2023.04.22
I AM NOT writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
In terms of basketball alone, almost everybody has to lose. A high percentage of the convicts in Athena, and now in this much smaller institution, devoted their childhood and youth to nothing but basketball and still got their brains knocked out in the early rounds of some darn fool tournament.
The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.
"I have to tell you, though, that you are not the first person to say the game was all over for the human race. I'm sure that even in Egypt before the first pyramid was constructed, there were men who attracted a following by saying, 'It's all over now.' "
"What is different about now as compared with Egypt before the first pyramid was built--" Ed began.
"And before the Chinese invented printing, and before Columbus discovered America," Jason Wilder interjected.
"Exactly," said Bergeron.
"The difference is that we have the misfortune of knowing what's really going on," said Bergeron, "which is no fun at all. And this has given rise to a whole new class of preening, narcissistic quacks like yourself who say in the service of rich and shameless polluters that the state of the atmosphere and the water and the topsoil on which all life depends is as debatable as how many angels can dance on the fuzz of a tennis ball."
He was angry.
The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
[On Human Space Travel] "How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer space? It was a miracle that such ravenous and cumbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store."
I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
[The 3 servants of the prison warden] were old, old men, sentenced to life in prison without hope of parole, back when I was a little boy in Midland City. I hadn't even learned to read and write, probably, when they ruined some lives, or were accused of doing so, and were forced to lead lives not worth living as a consequence.
That would certainly teach them a lesson.
My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone." You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.
"At least we still have freedom of speech," I said.
And she said, "That isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you have to give yourself."
Otter teaches human how to pet him.
Statistically, some of you will be single parents. Sorry, I have bad news for you: Love dies, and children live.
Celebrating a weird anniversary today - I just noticed about half of my music is date April 22, 2013 - ten years ago today (so like 2232 songs out of 4397 have the same date, though I know I ripped a big chunk of that from CDs in 2004 when I got my first iPod). I think that's most likely indicating when I switched to a mac as my main computer...
Its weird how liking to have files of music seems to make me old and stodgy. I just don't get the Spotify lifestyle, having to pay rent to get to your music...