I wish a healthy, happy, and prosperous New Year to all my friends.
I wish my dog could finally heal and find a food he's not allergic to.
I wish my mother luck in getting a buy-out at work so she can retire.
I wish my sister and my new brother-in-law the best of luck in trying to conceive their first child this year.
I wish that I can finally make progress in making a life for myself.
I wish the best of luck to all the men and women in the armed forces that they may get back to their families and friends safely, and that they may find peace upon their return from the horrors they have endured.
I wish everyone who feels alone can find someone who fills their heart with joy.
I wish the our country would evolve a little more and end its horrific persecution of people who are different.
I wish the President suffers a sudden, stunning moment of clarity where all the pain and suffering he has caused will suddenly become apparent to him.
I wish the people who support the President and his ideologies luck in explaining to their God how fear and hatred ruled their lives.
I wish dogmatic thinking would start to die out.
I wish that the Gods of various religions will speak directly to their disciples and reiterate to them, in no uncertain terms, that killing is wrong.
I wish people would learn to appreciate the beauty and wonder all around us.
I wish everyone on the planet, even those who are not my friends, the same healthy, happy, and prosperous new year.
*******************************************************
"Why don't you wish in one hand, and shit in the other. See which one fills up first."
Hope springs eternal, Happy New Year.
"I'm livin' in a state of grace and it's a fucked up place..."
-House of Pain
There is no doubt in my mind that we all posess the will, and therefore, the power inherent in the theoretical state of grace. And I am no longer Catholic. And I am no more Christian than your average Tamir, Duk, or Harel. But I have seen the grace of God manifest in the lowliest of sinners, and the antithesis of God in the most revered holy man. No name, no word, no conjured sound invention can accurately capture the spirit of energy that gives man his animus, or the soul its ache for communion. And I don't mean the Eucharistic cracker of flesh or the chalice of plasma. I mean the communion that sends explorers over mountains and oceans and through vast vacuums of space. The longing for communion that charges a child to put a piece of paper in a bottle and hurl it with all his might into a roaring sea. The same striving that connects over 900 million people through a network of wire over an entire planet.
Why are we here? Here on this web page. Here on LiveJournal. Here at this computer. Here at your desk, or in the classroom, or sprawled out on your bed. Here at your friends house checking your email and the latest posts on your friends list. Why?
When was the last time you said a prayer? What was it for?
You can't really remember, because of the hundreds of prayers we may consciously say aloud in our lifetime, we don't account for the millions that flitter through our minds on behalf of the greater luminous soul that resides within. Hopes and dreams and wants and needs and smiles and tears and fears and emotions. These are all prayers to our greater consciousness. We all seek fulfillment of a need we can't even identify. Our mind is like a dousing rod searching for the lifegiving water in an infinite expanse. The water is our grace. It's the ineffable thing, the uninvented word, that compels us to be, to live, and then to move on. And our minds are too small to grasp this magical thing, this god, this soul. And while we recognize it immediately when it is before us, we can no more describe it than we can describe heaven or love or what our own births were like.
The beauty and joy of our grace is how much we don't know about it, even though we search for it every day, simply by living on and then dying. And while there is tragedy in the world, and a sense of loss each time someone leaves us behind, whether through illness, or disaster, or the horrors of war, we should always remember that the grace of the soul is still within us all, and the spirit that moves us grants us each a key to that state whenever we decide to travel there.
As long as we strive for communion we know that there is hope for humanity.
60 Killed, 120 Wounded in Iraq Car Blasts
then
Time selects Bush as person of the year
which begs the question:
What qualifies you for selection?
Total disregard for human life?
Irresponsible leadership?
Fascist leanings?
Idiocy?
"i want us to go for a walk though the park"
a dream
nothing is forever, except perhaps love and goodbye
i've had enough experience with people coming and going in and out of my life that I shouldn't be surprised with this sudden, shocking, and deeply affecting return of her to my psyche. in fact, i expected it would happen. just not so soon. and because of this, because of the decisions i have made, i am not sure if things now in motion are a matter of pride or a side effect of loneliness. to be sure, i'm not feeling lonely. but we grow accustomed to a certain type of life.
as odd as it may seem, especially to some of the more unconventional people i know and who know me, i've never wanted anything less than a traditional, honest, caring, fulfilling, loving relationship. i am assumed to be a more renegade person than i really am, and perhaps it is my fault for presenting myself with a certain image. maybe, inevitably, i am to blame. but i never lie when asked a direct question, or about what i want from another person. in my heart, i believe in love. in my mind, i know that it isn't always as easy as i want it to be. but i will not manipulate a friendship to squeeze my needs out of it, and i will not pretend to be able to fashion a certain type of relationship out of a failed one. i am for monogamy, and trust, and dependability, but not at the expense of my heart, or anyone else's.
if two people come together, however they do, and make a go at it, and it doesn't work for both of them, sure, they can just be friends. but if it doesn't work for just ONE of them, then both are destined to suffer a greater loss. in the instances where someone says "let's just be friends" (and they really mean it) there has to be a definitive belief in the minds of both people that love was not a possibility. otherwise, one is getting exactly what they want, but the cost is payed for by the suffering of the other. it can be tricky, too, to spot those lines in this day and age. and some people don't even believe that the lines have to exist all the time. this is another area where i am not quite as unconventional as some might believe.
over this past summer, i had the privilege to spend time with two very different people. i was enamored of both, in my own way, and for different reasons. and for whatever reason, both seemed interested in something about me. of these, one was very brief, while the other lasted practically the whole season. we came together in different ways, and i have come to realize that the brief, and ultimately pain-free relationship, was with the person who was never vague or dishonest about their intentions. at first i felt a bit of anxiety about our situation, as it was not something i am accustomed to being a part of. but as time went on, i realized that my anxiety had more to do with how it would reflect on me in the eyes of others than how i really felt about myself. the other, longer relationship was the source of a great many nights of confusion and pain, and i attribute this to two things. the first was the inability of that person to be honest with me (and perhaps herself) about what was happening between us until a whole lot of time went by, and second, my reluctance to believe that person when they finally did. i lived a brief, emotional version of the "boy who cried wolf" and eventually i did not hear the cries.
i realize that any vagaries that exist between two people who may or may not love one another will, ultimately, doom their relationship. it is more a reinforcement of what i already believed than a revelation. that is why i am always painfully honest when it comes to relationships. it is a big risk, but the truth is worth it.
i don't harbor any ill will toward either of the people i have been talking about, but i only remain in contact with one. the reason this whole post started is because i have been thinking about the other. residual feelings? synaptic effluvia sputtering around in my subconscious? who knows? i just wish that by the time i meet the right person for me i'll have silenced the wolf cries, reconciled my (inaccurate) feelings of betrayal, and healed my heart for the loving to come.
"I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.
On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing --- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of a chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time. But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves".
E.L. Doctorow
"Tin habitually broadcasts extra electrons, and those superfluous particles create a barrier against acids in the foodstuff that would otherwise corrode the can, slowly weakening it from within, the way political convictions weaken morality and religious convictions weaken the mind."
"Freedom's glare is too bright for many. They panic when any sudden gust lifts the hem of the brocade. Eyes blinking frantically, they'll cling with their last broken nail to the protective folds of social control."
"What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude."
"not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is devine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul."
"Art is a plexus of forces and influences that act upon the senses by means of practical yet permanently inexplicable secret links."
"But it was her manner as much as her looks that turned men's hearts into squirrel cages."
"The level of structure that people seek always is in direct ratio to the amount of chaos they have inside."
"Humanity was a function of nature. It could not, therefore, live separately from nature except in a schizophrenic crime. And it could not blind itself to the wonders of nature without mutating into something too monstrous to love."
Tom Robbins - Skinny Legs and All
What is the geekiest part of your music collection?
Almost definitely the Xanadu soundtrack.
What is your secret guaranteed weeping movie?
No secret really, but Mr. Holland's Opus.
If you could have plastic surgery, what would you have done?
No plastic surgery, but I wouldn't mind some LASIK.
Do you have a completely irrational fear?
I am afraid of clowns, but that is completely rational because they are evil creatures spit forth from the bowels of the abyss.
What is the little physical habit that gives away your insecure moments?
I have a bit of OCD shine through, I tap all my fingers against my thumb.
Do you know anyone famous?
Hmmm, I know some second rate musicians. And a soap opera star.
Spontaneous or planned?
Spontaneous, unless it's combustion, that I always plan.
Who should play you in a movie about your life?
No one would want to watch a movie about my life anyway, so I'm gonna say Ron Jeremy.
What do you carry with you at all times?
Keys, wallet, cash, phone.
What do you miss most about being a kid?
My innocence.
Are you happy with your given name?
Yes, but people like me with one syllable last names should always have a two syllable first name.
How much money would it take to get you to give up the Internet for one year?
It wouldn't be a money issue so much as finding something else for me to do.
What color is your bedroom?
Blue
What was the last song you were listening to?
New Jack Hustler - Ice T
Have you ever been in love?
Sadly, badly, madly, and gladly.
Do you talk a lot?
I don't talk more than I should, but sometimes I say more than I should.
Do you like yourself and believe in yourself?
Too broad a question. I have things about myself that I like and things I dislike. I believe I am a good person, but I am not always sure I have what it takes.
Do transient, homeless, or starving people sometimes annoy you?
Not really.
Do you consider yourself to be a nice person?
Yes.
Which musical instrument do you wish you could play?
Guitar. Violin. Maybe the trumpet again.
Something you love and hate?
Poker.
What’s the one language you want to learn?
Spanish vs. Japanese.
What's one trait you hate in a person?
I hate the lack of personal responsiblilty in all people.
Most frivolous purchase?
Lately, football cleats. But there's at least 5 a year.
Do you consider yourself materialistic?
Not especially, I have a lot of things, but I know I can live without them.
What do you cook the best?
Breakfast.
Favorite writing tool?
G2 Gel pen.
Do you prefer to stand out or blend in?
Depends on whether you're talking about getting noticed by a beautiful woman or a sniper.
What's one car you will never buy?
Cadillac vs. Lincoln.
What kind of books do you like to read?
A healthy mix of fiction, poetry, and philosophy.
If you won the lottery?
There would be a lot of happy people around here.
Burial or cremation?
Better, there's this new thing where they freeze you with liquid nitrogen and then shatter your body with sound waves.
What's one thing you're a sore loser at?
I don't think I am, maybe I'm wrong.
If you don't like a person, how do you show it?
Generally by not having anything to do with them.
What kind of first impression do you think you give to people?
You never know just how you look through other people's eyes
Are you a giver or a taker?
A little of both. But I enjoy giving.
Favorite communication method?
Speech.
How many drinks before you're tipsy?
Four or five.
Do you have problems changing clothes in front of friends?
No, HS Football and the army puts that shit right out of you.
Last movie that inspired you?
Waking Life
Favorite cartoons:
Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Ren and Stimpy.(great list!)
Who is your best friend?
Don't have 1. My brothers know who they are, and hopefully what they mean to me.
Any last words?
Won't know until I die.
Stainless steel and painted glass
give me a pulse like a hammer and a mind to match
No relief, no food, no sleep
When you're king for a day you're a whore for a week
--Caution
