the past few weeks have been strange...
a soulful reunion brought about by the confessions of love by two of my dearest friends have had me floored. this event which felt like such a long time away is over. it is the day after everything that i've been looking forward to for months has come to pass, and i find myself reeling from the finality of it.

maybe its a sense of entitlement, but i thought i would get to spend more quality time with those that had jumped on a plane from somewhere distant. thought that i could discuss with them the things that only they know. thought that i would be more brave and open when i had the chance.

i've made these mistakes before. worrying too much about the outcome in the long run without realising that this is it. this is the moment where you should be happy. this is the second that is real and none of your fears for the future can be valid here, because right now you are here and you are fine.

in so many ways i had looked forward to these past two weeks. two of my best friends who both live on other shores came to visit south africa to attend the spectacular wedding of two of my other best friends. these two people know my soul. they inspire me to be daring and different. i love them and i miss them already even if its only been a day.

the truth is i envy them a bit. they are away on an adventure, am sometimes i forget that my life is one too. i think i'm addicted to adventure. it doesn't really matter in which form, as long as there is always something exciting on the horizon.

i don't really know what this post is about, but in a strange way i feel empty. drained of some of my energy by these two amazing souls, yet replenished by the thought of them. my love for them and everything they stand for. to me it seems i pale in comparison, yet they see something in me that makes them love me. i wish i could keep them forever.

does horse shit matter?

i sometimes think that i am worth nothing and that everything i have ever done or experienced has conspired to put me in a place where i don't matter. this is very obviously utter horse shit, because for all intensive purposes there is no such place on earth. we all matter whether we like it or not.

you could be famous or just infamous. you could be the bubblegum on the underside of somebody's patent leather shoe, yet you matter in ways you can never even imagine. everybody has or had a mother and father and even if they both hotly hate you - you still matter seeing as there would just be no response at all if you didn't. you are still somebody that changed your parents forever either for the good or the bad.....

the point is that you might be walking down the street, pissed off at the guy who is hounding you back at your office for a report of something that is essential to his corporate survival and wrapped up in your own little world, you don't think twice about the guy asking you for your help or trying to make and honest buck for his family. before he gets a chance to even approach you, he's rebuffed by your force field back into the mass of peopledom everywhere, while you go on with your not so merry life not even noticing that you could have changed his life forever.

we tend to think - screw it - i don't owe anybody anything - and essentially we are right, but maybe by being the 100th asshole to say "fuck off" you might just be the one to send a person over the edge. you might just be the one to make a person walk in front of a bus without ever knowing that had you just smiled and said "no thanks" you could have saved a life. this is obviously an extreme example, but it can be diluted into every aspect and facet of life.

don't get me wrong - i'm not saying we are responsible for the actions of others, but we do definitely contribute our way of thinking by the actions that we take against others and if enough sand is blown over an object at a hard enough rate it will eventually mold that object into something different, even destroy it in the long run....

so i say horse shit to thinking we don't matter, because we do. all of us matter regardless of the scale or place or time. whether we matter more positively or negatively is entirely up to us - but be assured you matter, as do i as does the guy begging on the street. life's just too grand for us not to :)

my truth as i know it

i had this conversation with a girlfriend of mine last night
and she told me the most truthful thing i've heard in a long time
she told me that my truth is my truth
and that hiding that truth with the excuse that it will disappoint or hurt others is totally selfish and self destructive, because not only am i making other people's minds up for them on how i perceive they will react, but i am using them as an excuse to not face myself and the ugly truth that resides there......

i'm not ready to tell my truth to the world, much less to the people i love
not ready to tell, because i don't always believe my truth
not ready because my truth could get me into a lot of trouble
not ready because what if my truth is a lie?

i hope some day that i'll have the balls to be able to say
"i am me and this is my truth as i know it"
until then - i suppose that omitting the truth is what i'll have to work with

the void

sometimes i pray for nothing
a place where everything stops
a place where nothing starts
a space that is no place
where there is no life or death
no life after death
where there are no sirens
no rape, no smiling
no aids, no babies
no men or women
dogs or cats
a place devoid of everything familiar
a place of non-contemplative silence
i lay down my head and pray for sleep eternal
pray for nothing

and then i wake up and its all still there
the pinprick earth in space and time
the wailing and whining
the loving the hating
the simple complexity

and i feel selfish
because without realising my own divinity
come the night i pray for the void

Rape

Extract from Johnathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals

Bycatch
Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident—except not really “by accident,” since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods. Modern fishing tends to involve much technology and few fishers. This combination leads to massive catches with massive amounts of bycatch. Take shrimp, for example. The average shrimptrawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend not to think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 pounds of other sea animals were killed and tossed back into the ocean for every 1 pound of this shrimp.

Or take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed—gratuitously—while killing tuna are: manta ray, devil ray, spotted skate, bignose shark, copper shark, Galapagos shark, sandbar shark, night shark, sand tiger shark, (great) white shark, hammerhead shark, spurdog fish, Cuban dogfish, bigeye thresher, mako, blue shark, wahoo, sailfish, bonito, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, longbill spearfish, white marlin, swordfish, lancet fish, grey triggerfish, needlefish, pomfret, blue runner, black ruff, dolphin fish, bigeye cigarfish, porcupine fish, rainbow runner, anchovy, grouper, flying fish, cod, common sea horse, Bermuda chub, opah, escolar, leerfish, tripletail, goosefish, monkfish, sunfish, Murray eel, pilotfish, black gemfish, stone bass, bluefish, cassava fish, red drum, greater amberjack, yellowtail, common sea bream, barracuda, puffer fish, loggerhead turtle, green turtle, leatherback turtle, hawksbill turtle, Kemp’s ridley turtle, Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, Audouin’s gull, Balearic shearwater, black-browed albatross, great black-backed gull, great shearwater, great-winged petrel, grey petrel, herring gull, laughing gull, northern royal albatross, shy albatross, sooty shearwater, southern fulmar, Yelkouan shearwater, yellow-legged gull, minke whale, sei whale, fin whale, common dolphin, northern right whale, pilot whale, humpback whale, beaked whale, killer whale, harbor porpoise, sperm whale, striped dolphin, Atlantic spotted dolphin, spinner dolphin, bottlenose dolphin, and goose-beaked whale. Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.