August 2011
Green Lights
Aloe Blacc
Green Lights- Aloe Blacc
“
In 2010, Rethink Afghanistan created a tool on [Facebook] that allowed you to re-spend, as you saw fit, the trillion dollars in tax money that had, by that point, been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I clicked to add various items to my “shopping cart” and then checked to see what I’d acquired. I was able to hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year at $12 billion, build 3 million affordable housing units in the United States for $387 billion, provide healthcare for a million average Americans for $3.4 billion and for a million children at $2.3 billion.
Still within the $1 trillion limit, I managed to also hire a million music/arts teachers for a year for $58.5 billion, and a million elemtary school teachers for a year for $61.1 billion. I also placed a million kids in Head Start for a year for $7.3 billion. Then I gave 10 million students a one-year university scholarship for $79 billion. Finally, I decided to provide 5 million residences with renewable energy for $4.8 billion. Convinced I’d exceeded my spending limits, I proceeded to the shopping cart, only to be advised:
‘You still have $384.5 billion to spare.’
[…]
A trillion dollars sure does go a long way when you don’t have to kill anybody.
” —David Swanson, War Is A Lie
“I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music…all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.”
—Hunter S. Thompson, Breakfast of Champions (1979)
- Q: Why do we remember unpleasant events better than ordinary ones?
- A: We think of memory as a record of our experience. But the idea is not just to store information; it's to store relevant information. The idea is to use our experience to guide future behavior.
YT048 - Holy Fuck - Red Lights
Holy Fuck, Red Lights
itchy knuckles are the worst.
poetry in the sun - Jamie Townend
The children point fingers
at each other, imitating guns.
Beer burns a hole in my chest
lending to a wet-eyed warmth
that watches the sun illuminate
miles of fields and sea.A gulp of relief;
beauty is not entirely dead,
yet.
“I feel like a lot of people are sitting around wondering about the apocalypse. You make your own apocalypse. I just made mine. I stopped what I was doing and walked out. Now that I’m here, society seems so far away and so ridiculous. Life is simple here. You wake up, you punch a horsefly in the face, and you start drinking water. You talk to the people around you, you build little projects to improve your life, you have complete control (aside from cruel and lovely Mother Nature) over your own existence.”
—The Escape Experiment
Play
“[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“For those who are told to speak only when spoken to and then are never spoken to. Speak every time you stand so that you do not forget yourself. Do not let a moment go by that doesn’t remind you that your heart beats 900 times a day and that there are enough gallons of blood to make you an ocean. Do not settle for letting these waves settle and the dust to collect in your veins.”
—Anis Mojgani, Shake The Dust
right now.
In Broken Images
He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.-Robert Graves
“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.”
—Anais Nin
“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.”
—Dave Eggers
