Rewind your modus operandi.

Is it that all of the good ones have been thought that no one has an original idea anymore? Or is it that we’re living off of history: mashing up and sampling and plagiarizing the past because its ideas are the greener grass on the other side of the present?

To control you.

The best things in life aren’t free, but they’re cheap. It’s the best distractions that are expensive.

A question.

Do you think the invasiveness of advertising in today’s world and its seeming battle with our RAS centers in our brains for recognition is causing more intelligent people to thrive?

A request.

The most constructive periods of my life have been driven by a goal of perfection, and what I need now is focus.

The latest chapter.

So life has been rather odd lately. I write this as I sit at home contemplating what next to move out of my single bedroom apartment and into my new digs with an old co-worker and one of his good friends, who have grown from acquaintances to friends and drinking buddies.

Why the change of scenery? It’s hard to say really. I really do like my current situation: I am walking distance from school and work, and downtown, I live near a really nice park and even closer to another good friend who I drink with more than seldom, and I’m generally a somewhat introspective, introversive type of person so the solitary lifestyle (insomuch as it is when I am home) appeals to me.

The new place, however, is cheaper. And my ridiculously great 10hr a week 1k a month job contract ends in about three weeks, so I will be forced to find a real job. Also, the house is really nice, hardwood floors, 12 ft ceilings, a stocked fridge (an amenity I have tried to have but never managed without funny smelling things) and a dishwasher (!).

The materials aside though, it will be nice to get away from this place (and hard at the same time) because of how much it reminds me of my ex girlfriend ( a story that I would have preferred remain locked away in daytime television). Finding her hair on my pillow and having the place exude memories is something that I could do without when she sends me such mixed signals these days.

Also, I’ve been missing a lot of school lately because I haven’t been well. - some kind of recurring, intensifying chest pain that the doctors can’t identify, and they should be able to, given the number of tests I’ve had done. I can uphold the perspective at this point that any news would be good news. And I haven’t told my parents. They’re three thousand miles away and would move up here and overreact.

What else… not a whole lot. Aside from my scholarly procrastination, I played my first night of rpg’s in a good four months last night which was entertaining in the least. Having a sacrilegious character is extremely so, having a character who is a conspicuously named ascetic with a halo who can walk on water. It brings character to an otherwise less lively than necessary game when you can yell “Jesus saves!” constantly without being one of those not-so-angelic hobos.

The act.

It happens that, once every three or four months, I stumble upon some paradigm that I lost without even noticing. It’s as if we have all of the intangible things we hold dear in our overflowing arms, juggling all of these memories and morals and straining to keep them all in the air and trying not to stumble… and we lose one, and we don’t even notice.

Stars.

It is such that the choices I make through life lead me somewhere I would have never expected, but foresight is just a spoiling of the ending.

Investments.

There’s a strange thing about machines: you can’t ignore them. Without constant use and care they fall victim to their complexities. Oils and lubricants dry and crack, iron and steel oxidize and wither.

But the very use of the machines brings about the same problems. It’s a Sisyphean task to foster our creations. But when they no longer need us, will they return the favor when our parts begin to wear?

To confine you.

“We're so trendy we cant even escape ourselves.”

-Kurt Cobain

When the pupil is ready the master will appear.

Spinning, everything is spinning again. I’m too used to sleeping and lazy days, cushy jobs and hazy nights. Pulling my head out of the sand seems almost too much to bear. I peek out and am scared back in. It’s downright stupid. I have to make this all meaningful. I have to find meaning in routine and rote. I have a lot of rocks to break to catch up with the rest of you with leaner minds. It would be easier if the story of my life was not a man vs. self conflict.

To catch you.

There’s an idea that you get when you’re a kid, and it kind of grows with you as you become a whole and capable person. It’s this feeling of permanency, like all of the people you love: your parents, your brothers and sisters, your best friends – they’ll always be there holding the net under your tightrope. But when you get older, people get replaced with other people. People move away, they die, they fall out of touch. You have to find new people to catch you. It’s a hard concept to accept; it makes you feel like you’re alone. But you’re not, you still have your safety net, the only difference being who it is tomorrow is anyone’s guess.
-

I think my recent writer’s block came from a loss of perspective. I forgot why I wrote here, my motivations. Truth is, and I’ve mentioned this somewhere in the stack, that this site is a place for me to vent all of the things that I want to say but don’t really have an… appropriate place to. This is my confessional, my cry in the thunderstorm.

Which is why its nice that very few people in my day to day life know about this place, and fewer still read it.

To define you.

A man is his history, his principles, and his strength of conviction.

-

As an aside: I write thirteen blog entries a week, and it's starting to get to me, as my last few here have been kind of lean, which funnily enough coincide with a contemporary’s post on aphorisms… but I’m giving my pen a bit of a reprieve, if not my brain, in an effort to keep updating this site daily.

A thought.

Labels are tools for those who are unable to accept the unabridged standing before them.

Through the thicket.

It is the path that we choose which defines us, not the path that we take.

With scalpel and irrigation and a needle and thread.

“When you're afraid of something, what you want more than anything else is to make it go away. You want your life back to the way it was before you found out that there was something to be afraid of. You want to build a high wall and live your old life behind it. But nothing ever stays the same. That's not your old life at all. That's your new life with a wall around it. Your choice is not about going back to the way things were. Your choice is about hiding, or about going right to the heart of the thing that scares you.”

-Leslie Bohem

Saint Valentine-

Craving:
The touch and the scent,
The smile and kiss
Aye, the exhilaration.

The sheer vividness
Of colors so deep
As to drown your eyes in passion.

Let me crash on your shore,
Let me drown in your sea,
Let me sink into your swells,

As some addictions
Are worth my very life,
And you:
You are worth my soul.

The afterglow of fire

My mind records and catalogues emotions: levels of hormones, psychological states, I don’t quite know what it is. But when something triggers one of these relapses I can actually feel my brain pattern change and I begin to feel exactly what I did in my memories. I can access parts that make me laugh or cry, that make me feel whole or empty, or parts that make me feel the complete range of human emotion. This may in fact be why I don’t keep photo albums, why I have no photographs up in my home. In my head lies a record infinitely superior.

Early this morning in my dream I figured something out, came to some stark realization or something. All of my disbeliefs, doubts, worries, and fears just disappeared and I saw self actualization, I guess it was. And I woke up an instant later, and it disappeared. I sat up in bed in the blanketing dark for an hour trying to find it again, the realization that led me to stumble upon my goal. But it seems like it was a butterfly spontaneously combusting in some brilliant flash that ripped through my dreams and my mind, only to leave a cauterized scar.

The Necessity of Bloodshed.

One can only truly internalize wisdom which one feels they discovered themselves.

Fishing in frozen streams.

Its amazing the power that ambiguity has over the mind. Give someone the choice of interpretation, and it is easy to see the currents running under the still surface of their stream.

A crude but heartfelt confession.

People need benchmarks: things to compare their experiences to, be they monumental or inconsequential. We change our benchmarks from our parents to our role models, our friends… anyone who is walking a path similar enough through the foliage that you do not lose your way. But when you’re alone, when solitude is forced upon you and there is no one from whom to gauge your worth, you make your own benchmark.

The truth is that we need these comparisons because moralities, ethics, every one of our reasons for living, revolve around what someone would think looking at our life, with varying degrees of omniscience. And when you find yourself washed up on some distant shore you may find yourself with an imaginary friend who will judge you, or wasting your very last strength hewing your story into rock walls so one day, someone may find it, and look upon your life, and measure your worth.

A plea for unfiltered radiation.

The world is a dirty rainbow of neon signs and oil slicks, drowning in its beauty, suffocating from lack of truth, smothered in so many cloaks as to never need the dagger. Give me a rhythm with which to beat my heart, and a white light with which to focus. Let the rest drown in its beauty.

Igniter.

It is better to be a machine of change than preservation.

My sad inevitablility-

Through the reflection of aviator sunglasses lies a world rippling with change, physics sliding around the edge like liquid, life erratic, structure unsound. You are a reflection, a glimmer in a pool, a diffusion in murky water. You are to me a reflection of myself, and I present to you a mirror; for as the light bends around these swells, it always leads back, in a path long and winding, to you.

Your war, your weapons.

When I was sixteen, I started a phase where I would make my way through the supposed best that classic literature had to offer, authors like Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Emerson, Shakespeare, Plato, et cetera. And one of the books whose words I devoured was Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

Sun Tzu had perfected a perspective that I see often in this world: he did not concern himself with ideologies, he felt them reserved for higher authorities. His domain was dominating men, and if you too refuse to let practicality be clouded by ideals, you would do well to learn his tools.

Enlighten-

Calming.
Cool but not cold.
Empty but full,
as a blanket of intangible ideas.
Not happy but not sad.
Content.
Clear, some incredible clarity.
Lining up past present and future
so you can see through them all at once.
The eye of the hurricane.
I’m addicted.

12/29

The structure of dreams.

I would like to mention the thing that I find most fascinating about the age of communications embodied by the internet today. If you think of information is food for thought, the internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet. If you think of a blank page as a playground for your mind, the internet is a chuck-e-cheese’s the size of Jupiter. There are spheres of relation that are tangible. Entire business models are based upon mapping the relations between these nodes, between these neighborhoods that spring up out of a thought. Only these neighborhoods are more abstract, because they exist everywhere, and can only be seen if you know how to see them. Because of that, it is possible to slip from one to another and, from your day-to-day life, experience entirely separate and differently beautiful spheres. This constant discovery is one of the facets of this world that keeps me coming back for more.

Echoes.

“Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where…”

I’ve been gone here for a while now, the out to lunch sign on the door made up of reason after reason to keep me from the pile of work on the desk. The loneliness of this life hits me sometimes like a flash of vertigo, like the camera focused on my head pans out suddenly and I’m sitting in McDonalds alone, with no one within a thousand miles that can solve my problems, and no one in a million that wants to hear them. It’s so reassuring to have someone looking over your shoulder, reassuring not to be a beast of burden for your own responsibilities, but to bear others’ weight in turn for a lighter load a while on. Stagnant is the right term.

It’s like after high school, when people moved on, moved away, branched out to the life they chose. Sometimes those paths follow yours, often they don’t, but the extent to which you can still see familiar faces from afar as you begin to recognize closer ones is dependent upon some of them being close enough to see. I often feel as if I have walked in the other direction entirely, and the only faces I see are ones walking toward and then away from me or walking too fast for me to follow.

1/25

A word from our sponsors.

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-Robert Heinlein

Your own personal mountain to climb.

It’s ironic how, as we get older, our pains become expressed in lamentations and dirges, our sorrow expressed eloquently and specifically, our rage enacted with swift and flowing verse, and our anger in words brimming with blades.

But our battles are the same; our emotions the same old friends. Their faces lose their innocence and grow lined and weary, but they are the same childhood companions that goaded you from the sidelines.

Sometimes I wish we could actually grow up.

-

On an unstimulating level, I would like to apologize for the blogger crew for my unreliable blog lately - I'm not sure what's going on. The link breaks 30% of the time, my profile views is broken, and my rss feed refuses to work. It's a travesty. On an even more unrelated note I consumed at least a hundred dollars worth of alcohol tonight: some fine liquors, an expensive fortified wine, and a $70 bottle of champagne. Nothing I'm writing would hold up in court, sorry.

With silver ink and an ivory quill.

A recent, good friend of mine was talking to me the other day about a personal situation which had just come up. It seems that, for some providential reasons he was being forced to revisit old chapters of his life, ones that he had assumed closed and catalogued. The problem, I told him, is that it’s not possible to think of life as a book, with our activities as words on a page.

When you read a book, you have the ability to control time, to skim ahead minutes, centuries, pages – and back. But we are lured into this false ideal; we cannot revisit old chapters as if we are placing ourselves back in the time. Our frame of reference does not stop or rewind, and you will never find that instant again that you recall so vividly. Though you may find others, that one is frozen in a book that you cannot read but live.

An excuse.

I’ve been putting off writing a heartfelt entry here because things have been slightly weird lately for a number of reasons. As evidence I would forward you to my myspace account blog. I haven’t stopped thinking about this space, and am waiting for my muse to strike me with a blunt inspiration, and for the rest of the world to stop.

Amphet o' mine.

“I said son can you play me a melody,
I’m not quite sure how it goes,
But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man’s clothes.”

An Irish folk song.

As I was going over the Cork and Kerry mountains
I saw Captain Farrell and his money he was counting
I first produced my pistol and then produced my rapier
I said "stand and deliver or the devil he may take you"
I took all of his money and it was a pretty penny
I took all of his money, yeah, and I brought it home to Molly
She swore that she loved me, no, never would she leave me
But the devil take that woman, yeah, for you know she tricked me easy
Musha rain dum-a-do-dum-a-da
Whack for my daddy-o
Whack for my daddy-o
There's whiskey in the jar-o
Being drunk and weary I went to Molly's chamber
Taking Molly with me, but I never knew the danger
For about six or maybe seven, yeah, in walked Captain Farrell
I jumped up, fired my pistols, and I shot him with both barrels,
Musha rain dum-a-do-dum-a-da, yeah-yeah
Whack for my daddy-o
Whack for my daddy-o
There's whiskey in the jar-o
Now some men like the fishing and some men like the fowling
And some men like to hear, to hear the cannonball a-roaring
Me I like sleeping, especially in my Molly's chamber
But here I am in prison, here I am with a ball and chain, yeah
Musha rain dum-a-do-dum-a-da

The breaking point of Mrs. Glass

Power, like every force in the world, has range: a specific distance that it can influence. And the power with the greatest effect, the greatest range, has often been said to be destruction, and when said thus in terms of culture and history it is meant to be death. The power to choose who will die.

But this model only works for independent, animal-like systems, where the participants are motivated by personal greed. In situations where ideals hold more value than life, death is often powerless, or even less – as it polarizes opponents. True power, ultimate influence, is therefore not physical destruction. Who has the most power is the one who can destroy ideas.

When you can destroy someone’s entire world with a sentence, when every word rips a stone from the masonry of the way they see the world, you have that power.

I lived half of my life this way, and honest to god left a trail of depression and decrepitude in my wake ruining people’s lives for sport.

The truth which I found is that most people don’t want to know what the world is really like. They have their eyes closed just enough that they can comfortably pass off most of the things they do not understand as the work of God, or technology (frighteningly similar to the old idea of magic).

You narrow your sight enough, and the system becomes simpler and simpler, there are less variables that you have control over, failure can more and more be attributed to the serendipity of powers that are beyond human beings to understand. When you begin to close your eyes, describing what you see becomes easier and easier.

It’s a daily battle not to force open the eyes of these sleepwalkers. But the truth, plain and simple, is that to take this away from them is worse than murder. But Jesus, you people can really tempt me sometimes.