You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.
I’m not stupid, but I’m getting there.
She reflected on her time in Paris and thought how it seemed as if she’d spent half her life drinking wine in bed and covered with contusions. This, it occurred to her, was how it must feel to be Melanie Griffith.
After a lifetime of posting on blogs and videotaping his every move and emotion for social media, he was facing nothing less than identity fatigue.
Only in death are we no longer part of project mayhem.
Jump back twenty years to the white house where I grew up with my father shooting super-8 movies of my brother and me running around the yard. Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs at night, and watching these same super-8 movies projected on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later.
Maybe God left it up to people to develop the ability to bring back Christ into their lives. Maybe God wanted us to invent our own savior when we were ready. When we need it most. Denny says maybe it’s up to us to create our own messiah. To save ourselves.
Imagine if Jesus chased you around, trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient passive God, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound. We want the criminal to confess during the trial. We want him to be exposed in the drawing room scene, surrounded by his peers. The detective is a shepherd, and we want the criminal back in the fold, returned to us. We love him. We miss him. We want to hug him. Mona.
Everything is nothing by itself.
All this goes star-filter soft and bright, every sharp edge erased or smeared behind the green and gold, and the fluorescent light coming through in broken exploded bits.
Some of the plants have obituary names: Iris, Basil, Rue, Rosemary, and Verbena. Some, like meadowsweet and cowslips, sweet flag and spikenard, are like the names of Shakespeare fairies.
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, you life becomes less about living and more about waiting. For cancer. For dementia. Every look in a mirror, you scan for the red rash that means shingles. See also: Ringworm. See also: Lyme disease, meningitis, rheumatic fever, syphilis.
You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain’t a lie, not no more.
The security guy asked my name address and phone number, and then he asked me what was the difference between a condom and a cockpit.
Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
Like it or not, the road to Hell is paved with sustainable bamboo flooring.
Not to belabor the point, but counterfeit luxury goods truly represent a false economy.
THIS IS WHY I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
To shut yourself off from these stories is to accept the banal version of reality that’s always used to frame advertisements for miracle wrinkle creams and miracle diet pills. It’s as if we’ve denied the real magic of life so that we can sell each other the sham magic of consumer products. Another example of the shop replacing the church .
The nouvelle cuisine of anarchy. Barium nitrate in a sauce of sulfur and garnished with charcoal. That’s your basic gunpowder. Bon appetit.