A Resignation to Conquest

War is fundamental to the romance man is dependent on. Conflict makes us real. We make new conflicts endlessley. It's how we ease the longing of being incomplete. And then we build fears to keep us from greatness. The consequences of this paradox speak out to our future as a species.

Man overcomes fear and achieves greatness, for better or worse.

The demands will only increase less the guilt of actions not taken drown us. There are few excuses anymore where the answers emerge in the nature of challenges, in the sentiment of our favorite songs, in the movement of those we idolize or lust for.

Our resistance is the evidence of a looming greatness. And we must follow the dark road, the narrow straits, the perilous path through shifting mountains and restless caverns. The stride is truer in the flames of adversity. There is no greater focus than one achieved on the plains to perdition.

Scary thoughts.

Many of us know the battle of helms deep. I forget how the words rang. Peter Jackson brought rain and mud and hundreds of wavering souls grimacing beneath waning light and a thunderous approach. I had goosebumps. Being run through with a blade was the last thing on my mind. Being a part of history, even an imaginary one, was a thrill more complete than the love of a female, unless that female throws her lot in with a destiny engineering your arrival.

Imagination has taken a bold move. Replicating the fantasies that would normally stir us to mischief, adventure, or conquest has created a shadow request for some inevitable calamity...at least for myself. How can a man live and not wish to be tested? Whether or not he learns where and when to test himself and in which manner is the bigger issue.

My cousin and I beat Uncharted 2 for the Playstation 3. The behind-the-scenes unlockable videos showed the efforts of an industrious team in conquest of the imagination. They were surely successful. There work resulted in a great adventure...a great advent. Not the game per-se.

The Great Advent won't be a great answer. It will be a great problem. And that will bring us together and to the next stage. We will face our fear together and over come or succumb and that's it. This process is repeated in every life from the earliest moments, either directly or indirectly. The only thing that tempers the future of some great eclipse is the effort of leaders who have overcome their inertia, to change the formula, to spread their energy among those prepared for guidance. Guidance will take us away from the longing, at least I believe it will. It should help.

Thus my emphasis on family. Thus my emphasis on a proper union. Thus my emphasis on personal growth. My perfect world, lol. But this doesn't mean I'm going to be a gentleman all of a sudden, they don't get a whole lot of play. Conquest requires resistance in order to be considered conquest. Look for resistance. Let it shape you.

God is Consequence

It is the omniscient ruler and receiver of all efforts. It has always existed and will so in the end. There is nothing more real and tangible than Consequence. There is nothing worth fearing and worshiping more than this lord of Justice. Consequence does not play sides. It is the proof of humanity's greatness. It is the weight in our concerns and the validation in our nightmares. There would be much to say for the benevolence of consequence if it were not so utterly felt in acts of attrition. The players busy building worlds are not the ones defending them. There are few defenders not solely concerned with their own survival. Consequence is the pyre's light. We are the logs, snuffed out into the ether.

I was on the JFK tram at the minute check-in closed. The next flight is 6 hours later. I'm at the airport thinking about why I'm so lax on life. Being on time everywhere must be great...but so is watching all the women that have come to the airport dressed for the warm weather.

I'll read, write, more likely than not play a skirmish in Starcraft II. Attempt to do some work and imagine that I really am capable of understanding how many tiers there are to self-mastery. You can control your actions and be someplace late because you prefer not to be agitated and then control your emotions so as not to stress the extra expense and idle time. I'm totally misusing these talents but it does confirm one thing: most people not even thinking along these lines have way more power than they care to recognize in the future of mankind. It's passive vs. passion out there and passive has a better long game.

Sticky Eyelids

No, not like that.

Several hours past bedtime, you may encounter a weird calm translated between your body and mind. Aside from fuzzy dry-eye I mean, if you're creative, if your pulled for reasons beyond your understanding, and if you're determined to believe that the fantasy of destiny is more than just a childhood wish. I get this way when I perform manual labor, or finally find the rhythm I was looking for in a school-paper, poem, stretch of fiction I was wrapping myself around all day while doing a million daily things. Usually I go to sleep before giving it a chance. I've been doing that for several years; betraying myself.

For all I know I may be writing now not to seem like the desperate schmuck throwing my guts to the wall to see what sticks (I entered info on Mike's [Michael Roderick's] tribe list with little to show for years of interest in production-value story-telling). I haven't been back to volition in a while, I miss it always though.

A friend of mind called today. We caught up. He's unemployed too, but he's bored for being in between semesters and taking Jujitsu for the last two months around 5 nights a week. I gotta admit, I'm jealous of his compulsion. I'm full of it . . . this inertia. My last semester was two semesters ago when my skull folded in like a wad of play-dough between a full-time job, my first film production class at Brooklyn college and business marketing at Phoenix U. There was a lot of resistance, the F.U. kind then. I'm recalcitrant. I think since the 4th grade.

I can't explain the downward spiral, it was subtle but my balls are somewhere out there now, rattling in the subconscious undercurrent of everything I love and hate about this world, having a great time without me and when I think about reclaiming them, it seems it'll be for a price paid by more than a few loved ones. That kind of change is spooky when everyone thought you were part of the furniture. Roland Deschain was given a similar prophesy on his own choices/sacrifices. I've been hearing songs all day easing the reality in past all the fear.

I'm 27, I've got to do something. I've got to get back to me. I've got to write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write

On taking an interest.

It looks like I was born with some smug apparel. I'm entertaining the idea that the reason I don't harvest respect for details is because it's someone else's details. Very little surprises or bothers me. I mostly contend with guilt when it comes to others and that's about as far as it goes.

I appreciate people as forces of nature, but not their baggage, or experiences or egos. I appreciate their living, I tolerate their character. We flip-flop between creation and destruction and get in our own way. So I don't pay attention to architecture, or all the names of the actors of the stories I can't remember fully, or how liquor is created. I don't pay attention to details, just smells, and smiles and starlight. I'm actually too reserved to be a hippy and too lazy to be conservative. I care about something but I can't name it for you, I feel passionate about mystery.

My original pangs left me believin I didn't belong, then I wanted to conquer the world as a way of making me fit here. Now I recognize bullshit when it stretches too long. I marvel at it, as if there's some gem held within that will make me see clearer. But there is no preparation for being proactive, just insanity and narcissism and belligerence.

Bah, it's late and I'm in a storm I don't quite understand. I am my own lighthouse always and this is a hint of madness with drooping eyes and a sagging frontal lobe sloshed in the mess of purposeful action. I have things to do and I'd rather exhaust my faculties figuring nothing out. This is distinctly have-not in have-town, wining for the fulfillment that comes from manual labor and prideful service meanwhile disdaining the luxury I so love to rest upon. Keyword: ungrateful, drinking cooled coffee, relentlessly figuring out how to pull a fast one on myself.

When the trumpets cry in unison . . .

You kinda gotta march.

I won't go into detail. My aid is in demand, it's up to me to build upon my resources. My heart is wayward and my mind is chasing it in circles. I can't get a grip on time or priority most of the day. I don't feel cohesive and I'm pretty sure I won't appreciate help. This is about me getting a hold of me. I ought to be able to. Or else why live? If I can't focus and take meaningful action, why live?


I keep trying in vain to relate this blog to being American, but I do wonder if non-Americans are capable of the type of faith-crisis born from too much opportunity and too much freedom. I can think what I want to in this country, I can push my brand and make money on products I put my heart into . . .

Everyday I'm confronted with a haze of ideas, all feeding on one another and never leading me to a definable staging ground. I can sit in front of this laptop for hours with fingers poised, struck by the nuisance of doubt.

I can do better but not for others. I can't learn the way with others yelling. I may not be ready for half the responsibilities I'm poised to accept, but I'm tired of having little and doing little.

For all this venting I might as well have a therapist, but there's no money for that, just people in need and me with a bunch of hovering talent.

No gods, No homo.

No homo - no gayness. Lets remove the literal definition and use the subtext of efeminite, vulnerable, weak.

No gods - no excuses, no rules, no divine reason. Just us.

No rulers, no crutches.
No gods, no homo.

No standards, no strangeness.
No purpose, just vision . . . our vision.

I told myself I needed a pen and paper to write. I told myself I needed pencils, erasers and sharpeners and how-to books to draw. I told myself I needed to learn perspective and research shapes before I could be a good story-board artist. I told myself I needed to do this in order to communicate to the real story-board artists, the people finding the locations, the DPs, the actors. I told myself I wanted to communicate windows into the story to the artists that drew the comics containing the stories I had written. I told myself I could learn photoshop to help with digitizing the project and after effects to make it cooler.

I told myself I could learn the piano and a beat machine to make custom tracks for the work and sell other stuff to up'n'comers. I told myself I could recruit fresh, empassioned creators for a production team in my old bedroom near my school, build workable PCs, hustle for extra cash and make stories out of nonsense just to prove that I could. I told myself I would research the masters of cinema and watch the tricks they called new that now don't get noticed unless someone's pointing them out, teach you how to look, how to appreciate what you see.

I told myself I could dance salsa and then become a b-boy and learn jujitsu and boxing and how to swim better and climb rocks, to be fit and functional and impress the need for a better diet. I told myself I could transform me into the hero capable of all these ventures and do it all cleverly with ferocity and focus.

I told myself I could be gravitational, learn other languages, take improv classes, acting classes, stand-up, open mics, to learn how to work with actors, to help break out of my shell, to earn a space for these words to blossom and inspire other folks on the fence of their own becoming. I would learn my soul's pitch, perfect it and publish it. I would create the buzz that makes the businesses want to pimp me out. My fiction would be in demand.

I told myself by then I'd have a few dozen shorts in the world and a book on the way. I write editorials in the Times. Circles I hadn't heard of would want my mind. My business side would spin off some copy-writing and grant-writing and business plan development and I'd make money.

I told myself I'd learn web-development to market my own stuff and learn a new skill I could push in the process. I'd self-promote, get businesses up. I'd teach kids how to do it all, I'd teach kids in after school programs in neighborhoods where they don't learn how to martial what's god-given into rights under-utilized, like the right to the pursuit of happiness, not just power or noteriety. Happiness.

People ask me why I'm down on myself. My mom, my boss. They don't know I have no leaders, no one projecting a truth of who I want to be, on the other side of faults that distinguish who I am today. They tell me to appreciate my accomplishments, like?

I'm here to make a difference, that's what the vision tells me, but I ain't makin shit. Double-negatives are about as far as I get and I can't figure out if I'm that close or that far from it. What would make the difference is doing the hard thing every day but every day is common enough to forget...until it's not and then I'm fucked or dead.

I've never let the anxiety get too deep. My mom taught me to fear reprecussion less and less with every mind altering guilt-trip she went through. It passed through me like a hot wave threatening to tear my world apart, until I got ice cold. Now I can't feel urgency. It's not her fault, it's just how I am. Born with a numb strength, passive to perfection. A seed of doubt was planted with a dad that couldn't stay and a girl years later that had nothing to say. Now unrequited love keeps me from blowing the world away, thats how I figure it at least and I expect no one to put their finger on it.

I let things go cause peace is too precious to lose and opportunities whither in my life till they're worn out. I'm getting older and sadder and my only comfort comes from the loss of joy from finite pleasures. The long term is more important now but I don't know how to work for it. My focus is garbage and I have too many loves waiting to spend my impulse and waste my willpower.

I need some spiritual recalibrating but I hate the way fate can call that in; with a drunk driver or a plane crash or a crack-head with a box cutter. What should you fear when the universe can't depend on you? When your country can't find pride in you? When your city doesn't include you and your community doesn't recognize you on the corner? Who loves a living ghost? And true love is for men, not boys. Boys won't get killed for it, and men prepare to die for it.

I am an American. I know nothing of the weight of my footprint. I guess with flawed perspective and fall into deep sleeps every night. All leadership seems try hard, I wanted guidance when I was 3, 5, 8, 12, 15, 17, 19, 23. I watch ambition in the world and I want to laugh sometimes. It doesn't work. I respect stubborn people now, fueled by their own bullshit and impracticality so much that others can't help but give in.

Renouncing age and resource is the best I got, hope is an old horse that shouldv'e been put down a long time ago. But, it's also an old friend. I want to leave something behind, some story with some importance and some proof of worthwhile things. I'd love for that love to be in a little me somewhere someday . . .


I told myself I'd have a family with enough money to entertain the vision of my son and daughter. I'd keep them safe and teach them how to respect their own power. I'd entertain them and listen and love them. They'd see the world from a seat on my shoulders. They'd see how people in love work together and stay young together when they watch me and mom. They'd know magic.

I've sold myself a dozen lifetimes of work accomplished by a better man than I. this is my addiction, it is my hell.

...but I am only 27 and I am not dead yet. I cannot yet speak of the end of things, only the beginnings, only the hesitations. Ignorance is evidence of possibility. Perhaps another cosmic joke is looming. Perhaps the deeds will fulfill themselves through me. Perhaps the vision is not to be trifled with and time was part of the equation. Perhaps the magic was not lost, but like all growing things, manifests at an impercepible rate. Perhaps I am not alone and somewhere I am being rooted for.

Every moment, everyday. Every moment.

Turning Tomorrow

I'm an intrapaneur... It's not a word but it's been created to define the people that commit themselves to the efforts of entrepreneurs building their team.

So I got drafted. I'm the first one here apparently.

Now that's not a bad thing though the circles in which people grab hold and rise are difficult to find if you're not looking. You're only hope is your own voice.

Getting acclimated to speaking is having an interesting affect on my observations. Real time acclimation betrays the sort of brooding that writers feed on. There are too many nuances in the results of self-improvement to record accurately. You can miss the good stuff if you're trying to hard to hold on to it.

Recently I was told that "he who hesitates is lost . . . and then you gotta go and jerk off."

I'm gonna let that simmer a little while.