I don't even know... Some things, I really don't understand... I couldn't even tell you what's confusing me so right now. Some intersection of Time and Change and Personality and Oblivion...

On summer.

I love the nights when the inside and the outside feel the same. Tonight, the outside could be nothing more than an extension of the inside; rather than different worlds, the outside and inside are only different rooms. Stars and recess lights are the same things, after all, and I could touch the indigo ceiling if I wanted to. The walls are still there, I am safe, no matter how infinite this house's borders may be...

How fair is vanity... (or, I should really be doing other things)

My head is swimming with rhetorical questions... I'd write some down, but they're in flashes and bits of sound rather than words. I can make out two: "I wonder..."

 

Well.. this one is actually mine. 

Deja vu (a transcription)

It's moments like this I remember how stuck I am. I sit on the porch swing, fabric weathered and grey, and wait for the breeze. My grandfather cracks open the breeze door, a scratched plastic bowl full of the same snack he offered me last time in his hand.

"Try this," he says, "you'll like it."

I rarely do.

But this is not the same moment as the other four hundred, the swing is on the other side of the patio and the bowl is green, not red. And I am not the same as the other four hundred times. This is what lets me know that I am not as stuck as I fear, I am never the same.

I always react the same way. I might as well be.

So many other writers (am I that really?) have spoken of those little comforts, of being home in all those places where things are always the same no matter who they've become.

Those other writers aren't me.

They don't have my mind.

So this time I've found a pen, and a bit of paper, and I'm writing myself unstuck. I'm writing myself out of time and away from the creaking of the porch swing. This is not a loop, I have changed. This is not a loop, though I keep coming back.

This is a new story, despite all those characters who act the same.

This one will be a fairy-tale, because I will write it as such.

I wonder what keeps me here when I lack reasons to be.

unending
all ending

in cycles is there any meaning?

pointless to continue
pointless to stop

perhaps i could go on
(but still)
pointless to go on
pointless to not

a smile or a good story are enough to mean something, they say
this is still perfect blankness
no pleasure and no memory
pure compulsion

insanity: try again, maybe you're wrong

how many times will this keep repeating?

sometimes the greyness just comes
(it doesn't call ahead)
it might be good and it might be bad, though grey is the opposite of both
and it devours

but everything is still here
it's just a new filter
greyscale

it looks like the outside but i know it's me because everyone else is still deluded

and now

something is off
something is very off
it's been crooked since the morning
and i know it's me because no one else feels (?) it

how do you know what's true when you believe one thing by day and another by night?

pointless to let the words out
pointless to keep them in

after all, i don't speak of what you might think

they're never enough to say it
(contrived by nature)
(i no longer write for me)
so i just keep adding more
(please let me be found someday)

but it's late
there is nothing left to do
and the blades of the fan creak out a persistent heartbeat

I really ought to create a glossary of metaphors. I suppose I will another night.

On friendship and the need to sleep before midnight for once.

The worst feeling in the world is wanting to talk to someone who's far away, but having nothing to say.

No, scratch that. The worst feeling in the world is wanting to talk to someone who's far away, having nothing to say, and knowing that without something to say that person will have no idea you are thinking of them.

There are friendships in which neither person needs to say anything of importance in order to renew the connection. Blame social anxiety for this, perhaps, but on a good day I would consider myself to have one of these at the most. And there are friendships in which neither person ever says anything of importance, and the bond is never renewed. Why are these so hard to break out of?

I hate to admit that even I, the shadow-dweller, am starved for companionship sometimes. I hate to admit it, but eventually I must, because the alternative is breaking in other ways. And so the cycle begins. I return, find myself disillusioned, fade, and return. I am too inconsistent to break out. Why give in? Because it's only fair to be the first to fade after all this trouble...


I do not know who, if anyone, reads this blog anymore, but I apologize if I have offended anyone. Perhaps I should leave those minutes following midnight for rest rather than writing.

I'm too lazy to write my own post, so here's a link to someone else's.

What is love?

Reactions to the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate.

Every religion has its own form of creation. Ken Ham is unaware of any other book that speaks of the origin of life and society, though the Torah and Quran do just that. Perhaps I have been watching with an eye out for Ham's errors, but he seems quite narrow-minded and rather ignorant of the world outside his own corner of ultra-conservative midwestern America. He seems to believe that even within the millions of practicing Christians on this earth, the majority of humankind is condemned to a fiery eternal life simply for not having the same rigid perspective as him. I believe the issue with the Bible, the Old Testament in particular, is not that it is irreconcilable with modern life, but that it is both mistranslated and taken literally far too often, as Ham so perfectly displayed.

I believe in the union of everything. Religion is not all-or-nothing; one can believe in a God, and I certainly do, but not believe in the literal version of a parable from one of the countless spiritual texts that all seem to converge and contradict at the same time. If you cannot question your beliefs, how will you ever find truth? If you cannot question your beliefs, how afraid must you be that they are not it?

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” (Carl Sagan)

Many of the greatest scientists the world has known considered their work the extension of God's holy vision. Some have even been creationists. The most important trait for a scientist to have, though, is not any specific belief system or lack thereof, it is the ability to be wrong. Nothing was ever proven by someone who mindlessly repeated, "I know I'm right, therefore I'm right".

How do you know what parts of the Bible to take literally, and which are pure poetry? Is this simply a matter of convenience, as much of the Christian world seems to consider?

"One of the biggest facts you have to face, Vicky, is that if there is a God he's infinite, and we're finite, and therefore we can't ever understand him. The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware. People should never try to make God in man's image, and that's what they're constantly doing." (The Moon By Night)

That is all.

Since I cannot draw reality, I aim for perfection.

“I once had a garden filled with flowers that grew only on dark thoughts but they need constant attention and one day I decided I had better things to do."


Well, they're paper flowers, of course. Nurtured delusions. There you go.

We're the lost dreamers, the last dreamers. We're the ones whose hearts still beat out of love, not fear. We live under the stars, these concrete boxes are not for us. We remain alone in every massive crowd, and when the electricity flows through us all only we can feel it.

I know there are more of us.

Why can't we find each other?

I'm here. I keep waiting. Come find me.

If only I could

step outside

 

evading the lights, of course

and find a place far away from those wanderers

to sit and watch the world turn

 

A little SL-induced rant.

Sweeping generalizations have no place in discussion of a specific situation.

You cannot make an overarching statement such as, "Attractive people always get promoted first," and expect to apply it blindly to every situation you come across. Sometimes, you and the rule will be wrong.

Now, if you were to throw out the name of a black man and the name of a white man and tell me they both lived in Birmingham in the 1960s and then ask me whose life was better, I wouldn't be able to answer. And then you'd look at me and say, "But that's such an easy question." And I'd look back at you and say,

"Okay. No one can deny that the black man hasn't had an easy life, what with him being paid a whole dollar less per hour at the auto factory where he works, and not even being able to take breaks in the same room as his white coworkers. And even now, he's still scarred from the stories his grandma told him as a child, the ones about watching her childhood best friend's father be lynched in his backyard. But at least he's inherited the family house, small though it may be, and his wife brings in some money too with her sewing. They're raising their daughter alright.

Now, the white man may have a house three times bigger in a gated neighborhood, but he's about to lose that just like he lost his job, and his wife, and his kids. Because white picket fences couldn't keep the flu out, and now he's afraid he has it too. There's nothing more tragic than a man left all alone to confront his own mortality, especially when he's afraid he'd done injury to God in his younger, carefree days.

Which one has it better? In this case, I think that's an easy question."

Now, if you had spoken of the general population of blacks and the general population of whites, that would certainly have been an easy question. No one doubts that segregation affected blacks much more adversely than whites. Yet attaching names that tie to individual people can reverse the conclusion, because while an institution deals with masses, each individual in that mass has his or own set of circumstances that are shifted at the forefront when the situation changes to center upon them.

And regardless of what the trend may be, you don't know shit about an individual case unless you know about the specific situation. It could well be a white man who had it worse during a time of segregation, it could be a thin girl whose self-esteem takes the greater hit from modern beauty ideals. Even when "better" and "worse" are measurable, for example in economic terms (just don't get me started on how you cannot determine how much emotional pain a person does or should experience), it is impossible to know exactly which scenario is the most problematic when all you're given is an identity and a generalized rule. Yes, maybe one side is favoured institutionally or has privilege, but that doesn't mean individual variances are now nonexistent and every member of a class suffers the same amount, in the same way. There are always exceptions to the trend.

Let's stop passing judgment on whose issues are worse, better, or more deserving of redress. Suffering is not a competition.

Did you ever walk up
to the edge of a cliff,
stare into the abyss
as your mind wonders if

you should take one more step
further into that night?
Well your mind says you won't,
but then, this all is your life,

your life,
your life.
This all is your life.


Damn it, TSO...

Such clarity.

Someone help me not get caught in the pit of this-has-no-meaning again.