wonderer

"I mean... I don't know if you've experienced this but... once you've left a place very special to you a couple of times, it's hard to feel the same way afterwards. It seems a little implausible to expect that every departure will be equally memorable or momentous; every farewell more poignant than the last. It seems more likely that every time you have to gather yourself together into a box and unfasten the little hooks and anchors that tie us to each other, the better you get at leaving less of yourself behind. You know how it goes by now. What to expect. You dread it less -- and also mourn it less. When the time comes, you separate yourself from your surroundings; efficiently, neatly, quietly and without fuss. You do this over and over and over again - till at last, when it is time to leave this world, you, like a visitor at a museum, rising from her bench, take one last look and exit through the gift shop without a word."

Rückkehrunruhe

Japan trip. also describes the come down after religious experience

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i miss you / shadow proves the sunshine

make a mix cd for everyone you're going to miss

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It's a strange thing listening to the songs you did when you were 15 and realising you are now the age the singer was when they wrote / sang that song. You're now where they were then, experiencing the same emotions, feeling the same vibe, still relating, still connected, on the same page. Feels a little like coming full circle. It's like in interstellar, where the protagonist's journey ahead into the unknown future is only possible because he's already been there before. From that point, looking back from the perspective of the songwriter, having sung the same song for so long, the same song the songwriter laboured over and poured their soul into, is it possible that you have experienced the same things as them, thought the same thoughts? It makes you wonder: did I love these songs because of who i was already; who I was always going to be -- or am I who I am now because I loved these songs

atropos cascade

"think of it this way. Everyone has an invisible anvil over their head. It weighs as much as you do initially then after the age of 16, you add one kg for every year you grow older. It has 100 ropes that suspend it above your head and for every year after the age of 16 one string gets cut or withers away. These represent your body's healthiness and physical reserve. The heavier the anvil gets the harder it is for the ropes to prevent it from falling. The fewer ropes there are, the more likely the anvil is to fall. It could all snap at once and fall and crush you in an instant, or it could lower gradually crushing you by degrees, first you feel a pressure on your head, then find you can't lift your head up any more, then you're bent over by an immense weight you can't seem to fight, eventually you are crawling and if the anvil doesn't fall completely it pins you to the floor absolutely until even your lungs are unable to expand. This is just a metaphor mind you. Risk factors: Everything you do to harm your body, adds weight to the anvil and subtracts from your ropes. Smoker for 60 years? add 60 kg to the anvil. Sunbathing without sunscreen for 10 years, add 10 years to your anvil and subtract 10 ropes.

Eventually everyone gets crushed. Some go suddenly, some go gradually. We can't predict the ones who go suddenly, but by counting the ropes and weighing your anvil, we can guess who it might happen to. If you have this condition and these risk factors, chances are you'll go downhill rapidly. If you have this many ropes and an anvil that weighs this much, it'll snap pretty soon - or not. That's all it is - an educated guess. We can't predict the future. We can only gauge the tension and calibre of the fibre and estimate how many ropes you have left. We can't tell you how many years or hours. We can do things in the short term that prop the anvil up somewhat - stenting, surgery, slipshod makeshift ways of strengthening ropes that are on the verge of breaking. We've gotten very good at recognising where the ropes are weak and how to fix them. But we can't make them unbreakable, and we can't add ropes, and we can't make the anvil any lighter. Every year you will still lose one.

Now imagine the invisible anvil analogy, but this time there's one hanging over each and every one of your organs. Your brain. Your kidneys. Your heart. Your liver. Your skin. Your gut. And how your body requires all of them to be working in tandem to survive. How your survival depends on the miracle of them all communicating and cooperating and operating exactly as planned. Your organs are the ropes that suspend the grand anvil over the thing you call yourself. Once they start failing, it's only a matter of time."

this guy gets it

kakistos andron

"but i think... the ones who don't struggle a little bit in the beginning.. they don't get to learn the lessons that will get them all the way to the end."

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is the lioness evil for killing the zebra, or noble for feeding her cubs?

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"how much detail did you think God put into making the world?"

"what?"

"as in - how much did He actually determine. Did he decide from the very beginning - this kid is going to spill his ice cream on Saturday which will lead to his dad being late for work and Trump winning the U.S. general election. Or did he just decide, okay so this is how ionic bonds work and here's this thing called natural selection. I think we can call it a day."

"Um..."

"If you take a microscope to everything and try and figure out how everything works - how desperately vast and intricate and interconnected all of life is... from chemistry to our biochemistry to our brains to our societies and cultures... it makes you wonder - if intelligent design is real - then how much of it was designed and how much of it is just letting the program run its programming. How much patching and debugging did God do.. to keep everything running as it should? Do you think he defined only the rules that govern the limitations and capacity of the human brain so that we could develop language and talk to each other... or do you think he mapped out what I was going to think of today and talk to you about and dictate every single word in the sentence I'm speaking now? How hands on of a creator do you think He is?"

"I... I don't know?"

"Me neither. But it got me thinking... maybe eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil didn't cause sin to enter the world. Maybe it was the threshold marker. A symbol. The result of sin rather than its root cause. Hear me out. In a world in which everything you do is permissible, how do you know you can think for yourself and act autonomously? You can't because everything you try to do is something an omnipotent deity has told you to do. Enjoy yourself, don't enjoy yourself. This is how I created you to be. This is all according to my plan. But what if you could disobey - and do something the deity expressly told you not to do. This would be conclusive evidence that you had will independent of your creator / deity. The Tree of good and evil was a way of knowing when Adam and Eve had reached a point in their development as independent entities where they could defy God's will and act of their own accord. And what about 'if you eat this you will surely die?' Well, again - maybe it's not eating the fruit that kills them but deviating from God's will and God's plan. Maybe the only way to get to 'everlasting life' or 'heaven' is by following a very strict code and set of behaviours. Maybe the way to metamorphose from being a flesh creature to a spirit creature requires a series of transformations and habits to be developed. Periods of waiting and hibernation and renovation. And what happens if you don't listen, don't do the required reading, if you don't follow the plan, don't obey the omnipotent creator, the intelligent designer, don't undergo the necessary transformation? Then you remain a flesh creature. One that doesn't live forever."

work in progress

"seems like an incontrovertible rule that dictating the terms of your own reality requires you to first participate and engage and labour in someone else's. The practice before the painting. The planning before the vacation. The scripting before the story. The consciousness before the dream."

song of the year