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It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.
Supplement therapy with boxing lessons. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
Suddenly, it was a Friday in the four o’clock range, two weeks before my death—my most loathed hour. A purgatorial
hour, neither afternoon nor evening, too early to eat and too early to drink, an hour that encourages its hostages to tally up their failures, an hour that portrays one’s entire life as a parking garage. I stared at my phone.
Four oclock
Then one day you find yourself in a boutique of terminal illness, forced to purchase something in order to use the bathroom, and from then on, you have nothing to think about except a catalogue of the instances you took when you could have given. My assistant said, “You are not alone.” “There is no time to update my software,” I snapped at her the next day, from my deathbed. “Who in God’s name cares if my cursor’s disappeared?” “What can I do for you?” she asked. That dreadful refrain. She offered me a cottage, a precious director, a bottomless brunch. The window was open, and the breeze was
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Concluding Remarks on Fame and Death: They’re both so lonely and boring. Bisous, Elsie Jane McLoughlin Blitz
As usual, when she confronted the world about one of its problems, the world suggested that the problem was Joan.
This resonates!
The faith and anger and geometry. All highways and God. Moses only understands contemporary politics when he’s in the Midwest.
Wong Kar-wai, Samira Makhmalbaf, Rungano Nyoni, Károly Makk, Bernardo Bertolucci, Denis Villeneuve, Jean-Luc Godard, Chetan Anand, Viêt Linh.
Her voice is limpid and cool, pond-like, her vocabulary casually vigorous, her posture assured.
She has eyebrows, chapped hands, a personality, a master’s degree in public health, a cautious laugh—the laugh of an adult who was constantly hushed as a child.
To the north of the historic houses sprawls industrial farmland, west to east, on both sides of the Vacca Vale River. Corn and soybean crops, freaky and inconceivable in scale. In the summer, they become an assault of chemical green, expanding like cultish odes to geometry for acres and acres. A patina of health desperately concealing and sealing a future of dust. Of drought. Of lifeless dirt that no machine, chemical, company, or person can defibrillate. This future is already materializing, and so now, when the land can sprout nothing else, it sprouts suburbia. Developers pounced on the
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Because they were American and because they were a dream,
is pretty but haggard, like she works the night shift on the highway.
Her job never allowed her to be a child, so her psychology never allowed her to age.
The Midwestern breed of narcissist, Moses reasons, must be much smaller and more docile than the breed they have in Hollywood—like
Even in a world that’s being shipwrecked, remain brave and strong.
She shakes her head. “Not at all. On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial
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The teenage boy at the desk stares at him like an undertaker.
Like most of Joan’s problems, this one derives from two incongruent points of goodwill. On holidays, Joan receives packages from her sweetest, loneliest aunt. The aunt has fake teeth, glamorous penmanship, and a fondness for disabled pets. She dyes her hair crimson and always smells like baby powder. She is Joan’s favorite relative. In her most honest moments—after two glasses of red blend, or during hot thunderstorms—Joan will admit that she prefers this aunt to her own mother, who was so afraid of dying she could hardly live, and also to her own father, who ate his way to premature death.
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“I used to date a guy who said that every time he passed a crucifix,” says Penny. “How’s it hanging? You don’t notice how many crucifixes there are in this world until you spend time with a guy like that.” Penny yawns. “That cross you gave me last time made me think of him.”
itself. She wears a tracksuit that’s not exactly the color of grapes but exactly the color of artificially grape-flavored foods.
Lori always sipped dark soda from a Chug Big cup. She wore sunglasses that evoked particularly American things, like goatees and drive-through banks and NASCAR.
He holds her automatically, his force restrictive and secure and warm, and she tries not to enjoy these things, but her brain and her heart are not calibrated to the same moral system, and she is so tired of contorting her
emotions to fit her principles.
They are elite, climate-controlled, dentally supreme.
A kettle of black tea circulates through her body, agitating everything.
Delicately, as though her body is made of loose soil, Joan walks to the sitting area, where she installs herself in a cold leather chair.
It takes Blandine a long time to respond, and when she does, the words seem laborious for her. She lugs them into the room as though they’re pieces of furniture.
