Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. – JOHN ADAMS.
The first step is to admit you’re powerless. You have an addiction, and you can’t stop. The first step is to tell your story, all the worst parts. Your lowest lows.
Jump to how life was when you were a baby and you could only eat baby food. You’d stagger over to the coffee table. You’re up on your feet and you have to keep waddling along on those Vienna sausage legs or fall down. Then you get to the coffee table and bounce your big soft baby head on the sharp corner. You’re down, and man, oh, man, it hurts. Still it isn’t anything tragic until Mom and Dad run over. Oh, you poor, brave thing. Only then do you cry.
You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog. People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden. People need somebody they can send a check at Christmas. So stay poor. “Charity” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.
I’d like to see more stand-up routines venture into depicting tragedy. It’s conventional to give people a humorous cathartic release; now I’d love to hear stand-up tragedy that would reduce the audience to exhausted tears.
Okay, the way I figure it, you’re just the subject of an experiment and the whole world you know is just an artificial construct populated by actors who play the roles of everybody in your life, and the weather is just special effects and the sky is painted blue and the landscape everywhere is just a set. Is that it?
You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid. Do this in an ice bath. Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. You have nitroglycerin.
No man has to be a rocket surgeon to recognize love.
Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That’s the earth. Why it does around. We’re the rocks. And what happens to us – the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse – why that’s just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.
To the World He Was a Loser, But to Me He Was the World.
The dreaming world, they’d think we were crazy. Those people still in bed, they’d be asleep another hour, then washing their faces, under their arms, and between their legs, before going to the same work they did every day. Living that same life, every day.
Kevin floated a trial idea. To him the protesters at the front gate were the equivalent of the protesters outside abortion clinics. The Rock Hudsons tried to stop people coming here the same way do-gooders tried to block people going to murder their unborn kids. The irony was in how those same rescued babies got adopted by Rock Hudsons. Kevin.
The thing about being cloned from all those shampoo commercials, well, that goes for me and Brandy Alexander, too. Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We’re all such products.
There’s a famous quote regarding Polanski. Perhaps Jack Nicholson said it, perhaps someone else, but it goes, “Polanski is the five-foot Pole I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.” So, yes, the world seems to despise him. I, however, love his work. It’s so much funnier and well-constructed than the pompous stuff of Kubrick. Polanski balances between camp and horror in much the same way Billy Wilder did.
Why did I cause so much pain? Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn’t know. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn’t know, so he said, get married. I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.
Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they’re watching a movie.
You never feel as alive as when you make somebody else dead.
Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting, that’s only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah or witch doctor.
These men and women sitting behind unlocked doors know a bigger house is not the answer. Neither is a better spouse, more money, tighter skin. “Anything you can acquire,” she says, “is only another thing you’ll lose.” The answer is there is no answer.