CONFUCIUS - "The object of the superior man is truth"

PLATO - "Until Philosophers are kings...cities will never have rest from their troubles".

ARISTOTLE - "If it is in our power to act nobly, it is also in our power to do evil."

EPICURUS - "No pleasure is a bad thing in itself"

CICERO - "Virtue is the foundation of friendship"

Marcus AURELIUS - "...We live but for a moment"

St AUGUSTINE - "Too late have I come to love you, O beauty so ancient and so fresh"

Severinus BOETHIUS - "The good are always strong"

Desiderius ERASMUS - "Fortune favours the fool."

Thomas MORE - "All princes have more delights in warlike matters... than in the good feats of peace"

Niccolò MACHIAVELLI - "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed"

Nicolaus COPERNICUS - "Therefore, the earth is not flat"

Francis BACON - "if a man ... be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."

René DESCARTES - "I think, therefore I am"

Thomas HOBBES - "...the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"

Blaise PASCAL - "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed."

Baruch SPINOZA - "there can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope"

Isaac NEWTON - "I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me."

John LOCKE - "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts"

Gottfried LEIBNIZ - "The soul is the mirror of the universe"

George BERKELEY - "Essence IS perception"

David HUME - "It is never possible to deduce judgements of value from matters of fact"

Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU - "Man was born free, and everywhere he is in irons"

Adam SMITH - "It is not from the benevolence of the.. baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Immanuel KANT - "Reason is the pupil of itself alone. It is the oldest of the sciences"

Jeremy BENTHAM - "Mankind is governed by pain and pleasure"

Thomas PAINE - "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil"

Mary WOLLSTONECRAFT - "I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves."

Le Marquis De SADE - "Cruelty is a virtue, not a vice."

Auguste COMTE - "Society... cannot be regarded as composed of individuals.."

Carl Von CLAUSEWITZ - "War is the continuation of politics by other means"

GWF HEGEL - "God is the absolute truth."

Ralph Waldo EMERSON - "A man is a god in ruins."

Arthur SCHOPENHAUER - "We can surely never arrive at the nature of things from without."

MARX and ENGELS - "The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas."

John Stuart MILL - "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Henry D THOREAU - "It is never too late to give up our prejudices.."

Charles DARWIN - "...endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

Friedrich NIETZSCHE - "When you stare into an abyss ... the abyss also stares into you".

William JAMES - "If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience"

Sigmund FREUD - "...we men... find reality generally quite unsatisfactory"

Albert EINSTEIN - "Gott würfelt nicht (God does not play dice)"

Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN - "The world is the totality of facts, not things."

A.J. AYER - "...logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else."

Jean-Paul SARTRE - "Once freedom has exploded in the soul of man, the gods no longer have any power over him"

Sir Karl POPPER - "Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification"

Ayn RAND - "Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness."

Well.
Turkeyday was boring.
Good night.

So why don't we start making demands instead of money?

I need a romantic candle lit dinner with a bar a singer and a soul.
I need a night out that gives me butterflies carried on untied shoes.
I need a day where the wings on birds don't flap over the ocean but just glide on four winds.
I need a child's dream, a first timers smile, and a preachers means in which steal beams and stubborn mules share lives with wrinkled t-shirts and open praries.
When city lights go out at night over breakfest with the fireflies.
An upside down obtrusive life.

Yet again the summer through fall travel has become utterly useless and I'll find myself back home broke, with nothing to do eventually. I keep trying to get out of that god damned state of boredom, but the final verdict should show itself as impossible with my passing there within the next couple weeks.

I suppose since I won't be able to get a job I really actually have to start teaching myself things. Things I wanna learn. Yet I know I'll lose the effort the second I step  into my dad's house and I'm handed a beer to begrudge myself as a mindless indulgent idiot just like the rest of us. I'll forget all about the ideas on my book within the first month, I'll forget about learning how to produce for myself as well, and will keep my status quo as the laughing stock of my friends behind my back, and on their faces.

I wish we had never started drinking.
I wish we had the same goals.
Wishing is for fools.
Wishing doesn't work.
Only the want and desire to change does.
Environment is everything since I've yet to fold my hand.
I've tried to do me, and its led time and again to failure, dissappointment to those around me, and a split eye'd view of the world.
Guess you can't go on living under the guise of travel, under the guise of smart smiled advantage.
Its a dismal territory.
So is Florida.
If I can't get along anywhere else, I can at least be stable and dormant in Florida.

November 4th I'm a criminal.

I'm extrodinarily envious of the self made man, have every aspiration to be him, and to 'make money,' but have no motivation to force myself into it.

So neither the hitchhiker, or the sustainable man are for me.

Mellowdramitic crap.

I need to go watch sports.

              Standing unnoticed on the edge of the group, Rearden heard a woman, who had large diamond earrings and a flabby, nervous face, ask tensely, "Senor d'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?"
 "Just exactly what it deserves."
 "Oh, how cruel!"
 "Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?"
Francisco asked gravely. "I do."

               Rearden heard Betram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil - and he's the typical product of money."
               
                Rearden did not think Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

    "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
 
   "When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor-your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you ther are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

  "Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions- and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the good produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

  "But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetenet? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made-before it can be looted or mooched-made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

 "To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgement of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss-the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery-that you must offer them values, not wounds-that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade-with reason, not force, as their final arbiter-it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability0and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

 "But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality-the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

  "Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
 
 "Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth- the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

  "Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

  "Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money-and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

  "Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
 
  "Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another-their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

  "But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich-will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guild-and of his life, as he deserves.

  "Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard- the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money-the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law  -  men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims  - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

  "Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion-when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing- when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors-when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you  -  when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

  "Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a morgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

  "When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of teh immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

  "You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood - money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves - slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers - as industrialists.

  "To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money - and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means : a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appreared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being - the self-made man - the American industrialist.

   "If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose - because it contains all the others - the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity - to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

  "Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest of achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest man, the industrialists, as black guards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide - as, I think, he will.

  "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns - or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other - and your time is running out."

There were people who had listened, but now hurried away, and people who said, "It's horrible!" - "It's not true!" - "How vicious and selfish!" - saying it loudly and guardedly at once, as if wishing that their neighbors would hear them, but hoping that Francisco would not.

  "Senor d'Anconia," declared the woman with the earrings, "I don't agree with you!"

  "If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully."

  "Oh, I can't answer you. I don't have any answers, my mind doesn't work that way, but I don't feel that you're right, so I know that you're wrong."
 
  "How do you know it?"

  "I feel it. I don't go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you're heartless."

  "Madame, when we'll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won't be of any earthly use to save them. And I'm heartless enough to say that when you'll scream, 'But I didn't know it!' - you will not be forgiven."

 does the sun not shine?
does the body ache still?
caught with the sting under autumn's foreshadowing sorrow
by the air's crisp chill unto lung, longing further 'til springs 'morrow?

has each drag conjured brute flame within sharp eyes and dull tongues?
is the heart weighting claim to sure death and drawn guns?
tarnished from past to future 'til further on, 'til no grass wilst look greener?

Placid as the void surrounding moon, hung by virtue of gravity
hung by law, hung as inconveinced man, as hung by its own kind
only to loaf slowly east and west to encompass also north and south with dim shine

 the beauty in your laughter
whisper went your voice
in the melting of our matter
"you'd never had the choice"

whats happenin' lj
how are your lives?
from the looks of things,
getting on as usual.
Same here.
I'm living in a basement, its nice,
I like it anyway.
Went to temp agency yesterday, to get a temp job, and temp pay check, to pay for my temp bills, and temp clothes, and temp life
should be exciting
i could be capping bottles or bottling caps
or i could be doing construction in winter.

oh well.

been getting pretty drunk lately, its been working out. build a road bike out of two bikes, it works , other than the back brake and it kinda feels like its gonna fall apart when you ride it.
found a space heater for my basement, moi bueno.
power went out this morning
living with three girls means
i'm the handy man.
kind of enjoy the roll.
can't stop listening to belle/sebastian or gangsta rap.
don't know why those mix together as if some funny brain cocktail.

haven't written more of the story of gregory picket, definatly need to.
want a type writer, badly.
should in vest in one.

oh and I need some winter clothes. they'll come shortly

still need to pay ian back
feel terrible about it.
been 2 / 3 months since i've owed him.
def giving him more than 400, more like 6 if possible.

pizza and ihop is all i eat cause i'm broke.
its no use.
i'll figure this all out.
matter of time.
 

So I've figured out how I'm gonna write this novel, its going to take time but I think it'll be worth the next year of analyzation.
I'm considering either going to cali with a friend, from fort collins whose yet to know I may be going to cali with them, or coming back home for a silent collection. If I do come back home though I ask that you don't call, and pretend I'm far from home any way, (other than people I need for inspiration, eric, you certainly are probably the only one I'd like to see on a daily basis). I'm looking to steal a hookah and other trinkets on my way from this place. Surely it was a waste of money, but surely it made its use. People are screaming at the tops of their lungs at the moment. This place reminds me of highschool, how the gossip fluxed, how the crews united to make their own, and how stagnantly every one ended. I'm calling my novel ripe, its going to be about me and how people had interrperated me from time and again, from vermont in the eyes of hannah and what i'd done there, from florida in the eyes of girj and who I was then, and dialogues from people on the road, and a dialogue from the persons room of which i'm sitting in whilst in fort collins colorado. I've also written a bunch of new material on guitar, I'm hopping you'll all appreciate it. I can actually sign and play with a lot of it which is cute. People really like to yell nigger in this town, I'm assuming its from the conception that there is only a 1% population of black people. Evil. Culture should be diversified, as I'm sure some of these people have had the diversity, but they certainly don't respect it as you would being well done as a child in this day in age or growing up in an inner city. Idiocracy. Hipsters here remind me of the movie. Its sad. Every one I've ever met in my entire god damn life has reminded me of the movie. Ignorance is Bliss, the underline switch blade for the brains of intelligent human beings across the nation.

this have been going smoothly for how last minute its all been. out of the house, out of the job, trying to get into a new job, trying to live with these other people for 200$ a month, riding my bicycle like a mad man all over the place. lost my phone. probably not a great thing to lose when looking for a job, but nonetheless its happened so i'll just have to visit places more often. I'm thinking by the end of september if nothing works out I'm heading down to arizona to hang w/ my uncle john if I can keep in good contacts with family, which i'm sure i will. I've been couch surfing around town, running into some cool people with really really really great music collections. at the time being I'm staying with a very generous and lovely, communicative girl named rebecca. definatly college indie artistic, weirdly reminds me of the cats back home. Finally I'm able to listen to some music that i love. 


Every day I bleed. 
Whether through my eyes in a transparent stream down the coast
or within my mind as a sharp pain, maddening me, the host.
Whether it be the counter culture's war
or under my sheets as lier, as bore
the days rarely go greenly to another side, as they were before.
They don't go fast
they don't go slow
and in some cases don't glow at all.
whither along they do.

 

im-prove
i'm not shaken or stirred
i'm not swollen or burnt
just crisp on the edges and begging to flirt.

broke-down
your not confused or alert
just accused and submerged
lit red and usurped, well love I'm not hurt
just curbbed

like the gum on my shoe
like the light from a post
late nights on the coast
I'm stuck on the moon.

lonely

thats all

terribly lonely

no real friends, no woman, no nothing other than me

which is what I suppose I've been looking for

let it be

i know i know

its just such a bastard in the moment

i've been unrequitd

and i'm just realizing it

four years

of running like a chicken without a head

realizing that my life has been a sham for this long

trying to restart a new

and dealing with growing pains now

i was so certain

but now i feel wrong

in all ways, in no directions home

far away as i cold be from who i was or what i dealt with

but i see the pattern reforming

and every day i find myself telling myself to be sober, but everynight other than today I find my self in a pint and through a bowl

by myself is less stressful

around people when i'm drunk in this town i'm completely un self aware and self conscious afterwords

i don't really think it helps

the more i realize the more i actually work on things

rather than grow

i create my own building blocks rather than let the blocks set themselves

i thought i was rehabilitated

and well off

apprently not

falling apart, coming together all at once, who'd of thought, I might of not.

 Another chapter of life built to spill on the page, 
another job to work to prove that some responsibilities really come with age
nine to midnight or later every day waking with swollen fingers burns and a "Can I make it?"
but the question demoralizes determination.
After I get out of work its another pint down, a hookah blown, a bowl smoked, and tip money wasted.
Tomorrow I buy a road bike. Monday I figure out if I can afford rent.
Three weeks I see if these people hate me. 
My job consists more of if I'm cool headed and rad than wether or not I'm a good worker.
It doesn't mean I don't bust ass though.
In the two weeks I've been there I've got 90 hours in, working every night with out a day off, throwing pizza shells, making pizza, running an oven, scrubbing floors on my hands and knees just waiting to buy into a material world, waiting to be fired, and begging for the next job.
The American dream.
American Cage.
Even running as much as you want, having fun, doing drugs, drinking, playing video games, hitch hiking, reading, using the internet, anything you can buy for entertainment that'll get you out of a work mode or into tiredness generally only leads to either waves of depression rarely or mild under tones through out your day. Theres something wrong with the dream, the work, the money, the posessions, but i can't put my finger on it. I'm inspired to have things, to represent myself with my tastes on my wall, or in representation of my bed, blanket style and bicycle, but what is the point of this? What is the point of nice things, that require absurd amounts of work. The weirdest thing about it, is that regardless of your tax bracket it seems as though all of us can have the same things. I mean the only absurdity with money is owning your own private jet, or having a house thats ridiculously huge. It doesn't bring any more happiness than a suburbinite house does, and no more happiness than a car would. however it does make me question whether or not freedom is a material purchasable value now. As if having your own private jet is the symbol of being able to do whatever you want when you want and not having worry about finance? Surely I could do that now, but when I do I don't feel free. I feel weighed down. Constantly. I suppose I'll just Carry that Weight. And Let it Be.

  



i suppose the wise words of wisdom are to be ignorant to yourself mr. erickson, you are the living, the american dream.

believe how much skum a lot of you people have actually turned out to be.
Minus Truckner.
I think I'm calling Fort Colins, Colorado my new home.