the giving of the thanks

yeah, ok. so i gave thanks. i have a wonderful family, great friends, food, shelter, clothing, health, sense of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste etc. i am blessed with all these things, plus other luxuries like money in my pocket, an education, and whatnot. i have reflected on all these things and i fully understand how incredibly fortunate i am. but that doesn't answer the real question on my mind in these post-thanksgiving days.


when do i get my presents?

death, eh?

i never used to be scared of death. moreover, i never understood people who claimed to be afraid of death. it seemed so foolish. death is an instant, and after there is nothing. even more so, death makes sense to me. when people around me wrestle with the idea "why do we die?" it was so clear to me: we die because life needs an end. i never believed in hell or heaven, for no reason that i can articulate without ending in "i don't know, i just don't get it." nevertheless, i always felt like death was a termination of life, not a gateway to anything else. death seem so final, and therefore, extremely neat. you live, and then at one point you die. to worry about something that was both inevitable and rational made me feel like a nattering naybob of negativism.

then recently, and i say recently meaning in the past week or so, i started to think: what if there is a hell? what if hell is like pittsburgh, in the sense that it is a real place. saying "i don't believe in pittsburgh" is not going to keep you from going there. it seemed so self-satisfying to dismiss any chance of me going to hell by saying "i don't believe in it." i seemed to wholly overlook the idea that my belief in hell is totally irrelevant. it would be like me saying, "i don't believe in 7th grade." that's all well and good, but my refusal to accept 7th grade doesn't diminish its existence, it only blinds me to it. i started to become anxious when i realized the notion that hell may be very real, and if that is the case, i will certainly be making residence there for the better part of eternity. i have not come to a conclusion, because doing so would be impossible. i will instead to what i do best: analyze something until i have deconstructed the hell out of it (pun fully intended) and it becomes meaningless to me.

i wonder what nietzsche would say about this.

listening to: "dust in the wind"

startling confession

i am, in most ways, a normal guy. i like most guy food, most guy movies, and most guy things. looking from a birds eye view, i am a typical american male. however, i have one feature about me that probably divorces me from most of the english speaking male species.

i like wham's "wake me up." i'm very sorry, but when that 'jitterbug' gets into my brain, it goes bang bang bang 'til my feet do the same.

sincere apologies.

irony defined?

now, i'm not a very smart guy. i am confronted almost daily with people who are more witty, articulate, and better at math than i. but, i do think of myself as having a keen sense of irony, useless as that may be. i did notice that today i saw a health insurance building/university health center located next to mcdonalds.

isn't that entrapment?

seriously, what is that thing?

i know jack about photo composition, but this is pretty damn good. 

the perfect blend

i was listening to cheezy 80s pop music on the soundtrack to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and i discovered the song "Hold the Line" by Toto. if there was a holy grail for power ballads that can totally wail, this would be it. whenever it plays, you have to shake your fist vigorously and act as though you are playing an enormous purple axe. if you are endowed with an active enough imagination, you can imagine a lot of neon strobe lights and girls with big, jersey hair mouthing the words to your song. they never do it right, but god bless 'em for trying. after the show, you turn to your manager, who despite being from detroit has a liverpool accent, and say, "that's how you rock and roll niles."

man, i miss the 80s.

urban archetype

looking at the windows open on my mozilla browser and on my taskbar, i see:

1. npr website
2. my gmail page
3. the new republic website
4. my blogger page
5. my itunes

i'm sure this probably pigeon-holes me into a very specific hole, and i don't know how good that is. but it's probably tragically accurate.

Nov 3

i wonder what is going to happen tomorrow.
scenario 1. bush wins
scenario 2. kerry wins
scenario 3. nader wins. nation's jaw hits floor, only to be found poking through the ground in shanghai
scenario 4. riding the wave of popularity from "american idol," write-in candidate randy jackson wins

i won't write who i am pulling for, but suffice to say in my dream administration, you'll hear a lot of this:
"wow dawg, you're really doin' your health and human services thang dawg."

ahh, dreams.