Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.

i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

It was just enough to sit there without words.

We have a huge struggle for our sense of what a democracy is. We're not living in reality when we think we have some sort of democracy. We're really on the edge. We have two presidents who lost the popular vote but won the election. This is not working.

I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.