Bring your own salt.

Over here, stone is packed on stone, and the wall of our city rises. We are proud. Another year dries against the Ages without end. Men and women pass rustling on into autumn. Forever. Whatever. It is a year like any other. Over here, peace. But over there, none. Listen. Mortar burst from seams, the walls are breached, they crumble. Swept across the dunes, listen, the soft suffering of all those caught in the claws of Chaos come again. Oh how they wail. How they choke on Fate and ashes. It is a year like any other. Ancient ocean of the possible ever ebbing into the single cave of the real. Into our actual. Here; peace and plenty, but There; there they have none. Girls and boys are born. Whatever. A thousand, thousand, tiny heartbeats in the dark. Forever. Two hearts. Beating their first at precisely the same time. They'll never know, because one is over here and one is over There. Lucky. He who has a home. So very, very, lucky. You see, we are here too, we just happen...

Travel teaches you more about you and how you work than you ever learn about them . You learn very little about them, really. Globalization. Everywhere's the same now. The internetting interknitting of our cultures and our cities and our stories. You can't get lost anymore  anywhere . You have GPS on your phone. Travel shows you how to get totally, utterly, wordlessly lost. If you're lucky you learn how people are the same everywhere you go. If you're lucky you learn how  people  couldn't  be more alien. You return home from your travels. Tired, content, ready for a new adventure. Perhaps then you finally see, I mean really see , where you came from. You see your home. Feel it, even. If you're lucky, and your eyes are open. You start to see people. You realize that actually you saw very little about where they live. Where they really live. You wake up in the middle of the night in your own bed and it hi...

Yes. There is a common, abstracted Path, the one we all walk. But the way it plays out for each of us, our individual journeys… that is always unique. There are overlaps, but mostly they're messy and inconsistent, like the sketched copy of some intricate blueprint – clumsy fingers hastily trying to recreate what was glimpsed but now gone, those precious moments of revelation. It's comforting to find footprints on some forlorn pass. Those who've been before. To follow them for a while and muse over the age and location of old campfires. It's fun to bump into the travelers along the way; to trade stories and advice, to join forces and walk together for a time. But always there comes a parting of the ways, and each must ultimately tread their own Path. No matter what. And that is painful, but the pain passes, and the joy you've shared always outweighs the loss of a companion. Well, depending on what you choose to dwell on, in your mind, as y...

All sense perception is illusion, all is filtered: the eyes and the ears are but simulacra of actuality. Our mental maps can't do it any other way. They obscure that impossible ocean of energy surging its truth throughout the fundamental fabric of the Beyond. So, basically, your five senses are lying to you. They're lying because they are giving you a partial truth. White lies. Limited, mothering you, protecting you from daddy's overwhelming awesomeness. But they have to, because we can't look straight into the sun for very long; our eyes are only jelly. Perhaps, then, when we delude our selves by choosing (whether knowingly or not) to see the world a certain way, that is why we then actually do start to see the world that way. Nothing changes; it's the same (objectively) except for all the differences (subjectively). Your belief system is a lot like a radio receiver, which you can tune to receive any of the available frequencies along its spectrum. You ca...

    Catchy title, no? Yes…but I'm going to tell you the naked truth. Please. (read between the lines) Okay, tell it. The first time you had sex.     "It was with a friend. There's actually not much more to it."      Just tell the story . You've baited them – sex – you've pricked the hook in – sex! – and now you have to deliver. Or they'll be pissed off. "Well, afterwards, it was kinda awkward between us for a few months because we were housemates. We didn't ever talk about it. It just kinda hung there between us, in grins. Or when one of us left the kitchen just a little bit sooner if we happened to be making tea at the same time.” And then? "Well, we stayed friends. Almost three years later when I came back from Korea and visited her and her girlfriend (yes, her girlfriend) we picked up our friendship just like that. It’s funny, but we've never spoken about it, that one night, and how we f...

Every day I walk past these three "Cash for Gold" employees. Poor souls whose job it is to stand in the middle of St. George's Mall Street with chest-sized billboards hung around their necks. Yesterday, just as I was pitying them, I looked down and I noticed as if for the first time how I was wearing a Nike t-shirt. I really saw it. And the message embedded itself deep, deep within my mind, much deeper than if someone had screamed it across the marketplace. We are creatures of vision after all. The message was this: "You're mobile advertising." I couldn't shake this insight, and on the train ride home I noticed all the eyes bouncing off my t-shirt. Drawn there by - just what, exactly? The cool? The bright red color? The brainwashing? And I realized then, sick to my stomach, how wearing branded t-shirts is like making yourself a walking billboard, no different from those Cash for Gold guys. The only difference being that they're getting...