Adrian Gray

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Adrian is Currently Reading

Adrian Gray is currently reading

The Confessions

by Paul Bradley Carr (Goodreads Author)

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Mar 08, 2026 11:51AM

“Routine was a system, a machine that would make me, well. Where before I had noted the ease with which routine arose, here, I felt its implacability, it's remorselessness and determination. It was a schedule designed to stifle possibility, because an excess of possibility had made me ill. At night, the lights in my room snapped off and told me that it was time to sleep. In the morning they flared and told me it was time to wake. After I woke I showered. After I showered I ate. Then I washed down a rainbow of pills and went to my first class or session. My body was irrelevant, my desires redundant and discouraged. To each external stimulus, only a single, pre-approved response was acceptable. (p.319)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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“You know what I think?’ said Zelma. ‘You got to start small, start symbolic, then grow it until it's huge.’
‘Meaning what’, I said
‘Meaning take back certain moments, enjoy certain moments starting with your body. Starting with how the only shit you can actually save her is at the weekend. I mean, Why? Why is that?’
‘In the morning I'm rushed. And when I get and then I get to work and I'm busy. And I feel like people notice when I'm away from my desk. I feel like either they think to themselves that I'm skiving, or that they just immediately know that I'm shitting.
‘Why shouldn't they know that you're shitting?’
‘I don't know.’
‘From now on, she said, I want you to prioritise your shitting. In your day now starting tomorrow nothing matters except shitting. Your sole purpose is to shit. I want you to get professional at shitting. And when you get good at it, celebrate it.’ (p.141)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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“Sometimes, looking back, I try to isolate a moment to change, a day or a night on either side of which things were demonstrably different. I never succeed. Partly, I think, is because it's simply not possible. Outside of sudden, violent events, changes is ongoing; we measure it only by holding what we've become against the memory of what we once were. But it's also because, in that space, at that particular time, We were so enmeshed in change, so completely caught up in it that singular, momentary factors became lost and blurred. Day and night slipped their boundaries. Our bodies ached, contorted, then were numbed with narcotics and went slack. My fingernails became sharp, then broken. In regular life, the life we'd left, we would have managed these processes, checked them, turned things back to how they were and how we liked them. There, in that concrete room, we surrendered ourselves to time and all its effects. The heat was unrelenting, pooling us in sweat and thickening the stink in which we lived. (p.271)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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“I began to feel as if we were merging with one another. The process was more than simply emotional. It was biological, systemic. Each of our bodies was a biosphere, slick with bacterial and insect life. Reteamed, and what we teamed with brought us closer not only to each other, but to the ecosystem we inhabited, fed off, and nourished. Bacteria bred in the ooze of our waste, our discarded food remains and puddled shit, then travelled onto us and between us, carried not only on the thickened air, but by the fleas and lice that hopped and crawled from one body to another. There was no difference, I began to think, between the puddles on the floor and the streaks of filth on my skin and the acne that erupted on Margot’s face. It was all just life, matter, the biome. We were leaking out into the world, and the pooled primordial essence of the world was soaking back into us in turn. (p.235)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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“We were inundated with food. Delivery, vans from local supermarkets arrived, laden with crates of booze, fine chocolates, cooked meats, exotic fruits....
What once had felt necessary, then abundant, now began to feel obscene. In part, we revelled in that obscenity. We took pictures of ourselves awash with food, not, just eating it, but rolling in it, lying on it, burying ourselves in it. When people found this offensive, we simply absorbed and digested their disgust in much the same way as we re-absorbed the shit we produced from our bodies. Zelma, in particular, enjoyed this aspect of what we did. It harked back to her adjustment of adverts. Her violent hatred of consumerism. This isn't our life, she wrote in the caption of a particularly excessive and indulgent image - Kim lying on her back while from above eight bottles of champagne were emptied over her face - it's yours. The post attracted a particularly high level of outrage. What was this? People wanted to know. Was this a protest? Or just debauchery? Were we anti-consumerist, as many seemed to feel we should be, or in fact, hyper-consumerist, an idea which some people found it offensive as the idea that we were some sort of plague cult. (p.266)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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