The Lake

"Everybody Hurts"
(stipe)

When the day is long
And the night is yours alone,
When you're sure you've had enough
Of this life to hang on.
Don't let yourself go
Cause everybody cries
And everybody hurts sometimes.
Sometimes everything is wrong
Now it's time to sing along...
If you feel like letting go
And you think you've had too much
Of this life...hang on!
Cause everybody hurts,
Take comfort in your friends.
Everybody hurts
Don't throw your hand
Don't throw your hand
If you feel like you're alone,
no, no, NO, you're not alone.
If you're on your own in this life,
The days and nights are long.
When you think you've had too much
Of this life to hang on.
Well everybody hurts, sometimes,
Everybody cries.
And everybody hurts sometimes
And everybody hurts sometimes
So hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on, hold on
Everybody hurts
You're not alone.

Unconscious

Odds 'n' ends

Once again, it's time for me to dump a bunch of randomness that never grew into full fledged blog entries into one space.
---
Los Angeles is a huge cemetery full of people who are completely dead but don't know it yet.
---
Some people are buried, some people get cremated. When I die, I want my body compressed into a diamond. We're made of carbon, right? Make me into a tiny diamond placed in a pendant hanging from a necklace worn by the woman I love. Or by some unsuspecting buffoon.
---
I'm: A no-good doer. A troll. A slimy thing in the earth. A death-head. A reptillian brained sugarcane sugar daddy. Dying.
---
Being with you hurts and feels good at the same time.
---
Don't waste your talent being talented. Get out there and work, like everyone else, and your talents may augment your happiness, but alone they can never bring it about.
---
Closes her eyes
Keeps her heart as cold as ice
Shuttered close and bolted
This woman who needs so much love inside
Feels the grip of night upon her shoulder
And is revolted
She opens her eyes
---
I'm great at handing out wisdom but lousy at following it myself.
---
To do anything great, you have to sacrifice many things that are easy or pleasant. People don't seem to have time anymore to care.
---
Hearing voices again, seeing people who should not be there appear in front of me. Whew, for awhile there things were getting weird.
---
If I had a kid I'd name him Tuffy.
---
I've had a beautiful pearl slip away; I've tried to polish a piece of glass to look like a diamond. And now I've just found a garnet/emerald who I want to be with so bad, and never lose.
---
You really ought to enter your cloud photo in a competition, you'd have a great chance of winning. Of course, since you won't, I have way more respect for you.
---
I don't write. I explode onto paper.

An old poem

Anxiety is rising
Up into the sky like grey smoke
My ribs push hard against their prison
A color streak in the corner of my eye
Whips my head around
Class was dismissed years ago
But I still dream every Sunday
I am back on my ten-speed
God where does all the time go

I saw you the other day
When you didn't know I was looking
Vultures were near
And an echo of sermons
Tossed my thoughts wildly
I couldn't say what made me smile
Right then, but it was a nervous smile
Voice stuck inside a golden throat
Forever passed that instant

Anxiety is rising
It is all I can do right now to
Keep my eyes from closing
My mind rushes through all the outcomes
Heart sputters like batteries in the gutter
I thought I'd figured this out
A long time ago
But there are roads which never end
And low, lonely waypoints abound.

(painting is Anxiety by Edvard Munch)

Plurality of worlds

Coldfire

I put all my heart in everything I do. I'm not here to sneak by. When I love someone I will bend steel for them. When I am down, well. But why not stretch that suffocating bodysuit of rubberized expectations we were born in? Why not be completely opposite, always.

Some people put their soul into what they do and give their all to those they care about. And some of those people do the minimum, or do nothing at all to reciprocate, to make an effort, to more than just make an effort. Like mold on life. Fuck people who don't try, I hope they burn in hell forever.

And now,

"Your Funeral... My Trial"
(Cave)

I am a crooked man
And I've walked a crooked mile.
Night, the shameless widow
Doffed her weeds, in a pile.
The stars all winked at me
They shamed a child.
Your funeral, my trial.

A thousand Marys lured me
To feathered beds and fields of clover.
Bird with crooked wing cast
Its wicked shadow over.
A bauble moon did mock
And trinket stars did smile.
Your funeral, my trial.

Here I am, little lamb...
Let all the bells in whoredom ring!
All the crooked bitches that she was,
Mongers of pain.
Saw the moon
Become a fang.
Your funeral, my trial.

The Sword of Mars

autumn brings out the red sword of mars
under a harvest moon cuts raw meat
soul-butchery
like an animated corpse-
when the magic is gone,
the body collapses and is reclaimed by the ground.

i hope you can keep yourself together until spring
until spring, until that sun
rises over behind the shed again
and paints all the world with all its pretty flowers;
i hope you can keep yourself together until
the green arms of life arrive.

Another time

When do your memories start?

How far back do you remember? Surely you remember being 10. Most likely you remember being 5 - at least a few events. Farther than that? 3? I have some impressions that I think are memories from that age.

Things start to get murky here though because it's hard to be sure you aren't transcoding what people have told you later in life about that time into pseudo-memories. It's been shown people can be made to "remember" things that never happened, by hypnosis, by psychotherapy, even by leading questions asked by researchers.

So when does long-term memory actually begin? More to the point, why don't we remember back all the way to birth? Is there some advantage in forgetting those first few years?

Of course, we forget millions of things every minute - only a tiny contingent of the vast armada of information assaulting our senses makes it into consciousness, and then only a small fraction of that gets transfered into long term memory.

Even long term memory goes away for one reason or another. But what I'm talking about is the seeming wall that exists before which we remember nothing. Is there a reason for this?

For you

green eyes, blonde hair
a smile that can melt a heart away
makes me want you here
every day.

it doesn't have to be ordinary
doesn't have to be extraordinary
it's just two people
with one heart to share.

For you, too

I want to do good in the world but I don't want to be a zealot
Want to push you to be your best without nagging you
I want to push myself without getting down on myself
Want to give you all the love you need without smothering you
I want to take care of you without mothering you
Want to protect you from harm without eliminating risk
I want to be playful without ever hurting your feelings
Want to show you I have class without being boring
I want to give you your space without ignoring you
Want to appreciate your beauty without trivializing
I want to follow my heart without leaving you behind
And I want to make your life as wonderful as you've made mine.

(picture is not mine; unsure of origin)

Sunburn

Sunburns feel good, because they hurt. They feel dry and tight and you gain sensation all over the affected areas. No more drifting - you hurt and you are aware of it. Maybe you feel hot or cold, or even both at the same time. But you're alive with discomfort. Pain is good in that way. It forces you into the now. We're not supposed to expose our skin to the terrible rays of the sun for fear of developing cancer. The whole educated world is against it. That's why I like getting a dark tan, venturing into the red, to feel alive again, and be put in my place. Nature is infinitely more powerful than we are, it's good to remember that from time to time.

Life begins and ends within the earth

It does and it's a struggle. But it's worth it, if you let it be. Some people may find it strange for me to be saying that, as the issue of "worth living" is one that has been plaguing me for years. But I'm not trying to tackle anything on the scale of Life. Just small-letter life as it is lived from day to day, even moment to moment.

When I see the sun high in the sky unfettered by clouds, I cherish all the things it does for us. Maybe it's too hot and I can't stay to gawk long, maybe its rays are coming in at angles and it's too cold. But the fact that it provides heat and light enough to support and nourish us and not so much that it kills us is reason for a small smile.

The moon - a jewel in the night that doesn't have to be there. We'd survive just fine without the moon. But would night be nearly as interesting?

Most of all, the earth. The solid two-dimensional plane undulating beneath our sandals, which turns out to be three-dimensional when you dig! I remember the awe I felt as a kid at the beach, excavating sand to build a castle, idly wondering just how far I could dig if I had all the time in the world.

Our big playground Earth has its limits, but they are completely beyond the scope of a single being. Collectively we can harm the planet, individually we are nothing. I'm grateful for that.

Untitled

you think you're headed
wild where trees bend in close
and the smells are of rose
so much to rewind
so much unallocated time
but freedom plays with your mind
the doors can close so quickly
you might lose your opportunity
that dead weight of trying too hard
monkey grabs your shoulder
in an instant the feeling is gone
and it's black, blind, subterranean,
extraterrestrial
outside all conceivable range of
fun and games until
the flat end of all things.

Untitled

I had a dream about you
you were pale white and standing in a nightgown,
downstairs amidst the baby toys and looking up at the sky
through the sliding-glass window.

You thought the few stars you could see seemed redundant,
having been there all your life and yet new to you here.
You felt bored because you see telescopes and computer-
enhanced images of them all day long, politely.

In my dream you were holding a bundle of yellow flowers
and you thought for a second about stepping outside,
outracing this feeling of being anchored to your new home;
You wondered if you could break the rope.

You thought the cut flowers would be nice for some old woman
whose life was shattered when her husband died
or whose grip finally slipped and all her memories flew away,
and you thought about the things you could change in this world,

all the small differences in those lives, if you could wake up
with the same utopian urges. The shadows here don't scare you,
you know them all by name. Your old life is fading slowly,
like a pleasant dream marred by tiny jolts of sadness.

You were in my dream and I was only present in mind
but inside you there were colors and questions, and
great big smiles and a few forced ones, and a heart on fire
beneath a glowing mind that asked but could not answer.

Your world is so large on the inside, there are
creatures crawling on its skin. Some are pastoral caretakers,
others crude consumers, and some are wistful watchers
and dreamers, and some people are lost from the start.

But your eyes are too big, too round, too kind and too smart
for any of that old nonsense. You forget the window and
get another half-glass of wine from the refrigerator.
The baby is sleeping, the husband dreaming, and you

are alone at the center of the universe again.

GONE is META spelled backwards

Dear black and white divinity, save me. I seem to be haunted by a past I can barely remember. God or anyone else, I beg of thee, help me in my time of need. I only ever wanted to do right.

(dead christ by giovanni bellini)

Modes

Is it better to feel, but almost always feel only hurt and loneliness, or to have no feelings, and in this supreme insensitivity hurt other people? This seems to be the decision given to me to make. One is unbearable, the other unconscionable.

And there is more. Like this, I am nothing. No ambition, no special skill or insight, no passion. Lacking condfidence, I feel cheated by time even as I dread the passage of hours. Yet too much piqued, too medicated, and I am an irate fireball of charm and terror ablaze in the other direction.

If only some systematic amount of such curatives could be released with my veins, the amount or timing over which I had absolutely no control, then perhaps I could find a balance, a thirst for life and the confidence to face it, without the accompaniment of amnesiatic madness.

Born in torrents

Life is hard. I feel bad for everyone who has to go through it. I know people spend endless amounts of energy staying positive and thinking the glass is half full and all of that, but that's generally because they're too scared to think it all might be pointless (yes, I'm simplifying). Pious people tend to think of atheists as afraid to commit, afraid to have faith and give yourself up to God, but I think religious people are the cowards who need a God they can serve to make their existence meaningful. Believing that there probably isn't any meaning to anything is rather frightening, deadening, confusing. It doesn't bear to think about too much. But the people who go this route, either by choice or because they simply can't accept the easy answers that institutionalized religions provide, are the real heroes in my book.

Because deep in my heart, I do wish there were meaning and it all made sense and there was someone I could mindlessly serve and make happy. And that such a being would then take care of me, like a parent, would answer all my questions and tuck me in at night. But it doesn't feel to me that this is way things actually are. It may be, but until I have evidence of it, I'll think of it as no more likely than seeing dinosaurs walking around outside my window. And yet I go on, feeding myself and sleeping and trying to move toward some inexorable fate, lastly marching on to death itself. Walking on in complete and utter darkness, and in the face of sheer terror, is a courageous act all its own, and should never be diminished. I feel sorry for those souls who travel the same path, and this is why I'll never make more children.

Learned helplessness

Good things go fast,
Bad things take forever.
Good things don't last,
Bad things are far too clever
To slip into the past.
They catch you trying to escape,
Drape themselves all over your back
Like a monkey,
Like the weight of the world.
Like money,
They turn all your dreams into trash.

หยิน หยาง

☯
Two opposites:
Each rests upon the other
Each precedes and yet follows
Each contains a bit of the other
Each is incomplete without the other
Each is defined by a contrast to the other
Together they are whole
The ten thousand things are enfolded in them
And there is still room for infinitely more
This is the wellspring of what we call life
And the wading pool for life that is failing
Turn it around, look at it any way you like
It's symmetrical and strong
It doesn't need anything else.

Web 2.0

Narcissa Redux

Riding a white horse

crashing through
the earth's atmosphere
austere and unique
like everybody else
I'm on zyprexa and benadryl
venlafaxine and daffodils
mother of pearl, zen, and windmills
chasing a lion down a long steep path
with a dragon in the aft
I'm steering toward a horizon
or a cliff
and I'm so scared I stay silent
shrug my shoulders
say it's all I ever do.

An Inconvenient Truth

Went and saw An Inconvenient Truth this evening. It's a movie in which Al Gore tries to sincerely describe the climate change - née global warming - problem that is facing the world, ostensibly without motive. It works and doesn't work, and let me tell you why.

In favor of the movie, it addresses the issue of global warming, makes you feel that something should be done, and does so in an entertaining enough way that you won't fall asleep.

Opposed, the interlude cuts between the main material seem a little too eager to establish Mr. Gore as a "regular guy" and are just the sort of nonsense you'd expect from a politician. Also, while there are lots of graphs shown and statistics quoted, these are rarely attributed to real scientists, much less mouthed by them. Instead they arrive on a PowerPoint screen voiced by Mr. Environmentalist, and seem suspect in that way, even though they are indeed valid.

This may sound, on balance, like a condemnation of the movie. It would be, except that the subject matter is too serious to be a flaky critic about it. At least Al Gore is talking about the problem, not pretending it doesn't exist like the current administration. In the end, it's the seriousness of the issue that recommends this movie more than anything else.

On the other hand, if you are interested and have a little resourcefulness, check out David Attenborough's recent 3-part series on climate change or the documentary called The Selfish Green, which presents a filmed debate between Richard Dawkins, Attenborough, Jade Goodall, and Richard Leakey. The latter program is one of the best ways to spend an hour of your life, in my opinion. There is some theorizing from on high, but also down-to-earth suggestions which anyone can follow to do their part to minimize damage to the global ecology.

And, most importantly, it imparts an urgency that something must be done, in any case. That is the strength of all these films - simple awareness of the issues. Some such film should be required viewing for every citizen of this planet - if we want to leave it usable for our kids and grandkids, that is.

(picture courtesy of NASA, used without permission)

Population

The figure is debatable, but it seems reasonable to assume that something like 100 billion people have ever lived on Earth, if by "people" we mean Homo sapiens sapiens, our little twig on the evolutionary tree after its most recent separation from some other line of hominid creatures that we define as nonhuman. This happened something like 5 million years ago, though again, the actual figure is in debate. Nevertheless it must be something over 2 million years and less than 8 million years, since we have strong fossil evidence in both directions from those dates.

Think about that for a second. There have been 100 billion human beings ever in the history of time, and 6 billion of them are alive right now. If we only count people who've lived in historical times (since the invention of writing), that 6% figure might jump to something like 35%. It's astonishing to realize that a huge chunk of human history is happening in this span of years that is so puny on a geological and even biological scale.

The human population has exploded. We were condensed into a relatively small are - the arboreal highlands of eastern Africa most likely - for most of our past. Something (climate change, perhaps) caused us to come down from the trees and adapt to life on the savannah, and from there things started to snowball and people spread all over the earth. The actual population size was still small, though; perhaps a few tens of thousands, certainly less than a million.

Then we learned to farm and herd. It's debated when this happened and why, and which came first (certainly herding in my estimation), but these technologies enabled humans to stop wandering after game and put down roots. Cities were born, and with them, division of labor. Soon there were kings, priests, soldiers, farmers, craftsmen, civil servants, artists, and so on. The fact that society could now support some portion of itself not tied to manual labor in pursuit of food or shelter meant that lots of esoteric things could be thought about and produced.

That led to smelting, tanning, writing, astronomy, and the rest of it, and soon enough Rome became the first city in history to have 1 million residents. Things hit a bit of a bump in the road with Rome's fall (though not nearly so much as you might have been taught in school), but soon enough London emerged with 2, and then 3 million inhabitants, and more importantly, was the site of the industrial revolution, where people began to mechanize labor. This produced an enormous surplus of available resources, and, predictably, human population exploded.

And what an explosion. When I was born in the 70s, there were 3.5 billion people. We've practically doubled now to 6 billion. The 60s and 70s brought fears of a Malthusian-type explosion leading to mass starvation, but the population growth rate seems to be declining so that the next 30 years likely won't see another doubling but rather a more modest increase. That is, unless fossil fuels are replaced with some even more readily available energy source. Cheap fusion, for example, could cause another population explosion. Such an explosion would necessarily mean a push into space, to the moon or mars or beyond, since the Earth's viability as a habitat would be jeopardized by so many people.

There is lots more to think about and talk about when it comes to population growth and control. I've only just brushed the surface here, and it is a fascinating field, if you're of a mind to be fascinated by such things (exponential growth, limiting factors, and so on). I believe a basic knowledge of ecology in all its subdisciplines must be learned by everyone who shares this planet, or we risk bringing about our own destruction through ignorance.

And it still blows me away that something between 5% and 10% of all people who have ever lived, are living right now.

the dance

dance with me now
and let the rain fall
there is a quiet inside our moment together
which could give us shelter
and your arms tracing circles and all
the flashing desires in your eyes
drift away in silence
when you've let go of the sound
preceding this whirl
that I entangle you in now
and blur your vision with colors
of the permanent.

(painting is dance of life by edvard munch)

Untitled

I'm not looking for a miracle drug
Your voice is miracle enough
As far as I can tell
The only reason to be alive is to make things that are beautiful
And to surround oneself with things of beauty
What other purpose could there be?

But it's not love of beauty that
Has torn my orderly garden to shreds.
It's more like the rooted earthen palms that pull one against
The skyward tug of Heaven
Are the only truth left in this World
Worth believing in.

(painting is van gogh's stairway at auvers)

I.E., Don't use

It just occurred to me to check how my blog appears in Internet Explorer. I only ever use Firefox to browse but as part of my feeling selfish and egotistical in the last post I suddenly remembered that there are those who still use that other browser. So I checked, and guess what? It looks terrible. The font sizes are not consistent from post to post for some bizarre reason, nor are the size of the line breaks between photos and such.

I am not here to tell you what to do; that's what mothers are for. But if you want an optimal experience viewing this particular blog, please avoid IE. Firefox is what I use to create it, so that's gonna be your best bet. As for even more obscure browsers like Opera, I cannot say. I'd be interested in hearing anything enlightening in that regard, though. Thanks.