intellectual properties

am i human, or am i dancer?

this is the best opening paragraph of a blog post i’ve read in a really long time:

“Lately I’ve been spending way too much time thinking about ‘my life’ and ‘the direction my life is going’ and whether I need to ‘reevaluate the direction my life is going’ when the only question I should be asking is ‘am I human or am I dancer?’ because that’s the kind of question where no matter what the answer is it’s always yes.”

it’s awesome in its own right, but especially awesome when that blog post then quickly devolves into a discussion about the inanity of facebook quizzes:

“Anyway, the random Facebook quiz is one of humanity’s great levelers in that anyone who does one automatically looks like a moron, no matter how neat their ‘About Me’ section is.”

which is why i never post the results of any of the ones i take to my profile

..::..

“I believe in the next five minutes.”

–JG Ballard

wait.

do i?

appreciating mortality

i drove west on 80 this afternoon along the shoreline, noting the beauty of a gorgeous sunny afternoon watching the sun reflect off the bay and not having any energy to do anything, not the free party on treasure island or the renegade at the beach, not brunch with my friends, not my laundry, not anything; so mentally and physically exhausted today but having forced myself to leave the house just so i wouldn’t feel a totally wasted day, i listened to tom petty sing something about having only one life to live and watched all the people in all the cars drive all the places, i thought and felt again about how sometimes life feels so long, how we are living so beyond our biologically designed ages and filling all that timespace, how maybe this is the one key central thing that leads to such strange modern human behaviors, and how i am already so tired i would never want to live forever.

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

- Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky

~via

QOTD

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Just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.

–radiohead

–via

QOTD

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“My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings.”

–Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee, and an important figure in the conservative movement.

the comments/debate there on thinkprogress.org are interesting and worth reading, esp wrt the difference btw being an economic conservative and a social conservative.

~via

alien

“People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system.”

–Terrence McKenna

via @spongemonkey

quickly the rain passes

1. i am enjoying this humid, warm weather. it reminds me of spring in the midwest.

2. i wrote this on facebook yesterday, feeling a bit overwhelmed and behind on life:

it’s more like feeling out of sync than behind, i guess. it’s one of those days where i’m like … i’m 32. i am not married. i have no children. i have not been to graduate school. i do not own a car. or a house. and i do not intend to do any of those things. so what do i intend to do then?! i am not really a laissez-faire person, but for some reason i’ve been living my life that way.

i am tired of writing things like this (and i’m sure many of my friends are tired of hearing it by now). something’s got to give.

3. “Everybody has the answers
or they’ll make them up
for you.
Just once I’d like to hear
a brand-new question.”

–from Rod McKuen’s “The Art Of Catching Trains“

the sound of

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“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”

or

“Where (or of what) one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence.”

– Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.
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in the places where i am silent, i am soft and brittle.

that which is revealed and unobscured is real, but it is not the essence.

the weight of the unseen, the mysteries of the darkness, the places where we only sometimes go and find the truth -

the silence after a gunshot, the lack of breath, the stillness of a night alone -

often, the strongest thing you can say or do is nothing.

learning which fights to fight, which words to speak, which thoughts to corral and which to let go into the ether:

a silent struggle inside, the end of which is only the beginning.

(see also: How to Deal with an Existential Crisis)

yes, i am aware.

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“I’m selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I’m out of control, and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”

–Marilyn Monroe

QOTD

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
-Wendell Berry

thx, alx. i definitely do not know what to do, or which way to go, and thus i do indeed feel on the verge of a real journey, and am totally baffled an increasing percentage of time.

life is odd right now.  i will write something soon.