Madeline’s Reviews > There There > Status Update

Edwin’s story about a native guy having a white frjend stay over and then the white friend starts inviting more people in, takes over the entire apartment, moves him under the stairs, and starts a business in his home.

“Some of us got this feeling stuck inside all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside. That thing we want to name but can’t; like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. We punish ourselves with it.”

2/2 We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them. Found more convincing ways to convince them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we’ve made. The one they’ve inherited.”

1/2 “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings falling to their deaths and we think the problem is that they’re jumping.
This is what we’ve done: we’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping, convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. for them. The one they’ve inherited.

“My memory was a fucking slide shit that happened to me went down and didn’t come back up from.”

Edwin Black

“While I was talking, something in me reached back to remember all that I’d once hoped I’d be and placed it next to the feeling of being who I am now. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup’, I say. And I don’t want to, but I really mean it.”

“The trouble with believing is you have to believe that believing will work. You have to believe in belief.”

“Wind howled through the tunnel, it was a mouth and a throat.”

“Dean wants to tell him he’s looked up the quote in its original context and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown in up Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the ‘there’ of her childhood, the ‘there there’, was gone. There was no ‘there there’ anymore.”

On Gertrude Stein’s comment that there is no “there” in Oakland