Sunday morning I awoke to find a swelling sadness gnarling and mewling at the corner of my heart. I don’t know where it came from, but I know it has been there for a while now. It’s a beast. A beast that I wrestle and defeat and am defeated by. One that I bruise and batter and scream at and yet, it never seems to shy away for long. It’s stubbornness is comparable to my own, and like two exhausted boxers we pull from our respective corners and fight it out again and again and again; a stalemate with no referee. The beast is always there. A cold reminder that I’ll never quite be normal or completely happy. I can hear him banging and burning against my brain, trying desperately to wiggle and squirm his way inside and all I can do is resist and hope that one day he’ll give up. I can feel him. He feels like the frost laden mornings in October. The time of year when the cold hangs just a bit longer in the morning, and settles in just a little earlier in the evening. The beast is the feeling of impending winter, when the

Continue readingI’m standing on a pier, smiling from ear to ear, I shout but you don’t hear me at all…

I often wonder what kind of religion birds have developed to explain the strange behavior of humans, specifically when we’re driving our vehicles. The next time you’re heading on down the highway, pay attention to the ravens, crows, and other little birds that stay just to the side of the road as they peck and forage for their next meal. You’ll notice that, without fail, most of them will jump just to the other side of the white line as a car is coming. They won’t go any further because, as far as they’re concerned, the white line is a sacred boundary that the evil cars are unable to cross. It doesn’t even matter if a car is driving outside the white line and would hit a bird standing just on the other side of it. The birds seem to expect that they’ll be protected by that strip of paint, regardless if it’s true or not. I’m curious if they have some sort of savior, a bird that once died for them so that they may have that white line. Maybe it’s big bird from Sesame street, or maybe they’ve attached some kind of cosmic significance to hawks and their

Continue readingA reason to be sinful

“Sorry man, we’re all just poor musicians.” Sean-Michael said, gesturing to the other band members standing around him. “Oh, is that right?” The homeless man asked, glancing down at the clothes that we were wearing. He wasn’t upset; he’d just heard excuses a thousand different times from a thousand different people. We were no different, even though I wanted to be. “Well, have a good night.” He said as he stood there. His skin was blistered from exposure, sunburned and cracked from his forehead all the way down to his neck. On his back was a familiar sight: a duffel bag stuffed with miscellaneous clothes, trinkets, and the tiny little items that most people would have thrown away without a second thought; but not him. To him, these were not trinkets. They were memories of a life long gone, but never forgotten. They were lifelines to sanity. He gave a last look at the six of us, and wandered aimlessly back in to the heat and shelter of his small camp beneath the freeway overpass. We continued gathering up photo equipment, all of us wearing suits that easily cost several hundred dollars a piece. In my wallet I had a

Continue readingFrom the swinging of the axe to swaying of the hips

In response to the blog entry that I wrote below, I wanted to share my absolute favorite piece of writing ever done by Carl Sagan. It’s pretty well known, but this video does it a decent amount of justice. Here’s the transcript, minus a part of the introduction: That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a

Continue readingHe’s bolting doors and getting stoned, locked and loaded and losing hope

Growing up, I had two heroes that helped to shape who I was and who I wanted to be when I got older: Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan. Geeks, to the highest order of magnitude to be sure, but they were also philosophers and poets and writers and men of peace and constructive thought. My step-dad bought me a book about Albert Einstein when I turned twelve, and on the inside cover of the six hundred page book (that I read several times within a few months), he wrote, “Einstein was not only smart, he was a man of principles and a man that searched for balance in all things. Don’t forget to strive for that, Andrew.” When I was twelve, the idea of balance in all things was mildly lost on me. I knew what he was trying to tell me, but at twelve, there was no need for balance. That’s what parents were for: to help me find my own equilibrium and eventually stand on my own. Or so I thought. I poured myself in to intellectual endeavors when I was young. I spent my spare time wandering through hospitals talking to doctors and nurses, lab technicians, and

Continue readingAnd I’ve been made a pet, chain one mile long, bleed me every hour, keep me from growing strong

Sometimes it’s good to speak, to say the things that we’ve held close to our hearts, to the things that we’ve never shared or would never dare share even in our most inebriated or vulnerable states. And just as equally, there are times when those same secrets, those same bits of information, those things that have helped define us or helped to hurt us, are damaging when they finally come spilling forward in an avalanche of last minute confessions. I don’t have much else to say. It seems the more I speak these days, the more I feel like becoming a mute. The problem with loving someone, whether it’s a spouse, significant other, family member, sibling, or parent; they’re really the only people that can inflict harm. And harm comes in incidental, unintentional ways. Not everyone is graced with the eloquence to know exactly what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. We all stumble along blindly, we do the best that we can, and we try to cling to the good things we perceive, even though they eventually fall in to the background. And what remains but the slings and arrows we’ve managed to accumulate,

Continue readingIf you throw it all away, you’ll spend tomorrow in bed all day. What I’d give to feel so young…

Notable philosophers over the centuries have believed that the soul was not something that you were born with– it was something you earned, something tangible that was gifted to you through trials and tribulations and suffering. I told a friend of mine that I don’t believe in the soul, and that if there is a hell, that I’m okay with going there for my disbelief. I’ve already been to hell, or very near it. It’s livable, manageable, so long as you realize that you don’t have any choice in whether you live in the dark or in the light. And really, it doesn’t matter which. A great poet once told me that there is very little difference between falling in the light and falling in the dark. Everything that is there in the light, will still hurt you in the dark. The only difference is the fear. And that’s how I’m feeling today. I feel like I’m groping around in the dark, waiting for another great fall. I’ve hit rock bottom in the center of my soul somewhere, and I’m scratching and clawing my way back up, just so I can fall down again. I only wish I knew where

Continue readingBreaking in to private places, blacking out so time erases