Chad Flaska > Recent Status Updates

Was NOT expecting the IT connection in this

“I suppose when I'm in my forties—always assuming I make it that far—I’ll look back on what I thought I understood at twenty-two and realize there was a lot I didn't get at all. There's always a later, I know that now. At least until we die. Then I guess it's all *before that*.”

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anonymous. It is not, after all, where you live.”

“She went to the movies instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.“

“He urges his eyes out of his thoughts to encounter her. Blue eyes. Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly toward fall, he looks toward her. Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see.”

“Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter—like the throb of a heart made of jelly.”

“If she was here now I’d probably be crazy again in about five minutes. Ain’t that ridiculous?”
A half-hour later, when they had gathered up the gear and were on the way to town, he answered his own question.
“It ain’t, really,” he said. “Being crazy about a woman like her’s always the right thing to do. Being a decrepit old bag of bones is what’s ridiculous.”

“You have to remember that I’ve been lonely for a long time. Loneliness is like ice. After you’ve been lonely long enough you don’t even realize you’re cold, but you are. It’s like I was a refrigerator that had never been defrosted at all—never. All these years the ice has just been getting thicker.”

Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea, one sailor recalled. "The man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss....You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss."

”…man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone, or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.”