Just Thinking

I have been too concerned with how I "feel." I have yet to write about what I think. I'm sure it's because I've spent too much of my life thinking, analyzing, and trying to understand things. It's almost as if I have shut the thinking portion of myself off, excluding the one thing that may or may not make me human in deference to something that all animals share. Every mammal is scared, every mammal feels pain, every mammal reacts to emotional stimuli, and every mammal is not like me. Because I do think. And I think often.

This is what I've been thinking recently:

"Balthazar's Journey" is easily the best book I've read in the last 2 years. There is much to be said about love that Amin Maalouf captures. There is also much to be said about cynicism, and the fear that is attached to it.

I'm almost certain that I live in a world that I can't connect to, physically. My mind inhabits a virtual representation of a world I am divorced from by the mere fact that I can't really touch things and can't really see a color that is "red;" I am continually forced to change how I live to react to this idea.

Flowers have the best dispersal mechanism of all living things. Except for the salmon. And the salmon tastes better.

Buying prestige is a fool's game.

Time is not a 4th dimension, no matter what the smart people say. It is a creation of our minds to differentiate things which are identical. It is less real, and less useful, than 0. (Which, just fyi, does not exist.)

Algebra is a way to kick mud in someone's face without having to apologize.

The preoccupation with politics has marred the truth of intent, and intent is the only thing I care to judge. Conversely, intent is the hardest thing to judge.

To draw a line, geographically, and call it a nation, is to skewer hearts.

There is no such thing as a collective. There is only the individual.

Hope is the biggest bane to the jerimiad.

Unicorns don't exist. But then again, neither does much of what I dream of.

Vegetarianism is foolish for humans. Morally, vegetarianism makes overweening and foolish claims. Physically, it is disproved by our teeth and our need for protein.

Reading novels is the only way to know truth. (Oh, and listening to music.) Abstraction is our gift. It is also the doorway to our biggest flaw.  To call a biography, autobiography, historical account or study of anything remotely human anything but fiction is to buy into a great and egregious lie.

If there are too many interpretations of any one thing, then that thing can't be true. The only true things are verbs.

To hold someone's hand is to be enveloped by all the grace and misery offered by this world.

A wholesale study of classics, to the exclusion of everything else, fails on its own merit.

I have lived in many places, some of them halfway around the world, and I still haven't found home.