Acid West Quotes

“like all legends boil down to the same thing anyway: a nagging sense the story we’re stuck living ain’t the right one.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“These are otherwise reasonable people, many of them kin to me, who suffer an inability to reconcile the ideology of American exceptionalism they’ve internalized with the anxiety daily seeping up out of their pores. I love these patrionoiacs and I am of their breed more than I’d like to admit, but I understand—I think—that it makes no sense.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“All those superheroes were not just the hope that something good could come of the Bomb but that something could come at all, more than an infinite stalemate, that the Bomb and its power could change us from the bloodthirsty thing we’ve always been, force us into something infinitely better, or, with the supervillains, at least something infinitely worse so that we’d get on with going extinct.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“The newspaper called them “Atomic Cows” and they traveled like a sideshow from Alamogordo to El Paso and back again. In December, Paramount Pictures came to town and “secured some good pictures of the cattle and also of two cats which have changed coloring.” This stretch of fame did not last long. The military took note and started rounding up the mutated cattle that hadn’t already been slaughtered, about three hundred head, and sent some as far away as Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were poked and prodded and bred until they were raw. Only twice in the 1950s would the atomic cows at Oak Ridge hit the headlines, both times to say they were fine or dying of natural causes or didn’t seem to be passing on any mutations to their offspring.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“I only just met Barb, but I agree our Applebee’s is a little bit haunted.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“I know that at times it is comforting (and empowering and necessary for getting out of a supreme depression) to reduce immense tragedy to a corny pun.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“And so the neighing of horses and ponies, the screeching of monkies, the trumpeting of Susie Q, all that happened right here but back then and in the wake of the Gadget. Susie Q stomping her giant feet in the radioactive ash.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“We cannot prove the innocence of someone we never bothered to identify and cannot now recognize.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“The awful great thing about baseball is that it’s boring as hell to watch. I can get lost in pondering all of existence, but I’ve got the crack of the bat to snap me back into the story, ground me in the game, in life for just a moment before I drift again into a lazy anxiety about the universe.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“Last year the Pupfish were banned from Applebee’s for ripping apart the dining room while trading blows with a bunch of airmen who got to giggling about the team’s name.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

“There are no ghosts, only unfinished stories. There are no horrors other than the familiar ones, made unbearable by our hunch they have no end.”
― Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays