Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

The threads around the hem lost their grip on things.

I can see from the smirk on her face that this isn’t her first late-night rodeo. She’s been around. She’s danced on water in life’s late hours.

“Life’s chaos,” the woman says, sounding suddenly like an oracle. “It’s all just a runaway mule hell-bent on destruction.”

Reality as a whole—past or present—just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion. There are better ways and places to spend your time.

a sleepy, small southern town in a sleepy, small southern county with a long history of strawberry production and lynchings.

Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that’s what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we’ve invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. So maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we best measure love.

He would talk about reality instead of the fiction that had been sold to him. He would say to his son: “Treat people as people. Be color-blind. Love openly. Love everyone.” And then, in the same breath, he would have to say to his son: “You will be treated differently because of your skin. The rules are different for you. This is how you act when you meet the police. This is how you act growing up in the South. This is the reality of your world.”

It was the bonsai of a child. His own child.

You limit how much you invest into the world and into people. It’s a type of emotional triage.”

“I hate to tell you this, but nothing ever sounds right after a certain age, Kid. The older you get, the more you find out it’s all just falling apart and, even worse than that, it’s always been falling apart. The past, the present, the future. They’re interchangeable when it comes to bad news. Tragedy and trauma are the threads that weave generations together. Hell, being Black, we should know that better than anyone.”

We have to admit that maybe some of us actually have it better than others and, in having it better, we have to admit that maybe we could get by with a little less so that others can have a little more and that means giving up some of the things that we have.

It looks the way jazz might if it had a form that you could see that wasn’t that Miles Davis.

Writing is an act of obsession, after all. And obsession is, by nature, a one-way street.

Had more tricks than a carful of monkeys.

That’s what I call “Now-stalgia.” When you know a time in your life is gonna last forever, even before the moment is over.

But only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something’ll kill you and being able to choose not to do it.

Skinny as a bank account after Christmas.

You know the ones: fast-talking private dicks dressed in double-breasted danger, getting steered between bullets by some hardcase dame that can’t be trusted half as much as she can be loved.

The modern author is only as important as their search results.

We are perpetually hurtling on a rocky raft through the void, taking the tour of the cosmos at 67,000 miles per hour, every second of every day, and yet we still find time to stop and talk over bridges in the late hours of the night and maybe reach out and touch someone else’s hand.

It was all anger, and fear, and sadness, because that was what their lives had become. Perhaps that was all they had ever been.

And there’s nothing better than feeling like you’ve got Life by the horns rather than being the used sucker glued to its bootheel.

She was a flight attendant from Tulsa and she had a smile that could break a man in half if he wasn’t ready to stand up against it.

Dead kids don’t linger on the brain like they used to.

You can’t be them. You can only be you. And they’re going to always treat you differently than they treat themselves. They won’t ever know about it—at least, most of them won’t. Most of them will think that everything is okay and that you’re being treated well enough and that everything is beautiful. Because, I guess for them, all they can imagine is a world in which things are fair and beautiful because, after all, they’ve always been treated fairly and beautifully. History has always been kind to them.”

I know for sure that I’m back in North Carolina. I know all the smells: humidity, pine trees, thinly veiled racism. It’s what home feels like for me.

Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

Say what you want about life in the South and the humidity that comes with it, but I swear it makes the world sound and feel different than any other place on the planet.

No. I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself.

It takes the misfortune of others to remind us of our own blessings.

I don’t speak French but I speak existence. I speak fear. I speak insecurity.

Love cures all. Loves takes away pain. Love makes us forget, and each of us is deserving of a little forgetting.

The receptionist is a thin man with close-cut hair and skinny jeans but he doesn’t seem like one of those skinny-jean assholes. He seems like a decent guy.

“In my experience, life doesn’t care much about what we deserve.”

Memory and death are countries that know no geography.

He did it because he had no country, and I figure that’s a sentiment people like me can relate to. They tell me I have a country but, hell, try telling my country that. Try telling my world that.

“Just because I didn’t do it doesn’t mean I can’t be sorry that something happened to you.”

Laugh all you want, but I think learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it—learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.

Thank you to everyone who has ever learned to sing in a world that does not want to hear your voice.