her name is ...

 I've been thinking a lot about why I do the things I do. Sometimes I do things because I want to. Sometimes I do things because I feel I have to. Is it okay to prioritize one over the other? I certainly have been lacking in my empathy for duty these days... nowhere in the natural universe are we told that we owe anything to anyone. I am trying to be an instinctual being, that's all. That doesn't make me a hedonist, just someone unwilling to compromise certain desires. Take babies (ok only one Freud reference, promise) - a complete manifestation of human instinct at its purest. They don't care about other babies. They want their mother's breasts to feel full and toys to keep them entertained, and that's pretty much the good life for them. And it's acceptable. We love babies.  We don't call them hedonists. We think they're the most perfect things that ever existed. Then they grow up, get "civilized" into constraining their desires and redefining themselves with the words of others. We have time and we have space. We ponder, we consume, we want to make the most out of them, but again, we follow what others have taught us to believe.... and we forget or never even attempt to find what it is we really want...

What is wasted time? When I sit in my room and play my guitar for two hours, I feel good. My voice doesn't make towers fall or angels sing, and my singing career is not going anywhere further than drunken nights singing a cold and broken Hallelujah, but when I sing I am alive, my voice reverberates through the millions of molecules in the air and I am everything and everything is me. Time not wasted. Then I have the time I spend at college (time worth well over $40,000 a year), trapped in the arms of a monster who wants to package me and ship me to some office job somewhere sometime. Man, when I think how much I could have done with those $40,000... Wasted time, money, and effort. Time passes and I'm losing brain cells, and I'm not getting closer to where I want to be. But where do I want to be? On the road with some gypsies somewhere? Why does that sound so appealing to me? Why do I like getting lost? I want to lose myself without a worry in the world, like in our dreams, where everything just feels like it's floating, like breathing and sensations are enough to make everything worthwhile. Or at least something makes everything worthwhile. Where you are connected, but disentangled. Will I ever have the guts to pack my bags and leave? Or will I go on eating and sleeping and reading about "The Best 500 places to visit before you die" over and over again until my body rots and my mind falls asleep for good? I hate familiar things. I want everything to be new all the time. I want faces to be kind, and people to be simple and untainted by what I know about them. I want to know nothing. I want only to live and sing and climb mountains all the way up to heaven. Even though heaven does not exist. But that is irrelevant. And so is life.

She pulls me down into the sand
and whispers into my mouth
all the vapor from her dreams
that she's been taught to forget.
It tastes so sweet but it burns burns burns,
like hidden pages in a book I never read,
with dragons and chiming clocks, SO LOUD THEY MAKE ME CLOSE MY EYES AND HOPE TO DISAPPEAR-
and witches cast spells to lure you to sleep...
and the wind, her love, runs because he is afraid..  
They are all afraid...
her name is Time, 
and she is trying to steal the air out of our lungs.

Manipulation, brainwashing, amen.

My room-mate goes to Korean church at least once a week. Sometimes two, sometimes even three times. She dresses up nicely, wears bright colors, puts make-up on like she's got a date to impress. She loves it so much that she refuses to go on vacation during break so that she doesn't have to miss the Sunday service. We've had numerous conversations about religion, me taking the Agnostic stance while she defends her own views, both of us at times doubtful and others, fully convinced of our own views. I try to bring some sense into her, not by trying to weaken her beliefs but by challenging what she takes as fact, by repeating, again and again and again, that there is a difference between belief and knowledge, and that although she may very strongly believe in God and whatever else she believes in, she does not know anything.  None of us do.

So anyway, I've been interested in peeking into her world for the sake of "stepping into her shoes" and joined her for an evening at a Korean church an hour's drive away. The pastor went on in Korean for over an hour, and while I was given a translating device to understand what he said, I decided to turn it off ten minutes through the sermon. He had started the address with "Some people think I'm a comedian, but really I'm a pastor." The crowd was entertained. I wasn't.  I am not a cynical person- if anything, I'm an idealist. But I saw an actor so convinced by his own act that he has let go of his own limbs to inhabit those of a stranger's.  He told the story of David and Goliath, of the battle between good and evil, and though the story works on a metaphorical level, ending violently with David's slashing off of Goliath's head, I wondered how all these people could be so fooled by these stories,  and who was the genius that was able to convince over two billion people that the right way to end a dual is by cutting the enemy's head off? Religion establishes so clearly what is right and what is wrong, but if there's anything human history has shown us, it's that there is no clear separation. And since that is clearly the closest to truth we will ever get, why don't we each try to draw our own lines, rather than let others (who's imagination might be fantastic, I have to say) to define our realities for us?

My room-mate once said, "It's not my life. Whatever God wants me to do, I'll do."  During the sermon, tears floated down pallid cheeks. Before it and after,  people sang with all their hearts to a man named Jesus.  Manipulation, brainwashing, amen.  People need something to hold them together, and I understand that, it's a pretty universal need. But I just think if people let themselves believe in something other than religion, other than false hope, things would be very different, in a good way.  If every person simply lived to love and just enjoy each other with no boundaries, with no limitations, no duties to country to government to whatever else we "owe" ourselves to, if we just followed our impulses like an electric shock,  there wouldn't be the need to be so disillusioned with reality, no need to build castles in the air, since we'd have our own right here on planet earth.

* Photos taken at the Renaissance Fair

three questions

I open my mouth to sing you a song, some solo with duende I heard on the radio, but gravity sucks all sound around us and we're left in a vacuum. My mouth is moving, but everything is silent, except for the wind blowing out of the mouth of some invisible giant somewhere. We're standing on the rails, and I hear the train in the distance, but we've always ignored these things, so it doesn't really matter. A dream that vibrates with our world. When we first met at the Guggenheim, two clueless corners of a room slowly drawing closer together like magnets,  paintings began to fall off the walls. It was an earthquake. You thought it was the drumroll in your heart that caused it, I thought it was mine. And then everything changed the new year's eve we set off the fireworks. They were illegal, and it was cold outside,  but the moon reflected off the lake, and since we had no watches, we relied on timeless beginnings. It started with your hands touching mine, then we got closer, and closer, till I could feel your breath on my cheek, and when you leaned in and whispered those fives words in my ear, I thought of U2 and their song "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" because this was exactly what I was looking for. Think in opposites, and thoughts come uninvited. When I asked you to describe a really relaxing day, you answered with five words: "Made me forget the others." When I asked you about the most interesting thing you've done, you answered with four words: "The mile high club."I laughed, you were intriguing. Then I asked you for three words, you said "knowing I'm loved." I said that was four. "Tea, brewing, pajamas." Sometimes I ask a lot of questions, but you were toxic, and I wanted to be intoxicated.

happy new year

If there's one thing I hope the new year brings, for every person on this planet, it's .... pretty clear.

Sheep and berries

After a scrumptious breakfast of waffles, home-made syrup, and melted berries picked and prepared by his beautiful wife, a hunter hungers for a prey. He leaves his cabin in a rush and tracks a creature's footsteps through the forest. To his own wonder, he finds a sheep, and when the right moment comes, his breath having found a balance with its environment, he shoots a bullet through the creature's heart. The sheep, having followed the sweet smell of berries the hunter had left behind from the fields and into the forest, found itself harmed by its own craving, tempted to want as if berries offered to light his universe. Melted berries smell so sweet, but even a hunter can leave that tasty scent behind.

The Great Gatsby

"[Gatsby] shivered as he found out what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world,  material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about..."

Maybe we're all dreamers until we become victims of our dreams,

all victims until we take our dreams like drugs- a necessity that might

 result in our own destruction, but surely worth the tragic joy ride.

Life is a thrill. Death is an idle brute.

two red travelers

Two travelers in red converge among a room in black and white. After the usual eyes interlocking, hands accidentally brushing, and awkward giggles reaching in for something more, the music sways them into a dusty room (think Gatsby's study) where the encounter turns into an interplay between desire and sacrifice. Waterfalls crash within their ribs. Two red travelers exchange their hearts. Had it always been so easy to give a heart? While most fusions result in polychromatic explosions, the shared redness blends their motions into one slightly lighter red (cooled down by the breeze and moonlight brought in by the aperture of the window) scribble among the shelves of books and well-kept secrets. Two lips lock so perfectly, paddle in each other's warmth. Months later, they decide to travel the world, sleeping under a restless sky in Arabian deserts and feasting under the Maharaja's lavish eye. They cross the Atlas mountains on horses,  dance to "kpanlogo" in Ghana's streets,  and feast on crepes while watching a sunrise from the tip of the Eiffel Tower (security is easy to outdo when you are related to Obama). But of all the wonders they explore, they are most amazed by the one they find within each other, and as gravity sucks them through the New Zealand sky, they decide to take that red fusion beyond the crossing of space and into a crossing of time. But forever is a long time...