knowledge is a slow burn

Question: Do people in russia kiss the police?

Answer: Only when they're angry.

The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self.-William James, to his daughter Peg, from Letters of Note

how can you teach anybody how to write

salam alaykum

words to live by

apeshit
global warming
dingy
quit your job
honey

There is a sadness in every note's beginning

"And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps . . . "
 - Mary Ruefle

Back then

I realized only quite recently that I had finally gotten truthful about a near-relationship from long ago.  Up to that point,I'd glazed over the memory, making him much nicer and kinder than was accurate. But the truth back then was that he'd been rather cavalier about whether we were "together" or not until it was clear that we were not; and then at the first public meeting afterward, I with new date in tow and he with his typical posse of male miscreants, he'd publicly denounced me as though I had proverbially fucked him over, all for the benefit of those he'd allowed to construe that we were together when, in fact, we were not. Indeed, apologies (from him) were extended and accepted (by me) later and we'd gone our own ways and let each other be although always with the thought that things could have been different, or worked out somehow, and that we might have had a happy successful life together or some similar kind of nonsense.  It's stupid, you might say, to take this long to get over this business. But back then, I was even stupider. 

don't walk

save yourself

the secret is we know more than we say

sleep dammit

don't wait