Sorry Please Thank You

I hope you read this, whoever you are, and imagine that there is a hypothetical person out there who needs your love, has been waiting silently, patiently for it all his life, is flawed and downright ugly at times and yet would have just eaten up any tiny bit of affection you had been willing to give, had you ever stopped your own happy life to notice. And then imagine that this hypothetical person is real, because he probably is.... Wish I’d met you. Wish I wasn’t your hypothetical. But you’re reading this, which means a few minutes ago, I went into that bathroom and pulled the trigger. You probably heard it. Sorry. You’re welcome. Thank you. And please. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.

This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?

All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.

I hate everything about her except for the fact that I love everything about her.

On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.

There are objects you may desire but cannot explain. There are objects that are not nouns, there are actions that are not verbs. There are things we want that exist at the edge of the forest, at the rim of the ocean, just over the hill, just out of sight.

Things go backward. And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it. Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has closed herself to me.

For a while, I thought I might be in a love story, but I hardly ever wake up next to anyone anymore. It still happens once in a while. When it does, the first thing I do, doesn't matter where I am, in the ocean, on the moon of some minor distant planet, doesn't matter where, doesn't matter if she knows who I am of if I know who she is or how strong gravity is or if I feel terrible or if the world is logically impossible, the first thing I do if she's there, is I tell her how nice it is to see her.

Is language all about desire? Is desire all about loss? Would we ever need to say anything if we never lost anything? Is everything we ever say just another way to express: I will lose this, I will lose all of this. I will lose you?

He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.

It’s hard to have a relationship in this world. Other people are not the same from day to day. I might wake up next to a woman three days in a row, or three hundred, but I never know if she’ll be there the next morning, or the next hour, or if the world will change completely while I’m not looking. She might even change into another person altogether. I might recognize something in her eyes, or she might not be a woman at all. She might turn into a man. Or a mailbox. Or a region of empty space. Or a feeling. Or a song. I might only recognize her as one recognizes someone in a dream, as in the way something is actually someone, and that someone is actually someone else.

It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.

Paternal Grandfather Remember the simple rule: you are to your father as your father is to your grandfather. Therefore, if you are male and terrified of your father, you should be exponentially more terrified of your grandfather. There are other issues related to your Earthling grandfather that are beyond the scope of this volume.

Should have made you a bet, because, hey, guess what, got a loaded gun in my underwear so it tuns out I was right. Not that I can complain. Had some good years. My life, in a nutshell: 0-8 yrs. happy, no reason; 9-19 happy, wrong reasons; 20-33 unhappy for all the right reasons, 34 to present moment, unhappy, looking for a reason.

This is what he has always wanted, or so he had thought, but now here he is, in the middle of a story of his own and looking for the exit, and realizing all the exits are blocked and then realizing that an exit is not what he needs.

I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I simply have to close my eyes, and wait until tomorrow in order to find out.

She doesn't look at me, but I feel, or maybe I wish or I imagine, that something in the way that she does not look at me is not quite the same. She is not-looking at me in a way that feels like she is consciously not-looking at me. And from the way she is not-looking at me, I can tell she knows that I am trying to not-look at her. We are both not-looking at each other. And yet, there is something in the way she is not-looking at me. For the first time in a long while, I have hope.

You wanted something to happen, right? " Rick says. "For all of this to be leading up to something? Closure," Rick says, pointing at the manila envelope. "That is definitely one way to have closure." "I didn't say I wanted closure. Drama. I said I wanted drama." "What do you think drama is, Murray?" "How about something more open-ended?" "Oh sure, that can be arranged, too," Rick says. "But even open-ended stories have to end at some point, right? Open endings, after all, are still endings.

9 Something else you need to realize about the book 9.1. Is that The sheer number of pages in the book is such that ordinary human fingers cannot turn the pages in a reliably repeatable fashion. Simply breathing in the same room as the book will cause the book's pages to flail about wildly. Even the Brownian motion of particles has been known to move several hundred pages at a time. 9.2 If you ever lose your place in the book it is unlikely that you will ever be able to return to the same page again in your lifetime.

A life without unfulfilled desire is not what you want. A life without unfulfilled desire is a life without desire. The beach, you say. You want to go to the beach? Is that really what you want? The beach. The pool. The library. You want to go to the butcher, the bake, the supermarket. You want to go to the mountains and swim with friends in the lake. To want, in the infinitive form. To want, conjugated: I want, you want, he, she, one wants, we want, you all want, they want. Have you ever thought about putting a question into this device, about what would happen if you asked about the world, instead of just asking for it? Who do you think you are> Who do you think I am? What do you think you have in your hands? Why would you think you have any idea of what you want? You've had thirty-seven years to get it right, thirty-seven years with the device at your disposal, just waiting, ready, willing, and most nights you still go to bed confused, angry at yourself. When are you going to start considering the possibility that you are exactly who you want to be?

The problem with unintended consequences isn't with the consequences, it's with the unintended. Just because you didn't' intend for something to happen doesn't mean you didn't want it to.