After ten weeks on the road I’ve finally got some time at home. What’s the first thing I do when I get here? I sign onto another gig that will keep me on the road into November. It starts next monday.
I wanted to make movies.
The problem with capitalism is that extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people and therefore extreme responsibility goes with that wealth.
– Sir Richard Branson
We already know that politics in Georgia are some of the most fucked up in the nation, or, if they’re not, I’m sure I don’t want to go anywhere that’s worse. I’ve mentioned before that we have a disproportionate number of politicians with outlandish names like Newt, Sonny, Zell and Saxby, though because these men are all republicans, no one really expects them to be reasonable in any meaningful sense. The ridiculousness of their names is really an afterthought.
More disturbing is the fact that both high profile third party candidates in the ‘08 presidential election are also from Georgia: former congressman and right wing attack dog Bob Barr and former congresswoman and one time assaulter of a capitol security guard Cynthia McKinney, who are running for the Libertarians and the Greens, respectively. Presumably, they are both running for third party seats because they can no longer stomach the vagaries and corruption of the GOP and that other bunch who need a nickname and not to get back at their former political allies that they see as throwing them to the wolves when their respective forms of douchebaggery were laid bare on the altar of public opinion.
Now, at least our fine state has offered candidates for both fringe parties and thus we are drawing votes away from both legitimate candidates rather than unbalancing the entire equation. That turn of fate notwithstanding, it really makes you wonder how we keep turning out political dingbats with such frightening consistency.
Someone told me today that “Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.”
This is a good thing to know the next time I get really lonely.
If you follow your feelings, you follow your dreams, you might find a forest, there in the trees.
– Tom Petty
Today my canopy opened with me dangling above a thin, gray, cloud. It was an ephemeral thing, translucent, still in the process of coalescing some three thousand feet above the ground, more a bank of mist than a cloud at all. I doubt anyone on the ground could even see it.
As I glided gently over this evanescent bit of atmospheric moisture I passed directly between it at the sun and there, for a few heartbeats I could see the shadow of myself, hanging in air, my canopy and my body sharply outlined against the miasma. Around my shadow I could see a halo of color, a perfect, round rainbow encircling the impression of my shape.
I am not yet skilled enough to be allowed a freefall camera so I have no memento save my own recollection. Perhaps it’s better this way, the memory of something so lovely and so rare can live as a motivation for excellence, the possibility of such a sight pushing me to jump and jump and jump.
For those who keep wondering why I insist on repeatedly “jumping out of a perfectly good airplane,” picture that and it’s not so hard to understand.
I once had a friend of great and unerring moral principal who refused to consume any product that was created through the perishment of another creature. While she would eat eggs and cheese, she would eat no flesh of any kind, terrestrial, aquatic, vertebrate or otherwise. She wore no leather and couldn’t bring herself to string a tennis racket despite an overriding love of the sport.
When questioned on this conviction she would reply, “I don’t believe in meat.”
Not to defame someone that I love and admire but, excuse me, you don’t believe in meat?
Meat is a fact. It cannot be denied. It’s existence had been proven empirically.
You can disbelieve in Santa and you can disbelieve in the Easter bunny. You can choose not to believe in the fidelity of your lover, the promises of politicians, the potential for cold fusion and your teenager’s explanation of late night tardiness but you can’t choose not to believe in meat.
Meat is real. It’s actually there. It’s existence is confirmed by billions of individual reports. You can see it. You can touch it. You can pick it up. You can, if you are so inclined, eat it.
Yes, I understand that that’s not what she meant but the English language is a semantic and semiotic tool of such power, efficacy and grace that we really should give some thought to it before we casually misuse it.
Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won’t do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.
- Sam Harris
The End of Faith p.215
ISBN 978-0-393-32765-6
Many of the best products of the human spirit are both achingly beautiful and entirely superfluous.
This is not to imply a similarity with the worst products of that selfsame spirit which often manifest those same properties.
The heart’s greatest challenge may be recognizing the difference.
It’s a bad idea but we’ve all done it, driven when we should have been sleeping. We’ve let our eyelids droop while behind the wheel. In a few heartbeats we realize and snap awake, hopefully while still on the pavement.
Once, when speeding down a desolate, pin straight, empty stretch of Arizona interstate I did exactly that but when I snapped back awake four songs had gone by on the CD.
I choose not to contemplate the potential ramifications of this.
