Character is how you treat those who can do nothing for you.
(via untitled-mag)
“It isn’t quite finished yet”, he muttered under his breath. Long years of exhaustion and mental fatigue had worn out the adjectives and hacked away at all the florid expressions he was given to abusing in his youth. He had briefly considered retirement once, but he couldn’t bear to part with the wraiths of the office and that typewriter of his, with its missing ‘e’ key. So he’d sighed and drew back into the damp and mildew, consigning the smell of wet cement and Claudia’s supersternal nodge to the demons of his mind. All that didn’t matter now, probably never did.
She was staring at him. He had to do something.
“Here, you can have this.” And he pressed something into her hands. He could tell from her expression that she was not expecting any tokens.
“What does it mean?” she asked. He had no answers, save the voices in his head. Never mind. “It’s a gift, from me, to you. Do you like it?”
She still stood looking at him. Then she quietly tucked a few curls of her golden hair behind her ears, and whispered, “This isn’t what I came looking for, mon cherie. But it’ll do.”
“Good. So, next Wednesday, then.”
And the meeting was over.
He had acquired a talent of sleepwalking, over the years. He stepped into the cafes and jazz bars whenever he felt like it, but never stayed more than a couple of hours. The cobbled roads were shifting under his feet even as he walked over them. The smells of the city were changing, and there weren’t any pigeons to roost up in the gargoyles of Old Truffy’s any longer. It wasn’t the sense of insecurity, no… he was still too young for the paranoia of senility to set in. The reason was unclear, much like everything in his life. The only things he was sure of nowadays were the strains of the rhythm guitar and the wails of the harp.
He unloosened his tie, and leaned back, his chair tilted at a critical angle. And began musing on the weather. It was pretty unremarkable to begin with, but he enjoyed worrying on the details, until he remembered the pretty women who’d sit in judgement over him when he came to them eventually. Then his chair gave way, and the germ of the thought was unceremoniously wrenched from his skull and frozen in the space the head had previously occupied, unthought. Curiously, in spite of the dull thud of his cranium on the wooden floor, the first thought that occured to him was the Zeno’s paradox about the half-distances. He managed a quick smile before the pain set in like resonating binaural beats.
Rambling was always his forte. He loved talking about places he’d visited, sharing anecdotes, keeping people entertained. He was adored by his adorers as a raconteur, one of the very best. He had an uncanny ability of judging the mood du jour and would select a story appropriate for the occasion. But all this was a long time ago. Now he reeled under the merciless onslaught of the blues that made even a simple act like crossing the road seem impossible. He didn’t cry when his friends left him. His disjointed thoughts were too full of hubris for him to take umbrage at the desertion.
He wished Claudia would call him sometime soon, wondering what was keeping her. Well, I do owe her an apology, he thought. A big one. So he drew out an A4 sized sheet of paper from his desk drawer and wrote,
“They tell me the rivers are sweet and the days golden, from whence they come. That may or may not be true, but the decision was mine to make, and I made the best one I could, given the situation. Please forgive me for all this, I couldn’t come up with anything better. There was so little time, and I had so many things to do…”
He glanced at the top of his desk. There, in a folder containing a mess of receipts, screenplays, spiral bound pages and et cetera, was a piece of paper. On it was written the words Working Title in New Century Schoolbook, his favourite typeface. He reflected that those two words described more eloquently his life’s work than the reams and reams of matter that was churned out by the well-oiled machines that manufactured culture nowadays, and smiled at the irony of it all.
Scientists believe that this is the animal from which everything else evolved. The first multicellular being that spawned every living being in this world through billions of mutations, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals to you. It’s an amazing discovery. Its name is Otavia antiqua, and it is the oldest animal ever discovered: 760 million years old. Scientists claim that it used to chill out in calm, nice, shallow waters, chewing on algae and bacteria through its pores and into its little tube body.
Read: You Come From This Thing: The Oldest Animal Ever Discovered - Gizmodo
(via untitled-mag)
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
(Source: inkv)
Oh, the merry insanity of it all.
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