## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Marshall]] - Full Title: The Straw Men - Category: #books ## Highlights - My parents’ real house, the one I’d grown up in, lay a long time in the past and a thousand miles west. I’d never been back to Hunter’s Rock since they moved, but I could remember that house like the back of my hand. The arrangement of its rooms would probably always define my understanding of domestic space. The one in front of me was like a second wife, taken too late in life to have a relationship with the children that extended beyond distant cordiality. ([Location 346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=346)) - My mother was out, gone to a crony of hers to do whatever it is women do when there aren’t any men around to clutter up the place and look bored. ([Location 373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=373)) - I can no more get back inside the head of my seventeen-year-old self than I could that of a tribesman in Borneo. ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=376)) - Two days later a sweater was left outside their house. The name Josie had been stitched into the front, using what was subsequently demonstrated to be the girl’s own hair. The sweater had been a sixteenth birthday present from the girl’s best friend, who had sewn the letters “FFE” onto the sleeve: Friends For Ever. They had been. Eternity had merely turned out to be short. ([Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=1302)) - Once you got behind the glamor of their celebrity, Zandt knew that serial killers were not the way they were portrayed in the movies: charming geniuses, charismatic with evil, sole crusaders of a bloody art. They were more like drunkards or the crazy. Impossible to talk to, or to get sense out of, sealed off from the world behind a view-point that could never be expressed or made accessible to those who lived outside it. ([Location 1343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=1343)) - Knowing that my willpower is as weak as the light from the farthest star on a cloudy night, ([Location 1413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=1413)) - Your group of friends alters as you get older. You change, you move. People who once seemed indispensable gradually become first less crucial and then merely names on a Christmas card list. ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=1441)) - it would just be nice to hear a voice whose owner knew you when you were young, who understands that your coffin-ready wilt is a joke of recent vintage and not everything you have ever been. ([Location 1445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=1445)) - I don’t find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They don’t even have the salve of believing that going to the gym is going to make things better, that they’ll meet someone cute in the small hours of a Friday night or that their career is going to suddenly steer into an upturn and they’ll wind up married to a movie star. They’re out the other side of all that, onto a flat, gray plain of aches and bad eyesight, of feeling the cold in their bones and having little to do except watch their children and grandchildren go right ahead and make all the mistakes they warned them about. I don’t blame them being a little out of sorts. I’m just surprised more oldsters don’t take to the streets in packs, swearing and raising hell and getting drunk. With demographics going the way they are, maybe that’s going to be the next big thing. Gangs of octogenarians, taking drugs and running amok. Though walking amok is more likely, I guess—with maybe an hour of dozing amok in the afternoon. ([Location 1677](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=1677)) - Though his faith in words had been deeply shaken, he clung to the belief that words and names were to reality what pillars and architecture were to space. They humanized it. Just as DNA took the random chemicals and turned them into something recognizable, language could take inexplicable phenomena and tame them into situations about which something could be said, and thus about which something could be done. ([Location 1856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=1856)) - All over America, the rich are carving out their hidey-holes. Ranches that used to support cattle or simply beauty are being bought up and subdivided into twenty-acre home sites where you can rejoice in stunning views and neighbors who are absolutely just like you. I’m not dissing this. I want one of these views, I want one of those lives, held in the palm of the mountains in one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. I just don’t want what comes with it. The golf. The part-share in a Lear jet. The cigar humidors. The bland, screamingly serene androids who live in these country clubs and lodges: bluff men with leather tans and firm handshakes, women with their steely eyes and surgery-tight cheeks; conversations that are one part greed, two parts self-satisfaction, and three parts eerie silence. I think it would drive me insane. ([Location 2113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=2113)) - I leafed through the brochures, which featured faux wooden lodges interior-decorated by some cowboy on drugs, or gleaming white boxes of such Modernist sterility they looked like they’d been discovered on the moon. ([Location 2121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=2121)) - An hour later I was listening to chip talk about golf. Listening again. Still listening. Would, I was beginning to fear, always be listening. ([Location 2135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=2135)) - But now he substituted her with the girls in the new files, trying to sense whether they were connected by anything other than speculation. Trying to reach out from the place where he was headed, where he had lived most of his life, the strange city of dream-makers, of poverty and test screenings and murder and gross points—to other places, other nights, other hunting grounds. To other cities, other machines, other forests of buildings and rivers of concrete where other men and women missed the stars at night and tended small plants on windowsills and kept tiny dogs and took them for walks along corridors in the endless procession of boxes and intersections and lights; where they rented space in other people’s property so they had somewhere to sleep so they could get up and perform profit-related tasks they neither understood nor cared about, simply so they would be given the tokens of exchange they needed in order to rent the space in which they slept and snarled and watched television until finally some of them slipped out of the window and ran howling down the dark streets, throwing off a numbness handed down from a society that was itself trapped in fracture and betrayal and despair; the lonely insane in a culture turning into a Christmas bauble, gaudy beauty wrapped around an emptiness coalescing faster and faster into parking lots and malls and waiting areas and virtual chat rooms—non-places where nobody knew anything about anybody anymore. ([Location 3541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=3541)) - Aimless movement was replaced by more directed activity, as society’s white blood cells moved in and tried to impose a structure. Some of these men and women moved with purpose: pointing, shouting, bandaging. Others might as well have been victims themselves. ([Location 3635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=3635)) - incident tape was already going up, fencing the event out of our reality, consigning it to exceptional circumstances. ([Location 3639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=3639)) - When nothing else makes sense, it is only your relationship to one person, and one person alone, that stands any chance of protecting you against the world. ([Location 3755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=3755)) - The sin was not there in the material, or even in wanting it. It was in needing it, needing it before you even knew of its existence—needing it so much that had it not already existed, you would have had to create it. Blaming pornography is like blaming a gun. Neither created itself. Neither is capable of pulling its own trigger. You need a hand. The human mind is this searching hand, its fingers slender enough to find small gaps, and strong enough to pull out what it finds in them. It is similar, too, in that after a time calluses sometimes form, hardnesses of use that mean that the sense of touch is rendered less acute. Hardnesses that may mean that something hotter or sharper is required to promote the same effect. And there does come a time when you are in blood stepped so far that it stops mattering what you tread in next. ([Location 3881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=3881)) - Like a smile from yesterday, he was gone. ([Location 3898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=3898)) - You are insulated from those you care about most by decades of durable time, like glass that seems clean but is a foot thick and impossible to break through. You think you’re right there with them, but when you try to touch, your hand can’t even get near. ([Location 4038](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=4038)) - The Summer of Love was already fading into the Autumn of Jaded Apathy, and drugs had laid many cold on the slab. Ed wanted out. Mary did, too. They had only really been in it for the excitement, after all, for something to do with their friends. Politics as social life, slogan as fashion accessory. ([Location 4108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=4108)) - Bobby realized he had never even scratched the surface of what was possible—that the wars and murders reported in the news were barely more than sports news updates, death for show, a screwed-up system of physical honor that varied only in scale and public accountability; that even the terrorists he’d interviewed had been dabbling in the shallow end of darkness. ([Location 4524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=4524)) - nothing we ever did in the daytime would bleach out what some of us were capable of at night. ([Location 4528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O84I2HW&location=4528))