things I would not have seen otherwise {

had i not worked in this particular cafe i would not have seen:



a coin fall, and land on it's edge




A coffee decorated, by myself, in the style i like most.



the single greatest piece of incidental latte art ever. try serving that to an unassuming old lady and keep a straight face, i fucking dare you.

fate delivers a bounty of fantastic photo oportunities.

*and so, he chose to live.

a person very close to me, to my heart, has chosen to continue living.

making this choice and following through with it is the most empowered action i can remember having heard of in a very long time, and one that i am so very proud they were able to make.

in the depths of yourself there is only what you have placed there. often without noticing yourself doing so you will fill the corners of your attention with so much that it seems impossible to espy anything beyond that false horizon. it is a ring of mountains and valleys made our our impressions, and the view from wherever we stand presents only a finite landscape, one which we know in our fibre.

If your landscape is surrounded by places you harbour no love for or have come to despise, if you're blaming yourself for being there at all and there seems no break in the ken it could well seem time to fall into the sky, rather than make a journey to another plateau.

my great companion has elected to live, in the face of all that was set to kill them, they have chosen, and i feel, have chosen well.

-{}-

most of us are here by default, most of us have not made the conscious choice to be alive here and now, and it is something i am beginning to value; the conscious and deliberate decision to live. all of this, everything you perceive, act upon and allow for, is your choice. if you do not perceive it, it doesn't exist; if you do perceive it, it is thn your choice as to how you react.

had they chosen otherwise i like to think i would accept my friends decision, as a secular humanist i believe we all reserve the right to that most selfish of choices; to make the sound and considered decision to not live anymore. but that is false bravado on my part, it is beyond me to accept self immolation as a choice, because i'm selfish and want everyone to myself. there is simply too much to share in this life for me to so easily accept that suicide of an otherwise physically sound person is the right choice, but it is not my right to impose that value, simply mine to express.

as i go on from the shock and this mode of acceptance i have refused to see this from the stand point of victimisation, either my own or for on the part of my friend, i will not allow myself to blame the other for what they have elected to consider. their pain is only my pain by choice, thus i choose to see the immeasurable positivity in electing otherwise (simultaneously their decision to live as well as my decision on how to accept that). it's the difference between compassion and condemnation, both are mirrors on the mind of the viewer, not the stimulus. and the consequence of both love and vilification is only more of the same. seeing this from the perspective i choose brings me to choose love*

- one of those directionless rants {with direction}

As per a conversation with Lux Seville; the dialogue within "conservative" circles about homosexual sex is coded misogyny. many of the derogatives are penetrative and/or feminising "he takes it up the arse", "he sucks cock" etc, these are vestiges of passivity, of retreat, accommodation and vulnerability. never is the man who has his cock sucked or fucks another man the abhorred object. the penetrator is invisible, proximate enough to 'normal' so as to avoid criticism. he is still resolutely Male, in the eyes of the patriarchal notions which still govern our discourse, because he subjugates lesser males, who must clearly be female, because all of us fit within a binary don't we?

conservative doesn't mean anything anymore, conservative as applied to a viewpoint or a ideology has become dilute and dangerous. why has it become meaningless? not simply because the function it served was that of calm during revolution (in america, in france). conservatism as a bastion of civilisation in the face of anarchy held that throwing away all vestiges empire and civil human interaction would be deleterious to the ideals of a fledgling nation, as it probably would be. yet here we are, as far along the path of the capitalist-democracy experiment as we've ever been and those left farthest up the path of conservatism are bigots taking refuge in a once great principle.

our systems of media only allow for short and (supposedly) easy to digest sound bites from those voices that have the clout to access a podium. we don't receive the moderate voices of any ideology, only those of fervour and bile, those that seek to extrude into the lives of others where and when they see fit. these are the examples of conservatism that penetrate the media sphere and are thus the voices that govern the perception of conservatism from outside. i've yet to meet a moderate with the fervour and bile to threaten to kick in a door. but this still only contributes to the meaninglessness of conservatism. in it's current and most extreme iteration, conservatism as an ideology denies human nature.

in a world where we are as socially and technologically advanced as we are it does not hold that we should attempt to stop progress, is that not what we built the platform for? by requiring a society of individuals to constantly stay the same, to deny the progression of life through experience, is to demand a slow crawl into stagnation and death. into unlife.

conservatism as it has come to be espoused and percieved in the mainstream is based on a single, pernicious lie. that there was ever a golden age. that things were some how perfect once and that we have sinned and been cast into this current time of non-perfection. there have always been exclusively homosexual people, it is simply that they weren't in fashion in the social age bigots try to cling to, through the idea of conservatism. this time of perfection denies our nature and our physical reality, it requires continual external others to be enemies and provide narratives binary evil. it's living in a tunnel vision horror.

this world has always been shit, and it only gets better every single day, through the efforts of individuals who hold true to the progress of the human spirit. this happens mostly unknowingly, because the essence of the individuals involved is of locomotion and detailed work, with small amounts of time inbetween for introspection. i speak of social workers, of nurses, ambulance officers, police, educators, child care workers, the civil service. any and all with their shoulder to the wheel, allowing us to move forward by increments as a society, as a species. does all that energy get spent to simply maintain our stasis, because if so our economic model certainly does not reflect this; we aren't simply hummingbirds, fighting to remain still just long enough to gather what little sustenance we can. are we?

voices within every single generation of people have sought to espouse this bigoted hatred of the young and foist their self loathing on them. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, the Author of "The Book of the Samurai" reports his masters perception of the succeeding generation as weak, indulgent and unworthy of the mantle of the world. he was speaking this utter shit in the 15th Century. one can only imagine how perfect people must once have been [sic].

conservatism serves for a season, and is a principle of hindsightedness, not of vision and scope. it denies scale and passion in exchange for the maintenance of status quo, the perception of safety in a world which could simply shrug and loosen all of our coils.

when my parents visited in april i talked to them of the future, and how it arrives in pockets here and there, bleeding into the now. i told them that they should consider purchasing some touch screen computing device for my niece and nephew before they finish highschool because otherwise they would be left behind socially, and technologically. tablet PCs will be an ubiquitous feature of our social lives, very, very soon. i didn't expect them to race out and do it, obviously, i was simply introducing the future in as smaller bites as i could deliver, because i don't want them to die years before they do so physically.

i have seen the fear and misapprehension in the eyes of those who don't understand the new technology, and it is the same fear that governs those hearts locked into bigotry. the yearning for an eternal return, to climb back into the womb and forget how to live like a mountain.

ignore the young at your peril, it'll be their world for longer than it will be yours.