i feel so lucky to have people in my life who i can talk to and legitimately get to the bottom of things in one conversation and then be able to go to bed with all this weight lifted, a clear head, and love in my heart.

for so much of my life i haven’t had that, i go to bed stewing, confused, sad, frustrated. and see so many people going through the same things, caught in the muddle of the subtle passive games people play and it makes me realize how incredibly valuable it is to me to have anyone at all who can just cut through all that.

i feel like i am on the razors edge of becoming bitter. thats how i feel, in spite of the fact that i am “young.” but at this point i think the very concept of “youth” is social propaganda, like religion in some ways, designed to keep us happy, keep us from thinking about death, to keep us hopeful and active. i am “young” and yet a quarter of my life is gone and i have done nothing. it took me a quarter of the entire amount of time i have been allottedto start realizing what my priorities are.

it took me 21 fucking years to get here, and for most of that time the world was teaching me the names of countries and rivers and mountain ranges, and famous men (and a disproportionate number of famous women), and “important” formulas and theories, essentially misdirecting my attentions, so that having completed the first quarter of my life, i would be set up to fulfill the next 2 quarters of my life mindlessly pursuing their ends. and then i get my retirement, the final quarter of my life where i sit by as my body fails where i bask bask in my “accomplishments” and say wise fucking things to the new “youth.”

but in spite of all this i have begun figuring out my priorities, 1/4 of the way in. Which is kinda bullshit, that should be what they try to help you figure out in school. Anyhow, they are:

• To have honest, caring, emotionally grounded, growing, fluid, relationships based in mutual respect, awareness, and acceptance and built around continued self-disclosure and shared experience, with the few people that I find who both capable of that, and who are otherwise compelling to me as individuals.
• To see the world with those people, traveling, exploring culture and the natural world, art, pushing boundaries of experience. assuming that life is a one time deal, (which is the safest assumption you can make) thats the only way to get your money’s worth.
• To minimize suffering in the world with my unique talents and skills in a way that is meaningful to me.

put simply, to love, to experience, to serve. This is what I believe will make me happy, this is what give my life some sort of purpose. but I fear i am on the verge of becoming bitter, or at the very least disillusioned which is the first step towards being bitter. i’m not there yet but im afraid.

i’m afraid because the people i have come to love are across the country, or they are choosing a different path than i, one that is minimally compatible  or they fall prey to their own weaknesses to the point where they cannot function i can no longer do anything for them.

i’m afraid because of my own weaknesses, my own fears, my own comfort zone. to dive into the world is not so easily done as it is said, especially when the people i had sought to dive in with are not the steadfast anchors that would give me the confidence to make my move.

i’m afraid because although i know i have a lot to give, i don’t know if the world will have it. i want to have an impact, make a dent in something that matters.

but fuck if this doesnt start moving somewhere that i want to go, i’m afraid im going to get bitter. i’m not there yet, im still “young” and hopeful and naive. in theory all of my priorities can coexist and create something unified - there are no inherent conflicts, but i just have this sinking feeling that reality plays out a little less simply.

i want to run through the airport with you with that sense of dread. and i want to talk to the lady, out of breath, and i want her to tell me we missed it because i want to be disappointed with you, i want to scowl with you. and i want to wait with you for 5 hours for the makeup flight. i want to watch the luggage while you relieve your bladder, or take a nap under my winter coat. maybe we do a crossword puzzle but i think we would give up pretty quick, and giving up would be the funnest part of it. and we would get the cheapest expensive airport food and maybe eat carrots because we brought some. and when we finally walk down the tunnel, exhausted, the wheels on our luggage click-clacking, for some reason we cannot contain our smiles, because its simply not about where we’re going.

Memories come easy but the past never sleeps
The earth is warm, like the vines she creeps
Through my mind but it’s not how you think
As I write my memoirs in India ink

And I’ve presumed to
Put all this aside
We’ll go our separate ways like
Everything’s alright

I’m thinkin’ it out if it’s not to be
Dipping my pen into the black sea
The story is sad, the story is sweet
Her long dark curls my calligraphy

I’ll see her for a day
Before she goes away again
It never feels alright to me
To watch her fade away again

The quill is dry but the work’s not complete
To some other end my heart still beats
Scratching the paper to no avail
Oh what I’d give to see behind the veil

I saw her in a dream
And she was in my arms again
It felt all right to me
Before she slipped away again

wouldn’t it be curious if one time the murderer is sitting up there in the courtroom in front of all these people and tells the judge that “god told him to do it” and all of a sudden the jury all stand as one and cheer his name and applaud and the judge is just beaming and he walks over and gives him his hammer and tells him that it would be an honour for his next god decreed murder to be with it, and all the people throw their hats into the air as they carry him out the front door of the courtroom, and set him free, back into the wild wild world.

this never happens, because it seems to me that, whatever people say, when it comes down to it, no one really believes in miracles anyhow. we are functional creatures, so we abide by god until he ceases to be functional, at which point we resort to whatever is left, and that tends to be empiricism and rationality and basic pragmatism, because somehow those things never cease to be functional.

in the courtroom, you can claim that murder is morally wrong because god said so, because its in the bible, because jesus wouldn’t have done it. but in all honesty, its not even a moral question. rationalize it however you want, but it comes down to this: you don’t want to die, i don’t want to die, none of us want to die. lets be pragmatic and limit this whack-jobs ability to make us die.

i wish people would stop clinging to the concept of a inherent universal moral standard, like some undiscovered law of physics that a bundle of particles could somehow react with each other causing them to behave in an immoral fashion.

so i have run this idea past a couple of people and have gotten amazingly positive responses from all kinds of people, even the elderly. no actually it has gotten no positive responses at all, especially from the elderly but a boy can dream. anyhow here it is:

so males do not have a socially acceptable equivalent to the female cleavage. so i want to implement a revolutionary fashion technique (of my own invention) called the “ball bra”. essentially this will involve pants having a tear in the groindular region too allow the gonadulars to dangle below in a “ball bra” that is not ENTIRELY revealing but simply gives a little ball cleavage, (or even a lot if the dude is really slutty/sexually expressive or whatever is politically correct).

for too long, we have expected the ladies to accept us for who we are WITHOUT any prior knowledge to what is in our “toolbox.” besides, i think this could really solve the whole ball-stuck-to-leg syndrome.

thoughts? 

so here a really good thing to say to get out of any unwanted social situation: “i am an introvert and this situation has exhausted me so i am going to leave now.”

for some reason i’ve always felt like i needed an excuse to leave, people get offended about these sort of things, but brutal honesty about your own experience and state of mind sort of takes people off guard and leaves them unable to properly take offense or find any reason why you shouldn’t simply take care of yourself.

its really quite odd how i can come to a conclusion and then not like it much and find a way to un-conclude on it, and finally conclude on the opposite thing only to not like that so much either. 

truth may be objective and immutable but to our minds it is not. so even if there was some absolute right answer we would never know it. its sort of like wondering whether or not free will exists, when regardless of the truth of the matter, we experience free will, so for all intensive purposes we have free will. besides, supposing we don’t have it leads to some shaky ground

point being, its functionally useless to suppose that truth is objective since anyone can convince themselves of anything anyhow, and even call it objective truth, in spite of the FACT that all facts simply have the appearance of fact. Except for that fact, that ones straight up fact.

The human mind perceives everything on three planes. These are the three evolutionary levels of the brain - the reptilian, the limbic and the neocortex. The reptilian brain is all about survival and reproductions, basic animal instincts. The limbic area appears in early mammals and is all about feeling; emotion, basic judgement and evaluation of ones experience. The neocortex is where complex thinking comes into play: planning, predicting, interpreting, theorizing, making generalizations, abstract thought and ideas.

As a society we put a very heavy emphasis on the value of the neocortex. The value we put on education is entirely based on the assumption that it is the most important and useful part of the brain. In fact, in western culture, the other two areas of the brain are largely neglected, they are not brought into the light, stretched and developed, and are often actually discredited and devalued.

Then there is art. For a long time art made no sense to me, why it existed, whether it was ink on a page or a certain set of sounds that fit together, and in particular I didn’t have a clue why it all appealed to me so heavily. Now I am realizing that art stimulates the rest of the brain, almost completely bypassing the neocortex and hitting the limbic brain dead on. 

In a world where feelings and personal experience are often put on the back burner, all kinds of art explodes into existence and permeates our minds to fill in the holes we are leaving in our emotional and experiential education and development. A song or a painting is to the limbic brain what a calculus problem is to the neocortex, and our desire and enjoyment and need for art is all in there, just beyond the place where we can rationalize it, understand it, put words on it.

i dont know what im so afraid of. i suppose this has all been held in some balance, just out of reach all along, almost to be tasted once, but then held, just there, just over the hill. it has never moved, it sits still, motionless like everything else in life. i suppose nothing really moves, nothing but us.

and i come to realize that those few days will come and go just as this life does. a week is a lifetime in itself, we just get to live another one after, so we think less of it. but one life affects the next, so really what i am afraid to see is how we make up our minds.

but beyond all that, i am afraid to live the lifetime contained within these days, and then not even be greeted by the silence that lies beyond them. to be reincarnated as myself, right where i left off, another monday morning with all these things on my shoulders once again.

firstly, beauty is arbitrary. there is nothing inherently better about symmetry or pleasurable dissymmetry, about certain colors or shapes over others. a man, fit and agile, or a woman, slim and curvy, a masterpiece or a child’s drawing - all just collections of particles, without inherent hierarchy or order.

and yet as an observer beauty is not arbitrary. i am programmed to trust and like people with good facial symmetry, and there is something clearly distinguishable both in nature and manmade artifacts between what is aesthetically pleasing and what is not. that’s my default factory setting, and i havent sorted out any way to shut it off.

so there is this apparent disunity between my logic and reason as my brain deals with it, and the presets it seems to be permanently limited to. and to me it is this recognition, of the imperfection and chaotic nature of my own existence, of the limitations of my ability to perceive and interact with the world, that frees me from it all.

i am not programmed to be happy, i am programmed to survive, and yet somehow i am able to be aware of that fact, and against all odds, nothing makes me happier.