Category: General Musings

There is a way of writing that doesn’t stop at the end of a page. The words continue, letter by letter, across the margins and past the edge of the paper. You can’t see it, but they don’t stop there. Dark limbs, they stretch outward, streaks of black across an amber sky.

Winter-boned, too dusky to be stark, they are bloody insistent. They are symptom and ailment both: red-eyed, bleeding fingers, unheard voices and low growls.

But I’m not afraid of them; I have a Cronusian appetite and my children will make a fine meal.

For they are ash, incense incarnate, the Wednesday of the soul, and they have no voice but that of my less-then-meek typing.

My baby sister just had her first child, a beautiful girl.

That makes two nieces, four nephews so far.

Which is great, because the more of them there are, the less tempted I’ll be to have one of my own.

When I was young, really young, I saw a robot in the back of Boy’s Life. It had a little tray and it could move around the house.

In my mind, I thought that if I had one of these, I could get it to do all kinds of cool things. Bring me my lunch. Spy on my brothers. Go places I couldn’t go. I wanted nothing more in life then to save up enough money to have one of those robots.

I need more goals like that one.

The only thing you get from being honest about your conceits is the additional conceit that this somehow will make you a better person.

Freedom is ignoring the walls we know are around us.

Today I am a fist. My hand is so tight I can’t tell what I hold inside it.

Sleep is precious; it provides the space we need to think. Without it, the walls are a bit closer.

I walked myself through a thought experiment today.

One of my greatest fears is set thinking and ingrained responses.

Now, at thirty-four, the threat is greater than ever.

I think our brains are designed to spend the first twenty to thirty years learning.

We listen, we watch, we taste. We adventure. We test ourselves. We test others.

But the experiences we enjoy are a double-edged sword: while each new experience broadens our perspective and challenges our assumptions, most of our experiences aren’t new ones – they are the routines that make up our lives. They are the things we enjoy most, the work we do every day, and the people we love. They form the rules and guidelines that govern our lives; they train ourselves into a pattern of behavior.

Not just in the larger concepts of job and lifestyle, but in the small. Do we smile when we make eye-contact? Do we respond to pity with anger? Do we judge certain people more harshly than others?

It becomes easier to be what we are – human, father, worker, coke-head – and not who we are.

There’s nothing inherently wrong that. Ignorance is bliss, and so too are the comforts of the familiar.

Personally – I’m just not ready to be that comfortable. I want to keep my rituals, but I’m not done testing myself.

When a story is being told, it is often best read in one cohesive form.

I’ve moved the Scarlet Letter postings to a separate page, and they can be read here:

Scarlet Letters

Overhead while waiting for Rose Red to arrive at the Museum of Natural History (determined not to be late for a third time, she guaranteed that no other outcome was possible).

Little boy: “The buses take a little long time.”

Mother: “Little long?”

Little boy: “Yes…they take a long time to get here. Not a while though, just a little.”

His logic, I have to say, is impeccable.