Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard
Art: Solitary Figure in a Theatre by Edward Hopper, 1903
The Keyrock Kollection – Volume 2
Saved quotes from my 2013 black Kindle named Keyrock, Part 2 – read Part 1 here.
1/4/18 – The Storied Life of A.J. Fikroy by Gabrielle Zevin
People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?
2/9/18 – The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman
The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this: life is not fair. Forget all the garbage your parents put out.
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He didn’t really blame them; he looked like the kind of person you did that to, mocked. His clothes were torn and his throat was gone and his eyes were wild and he probably would have yelled too if he’d been their age.
12/6/18 – The Good Widow by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke
It was one of my biggest fears… that instead of just being a widow the rest of my life, I’d be a victim. People say that’s a choice, and they’re right. But the thing is, when it’s your shit hitting the fan, it’s ridiculously easy to lean into the sadness.
Keyrock is dead; long live Keyrock. On January 19, 2020, after almost seven (7!!) years of near-daily use, Keyrock (second of His Name) went into sleep mode for the very last time. Future Keyrock Kollections will be coming at you from Keyrock III, my 2020 graphite Kindle Oasis.
Pure human fuckery
Struggling to make sense of the world today, I decided to indulge in a bit of light escapism by finally picking up my old copy of The Stand by Stephen King. Nothing like 1,137 pages of 7 point font detailing the horrors of a highly contagious flu to help relax before bed. Not so much, right? But at the risk of sounding dramatic, at this point in time it feels faintly inappropriate to be reading anything else. So, overall this read is going about as well as when I cracked open The Handmaid’s Tale a year and a half after Trump got elected.
The Stand was originally written in 1978; the complete & uncut version hit in 1989. My copy is from 1991. We exist today in 2020. Six pages in I have already spotted one of (what is sure to be) many, many examples of how some things never change:
‘That ain’t necessarily how it would be,’ Hap said weightily, from the depths of his ninth grade education. He went on to explain why.
Altogether it has been deeply jarring but cathartic in a weirdly emotional way, hitting some dark space inside me and giving me back some sense of peace. It works – better than obsessively reading news articles and watching my fellow citizens demean themselves on Facebook, at least. In These Troubled Times, I will take it.
The Keyrock Kollection – Volume 1
Saved quotes from my 2013 black Kindle named Keyrock, Part 1
2/7/15 – Cry Father by Benjamin Whitmer
They put people in prison for taking drugs. They lock kids away for stealing money from gas stations, for joyriding in cars. But men who abandon their children, they float through life, as light as air.
2/7/15 – The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
They were glued down, every last one of them. A packet of souls. Was it fate? Misfortune? Is that what glued them down like that? Of course not. Let’s not be stupid. It probably had more to do with the hurled bombs, thrown down by humans hiding in the clouds.
10/18/13 – Canada by Richard Ford
The prelude to very bad things can be ridiculous […] but can also be casual and unremarkable. Which is worth recognizing, since it indicates where many bad events originate: from just an inch away from the everyday.
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There are people like that in the world – people with something wrong with them that can be disguised but won’t be denied, and which dominates them.
emohen.net 