let’s get this started!

www.hopebigger.com

First, click on that link and read away. What you’ve got there is an effort by a close friend and I to do our part in changing the world and making it a better place. It was fortuitous timing tonight that we got the ball rolling, as I happened to be watching a 20/20 special entitled “Last Days on Earth”, detailing the most likely ways in which humanity could face its own extinction. Obviously, I found this very depressing. While I try not to worry too much about the things we have no control over, such as black holes swallowing our galaxy, some of the more plausible threats such as nuclear or biological warfare concern me greatly. Number one on the list was global warming, which I think most people would agree is a real threat and the one that we are able to experience even now. As a species, we seem always ready to throw away the only planet we have and make it uninhabitable for ourselves. I suppose it might be a matter of perspective. From where everybody stands it is hard to see how changes effect us all, and how we are responsible for planting the seeds of our own demise. I imagine if we could all float above the Earth, and see it for what is really is–an oasis of spectacular beauty in a dark sea which is only occasionally broken up by stars and dust and planets–we might be more concerned with damaging it. I’m guilty of course. We all are. I think this might be the one case where we’ve all done our part in taking from the Earth and giving back only pollution and destruction. The rapidity with which we have done this is frightening. It is only the last hundred years or so that we’ve cause so much damage to the planet. Humans got on just fine before then without causing so much destruction on a large scale. Modernization and industrialization seem to be the causes. Of course, we’ve also reaped great benefits in extending our own lives and bettering our standard of living, so I don’t want to call either of those things evil. But in many ways we just need to change the way we think about our place in the chain of things which make up living. Perhaps that is what hope bigger is all about. It may seem trivial or meaningless, but everything starts from the smallest thing. If we could harness the power of the mind, of everyone’s mind on this planet, and turn it to the things that really matter, those things which are essential to our true humanity, we could achieve great things.

trailways, love at first feel, and a house built solely on smoke and mirrors. the magician comes through. part one?

Ok. Yes this is another post on August the 25th, however I feel it is time. It is time for an epic series of posts where Jeffrey comes forward and decimates, destroys, tears apart, and slowly rebuilds everything he can see from where he stands now. I stand now in my room, so my view is limited. But my mind is endless and limitless and I feel I can see everything that is most important to me. I’m fertile in all the ways that count. I don’t know what’s going to sprout from this. Yet I’m interested in finding out. I’ve put too much thought into blogging lately, thinking too much and letting it stop me from just writing, just letting it flow. All the time I sit here trying to think of topics which are interesting enough to write about, while in reality I should just fucking write anything. It’s all the same, what’s golden and what’s garbage. That’s the truth in blogging, how it reduces and equalizes everything and everyone at the same time. Look, maybe we write to please ourselves first and foremost. It’s only happy accidents that others read something and say “hey, that’s funny!” or “hey, that’s interesting!” and keep on reading. So perhaps it is just one big egotistical exercise. So be it. SO FUCKING BE IT! Let us feed the ego and take apart any notions of pleasing others or even pleasing ourselves. Let us just write.

Right now, RIGHT THIS INSTANT, I’m listening to the track “This Time” off The Smashing Pumpkins’ Machina/The Machines of God. Goddamn if this isn’t one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. Let me tell you from personal experience that when I had this on the other night while it was raining there was a syncing of nature and music and myself. Sometimes you get that just right. For example I once listened to The Cure’s Disintegration while in a rainstorm and that album was revealed to me in an incredible way, with every raindrop that moved down the frosty window I understood just how nature and music will collide, how they are meant to collide. This is just my experience and the beauty of it is you’ve probably had many experiences like this, when the perfect song met the perfect weather and for once you saw how there is something inherently musical about the way a raindrop falls or how a sunbeam hits your window. Let me also reveal something else to you all. Autumn is coming and I love it. Have you ever felt a real connection with a season, so fucking real that you are sure at some point you experience that time and place in a way that no one else understands, that you struggle to put in words because you know that it is essentially only to be experience by itself? Probably you haven’t, because I’m pretty fucking nuts. However, if that is what it is like to be nuts I don’t mind. Listen, in Autumn I understand it all. Everything is clear, and it is spelled out to me in incredible ways. You can feel Autumn, moreso than you can any other season. The colours for one. The colours burn more brightly, more intensely, yet shorter than any other time. The world goes on fire. Don’t tell me it doesn’t. You’ve seen how leaves look as they turn, as they go red and orange and finally dead brown. It’s incredible. And in Fall there is a feeling in the air, of expectation, of beauty. It’s slightly cold but you don’t mind. That’s the beauty of it right there. YOU DON’T MIND. You can feel how the weather is turning, first at night then at dusk and then in the middle of the day. It forces you to put a sweater on, and when you do you know you’ll be warm but you’ll also feel cold enough to appreciate what is happening around you. Fall comes through and clears it all away, but as it does it lights you up in a million ways and every feeling you have comes through cold and clear, like a train and so very fast yet so powerful. And if you are lucky enough to put the right tunes on, if you pick something mellow and melancholy and sad but beautiful then you’ll experience Autumn in a way that goes down somewhere inside you that is primal, the part of you that speaks only of loss and leaving but remains hopeful because it senses that all will come around again. That’s the part of you Fall inflames, awakens, the part that drives you crazy because you feel the most comfortable melancholy ever, the hollowness of knowing that what you lose you will find again. I wish I could give you the experience I have in Fall, I wish I could let you feel how empty but full you get when the sun sets early and burns so intensely that a part of you cries and a part of you nods because you understand, you know that everything burns harder towards the end. They say in Spring you fall in love and you crush over and over again because the world has awoken anew. I say they lie. I say it is in Autumn where love deepens, digs its’ claws in and takes hold and says to you “what you felt in Spring is NOTHING, it is only the start of what I have to show you”. In Autumn love is there, everywhere but silent. It needs not to explain itself, or to make itself known. It takes your heart and shakes it and pulls on it and twists it and wakes you up in the morning, cold and shivering but alive, but awake and confronting how you feel. Spring makes you lust, but Fall gives you love and lust at once, mixed together, impossible to pull apart but aching and yearning. I want to take you for a walk in the Autumn, watch the trees go aflame, feel the cold start to come down, see how thin and high the sky gets as it pulls away to a warmer place and leaves you standing together, not alone but aware. Awareness is how you are awoken in Fall, with your lover beside you. Every note is a sad one but it is the RIGHT one, and in the sadness there are great depths of beauty. And if I, or you, can share that then Fall laughs in the face of Spring and says “what I give needs so very little to bloom and so little to stay”. My explanation is nothing, it pales to what the reality is. I can’t explain this properly because I imagine it refuses to be explained properly. I’ve probably lost you all already. It’s alright, it’s just the way attention and imagination come together and fall apart. I just put on Coldplay’s “Fix You”. Yes I know this song is huge and lots of people love it and many say it is weak and overproduced and garbage. But in this song I can never not love the moment where the song explodes. You know the moment I am talking about. You can literally feel the song coalesce around you. You wait in expectation for the explosion. And when it does, nothing is the same. Such transformation is beautiful, righteous, necessary. It is the movie moment where the kiss comes. You make the soundtrack to your life with moments like these. No words are even necessary.

Times are approaching where I am going to have to make decisions. Sure I have made choices in my life, some of them small and some of them huge. But these choices are going to be beyond what I’ve encountered so far. I’m off the track, I’m off the plan. Where there used to be a set path there is only the door. Once I step through, once I make these choices the me I know won’t be here anymore, if he ever was. Am I going to make the right decisions? I believe that if I always choose with my heart, I will. I imagine then I’m putting alot of faith in my own goodness and knowingness about what is right and what is wrong. Perhaps that is the ultimate act of faith; not believing in God, or Heaven and Hell, but believing in ourselves. Maybe I sound like an idiot; I for sure sound romantic or naive. But who ever said those things were bad, or wrong? Maybe I get burned. Maybe I get hurt bad. But I need to do what I feel I should do. Maybe it is destructive, maybe everything I think is wrong. But I have to find out. I think I’ve run out of steam on this one. I doubt anyone will actually read it all. There’s going to be more though. I can’t stop now. I have to lay it all out. If this blog is to be mine, then it must truly be me.

say it in words

First order of business: if you are looking for a more introspective post, check out the one below this from August 14th.

Secord order of business: go check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/hcapadisli/ . There you will find some very beautiful photographs taken by my brother from another mother, “H”. You may also find a picture or two of me there, notoriously camera-shy as I am that is quite a feat in itself.

Right now, I’m currently reading Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Hemingway has quite the distinct style of writing. He writes like this:

Ernest Hemingway wrote a book. He picked the book up. He put it down. It was heavy. Ernest Hemingway liked his book. He once visited Spain. There he found some inspiration for his book. Ernest Hemingway put down the book he wrote which was inspired by his trip to Spain. Ernest Hemingway shot himself.

And so forth. But I don’t mean to suggest he is some hack writer. Quite the opposite. He uses sentences briefly but he uses them properly, and with just enough style and panache that you forgive him for writing peoples’ names in full over and over again. Yesterday I read Willa Cather’s “My Antonia”. It’s pronounced “an-to-nee-ah”, in case you were wondering. I actually enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, as I usually find books set in the Midwest to be pretty boring and dry, much like the Midwest itself. However, I’ve found out I’m a sucker for any story where the narrator doesn’t get the girl yet is in love with her enough that he can write about her without falling apart completely.

Bobby D said “you don’t need a weather man/to know which way the wind blows”. That’s about as righteous a comment I can lay on you tonight. By the way, I’m toying with the idea of delivering a new post every day in September. What a frickin’ challenge that would be. There is the danger that I’ll start strong and fade out so by the end of the month you’ll be getting posts which consist of what I had for breakfast that day. But that’s fun too. Oh yes, I also want to shout out to all of you who have been posting comments here on my posts. I do read them and I do appreciate them. It’s nice to know you took the time to read what I had to say. Well that’s it for now. Look for something deeper and perhaps sadder by the time the weekend rolls around.

open your eyes

“Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around”

-delivered by Penelope Cruz, written by Cameron Crowe for Vanilla Sky (2001)

Ok, keep that quote in mind, as I plan on returning to it later. In the meantime, I feel the timing is right for another introspective post. As I free-associated tonight, I realized I wanted to talk about trust and jealousy, and how important and devastating these things can be. Jealousy, in particular, because it is an emotion I am quite familiar with. In the last few years, particularly in my twenties, I have come to realize some not-so-pleasant things about myself and my behaviour. I won’t go into all that is bad and wrong about me (because I still want y’all to read this blog and you won’t do that if I reveal everything hahaha), but I thought I’d talk a bit about how sometimes you get to see those dark paths a part of you wants to go down. Of course, alot of the traits you carry, good and bad, are developed in your earliest years. However, it seems that you only get to confront them head-on once you get out of your teenage years and are forced to take stock of your life and how you behave in the adult world. I think it is then we all see those things in ourselves we rather wouldn’t; I know I certainly have. I’ve seen places where I could go (sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally) that would change me in ways that would fundamentally alter who I like to believe I actually am. In truth, alot of those places wouldn’t make that change for the better. There are ways I have acted that I regret very much, because they have taken me away from the person I thought I knew. What motivated me those times when I decided I would see who I could become? There have been many reasons I suppose. Much of the time it results from not thinking things through, or seeing the consequence my actions have on others. Sometimes my mind is clouded by alcohol, and I will take things farther than I would if my mind was functioning clearly. Of course, I don’t want to blame anything on drinking. I take the responsibility, I don’t point to the bottle and call myself a victim. But most of the time I have been sober, clear-headed I believe, and yet I make those mistakes which take me further and further away from myself. Jealousy has oftentimes acted like a filter over my eyes, making me act in ways I shouldn’t have. I think that jealousy is perhaps one of the most dangerous emotions we are forced to co-exist with. It clouds everything, poisons all that is good and twists it. It leaves us doubting the things we were sure were rock solid, including ourselves. It has a horrible way of corrupting your thoughts of others so that in the end you worry more about yourself than someone else. I was thinking of Othello earlier, and how Othello and Desdemona’s relationship was torn apart simply through jealousy. Of course, in actuality there was nothing to be jealous about; Iago was manipulating both of them for his own ends. But often it seems jealousy works best when there is no reason to be jealous. It plants a seed of doubt and many times that seems to be all it takes. Related to that is trust. If you will forgive me, I will make a rather simplistic metaphor and say trust is much like the foundation for a house. It is laid brick by brick, one at a time, over days, months, and many times years. And although you probably never put all the bricks in (as it is impossible to ever know that your trust in someone else is being returned fully), if you are lucky you put in enough bricks that your foundation is stable and you have a house you can live in. But jealousy removes those few crucial bricks at the bottom and suddenly everything collapses, much quicker than it took to build. I’ve been forced to see how jealousy has done similar things to myself. Things get twisted and meaning starts to become poisoned. Trust starts to fail and looking in the mirror you become the reflection. Nietzsche said something about if you stare too long in the abyss, the abyss starts to stare into you (to paraphrase badly). What he meant was you can’t look too long into the dark without being affected yourself. Jealousy has just been one of those ways in which I’ve been given a look down one of those long, dark paths. The scary thing is you never let go of them. Even if you don’t travel down one, you live your life knowing you are always only one step away from moving towards the dark. But, wait. I don’t want this to be totally hopeless and make it all seem just that more darker for you. Remember that quote I referenced at the top? Take another look. Ok, so perhaps it is just a line from a Tom Cruise blockbuster. But I prefer to really think about what it means. For me, it is a truth which makes alot of sense. There are dark ways to go, yes. And sometimes things fall apart, break down, and you want to turn away from them and wish them away. But nothing is final or over until we make it so. I do believe that every minute we can change it all, and make it better. Nothing has to be over unless we want it to be. Even if it looks hopeless, it’s not. Life is giving you the chance in each moment to make it all better. I guess I’m just saying you can travel a pretty far way down that road, however hopeless or dark it maybe, before you are really lost. And I don’t think we are there yet. In another minute you’re going to have your chance again. Take it.

The Hoot Line

The waters of Lake Erie were rather calm last night. This is in contrast to the rather raucous party happening just across the road in Lowbanks. Lowbanks you say? Yes, the lowest of the low. If Dunnvile is your fever dream, and Stromness is your sober nightmare, then Lowbanks must somehow exist beyond them, beyond good and evil, beyond order and chaos. Last night as the bonfire burned we got to meet some of the Lowbankians (some, I must say, who seemed to have just crawled out of the lake and taken their first steps into evolving into something other than reptilian creatures). But many of them are good people (well, actually the really good people were the Dunnvillians, not so much the Lowbankians), and they knew how to really kick out the jams on a Saturday night. So, when adding up the final score, and weighing the pros and cons (including our high-speed run in the dark to make it to the lake before being stranded in the night with some of the not-so-lovable country folk who live just south of the Hammer), I must say it all comes out in the positive category. However, I may have accidentally offended a man who believed I was putting the moves on his wife. I assure you sir I was having a joke at her expense too. You seem to have missed that subtlety (as did your wife). Of course, you were also drunk and making a fool of yourself. So I believe by all accounts I am still a good person.

hoppipolla

Look, this is going to be a quick post. For reasons I will not explain right now, anything longer than a few sentences is going to get confusing and frankly ridiculous. So I wish to talk briefly about the most glorious, most happy, most joyful song ever made: Sigur Ros’ “Hoppipolla”. I am a huge fan of Sigur Ros. I have been since I was first introduced to them on the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s magnificent film “Vanilla Sky”. From there my love has only grown. With their new album “Takk”, I have only fallen more in love with them. All I want you to do right now, faithful reader, is download “Hoppipolla”. You will smile as you listen to it because it is such a glorious song that is all you can do. I cannot say anything more than implore you to download it. Do it now.

one for all the lonely kids

I think perhaps I suffer from “amotivational syndrome”. It is real. Look it up. Add a touch of possible clinical depression on top of that and that might explain the lack of posts on here lately. Actually, some of my blog friends have not posted very frequently as of late either. I am sure they actually have good reasons for that (for example, having a life and actually being busy). I have no excuse for my laziness. Nor can I think of much to write about as of late. I am beginning to despise August though. Let’s just get this summer thing over with and get Fall here. In the meantime, my advice is start listening to Nine Inch Nails very, very loud. Specifically, if you put on “the downward spiral” you will see what I mean.