Politicians speak to the mainstream. Musicians speak to the bloodstream

To all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace. (New Year’s Eve Toast, 1947)
Patricia Highsmith (American, 1921–1995)

"I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs."
~Louise Gluck, Circe

Music can also trigger memories by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the brain just behind the forehead. This region is one of the last areas of the brain to atrophy during Alzheimer's, explaining why many Alzheimer's patients can recall songs from the distant past.

from "Life's Little Mysteries"

When lost in the desert or a thick forest — terrains devoid of landmarks — people tend to walk in circles. Blindfolded people show the same tendency; lacking external reference points, they curve around in loops as tight as 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter, all the while believing they are walking in straight lines. (…)

The researchers believe that loopy paths follow from a walker’s changing sense of “straight ahead.” With every step, a small deviation is likely added to a person’s cognitive sense of what’s straight, and these deviations accumulate to send that individual veering around in ever tighter circles as time goes on.

Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
If Caesar were alive, you'd be chained to an oar.

Walker, your footsteps
are the road, and nothing more.
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
~ Antonio Machado

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off




‘We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.’ –Rothko

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.’ –Kafka

‘There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.’ –Edward Abbey

To sing is to begin a sentence
like “I want to get well.
I am not born for nothing
and neither are you:
Heaven never wept
over nothing."


~ Thomas Merton
from an untitled poem

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”

Edgar Allan Poe

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Draw a crazy picture, Write a nutty poem, Sing a mumble-gumble song, Whistle through your comb. Do a loony-goony dance' Cross the kitchen floor, Put something silly in the world, That ain't been there before.
— Shel Silverstein

“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” Federico Fellini

"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth."
– Frank Zappa

"Loneliness is not lack of company, loneliness is lack of purpose."
– Guillermo Maldonado (via endormirse)

I have always been fascinated with the idea of hidden passageways and hidden stairways, and I believe I'm probably searching for one out of this plane of existence into the next. Alcohol is probably one, and so is religion.

"I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ”idea of them."
– Anaïs Nin

"Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness."
– Richard Carlson

"Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky."
– Barbara Kingsolver

"A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."
– Franz Kafka

"And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened."
– Douglas Coupland

"for we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell."
– Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
"The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back."
– Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"I believe holy is what you do when there is nothing between your actions and the truth."
– Stacyann Chin


"Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing"
– William S. Burroughs

"A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey."
– Sufi proverb

‘The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.’ –Samuel Beckett

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

Ezra Pound (American, 1885–1972)

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
William Faulkner

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Jack Kerouac

Accept loss forever.
Jack Kerouac

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac

All of life is a foreign country.
Jack Kerouac

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Jack Kerouac

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.
Jack Kerouac

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Jack Kerouac

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Jack Kerouac

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
Jack Kerouac

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
Jack Kerouac

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
Jack Kerouac

Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.
Jack Kerouac

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
Jack Kerouac

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
Jack Kerouac

My witness is the empty sky.
Jack Kerouac

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
Jack Kerouac

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
Jack Kerouac

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
Jack Kerouac

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
Jack Kerouac

You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.
Jack Kerouac

‘Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.’ –Arthur Rimbaud

John Dryden - Happy The Man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

…and your retreat becomes your exile, your shelter becomes your prison, your solitude becomes your silent hell. What you gonna do? Where you gonna go? You carry your own hell under your chest, hoping that one day someone will force the way into the darkest halls of your soul, and free you from your own curse, after fighting your demons. But it doesn’t work that way. What do you think a soul is? A sum of everything you are. So beautiful in its complexity and yet so lonely.

Never hope another soul to free you from your own curse. Its your part to fight your demons, no one will free you from the fears and darkness you had in you all this time, most people are not willing to do it, and the rest are not capable of it.

You fight your own battle alone, who ever may join you is just a companion, a companion that may or may not leave at any given stage,

You cannot rely on others in a world where everyone is fighting for their own promised land…”

“Never mourn those who left you, existence in this universe is far more complicated than such attachments. You exist as a source that gives and receives all sorts of energies, don’t limit yourself to those negative in nature. Everything changes, nothing remains the same, everything evolves and moves towards every direction, open your eyes and seek new ways, new paths, new energies, new people. Open your mind, open your soul. Don’t stuck within a state of being, evolve, like the universe itself.

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

~~ D. H Lawrence

William Burroughs

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: -
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -and gazed -but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with
our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our
actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
~~Herman Melville
US novelist & sailor (1819 - 1891)

Nine Words Women Use

1. Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut-up.

2. Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half-hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.

3. Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with ‘Nothing’usually end in ‘Fine’.

4. Go Ahead: This is a dare. Not permission. Don’t do it!

5. Loud Sigh: This is actually not a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time and standing here and arguing with you about nothing.

6. That’s Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a woman can make to a man. ‘That’s okay’ means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

7. Thanks: A woman is thanking you. Do not question or faint. Just say you’re welcome.

8. Whatever: Is a woman’s way of saying ‘To hell with you!’

9. Don’t worry about it, I’ve got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it hersef. This will later result in a man asking ‘What’s wrong?’ For a woman’s response, refer to #3.

Paul Newman Quote

"I’m a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being… by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.

Interesting Songwriter

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

Jack Kerouac (Canadian-American, 1922–1969)

Water, is taught by thirst.

Land — by the Oceans passed.

Transport — by throe —

Peace — by its battles told —

Love, by Memorial Mold —

Birds, by the Snow.



~ Emily Dickinson

The white girls lift their heads like trees,
The black girls go
Reflected like flamingoes in the street.

The white girls sing as shrill as water,
The black girls talk as quiet as clay.

The white girls open their arms like clouds,
The black girls close their eyes like wings:
Angels bow down like bells,
Angels look up like toys,

Because the heavenly stars
Stand in a ring:
And all the pieces of the mosaic, earth,
Get up and fly away like birds.

.

~ Thomas Merton

Dis-covery

The word "Decision" comes from the Latin "to cut off" (shared root: "incision")
The intended meaning might be that when you decide on something you cut off other paths or options.

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.”

Duke Ellington