This soundtrack of
Water running down
Tempered glass
Has a hypnotizing
Rhythm that
Slows the beat
Of my New York
Heart enough to
Black out a
City block of
Synapses.
When street lights
Blink yellow
And department stores
Can't ring the
Next sale,
My city sleeps.
It's then
I peel back asphalt
Like a bitter rind
To expose the
Moist soil
And bite into
Nature.
Sweet juice cascades
From my pale, dry lips.
In a downpour of
Tranquility, a flock of
Five egrets join me,
undisturbed by the
Falling rain.
They forage through
Puddles and loose soil.
Orange beaks
Curve down
Like a long, thin
Snaggle tooth
For finding sustenance.
They feed their bodies.
I nourish my soul.
I want so surrender
To this simple life.
I want a Henry cabin
on a Walden pond
Where I can
Drink the rain
And enjoy every
Beat of my heart
Before it stops.
I want to know
My city song
Has a bridge to a
Chorus with the earth
Where I will one day
Retire smiling
Because I'll finally
Have come home.
I can't relate
To political debates
And concerns about
The economy
Because in my mind
There's an entire nation
Of thoughts,
Dense cities of conflict
That reside in
51 states of confusion
With delegates arguing
In a congress of
Concentric circles
Round and round
And round.
How can I care
About conflicts in
Conservative Muslim
Countries when
My thoughts can't escape
The gravity of
Me?
Like an earth,
Red magma flows
In my viens
And creates
A pull much
Greater than 9.8.
And that's why
You can't relate
To my selfish needs.
You're not living
In my atmosphere.
You don't orbit
My world.
But I'm thinking
Of starting a
Space program,
a National Agency
of Special Attention
Whose job it is
To find your
M-class planet.
Now, if only Congress
Could approve a
Budget.
Like two long distance
Runners we held on
To the end
Filled with
The numbing feeling
Of love's adrenalin.
You never felt
The first false step,
But I knew.
I was short of breath
And you were too.
But we kept lacing
Our shoes
Every morning
And night,
As each step
Frayed our shoestrings
And wore our souls.
Love eased
The pain of our
Condition
So we kept running
On our mission
To deliver the message.
Up pathless mountains,
Down jagged slopes,
Our conviction
Carried us until
Bruised bodies
And blistered feet
Could stand no more.
Crippled, we sat
Side by side,
The passion and life
Gone from
Body and mind.
Now our charge
Will never be complete,
To deliver this message
I dropped between
Our feet
That reads:
Love conquers all.
It's easy to overlook a city's distinct advantages. In Atlanta, it was the smell. It was so green that you could go anywhere, take a deep breath and feel life flowing into you from everywhere.
Now that I've moved back to Miami, I traded the trees and rivers and mountains for everglades, beaches and, yes, the sky. Sunsets and sunrises are Miami's trademark. Where ever you are, you can see the unobstructed skyline. And in that sky is a beautiful display of colors every day and night. Warm oranges, reds and yellows mix with cool blues, purples and greys. Clouds form interesting shapes. It's abstract artwork at its best courtesy of Gaiea. (Did I spell that right?)
I'm reminded of an episode of Heroes right now. It was about this boy that had the power to fly. He did so without worry of being caught because, he said, people rarely look up.
Driving to the beach the other day, I looked up and saw an airplane so low to the ground it was almost unreal. And then I remembered that this probably happens all the time and it's just that I never looked up.
There's a reason that I can take a pictureee clear to the other side of the pit at this concert. The two opening bands suck. Never in my life have I been so bored at a rock concert. Even Ben Gibberd, who is eight million times more mellow than this, got people moving more. The Secret Machines should really be kept a secret. I can't imagine that even a deaf mute would enjoy this music.
Since I arrived at Revolutions I have read three chapters of George Carlin's Napalm and Silly Putty and at least one chapter of Anthem by Ayn Rand.
God bless e-books. And thank god this band finally finished playing. People actually stood up to clap!
Bring on the Coheed!
The commonly accepted cliche is "home is where the heart is." That couldn't be more true. Throughout my life I have been very lucky. But there has been nothing better than knowing I have two homes. A majority of my life has been spent in Miami. I have friends and family there. But when I fell in love and moved eight hundred miles north to Atlanta I was out in the storm. Now, that's not a bad thing for me. I like rain and I like water and the excitement of new possibilities filled me with energy. I spent only two years in Atlanta and in that time i not only found my love, Amber, I also found my second home and my second famiily in the Atlanta Bujinkan.
This weekend has beeen an excellent time. I've learned much and reflected on some good memories. I have also taken time this weekend to live in the moment, absorbing every sound, smell and sight and locking them away in a wrinkle of my brain so I can remember it for tomorrow and all the days after that.
Damn I just don't know what to say other than I have people that love me and I thank God for that feeling. It's the geatest one in the world.
I can't wait to be home but I also can't wait to return here to my other home, my other friends and my other family.
Time and convinience are two reasons why its taken me close to a year to finish reading the Bourne Supremacy. One is I'm always on the move. I've spent much of my life at a desk learning and what I want to do most now is live. I wanted to act and experience because I felt I had none. Of course that wasn't true. I did have experience but because it came to me easier than it did to others I didn't feel jutified with it.
But I digress. Reading is something I haven't really done since college. And writing is another thing thats taken a backseat. In my closet I have a crate of poetry and literery scribbles, mostly bad, but some good. Anywho, lately I'm finding myself just stopping. Whether its to read or write or just breathe. I'm findiing it imporrtant to learn. And yes I've always known you never stop learniing, I agree, but you don't need school or an argument or a new foundation to learn. Learning can be done in ten minutes. Every new connection in your brain is learning. For example, the other day I was watching Pulp Fiction as Uma Therman's character was describing this tv pilot she was in. As she spoke it clicked in my mind that the tv pilot she described was the basic plotline to Kill Bill. Bam - I learned something. And not just another useless fact about Quentin Tarantino. I learned about recursive storytelling. That's what I call it when a story circles itself or references another story with similar elements.
So what's this all have to do with rediscovering the joy of reading? Well I've wanted a Kindle for some time because I've had little room for books or time for libraries in my life lately. Plus, I'm a geek. I need soomething quick and digital. However, I wasn't prepared to invest over $300 in something to read books when I wasn't reading that much anyway. So I do what I usually do when things peak my interest, I research them to death. And what did I find? Ebooks.
No, ebooks are not new and yes I'd heard about them before. But not until recently have I been comfortable with the idea of paying ten dollars for a pdf file. Well, about a week ago I decided to risk it and I haven't looked back. With an ebook, I can read anywhere. I just download the file onto my phone and open Mobi Pocket reader when I want to. I can add bookmarks and notes and read at my leasure. If I have five minutes, I can turn to my phone and read and learn. Ebooks make it easy to read, stop reading and pick up where you left off. And when I learned that lesson, I realized how easy it is to learn. Period. :)
It's amazing what you find on DIgg! :-) Who would have known Robert Ballard was really looking for sunken US subs. I wonder what kind of questions would have been raised if he HADN'T found the Titanic...hhhmmm.
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Titanic search was cover for secret Cold War subs mission
The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines.
When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of finding out what happened to USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.
Both of the United States Navy vessels sank during the 1960s, killing more than 200 men and giving rise to fears that at least one of them, Scorpion, had been sunk by the USSR.
Dr Ballard, an oceanographer, has admitted that he located and inspected the wrecks for the US Navy in top secret missions before he was allowed to search for the Titanic.
Only once he had used his new underwater robot craft to map the submarine wreck sites was he able to use it to crisscross the North Atlantic seabed to pinpoint the last resting place of the luxury liner. It meant he had only 12 days to find the Titanic.
“I couldn’t tell anybody,” he said. “There was a lot of pressure on me. It was a secret mission. I felt it was a fair exchange for getting a chance to look for the Titanic.
[READ MORE]Today is the long-awaited launch of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV. It's a game that has as much controversy as it does innovation. But there will be no controversy talk here. Today's message is strait - Rockstar has some ingenious marketers working for them.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Grand Theft Auto is the original sandbox-style game. That means a player's character can move anywhere about the landscape in front of them. You aren't restricted to one specific area of the city. If you see a building, you can drive to it. You can park in any parking garage. Pedestrians walk the streets and react to your character. It's a all-encompassing world for gamers to play with.
It's here in this virtual world that new advertising opportunities emerge. For example, because this is a virtual city, there are also virtual billboards. Why not have real ads for real companies on them? Crackdown (another sandbox-style game) did this. The streets were littered with real ads displayed on in-game billboards. It's a new take on an old idea. Today, we gloss over ads on the highways but when we're gaming we don't expect to see them. This new media outlet definitely stands out and is a symbol of the kind of out-of-the-box thinking marketers need to use.
And that brings me to Grand Theft Auto IV. A staple of the series has been the in-game radio stations. They play music from real-world bands that are mostly unknown to the general population. Well it's now possible to purchase the music you hear in-game. While playing Grand Theft Auto IV, if your character hears a song you like, you character can send a text message from his phone in the game to the radio station playing the song. All information necessary to purchase a DRM-free copy of the song from Amazon.com is then sent to your Rockstar Social Club account. Neat huh?
I wonder what other interactive opportunities GTA IV will bring. And outside of the GTA universe, what kinds of new ideas will we see develop to merge the digital and the real? There's already Second Live and a host of other massively multiplayer online role playing games. Now mainstream multipayer games are following suite, finding new ways to bring people together in a digital world.
Matrix anyone? :)
