8:55 p.m. - 2003-12-07
Broken Glass and a Pocketful of Quarters
"Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they're not necessarily evil, unless you let them be. What you need to do is keep moving, keep walking, in step with your skeletons. They ain't ever going to leave you, so you don't have to worry about that. Your past ain't ever going to fall behind, and your future won't get too far ahead."

" 'Yeah, but everybody talks to everybody on airplanes. It's too bad we can't always be that way.' "

" 'I can't believe this..You drive for a thousand miles and there ain't even any bugs smashed on the windshield. I drive for ten seconds and kill the only living thing in Nevada.' "

"Once, he owned a black-and-white television. He thought everything was much clearer then. Color complicated even the smallest events."

"She isn't always asking questions and sometimes she has the answers."

"The ordinary can be like medicine."

"There they were and suddently they were forgotten for just a second and for just a second nobody thought about them and then they were gone."

"That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like the disappearing....no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice. I'm traveling heavy with illusions."

"These were the children who carried dreams in the back pockets of their blue jeans, pulled them out easily, traded back and forth. 'Dreams like baseball cards'..."

"There is something beautiful about broken glass and the tiny visions it creates. For instance, the glass from that shattered beer bottle told me there was a twenty-dollar bill hidden in the center of an ant pile. I buried my arms elbow-deep in the ants but all I found was a note that said 'Some people will believe in anything.' "

"I want to rasp into sober cryptology and say something dynamic but tonight is my laundry night. How do we imagine a new life when a pocketful of quarters weighs our possibilities down?"

"How do you talk to the real person whose ghost has haunted you? How do you tell the difference between the two?"

"I was born with eyes that can never close."

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