wednesday 11 november year of the depend adult undergarment

• it’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know (589)
• orin can only give, not receive, pleasure, and this makes a contemptible number of them think he is a wonderful lover, almost a dream-type lover; and this fuels the contempt. but he cannot show the contempt, since this would pretty clearly detract from the subject’s pleasure (596)
• i miss sneering at something i love. how we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff […] i miss summer reruns. i miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers' strikes, actors' guild strikes. i miss jeannie, samantha, sam and diane, gilligan, hawkeye, hazel, jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. you know? i miss seeing the same things over and over again […] with television you were subjected to repetition. the familiarity was inflicted. different now (600)
• at the blade’s sound the situation becomes even more automatic and gately feels adrenaline’s warmth spread through him as his subdural hardware clicks deeper into a worn familiar long-past track. having no choice now not to fight and things simplify radically, divisions collapse. gately’s just one part of something bigger he can’t control (612)

8 november year of the depend adult undergarment

• you burn with hunger for food that does not exist (389)

6 november year of the depend adult undergarment

• he told joelle van dyne, she of the accent and baton and brainlocking beauty, told her in the course of an increasingly revealing conversation after kind of amazingly she had approached him at a columbus day major sport function and asked him to autograph a squooshy-sided football he’d kicked a hole through in practice — the deflated bladder had landed in the marching terriers’ sousaphone player’s sousaphone and had been handed over to joelle after extrication by the lardy tubist, sweaty and dumb under the girl’s actaeonizingly imploring gaze — asked him — orin now also suddenly damp and blank on anything attractive to say or recite — asked him in an emptily resonant drawl to inscribe the punctured thing for her own personal daddy, one joe lon van dyne of shiny prize ky and she said also of the dyne-riney proton donor reagent corp. of nearby boaz ky, and engaged him (o.) in a slowly decreasingly one-sided social-function-type conversation — the p.g.o.a.t. was pretty easy to stay in a one-to-one like tête-à-tête with, since no other terrier could bring himself within four meters of her — and orin gradually found himself almost meeting her eye as he shared that he believed it wasn’t all athletic, punting’s pull for him, that a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, if there was such a thing anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as one soul. (295)

7 november year of the depend adult undergarment

• it was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the cooking procedure that she’d first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live. she is not stupid (236)

winter b.s. 1960 – tucson az

• you enter a trance. you feel the seams and edges of everything. the court becomes an extremely unique place to be. it will do everything for you. it will let nothing escape your body. objects move as they’re made to, at the lightest easiest touch (166)

3 november y.d.a.u

• good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her (146)

year of the depend adult undergarment

• that most angelic of distortions (97)
• attachments are of great seriousness. choose your attachments carefully. choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. what you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. die for one person? this is a craziness. persons change, leave, die, become ill. they leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. your nation outlives you. a cause outlives you. (107)

year of the depend adult undergarment

• we sort of play. but it’s all hypothetical, somehow. even the ‘we’ is theory: i never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game (68)
• doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession’s practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they’re entering is a hospital’s fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating (68)

year of the depend adult undergarment

• american experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. some just prefer to do it in secret (53)
• like most north americans of his generation, hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. it’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency (54)

october — year of the depend adult undergarment

• orin wakes with his own impression sweated darkly into the bed beneath him, slowly drying all day to a white salty outline just slightly off from the week’s other faint dried outlines, so his fetal-shaped fossilized image is fanned out across his side of the bed like a deck of cards, just overlapping, like an acid trail or timed exposure (43)

year of the depend adult undergarment

• i have administrative bones to pick with god [..] god seems to have a kind of laid-back management style i’m not crazy about. i’m pretty much anti-death. god looks by all accounts to be pro-death (40)
• [about his mom seeming happier when his dad died] one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. there’s another way though. you can just raise the pole (42)

9 may — year of the depend adult undergarment

• another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. this holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive (32)

1 april — year of the tucks medicated pad

• that your quote-unquote “complimentary” dunlop widebody tennis racquets’ super-secret-formulaic composition materials of high-modulus-graphite-reinforced polycarbonate polybutylene resin are organochemically identical i say again identifical to the gyroscopic balance sensor and mise-en-scene appropriation card and priapistic-entertainment cardtridge implanted in your very own towering father’s anaplastic cerebrum after his cruel series of detoxification and convolution-smoothings and gasterectomy and prostatectomy and pancreatectomy and phalluctomy … (31)

year of glad

• ‘my application’s not bought,’ i am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. ‘i am not just a boy who plays tennis. i have an intricate history. experiences and feelings. i’m complex. ‘i read,’ i say. ‘i study and read. i bet i’ve read everything you’ve read. don’t think i haven’t. i consume libraries. i wear out spines and rom-drives. i do things like get in a taxi and say, “the library, and step on it.” my instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, i can tell, with due respect. ‘but it transcends the mechanics. i’m not a machine. i feel and believe. i have opinions. some of them are interesting. i could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. let’s talk about anything. i believe the influence of kierkegaard on camus is underestimated. i believe dennis gabor may very well have been the antichrist. i believe hobbes is just rousseau in a dark mirror. i believe, with hegel, that transcendence is absorption. i could interface you guys right under the table,’ i say. ‘i’m not just a creãtus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’ i open my eyes. ‘please don’t think i don’t care.’ (10-11)

• marginally mammalian (15)