cycads and ferns > Recent Status Updates

We had loved each other, yes, if only over and around other people, and we had married each other, even if only in a neighborly sort of way. But divorcing was something only one of us could do to the other.
It was her hands, finally, that were inseparable.
I could never get them to let go of each other and seek any hold on me.

A nation is not made wealthy by the childish accumulation of shiny metals, but is enriched by the economic prosperity of its people.
-ADAM SMITH, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
ECONOMIST

I still can't imagine entanglement. You know what entanglement says? No. Two particles are somehow related and they- oh yeah. Even at a distance. And one of them changes, and then the other one changes. Instantaneously. How is that possible? That makes no sense. How does information pass between them? I guess there must be some other realm, the realm of the mind or consciousness that they're both a part of.

Our communication, initially meaningful and coherent, turns into a series of fitful exchanges containing neither sentences nor information: little words and sounds meant- I suppose- to keep the line between us open, but which, instead, make all too clear how far apart we are. So we have learned to split the work between us, stick to practical matters, and only speak to one another when necessary.

The microbiologist, Cristina Dorador says, “‘Lithium mining is not sustainable. It's a myth.’ She has long argued that the real problem is much bigger than lithium mining in Chile. The real problem is the sheer amount of natural resources that human beings devour.
‘Maintaining the same level of consumption is impossible…We need to change the way that we live on Earth.’”

When he is angry,something in him laughs…When something moves him,he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action.What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context-nothing is, to him,what it is; everything is subject to change,in flux…So every answer he gives is only a partial answer,every feeling only an opinion and he never cares what something is, only 'how" it is…

Your friends were simply who was around. It didn't occur to anyone that it could be another way….We were fine with living our mediocre lives. It didn't occur to anyone that we could have great ones. That was for people far away. Our lack of awareness of the scope of the world kept us from any great falseness.

She said, for example: I get the feeling those twentynine people weren't the only ones who sank that night - which I found quite offensive but didn't take her up on, as well as other remarks in the same vein, some incomprehensible, some fake-caring or concerned, and some just downright hurtful and inept.

I didn't ask you to leave….I didn't push you into the water, I didn't fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat, and now the water's up to your ankles, I get it that you're frightened, and you want me to save you….But I didn't ask you for any of that.

If it is the fulfillment of man's primordial dreams to be able to fly…drill our way beneath the bodies of towering mountains, send messages with godlike speed…then present-day research is not only science but sorcery…forcing God to open one fold after another of his cloak…a religion whose dogma is permeated and sustained by the…keen logic of mathematics…We have gained reality and lost dream.

One night she wanted to know something about me. I coughed out an account of myself. I tried to make a case for having once wanted a full and tiring life. I described a bounteous enough marriage to a wife summarily venerated, a wife who sipped at life through last straws….

"We don't think your behavior had anything to do with writing. We think the Mythical Father used writing as an excuse for just about everything. That's how we analyze the matter, Daddy. We think writing was never the burden and the sorrow you made it out to be but as a matter of fact was your convenient crutch and your convenient alibi for every possible failure to be decent."

I picked up the iPad mini...I tapped on the words reading "Fukuoka Edition" in order to assign Buddha as editor. That was my account name-Buddha. For twenty-nine years now, I have been residing in Nirvana.

‘The funny thing is,' the Sergeant said, 'that MacCruiskeen lay for two years staring at that ceiling before he saw it was a map of superb ingenuity?'
'Now that was stupid,' I said thickly.
'And he lay looking at the map for five years more before he saw that it showed the way to eternity?

Our high-tech, carbon-free future depends on one of humanity's oldest and dirtiest endeavors: mining…Some of those metals are familiar…Some are not. Tiny flecks of indium in the screen make it sensitive to the touch of your finger. Europium enhances the colors you see on that screen. Neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium are used to build the tiny mechanism that makes your phone vibrate.

Possibly, it's a fiction by Borges: "The Suicide is laboring to compose a fiction titled 'The Suicide.’“ Typical of Borges, the tale is a (shameless) mind-teaser: "The Suicide is laboring to compose a fiction titled 'The Suicide’ but endless digressions, meanderings, and nightmare roundabouts from which there is no exit impede him."

We would coach each other forward into bed, where she always thought she ought to owe herself something first... Yet when you touch someone- if you're going to take things that far- where all must the hand really go?

"...this city...that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes....Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes."

' But remember...If you meet anybody, you don't know what you're looking for, you don't know in whose house you are...'
'I don't even know my own name,' I answered.
...remarkable thing for me to say because the next time I was asked my name I could not answer.

She felt the uneasy force, the strangeness of seeing a man who had lived in her mind for years as words alone- the force of a body in a room. She almost could not look at him. She looked indirectly, trying to conceal her glances in flurries of preparation….He watched her handle the equipment, looking past her into another moment somewhere. Already she sensed he was disappearing from the room.

Where of necessity K. is out of place. Where she (alone) is out of place. It is always thus. Once out of place, one can never be in place. For once out, the concatenation is broken.
A corollary: those in have no idea that they are in. For they have no idea of out.

The liquor you can do without, but not that solemn sac of certainty, that transparent forestallment of the end, an end you fear will arrive like the terrible blossom of your self stillborn under the sun. Nothing scares you more than discovering the nature of that end. To put it another way, you would rather drown than risk finding out you can't swim.

“How about some whisky?"
I told him I didn't drink. "Smoke?" Again I declined. Such abstinence surprised him. In fact he scowled.
"I'm suspicious of employees who don't smoke and drink…Are you a pederast by any chance?…No? Too bad!…They don't steal as much….That's been my experience….

Under "Florence, April, 1899" is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: "There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report."

…I was living with a groggily scholarly older man…He did not want me to work…wanted me staying put at home, daintily abed…the poor guy had yet to find out that I had all along been overdoing it with a scathingly blond, preachy…woman who was married…To this day, I restrict how I feel about her- I set limits, and then I cheat. It's darker in a room that has people in it than in one that doesn't.

Recovering from the accident, learning to move and walk, understanding before I could act- all this just made me become even more what I'd always been anyway, added another layer of distance between me and things I did. Greg was right, absolutely right. I wasn't unusual: I was more usual than most.

"God is not made manifest in language…He's not manifest in anything, He doesn't exist…There's no sense or meaning in anything. It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations…that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay. There's no escaping that…”

…his oldest is rarely present for what her life entails…she is never quite actually in person and instead operates on a kind of delay, trailing after herself in her own wake, sinking only with reluctance into her accumulated life, then backing out again…she's working part-time for a caterer and writing songs about herself. Most of the songs have the same title:
"I Do Most of the Business Cards Around Here."

To Profane…it would always seem maybe he was looking for something too to make the fact of his own disassembly plausible as that of any machine. It was always at this point that the fear started…Because now, if he kept going down that street, not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge brain and clock of a heart must be left behind to litter the pavement, be scattered among manhole covers.

Or gynophobia, which is fear of women, and naturally afflicts only men. Very widespread in Mexico…Some Mexican men may be gynophobes, said Juan de Dios Martinez, but not all of them, it can't be that bad.What do you think optophobia is? asked the director. Opto…my God, fear of the eyes? Even worse: fear of opening the eyes. In a figurative sense, that's an answer to what you just said about gynophobia.