"House of Cards"

[fiefoe]

Six word summary: religious young man worked for Hallmark. The coming-of-age drama is pretty much Shalom Auslander territory. I was much more interested to read David Ellis Dickerson's explanation as to why humorous Easter 'sentiments' are the hardest to write.

• Some part of me was also nervous about the pressure that comes with being good at something: you have to be just as good later.
• We went back to work, and testosterone quietly gnawed off its own leg trying to escape.
• The "jokes" can rarely be edgy, unusual, or interesting. Every pitch needs to be slow and in the strike zone -- not much fun for anyone who enjoys pitching.
• Our department would buy pop-up books and ruthless dismantle them, like pre-Englightenment vivisectionists pursuing dark secrets.
• It turned out that masturbating underneath an umbrella is actually somewhat complicated.

• Stately forty-room mansions are poised near one another like happy monks, each in its own serene prayer bubble.
• This priest had essentially camped on the shore near where childishness was surfing all around.
• Every wall hanging seemed to carry a subliminal message about the importance of not renting.

<'My exuberantly irrelevant brain':>

• Leon Trotsky is the only famous person I can think of who was killed by an ice ax. Jane never needed footnotes.
• I'd had moments like this before, and I knew it took time for the actual shape of the conflict to seep into my brain in some manageable form.
• My interlocutor might not know who G.K. Chesterton is, so I'd better mention the book so they know he wrote books. Besides, Chesterton wrote dozens of books, and I'd hate for someone trying to track down the quote to have to go vainly through volume after volume...
• Oh. That's my vice. I inform people against their will.
• To keep cool in the desert heat, camels will pee on their own legs.

• I'd gone from being an extremely lame, PG-13-seeking stalker to an actual Peeping Tom.
• ...once to Sex Addicts Anonymous (where I was the only virgin in the room, and no one took me seriously)
• We don't pray that aspirin will work... prayer and God were always used .. to settle the uncertain.
• this tiny sanctioned interstice between my past life of superstitious abstinence and my upcoming life of principled abstinence
• (break up for a year:) Behind it all was that dream of the big, beautiful, loving, restorative gesture: my gift to her of all the poems I'd ever sent her, assembled together in Songs from a Love Affair, where the first new poem on top would be called something puckish and rueful, like "The Break Didn't Take."
• Oh, fuck, I almost forgot that I'm dying, and the band would tighten again, as if my heart were a dog that needed to be broken to a new and crueler leash.