28.

3/15/11

Humanity is vast. It's huge. There are so many communities, systems, ideas, belief systems, people… It hurts my mind to try to comprehend and understand all of them when I simply can't. There is too much out there. I can't be everyone, I can't see everything, experience everything. I can only be me, I can only experience my life.

27.

"I am in my old room once more, for a little, and I am caught in musing - - how life is a swift motion, a continuous flowing, changing, and how one is always saying goodbye and going places, seeing people, doing things... Only in the rain, sometimes... closing in your pitifully small radius of activity... only then do you think and feel sick. You feel the days slipping by, elusive as slippery pink worms, through your fingers, and you wonder what you have for your eighteen years, and you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day... You could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run... Now, you begin to get scared. You don't believe in God, or a life-after-death, so you can't hope for sugar plums when your non-existent soul rises... You wonder with a quick sick fear how to cling to earth, to the seeds of grass and life. You wonder about your eighteen years. You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. Again the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? And you know that whatever tangible things you do have, they cannot be held, but, too will decompose and slip away through your coarse-skinned and death-rigid fingers. So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life, which could be typed.. 'She was the sort of girl...' and end in 25 words or less."

              -Sylvia Plath, #81

26.

4/4/11

I don't really love this song.. (a bit too "screamy" for me).. but I love the lyrics. Whenever I feel like shit, I like to read them over and over.

Forevermore - Moths and Rust

“Stand up. Don’t trip up now. Just see this through. Hold firm your grasp. You will pull through.” “Now’s not the time.” “Fix your gaze on what’s head, the path that tempts your foot to stray from this place brings death.” “So take your life back. Take the reigns and never let them go. Just find your place. Where’s your strength- where has it gone? Find the courage that was yours the day that you gave up.” “There’s no excuse, no, not this time.” “So stand up; get up and fight.”

Lyrics
Video

25.

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another."

    -Anatole France

24.

The following is my collection of quotes from the graphic novel Watchmen, written by Alan Moore.


"Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and god was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hellbound as ourselves; go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not god who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
           -Walter Kovacs/Rorschach


"Who of us is responsible? Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there… a clock without a craftsman."
           -Jon Osterman/Doc Manhattan

"There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet."
           -Jon Osterman/Doc Manhattan

"…The point of all that struggling; the purpose of this endless labor; accomplishing nothing, leaving people empty and disillusioned. Leaving people broken."
           -Jon Osterman/Doc Manhattan


"The Earth. Humanity. All we've ever known… "end of the world" does the concept no justice. The world's present would end. Its future, immeasurably vaster, would also vanish. Even our past would be cancelled. Our struggle from the primal ooze, every childbirth, every personal sacrifice rendered meaningless, leading only to dust, tossed on the void-winds. Save for Richard Nixon whose name adorns a plaque upon the moon, no human vestige would remain. Ruins become sand, sand blows away… all our richness and color and beauty would be lost… …as if it had never been."
           -Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias


(Note: These conversations take place at different times throughout the book.)


"Laurie: '…The most powerful thing in the universe and you're just a puppet following a script?'

Jon: 'We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.'"



"Laurie: 'Humanity is about to become extinct. Doesn't that bother you? All those people dead…'

Jon: 'All that pain and conflict done with? All that needless suffering over at last? No… No, that doesn't bother me. All those generations of struggle, what purpose did they ever achieve? All that effort, and what did it ever lead to?'"



"Laurie: '…Just the existence of life, isn't that significant?'

Jon: 'In my opinion, it's a highly overrated phenomenon. Mars sets along perfectly without so much as a micro-organism. See: There's the south pole beneath us now… No life. No life at all, but giant steps, ninety feet high scoured by dust and wind into a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the pole in ripples ten thousand years wide. Tell me… would it be greatly improved by an oil pipeline?'"



"Laurie: '…Everyone will die…'

Jon: '…And the universe will not even notice. We've been through this before, Laurie. You argued that human life was more significant than this excellent desolation and I was not convinced. You attempted to compare the mere uncertainty in your existence with the chaos of the world beneath us…'

23.

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

    -Oscar Wilde

22.

4/20/11

It's too much stress, too much pressure and no end in sight. I'd like to have something to work towards but all I can see is stress, work, and then death. Sure I want to learn more, experience more, fuck and feel loved… but it's just constant battling to be happy. Push the depression away, fight to focus on the positive. But fuck, man! The struggle wears on you. You can't fight forever and everyone's fighting, always. There's always a trouble, a depression, a complaint, no matter where you're at in life.

I'm just so sick of the struggle. The fight has left me.

21.

The Two/The Witnesses

You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock.
            The Two.
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
        We are watching you.

Wiser not to ask just what has occurred
To them who disobeyed our word;
        To those
We were the whirlpool, we were the reef,
We were the formal nightmare, grief
        And the unlucky rose.

Climb up the crane, learn the sailor's words
When the ships from the islands laden with birds
        Come in.
Tell your stories of fishing and other men's wives:
The expansive moments of constricted lives
        In the lighted inn.

But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won't show
        At a glance.
Nothing is done, nothing is said,
But don't make the mistake of believing us dead:
        I shouldn't dance.

We're afraid in that case you'll have a fall.
We've been watching you over the garden wall
        For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain,
Something is going to fall like rain
        And it won't be flowers.

When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
        Unpleasant.
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
        In deadly crescent.

The bolt is sliding in its groove,
Outside the window is the black remov-
        ers' van.
And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the woman in dark glasses and humpbacked surgeons
        And the scissors man.

This might happen any day
So be careful what you say
        Or do.
Be clean, be tidy, oil the lock,
Trim the garden, wind the clock,
        Remember the Two.
 
          -W.H. Auden

20.

9/22/10


Saosin - Deep Down

"Let the water wash it all away."

"The ocean is rising and I keep sinking. Deep down, it's getting hard to breathe now."

"I can't feel at all."

"I watch the waves from underwater, see the ocean push you all away. Live like there's no today."

Lyrics
Video

19.

3/4/11

I don't want to just be. I don't want to live a normal, boring life and be forgotten. I don't want to spend time on the "necessary" things, like cleaning, making money, dealing with relationships and difficult things. I understand they are a part of life, but I don't know if I'm willing to pay that price for life. I don't know if life means that much to me. I don't know if the good outweighs the bad and if it's really worth the trouble. If life meant spending time doing things that made me happy, I might be more inclined to stay, but it seems like all it will ever be is tedious work followed by more tedious work in order to squeeze out some transient happiness.

18.

"...why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?"

    -Sylvia Plath, #40

17.

"'If the gods do not bring Sita back to me unharmed, o Lakshmana, I shall blot out the three worlds,' he cried, his eyes flashing with wrath. 'You will see my arrows fill the sky, stopping the planets in their courses, holding back the wind, darkening the sun and the moon. I shall shatter the crests of the mountains, dry up the lakes and drain the ocean! No being will escape, neither demon, spirit, nor man. If they do not bring back my beloved, I will lay waste the universe and all that is in it!"

    -Rama (The Ramayana)

16.

4/26/11

I don't want to die. I fear the unknown. I fear change. I fear change because it is the unknown. I won't know what to do. I don't know what to expect. I can't plan for it. If I'm right, I will just not exist. I can't even fathom that. I don't want to not exist. I still want to exist in some way no matter what. I can't "wing it." I can't stand not knowing what I'm doing. Fear of judgment. Fear of what other people think. Fear of not knowing everything always all the time.

15.

Avenged Sevenfold - Seize the Day

"Newborn life replacing all of us, changing this fable we live in. No longer needed here, so where do we go? Will you take a journey tonight? Follow me past the walls of death? But girl, what if there is no eternal life?"

Lyrics

Video 

14.

Click-click: tick-tick
Clock snips time in two
Lap of rain
In the drain pipe
Two o'clock
And never you.
Never you, down the evening,
I cannot
Cry, or even smile
Acidly or bitter-sweetly
For never you and incompletely.
Things surround me;
I could touch
Soap or toothbrush
Desk or chair.
Never mind the three dimensions
All is flat, and you not there.
Letters, paper, stamps
And white. And black.
Typewritten-you, and there
It is.
The trickle, liquid trickle
Of rain in drain-pipe
Is voice enough
For me tonight.
And the click-click
Hard quick click-click
Of the clock
Is pain enough,
Enough heart-beat
For me tonight.
The narrow cot,
The iron bed
Is space enough
And warmth enough…
Enough, enough.
To bed and sleep
And tearless creep
The formless seconds
Minutes hours
And never you
The raindrops weep
And never you
And tick-tick,
tick-tick,
pass the hours

             -Sylvia Plath, #32

13.

7/3/11
 
I can't mentally comprehend death. How someone can be there, conscious, with thoughts, emotions, vision.. And then not. How can someone just stop being? It doesn't make logical sense that something can turn into nothing.

12.

3/24/11
 
"I believe that there is a realm (abstractly hypothetically, of course) of absolute fact. Something IS. And that, in our poor human lingo, would be the "truth." (But as far as I am concerned, that truth is matter, not spirit.) However, to each individual man, viewing facets, slivers, fragments of this whole truth which must be through his own particular grotesque glass of distortion, the truth will be, for him, a mere magnification and personal fallible interpretation of the special facet, sliver or fragment he sees. No man can ever grasp the whole impersonal neutrality of a universe. That is hidden under the mists of subjectivity… Hence, "Thinking makes it so." We all live in (our) own dream-worlds and make and re-make our own personal realities with tender and loving care. And my dream-world – how much more valid, how much nearer to the truth is it than that of these people? Valid for me, perhaps – even though it is not metaphysical… We live and move together in the realm of concrete experience, harmoniously, motivated and propelled by our own dream-realities. And even that idea of mine is no doubt itself an artificial dream-reality."

           -Sylvia Plath, #130

   
There is a truth. Somewhere. There is truly an answer, it is just impossible for a human to perceive it completely accurately. Our views are always colored. But there must be a truth, whether we're talking about what happens when you die or what color that shirt really is. Something has to happen when you die (even if that something is nothing), the shirt is actually a certain hue. But there is ONE truth, there aren't multiple truths. Sure, everyone believes something different, but they don't each have a separate truth, they're all wrong and just perceiving the truth through their own subjective glass.

11.

"I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was an individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupt of a million fine actions the night he passed on."

    -Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

10.

"People say 'it's as plain as the nose on your face,' but how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?"

    - Isaac Asimov (The Evitable Conflict)

9.

"They say there's no such place as Paradise. Even if you search to the ends of the earth there's nothing there. No matter how far you walk, it's always the same road. It just goes on and on. But in spite of that, why am I so driven to find it? I hear someone's voice, calling to me..."

-Kiba (Wolf's Rain)

 

8.

12/15/10

I find that this quote from The Great Gatsby goes along very well with a situation I was recently in. It describes how easy it is to build up a view of someone that is not entirely true when you have admired them in the past and spent some time apart. I had not realized until I read this that others have done the same thing. It made me feel like less of an idiot.

"A faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."