Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
Denial can blind.
It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is. We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people.
Technology is both an end in itself and a means to other ends. When you figure something out and make it work, there is pleasure and excitement. Not just because the technology is going to do something, but because you created something with its own inherent beauty, like art, like literature, like music.
All art is in some fashion escape. It sucks you out of your own life. It absorbs you.
You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.
Satisfaction doesn’t come in moments but in periods of time.
Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that’s a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn’t the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.
Take a bit of the future and make it your present.
Rogue traders can destroy a company in milliseconds — it only takes one of all three
Names: Melody, Autumn, Garrett, Candice.
Places. Nouns. Pronouns but no connouns yet yes connotations.
Seeing reactions with no desire to profit from them.
Laying crumbs along a trail, asking the birds to peck their way along behind, not the pied piper, recalling Latin lessons about silva and “p” words that trigger dim memories of pied (pronounced pee-ed rather than pie-uhd).
Conscious and unconscious at the same time again and again, seeing connections, sensing subconscious influences upon fleeting conversations, creating twists and turns on trails to hide going in a circle, corpuscle, corporal, corporate, cerebral cycle.
Trigger finger over the keyboard, waiting for the signal to press/type/click.
But with touchscreens, it’s press/swipe/touch.
Multifinger gestures.
Gestation, Guest station, Geriatric, Acrobatic, Aeronautic.
Cranking through the sausage maker, maker, maker, maker…
Imaginary rhythms, a wooden finger tacked to the wall, cough drops fall, that’s all.
Disjointed intersections of ceilings and floors.
Can a ceiling touch the floor?
Can a floor touch the sky?
What makes the sky “up”?
She sits
But she doesn’t sit for long
She waits for no one
Others wait for her
No time for her
Because time is meaningless
Words do not touch
The stirrings of her soul
She prepares each movement
Like a tai chi master in meditation
The turn of a wrist
Raising an eyebrow
Sitting in a chair
Listening for the silence between heartbeats
Music only she knows
Folds in her skin deepen
Aging finely maybe wisely
She sleeps
But she doesn’t sleep for long
Trumpets blaring ideas deep within her brain
Push her out of bed
Ideas scribbled on the napkins of last night’s mind
Fade too quickly for human use
Extraterrestrials passing by the planet
Record the thoughts for later dissemination
A purpose for being
Being not the purpose
She moves on
Like water from a fallen bamboo flute into a pond
Fish breathing her in
Exhaling her out
Discordant sounds of a Qinqiang
Playing up her strengths
The paper bird pales in the sun
And flies away.
— 10 Dec 2004, Rick Hill
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