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It’s much better to get in trouble than it is to be a robot, because the effects of being a robot are difficult to remove.
Anyway—there is no stealing because you can’t own anything, so stealing isn’t stealing, it’s just taking something that you can use. However—if someone puts their life into something, then maybe you shouldn’t take it.
There is a rule also about being considerate, which is basically just making sure to have empathy.
Most people can’t keep all the lies straight—and they end up believing everything. I promise myself every day that won’t happen to me.
Maybe you can see from this that I am quite familiar with being in detention. Matter of fact, I feel like I have always been in detention. I am an old veteran of detention, like one of Napoleon’s soldiers limping back from the battle of Moscow. No, not like them—they were chumps. More like—one of the girls who died in the Triangle Fire looking out the window and realizing it is too far to jump, then jumping.
My aunt was always telling me—never accept any privileges that are for girls, because it is only half the coin.
To explain: there are two stores that sell the licorice I like. One of them, I can steal from. The other I have to have money. Now, my aunt has almost no money, so I can’t use the almost no money she has to buy licorice. That means, I only get licorice when Green Gully has it. They are a fancy supermarket, which means they charge so much they don’t need to have proper security.
if you are a young woman, there are many people who want to do things to you that they enjoy doing to young women, so if someone is interesting for other purposes, it can be good to use them for those other purposes and avoid the things that anyone could do.
One thing about perspicaciousness is that it doesn’t have to be allied to traditional knowledge structures. It’s just good clean insight. I aspire to be a perspicacious person, like a carpenter who knows which one of the beams is important.
If a guy is a pariah, there is no reason to ever talk to him, societally. But if a girl is a pariah, there is still one reason. How fucked-up is that?
The trouble is—the someone else you are okay with being isn’t anyone you know. So, who is it?
to enter the sweet land of fiction, think about something outside of yourself. Then imagine yourself inside the thing. Then that is a story. I have no intention of entering the sweet land of fiction, wherever that is.
We want to have nothing that we cannot share. We want to have an empathy that says: it would hurt me to have a thing that others cannot have.
Wealth squeezes us, the wealthy squeeze us and squeeze us, until we cannot even help one another as we would naturally do, as it is already in our hearts to do.
Here is the best thing to do: arrange to begin a new life for yourself that is disconnected from the life that you have hitherto led. You will go away. You will know no one that you previously knew. You will use a new name. You will live by a skill that you previously did not display. Then, when you go to set your fire, you go as yourself, as you always go, in the costume you always wear. Then, the person who is discovered is you, but only the one you have been in the past. That person, insomuch as he/she may be found in the world, by her habits, by her dress, by her occupation, by her circle,
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The governments of the world would like very much for you to make the distinction between civilian and military targets. This is interesting because they do not make that distinction when they wage their class warfare upon us.
There are no military targets. Likewise, there are no civilian targets. These are abstract ideas that are part of a nineteenth-century framework. We are not sitting with frock coats at a Geneva Convention talking about war as the wealthy would like to wage it (on the backs of the poor). We are not talking about the war that is convenient for them.
Do not be in a hurry. Remember—there is all of your life prior to the great fire you will set, and all of your life thereafter. That transition will require grace, thoroughness, and a deep compassion that stiffens into an unbreakable resolve. If it takes you some years to become the person who can burn a building, so be it. Carry your matches in your pocket, look at the faces of those who surround you in the crowd. Are we not all the same? Do we not all strive to simply have enough?
Curious people aren’t necessarily good at learning what you want them to learn, though. They are too busy learning about other things.
One guy even tattooed it on his leg. Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what it’s like to hear something like that? To hear someone say something and feel the world ripple around you?
We’re just not permanent at all, not the way we want to be. Something happens, maybe even something small, something no one even notices, and next thing you know someone is spooning porridge in your mouth and maybe you like it. Next thing you know someone is wheeling you into a room with carpeted walls.
Helplessness: it’s our essential condition with regard to the future, no?
A person writes down what has happened in order to know it. Then a person can find the way forward.
