Fire your engine.

Yeah, there’s no decent reason to smile, and so what? You need one? You really have to convince the demons which destroy you that you have a right to remain alive? Your will is the only tool you have, and the only weapon. Use it! Use it, or be damned!

You get so many choices in life. Who to listen to, who to be, how to act, how to dress; you give those choices to other people, and you’ll find yourself with a personality you can’t stand. Revert! You don’t have to stick to the ways of the past.

God is the good ground on which the house of pain was built, and even should you knock that house to nothing, you’ll still have love. Your thoughts don’t hang together; everything falls apart; so what?

How do I explain? How do you wash a word?

Anyone who tells you about your enemies is, fair chance, your enemy. Why else is he riling you up to fight some other fool who’s just protecting his children? Why else is he so invested in your opinion? Because he’s your friend?

A fool, in his folly, believes himself wise; but once he knows he’s a fool, does he then become wise? In the sense that he has that little wisdom; that little understanding that he has little understanding, sure. But – in the sense that he can solve any problem he couldn’t solve before, not yet; with time, foolish, effortful, loving time, perhaps.

As the time passes, as the brain-tree is built up, maybe if everything goes well it gets better; but everything follows everything else, and the brain, in the end, is just fatty flesh with a charge on it. Since that’s the case, why do we take it so seriously?

A better question is; how do we stop? The wires want to know the truth of things, the truth of things can’t be written into the wire; the wires want, also, to feel like they already know, and the truth is that it can’t be known.

Somewhere beyond the rocking and rollicking of emotions, somewhere beyond the quick flash-and-gone of thought and memory, somewhere you can’t see, hear, touch, or taste, the original love is waiting. It’s waiting, to remind you that your enemy is wrong when he thinks you’re his enemy; to remind you that your friend has as much need as you do of reassurance, and that the one you haven’t yet met is your friend. Somewhere beyond the quick, easy answers supplied by frazzled parents and stored deep in your mind is the real, raw matter of life. What you do with that is up to you; just don’t forget.