(My grandmother will always introduce her best insults with, “I’ve got news for you,” which is what I want to write right now, but frankly it just does not pack the same punch on a screen.)

Anyway, I think I was going to say something about the only way to not be depressed is to bully yourself into gratitude for like, everything, at every second, in every direction, for all of time. I guess the summary is enough. I also wish the idea of keeping a “gratitude journal” did not embarrass me even when I am alone, tucked away in an apartment with just a dog and a cat, both of whom do not care to read much.

My favorite radio show host, for example, is always going wild over the fact of us walking on the moon. And when he does, I too am like holy fuck. We have walked on the fucking moon. There is a moon. That some one has walked on. There is gravity. Gravity is such a mindfuck. There are tides that have something to do with this moon that we’ve walked on by some mechanism I can’t quite bother to understand. The ocean is outer space. Et al, on and on.

Alternately:

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about for it, he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential—there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

- from Mark Twain’s The Death of My Wife

Thank you for these words of encouragement, they’re writing.  It was exactly what I needed to hear.

Right now you’re like a sulking cherry tree that hasn’t bloomed for years but then inexplicably erupts with pink flowers in mid-autumn. You’re like a child prodigy who lost her mojo for a while and then suddenly recovers it when her old mentor comes back into her life after a long absence. You’re like a dormant volcano that without any warning spurts out a round of seemingly prophetic smoke signals on the eve of a great victory for the whole world.

Having a fan in your face turns anyone into a paperback romance.

9 March 1944

Dearest Tess

Here is a little note to wish you every happiness on your birthday. Your mother will give you the present I have for you. It is some painting material and I want you to take great care of it & paint very carefully, because these colours and brushes are not made as toys but are the kind which real artists use, and when a thing is the best of its kind, even if it is only a little thing like a paint brush, it should be treated like a Sacred Animal. Always remember it is not the size or price of things that is valuable but the quality.

You have been a great happiness to your mother and me for five years. It is very sad that I see so little of you. I pray that before you are six ¹ we shall be together at home once more

Ever your loving
Papa

¹ It was her sixth birthday.

(From The Letters of Evelyn Waugh)

Later he would write, “My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.”  A charming brilliance, he had.

(except really I was just pissed because the bartender was acting like I was just gazing at him for my own goddamn pleasure, except I got news: no one’s throwing him any goddamn parades)

(maybe they were, who cares)

(via weekendpartyupdate, ole)

Recall Lolita; ol’ Humbert Hum spends his afternoons milking the venom from his fangs in a fey little leather bound diary.  He assumes the Big Dove too witless to make any attempt at deciphering these ruinous revelations, the stuff which fills the exhausted silence she neurotically mistakes for love.  And yet, Lo!  The Fat Haze has it in her.  A Bad Accident soon follows.  Hum, feckless greedy tick that he is, was not writing on Doane Paper.

“College ruled” paper should be left for the animals.  Wild minds need structure or else they’re all over the page.  Must each letter be a mile high, visible to every wandering eye vying for a peek at your engine?  That’s always infuriated me.  My mother prefers gridded paper, but because I am a dumbell, my eyes cannot stay on a linear path.  Chad Doane has brilliantly solved this.  Every three horizontal lines on the grid are a slightly bolder blue.  It’s a beautiful thing.

No one’s throwing themselves in front of a speeding car for me, my friends.  They can’t read a goddamn thing I write.

It’s also great for drawing and mapping out plans to better your future which you will never execute, but will frequently pause amongst the ruins to admire the order and ease they had so elegantly promised on paper.

(I’m only allowed Nabokov in small doses.)

My mother found this on her window shield a few years ago randomly.  I have kept it for years.  At first I was astonished by how many of those needs seemed superfluous, even luxurious.  Don’t allow yourself to live without, in both what you demand for yourself and what you give to others.  With each day that’s passed since first holding this in my hands, I have understood better in small, nearly imperceptible ways how deeply impoverished we so often allow ourselves to become.

This is the only time I will ever use this concept in the affirmative, because it could be the only instance in which it applies: you deserve every single one of these.  You do.  Perhaps rationally you might agree; now the trick is to massage it so deeply into your psyche that you do not just agree, but believe.

The only way to answer this is by saying to the universe, “I’m right on top of that, Rose.”

(click to enlarge)