Lunatic Fringe

All their lives dogs are digging holes, monuments to their vitality, visual reminders of where they’ve been. And still it’s remarkable that we don’t truly see the greatest hole they’ve left us with until after they’ve gone - the one in our hearts.

"Gather sunshine, and let the ills of the world spoil with the first frost of confusion, this is the harvest of the wisdom of old age." Increasingly in the day to day of things I find myself looking upon something that reminds me of a face, or a thing I find familiar from places I cannot go. My heart leaps, just as quickly my thoughts betray me like a soft whisper-- "Once upon a time." And just like that it's once again at my fingers- if the past could be something tangible- and the embraces of those that once loved me envelop me in the indelible hold of something that once was. I posit vehemently here that we are never really alone if we were ever truly loved. And still these bursts - these disquieting storms of emotion, and creation - come to me. Like the steam hisses hot, the twitches remind me: That I am alive, and not forever of this mortal coil. Not a thing at all here is given-- And yet at the same time anything at all is possible. Looking up at these cel

I met an old friend the other day, asked me why I walked slower, explain about talking lower. I opined about a heavy heart, the sort one would drag around, whispered it’s hard to speak up when everything's looking is down. 'Cept I can still fake it, and make it if I gotta. Said I just plain don’t wanna. There’s no room for lies in a room full of sad eyes. See that’s all I see, and the same’s foryou, as you've been lookin’ at me. -- But let me tell you, like I told her – Some sunny day it’ll all come back - a bolt from the blue - a cold shot up my back. She inquired after the hows, and a date as to when it'll be? And I replied honest and slow, lord I don’t know. Just the same she'd be welcome to wait, along side me. -- In the mean time I can still hop to music, and saunter on a sunny day -- it’s all just a matter of keepin’ the beat, and swingin’ away.

Nothing has less in common than all of the girls that have loved me,just like in the right frame of mind, all sunny days are the same. The sensation of some girls is best described as a fog you have to walk out of. It’s a beguiling sort of demise. A perfumed haze, naked, and wicked, and as helpless as it is assured. Ephemeral in her wants, perpetual in her haunts. It passes quickly, washes over you like a tidal wave, and just as violently, she retreats. Defenses are dares. Try to retreat and still you remain a sojourner, breathless like the night, words take form on her lips like clouds blocking out the midday sun, your world becomes as barren as the moon. And always that fog, she hems you in until even her weaknesses she can turn against you. The lighthouse in the storm becomes just another snare, and the wind and the water and the waves join in chorus against you. Her smile is the shore they long to break you upon. It takes years, if you are so bold as to throw yourself to the tempes

People will always disagree with you, don't let it break you. People will incessantly doubt you, don't be one of them yourself. Be always positive about who you are, and where you stand. Be tirelessly for the things around you, and those who stand with you. And when it comes time to be counted, endeavor always to be remembered as one who rallied friends and foes alike with the strength, and passion, of your conviction. And may you forever be a beacon of positive light, a buoy against the storms of adversity. For your passion carries infinitely more weight than the minor drag of those would rather drown you in a sea of differences than allow you to live happily on a different shore.

The following, unlike most everything else you will ever be told, is completely true. Really, if you sit and think about anything for long enough, expand on any one single concept, focus in on any given idea--you will eventually realize that whatever it is you had in mind is absolutely trivial, completely pointless, and horrifyingly absurd. Devoid of all meaning Do not do this. This is the opposite of living. This is inaction. Life is in action. Go now, you, the living. Live.

How Facebook Can Ruin Your Friendship Via the Wall Street Journal This article resonates along a nerve I've noticed struck in increasingly more and more people, one of those people most importantly, being me. This brings us to our first dilemma: Amidst all this heightened chatter, we're not saying much that's interesting, folks. Rather, we're breaking a cardinal rule of companionship: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Friends. "It's called narcissism," says Matt Brown, a 36-year-old business-development manager for a chain of hair salons and spas in Seattle. He's particularly annoyed by a friend who works at an auto dealership who tweets every time he sells a car, a married couple who bicker on Facebook's public walls and another couple so "mooshy-gooshy" they sit in the same room of their house posting love messages to each other for all to see. "Why is your life so frickin' important and entertaining that we need to know?" Mr. Brown

We discussed the idea of September for the first time today, right now it’s only August, the days of which are in the terminal stages of some sort of disease the doctors as yet don’t understand. I slept through today’s round of treatment, if you can call surrender that. I’ve been alive, truly, for ten years now, and I don’t mind making myself patently aware of that fact. It’s funny how, for all it’s boldness, youth doesn’t fight back. In fact it’s quite an elusive fighter, having found itself in a war it never wanted to wage, and has no designs on winning. There are no fortresses of redoubt, no bastions of youth, simply a lifetime of fighting along diminished and increasingly timid frontlines, vast armies put asunder by the mechanized legions of time, pressed relentlessly onward by the hordes of death and non-existence. I vowed to fight, ten years ago. An impassioned plea the first time I felt it necessary to comment on these dying days. My mind is still for it, even as the gray of bat

If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short at the longest. Improve each occasion when thy soul is reached. Drain the cup of inspiration to its last dregs. -Henry David Thoreau We should also strive to live life in this way. Interestingly enough Hemingway's advice was to always leave a bit of inspiration in the well for the next day, so it may replenish of itself, he may have said that in A Moveable Feast , I should look into that.

I come from a sleepy little town, full of small ideas and big frowns. I once was a good writer, on this place called earth. I’m just a tree falling in the forest now. I’m surrounded by new growth and illiterates. I hope she carves me up good this time. I always wanted to be a guitar.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. Sound familiar? Perhaps an excerpt from George Orwell's 1984? Maybe a billing posted in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia? Nope. This is from the Whitehouse's website, encouraging you, the average American citizen, to inform on your fellow Americans for intellectual thought-crimes against Obama's great plan, and the current regime. I wonder what the reward is for thwarting these would-be "email terrorists?" Favored citizen status? Maybe first in line for big brother's healthcare? Who knows. But as our secon

I find it ironic that what is left in this world that can be considered "magic" is quite actually hard work. And now it turns out the coin toss, long held to be a 50/50 proposition quite actually isn't. Via The Big Money This is adapted from David E. Adler's book Snap Judgment, published this month by FT Press. Coin tosses are a classic metaphor in economics for randomness. For instance, in his book about market efficiency, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, economist Burton Malkiel compares the price movements of the stock market to the random outcome of a flipped coin: "[S]ometimes one gets positive price changes for several days in a row; but sometimes when you are flipping a coin you also get a long string of ‘heads' in a row." According to Malkiel, mathematicians' terms for the sequences of numbers produced by any random process—in this case a coin flip—is known as a random walk. To him, this is exactly what stock price movements look like; hence t

'Time leans on us all, old friend.'I remember saying to him, as he leaned in against me instinctively, reflexively. As if I could protect him against the attack of years. I wonder if he knows this, and I thought some more in the silence that followed what I had said. 'They'll find me too, and then I'll follow you.' The best I could say to the truth of what he may have been thinking. I guess I just hope I was listening too. And still the thoughts of a young man persist. I imagine they'll carry me to a certain point some time from now. And then one fine day...They'll act on strict orders, and leave me as I found them: Confused. And indifferent, if I'm lucky. I too can remember being innocent. But that was only because of a dearth of instinct, and a lack of desires. I don't have these problems anymore.

All the day long, on paper I endeavor to make the world connect. It seems like all the letters and numbers and figures are, like my life somehow, in the shape of a heart, or some distant star. A straight line is the closest thing I’ve seen that can successfully draw together two distant things. Just as a straight line is the easiest way to say that some things should not be, that two people never were . It’s something like a bullet, something like erasing with ink. But it’s nothing like trying, crossing things out is nothing like forgetting, because it’s all still there. I try to make everything connect, a lifetime of related revelations, stretched across a lifeline of gray and memories and ink. A stained page full of blank translations of mental pictures of what a thought ought to sound like. In this way you’ve written on my soul, that’s your straight line to my heart, that’s what connects me to you. I guess I don’t get the heart thing though, at least on paper, but it’s all in how y

Some days it all seems so close, like the right words would lead me right to where you are. Most days though I feel every single mile between us, and you for your distance, remain unmoved. Indifference between two people is the most difficult sort of pain for the person who isn’t, and there’s nothing that can be done when nothing is wrong. But if words were the stuff of bridges, I’d build one to span the miles, and traverse the years, to bring me to where you are now, in the flesh I love, and in the mind I cannot reach, the easy part would be to carry you across. I’d deal with the kicking and screaming later. Admittedly these are easy decisions for one of us, as a broken record does not change it’s tune. I believe I’d serenade you every night if you wanted me to, but I trust we both know singing would never advance my case. But changing your mind is as simple a thing as building a bridge with nothing but words, or raising the dead, or changing the past on a whim, or pretending to know

When the blood on my hands has been washed and cleansed: the time in my life I will begin again. When the ink is dry on all my sins - there will be time enough to begin again. When my thoughts are clear of the things I've been, will there be time in my life to begin again?

The Saint Anthony Falls Bridge took me over the Mississippi once, I looked out to see where the 35W lay, not too long after it took it's bow into that big river. And I spent a few days of a winter blowing around Iowa, I ran up and down a highway of the same number, near a different river, though, the Des Moines. The one that gave that city it's name. I don't know how much I liked those places, maybe one a little more than the other, but that could've just been because of the sunshine, and how one was a little bit nicer than the other. Or at least warmer, anyways. I bet it's still windy on the run down from Ames. I fell in love on 35, too. Somewhere outside of Waco, it was a hot night, and I had a feeling like something was there, just out in front of me, the kind of thing headlights don't pick up on. Maybe it was coming in through the windows, or maybe it was that song on the radio. I guess it just could've been that Texas weather they're always talking

Perhaps the strangest truth of life is that even a million years from now is still closer than yesterday. For time will never come again. We remember, but we cannot return.

I can see you are like me, most morose friend. These are not words of comfort, these thoughts between you and I, are not a safe harbor, nor a place to find shelter from the things that some day may be. This is common ground we tread now, your furtive glances see the same as mine. Our misgivings are born of the same realities. When did you come to this secret? Where did you first walk that you realized the thorns which held strong were lacking for the rose? This thing is true, a sad truth that is held for much longer than the rose, though the bards do not espouse it, such a thing does not make it any less true. But be certain, such things should not harden the heart, and you should not shrink from the joys which life will assuredly afford you, quite the opposite. You would be well served to lose yourself, as earnestly, and wholly as you can, in whatever it is that breaks against the odds, and runs for sunshine. For this is not the rule, these things are neither promised, nor certain, de

Anonymous (A): so awesome quote in [a] book i thought you would like A: Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sappng your courage and corrupting your judgment. -Orson Scott Card Me: And who/what does he propose these enemies are? A: well i don't kno who his were the author just quotes him cause it's relevant to her story line Me: Yes, but whats the story line? its meaningless for sure outside of context. A: really? i always put things into my own context anyway, but in the story bella wasn't supposed to have a baby and people will be coming to try n kill it. A: without that part i thought the everyone you love being hostage was meaningful to me anyway Me: I dont think it makes any sense. A: i guess i can't explain it Me: I'm sure you could explain it as it relates to the story, but as a stand alone idea its supposition at best. A: well, not entirely, like when

Cleaning grave sites is perhaps the most contemplative activity there is. It was, I suppose, what one would call unseasonably cold today. Compounding this being so was an intermittent breeze, not strong enough to be noticed, but vital enough to be real. And with the late afternoon soon peering in beneath the brim of my hat there is no room for immediate, or familiar thoughts. Just the sort that linger. To think that there will be someone I've not yet met, or as yet has not been created who will care enough for my remains after I have left this place is mind-boggling. But I do my best not to press this issue, to those before me, or the phantoms after. There is no room for thought here, though there is plenty of time enough to think. More succinctly it is not recommended, I cannot. The confrontation with finality is all too intimate here, and all too abrupt. To be certain. It troubles me to think I struggle with the thoughts of an old man, then again there are just as many dead whose

I lead inside a girl I knew twice in two different past lives, this is all past tense now, so read it as such. Arm in arm you might say, determined to forge ahead, away from what we both lacked. I’m not sure if I ever really took a shot, if I did I half suspect we never would’ve kept formalities intact this long. Love or hate, love or hate for and from them all, is the rule of engagement as far as she’s ever known. The rule this night was indifference, however, and she chased a name as soon as we hit the door, I was left alone, to face the world, and a crowded floor. To my left a name I myself knew, an old friend calling my own, and I joined their party. One true friend and a bunch of false ones, for they were not known. But that is an old friend’s worth, you will accept his lot, if for no other fact greater than the one that he was willing to accept you. We ate meals that had no name, from dishes that had no shape. And all about silence abounded, lest the lights should flicker and fin

H1N1 will be back, in the fall. And I'd guess in a much more formidable incarnation, much like the outbreak in 1918. You heard it here first.

Most afternoons the old man would take his walk through town. He would stroll idly, though with a gait and pace which readily betrayed his age to those he would pass before. The hours would winnow away in this same idle fashion, some days with a breeze blowing through the trees which had grown here, their years mirroring this man’s. Other days rain, other days a hard sun, and still other days nothing, or more truthfully those other days were too perfect to ever be worth writing about. Perfect days are full of incomplete, and half thoughts. And if nothing ever comes of them but happiness, then all the better. But the breezy days, they were always the most pensive. The wind whistled down the same streets as this man, sometimes through familiar haunts, sometimes breathing change. The casual observer would be unable to match the elderly man’s thoughts though, on days like this. A vacant lot would elicit a frown, for a house- and a family it once sheltered within- long gone. The large trees

Aliens come to get you when you're dying. The stars are moving against us. Can be seen in the sky, flying around, like fireflies. I try to shoot them down, blow them up, try to run them away. Someone close figures it out. Figures out he’s dying. These aliens are coming for him. These aliens are coming for me, too. Tonight we fight like brothers, for the light. The light of tomorrow, the light of the dawn to come. We’re fading away, we’re fading away. We’re sparkling, but we’re fading away. So we fight them off, we chase them away. We’ve won. We’ve won. Will it last?

From the Washington Post: "I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary," said Specter in a statement. "I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election." He added: "Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans." President Obama was informed of Specter's decision at around 10:25 a.m., according to White House officials, and reached out to the senator minutes later to tell him "you have my full support," and we are "thrilled to have you." Specter as a Democrat would also fundamentally alter the 2010 calculus in Pennsylvania as he was expected to face a difficult primary challenge next year

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. -William Blake, Auguries of Innocence. I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame And every time I pass that way I always hear my name Then onward in my journey I come to understand That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand. -Bob Dylan, Every Grain of Sand. Each grain of sand a tiny work of art. Absolutely one of my favorite ideas, a wonderful visual representation of the idea I've always tried to convey.

When I think about how you leave me hanging, it all really falls away until I'm left to lie about where it all went wrong. Just about ever right now you're my re-occurring daydream. On good days I bet against banks of morality where I have no account. I wager I'm soon to write all my sins away, a vice of a bid pitting all I may imagine against all the wicked things I've done. I'm certain I'll balance the books a second before I reach hell. Irony: burning eternally a moment after I cease to burn for you. And on bad days payments are called to interest, and I'm left with just my thoughts- for the devil takes his due in the things I might have said to make this all better- and they're all made of gasoline. My brain becomes as much a funeral pyre as a drowning place for well intentioned thoughts. Laboriously, I stoke the embers of memory which smolder here. I wonder incessantly why your father ever bid you carry a flame for me. It is in that instant before i

I'll lay on the couch in a silk bathrobe, dazing in and out of consciousness... you can write me wonderful stories... ... A muse with a missive. Muses inspire creation. I have thought of words to match these visions in the morning. At the midday I rested and pondered not except what was before me. In the afternoon I sought reason in distraction, in time I pondered words to convey these visions. In odd intervals I would speak, in odd moments I would not. In the evening I go to places where men seek happiness, and find a semblance of reason in the plaintiff woes of the day. My problems steal away, I am soothed by the solace of the implacable task before me: Chronicling these silken visions. I think in a vibrant blue, thought-streams patterned after places I've never been. In the night I scheme on words to accompany your suggestions, I can think of none but what you have said most succinctly. These days are wrought with conspiracy to bring to fruition the promise of "lost day

Was there time yesterday love? When last we laid down? The night progressed until everything went backward. But the past cannot be revisited, just remembered. Was it a game in the hallway, when we came together? You smoking just like you swore you never would, me on fire like I swore I’d never be again. Here beside me, the silence is disquieting, everything is calm, I’m writing my thoughts onto the small of your back. You are asleep, and I know no one will ever read these words, least of all you. I have no paper, I have no pen, just flesh on flesh, fingers whispering lithely of mortality on pages the world will never read. I half-think the great bards would weep, could they read the thoughts written here. Quaintly, I saved them all this time, for a day I knew would come, to share them only with you. Quickly, these emotions steal away from me, if only they could find your heart, speak to the places where my words fail. My time is short, all things are that way between you and I. I cry h

I’ve been distracted lately. More busy than distracted, but the two relate. Quite simply I’m torn between what I should share and what is best kept inside. To be certain there are thoughts so morose that I’d never share them, out of consideration for anybody I care about enough to share with. I wonder if I’m doing anyone a favor in these instances, just like I hope there’ll be a time for these stories to tell themselves. For better or worse this is what life’s about. I acknowledge I’m in a coping stage of course, coming to grips with certain things, entertaining certain ideas, letting certain things go. Hemingway said what we win in Boston, we lose in Chicago. I relate that to people. Certain things end, and others begin. We lose old friends; we make new ones, or regain old ones. I had a brilliant conversation last night with my prodigal son, only he is a she, and a one-time love interest. Once we had dispensed with the how has your life been’s to rehash the last year or so we got to t

All these roads going nowhere. My eyes on everything except what’s in front of us, we’ll get there soon enough though, I know. Hundreds of different streets, they were somedays once too. Just like me, I could’ve been any one of them. But not today, for me, maybe someday. Hundreds of streets. Millions of different houses, unique to each all are questions they beg. Special to all are their outlooks on the world. I wonder what they could’ve told me- maybe shown something different- if they were mine. Maybe too if I knew something different I’d be there now- in the instant just passed- intent on seeing for the first time something I’ve missed for just this long. There is so much left to know in each and every one of them, and really, to me, that makes them all the same. I suppose they’ve shown me something already. Or maybe I’d be half a world away from here, had I known that something sooner, indifferent to these possibilities though, these ideas and places just passed, pass me by. They’v

And so we turn for home, in a car still not quite warm. He climbs into my lap and very quickly falls asleep, as if to say the hard part of today is over. My mind races, my reflexes though are unresponsive, and we nose along at the same speed, as if I were not having these thoughts at all. I think about a million things, about how it still hasn’t fully fallen upon me that the gray hairs I see in the mirror are not temporary, are not so much just a stage as they are a passage. A betrayal of the body that the mind has failed to acknowledge, and there will be more to come, I fear. Comfort is a good thing, as is peace, and even though these are disjointed thoughts I never wanted to find myself in a position where I would be willing to accept small victories. But that’s what life seems to be, acquiescing increasingly meager positions in a losing war, under the guise of dignity, and wisdom. I find myself struggling with the fact that we are too absorbed in childish things to appreciate our fo

It’s late, the music keeps the time, endures, as the hours pass. I feel your voice like the touch of your skin, soft and slow. Sometimes it feels like drowning, but if there are fates worse than a death like this, I care not to know. We take guesses, we make promises, things we’ll do, places we’ll go, time ticks, despite these wishes. Your eyes are quiet, like the darkness you’ll soon go out in to; my heart is on fire, for me a light, like your laughter. We’re not supposed to realize there are so many things we’ll never know. I worry about you, but then I’ve worried about everything I’ve ever loved. Every reason, every feeling, every firework you’ve burned within me, they’re still there. You move slow across my mind, clouds in the sky in the summer you are, sometimes. And somewhere in the corner of my eye I catch a memory, and I swear it’s like I just found you. Sometimes you just stay there, maybe I can’t look away. It worries me to I think it’s a sin to care still; I guess I always w

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters. John Updike March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

And there are moments when you see the whole world, in a way you'd never imagine, though just as it's forever been. It's not the world that's different, just you, just a different point of view. And you're caught in that moment, even as the world is still spinning, an indelible moment in a world of incessant change. And it all matters because it's the love of something, something temporal, something forever fleeting. In the mean time the world carries on as before, the briefest of sunsets like a knowing wink to wit that even this too will someday change. There's an idea that it should all be different- the world as it is, and love- to be the other way around. But maybe everything should be just exactly as it is. At least just for now. And I wonder if this is something I'll remember for the rest of my life.