More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, people won’t be famous for fifteen minutes. No, in the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes. Typhoid Mary or Ted Bundy or Sharon Tate. History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.
“The big reason why folks leave a small town,” Rant used to say, “is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.” Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.
“Life’s greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.”
“You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.”
“The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.”
“Some people are just born human. The rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.”
Picture the moment when your mom or dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.
Most mothers talk the same way, in the moment they’re still one person with their child. “You’re Mommy’s perfect little man…” That moment, before the cow eyeballs and the rattlesnake bites and high-school erections, here’s the last moment Rant and his mom will ever be that close. That much in love. That moment—the end of what we wish would last forever.
Chet Casey, he looked at that baby like his worst enemy and best friend, combined.
Times like that, you look like a failed experiment your parents will have to face for the rest of their lives. A booby prize. And your mom and dad, they look like a God too retarded to fashion anything better than you. You grow up to become living proof of your parent’s limitations. Their less-than-masterpiece.
Love is a skill you learn. Like house-training a dog. Maybe a talent you do or do not build up. Like a muscle.
Irene told time by the flowers in bloom. First crocus, then tulips, forget-me-nots, marigolds, snapdragons, roses, day lilies, black-eyed Susans, and sunflowers. The spinach, then the radishes, the lettuce, and the early carrots. To Chester Casey, one week equaled time to mow the grass. One hour meant time to move a lawn sprinkler. We all live by different clocks and calendars.
Things in life is either flesh or money, like they can’t be both at the same time. That would be like somebody being both alive and dead. You can’t. You got to choose.
It wasn’t only the boosted experiences that bothered Rant. It was dipshit kids done up as soldiers and princesses and witches. Eating cake flavored with artificial vanilla. Celebrating a harvest that didn’t occur anymore. Fruit punch that came from a factory. A ritual to placate ghosts, or whatever bullshit Halloween does, practiced by people who had no awareness of that. What bothered Rant was the fake, bullshit nature of everything.
In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.
Even the way a bizarre cultural delusion like Santa Claus can drive half of annual retail sales. Some mythological fat asswipe drives our national economy. It’s beyond frustrating.
The viewing, with all of them dressed up and so somber, it looked like her junior prom. But no one was dancing. Or smiling. Or laughing. Everyone gloomy and dressed in black… Okay, it looked exactly like her junior prom.
Something the wealthy know that most people don’t is that you never burn a bridge. Such a waste. Instead, you sell it.
Rant sawed how reality was something you could build. Same as the Tooth Fairy money. If enough folks believe a lie, how it ain’t a lie no more.
The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.
In addition, insisting that the journey is always a means to some greater end, and the excitement and danger of the journey should be minimized. Perpetuating the fallacy that a journey itself is of little value.
If your car skids into oncoming traffic, and you die listening to The Archies sing “Sugar Sugar,” it’s your own damn laziness.
there’s worse ways to be dead than dying.
In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it’s stunning how little imagination most people display.
