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transplanted L.A. with lawns and palms and people living on someone else’s stolen water. It’s supposed to be a desert, not a sprawling vanity garden.
You can’t ask people to give up personal, tangible comforts for some ethereal ideal.
Selfless suffering feels good for short crusades, but as a way of life, it’s unsustainable.
eighteenth-century French philosopher. He believed that early humans were essentially good, but when humanity began to urbanize, separating themselves from nature, they separated from their own nature as well.
Denial is an irrational dismissal of danger. Phobia is an irrational fear of one.
Goddamn “Black Hole Sun.”
“And there she is,” said Yvette, “waiting with open arms.” And then she said a word I’d never heard before. The name of who, what, was waiting for me. Oma. Guardian of the wilderness. Yvette explained that Oma was a spirit of the First Peoples, a gentle giant that arrogant Eurocentric white men have perverted into the name “Bigfoot.”
if FEMA hadn’t been folded into the Department of Homeland Security,
if the president was competent and the media was responsible,
Constant variable.
It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl.
All positivity all the time. Learn to fly, even if it’s in the Hindenburg. Move fast and break things.
A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL,
“suspending UAV supply drops.”
Honey, that's you....
the things they’re asking. It can’t be true that rescuers are focusing on “corporate assets” like Boeing and Microsoft. They can’t be choosing rich neighborhoods like Queen Anne over middle-class ones like Enumclaw.
She's really rather naive.
The business model of America’s food industry is same-day delivery of farm fresh ingredients. But what happens when the delivery trucks don’t come?
The whole country rests on a system that sacrifices resilience for comfort.
Of course they’re hungry. But so are we! Spinning on this makes me wonder if these cute little critters aren’t actually more dangerous than a bear. After all, if they’re eating our food supply, aren’t they threatening us with starvation? Death by competition.
“Injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you. That’s why most weapons of war are designed to injure instead of kill. Wounded are more of a drain than the dead.”
“This is when, as the saying goes, adversity introduces us to ourselves.”*1
I remember reading somewhere that perception of height is distorted by positions of authority.
This rather makes sense.
“Need. That’s what makes a village. That’s what we are now, and what holds us together is need. I won’t help you if you don’t help me. That is the social contract.”
knowing you saw something is different from knowing what you saw.
I think the human mind isn’t comfortable with mysteries. We’re always looking for answers to the unexplained.
Too paranoid? “Siri, should we be worried?”
Always looking out for themselves. Our community.
“People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.”
dawned on me how vulnerable our house, all houses, really are. They’re not built for physical safety. That’s what cops are for.
I heard a theory once that if aliens ever do come calling, they may very well be hostile, because the same brains that mastered spaceflight learned to think by hunting.
In the animal world, it’s called “prey switching,” where a predator ends up developing a preference for a certain food source simply because it’s more abundant than their traditional prey.
“They never warn you,” she breathed, “they always come in before the sirens.” I heard her sniff, hard, then cough. “Never get caught in the open, always away from the doors. The old streets are best, narrow. They shield you from shrapnel.” More cryptic Mostar-isms.
Why? Why are we always looking for someone else to save us instead of trying to save ourselves?
Whenever someone said “Good luck” or “Godspeed,” I only heard “Better you than me.”
“They never listen. No matter what you say, sooner or later someone always tries to run the blockade.” And she muttered something in her native language,
both the Mount St. Helens attack and the bombardment of Greenloop
So he's making a history of Bigfoot massacres here.
finish the perimeter.
Why aren't they consolidating space and move to the common house?
Denial. Hope. Xanax.
A’oodhu bi kalimaat Allaah al-taammaati min sharri maa khalaq. I seek refuge in the perfect words of Allah from the evil of that which He has created. —Sahih Muslim, Hadith 2708
Professor Tongun, from Sudan, “Like a tree in the forest, America doesn’t hear foreign suffering.”
Amazing how your perception of a space can change so quickly. If I’d been invited into Reinhardt’s kitchen two weeks ago, I might have just thought about the décor (or lack thereof). Then, when I came in with Dan a few days ago, all I could think about was what there was to eat. Now all I could think about was what I could use to defend myself. Same room, different priorities.
Grant that we may lie down in Peace, Eternal God, and awaken us to life. Shelter us with Your tent of peace and guide us with Your good counsel. Shield us from hatred, plague and destruction. Keep us from war, famine and anguish. Help us to deny our inclination to evil. God of peace, may we always feel protected because You are our Guardian and Helper. Give us refuge in the shadow of your wings. Guard our going forth and our coming in and bless us with life and peace. Blessed are You, Eternal God, whose shelter of peace is spread over us, over all Your people, Israel and over Jerusalem. —The
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“I’m saying,” I shot back, “that it’s suicidal to waste time deconstructing the Versailles Treaty the morning AFTER Kristallnacht!”
“You claim to defend our traditional homeland yet the method of your defense is exactly what lost that land to begin with.”
Hmmmm....current events by Israel.
but when they’re coming for you, when you know they’re coming, when they won’t listen and it’s too late to even run, you have to defend yourself. You have to fight!”
Adversity introduces us to ourselves.
All these overeducated, isolated city dwellers who idealize the natural world. And they don’t stop with animals.
They all want to live “in harmony with nature” before some of them realize, too late, that nature is anything but harmonious.
According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
I’m good at apologizing. Specialization.
Zulu spear. The sound it made sliding from the wound: IKLWA
