Saturday, November 5, 2011

Quotes For The Year

"The funniest thing I have ever seen was a kettle and a black pot, living as neighbors in glass houses with the only green grass on the other side, throwing stones at each other."

" intelligence is a genetic advantage of intuitive thinking that may or may not come to fruition. Wisdom is a product of experience and requires nothing more than the ability to remember the invaluable necessity of hindsight "

Elitists who spend their time looking down their noses at the poor while being terrified of their own poverty, are worse than destitute. They are merely too lazy and arrogant to be aware of the fact that even the poorest did not have to sell their own souls to be where they are and with who they choose to consort with."

Once upon a time a very small boy in a mountain village hoped of being a sailor instead of a farmer while his best friend wished to be a grave digger. Every day of his life the one boy wished a ship would come for him while the other boy dug graves wishing he could dig more. One told everyone his whole life of his dream, and the grave digger continued to dig. They both died on the same day and were laid together,side by side.The epitaph on one read "Here Lies The Grave Digger". The other read..."Here lies an Unhappy farmer". Wish, hope, and dream are pointless without moving. Better to DIG!"

Need is no weakness. If anything, it is the greatest affirmation and strength of both love toward others and of the human condition in general. It forms the pediment of generosity when it is given unreservedly , and it fosters the virtues of gratitude and humility when it is received. it allows a person to recognize their own accountability as critical to the survivability of others, and instills our responsibility to reciprocate in the event you can not do so for yourself."

"The end result of a person who would read the directions on and 'Easy Bake Oven, but doesn't have one, a person who has one and read the directions but doesn't care to put in a light bulb in, and a person who understands the necessity of a light bulb,owns an oven and believes the directions don't apply to him, is the same in all three cases. NO FUCKING COOKIES!!"

When a person erases all places and traces from faces of you in their mind, it is closer to honest to know what was promised, than stating that it was unkind. What you ask,what you do,was all up to you, you decided before I could state, that I wanted and needed, and to you I had pleaded,"I won't eat what is set on my plate." But you did and you do what is needed by you, you have no need to think it is true. Not from me is it told, "This is getting so old.",its from him that your dinner is cold."

"Most people are terrified of being alone, but define it by only a very notional concept of what it really means, based on an unexpected bout of forced solitude. Much like we are terrified of drowning because we've aspirated a bit of water in a bathtub. What we don't know is how close to the truth we really are; How it feels  to flounder in a submerged loneliness and have your lungs slowly fill with something that will kill you, or what it feels like to sit and slowly flounder having your lungs  fill with something that will kill you."

"If all things were equal, and you can readily rationalize being treated like a piece of crap for financial gain or security, why not just reverse the position? Is it any less valid to attribute the price of what it feels like to be treated well and then subtract that from the meager 'benefits' of being treated like crap? The math is easy. Just learn to add and multiply as well as you can divide and subtract."

"Its one thing to avoid someone by deciding that you aren't in the mood or mindset to be told that you are important and necessary to their lives. It's quite another to have them attribute the exact opposite of themselves, because you chose not to."

The perceived necessity to protect oneself from something or someone that has no regard for your own life as it is, shouldn't come at the very real sacrifice of something or someone else to give you the opportunity to recognize a difference you should have known inherently."

I'm not depressed. Depressed is a temporary thumbprint on fruit. This is a bit more like a fist sized indentation on a gym locker. Keep it up, and I'll cavitate like a submarine under the onslaught of a depth charge.

"The best way to keep a bad situation at a veritable standstill for the benefit of one, is to blame another person who isn't responsible for what occurred, but can be forced to concede that they are simply and not being given a voice, that they are. When they fail to fix it, it can be said it was due to their incompetence. At that point they are in the prime  and unfair position of being blamed for both the situation and the inability to have it come to a good end."

"Whether you are seen as diligent and dedicated, or stubborn and stupid, hinges primarily on your ability to convince others to the validity of that which you claim as true based on evidence they can quantify, rather than on your own perceived ability to hold notional ground with ever changing abstract parameters."

"Time is a commodity. Some watch the ticking seconds of a clock as a collection of moments expended; wasted, and therefore regretted for their full value in retrospect. To them, time moves much too quickly. Others, anticipating unknown future events, pace floors in increasing frustration, waiting for mere grains of sand to manifest for them what their feet can not achieve, themselves. To them, time slows to a crawl. And then there are those who simply take no notice of time whatsoever. These are the worst, for they have about them all of the time in the world to expend indefinitely or prolong interminably, the commodity of time, from others at no expense to themselves at all."

Now I know why soldiers get PTSD, problems with reintegration, and an overall diminished sense of self or identity beyond what they are sent to do. I packed all of my bags,attached every frigging piece of equipment to the appropriate toggle,and am asking myself "How in the fuck I am going to fit all of it onto my back?"....and then realized there is not a single thing in any of this mindless crap that has ANYTHING to do with me. NOTHING. Thank God my opinion doesn't require a toggle.


"If one person makes the demand that they be provided for to the level to which they are accustomed, then it stands to reason that they will also, eventually, be devalued by the other to the point where their maltreatment is provided at a level to which THEY are accustomed to give as payment. The worth of anything is not so much determined by what it is sold for, as much as it is by how much it was bought. Basic general rule of thumb is to never put a price tag on your own head and then sell yourself to the lowest bidder. Good or bad, you have been bought or sold, as a commodity and nothing more.

Those who gave the ultimate sacrifice lie in their graves,but they are not silent.They speak if you understand what they lived for.Not to secure for themselves the right to be honored or remembered,but to remind the living to ask what they believed was worth their life to protect.The highest respect is not the size of monuments we build to our fallen,but our own capacity to rise to monumental heights of an awareness for their sacrifice.Remember the past,but do something in the present,to define a better future.


Your own self esteem is as much a critical component of you as it is to others to theirs. When you lower yourself to the worth of shit on the bottom of a shoe, by refusing to acknowledge your own worth or importance, you set up a cascade of flawed assumption that our perceptions of you must also be flawed, and, therefore, we are no better than you in your eyes."

"Most of our frustrations do not come from that which we strive to do for others based on our own definitions of ethics,morality, and compassion. Our frustrations are caused because we wrongly assume others to have equal amounts of respect for what they ask, as much as they do for who they receive them from."

Before you make the requirement of someone to go 'above and beyond' to prove themselves worthy of your respect and effort, it might be wise to ensure you are enough of a person to not to view them as 'below and beneath' you in the first place. To do so, is to demand of others a greater degree of that which you were either unable or willing to provide to them at all."

We the Sheeple of the Conjoined Paddocks, in order to form a more perfect grazing, establish consequences, demand domestic passivity, provide for the common indifference, institute overall welfare, and secure the dwindling possibility of liberty to yourselves and your Posteriors, do ordain and establish this Construction for the 'Animal Farm' of America.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" ~George Orwell

"How we understand the world is not so much what we see and experience as much as by the definitions we are forced to take to explain them without the right to disagree. If what you feel about anything has you distraught and unhappy, ensure that before you go so far as to believe you are wrong, that perhaps, you have simply learned what is right, and are no longer willing to excuse it with incorrect and haphazard generalizations."

WHY?!?! do they have shaving commercials where little boys with jaw lines smoother than a babies butt dabbles shaving cream onto hair I've seen finer on the ear of a KITTEN, runs a five bladed razor over it, and suddenly gets a nymphomaniac runway model to give it up? Let's get real. Show me a five bladed rototiller that saws the bristles off a cactus or paint off a battleship and has a model with more wrinkles on his jaw than a secondhand baseball glove.

"If you love a bird for what it is and all it can be, but clip its wings and hold it in your fist, then it is not a bird. It can be many things to those who wish it, but it is no longer a bird. To itself or to you"

"When I was young they said "Children should be seen and not heard". When it appeared to me I was expected to not act like a child, I spoke. They said "Be quiet until you have something smart to say". I learned, and I asked questions.They said "Don't be smart with me." Then they said I needed to become myself, and soon after said "Who do you think you are?". I told them who I was and they said "I don't understand where this is coming from". I explained it and they call it radical. If I agreed and they called it  passivity. They said to be compassionate and they they called it a weakness. They said "Be creative and color your world, but stay within our lines." They said 'Be strong' and then they called me selfish. My guess is that they didn't want an individual at all. What they wanted was a vessel for their own limitations and misgivings, and voiceless company for misery."

A soldier does not exactly defend his country. An Army does that. A soldier defends that which defines his idea of the country as it relates to him. So when you thank a soldier for his service to the country, don't be offended if they say "You are very welcome" in a way that seems less than heartfelt. The truth is that all service members defend every person who made them who they are, and they make our country.

I have decided that if sporting events have degraded to such a degree that team loyalty and the wearing of a jersey elicits anger, and rationalizes the death of another American in a different one, then I'll pass on the whole damn thing.

You have the right to free speech, but also the responsibility of discretion and tact. You have the right to assemble,provided that your intentions do not to collude to segregate and isolate others.You have the right to bear arms,as soon as you understand the finality of actions with arms are a matter of life and death. You have the right to your  religion,provided it does not avow the intolerance of conflicting ideology. Our freedoms are ours because they are ours. Not yours.

My sacrifice as a soldier does not come from the cold or the mud. It does not come from the interminable loneliness and distance from those I love. I certainly does not come from what I choose to do as a profession or the hours that, at times, exceed two full time jobs. It comes from the belief that as a guardsmen I am less of a soldier than a federally employed one. It comes from being on beach heads and front lines next to 'regular' soldiers who will be remembered as better heroes and worthy of a higher degree of respect than the plumber, or the teacher, or the baker who will be buried with the same caliber bullet buried in his chest. It comes from earning 1/3 less in pay than a civilian who feels entitled to scoff at financial difference as a matter of success rather than as the cost we paid  to give them the right to say it regardless. We are not less because are forced to. we are less because we assumed the responsibility and the sacrifice to ourselves to give those who succeed beyond us the ability to do so unimpeded with what we face every day. We are not poor because we are less, we are poor because we are more. We are not alone because we are unworthy, we are alone because your life is more important to us than our own is to have."

I'm tired. Tired of everyone needing to be young or old or black or white or male or female or gay or straight or bisexual or rich or poor or in or out or Republican or Democrat or Independent or Catholic or Jewish or Athiest or Agnostic or Pagan or foreign or native-born or East coast or West coast or Southern or Northern or...or...or.

Maybe the reason you can't do all the things you'd like to do with what you've got, is that you don't understand that what you can do with what you have to do it with, is not up to others to decide. It is up to you.

Know the difference between the fruits of kindness and the stone of contempt? Try a serving of both for yourself before offering either to another. Let's hope you understand the continued nourishment of compassion before you choke yourself to death on a single stone."

"I am not a product of my environment nor the conditions of my life. I am a product of my outlook and my experiences." My sacrifices and my shortcomings came no less from my failures as they did from my compassion to give to others. Consider that prior to looking at what I have and measuring my worth. Chances are that what is around you is just as much from someone else as from you.

"Perception is like a wet shirt. in a fair world, it has a front, a back, an inside, and an outside. But when you allow someone to twist and coil it up to get what they want of it like so much water, is it any small wonder that you cant seem to make sense of any part of the shirt, let alone be able to wear it for what it was intended?"

"Silence is not golden. In fact, it's as brown as bullshit. A colorful truth is better than a black lie but without the truth spoken, all it takes is a single angry crayon to mar both the surface and the unwritten pages beneath."

"The most exhaustive arguments to be had with another are invariably those spent in an interminable silence over a prolonged period of time. There is little the spoken word can not overcome....except maybe willful silence."

"I never said I wasn't religious or spiritual. If anything, I am more so than anyone could possibly imagine. I simply refused to believe man made dogma that said God expects me to make a petty distinction of superiority for myself with a specific religion BEFORE He expects me to live as a human being with no distinction of ideology at all."

OMG I make coffee like a rock star. Its like a happy hot wall of brown yumminess. A Cinco De Mayo parade in my mouth with cheerleader topless midgets holding chocolate bars on the trampoline of my tongue.

Courage is not a trait of the fearless nor the foolish. It is a unique quality derived from the awareness of both the conditions to which they are subjected, combined with the need to protect others from it. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is forged in it."

"No one should ever ponder their supposed betrayal without first scrutinizing the demands of the accuser and the tactics they employ to have another individual contemplating their own definition of loyalty to account for it should they choose to fight.. Many a well and just revolution was started with supposed traitors...but only in the eyes of those who would no longer benefit from imposed tyranny."

"I would rather be nearer to an honest woman in a clean, simple dress she made for herself than to give undue credit from afar to a princess in a beautiful ball gown that stunk to high heaven"

"We all seek a person who is both religious and financially able.But when you make a god of money,you twist your financial institution into a house of worship.A god as a finance clerk you believe will take a bad check from an already overdrawn account, to cover interest on misdeeds,is no better.Perhaps we should see to who we write checks,and to whom we pray,before assuming it is good to be both pious and prudent."

"Love is not the bedrock on which other critical virtues are based.It's is a byproduct of respect and consideration;by necessity,multifaceted and interdependent and worth more than the sum total of its parts.To put love as the catchall excuse,with no limits or boundaries,is to allow respect and consideration to be ransomed at will for a malignant and conditional bastardization requiring neither.That isn't love"

"Know what the difference between an unopened gunny sack full of crap and an unopened gunny sack filled with untold riches ? Nothing. To the distrusting, they are both just a worthless sack of crap."

"I am more disgusted with a person who would demand a higher degree of respect for themselves for accomplishing absolutely nothing than I am upset with myself for accepting the opinion of a lazy person as a qualified authority to define respect and effort in the first place."

"Be not so quick to define nourishment based on a skewed definition of family. Blood may be thicker than water, but bullshit and bile are even thicker than blood."

"Any person can tell a bad person in much the same way that a woman chooses a good dress; its not the color of the gown so much as the cut of the cloth. It's about how she feels when she wears the dress, and, hopefully, not so much about how it wears her out about town."

" ..The clock ticks on the wall paying seconds out like a slot machine on TILT... water drips from the faucet in a deafening regularity toward the same pan that has been there for a week...a wind chime out front taps the same b flat over and over on a straw thin pipe...but are any of them revered for it? Patience is the numbing awareness of repetitive stagnations through objects that feel nothing."
"Sometimes a circular argument is distressing because it implies a refusal of the facts. At others, however, it is due to the refusal to acknowledge our own circular behavior."

There is absolutely no limit to that which can be given invisibly to another person who understands love, but there is also no limit to that which will be demanded and taken from others for a person who does not.

"Nothing on Earth is fed and nourished by poisons except the efficacy of more powerful poison. Like a lamprey that latches onto its own skin, it defies comprehension growing larger and more sinister as it gains strength by coiling inward on itself. Circular and self serving, there is no end to it, nor to the places poison will manifest itself if left unchecked."

"Waiting for unrequited love in sadness and grief to evolve into a resentful anger and hate,to justify leaving,is a fruitless endeavor.It implies that the only good reason for you to do so is to condone hate toward you in the first place. And if that were so, you wouldn't have had the compassion within yourself to be sad or grieve the loss to begin with let alone the ability to visit it upon another over time"

"When a child is born he looks at his hands. As soon as he uses the opposable thumbs we say "Don't take that". Then we tell them "Don't touch that", followed closely by "Don't use your middle finger,EVER!" and "Don't put your pinky in your nose." Then we say "You've got plenty of time to get married". Is it any small wonder that by the time they reach puberty we cant get them to do a goddamned thing and spend our time saying "Why won't you lift a finger to help around here?"

"If your goal is to ensure that you're seen by others as persevering, at least be attempting something more meaningful than doing a whole lot of nothing and expecting praise for it. "

"One of the worst things a person can do to a child is to accept from them the phrase 'I don't know' as the easy answer for ignoring the consequences of the far more damning phrase 'I refuse to think about it' "

I am far more respectful of a person who, regardless of the overwhelming consequences,transcends fear with courage and attains the right to be called brave, than to attribute false courage to a person of so little conscience an apathy as to be unaware of the consequences and be respected as courageous by default

Some people simply hate because that's all there ever was. But there is worse. Like bleach flavored Snapple, even more take "the best stuff on earth" and, through maligned alchemy, manufacture a drink they are all too accustomed to drinking themselves, but can't get anyone else to swallow."

"Making a choice between two things by forcing yourself to quantify only one is much like choosing the best pet by spending all your time with one and not the other. Like an angry, snapping dog on a short leash, or a warm puppy in a closed box. After a while...both of them just plain stink. One you made that way. The other.. you let be that way"

" 'Practice what you preach' fails the very instant that we choose to instead profit from what we pretend."

"What you choose to see is not the measure of all things. It is only all that you allow yourself to see that you care to measure. For those who live by the mantra "looks can be deceiving" you would think this underlying worth would be self evident to those who strive so hard to maintain it. Sadly, it is not."

"Skewing your own perception of a situation, while looking down your nose at those whose moralities and ethics will not allow them to act as you, does not give any more validity to you than should be afforded to a politician who taxes a pig farmer to his knees to raise funding for bacon only the elite can afford to buy."

If love is a battlefield, then the worst is to exist in a protracted version of trench warfare;defined and seen by others as a brave soldiers while they themselves huddle in the mud on the brink of starvation,yearning to breathe, anxious and paralyzed, awaiting a canister of chlorine to creep over the top of hope like a vine."

"The best way to have your position discredited is to give a higher degree of credibility to those who would benefit from an unfair and malicious falsehood with your silence, than you expect to have attributed to you by having them see in you the courage to speak and demand the the difference"