All posts in prose

Aesop Rock – Coffee & Pigs

Personally, I think this is one of the best and most accurate protest songs of my (North American) generation. I’m part of a generation that found Bob Dylan talking of conflicts past, and a generation that found that Gil Scott-Heron’s advice on staying away from the hard drugs and hard streets that came out of the 80s was already street knowledge because we saw what they both did to idols like Huey P. Newton and Tupac (no Depression, no Vietman War, no Civil War, no ‘War on Drugs’, Continue Reading →

I don’t want to change the world, I only want to stop pretending. And to help others stop pretending. And to help others stop pretending by pretending.

This is very very very hard to do, but I will die trying. Yes, trying, because I will fail, I will do and fail; I will stop myself from pretending and start, start others pretending and stop, and fail many times over. It’s a ridiculous life mission, I know, but aren’t they all? Hey, if all roller-coaster rides end with you getting off, I might as well pick the one with the highest ups and downs and pee my pants proudly. I will get off this ride laughing and scared out of my mind. Point and ridicule all you want, my sheepish smile will be as big as Texas.

At any given time, the most dangerous person in the world is the person who has absolutely no doubts about their beliefs.

It’s important to protect the innocence of children because when children lose their innocence too young it does more harm than good.

Try to imagine yourself as a newborn being raised by good parents. Right now, and for a couple of months, you’re in a crib, it means the world the you, it is the world to you; it’s wonderful and roomy (and so many toys!). One day, after you’ve seriously explored that loveable crib of yours, you notice life beyond the crib, and you try your hardest to leave the crib which now looks small and confined. Your parents (thinking to themselves, “it’s time”) let you out of the crib, only after making sure that nothing around you can hurt you; they get you a bed with guard rails close to the floor, they babyproof the entire house (if they haven’t already done so), and they make sure one of them always knows where you are. You don’t really notice all of this though, because you’re now completely busy with exploring this humongous world called home; you’re crawling everywhere, exploring every nook and cranny you can reach, and you bump into things now and again that hurt but nothing too major.

Pretty soon you’re standing on your own two feet, walking, and your parents start to slowly un-babyproof the house. One day you look out of a house window and notice the yard, and you make up your mind that you have to play there, the house is too small. Your parents, seeing you’re ready for it, let you play in the yard, as long as the fence gate is closed and locked. A couple moments later (days, months, or years), the yard starts boring you and you tell your mom and dad that you want to play with the other kids, beyond the fence and gate. So your parents take you to the park and watch you as you play, and eventually they start trusting you enough to play on your own.

And things develop as so indefinitely; as your parents see and trust that you can handle more and more of the world, they open more and more of the world to you.

The crib, house, and yard mark your intellectual grasp of the world. Continue Reading →

Happiness, such a broad sweeping word. So abstract. I’ve always liked approaching things pragmatically, so let’s see if I can make this ambiguous word more concrete.

So, what is happiness?

If you think of happiness in the philosophical sense of living the good life, then you just have to have more good days than bad and you’re set. If someone, who hasn’t accomplished anything, wakes up most days filled with a zest for the day, for life, then I’d say they’re happy. No matter how little they’ve accomplished. A good number of young adults, some in love, wake up exactly like this, and an even greater number of toddlers do. (The nerve of those little rascals! Waking up to play (to play!) instead of trying to accomplish something of merit.)

If you think of happiness as Continue Reading →

Though I’m a non-believer and all-that, if Lucifer existed I think his general mood would be one of spite with an underlying layer of confusion. I figure, when you’re kicked out of paradise by someone you love your first couple moods include all the many states of confusion, sadness, and heartbreak; and then you’d slowly descend into that revengeful sort of hatred called spite. But underneath that spite you’d still have a couple unanswered questions rattling around in your noggin, like “Is this great and supposed good being who kicked me out of Heaven just like that actually good?”

And that question would rattle and rattle till’ Continue Reading →

It’s very very very difficult for me to accept the slow (yet quickened) death of innocence and its self-perpetuating nature.

Hurt people hurt people, and the impossibility of ending that cycle defeats me.

There’s nothing as hurtful as realizing that a little boy playing on a jungle-gym with the biggest smile you’ve ever seen has a father who beats him every day, and that he in turn will beat people back. Nothing as shattering as Continue Reading →

Nighthawks, a 1942 painting by American realist painter Edward Hopper.

I am both all the characters and settings in Nighthawks. I am constantly switching from being the dark and mysterious observer watching people interact, to the stooping man who deems it his job to serve, to the Clyde-like male figure with a Bonnie-like lady in red by his side, to being the lady who finds herself contrasting the people around her thanks to her attire and the fact that she’s either a yang in a yin, or a yin in a yang dominated environment (depending on the how you perceive the situation). And all these characters, these nightowls, these parts of the ensemble that is I, are ones which I switch between whenever I’m in a social and semi-light mood that reflects my environment, yet the majority of my moods are of a dark and consuming calmness that hints of the approaching night.

I don’t care what profession you’re in, what title you hold, or what degrees you’re using and/or neglecting; If you care about the work you do, the impact you make, and somehow got it into your head that you’ll leave things better than you found them, you only have one job:

Your job is to struggle.