Aaron > Recent Status Updates

How can it be that a man
can sup his fill, and still all around him find emptiness and drowsiness,
if he must go to the grave this way, unattended? Yet certainly
there are some bright spots, and when you listen to the laughter
in the middle of these it makes for more than a cosmetic truth, an invitation
to chivalry ringed by the dump fires of our deliberate civilization that has
got some things going for it---

"I want to look at myself in the mirror but I look so shitty I don't want to expose my third-rate vanity."

"Dogs do not believe in God or Art.
Intrinsically they have a grip
on things.

I unfortunately do not. I sit
here with a bottle of beer, a cigarette
and my latest poem, The Irony of The Leash."

Wow, these are fantastic.

"my belly is homeless
flopping over the way of my jeans like an omelette
there better be something about feeling fat
what the really is is a lack of emptiness
I'm aiming for that empty feeling
going to get some of that
and then I'll be back"

How hilarious and beautiful.

Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

"The few times I spoke to him, I could sense how logic and logical thinking were inextricably bound to his mounting derangement, because, in some sense, paranoia is logic run amok..... he was of the firm belief that there was a reason for everything. If you think that way, it's a small step to begin to see hidden machinations and agents operating to manipulate the most common, everyday occurrences."

it suddenly occurred to me that true believers in hard-driving jazz - Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor - could never become owners in cleaning shops in malls across from railroad stations. Or maybe they could. They just wouldn't be happy cleaners.

One of the things I love about Murakami: no one else has such completely insane thoughts that somehow ring so true like him.

Cut this tree I'm living in down. Hollow its trunk out.
Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides.
Slide the new me back inside the old trunk.
Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year's crops to grow.
Birth me all over again
Burn me and the tree
Next summer's sun
Midwinter guarantee

This book is almost unbearably beautiful.

Regrets when you're dead? A past when you're dead? Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

That's precisely why I say we are trapped forever. We're properly doomed. It's best not to try either, best not believe your eyes. It's a trap, Petrrina. And we fall into it every time. We think we're breaking free but all were doing is readjusting the locks. We're trapped, end of story..

...every failure was an act of heroism.

"Justice? --You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law."

What a way to start a novel.

"It's just absurd for people to sit around being offended by their own meaninglessness, so that they have to force everything else to come into the hole with them, and die trying."

- Bob Dylan

"The sense I get from a lot of contemporary memoirs is that they have an unconscious and unacknowledged project, which is to make the memoirist seem as endlessly fascinating and important to the reader as they are to themselves."

I very rarely feel quite this connected to an expressed opinion.

"And corpses, whatever their other faults, never ever screw up."

... And (I claim) the metastatic efficiency with which is done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the level of people's tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of which narrative art is art.

Man, I wish DFW was here to see TikTok. I imagine he'd feel lucky that he isn't.

And, even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It's a narrative art that strives not too change or enlighten or broaden or reorient--not necessarily even to "entertain"--but merit and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end--openly acknowledged--is to ensure continued watching....

"They're always telling us that cars are more dangerous than planes. Why not be afraid of both?"

"The last time I had felt as I did on that June day, was at Mycenae, at the grave of Agamemnon."

Well, that might be the most dramatic sentence I've ever read.

"'Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.'" - Lila

Very few times have I read more profound and utterly true words in a book.

"And this is how I see it today: it's not the neighborhood that's sick, it's not Naples, it's the entire Earth, it's the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things."

"I thought of... how many who had been girls with us were no longer alive, had disappeared from the face of the earth because of illness, because their nervous systems had been unable to endure the sandpaper of torments, because their blood had been spilled."

Sandpaper of torments??? I love Elena Ferrante so much.

As his father is being apprised of the options to operate on his brain tumor:

"It was a lot to tell an old man whose strength, that evening, you could have measured in teaspoons."

Strength measured in teaspoons. Wow

"This guy is human, I thought, in the worst sense of the word "

"... Decide the impulsive way he decided. This was the tissue that had manufactured his set of endless worries and sustained for more than eight decades his stubborn self-discipline, the source of everything that had so frustrated me as good adolescent son, the thing that had ruled our fates back when he was all-powerful and determining our purpose. And now it was being compressed and displaced and destroyed..."

"Alone, when I felt like crying, I cried and I never felt more like it than when I removed from the envelope the series of pictures of his brain--and not because I could really identify the tumor invading the brain but simply because it was his brain, my father's brain, what prompted him to think the blunt way he thought, speak the empathic way he spoke, reason the emotional way he reasoned..."

"What I wanted to take on was not my mother, but her rectum. I couldn't just stand by and watch a stranger clean it, cursing and shuddering in disgust the whole time... Why did it have to be a loose rectum? Why, of all people, my mother?"

Another quick update to share this hilariously honest and heartbreaking quote.

"For Ha Young, kissing a corpse was the first and only contact she had ever had with a man."

Well, now there's a line if I've ever seen one.

"She greeted me with the kindness of those who have long been fighting a losing battle, and who had come to terms with the unlikelihood of her modest hopes ever being fulfilled."