Wayward (Wanderers, #2)

by Chuck Wendig

Shana thought absurdly, What if Skynet didn’t make the Terminators and just made John Connor, instead?

Sign me up

don’t know if my depression is gone, or if I’m the one that’s gone and it’s only the depression that is left behind.

Truth was, Marcy never felt particularly cautious when talking to other people—she knew that for some people conversation was like a dance. You engaged in a certain way, you had to know the steps, you really had to be careful not to stomp on somebody else’s feet. But to Marcy, it was less a delicate dance and more a barn door she had to break through like a trapped

“I believe in God. Still.” He wobbled a little on the saddle. “I just don’t know that God has our best interests in mind. I always understood the brutality of the Old Testament as a metaphor—the world was brutal and so their grasp of it was equally brutal, you know? The New Testament gave us a reckoning with that, and showed us a God who believed in forgiveness and love. But now, looking out at the world, I’m not so sure anymore. I think the God I believed in, or believe in now, is that Old Testament one. The fire-and-flood guy. The one who lets disasters happen and evil flourish in order to make a point.” “That’s kinda dark.” He shrugged. “Not too far out of line with what modern evangelical thought had become, sadly. Selfish people in awe of a selfish deity.”

This is all a simulation run by JFK jr and Epstein to keep us docile while they fuck and eat our children dude that’s just Dipshit Matrix vibes Fuck off cuck pedo ok boomer

You want to know the truth of the thing? It’s that there’s always a segment of people who want to be controlled. They like it. It’s easy, for starters. And it makes them feel special—which, I know, runs counter to how the rest of us think, but we foolishly like to imagine everyone wants free will, that they cherish their autonomy. But that’s wrong. They don’t. Some feel like they’ve been chosen to serve at the feet of dictators and autocrats. As if it’s a place of privilege. Some people really, really want to be told what to do, even as they think themselves mavericks, patriots, free-thinkers. They don’t see the hypocrisy. They feel the tug of the leash and think it’s the call of freedom.

Motion in silence Drastic times beyond this world Flags drift softly still —Black Swan’s first poem, a haiku it called “Wet Disguisement of Unsimulated Bone, Mouse Flight of Nationalism”

A family is just the cult you were born into.

I think good rock’n’roll has always had this ability to be transcendent. A song might be about losing your gal or whatever other misfortune has come your way…but the best stuff takes your hand and helps you dance through the apocalypse. I’d like to think that’s what we’re trying to do. —Mike Dirnt, bassist for Green Day

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” “Hindsight is, I wish the year 2020 never happened,” she said. “Not humanity’s best year, no.”

But the world goes to hell in high heels, you start to re-evaluate things. You start to think, I got this moment right here. I don’t have yesterday, and no promise of tomorrow. I have this moment stuck between all the other moments, so I might as well live here instead of in a day that’s gone, or a day that might never come.”

The old world nonsense obscured something important: At heart, what we give to the world is our service, and what we give to ourselves is our purpose. For most people, especially back then in the old bullshit, all they did was give service. They worked and worked and worked, but for what? For scraps. For nothing. For a forgotten life and an oh-well death. Unless you had privilege, then what you had was purpose, but didn’t do the work. But now, all that’s been stripped away and I see it clear: For the world to progress, for it to heal, we must see clear to both of those things. Our service and our purpose must be two circles perfectly overlapping. What we give to the world must be the work that defines us. Meaning we give ourselves to the world to make it better. We don’t just work to work. But we don’t just let our destiny die on the vine.”

I hope she never dies. Though she damn sure deserves her saintly rest, I also fear she’s the final column holding up all of our reality. Bowie gone, Prince dead, we cannot lose Dolly.”

But Dolly doesn’t do that. Dolly, she set traps. No, no, I mean it, traps. Pits, usually. Pits they fall into and can’t get out of. And now you’re thinking, That’s dark, that doesn’t sound very Dolly Parton, her going around, digging holes and dropping Nazis in ’em, but that’s what she did. They fall in there and she keeps them there, but it’s not as grim as it sounds. She tries to rehabilitate them. She gives them food and water and sings to them, reads to them from—well, the Bible, the Quran, some Buddha shit, some poetry, and she tries to help them be better. Sometimes they get better, and she helps them out of the hole. I met a few. They work for her now. Devoted as hell. I personally subscribe to how it is in that Tarantino movie: The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. But Dolly, she’s magic. She can bring anybody back from the brink. Not sure anybody else can, or should try. But Dolly’s not like you or me, is she?”

Giving it all to God was his greatest failure.

you realize either God doesn’t care and is horrible, or He doesn’t exist, or He has plans that are so…so bizarre, so Byzantine and inhuman we can never hope to understand them much less preach them to other people as if it makes any sort of sense at all—”

Until we disentangle fundamental needs and rights from someone’s ability to charge us for it, capitalism will continue to throw us over the cliff’s edge. This is how the world ends: not with a bang, but a ka-ching. —Afzad Kerman in his TED Talk, “Chaos and Crisis: The Accidental Ingenuity of the Almost-Apocalypse”

“ ‘The Gambler,’ I’ll have you know, is Kenny Rogers. Every father knows the lyrics to that song. It’s given to them by an angel upon the birth of their first child.” “My dad did really love that song,” Shana said.

As it turns out, art is almost never born of happiness. It tickles different emotional strings.

And I thought it was worth talking for a moment how I came to actually write it, given that writing felt difficult—even impossible. I did it by resting. I did it by giving myself the time to rest. I did it by treating myself gently and practicing the kind of self-care that isn’t just “eat ice cream, you deserve it” (though I did eat ice cream whether or not I deserved it) but instead added up to something less indulgent and more stern. It was the kind of self-care that said I need to do this, and not doing it would not be kind to myself.