Real affection has no alternative;
if you can experience something you find to be an alternative, then what you have
is not affection, but a game of talk that buffs your self image.
  Everyone has a clipboard and is doing a survey of everyone else,
  to whom they listen just enough to get them to in return, listen to them.
    Real affection just happens and cannot be explained nor justified;
    (not unlike how a person feels about their self after they wake from the dream).

Two things exist for man: acts and facts: the first just is,  while the other is
because it says it is.

Real affection has no alternative:
if you have an alternative  –  you have no real affection.

If you know a way out  –  you’ve already taken it.

As long as you believe that human explanations can or cannot explain anything  –  you’re stuck with them.
After you once eat truffles you can never erase the taste from your mouth.
  (“Is this why my uncle says that adam should’ve never responded the first time
     he heard that voice calling out to him?”)

Another Equation.
Being satisfied with your nervous-system’s normal thinking = mental suicide.
Everyone is like a complex-looking map of a railroad system,
except the wall that it’s hanging on is them,
and no one outside the map can even attempt to read it,
and the job it does is pitifully meangingless in that it has nothing by which
to compare its analysis of itself.
(Can calcutta give you an objective description of itself?  In fact, the insufficiency of the word objective here is actually insulting to the act of description.
  “Is this another slant on why the man-who-knows doesn’t talk about his self?”)

You show signs of actually thinking when it’s only you who can make you feel mad, sad, embarrassed or guilty.

When causes are unrealized  –  explanations are sure to follow.
The tour guides of hell are the only ones there are and they certainly seem knowledgeable on the subject, but you must keep in mind:
what they know came with the job.
  “So you’re saying that humans are born being far too human?!”
But from their normal mental perspective you must remember this caution:
a bear can’t overdo the purely bear thing, but it’s another matter if he starts offering personal reflections on what it’s like to be a grizzly.
The city, civilization, man’s entire culture and second reality cannot exist without
they be talked about;
consider: once adam responded to the voice in his head, what is the very first thing
it spoke of?  –  him.
Many materially non-existent matters are of essential importance to what has become the normal life of man, and none more important than man’s verbal picture of his self.
  (“Is this why the outlier’s billfold contains no family photos?”
Yes  –  no family.)

Civilization is the struggle by facts to overtake acts.

Once you know the first number, all others inevitably follow;
once you have the first word (“Adam?”), the dictionary’s already written.
The runners in the ongoing, International Tar Baby Marathon are only hurt by
their first fall; after that, memory takes over and they limp forever with no additional action necessary.
  (“Is this why the rebel's memory seems to be such a latticework affair?”
The result of many years of dedication.)

You can say that man’s entire second reality is a world of pretense  –  but such a description doesn’t begin to cover what is going on.
  (“Is that why the only way to understand intoxication is to get drunk?!”)
Some allegory-ferries tend to slam into the pier harder than others; the certain-man’s landing ramp howevere is tough enough to handle whatever tries to dock.

What It Takes To Be An Expert In The City.
A glib tongue and passel of excuses for its impotence.

If Life could be explained  –  there would be no explanationS  –
there would, at some time, have been a single explanation that explained everything,
(which theoretically you might say, could have been possible during that brief period between when adam heard the voice calling him and he answered,
as though he was a party apart from the voice).

Yet Another Brief Equation.
Natural = inevitable.
How can an entire species (in this case, elk) fail to notice the existence of antlers.

The certain-man knows a secret way out  –  his own nervous-system.

Every explanation gives the ordinary man another way out.
  (“I take it to be unnecessary to note an absolute distinction between
     ordinary men’s ways-out and the one of the nervous-system-rebel?!”
Of passing note: All the chicken processing plants shut down on one world
were owned by the I Take It To Be corp.)

Real affection = understanding (and if you don’t care for that word: acceptance).
“Pa pa: What difference is there between the two concepts?”
    “Don’t forget to add: ‘The exclusively human concepts’.”
“Right.”

An individual’s verbal personality is civilization-writ-small.

Conversation.
“New thought does not exist at the expense of old thought.”
    “But it must?!”
“Okay: it does  –  so what!”

What It Takes To Be An Expert In The City.
A passel of explanations with running clarifications of why they’re useless,
and ultimately explain nothing.

Until you understand that half of everything you know is composed of
what you don’t know, you don’t understand enough to hurt yourself.

Being civilized is the ability to turn your back on the obvious.
  (“And don’t forget: ‘And deny the inevitable’.”)

Believing what you can never know is the human way.

City talent will not on its own, will out  –  you have to speak up.
No one near the north pole seems ridiculous  –  not unless they start commenting on their never-seen toy factory and elfin associates.

As insane as it sounds: it requires a whole new way of thinking
                                          to look directly at the obvious.

(To employ standard terminology):
Ordinary thinking always lies  --  (or):
ordinary thinking lies half the time  --   (or):
ordinary thinking, even when it tells the truth, lies half the time.
Ordinary thinking can only believe what it can’t comprehend.
  (“Is this why living in the city requires such a [shall we say] curious-mental-process?”)

The Sequence.
After facts  –  criticism.
If you compared the ratio of men’s criticism of facts to their criticism of acts,
you would be astonished.
No one holds it against bears personally when they kill a human  –
only when they shoot their mouth off about it.

You can’t be a second reality expert without announcing that you are.
If facts had to make it in the realm of acts, eagles who were mute and thus unable to comment of their flights, would be unable to fly.
  (“What's this to do with a man’s attempt to alter the way his consciousness works?”)

In the city, no one can be-their-self until they tell about their self.

Having somehow developed a great faith that words with the same initial letter are somehow quite similar; one man has stopped storing new knowledge in Folders,
and instead places it now  into Fuckers.  And this email just in:
“Exactly how insane do you have to be to accomplish this waking-up thing!?
Yours,” etc.
Piers not naturally constructed of the toughest possible material
are never subjected to rougher treatment than they can handle.
What you might think would break a normal person might be no more to a true knight than a bit of armor rust.

Life operates in a certain inhuman fashion and it’s only humans who take it personally.

The only way you can know that you know something is by realizing what you
don’t know  --  something that everyone thinks they do; can you spell: All polar bears are white regardless of the species-wide insistence that they’re blue.
  “But if all of them say that they’re blue  –  then aren’t they?!”
Well, yeah  –  but that’s not what we’re talking about, now is it.
(And yet another email just arrived juxtaposing the notion of insanity with that of achieving enlightenment,    which we won’t bother to reproduce.)

Six Words To Fruitfully Live By.
Be stupid on your own time
 
 

If you're the last one to know something important --
it's nothing that actually concerns you.

There is a man in Argentina who has three noses  --
although he won't come right out and admit it.

Doctors can't really tell anything from urine samples; they just take them for a laugh.

If your car doesn't break down, someone else's will.

A person's knowledge expands to fill any question asked.

Things happen in such a way that there always appears to be things happening.

If you can remember something  --  it wasn't important enough to forget.

For what is known there is an equal and  opposite unknown,
(that no one knows about).

Those who can, do  --  and those who can't, don't.

The amount of energy expended in doing something the way people say
it should be done is always more or less the amount expended in not doing it at all.

The "great" are not  --  but the "poor" are.

There are taxi drivers in Bangkok who'll take you anywhere you want to go.

There always something funny going on.

People often say that it is harder to understand some small thing than it is a large thing,
but really now!

There are no near misses.

If your feet suddenly developed the ability to talk,
you'd soon decide to keep your shoes on for as long as you could stand it.

Time solves all problems  --  and why not?!  --  it created them.

Deaf people don’t miss much.

Just before they're born, the Angel Of Good Taste gives ugly people a choice:
they can come into the world better looking, but as twins,
so that half of their improved life will be experienced by someone else.

In Bulgeria there is a state run home for the criminally stupid.

Chaos is order in motion.

To say: “It's a habit”  is to describe the universe in three words.

People who say that life-takes-their-breath-away  just ain't seen death yet.

The buck doesn't stop anywhere.

All serious people should be taken out back and hosed down.

When your memory goes   --  you oughta forget it.

If you feel like doing something  --  it doesn't need doing.

If opposites attract, then how come my wallet doesn't have money in it!?

If opposites attract, then how come everyone I meet disagrees with me?!

There is no such thing as “saving” --  only the forstalling of the inevitable.

A short-cut to a problem is a problem.

If you believe you're doing the right thing  --  just wait a bit
and you'll believe it's the wrong thing.