Something is turning into nothing very quickly.
Hardbody.” McDermott nods in agreement. “Definitely.” “I’m not impressed,” Price sniffs. “Look at her knees.” While the hardbody stands there we check her out, and though her knees do support long, tan legs, I can’t help noticing that one knee is, admittedly, bigger than the other one. The left knee is knobbier, almost imperceptibly thicker than the right knee and this unnoticeable flaw now seems overwhelming and we all lose interest.
Haven’t we outgrown all this tired irony? Weren’t we supposed to give up acting twenty-two forever?
I guess the consolation is that she’s not going to be beautiful forever,” he says. “But I’d like to be with her before that happens.
Confusion and hopelessness don’t necessarily cause a person to act.
Why not end up with her? floats into my line of vision. An answer: she has a better body than most other girls I know. Another one: everyone is interchangeable anyway.
Tim glances over at me and I avert my gaze and an imagined sense of imposed peace washes calmly over the two of us, answering my question.
Who Dunnit?′ profoundly expresses the theme of confusion against a funky groove, and what makes this song so exciting is that it ends with its narrator never finding anything out at all.
I passed what I thought was a Halloween parade, which was disorienting since I was fairly sure this was May. When I stopped on the corner of Sixteenth Street and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a “Gay Pride Parade,” which made my stomach turn.
The fact that... you categorize everything as either sexist, or racist, or homophobic, whether it is or not, and therefore harmful to you and you just can’t take it, is a kind of mania, a delusion, a psychosis that we have been coddling, encouraging people to think that life should be a smooth utopia built only for them and their fragile sensibility.
You can disappear here without knowing it.
If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you’ll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
It’s as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there... is... no... key.
When I flush the toilet in my bathroom, it becomes stopped up with Kleenex, and blood clouds the water and I put down the lid, because there’s nothing else for me to do.
There are some guys sitting at tables who all look at this one gorgeous girl, longingly, hoping for at least one dance or a blow job in Daddy’s car and there are all these girls, looking indifferent or bored, smoking clove cigarettes, all of them or at least most of them staring at one blond-haired boy standing in the back with sunglasses on. Julian.
So many people died last year: the accidental overdose, the car wreck in East Hampton, the surprise illness. People just disappeared. I fall asleep to the music coming from the Abbey, a song from the past, “Hungry Like the Wolf,” rising faintly above the leaping chatter of the club, transporting me for one long moment into someone both young and old. Sadness: it’s everywhere.
Honey?” she asks. “Don’t call me that,” I snap. “What? Honey?” she asks. “Yes,” I snap again. “What do you want me to call you?” she asks, indignantly. “CEO?” She stifles a giggle. “Oh Christ.” “No, really Patrick. What do you want me to call you?” King, I’m thinking.
I’m having a difficult time containing my disordered self.
Here’s the dead end of social media: after you’ve created your own bubble that reflects only what you relate to or what you identify with, after you’ve blocked and unfollowed people whose opinions and worldview you judge and disagree with, after you’ve created your own little utopia based on your cherished values, then a kind of demented narcissism begins to warp this pretty picture.
This forced you to look again at the people who raised them, coddling them with praise and trying to shield them from the grim sides of life, which might well have created children who, as adults, appeared highly confident, competent and positive but at the hint of darkness or negativity often became paralyzed and unable to react except with disbelief and tears – You just victimized me! – and retreated, in effect, into their childhood bubbles.