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No one chooses to become a banker. It just happens, like cancer, and then you try to live with it for as long as you can.
The money buys the drugs, the drugs work harder and harder to trick your blackened dopamine receptors into giving a damn about living. At some point you make a choice: fight your need the rest of your goddamned long-suffering life, or fill your need until it disappears into the grave with you.
Every time I veered from the ugly truth into a version of the story more amenable to the survival of my ego, I noticed their eyes squinting, their lips tightening. Tim and Dara were ace lie detectors. I was mostly untrained at selling my delusions to anyone other than myself. It was frustrating.
our reality sat on the narrowest precipice above an endless void. We were meat to the grinder, fucked beyond unfuckability.
Most of those deaths stemmed from occupational hazards. You get paid to murder, don’t act surprised when it’s your turn for a dirt nap. Or if you sell fucked-up drugs and make tweekers show you their junk, sometimes a giant mutant eats your brains. That’s the streets.
“You worked for the bank, right? You must understand the immense power of self-serving delusion.”
“We have no name. Something named is more easily defined, infiltrated, and broken. Our desire is to function outside of any rigid structure—to simply exist, in as low-profile a way as is possible, as a counterbalance, until the blessed day when we are no longer needed.”
“Nothing’s real. It’s just the things you think you know. Perception is a web of lies that helps our bodies float through space.”
“Any law which runs counter to the good of man is no law at all.”
It is impossible to understand the heart’s strength until you wrap your hands around one fighting its own death.
