Laurie Perez Quotes

It's a curse to have traumas imprinted in our wiring, to accept that what we fear and grieve and impale ourselves upon from day to day defines the way we translate the chemistry of emotions into a fixed identity wired for suffering.

It's also a marvelous asset, our malleability. When the imprinting experience is loving, exciting, rich and worthy of our more expansive nature, we align pleasurably with harmony and bliss.

But let's face it, we're humans.

Disasters entertain our brains far more than comforts, ease and joy ever will.

No one straps into the ride for the smoothness of it all going well.

This room is crowded, haunted by the stale breath of the living. Until now, I have been able to imagine him dead, gloriously rotting in soil, on his way to Hell, perhaps, or stuck in the mire of nothingness that catches wandering spirits. In that image I have found small degrees of warmth, a tangible explanation for not knowing my father.

I look at the picture and enlarge it with my mind. It is impossible to sleep knowing the chance exists that I might still meet him. I feel the planet spinning under me, like a whirlpool, the surface shrinking so that everything must eventually touch. I resist until it shatters.

There are many men out there who can see nothing but evil. It is on their vision like a cataract. Don't make yourself available to their interpretation of your worth.

Light, Amie, can be blinding when it first comes on. Lasers can be deadly, even when streaming from benevolence. We need perspective. We need it to seem wiser than us, tested and tempered by time.

Now, what's stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history.

We pick up our shots and for the first time there's a total absence of sound in the room. From the ceiling, shy silver things blink and wait. Dennis doesn't sit, but hovers at the edge of the table, leaning in with a darkroom perfected slump. His hair hangs like its edges were dipped in lead. Thin spears pointing to the table. I'm looking at his face; we're both serious in a self-aware way, pretending not to notice.

"It doesn't even feel like I left. God, you look fucking terrible. But it's a terrible face that drinks tequila well. Down. And cheers."

We force a dull clash of cups and pour everything down at once. The hard tequila shudders that never happen in the movies. First your head feels light, then it starts receiving the distress signals from throat, lungs, belly. Your shoulders jerk to shake off the snake that wrapped around you and squeezed. It burns. The good burn.

There's no matter here you can't re-matter into love.

The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.

I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go.

Kingdoms rise and fall.
I can be steady.

Each cell within its atom is a raw, formless idea that exists beyond mortality. It is the wild state constantly creating your world, the one word in a collective equation that is you becoming written from nothing into something - and so it knows, ultimately, annihilation is an essential instrument of becoming new to all that can be known.

Shake off the tonnage of old genetics, nitpicking naysayers and hand-me-down Egos hoarding junk in the back of your mind.

Be a Friday night liberty set loose on Monday morning.

A track I've always liked by Mogwai goes on a loop while I pour a second glass of Reyka. This time it tastes of lava fields and thermal springs, aromatic alcohol evaporating stale thoughts, familiar and foreign. Something unnamed is melting, germinating, potentiating the currents of tomorrow across frozen, unpopulated dreamscapes.

Pregnancy sucks the nightlife out of you.

I stood in the doorway and watched Dennis unbuttoning the blouse, pulling long shirttails out of her skirt and wetting her hair with his hands, letting hairspray clump together in long strands. Ruined like that, in front of me. It was hard to watch because it was so clean, so perfect.

The glow from the television screen crawls over their faces and it's hard to convince yourself they are breathing, living things.

Someday I want to go back to San Felipe de Jesus and find the Jesus in that place. Someday I want to trap myself in those washboard towns, Aconchi, Magdalena; I want to meet their saints someday. I would ask them if they have ever been in love.

I don't mean the syrup they lay on you in the media. I mean the meat of love, the hardness of it, the ice water that wakes you up into the heat of day. The Mexico of love, with rocks, pickup trucks, fat men and sugary children. Cock-sure, moonlit tequila, sweet lime, metallic bed for secret touching. Did they ever reach that side of life? Those mealy saints with their crosses on their backs, did they have enough stomach for the midnight lunch of love?

I chose to live in the Ether, to be starlight and legend....

I used to think I was in love with Mia because she was in love with me. Now when I watch her strutting down the runway, twisting and flouncing the way her mother trained her, I know she's just a human coat hanger. A wired body I hold late at night and try to fit into.

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else's snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It's world-creating.

It's raw, exposed dreaming. It's humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next.

It's what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience.

His eyes spark with revolutions, enlightened trickery and unconditional affection.

Compassion for oneself requires a willingness to step OUTside your own story and see it with loving eyes; the courage to recognize truth and follow new leads; the wish for your own heart to heal and the intention to add a vibrant rhythm to enhance the greater dance around you as you begin to join in.

I look around with divine precision and gazing free upon the earth, I see -
- architects and earthquakes - empaths and robots - fictions and near misses - lives changing, children sleeping, beauty brimming.
I see us - trying on ways of being - so sweet and messy, so worthwhile.

The chaos, the organized, instrumental fear and pestilence was everywhere, and still he was in love with his existence. In. Love. With the whole mad mess, the goldenness, the ripening young psyche of the world.

Feeling compassion toward a dangerous person will not lead you to submit to them or put yourself at risk or condone their actions. What it does simply, is relieve your anxiety – which immediately makes you stronger and more resilient.