"To crawl or be dug out of the rubble that day, was to know that death had passed over you with nothing but a kiss on the cheek." 

- Wayne Goodman, NPR report on the tornado that destroyed Moore, Oklahoma. 

Fuck swag.

Forget flash. 

Never mind cool. 

Loose the bling. 

No ritz, glitz, and all that other glamorous shit.

Don't go ham.

Or ball out.

Don't even make it rain.

You only need to ever do one thing.

Exude class. 

Hold open a door for someone. 

Wear a tie or, even better, a bow tie.

Say, "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

Make eye contact.

Respectfully disagree.

No matter what you do, always exude class. 

"My favorite part of riding on an airplane is when the aircraft passes through thick patches of clouds. For a moment, just before you recognize the wafts of gas and condensation passing over the wing, you lose any sense of depth. Outside the window, there is just stark, white emptiness, and turbulence. The only thing separating you from certain death on land or at sea is metal, plastic, and 20,000 ft of air."

Journal entry, Dallas/Ft. Worth - Narita, Japan, May 2013

"I'm glad we were able to come to an understanding," he said. "This is exactly the kind of nonsense the Ministry is not inclined to abide."
The leather in his uniform creaked and stretched as he shifted in his seat.
"You see, we like to consider the actions of the Ministry more as interventions than coercions. Encouragement. Guidance. Never so much force as to make our citizens feel manipulated, but just enough of a push to get them marching in the proper direction."
The steadiness of his voice began to disappear, slowly replaced with a trembling that betrayed his meticulously crafted image of self-control. 
"It is our duty to assist those living within the ranks and files of our society with their acclimation. They must all fall in line. You must fall in line. There is no alternative."

The feeling of ants crawling on your skin.

The bees don't sting as hard as they did last winter. 

Perhaps they've lost their will to protect. 

Autumn has come again and we bitterly watch the ice cover that once picturesque landscape. 

Sheets of white that turn the horizon into a sweeping gradient like some abstract expressionist painting. 

With grit teeth, trudging on, one foot after the other, onward. 

The compass spins, dancing around the letters. 

North. Please. North. 

If the shoe fits.....wear it.

Then use it to kick in the face of the person accusing you of wearing that particular kind of shoe. 

You only wear a size "brutal."

Three year old vaseline

The water came up to our knees
You cried and cried
And it churned the seas

No surrender. No retreat.

Maintain eye contact.

A list that started in my head as I finished painting the accent wall in my parent's living room:

- I like the smell of blue painter's tape
- I like a perfectly folded stack of laundry
- I like the act of polishing dress shoes
- I like the feel of a new pair of socks

This song still makes me tear up when I hear it.

I think it's interesting how strongly certain memories or emotions can be tied to a piece of music. It's not that this song was playing in the background at anytime during my last relationship. Nor was it ever a track that was shared between friends or bandmates (although Bows + Arrows was introduced to me by a dear friend in grad school). These two associations don't even occur within the same time frame, and are in fact years apart from each other.

For some reason though....whenever I hear this song, I can't help but think of these two things.

I discovered something interesting today...



While listening to the introductory track on Kanye West's Graduation, I became fixated on one line from the following verse:

Good morning, on this day we become legendary
Everything we dreamed of
I'm like the fly Malcolm X, buy any jeans necessary
Detroit Red cleaned up

For some reason when I thought back on the song, I had remembered it as "by any means necessary." Turns out that the lyric was a play on the very same phrase, once uttered by Malcom X in a speech in 1965.

"We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary." — Malcolm X, 1965

HEAVY.

Malcom X brought this phrase into the lexicon of the public through that speech, but it's origins can actually be traced back to the play Dirty Hands by the French intellectual Jean Paul Sarte.

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary. — Jean Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands: act 5, scene 3. 1963

I think it's amazing how a rap lyric can lead you to a civil rights speech, which can then lead you to a play about political assassination. In a matter of minutes we go from listening, to discovering, to learning; spanning pop culture (and rap), activism, and institutional critique.

The internet is such a wonderful place...

A memory of a fantasy

There. A man.

He understands that he cannot even begin to grasp the breadth of what will happen to him in his lifetime.

He will not fully know the people he'll meet. What makes them tick. What machinations turn, clank, and whizz behind their faces as they introduce themselves.

He will not be able to foresee the consequences of a smile he gives to a child, a stack of blueberry pancakes he cooks for his family, or the applause he makes for a community play.

He will not appreciate the time it will take to go through a whole package of fireworks with his friends until one summer evening, many years later, the smell of fire and color helps him remember how the cold beer went flat in his mouth.

He will not realize that at the very same moment he feels chills go up his spine from listening to a street musician perform, fifteen other people around him are having the exact same physical response. The sheer amount of dopamine swirling through everyone's brains is enough to make anyone completely numb.

But, he understands that he cannot completely grasp these events, even as he experiences them. Their totality is one step beyond him.

Just over there.

Let's write more.