Words are innocent.  They stand neutral until people get in the way hiding connotations between inflections, meaning between gestures.

“I’m going to ask you to do something for me,” she said, “but you can’t ask me to reciprocate.”

He stood beside the bed looking down on her.  The room was dark apart from the low glow of light escaping from the half-shut bathroom door.  It was enough light for him to see the smudged mascara around her eyes.  Had he done that?  She was still in her red dress, damp and clinging to her body.  Her perfume, soft and spicy, mingled with the smell of musky clothes made wet from the autumn storm they had walked through to get to here.

She didn’t belong here in this room with him.  But she had looked lost at the party like a wild animal that suddenly finds itself trapped inside a house, confronted by the screams of a frightened wife.  He had stepped in like a man full of courage and indifference to shoo the scared beast out the back door.

“Take off your shirt,” she said, “I know I have no right to ask you this, but you invited me here and I want to know how your mind works.”

Words can build bridges across chasms of incomprehension and chaos.  But as she shifted her position in the bed to make room for him, he could only comprehend the thought of her naked.  She was the real thing, sexy, hot, and ambitious.  She was also not his wife.  But then, the idea of marriage and a wife were only social constructs to legalize the transference of property. Marriage was nothing more than a legal transaction.

Morality.

Morality is for the meek, a concept that exists in the mind and free for interpretation. None of it is real.

Reality.

She was reality.

And he looked forward to getting to know reality in a way he had never known reality before.

“Where does your mind go when you are not here?” She asked.

“As far as I know, if your mind is not in the present, it goes in one of four places, either in the future, the past, subjective-me, or objective-you.”

He slipped her dress off.

She didn’t protest.

“Give me example,” she whispered, nibbling on his ear.

“A moment ago, when you walked into my room dripping wet from the rain, immediately my mind jumped to an imagined future of you naked and in my bed.  I trembled with excitement over something that was not real.  And all things considered, should never be real.”

“It is real now, no?”

“Oh yes, if we’re defining reality by what we can see, taste, touch, hear, and smell.”

He kissed her small breasts.

“Our minds can take a walk into an imagined future and fill us with excitement or dread depending on what we imagine the future to be like.  Or our minds can take a dip into the past and fill us with either nostalgia or regret depending oh how we choose to remember the past.”

“I only think about the here and now.  I care nothing about the past and even less about the future,” she said.

“That’s a good place to be if you can pull it off,” he said.

She kissed him hard. And in that moment of her hot kiss, he forgot about his past and his future.  He forgot about his obligations and responsibilities and the promises he made.

He forgot about…

The consequences…

Of a kiss…

To fuel your addiction to surfing, I thought I’d create a category to share sites that I find interesting and seem worthy of a visit.

Like a lot of webheads, I spend probably more time than I should surfing the Net.   When it comes to surfing, I’m like a sentinel in the Matrix on a search and destroy mission, looking for useful information.  If the site is good, I stay.  If not, zap, boom, bang, gone!
Anyhoot…
The first two I’ll share with you are both based on cutting edge interactive design display of information.

If you are music buff, Musicovery is a site that lets you explore music according to your mood, tempo, genre etc.  I like the mood search, which for some reason I always set to dark.

For newshounds, I found Newsmaps, which visually reflects the Google news aggregator and creates a treemap visualization algorithm or something or another…it sounds complicated, but looks great.  If you are a person who takes in information visually, you’ll love this.

In the twitterverse we are all little messiahs trying to convert the army of the masses into followers. Compared to twitter gods and goddesses like emilychange (2,358 followers) and calilewis (4,435 followers) and waynesutton (1,282 followers), I am an insignificant messiah with only 21 followers. I’ve got to do something about increasing the numbers in the temple before I lose my guru status.

I staggered out of bed at 3 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the lunar eclipse. Instead all I saw was clouds, so I staggered back to bed. I won’t get a chance to see another total lunar eclipse now until December 2010.

I’ve spent the last 3 nights in The Selfridge.

Hotel rooms make me incredibly sleepy.  Like a bear, I go into hibernation the moment I crawl underneath the sheets of a strange bed.  I just want to sleep and sleep and sleep.  Unlike at home where I sleep on average only 5 hours a night and am up before the sun most mornings, including the weekend.

I read an article that said men sleep better alone.  Perhaps I am a testament to this premise.

**

London is truly a diverse cultural experience.  I know it’s sad, but of all the restaurants I could have eaten at in London last night, I chose to dine on the fine cuisine of a Big Mac and large fries.  The truth is I really wasn’t in the mood for a proper sit down meal.  Anyway, I say London is truly diverse because while sitting in the downstairs eating area, I couldn’t help but noticed that there was very little English being spoken.  In fact, if you were to close your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to tell what country you were in.

**

Success is a choice, not a lottery.

**

And just in case you wanted to know:

Ontology is the study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being.  But what is real right?

Hey I made it into one of the local glossies: (click for a larger view)

I spent some time in the Brecon Beacons yesterday with some friends.  We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect mountain day.  The sun shone bright against a blue sky offering us some warmth out of the shadows.  We walked a trail that is less frequented by the casual weekend hiker, which meant we basically had the mountain to ourselves, passing less than 10 people on a 6-hour hike.

As usual, we spent a great deal of time sharing our stories and the challenges we are currently facing in our day to day lives.   When I share my story with others, I feel less alone and come to appreciate how much we are all the same at some basic level of being human.  A good mountain day strengthens that bond as we whittle away the miles together.

I did take pictures of the walk, but unfortunately I left my camera with Will.  So I’ll have to post them another time.

Click the image to enlarge:

Click the image to enlarge

I overheard two women chatting in a restaurant at lunch today.  I know it’s not polite to eavesdrop, but I can blame it on being a writer and my interest in people and dialogue.  Anyway, I pretty much ignored the two of them until I heard one of them say she had been to see her fortune-teller.  I stopped devouring my burger and leaned back in my chair under the pretence of stretching my belly to accommodate the 16oz of meat I was stuffing into it.

They were telling the same story I’ve been hearing for the last 8 years: there are no more good men left on this planet! And all the good woman are left to pick over the scraps in hopes that there might be some redeeming quality about them.  I can’t turn around to see what these women look like and one is a low talker and the other a high talker so I’m only getting half the story.  The fortune-teller tells her some stuff that’s not all that interesting.  The story ends with the high-talker resigning herself to her fate: “I’ve come to a point in my life where I just have to accept who I am,� she sighs.

Her words were heavy as if soaked in the sadness of believing that she could never have the life she wants.  Instead, she must settle for whatever she can get.  That to me sucks.  And I wonder what has she been through that she has come to this point in her life.

I watch them go up to pay their bill and the one friend strokes the arm of her friend in a gesture that says, ‘I feel you.’

I feel her too, now.

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? – Morpheus, The Matrix

How do you know that what you are experiencing moment to moment is actually real and not just a complex construct of your mind?

There is a thought in therapeutic community that we are not who we think we are and that we are all living in a massive trance state with only rare moments of being truly awake.

The theory goes that the problems you have, or think you have, are always about yourself.  You become the object of our problems. But in order to be the object, you have to be something; and that something is always an idea or a set of ideas.  The idea is only a suggestion of who you are, but it is not you.

For example you might look in the mirror and say I am fat, or I am not handsome enough, or host of other you might say about yourself.  In order for you to say you are fat, you must have in your mind a self-image of what you imagine you should like, an ideal self.  When this ideal self doesn’t match what you see in the mirror, then feelings of unhappiness or discontent follow.  Basically what you have done is tied your identity to the problem.

To liberate your identity from the problem ask yourself, “Who is the ‘I’ that is fat?� The ‘I’ or imagined ideal self is an illusion born of a myriad of personal, social, religious, and cultural influences.  You could, in theory, walk away from the illusion.  But then who would you be?

You can find out through a process of self-inquiry.  And a great place to start is by asking your self the question, “Who am I?�

What you will eventual find is that who you really are cannot be comprehended by thought.

One day you’re going to wake up and you’ll be dead.  All life is folly.  Your time here is transient.  From the moment you are conceived, the big countdown to the end starts ticking and you haven’t even tasted your first breath.  Life moves towards death.  It seems almost ludicrous to get attached to anything, or anyone, or to life itself for that matter.  Life is precious and precarious.  You can be snuffed out in a moment – the next moment or the moment after that.  Maybe you’re lucky and fate has arranged your cards such that you get to languish around into your 80s or 90s but you know what, you still die in the end.  The whole equation life = death, makes everything we do, everything we strive for or worry about, seem insane.  What’s the point?  Why go through all the trouble of trying to collect and hang onto all the scraps you fight for every day?  Why not just get naked and party hard?

“Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, champagne in one hand – strawberries in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming WOO HOO – What a Ride!â€?  I can’t find the person who wrote that, he or she comes up as unknown.  They were probably to busy living hard to bother about leaving a note to get quoted!

I think I might be on the brink of becoming a hedonist.  It seems insane to do otherwise.  Why not get the maximum enjoyment out of life and do the things you want to do? Or as the Grateful Dead sang:

I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe
But at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride
At least I’m enjoyin’ the ride
Yeah, at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride
Yeah

Saturday morning, I can see a little blue sky peeking through the drawn curtains of my front room.  The blue conjures a feeling of mountains and open spaces and I suddenly long to be outside.  I realise that I haven’t planned anything for the weekend apart from attending my daughter’s play on Sunday.  Usually if I don’t plan something, it means I will end up on the computer for most of the day with intervals of time spent reading or playing PlayStation with my son.

Creation…the greatest gift of life is expressed through our choices.  Through our choices we create our realities.  Shatter the illusion.  If our reality dissatisfies us, we are free to destroy it and begin again.  It is time to stop the ignorance. – Big Mountain