Stars at Elbow and Foot

There is no 2012. But there are end times. Each one of us will have an end of the world. It will be the day that we die. There. No crappy Michael Bay-ish Apocalypse Armageddon. No UFO brothers returning from the ancient past to enlighten or destroy us. Just the world and the weirdness of our lives and myths and imaginations and each of us with our own personal Apocalypse, just without the digital effects and the really beautiful people. It's that, or the Universe wanted movies to watch and conspiracy blogs to waste its time on. And whatever you believe, you are mostly wrong. I'm sure that the real end will be no big thing, kind of like the time I had a root canal. I spent weeks thinking about the drilling and the pain, remembering Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man under the drill of a NAZI bastard diamond hunter. And when it was all done, I tasted blood for a few hours, my jaw was sore, and my mouth was foolishly numb from Novocaine. Not that much pain. Not that much terror. Defin...

Some people believe that Superman is broken. I for one am not sure that he is broken, but I believe the character is in need of a tune-up. If I have one problem with Superman, it's that he has become a god - an all powerful god. If you want Superman to be relevant, you have to scale back his powers. You have to weaken Superman. The closest thing to this I've seen is in Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman and in Bryan Singer's underrated Superman Returns . The only time this alien from another world's stories become emotionally resonant are when Superman is in mortal or moral danger. Now I admit there are somethings you cannot do to Superman, the character: Superman cannot be corrupted. He has to remain the moral center of the DC universe. He has to be better than any man or super-powered man alive. Superman's true character and strength is not that he is all powerful, but that he is powerful enough to be the man of last resort to save us all by doing the right t...

I think that god will destroy the universe, not because we've been bad, but because we've become boring. What if we're a simulation god has run, only, instead of simulating god or whatever its grand design was, the simulation is simulating the simulation. A referential reference without end. Am I having a semantic apocalypse ? I don't know. This is what I get for reading too much Baudrillard .

I've been wondering if the people and organizations that have been lawfully or dogmatically providing us answers wouldn't do better to be offering us more questions. Especially where religion & spirituality are concerned, I'm not sure I trust or want my religion or spiritual organization to provide me with all of the answers. I think more questions are needed. Questions that challenge, that disturb, that bring about change.

Moment by moment. Time slips moment by moment and memory paints our lives in the colors of good and bad and sad and happy and bittersweet. My favorite memories are the ones where nothing much has happened. It's the memories of those days that were perfect, as if one had reached Elysium; all soft music and sunlight before dusk and warmth and love. There were a set of moments in Montmartre. Paris in the springtime. We climbed out of the Metro, a long and seemingly unending stairwell out from the depths of Paris into blue skies, no clouds. 67 degrees Fahrenheit. The air was dry and cool and crisp, as if it were charged with electrons floating about and crashing peacefully into each other invisibly around us. Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, with it's white stone, stood out against the electric blue of the sky as if someone had painted it in the boldest of colors. The painters were all out selling and creating pieces of art while all of us, the tourists/observers and the artists/creators e...

We bring order to chaos, but one man's chaos is another man's order. I pay for everything with paper and bits of metal that have been given meaning and worth and whose meaning and worth I accept. If I didn't accept money as a concept of worth, I wouldn't try to make more of it and save it and spend it and use money on credit. I have trapped myself by accepting the construct of money as having any worth. And you say, "But Adrian, you have to use money to survive in this world!" And I say I have to use someone else's idea of my worth in this world to survive. And I also say that I agree with you. But it isn't money that puts food on the table, but the work that you do in the world that puts food in the table. And oddly enough, if you work enough you can put away enough money that will actually start to work for you. A concept, a construct, paper imbued with worth, an actual inanimate object is producing something from itself. This is a miracle. I have a ...

The platform is barren in the early morning, except for the four of us, travelers waiting on the railroad. The sun barely shines through this fog, a dull reminder of things to come. There is the kid, can't be more than twenty-two, the baseball cap backwards, the T-shirt a maze of creases and folds with his black jeans and slump of apathetic confusion. You see this everywhere and I even catch myself at work, under the tick-tock man keeping the pay clock, slouching toward infinity. Guilty, guilty, guilty. Then there's the woman in mom jeans smoking a cigarette, high waisted almost white jeans, striped t-shirt tucked in. Her husband is holding their little girl in his tanned, wiry arms, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Maybe they should give the little girl a kiddie smoke too, like I used to have in my childhood; the candy cigarettes made of that powdery hard barely sweet nearly flavorless gum. Smoke they all told us, even Joe Camel™ told us to with his sly smile and penis sh...