Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

All the music we listen to is about carrying the past around with us. All the books we read are about carrying the past around with us. Whatever.

For a while Maria got into the revolutionary potential of being nice, but now she’s kind of over that, too, and gets pretty Zen about it. Mindful. Being a dick to people who aren’t being dicks first just leaves her feeling like a dick, which is a shitty feeling. So she’s pretty nice.

It’s an exhilarating feeling, when you’re so used to not being able to sleep, to decide ahead of time not to sleep.

Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.

When you’re kind of feeling like you don’t know anything about anything, though, who cares. Whatever. How Zen. This is what enlightenment is like: it’s boring.

She’s like Sigmund Freud: she can come up with a million examples to support whatever bullshit theory she wants to support.

It’s like the Buddhist thing where the Zen master goes, Show me your true face, and the student goes, Sure, here it is! And the Zen master goes, No, show me your true face, and the student goes, No, seriously, I am, this is my true face, and then the Zen master goes, Get the fuck out of my house, you are not showing me your true face, and then the student goes, AAAH I AM SHOWING YOU MY TRUE FACE WHAT TRUE FACE ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT NOBODY HAS A TRUE FACE, and takes a swing at the Zen master and the Zen master dodges it all easily and sits back and goes, Ahh, there it was, you don’t have to leave my house after all.

Real little kids are as dirty, impure and complicated as the adults they’re going to grow up and be.

The only way to be a buddha is just to be a buddha, to disregard the shit that’s in the way of being a buddha.

James just doesn’t know how to be in a relationship because he doesn’t know how to be himself and you can’t be one of the people in a relationship if you’re busily refusing to be a person.