Dreamcatcher

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.

Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.

Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter how you feel.

Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it’s March that’s the cruelest, holding out a few days of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit.

After that we're going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options.

Same shit, different day, he thinks, but now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness that feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

When you thought about it, it was sort of a blue-eyed wonder that women could love the best of them, let alone the rest of them.

The body is either stupid or infinitely wise, but in either case it is spared the terrible witchery of thought; it only knows how to stand its ground and fight until it can fight no more.

Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time travel when he was a teenager had it right: you can’t change the past, no matter how you try.

He will be with his friends, and that always feels like coming home.

What really bugs Henry about Barry, he supposes, is Barry’s complacency. His inner assurance that there is no need to change his self-destructive behavior, let alone search for its roots.

Jonesy is in his third-floor John Jay College office, looking out at his little slice of Boston and thinking how wrong T. S. Eliot had been to call April the cruelest month just because an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth supposedly got himself crucified then for fomenting rebellion. Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it’s March that’s the cruelest, holding out a few days of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit.

Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.

The sleep you didn't get one night sometimes came to you on the next, and then it came like a lover.

Once things were different, but now they're the same. He reckons he can live with that; for a guy like him, the rule of thumb is just SSDD, and so fucking what. You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.

When you fall, Barry, it's going to be like the fall of Babel in the desert. The people who see you go down will talk about it for years. Man, you'll shake the dishes right off the shelves -

Doctor,' he says, 'I just fucked up. 'How did you do that, Henry? 'I told a patient the truth. 'If we know the truth, Henry, does it not set us free? 'No', he replies to himself, looking up at the ceiling. 'Not in the slightest.

The guy was tall, and possessed one of those earnest faces Henry associated with middle management.

Henry tipped his head back, flared his nostrils, and sniffed gently — he had a memory, both clear and absurd, of being in Maurice's a month ago with his ex-wife, smelling the wine the sommelier had just poured, seeing Rhonda there across the table and thinking: 'We sniff the wine, dogs sniff each other's assholes, and it all comes to about the same.

It is the laugh of a man in the grip of fond recall- the sight of a sunset, the firm feel of a woman’s breast through a thin silk shirt (not that Barry has, in Henry’s estimation, ever felt such a thing), or the packed warmth of beach sand.

But that's enough. Fun is fun and done is done. Turn out their lights, beautiful.

Hearts were made to be broken and minds were made to be changed...

Oyendo reir a Duddits Cavell, volvian a creer los cuentos chinos de toda la vida: que era buena la vida, que tenia sentido vivir, tanto de niños, como de adultos. Que ademas de oscuridad, habia luz.