Random Acts of Awesome

I had a very funny, very short conversation with a dude at a bar last night. I was at Baileys, celebrating a friends wedding. I was in full on introvert forced to be extroverted mode, and rather overwhelmed with it, so I kept making excuses to get up and get away from the group I was with. During one of those gasping for air forays, I saw an old acquaintance at the bar. He is someone who I've talked to numerous times, and always had great conversational chemistry with. He's also one of those people who you'll never know if they'd be good in bed because you'll never go to bed with them and that drives you a little crazy and makes them seem like they're going to be better in bed than they probably are. We're curious about each other, but he's got a girlfriend and he's not a dick, so... Anyways, he waved when he saw me, and I went over to say hi. We chatted a bit about how things were for both of us, and he asked me how my travels had been going. I sa...

I am in Tucson, Arizona right now. Sitting in a wealthy persons beautiful kitchen, listening to John Denver sing about a reason to try. I am surrounded by desert. Big, beautiful, terrifying desert, with cactus soaring 20 ft above me, hundreds of years old. I am walking someone elses chihuahua, milking someone elses goats, feeding their chickens. Sleeping in their bed. A part of me loves it. And a part of me thinks it's a very lonely sort of existence, and isn't sure we want to do this long term. Someone elses home, no matter how beautiful, is not my home. And I want a home. But more than I want a home, I want to be healthy enough to create a home. I want a home crafted from my heart and head, my happy, healthy, and whole heart and head. So, in order to find a home, I am on the road to fixing a few things. I hate that term. Fixing things. Like I'm a machine with missing and broken parts. It feels true, though. Regardless of what else I am, first and foremost I am a ...

The problem with having a hard (extremely hard) time being vulnerable is that, when you finally let yourself be vulnerable, you all too often choose the wrong person to be witness to it. Because you hate being vulnerable, so you choose people who you kind of know aren't really "worthy" of your vulnerability. They're not going to process it the way you need them to. They're going to be too self centered to take it in and let it change their opinion of you. They're probably going to love the fact that you opened up to them, because it validates their view of themselves as a wonderful human being. And they're going to appreciate your weakness more than your strength. And all of that? You know it's your own damn fault. Because you choose not to deeply connect to people who are better than that. Because you don't want being vulnerable to become something healthy. You want to be validated in your fear and your shame. So you choose people who, even with...

I have an interesting relationship with symbols. I attribute much power to symbols, regardless of whether they originate solely in the human mind or not. For instance, this morning I did a tarot reading for myself. In fact, I did 3 of them. And came away with a strong sense of comfort and warmth. And knowledge, coalesced into useful, tangible meaning. The symbols on the cards, the paintings and general meaning of them, are just geometric shapes and concepts. They're just words and ideas, not mystical portals to another world. But what are words and ideas, if not power incarnate? The questions I asked I asked of myself. And the meanings I pulled from each card are meanings that I pull specifics from for my own benefit. But that doesn't mean that I don't feel a pull when I lay out my cards. It doesn't mean that each card isn't set down with a purpose, pulled from a random selection for a reason. I don't know what that pull is. I don't know if it comes f...

I have had the craziest, weirdest, most apocalyptic dreams for the past two nights. They've been kind of awesome dreams. The kind you still remember every moment of, because it was more like watching a movie than dreaming... The first dream, from the night before last, I was in a giant, futuristic office building. It's a regular in my dreamscapes, and has elevators that go sideways. 'Nough said on that. It was a police state, in the midst of fighting the bad guys, who were basically Brown Coats (you know who I'm talkin' about here, my nerds) in stiff black trench coats and fedoras. Yeah. My first glimpse of the bad guys was to see a group of them running into the giant lobby of the building, and my heart went pitter patter. Because they were hot. And the police? The police were robots. Who didn't come running into the building after the bad guys. No no. Nothing so simple. Instead, as the bad guys disappeared into the guts of the building, I felt a rumbling b...

I woke up at 4am, thinking about the nature of evil. This after a nightmare where I was riding around in a big van in a city in Ireland with a young man, listening to him describe the circumstances of the past 2 times he wasn't able to kidnap the women he wanted. I realized that he'd pulled into a deserted parking lot just as he started to attack me. I fought back, but weakly, lethargic in the way of nightmares. And I quickly came to the realization that I was about to be bound up and helpless. I woke up as he plunged a hypodermic filled with sedative into my leg. It was interesting more than terrifying, though it was scary. But I woke up with the Edmund Burke quote running through my mind "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." And spent the next hour or so lying in bed, thinking about what that really means. And about how we define evil in our world. How evil is active, and goodness too often passive. How accepting that truth, ...

When you hear that steeple bell, you must say goodbye to me. The convoluted way my brain works awes me sometimes. I mean, getting from point A to point B really shouldn't involve 14 steps, half of them over lava and between crumbling mountains. I want to be able to burrow inside my brain, sit down, and have a coherent conversation with it someday. I'd ask it "Why, brain? Why can't we just go from point A to point B? They're only 10 miles apart. There was no need go 3000 miles out of our way, twice, just to get to where we want to be." In related news, I'll be taking the train across the country again, to Pennsylvania, in a month. I'm going to be housesitting a farm for a week. With pigs (amongst other farm animals). In the middle of the hottest time of year. In a 200 year old house with no air conditioning. But with an awesome crick nearby, with a bad ass swimming hole, apparently. AHHHHHH!!! PIGS!!! I am disproportionately excited. A couple of...