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It had in fact been Elvis who couldn’t accept that he was alive,
He looked in the mirror, and the person he saw looked like him, and it looked like Elvis. But it didn’t look like he was Elvis.
this new, almost-Elvis was replacing and erasing—show by show, ten thousand by ten thousand—the Elvis that he did know, for sure, had once been real, and true, and not this.
Before long, he found such a job, and became an Elvis impersonator.
And that was the moment—almost to the hour—that the tabloids stopped making up stories that Elvis had been seen here or there, and started making up things about people everyone already knew were alive, a tradition that continues to this day.
I believe in keeping work and home life separate when possible for psychological reasons,
Psychological counseling to handle the effects of devoting my life’s work to this crushingly bizarre and isolating activity of no relevant value or connection to the wider world should run me approximately $750 per week.
maybe I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d get by.
who now rotated toward the class from the chair as if he were an amateur actor with stage fright in a community musical who was nonetheless following through on the play’s plan to break the fourth wall,
a whopping thirty-five dollars for what would become the most famous math problem in America.
And there’s no telephone in your pants. You don’t get news very often, and when you do, your heart pounds because it might be bad news.
Maybe Amanda wasn’t the best-looking girl in the class. Maybe she was just the blondest.
If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can’t they be well paid for changing young minds? I mean, wouldn’t more people do it?
more people thought they could make a fortune curing cancer, wouldn’t more people be trying to do that?”
Or maybe he was just old, and you just had to ignore a few of the things he said to get to the wisdom.
It’s very suspenseful for someone to put a hand on a doorknob but not turn it, especially if he’s old.
The universe will tell you what it wants from you, if you listen to it.
in an instant he realized that what was also approaching, in tandem, was an offer from the universe: legend or star,
Discussion question: Do you think Johnny Depp should have driven his motorcycle off the mountain highway to his death? Why or why not?
basically just putting everyone at ease and letting them know he was one of them, which he was, and that he wasn’t going to hassle anybody, which he wasn’t.
“The food believes in itself, man. It has confidence. It has self-respect. It has self-worth. You just have to look at the labels: SOY NUTS.”
“You go into Whole Foods? SOY NUTS!!!”
“YO SOY SAUCE! CÓMPRAME!”
Nobody knew why the market was down that day.
If the market had never existed, would anyone miss it? Would anything really be different?
then the market thought of something so sad it made it want to kill itself: what if Warren Buffett was just wrong?
Now the market felt so guilty and terrible it let itself wonder what it would be like if it let itself completely collapse. But it didn’t. Oh, that’s ridiculous, the market told itself: now you’re just down because you’re down. Come on. Look alive.
It was still down, though. Just kind of down.
The thing was, the market could only be what it was. That’s what it was: the market.
It was just its job to be what it was.
“More satisfying than a candy bar, but less satisfying than love,”
We had all known for years that someday, sooner or later, we would have to do something about Willie.
the first party that didn’t have ice cream.
A new photo of Willie passed out on a floor or out of control in a bar came across our screens literally every day.
were we just slowly transforming into simpler and more easily digestible fictional characters to one another—in other words, becoming our profile pictures:
Everyone agreed that Willie seemed to have wandered into some territory where “out of control” and “out of control!!!” both got by security with the same ID.
I had the actual, literal thought that I was lucky to be alive.
Dave committed suicide six months later.
“Wait! Let’s not get distracted,” said Sally. “Every time we talk to Wikipedia Brown, we get distracted. We spend hours and hours with him, and always forget what we were supposed to investigate in the first place.”
“I’m not perfect,” said Wikipedia Brown. “I never said I was. But I work fast, and I work for free, and that’s all anyone seems to care about these days.
This story is under review.
Regret Is Just Perfectionism Plus Time
“Who? Pedophiles?” snapped his daughter. “You’re afraid of making pedophiles uncomfortable?”
if I look at them back for as much as a split second, then everybody’s gonna stare at them for the next two hours.
There are only a few people at this point who are not looking at me, who are trying to avoid eye contact. Do you know who those people are? That’s right,” said Chris Hansen. “Pedophiles.
How am I supposed to alert someone in a position of authority that these people are definitely pedophiles who are destroying lives, but that the only evidence I can offer to support this charge is that these alleged pedophiles are suspiciously not staring at me?
‘Good writers borrow, great writers steal.’
Basically, just drop everything, who cares.
“He’s going to stamp the word VOID on it and sell it for fifty million dollars.”
Just an idea.
