I thought about what I find attractive in the opposite sex, and sexual charisma is the root of attraction. 

It’s hard to quantify, but it’s that burning aura someone gives off when they walk into a room. A single look they shoot your way, or the way they laugh that connects with something deep and primal in your instincts. 

I don’t want someone who merely exists, I want someone who could burn a whole in the ground they stand on with their presence. Their appeal transcends physical appearance. Although looks certainly can contribute to their aura, it’s more a matter of how they carry their looks than just their looks alone. 

Cardboard cutouts just don’t cut it. The fourth dimension — the dimension of charisma — is where desire lives. The attraction is much deeper, you don’t just long for the person’s looks or personality but you become addicted to how they make you feel when they are around you. Their energy feeds your being, and when you are not around them the lack transforms into a hunger for all that they are. 

That flame, that enraging fire that consumes your thoughts and turns your heart to ash — that is the level of attraction I seek. 

Let’s see where I can find those embers. 

I’m not a fashion expert, but men should look like men and women should celebrate their curves.

Recently I got interested in men’s fashion as a result of Mad Men. Goddamn, the 60s was a era of strong drinks, lethal tobacco, and men who knew how to look good and women who looked like women.The 50s were even better.

Then I discovered this site called lookbook and the “top” looks for men are women. Jesus christ. 

Goddamn when did men become dainty little fairies? I hope they develop a time machine to bring back James Dean and Marlon Brando to kick some sense into today’s fashionistas.

I would hope at its basic fashion celebrates gender, and all this lookbook shit has torn apart that foundation and replaced it with fruit punch. Men look like women and the women look like 12 year old boys. Men: wear a pair. Women: it’s ok to gain weight. It means you get juicier tits and ass, and we men love that.

We live in a world of alternate universes. We may say we live in the present, but in reality the way our brains think traps us in the past. We’ve been so conditioned by society to predict our own futures (career, love, life in general) that the only concrete evidence we can use to judge what is yet to come is what has already happened. We don’t live in the present because its fluidity defies understanding, we can’t process things until they’ve become ingrained into our own mental timelines. The way we look into the past for answers about the future is almost in its own nostalgic way a sense of mourning because we long so much for the good we’ve experienced that we’d rather sacrifice our own enjoyment of the moment for false hope in recreating the past in all its familiar potency.

We live in a world of what-ifs. We see through our own looking glasses into a past muddled by all the roads not taken, all the sights unseen and all the lovers lost and all the moments in time that slip us by and become a world of forever unknowns. What if I’d woken up late, would I have made it to my final on time, would I have done well? What if I’d chosen a different school, would I have met the same people and lived life the way it played out? What if I’d boarded myself up when I should have been open and what if I’d spilled out too much of my guts when I should have sewn myself shut, would I still keep the same people close to me? We just won’t know, and that lack of closure in all these alternate worlds is what keeps us revisiting and fleshing out all the things that didn’t happen but should have.

We can’t live in the present because to do so would deny our own existence. Humans are creatures of habit, and the past is the greatest habit that determines our future. None of us came into being, we gestated inside a womb for months before we were born and we walked for months before we could run and we ran for a lifetime before we realized what we were running from was ourselves. None of us simply were thus, we all became thus. We will never cherish the present. Like sand the present escapes us and piles up right before our eyes while we’re busy watching the waves from the past crashing against the ever widening shores of our future.  If only we could sail across that ocean and bridge the gap between our past and present we would know all, see all, and become what we desperately yearn for in all the possibilities lost across these oceans of time. 

Life has no intrinsic meaning. The most random things happen to the most random people, and a lot of times the consequences are undeserved.

The holiday spirit for me has been more of a pensive reflective mood. I guess I’ve always tried to be a contrast to the norm, not because I’m an elitist but because I question too much the direction the general public flows toward.

So while this time of year is usually about getting the things we want, I decided to think back to all the things people have not wanted in their lives.

So begins this Debbie Downer tirade. Wamp wamp wamp.

Around 6 years ago the tsunami hit in Indonesia, killing about 300,000 people. If there is a God, he’s got a great sense of humor because it was a helluva contrast to the overhyped buying season that usually sweeps through most first-world countries around that time of year. Nothing like the mass death of poor dark people in a faraway place with faraway problems to put everything in perspective.

I suppose you could say that disaster and tragedy strike to remind us to cherish the goodness we keep sacred to ourselves. But surely there are better and more efficient ways of doing so than killing other beings to remind those still alive to be good this year and remember to donate and recycle. This, of course, is all coming from a cosmic omnipotent point of view. If I was God I’d figure out a more efficient way of governing my beings than killing a handful every now and then as a slap on the wrist to the 99.9% still breathing.

What a waste of time to create and destroy. God is a funny and very indecisive guy because instead of choosing to create man as either all good or all evil he took the more difficult route and made us complex. In doing so, he’s stuck either micromanaging us like mid-level corporate boss or tossing us to the fun of his own larger schemes and plans and letting us fight for the meat.

We only see the meaning of things in retrospect. People die and the world turns slower and it is only after its movement slows that we can really appreciate why things happen the way they do. We can’t see the movement when we’re caught up in the motion. 300,000 dead is a tragedy today but tomorrow it might be a lesson learned. It’s up to us to extract the meaning out of things because on its own life means nothing more than simple consciousness kept pumping by a heart and veins.

So slow down, enjoy the view, get caught up in the rain, and remember that today could be your last tomorrow. Because the man upstairs loves some sick humor, and we’re all part of the punchline.

Closure cauterizes old wounds, it cuts through infected emotional wounds and opens up new paths to healing. Closure is amazing.

My mom was talking about the problem with the writing and creative types versus the math and science types. She said the problem writing types is they’re so caught up in their heads they’re always chasing the abstract when it comes to love. Math and science types are realistic and appreciate what’s already there.

This lead me to think about the hopeless romantic as a hunter.

The hunter stalks prey and savors the thrill of the kill. The kill itself is nothing more than a symbol of his skill and wit. The real hunt lies in the chase, not the fatal shot.

Hopeless romantics love the pursuit of romance. They seek true love, but subconsciously they enjoy the thrill of finding new loves more than the idea of love itself. The long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners, and moments that last an eternity are nothing more than attainable pieces of an extremely complex and unsolvable emotional puzzle.

Take the prey away from a hunter and the hunt is nothing more than an empty pursuit. Likewise, make the hopelessly romantic realize they are chasing that which does not exist and their noble pursuit of true love becomes childlike in its futility. The hunter loves to hunt because the kill consummates the thrill, but I wonder if hopeless romantics would know what to do with love if it hit them right in the face.

The problem, I think, is that hopeless romantics are in love with love. They love the idea so much that they cannot face the reality of it because it is far more honest but disappointing compared to their own image of it conjured by Hollywood. They are forever hunting, always looking for a consummation which can never be because to attain that satisfaction is to drain love of all its wonderment and beauty.

They’re like a child chasing a kite, so entranced by the fluttering that they fail to see the beauty of their surroundings. Hopeless romantics are so in love with love that they fail to experience the love already burning below the surface. Love is not an emotional fantasyland, it’s a real connection that you have to slow down in order to feel and appreciate.

And so on that note, hopeless romantics are just plain hopeless. But I feel like we’re all a bit hopelessly romantic because it’s human nature to desperately want what you can’t get. Anything worth getting is always worth the chase isn’t it? But is it still worth it if the chase is all you ever get?

Test video.

It’s not even Christmas yet and there’s still 2 weeks to go until the New Year, but given everything that’s happened in this past year I may as well take a second and reflect.

So much has changed over this past year. I’ve met so many new people, felt new emotions both joyful and painful, and been broken down and at the same time slowly rebuilt.

One year ago I did not know anyone from the Fraternity. I knew myself and my close circle of friends at UCI. There was me, my guitar, my guns, and a few good friends and the world at large.

My world has expanded so much since then. I’ve made new friends, fallen in love, suffered heartbreak, and fought a battle with myself that some days I win and other days I lose — but losing the battle doesn’t mean I lose the war.

I feel like such a fuller human being for having experienced it all. Where would I be had my path been different, if the string of life had been woven in another direction? I wonder what other people I would have met and who would have fallen into and out of life as I rode through the tides of time.

I have a rifle made in 1954. M1 Garand, semiautomatic, caliber .30-06 Springfield. Made in 1954 in Springfield Arms. It’s pretty much sat in mint condition since then, but it’s amazing how much life can live in something inanimate. The wood and steel and weight of the rifle is the exact same as what a GI would have felt slogging it through the forests of Europe and jungles of the Pacific during World War 2. How many people’s timelines have intersected with that one inanimate object, I wonder. I’m only 21, the rifle is damn near 60.

I look at the rifle next to me, admire it and hold its history, and simply sit in awe of the passage of time. One year in my life has meant so much, 60 years of life in that wood and steel have left such little marks on it. Time is not a linear road, it’s a fluid ocean against which we swim and sometimes drown. Some things, like the rifle, hold up better to its toll, and more complex creations like ourselves do not.

The Second Earl of Rochester John Wilmot was right. “But life is not a succession of urgent “nows”. It’s a listless trickle of “why should I’s”.

I did things for my own reasons, and I’d have to say this past year has been full of “why should I’s”, none of which I have answered with regret or indifference. 

I’m grateful I pledged. I’m grateful I felt both extremes of the human spectrum. And most of all, I’m grateful that on a daily basis I still ask “why should I”.

The day we stop asking that is the day we die.

I took a walk after dinner tonight to the abandoned railroad tracks just to think.

From there I could see the floodlights in the golf course in the distance and you can feel the wind moving across the green.

I felt at peace, and I just traced the tracks halfway to where they would have met the highway and just walked along and looked at the lights and noticed my thoughts.

I was thinking about the recent past and how quickly time passes.

It’s been almost 3 months since I left school, almost 2 months since Halloween, and 3 weeks since Thanksgiving. Time moves and we get swept up in its currents and we don’t notice its movement.

I thought about the people that have come and passed into my life and their impact on me so far. Pledging, joining the fraternity, meeting people and getting to know them. The person today on those railroad tracks has come a long way in the past few months. I looked around and I could see past myself for the time being, and I felt truly at peace with the way things have been going. It’s almost Christmas time and I don’t even feel that childlike joy, I just feel grateful for my past and hopeful for my future.

I took a walk tonight along the railroad tracks and I didn’t hit the highway, but I’ll get there one day. Just gotta keep walking and look around, notice, and absorb.