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“She hops expectantly into the sink. I turn on the tap for her; she laps without a glance in my direction, like a duchess so used to being ministered to that she no longer notices the servants and sees only a world where objects dumbly bend to her wishes, doors opening, faucets discharging cool water, delicious things appearing in her dish.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, Another Insane Devotion: On The Love of Cats and Persons

“In the middle of my depression, somebody told me about a self-help
group for people who wanted to persue personal visions, and I thought
that might be just the thing for me, since I no longer had any. So I
went to this Goals Meeting. It was in an Episcopal church in the leafy
suburbs, and when I walked inside, a nice lady was explaing that her
Goal was to get out of debt and buy a pony for her little daughter.
Then this other fellow got up to share. He was a white boy in a
dashiki. He said, "My name is Ira and I have a Goal. Right now I'm
unemployed and in debt and I'm living with my parents, who don't
understand me at all. But my faith in this program is so huge that I
know that one year from today I'm going to be traveling across the
United States with my Spirit Guide. My Spirit Guide is going to be a
while malamute dog named Isis. I mean, I know this as clearly as I've
known anything in my life. My Goal is for Isis to guide me to the
homes of my favorite self-help authoers. Isis is going to take me to
meet John Bradshaw and Louise Hay and M. Scott Peck, and I'm going to
get them to mentor me!" He kind of bellowed this. And I wasn't sure
whether Ira was exactly what John Bradshaw and Louise Hay and M. Scott
Peck deserved or whether I hoped they kept shotguns in their homes. I
was honestly torn.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh

“I had a sudden understanding of tattooing's true appeal: It's
Troll-collecting for biker types.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh

“The philosopher Berkley claimed that everything in the universe
exists solely as a thought in the mind of God. In response to this
Samuel Johnson is supposed to have kicked a stone and said, "I refuse
him thus!"
Nowhere is it written that Johnson stubbed his toe when he kicked
that stone. But he probably did and it probably hurt.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh

“This fantasy of immunity arose out of traditional American exceptionalism but became prevalent only amid the euphoric abundance of the postwar years. It is a child’s fantasy, and it has made us a nation of children.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning

“A common feature of many theories of trauma is the idea that the causative—the wounding—event is not remembered but relived, as it is in the flashbacks of combat veterans, experienced anew with a visceral immediacy that affords no critical distance. To remember something, you have to consign it to the past—put it behind you—but trauma remains in the present; it fills that present entirely. You are inside it. Your mouth is always filled with the taste of blood. The killers are always crashing through the brush behind you. Some researchers believe that trauma bypasses the normal mechanisms of memory and engraves itself directly on some portion of the brain, like a brand. Cattle are branded to signify that they are someone’s property, and so, too, were slaves. The brand of trauma signifies that henceforth you yourself are property, the property of that which has injured you. The psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi believed that trauma is characterized by the victim’s helpless identification with the perpetrator, and elsewhere in the literature one often comes across the word “possession.â€� The moment of trauma marks an event horizon after which memory ceases. Or else memory breaks down, so that the victim can reconstruct the event but not the feeling that accompanied it, or alternatively only the feeling.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning

“Because Americans don’t know how to suffer, we are inflicting great suffering on others, and in all likelihood we will bring further suffering upon ourselves.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning