maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves
An old man likes to return in memory
to the days of his youth
like a stranger who longs to go back to his own country.
He delights to tell stories of the past
like a poet who takes pleasure in reciting his best poem.
He lives spiritually in the past
because the present passes swiftly,
and the future seems to him
an approach to the oblivion of the grave.
An hour full of old memories
passed like the shadows
of the trees over the grass
Said a sheet of snow-white paper, “Pure was I created, and pure will I remain forever. I would rather be burnt and turn to white ashes than suffer darkness to touch me or the unclean to come near me.”
The ink-bottle heard what the paper was saying, and it laughed in its dark heart; but it never dared to approach her.
And the multicoloured pencils heard her also, and they too never came near her.
And the snow-white sheet of paper did remain pure and chaste forever, pure and chaste—and empty
pump the hand pump
until the plumbing was superpressurized to 110 psi.
This way, when
someone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode.
At 150 psi, if
someone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the shower
head, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell.
the woman in Dear Abby who married a handsome successful mortician and on their wedding night, he made her soak in a tub of ice water until her skin was freezing to the touch, and then he made her lie in bed completely still while he had intercourse with her cold inert body.
The funny thing is this woman had done this as a newlywed, and gone on to do it for the next ten years of marriage and now she was writing to Dear Abby to ask if Abby thought it meant something.
You take enough blasting gelatin and wrap the foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the world.
You have to tamp it good and tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the column and not out into the parking garage around the column.
“You can mix the glycerin with nitric acid to make nitroglycerin," Tyler says.
"You can mix the nitroglycerin with sodium nitrate and sawdust to make dynamite," Tyler says.
"You can mix the nitroglycerin with more nitric acid and paraffin and make gelatin explosives,
The nouvelle cuisine of anarchy.
Barium nitrate in a sauce of sulfur and garnished with charcoal.
That's your basic gunpowder.
Bon appetit
You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid.
Do this in an ice bath.
Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper.
You have nitroglycerin
Three ways to make napalm:
One, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate,
Two, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and diet cola.
Three, you can dissolve crumbled cat litter in gasoline until the mixture is thick.
A paste of lye and water can burn through an aluminum pan.
A solution of lye will dissolve a wooden spoon
You’re a projectionist and you’re tired and angry, but mostly you’re bored
so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth,
and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie.
This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there’s the flash of an erection.
For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone.
I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans.
And account for every drop of used motor oil.
And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born
I see all this potential and I see squandering.
an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars,
advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
We're the middle children of the history
no purpose or place,
we have no Great war,
no Great depression,
our great war is a spiritual war,
our great depression is our lives
if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you.
Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.
You had their full attention.
People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
And when they spoke, they weren't just telling you a story.
When the two of you talked, you were building something,
and afterward you were both different than before.
What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God.
If you're male and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God.
And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?
What you end up doing is you spend your life searching for a father and God.
What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn't like you.
Could be, God hates us.
This is not the worst thing that can happen
getting God's attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all.
Maybe God's hate is better than His indifference.
If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
We are God's middle children, with no special place in history and no special attention.
Unless we get God's attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption.
Which is worse, hell or nothing?
Only if we're caught and punished can we be saved.
You buy furniture.
You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life.
Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled.
Then the right set of dishes.
Then the perfect bed.
The drapes.
The rug.
Then you're trapped in your lovely nest,
and the things you used to own,
now they own you
Man will be on the path to perfection
when he feels that he is one with space that knows no bounds and with the ocean that has no shores;
when he becomes that undying fire,
that ever-gleaming light,
that still air or that violent storm,
those clouds charged with lightning, thunder and rain,
those rivers merry or sad,
those trees in bloom or shedding their leaves,
those lands that rise up into mountains or slope down into valleys,
those fields under seed or lying fallow.
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night