and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

"the problem is i sleep with my friends and im friends with the people i want to sleep with."

(i was so high, i could have stacked one brutal, personal truth on top of another, pleasant as pancakes.)

"hmmm. maybe it's cuz you're dyslexic," she offered.

I have a way with getting myself into situations I want to be in, just at the completely wrong time. Wrong because it's not going to work out the way I wanted it to and so I'll just get whiny in the end. Wrong because, while the future may be hard to predict, it's at least easy enough to stick your head out the window of the now-bus that you are riding, careening down a mountain pass, and take a look up ahead half a mile or so. So I know from the start it's disaster waiting to happen, I guess.

Or I tell myself it is.

Crushing self-confidence or complete lack of self-esteem, I wonder? Sometimes you can be too big for the pedestal everyone is trying to balance you on and you just end up falling off, you know. You're nobody if not your own worst enemy. Try standing on your head for awhile and telling me otherwise.

Intellect - not any extreme case of it, but just the normal stuff we have floating around in the human species - is the stuff of stars. Intellect is the stuff of complete and pure genius because without it we wouldn't have the theory of relativity, we wouldn't have charm quarks, we wouldn't even have television, for christ sake. And then, somewhere, somehow, a switch is thrown, a light burns out, a spark - ouch, my finger - and the universe shuts down like some giant vending machine, some old 70's style tv in an airport lounge that runs off quarters flickering off, the tube slowly fading to black. I ain't talking about the ideas of things here, I'm talking about the things themselves. If you can't think up television, if you can't think up the proton, if you don't comprehend life then it doesn't really exist.... right?

relatively speaking. i mean, for you. questionably so for others.

Yet somehow the things we choose to believe in include choices like blackholes, viagra, and AIDS. Explain that. We choose to believe that world hunger is an epidemic - of course! we tell ourselves, epidemic sounds so unsolvable and, well, with this label we don't have to feel too badly about our lack of effort. Hunger is no more an epidemic than hair growth and stinky armpits.

We choose to believe in civil rights for prisoners, the death penalty, and pro-life all at the same time while we puff on our cigarettes outside the courthouse; "guilty? nah, just dysfunctional." Our judicial system has roundly rejected the idea that individual humans beings are capable of wrongdoing: it's society's fault. This is perhaps the squarest logic I've yet heard.

Brilliant!

For each shoplifter calling in sick, for every rapest satisfying their deviant need, for every rich old man shuffling off his mortal coil while the other one - the one that should be plugged into the wall - is held by his smiling grandson, for every religious fanatic who throws a rotten fruit on the doorstep of their neighbour, for every insurance company executive that goes home at the end of the day and doesn't kiss his kids goodnight, for every politician who thinks in his own best interest, for every country that draws an artificial representation of space and call it a map and then draw an artificial line on that map and call it a border and for every country that crosses that border that they have drawn,

for every one of these parts there is a group made from them, call it government, institution, corporation, cult, or following. There is a group made from these parts. That being said the milk makes the maid for, if there were no milking to be done, would there be maids?

That's a roundabout way of blaming myself for creating the lousy situations I've (knowingly and wantingly) placed myself in which I would have done better to avoid and also a way of legitimizing my cursing of lost opportunity when I have finally cleared myself from the situation.

Or in other words, I know from the start life is a disaster waiting to happen. Or I tell myself it is. Anything less and I'd be shoplifting in Shaw's, believing wholeheartedly that all was a competition and that survival - fittest or not - was bound to favour the guy with more candybars in his pocket.