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 | Winners and losers, turn the pages of my life
Were beggars and choosers, with all the struggles and the strife
I got no reason to turn my head and look the other way
Were good and were evil, which one will I be today?
Theres saints and sinners
Lifes a gamble and you might lose
Theres cowards and heroes
Both of them known now to break the rules
Theres lovers and haters
The strong and the weak will all have their day
Were devils and angels
Which one will I be today?
Are you happy now with all the choices youve made?
Are there times in life when you know you shouldve stayed?
Will you compromise and then realize the price is too much to pay?
Winners and losers, which one will you be today?
Theres a light and a dark side
Standing at the crossroads, there well meet
Theres prophets and fools there
The lies and the truth, will be at our feet
I got a reason to turn my head and look the other way
Its heaven and hell here, which one will I live today?
Are you happy now with all the choices youve made?
Are there times in life when you know you shouldve stayed?
Did you compromise then realize the price was too much to pay?
Winners and losers, which one will you be today?
Which one will you be today?
Which one will I be today?
--Social Distortion, "Winners and Losers" |
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Mar 7, 2008 7:33 pm
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Call me crazy, but I love the default colors of alt.com's blog display. The various shades of gray are wonderful.
I won't fault those bloggers who mix neon orange and glowing turquoise backgrounds and purple text, or other such color schemes. Or highligted boxes, different font sizes and styles, "bling," or any of the other devices that are available. (Though some of it is a little hard on the eyes...)
But the gray... it's just perfect. Tasteful, understated--classic comes to mind. If I had to have a favorite color, I think it would be gray.
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Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you're beautiful!
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Feb 15, 2008 11:45 pm
690 Views
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My wife set up the massage table in the living room tonight. Her Dom wanted a massage, and she is doing it (right now as I write this, in fact). She walked out of the bedroom dressed in a low-cut spagetti-strap black top that sculpts her ample tits and shows off plenty of cleavage; ass-hugging blue jeans; and her leather motorcycle boots. She had the massage oil and a towel as she was headed into the living room, and soon he was naked and headed the same way. She stopped in to visit me surfing for a moment--and my jaw just dropped open.
She is SOOOOOO hot tonight! Ye gods, but life is good!
(And bonus points to anyone who can identify the "sample" used as a title for this entry.)
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Fucking Stimulating
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Jan 24, 2008 7:10 pm
950 Views
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So, the House and the President (what's left of 'im) have agreed on an economic stimulus package, and everyone in the media seems to be whiplashed by how fast a deal has been done. The sub-prime mortgage mess has been brewing for better than a year, with various economic indicators trending downward; then in the past week or so, two big banks come out with multi-billion dollar loss figures for last quarter, and suddenly everyone in officialdom is falling all over themselves to spend another $150 billion of your money to prop things up.
The idea is to get a few hundred dollars into your hands as quick as possible (which at this point looks to be about May or June), so that you will spend it on clothes, or Doritos, or gas, or new glasses, or (knowing this crowd) dildos and lube. Which is supposed to jumpstart the economy and keep this RECESSION from becoming too noticeable. (This of course assumes that you're not going to use that money to buy clothes, glasses or dildos made in China...)
This whole deal brings up a question I've had about American macroeconomics for a long time, and never heard asked, let alone answered to my satisfaction. The question is this: what are the moral implications of an economy that is based solely upon consumption?
Here is an underlying assumption that I make. Consumption for its own sake is an evil, and we all do too much of it. Look around your house, and see if you can identify anything that is taking up space, that you could really do without--I'd be surprized if you didn't find something, and probably a lot of somethings. Look in the garage, in closets, in corners and cupboards, and you'll probably find lots of little crap just sitting there gathering dust. Maybe you wanted it at one time, maybe someone gave it to you as a gift, maybe it's half-used. But it's there. And it took resources and labor to produce, and money to purchase. And so its existence contributed to "good" economic numbers, but now it's just waiting to take up valuable landfill space, which is exactly where it will end up, sooner or later.
And we're surrounded by these things, all our lives. And when things get tough for Citigroup or Morgan Stanley, the elite in Washington try to get you to buy more of them. Waste more resources. Waste more space. Waste more money. Waste more sanity as you look around your home, your life, your world and wonder where all this crap keeps coming from.
What does a life lived amid clutter, a life spent laboring in the service of clutter, do to the human spirit? And what does it say about us when we consistently choose to bring it into our lives? Indeed, when our desire for crap becomes a bankable macroeconomic reality?
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The Bucket Blog
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Jan 23, 2008 10:51 pm
572 Views
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Listening to the radio tonight, I heard a bit of "On Point" on our local NPR station. They had gathered a handful of cancer survivors together, and were discussing the recently-released film "The Bucket List," in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play two terminally-ill men who form a friendship and decide to spend their remaining days living out their wildest, most deeply-held dreams.
The host asked each guest in turn how they populated their own personal "bucket lists," that is, what would they want to do or experience before they kicked the bucket.
One woman had been diagnosed with 6-10 months to live. She said that directly after her diagnosis, she wanted nothing more than to spend time with and really connect with the people she loved. Then, as she didn't appreciably sicken, she looked forward to a year of continued life and health, then two. After she passed the two-year mark still going strong, she started to ask herself what was out there in the world that she wanted to see, wanted to do. And she had to spend time really searching how to use this unexpected gift of time.
It sounded to me that her first reaction was esentially defensive--to pull into her closest intimate circle and make those relationships sing. Then, as she found her own personal finish line getting farther and farther away, she opened herself to the wider world, and felt the urge to be more adventurous, or at least adventurous in different ways.
Reflecting on it, I get the impression that my life, though it's had moments of adventure, has been primarily defensive. True, I went to college, studied in Europe for a year, married for love, joined the Army, went poly. But I've always returned to what seems to me a fundamentally protective and sedentary life. I've tried on numerous political, social and philosophical orientations, only to end up coming back to an almost "default" attitude of inert pragmatism, doing whatever it takes to get through the day, the hour, the minute ahead of me.
I have spent a lot of time over the last several months thinking about "needs," as in what needs a person brings to an intimate relationship. And beyond the usual human biological needs (air, food, shelter, etc.); and beyond a few half-glimpsed yet sometimes very insistent sexual and sensual desires; I'm not sure I can identify, let alone articulate, what I absolutely have to have in my life, what I "need."
It's a little daunting to encounter as many people as I do who seem to know beyond a shadow of doubt what they need. If there is a spectrum, I feel sometimes like I am on the other end of it from them.
And I'm trying to figure out how I feel about not knowing, not having a clue, what I would do with the life I had left if I were diagnosed with a terminal disease. If I had needs to satisfy and a finite amount of time in which to do it, how would I proceed?
Because, essentially, that is the situation we all find ourselves in. Nobody lives forever...
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Shuffle
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Jan 20, 2008 12:10 am
563 Views
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They say that there is no one so avid in their faith as a brand new convert.
Well, I had my own "conversion experience" last weekend, and I am still rattling from its effects. It happened at the Southwest Leather Conference in Phoenix. I have never had such a sustained burst of what I can only describe as the influx of transcendent insight. Every workshop I attended, every event, every new person met or old acquaintance bumped into, was another opportunity for an idea to shoot through me and crystallize into some sort of intuitive truth.
The event is billed as having a "spiritual" focus--spiritual being a word that has never seemed to me to have much descriptive power. But power was exactly what I found there. Powerful ideas and realizations, and a powerful sense of community, such as I've never experienced in the BDSM community before.
I've got pages of notes, jotted quotations, fragmentary ideas, workshop handouts with scribbled insights that I desperately wanted to keep hold of. I'm planning to sit down and write about all of it, to take the raw insights and distill them down into something more accessible and memorable.
It was a great weekend. I'll definitely be back next year.
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Gratitude--Oct. 28, 2007
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Oct 28, 2007 7:22 pm
499 Views
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Things I am grateful for today:
1. An unasked-for shoulder and scalp rub
2. Mashed potatos and sausage gravy
3. Milena Velba
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Gratitude--Oct. 26, 2007
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Oct 26, 2007 7:38 pm
473 Views
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1) Someone who will drive you to the dentist to get your wisdom teeth pulled
2) Someone who sees you struggling with an armful of thorny problems at work, and plucks one of them out of your arms, unasked, and says "Would you like me to take care of this for you?"
3) Vicodin
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Gratitude--Oct. 23, 2007
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Oct 23, 2007 11:07 pm
456 Views
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Three things that I am grateful for today:
1) Moonlight on waves just after sunset
2) Benicio del Toro
3) The ability to forgive
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To link to this blog (Howard1000) use [blog Howard1000] in your messages.
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