Happy 2014!

Rosie and I wanted to pop in and say "happy new year" to you all! May 2014 treat you kindly! Here's a nugget of wisdom from one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman...

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

 

Machinery

An excerpt from The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

Since I left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this -- how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery.  It's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes.  Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life lived in certain ways in certain places and from certain angles are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone.

A man lives so many different lengths of time.
A man is so many different lengths of time.
Change. Collapse. Reinvention.

Favorite quotes from Odd Thomas, part 1.

I'm currently in the middle of re-reading my favorite book -- Odd Thomas, by Dean Koontz. Here's the intro (wonderful, wonderful) and a few of the many highlighted quotes in my tattered copy.

"My name is Odd Thomas, though in this age when fame is the altar at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist.

I am not a celebrity. I am not the child of a celebrity. I have never been married to, never been abused by, and never provided a kidney for a transplantation into any celebrity. Furthermore, I have no desire to be a celebrity.

In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.

I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I'm old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless."

"You can con God and get away with it if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next. He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life."

"Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way."

"I prefer ghosts to be somber. There's something about a walking dead man trying to a get a laugh that chills me, perhaps because it suggests that even postmortem we have a pathetic need to be liked -- as well as the sad capacity to humiliate ourselves."

"Fire scares me, yes, and earthquakes, and venomous snakes. People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable."

"From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity."