The wealth of the world.

Home is behind,
The world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadow, to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Mist and shadow, cloud and shade,
All shall fade,
All shall fade…

-Billy Boyd
I have seen many things, so very many things. I’m sure that we all have. I have experienced things that have changed my life in incredible ways that I all but forgot, tried to ignore, cast away,
and so have you.
Then something brings ‘em to the foreground and it’s as if you open your eyes for the first time in a long time. You raise your gaze. You see a flicker and wonder, “do I really want to know what changes between the light and dark sides of the world?” I know, and it has nothing to do with evil beyond what you and I know in our own hearts.

Words from blind spirals-

Play your life from this instant. Everything before was just a back-story for the real thing. Use the tools around you to build a world that makes you smile and laugh. A world that makes you frown and cry. A world that makes you addicted to the best things, and a world that takes them away to keep you sane. Build that world like a saddle on reality and ride it until death pulls you from the reins.

Limited currency.

It appears to me that the mind can only juggle so many balls at one time. I once knew so many things that now I can only just recall as an idea. I could quote Keats, Blake, Shakespeare from memory. I could cite Kant and Plato, Descartes, Hooke and Newton. Now, however, it seems that life has forced me to narrow my eyes to the ever constricting path.

I have the ability to warp the very universe with numbers, and explain it all with an intimidating vocabulary, but I give up the things I liked for their simple beauty, as they are not stepping stones on my industrious path, and I don’t have the dexterity required to keep them also in the air.

Fiery the angels fell...

“Human beings are animals. We are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent, but always animals. We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels but in reality we are risen apes."

-Desmond Morris

Basslines will set you free.

Well I can’t say that I’m not inebriated, but I can say that I was well entertained. And I can also assume that means entertaining posts. I love lights, and I love German girls. I love vodka. I love friends of friends of friends who are good looking and know how to dance. I also like DJ’s who I’m remotely connected to. They always turn out good people. James Turner is a wacky dancer, and I always get let down by girls who talk to me about threesomes. That is all.

Adolescence.

"In my little town, I never meant nothin’ I was just my father’s son…
Saving my money, dreamin’ of glory
Twitchin’ like a finger on the trigger of a gun.
Nothin’ but the dead of night back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead of night back in my little town."

-Simon & Garfunkel

A Critique on Larry & Sergey that made me smile.

Regarding the co-founders' interests in keeping the Google machine well oiled:

"Sure they have some interest, in the same way a millionaire poker player has an interest in a $10,000 hand. They can afford to act imprudently, and if it doesn't pan out they'll never notice the difference. Once your bank account has 10 digits, you're pretty much immune to anything short of complete and utter economic collapse. Legitimate worries of such an individual would be that the dollar becomes less valuable than the material it's printed on, or that the not-so-small island they just bought is precariously close to collapsing into the sea."

Recycled Ideas.

Black, white, and silver serenading on the open sea, weaving skylines that rise like Excalibur from the surf. Blinking, glowing from relentless productivity. Boilers fueled by ambitions and dreams, furnaces fueled by the dregs that come from cropping circles into squares, modularizing hope and talent and humanity. Why? So it will stack well.

On uncertainty.

It occurs to me sometimes that the path we choose for the future, the way we see the road beyond the fog, is rarely what we encounter when we step into the mist. One has to pay the most attention to where one’s feet are presently, and then to the next step. And then the next. Anticipating the direction of the path beyond your sight is crucial, but only once you are sure-footed on what you can see.

The one that says badass...

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

"Ezekiel 25:17...I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. Now I'm thinkin': it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd."

-Jules, Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)

A Gift.

It’s over, I’m gone. I’m glad I went, glad for a lot of things. Family is a strange thing, and I wonder if I deserve it. I neglect and cast off, I ignore and I fight, and in spite it remains, my own trapeze net, to catch me right before I hit. And yet I walk away.

12/27

Inspirations-

My muse is a harsh mistress,
Who twists me to her will.
And though I try
I just can’t pry
Her hand from ‘round my quill.

Lessons.

We make this: this choice, this journey, this life, this way in which we percieve the world. We build it with unsure hands, clumsy minds – a crude block house, an ugly sandcastle. The ocean washes it away. And so we start again – with moats and walls, with towers and cloisters, we build higher, thicker, sturdier walls. And the tide comes again. And the ocean washes it away.

And we rebuild better, sturdier, more beautiful, more complicated facades. And the waves break and steal its beauty one swell at a time.

You learned the most fundamental lessons of life on the beach in your childhood, while you toiled under the sun.

Fantasy.

There are times, when you finish a good book, when you see the credits roll past of some new film, a play… After you’ve been taken away from the world for a while, there are times that there exist unbelievable shocks of clarity.

I’m not naïve, bordering on destructively cynical. I do not believe that there are truly good people in this world anymore, and haven’t in a long time. A good friend told me, earlier this month, that when you are presented with two conflicting views, one truth and one fiction, you can always trust the one with nothing to gain from lying, his point being that everyone has a price. Everyone wants to gain, either in this world or their next. The world is not full of Hollywood’s white and black hats; the world is full of its complicated bad guys.

But these writers can imagine the good people, the white hats. They can take you away from your world for a spell and introduce you to the beauty you should see in life but never do; they can create in their minds what should be, perfection too fragile for life. I don’t cry in real life when people die. I don’t cry from pain, and I don’t cry from personal misfortune. But I cry when I have to give up these imaginary people. I cry when the ideals fade.

From your point of view.

It appears to me that problems can always be thought of as a lack of light illuminating your path. Problems shroud your perceptions in darkness, and when you see a flicker, an afterimage of light, you trudge in the direction you thought you saw it. For all you can see you may as well be in a tunnel. You may as well be walking a tightrope. You may as well be walking toward a cliff.

The right way to say goodbye.

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

Bertrand Russell, What I Have Lived For

Fresh Material.

Great music is enigmatic, necessarily; it embodies the phrase “je ne sais quois”. It makes us recede into our minds and imagine beauty. A dancer, a shooting star, birds riding a current, waves in verdant fields… Something that you associate with freedom. The notes are alive - the transitions speak to you in whispers of a language that you can almost understand, like waves crashing upon the shore of your mind.

This language is what is missing from modern music. Modern music is a marketing publicity stunt; it is a mass produced clothing style, a cheaply wrapped ideology, a way of life with a shelf life of 2-4 months.

Realizations-

Serendipitously serenading on a floor of blades.
Hold tight to me lest you lose your poise,
Hold fast to me lest you fall.

Every movement a wave,
Your thoughts are the moon,
Directing the tide, your actions depict your mind.

It’s a choice old as words,
To fall or to dance.
When the only right answer is to let go
When you cant bear the weight of you.

And don’t look back as you fly...

10/1/5

Stealing from the tongues of erudites.

Quotations are beautiful things, as they solve an incessant problem with provocative writing: no matter how insightful and lucid you can make an idea, it falls under the weight of its own brilliance if you don’t support it. But with a quote you sidestep the examples and logical reasoning altogether with a name – a name that people will trust with such suppositions more than they will trust you.

Your Kingdom.

“Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.”

-Frank Herbert

Updates.

“One ring to rule them all,
One ring to find them.
One ring to bring them all,
And in the darkness bind them
In the land of Mordor
Where the shadows lie.”

I’m back at work finally, and school, after a sufficiently long holiday, and I find that in the aftermath of holidays like Christmas it is easier to sink back into routine. It’s as if real life itself, the unthinking repetition, the schedules, the weekly gatherings, all of that is the real vacation. The holiday retreats are there simply to pull you out of it, make you adapt to something else, in order to help you appreciate just how nice it is to know the boundaries of your system. It also makes you appreciate getting paid a hell of a lot more - going a month without a paycheck as an independent student almost had me reaching for the Kraft dinner.

There is something to be said for the sedentary nature of modern life. It’s like confetti: while in the air it changes beautifully, constantly, always showing you new things, always rearranging. But you have to keep it in the air, you have to fight the gravity of security and comfort constantly, and once it drifts to the floor, it becomes lifeless, and more difficult to spur into action, into change. Starting exercising and school again feels as if I finally managed to whirl the pieces of my life back into the air. But not without its measure of sacrifices, fuel for the fan so to speak.

Games-

People play chess for a lot of reasons, all of the same reasons that people live for: ambition, pride, love, tradition… It parallels life in so many ways. There are times, during a game of chess, that the pieces are like a machine, the moves like routine, the game moves like the hands of a clock. And then something comes along you didn’t see. A fork: to go left or right? Make the wrong choice, and things begin to spiral out of control. One move after another the game in your mind falls from the game that is real, it deviates like a plane crash from a routine flight. And you begin to make moves to cover it up, to patch the hole, to make them match again, and the more it decays, the bigger the deviation, the more hasty your moves to right your plane, your plan. There is only one winning strategy when your pieces start to dwindle. You focus on the most important things, and you work your way out.
You, the king: what ails you? How do you fix it?
Your queen: what is her poison?
Shrink your globe, amputate your appendages and let them fend for themselves. Get yourself back in control, back to where you can see the dance, the plays, the strategy, only then will you find purchase before gravity consumes you.

Preface to The Principia Mathematica

“Those who would assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations… may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.”
-Roger Cotes

Fight Freedom-

The wind sings around the spinning bullet,
Released from a gun with conviction,
Released from its cage with good intentions.
Between takeoff and landing it is beautiful,
It is Schrödinger’s mystery,
Trading good intentions for ill effects,
From prayer to curse faster than the speed of sound,
And all it can do is consume and destroy.

Your world is a sand trap open 365.25 days a year.

All hot beverages I consume carry with them an incessant urge to extend my little finger. I drink my iced tea with the spoon between my index and middle fingers. I always use the correct silverware. And I don’t even know why. No one ever taught me these things. I hate etiquette; I try to do it wrong on purpose, if I ever even notice that I’m doing it correctly. This is the life from which I run. In case you're curious.

Absinthe-

“These days the whole world has a speech”, and we’re all just clamoring over each other. We don’t listen to anyone else anymore.
We just yell.
At the top of our lungs we scream our epiphanies and our paradigms. The deafening sound of the tubes at rush hour. Everyone screaming like wall street before the bell. We don’t hear anything else. We want everyone else to shut the fuck up and listen to our sordid, morbid, mordant, struggling tales.
Everyone’s got ‘em, these epic dramas, these copycat films.
Yours just has a different cast.
A different wrapper.

Potential and the Limiting Mind-

"They'd altered what rabbits do naturally because they thought they could do better...You say buck rabbits don't dig...But they could if they wanted to. Suppose we had deep, comfortable burrows to sleep in? ...And there's nothing to stop us from having them, except that buck rabbits won't dig. Not can't--won't."

Blackberry, Richard Adams – Watership Down

To Myself.

I had a conversation with a good friend yesterday about perspective. Perspective is so incredibly important in life. “So often my compassion is overwhelmed by imaginary holes that people fall into, the only ladder required is open eyes and a new perspective.”

There is a reason for this. People create worlds, they exist like a globe of relationships and events, the things that matter to someone, all of the things that matter. But it is never all things. But you can get so isolated, you can make your world a person, an event, a globe so small it traps you, for you see nothing outside and all inside is chaos and negativity. And then you walk through the barrier for a spell, you bathe in new people and events, you discover for a time other things, and you know that it was never as good as perfect, and never as bad.

This lesson is so easy to forget. Never lose sight of the rest of the world, or you will be trapped in a globe with nothing but your fleeting memories to haunt you.

Dreams of dying happy-

And all of this pain drives me to be perfect.
And all of this perfection only leads me to more painful truths,
Like a dog to its tail,
Spinning faster and faster,
Until the whole world blurs
And I can see the beauty hiding in the corner of my eye.
And I wake up.

Invisibility

I know you.
You’re that person from the party, the one in the corner, the one who wasn’t really there.
The one who was looking through everyone at the only things that were real: the trees outside, the tiles underfoot.
You were the one that saw through this madness, saw the poison in your glass, the air that people speak.
You were the one I envied, the one I wanted so much to be, the one person whose words were more than noise riding the wind, the only one I wished to look inside.
And you just looked through me.

The real art of war-

“When you are content to be yourself, simply, and not compare or compete, everyone will respect you”

-Lao Tzu

"Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes"

"Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning yourself; and how then shall I choose better than you? But if you demand advice, I will for friendship’s sake give it.”

-Tolkien

Stolen Epiphany

Ruin, Disaster, is the most productive thing for the soul, for the mind, for you. Disasters force you to rewire, to rework, to build another path through the maze – the more destructive the better. You will only ever really challenge yourself by picking the most terrifying, unrecoverable, catastrophic choices in life. Dive into the hole, if you come out you will be better than ever before.

2006

In the purity of naïve sin do I accept all confessions,
And in the name of progress do I lay down my weapons.
In the name of clarity do I see truth in fictions,
And in the name of the perfection do I destroy my convictions.
With a voice do I end a book and begin a new.
And with a kiss do I seal the story with auburn hue.
In the name of independence do I doff my blankets,
And in the name of the future do I weave my own.
For it is all just a story in a memory,
Just a glimpse of the truth,
Just a figment, a romance,
Just words.