I’m an adult. Discipline me and I’ll bury you alive. – Roger.
The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.
Hasn’t it been a long time since you had a flying dream?
I think God is how you deal with everything that’s out of your own control.
Dreams don’t come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.
It’s around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.
Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?
SAFETY NET-ISM: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life’s hurts. Usually parents.
At least when you’re young you’re also stupid.
I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with 3 bowls of Cap’n Crunch – had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day.
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age – regardless of how they look on the outside – pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.
Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What – suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?
If you don’t change, then what’s the point of anything happening to you? It’ll still be happening to an unchanged person.
We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.
As I’m never going to be old, I’m glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness.
There is no shame in impulse.
Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.
Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don’t put it in a list. Don’t even say the words.
ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: ‘You wouldn’t understand it there, mother-they hug where I live now.’
I didn’t realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.