More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
that make up the Barely Blur—all of them zuzzing and trembling and shuffling around in the bucket like cicadas on their backs,
we’re waiting to see how Armageddon plays out, keeping an eye open for ways it might turn to our advantage.
In another life, I’d take him back to the Guiding Star and feed him and nurse him back to health and he’d become my sidekick and I’d teach him the ways of the Barely Blur. But in this life, he’s no son of mine.
What did she hope for in a dad? What did I hope, for that matter? I don’t remember. Maybe I didn’t hope for anything at all. Maybe I would have latched onto whatever potential other life was placed before me, and I wonder if she’s the same. There’s a chilling thought. I run a piece of waffle through a curving mountain road of syrup, puttering the vehicle along slowly—
One of the things I’ve observed about white folks who grew up well-to-do: they have a deep investment in the idea of merit, and there’s a special scorn, I’ve noticed, for the poor of their own kind. They may acknowledge that race plays a role in keeping people down; they may even be sympathetic to the plights and sufferings of certain marginalized groups—but white trash is trash for a reason.
“Right on,” I say, and I hope we don’t get into a discussion about extinction and habitat collapse and the ecological apocalypse, because what can a person really say?
Maybe, I think, she’s starting to go into one of those manic phases the way I used to when I was her age. I can remember that ticklish feeling in my head—like an itch on the sole of your foot, that soft, insistent, distant-bells-ringing sort of feeling, and then the way it spread bodily, slowly, butterflies in the stomach, tingling palms, a twittering in the groin region, and you become aware that the world is exciting and deeply interesting, and your every thought seems clever and urgent, and you might begin to chuckle privately. You’re brightly alert and scattered at the same time. In order
...more
Instinctively, I don’t know why, I reach down and turn it off.
These days, nearly everyone you meet has patched together a different version of reality, depending on which news sources and websites and YouTube influencers they’ve decided to trust, and so my policy is just to listen with an open ear, hoping there might be some small kernel of truth at the core of what they’ve come to believe.
After the newspapers started dying, a lot of the things we thought were accepted facts—our shared truths—those started dying as well, and even the fundamentals of science and mathematics, even events that had been filmed and corroborated by dozens of witnesses were open to question.
He doesn’t know the answer. Nobody knows. There is no answer.
