More Nonsense: Pocket Fragments, Part II
Sometimes, in a despairing effort to make contact with some living thing, I'd dig up the worms from the borders and lay them in a line on the lawn and kiss them one by one.
--Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley
South Dakota town slogans: "We'll Do!" And: "A little bit of Nothing in the middle of Nowhere."
Eastern Montana: landscape's frozen version of the panic attack.
The crow gets wise to the scarecrow: Eventually I figured out it wasn't a man.
Yeah, that's a great idea, let's put a motherfucking tank out in front of the high school.
Oklahoma: cattle gulag, hell's anteroom.
Graffiti on the side of a burned out house: "Stay out, Tammi!"
Chester Grinwiddy, the Blind River hypnotist. "Stop Smoking!"
Town name: Black's Madness.
Urinals in the Land of Giants: the fucking American Standards are mounted four feet up the wall. I'm not an unusually short fellow, but the only way I could piss in these things was by pointing upwards and hopping a bit.
East Texas church sign: "Dr. Lyndale Truss, Sr. Pastor. Sunday: Conversations With A Lawn Mower."
The motel tampon "nap sack": first cousin to a doggy bag.
Rest stop bathroom graffiti, scrawled with extreme aggression into a stainless steel tile above the urinal: "That casino up the road is a gyp! Fixed! Rigged!"
UP motel room: everything about the place was essentially fraudulent, and yet there was something about that very fact that cemented its credentials as genuine Americana, the real (charming) deal --tricked-out rusticity; corny, over-the-top, archetypal American motifs: heavily varnished pine, shag carpeting, regional wildlife art, plastic curtains, gift-shop knick knacks. A place where Native American art peacefully coexists with Hummel figurines.
Overnight it seemed like everyone in my world got sober and became vegetarians. Liquor and meat, unfortunately, were two of the only things I believed in passionately at the time.
Estragon: I can't go on like this.
Vladimir: That's what you think.
--Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot
I was 40 miles from the nearest microwave burrito.
The world never once threw that poor bastard batting practice. Day after day nothing but gas and hard sliders.
I wish some psychologist would provide a convincing explanation of why murder is commoner among cooks than among the members of any other profession.
--W.H. Auden, The Kitchen of Life
Scared shitless that one day I would wake up a realtor.
Sitting around, painting the town, with a paintbrush I hold in my toes.
All that liberal parenting monkey business is for the birds. It'll get you nothing but a kick in the teeth every time.
He had wanted to become a criminal for a long time. He read detective novels by the dozens and watched anything on TV or at the movies with shooting in it. There was little he loved more than the feel of a gun in his hands....
--William Allen, Charles Starkweather
The Dark Ages: Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives on the stereo. Two a.m. Hitting Grain Belt long-neck beer bottles off a sixth-floor balcony with a Boog Powell Louisville Slugger.
Few persons appreciate the fact that the voluntary curtailment of sleep for an hour every night for a year is equivalent to the loss of forty-four nights' sleep of eight hours' duration....
When sleep has been limited unduly, inability to sleep ensues and becomes the bane of existence. Exhaustion of the cerebral structures leads to still graver symptoms, such as insanity....Indeed, insomnia precludes or enters to a greater or lesser extent into the causation of almost every form or mental alienation....Many of the tragedies of life are due solely to the prolonged want of sleep.
--Chambers Encyclopedia, 1879
During my insomnia I tell myself, as a kind of consolation, that these hours I am so conscious of I am wresting from nothingness, and that if I were asleep they would never have belonged to me, they would never have even existed.
--E.M. Cioran, The New Gods
5:12:54 PM 
|
