ג ז י
tru story
I took AP Physics when I was a senior in high school and this was me (except I never ended up getting the answer right)
(via shrutea-and-coffee)
The weather today is so wonderful!
Sounds better with the volume up/sorry for the macbook quality!
I LIVE WITH HIM I GET TO HEAR HIM SINGING ALL THE TIME I COULD NOT BE HAPPIER
there were tons of cop cars and policemen around our neighborhood, and sketch things were happening, and we only realized about an hour after that we hadn’t actually locked our back door…but we are still alive so that’s good I guess
I visited him in June. He had been given a new series of shock treatments, but it was as before: the car bugged, his room bugged. I said it very gently: ‘Papa, why do you want to kill yourself?’
‘What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?’
‘But how can you say that? You have written a beautiful book about Paris, as beautiful as anyone can hope to write.’
‘The best of that I wrote before. And now I can’t finish it.’ I told him to relax or even retire.
‘Retire?’ he said. ‘Unlike your baseball player and your prizefighter and your matador, how does a writer retire? No one accepts that his legs are shot or the whiplash gone from his reflexes. Everywhere he goes, he hears the same damn question: what are you working on?’
I told him he never cared about those dumb questions.
‘What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them.’ Then he turned on me. I was just like the others, pumping him for information and selling him out to the feds. After that day, I never saw him again.
"Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds - NYTimes.com
This actually made me want to cry.
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu
Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels
Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money
That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—
And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—
Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,
And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”
But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be
When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river
Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters
And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
