everything except himself

In the game of Chess, your most potent weapon is being able to know — well, perhaps “predict” is a better word for some cases — how your opponent will move. It is not so simple as to say where he’ll move next. As you think upward into the moves, each prototypical move begins its own set of lines, all colored by that common ancestor, so that you think ahead going upward and outward.

In life, I try to think in people, outward and downward. There are people I write off — to make them happy usually entails making everyone else miserable. I’ve gotten good at understanding people this way, but it’s arguably harder than Chess. In Chess, you have only one piece to move at a time — that much is the same — but you are able to take many actions in lieu of a response. For that matter, the one thing I think Chess lacks is the ability to do nothing for a round. Silence and immobility are both powerful tools, and ignorance is greater than both of those.

Ignorance, that was my mistake; I forgot another party involved: Withdraw; Give up the fronts you’ve won; Regroup; Pick different fronts to take, ones that don’t border that other party’s claims; Prevent intrusion — stifle revenge; March and maintain; Maintain and march; Above all, leave.

I wake to find Spring stretching out beside me,
Showing the precious flower that she’ll be.
She spreads herself out beneath the sun,
And her quiet smile brings recollections of fun.

Summer’s heat slowly wakes,
Falling back to sleep as a cool wind overtakes.
Our eyes meet to share this treat
And part, this open secret we keep.

I feel like a part of everything,
And my heart beats to the tune songbirds sing.

I turn to see Winter slink away,
Put out by this happy delay,
And Autumn goes in a similar way,
Leaving green where there wasn’t just the other day.

And it is your scent that calls out
So that I have become one of the devout.
You soak my soul in pleasantry:
You are the world to me.

This is what I wrote for the Creative Writing group thing.

I had to pull my hair back to shave yesterday. My hair behaves pretty unwieldly these days.

I feel like today was the first day of Spring. Ignoring the fact that the pollen count was astronomically high here, it was hot, but there was a continual breeze. I wrote something else about it, but that’s what I’ll submit for the Creative Writing group later. So, I won’t post it here.

This is a work in progress piece. Basically, aliens are sexy. End of story: sexiness.

I wanted to write something last night. Okay, so, to be fair, it was more like 6am this morning, but that doesn’t matter. I’m reading 1984, by George Orwell. Not only did I learn where a certain song by Rage Against the Machine came from, I also found a line that just struck me:

“He felt as though he were wandering in the forest of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone.”

But, really, being a monster has a certain power to it. It is something basic and undeveloped. People come to worship such monsters out of the fear of being trampled on by the sort of violent animal a monster is. Why are monsters so powerful? They are powerful because they act. It goes beyond that, though. They act in such a way that will get criticized as being too rough and self-serving when they do it, but those same actions, in retrospect, will seem like the only way it could have happened. A line from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying:

“I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words.”

I am you,
And you are me.
Tonight, we’ll relive the ceremony,
Drinking poison to our health,
Not to lightly be undone by fame or wealth.

With hands held high,
It is we ourselves that die,
And we our pallbearers are,
Carrying ourselves out however far.

Marching on with cold and miry breath,
We shall sing the song of Life and Death,
For I have died and found no rest,
Seeking something between the lines that we had missed,
Some cruel and evil line dismissed.

Was it ‘Fate’ where we sang ‘Fortune’,
And where is there the author to importune?
I’ve just a simple question to raise:
Was what we called progress moving forward,
Or did we have it backward?

We are now steeped in this ultimate night,
Cleverly disguised by day’s shining light,
Where we are buried quietly among those who are alive,
A captive audience witnessing their dive:

Ah, the tragedy of Life and Death,
We spend our lives speeding to our last breath!
Immortality was never meant to be a reward,
And we, one and all, shall join the rite,
Stalking endlessly in this forever-night.

Well, it took a bit longer than I had expected it to take, but the new design is up. It works in both IE and Firefox. The secret, gremlin-embedded font can only be seen in IE, though.

Okay, a little work got done on the layout. I had stuff I had to do for school yesterday, which sucks during Spring Break, but whatever. Check it out here: link.

I’m not quite happy with the way the font for entry text looks, and I’m probably going to have to write a simple string parser to keep the entry title text and the sub-category title text as-is.

This is a preview of the way this blog will look soon: link.

I haven’t figured out how I want anything else to look, so maybe by the end of Spring Break it’ll be done.