Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

They weren’t test curses, dropped to see how you’d react, or tried on for the first time after moving away from mother and father; they were the real thing, casual and heartfelt.

Why’s Grandma calling me Billy, Daddy? Try explaining to a kid, Well, honey, it’s cuz Granny’s thalamus is being eaten away by misfolded proteins and she’s having waking dreams that are more like fucking nightmares and she doesn’t know where the hell she is and she thinks you’re her son who was actually a miscarriage she had in high school when she was fifteen. I could give her ten Valium and a bottle of Zinfandel and she’d chill out; I’d fucking kiss you that worked.”

Things are as bad as you fear they are. People are as self-serving as you fear they are. The universe does not care. And neither do you. Not really. Go find a warm body you can huddle against for animal comfort. Go get in your car and don’t look at me again. I’m getting bored of talking now. Go away before I get bored of not pulling the trigger and not watching your brains fountain out the top of your head.”

Charlie Huston is a mad genius

An inferno of beefs, not all of them dead. I summon for you the image of a wounded cow, running, in flames.

his

“Money makes people stupid. They don’t have to work as hard as people who don’t have money. That’s why the smart people who do have money mostly use it for one thing.” Park thought about his father. “They use it to make sure the people without it don’t get any more.”

One could easily clear physical space around oneself with some alacrity by mentioning that one had been sleeping poorly of late.

The seat of sleep, the thalamus is also a switching station for communications and telemetry within the brain, a key target where a terrorist of the mind with only one bomb at his disposal might choose to blow himself up.

In doing so, said terrorist would be particularly successful in the ultimate goal of his trade. For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to question one’s own abilities and judgment, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.

“It’s not their job, Parker, to accommodate our ways, it is our job to understand theirs. Once we understand how they think, we can begin to predict their behavior. Once our predictions become accurate, we can begin to manipulate their behavior. That is diplomacy.”

It was not sentiment. It was practicality. Enduring pursuit and notoriety being the inevitable rewards for starting wildfires in the Hollywood Hills.

Speak truth to power. Always. Kings and potentates will be coddled, don’t let it be by you. Speak truth to power and your voice will be heard. If it is disregarded, as is likely, still you will sleep better at night. And you will have done humanity some service. Which will comfort you when you are dismissed early from your post.

A lie changes nothing. Not what has happened. Not what will be. Not what you must do. The truth changes what has happened. It changes what will be. It changes what you must do.

Walking, he thought about what it had been like when he first felt himself made vulnerable by his love for Rose. The fear. How that had been compounded to terror when Omaha was born. How willingly he had embraced the horror that he might lose them one day, in exchange for their miraculous presence in his life.