The inherent folly of internal isolationism

Casablanca is an awesome movie (as recognition of such, here's a link to a very nice fan page of said film). (The movie, though far from a comprehensive picture of the period, and far from an accurate picture of Morocco in the early 1940's, is all the cooler to parse from a historical perspective due to its omissions and selective inclusions) If you dare to question that I will have to smack you upside the top of your head. And as such, though from some angles it can seem down right pulpy, on many, many levels it speaks to the human condition.

Let me just pick one as if for random (or perhaps my mention of Casablanca was really a lead in to this topic, you'll never know! Actually the later case is the truth).

One theme in Casablanca I've always been fascinated by is the connect between emotional internationalism and political internationalism, or rather pragmatic apathy in personal relationships, like cheating a woman into sleeping with you, feeds into and onto political isolationism and apathy, like kow-towing to a viciously evil regime like the Nazis. In the same, "rank sentimentalism" feeds into and onto political idealism which allows one to give up a chance for love because of the larger causes of the world.

Thus Rick, who once ran guns for Ethiopia (wooo Ethiopia!), when a bitter romantic disappointment makes him turn callous in his personal relationships, becomes politically callous, at first dismissing the very idea that he help a man on the run from the Nazi's escape certain torture and death. And thus when he re-accepts the idea of personal love, he re-discovers his idealism, and is willing to let go because his love belongs somewhere else.

What a world... that Rick's love be so doomed by those circumstances... but the non-fictional world can be far more brutal... but then again it can offer even great beauties such as the film itself Casablanca.

I'm just saying...

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

And if I can turn the stars blue can I follow you

Otherwise, how can I find where you go when you're lonely?

I'm a bit tired all and all of romantic songs. On the other hand I'm dreadfully romantic at heart. With an emphasis on dreadfully. It's become something of an irritant to me as much as a virtue... if it can be claimed to be so.

At least once upon a time I viewed romantics as an advantage, but overall... I dunno, I have to say were I less romantically inclined my life most likely would be simpler. But better...

Yet romance has always fueled my creativity, even in its absence. And yet can one depend on such an uneven fuel as the ever-changing fluxuations of the human heart?

To dream of something more, a real relationship, that, that would be wonderful but it does seem immensely out of my reach...

As abstract and jumbled as these ruminations might be, they are not idle. For there is a great significance to my long-term goals depending on whether or not I am looking to eventually get married, financial planning, career choice, the type of skills to acquire, and then there is also an immense short-term significance depending on how much I want to enter the dating scene. How much energy should I spend on it? How much should I let it draw me away from the other things in my life?

And then there's always... is it feasible for me to have a relationship? Is it wise, when my emotions are such petulant forces?

In the end, tossing and turning such thoughts, I end up with a great deal of frustration, but little solid answer-wise. Looking inward, looking spiritually, asking God for guidance... I think I am meant to be married someday, and even to have kids someday. And yet I also believe I am supposed to be creative and a person who lives honestly, despite his oddities. Which is to say, yes, I am a romantic, but what that means for now, I do not know... I guess I'll keep my eye out and my heart open, lest I my soul fall into a Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Anywho, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God bless.

Circles, Dots, Squares

Circles, dots and squares

Circles, dots and squares

Circles smiles intertwined

Spinning round you always shine

Smiles for me smiles for you

Smiles for all spinning round they're true

Dots� I'll get to them later

But squares is first right now

Squares, oh the lines

So solid and strong the lines of your life

Then the perpendiculars kick in

And crazy you're cool

Circles, dots and squares

Circles, dots and squares

Circles, dots and squares

Well dots, oh dots

The dots of your eyes

Points of light

Points of might

Like pretty little kites

Flying away into the sky

You make me remember to try

Circles, dots and squares

Circles, dots and squares

Circles, dots and squares

Oh your hair is so colorful

-Rand

Beastia Viri

Bestia Viri

If the animal dwells in man

Why should woman tame it

Certainly an animal dwells in woman

But it is a different beast

And that justifies nothing

Why should woman be the one

To calm man when he is feral

Simply because

Women are most capable for the task

-Rand

None the less, Doom my friends, doom

Since the latest reboot of the Rand Show, a couple weeks ago or such and such, (actually at least a couple months ago, dude, my sense of time is wack, yo!), this almost week without posting has been the longest such period.

Peeling out why, I can say probably that it has to do with the relative calm and decent feelings I have and my fear that actually doing something meaningul/useful/relevant in my life might mess that up.

I could go into that further, but I don't feel like it.

Also, your face is smelly.

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

I suppose I was bold that day

Rand writes. It's what I do. It's something I've done for quite a while, sometimes by necessity, most often by choice, and always with awesomeness. And thus I have a number of scraps of writing like this, written long-ago in my prehistoric high school junior year, which despite their age have quite a bit of life to them and are deserving of throwing onto the web. And who am I to make such a judgment?

I AM RAND!

“Just because someone smells does not make them any less of a person!” I shouted in the late September, early October day. Those may not have been my exact words, but I remember the feeling of frustrated anger. I stood tall that day, eyebrows raised and nostrils flaring. I was pissed off because a kid was getting picked on because people said he smell. I don’t remember smelling anything, but my opinion is biased. The entire room turned against him, and even the adults joined in. That was the way group therapy was supposed to work, but this wasn’t a sin, some gaping flaw that made the kid, named Bill (not the real name for obvious reason), any less ofa man. At the worse this was a minor annoyance that it would be nice for Bill to change. Perhaps my anger came from other reasons. Many of my friends have been picked on because of how they smell, they have been alienated and made outcasts. While I’ll admit some of them did not smell pleasant, they had good hearts, and that is what ought to have been judged on. And perhaps my anger came from another reason. Perhaps it was because I had been in a mental hospital far too long.

The days pass in a mental hospital like slugs. My two weeks of in-patient confinement and 2-4 weeks of outpatient therapy seems now like a lifetime. Some of the people there, they didn’t deserve it. Bill told me he was sent there because he was sitting on the roof singing, heck, if I knew an easy route to my roof I might do the same. Others were sent there because of zero tolerance policies and abusive parents. Of course some of us needed to be there. Some of us needed some of the constant surveillance. Not all of the maddening rules, mind you, but some of them. Some of those people were like me, with a disease in the brain that wanted very much to kill them. Still after a week or so of in-patient therapy I was pissed off royally at the world. And so I didn’t take it when my friend was being picked on.

That alone is sort of standing up to authority, I suppose. The authority of my peers. And I am proud of the act if just for that. But one thing must be remembered about the mental hospital I was in, though nearly all of them were signed in ‘voluntary,’ we could only leave when the doctors gave the go ahead. Getting pissed off and yelling isn’t a good way to look sane.

Of course for all of the dramatics of my act it wasn’t all glamour. I hurt someone’s feeling, and I apologized for yelling. Yet I did not take back my message. Over the next week I tried my best to stick up for Bill whenever I could. Occasionally I got pissed off, though it never came to fists for me (though Bill ended up getting into two fights in the hospital, one the starter I do not know, but the second was most definitely not started by him). Still I felt like I stood against the grain, and against the sheep-makers in the mental hospital. I was his friend till he left. I suppose I stood up against authority that day, maybe, maybe I was just being a friend, I dunno, but heck, I helped Bill out, so that’s worth quite a bit.

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

Just a little lonely

I'm okay.
I'm just a little lonely.
He said with something approaching a smile on his face,
And something approaching bitterness in his voice.

Is it so taxing?
Are you so needy?
Is it so much to wish for?

When alone, I find company is something I can do without,
But it is hard to close your eyes after a day lived in silence,
Without admitting that while
A companion may not be something you need,
It is something you want,
Which is to say you might not always get it.

And I wonder on how to weigh this,
And I dismiss my ponderings as irrelevant,
But I must admit, that there is a part of me that is less than well,
When I am even a little lonely.

Even in defeat, one can reap the dividends of peace

Let me now not speak for current times but for the future,
And for the past,
But not for the present,
For that would be reckless,
Careless
And I have sworn off such ways

If you do not understand me
That's not unusual
We are humans are we not?
At least on the inside
At least for now

Even if we speak in the same language
Do we really use the same words
Each sentence, each body movement, each thought
Is enveloped in connotations, denotations, emotions and assumptions
Till the common syntax is an obscurer of the truth rather than an aide

And that is without getting to the intangibles

And what is life without the intangibles

And what is life without that most misunderstood intangible
We bear to each other
And we do not understand the other
Nor their understanding of us
But what is life without that dream of understanding

And so we try to impose a bridge upon this chaos
We try to force an understanding to bring down the truth
Of that feeling we have for another
That feeling that it is so essential that we give without misunderstanding
That feeling that we so desperately want to understand in the others' eyes

And so it comes to war
We misunderstanding
Take advantage of the fog of our mutual fiction of communication
To bring down what we wish were the feelings that are being misunderstood
That we might be able to understand
But without agreement
And how can their be agreement
And in such conflict

Yet to understand is not always to triumph
Your conception may not be conveyable
It might not even exist
Even in your mind
And if what you wanted to understand
Is worth understanding
Then can it be worth understanding even if it is only the others' definition
That remains

And so it comes to failure
To defeat
Both dismal and deep
But we emerge a little closer
Not understanding still
But a little closer

And in that we advance the longer triumph
Far down the road

Because this is my path

Though it be a lonely one.

And so we have run down yet another failed attempt at romance. Many of the same mistakes, many of the same responses, a little bit of crazy and a little bit of sanity.

All done with now.

While I can't promise that things are actually done with, on my end or on hers, I feel a certain wash of emotions that signals an end to the obsession that is a crush.

While a part of me is relieved, this did not end up spiraling into a real obsession, a part of me will miss the emotion, and an even larger part of me will miss the delusionary promise of a lessening of my old loneliness. And so I'm back to well, dwelling on that loneliness.

Meh.

Meh! MEH! MEH!!!!!!!!!!!!

And so on.

Just got to keep running (or not since I'm going to go to sleep soon).

Come on! Cheery yet!

So take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

Does there really have to be any reason?

I'm sure in the grand scheme of things there's a rhyme and/or a reason to everything.

But more specifically with events in my life, and feelings in my brain, I don't think there really needs to be a reason that deals with me. I mean events happen for reasons, but those reasons could largely concern the actions of other people. And with feelings...

With feelings... well, I feel like we're taught that every feeling has a reason. In this post-Freudian era, every unhappy moment has some hidden trauma behind it. Yet sometimes I think, especially with me and certain medical circumstances of mine, sometimes feelings just come on you like waves of the ocean guided by some unseen moon. It just hits you and all of a sudden you're full of anger, or full of sadness. And despite your best efforts you can't figure out why. The best you can do in a situation like that, or the best I can do, myself, is weather it out, endure the storm, and wait for the waters to calm or for your body or mind to become used to the currents.

However, sometimes feelings do have reasons. Sometimes there are hidden or not-so-hidden reasons for feelings that have to be dealt with. And sometimes it is not easy to distinguish between the completely irrational feelings and those with a core of truth to them. We are biological creatures, built with raging chemicals, but we are also creatures built from experiences (we are in the end crafted by God, but these are the means), and so while biology may explain our turbulent moods, usually the reasoning is a combo of biology and reasons. Except when the turbulent moods don't stop, you can't just say it's one or the other or both, but all of the above, mixed together. If it's not easy to sort out the mess, well, sometimes' life's not easy.

If I were to say any way out of the matter, I would be simplifying far too much. But it is best to pay attention to your emotions, to know when to resist them when they threaten to destroy your mind for no reason, but also to learn when to dissect them to find the truthful core. The best way to distinguish between the two is to pay attention to the circumstances around the emotions, if there is a reasoned core to the feelings, the same circumstances should eventually repeat themselves and revel themselves to be a trigger. And yet one should also be careful about paying too much attention to their emotions, while the unexamined life may not be worth living, neither is one devoted solely to self-obsessed introspection.

And so sometimes we are left with questions about feelings that defy attempts to answer them.

So be it.

Still we march on, for no matter how the waves might batter us, there is a glorious sunrise on the horizon.

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

Even in sorrow life remains

I remember a conversation I had in middle school. It was after the Columbine Massacre, I was talking to some friends, and we were talking I guess about the impact that the Massacre would have on our lives. And I remarked how we would probably forget this in a week or two maybe remember it a little a year from now, but eventually forget it completely. It seems a little cynical looking back on it. It also feels immensely sad.

I sometimes feel like the sorrow of a tragedy should be carried with you forever, and to some degree that's true. You can incorporate lessons and memories into your mind and thoughts. But the full morning of the tragedy has to end, and relatively quickly at that. Because we need to live.

It still seems like a crappy way to run things, but what do I know.