“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.” -Lemony Snicket

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

I asked you a question, 

But I didn’t need you to reply. 

Is it getting heavy? 

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you are riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief, and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts, put your visions to reality. Wake up and Live! 

— Bob Marley 

Aux Champs Élysées 

A thousand years is but an instant. There’s nothing new, nothing different; same pattern over and over. The same clouds, same music, the same things I felt an hour or an eternity ago. There’s nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember, this happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible knowing that it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, filled with joy and sorrow and laughter, empathy, compassion, and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from, and how I became human, why I hung around, and now my final departure’s scheduled. This way out, escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but Infinity.

"L’avenir, fantôme aux mains vides, qui promet tout et qui n’a rien !"
Victor Hugo

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturn Sun

Our critique began as all critiques begin: with doubt. Doubt became our narrative. Ours was a quest for a new story, our own. And we grasped toward this new history driven by the suspicion that ordinary language couldn’t tell it. Our past appeared frozen in the distance, and our every gesture and accent signified the negation of the old world and the reach for a new one. The way we lived created a new situation, one of exuberance and friendship, that of a subversive microsociety, in the heart of a society which ignored it. Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication. The adventure of finding it and losing it. We the unappeased, the unaccepting continued looking, filling in the silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. Driven forward by the fact that no matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible. And, given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one.

"Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill."
Muhammad Ali
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]