You may fish all day and not get a strike. Therefore, make up your mind to have a good time. Enjoy camp life and exercise in the open air and you will be well repaid for your trip.
L.L. Bean, from a new book, Guaranteed to Last: L.L. Beans Century of Outfitting America.
The book is excellent, and the quote is just about as good of a metaphor for life as you can get.
The news said it’s raining in New York.
Michael McManus
It’s raining today. Days like today always remind me of the scene in The Usual Suspects. The one toward the end of the 2nd act, when the boys are in a car on their way to pull the big job, and this is after a good bit of killing and stealing and deception. They’re riding along and Stephen Baldwin with his head on the glass delivers this line with just the right amount of melancholy, boredom, and a wistful desire to return home from California and go back to New York. It’s one of those lines that make his character so likable (and almost makes up for Pete Postlethwaite’s terrible accent), so cool, even when he’s a total and complete cold-blooded killer. I identify with the sentiment.
It’s raining today, been raining all day, and all I could think about was this movie, this scene, and the feeling of being somewhere beautiful, but somehow missing the rain back home, because you know it’s where you belong. Today I don’t mind the rain, today I feel like I belong.
"I think my life fucking sucks sometimes because I’m so worn down from simultaneously being my own pimp and my own whore, but I still understand that that’s how it works if you want to be great."
Rad blog post about hustling, and working hard to get what you want and need. Also another great quote from her, “Get admirable.”
Great lovers were always men of leisure. I fucked better as a bum than as a puncher of timeclocks.
There are so many dope babes in Brooklyn you’ll have like ten fall at your feet the moment they get over their quarter-life crises and ambitions of being a career woman once they’ve had the shit kicked out of them repeatedly by their own high expectations and life in New York and guys, then they will realize they should go for a good dude like you.
Well don’t that just beat all? I was just thinking about this earlier in the coffee shop about how hard it is to meet women (not that I want to, but if I did, you know), and here I’m talking to Laura and she comes out with this gem of a sweetheart quote. This woman is ace.
Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.
Drew Carey (via kathrynsoloway)
Goddamn I said goddamn. This ranks high on my all-time favorite quotes.
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
- Henry David Thoreau
Though, not the woods, quite the opposite, the city. Today is my last day at Whole Foods Market. I have spent three years, one month, and 9 days working for this company. Currently, I am a Customer Service Supervisor, and go-to grill guy (we cook-out a lot, and I’m good). I was once an over night produce clerk, the data technology specialist, and the back-up graphic artist. I’ve don’t a lot with this company. I don’t regret it. The last year, or so, though I’ve had an official title of supervisor, I’ve been more of a concierge, in that I spent most of my time helping customers and doing whatever the hell I wanted. Some co-workers don’t like me, because I get away with doing my own thing 99% of the time. It’s weird, I blogged the other day my goodbye note, and I said, “I’m sorry you all got so attached, lesson learned.” and I mean that. I don’t know why I’ve been able to do what I do here, and still remain employed. It’s been great though. I just don’t want to look back at my 20’s and say, “Man, I shoulda,” or “If I only could have,” or, “If I could change one thing,”
I’m going to live, or die trying.
Coincidentally, Mike Adams last day at work was yesterday, and I’m sure you all will wish him luck, exploring the infinite abyss, and contemplating The Mountain (the future), it’s something we all should do.
“Fred and George opened a magic shop during a really shaky economic time, dont be afraid to follow your passions, no matter what.”
I think I say more interesting things on my twitter than I do in this blog, and I strongly suggest reading back on all of my tweets. For example: last nights drunken tweets about Harry Potter. LOVE IT!
The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.
Charles Bukowski, from Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews & Encounters 1963-1993
Goddamn, this is exactly, exactly how I feel. That shit’s soul crushing.
TRIES TO COOK AND EAT GIRL
A Richard Marx CD plays on the stereo, a bag from Zabar’s loaded with sourdough onion bagels and spices sits on the kitchen table while I grind bone and fat and flesh into patties and though it does sporadically penetrate how unacceptable some of what I’m doing actually is, I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing, is shit, and along with a Xanax (which I am now taking half-hourly) this thought momentarily calms me and then I’m humming, humming the theme to a show I watched as a child— The Jetsons? The Banana Splits? Sigmund and the Sea Monsters? I’m remembering the song, the melody, even the key it was sung in, but not the show. Was it Lidsville? Was it H.R. Pufnstuf? These questions are punctuated by other questions, as diverse as “Will I ever do time?” and “Did this girl have a trusting heart?” The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don’t notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I’m weeping for myself, unable to find any solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing, “I just want to be loved,” cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principals, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the dissembodied voice coming from it’s mouth: These are terrible times. Maggots already writhe across the human sausages, the drool pouring from my lips dribbles over them, and I still can’t tell if I’m cooking any of this correctly, because I’m crying too hard and I have never really cooked anything before.
American Psycho p.345-346 (one of my favorite paragraphs of all-time)
The Rat
❝I’m talking to the delivery guys from Park Avenue Sound Shop about HDTV, which isn’t available yet, when one of the new black AT&T cordless phones rings. I tip them, then answer it. My lawyer, Ronald, is on the other end. I’m listening to him, nodding, showing the delivery guys out of the apartment. Then I say, “the bill is three hundred dollars, Ronald. We only had coffee.” A long pause, during which I hear a bizarre sloshing sound coming from the bathroom. Walking cautiously toward it, cordless phone still in hand I tell Roland, “But yes … Wait … But I am … But we only has espresso.” Then I’m peering into the bathroom. ❞ -American Psycho (Page 308)
Pretty awesome that way back in March of 1991, Bret Easton Ellis writes about HDTV. In the previous paragraphs, Patrick mentions just buying a state-of-the-art VCR, and this is where we’re at today.
I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia, food of the gods.
