Masks

Angelina jolie's face is on the wall
eyes closed and sprayed gold,
Immortalized in plaster.
though her lips are full
and sculpted.
even now there are lines on her face.
And her head is strangely shaved, like a monk.

this image is what we are told
is perfection, this is beauty,
even more so than the real:
this will never fade, this will never cry
this will never bleed, nothing ugly like pain
will cross this face.

But even here there are lines on her face
and her head is shaved, like a monk
atoning for it all...

Skin and Bones

Copper reflections showing scars
we never knew we had,
granite staircases too slippery to climb.
You took me to your house.
sleeping on the couch.
LED stars and screens,
distractions from myself,
and the voices of paranoia
and truth. It is all cactus
fruit and unsweetened lemonade.

mouse intestines and head on the bathroom floor,
omens of a brighter future and longer beards,
you see, graveyards are lovely dancefloors.

Sharp Puzzles poem and Uncertainty rant

Sharp Puzzles

Dice have razor edges,
every roulette game is russian.
The world is full of butterflies
and their fatal affects;
the sigh, the batting of the eye,
But the reaper whirlwind strips them of facade.
Yet we still sow,
mending the leftovers,
creating frankenstein futures
from fractured glass pasts,
only to realize we cannot find
the heart of the situation,
cannot find the purpose to shards,
but that is all we have left.

I want to be able to sing this to a woman some day...


Uncertainty and unpredictability are the most dangerous things in this world, yet they are inevitable as long as we are reliant on our senses and on outside information. The more unpredictable something is, the more dangerous. Things that seem harmless, like food, water, air can become deadly once unknown agents are introduced. The more variables that can go wrong, the more variables that will go wrong.

That is one thing that fascinates me about engineering, we say a car is a lemon if it needs a major repair 2 or 3 years after being "brand new" yet think about a car. How many parts does a car have that are absolutely necessary to functioning properly? hundreds? thousands? Most cars runs on EXPLOSIONS for gods sake! Controlled, but still one of the most seemingly unpredictable expressions of energy one can think of. The energy from those explosions are transferred to the wheels through gears and shafts and whatnot, each has to withstand various forces in various directions at various temperatures and fit to extremely tight tolerances. I find it amazing that a car can go hundreds of miles without wearing itself out, or spontaneously combusting, much more thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even 1 million miles http://autos.aol.com/article/million-mile-car-donated-to-museum/ (with luck and proper care)
so you can usually be certain that your car will work when you need it

Computers have billions of gates and parts that control it and work together to do extremely complicated tasks through logic and physics. It can calculate and store information using electrical charges for heavens sake. It can turn mere numbers into words and colors and movement and shading and physics. This is how I feel when I think about it too much: http://xkcd.com/676/ and the most amazing part is that they work, almost always, the number of defective computers is very low despite that they rely on both hardware and software to allow them to run. Now we even have software that learns, how amazing is that? Most of us are certain that our computer will turn on and work no matter what (that is if you have a mac lol).

Though my life is governed by the laws of physics (and chemistry, a subset of physics) it is not predictable at all. All is uncertainty, and frankly I dislike uncertainty, I have a tendency to paralyze myself until I am certain, I delay making decisions until I have sufficient information. But I do not have the time nor the information to see what is next, and I do not know when it will come. So what the hell do I do now?

First a Poem, then a rant explaining my thoughts while writing the poem

He has a crystal globe
with a texture like diamonds
light liquid across it's surface, alive
But when I see the hollow, translucent world,
I can only imagine it in freefall,
and shattering, the shards cutting us all.
but lets enjoy it now, shall we?
dance with me moon, around the glass
then around the cosmic light bulb,
here spin me more, let me go
let me fall where I may.

I like to think of myself as an optimistic pessimist, I was raised expecting the future to only be worse than the past, which is inevitable if one believes an epic apocalypse is coming soon and there is nothing you can do to delay it a single second. It kind of makes you feel helpless, just a little. To be honest, when I was in elementary school I did not expect to make it to high school before it came, much less college, much less 3 years into college.

Though once I got out of high school I had some hope (if that is what you could call it, disappointment was in there too) that I would make it to a good career before any of that happened, and now I am lost. Is this the stereotypical time to be lost? I thought it was always in the mid-life crisis- some decently well off 40 year old starts wondering when his life became so boring, so he fills it with stuff he bought using his kids college fund or something like that.

At my age you are either supposed to be a starry-eyed future professional or someone who doesnt give a @!#$. I care about my future, it wont work itself out, waiting will only allow me to sink deeper in this quicksand, but I dont know what direction to go, and frankly I am pissed at myself for not finding something I can see myself doing for any number of years. When I see those older than me, those who have gone through tougher times than I, I feel like a preteen fussing about unimportant crap.

Take my uncle for example, he is a lawyer working adoption cases (the best line of work as a lawyer I am sure). He has a fairly large victorian-style house on the hillside of El Cajon, it is not La Jolla, but it is pretty nice. He has a newish benz, my aunt has a nice BMW. He is not "rich" per se but he is not lacking, he does very well for himself and his family.

He never got through high school geometry. He just could not do math, he was decent at english and the writing related subjects, but not math. After high school did he go to USC or UCSD or USD or some other college, no, he went to community college for a while, he had a band (taught himself guitar, cannot read music notes) met the beatles (for real, he has a pic of him and the beatles). But he came to a point in his life where he wanted a family, and he wanted to be able to provide for his family, so he went to a dinky law school in SD (they let in anyone who could pay). He obviously went through it and passed the BAR and became an independent lawyer with a friend as his partner, and the rest is history.

There are so many alternate possibilities where it could have gone so much worse.

Or my dad, he did decent in high school, played football, didnt really sweat over his grades, B's and C's, went to college for film, bicycled alot. but he never got his diploma because he missed the last month of college to film the race across america (bicycle race). Answered an ad in the paper for a alarm company start up, just him and three other guys working from the bed of a truck, the company eventually took off, they made fortune 500 two years in a row, my dad was a partial owner. Sometime after that he out and out quit. He decided to go into ministry, went to the school of ministry. He ended up just having side jobs while going back through college and through the school of evangelism, the time spent in those schools was around 7 years, now he is a full time pastor in a very small church.

My point is, you never know where life will go, and sometimes it feels useless to plan, because your plans rarely work out. That saying, "failing to plan is planning to fail" is really trite yet really true, even if we have no idea what we are getting ourselves into, or what direction we are going, we have to go in SOME direction, but it may not be the right one.

in case you havent noticed, this rant has been the subject of MANY of my poems, that is why I like poems better, they are easier to swallow (that is what she said) than rants.

Anatomy of a Wave

cutting through glass and slicing through liquid,
it pushes back and bobs, choppy as asphalt potholes,
silky as lonely bedsheets,
when everything comes crashing down,
the floor curls and throws you beneath itself
drowning, breathless, loveless you try to gain your bearing,
pushing to find the surface, hope abides in each stroke,
and disappointment in each step, so you open your eyes.
Feel the stinging truth, blind as the day you were born,
but somehow there is light, color, meaning in struggle,
so you follow your face, whatever way it is turned
gasp choke cramp air explodes into your mind,
the ominous sky appears, but futures are never assured,
only desired.