Killing is Easy, Living is Hard
I did my best to kill Bobby Ackerman late one April night when we were both seventeen.
We were speeding down a two-lane highway, a narrow trail of asphalt that sailed off a ridge and down into a long, sweeping right-hand turn and then rushed past a white stucco house with a tile roof, a house that crowned the hill beyond a quaint covered bridge over a dry creek bed running parallel to the road. We were descending toward a little town named Crane, and we were flying.
"Geez, man," Bobby said. I looked toward the passenger seat as the Plymouth dug into the arc of the curve. Bobby’s eyes were wide.
"Slow down, slow down."
Bobby grasped the armrest with one hand and braced his left leg against the hump in the floorboard. I could smell the beer on his breath as he fought to stay in the seat.
The old sedan wallowed back toward the right lane.
It was the first time I'd driven his car. But it wasn't Bobby's car, really. It was his dad's. His dad was a railroad engineer, complete with the traditional bib overalls and cloth cap.
Bobby was my friend, trapped like me in the last year of high school. But he was different. I was secretive, sullen, and sarcastic, but Bobby was outgoing, with an ever-present desire to please sometimes amplified by a brittle manic energy. I liked beer, the drug of choice for our generation, but Bobby liked beer too much. That night he needed someone to drive him home.
Now I had the old car racing down the road and off the ridge at something close to 80 mph simply because that was all the speed I could wring out of it. I'd made one turn, but there was one more ahead before we entered the valley and the town that lay astraddle a creek. The next turn was a sharp, banking left-hander, edged by a dozen or so white posts laced together by steel cables, and oncoming traffic was obscured by a little hill.
I caught a glimpse of a yellow sign ahead, one marked with a black arrow curving around the words 35 mph, but I didn't lift my foot from the accelerator. My hands chased the steering wheel, persuading, begging the car to stay off the limestone bluff to the right, and the old sedan was reluctant, never steady, demanding one correction after another.
Additionally, although proclaiming his love for her, Lester becomes a negative influence on Kathy. Under the false sense of security he provides, Kathy, a recovering alcoholic, allows herself to start drinking again after an abstinence of three ye...
The Confidence Alcohol Gave Me: “I believed the people who romanticized those years, the ones who told me to embrace irresponsibility before I was slapped with the burdens of corporate adulthood” (23). Zailckas’ alcohol binging started at a very young age and followed her for nearly a decade. She turned to alcohol because of her peers who told her to live it up while she was still young and before she had to take on all these adult responsibilities. In the novel, “Smashed: The Story of a Drunken Girlhood,” Koren Zailckas opens up about what caused her alcohol addiction and how it left her with lifelong physical and emotional effects. Alcohol is very commonly used because it distracts the mind from the problems we face in life.
The author then looks back upon the time in his life when her mother decided to drive Hunter Jordan’s old car. However, she didn’t know how to drive, and was generally afraid to get behind the wheel. On that day, she drove crazily on the road, and declared to never drive again. James McBride also reflected on his life up to a teenager, who knew that bad things would occur in the not too distant future if he didn’t change his ways and behavior.
Drugs is one of the themes in this story that shows the impact of both the user and their loved ones. There is no doubt that heroin destroys lives and families, but it offers a momentary escape from the characters ' oppressive environment and serves as a coping mechanism to help deal with the human suffering that is all around him. Suffering is seen as a contributing factor of his drug addiction and the suffering is linked to the narrator’s daughter loss of Grace. The story opens with the narrator feeling ice in his veins when he read about Sonny’s arrest for possession of heroin. The two brothers are able to patch things up and knowing that his younger brother has an addiction. He still buys him an alcoholic drink at the end of the story because, he has accepted his brother for who he really is.
on a car as it passed them. A skeleton of a car went in and after each
He grew up in this small town and knew he would live there forever. He knew every landmark in this area. This place is where he grew up and experienced many adventures. The new journey of his life was exciting, but then he also had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach of something not right. Three weeks ago John, twenty-four years old, finished his fourth semester of college.
Temple, Robert, He Who Saw Everything: A Verse Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Rider, 1991
"Hey boy where are you going?" the driver shouted at Bill while he stretched his arms across the opening to prevent myself from stepping down. I stood waiting. "Where do you think your going?" he asked, his heavy cheeks quivering with each word. "I'd like to go to the rest room." I smiled and moved to step down. He tightened his grip on the
We continued down the infinitely long interstate towards our destination. Thunder clouds continued to rumble in, like an ocean tide rolling closer and closer to the beach front. Within minutes the entire landscape was calm and dark. It looked like a total eclipse of the sun, and the once ...
Technology has developed in leaps and bounds over the past few decades. The case is that the law always has difficulty keeping pace with new issues and technology and the few laws that are enacted are usually very general and obsucre. The main topic of this paper is to address the effect of technology on privacy in the workplace. We have to have an understanding of privacy before trying to protect it. Based on the Gift of Fire, privacy has three pieces: freedom from intrusion, control of information about one's self, and freedom from surveillance.1 People's rights has always been protected by the constitution such as the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from "unreasonable searches and seizures". As said by Eric Hughes, "Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."2 As written by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928 is the right most valued by the American people was "the right to be left alone."3
“Gilgamesh." Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6Th Edition (2013): 1. Literary Reference Center. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.
Logan was on his way home from an evening at the local bar. He and some friends had gone out to have a couple beers. As he sped down the road, he blinked vigorously to try to clear his vision. Although it was a perfectly clear summer night, Logan’s vision was blurred from the alcohol. “As long as I keep this car on my side of the road, I’ll be fine,” he thought to himself. He was doing a decent job of obtaining control over the vehicle, or so he thought. Only three miles from his country home, he became unaware of his position on the road as it began to curve. As he continued around the familiar curve in the road, a truck came out of nowhere at hit Logan’s small Toyota Camry head on. The big F-350 pickup truck was no comparison to the little
I had driven home this way a thousand times before, but today would be different. The misty rain made the road slick as I steered the car through the slow, wide curve. It may have been the setting sun in my eyes, but it was probably a combination of the loud song on the radio and the slight yawn that escaped from my mouth. Regardless, a momentary distraction was all it took as the tires hit the damp gravel. The wet rubber and slick stones triggered the car to slide off the road to the right. In a panic, I jerked the wheel to the left, over-correcting the slide. Swerving across oncoming traffic, my car jumped over the drainage ditch and smashed down into a neighbor’s front yard. Continuing its dangerous journey, the car destroyed a lamp
Life is a precious thing, death is the great evil”, said by Heinrich Heine who is a famous poet. So we can know that life is the most important thing for every single life entity. There are a lot of words that can modify life, such as important, precious, formidable and so on. The reason why there are so many good vocabulary can modify life is nobody want to lose their own life. It is clear that not only human, but also animals cherish their own life. According to the utterance which Heine said, we should not kill anyone. However, the life is also cruel. Crime is happens every day and some of them can’t be excused. People may do some wicked things for some reasons. In this case, the death penalty is the way that can punish them and caution other people and it is necessary to have death penalty.
Unsuccessful in trying to get me out of his car; he began to drive mystically and made a sharp left turn. My reaction was to reach and grab the wheel and turn left. Big mistake. This day will always haunt my memories.