There are days when love is not enough, when you need justice, too. Those are the hopeless days when it’s best to hole up in solitude so you don’t hurt or kill anyone you might later regret having hurt or killed. When such days become frequent, it’s time to find wilderness. Wilderness can be inside or outside and is full of dangerous beasts, toxic plants, and hostile terrain either way. Tread lightly near us on such days. We will pounce.
–Samael Gyre, opening of “Nightmare Days On Autumn’s Cusp”
And me on the inner ice, out where it’s thin enough to see the hungry whales under me.
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Every woman knows those who look at her want her. Every man knows no one wants him. Therein lies the dichotomy of our desperation to connect just once, even for a single fucking second.
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“Close to the Edge” by Yes. The opening. Right the fuck now. Oh yes, it’s how I feel. “Ahh.” That frenetic guitar figure repeating as the bass plays lead, the interjected harmonic shrieks of existential pain. Damn.
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In my rock&roll youth I wrote a song called “Friends”. It had a lovely Biercian quality, with lines such as: “Friends pour your drinks, then they watch you drive…” and “Stay clear of me, I’ve got friends…” Naturally, I cannot find a copy now, it being, what, 40 years down the noose. Wish I could peg it. Hell, I think I still remember the chord structure.
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“If you want them to do something, put it in terms they can understand and motivate them with greed, fear, and hate.” / Monty the Pith’
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Asked what the most romantic tale ever was, I said: It will be one of impossible love across immutable barriers, unrequited love, or some other bittersweet thwarting of the lovers involved. Oh, and according to Poe, it must involve the tragic death of a beautiful young woman.
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Most of all to decoy our attention from the looming maw of darkness.
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“…the world always presents the next diversion, the next elaborate distraction from the problems that vex.” / the ELEMENTARY Holmes.
— I find it does not, and have no drug addiction to fall back on.
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What every writer feels:
We have spilled much ink, you and I, in our discussion of human connection, and we’re no closer to understanding than we were when the correspondence began. I feel as if I am standing on one side of a wide chasm, shouting across, and wondering if the response I hear comes from you, or if it is my own voice echoing back to me. It seems to me, on my side of the canyon, that the search for unity with another is the font of much of the world’s unhappiness. I watch as Watson, eager as ever to extract some meaning from prevailing societal conventions, endures a series of curated mating rituals, it seems to me that she is incrementally less content each time she returns from one.
I conduct myself as though I am above matters of the heart, chiefly because I have seen them corrode people I respect. But in my candid moments, I sometimes wonder if I take the stance I do because love, for lack of a better word, is a game I fail to understand, so I opt not to play. After all, if I truly had the purity of all my convictions, I would not regret so many of the things I have done. Nor what I persist, against so many of my better instincts, in this correspondence. I find you a challenge, one that, in spite of all what you’ve done, continues to stimulate. So the conversation, futile though may finally be, continues, and we are left to wonder: have we simply failed to find the answers to the questions that preoccupy us, or can they not be answered at all? Fortunately, for both of us, the world always presents the next diversion, the next elaborate distraction from the problems that vex.
/ Sherlock Holmes in ELEMENTARY, episode 212, The Diabolical Kind, opening voice-over.
All is One, No Separation
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We scattered my father’s ashes at a lake that he loved in the western Pennsylvania hills. It was a rainy and overcast day. We did not get there until dusk. Mist was rising, making everything ghostly. We scattered his ashes in a field near a woods. Out of the misty wood stepped a stag, to watch us. Then a doe stepped out to stand beside him. That is where we had scattered my mother’s ashes a few years earlier. All of us faintly heard bagpipes. It was a magical mysterious moment.
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