Feast like a sultan I do.

The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs raging outside may not even exist.

-Frank Herbert

To crack its weary spine.

New pages of the book pedantically postponed in lieu of imperfect posts. The words have lost their luster, the rhymes not flowing forth as they once were. My pen, they might say, has all but run dry. Why? My life is becoming rote, normal, and less something from a picaroon romance. And I, stuck mourning the loss of my unexpected, half tempted to jump in another blender just to throw the stray pages once again in the air. I once found beauty in happiness, and then forced to find the beauty in sadness... but this uncomfortably numb feeling is nothing but ugly gray. Or maybe, just maybe, the only problem is acclimating to my first full week of work in the better part of a year.

Digital Oedipus.

We are all of us fighting an uphill battle against our own creations. Addictions that spring up out of a desire for something fresh and fulfilling, only to be consumed in their entirety as we crave more. I was once addicted to video games, I was once addicted to caffeine, I was once addicted to email, blogs, music, instant messages, myspace - I was once addicted to my cell phone. Reliance is dependence is a weakness is everywhere you turn these days when you overdose on vitamins for the fake purple taste of Barney Rubble.

Veritas

Wandering downtown yesterday, I noticed a large advertising banner down the side of one of the cathedrals. It advertised a course about the history of Catholicism and Christianity, which it entitled "Veritas". And I think to myself, "Truth? It's a strange way to say the word. As if they are afraid of how people will react if it were named in spoken language".

But the truth, as it was, and as I slowly came to realize, is that
their "veritas" is more than that. Like the language in which it is
written, it is old and almost forgotten, often twisted to mean more or
less than it really does. The truth: not the whole truth, but the real
truth.

A simply beautiful idea.

"We are star stuff. We are the universe made manifest trying to figure itself out."

Your history.

I was thinking today about repetition, about the past, about writing something – I was thinking about what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about history: he believed that history is one of the most important facets of living a whole life. We are evolved beings, and we have a memory because our past helps us to survive.

He spoke of how he could get lost in history texts, find himself fighting alongside Alexander the Great and Napoleon, how he could see history for his history. He believed that we must be able to relate, because the past has so much to teach us about here and now, that the mistakes you read about in books could be yours if you don’t make them yours through imagination.

I think he’s wrong.

There’s a good reason we don’t internalize our own mistakes, why we hear health warnings and sob stories and we smoke and drink and ruin ourselves - diatribes about the fall of civilizations and yet we walk the same path. Why we repeat our mistakes knowing full well. The reason is everything changes sometime, and maybe it’s this time.

Just a thought.

People say that human beings are not animals, that we are logical, thinking creatures, sentient beyond the mere classification of animal. But still I must eat and drink, still I must prove my prowess, still I must procreate, still I must sleep. Only now, thanks in part to the internet and fast food, I can accomplish it all before noon. It is in the ensuing twelve hours that I am your human, a strange, logical, unnatural creature.

Mortal

Time will be the death of me.

Gabriel's Horn

I am not a religious man, but there are times that even I can here the angels’ trumpets sound. It’s the sound of perfect silence that comes before great things, and I heard it this morning.

Winds of change.

You speak of butterflies and hurricanes? I have seen a phrase change a life, and a life change civilizations. Hurricanes? No, not hurricanes. You can shake the very earth.

To fly on leathery wings.

The devil has many faces, and I’m in love with them all in spite of myself.

Wearing the souls thin.

There’s a strange and beautiful thing about physical exertion: when you’re running, when you’re pushing yourself to the edge of what you can do, something happens. You start to push yourself so hard that the rest of your body has to struggle to not be left behind: your lungs burn, your heart pounds, your muscles strain, and you start to drift away. You find beautiful random clarity. This clarity, though, is unlike what you find in the waking moments of a dream, or in the bottom of a crystal snifter, because unlike those, this one is bound to the rails of the tunnel that you’re screaming through to reach the light. It is the same force of will that keeps you from stopping or slowing down that keeps your mind likewise within its means. And when the only way you have to wander on a one-way track is faster, you find beauty at high speeds.

(I later realized that I may have stolen this from a Palahniuk book that I read last year.)

Smile.

Personal beauty’s only requirement is vanity.

Silence as a note-

Flowing freely of form and functions, sliding softly and serendipitously like rapids in a rousing river, shaking off the sleep of winter. A slow sound that gathers like the rushing tides, a rumble in the world turned to trumpets blaring.
And with the sound she awoke.

Ten and two.

It is a popular aphorism that you are who you choose to be, and that our choices determine how your future will end up. And I believe that. People can change who they are – they can be the people they’ve always wanted to be. But when you stop paying attention, when you hit cruise control and grab the wheel of your life with your knees while you enjoy the sights or have a French fry, things change; the car that you’re riding in tends into the same rut in the road that you’ve been trying to avoid you’re whole life. Being the person that you want to be is not difficult, but it sure as hell requires your attention.

I write this because, looking back on the last semester of school and those three months of my life, I don’t necessarily see what I wanted to at the beginning. The ideals I strived for are completely gone, surgically removed from my head leaving only the scars to tell me they’re missing. I’m beginning to settle and satisfy, to revel in the pleasures of the now instead of look to the glories of the possible future.

And the worst thing is I don’t know if that’s so wrong. I’m twenty years old, enough to have most of my worst mistakes behind me and most of my independent life ahead of me, and beyond these notions of grandeur that seem a six-year-old’s astronaut ideologies, I don’t know where I’m going, whether I should stop for gas and continue on the road to the Kennedy Space Center, or pull over at that real estate office and look for a comfortable nook to grow old. The only thing I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt is I had better be good and sure before I decide. To drift into a truck stop is not the way I want this trip to end.

High ground and pain.

One of the most tragic things about the best parts of life is that they’re uncontrollable, like some kind of thunderstorm that strikes with ecstasy and grief where and when it will. And, as much as you want to, you cannot ride this storm. You can feel it approach and stand out in a field with your arms outstretched, but you cannot ride the lightning. It will strike you down, and it will make you struggle to find the moral of your broken state. And when you toil to your feet, charred and weary, you can either run for cover or look up as the light screams toward you.