desire's flame

some say: brilliance is a fleeting cosmic event, a shooting star. its origin is a matrix of factors both unknown and unrepeatable; they will call it: inspiration. brilliance, they say, is not for the taking; it is first prize in life's lottery.

the brilliant know better. desire ignites the brilliant, it agitates their veins, and shoots them through life's path like a burning comet. faith in ability paves the pathways of their pasts; surety of success lights their way ahead. they willingly submit to the desire to be brilliant, to be consumed in desire's flame. brilliance, then, is not chance's favour; it is the award for 'best in show'.

Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit.

-- Pico della Mirandola

a shawl of white

Late at night, after much snow has fallen and while vestiges of the downpour continue gently, the streets are very quiet. The blanket of white inhibits sound and makes the yellow streetlights eerie beacons. In those hours, empty streets offer themselves to me, and i take them slowly, unwilling to ravage them after their recent purification.

read the rest ... The Chinaman in the Snow

pleasure and coincidence

the immensity of life's pleasure is, i think, in its minuteness. the pleasurable moments threaded together make a happy life - life is a persian rug of finely woven pleasures. but, most of those moments (if i were braver i would say all of those moments) are unplanned. the conjoinings of seemingly disparate events are the recipe for these unplanned happy events. but, let us not forget, what may appear unplanned to the conscious mind is never without method to the subconscious, whose perpetual goal is the creation of our happiness. i am most pleased with the coincidences that make up my daily happiness, and the coterie of friends that make it so. it is a blessing of which i am forever mindful.

love

The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,
they're in each other all along.

- Rumi

love is linked to life. the longer we live, the more deeply we understand love. the love that a teenager insists that she feels is a legitimate love. it is different from that experienced by a twenty-five year-old or a sixty-five year-old, but it is love nonetheless. how do we know when we are in love? we feel it. we know with certainty when we are not in love, but we are unsure of everything when we are in love. the love between two people is an intimation of universal love, love in the abstract - the love one experiences when one effaces one's ego, one's self. when one gives love unselfishly to everyone, then one is divine. when one is united with love, one realises that loving truly is to recognise the universe within oneself, to recognise that the lover and the beloved are one.

NEW! Reviews of EIE (courtesy of Ja'red)

Everything in Excess Reviews:

"Soap box ramblings of a madman."

-New York Times

"The internet has ruined the art of writing. I quit."

-Thomas Wolfe

"I wish, in addition to Spell Check, there was such a thing as Suck Check."

- Chicago Sun Times

"Genius! Brilliant! One of today's greatest minds!"

- North Korea State Controlled Sun Times

"It scared me."

- Stephen King

"Great piece on cookies."

- Cookie Monster

the finite timelessness of youth.

We get lost in our youth. We don’t know anything else. Youth is invincible and impervious. And beautiful. And wasteful.

sinead o'connor's beautiful face.

the sentiment seeps from her, her mouth is expressive to the hilt. she sings strongly and passionately and vividly and lamentingly. there is nothing except her face, her mouth, her tears. the song is a jeremiad. its mournful tone entwines one into its sentiment, her face plumbs its deepening emotion. her mouth's graceful wailing is intense and intoxicating, its beauty is bewitching.

3:13

at three thirteen the world stops. 313 souls, 313 heroes. 3 hours and 13 minutes. there is no similarity, there is symbolism. there is righteousness and its path, and the lantern that lights it, lit by 313 souls, 313 heroes. at 3:13 we are reminded of our duty.

a cheap trick (illusion, really): the despite-or-maybe-because-of-$3.75 so good dilallo burger.

the chain with the name dilallo: i frequented it frequently this past week, as my gustative peregrinations took me there on sunday night, some twenty-odd hours subsequent to my first experience there when i ingested two of the namesake delicacies as well as an entire french fried, and i again visited the scene of this crime of passion on tuesday night, when my enjoyment was, once again, plain and evident, like a piece of cheese in a mousetrap baiting its prey. the dilallo pattys are flimsy and unsound, nestled between a top bun that looks like a sexy bottom bun and a bottom bun that looks like a top-heavy bun, punctuated with hints of tomatoes, a lavish hit of onion, a Mr Pickle Two Slice, and pleasurable mustard, all topped with a grease that allows one's fingers to slip and slide, reminding one of the tenuousness of youth's pleasures, and the frivolity of trying to hold on to them. the first time the burger and my mouth met, the world was bright - it was a sunny day. there was an initial shock, followed by a rapturous engorging. the chemistry was palpable.

spaghettibolognaiselust

it's basic. it's for kids, for young people. it reeks of simplicity, like pesto pasta, another of my lusts. it's sometimes disparaged by people who fancy they've sophisticated palettes; sometimes not. but it can't shake that sense of innocence, that sense of easiness, of being at the beginning, something from which one graduates. i never craved it in my minority. i never remembered it in the early years of my maturity, eschewing pasta generally. but, it's overcome me now and i've never wanted it more.

pointless/perfection. pear/pair.

nothing means anything. we are all flotsam of a lonesome jetty, urged onwards by a current not of our own volition. we are victims of its caprice.
/
nothing is without meaning. all is pregnant with purpose. it is our propulsion on the ship of life, coasting us casually past wreckage, anchoring us at shores of contentment, gliding us steadfastly into the sun.
from time to time, and all the time, i try. i try here and there. i seek to the attainment of the objects of my desire, and in the pursuit of my passion they are mine so often, but so often only imaginally, and thus they poof away like vaporous clouds trying to be grasped.
/
in honesty, it's not enough effort or skill that i employ. but hope re-springs eternally in me, a symptom of grace's ever-effulgent mercy; its hand on my hand. tomorrow's promise is a bargain re-struck nightly.

the fatality of friendship

'do you know what it feels like?', asks enrique. i suppose everyone does, it's a shared human experience. in every interaction, one gives something of one's self, in trust, to another. but the disparity of it, the inconsistency of reciprocation, is traumatic. how often it is that your friend doesn't want to be your friend anymore. and how often it is that where once love prevailed, or at least pretended to, is now barren of passion and plagued by tension and discomfiture. and how often it is that that barrenness is unexpected; though its spectre looms we ignore its shadow. at least you can predict birds' annual southward flight, enrique sings, but 'love: you never know the minute it ends'. everything of this world is fallible, everything of this world is terminable. despite knowing this, we still must run the gamut of interaction and its outcomes good and bad. despite knowing this, we can do naught but live and give more fully, more passionately, more completely; to do else is to die.

"

despondency is a sin. failures should be forgotten and new efforts made. life is a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing to be shuffled through as best we can, but a lofty and exalted destiny.

"

beauty's quickening

beauty inspires a passion, a quickening that's sickening, and wrenching, and exciting, but mostly painful in its intangibility, its remoteness. it's unattainable, though it flaunts itself before you. though it envelops and enlivens, and animates and drives-crazy, it's unattainable. though it's a veil and not real, it's unattainable even in its physical form. it's faraway and never today.

pretending/plebian.

youth forever bangkok drink / book root beer date / district of thinking outside the box gaylord so far twenty minutes by car two hours by car / luncheon in london / youth / american teenager in montreal / hair orange nails black nails blond hair / down hot sufficient or not / it's just so naturally brilliant i want it but can't i have it? / please / nice but lame precise and boring / most ppl see not what's there in reality but what's there in their minds / this is not something i like and it will disappear / forever.

 

mindquesting by moleskine.

a discernible comfort in having always in one's back pocket the flexible soft cover to fill with one's lists notes thoughts-more-significant in a presence more ordered than one's iphone whose slow slow slowness bogs down its usefulness and disturbs one's thought-trains unlike the eveready quickness with which one scribbles all things necessary and not in the pages of this thick deep leather simplicity-personified beauty easily reached and kept shut by its overwrapping elastic strap trapping within it pages separated precisely by the ribbon that ends perpetual pageseeking and commences perpetual mindquesting.

O-rangina!

acid-pleasure pure-leisure bell-bottle pulp-brothel.

an exercise in bret ellis: fictional account of lackadaisical life in first-person narrative

I’m sitting on my couch at 7 p.m. watching this show about two guys and some chick eating pizza and my phone rings. My friend wants me to pick her up to go get a crepe. An hour later we’re sitting with a plain nutella crepe between us and she’s telling me a story about how she was such a mischievous kid and when some silly song starts to play I say I like this track but she just gives me a face. We leave and run into a couple of friends who’re going for shisha and so we join them. Three hours later I’m feeling dizzy from the smoke but it’s not bad, and everyone is tired so we end up at my place smoking and drinking and watching a movie that half of us have seen already, but nobody minds. Everyone leaves before the sun comes up and I lie back listening to that same silly song, not wondering what I’m going to do tomorrow, ‘cause I already know.

live freedom freely

i am pleased that we live in a country that is not obsessed with itself, with its own augustness, but, rather, concerns itself explicitly with a concern for others. i am pleased that we live in a country in which we are unafraid to wear our skin on our sleeves and our ideologies on our heads. we live in a country in which we aim for plainness and honesty, not only through the behaviour of our people, but also through our state's ideology. we are not perpetually diminishing the role of public religion while at the same time infusing our public pageantry with the trappings of the dominant one. we are not concerned with raising ourselves to a position of physical dominance, but, rather, to be a force of morality among other forces of morality, in a co-operation of communities that struggles to ensure the upliftment of humanity at large, that commits itself to the freedom of every human individual, regardless of nationality, in a fraternity of humanity. we do not say we will help you, rather, we say we are united with you, and compassion is a given. to be canadian is to be human.

duty/free [manifesto]

a life of contemplation without action is a life lived lame. a life of apathetic experience is insubstantial. but in combination you have a whole: a life of both active contemplation and impassioned experience is a balanced life. in the actualisation of both/all aspects of life is life's real pleasure - experiencing the whole, wholly. in the acceptance of all our diverse and conflicting components is freedom. freedom is being whole. it is our duty to be free.