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‘Jesus, why am I even here? Why don’t you just interface with yourself if you think you know all my issues and shames and everything I’m going to say? Why not take the suggestion to say No?
some aural combination of a tomato thrown at a wall and a pocketwatch getting clocked with a hammer.
The Ennet House residents call Hefty bags ‘Irish Luggage’—even
‘Irish Guccis,’ extra resilient and a businesslike gunmetal-gray in tone.
bonerfied miracle
the more basically Powerless an individual feels, the more the likelihood for the propensity for violent acting-out—and
The State Bird of Massachusetts, he shares to Green, is the police siren. To Project and to Swerve.
his whole life (and then some) tear-asses across his mind’s arctic horizon, trailing phosphenes.
vividness vacuumed of all but his name:
The urban lume makes the urban night only semidark, as in licoricey, a luminescence just under the skin of the dark, and swelling.
If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody’s different footwear’s footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient.
decent but Dustbowly-looking Seventh-Day Adventist who never once pressed Brucie to speak, probably out of sympathy, probably sympathizing with the searing pain the opaque-eyed child must have felt over not only giving his Mama a lethal Xmas present
Bruce Green’s aunt handing out poorly reproduced W. Miller tracts to the crowds outside the Ohio prison as the clock ticked down to Injection,
coins of blood on the street
The fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world
breasts like artillery and a butt like two bulldogs in a bag
It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is
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An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location.
That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain.
Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good. It’s the first time she’s felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing.
She had a brainy girl’s discomfort about her own beauty and its effect on folks, a caution intensified by the repeated warnings of her personal Daddy.
‘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.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky.
This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he’s saying is too obviously true to waste time on.’
this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.
the sky’s combustionish orange had deepened to the hellish crimson of a fire’s last embers.
Hal figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs,
The music’s still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.
In Boston AA, newcomer-seducing is called 13th-Stepping 351 and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It’s predation. Newcomers come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous systems still on the outside of their bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance. To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. To avoid acknowledging their old dear friend the Substance’s betrayal, and grieving
seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.
the screen taking on a milky blue aspect like the eye of a dead bird.
I picked some clothing up and began separating it by smell into wearable and unwearable.
Remote-site journalists used such words as emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, and developing. But all this impersonal diction was preceded by the anchorperson’s first name, as if the report were part of an intimate conversation.
Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow.
efficiency and safety-consciousness are not exactly hallmarks of addiction-motivated crimes, which tend to be impulsive and fuzzily thought out at best.
picture several cups of Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled sap across the back of the skull.
The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy.
There’s something about a very very tall woman trying to operate a Rototiller.
Post-racket tingling quiet descends.
‘The fourth horseman stays hidden, of course, like in all quality eschatologies, the unturned card, under wraps till actual game-time.
