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Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer. Ions might charge the air, but they fell flat when it came to charging the imagination — my imagination, anyway.
As youngsters, we participated in all the usual seaside activities — which were fun, until my father got involved and systematically chipped away at our pleasure.
It was like having a foreign-exchange student living in our house. Nothing we did or said made any sense to her, as she seemed to follow the rules and customs of some exotic, faraway nation where the citizens drilled the ground for oil paint and picked pastels from the branches of stunted trees.
True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible. Maybe I couldn’t paint or sculpt, but I could work a mood better than anyone I knew. Unfortunately, the school had no accredited sulking program and I dropped out, more despondent than ever.
I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.
Speed heats the brain to a full boil, leaving the mouth to function as a fulminating exhaust pipe.
The drug laws had changed as well. “No smoking pot” became “no smoking pot in the house,” before it finally petered out to “please don’t smoke any more pot in the living room.”
After all these years our father has never understood that we, his children, tend to gravitate toward the very people he’s spent his life warning us about.
Mädchen II. This tag-team progression was disconcerting, especially to the new dog, which was expected to possess both the knowledge and the personality of her predecessor.
In terms of mutual respect and admiration, their six children had been nothing more than a failed experiment. Melina was the real thing. The house was given over to the dog, rooms redecorated to suit her fancy.
Like branding steers or embalming the dead, teaching was a profession I had never seriously considered.
The position was offered at the last minute, when the scheduled professor found a better-paying job delivering pizza.
mindful that I had stupidly armed my audience with straight pins.
A terrible silence overtook the room, and seeing no other option, I instructed my students to pull out their notebooks
In my experience, it was hard to write without your preferred tools, but impossible to write without a cigarette.
There was the perfectly understandable fear of being exposed as a fraud, and then there was the deeper fear that my students might hate me.
As it was, I had to find some way to pass the time and trick my students into believing that they were getting an education.
Now the students were to watch an episode and write what I referred to as a “guessay,” a brief prediction of what might take place the following day.
In the past I had tried my hardest to be understanding, going so far as to allow the conjugation of nouns and the use of such questionable words as whateverishly.
Come critique time, most students behaved as if the assignment had been to confine the stories in a dark, enclosed area and test their reaction to sensory deprivation. Even if the papers were read out loud in class, the discussions were usually brief, as the combination of good manners and complete lack of interest kept most workshop participants from expressing their honest opinions.
The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers.
This line of questioning allowed the authors to feel creative and protected anyone who held an unpopular political opinion.
“Let me get this straight,” one student said. “You’re telling me that if I say something out loud, it’s me saying it, but if I write the exact same thing on paper, it’s somebody else, right?” “Yes,” I said. “And we’re calling that fiction.” The student pulled out his notebook, wrote something down, and handed me a sheet of paper that read, “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard in my life.” They were a smart group.
I had no job at the time and was living off the cruel joke I referred to as my savings.
I didn’t want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks. The money was tempting. I just didn’t know how to get it.
After painting the walnut-paneled library a screeching canary yellow, she strung a clothesline across the nineteenth-century wrought-iron balcony
but I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment.
Somewhere along the way she’d got the idea that broke people led richer lives than everybody else, that they were nobler or more intelligent. In an effort to keep me noble, she was paying me less than she’d paid her previous assistant.
In an effort to impress his latest parole officer, Richie was trying to improve his vocabulary. “I can’t promise I’ll never kill anyone again,” he once said, strapping a refrigerator to his back. “It’s unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.”
Their new, higher rents meant that they’d have to cut back on their spending, to work longer hours, or try to wean themselves off their costly psychiatrists.
The thinking was that because we were furniture movers, we obviously weren’t too bright. In addition to being strong and stupid, we were also thought of as dangerous.
I began to change in subtle ways and quickly lost patience with people who owned too many books. What had once seemed an honorable inclination now struck me as a heavy and inconvenient affectation.
The first of the month was always the busiest time, but there were more than enough minor jobs and unhappy marriages to pull us through.
In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.
“IT DEPENDS. HOW MUCH WAS YOUR RENT?”
When the waiter brings our entrées, I have no idea which plate might be mine. In yesterday’s restaurants it was possible both to visualize and to recognize your meal. There were always subtle differences, but for the most part, a lamb chop tended to maintain its basic shape.
The potatoes I’d been expecting have apparently either been clarified to an essence or were used to stoke the grill.
Because I am both a glutton and a masochist, my standard complaint, “That was so bad,” is always followed by “And there was so little of it!”
Visiting Americans will find more warmth in Tehran than they will in New York, a city founded on the principle of Us versus Them. I don’t speak Latin but have always assumed that the city motto translates to either Go Home or We Don’t Like You, Either.
Our bodies were viewed as mere vehicles, pasty, potbellied machines designed to transport our thoughts from one place to another.
When the manager was called, she calmly explained that she wasn’t stealing, she was simply pretending to be a thief. “And thieves steal,” she said. “So that’s what I was doing.” It all made perfect sense to her.
She failed first grade by pretending to be stupid, but the setback didn’t seem to bother her. For Amy school was devoted solely to the study of her teachers.
Unable to afford the suit’s matching top, she’s been reduced to waddling the streets much like two women fused together in some sort of cruel experiment. From the waist up she’s slim and fit, chugging forward on legs the size of tree trunks and followed by a wide, dimpled bottom
the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten.
you meet a guy, relinquish a tiny bit of control, and the next thing you know, you’re eating a different part of the pig.
know it sounds calculating, but if you’re not cute, you might as well be clever.
My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that’s confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we’ve done.
Every day we’re told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it’s always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it’s startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are “We’re number two!”
The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide, and I jotted frantic notes in the margins of my pad.
The teacher’s reaction led me to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France.
