There was a mad dash down the stairs, cold echoes up toward the vents. The pavement stabbed back, upon their exit, at the soles which dragged along the tiny stones, the empires of real estate for the overlooked insects. And the race for escape began, the desperate search for that certain something that slipped between the birthday candles of their youth.

In a foreign land, fresh from the plane, one peeled one’s eyes, soaking the colors of the odd trees and faces, the sheets on the new open sky and on starched beds, much like  how the skin, open-pored, from a warm bath pulls in the air on the other side of the door.

In a familiar room, snug in worn clothes, one seeped into the cushy crevices, the dim lights that work to stretch the past. One lowered one’s eyes and stared beyond gravity’s influence. That one saw the future, the blue starched sheets of open sky, and the flickers of holiday smiles.

The race was to get as far away as possible and as quickly as possible. But when all of space-time can be imagined does anyone really go anywhere?

Each day this body dies and is born and with every memory the world adds a rich layer that is both harsh and beautiful, depending on the state of mind. Each day is a lifetime, for time is life and the most important day is obvious.

So our “progress” has allowed for a closed state in which our demons are locked in with us. But why confront them when we can become them, and it’s so much fun to do so? I then ask can we be closed and free? How can one be closed in, shut away to one’s demons, one’s own devices, with idle hands, and be called free? Free to do what? To commune with the past or the future, or obsess as I described above? The only way to be free and closed is to be open while closed. A prisoner may have such a fixed perspective of existence that s/he may find the universe collapse in on itself in his/her prison cell.

We must have heroes: the Greek gods and the ancient gods of India, the superheroes of comic books and their villains–all humanized to be relatable. But does our “progress” provide a better environment for obsession, for villainy, than it does for heroism? Is it not easier to close oneself off from society and stew than it is to sacrifice oneself for a greater cause of true progress? For even the keys to a massive audience are locked by the cages of Mammon (the god of money) and his servants.

But I see new flowers grow, flowers that don’t need outfits or categories, flowers that believe in connections and oneness. Self-absorbed flowers, yes, but flowers of new colors, flowers that may know their true selves and the true selves of others. Flowers that I faintly hear rustle in the breeze. They grow open and free and they know they are deceived by the knotty trees who say they will show them light. These are new flowers that bend and twist like vines. These flowers are not slow and lazy, they twist with each other and grow stronger.

These flowers: heroes, them all.

Flowers cannot grow closed in the shade. Open and free is the way to be.

They never figured it out.

And I had to pee when we boarded. And the coffee wore off and I became tired after seeing Mt. Rainer and Mt. Hood as passing roadsigns, frostbitten ice cream mounds that pushed away clouds with their breath. The flight attendant forced me to accept a bag of cinnamon pretzels which I could not eat. I listened to Pink Floyd and wrote a little.

When we landed I tugged and shifted the luggage over my back and shoulders across concrete football fields under the runways of LAX. People stopped in mid-stride, right in front of me, without looking. My duffel bag had momentum of its own, but I was courteous. The taxi driver may not have been so. My hotel was only twenty minutes away and when the attendant gave me a yellow receipt for the trip before I got in the back of the taxi-van I thought I would have no problems.

I waited for the driver to ask me where I was going. Then I told him. He said that that’s no good for him, that he’d been waiting for three hours and my hotel was too close.

“There’s a free bus,” he said, “a bus, it’s free and it’ll take you to your hotel. Or else you pay nineteen minimum.”

I knew there was no shuttle to my hotel; I’d stayed there three times before. His voice and mannerisms showed me that he was irritated, that my receipt for the trip was bullsh.

“So do you want to take the bus or take the taxi?”

“I want to take the taxi, that’s why I’m here in the taxi!” I said. So he drove off in silence. At the hotel, after not turning on his meter, he told me how much–after I asked. His nose and chin were high and he hadn’t shaven in a couple days. I thought that taxi drivers were supposed to drive people in their taxis to where the customers wanted to go?

When I got to the front desk the woman told me that there were no rooms ready. I had booked my room months earlier–double queen beds, mini-fridge, early check-in, and preferably on a higher floor. This trip would be thirty days at the same hotel. I don’t want to do the math. The most important thing was the mini-fridge.

I wouldn’t get the fridge for a couple days after check-in. The room had no remote for the TV. I had two little twin beds and the room was on the third floor, out of twelve or so…

Maybe more to come later.

The world he sees bends in an ecliptic motion and time slows to a stop. Infinity. Light and darkness split like an atomic bomb and he feels the entirety of the air like he knows the range of his whole body. The water in his blood is what keeps the salt in the oceans, the flake of dust on the hood of a car.

He sees the world in a cool eternity, another kind of warm glossiness such as the glazed doughnut crust after the kiln or the frosty January threads of Arachne. No longer does he care if he is naked for he knows everyone is naked, everyone is born and dead, alive and changing. Before him is an intangible realm beyond the mind, but between the mind and the body.

And he could sing, floating on a sling of angel hairs, but to sing would shatter the fluidity of his vision. The transcendence. So he steps beyond the voids of our thinking, like skipping over puddles on the sidewalk. He steps where we all meet–the giant canvas in the sky that holds everything, but erases all at once.

The field of his vision is limitless, yet concentrated enough to be focused.

He drifts…a puff of cotton gliding through the intangible realm.

Look at cancer researchers. (No offense to any cancer survivors, treatments are one thing, finding a cure is another.)

Without getting into too many specifics, according to the National Cancer Institute’s website nearly $5 billion goes into funding each year for cancer research. Most cancer researchers rely on grants for their income. The average salary for these researchers is about $75,000 a year. Would these researchers, who undoubtedly prefer lab work to practicing medicine to the public (a possible alternative), knowingly find a way to make their job obsolete? Essentially, isn’t the cancer researcher’s job to find a cure for the disease they are researching and thus put themselves out of a job? Or maybe the incentive to finding a cure is the patent they would get, but they would still be out of work. And a curious mind like a researcher may find life unbearable without a subject to hold his/her interest. Of course, there will always be more diseases to research and find cures for–or a new disease could be “found” which would then need research.

I’m not saying the cancer research institution is corrupt. Or am I?

But I may say that the education system is corrupt. Practically all traditional universities are “non-profit,” yet big money goes into and comes from athletics and alumni associations, while presidents get six-figure salaries and students pay higher tuition. Universities are also willing to take out-of-state and international students because they pay even higher tuition rates. A few years ago Yale received some $70 million in grants, with tuition on top of that.

Non-profit = not for profit, right? Wouldn’t this mean that society’s best interests are in mind and not the people working for the business?

Back to where I started…if we can find a way to make our own jobs obsolete then we would not be obsolete, just the job. This doesn’t mean that people are obsolete. But, if a population grows so much, then statistically there will be more people that may be seen as “unimportant” or “obsolete” to others. There are over 7 billion people in the world with a little over 1,200 billionaires in the world.

If a job that can be automated is obsolete, then are college grads obsolete to a university president? There are more college grads who are unemployed right now than ever in U.S. history. So what did the university do besides take tuition from those students? We know they didn’t make a profit, because they’re non-profit, and we know a university’s job (to educate) is not obsolete–just like a cancer researcher’s job is not obsolete.

Who are the important people in this world that judge whether or not someone else is unimportant or obsolete?

You are important.

You are not obsolete.

Prove it.

(Worship life, not money.)

Ordinary

Verse 1:

See the people around

And they fill up all the towns.

Young kids obsessed with violence,

Children always make real sense.

Generation Y from X

Teetering on a white fence.

Chorus:

Just ordinary people,

America is feeble.

We are just

Ordinary.

Life is a monastery.

Verse 2:

You know you have a neighbor,

He lives in all his labors.

Listen to his regular words,

Because he always speaks the good.

A dog comes by,

Feeling high.

You look at him,

Then you sigh.

A boy starts to skip along,

Listen to his merry song.

Chorus:

Just ordinary people,

America is feeble.

We are just

Ordinary.

Life is

A monastery.

Verse 3:

Then the dog barks

At the boy.

You notice a gun

Is his toy.

Stay inside your

Cozy home.

Dogs like to bury your bones.

Another neighbor you are,

Listen to me and go far.

Look around,

There’s laziness.

All I see is

Craziness.

Such a pure gaze creates purity in the thing gazed upon.

Why do we forget sometimes that’s it’s as simple as a state of mind?

Maybe to be an adult is to have a headache; maybe to be a child is to shrink-wrap our mind around one sound at a time and forget the noise.

I’ve read the ancient poetry of Greece and they do not describe the sky as brilliantly blue. Perhaps their minds, their vision, weren’t adapted, evolved enough to experience blue. Perhaps their minds couldn’t handle a calm world surrounding them. Perhaps they couldn’t project their peace strongly enough unto to the sky that they saw. Quantum.

How do bees see the sky? What color, what shade of ultraviolet that we have not the capacity to comprehend?

I’ve heard that blue is the most human color.

There is a crucial difference between believing that the world was created for us and believing that the world was created by us. Consciousness is king!