Daniel Montague > Recent Status Updates

“What is like when you lose somebody you love?” Jane asked. “You die too”, I said. “And you wait around for your body to catch up”. “Is that what you are doing now?” Jane said. “Waiting for your body to catch up, I mean.” “No, not anymore. You eventually get to live again, you just live a different live, that’s all.” "So, you're on your 3rd life now", Jane said.

Michel Q. flickered on the screen... Through the years, I studied the transformation, in newspaper photos, on television, from murdering hoodlum to militiaman to patriot to politician, a well-trodden path taken by everyone at the top.

61%: “Well, I miss my wife you know”, I said. “But I miss the feeling of I don’t know, comfort, the sense you are where you are supposed to be, with someone you are supposed to be with. I sure as hell don’t feel that way out here…There is no stable ground out here”, I said. There is nothing out here I feel really safe about.”

“We didn’t have to do this, you know. Knock these poor sons of bitches out of space and make it so they spend the next couple of decades starving and dying and killing each other. We didn’t murder civilians today, well other than the ones that got Bender, but they’ll spend a nice long time dying from disease and murdering each other because they can’t do too much of anything else.”

“You’re letting one stubborn, weary heart ruin your career. Our patients need us to be reliable. To be diligent and responsible and strong when they need us the most. That’s what being a good surgeon means. A steady hand and a clear head under the direst of circumstances. What if you were operating under enemy fire or after a natural disaster.”

"Fallen down," she says simply. She doesn't apologize.
"It doesn't matter," I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. "I knew it would happen."
"Then why you don't stop it?" asks my mother.
And it's such a simple question.

I also found out why I should never reveal “why” to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.

But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once again: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.

Feigned or not, sometimes I'm jealous of Hominy's obliviousness, because he, unlike America, has turned the page. That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book-that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

Monopoly is a flywheel: Big companies subvert politics, paving the way for corrupt practices and anticompetitive mergers. This lets the companies grow, as does their corrupting influence, which paves the way for greater profits, more growth and still more corruption. Anti-monopoly is a flywheel too: competition-enhancing regulation reduces profits and clear space for new companies that pose an innovative threat ...

“Sometimes, ain’t no answer Felix, sometimes a man just gotta take the way life come and hope you’re on the right side of things with god” Jimmy said.

Microsoft owed its existence to IBM's forced conversion from cheating bully to accommodating partner, but the lesson it learned from the IBM affair was that cheating paid. Microsoft was charged with breaking the same laws as IBM, in the same ways, declaring war on the Internet itself, creating a string of proprietary alternatives to the public Internet that leverag
ed Microsoft's control over its OS ...

When we are out in public, on the street, in the store, on a public conveyance, we are quite visible and white people go to great lengths to keep us at a distance. When we work in their homes, cooking their food, washing their clothes, cleaning the houses, caring for their children, we become invisible. Not so much invisible as ordinary, unnoticed like a table or chair that has rested in the same place for 20 years

"They loved it. Stole for it, lied for it, killed for it. But I'm the only one left. Me and the dogs. And I will never clean it again. Never. Nothing. Not a speck of dust, not a grain of dirt, will I move. Everything in this world they lived for will crumble and rot."

It isolated her. Already without family, she was further isolated from her people, for, except for the relative bliss on the island, every other resource was denied her: partnership in marriage, confessional friendship, and communal religion. Men frowned, women whispered and shoved their children behind them. Even a traveling side show would have rejected her, since her freak quality lacked ...- the grotesque.

Those men, most of whom would never benefit from the cruel institution of slavery, which they risked their lives, had received wages of war in the forms of physical and emotional disfigurement and as in the wake of all wares, they were already becoming ghosts on the periphery of civilians minds.

You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some wooly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green... Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

"I think he had this little broken heart inside of him," says Martin. "I'm not a shrink, but there was something in his soul that was melancholy... And when you're around somebody, there's a difference between constantly jovial and a jovial angst. Some people are just born with a little melancholy."

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power - a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

He had never before seen a family at close quarters, and their oddities and quarrels and misunderstandings and loves and hates and imperfect sympathies and impossible yet inevitable togetherness fascinated him very much.

I had me a good man/
So sweet so strong/
Yes, lord he was a fine man/
But I treated him wrong/
I wanted a good time/
And I thought I could play/
Till a silver tongue devil led me astray/
Now my man is gone and my baby too/
I once had a rainbow/
Now all I have is blue

"We all use different tricks on ourselves, ways to get through the day. A lot of time I say Skinny cause it puts me out there, gives me some distance."

People who thought that Stella lived in hell were not wrong; but like all those who do not, they failed to understand that hell is a large place wherein there are familiar refuges and corners.

This was the story of our lives: minor insurrections; tiny victories; a brief chance to ridicule our oppressors; little floating vessels of hope amid a great sea of uncertainty, deprivation, and fear.

I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match it's weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one's own.

If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives. Falling might take just as long but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone

He had a wildebeest build, a head as bald and shiny as the chrome knob on a truck hitch, and a nose that looked like a gnarled chunk of pink charcoal. He shared with Beaufort the same ruddy complexion and near-handsome Neanderthal face. The kind of face where the brow is heavy, but with youth it looks serious. On the elder Brokamp, it only looked cruel, a concentration-camp guard quality to it.

The sky over the place you were born has a familiarity beyond how the clouds roll in or how the stars wink at you at night. The sky over your home behaves like that moment when, as a parachutist, you pull the rip cord and the heavens snatch you back . . . when you get that remembered glimpse of the fields and forests and rises and rivers of your home meeting the horizon, your jaw will tighten.

You only get one childhood, one chance at formation, and Stacey would carry those lessons with her long after she'd ruled their conclusions bogus. Such lessons came conjoined at the heart, Siamese twins, to the dizzying sensation that settles in when a person of faith comes to understand that, after all this, it's logical that only darkness awaits.

It was really all he'd discovered from his travels: No matter where you wen or how novel it seemed when you first pulled into town, it always turned into the same bars, same food, same women, same politics, same liquor, same drugs, same troubles.

It appears this is going to be an uplifting read. 😄