Everyone is yelling, and maybe that is perhaps why a whisper of love into the heart is the strongest voice.

There are not enough variables to decide in the negative, we must conclude the positive, given its condition of faith for successful result.  Earth and its evidence paint no clear picture, and this is why we cannot simply disdain and hurt for the earth’s lack of facts, but choose faith as a viable option.

If you look around the world there are so many different things.  This statement is in regards to anything that can hold a person’s attention, or take up their time. 

But think back.  Way back before all the masses of humans that are living were born and there were a lot less humans.  There wasn’t much to do.  All the things that occupy us today were once not even here.

I’ll name some examples from my own life.  Last weekend I watched the much-hyped Buckeye game.  Right now I’m on the computer.  I’m eating chips and salsa.  I’m in a suburb.  I was recently reading a book.  Yesterday I watched a movie.  Tomorrow I will study calculus.   

Imagine being in a town in the middle of Persia thousands of years ago.  There simply was not much to do besides marry and work.  There was not really things to learn, events to attend, or things to waste time doing. 

This world around us was built by man, and is cluttered with his words, his inventions, his cities.  In history, as time progressed, mankind learned to creatively produce, and exponentially increased this creative production, until today when we can so clearly see mankind churning out these things in full gear.  I will bet 1,000 more songs were written today to take up my time.  Trying to keep up with the trends of the day is much like playing whack-a-mole.     

My daily life as I now know it is like a puzzle that was put together one piece at a time throughout history, starting at the very beginning and gradually becoming bigger and more complicated, not even stopping expansion at my birth, or even now.  Every object around me and my presence in this room is a summation of mankind’s efforts.  Everything around me was crafted by someone, somewhere, at some point in time.  This carefully plotted and masterful construction of my life by humans in history has worked.  It seems to me the focus of my generation is externally, rather than internally.  Collectively, our focus is on all these things we have to do and have to see.  “Where’s my cellphone?!”  “I’m going to school!”  “Want to see Borat?”  ”Let’s go wait 14 hours to buy a PS3!”   

But if you go back in time the world becomes smaller, with less things, and less preoccupations.  Take away everything and you are one soul, standing alone, unaffected by the extraneous additions of man to this world.  Now what are you? 

Things, things, these meaningless things!  As I meander through the museum of man and my mind marvels and mangles at his magical makings, I must remember to imagine.  What am I?  Sweep away my surroundings and what then remains?  Things are like a perpetual dull hum in our lives that drown out His voice.  Actually, it was a dull hum many years ago, today it is more like a vivacious roar. 

Especially for the soccer moms, our lives are like whirlwinds.  Psychologically, this trend of a multiplicity of options and opportunities in life has had a negative impact on teenagers, prolonging their decisions on what they want to do and who they want to become.  Our attention is being vied for, and no one is winning.  From one thing to the next we jump, in disordered, capricious actions. 

A thousand bullhorns yell a thousand different commands while I stare at a thousand mirrors that each reflect a different image of who I am.  Turn them all off, smash them all I say!  and see what’s left.  

We are so distracted.  Let my surroundings fade to know Your presence.  When everything in the world screams at me to listen, drown them all out, so that all that is left is the one voice that does not prevaricate, but speaks with love and truth.

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”

Avoiding An Answer

We experience too much freedom in our lives.  Our excessive freedom is seen in that we are not forced to make decisions about what this life is.  Institutions of the world yell in our faces: we receive orders from school, orders from work, orders from government, but the demands of life are left unspoken; we must find what it is the world is not telling us.  The standard authorities control our thoughts’ direction by setting before us the matters that are important to them: curriculum, assignments, and taxes.  The satanic purpose of these institutions is to keep our attention long enough so that we do not become aware of the spiritual war being waged on earth.  The institutions inherently have power over us: we are subjected to them from birth.  Contrarily, practices that spur thought on life are not universally institutionalized: it may only happen by chance that we watch a person gruesomely die.  As a radio the human brain is born with its thoughts tuned to the station of the small and frivolous.  This world has an array of quite convenient hideouts from things that matter.  Rest easy, souls of America, we are safe from the truth; I think we outran him. 

Sorry for the delay!  There was an accident on the highway of thoughts in my brain; thoughts were backed up for miles.  However, thanks to our tip top emergency officials, traffic is moving along steadily once more!  No thoughts were hurt in the accident. 

Speculation about the birth of the documentary makes me smile.  Originally, the idea of the documenatary was a seriatum of interiews with people and the showing of pictures while a narrator is heard overhead.  At this point the documentary was missing something, but what?  It needed a hook, a grab, something that would keep people captivated from each frivolous detail to frivolous detail.  Then sudenly, it dawned on one of the first documentarists what the documentary desperately needed, “A HA! I’ve got it! …. we’ll zoom in on the stillframe pictures while they’re on the screen.  Ehhh? Ehhh?”  Giddily, all the other documentarists immediately agree, and thus was born the defining feature of the modern documentary: the zoom in.  Sure just looking at a picture is nice, but you just can’t beat the thrill that comes from zooming in on one. 

The secret to ensuring the alarm clock will wake you up for the day is by putting it across the room.  However, I have found out that I just as easily run across the room to turn off my alarm clock and run back to my bed to fall asleep as I did when it was right by my bed. 

I don’t know what wars all about.  If you’ve ever seen a satellite photograph of the earth you can clearly see that the color green has conquered the earth and doesn’t seem to be leaving anytime soon.

Bally well then, have a fair evening!

Strangers

I am now seventeen years old, although a trifle part of me is incredulous of that fact because when I was young I could never conceive of actually being one of the “big people.”  Despite my skepticism as a child, however, I actually did continue to have birthdays and my extremeties did gradually enlarge into proportions that now allow me to look at some adults on the same eyelevel.  The process of growing up was a bit too gradual, however, and I still view home videos of a younger me with a natural inclination to dispute that this person I am seeing on the screen was me, and that I said those things and I acted that way.  The entire idea that I as a large, cognizant creature must be informed that I used to be this smaller, nonthinking creature, but of course cannot remember being that smaller creature because I could not then think, seems … sketchy.  Regardless of my doubts I do somehow find reason to believe that I once was that adorable, unbelievably cute organism, and have slowly learned over the years what role I am playing: a human on planet earth.  

I do specifically recall thoughts and sights from shortly after the time that I had a party with a cake that had seven candles on it.  It was at that time it occured to me that I was a small person, and everyone else was a big person, and since I didn’t seem to be getting any bigger from day to day, I concluded I would forever be one of the small people.  Now, at age seventeen, suddenly taking time to think about how old I am is like waking up after a long family car trip to discover that we have arrived at where we were traveling to; that place that once seemed so far away but is now undeniably all around us.  The surreal nature of realizing you are currently in a place you had previously thought you never would be is comparable to an episode of the twilight zone.  The shock comes from the fact that although I didn’t consciously realize throughout the transition that I was changing location, it is indisputable that I am here. 

In this particular moment, as I sit here writing out my thoughts, life does not seem so fast after all.  Of course it seems like I raced to age seventeen, but now that I am here life’s pace has slowed significantly.  Here is why that is: experience is fastest the first time around.  While traveling life’s course in my first years every facet of life was like meeting someone new, and finding out all about them: my family, the world of science, the history of mankind, diverse cultures, emotions, virtue and vice, friendship, language, religion, eccentric people, philosophy, disappointment, politics, ideas, days,  humor, American culture, tragedy, great persons in history, the universe, everything!  During our first years we are exposed to simply … everything.  

Life on planet earth is much like a person I am getting to know.  On top of that, everyone else is getting to know him too, and I have had the privilege to hear what others have found out about him to add to my own collection of thoughts.  Now with all these things experienced it seems that the variables of life are standard.  Not that there aren’t new things to discover, but the majority of life’s basic elements have been exposed by the time a human reaches around my age.  The frisson of discovering something truly new, like we do as children, is just about as big of a thrill as it gets.  And this makes it plainly seen: our first years shock us with all of the things we find out, and eventually we lose our shock and settle down. 

One by one, the bits of information we learn about life build up.  Too often the gradualness of this process blinds us from remembering the initial premise of our existence here on earth: we learned about the world, we were not always a part of it.  It is easy to forget, we came to this planet as strangers.  It’s an odd place we’re in. 

So here I am.  Everything is in focus.  I am aware that with every passing moment, with every strike of the key, humanity is amassing statistics in almost every imaginable category.  Somewhere a couple is in love, a birthday party is thrown, a person is sad and alone, someone dies, a child learns a lifelong lesson, a wrong thought occurs, a person is starving, and many other things are happening.  At this time I am aware of what goes on in the world: the good and evil, the pain and pleasure.  I can picture my personal, subjective existence as a human next to the collected, objective existence of all humans.  Growing up is like zooming out of our small little minds to see the world in its place in the universe.  It is as though the world were a model, and the inventor has just swept off the sheet covering it over the last sixteen years, and I may now inspect it. 

Some people, I find, never stop to think about life in an objective frame of mind.  If the analogy of life were a person in a room waiting to be permitted into another room, then some people could be described as spending their time simply waiting, unaware and unconcerned with their surroundings, never waking from their dull stupor to realize what they’re staring at and the room they’re standing in.  Others, however, instilled with innate curiosity, will spin ’round and examine their surroundings, interested in the environment they have been thrust into.  There is so much clarity in the air, for there is ample time to study the room; and once studied, questions arise.  Every person is an investigator of life, an interrogator, trying to coax it into telling him or her what this whole thing about.  Is this a joke?  Who sent you?  Why do you hurt?

You and I, my friend, have lived these years investigating a crime scene.  Something absurd has happened here on earth, that much is obvious, but what has happened exactly?  Collecting samples of evidence from the strange inventory of life is what has preceded this time, this time in which we are now in the lab ready for the results.  This is what growing up has amounted to.  What is this place called planet earth?  Who are these people?  There’s pain—should we hide in a cave?  There’s pleasure—should we indulge?  It’s necessary that we decide.  How will we then view things?  These first sixteen years were a movie.  A test run.  An initial showdown.  A short tutorial.  We all encountered our firsts.  Now I question—what the heck was that?

Sorry it’s been awhile, I’ve been writing elsewhere recently on topics I don’t post about on xanga.

The word quite is quite overused, but it will never stop being overused because there is no word quite like it.

I’m getting over a cold, and I’m not happy about it.  I like having a cold.  It’s like my way of sticking it to global warming.  

I have furnished a skill that is embarassingly amazing.  I set my clock by my bed 5-10 mintues fast usually, depending on whether it somehow got unplugged or I just felt like I didn’t want it to be the time it actually was.  Well, I normally set my alarm for a time like 7 A.M., and only after waking up and walking upstairs do I see it is really something like 6:52 A.M.  Somehow, someway, beyond all measure of what seems to be a reasonable amount of stupidity and forgetfulness, I actually have a drain in my head that leaks pieces of information out during the hours of the night, and the fact that my clock is wrong is always one of them.  Although I set it fast by 5-10 minutes, I believe it’s the actual time the first moments of waking up every single day.  It really helps if I sleep in and I begin to freak out, but then after seeing another clock realize that things aren’t really so bad.  However, there is some time barrier for when I may start remembering.  It’s something like that for every three weeks of having the wrong time I must have one week of the right time, just to keep my brain from figuring it out. 

Have a wonderful ensuing 24 hours!