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When I thought about that—how even nothing happening is just a way of describing something happening-I became hopeful. I thought maybe I could write a novel about nothing, that is, something. Well, I thought, what's happening? What's happening right now? Unfortunately, what was happening was I was thinking about what was happening.

First taste from the world's full cup. Everything beginning again.
Aesthetic splendour he remembers: evenings in the back dining room, dusk settling over the tennis court outside. Voices through the windows. Lamplight. Walking her to the library under the trees. Live again one day of that life and die.

Strange relief like a catch released: I wish. Deepest and most final of desires. Something bitter in it too, luxuriously bitter, yes. And why not. Why doesn't he, that is, if the idea is so consoling. Oh, for other people, of course: to protect them. Other people prefer you to suffer.

Remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that's it, I'm going to kill myself. Except in his case, the embarrassing thing is his life. Doesn't mean he wants to really.
Or even if he does, not as if he would do it. Just to think, or not even think, but to overhear the words inside his own head.

..saying: It's okay. And it is okay, he thinks. The story of human life. All of their ancestors, his, and hers also. Life itself, the passing mystery. Very easily in the end he moves inside her.
She lets out a little gasping sound, her hand grasping his arm, and she whispers something. His name. He hears her. Closing his eyes quickly now not to see.

in Los Angeles, a place with such well-bleached surfaces I was actually afraid to breathe. In general, that's the effect Los Angeles has on everyone who stays for more than a year—we were all a little afraid to breathe. Maybe it's the inevitable result of being slumped over a steering wheel three hours each day, squinting at taillights through the smog.

The more you say something, the more it becomes part of the essential calculus of your existence. Unless the opposite is true, and the more you say it, the more meaningless it becomes. Unless there's an even worse third option, which is that both could be true at once.

Another possible ending was the explicit death of the narrator, that is, me. I could kill myself off in a fictional way. Maybe this would save my life somehow. Unfortunately, I knew I wasn't famous enough for this to resonate. Unless you're famous, killing yourself will always be widely perceived as pitiful, even if it's only a literary device.

There's always some latent violence in the fingers of people, in the very shape of them, waiting for a chance to emerge, the simplest transformation.

Anyway, surgeons don't kill people they dislike, I said. It's unprofessional.
That may be true. But I worked hard to make sure my surgeons liked me. You can't convince me it didn't pay off.

My poop is afraid of me.
Stephen Curry recently won his fourth NBA championship.
When I told my therapist about Curry's automatic toilet, he said, There's a guy who wants nothing to do with his own shit.

One of my favorite scenes in literature, from Kobo Abe's The Ark Sakura, involves the protagonist of the novel getting his foot stuck in an unusually high-powered toilet.
Judy Garland died on the toilet.
I have never had sex on a toilet.
I have never, as far as I can recall, fallen into a toilet.

Why do you persevere?
Are you asking me why people persevere in general?
No. You, personally.
Simple, she says. Because I love you.

But to accept that because the body dies, at any point in time, the mind must die also, just literally whenever?

The body is an insentient object, animated by a sentience it does not share, like an insentient car is animated by a sentient driver.
More or less everyone can accept the death of both body and mind past a certain point, like past the age of ninety, say, or at least it's acceptable in theory if you don't think about it too much.

Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. All very well as far as it goes, the question of constitutionality arises, and so on.

Young then. Mixing memory and desire. Dark remembered walkways.
Graveyard of youth.

The old life of pleasure gone and never returning: accept, or else delude yourself, all the same in the end. The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines. Like a kind of death, what happened. A kind of death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love.
Christ also survived his own death. And was dignified and exalted.

Christ commands us universally to love one another.

Not that anything happened. Just the feeling, memory of a feeling, which was nothing in reality.

because you see the wildness shut inside of the animal itself. That they are made to contain the expanse of their own limitlessness, a limitlessness that is wildness itself, that they are made to domesticate their wildness inside of their bodies while they are forced to live in a fabrication of their world.

The pulse of the instincts—the true purpose of each creature—is fully alive underneath its oppression,

And infinity is a perfect way to describe where the silence of my repeated labors deposits itself, somewhere between the trash can and the sink.

And then I actually woke up, and the sound that took me from dreaming to awake was myself laughing at how bizarre this experience is of making a lifeform while being a lifeform. I woke myself up laughing, and the laughter was like a string of bells being pulled from inside of me.

Honey, you should miss me because I know you as the person who looked past my fits of fright and helped me through to now.

I was down in New York City. I was out of my mind inside of my mind, but I was not a lost cause.

“Wanting love does not mean that you lack confidence—in fact, it is that part of us that wants the love that is also the part that compels us to do our most courageous and unexpected acts,”

I am able to rest and soothe myself a bit by saying things like, “It is only natural that you would feel very frightened by a chance at real happiness. But at least if it gets ruined, you can finally admit that you are bad at romance, and stop trying to partner up, and just become a mammal in clothes who does creative projects and travels the world.

We all have to do our jobs if we want to be able to buy our stupid fucking shirts and an infinity of alcohol.

and I think, What if I actually cannot do this? What if I get what I want and it just overloads me and I malfunction because I am not normal?