Pyre of Golgotha

Blood red flames fly through the sky;
Regurgitated remains return to the sea.
Sand and grit collude in the air
As bones rain down on the beachhead.

This beach turned Golgotha
Shrieks, wails, and moans.
Muscles quiver and quake as
The wind blows through the bones.

Fleeting lull
Swiftly wrecked.
The wind goes unheard.
Whine of the missiles,
Screams of mechanical birds
Drown out melancholy cries
From each body that dies.

Sullen fingers splay sunken in sand
Scratching for solidity in a slippery land.
Purchase gained through agonizing depravity;
Pulled to position to peer over the precipice.

A scattered wasteland of blood and gore,
As I drag my belly over glass.
Beyond mere physical pain now
That I have witnessed this death en masse.



I never knew stone could bleed
Nor that seas could cry.
Trees scream their protest
and sand is silent in reply.



Eruptions reign the horizon.
Carnage ne'er ceases--only calms.
Shoulders slump in supreme defeat.
Which bastion do I abandon?

A neuron fires with ultimate reason.
A capillary bursts with fiery passion.
Feelings flare; Thoughts thunder;
Trying to sate their personal hunger.

My head--so rational.
My heart--so full.
The answers forever unfound.
Veins pulse blood
While an axon's thunder crack sounds.
The clash of necessity and desire,
As moths dance 'round the Pyre.

Miniature meteors spiral from the flame.
White wings singing through air
Turned brown by the time they touch the ground.
Victims of passion with no cogent care.

The wolf slowly emerges from the shadows
Inspecting burnt pilots without shedding tears.
Watching the moths from the bowels of Golgotha,
The stars in his eyes betray yearning and fear.



I watch from the precipice; helpless,
No finale in sight through the haze.
Transfixed by the carnage; confused,
Life draining away as I gaze.

The Hardest Test to Pass

The hardest test to pass is not taking oneself so seriously. The best way to know whether you do this is to look at how many times in the past week that you have been able to laugh at yourself. It is harder to do than it sounds.

I just sent out an email as a job application to a company and forgot to change the company's name in the body of the introduction email; Two or three lines of stock that I wrote to save time when sending my resume out. So I sent company B a cover letter addressed to Company A. It made me wonder how many times companies receive this kind of error and what emotion is felt when they see it. For a split second, I was actually embarrassed at the error.

Then I just started laughing hysterically at how I was embarrassed for even a split second at such a minute error. Do I look stupid to this company? Sure, but what does that really matter? I quickly found my simple error to be darkly comedic. At least I was able to pass the test this time, at least, for once.

I Like Poetry

I Like Coffee,
I like Beer.
I like Free,
I like Fear.

I like Ireland,
I like China.
I like White Sand,
I like Regina (Spektor).

I like Frisbees,
I like Writing.
I like Memories,
I like Biting.

I like Reading,
I like Books.
I like Meaning,
I like Looks.

I like Music,
I like Card Games.
I like Frantic,
I like Nicknames.

I like Crosswords,
I like Vocabulary.
I like Leopards,
I like Cherry.

I like Friends,
I like Family.
I like Loose Ends,
I like Giggly.

I like Baseball,
I like Women.
I like the Wall,
I like Jasmine.

I like Pinot Noir,
I like Peace.
I like War,
I like Release!

I like Lifting,
I like Skipping Stones.
I like Drifting,
I like Gripping Waffle Cones.

I like Absurdity,
I like Poses.
I like Spontaneity,
I like Roses.

I like Outside,
I like Gripping.
I like Inside,
I like Tripping.

I like Laughing,
I like Comedy.
I like Scoffing,
I like Rowdy!

I like Crying,
I like Sadness.
I like Flying,
I like Madness.

My Emotions are Idiots

I want to stand out. I want to be different. I want to be abnormal. I want to be an outlier.

My emotions, however, fight against this. They tell me to conform. They tell me to fit in. Don't go against the grain. Don't rock the boat. Go with the flow.

It may also have been nurtured by a seeming governmental mandate that is backed by the whole of society and its mores to have everyone conform to the status quo. Most people who know me usually don't use the word "normal" to describe me, so I usually overcome this stupid penchant of my emotions.

It would be quite nice though to not even have to fight the battle to overcome the stupidity of my emotions.

Hole in My Soul

Tell me how it feels to be the one who turns the knife inside of me

Jesus and the One Night Stand

What do missionaries have in common with the silver-tongued asshole at the end of the bar?

They have an instinctual and finely honed sense to identify, corner, and pick off the weakest of the herd.

A religious conversion requires change in one's life and for change to occur, the person must want something different and be unhappy with their current situation. Jesus came for the poor and the meek, because they are vulnerable and in a position to be taken advantage of. When someone is in dire straits, whether it be temporary or permanent, religious missionaries swoop in and take advantage of the situation to give the person an option that is different than what they are going through, hope. False hope, but hope nonetheless. Missionaries don't exactly flock to the rich countries full of happy people, they go to the poor, run-down countries with people who are desperate for anything different than what they see.

The pick-up artist is the same way. Most don't go for the girl that every guy in the bar is drooling over. They go for the cute looking girl that no one else is looking at. They pick the girl with no self-esteem, the desperate one. They isolate her and give her an option other than being alone.

What is the common link between Missionaries and Players? They live their lives looking for the weakest of the herd to manipulate.

Close Calls

Have you ever wondered how many times in your life that you escaped death by a fraction of a millimeter? How many times a simple decision like deciding to go to a different restaurant as you are walking out the door has resulted in your life continuing along its course instead of ending in a car accident on the way to the restaurant you had thought of going to? How many mundane decisions in your life may actually have been a critical life-saving decision? How many times your heart continued to beat strictly as a result of a decision to bend down and pick up that dime on the sidewalk? Have you ever wondered how many times in your life you have narrowly escaped the end of your life?

Human Nature

I am now in the best physical shape that I have ever been in. This actually includes the time in college that I was swimming 50 laps every other day and training to be a boxer. This should be a source of happiness for me. And, to a certain extent, it is. The only issue I have is the timing of it. I basically need a breakup to occur in a long-standing relationship to motivate myself to reach another level of fitness. It also has to do with circumstances that allowed me to find a workout regimen that is unlike any other I've tried. But I find it odd that I can only find the motivation to do more than just maintenance after I am suddenly not with the person that I should have been lifting to look better for. I guess human nature does come into play here though. The threshold is simply higher when something is new than when it is old.

I need a reason. I always need a reason. For everything.

I guess human nature is the reason for this one. That doesn't mean I have to accept I can't change that about myself though. The only thing that remains to find out is the trade-off and whether I'm willing to give it up in order to change.

There's Nowhere Like Home

Will I ever feel at home?

I've been on the move now since I left college in Boston and haven't stayed in the same city for longer than a year. The result is an amazing array of adventures that I wouldn't trade for the world. The by-product, however, is that I don't actually feel at home anywhere in this world.

It seems like a fair trade-off, but there is a point at which a feeling of home would be welcome to me. There are two problems with this though.

1. I enjoy traveling too much to be happy in one place for long.
2. More importantly, I haven't quite found a place that I actually like enough to stay for a decent amount of time.

There is always a give and take. I enjoy the fact that I have been so mobile, but I also want a sense of belonging. There is not much middle ground and it just depends on what is more important to you.

Make the choice wisely though, it is very difficult to transition between the two.

Jungle Love

(Click on the image for the full view)

Google's contextual advertising has gone too far. I made a blog post making light of the fact that I like my coffee black by likening it to an African-American woman. As I published the post, this image is what I saw. The most interesting question I have for this occurrence is: How did they know that I am white?

Law of Reversing Perspective

There is an interesting phenomenon in life. I call it the Law of Reversing Perspective. When things look one way, it can tell you about the underlying feelings because they are usually the opposite of the extant acts. I'll give a few examples.

1. Someone who purports to like being alone is usually someone who has always had people around them willing to be with them.

2. Someone who is outwardly arrogant and cocky is usually someone who is insecure with themselves and needs external vindication very often to make them feel better.

3. Someone who purports to not care about money at all are the people who have enough to not have had to worry about it in their lives.

4. Someone who is talking all the time and blathering on about nonsense seems like they are comfortable with themselves while quiet people are just plain creepy, but the talkers are the ones who are so uncomfortable with themselves that silence drives them crazy. This is because silence makes you have to think, and they don't want to think about themselves or what people think of them. The listeners are usually the ones who are actually interesting. But I will admit some of them are just plain creepy.

5. People who have never had to struggle in their lives strive to find it in other ways and count themselves elite and virtuous for doing so, and don't realize that people actually struggle because of circumstances and not desire. The by-product of the guilt-centric society that we have grown up in.

6. People are envious of someone who rebounds very quickly from anger or sadness or trauma because they wish they could. The reversal of this is the fact that they just know ways of drowning the trauma in a temporary sinkhole. It actually means that the trauma is just buried and crops up later in their lives since they never dealt with it on their own. People who can't deal with the trauma actually are dealing with it and eventually come out of it with a clear head. It is the classic push and pull between immediate satisfaction and long-term joy. This also does pre-suppose the person actually does come out of it eventually. If not, they are just pathetic and need a kick in the ass.

Life as Art

What do capitalism and a movie culture have in common?

If the success of Seinfeld has told us anything, the secret of success in art and media lies in the talent of mimicry. To mimic life and use slight exaggeration to occurrences in people's everyday lives is to be successful in the realm of artistry.

The oddity that this seemingly obvious observation introduces is the backlash. Not only does art imitate life, but eventually, life begins to imitate art. It might not seem so outlandish, but it does get annoying.

The problem that lies here is the addition of exaggeration that makes art, art. It causes life to imitate an exaggerated form of itself. Then art again imitates the new exaggerated life by, you guessed it, exaggerating further. It is a cycle.

This is where the analogy to capitalism comes in. There is an upward spiral for capitalism to work. A spiral of inflation, there always needs to be more money and more inflation for capitalism to keep working.

At what point does the breaking point come in for both of these phenomena?

Cataclysm

The mechanics of change are biologically frustrating. Entropy and Negentropy are both easy to fall into because a balance between the two is the hardest thing to get used to. I logically like the idea of disruptive change. It flows in so many ways and makes many things in life better in the long run. The only thing that irks me is that the agent of change has to be external.

Something has to crash the party.

It's biologically logical that this would be true as we have a word specifically set for this phenomenon: catalyst. I hate catalysts, because they always change things beyond repair. Whether its an atomic reaction brought about by a catalyst, a revolution overthrowing a government sparked by a catalyst, a human life changed by a catalyst, or a business going bankrupt and giving rise to another sparked by a catalyst, there is no room for moderate change. There is no way of internally modifying behavior without an external catalyst. Biologically imperative and logically frustrating.

Here I am, just waiting for the next cataclysm.

As Night

I like my coffee like I like my women: Black and Strong.

The Google Empire

It's a hot button topic. Is Google taking over the earth? I don't know, but I've been thinking quite a bit about it since I am doing market research on their cloud computing arm this week. It's more boring than the radical answers you normally hear:

i.e. "Google is awesome, they are the best company ever, please take my wife if you'd like!" or "Google is horrible and trying to sleep with our girlfriends!"

I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Its not as if they have a webcam installed in our computers. But they are profiting from information they glean from us. If you have any question about that, take a look at the ads alongside your emails (if you use gmail, like everyone I know my age.) The only issue with this is how far it goes.

Google is attempting to place everything online. Why? The more activities done online, the more information they have about people's behavior and the more access they have for targeted advertising, which is where their 26 Billion dollars of revenue come from per year.

I have an idea, let's all get together and start playing large scale practical jokes on Google. Start sending emails about things you don't care about. Start clicking on ads you don't want to. Companies will be paying Google for no revenue themselves and the whole system will come crashing down in 20 years! People will start rioting on other search engines! Computers will explode and planes will fall from the sky and Jesus will show up on everyone's monitor at the same time!

Or you could just walk outside, get some fresh air, talk to an actual human being and not worry so much.

And by the way, if you think the world is going to end tomorrow, just stop watching the nightly news.

It’s Just Justice

I sit here and think of everything
You used to say to me and do.
Just say that you miss me
And I’ll run right back to you.

My hands ran through your hair
Just like blades of grass through dew.
Just say that you’ll kiss me
And I’ll run right back to you.

Tell me my mistakes
I’ll do more than just list two.
Just run right back to me
And I’ll tell you that I missed you.

I can tell you I can change
But what good would that do?
Just take a chance on me
And I’ll run right back to kiss you.

People don’t ever change,
That is, unless they’re forced to.
Just lay your eyes on me
And I’ll open up to you.

I will love you ‘til my death
Comes slowly into view.
Just say that you love me
And I’ll die with you.

Elephant and Rider

I have been searching for a long time for a proper analogy to describe the push and pull between the heart and the mind. I heard one the other day that describes the necessity for the head and the heart to be aligned in order to make any progress in life. It describes the ability for a human being to change.

There is an elephant and a person riding this elephant along a designated path. The path represents the direction your life is going and the direction that your life and attitude have developed. The rider represents your brain and your logic. The elephant represents your emotions.

With this picture, try and imagine the rider trying to turn the elephant off the path in a different direction that you know is better for you or that you simply want to make. There is about as much success as a result of this as people who attempt to change because they think they should, but don't want to. That being said, when the elephant wants to turn and the rider wants to as well....That is a powerful force.