More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The truth never makes sense unless you force it to, just like anything.
Flatworms beneath my skin. An encroaching loss of language.
And he squeezed my hand in his and we sat there in the grass, watching the pines turn to fireworks.
Below, the lights looked like jellyfish and fireflies, and just then I decided I wanted to be buried at sea.
We’d eat bars and drink in the crackling bit-crushed oblivion, the splattered clusters of pixel and polygon. It mattered to us tremendously. We were children. We ditched our bikes and started running.
All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I’d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you’ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn’t miss me.
Vultures swam above in muggy beige and blue light and everyone around me felt as hollow as balloons.
As far as science has determined, our “self” is nothing more than a product of nerves and neurons and hormones and chemicals. From that foundation, the question becomes many: What forces are we unable to sense that nonetheless influence our existence? Is it possible for us to become aware of these forces? And, perhaps most terribly, what do these forces intend for us? Most of us would likely prefer
The sun drowned behind the mountains and the sky went bloody then black.
The other kids on the field laughed and sang along while coyotes wailed from the mountains.
He turned, his eyes saying about a million words but none I understood.
He told me the planet had nerve endings. Sprawling out toward stars they’d never touch.
Someday I’ll wake up and it’ll be like my life’s already over, because it’ll be dozens of years from now already and I’m still the same. Sets of mirrors facing each other, expanding space and me and every moment I’ve been here. Nobody knows me, because I haven’t left anything for them, and I can’t stand to look half of them in the eye.
The most important thing anyone can know is this: just by existing, by inhabiting this planet and space, we are put into communion with entities we cannot begin to understand, in manners we cannot begin to understand. We float on the surface of an unfathomable ocean, and though we may stick our hands, our feet, our faces beneath, we can never go much farther without drowning. Once made aware of this, a man can no longer see the Earth as a sphere. It is a serpent. It is a length of rope, forever curling around our persons.
How much does a thought weigh? While no one would deny the substance, the physicality, the realness of those qualities grouped under the banner of endosemiotics—cells, hormones, nerves, etc.—psychosemiotics is generally considered to belong to the realms of the subjective and physically insubstantial. This, however, has already been disproven. Using the neuron model for consciousness, physicists have determined that a thought (defined as a piece of information), when converted from neuro electricity to mass, possesses weight roughly equal to that of a water molecule. And regardless of its
...more
He said that God was unpredictable; that God didn’t even know we were here.
A sucking torrent, roaring like ocean waves crashing through rocks. Tides sucking my insides away, into a vast hole filled with stars and suns. A place I’ll never see.
Time compresses the older you get. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to seasons turn to years, until your life resides in just one moment expanding forever, where each step and breath folds wrinkles into your face, carving minute, irreversible wounds between your joints. Pressing down the notches between your spine, driving your ankles and knees to ruin. I feel it now and it’ll only be worse in the future.
The future pushed forward. Max went frail and splintered and perished (he went to sleep and stopped breathing). I took over his shop with his boyfriend, until he went frail and splintered and perished. Then it was me and Eugene, until he went frail and splintered and perished. The polar bears went extinct. East Boston sunk beneath the ocean. The west coast burned to cinder. Thousands died in a tube shot through space, floating frozen and static forever. I’m still here. Here for some time.
He goes on for hours, maybe days, and when he finishes he slow dissipates, like a mind falling asleep, or a star collapsing, and I wake up in an alabaster room, to a dot on the wall speaking to me.
An ocean of gold. The most beautiful creatures I couldn’t begin to imagine. A spinning disk.
Every color at once. I’m glad I’m alone. With all of my dreams.
