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d00c9dd
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Please," she says. "Tell me what you're thinking." It's an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don't share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations o..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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5eb28ac
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Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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092330a
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I would have done the same thing I did. I would have put all my energy into loving someone that wasn't you. I would have tried in vain, every day, to not think about you, and what could have been. What should have been. I would have tried to convince myself that there's no such thing as true love, except for the love you yourself make work, even though I know better....The bottom line is I never had any business marrying anyone who wasn't y..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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77e5084
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You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you're not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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6680198
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I want to explain everything to him, show him that it's really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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398a389
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The sky is fucking with me. It's one of those militantly perfect spring days, the kind that seems to be trying just a little too hard, the kind you want to smack in the face, and the sky is bluer than it has any right to be, really, an obnoxious, overbearing blue that implies that staying home is a crime against humanity. Like I've got anywhere to go. The neighborhood is alive with gardeners mowing lawns and trimming hedges, the mechanized ..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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2118371
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Wendy taught me to curse, matched my clothing, brushed my hair before school, and let me sleep in bed with her when bad dreams woke me up. She fell in love often, and with great fanfare, throwing herself into each romance with the focus of an Olympic athlete. Now she's a mother and a wife, who tries to get her screaming baby to sleep through the night, tries to stop her boys from learning curse words, and calls romantic love useless. Someti..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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1269d07
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I look at her, wondering what it is about her that makes me want to simultaneously devote my life to her and get as far away from her as I can possibly get.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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880038a
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Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you're bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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393b17c
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Rowdy, hopped-up college kids pass us in an endless, noisy blur like they're being mass produced or squeezed out of a tube - guys skulking in their T-shirts and cargo shorts, girls in low-slung jeans and flip-flops, pimples and breasts and tattoos and lipstick and legs and bra straps, and cigarettes; a colorful, sexy melange. I feel old and tired and I just want to be them again, want to be young and stupid, filled with angst and attitude a..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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d144283
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Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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8e807c8
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There is nothing sadder than sitting in a car and having absolutely nowhere to go.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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ae6dbdc
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If at first you don't succeed, lower you expectations
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jonathon-trooper
success
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Jonathan Tropper |
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fbd7b76
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Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all around them, on grass and tombstones and the roods of cars, generating atmostphere. What they don't show you is how the legs of your suit caked with grass clippings, cling soaked to your shins, how even under umbrellas the rain still manages to..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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6a4eb63
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Jen shakes her head sadly and I can see her lower lip trembling, the tear that's starting to form in the corner of her eye. I can't touch her, kiss her, love her, or even, as it turns out, have a conversation that doesn't degenerate into angry reincriminations in the first three minutes. But I can still make her sad, and for now, I'll have to be satisfied with that. And it would be easier, so much easier, if she didn't insist on being so go..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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3f2df11
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and if you want to know where all the good guys are, we're standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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538104a
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There are some people out there who don't wait for what come next. They decide what should come next and they go and make it happen.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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a9a4b30
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I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don't know.
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love
marriage
relationships
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Jonathan Tropper |
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d3953d8
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If you're eating an ice cream cone, it's just very hard to believe that things have gone completely to shit. That there isn't still hope.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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ce475e3
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It's a sad moment when you come to understand how truly replaceable you are.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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9ce5499
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You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I'm heading into the trenches alone.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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2cf7242
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To err, as they say, is human. To forgive is divine. To err by withholding your forgiveness until it's too late is to become divinely fucked up.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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7ce5f5c
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I've been treating my life as this pit stop, just kind of regrouping before I move on. But it's been seven years, and I never moved on. I haven't done anything. I just...stopped.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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6cab5e9
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I feel a dark wave of regret for the kind of person I turned out to be.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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5d7af55
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There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.
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grieving
last-times
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Jonathan Tropper |
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e1e2fa6
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top up position down The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.
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humor
jonathan-tropper
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Jonathan Tropper |
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5e1c80e
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We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don't understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn't. The five of us, huddled together shoulder to shoulder over the bima, read the words aloud slowly, and t..
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death
religion
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Jonathan Tropper |
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dd70d3e
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You learn not to think about what might have been, and to just appreciate what you have.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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a615f36
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here's the thing. I don't think you're in love with her, not all the way. If you were, I think you would seem more certain about it. More jazzed. You wouldn't hug me the way we hug, and say the things you say to me. You definitely wouldn't have kissed me the other day the way you did. I'm not saying you're in love with me. I'm just saying that whatever this thing is you feel toward me, this thing we're both too scared to mention, I don't th..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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d151430
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And ice-cream cones,' she says. 'What is it with you and ice-cream cones?' He licks around the edge of his cone as he considers the question. 'I guess no one ever eats an ice-cream cone at a funeral, or a fire. The Red Cross doesn't drop ice-cream cones into third-world countries. If you're eating an ice-cream cone, it's just very hard to believe that things have gone completely to shit. That there isn't still hope.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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bff53d3
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Never marry a beautiful woman. Worship them if you must, go to bed with them if you can--by all means, everyone should have carnal knowledge of physical perfection at least once in their life--but when it comes to marriage, it's a losing proposition. You will never stop feeling like a gatecrasher at your own party. Instead of feeling lucky, you will spend your life on edge, waiting for the other stiletto to fall and puncture your heart like..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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d00fa28
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Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughtfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said." --
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Jonathan Tropper |
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692e66c
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As far as rapprochements go, it's awkward and vague, but the advantage of being as emotionally inarticulate as we are is that it will do the trick.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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88fd1a3
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You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?" "Yeah." "Well," he said, "I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, look..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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729169e
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THERE IS NOTHING more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It's the one time of the day where I feel like I have options.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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73a5186
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Do I really look so pathetic to all of you? Like I couldn't possibly meet someone on my own? Half the people in the world are women. Odds are that at least a few of them would be willing to go out with me.' 'Damn right,' Phillip chimes in. 'And it's not like he's been celibate since he moved out. He had sex last night, FYI.' 'Don't help me, Phillip.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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dc8be3d
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If there's a perk to having such a fucked up father, it's that he's in no position to judge.
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one-last-thing-before-i-go
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Jonathan Tropper |
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9526b93
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An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when it used to carry live rounds. Occasionally, though, there's a bullet you missed, lying dormant in its overlooked chamber, and when that trigger gets pulled, the unexpected gunshot is deafening even as the forgotten bullet rips its way through ..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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03913fb
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she'll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she'll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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5504be0
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Loneliness doesn't exist on any single plane of consciousness. It's generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you're reminded of what this baby's carrying under the hood.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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0b37c68
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Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right. We were that couple for a while, nauseatingly impervious assholes, busy staring into each other's eyes while everyone else was trying to have a good time. When I think about how stupid we were, how obstinately clueless about the realities that awaited u..
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Jonathan Tropper |
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ff2e8c0
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Pity, I've learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can't stand anyone else's.
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funny
humour
joke
pity
sad
sadness
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Jonathan Tropper |
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c62c666
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coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.
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Jonathan Tropper |
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cf82ee0
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I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire.
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drink
drunk
drunkeness
fire
grief
sadness
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Jonathan Tropper |