At the narrow passage there is no brother, no friend. -- Arab proverb

04.07.22 There's a saying salient to relationships: "Don't stick your dick in crazy."

More generally: Don't share your thoughts with crazies. Because those driven by emotion will hear only what they want to hear, and then there's no salvaging what you actually said.

Hermits had the right idea.

03.20.13 A line from a 1950s children's book says:

Courage consists of hanging on... just... one... minute... longer.

This is in truth cowardice... clinging to what you have out of fear that nothingness might be worse. 

Courage consists of  letting go. Embracing oblivion.

03.03.13  Nothing is more cruel than hope.

Hope keeps you going even when the only sane course is to give up. When going on will only prolong the agony.

The death of hope is a kindness.

6.08.12  Trust is a brittle thing.

It grows among people we regard as friends.

One of those friends, whom I trusted and shared my life with, betrayed me, and destroyed everything I care about.

Thanks to you, I no longer trust, nor will I ever again.

Trust is for fools.

9.08.04  And then there's the dream.

Everybody has one. That special something you work for your entire life, your best bright hope for the future.

But when you finally reach that brass ring, you discover -- it's only brass. You've worked too long, too hard, overcome too many setbacks, and the dream has withered and soured and was never worth the pain. And you find you don't care anymore. Can't care anymore.

The opposite of dreaming isn't nightmare. It's being awake.

5.31.01  A day late and a dollar short.

Now that one I can attest to, having experienced it over and over. Every time I get close to finally having some security, something that's really my own that no one can take away from me, I come up just a little short. Close enough to smell it, sometimes close enough to touch it, but never close enough to keep it. And then covering what it took to get that far eats up whatever reserves I'd built up, and I have to effectively start over from nothing.

I can't do it again. I'm tired. This time I'm not starting over. This time I'm giving up.

5.18.01  Another fallacy: "Life is too short".

Life is mostly about enduring unpleasantness in the generally-vain hope that better times are ahead. Any realists out there care to explain why I'd want that to be longer?

9.7.00  Life sucks.

I first realised mine had no value when I was five years old, and got my initial hint that my needs had no significance in the adult world. And it's gone downhill ever since. At 45, the best thing I can say about my life is that it's been over for years.

Every time it starts to get better or I begin to have something worthwhile of my own, someone or something comes along and takes it away from me. Sometimes by bad luck, just as often through malice. That's why it will never get better, no matter what I do or how hard I try. At best it's wasted effort. Heads bleed. Walls don't.

Life sucks. I don't want mine anymore.

5.16.00  They say you can choose your friends, but that's not true.

Friendships are more haphazard than relatives, which can be legally altered, or romances, which usually have some biological fuel in the mix. Friendships just happen, often with the most unlikely people.

And sometimes they go bad.

Sometimes they just drift away, and that's not so harmful. Sometimes you hit a hot button you didn't know your friend had and the whole relationship blows up, and maybe that's as well -- if you didn't know each other any better than that, perhaps the foundation was shaky to begin with. And sometimes you discover that you can't trust the person you'd considered a friend and would have laid down your life for -- and that's deadly, because trust is the basis of all true friendships.

If we could choose our friends, that would never happen.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.  -- Henry Brooks Adams

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Original trumpet graphic by K.Tyler
Hazard by Richard Marx

updated  03.20.13