KONSTANTINE
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Monday, February 27, 2006
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I love life. Every morning it is a privilege and a joy to wake up and get to live the life that I do. I am so fortunate to be able to live and love the small stuff because the big things are already taken care of and that is what puts a smile on my face each and every day. My family and my friends are all so incredible and so inspirational that every day I have a new person to aspire to, a new person to reconnect with, a new person to invite to lunch, a new person to learn something from, a new person to share idiosyncrasies with, and a new person to laugh with.
I love waking up in the morning with the sun on my face and looking out the window at a beautiful day. I love waking up in the morning and looking out the window at a morbidly overcast day with the thought that I will get to jump in puddles soon. I love music. I love Ludwig van Beethoven. I love listening to music. I love listening to new music. I love listening to that song from high school that you haven’t heard in like three years. I love listening to that song your parents used to play when you were little. I love singing. I love singing as loudly and obnoxiously as I can. I love that perfect lyric. I love watching people learn. I love volleyball. I love good stand up comedy. I love to hate country music. I love children’s books. I love Roald Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dr. Seuss. I love kids because nothing is ever what it is as a kid, it’s always something much more exciting. I love spring. I love summer, autumn, and winter. I love badminton. I love swimming. I love the beach. I love the mountains. I love long, windy roads. I love long conversations. I love stars. I love spooning. I love watching happy people. I love watching sad people because I know that sadness only makes happiness a little bit sweeter. I love a comfy bed. I love telling people that they just made my day because that usually makes theirs. I love smiling. I love smiling at random people. I love smiling at a good friend when they’re talking to you. I love awkward “Hellos.” I love a good hug. I love laughing. I love making inappropriate faces in pictures. I love dressing up. I love dressing down. I love not dressing at all. I love my family. I love my friends. I love my girlfriend. I love seeing two people happy together. I love seeing lonely people because I know they have an infinite amount of opportunity in front of them. I love long showers. I love making fun of boy bands. I love cool eyes. I love summer camp. I love a good, warm, home-cooked meal. I love good leftovers. I love Konstantine. And I love knowing that every time I step out the door, I might be able to change someone’s life.
I guess that’s ultimately why I love to get up and live every day like it was my first and my last. You never know who you will get to see, what you will get to do, and how magnificent it all will be and I guess that’s why life is so incredible. It saddens me to know that not everybody loves life as much as I do because I know everybody can, it’s so easy. That’s why I love doing everything I do, because I hope that if by doing it, maybe just one person will learn to love life the way it’s meant to be loved. That’s it. That’s the secret. That’s the magic, the good stuff. Just the realization that there are too many amazing things in the world to ever get stressed or hung up about one silly little thing, regardless of how important it seems at the time. I love life.
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Wednesday, September 21, 2005
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She’s fuckin’ nuts! I don’t really think she even knows what she’s saying. Every other thing that comes out of her mouth is a non sequitur. I feel that she beholds certain brilliance but is perhaps too stimulated to let it out coherently. All around me they linger on the brink of consciousness. Heads dip steadily forward or stand propped on a hand beside. Pens and pencils chewed and notes are passed and read. Doodles line every notebook margin as the class all sits slouching, reclining, stretching, and gazing at something in particular and nothing at all. Somehow we are currently changing the world. Without effort we pull the sun and the stars and exert our gravity upon the Earth. We, little, insignificant, infinitesimal beings pull the universe as it pulls us. I see thirty people lost within incoherent jargon, people with talents and skills and passions, losing 75 minutes of their very short and valuable lives. Some of them have smelly feet, some have pretty hair, some have large breasts, and some have blue eyes. Should we mourn this loss of life? Should I be sad to passively watch this company idly passing? No. Because this is it. This is life. We need this hour to seethe. We need this inspiration to be bigger, faster, stronger; smarter, kinder, and more diverse. Let’s see it you guys. Let’s get up from here and go attach that great big world. So much awaits us and so little will come on its own.
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Monday, September 19, 2005
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Three cheers for violation, exploitation, and the human temperament. I love seeing people at the brink of faith, lingering on the abyss of sin, weighing themselves against the wind of wrong or right. Who dare test that sacred boundary? Charisma will do you no good at this fatal junction. It takes balls. It takes vindication. It takes flagrant disregard for the forces of vice and temptation. O! But he who can stand strong in the face of adversity. He who can withstand that human bane. He will be the victor. He will gain what others’ ill will besides. Greatness is his prize and faith will be his bounty. And so others will follow his ferocious independence with mediocrity and zeal. Too many leech off genius to try and pry their own anonymity from its reaches. Too many two faced preachers and prophets play the Pardoner. Too many steal from the inspired. But do not falter you faithful few. Do not trade your passion for pennies. Do not succumb to that avarice. Be not ambivalent in your conviction. Maintain your bearing and your inspiration. Maintain your fidelity. Maintain his decision. He stands behind you still. He marches with his right foot forward. He is a true leader amongst men. He who was not afraid.
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Monday, July 11, 2005
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I’m in love! With her, with them, with those, with it. Smiling rather sounds appropriate for this time of night. Who says I should not love them all? Who says I should not love at all? Well fuck them! A friend once said to me, “I love you man, we don’t say it enough, but I love you.” And so I say it, I love you, I love her, I love them, I love those, I love it. I recount those things in my life which I have loved and I realize that despite hard times, wrong doings, and fallings out, I still love every single one of them. But I do not love freely. I only love selectively and very passionately for if you receive my love, know that you have earned it for good reason and cannot and will not lose it so long as I live. I do not forget the reasons for my love and so my love is never forgotten.
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Friday, June 10, 2005
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It was fucking amazing! The stars. The night. The sky. But now I’m tired. Goodnight.
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Monday, May 31, 2005
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I specialize in the freedom of souls—the emancipation of the human spirit. Like the dogmatic rapture of religion I dedicate myself to virgin virtue. Fidelity. A systematic masterpiece is created like the staccato notes of a majestic symphony—and epic whole of ordinary proportions. Grandeur of such epic magnitude is only natural. So is genius. Shy men are built for attention, poor for wealth, and apathetic for faith. But no man will discover his challenge without catalyst. It is inherently a physical and existential law of our universe. Isaac’s second. An object in motion will maintain its particular, unique motion unless compelled by an external force. Watch me push.
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Friday, May 27, 2005
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I am a frivolous scribe in a paper of two thousand men, and yet, week after week my pen bleeds its black blood onto these recycled pages. My thoughts are a technicality measured next to hard fact and bold print. The syllabus, thus, to this course is my life. And every combination of matter and momentum which, in turn, corrupt the virgin annals of my fastidious life are so written henceforth. No claims of jurisdiction or jurisprudence do I burden these words with. Only with the suppression of pure, unadulterated liberty do I limit them. My good friend Nick Carraway once wrote a book. I never could be quite sure whether he or I wrote it. But regardless, Nick authored it. He wrote the tale of a Great man unmarred by the suppressions of guilt and loneliness. A man so Great as to sculpt, with scrutinizing coincidence, the kingdom of his rise and the depths of his demise. So precise was his obscurity that he was exactly incorrect, and so, garnered the pathos of a genius and the contempt of a criminal in his death. It was inherently…perfect. And so it was, in the wretched year of our lord, two-thousand, no hundred, and five, that beauty abounded like stars in the night.
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Thursday, April 28, 2005
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The microphone holds some greater
portent by which his vehemence can be manifested. The anger of his intuition is brave and
brilliant but his words are lost on parody and pessimism. In one square mile I can observe every walk
of life; I can share every desire; I can drop eves upon all spoken word; I can
age any number of years or epochs; I can hackey sack
or skate or read or kiss or sleep on a bench or eat false meat. Ultimately, I can! His curiosity cowers
behind a malevolent mustache. Grandeur
in steel and stone undermine spoken conspiracy.
Everyone bears their own witness not to heed credence to others’ false
pretense. This is spontaneity. This is incredulity. This is life.
Courage and a coke bottle on granite ground. Likewise an author of
private purpose. I am certain
that in this exact moment of life, cause exists to move the universe. People and passion in between have reached a
critical mass of propaganda and altered reality to implode upon the courage and
creativity of man to imagine a brave new world – and it will be. Adversity breaches the sacred boundary of
individuals to unite in unlikely force.
I see before me six people playing hackey
sack: one girl, braided cornrows, green
Capri pants and dirty Puma shoes; one thirty-something Wall Street man,
bearded, in a business suit and collared shirt; one asian
kid with long straight hair down to his waist and a bar through the middle of
his nose; one Indie boy with his standard black
zip-up hoodie and canvas hat; one BMX biker in a
backwards Mets cap and Old Navy jeans; and finally a black kid in a baggy
t-shirt, the half burnt butt of a cigarette forgotten in between his right fore
and middle fingers. In these six people
I see
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Wednesday, April 20, 2005
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It is a malevolent beauty. Old pony-tailed men riding towards me in yellow spandex. The afternoon lingers lazily drowning in the marvelous blue. An afternoon horn blows. Naked skin abounds in the heat. Calico bricks stacked high, newly cemented in the solid sun. People parade through bush and bare legs plow forward without regard for obstacle.
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Friday, April 15, 2005
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A rabid bunch of Israelis dance in circles on the staggered asphalt. The music stops and feet follow. They are left making awkward conversation on the cobblestone court. A gorgeous head of golden locks and only two years in the making. It is gorgeous, pure androgyny. I am very tired and this is very odd.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2005
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Everybody needs to be heard at one
point or another. Whether it be the
long-necked midget begging for a spare shekl or the
poor, lonely woman strumming her small harp in the middle of Ben Yehudah Street wishing her deftly depicted notes upon
passing ears. She finds a crowd. Onlookers and well wishers crowd around to
drop a coin in her bucket. The power of
music is amazing. Nobody knows her songs
and still they take ten seconds from their peripatetic lives to open their
wallets to her heart. A child looks on
from his stroller, enchanted by the beauty of vibrating strings. A mother smiles. Emotion and music transcend many
barriers. Barriers often un-transcended
by our minds are idle lines for the powers of emotion and music. I can see it.
I can see the tiny vibrations and oscillations. Each with a different timbre, a different
style, a
different genre, a different disguise. But all the same. He
hears it; she hears it; you hear it; and I – I hear it. It’s really magnificent. Music has the power to move people. Be it a coin in a can or a war on the world,
music can create human miracles. Right
now I sit amongst Americans, Israelis, Germans, and Russians, Jews, Christians,
Muslims, and Atheists in one of the most unique cities in the world.
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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
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The Israeli countryside unfolds before my eyes. Greenery abounds in the sunshiny day. I sit in a cab full of bickering Israelis, parlaying factual opinion in languages unknown to me. I am a bit lost in the chatter. I half wish that I had made this journey without my beloved family bickering in the background.
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Saturday, April 9, 2005
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I am completely…lost in translation. I sit, awkwardly, eating my cake on a sterile white-cushioned couch in my great aunt, Golda’s little apartment. To my left sit a wrinkled, old raisin sweet as a grape, and a drooling giant ravenously stuffing his mouth with the bare remains of a half-eaten pear, the two bantering back and forth in an international patchwork of Hebrew and Romanian. “Hicarti et h’ima shelcha, atah yode’a.” “I knew your mother, you know.” I understand scattered words and phrases. “Oh, yeah? Wow.” I feign surprise and do my best to sound interested. She smiles and pinches my cheek. Oh, I love this place. Right. The giant is my father, loud and obtrusive, but he is mine.
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Monday, April 4, 2005
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Thoughts never stop. I try. I do. I try to placate the tempest of my mind but the gale only blows harder. Ferocious tides flood my sedated mind this sober morning. Every simple thing can be disassembled into an infinite number of complex elements making the elementary into quaternary. I envy simple minded people. I envy those who can focus on one thing without worrying about every relevant aspect of life. I am distracted. Who are those happy-go-lucky, those carefree fun-lovings? I want this; I want that. I think this; I think that. I do this; I do that. Rest.
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Sunday, April 3, 2005
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Oh, thunderous night! You are an anthem of loneliness, a grave for sunshine inspiration, a chasm of the darker epiphany. You hide those complex and infinite secrets which have killed all the most brilliant minds to ever grapple with your existence. Sunshine simplifies things. Bright brilliance can make you forget the complexities of it all. But the dark…Oh, the dark! Think.
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Monday, March 28, 2005
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When is a man not a man? When does one transcend that boundary and become something more? Philosophy, passion, brilliance, and inspiration create genius. It is such a vague thing. It manifests itself musically, orally, visually, theatrically, educationally, scientifically, athletically, and existentially but isn’t genius still the same thing? It is that reckless abandon, that blind and flagrant pursuit of passion that creates greatness from mediocrity. Beauty of form, chemistry of sound, subtlety of action. It is all the upper echelon of the elite. I can change someone’s life in many ways but ultimately the only gauge of my success is their influence on someone else’s life. If I can cause just one individual to change someone else’s life in a brilliant way then I can face death without fear for in life I know I have achieved the greatest good. In some senses it sounds like religious dogma but in reality it is not religion that preaches such righteousness but rather simply the inherent, immutable goodness of people. We are all faced with the same infinitesimal insignificance; each and every one of us is allotted only an unfathomably brief segment of greater history in which to leave our indelible mark on the history and future of mankind and the greater universe. Such queries of infinity cannot be properly grappled with in my time span or yours. So instead it is up to us to deviate from thinking about anything except for now. Now. Now I must make sure that I do not waste what time I find in my life. I must inspire others to inspire. For if noting else, I was put here to share the love and beauty of all things with anybody that I interact with. Only then will I have ensured my legacy amongst genius and giants of past, present, and future.
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Thursday, March 17, 2005
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Brilliance. Back atop my perch looking down on the world below. Here it all makes sense. The gentle motion of weeds in the wind and the muted cry of a fog horn in the distance. Birds seldom chirp for gloom, only haberdashery in this hazy day can make them come alive. Everything exists up here: the subtle sounds, the inanimate sights, the sweet smells, and the gentle touch. It is almost as if I can pull myself delicately from the motion picture that is my life and remove myself to a higher place. I can see motion, but it all seems slower. I can hear sounds but they all seem softer. I can smell smells but they all seem fainter. I can feel the wind but it seems much kinder. I feel as if motion is all relative. If I move the world around me stays. If I stay, the world around me moves. I see these arrows pointing around in a circle. I feel like I am stuck in that cycle. I cannot get out of this revolving loop that keeps me on the same path. If I could deviate from that path, Oh if I could traverse that un-stepped bound, I could traverse many great things in this world. There are so many spectacular, extraordinary things which compose our lives, so many facets of this universe that one individual can change, how does one choose what his brilliance should be spent on? For if I choose music, then how shall I know what impact I could have had on a student’s life or a Broadway play or the fashing world or a camper’s summer? I cannot be sure that one opportunity is greater than another. I can only be sure that my use of that opportunity does greater things than anybody has ever done. I, with my two hands, must change the world. It’s not “tikkun olam.” Do not repair the world. It’s not broken! Share the world. Show its brilliance to everyone. Let the world open its eyes and realize the gift we have been given.
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Friday, March 11, 2005
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Silence. Each immutable crunch and crackle of a granola bar rapper. The zip of a backpack, the flop of a folder, the rustle of papers, and the patter of feet on dusty tiles. You can hear the grime fighting between the floor and the souls of shoes. We just landed in LA and I sit here in the furthest seat from the door, tucked into a corner by a shy Asian woman and the lavatory with a broken door. I wonder. What makes us adult? We all asked the same questions once, “Daddy, why do we bleed? What is this squishy stuff? When are we gonna get there? Can I go first?” But yet, those people who answer our questions, still ask similar ones of other people.
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Friday, March 4, 2005
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I’m looking forward to camp. I want to show kids the world. I want to take them on hikes and to ball
games, museums and parks. I want them to
see
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Friday, February 25, 2005
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The world spins around me in a magnificent minute. Distractions embattle my path on this sunniest of days. Sleep of two hours but somehow the world is more lucid. From inside a fluorescent room the sun-kissed world seems to bloom. The flowering branch encroaches upon my window, a green memoir to the season. Terra cotta brick and white washed wood in between geometric concrete under the desert sun. I guess the best analogy for my brain would be a desert highway: a clean slate, empty road to pick up great speed upon with ideas rolling by precariously like tumbling tumbleweeds to get caught up in. My problem: I need to choose a tumbleweed. I need to be stripped of all the excess baggage which I have accumulated. I need to go back to the drawing board with a clear head and nothing but sheer passion to pour into my new life’s course. I look at people and I see their eyes. I see their thoughts, their unfaltering sequence of ideas and logic running throughout their body like the Matrix. I can’t quite understand it yet but it’s phenomenal. My eyes suddenly have new abilities to paint pictures from thoughts, to see songs from sights, to see the purpose in every step. Yes! Sometimes I wish I were apathetic. Where is my crucible? Where is my checkered flag? My brain just writes and my eyes just see. I feel removed from myself. I feel like I am an audience member of my own life. Clouds are spectacular. Billowing apparitions of unknown grandeur. So lofty and intangible. I watch the striped sky through half-lowered blinds, a uniform blanket of true color. That is a blue that cannot be imitated by crayons or colored pencils. Ancient chalk smeared upon the grey, slate boards. Patterns of erasers passed forever captured in the wispy patterns left in the dust. Through a red lens the sky comes alive. Clouds from the general massiveness discern themselves. Lines and colors become defined and a crane swings. Light forms amazing lines overhead as the sun breaks free from the clouds. She makes her presence known. Just imagine! A giant flaming ball of condensed gas and unfathomable size. Texture is ubiquitous. Class has begun and the crowds have dwindled to a few lonely stragglers like myself. Sounds are much more distinct now. Two men roll old iron barbeques onto the mall, left to stand in the midst of all these apathetic people. There goes Alex, still shaggy. He doesn’t recognize me. I kind of like that. By cutting my hair or wearing sunglasses or changing my image in some minute way, I can become an entirely different person. I guess it’s the first element of being an actor.
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Tuesday, February 8, 2005
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Beanies
abound in the overcast day, hiding away bald heads and long hair.
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Wednesday, February 2, 2005
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Awareness. I sit amidst the disheveled entropy that is
his wake. It is a euphemism for his
brain. A half-empty
bowl of pistachios. No, wait,
half full. A mountain
of empty shells in an adjacent bowl.
Dirty socks, mismatching pillows, and Zephyr Song. I see my distorted reflection in the concave
TV screen. I sit in
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Friday, January 21, 2005
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Wednesday, October 13, 2004
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I look at the back of people’s heads. Buns, spikes, ponytails, and flares. Some wear hats some have bald spots. But they are all stuck in class. Nobody frees themselves. No one releases their mind to wander the room.
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Saturday, October 2, 2004
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Over what am I hung? Over a morning of convulsive sleep? A lethargic afternoon of unproductive projects? I see and do so much and yet I find no direction. I attain no focus; I crash upon the idea of multi-tasking. My head is stone, thick with boredom. I keep thinking in unfinished thoughts.
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Friday, September 17, 2004
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Too many. Too many nights spun doing nothing.
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Monday, August 16, 2004
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Day one. Some may call it a new beginning, a bitter end, a strange progress, or a sweet opportunity. It is endless. Eighteen years I’ve prepared without holding the vastness in the palm of my hand. Two ideas have collided in a confused bedlam atop my brain. I see so many new people, all of whose stories tear at the walls of my ears but I sit solitary again, just silently smiling to listen. I love sitting in this same sweatshirt reserved amidst a new walking, breathing beast.
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Thursday, August 12, 2004
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Goodbye. Goodbye to my little paradise. My little painted pasture in the city. Tonight I leave this surreality for my next
destination in experiment. Four days
hold this life in my hands. Four days
between me and that runway. For eighteen
years I have bloomed and withered in this place, never understanding the
deadline.
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Thursday, August 5, 2004
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It’s home
but it’s fleeting. I feel the detachment
as I sit upon my pedestal. I feel the
people leaving; I feel the lights turning low.
It’s an eerie reality of adolescence.
As Fitzgerald put it, “the short-winded elation of
men.” So many new faces have
spawned in the crowd. New
energy and charisma. That tart
wind of kettle corn tickles my nostrils, and effervescent reminder of my
milieu. The multitudes of gel and
product are soaked atop these heads. It
is a strange paradigm. Somehow humans
are less inclined to wonder when you can see someone interesting. People only inquire into that which they have
no preconceptions about. Flashing fluorescent and passing shadows. I’m just another silent frame in the looping
slide show. Such
sprite brilliance in these youngsters’ faces. The Technicolor trees are so silk in this menagerie of reality. In eleven days I being
my new journey. But
what to do in that parallel? Do I
hold on and seek a proper bon voyage or do I shirk all old tethers in
preparation for this road un-traveled?
My wheels tread and burn for this new sensation when suddenly this
worn-out, familiar, hand-me-down place welcomes me back. I feel like that sweat-stained shirt left
neglected on a Goodwill shelf, new-found by a young boy in his adolescent
crisis, a lost treasure in a new pirate’s hands. How odd a temperament fate must have. How
schizophrenically karma can manifest itself.
Such a bipolar playing field for life. In life’s most dire hours, its most
magnificent miracles are born. The
streets filter out their vagrants and vagabonds and heed way to the
incandescent patrol of cars. The last
spring flower is pollinated and placed, a futile revolution against progress
and cycle. Summer smells its blooms and
burns its pigment to brown. Fall fells
its petals to be washed by winter’s waves.
I am that spring pollen, and it’s summer. I’m burnt and falling.
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Thursday, July 28, 2004
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I’m back and it feels so good. I love the chill of fresh breath on the pits
of my lungs. I love the amber scent of
peaches in the wind, the waft of kettle corn, the buzz of people. I love the inconspicuous feeling of strangely
ironic isolation on my little
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Monday, July 12, 2004
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Golden, melting hills like summer dulce de leche topped with mint trees, lemon flowers, and chocolate cows. Symmetric vineyards asymmetrically lining the absent asphalt.
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Sunday, July 4, 2004
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It is quite a spectacle to see the flock of families milling about the festive park like ants swarming upon a neglected picnic. Ants with cell phones and strollers, bikes and backpacks, drinks and dresses, hats and holiday. Al Franken with corner-store shades and a family peruses past in search of greater things. A shadow blows across these pages, a cool summer breeze. The wind is ominously ubiquitous. Sun kissed skin. Each person moves with some lethargic urgency, gently strolling with their own agenda, flocking from one cache to another is their ever-human quest for company. I recognize faces and frolics but I am anonymous, invisible – invincible. Waves of generations roll past me. Trotting tots; curious kids; exploring tens; romancing teens; single twenty-somethings; newly-wed baby boomers; youthful over-the-hillers; and slow, nostalgic grandparents. A curious Weimaraner extends his leash to me. I don’t feel welcome. A solitary and sentry son, alone in the masses. They turn a shy shoulder.
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Friday, July 2, 2004
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A ship sails aloft in the wind. The temporal breeze soars beneath the flapping rudder as it takes flight upon the wings of a storm. The wind wanes and her majesty gently descends to kiss the pale sand. Kites. A magnificent flight of string and synthetic fiber, the effervescent existence of human flight. It is a brilliant afternoon amidst the colloquial ambience of wind and waves. The rolling crash a drummer’s beat to the sunshine steps and summer screams of parenthetic passerbies. A young, barefoot couple walks by squinting and smiling at the gaining horizon. I remember what love was like. I remember what it was like to dote over her every inch and crack. I remember how soft that hand felt in mine and how warm her arms felt about my back. I remember the enchanting twinge of her voice and its every perfect melody. I remember perfection. I forget devastation. I love the human body, ergonomically engineered in every aspect. I love the vertical elegance and horizontal balance of its form. I love the mechanics of motion and design of dance in every bone and muscle. Smoke rises to the right, a grey sky rises.
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Tuesday, June 22, 2004
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Back home and I finally understand it. The fresh air feels so clean with every invisible wave of wind. The sunshine is so bright and consuming of every mile, inch, and crevasse. And my eyes feast upon the fruit of my world. So trite and common but the spectacle is still so humbling. I can see the winding dirt paths blaze their way into the shrub and shale hillsides rolling like sensuous breasts, kissed by golden misty sunlight upon the bosom of my steps. So much. So vast. So spectacular. So gargantuan. But yet;, no matter how divine and immaculate the ‘scape is to the horizon, my soft steps still conquer it idle. If I squint small enough over the moving still frame, through the settling haze, over water and buildings and earth and mountains I can see my back, one-seventh of a second ago, right back here, atop this majestic place, an entire world away from where I sit right now. There is no single place, no single thought, no single life that a single man can be in at a single moment in time. My front is thousands of miles and thousands of nothings away from my back. My thought now is forever connected to my last and my next thought as now can never actually happen. My life, by relationship and rumor, lives and is lived by all whom I know and know me, for they are always in my thoughts and I always in theirs. I am many men because each different second is inherently different and always lived by a different man. And every second is in fact composed of different seconds depending on where I look or listen because at the same moment in my life I can see what is happening now right in front of me or millions of years ago, millions of miles away. If only I were a bird and could take flight. Oh, the things that would fall. If only I could spread my wings wide in the wind and wish the places I could go, I could wrap my arms about this earth like a child and envelop it in my curiosity. I am in love with this place. I am in love with this place because here the wind blows love and life in your face. Everything I ever learned of love I remember here. I remember those first kissed, those silent hugs, that loving look. I remember long talks and even longer silences and not being able to decide which I liked more. I am down at Cronkhite now, where suddenly I realize the whole landscape is wind. The cliffs are fluid and running like blown glass upon the icy water.
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Sunday, June 20, 2004
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Twilight sets hazy shades of maroon
and magenta behind the leafy silhouettes of trees on the horizon.
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Monday, June 14, 2004
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Well, I guess it’s actually Tuesday the 15th because I’m sitting here now alone at 3:00 AM in a florally upholstered throne at the head of a vacant dining table. A pair of solemn sunglasses challenges me with its stare. Two empty, tinted lenses enrapture my gaze blankly silent with memories of the evening passed. Four candles tortuously melted into the hearth, slightly misaligned from rowdy revelry. Forgotten crumbs sprinkled like fabled fairy dust atop the lacquered varnish patina. The gold trimmed antiques and rustic, mildewy wood attest the blinking stereo and misshapened clutter of casino cards, a common androgyny in the perfect balance of Chataqua. Out the dirty screen door is blankness except for four distant bulbs. Little incandescent reminders of existence, Einstein’s relativity to night. I realize I am not alone, a family of fleas or flies or just simply common pestilence continue to circle the yellow chandelier. Again, the infinitesimal insignificance dawns on my tired drunken mind. I am just one; just a single organism amidst this intricately immaculate system of bugs, bears, bushes, and breezes which compose our human condition. Everything which we know, understand, or believe is simply, or maybe not so simply, a creation of our own emblems. I see a light only because I can differentiate contrast, but who makes that contrast? I understand contrast only because I can see, but who defines sight? I can understand sight only because I am told the physical, chemical, and electrical processes of the brain, but who proves that I have a brain in my head and who permits those processes? Why can’t the most elementary building block of human evolution in creation and understanding be wrong and the world we live in actually be an inverse of the world we believe today? Or better, why can’t our lives be a figment of our own imagined imaginations? And if imagination is imagined, what force derives those consequential images and senses to create that greater existence? But most importantly, if all these questions are unanswered, all these great queries of such immense purport exist without concept or solution, then why am I burdened by the meager quest for human relationship? What inexplicable force makes me care so damn much about a stupid girl or worry about a stupid comment? It must be that the answer lies within the unexplainable and unimportant.
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Monday, June 7, 2004
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The crash of young waves upon the sandy Stinson shore is temporally therapeutic. Every time I come here I cannot avoid realizing the same pathos of life. It is inevitable that each life be so ephemerally insignificant in both time and space. Infinite unfathomable. So many stars, so much space, so many seconds, so much time, everything eventually is nothing more than an infinite number of infinitely small building blocks all infinitely combined into an interpretation of a vast, endless infinity. Everything that we as humans and I as an individual have come to know are all electrical and chemical processes of my own brain. Even the thought of the thought itself is derived from this same philosophy. Thus, who is to say whether we actually have a brain and how it functions if we do? Who is to say what a brain looks like to me? To you? To a cat? To a tree? To a God? For that matter, who is to define the ocean or the cosmos or simply your dinner last night?
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Thursday, June 3, 2004
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June! Spring’s summer falls the winter air – a copulation of the things beautiful in the lukewarm evening. A chill breeze meanders the menagerie, reminiscent of the cool ocean breeze upon the summer’s sands. I am here late tonight; I was with Tibby navigating the attractions. I can hear the semisonic timbre of the night’s shrill sounds dissipating with the intermittent gusts. Children swim amidst their balloons, a circus affair of collateral crafts and craftitioners. These young punks crawl the asphalt like hyena in the ruckus. Heathen drawing trouble from their lives like poison from a wound. A kilt-clad Celtic cat roams the fair. Two garrulous young ladies each combating their cell phones with a deluge of foreign gibberish. Back they come, one is done, the other slows. Rough riders in do-rags pedal on the prowl. Families are almost spent, the last lingerers dispense to their mini-vans and condominiums to seek refuge from the waking night. Its darkness siphons hibernating demons from their lonely, music-less lairs. The familiar flair of clanging metal chases the life into a growling truck. A hooded man under his dirty blue cap burns behind a fiery butt. His linen cloak tightly tied about his hungry build. Green is the light. The man walks.
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Thursday, May 27, 2004
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Well, I’m back. This is twice today. Once in a company of friends and now back in
my familiar form. Tonight is mellow,
like the lively air has been sedated with weariness and doldrums. The music still plays, the regulars still
mingle, but the vibe is amiss. Everyone
seems lost and devoid of some magic which normally possesses their insomniac
spirits. I have a face tonight. People are recognizing me, it is a facet of
routine, it is comforting to people. I
am in love with the strangeness of it all, the madness, the hysteria, the fever
which consumes so many flocking people.
It is all strangely familiar, like I knew it all so well in some other
mindset. Each face is illuminated in the
hazy night, each holds some fire which glows from the
hearth, a different color, a different shade, everyone a different trade. Facial hair is strangely ubiquitous
tonight. Mikey and Stephanie, fittingly in
love. Two great, young, lively
spirits, they live the fun and the exciting.
He has made my life, his energy and charisma
have inspired something nearly lost one me of late. It is that simple inherent goodness which is,
however hidden, an integral foundation of the human condition. The Mikeys of this
world keep my disposition from turning sour.
Tibby is back today. She is bright and burning. Two new friends, Lauren is gone, Kelly and Arslan? These girls
have this genuine smile which glows in the trefoil sky. An estranged woman stands solemnly solitary,
slowly going nowhere but rather traveling with her eyes. She is deserving of that calloused compassion
but her complacency is deterrent to its sparing cannon. The incessant thrill on the drummer’s crash
scores the footsteps to a new beat.
Rhythmic clash of flesh on the pavement, a uniquely choreographed art on
the breathing asphalt like a ballerina’s slippers steal the floor. Pregnant women abound in this summer orgy –
an expression of the love compounded by lust in a continuous cycle of
unfaltering feelings. An intentional
prophet named Rich finds his want through my pen. His triangled
goatee combed with spines of grey is an archaic symbol of the nomadic
Wiseman. A beat intellect carefully
placed on the
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Thursday, May 20, 2004
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It’s a lively night tonight at the
Farmer’s Market. The air is rife with
energy and life, played out nightly on these concrete corners. This crowd is saturated with youth, a
brimming crucible for the pessimists and introverts. Except me.
I sit quietly centered in the madness, my common statue writing in the
twilight. A bloated mad scientist, a
frisking woman, she to him a pat on the butt.
People walk within my legs’ swing, oblivious to their peril. They unwittingly risk with their every daft
word, a conversation, a meeting, a date or a relationship. For all we know they are within arm’s reach
of their life. Not what they are living
now, that is already done and spoken for, dead you might say. No, they step into the shadow of what
promises may be, what life lay still ahead of that
infinitesimally ephemeral bubble of bursting “now.” Happy cuples and
sprouting children turn a derisive smile to my latent lips. That’s where I once was, it is where I daily
strive to return to. A futile flight,
but the objective is not in the score but rather in the game. Without the game, without each unfaltering
move of each piece, the world would have no score. No winners, no losers, no draws, and no game
over. The climax is actually a paradox,
the only tangible evidence of an aberrated ending all along the road to Candy
Land. A man with his pizza rightly
claims his adjacent throne in the waxing moonlight of summer’s night. Old men flourish in this fiesta, always
curious to what they’ve missed, always seeking what they can still fit, all
embodied in provident insight.
Seven-foot-three and three-foot-seven alike, their footsteps intertwined
in an elementary parlay of peripatetics.
The New York Yankees are not pink but by his error, his perception
governs the colors of blindness. All I
saw was a smile behind some flowers.
Another and another old man. This
with a carved wooden cane, grey pleated slacks under a beige wool coat, topped
by the Rescuers Down Under upon his chalk white hair. His beard is a mask for his underlying
youth. A young Auntie Carmie. Two
girls, again
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Thursday, May 13, 2004
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Thursday’s fair takes me to a new pedestal. My old, warn, warm one is not vacant today. Three musketeers barrage my home, novice, searching, fishing for hungry fauna amidst a fountain of flight. It is the same old vibe, fighting weariness in the twilight of tonight. A chef from Fifi’s Diner, wide-eyed and grinning, a stroller and a mother, happy to be made, a man in a new context to me. A lonely woman in a wheelchair rolls quietly by, I smile at her eyes and I can feel her warmth in return. Just that simple exchange of twisted lips can change a world. As canopies collapse and the night folds itself into the back of a van for its return to the hard fought exchange of tomorrow. A head of lettuce and a bandana. A little Asian man’s only context in my life, a pawn in an inanimate vegetable stand in a midsummer night’s dream. No one sees me tonight, I was late and paid for my procrastination with apathy rather than empathy. A forlorn man, lost between GI and Goth, bearing a skateboard and a secret, anonymous like me. I searched the contours of her nose and unearthed a diamond. An inconspicuous stud lifted from the layers, hidden in the gradient shadows of her rolling landscape. One kid, the patina of unconcerned adolescence sees me, only with a simple question he vindicates my night. Handlebars and a mullet, crusty and traveled, an old Harley boy I guess. The pawn moves, the board is never content to be set. Raggedy Anne and a flower. Four fog-heads stand and reminisce, diggin’, fibbin’, laughin’, livin’, they do it, never impeded by the obstacles of burden and worry. The wheel chaired woman found a friend and an infectious smile. The night is done, the pieces are moving and the king has retired. The three musketeers lost a comrade and found a concubine. This evening ends happily for my milieu. All smiles and savvy. Laura and Sarah, still kickin’ and happy, memories of an opportunity lost.
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Thursday, May 6, 2004
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Back at the Farmer’s Market on a brisk, grey evening with the clouds rolling by in a dreamlike procession. The night is alive with music, love, and voices. It’s all an amalgam of commotion, but every cog turns to its own beat in the eternal wheel of progress. Nothing stops, the loop of circus tunes into my left ear. Colors blaze a fire through the night. The fluorescent exchange of red, green, and yellow. The lime leaves lit by the candles of filaments shrouded by the sapphire sky. Green Joe’s and Blue Nautilus, buzzing the beat of an immutable tune. Barbershop quartet sings my ears song. A wide grin in a purple sweatshirt. Everyone seems peripatetic, a nomad, with no loss and no destination. Everybody promoting their own life, no one wants to be alone in their journey. Beards and beanies. Bras and bustiers. Everyone is eating life by the season. A little boy on an even littler bike, driving untouched on his own road. It’s a kind of magic. Too young to know, too old to care. Not there, but somewhere in between. Delight in a child’s eyes lights up the stage. A little girl who clutches a doll to her hip finds joy in life, she is special. She will someday understand the greater import of her whimsical world. I am still anonymous, not blind, just invisible. Intertextuality? Inter-life-tuality. Seth and Liz. Another happy couple. Sweet smells and sights and sounds. The staccato stimuli of cold and flavor warm the night from the hearth. John Hirsch, yellow clad and living life, searching for a life to settle into. Some meander and still others rush by. Three Redwood froshies are born in fun. I know them by face and they know me by name. I feel bad, but they dig. Thugs walk with a constipated gait. Innocuous and trivial. Nobody cares that I’m alone, I’m supposed to be. Where do you hide from cold? Peopole come and go with the wind.
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Sunday, May 2, 2004
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Today’s patchwork dream has brought
me to Stinson after a pilgrimage about China Camp, down 101, and my favorite
1. Alone again, sitting in my throne of
sand, partaking in one of the most beautiful days in the history of the
world. It is believed that there are
more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. I sit with hundreds of grains of sand on my
lowly little fingertip, grasping the infinitesimal relativity of my negligible
life. This water that rolls in front of
me is free. It comes and goes for all I know, from
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Saturday, May 1, 2004
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I am on the Larkspur Ferry on a
gorgeous, hazy, spring morning on my way into the city. I missed my original ferry to the ballpark
only to realize that I had made a fortunate mistake. I am on a boat with a stoic man in a
ten-gallon hat and wide-rimmed reflective aviators, staring, with a Band-Aid,
into the wake of our flight, a derisive grin embodying the magic of his
journey. Two times have I written and
two times have I seen the same girl. Ali
I think. A sophomore at
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Thursday, April 29, 2004
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I sit here at the Farmer’s Market in
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Thursday, April 19, 2004
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Sitting in the musky cab, reeking of stagnant rain, passively watching the dull, incessant pitter-patter of spring sunshine splash drop-by-drop onto the foggy, cracked windshield, my thoughts refracted through their ephemeral beads and sang a new song to my lonely ears. I was of a party, saturated by people, surrounded by the facsimile shelter of social paradigm. But I still felt lonely. I realize suddenly that it is not many people whom I long to linger with, but rather an equally lonely soul, floundering similarly in the tide of life, looking for an anchor to contain the disjointed rush of their life downstream. I want that one close friend.
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Friday, April 9, 2004
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I’m tired. I’m tired of all the drama. I’m tired of long nights wondering. I’m tired of falling short of my long-winded, whimsical fairy-tale with every passing day. I’m not depressed. I feel like I should be but everything is still too bright and fun to get down. Every day is the nicest day in the history of the Earth, day-in and day-out. Music is too sweet to my ears not to sing out of a wry smile. The voices of my friends are too harmonic to deny the symphony of their discourse. Everything is sweet, but something is still absent. It is an anchor. It is one. One thing, one person whom I can share it all with. One person whose opinion does not falter, one who does not trade passion for pennies.
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Friday, April 2, 2004
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Age is volatile. It is a malleable concept which we as humans are so inertly dependant upon to classify and segregate our society. But it is also us, its creators, who so irreverently nullify its significance at our own will. As a youngster, age dynamics are a caste system in themselves on a monumental scale. The difference between a one and two year old is a universe; a two and a four year old a galaxy; four and seven immeasurable. But as infancy and childhood is molded into adolescence and teenagerdom, the difference of even a year or two is unfathomable. The institution of grades creates this segregation.
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
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Emotion is an irreverent thing. It embodies so much of the human condition but is as malleable as Jell-O is with a plastic spoon. There are those proud individuals who wear their demeanor like a boisterous scabbard over their soul and still the others who hold their inner dialogue sacred and forge its face into their persona, never overtly showing its true colors. Emotion is a tool by which humans pine for attention. They are easy to forge and still easier to belie. A tear is not juiced from the sould out of sorrow but out of a craving for affection.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
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What is love? Is it an emotion? A craving? A theory? Is it actually attainable or is it rather a fictitious figment of our imaginations created by the amalgam of dream, media, and folk tale? Or is love simply a romanticized embodiment of lust? Is it rather a façade of righteousness and vindication which we humans hide behind to mask our obsession over sex? Ultimately, popular culture has isolated that copulation as the ultimate and defining “act of love.” Do humans not simply n eed an excuse to hide our dirtier side behind for sake of modesty and humility? Sex is what it is really all about, no? In adolescence you revere and titter at the opposite sex. Both humans but that is irrelevant for you are either a penis or a vagina and then a human individual.
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Last edited Monday, February 27, 2006