I checked my words carefully. Words more powerful than atom bombs and more cutting than AK-47s. People are fragile and words, not bullets will break them, and once they break every part of them spills out. Their soul, spirit, identity, ugliness, and their beauty. It’s all there, right in front of you if you know where to look. Most people see the ugly and I didn't want to become that. I thought I looked for beauty but then wondered why I often say such ugly things.
A successful actor is praised for never giving up his dreams to become someone else for a living but to dream to be an unmasked artist is a mortal sin in a consumerist society. Artists don't consume; they create things that can’t be consumed with riches. You consume art by seeing, by listening, by feeling, never by buying.
The car housed a hysterical bumper sticker: Save the Planet, and I permitted a moment of contemplation to truly bask in this thought. Save the planet? What a joke. Save the planet from what? From ourselves? And save it for what? For ourselves? It was a kind of perpetual stupidity in a tug-of-war battle over trivial matters. Only imbeciles see things in black and white: liberal or conservative, yes or no, this or that. Those in power laugh at those people in their morally inverted shades of grey, basking in the labels they've created so the people are easier to control.
It takes courage and strength to be sensitive to things and even more strength and courage to own up to it or be vocal about it. Robots, the only things with a perfect lack of emotional capacity, are easily controlled, and I suddenly realized that’s why the military often trains people to suppress their emotions. Unfortunately for them, humans aren't machines. We feel, we love, we cry, we despair, and we rejoice. Anyone who’s ever tried to convince me not to feel is someone I shouldn’t have trusted. The only reason you should shut off your emotions and emulate a robot is if you're doing horrible things. How fatal my decisions have been. How many people would be loving, rejoicing, and feeling right now rather than crying indefinitely in the depths of the afterlife? If only I’d figured this out sooner.
Those who’ve left their bootprints in the trenches are those who value human life most. They get unwanted glimpses into the savage nature we really have underneath all the expensive clothes and moisturized skin. This of course, rules out the politicians, feminists, and liberals who are far too cozy hiding behind their daddies’ wallets and sophomoric mentalities as those who feign having tasted the true consequence of a single blood-drop darkening the sand.
Naturally, the plague of humanity named confidence (or pride to some), which symptoms often render each person to fiercely believe himself to be above average, let them to believe that it was others who were affected by this case but not them. Everyone thought they had the quintessential ability to detach themselves from the cases they were working, even if the victim looked and behaved exactly like their son, daughter, niece or nephew.
Trust me. What a phrase. Is it a phrase or an idiom? I was never a wordsmith and I was too far along in life to even attempt to tackle a problem as complicated as words. Do writers struggle as much with words as a painter does with his paint and his brush?“Okay,” it is impossible not to trust a beautiful woman. Even macho noir anti-heroes who talk about staying out of trouble and doin’ nothin’ for nobody always get sucked into intricate snares set for them by beautiful women… I would not be an exception.
We enter this universe alone in search of microscopic beauty—and while we love, or are loved by others—we leave this world completely alone, having only found infinite sorrow. Despite there being so many of us, each of us tragically realizes that everyone is on a solitary journey. No one else can see what we see, hear what we hear, feel, what we feel. All we have of each other are glimpses of moments, whispers of experiences, memories of the past we wish we could make eternal, but in the end, we become a faint memory in the minds of a few good people.
Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.
How simple the American narrative. Suppose you have two hands. The American political system will cut off both hands. You’ll then hear that those with one hand will be along the upper class and those with two will be part of the elite few. Then politicians will come along and tell you their plan for giving each American two hands. The people will buy into this and fight the disillusioned in favor of the politician. They are never for themselves and the politicians are only for themselves so no one is for the people.
Unfortunately for him he looked more like an innocent man on America’s terror watch-list rather than a gallant Viking possessing all the benefits of modernity. More like a villain in a Western fairy tale with his slicked-bouffant obsidian hair rather than the long sun-like curls that all great saviors of the poor have been obliged to possess. I squinted to the side towards him for a second and he caught my gaze almost immediately; his inky irises were comfortable enough to hold my stare indefinitely, his pupils seemed entirely ravenous as opposed to the feminist preferred oceanic turquoise, which for them is a physical demarcation of emotional sensitivity. He seemed like an uncanny bad guy any which way I looked at him, except of course, by his actions thus far…
The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone’s outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness.
I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.
First, our enemies were the natives, then they were the Nazis, then after a while it was the communists. Finally, at the pinnacle of what we’re calling civilization, our enemies are the Islamic terrorists. Our enemies seem to change over the course of history along with our ways of fighting them. But what hasn't changed is government profit; politicians and leaders seem to always be getting richer by the blood of our soldiers. Makes you wonder who the real enemy has been all this time.