Honoring the Lost

Today marks the 9th Anniversary of the September 11th attacks in America. This day should be filled with remembering those lost ones in the attack that took 2,977 lives.

These people were spouses and singles, the children and the elderly, men and women, Christians and Jewish, Hindus and Islams.

So why do we wish to burn the Koran? The holiest book in the Muslim religion? It's like burning the Bible. In fact, the Islam religion stemmed from Abraham, the same with the Christian and Jewish (By the way, the Jewish religion focuses on God and treats Jesus like a prophet, while Christian has Jesus as the Son of God). Maybe we all need to inform ourselves on topics before opening our mouths to condemn them.

And why do we want to focus on this aspect of 9/11? It's a day of remembrance, not hate. Not all Muslims are bad, the only ones that we should blame were the ones who destroyed those 2,977 lives, and the group behind it. We shouldn't blame the religion or the ones who preach their beliefs.

If we fight hate with hate, we get nowhere. We must be tolerant of other cultures, despite how "different" they may seem.

We are all human, we are all animals. We have the same desires, the same greed and the same sins.

Death is tolerant but so is life. No one person deserves to live above another, just because they're of a "superior" race or religion.

What is religion? Does God create us? Or do we create God? Is there a "true" God?

I hope one day, we forget our differences and live under one God, one that isn't Christian, isn't Islam, isn't Jewish, isn't Hindu or Buddhist. I hope one day we live spiritually and not religiously.

It will be a hard endeavor but I believe we can do it.

This is all I have to say on this topic, I hope everyone who comes upon this post will take into account what I've said.

My thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their lives on 9/11 and for those who gave their lives to keep our country safe.

Chaos

White almost metallic leaves flash

Against the soot black skies,

Wind howls through the branches;

A large jutting cloud rockets overhead,

Engulfing the land

And trapping it within the jaws of chaos,

Roiling, undulating, clashing clouds make up the sky,

A sickly green color bathes everything in eerie light.

Sparks fall from the roof of the mouth,

Falling into a sharp, white beam of electricity,

CRACK!

With the report of a cannon shot,

The air explodes into a cascading crash heard for miles

WHOOSH.

Waterfalls come from the clouds,

Filling the fields with their destructive rivers

BANG!

Ice falls in unbelievable sizes,

Fist sized chunks of destruction that, as they fall from the stratosphere,

Break everything in their path

Then . . . silence

The storm's far from over though,

With a shriek of a thousand damned souls

a tendril of cloud reaches towards the ground,

It's blacker than the night sky,

It descends to the ground,

Spinning mercilessly.

Tearing up the earth.

It flies across the land,

Everything in its path is in danger.

Animals scream haunting wails

As the Tempest destroys their lives.

Certainly this is no ordinary storm,

It's too godlike,

Too destructive . . .

Too alive

Surgery

Today, I get surgery. Nothing too major, just a removal of "hardware" which is a plug on my left ankle.

I'll be fine. I just got up insanely early, the sun hasn't even risen yet and I'm awake. I didn't get much sleep last night.

Something tells me I'm going to be sleeping a lot tonight.

The Bridge

It had stood there from the beginning of time it seemed. Stalwart, an outline of human ingenuity and confidence on the horizon.

It was falling apart.

The bridge knew no pain and every time a large piece of concrete fell off of it or a wire snapped, it shuddered but didn't fall. Clouds masked its structure every morning but when the sun burned off the haze and shone on the cold metal and concrete structure, bathing it in light and basking it in unrelenting heat, the bridge stood tall and proud in the bay. There were no animals to nest in it, no people to walk or drive upon its massive roadway. Just the bridge, standing on the edge of time.

The only thing on the bridge were corpses, hundreds of them, thousands. All burnt black, their gaping expressions were emotionless and staring up into space. There was no sign of trauma on them, only the burnt and leathery skin. The sun pounded on these corpses all day long, slowly decaying them through heat, turning them into ash in painful increments.

The bridge was impartial to its visitors, it stood there, once in a while a piece of steel fell off, or a gaping hole opened up on its road deck, shoving thousands of corpses into the bay below. Sometimes a freak wind gusted, surprising since there were no storms in the area of the bridge, the storms had all disappeared with the living. The wind would twist the chemicals around and throw even more dead bodies into the churning waters below.

The sun left its throne in the sky and descended to its bed in the horizon, behind the mountains that rose behind the bridge. The last view of the bridge was of it standing in front of the ruins of the city it once served. The cold sun falling behind the mountains, casting its last rays of light upon the doomed earth.

Bieber Fever? You Wish.

Recently (and by recently, I mean around six months ago) I've heard of the new teen sensation that's been sweeping the international spotlight. Seriously, it was the best thing since Stephanie Meyers' bestselling "saga" Twilight. Yes my friends, I am talking about sixteen year old pop singer Justin Bieber.

Before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy and says that I've never listened to his songs, I'll tell you I listened to one . . . barely one. I had a minor bee problem when I decided to play this "music", as soon as I started playing that one song, the bee moved on to greener pastures. As for me, three years of my life have been chopped off because of the unnecessary stress Justin's high pitched whining he calls "singing" was replaced by the ten years added as soon as I switched off the video and proceeded to laugh my ass off.

Seriously, this kid's what? Sixteen? He sounds (and looks) like he's ten. Doesn't he have school? Doesn't he have a social life? Does he have a life at all?

I decided to give this kid a second chance and read his lyrics, maybe I was missing the big point whilst laughing at the banshee music. Nope, no luck there. I've seen better lyric compositions by a kindergartner. That's the truth there plastic hair boy.

I kept giving this kid a lot of second chances, since his music sucked, maybe all the rabid fan girls loved his character. So, I checked out his Twitter account. He seems as immature and whiny as any other regular teenage kid. Maybe even whinier given that he rose to fame on YouTube (whatever happened to being a local band, playing to your heart's content in the town bar and getting to fame on luck and prayer?). I know Bieber wasn't trying to get to fame but it still irks me that his mom allowed her child to go with what amounts to a total stranger to a different country to perform. But I digress, Bieber's final blow to his character was when he decided to complain to Twitter about changing their algorithm for their trending topics.

Proclamations by rabid fan girls such as, "Let Bieber trend!" and "Make Bieber a TT" inundated my live feed for days after Twitter was just trying to stay up-to-date. I was sad that I followed these fan girls. Then Bieber joined in and said he missed being a trending topic. The guy's one of the biggest pop singers in the international spotlight right now, and he's complaining about not being a trending topic? Does he have anything better to do? Scratch that, he doesn't , other than singing like a banshee and posing for "seductive" photos that honestly look like he's trying way too hard.

And speaking of fan girls, they're the final nail in this little coffin I made for Justin Bieber. They're on par with the Twilight junkies and most of the Twilight fans are probably Beliebers (as they call rabid fans of Bieber) too. They tweet, blog, vlog and talk endlessly about how "hot" he is and how "awesome" his singing is. Now to be fair . . . Justin is kind of cute and he reminds me of a metro-sexual teen in my class with the same exact hairstyle but a thousand times cooler. Still, the fans have gone way too far, they even created a Twitter for the kid, a Twitter. It's called Twieber and Justin Bieber may or may not have an account on it, honestly, I'm too annoyed and tired to conduct a legitimate search. Twieber apparently features Justin Bieber and Chuck Norris as trending topics, it earns cool points for Chuck Norris, but not for Justin. I shudder to see them on the same page . . .

Bieber's following has gotten so bad that they created a Twitter site for him. I can only hope that the shark in the background will eat him.

The bottom line, if you want to listen to a banshee singing about his girlfriends in lyrics that have more sap than a maple syrup factory can hope to produce in a life time, then go for it. But if you want to listen to legitimate rock with complicated rhythms, good lyrics and a vocalist that won't make you want to gouge your ears out. I suggest you listen to something else other than Justin "Beaver Banshee" Bieber.

Black Skies and Happy Thoughts

I was looking at the full moon rising over the trees, the black leaves were silhouetted against the bright white and gray circle in the dark sky. I felt an intense moment of poetic-ism as I looked up at the sky. I realized that in a few short weeks, I will be staring at that same sky, but in a different back drop. And instead of the full moon, I will be looking at millions upon millions of stars, twinkling and shining throughout the Western Skies. Luckily, the trip's landing on a new moon night.

I also felt with a pang of something close (but not quite) home sickness, that I was missing Alaska, the place I went last year. And the next topic in my next post. I realized then, that Alaska (even if it experiences almost 24 hours of sun light) will still be under the same sky I am now, and that eases my heart. I miss Alaska, it was the best two weeks of my life, the air was clear, the skies, though cloudy, were beautiful. And when the sun came out, the sky was clear and a deep blue I haven't seen before. I hope to go back to Alaska, and go back to Yellowstone and visit all the wild sections of the world. Adventures are something that can be remembered for a lifetime.

Alaska

I'm hoping that one day, I'll be able to portray my experiences in Alaska in painting. I have not yet reached a level worthy of being able to even attempt this, but one day, I do hope I am.



For now I will continue writing about my experiences, putting them into new light, and hoping that one day, we will all reach a certain agreement with one another that the world cannot be conquered fully. Because if we have a world without any unexplored terrain, or any voids of darkness and unknown territory, we'd have a very boring life. Many people have adventures awaiting them, good ones where one can feel many years younger than they truly are, but they have to just look past their nose to see them. And that my friends is the problem with human society.

But honestly, in a less serious note, we need woods, because if we didn't have any, I'd be bored out of my mind right now without anything to search and rescue.

Just a thought. Just another post on a forgotten webpage.