Callahan's Place 10 - Off The Wall At Callahan's (v5.0) (3 page)

Hip humor: laughing at a fat girl–cruelty pretending to be fun.

—Mike

Popular myth to the contrary, drink is not really a good drug for pain.
 
That is, it can numb physical pain, but will not blunt the edge of sorrow; it can help that latter only by making it easier for a man to curse or weep.
 

    
But alcohol is
great
for happiness: it can actually intensify joy.

—Jake

I
like
fashion—and Porsches, and Rolexes—all that stuff! How nice of the morons and drones to wear uniforms, so one can avoid them...

—Long-Drink

In our society, big lush women and small slight men go through life wrapped around a softball-sized chunk of pain; it breaks some, and makes others magnificent.

—Jake

Still I persist in wondering, whether folly must always be our nemesis.

—Edgar Pangborn

It claims to be fully automatic, but actually you have to push this little button here.

—Gentleman John Kilian

Logic is a way of going wrong with confidence.

—Stinky Kettering

The only real perversions are nymphomania, satyriasis and celibacy… but even they should be permitted for members of a free society.
 
The only consensual sex-related acts I would proscribe—for reasons of public health—are those involving former food or former people, and lying about the state of one’s venereal health or contraceptive status.
         

—Lady Sally

Art takes whatever—and as long as—it takes.

—Lady Sally

Certain kinds of shit are quite palatable, with a little necessity sprinkled on them.
 

—Joe

Take your skinny women and stick them up the same receptacle with hard beds and cold showers and red-line exercise and "natural" food and all the other things everyone earnestly pursues in the belief that pleasure and pain are nature’s diabolical attempts to trick us, that the less you enjoy a thing the better it must be for you; take ’em and stick ’em, and give me something a man can enjoy!

—Jake

What you put your attention on prospers.

—Stephen Gaskin

Sexual intercourse vests no property rights.

—Jake

Perhaps I could stand loneliness if I were not so useless; perhaps I could stand uselessness if I were not so lonely.

—Mickey Finn

Sometimes, just naming your burden helps.

—Mike

"You don’t even know if our species are sexually compatible."

   
"The hell I don’t.
 
I can see fingers and a tongue from here; anything else is gravy."

—exchange between Mickey and Mary

Writing is a simple trick: all you have to do is sit and stare at a blank piece of paper, until beads of blood form on your forehead...

—Larry Van Cott

There are places on the skull where even a gentle rap will reliably drop a man—but the back of the skullbone is not one of them.
 
Try it yourself.
 
Borrow a blackjack from your mother and sap a random sample of ten guys, as hard as you like.
 
I’ll bet you fifty bucks not more than four of them go down.

—Joe

From an ergonomic engineering standpoint, the only pardonable object in the typical human bathroom is the towel rack.

—Mickey

So many men seem to have the idea that what women secretly want most of all (no matter what we say or even believe ourselves) is a powerful and remorseless engine of flesh impersonally hammering away at us without pause for hours at a time.
 
They become upset with themselves if they cannot deliver this silly commodity.
 
I don’t mean that, on the one occasion in my life when it actually happened to me, it was an
unpleasant
experience, exactly.
 
(Until I tried to get up and walk the next day.)
 
It’s just that maybe once in a lifetime is plenty.
 
And I’ve never seen that guy since, don’t much care if I do.

    
I mean, you could buy a machine to do that.
 
They exist.
 
And women don’t buy them.
 
Neither do gay men.

—Maureen

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think people can be subdivided into as few as two categories, and those who know better.

—Doc Webster

I’ve tried my hand at matchmaking a few times, and learned that you should approach it like walking into a chemistry lab and mixing two unidentified beakers of chemicals: you might luck into a stable compound, or you might blow your hands off.

—Jake

You can love only your equals or inferiors—with your superiors, compassion is the best you can do.
 
And it’s pretty damn good.

—Mary Callahan-Finn

Why
does a man try to comb hair over a bald spot?
 
Is he afraid you’ll fail to notice he’s a jerk?

—Maureen

Some memories you don’t
want
to put words on… because that would change them.

    
Suppose, for instance, you gave a savage a helicopter ride.
 
The experience would be rich and vivid for him.
 
If, on his return to his village, he told friends he had been in a little cave of ice that flew like a bird, at first his memories would still be true, and different from what he said—but the more times he told or rethought the story, the more "helicopter" would become "flying ice cave"… which after all is a lesser thing.

    
By naming the inexpressible, you lose it.

—Edison Ripsborn

The Nazz had them pretty eyes.
 
He wanted everybody to see out His eyes so they could see how pretty it was.

—Dick Buckley, speaking of Jesus of Nazareth

Vengeance is counterproductive.
 
Not to mention the fact that it gets your soul all sticky.

—Lady Sally

When I say that she played with me, for the first time in my life I mean that the way a little kid would mean it.
 
She
played with me
, like a kid might play with another kid that had been whacked on the head recently and needed some diversion.
 
Well, if this was a sane culture, I mean, and kids were allowed to have sex with each other as part of playing, like God intended.

—Joe

Art with contempt in it is always sour.

—Lady Sally

If it’s sloppy, eat it over the sink.

—Tommy Robbins

Now
 
I remember where I know you from.
 
I looked up "ugly" in the dictionary and they had a picture of you.

—Long-Drink to Doc Webster

"So isn’t it a pity,
 

when we common people chatter

of those mysteries to which I have referred

that we use for such a delicate and complicated matter

such a very short and ordinary word?"

—Anonymous

We were not making love, we were fucking.
 
Nothing wrong with that; just not enough right with it.

—Maureen

I’ve been in hospitals.
 
They take away your pants.
 
Then they hurt you and starve you and expose you to disease.
 
Then they bill you.
 
A lot.

—Joe

All humans—without exception—want to love.
 
No organic or emotional or psychological damage can remove that need.
 
Humans can survive, albeit in pain, without
being
loved—but lock a man in a dungeon and he will find an ant to love, or try.
 
The sociopath, who feels no emotions, wishes he could, and is driven mad by his impotence.

—Mickey

If you are feeble-minded enough to want to believe in good and bad joss, the Constitution so entitles you—but have the decency not to try and spread the virus.

—Lady Sally

      
"Why do men want to leave right afterward so often?
 
When they could be cuddling and being held?"

      
"Sometimes because the intensity of the relief, the depth of their gratitude, makes them feel small or out of control.
 
Sometimes because in their secret miseducated hearts they believe they’ve done something disgusting to you, and are glad of it, and so are ashamed.
 
And sometimes just because they were
doing something
when the dread compulsion came over them, and now they want
 

to get back to whatever it was."

—exchange between Mary and Phillip (last name unknown)

I don’t know why it should be worse to die
without
time for pain or regrets… but to me, it is.
 
I’m not looking forward to dying—but I’ve spent a lifetime getting ready for it, and I don’t want it stolen from me.

—Joe

"…remember what I told you, kid: life is a shitstorm—and when it’s raining shit, the best umbrella you can buy is art."

—Pedro Carmichael to Martin Looder, in the film
Tune In Tomorrow
, written by William Boyd.

Skills are the flowers you get if you water your talent bush enough.

—Arethusa

God gave women buttocks because sooner or later they have to walk away from us, and at least this way there’s some consolation.

—Joe

Try to live your life as though one distant day, your descendants will develop time-travel and cloning skills, and come back to resurrect everyone that ever lived who wasn’t a jerk or a creep.

    
Maybe at the end, when your whole life passes before your eyes, it’s a high-speed data dump.
 
Endeavor to see that it makes you seem worth the trouble of reviving.
 
Try to be the kind of guest they’ll want at The Last Great, Never-Ending Party At The End Of Time.

    
It could happen, right?
 
Do you know of a
better
shot at immortality?

—Sam Meade

Don’t belittle yourself.
 
If it truly needs doing, let someone else do it.
 
There’ll be no shortage of volunteers.

—Lady Sally

What shall it profit a man if he gaineth the whole world, yet he hath no allowable deductions?
 

—Mike

Any
man is willing to believe that he was the best you’ve ever had.
 
He knew it all the time.

—Maureen

"Leer" is not what happens when a mature and sexually satisfied woman spots an unintentional double-entendre, but "smile" doesn’t seem to cover it either.
 
Interesting, that there is no word for a woman appreciating bawdiness.