This then would be Chicago in the winter of the last year of her life
How come sheep don’t shrink in the rain?
Mozart’s second violin concerto.
Smell of oil and the rich tidal funk of mangrove and saltgrass from the islands
The pilot was hovering overhead against the ceiling with his arms and legs hanging down like an enormous marionette
Stainless steel Heuer watch
Black and lapping water
A saker. A Lanneret
Nature nurture
Somebody next to you takes a round and it sounds like it’s hitting mud
Punji sticks
Where we flew out of Quang Nam we’d see these elephants in the clearings and the bulls would back off and raise their trunks and challenge us. Think about that. That’s pretty fucking bold. They didn’t know what we were. But they were taking care of the old lady. The kids. (…) And it would just blow them up. They’d just fucking explode
They rose from the couch simultaneously. Like birds leaving a wire
All right. Any other questions?
The left dwarf raised a hand
Not you, fuckhead. Jesus. Are you trying to give me gas?
I knew that freedom was just like it says in the speeches. It’s worth whatever you have to pay to get it
If there is no higher power then I’m it
God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Don’t close your eyes
You’ll never get rich selling your time
Billy Ray
The shadow of some colossal fundament hoving. Blotting out the sun
Where do the days go?
Oppenheimer was a chain smoker with a chronic cough and bad teeth
There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. (…) They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors
The moon dropped down the glass of the cabin like a coin falling through the sea
A river like a frayed silver rope
An iron casting with two machined faces that was marked Brown & Sharpe
US Mint double-eagle twenty dollar goldpieces bright as the day they were minted .St-Gaudens.
To where this ship is headed and why
Gabelsberg
The world will take your life
To prefer a world of paper
I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart
Stay slightly ahead of the curve. Try to keep the more common miseries at bay. Don’t look luck in the eye. Cheers.
A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.
What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple
Hoffer has it right. Real trouble doesn’t begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature.
There were dark flowers hanging over the wall. Carnivorous flowers, you thought them. Black and leathery in appearance. Like a dog’s cunt, you said.
The founders of quantum mechanics– Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg.
Did Ehrenfest work with Boltzmann?
I would say no
What did they share?
They both committed suicide
The original theory was a pretty elegant edifice
And yet it moved
To the skeptic all arguments are circular
Murray (Gell-Mann) called the particles quarks–after a line in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
1954 Ferrari Barchetta
Gibson mandolin
Frank Ramsey
All in white like dead children in a dream
A paperback copy of Hobbe’s Leviathan
Down on the drilling floor dead seabirds lay everywhere
A community of men
He wandered the streets tapping at Billy Ray’s bowl with a spoon. Like some wandering mendicant. He never saw him again.
My grandfather died and the parrot hasn’t spoken since
What did the parrot do? In the carnival
He rode a bicycle. On a wire
Can he still ride one?
I haven’t asked him. Although supposedly it’s something you never forget
It’s the exchange particle in quark interactions
When i was thirteen I found a wrecked airplane in the woods
A Laird-Turner Meteor
Deep sea diving. Car racing. What. a love of hazard?
Beauty has a power to call forth grief that is beyond the reach of other tragedies
I think the idea that the government of the United States of America routinely assassinates its citizens is something of a paranoid fantasy among certain political groups.
I would agree with that. Unless you’re one of those selected for assassination
I would rather make a good run than a bad stand
He had seen a dude in India drink a glass of milk with his dick. Do you believe that?
Jesus.
Somewhere out here the last ivory bill died
Too soon old and too late smart. You don’t know anything till it gets here
Good looking but in an odd way. Incisors like a Jurassic cat. A man shouldn’t ignore a thing like that
Pleistocene
What?
Pleistocene. Cat.
Wash them down with a chilled Montrachet
The Thalidomide Kid
Maserati A 73 Bora
When smart people do dumb things it’s usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear.
Improbable birds
What’s the strangest thing you ever beheld? In your travels.
In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.
The truth is that everyone is under arrest. Or soon will be. They don’t have to restrict your movements. They just have to know where you are.
The day of the locus.
Emerging structures
Something out of a Lewis Hine photograph.
A vintage black enameled Minerva
The only thing worse than losing is not playing
In the end you can escape everything but yourself
You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares
Some people cling to the wreckage forever
A tragic figure is a person of consequence
Pheasants crossed the road with their heads bowed like wrongdoers
Immense spread of stars overhead in the cold
Enormous liquid eyes
A thing once seen cannot be unseen
Me and Amundsen
Just because the world was spinning didn’t mean that you couldn’t get off
Kant had it right about the stars above and the truth within
Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not too
It could be that some part of your understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves
Dodge Hemi
The ring and the chain slid into his palm. He sat looking at them and then he slowly closed them in his hand. Oh, baby, he whispered
She tried to get into the place where they’d confined Rosemary Kennedy
Faster is what counts. Speed kills
Energy increases equally with mass but it increases with the square of the speed
Frame 313 of the Zapruder film
Bell & Howell
Kennedy was killed with a high power hunting rifle. .270 Winchester or Holland and Holland .300 Magnum .223
Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.
What do you say to the dead? You’ve few common interests.
Amati Violin
She made mathematical models of their acoustics. Sine-wave patterns of the plates. She finally worked a topological model that would tell you how to make the perfect violin
Vor mir keine Zeit, nach mir wird keine Sein
Fathers are always forgiven
The other dream was this. There was a riderless horse standing at a gate at dawn. Some other country, some other time. The news that the horse brings is a day’s ride old, no more. The horse’s dreams were once of mares and grass and water. The sun. But those dreams are no more. His is a world of blood and slaughter and the screams of men and animals all of which he has little understanding of
To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself
Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough
Godel’s boxes of notes in Gabelsberger
Lands unknown alike to men or to their gods
