“And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.”
“[...]I am a romance slut, and there's nothing I can do about it. If a guy does or says something romantic, I'm all "Oh, please excuse me, kind sir, let me dial down my IQ and oh, if it would please sir, may I offer you this moist, yet helpless va-jay-jay that seems to have lost its way."
-The Chronicles of Abby Normal”
“Kayso, it turns out that driving an actual car is way harder than it is in 'Grand Theft Auto: Zombie Hooker Smackdown.”
“Wet towel under the door,' said Barry. 'It's what you do when you're smoking weed in a hotel and you don't want everyone calling security. You're always supposed to have a towel. I read about it in a guide for hitchhiking through the galaxy.”
“Kayso, Foo finally came home and I jumped into his arms and sort of rode him to the ground with a massive tongue kiss so deep that I could taste the burned cinnamon toast of his soul, but then I slapped him, so he didn't think I was a slut. (Shut up, he had wood.)
--Being the Journal of Abby Normal”
“Pervy and redundant, don't you think?" I asked the big gay cop, who wouldn't know a va-jay-jay if it bounced up to him and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner." (You ever notice that hardly anything besides the "Star-Spangled Banner" is spangled? There's no, like, the Raisin-Spangled Scone, or the Flea-Spangled Beagle. I'm just saying.)
--Being the Journal of Abby Normal”
“She's so obnoxious. Like a whole Saturday night drunk tank full of obnoxious packed into one little body." Detective Cavuto”
“Then someone started pounding on the door. And not a little "Hey, what's up?" pound. Like there was a big sale on door pounds down at the Pound Outlet. Buy one, get one free at Pounds-n-Stuff.
--Being the Journal of Abby Normal”
“I tried cutting myself to express my heartbreak over Tommy (Lord Flood) rejecting me, but OMFG it hurts like flaming fuck.”
“Yeah, that's right, Lash. Because I'm Chinese I have a deep-seated need to nosh house pets. Now why don't you let him in before my inner Chinaman forces me to kung-fu your bitch ass.”
“Oh my God, you're like Obnoxious and Annoying had an ass baby!”
“So, like, the master needed a hand, if you know what I mean, so I was like, "Oh chill, it's a stress thing, everyone does it. I'm flicking the bean under the table right now just to dial the tension back a little. Yes. Yes. Yes! Oh-zombie-jeebus-fuck-me-Simba-lion-king-hakuna-matata! Yes!"
--The Chronicles of Abby Normal”
“Foul and magical fumes bubbled out of the kettle, like the flatulence of a dragon on a demon-only diet.”
“Which isn’t, like, as bad as it sounds, because the general public kind of sucks ass.”
“FYI, when I type WTF, you are supposed to read What the Fuck? Same with OMG, and OMFG, which are Oh My God and Oh My Fucking God. Only a completely lame Disney Channel nimnode pronounces the letters.”
“He, Jeff, and Troy Lee carried Super Soakers loaded with Grandma Lee's Vampire Cat Remedy, other Animals had garden sprayers slung on their backs, except for Gustavo, who thought that making him carry a garden sprayer was racial stereotyping. Gustavo had a flame thrower. He wouldn't say where he got it.
"Second Amendment, cabrones." (The guy who sold Gustavo his green card had included two amendments from the Bill of Rights and Gustavo had chosen Two and Four, the right to bear arms and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. [His sister Estrella had had seizures as a child. No bueno.] For five bucks extra he threw in the Third Amendment, which Gustavo bought because he was already sharing a three-bedroom house in Richmond with nineteen cousins and they didn't have any room to quarter soldiers.)”
“Foo shuddered. It had been less than an hour since the cops led Abby away and already he missed her like a severed limb. It was embarrassing. How could hormones and hydrostatic pressure make you feel like this? Love was very unscientific.”
“That's it, said Cavuto. You're too much of a nerd to be gay. I'm contacting the committee. They'll revoke your rainbow flag and you will not be permitted anywhere near the parade.”
“You motherfucking kitties need to step the fuck off!”
“So I'm like getting some perspective now - like when you're a kid and you think it sucks that you have to eat hydrogenated peanut butter on your PBJ, and then you see one of those starving commercials kids with flies in their eyes, who don't even have a sandwich - and you're all, 'Well, that sucks.”
“…turning your ankle hurts like hell, even if you're a superhero.”
“[Abby to Tommy and Jody who are hugging]
So I'm like, "Cold-faced killers on the clock, bitches, we don't have time for your bonery right now."
--The Chronicles of Abby Normal”
“He started skipping, but then caught himself and returned to deliberately pacing out his steps with his sheathed sword. People might ignore a tiny Japanese man in an orange porkpie hat and socks, with a sword, but if you went around expressing unrestrained joy, they would have you in a straightjacket before you could belt out a verse of "Zippity Do-Dah.”
“The City of San Francisco is being stalked by a huge, shaved vampyre cat named Chet, and only I, Abby Normal, emergency backup mistress of the Greater Bay Area night, and my manga-haired love monkey, Foo Dog, stand between the ravenous monster and a bloody massacre of the general public. Which isn’t, like, as bad as it sounds, because the general public kind of sucks ass.”
“Oh, and a huge Federal Building that looked like it was being molested by a giant steel pterodactyl, but evidently that was just the government trying to get away from their standard bomb shelter architecture to something more aesthetically appealing, especially if you liked Godzilla porn.”
“The noise was like, well, it was like a thousand vampire cats clawing on Plexiglas—it made their teeth hurt.”
“It had been less than an hour since the cops led Abby away and already he missed her like a severed limb. It was embarrassing. How could hormones and hydrostatic pressure make you feel like this? Love”
“I’m very insecure, actually, but I have found that if you roll up screaming like a madwoman, hair on fire, guns blazing, no one is going to mention the zit on your forehead.” Which”
“And I’m all, “Do you want to get coffee? I have a bag of blood and ten thousand dollars in my messenger.” The nosferatu can totally drink lattes as long as they put some blood in it, unless they’re lactose intolerant. And he stops and looks at me. He’s like, “Really, ten thousand? Think that will be enough?” And I’m like, “Well, you’ll have to drink the cheap stuff, but I like to drink my lattes directly out of the veins of a toddler, and those little fuckers aren’t cheap.”
“His words were: hello, good-bye, yes, no, please, thank you, okay, sorry, and suck my dick. He”
“To discourage future dark moments, I believe we must nourish the minds of our young with learning that creates understanding between ethnic and religious groups.”
“And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.”
Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke.
Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not.
Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one.
The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks.
They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others.
More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.”
“I tried to get over you. I wanted so fucking bad to forget you. But every time I was with someone, it was you. Your hair, your eyes, your touch. You're all I fucking saw. You have a choice Georgia but I don't. I don't have a fucking choice, I never did. It's always been you. You destroyed me. I'm not the person I was before I met you and I can't go back. Nothing works anymore without you." ~Tristan”
“Honestly I think she’s terrified of letting anyone close enough to break her heart again.” I shrugged and started to slide out of the booth. “Nothing wrong with reaching for the stars.” “There is when what’s available is only here in the ground level. I love Rule with everything I have, but he is far from perfect. Relationships are not tailor-made and people are flawed. You have to work around that and love the other person anyway. Our flaws are what make us unique, and while Rule might not be perfect, he is absolutely perfect for me.”
“Humans fear death so much, but there is no death,” he whispers. “There is only the illusion of it. We can never cease to be. We must stay like this. Forever.”
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