- Fine, fine. Fine. Just completely fine. No problem at all. Happy to be here. Feeling better. Sleeping better. Love the chow. In a word, couldn't be finer. The grinding? The tooth-grinding? A tic. A jaw-strengthener. Expression of all-around fineness. Likewise the thing with the eyelid.
- In short, that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.
- That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.
- That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.
- That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.
- That a person -- one with the Disease/-Ease -- will do things under the influence of Substances that he simply would not ever do sober, and that some consequences of these things cannot ever be erased or amended. Felonies are an example of this.
- The odd thing was that the more obsessed I got, the worse I played and slept, the happier everybody got. The grief-therapist complimented me on how haggard I was looking.
- Pemulis says 'Blarg.'
- some doom-gray surrender of his childhood's promise to adult gray mediocrity
- Watching Burt F. Smith smoke a Benson & Hedges by holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like a guy with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking pathos as far as Gately's concerned.
- They returned from Long Island bearing their shields rather than upon them, as they say.
- ... three subway stops distant from B.U. and the all-new inconvieniences of being publically stellar at a major sport in a city where people beat each other to death in bars over stats and fealty.
- He wepy silently in pain and shame at the passage of each brightly lit public second's edge. ... feeling each slow second take its cut.
- a quotation from President Gentle's second inagural: 'Let the call go forth, to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched by a new and millennial generation of Americans'
- You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal.
- The Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group seems to be over 50% bikers and biker-chicks, meaning your standard leather vests and 10-cm. boot heels, belt-buckles with little spade-shaped knives that come out of a slot in the side, tattoos that are more like murals, serious tits in cotton halters, big beards, Harleywear, wooden matches in mouth-corners and so forth... the sound of high-cc. hawgs being kick-started is enough to rattle your fillings. Gately can't even start to guess what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It's like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like playing a lot of really precise pool.
- Bob Death smiles coolly (South Shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in everything they do) and manipulates a wooden match with his lip and says No, not that fish-one. He has to assume a kind of bar-shout to clear the noise of his idling hawg. He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.
- they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out.
- He didn't have any God- or J.C.-background, and the knee-stuff seemed like the limpest kind of dickless pap.
- Randy Lenz likes to raise his can of tonic and say that Don's food is the kind of food that helps you really appreciate whatever you're drinking along with it. Geoffrey Day talks about what a refreshing change it is to leave a dinner table not feeling bloated.
- I'm thinking it'd be doing a favor if Staff clued in anybody new that comes in on the fact that the H-faucet in the shower that its H really stands for Holy Cow That's Cold.
- And can I say by the way nice shirt. My dad used to bowl, too.
- That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency -- sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying -- are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
- He'd settled down in his conviction about who was trailing who, here. As in just who has the controlling discretion over the general situation right here.
- He said I was a lousy lay and my snatch was sure awful big for somebody with such a little flat ass.
- Clipperton plays tennis with the Glock 17 held steadily to his left temple
- a framed print of Picasso's 'Seated Harlequinn,' and nothing else that wasn't kist institutional bullshit, visual Muzak.
- He still has this intractible habit of making a move like he's straightening a bow tie before he enters a strange room.
- ... and with a little red corduroy tongue protruding from the mouths, so the bears all look oddly throttled.
- It's at this point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open-mindedness and to get a bad personal feeling about this Narcotics Anonymous ('NA') Meeting. It seems more like some kind of cosmetic-psychology encounter thing.
- Kevin Bain's just about vivisecting his poor bear out of mortified frustration.
- Morris Hanley, speaking of T-cells, has baked some cream-cheese brownies for Gately as a nurturing gesture, but then the twats at the Trauma Wing's nurses' station, like, impounded them from Thrust when he came up, but he'd had a couple on the way over in the bloodstained 'Vette and he could assure Don that Hanley's brownies were worth killing a loved one for and everything like that.
- Gately's after all a fucking drug addict, and a drug addict's second most meaningful relationship is always with his domestic entertainment unit, TV/VCR or HDTP. And Gately, even in recovery, can still summon great verbatim chunks not only of drug-addicted adolescence's 'Seinfeld' and 'Ren and Stimpy' ... and especially the hometown ensemble-casted 'Cheers!,' both the late-network version with the stacked brunette and the syndicated older ones with the titless blond, which Gately even after the switch over to InterLace and HDTP dissemination felt like he had a special personal relationship with 'Cheers!,' not only because everybody on the show always had a cold foamer in hand, just like in real life
- The son didn't exactly sound like the steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith's shared.
- Probably our room's best message ever was Ortho Stice doing his deadly C.T.-impression, taking 80 seconds to list possible reasons why Mario and I couldn't answer the phone and outlining our probable reactions to all possible caller-emotions provoked my our unavailability.
- It was honesty and abstinence week, after all, and this seemed a more truthful message to leave than the pedestrian 'This is Hal Incandenza...,' since the caller would pretty obviously be hearing a digital recording of me rather than me. This observation owed a debt to Pemulis, who for years and with several different roommates has retained the same recursive message -- 'This is Mike Pemulis's answering machine's answering machine; Mike Pemulis's answering machine regrets being unavailable to take a first-order message for Mike Pemulis, but if you'll leave a second-order message at the sound of the clapping hand, Mike Pemulis's answering machine will...,' and so on, which has worn so thin that very few of Pemulis's friends or customers can abide waiting through the tired thing to leave a message, which Pemulis finds congenial, since no really relevant caller would be fool enough to leave his name on any machine of Pemulis's anyway.
- Joelle doesn't know that newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion that people with more sober time than them are romantic and heroic, instead of clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by-day like everybody else in AA is (except maybe the fucking Crocodiles).
- Maybe the worst part of the cognitions involved the incredible volume of food I was going to have to consume over the rest of my life.
- Her voice is like you can just imagine what she'd sound like getting X'd and really liking it.
- several of Brown U.'s most sirenish and school-spirited hetero coeds had been recruited, auditioned, briefed, rehearsed (i.e. 'debriefed,' giggles Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, whose giggles involve the sort of ticklish shoulder-writhing undulations of a much younger girl getting tickled by an authority figure and pretending not to like it), and stationed at strategic points, all prepared -- like the Brown cheerleaders and Pep Squad, who've been induced to do the game pantyless, electrolysized and splits-prone to help lend a pyrotechnic glandular atmosphere to the power forward's whole playing-environment -- prepared to make the penultimate sacrifice for squad, school, and influential members of the Brown Alumni Bruins Boosters Assoc.
- iBy the time the final repetitive image darkens to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man's face stops spasming in horror and the boy shuts up, the cartridge's real tension becomes the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry 'Murderer!' for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?
- Questions like these become almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All, since this appears as a textbook lie under the therapeutic model. The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie.
- Anything less than a combination thoroughgoing professional and AA-longtimer would have at least hiked an eyebrow at one of the most powerful and remorseless constables in three counties saying sponsor.
- The A.D.A. leaned forward, hat rotating between his calves, elbows on knees in the odd defecatory posture men used to try to communicate earnestness in their sharing.
- it was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams.
- somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings--as in the historical Beatles's McCartney--taken it and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. ... Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing--her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups' voices. Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney...imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband's pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tanbourine: [the] depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.
- Mr. Gately Sir, I found myself sitting tonight in yet another Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting the central Message of which was the importance of going to still more Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings. This infuriating carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings... what's supposedly going to be communicated at these future meetings I'm exhorted to trudge to that cannot simply be communicated now, at this meeting, instead of the glazed recitation of exhortations to attend these vague future revelatory meetings?
- 'AA's response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.' ... Am I out of line in seeing something totalitarian about it? Something dare I say un-American? To interdict a fundamental doctrinal question by invoking a doctrine against questioning? Wasn't this the very horror the Madisonians were horrified of in 1791? Amendments I and IX? My Grievance is disallowed because my Petition for Redress is a priori interdicted by the inadvisability of all Petitioning?
- iI'm about to get fucking lapped here I'm so not-following. You honestly don't see what's a little whacked-out about what you're saying about Denial?
- I'm thinking your failure to engage me on the question itself means either I'm right, and AA's whole Belonging-versus-Denial matrix is constructed on logical sand, in which case horror, or else it means you're stupefied with condescending pity for me for some reason I fail to grasp, doubtless because of Denial, in which case the look on your face right now is the same weary patience that makes me want to scream in meetings.
- Don, I am sincere when I say I'm frightened when I find that there are things about this allegedly miraculous Program's doctrine that simply do not follow. That do not cohere. That do not make anything resembling rational sense.' 'I'm with you on that one now, brother.' 'Tonight's example of the one-in-a-million, say. Don, let me ask you, Don. In all earnest. Why shouldn't every human being in the world be in AA?' 'Now I'm not with you anymore again, Geoffrey.' 'Don, why doesn't every featherless biped on earth qualify for AA? By AA's reasoning, why isn't everyone everywhere an alcoholic?' 'Well Geoffrey man it's a totally private decision to admit the Disease, nobody can go tell another man he's ---' 'But indulge me for a moment. By AA's own professed logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why then you're by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem.'
- 'Some vital part of my like personhood would die without something to ingest. This is your view.'