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I don’t like mysteries, which is why I want to solve them. It bothers me that there are things I don’t know.
The last big deadly human influenza epidemic in the world was in 1918. There were about twenty million dead worldwide, including five hundred thousand in the United States. Based on our present population, the equivalent number of dead now would be approximately one and a half million people. Could you imagine such a thing today? And the 1918 virus wasn’t particularly virulent, and of course, travel was much slower then and less frequent.
Paranoia’s kind of fun if it doesn’t eat up too much time and doesn’t get you off the track. I mean, if you’re having a routine day, you can make believe someone’s trying to kill you, or otherwise fuck you up, then you can play little games, like using the remote car ignition, imagining someone’s tapped your phone, or tampered with your weapon. Some crazy people make up imaginary friends who tell them to kill people. Other crazy people make up imaginary enemies who are trying to kill them. The latter, I think, is a little less crazy and a lot more useful.
Sometimes things don’t make sense while they’re happening, but after a period of time or after an incident or whatever, then the significance of what was done or said is clear. Right?
my mind clear, the disappointments and worries of yesterday put in their proper perspective. I was rested and eager to do battle.
Sometimes if you don’t ask questions, the person you’re interviewing gets fidgety and starts to babble to fill in the silence.
He seemed to mull something over; I can tell when a man is mulling, and I never interrupt a muller.
But my experience with fuel gauges—ever since I had my first car—was that they show either more fuel than you have left, or less fuel than you have left. I didn’t know how this gauge lied, but I would soon find out.
A century ago, people occasionally came to a crossroads in their lives and had to choose a direction. Today, we live inside of microchips with a million paths opening and closing every nanosecond. What’s worse, someone else is pushing the buttons.
That’s life. The meaning of life has not much to do with good and evil, right and wrong, duty, honor, country, or any of that. It has to do with cutting the right deal.
