fate keeps on happening

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Years ago, when I was in college, I remember waking up my roommate while I was reading Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: : A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. I was laughing so damn hard and I just couldn't stop.

I was re-watching the film with Johnny Depp and Benecio del Toro. They're both excellent. I'd forgotten that Terry Gilliam directed it. All I can say is... it figures. You can see it on hulu. It's fabulous!

How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then?

This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection when my attorney starts screaming about bats and huge manta rays coming down on the car?

If so -- well, we'll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can't turn him loose. He'll report us at once to some kind of outback Nazi law-enforcement agency, and they'll run us down like dogs.

Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me?

Maybe I'd better have a chat with this boy, I thought. Perhaps if I explain things, he'll rest easy. . .

Truman Capote

I love the 1966 version of A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, starring Geraldine Page. It's narrated by Truman, himself. I know what you're thinking... "Yikes... that voice!" But, it really works. Truman's writing + Geraldine's acting = Amazing. You can actually see the whole thing on youtube. Geez, now I'm wondering why I've never read the book! Gotta do that one day. There's a 1997 version with Patty Duke. I've never seen it, so I can't vouch for it.

Here's a brilliant excerpt:

'My, how foolish I am!' she cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. 'You know what I've always thought?' she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. 'I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun shining through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine takes away all the spooky feeling.'

'But I'll wager it never happens like that. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are,'--her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie, our dog, pawing earth over her bone-- 'just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with just today in my eyes.' "

Hodge-podge of great quotes

Huh... hodge-podge... you never hear that phrase anymore. Well, except here. Right now. Yeah, so here are some great quotes...

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"Men were imperfect creatures, she thought, but so were women--although this was an occasion when one might allow oneself to think that women were perhaps just a little bit more perfect than men, just a little bit."

-Doing the Shopping by Alexander McCall Smith

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"There probably isn't any meaning in life. Perhaps you can find something
interesting to do while you are alive."

-Orochimaru (Naruto)

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Music in the soul, can be heard by the universe.

-Lao Tzu

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I like my porn the way I like my eggs..... scrambled.

-Some guy called TheNextDanSmith from The Something Awful Forums.

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"Because I have traveled, I can see other universes in the eyes of strangers. Because I have traveled, I know what parts of me I cannot deny and what parts of me are simply the choices I make. I know the blessings of my own table and the warmth of my own bed. I know how much of life is pure chance, and how great a gift I have been given simply to be who I am. ...

"If we don't offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting."

Kent Nerburn, Letters to my Son, New World, 1994, pp. 114-115.