w00t and whatnot! Same ole drill, Hillary opens for voting and new week is up.

Graffiti

Time is a fickle thing. It goes on with or without any of us, yet it dictates every single one of our lives. “Life is short” they say, yet I still feel like I have lived many lifetimes in my short 21 years of existence. How can this be? I ask myself that question many times, if only I could get answers. I ask myself many questions that have yet to be answered. Like the ever present “Why am I here?” or along the same lines “What is my purpose in life?” Maybe I have no purpose and I am simply here to exist. But that cannot be! There has to be a reason, right?

My existence could be nothing more than to live, love, and learn. But I have a problem accepting that. I have so many things going through my head on the way things should be, but no one listens. To the world I am just another 21 year old trying to survive. I see so much more in myself though. I know I have potential to be something great, I just don’t know what it is, or how to get there. Some say to me “Go back to school!” Why? I have never liked school. That’s why I quit in the first place. I prefer to learn on my own. It is much easier for me. I absorb knowledge easier on my own. So to me, that is out of the question. I think many times about being famous, almost to the point of obsession at times. ‘If only I could start a band, yeah! That would be fantastic!’ But then the logic side of my brain overshadows the imaginative part, and I am left with the knowledge that it is hard to get a band into the big time, no matter how good ones message is. What about being an actor? I could do that, right? Nah, I am no good at acting. That’s why I quit drama club. What could my claim to fame be? Well I guess being famous is out of the question.

It’s time for a little story. My last job. I loved that job, it was easy, I was comfortable, I was making decent money, but I got fired. Want to guess why? “You are too smart to work here.” That is what my boss told me. Too smart? How could that be? I am getting fired for being too smart?! I was in shock. He had told me about this vicious circle that he saw me in. I was damn smart, but had no pieces of paper to back it up. So I kept going around and around and not living up to my full potential. So he fires me. I still don’t understand that and I am still quite angry over it.

So I am back searching for my purpose in life. My mother has told me time and time again that she still hasn’t figured out what she wants to do in life. She is only talking about employment though. I am talking about so much more. Sure I want to find employment that I am happy with, but I want to find a reason for being. This existence is so simple, yet I make it so complicated. Or is it the other way around? I’m not sure anymore.

I have always asked too many questions for as long as I can remember. I used to get in trouble in school for “disrupting the class” for asking questions about a certain topic that the teacher was discussing, but because whatever teacher I had at the time couldn’t move on because I wanted questions answered, I was disrupting the class. It made no sense to me then, and still doesn’t. It’s no wonder I dislike school as much as I do.

Yet another question that I am sure many of you have asked yourselves, and one I ask on a daily basis is “Will I ever fall in love?” Some of you are already experiencing the bliss known as love, and need not ask yourselves that question anymore, but there are so many more of us out there who are quite alone. I have been in love once, the most amazingly wonderful and horribly terrible experience at the same time. She was so wonderful. Everything I could have asked for and more, only one problem, she saw me as a toy, someone she could play around with until she got sick of and then threw me out like trash. I don’t really blame her as much as I blame myself. Sure, she did indeed string me along, but I knew it was happening and didn’t want to admit it to myself. Because of that one experience, it shot my self-esteem; my self worth went right down the drain. I went into a period of heavy drinking and smoking a whole lot of weed. I thought those two things were the best way to cure my depression. I realized I was wrong soon enough and stopped. But the damage to my very being had been done. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw nothing but ugly. Everything about me was ugly. I beat up on myself quite a bit. I had a few fleeting relationships, and in them I needed reassurance that who ever it was really did care for me. They always ended badly, and I can honestly say I have never had a “good” relationship, what defines a good relationship anyway? Doesn’t matter right now.

Let me get to my point about love. Here I am, I’ve met someone absolutely wonderful. Someone who makes me smile just by thinking about her, someone who I can’t wait to talk to, and no matter what we talk about, I enjoy every last second of it. I am scared shitless. I haven’t felt this way in a very long time, yet here I am feeling it. I don’t know what to do, I suppose that is why I am asking all these questions to myself yet again. Trying to reevaluate everything, and make sure there is nothing wrong with me. I have gotten advice from people that I should just go with the flow, and let things happen. I have a real hard time doing that. I want to make sure I am doing the right thing, I want to know she is the one for me. I will not know either of those things right now. No one can answer those questions. They won’t be answered until it’s the right time, or until it’s too late.

So it all comes back to time. Wounds heal over time. All questions answer with time. I guess that’s the downfall to being an impatient person, time never moves fast enough to satisfy my need to know. Jim Morrison said it best. This is the strangest life I have ever known.

Now let's get some more pics in there people!

Due to my own ignorance I suppose, I had entirely expected a romantic comedy. What else does Julia Roberts do, after all? I knew the basics of the plot, that it involved a kidnapping and Mexico, but I was thinking Life Less Ordinary, not Get Shorty. So let’s just say that 10 minutes into the picture, my expectations were totally dashed.

But then again, this movie is FULL of surprises.

The Mexican stars Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini (playing, guess what, a criminal), Bob Balaban (a terrific character actor that I remember most as the music teacher in Waiting for Guffman and the quirky scientist sidekick in Altered States), and a whole lot of Mexicans. I gain more and more respect for Brad Pitt with every movie I seem him in. I really appreciate the chances he takes with his career, and he plays terrifically in this film, as a born loser named Jerry (think Mr. White meets The Dude). It’s a lot of fun just watching him in this movie. Julia Roberts is adequate as Sam, and James Gandolfini (who plays Leroy) is perfect in a role so juicy it would have been an absolute crime to not give it his all. While the acting in the picture is great, the real fun involves the story.

Sam and Jerry have been lovers for a long time now. Yet their passion for each other is so great that they drive each other batshit whenever they aren’t fucking or going to marriage counselors (despite the fact that they aren’t married). What doesn’t help the situation any is the fact that for five years now, Jerry has been involved in a life of crime. Mostly just acting as a courier for a big time criminal named Margolis who is currently running his whole operation from a prison cell, in part because it was sort of Jerry’s fault that the guy got busted in the first place. We never see Margolis until the very end, though as much as he is talked up during the course of the film you just KNOW it’s going to be a cameo played by a really famous actor. Margolis’ face on the outside is a guy named Nalin (Balaban), a weasely looking fucker who tells Jerry that he has only one more job to do before he has worked off his debt to Margolis (the debt being, got him sent up the river for five years). All Jerry has to do is go to Mexico, find a kid named Beck who has a very expensive antique gun, and bring Beck and the gun back to Nalin. This, of course, does not go over well with Samantha, as the two had planned on going to Vegas to finally get married. She informs him that if he goes on this job, the two are over and she is going to Vegas herself. He informs her that he doesn’t consider not dying to be “selfish”, and really has no choice in the matter. So the two go their separate ways. In retrospect, Roberts and Pitt probably only spend about a total of ten minutes together on screen, but the story of their romance is thoroughly explored nonetheless.

So Jerry goes to Mexico and Sam goes to Vegas.

In Mexico, Jerry has a pretty easy time finding Beck and the gun. The gun in this picture is not just a McGuffin though, it turns out to have a story of its own, one that Beck relates part of upon meeting Jerry and handing over the gun, and a story that gets retold several times throughout the film, each time adding a new part to it. Essentially, the gun is said to be cursed. This holds true for Jerry, as within minutes of acquired the antique and Beck, things start to go horribly wrong for Jerry and he enters into a downward spiral of detrimental coincidences, poor judgement, people fucking each other over, and just plain old fashioned bad luck.

Things aren’t going so hot for Sam, either. En route to Vegas, she gets intercepted by Leroy (Gandolfini), a notorious hit man and kidnapper, who informs her that the Powers That Be suspect Jerry has nabbed the gun and is making off like a bandit with it. And, since they know that Jerry and Sam were in a relationship…well, as Leroy says, “he who controls the girl, controls the gun.” That is, of course, until Sam informs Leroy that she kicked Jerry to the curb before he left. At which point Leroy’s role quickly switches from Kidnapper to Marriage Counselor.

This is not a cut and paste sort of a plot. Trust me. It reminded me a lot of movies like Snatch, Get Shorty, and U-Turn. A plot device at every corner, an unexpected event every five minutes that completely changes everything, at least until 5 minutes later when it gets usurped by another out of the blue event. The movie surprises you time after time after time, and the surprises don’t stop until the credits roll. The surprises aren’t cheap either, you don’t feel cheated. Forgive me but I’m a sucker for great plot devices.

And the thing I think I like the most about the movie is that it has amazing depth but maintains its light hearted tone the whole time. The movie is a comedy, to be sure, and a pretty funny one at that. But everything is explored; the characters aren’t two-dimensional throw-aways. Leroy the hit man, a role that in most movies would be cookie cutter, has some of the film’s most surprisingly emotional moments. That sums up a lot about the film. Part thriller, part crime story, part comedy, and part romance. That’s a pretty tough hybrid to pull off. This film does it.

It isn’t perfect. There are a few things that could have been done better I think. The romance between Roberts and Pitt isn’t as believable as it could have been, and that’s pretty important to the plot. And one of the important characters in the film, Nalin, works with pretty two-dimensional motives. But on the whole, I thought this was a helluva fine film. I appreciate it when I say to myself in a film “Wow, how the FUCK are they going to get out of this one?” then five minutes later, “Ahhh, hahahahaha. Sweet.” Five minutes after that, “NOW how the fuck are they going to get out of THIS one!?”

On the whole, I give it four beers out of five.

Since I live in Japan, I am not privy to a lot of current US news. I did however get to keep track of the recent Californian power crisis. I don’t know the current status of the their power grid, but I hope that you were all scared shitless by it.

I argued earlier that humanity has messed up the environment so bad that we are not going to be able to pull ourselves out of the tailspin we have gone into. I don’t think that the end is entirely inevitable, but since there is not a massive immediate effort to switch into a sustainable mode of living and producing, I am pretty sure that we will end up running the system into the ground.

Opponents of my first article claimed that human ingenuity would bail us out. Humans are incredibly adaptive and technologically adept, they said, and therefore will be able to surmount any challenges that may arrive. My contention is that the types of solutions needed in the current situation cannot be remedied overnight. Fundamentally our energy use is destructive and finite. We are quickly approaching the end of this finite limit. When that day arrives, there is no more power, anywhere. As California illustrated, new energy cannot be quickly produced.

California serves as a perfect example. When they began to run out of energy, they couldn’t just flip a switch and start generating solar power or geothermal energy. Even traditional power plants take time to build. California was able to survive by leeching power from neighboring regions, and still had to have rolling blackouts. What happens when the neighboring regions cannot fill in the gap?

The West is a bit better off than the East because of nuclear and hydroelectric power. The East is primarily coal-fueled, as far as I know. When the coal runs out, they are screwed.

The answer is to begin building a new renewable energy infrastructure RIGHT NOW. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening. People seem to think that we can just wait until the last minute and then begin to develop these alternative energy sources. Hell, even if we don’t go solar or geothermal, it still takes a long time to build new dams or nuclear power plants.

It is also disturbing to me to hear the Bush administration blaming environmental policy for the Californian energy crisis. It seems that they are going to use that as an excuse to relax some of the environmental limitations on energy procurement, in effects polluting the whole system even more while doing nothing to remedy the inevitable crash. Pure capitalistic irresponsibility.

In 1997 (I think), there was an international conference in Kyoto, Japan about global warming and emissions. The United States agreed to reduce emissions to something along the lines of 10% below 1991 levels. Since that time, emissions have increased by 4% or so. The European Union has decreased their emissions, but the U.S. has actually increased their amount of pollution. My details may be wrong here, but the gist is correct. (By the way, the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but uses 25% of the world’s energy.)

It has been argued that it would be economically impossible to achieve these levels of emissions in the United States. My perspective on it is that if we were really committed to cleaning up the environment, reducing global warming risks and developing a sustainable energy base, we would have at least began a concerted effort to develop alternative renewable non-polluting energy sources. But we didn’t. And with Dubya in the Oval Office, we won’t. That’s at least another 4 years of fiddling while Rome burns.

Unless the whole world immediately begins the switch to renewable/ sustainable energy sources, there is a very ugly crunch waiting in the future, probably in the next few decades. Rising population, global warming, and decreasing resources all point in the same direction.

I don’t relish the idea of having our entire energy grid collapse, but I really think that it will. California showed us that it can. Unfortunately, I suspect that utility companies will not seek to improve the quality of the energy they produce, but rather seek to increase quantity by whatever means possible. The problem with this is that it generally contributes to global warming and depends on resources that are fast dwindling. Pouring gasoline on the fire, can’t you see? They will temporarily reduce the pressure on the energy grid, but this remedy is doomed to fail sooner rather than later because it hastens the overall speed of pollution and consumption of non-renewable resources. A responsible solution would be to force modern society to live within current energy production while we develop and build clean renewable energy sources.

There will not be time to play catch up when the system starts to fail.

I am not predicting the end of humanity; people will survive. There will be a lot of pain, suffering, and death, but people will endure. Current society will not.

This week's theme is... BREAK-UP ART.

This is the art inspired by a break-up. When you were at your lowest what did you create? Did it show your emotions at the time? Did it help to take away some of the pain? Show us!!

Thanks!

CAL

(Check it out here!

This week's theme is... BREAK-UP ART.

This is the art inspired by a break-up. When you were at your lowest what did you create? Did it show your emotions at the time? Did it help to take away some of the pain? Show us!!

Thanks!

CAL

(Check it out here!)

and for the record Wasted P got jacked!

Graffiti

There wasn’t any view from his room. Two stories above an empty street that looked off, that led off into nothing.

Alone on a mattress, midnight and on, he cried. Twisting around, pulling square blankets over himself a hundred times and each time they didn’t quite fit, didn’t quite keep him warm enough. He’d shiver. His stomach muscles would tense up; strain against his whole body as he sobbed.

He’d sob... Sob until he had nothing left inside of him. Until all of his loneliness had overwhelmed him, stolen his energy, and left him dry.

Exhausted, curled up into a tight ball, he’d finally begin to sleep.

To dream...

...about his potential. His eyes would open, and in his mind he could see the beauty, the wonders of his world. His imagination would bend around; configure a plethora of shapes and colors he did not know, but was thirsty to watch, to see. Hundreds of permutations, variations of themes, ideas, concepts both absurd and consistent, both useful and useless would play themselves out inside of him, within him, gratifying his mindless satisfaction.

His mind would project his lack, all that he did lack along the inner walls of his skull. Like a theater with only one seat with only one chair with only one single view without any relation without any perspective other than his own inner voice. He wouldn’t talk he’d only listen and the movies kept playing but he never spoke and he never made comment he’d only observe these things around him without participating in his life in this life in his own life his only life.

Four walls. Confined inside of four cold, gray walls for three years. Days, weeks, months and now these years had passed and he hadn’t moved from his confines. He’d work listless jobs that he never kept for long, meet people that he didn’t like, share nothing of himself and his life with anyone. Just lock himself away, hurt and alone, dying slowly inside of four walls, and four cold, gray walls without any view of anything other than the insides of his atrophied imagination.

His alarm shocked him into day, into another day. A day bright with windows, with opportunity...

...but his eyes were looking inward at the darkness and not towards the open sky, splendid and warm.