Gone Before Goodbye

by Reese Witherspoon

Was it nostalgia? What do you call a longing for critical thinking and common sense and decency?

one of life’s greatest and most unappreciated luxuries was a hot shower.

“Enjoy the smaller moments,” her father had often told her. “That’s where life is lived.”

Never be too provocative but never be too stuffy… Oh, but have a sense of style and always know what’s trending so you don’t appear, gasp, out of date—always trying to find the right balance between feminine and practical.

Do you have an Alexa or Siri or some other smart speaker in your house? It hears you, records the data, and stores it in clouds. Your iPhone’s built-in microphone does the same. So does your home surveillance system and doorbell and motion detectors and monitoring feeds—they all spy on you and listen to every word you say, even when you think they are off. This isn’t a shock—most people know this. The problem for big tech has always been what to do with all that stored raw data, how to sort it and make it profitable or at least useful.

Or conversely, is it any worse than spilling your guts to a paid therapist—or talking to yourself? We all have constant inner monologues going on in our heads. We all have imaginary conversations with superior beings or dead loved ones. Is it any crazier to have these conversations with a nearly flawless AI replica of the man you loved?

These are either deep philosophical questions or delusional self-rationalizations.

You Americans don’t really know poor. You have no idea what poor is. We wouldn’t eat for days, until it feels like your stomach is stuck to your spine.

You in the West think you have problems. I see it on social media now. People seeking”—she

self-help, whatever that means. Self-care. Searching for, ugh, fulfillment. Whining, complaining, not feeling satisfied with their perfect lives.” Nadia shakes her head in disgust. “How come starving people never need self-help or self-care? If you really want to cure your sleep anxiety over… over I don’t know what… try not eating for five days in a row. Try sleeping on a dirt floor in the winter with no heat. Then let’s see how much you worry about ‘fulfillment’ in your big house with two cars in the driveway.”

“Greed isn’t what you think it is.” His voice is thick with drink, or maybe that’s just sadness. “What do you mean?” “The problem is, you can’t go back. You can try. But human nature never lets you. Wherever you are, that becomes ground zero. Greed is not ‘I need more’—it’s the fear of losing what you already have. Of going back. So you hold on tighter and keep trying to climb up. Because that’s the only way you can go. Life won’t let you stand still. You are either on your way up or you’re on your way down. And you’ll do anything not to go down.”

That’s what we stupid humans do. We carry the seeds of our own self-destruction.

There is no such thing as a consequence-free discovery. It is what man chooses to do with it.

The end of the dream, if this is a dream, is always the most painful.

Somehow, she both knows he is dead and yet completely accepts that he is alive. Yes, this makes no sense, but that’s true of most dreams when you analyze them.

‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.’”

“Nothing ever stays stagnant in life. The world is in constant

the poor man wants to be rich, the rich man wants to be king, and the king ain’t satisfied until he rules everything.

Appreciate the connection, as fleeting as it might have been. It’s so damn human.

Life is always a high school cafeteria.

“The dead are dead,” Porkchop says. “You’re not supposed to get over it. You’re supposed to live with it.”

“All comfort is false, when you think about it. That’s almost the definition.”

“Sometimes a crutch is all you need.” “In the short term. You can’t keep using a crutch.” Sharon tilts her head. “Why not?” Porkchop doesn’t have an answer to that. “We all have crutches,” Sharon says. “We all have something to numb or distract or get us through the day.

Grief doesn’t attack her on Marc’s birthday or their anniversary or any of that. Grief knows you are expecting it on those days. So Grief bides its time. It lulls you, makes you think it’s not such a threat anymore, and then when your defenses are down—when a plane simply starts down a runway, for example—boom, it attacks.

“Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex—no one knows what we are really thinking, what we are capable of—and yet we are convinced we can read other people. We think that we know what’s going on inside others, what they are really feeling or experiencing or thinking, but they can’t tell the same about us. That’s obviously impossible.

As always. It’s just the bike and the road. Forget massages. Forget aromatherapy or hydrotherapy or saunas or body wraps or hot tubs. This is peace and isolation and freedom.