Sky Tied

“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

I managed to cram in a whopping hour or two of sleep tonight. I’m so far beyond exhausted that I’m having trouble holding my head up. I’m at that level of exhaustion that makes you feel like puking. And yet, my eyes refuse to stay shut. It usually starts to become unbearable at right around midnight or one o’clock. The voices in my head start swirling and talking faster. I can’t seem to hold a thought, and at the same time, I’m trying to hold a hundred different ones. I’m not sure why I’m having so much trouble tonight. Probably because I’m feeling vulnerable, and in turn, my self-destructive side thinks that I welcome the distraction from my problems. I don’t. I just hate it when people point out my faults, insecurities, and when they make it blatantly obvious in the ways that I’m failing them. And really, it’s my fault for failing them. It is. But there are ways of communicating that, and there are ways not to. So tonight I’m sitting on the couch, watching bad B movies and waiting for sunrise to come rescue me from myself. The wait is always long and the night always drags

Continue readingAnd in every woman’s man is a little boy that died

For over a week I’ve had nothing useful to say and to be honest, that’s probably a good thing. When I write, it’s generally when things are going wrong or things are bad or I’m just needing a place to rant and rave about the stupidity of others. In that sense, it has been a pretty decent nine or so days. So let’s talk about fear. And not just regular fear, but irrational fear. You know what that is. Everyone does and has some kind of fear that controls them. A fear that consumes them in some manner. A fear that would eat you alive if you hadn’t learned of some way (healthy or not) to deal with it. We tend to calls these types of fears “phobias”, even though a lot of fears wouldn’t normally be associated with a phobia. Merriam-webster describes a phobia as such: an exaggerated, usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation. Now think about that for a second. Have you ever been afraid of something and known, abstractly at least, that it was an irrational fear? Of course you have, and that qualifies as a phobia. Afraid of

Continue readingAshes and diamonds, foe and friend, we were all equal in the end