“This isn’t something you kid about, Brittany,” her mom scolded, snatching the kitchen cordless and taking it down the hall to call the Johnsons. A minute later she returned, her face a mask of shock and terror. “Honey, I’m so sorry. We’re too late,” she said tonelessly as Brittany’s knees buckled; 13-year-old Sam had climbed into the bathtub after school and shot herself in the mouth with her own hunting rifle. No one at school had seen her suicide coming.

No one saw the rest of them coming, either.

I have mixed feelings about exclamation points!

— Rob Baedeker (@robbaedeker) January 26, 2012

A crowd had come out to greet them. Through the scope he saw a woman, with a child close by, approaching his troops. She had a grenade ready to detonate in her hand.

“This was the first time I was going to have to kill someone. I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to do it, man, woman or whatever,” he says.

“You’re running everything through your mind. This is a woman, first of all. Second of all, am I clear to do this, is this right, is it justified? And after I do this, am I going to be fried back home? Are the lawyers going to come after me saying, ‘You killed a woman, you’re going to prison’?”

But he didn’t have much time to debate these questions.

“She made the decision for me, it was either my fellow Americans die or I take her out.”

He pulled the trigger.

(via the browser)

Before they protect their predators, victims of trauma (defined as any experience “which by its nature is an excess of what we can manage or bear”) protect themselves by not consciously expressing what happened to them. To articulate, or to say, is to put together, to draw fragments of an experience into a coherent narrative, a potentially devastating process if the experience was so overwhelming as to have been, like the author’s own past, “shattering.” Before a thing is consciously (if not audibly) voiced, it has yet to be acknowledged or owned; it has yet to be believed.

To learn that “the unconscious is structured like a language” is to see this aspect of the self as radically different from the way it is popularly misrepresented, as a murky soup of dream fragments and primitive urges from which it’s possible to fish out the occasional insight, a kind of primordial chaos from which higher consciousness distinguishes itself.

For Freud, Lacan and Rogers, the unconscious is as complex and sophisticated in its organization as is the conscious, and as individual: each psyche requires its own lexicon. Within this mysterious realm that the Jungian analyst Alan McGlashan called a “savage and beautiful country,” Lacan’s voice does hold the power of an archangel’s, and Rogers’s ability to listen and perceive has an equally rare authority. It isn’t everyone who can hear what we don’t allow ourselves to say.

There are used copies of the book on Amazon for under $5.

It’s funny how when you buy these 2-packs of Grenade Splasherz @ Von’s Grocery Stores (impulse items next to the GIANT $4.49 each size of Red Bull!!!) they carry this warning across the top label: “Do not aim or throw at anyone’s face.”

Much more fun is what it says across the bottom of the label: “Squeeze’em, Soak ‘em, & Throw ‘em!” :^) YAY !!!!!

Bonus: Teat for tête.

People are always nicer someplace else. The rotten little shits.

Moving his family to Southern California in 1984 to be closer to the aerospace industry, Stakes was soon scouring scrapyards for parts he could use to build a rocket car. His most impressive find is a set of XLR99 rocket engines designed for NASA’s legendary X-15, the stub-winged experimental plane that grabbed the flight speed record of 4520 mph in 1967 and has never let go. “Back in the ’80s this stuff was considered scrap metal, and everyone was melting it down to recover the silver and gold from the brazed tubing,” Stakes says. “But these engines weren’t built that way. They’re made from Inconel-X [an exotic alloy] and virtually indestructible. I think they cost $1500 each for four. I have two left. One for the car and a spare.”