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Holidays with Bigfoot

Book by Thomm Quackenbush · 49 quotes · Travel, Woodstock, Las Vegas

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Holidays with Bigfoot Quotes

“Any relationship beyond acquaintanceship is composed of one to three qualities: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Simple friendship has one: intimacy. You can have other friends and you do not feel passionately about one another, or we are dealing with another animal. Most romantic relationships begin with a dollop of passion, often to the exclusion of anything else. The person in your arms is the best in the world, though you barely know him or her. You have never felt this way. Any gaps or deficits are temporarily puttied over by passion. When most people envision romantic love, this is where they stop. Romantic comedies but only rarely deal with washing your lover's dishes because they must be up early for work. No one wants to see the mundane when they can flip the channel to a desperate, emotionally-stunted frottage. The passion of infatuation triggers the release of addictive chemicals. We would rather get another hit than cope with the relative dullness of intimacy and commitment.”

“How I could ever establish a relationship with her father, though? His world was logical and mine was a morass of adolescent feelings. On television, we would grab a beer, replace a fan belt, and I would earn his begrudging respect. He might tell me to treat his daughter right while hitting the head of the wrench against his palm. In this world, I stood a better chance of connecting with the fan belt.”

“More so than any child I have met, Bear straddled the line of eating nothing and eating everything. He piled a plate with whatever was available, ate three tactical bites to discourage stealing, and ran off to do anything else. When questioned, he would swear he was coming back to finish off the warm macaroni salad and cold hamburger, but he never did. The world was too full of gleeful abandon to pay mind to calories. When his food, now spoiled, ended up in the garbage, he would growl at the rank unfairness of his starvation.”

“Dawn through the window woke me. I placed an extra pillow over my face to block it. When Amber woke, she panicked that the ghost children were smothering me. She was not going to stop the ghost children, but she was going to observe and record. Even at the expense of my life, she figured I would rather have been a part of the paranormal, particularly if it made for an entertaining story at her murder trial.”

“A moose can and will murder the unwary in ways obvious to improbable. They can trample you, the pressure of tons of muscle and bone turning your own into jelly. Their antlers pose an understandable risk not merely of goring at thirty-five miles an hour but picking up your limp body and tossing it over a cliff. As though this was an insufficient threat, their nostrils may house bumblebee-like Cephenemyia ulrichii, flies unable to distinguish between moose nasal cavities and human eye sockets when spraying their larvae. You wouldn’t die, but you would need immediate medical attention to prevent significant injury and certain embarrassment when your friends found out.”

“No story about Las Vegas should begin in Vegas. It is a place one goes, often rashly, and from which one returns often poorer in money and richer in experience. It is a crapshoot—pun intended—if the outcome will match the intention. Las Vegas will not disappoint, becoming a story one can tell in a bar, how one got an unfortunate tattoo, or drunkenly married a new acquaintance at the Little Vegas Chapel in front of an Elvis impersonator.”

“For the canny traveler, the map is dotted with tourist traps that were once something sincere, something worthy of reverence that gave way to branded merchandise. We follow the billboards that are as accurate as those guiding us to the Corn Palace or the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, kick at the dirt a bit, watch an overinflated PowerPoint or squint at a dusty artifact, peek at the gift shop, and go home with less money but nothing in value gained. These sites are mental stamps that one was in a place where something had once mattered, but the veil between Then and Now is thick and impermeable.”

“Campgrounds are never comfortable. They are merely less awful than other options. In normal circumstances, if told that the nearest available toilet was half a mile away, up a dirt path frequented by animals in gastric distress, one would lock the doors and speed to civilization. When a tent or camper is involved, one is jubilant. At least this site had flush toilets!”

“The closest my generation will ever come to the spirit of the original Woodstock was September 12th, 2001. For a few weeks, we believed that we were integral members of the brotherhood of Man. It didn't matter who our neighbors were (aside from a few isolated cases of the paranoia-induced beatings of Sikh children). We wanted to make sure they were holding up so that we could feel that they wanted to know the same about us. We needed a national tragedy beyond our reckoning to shake us loose from the mundane, a trip far more heinous than anything the infamous brown acid would have given us. Woodstock existed for people on the brink of seeing what life meant. September 12th was in acknowledgment for how that life could end, and the almost guilty thrill that we made it through.”

“The town had an idyllic quietude, a fishing village that decided that was the best way to stay for a century. The houses were wooden, the exteriors faded to a uniform gray by the salt air. They were not, however, the least bit drab. Bright plants prospered, ivies snaking over the shingles so that the houses seemed less built as grown. The sole exception to this canopy was the church. Set at the foot of a mountain, its door was a staggering red, the stained-glass of the steeple pulsing decadently. When the sun hit it, I could believe the town had fallen under a spell that tithed its color to the church. When Sunday night mass began, this window poured forth a kaleidoscopic radiance rivaling saintly visions.”