Short Thoughts

Life is a series of moments, where we have the opportunity to look around us and take it in, and absorb and enjoy everything about it. And if we don't do that, there's nothing more for us - if we can't enjoy the experience of life, what else could there be?

But if we do enjoy it, if we take it in, then we have reason to reach for more, we have reason for ambition and dreams and working towards grand schemes and plans, for creating things and improving ourselves and the world, and for sculpting the future of our bold imaginations.

When Harold Camping's May 21st rapture failed to materialize, I imagined he'd be devastated. I thought he'd fall into a deep depression, probably disappear from public life, and (I was afraid) might possibly commit suicide. I pictured him crying out to God, with a gut-wrenching "Why?!!!"

I guessed that his faith in God and the bible would remain, but that he'd be unable to bring himself to preach publicly. I thought he was like billions of other people with a faith in God, just with an additional layer of quirky beliefs.

Friends of mine know I have a weird fascination with Katy Perry. It's partly just because she's a weird girl, but part of it is how she keeps being surprising. She plays the public attention game very well, but instead of devolving into one constant media blitz, she seems to go for depth in strange places.

I wrote this the morning before Osama Bin Laden's death was announced. It was therefore, obviously not written about him, or the political environment surrounding his death.

Revenge, I think, is the ugliest of all motivations. It descends beneath the "savage beast", who acts simply to achieve it's own ends, to a demonic impulse, which seeks to actively destroy that which is beautiful and good in the world.

there's something about being somewhere far from home, maybe in the middle of the American midwest, with the horizon clearly in view, and the lights of cities strangely absent from the sky, or maybe in the kingdom of Kyrgyzstan, on a military base, at 2am, underneath a wooden and steel stage, fumbling around in the dark, trying to stretch your arm around one large metal object, stretching with all your strength, your other hand holding a weakening flash-light, almost powerless against the vast, convoluted darkness underneath this stage