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It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
The little evening breeze blew over the clearing and the leaves rustled and the wind waves flowed up the green pool. And the shouts of men sounded again, this time much closer than before. George took off his hat. He said shakily, "Take off you hat, Lennie. The air feels fine." Lennie removed his hat and laid it on the ground in front of him. The shadow in the valley was bluer, and the evening came fast. On the wind the sound of crashing in the brush came to them. Lennie said, "Tell how it’s gonna be." George had been listening to the distant sounds. For a moment he was business-like. "Look acrost the river, Lennie an’ I’ll tell you so you can almost see it." Lennie turned his head and looked off across the pool and up the darkening slopes of the Gabilans. "We gonna get a little place," George began. He reached in his side pocket and brought out Carlson’s Luger; he snapped off the safety, and the hand and gun lay on the ground behind Lennie’s back. He looked at the Back of Lennie’s head, at the place where the spine and skull were joined.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night. See how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek! JULIET : Ay me! ROMEO: She speaks. O, speak again, bright angel, for thou art As glorious to this night, being o'er my head, As is a winged messenger of heaven Unto the white-upturned wond'ring eyes Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him When he bestrides the lazy puffing clouds And sails upon the bosom of the air.
In 1980, Denali National Park was expanded to include the Kantishna Hills and the northernmost cordillera of the Outer Range, but a parcel of low terrain within the new park acreage was omitted: a long arm of land known as the Wolf Townships, which encompasses the first half of the Stampede Trail. Because this seven-by-twenty-mile tract is surrounded on three sides by the protected acreage of the national park, it harbors more than its share of wolf, bear, caribou, moose, and other game, a local secret that's jealously guarded by those hunters and trappers who are aware of the anomaly. As soon as moose season opens in the fall, a handful of hunters typically pays a visit to the old bus, which sits beside the Sushana River at the westernmost end of the nonpark tract, within two miles of the park boundary.
It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache. The school bus wheezes to my corner. The door opens and I step up. I am the first pickup of the day. The driver pulls away from the curb while I stand in the aisle. Where to sit? I've never been a backseat wastecase. If I sit in the middle, a stranger could sit next to me. If I sit in the front, it will make me look like a little kid, but I figure it's the best chance I have to make eye contact with one of my friends, if any of them have decided to talk to me yet. The bus picks up students in groups of four or five. As they walk down the aisle, people who were my middle-school lab partners or gym buddies glare at me. I close my eyes. This is what I've been dreading. As we leave the last stop, I am the only person sitting alone. The driver downshifts to drag us over the hills. The engine clanks, which makes the guys in the back holler something obscene. Someone is wearing too much cologne. I try to open my window, but the little latches won't move. A guy behind me unwraps his breakfast and shoots the wrapper at the back of my head. It bounces into my lap-a Ho-Ho.
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and allI'm not saying that-but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those lithe English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt. When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel. Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father's cafe, sits in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. She rolls down the window to tell my sister Frieda and me that we can't come in. We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. When she comes out of the car we will beat her up, make red marks on her white skin, and she will cry and ask us do we want her to pull her pants down. We will say no. We don't know what we should feel or do if she does, but whenever she asks us, we know she is offering us something precious and that our own pride must be asserted by refusing to accept.
The trail was blazed in the 1930s by a legendary Alaska miner named Earl Pilgrim; it led to antimony claims he'd staked on Stampede Creek, above the Clearwater Fork of the Toklat River. In 1961, a Fairbanks company, Yutan Construction, won a contract from the new state of Alaska (statehood having been granted just two years earlier) to upgrade the trail, building it into a road on which trucks could haul ore from the mine year-round. To house construction workers while the road was going in, Yutan purchased three junked buses, outfitted each with bunks and a simple barrel stove, and skidded them into the wilderness behind a D-9 Caterpillar.
on the northern margin of the Alaska Range, just before the hulking ramparts of Mt. McKinley and its satellites surrender to the low Kantishna plain, a series of lesser ridges, known as the Outer Range, sprawls across the flats like a rumpled blanket on an unmade bed. Between the flinty crests of the two outermost escarpments of the Outer Range runs an east-west trough, maybe five miles across, carpeted in a boggy amalgam of muskeg, alder thickets, and veins of scrawny spruce. Meandering through the tangled, rolling bottomland is the Stampede Trail, the route Chris McCandless followed into the wilderness.
"A flyleaf is the blank page at the front of a book," explains Lacey Mosley, Flyleaf's vocalist. "It's the dedication page, the place you write a message to someone you're giving a book to. And, that's kind of what our songs are — personal messages that provide a few moments of clarity before the story begins."
Immediately. When that deacon prayed for me, I saw that the love I had for my boyfriend and even my family was nothing compared to God's love for me and for all of us. Seeing that God loved me despite how horrible I was made me think, Who am I to say anything about anybody else? Who am I to hate anyone if God loves me despite my stuff? The love was the thing that hit me the hardest. I felt forgiven.
"If you're waking up living for something you won't die for, why are you living for it?" -Lacey Mosley
I FELT FORGIVEN
LM: When I was younger, I would just lay in bed and I wouldn’t be able to sleep because I had so much going through my head. I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I wrote it all down. That’s where a lot of the songs came from. I still do that sometimes. If you are honest and really examine yourself and write it all down, then somebody else that feels sort of the same way…might be helped emotionally because you put into words what they couldn’t say.
LM: It’s about the Columbine High School shootings. There were two girls singled out by the gunmen because they were Christian, one of them was Cassie Bernall, the other was Rachel Joy Scott. The gunman pointed the gun at Cassie and Rachels’ faces and asked, “Do you believe in God?” and both of them said “Yes” and were killed. I like the story because they stood up for what they believed in and sometimes in high school and junior high, we don’t stand up for what we believe in if it costs us being embarrassed or feeling that we don’t fit in. They stood up for what they believed in and it cost them their lives. Another reason I like the story is cause it is a good question to ask. If someone pointed a gun in your face and asked, “Do you believe in God?” and you thought if you said no that they might not shoot you. But if you said no and they shot you anyway, then you would have to answer to God if he, if he was real. You wake up every day and it’s good to ask yourself what you believe and what could happen if I die today. How would that change my day? What’s important to me and what do I believe and why? You keep asking questions because you never know what’s going to happen. TMSZ: Is that how you live your life? LM: Yes, as much as I can remember to do that. I think that’s the best way. TMSZ: What are your plans for Flyleaf in the future?LM: We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re just thankful for today…whenever I think about the future; I just can’t believe that we’re here today. It’s amazing that we’ve gotten here. I didn’t start out thinking we’re going to make it and have a gold record and we’re going to have a video on MTV. I never thought that way. God gave me today and I am going to use it the best way I know how. If he gives me tomorrow, I’l thank him for it and try to do the same thing.TMSZ: Is there anything else that you want to say about your bandor music that I haven’t asked? LM: We’re doing Music as a Weapon Tour with Disturbed and Stone Sour and while we’re on this tour, we’re going to sell a cd that is only going to be available at the shows. All of the money is going to go to the Red Campaign and World Vision…there’s a Christmas song on there and you can only get it while we’re on this tour. My friend’s P.O.D. are putting out a record on November 21st. The Greatest Hits record. Some of my favorite songs are on there. I want to tell everybody about that so they’ll go buy it on November 21st.
"Sorrow" Sometimes life seems too quiet Into paralyzing silence Like the moonless dark Meant to make me strong Familiar breath of my old lies Changed the color in my eyes Soon he will perforate the fabric of the peaceful by and by Sorrow lasts through this night I'll take this piece of you And hope for all eternity For just one second I felt whole As you flew right through me Left alone with only reflections of the memory To face the ugly girl that's smothering me Sitting closer than my pain He knew each tear before it came Soon He will perforate the fabric of the peaceful by and by Sorrow last through this night I'll take this piece of You And hope for all eternity For just one second I felt whole As You flew right through me And we kiss each other one more time And sing this lie that's halfway mine The sword is slicing through the question So I won't be fooled by his angel light Sorrow lasts through this night I'll take this piece of you And hope for all eternity For just one second I felt whole As you flew right through me And up into the stars Joy will come
"Red Sam" Here I stand Empty hands Wishing my wrists were bleeding To stop the pain from the beatings There you stood Holding me Waiting for me to notice you But who are you You are the truth (you are the truth) Outscreaming these lies You are the truth (you are the truth) Saving my life The warmth of your embrace Melts my frostbitten spirit You speak the truth and I hear it The words are I love you And I have to believe in you But who are you You are the truth (you are the truth) Outscreaming these lies You are the truth (you are the truth) Saving my life My hands are open And you are filling them Hands in the air In the air, in the air, in the air And I worship And I worship And I worship And I worship You are the truth (you are the truth) Outscreaming these lies You are the truth (you are the truth) Saving my life
I will break into your thoughts With what's written on my heart I will break, break I'm so sick, Infected with where I live Let me live without this Empty bliss, Selfishness I'm so sick I'm so sick If you want more of this We can push out, sell out, die out So you'll shut up And stay sleeping With my screaming in your itching ears I'm so sick, Infected with where I live Let me live without this Empty bliss, Selfishness I'm so sick I'm so sick Hear it, I'm screaming it You're heeding to it now Hear it! I'm screaming it! You tremble at this sound You sink into my clothes And this invasion Makes me feel Worthless, hopeless, sick I'm so sick, Infected with where I live Let me live without this Empty bliss, Selfishness I'm so sick I'm so sick I'm so sick Infected with where I live Let me live without this Empty bliss, selfishness I'm so I'm so sick I'm so I'm so sick
When I said good morning, I was lying,I was truly thinking of, How I might quit waking up, He pointed out how selfish, It would be kill myself, So I keep waking up, It feels so much like falling, Dying while I wait to die, The fear of something or nothing, Lonely empty lie, I don't want to be a liar, I don't want to be selfish anymore, I want so much to change, Learning your love everyday, There's still so much to know, You grip my wrists, I let go, It feels so much like falling, Separated from the fear, Aware of a destination far away from here, Far away from here, It feels so much like falling, Separated from the fear, Aware of a destination far away from here, Far away from here.
Never
forget
the
power
of
words
sass4 added this comment 2008-05-20 14:52:41-05:00
kool, to deadly!
geestarleebanditway44 added this comment 2011-11-01 20:23:17-05:00
nice...
jessasaurus added this comment 2008-05-19 19:16:56-05:00
WOAH BABY!! that looks really coolio!! i love it! :DD
deathnote added this comment 2008-05-19 19:05:21-05:00
woah
yomama316 added this comment 2008-05-19 17:54:05-05:00
wow. that's insane!
sass4 added this comment 2008-05-20 14:52:41-05:00
kool, to deadly!
geestarleebanditway44 added this comment 2011-11-01 20:23:17-05:00
nice...
jessasaurus added this comment 2008-05-19 19:16:56-05:00
WOAH BABY!! that looks really coolio!! i love it! :DD
deathnote added this comment 2008-05-19 19:05:21-05:00
woah
yomama316 added this comment 2008-05-19 17:54:05-05:00
wow. that's insane!
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