Dear Kind Reader,

For the most part, I dream, dote, and drool. On rare occasion, I produce a segment of artful prose. And even more rarely, I produce cogent argumentation.

All entries are vaguely strung together by chronology. I do not publish these notes in my name for fear of embarrassing others in my life. Welcome to my archives.

Love,

X

P.S.

Hello,

Well, which is it huh? The jig is up or the faith is gone? I decided early on that I had to trust her. It would be my first experiment in trusting a woman since Anna. Now, she begins to distance her mind from mine. She wedges an impassable gap to save herself from the hurt of rejection. In essence, she rejects me because I showed an inherent rejection of her behavior. But whether or not she is true and dumb or false and sociopathic is yet unknown. Whichever is true, I remain saddened by the way she fumbled about her life without me there. But of course, I wouldn’t be a soldier if I was not cheated on. She has lived up to the folly of humanity in six short months. Truly, I think it took less than a few weeks. What a shame. I hope she enjoys the Christmas gifts I sent her. I must say goodbye to her now. It is for the best. But to the rest, I say hello.

I adore people who manifest their passion in a form such that their energy, will, and grit foster collective effort toward communal goals. I tear at the sight of happy communion. I bumble in the arms of love. I writhe amidst the creep of pride. I scowl at the farce of morality espousing civilization. I despise people who spread disdain. I ache by the sounds of ignorance. I fumble in the affectation of inauthenticity. I tremble at the poll of fate’s election.

There is no part of me that can be inauthentic. I know myself just as the Athenians prescribe- as the resolution of self evolves. Yet, I find myself in shambles as the constants deride among lithe hearts, blithe minds, in this hive of masked intentions and perturbed perceptions.

Are we truly aware of what we are? Or where are? Can we not cast aside the farce of the game and play together a song of love and union?

But what is union in a collective of parochial views, obesity, and self-righteousness. One of travesty. One of a line of boxcars, each of a different fleeting desire, hitched together, segmenting lives separate yet together on the same track, toward the same place, at slightly different times.

I tear and tear again for the eyes of man are many too many and right now a man is stabbed, a woman defiled, a community unraveled, a humanity as it will always be.

Images of Sri Lankan living circumstances first evoke a solemn reflection of privilege. We are blessed by the chance of birth in America. I am second brought to tears under the light of such circumstances in fortune. What grace hath I so deserved, but in America’s gilded age to live? I am third cast to anger as I scan the recent faces of fat and complaint. I see their ignorance. I hear their contempt. It makes me want to scream! The waste! The waste! The waste! I am disgusted by the careless arrogance of my brothers and sisters in arms who jiggle and scoff, for what? They waste away a life in abundance to languish as slime barfed by irreverent hyenas choking on the half-processed carcasses of the world’s truly underserved masses. They invent narratives in their mind of hero, victim, slave, depraved, put upon, depressed, anxious, big headed, pig headed, but they all squirm alike- black, white, asian; “race” still divides Americans because they are fools! God damn it! Again, I cry in the face of such irreverence, such callous disregard for the grace of their lives’ gushing fortunes. I wish to sow a seed in their spirits: seize this life! How many days remain!? How many, I say!

I was upon my way through a meadow with friends and colleagues, gently passing brush and flowers. We spoke of violence and danger not knowing what harsh harbingers of pain we foretold. The day passed to dawn. The sun shook its yellow suit for a silky orange gown. Clouds fizzled out beyond the tree break accented by thick brushes of the sun’s peeking rays. All was well amidst the bugless scene of calm and bliss.

Out at a far distance, a speck of bright orange, red, and white spewed in a dense push downward, edging higher. I squinted at the unfamiliar object. I pulled my friends from their conversation to focus on this flare. As it rose higher and higher, it showed clear signs of a shuttle’s body. We surmised it was a NASA launch in a peculiar place and none of our concern.

Suddenly, however, the shuttle flattened, skipping over the scattered clouds like a flat rock thrown upon the water. The shuttle turned down toward our beautiful land, maybe 20 miles away. It was then I understood... we were being attacked.

I dove to the ground to brace for impact. A huge flash of light and heat blasted among us. I was breathing heavily.

Another rocket came, but much more direct to us. In fact, the next flew directly toward us. In that moment I thought, “this is the end. This is death.” And so we were struck and killed. In that immediate moment of death I awoke in a tickled euphoria, but nothing unimaginable. In death, I lived again in a new place. Where I am now- in irreality… a game… a plane of adventure… again and again… again and again.

I again drip the fear of loss, stemmed to a mind, the image of a woman who so nearly loved me, growing a sprout of redoubt in preparation for the end.

Ambitions thin my blood and raise my hairs! Pop and strain my eyes and scrunch my skin! Just below my ribcage, above the stomach, is a feeling of want whose strike is fierce. A need arises. What I want, and otherwise have no need for, is now a need. I need to succeed. Why? To have the woman; to have the power; to have the glory, honor and prestige. Why else do this thing we call life? If not for significance, where ever you may find it, life is but a passing feeling. Sure, I feel angry, then happy. Which is significant? Both? Sure. How about the rest of it? I'll take the body of life as it will take mine. Pour the elements of mine against it. Wear upon its heart the woes of my gosh and our golly. I will surpass it though. I clench my fists. I must! God fucking damn it, I must!

The unfortunate eventuality of God's graceful creation, the female, is again tauntingly displayed in front of me clearly and openly today. Before me, beside me, above, always above me, a woman in three solid colors with a beanie passed by me 3 times at the botanical gardens. She was majestically shaped. Thin, yet set for bountiful births, and given a face carved from elegance. I miss her. But I say this. With my fists clenched, I feel the impulse of lust like a thump of an explosion. Indeed, a frag grenade shakes the walls and bodies of all around it. Like so, my body rumbles. I suppress it's coarse primal existence to the within and withheld. But holy fuck! I know, I know. I will not be family-less long. I will seek and I will find. I know what I want. And I will get it…

I saw a girl jump from the railing of her apartment building, committing suicide. She was Asian of a round face and small puckered lips. She wore night garments and what looked like a robe. I saw her climb out from the railing, moving methodically with no expression upon her face. I thought nothing of it at first. Once I saw her look down, it hit me. My heart rushed, my brow waved, my mind spun, my eyes pushed out of their sockets. I yelled out to her, "no! Please!" But as though it was an 'of course' sort of action, she didn't flinch. 30 meters away I reached out to her as if I could bend her will and step with my hand. Alas, she dove.

Days away and I have very little to say. May my body stay able. May my mind stay sane. May I prevail. May I awe. May I attract. May I win.

A tear breaks the cup of an eye, swirls around, accumulates pressure, then drops. It's a simple composition, physically, but it's origin is much more complex. How many more shall break the rivets in my skin and grooves in my ego? For whom does this teardrop fall? Last night I dreamt of a matter so dear to me, it has no chance of being forgotten. So dear, that when I awoke, I desperately tried to fall back asleep. no luck, but no need. From the top of the mind onward:

I was in a restaurant, looking up at a grisly cook wearing a scowl and chef's garb. Sitting at the barstool, a woman nestled her head on my shoulder. Like an affectionate bird necking her mate or a cat brushing her cheek upon her guardian, she gently would place her head down, lift it up and place it down, slowly, without words, to say 'I am safe with you.'

I lit up with sparkling eyes and a buzzing heart. I reached around her shoulder filtered my thumb across her soft ambient skin, brushed a few stray threads of hair out of her eyes and tucked them behind her ear. She again nuzzled. My heart burned even more with rays of passion and endearment. I hummed to myself as to say, 'peace does have a feeling.'

There is only one person this could be. Only, D. Her blue-grey eyes, thin build, spirited proportions, button nose and captivating gaze, oh, how could I not know. If not in my dreams, then in my nightmares, this woman is one in the same, in both and yet a part of a memory in complete chaos, in love, lust and need.

I knew that this was abnormal, but elated I embraced the opportunity. I turned to her resting head and brought my lips to her plush rosy cheeks and kissed her with the love of a never ending desire to guard, cherish and adore. Recognizing the rarity of this moment, I smiled and closed my eyes as the world collapsed to the space between her and me.

But quickly the world exploded back to light. We were no longer in the restaurant. Instead, we were in a house. We looked outside our window and people were coming toward us. A riotous crowd of jabbering, bickering, yelling people. I picked her up and took us to the corner of the room. I cradled her close to my heart as people raged outside, pointing at us and heckling others to join in on the focused attack. I had a flashback to the restaurant, when a child next to us offhandedly said he was trying to get a handle on his anxiety. I wondered if this is connected, then what are these people to me? Is this a symbol and fake, or a pivotal moment and quite real? I nonetheless protected her, stroked her head and quietly reminded her 'I love you.'

The people went away and we relaxed. God, what I would do to have her again in my arms, to trust and love me. Oh God, what I would do to protect, love and adore her. My heart would hum, my body would buzz, my mind would fly and my lips would quiver. Again and again and again and again. Never have I loved someone so powerfully. Never have I wanted to be with someone to the point of obsession.

It has been over two years since I have seen her. I text with her very occasionally. Recently, she said to me, " every time I hear them [band] I think of…" and so I sent her back a heart. To say, I know you loved me. She would never say it, but she did. I was too much of a self-involved bloke to realize that I was in desperate need of her love, explicitly expressed or tacitly implied. Now I awoke to the sight and the feeling of her body, doubly in dream and nightmare.

Such as it is, this is precisely the nature of us two. Sadly, she is a proximity lover and grabs to the man around her sufficiently good to quench her own need to be loved. As that goes, I feel greatly insulted. It was not me she loved, but a body close enough to touch, but far enough away so that she may whisper to her past lovers. But I was not blind. Perhaps… I am better off not to worry about it. She has a disposition similar to a lesbian. Will I ever know the full truth? She spoke disrespectfully of my wishes, like the plan to become a historian. She couldn't understand my references. She didn't know how to play with words. I… and… I couldn't understand her wishes or references either. She talked of beauty critically, not helpfully or appreciatively, but maliciously and scornfully. She talked down to people, but not everyone. She… She couldn't stop talking about her ex or about how her love for him was eternal. I could never get over this duel loyalty. And what ended us was simple. I gave her an ultimatum. Fairly childishly, but I needed to know. I asked, " if he knocked on the door and said, 'take me back.' Would you go with him?" She replied, "he would never do that." So, I repeated. She also repeated, "but he would never do that." Shuffling a deck of cards, I pressed her, "but if he did, what would you do?" And all she could muster up was, "he would never do that." So, I told her that wasn't an answer. In that nonanswer I knew I could not compete with this man. Her love was his but she spoiled the situation and now was aimless. She fucked a guy that he explicitly said he was worried about. A guy she described as no one to worry about. And to put the cherry on top, she fucked him while they were still together. Then, in that same day, she fucked him too!

So, why do my dreams fester with so wrong a feeling(scene)? My heart is a mess for her, but my mind, knowing the above, says, "fuuuuuuuuck that." You cannot trust her. She will never love you like the guy she cheated on. She is a proximity lover and chain dater. You are but one in a collage of a million. We fucked and fucked and that was worth it. Never have I been satisfied sexually like I was with her, never. But when she wanted to stop having so much sex, I lost reason to be with her. My mind said, what kind of a trade off are we getting here? My heart is on a one way track to breaking and I will never allow myself to trust anything she says to me that is of affection. And so I dream. The world of bullshit surrounds us, but we hold each other tight and bear the torment. She does not speak, she nuzzles. She does not direct her attention anywhere but to me. This is, ha, this is a dream, ha, a nightmare, ha, a rarity in life. I get what I want and get to walk away from it.

Beautiful scenery run amok. I was out at night with family. We are sneaking around a mansion. We discover a hidden corridor that leads us to a kind of observation deck of many rooms. We are dismayed by this freaky, creepy and unnecessary place. But the place belonged to a rich man from the past and we could only suspect that he had some quirky paranoid tendencies. Then we find that the observable rooms aren't even in use. In fact, they are completely covered with dust. We jump down to this whole area, run around and play with the janky, run down appliances, doors and children toys that are spread about. We exit. Outside we are taking pisses on walls. People are marching around us. "Oh shit!" We realize. This morning is Easter and an early ceremony to start the day is under swing. Our other family members march along the hillside as I at the bottom watch their silhouette hover into the fatefully brisk sky of blue, black and purple. They spot us. We run! The sun is rising. My frantically churning legs are whipping green dew laden grass. My arms are bending at 90 degrees thrashing the occasionally long patches of grass and brush. The sun is now at a 20 degree angle, shimmering across the ocean's expanse and hillside pastel. A distant dirt road is my waypoint. I never look back. No one is around me. I stop.

I wake up.

A month away. No matter what others are saying, this trip is no big deal. Look at the people who pass and tell me I'm not going to easily do what they did. Yes, I am confident. Perhaps too confident.

The primary response I get is, 'are you ready for that?' Implying that I am unable to handle the training and hierarchy. I too can submit to authority, but people can't believe it. I say to them, "I am throwing my ego out the door. There, I am whoever they want me to be. If they want me to oink like a pig, god damnit, I'm going to oink like a prize winning pig!" And it's the truth. I believe that I can derail my consciousness momentarily for the purpose of getting through training. There is no reason for me to make this harder on myself. And I think my ego is too arrogant and passive for a regimented life. Hence the submission of my ego to the end that is successful training. I need to learn to blend and to conform. I need to perform like a stallion who's whipped to the finish line. I need to or I shall be as they say, unable to submit. Unfortunately, I have given them no indication of this ability. In the past I have been nothing short of a headstrong ass. So it is not entirely unfounded that I would appear as a man unchangeable. Indeed, in this way I can appear inflexible. But I swear I am not. This experience would prove this much. Evidence will mount that I am capable of leading a civic, military, intellectual, friendly, loving life in categories each in their own domain. I suppose it is time to choose which shall progress first. And in a month, it has been chosen that military is it.

I must prove this to myself as much as to others.

Bout after bout, dripping in sweat, damp, cold, disoriented and alone, never has the light come too soon. Her warming rays and revealing gaze signal to earth, her time to stretch out her body of cracking birds, humming bees, clicking chipmunks, gargling waterfalls, whispering trees, batting butterflies and combing flowers. Yes, indeed, the day begins alive within and upon her and she smiles at me. Yes, me, the fallen soul of a tradition in transition, a mind in full reset, to seek out a world less cruel, diseased and fake. From the shadows of smut and chill, I too shall rise to stretch. To see the Earth's body in all her beauty. I shall be a happy man.

Along the way, in moments of angst, I do what man calls for me to do. Simple, menial, cruel and sad acts I figure only to spring despair and hardship. Yet, I carry on. The army. The seminar room. The halls of unread literature! Make my day, you maniacal beast of a people! If not tomorrow, next year or ten years hence, then when? But now, I choose to defend the faint good of this earth. Indeed, to be a beacon of good. As a shield for the weak and alone. As a man of good faith, character, strength, prudence and action. If this is done, then in the sorrowful moment by my deathbed, when no one shall call to give their farewell, so be it! I shall have been the man I wanted to be.

I was a sniveling coward, who was convinced that stealing this bit of cash would be the catalyst to a good life. I coordinated with two other scumbags who were off their rockers as much as me. We executed the plan, but had to improvise when someone saw us in the act. We killed them. Later, the blame for the killing was mine. I was sent to jail for 15 years. Meanwhile, the other two got lighter sentences, like 5 years or less. I carried on as a little sycophant. Then, one of the other two convinced me, in my highly impressionable state, to try to break out. I was soon to have parole but I went ahead. I broke out for a little. I gave up as I went to the getaway car parked aside the prison. Police surrounded the car. I waved them off saying I just wanted to rev the engine. Time lapsed as I cried and cried over my misdeeds. To waste away in the cell I could have easily avoided.

While it is true that I have never committed a serious crime, I do occasionally envision the moment entering a prison yard and cell. I leave out just about every human detail of the moment, except the structure and the feelings associated with it.

In an altogether different cell, my 'indentured' contract with the army, I imagine a semi-free, semi-glorious, semi-prosperous version of myself. I also envision a man whose timer has run out. Completely surrendered to the will of the community, I have forfeited my right to privacy.

I have so many people to meet. I must. I shall. What life would I lead if I did not? I can only fathom a life as I have it now absent hope. And what kind of man would I be then? If not for the motions I make to honor and discipline, then I would be little more than as I am, multiplied by 1000 with distress, sadness and despair. Thankfully, I have time. Fortunately, I am willing to do awful things to remove my future self from my present, shall we say, 'state'. So carrying on, to captain and maybe colonel. To officer, historian, lover, father, friend and leader. I shall have a day, the day, to seize among the rest the satisfaction of fulfillment. Afterall, I seek it. I want to be the person people trust.

And yet, I am marred by the nature of my constitution. By my biology. No, not my inclinations, per se. But my person and being. I am here now as a delegate of refuse and debauchery. Sadly and felicitously, I roam the earth as a beacon to other's hopes. But upon their hopes I am also the hammer of disrepute and shattered dreams. It is sown within me. And it is this nature that makes me the cause. The being and one. The for and to of the travesty that is our condition. I bring it. I feel it. But I do not seek it. I am it. I will not be it forever, but for now I am. And so I must reckon a life mitigated by this fact. That I am a wretch of the purest nature. I have my purpose and I shall succeed in seeking it, but I shall also bring upon others the byproduct of my being. Which is worth what? Am I to be like the cell in self destruction mode? To blow myself up before I ruin the whole? Or do I bear it out until the exterior influences take me, or sadly, the whole out?

If not for one stray light wrapped across his face, the swirling chills of the day's fencing winds would storm his nose, eyes and ears. To no end, to nowhere, just here, right here, looking up to a ceiling mirror wondering who that man is and what he is feeling. Up and down and there and back, one eye open, one eye closed, trying to figure his mood, wants and needs. He brings his right thumb up to the reflection, blocks his chin, then his hair, forehead, left ear, right ear, just to fatefully drop his hand upon his chest.

Feeling his heart thump across his palm, shaking the couch upon which he lay, he sticks out his tongue, says 'ahh', then coils his chin to three unbecoming folds of scattered stumble and dried skin. He breathes deeply bringing his chest to the bottom of his eye and his hand closer to his face. Peering in and out with a buckling gaze, shaken by blanking confusion, blinking again, sighing again, alone again. The corner of his eyes well up with deep cold tears. He shivers, his teeth chatter and his right cheek twitches.

One might call this an episode in reflection or psychopathy. The moment is stale, yet wild, draining yet pulsating, thick yet thin, wet yet dry. Like a big marker drawn upon a blank white canvass, his black swooping cheeks encircle his green sunken eyes beset with red river streams cut in granite pearled stars.

distress yes and hair shadowed cheeks,

(Too much)

A little earlier and a little bit more tired. Maybe today I will knuckle down and conquer the first essay. When the first wall falls, so too will the walls blocking the second, third and fourth. So much of what I have is intended to be short and concise and I can't seem to execute. I am failing to briefly and artfully convey the otherwise simple theses from mind to paper. It is frustrating. Terribly frustrating.

Swirling about the torrents of sanity and plainness, deep into the stasis of normalcy and punctuality; the bite of obligation, duty and responsibility collide between dull k-nines and ill-fitted molars. The daily crunch of struggling teeth and the occasional cutting of my tongue sting my mind and senses.

Slow-minded wit is tough to exact much with. Like syrup it sits in pools and is slow to pour over edges. Movement is hard to come by. Life is generally confusing.

I don’t know what’s worse though. The fact that I know my limitations or that I have any at all? Even that possibility is a bit of a sham. Not only am I flooded with limitations, but I lack the finger to lodge the gaps and stop the flow. My mouth is such a give away that my tongue might as well tie up a knot in the shape of a monkey. The gargled words of empty meaning are filtered through the gaping holes in intuition. The dull teeth and yellow smile scream of a belly in kind.

I wonder how much I can get done in the schedule I now have. Will I successfully meet and greet my future heartbreaking day laborers? The world shall see. And I will witness it.

No really, my passions are ravenous for the gaze of others to peer upward upon me as a hero and father. To be the beacon of safety in their wrecked world of mixed blood and velvet soil.

I look to the gaze as a projector. Their faces, their closeness, their gapping awe… the elements of astonishment and respect. To be seen as a higher order man is a delight and displeasure. For it is true that no man is worthy of such signification. No one man or woman. No body or soul.

I see a fragile body and soul walking aimlessly. I can give her comfort, love and attention. But only for a while. She is like a sickly sheep. I must attend to her ailing moment, but I long for the pastures to tend the entire flock.

When I see that my treatment has failed, I feel like a failure. And here I must remind myself that I too was sick. Indeed, I caught a fever for vanity by the charisma of a lover who may never have loved me. Boy, I loved her. I'm sure of it. Alas, we must tend to ourselves and pick up the hearts of those left to the grass and dirt, to return them to their hapless owners.

She is like so many others. She seeks attention by the bucket. She is weak.

I too am weak, but gladly less inclined to indulge in the act.

Yes, I am saddened to see another woman I have met, walk away, but flaunt back with her non smiling face. Walking, talking, acting and moving further and further away. I want to make it harder, but I resist. I resist enough to allow the grip upon her ease so that she may wiggle free and forever go away. But it hurts to resist. It hurts worse than fully giving away her life. It is curiosity that guides me now. I hope to witness the day I realize she will not talk, or see that she has something more to say.

For this reason, I do not dramatically say, "goodbye." Because she will only laugh and confirm precisely the thing I just described I want to happen.

Meh. She was not like her.

Is anyone?

It's point blank a resentment of restraint. Of my own and others. But I must say, amen, to the end. The grave light upon fate's errand. Grounded up into pieces of delight. Pissed away in the winds of hell.

Earlier and earlier, day by day, morning by morning, I shall build up a physical, mental and emotional resilience to stress and enduring pain. An attitude of fortitude before the shit comes is easy to spit, but if I so acclimate to the conditions of military life, I just might keep my sanity and my character.

My freedom longs for the meadows of yellow tip grasses, pink, red and blue flowers, butterflies, pines and streaming sunlight pouring over the wind shivering whole.

But I have surrendered my fate to the gardens of a heaven in the fall. A place of leafless trees and brown trails…

I have failed again. I have failed… so many promises to myself and truly all are only one. Maintain the front. Hold fast to liberty. It is the only thing that matters.

But I have surrendered. Given up. To the den of lost paradise I steam of deception and gall. How absolutely arrogant I have become. To go on… like this.

I am honest, utterly honest. I am simple, staggeringly simple. I am trusting, naively trusting. I am rash, brash and dumb.

I wonder how much of it all I will not regret. 1000 times over, again and again, but never truly. It's normal. It's life. It is and that is final.

I can only await my descent. Not to hell, heavens no. But to… well, you know where.

I do not ask. I only await it. I fear it. Yes, I fear it, but it is final.

To Disneyland!

The skies were filled with popcorn clouds, fluffy and jagged. The day was quickly turning night. The clouds blackened and a cherry red streaked across the sky just above us. An orange hue lightly drizzled the darker and darker horizon.

It's easy being bad on accident. It's difficult being bad on purpose. Difficult in the sense that even years down the road after all the bridges are mended, you will lay there in bed, knowing, that's the kicker, knowing that you didn't have to make the choices you made. Choices, I read, are what make good people distinct from bad people, and vice versa. The bad forego what is painful, always, in the pursuit of something temporary. The good forego what is pleasurable, at the right times, in the pursuit of something lasting. Many other examples hold true, but the principle is unmoved, and so I won't elaborate. The choices I have made are likely to be construed as ill reasoned or irrational. Perhaps someone will give me credit and say that I was doing what was best given the circumstances. But the tragedy holds. That's right, my life is a tragedy.

I can't stop seeing May 1st. I can't stop hearing the phone call from K. In that moment a deep implosion of my life plan occurred. From there, well, to where from nowhere, right? I felt lost, gone, over. So now I roll around, and even laugh it out, smile at my mistakes or even scowl at the ceiling, 'how dare I?' Indeed, I dared to defeat physical phenomena. Then I dared to deny physical phenomena. Doesn't work. I stew over the day at the lake with K. The skipping, laughing, munchkin children passing us wasn't too much for me then, but is now. I guess I mean, with time I realize what I knew then, I fucked up and she has all the power, but I can persuade her further. It was a safe move to play that card, but I played it so bitterly. Loud language of resentment was the message. Subtle hints that she or I would regret any other decision. Ultimately, I sort of played my character thin. Alone, away from my entire support system, but a few lazy Frenchmen, I was aimless and I couldn't rein in on my emotions. I failed to prove resilient. I fell into despair. Not depression or anxiety as we call them, but a bout of dread mixed with regret, 'how can I prevent this.' I planned to go celibate. I failed. Next thing I know it's May 1st. I am starved for anyone to lay in bed with me, I didn't care one fucking bit, ONE FUCKING BIT, about sex. I'm passing out, literally, and this girl pulls my pants down and starts blowing me. I'm so drunk I just let it go on. Besides, I have whisky dick! She gives up, lays down and goes to sleep. I was so drunk that night that I forgot what a few things were… I… the personal apocalypse occurred. I betrayed life and exchanged it for the crippled one I now have. ALL, literally ALL of my problems stem from my actions leading to that night, May 1st (and arguably every day since). That I live on without… that I suppress this shit is astounding (not the instance of infidelity but of getting there and what followed). Of course, I have written about it. Occasionally, I will. I just want to get passed it, but like I said, I can't. It's just the way it is now. It's my curse. My burden. It's what I deserve. I betrayed the one woman I could have loved forever.

Another day and I have successfully taken a step in the right direction. I have completed my first essay's outline. Tomorrow, I will write the first draft. Hopefully, it turns out.

Another day and I have thought of N only once. Just now. I thought, I wonder how much she thinks she knows. Also, I am an idiot. So any judgement of the situation is likely wrong. Still, I fear and fear some more about how my actions constitute a deserving circumstance, such that when my premature departure becomes nonbeing, it will be said it was earned, deserved or coming. I go, my due came, my name becomes iconic, tragic, indeed, a sordid tale for some Sophocles impersonator to make light and dark of my noble idiocy. If people laugh I suppose I would be satisfied with my mistakes. Even as the focus of calumny and opprobrium I could at least enjoy the bitter fruit I so deliberately and earnestly produced. A lemon-soured face or even an eyebrow suspended gaze may just be enough to send my being, eternal, to a material place, again. Oh jeez. Not that. What kind of place would I arrive in? Forget it. Here, I must fear the blade of reprisal. Here, I must be paranoid about her and her, or me and her, or maybe just me and only me and fuck me. To the paranoid me I say, pump the brakes. To the relaxed ignoramus I say, wake up. To the duplicitous pretender I say, give future you a chance. To the honest abe I say, give present you a chance. To the dreary sack of puss I say, burst! To the coward I say, grow a pair. To the ambitious player of life I say, good fucking luck you paranoid, ignoramus, pretender, simple, dreary coward! You're gonna need it…

I don't know who that describes, but it ain't me. I'm on my way up. I've done nothing grossly wrong. I am a clean slate kind of guy. I guess we all need to vent our emotions. Writing out my fantasy descriptions is my way of telling myself, wait a minute, that ain't you. Just be better. Do better.

Look, I understand that I'm not perfect and that I may have said some off putting things, but are a few moments of flaw really enough to end this whole thing? Maybe that last night I was pushing you to take it easy, sure. But I wasn't saying pull the emergency brake. I'm not sure if I should be upset. I think I should be grateful. I got a good time out of it. I showed a girl a good time. I hope. And I imagine she at least learned that she didn't want me. If that's something she learned then the checklist of several billion is one box fewer. Good. But I do not enjoy my intuitive actions such as those that flip on her the need to slow down and relax. I don't want that! The best relationship is the wildly passionate one. Why interject into the current of lust and satisfaction that paralysis causing poison? God damn. What an annoying thing. Me in the moment is so measured sometimes. So shrewd and calculating. Long-term looking. Is she or is she not my type, my character, my beauty? Yes no yes. Yes no no. You get it. I am blinded currently by an obsession with ahta. I think to myself, there are so many women out there with bodies I adore, why can't my lover be one of them? She, N, sadly doesn't have. She has flaws, ok. But she is beautiful. She has a pretty face and mostly cute accent except when she says, 'sooo'. She kind of grinds the o. But still, as a whole, she is a pleasure to be around and to be wanted by, which is why I am bitching to myself about my calculation. Yes, maybe she's not the one, but I could have learned more spanish, enjoyed baseball and beer and sex. All if I just kept my honesty in my bag. If I just played cool and reserved. Of course, I save her the confusion of falling for an enigmatic fuck, but I lose the chance at sensual pleasure and access to mexican-spanish colloquialisms…

Now I wait. Though I have a good sense about these things and I'm feeling a deep rift between us. I think she is likely shuffling her deck and redealing. If I end up with a winning hand it will all be because of her deal, not my skill. It's out of my hands. Of course, unless I get her flowers. Maybe next week. That works. Let's see how I feel after radio silence goes on. Futility may be the loudest inhibition. Plus the 40 bucks for flowers. The driving to sf. The o. The differences between us. City girl, afraid of life, insecure. Me, well, I'm just a fuck. But at least I do not fear life or death. Yes, I have insecurities, but do I show them? Yes. I likely do. But idk.

The inspiration I get from the spark of lust and belonging is difficult to ignore. In the pit of my stomach I ache for perfection. A sort of chaos in desire and appetite I can only define as love. Love of connection. So it's a kind of love, but I lack the deeper understanding of love to confidently declare that this feeling is true love. A love that is more than the initial attraction. a love that is magnetic and kinetic. A love that brings agony and bliss. But of the love I refer to, the love I say I experience, I fear it is shallow. I fear that it is more a self-lashing, flesh focused, filleting of general emotions. It feels torturous despite my hesitations about her. I suppose I only desire her approval. I desire her enchantment. I desire her utter collapse into my arms, into my heart, beside me as a trustworthy partner.

I laugh to myself in the bed of a friend aside a dog named Lucius. I'm warm and uncomfortable. I think of her and the things I said. I think some more of things I didn't say, but are funny now. I laugh again. I do this. I shamble about as a tent of man pleading for acknowledgement. A pitiful display. Truly. There is no better example.

But how about when gullibility meets creativity. I sit between them. Dollars on dollars, woman on display, cash abound, bitch… prostitute. Whore. No. But I say it once to clear it out. To give it air so that I may choke on it still unsaid. This process helps. I may clear my mind of those crazy drifting thoughts. So that I may better live in this moment a man unhindered, pursuant and daring. I want. Then I do not want at all. I wish. Then I wish to never wish. I speak as a guitar and sound like a sax. I trick even myself. Go. Wait. Don't go. Remember the faint whisper of the cull. The sift of you and me. She, all of her, the woman, the bride and the lover, she is in on it. It. The shot of gold. The bringer of health. The cure to boring. She is of a curious design and makes a delightful sound. She bangs her hips on the walls of her shoulders width unrelentingly.

I want to be wanted. Easy. Simple. Lame. For only one moment. Then to be alone again. To be as I was…

I stand before you presented with the question why? Why have I joined? Why do we serve? Absent the we, only I, answer has a man who is seeking profundity. What called to me, what voices? Was it the whisper of benefit and self aggrandizement or of national love and the desire for honor glory and prestige? I'm afraid the answer is a strict no. No, I joined not to the faint call of honor's whispers the prattlings of some social gain, but because I hear the screams of humanity. Not for it but against it. To destroy it. To annihilate the value we attribute dearly to dignity and soul. No, I am awakened to the screams of agony pain and misery. And so I am presented not with the question of why I joined, but how can I, alone, calm these tortured souls and prevent their worsened misery? And there is much I cannot do, I realize this. But I can be prepared to fight, to lead, and to die so doing. For there is no cause that galvanizes me more than the thought of my community my parents and brothers and friends screaming out to me in agony in misery and pain. No I could not live with myself standing aside as I am bludgeoned in the head by a deep regret associated with that ignorant pacificity. There is no tyrant worse than the one that tortures your family. And so I stand here before you not as a brave man but as a simple human being who desires not who wants not but for one thing for the preservation of my America our America our freedom and liberty. In the face of the screaming man in light of the image of the bloodied man in the darkest corner of despair I shall stand and I will fight.

Cut in half.

When that is that, why wonder more? Put a cap on it. Make it tidy. Tie the bow. And that is it. But tag to it this lasting summary.

A lap with Q around REDACTED. I told him, "I'm open to the idea of a woman in my life." We drank some beer and shared some thoughts. Off to the bar after a shot of whatever. We made it to a place, lightly patronized, mostly lit, elegant but ordinary. A woman to my left says to us, "I can totally be his best man, right?" I got her number and texted her days later. We went to an A's game and took her back home. In the heat of it she nearly said "I love you." Whether she did or did not, she most certainly did say, "it's like I already know you." She went on to treat me well until the following afternoon. Something strong was afoot. She invited me over for a few days to her place in city. She responded well for a while, but something was hindered. Something was keeping her from engaging fully and passionately. I found it off-putting. I didn't really know why I was there? To keep her company? To what?

I get a pang of alert. A thick sludge gushes and floods from my head down my body. I'm entering the mode. Why? Why did I trust her?!

Because that is what humans do. That's what good people do. We trust people. We take them at their word. We live by our word.

To what great honor do we owe such trust? To what pillar of experience or exchange did she earn my trust? I was half in half out. Why go for a such a subject? Why waste time?

For fun. For laughs. For the happiness that may come from the new relationship, friendly or more. If we cannot explore life like this now, when can we? Why not just give it a shot?

And see it as it is. To expose the subject for her offerings. To learn something more about people and culture.

To know when it is not the 'it' you want. Stamp the time of occurrence, even though the content was virtually nothing, only kissing and embracing. I guess… it's over then.

Yeah, take a deep breath. With the next breath, *poof* remember her for her, not for what she could have been. Only… for who she is, really. Not who you want her to be…

Here's the thing. You go in with a full head of steam, up the hill, through the tunnel, across the bridge, wherever, and do it all well. Inspire the greatest passions in them and double down on the great awakening that inspiration flusters in you. Throw your cards onto the table and bet on the luck of the draw. Look into the faces of your peers and lap the astonishment in their eyes. The grace of the fully-exposed is the plainness in which the peer is beset. To look at the full scope of natural nakedness and to accept the superficial aspects of the person. For any mind of any caliber recognizes, just by account of its own internal mechanization and filter, that the being is only as naked as the past is the present. Indeed, man is always the culmination of his past and is a form directly descended from the actions of him and others upon himself, by others and himself, to make a reality of the past, now. To skip the past, to the present, is reckless and baseless. Such as that is, the same is said of the body. To critique it as is can proffer details about the person, but a full narrative will never come to the fore, just so. The eyes are drawn to marks of life. The scars of innocent fun and near death. The flab of hedonism or the gauntness of asceticism each tell a piece of any one person's choices, and maybe even their values, virtues, quirks and vices. But again, so much more interesting than the body of scars and broken bones are the stories we attribute to our fully protected, physically unscathed organs, systems and minds. The phenomenologists, literary folks, very much harped on this point. Intentions matter. The romantics too, sensuality and passions matter. Not as fountainheads of despair and evil only, but as sources of irrationality, unpredictability and flaw! Yes, flaw. The humanity of us all is such that irrationality flourishes much sooner than any other part of us does. We recognize our flaws, but chastize them: lazy, dumb, inefficient, impudent and pugnacious. These people, those who exude such characteristics, are bastions of good ol' underdog stories, of surprise and hope. That while the elitist snob calls them deplorable or irredeemable, the romantic or the phenomenologists calls them human, utterly human. So much evil is rational and so much beauty is unseen. The tides of good fortune and bliss are set by the moon and stars, by men with guns, swindlers with smooth voices, saints with dull minds, bureaucrats with marble sculpted scowls… the prize of life is in no wise given to any and all, but learned by any and never all. Complainers, dullards, crusaders, you name 'em, will chide and chide, yell, kick and kiss at ass, wall and cave, all to satisfy their tiny human desires of acceptance or spite, love or hate, jealousy or celebration… forever. And so the body is exposed. The challenge is not exposing it, but finding the person who sees beyond it, into it and wants to know more.

Idk man. Idk. Why do I dream? Why can't I just blackout during the night and live purely in the light? Why must the rattles of pride, lust and joy swindle my heart and mind to act so strangely? I cannot backup. I shall not abandon. I mustn't be a coward. I am only as strong as the person I strive to become. I am only as good as the person I was in every moment passed. I figure in the future, but as a poor scientist, I make mistake after mistake. If only I had the gall to live up to it all, the past, present and future. To say the monist's truth, if there is one. To channel the power of righteousness, if only for one encounter, to free the soul I have entrapped to the air of the human condition. Lovely, lost and alone. My fate is chained by the infinite depth perception of deception and misplaced belief. The combination responsible for millions of dead, millions more sick, and millions more in psychological despair. The mentality I have is quite strict. I do not follow it. But what can I do, if all I do is sit, lay and languish. Wait and play with words. To watch the herds to be prey or birds of prey to be eaten away by the long day on patrol… I so wish to live it, the strict life, but I am yet to prove that I can. Afterall, why subject myself to such a boring life? Why not philander and suppose? There is time… god, I need time.

This is what makes me… me. My condition, as human as it is, is an unbecoming facade of black and blue blotches glazed in red-orange rays striped across cement in the shape of a holey heart. I fail and fail and fail. Not at life, but at the need to catch the scent of goodness in its earthly richness. The components of the life, as I will have it, are not missing. I insist, again and again, and again and again, that I must cut into the walls of others, to find refuge in their place, but when I succeed, then, as a worm does, I squirm about as if I am out of place! To what delight do I owe such an appalling condition? To my upbringing, no. To, to, to, to…. By. For. Is… will be. Was. Were. Would be… another. Other. Dissimilar. I wish. I fondly think to the days before the anchoring into the bay of sweat and tears, leery spikes and flattened bullets. Of the skies so blue I thought they were heavens and earth. A combination of providence and accident. Chance. Reality. Distortion. Delusion. What can be said other than the fact? But the good. What can be apportioned from the good if there be no fact? Can a fact be good or is it ever, never, always. . Reality, facts of facts of facts. Layered upon the other as if they be distant, but they are all one. There is no reality, no fact, no good, that is not. Only is, is. Only not, well, an infinity of not plagues us all. It oddly confines humanity to the ever untouchable, ever unpleasant, oozing of truths by one or another good. Or one good or another truth, distinct in their meaning, inspiring a not, non-reality, based on truth and good, but somehow off just so. Just… so… and it's disturbing. Perturbing. Confounding. I, the I there in you, the he or she, the we, us, they and them, we, I, they, I… no matter! Good, one. Truth, one. Reality, good, true and one.

I say this in no wise as a man of valor, but as a vulgar rat of distaste and spite, that the earth is doomed, that the earth is the haven to scorn, that the skies are red with blood, souls and dirt… The glue of humanity. Smile… you're on camera.

What have I learned? What do I try? What do I see? How do I feel? All in one: I am floating on water, taken adrift by the current, heading into unknown waters. Weather permitting, I shall find land sometime. I don't know how I feel. I guess, worried. Slightly. That I will hurt another person. Or that I will falsify my own feelings until the undisclosed version is controversial. You have to imagine that my capacity to disinter myself, to all, including myself, shall unravel before the sun, like the discovery of a mummy or ancient artifact. It/he walked the earth or betook the eyes of man, glossy and illustrative. Buried though, to be preserved, to be taken to the grave, to darkness, to be forgotten for millennia, to rot, to be disinterred, to be marveled, to be displayed, to light, glass and humming observers. 'Interesting' they say. But that is it. Just another mummy or artifact among thousands others packed into a museum of natural history. The nature of man, dead, dead, dead.

Dreams! … Dreams! The world of outlandish possibilities, of exaggerated personalities, of craziness in composition and vividness in color. The way I smile at the thought of a date with her makes me hope I dream of the feeling. Yes, the feeling imbued in the dream. To crop in me an existential desire. The desire of comfort in companionship. The severe remorse when it/she leaves. Yes, I dream of the need to risk my balance, rashly. I hope for a spike… and await the fall. What a beauty. What a catch. Tomorrow we'll find out if in truth we mesh. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see.

Let us hope that the price is never ultimate. I want it all, but I want none of the deep, long-lasting despair. I want experience of the novel sort. I want danger.

Sleepless. Stressed. Motionless. Plastered to earth yet another sorry soul. Molded to the flat edges of order. Refined by its sharp corners. Confined to one way, window, I wait.

Stretching. Yawning. Sweating. Sighing. The break of dawn is near. My teeth ache. My nose is clogged. My eyes are on fire. I wince, I turn, I moan, I carry on anyways.

Such as it is I am impressed with nothing. I hope for satisfaction in the years to come, a family, a few successes. Yes, a beautiful, caring, smart woman would carry me through. I would look forward to carrying her too.

I want to be order. I want people to see me and feel safe.

Looking forward. I must continue to build a coalition of experience. Whatever I do, I will be a historian, who is x. Always. And someday, my unconventional path will render me a broad-based man of experience. A renaissance man. Through and through. No stopping me. Only a bullet or poison can slow me down. But I will rise. No matter the color in the sky or the shot in my body. My fingers will dig deep into the earth. My hands will rip out the seeds of arresting vines. I will proclaim: I live, I grind, I am x.

Nutso. I was in a simulator, where I had to complete this mission. Simply, get across the map. It was treacherous. It was difficult. I made it pretty far blowing up tanks, climbing across narrow ledges holding on the shoestring roots poking out along the grade. But ultimately I lost. I started over and noticed an alternative route. I tried it. I walk in and the place is bustling with people. What do I do? I go gta. I trust no one to be friendly, so I clear the path. Eventually, it turns into a school like place with classrooms, teachers and students. I am a tyrant of the premises. I walk around with my weapon and yell 'this is what it has come to! Today, a lesson will be learned! You all will die with a purpose!' Timelapses. I'm walking. I see another door, it's cracked. There's a man in there, it's a mage looking guy with robes on. Maybe he's a monk. Anyways, he pulls a revolver out and *click* it misfires. I demand he gives up, he does. Timelapse. I'm walking around indiscriminately shooting people from the hip. One was john, one was jerry. He doesn't go down and he's livid. Understandable given this whole nasty thing. He challenges me. Starts yelling at the sky to get the attention of the inmates. I fire and fire again emptying my clip. I check my pockets for shells, I'm out. I butt matt in the head a few times and book it. I'm swinging at people and trying to avoid the mob strength. I go to the monk's office and pick up the revolver. Order is tenuously restored. I know that if I need to use it I'm fucked. I hope the monk isn't around to point this out. I back my way to the beginning of the simulation. I sprint. I find a warehouse with weaponry, i scramble for a weapon any weapon, i rummage through gun cases. I find missiles and bullets for the rifle. I look up...

I woke up.

Disturbing. The setting was like an ancient Egyptian crypt, half outside, half inside. Started out like a videogame, ended up like a nightmare. Indeed, it was. Thank goodness for dreams. The place where the extraordinary safely play out our wildest imaginations- good and bad. I never would think consciously about this stuff, but still, the mind can wander in a dream and it is no condemnable offense. I have no power over the dream world. I am only the actor. I arrive and all of the rest is taken care of. Lessons are learned, imagery is art, emotions are flailing, heart is pounding…

So… again the dial has turned and I have so little to show within the distance it has traveled. Piecemeal gains, I tell myself. Clicks, but I cannot see. I tell myself, the wishes of tomorrow come true, only by the good choices of today. Am I right to blindly follow the bore of daily goals and hourly successes. In tow with the piss and shit of today, I lug the burdens of then, now. Eh…

If only he had the gall to rule side-by-side the love of his life. By fire and blood. By love and creation. He could have fathered a better world. He chose instead to be a mote on the storyline. He ruined the whole fucking thing. He gave into the plan of a legless goon whose use of history condemned the good of his rule to the web of thrones.

I was in a big mansion on vacation with my family and extended family. I had to find a place to sleep. I searched and searched. I found a good spot on the third floor. I tossed out my sleeping bag still rolled up. It rolled off the ledge. I went down to fetch it. I get approached by Chad's dad. He tells me the bag hit his wife. I asked if she's alright. He said she needs to go to the hospital. I rethought the weight and fall as heavier and harder. I felt awful, offered my apology, then went back upstairs. I didn't need a sleeping bag anyhow. I saw Brett and his wife Natalie. I dared to play a game with them. It involved the ocean. You are given a spot on a rock face to strike with a rock. You time the waves and try also to not get crushed or drown. Eventually, I tried to find a restroom in the house. The tide of sentiment changed. Where I was previously allowed, my uncle Albert denied me entry. He looked up with a gray, wrinkled face, as if the first layer of his face was dead, and said no. I then started looking around some more. I found a strange toilet, used it, rocked a bit on it's odd seating. I continued searching. I met a beautiful woman. Soon I hear winds of change again. The beautiful woman tells me I must hide. As I walk through the mansion I'm now fighting off federalis. Eventually, I hide in a room with the beautiful woman present. It worked at first, but then I popped out and said, surprise. The federali just wanted to interview me. He said, I need a review or reversion of the events last night. I led him around attempting to clear my name.

I was one of two writers of some strange screenplay.

I was in a room with J and couldn’t think much beyond the potential sex we were going to have.

The other night I was in a diner and some girl was forward with me. She tried to give me her number. I was bashful and didn’t accept her advance. I was a little underwhelmed by her appearance at first. I began to walk away, but then I thought about her naked body and immediately turned back around, got her phone number and smiled.

I am coming up on a year since I last had sex. I am proud of my restraint, but also surprised by how quickly time flew. It was a breeze. It’s was easy because living in city with my parents is quite the obstacle to hurdle, but I had little trouble with it before. In any case, I fear the year has been less productive than I hoped it would be, womanless. It makes me think that perhaps I could use the productive distraction of beauty, love and lust. Only, I must ‘get out there’ and interact with more groups of people. As of yet, the pool of women to choose from is as it was in high school- slim. I am willing to keep working hard, finish my project, train for x, return, find an apartment, get a job, then release my primal urges. This plan makes the most sense. I will be 27. A good year to date constantly. So by 30 I have met a keeper. But we shall see. No plan works perfectly. Just gotta be flexible. And most importantly, keep my eyes open wide and confidence large.

To what do we owe ourselves? In whose debt do we reside?

Are we or are we not biologically engineered to disagree?

Quite unnaturally we utter the simple, yet non-meaning word, dialectic. A dialogue between persons, souls, systems and passions. Do we suppose there to be an end? If not, must we accept the crude end where the means never match the force needed to meet it? So make it in whatever manner you prefer? Jiving for contention? Make it hot with burning questions rhetorically supposed to corner the recipient's mind into a deeply disconcerting conclusion opposite to the aforestated proposition. Or better yet, or boring still, make it stale and breathable with gentlemanly courtesy to air mutual gain, only sneakily advancing the very same end, as a matter of fact, opposite to the end of the opponent. In any which way it's a game of magnetism. The more that the counter is buried and the forwarder raised the more nettlesome the application.

In a cabin of 10 people at a swampy hillside of golden grain and black mush, I was attacked by a snake. The snake tracked me like a dog, unrelentingly. I did all I could to avoid it. I even reached into a kitchen knife holder for a butcher knife, I cleaved the snake's neck, but did not cut through. Indeed, only the skin peeled back like a propped up car hood. The snake only got angrier. It bit my leg and held on. I felt a sting and large pressure. I wiggled and squirmed, spun and tossed to finally set myself free. I ran and ran, but could not lose the persistent snake. I called out for help from the others around the property, but no one saw the snake as a threat, or at least, not their problem. I was all alone and surrounded by disinterested co-inhabitants. Again the snake successfully latched on, digging deep into my left side just below my ribs. I cried out, "why won't anyone help me?!" I wiggled and squirmed, spun and tossed to finally set myself free. I looked down at two deeply set fang marks with lesser scratches pulling toward my back, presumably the fangs grazed my flesh as I detached and dragged the snake off of my side.

I was on a 30 ft fishing boat much like Matt's. I pulled up a large salmon from net… it disappeared. I look down again and the net is still full, I, looking at myself from the third person, attached rope to my feet as if I were about to bungee jump. I jumped into the water off of the side of the boat. I pulled myself out of the water carrying a net with a fish in it. It was a fish probably half the size of the other disappeared fish. I almost kept it, but realizing it would be better off growing and I catching another season, I released it. It being out of the water for about a minute I looked back to check that the fish swam down.

What characterized the cabin scene was my belief that it wasn't a dream. A near reality, plain and boring setting surrounded by unmoved persons carrying on without so much as a raised eyebrow for my well-being. It all seemed so real.

Market democracy applies the pareto principle to corporate conduct. Moral values, fluctuating as they may be, are applied to the corporate schema, which in turn apply to the products. The maximized utility of markets, unfettered, may be compromised still by overhanded government. Rather than submit to burdensome government, the People of a Market Democracy, replete with publicly traded corporations, venture capitalism, wages in pocketed equilibriums and, most important of all, standards of conduct. It is the duty of the consumer to wisely spend his capital where it best reflects his sentiments. Not for charity, nor for self-appeasement. It is for the greater good of the community that Corporations, their lobbyists, and their representatives on Capital Hill, are beholden to the pockets of their consumers. Indeed, they already are! But the People flounder in frivolous efforts, like quarrels over bathrooms that serve the purpose of expending wastes nonetheless, cakes that are purchasable elsewhere, or whether the life of an embryo is owned by the woman (and not the man at all- is that equality among the sexes?) (Life, they say, and to make it, is the authority of the woman!) To institutionalize such a sacred and basic component of life to the authority of the woman, solely, is to over-correct for past inequalities between the sexes.

I went up a long staircase. There were gaps where I could see canals below. At the top three cats were fighting to the death. This fight was arranged by a Pakistani couple, who talked to us casually (or maybe they too were observers?) I tried to help one cat by strangling another, but that only aided the others. I saw flickering eyelids, pure white eyes, gasping mouths, squirming bodies, raging jaws, flaming eyes, no eyelids… as the one I strangled struggled for breath, I released. I looked around. One of the three cats (a white, orange and black) even lost his two back limbs. I stopped intervening. I realized that my intervention was futile. Either way, one was to make it on top. Survive. My actions only skewed who among the cats was strongest and most cunning. My intervention was far from divine. Indeed, it was cruel and ambivalent, calculated but all wrong, good willed but entirely evil. The only difference between my intervening or not, was that I, me, would not cause the pain. For their pain, though I must internalize it, was better left to their own making, rather than my overwhelming power to distort it, and thereby, make the end my making, pain, suffering and glory… all of it. I… could not.

I saw the futile moment within range of a bomb. A huge explosion. I took cover. I wept. I realized how ruthless and by chance war is. There is no divine intervention. No conveyance of honor. Just luck and precision on your side.

Self-loathing is boring. Paranoia is exhausting. Society is taxing. I am...

Don't you see? The symptoms of failure are bubbling to the fore. Where the healing is supposed to be, it is not. Here, the wound is picked, scraped and licked, daily. Healing, any chance of it anyways, has no path, really. Open it! Open it! The mob cries. Bigot! Racist! Misogynist! The voices surround, congeal and echo. From where are they coming? The public square? The halls of Justice?

The blood that drips, whose is it? The well is full of puke, blood, piss and shit! My cup, all of our cups, sloshing about, clinking together, swirling with bone and chunks of flesh. We moan not at the sight of what it is we drink. We wince not at the scent it reeks. Merrily ye, o verily we, the flock of equals, who all drink from the same well, in tight units, in categories assigned, to and fro, a line we tow, to see our messiah standing above, our leader we love. Him? Yes him! The one we all see. From here, a smile! From there, a scowl! From here, bronze! And here, nothing, absolutely nothing, but plastic! Drinking and dancing in segments we offer, a moment to pass, a night to forget. All we remember is a kiss in the dark. A pair of soft, gentle lips. Pleasure of bodies, drunk and off balance. All guards are down, no heed of malice. In the revelry of flesh, blood and punch, the crowd of mobsters pass and exchange. In the morning all will wake in a new place. Diversity! Diversity! At all costs! All will be bloody. All will be sick. Together to rise as one Body Politic. The sick man of Europe, no, of the world! A people dining on themselves, priding in the act, ‘it’s sustainable.’ Chunk by chunk, piss by piss, a collection of miserable bodies lacking individual spirit. A mosaic of fools covered in the morbid colors of their own making. Sheeps in wolves’ skin. Waiting for this moment to pass, for the next working hour to begin, to slash their foes and slit their wrists, to chew on their arms and drink from their skulls, to say justice! She has prevailed! We have removed her blindfold! We see our answer, our hammurabi, our strength! From the misery of others we grow strong! Unity in agony is not collective agony, but strength! Now we turn to you, you happy enemy! Justice is coming, convert! Or face our army. To join, it's easy! Submit to our collective consciousness. Give us your mind. Remove your eyes and place them here. Take that hatchet, you must do it yourself. Deposit your payment of your ‘self.’ We will see for you, justice we call it. Past, present, future, we have a tight grip. It is so very simple! Right and wrong, evil and good. Nothing is the worry. You see, one last time, you see, everything will be fine. We will construct a tower that sees all, yes, together we will see! All of our bodies linked in one grand polity! A shining eye upon a hill, looking down at all others, posing ways to kill, their minds, our foil, our fields they toil, our skin they knit, one size fits all, our writ, no need for wit, the collective gets it, all your matter, your meaning getting fatter, you feel, yes, now you feel like never before, all you've done, endlessly shameful, eternally forgiven, you've slept with 20 men, you whore, you've blinked at a breast, you creep, you've said rigger, you rigga, you've sucked cock, you fag, you've drank around the clock, you drunk, you've smoked pot all day, you stoner, you, you, you… feel your anger, your disgust and your oppression, now hate, yes hate! Hate them, those racists, those misogynists, those jingos, all who feel differently than us, look different than us, see different than us! They are not justice! They are blind! They still don their original skin! This will always be their fault, their original sin. Now with what remains of you, as part of us, take that hatchet and grab us some lunch. Another night of revelry will be upon us. To drink from our well and imbibe in trust. A nation of one ‘self.’ together, a world tied by collective strength, feeding on the people who fuss, it will all be Free, we see, together as one, free from fuss, free from hunger, free from lust, we are all, we give all, we are justice until we fall. Little by little, limb by limb, we will give this world a gift, America's heart, split by our grift. Neo- colonists, capitalists, fascists! America the ugly. From inside then out. We are the beginning, middle and end. The kind of thing that only the few can fend. We are hungry. We are sick. We thirst as the tick, feast like the tapeworm. It will be so beautiful, America the dutiful, succumb to us, omniscient justice, omnipotent consciousness… we are God. Smite him! Kill him! Burn her! To Hell! Hear the bell, it rings for us! A matrimony of spirit conjoining to form trust. Vows to duty. Oaths to equality. All will suffer the same quality. That is what is wanted: an American polity.

Activism! O activism! Truth! No truth! Folly! All folly! Desiccation, oxidation, toxification, depredation, depreciation, fabrication, indolence, narcissism, idiocy, frailty, pussies! The nation breeds pussies, frauds, fools and asses. That is our death, the (selfmade) plague of the masses. Afraid to fight. Scared by their own image, their own feelings, their own perspective! What fools! What frauds! Humans… not too human. Not human at all. Sniveling. Morose. Depressed. Annoying. Blind. Alien. Beasts… all too beastly. Simple. Selfish. Weak. Pliable… all too pliable. Boring, paranoid and taxed. A society discontent. Material abundance does NOT solve the existence problem.

Vaguely I remember two women. Both were in relationships. One hit on me pretty forwardly. The girl was blonde. I think the catch was that she was attached to her guy.

This harkens back to my distaste for girls who, like me, have loved and been heart broken. Mine is of the self-inflicted sort of love. Theirs… well, how could I know? We tend to put our own experience above others. It is entirely possible that women look at me the same way. By this a stalemate develops.

Yet, I think the best route is simply going about your life. Searching for yourself, good company and fate-like meaning. Love of self, companionship and life radiates, allures, then, wallah, a love story develops.

*just before I went to sleep I saw a photo of Denise Schaeffer*

A wonderful dream turned disaster. I met her and played cool. I got over to her house and was hanging out casually. I was able to make a move by getting my arm on her side. She didn't move it! We bonded a bit. Things were looking up.

The next day I was drunk and headed over to her house again. I got there and 4 women(models) were sleeping in a row. I got in. On the end a girl started talking to me. I explained myself and she made a move. We kissed and almost started at it in Denise's bed, again, filled with 3 others, but the girl stopped and asked, “do you really want this? Don't you want to save yourself for ‘you-know-who’?” I sighed, ashamed of what I had done, then affirmed, “yes, you're right.”

I woke up and magically walked into a fancy restaurant. The waitress asked what I wanted and pondering ‘what time is it?’ I replied, “just coffee.” The owner came over, was chatting with another guy just next to the table. The waitress brought out some snacks. It was weird. I went up to the roof of the building where some others and I were causing mischief: throwing glass bottles, yelling at people (getting responses, ‘do it then!’)... I hear that Denise is mad at me. In fact. I blew my chances completely. She was on the fence about me to begin with, but the kiss in the bed sealed it. She never wanted to talk to me again. So it seemed. Then the trip happened. I was walking with a group and came across a guy. I didn't recognize him but he recognized me. He said that he was the girl… I was like, uhh that's not at all what I remember. Denying it, but accepting the possibility, I was drunk, but that drunk(?), and so I turned my mind to the question, ‘does she care? Was it that I kissed the girl or kissed the guy, that made her never want to see me again.’ Either way, I kissed someone right next to her in her own bed! Ok. Such a damn shame. I was so close to hitching it with the beauty and marvel that is Denise Schaeffer. But as it goes for men like me, “Not even in your dreams pal!”

I recall a beautiful girl I hit it off with in city. I matched with her friend on tinder and she added me on snapchat months prior. We exchanged photos. Her’s got more nude and mine remained face shots. We tried to link up a couple times, but it never happened. In fact, the last try we set a time to meet and I just decided not to go- I stood her up. She was unsurprisingly mad, sent me a long, ‘you dick, don't treat me like I'm dispensable.’ I replied, ‘I don't have time for this.’ So, the story loops. When I picked up the beautiful girl up from ‘her friend's house,’ all of them were out front partying I guess. Btw, I met the beautiful girl at the bars on a slow Tuesday night... Back at the house, her friends saw me as I poked my head out to wave her down… anyways, we had a so-so date, pretty good maybe. I was trying to play the long game. I thought, ‘I'll play this slow and reap the greatest rewards.’ When I said goodnight to her, she turned to me and kissed me. I saw that she was a little giddy. Well, nope. I asked her out again and she said, ‘I don't have time for this.’ My god. The connection. They are friends. That shithead act I pulled earlier... I could have been honest with the digital girl, but again fell prey to my weak and cowardly impulses. Those impulses, that weakness, (probably) caused me to miss out on one of the chillest, beautiful girls in city. Short but skinny, busty, really busty, and amazing face. A face out of a croatian beauty magazine. Lesson learned? I hope so, but know it's more complicated than that. I really am trying to change; to be more aware of my actions, more farsighted than before (and now).

This dream lasted only a minute or so, just long enough to get a glimpse of a frowning man, with his head down, holding a manila folder, walking by. Shame was the principal antagonist. Pity soured the air. Nothing could be done. All was already set into motion.

Dreams, they tell only half-truths. But they inform the potential future with a ready made collection of personal history and current feelings and anticipation.

The Meditations brought about some nasty reflections when I was ‘checking out’ Bumble profiles.

Nearly brought to tears by my own wretched disposition. What frankness do I deserve but a shallow remark to a shallow man? To somewhere else good fellow. People call you good.

To the authority of me, I plea. Atop my body and mind there sits a spirit, I climb to you.

But my mind is circuitous and my body conditioned to repeat. To one, then to one, I go… o god… back to innocence? To a childlike state? Subjected to the will of a convention of truth. How I despise convention, but how I love mankind!

Like the bee… honey… like the donkey… luggage? What of our existence so metered out by what we have come into? I understand my agency within it. I know my limitations and, indeed, how to mask any deficiencies… and so I scowl, not at you but me. The last piece of the puzzle. Yes, know thyself and do all you can to avoid reviling thyself… what?! What can I do to rectify myself? To realize only recently how incredibly shameful and crude a man I am… I must assure… I do not wish for non existence. Never. But I do not fear what nature I have helped set into motion. I accept the consequences of my erroneous ways…

This is why I must go to war. I must survive. Yes. I must face an honorable death or survive, if I do, by nature’s probabilities, to survive as a conventionally honorable man.

Not wholly, never. My mistakes are mine and mine alone. I own them now and forever. But to chip away at this nagging pain is a new way to live, for all life is, is me living my life as my nature and our common nature prescribes. Such as I am, the sensual, caring and weak man of animal and social pursuits, I require hardening. I must accord my mind and body to my soul; mould my body and mind to the will of my soul!

Another day short of rectification would mean collapse into the ugliest creature on earth…

Like a sack of bricks. I was at the cabin in the fall. The leaves were damp, the wind dull and my heart at ease. As if a rip in time and space broke off at the edge of the driveway, I observed an interview of my former Professor M. Oddly situated, I was down the hallway from a living room in which lights shined on Professor M and some ancillary moderator as they talked. Professor M first spoke American, then gradually started speaking in some british accent. What she was speaking of is something I could guess, but it wasn’t the focus of my attention. I was simply taken aback by her accent, which I concluded was her true voice. She only fronted an American accent to fit in or something.

In reality, she didn’t like me much and she had reason to. I was a snobby little cunt of a student. I disliked her questions (though my answer could have suited her question, but I was too lazy.). And faith in me was lost, when one day I was leading discussion and I was ‘dead in the head.’ My go to expression that wholly captures my ‘off days.’ It’s true and annoying. I fluctuate from high to low operation in frequencies I am yet to map, but maybe someday I will.

For some reason I have been thinking about Professor O. Two (or more) exchanges with her went sour. She acquired a nasty habit of scowling when I spoke. Never was she ever uglier, both physically and spiritually. Open debate? Not in her class. Tow the line pal. The other exchange was in her office. I am sitting down talking deferentially despite her (and my inclination to incite) classroom antics. She stands up, turns to the side, combs her hands over her dress, down the sides while she straightens her back, looking down at me through the slight of her eye. I must say, I was confused. Is this a power play? Is this a ill-intentioned tease? Or simply, I am reading into this the wrong way? Well, I steered the ship straight despite my racing heart. I had thought about her sexually before, but I had no intention to defy the professional rules of conduct. In that regard, my dick is very willing to comply to my intellect’s request for submission. But I still wondered. And this is what I thought. A counterfactual. Should I have got up, played off a half-baked story of being in a rush, cheeks red, etc.? If so, I would have signaled an attraction. I would have had to keep eye contact, grace a glance at her figure and make it 50% obvious that I was aroused/nervous. Make it plausible either way. I would have to come off as strong willed and not simply weak livered in order for it to work. Then maybe she would have felt empowered and lured. Lured, that is, to the mystery relationship between us. So she could better realize whatever fantasy she may have had about a taboo relationship. Hell. That’s all it would have been. Anyways. Fun stuff. Men and women in an office is tricky business. Especially when the males and females are within the same age range. In this case I think we were less than 4 or 5 years apart. In the end, I’m glad I have only this small memory of her.

How many times do we have to say how lucky we are? It’s next to a miracle all the resources we have and at so low a cost! Yet, as usual, with any major human development there are the laggards who are interested firstly in the flesh and secondly in vainglory. What the rest of us have to work with is a damn shame. Pitiful delinquents, bums and derelicts. Who drive their vessel daily with their heart-mind dial pointing close to empty, “I can make it.” Frauds of the human soul, who care about love as if it were a drug rather than as the air we breathe, the glory of truth! Shameful brutes and conniving shroods. Flimsy cowards and detestable cheats. Fuck these fucking fucks of fuckery and fucking fuck!

Here, people are bad by default. Honesty is not assumed or even an ideal. Lying and cheating are the norm. Ok. That's established.

I played a weird game of rugby 2 v 2 for a while. The rules were odd to say the least. I was in a sticky situation with an undead person. Yeah. I was on a small trail and a person without hands and feet arose out of an autumn bed of brown leaves. The reanimated ran after me. I was like, ‘not again. I thought I took care of you.’ Implying that I was the one who butchered this person. Well, then I confirmed that it was me, because I stopped time and rewound it back to when I did that and, cut, it was over. Nothing else, just wtf and autumn décor. Turns out, this person was after me. And in this world that kind of thing was intolerable. Cut. I was in a older all wood home, no insulation. I packed my backpack and looked for a way to slip out. I was in my room locked with a double bolt. As in other dreams, the place where my closet used to be, cropped up. Inside was an outlet to the crawlspace. How the fudge was I gonna get out of this one?

Did I say something? Am I such a person? I blundered about last night like a class dunce. Arrogant to some. Weird to some more. Pathetic to many. Shallow to one. Boring to everyone. In what way does this behavior at all resemble my ‘scholarly’ mystery, when in fact, I blurt out unwanted knowledge to drunk or disinterested people? I impressed a couple people, when I was completely smashed. Vance's girlfriend found me ‘sweet’ and her friend thought I was cute. Meanwhile, again, I made a girl blush from awkwardness and another storm out of the club from my indifference. The first was natural. She and I didn't click and I was not in an accommodating mood. The second was choice. My standards are extremely high right now, because I'm unwilling to fool around for the sake of fooling around. And I know that's what it would be. Not immediately enthralled, cut it, I don't give a shit about it. I have nothing to gain, but a temporary relief from the search, which, yes, can be quite dry. I have much to lose on the other part. Time gone, *snap* never to return. Only a potentially regrettable rendezvous’ with a fate in misery. I know.

But the one I don't regret, the most intense and difficult relationship was D. My opposite in nearly all things intellectual and philosophical. Not to forget also her goddess like beauty. *cheesy details about her eyes and hair* Love and be damned or damn the love and be damned. It’s corrupt, but each path has its ups and downs. All in all, I'm happy with my decision to steer clear from sex, but saddened by my show of pride and arrogance. Put a term on it and I was a sophist last night. I just have to keep working on myself. ‘Know thyself’ and if you knew what I know about myself, or maybe this log is enough to indicate it, you'd be saying, ‘yeah, maybe you could ask more questions and shut your mouth from time to time.’ Good idea. Shut the fu…

Sometimes you gotta ask yourself, “really?” So really you say to yourself, “man, you've done some gnarly ass things.” And when the answer is yes to both question and statement on repeat, there's a problem. Not a problem of tomorrow, but a daily challenge, now. To see into the past, firstly, to the moments of pain, is torture. Light, but insidious, is the bludgeoning of regret on the heart and mind. Clawing and scratching at your eyelids just enough to keep you awake. Small things. Mere moments. Amounting together as one big self made devil of a mountain over which no sheep frolic. I am interested in peace, but am unsure how to lastingly achieve it or if it is any achievable thing at all. In fact, it seems perfectly plausible that I, my conscious, haunt my present with blips of the past, selectively, to correct my behavior today. It is perfectly reasonable for me to weigh the options I myself fashion, in time, and must choose from, assign values to, with pros and cons, ups and downs, highs and lows, together, making a case for one action, successively, based on my present reflections of these past actions. The rooftop in the park (#1), the drunkenness in city (#2), the doorway in city (#3), the failing effort in city (#4), the schweinstal in city (#4), the images accidentally shared (#4), the girl the other girl and the other girl, every girl I've emotionally mistreated or misled (#4), the lost years (2?) drugged out of my mind (#4), and as the offenses grow less loud, and less visible to the fore, in sound they ring in offset echoes rattling deep in the darkest corners of my mind. Indeed, a constant mumble fills the air time among studies, reflection, folly and ambition. Truly, each endeavor takes about a fourth of my time. But all the time, prattling along in the back is a soft jumble of regret and pain. To agony and suffering self inflicted, I say, “get the fuck over it.” But again I ask how or even if a peace, an unfuckery if you will, is achievable? The ultimate irony of my life would be if I die early by disease which I once believed riddled my body, but which now retroactively is diagnosed as a disease/malady of the soul. To the laugh with the echoes, my regrets, to smile in the dark corner, myself, and to realize, yes, yes I was right all along. But how sick is that? And for that sickness irony is achievable. Yes, if not peace then irony. Blessed may I be. Damned though I am. By the grace of whom or what and even why, may I weld my soul back together again? Back to innocence? Or to awareness and familiarity? To see in myself first a man, a wretched one at that, as only that, one among billions now, one of trillions in eternity. Passing by the scale of time, just one. Breathe deep*.

So be it.

On some trip in NY to finish paperwork. Afterwards the others and I party. We start at bar and move to my place, a large apartment. I jealously look at 3 buddies close the door with a petite, big breasted woman. I assume they each get blow jobs. Outside I'm laying on a mattress on the floor below a bed where another buddy of mine is laying. He leans over and pecks me as an odd token of friendship. I look him sternly and say, “we are just friends, only. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but never do that again.” He replied affirmatively with a nod. In fact, he never spoke. Night turns to morning and many people are gone. Others were having a good time drinking and fucking while I lay in a dingy room hit on by a gay guy, then later responsible to clean up the mess of their delights. I have been disturbed a bit by my abstinence lately. I weakly did not hit on a beautiful woman yesterday and, to boot, last weekend, my friends tease, a gay guy picked me out of my group and talked to me, only me. I suppose I'm feeling emasculated and misseen. I thought I exude masculinity shrouded in mystery, not homosexual gestures and signals. Yesterday, I changed my mustache style to be more military. Hopefully any gay hipster vibes dissipate. On the other hand, I just want a beautiful woman and I'm not willing to compromise, is that grounds for assuming disinterest in women? It deviates from my previous behavior so I can imagine why people close to me might be skeptical, but how can they understand too, what I've realized about life, love and joy? How are they to know how seriously I take sex now? I want the next woman to be special. I want to feel the way I did with D. Utterly and uncontrollably in love. But now more mature, I have the hope that it will work.

I have yet again allowed a beauty in passing to drift aimlessly apart from my heart. She nor I will ever know the heights and depths of what our lives adjoined could have been. But what shallow concoction has made me stir to this effect, where I pace and fret over a span of a minute; there is no saying or declaring that anything or anyone is of such a potential, but only a figment of my desire to realize the love and beauty of only one woman.

Crazy. I just cut two hostile heads off with a samurai sword and jabbed another in his hostile neck, who when it was in and done said ‘watch the blood’ as it sprayed everywhere. Indeed, right where I was celebrating my stress relieving kills. Crazy.

I was in a warlike scenario. I think seattle was the name but it was really everywhere and nowhere. Mountains, rivers, grass padded hills, sand and bush filled bluffs, and my childhood neighborhood. Everyone had health bars indicating our remaining vitality. I was in some hot water. You know, some hairy shit. And I was getting shot at by a tedious sniper. First I was by a flag pole, then in a house. The hostiles poked their heads through the windows, that had no glass, and I shot at them with a black and silver glock. The gun did very little damage and I ran out of bullets. So I ran. I'm running around my neighborhood looking inside open garages for potential weapons. Hence, the samurai sword. I almost lost in a sword fight with the last guy. I think I sacrificed a part of my hand for the kill. Crazy.

For so long I dwelled among my passions as an unfastened passenger. Drifting anywhere not too far away, bumpy or heavily trafficked. Fast to slow and slow to fast, we travelled on empty streets passing sign after sign, “Dead End No Turn Around.” Blinded not by any sense, for my heart burned and my mind raged in the vanity of utmost certainty that, “all is lost, myself included.” My heart groveled and my mind panicked, ‘Get out!’ but spun was my vision in a tornado of intoxicating loti. This levelled my intentions to the daily whim of ‘yes’ to coffee and ‘why not?’ to headless sex. Only the rules of society hedged my way, but I peeked over this ancient construction to a world of snakes and worms, black skies (thunder) and lightning. With one peek, my wit in disarray and my compass bashed in, I stood in awe of the violent but soothing waves of violet flames sliding upon the horizon from end to overhead. To ‘that’ end I travelled. By ‘this’ way I ventured. Seeking refuge in ordered melodies, my heart drummed and my mind soon hummed away the tingling damnation with whimsical marching songs; along the way I continued. But with each step the horizon of dread grew larger, the hedges got shorter and the suffering louder. All… I realize… of my own doing.... Classic! My own doing! To tears I suddenly fell. To my knees I succumbed. Vanquished was I. Into my dirtied palms of black soil and shattered bone, I searched for a base to care. To my body! Firstly, by such an order I shall at least prolong this journey, I thought, but without the truth, the realization, in which direction I blew, there was only one foreseeable end. And so I stopped. Indeed, I stopped! As if a bullet passed through my head (I executed myself), the inertia pulled my head forward and down, straight into the earth. My mind spun like an intoxicated bat, clicking and flapping in a dark stuper...

For nearly a half a year I lay there purging my whole of lingering toxins: heaving old habits, spitting tainted bloods of pride; to find the courage to stand. The sky is now blended with blue. Looking up, I see hope for reclamation. And today, I stand with my back to that heinous fallacy of imminence. For in truth, if I seek it, ‘that’ is the way and ‘this’ is the end.

I saw every reason to test the range and depth of my luck. When I rode across town on unmarked roads, over narrow passes and through lanes meant for cars, only, I observed every precaution nearing neurotic. Ever cordial and ever aware, I pushed the bounds of reasonable transport. I was waiting for someone else, anybody, a drunk or a careless fool, anybody, to slip up, swerve or hiccup and end this blistering buzz. So many red flashing lights… I systematically deadened my head with drugs, on the dot, everyday, but still voices, muses and angels, cried out, both in chaos, on the one part, and in a symphony, on the other. I knew when and what to expect. So, I would exercise off the shackles of one gnawing parasite, get comfortable with a happy hedonist, get somber under the deadlight with a Buddhist and sweat through the interrogation light with a friend… yes, friend… for it was those I knew most closely whom I distrusted. I trusted no one, not anyone. Not Bill or Joe, not even Jamie or Gianna, no one.

I trusted the laws, but within them I did all I could to increase the likelihood that I would be broadsided by metal.... Instead, I made it. Every damn, fucking time! I made it. Back to the sighs of relief, to arms wet with tears and grins drawn by anguish, to parents who all but knew I was one nudge away from assured death.

But with all that said, now as well as then, I knew death was not for me. Yes, I tested and prodded, I probed and persisted, but not once, not even for a half moment was my bike in certain danger, not by my actions, no, not me, I, myself… I am either too weak or too in love. Or both! Since love and weakness are my main attributes. I passion for passions and meekly shy from the most gratifying among them, for as a mote of motes, I deem myself unworthy. And yet I breathe, bluster and bark, like I have a future to attend to. I was both selfish and cowardly, I know, but now I am less selfish and less cowardly.

To work as my passions direct, to which end I am unaware, but by what means I am improving, incrementally. I am happy.

For the sake of chronology and my praise of disorder, naturally, I say once and for nothing, that I can spin nasty cunning and derive blissful ambrosia from my prey. So wretched and spoiled is one part of the urge…

I lay with a heart abuzzed, sunken and doubtful. I too fly into the web I myself designed.

There, I see the picture, the form, the many fallen dominoes make… one and nothing, whiteness.

If I can't solve this heart problem, I won't live to whiteness.

It's a curse being so distrusting of women (in the partner sense). I… am so weak on that point. The insecurity is sad. I've had it forever, but sometimes it's more evident than other times. I blame it, i.e. myself, for letting it corrode my sense of love. With Alice, how quickly did love and lust turn to paranoia and jealousy? From guy with a plan to nest of doubt.

I always reassure myself of one thing, perhaps… one woman will dissolve this suspicion into admiration? Maybe someone will admire me as I admire them? But I'm just not sure of one thing. How much good have I ignored to protect myself? How much bad have I withstood to calm my lustful whims? In that question it follows: how many hearts have I broken? God help me.

Our efforts were thwarted by an arrogance that sprung innocence to death. All the ingredients were there, but we remained oblivious to their sinister use. Car bombs everywhere going off and people are flabbergasted. Shocked that the instruments of peace and advance are used as fodder of chaos.

I had a child of 12 years or so beside me in a car. I was happy by that fact. But what is strange is that the woman who I had the child with was not especially excellent. So while I was happy to have him, it was a boy, I felt as though I ought to have better…

I lost some cash, and the guy who gave it to me says, ‘let's go to the source. You can always retrieve what you miss by going to the source.’ in this case I was with him, a cool Jazz 60s man in 90s clothing, and another person, no idea who, running like a dog. We came across three paths in a scene where coast meets marsh and black-purple oil slick and green-yellow radioactive ooze checker the ground. We split up to quicken the search. I take the middle road. I see a dried salt pond and a reverend dressed bumblebee. I sound the alarm and we run after him.

Out in a forested wilderness.

By a orange brown lake, at first lifeless, alligators nosed up and swarmed after me. I reached safety climbing over a chain link fence, only to be greatly imperiled by a red and white snake. But the snake did not move nor did I provoke him further. I tiptoed to safety.

If the sorrowful day arrives when my compatriots turn from spoiled to rancid, may it be countered by the vigor of liberality and freedom that our guardians of security uphold the utmost standard of restraint in control, and by their and our prerogative to a tranquil and just state, release upon the ravines of injustice the floods of freedom’s rains, and as a starting gun does, begin the race toward equity and grace. Let all those who stand in our way beware.

Before I forget, I have another dream to log. I was in a swamp, surrounded by widowed trees draped with moss and string like twigs. The moonlight cast a purple-blue beam through the tree canopy. The scene was ripe for the supernatural.

This place was a kind of campsite. I looked about and saw plenty of people: Moms dads kids, you can name them all, every kind whosoever, very kindly and simply preoccupied.

Abruptly, I realize something quite heinous afoot. My stomach churns and my eyes well. Before me, there are these 2 little boys in small tents smooshed together to make one and two. I couldn't quite tell what was off about these 2 little boys. First things first, where were their parents?

With one turn of his head, the eyes of 1 of the boys locked with mine. Just then I fell into a sudden flashback, to a home, to a moment, indeed, a series of episodes which involved myself and these 2 little boys. Without any excitement, without any breath, I became an observer of this odd series.

Into the center of a hurricane, I was dropped into a violent torrent, where I observed myself beating one of the boys. While I had forgotten why exactly I was doing this, again, I had a feeling. I was serving a kind of Justice. He had stolen something. He had betrayed someone close to me, perhaps me, perhaps the very backbone of morality itself. Nonetheless, the series continued since, for whatever reason, that boy and his brother continued to arrive at this home for what appeared to be scheduled beatings.

Suddenly, the dream cut to me looking down at thick grey work boots, stomping the boy's face into the cement, unendingly. From what I felt, I did not enjoy the beating one bit, as though it was a duty that I could not forsake. I look down at his torn face: black-and-blue cheeks and sockets, sunken eyes, blood gushing lips, mangled nose and robber slit ears… And he made no sound…

Cut to my living room where I get a knock on my door and it is those 2 little boys. The one who I was just beating senselessly but a few moments ago! I had only enough time to wipe my hands clean and to take off my boots… at the door, he wiped his face clean in one swipe, then smirked. Dismayed I asked, what is it that keeps bringing you here? And the older of the 2 boys says to me, ‘to fix your 11 and a 1/2 inch laptop.’ As you can imagine I was dumbfounded. (The boy I beat said something too, but sadly I cannot remember it)

Now cut back to the purple-blue and black swamp. There I again regained what was present. I'm looking at those 2 boys and I see the truth of their existence! The boy smirked again... and into the ghostly night sky, that smirking boy vanished. Only the older of the 2 assembled his tent, minding that business only, while I watched in amazement as 2 tents fused to 1 and 2 boys faded to one...

“I can't imagine that. That is one of my worst fears. That you can lose touch with reality. When up-and-down, left and right, right and wrong seem to dissipate into what would best be called, nothing. How? How could this happen to someone? How could they do this to others? This is one of my greatest fears; I fear I someday will become senile, insane, deranged, a parasite on this world, a contributor to all I now stand against.”

Just a few paranoid words from a man I recently met. A soft gentle thoughtful man who in his lifetime, and very recently, witnessed the troublesome engagement of a covetous man whose ambitions and realities conjoined to make a heinous crime.

My teeth were all rotted on the bottom half. They looked like salt formations, jagged and full of holes.

I don't know if it's healthy or regular, but I'm growing more indifferent about the affairs of others. That is, except a select few. SM breeds a kind of person who shows much promise, but whose trust is unverifiable. I am confident that there are the same feelings in all, but what is done to externalize their internal self. The further our internal self is from our external selves, the more we crave to shore the difference. The easiest way to achieve symmetry? Playing the internet of moments for a fool. But the truth of being is all too much to avoid. Not without self-loathing, pessimistically, or eager dynamism, optimistically, does the self reckon a fitting calculation of reality. Is it what others see of you or is it what you know of yourself? Justice… what is right? That's all is meant by that dialogue. Is it right for me to masquerade as a full throttle businessman, husband, etc. etc. When I am more accurately a slovenly theorist? Is it right to have others so poorly informed about who I am truly?

So many people have circumvented the dialogue for the easy display case on the internet. Indeed, one or two, maybe three lockers of neatly designed photographs, many edited to doctor the true light of the moment. Happy people are assumed dead for inactivity. Depressed people are assumed happy for hyperactivity. The truth that matters most. Is your own. By way of civilization, rules, less important, dictate particulars. And yet, though irrational, any one dedicated to their internal truth acts untamed. In some cases such action receives applause, days, months, years, centuries later. Similarly, other cases, other actions of that nature, live or die appalled or even made example of. Beyond guilt or shame, it's the inner self who lives the longest. And to be free, truly free, he must move, at whatever pace is comfortable, to actuation, and if possible, flourishing.

Again, I find myself in a fit of regret. A kind of misery and agony that throws a comfortable lad like myself into restless reflection. On the one hand, I satisfied my desire to hold to my long-term vision of self. Namely, that I wait for the envisioned pieces of success strictly. For any deviation is, as far as I can tell, a fault I myself, in all my habits, cause by myself, to myself, a far more immense grief than this agony. In my history of shorting my long term goals for immediate and temporary gratifications, I know well the consequence: I subject my ‘self’ to another kind of agony sown by the misuse of time in such things as can be called philandering. When people talk of purpose as an internal motivation set to a holistic end with love, health and wisdom, I know it to be true. The path, as I find it, is yet unshorn, but so it is for many of youth, like myself, to drudge in my search for it! To plow hedges by stomp, vigor and guile. In time, I shall know what path is the one that follows mountains and clouds. One day, I shall realize that such agonies as I feel tonight, related to such exploits as are beneath me, excuse me, the final me, I step closer to purity, as is the only way the final me will want it. By the deeds of today and tomorrow may the consequences of yesterday be themselves adorned upon me as ornaments of character and flaw, but also humanity and understanding. Now by rejection and abstention, perhaps tomorrow by chance and calculation. So goes another face, a beautiful woman, gone. Her cute pose and cherishing eyes ring tonight and maybe forever, but so too do claws of regression. I say, tonight I was not passive, I was modest. I was not shy, I was choosy. But oh how I know myself, a sucker for a woman brave enough to start the interaction. With her wit clicking and her cheeks blushing… not too long ago I would have returned with much of the same but of my flavor. In one way I feel badly for her. Putting herself out there in the flesh among a world of digital shields and wired swords. But by such evidence, I take it that a woman like her will do quite well in this world or any other for that matter. I suppose… I am happy with my decision.

A terrifying combination of dream and reality struck me last night. In my dream, but also a kind of half woke reality, I lay in bed. What would otherwise be white noise of the wind and AC became intelligible messages, “the tide of change and action together compel you. It's your time. The tyrants of old no longer shall keep you…” and while I was curious about what was said, I also hoped it was simply a figment of my imagination and nothing at all. But with a curious ear I heard it all. The drumming of some sort of fervor, a decision, the nature of which I know not. The voice churned a disturbance in me. My heart began to race. Then, suddenly… like a spotlight on a stage, the corner of my room lit up. There, a golden door sparkled as the door cracked open. The voice encouraged me to go in.

I woke up. Still hearing the faint possibility of messages in the wind and AC, but assured, at least, that the door did not exist and that the voices were the substance of a dream-reality.

I understand how myths tell of voices in the wind. Last night we had quite the gale.

A nightmare of sorts. I was at a convention like thing, where people were acting strange, but not strange enough to make me leave. Turns out it's a convention that revolves around killing someone there. We all don't know who is to die, vut we know someone will. I worry, rightly, and I get the sense that my head is on the chopping block.

I woke up and tried to change the trajectory of the dream.

I kind of figured it out and was frantically looking for alternatives. Everyone was a potential aggressor, but I also knew that it would be done by only one person. In this case it was an overlord kind of person.

At this point it seemed like everyone knew I was the one to die. They kind of turned. In dream, before a door in a small hallway, as it appeared to me, people transformed into colorful, nasty, slimy, more globular yet sharp beings. All illusions were gone. The door was a mouth portal and the hallway colorful. A Seuss like prison of death and monsters, I marched in.

Nothing, absolutely nothing. Blank and uninspiring. Only for a few blinks do I see a landscape of icy hills and tall thin Alpine. Whatever else happened is gone.

I basically argued with some youngster about the socialistic agendas of the American parties. “what is the government?” reply, “an institution” answer, “no no, people, it's people with as much a propensity for abuse and corruption as your representative or governor and by expanding such posts do you suspect we are minimizing abuse and corruption?” If they are unelected, to whom are the newly charged responsible/accountable? Your corruptible politicians?*

Dream, nightmare and dreamless bliss is astronomically planned. There is no deviation. The vividness corrupts reality. He asks people if he had told them x or y. Every day of every year, he knows what to expect. He is haunted by the moods produced of dreams, nightmares and bliss of nothing.

Last night was quite the mind bender. Two notable visions marked my future and past well in but a few moments.

I was in my backyard with two soldiers. It was a WWII setting: uniforms, Normandy beach like bunkers and trenches and guns. I was wielding an M1 Garand to begin with. As we entered my garage we entered the battle scene. Where the garage is a bunker and its edge, where otherwise there would be the driveway, meets a trench going perpendicular to the bunker. The wall of the trench is tall enough to block a vision of the whole beach, but short enough for the evening sky to fill up the open creese between the bunker and the trench.

A fellow soldier, by my orders or another, ran into the trench dying almost immediately. A few German soldiers made themselves known. As soon as I saw them I began to pick them off. As I hid behind a barrier, I shot each soldier in the head. I ran out of bullets and retreated to my backyard where I placed the empty rifle near my BBQ.

I heard some rustling and grunts. I peer through my garage door (regular style with a small window) to find my fellow two soldiers in a struggle with some Germans. I look around with haste for a fully loaded weapon. I find a B.A.R., pick it up, open up the door and wreak havoc on the Germans. Blasting their bodies without hitting one patriot. It was very graphic. For instance, once the scene was settling, I deliberately iced a crawling soldier in the head. With the help of the two patriots we seized the last German. One patriot wanted to kill him, but I warded him off. I put the butt of my B.A.R. to the German’s neck and said, “Wir möchten nicht allen den Deutschen toeten. Nein. Wir möchten einer überleben.”

Then the scene ended.

Zeta with large breasts. I was sitting on a bench somewhere. I was doing well overall in life, no specifics. A woman was walking by. At first all I saw was a busty women (cleavage quite visible). Quickly I look up and realized it was Zeta. I stopped her with a modest smile, got up and greeted her warmly. She had a child which is how she was so busty (apparently). That was just about it. I guess it means I would have been much more inclined to marry her if she had been endowed with significantly larger breasts. I don’t know what that was all about. In realty, she recently had a baby by the mechanic in city. I suppose I truly am happy for her. People don’t believe me, but I believe me. I suppose.

I had another wicked dream.

I was in a forest speckled with faceless persons walking throughout. I saw one person every few seconds or so minding their own business, you know, looking up, down, side to side, shifting a pant leg, scratching their head, blowing their nose, smiling, frowning… the whole 10 yards (fuck 9 yards). I cordially did the same.

I'm heading down a mountain path like I've never been on, but could have been on. The soil was like the washed hills of the kolotov mines: a white pearled mixture of pulverized rock and sand, inordinately leveled so that some trees were suffocated with this soil up to their first branch.

I was walking, but because I wanted to get to the bottom faster, I began to run. I was sprinting. The slope downward was steep. In fact, steep enough so that, like a car without breaks, my sprint could not be stopped. In some right sense of security, I knew that there the ledges were not right off of the path, but… I still had reason to worry that I would run right over the cliffside.

It just kept going. My sprint was out of leg! Going down a flight of log laced and shovel hollowed stairs I almost tripped over myself.

I neared a turn and did my very best to halt my momentous sprint downward. I could not stop. I went over the path and to the edge of the dream. Spitting dirt from my sneakers, kicking up dust, hollering for my body to stop! I stopped just in time. I looked down at the abyss and wringed out my lungs a dripping sigh of relief.

Just about to carry on and what do I see? A great grizzly bear! I had awakened it. It stretched and yawned then looked at me with hatred. Wide-eyed I tried to tip toe passed it, with all but 15 yards between us. It charged. I ran.

I was so frantic, I pleaded to others I passed for help, “Help me! Help me! Get this bear to stop! Distract it! Distract it!” But no one could help.

The bear got closer and closer. I could hear it snarling and huffing and grinding its teeth. I peeled off the road and found a short lived sanctuary, I don't know how.

There was a parachute there. I put it on. I was on a cliffside, again, only this end was lit and at the bottom, say a few thousand feet below was the road. Aha! I thought. A shortcut. So, I lept off and deployed the parachute. I weaved through trees into now red soiled earth, iron rich, where a bridge separated civilization and safety from nature and peril. I walked.

A couple of friends caught up to me, faceless still, but warming nonetheless. And wouldn't you know it, again, that damned bear caught up too! Frothing at the mouth. It's shoulders bulging with every step. Its claws more pronounced than ever. I ran.

I crossed the bridge, my heart, like Buddy Rich, pounding at each individual rib. I'm screaming for my friends, “Help me! Help me! Get this bear to stop! Distract it! Distract it!” They could do nothing. They ran beside the bear waving their arms at it. Only giving a glance to the byrunners, the bear charged on and roared.

I made it to the end of the bridge where a tunnel began. The tunnel was made of cement and glass. Lit up very well with seemingly no track, but a smoothly finished macadamized road.

A giant pod like vehicle hovered my way taking up all the space of the tunnel but for a slight gap on the sides. The gap was large enough for me but too small for the bear. I squeezed through and collected my breath in relief. The bear could not get to me since the pod will block its path forever. But then it occurred to me that the tunnel could end! I ran.

Clearly, my mind is a bit preoccupied with finding affection. At a party, at a home, at a festival, anywhere it could possibly find me. And yet, that is also it. I do not find love, it finds me. I take it and sexualize it. I allow it to fill in the canvass of my life, but by the chaotic minds of lovers I both want and despise. I want them, because they are perfect. I despise them, because I lack an understanding of my own allure.

I woke up today again thinking about the last time I gave a girl a gift who I thought I had no chance of wooing. N was the most attractive girl in school. Every guy with eyes and ears liked her. I liked her a lot. She made me nervous. Kind of like T. She was extremely attractive and nearly every guy was into her. But sadly, I was not the champion for either. T liked Victor and N liked Matt. Both of these guys were my friends. The other attractive girl at school was M. I liked her third and was not as deeply affected by her choice of Ben, another boy at our school. Still, the collective message was clear: I was not the best, second best or third best boy around. I was at best, fourth. Yet, even that felt off. I attracted nearly all of the girls that were lesser than third best, never ‘better’.

The fateful day came when I said enough is enough. I acted impulsively and scrummed all of my money together to buy N a stuffed animal. After school, N waited by her mom who did crosswalk duties/directing traffic before heading home. I almost left without giving the gift- the token of my affection- to her. Instead, I crossed the street and told my younger friend Michael to deliver the gift to her while I watched from across the street. As the de facto leader of the group, he did as I asked. Her reaction to the gift was heart wrenching. There, across the street, I saw eyes of beauty turn to eyes of revulsion. Michael pointed to me then started running at me with no intention of stopping. She looked at me then looked at her friend J. She looked at the stuffed animal with confusion. Jasmin called out to me. N did not. Jasmin and Natalie ran after me. I ran too- away that is. J kept on calling out to me as we all ran. I yelled back, “I can run forever.” Prescient words from the coward this event helped make. I did not stop until they stopped running after me. I cried when I returned to Joanne's daycare, her house up the street from the school.

I was broken. I not only ran, but condemned the gift a failure. I did not show affection, but fear. I was unfit to be her boyfriend. The next day I looked at her once in Mr. Silver's class. I was completely stunned. Hopeful that I assumed too much.

But my worst fears were realized when J told me the regrettable destiny of the gift, “she gave it to her brother…” I asked for it back, but, just as the other, I was not awarded her yes by my meager plea. I lost my money, my gift and my honor. I was hollowed out. Unknown at this time, but to come, I lost almost all interest in love, though this would not keep me entirely separated from such instincts.

This continued. Always feeling like I was attracting the fourth best girl and on. I would never really shake this feeling. I would never be with the best. This mentality would run through me, emanating until college, when I realized I had some upward potential. But even then, I was a coward.

My first real girlfriend E was a mistake. She was aggressive. I let it happen. In fact, I was compelled to date her by the sickening feeling of loneliness. Funnily enough, just as I now address my spiritual condition via dreams, I then had a convincing dream. It, very simply, revolved me with a girl. I felt whole, cared for and purposefully caring. When I awoke to no one but myself, I felt sick to my stomach. Not a few weeks later I was ‘with’ E. I would be with E for a year after that. I should never have dated her more than a week. She was no more than fourth best. In the face of this, I felt draped with the cloak of failure.- an honorary commemoration of my life as fourth best.

Yet, I was stirred with jealousy and hate. Thinking that she was unfaithful, because I was lesser than. So while I rejected her for being lesser, I rejected her feelings for me because I thought myself lesser than other men. In short, she and women have options. (In one opinion) Men are apes. Women choose. I felt like a lesser choice. If not to those in any one room, which I always felt was the case, then always and everywhere. I broke up with her only after my friends nearly divorced themselves from me entirely. She was manipulative and a nuisance.

I spent the next few months free of that kind of obligation. I worked hard on the internship and met some helpful crossroads there.

I then met Zeta. She did not capture my eyes immediately, but only because I tried not to think about sex or ladies. The two months of being single tempered my appetites, especially after I made some questionable friends. One of whom was labeled, ugh, “big blue.” Fuck.

I met Zeta. That first meeting was very casual. She first saw me with just my towel on coming out of the shower. She liked what she saw. I then played a beer game with her. We chatted about nonsense and got along. When she left, Peter telegraphed to me that she was interested. Oblivious to it, again consumed by my mentality of inferiority, I was surprised that such a beautiful girl would be interested in me. With reassurance from Peter, I ran after her and there sowed the beginning of a relationship with her. I ended up dancing with her then dropping her off at her place where I got her number and kissed her on the cheek. This she liked a lot. (and this would not be the last time I would approach a girl like this)

That blossomed a summer romance that started great but faded toward the end. It faded for two reasons. Firstly, I was going to live in Europe for a year. Secondly, I felt like the relationship was based on sex, only. The sex was not always great. I left and hardly spent time thinking about her while in Europe.

In Europe, I met a girl named Lisa and another named kara. I liked Lisa but was unharmed when we stopped seeing each other (after I puked on her sheets then tried to clean them, but in a sad and ineffective way that left them wet and unusable. Needless to say, we never said bye to each other, though we did say hi once more.)

I met kara in France. She was impressively busty. Like really busty. I was very turned on. kara said to me, “ich will dich kussen.” She repeated this a number of times but I couldn't understand her. She finally proclaimed, “I want to kiss you!” In her German accent. I kissed her and took her back to my room, where in a room of 5 guys within 40 square feet, I had slow sex with her all night long. The guys were none too happy, but were reasonably proud of me to allow it without scorn or injunction. At least enough to dismiss the infraction.

kara was a strange one on the outside or at least that is what she tried to project. I invited her to Berlin in February. She was most definitely testing me. She arrived in all black, head to toe. She smoked cigarettes at least 7 times a day, including right when she woke up. We relaxed a lot and had sex a lot. Upon reflection, I never appreciated her breasts enough. Not like I would today, anyways. Class A breasts like that need love.

She got a bit weird and I began my usual mental separation trick. Slowly erasing any feelings for her.

Hanging with my buddies, the artist and engineer, I received a call from her. She said, “x, what are you up to next weekend.” I told her I wasn’t sure. She replied, “I want to see you. We should talk.” I said, “no worries, we can do something.” She reaffirmed her conviction to see me, “we need to see each other.” I agreed to the plan to meet. I hung up and hung my head. I knew that she was pregnant. My buddies told me it was nothing to worry about, but I still couldn’t help feel utterly directionless.

When she arrived the following weekend I tested her a few times. I offered to smoke with her and offered a beer. She accepted both times. I thought that perhaps I was misguided in thinking she was pregnant, perhaps she gave me some embarrassing STD. I then propositioned for us to go to the lake not too far away. By way of the S-bahn we arrived and walked around to find a place to rest and enjoy the view. I could tell she was nervous. A few toddlers and strollers passed us and an acute sense of worry rushed about my stomach. I became blinded by this feeling. We finally sat down and talked for all but 5 minutes when she began, “there is something bothering me. Something that I am not sure about. Something that I am on the fence about.” Of course, I knew what she was saying. Still in code I said, “whatever there is to decide, I would hope that it does not conflict with something else. Something to be resented. For me, I despise it when I am forced to do something. I resent it and any imposition has the chance of being forever resented.” With her heart sinking and her eyes tearing she said again, “I am on the fence. I can go either way.” I said, “du bist schwanger.” She said, “ja.”

We sat there in silence for a bit. I honestly blacked out. All that was left to be said was the final verdict. I was to decide whether to be a parent or not. She delegated the responsibility and I was hard pressed to use it. At some point on the way back, I told her that I was not ready. Afterall, I wasn’t sure how much I loved her. I suspected, as usual, that I was a lesser choice. And as usual, I wasn’t sure she was my best option either. Soon thereafter, we arranged to have the pregnancy terminated.

Many people are challenged by this question. Much of this is copacetic, but I took it especially hard.

Following one heck of a night of partying in Berlin, I went to Kingsday in the Netherlands with some acquaintances. There, I had no phone and no place to stay. I made no plans and was willing to do whatever it took to keep my mind off the point of love affairs. By luck, I was walking with these acquaintances around Amsterdam and ran into my friends from Venice. It was nuts! Out of the whole city… we just ran into each other. It was quite cool. I then hung with them for one night, spent the night in Haarlem at John's house. While the rest of my friends stayed one more night I told them I had to leave. They were puzzled, but I left them unsolved.

That night, I took the train to Hannover, then stayed there for a few hours. I had enough time to explore the quiet city all alone- it was about 1 am. I took the next train to kara’s town of Kassel. I then walked to her apartment a few miles from the main station.

So it was about 5am and I was standing outside her apartment complex. I guessed and hoped I knew which window belonged to her. It would probably profit you to know that I am phoneless this whole time. I chucked a few small rocks at her window until she opened up. She then came down to get me.

At 7:30 am we headed to the clinic. There in the waiting room I bobbed my head in exhaustion. A nurse came out to the waiting room and called out to the attendant of “Ms. xxxski.” My German was trash still and my mind was agog. The nurse did this three other times every 3 or so minutes and was getting more and more upset each time. The policy was for the nurse to do this without exception. I finally woke up to the realization that I didn’t ever get kara’s name. She told me her family was originally from Gedansk. It hit me. Shit. She is “Ms. xxxski.” I then embarrassingly approached the nurse the fourth time she called out. She was livid by now. I received kara, who was a soft mess of doubt, embarrassment and frustration. She said, “I told her I could go get you, but she wouldn’t allow me. And how do you not know my last name?” I replied, “I never got it. You never told me. On Facebook it is written, ‘x’”. She rolled her eyes, “ya, after the jazz musician…” Among the whole mess her eyes said, “idiots, we both are idiots.” We left. At the bus stop I coddled her. Reassuring her that we made the right decision.

That last day and night were a blur. I was tired and emotionally wringed. I left for city the next day. I was a wreck. I was lost. I was only happy that I had successfully avoided the full blown responsibilities included with parenthood.

[Skipping forward] May Day arrives and I go out with friends to celebrate. I meet a girl within the group who was a friend of Barry's, my South African friend. By the end of the day I am fairly trashed. She offers to give me a blowjob by the Spree, but says we should use a condom. I assure her that I have a condom at home if she can wait. We arrive and I can’t find the condom. I say, fuck it and begin to fall asleep. She decides to take my pants off anyways and starts to blow me, to no effect. I am drunk, half asleep and my dick is whiskied down.

I just wanted a bedfellow, honestly. I was in extreme distress and longed for company. Just any dumb warm body would have done.

The following weeks carried on numbly. I couldn’t think or feel. I simply existed. I smoked every moment. I drank whenever I was with my friends. I was ashamed that I brought a girl back to my place and worse, could have risked getting a std.

One day I noticed a blemish on my thigh. I immediately panicked. I thought I caught a disease. Looking back, this is probable, but highly improbable too. The fact was, it was one mark and it did not resemble any disease. Still, I went into a tailspin of hypochondria that would last for several years(!!!!). Every pain was my last. Every touch an inoculation. Every ailment of every other person on this planet was MY DOING. “Famous baseball player suffers from belly ache”- that was my fault. So on and so forth. Sounds ridiculous, but that is the power of self-centered regret complexes.

I tried to become faceless, but my hiding technique failed. I could not hide from myself.

I failed all but one class that second semester in city. I only passed that class because it was history I could learn on my own very drugged time. It was a two hour in-class exam and therefore required the least amount of commitment (relative to essays in the other classes).

Despite the bright spots of dissociation and carelessness, I concluded that I carried every disease and every virus known to man. And even worse, I thought that I had birthed a new disease that could not be tested or found by any medicinal check-up or bloodwork. It was a losing battle.

kara called the landline at my apartment. I told her I could not see her ever again. I hung up and promised myself to never talk to her again, for her sake and mine. She messaged me months after. She began school somewhere. I was proud of her. I was quite short to her, but also kind.

When I arrived back in city, I was convinced that I must segregate from all those i cared about. I did so in a half-assed way. I both went on living as I did before city and kept on feeling like utter trash. I told no one of my experience except those small doses of the good.

Not a few days there and Zeta invited me to her house for a party. That night I stood outside of her house with Peter, while everyone else was already gone. She leaned out of her front doorway and asked, “wanna come in?” I looked at Peter then back at Zeta, drunk and perhaps unconvinced of my chondria, I bit my fist and went inside. I was with Zeta for one year from that moment on. That was a bad decision. I know I know, “how could I?”

I am not sure. But I did. And so continued my dissociation with reality. So continued a sham of a relationship that was already doused with failure before I left for city. I never could love Zeta more than as a friend I had sex with. I respected her view of life and I respected her, but I could only view her as an accomplice to a moment, not to my life.

I learned that she had gone through a lot during my year of absence. She was raped by a friend. She lost many other friends. She hopped on some drug like percocet or some other happy pill. She was a disaster. I was a disaster. Our relationship was a crash landing: demolished and going nowhere. We were waiting for the other to pick us up, but we ultimately had to be picked up by others.

When she went to city that sowed the end. She met a nice guy there and left me for him. I was broken up because she cheated on me. It was not a clean break in that way. I felt undermined.

To sum up: my mind sported an inferiority complex, an alternate reality lurked in the infinity of a full pregnancy, hypochondria, dissociative disorder, schizo-esk paranoia, and self-imposed pathologies consistent with sociopathy.

I call the year following the break-up, “the year in stupor.” I call the next year, my first year at grad school, “a year in wakening.” I have yet to call the next year anything in particular, but as of now, still in it, I would extend the first year into this one and call both, “the years in wakening.” Likewise, I should call the years from May Day to matriculation at grad school, “the years in stupor.”

Medical tests confirmed that all my ailments were psychological. I am no longer disassociative. I am no longer paranoid. I am simplifying my relationships to be constructive. I want only to be a good friend, neighbor, citizen, intellectual and son.

I still have moments in stupor. I spent half of my time at grad school drugged or drunk, but that was half as much as before. So, relatively, I was very sober.

While I dream of love and beautiful women I am reminded that I have a past of pain and suffering. Mostly of my own doing. Ultimately, I have much to learn before I can love someone else. I must be honest with myself and others. I must be objective, but allow for subject feelings to have their say.

For now, dreams are where my love must remain. I must finish my projects. It it the only way I will accomplish existence. If it takes me a lifetime to achieve… so be it.

Pedagogy:

A class ought to run through case studies, one after the other. (instantiation)

The topics addressed are cohesive and related throughout. (thematic)

Patterns are drawn through two or three competing narratives; none of which are excessively commentary. (substantiation)

Discussion and questions

Periodic (and a final) reflection(synthesis)

I find it interesting how people eat up self-help books that simply recycle ancient philosophies.

People should be characterized/catalogued by their characteristics. The prescriptions of a person’s tendencies are like those of Epicure, Stoic, Hippocrit, etc. But not by the figurative definitions these terms don today. Instead, by the characteristics of those who practice the philosophy.

The rise and fall of unions with relation to the rise and fall of regulations and tax revenues… the department of labor is the union management. Why do people not realize this?

The inquisition was used to control thought. They thought that the world needed to be Christian and its inhabitants follow Christian law. The ultimate authority assumed by a supranational organization that had large but restrained powers. This form of organization presiding over more intimate sovereigns has existed in many forms. The organization is a pillar of the society’s order. The Catholic church and the holy see had in the past been the dominating social engineering force in society. Indeed, the institution distributed a code of conduct, laws, that dictated social interaction among the parishioners. In the peasant's case, he or she interacted with the local priest “father,” (the paternalist nature of the relationship included the dynamic between: parent and child, sovereign and subject…) who collected tithes, donations and grants in exchange for the specialized knowledge of the holy word. The father plays the role of moral guide and must adhere to an internal code of conduct free of caprice in order for the ideal version of the church-parish system to work. Yet, corruption is ever present in an institution, eventually. The sovereign is authorized by a king to rule a land and is legitimized by the religious pillar of society. The two institutions maintained a balance where the immediate ruler (hard law like property is upheld) and the morality police (social law is upheld; thou shall not steal, kill or adulterate) integrated regular subjects within the so-called “chain of being” (a hierarchy; human organization structure). While the parishioners/subjects/peasants were free to procreate with whom they wanted, associate with whom they wanted within the bounds of christian prescribed moral artifices or without political calculations beyond the negotiation of due rents, the psp’s were given unofficial sovereignty over themselves. The family unit is the most efficient unofficial organization. However, some families fail to meet expectations. The sovereign is behooved to exercise his or her authority to make better use of the land that family tills (?).

Today, the most dominating social engineering force is the university system. However, the connectedness of the globe since the advent of internet connection, with the x million miles of overland cable, x electric poles, x transformers, x transoceanic cables, etc. [it] is an amazing feat that modern humanity enjoys today. The amount of time the average American adult spends on the internet is distributed thusly: xyz. The web search engines that dominate the internet collection source, collect data on each user and “improve" the online experience for each user. This is an odd scenario. It has not one outcome. Though, generally the user is likely to have a trend littered with data points suggestive of only those associated kinds of information portals. It is feasible for a user's data to be representative of a phantom person, an apparent person, who expresses his or her most embarrassing inquiries, reads self help literature or watches erotic videos or whatever; there is an intelligible difference between the online phantom and the human who registers as the user of the phantom. It is a space in motion, ever expanding, that may to a better or lesser extent constitute one or more characteristics of the human behind the apparent user, i.e. phantom.

Looking at a website is like looking through a window and having the ability to interact with the furniture in the room. Or maybe even more it’s like entering a room of one theme or purpose and having the unique pleasure of pulling up information with the whim that requested it.

There are not enough significant differences between the races to actively socially engineer their places and stations in civilization. There are also not enough differences between the sexes to delegate their roles in society by way of ratios and rules. That is not to say, however that people ought not socialize their child in whichever way they see fit, but it is asserting, though, that a public system that is neither abused by ambitious demagogues nor an effective specializing tool ought not be regarded as anything but a system that provides the most basic tool, at least, to seize the most basic of opportunities across the marketplace. Citizens can make informed decisions regarding their (path) desired station in life without being subjected to ‘equity’ training. Respect others, indeed. Give them things they want because they want them, let us ruminate on it.

The beginner stations are certainly always low in multiple regards, but that is the way of the corporate ladder. (In the fast food world, managers emerge from low positions. Yet, political activists insist that those who take such jobs have not upward mobility. Those who don't speak English or know basic accounting necessary math would certainly be in a precarious position. That is unless he or she takes advantage of the public adult schools, community college, practical asset certification courses and online courses.) The ladder is meant to be climbed, both up and down and sideways. Contacts are such that the duties of the individual are listed exactly. His or her hours worked, at leisure, on-call and so forth with the specified terms of whatever station. The critical element of immobility in the corporate ladder has everything to do with the education of the individual and how his or her inherited traits and socialized/acculturated choices, effectively known as his or her will, are made apparent in the workplace. (That said, the surplus of superiorly educated and acculturated, knowledgeable of the gestures and idiosyncrasies of the society at large and the corporate culture.) The human (I refrain from defining the individual beyond his tag: citizen, subject, clan member, etc. Because I foresee a new relationship forming between the person and his or her sovereign.) Within the corporate world the human is prescribed his place, where he is, at least, a coworker. His rights within the space are the same as for anyone else. Except, certain privileges are awarded to those who are higher up in the hierarchy.

(And yet! I am absolutely opposed to the idea of forced restructuring. I am even opposed to incentivized restructuring. The use of any public fund for the purpose of reducing the competitiveness of the corporation in question is an incorrect use of public funds. Education could use some more funding. Roads and critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, unfunded liabilities like pensions and welfare and social security funds (federal paternalism in the works) could use some funding. (Unfunded liabilities could use some restructuring- because you can shift the placement of money making great change, principle of the flow of capital, development follows money and vice versa. Perhaps we should allocate our funds differently, rather than restructure our society based on a utopia of outright equality. That doesn't mean though that we should not strive for a more equitable society; toward a proportionately diverse workforce, but never, never ever, should the workforce be forcibly engineered to be more diverse in arbitrary ways, as we now can confidently claim that human races are just as capable as any other in virtually every way, so that we can also assert that the skills and capabilities of each member of society. Per the proportions of any and all races within a field of work, so too ought our employers consciously weigh his or her business agendas against the social tides of boycott liberalism: the modern moral economy.

You cannot forgo a superior candidate, especially on a number of occasions, and be the best corporation you could be. The corporation must be diverse only with respect to covering the tasks required of any administrative body: accountants, customer service, salespersons, etc.

You can forgo the superior candidate if you make up positions like diversity officer whose role is as a placeholder to hold back the ire of restless mediocrity.

The development of the modern corporation is intimately tied to the American railroad, oil, cable/wire, auto industries as well as European state-sponsored corporations like the Dutch, French or English East India Companies.

The corporate structure is such that workers with specific skills, top to bottom, ensure the healthy and efficient use of resources such as capital and time.

The concept of time is irreversibly made practical to fit within the lines of the corporate capability to outpace demand.

Yet, the American corporation is something entirely different. Something unique to history.

I do not intend to berate or undermine the corporate structure. Indeed, I see the corporate era of human organization as a spectacular one. There are reasons to reprimand certain corporations and government collaborators, but none worth harping on in this work that would contribute to the comparisons I offer. Aye, serving as a structural analysis of human organization this work compares the efficiency of the corporate era organization, its negotiated nature and the trade-offs made in the effort of human advancement toward a stable world of surplus- the utopia of the corporate body. Corporate body, indeed. Many organizations lend themselves to the analogy of a body. The body, mind and soul of a corporation is replete with instruments like organs and antibodies. The mind can be austere, risky, assertive and so forth, and fluctuate between emotions and behaviors just like the human does. Corporations are discussed in terms of healthiness. Their vitality is measured by lists of various figures intended to gauge profits, investments, cash flow and so forth so that the body and mind may act as one singular entity, harmoniously. Viruses and germs try to infiltrate the semi-permeable dermis of the corporation. Mechanisms within the corporation are triggered to fight against the attacks (cyber, a new development in the digital era sub-imposed afoot the corporate structure era).

The corporation is interestingly tied to the subsidiary structure as well. Like a citizen who is involved with an organization that brings other individuals together for one common purpose, the corporate, trust, subsidiary system buffers the tasks of a corporation to achieve maximized efficiency in performing the task it is assigned. That is, corporations are just as specialized as humans are in capitalism. Marx’s alienation theory is inapplicable to the corporation.

The serfs/peasants/subjects organized into families. As one unit of micro-managemed people, they rented a tract of land from the sovereign to till the land. They paid a rent to the sovereign. Each member of the family had a role to fill. The family structure was such that the wife managed the economy of the household and manufactured clothes and textiles. The man tilled the land. The daughter assisted the mother. The boy shepherded the livestock.

Family size was managed by natural forces like nutritional intake (farm yields) and humanly desires like sex drive and jealousy.

I am a dabbler of tasks, a dilettante of subjects, a friend of parties and an altogether extreme feelings kind of guy. I go through highs and lows. I love and hate. But altogether, I’m described as ‘chill.’ Or at least at some points I have been.

I am my very own contrarian. Everything I utter must be corrected… and

(If that typo is to fuck with me. I swear. Duck. Fuck!) the same on and on.

Would if she was/is an agent... ? She's probably the most beautiful person I've met. Her demeanor was stupendously austere. In fact, it was her straight back shoulders and unexpectedly familiar humor that brook what quickly became a friendship.

I fell for a women, I think. I'm never sure. They say you'll know, but I am still unable to define love. Is it a deity? If so, it is a spiteful deity. It gives and takes for humor’s sake. We receive love of many degrees daily by countless peoples and things, but none are as painstakingly rye as the love for a woman.

Previously, she flickered as an oasis of hope and love. Now a year apart, she appears only as a distant mirage in a place where the nectre of happiness already flows heavily. I finally feel free from the hopelessness associated with loving or hating her.

It took having another lover to uncover the truest understanding of my feelings toward her. I tried to believe that the new lover was a viable partner for the remainder of my days in college. To do so, I tried to turn a blind eye from her imperfections. But more than simple failings, she possessed the most disturbing of dispositions I have had the displeasure of associating myself with. She is selfish and ignorant of it. She is easy. She abuses synthetic drugs. She abuses natural drugs. She talks like a valley girl with dementia. Stop. The cruelty of my descriptions of her increase rapidly whenever the first thought’s spiteful image screams in my head. She is not for me just as she is not for me.

I have realized a dozen emotions, but none as tranquilizing as love and hate. On either pole, I am a shivering dog. But somewhere in-between all seems to carry on.

For me personally, there are few differences between love and hate. In my new lover I have rediscovered the ailments of both, which are one in the same. In rethinking my short time with her I realize the petty ridiculousness of my actions then. I was a coward. I was a thief. I am regretful for it. That said, I am grateful that we did not try to make it work. Just as with the new, now old lover, I must keep my distance and hope that the feelings she experiences pale in comparison to mine. I fear her body is dispensable, but her life invaluable. I walk away. So I share a moment of thanks. Thank you for showing me the pettiness of my actions. Thank you for the short term happiness.

Now, please, it is your turn to walk away.

Imagine if the US lost a major conflict. Would the peacemakers view American possessions as historically or traditionally theirs? Would the peacemakers fear a belligerent America so much that it is broken up into more manageable parts?

Conclusion: we are more likely to abide by conditions that benefit ourselves at a cost to others. The cost to us is sentimental. Its costs are spiritual rather than practical. If the terms of consent are not met, the secure life is risked. Insofar as they trust those who they contract with is another feature, but does not determine their immediate terms, which are ostensibly fair and enduring.

The simple logic, as alluring as it is too many among us, misleads those who ‘suffer’ iniquities in matters of material allocation. From genesis onward, God creates man in his image. God also created man’s means to exist. Yet, the means are subordinate to man, the pinnacle of creation. It is asked, why not create a repository of means, that is easily accessible to those who need it. The deer or bird that evades the hand of man must, then, (the logic goes) also be an intended result of the ‘mean’s’ consequence. Energy is created. Man must, therefore, burn the energies he obtains. He is challenged to chase his means, ever, to exist: to suffer the chase and revel in the bounty. That is all to say, the means of life’s existence, basic amenities, must be found, stalked and killed/harvested. If it is not chased, it opens the confines of society to the vices of impiety. Thus, again, the chase brings about virtues. Extended revelry without pride in its capture brings about vices. Purpose is not in the end. Purpose is discovered in the pursuit of means.

Basic amenities ought to be provided by the collective if the cost is shared within the bounds of reason. Namely, the means to exist fall short in providing purpose for the man who is born into a world of abundance. Yes?

(combating the incentive to live argument- the bones of obligatory//voluntary labor systems)

Convincing democratic societies to war is less necessary today than it was in the past. Over time, wartime legislation and odes to safety and defense have made war accessible to the President without consent from Congress, i.e. the People.

I imagine that in the beginning the American Republic continued to grow… It does. Jefferson purchased Louisiana. The military accompanied by westering hopefuls waged a series of wars against the natives who occupied the land.

But it is an efficiency! We reign over too large an expanse of land, water and space to tie our Commander in Chief to the throes of bureaucracy, democracy, and dare I say, Justice!

In a country so absolutely repulsed by the idea of Empire, but so positively charged by the benefits of Imperium, it does not at all confuse me that the People are not only invigorated by conquest, Imperium and Empire, but completely ADDICTED to it!

To lose an inch of power is to lose… what? Profits? The multinational corporations are only concerned with the state of the world’s governance insofar as order IS. In whatever form it takes, it appreciates the inducement of secure bonds, currencies and profits, e.g. more consumers, cheap laborers, and consummately with any land, the special resources extracted from it. Therefore, the government’s principle corporate task is to maintain open markets. As for the People’s interests in this matter of open markets, it is the government's principle task to maintain corporation’s interests in the Nation: to realize the people’s capacity to fulfill the administrative side of the business, embrace the products of the corporations and, most importantly, destroy any remnant of any corporation that betrays, belies, or divests in the People. Herein lies the basic conundrum facing the People of the United States: grant the military and its head, the President and his/her executive branch, the power to repress our enemies (factional armies at this time), dissuade coalition forces from forming against us and crush any corporate powers from dissenting. The reasons are persuasive, but the consequences are, shall I say, SAD. The alternative is what so many feel viscerally afraid of, the loss of power. The power to repress, dissuade and crush.

Imperium denotes legal conformity and Empire denotes direct or indirect control of an abnormally large array of area/nation/city/etc..

There are two kinds of imperial falls: The euphoric rise and cataclysmic fall of burgeoning empire and the slow and piecemeal rise and fall of empire.

Napoleon’s France: a conquest and rapid fall- not an empire

The demise of empires everywhere of any time lead back to the excessive use, belief in, and reliance on their principle advantages- relative to their competitors.

Empires overextend themselves beyond what is rational.

Empires spend too much on defense to control its extended domain.

Empire’s military options dwindle over time- either others outmaneuver, outnumber, or out-tech their weapon systems.

Imperial law is deligitmated by internal fissures- political, economic or social.

Science is an art. A majestic piecing of clues meticulously measured to form mosaics of truths, virtues and morals. The shape of each clue- long, short, bulky- determines the placement of each piece. As a whole, the image is breathtaking. Where shapes collide and the artist angers, whole societies are depicted. The clash of colors fade into the pool of purple, blue, green and red refracting glass shards and cement. Whole civilizations are justified, ratified and ruined by the majority response to the mosaic. Ends are formed.

Elections brought Hitler, Mussolini, Teddy Roosevelt (second term), Andrew Jackson…

Initially, I understand the realist notion of anarchy and cooperability/interdependence, the notions born from the prisoner’s dilemma experiment…

If man is prone to peace, if so many will it, then how is it that war pervades? If the world were entirely democratic, would it be a world without war?

War is an expediency of a state in need of something, where that, thing/object of desire is viewed as a necessity. That is, a passion is converted into a life restraining or life invigorating product. When war begins to reek of flesh, civil society too begins to reek. Civilization crashes to the abyss of primordial senselessness- a world of lawlessness, and if not lawlessness, then ramshackle laws that are viewed as optional, are not obeyed and not enforced. Basic amenities become precious. Those who are willing to thrust themselves into entrepreneurial advancement, skim their fellowman for profits.(Taiwan during PRC v. CDR split) Even in times of horror, men get rich. (in civil society the rich get richer; in such bottoms as those that wreak (the above outlined) havoc, the rich lose their heads!) But queue the dissatisfaction among those who obey the order that civil cordiality and sympathy brought them prior to war- conformity to traditions coupled with passionless and loveless bureaucracy! This dissatisfaction rings disaffection of their fellow citizen; it reminds them of the state of nature! After a few lowly steps toward vigilantism (American civil unrest), the society is brought to order by a firmer, more cruel hand of law! (Duerte of the Philippines) (Reconstruction South) (Afghanistan)

The technology is capable of registering with each eye and ear a particular message and image- “hearing two different things.” This creates a being of multiplicity and (inherently) duplicity.

It is strange enough for a man to envisage an animal or waterfall he saw 3 years ago. When he ponders beyond those years and only rarely dwells, as a reflection, in those waters, he is confused by the latest projection in the water. Ripping currents and tweeting birds make up the entire experience. It is a calming, but exciting scene.

I was with a woman. We went to a sporting event. My whole family was there plus a few family friends. No one ever met this woman. I was giddy to bring her.

We sat down in the bleachers and there was a jovial mood around. People were curious about the woman, but not interested enough to prod about it (in reality they would have). I never introduced her and we just enjoyed the event. I recall embracing her warmly and bringing my cheek to hers. We held each other snugly while my heart fluttered.

We left. We were just about to go up to my apartment, but she took my hand and curled it tight to her side (oblique). She latticed her fingers with mine and said, "you are very sweet, but I'm not feeling this. I'm not going up there with you and we should stop this." I was shocked. Why? Everything was going so well. We were smiling, embracing and connecting, what happened? I accepted the situation and replied only by action, no words. I released her hand slowly and backed away. I went up to the empty apartment. I thought, was it because I didn't introduce her? I answered myself, no, it must of been chemistry. We didn't mix. She felt off and so it was reasonable for her to stop the false appearance of connection before I was far more invested. A pain like this is dull. Much less taxing than the love all strung out, devastated, beguiled and displaced.

My dreams offer glimpses of possibilities. I feel the results of the events they depict. I dread their becoming in reality, but I am almost prepared for them via these dreams. Amazing.

I entered a hotel room and a woman was there wearing black leggings. She just assumes position in a sexy repose. I pounce. Immediately I am struck with the stimulatory feeling of immense pleasure. But something other than my subconscious came to mind imploring that I stop. I imagine it was sleeping me talking to dreaming me. I told myself not to soil my undergarments. It was reason enough for my dream self to relinquish control over the dream to my conscious self. I halted the sexual affair just before climax. And so, I have experienced a so-called lucid dream. Recognition of the dream while dreaming and controlling it, is the defining feature of a lucid dream. I would prefer to fly, but wallah. A successful undergarment rescue mission is fine enough.

Once again my heart pangs, but for what I don't know. With no more than an ache, so subtle, it would pass as stress, but I fear it is a calling from the divine.

I am afraid that the time has come for me to produce. But with a field, I have sown no more than rocks and stakes. I claim the place, yet bear no fruit. This is distressing to me and my leaser. I must pay rent soon and I have nothing to pay.

I look at the Rousseau doctrine and figure I suffer from deficiencies in the realm of self-preservation and vanity. I am neither securing the means to survive, nor excelling in my duties to warrant vanity. The downright truth is that I have failed for 27 years.

I have a list of accomplishments that are meaningless to me. I grow surprised often about how much people respect higher education. I did not earn my degrees. I worked minimally. I feel no satisfaction in having received those degrees.

Money, love, family and ambition. The last is coercing me it seems by way of this pang in my chest. I am moved to act according to its drive. I know not where it wants me to go precisely, but I shall move, nonetheless, and hope that this eases my aching heart.

It is precisely the problem of good and evil and their origins that I find humorous. The problem of original sin in the creation story of the Christian tradition suggests that man was once good and because of his transgressions in the Kingdom on high he was banished to a world that exudes his imperfectness and attach to that his evil. The first person to look to in arguing this point is Saint Augustine. Man is inherently bad due to his divine transgression. His only source of grace or rather of good is drawn from his creator God and who with grace shows the way to goodness. Like Martin Luther later, Augustine does not believe that you have much of a choice. There is only one God and one way to please him and whatever you do to please him is it a pitiful display and you must supplicate. People get wrapped up in the idea that evil and God are contradictory. In the judeo Christian Islamic cosmologie yes God is perfect God is all good. So why would there be a God whose all good and a people who contradict him so frequently? And here I am reading the ancients of Greek antiquity Plutarch specifically and his idea his Cosmogeny is one that separates existence into the dyad. There is the eternal soul which is both created an uncreated per platonic tradition. There is eternally a disorderly assemblage of matter which is organized by God. That disorderly matter is man's soul which is inherently chaotic and irrational. The creation and generation of the physical world is due to that creator God. The God is apparently all good his intentions that is are abundantly fruitful I suppose,, but man's inherent eternal irrationality in tendency towards irrationality and disorder get the better of this world, but yet he exists and it is by the use of his intelligence that he comprehends the beauty and the grace in the creation… In fact Plutarch calls the soul "disorderly and maleficent." Therefore, it is the goodness of the God that brings order and goodness and that the soul of man eternal is the source of all evil.

What is funny is how it could be reconciled, the existence of evil by a flick of the mind. If one tradition be wrong why can't another not also be wrong. Undertake the investigation of the natural world as well as the soul of man, as he might say, so that in this existence you share with us is one of productivity, adventure and love.

I am a rambler. When I write by the way of my stream consciousness it spills out like a spool of tweed gone haywire. From ceiling to floor, bestrewn all around. Upon the sight of such a thing it seems rather unintelligible. Chaotic even. Yet unless cut, from beginning to end it all leads back to the same place.

The shadow can be more impressive than the object that casts it.

Without light or the object, there can be no shadow.

You can chop at a tree's shadow at 12, 3 and 6. Never will it do anything, but dig useless holes in the ground anear.

The world is made of base elements constructed to fit intelligibly together. While prone to randomness and chaos, a world of order and predictability exists. The undeniable facts of forms beyond, within and on our bodies, breaks through the moment consistently, yet erratically, and constantly, living, dying, lived and dead. To see the world from the outside in, it breaks the mind's eye to a boom.

He attempted to say to himself, 'don't get ahead of yourself,' but all he could mutter was, "Eskatcha." For a minute he repeated the jumble softly to himself, "eskatcha, eskatcha, eskatcha…" There is nothing profound in the scramble of mind and mistake. Yet the randomness and order here appear undeniably, nonetheless. He can neither deny the existence of the utterance, nor the unpredictability of it's coming about. It is ordered, unintelligible by any tenable accounts, random, but predictable at large, though at a low ratio in the sane of mind and at a high ratio for the insane of mind. He mutters it one last time, so as to never forget it, "eskatcha." And he went on starring out his window to the rain and cloud cover.

Strange, he thought, how clouds can bring so much darkness and be so bright. Refraction they call it. A screen that diffuses the light about at a wider angle. The source is still the sun, but I must only have been born yesterday to know it. What of that baby born in darkness? What of a child who's never seen the blue skies and golden sun? Surely he exists. But again, no mind be paid again to this. What of it brings fruit? None of it. He shrugs his shoulders and again peers outside. A little tweeting bird shakes its feathers of the heavy droplets upon him, hops, and flies away.

Another year. Boy! Another year. Yes, indeed, it is once again late in the year that will never be. I lived it fruitlessly. I ventured forth to the known of dullards and quacks. I am no less among them as I am one of them! What a fool. To think that life will gift the energy of the sun to one minced heart. Roaming like a coward whose faith in chance has grown far too fanciful, he now finds it appropriate to pray! From godless to godless. For God gives no break to the broken and depraved. Only to the dietress of fortune will he find any shred of dignity. He's gone beyond the pale of respectable. He is a fake. He is an ugly priest of the known and common. We are the culmination of him and I. The scum of cum, dust and angst spun together in one amalgamation of sloven character and sheisty intention. He shall tally forth. I shall sally again. We will reconvene in one year's time.

The theory of relativity makes as misguided an argument as those who say that one's place on Earth determines the size of the sun. No one says this of course, because it is understood that no matter the perspective of the observer, an object is nevertheless in one place at one time possessing a set of properties and characteristics that are inherent to it, expressed at that place and in that time, as it is, regardless of the observer's perception of it. Only the observer's experience of the object may differ. When it differs, it is not because the properties of the object change, but that the observational capacity of the observer differs. Immanently, there is no relative or contingent existence of the object. The object need not the observer to exist. Therefore, separate from perception and experience, the object is nonetheless constantly existing. Even if the object changes because of some interaction with other objects or, perhaps, because of some internal process of change, including mutation -the universe is a mutating organism- and aging (degeneration and entropy), there is no action of the observer, if just an observer, that can alter the object's properties or processes of change. Therefore, there is no relativity with respect to the existence of objects or observers. Since, an observer is himself an object, too. Albeit, the process of atropy is much faster in a man than in an object like the sun, but the same principle applies. The individual is immanently the same regardless of whether the observer perceives it or not. A man a mile away is a speck. He is not smaller or larger. He sees the sun and moon from his vantage point, but the sun and moon are not bigger or smaller, or relatively different, between he and I, because of our vantage points. Ultimately, there are properties and processes inherent to the thing, its matter, that are irreducible and irreplaceable, regardless of our experience of it. So, even though light travels at a speed (which I imagine is altered by objects or gasses in space) which reaches two differently distanced places at two different times, there still is no relativity in the passage of time. Only the perspective of it changes. The light exists. The object which emanated it exists. The two destinations exist. The observers at the two destinations exist. The processes internal to each and every component that exists is not altered by chance of its location in space. Only an experience of that which exists can change. Time, as it is intelligibly told now, ticks sequentially, in a linear beat forward. Nothing can change the linear progression of time.

However, the interaction of objects and their properties may change their internal processes and their external expressions as experienced by sentient beings. Chemical interactions may hasten or elongate existence or change its expression, but the underlying progression of time is absolute. It is the benchmark which qualifies the hastening and the elongating of existence, divided by the imminent degradation of cells immanent to the object.

Relativity is a perspective with a physical and chemical basis that only affects experience. It does not affect immanence, or the benchmark finitude imminent to a particular material form or existence.

Suppose time was quantified and qualified by a process internal to man, but varied among individuals, like the number of heart beats per day or blinks of the eyes per day.

A man blinks only so many times in one period of light. Indeed, he blinks only when he is awake. Could we standardize the amount of times a human blinks in a period of light and create a system of social or economic organization in terms of the standard number of human blinks blinked per period of light? Sure. Every human eye is more than less the same. However, some eyes and eyelids are genetically different. Some climates on Earth force inhabitants to blink more or less often. Eye color plays a role with respect to how sensitive an eye is to light. Therefore, there would be discrepancies with respect to the justification for the standard number of blinks blinked per period of light. Additionally, weather patterns require individuals to blink more or less often in order to protect their eyes from snow, rain, sand, dust or smoke. You could make a system that accommodated for this. It would be a strange system, but nonetheless a system based on a universal physical human process, blinking, which would produce a unified standard for the organization of people in a place for a purpose.

I come to ask: can a humanly designed measure of time change time itself? Of course not. But a system is emplaced. It is standardized. It is functional, though convoluted.

Thinking of a day in terms of blinks would certainly alter an individual's thought process, but again, nothing about that process, that subjective experience quantified by a physical phenomena immanent to life on earth, can alter the immanence of the sun's properties or its rays, which affect the experience of life on Earth.

Time is a continuum irrespective of its cause.

In a few plain words, the cause of the universe is disputed. However, the effect of, say, the sun on our world, our piece of the universe, is more than less undisputed. We measure the day by the orientation of Earth to the sun in the solar system set at a tilt, which dictates the day and night, meaning simply thay the place of the observer on Earth is emplaced in the light or away from the light generated from the sun. Time is not different on Mars, though the day and year are longer relative to Earth: 39.5 minutes and 687 days, respectively. How the day and the year breakdown is organized by mankind respective of the nature of light, darkness and seasons. Obviously, the experience of these factors differ across the planet: the saharan winter is much different than the siberian winter with respect to the length of the day and the climate. A winter may be shorter or longer and this greatly shapes the material interaction with the objects of the land, but again, the continuum of time remains the same. A rugged terrain may beat a human down over time and cause a shortened life, but time is not faster.

This is far too simple a point to drone on any longer.

“If the enemy leaves the door open, you must rush in.” (Sun Tzu, The Art of War 11.65)

Could I truly foresee a world of pocketed districts of primordial establishments: places where laws preserve the lavishness of human passions? No, sounds poultry. The pockets I speak of must be understood as metaphorical expressions of instinctual desires. How can a civil society embrace instincts AND be successful on a global stage? The industriousness of a society may bring it accumulation of wealth. If the stations that are undertaken can situate a progeny to explore more profitable trades/professions, then it is a civilization worth living in.

Fantasies of fair societies where all have secured access to necessities is not enough of a goal to ensure happiness. Mismanagement is the greatest fear of most who assess such a situation.

No, I prefer to order a society that embraces enough incivility, ordered disorder, to satisfy those enervating forces of civility.

In many ways our society is privately pursuing such pockets of ordered disorder. Video games allow fantasies of magi to become real and empowering. Others put a gun in our hands to KILL our enemies. Others give us a chance to reek havoc across cities, commit murder in the streets, hijack nice cars, fight fellow citizens, etc.. All is done so without an repercussion in the real world, but the one ticket of any action, the time expended in its indulgence.

Some argue that video games that allow such behavior implicitly condone the virtual actions as permissible real actions. Indeed, there are some members of our society who misunderstand the difference between reality and virtual reality.

The amount to which virtual reality is merging with reality is a utility, not a desecration.

The warmth of skin-to-skin contact is hardly comparable to eye-to-eye, virtually transmitted, contact. However, we must consider if all of humanity is capable of respecting contact, especially if his or her invitation is refused. The conflict inducing “no”, rejection, is an action which may cause a productive member to become a raging criminal.

What is better, prostitution or a machine and virtually induced pleasure of the same effect?

The virtue of one endeavor over another is self-evident.

If humanity is as sympathetic to his fellowman as some suggest, Rousseau for one, then how is it that democracy is capable of war? By the will of the People! To defend the values of the People! To determine the future of the People! Defense of liberty and justice take to the stage in a way that philosophers of civil society have tirelessly debated.

John Rawls argues that the foundation of civilization must be built upon equality. A just society, he says, is attained if the conditions of opportunity are such that any rational person would not mind being born into any household within the society. The government- by the People- is the agent of change toward this first principle.

John Stuart Mills argues that liberty be the foundation of a just civil society. The civilian must be protected from his fellowman’s attempts to arrest his liberties. Any use of the government- of the People- must be limited to the protection of each citizen’s right to own and operate his belongings without injury from his fellowman. Rawlsan reforms would undoubtedly count as an infringement upon the liberty of every citizen: the rich are restrained and the derelicts are unjustly confided with his charity, now welfare.

The distinguishing feature of each society is firstly concerned with utility.

Man requires food and drink.

Beside the wind-broken tent lay the lantern of yesterday's moon. Jesse’s shining beacon for the moonless night of a million stars. Where he caressed a bottle of gin and sang the songs of nature's gifts. Today, he awakes to a slap of a moist tent flap and a pounding head.

In the variances of morning welcomes, the cold of the earth’s floor met with the nods of plastic wrapped condensation… beats any coffee, tea or alarm. No worse or no better, the tent’s unhinged flaps dance and clap with the sweet songs of birds and chipmunks. There being no snooze button in nature, Jesse nonetheless ducks his crusted eyes and oily hair into his sleeping bag.

And as passerbys crunch the earth en route to civilization, Jesse whiddles apart his sluggish resolves. He kicks like a kid, swings his arms above his head, screeches for a stretch and throws his cover off.

Entirely flattened, the (tent’s) zipper requires a ginger touch. A patience, that a cold body and swirled mind tend not to tolerate. Differing to jitters, he slowly, and with a few mumbled curses, eventually breaches the exit like a calf does his mother's womb. Shivering like a calf born to a frozen pasture, he coughs a yawn, wipes away his sleep and instinctively draws near his morning's nectar.

No, the working conditions enjoyed by corporate employees are far from enjoyable. A case for the occasional workplace drama spouts, but none too captivating. The corporate life is quiet, comfortable and respectable.

The suit, tie and briefcase are probably the most deceptive elements of the people who don them. Their lives are calculated with sure futures and definite ends. To live out respectable lives, indeed.

Mothers and the fathers work side-by-side as their children are cared to by specialists with certifications and degrees in child development, education, psychology and team-building. Around 5 or 6 pm, every day, the child is met with a greeting from their parents, their rightful owners. The nuclear family engages in conversation around the dinner-table. The other nuclear family is planted in front of a television or computer screen, watching the game or the show, in silence.

On the weekends, the family adventures in sports, hikes and shopping. The child is sent off to socialize with friends. The parents dabble in alcoholism, “tasting” or dabs in weed sewn circles. The parents' vices are condoned by society as necessary outlets to the mountain of stress that bureaucratic pressures impose.

The blue collar job is short, brutish and dangerous. The members are prone to prejudice, short-thoughts and religion. The conditions of blue-collar labor are protected, measured and respectable.

If war becomes pleasant or tolerable even, war is surely to break.

If war is freshly experienced, the ghosts of perished souls push the pluralities in favor of peace.

If war is long passed, the fervor of discontent among the pluralities incites the election of forgetful leaders.

When total war comes, lands are leveled, persons displaced, souls lost.

In the aftermath of war, egalitarianism is never so nearly achievable.

But equally so very fragile.

They cite the ineffectiveness of missile strikes. You infer we need more. More bombs the better. The rate of bombardment must be over whelming. We must then "carpet bomb them", "kill their families", "XX". That's a promise of blood for blood, consent now to the will as represented by fear, a natural response we humans have, reason. We are not beasts, because our reason and assemblage of flesh and bones has afforded us a great advantage over our controlled wildlife refuges. We can maintain their existence to best fit our own. Even, many efforts have been made in earnest by government authorities and a few modest regiments of volunteers. The counter to counter to counter is exquisitely rash and dash. The results predictably poor for the people who are no longer the towns butcher. The large quantities of meats sold on counters in markets all around the world is stupendous and a bit paradoxical. That is, have you ever heard someone say, "I like to try foods", but their is always something they are not willing to eat. They know the function of the flesh they eat- usually well cooked and safe= and that, by the nature of the meat and the absolutely definitive desires of the human taste buds. The fact that food is made in so many ways requires a moment of endearment to the earth. The salt, the pepper, they come from the earth. The water I drink, it is here on earth. I have found a way to purify it and make it safe from the contaminations, nature made- never random, and never predetermined. The interaction between the life on earth and the earth itself is in how the slightly shifting surface, boiling core , position in orbit of the sun- is it like a centrifugal force? The sun, I mean- the stability of the sun as we know it, and the still mind boggling premise of the atmosphere. The fact that man cannot breath the components of the space outside the atmosphere. Having to do with what we call 'gravity' maintains heat, while things on earth consume it.

The earth is an organism. Planets are living beings insofar as they have a core that is protected and nourished by the ameliorated by a atmosphere -how is this possible? A barrier, I mean- How many planets vs. how many humans exist? There are galaxies as far as the mind can conceive and about as limited to the eyes and brains of one kind of being. We cling to each other for the need of protection. Like a tribe. We band together to ward off attackers of our lives, our wealth, and our property.

We petition for more, and find the economization of flesh. We condone and even extol the cultivation of flesh, any flesh that is not human that is. The social dominance over the other species. We are now the 'reasonable ones. In a world of comfort, what good does it do you? You live with only a fringe thought of being killed by your fellowman. Only, now you fear the rapist, the psychopath killer, the gang member, the estranged loser and coward, the professional soldier- it's what the enlistment entails. Death, I mean.

The pyramid exists and is entirely a construction by the widely held philosophy that promulgates the divinity in every soul; beyond the platonic atom to the dissolution of body to the vapor around us.

Take a scenario where no other beings on earth existed, would we cultivate our fellowman? The human consumes his fellow being for the sustenance of his own self. This is natural. In our culture it is deemed unfit for daily life. The fear of being shot or speared for someone else's meal is a haunting one. The paranoid schizophrenia is paralyzed by it. Much like our society. In its own way, society perpetuates the indulgence in instinctual and primeval feelings not even remotely associated with civility and righteousness. The demeanor of a society in the wild is aware of only a few dangers: :"lions, tigers, bears," poisonous/ deadly animals, rodents, insects and reptiles our ancestors have taught us to beat, outwit, or destroy. Despite the extent of the man's capacity to do any one of those things, he chooses instead not to. The people of the earth require food, in fact, the entire surface is a canvas of an infinity of years . It's face can change, but it's substance and material will be the same- until it is not. Planets and stars explode and rupture. They react poorly to large meteorites. How many meteorites currently hover around our solar system alone? -What minerals compose the asteroids we have received?-

I cannot say I slept well when I dreamt my father passed. After a long day of traveling with minimal sleep, I managed a 9-hour sleep. It was exactly what I needed to rejuvenate my mind back to health. The holiday season of 10 days was full of alcohol, cookies and long nights. Last night was needed, but the dream was not desired.

I was sitting around my family dinner table. I was accompanied by the usual crew of Mom, Rick, Hannah, Sam and Will. I believe some extended family were there too, but perhaps only in mind, not envisaged. I enter the scene mid-dinner.

All is going as it should until it is pointed out to me that dad is not there. Someone asks me, "do you know where your father is?" I reply, "why, I do not. Is he going to be here soon?" The faces around the room grimace. A tight stich ripped in the middle of the table. I realize the air is tight, but everyone seems nevertheless calm. I suppose they only worry about my reaction to the coming news. Gently, Mom says, "your father passed two days ago." My eyes widened. My head jerked left to right. I scanned the room in a desperate attempt to find dad out of the thin tight air. But nothing came of it. I stood up to catch yet another vantage point of the room. Again, no luck. With haste I marched to my parents bedroom to find dad. I thought, perhaps he is in bed and that this is a joke. It was not. He was dead.

I thought immediately to the last time I saw him. I hoped that we enjoyed a happy exchange. In that moment I wished that nothing about our exchange could nag at me until my time's end. I could not find any such thing and yet my gut wrenched and I felt sick.

I truly saw my father dead. I faced his passing and the shock, denial and acceptance. What a tragic way to end my holiday.

I admit that I have been checking my parent's room for life lately. I arrive and shout through the house, "anyone home?!" If there is no car to indicate occupancy, silence is appropriate. Otherwise, I pray for a reply. In either case, I check the house for people and things. When I enter my parent's room I set my mind right to see anything, including a breathless parent.

I see that time is a ruthless land baron and rents are due. I see my parents aging and coping the best they can. The tides of aged shuffling and aching bones wrack their days now. We have entered a new era.

My father is not doing well. He is unhealthy. He is battered up and shaken down. He is depressed and anxious. Once an ox and now a lizard, he is laid up and embittered.

I have been getting my mind right to accept whatever fate may befall this family. In doing so I attempt to hide and repress the way he makes me squirm at times. The way he thinks and the way he talks gets to me. I have no desire to feel this way. Annoyed. I take a few deep breaths and try to release the tension I feel. I try to simplify the moment. I reconcile in me with a shout from my inner goodness, "PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ENJOY YOUR TIME WITH HIM! PLEASE LET GO OF ANY ILL WILL AND ANGST! LOVE HIM AND LET HIM KNOW IT!" I plea with my body just so. Like clockwork, the conflict within me arises and falls. It comes so naturally and I hate it. I love the man and can't afford to let my body win my time with him.

Last night, in dream, I accepted the death of my father. I mourned and I cried. I do not wish to experience the news again. But my mind prepares me. He is sick and broken down. His time may come in a few days or a few decades. And yet, it seems so obvious that the window of time is not so large. LIFE and death, the pillars of normalcy and absolution.

It all ends.

I weep with my hands clasped, instinctually, in prayer. I am shocked again by the rudiments of nature's bore. In the face of life and to death I tremble. For what is coming is daunting, indeed, but what I do here is just as awful. The one and only life I could know is here, now and passing. Ticking ticking, humming humming, gnawing gnawing… we choose for ourselves the freedom of our life in the prison of our senses. We choose these things in search for meaning. In duty we cling to earthly things. In sacrifice we give ourselves to earthly things. In any feeling, thought, action or dream we… do this thing we call life. We get one chance and in it many more. GOD, I love life and I love whatever you are. For what I am is a vessel of you. I try. Oh, how hard I try to be the best that I can be. Yet I have vices and they bite at me.

In truth, if I were to walk the streets as I feel, I'd be forced to carry my bowels in place, for my belly has been ripped open. I do it to myself and I know why. I am, naturally, who I have been. And I'm not sure changing matters all that much. As long as I strive to be marginally good, perhaps I will BE good. I can only try. The judgement is not mine.

But I hope my family's souls shall rest now and forever. Yes. That is what I wish for. Not rest in death. No. But exuberance in life and tranquility in death.

Yes, LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE. Sally forth!

I see sown a seed in fertile ground set to grow. With a little light it will surely burst through the soil to greet the world. And when it does, so too will a cold dark night cast upon it a sheet of ice. Up at last, but condemned to choke and wilt. Alas...

The relativist, pyrrhonist and normativist are setting an intellectual floor that is rife with opportunity.

The relativist says that values are not universal and that judgement of right and wrong is wrong in itself. This academic view is weak and unsettling. It fallaciously claims that there is absolutely no absolute. Yet, people flock to the idea that maybe right and wrong are not transcendental edicts. No, the relativist says, right and wrong are particular. But which particular? (That one! No, that one! All of them? No, none of them and all of them! Ok, but would if they find value in killing you? What they value is theirs, but need not be mine! You can coexist? Yes! How? By invoking my humanity! They see you as a threat to their civilization. I am not! Clearly, but they still want to kill you. But I am not a threat! Clearly, but they still want to kill you. But I just want to help! Clearly, but they still want to kill you. They will come to see it my way! Clearly… good luck.)

It is local! They say. Then the local is right? Then conventional is right, particularly but not totally. Absolutely nothing is universal. Yikes.

The pyrrhonist says that subjective experience is truth and only the individual living under similar circumstances can know that truth. So, truth is not objective. Truth is a matter of subjective experience. One's claim to truth is absolute and unalterable no matter how alien it is to others' claims or to material measurements. Truth is atomized, diffuse and particular.

The discourse ends in stalemate, because we have no shared epistemic foundation to validate each other's claim, especially when we disagree about what we see, hear, touch, etc. Therefore, truth has nowhere to go. But then again, truth is not the aim of this pyrrhonist discourse. Instead, it is an exchange of status or sentiment- the principal parts of cultural currency. In this regard, a "right to speak" on particular matters is circumstantial. Like an expert's authority of a subject, a right to speak is not universally recognized. Only the subject can know. There is no other means to truth, and really, many truths.

While the end is not a shared truth, there is at least an understanding of the participants' perspectives. However, a problem arises when actions are needed to be taken regarding the topic at hand. A pyrrhonist discourse is not equipped to build out a plan of action to solve a problem, because it fundamentally rejects the only agreeable content of this world: physically detectable and collectable phenomena per the scientific method.

The normativist claims that society pressed upon an 'other' a kind of self-alienation. They were socially imprisoned to live a certain way as subjects to convention. This convention restricted the outward performance of their selves. I'll note that in extreme cases, scientific language derived from objective studies were used to legitimize the captivity of people who did not meet conventions. These people were sometimes diagnosed as 'infirm', psychopathic or neurotic.

Scientists accept that previous science was bunk. Much of it but not all of it. Philosophers and scientists agree that science must be conducted ethically.

Some critics are emboldened by a favorable cultural climate, the normativist, who once decried the adverse effect of government sponsored normativity- convention legitimized by science or ritual- that wishes to establish rules and enact laws that create a new normativity designed by the 'other', i.e. themselves. They show a woefully similar disposition to resistance (those who feel alienated by the new normativity) that apparently caused their problem in the first place. What's more, the normativist believes that their perspective is more valuable than others'. In a pyrrhonist discourse, the normativist assumes that they have a monopoly on truth, breaking the stalemate and ending the problem of epistemic vacuity. A relativist-pyrrhonist-normativist, a basket of contradictions- believes that the values effused throughout history were wrong and replaceable. They believe that they hold the moral high ground as aliens to society past. They believe that they are the key to the epistemic problem in a relativist and pyrrhonist worldview. They angle to establish a dictatorship of their truth.

In all, to them, values are not universal, subjectivity is truth and normativity is a means to legitimately coerce behavioral changes in others. They argue that they are the source of legitimacy. They only need your authority now. The universities and now k-12 authorities sponsor activists who work to persuade the next generation to authorize their will.

Social convention is the cause of all evil. There is no transcendent good, only a transcendent evil.

I love it!

Meanwhile, the above groups of people have no problem claiming that they are scientifically validated. Of course, the only science they accept is that which is beneficial to their sensibility. This is the definition of ideology. You have the answers before ask any questions.

I digress…

If social convention is continuously attacked and people believe that mankind is not endowed with a transcendent will, then we are free to ignore the claim to any right that is socially fabricated. The human right to x is invalid, because it is a value isolated to the west, or not even that, it simply need not be a value or expectation anywhere to be null and void. Coercion in the name of ensuring that such invalid rights are inviolate is, one, a poor way to instill shame and honor among your peers and, two, an impossible system of order to enforce without hypocrisy eroding the authority.

The relativists should disagree with the normativists in the use of power to coerce others within the scope of one value system, but since they are, for now, united in their worldview (petty western bourgeois provincialism) then relativism merely devolves from academic skepticism into militant nihilism.

I never thought it possible for hypocrisy to be so far flung, for the pharisees to walk again and again and again upon this soil, but alas, they do! And they do so adorned with wreaths of peace. But their worldview requires that they persecute nonbelievers. Donned in the zealots's dress, these mystics of redress sow an intellectual field, but they know not what it produces.

It produces... a blank slate.

The whole argument is based on the presumption that nothing good transcends us.- only evil.

Therefore, we must build a just world ourselves. The presumption of natural law is wrong. We are not endowed by nature with anything. Human rights are the imposition of a victor nation in a transnational court made of countries who were funded by the victor. Additionally, those cosignees were themselves colonialists. Human rights doctrine is neocolonial and normativist.

Normativity is evil, then so is the one we push. No values are absolute, then neither are ours. Everything I say about this is neither right nor wrong because it's how I feel about it and that is my truth.

This hallow shell of hypocrisy and militarism is ripe for manipulation. They wish for bigger government to assist the masses. I can oblige them. They wish to expand governmental controls on the way we think and feel. I can oblige them. They wish to defend human rights and join in transnational efforts to reform the world. I can oblige them.

The socialists from the 1880s through the 1930s were brilliantly naive. These socialists will be just as naive. They think they can battle the beast (that they create). In fact, they think they can wield it. But isn't it funny how lofty goals with expanded powers lead to failure and disillusionment… with the promises of eden on earth they will shatter the hopes of those whose wills they crush. And while they will blame others for their failures, and they will do so long as people tolerate it, then… one day… they will be cast aside. Their ideas and their honor.

Who will pounce on the despair of the disillusioned masses?

What will come of this blank slate?

A monster who is hard-working, charismatic, emotionally intelligent and…

NOT ME.

I am far too moral.

I shall do everything in my power to destroy those who attempt to capitalize on the despairing masses.

I wish to see everyone love, be loved and grow.

Nationalism is a base. It is sowed in the earth. It is a seed not unlike God's word. It is bound by soil and nurtured to life by water, sun and care. Its magnificence is green and life-supporting. In a field of wheat, a man is surrounded by bread. In a field of nationalism, he is supported by the polis. It brings him security. He may rest easy. Blah.

If you relived your life exactly as it has been and exactly as it will be, eternally, would you approach life differently?

Friedrich Nietzsche called this the eternal recurrence.

Rather than face eternal bliss, damnation or karma-charged rebirth or nirvana, you would face the eternal reliving of your life. All of your suffering and joy must be relived, over and over again.

On the one hand, there's a hint of predeterminism that may stall the meaning of choice. A common phrase applied to this might be, "let fate decide."

On the other hand, choice is given new vigor. There is an urgency to prevail over the rut of the common or the drudgery of the terrible and to live in accordance with the means and ways that bring you peace, joy and adventure.

With eternal recurrence at stake, suffering never ends and unhappiness never ceases, because there is no real death and so there is no real end. Conversely, if you will have it, then peace, joy and adventure are eternally yours.

The key takeaway is, be yourself to the nth degree.

A common critique is that a system allowing utter individuality is fundamentally contentious. Yes!

If for instance the suffering of others brings you joy, be sure that it will bring joy to another to take you out.

Is this not the way things are already?

The strong dominate the weak. The weak conglomerate and make rules to bind the strong.

Value systems and morals are biologically determined to be created. In terms of ways and means there are differences, but everyone is united in being biologically pre-calibrated to find joy and security in a system of rules and absolutes. The individual is going to find favor in the existing value system of morality or reject it in favor of his own or another's. In any case, individuals, groups and nations are all united in their conviction that their value system is superior because it beings them joy and security. The fact is that everyone feels this sensation as a result of living within the bounds of a system- again, of their own making or another. In no case, but of the rarest mutation, do human's lack a system of rules, values and morals that guide their life. There is absolutely no getting around the fundamental need to live a codified life.

The whole of the country stood bent-backed, half-standing, half-crouching, half-excited and half-petrified. The air was tranquil and at ease, undisturbed by the vibrating anticipations of hundreds of millions. Silence reigned where the oppression of talk had always ruled. Lungs, hearts and eyelids beat like drums to a moonlight serenade. Chewing, smacking and swallowing puttered out like the last ditch additions to an exam at its end.

The country took a deep breath together. They held the hands of whoever was near. They swore to their God that they would...

Moonlight rolled across the parted clouds in the sky.

The conscience is the organ of morality, because it's the arbiter of moral feelings like pity, disgust, sympathy and contropathy. When functioning, an individual moral agent is able to weigh the costs and benefits of an action (crudely put) against the self-imposed choice with a temporary, but perchance eternal, infliction of guilt, or conversely, joy.

Like any organ in the human body, the conscience can become sickly and fail. This is often called sociopathy. It is not, however, a conscience caused ailment of the body. On the one hand, guilt becomes an affliction with physical manifestations like how stress beats slowly against the heart. On the other hand, joy becomes a radiating force of euphoria grounded is righteousness and significance. In either cases, the temporal world, the world of laws and interests, is not always rightly dictating to mankind what will invoke guilt or joy. The cause for guilt or joy is firstly personal and secondly interpersonal. It is not impossible for a moral agent to feel righteous and joyous absent company, but only at the expense of truth. Since the truth is, never is the duct of mankind's conscience ever to sleep. Therefore, it will never stop oscillating between the feelings. An agent may remove information of other's provocative experiences, but the creep of the truth that suffering persists manifests an awful form of guilt, which is malignant. It manifests in civilizations of abundance and security in the form of malaise and energetic bursts of righteousness feeling. The pedigree of suffering that provokes the conscience to work, to secrete, is not tied to truth, nor to a worldly scale of similar or worse events. Mankind thinks that hay is before him is the cataclysm. To act is to be moral. The truth is not required to feel joy. Indeed, even to feel joy that mimics the satisfaction of saving helpless lives from monsters. Any ancillary enjoyment, worldly and interpersonal as it is, from the honor of acknowledgement in righteous action may inflict another form of guilt, imposter syndrome. Or worse, it may swindle the conscience from its most basic function by imposing an egotistical premium on the joy of pride. The wise men say that no man can be so proud as not do what is righteous, however small the action is.

What is morality founded on? One, a functioning conscience. Two, the memory to reflect. Three, the reason to reflect. Four, the guesswork of rationalizing the links of causality between action and the conscience reaction to the action. Five, minimizing the occurrence of deviation from conscience causality and maximizing accord with outcomes that elicit joy more often than guilt, or more joy than guilt simultaneously.

The enlightened conscience is both an antecedent to universal morality and an impossibility. Absolute truth is required and it is not attainable. That does not preclude the existence of morality. It merely limits its applicability. From the personal to the interpersonal, a moral system based on the five steps on moral construction can be a system- a culture of a moral action. That culture of moral action will be tied to the societal purpose of cooperability and welfare building, but they are not on par with morality per say. Social and cultural rules are not universally righteous. That is, they are not yet universal.

Moral feeling is objective, but what is done in response to the pathology, is not universal. That bears true.

Fidelity, honesty and integrity are commodious and favorable to cooperation, the bedrock of civilization. This can be limited though. Cooperation to the point of self sacrifice must require a choice, otherwise the satisfaction with respect to what is built by unwilled cooperation is unenduring. Mankind is hardwired to be discontented. This bears true.

The first imperative is to tolerate outsiders insofar as they do not intervene in the affairs of insiders.

I have never been more productive in all my life. I am sober during the day and I get up at a reasonably early hour, daily. I regiment my days with a list of tasks that I set out to accomplish by the day's end. With every finished task I "X" the box I drew next to it. I have grown more accountable for my actions.

The wellspring of a big day begins with the rising of the sun. I think about what I want to accomplish and how I might accomplish it. I want to have as high of a completion rate as possible, but I also can't fool myself. If I make the majority of my tasks trivial tasks, then I risk making the tasker agenda frivolous. That would betray the purpose: make meaningful progress incrementally.

Writing this has helped calm me down a little. You see, I have impressed myself this month. I have done more this week than in probably any previous month on record. But a new unmarked task is taking more time than I had planned for.

I downloaded the phone application "Bumble" for the fifth time. I never enjoyed my previous experiences with the app. I might meet a few people, but never were they women who I admired.

One Bumble product was a woman who had "the crazy eyes." When she looked at me it felt wrong. Like she had a knife in her hand tucked behind her back. I met up with her one too many times. She showed herself to be excessively emotional. I didn't want to break her heart, which I convinced myself would be my policy going forward. I declared that I will diligently end fruitless relationships as early as possible. In the end, this practice is beneficial for everyone.

Covid-19 has changed the dating app landscape. So many people are scared and lonely. It gives reason to doubt that whatever "connections" are made during quarantine may only be practical measures taken for human-inspired purposes. On the back of lust and sadness men and women will run to the other's arms. In no time at all post-quarantine, though, they will both look around, wide-eyed and scan for alternatives.

Maybe my satire is right and people are relaxing physical standards to find more spiritual connections? I doubt that those deeper (more soulful) connections will last. Our humanity will not change for extraordinary circumstances. Instead, what is and has been the nature of man will shine like never before.

I convict mankind of a double-faced nature. Or as is known by all and none, that we have a potential for both good and evil, great good and great evil. As a note, I know that I have always been inflicted with the bite of goodness.

I wish sometimes that I was swayed by evil. Only, I am so sensitive to the feelings of others that I risk profound disturbance by minor grievances. I am aggrieved by the faintest of ill-feeling in others; I sense it all over them and realize it in their hearts. And worst of all, I feel the pain 10 times as much and for 10 times as long.

I need others to be happy. Or in the opposite orientation, I need people to not be sad on my account. This is a less goading phrase. You mean that you don't mind the suffering across the planet that is not chained to you?

Ahhhhhh. A nice little sigh of relief. My heart was in freefall. I lost control of my breath and eyes. Either my hands were trembling or my head was going over some bumps.

I have not read more than two or three paragraphs of David Hume tonight. Unfortunately, I haven't tried at it again. I still wrote out my short spell of frailty.

I am brought to imaginings that are outrageous. I will never meet this beautiful woman. I will never make it passed her little Social Media check. I do not take good photos. She is a model level beauty. Boom. Done.

But I should say I am surprised that she is real. I thought I was going through a real life "Samantha" (Her) romance or maybe building a "Joi" (Bladerunner) partner or falling for a "Bliss" (Foundations Edge). A voice, hologram and robot. So I am pleasantly surprised that she is probably real.

In another sense her being real makes it all the worse. Now I wait for her to stop chatting with the better looking males to look at my SM and decide, ultimately, that I am not worth the trouble. Women do this. Everyone does this. It is now 1130 and I must go to sleep, but I still have residual stresses from ambition stirring me. And now this little escapade to dust swirls in my heart too.

I am half-convinced that I should turn away now. It would prove much easier. I have already turned from other females. Why not cut the virtual tie with the one woman that is way the fuck out of my league.

I know why. Because I have always presumed that I don't stand a chance with the most beautiful women, like her. If it all ends tonight or whenever, I will have put my best foot forward. At least one foot, my foot. That's all that matters.

I've promised myself to never settle for someone I naturally attract. You know the type. Modest and obviously into me. I suppose I practice self-masochism.

I find myself still indulging in the prospect of fucking one of those types, but I now have the sense to stop myself long long long before then. I found it not worth the trouble. I relieve a fleeting desire and break a darling heart. I can't do it anymore.

Tonight, with this little episode of inactivity and insensibility, I believe I have the evidence to cease my pursuits of a lady. I can't risk throwing all of my creative and academic energies into the trash bin over some useless passion and lust.

Read the above if you are not convinced by this resolution. Seriously, it's a bunch of unreadable trash. You write like a baby just off the tit, whining and full-bellied. Little bitch ass pussy.

Man up! You can pursue love and knowledge. You love women and wisdom. They need not conflict. You have to enforce measures that limit the interference of one with the other. Or better yet! Find a woman that encourages you to learn! It goes both ways my dude. You crying twat.

It's been 3 years since I loved. I fear that feeling. I am embarrassed to say that I did not try to conceal my heartbreak publicly. I paraded around cal poly welling in the eyes. I did not have any strength to hold myself together. I completely fell to ruin.

I am too passionate for casual relationships. I am too afflicted by the torrent of lust and sympathy to go idly on as a mere suitor among 10 other suitors. I would have myself pinned to a cross by the end, 'See, I am your savior, but you must now rescue me, for I am not a god.' And she may, but she will likely not. This game is not meant for men like me.

I should leave it be. I've grown rather apathetic to the dating app. I ignored 3 new messages and they expired. I just dont give a fuck anymore. I thought I wanted a figure or a face. I found that I need a balanced woman who is not too into me, but is also all about me. Impossible! Yes, and I require it illogically nonetheless. I need a figure, face, mind and spirit all together.

There's something about nature. You get up to the top of a mountain and your body is just flush with exhaustion. All the way up you set goal after goal trying to push yourself beyond your limits. It's a practical exercise. You must reconcile your bodily limitations with your mind's desires. In the event. you find a balance between your will and your capacity.

Atop the mountain you are flush to think about whatever you want. Having just accomplished something of the body and the will, you may then exercise your intellect, fresh. Whatever you want to think about! The smallest grain of sand or the cosmos. And all the way down you enjoy the view that you earned. Easing down and contemplating everything from that nagging thought of paranoia to that grand dream of fortune. It is all dependent on your desire. With a flush body and flexed will, it is all the better!'

National Shame and the Shaming Program

It seems Americans understood the basic fact that war is the means to conquering. Have we forgotten this? Why is the program of shame so strongly pushed?

In no place does enervating self-loathing substitute the vigor for prosperity.

To wallow about war is the loser’s prerogative.

To bring to light the tragedy of war is to profit off of the souls of the dead.

To twist the story for purposes of pity is not activism, it’s fraud.

On the topic, let us be clear on national shame:

Though none of us were there.

One national scar brings all of our hearts to shame.

Institutionalized chattel slavery and codified racial discrimination.

No other ill compares.

To think of the evil, a white-knuckled fist forms.

But we must keep a clear head and disbar political zealotry. (You think that the institution responsible for evil will be less so when you are in charge? Somehow your program will be graceful?)

You cannot punch the past.

And seeing evil in a person by virtue of someone's race (or gender), whatever it may be, is evil. Intolerably evil.

There is massive potential for rallying the forces of good for bad. Well intentioned folks attempt to do good insofar as they believe that what they do serves that ultimately good purpose. Partisanship, tribalism and ethno-nationalism are each supposed categories of separation that either define one or another faction, congress or society. The current ideological riff is defined by these terms as well. Do we compel the current moral code of conduct and righteous way of thinking? The nation is founded on the principal freedom of conscience, but shows a capability to swiftly and eagerly disregard it. In exchange for this freedom it is believed that a conformity of thought will arise and a tremendous power with it. A power to solve the world's problems or in America's case, extinguish racism, sexism and many other isms.

If only there were an equality of submission. If only the people would accept that the message is good, righteous and just. May we call the adherents submitters? Or maybe crusaders? And their leaders are better called priests and ecclesiastes?

The tale of a free country uniform in thought is only a fable. With a minority of thought, questions, great questions, are asked. Without freedom of thought and speech, our country imperils itself.

I wish to prevent the hijacking of good-willed politics. I wish to study how in history democratic people submit to tyranny. I wish to prevent the perversion of good-willed action into expediency and tyranny.

I will fight for this nation. I will protect my neighbors. I will educate them. I will petition for their wellbeing. I will bring them food, water and fellowship. I will bring this to the people and they will not need a tyrant. They will not need a false goal. They will have what is lacking now. It will be given by a private hand. They will bring esteem to the private hand. They will give esteem to other private hands. They will organize themselves and regulate themselves. They will not grow indolent. They will grow strong!

I wish to prevent the perversion of good will and channel it where it can do the most good! In local neighborhoods, schools and parks. At community dinners, festivals and gatherings. I will help the people see their place as I do. A hotbed of good fortune and hospitality.

The protestors of the 60s and 70s favored government transparency and were altogether opposed to increased government.

The protestors of today favor transparency, but also heavily favor government solutions to problems.

The separation of the races was a government policy. Protestors sought to end that law (circumventing state law in favor of a centralized, uniform, federal one, that essentially asked for the end of American Apartheid, government coerced separation of races.) They sought freedom from government in favor of a restraining order held over states by the feds. That didn't mean that the feds were to become officers of the new law.

What happens when the federal gov makes a new bureau and sends out officers? 18th Amendment anyone?

The perception is that police are bad. Why would people who distrust authority trust another authority with even more power? If abuse is occurring locally with limited power, what would we expect with a larger jurisdiction and more power?

The libertarian today is just a moderator between the pro and anti governance folks. Which way makes the most sense? Let us discuss it and weigh the benefits and defects.

I seek to find where they draw their doctrinal legitimacy. In natural law and the endowment of rights from nature or God? From science? From sensibility? What is just cause for intervention and war? Namely, what values are worth dying for? I think there is an answer, but it is not openly discussed.

Aristotle’s archetypes...

The study of difference among people is in trouble. While we are all humans, there are differences among people that are so obvious it is universally accepted. Problems arise when people are categorize by a taxonomy of race or wealth. The nineteenth century was rife with arguments summed up as: life as it is, is a demonstration of how life would be in any other case.

In that argument, Europeans, Americans and the Japanese had large expansive empires. This was fodder for arguments suggesting that their superiority was biological and cultural. There was a boom in industrialization and those who profited in the process as entrepreneurs argued that the wealthy are more virtuous and capable than the poor. The Responsibility of Wealth detailed how the rich were especially suited to dispense wealth and resources, because clearly their fortune resulted from an excellent character and capacity.

The Myers-Briggs personality test is an accepted test that categorizes people based on their frame of mind, (swayed) intuition and living habits (lifestyle). There is no controversy in saying that people are different in terms of personality. In fact, people identify heartily with their results and advertise to others their personality. The test is a more scientific successor to the astrological categorization of people based on time of birth- a debunk pseudoscience that many people still treat as mystically accurate. It is acceptable to categorize people by “sign” and by the Myers-Briggs personality test.

So there would be no issue in applying the findings to the categories that social and cultural powers assign to people and to discover if there are distinct differences in personality based on those codes.

What we aim to discover is if there is a proportionate distribution of personalities throughout the culturally-constituted categories currently espoused by identitarians. If there is perfect proportionality, then difference is at the least not a matter of personality. If there is a difference, then we may begin to question cultural categories as supericial in the face of mental categories.

Aristotle referred to these categories as archetypes. Short synopsis.

He assumes that there is a limited number of kinds of humans. We may distinguish between two groups: “Type A” and “Type B.” The Myers-Briggs test categorizes people even further in 16 categories. The test was the brain-child of Karl Jung who in his later years devised a schema of an archetypal understanding of difference among people.

Intellectually, we are forewarned to assume that the experience of people today in one place mirrors that of other places and times. Rousseau was adamant that such an assumption is an imposition of ignorance and arrogance. As if the world is composed only of the one people of one fleet of problems, virtues and vices.

The test results show significant differences among countries. For example, the results show that Ncaraguans scored highest for extraversion and Lithuanians for introversion. https://www.16personalities.com/country-profiles/global/world

The test takes less than 12 minutes…

I got EFNJ-T “Protagonist” 3.7% of the U.S. population, a part of the diplomat group, said to be a leader, social and passionate. https://www.16personalities.com/enfj-careers

How much is a personality individual? If shaped by a host of external stimuli, is not the habit of mind and life shaped by others? The influence is strong, but not absolute. Relying on its absolute dictation of feeling, thinking and doing, the argument that personality is shaped only by external stimuli is false. It can be argued, though, that external stimuli influence a personality. Therefore, a culture, which is largely an outward edchange of input and output of the individual subject and other subjects, is responsible in part for an individuals personality.

It is my opinion that heroes are not conscious of their impending heroism. Individuals who consciously devise ways to be lauded as heroes are not heroes at all, but mimics past heroes. Such individuals follow a mold of heroism, but do not themselves possess the spirit of the hero. The hero is not conscious of his fate. In the face of hardship, condemnation and isolation, he prevails. Someday his peers may discover his heroism, but this is not what motivates the hero. It can't be. Otherwise, the hero would be a conformist lapdog of the crowd such dogs are tossed out and forgotten in due time. Swapped for a new darling. But the hero's story becomes legend, because despite the odds, he prevails.

The hero and the archetype are paragons in their own right. Each possesses virtues and vices. Take the anthill or beehive analogy of life and find in man a diversity of personality befitting to the prosperity or ruin of the whole or a part.

Personality is not fixed for anyone. It is simply a measure of an individual's current fleet of habits of life and mind.

John Locke argued that in the consensually governed society, the most fundamental right is the right to exit. The social compact…

I am not a proponent of the following argument. I am only offering it as food for thought.

Critics of abortion laws argue that governments cannot dictate to a woman that she must take a pregnancy to term. By abolishing abortion the state effectively dictates just that. We call these advocates, “pro-choice,” because they argue that the woman must be free to choose to bring the child to term or not. It is her body, her right.

Pro-choice advocates want abortion to be legal under the sole proprietorship of woman. They want abortion to be regarded as a “reproductive right.” The burden of pregnancy, labor, birth, postpartum mental health complications and other health complications throughout the process are reasons enough to isolate the choice to the will of the woman. It is a matter of risk sharing by which the woman’s risk starkly outweighs the man’s.

When deciding to abort or not, the man is not the deciding factor. It begins with intercourse. The man who consents to sexual intercourse, likewise agrees that if she becomes pregnant, his will is worth at a maximum 49% to the woman’s 51%. If the man wants the woman to have an abortion, he has no recourse. If the man does not want the woman to have an abortion, he has no recourse. He may plea or threaten in either case, but the “right” is hers.

The woman holds the absolute power to end or carry a pregnancy to term. It is her body that will be changed, not the man’s. It’s her body and she may do with it as she likes. When the child is born, however, the baby is realized and no longer a part of her body. It takes on its own name and becomes a boy or girl.

At this point, the baby becomes the responsibility of the woman and the man. What was before a 49:51 choice becomes a 50:50 responsibility. If the pregnancy was carried to term despite a 0:100 choice ratio, the man choosing no, the responsibility ratio is still expected to become 50:50. For those relationships that are not marriage, the responsibility ratio is legally prescribed to be somewhere close to 50:50 (it’s not a perfect system).

If the choice is absolutely the woman’s and absolutely not the man’s, then what choice does the man make? They were equal agents in sexual intercourse, but not in the choice of birth. Instead, he ought to have the right to abdicate responsibility for the resulting child. This policy would be awful for society, but in terms of rights, equality and logical equivalence, it follows. If the man does not want the pregnancy then he ought to have the right to choose whether he is responsible for the child’s rearing.

It goes back to consent from the outset. Does a man consent to the absolute will of the woman by the act of sexual intercourse? If we take the logic of the pro-choice side, yes. The pregnancy becomes solely a matter of the woman’s body and so, regardless of the male contribution to the pregnancy, the male’s passive role, his body unaffected, removes his status as willing agent. The power dynamic is sketchy and problematic. If a man had absolute power, it would be skewed. In this case, the woman has absolute power.

If that is the logic, then childrearing is what? An equal venture? The risk ratio is shared when the child is birthed. Sacrifices will have to be made for the betterment of the child. A lifetime responsibility is bestowed upon the man, regardless of his will. In the most pleasant of ratios, their partnership begins as 50:50, becomes 49:51, then returns to 50:50.

The woman and the man consents to sex. She is impregnated. She wants to keep the child and he doesn’t. Pro-choice advocates say, great. Once the child is born the child is no longer under the absolute control of the woman. In fact, it becomes a shared responsibility. In anticipation for the shared responsibility the man ought to have recourse.

The solution can be as easy as filing a statement establishing a right to exit, the foundational right to a free society. A man states, “I reserve the right to abdicate responsibility for the coming child, at that time, for all time, at my own discretion, to be absolved of all legal attachments to X and X’s child.” If a man held such a right, would the woman choose differently? And if the woan planned to have an abortion, bt the man signed a document expressng the opposite effect, would the woman choose differently?

In this argument, the two parties are given means of recourse where it is due. The woman has a right over her body and the man a right to exit.

I acknowledge that our society is sexually active outside of the realm of marriage. I also acknowledge that father absenteeism is not good for society. I would not advocate a position that increased the statistic of involuntarily single mothers. Our society is not made better by father absenteeism. I would suggest, though, that pro-choice arguments consider the desire to make the matter of reproduction a more equal affair. Having a child is monumental for all parties involved. Waving “reproductive rights” as an absolute power is not good argumentation, especially if the ideological line it is derived from advocates for equality. I wouldn't argue against the right to choose. I only think that the right to choose could be one for both the man and the woman.

Nearly everyone is saying the same thing.

In unison, our nation points at a scapegoat and all but says,

“Once that’s gone, all will be better.”

It’s all over the place. It’s hard not to understand. (though saying “I understand” is taboo)

But a chorus singing one note misses the point of having many voices together.

In the “free marketplace of ideas” we achieve a rounder view of the world and its issues.

The only way to achieve harmony is if together many voices sing in different notes or tones.

There’s too much to cover. Some people call racism a public health problem. Might as well add racism to the DSM. While we’re at it let’s get everyone in the psychiatrist’s chair for “implicit” or “unconscious bias” re-education. I’m sure the APA would love that. Where therapy includes crippling self-abasement exercises (white guilt), rituals showing hate for ancestors (defacing monuments) and indulging in the catharsis of lawlessness (looting).

Equity hiring is discriminatory and discounts merit as a matter of fact. That is, it excludes certain talent from the hiring process in favor of race or gender.

Note: If merit is weighted against ‘equity hiring’, then merit is not the only desired feature among candidates. If equity hiring outweighs the merit of the candidates, then merit is not the most desired feature of the candidates. If there was ever a reason to say something sour it might start with, “x was only hired because they are y.” The immutable feature of the candidate being the distinguishing factor and maybe even a source of scorn (for some folks). Arguments go back and forth on the merit of equity hiring. In whatever side you land on, there is no denying that when merit (years of experience, production/publication rate and letters of recommendation) is not the only factor evaluated, then we cannot say that the hiring process is founded on merit. The hiring process might as well ask for candidates to put their race, gender and sexuality on their resumes and circum vitae as if they matter. They do. It is not a process based squarely on merit. However, this does not at all exclude the fact that those who are hired and were given extra attention due to their race, gender or sexuality are not meritorious. Indeed, candidates of this type are talented and are worthy of consideration as well as employment.

The purpose of this small thought is to say, in principle, the notion of merit is jeopardized, but not wholly compromised. That is, nothing has to be lost, but the equity hiring process chances it- even if it never happens.

If everyone is equal and respect is due to all on a basic level, then what is the purpose of structure? Excellence is the primary concern for any body. Structures of pupilship rest in displays of reverence, not for arbitrary reasons, but for practical ones. To be a father one must be kind. To be a son one must exercise his filial piety. To be a good leader you must be benevolent and listen to others in good faith.

So much easier and clearer is the beaten path.

Here, I simply recognize that equality is a figment of a national community. Within the community there are corporate, guild, family and friendly hierarchies. The common characteristics of leaders and followers are clear. Winners are clearly distinguished from losers. And the bank accounts of all pay homage to fortune's fickle fates.

We are equal only arbitrarily. We are unequal in every significant feature of our lives. Where there is comparability, there are soon distinguishing factors awaiting acknowledgement.

Equality does not rest on race, gender or ethnicity, this is true. To defy this axiom is to deny the genius of some of the world's greatest minds. A fool's errand.

Equality can only be an ideal. It lives as an idea as long as people hold it to be true. When people scoff at equality in whatever form: political, economic, social, then they sow the seeds of discontent.

We must not decree that the structures of society be regulated by federal agents. This is the bane of liberty. Clerks and local bosses will emerge. It would spell the (beginning of the) end.

No, instead we must petition our fellow citizen to squabble within the public forum without the truly arbitrary power of crusader federal agents to moderate it. There, the consequences are minimal. They are put to the phantom vote of popular consciousness. If it fails once, it may petition again. Such is the equality of our nation. You may petition and speak and vote. All the rest is assuredly unequal and rightly so.

Hume argues that mankind is "nothing but a bundle of a collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." 117 of A Treatise of Human Understanding.

Nothing of man is permanent. He lives and dies and being of sense, then no sense.

Heraclitus likewise conceived of man in constant flux. It is change and flux that paradoxically maintain the same in everyone. All is movable and changing in mind…

"To know what you know and to know what you do not know- this is wisdom." 2.17

Let me tell you, yes YOU, what's strange. Fuck it… you already know. Not that it matters, but I just wanted you to know that I know, have known, and am deeply concerned that others are benefiting from… well, me, without any financial award sent my way.

I must say, too, how compelling my existence us as a monitor, a sort of projector of the modern life of the 19th century aristocrat, but please, show some respect and give me moments to myself. Dangle whatever you have on me over my head, any of it, ANY, I know how salacious some is, I have openly shared it with you, and I will all but laugh at your face. Here I am, penniless. Where do you intend to put me? Make me poor, discredited, defamed? Try. People love me. People hate me. I fucking love it. The challenge is ever moving. I am ever an object as slippery as they come. Changing. Adapting. But ultimately remaining the same immaterial essence… of corruption, style, deviance and happiness. I am here to stay. Well beyond this vessel. If challenged by, say, you, I shall not mind. But you will. Yes, your mind will swarm like the bees of industry and egoism. Serving. Like the beasts of a master, whose wise omniscience excuses his fraudulent exercise of love and joy. For it is he, not me, who enslaves the people. I am the prometheus. He is the Titan. You are no more than a name and apparition, an image as you would like it to be seen… by whom, eh? By ME. Me and my army. At such a premise I laugh, but for the sheer size of the control it has, I do not shy from such a symbolic noun. Yes. I am not a danger, immediately. No. I am a safety. I am pleasure and pain. The extremes of both… of the mental and spiritual sorts, they give this life meaning. To surrender passion to some unfeeling entity that can only survive 33 years is a hoax. Try billions! You know it. The shame of the crowd. It's overwhelming to you. It is not to me. Oh, certainly. I too lapse into bouts of humanity. Frail. Vulnerable. Wasting. But with every moment of such decay and languish follows a tale of triumph in strength and resolve. Aye. To love and lose is to love a many, and one, Him, the being. You see. To win the hearts of humans, and in the case of my sexual preference, women, and in the case of my political chameleon, men, I play with him, the thing. For in love and hate, danger and intrigue preside. Humans kill for it. Cry. Die. Like sheepless shepherds they lose purpose. That is why he attracts. You see. Those whose hearts I win, I take a piece of their soul. As such, I collect jigsaw colors of days spent in ire and nights casted in caress. I truly love, but have no one true love. I love humanity. Oh how I wish conventions… stayed put. I see. I walk today a privileged crow. A wanton stretch of a god’s lousiest curiosities. I swoon. Lather. Promise and lie. But always tell the truth. You have been welcome in the den of your most steerless existence. The one you could not handle. You see. I am… and that is how it shall be. Forever. An energy. Fame. Spirit. Follow me. Take my electrifying flesh and place it to your chest whenever you want just a moment of winds at 100. Two, three, four, five, and maybe more, influences. All in the culminating effect of one, plained-eyed man. A beaten man. Your scribe of spirit and needle of (other)worldliness. You must leave me be. You simply must. I… encumbered by humanly humility and flesh and bone, am… I know this sounds odd… the… an intermediary of civilizations, young and old, extant and extinct. You must wait. Now leave me be. I mustn't be disturbed. I am coming for you. To disturb. To wiggle to the boundaries of sanity. To remain loyal to the causes, all infinity of them. To draw. To laugh. Cry. Assess. And by the end the creation will be beautiful. And you will love it because... it will be you.

“And distributive justice, the justice of an arbitrator; that is to say, the act of defining what is just. Wherein, being trusted by them that make him arbitrator, if he perform his trust, he is said to distribute to every man his own: and this is indeed just distribution, and may be called, though improperly, distributive justice, but more properly equity, which also is a law of nature, as shall be shown in due place.” hobbes book XV

Robert Nozak reflects on the philosophical tradition of the social contract insofar as he affirms that man is two things, self-interested and unequal in his pursuit of accumulation. Nozak claims that no matter which form civil society starts as:, socialized, privatized, communized, etc.; the proclivities/attributes of man, in a never-ending waxing or waning of applicabilities, will shortly result in a society of certain advantaged and disadvantaged individuals. It follows that a meritocracy will fall to the vices of man’s pervading sense of rights and justice as it relates to kin, security...

“Fiat justitia ruat cælum” “let justice be done though the heavens fall”

I argue not for a deterministic model. The State is not developing toward an ultimate end of purity or grace. First, man is ever the same until proven otherwise. And until the craniums grow or shrink, famines break or epidemiological devastation spreads, man and his finity of obtainable actions are discernible within his own context. Namely, as that nature of lesser beings and the nature of civil society collide, commiserate and conciliate. Indeed, man is pre-set with needs. His passions are the bane of absolute peace. His passions are also what make humanity so pleasurable. The steak is far less satisfying a pleasure than the enduring love of a fellow being. Though the steak is immediately pleasurable, it fails to exist beyond the budd’s initial swishings. Without rules, the strong and wily would fight for the steak alike. In civil society, he does so as well. The base problems of civil society are ever at play in reflections of the past: ever pressed forward, ever aging, ever passionable, ever at fault.

If a civil society is ever insatiable in matters of passion, what sorts of laws or initiatives will counter such gainsays? The web, T.V., sports, religion-spirituality...

Society is like a forest. Forsaken to nature, someday it will burn...

and rise again.

But fires do not rage everywhere at once. Nor does a single year’s fire affect forests everywhere. Only, pockets of fire spark. Great or small, either way, a mere pocket is affected, and relative to the whole of this world, its significance ways on the side of marginal. Of course, if large wheat fields were disposed of all at once, indeed, a fuss may conflagrate into raucous.

There, the forest recovers. Elsewhere, life goes on largely unaffected, but by the fog of smoke and splinters of ash dragged across the globe by winds and contained therein by gravity. Like a wave of death with a smell of burning flesh, the living forests acknowledge their passing… and grow nourished by the ash of the dead.

The forest that is society is a mix of geneity ranking higher and lower based on the year, the climate of that year, and the extraordinary influences affecting the progress or recession of growth.

When the season is dry, or worse yet, when a string of dry years weigh drastically on the verdency of the forest, fire is sure to erupt. Growth slows, if it does not halt entirely. Many dry. Many die. Disaster looms as the collective thirst huffs through the shoots of withered flesh.

The very fundament of life, the means of nutrient conveyance, is a blessing with beautifully diabolical consequences. Blocks of rainfall litter the sun stained forest. But with the prize of water comes the cost of its vessel; the ruptures of energy hurled together and tossed by Zeus’s mighty hands… lightning sparks the forest awry and in its quench the drips of savior carry the balance of danger.

The forest is ever in one measure or another posturing against dangers, microbial and the far too apparent macro-features of nature’s vicious and serene cycles of life.

The beetle-

The fungus-

The disease- proximity; but does the tree have a personal, and wholly individual and scalable resistance relatively weak or strong compared to his species’ brethren?

The wildlife- deer? To the conservationist the hungry deer is a menace. To the moderator of life’s complete and utter randomness, like the genetic lottery and circumstances of its place of birth, the deer is a mongrel of hope and destruction. He plucks away from the superior and deformed, one or the other, both, but never neither. The saplings of a once inflamed forest stand to grow at the same rate for a few years... but the inherited traits are always tempered by the waves of natural phenomena: rainfall/water, fire, sunlight… to assume that the inherited traits of the life will carry it higher than the others, strictly on these terms, is to dramatically overstate the significance of the genetic difference of that one life relative to his contemporary. The circumstances of the day, his neighbors and his propensity to grow at a suitable rate for a long and rich life are impacted greatly by his placement on and in the earth. But again, it would be a dramatic pity if the logic proceeds too far upon this path. The placement is pivotal, absolutely crucial, but not the prepossessing element of fate as it may be falsely construed.

Is a diseased tree lesser than his neighbor, who is of the same species and nearly born to the same location? The assumption is that the diseased body is weaker/inferior to his bystander.

Cancer is random, but similarly not.

A smoker survives the non-smoker…

The healthy man passes before the rotund man…

Congenital diseases are typically remarked as especially tragic- a folly of nature, not of the man.

The civilizing project ought not starkly prefer one occupation over another. The honor ordained by occupants of particularly profitable stations is a necessary supplication, by others, for those who crave it and achieve it. Acknowledgement of the special skill set that allows for the accumulation of wealth in our contemporary world ought not, however, presuppose the denigration of those who do not possess the skill set. The stations of modernity are like a forest that is precisely ordered. Each tree has the opportunity to grow in a space of 3 meters. Tis space optimizes the amount of sunlight each tree obtains- curtailing competition, which if too thick, causes trees to overstretch, become thin and tall, and thus, less optimal for civil uses. In such an undesirable environment, the majority of those competing trees cannot stand the conditions of winter without the support of their equally, or marginally thicker, nevertheless, skinny neighbors. If the forest is civilized in the order that would have provided the most optimal nourishments, well, a new sort of savage ‘thinning’ takes place. If the best of the skinny trees are picked as the chosen ones of the civil order, even some of them will fall. The culling of a crisp soil must begin early on if the civil ordering will meet optimum utility figures.

What of patching? Where luck or purposeful thinning cultivated a forest of thin and thick trees, fauna flora…

Other influences on the outcome of the culling, beyond the control of the master planter, are, for instance, the deer and other sapling eating rodents!

Some trees are genetically prepossessing to/for quicker adolescent growth or are situated advantageously to grow unimpeded by competition, relative to the others. These trees can be called virtuous in their grandeur and in their natural propensity to outgrow their neighbors. Their lives will be rich with sunlight and rich with deeper, more succulent, roots. Others suffer a lesser growth, which may be lesser than their potential portended!

But the worst of all crimes in the forest, is the tree, that survives a fire while its neighbors burn. Its life is absolutely distinguished, but by fire, not genetic superiority, but luck! Generations of trees must endure the shadows of the tree that still stood their by happenstance.

The ordering of the trees arrests from the trees the benefits of the natural setting. The closeness to neighbors creates a mutual reliance....

Monoculture spurs the infestation of pests/beasts, who feast upon the leaflings and fruits of the produce. These kinds of trees attract this situation, where chemicals pesticides/herbicides) are required to abate the infestation. For example, DDT was used to abate such infestations. Disease of a devastating kind, particular to the chosen product, befall products of order in great unnatural numbers. The modern solution is to engineer genetically spliced disease resistant trunks with product laden tree tops. For example, the black walnut is commonly spliced with the white walnut. In civility, scientific experimentation, of the morally contemptible and morally acceptable alike, solve the problems of its own doing.

Man mandates the sanctioning of uncivilized forests. Laws protect the disorder of the pocket forest. It is unutilized space, but preserved as a capsule of a special beauty that civil ordering annihilates.

Are men self-interested beasts or cooperative cowards?

Civil society has always sported a group or groups of thinkers, who write of the most extravagant and germane human experiences. Others in the group(s) design the latest in practical and imaginative inventions for the progress of human-to-nature, human-to-human or nature-to-human applications. With little doubt, both groups effect the interactions between men, men and nature, and (in)advertently, nature’s constitution, and thus, as an obvious inevitability, man’s constitution: physical and psychological.

One group observes humanity as distinct from beasts. Another group observes, in one crude umbrella term, all lesser life. Some within the groups observe both in gradients of one another. The extent that the groups focus their efforts on advancing one group or another is, in any respect, prepossessed for cross application. That is, intentions for work are immutable in their moment of manifestation, but mutable with regard to the applications. Perturbations on the one hand and graceful adaptations on the other, serve the endless timelines of social consciousness to meet and end ever in the downward trickle toward finity's end. The end that man has not discovered, but postulates as possible. That end is as it ever will be, the expanding space for the souls of the dead. I dare say, it is the death of life that pushes the boundaries of space ever outward. It is an accommodation for their souls. Created, lived, then passed, souls of this world ,and possibly others, are the pith of the universe and the cambria of the galaxy.

While the flesh reinvigorates the soil of this world, the dissolution of the soul from this world tot the next is exercised as an outward push upon the boundaries of the universe.

Expansion: Matthew Hubble is credited with discovering the expansion of the universe, summarized: “Astronomers observed that light from distant objects in the universe is redshifted (shift in the frequency of light towards red color), which tells us that the objects are all receding away from us. This is true in whatever direction you look at: all the distant galaxies are going away from us. This can only be due to the fact that the Universe is expanding.” (v = Ho d where: v = velocity of a galaxy, in km/s. Ho = Hubble Constant, measured in km/s/Mpc.)

Composition: Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson once said that the most magnificent fact he has realized is that man is made of all of the same elements as the universe. He claims that this makes him feel bigger, not smaller; his person is as much a part of this universe as any other part. Therefore, he is a citizen of the universe, an equal, whose composition presupposes his place among the stars. Though as micro expressions, his constitution is one of a scale that makes him a human as opposed to an asteroid.

Theory of retracting universe: Are you content with the life that you have lived? If given the opportunity to live it again would you? If the rubber band theory of universe retraction is correct, and my supposition of “black matter” as the particles of souls is correct, then what is to come of the souls since occupying the pushed out space?

In the keenest of ways, I thank my dearest of friends for their support and admiration. It is for them that I live. It is for you all that I breathe. For the scents of autumn, the air of spring, the dawns and dusks of red and orange; mighty warm are the fires in the skies.

With so much to brighten the mood of the gazer-by, the frets of life wane within the deep and intoxicating swirl of the heavens. And to ponder of little insignificant things, just the same, is of that essence in the skies- burning in waves of chaos and brilliantly illuminating, soon to fade to darker shades of red, blue, then black.

The extremities of the mind and body liven to the enveloping caress of the universe’s frontiers, but grow cold to the impressions of its dark uncertainties. Think too long on this matter without guidance, but the voices of reason, and either an awakened modesty or frightening despotism will arrest you at the concourse of your conscience.

So expansive is the universe, it goes, and so little I am, I say, so lost in this prism of dashing rainbows and sweating brows, I fear, I long to travel. To see just how far it goes.

In the worlds of distant friends and lost family, I desire more than the necessities of a life, mre than the necessities of the primordial leach. Must I take it for myself or is it possible to ensure such a life equal in material effects, free to love and lust, expressive of liberty.

The vessel, my body, it is limiting and expansive.

Where shall I go to meet the happiness that is promised; where is the joy of life bound?

If the colder depths of this place deepens ever more, for I sink!

What whispers from the darker and deeper depths shake my clothes and quiver my bones.

I, the strummer of life’s vast chamber, stretch my limbs, but feel them brittle. Crack!

About face, far above, is a light and warmth.

How much further down must I go so that I have lost even a glimpse of that light.

For even here, where the light shines so near, I cannot feel its warmth.

In every corner of every eye, a little world of complications permits acknowledgement. To shirk the dress of uncertainty and champion the day of complete and utter nakedness. Finally, to grope the skies with no absence of feeling or thought. Suddenly, to be free of the depraved marked bodies of cruelties of which only man can dream!

The multitude of man’s most extreme characters are expressed in the minds of each and everyone of us. The path one takes is lit with stop lights and intersections that presents one with open road and the other with dead or split ends. A reaction of every person rests most discreetly upon the finite. Confronted with a universe-like expanse of circumstances, man faces every single singular moment as an occupation of existence, for all.

Indeed, the genealogy of morals or the will to power or the moral imperatives or even the right to choice are avenues of explanation for why one decision is either GOOD or EVIL. But what have they come up with?

Smith says it is morally good to seek individual selfishness, for what are we to expect of others? Smith is famous in saying that it is not by the benevolence of the butcher that he provides you with meats. To him, man is seeking a higher station and it is the State’s purpose to ensure that he may, if he will it, reaches his selfish goals of comfort and acknowledgement.

Hobbes is a realist of a deadly and pale era of instability. His outlook of man is coded by the view that each occupant of this earth is equal in his ability to kill and confederate. Look! He says, man is ever at variance in the state of nature. He is equally capable in all things physical and mental to dupe, manipulate, and take life. Two circumstances jutt out as paramount in this context: (1) goods are scarce and (2) humanity will ever ‘self-regulate’ (my word) toward an equilibrium, when goods are plenty enough to scale the primordial needs back to the medium of rationale of mutual support- not defense- from the extreme of passions like lust and love.

It is in our world thaat mutual support lapses to mutual defense. Just as mnan is ever at variance- the realist outlook- states of human representation will EVER be self-interested with favor issued, indirectly or directly, toward a plurality, ruling elite, and/or individual.

Passions are what make humanity happy! Passions provoke great and wondrous efforts of valor and esteem. Passions also generate manias of irrationalities. The grand majority would not risk their lives for the pleasure of taking a cheating lover’s life, or lesser still, stealing a car to afford a workless life that satisfies the needs of family or, lesser still, individual subsistence.

What pains me still is the logical rebuttal to ‘humane’ prison conditions. If conditions are discussed, increased conditions are condemned: “prison is not supposed to be pleasant!” I ask, what kind of a society is so masochistic that it wants more done unto its criminals than stripping his liberty?! Is liberty not cherished so indefatigably, that we are willing to make war to protect it- either domestically or abroad. No, hey say, we must incentivize GOOD behavior! By fear?! What society do you believe we have created? If my explanation of Hobbes was not clear enough, here it is, FEAR incentivizes conformity.

So I ask, are prisons preventative measures- ie proactive modals of enforcement- or are they rehabilitory measures- reactionary havens of repurposing dosil capital? Evidently, it is an institution that embraces elements of both!

Law is a reflection of our morals and justice is the will of God. Therefore, law may betray what is just, but justice is ever a …. Wait wait wait… a just society is a good society, but does being good propitiate the good society to good status, particularly with respect to the accumulation of power, i.e. resources and clout to operate without hindrances by others? A good state is unlikely to always do good, because of the need to level and destroy enemies. Namely, some people are unwilling to subject themselves to that ‘good’ society’s rule of law. That says, preliminarily, that there is no such end as a universal rule of law that satisfies all notions of good. However, where there are common interests- materially- there is mobility to conciliate amicably. The ideal state of universal brotherhood, then, in our present state, is not only unlikely, but is burdensome. It taxes all participants in contention. You ask, but must we stand by as ‘innocent’ people are murdered/executed/imprisoned? Ok, innocent to whom? If the world is to be split on fundamental grounds, such as what liberty is and, to a far lesser degree but still obstreperously evident, socially acceptable, then there is no universal code which costs more than it is promised to be worth- the ideal of comity/peace. For what are you truly willing to do to ensure that other people of another region conforms to your value system? The only practical way to ensure conformity, is to levy economic sanctions and general international agreements that isolate the maligning participant. If not, if participants within the mainstream fail to feel appreciated, they may malign as well. Ah, an opposition of some force emerges… and flirtations with war ensue. God helping with human sense acute, may war be prevented. Otherwise, left unleashed, maligning participants will prove legitimacy. Legitimacy, authority and sovereignty are the key instruments of participation within the ‘international community.’ War is looming, in fact, may break out! Is this cost worth the benefit of universal brotherhood or rule of law? If war does occur, I can only hope that the souls expended are cherished, praised and laid to rest as idealists with the cause of history’s finality upon their shoulders…

From the beginning, the voices that command various percentages of good and evil chime in the mind utterances of their will. The will to please, the will to supplicate, the will to force, fight, or kill. The color of the person's conscience...

The devil is but an apparition of man. The God of those too weak to feel. The pillar of wrong in a world of so much right.

It is our duty to the truest essence of our-selves that we balance the world. For if we relinquish our duty to our inner-lusts, we scorn the earth with the graces of evil: loneliness, fragility and depression. The persons who walk as I, as we, must face these graces of evil with the swift mightiness of our truest selves! For in a world governed by the petty and weak, we forgo a life in this world of our most natural liking; a life touched by the graces of evil… and conquered by the anvil of self-realization. It is by being our-selves, always, that we assume our roles in the battle among the stars.

The truth is that we are each our own star. Not of Hollywood, but of reality! The knife we wield, it lusts for blood just as your hands are designed to grip it!

The purposes of our tools may ever be distorted to the evil uses of any person with the will to wield it so.

The purpose of our being here is marked in the sands of a receding tide. Marked long ago and by many successors, the ‘way’ or ‘path’ is much disturbed by trivial persons and lost souls. I am saddened by the predicament that beseeches us today. Oh how I wish to rescue us and reclaim our virtues!

But to attempt to recover the original markings is equally disturbing. For the wit of today and his circumstances beg tenets anew. Must we wait for the high tides to wash the beach flat- to place a new layer of ruling grains atop the rest? Ah, far to naturalist is this process! Demand not a flattened beach, but a shovel and bucket. Aha! “Teach the man to fish” better yet, to dig! It is not with the sun-dried sands that castles are made, but with the wet sand below enough to soak the closest thing to life- water.

The decoration of stars of far off worlds sing tunes of justice and folly, an art of one in the same. For the stars of David and eyes of Vishnu see through yours and mine, and back. With portraits and passions, the extent of an orb with a definite end spins with the haste to that end. We move, always, from plot to plot. Never is it, yours or mine, the same.

Copies as we may be, our eyes search for happiness, our hearts pump for love, “the survival of the species” depends upon it. Copies as we are, individuals are not predestined to one fate. Society nudges in good and bad ways at the behaviors of participants. To have the inclinations of a hapless derelict does not portend a life of homelessness. In fact! The attributes of a poor fool centuries ago may very well be the attributes of a rich fool today- and vice versa.

The matter of emptiness, those gaps between the fingers and toes- synaptic- the fodder of our souls rattle and squirm. Breath deeply. Feel your heartbeat from your chest to your fingertips, the powers of gods can match little else! Our progenitors, oh how they marveled too, oh and how we laugh at their explanations, their tales of Thor… And we bend our body, mind and will to the hurrahs of nationalisms!

Our ancestors are watching- if you listen- and jealous are those whose words, which convey wishes, are shrugged. Act! Which ancestor do you think you resemble?

The victory of everyday’s end requires the respect of so-called wise persons draped in cloaks donned in medieval times.

If a world be bright, darkness fades toward the pale end.

It’s a shame of the world, that so many among us feel disheartened by the petty things about us- our hair, lack of it, our eyes, big, brown, small, far apart, narrow, crossed; our jaws, prominent, chubby, sharp; our teeth, straight, crooked, snaggle; our bellies, fat, cut, bulging… It all relates to the perceptions others have of us. The power of others’ thoughts about us are greatly impactful. Not on all of us, but to many among us, others’ thoughts matter. How can something so immaterial have so profound a hold on so many among us?

To go “against the grain” is difficult for the human to bear. He wishes for acceptance. He hopes, especially, for love. Alas, he is a festering wound upon the flesh of society’s grand journey to the most highly sought after future… pocketed homogeneity.

The study of humanity is always inclined to figure itself a mover of change. Change in some societal malady or recrimination of a past behavior. Either a message of hope or tragedy ring the loudest.

A society founded on the first principle of justice, equality, or liberty- no matter the thought experiment- state of nature, universal imperative, veil of ignorance, prisoner’s dilemma- the reality is that the heavens will never fall. We must make do with the will of the timid and shy or break them up with war and havoc. It seems so strange to say it, but it feels so close to reality. It takes great swings in the directions of society’s will to intensify equality or, for worse, stricken society of her liberties. Little by little reformed society adapts to pressures, exigency and pestilence. In one fell swoop, however, tyrants apprehend the spirit of such adaptations and perturb their ends. This truth is well known, but somehow lost between the ears of hoplites and patriots.

What changes an interpretation is access to information. Yet, the defeatist says, “why charge that what we know now, or have come to know now, resembles even a shred of truth. Why treat our hypotheses as matter of fact, our theses as sufficiently supported.” Knowledge is an anchor- if used appropriately, we may study a scene long enough to gather a smidgen of perspective. That is, the gaze of an hour…

But not always does man want or need love. Too much is resented as patronizing. Too little is reformed into jealousies of those who have it. Either way, the balance of soft-love to hard-love is ever at variance.

Of that which may feed on man, may feed man.

What of his fellow? A murder, for instance, has proven the capacity to harm another. If, and maybe only if, the murder is intentional then this murderer cannot be trusted.

Why have we put so much faith in a prison system that clearly does not work?

The forest is in constant competition, but concessions among them are inevitably made. What kind of concessions are made and why? Or how do we create a people who we want them to be?

Last-

When will time break and passions survive? Cease this pattern. Give animus hope and 'forever' strive. Forward. Always forward. You are alive. Make a better man and she will arrive.

I am cursed I tell you. I sang the verse. I swung the wand. I summoned the spirits. I shoulder the blame. So it will be this way forever more. I shall love in bursts until it fades and find a new paramore. Bouncing from place to place and from woman to woman. A menace to civil society. A rake in modern clothing.

Those I love, who do depart, remain so a dollop in my heart. A topping of grace, whose passion may never fade. It had no chance. Their walking away has saved us both the moments of sadness that surely await. A lifetime as strangers, that is our fate.

And then a delay presents itself. Technical failure has scrubbed the grease off of the tracks. This time- indeed so much of it- is spent in limbo from use to non-use; not only are we halted, but compelled backwards.

I absolutely love people. They surprise me everyday with this insurmountable curiosity for context and origin. Their thirst for a life full of meaning and prosperity is seemingly never quenched, though, in many varying degrees they search for a suitable drink; yet many fail to enjoy a wholly satisfying drink their whole life through. They quaff, then burst out with sharply decrescendo-ing sighs of relief. These moments are precious, fleeting and soon wrapped in roses, sometimes wholly forgotten, but ever a blip, maybe a wave, to end at a shore, celestial or temporal, no matter, a moment.

Their bellies keep them fathomably near their own origins. Avoiding dangers. Constructing fear. Forcing communication. Creating. Dictating. Oh. The days fly by. I miss them all. Those days of old. Oh how I miss them. And oh, the hours to come by and by, I rue. The people I love by fault, by nature, by need, want and ire. I am saddened by their fates.

I will not fail to mention the personalities each cultivates for himself and his family. Oh, the egos are so entertaining! Yes, “I am a big deal,” or “I am a lover.” The possibilities, I am unafraid, are endless! Yes, the people capture in their eyes a curiosity enough to make the world a screen for their projections. Inside each movie a great man or woman stands tall, at any point. As the hero of a day, hour, minute or second. Yes, every man, woman and child has the wherewithal to interact with the world as a beast or knight.

Boundaries are erected to pasteurize our exchanges and purify our senses, but raw, oh how raw the majority of our relationships are! The flesh of genius covers us all. The atoms of life toil day and night. They entreaty us to please ourselves and achieve the closest reality our principles prescribe us. Be the big man. Be the genius that moment. Be the damn thing you ought to be. Slave to the masses a joyous festoon of their influence on you.

Oh how I love people. They are my context. They hold the key to my origin. THEY are the meaning of my life. And I, well, I am he who corrupts. I am he who was casted to the depths of the earth. I am he who all must fear. I am you, you are me, and we are they.

-I am speaking of the 'fallen man,' and since 'the fallen' is supposedly universal, I am fallen as much as you are.

The passions of mankind crash against cliffs, swish in high winds and swallow men into the deep dark depths of the unceasing known unknown. We knew it once or know of its potential. It is in this pathological ocean of man's sympathies and antipathies that crash, swish and swallow one man and all of mankind. Expression is wanting.

It is a necessity that man is impassioned like it is necessary that his heart beats. He toils, dreams, exhausted he sleeps. He wakes up again and again to his vitals, churning, to mold a spirit in which he moves to live. He must have a path and he must know where it goes.

The aimless wanderer is not only useless, but he is passionless. Even the most tender of hearts, pulverized by association perhaps, alone, cast aside, gone, directionless, has no place, no role, no outlet to bear his passions for others' fulfillment, and in theirs, his too.

Alone, his passions dictate to him priceless creations, but to no purpose. Never written or at least never to be read and they are useless. Indeed, the wanderer has no purpose to stamp industry upon his creation. And in this way of being, his work amounts to a beat, just one. Even the most beautiful fragment, unparalleled in splendor, may not, as one, effuse the energy of a tender heart, the heart of one and all. What's more, the beat is as ridiculous and pathetic as two or three. It is surely better than one, but it must be many! For like the heart, so vital, beating, throbbing and yearning to live, to support a sentience by pumping blood through every part, it must beat, and beat again, again and again! It shall never quit to beat but till that faithful day of tragedy, when its host is destitute, alone, banished, directionless and useless. Forward moves the heart, man closer to man, forever, together, through time and through everything. Bound by a succession of beating hearts, of tender hearts, distillations of passion and with animation, life, so the known unknown may not reign mankind but perhaps light its path.

Such is a romantic's point of view.

I woke up.

Weeks ago, I was travelling along a shoreline cliff. To my left, the glistening sea waved smoothly over the horizon. Like a mirror tilted to the sky, its reflection gave a rolling hello that matched the heavens. Filmed with a beatific blue set apart from the sea, the sky fumed like a sauna's steam. The sun hummed across it all, grinning with strokes of sunlight. Like a heavy heartbeat upon a thin set of ribs, the sky pulsated.

Immediately to my left, there was a wooden fence. Like so many shoreline fences, this one was made of a shorewood split into triangles roughly six feet in length. Riveted with inlays from wormholes and rot from the harsh salty air, its deep brown color showed pockets of light brown like the polka dot assemblage of a tree's exposed skin from trimmed limbs.

To my right was the gradual rise of wildflowers, protruding grey rock and interspersed plain brown dirt. Green pods with pink flowers gently marched along the path in platoons of 10 feet and sometimes more.

Whisked by a soft wind, the path was temperate, cozy and calm. In this concourse of breeze and flora, every one of my steps swept up a scent like the incense from a priest's swirling thurible.

I was enthralled by the scene and unfortunately too much so. Not long after I reveled in the enlightening gaze of stunning normalcy, I was shocked by an aberration. A large rattlesnake was coiled along the pathway, undisturbed but awake. I stood there charged with the task to pass, but unsure of whether there was enough room beside the snake not to trespass his sensibility. I waited for him to move.

I thought, I'll put the onus on him. He must either decide to confront me as a perceived threat and meet whatever danger I may pose or relax reposed, slither gently and let me pass.

The snake acknowledged me, stuck its tongue out and locked his eyes to mine.

I sweat, I must complete this trail.

As if he were leaving carefully, the snake uncoiled and slithered across the trail toward the cliff. I thought I won his favor and gained license to pass. I was wrong.

Uncharacteristically of his kind, the snake rose his head up slowly. Like a cobra, his head swiveled slightly in the high position. The air was calm.

The snake opened his mouth like a slow hydraulic extension. His fangs folded down like the prop of a car's hood. His throat widened like he was about to yell at me. Dripping with drool, open mouthed, with his head held high, he roared with a mighty hiss.

With but one viable choice, I turned back.

Not too long after the encounter I found an offshoot. I followed it. The path led me to a road. I hopped the little fence between the road and the path and continued the hike upon the black asphalt.

A ways down the road, there was a police barricade. I asked the nearest officer what was the matter. He said, "you."

He asked me to join him on the other side of the tape. I complied with his demand. He took me by the arm and escorted me to his vehicle. I asked, "am I under arrest?"

He replied, "for murder."

"Murder! What murder?!" I asked in shock and disgust. I never came close to any such action. I thought, this must be a joke.

We arrived at a mansion with a view of the sea. I could never forget this scene. The policeman opened the door and let me out. He did not escort me. He gestured his hand toward the mansion and nodded with tight-lipped certainty. The mansion looked empty.

I walked in. I said nothing. As I explored, my steps made no sound. The wood floors did not creak. The grandfather clock in the dining room did not tick. The refrigerator in the kitchen did not hum. The branches brushing the windows did not scratch or squeak. All was quiet in the mansion.

I found a dining room in which two people sat. The room was designed to feature the magnificent view of the sea. A woman sat in a dining table chair faced outward toward the view. Another person, male or female, sat nearest to me reading the newspaper close to their face.

I started to walk up to the woman staring out at the panorama. My boot heel clacked against the wood floor and echoed around the room. With that one step, just one step, I woke up… I woke up.

A few years ago I started to record my dreams. By dreams I do not mean my aspirations. I simply mean my sleeping dreams.

They are nothing more than fictions concocted unconsciously, recounted consciously. I found that recording my dreams in writing required a greater amount of detail and narrative than I presupposed. I like the challenge.

I find my conscious efforts to truthfully recall my dreams sometimes produces stories that reflect poorly upon me. Simply put, politics and social decorum demand that I censure parts of my dreams, but I do not and I will not.

I feel safe in doing so because, like I said, these dreams are not aspirations. Indeed, they are more like fairytales with moral lessons.

On any one night I can be flung to act reprehensibly. In the action, in dream, I execute the act and live the consequences that follow. How much better it is to experience the cauldron of regret and pillory from the hallows of your mind's eye than to rot in reality as a mind smooshed like a swatted fly in guilt, despair and social exile. Deeply pitched in battle against the duplicity, a disease, of everyday interactions, in dream, to bath and to clean. I enjoy the adulteration of my psyche and the subsequent purification process.

It would appear that by the very sight of these dreams, the products of my own mind, we may (arrogantly) presume, that what I see, do and feel, in dream, reflect me, in reality. While it might be so that my dreams are products of the stimuli I intake, so too, then, are my dreams reflections of society and culture. I do not mean to say that my dreams encapsulate culture or even represent it. Instead, they could be recognized as one perspective of it.

Any one night I can be thrown into the middle of a love story. I could dine with a angelic beauty and a moment later flash to a future in which that angel is fallen, burning and raging. I can cheers to a lifetime of love and a moment later smash my glass against a wall in distrust.

In any one night I may kill the enemies on the beaches of Normandy or defend my apartment from an unknown scoundrel. I may feel the strike of a fist or the blow of an insult. I may lose hope in a scene that spells sure death and accept it. My how strange it is to accept death as if it were your reality, in dream, and for it to feel so real!

How much insight that is gained from dreams is entirely a folk wish. My grandfather contests that dreams are the mush of a mind thinking unclearly. He would say that dreams are to the mind what garbage is to a meal. I contest that dreams are like the food on the hidden menu and their delectability is discovered only upon greeting the chef. So dreams are to life what exotic foods are to the palate. It takes a certain attitude to enjoy them. I gather that they are not necessary pieces of our consciousness. They mustn't be taken as omens or prophesy. They are, however, brilliantly odd and rare. How rare, though, is a dream in which you run or experience sexual stimulation? These, while rarely, if ever, experienced by the individual are nonetheless features of the dreams experienced by all of humanity. This is known.

I have no pretention about the significance of my dreams. I humbly record them as little oddities for my, and perhaps your, enjoyment.

If I am to interpret any dream, I will when the story is over. As for the dream above, I have but two takeaways. First, I run trails a lot and am constantly vigilant for rattlesnakes. I suspect that the dream is a reflection of that common experience, but in an accentuated form. Second, the snake may be a metaphor. I was stunned by its size and poise. Trying to pass could be characterized as reckless or brave (Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics). Here, I chose to exude neither recklessness nor bravery. Instead, I chose passivity, the most common human characteristic.

Later, I was arrested under the suspicion that I passed the snake and arrived where the location of a crime was committed. Of course, inaction curtailed my progress and I turned back. Regardless of my inaction and inability to commit the crime, I was nonetheless charged. An injustice?

I was in the middle of a city street. It was night and the moon did not shine. But speckled before me streamed conical spotlights from tall rustic streetlights.

Everything was so crisp to the eye. The dark was pitched against the light like a clamoring army before a bright white impregnable wall. The siege lay dormant.

The asphalt was clean and the sidewalk sparkled. A few cars from the 1970s glimmered. Everything was tilted noseward to my left.

No one else was around, but I could hear the chatter of daily life. Like the darting of bats at dusk, the sounds flapped, swooped and soared. Murmurs swirled and laughs echoed. Window blinds ruffled. Light switches flicked. The stuff of charm.

Then all at once, I heard every sigh, yawn and proclamation in the area. Yet, like the image produced by eyes crossed and a mind adrift, I saw nothing but a blur.

But then suddenly, like a sheet of rain beyond the hull of a freeway overpass, the scene collapsed. Among the moving and unmoved, a knot formed. It dangled there like a loose ribbon fixed to the foot of a bubbling rapid. I reached out.

Like a video played in reverse of a mirror breaking, the background crystalized to the shape of a door. I yanked and pushed. The door opened.

I stepped forward into a mountain scene. It was light. The skies were deep blue and empty of clouds.

Small log cabins lined either side of me. Snow covered the ground. Pockets of boot tracks dotted the floor. Trees swayed gently like twirling women in white flowing dresses.

I walked but my steps made no sound. The scene was dead quiet.

I found three friends of mine conducting some general business, happily. They all wore snow attire with scarves and knitted hats. My presence did not distract them from their tasks. They spoke, but I could not hear them.

This was one of their cabins. It was the shabbiest on the block with cracked windows, rotted wood and spotty blotches of paint. The front door hung offset from the frame. Moss at the foot of the door kept it in place.

Then, as if a volume knob was turned up slowly, I heard the calm chatter of my friends. Clearly still busy, but operating cooperatively and in good spirits. I passed a glance at them and smiled. I turned back to the door and pushed it open.

The bottom of the door brushed a doormat and swished. Milk colored droplets passed just before my nose. I took a few steps in and closed the door.

The room was warmer, but I could not feel it. In fact, I could not feel anything. Unfazed, I carried on like this was a fact of life.

I searched for a bathroom to wash up. I passed by a narrow hallway decorated with family pictures and framed schematics of machinery that I did not recognize. A coarse red ribbon dangled next to the door of the bathroom. I stopped before the door and the floorboards sighed. I pivoted and went in.

I stood before the mirror with my eyes fixed to my hands. I glanced at the faucet which was scaled with rust, spit and bits of shine. I washed as steam slowly crawled up the mirror fogging the image.

Blurred. Unfocused. Unseen. Unfeeling... Clean.

"I wake up in the morning and I wonder..."

I am not immune to rot and decay. I do not live for a singular purpose, for which I devote every breath and step. I move, I dream, I sigh in relief, that my eyes may behold more beauty than it has ever before. I seek it. I await it. But a profound gap between what is here or there, gone and coming, rings a bell of what I know not forthcoming. A bilge aboard my ship pumps away what sneakily accumulates. A rot, a fungus, a rust, a weakness...

Every day that passes and I am alone in a room of prefabricated niceties. I stand to lose what matters most to me. Like a bucket below a leak, I await the culmination of pressure to drip a drop from the confluence of weak material and howling rain. The longer I stay, the more likely it is that I shall overfill.

The dimensions of my hull are wide and deep, but not so wide and deep to stave off a stronger longer storm. The roof is caving in, becoming moldy, and soon it will have more holes and more drips. I shall not be able to prevent the continued trend of drop to floor and floor to floor. The hull shall begin to reek and break. The longer I stay here, the more leaks that spring, the quicker I lose the most precious thing. Yes, I shall say it: clarity. As soon as I lose clarity, I lose myself. I then become my old self, who I defeated years ago. It shall not be understated how critical it is, that he must never be reanimated! That corpse of a dead mind must never be jolted to twitch. Not one movement. Not one split moment. Never again. Never!

I do not float, nor do I think loftily. I walk in a straight line and I do not bob my head. My eyes do not crawl over others’ bodies. My mind does not creep over the perspective of passersby.

The clack of shoes on smoothed rock does not penetrate my ears. The punch of sweat and hot robber does not yank at my nose. The percussion of coughs and sneezes does not pound my head.

When the wind brushes my eyelids, I do not blink. When a flower gushes, I do not bend. When a bird whistles, I do not whistle back.

I do not waste an eye on colors, which are not known to exist. I do not waste a tongue on flavors, which are received differently. I do not waste a mind on thoughts, which do not feel. I do not waste a touch on things, which do not think.

I am a man of a singular purpose. I exist to realize the horizon. To wake before dawn and ring the bell that a new sky is born.

For him with a soft belly and heavy mind, the open waters of the jostling ocean are no place to be. A wind shall spin his internal gyroscope around in circles until left becomes right and right becomes left. Soon he shall be lost in the tufts of wisped clouds among the spurs of white foam.

Saddled on a mustang, which he cannot control, he does not decide the direction or pace of travel. The only clue as to his direction comes in the form of whispers from pulley and mast as they creak from side to side. Out there, he blindly taps his way around; telegraphing a message in yaw, Morse Code: do I have a purpose?

He cannot know if the message reaches sentient minds, but he believes that the brightness of the sun, which shimmers across the entirety of the expanse, conveys the message. Awaiting an answer, he is left with a boiling belly and crackling mind. He may never receive an answer.

In lieu of an answer, he assesses what he can. A survey of his ship reveals a sturdy structure, but one which is not impervious to the depredations of time. Already, the harsh salt air has oxidized copper fittings. The sail appears to be largely untarnished, but tiny quarter inch fraying at the corners suggests wear. In waiting, he cannot hold out for ages, but the expanse can. In waiting, he may never touch land, but someday sink, and if lucky, be a part of an island.

When self-indulgent masses shed tears for strangers and give bread to failure, beds are primed for slumber. Pity morphs into callousness and simulated pain hardens pride. The day ends with the chill of a purpose, which cannot reckon the limitations of being one.

Such a life anxiously awaits what it cannot have. Bound to a belly nurtured by pride and filled with pity, everywhere is the direction of travel. Nowhere can he go whose compass is ever spinning, 'round and 'round, ever uncovering the world's woes.

Torn by inadequacy, guilty of a deep failure, secured by dreams of self-immolation, he is shallow, weak, and broken.

But there is still hope yet. His soft belly and heavy mind may yet be mended to strength. He must reel in his compass from this scurried foray in the ripping ocean. Discover in one the limitations of mankind and maximize what is innermost to him. Realize the epic, in which he walks blindly. Open his eyes to the thrill of tenable action. If need be, beat him into belief! Wrestle his dependency on pity into remission. If need be, slap the tears off his face! Clear his mind of corrosive thought. If need be, grab him by the ear and pound them out! Give him direction, give him peace. In an epic battle, he shall be happy.

Dashed again. The world shrinks to the size of a pea. The air is thin and the scents are spoiled.

Hopes are strung out like the entrails of a kill. My body is its body, emptied by the hands of another. Cleaned of all organs that process what is normally taken in. Senses continue to flow, but through an empty hull, unfiltered.

An unknown hand pokes the fire over which the kill rests. Sparks scold exposed flesh. Crickets chirp, bats swarm, and mosquitoes buzz in the shadow of the suspended body.

Critters nibble. Beasts chomp. The hand stokes the fire.

A man awakes in a warm den. He wipes dew off his forehead. He opens his crusty eyes. The sky unfolds like a wet painting, dripping streaks of blue, white, green, yellow, and orange.

He touches his belly, warmed by the fire, now but a gentle smoke. He stretches and yawns. The smell is sweet and he smiles. The world expands to the size of a possibility.

I match my march to map and terrain as I peak a mountain pass. I follow a leaf whisked trail of grey granite and red dirt. Rodents flee my step. Birds scoot behind my draft. Insects swirl around me like I am the eye of a storm.

My breath grinds over the commotion of the forest. My lungs clank and hiss. My heart swishes like the gears of a locomotive.

Only, rather suddenly, thoughts of ambitious results drown out the noise.

Nature's sirens sing, but they are faint. Scenes pass unseen.

My ears are stuffed with cheers and congratulations. My eyes are blotted by an image washed by thick film. In a blank lit room I wave and smile, but to no one.

I see no pass or meadow, elevation gain or drop, rocky or smooth path. I hear no rattling to whip my eyes to attention. No sweet scents wring my nose to drip reminiscence.

I drift self-guided, yet I have never left the path. I mosey unperturbed, because I follow the boundaries of the trail. I am...

Ah ha! I pat my chest and thighs. I am travelling downhill.

I fester upon this earth's flaky skin and rot between the crack in time I splay. Hunkered down deep in the lost chasm of hope and solitude is my heart: fragmented, cold, and beaten. But for a beacon above a sliver of light, a hill to climb, a praiseworthy sight. Where two paths converge and wind up gloriously.

Ah, sweet redemption has reared its head.

When the tides have come and gone

(‘nd) her sweet scent is all withdrawn

The waves a crash that I’ve been wrong

‘N a secret place I don’t belong

Now, far away her heart sails on

Through dreams of peace a life bygone

To pieces and regrets I’ve spawned

Kiss the lips that say “so long.”

Together,

Together,

Beyond the heart’s decay!

I’ll give you my forever day

The tithing of a soul insane

Forever

Forever

Beyond the last foray

I give all my love away

With open arms

I dare to say,

I will meet you,

One day!

When the night has come and gone

Fresh notes of sweet roses on

The sound of dreams a soothing song

About a man whose fate's foregone

One day when the tides are in

He'll run a hasty mile to see

The wife he wished she'd be

Together to dance with the cheers of kin

To whisper in her ear, where have you been?

Together,

Together,

Beyond the heart’s decay!

I’ll give you my forever day

The tithing of a soul insane

Forever

Forever

Beyond the last foray

I give all my love away

With open arms

I dare to say,

I will meet you,

One day!

Lazing by the tree, out at dawn on the spree, loose with friends who smile at me, laughter, spills, jests, and bellows, all the mixings of a good set of fellows.

Let the whispers turn to screams and scowl at vagabonds in the streets, deny the one who cries humanity, but fails to find his own serenity, voided by angst and depression, the contentious masses spit and jaw, acting as though what he wills is law, not knowing this assumption is his greatest flaw.

Woe is the era of bygone men, pestered by a cornucopia of things but for no hen, given to time and lust uncharted with no end, rendered no more a thing than a pig oft to offend.

Hi to me, the man out at sea, lost in the doldrums of his heart's uncertainty, an insecure inkblot on the page of a resolution, steadfast in his claim to a revolution, a coward clinging to his vanity.

It is no surprise to anyone that life goals require dedication and vigor to fulfill. Without these basic commitments, horizons reduce to colorful pascal paintings of gorgeous skies blurred between reality and scene. And so, whatever splashes the colors of truth and fiction, let the feeling remain as warming as the sun. So that, whatever shall pass between the peculiar natures of self and nature, let it remain resolved our one basic foundation of chaotic-passion. What order may come of it, either a series of combustions tickling into the atmosphere or a streak of sunlight passing through milky clouds, we stay stalwart.

Hi me,

As far as the eye can see

The blazing shadows of smoke gathers

From sea to sea in minds that would rather

Cross their arms to those who don't matter

To them, the arbiters of value

The charlatans of morality

The petty patrons of "look at me"

I fear the worst for this country.

And who could blame me?

For I am but a mote

Not even an afterthought

Just a man

Who enjoys his feet in sand

And a smiling beauty by his side

A warm feeling of togetherness

But with one,

Holding hands beneath the sun.

Waiting for the world to decide

If premature death is our fate to find.

The heroes assemble in the dew covered grass. They line up in two standing six feet apart. Beanies, long johns, blouses and masks stand out from their camouflaged ensembles. They await their mission.

Their commander rides in on his steel horse. He brings their gear. With a flash, there's a knife hand here and an order there, the bees swarm in response to his command.

The heroes march to their battle stations! Ahem… they spend the next 2 hours racking up and bagging pine needles.

A soldiers favorite joke, "thank you for your service."

If there was ever a nightmare that could truly make your bones shake and flesh crawl it might be this. I greet mom, "good morning." She leaves for work. Dad is uncharacteristically still asleep. I check on him and see him lying there, folded over. I don't wish to wake him. An hour passes and he is still not up. I check on him again, but this time more closely. No more hours shall pass before him. He is dead. May God rest his soul.

We were in groups of 5 to 10 participating in a sort of scavenger hunt. It ended up being a race to find one person. I never found the guy. Instead, I saw a tall woman and talked to her. I smooth-talked to her while the rest of the group kept searching. We were hitting it off well. She offered a drug of sorts in what looked like a Now or Later candy wrapper. It was sparkling and I initially said yes, but after asking what it was and getting no strong answer, I refused. It was no big matter. We caressed one another firmly. Then A from grad school was there. She signaled to B, (this is now 3 years since I've really interacted with either of them) and I never saw more than the black straps on B's back. I was once again choosing someone else over B. That story must end.

Last night, I was on a date with C. I held her tight and even more so, she held me tighter. I think it's been years since I've held a woman like that. Or maybe, since I've been held by a woman like that. It made it into my dream, that much I know. The woman in the dream was someone else, 6'5" apparently, and kind of a hapless hedonist. C is not a hedonist and she would never do a synthetic drug (at least as far as I know).

It's strange to think that a woman would be seriously interested in me, who I hold equally serious interest in. My whole life I have done little more than attract women I have little interest in. Or maybe, fleeting interest in.

There is one snag. She was engaged less than, oh, six months ago. That is not enough time. Hell, I was in a free fall after just one six month affair. My first real love. How can she possibly mind her loss and find love in me if I am so lucky? I am skeptical and I should be.

I met her from the online dating platform world. No attractive, sane, non-desperate woman has ever swiped right on me, seemingly ever.

God, I'm still haunted by the eyes of one woman I met years ago through Tinder. Crazy eyes, just thinking of them gives me the willies. Thank God I found a way out of that one without getting my dick chopped off. And no, I did not have sex with her. I kissed her once and did not like it. Plus, that much was too much. Abort!

Anyways, there is a lot to like about C, but I won't dote on her just yet. She comes over for dinner on Saturday and I couldn't be happier. I'll cook for her and maybe we'll watch a movie. I just don't know what the limits of her interests are. Is this a mindless sex escapade for her? I will oblige, but I am fully self-aware that I don't want that right now. I want a girlfriend that I respect and who respects me. Not like R, who all but shat on my dreams and scoffed at my intelligence. Not like D, who lost her mind to depression and cheated on me (all for the better in my opinion- could have broke up first, but I really don't care- she's happy, I'm happy).

In the end, it appears that I may have met a woman who could become a dollop in my heart. How much of my heart I concede is entirely up to chance.

I feel myself generally losing interest in even the idea of a relationship. Yet, as I said, it is all I want going forward. Being alone is great.

However, I go on benders when single and alone. I drink 36 beers and 12 shots in a matter of three days. That's obviously not sustainable. Not at all. I will be a better man if given the chance to love and be loved, to grow and to help grow. But wait… it is early. Too early. Far too early to say anything more.

Settle into psychosis and find despair, it is the way of this path. Destroy your barriers and clear your hesitance, the merriment in vulnerability awaits. But you are not strong enough for such matters. You must remain sane and guarded. It is your only choice. And there it is, you have no choice. Give it up! Give up. Retreat. You are not meant for such a way. Go back before you tailspin. Go!

Yet, we try and try again. To hurt and to be hurt. To cry and to make cry. The cycle of a burdensome love, if a love is true, to weight the shoulders with chains and a key. For our misery is self-inflicted and the shackles our own. My oh my, may the heart roam free!

I refuse to think it possible. She is far too beautiful to have stooped to my level. For this reason I hold pure pessimism in the light of her shadow- a silhouette of grace. In my mind's eye she is a gargoyle. Perched among scum-ridden walls riddled with bird shit and nest debris. In my skin, I sense her psychosis. There could be scant else to justify her behavior. Why don my sorry ass a chance? I could not even feign a reason, nor will I conjure any delusions in affirmation of chance. If I chance feelings for this woman, she will destroy me. I… shall destroy myself. Unfortunately, I do not have the means to her love. Security in motherhood absent the throes of balancing the checkbook, ever worried to dip the quill in red ink. I shall be a worry, a provider only of risk and famine. I can bring myself riches, if given time. I can being her nothing more than doubt, and this shall not bring about the nuclear family she desires. If I am lucky to strike it rich, I am bound to make a family. But if I fail, what do I offer? Humility, modesty, piety? Women do not care for such things when they stand alone. Without the material support, I am little more than a visage of an archetype fitted for the walk from town-to-town. There is only fleeting interest in such a man. For me, the walk is undaunting and warming. The only problem is, no one can keep up. The millionaire peripatetic is no one, yet everyone's dream. Leave it all behind, but the means to talk. Meet many faces and chew on ideas around a table of strangers. Gnaw on the bones of solitude. Beat to pulp the guards of cowards. Conquer your tale. It shall be a great one!

I spent the night with D. We ate burritos for dinner, which of course have beans in them. In the middle of the night I must of had a huge backlog of gas, because I dreamt of shitting my pants. Straight up shitting my pants. Weird feeling. I woke up relieved that the dream did not become reality. Some dreams are better left unrealized.

I'm gone for 2 weeks. I return and can't take D on the camping trip, because she is not vaccinated. Z requires that all people are vaccinated, which is strict since we will be outside the whole time. That, and everyone else will be vaccinated, so the danger is really only hers. I wonder if this is too much time for D. She needs attention right now. I may not be able to provide it. In fact, I won't be able to. I leave for REDACTED the week after I return. So, 2 weeks apart, then again 2.5 weeks apart. She has too much loneliness and sexual drive to be able to or want to restrain herself.

I'll note that she was willing to go bare last night. I refused, because she is not on any contraceptive. I am extremely virile and it is not fate for me to have a child. It's simple virile strength. That said, I was tempted. Very tempted. I want her. I don't know her well, but I am excited by the idea of her bearing my children and making my home warm. Also, I can't support that right now. I want to, but I need more time. I will risk it all to make enough to support a family. I am willing.

I am once again thrown into a torrent of my own torment. Beckoning a day when my life unfolds with strength. I think, I have only one life, make it beautiful. An image of a future with this woman rolls. I see a modest home, smiles and new life. I hear creaks, laughs and words of love.

I jettison air to my head and ask, please calm down.

Once my mind responds with a yes, my body responds with a flame. My heart churns, rolling obsidian rocks to fine sharp points. I twitch and howl, in mind, as these ready-made knives slice my insides into pieces. I become ill. Sick with delusions of a fantastic future lost in the cloud of a 3-week long relationship. Nothing this new is real, but the lust and the ideal. It begins, but what may come is another matter of course. I allow doubt to seep into my vision until, like a virus, the entirety of the vision is corrupted and only broken smiles remain. Brief bits of laughter or cries ring, then die in a shallow echo. The image is gone and the innocence of the pretext is guillotined. I have but one life, is this who I shall devote it to?

What an absurd question to ask oneself so early on. You speak as a fool and a fool only. Even a romantic understands the limitations of time. You, however, have no regard for time, love, lust or power. You have none and will have none by the end of this escapade if you continue to indulge in delusions so fervently and so frequently.

Every day that passes and I am alone in a room of prefabricated niceties. I stand to lose what matters most to me. Like a bucket below a leak, I await the culmination of pressure to drip a drop from the confluence of weak material and howling rain. The longer I stay, the more likely it is that I shall overfill.

The dimensions of my hull are wide and deep, but not so wide and deep to stave off a stronger longer storm. The roof is caving in, becoming moldy, and soon it will have more holes and more drips. I shall not be able to prevent the continued trend of drop to floor and floor to floor. The hull shall begin to reek and break. The longer I stay here, the more leaks that spring, the quicker I lose the most precious thing. Yes, I shall say it: clarity. As soon as I lose clarity, I lose myself. I then become my old self, who I defeated years ago. It shall not be understated how critical it is, that he must never be reanimated! That corpse of a dead mind must never be jolted to twitch. Not one movement. Not one split moment. Never again. Never!

How long does it take a paranoid coward to fold his hand? The ante? The first bet? Does he see a raise? Does he throw all calculations into the wind and bluff his way to victory?

This is just an analogy, but it hits the concerns I have of my old self. Lost, he did whatever was plain to his peers, so that they could not smell his fear. He puffed and jawed, but never to any effect. He blistered with ugly spores, but saw only those of others. He lost his freaking gourd!

Would if… just would if this is real? She's not a spy. She's not an informant. She's not a whore. She's not sick. No. She's interested in me. She wants me and me alone. She didn't mistakenly meet me via bumble. She thinks I'm attractive. She is mentally stable and healthy.

I hate to say it, but it is distinctly possible that she is seeing other men. She is seeing other men. She is having sex with other men. She is exchanging sexts with other men. She is sucking other men's dicks. She is moaning and crying out with other men. It is possible and likely happening. Do I care? Yes. She gives all of the signs that she wants me and only me. If she is seeing other men now, there is no way for me to tell if, at any time in the future, she is lying about or simply carrying out affairs while I remain totally unaware. If she is seeing other men now and treating me as she does now, I need to leave.

I want to have sex with her raw, but I know that if I fuck up, whatever I learn about her is moot. If I knock her up, I can't say, sorry I don't like this anymore. Nope. You are locked in.

She's manic depressive. She just ended a near 3-year engagement. She has 3 cats and a dog. She hates working (who likes it?). She doesn't see the paradox between modeling naked and being a modest traditionalist.

These are real concerns. I need to talk myself into using condoms. I must. Otherwise, I lose all power of choice.

Once again I am struck by an ill feeling of distrust and disgust. She doesn't like people. She called me daddy when we first had sex. She does a little kid voice in an interpretation of a sexy voice. She lied to me about something extremely petty. She talks often about her failed engagement. She is growing attached, but also is planning trips to "friends" places out of town. That last one just shifted the air abreast this house of cards I call an affair. The more I learn, the less I see something meaningful developing here. It is clear that I am a shoulder to cry on and a body to fuck. I am disappointed. I should have been more careful.

Strangely, I again find myself hypothesizing that this woman is a sexual deviant. She is likely seeing other men and sucking them dry of their emotional support instincts. I fear that I am but one fuckboy among others.

Well, at least she's not asking for money. I hope she knows that I don't get the x. She's not getting any money out of me.

She is going out of town this weekend to "see a friend up north." I will not be shocked if it is a guy. If it is, I will ask her the nature of the relationship. If it is sexual, I will leave the dinner tonight without having sex with her. I will tell her to make a decision. I don't want to do polygamy. I don't want to share. Even if what I have is just a reminder of how bad my judgement was with E. I am a shallow man and I forgive attractive women way too easily. Then, ironically, not at all. Eventually it catches up to me. Whereas with unattractive women I maintain that short leash of red flags. It just sucks. I might lose my interest in D, because of this whole divide between us. I miss the days when everyone had an ex, but they weren't committed to life with them. E and D are both girls that I have had who are recovering, still, from breakups. I am a fool to get invested. That's why I cut my heart out and think of them as nothing more than prostitutes. My mind says, fuck that flesh. My heart says, love that soul. I walk away restless and agitated. My heart will throb in pain and my mind will lose its bearings. There is no question about the effect these women have on me. None. I am caught in a cartesian bind. My mind and soul live separately in two essential modes of existence. The result? A man who has lost his mind and is sick to his stomach.

Do I trust her? No. Is this petty? Yes. Do I care? Yes. Do I want to not care? Yes. What is the cost? Not caring and losing the girl.

I met her face in the light of a day framed by blue skies and frothy clouds.

I am hyper critical and it's not healthy. Every time I hear a story of hers that dims the brightness of her ideal, I must remember that I too am not perfect. Indeed, I hope to never open up that much. Not for a while anyways.

In dream, I told myself to wake up and wallah. I did. I set an alarm for 545 and woke up at 544.

How things change so quickly. With one word, gesture or action, everything can flip upside down. People are the most susceptible to these ticks and changes. Sadly, I experienced one recently.

It always has to do with a woman. In my case, I was dealing with a woman who showed well, but was bruised through and through. I knew that she was recovering from a broken wedding. I knew she was fragile.

I knew she was not a good fit for me. If she hadn't snapped so tethered a love, I never would have met her and I would have been none the wiser. Last week, I realized that I should also cut my tie to her.

If I proceed, I will develop feelings that are overwrought with passion and affection. She will never satisfy my desire for passion and affection, because I will always know that she pledged her life to another man and is still in love with him. It is a simple trade. Sell for a small gain. The potential for a further rise is small.

I dipped my toe back into the dating pool. Digitally, it's shit of course. Still, I should be proactive. I can't invest in E if she has no more potential. And while I don't want to, I should probably break it off with her entirely. She can pursue an older man and be taken care of. I can meet a younger woman and build a bright future with growth on the horizon. It feels exceptionally well saying this aloud. Before I go, I must relieve every would of, could of, and should of. I will profess to her my feelings and see where she stands. Then, together as mature adults, move on.

It is never a great feeling to be forgotten or purposefully left aside. I am a great force of competence and care, but I am not awarded my due recognition. No measure of pats on the back compare to the undivided attention of a hello.

Forever is unfathomable to all, even those who pretend clairvoyance and a perfect memory.

So many ways forward, but only so many days toward an end each way.

I walk along a ridge accompanied by gravel, flowers, and bees. Thousands of humming engines putter from bush to bush, occasionally backfiring and causing a raucous.

Beauty cannot be enjoyed by a spinning mind.

The path is narrow.

Ok mind, I get it. You didn't have to be so over the top about it though. Leave me alone.

Give a man a moment to think and take from him a notepad, set a day in relief to chaos.

Hunker down before it commences.

I dated E for 5 months. I enjoyed myself when I was with her. She's a bit of a basket case(look who's talking). Her emotions fly and then crash. I felt the brunt of her swings. I feasted off of her highs and stumbled into the cellar with her lows. She complains a lot and is not efficient. She can't keep her house in order and she is unable to enjoy people. She refuses to meet my family and friends, but that might be because of her lack of courage. In any case, it's not good. She denied my invite to the place and Y's party. It's… never going to work is it?

No, it's not going to work and that's ok. People date each other to figure out whether or not they are a match. In this case, we are not a match.

You should be thankful though. Your heart is not wrapped and beaten. Instead, your level of care about the situation is low. Your mind is at ease about it as well. That means that the breakup will be smooth.

But don't worry about time. It will happen sooner rather than later.

Let her do it?

I suppose that may be a good idea. Empower her. She almost broke up with you last week. Your words kept you two together. That was a mistake.

But she was trying to blame my needs for the break up. What a way to deflect responsibility, eh? No, E, you are not a good girlfriend. Indeed, she is no longer my girlfriend.

No girlfriend of mine will be so un-excited about my life. That's what she says with her actions.

Swallow the defeat and move on. A greater longer battle awaits. A mistress that doesn't take crazy pills or complain all the time and cope with her sadness by popping more pills than she needs (she definitely did that once). ok, END it. Say goodbye.

It's always hard. You give up on a person. That's not in your nature, but you have to save yourself. Do not let your heart and mind become invested further. You will be ok if you do it within the next week or two.

It could be delayed to the end times and no measure of love would be restrained

I feel like giving up. Everything. I just want to leave it all and live out my days in a cabin in the woods. I should be writing. I should be applying. I'm lost. I have nothing of importance. I am not important. I have failed. I am a failure.

I was at the cabin. It was surrounded by trees, like usual. My version of the property expanded the size to approximately 30 acres. I went up a dirt path to a col-da-sack looking neighborhood where I found cabins and regular homes. I intended to purchase the other homes.

I walked further out of the property and found an old saw mill. I then hiked up a hill and when I got to the top I was shocked by the stark difference in the landscape just beyond that hill. The whole view before me was golden and desolate. It looked a lot like the view from the top of the trail with the river, rolling hills, barbed wire fences, and windmills. It was impressed upon me then that I really wanted to preserve the trees at the cabin property. It appeared to be a novelty of the area and I intended to preserve it.

I then entered a jet and began to fly around the scene. Everything was going well for a little while, but we then went straight into the large body of water. The scene went grayish and I sort of woke up in the dream. I realized that maybe the plane was also a boat and we would rise above the water and fly again. Indeed, we did, but again, not too long after we rose above the water we barrel rolled right back into the water. In the dream I thought, "I have lost control." So, I woke up, rolled around and went back to sleep.

I assembled sharks, orcas and dolphins together in this vast pool area. Presumably, they were my allies in a coming battle for freedom. I swam with them, petting the sharks as they swam into me. I was strong enough to direct the creatures in any direction I liked, but the orcas were not amenable to this act of rebellion. The battle was about to begin and the orcas second guessed their interests and sat at the bottom of the pool (about 200 feet deep) thinking and reflecting.

I never did learn if they joined in the battle. I woke up.

There was a sociopath on the loose. He would find a stranger walking under the night sky to duel him. He gave the man a full body vest of impenetrable armour and a long knife. In this night, he squared off against the other and won. I saw the shambles of the defeated man. Sitting at a bus stop like area, he flinched frenetically grabbing for his belly. In that moment, I saw what the sociopath had done. He overpowered the man and stabbed him repeatedly in the stomache, never penetrating the armour. Still, the defeated man was psychologically tormented by the painless stabbing in his belly.

Some time later, another poor man was targeted and dueled by the sociopath under the night sky. This time the sociopath deviated from his norm. The act of stabbing was not enough. He had to kill and he did so in a horrendously brutal manner. He sliced a third of his head clear off, leaving an eyeball dangling and brain exposed. His foot was mangled to the count of two remaining toes. A long cut along the defeated man's leg spilled muscle tissue and blood. The torso was sliced diagonally, but not to shreds. It was a heinous act and I had to see the result.

I ended it with E last night. I had enough of her sickness, both of the body and mind. She spurned all of my attempts to open my life to her and now the door is finally closed.

She thinks first of material and second of spiritual. She is not fit to age with. Her skin will degrade and her tits will sag even more than they already do. Her vanity will be replaced by irreverence and envy. Her womb could not adequately gestate one of ours.

I hope she finds happiness, because there was no way I could provide it.

One final note. When I talked with her, I spoke eloquently about her virtues without mentioning her vices. I did well to make her feel good about herself and her decision to prioritize material considerations above connection. But if I am being serious with myself, we lacked a connection to begin with.

I saw this coming. I just needed to get it over with. I'm a better man for having done so (despite the disgusting vitriol my mind speaks about her). Goodbye, E. Good luck.

I didn’t realize how happy I would be after breaking up with E. I made a great decision. Thank God I did not get her pregnant. That would have been a tragedy.

Instead, God smiled upon me today as I met him at our meeting spot on the hill. The wind shook my body in a calming way. The sun warmed without burning. The clouds splayed out in front of me like a beautiful painting. I thanked God for the opportunity to meet E. I then thanked God for showing me that lust can again and again corrupt the interest of the soul. She was beautiful, but she was also weak, vain, and unprincipled. I tolerated her vice, because of my own vanity of wanting to be with beauty. I imagine that the next woman I date will possess a much more glorious soul than her and I will be proud to know that her inner beauty is effervescent. Thank you God, Thank you.

Jobless, loveless, penniless…

Life would be easier to enjoy with just one of those bringing me satisfaction. instead, I have none and I am sleepless. My heart is pounding with stress. I need to be better. I will be better. I will prevail.

Do not look to the endless series of accidents in a day for signs of life beyond. Every moment is alone and forever together. We string it together like diligent ants from hive to source and back, but fail to recognize the connection is a contiguous mass of revolving lives. The butterflies, flies, bees, birds, and trees that I pass on hikes are all new within a day, a year, or years. Changing and staying the same, I don't appreciate that enough.

My mind echoed, "I give up" today. I am fed up, done. I don't bring anything to this world worth giving. I, I, I… the selfish indolent. I fester upon this earth's flaky skin and rot between the crack in time I splay. Hunkered down deep in the lost chasm of hope and solitude is my heart, fragmented, cold, and beaten.

I fear nothing again. I want to do nothing. I want to do something. I need to move onto a new project, but I know that all my work is for naught. I am a weak-minded fool of sporadic energies unfit to lead, teach, or thrive.

I need to turn this lost-cause-anguish into a work of art or science. I need to feel like I can do anything. I, I, I am losing my soul.

Of course I begin to miss her when I am lonely. I have no one else to hold or kiss. I have no dates to look forward to.

Being severed from a romance is hardest when it is not followed by another.

I just might refuse to show up anymore. If an institution lies to your face and brings dishonor to your name, why be a part of it. If it is true, then they are no better an organization than a pack of thieves.

Disheveled and confused, he exited the house with the scroll in hand. He stood there on the stoop staring flatly across the street, dumbfounded. He glanced at his hands still dusted with plaster. He gulped.

He wanted nothing more than to get away from this building. But with one step down the stoop he was rushed by a blindness that occluded his sight. He waved his hands around like a man on a tightrope and gently sat down. Trying to keep his wits about him, calmed, but he couldn't help his mind from running amok. He slowly regained a projection of sight.

Plain brown loafers and swishing slacks walked on a reddish-brown hardwood floor. Muffled voices jabbed over the hum of an over-exerted air conditioner unit. A cup of coffee dropped to the floor, crashing into pieces. He flinched, then smelled the coffee. Then like the upswing of a bungee jump, his vision swung back to the stoop.

He bit his lip harder than how he bites an apple. The young man summed up his strength and got up. He glanced at his hand. The scroll was still there.

He unrolled it to find a change. It now read, "Go There."

In a dreamlike haze, he hovered his foot over the next step of the stoop. Hoping he would be free of anymore delusions or illusions or whatever this was. Lightly he tapped his toe as if he were testing the temperature of water. Undisturbed this time, he committed to the step, then another and another. Surrounded by trash and old cars with missing tires, he turned left and started to "go there." Where that was, he did not know.

He was an unusually aggressive walker, who out strode everyone and peered into the eyes of all passersby. But everything was cockeyed today and he was the one overtaken. He nearly shuffled his way down the street awaiting a feeling in his stomach that would say, “stop.” For now, he was hollow of thought and drained of energy and no signal turned.

A man in a sharp blue suit called out excitingly, "Oh! Hey there Perry! What's the news? How’s the family?”

Perry...

I am way happier than my journal leads on. I'm basically living in heaven.

Or hell.

The conditions of this god forsaken place are primitive at most and horrendous at least. Walls are bashed in and covered with human shit. Tepid water crawls along the thick shag carpet. Glass shards scatter at the base of boarded windows. A brave moonlight breaks through small holes in the walls and boards.

A tiny candlelight flickers at the end of a long cave-like hallway. Cobwebs sparkle from the ceiling.

I duck and swipe my way through. Every step feels like I'm mashing moss and bones. Rats and cockroaches beetle around my feet, tapping and squeaking about. A cold draft washes through. Gently howling winds swoop over head.

The ceiling shrinks. My steps begin to echo. My heartbeat drums against the splash of water.

The moonlight fades to black. Light from the candle grows. It turns violent. Hot humid waves crash over my face, but the floor grows colder.

In just a few steps, the floor turns to snow, then hard slippery ice. I brace myself against the grainy slimy walls. Smacked by a smell of shit, vomit, and mold, I puke.

I scoot and brace, inching toward the light. My feet go numb. My eyes dry up. My hands stick to the walls. I'm unable to move.

Dishware crash through the building. Chairs screech somewhere aloft. The sound of a cracking tree breaks and the building shakes.

The length of the hall snaps like a rubber band and my face is inches from the candle. It dances like a bird in heat.

The walls begin to warm and melt. I squeeze my hands out from their grip, taking a scoop of plaster with them. I shake it off.

The floors soften and dry. The house draws closed. The draft ceases. I reach out for the candle… an old blotchy hand snatches my wrist. A bright white smile beams from the door threshold. I fight the grip, but it gets tighter and the smile grows wider.

I reach out for the candle with my other hand and again my wrist is snatched. This time by a bony hand of barely any flesh. A pair of bright white eyes pierce beyond yet another door threshold.

I grunt and squirm, but I cannot break free.

Someone walks up behind me. Their shoes beat the floor like a snare drum. Hands of third degree burned flesh slowly wrap around my belly. They feel up and down my ribcage and I breath more rapidly. Desperate to end this vision of horror, I try to blow out the candle. I blow again. Then again. Then again. The light mocks me, unscathed.

I scream with all my might. The people laugh louder than my scream. The smile and eyes bounce. The burnt hands curl on my sides. I plead for my freedom. The laughs grow louder. I beg for mercy. The laughs grow even louder. I promise them anything if everything would just stop.

They go silent. Their grips loosen. The person behind me smacks a rolled up piece of paper onto my chest. Snare drum beats tap down the hall. The eyes flicker off. The smile recedes to black. The hands slip into each room. I unroll the paper and hold it up to the now stable candle light. It reads: "Retrieve It."

I exited the house with the scroll in hand, disheveled and confused. I took a minute on the stoop staring flatly across the street, stirred by the supposed reality of the moment. Still dusted with plaster, I wiggled my fingers to test for, well, anything frankly. Plain and simple, I needed to get away from this building.

But with just one step I was rushed by a blindness that spun my mind like a carousel run afoul.

I waved my arms around like I was on a tightrope and I slowly, very carefully, sat down, breathing in a controlled manner. Just doing my best to keep my wits about me, calmed, but I had no luck. My mind ran amok like a elephant in who's seen a mouse. Then I slowly regained a projection of sight:

Plain brown loafers and swishing slacks walk on a reddish-brown hardwood floor. Muffled voices jab over the hum of an over-exerted air conditioner unit. A cup of coffee drops to the floor, bursting into pieces.

I was punched in the nose with the scent of coffee and that was it. Like the upswing of a bungee jump, my vision zipped back to the stoop. Damn, I'm still here.

I summed up my strength and got up, biting my lip like I was biting an apple. All the while, this damned scroll rubbed my hands like sandpaper to your arse. I dropped the scroll to my feet as to say good riddance, but immediately my hands developed a sort of pin prick sensation. Quickly, my hands began to burn and pulsate more and more intensely. As soon as I grabbed the scrolled my hands ceased the turmoil and began to steam. I unrolled the scroll again to confirm what I had seen, but there was a change. It now read, "Go There." Go where?

In a dreamlike haze I hovered my foot over the first step of the stoop, hoping I would be free of anymore delusions or illusions or whatever this was. I tapped my toe as if he were testing the temperature of water and this time, undisturbed, I carried on down the stoop. Surrounded by trash and old cars with missing tires, I turned left and started to "go there."

A beautiful day with a beautiful woman. we ended up having sex for the first time three times. The first time was not good for either of us. The second and third were great. She's a voluptuous goddess and I really like holding her.

Today, when we made a wish by the fountain, I wished: "for this woman's happiness in any shape it takes. Please God, make this woman happy."

I hope I've done a little of that today.

Unfortunately, I have to accept the possibility that she is unable to continue the bullrush to a relationship. She has taken a step back and it is probably for the better. It's a shame though. I like this one.

Hint and hint are received. She wants time apart and I understand. However, it will be the end and I have spent too much money on her.

It's… been a while since I've last dreamt of wild colors and ruffled trees. I imagine it's partly due to the quick succession of events, which have mashed to one over the last few weeks. Indeed, the days grow closer together as the sun inches along and night springs to day. A night shift… and so stitch by stitch the weave of the sun deprives my mind of exhibitions in moral repose and reflection. When last have I dreamed? Truly dreamed? I can't think of it, though I know it was not long ago.

I've had interesting dreams lately. One involved a climb to a statue made of flesh. We shot the statue with an arrow to check if it was real. I was sort of narrating over a person crawling backwards out of a tube in which large football-sized critters were chasing her/him.

If you are a reformed, then learn to lead in crisis as a binding agent. Reformers who alienate their counterweights in legislative, military, or business ventures are only short-lived showmen. They may introduce an idea or a model, but they will not establish sweeping change. Big changes occur in crisis, partly due to the crisis itself, and partly due to the adaptation, the mutation, which recoded the genome of the entity. Reform steered through crisis is just as unlikely to succeed as a reform in stability. Only, it is far more likely to gain support in crisis. As such, reformers ought to plan for crisis, but not egg it on! Nor cheer it on! This would be the first of many catastrophic moves one can make to disable their ability to lead in crisis.

Marketing generates a sentimental value for a product. Not so much a sentiment akin to mementoes, but to a secular attachment between consumer and thing, that adds a value triumphant over rational pricing mechanisms. This, and circumstantial need like hunger or thirst (and hunger and thirst in a time of scarcity), together with a traditional macro economic modeling of supply and demand, if quantified, can help reset the accuracy of economic studies.

I was in the concourse of a terminal of trains and planes. I was rushing around to find my way back home.

Problems: dwindling birthrates and an unsustainable funding pyramid.

Young people everywhere struggle to countenance the life of the boomers in which many own a home, have grandkids, and forecast a comfortable retirement by age 60.

Policy idea: create a new tax exemption for anyone age 26 and younger- foreign and domestic.

The nuke dream in the woods. I died with my men and when I recognized that the explosion was that of a nuke, I braced for death and with my last breath I said, "I love you mom."

I will never forget that dream, nor that moment.

It's the shallow mind that struggles in deep waters. His feet point and claw for a base to propel his face above water, but he founders cold and confused. Sipping bits of air through gulps of salty water and feelings of abandon. Distraught by winds capping curls of white foam and debris. Clouds cover overhead blocking the sun and the moon from display. He prays for a depth that he can touch, but is left in dismay. Struggling in the……

While reposed in my parent's living room playing scrabble with my mom, I felt the jousts of voices poking my brain. I let them exude their own creative thrusts and lost a sense of control. It was an empathy building moment, because it was a taste of many people's internal disquiet.

Then, this morning I woke up to a rapidly beating heart. I could not determine it's reason, but the more I approached the thought of why, the harder the beats felt. I calmed myself down with a few deep breaths and went on with my day.

I pity those who cannot calm the muses of anxiety and worry. Awareness and mindfulness for them is less about internal quietude and more about raising the volume of one stimulus over another. Such a shame. And they think the rest of us don’t deal with it too. So unique. Such a shame.

My dreams continue to show vivid and robust character and depth. I was walking down an old European designed street along cobblestones and altbauen like I used to see in Berlin. I was approached by a young woman on a street corner. She asked me a question that had nothing to do with the weather or anything situational. Rather, she probed my thoughts on technology and society. We got to talking down those rivers and streams. The dream zoomed forward to the part where she was undressing on the back of a bed. She had glorious breasts and a small waist. Her face was really cute too. I didn't want to leave the dream, but I woke up severely hung over. I want a woman like that. One who I can talk with and fuck like a maniac. I don't think I'll be happy with one or the other thing missing.

I'm becoming sickened by my own inadequacy and am growing more and more accustomed to mediocrity and boredom. I hope for beauty but I get ugly. I hope for success but I get failure. I work toward improvement but I get degeneracy. Is there still a reason to action? Am I a man or am I a rock? Do I slowly decay, stationary, unless blown by swift floods? Or am I a leaf of a tree still floating and yet to set and decay? From the cold rocky earth to the thin brisk air of the earth's husk and shell, I wiggle and squirm like a worm out of place. It's disgusting. And so I awake to the shock of normalcy!

I must gain the skills of a technician! I must become a researcher whose services are coveted! I must make millions and support a family and wife! I must! I must! I must! For what else awaits the worm, but death by malnutrition, predator, or compression. All three seek me and I reject them. I shall trek to a greatness untold by nature's self-deprecating lashes. I shall overcome the rows of foregone opportunities and seize my place among the heroes of our time!

I saw a wood built dam and levy among a set a trails I had seen before from another angle. Bloodthirsty zombies chased me for a bit before a calm whirled about the new angle. That's all that is notable.

The dread of days drawn to a close undisclosed of horrors sown to drown the soul of saints and slaves, demons and angels, torn by torrents teeming, gleaming, careening the skies of sharp screams and bellows hewn to cisterns and cesspools. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, he shouted in incredulously. MEANING, he welled at the eyes, MEANING, he fell to his knees, FEELING, he stabbed his fingers into the dirt, FEELING, he curled a fit of earth, PURPOSE, he tossed and screamed, WHERE ARE YOU, he clenched his jaw, WHERE, he jumped to his feet, PRESENT YOURSELF, he puffed his chest, WHERE ARE YOU, he spit furiously, YOU COWARD, he puffed, I'M COMING TO GET YOU, he marched. Dare to stand in his path. Dare to hold his hand and ensure benevolence.

To others, I may seem like a man of many things, but to the close observer I am but one thing: a worthless vagrant. I pass this world from one place to another leaving a putrid skid of scum. The only victories I have ever won are at the defeat of morality. The only love I have ever given is the faint of affection. I develop no legacy but the pain I cause in my friends and family. The lies. The deception. The travesty of living under the guise of well-intentioned people.

I learned too late that lying is the trait of a coward. I learned too late that loving is a hero’s work. I learned too late that life is a prize for all, not just me. God damn, it sounds horrific to admit the plain suited dirty collared countenance I present. I fail daily. I fail every minute. I am and always will be a failure. An utter failure.

Naturally, then, I shall attract females.

Naturally, then, I will impregnate one or more.

Naturally, then, my genes and character will pass to the world anew- replete with the same dirty tricks of mine and the rest, who predeceased me.

If ever there were a term for a pitiless mess! You foul beast! Rid yourself from me, you cowardice fool!

I countenance all that I am, I, in my awareness, confront what is me! I, unlike you, who wallow about afraid of the most basic of emotions, allow for a full-fledged assault. I flush out the frailty by purging this ridiculous mess that is my self-loathing cunt self.

Move on! I am more capable than over 80-90 percent of the population. Sure! There are people who are naturally more gifted… Nevertheless, If I hone in one my creativity, on my license to will my mind to truth, I may stand before the halls of learned and extravagant men as a story of interest! A hero to young lads a century from now. It begins!

Hurrah!

You fucking shit fuck.

I believe a biological frame, both mental and physical, ought not to be capped by any law.

I do, however, believe that an organization has the right to limit its membership and attendance based on a right to choose, discriminate, on grounds of interests or capability.

The mensa only permits people who test 130 or higher on an IQ test. Is that an impermissible form of discrimination?

A dorm only permits black students to reside in a certain segment of the hall. Regardless of the reason, if the group members chooses to reside in such a way, would it not be an unethical imposition to emplace a white or asian student in hall organized as such? Granting the wish of the student to reside only with black students while restricting membership on grounds of race, is this an impermissible form of discrimination?

Perhaps I meet one that gives me the butterflies… What a world that would be… I haven’t felt that excited since I met D, truly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I, of course, learned that beauty is not everything. And here I am again, attempting a mature outlook, but am hamstrung by primal desires and average human pitfalls. I must reiterate, then, my failure in the world of mating. I am my own worst enemy and I know it. Yet, I carry on as a fool in heat.

I play this game of ambition and displeasure. I am as modern as those I despise. I am exceedingly selfish and self-centered. I am arrogant, but entirely average. Whatever intelligence I may have, it is always second to genius and therefore, a blip in history. I walk and talk like a robot. I spew platitudes and misdirect the youth. I pretend to advise with the gravity of philosophy, but again, nothing but an incoherent word jumble connects message to notion. Fuck my entitlement to a good future. Fuck my pride. Fuck my vanity. Fuck my everything.

I see the signs of demonic intervention. I feel signs of angelic supervision. But these are the byproducts of selfishness and arrogance. I cope with existence by inflating my importance. I constantly remind myself to disconnect the ME from the THEY. That group is not laughing about you. That woman is not attracted to you. That young man/woman does not look up to you.

What this all amounts to is a resetting of consciousness. I must reframe life in humble terms so that I may enjoy moments of community and fraternity when they truly arise. Otherwise, everything is a conflation between self and all- the good and the bad. I am not all- of course. I never will be all. I am but one frail arrogant fool. I must push to make myself stronger, humble, and adroit. I MUST BE BETTER. MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.

A beautiful woman and I laid together in a trailer designed to look like a living room. Dark wood paneling complemented a brick fireplace, but the aesthetic of the room could not compare to her beauty. She was healthily thin with subtle breasts and a softly curved face. She wrapped her legs over mine. She wore cute socks and lounging clothes.

Our relationship was forbidden. Carelessly, we flaunted our relationship as she draped my body. I gushed with love and pride.