Wage Beauty.

We live between
crosses and crescent moons
prayer rugs, cell blocks, & a ballot box
prisoners and presidents
resistance and resilience
hope and a hurricane
hope and a hangman
hope and a hang noose.
When our children are elders their children will call this time we live in "the era of wounded dreams" when systems openly assassinated imaginations.
No one tells stories anymore.
It's as if we believe gravity is real & unicorns are not.
We've swallowed the sugar coated cyanide that tells us the narratives of invaders hold more truth than the memories of my grandparents.
How damaged our belief systems are.
We tell ourselves existence is resistance, not life is affirmation.
to fight and write back, but not fight and dream forward
to deconstruct empire but rarely blueprint ourselves
it is as if we have forgotten that a nation is nothing more than a collection of narratives.
A community does not make sense of the world thru statistics but stories and bigots are painfully unimaginative
this is why they want to censor our culture
they know they cannot compete with our creativity.
So this is for you
who dance write speak dream love exhale the work anew
who place starlight in the barrel of rifles and march against darkness
militant sunflowers holding up your heart up like a hand grenade
hummingbird in a hurricane with hope strapped to its core like it was c4.
We remember the only reason we are alive
is because we had at least one ancestor who refused to die
and lived long enough to have children who did the same.
This is our genetic inheritance
remember this
so dance indigo
cultivate brilliance
speak life
name pain
grow dreams
& in times of terror...
Wage Beauty.

Dad Turned 53

‘We need to be more offended, in order to be more passionate.’

‘You got it backwards there.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘How so?’

‘Passion is usually a paradox, something that requires faith with so much absurdity around, offensive absurdity.’

August 14th, 2013

And today, everything changes.

Today, I grow up.

Be Your Own Home.

Schrödinger’s Sonnet.

We’re all Schrödinger’s cats. The one difference is that atheists know they’re Schrödinger’s cats.

Agnostics, however, live the benefit of the doubt that keeps it alive and dead, simultaneously.

So you could say that believers and atheists have the best bits of the bargain, being the illusion of confirmation of one state as opposed to the other.

What nobody will admit is this; none of the three are better off, because the outcome is the same.

Of Russia, Dunbar & Being Pissed.

I came here to watch Dexter, or Suits. I heard they were nice, not that I care if they are. I was hoping Hollywood put enough shit in them to drown through layers of ennui, frustration and problems.

Anger, anger is good. People should get pissed more often, I don’t know what people have against anger, wanting to dump it and go for acceptance, a pathetically passive life hack that helps you get over things by extinguishing your core so you won’t have to deal with them, which reminds me of something I read in Catch 22 the other day:

“Dunbar was lying motionless on his back with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll's. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom.
Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead.”

You see, anger is healthy, it means you have gusto, it means you still have some fight left in you. But most of all, it means you still have hope. As long as you still have it in you to get genuinely and vehemently pissed at things, then your soul is fine and kicking. That’s what you should thank God for, you idiots. It’s like he gave you this life-beeper and all you bitches are complaining about is the noise. “UNPLUG MEH UNPLUG MEH D: WAH!”

How can someone in their right mind opt for acceptance over anger? That’s like choosing a wheelchair over a marathon-chiseled pair of Herculean legs. Anger is good for you, you dipshits. Go break something until you feel better. You should be worried if you don’t have it in you to get pissed.

Gallows humor is damn ugly though. You see, gallows humour is just like anger, except it doesn’t have gusto, fight or hope. It’s the pulverized version of the package, what zombies are made of. It is neither aggressive nor passive, nor does it care enough to be neutral for its own peace of mind. No, it’s the darkest pit of hell, right down next to Beelzebub playing poker with Hitler’s toes. It’s a form of pain that is beyond consolation as well as human reach. It’s beyond the human reach even to the human hosting it. That’s what you do to pain you see, you don’t contain it, you host it, it’s gotta be nice and comfortable with a shitload of ever-expanding space like a black hole that swallows everything and doesn’t show a nickel for it. Gallows humor is what echoes when there is no medium, it’s what makes Russian novelists sell.

I got a theory that if you wanna find the answer to any political impasse, it’ll be right there in Russian history. They’ve been through hell and back so many times that when they finally set foot on solid ground they thought it was easier to walk on water and ended up drowning everybody else trying to patch the gap, jump pits and get some of that nirvana they’ve mined. It just doesn’t work that way though, because they paid for it with years of fighting against their own human nature only to find that humans weren’t that great after all, and their nature, in its purest form, was kind of fucked. Some answers you get when you have no other choice but to go about them the hard way, sounds pretty easy and cliché when you put them on paper, eh?

Man I love Russia, the same way you’d love a dead puppy.

It’s funny how I always find myself staring at a blank post right about the time I’m usually staring at a brick wall. All those years of writing for magazines haven’t done anything but make me feel guilty for whoring it out. I define myself as a writer, not because I can write, but because I need to write. And all that printed shit with marketing tricks and psychological manipulations aren’t pieces of literature, they’re just origami. And not the creative type either, but the type that comes with a catalogue. All about target and method. There’s something about writing for the sake of writing that makes you vulnerable, to yourself and to the world; and that is why I can never see myself writing a book. There’s something about whoring out your vulnerabilities that doesn’t hold a candle to whoring out marketing techniques and psychological loopholes. It’s depraved. Kind of like spending hours practicing an instrument, not for your own enjoyment, but to wow a crowd. One day, the last panda on earth will run into a metropolis choked with humans holding a sign saying ‘You’re doing it wrong!’, and humanity will finally get it.

They say the best thing that happened to humankind was when one of them decided to ask why, I think it’s the opposite. That’s just one of those times when people deny things and rationalize their diametric contradiction so damn well that they couldn’t reach it again for solace if they tried. If somebody pretends to know why, or happens to be sure of anything, they’re probably lying. There are no reasons, there is no design. It just is and you ain’t special.

And isn’t it great?

Highlight of the Evening

Meet the friendly neighbourhood butterfly.

All your scribbled lovedreams, are lost or thrown away,
Here amidst the shuffle of an overflowing day
Our love needs a transfusion so let's shoot it full of wine
Fishin' for a good time starts with throwin'in your line.

Sting and Robert Downey Jr - Driven to Tears (HQ)

Message Received.

Necesito más ángeles a mi alrededor.

Fact Vs. Fiction; From Iain Banks’ Last Interview

Go Ask Alice, I Think She’ll Know.

Of Squirrels, School & Now.

I woke up the other day and said the words I thought I’d never hear myself say, the one I’d call people mad when they tell me that one day I’ll say it and I actually meant it. I woke up the other day and said: ‘I miss school.’

Life was simple back then. I didn’t like it, I still don’t. Time hasn’t sufficiently warped my memory for me to like that loathsome bubble, but in comparison to what I’m expected to handle day in and day out as another digit shuffles and flaps me on the ass, man it was simple back then. They didn’t leave much room for unpredictability. My uncle used to say I’ll miss school because when I grow up I’ll know that school was the only place where I’d know I’ll get what I worked for, the only place where the outcome and the process that leads to the outcome are clear as daylight, and sure as clockwork. He said it didn’t work that way in real life, and I sniggered. No one’s laughing now, and I’m 20; I’m just getting warmed up.

I made another discovery of my own along the way. I realized how stupid and dangerous it is to trust anyone with anything but 'now', or even count them in, for you can hardly trust yourself with more than 'now', let alone ‘now’. If you lose sight of ‘now’ and think of near or far future, alternate situations and delve into the past for reference, then you're fucked. If you find that you've started putting into calculation anything other than 'now', that's a sure sign that you'll be, and are, fucked. The reason is very simple, bargaining with more than ‘now’ means you have to stop, and in order to stop you have to entrust yourself with other people, and people are shit, just as you are, because you’re people too. So you should know how to handle your shit before you count other people in, and in both cases the one time variable should be a constant, and the constant is ‘now.’ That’s also why when you find that your automatic response is not strictly ‘now’, you oughta start looking for holes on the deck and I guarantee you, you’ll find plenty more than your Q-tips can fix; some will be big enough to fit a poodle.

But that’s okay, because this is not the first, nor will it be the last time, you lose yourself and somehow find it again. That, you can depend on. That, you can also learn to enjoy. Did you know that millions of trees in the world are accidentally planted by squirrels who bury nuts..then forget where they hid them? That’s one of the many quirky ways life balances out its own shortcomings. Have you ever seen a squirrel take itself seriously? It survives all the same, and has more fun with your garbage than you had with it before it even became garbage.

Because after all, it is worth remembering that we're all drunkenly groping for happiness in the dark and it often turns out to be an unwilling stranger's boob.

Not all those who wander are lost.