Quotes by Rebecca McNutt

Her latest client is Professor Desmond Curnin, a university professor who teaches library sciences to large groups of students. He’s quick to pay on-time, quick to never fall behind. He’s a brown-haired man with an unkempt beard and thick-framed hipster glasses. He slides a leather briefcase stuffed with dollar bills into the open window of Geraldine’s car. “Your fly’s unzipped,” Geraldine points out, disgusted. “Who gave you a license to sell hot dogs, buddy?

Money isnt everything. Its the only thing.

Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after… you know… after the funeral we haven’t had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you’d be more mature now that Jud’s gone,” her father had disappointedly added. “How much’d that cake cost you?”“It’s paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy’s last year and I… it was my birthday, dad!”“You can’t even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained.Mandy hadn’t cried, she’d only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “…I’m normal.

Some people spend their whole lives in a fantasy world, and that’s not a good thing!

Your imaginary friend isn’t the problem, Amanda. The problem is that you don’t seem to have any real friends.

Some of the most evil human beings in the world are psychiatrists. Not all psychiatrists. Some psychiatrists are selfless, caring people who really want to help. But the sad truth is that in todays society, mental health isnt a science. Its an industry. Ritalin, Zoloft, Prozac, Lexapro, Resperidone, happy pills that are supposed to normalize the behavior of our families, our colleagues, our friends - tell me that doesnt sound the least bit creepy! Mental health is subjective. To us, a little girl talking to her pretend friends instead of other children might just be harmless playing around. To a psychiatrist, its a financial opportunity. Automatically, the kid could be swept up in a sea of labels. not talking to other kids? Okay, shes asocial! or imaginary friends? Bingo, she has schizophrenia! Im not saying in any way that schizophrenia and social disorders arent real. But the alarming number of people, especially children, who seem to have these illnesses and need to be medicated or locked up... its horrifying. The psychiatrists get their prestigious reputation and their money to burn. The drug companies get fast cash and a chance to claim that theyve discovered a wonder-drug, capable of curing anyone who might be a burden on society... thats what its all about. Its not about really talking to these troubled people and finding out what they need. Its about giving them a pill that fits a pattern, a weapon to normalize people who might make society uncomfortable. The psychiatrists get their weapon. Todays generations get cheated out of their childhoods. The mental health industry takes the worlds most vulnerable people and messes with their heads, giving them controlled substances just because they dont fit the normal puzzle. And sadly, its more or less going to get worse in this rapidly advancing century.

Amanda, you finally decided to answer the phone,” her mom exclaimed after picking up at the first ring. “Where’ve you been, what’ve you been up to?”“Mom, do you remember when I was a kid, I had a friend, he was a Personification of the Sydney Tar Ponds, sort of my imaginary friend?” Mandy asked.“No, what in the name of god are you on about?” her mom sighed in exasperation.“Remember? Only I could see him, but he was real and he was my best friend when I was eighteen?” Mandy insisted.“No, I dont remember Alecto Sydney Steele at all,” said her mom all too quickly.

Mandy was thinking back to when she was five years old, when she, her parents and Jud went outside before Christmas and had a snowball fight with the gray snow of Sydney Mines. “This is a wicked blast,” Jud would say, and Mandy would snap photos with a 35mm disposable film camera, photos she wished very much she could step into sometimes.

People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines.

They think I’m not entirely ‘grounded in reality’, they say. They want me to go to some live-in nerdy activity ranch thing for troubled Canadian youth, that one out in Ontario where you come back programmed like some robot, dressed in a tye-dyed shirt and eating tuna sandwiches,” Mandy explained, a horrified look on her face. “You’re eighteen, not twelve! Would they really send you to some rat’s nest like that?” Wendy questioned in mock horror. “Aw hell no, if you get sent there, they’ll make you hold hands and sing songs about caring! And they’ll force you to recycle everything in blue canisters, and to discuss your emotions in front of groups of bratty little dopes!”“Dear god, they’ll have geeky youth wiener roasts at night, and no locks on the doors!” Mandy added, eyes wide. “…It’ll be the day pigs fly, my parents have the camp brochure on the fridge but they’ll never go through with sending me there. They always forget.

Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It’s a house like every other house… but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place… and that’s what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That’s where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we’re no longer human at all, not really.

A pictures worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories.

The worst feeling in the world is not losing your friend forever, but rather having patronizing people tell you that the love you have for your friend and the connection and emotion you have towards them is an illness to be cured, a problem to be covered up and hidden away by the power of mood-altering drugs. I used to trust doctors when I was younger... now Ive lost my trust in all mental health professionals forever.

Friends are like the stars that glow in the sky... you dont always see them, but you know theyre always there overhead, and even when its cloudy, snowy or stormy, even when the power goes out and youre trapped in darkness, theyll always find a way to shine through to you.

Newspapers take peoples’ tragedies and force the world to experience all of it.

I don’t want anything else bad to happen,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “I’m so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I’m guilty of so many things. I’m sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I’m sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world.”“I wasn’t alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn’t really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere,” Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing.

In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother’s old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm.…And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks.…She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory.

Oh, I’m Chrissy Mackenzie, I’m from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism,” the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. “You got any advice?”“Search me,” Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. “I like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it’s in favor of all that “go green” hippie crap.” “Oh, well….” Chrissy seemed taken aback, offended, and Mandy sighed a fourth time. “Damn it, I’m really sorry,” she apologized, smiling dismally at the aspiring writer. “It’s just been a really lousy day for me and I wasn’t really thinking. My advice? Find your own cause to represent, not one thrown out into society by a ton of environmentalist dopes. Find something new, something you think could be improved, and work from there.” Chrissy smiled with a look of total ecstasy as if the words of some nobody woman were important. Mandy momentarily noticed the groups of laughing, drunk, giggling people, all acting childish… and for a moment she wished she could be them.

How promising todays generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But Id like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.

…Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos,” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products… it’s sad.” “Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then,” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.