talking to this guy I used to know in high school who is now stationed in Afghanistan. I’m mad stoned and somebody should stop me.
me: so what are you up to?
him: “oh you know, hanging out in the desert.”
me: sounds like a blast
me: haha
me: get it
March 2011
56 posts
“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of ‘parties’ with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
—Sylvia Plath
“I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, “Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case.” I will turn and say to them, “It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!” And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup.”
—Henry Rollins
“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”
—Oscar Wilde
“I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.”
—Anton Chekhov
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been re-reading On the Road. This second time around hasn’t had the same impact it did at 19 or 20. The shining, hopeful college years. I wonder if I’d never read it if I’d be a different person now. I think Kerouac started something in me that he can’t take back.
“He had no place he could stay without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere…”
“Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes’.”
—
Stephen Colbert
I know a few cynics but they’re dying away…
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting—it’s going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s unwanted children. What a fate—to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers…”
(via f. scott fitzgerald)
Tonight the super moon shines out over the world without prejudice, as we bomb one another, as if to say the universe will go on as it has before, with or without us.
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“Habitual drunkenness is usually, psychologists inform us, the result of the inability to accommodate oneself wholly to reality. It is often a vice in that unfortunate class of people who have imperfectly coordinated artistic facilities. They yearn vaguely for something other than the world they know but they lack the capacity to create a world nearer to their hearts’ desire. Still more, do they lack the capacity to attain a comprehensive vision of the beauty emanate in this world. Neither the art of escape nor the art of revelation is possible to them. Nevertheless they have perceptions they cannot use and impulses that never come to fruition. Drink, or some other drug, by relieving their sense of impotence an by blurring the unfriendly outlines of the real world brings them solace and becomes a necessity.”
—J.W.N. Sullivan, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (via nevver)
“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”
—(via oscar wilde)
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My favorite Radiohead song .. ”Talk Show Host”
