Category Archives: Life

PROMPT: Live Anywhere

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If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

First of all, I’d say that I probably could live most places in the world, and the few I couldn’t (e.g. North Korea) have no appeal to me as a place of residence. Having lived several places in the US, a couple years in England, and now over ten years in India, I’m under no illusions that there is a Shangri-la out there, a perfect utopia. Most places are fine places to live if one is flexible-minded and can adapt to that place’s rhythms and peculiarities. There may be a honeymoon period during which some place seems better than the rest, but even the most seemingly idyllic place will lose its luster in time.

That’s why I recommend travel. Everyplace offers beauty and life lessons when taken in bite-size pieces.

PROMPT: Time

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Do you need time?

I believe I prefer the order of a sequenced life rather than a life of “everything, everywhere, all at once.” But having never ventured off my worldline, I don’t have sound basis for comparison. If you know of how I could experience atemporal existence, I would be happy to give it a try and get back with you.

PROMPT: Re-live

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Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

If I could do so as the me I am now, I’d do any of them (post-High School,) but if I’d be the me I was at the time, then I don’t see the point. Either way, there would be changes that would ripple through the rest of my life, to varying degrees. I got through largely without unnecessary tragedy, I’d as likely screw it up as improve upon it.

If nothing downstream could be changed, that would be like watching a boring documentary that had none of the tedious parts cut out. Like watching the 17 days a wildlife photographer sat freezing his ass off uneventfully before he got footage of a snow leopard. I really don’t see the point of that.

Life is beautiful because one has no idea what it might bring.

PROMPT: Kid at Heart

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What does it mean to be a kid at heart?

The capacity to see humor in flatulence, even when it’s your own.

Oh, wait, maybe I’m thinking of a “kid at fart.”

PROMPT: Moon

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How much would you pay to go to the moon?

Not one thin dime. I have no pressing need to go to a place without breathable quantities of oxygen for longer than I can hold my breath. If complex technology is required every millisecond to stay alive… well, I know where I’m not wanted.

I’ll leave it to the billionaires who have enough spare change lying around to fund personal space programs.

I’ll stick to gazing at it admiringly from afar.

PROMPT: Historical Events

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What major historical events do you remember?

From the Iranian Hostage Crisis onward, pretty much all of them — given they were considered “major” in whatever place I was living at the time.

PROMPT: Emergency Plan

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Create an emergency preparedness plan.

For Zombies: walk briskly.

For Global Thermonuclear War: Find a nice place near a likely ground zero for instantaneous demolecularization — so as to avoid slow death by radiation sickness & nuclear winter starvation.

For Climate Change: carry a Nomex suit, a rubber raft, and an umbrella.

For aliens: assume Roddenberry was right until proven otherwise. (If Hawking was right, we’re screwed anyway.)

For all else: maintain a peppy, can-do attitude.

Ubiquity [Blank Verse]

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I ran into a seeker from far lands,
 and asked him what he sought in my hometown.
  He said he sought what's true and beautiful.
  I asked him if it was here, more than his home?

"Sometimes you have to walk a thousand miles
  to find that which resides beneath your nose.
   To unlock truth, the tumblers must align
    from the shake of experience and time."

PROMPT: Security or Adventure?

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Daily writing prompt
Are you seeking security or adventure?
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Uh, we are all seeking both. That is the fundamental strain of being human — the struggle between a need for novelty and a need for familiarity. We are all both tribesman and traveler — though in varied proportion. I love the traveler more in my own particular self.

PROMPT: Better w/ Age

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Daily writing prompt
What do you think gets better with age?
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As far as life experiences, I find just about everything gets better with age. It’s probably to do with the dawning realization that most of the shit one has gotten worked up about over the years wasn’t worth it (as well as the realization that one has fewer years ahead than behind and so one had better get on with it in an aware kind of way.) As icing on the cake, I’m virtually certain to be long gone before the oceans boil or the robots rise up and massacre humanity.

If the question is what kind of things get better with age… certainly not french fries.