Alan > Recent Status Updates

The full-scale Wabash Avenue once-over and then some. Has he ever been scrutinized quite this close before? Normally at about this point there begins to drift across the face of the broad in the scene a look of evasiveness Hicks has grown used to, followed by some form of "How cheapened has my life become that I have to put up with attention from palookas like this?"

"Yes, it was tragic," she said, with a voice like flint. And didn't say, as she might have done-at eighty she could be oracular: We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of com-bustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn't it?

A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her. Her life was beginning, it was not ending, it had not ended. She would never be able to explain (or be required to) this illogical, enveloping inversion.
As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow-pouring itself outwards—with the air she was breathing.

In any case, as friends or perhaps even as lovers, or just as young Mister Paul and the new Beechwood maid he'd spotted one day in the post office in Titherton, they'd done all sorts of things together, in all sorts of secret locations.

It was a strange business, this Mothering Sunday ahead of them, a ritual already fading, yet the Nivens-and the Sheringhams-still clung to it, as the world itself, or the world in dreamy Berkshire, still clung to it, for the same sad, wishing-the-past-back reasons. As the Nivens and the Sheringhams perhaps clung to each other more than they'd used to, as if they'd become one common decimated family.

An Oral History of Atlantis

"Hans," my father said, "it's time for you to fly." Instead I walked all the way to Manhattan, arriving at noon. This was the day before the day the city blew up every bridge, back when they thought rats spread the dread virus MtPR, pronounced "Metaphor," which they wanted to contain or exclude, it was hard to remember which.

By the time Zoe was in college, she found many occasions to tell me that my generation had fucked up in every major way. We'd ruined the planet, we'd let a criminal 1 percent own everything, we'd gotten everyone used to constant war. Our current life-form was an invasive species, worse than kudzu, choking out anything around us.

Watch Your Step

"Listen," you said. "This afternoon my uncle had me over for lunch." And soon you were telling me everything. That was the problem: you enjoyed the narrative of your own im-portance. It made you a charming conversationalist but a very bad spy.

Our participation in the diminishment of nature is another form of self-betrayal; I want to give nature as much priority as I give myself, want to feel it as an extension of the same body that walks in my two boots over the ground. The grass is my thinker, my speaker, my twine.

…Wren says, "I basically feel like I've
been preparing for an apocalypse my whole life."

"I mean, most kids my age have been hearing about climate change since we were born and walk around with a sense of doom, knowing this world will be totally different before we are old. The crazy thing is that it sounds slightly thrilling to me. No rules! I like the idea of having to use my skills to survive."

The two valleys drop away and rise up again in layers; the sky feels huge above and beneath us, as if we stood on the prow of a ship and could fall into the sky like water. As the sun comes over the forest edge, white light blots out the hills, splashes down through the new leaves, and blinds us.

What if one of the grime-covered kids from the MOTH decided to take it out on the "merely rich" "cosmopolitan class" without identifying Vera as a fellow downcast child, albeit one without a biological link to the colonial era?

The apartment was a combination of a two-bedroom apartment and a studio, which together formed three bed-rooms. The living room was called the Maginot Line by Daddy (a fine entry in the Things I Still Need to Know Diary).

"Fun never ends around here." She took Dylan by the hand and dragged him away into their side of the apartment while Vera enjoyed the extra moments she spent with Daddy alone even if he was mostly silent with his mouth open. (Looking at Social Media)

Scalp Hunters
Travel. They had been formed by Control on Bill Haydon's suggestion in the pioneer days of the cold war, when murder and kidnapping and crash blackmail were common currency, and their first commandant was Haydon's nominee. They were a small outfit, about a dozen men, and they were there to handle the hit-and-run jobs that were too dirty or too risky for the residents abroad.

Then, as the light was stronger, he could see the tops of the palms blowing in the gale and then, as the sun began to come up behind the hills, the palm trunks were whitish gray and their blowing branches a bright green and the grass of the hills was brown from the winter drought and the limestone tops of the far hills made them look as though they were crested with snow.

Then, astern of the boat and off to starboard, the calm of the ocean broke open and the great fish rose out of it, rising, shining dark blue and silver, seeming to come endlessly out of the water, unbelievable as his length and bulk rose out of the sea into the air and seemed to hang there until he fell with a splash that drove the water up high and white.

His life was built solidly on work and on the living by the Gulf Stream and on the island and it would stand up all right. The aids and the habits and the customs were all to handle the loneliness and by now he knew he had opened a whole new country for the loneliness to move into once the boys were gone.

Thomas’ three boys visit the island

…swam out in the green water, their bodies making shadows over the clear white sand, bodies forging along, shadows projected on the sand by the slight angle of the sun, the brown arms lifting and pushing forward, the hands slicing in, taking hold of the water and pulling it back, legs beating along steadily, heads turning for air, breathing easily and smoothly.

But he did not worry much about any of it. He had long ago ceased to worry and he had exorcized guilt with work insofar as he could, and all he cared about now was that the boys were coming over and that they should have a good summer. Then he would go back to work.
He had been able to replace almost everything except the children with work and the steady normal working life he had built on the island.

…just as he knew how many stairs there were to each flight of his own house and which way each of the twelve doors opened.
But Smiley had a second reason, which was fear, the secret fear that follows every professional to his grave. Namely, that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand the reckoning.

Outside Context Paradox!

During a crisis, everyone was plunged into the animal fear that she frequented all year round. The only benefit of her generalized anxiety disorder was that it prepared Hope for the Worst-Case Scenario; she was never surprised when one materialized because the Worst-Case Scenario was where she spent most of her time.

Moses Blitz arrives in Vacca Vale

He sees no ventilation for air-conditioning, but the structure is chilly-either from strong insulation or supernatural forces, Moses concludes. He blesses himself with holy water, relieved when nothing happens, trying to clear his mother from the windshield of his psychology, thinking in social media posts. He is fifty three years old.

A Variable

Which was also enraging.
But the most enraging aspect of all the aspects is the Situation's banality. Blandine is thereafter cursed with the knowledge that one of the defining events of her life was nothing more than a solution to a tired equation.

Independence Workshop

Despite herself, Blandine feels affection for this man. Maybe it's pity. His optimism is embarrassing, yes, but she finds herself helplessly rooting for him. The course involves watching a lot of videos from the nineties about how to balance checkbooks and triumph by bending the truth in job inter-views.

Sometimes, Moses Robert Blitz— only child of Elsie Jane MeLoughlin Spite paints his entire body with the liquid of broken glow sticks, forcibly enters the house of an enemy, and wakes the enemy. Then he flails around in the dark, naked and aglow.
He doesn't mean any real harm. He just likes to fiddle with people.

No one has it easy in the Vacca Vale system, but Blandine had it the worst, being so smart and female. People want things from the Blandines of the system, and I'm sure her brain didn't help. Thinking too much can zap you dead, and Blandine-she just shuts herself in rooms und thinks. Thinks and thinks and thinks herself into all kinds of doom, and by sundown she's afraid of the doorknob.

Blandine, Apt C4
Alone, Blandine grips her forehead. She's certain that she has some kind of social impairment; she just doesn't know what it's called. Internet quizzes never know what to do with her. In general, she feels too much or too little, interacts too much or too little-never the proper amount.
It seems to her that she's spent her whole life sitting in a laundromat, freaking people out.