Pavlo > Recent Status Updates

Many times I’ve heard that it’s dangerous to let bears get acclimated to people. I’ve never been told what now seems clear to me—that it’s at least equally dangerous to let people get acclimated to bears.

The survivalists [...] decided to respond. First they posted a sign by the trash bins that read NO BEARS ALLOWED. It seemed unlikely that the bears could read, but you never knew, right? Bears had recently torn down and broken a man’s tree-mounted game cameras four times, as if they were convenience store burglars disabling the security camera system. So maybe a three-word sign wasn’t beyond their capabilities.

People reject the genetic modification of animals in the laboratory as artificial and unseemly, but in fact there is a much less controlled genetic experiment happening in a continent-sized laboratory: the unintended natural selection of the bears that are trying to survive alongside modern humans.

Most Americans, including many people in Grafton, like bears.

Things would improve, they insisted. They just needed more freedom

To get an idea of how broadly the [tax] rules define “public charity,” consider that the American public supports, through tax exemption, the National Hockey League, the National Rifle Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, and a rogues’ gallery of fringe hate groups that have taken up the ever-ennobling charitable mission of promoting white supremacy, nazism, and ISIS.

The people of Grafton are armed, dangerous, and extremely pissed at you

Like many Free Towners, Babiars implied that it was grossly unfair for people to judge the Free Town Project by the views expressed on the Free Town Project website.

It’s not clear whether, at this point, the Babiarzes fully understood that the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.

“Oh, and also, Pendarvis sought to assert the right to traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights, in which people who are homeless or otherwise indigent are paid small amounts of money to engage in fisticuffs. Logic is a strange thing.”

“Just like the founding fathers, they tended to keep firearms within easy reach and were acutely aware of personal rights. And just like the founding fathers, they intended to father a new founding."

Outside of Bungtown, not many people made the connection between the shrinking number of household cats and bears. But Bungtowners found the bears’ taste for cats to be particularly unsettling.

Mightn’t eating cats, they wondered, be a kind of gateway drug to eating humans?

Primo sentences in this book

“Diplomatic corpse”. I know I can’t be the only one to have thought of that little joke, but it was nice to see it in print

Fuck Brett Kavanaugh, by the way

He had a lot of lawyers. He had a lot of words. He had a big voice. But we had all the facts.

To reiterate: Harvey Weinstein, what a flaming, colossal asshole

...партійний секретар, товариш Аніхвілі Теґонєрадзе...

“Like Meat Loaf, I don’t like anybody or anything unkind, even unkind as a joke, and so my yearning for irony is an act of profound self-sabotage designed to leave me unhappy. Because an ironic writer is, above all else, an armed writer. Free from the expectation that his work passes any emotional smell test, he is shielded from too much feeling, any kind of feeling, even love. Even Motorcycle.”

Flavortown is a red Camaro painting a gray hamlet pink.

Twas not, I think, a conscious search for God
That brought me to these dim forgotten fanes.
Largely it was a longing for the past,
With a slight sense of something unfulfilled;
And yet another feeling drew me there,
A sense of guilt increasing with the years—
“When I am dead you will be sorry, John”—
Here I could pray my mother would not die.
Thus were my London Sundays incomplete
If unaccompanied by Evening Prayer.