Stormy Weather

Hood’s odyssey across the front lawn of Silver Meadow and into his own driveway, down that meandering path and into the house was as heroic as anything from the epics of the past. He wasn’t quite as execrable as he thought. The magic involved was not visible to the naked eye. There were no swords or orcs or dragons or elves or rings in this adventure, but it was magic anyway. Hood had been transformed on Saturday morning from a self-pitying and disliked and hung-over securities analyst into, however briefly, an agent of sympathy. On the other hand, which life wasn’t heroic? Just living was heroic. Just talking to your family in the moring, before coffee, was heroic.

The Ice Storm
Rick Moody

Getting me through the Winter

Prohibition-Era Euphemisms for Alcohol

The noble experiment of 1920-1933 didn’t stop anyone from drinking, of course. But the dubious quality of bootleg liquor and homemade toadstool hooch did cause sufficient brain damage among the speakeasy set such that simple, useful descriptiors were maniacally replaced with the zippy, jazz-age lingo of the insane. Broadway was “That Great Glowing Gulch of Drowning Dreams,” tough guys were “gorillas,” and “gorillas” were “mega-chimps.”

The Areas of My Expertise
John Hodgman

Snowed In

In a snowstorm it always seemed, at least for a time, as though there were no enemies. In a snowstorm the wind could blow a gale; but it blew a white cleanness and the air was full of a driving whiteness and all things were changed and when the wind stopped there would be the stillness. This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it.

For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway

Quiet Sunday

Who doesn’t crave a little refuge (or a loan) at least once in life, especially when you’re young and broke, or old and broke, or moving up, or slipping away? People don’t always need, don’t always want, a clean well-lighted place… But the nice thing about loneliness (and solitude and sadness) is the silence.

Take the Cannoli
Sarah Vowell

Quick Look Back

(Trying to maintain forward momentum here, but I borrowed this one from Sussy and am taking advantage of the fact that it hasn’t made it back to her apt yet.)

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can’t die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land. Horst theorized that we’d all live longer for “wintering in these scalped zones.” The redheads moaned that it just seemed longer. As the days and miles went on they stopped moaning and leaned toward long silences. Their faces took on the flat, wind-tracked look of prairie. “The grave looks good by bedtime,” they said, but the complaints lacked their usual spice and crackle.

Geek Love
Katherine Dunn

Oh, then. Oh.

They were walking through the heather of the mountain meadow and Robert Jordan felt the brushing of the heather against his legs, felt the weight of his pistol in its holster against his thigh, felt the sun on his head, felt the breeze from the snow of the mountain peaks cool on his back and, in his hand, he felt the girl’s hand firm and strong, the fingers locked in his. From it, from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, as light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze; so light that it could be felt with the touch of their fingers alone, but that was so strengthened, so intensified, and made so urgent, so aching and so strong by the hard pressure of their fingers and the close pressed palm and wrist, that it was as though a current moved up his arm and filled his whole body with an aching hollowness of wanting. With the sun shining on her hair, tawny as wheat, and on her gold-brown smooth-lovely face and on the curve of her throat he bent her head back and held her to him and kissed her. He felt her trembling as he kissed her and he held the length of her body tight to him and felt her breasts against his chest through the two khaki shirts, he felt them small and firm and he reached and undid the buttons on her shirt and bent and kissed her and she stood shivering, holding her head back, his arm behind her. Then she dropped her chin to his head and then he felt her hands holding his head and rocking it against her. He straightened and with his two arms around her held her so tightly that she was lifted off the ground, tight against him, and he felt her trembling and then her lips were on his throat, and then he put her down and said, “Maria, oh, my Maria.”

Then he said, “Where should we go?”

She did not say anything but slipped her hand inside of his shirt and he felt her undoing the shirt buttons and she said, “You, too. I want to kiss, too.”

“No, little rabbit.”

“Yes. Yes. Everything as you.”

“Nay. That is an impossibility.”

“Well, then. Oh, then. Oh, then. Oh.”

For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway

Enter Pilar

“What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable unmarried gypsy obscenity?  What are you doing?”

For Whom The Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway