Mr. James > Recent Status Updates

Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons. [...] What do you aim to do? Hell, I don't know. It's about too late to do anything. He's damn near screwed the whole patch. I don't see why he couldnt of stuck to just one. Or a few. Well, I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailor in a whorehouse. -- C.M.

The last time I drank some of that shit I like to died. I stunk from the inside out. I laid in a tub of hot water all day and climbed out and dried and you could still smell it. I had to burn my clothes. I had the dry heaves, the drizzling shits, the cold shakes and the jakeleg. I can think about it now and feel bad. -- C.M.

Early times. Best little old drink in the world. Get ye a drink, Sut. Suttree held it to the light. Small twigs, debris, matter, coiled in the oily liquid. He shook it. Smoke rose from the yellow floor of the bottle. Shit almighty, he said. -- C.M.

From all old seamy throats of elders, musty books, I've salvaged not a word. In a dream I walked with my grandfather by a dark lake and the old man's talk was filled with incertitude. I saw how all things false fall from the dead. -- C.M.

The shadowed earth in which he squatted bore the stale order of a crypt. -- C.M.

They stood looking at the dead man. The squad workers were coiling their ropes and seeing to their tackle. [...] He lay there in his yellow socks with the flies crawling on the blanket and one hand stretched out on the grass. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist as some folks do or used to and as Suttree passed he noticed with a feeling he could not name that the dead man's watch was still running. -- C.M.

Down there in grots of fallen light a cat transpires from stone to stone across the cobbles liquid black and sewn in rapid antipodes over the rain dark street to vanish cat and countercat in the rifted works beyond. -- C.M.

Pouring hot mix asphalt onto my scalp would be more entertaining than this Bachman book. Coincidentally, they're both painful.

He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets. But still, out of defense to his adoptive parents and his aunt, he kept himself in check. This created both light and dark sides of his life. Seeing a comic puppet in a Weatern's tailor's shop made him wonder how close he himself was to such a figure. -- R.A.

Walking through the rain, he looked back and up once again at the trolley line. The cable was still sending sharp sparks into the air. He could think of nothing in life that he especially desired, but those purple sparks -- those wildly-blooming flowers of fire -- he would trade his life for the chance to hold them in his hands. -- R.A.

He often wondered, in that suburban second story, if people who loved each other had to cause each other pain. Even as the thought crossed his mind, he was aware of the floor's eerie tilt. -- R.A.

All the lunatics had been dressed in the same gray clothing, which seemed to give the large room an even more depressing look. One of them sat at an organ, playing a hymn over and over with great intensity. [...] Ten years earlier, his mother had been in no way different from these lunatics. In no way. And in fact in their smell he caught a whiff of his own mother's smell. -- R.A.

I am living now in the unhappiest happiness imaginable. Yes, strangely, I have no regrets. I just feel sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me. So goodbye, then. I have not tried -- consciously, at least -- to vindicate myself here. [...] I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity. -- Akutagawa Ryunosuke, 20 June 1927

She was like the rest of the kids, like Vinnie, like the people that thought education was truth: she wanted propaganda, complete with charts, not an answer. -- S.K.

When I was very young, my father would try to entice me back from my adoptive family by plying me with these rare treats. I remember how he once openly tempted me into running away while feeding me ice cream in the Uoei restaurant in Omori. -- R.A.

My mother was a madwoman. I never did feel close to her, as a son should feel towards his mother. Hair held in place by a comb, she would sit alone all day puffing on a long, skinny pipe in the house of my birth family in Toyko's Shiba Ward. [...] In general, though, she was a quiet lunatic. -- R.A.

"This is the end, then. Please be so good as to allow me to take your life. I will quickly follow you in death." -- R.A.

Oh come on, killing a man is not as big a thing as people like you seem to think. If you're going to take somebody's woman, a man has to die. When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don't use swords. You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with words [...]. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you've killed him all the same. -- R.A.

She was smiling. "You have a nice sense of irony."
"It's my sad life." -- S.K.

"What's a Minnie? It's our name for Minnenwerfer -- that's one of them big German shells. Make an 'orrible row they do, even before they land, a sort of whistle that gets louder and louder, and then -- KERBOOM!" -- L.R.B.

I.F.S. and His Aunt: She was a woman washing laundry in basins filled with black water; she was a woman cooking for children: comfort, cultural, and seasonal foods; she was a woman plowing with raw hands: cuts on fingertips and bruises on the dorsum of her nose; she was a woman that cared for an angry old man and birds that sang broken. In short, she was a woman without a woman's mercy.

We ought to explain here that the aunt judged a woman's beauty first of all by her eyebrows. -- N.G.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I can't hear a word. I must tell you that I had a cockroach in my left ear. Those damned Russians have thousands of cockroaches in their cottages. The agonies I suffered! No pen, sir, can describe it. And it still tickles. Keeps on tickling. An old woman, you know, did help me once in the most simple way..." -- N.G.

She climbed the pear trees and shook off the pears; she administered beatings to her lazy vassals with her own terrible hand and offered a glass of vodka to the deserving ones with the same terrible hand. Almost at one and the same time she would scold, dye the yarn, run the kitchen, make kvas and honey preserve. She was busy from morning till night and was in time to see to everything. -- N.G.

He was not, as a rule, very fond of reading, and if he happened to look into the fortune-telling book sometimes it was because he liked to find something familiar there, something he had read several times already. So does a city dweller go to his club every day, not in order to hear something new there, but in order to meet those of his cronies with whom he has been accustomed to chat from time immemorial. -- N.G.

"In the matter of this kind, I must rely on the opinions of experts. I can't see how my opinion can be anything other than to find this defendant insane. I so find him and do hereby recommit him to the central state hospital in Waupun for an indeterminate term of commitment." -- Judge Robert H. Gollmar

"A creature out of folklore. Something about the human imagination, I guess. When a homicidal maniac like Gein comes around, the mind just can't grasp reality, so he gets turned into a legend." -- A Reporter

"Happened just about a year ago. Eddie showed up on the front porch, real neighbor -like, with some meat wrapped up in brown paper. Said he'd shot a deer and figured we might like venison. I thought it odd at the time, since I never known him for a hunter. Now I know what sort of meat that really was. Good thing we never et a bite of it or we'd 'a been cannibals, just like him." -- A Farmer

"This tea, in fact, seemed as precious a thing to Swann as it did to her, and love has such need to find for itself a justification, a guarantee that it will last, in pleasures which in fact would not be pleasures without it and which end when it ends..." ― Marcel Proust

“If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"Reaching up, he snatched off his chief’s headdress and threw it violently onto the ground. Before Omri could stop him, he began jumping on it, and in a second or two all the beautiful tall turkey feathers were bent and broken."
― Lynne Reid Banks