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Category: Statements

Quotations, seed thoughts, and individual components of the bigger picture.

Beyond the Sea

If there is a distant shore strewn far across the vast and endless sea from the righteous land where the fascist and power mad make their camps and hawk their wares, that is where you’ll find I’ve pitched my tent. On the map, you may think it always on your left. And you may be right. But the world is a circle not well served by the illusion of two dimensional cartography.

If you look, I’m always just beside you. So close, and yet so far away.

19 Apr 2025

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Change Your Mind

“I have an idea. I want to find what the average man thinks of it. Then when we’ve found out what he thinks of it, we’ll change his thinking.”

A great quote from Vincent Price’s Champagne for Caesars. But is it about advertising or religion or politics? And does it matter? Aren’t the effects the same? So loaded with promise, so ripe with possibilities. If a better movie, in a better time, with a greater social media presence and more mentions per capita, it would probably be a text studied alongside Machiavelli’s The Prince, Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal. No kidding. I’m gonna go write a doctoral thesis on that now. Give me a minute.

I can’t think of a better way to tell you to stop drinking the water. Or Kool-Aid. Or Drano. Whatever it is they’re telling you is in the Dixie cup, or what you wish or you’re hoping it will be. It isn’t going to be what you think. Cause it’s never going to be forever. Nothing is.

As was said in another film, The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, princess. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.”

19 APR 2025

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An Epitaph

Spent his life exposing anyone he could to his art, until he went broke and died from doing it.

Worth every damn minute and every single penny. There’s no Nothing better. And if there was, no one could afford it.

So what’s the point of worrying about that? All that does is pay for a bigger stone to chisel words into like this, so people you don’t know or who don’t really remember what you were like most of the time, can read about you when you’re dead, in one of the few places on earth you can still go and find a little quiet.

And even then, somebody or something is always singing.

19 APR 2025

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On the Other Hand

Imagine the worst possible situation to be in. Really dig deep and put it in your mind, letting the feeling of the situation suck it right into your soul like holy weather, and breathe out the fire of absolute certainty. You’re hosed.

You can conjure this in your own mind, surely – everyone’s got their Waterloo, their Kryptonite, their Chappaquidick, their done ran out of road ain’t go no options. If you don’t know what yours is, chances are your ride or die buddies know. What was it Dirty Harry said (and I’ll say it the way it should have been said), “A person’s got to know their limitations.” We all have them, no matter how hard we try to make sure nobody else ever knows what they are. And that’s a lot to keep track of. I wonder which spiritual path really helps you let go of that?

So now you’re thinking about it, aren’t you? It’s become a serious topic of conversation; that defining moment of your life when you decide between what’s worth living for, and what’s worth dying for. In that precise moment of existence, that exquisite here and now that is the only time and space where anything actually happens, you have become your worst nightmare.

This, my friends, is a rock bottom beneath which there lies no further shore. Further down than this, it’s really Nothing.

Now: see yourself laughing lightly under your breath, a sense of something having gone absolutely right, and saying with a wry chuckle in an aside to the motion picture audience, “Well, at least we’re not living with Nazis.”

04 APR 2025

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King Me, Please

As a culture, we have fought a long and hard war against personal responsibility. Because everyone KNOWS the right thing(s) to do. They’re just hard. How much easier it is to elect a clown-buffoon-strong man to make all the decisions and take all the responsibility so no one else has any guilt, shame, or sense of sublime ridiculousness. Throughout the history of humanity, we have sought rulers, kings, and tyrants for this very reason. A despot is the ultimate scapegoat. We don’t even have to say we were just following orders. We will always just be children of our gods, never need to be grown-ups.

01 APR 2025

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Go Outside

Whatever you’re doing right now,
wherever you are,
no matter what time it is
or who’s watching:
stop whatever it is that is;
stop that and go outside.

Not just out the door,
or down the hall or ‘round the corner —
Outside.

Beyond that definition
of who and where you are
that clouds your vision
and you can’t tell your arse from your elbow.

I mean: Go Outside.

For a little while.
Everything will get better
(not because you do
or don’t want it to)
in a while.
For a while.
Yours and everybody else’s.

07 FEB 2025

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