Delicious coffee makes the days pass smoother
Sometimes I wonder about life. Is it just a waiting period until death? Everything we do on a day-to-day basis is just something to keep us occuiped until the grim reaper comes to call. Some people are kings and presidents and others are writers and paupers. More or less though we are each worm food.
I take comfort in this.
Bleached out frozen Sunday morning
After getting a full night sleep, which I rarely do, this morning I am greeted by a dusting of snow and some ice on the window. The sky is clear blue and the light outside has a bleached out quality. The wind rattles the windows and plastic bags blow down Eleventh Street, one bag catches in the barren tree across street and blows in the torrent of air like the flag of some garbage country.
Nancy Sinatra sings "
These Boots Are Made For Walking" from my speakers, and I wonder when those boots are going to walk all over me.
Animations of insanity
Check out this
insane flash animation from
The Friend SocietyHere is another one of those insane flash animations. Check out
The Ultimate Showdown
Just before the tea kettle calls
Long nights of the soul turn into early mornings of the soul. For some reason I lay in bed thinking about things from when I was in ninth grade. Faces and places played through my mind as I remembered minute details of my life at age fourteen. Strange the way that my mind triggers memories when it does not want to shut down for sleep.
I have along day ahead of me preparing for tonight's sushi dinner party for seven. I hope I can find top quality fish this morning. Perhaps I'll steal a few winks of sleep around noon. Ah, I hear the tea kettle humming her harmonic whistle...
Games
It is so much easier to play games than it is to write. I can spend unlimited hours playing against an opponent half the way around the world in online Go (also called Baduk in Korea and Weiqi in China) but sitting down and writing down my thoughts, or to work on my novel, these this takes a goal oriented motivation that I find so difficult to summon some times.
I received an email today from one of my oldest and best friends, it was short but to the point and he raised several issues regarding his feelings and our relationship. We have been buddies forever, and will be I hope until one of us is cold in his grave.
I think as we grow older is it harder to take people for granted. When you are young and beautiful and outgoing, people seem to be everywhere offering you their time and affection, and perhaps as we grow older we must face certain things, that we are mortal, that our lives are short, and that who we choose to spend our time with is really the ultimate power that we have in our lives. I struggle with the fact that I am so far away from most of the people that I love. My family is in Minnesota, so far from this craptastic eastern city of Philadelphia, but still here I am, while my nephews and nieces grow up and make their way out into the world. My parents grow older without me and one day I won't have the option of visiting them... Here I sit, playing Go and feeling nostalgic about a life I used to share with so many people that I love.
Fire up the virtual Goban. Find me playing in the English room of the
Kiseido Go Server as "John Brian."
Dangerous ideas
I have enjoyed reading the scientifically minded submissions of persons writing about their
most dangerous ideas over at The World Question Center. The ideas there have kept me company the past few dark nights.
Although the New Year is typically a time for resolutions and focusing on goals, I find myself adrift on the void, clinging neither to outcomes that I want to work toward nor to the year's coming events. I am at home in meaninglessness.
