It is better to pray for someone than to tell them you will do so.

Some days are "holidays" and thus on that day people think about the significance of that day.  But since everyday is automatically Reality Day, people ought to always be thinking about the meaning of the place they are living in.

A pet peeve is something that annoys you, and therefore everyone's biggest pet peeve ought to be pet peeves. 

People in general reason for the view they want to believe. 

A person who has discovered how to fix the world need not convince others that it is the right way to fix the world.  If they have found how to fix the world then what they should do is fix it. 

Everything first exists without a name, but then we will add a word onto it.  This is a dangerous enterprise, for people then tend to continue using the word while the meaning originally behind it slowly vanishes.

Some think of their life as the main event, and think about God as if he were a character in it.  But the true format is that the universe is God's story, and we are the characters in it.  It is a problem of priority. 

Of all the matter in the universe, only a select few capsules of skin on planet earth have been granted the privilege of thinking, but once in this position man cries out, "I don't want to think about it!" 

I thought that a battery exploded if you dropped it.

I used to think that the "conscience" was a actually a thing in a person's head.

I was very intimidated by girls who could write in bubble letters, and I was always frustrated that when I tried it didn't look as good.

When being driven somewhere, it always seemed to me that headlights were like the eyes of a car.  Thus whenever looking out at the busy intersections I always saw cars as the main agents, like they were the ones driving and deciding where to go.

If I was ever in a room with a lot of people and the door was closed, I was always afraid that we would breathe up all the air and start suffocating.  Since we inhaled the good kind of air, and breathed out carbon dioxide, how would more of the good kind of air get in the room once we used it all up?

The mind of a child is a place of quiet wonder, and while adults busy themselves about grownup things and conversations, many ideas stir within it.  What a curious and wondrous environment is the world to those who still view it as strangers because they have just begun their visit. 

The present moment has the illusion of being more present than moments have been in the past.  When thinking of history, it seems like time flew by through all the kings, wars, and noteworthy individuals, but now time is here.  And here it will stay.  It seems the past, summarized in our minds in quick concepts, was fast forwarded to the present moment for our existence to take place; it is as though reality in the past never seemed to people like it does to us in the present, as a slowly progressing reality with a blank canvas of a future.  It does not seem like the past happened at the same rate as the present is happening, but rather much faster.  But this is simply time and the mind playing devilish tricks on us. 

The past happened at the exact same speed as the present, the only difference is that the past is finished and your life is not.  But slowly and ever so surely, the past sucks you into its abyss of nonbeing, slowly drawing in your existence like a whirpool down a drain.  Like gossamer, our physical being slowly unravels into the wind off our backs.  And the absorption of your existence into the muffled and immobile past is inevitable; indeed, history is a long record of it having happened to every person. 

When you read the name of a historical figure on the pages of a book, you are witnessing him in his paralyzed state;  his name written there is simply his place on the victim's list, gagged and motionless like the rest of history's prisoners.  Some people say they love history because 'it is alive'; how confused they are, for history is a communal grave, where all persons who were once animated and talkative beings have now been eternally frozen. 

Despite its ubiquity and surety, civilization remains casual and oblivious in the midst of this unending bloodbath at the hands of time.  Do they expect it to stop one day?  Such would be foolishness to hope that the very villain at work will soon negate his own project. 

The present moment is merely the edge of the tidal wave of time which is consuming all of mankind as it surges into the future, pulling humans into the enormous ocean of blood which is the past.  Yet though this monster lurks right behind them, people continue facing forward, unaware that they will be gagged and bound for eternity in only a moment as well.

It is amazing and profoundly peculiar that people should have clocks in their houses, on their mantles, right in the open where everyone can see; it is a murderer on display, indeed, showing the murder take place!  People should be outraged and offended when they see a clock, grabbing it furiously and asking, "Why do you continue?  Why are you killing us all every second?  Are you laughing at your cruel joke?  Is this your idea of a joke?  Stop.  I said stop.  Stop, I say, stop, stop, stop!  Commonplace trinket!  Wretched murderer!"  The man smashes the clock on the ground and walks away quickly.  He looks at his hands, feels his abdomen.  "Is it happening now?  I seem fine.  But no.  I am dying.  We are all dying."  And all around him the man watches as the crowds enjoy exploring and living in their gas chamber of a home.  "Life is a death march," the man thinks, "and no one even knows."

After raindrops form, they have a short fall but then disappear instantly upon hitting the ground.  Humans are the same; their life is a short fall before they land at death and likewise disappear into the ground, as though they were never even there.  Also like raindrops, humans are very small and fall quickly and in great numbers.  But sometimes a person will go to sleep, and when he has awoken a storm has happened in the night, though he slept right through it.  Because history quickly unravels, and afterwards it seems it has always been done with, humanity is like a storm that happens during the slumber of the universe.

If a person's day does not go so bad, then they will perhaps have hardly noticed the time, but when they arrive home they find that a friend had an excrutiatingly long day because of the suffering they experienced during it.  But to the person who had a fine day, the slow and miserable time that the other person endured seems to have never happened.  Now that they are together, the person's suffering is over, and thus to the first person it seems the suffering must not have seemed long, for it happened during the same time as the day which seemed to fly so quickly.  So it will be with the universe at the end of our lives; to the universe, as though nothing happened, though we suffered through every second.

Life does not take time.  Time takes life. 

There are only a few ways to be brilliant, while there are many, many ways to be stupid.  Thus a brilliant person may only discover the fact that he is brilliant per chance, like once he encounters a vexing riddle, whereas a stupid person can be stupid in every little thing he does. 

On that note, yesterday was my first day as a driver at the pizzeria where I work.  There are not many orders during the day on a Saturday, so I did not have much work to do.  The first few orders went okay, although I did go to the wrong house on my very first order, but in my defense there were two apartments with the exact same number about one hundred meters apart in a very confusing apartment neighborhood. 

But the next order was a problem because not only had the store that I needed to find change locations since the last time they ordered, thus making the managers have no idea where it was, but they moved to a place hidden in a web of backroads behind a huge commercial area that made looking for it extremely difficult.  So I went outside and put the few orders I had on my car before I remembered that one of the managers had told me to bring my cell phone in case I needed help navigating.  Even though my cell phone is broken to the point where I need to shout in it at the top of my lungs to sound like anything more than a faint whisper to the person on the other end, I thought I had better be safe and bring it.  So I ran in, got my cell phone, and then left.  

I pulled out of the parking lot, then went about another hundred meters to the main road where I needed to take a right.  While making the right I heard a weird ca-clunk sound, and as I kept driving I decided to look in my rear view mirror, wondering what on earth it could have been that made that sound.  I looked in the mirror and ensued to see my orders in the middle of the road behind me!  My mind leapt into an intensity of shock and panic.  I immediately glanced to my right in disbelief that the orders were not in the front seat, where I had clearly put them—or had I?  Thankfully no cars had followed me in taking the right so I hastily reversed back to get the orders.  A biker who I had passed was at the scene picking up the orders and he remarked, "Sorry dude, I tried to flag you down."  I thanked him and got the orders in my car.  

They looked fine.  But then again, they were still in their delivery bags.  I decided it was best to check, so I slowly took the pizza box out of the delivery bag and hesitantly lifted open the lid, only to reveal the pizza heaped into a slimy pile of grease and cheese on one side of the box.  The other order, which was not a pizza, was, well, let's say—deliverable.  Though I do admit to running from the house once I dropped it off.  But before I did that I rushed back to the pizzeria to tell them I needed the pizza remade, though I didn't have time to explain why.  When I got back and told them what happened, they laughed about it for the rest of the day.  Apparently they've never had a delivery boy so stupid that he drove off with the orders on his car.  But then again, they didn't know they were working with the son of a woman who had crushed her own cell phone after driving off with it on her car at a gas station.

And that is why I say there may not be a way to be brilliant in every situation, but there is always a way to be stupid.  Leave it to me to drive off with the deliveries on my car on my first shift as a driver.  I mean really, it takes some kind of a mind to set huge delivery bags on their car, walk inside to grab something, walk out, climb in the car, and drive off.  Although in my defense I had gotten a text message (a means of communication I do not like nor endorse, by the way).  Though I suppose that should be considered a "less than sufficient" cause for my forgetfulness. 

Farewell to you all, God bless in your endeavours this week! 

I was under the impression that we rebelled against Britain because we were being taxed without representation.  Well, we won, and thus now we are taxed with representation.  Great.  But I can't help but feel as though we were upset about the wrong variable in the equation.  If my house is robbed during the night, it doesn't matter to me if it was my next door neighbor or a tourist from Europe who did it; furthermore, fixing it so that it is my neighbor does nothing to solve the main problem here. 

Not to mention, back in those days England had a Constitution that no one followed since it wasn't written down.  We wrote ours down, but still don't follow it.  It's the same fallacy all over again of removing the wrong variable.  You could call this instance of it the Ten Commandents fallacy, I suppose.  Writing it down didn't really fix the problem. 

The leader of our nation is also the son of a past leader, and, like we've been over, does not really feel any obligation to follow the Constitution, which basically constitutes a monarchy and an autocracy.

In other words:  Great.  We're right back where we started. 

To top it all off, given the technology of modern militaries, rebelling is not even an option anymore.  It is quite disappointing that the time is over when citizens were capable of matching their government's military strength, given a sufficiently impassioned speech in a public square beforehand.  Seems to me the world was a lot more fun and interesting when we were always just one collective riot away from overthrowing the government.  Besides, a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing.

Word on the street is that the government listens to our phone conversations.  Just in case, at the end of every conversation I always throw in, "Ok, I'm a terrorist, bye." 

Imagine being put in a small closet with one other person and being told you will die in an hour.  That is what life is like, just with more room, more people, and more time.

A person may read many books.  But understanding them is the point.

All of life is simply spent determining what will be said at one's funeral. 

Most people think freedom means the freedom to do.  But it rather seems that true freedom is the freedom to know.  I would rather be locked in a cell for all of life while knowing the truth than to have an eternity of time to do anything I wanted while not being able to know the truth.

Do not expect other people to do what you have not.  If you encourage them to do so, your words are empty, as your mind speaks of meaning outside its grip.

The way you live your life, in total, is what you think the truth is.  If life were a download bar that started with a question mark in its background, you living your life would be slowly completing the download, until your life is over and your answer is revealed. 

Paganism is still alive and well, as anyone living within America should be truthful enough to admit. 

Celebrities are the gods who all congregate in Hollywood, their Mt. Olympus. 

They are decadent creatures, corrupt, jealous, lustful, vain, and angry, displaying their rage at each other and sometimes at us mortals.  And yet despite their thoroughly depraved minds, they have bodies that display the height of beauty, seemingly flawless paragons of the human physique.  They copulate with one another and thus bear further divine offspring, and sometimes have relations with us mortals and bear children among us, thus producing half-gods. 

But we mortals mirror the ancient Greek, too, for despite the moral shortcomings of the celebrities we still worship them as gods.  In our boring, daily lives as peasants we read and eagerly talk with other mortals about the stories that our primary authorities on the gods have made up about them, though we always accept the stories as being completely real.  Our belief in the gods and their wild tales remains firm even though none of us have ever trekked to their residency to confirm their existence, much less the fanciful tales attributed to them. 

But our imaginations like it better that way, where these beautiful yet depraved people actually exist and do all these fantastic things we hear about.  It is better than thinking about gas prices, anyways. 

Farewell, fellow pagans.  See you next temple.

It has been storming all night long, and I have been loving every minute of it. 

Seeing lightning bolts, especially elaborate ones that spread out over the sky, is really an exciting thing for me.  It makes me wildly ebullient, which explains why I am able to stand for so long simply staring at the sky waiting for the one that I will remember for years to come. 

While there were a few of those tonight, one instance clearly topped the rest, though I was not a direct witness of it.  Some friends and I were under a bridge, right next to which there was a small clearing.  Rain was hammering the river the bridge went over and we were watching the lightning as it attacked the city on the other side of the river.  My friend Alex and I were standing next to each other a few feet into the clearing when suddenly it seems like the entire universe exploded.  Alex claims he saw it—twenty feet from us, a lightning bolt struck.  The light shone bright and ubiquitous for just a milisecond before the roaring thunder sent us all jumping and shouting in confused mayhem out of our fright and excitement. 

I can believe it was right next to us because of the brightness of the light and the speed and volume of the sound, but Alex said he saw it, and I find that remarkable.  Too bad I was turned the other way.  At home I watched from my doorstep for awhile, and there was one the seemed to fill the whole sky.  It was like a picture that started drawing itself from many different places all at the same time.  Unfortunately it was around 2 A.M. so all I could do was jump around, since shouting would have woken the neighbors.  But it was truly awesome.

If I were not so tired I would be relating to you in full terms the frisson of joy and terror I feel when I see lightning illuminate the sky.  But it has been finals week and my body has made quite a succesful protest for me to leave that to another time.  

Night!  (Er...morning!) 

Thoughts are the primary problem of existence. 

What do they mean?  Why do I have them?  Are they here to just be known by me individually or to be known by God as well and redeemed by him if I focus my attention on him? 

No one knows what it is like to be a being that walks around but cannot think.  Because if there were such a creature they would not know anything.  Thus they would not be able to think 'This is what it is like to be a creature that cannot think.' 

I can look at whatever screen I am viewing and consciously attach the appropriate word to everything I am viewing.  But what is before all the words?  In general as I live and look through my head and walk around, I am who I am every moment.  There is one basic thought that is always running in everyone's minds; life, as a total thing being experienced. 

I look to the stars, which crush me with their beauty and existence, and want to know the truth.  Truly, and deeply, in my quiet moments, alone and away from all the other people, like right now, I want to know the truth.  There is a madman deep within every person who wants to know the truth at any cost.  But he is so deep, it could take some people centuries of living to find him even if they tried, but most, even if they lived forever on earth, would never find him.

But what is even more amazing than the stars is that I can think about them.  I can think about their meaning, I can wonder how they got there, I can imagine colliding two of them together, I can assign the value of 'beauty' to them.  That is the more truly wondrous idea going on while looking at the stars.

Thoughts have very basic content, like what I should do, or what is reasonable, or thinking about the details of a mundane task while doing it.  But they are not neutral forces; they are enflamed with emotion and power, good and evil.  This is why they are a problem: we are not just calculators with legs, but have an entire world of good and evil following us around, with us in the center of this world constantly declaring our allegiance to one of the sides.  And our allegiance is declared in the world of thoughts. 

But when we turn to face this world, the one that follows us around and charges our thoughts with meaning, is it even there to face?  Is the medieval peasant who went off into the woods all those years ago, and, as he desperately faced the futility of his fight against his own turpitude deep in the night, came to the end of himself, even dealing with something real?

Well?  Is he?

That is the question.  That is why thoughts are such a problem.  They determine everything.  They are what creates the world every second.  Who we choose to be animates our being in the very next second, and it is the same with everyone else, and thus the world in every moment is ultimately a mural where every person is a variable determined each moment by the choices within that person.  Their physical appearance is a marionet, their mind the person holding the strings. 

And if our thoughts are not real then they are like sock puppets, putting on a silly show we think is real, when really there are fools holding the socks who snicker at the trick they are playing on us.  They have pulled off the greatest prank of them all, creating an entire reality that wasn't real, duping a creature for an entire lifetime that his thoughts had some meaning when they didn't.  Even though many sought to uncover the secrets and truth of their thoughts, these fools were so clever that none found them out.  For how can you find something out when the medium by which you would find it out is what you are trying to verify? 

And what are we to conclude?  I see that we can do nothing else but assume that our thoughts are real, and they hold the meanings they seem to.  We should conclude that our thoughts hold a commensurate value in a parallel reality.  But it is perhaps in this thought that I have taken a wrong step, and I will never even know it.  Perhaps.  But even though such a thing is possible, there still seems no reason to tilt my decision in that direction. 

And if our thoughts really do mean something, if this world is simply the context for our thoughts to play out and take shape as we make our innumerable decisions throughout the day, how amazing is reality!  We are not in the very boring world that everyone thinks, where life is simply a pleasure-experiencing medium, or where our days are meant to be lived slowly and dully like it seems they always are, but rather every day is important for more choices, to shape our minds once again.  We are agents in an ultimate story, where the virtues and vices are variables at war every day, and we are the players moving the chess pieces in this battle of good and evil.  How overwhelming it is to realize this.  It may seem too amazing a reality to be true, but then when we look back at how absurd the opposite is, we realize we are not thinking unreasonably in affirming it, and are therefore even more appreciative of the reality we are in.

The other thoughts that come with this are chilling to the core of one's existence.  They make the soul tremble with the anticipation of the power it is approaching.  To think we are here for but a blip, a trite, faint moment, yet from our thoughts and choices stand then ready to inherit eternity, is simply deadening in thought.  Oh how big a thought eternity is next to the nothing of a life we are living!  I stretch my arms to heavens and feel the glory of eternity, and see how little life is next to this giant thought.  For we are in a rather simple place, where the physical objects and unspectacular people we see every day do not make us feel the ultimate weight of life.  But when we see the stars, when we see the sunset, when we think of death, when we face our thoughts, when we feel the truth of a song, the ultimate reality of life comes crashing down on us like sweet breath from our souls. 

Life seems so big, but shrinks next to eternity.  Eternity swallows everything up in its ultimacy. 

Is this the truth?  That I am a human put here on earth with my thoughts, to then realize the ultimacy of life through these different signposts, and then to finally realize in a majestic and completely overwhelming thought to silence the rest, that God loves me, and follow this until I die?  It seems true, but the thoughts are too big for my mind, and I wonder through these moments of what I should do. 

I was at breakfast one morning with some people when I heard a friend say she didn't want any tea because it would make her teeth yellow.  But I drink tea all the time and don't mind one bit.  Sacrificing attractiveness for food seems like a good trade to me.  If eating pizza bruised my arms, or if drinking chocolate milk made me look sickly and frail, it would simply not be a problem.  I would rather be a bon vivant than an adonis.

Is anyone else out there betting partners with themself?  Like if you are heading towards a green light from far away and you whisper, "Ten bucks it turns red before I get there."  I do that all the time.  So far I think we're even. 

Hopefully when we get to heaven we gain all knowledge, because I have a lot of bets laid down on things that went down on earth.  For instance, I have a ton of money on that there was a gunman on the grassy knoll.  And let me just say there had better be life elsewhere in the universe.

Some people say, "Live every day like it's your last."  But hopefully I'll live to old age, and will be in bed all day the last day of my life.  And that's just not a practical way to live every day.  Or as my friend Mike put it, he would hate to be shot every single day. 

Hope everyone has a great day.