Miles of Something
Love the world you find or get to work.
Q
so pleased to make your acquaintance, mr. osborne, something (instinct? your bio?) tells me this is going to be a wild ride
A
I like your style almost as much as I like your moves.
It’s nice when nice happens to somebody nice.
Zero Mostel as Hecky Brown, The Front
What art thou but a wretched soul, appointed to carry a carcass up and down?
Marcus Aurelius
Until you have lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
Margaret Mitchell
The Consul dropped his eyes at last. How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, how many bottles had he hidden himself, since then alone? Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses—towering, like the smoke from the train that day—built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygénée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands—and now he saw them, smelt them, all from the very beginning—bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Viuex Whiskey blanc Canadien, the apértifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal. […] How indeed could he hope to find himself, to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, forever, the solitary clue to his identity? How could he go back and look now, scrabble among the broken glass, under the eternal bars, under the oceans?
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
