What the Hell Did I Just Read (John Dies at the End, #3)

by David Wong

Or, in her final moment, had she gotten just a glimpse of just how little of a shit the universe gives about her? Did she have the realization that what she had always thought of as a normal human life was just a tightrope walk over an ocean of unfathomable suffering?

“You want sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.”

Amy had long ago learned the secret to reading people’s minds, a mystical two-step process that involved 1) shutting her mouth and 2) listening to what they say. People will scream their secrets if you just give them a chance. Even the liars can’t resist letting the truth ooze through the gaps.

The people with health insurance get antidepressants and Adderall, the rich get cocaine, the clean-living Christians settle for mug after mug of coffee and all-you-can-eat buffets. The reality is that society had gotten too fast, noisy, and stressful for the human brain to process and everybody was ingesting something to either keep up or dull the shame of falling behind. For those few who truly live clean, well, it’s the self-righteousness that gets them high.

Whether you “see” the universe as pure or corrupt, peaceful or violent, just or unjust, is largely determined by what you need to believe in order to motivate yourself to continue living for another day.

They just do not grasp the fact that they do not believe based on what they observe; they observe based on what they have been tricked into believing. And so it goes for all of us.

you want to see where the devil lives, you look in your own heart.

The assholes throw themselves into a fire, but then your happiness is ruined because they get burned. They use your sympathy against you. That’s the final trick of Hell—its fire burns everyone.”

Witches, they were just any elderly women in the village who never got married—the men decided they were old and ugly and worthless and so they blamed them for every disease and bad batch of crops. Just burned them alive, no family to come to their defense. They didn’t have witch hunts because they believed in witches. They believed in witches so they could have witch hunts.”

You see that oak tree, by the parking lot? That tree is a murderer, it would commit genocide if it could. Those leaves serve two purposes—to collect sunlight to nourish the tree, and to block sunlight from anything below it. Its height is a result of competition—growing taller than the plants next to it, getting between them and the sun. Starving them out. When you stroll through a tranquil forest, you are actually walking through a battlefield—it’s just that the attacks and counterattacks occur too slowly and quietly for you to perceive their ruthlessness. Do you enjoy the smell of fresh cut grass? What you are smelling is a chemical panic signal, released by each blade in the moment its head was severed.

Amy is my constant, she is the only reason I continue to do any of this. If she’s not real then my life isn’t real and I’m not real and nothing matters anyway. If she’s a monster then I’ll take her home and hug her and we’ll be monsters together.

“Society is nothing more than people cooperating with other people they’d much rather murder.

“If a spider walks onto your bed, you squish it. If a butterfly lands on your bed, you take a picture. Is the butterfly ‘doing something to your brain’? If I didn’t make myself look like this, I would already be dead. You kill everything that doesn’t have pretty wings.”

I want to find the jerk who convinced males that martyrdom is cool and kick him in the teeth.”

I’ve been here a million times, you know I have, and that anger, it’s the rage of a kid getting dragged out of a warm bed on a cold morning. That’s all it is. Because that depression, it’s the most comfy bed in the world and you will say whatever you have to say to stay in it for one more minute. But there’s people out here who love you a lot, telling you that there’s a truck heading for that bed. And if you can’t work up any concern for your own life, then think of it like this. Somebody Amy and I care about a whole lot is about to get hit by that truck and only you can save them. The person we need you to save just happens to be you. Also, the truck is filled with shit, I don’t know if I mentioned that.”

“Of course it’s the way you are. But having really hairy legs is the way I am, and I still shave them regularly. In our natural state, we’re all smelly, sticky, angry creatures nobody would even pay to look at in a zoo. We’re all at war with that awful, primitive version of ourselves, every day. You’re scared. I get it. You’re scared you’re going to get cured and suddenly be this corny, boring person. Well, I have good news—there is no cure.