February 2011
38 posts
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Lucifer: “The million lords of hell stand arrayed about you. Tell us, why should we let you leave? You have no power here, for what power have dreams in hell?”
Dream: “You say that I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly. But – you say that dreams have no power? Ask yourselves, all of you, what power would hell have if those imprisoned here could not dream of heaven?”
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Lou Reed - Take a Walk on the Wild Side
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Wife: What’s going on?
Husband: I don’t know. Some uprising or something somewhere.
-Two people commenting on the TV news while walking out of the bar that I was eating wings at tonight.
January 2011
39 posts
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Here is the [unfinished and unedited] opening to one of the novels that I am working on, what I envision with delusion as a sprawling Steinbeckian story about the lives of two childhood friends and the people who surround them. The story, while fictional, is layered with elements of reality - taking place in my small, rural Pennsylvania hometown in the early 1900s, back when it was a mineral water...
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“He was a young man of pleasant appearance. Of medium height and exceedingly...”
– Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman
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“Nome, I ain’t a good man … but I ain’t the worst in the world...”
– Flannery O’Conner, A Good Man is Hard to Find
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Today, I began teaching the upperclassmen psychology kids about human nature and three of the popular views throughout history: original sin, tabula rasa, and innate goodness.
It’s fun watching their minds be blown as they consider all of this for the very first time in their lives. It’s especially fun to force them to choose and defend one of these theories.
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I feel the grasp of contentedness beginning its slow suffocation, the sinking realization that I am a quarter of a century old and with very little outside of the superficial to show for it, realizing that I am exactly where I planned not to be at this point in my life. I’ll write tomorrow. I’ll work on paying off the debt next month. I’ll be out of here next year. Same old story. Gone is the...
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“Your father is a child in a man’s body. He cares for nothing and everything at...”
– Hank Moody in Californication
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“I blame the individual for the first 10 bullets. I blame the law for the last 21...”
– Lawrence O’Donnell, during a very much heated debate with Rep. Trent Franks (R - AZ), regarding high-capacity clips and the Tucson shooting, on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. Rep. Franks is the Congressman who somewhat famously said, “I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the...
Drinking cheap wine and responding to prompts for online graduate courses probably should not mix, but what can I say? I live life on the edge.
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Paper Tongues - Trinity
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“I really don’t know, Ray, but I appreciate your sadness about the world.”
– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
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“When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard...”
– The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats
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“Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage...”
– Joseph Heller, Something Happened
“I’m going to go stoke the fire… then we’ll go stoke some fun!”
– Sarah Palin to Kate Gosselin’s kids while on an Alaskan camping trip for Palin’s painful reality show. Yes, I’m actually watching this.
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“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
– Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
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