An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

by Hank Green

Manhattan is less legit than it once was, for sure, but this is still the city that never sleeps. It is also the city of “Behold the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.”

Being annoyed by carefully crafted internet personas was part of my carefully crafted internet persona.

neat. It’s way more efficient to do occasional dedicated cleanups than constant maintenance. Plus, my mind likes clutter. It’s almost like I need to make the world around me messy to make my art and ideas neat.

“Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,”

“Skamper2001,” which I named when I was eleven and am going to regret for literally the rest of my life. Final proposal . . . we should collaborate on future videos about Carl(s), but we can talk about that later.

Written,’ ‘released’ . . .” She thought for a second before poking her head into the bathroom. “‘Album’ and ‘August.’” “I, A, M, U,” I said.

Much of the best art is about balancing between reflecting culture while simultaneously being removed from it and commenting on it. In

@AprilMaybeNot: On my way to LA and got bumped to business class. My little plane TV is broken though, so I want the money I didn’t spend back! I was virtually a social media celebrity now, and so I had to let the entire world know every time I experienced any inconvenience!

be worried about?” “When you’re faced with something you don’t understand, I think the most natural thing but also the least interesting thing you can be is afraid,”

than-average life. It’s so built-in that people mostly don’t realize how powerful they are. Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world. But, to them, they feel completely average.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Occam’s razor but, basically, it’s a principle that the simplest solution tends to be the correct one. It’s BS. If there’s an objective measure of simplicity (outside of, like, entropic ones), I haven’t seen it. Every person will have a different opinion regarding which explanation is simplest. So when I say that the “external origin” hypothesis is the simple one, that’s informed by my bias. But I also recognize that it’s the least likely, just because so far there have been a lot of things that have happened, and “external origin” has never been the reason.

“Is that a good thing to be? Shouldn’t, like, the president be three steps ahead and not a bunch of . . . whatever-we-ares?”

If it looked natural from the outside to you, well, then I guess we did a good job.

You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.

Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it. If I

“Carl just had too much mass—we couldn’t stop falling into his gravity any more than we could jump to the moon.”

showed up in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the city’s major tourist spots and probably the most heavily trafficked pedestrian spot in LA. Not only that, but it’s a place frequented by street performers and phony costumed superheroes charging twenty dollars per photo.

April May, former pet detective, dairy-supply heiress, initiator of First Contact with space aliens, video blogger, and patient zero for the first and only known infectious dream. And also . . . terrible girlfriend.

Basically, do your best to mock and deride their connection to and appreciation of you because, deep down, you dislike yourself enough that you cannot imagine anyone worthwhile actually wanting to be with you. I mean, if they like you, there must be something wrong with them, right?

You’re probably going to hate me in a couple of pages, and I’m giving you a well-rounded understanding of my psychological turbulence so that you will hate me less.

But in the back of my brain, I also knew I had been infected by an impossible dream, and that most space alien movies ended with wars.

The Dream seemed to be a harmless call for people across this planet to work together.

I’m honestly worried, because I think we’re just starting to get used to the impact that the social internet is having on us culturally and emotionally and socially. It wasn’t exactly bringing us together before this, right?

What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? The Dream, in that sense, was very, very real.

Dehumanization is usually a metaphor, but for a certain segment of folks, it had become reality. I was not human.

They didn’t ask that because I sure as hell didn’t stab myself in the back, and when a radical extremist stabs someone in the back, the only person at fault is the radical extremist.

“Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. Carl has amazing taste in music.

I was addicted to the attention and to the outrage and to the rush of being involved in something so huge, but more than any of that I was just addicted.

No one could explain what had happened to our minds to make the Dream possible, and if people could find a reason to be scared, they would be.

I’ve been reading April’s books. She’s got a biography of Rodin that starts out with this line: ‘Fame, after all, is but the sum of all the misunderstandings which gather about a new name.’ I think she read that line a lot of times. Carl was always a canvas on which people would project their values and their hopes and their fears. April is going to become that now.