J Torres

“When I set the hook on a nice fish, Gartside asked, “How far out was he?” “Just outside the mud line,” I told him. “That’s where I thought they’d be. Don’t be a barnacle. Keep covering ground after you land him.”
― David DiBenedetto, On the Run: An Angler's Journey Down the Striper Coast

“Now, in my fifties, I wake up knowing exactly where I am. My windows are open, which I remember opening last night. I am naked, and I remember taking off and throwing my dirty clothes in a hamper I bought the other day at the equivalent of a Hungarian Target here in Budapest. I wake up with eyes wide and I don’t need coffee but I enjoy the ritual. I am right where I’m supposed to be, fully aware, and shame no longer follows me like a reticent dog being belly-dragged on a leash. With this clarity comes an interest in smiles and honest laughter and the patience to suck the nutrients from all those walks of life that now tickle my senses. Morning has me in its grip and I’ll walk today, I’ll stroll to the river or up the hill or to a coffee shop to witness and engage. The world is a hard and unforgiving dark alleyway. Sometimes the riot of a bar fight becomes a communal heaven we never saw coming. For now, I’ll marvel, sufficiently stunned, at the fortune of it all. Amen.”
― Josh Brolin, From Under the Truck: A Decidedly Un-Celebrity Memoir from the Enigmatic Actor

“I had come with one question for Cole. “What is it about the striped bass?” I asked. “The thing about the striped bass is that they’re beautiful. They’re also the wildest, biggest fish that’s inshore. And they’re very loyal. You can walk out to a salt marsh anywhere along the coast and catch one. They show up every year in the same spot, unlike the bluefish, which is evasive and mercurial. You develop an affection for a wild creature that comes to you, that puts itself in your environment. Stripers allow us to connect with the natural world. And they taste pretty damn good.”
― David DiBenedetto, On the Run: An Angler's Journey Down the Striper Coast

“myself—like Johnson, a solid hand at running the old Stata models—came to virtually identical conclusions writing for the online journal Quillette in 2021, noting that “between 2019—by no means a famously peaceful year—and 2020, homicides alone surged by 42 percent during the summer and [another] 34 percent during the fall.”34 Left-leaning magazines and journals like Vox largely attributed this trend to general chaos associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.35 However, I noted that an alternative explanation fits the data far better: crime leapt like 1990s Mike Jordan because many large police departments had their budgets cut, and almost all of them reeled in their stops dramatically.”
― Wilfred Reilly, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula