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21 " striding toward the store, I started to get all of those little nervous feelings: sweaty palms, churning butterfly stomach and the bloat of what felt like explosive diarrhea swelling just below that. Panic rolled over me in waves. But when I looked around, no one in the lot was paying any attention to me, even with my eyes probably shifting around like crazy. No one cared. "
― L.T. Vargus , Casting Shadows Everywhere
22 " I can’t teach you some simple lesson and have that somehow prepare you for what the world is really like. I can only try to show you by having you experience different things for yourself and seein’ what you think of them. "
23 " G mode "
24 " We all have heard a bunch of times that drinking kills brain cells, right? Right. Well, what I didn’t know was that the actual sensation of brain cells being damaged is what being drunk is. So basically people are killing their brain because it feels good. Weird, right? So the booze gets in there and starts damaging the crap out of these things called dendrites, which are sort of like the stems at the end of brain cells that communicate from one cell to another. In other words, the damaged cells can no longer talk to each other. As people first get drunk, the inhibition of communication between these neurotransmitters and stuff give them a euphoric feeling. "
25 " And I kind of realized that his pain is real or whatever, but his pain isn’t over the loss of me as an individual. It’s over the loss of the role of a son. He doesn’t know me, so none of it connects to me. It’s a loss in his imagination, you know? Like all of the ideals and hopes people project onto their children? He lost all that. But that’s not me. "
26 " There ain’t no magic power that makes right and wrong have real meanin’ is all. I mean police and prisons keep order to a degree in a real world way, but on the most basic level, there’s no order in this world like they try to say there is. None. It’s chaos. Now I coulda told you that repeatedly, but I don’t think it really strikes you until you go out and feel it for yourself. "
27 " It made me think about this article I read, though, about how men find skinny women attractive not based solely on physical attraction, but the idea that a skinny woman is an obedient woman. You know? If she works out and watches what she eats to meet that social norm or expectation, she is obeying what men want, and that’s part of why they like it. "
28 " And then breast implants are even more so. At that point the woman is going under the knife not only to obey men but to actually debase herself in a certain way solely to be sexually attractive to men, you know? It’s no longer in any way a health issue or a grooming issue or anything like that. It’s getting huge sex balloon things attached to your body. Willingly making yourself a toy for men. Humiliating yourself, and in a way some men like that. "
29 " It’s like this weird oversimplified order that our left brain tries to impose upon everything. It can’t comprehend the unknown. It hates the idea of not knowing what will happen next. It won’t acknowledge that there is a randomness – a chaos "
30 " The left brain wants to believe that all history can do is repeat the same results over and over, because recognizing patterns is how it understands the world. "
31 " Everything that we do wires pathways in our brain. So every time you practice a song on a guitar, you are wiring that into your brain, and each time you practice it, the wiring grows more intricate, more precise. That’s why you improve over time. That’s why repetition and practice lead to success in all things. Eventually the wiring perfects itself and your fingers just know where to go. You don’t think about it anymore. It becomes a part of you. "