busy at the office

The monitor bristles

with Post-its and memos “to do”

Obstructing view.

BTW, haiku authors are the same people that point out to you when what you say is "actually, not technically 'irony' - it's blah-blah-blah... ." So, for all of you rules sticklers out there, none of my word snippets are haiku, or any other form of poetry. I might call them boonaikoo sometimes (as in "we're so sad that we're not cool enough to be haiku" or "down with traditional style - we're not haiku so suck it"). 

Really, though, I'm just lashing out at the true haiku masters out of jealousy steeped in pure admiration (sincerely) - brevity (in my mind at least) is the greatest mastery of the language.

Rockin word of the day

VERACITY
It just sounds so fierce!
It's got to be cousins with voracious and ferocious, right?

ve·rac·i·ty  (v-rs-t) n. pl. ve·rac·i·ties 1. Adherence to the truth; truthfulness. See Synonyms at truth. 2. Conformity to fact or truth; accuracy or precision: a report of doubtful veracity. 3. Something that is true. [Medieval Latin vrcits, from Latin vrx, vrc-, true; see veracious.]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

the meaning of life

My writer friend spends his days searching for meaning.

I appreciate his musings.  They lead nowhere in the practical sense, of course.  But they remind me of a bigger, greater world out there, the inspired madness of it all. 

He makes me almost believe there are indeed noble ways to waste time, that working to understand our “greater purpose” is a noble waste of time. 

Sadly, he can't change the truth.

We live for the most basic and selfish of reasons – to exist.  Nothing more. 
Everything we do outside of eating, drinking, staying warm (or cool), fucking and squirting out babies – all our intellectual pursuits - are to either help us accomplish those basic tasks better, or to distract our tumorously over-active frontal lobes from interfering with our main function - to procreate, to sustain the species. 

Nothing more.

Luckily, along the way, we glimpse so many other, different from us, creatures in the same pursuit!  And there’s grace and beauty in it, and that’s my respite from the pointlessness.  It’s trivial to say “the sky, trees, sun, water, birds, animals are pretty” but they are.  And they are different everyday, so you get to greet a brand new world every morning.  And every extra day that you survive to succeed or fail in continuing your species’ selfish procreation game, you get rewarded with the most magnificent backdrops. 

There is no deeper meaning - just heartbreaking beauty everywhere you look.

Image by Cateyano Arroyo

To watch and to eat

25th hour (2002)
Rashomon (1950)

Pizza: beetroot, blue cheese, spinach, bacon and a cream-based garlic sauce.

At the coffee station at work this morning

Me: Blah-blah... How's it going?
Co-worker: Friday's coming!  And right behind it - spring! And the days are getting longer!
Me: Of course, the fact that the sky's a bit lighter this morning might be due to the snow clouds, bringing the prospect of daily snow shoveling this week... This week that has JUST begun.  You know it's Monday, right?
Co-worker:  Yes, but right behind the snow is spring!  And Friday is already peaking over this Monday's shoulder! There's hope!

I had a full coffee pot in my hand.  If I were him, I would have exercised better caution.  Self-control prevailed though.
Gotta love the glass-half-full people.

Quote of the Day

"Armed revolution, the history of numerous countries sadly illustrates, is habit-forming. To overthrow a constitutional democracy by force creates a precedent for the transition of power by force."

From http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2011/01/dont-you-know-that-you-can-count-me-out.html 

Moment of Death

Watched National Georgraphic’s “Moment of Death” and did not find the profundity I sought.  Let’s rehash the old 21 grams and white tunnel legends and NOT actually offer any new insight into their origin or possible explanation! 

Maybe the point is there IS no profundity to be found in death.  No swelling music, no grand finale – just an interruption of living. 

So, then burial rites are how survivors give death more meaning.  I kind of get it.

Or maybe that's the point: I don't get death.  What evolutionary purpose would that serve anyway?  My biological purpose is to procreate as much as I can, and for that I need to stay alive - hence fear and aversion to death. Right? Right?...

Old cheese

A friend is twittering (“twittering” is waaay more fun to say than “tweeting”) about old music.

And it made me nostalgic for so many truly worthless pieces of music, mildly offensive to any human with a decent taste!  A priceless gem each and every one of them.  Every god-awful Russian 90s pop song, every Scorpions and Bon Jovi ballad  keeps a memory of that time and place.  Crack that baby open and drink up the youth marrow. 

Old cheese is the best cheese.

Krampus!!

How is it that it took me thirty years to hear about Krampus???
He’s awesome!

So, with him in the picture, each Christmas (or St. Nick Day) is a mini-judgment day!  A rehearsal for the end-of-life (or end-of-days) tally of what you’ve done right and wrong. 
Here's an ultimate illustration of Christianity, distilled into its purest essence for children: 

Be good = get candy.

Be bad=get dragged away in a burlap sack to suffer unspeakable horrors.

Love it!

Photo credit and many thanks to: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MatthiasKabel

"Creative"

Sooo, it occurs to me that anyone having to actually say s/he is creative is most likely not.
Which means this blog title is pretty much crap. 
I might as well have titled it "Trite Griping 101"  or "Pretentious Sniveling from A to Z."
I did like that it looked so much like "Creative Writing 101."

'Sokay - i'll keep it.  I'm obviously that much of a dork - might as well own it.

What are you afraid of?

Does growing older make one more cowardly? 

Does the warm comfortable blanket of inaction and apathy slowly age and soften you, quietly seeping nightmares of discomfort into the pores of your pale, atrophied limbs? 

Doubt poisons every meal. 

Seemingly reasonable concerns grow into flesh-eating monsters who tear to shreds every wispy thought of change or a new beginning.

Comfy?

Office Haiku

Silence lies like snow

Over cubes and computers

We give mind jobs.

Yes-yes, I know it's not a strict adherence to the traditional 5-7-5 structure but live a litte - cut a hapless hack of a poet a little slack! I like 16 instead of 17 sillables. 

Social Consciousness or another Eugenics Project?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11545519
A charity offers to pay 200 quid to any drug/alcohol addict who wants to get sterilized.
Bribery?  yes.  Atrocity?  maybe.
Mainly because it seems people should not make such long-term decisions when (most likely) intoxicated.  It's like a drunk person cannot legally consent to sex because the judgment is severely impaired. 
On the other hand, this project is clearly a desperate measure that fits desperate times.
I'm undecided.

Spathiphyllum Mortuus - or is it?

Peace lilies are seriously freaky.  Not only are they really hardy, but totally dramatic, too. 

I come into work after the holidays, to a plant that looks like a building destroyed by a bomb – a crater of random sticks sticking at sharp angles out of the ground, dark leaf debris hanging straight down. 

Dead. 

So I fill a bottle with a 50/50 mix of water and skepticism and dump it in the pot.  The soil is so dry that the water lifts it in one piece from the bottom of the pot like a floater. 

A half hour later I catch movement out of the corner of my eye.  Paranoid, I dart my eyes in that direction but see nothing but the wilted peace lily.  The scenario repeats itself 3-4 times before I make my gaze linger on the plant.  It actually moves!  It twitches upward like a zombi’s jerky gait.  The stalks straighten, the shriveled rags of leaves lighten and smooth out.  And all I can hear is Massive Attack’s “Angel” and all I want to do is baseball bat the shit out of a house plant screeching “It’s alive! Kill it! kill it!”

Instead, I keep one at every location where I’m responsible for keeping flora alive– it tells me how the other, less expressive plants are feeling.  It’s my Fido.

Oh, yeah, another year’s started. Big whoop.

Monday morning

Sleep-deprived brain shuffles in circles.

Loops get smaller

Consciousness fades.

Self-inflicted bottomless stupor

Muscles twitch

In habitual daze.

Coffee pot is my defibrillator.

Taste the burn…