A special request to those of you who rend the fabric of space-time and generate alternate timelines: please create a reality in which Billy Idol takes Kiefer Sutherland's role as lead lost boy vampire in The Lost Boys, as well as the role of mad-scientist-built Rocky in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as well as the "pleasure model" replicant Pris in Bladerunner (you didn't think we'd suggest replacing Rutger Hauer, surely).  We would also welcome Billy Idol in the role intended for him before a motorcycle accident forced recasting: the shapeshifting android assassin T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  Why not Billy Idol replacing Sting in David Lynch's Dune?  That's simple: David Lynch's Dune should never have happened in this or any other universe.

On the importance of "useless" books to exist for the "'queer folk' who no longer set much store by the uses, aims, and meaning of present-day 'civilization.'"  From C. G. Jung's marvelous introduction to The Tibetan Book Of The Dead.

• to get back to your bedroom.
• to untie the knot into a circle.
• to ask the moon for her compassion.
• the hard part.
• to enjoy the day.
• for the lawyers to clean up the details.
• to fly higher.
• to ask if it’s worth it.
• a bunch of unanswered questions.
• to connect all the wires and turn it on.
• a little moody calm for a respite.
• surgical intervention.
• proving everything is independent.
• telepathy.
• to travel to Ararat.
• floating information.
• to liquidate and save what can be saved.
• the blood, some meat and the remains of magical power.
• a light.
• to proceed upon established lines.
• the space that includes the viewer.
• the unspeakable, the pure.
• some of their names.

"Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb—that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully ... which only reinforces that particular Lie.  I imagine that if Sweet Jesus is listening to me He is becoming very angry now, but if He follows his own philisophy He will fold his hands, look tragically toward heaven, and do nothing."

"The paranormal is about paradox, not proof; about meaning, not mechanism; about myth, not math.  Most of all, however, the paranormal is about the 'coincidence' or fundamental unity of mind and matter.  Two of [Philip K.] Dick's favorote scholars captured this truth in two Latin sound bites: the mysterium conjunctionis, or 'mystery of conjunction,' of C. G. Jung and the coincidentia oppositorum, or 'coincidence of opposites,' of Mircea Eliade." —Jeffrey J. Kripal, footnote in Philip K. Dick's Exegesis

"Is the world all wrong? Reform yourself."  From The Doctors, A Satire in Four Seizures by Elbert Hubbard, 1909.

"We are going to have to deal with propositions which are simultaneously both true and false; my corollary is that mutually contrary propositions may be equally true."

—Philip K. Dick, Exegesis

"The three learned professions surely need our sympathy, since they so many things that are not so."  From The Doctors, A Satire in Four Seizures by Elbert Hubbard, 1909.

"Things done in violence have to be done over again."  From Little Journeys to Homes of Reformers: Bradlaugh by Elbert Hubbard, 1907.

This says that people who promptly answer correspondence are "stunted and queer."  We, too, strive to answer promptly and are unabashedly stunted and queer.  (Not proudly, mind you, for the opposite of "shame" is not "pride" but "shameless.")  From Mince Pie by Christopher Morley, 1919.

From a typed message on the back of a 1908 postcard of Johnson Bible College.

Desperate times do not call for milquetoast measures.  Messrs. Meow and Miaow (no relation) enter an old wizard's manor to set up a strange ritual.  See also this unusual collection of Strange Prayers for Strange Times.

The saxophone is here called unnatural, abnormal, degenerate, discordant, nervous, and ugly, like America.  From the Muhlenberg Weekly, 1938.

"We are made plutocrats of the supernatural. ... Others have money ... or power ... or strength and courage. ... We have gods and ghosts."  —Gene Wolfe, Lake of the Long Sun