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Only 351 copies of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams were sold in its first six years.

Unravel the Invisible Man’s bandages, pop off his fake nose and find a cackling void. We live in houses built on sans.

When one looks for time, time flees. When one flees from time, time floods.

Before Sunset is so much better than Before Sunrise.

Mouthbreathing is sexy only in the fashion world.

Marilyn Monroe really was a talented actor, and her own writings consistently contain bursts of cleverness and sublimity that can’t be discounted as the luck of a stopped clock being correct two times a day.

What’s humbling is the perception of the me in you and the you in me. Mirrors are spiritual medicine, great equalizers.

Every time I ask “Can you really hate hate?” a koan gets its wings.

Social media is thick with thin-skinnedness.

Ricky Gervais: “If you don’t believe in free speech for people who you hate, fear and disagree with, then you don’t believe in free speech.”

PC stands for “political correctness,” but it also can stand for “pressure cooker,” which political correctness creates.

The logical extreme of trying to quash real or perceived hateful or disgusting offenses is, indeed, the demonic effectiveness and finality of violence, so the enlightened need to realize there’s a dark age within them.

Bad: Every utopia is a dystopia.

Good: Every month is Black History Month.

There are folks who sneer at the general Western canon, rejecting Shakespeare as irrelevant to this or that non-white heritage…[S]uch omission is deficiency rather than healthy heritagical flexion. See James Baldwin’s “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare” (1964).

The talk about the nature of fate, how it might be elemental and inevitable, in the class in Halloween. I guess one could say this about fate: It Follows.

Know who the biggest creep in the original Halloween is? That little girl Lindsay who gapes at the TV and ignores her babysitter.

There are Perfect 10s, much to the displeasure of so many folks who talk about “real bodies” and attribute all hotness to Photoshop.

None other than feminist foremother Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “the woman who makes free use of her attractiveness – adventuress, vamp, femme fatale – remains a disguieting type…Women have been burned as witches simply because they were beautiful.”

Like it or not, beauty is deeply desired and desirable, and the notion of it is not going away anytime soon. (Beauty is beautiful. That’s why it’s called beauty.)

Dave Sim’s dedication in Jaka’s Story: “To Venus, damn Her.”

My who-would-be-perfect-as-Red Sonja picks: Deborah Ann Woll or Rose Leslie.

Lester Bangs: “[T]hose hysterical paranoid Left-er New Left idiots are just as much to blame as anybody.”

from Abyssinia, Jill Rush…

I wish there were cyclistless bikes.

I shared The Bread, My Sweet (A Wedding For Bella) with my mother a few weeks ago, and it touched her heart as it’s touched mine so many times. Scott Baio = maestro in it – along with all the other stellar actors.

Don’t think you can cheat the Solar System by sneaking through some black hole, Pilgrim, because those tidal forces will stretch you to pieces.

If I ever pen an essay about The Catcher in the Rye I’ll call it “The Holden Rule.”

I associate the shimmering tambourine at the beginning of The Doors’ “The End” with the dream-invading bell in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky for some reason.

Richard Schickel called Don Sigel’s The Beguiled a “story of a fucker fucked.”

Missing comics maestro Dwayne McDuffie.

Max Allan Collins on Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer: “You know both James Bond and Shaft were sold, respectively, as the British Mike Hammer and the black Mike Hammer. Hammer is where really all this stuff comes from.”

I feel this way about airplanes. From David Ames’ You Were Never Really Here: “He avoided elevators if he could. They were dangerous boxes in every way – coffins with cameras and only one way out.”

BlacKkKlansman is an effing excellent movie (though the post-conclusion appendix is somewhat bathetic – with a b). And it’s now my favorite Spike Lee joint, right above Mo’ Better Blues.

Bob Ross: “Beat the Devil out of it.”

(Goodbye, Zelda Zook…)

Sweet Pea