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To calm this girl down, to get her to listen, I tell her the story about my fish. This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.
The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life. Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.
We were kept busy learning. We had a million facts to remember. We memorized half the Old Testament. We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can’t feel a thing. Trust me on this.
Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don’t throw yourself down the stairs, that’s a choice. Every time you don’t crash your car, you reenlist.
The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved?
The skeleton is just a way to keep your tissue off the floor. Your sweat is just a way to keep you cool.
When you get famous, dinner isn’t food anymore; it’s twenty ounces of protein, ten ounces of carbohydrates, salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free fuel. This is a meal every two hours, six times a day. Eating isn’t about eating anymore. It’s about protein assimilation. It’s about cellular rejuvenation cream. Washing is about exfoliation. What used to be breathing is respiration.
People are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified field theory that combines glamour and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being good and being good-looking.
You’re gone anaerobic, you’re burning muscle instead of fat, but your mind is crystal-clear. The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time. Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot? And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven? This wasn’t a question of whether or not I was going to
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It’s weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized. The same as the name carved into stone on each crypt at the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum, only the caseworker’s name is left.
In the back of this edition of the DSM are the revisions from the last edition. Already, the rules have changed. Here are the new definions of what’s acceptable, what’s normal, what’s sane. Inhibited Male Orgasm is now Male Orgasmic Disorder. What was Psychogenic Amnesia is now Dissociative Amnesia. Dream Anxiety Disorder is now Nightmare Disorder. Edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are insane by a new standard. People who used to be called insane are the picture of mental health.
“What I told you about,” Fertility says, looking at Adam, “it’s starting. We need to get him locked up someplace, stat. He’s going into Attention Withdrawal Syndrome.”
