Graffiti 116

I don't know what this is suppose to be. At first I thought Wonder Woman telephone. I think I like it. I think its funny. Maybe its just creepy.

"I've had years of bizarre hallucinogenic magical experiences in which I believed I had communicated with entities that may well have been disassociated parts of my own personality or conceivably some independent entity of a metaphysical nature. Both would seem equally interesting." -Alan Moore

Graffiti 115

I started smoking three years ago when I first tried to get sober. The old substitution method. I kept on and now in my recovery I cling to it in a way, the only vice I have left. I want and hope to quit at some point. But not now. I'm not willing to give it up. Not yet.

"Coffee and smoking are the last great addictions." -Lara Flynn Boyle

"So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it's bad, it's really simple." -Damian Hirst

"Every citizen who stops smoking, or loses a few pounds, or starts managing his chronic disease with real diligence, is caulking a crack for the benefit of us all." -Mitch Daniels

The Cold

No work today due to hazardous weather conditions. This relentless cold is draining. My mobility is hamstrung or at least the effort it takes to travel doesn't seem worth it most of the time.

Today I've obsessively cleaned my apartment and reorganized my movies and books. I watched the first three episodes of True Detectives(shows promise) and started a collage. I checked how much a tape player would cost and then I read for a little bit.

Now I sit and think of things to do, potential projects, and come up blank. Ice gathers on the window sill and the pane is frosted over. Soon I'll be able to go for a walk, run, ride a bike, or browse a book shop without having to bundle up and concentrate my will. This winter has been daunting and the extremity of the cold makes it drag on and on.

But the end is in sight, it must be. One more month or six weeks or eight. Sooner or later, warmth is inevitable. Spring gathers. We wait. Time ticks.

"You can't get too much winter in the winter." -Robert Frost

"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." -Albert Camus

Graffiti 114

With the feverish popularity of The Wolf of Wall Street its a good time to reexamine, expose, and reflect on that most noble of pursuits: American Greed.

"Look around. Oil companies guzzle down the billions in profits. Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, and Wall Street CEOs, the same ones the direct our economy and destroyed millions of jobs still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them. Does anyone here have a problem with that?" -Elizabeth Warren

"It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second." -John Steinbeck

"Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people." -Garrison Keillor

Survival

This is the second in Beanpole and I's quote collaboration. David Mitchell is one of my favorite authors. In his book Cloud Atlas he uses this quote. Originally, come to find out, a Japanese proverb.

"The weak are meat the strong do eat."

Graffiti 113

I've been thinking more and more about going back to school. Getting in an MFA program for acting. Maybe this is a sign.

"We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change you're the one who has got to change." -Katherine Hepburn

"Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying." -Johannes Tauler

"The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else." -John W. Gardner

Graffiti 112

“Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status...Hipsters, then, are the direct result of this cycle of indie, authentic, obscure, ironic, clever consummerism...It is ironic in the sense the very act of trying to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture people will in turn attempt to counter.” -David McRaney

"I'm just another stupid human." -Markus Zusak

Graffiti 111

I've always been drawn to eyes. The first painting I ever did, which was terrible, in 8th grade art class was a disembodied red and black eye floating in a maroon storm. Because of Lord of The Rings and folklore there's a ton of evil eye imagery in a lot of fantasy books. There's something deep and unknowable about the eye.

"The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing." -Bill Cosby

A Cold City

The Chicago winter has come on quick and vengeful. Kept temperate for the past couple years it seems this winter has much too prove. The city is not less welcoming but seems to be fortifying itself for a long siege, as do most of it's occupants. People travel less and with more purpose, bundled and distant. With thickening blood Chicagoans guard against the long dark. A temper of reservation spreads, anxiety and depressive traps are prevalent.

But time passes, the city pumps, and we preserver.

"I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago... I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages." -Rudyard Kipling

"A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again." -Margaret Mead

Silence

Every statement doesn't require a response. We are becoming more and more conditioned to respond, even if we have no thought or opinion to voice, to anything and everything- it's become expected. I say something, you say something back, if you don't it's rude. You're being aloof or distant or unengaged or cold if you don't fill a moment with words regardless of their meaning.

A silence can be comfortable. Discomfort is something you apply to it, its not inherent in the absence of speech. Truly being in a moment and listening to someone is often enough and can mean more than repeating back to someone what they've just said or blurting out the first thing that comes into your head. I like chatting and keeping the conversation going but it's not always necessary. If there is no more to say, cease to speak.

People don't argue the peace and beauty of quiet in nature or in the dark of night. We should apply that same calm and ease, periodically, to interpersonal interactions. Sometimes not saying anything says a great deal.

"I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art." -Kahlil Gibran

"Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over." -Octavia Butler

Graffiti 110

"Maybe you don't like your job, maybe you didn't get enough sleep, well nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep. Maybe you just had the worst day of your life, but you know, there's no escape, there's no excuse, so just suck up and be nice." -Ani DiFranco

"At home I am a nice guy: but I don't want the world to know. Humble people, I've found, don't get very far." -Muhammad Ali

"Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with the people the same happiness." -Khalil Gibran

View From A Bike

On a motorcycle the world looks different. You're engaged in a more direct way. Things look, smell, and sound different. More vivid. Your senses are heightened, they have to be. You recognize beauty you may not have noticed, danger too.

“In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.” -Robert Pirig

Graffiti 108

Happiness is not a constant. It's a process. A system of ups and downs, of balance. There is no light without dark. No happiness without sadness. No joy without regret.

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity." -Carl Jung

"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person." -W. Somerset Maugham

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking." -Marcus Aurelius

Graffiti 107

A coaxing message from Death.

"Too weird to live, too rare to die!" -Hunter S. Thompson

"It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love." -Graham Greene

Graffiti 106

"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." -Bruce Scheier

"To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well." -Albert Camus

 "I believe that the human race has developed a form of collective schizophrenia in which we are not only the slaves to this imposed thought behavior, but we are also the police force of it." -David Icke

The Right Time

"This is how we go on: One day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time... We say yes, I agree that the clouds often look like other things--fish and unicorns and men on horseback-- but they are really only clouds. Even when lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on."
-Stephen King

Graffiti 105

Technology Sucks.

Put down your god damn phone.

"It's become appallingly obvious our technology has exceeded our humanity." -Albert Einstein

"Men have become the tools of their tools." -Henry David Thoreau

Graffiti 104

"Always knew I would clock G's but welcome to McDonald's may I take your order please? Gotta Serve you food that might give you cancer, cause my son doesn't take no for an answer..."

I found a series of these in Logan Square. It feels like some kind of comment on baby boomers and the ungrateful GenX crowd. Although I don't know what the comment could be. But I think we can all agree that fast food is shitty and bad for you.

"Meat consumption is just as dangerous to public health as tobacco use... It's time we looked into holding the meat producers and fast-food outlets legally accountable." -Neal Barnard

"The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc." -Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Graffiti 103

Saw this in Logan Square which seemed appropriate. Seemingly a riff on internet catch phrase and meme "cool story bro". I like vests, I went through a period in high school where I was wearing a fleece vest all the time. If memory serves I'd use it to cover my incrementally increasing pit stains. Now I have one blue dressy type vest that I'll wear if I want to give a show outfit a little extra pop.

Scorn for those people who attempt, and sometimes succeed, to pull of a vest is misplaced. In all of fashion scorn seems inappropriate. Except maybe for sweat pants worn in public.

"He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest." -Walter Benjamin

A Small Victory

I think my basil plant is drowning. I've moved it inside so I can regulate the water intake better. All the rest of my plants seem to be flourishing. I woke up the other day to find my first flower. I didn't notice a bud or even the hint of a bud in the days leading up to it so it was quite a surprise. It feels good to have plants and watch them grow. I sit on the porch and visit with them quite a bit although I haven't started talking to them yet. I'm sure that'll come soon. It's suppose to help them grow, maybe I'll even sing to them.

"The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises." -Leo Buscaglia