Amen, sister, ... All apologies to Tom Cruise.

'Pastoralia' by George Saunders. Possibly my favorite book. It's one of the weirdest books I've ever read. If Monty Python and Thomas Pynchon had a love child, and it was raised by Frank Zappa on a weird commune, that would be this book.

You can never know about about your own destiny: are the people you meet there to play a part on your oun destiny, or do you exist just to play a role in theirs?

People always think they know other people, but they don’t. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won’t eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don’t know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel fucked up and sad for no reason at all.

These are hard times. The world hurts. We live in fear and forget to walk with hope. But hope has not forgotten you. So ask it to dinner. It's probably hungry and would appreciate the invitation.

Evie wanted to cry. From fear. From exhaustion, yes. But mostly from the cruel uselessness, the damned stupid arbitrariness of it all.