Philosophy (particularly Existentialism, Ethics, Religion, Feminism, Phenomenology, and the Mind), Writing, Coffee, Basketball, Boxing, Travel, Fishing, Literature, Political Theory (unfortunately), Movies, Drawing and Painting, Smiles, Psychology, Poetry, Drinkin' and Philosophizin'.... I love being outside, out on the water fishing or just under the sun in general....
Without a net, I catch a falcon
and release it to the sky, hunting
God. This wine I drink today was
never held in a clay jar. I love
this world, even as I hear the great
wind of leaving it rising, for there
is a grainy taste I prefer to every
idea of heaven: human friendship.
by Rumi
We are all liars, because
the truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow,
whereas letters are fixed,
and we live by the letter of truth.
The love I feel for my friend, this year,
is different from the love I felt last year.
If it were not so, it would be a lie.
Yet we reiterate love! love! love!
as if it were a coin with a fixed value
instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.
by D.H. Lawrence
"There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit."
Ansel Adams
I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.
Hemingway
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
by Yeats
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
Sartre
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Marx
"Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement."
Bukowski
The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.
Tolstoy
There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
Hemingway
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is
odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, and buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood
and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color'd
sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch'd words of my voice, words loos'd to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and
meeting the sun.
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? Have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns
left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
by Whitman
A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
Angelou
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Camus
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
Bukowski
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
Pascal
Ideas are clean. They soar in the serene supernal. I can take them out and look at them, they fit in books, they lead me down that narrow way. And in the morning they are there. Ideas are straight--
But the world is round, and a messy mortal is my friend.
Come walk with me in the mud.
by Prather
Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.
Pascal
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
Sartre
A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
D.H. Lawrence
later CASH & earlier DYLAN , Andrew Bird, Damien Rice, the holy Soundgarden/Rage/Audioslave Triumverate, Norah Jones, Creedence, classic Metallica, Tom Waits, REM, Tom Petty, Ani Difranco , the Satchmo , Wilco, Townes Van Zandt, Pearl Jam, Ben Harper, Offspring, Radiohead, Nirvana, the Stones, Alison Kraus, Kristofferson, the Ramones, Fionna Apple, Neil Young, System of a Down, Staind, Sarah McLachlan, STP, Smashing Pumkins, Tchaikovsky, Paganini, and, of course, the lovely lovely Ludwig von.
The Big Lebowski, Frailty, The Human Stain, Equilibrium, Pulp Fiction, Cool Hand Luke, Leaving Las Vegas, American Beauty, Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Spiderman, Waking Life, The 9th Day, The Machinist, Closer, Happy Gilmore, Napoleon Dynamite, Office Space, Fallen, Silence of the Lambs, Memento, Identity, the Proposition , the Gladiator, Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Kill Bill, Sling Blade, The Exorcist, The Omen, 61*, Count of Monte Cristo, I <3 Huckabees, Unforgiven, Seven, Winter's Light, Road to Perdition, Goodwill Hunting, Lonesome Dove, Interview with a Vampire, Donnie Darko, Lost In Translation, Signs, Ferris Bueller, Reality Bites, With Honors Batman, The Pursuit of Happyness, Born Into This, Factotum... love a good movie.
Just about the only thing I watch regularly on TV is basketball. And I friggin love me some basketball. (GO SPURS!!!!!) Oh, and Aquateen and the Family Guy, when I'm around....
Narcissus and Goldmund, Leaves of Grass, Ender's Game and The Speaker for the Dead, Candide, A Clockwork Orange, Nausea, the Worthing Saga, Interview with a Vampire, Being and Nothingness, No Exit, Heart of Darkness, the Brothers Karamazov, the Dragonlance Chronicles & Legends, The Myth of Sisyphus, Mere Christianity, Count of Monte Cristo, Seventh Son, The Second Sex , Red Badge of Courage, The Screwtape Letters, Life of Pi, really any philosophy or anything with some depth, definitely anything by Sartre, Kafka, Rilke, Kierkegaard, Camus, Dostovesky, Merleau-Ponty or Ortega... the Existentialists are great. As far as poetry goes, Whitman, Rumi, Neruda, Vallejo and Bukowski are some of my favs.
Hero? That's a strong word. I don't think I have a hero.