Archive for the ‘ Life ’ Category
A great white-golden light
in the sat-feed from the west
the technological wonders of my home glowing bright.
The brighter white stars
of the uncluttered east over my head
as I glance up from the
gee-ar-gee on my
right wrist.
On my left a gee-pee-ess
the blue-force-tracker:
a corded bracelet…
new world and old
encompassed on my flesh
should I but face North.
I find some small solace
in the irony.
I find myself,
as if awoken from,
a dream of gilded,
lamps and golden mirrors.
There is steel found here,
this desert,
this sandstormed reality,
of space and time.
The gilded dream is,
programmed, conditioned –
all constructed,
for you.
Only my real ones smell of copper and
cordite; gunpowder and blood.
Awakened,
the colors are a mere shade,
of what I know they should be,
you see, that’s the way…
the way they conditioned,
me.
“The greatest thing about being a scientist is that you never have to grow up.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
I’ve always enjoyed science as an academic discipline, as a way to categorize the world around me…as a safe place where it doesn’t matter what you believe because truth is truth and the facts don’t lie.
Humanity is messy, the world we’ve created, the social construct is even messier. So imperfect, is it because we are, as a species, incapable of perfection or because there is no such thing in subjective reality?
I have no real answers. Just data, and my interpretation of that data is just that, my interpretation.
❤
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
-Douglas Adams
There comes a time in every man’s life when he will be faced with a choice. There is no warning, there is no long buildup leading to the moment the choice presents itself. It simply arrives. No fanfare, no epic music, just a moment when you realize that no matter what you decide your life will never be the same again.
Some of these types moments happen to some men more than once. To live a life filled with defining moments is both blessing and curse.
They change you. They change the way you view the world. They change the way you view life. They change the way you view yourself. They change the very things that make you you.
Some of the choices are big, easily recognized when they burst into the room. Others are much more subtle; little things that only become apparent when they are added together.
They are all the same. And yet they can be so very different on the surface.
To be honest, I cannot complain. While there have been some very difficult moments, hard choices, I would not trade it. Because my life has been wildly exciting – with a serious relentlessness to the pace of the thrill-ride that I have been gifted.
But such a life comes with a price. There are many, too many, empty seats.
I don’t refill those chairs.
Occasionally someone will pull a new seat up to the circle, but the fireside is a much quieter place than it once was. Loss is a part of life, our universe of dualities requires that there be death to offset life. For every action an equal and opposite reaction. This is the way our reality functions.
I’ve experienced enough for any one man, and yet I still move through the world with the same hunger, the same fire that has driven me since I could form thoughts from the chaos of my evolving mind.
For the longest time, that fire was pure rage.
It drove me ever forward, pushed me further than I thought I could go, kept me warm when I froze, kept my feet moving long after I should have fallen down. It pushed me through things that should have ended me. Rage is a hell of an anesthetic.
But it is a poor substitute for life. Rage has no real future, has nothing positive to add to the world.
It’s fires burn hot and bright and then go nova. It consumes you, if you’re lucky you aren’t forced to survive that process.
After the nova comes the steel, you’ve been burned, hammered into a blade, tempered and forged by the hate that has driven you. It makes a wonderful weapon, a tool for vengeance.
But again, there is no future in that. There is no legacy, nothing eternal about hate except that it will always exist, long after those that hate turn to dust. The concept is all that survives.
Legacy was not something that was important to me as a young man. When asked what I wanted to do with my life as a teen I replied with: “I just need to live long enough to accomplish some specifics.” I refused to explain what I meant. I still don’t know that I really understood what I was saying at the time that I said it.
I get it now. But that was many years, many hard choices, many moments ago.
I am no longer that boy.
I am something forged from his ashes. Tempered by experience, now driven by something he would never, could never, understand.
I have always wondered about the why of things. About purpose and place.
I don’t pretend to understand the nature of life, of earth, of the universe itself. It only makes sense in the mathematical realm of thought. This is very little, and very cold, comfort. Math never explains why, only how and how has never been good enough of an answer for me.
I wonder why and how people can be so sure of purpose and place. I have never found any comfort in any of the places or purposes I have encountered on my path. That is not to say I am unhappy, just that I probably think more than is good for me and I wonder about things that do not have answers.
To me, those are the only questions that actually matter. I can’t just gloss over them and move on to answerable problems. I have this need, this burning desire to understand this here and now, to know why it’s all here and for what purpose it was designed.
Maybe that’s the answer.
Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe one of those defining moments I speak of is to force myself to stop asking why and just enjoy what time I’ve been given.
I’m not sure how to do that. Maybe there are just too many ghosts, too many echoes of hard places to let me coast through without the answers that will let them rest.
Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I think too much. Maybe I took all the wrong classes in college. Maybe I read all the wrong books. Maybe I walked down all the wrong paths. Maybe I made all the wrong choices when those moments found me. Maybe I… maybe, maybe, maybe…
❤
I want to sleep. I have a lot on my mind though.
I have not slept well often in the last several years. Post traumatic stress is a motherfucker on your subconscious.
I have special people to me, in my life, that suffer it’s awful effects. I wish that I were able to take all of their pain and make it my own so that they would no longer have to worry about the next minute, hour, day.
I know that I am strong, I don’t think that any of them are weak, it’s more that I know I was given broad shoulders and that I’d gladly carry their portion of the burden for them, even for just a little while.
Long enough for them to be able to reach deep and find a genuine smile. Some laughter amid the pain, hope rising from the ashes.
I wish I could.
❤
Sitting in the dark, letting the air of many fans wash over me. It dries out my contact lenses. But I can’t hear the air moving or the noise the fans make over the music pouring into my ears from the very phone I’m typing this on.
I have been trying to pour my writing into something other than this, my personal and public blog. I have a need to be more than just verbose but creative.
I can’t shake the feeling that having an ability, a talent, is a responsibility. A contract you’ve unknowingly signed to use that to make things better for yourself and for others.
Maybe I’m just crazy.
❤
I am sofa king sick of almost all of my current 40gb’s of music,
Yes, all bought.
If you want great bands to keep making great stuff…open your wallet.
❤
What is there to say.
That’s a statement, not a question.
In some ways I think these long absences of I from writing in these very public blogs that only a few people know of are what generate the things I have to say.
I tend to speak inwardly more than outwardly. One of those things I still work on.
I have had odd premonitions at times throughout my life. My “danger sense” has been honed to a very fine edge.
I don’t like what I can feel coming, I know it’s going to be bad.
I don’t know how I know these things. I just do.
Hmmmm, seems my original intent for this post has been hijacked for an ephemeral feeling – fleeting yet so sure.
❤
As I look back at my life I can’t quite shake the feeling that something has been trying to kill me since the minute I arrived here.
Taken apart it’s a (too) long series of near misses, narrow escapes and sometimes terrible injury.
But I still draw breath.
Bring it.
❤
Where does the magic go when it leaves?
I get these glimpses, a stir, almost like a tunnel-shake in my peripheral vision and I can almost feel.
Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to have no walls, no borders or boundaries. It’s a completely alien concept to me.
I’ve had walls since before I could form coherent sentences.
Some lives are more broken than others, but only on the inside, only where nobody will see the me I see when I see me. All of you get a facsimile, I learned to hide before I learned anything else, it’s my Dexter Morgan moments that you’ll never get to see.
There’s this image in my mind, a chalkboard and the words “hope is a four letter word” scrawled with haste, as if written during an escape attempt.
That’s your whisper in the dark, the half-glimpsed form, the cold wind tickling the back of your neck – like a kiss of death.
Faceless and formless, just a vast darkness that claims anything it touches.
Somewhere in there is a boy silently screaming, soundless tears burning clean furrows down dirty cheeks. Fists balled, white-knuckled with impotent rage.
Nobody hears the quiet ones, the ones who scream inside, who create a version of acceptable to show the world; mine feels two-dimensional.
As if I could step out from behind it and you’d all see it was really made out of cardboard the whole time.
Real life doesn’t work like that. Not when your subconscious mind built a fortress before you even knew what one was and then crammed you into it to keep those terrifyingly real things that happen to people from ever being able to touch you again…it leaves a sort of trail, a psychic slash in the mind, like a neon-lit river in the darkness, one that fills brimful of all the normal emotions that should be flowing in and are instead channeled out and away: sometimes you get splashed but you’re dry before you fully realize it.
That’s what it feels like today.
❤
curro ergo sum 