To GroundControl42, with Love from Mercury3
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Today is the 30th of March, 2009. Which, if I've done my maths correctly means it must be your 32nd birthday (or something like that)! I have told you on more than one occasion how dear you have become to me over the past ten years. Ten years! This September will be ten whole trips we have zipped around the Sun at 67,062 miles per hours together-- 5,874,631,272 miles we've held on for dear life to this lovely, fuzzy, delicious, sunny, forest-and-water-clad chunk of rock in space with one another. I can't even begin to pretend that I've spent that whole time with you, nor could I con you into believing that you have been in my head through each of these miles, yet the fact remains the same. We still share this crazy ride together, and having you along makes the trip so much easier.
I would have never guessed, meeting you the first hour of the first day of high school, that you would have evolved into the beautiful girl you are now. We were such dorks back then (and maybe we still are)! It's funny though; I've always thought you were a beautiful girl-- a classic beauty since day one. In a world that can be so convoluted by the experience and actions of man (and woman), you have always brought a fresh, honest breeze. While you hair might not be the same colour, your eyes and your smile and your soul have never changed. In a world where the mind and spirit are masked behind gossip, consumerism, and the mob-mentality of culture, you have always stood independent in my mind.
I know sometimes you get anxious, and I do too.I know sometimes keeping your balance (in body, mind and spirit) while along for a ride can be a tough trick, but it's okay. You're doing such a good job. Most seem to not even know how stand on their own, and you dance so freely on this planet. Most people are just starting to learn to crawl forward, and you seem to be making leaps and bounds. Most people clutch to the hands of those above them, barely able to keep their balance, and you have both hands free to do as you please. All of this is some stupid poetic illusion to the fact that you're an honest and free creature, while the average mook hasn't seen enough to form an opinion of their own. While people like John Q. Public and Suzi Fucksanidiot frantically grasp on to their college education, sitting in a cubicle, slaving for the man, you stand laughing in your very, very little black dress sipping a beer. You dance. You go where you want. You make the choices you choose to involve yourself in.That spirit makes the world so much more worth being on. Not just for me, but for everyone.
A free spirit is rare, and is a valuable commodity to inspire the masses, but you're more. On top your independence and your beauty, you bring benevolence to all. With this you inspire beauty in others. Simply surfing this planet so fluidly inspires others to consider what it may be like to let go of the bullshit that holds them down and stand on their own. At least, you do for me when I find myself weak. You have made me so very proud. It is an honour to call you my friend. I can't wait to write you another letter, after another decade, describing where you have gone and what you have done and how you have brought beauty.
You are truly an Aries, full of fire and passions. Full of opinions and experiences. Many happy, some sad, but all of which are real. All of which are of value and contribute to the lovely woman you continue to develop into. I could pretend that astrology is some real and mystical tool of man instead of a primitive way to translate the heavens into dates and times. I could tell you the the influence of the first light to hit your eyes from the stars you were born under inspire who you are and who you may become, but I think perhaps you understand these things better than that. That fate is nothing compared to the fire within. The light of stars may influence who we are, but it is in reverence for their beauty not because of their connection to the fates. Sunspots, on the other hand...
If spirit is defined as the energy from inside us and this energy fuels our actions, then your kind and honest energy has blessed a massive chunk of the Earth. Your spirit is strong and free from the alienation of others. I know over the years, my hippie-dippy attitude might have been a bit odd to understand. Further more, I can't say that we've ever been close in a traditional sense, but I can easily say that you are one of the few fleshy bodies lost in the sea of the Universe that I can trust. Thank you, GroundControl -- for doing nothing but being you! I love you very, very much and will always freely choose to spend my energy to help you. You're going places, my dear. I will surely invest to make sure you get where you're going!
You are beautiful.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Chronicles - Home
I get back to Columbia, after being away for less than a month, and my roommates have managed to put us all in a situation where we will no longer have living arrangements in just over a month. You would think that they would be wise enough to renew our lease while I was gone, but I suppose that is the sort of thing that gets overlooked without a reminder.
I can't say that I'm attached to the place, at least. Although, it's sort of annoying to think that I am going to need to relocate when I have even finished unpacking. Again, my life seems flanked on all sides by whatever sort of nature that is found inside of me that perpetuates transience and adventure. I've spent more time living out of my backpack than I have living in my house now. I've spent more nights with my arms around that bag than I have with my arms around any single lover-- or even all the lovers I've had recently combined.
I can't even figure out why I'm in this city.
I'm not part of the University that brings life to this town, nor do I hold a position of employment here, nor do I have a girlfriend to be with, nor even a place to live over the coming months. I have began asking myself where I want to go and what facets of my life I can cull with no regrets. I am admittedly an impulsive creature. I tend to do what I please as it comes to please me. Most my goals involve keeping options open rather than pursuing a terminus.
This year marks the 25th time my body has ridden this hunk of rock on it's trip around our solar centre.
Over these years, I've spent most of my time in the suburb-clad hills amongst the trees, concrete, critters, and cars. While I've spent at least a little time in most of the states of the union that binds the people of these lands, I cannot claim to be an adventurer as I haven't even began to go as far as my dreams tell me I could go. I've drank from streams of melting snow on mountain tops, kayaked between islands in the tropics, ventured into caves and canyons and colleges, yet have never made it as far as another continent.
I don't know why it matters. I suspect it really doesn't, but still I want to explore far away lands, meet interesting people, make stupid choices, live to tell the stories, and maybe even one day come to profit from my experiences. Still, here I am in a city I have no aspiration to be in. There seems to be no mystery-- nothing left to explore by any means of transportation-- for me to find and report back on. Mr. Obama urges each of us Americans to go out and pursue a higher education, and thus bastardizes the term. "Higher" education comes to be the status quo, and with that anything short of a masters fails to impress or be any higher education than what is literally expected of us to achieve by our leader.
In high school, a teacher approached me after class with tears coming down her eyes. I could tell she was trying to keep composure, but could help but submit to her emotions. Emotions are a valuable thing. They are to be trusted. It seems so often we over-think the simple facets of life, when (in reality) each of our bodies are so much smarter than our minds. When you're hungry, horny, happy, or hateful our body tells us, often without a single thought. And, here is a kindly woman whose body has invested into me so much to come to me in tears. She pleads with me to pursue my education. She tells me, between shelves of books, that she hasn't seen a student as smart as me walk these halls in all her time teaching. With that, I could feel my eyes grow hot and tense with tears of my own. I couldn't help but feel angry and sad and lost because I simply didn't care.
Years later, now, I still find myself lost. My scholastic education has all but failed. I recently got dropped from class by my instructor. She told me I wasn't fitting in with the student atmosphere. It was an English class. We were reading shit like Vonnegut-- the sort of thing I read in middle school over a decade ago. I had learned to keep quite around all of the 19 to 20 year-old kids. Any opinion on a story that isn't obvious sadly would merit a salvo of snide comments and suggestions that I was a fucking idiot and that my opinion somehow does count. Despite any textual support I could return fire with, I was discounted by a Professor telling me that what I was saying isn't what Kurt Vonnegut was getting at. In our society, the title "professor" is above that of "doctor" in that both have a PhD (which means they have expounded upon known knowledge), and gone to teach what they have discovered.
Professor Jones is my hero.
Who can be upset with a character armed with nothing but a bull whip and a PhD liberating holy relics from Nazis for the sake of culture? So let's say I wish to be an educated and fedora clad hero abroad. How the hell do I liberate culture, art, and all those hippie-dippie concepts I love if I can't even culminate my undergraduate experiences with a paper document from an accredited institution? In a wired world of instant global communication and information, is the title professor really a requirement to advance our antiquated educational paradigms? Any mook in our nation (and several others) can walk up to a library and key a question into a computer terminal to fetch information from a non-centralized location. Hell, they don't even need to use correct spelling; google doesn't care much for grammar and will tell you when you've bastardized a word.
I can't tell you where I'll be in five or ten years. I can't even tell you what state I'll be living in by June. I once promised this girl I would marry her if we were both twenty-eight and unwed, but that aside from that I have no obligations to fulfill and am free to do as I please. Hopefully I learn something in the next years, and (degree or not) hopefully I never have to kick someone out of my sphere of influence for having an idea that is outside of my notion of what information should be spread.
End Rant...
~ Mercury3
I can't say that I'm attached to the place, at least. Although, it's sort of annoying to think that I am going to need to relocate when I have even finished unpacking. Again, my life seems flanked on all sides by whatever sort of nature that is found inside of me that perpetuates transience and adventure. I've spent more time living out of my backpack than I have living in my house now. I've spent more nights with my arms around that bag than I have with my arms around any single lover-- or even all the lovers I've had recently combined.
I can't even figure out why I'm in this city.
I'm not part of the University that brings life to this town, nor do I hold a position of employment here, nor do I have a girlfriend to be with, nor even a place to live over the coming months. I have began asking myself where I want to go and what facets of my life I can cull with no regrets. I am admittedly an impulsive creature. I tend to do what I please as it comes to please me. Most my goals involve keeping options open rather than pursuing a terminus.
This year marks the 25th time my body has ridden this hunk of rock on it's trip around our solar centre.
Over these years, I've spent most of my time in the suburb-clad hills amongst the trees, concrete, critters, and cars. While I've spent at least a little time in most of the states of the union that binds the people of these lands, I cannot claim to be an adventurer as I haven't even began to go as far as my dreams tell me I could go. I've drank from streams of melting snow on mountain tops, kayaked between islands in the tropics, ventured into caves and canyons and colleges, yet have never made it as far as another continent.
I don't know why it matters. I suspect it really doesn't, but still I want to explore far away lands, meet interesting people, make stupid choices, live to tell the stories, and maybe even one day come to profit from my experiences. Still, here I am in a city I have no aspiration to be in. There seems to be no mystery-- nothing left to explore by any means of transportation-- for me to find and report back on. Mr. Obama urges each of us Americans to go out and pursue a higher education, and thus bastardizes the term. "Higher" education comes to be the status quo, and with that anything short of a masters fails to impress or be any higher education than what is literally expected of us to achieve by our leader.
In high school, a teacher approached me after class with tears coming down her eyes. I could tell she was trying to keep composure, but could help but submit to her emotions. Emotions are a valuable thing. They are to be trusted. It seems so often we over-think the simple facets of life, when (in reality) each of our bodies are so much smarter than our minds. When you're hungry, horny, happy, or hateful our body tells us, often without a single thought. And, here is a kindly woman whose body has invested into me so much to come to me in tears. She pleads with me to pursue my education. She tells me, between shelves of books, that she hasn't seen a student as smart as me walk these halls in all her time teaching. With that, I could feel my eyes grow hot and tense with tears of my own. I couldn't help but feel angry and sad and lost because I simply didn't care.
Years later, now, I still find myself lost. My scholastic education has all but failed. I recently got dropped from class by my instructor. She told me I wasn't fitting in with the student atmosphere. It was an English class. We were reading shit like Vonnegut-- the sort of thing I read in middle school over a decade ago. I had learned to keep quite around all of the 19 to 20 year-old kids. Any opinion on a story that isn't obvious sadly would merit a salvo of snide comments and suggestions that I was a fucking idiot and that my opinion somehow does count. Despite any textual support I could return fire with, I was discounted by a Professor telling me that what I was saying isn't what Kurt Vonnegut was getting at. In our society, the title "professor" is above that of "doctor" in that both have a PhD (which means they have expounded upon known knowledge), and gone to teach what they have discovered.
Professor Jones is my hero.
Who can be upset with a character armed with nothing but a bull whip and a PhD liberating holy relics from Nazis for the sake of culture? So let's say I wish to be an educated and fedora clad hero abroad. How the hell do I liberate culture, art, and all those hippie-dippie concepts I love if I can't even culminate my undergraduate experiences with a paper document from an accredited institution? In a wired world of instant global communication and information, is the title professor really a requirement to advance our antiquated educational paradigms? Any mook in our nation (and several others) can walk up to a library and key a question into a computer terminal to fetch information from a non-centralized location. Hell, they don't even need to use correct spelling; google doesn't care much for grammar and will tell you when you've bastardized a word.
I can't tell you where I'll be in five or ten years. I can't even tell you what state I'll be living in by June. I once promised this girl I would marry her if we were both twenty-eight and unwed, but that aside from that I have no obligations to fulfill and am free to do as I please. Hopefully I learn something in the next years, and (degree or not) hopefully I never have to kick someone out of my sphere of influence for having an idea that is outside of my notion of what information should be spread.
End Rant...
~ Mercury3
Monday, March 9, 2009
Chronicles - Part 1
I love story telling and traveling. More than that, I love to empower and educate others to help those people realize that when their mommy said that they could be anything when they grow up, she wasn't kidding. It's so simple to get out there and do something (anything), especially in this world of high-speed communication, computers, and digital community. We now have the power to decentralize major projects. There are many examples of humans interfacing with each other over thousands of miles to create, not only intellectual, but even physical output. Someone with a camera in London can upload files to a friend in Sydney for editing. Communities of hundreds from all about the Earth can be eyes and ears for one another to expand their individual conscientiousness (perhaps even spawning a new entity in its own).
~ Mercury3
~ Mercury3
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