Experience is like evidence. When you're young and don't have much experience yet, you don't have much basis for confidence. All you really have is hope, and that can get shaken pretty easily. But as years go by, you start to gather this evidence. Yo...
Your Kentuckian of the present day is a good illustration of the doctrine of transmitted instincts and peculiarities. His fathers were mighty hunters, - men who lived in the woods, and slept under the free, open heavens, with the stars to hold their ...
You really want to go out to dinner?" Gabriel shot Rase a skeptical look out of the corner of his eye. "As opposed to what?" "Getting on your knees and begging me to beat you." There was no inflection in Gabriel's voice, no heat, and no emotion at al...
During Basic, sometimes you're so tired you can't even get up to piss. You're pushed beyond whatever limits you had set for yourself. You realize that your body can do things that you never imagined. But there are times when you don't think you can g...
The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust...
My muscles informed me they did not want to go through any more exercise today. So I suggest that maybe he should let me off this time. He laughed, and I'm pretty sure it was at me...not with me. "Why is that funny?" "Oh," he said, his smile dropping...
David." "Nobody home but you and me," he said, nibbling at her jaw, her throat, her mouth as he guided her out of the kitchen. "You know what I was thinking the other day?" "No." How could she? She didn't know what she was thinking right now. "That i...
You need a place just a click over middle range. Don’t want to go all-out first time, but you don’t want to run on the cheap either. You want atmosphere, but not stuffy. A nice established place.” “Bob, you’re going to give me an ulcer.” ...
The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and 'family values' are crushed by grinding poverty...
I love those dark moments in Peanuts. I love that they're in there, that Charles Schulz put the sad lonely bits of himself into the comic. I love the silliness too, the dancing Snoopy strips. The little boy Rerun drawing "basement" comics about Tarza...
Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you're not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] ... It's unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say...
Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn't everything. I'...
The central attitudes driving the Victim are: Everybody has done me wrong, especially the women I’ve been involved with. Poor me. When you accuse me of being abusive, you are joining the parade of people who have been cruel and unfair to me. It pro...
If you were determined to get enjoyment out of every moment, you would learn to do whatever it took. What it takes is not listening to negative thoughts, yours or anyone else's. Disregarding negative thoughts isn't hiding our head in the sand, but si...
We speak often, and sentimentally, of being 'enchanted' by the natural world. But what if it's the other way around? What if we are enchanted, literally, by the human world we live in? That seems entirely more likely - that the consumer world amounts...
Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on g...
Do you wanna go out for lunch? In celebration?” I asked and then touched my lips in thought. “Or we could swing by the store and get something really good for dinner?” Wesley glanced at me sideways with a puzzled expression I couldn’t figure ...
Service members will only stay on active duty if they can provide for their families—and DOD schools provide a world-class education that has proven time and again to be an incentive for sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines to reenlist. Military d...
Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilec...
I said, I ain't buyin' no chocolate covered cherries." "Oh, come on. You know you want to." D shook his head like Jack was just too much to be believed. "I do not either want to, and them candies makes me think of my grandmother, so it's real fuckin'...
Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are ...
