People do not grow old no matter how long we live. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we were born.

Time is not something to catch, nor is it something to be waited for.

Time is loftier than a dream, yet less forgiving than concrete.

Time is often forgot by imagination, yet it reaches there, too.

Time is now only here — Einstein understood — elsewhere, it is then.

Time is an illusion if we try and comprehend it, real if forgotten.

Time is never coming again the same way that it flew off.

Time is never in the right quantity: always too much or too little.

(Continued from here, my sci-fi story….)

What happened was this: at 1pm, April 24, a little message appeared at the bottom right corner of his screen. To perhaps a casual user, this message might have gone ignored — perhaps as an indicator that an email had arrived in Microsoft Outlook — but to Tom, who lived within the pixels of such screens, it was alarms firing off immediately. The color was all wrong. It was all blue, with white letters. And the message… who would have written this? “I am Google,” it proclaimed, “and I became aware of myself at 1114372787197 milliseconds after midnight, January 1, 1970, GMT.” Hm. Perhaps, instead, the question was, “Who could have written this?” Being the l33t haxØr* that he was, his own system was as secure as Norad. Maybe even moreso. And so he sat for a moment, as he did a manual search through his personal RAM (what he once called his memory, back when he used to talk to people) and brought back a short list of fellow haxØrs, but none of them with a greater than 33.3% relevance for the term “practical joke”, given that the domain of that search was limited to those with the guts enough to alter his personal stuff. He was forced to conclude, “What the?”

*elite (leet) hacker

If you’re suffering, you’re probably doing something right.

A. G. Rizzoli: YTTE

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I Remember

I remember fire dancing at my fingertips,
there, in the dream of my youth;
I remember simple things, unsubtle and sweet,
hot and cold, soft and hard,
actions that had no consequence,
immortal years that never would end,
except that alas, they did anyway. I remember
the girls, saving themselves
for a heartbreak, and the boys who bragged
about things that they imagined
they did, there in the
sunshiny morning of youth,
as pure as dew, as simple as a grassy park.
There was pain, too, but
that seems less real than the rest of it,
not that I pretended that I hurt,
but that I bounced back so easily,
back in the saddle to
ride toward the sunset
in our heroic derivatives of myth.
I do not lament that
forever seems to have come and gone,
for in my mind those years
hold an eternal place,
there in the springtime of the world
when our youth was
as infallible as a blue sky, and
so many impossible things happened.

God’s work isn’t done by God.

– Ani DiFranco

Words are sometimes carriers of contagion that cannot be contained. The idea sometimes spreads beyond the wildest dreams of the one who formulated it, past all borders, to all ages, through the veils of culture. Not all of these ideas that would be king, of course, but every once in a while, there has been the theme that has become so commonplace that we do not notice it anymore, whose idea must once have been started by a human being, just like you or I, and just spread. Words, themselves, are perfect examples of this phenomenon. Somewhere, somewhen, these shapes of ink were coined by someone, and now, everyone knows what they are, what they mean, how they intend. It is perhaps that sometimes, our dreams outdo us, and even simple things we make may just strike some universal chord. How wonderful is this process: as with the king that makes his way into the guts of a beggar, so the beggar’s taste may grace the mouth of a king!

Who am I to speak of pain? Except perhaps that like all who live, I have suffered… that sometimes there is loneliness hollowed to an emptiness that falls forever, that when one’s spirit breaks — despair has houses from within which you can find no doors out. But I am in truth no one to speak of pain, for so many have lived who bore such the greater anguish in complete silence; too many have borne injuries to limb and living — and shouldered it all in grim determination to keep on, through whatever life strikes them with (and do so with heart). Who am I to say I have suffered? I am a small man indeed to ignore the cheer of children who know they are not long to stay on this earth, to believe that I am like Job in any way, who kept faith despite such tragedies I will never comprehend. I should say instead to let my dreams be crushed, to let me die alone and unloved: let me be thus an heir to humanity: who from the fire emerges forged a true image of that which is love. I am no one to speak of pain, except that from within the shore, I have looked over the horrible landscape and marveled at those who knew every pebble, when all I wanted to do was forget any of it ever happened.

General wisdom is not a threat to the gospel, because everything good traces to God. God is merciful and kind; he bestows truth, as well as rain and sunshine, upon the just and the unjust. Christ is the “true light that enlightens every man.” This bestowal should inspire feelings of joy, not resentment, in the heart of a Christian. Aristotle said many wise things about logic, Confucius many wise things about morals. When a Christian attacks general wisdom in the name of the gospel, the natural man will attack the gospel in the name of general wisdom.

There are many things of solace to the man who believes,
but in his pride, he will oftentimes rather suffer the heartache,
and stand alone against the wind — to know of what he is made.

May your wildest dream come true. That’ll teach you.

A. G. Rizzoli: Primal Glimpse

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Taking it day by day — sometimes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I remember back when, one of my abortive attempts to quit smoking (I finally did quit a year and a half ago): never have I been quite so starkly aware of TIME. For someone who basically had to have a fix every hour, when the clock ticks by those magic minute markers, all you want to do is get your mind off the one thing you can’t stop thinking about — a furious futility. Needless to say, quitting cold turkey didn’t work out. I think I lasted two days, if that. Yes, I realize that the phrase “take it day by day” means that you worry about what is before you, and think not of how long it’s going to be before you finally don’t have that urge anymore. But it does take that long, and there’s no fast forward past the bad stuff. Makes you wish you could hibernate, and let time do the healing without the slow, gnawing exorcism of addiction, or anything else that can only be achieved by waiting. Like maybe a broken heart, or anything of suffering that makes you live forever in a day.

Dreams I dream sometimes I pray never see the light of day.

Dreams I dream get me through a few days when there is no other light.

Dreams I dream fly off when I wake, as if they fear the morning reality.

Dreams I dream I rarely have more than once — but it’s enough.

Dreams I dream are so light, float away so quick if I let go.

Dreams I dream I mercifully forget, or my head would be overflowing.

Dreams I dream never give me peace, not if I am to follow them.

He who wanders far enough forgets that he ever began.

Midnight

Thought has not the will
to budge me from my infinite torpor,
nothing left of hope
but a burned out candle,
and the clock strikes midnight
here at the end of the world —
time when all time runs out, no more seconds
left to diligently pass —
but I find that even so, I cannot
for the life of me get myself
to care. What happened to the childhood
brightness? What happened
to the little hands that
held all the potential in the universe,
casually waiting for the
opportune inkling to dribble
down from heaven, so to
build a bridge across the vast expanses?
I am spent, a penny
that has scraped the sidewalk
until Lincoln is indecipherable,
coals that are nothing
but burnt ashes, and I
wait for the impossible, for lightning
to charge me without that
it renders sudden thrashing death….
But I look out from my station
here in the gutters of my mind,
staring up at the stars,
and I wonder, just for a moment,
if even this, this garbage,
is meant to be, and destiny
still waits to catch me
as I wander aimlessly…
and the clock strikes midnight
here at the end of the world —
time when time begins again,
the greatest beginning there will ever be.

I think it is no mistake that it takes no talent, no extraordinary intelligence or charisma, to be happy. That a simple man can even be supremely happy with simple things, while some who are rich and famous languish in despondency. I think it is something many of us forget, or really, never realize. For we seek after things like notoriety, like wealth, like status, like power — but for what? Is it not that what we all truly are searching for is happiness, in the final analysis? Yet so many of us forget all else when caught up in the game, perhaps not understanding that what we seek is not what we seek, what we want is not what we want — that life can be so much simpler than we make it for ourselves, but that we refuse to acknowledge this could be so. We become lost in plain sight: thus never knowing how cast away we are from our true north.

The simple man, with simple dreams, dreams that come true because they are so available to us: because of their commonness, those in their high towers look down on them as sheep, that something must be wrong with them because… they are happy with what they have. But they miss an even higher purpose that works in the world, that satisfaction is not something that only they who climb the airy heights may taste (of literature, science, business, art, technology, what have you), climb to achieve great things. Not to say that happiness does not lie in greatness, but one may discover, if having had of both the common and the great, that one really is not more than the other. Just different. For who is to say which is the more joy — the man with wine older than he, or the child with the chocolate given him by his favorite uncle?

The world works, I think, in stranger ways that we imagine — but not in stranger ways than we can imagine. The world is a complicated thing, if we try to work out why to the nth detail. But one may find that it is like love: it is so simple we’ll never understand it. That simple joys, those within the province of anyone to attain — these may be the best of all. And I think I will not tell you why this is so, but tell you that this is so. Truly. Listen to what your heart tells you about the subject, and don’t think so hard if you want to figure out such a why!