The Deluge

BY STEPHEN MARKLEY

In one line: The most accurate contemporary commentary on the social, socioeconomic, climate, and political issues of our generation; some of the most creative and visual prose I’ve ever read.

Two of my Favorites: If there’s any measure of a person at his death, it is what they have done to advance fairness and compassion and decency in their personal life and wider society. // You are alive and as long as your lungs draw breath, you have love in you, and you have hope. No man or woman is beyond love or hope. I firmly believe that in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, every last person is worth of redemption. It’s never too late to begin again.

• The more we try not to think about things, the more we think about them
• Free market globalization is the vascular system that continues to incubate inequality
• Movies are cheap facsimiles of what books accomplish
• When you want to create an emotional response in a stranger you first look to your own joy, melancholy, or nostalgia
• Fury & longing are somehow the same thing
• If you find gambling exciting, you’re doing it wrong
• People become subject to outside narratives too often
• Happiness is about using your gifts for something beyond yourself
• Bad weed makes you feel paranoid. Good weed makes you understand why you should be paranoid.
• Only cowards throw punches
• Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people
• At some point you have to take your parents for who they are and not let it rule your life
• We have a moral duty to speak with those we disagree with
• That the highest levels of govt seem to spend so much time behaving like its 7th grade never failed to astonish me— its as fascinating as it is obnoxious
• You can leave the game, but the game never leaves you
• It never pays to lose your temper at a white man in Washington. They will always find a way to weaponize it against you
• Congress is just another neon-lit whorehouse
• The word terrorism was the most powerful marketing tool of the 21st centruy
• This is an age of faith. Every age is one of faith. Disbelief requires an effort of will. But all belief requires is acquiescence.
• One came to understand all purchased, voted, worshipped, and loved and unconscious obedience to narratives we thought were original but were largely dreamed up in sterile boardrooms…then we went and called these stories our passions and dreams
• We are living in a time of overconsumption, addiction and poverty of the soul
• Sometimes I have this nostalgia for the worst moments of my life because they are the most vivid and unforgettable.
• Don’t make demands of children. Be firm but not harsh
• No one deserves anything or anyone, that’s not how it works
• Don’t talk about what you don’t understand
• Earl’s parenting method was to ignore the boys until he found a hill at random to die on
• To let the infotainment bath of the day stream over you, is to slowly scrub away at the skin of your own humanity
• Maybe he was an occasional failure as a parent, but he trudged on. That’s what parenting was. Never getting over all the grave mistakes you made while cherishing a special fear. That this part of yourself, externally you, was in constant danger.
• Encyclopedia of accusations
• The simplest answer is always the right answer
• The contortions our minds will attempt to tell us that what we are seeing is not real
• I’ve become radicalized in the sense that politics have now infected government agencies so thoroughly that we must continue to advocate for sound science and the policy it demands as these emergencies barrel forward
• The catastrophic shortages of water are causing refugee flows, eruptions of conflict, and ethnoreligious carnage
• I’m sure you can guess my feelings toward an insipid notion like destiny. The brain seeks patterns because that is what brains desperately do.
• I punctured his enthusiasm, and as he deflated, I admit, I found it very gratifying
• It’s remarkable how the people who caused the most chaos are also the most boring and insecure
• It’s a mathematical certainty that in a nation with such wide availability of firearms citizens will find use for those firearms
• Righteous paths always lead to darkness
• We don’t see the people we love clearly
• Sometimes, when you’re in love with a person, you don’t know what you’re about to say to them until its already leaving your lips. It’s like you walk around with this splinter buried deep in the skin and you think, no way will that ever come out. And then suddenly it does.
• We make compromises with ourselves all the time because we believe the ends will justify the means.
• My fucks budget is full, can give no more
• Description of feelings at death – eons rushed over him with each second taking on the duration of a whole millennia. The rain of the sun, earth’s corpus blooming to life human kinds dallying, all visible for those interminable nanoseconds as the souls of the dead whispered in his ears. The terror he’d felt his whole life, the siege that begins at birth slipped away. And the more the dread of oblivion receded, the more overwhelming the wave of love. His mom, dad, and sister were there. And even his life’s sorrows felt precious. The curse of this life, from the yacht to the ashes, finally blew apart.
• He felt like he was giving orders in a dream where nothing obeyed the laws of physics. Like a stapler might just float past his line of vision in this realm of selective gravity.
• The joy of violence is inborn. People secretly love to supplicate themselves to men powerful enough to unleash it decisively.
• Fear is useless. You act in the moment. Figure out what comes next and get another mile down the road. In her dad’s estimation, fear conscripted your whole mind. Rationalized irrational behavior.
• History demonstrates that the most powerful empires in the end turn out to be surprisingly fragile.
• Sharing secrets in a relationship is a complicated thing. One must convince himself that he is telling his partner the truth in the moment. One convinces themselves to allow for a gray area in which the truth is mutable.
• When a person you love hurts or angers you, think of a thing they’ve done that made you love them.
• I don’t want to hear the word green attached to anything ever again. Besides, its a total misnomer. During extinction events, the oceans acidify, carbonate forming species get wiped out, and its all replaced by green plankton. “Disaster plankton” scientists call it. The oceans bloom with it.
• Go on this journey with me and maybe it will be a huge mistake, but that’s what life’s for, right? And its better to go with the wild outrageous mistakes.
• Mountains are chaos disguised as stillness. We carve out these places in the world. Spare them from our cruelties. But only because its one of the last ways we can still feel mystery. And then even our sense of mystery becomes another consumer-edifice.
• The dead don’t receive honest criticism. Everyone is too stunned for impartial assessments, though they shouldn’t be. Death is only the second law of thermodynamics. Everything evolved to a state of maximum entropy. Everything decays. The ultimate regression to the mean. I find this principle almost too useful. The human mind is dead set on resisting regression to the mean, even those who are secular and rejected at all costs. From religion to basketball, the mind yearns to believe in the extraordinary. And this explicates so much about our fears, insecurities, and delusions.
• I was frustrated and anxious because I kept saying things I didn’t believe. It was like driving into quicksand and throwing the car in reverse was only pulling me deeper.
• When you see a person do violence to themselves, it never really leaves you
• “If I knew this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this was the last time I’d see you, I’d tell you I love you and not just assume foolishly you knew it already.” – Gabrielle Marquez
• What is at the root of all financial panics…? Confidence
• Wounded people tend to welcome camaraderie. It is a key component to getting them to agree with what you wanted.
• I pretended to stew for a moment. One must be careful in the handling of difficult realities. People cannot hear bad mews all at once
• After a long career in the fields of science and politics, I’ve learned its best to nudge people in the direction of the correct answer and allow them to think they’ve thought of it themselves
• Look, you want me to tell you we’ll pass a bill and suddenly unicorns will start shooting outta my ass? Doubtful. But we’ll have a civilization to wake up to in the morning.
• You have an emergency, you called the lifeguard, now we’re swimming our asses out to you in choppy waters. But you know the worst part of trying to save someone from drowning? They’re panicking and trying to pull you down with them. Ask a better question next time.
• Marriage is the hardest thing I’ve ever done…I’ve thought a lot about complicity, how we’re all compromised. But we have to try to do what’s right, and love each other all the same.
• The central paradox of any crisis is what feels unfair and unjust is exactly what you need to stem the crisis. Old Testament justice feels good but it doesn’t solve anything.
• You always got something to say that will curdle the milk in your mommas titty
• It’ll be like bailing out the titanic w a dixie cup
• Greed is a strange thing. You think it was made up by the bible right until you see it.
• Even in the midst of free fall, the human animal craves the simplest of carnal pleasures.
• Politicians are contempt to preside over the holocaust of our planet so long as it leads to their own material gain
• Cancer doesn’t actually kill you till there was major organ failure and it gets hungrier at the end, feeding on the body with ever greater speed and lust until it consumes you
• Morality and justice are two overused words often expressed in a misunderstood way
• Fear is physical. It creates a fog in your mind where you can’t concentrate
• As bureaucrats have discovered time and again, getting people to do what’s in their best interest, is often more difficult than unleashing their worst natures.
• According to social scientists, the sensitivity and attitude around pronouns and labels has grown out of virtual reality. And the masking of identity the format makes possible. In VR, people live entire lives outside their genetic or cultural identity groups. Now this approach has spilled into the real world.
• The imagined divisions between groups created barbarically out of thin air and handed down generation after generation have led the human project to the brink
• If there’s any measure of a person at his death, it is what they have done to advance fairness and compassion and decency in their personal life and wider society.
• We can only know something higher if we reach for something higher
• GRIEF – grief is actually always there. it’s like it lives in you, dormant till something happens or somebody goes, and that person dying or leaving, just wakes you up to it, makes you aware of it, but its always been there.
• That feeling from childhood has never left you. That you don’t understand anything that’s happening or why it’s happening or how to change it or stop it. But never has that sensation been more intense than it is right now.
• Now everyone was getting a glimpse of what you long knew—the fragility of all those things that seemed so permanent and steadfast, how very simple it is for everything and everyone to go away.
• Advertising is an insidious form of pollution that has distorted the economy in myriad ways, particularly in the digital age
• Like a lot of people in a lot of walks of life, you learn instinctually how to manipulate yourself so you don’t have to look at what you don’t want to look at.
• Extremism always demagnetizes its own moral compass. The righteous start off wanting to kill the tyrant, but that’s never enough. Then they’ve gotten kill the tyrants family and children and army and supporters
• You are alive and as long as your lungs draw breath, you have love in you, and you have hope. No man or woman is beyond love or hope. I firmly believe that in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, every last person is worth of redemption. It’s never too late to begin again.
• Powerlessness causes us to seek power anyway we can. We’d sacrifice anything, particularly our conscious, to feel it. There’s nothing more dangerous than the excitement than those suffering from a lack of agency and great bitterness of the soul.