thank you.

"The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving inexorably towards any higher purpose. All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die.

Do not try to \"find yourself\", you must make yourself. Choose what you want to find meaningful and live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it. Do not let your life and your values and you actions slip easily into any mold, other that that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, \"This is who I make myself\".

Do not give in to hope. Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which imbue it. Whatever you do, do it for its own sake. When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, \"Fuck You!\". Remember that to fight meaninglessness is futile, but fight anyway, in spite of and because of its futility.

The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own. Live deliberately. You are free."

found here.

quick little math lesson

When I graduated college, I learned about subtraction. When we're in first grade or so we learn the arithmetic action of subtraction, the mathematical component and motions, but it's the anthropological, psychological concept of subtraction that doesn't really kick in until much later. About what you have left in your life when everything else is removed.

I've been formulating this theory because today I came home and my roommate had unexpectedly moved out. I dimly knew she'd be headin' out soon, but I've been too wrapped up in my last film project here for it to kick in that this weekend she'd be gone. So I came home, and saw the unexpected physical manifestation of what my life was like once she was subtracted from it.

All the shit I've accumulated in my years on this coast is pushed into corners, and this is the difference that is left in our lives once she is subtracted. My sneezes echo.

Seeing this math problem led me to think about subtraction and the parts of my life that have been shed now that we are scattering. I'm all that's left in this apartment. I'm looking at my life now that the social construct is taken away, the roommate removed, the college subtracted, and the film shoots are at an indefinite hiatus now that the necessary academic requirements are no longer relevant/impending/impeding. So...what's left are the parts of my life I haven't looked at very often. The lesser parts. Like why I pick at my cuticles. Or fixate on the things(people) I shouldn't.

This is a pessimistic way of looking at things. Wise man say you have education, relations, riches, and LOVE. Which I'm truly, painfully, aware of. But right now, I can only hear my typing clattering noises clicking weakly in the empty apartment and my social calendar is empty. Shit. I'm a negative number.

H.A.G.S.

There's always these little chillen's being carted around Hofstra's campus, trotted out from some nearby daycare center when the weather warms up a bit, and sometimes I want to run up and smack the smiles off their faces and yell I KNOW YOU'RE THREE. BUT PREPARE FOR WHEN YOU GET TARNISHED AND IT'S NOT FUN ANYMORE.

I had no idea that I would become this jaded. There wasn't an inciting event that lured me away from enthused orgiastic acceptance of unfortunate life circumstances, or any riotous fight with a loved one that made me the way I am, but here I am. Anesthetized. Overlooked. Unconscious.

When I'm stuck in traffic now, in the summer, on the Belt Parkway, people roll down their windows and just stew in the muggy heat out there on the asphalt. Lots of old people clutching the wheel and waiting for their exit to crawl by since I live in a "NORC" (naturally-occurring retirement community). We start out sprinting, just kind of racing for an inevitable flag to fly by like a graduation or a marriage, getting there as fast as we can until at some point we see the definitive light at the end of the tunnel and we slow down. We age and we move slowly and we stutter and we forget and we lose ourselves in the marathon. We put up a fight.

It's raining now. Rain always smells like pennies. I walk outside and can smell weird minerals.

I'm transitory. I am aware that we are always transitory, that because we are aging and moving and talking and changing at all times, that we are permanently transitioning from one moment into the next so that we may string together a personal, linear, sequence of events and scrapbook it and call it a life, but I feel especially transitory. Aleatory. Moving without purpose. This part of my life will go undocumented in my scrapbook.

In my french literature class this past semester, these two kids gave a presentation and asked everyone in the class to write out on a notecard what we want to be when we grow up. Yes, phrased like that, in a college course. I instinctively wrote "happy" (which has been my every shooting star/birthday candle/fountain coin/eyelash wish since I was a kid, but don't tell anyone that or it won't come true) and then the people giving the presentation asked who wrote happy. Of course my hand shot up, because I assumed that many people would have answered similarly. They didn't. They were astronauts, forensic anthropologists, dance studio owners, exotic trade derivatives. I was the outlier for just wanting to be happy.

I say things, a lot, I talk real big when it comes to my future, but I gotta say folks, when it comes to graduating college and staring down my identity for the first time, I actually feel like I've just been flung out of slingshot blindfolded and I can't even feel the trajectory. It's scary. It's normal, and expected. Right? We base our entire beings around the confines of some sort of synthesized academic personality and we identify with the people who have chosen the same interests so we conform to create a group, and find our role within this group, which is easier than tackling a larger percentage of the population. It's simple. We categorize. We eke out our identities and build ourselves up within these little microcosms, which just seems like exercises in futility once we have finished school and all of our anthropological attempts at existence return, sunburned, to their separate suburban homes with bidings of a good summer and see you soon. I'm going to miss my friends.

I can't remember everything about college. I mean, I remember these little moments and these big walls, and those people who maybe saw me when most didn't, but mostly I remember the spaces that contained me. That dorm, that bedroom, this one. I remember you and I remember the smiles that glowed in the dark and I remember the bone-crushing exhaustion and I remember pushing through that and I remember momentary connections and that's why I can't stay in New York. Nobody settles down here. No one grows up. Manhattan is a playground. Some people fall in love. I just shatter. At this point, my heart just wants to know it exists.

So, I watch the rain and I bleat out insipid refrains online into nowhere and hope to reach some sort of semi-enlightened catharsis. I mostly feel like an untethered kite. And I'm sorry for that. I'm mostly really sorry for the things I never said. Like thanks. I love you. It's been the best four years of my life.

Here's an irrelevant but currently-listening-to-song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOAPzYJprS8

bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzbuzzzzzzzzzbuzzzz

Okay. Breathe, breathe, breathe. I am standing on the shore facing a tidal wave.

Or, even better, I am a rubberband that is stretched much too tautly. Little plinks pull me down and I vibrate, but eventually I am just going to snap and strike out in futility.

The past three years have been a practice run. A drill. Simulated combat under controlled circumstances.

This is not a drill. This is the war.

This is the year of the tiger? I heard that weird things happen during that. I'm looking for full moons and swinging tides to explain the chaos, because shouldering it and not asking questions is not enough any more. I'd rather find an external source, some smoldering mysticism to blame. Until then I have to content myself with placating internalized falsehoods and picking my cuticles.

This is war, right? We fight. We fight. We fight.

We arm ourselves, kick and scream at the wicked things, and hope for the best.

i feel ya buddy

remind me

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3. Mic check.

You ever hear a song that makes you feel like a damn hand puppet? Just like someone shoved their hand up your ass to make ya sit up straight real fast?

I heard her and sat up straight:

Hey, Jesus, What Gives? We Miss You! Come Back!

I used to be afraid of very few things. When I was a child I pretended to be afraid of swing sets and falling out of moving vehicles, but really I was aware of how brave I was. I would ride horses. I would climb trees. I would get lost in the woods.

As I got older, taller, bigger and less outspoken, I started developing other strange fears to replace the old ones. I was no longer comfortable with the ocean pulling the sand from beneath my feet as the waves retreated back into the sea. It felt to me, like it wanted to take me with it. The idea of the moon’s gravitational pull, tugging back the ocean to expose its tide pools and thoughts and feelings, little living secrets, made me nervous.

Similarly, I stopped cloud-gazing and staring at the stars, which I used to find hopeful and beautiful. I was on a friend’s ranch one time, and looked up, out of the absolute darkness, and saw so many stars I thought that’s all there was, that I was in space, alone, hurling along like some kind of a sci-fi nightmare. It felt like suffocating.

We are taught to require a modest house in a modest neighborhood, where children can play and trees are sequestered into neat, attractive rows. Sometimes, when I’m driving down over a hill and I can see a basin beneath me, I remember that all of this used to be underwater, and there they are, those houses that stubbornly stick up on the hill like unwanted barnacles, dominating the landscape.

We are born red-faced and screaming, and we stay this way- dominant and needy, pure emotional little wrinkly beings until we are ruler-slapped into submission and put into little boxes that are full of boundaries and rules and then given our inbred, inborn self-centeredness that We are all that matters. This world is ours for the taking. Dinosaurs died for a reason.

In my backyard, there is a crepe myrtle. It is feeble. It’s little blossoms constantly fall, as if choosing death to escape the heat, and they fall to the ground, where they are trampled, or they choose death by drowning and float into the pool where they are ultimately sucked into the filter or scooped out by a net. When I was a kid, I used to pluck the big, resistant ones off a different tree that grew near our old house, and then I would turn them over, little pink frilly dresses, and play ballroom with them. Sometimes these little princesses would go on adventures in magnolia-leaf boats with an acorn captain, and they’d sail down the wild river, doomed to wander the seas eternally.

The poor crepe myrtle in my backyard is so tired. It’s tired because it doesn’t belong there. He was put there on purpose, to help break up the monotony of the concrete and rock, so he’s manicured and planted. I can’t help but noticing the exhaustion in more of the inappropriately placed plants in Texas. At some points in the summer, you look outside and see brown grass on the median, brown trees, gray-smoggy-ozone-warning skies, and from inside your artificially cold car, it’s like winter. When you step outside, you feel the hot air hit you in the face, it’s a lie, all lies.

There is a park near my home that is a swath of land in between neighborhoods that I believe was made into a park as an afterthought. Or perhaps to raise the values of the houses. Nonetheless, there is a “park.” That over there is a “river.” Behind you, behind the fences, you can see trampolines and Irish setters and the occasional abandoned piece of plastic childhood. In this “river” there is a “waterfall” and you can see the little hints of pressed gravel from the tired water running down unenthusiastically. It is not there for nature. That park doesn’t exist for conservation. It is there so people can ride their bikes and run and plug their ipods in and sweat along that concrete sidewalk, more proud of their loss of calories than their commune with the outdoors. The sun is dominant, punishing, and the park closes at dusk, so you can’t even stick around to stargaze or stare down the moon if you wanted to.

Once, on a dare with myself, I watched an eclipse on the internet, out of morbid curiousity, to see if I could handle it. I was so terrified, even as I was sitting in my protective house, aware of the computer, and it was broad daylight. When it happened, in that little box playing on my screen, I lost my breath. It was magnificent, but in a terrible, apocalyptic way. It doesn’t just look like two massive celestial beings matching up- it looks like a damn hole in the sky. It looks like a giant hole in a big black sky, and we’re all going to get sucked up into and spit out into nothing, nowhere, the great beyond. It went on forever. I wildly imagined that he was keeping the sun, that we wouldn’t get it back. Then it was over, and we were done. It came back, of course, a beaming reminder of the divine to shine anew.

I am now afraid of very big things. I can no longer swim in the ocean, and when I’m in my little pressurized cabin gazing at lift off, I can only stare at the dropping sky until I get dizzy and then I shut my window, shut my little world, plug in my ipod and become nothing. Our solar system (please note my overconfident use of the word “our,” we are so self-centered) I find to be impossibly perplexing. I am afraid of big things because I have come to terms with our inevitable irreverence. We are insubstantial. We are not only endangered ourselves, but as an overconfident race, we are quickly using up our resources and damning ourselves, our eternity to a less glamorous fate than we intended. What are we waiting for? I once fought with a friend, who quickly defended the human race, as the beautiful optimist she is. I asked her about Jesus, and when he was coming back, and when he did, what she would be expecting. The second coming of our dear lord obviously equates the apocalypse, so is this what we are waiting for? Even those with the Great Hope Our God are waiting for the end. We’re all waiting for something, for the light to turn green, for the morning to come, for our Prince to come, waiting in the wings to go onstage, or waiting for Jesus to come back and take us away from this place. That must be why we are using up all we got while we’re here.

I have a more practical view of the matter. We will be undone, our songs unsung, and we will neatly be replaced. We will return to dust. We put our dead back in the Earth, and she eats us up; we offer our bodies so she can get that carbon and iron and nitrogen and calcium, yum, taste that sapid flesh. As far as the parts of us we can’t see-that electricity that makes our synapses fire up and that ever-elusive soul everyone’s going on about, I’m not sure what happens to those. I suppose if you have a God you can trust he’ll take care of your luggage, make sure you get it later after you’ve touched down in your final destination and de-boarded, but as for the rest of us, we’re all just floating along, sometimes bumping into each other and experiencing momentary touches and connections, but for the most part, we’re alone.

I am afraid of very big things. I found a word recently- chromomentrophobia. Fear of time. I am not afraid of the physical prowess of the great beyond, and I am not even afraid of that stinging salt water itself, but more or less the notion that it will be there long after I am. My inevitable path hurtling along towards mortality terrifies me, because it means I won’t be around to see the end. The second coming. The Big bang. Armageddon. Nuclear Holocaust. I am disappointed, because I just want to know how it ends.