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[...] He had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor. Never before in his life up to now had he once thought of suicide. He was doing a return at the same time he fought with his mind, with the sin and affront of even the passing thought. [...]
[...] He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn't already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners around him had heard it or were looking at him. [...]
[...] To the medicine cabinet's mirror in the home's bathroom, for instance, where he could not help but reread and internalize them as he tended to personal grooming, were taped inspiration mxims such as:
'NO BIRD SOARS TOO HIGH, IF HE SOARS WITH HIS OWN WINGS--BLAKE'
'IF WE ABDICATE OUR INITIATIVE, WE BECOME PASSIVE--RECEPTIVE VICTIMS OF ON-COMING CIRCUMSTANCES--BEECHER FOUNDATION'
'DARE TO ACHIEVE!--NAPOLEON HILL'
dare to achieve is my fave cus it's so empty
[...] 'ghost conflation' problem for employees with identical names had been recognized as early as December 1984--thanks mainly to a hideous mess involving two separate Mary A. Taylors at the Southeast Regional Service Center in Atlanta--and Technical Branch programmers were already in the process of inserting a BLOCK and RESET sub-subroutine that overrode the GO TO subroutine for the thirty-two most common surnames in the United States: viz., Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, & c. But Wallace was, according to 1980 US Census figures, only the 104th most common American surname, way down the list between Sullivan and Cole; and any override of GO TO that countenanced more than thirty-two surnames ran a statistically significant risk of reintroducing the original 'ghost redundancy' problem. In short, the name David F. Wallace fell in that statistical middle area where the original debugging's consequent 'ghost conflation' bug could still cause significant problems and woe, especially for any employee too new to understand why or whence these accusations of everything from contractual fraud and 'impersonation of an immersive' [...]
amazing example of yak-shaving a problem from bad to worse. the implied personal swing at the very end is great
footnote 7 below is just the cherry on top: "Now you can probably see why this occasional 'author' appositive thing is sometimes necessary; it turned out that there were two separate David Wallaces posted at the Midwest REC, of whom the one who ended up accused of impersonation was guess who."
[...] It was not just that at almost sixteen Stecyk was 5'1" and 105 pounds soaking wet, which he was (soaking wet) when the boys in his PE class's shower all urinated on him after knocking him to the tile floor, which ritual they called a Stecyk special [...]
'[...] The sort of guy who comes to your party and you get him drunk enough to pass out by nine and put him in the Rescue Rangers minibus and strip off everything but his shoes and socks and leave him propped up on a bus stop bench in East St. Louis and he'll not only survive somehow but the next night he'll be back at the Jaegerschnitzel punching you in the shoulder and saying Good One like you'd just given him a hotfoot, desperate to be one of the guys.'
[...] It's interesting that the two false administrative styles--the tyrant and the fake friend--are also the two main stereotypes that books and television shows and comic stripes present administrators as. One suspects, in fact, that the mental picture the insecure administrator erects inside himself is based partly on these pop culture stereotypes.
[...] Jay Landauer feels absently at his face. Every love story is a ghost story. Ryne Hobtratschk turns a page. [...]
the idea of random gems being hidden among descriptions of banality ... something similar for tech? bug reports? spam emails? programming?
[...] It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God. [...]
relevant for when MC thinks church might be his way of finding a reason to live?
Under the sign erected every May above the outer highway reading IT'S SPRING, THINK FARM SAFETY and through the north ingress with its own defaced name and signs addressed to soliciting and speed and universal glyph for children at play [...] and then hard left along the length of a speed bump into the dense copse [...] along the north park's anfractuous roads [...] skirting the corrugate trailer where it was said the man left his family and returned sometime later with a gun and killed them all as they watched Dragnet and the torn abandoned sixteen-wide half overgrown by the edge of the copse where boys and their girls made strange agnate forms on pallets [...]
description of toni ware, embedding human tragedy in factual input in a way that might be lost or glossed over
something similar but for Silicon valley woes? startups dying, corruption, people breaking down, homelessness caused by rent going up