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Whoops! Knew I forgot something last week.

I’m citing more audiobooks here than I usually do. So, let me again stress that punctuation, sentence/paragraph breaks, and so on are guesswork on my part.

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Lincoln checked out the kitchen. The fridge was new, but the rest of the room did indeed know the differene between Red Skelton and Red Buttons.

“I don’t know if I even believe in that anymore. The fith guy. The perfect guy. The one. I’ve lost faith in ‘the’.”

“How do you feel about ‘a’ and ‘an’?”

“Indifferent.”

“So you’re considering a life without articles?”

“I’m sort of…coming off a bad relationship.”

“When did it end?”

“Slightly before it started.”

Adult Assembly Required by Abbi Waxman

“I know it’s hard to imagine right now, but Los Angeles does have different seasons. There are three days of spring every May, an unpredictable and unpleasantly hot summer from then until three days of crisp and lovely fall sometime in November, then an unpredictable and unpleasantly chilly winter until the three-day spring rolls around again.”

Laura laughed. “Well, New York isn’t much better: Spring and fall last a month each and make you certain there’s no better city on earth, then summer and winter are brutal and exhausting. Precisely when you decide it’s time to leave once and for all, spring or fall shows up and you forget the pain all over again.”

When the body experiences a sudden shock, it actually freezes for one twenty-fifth of a second and then deploys intense psychological curiosity, mobilizing every neuron and nerve, every sense, every possible input to work out exactly what just happened. In a microsecond or two the brain gathers the intel, sorts it, analyzes it, cross-references it, and is ready to issue directions for what to do next. It’s a miracle, really, and while it might not definitively prove the existence of God, it certainly deserves an enthusiastic round of applause.

How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain by Author

Are Shakespeare’s plays truly the greatest in the English language? Shakespeare scholars certainly think so. But I’ve actually read some of them, so I speak with authority when I say that his plays are okay, I guess? But it’s hard to argue they couldn’t be improved upon. For example, did you know that not once in Shakespeare’s works does even a single character gain access to a giant robot suit, much less employ it to lay waste to their enemies? Academics will argue that their beloved Bard captures the very heart of the human condition with sublime nuance and rapturous magnificence, but any conception of humanity that excludes the ever-present desire to possess a robot large enough to climb inside and which also fires lasers out of its eyes and missiles out of its hands is one that feels somewhat blinkered.

Crazy in Poughkeepsie by Daniel Pinkwater

“Tell me if I get this right. The way to get there is just to drive along without any kind of plan, taking various turns on the spur of the moment.”

“With the right attitude.”

“And the right attitude is…”

“Assuming we’ll arrive.”

“Shouldn’t we consult the global positioning thingie?” Vern Chuckoff asked.

“We don’t have one,” Maurice said. “This car is pre-digital, but there’s a blue light that comes on when we are on the Interstate.”

“The Interstate Highway System, which was just being completed when this car was built?” Vern asked.

“I think it’s more likely to be the system of virtual or quasi-imaginary roads or routes that exists in between the state of so-called reality in which we operate and some other states of existence of which we are ordinarily unaware,” Molly said.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

We took a minute to enjoy the joke. Belly laughs are one of the best things about sentience and you should never miss the chance for one.

Against All Odds by Jeffrey H. Haskell

Being blown out into space was on the top of every spacer’s list of “how not to die.”

Back on the O-Deck, he stopped next to Jennings before entering the bridge. He gave her a nod and she snapped to attention.
“Captain on deck,” she bellowed. In his experience, Marines loved yelling at anyone, especially the Navy. It didn’t surprise him at all to see her grin as he stepped through.

She hadn’t really known Commander Stanislaw that well but having him react so was surprising, even though doctors had a long history of acting like they knew better than everyone else.

Movieland by Author

“The ME called with her autopsy report on [name withheld],” he said. “I learned that getting a shotgun blast in the face and driving off a cliff can kill you.”

“Did you reach them?”

“Yeah, an ADA named Joel Goldman, I got his take on the possibility that Honig hired a gunsel to take out Kim Spivey.”
“A gunsel?”

“It’s the same as a gunman, but more fun to say.”

The Border by Don Winslow

It’s funny, he thinks, how the big decisions in your life don’t always follow a big moment or a big change, but just seem to settle on you like an inevitability, something you didn’t decide at all but has always been decided for you.

Barrera made billions of dollars, created and ruled a freaking empire, and what does he have to show for it?

A dead child, an ex-wife who doesn’t come to his wake, a young trophy widow, twin sons who will grow up without their father, a baseball, some smelly old boxing gloves and a suit he never wore. And no one, not one of the hundreds of people [at his funeral], can think of one nice story to tell about him. And that’s the guy who won.

EI Señor. El Patroón. The Godfather.

In a better world, the movies that play on the inside of his eyelids would be features, the product of a screenwriter’s imagination and a director’s style, but in Chuy’s world they are documentaries; memories, you could call them, except they don’t flow like remembrance but are choppy cuts, flashes of surrealism that are all too real.

They are of flayed bodies and severed heads.

Dead children.

Corpses mutilated, others burned in fifty-five-gallon drums, and the memories reside in his nose as well as his eyes. And in his ears, as he can still hear—can’t stop hearing, really—the screams, the pleas for mercy, the shrill taunting laughter that was sometimes his own.

“You got kids?”

“No,” Cirello says. “You missin’ out.”

“I figure I got time.”

“We all figure we got time,” Darnell says. “Ain’t true. Time got us. Time undefeated, man. You never beat it. You wanna know about time, ask a convict. We experts on the subject of time.”

Eddie Ruiz stayed in the witness protection program for about thirty-seven minutes.

Which is about the time it took him to scope out St. George, Utah, and say, “I don’t think so.”

Yeah, a lot of the homeless are addicts, but most addicts aren’t homeless.

Jacqui has learned this on the blocks and in the parks and housing projects where she scores and shoots up. Most of the junkies out there with her have jobs—they’re roofers and carpet layers, or auto mechanics, or they work at one of the few factories that survived after IBM pulled out. There are housewives shooting up because it’s cheaper than the Oxy pills they got hooked on, there are high school kids, their teachers, people who drive down from even smaller towns upstate to score.

You have homeless like her who stink of body odor and you have suburban queens who smell of Mary Kay products and pay for their habits from their Amway earnings, and you have everything in between.

Welcome to Heroin Nation, 2016.

One nation, under the influence.

With liberty and justice for all.

Amen.

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)