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The jet’s movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the wake of the blade.
Schtitt has the sort of creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously.
not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty.
and two neatly groomed Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers who’d seen human heads through the living room window and found the front door unlocked and come in with all good spiritual intentions—all
Marathe shrugged again in that maddening Francophone way that can mean several things.
‘Geronzai!’
The feminine manner to examine the fingernails was to raise the whole hand’s back into view instead of malely curling the nails in over the upturned palm;
It’s a pivotal, it’s a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment, Jim.
They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are.
Severity is in the eye of the sufferer,
That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper
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loneliness is not a function of solitude.
it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person.
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.
That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.
‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.
What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.
the party’s music now some horrible collection of mollified rock classics with all soft rock’s grim dental associations,
the little birdlike head-movements of the deeply vain.
both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: 100 i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
People who’re somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise.
Toe-worn cast-off corporate-supplied sneakers sit open-mouthed and serenely lethal, strongly suggesting the subs they stand for.
huge hanging gut and just no ass at all, the way some big older guys’ asses seem to get sucked into their body and reappear out front as gut.
then eventually a terrible acknowledgment that some line has been undeniably crossed, and fist-at-the-sky, as-God-is-my-witness vows to buckle down and lick this thing for good, to quit for all time, then maybe a few white-knuckled days of initial success, then a slip, then more pledges, clock-watching, baroque self-regulations, repeated slips back into the Substance’s relief after like two days’ abstinence, ghastly hangovers, head-flattening guilt and self-disgust, superstructures of additional self-regulations (e.g. not before 0900h. not on a worknight, only when the moon is waxing, only in
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Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes
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special children’s second world of shins and chairlegs and tile that exists under long tablecloths, making various sorts of puerile trouble—investigations from last year’s
their sweater vests and tweeds and dirndls and tank up on espresso at the concession stand and find seats and sit down and make those little pre-movie leg and posture adjustments, and look around with that sort of vacant intensity,
O.N.A.N.’s official crest, a sombreroed eagle with a maple leaf in its mouth,
Gentlemen, let the president just say that no one’s prepared to say they’re quite sure what’s happened, or just which quote unquote loyal part of the Union or Organization might reasonably be said to be culpable, but it’s not the administration’s immediate concern to point the levelling finger of blame or aspersion just yet or right now. Our concern is to act, to respond, and act and respond decisively. Swiftly. And decisively.
the parents apparently being not exactly the two brightest bulbs in the great U.S. parental light-show.
The inmates at the Shattuck suffer from every kind of physical and psychological and addictive and spiritual difficulty you could ever think of, specializing in ones that are repulsive.
Gratitude-battery totally recharged.
Gately adopts this expression where he lets them know he’s ignoring them totally as long as they keep their distance, but it’s a look that says Street and Jail and not to fuck with him.
dead as a rivet.
‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.
they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain.
‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out.
Sir Osis of Thuliver,
transport cruiser-search all cops perform when the arrestee’s pupils are unresponsive both to light and to head-slaps.
get reliable morphine in fucking Utah?)
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.
Pat had said it didn’t matter at this point what he thought or believed or even said. All that mattered was what he did. If he did the right things, and kept doing them for long enough, what Gately thought and believed would magically change.
talking to the ceiling was somehow preferable to imagining talking to Nothing.
science. It was all experimental. A whole lot of electrodes
through heavy ethnicity
sounds like some sort of supposedly unrippable fabric getting ripped, over and over, a dental and life-denying sound.
A competitive athlete cannot skip meals without terrific metabolic distress.
dentist’s office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent light.
