a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Philip Larkin

Heads in the Women’s Ward

On pillow after pillow lies
The wild white hair and staring eyes;
Jaws stand open; necks are stretched
With every tendon sharply sketched;
A bearded mouth talks silently
To someone no one else can see.

Sixty years ago they smiled
At lover, husband, first-born child.

Smiles are for youth. For old age come
Death’s terror and delirium.[/b]

Maybe you, maybe not you.

[b]When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you’ve always done what you want,
You always get your way

  • A perfectly vile and foul
    Inversion of all that’s been.
    What the old ratbags mean
    Is I’ve never done what I don’t.

So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay)…

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you’ll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.[/b]

Maybe you, maybe not you.

Saki says that youth is like hors d’oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don’t notice it. When you’ve had them, you wish you’d had more hors d’oeuvres.

If only all the way to the grave.

I’d like to think that people in pubs would talk about my poems.

Maybe even in a few bars.

I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself…

Just not anymore of course.

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three…between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

Not many of us [left] can say that.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I remind me of someone I don’t know.[/b]

More to the point, of someone I’d never want to know.

…cries in orwellian…

It started in 1984.

exercise: metal
driving: hip hop
cleaning: early 80s new wave

Or, sure, for some, early 80s new wave 24/7.

who am I to be selfless?

Of course no one ever goes there anymore.

my horoscope is avoiding eye contact

That can’t be good.

bury me in the future

And then out of the blue [or not] the future is now.

fuck demands. I’ve got a list of examples.

Me, I’ve got an avalanche of groots.

[b]Neil Gaiman

If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.[/b]

Tell that to the judge and the jury.

Things bloosom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.

So they keep telling us.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

Of course that all changes in Heaven. We just don’t know how yet.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

In other words, if you’re paid enough for that to actually be an option.

It’s like you said the other day, said Adam. You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years.

He means the fucking liberals of course.

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser’s own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.

Not yet, perhaps, but heading in that general direction.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?[/b]

Sometimes you’re parked here and sometimes you’re not.

We just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart.

At least nine if your’re lucky.

I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

He wondered: Anyone ever said that about me?

The room was filled with conversations we weren’t having.

And, fortunately, didn’t want to have.

He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of course, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do?

Plenty of dust to go around though isn’t there.

Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?

They never let you forget, that’s for sure.

[b]Terry Pratchett

Progress just means bad things happen faster.[/b]

Let’s all agree at least that it can mean that.

A European says: I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with me? An American says: I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with him?

At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.

The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.

No, seriously.

Of course I’m sane, when trees start talking to me, I don’t talk back.

Let alone brick walls.

Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplow driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.

I know, let’s invent another God.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

Where can we take this? Philosophically I mean.

[b]e e cummings

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because[/b]

In other words, why not?

…remember one thing only: that it’s you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.

Let’s discuss why this is bullshit.

I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

I call it my food stamps years.

may I be I is the only prayer–not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong

May I be I what though?

…nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands…

Cue Woody Allen.

…great men burn bridges before they come to them…

Either that or build them.

[b]Michael Parenti

People who think they’re free in this world just haven’t come to the end of their leash yet.[/b]

And then there are those who, for all practical purposes, never do.

Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.

No, really, political economy is an actual thing.

[b]Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.

Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.

Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.

At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies.

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people. [/b]

No, really, political economy is an actual thing.

Democrats—lily-livered, weasel-assed collaborators.

Most liberals he means.
Well, not counting the “value-voter” issues of course.

You dont know your wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day.

How close to it are you?

As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.

Throughout, for example, the entire Third World.

[b]Ethan Hawke

Don’t you find it odd, she continued, that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.[/b]

Of course first we’ll have to know what the dream actually is.

Give your heart to everybody you meet. The rest is pretense.

Anyone here ever tried that? Oh, and define pretense.

Success isn’t measured by what you achieve, it’s measured by the obstacles you overcome.

Let’s go out on a limb and suggest it’s both.

The older I get, the more I realize how rare it is to meet a kindred spirit.

And then one day you’re old enough to admit it’s probably never going to happen at all.

You are always in the right place at exactly the right time, and you always have been.

With the possible exception of now?

Now I have a theory that if a woman wants to keep a man she only needs to say two things: She believes in him and he’s got a big a cock. That’s all it takes. It doesn’t even have to be true.

Has that ever worked on you, Mr. Uberman?

[b]so sad today

she died as she lived: worried she was dying[/b]

And what if it doesn’t stop there?

whenever I say yes to hanging out it’s like i’m watching the word come out of my mouth in slow motion and trying desperately to stop it

Or [here]: whenever I say yes to posting it’s like i’m watching the words come up on the screen in slow motion and trying desperately to stop them

it’s going to get worse before it gets worse

Unless of course it gets much worse.

i’m annoyed, therefore i am

Or, sure, even fucking enraged.

lonely but don’t want to see people

Don’t ask us to explain that.

too anxious to sit still, too depressed to move

Don’t ask us to explain that.

[b]Joseph Heller

Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.[/b]

Shall we just chalk this up to human nature?

As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.

Either that or an objectivist. You know, if there’s a difference.

Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.

Or, for some of us, something will happen.

He was one of those people with lots of intelligence but no brains.

Let’s explain the difference.

The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as the frog?

America was born on July 4, 1776. You do the math.

I’ll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning.

Maybe, but how would we confirm it?

[b]Steven D. Levitt

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.[/b]

I think that, among others, Don Trump would agree.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent–all depending on who wields it and how.

I think that, among others, Bob Mueller would agree.

Don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do.

Well, not here of course.

As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Drunk or sober.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Which doesn’t mean that, in fact, it really can’t be done.

Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of “identity”. It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.

Not really a problem for some of us.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The vain man does not think he is vain.” Gilbert Ryle[/b]

Let’s run this by, among others, me.

"Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.” Jorge Luis Borges

That’s certainly worth bringing up.

"At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.” Karl Jaspers

Not to worry, you’ll find it again, right?

“Man is something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process.” Karl Jaspers

Until perhaps [once and for all] he is dead.

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong” Bertrand Russell

Anyone here willing to die for theirs?

“You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough." William Blake

Philosophy being the least of it.

[b]Brit Bennett

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.[/b]

If not hammered to a pulp.

The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.

No, really, what if it always was that way?

Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

Statistically as it were.

But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain’t about shit.

In much the same way there are two types of women. But, sure, point taken.

A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing.

And [of course] with absolutely, positively no exceptions.

She’d already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the difference.

Ugly too.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade…It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’re really like to be.[/b]

Let’s pin down a description of great writing.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.

Great, yet another component of dasein.

I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups–and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand … you have to go back to the past … it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact.

True. Now, let’s see who can reconfigure it into the most extreme point of view.

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

So, we need find only one black God.

Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Any special few here?

We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

I know that you have.

[b]Existential Comics

How to be a philosopher:

  1. Sit around and think about stuff.
  2. Really hard.
  3. No, even harder…keep thinking.
  4. Okay done.
  5. Philosophy![/b]

Don’t try this at home.

[b]How to write an existentialist novel:

  1. Thirtyish white guy thinks he’s the first person to ever be depressed.
  2. No real plot.
  3. The end.[/b]

Volume 1 probably.

Remember, my friends, very little in this life is remotely serious at all. But the few things that are serious are serious beyond measure.

Trust me: We’re not one of them.

[b]Dating tips for feminist men:

  1. Be confident, but respectful.
  2. Don’t treat women as a means to an end.
  3. Be mindful.
  4. Kill all men.[/b]

Obviously: Starting with yourself.

[b]How to have a fulfilling life:

  1. Be true to yourself.
  2. Find a job that helps others.
  3. Radicalize the youth towards worldwide communism.[/b]

Maybe, what, 50 years ago?

Jesus: love your neighbor.
Nietzsche: love your fate.
Sartre: love your freedom.
Schopenhauer: I hate everything and so should you.

Of course it goes without saying: Not necessarily in that order.

[b]André Gide

Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.[/b]

On the other hand, this may sound considerably more profound than it actually is.

Yet I’m sure there’s something more to be read in a man. People dare not – they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry – I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don’t find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia – it’s the worst kind of cowardice. You can’t create something without being alone. But who’s trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that’s the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that’s just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.

On the other hand, this may sound considerably more profound than it actually is.

The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.

Tell that to the folks on the assembly lines. Or in the cubicles.

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.

For one thing, it’s considerably more ambiguous.

Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.

Maybe back then, sure, but now it’s more in the way of blah blah blah.

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

Anyone here actually believe that?

[b]Roland Barthes

There is a time when death is an event, an adventure, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.[/b]

He means his death, your death and my death.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Though, sure, go ahead, take your chances.

Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.

I must be doing it wrong then. Unless, of course, he is.

What I hide by my language, my body utters.

Here that gets particularly tricky.

The editors of Life rejected Kerész’s photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images ‘spoke too much’; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Or, going out on a very short limb, both.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to ‘express’ what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.

Or, going out on a very long limb, both.

[b]Nein

War is data. Hell is data analysis.[/b]

And not just on Wall Street. Or in the Oval Office.

Language. I miss it sometimes.

I know: a rather peculiar way to put it.

Eat. Pray. Delete.

Or: Eat. Pray. Save draft.

Let’s be honest: the best things in life are free. With the purchase of another.

So, philosophically, is it really free?

Friday. Casual capitalism.

Maybe not your capitalism though.

Let’s be honest: your weekend was ruined years ago.

On the day you were born perhaps. If not conceived.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime…which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise.[/b]

Not, as it were, that the particulars matter.

A conservative is not merely an obstructionist who wishes to resist the introduction of novelties; nor is he, as was assumed by most 19th-century parliamentarians, a brake to frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do … Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all … If [it] falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

True, but not too conservative. Or, for that matter, liberal.

One of the problems of the vacation is money, father.
Oh, I shouldn’t worry about a thing like that at your age.
You see, I’ve run rather short.
Yes? said my father without any sound of interest.
In fact I don’t quite know how I’m going to get through the next two months.
Well, I’m the worst person to come to for advice. I’ve never been ‘short’ as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke? On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that. Your grandfather once said to me, ‘Live within your means, but if you do get into difficulties, come to me. Don’t go to the Jews.’

This then gets passed down through the generations.

Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that. I suppose you think that’s all bosh.

Bosh being the least of it. You know, for some.

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

And not just on the Korean Peninsula.

Modernization is just another jungle closing in.

At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.

[b]Mary Roach

Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter.[/b]

Unless of course religion is more about comforting and consoling you here and now than in whatever might actually be your fate there and then. That’s the beauty of it.

It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?

Is that really something to joke about?
[sure, apparently]

There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed and waved her hair and made up her face. They’d done a great job, but I felt taken, as if we’d asked for the basic carwash and they’d gone ahead and detailed her. Hey, I wanted to say, we didn’t order this. But of course I said nothing. Death makes us helplessly polite.

Not counting mine of course.

The slang for the rectum is “prison wallet”.

Gee, I wonder what that means?

It’s possible that the reason I’ve never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren’t wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics…and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.

Sure, it could all be as simple as that.

…think of it, said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

Right, like that will work, among other places, here.