's a bit like fucking which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." The old man who will not laugh is a fool
"True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it"
Missionaries
Our surgical wars are devastatingly interchangeable
He remembered the Columbia Village - Afghan reporter - Special forces Afghan - Columbia Police with unruly operators - the brutal sameness of it all.
- He wondered how the forever wars are enabled by systems, intelligence, bombing, radar, and guerrilla warfare but Ukraine still fights from trenches. It was hard to follow the reality of big numbers. One unit killed 3,400 Afghans without a single casualty.
- He had read elsewhere that it wasn't normal for people to want to shoot other people (1/2 unshod rifles Vietnam, Germany loading soldiers with cocaine, tribal battles with measured casualties). Though, modern societies seem to have made progress there.
- In the end, he was glad he didn't join the army. He didn't know if he would have had the strength not to be gung-ho.
Quotes
"We finished up, and as we prepared to leave, I asked Tahseen what he thought would happen to the little girl. He looked her over slowly, considering the question, and then said, “She will marry a man who beats her, and have children who cannot read.” No sentimentality in simplicity
"When the price of wheat was high, opium production went down. When the price of wheat was low, opium production went up." Incentives drive populations
"Blood, as they say, makes the grass grow. In Afghanistan, it grew tall." Boys fight the wars (May 4th, 2026)
"It was the war as a whole that was insane, a rational insanity that dissected the problem in a thousand different ways, attacked it logically with a thousand different mission sets, a million white papers, a billion “lessons learned” reports, and nothing even approaching coherent strategy. Insanity overseeing a thousand tight logical circles." Systems, circumventing humanity
"I forget who said it, that stepping over a single corpse is painful, but walking over a pile of corpses doesn’t bother you at all." Dark, Twisted Beautiful Fantasy (June 15th, 2026)
"We end up going to his apartment and having what I think of as an “empty-calories fuck,” enjoyable but not quite enjoyable enough to be worth it." There is fucking, and there is sex (January 5th, 2026)
"'Rich people don’t eat garbage,' the lawyer said a bit testily. 'Rich people know how to live.' He picked up another ant and held it up for inspection. 'If life isn’t about hunting down every strange pleasure and tasting it, then what is it about?'" Moderation within moderation
"“SEALs.” Mason grunted. Everybody hated SEALs. The joke when the DEVGRU guys killed bin Laden was, Oh wow, after ten years of shooting every unarmed civilian in the room, the SEALs finally got the right guy." We are our stereotype
1984
A future filled with rats
He wondered whether it would ever truly happen: telescreen - diary gone wrong - Doublespeak - beauty in violence - Goldstein hate - Thought Police - tell on thy neighbor - editing history, better now - forced marriage - pint and crazy - love, rebel - back alleys - bad trust - party history - proles' cafe - capture - torture of memory, love split, suffer, rats in 101 - sellout - submission.
- How could there be so few deviants in our world that are easily contained by so few? What is more effective than distancing words from meaning?
- He let the relentless barrage of Doublespeak wash over him: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH + Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love, and Plenty + relentless war and zen-like acceptance of 2+2=5.
- But thought: we really didn’t need a central power, we would probably do it to ourselves.
Quotes
"He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act." Action, the world learning about itself
"Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still." New words for old things (September 5th, 2025)
"How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal—tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree—existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favored." Groups of people are scary. (September 1st, 2025)
"It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed. "" Privacy is worth inefficiency (February 2nd, 2026)
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. " There is fucking, and there is sex (January 5th, 2026)
Klara and the Sun
The harsh brevity of robotic love
He felt for the robot girl - worships her solar sun - martyrdom - saving a girl who then moves on - a future where only the CRSPRed thrive.
- The seasons of a love: desperation, warmth obsession understanding forgiveness, and finally, a proudly melancholic death in a dusty attic. Simple emotions do not preclude stunning intelligence, or perhaps, direct emotions indeed anchor the rational.
- He knew the surprising infinity in relationships bound to end: Summer, Nannie's, first loves, random acts of kindness. Does surviving a disease make a girl a hero or just a survivor?
- He asked, does being loved as someone you are not change the perception of yourself?
Quotes
"Sometimes,’ she said, ‘at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"I'd begun to understand also, that this wasn't a trait peculiar just to Josie, that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passersby - as they might in a store window, and that such display needn't be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.” The loneliest thing in the world is only being able to see from our own eyes
This is How You Lose the Time War
Love makes time secondary in this frenetic, epistolary exuberance of self
Presence is beautiful - Meaning encoded in walnuts, swirling tea houses, fallen lighters, flowers that drown out a battle across galaxy and time for two visions of future (organic vs machine)
Quotes
"Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you." No love is the same
"I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them,"
The Only Story
Maybe arranged marriages weren't all that bad...
An attempt to describe a love story in the context of a life. Temporary, brilliant, selfish, destructive - aloof. A wrecking ball only seen in the hindsight of age. Any way to know at the time?
- I guess that is the question as can you be anything but fatalistically unaware in bliss? But at the end, that love does die, as do other things that you care about as your mind wonders to the next challenge (finding petrol), is the capacity to love fixed?
- Easier to chip away at parents without actually knowing where you want to go.
- A lack of direct conflict leads to a world of sadness as the time to heal decreases - less other things to worry about.
- The unmooring of the day-to-day can lead into complete destruction.
Quotes
"I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do them, and from what they will probably do to one another. But of course, this isn't possible. My care is not required, and their confidence insane."
"I used to prowl the Macleod house, part anthropologist, part sociologist, wholly lover."
"I said how my credo was love and truth; I loved her, and I saw the truth. But I must also admit that this coincided with the period when I lied to my parents more often that before or since." We are the sum of our contradictions (December 8th, 2025)
"Their docile obedience to social norms, their snarky disapproval of anything satirical or questioning, their assumption that their children's success would be measured by how well they imitated their parents."
"Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer."
"Its not so much marriage that ties couples together as the shared occupation of property. A house or a flat can be as beguiling a trap as a wedding certificate; sometimes more so. Property announces a way of life, with a subtle insistence on that way of life continuing. Property also demands constant attention and maintenance: it's like a physical manifestation of the marriage that exists within it". Melodies are our scaffolding
"Life is a cross section, memory is a split down the grain, and memory follows it all the way to the end." Fear drives memory (November 17th, 2025)
"He knew that no one can truly hold their life in balance, not even when in calm contemplation of it. He knew there was always a pull, sometimes amounting to an oscillation, between complacency on one side and regret on the other. He tried to favor regret, as being the less damaging." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely."
"He worked in a number of countries. This was enough for him to find the sexual companionship, the social life, the daily wamth he needed - until he moved on to the next job, the next country, the next social circle, the next few years of being agreeable to and with new people" "To some his way of life might have sounded selfish, even parasitical. But he also took thought for others". "Somehow he had got into work that day and gave a comic account of his misfortunes, which made his colleagues lauvh, and made himself laugh, so that this lighter, distorted fiction swiftly took over from what had actually happened."
"They were compatible for the necessary hours, and alcohol dissolved any distance between them."
"Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. And, You may point out - correctly - that it isn't a real question. Because we don't have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don't, so there isn't. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn't love. I don't know what you call it instead, but it isn't love." Jump into (September 29th, 2025)love (September 29th, 2025)
Tokyo Ueno Station
We are what we sacrifice for.
He imagined the ghost watching - Homeless homes - Duty over connection - Helicopter regret - Away - Crown Prince - Son's funeral - Wife doesn't awaken - Tsunami sweeps it all away.
- He questioned what all this sacrifice was for?
Quotes
"There was never a time I was not tired. / Not when life had its claws in me and not when I escaped from it. / I did not live with intent, I only lived. / But that's all over now."
"The moonlight made it look as if all the houses had sunk to the bottom of a lake." No sentimentality in simplicity
"I was relieved that he left, of course, but at the same time I thought what a thing of sin poverty was, that there could be nothing more sinful than forcing a small child to lie." No sentimentality in simplicity
"To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hit dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen." Writing is easier than truly reading
"To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone." The loneliest thing in the world is only being able to see from our own eyes
"Nobody starts off life in a hovel made of cardboard and tarps, and nobody becomes homeless because they want to be. One thing happens, then another." Have empathy before justice (February 9th, 2026)
The Painted Word
The "artist" dance to give meaning to art, eventually the story itself dominates.
Tension of bougiesie artist and collectors - Few people determine cool - Greenberg, Rosenberg, Flat - Realism dead, art as an event, as itself - Pop art cool and aesthetically pleasing - The more minimalist, the more need for a story - Trapped in theory.
Quotes
"The modern picture of The Artist began to form: the poor but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy and hypocritical bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever—in short, to be the bohemian."
"That is the art world, approximately 10,000 souls—a mere hamlet!—restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities." niches are big worlds
"At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act,” said Rosenberg. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."
"Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois." Beauty in honesty (June 1st, 2026)
"So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared in Arts Magazine—as a work of art—with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit (1) The artist may construct the piece (2) The piece may be fabricated (3)The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership."
Ready Player One
80s nerd romp on perception
He ran through the Halliday Challenge - stacks and trailer parks - the glory of the Gunter - the blurring of reality - three keys - tomb of Horrors - love - flicksyncs War Games - sponsors - love lost - love robots - cap'n Crunch - indentured IOI - It all came down to mechs and side quests - hackers for life - love comes out.
- He thought: there are already enough content and knowledge to fill a lifetime, so who cares if now we generate it endlessly.
- He didn't understand how nostalgia provides others with such great warmth and such joy in fuzzy understanding.
- But, why not play another game?
Quotes
"I confronted the grim realization that virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation. At the end of the day, I was still a virgin, all alone in a dark room, humping a lubed-up robot." There is fucking, and there is sex (January 5th, 2026)
"There, inside the game's two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It's just you against the machine. Move with your left, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible." Systems, circumventing humanity
"Dozens of books, cartoons, movies, and miniseries have attempted to tell the story of everything that happened next, but every single one of them got it wrong. So, I want to set the record straight, once and for all." The loneliest thing in the world is only being able to see from our own eyes
How to Read and Why
A love story
He fully believed, like the book, in the solitary necessity of reading in order to act considerately without ideologies. He loved the the closure of short stories - Chekhov vs. Borge types - prophetic poetry - heroic novel - plays over bible.
- He loved to read but wondered what happened when you read candy and forgot most of the good stuff. As Bloom would say, it didn't all come from Shakespeare.
- Similarly, he wondered about all the things he mused upon while reading. Where all those characters ran about when he wasn't paying attention?
Quotes
"We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find." Intro
"The actual Gogol, a religious obsessive, never married, and deliberately starved himself to death at forty-three or so, after burning his unpublished manuscripts." Greatness, without acceptance (March 2nd, 2026)
"To read human sentiments in human language you must be able to read humanly, with all of you." De-humanizing leads to atrocity. (April 27th, 2026)
"[Poetry]: to startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"Bad writing is all one; great writing is scandalously diverse..." The Evil of Distraction (November 24th, 2025)
A Short Stay in Hell
When the personal is infinite
He laughed at the Personalized hell for the non-Zoroastrian - Mormon Geologist in Balanos infinite library - Conceptualizing of the infinite - Perfect memory meaninglessness - Constant morning resets - Why white? - Love - Death Gang - The jump - Wondering.
- He giggled at the idea that content had ever been finite in the last hundred years. Maybe the joke was that nobody had hope anymore of finding anything new worth it.
- Then he got distracted. He was sure there wouldn't be an afterlife.
- Though, that could be one hell of a mistake...
Quotes
"With about 95 possible characters on a standard keyboard, that implies that the number of possible books is 951,312,000, a rather large number when one considers that there are only (according to Arthur Eddington [1882–1944]) 1.580 electrons in the universe. Now, assuming the books are about 1.5 inches thick and take about 1.5 feet to shelve vertically, figuring about 8 shelves 200 feet long and about 100 square feet of living space, the width and breath of the library (given two shelves, one for each side of the library) is about 7.161,297,369 light-years wide and deep."
"Breath, comes to me in bursts of joy. Stones retched out bloody worms, worn red with the passing of licking patterns of salt. Why signal wu8&xxKJOPOlns;kkk; I’d never read anything of such profound clarity in the library before. Tears rolled down my face, and I looked up at him in gratitude." Truth is relative, and important (May 25th, 2026)
"Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair." Who doesn't love a good siren?
"It seems odd to me now that after so long I still focus on a time so brief as to be but a fraction of an instant in the time I will be here, but so powerfully has that instant rooted into me that I hold onto it with a hopeless desperation." No love is the same.
"In our 708th year together, we started an elaborate game of tag that involved hundreds of people and lasted for over twelve years." Incentives drive populations
Miss Lonelyhearts
Rancid struggles and then are crucified
He was saddened by particularly like the letters of the downtrodden - the surrealism of staring at the cross - shrike's cynicism - the half-killed lamb - selfish love of women and beggar - shrike's wife plays them both - the sickness, and golden country life - praying on a woman's need - the play, the cuckold, the death.
- He wondered why misery was new? Haven't the historical been around for a while? He must have lost sight of the line between parody and reality.
- He felt uneasy at the end, but New York was never for him.
- “For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation." Writing is easier than truly reading
- For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.”
Quotes
"Miss Lonelyhearts felt as he had felt years before, when he had accidentally stepped on a small frog. Its spilled guts had filled him with pity, but when its suffering had become real to his senses, his pity had turned to rage and he had beaten it frantically until it was dead." Dark, Twisted Beautiful Fantasy (June 15th, 2026)
"Once he had tried to get fired by recommending suicide in his column. All that Shrike had said was: “Remember, please, that your job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose.” Incentives drive populations
"Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
The Interrogation
Lonely man defamiliarization leads to prophetic denouement
He became lonely with the prefaced apology - Adam escaped - lonely house - lost love in phone calls - aggressive wondering like a dog in heat - drowned man - lost prophet - condemned rationalization
- It's exhausting to live alone as you have to be endlessly entertained by your own thoughts.
- He knew a man without a story becomes a magic pixie girl.
Quotes
"I have made very little attempt at realistic treatment (I have a stronger and stronger impression that there is no such thing as reality); I would like my story to be taken as a complete fiction, interesting only in so far as it produces a kind of repercussion (however briefly) on the reader's mind." Preface
"While awaiting the worst, the story is over. But wait. You'll see. I (please note I haven't used that word too often) think we can count on them. It would be really strange if one of these days there were not something more to say about Adam or some other among him."
" You must understand that what was happening to Adam on this particular rainy day might equally well have happened to him on any other day. On a very windy day, for instance."
"Telling his story as a cheap parody of uneasy recollections"
""When you've seen a drowned person once, just pulled out of the water, still lying on the road, there's not much to add. Especially when you've understood why some people drown themselves on certain days." Have empathy before justice (February 9th, 2026)
"“Don’t you see it? This life, this fucking life, all around you? Don’t you see that people live, that they live, that they eat, and so on? That they’re happy? Don’t you see that whoever wrote ‘the earth is blue like an orange’ is either a madman or an idiot? But no, you tell yourselves, he’s a genius—he dismantled reality in two words. It detaches from reality. It has a childish charm. No maturity. Whatever you want. But me, I need systems, or else I go mad. Either the earth is orange, or the orange is blue. But in the system where we use words, the earth is blue and oranges are orange. I’ve reached a point where I can’t stand deviations anymore. Do you understand? I struggle too much to grasp reality." The loneliest thing in the world is only being able to see from our own eyes
Cosmopolis
What is it about rich white men and emptiness?
He recognized today's world in: Seeking nothingness - The haircut - The Limo - CTO - Fear of the revolution - cold wife - the Yen - the premonitions - art dealers, always the mistress - trying to confirm alive - asymmetrical prostate - rats - anarchists - whirling dervishes - pastry assassins - American Psycho - haircut - the struggle of a playwright - transcendence.
- Numbers are so mesmerizingly, brutally reductive. They go against everything (most) of us have lived.
- Though, he agreed that beauty in the English language took a hit with SkyScrapers, AirPorts, and Computers.
- And, he guessed that if you looked at numbers all day, you must yearn for the violence and sex behind them.
Quotes
"Talent is more erotic when it's wasted." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
"I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on." There is fucking, and there is sex (January 5th, 2026)
"He missed Elise and wanted to talk to her, tell her she was beautiful, lie, cheat on her, live with her in middling matrimony, having dinner parties and asking what the doctor's said." No love is the same.
"In the old tribes the chief who destroyed more of his property than the other chiefs was the most powerful." Capitalism is the steady drip that will destroy us
"It is in me to hurt someone and I haven't always known this. The act and depth of writing will tell me if I'm capable." The Sadness of Reading (January 19th, 2026)
"Yes, exactly. One learns about the countries where unrest is occurring by riding the taxis here." The Evil of Distraction (November 24th, 2025)
"It had the kind of banality that reveals itself over time as being truly brutal." Art elevates while content passes the time
"With the currency ticker restored to normal function, the yen showed renewed strength, advancing against the dollar in microdecimal increments every sextillionth of a second. This was good. This was fine and right. It thrilled him to think in zeptoseconds and to watch the numbers in their unrelenting run. The stock ticker was also good. He watched the major issues breeze by and felt purified in nameless ways to see prices spiral into lubricious plunge. Yes, the effect on him was sexual, cunnilingual in partic-ular, and he let his head fall back and opened his mouth to the sky and rain." Incentives drive populations
Hiroshima
Noiseless devastation and life goes on
He had to own it, the noiseless flash - gladness it wasn't a firebomb - the total war - parks triage, rivers forded - the horrors of radiation sickness - permanent shadows - no doctors - valiant efforts - the recovery.
- He knew it wasn't for him to judge.
- The class of people to which Nakamura-san belonged came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, “hibakusha”—literally, “explosion-affected persons.” Euphemisms are horror
Quotes
"In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt." Groups of people are scary. (September 1st, 2025)
"Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew." Life is absurd, but worth living (January 26th, 2026)
"And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped." We are our bodies.
"In referring to those who went through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Japanese tended to shy away from the term “survivors,” because in its focus on being alive it might suggest some slight to the sacred dead." Cliches are cliches for a reason (October 6th, 2025)
"He could face Hiroshima now [1985], because a gaudy phoenix had risen from the ruinous desert of 1945: a remarkably beautiful city of more than a million inhabitants—only one in ten of whom was a hibakusha—with tall modern buildings on broad, tree-lined avenues crowded with Japanese cars, all of which had English lettering on them and appeared to be brand-new; a city of strivers and sybarites, with seven hundred and fifty-three book-stores and two thousand three hundred and fifty-six bars." Capitalism is the steady drip that will destroy us
Tender is the flesh
Cannibal Slaughter House 5 where even the best men only want hot sex puppies
He got hungry upon hearing how they ate humans to survive - the industrialization of process - the man given woman - the man pretends to reader to be nice - the man impregnates women because wife barren - the man/wife given child and happy - the woman dies.
- He wondered why the future always ended with us eating one another and learning how tasty it was.
- Why wait?
Quotes
"There’s a certain purity to this being who’s unable to speak, he thinks, as his finger traces the outline of her shoulder, arm, hips, legs, until it reaches her feet." We are our bodies.
Trust
An meta-made-easy tale of how a rich man is brute and his lover is smart
He had heard before the story... Young man - overcoming father - bored - plays the market - meets girl - tries to hide brutishness - arbitrages markets through her intelligence - she fades away - he tries to rewrite legacy.
- He wondered if building a 1920s fortune was always a poor fugue.
Quotes
"The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory" The old man who will not laugh is a fool
"It had taken three generations of failed politicians and novelists to reduce them to a state of dignified precariousness." Writing is easier than truly reading
"Generosity is the mother of ingratitude." Cliches are cliches for a reason (October 6th, 2025)
"He discovered that he was jealous of the illness, which demanded and got all her attention and energy". Jealousy, the only unfun sin (September 15th, 2025)
"Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt... A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, whether they be epic or tragic." Magic Pixie Girl
"Now that we’re truly alone here, I see how lonely he + I have been. It’s not that I’m tired of him. I’m tired of the person I become around him." The Last Novel
"A few stagnant years went by, during which he made halfhearted attempts at starting different collections (coins, china, friends), dabbled in hypochondria, tried to develop an enthusiasm for horses, and failed to become a dandy." Caring Matters. Detachment is a tool. (September 8th, 2025)
Great Expectations
Pip carries on
He didn't remember much.
Quotes
"In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter." niches are big worlds
"Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion." Have empathy before justice (February 9th, 2026)
"Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth"
"Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection." Simplifications are powerful (September 22nd, 2025)
""I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did!" Jump into love (September 29th, 2025)
"that I almost understand how this comes about. If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight by which she had never once seen your face,—if you had done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and angry?" Action, the world learning about itself
The Gate
Mat-sized lonileness
Japanese couple, modest house, living down the valley. The intricacies of small movements, small gestures, prolonged silences, that lead to a subdued beauty.
- A past that haunts (stealing out of a small village with a lover) holds sway over the life and prevents growth by being subtle and enjoying the quite - like mom - which is the true price of moral guilt and shame. A lifetime of hiding away from it. Either accept, move on or live in purgatory. You must be willing to accept your sins along with those of others.
- An entire story about that what may happen and yet never comes to pass - the obsession and anxiety contradicting with the focus on the present (small flowers, intricate houses and the cherry blossoms.
- A lifetime lived with a partner, the depth of meaning as we make the smallest world into everything there is. How do you transition this to beauty rather than making the small things everything - and all consuming? How do you turn life inward and make it beautiful.
- Lying in together on a weekend - with no cares in the world except the soft sunlight coming in through the bamboo lit openings. Soft murmuring and kindness.
- A house you measure in the size of the mats it can hold.
Quotes
"The fewer words spoken, the easier it is to believe your standing on common ground." niches are big worlds
Dark Neighborhood
He dreamed of the death snake (treasure, shit, expectancy, errant gunshot) - Cuba Voodoo housekeeper - dirtbike blondie lover at prostitute ranch - winner ketamine spinout listening to voice messages - woman's death on doorstep - the knocked head on escalator.
Hope kept people fending for themselves waiting for deliverance, redemption, or at least Godot, while they let things go to shit. All because God's words faded over time, leading everyone to wait for different things
- He read the repeated prose in a lyrically stuttered basement, and knew it was a song of death that will come for us all.
Quotes
"Deaths are permissible when there is no hope" Life is absurd, but worth living (January 26th, 2026)
"She reminds me it was her who taught me sayings such as 'The squeaky wheel gets the grease,' The enemy of my enemy is my friend' and 'The right tools for the job.' Those sayings we have lived by to survive". Cliches are cliches for a reason (October 6th, 2025)
"How long am I here, in tight trouser and panting? And lost at sea? No, saliva pouring out of my mouth a surf lapping at my cheek. Flat out, hot feelings. Yes this office room brighter than ever, powder falling from the walls, is all that I've absorbed into myself spat out? Mercy. All the smokes are smoked. God is on the edge of a knife, the cutting blade" Moderation within moderation
"Winner, she says, you will be missed but not in any of the important ways" some people aren't beautiful (April 13th, 2026)
The Book of All Loves
Love, makes the world go 'round
Declarations of Love - Venice - Record of all sounds - Ambassador - Blindness and Loss - Holding to each other - love eternal.
Quotes
"The tragedy of the monster lies in its awareness that it is made up of bits of other creatures, fragments of corpses of unknown provenance. The tragedy of the monster is to do with identity. Hence the monster's yearning to love. And hence why its love is rejected. (Fragmented love)". some people aren't beautiful (April 13th, 2026)
"A couple is music, whether abstract or melodic, tonal or atonal, but it is always music. At times a couple is found in the most splendid fragment of a refrain, and this affords a glimpse of things that no other person or collective can ever make out. Because shared life, which is normally made up of inertia and repetition, will suddenly melt the two together into a single body - without either of them losing their individuality - and this gives rise to unique, visionary states, states in which the couple become a mutant creature, a species apart, neither animal nor mineral nor vegetable - but not all three either - and in that moment the visions experienced by the couple are as unprecedented as they are invincible. Then, like at the ends of certain recorded songs, when the music fades away but at the same time the chords become unusually powerful, all the banalities and little details of years past emerge in the memory, and you then wonder what beautiful kind of trash, what submerged zenith, there was in all of that. (Trash love)". No love is the same.
"It is not the metaphors aren't true, and far less that they aren't real - they are at least as real as a theory - but rather that they have a different nature, the nature of analogies, figures that, while they relate to what we tend to call 'reality', bring something else into being: the maturity of an intellect that sees relations between things without confusing them as one and the same."
"It is normal that, in trying to make a better life for our-selves, we guess at the future, something that ultimately comes down to simple cause and effect, which we use every day and which can be described as understanding past and present allows us to predict what will happen tomorrow. But it is no less true that without the risk inherent in all that is present - in things happening at this very moment, live and direct - [..] The vegetal image applies perfectly here: the tree now producing fruit - real fruit, fruit you can chew in your mouth and consume - does so because of the flower it once gave forth and because that fruit will eventually become something inedible, something rotten. This and only this is why we are able to experience and touch with our hands the one thing we will never completely know, the here and now. Love - that which is radically alive - is this here and now, but projected spherically, in all directions. (Present love) Zen vs. Ambition (January 12th, 2026)
"When I enter and exit the groove between your buttocks, my skin comes from another world. he says. To love has nothing to do with looking up at the heavens and feeling stupefied by the gods' demands. To love means looking down and using the tip of your tongue to write in the orifice of desire. She says." There is fucking, and there is sex (January 5th, 2026)
"What becomes clear, therefore, is this one truth: leaders do not relate to the masses through the semantics of their words but via the secret musical score within which these words are inscribed and modulated."
"Another way of understanding things is to say that ve come from a darkness and are moving towards another darkness. Between the two there is only a brief candle, a match pointlessly struck, although everyone's soul ges its corporate branding in the end. (Match love)". Life is absurd, but worth living (January 26th, 2026)
"In all these years I have found infinite happiness in your cavities. As if they too were infinite. he says. They're finite, though they have an end. If not, everything we pour into them would be lost, you and I would have no memory of each other. she says."
"I went to a museum once. Everything there was spectacularly still. It was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. He says. A body is also a silent avenue; extreme mute sex. She says". Aesthetics is reason enough for life (December 15th, 2025)
"You and I are nothing. he says. In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it's better to be nothing. she says." Do less; save the world (March 16th, 2026)
Mr. Roberts lived a long life between books and people. He tried to understand the link.
He wrote down his beliefs in his stories and poems. He reviewed others' novels and copied their quotes. He linked his beliefs to their quotes. But he lost track of what formed what; fed on his own reflections.
Sigh.
To see for yourself, see his belief that The old man who will not laugh is a fool, described by his poem:
Constellation / / We bathe our stars in light / until only the brightest ones shine / the others awash in dreams and fervor / that nights imbue in the young / cloaked in anonymity / high on what-might-be, / distrusted by the old / as we court sleep / knowing daylight comes / to disrobe the mirage / and fewer choices remain / to create a constellation / worth living.
Which he linked to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "[On writing], I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
But where did it start or end?
He never knew. But he thought there must be something in the connections.