For a while, as the spent sky sluggishly refilled its reservoir with laden clouds drawn off the ocean, Bibi.
When cool-climate relatives and friends are astonished to hear such temperatures, Pico Mundians put a chamber-of-commerce spin on our meteorology, noting that the humidity is a mere fifteen or twenty percent. Our average summer day, they insist, isn’t like a sweltering steam bath but like a refreshing sauna.
Women don’t find me as appealing as they do, say, that singer Justin Bieber. But I take comfort from the fact that Justin Bieber wouldn’t know how to escape from a walk-in freezer after being chained there by a couple of huge guys in porkpie hats. He couldn’t sing his way out of a spot like that; inevitably, he would be a Biebersicle.
These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil.
To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes.
But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn’t have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclination.
As for the butter-side-up day: Each morning, he makes one extra slice of toast with breakfast, lays it on the kitchen table, and in a contrived-casual way, he knocks it to the floor. If it lands butter side up, he eats it with pleasure, confident that the day will be good from end to end. If it lands butter side down, however, Malcolm throws the toast away, wipes up the butter, and goes about his day with heightened awareness of potential danger.
Guns don’t feel nothin’ about you, one way or t’other. No fair reason for you to feel bad towards them.
Laser beams slid around them, spurts of light sinking through the darkness, eventually touching the stars or lighting the water for a moment on their death ride to the murky bottom.
Fate isn’t a straight road,” I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to be for her. “There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.
Because I can see them, I bridge life and death, and they hope I can open for them the door they are afraid to open for themselves.
Blood has an oder faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the smell of what we are...
Music-good music, great music-is itself magical, it’s mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so in adequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.
Their melancholy drains me. Their need exhausts me. I am wrung by pity. Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving it scarred and sore.
I do not wish to shine. I prefer shadows, quiet, periods of solitude. I do not wish to be noticed. If one is all but invisible to others, one cannot be envied, inspire anger or suspicion. Near invisibility is a way of life that I recommend.
Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.
Surrender to fear is an invitation to doubt.
You couldn’t be afraid of anything if you were sure you could bear the pain it might cause you.
Furies, Alecto. In classic mythology, Tisiphone and Megaera and Alecto, daughters of the earth goddess Gaea, punished crimes in the name of the victims.
I believed suddenly not merely in evil as a necessary antagonist in movies and books – bad guys and boogeymen – not merely in evil as the consequence of parental rejection or parental indulgence or social injustice, but in Evil as a presence alive in the world.