Nicolai > Recent Status Updates

The he turned and led the horse he had been ridin across that terrain of black and glassy slag, treacherous to man and beast alike, and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith.

Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

He was wounded in an enemy country far from home and although his eyes took in the alien stones about yet the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul.

I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. I knew that 10-12 thousand miles driving a truck alone and unattended, over every kind of road…represented the antidote for the poison of the professional sick man.

Who doesn’t like to be the center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. … for I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness.

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

When the world itself is the source of your torment then you are free to exact vengeance upon any last part of it. I think perhaps you would have to be a woman to understand that. And you will never know the depth of your hurt until you are presented with the opportunity for revenge. Only then will you know what you are capable of.

In any case, to prepare a place in our lives for the tragedies to come is an economy few wish to practice. … There is no rule of exchange here, you see. Grief transcends every value. A man would give whole nations to lift it from his heart. And yet with it you can buy nothing.

I would urge you to see the truth of your situation. That is my advice. It is not for me to say what you should have done. Or not done. I only know that the world in which you see to undo your mistakes is no the world I which they were made. You are at a cross in the road and here you think to choose, but here there is no choosing. There is only accepting. The choosing was done long ago.

You should be careful what you wish for, Angel. You might not get it.

Life is being in bed with you. Everything else is just waiting.

Maybe hope springs eternal in the whale’s heart too. I don’t know. If you look at the species there seems to be no selective advantage to intelligence. … The process of evolution appears to be about specialization and adaptation and yet these are the very things that seem ultimately to mediate against survival itself.

I long for the alternate timeline in the way I long for a lost idea of clarity, or for my former naive belief in its possibility, in the way I long for mythical understanding which engineering squares tidily with poetry, math with metaphor. A synthesis in a single line. But I digress. - Concision: A Prawl by George Estreich

“If intelligence isn’t connected to empathy, it’s incredibly dangerous.” - Fat Man and Little Boy by Sylvie Baumgartel

God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit.

The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in-as if he’s been pulling hard the wrong way and now was turned around headed downstream.

It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.