Normal

Sometimes you just want to be normal. Warts, quirks, idiosyncracies, goofy walks, imperfect bodies, small transgressions, a dysfunctional family, an obsession. Nobody is normal, and that's what makes us all human.

Smarter than...

If you are an artist, early in your career you are smarter than your art. It is still gaining skill and trying to figure out how to use its language and what to say.

Then you come to a point where you and your art compete with one another for who's the smartest. Sometimes you tell it what to do; sometimes it tells you what to do.

But in your maturity, your art is always smarter than it. It always digs deeper for meaning. It tells you and its audience things you never knew you knew.

Fuck justice

Fuck justice. I need to break the rules when it benefits me.
Fuck peace. I want to kill the people who get in my way.
Fuck equality. I'm better than anyone else.
Fuck the poor. They're responsible for their own condition.
Fuck the children. They just drain the society of its time and resources.
Fuck integrity. It's just for losers.
Fuck the serious artists. They just cause trouble.

From the beginning of history with kings, lords, plutocrats, oligarchs, dictators, czars, the best in human beings have been fighting the attitudes above. Sometimes I wonder if we have made any real progress.

The hug

The woman hugged her husband. He picked up the child and gave him a big kiss. The child helped up his little classmate when she fell. Hi little classmate grabbed the hand of the new student and led her to the bathroom. The new student kissed the hand of his teacher. His teacher shared her lunch with her colleague. Her colleague stayed after school to tutor the Hispanic student. The Hispanic student gave a little doll to his new friend. His new friend gave it to the woman who bought him a candy. The woman who bought him a candy hugged her husband.

The bullet

The bullet went through the brain of the Swiss chef, and ricocheted off to Afghanistan where it tore through the body of a 10-year-old former child soldier. With persistent speed and a sure trajectory it took four lives in a murder suicide. Then paralyzed a small black child in Chicago, killed an innocent bystander in New York, a policeman, a third grader, a homeless man, and it's not finished, not slowed down by any means.

Stories

Isn't your story or mine or the story of any human being worth telling? What would seven billion stories tell us about suffering, faith, inevitable failure, courage, longing, greed, justice and the bottom line of being human?

Traditional values

Republican candidates are whipping up crowds with talk of traditional American and religious values. Anyone who grows up with a value system as a moral guide must recognize that it is a only a guide and not a straight jacket, especially a straight jacket that you want to put on others.

Often personal decisions are made, seemingly under the banner of traditional values, but are really based on discrimination, self-interest and rigid ideologies. A thinking adult makes his/her life decisions informed by his/her upbringing, but from deep within the authentic self, formed by serious thought and experience.

Peel off all the historical, cultural, political and ideological layers, and what's left is one of the most traditional of values,  "Love one another." That's enough to grapple with for a lifetime.