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[...] Bondy the poet says that real poetry must hurt, as if you’d forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your handkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it’s meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out [...]
[...] which is why Batista’s book on sexual hygiene warns men against giving in to their passions, no more than three times an afternoon or four times for Catholics, to prevent sinful thoughts from taking shape, you never know where they might lead, they get into your blood, sultans are particularly susceptible and always come to grief, sometimes even popes and kings have their problems and it’s all over before you know it, a kingdom on its head over a beautiful woman [...]
[...] poor Pushkin, to die in a duel, and so young, his last poems gushing from the bullet hole in his head [...]
wow. almost missed this
[...] Listen, everybody, not only people who aren’t with us are with us, no, even people who are against us are with us, because you can’t cut yourself off from your times, there you have it, ladies, now you see why poets love to drink and meditate, and just when things are looking grim the heavens open up and out comes a thought making its way to the light [...]
[...] Mr. Haňka knelt and begged the bees to stop, he had a wife and children, but they stung him all over, even his private parts, which swelled up to the size of a watering can [...]
[...] one day when we were practicing Parade rechts and Parade links and single combat with fixed bayonets, so we got into position and I lunged then and there and pow! whacked him on the chin with my bayonet, which had this little ball on the end of it, and he did a backward somersault and had to be given artificial respiration by the Bosnians, You could have killed him, the lieutenants yelled at me, but I said, He asked me to be his enemy, but the lieutenants said, You should have done Parade rechts and Parade links first and only then gone into the einfacher Stoss, but I said, Really now, you don’t expect me to do Parade rechts and Parade links with my enemy! of course I went straight to the einfacher Stoss, that was what made me a hero [...]
I think the German language is simply funny
There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me.
It's the beautiful thing about youth.
There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.
I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.
I sit in bed watching the daylight fade over Chicago.
Whatever storm system brought the rain last night has blown out, and in its wake, the sky is clear and the trees have turned and there's a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening - polarized and golden - that I can only describe as loss.
Robert Frost's gold that cannot stay.
"Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn't make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. [...]"
I find myself moving toward you through the grass, carrying a new glass of wine, and when your eyes avert to mine, it feels like some piece of machinery has just seized in my chest. Like worlds colliding. As I draw near, you take the glass out of my hand as if you had previously sent me off to get it and smile with an easy familiarity, like we've known each other forever. You try to introduce me to Dillon, but the skinny-jeaned artist, now effectively cockblocked, makes his excuses and leaves.
Then it's just the two of us standing in the shade of the hedgerow, and my heart is going like mad. I say, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but it looked like you might need rescuing," [...]
I only remember pieces of what was said in our first moments together. Mainly how you laugh when I tell you I'm an atomic physicist, but not derisively. As if the revelation truly delights you. I remember how the wine had stained your lips. I've always known, on a purely intellctual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We're all made of the same thing - the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I've just never felt hat knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it's because of you.