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I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
‘I cannot make myself understood, now.’ I am speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Call it something I ate.’
I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.
I’m not a machine. I feel and believe.
At the only other emergency room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back, the psychiatric stretcher was wheeled in and then parked beside the waiting-room chairs.
I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head. There’s very little doubt that Wayne would have won.
‘You seem persistently to confuse me with someone who merely hangs out a shingle with the word Conversationalist on it, and this operation with a fly-by-night one strung together with chewing gum and twine. You think I have no support staff? Researchers at my beck? You think we don’t delve full-bore into the psyches of those for whom we’ve made appointments to converse? You don’t think this fully accredited limited partnership would have an interest in obtaining data on what informs and stimulates our conversees?’ ‘I know only one person who’d ever use full-bore in casual conversation.’ ‘There
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‘That your quote-unquote “complimentary” Dunlop widebody tennis racquets’ super-secret-formulaic composition materials of high-modulus-graphite-reinforced polycarbonate polybutylene resin are organochemically identical I say again identical to the gyroscopic balance sensor and mise-en-scène appropriation card and priapistic-entertainment cartridge implanted in your very own towering father’s anaplastic cerebrum after his cruel series of detoxifications and convolution-smoothings and gastrectomy and prostatectomy and pancreatectomy and phalluctomy…’
‘Who used to pray daily for the day his own dear late father would sit, cough, open that bloody issue of the Tucson Citizen, and not turn that newspaper into the room’s fifth wall? And who after all this light and noise has apparently spawned the same silence?’
I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I,
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.
Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.’
Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.’
JAMES O. INCANDENZA TOOK HIS OWN LIFE BY PUTTING HIS HEAD IN A MICROWAVE OVEN
Dave (‘Fall Down Very’) Harde, the well-loved old janitor laid off from Boston College for contracting narcolepsy,
‘I’m awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.’
‘Three more! Get it up there!’ ‘Hoooowaaaaa.’ ‘Get that shit up there man!’ ‘Gwwwhoooooowaaaaa!’ ‘It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!’ ‘Huhl huhl huhl huhl gwwwww.’ ‘Do it!’
evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.
That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis.
In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.
That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.
That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
when one’s allergy to the confining realities of the present is just starting to emerge as weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew 120—maybe a dozen of these kids, mostly male, get fanatically devoted to a homemade Academy game called Eschaton.
The Why of the Disease is a labyrinth it is strongly suggested all AAs boycott, inhabited as the maze is by the twin minotaurs of Why Me? and Why Not?, a.k.a. Self-Pity and Denial, two of the smily-faced
And it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There. And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for.
‘What fire dies when you feed it?
Pat told Gately that grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also, she said.
first year sober, with a faultlessly baked and heavily frosted one-candle cake, Don Gately had cried in front of nonrelatives for the first time in his life. He now denies that he actually did cry, saying something about candle-fumes
Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science, though a great uncle had accidentally electrocuted himself with a field series generator he was seeking to patent.
‘And lead us not into Penn Station’ during the Our Father.
‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added.
‘Troeltsch’s so dumb he thinks a manila folder’s a Filipino contortionist.’
U.S.S. Millicent Kent, sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with breasts like artillery and a butt like two bulldogs in a bag
‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself”—“He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’
He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important,
A couple of us remarked how Hal wasn’t eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal. Hal had his hands on Loach’s shoulders as the tape went on.
New perspective POV
His face today had assumed various expressions ranging from distended hilarity to scrunched grimace, expressions that seemed unconnected to anything that was going on.
God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini’s ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.’
‘Kid, sobriety’s like a hard-on: the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it’;
Y.E.T. is ‘You’re Eligible Too,’ a denial-buster for those who compare others’ ghastly consequences to their own so far, the point being to get you to see the street-guy with socks for gloves drinking Listerine at 0700h. as just slightly farther down the same road you’re on, when you Come In. Or something close to that.
