Philosophical fever, OH YEAH!

I guess for some people the world keeps changing and they feel like they're standing still.

And for others they keep changing while the world around them becomes stagnant.

An elite few change the world.

As for me, MY world is changing.

If this gives me the chance to change the world I live in, I will seize it. It's about time I added my difference to the ever-changing world. If the world is stagnant then you aren't taking care of your part of the world. If you keep changing but leave the world behind then what world is there for you to look forward to? And further more, if either the world is changing without you or falling behind, then you aren't really paying attention at all.

Or you do not live on this world.

Sense and sensibility

Oh how I want. I want as I have never wanted before.

In the past what I wanted was always either beyond my reach, or something that I shouldn't have that wouldn't go to awry if I had it anyway. Now is different.

Something I want more than I can understand is in my reach. All I need do is ask for it. Also it's one of those things that I shouldn't have. But if I take it anyway, I will have violated my principles. It's not a simple want, like I want to eat pizza, and then I eat too much, but eh. I'll live. I'll take a jog and be done with it.

This time my world has changed shape solely on the desire of something that I can but shouldn't have. I want. To have, to hold, to care for. I need. But no. That's a feeling. In truth, this might destroy me.

Before me have many friends fallen to the same temptation.

I want to fail. I want to unsuccessfully attempt to abstain from this desire. So each action, no matter which way it goes, comes with regret. I don't call. This is right. I shouldn't prolong it. And so I do not call and am so unhappy because of it.

I shouldn't reply. But I'm so happy to see it that I reply anyway. I'm so excited! And guilty.

I thought feelings meant something. I don't know if they do now.

I believed in love. Love lifts us up, gives us hope! Love is the greatest and most powerful thing in this world! If it is love then it MUST be right! So I thought. Am I wrong?

What if I fell in love with what was obviously wrong? Does the love that is there redeem the wrongness? I feel like it should. It is because of love that we do right, isn't it?

A man who loves his friend might go back for him in the heat of battle. Lovers put aside the differences of two different worlds, all for love. But should they have restrained themselves in the first place, not allowed themselves to fall? Was it wrong? And does it stay wrong? A horrible stain on their souls for all eternity? Or does the love wash that away?

What is this supposed redeeming power of love?

But that's not what I'm worried about, yet. What I do worry about are the opposing persons within me. My Feelings have risen up to battle my Reason for control of my actions. I hope my Feelings win, but know that my Reason should prevail.

It's like in that terrible movie, War, where the guy you were rooting for the WHOLE MOVIE turned out to be the bad guy.

Either way, I lose. If I fall, I will regret not having the strength to resist. If I resist, I will regret never knowing what could have been, or whether it would have been one of the greatest stories of all time.

All is loss. And all is victory. So either victory is tainted by the bitterness of loss.

The disease

Hope.

It is what sustains us. It is all that stands between humanity and extinction. And how it does its job. Instinct? We haven't got much of that, anymore. That's what keeps the animals alive. But we do have hope. And that will keep us here long after the creatures have gone.

Hope is our cure.

And what is the disease? Is it our cruel, natural human condition? And what is that? The desire to kill, steal and destroy? Why do we do that? Because we want to live, and we want to live well. And the reason for that? It is because we hope for a better future. Hope.

Hope is our disease.

Our everlasting beacon of salvation and doom. Hope is what saves us from what we're doing to ourselves, and it is what keeps us doing just that.

Remember that story about Pandora's box? Apparently some bitter god or titan gave mankind and his wife a box, as a gift, but instructed that they never open it. She got so curious that she opened it anyway.

Out of the box flew creatures, embodying disease and suffering and misery and all the things that are bad in this world. Pandora shut the box, but by the time she did evil had already been unleashed on mankind.

And there was only one creature left in the box. A sad little critter named hope. And Pandora kept it and nursed it and cared for it.

Question: WHY would there be ANY good in that box?

It's an interesting story. But I don't know if I can deny hope the right to exist. Consider heaven and hell. Hell hasn't got a sting if it's citizens haven't got hope. If they couldn't dream of a better existence, then hell would be no worse than any other place in this universe.

Even if we couldn't hope for a heaven, then what use would anything better than the now exist? Mankind would lose his will to live. Hope is all we have to live for.

Is there nothing else we ought to live for?

Of course I'm bitter, I suppose. I too have hope. Lots of it. And honestly that hope isn't based on anything solid or real. So when the universe disappoints me I'll come crashing down from my cloud of hope. I know this. I know that I will be disappointed. And yet I cannot discourage hope.

I'd rather hope for something I'll have someday, rather than only for something I only might have, or worse might never have at all. I suppose it's meant to make me reach further than I might, if I'd hoped only for something I knew I could reach.

How simple and deplorable such a life would be, one in which I only reached for what I knew I could have. I'd never ask for more, from myself or anybody else.

I'd really hoped to pass judgment on hope and find it guilty. Yet once again hope has disappointed me. The worst part? That it might be a good thing, this disappointment.

Hope makes us miserable, but our misery might not be in vain.







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Art, I miss you

We aspire to responsibility. Why?

Yes, being responsible is a very good thing. It makes you a good person, when you stick to it. It makes you a hero in times of war. Unless of course everyone does it. Suddenly it's just expected of you. It's a shame how something even as important as that loses its value as supplies increase.

(guess who's taking an economy course?)

But there are greater things to be responsible to, greater than just living day to day, making money, getting food on the table. These are the necessities. We all adhere to them as best we can because we have to. It's made it easy for us to deny our responsibilities to being true to ourselves, and encouraging that of others.

And so we have abandoned that which should matter to us, that which was part of being true to ourselves. And I miss it.

I miss painting.

I miss playing my guitar.

I miss writing.

I miss putting my songs together.

I miss learning for the fun of it and reading until the sun rises.

I miss four hour wikipedia bunny trails.

I miss scraping up weird, independent films and becoming a devoted fan.

I miss holding my nephew every day.

I miss that feeling when I first fell for the boy.

I miss having friends in town to go out with.

I miss Stephen and Jesse's stupid antics.

I miss spontaneous trips up the mountain and doing donuts in the taco bell parking lot.

I miss quietly drawing in a corner until I have it exactly the way I imagined it in my head.

How much have I abandoned that we should be free at any time to explore? We are free but fruitless. I challenge you to rise up to the potential beyond the requisites. Do something more than what's needed to get by. Look outside of your needs, and show yourself what you want to do.






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Sunrise

It was Friday night a few hours ago. I got off work early, did some banking, got some Chinese take-out. Then I conversed via the netterwaves with my friends until, one by one, they dropped off to sleep.

For once in a long, long while I do not work on a Saturday morning. So I decided, around perhaps two in the morning, that rather than going to sleep then and there, I would stay a while. I want to see the sunrise.

It's been a long time since I've been so "irresponsible", I suppose. But then again, I'm an adult now and it's my turn to decide what that means. This isn't a moment of irresponsibility. This is a life experience.

The last time I saw an actually sunrise, I cannot recall. I only recall the last time I was up whilst the sun was rising. I did not see that sunrise, though it ended a night marred with nightmares, which is what awoke me from my rest so early. That was late last fall.

It's very frightening, that hour before the sky really lights up. The sky is not so deep a blue as it was in the evening. It feels as though I could nearly smell the nearing dawn. And it's quiet. So quiet. Thus every sound is amplified. Each rustle of an insect in the brush is an imagined evil of the night. Every muffled tap of a cat hopping onto the roof of a car is the footsteps of a nighttime psychopath, fresh from the asylum.

To comfort my irrational fears I write. My creativity flows because suddenly I need it, like a shield, protection against the dark before dawn.

I sit on my porch and listen and breathe deeply. Someone's air condition near by shuts off and the silence is deeper even than it was before. The only sound is that of my typing and tiny, unnamed night noises.

I can see a planet. I think it's Mars. It's got an indistinct red tint to it. Or perhaps that's my eyes playing tricks on me. Is that the television on in my neighbor's front room? It is! Good grief. Everyone knows there's no good television on at five in the morning.

It's getting lighter in the east. Just a tiny bit. A solitary truck drives by and I wonder what could have possessed the driver to be up at this hour. Perhaps he is sleep driving.

The moon is nearly full tonight. This morning? I do not know. It's indistinct when you've yet to sleep. But of all the light, my streetlight is the brightest. There's one just outside my house. Usually it doesn't work. It's ironic that it should only work now, when I would make a bid to see the sunrise.

An indistinguishable tint of yellow permeates the deep blue at the edge of the eastern sky. It is nine past five in the morning. The sun should rise in twenty minutes, if the chart I looked up is correct. I wonder if the sun ever rises at the exact same time, or if it's always just a fraction of a moment out of pace?

There is a thunderstorm far to the north west. I do not hear the thunder rumbling, but every once in a while the northern sky lights up with a flash of lightning. It's almost surreal, somehow. The quiet, the purplish red below the belt of green and yellow beyond the eastern mountains, the flickering clouds in the north, it all seems like some unbelievable place, something from a sci fi movie or a fantasy realm.

It certainly doesn't ring true to what I've come to know of reality. Is this the world without people? With less people? I don't know what to make of it. The silence is like nothing I've ever experienced. What is in this silence?

I'm afraid that if I look away too long, I'll miss it. The sky is changing so quickly! There's a thin line of what could nearly be daytime sky blue between the deep blue and the yellow! And then an unsettling maroon at the edge of the sky.

I can still see Mars. The last lonely twinkle in the sky.

It's getting cooler. That's so strange. It just feels so odd, especially in a desert like this, for this sudden rush of cool that preceeds the sunrise. Perhaps it's what wakes up the birds. I can hear some of them now, quiety twittering, shouting out to one another from the trees.

It's truely amazing how one singular light, even one so great as the sun, can chase away the vast darkness of space. I say this because it's so strange to see the darkness flee, driven away. There is so much more darkness than there is sun. And yet the sun overpowers it daily.

I wonder when the streetlights will shut off. I wonder when Mars will fade.

Heh. Now it seems like the sun is taking its sweet time. There are some clouds on the east horizon. I wonder, is sunrise when the sun peaks over the mountains, or over the clouds obscuring those mountains?

For a brief moment, I wonder where that music, like bells, is coming from. Then I see that some unfelt morning wind has stirred the wind-chimes. It's perfect. I could not ask for a better instrument on which to play my sunrise.

Mars is dim. The sun would be up, if not for those clouds. A line of large, sleepy ants meanders past me. The early shift, I suppose.

I have a "I should be sleeping" headache. The sun was to rise around 5:35. It's nearly ten minutes past that and I still can't see it. It's those clouds. The world is illuminated, and I can't even quite see the sun yet. It's as though the sun has never taken such pains in rising before. Each moment the sky is brighter, but still the sun evades me.

I'm determined. I will see the sun before I submit to sleep and fail to extricate myself from warm, seductive dreams.

The world is bright but the sun is nowhere to be found! Perhaps it has disappeared, and left only its light to remember it by?

In the morning this desert city smells as the mountains do. Fresh and clean, cleansed somehow in the night. It's wondrous.

Oh! Some bold, foolish bird hopped into a dense potted plant here by my side! Looking for the bees that about in it, I suppose! I heard him rustling in the plant and turned abruptly, surprised, and frightened the silly creature away.

There it is! At last!I've seen the world awaken. And the shy but glorious sun comes forth and peaks through her curtain of clouds. Even the sun slept in on a Saturday. And now I think I'll do the same. Good morning! And Goodnight!