o

o

of course we are gods;
we can imagine!

of course we are imperfect;
we can imagine!

of course we are disappointed;
we can imagine!

of course we are doomed to change;
we can imagine.

of course we are driven;
we can imagine.

y

y
imagine the moment spent upon waking
the cusp between dream and consiousness
to know you are awake
to know you are awake and alive
to know that and nothing else
not who you are,
not where you are,
nothing.
this place without names does not have a name.
it is
serene.

j

j
and the wind blew it down
it blue our love down
and the sky, blue, tried
to remind me of the times
that you said to me, and to you,
"I love you dearly"
like the wind, the sky, and your eyes,
you spoke so clearly
and your eyes, and the sky, and mine
are blue and feeling
and the times that would fly us around
were filled with feeling
it's a tribute, I make a sound
cause my mind is reeling

The moon.
The sand.
That was perfect.
I was flawed,
you were not the same.
But the moon, the sand,
that was real.

Art isnt beautiful because it is scarce, it is beautiful because it encapsulates the overwhelming beauty we all live with in every day. Every single day we experience hundreds of thousands of beautiful things. I am so overwhelmed by the beauty surrounding me. It is everywhere. There is so much that the act of encapsulating one single part of it is difficult not because there is a lack of material to draw from, but because everything I go through is filled with so much meaning (positive AND negative) that there is simply not enough time to crystalize one part of it. Does that mean that to make amazing art you need to detach from life long enough to isolate the one part of it you want to identify as beautiful? I do not know!

It is not a crime of passion,

It is an acceptance

The music, drifting, throbbing, reminds me

I still love you, all of you.

It is a crime

that I do not have time

to build a sacred shrine

to you, to us,

to every single memory.

a shrine for every one!

So I build my imperfect shrines

monuments to you

in awe of every moment

can you hear my adulation!

can you hear my concoction

equal parts love, anger, fear, joy

above all, I am humbled

we built something larger

larger than both of us

a monument, standing

a shrine, lasting.

I would like to keep building

its why I keep smiling

smiling, building a feeling.

Sex offenders. no one likes them, and many people carry a kind of hatred for them that is more emotional than for any other kind of criminal, and for good reason. Horrible things done to the most vulnerable people: children. But what if our emotional anger towards sex offenders is actually making our societies less safe for children? We spend more on trying to keep convicted sex offenders away from children (and failing despite how much we spend) than we do on working towards safer families. Because the overwhelming majority of the time, child molestation happens in the family.

if we all reserve the right to lie,
as im sure we all must do,
ive got reservations about using mine
im scared of losing track of you
losing track of whats true
as true as I can do
for you
for you
for me
and for you.

if you've got a love, why dont you feed it?

and ive loved a face because that face

made me feel a certain way

you know its a sin to fall in love with a face

and yet I see it to this day, this way

yes ive got no right to be here
yes ive got no right to say

but have I told you that I wonder
yes I wonder every day

and have I told you that I love you
yet I wonder every day

and have I told you that I wonder
yet I love you to this day

im so lucky, ive been writing music effortlessly lately. its like when im not playing music, there is this section of my brain thats just always experimenting with sound in the background. for the last 5 consecutive days ive woken up with a fully formed song stuck in my head that I wrote in my sleep! Literally every day ive felt aimless, picking up my guitar has just been this eruption. I've had a lot of thought-provoking experiences in the last week, parties with new friends, parties with even newer friends, and parties with other new friends. Three distinct social groups whom dont know each other, each with a different dynamic. As long as I pay the bills and get good grades and remember to pick up a guitar when im restless, and have someone to talk to sometimes, I think I will be set for the foreseeable future.

I remember a time when I imagined how I would affect you

I remember that time, I wanted control

Now I the more I think about it

Affecting itself feels serene

So pretty early on in my life I realized that I shouldn't expect everyone else to do what I think they should do. In general believing in your perception of what is right for people strongly enough to override their perception of what is right for themselves will get you into a lot of trouble, and it almost always doesn't work, either cause you in fact didn't have the right answer, or because even if you did, the act of telling them you do does more harm than good.

So to sum that up, try not to hold people accountable to your personal values to heavily, as theirs may be different, and they have a right to have different values.

But here's where things get tricky...

What about their stated values? What happens when someone tells you they will do something, and they don't? What happens when someone can't be held accountable to their own professed values or actions?

I suppose ideally I could accept people for whoever they are, even if who they say they are doesn't line up with what they do. I've always had a hard time with this. I have a hard time forgiving people for not taking responsibility for their own actions, especially when the responsibility is simply admitting that by their own stated values they made a mistake. I also want to get better at forgiving once they have admitted their mistake of course, but I at least CAN do that. Accepting people who lie, cheat, or steal, is something I've always struggled with.

why face your fears when describing how hard it is to face them is so useful?

an uncomfortable truth revealed and resolved is much less interesting to read on paper than someone writing about how uncomfortable and unresolved they feel.

Consider this: What makes you sure that what im writing right now isnt some kind of poem? Or, if you werent sure, what makes it less poetic-sounding than, say, wordsworth?

Ambiguity sells. And its a great way to enthrall, inspire, and experience a feeling without the negativity that comes with facing the complexity.

Trouble is, life is more complicated than any allusion to an experience found in books, movies, music, poetry. Before you ever figure out what situation A meant, youve already had situations B-Z fly by.

So make an educated guess, and maybe thats enough. But what does "educated" mean? To me, it means instead of hiding from something that bothers you, hoping you forget about it, you bite your lip, look it right in the eye, and dare yourself to overcome.

Because in my modest time, i've learned that lying to yourself is a waste of time. If you dont live up to your values, change your lifestyle, or change your values.

And remember, you will be able to tell if you cheated.

I am a man
I am self-aware
And everywhere I go
You're always right there with me
I flirted with you all my life
Even kissed you once or twice
And to this day I swear it was nice but
Clearly, I was not ready

When you touched a friend of mine
I thought I would lose my mind
But I found out with time that
Really, I was not ready.

Oh death
Oh death
Oh death
Really, I'm not ready

Oh death you enter me
Death's unmade those dear to me
And tease me with your sweet relief
You're cruel and you are constant

When my mom was cancer sick
She fought, but then succumbed to it
But you made her beg for it
Lord Jesus, please I'm ready

Oh death
Oh death
Oh death
Really, I'm not ready

Oh death
Oh death
Oh death
Clearly, I'm not ready

Groovy and cathartic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUcS5Auiac

I'll not use incoherence to hide the fact that I dont know what im doing.
Acting as if im on to something while intentionally being vauge so that I dont have to admit that im just as lost as anyone else is probably a great way to write a book or a song. That way, I can convey the feeling that I am some sort of prophet. The act of saying "im on to something" without letting the listener/consumer know that I dont know what it is allows them to assume I do. And Im not going to let that happen. Ill be as unsure as anyone, because a broken and half-expressed truth means more to me than a beautiful, all-encompassing, elegantly formed lie.

I am a musician! I just know it! I have so much to say. I fucking love every single one of you. Whenever I meet a new person, my mind explodes. I perceive all these possible futures where all these different incredible relationships exist between me and that person. I see them so vividly that it gets distracting from time to time. I get so fucking overwhelmed. Most of the time if im not expressing how important a person is to me, its because I worry about being pushy or something. but I love! SO MUCH! I have so much love inside.

Canada’s electoral system at its core has not changed since Confederation. Who has access to this system has changed, however. If extending the franchise to those without it is considered electoral reform, then Canada’s electoral system has changed. Those who are able to make use of our electoral system are more representative, but the system itself may not be. The current first-past-the-post system allows a plurality to win without a majority. If three parties are running for a seat, one third of the vote plus one is enough to win the entire riding. Is this fair? Canada has not implemented proportional representation, which is a group of voting systems which attempt to ensure that the percentage of popular vote is better reflected in the percentage of seats in Parliament. In looking at why this has not been implemented, we need to look at the issue both from the top-down, and the bottom-up perspective.
The current electoral system works fairly simply on the federal level. Canada is divided into ridings, and each riding elects one Member of Parliment. These ridings are supposed to generally represent an equal number of people, although in reality this is not the case. This source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_district_(Canada)#Formula) and its corresponding source indicate that the “grandfather clause” and “senatorial clause” dictate that a province can not have fewer seats than it had during the 33rd Parliament, and that it cannot have fewer MP’s than it has senators. Today, these clauses are responsible fort he Maritime provinces having a consistently smaller ratio of voters to MP than that in British Columbia, for example. However, ongoing incremental reform has improved this situation over the decades. Each riding elects MP’s based on a simple plurality. This means that whoever among the parties running in a district has the most votes wins the entire riding. This can lead to problems. For example, if more than two parties are running in a riding, it is possible for a party win a plurality but less than 50% of the vote. This means that in Canada, it is possible that a majority of people in your district did NOT vote for your representative.
This system makes it possible for a large percentage of people to simply not be represented in Parliament. It also allows for issues like vote-splitting. For example, if the votes for the Green Party were added to the votes for the NDP in BC during the last federal election in all ridings, many elections would have different outcomes. This is significant because the ideological and policy platforms of the NDP and the Green party were very similar when contrasted with the Conservative platform at the time. Essentailly, 65% of British Columbians could have agreed on 90% of policy issues and still lost the election.
Proportional representation attempts to address this issue. The aim of the various types of proportional representation is to make the percentage of actual MP’s elected for a party nationally more reflective of the percentage of votes cast for that party. There are many ways to do this, and most of them attempt to address “wasted votes”. A “wasted vote” is a vote which did not elect a candidate. There are a variety of methods used to reduce the number of “wasted votes”. A runoff election is a simple way of doing so which is used in some electoral primaries in the United States. If, during a primary, no candidate gets 50% of the vote, another vote is held between the top two candidates. This addresses the issue by simply reducing the number of candidates once a first and second place among multiple candidates is established. This gives a chance for those who voted for the third, forth, et cetra candidates to influence which of the first and second place candidates wins, making their votes no longer “wasted”.
In my opinion, the three reasons proportional representation has not been established federally are that it generally does not benefit a government in power to implement proportional representation as it would usually lose the party in power seats, that those who want proportional representation have not reached consensus on exactly what form of proportional representation would be preferable, and that many Canadians prefer the simplicity of the first-past-the-post electoral system and do not trust a more complicated way of electing MPs. The first reason cannot be addressed directly, as it is an inherent flaw in democracy. The second reason may be solved if one form of proportional representation becomes popular enough. The third reason is rooted in ignorance, and can be solved through education.

Slowly unpacking,

I save as many posters from concerts as I can, now im slowly putting them all on the wall. Its a very nice feeling, I look at each poster and remember the performance. I am so lucky to have played in front of people in bands!

work hard,
blank slate,
focused mind,
meditate.

hard work
earn the day
your sleep is earned
still, peaceful
contended state.

three dollars a hole
doesnt sound like much
three feet deep
is deeper than it sounds.
use the crowbar
if the shovel wont fit
the rocks fight back
Bang! Bang! Clinkt!

hard work
work hard
shovel down
kick, push,
push, lift,
heave, throw

kthud, kthud

Heavy Feet
pull tired arms
tired back,
back home.

happy arms, and happy back, you've earned your rest.
no guilt, you are supposed to relax.