…pain is a sacred puzzle…

He…told me of the sad discovery he had made when he was 40, namely, that ‘pleasure doesn’t really make one happy,’

Everyone loved San Francisco, but Jones couldn’t suppress his fears that it would soon disappear in a mushroom cloud.

How many times would I have to learn? Every moment of my peace was a lie, for it came only at the gods’ pleasure. No matter what I did, how long I lived, at a whim they would be able to reach down and do with me what they wished.

All institutions require our collective faith in them for them to work. We call that legitimacy.

“I’m sad. I feel like I’m watching the last perfect justice system in the world destroy itself.”

Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest.

All across the hexarchate were people like his older sister: loyal citizens, decent people in their day to day lives, many of whom had benefited even from a system that ran on regular ritualized torture.

• 77 books so far (5 down from this time last year)
• 58 women, 15 POC, 13 queer and 5 trans authors
• Best memoir of an addict recovering on the island of Orkney: Amy Liptrot’s gorgeous The Outrun
• Best lightly fictionalized memoir of an addict living between Oakland and Mexico City: Lucia Berlin’s stunning A Manual for Cleaning Women
• Thirteen more that I truly loved:
  • A Queer and Pleasant Danger
  • Artificial Condition
  • At the Dark End of the Street
  • Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
  • Farewell to the Horse
  • I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
  • Saga
  • The Bear and the Nightingale
  • The Cloud Roads
  • The Flowers of Vashnoi
  • The Henchmen of Zenda
  • Weave A Circle Round
  • When They Call You a Terrorist

…so yeah. Lots of escapism, some memoir, a little unflinching political realism. And Michelle McNamara’s extraordinary book, unbearably unfinished, filled with righteous anger, and an instrument, in the end, of justice.

The world is on fire, and everything seems to be about death right now, but some things have dealt with death in a way that makes me feel less terrible.

Nights are endless because you wake at the softest cough or sob, then lie awake listening to her breathe so softly, like a child. – A Manual for Cleaning Women

This book encouraged me to go back to the stories I’ve already told that still haunt me.

I took the kids to see an all-woman production of Jesus Christ Superstar. It was fabulous, all Resistance and bisexual lighting. Jesus was so good she almost upstaged Judas. Between my parents loving the Sydney production and the Spiral Oasis staging at Burning Man in 99, I have such an odd relationship with this play. It’s puzzling that Lloyd Webber could have written this one decent thing, in a career otherwise so very full of crap. Maybe Judas is his Mary Sue, as Doctor Horrible is Whedon’s.

He rubs his fingers over old scars. – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

Michelle McNamara and death fought one another to a draw.

Against its nature, the terrified prey animal is turned into an incarnation of terror which drives the predator, man, to flee

The horse was born not in Troy, but in Alexandria: it is a phantom of the library

The connections forged between humans and horses nowadays are relationships based on love, communities of interest and sporting camaraderie.

the native language of equine history is Arabic.

Nobody would have noticed the waif-like boy who hung around the Paris horse market for days on end, in 1851 and the following year. Confident that he was unobserved, he scribbled away on the notepad he took everywhere with him, like a painter on his travels. Nobody recognized him as a young woman dressed as a man, pursuing her ambitious plan.

girls and horses are islands in the flowing river of time.

Somewhat like a precursor to cybernetics, only more direct: a neuro-navigation between interrelated natures. Two moving, loosely coupled systems, circumnavigating the lengthy route of thought, exchanging information directly via the short cut of touching nerves and tendons, thermal and metabolic systems. The act of riding means that command data is transferred in the form of physical data, in a direct exchange of sensory messages. Riding is the connection of two warm, breathing, pulsating bodies, mediated only by a saddle, a blanket or mere bare skin. Humans enter into similar informational connections when they dance together, wrestle or embrace.

It was one of Kami’s earliest memories, the look of fear on her mother’s face as she watched Kami. “I’ve been scared all my life,” Kami said slowly. “I’ve thought I might be crazy all my life, and you did it to me.”

I am beginning to think that there are some events that simply cannot be “processed,” some things one never gets “over” or “through.”

The more I take the time to look at things, the more rewards and complexity I find.

Aminat has her own story; she is not a supporting character of yours.

I am heartbroken but at peace.     Last night, before getting some sleep, I came in to see if he needed anything. I tucked him in and kissed his forehead.     “Do you know how much I love you?” I said.     “No.” His eyes were closed. He was smiling, as if seeing beautiful things.     “A lot.”     “Good,” O said, “very good.”     “Sweet dreams.”

Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another. Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of.

How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it.

“Do you think anything will really be different after the war?” Rachel asked. She felt afraid even to voice the idea. Did one wilderness only give way to another, on and on into eternity?

For those of us raised by mothers and fathers who experienced such trauma firsthand, it is impossible not to continue this remembering.