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| "How can you dream if you don't learn to shut off the thoughts you don't want?" | | |
| But how do you fall in love? I heard Ma say to a friend of heres that there was nothing in life but men, nothing but love. "Jesus, when you come right down to it, what else is there?" she said in her flat, amused voice, as if she'd gone through everything and had to admit this truth. But how do you fall in love? I am thinking of Ma throwing things around the kitchen, drunk, crying, her face twisted and ugly and the words ugly coming out of her mouth, when some man let her down--they were always letting her down, poor Ma, and she was kind of a pretty woman. Why did she open herself up to that pain? Again and agin she opened herself up.
Oh, we women know things you don't know, you teachers and writers of books, we are the ones who wait around libraries when it's time to leave, or sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen; we make crazy plans for marriage but have no man, we dream of stealing men, we are the ones who look slowly around when we get off a bus and can't even find what we are looking for, can't quite remember how we got there, we are always wondering what will come next, what terrible thing will come next. We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long heavy hours sunk in our bodies, thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for something to come to us and give shape to so much pain. | | |
| Choke, by Chuck Palahnuik
You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you.
All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog.
People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden.
Just don't hold anything back. This is going to be the best story of somebody's life.
"Griping isn't the same as creating something," my mom's voice-over says. "Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing..." And the voice in the speaker fades out.
...On number five, her voice is back. "We've taken the world apart," she says, "but we have no idea what to do with the pieces..." And her voice is gone, again.
...On number seven, the voice comes back: "My generation, all of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better," she says. "We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own."
Out of the speaker, her voice says, "I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation."
The voice-over says, "It only looks as it we've accomplished something."
The Mommy, she sued to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.
The laws that keep us safe, these same lays condemn us to boredom.
Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.
Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.
This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him.
She used to say, "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight,"
If you change the way people think, she said. That way they see themselves. The way they see the word. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create.
"My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people's lives."
She'd stared straight into the stupid little boy's eyes and said, "My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell."
"You know the old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember their past are even worse off."
In voice-over, Paige says, "Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up."
..."In my opinion, those who remember the past are paralyzed by it."
And Paige pushes her along, saying, "How about; "Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us'?"
What Denny says is that maybe the second coming of Christ isn't something God will decide. Maybe God left it up to people to develop the ability to bring back Christ into their lives. Maybe God wanted us to invent our own savior when we were ready. When we need it most. Denny says maybe it's up to us to create our own messiah.
To save ourselves.
Maybe with every little effort, we can work up to performing miracles.
We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.
Letting our past decide our future.
Or we can decide for ourselves.
And maybe it's our job to invent something better.
Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
And maybe knowing isn't the point.
Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything. | | |
| The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end. "That's not what I mean." Then I realized the truth: "I wasn't thinking about you," I said. "I was just being \with my dad."
He gazed at me. "You've grown up, honey." It occured to me that the quiet in the suburbs had nothing to do with peace. Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself.
You imagine him being attracted to them.
You're drinking gasoline to stay warm. In the morning, he asks where his razor is. You tell him that you threw it away when you bnroke up. He says, "I framed your deodorant." He turns on his side and moves closer, and tries to hold you. But you're concious of his head and his chest and his arms just as hair and skin and bones. "Ask him what a stage manager does."
So I ask, and he says, "I do what no one else wants to do." "But it's like I'm tricking him into it," I say
She says, "Well, what about all the guys who act like they're in love with you to get you into bed? Like Fuckface."
"But," I say. I'm having trouble saying what I mean. "I want this to be real." "You were really funny and smart and open," he says. "You were out there."
"I was out there," I say.
His voice is sad. "Yup."
"Listen," I say. "I got scared."
"I'm bad at men," I say.
He laughs for the first time in a long while.
"You get all these voices about what a woman is supposed to be like-- you know, feminine." I do not want to continue. "And I've spen my whole like trying not to hear them. But..." I steel myeslf to go on. "I wanted to be with you so much that I listened." | | |
| My breasts seemed to say something about me that I didn't want said. My Achille's heel, they put me in constant danger of humiliation.
My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn't exatly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex anyway. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen almost against their will. Then the sex would be about love.
I'd told my theory to my friend Linda, who wante to be a social scientist and was always oming up with theories herself. I'd concluded that breats were to sex what pillows were to sleep, "Guys might think they want a pillow, but they'll sleep just as well without one."
She'd said, "Guys will sleep anywhere if they're tired enough. I knew how I felt at parties. The worst thing was to get caught standing alone; it seemed to prove that you weren't worth talking to. I realized that it must have been even harder for him, because Julia had seen. "I thought you really liked her."
"I did," he said. "Julia's great."
"I loved her," I said.
He nodded. Then he said, "There was too much of an age difference."
It sounded to me like "better course selection," and I gave him a look to say so, but he pretended not to see. "Nice," I say, realizing only afterward that I've mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive. He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women.
I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. more proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone. "I'm not a game." "But it is not Jame's fault," she continues. "You should not punish him for the way I acted."
"At the moment," I say, "I'm trying not to punish you for the way he acted."
She raises her eyebrows, as though to say, You are most interesting than I thought. "But he did nothing. An he is the one you need to forgive," she says. "he is the one who matters--not me."
"Everyone matters," I say.
"You are making it harder than it has to be," she says.
I say, "and I should forgive him because it would be easier?"
"You don't need a reason to forgive," she says. "If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do." It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it's this way for everyone. Insisting on playing a game for which, after a fair amount of time, you show no natural aptitude is frusterating to you and annoying to all but the most complacent apponents. While home is the place where you can relax and be yourself, this doesn't mean that you can take advantage of the love and affection other members of your family have for you. The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three houses went.
The art of lsing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gester
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
-Elizabeth Bishop | | |
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