Anna Rose’s Reviews > The White Album > Status Update

“I was asked this question by the manager, who was a Mormon: if you can’t believe you’re going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what’s the point of dying?
At that time I believed that my basic affective controls were no longer intact, but now I present this to you as a more cogent question than it might first appear, a kind of koan of the period.

“A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.”
“I remember all the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

Again, 1968 or 2026

“I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable.”

This is 1968 but it could have been 2026.

"By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

P.188 WTOSIOTL

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
"I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises or all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition I found troubling."