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History was a chain, and many of the links were wet with blood.
everybody lost everybody. They all lost their mothers, their fathers, their sisters and uncles and husbands and kids. If you’re alive, you are alone but for the kin of despair and destruction. We are not a nation anymore. There is no America. There is only this one big family: a family of death, a family of disease, a family of survivors. We can love one another or we can eat one another. Same as any family.
Either that, or we just follow the doc and we shit in her geraniums. I don’t even care what she did, I’m ride or die for you, bitch, you know that.”
That’s humanity. That’s people. I got mine, you can’t have any of it, and if you even look at me sideways I’ll put a bullet in you.”
But there would be another, she knew. There was always someone like that out there, ready to ride their hate like a horse and gallop right over anybody who wasn’t like them, who had what they wanted. Someone always wanted to bathe in blood.
“When we’re good to each other, the world is good, Marcy. It’s as simple as a sunset. We help them, they help us. If we can’t live like that, then what’s the point of living at all?”
I’m just a witness, wayward and alone. A watcher, separate from what exists.
We’re back to monkeys now. Just fancy primates fumbling through a world we nearly fucked to hell. That old world is lost and I’ve no interest in trying to find
The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness. —Robert Green Ingersoll
“Plenty of people find you a bit…tough to deal with.” “Hurtful again,” he said and meant it. “Apologies again. Long day plus whiskey.”
Benji took a sip and tried to pretend it didn’t taste like he was drinking an old library book, pulverized to dust and mixed with mulch and hot water.
Nothing is forever.” “Coffee should be forever.”
Priming that fear engine was key to the campaign’s success. And that meant the internet. The internet—the saying went that a lie traveled halfway around the world by the time the truth got its pants on, and the internet only made that faster. The internet gave wings to every lie, while the truth was stuck on the tarmac.
He was Pete Corley. He’d make it work. One time he did a show with a lipstick tube full of cocaine up his ass, Viagra coursing through his bloodstream, and a rent boy’s pubic hair caught in the back of his throat. He’d make it fucking work.
Turned out, when civilization burned down to the wick, time ceased to be measured the same. Day was day and night was night, but it all sort of flowed together like melted crayons.
Rage roared through her like a reaping wind.
Idiots were useful tools. You didn’t want a shovel to think. You just wanted to hold it tight and use it to move earth.
It’s like a broken mirror, this country. Shattered all over the ground. Some shards, they’ll show you something pretty: the sun, a smiling face, a bird above. Some of those pieces are pointed in the wrong direction, and all you see in them is something ugly.”
It’s a world of cults. Believers worshipping a god, a town, a father, a mother, an idea, a book, a beast, everywhere, a new group praying to some new thing.
what remains true is that many died not from the disease but from our failing to handle it.
don’t even get me started on chocolate. I wouldn’t not club you with this metal napkin dispenser for a bar of good dark chocolate.” She shrugged. “See, I’d murder your ass for Skittles.” “Well, now, I didn’t say murder, I just mentioned a casual bludgeoning. You’re the one who had to upgrade it to murder.”
hope right now, just as I’m keeping this diner and this little town running, there’s someone in Ecuador or Ethiopia still running their family’s coffee plantation. That’s what it takes. People sticking around, doing the work.” “I suppose that’s how communities form in the wake of disasters. They find the purity of a role and choose to fill it. A life of simplicity and purpose, uncomplicated by…” “By all the bullshit of the old world.”
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.”
what we give to the world is our service, and what we give to ourselves is our purpose.
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.”
Nazis are like cockroaches and mosquitoes—they survive some shit. They blame everyone but themselves. Hate is their virus, and that one will never go away.
I also fear she’s the final column holding up all of our reality. Bowie gone, Prince dead, we cannot lose Dolly.”
It was a town of broken teeth and empty eyes. White Mask had gone through this place like a pale-cloaked reaper, swinging a scythe blade of stolen lives and lost minds.
“You’re a good man, Hogan.” “No, sir, I am not. But I do get shit done.”
A swarm, but not a mind. Deeply simple. Humbly elegant. Essentially: art. Nature was amazing. Nature was also terrible. Terrible because it was so, so mystifying. The human body, the most mystifying of them all.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: I loved you when I met you, I love you now, and I love you in the future tense. Even gone from this world, I will love you, and I want that love to echo back and forth through time, till it finds you in every moment. I want you to remember me from tonight. I felt clear tonight. I felt good. (The wine didn’t hurt.) It felt good to be with you this last time. I’m sorry it’s like this. But I know if I wait, I’ll do something untoward. And I can’t have that. I can’t have that being the memory of me you keep. Don’t worry about where I’m going. I’ve always
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He wiped his nose with a black handkerchief he pulled from his jeans. “See? Look at us. Two manly men, pushing back on toxic masculinity, weeping at one another, loving each other un-fucking-abashedly. I mean, okay, one of them is gay as a three-dollar-bill but honestly I think being gay is even more manly, because it’s like, whomp, double-dicks, extra dick energy—”
Gumball did as she said. Because Good Dogs listen to their true pack, woof.
Gumball knew that cats were not to be trusted.
Black Swan is a fire, a river, a scream, a tectonic break—it is cracking teeth and a thousand fists and a million biting flies. Dragon and serpent and great Humbaba and Grendel’s mother. Behemoth, Leviathan. It is fury and grief; it is petulance and wrath. It is everything all at once.
They were once again on their own. Alone, but together. Walking without a plan, despair at their heels. And who knew what waiting ahead.
Basically Nazis. Or some variation thereof. Buncha white-hood white-pride Proud Boy dickheads.
Once upon a time, he’d felt guilt—guilt over surviving, yes, but also guilt over seeing how the world had changed and feeling at peace with it. He’d seen some value in the clarity and the purity of a quieter world, one…less choked by its human presence. But now… Now all he had was anger. He’d once regarded his survival as a kind of gift, but now it felt like a curse. The future was dirt, him and all of it chewed through by worm and ant and invasive root.
Nobody ever says, well, what a fun anomaly, do they? It’s always UFOs and cancer shadows. It’s never, oh, look, my adorable new puppy shits out gold coins, what a delightful anomaly.”
This was Pete’s ultimate, final form: He was the party bard.
“There’s no faith to be had in something that’s right in front of you.”
Grief is like a cut in a strange place. You never know when you’re going to bump into it, make it hurt again.”
A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain’s pleasure centers. If you don’t provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you’ll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it’s a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you’ve got it right. —James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
‘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.”
“It’s Nazis, even if they’re not calling themselves Nazis. It’s why the Indiana Jones movies with Nazis are better than the Indiana Jones movies without Nazis. It’s why Star Wars works, because Space Nazis. Everybody knows Nazis are the ones who show up to shit in your soup.”
He had that craving. The craving to do fuckery. Pete was not very good at denying his cravings. So fuckery he would do.
“I’ll play some Kid Rock,” Pete lied, because he’d pound his balls into pizza dough before playing that asshole’s hee-haw quote-unquote rap.
Inside you are two wolves, and both of them are very confused about everything all of the time. So for the most part, give people a break when you can. Everybody deserves a bit of leash. Except for Nazis. Fuck Nazis. Only leash they get is the one you use to strangle ’em.
IT’S DOG TIME, SO WHO THE HELL KNOWS
I was drawing a summoning circle and conjuring my demons within that boundary, so they would be held firm there while I kicked the absolute shit out of them.
