I was about to start a speech by saying, "Now certain people, who shall remain nameless," but then I thought, "Oh crap. If someone's walking around without a name, people are going to notice."

Cops are like girls.  I see someone pulled over for speeding, and three cops cars are lined up behind them.  It's like a girl who broke a nail so all her friends rush to the bathroom with her to worry and stress about it.  "Copy that Unit 23. Broken nail, I'm on my way."

I stretch the baby's lips with my hands.  "See! Look how happy she is when I force her to smile."

I think that traffic lights should have an alarm clock go off when it turns green so that I can take naps while I'm waiting.

At least once while trying to figure out how to get a person's phone number, I think of calling and asking them for it.

People who make no sense to you get together with one another and have a wonderful time.

Expiration dates are depressing.  You look at a gallon of milk, and all you can think of is when it's going to die.   I feel like they should include birthdates on there too.  Then you can have a two-week anniversary of the milk, and give it a cake and sing to it, and the world will be a bright and sunny place.

Some people fish for food, some people fish for sport, and some people fish out of sadism. I think tow truck drivers fish out of sadism.

A person might say 'They were walking two abreast' but if it's girls they're talking about I think, 'There were two breasts? So just one girl? Wait—how many breasts were there?'

Ha ha, so long!

I was gone for a few weeks.  It was good, it was refreshing.  It's always good to dust off the cobwebs and remember what life is really like.

I only used a computer out of absolute necessity, and only for a few minutes.  It was wonderful.  Based on my eleven days away from facebook, I began realizing what facebook does to the reality of ordinary interactions with other people.  And I realized: facebook is not just 'an addition to' humanity.  I think it is something that has changed humans.  We are different than we were before.

Before, when you saw someone, you were seeing all of what they were.  There are other places they've been and people they know, and in a way a person is initially 'distant' from you until you speak to one another and connect somehow.  We always try to tell our stories so the scenery of our minds is not invisible.  Other than that, there are books and movies that you've read and watched, and those things are the rest of your mind's furniture.  But even those you can relate to people if you put forth the effort.

With facebook, however, we are not fully where we are.  We are 'somewhere else', too.  We are wherever we are, and on facebook too.  Our soul has been divided in two; I am with you, but my facebook is my 'second self', and since I try to be me on there, and I constantly use facebook, my social life is now split down the middle.  Whoever I am talking to in person it now feels like is seeing less than all of me. 

Not being on facebook allowed me to talk to people with a renewed sense of purity.  It hearkened back to the ancient days when people took all of them everywhere they went, when life was a univocal concept, a full sound that did not dim in intensity from scene to scene.  Our stories set in real time and the concepts of the philosophers were what made us; there was no 'invisible place' where we could plaster and leave ourselves besides.  Life was always filled to the brim.

Xanga, for me, is different.  If anything it makes my thoughts more real by cementing them somewhere in reality, and I don't really get into the hustle and bustle of it.  Writing is an ancient practice, and good for life when it doesn't become the point (writing is the means, true living the end); facebook does not have such an excuse.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this, if anything, but I do hope I at least transfer meaningless facebook time into reading, if not into spending time in the presence of other divided souls. 

Here's to hoping.  Drink up, friends! 

(What . . . it's chocolate milk . . .)

The worst thing that can happen to you is that you lose yourself. 

Do you ever feel like history happened quickly, but now that that it's at the present (we're in the modern age! just like all the other ages were) things are going slowly?  All an illusion.  You'll die too, and it will have seemed just as fast to the people who will take our places in the future.

People who go on diets think they are winning at something.  But they'll die too.  Everyone dies.

When I was a kid I thought the truth was all that mattered.

When I was a kid I could run anywhere I wanted.

There's always some sacrifice you think is worth it, but it turns out not to be worth it.  What could matter next to a life truly lived?

There's something we're supposed to be doing, some faint voice susurrating with the leaves in the wind.  There's a giant sky above these buildings, a certain angle the sun looks between the trees and houses.  There are young girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalks that know nothing of Libya or what we did to Nagasaki. There's the moment a fawn stares straight back at you.  There's the thought of your whole life from start to finish.  The sight of an enormous sky of golden orange clouds. The thought of deep history, and all the lives and stories that have animated sound and time, and how amazing it is that there are humans.

There's a perspective that realizes all the things I've got wrong.  I wish I could have that perspective.  But you can't wish it, you can only find it by living your way to it.  But our bones should ache from the tension; I want to know how to live.

Someday you'll have a dream where you know you're going to die, and it will seem more real than it ever does in real life.  You'll see how you order your universe; what people you think of, what it is you want to do, what it is you want to say. 

But why do we wait?  Why do we not always live with reality?

It's not worth it to live just how others want.

Who are we anyways?  If you didn't expect to be a human you don't have to pretend the social world makes sense.  Which means no one has to pretend the social world makes sense.  This is the first and last time you'll ever be here. 

The truth is a very specific thing.  We can miss it in many more ways than we can find it.  But if only once in life, in that one moment you feel the rush over your bones and everything around you comes alive, you must make one mad dash for the truth.  You must think that love and death are too big for you to be quiet in life.  You have to head forcefully in the direction you have always wanted to, to the world you saw as a kid.  You will not be sorry for it.    

It is hard to identify; it's just a pull, a dream, the thought of the world to music, something about the air when I find myself on walks when I'm alone.  It's something I can't get away from, maybe even a disease, an infection of the soul that drives towards a realness that illuminates everything and completes our thoughts.  But if it's a disease it's no worse than others' disease, the disease that pulls towards routine, control, happiness, and consistency.  And it might just be true.  It might just be that there is something beautiful to find, that everything will light up and make sense, that salvation is before our very souls.  And if that's true, I want to be there as it happens.  If only for this life, my hope is in there being a truth.

You have to explain yourself, you know, as a conversational rule.  You have to explain where you are, where you're going, what you value, and tell people all about yourself.  It's horrible. 

What if I don't have a plan, and don't want to have a plan?

I find some people can talk without giving themselves away.  They never say anything. 

How do some people say nothing?  Somehow they just nod along, and you never expect for them to say more, because it never seemed like they expected themselves to say more.  In that way some people hide, and everyone passes over right where they are hiding, and don't see them. 

Once you show yourself to have a certain kind of reasonability and way of thinking, people will always know you're that person, and you'll never be able to hide again.

Sometimes it's safer to say less, because while you can take a whole life to build an accurate of image of yourself, you will never have enough lifetimes to get ride of an inaccurate one. 

Images are indelible things. People hold everything I say against me.

But then, if you don't talk, you can never be the person who had just the thing to say at that very moment in the conversation.  What if we don't know how to be who we want to be?  Sometimes life shapes itself accidentally after our comments, in ways we don't intend.  It is really an illusion that we ever have control over how things turn out. 

So should we talk or not?  Thinking about it leads to a stalemate.  People talk basically just when they feel like it, and not because they have things figured out. 

It's a good thing we have moods, or I'd be as mute as the moon.

Sometimes how we become a little holier is through a long chain of things in life, that happened after specific conversations and relationships happened with many different people.  God is the only one who needs to have a plan. 

Whenever we are in a relationship, we are actually in two relationships.  God is alive in his creation, and interacts with you in everything you do.

Only one thing is for sure: telling a bedtime story is always the right decision.  Goodnight!