What St. Peter will say

"Let's see. You've denied the divinity of Jesus, the existence of God, and the sanctity of life. You've taken His name is vain and questioned the validity of his Word. You've actively sought to dissuade others from indoctrination into His teachings. Instead, you've espoused near-atheistic Eastern philosophies which empower the subcreation of Man with the authority to choose his own experience and destiny. You've clung to empiricism when everything surrounding you has shown that experience and the science built upon it cannot be trusted, because they lie subordinate to and are necessarily filtered by human psychological considerations. You've written off profound sensations arising from dreams and drugged states as meaningless in a spiritual sense, attributing them instead to the vagaries of neurology. You've made jokes about those who believe in God, about God Himself, and - in fact - about this very position you find yourself in today, your presentation at the Pearly Gates."

"On the other hand, you're very good at catching things falling unexpectedly when opening the fridge door."

"Ok... you're in."

Getting stuff in the mail is cool

I like getting packages, cards, letters. Even if it's just a trinket, the simple act of walking to the mailbox and being rewarded with something to open is one of life's little pleasures. You get to anticipate as you walk back home. I wonder what Jon is up to? So and so remembered my birthday! Cool, I forgot I ordered something from Amazon. And so on. It doesn't really matter what it is, the fact that you've gotten something in the mail is cause for a tiny celebration on what may be an otherwise nondescript, grey day.

Solveig

safety has its dangers, too
reach the end of each alley
shine a light in every corner
see the path that takes you to the sea
and you were only born for you
and I was never free

so I just leave the light and take it slow
move with it frame by frame
where it takes me is where I'll go
where the mystery leads,
I never want to know
the chase is the thing

and if the world really were to end
what a godsend
for it would save us from all those untidy
and inconvenient loose ends
no way to tie up or summarize the past
the past exists in lock step with us now

but I know something,
the feelings I have inside me right now
if I know one thing alone
it's that I crave you beside me right now
if I ever stood for anything
let me stand by your side should you let go

Glint

Why do some people take chances and others play it safe? Why do many enjoy the risks and reward of the larger world while others cringe and cling to the known? Life comes in such variety, such complexity. Why do some blossom under the light of the sun while others shrink away and shrivel? Sometimes I see the outside, exchange a smile, smell the grass that grows along the road, and for a moment I hesitate. Sometimes I do not want to go back to my safe little world.

Untitled

At dawn simply
Relieved to be
Vessel of serenity
No fear today
No forward thinking
I move my limbs
Feel free
Mind is in the body
Not the other way round
Nothing profound
Just sun's red rising
And cool air
Vitalized now.

High School

Buying posters on Pier 39 with my Mom and my brother and my friends. Martin Gore, Siouxsie Sioux. Kissing Jennifer Harrison on a bench on Pier 39 one night on a date in the middle of high school. Mrs. Fields cookies. Doing what was unexpected in the moment, fully expected in the grand scheme of adolescence. Dalliance; affair with a black girl. Kissing in spades. Parents never knew what I was up to, returning the Honda Accord late one night, never suspected the intellectual risks. Fields of clover on Bennett Mountain unaware of Death looming over the cow-grates, forget about Gravity Hill, this was Love and Life, tapes played in sequence. Nature is ancient. Trees call and echo Stephen King, Bauhaus, Ian Curtis like I am full of taxidermic Palace of Fine Arts place-time Japanese uncertainty. Forever. I wish I was still a child of my mother and father. I wasn't made for this big industrial world.

Net

Sometimes I love life, sometimes I don't. But the point is, sometimes I do, which is a benefit over the no-exist condition. If you're not around, you can't feel good. While this is a bit of twisted logic, it still intuitively works. I think most of us feel that living a life of happiness and fulfillment is preferable to being dead, while living in constant pain and sadness is probably worse than death. Nevermind that comparing living states with nothingness is like diving by zero - the point is, that's how we feel, and we base our actions around that intuitive feeling. So if you can ratchet things up so that you feel good at least as often as bad, you're at least at the level where life and death are a wash. If you can do a bit better than that, you've given yourself a reason for living.

Certainly there have been and will continue to be those heroes among us who suffer ungodly torment and yet elect to go on living. I would never tell another what they should or should not do, and indeed I find such stories a source of wonder and inspiration like most people do. But would I do the same in their shoes? I honestly can't say. I don't see why I would, from a logical standpoint, but of course when you bring that zero-division of death into the equation logic sort of goes out the window. Maybe the will to survive as an instinct overtakes the rational mind at that point, even for those of us who consider ourselves rationalists in the extreme. Never underestimate biological programming.

Anyone still reading this?

Post something!

Scrabble

Scrabble is a fun game. My feel for wordplay and semi-large vocabulary contribute to my success in this game, to the point where I suppose I am above average. Still, there are untold numbers of people better than me, and that bothers me. Now, saying such a thing seems to strike most people as egotistical, or worse, and that hurts because, like the notion of chivalry, I've always thought it to be a noble thing, an admission of imperfection and refusal to resort to excuses, along with an earnest desire to try harder. In other words, it's positive, not negative.

I don't believe it's egotistical to strive to better oneself, to have amibition. I think it's admirable to aim to be the best, and also - here's the catch - to accept graciously the position you actually find yourself in, whatever that may be. So accept the hand you were dealt biologically, set your sights high (if the matter interests you of course), and work to become the best you can be. This ethic is praised in most quarters but irrationally condemned in others.

My high score to date is 536. I believe most scores in this neighborhood or higher rely largely upon 'bingos' (7-letter plays) due to the large bonus they confer. This is the chief focus of my efforts at the moment, such that I'll forgo better non-bingo plays in order to accumulate a mix of letters that gives me a better chance to bingo (within reason). It's almost too bad such a mechanism exists. It would be nice if the quality of the word - a subjective concept, of course - were more highly rewarded. But Scrabble is a game relying on codified rules, rules that will not change for anyone. In that context I do cherish the game for what it is.

And I practice my bingos.

I love my family

I am so thankful for the people who have made life as tolerable as it is. At times not only tolerable, but enjoyable. Sometimes even transcendent. Thank you Taunya, Heath, Mom, Sue, Reuben, Aaron, Bill, and everyone else who has been there for me, who has entertained me, who has listened to me. It means the world to me.

The genie out of the bottle

Depression clouds my past
In the midst of a happy moment
I am haunted by memories
Keenly aware of the specter hanging over me
These are not just words
I fear it with every fiber of my body

Paralyzed by chemicals
Wired to a black machine
That took my identity itself away
Replaced me with someone else
Who goes on laughing and playing
On guilty borrowed time

The genie has escaped its bottle
The things I held in for so long
Have exploded, done their damage, and subsided
And nothing much feels real anymore
I can't ever go back to the way things were
Just stumble on, pushed... gasping...

Tonight's words courtesy of Sheila Chandra

Bhinna Abhinna
Everything separate yet one
Bhinna Abhinna
Everything separate yet one

Bhinna Abhinna
Everything separate yet one
Bhinna Abhinna
Everything separate yet one

Dark into light
Day into night
Dark into light
Day into night

Bhinna Abhinna
Everything separate yet one
Bhinna Abhinna
Everything separate yet one

Dark into light
Day into night
Dark into light
Day into night

Dark into light
Day into night
Dark into light
Day into night

Bhinna Abhinna
Everything separate yet one
Bhinna Abhinna
Everything separate yet one

Untitled

I don't believe in spirits
Or auras
Or gods or monsters
Or metaphysical purpose.
If there's an order to it all
I don't believe that someone knows about it
And will tell us all about it for ten bucks.

I only believe in what I can see,
Hear, taste, touch, and smell
Hell, I don't believe in that half the time.
It's fun to think about fairy tales
Spin yarns to while away
The too-real light of the boring day
But night always comes anyway.

Mozzer

New Morrissey album on the way in March! I'm so excited, I can't help but feeling excited. I hope he tours the US.

Objective or relative?

One day you're feeling positive and energetic, and all those down times seem unnecessary - just holding you back, the result of all your psychological flaws intermeshing and snowballing. To be happy and motivated seems definitely the right way to be, the state you're left in when all the fog of misperception is cleared away.

The next day you're cynical and sad and all those happy times seem like a delusion, a suspension of disbelief about a world that is so obviously pointless and rife with suffering. Without chemicals in your brain to blind you, the gritty truths emerge and you realize this is the way the world really is.

How can both states seem so real at times and contrived at others? If I needed proof in the relativism of truth, here it is. If there is some kind of objective reality to the world, I can't see it through these masks of mood and perception. And since they are the only tools I have at my disposal, the reality they construct is the only one I will ever know.

Emiliana

Jesus, I really like Emiliana Torrini. I've really only listened to the Fisherman's Woman album, but it's amazing. Just amazing.

More words than that would be wasted.

All or nothing

I can't bear to think of it
All the old songs, the old moods,
The old ways of seeing the world
It was so much more real back then
More genuine, back then
It was the edge of everything and nothing
Graduates leaning, smoking
Afternoons on the lawn crawling
A million ways to tomorrow
Where have those feelings gone
Have those feelings gone
Gone...

Untitled

I keep trying to drown my sorrows
But my sorrows have gills
Scraping hopes off the floor to try once more
To see what's in store,
But I never will

Once upon a time I plugged all my holes
Submersed myself in an aggressive world
It was fun smiling, exciting
But I sprung a leak
Peaked hard,

Then my heart was still.

East/West

'Adult films' make me sick. Especially the ones with all the beautiful girls coming out of Eastern Europe. It's such obvious exploitation. Why do people have such a lack of conscience? Why does money drive everything? It's disgusting what men want women to do, how they want them to act in these things. It's not my fantasy at all. And it's just as disgusting that these women will degrade themselves by doing such acts for money. Their bodies are a business, that's all.

They'll do anything to get ahead. Except go to a university, work hard, and succeed like those who are not blessed with a certain 'look.' No, that would be too hard. So they succumb to modeling, then softcore, and finally maybe even the hardest of the hardcore in their pursuit of their capitalist dreams.

What a wonderful thing the West is. Good thing we won the Cold War, huh? Wouldn't want Eastern Europe to stay a bastion of pristine natural environments and family-oriented people. We have to get at those resources and exploit them no matter what, and if that involves villfying them to ease our consciences, then so be it. Of course many of them once "liberated" from their idealism will run rampant through the world like us capitalist monkeys, because that's our base nature.

Communism seems to be too idealistic to compete economically against this nature, and that's a shame. It's such a good idea, everyone being equal. So instead the West is trumphant all over the globe, and we wonder why our sons and daughters are having sex and doing drugs earlier with every generation, why the media is driven by sensationalism, why religion and general ignorance is on the rise.

We are free to choose what we want, not what the government tells us to do, so we choose unabashed hedonism and all the destruction and short-sightedness it entails. Maybe government is there for a point? Maybe minds wiser than that of the average joe should be running the human race? But no, that's elitist. Instead we'll all clutch our rifles and jump in our giant SUVs and ride off into the sunset of civilization.

Ok, now back to my adult film. Man, these Hungarian chicks are hot.

vassily

what is that sound its
the sound of someone losing his mind

but wait here comes a chemical change
brains are amazing
i thought i would be the same but im wrong

i was told it might hurt
i thought i would be the same, but im wrong.

Same truth

I'm a loser. Everyone knows I am. I'm a nerd, girls cover themselves up, give me that look, and tell me to get out of there. I'm timid and afraid of the ball. I suck at all sports, at all skills, at all games. There are always tons of people way better than me, and they laugh at me. I can't join a conversation, even one on a message board, as one of the guys. Everyone thinks I'm a joke and I don't fit in. I'm weird looking and not cool. Not with it. Not acceptable. Not even in a way that's 'cool because I don't care.' People who stop and think about things, who are sensitive and smart, have the hardest time of anyone in this world. No one likes them and their life is a living hell until they reach the other one.

Sigmund Fraud

Why do people place such importance on Freud and his clan of psychologists? I constantly see them placed in lists of great thinkers and innovators. They weren't scientists, they didn't do anything of merit. All they had were theories and made-up explanations. Anyone can do that. Psychology isn't and never has been a science. It's beginning to become one now, as the brain is actually experimented upon and the field of neurology develops. This is the only field of study worthy of admiration. Otherwise, might as well venerate actors and business leaders. Oh wait, people do do that. People are idiots.

Sandbox walls

I'm confused over the approach to take to counseling. Is every relationship an exact balance of blame and dysfunction? Or does sometimes one side need more fixing than the other? If so, what should the other person say in the counseling session? Be honest or say and do what the counselor wants? I suppose I just need to worry about fixing myself.

I want to learn to be emotionally healthy. I'm not and never have been. I want to do more work with therapists at identifying my personality types, gauging the position of the sliders and bringing them into some kind of normal range. I also want to get more motivated and better at planning and life skills. I want to learn strategies for increasing my focus and disclipline. How do you unspoil someone? How do I make up for not learning ways of coping? Why was I born the way I was and how can I change despite that?

I want to improve my health, especially my energy level and ability to relax. I want to prepare myself more balanced meals and take care of myself better in other ways. I want to find someone that will really take these things seriously and will spend hours and hours talking to me and working with me. This isn't something that can even be discussed properly in 1 hour chunks, much less worked on. I need some kind of serious, intensive treatment or my whole life is going to be an endless struggle and all the things I have to offer will go unrealized.

Yet it's not enough that I go to rehab, that I see a psychiatrist, that I seek help for anger, frustration. After all, why am I frustrated? I feel I have a number of very good reasons to be. Life is lived in context, and that context must change for the better as well or I never will.

I don't want to be manipulative or self-centered or anything else. I want to find out what I'm really like, how others see me, and to fix what needs fixing so I can be a person I am happy with. I want to build better relationships. I want to know if it's me, or if it's the people I've happened to meet. Or both. Just need to know so I know what needs to be fixed.

Maybe I'm the problem and wherever I go I'm going to run into the same problems. Maybe I'm fine and just need to get away from the people who makes me feel bad. Or maybe it's some combination; I have issues and so do they. This last one is surely the case. But I want to find out the details, see things from the outside with an impartial eye, find out what's really going on.

My life is EXTREMELY stressful. I worry about death and meaning and being so flawed and unhappy and wondering how I'm going to pay my bills and how I'll eat and not wanting people to feel sorry for me but still wanting them to care about me and fearing being taken to a mental hospital or dumped out on the street and how I am going to cope with my surging and plummetting moods this whole time and jesus my stomach is killing me and why don't I have any energy and why can't I just be like everyone else?

But to expect me to be completely different, other people's idea of high-functioning, is out of the question for me. Maybe one day I'll achieve my own idea of high-functioning, but it's going to have to come from lots of work and lots of love. And even then it's not going to fit most people's mold, because I simply don't care about the things that are important to them.

I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps and "get things done" ... but I truly am phobic about some of these things, and fearful of mental breakdown as well. I feel completely blocked from doing anything that will change the protective micro-world I've built around myself. I begin to feel extremely threatened and anxious. I don't know how to get beyond this point.

Empty vessel

I think about suicide a lot. Usually several times a day. Sometimes I think about it in a detached way, and sometimes it's accompanied by intense sadness or angst. But increasingly, it's not even about escaping from unbearable sorrow - I can be in an even mood, feel mentally strong, and still ponder the idea and not rule it out.

I have learned a lifetime of negativity which I am trying to slowly replace with thoughts and feelings that are more constructive. I've romanticized death, tragedy, self-destruction, darkness. I've assumed there was no other way. On a very basic level I don't think I want to be one of the survivors. I think this is my low self-worth speaking, believing my only way to avoid ignominity is to make a splash of the tragic kind. In that way, I'll be remembered, even idolized. It's like I've given up on making anything out of myself the hard way, by living. On top of all this, there is the lack of philosophic bedrock beneath my feet, the absence of a persuasively rational reason for fighting that battle.

The three-headed demon dog of grief, insecurity, and nihilism has never loomed larger as a nemesis. To defeat him I will need to slay all his heads, not just one.

Sandbox escape

I'm not who I want to be
I've spent the last ten years of my life doing nothing
Fearing everything
Chasing something I was meant to be
Instead of living
I made plans in a sandbox
Practiced feelings and made speeches
In preparation for the real thing
And every night when the wind came,
It blew away the pieces
And left me alone with my thoughts
For want of a legacy
I wrote grand tales upon the stars in the blackness
On the inside of my skull
Until my stomach was full and I couldn't stand
To ingest one more ounce of make-believe
To deceive myself any further
Moods ran the gamut in the space of an hour
While I dreamt of the heavens
Curled up on the floor
But everything must end
Phases, put to bed
I want to move out of the shadows now
Make some kind of life for myself
Find a friend at long, long last
Inside my head.