01 JAN 2014
This year, instead of New Year's resolutions I'd like to offer a few suggestions:
1) listen to the song 'Sunscreen' by Baz Lurhman.
2) Make 'pay it forward' a habit you do AT LEAST once a day. If it happens to you, do it twice.
3) Read one page of any great literary work every day. If you want to read more, do so, but at least one page. Most people have not read a single book in many years, but if you did this every day for 50 years you'd have quite a bit to talk about.
4) Learn to say 'Please' or 'Thank You' or 'I'm Sorry' habitually. Or be an over achiever and say all three habitually.
5) Understand that MOST people do not intentionally cause harm or pain or sadness. There are those who do and who take a sick amount of gleeful pleasure in the obnoxiousness of it, but they are not worth assuming the majority is of the same ilk just because they are not paying attention. That's unfortunate, but not worth the anger and defensive posture that should be reserved for those who do it on purpose.
6) Write one page of a story of your own creation. Forget about plot formation or grammar or punctuation. Just write your story, one page every day. At the end of the year it will be as long as a novel. Do not tell yourself you can not or do not have the skill to do it effectively. Just write it.
7) Bend. Be willing to compromise. Expecting a person to wholly comply with your own wishes, opinions, expectations, or demands to solve a problem to your complete satisfaction is no better than them telling you that your opinion is of total irrelevance to them. No one gets it ALL their way. Even you.
8) Go outside of your comfort zone. Seek to understand and know a person within the framework of their own experience. Date a person of another culture or ethnicity, a major disability or handicap, a different job or lifestyle. You don't have to subscribe to it, but try and see it through their eyes with their value system. See it for it's possibilities and it's inherent limitations.
9) Find awe in something. Anything, but find something you can't quite wrap your head completely around and embrace it for the fact that it is much bigger than your ability to understand the whole of it on your own. It doesn't matter whether it's religion or nature, or astrophysics or chicken farming. Find it and get lost in it. It might just scare the shit out of you. That's a good thing. It means you are learning.
10) Take pictures. We live in a world of absolute documentary technology. Use it. There are THOUSANDS of generations that wish they could have had what we do and do not use to its fullest potential.
11) Make amends. Apologize, atone, account for, repent and restore.
12) Forgive, forget, give chances comparable to your own desire to have good things succeed from it. Bury hatchets, erase grudges, absolve debts, and let go.
13) Consider the possibility that regardless of what you think or feel, you may in fact be DEAD WRONG.
14) Consider the possibility that regardless of what others feel, you may in fact be ABSOLUTELY CORRECT.
15) Be careful when, and where, and how you put your foot down in either case.
JAN 2014
"Wounded soldiers are wounded soldiers. We do not define the whole of collateral damage to any individual solely on the mechanism of injury alone, and must wait to see the possibity of additional impact of treatment and recovery before it is known.
PTSD is a wound. It is invisible, and therefore difficult to recognize in a person. We are so overly conditioned to a concrete and material, objectivity (length, depth, weights..) that when it comes to abstract and immeasurable subjective causes, we inadvertently assume that objective abstract and immeasurable methods will suffice. They do not.
Hearing that you belong and are loved and are but a phone call away is all fine and good but that was true just as much when they were deployed as when they would get home, and yet they still needed to be home. Why?
The truth is this. When you tell a soldier you are just a phone call away, and that is it, that's no closer to them, now, than when they were half a world away. It's still not close enough.
Good medicine and medical proficiency is only one side of a wounded service member. The OTHER hand, that concrete measure able,weighted hand, is the other. A phone call away is not close enough."
JAN 2014
"Perhaps the greatest account of our own lives is to ask ourselves, at its end, how it is that we see and confront our death. Our mortality is inevitable, and not a soul, however grandiose or humble in its expression, will escape it. How you meet Death, whether as a friend for whom you have waited the whole of your existence to carry you onward, or as the haunting spectre of your worst nightmares that comes to rob you of your life, hinges solely on how you defined your true ambitions toward others. To those who gave of themselves, there will have been a daily expression of what it means to live. There is no fear or regret in that. For others though, there is only the horrifying regret that they must now leave this mortal world wholly unrealized, and that all they ever clung to for the whole of it, was yet another empty day. Death comes for us all, and his countenance is what it is. At least be able to look him in the eye and tell him you have already accomplished the gift of your existence without regret. Take its hand, and know that the pathetic groveling to be given yet another day to do nothing at all, was not within you to need."
JAN 2014
"If, regardless of the circumstances, you demand that others blindly accept and believe that you can do no wrong, and that you are superior to them in your own thoughts and actions under every possible scenario or situation, to them and their own, is it any small epiphany that what you say, and how you say it to them, is in fact, the larger part of the reasons for why those around you feel as though they can do no right? I'm not saying a person should give undue credit where there is no reason to, but neither is there the critical necessity to inform them of every dissatisfaction or disapproval, either. There is no real perfection of yourself if the only way to attain it is to force everyone else to be imperfect by default."
Jan 2014
There seems to be an overriding, and pervasive thought process regarding nearly every facet of American culture. From religion to politics, business to relationships, ethics and morals, the adherence to simple common sense statements, combined with an almost obscene demand of specifics designed to make a wholly unique personal exception for one particular person, and then the additional invalidation of any further statements or claims of others to the contrary. It has us all at a societal standstill because the short term benefits that can be gained at the expense of adopting and condoning our own Cognitive Dissonance is enabled by automatically forbidding the very same in others, at all. Our demand that the truth always be told to us from others while at the same time being intolerant of anyone who does not enable us to manufacture, not only for ourselves but others by default, any artificial reality we choose and criticize or lessen the importance of them for not conforming to the whole of it based solely on their our own unique perspective and their 'right' to it at the full expense of someone else.
As an example, if I make the statement "Having an alligator as a pet is extremely dangerous because alligators are known to be aggressive, unpredictable, territorial, and bite.", for the most part, that is agreeably true for the majority of people for the majority of the time. Common sense, right?
But then, I make the demand that you can call it anything you like but DO NOT call it an alligator. That's a deal breaker, and to say so is tantamount to heresy. I'm not disagreeing with what it is, just with what you call it.
Then I bring in a very large, scaly, green reptile, with a long tail and snout full of teeth, and plop it into the center of the living room to hold territorial glaring court with everything that is now forced to contend with it.
You say to me, "Holy shit, there's a frikken ALLIGATOR in the living room!!" It is PAINFULLY obvious, label or not, that it is what it is.
But I tell you that you have violated the ONLY restriction I made. I told you not to call it an alligator. Claim invalidated.
You then attempt to call it anything else, BUT an alligator, but that is not what it really is, is it? The claim you make now, any claim other than the label I forbid,is now made to be incorrect either way. You either call it an alligator and I invalidate you, or you call it something else and I invalidate it because it isn't true. Statement invalidated.
See how easy that was? See how inherently contrived that was too, though.
So what is the result? The falsehood gets to remain as is, undefined, but no less than what it was in the first place, and no less of the whole than the sum total of its debilitating parts. The new 'reality' changes out the ugly face for a pleasant mask. The truth is denied, the whole of it is made real by default by your own inability to be seen as anything except incorrect and anything you say is false at the feet of it.
Perfect, Alice. Just frikken perfect. So all we need do now is follow you into the rabbit hole and just call the direction we all plummet anything but down? Just great.
This isn't how it should work, but it seems as though people are ceaselessly MORE concerned with winning just for the sake of being right in their own minds rather than they are at how they came to arrive at that victory at all. Does it matter? It should.
Know what you call an alligator wearing a bunny costume? If you are as wise as you are honest, you'll call it an alligator LONG before you wade neck deep into the water and try to feed a carrot to a bunny costume."
JAN 2014
"Remember when the only thing you had to get around on was your own two feet? They worked fine, and then someone told you they didn't want to walk beside you because someone else had a wagon?
You finally got a wagon, but the person you really wanted to be with had made the decision long before that and that was just too bad.Then you found a person who liked to ride in your wagon, but someone else had a bike and wanted to ride on the handle bars more than in your wagon.
You finally got your own bike but by the time you did the person you had wanted to ride with was gone. Oh well. You met a person to ride bikes with and that worked right up until someone else had a car.
They couldn't possibly ride a bike when a car could be had, and by the time you got a car of your own, it wasn't as nice as the car they wanted to ride in and you never got a second chance because you didn't have the right car.
Then you got the same car but now it was an older car and someone else had a newer car. They had standards and 'why couldn't you just be like them and push yourself to get the newer car they had?".
So you got a newer car that was the same as that one but theirs was black and yours was blue.
You finally got a black car but by the time you did, they were gone with someone with a bigger car.
Now you've got the bigger, newer car, that is the same color that is no different than anyone elses car and you drive around in it alone.
I stopped one day and asked someone if they'd like a ride. They replied that they couldn't possibly lower themselves to be with a person who didn't enjoy walking and "besides, you're too old".
What. The. Fuck."
JAN 2014
"Our lives are so incredibly short even under the best of circumstances. Sometimes the paths we take shorten our own lives even a bit more, to lengthen and protect the lives of others. Some will walk with you, and for those particular people, you stop seeing them as mere men and call them, Brothers. The path becomes no shorter, but is made easier and even enjoyable by knowing we were not so alone because of their company. Rest in peace Bryon Hulsizer. You will always be missed. I always shared my coffee and you always shared your Oreo's. When I get there, don't comment on how slow I marched and I promise not to tell anyone I put Hello Kitty bandaids on your blisters."
JAN 2014
"If I disagree with you in part, it should not automatically imply that I am wholly against you, either. It simply means that there needs to be more clarification or communication on both our parts in order for me to understand the whole of the issue the way you expect. You may be correct, in which case we will be stronger allies as a result. Then again, perhaps the clarification will result in a further divergence of viewpoints to such a degree that we must follow separate paths, but if the only other acceptable solution to that perceived total disagreement with you, is for me to say nothing at all, it should not automatically imply that you are any more correct now, because of it, than when you started. You simply adopted the same effective use of intolerance as a justifiable tool to your own cause and invalidated the larger issue by eliminating ANY voice or ANY opinion at all to the contrary, as subversive. That has been the root cause of innumerable injustices in the past and a poor method to validate anything positive in the future . "Agree with me wholly, or say nothing at all against me" is hardly the mantra that should be demanded of anyone for anything, and is little more than a justified mouthpiece for unopposed tyranny."
JAN 2014
"If you discredit an educated and intelligent person because they lacked the experience to validate their thoughts, and judge the actions of those who learned great wisdom through their own experiences because they were not educated or intelligent, you can not hope or expect to be either intelligent, or wise, by refusing to listen or learn from either one."
JAN 2014
"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade...but shared lemons makes for better lemonade. Share both the lemons and the lemonade, but share.
Life is NOT about weathering the storm alone and then learning to dance in the rain. That's acceptance of the condition through the denial of the adversity. Open and umbrella, share it with someone, acknowledge the adversity for what it really is, and , and count your blessings that you have both a friend and a shield. But share the awareness between each other of both.The rain will not stop either way. That is the nature of adversities. It is also the absolute validation and true purpose of both umbrellas, and friends. But share.
If I have but a half a loaf of bread, and already less than what I need, it is still more than I can afford to eat alone while someone else gets even less. Share. You will gain more from your generosity under adversity toward others than can ever be achieved by a half a loaf if bread all to yourself, once. Share."
JAN 07 2014
My wonderful "Grandma With The Hot Rod" has passed away. She wrote to me in Hawaiian, corrected my English grammar, and read Chaucer. I'll forgive her for that one, though.
She was once purposefully ignored by King Farouk of Egypt while breastfeeding my uncle, chosing to address a suckling infant rather than offend her with his unannounced intrusion.
She taught me that anything that can be said can be made to be far more caustic and biting in its underlying truths as much as heartfelt kindness becomes beautifully poetic in its simplicity, provided that both are done with sincerity and wit. If the pen is truly 'mightier than the sword' then my grandmother was an Amazon and a Titan.
She swam a mile a day for as many days as I have been alive. She believed in Heaven and in God, and in the grace of angels, but I honestly believe that Heaven has within it an abundance of water and a sea that stretches to infinity. My grandmother will not receive wings. She will however, be bestowed with the gift of fins and show the whole of heaven that she is no less blessed than those who fly. Swim, Tutu. Swim, and know you are truly loved and missed , felt in everything that is reflected off the surface of water, and calls everything beneath its waves, home.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Monday, December 9, 2013
QUOTES FOR 2013
"Be single minded and you are OCD and there is something wrong with you.A disorder.But think the opposite, and you are ADD. Eat too much and you are obese, eat too little and you are an anorexic. Puke in either case and you are either a bulimic or a hedonistic glutton. Read and be too much of a geek and a nerd, don't read and you aren't interesting enough. Go out and you are a narcissistic socialite with identity issues, or stay inside and be introverted with a Social Anxiety Disorder. Dress nicely and be a snob, dress down and be trashy. Speak your mind and be seen as overly opinionated, say nothing and be victimized. Be rich and you're too rich, don't be rich and be called poor. Be a nice guy and finish last, be an asshole and you're a dick.
I'm beginning to think that there is only ONE thing wrong with all of us. We are all suffering horribly from 'Syndrome Syndrome Disorder'.
There is only one cure for what you have. What you have is called being ALIVE, and being dead is the only pill. Don't take it too soon, though, or you will only cause another syndrome called 'Being Fucking Dead Syndrome'.
People, no one said it was ALL going to be fantastic being alive. There is pain.That is why we have nerve endings- to keep us AWAY from harmful things AND use our brains and fucking limbs to MOVE AWAY from that which causes pain as much as TOWARD that which is good and pleasurable. It isn't a syndrome. You don't need a pill or a label to excuse you not having it.What you NEED is a pill/syndrome/disorder/ therapy free REASON. That's just common fricking sense. Do you REALLY need a goddamn pill to enable you to do what even Planaria can do instinctively? The fucking Planaria are even smaller than the whole of the pill!!
You are supposed to cry. That's why you've got LACRIMAL DUCTS, but it doesn't take a pill or therapy to 'fix' you because someone else didn't evolve enough to use them. Talk to your idiotic therapists all you want but don't be surprised if he hands you another pill and makes another appointment. They ought to call them 'pointlessments' for all the good they seem to do most people anyway. Walk away from that which causes pointless and self created pain.
There is NOTHING wrong with you except that you feel as though you need to take a pill yourself for being too ridiculously self accusing to recognize that you have both a personal responsibility to act on your own best behalf at the same time that there is no possible way to ensure the efficacy of a pill you take to fix someone else's problem with themselves."
"It's perfectly normal to have a person give you a half a loaf of their bread if they so choose. That is an expression of their own concern for you. That's generosity. But each time you receive a half a loaf of bread from them, don't automatically assume they still have a half left for themselves in their own pocket. Sometimes all they had was a half a loaf of bread and felt you needed it all more than themselves. That's not sharing. That's sacrifice, and with it, should come a silent reverence and the unspoken awareness of your own importance to them. As weighty to your own soul as a boulder in your pocket, but nothing to take as lightly as a half a loaf of bread."
"Know the difference between being solitary and being lonely? One is selected by yourself as a choice, the other is imposed on you by force. If you feel time passed too quickly for your liking, that's solitude. If you feel as though time has stopped, and you along with it, that's alone."
"Right on the heels of my most favorite holiday is without a doubt the WORST profit driven idea since Hitler's 'Let's Unify Europe' idea. Black Friday is the day the rest of the world gets to watch in horror, Americans celebrating their obsessive perception of holiday gift giving and sincere compassion by being the biggest passel of greed driven, selfish assholes to everyone else in their path. If it's such a great deal on one day that people would be willing to push,shove, fight, trample, and in some cases even kill, to get that blessed savings, is it really worth it? Do you REALLY think that corporations are giving you these savings for one day because they're kind and generous? Instead, consider the more believable possibility that it's the percentage you are screwed out of for the OTHER 364 days that makes this one day as pointless as it is pandering.
Folks you JUST gave thanks for everything you have. YESTERDAY! And now you have to clot every single store with a bunch of crap you already have too much of yourself to give to someone else to have so much crap that they can afford to now buy YOU more crap to say thank you for...MORE CRAP!
Do me a favor. Spend just a minute, one single minute, to contemplate and understand the critical difference between a 'want' and a 'need'. Take the BIGGEST high dollar Holy Grail of Black Friday that you think you or someone else NEEDS and put it in your mind. Visualize it for EVERYTHING it will give you because you NEED it. Now hold your breath and slap a piece of duct tape over your mouth and nose while you look for it. See which one, air or the blessed acquisition gives out first. THAT'S the real need, and I can assure you that if it's so critical to someone's survival, they would have secured it for themselves long before they relied on you to get it for them on one stupid day at a discount, in which case you've now given them two of them. And is that a need at all now? Seems to me the reason we call it Black Friday is because it refers to the color of profit margins while putting you into the red, discount or not."
" It's very common for a house on Thanksgiving to be completely filled with everything a person could ever hope to want or need. Often times, it is filled with a whole slew of petty crap you don't want, too. Cigar smoking Uncle Charlie who keeps screaming "Nazis!" every time the door bell rings and his insistence that Aunt Claire holding a tray of Yam Cakes, is most definitely the biggest one. There are people you'd probably wish to set on fire as break bread with, and the odd perception that despite the fact that you have more people in your house than usual, you can't quite get over the feeling that you aren't as successful as you should be because you can't find chairs or space for all these people. Trust me, the last thing you want is to find permanent lodging space for them all. Take comfort in the fact that there isn't enough room today. It could be like that out of necessity EVERY day. But it isn't.
Giving thanks or saying the blessing, especially for a day CALLED 'Thanksgiving', seems to be a more difficult time for most, though. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe we should have called it "Shut Up And Eat Day". But it isn't. When it comes time to sit down together and say grace, a peculiar thing often happens. people shuffle their butts uncomfortably in their chairs and look to each other hoping that someone will come up with something good to say. Like The Donner Party sitting in a tight circle hoping to not be the one forced to ask "So..What's for lunch?". That's not an insult to our blessings. It isn't our fault that we are at this point of discomfort and it isn't proof we are selfish and ungrateful. Just unaccustomed to seeing it for what it really is. It is the greatest proof that we have so much we don't even know where to start to make the comparison to what we don't have because we have never been without. Before anything else, be thankful for that. Be thankful that it is nearly impossible to know something about what you know nothing about. Weird huh?
We live in a country where we have so much that it is difficult to imagine our lives without any of it, let alone even half, or even half of that. because that's where most people on the planet begin to give their thanks. Half of a half of a half of a half of what you are trying to see right in front of you. So when you see your family and friends wondering what to be thankful for, be thankful yourself that it is taking them so much time to figure it all out. It isn't every country that has the luxury of this. So instead of making you squirm as well, I'm going to try and tell you what I am thankful for.
Currently there are over 7 billion people on the face of the Earth. If you are lucky enough to be an American (and I do mean extremely LUCKY) you can count yourself as being in the top 20% of the world with respects to your standard of living with regards to basic survival needs. In the Third World, where three-quarters of humanity is already concentrated, a person misses being thrown into misery and deprivation by nothing more than sheer luck. Two billion people in the world subsist on just $2 a day or less. Just to put that into perspective, that's like spending everything you make on just your morning coffee. If you spent 250 dollars on your one Thanksgiving meal that is equivalent to spending one quarter of your years TOTAL income in a Third World country on a single meal here.
Three billion people have insufficient sanitation facilities, and yet we complain that we have to do our laundry and wash our dishes every day. Three cycles, three water temperatures, all of it clean water, and we still complain.
One and a half billion have no access to clean water at all and yet the water that we flush in our toilets is cleaner than they drink. Our pours by the hundreds of gallons each month while others can walk as much as five miles for one gallon.
Four billion people living on the Earth right now, do so on DIRT FLOORS, and yet we gripe that the vacuum cleaner needs a new belt or that we can't get our kids to take their shoes off before they run across the carpeted or heated, wall to wall, insulated floors. Worry that the electrical plug is too far away to get that one corner of the bathroom? Console yourself with the fact that another two thirds of the people with electricity have but one plug for the entire house.
The food that we put on our tables on Thanksgiving is a testament, not only of the hard work and perseverance of those who came before us, but to a prosperity that was handed to us and that is unheard of in the history of mankind. Where countries, even to this day, experience periodic starvation, how many of us can say that we have missed even a single meal that wasn't by our own choice to not eat? One quarter of the food we produce in this country is wasted by throwing it out because it doesnt "look good" or the expiration date is not optimum for sale, while I have seen people in other countries scrabble in the dirt for single grains of rice to be clutched in one dirty hand while they look for more just to survive. Think about it. A half of a single hand of rice. Be thankful. Ungodly thankful.
We sit in our living rooms, warm and safe right now, because others spent their past and present Thanksgivings leaning over the barrels of a rifles and in harm's way, cold in the mud, for you. Its suffering is manifested by having the ability to serve a meal to our children in the comfort of our home devoid of the sufferings to acquire or protect it. Do it happily and with joy in your heart while reminding them that soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines are now currently serving in operations in multiple countries overseas to continue it. There will come a time when those children will do the same and ensure that we are warm and protected when we are too old to do it for ourselves. But not today. Today they receive the benefits first.
Count your own personal blessings. Don't worry that Crazy Uncle Charlie wont and would rather stuff his oblivious face without a second thought. Don't waste time with derisive sneers and angry glares from others across the table. Count your own blessings and whether they recognize them or not, is none of your concern. Give your own personal thanks for the blessings you do have, rather than what you do not. We can do enough of that self damning resentment another day. Today, look at what is and what is good, not at what is not.
There are many things that we do not like about our country and many things we would like to change, but for today, if only for one day, forget all the petty squabbles and fights that come with living our lives. When you set your table, put out an empty serving bowl, and pass it around. Not to serve anything from it but to draw attention to the fact that every other plate is filled. Close one room to your house and open the window to the outside. Sit in it, alone and cold, with no jacket or coat or lights, and understand what cold and alone really feels like. It is horrid and wretched and the longer you do it the more thankful you will be yourself, while less tolerant of have others experience it.. Put a teaspoon of dry rice on the table (no water remember) and really LOOK at it. Be thankful. Forget income and race and gender,and inequality and injustice, and just be glad that you are where you are at the time rather than the thousands of other places and circumstances you could be in. There are more people in their graves already than there are alive now. Be thankful you are not. Pray, and be thankful of the blessings bestowed upon you, but don't forget that God does not merely drop the blessings to you alone while it didn't go to others. Others worked just as hard as you and received so much less than you for the same effort. Be thankful, but be humbled by that too. With just a bit of humility, bow your head. If not to God then to your fellow man, If not at any other time, know that right now, this very moment, you are happy and healthy, warm and safe, clean and dry, fed and free. Happy Thanksgiving!!"
"If the 'solutions' to your problems serve absolutely no useful purpose for yourself, and invariably cause you to rationalize even more of the ridiculous and absurd as fact in the future by making it, it's a good bet that your 'solution' was merely the product of a predictable reaction.Ask yourself who or what it was that caused that reaction and why it would be more useful to them or it,rather than you, to do it. Did it in any way make the situation better for you at all? Sheep are not herded to slaughter by bad choices. Just by predictable reactions after eliminating everything else. But at that point, who gives a good god damn about the opinions of butchered sheep?"
"Never bite the hand that feeds you. Conversely, never play into the hand that bites you."
"Demanding that a person be so removed from your own life that they require the use of binoculars to be a part of it as a mere inconsequential spectator is pretty arrogant, but to assume that you also have the inalienable right to scrutinize them through a microscope while they do, is deplorable. You can not define your own accomplishments as successful solely by forcing the acknowledgement of them from others. To do so, begets the further possibility that without the efforts of others, you have achieved nothing at all."
"Contrary to popular belief, freedom IS in fact, free. But it is given as a gift with sacrifice and loss and hardship and blood,.For that, it is indeed unconditionally priceless. Our freedoms are manifested in our own individual and unique presents by the actions of those in our collective pasts. That in turn, gives us the distinct and dubious honor and privilege to return to the future that which defined and enabled ourselves. Happy Veterans Day to every soldier who enabled me to gain so many more brothers and sisters in arms, but thank you to every American who exemplified themselves as the people worth defending, as well. The sacrifice of soldiers originates from the fact that you were worth every bit of it. Every boot, every bullet, every lonely mile marched, and every drop of blood is paid for. But freedom, is free. That's what makes it priceless.
Thank you to A co 2/16 INF, C troop 2/10 Air Cav, B troop 2/9 Air CAV(RECON), A co 4/501st AVN REGT, A co 1/25 AVN REGT, C co 2/25 AVN REGT, B troop 101 CAV, and HHC 2/108 INF."
" I keep seeing this commercial for a Britta water filter that tells us that as Americans we use enough plastic water bottles in a single year to circle the earth 7 times. I did some quick math and found that to be absolutely impossible. An eight inch long bottle × 300 million people × 365 days × even as much as 4 bottles a day per person is roughly once around the earth. Still way too much to ignore but I went to check the actual data anyway. I couldn't even do it intelligently. I found distances of once, three times,seven times, 56 times and a whopping 72 times around the earth. I'm all for checking the facts first but when EVERYTHING that needs to be checked is in a giant pile of internet BS, even trying to be empirically correct is next to impossible.
I found water bottle measurements from four inches (a Dixie cup?) to a gargantuan 22 inches. What is that, a beer bong? And who the hell is managing to intake this much water into their bodies without the need of a firehouse doubling as an enema?
Here's a great way to save the planet, eliminate all the plastic bottles altogether and forget having to rationalize with what I call 'arbitrary constants' depending on your insistence they be more correct than you.
Drink from your water taps in your home! Its tested all the time and it was as bad as the water bottle companies told you it was we'd all have died of rectal squirting dysentery and cholera long ago. You drank from a hose at home, happily swallowed pool water and dumped water into aluminum canteens (also filled from the tap) your whole childhood.
Here's an even more scary thought. Every water bottle costs more than a dollar. Multiply THAT with the same numbers and ask how it is we have SO many living people enough money to wrap around the earth that many times for a resource that pours from a regulated and tested tap anyway."
"Lean in on your shield if you must. Let the resisting press of adversity become the bed to which you apply weary muscle and bone.Pin it to the earth with the weight of your own exhaustion and fatigue. Shift your boots to gain first a firm footing and then inexorably slow purchase to advance. Dip your visor against blinding rain or curse the sun for the sting of sweat but never drop your sword. Let anger curl your knuckles to the hilt if you must but never drop your sword."
I remember. I remember where I was and how quickly everything I knew changed and how nothing would ever seem as safe as it once was. I remember putting on a combat helmet and frantically climbing into army ambulances to drive , nervous and angry, to New York City. Not Berlin, or Normandy, or Seoul, or Saipan. Here.
I remember trying to work with grim determination in and around a city in blind panic, trying cope with the confusion of family and friends elsewhere, all the while trying to wrap my own head around a pile of rubble and destruction larger than many full sized erect buildings. I remember.
But I also remember the faces of my friends and I remember that the reason they were there instead of with their families was that it was important to defend something bigger. I remember the loneliness of being so close yet so far from their own families but that it was more important to keep that home for them. All of them. All of US. Because 9-11 is not defined so much by what we have lost but by what we continue to refuse to invalidate in ourselves through a loss of hope or demoralization. 9-11 did not hurt us as much as it defined us. Do not look backwards and give undue credit to what some tried to take from us all. Instead, let it become the reason and the cause to want to do better. Because I do remember, but I remember 9-11 not as the day two buildings fell but when those who survived, stood up."
"I understand that it is a woman's prerogative to expect a man to have enough balls and backbone to step up to the plate when he believes she has gone too far, but before you assume he may too weak for your liking when he says nothing, perhaps you should also consider the possibility that he is also making his own expectations that a woman should know better than to push a person to a test simply because she can. perhaps his silence is his own way of seeing if she has it within her the grace and backbone to not do it in the first place? Two can play this game, but two shouldn't be forced to.
"So...You're waiting for something to change your tomorrow so that it is different from your today? But if you do as little with tomorrow as you did with your today to fix it, will it come as a surprise that your tomorrow looks no different than your yesterday does today?"
"This Memorial Day, remember that those who gave the ultimate sacrifice as soldiers and seamen, lie still in their graves, but they are not silent.They speak, if you care to listen and understand for what they truly lived, believed, and died for. Not to secure for themselves the right to be honored or remembered to a greater degree than any other person, but to remind the living to ask of themselves what they believed was worth their life to protect. Even if we are not quite sure yet, they gave their lives fully knowing and aware of what you had yet to know of yourself.The highest respect to fallen heroes is not the size of monuments we build to ensure we remember them,but our own capacity to rise to monumental heights of awareness and the ability to be enabled to do so with their ultimate sacrifice. Remember and honor fallen soldiers of the past, but do something in your own present,to define for everyone a better future. "
"Trying to get a person to understand what they don't care enough to feel for or know in the first place. is a bit like trying to explain what the color 9 smells like."
"You have the right to be angry and to be hurt. You have the right to feel foul and miserable, if you so choose. You have the right to take pointless blame and to absorb unnecessary guilt even if you don't deserve it. I do not agree with it, but it is your right to feel any way you want. It's your life. But with that right comes the responsibility of knowing exactly which people caused those feelings, and who did not. Because regardless of your right to be miserable, you do not have the right to visit it upon those who went out of their way to alleviate it in you, while using it as an opportunity for yourself to shovel what we already knew was misplaced in yourself to begin with."
"If I hear, one more time, "You aren't a true patriot" or "You aren't in the 'real' Army" or "what do you know of freedom?", I am going to become hostile.
My first family member to come to this country came here, on his own, in 1639 by way of Holland as a pastor. If you think it has more to do with who was here the longest in order to be more right, our family was here a whole 137 years before it was even The United States. And yes, he carried a rifle for it.
Our family has, within its ranks, the distinction of being a part of the very first organized militias in the colonies, 4 documented pilgrims and 8 Daughters of The American Revolution.We have those who fought in the French Indian wars, on both sides of the Civil War, and every major military war or conflict to include Pearl Harbor and The Battle of The Bulge. My own immediate family has sacrificed 37 years of military service to this country. My parents generation contributed 29 years. My grandparents gave 60 years of combined service. Added all together there is not a single year that this country has been defended that it has not had at least one of us holding a rifle for it. Not just as a soldier but as a citizen.
I do have the right to an opinion, and I do have the right to a difference of opinion. Are we or were we all magnificent soldiers? Of course not. But that's not what you asked of us. You asked for patriots, and patriots stand up whether they are going to become colonels or corpses.
I carry a rifle, and I carry an opinion. I have earned the right to disagree with you regardless of whether you want me to carry either one or not. Please don't assume that because you have a bigger weapon or a bigger mouth that you have the ability to tell me how it is that I am going to think and behave. If you do, then it is me who should be questioning exactly what type of 'America' you are describing if you want to simply make me do what you want."
" December 22 2012- Okay, so now that it hasn't happened, and we've all faced our own implied obliteration from prophesy, bravely, perhaps you'll let me put something back into the place where OUR definition of "The End Of The World' in no way fit within Mayan culture and belief. the Mayan definition of 'The End Of The World', is closer to what we would call the end of an age or an era. Where we look into the past and identify a point of reference based on an event, Mayans looked into the future and defined them with a celestial event before it occurs. It is a time in the future that is predesignated to actively move forward, not end. It's the time that all of the things and actions used, good or bad, to build the current 'world' are dismantled and a new 'world' begins. All grudges are forgotten, all debts ignored, all conflict absolved, and all plans for everyone given a new chance. If you are going to take the prophesy for everything you perceived it to be based on your own interpretation before it arrived, the least you can do is give it its fair due credit for its own definition afterward. Go out and start a 'New World', but don't do it with the same nasty thoughts and actions you used to justify the fear you had for the end of the last one. You can't build a new hearth in a home with the cracked and broken bricks of the last failed hearth. Get up, go out, and continue with your lives, but do so with the understanding that if you gave so much credit to the validity of your collective demise, that perhaps we should expend just as much effort to do things differently to make it better. Today is the start of your second (well, fifth) new world. Don't cock it up."
November 2012 "Regardless of how you voted yesterday, or the outcome of our combined voices, take a moment to give thanks for the right and ability to do so, unimpeded. Whether your party won or not, you have exercised an individual act that in many times and places in the past, came at the point of a gun - when leaders wished to retain the appearance of a democracy while assuring your opinion was wholly irrelevant, or rejected that democracy altogether by ensuring YOU were irrelevant. Our brief time and energy expended to temporarily divide ourselves by our ideologies is over. Now is the time to take responsibility for the other half of our democracy that gives credence to the process of voting in the first place. To come back together and give a leader the opportunity to do what he claims without the additional requirement of wasting energy on internal dissent. The individuals have chosen its course. Now grab the oars of the collective ship and do everything you can to ensure that,as an American, we are still a whole body."
"I am watching so many of my friends deal with what can only be described as 'the very worst time of their life'. Some for their jobs, some for their children, some for their marriages and relationships, their health and self esteem or personal identity, and then even some for their very lives. It's harrowing, but if you know who you or who I am referring to, then let me tell you this. You are all SUCCEEDING by continuing. For as bad as it is, I am watching these people who honestly believe they are coming apart at the seams, instead, exemplifying themselves for everything we know them to be. What they said and believed in before they came to where they are now will be what brings them back stronger.That doesn't replace the need for our empathy toward the situation, but it does allow them to rely on our faith and hope in them that they can pull from when it isn't in themselves to see right now. They are all succeeding, but personal lives are not part of a race or a competition with another. I am not more impressed with those at the end of their lives than I am for those who are still living theirs. It's hard, it's tough, it's incredibly unfair, and it is, more often than not, more than it looks like we can handle alone. Welcome to life. Be proud and happy you are living it because we are proud and happy to see you living it for everything it is."
"A marriage relationship is symbiotic. It is not parasitic and then excused away simply because it is still a relationship.Divorce is obviously not God's will, but He NEVER intended a marriage to be defined solely by the written contract alone without also expecting both be living up to the unspoken and assumed needs of the other."
" September 29 2012 Before I go home, and leave behind the very worst parts of myself while returning to the better ones, I'd like to stop for just a second to tell my friends that you are all rather remarkably unique to me in and of yourselves. It often goes unrecognized that you are all not merely a conglomeration of unrelated people in a Facebook list of friends. You each share something that is absolutely critical to me and what I value. I wrote something rather blunt and honest the other day and something very unexpected happened. Instead of having my newsfeed fill with a bunch of crap, I got personal messages asking if it was perhaps intended for them. To be quite honest, no. It had absolutely nothing to do with any of my friends because my friends are incapable of it. But how nice to find in a very abstract way that my friends are both introspective enough to have looked into themselves, and impressive enough in their own right to be humble enough to venture the possibility that perhaps they had overlooked something and felt the deeper need to rectify it if they had to. That's says a great deal about you all. Even if what I said had nothing to do with you. You are my friends for the things that you give of yourselves that I define as being above others, but from what I receive without ever asking. It is not because of what I get at all. You express what it is to be brave, thoughtful, determined, resilient, resourceful, creative, brilliant,loving, and most of all, human.They are all qualities I expect to see in the very best of human beings, but are exemplified by those I call 'my friends'. Worry far less about what I say on Facebook. The very fact that you can read it at all should be all the proof you need enough that I know you to be above it already."
"Sometimes people ask us why it is that we do what we choose to do and go where we are asked. "Why would anyone willingly spend their lives behind concrete walls covered in concertina wire and not be free to go where you want?" they ask. We have a very simple answer. "Because we don't want our families and friends to live their lives where walls are something normal for civilians to see." Thanks to all the Brothers and Sisters of Blood and Iron for making the 'Middle of Nowhere' on the other side of the earth, be a place we didn't have experience alone."
"Basic human kindness is not a science as much as it is an expression of compassionate creativity. Those who produce it, are not so much intelligent as they are masters of a lost art. Kindness, and a desire to instill happiness, rather than easy fear, is not something you are born with. It requires much more in the way of effort than it does to be vicious and cruel. Saying that people are "born" good or bad does two things. It robs the compassionate of the time and energy they expended to make a better world for others, while it condones the laziness of savage cruelty as a matter of mere genetics with zero accountability."
"It's okay to kill insects and spiders because they have no nerve endings, and it's okay to kill any other animal because they have nerve endings but no emotions or feelings to understand the nervous impulses of pain or death" SERIOUSLY?? Is this is all it takes to rationalize death and cruelty? Who thinks this CRAP up? No. fuck that, who is stupid enough to BELIEVE it? I know insects, and spiders, and dogs who would listen to that wad of drivel and disagree. So why do I have to hear it from the only species on the planet that should be smart enough to know better by default and STILL be the one species I can understand? Jesus? If you are coming.....Hurry the fuck UP!!
"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 Atheist or Agnostic or Pagan or foreign or native-born or East coast or West coast or Southern or Northern or...or...or. What we REALLY need,all of us, is to stop drawing lines in the dirt and believing them to be powerful enough to stop us from being human."
I'm just so tired. SO fucking TIRED of expending pointless energy to convince I care about people for being who they are already while they expend more of their own energy trying to convince themselves to be appreciative of others who make them into something else they never wanted to be."
"Need is no weakness. If anything, need allows the greatest affirmation of both strength and love toward others and of the human condition in general to be manifested. 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 we might not be able do so at any time in the future."
"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."
While I'm on the soap box. I don't give a SHIT about someone saying 'Im sorry' without them knowing what that really means. I am SORRY assumes that you have both the ability to fully comprehend the actions you made in error, AND know enough about emotions and feelings in general to care about which ones you caused. Without it, "I am sorry" is just the cheap shit way to rely on the good nature of another soul to forgive you for something you dont want to admit to."
"People look for a lot of things. You look for a job. You look for your other white sock. You look for your car keys, but you don't go looking for love. That's the trick. Love, finds you."
"On the days that you can not tolerate it any more, crumple into the dirt. Just do it. No one will stop you. Grieve and weep if you must. Rail at the unfairness of it all and sit in a disheveled misery at your plight. Roll in the ashes of your supposed failures imposed by others if that helps.. Wring your hands, curse the gods, call Luck and Fate the whores of complicity if you so choose.. but then STAND back UP!"
"Its not a question of individual survival to justify sacrificing something you need in order to merely exist. Its a matter of knowing what needs to survive, even at the risk of your own death, to perpetuate for others, what is meant by being alive."
"Know the difference between vengeance and vindication. Know the difference between judgement and justice. Know the difference between caution and cowardice, and know the difference between fear and failure. They are not synonyms for each other simply due to the convenient perceptions of evil to get you to believe it"
"Trust is an all together strange virtue. Not because of what it means, but because so many people fail to realize that it is something inside of YOURSELF that has to be given and NOT something to be shown or proven by someone else in order to have the benefits and rewards trust provide. You will gain NOTHING by demanding that trust be proven before it is returned by you. That is the very antithesis of the nature of trust to begin with."
I'm beginning to think that there is only ONE thing wrong with all of us. We are all suffering horribly from 'Syndrome Syndrome Disorder'.
There is only one cure for what you have. What you have is called being ALIVE, and being dead is the only pill. Don't take it too soon, though, or you will only cause another syndrome called 'Being Fucking Dead Syndrome'.
People, no one said it was ALL going to be fantastic being alive. There is pain.That is why we have nerve endings- to keep us AWAY from harmful things AND use our brains and fucking limbs to MOVE AWAY from that which causes pain as much as TOWARD that which is good and pleasurable. It isn't a syndrome. You don't need a pill or a label to excuse you not having it.What you NEED is a pill/syndrome/disorder/ therapy free REASON. That's just common fricking sense. Do you REALLY need a goddamn pill to enable you to do what even Planaria can do instinctively? The fucking Planaria are even smaller than the whole of the pill!!
You are supposed to cry. That's why you've got LACRIMAL DUCTS, but it doesn't take a pill or therapy to 'fix' you because someone else didn't evolve enough to use them. Talk to your idiotic therapists all you want but don't be surprised if he hands you another pill and makes another appointment. They ought to call them 'pointlessments' for all the good they seem to do most people anyway. Walk away from that which causes pointless and self created pain.
There is NOTHING wrong with you except that you feel as though you need to take a pill yourself for being too ridiculously self accusing to recognize that you have both a personal responsibility to act on your own best behalf at the same time that there is no possible way to ensure the efficacy of a pill you take to fix someone else's problem with themselves."
"It's perfectly normal to have a person give you a half a loaf of their bread if they so choose. That is an expression of their own concern for you. That's generosity. But each time you receive a half a loaf of bread from them, don't automatically assume they still have a half left for themselves in their own pocket. Sometimes all they had was a half a loaf of bread and felt you needed it all more than themselves. That's not sharing. That's sacrifice, and with it, should come a silent reverence and the unspoken awareness of your own importance to them. As weighty to your own soul as a boulder in your pocket, but nothing to take as lightly as a half a loaf of bread."
"Know the difference between being solitary and being lonely? One is selected by yourself as a choice, the other is imposed on you by force. If you feel time passed too quickly for your liking, that's solitude. If you feel as though time has stopped, and you along with it, that's alone."
"Right on the heels of my most favorite holiday is without a doubt the WORST profit driven idea since Hitler's 'Let's Unify Europe' idea. Black Friday is the day the rest of the world gets to watch in horror, Americans celebrating their obsessive perception of holiday gift giving and sincere compassion by being the biggest passel of greed driven, selfish assholes to everyone else in their path. If it's such a great deal on one day that people would be willing to push,shove, fight, trample, and in some cases even kill, to get that blessed savings, is it really worth it? Do you REALLY think that corporations are giving you these savings for one day because they're kind and generous? Instead, consider the more believable possibility that it's the percentage you are screwed out of for the OTHER 364 days that makes this one day as pointless as it is pandering.
Folks you JUST gave thanks for everything you have. YESTERDAY! And now you have to clot every single store with a bunch of crap you already have too much of yourself to give to someone else to have so much crap that they can afford to now buy YOU more crap to say thank you for...MORE CRAP!
Do me a favor. Spend just a minute, one single minute, to contemplate and understand the critical difference between a 'want' and a 'need'. Take the BIGGEST high dollar Holy Grail of Black Friday that you think you or someone else NEEDS and put it in your mind. Visualize it for EVERYTHING it will give you because you NEED it. Now hold your breath and slap a piece of duct tape over your mouth and nose while you look for it. See which one, air or the blessed acquisition gives out first. THAT'S the real need, and I can assure you that if it's so critical to someone's survival, they would have secured it for themselves long before they relied on you to get it for them on one stupid day at a discount, in which case you've now given them two of them. And is that a need at all now? Seems to me the reason we call it Black Friday is because it refers to the color of profit margins while putting you into the red, discount or not."
" It's very common for a house on Thanksgiving to be completely filled with everything a person could ever hope to want or need. Often times, it is filled with a whole slew of petty crap you don't want, too. Cigar smoking Uncle Charlie who keeps screaming "Nazis!" every time the door bell rings and his insistence that Aunt Claire holding a tray of Yam Cakes, is most definitely the biggest one. There are people you'd probably wish to set on fire as break bread with, and the odd perception that despite the fact that you have more people in your house than usual, you can't quite get over the feeling that you aren't as successful as you should be because you can't find chairs or space for all these people. Trust me, the last thing you want is to find permanent lodging space for them all. Take comfort in the fact that there isn't enough room today. It could be like that out of necessity EVERY day. But it isn't.
Giving thanks or saying the blessing, especially for a day CALLED 'Thanksgiving', seems to be a more difficult time for most, though. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe we should have called it "Shut Up And Eat Day". But it isn't. When it comes time to sit down together and say grace, a peculiar thing often happens. people shuffle their butts uncomfortably in their chairs and look to each other hoping that someone will come up with something good to say. Like The Donner Party sitting in a tight circle hoping to not be the one forced to ask "So..What's for lunch?". That's not an insult to our blessings. It isn't our fault that we are at this point of discomfort and it isn't proof we are selfish and ungrateful. Just unaccustomed to seeing it for what it really is. It is the greatest proof that we have so much we don't even know where to start to make the comparison to what we don't have because we have never been without. Before anything else, be thankful for that. Be thankful that it is nearly impossible to know something about what you know nothing about. Weird huh?
We live in a country where we have so much that it is difficult to imagine our lives without any of it, let alone even half, or even half of that. because that's where most people on the planet begin to give their thanks. Half of a half of a half of a half of what you are trying to see right in front of you. So when you see your family and friends wondering what to be thankful for, be thankful yourself that it is taking them so much time to figure it all out. It isn't every country that has the luxury of this. So instead of making you squirm as well, I'm going to try and tell you what I am thankful for.
Currently there are over 7 billion people on the face of the Earth. If you are lucky enough to be an American (and I do mean extremely LUCKY) you can count yourself as being in the top 20% of the world with respects to your standard of living with regards to basic survival needs. In the Third World, where three-quarters of humanity is already concentrated, a person misses being thrown into misery and deprivation by nothing more than sheer luck. Two billion people in the world subsist on just $2 a day or less. Just to put that into perspective, that's like spending everything you make on just your morning coffee. If you spent 250 dollars on your one Thanksgiving meal that is equivalent to spending one quarter of your years TOTAL income in a Third World country on a single meal here.
Three billion people have insufficient sanitation facilities, and yet we complain that we have to do our laundry and wash our dishes every day. Three cycles, three water temperatures, all of it clean water, and we still complain.
One and a half billion have no access to clean water at all and yet the water that we flush in our toilets is cleaner than they drink. Our pours by the hundreds of gallons each month while others can walk as much as five miles for one gallon.
Four billion people living on the Earth right now, do so on DIRT FLOORS, and yet we gripe that the vacuum cleaner needs a new belt or that we can't get our kids to take their shoes off before they run across the carpeted or heated, wall to wall, insulated floors. Worry that the electrical plug is too far away to get that one corner of the bathroom? Console yourself with the fact that another two thirds of the people with electricity have but one plug for the entire house.
The food that we put on our tables on Thanksgiving is a testament, not only of the hard work and perseverance of those who came before us, but to a prosperity that was handed to us and that is unheard of in the history of mankind. Where countries, even to this day, experience periodic starvation, how many of us can say that we have missed even a single meal that wasn't by our own choice to not eat? One quarter of the food we produce in this country is wasted by throwing it out because it doesnt "look good" or the expiration date is not optimum for sale, while I have seen people in other countries scrabble in the dirt for single grains of rice to be clutched in one dirty hand while they look for more just to survive. Think about it. A half of a single hand of rice. Be thankful. Ungodly thankful.
We sit in our living rooms, warm and safe right now, because others spent their past and present Thanksgivings leaning over the barrels of a rifles and in harm's way, cold in the mud, for you. Its suffering is manifested by having the ability to serve a meal to our children in the comfort of our home devoid of the sufferings to acquire or protect it. Do it happily and with joy in your heart while reminding them that soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines are now currently serving in operations in multiple countries overseas to continue it. There will come a time when those children will do the same and ensure that we are warm and protected when we are too old to do it for ourselves. But not today. Today they receive the benefits first.
Count your own personal blessings. Don't worry that Crazy Uncle Charlie wont and would rather stuff his oblivious face without a second thought. Don't waste time with derisive sneers and angry glares from others across the table. Count your own blessings and whether they recognize them or not, is none of your concern. Give your own personal thanks for the blessings you do have, rather than what you do not. We can do enough of that self damning resentment another day. Today, look at what is and what is good, not at what is not.
There are many things that we do not like about our country and many things we would like to change, but for today, if only for one day, forget all the petty squabbles and fights that come with living our lives. When you set your table, put out an empty serving bowl, and pass it around. Not to serve anything from it but to draw attention to the fact that every other plate is filled. Close one room to your house and open the window to the outside. Sit in it, alone and cold, with no jacket or coat or lights, and understand what cold and alone really feels like. It is horrid and wretched and the longer you do it the more thankful you will be yourself, while less tolerant of have others experience it.. Put a teaspoon of dry rice on the table (no water remember) and really LOOK at it. Be thankful. Forget income and race and gender,and inequality and injustice, and just be glad that you are where you are at the time rather than the thousands of other places and circumstances you could be in. There are more people in their graves already than there are alive now. Be thankful you are not. Pray, and be thankful of the blessings bestowed upon you, but don't forget that God does not merely drop the blessings to you alone while it didn't go to others. Others worked just as hard as you and received so much less than you for the same effort. Be thankful, but be humbled by that too. With just a bit of humility, bow your head. If not to God then to your fellow man, If not at any other time, know that right now, this very moment, you are happy and healthy, warm and safe, clean and dry, fed and free. Happy Thanksgiving!!"
"If the 'solutions' to your problems serve absolutely no useful purpose for yourself, and invariably cause you to rationalize even more of the ridiculous and absurd as fact in the future by making it, it's a good bet that your 'solution' was merely the product of a predictable reaction.Ask yourself who or what it was that caused that reaction and why it would be more useful to them or it,rather than you, to do it. Did it in any way make the situation better for you at all? Sheep are not herded to slaughter by bad choices. Just by predictable reactions after eliminating everything else. But at that point, who gives a good god damn about the opinions of butchered sheep?"
"Never bite the hand that feeds you. Conversely, never play into the hand that bites you."
"Demanding that a person be so removed from your own life that they require the use of binoculars to be a part of it as a mere inconsequential spectator is pretty arrogant, but to assume that you also have the inalienable right to scrutinize them through a microscope while they do, is deplorable. You can not define your own accomplishments as successful solely by forcing the acknowledgement of them from others. To do so, begets the further possibility that without the efforts of others, you have achieved nothing at all."
"Contrary to popular belief, freedom IS in fact, free. But it is given as a gift with sacrifice and loss and hardship and blood,.For that, it is indeed unconditionally priceless. Our freedoms are manifested in our own individual and unique presents by the actions of those in our collective pasts. That in turn, gives us the distinct and dubious honor and privilege to return to the future that which defined and enabled ourselves. Happy Veterans Day to every soldier who enabled me to gain so many more brothers and sisters in arms, but thank you to every American who exemplified themselves as the people worth defending, as well. The sacrifice of soldiers originates from the fact that you were worth every bit of it. Every boot, every bullet, every lonely mile marched, and every drop of blood is paid for. But freedom, is free. That's what makes it priceless.
Thank you to A co 2/16 INF, C troop 2/10 Air Cav, B troop 2/9 Air CAV(RECON), A co 4/501st AVN REGT, A co 1/25 AVN REGT, C co 2/25 AVN REGT, B troop 101 CAV, and HHC 2/108 INF."
" I keep seeing this commercial for a Britta water filter that tells us that as Americans we use enough plastic water bottles in a single year to circle the earth 7 times. I did some quick math and found that to be absolutely impossible. An eight inch long bottle × 300 million people × 365 days × even as much as 4 bottles a day per person is roughly once around the earth. Still way too much to ignore but I went to check the actual data anyway. I couldn't even do it intelligently. I found distances of once, three times,seven times, 56 times and a whopping 72 times around the earth. I'm all for checking the facts first but when EVERYTHING that needs to be checked is in a giant pile of internet BS, even trying to be empirically correct is next to impossible.
I found water bottle measurements from four inches (a Dixie cup?) to a gargantuan 22 inches. What is that, a beer bong? And who the hell is managing to intake this much water into their bodies without the need of a firehouse doubling as an enema?
Here's a great way to save the planet, eliminate all the plastic bottles altogether and forget having to rationalize with what I call 'arbitrary constants' depending on your insistence they be more correct than you.
Drink from your water taps in your home! Its tested all the time and it was as bad as the water bottle companies told you it was we'd all have died of rectal squirting dysentery and cholera long ago. You drank from a hose at home, happily swallowed pool water and dumped water into aluminum canteens (also filled from the tap) your whole childhood.
Here's an even more scary thought. Every water bottle costs more than a dollar. Multiply THAT with the same numbers and ask how it is we have SO many living people enough money to wrap around the earth that many times for a resource that pours from a regulated and tested tap anyway."
"Lean in on your shield if you must. Let the resisting press of adversity become the bed to which you apply weary muscle and bone.Pin it to the earth with the weight of your own exhaustion and fatigue. Shift your boots to gain first a firm footing and then inexorably slow purchase to advance. Dip your visor against blinding rain or curse the sun for the sting of sweat but never drop your sword. Let anger curl your knuckles to the hilt if you must but never drop your sword."
I remember. I remember where I was and how quickly everything I knew changed and how nothing would ever seem as safe as it once was. I remember putting on a combat helmet and frantically climbing into army ambulances to drive , nervous and angry, to New York City. Not Berlin, or Normandy, or Seoul, or Saipan. Here.
I remember trying to work with grim determination in and around a city in blind panic, trying cope with the confusion of family and friends elsewhere, all the while trying to wrap my own head around a pile of rubble and destruction larger than many full sized erect buildings. I remember.
But I also remember the faces of my friends and I remember that the reason they were there instead of with their families was that it was important to defend something bigger. I remember the loneliness of being so close yet so far from their own families but that it was more important to keep that home for them. All of them. All of US. Because 9-11 is not defined so much by what we have lost but by what we continue to refuse to invalidate in ourselves through a loss of hope or demoralization. 9-11 did not hurt us as much as it defined us. Do not look backwards and give undue credit to what some tried to take from us all. Instead, let it become the reason and the cause to want to do better. Because I do remember, but I remember 9-11 not as the day two buildings fell but when those who survived, stood up."
"I understand that it is a woman's prerogative to expect a man to have enough balls and backbone to step up to the plate when he believes she has gone too far, but before you assume he may too weak for your liking when he says nothing, perhaps you should also consider the possibility that he is also making his own expectations that a woman should know better than to push a person to a test simply because she can. perhaps his silence is his own way of seeing if she has it within her the grace and backbone to not do it in the first place? Two can play this game, but two shouldn't be forced to.
"So...You're waiting for something to change your tomorrow so that it is different from your today? But if you do as little with tomorrow as you did with your today to fix it, will it come as a surprise that your tomorrow looks no different than your yesterday does today?"
"This Memorial Day, remember that those who gave the ultimate sacrifice as soldiers and seamen, lie still in their graves, but they are not silent.They speak, if you care to listen and understand for what they truly lived, believed, and died for. Not to secure for themselves the right to be honored or remembered to a greater degree than any other person, but to remind the living to ask of themselves what they believed was worth their life to protect. Even if we are not quite sure yet, they gave their lives fully knowing and aware of what you had yet to know of yourself.The highest respect to fallen heroes is not the size of monuments we build to ensure we remember them,but our own capacity to rise to monumental heights of awareness and the ability to be enabled to do so with their ultimate sacrifice. Remember and honor fallen soldiers of the past, but do something in your own present,to define for everyone a better future. "
"Trying to get a person to understand what they don't care enough to feel for or know in the first place. is a bit like trying to explain what the color 9 smells like."
"You have the right to be angry and to be hurt. You have the right to feel foul and miserable, if you so choose. You have the right to take pointless blame and to absorb unnecessary guilt even if you don't deserve it. I do not agree with it, but it is your right to feel any way you want. It's your life. But with that right comes the responsibility of knowing exactly which people caused those feelings, and who did not. Because regardless of your right to be miserable, you do not have the right to visit it upon those who went out of their way to alleviate it in you, while using it as an opportunity for yourself to shovel what we already knew was misplaced in yourself to begin with."
"If I hear, one more time, "You aren't a true patriot" or "You aren't in the 'real' Army" or "what do you know of freedom?", I am going to become hostile.
My first family member to come to this country came here, on his own, in 1639 by way of Holland as a pastor. If you think it has more to do with who was here the longest in order to be more right, our family was here a whole 137 years before it was even The United States. And yes, he carried a rifle for it.
Our family has, within its ranks, the distinction of being a part of the very first organized militias in the colonies, 4 documented pilgrims and 8 Daughters of The American Revolution.We have those who fought in the French Indian wars, on both sides of the Civil War, and every major military war or conflict to include Pearl Harbor and The Battle of The Bulge. My own immediate family has sacrificed 37 years of military service to this country. My parents generation contributed 29 years. My grandparents gave 60 years of combined service. Added all together there is not a single year that this country has been defended that it has not had at least one of us holding a rifle for it. Not just as a soldier but as a citizen.
I do have the right to an opinion, and I do have the right to a difference of opinion. Are we or were we all magnificent soldiers? Of course not. But that's not what you asked of us. You asked for patriots, and patriots stand up whether they are going to become colonels or corpses.
I carry a rifle, and I carry an opinion. I have earned the right to disagree with you regardless of whether you want me to carry either one or not. Please don't assume that because you have a bigger weapon or a bigger mouth that you have the ability to tell me how it is that I am going to think and behave. If you do, then it is me who should be questioning exactly what type of 'America' you are describing if you want to simply make me do what you want."
" December 22 2012- Okay, so now that it hasn't happened, and we've all faced our own implied obliteration from prophesy, bravely, perhaps you'll let me put something back into the place where OUR definition of "The End Of The World' in no way fit within Mayan culture and belief. the Mayan definition of 'The End Of The World', is closer to what we would call the end of an age or an era. Where we look into the past and identify a point of reference based on an event, Mayans looked into the future and defined them with a celestial event before it occurs. It is a time in the future that is predesignated to actively move forward, not end. It's the time that all of the things and actions used, good or bad, to build the current 'world' are dismantled and a new 'world' begins. All grudges are forgotten, all debts ignored, all conflict absolved, and all plans for everyone given a new chance. If you are going to take the prophesy for everything you perceived it to be based on your own interpretation before it arrived, the least you can do is give it its fair due credit for its own definition afterward. Go out and start a 'New World', but don't do it with the same nasty thoughts and actions you used to justify the fear you had for the end of the last one. You can't build a new hearth in a home with the cracked and broken bricks of the last failed hearth. Get up, go out, and continue with your lives, but do so with the understanding that if you gave so much credit to the validity of your collective demise, that perhaps we should expend just as much effort to do things differently to make it better. Today is the start of your second (well, fifth) new world. Don't cock it up."
November 2012 "Regardless of how you voted yesterday, or the outcome of our combined voices, take a moment to give thanks for the right and ability to do so, unimpeded. Whether your party won or not, you have exercised an individual act that in many times and places in the past, came at the point of a gun - when leaders wished to retain the appearance of a democracy while assuring your opinion was wholly irrelevant, or rejected that democracy altogether by ensuring YOU were irrelevant. Our brief time and energy expended to temporarily divide ourselves by our ideologies is over. Now is the time to take responsibility for the other half of our democracy that gives credence to the process of voting in the first place. To come back together and give a leader the opportunity to do what he claims without the additional requirement of wasting energy on internal dissent. The individuals have chosen its course. Now grab the oars of the collective ship and do everything you can to ensure that,as an American, we are still a whole body."
"I am watching so many of my friends deal with what can only be described as 'the very worst time of their life'. Some for their jobs, some for their children, some for their marriages and relationships, their health and self esteem or personal identity, and then even some for their very lives. It's harrowing, but if you know who you or who I am referring to, then let me tell you this. You are all SUCCEEDING by continuing. For as bad as it is, I am watching these people who honestly believe they are coming apart at the seams, instead, exemplifying themselves for everything we know them to be. What they said and believed in before they came to where they are now will be what brings them back stronger.That doesn't replace the need for our empathy toward the situation, but it does allow them to rely on our faith and hope in them that they can pull from when it isn't in themselves to see right now. They are all succeeding, but personal lives are not part of a race or a competition with another. I am not more impressed with those at the end of their lives than I am for those who are still living theirs. It's hard, it's tough, it's incredibly unfair, and it is, more often than not, more than it looks like we can handle alone. Welcome to life. Be proud and happy you are living it because we are proud and happy to see you living it for everything it is."
"A marriage relationship is symbiotic. It is not parasitic and then excused away simply because it is still a relationship.Divorce is obviously not God's will, but He NEVER intended a marriage to be defined solely by the written contract alone without also expecting both be living up to the unspoken and assumed needs of the other."
" September 29 2012 Before I go home, and leave behind the very worst parts of myself while returning to the better ones, I'd like to stop for just a second to tell my friends that you are all rather remarkably unique to me in and of yourselves. It often goes unrecognized that you are all not merely a conglomeration of unrelated people in a Facebook list of friends. You each share something that is absolutely critical to me and what I value. I wrote something rather blunt and honest the other day and something very unexpected happened. Instead of having my newsfeed fill with a bunch of crap, I got personal messages asking if it was perhaps intended for them. To be quite honest, no. It had absolutely nothing to do with any of my friends because my friends are incapable of it. But how nice to find in a very abstract way that my friends are both introspective enough to have looked into themselves, and impressive enough in their own right to be humble enough to venture the possibility that perhaps they had overlooked something and felt the deeper need to rectify it if they had to. That's says a great deal about you all. Even if what I said had nothing to do with you. You are my friends for the things that you give of yourselves that I define as being above others, but from what I receive without ever asking. It is not because of what I get at all. You express what it is to be brave, thoughtful, determined, resilient, resourceful, creative, brilliant,loving, and most of all, human.They are all qualities I expect to see in the very best of human beings, but are exemplified by those I call 'my friends'. Worry far less about what I say on Facebook. The very fact that you can read it at all should be all the proof you need enough that I know you to be above it already."
"Sometimes people ask us why it is that we do what we choose to do and go where we are asked. "Why would anyone willingly spend their lives behind concrete walls covered in concertina wire and not be free to go where you want?" they ask. We have a very simple answer. "Because we don't want our families and friends to live their lives where walls are something normal for civilians to see." Thanks to all the Brothers and Sisters of Blood and Iron for making the 'Middle of Nowhere' on the other side of the earth, be a place we didn't have experience alone."
"Basic human kindness is not a science as much as it is an expression of compassionate creativity. Those who produce it, are not so much intelligent as they are masters of a lost art. Kindness, and a desire to instill happiness, rather than easy fear, is not something you are born with. It requires much more in the way of effort than it does to be vicious and cruel. Saying that people are "born" good or bad does two things. It robs the compassionate of the time and energy they expended to make a better world for others, while it condones the laziness of savage cruelty as a matter of mere genetics with zero accountability."
"It's okay to kill insects and spiders because they have no nerve endings, and it's okay to kill any other animal because they have nerve endings but no emotions or feelings to understand the nervous impulses of pain or death" SERIOUSLY?? Is this is all it takes to rationalize death and cruelty? Who thinks this CRAP up? No. fuck that, who is stupid enough to BELIEVE it? I know insects, and spiders, and dogs who would listen to that wad of drivel and disagree. So why do I have to hear it from the only species on the planet that should be smart enough to know better by default and STILL be the one species I can understand? Jesus? If you are coming.....Hurry the fuck UP!!
"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 Atheist or Agnostic or Pagan or foreign or native-born or East coast or West coast or Southern or Northern or...or...or. What we REALLY need,all of us, is to stop drawing lines in the dirt and believing them to be powerful enough to stop us from being human."
I'm just so tired. SO fucking TIRED of expending pointless energy to convince I care about people for being who they are already while they expend more of their own energy trying to convince themselves to be appreciative of others who make them into something else they never wanted to be."
"Need is no weakness. If anything, need allows the greatest affirmation of both strength and love toward others and of the human condition in general to be manifested. 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 we might not be able do so at any time in the future."
"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."
While I'm on the soap box. I don't give a SHIT about someone saying 'Im sorry' without them knowing what that really means. I am SORRY assumes that you have both the ability to fully comprehend the actions you made in error, AND know enough about emotions and feelings in general to care about which ones you caused. Without it, "I am sorry" is just the cheap shit way to rely on the good nature of another soul to forgive you for something you dont want to admit to."
"People look for a lot of things. You look for a job. You look for your other white sock. You look for your car keys, but you don't go looking for love. That's the trick. Love, finds you."
"On the days that you can not tolerate it any more, crumple into the dirt. Just do it. No one will stop you. Grieve and weep if you must. Rail at the unfairness of it all and sit in a disheveled misery at your plight. Roll in the ashes of your supposed failures imposed by others if that helps.. Wring your hands, curse the gods, call Luck and Fate the whores of complicity if you so choose.. but then STAND back UP!"
"Its not a question of individual survival to justify sacrificing something you need in order to merely exist. Its a matter of knowing what needs to survive, even at the risk of your own death, to perpetuate for others, what is meant by being alive."
"Know the difference between vengeance and vindication. Know the difference between judgement and justice. Know the difference between caution and cowardice, and know the difference between fear and failure. They are not synonyms for each other simply due to the convenient perceptions of evil to get you to believe it"
"Trust is an all together strange virtue. Not because of what it means, but because so many people fail to realize that it is something inside of YOURSELF that has to be given and NOT something to be shown or proven by someone else in order to have the benefits and rewards trust provide. You will gain NOTHING by demanding that trust be proven before it is returned by you. That is the very antithesis of the nature of trust to begin with."
Friday, May 10, 2013
YOU DO NOT, CAN NOT
You do not get to demand you be heard
if you do not know how to listen,
and by failing to to accomplish either, objectively,
you do not get the right
to be able to say you communicate at all.
You do not.
You do not.
You do not get to feel real genuine love
if you can not understand sacrifice,
nor do you have love in return
nor do you have love in return
if you believe you can demand it.
You can not claim to be courageous
without knowing fear.
one requires the awareness of the other
one requires the awareness of the other
and if you can see that
then you will never know what it means to be brave or courageous.
You will not.
You can not trust if you are not willing
to set yourself up be destroyed.
You have to stand exposed
and believe you will be protected.
You have to stand exposed
and believe you will be protected.
You can not feel true pride from others
if you manufacture hubris instead and believe it is the same thing.
It is not.
It is not.
You can not have worth
if you are not valued.
You can not know true comfort
if there is always imagined fear.
All of these are dependent
on either the understanding of the difference
or the ability to make one accountable
for what it affects others.
Most importantly,
you simply can not gain the full admiration
and love of another person
if you are towering above them on a ladder,
nor can you assume you love another
if you are expected to be immovable
to be what they need.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
QUOTES III
Here's a quick way to find out if what you say to others is as cruel as it is unnecessary, whether you think so or not. Take your
insistence to say whatever it is you choose with your head up your ass
and your temper in your mouth and say it inwardly to yourself, first. In
direct proportion to your own insecurities and fears, eat it. Tuck in.
Chew and swallow the whole of it. If it causes pain without truth,If it hurts and bruises you to swallow it, and you
say it to someone else anyway, then you are indeed as savage as you are ineffective".
"When you give someone more than 'one more chance' to redeem themselves in your estimation, and it seems as though no matter how many times you give them the benefit of the doubt it does not happen, it would be wise to consider that perhaps they are not seeing this as a chance at all and are, instead, giving themselves yet one more opportunity, to do less at your expense."
" Fear, anxiety, vengeance, retribution, pain, and inflicted immeasurable suffering are the dismantling tools of the corrupt and reprehensible. Loathe them in your life for those who purposefully, and by their own choice, took the laziest of approaches to gain for themselves with apathy what others paid the full price for with an inescapable virtue to grieve, or to care, or to weep. Give neither mercy nor pity to destructive people. Those qualities should be reserved for those who deserve the opportunity to rise above their own human condition, and not cut down before they were ever given a chance."
"Love is the abstract quality and an expression of 'exemplified and unconditional endearment'. The highest and most specific definition of true magic, it is the use of means (by thought or action) believed to have supernatural power over, and superior to, natural and physical forces. It is created by one, and manifested in another, by their combined belief and faith that it exists at all for a purpose beyond explanation. It so clearly defines the result of their intentions so as to become the fulcrum of a knowable, yet undeniably invisible truth, that can be hefted as surely as the weight of a stone in your hand, without ever being seen."
"Using a persons own trust and belief in your credibility as the means to sway their decisions to your own personal benefit is already the epitome of disrespect, regardless of how much you think you deserve it. But by allowing them to suffer both the consequences and indignities of that decision alone, and with every intention to condone judgements and criticisms by others, regardless of your complicity, is an atrocity."
"When you give someone more than 'one more chance' to redeem themselves in your estimation, and it seems as though no matter how many times you give them the benefit of the doubt it does not happen, it would be wise to consider that perhaps they are not seeing this as a chance at all and are, instead, giving themselves yet one more opportunity, to do less at your expense."
" Fear, anxiety, vengeance, retribution, pain, and inflicted immeasurable suffering are the dismantling tools of the corrupt and reprehensible. Loathe them in your life for those who purposefully, and by their own choice, took the laziest of approaches to gain for themselves with apathy what others paid the full price for with an inescapable virtue to grieve, or to care, or to weep. Give neither mercy nor pity to destructive people. Those qualities should be reserved for those who deserve the opportunity to rise above their own human condition, and not cut down before they were ever given a chance."
"Love is the abstract quality and an expression of 'exemplified and unconditional endearment'. The highest and most specific definition of true magic, it is the use of means (by thought or action) believed to have supernatural power over, and superior to, natural and physical forces. It is created by one, and manifested in another, by their combined belief and faith that it exists at all for a purpose beyond explanation. It so clearly defines the result of their intentions so as to become the fulcrum of a knowable, yet undeniably invisible truth, that can be hefted as surely as the weight of a stone in your hand, without ever being seen."
"Using a persons own trust and belief in your credibility as the means to sway their decisions to your own personal benefit is already the epitome of disrespect, regardless of how much you think you deserve it. But by allowing them to suffer both the consequences and indignities of that decision alone, and with every intention to condone judgements and criticisms by others, regardless of your complicity, is an atrocity."
"Love of children, and love of a mate are completely different. Love of children is affectionate love, while love of a mate is intimate love. One is no less valid than the other. They can both be loved equally, in different ways for different reasons and at different times. But it's also not a contest where there is only enough for one at the expense of the other. You can feed cat food to a dog and it won't know to give a damn, but you can't feed dog food to a cat without it ultimately starving to death. Feed them different things, but feed them both. If you love them as you say, you won't pit one against the other for yourself.
" 'Perception' is like an artillery cannon on a battlefield. Placed well, it has the ability to deliver devastating blows with surgical precision to eradicate opposing threats at a distance. Placed poorly and with no idea how to load or aim it, and you may very well become your enemies most valued asset by accomplishing for them at close range, what use to take legions."
"I am never sorry of, nor have I ever regretted, any of the decisions I have chosen to make in my life. My resentments however, stem from the fact that the consistent assent and reaffirmation of my actions, from those on whom the decisions were dependent, should, in large part, have also included an ever increasing responsibility on their part to recognize the consequences of others beyond the mere asking that it be performed in their stead."
"Just because you saw the necessity to contribute more than your fair share of effort to an idea in order to have it succeed, does not also mean you should assume any more of the responsibility for its failure than what you would allow of yourself in the beginning, before the apathy of others caused it to fail, regardless of your intentions."
Growing a bit tired of people using their size alone to imply power. "Listen, Chunky, You may think your meaner than me, but if i cut the fat off the both of us I'm twice your size with half the delusion."
"When you make a promise to someone you have to be cognizant of the fact that it can ONLY be understood by THEIR own value system for what the promise implies. Not yours. That being said, a promise becomes infinitely more important because it requires you to react and behave to THEIR expectations, and not just to your own behavior."
Once upon a time a little boy wished for a dog. He begged and pleaded and promised to love a dog if only one would come. Finally, a puppy was brought to him. He loved having a dog and worked to train it to exactly as he wished. He taught it to sit, and it would sit. He taught it to stay and he would not move. He taught it to roll over, and without question the dog would roll over. Then he asked it to fetch, but the dog would not fetch. He demanded the dog fetch and it would not. Then he yelled at the dog and still it would not fetch. In the end the boy tied the dog to a tree and complained that perhaps a dog is not really all that important. But I wonder what the dog thought.
I take no offense to the concept of wealth in general, but when those who demand respect at a higher degree because of it,and with no right of mine to disagree how they achieved it, at the expense of those it was earned from, despite their efforts or intentions, is unconscionable. It is the perceived right to entitlement of elitists that has transformed simple prosperity into an obscenity they demand we ignore while keeping the accountability of actions as a purchased excuse for them to be less.
"A great many have demanded I perform, and to impossible standards, a menagerie of outrageous expectations; My time,energy,effort,patience, perseverance,silence, sacrifice, advice,understanding,reputation and ability, have all been expended beyond capacity. To those who have aided me by sacrificing the very same of themselves, you have my greatest admiration and truest apologies for pain caused to you, because of it. But to the rest...step up an shit out ONE OUNCE of that 'pound of flesh' you require of me every day, when you couldn't see fit to lift so much as a finger to help, a second of your time, or a penny of support, for anything more than the unjust opportunity to demand more."
"On Veteran's Day, do not thank a veteran. We need no thanks for what we felt we were returning to you, anyway. Instead, assemble a group of women and let everyone say something outrageous, then vote to see whose was the best. Buy a gun and then choose not to fire it. Pray on a bus (in the front seat if you happen to be black), go to a church and just sit there,read a controversial magazine, hug a lesbian, kiss a Jew,criticize a politician, burn a bra, drink from any water fountain you choose... and then go to bed knowing that tomorrow...you have the right to do it all over again."
"When you demand the right and ability, above others,to be seen as making fair and honest, objective, opinions about two things, it would be wise not to be seen turning a blind eye to that which is directly beneath your own feet using a set of binoculars while simultaneously using a microscope to scrutinize with a critical eye at a distance."
"God did not design the world to have us believe that men would be expected to be the fully capable providers while the women would be beautiful, instead. He made us BOTH capable and unwisely provided ourselves the distinction of beauty as both the excuse and the reason to take from the other depending on which we had more of at the time."
" You can live for love, and you can live for money. Sometimes you can live for love and FIND money along the way, and that's good, but the inverse is nearly impossible. The saddest is to have a person demand both. As soon as you say it, a indelible tattooed price tag, unseen to you, erupts on your forehead. It displays not what you are worth to them, but what you are willing to settle on as the price of love FROM you. At that point, whether there is love in abundance for you or none at all, it is irrelevant. It is no longer priceless to either one."
"For most people(those who believe they are far too refined and intelligent) life is simply too complicated to be identified by quotations, parables, and adages. The others (for we are far too simplistic and ignorant) know better."
"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?"
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"
" 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"
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