you will be loved

Not too long ago somebody asked me if I believed in the idea of love…

I put on some cologne before going out to explore Bloomington at three in the morning. It was pretty unnecessary. As I was walking though, I got the certain feeling that I was going to die. Needless to say, it was pretty uncomfortable, and my relaxed pace quickly turned into a sprint down the cement channel. The channel eventually opened into a river, and I got back onto the streets to figure out where I was. The mind can play dirty tricks on you sometimes, and for the rest of the nite I had the distinct feeling that someone was walking next to me. It was an awkward presence, but kind of nice at the same time.

Our bodies are capable of a wide range of emotions. Just to name a few: fear, anger, sorrow, happiness, dread, uncertainty, disappointment, kindness, firmness, and love. Quite simply we feel emotions as a result of the random firing of neurons in the brain to spark chemical reactions in the body, causing you to feel a certain way; however, something must catalyze these chemical reactions, else we would just randomly feel different emotions throughout the day. It is our interaction with the world that will catalyze these reactions to cause emotions within someone. My walk down the cement channel, with which I was unfamiliar, caused me to be afraid, and so I ran. Equally it is your interaction with someone or something that will cause you to love. It’s very real, and whether or not they love you back is their decision because we have free will.

I heard a story the other day about a mother with her two children, fleeing for their lives in a country in the midst of a war. An officer heard faint noises coming from a bush, and so he sent someone ahead to see what the noise was. Inside the bush were the mother and her two children, starving and thirsty. The officer handed a loaf of bread to the woman, and she broke it in half for each of the children, but kept none for herself. I don’t know of any emotion besides love which would allow for such a selfless act.

On that note I think it’s time to close this chapter and start a new one. La vita è bella.

-jack

light up, light up

Getting tired of writing, so I drew some more:






Scooby Doo



Marvin the Martian

somewhere in another time

I went to church this morning for the first time in a few weeks. About halfway through the service a woman called all the children up and started teaching some lesson on saying God bless you when people sneeze. The kids were funny and answered her questions in that high pitched, timid sort of tone that can put an encouraging smile on your face. It would have been a decent message except for the fact that she was preaching with a monkey puppet. I’m sorry; I can’t take you seriously with that monkey on stage. The kids can stay, but the puppet really needs to go; you’ve pulled off a poor impression of Mr. Rogers.

Kids are pretty awesome. My brother was talking about buying the new PS3 the other day and my mom mentioned how ridiculous it was to invest in a system like that when you’re only going to be around for a few more years. Three years is not such a long time, but in high school it felt like forever. I’m rather sick of time sneaking up on me like that; college will be over soon, and retirement is just down the road.

Rolling around the yard in a cardboard box, eating snow, building forts, collecting lightning bugs, selling lemonade, making snowmen, being naïve to world affairs, but still wise enough to know that going down a metal slide is much more fun than the plastic ones. What made us want to grow up so fast? The next time July 20th rolls around I’ll just pass. So sorry everyone, but I think I’ll be 19 for another year.

listen closer to the verse i lay

I wrote this awhile ago about someone who got on my nerves:

You’re fake. Everything that floats from your lips is a lie. Like poison your words fill the room with fallacies, and sooner than not we will see through the outer shell that protects you. The toxins fill the room and pour out of the seams. The dam is breaking, watch out. Your followers are few and far and soon you will find none if you continue in the same manner as before. Narcissistic, ignorant, paranoid, phony, and irrational are you. Your expertise in subjects lie from what you hear from others. Run to your kite like so many have. Everyone sees through you now. It was only a matter of time. Did you think you would escape unscathed from the scorching heat? Run faster now. Your time is gone. The ground dissolves from your feet, you have nowhere to stand. All alone in your steel cloud you fall from your venue, which was once so beautiful. Try and stop it. Everything around you evaporates leaving one last shining core of truth and reason. Taste it. Take it in your hands and swallow the last bit of rationale that is left. Your kite is gone. Scramble frantically and gather up what little you have. Does it make you sad to know nothing was true? Float and fall. Laugh and cry. Love and hate. Win and lose. Play and Work. Live and die. You take your high and finish low. It will destroy you from the inside. Stop your search before it kills you. Life is a joke so laugh. Nothing can be more real than that, but at the same time nothing can be more fake. Pseudofallacies fill you as life goes on.

That’s what I do when people annoy me. I write figuratively about their maddening characteristics and then smile at the thought of sending it to the person and watching them read it. I never send it though. Brutal honesty kills me. I’m glad though that I can take out my emotions on a keyboard rather than throwing punches at someone. I seem to have more friends as a result, who would have thought? Anger can stir a storm within me to make me write, but I would much rather be driven by something more pleasant. Currently though I’m not feeling that, so for now I’ll fire out another paragraph of garbage and beam with intent.

i'm screaming at the top of my lungs

Thank goodness I’m not as spontaneous as my thoughts. I was engineering a well for an African village when our business class got out the other day. I think this eventually led to a giant convention in Northern Africa where I gave an inspiring speech about putting wells in every village. My first thought was a bit more bona fide. I think I hit a wall though, when I became aware of the language barrier, and the fact that my limited budget would probably run out in a matter of months. This led me to getting corporate sponsors and such to support my great cause. In any case it’s pretty ridiculous what one can dream up in just 50 minutes. It doesn’t just stop at the end of class though. This goes on the entire day. I set up a hookah bar across from Watterson towers and gave a speech to the town committee on making the town of Normal more college oriented later that day. It’s a shame these thoughts will only ensue in my head and not in my actions.

Certainly I’m not alone when I dream up plans to start my own business or travel the world. Imagine being able to see people’s ambitions rather than their bodies. Our sight would be filled with ground-breaking ideas and thought that could vastly improve society’s current state. The world is flooded with potential, but a good majority of the people will never act on their instincts and drop what they are doing. I guess that includes me. My insides will swell and stretch with pipedreams ripping through my conscious until one day I’ll explode.

alright, alright, slow down

I've been in the strangest mood lately. Sunday nite I couldn't concentrate on my paper for the life of me so I took a nap around midnite and woke up an hour later. Sadly though the nap didn't shake my lack of motivation and I sat around some more. I've never been so easily distracted in my life. I think I ended up praying for some inspiration, which came later after eating a bag of Fritos. I sat down and spat out a few more pages early Monday morning. Funny how the paper was about my Lifevision; I should have just written about how I'll never do anything on time.

I think I start tutoring today...I'll have to call and see about that. This should be interesting; I've already been asked twice by random teachers to remove my hat. I swear they have hat radar because I honestly had only been wearing it for a couple seconds and was walking out of the building when I was stopped by a teacher. I've never understood rules like that, but I guess I'll comply if it helps them sleep easier. Anyways...

My problem with writing is that I don't have a goal set in mind when I sit down and start typing. I just sort of let my thoughts spill into my fingertips, where they stay until something triggers me to begin typing. Then by chance I'll think of something else I want to expand on and I'll start a new paragraph. I'll completely forget about what I was typing about and just put down, 'anyways...'. I'm guessing this is why I've never been able to complete any of the books I've started. I'll get past page 15 and try to link an idea that I wrote on page three, but I've drifted so far away from the main point that I'm stuck explaining everything over again. Actually I don't think I've ever even had a main point. That's also a problem. I get in these zones and write down everything that I'm thinking, but when I get out of my zone I'll look back and wonder what I was ever trying to accomplish in the first place...

there we stand about to fly

So I watched House of a Thousand Corpses the other day and was terribly disappointed. Not that I had high expectations for it in the first place, but I was expecting something else I guess. It reminded me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it's filmed really differently and they threw in a bunch of random clips of naked girls throughout the movie. It's interesting to think about movies like this actually having some truth to them, but at the same time it's hard to believe. Something which is so far fetched just makes me laugh when I watch it because I can't buy into the story. Gullible people probably have more fun with horror movies. Like Attack of the Killer Clowns; the movie is about alien clowns that come down to Earth. You can't honestly expect me to believe that this could actually happen, but for some people maybe it could. Clowns are kind of scary I guess.

Someone asked me the other day what my worst fear is. I hadn't thought about this in awhile and a lot of things ran through my head, but nothing really came to my immediate attention. After some more thought it came down to this: the one thing which makes me more afraid than anything is something bigger than myself. Something really big. Not like The Sears Tower or Jupiter, but something which is infinite. Something so powerful that one cannot even comprehend its size. I read somewhere that roughly 1,000,000 Earth's can fit into the Sun. That's unfathomable. Actually, it's fathomable because you can picture 1,000,000 Earth's fitting inside the Sun, but what about something you can't even picture or put into words? That is what I fear, and I suppose I'll call it God. I don't even know if fear is the right word; perhaps it's dread like awe. Anyways...

Over the weekend pretty much everyone went home so I decided I'd draw on the wall again:



Because it's pretty difficult to see anything, I put individual one's below.



Calvin


Pigpen


Sponge Bob


Cookie Monster

I want to fill the entire wall with drawings; I'll note that I wanted to do that last semester also. Maybe I'll follow through this time around. We'll see...