Approach

I learned a little about human intelligence collection from the army while on my second tour in Iraq. I always snickered at the idea of collecting the intelligence of humans; "I got Einstein!!!" "I'll trade you my 1939 Einstein for your post hemlock Socrates?" "Careful, that Van Gogh thought is fragile. It's pre-self-mutilation." But I digress...

Interrogation by any other name...

It was all about the approach. The approach set the scene for the questions. Improperly set, the scene would fail the questioner and their way would be difficult.

It's all about the approach.

I'm going to scrap my initial approach for the story and rewrite what I have so far from a different perspective. Instead of first person, past tense, I'm gonna try third person, limited, past tense. I'm going to approach the story as a collector of information, of the intelligence I've created for the protagonist, and let those that were there to witness the events, to bias the story through their intelligence, help me tell the story. Hopefully it will add some color.

'Course, now I have to rewrite everything I've already written. Both pages. Le sigh.

Dust It Off and Try Again...

A thick, black, large format Moleskine notebook lays the path and I am two typed pages in... I'll try to use this as a journal of my efforts to complete my first large attempt at a written work. Crossing my fingers and duct taping them to stay for luck. I just hope I can type that way...

Time to get exhausted.

More tomorrow, I hope.

Definitions: The Edge

"I have reached the edge and have found that I can do more than just peer over." - Pelican Poems

An edge is a boundary of our experiences. It is the limit we have heretofore accepted and allowed to constrain our thoughts, plans, and actions. For some it is a safety, a guardrail tacked with warning signs keeping us from straying into danger. For others it is an implied goal, waiting to be pushed past, overcome, or broken down. An edge can represent fear or hope depending upon the resolve of the observer. Regardless of how one views and approaches an edge, it must be thought of as an edge of a experiential polyhedron; a three (or more) dimensional shape. Beyond an edge is not just empty void, (the hereditary fear of falling of the map shared by old sailors), but rather another surface of life, waiting to be explored.

Seeking the edge is the seeking to surpass the average, to disregard the predictable confines of our comfortable lives, and to aspire to attain the unattainable.

Ultimately, no concrete explanation of the edge can encapsulate or capture what it is to anyone pursuing it. The abstract knowledge of the edge appears when one nears its threshold. At that moment risk, and naturally a sense of fear, become sharp in our perceptions. In response, we must surrender the comfort of anything that distracts from our absolute focus. With focus and a willingness to trespass that threshold, to take the risks implied, we can plunge past the edge that looms before us and begin to explore the new dimensions that have appeared before us.

Internet Attic Artifact

Look what I found! I should do something with this instead of just forgetting about it again...

Make Some Wrong Decisions

This is an adventure. Nothing exciting comes from the safe, the sure, the done before and well groomed path left to follow. Branch out. Break the fence and rush the untamed possibilites with your torch held firmly in front to light your way.

Why make the safe choice? When in life, the risks appear, see them for the potential rewards that chasing them can bring. The horizon speaks to those who will shoulder their packs and forge on for it, leaving behind the safety of the camps that have already been made. Let the hum of the adventurous spirit drown out the cries of "Remain! Remain! Do not leave the safety of the fire and the camp!" If no one will chase the horizon, who will find the new lands, the new people, the new worlds for those in the camp to follow upon, when their camp is flooded and their game all chased off?

Cultivate those hearts that yearn to do that which has not been done. Cultivate those spirits that will not sit by, apathetic to the desires of their feet to move. Cultivate the eyes that see beyond the safety of the city's walls to the mysteries of the horizons beyond. Cultivate those voices that lift up and encourage the marginalized to push boundaries beyond the limits that have been painted before them.

For who will if we will not?

How to get where we have no business going...

Obligatory disclaimer: Everything posted on this site represents me. Wile some thoughts may be transitory and others more enduring, in the Zen fashion, they all represent a single perfect moment of me being me. Not that I claim perfection in the relativistic sense. Just the subjective. When it comes to being me, there is no one more well qualified. Therefore, I claim all content posted here.

My intended purpose for this site is to chart the course of my impractical, idealistic, and for some, infuriating beliefs on how we should be. In every sense, we seem to be adrift in a vast sea of poorly charted courses. While some of you may be rallying your crafts to form formidable navies, intended to fend off the scurvy of philosophical pirates, marginalized by political, religious, or economic differences from the flotilla, others choose lonelier courses. Regardless, we all seem destined for different lands, some that may exist, and some that, like Atlantis, were either lost long ago, or never existed in the first place outside of the imaginations of the hopeful and romantic. The point of these discourses is about where I would argue we should be going and whether we should be flying the colors of a formidable navy, or the Jolly Roger of personal conviction in spite of popular convention.