Dreams are our way of communicating with the unconscious, they’re kind of like “The Force” in Star Wars. They tie all the living things together. We dream, animals dream, and plants probably dream too.

You should contemplate your dreams. They tell stories that are very important. They speak what you need to be hearing.

Listen.

Image by Petr Kratochvil, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/

Image by Anna Cervova, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/

Nothing’s worse than rust.

My writing is covered with rust, and I hate it. But you know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that rust really isn’t something your will-power or motivation can wipe out. You can’t break a habit with will — you break it with habit. I learned, for instance, you simply can’t keep extra pounds off your body without going for a long walk a couple hours a day. It’s just a required habit if you want to get the job done!

The frustrating thing about habits, though, are when you get those bursts of will-power. Will-power spurts frustrate me because I become determined to make progress, but a spurt isn’t really progress, per say. A spurt is just, well, a spurt! Growing up is a daily process, your “growth spurt” in the teenage years is just a little boost of your regular growth.

Spurts don’t get rid of rust. Habit does.

Stop being motivated, and start living by good habits.

The libraries are dying, and I’m convinced it’s because businesses are trying to kill them. You actually see books in the library that aren’t in book stores. I’ve found in the library that I’ve never heard of that are actually… you know… useful.

Everything in a book store is there to make money. Any kind of like high minded book is there because its on a high school’s summer reading list and therefore sells a lot (and the kids don’t actually read them, so it’s a wonderful racket, actually).

But those self help books and shit? They’re the biggest scam on Earth.
They’re designed to keep you needing help. Be a good little capitalists and keep buying the weight loss books, ma’am!

So visit your local library before it’s too late!

I cringe whenever I hear someone on their cell phone shout,

Where you at?

The lol’ing, the brb’s… I find myself using it all the time, and it’s like, my God why am I using these stupid terms?

My discomfort is this fear that we’re all just de-evolving and getting more and more stupid. How did we find ourselves in this world? The internet was supposed to make electronic democracy, spread ideas and free thinking and take down prejudices and open borders. But look at what it’s become. It’s a great big porn and pedophilia machine peppered with apathy, video games, and political Loony Tunes just like cable news.

In a way, for me, Twitter is like a straw breaking the camel’s back. We’ve fallen so far that we’re now sending pointless microblogs to each other about our mundane, boring days at work, our nights out drinking, and our mindless ramblings. Ironically, this post you are reading now, is also a mindless rambling! But shh… don’t tell anyone!

Personally, I’m not taking it anymore. I highly recommend that we get off these blogs and forums and twitter accounts and back into books and encyclopedias. We need to expand our minds and actually learn something, not masturbate our egos and spam friends about our two-bit daily activities.

I had heard of My Lai before — as a footnote of a footnote during a dryly taught Vietnam unit in school — but I never understood it the way Tim O’Brien described it:

What happened, briefly, was this. At approximately 7:30 on the morning of March 16, 1968, a company of roughly 115 American soldiers were inserted by helicopter just outside the village of My Lai. They met no resistance. No enemy. No incoming fire. Still, for the next four hours, Charlie Company killed whatever could be killed. They killed chickens. They killed dogs and cattle. They killed people, too. Lots of people. Women, infants, teen-agers, old men. The United States Army’s Criminal Investigation Division compiled a list of 343 fatalities and an independent Army inquiry led by Lieut. Gen. William R. Peers estimated that the death count may have exceeded 400. At the Son My Memorial, a large tablet lists 504 names. According to Col. William Wilson, one of the original Army investigators, “The crimes visited on the inhabitants of Son My Village included individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy, maiming, assault on noncombatants and the mistreatment and killing of detainees.”

The worst part about it is the aftermath. The families destroyed and ruined, and the lax punishment on the criminals:

In some cases, judicial action was never initiated; in other cases, charges were quietly dropped. Calley aside, only a handful of men faced formal court-martial proceedings, either for war crimes or for subsequent cover-up activities, with the end result of five acquittals and four judicially ordered dismissals. Among those acquitted was Capt. Ernest Medina, who commanded Charlie Company on the morning of March 16, 1968.

It’s no use weeping and shouting outrage over something the happened so long ago in such a terrible war, but the least we should do is know about it, remember, and reflect so that we can try to never let it happen again.

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