The other day I was wondering about cuteness... I was thinking about how even stuffed animals can be cute... Doesn't it seem funny to you that an inanimate object can elicit a response? Shouldn't we be smarter than that? But no... We usually aren't.

And without cuteness where would we be? We certainly wouldn't be such caring mammals as we are. We love cute things and we take care of them sometimes solely because they are cute. That is just part of who we tend to be....

So many of the things that we do have no good moral, or even realistic, foundation. We are mysterious creatures capable of incredible, and incredibly unconscious, acts. Bravo!

Just some pictures from my time in SF. I have since moved to the east bay and bought a ten-year-old red stick-shift Jetta for way under blue book. Now the all the vast Americas are just a drive away....

Photos from days of yore.

LA TRIP

This weekend I saw artifice that stretched for miles and miles, I watched the perfect movie for occasion (Science of Sleep), and I saw people that bring sunshine into my soul.

Concrete, metal, rusty metal, smooth trains (Metrolink).

Griffith Park, Claremont foothills, Santa Monica sand.

Stuff, stuff, stuff. Artifice. Waste, creation, destruction, and all the emotions involved. Alive.

(picture not from this trip, but must plan l.a. photo trip soon)

In the end, we are primates

pri·mate /ˈpraɪmeɪt or, esp. for 1, ˈpraɪmɪt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[prahy-meyt or, esp. for 1, prahy-mit] –noun

1.	Ecclesiastical. an archbishop or bishop ranking first among the bishops of a province or country.

2.

any of various omnivorous mammals of the order Primates, comprising the three suborders Anthropoidea (humans, great apes, gibbons, Old World monkeys, and New World monkeys), Prosimii (lemurs, loris, and their allies), and Tarsioidea (tarsiers), esp. distinguished by the use of hands, varied locomotion, and by complex flexible behavior involving a high level of social interaction and cultural adaptability.

3.	Archaic. a chief or leader.

There is much to be learned from what it means to be a primate. Phenomenons like American Culture can be understood much better with this particular learning. Environmental crises can also be understood much better.

Understanding, however, should not mean justifying our actions.

Additionally, we should try to prove to be the primates who are best able to not act narrow-mindedly and ignorantly -- something we fail to do so much of the time (especially in the case of George W. Bush).

Irrationality, xenophobia, and partisanship seem to run in our sub-order (see definition above).

Think about it.

City of Angels

One weekend; wish I could stay longer!

Why do we hide so much from each other?

We must be more honest, and we must have more emotional integrity, as my friend Thishi says. Poems, even works of non-fiction, too often obscure what people should be saying outright.

America has serious problems. Vietnam created a large group of homeless, sad people in our cities and now we are making a similar mistake with Iraq. Not to mention the fact that we are polluting the world far too much (stemming from our over-eating and wreckless energy abuse).

I wrote a whole year of blog entries on my time in Japan and, more often than not, did not write about what was really on my mind. Instead, I channeled those thoughts into much more abstract pieces.

I am going to work on being more honest with myself, and to other people, even if it hurts to do so. Being honest means more than you might realize.

A life without words,
Persists inside us,
Silence, muteness, deafness.


The tears of this world
Flooding -
At the loss
Of sentience.


It is lack of feeling that makes us vile beasts,
It is the loss of sensitivity that makes waste of human life.


Rebirth, when we halt our neglect.
The daisies in the rain await our attention -
Each moment should not be
A moment lost.