What A Fool I Used To Be

Love is a wonderful thing.  It may actually be, the most wonderful thing. Our world holds many sensations, pleasures, and joys; but none is so sweet or so universal as love.  When we look at the history of human art and human consciousness, its easy to see a pattern of development, of building things and thinking up things and creating things. These things posses unlimited variety of size shape and sensation but they are all, in a way, the same thing. They are things.  Objects. Physical matter. From a recording of a song to a fancy shoe to the Taj Mahal, they are all manifestations in concrete matter. They change only when acted upon with great force, and seem to stand as humanities greatest (if silliest) attempt to fight against the cruel passage of time. Love, on the other hand, is much different. Love is formless.  Monuments may be made to love just like everything else, but these are mere manifestations of the true intangible beauty.  Love changes rapidly. I...

Life is what's already happening. We all come into the world without planning on it, without being specifically picked to exist and into a certain set of conditions which we did nothing to earn or deserve.  From this beginning, whatever it may be, we are all encouraged to live. At least for a while Life is not a singular event. It is an action that begins at birth and must be continued each day by each person who chooses to live. We come into the world because two people (sometimes more) came to a decision (or didn't) to bring another person into the world. Life creates life. Some chose not to live, often in the literal suicidal sense but even more frequently in the more subtle and more depressing manner of half hearted eternal resignation. Death is what happens when we stop living. Sometimes by choice, often not so much. We spend a lot of time morning the loss of those who did not choose to die, but sometimes not enough time is spent morning the loss of those who lose the will...

As a direct result of watching too much sex and the city, the witty young hermit of nowhere, Ohio has decided to start their own personal column. The focus of the column is going to be wisdom; things I learned from a short but thoughtful life mostly filled with over analyzing people, culture, and media. Its important to note that the idea of what Im writing is not to pretend to know anything for certain, nothing I write could ever pass as absolute truth worthy of the shouting from mountaintops. Thats not what wisdom means to me.  Wisdom to me, is anything which combines subjective insight with objective experience to create something which is, well human. I'm not going to pretend that any of the conclusions I draw are going to be bullet proof; after all this is a column not a gospel. But I do make these promises to you, reader who may or may not ever exist. Everything which carries the title of this column or indeed my name in the byline is going to be thoughtfully conjured from no...