Don’t look away. The ugly beauty might surprise you.
Were you a person of consequence?
Were you even a person?
Did you learn anything?
Was there still hope?
·
Nope, no, nyet, maybe.
That year’s mingled scent of burnt coffee, jet fuel, lavatory disinfectant. Dismal at the time, now you’d give anything to have it back.
A surprisingly common admixture of spiritually adept and psychologically unaware.
Because their abject suffering represented an affront to the fragile belief systems of those around them, they were held responsible for their own misfortune.
We usually tried to avoid his visits, which often felt weighted with some unspecified tension or grievance. Later I learned that throughout this period he’d been in dreadful pain, and that our times together had been among the few things that distracted him from his suffering.
In the future, kimchi will be the only currency.
This was the day he realized everything was a bonus.
Their rigorously maintained veneer of civility lasted 90 seconds into his birthday toast.
He’d often had the feeling people were laughing at him, and finally understood why.
Sleep—when there’s nowhere else to go.
Stock characters:
1) man with gangrenous wound.
This big, beautiful world is made up of all kinds of people, and on a given day you might despise any one of them.
Your long-awaited genius grant; your self-designed modernist house; your late career retrospective; your fond encomiums from friends and colleagues: zero, nada, zippo, zilch.
