Life Philosophy

There are days where you feel like you're just swimming through gelatin, waiting for it to be over.

The trick to modern life is to keep throwing shit onto the conveyor belt. Work to pay bills. If you stop, the machinery blows up. Western civilization depends on spin cycles.

Logic for the computer age. Forms always include more questions than they need answered. Better to accumulate useless information than to miss something important. Or you could just ask them personally.

I have a picture on my desk of a man sculpting angel wings. The man is more important than the wings, but it's the wings that I look for when I'm down.

How amazingly stable a screaming match marriage can be.

The state of modern American government is clear evidence of the importance of birth control.

Why try to explain bigotry to a bigot?

Confessions are good for the soul. Secrets clog up the gears. If you want to be an authentic person, you have to crucify yourself occasionally – and enjoy it. A nightmare: I was tied up, beaten and raped by men in business suits, and then left for dead in the housing project they'd built in the desert, where nobody would ever live.

Isolation breeds a certain kind of wisdom. When you stop paying attention to everything but yourself. You may not understand perfectly, but you at least have time to think.

Occasionally my boss comes into my office to sign off on something. He almost never notices the drawings I've got lying around, the tarot cards and knick-knacks. He never looks at me, I never look at him. Then he leaves. It's healthier this way.

I'd love to have my aura photographed to see what's there. But I'm afraid I won't see wings. Or worse yet, nothing at all. Thus, it seems safest to just imagine it.

The United States plans to control near earth space to the exclusion of all other nations (except allies of the moment), from where they can nuke any country off the map with impunity.

Just keep grinning. I overhear your phone calls.

Funny how the cogs are always blamed and not the motor when something breaks down.

I have a coworker who tells me how healthy he eats, how happy his marriage is, how well his kid is doing in school, when I know he eats fast food shit, he yells at his wife every day, and his kid is suicidally depressed. Everybody does. Yet we keep smiling and nodding. This man keeps a gun in his briefcase.

Human beings will never become irrelevant because so much decision making involves making sense of something with lousy, inaccurate, piecemeal information. A computer would choke on figuring out what I do every day.

There's a reason doctors' handwriting is so horrible. Their hands have seized up from constant writing. And all for what?

Jesus saves but I've never met him. This worries me occasionally.

At the end of the day you look at yourself and wonder where all the bruises came from.

I occasionally forget that I'm not dreaming. Or awake. I forget.

It's virtually impossible for modern medical dictionaries to keep up with the number of new words added to the vocabulary every year, and most of them amount to, "It doesn't work."

In my dreams, I sometimes have a younger blonde sister who acts like she's not that smart but she's the only one who knows what the hell is going on. One time I climbed through our bedroom window to find her working on a laptop and watching TV news, so I wasn't sure whether to think her clever or vapid. She seems to enjoy doing that.

Sometimes when I'm sitting around, I realize my wings are out, big, white and feathery, and they're touching other places in the room. It's when I realize I can feel what they're touching that I begin to get confused, especially when no one else notices.

I can fly faster than a supersonic jet, but it makes me dizzy.

When I was younger I considered buying my own tombstone and just leaving the second year blank, just in case.

I'd prefer to die in my nightgown. A short one. If I have to die, I'd like to look sexy doing it.

When I was young, I was clueless about pop culture. Other kids made fun of me for not knowing who bands were. I felt like I'd missed some vital skill, like tying your shoelaces.

It's embarrassing to have to demand your meditation balls back.

How many times do I have to dream I'm dead?

They say if you die in dreams you die in real life as well. This makes me nervous, because I must be very, very dead by now.

We have a vending machine at work that sells bottled water for 55 cents apiece. And we have a water fountain with a purifier attached. And my boss keeps a fridge full of bottled water behind a locked door. I drink my boss' water. Somehow it's easier.

There's a certain joy in writing everything in red ink, especially credit card receipts. Most people avoid it like the plague. Like signing in blood.

In the future the US will win wars by offloading our accumulated pollution onto other countries.

There is the constant fear that what I think determines reality, and I don't trust myself to think pleasant thoughts.

Serenity is easy. Drive away from your life and don't look back. They can only take things away from you. Smile!

I often think the Buddha was unenlightened, just fucking with people's minds.

For a long time, I was keeper of secrets. One friend tells me a secret about another friend who just told me a secret about her. Both of them expected me to tell the other, but I never did. Hence, I stopped being keeper of secrets.

Black magick is simple. All you have to do is dislike someone very much. Passive aggression wins eventually. Everything else is just window dressing.

The person in the mirror isn't you. Assign them whatever attributes you like. Just don't treat them like they're the real you. Ignore them. They do the same thing.

Modern society functions because people erroneously believe that well-known people know what they're doing and will take of everything for us.

I could be sunshine. A billion watts worth of pure light. If I wasn't afraid.

Fog is popular. It evokes fears of an unknown which is safely obscured.

Deep space. The idea conjures images of soundless panoramas and monstrous things beyond my comprehension, compared to which I am utterly insignificant and fragile. Yet I find the idea so fascinating. Why is that?

Machines paralyze me with fear. Any sharp edge or hidden compartment convinces me it will come to life and I will be maimed if I touch it.

Sarcasm is so appealing because it requires no personal revelations.

I once read a book about flying saucers in my school library. I had a vision of a grainy, black and white television image of a shapeless grey object hovering in the air, refusing to be understood, with buzzing static silence in the background. The vision so terrified me I put the book away and left, shaking.

Everyone dreams about sex. Some have Oedipal complexes. Others about the girl next door. Mine are always about fumbling uselessness, like I lack the proper equipment or equipment of any kind. I prefer to dream about romance instead.

Part of the desert's appeal is that it's empty. There are no other human beings there to disagree with you. You can make up your own reality. So long as it involves deserts.

The trick to flying is believing you don't belong on the ground. The earth really doesn't want you. Just let go and it's content to let you float away at leisure.

I often think that everyone harbors a secret (or not so secret) desire to be the opposite sex, if only for a little while. It's the underpinning of sexual identity and intercourse. Know thy enemy, so to speak.

In earlier epochs of the universe, star formation was vastly more common than it is today.

All philosophers are proven right in the end.

Women's clothing is predominantly designed by men. In a perfect world, the reverse would also be true, but it isn't. Hence, men rarely think about the clothes they wear, whereas women's clothes are everyone's obsession.

Androgyny is far more interesting than masculinity, which by definition has nothing to say. That androgyny is defined chiefly by femininity should tell us something.

People have every reason to be afraid of artificial intelligence designed by human beings.

There was a girl at Wal-Mart who had just broken up with her boyfriend, who was abusive to her, and she had nowhere to go. She was on the phone trying to find someone to help her. Eventually she ran out of money for the phone. She asked me for money, but I had none. She asked me for a ride back to her boyfriend's place, but I didn't have a car. I didn't even have anything helpful or reassuring to say. When I left, I felt so utterly disgusted with myself I couldn't bear to hear myself speak.

Searching through a bookstore looking for something to buy. The lights are out in most of the store and flickering badly in others, but people are browsing anyway, even though they can't see. No one is speaking. None of the books are interesting, yet there must be something there, so more searching. On and on and on. Eventually I can't find my way out.

The mind instinctively fills blank spaces in consciousness. You must not look through the gaps at what's outside.

A long life is one that goes unlived.

Ghosts are not aware of reality, nor of the gaps in their logic. They walk, talk and act as they always have, oblivious to their own nonexistence. This is what sustains and imprisons them. We make abstractions of ghosts for our own sanity. If we realize there is a real person caught up this way, like a bug in amber, and we might be next....?

Become aware of your own mortality: See how long you can hold onto a burning match.

The sweetest sign of love is an embrace. Hold the other person close to you. Feel their heartbeat and their breathing. Wrap your arms around them. Fold your wings around them. Restore them to innocence.

I wake up from a bad dream. My boyfriend is there. He smoothes back my hair, kisses my forehead and tells me it will be alright. Soon I fall asleep again. When I wake up the next morning, I realize he was 40 miles away at the time.

When they cremate me – for I dearly wish not to be buried, no matter my romantic inclinations – I hope they put a plaque on my urn that says, "Well, at least she tried."

Wake up, clean up, get dressed. Lie down for a minute and rest. When I look up again, a year has passed.

Long hair is an absolute necessity. Few people, including men, make short hair look good. Keep it clean, keep it brushed, but let it flow.

I wake up and hear my mother listening to the radio in the living room. A nice song is playing – thumping bass, solid drum rhythm, good melody. I smile to myself and look forward to saying hello when I come out of the shower. When I do come out, clean and dressed, I walk in with a flourish, ready to greet the day. But there's no one there. The stereo is playing to an empty room.

I like to run from problems. Only when I look down I'm standing still, in a nightmare.

For some reason, the image of a snowman melting has always made me sad. A whole life, a mind, dissolving into nothingness. Or worse yet, perpetual, useless consciousness.

If I were a man: I would be smallish. I would be slender. I would have long, richly colored hair and attractive eyes. I would speak softly. I would be romantic. I would be gentle and kind. I would dress in comfortable fitted clothing that showed off my figure. In fact, in many respects, I would still be a woman.

The paper trail will bury me. The passwords, the codes and secret handshakes. The scum of minutia built up over real life, so difficult to scrub away.

I step off the ghost train and realize my watch has stopped.

Sounds seem muffled in the womb, transmitted from the outside to my inner world via a serene, amber ocean, like the tide of history washing over me in slow, gentle laps.

Humming or singing to yourself in public ruffles the feathers of everyone around you, as if you have committed a tremendous social faux pas no one feels comfortable pointing out in strange company. They fear you will go berserk and attack them for no reason. They think you are mentally unbalanced. They resent that you will not be in their world, but in a world of your own making instead. Thus singing in public is extremely pleasurable.

When I was young, I used to entertain myself at night by pretending I had a fatal illness or injury. Whisper heartfelt goodbyes on my deathbed, close my eyes and lie still. Imagine the passage into the next and better world. Wait for an audience reaction that was not coming. Eventually, I would open my eyes and repeat the process until I fell asleep.

What I wouldn't give for a video and ticker tape recording of my entire stream of consciousness from birth forward. I've written so many novels in my head that I've forgotten.

A dream. The angels of Heaven come into view, and I am among them. But I am in the dock, chained and under judgment, to be shot in the head execution style. At the last moment, I gain a reprieve and my wings are torn off instead with bloody, scythe-like bone saws. I tumble forwards into a very small space, to be diluted and distilled into a human being, in whose body I feel cramped and alien.

When I think of time, I think of a vast clockwork monster. Its eyes are red LEDs reading out the time I have to go to work or go home and leave Stephen. The prophesied time when it will catch up and devour me. Its arms and legs are ticking hands cutting scars in the landscape. Its internal organs are brass springs and machine pieces, where those it has already captured are ground down and used for lubrication.

Beauty is to be admired from afar. Up close I am blinded by the searing light of inadequacy.

No one ever died from unfulfilled desire. They died from the bullet they shot themselves with when desire became unbearable.

Soaring high above the earth under your own power. White stars glitter in the blackness above you and the city lights are strung out like a spider web seen hazily through the clouds. Hurtle toward the moon until your heart is in your throat. Feel the wind surround you on all sides, your hair trailing after you like a ribbon. Embrace the sky. Forget the lonely world below.

I have never felt more safe or loved than I do curled up against Stephen. Listening to his heartbeat, soaking up his warmth, surrounded by his scent and his presence. I am transported to another place in a way sheer ecstasy never can.

Autumn sheds the years from my eyes. I am in high school again, sitting on cold stone steps with friends, breathing in the crisp air. Drinking honey, smiling dizzily at a beautiful world awash in gold and auburn. It makes my eyes water looking at it. Hair is fanning against my back and falling across my eyes. I curl up in my turtleneck and dream. I am as timeless as the world, as sweet as the drink, as clear as the sky.