John > Recent Status Updates

“ If I was asleep, I was asleep. Once I had thought it was a sign that I wasn’t a real writer. Writers slept badly, had ravaged faces, at the crack of dawn they sat at the kitchen table staring out the window, tormented by their inner demons, which never rested.
Who had ever heard of a great writer who slept like a child? ” (851).

“The connections that hold us back ... as it were, have to do with expectations and obligation, with what the world asks of us, and sooner or later ... we realize the imbalance of honoring the world’s demands while the world fails to honor ours. At that point we become free, we can do as we please, but what has made us free, the meaninglessness of the world, also deprives that freedom of its meaning,” (381-2).

“A sliver of the feeling that could come over me at night, when the lights changed in the empty streets without anyone there to see them, implanted itself in my mind like a note slipped under a door. The image it conjured, which I could so vividly entertain, was of a world without people,” (375).

“To be human is to be several …. the heart is a bird in the chest … the hand is a crab and the hair a haystack …. It is because the teeth are a stone wall and the eyes apples … and the ribs a gate. It is because it is always dark inside the brain, and still …. It is because we are blood. It is because we must die. Death, that great restorer of stillness,” (367).

“To be human is to be several …. the heart is a bird in the chest … the hand is a crab and the hair a haystack …. It is because the teeth are a stone wall and the eyes apples … and the ribs a gate. It is because it is always dark inside the brain, and still …. It is because we are blood. It is because we must die. Death, that great restorer of stillness,” (376).

“He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them,” (292).

'In San Francisco you have to take off your sweater and put it on again twenty times a day. What else is there to say about it?' (282).

I was twenty years old and scared stiff of other people being angry with me. It never went away.
When I left everything behind and moved to Stockholm at thirty-three, the fear was still inside me.
[At forty.  Still.]
Fear of people being angry with me was the child’s fear, it didn’t belong in the adult world… yet something inside me had never made that transition, become adult and hardened in that way.

" She remembered what had been bothering her, the vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing, though, a small bother, " [ - 39].

They're strange, the Dutch. After talking to [several], I met a man who frequently calls his 18 month old daughter a "little ball sack." "Because, I mean, it's what you do," he explained.
"What do you mean, 'It's what you do'?" I said. "It's not what I do or anyone in my family does. I don't even call my ball sack a ball sack."
He shrugged, Dutchily.
( - 241).

[One day while out walking 6 months earlier, I'd come across a strap-on penis by the side of the road.] It seemed pretty old and was Band-Aid colored, about 3 inches long and not much bigger around than a Vienna sausage ...
I thought about taking the penis home and mailing it to one of my sisters for Christmas but knew that the moment I put it in my knapsack, I'd get hit by a car and killed. That's just my luck.

A few days later, at the big Comme des Garcons shop in Omotesando, I bought yet another pair ... a fancier pair that are cerulean blue.
'What are you doing?' Hugh moaned as I stepped out of the dressing room. 'That's THREE pairs of culottes you'll own now.'
All I could say in my defense was, 'Maybe I have a busy life.'
( - 75).

"Mrs. Hamrick visits, though, and sometimes she and Hugh will sit in the kitchen and talk about Sam.
It's not the snippets of conversation that betray him as the subject but rather their voices, which almost a decade after his death, are still brittle and reverential, full of loss and longing," ( - Pg. 15.)

You hear people saying, 'Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.’ Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way?

[ That is not the full story... If you uncover] one, a full story will sit on your brain like lead. They are difficult. They are long-winded. They are epic. They are like the stories God tells: full of impossibly particular information. You don't find them in the dictionary.

The mist hung over the trees, the rain was heavy and …. the evening sky was gray and shambling, seeming to sink into .... a forest of twisted limbs and disordered minds. With the lights from the windows and the silence among the trees it was as disturbing a place as it was appealing [and] aroused ambivalence ... the routines and the slow rhythm in which everything happened.

I opened my eyes …. The trees outside the window were black, the darkness between them pale [at night]…. The sky was overcast, the air warm and still [during the day]…. Two of the patients … stood watching us …. No one spoke; the sound of footsteps and people on the move, slowly making their way forward, surrounded by the stillness of the forest on both sides…. Lawns, dry and discolored, had been laid between.

[It] was about two lovers moving back and forth in the mass of sinners drifting like a flock of birds in the wind ... who can never come close to each other.

[I hit] him as hard as I could. [I] hit him in the face.... The feeling of finally having acted was strong. I looked up at the sky, which was light and bright and wonderful, and stared into the green darkness of the park, and then I was gone, it was as though I had been switched off.
[ - 242].

" I came close to praying a few times, but everything felt unanswered enough and I didn't want another frame for the silence. "

"Shit," he said. "I keep noticing that being a person involves, like, frequent adjustments to your actual circumstances."

[26. Martin, Andrew. "The Wedding Stray."]

That year we went to see, 'The Day of the Locust,' my favorite movie. The man at the box office gave us a discount, saying, 'I can't charge full price fkr something without a plot,'

I hated my boyfriend but I liked the neighborhood.
[....One time] lying outside on the grass, he held my face toward the sun, stared at my eyeballs, and began to cry.
....If I turned my back during breakfast he'd say, 'I noticed you spilled some of your coffee. So I wiped it up for you.' If I didn't thank him, he'd put down his fork, ask, 'Was that okay?' He was a child, really.

On our first date he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients' theories of light, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens.
....And he explained something he thought most people didn't understand about intelligence. 'It comes from the heart,' he said, beating his chest with his fist. 'It has a lot to do with your blood type. And magnets.'

" Who can remember or even cares about the actual plot ... I certainly don't. It's the MOOD [that's recounted or re-created] ... that lingers ... This is what counts, " [1].

All my life I have longed to be alone in a place....
Even then... in the middle of an embrace, someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence.

In a 1963 Gallop poll respondents refused to self-identify as either poor or rich: approximately half said that they were working class while the other half perceived themselves as middle class.... 'Those refusals reflected a national conceit... America didnt have classes, [and if] it did, Americans should act as if we didnt'

Widely regarded as the best writer of the Aryan Brotherhood.... John Lee Brook's body of work, which comprises 5 books, is soundly built, echoes Whitman and the New Narrative poetry, makes abundant use of colloquialisms, and concerns itself with African American sexual violence in prison, Mexicans as diminutive devils, the absence of women, and motorcycle clubs, [et al].