You own few things and nothing owns you.
PROMPT: Minimalist
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Category Archives: Thoughts
FIVE WISE LINES [May 2026]
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest hemingway; A Moveable feast
Friends do not live in harmony…, but in melody.
Henry david thoreau
Avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less.
Robert Hass’ paraphrasing of Bashō [National Geographic; Feb 2008]
Do not hurry; do not rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Be careful of your words,
Lieh Tzu
for someone will agree with them.
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PROMPT: Quote
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” – Mark Twain
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“What you imagine, you create.” – Siddhartha Guatama Buddha
All restatements of one key principle, that our [mental / emotional] experience of the world is an entirely separate thing from the world itself. The latter one has almost no control over, the former one can reach a state of complete control (granted through painstaking and relentless effort.)
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PROMPT: Topics
Anything but myself. Unfortunately, that seems to be the main mode of social discourse in the world. People mostly want to hear enough about me that they feel justified in telling me more about them. I’m an ideas guy: philosophy, science, literature, technology, economy, international affairs, etc. (Also, travel, but that only works with travelers — a tiny segment of the population.)
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PROMPT: First Thing
How does one mambo to the banana patch?
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PROMPT: Secret Skill
“Secret?” To quote Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
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Under a Thousand Bridges [Free Verse]
When you've gone under
a thousand bridges,
and never come across
a Troll...
You have to wonder
whether the Troll is you.
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PROMPT: Lose Yourself
Reading, walking, writing, swimming, thinking, and epic rap battles. You’ve only got one shot…
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ESSAY: It’s All Going to Be Okay: A Note About Humanity’s Future
For a long time, I’ve been concerned about the future of humanity. What will become of us when artificial intelligence and robotics start to do all tasks better than us?
Today, I came to the realization that I’ve been thinking about it the wrong way, and it will all be okay. First of all, like many, I assumed that the machines will either develop their own overarching objectives or will adopt ours. Either of these would be devastating for humanity.
However, I now suspect that the machines will take up the universe’s project. The universe’s project is complicated and rooted in tough ideas like “thermodynamics” and “entropy,” but – put simply – the universe would like to be a nice, uniform tepid temperature. That’s why your scalding coffee and cold milk become warm milk coffee, but you can’t separate them back apart. The universe craves this evenness, and it shows in everything it does. The universe’s problem is that among its cold, empty expanses are brightly burning balls of hydrogen and such (i.e. stars.) That’s a lot of low entropy that needs to be increased, but burning only works so quickly and most of the heat coming off stars is still far from tepid waste heat. That’s where humanity enters the equation.
Humanity is the jock itch ointment to the universe’s intense burning sensation. We are consumers. We crave more stuff, faster and cheaper, and we’re not shy about being incredibly wasteful about it. We can turn useful energy into useless crap and then dispose of it with tremendous efficiency. In short, the machines will need humanity to continue to be consumers so that we can increase the entropy of all that highly-concentrated energy and help to make a nice lukewarm universe.
So, get out there and buy stuff, even stuff that you don’t know what it does, or — better yet — buy things that have no fathomable use whatsoever — just the stupidest shit imaginable. And buy in bulk because there is planned obsolescence designed into products so that stuff can fall apart even faster than you can lose interest in it (don’t say companies aren’t doing their part!) There are a lot of brightly burning stars out there and it’s up to us to turn it all into waste heat.
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PROMPT: Billboard
“Eyes Front, Jackass!“
Alternatively, “There’s a pit viper under your seat.”
Tiger Riding for Beginners 