January 2012
I looked to the rain for answers but each drop was only the entrance to an ocean whose depths would be plumbed by currents I could not follow with grace or agility. So the questions hung in the air, wet sparrows searching for a sheltered branch.
”… and so let me get this straight: It was all just a gas pain and nothing more. But what about the excess helium and the football shaped growth on the end of his neck? And the voices… what about the voices? There they go again. Julius H. Cripes! At least babble in a language I understand.”
The sun slid down the back of the sky and into my skull, and so the story continued.
59. Prime number. The arrow of time points forward, the mind keeps growing. There is always something new to learn, new to do. Let’s go.
Ain’t enough to be who you are. Seems you have to sell who you are. I ain’t sellin’ nothin’.
If I had expectations, would it make a difference? Ain’t carrying that baggage. What comes will come. Expectations have killed many a good man. Ain’t playing that game. It may not be enough to some that I awake and I breathe and than what I know I know is more than the sum of nothing. But it will suffice until the sun comes out and all is seen for what it is.
If only, if only, [fill in your own story}, then send me, please send me to some place I’ve never dreamed of before.
Memes and genes outlive their carriers. That is the nature of this ongoing existence.
No one owns an idea. Ideas assume lives of their own.
If I could kill the world I would. But I cannot. The world cannot be killed. Only the eyes that see it. And the world will go on, blindness not discounted.
If I could kill the wind I would. But I cannot. The wind will not be killed. It cannot be held long enough, as with water except when it becomes ice. And then it becomes the murderer and I will flee across vast white expanses, searching for a...
Magic is a matter of will, mental acuity and manual dexterity.
In the absence of deities, make you own miracles.
Do not rely on gods and spirits to save you from drowning if you do not learn to swim in the river of life.
A bleak view of reality should motivate you to control what you can control and instill meaning nto what you can instill meaning.
Don’t let them kid you. You are replaceable. With billions of individuals out there fighting for your job, your food, your breath, your life, who but a few are going to miss you?
Luck, or should I say random fortuitous circumstance, is a peculiar beast to say the least.
There always seems to be time until there isn’t and then the obvious takes its cue and the seemingly inevitable dons its face.
There are moments to fill but we must make the reasons to fill them.
True beauty lies not only in the honesty of its answer but too the elegance of its expression.
Don’t ask for simple answers. There are no simple answers. Only fanatics and true believers deal in absolutes.
Once the cards had been laid on the table, even in the dim light from the single window in the the small and cluttered room, he knew that the meaning was not in the cards and their archly rendered symbols, but within him, buried beneath layers of the accumulated detritus of modern life and its modern superstitions.
The problem is not what you are but what you are perceived to be. Whether you can escape the web of these perceptions will determine how free you are from the definitions that others would, in their inability to see clearly, impose upon you. Then again you cannot evade detection. This is how reality co-opts you.
He could not stop the music if he wanted to. Even the silence sang to him in its strangled voice.
If he were a religious man he would have believed this was purgatory, limbo at the least, but not yet hell for his flesh, this fragile vessel, was still intact.
It doesn’t change the perception that everything embodies its own absurdity. It only means that purpose comes out of the meaning we have created for it, that as beings imbued with a seeming hunger for a mythos in which to believe, that we must create and invigorate our own universe of irrationality.
What hard edges exist cut two ways.
It doesn’t change the perception that everything embodies its own absurdity. It only means that purpose comes out of the meaning we have created for it, that as beings imbued with a seeming hunger for a mythos in which to believe, that we must create and invigorate our own universe of irrationality.
The snow was draped across the landscape, a languid lover awaiting the touch of lips on her icy loins.
I asked the sun why, but the sun did not reply.
Time inevitably eroded what he thought he was.
… over and over he said it to himself, constantly in fear of repeating himself, like a man lost in a hall of endless mirrors reflecting nothing more than his startled face…
He always insisted that life was only the punch line to a bad joke. But who was laughing?
Same as it ever was, sane as it ever was, insane as it ever was, lame as it ever was, never was, never was, because … laughs the Buddha with a crooked smile.
I am just the instrument through which the music comes to life.
There is a song that keeps running around inside my head, so I put my lips to my horn as I would a woman to coax the song out of my mind. The notes come, pure and sad, like the soundtrack to a noir movie that you know ends very badly, but the song is not yet done and I sit in the darkening room. playing and waiting for the song and this night to end.
I can’t tell you the truth, because you already know the truth, what truth there is.
Serendipity can be a bitch, luck, a fickle bitch, death, the one who waits for us until we come home, as we must, sooner or later.
It is enough that when it happens we will not be able to control what happens, that we will be in the throes of chance and circumstances and that all the randomness that our humanity tells us to deny will stand nakedly before us and taunt us as we cry out to apparitions that we have crested to save us. There will be no saving, and the fires that burn brightly into the night will burn with the fat...
Life happens. You supply the purpose.
Make no resolutions. Just do what you need to do.
Deny everything until your last dying breath. Be a rebel to the last.
Face it. There is no escape. You will never get out alive, no matter how far you run. You cannot outrun life itself, and it only ends one way.
I would ask you to dance, but first you must learn to hear the music.
Thus in the new year, much will be written in wind and smoke, little of it as true as it was in the year now passed. But this is the way of things. Invention forever strikes new poses, shouts new slogans, builds new monuments and yet on and on surges the universe, prey to no boundaries, victim of no expectations.
December 2011
As the old year faded to black, the projectionist loaded the new reels into the projector, aligned his equipment to the screen and waited to dim the lights at midnight at midnight on the last day of this old film’s run. The beauty of a fresh film was that it was always running out as it developed, the auteur improvising as each scene evolved from its intrinsic elements, although in the end...
Every culture propagates its myths. Capitalism’s myth is “rags-to-riches”: consumption, expectation, satiation but never quite, more consumption. It is the biggest Ponzi scheme in existence because capitalism is a Ponzi scheme. Death becomes the only opt-out.
… nor did a thought recognize itself every moment. Some thoughts left dumbfounded and mute, enlightened only by the neon of the exit sign above the lintel.
And thus he slipped out the door before it closed, leaving the silence ringing in their ears. http://t.co/gdDgTorY
And thus he slipped out the door before it closed, leaving the silence ringing in their ears.
The sun rises only on those who awake. Dreamers dream in the twilight.