First Impressions.

In our contemporary times, ones worth is determined by ones appearance. What comes in through the ear, is considered less remarkable. I've heard it said that people decide whether they like you or not in the first few seconds, and they are swayed either for or against you by your looks. This to me is ludicrous, superficial and senseless, but sadly, true. People always say that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but no single person in the world abides by this gallant guidance. It is sad to see the pains that people go through to establish and secure their self-image. So much time, energy and resources are wasted in an attempt to look appealing to society's eyes, literally! Those of us to whom appearances mean nothing know the persecution, misunderstanding and a million other consequences that result from this attitude. But the sad fact is that people are always staring, and never listening. People don't and will never understand that the ear is the avenue of the spirit, while the eye is always duped by mere seeming. The society is deaf. You can't change hoi polloi's mindset, the best you can do is learn how to live with it. I can't change it. All I can do is point it out. There have been others before me to whom this societal deformity has been a source of pain and disappointment. Ben Jonson in his brilliant poem 'My Picture Left’ expressed this disillusionment in sentences that glide and ballet across the lines and assonances flamenco style, creating space where there was none ... And what better way to sum it up than with the pain of despised love?
“I now thinke, Love is rather deafe, than blind,
For else it could not be, Whom I adore so much,
Should so slight me, and cast my love behind,
I'm sure my language to her was as sweet,
And every close did meet,
In sentence of as subtile feet,
As hath the youngest Hee,
That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree,
Oh, but my conscious feares,
That flie my thoughts betweene,
Tell me that she hath seene,
My hundreds of gray haires,
Told seven and fortie yeares,
Read so much wast, as she cannot embrace,
My mountaine belly and my rockie face,
And all these through her eyes, have stopt her ears."
In the world we are living in first impressions are highly regarded, but they are rubbish. People would be better off and much happier if they'd give up such a base and trivial concern.

Bibliophilia

Books. The very word has an effect on me that many people may associate with coitus. Its a love that is inches away from becoming a mania. And its not only about the contents of books, but their smell, their texture and how the pages feel underneath my fingers. Few people understand this kind of adoration.
Books have been the solace of many souls. They offer an escape to worlds so far from reality, where tranquility is akin to oxygen.  So tired of practicality and routine, books allow the mind to roam in vast worlds with no law and order, where anything imaginable is acceptable. I'm addicted to that.
Bibliophiles understand the joys of being lost into the world painted by words. The joy of entering a library or a second hand bookstore and just running your fingers down the spines of all those chests of knowledge and mysteriously feeling as if you are absorbing all their wisdom through your skin. It makes my brain swirl and be ecstatic. A high that no drug, no matter how potent can match.
My respect goes to all bookworms to whom books are opium, and whose private rooms are too modest to be branded libraries, yet are full of books. Individuals to whom reading is much more than a leisure, but a religion and a way of life. As Macaulay so full of insight wrote " What a blessing it is to love books... To be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!"

Martyrdom

I've never been a fun of martyrs, as a matter of fact, I despise them. To me martyrs are the epitome of irrationality. As much as I adore heroic failure, I just can't grasp the sense of pushing this failure to the point of death. In the words of Twain  "Never put off till tomorrow what may be done the day after tomorrow as well..." Even death. Why die on a Tuesday when I can make it till Friday? And for what? Some ideology which is debatable? I live by one rule; Never shall I die for what I believe, I could be wrong. People who are willing to die for debatable beliefs are, to me, stubborn and incapable of intellectual openness and honesty. They display a rigidity which is despicable. Throw religion into that mix and you've got yourself a recipe for disaster and terror. Some may claim that martyrdom is much more than dying, that it is all about fortitude and honor. Well I find nothing honorable in being adamant till death. Do martyrs change the world? No. Their stories are just twisted into stretched fables about morality and standing for what you believe. Most of them are fraudulent personas who are idolized for nothing by their followers, Jesus for example. So many lives have been destroyed and cut short in their prime trying to emulate a senseless and fictional act. By the way Jesus resurrected, so technically he is not a martyr. My advice; if you are going to be a martyr, you better choose your animus with great care. There is a high chance you will be disappointed.

The Past

Some say it is not worth it to brood about the past, that our energies are better placed hoping for the future. Others say that the past is gone, today is here, and the future is yet to come, that we should place our hopes in the present obeying Horace's immortal words 'Carpe diem... Seize the day'. All these opinions are wise, but sadly, they are not true. The future is bulletproof, and the present is the least happiest moment of our existence.
We came into this world innocent, but as time progresses fate strikes. The currents and tides of life hit us like a sea onto a coastal cliff, and in their retreat carry away with them some parts of us.
It is how we repair the dents, how we fill the gaps that have been washed away, how we put back together the pieces of our broken lives that makes us who we are. And that, fair reader, is the essence of the past.
Our greatest mistake is trying to shut out and forget our past, and by doing so we forget that the present is what it is thanks to the past.
The past makes us who we are, it moulds us, strengthens us, defines us, as an individual, as a family, as a community, as a nation and as a species. If you can learn from your past and be content with it, yours is the Earth and everything in it.

Self Interest

It is the heart of humanity, the fuel that drives this great machine that is civilization. Yet despite being such an imperative factor in our lives it is the least understood and the most exploited. It governs every aspect of our existence, and influences our every decision and action. Self interest has been the fire behind evolution. It is hard wired in our DNA. It has been the reason why humanity is not extinct yet. The desire to survive. We all love ourselves more than we care about others. Love thy neighbor as thy self is simply ridiculous. Communism failed because it went against this fundamental aspect of human nature. Some people would say religion teaches the ideas of selflessness. On the contrary, it exploits self interest to extra ordinary levels. The fear of eternal damnation. Each one of church, mosque or temple goers are driven by the hope of salvation which is nothing more than the desire to save ones own skin and be looked upon favorably by whichever mythical being they think is in control. Charity by nonreligious people? Well,it all started as self interest that resulted into wealth and ultimately pity for the less fortunate.  Besides, one feels satisfied and good about oneself by being charitable. It gives you the feeling that you are somehow important and better off. Each and every human action can be broken down to the benefit it has to the individual. The only way to get ahead in life is by thinking about yourself above everything else. Sounds cruel and selfish. It is. It has always been and always will be. Self interest is civilization's drive force, the vehicle of progress. I just got rid of the sugar coating that is so treasured by the society.

Profile

Vague and objectless anxiety in the present, and in the future a continual sacrifice that leads to nothing... That is all that lays before me. Is it despair? Then it must be divine.  I feel not the hope and optimism that comes with the passage of time. My life is subject to entropy, decay and eventually death. I seek hope in the thought that everyone's life is the same as mine. I'm I wrong? Possibly. I envy the average, normal individual, unquestioning in their faith, driven purely by instinct with a worldview that is governed by a duality of black and white. They have no concern about the most important and life altering shades of grey. I have a fucked up brain, obsessed by a need to make sense of every stimuli I experience examining, analyzing and contrasting. The burning desire and compulsion to fit everything in a jigsaw which is, sometimes me thinks, a futile attempt to make sense of life. The result... A twisted personality that no one gets and a neurotic brain that is on the verge of psychosis. I look at myself and there are so many things I hate in me. So many things are so hard to believe. I wish somebody would come to my rescue. Till then, I'll make the best of this gaol, with its wet dripping ceiling and malnutritioned rats.

Intromania

The walls are slowly closing in. I feel the air being squeezed from my lungs. The taste of blood in my mouth as my body is crushed between the spiked walls of socialization. There is a nervous bleeding in my brain as I struggle to be social, a fake smile here, a phony complement there. I feel like throwing up. And it always goes from worse to a living hell. A noose keeps flashing in front of me and its magnetic. Oh, the pains of being human. Do we really have to socialize. If death is the only way of being free of human interaction then suicide looks like a pretty reasonable option to me. Besides, I'm already choking to death, I may as well go out on my own terms....

Burn After Reading.

I'm gonna do this now...." Those who are familiar with my work will know what a distaste Motivational books are to me...." you see that's how a famous writer will write about his previous book. But since its the internet I can commit this blasphemous act without a moments hesitation. Now, to the matter at hand. I once made an aside about motivational books. I once saw a bookshelf of a friend of mine and all I could see were the names like Joel Osteen and Dannie Hood, and a bunch of names that gave my tongue a rigor mortis. Now, how a person can buy and read such crap over and over again is excruciating. In my list of the most profitable activities that prey on gullibility, motivational books are number two after organized religion, although I think one is  a brain child of the other. But I digress, over the couple of past centuries the intellectual curiosity of humanity rose to unimaginable peaks, suddenly man was asking weird questions and in a blink of an eye we had Copernicus and the solar system, Newton and his gravity theory, Galileo and his telescope, Madam Currie and radioactivity, planes, cars, penicillin, the A and H bombs.... And with all this came the fundamental understanding that we were part of something much greater. Man suddenly came to a realization that humanity is not the centre of the universe. Granted, the universe  doesn't give a rat's ass whether we exist or not. This sudden understanding of reality was blinding. While mankind is grasping around trying to make sense of what life is all about, motivational authors have taken this chance and are making tons of money feeding gullible human beings soul-butter and hogwash; crappy life lessons that are nothing but lies. Motivational books are nothing but psychological exploitation of the insecurity that all of us harbor within ourselves. All my heart's despise and hatred is directed to authors who take advantage of the pain, confusion and desperation of the masses. They write about solutions to human emotional calamities' that are non-existent and are bound to send their readers back to the bookstore for the next issue. Its all a mental con that drains its victims of their creativity, problem solving abilities and their grasp on reality and make no contribution to the betterment of humanity. If you are reading such books, my advice to you is to stop wasting valuable time and money on useless pages of words that talk of nothing but a Utopian world that does not exist, even after death. Take life as it comes, and don't listen to anyone who tells you it will be better. Sincerely, if it ain't better now, it never will be. The future is bulletproof. In the immortal words of Samuel Langhorne Clemens "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." No books telling you otherwise are worth reading
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Blank

This cursor is blinking up at me in mockery. As if it knows that my mind is blank and I have no clue of what I'm going to type after this. Me and this stupid cursor, oh, how our lives are painfully similar. Blinking away at a steady rate surrounded by so much noise.  Shit... This is so gruesome having no inspiration to do something but yet having a burning desire to do it. Well I guess this will be all for the day, just sit here and act like a douche bag and watch cheap comedy and laugh at some shallow humor, surrounded by shallow, irritating people. I bet it can't get any worse than this. In the immortal words of A. Attanasio "Being human is the most terrible loneliness in the universe". Crap, the cursor wins. Blink on, ye slim, black, strip. I will be back with all me intellectual wrath...

Twenty First Century

The possibility of a revolution in the mode of thinking currently employed by the human race is slim, nay, improbable. It is of course quite evident that once in every a hundred years we witness one or two instances of great genius that dramatically alter our societal structure, our customs and our perception of reality.
Over the past century however, this sudden immergence of outstanding mental powers has declined and the frequency of which ingenuity occurs today is small. This can be blamed, chiefly on a brainchild of genius, technology. With the rapid growth of technology man kind has been subjected to partial or complete dependency to machines for the running of everyday life. This has led to a numbing of the intellect that is so motivational deficient. The culture of reading has died. Today libraries are deserted buildings with what many consider as old books rot and collect dust on shelves. Its a pity.I wish I existed in the days when scrolls and letters were the most advanced forms of communication. I bet back then wooing a girl was magical. You would write down a few lines of poetry and she would reply to you after 3 weeks... Just enough time to think things through right? And you would smell her scent in the leaves of the paper, marvel at the graceful curves of her handwriting and feel her emotions as her hands trembled while writing. But gone are those days. This days all you get is some weird abbreviations in a text and a stupid smiley face. Shit... Nobody appreciates longhand anymore. So here I am typing away this words to an audience I don't even know exists. Symbols that cannot convey my innermost feelings.
Technology has ruined the written word, now all we have are EPUBs and PDFs and fucking audio books... Cursed twenty first century.

Open Letter to Michael Bay

Dear Michael Bay, I hope this letter finds you well. I write to thank you for ruining the Transformers for me. You took a cool cartoon that I enjoyed as a kid and trashed it, turned it into nonsensical ruble and chaos. The first movie was tolerable, Revenge of the Fallen was pathetic. You really tried with Dark of the Moon, and when I saw it I thought it was a good recovery from the previous one. But, I guess you ain't a man who knows when he's failing. You should've quit and never made another installment, you could have let Optimus Prime bask in his metallic grandeur after saving Chicago. But you just couldn't, you had to come back again and this time you were at your worst. I mean what the hell was wrong with you when you were on set making Age of Extinction? What was going on in your head? What astonishes me was how you got Mark Wahlberg( Whom I respect and think is great at what he does) to play lead character in such a crap movie. Age of Extinction is the worst movie in the Universe, but I guess that doesn't bother you does it? I mean how do you sleep at night knowing how crappy that movie was. If you think it was great,  you shouldn't be in the movie business. Wahlberg's charm didn't even get close to making the movie worth seeing. The script was senseless, the plot so far fetched and unnecessarily stretched, the attempt on humor was depressing, and lets not mention the acting which was much more mechanical than the robots. By the way, did you have to fill the movie with washed up models in every scene. And what's up with all the advertising, I sat through the movie and at the end felt like I had just watched a two hour commercial, I guess you just had to kiss ass to your sponsors, what a disgrace. You really suck! And I want you to know what a dishonorable thing you've done to iconic heroes that helped a kid cope with childhood and I hope you burn in hell for that!

Sincerely yours,

Ralph.