Here Goes Nothing

by Steve Toltz

‘Visiting the past because you’re nostalgic is like drinking sea water when you’re dying of thirst. It’ll only make you thirstier. And it’s gross. Why would you do it in front of a complete stranger?’

when you’ve just met someone, you shouldn’t be able to tell their fake smile from their genuine one.

‘Newlyweds are refugees fleeing single life,’ she said. ‘Most people totally misrepresent themselves and enter into legally binding, lifelong marital agreements dragging a trail of half-truths. They’ll do anything to grow old with someone overnight.’

Being called names has never particularly bothered me. I find insults amusing if they aren’t true, and a free life lesson if they are.

‘Don’t worry, Numbat. Things will get easier with time.’ (Now I understand: of course things get easier with time. That’s how desensitisation to pain works.)

To accuse a child of wisdom beyond their years is to imply they’re abnormally devoid of youthful enthusiasm and naiveté.

‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ That made no sense. It’s pretty easy to understand why the devil is wily—but why must God be too?

I put up with a lot during my childhood, and the Almighty was just another nuisance.

There was never anything so inexplicable to me as those who could switch between incompatible eternal truths without breaking a sweat.

It’s always the same with these guys. They never let you forget that Jesus is dead, that it was foul play, and that you’re the main suspect.

The bishop smiled with the seedy delight of a lothario who’d just notched another sexual conquest.

The parishioners all said ‘amen’ at the same time and I resisted the urge to say, ‘Jinx.’

The devil never made any sense to me, conceptually, and still doesn’t; for me his motivations are just too evil to be believable. Personally, I never met a torturer who wasn’t well-meaning.

Death is an abusive partner, gas-lighting you with sunshine and dawns.

Frankly, nothing said about ghosts ever made sense to me. Why moan? A voice in the dark saying plainly, ‘Hey. Nice to see you,’ would petrify me more. And why are they always stuck in their murder houses like convicted criminals with ankle monitors on house arrest? And why did ghosts stop rattling chains at the same time in human history that men stopped wearing hats? And why don’t ghosts appear so much in the day? It never made sense to me that ghosts, as well as being dead, are reputedly night owls.

In my opinion, most paranormal phenomena are debunked by the spiritualist’s own shit-eating grin.

It annoyed me how people professed to believe in the unseen world and then bored you with how they’d seen it. To make it worse, they looked at you with pity, as if they were born with superior antennae and you were too physically and mentally underdeveloped to perceive the invisible.

Why were so many people susceptible to God and I was not? And who even wants to be? I always hated how, even on his best days, He could be merciful but never actually kind.

‘Right. Here are some survival tools: The enemy of love is impatience and eye rolling. Even gentle mockery is corrosive. Learn how to defuse the other’s ticking bomb. Notice what the beginning of a negative spiral looks like. Prioritise snoring remedies. Don’t exaggerate hurt feelings. Have more morning sex than night sex. Identify which of your partner’s faults are unfixable and devise a workaround. In marriage it is survival of the deafest, okay?’

And remember, you’re there to soften the blows even when you’re the one delivering them!’

‘When someone tells me they want their ceremony to be dignified, I think, This will end with one of them not leaving the other a forwarding address.’

‘When you go out in the world, not excelling at anything for years on end, you crave the satisfaction of a job well done.’

I always believed, I went on, that nearly all the people on earth are self-mythologising liars who only have premonitions in hindsight. (If you told them, ‘Hey, someone was murdered right here in this house,’ it was only then they said, ‘Yeah, I knew I felt something.’)

there’s no mystery to my hypocrisy; when you resolve to adore someone, you develop new blind spots as you go.

Sometimes the sex was aggressive, like I was trying to catapult a baby into her or she was trying to yank it out of me. It felt nothing like making love and everything like a tug of war. Other times, it felt like we were fucking as asexually as plants.

Working, for me, meant never being equal to any assigned task, never being up to scratch, and clocking off with the suspicion that I was living the wrong life.

I hoped nationalism was dead. Of all the arbitrary distinctions made between people, the longitudinal and latitudinal happenstance of birth always seemed to rank among the most meaningless.