Invincible

You’re invincible.

Invincible.

I don’t think anyone realizes that.
Oh sure, this body might stop working, but you'll get another.
For all practical purposes you are immortal, indestructible.
You’re all walking around on eggshells like you’ve got something to lose here and you’ve got to hold on to it.
It’s burning away in your hands, don’t you get it?
Don’t you feel your fragile body quickly giving way?
Don’t you see forever stretching on ahead of you?

Forever has already begun.

You might think that gets you off the hook. It doesn’t.
You are going to exist forever, got that? Forever. What are you going to do about it?

What you do now has eternal ramifications for you.
And those you live with.
Who will you align yourself with?
Who are you entrusting with yourself forever?
Immortality can be a horrible place.
Eternity can be damnation.
Alone in the dark forever.

Unless.

You gave yourself to Someone besides yourself.

Think about it.

Forever has already begun.

Red Flight

Airplane rides are essentially tiny morsels of communism.


Someone somewhere has complete control of where you're going. You depend on this someone for food, water, even air. Enforcers patrol the streets/aisles, making sure everyone stays in line. They even tell you when you can use the bathroom.

For so many hours, you are part of the collective, a commune, and you abandon your individual rights and comfort for the betterment and safety of the group. The only difference, I suppose, is that instead of working in some government approved work place, you are simply asked to "enjoy your flight."

Death, Rain, Dirt

Rain

Laid down in earth

Where the death of life is washed away

By dirt and water all is clean

There is no tragedy

In going back to your roots

Roots of the tree

That cradles your casket

And rocks your sleeping skeleton

Home again

From your long sojourn in foreign lands

On concrete platforms

Some factory

Above spinning wheels

Branches

Beckoning arms

A blur beyond glass and calendar events

Pass away pass away

Soon your sorrows will be washed by rain

Pass away pass away

Death shall decompose and you will be home

-Death, Rain, Dirt

(Death never killed anybody)

The Hypothetical Shedding Light On Yourself

What if I took you to a place you've been before.
An office? The street? A grocery store? The DMV?

What if I hypnotized you.
But, instead of telling you what to do,
what if I set you free?

To do exactly what you long to do,
but have learned not to.
Your inner child unleashed.

What would you do?
Who are you really?

Would you dance?
Would you explore?
Would you destroy?
Would you rearrange things?
Build?
Hide?
Create?
Stockpile?
Clean?
Embrace?
Would you paint everything blue?

Would you hurt people?
Burn everything?

Would you do anything at all?

Confidence

A MacDonald's drive through. I roll down my window and hand over the money.

"Umm, I-I think that's enough?" I stammer.

The twenty-something with greasy hair stuffed under a rumpled cap gazes back at me.

She seems equally unsure about the existence of the money.

After a moments pause, she cautiously lifts it from my hand.

She avoids my eyes, just as I avoid hers. She counts the money and puts it in the drawer.

I shift uneasily in my seat. I reach up to scratch my head, but change my mind and put my hand back in my lap.

Announcing the amount of change I've earned, she holds it out.

With a start, I realize that she wants me to take the money from her. I rush to cut the awkward silence short and almost knock the change from her hand.

"Have a nice day." She says. She attempts a nervous smile.

She glances at me for a millisecond, uneasy, then spins back to her register.


Trust me friend, I speak with experience when I say:

People feel more comfortable around you if you act with confidence.



The reason for this has eluded me for most of my life. However, after the experience conveyed above, I have a hypothesis which I believe is logical.

Every person on earth knows, deep in their subconscious, that someday, the world will end.

That's right.

And this knowledge creates a tiny anxiety in the back of their minds. Like an itch on the back of their neck. Or a dog barking incessantly four houses down while they are trying to do their taxes. The anxiety bothers them, but not quite enough for them to know it's there.

When they converse with someone who behaves with confidence, they get the impression that this person knows that the world won't be ending just yet. They gather that this person must have somehow come upon knowledge of the inner workings of the universe. Therefore, that nagging anxiety about the end of the world is momentarily put to rest.

However, when they speak to someone like me, who acts uneasy and confused, that nagging anxiety is confirmed. They begin to worry that this person might know something they don't.

Fear builds up inside them. Perhaps the world will end now... or now! Goodness!

They long to speak to that confident person again so they can stop imagining the parking lot opening up and swallowing the entire restaurant.




So that's how it happens. I'm pretty much positive. Maybe.

Self-Disciplined

This happens almost every workday morning.

I do my paperwork at home. In the living room. On the couch.
My wife is usually still quietly dozing in the bedroom, happy and unaware of my activities.

I sit at my computer. I open the correct program. The work program. The boring.

In the corner of my desktop, the tiny Firefox icon winks at me.

"Hey man." The little orange fox whispers. "What's up? Hey, you've got plenty of time. That boring work stuff will take care of itself. Let's have some fun!"

I'm supposed to be responsible, I work with kids after all.

But I am powerless to resist. "Okay." I say to the fox. "We can have a little fun. But then, I will do the work!"

"Sure you will..." Whispers the orange fox wryly as I click on him.

Happiness and joy dance across the screen. Fun. Laughter. Unicorns.

I look at the clock over and over, but the time just doesn't register in my mind. I have been sucked in and my brain can conceive of nothing but colorful pictures and funny blogs.

After several hours, a sudden, cold realization overwhelms me.

I glance at the clock, but this time, the clock has had enough. It leaps out at me and grabs me by the ears. It looks me straight in the eyes with its shining digits and big 'PM'. It shakes me like a rag doll, screaming "You are a horrible person!"

I awake from my blissful stupor in panic. The things I should have been doing trample over me like a stampede of failure. Somewhere, the little orange fox snickers.

I try to think of a way to save my morality, but there is no hope. I awake and discover that I've committed the unpardonable sin. I am reduced to a pathetic mass of self-pity and disgust weeping in the corner.

Slowly I realize. I have destroyed the entire day. Due to my incompetence, the delicate balance of existence has been ruined. The time I wasted has created a vacuum in the space-time continuum which, once it implodes in on itself, will form a black hole to engulf the earth and crush everyone into tiny pebbles.

In short, the day is surely ruined.

I wander the house, in anguish and mourning, praying hundreds of apologies to God and begging for a way out of this truly hopeless situation.

Eventually, I wander into the bedroom where my wife sleeps.

I cast myself upon the bed. I cast my limp arm upon her. She rolls over.

I moan. "I've ruined everything. The world is ended. I just came to say I love you before the world is engulfed in chaos."

With her eyes still tightly closed, she mumbles something.
"But I made you an enchilada for your lunch today..."

The weight of failure and hopelessness slowly slides from my shoulders.

Truly, I have been set free.

I burst from the room with renewed vigor. I dance to my duties and effortlessly glide through all my work. I defeat the boring, and crush that sneaky little orange fox beneath my new-found chastity. In one short hour, it is finished.

My wife slowly opens the bedroom door and pads to the stove to make tea.

I embrace her and declare. "You've saved the world!"


And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why my wife is a superhero.

World Domination

I am often guilty of critiquing the behavior of those ambitious souls trying to conquer the world in cinema.

"You put them all in the same prison cell?"
"Why would you have such a deep hole in your evil lair?"
"There's no reason to go on gloating for so long!"

So now I will put my keyboard where my mouth is.


30 Rules I Will Follow When I Dominate The World


1) My evil lair will have a licensed clinical therapist on staff.

2) I will not allow any canopies, fruit stands, or hay bails to remain anywhere near my 100 story tower off doom. When I push you, you WILL hit the pavement, and I will hear that wonderful *splat* sound.

3) I will increase the morale of my minions by using a bright and cheery color palate for my barracks' interior.

4) I will never murder anyone with children. Those cute little bundles of joy have a tendency to become vengeful when they grow up.

5) Speaking of children, I will do my best not to procreate. And if I must, the little brutes will be brain-washed thoroughly to prevent them from betraying me the moment some dashing hero type comes along trying to stop me.

6) Any adviser who says "Nothing can stop us now!" will be shot.

7) I will never, under any circumstances, turn myself into a snake, dragon, or giant insect. A snow leopard is a possibility, but only after careful consideration.

8) Also, growing twenty times normal size is usually a bad idea. The bigger you are, the easier it is to ram a ship into you.

9) I will enslave entire tribes of natives *before* I rip up their forests to fuel the fires of industry.

10) Pacts or deals with demons, ghosts, witches, or anyone more evil than I are strictly off limits. Doubly so if they involve the state of my eternal soul in any way.

11) If any heroic type challenges me to a mono-e-mono duel to prove that I'm not a coward, I will command my minions to blast him into oblivion. Perhaps I AM a coward. But I'm alive and he's dead. That's got to count for something.

12) If ever I suspect that rebellion is afoot amongst my subjects, I will not become paranoid and I will not persecute those whom I mistrust. I will throw a grand party and give possible turncoats extra large pieces of cake.

13) Of course, those pieces of cake will be poisoned.

14) All of my power will never ever be vested in any animate or inanimate object that is not myself. (I don't care how pretty the blasted ring is.)

15) My enemies will never be considered dead unless I personally witness their death. Or, even better, witness their cremation.

16) No self-destruct mechanisms.

17) Evil people make bad allies. Therefore, I will ally myself only with infinitely loyal goody-two-shoes. Infinitely loyal and infinitely dense.

18) My evil lair and the vicinity thereof will have absolutely NO precipices. All windows will be shatterproof. No pits of doom. No volcanoes. Those who stand in my way will die from bullets or not at all.

19) My entire ventilation system will be electrified. Any courageous rebel who's seen Mission Impossible will be fried.

20) If there are any prophecies on which my victory is contingent, I will hire a grammar and rhetoric scholar to analyze the prophecy for possible loop-holes. (For instance, if no MAN can defeat me, but I'm completely vulnerable to WOman, I need to know about that.)

21) The hero, his comic relief, his love interest, his faithful dog, his cute critter, and his great-great grandfather/mentor will not be imprisoned in the same cell. Or even the same prison.

22) I will not engage in a musical number before striking the final blow against my enemy. Shoot first, sing later.

23) If my doomsday device requires a certain period of time with which to complete its task, I will always always always LIE and tell the heroes that they have much more time than they actually have.

24) I will not allow "harmless" natives to continue living near any of my important installations. Even if they look like teddy-bears. Especially if they look like teddy-bears.

25) Overconfidence IS a weakness. I will hire someone to insult me for thirty minutes everyday.

26) Computers do not need self-awareness or the ability to make decisions on their own. If that means I have to do math in my head, so be it.

27) I will keep a healthy sense of perspective. If some goofy flying kid feeds my hand to a crocodile, maybe I'll let it go after the first few years of seeking revenge.

28) There will be railings on all my cat walks.

29) My minions will wear helmets which display their entire face. Not only will they probably live longer, but I won't have pesky heroes trotting around stealthy-like in disguise.

30) In the unfortunate event in which I fail and a hero defeats me, I will not throw my life away for one final, foolish, and probably fatal blow. I will scamper off, build up an army of mutant alligators, and try try again.

Ambitions

My brother has a bucket list the length of a constitutional amendment.
When it comes to living, I don't know what all the fuss is about.
Everyone else is doing it too.
As long as my life appeases God and myself, I'm happy with it.


I have three ambitions for my life:

1) Write a novel.

2) Learn Kung Fu.

3) ... I forgot.