lucila soto

The kettle’s high pitch was audible all through the house. She left the bedroom and walked briskly to the kitchen. This night dinner would be instant coffee with a dash of milk and a toast. She needed to watch her weight as her right hip and leg had been achy the past couple of weeks and her doctor advised taking some weight off her small frame was a good idea.

Well, maybe she could have 2 vanilla cookies, her favorites since forever. They were thin and small so they would satisfy her craving for some sugar and, at the same time, her doctor’s requests.

Dinner in hand she returned to the bedroom and placed the tray into her night stand. Then she sat on the far edge of the right of her now way too big king size bed. She started to search for the T. V. remote when a sens of misplacement took over her.

– Hi! said his voice.

She felt goosebumps and turned to the left side of the bed slowly. He was there, he seamed fine, healthy, a bit younger even. And he was smiling, a sneaky ear-to-ear one, like when he was enjoying some mischief he had just done.

– What are you doing here? She said a bit surprised. – Where have you been all this months?

– Where do you think? was his answer. Again he smiled and after letting a minute go by so the thought could sink on her he added, – Look at what I can do now!

With no apparent effort nor pain he reached his right hand to touch her without moving any other part of his body. So his arm got longer and  longer and longer, until he could caressed her cheek softly. Meanwhile his left hand mirrored the sudden elongation and was almost falling out of the bed.

– You know you shouldn’t be here. It is no longer a place for you, and as much as I miss you, you need to go. Go and find rest and peace. She then told him.

Then, she turned around just a second so she could wipe a tear from her eye and heard him say: – It’s fine, I’m going then.

And he was gone again. And she felt once again the sense of loss and that now familiar pain in the center of her chest.

And she took a sip of her instant coffee. No mood for cookies now.

1984
In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

There was a time when the world was half finished. There were no colors anywhere except for a set of paints which the gods had given to an artist.

– The fabric of the cosmos. Space. Time. And the texture of reality. Brian Greene.
The real question is whether all your pondering and analysis will convince you that life is worth living. That’s what it all comes down to. Everything else is detail.

There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Albert Camus.

The Infinities
Spinoza says the wise man thinks only of death but all of his meditations are a meditation upon life. Which is true. Death is not the point. Life is the point. But death is the beginning of what gives life its point.

Dare me to jump and I will
I’ll fall from your grace
But I’ll never let go of your hand
TOM WAITS (bawlers)

Snow White -Donald Barthelem
We exist in different universes of discourse.

Me: why aren’t there pictures of crying people? As an emotion it should also be documented. Otherwise you are incomplete in your storytelling.

An intimidation followed by a demoralization eventuating in a disintegration.

She was experiencing a degree if anger at male domination of the physical world.

I have conflicting ideas. But the main theme that runs through my brain is that what is, is insufficient.

What is merely fashionable will fade away, and what is merely new will fade away, bur what will not fade away, is the way I feel: analogies break down, regimes break down, but the way I feel remains. I feel abandoned.

The refusal of emotion produces nervousness.

This concatenation of outward and visible signs may I say may detonate an inward invisible subjective correlative, booming in the deeps of the gut like an Alka-Seltzer to produce tranquility.

After a life rich in emotional defeats, I have looked around for other modes of misery, other roads to destruction.

[the quality of life]It seems to be deprived. I don’t mean that the deprived people are deprived, although they are, clearly, but that even the fat are deprived.

… Spontaneously and scandalous hurling itself into the arms of bad situations, with never a are for who is watching or real values.

Why is it that we can never be satisfied. It is as if we were designed that way. Ad if that were part of the cosmic design.

-Slaughterhouse five. Kurt Vonnegut.

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news if massacres of enemies is nit to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trustful and beautiful. They shared.

“That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.”

The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel.

It was very exiting for her, taking away dignity in the name of love.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.

God gave me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.

Corpses created by military science.

I supposed they will all want dignity.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It has twenty-dollar bills for leaves. It’s flowers were government bonds. It’s fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer. So it goes.

“Find your Africa” – Dave Chapelle

Mindfulness: being where you are, not where you’ve been, not where you’re going and recognizing all things will pass will pass joy will pass, sadness will pass and your life will pass. Embracing the mortality and being in that mindful place is freedom to be where you are, everything that happened adds up to you.

Drown – Junot Díaz
She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.

That was the way he was with his punishments: imaginative.

Work, Tía said, like it was somebody’s name she didn’t like.

You watch anything long enough and you can become an expert at it.

If something inside of me is saying no, why do I say, Yeah, sure?

You know what it is when you get back with somebody you’ve loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again.

She has discovered the secret to silence: pouring café without a splash, walking between rooms as if gliding on a cushion of felt, crying without a sound.

You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There’s a lot out there.

You can’t be anywhere forever.

The dream of reason creates monsters. Goya

After Dark, 2004. Murakami.
Of what value is a civilization that can’t toast a slice of bread as ordered?

Irony: means taking an objective or invented view of oneself or of something belonging to oneself and discovering oddness in that.

Walk slowly, drink lots of water. Life motto by Takahashi “Walk a lot, drink your water slowly”, Mari thinks one’s as good as the other.

He is considering aspects of the interrelationship of thought and action. Is action merly the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?
The world moves on continously, without iterruption. Thought andation continue to operate in concert.

People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenence of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the news paper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed them to the fire they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking, ‘Oh, this is Kant’, or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction-they’re just fuel.

“You’ll never get away… You might forget what you did, but we will never forget. You probably think you got away with it. But you can’t get away. You can run, but you’ll never be able to get away”. Haruki Murakami

R. J. Sawyer – www: wake 2009
The difference between a geek and a dork is that a geek wonders about what sex is like in zero gravity and a dork wonders what sex is like.

That’s who you are. That’s who we are: a small and fragile world, floating against the vast, empty darkness. All of us. We are one.

I had experienced this: me and not me -a plurality that was a singularity, a strange but true mathematics in which one plus one equals one.

Wild Sheep Chase, 1989. Murakami
So I got up and went over to grind coffee for two cups. It ocurred to me after I ground the coffee that what I really wanted was ice tea. I’m forever realizing things too late.

Sometimes I get really lonely sleeping with you.

To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there’s sex as therapy (self-therapy that is) and there’s sex as pastime.
There’s sex for self-improvement start to finish and there’s sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa.

[Her ears] They were like some great whirlpool of fate sucking me in.

“Not really. It depends on the angle of discussion.” […] “Tell me straight, because that’s my favorite angle.”

“Dumb to the world, that’s me,” was my feeble excuse.

Yawns you could built a lawsuit on.

There are symbolic dreams -dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -realities that symbolize a dream.

Say we have a concept. It goes without saying that there will be slight exceptions to that norm. Now, over time these exceptions spread like stains until finally they form a separate concept. To which other exceptions crop up.

The mutual oposition of ideologies.

… Like the mule who, placed between two identical buckets of fodder, dies of starvation trying to decide which to eat first.

triple-feature-plus-coming-

The wise thing to do is have no expectations from others, but be harsh and exigent with oneself. You can only master yourself. You can only praise others. It never works if you do it the other way around. This I learned from my father.

Provide knowledge and confidence; teach passively; teach openly; be generous in giving from yourself. Preaching by example. Easier said than done and somehow he managed.

True statement: h e never hold high hopes for me. He never wanted me to be famous, make a fortune nor excel. Nevertheless he was always ready to offer his support when needed or to be amazed whenever he saw me passionate and intrigued about any subject matter I decided to pursue. He would celebrate my success and lend a non judgmental ear along some wise words when he found me in distress. I now know he cherished me so -as he did the ones close to him-, that he only wanted for me true happiness and fulfillment, the way I chose to achieve it would always be entirely up to me.

From himself, he would only accept the very best, never a conformist, always searching for more. Even at his old and savvy age, he still wanted to do more and always spoke about how he still was searching for the chance to produce his best ever opera, or to give his best performance.

A year has already gone by since I last saw him, since we last spoke. I know he would be a little disappointed on me because there’s always a shadow of sadness in my smile ever since he passed, but I can honestly say I have become wiser,Ii do focus better and of course, I am searching, learning, staring, becoming better and this, I have found, is happiness for me.

My path, my pace, my footprints, all of them will always be strong as they are based on such hard foundation as my father supplied. The melody of his being will always linger within me.