All or Nothing

"Never get out of the boat....  Unless you're going all the way."

-- Willard (Apocalypse Now) 1979

Windpower

Switch off the mind and let the heart decide

who you were meant to be. 

Flick to remote and let the body glide. 

There is no enemy. 

Etch out a future of your own design

well-tailored to your needs.

Then fan the flame and keep the dream alive. 

Shatter the lens and grind it into sand. 

One measured exposure.

Scatter the seed and furrow in our land. 

The future is roses! Roses! 

-- Thomas Dolby (1982)

resist now

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? ... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, 

Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town,
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine,
Staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long,
And there is time to kill today.

And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run,
You missed the starting gun.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines.
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.

-- Pink Floyd (1973)

Between the Wheels

To live between a rock and a hard place -- in between time,
Cruising in prime time -- soaking up the cathode rays.

To live between the wars in our time -- living in real time,

Holding the good time -- holding onto yesterdays.

You know how that rabbit feels going under your speeding wheels.

Bright images flashing by like windshields towards a fly.
Frozen in the fatal climb, but the wheels of time just pass you by.

Wheels can take you around.  Wheels can cut you down.
We can go from boom to bust; from dreams to a bowl of dust.

We can fall from rockets' red glare down to brother can you spare.
Another war, another wasteland, and another lost generation.

It slips between your hands like water -- this living in real time.

A dizzying lifetime reeling by on celluloid.

Struck between the eyes by the big time world.

Walking uneasy streets, hiding beneath the sheets.
Got to try and fill the void. 

-- Neil Peart (Rush) 1984

shock the monkey

fox the fox.  rat on the rat
you can ape the ape -- i know about that
there is one thing you must be sure of -- i can't take any more
don't you monkey with the monkey
-- peter gabriel (1982)

I Can Feel Him in the Morning

Take me down to the water, let me feel it run over me.
Let me feel the pain and the coldness, the loneliness that there must be.
Can’t you see their dreams as they go drifting by?
Can’t you see their faces and their tear-soaked eyes?

I can feel Him in the morning; I can feel Him in the evening too.
I can hear Him in the morning telling me what I got to do.
Got to make a new world; ought to make the old one right.
I can see Him in the morning; I can see Him in the stars at night.

Take me out to the battlefield; let me hear the shells flying by.
Let me hear the sound of the cannons; let me hear them scream and cry.
Can’t you hear their dreams as they tumble to the blood-soaked ground?
Hear them scream for shelter from the world they never found.

-- Brewer / Farner (Grand Funk Railroad) 1971

Steve Jobs - RIP

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired.... It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

-- Steve Jobs (Stanford Univ. commencement address) 2005

the scoop

i'm getting intense, not talking nonsense
i made up my mind, not sitting on the fence
i don't always know the right from the wrong
i do my best to figure it out and work it out in the long
i try to do a lot, more than i can chew
balance out my ambitions, what i've got to do

DIY -- that means do it yourself
i don't sit around waiting for someone's help
i don't sit back and say good enough
keep on striving, reinventing, keeping it off the cuff

-- Mike D (Beastie Boys) 1994

the hero

So you feel that you ain't nobody
Always needed to be somebody
Put your feet on the ground
Put your hand on your heart
Lift your head to the stars
And the world's for your taking

So you feel it's the end of the story
Find it all pretty satisfactory
Well I tell you, my friend
This might seem like the end
But the continuation
Is yours for the making

-- Brian May (Queen) 1981

words from a big wave surfer

Anything I do, I want to be good at. I honestly don't get that stoked beating people or being better than people. Contests are fun sometimes, but I don't have that crazy drive. So I like to challenge myself and get past any mental barriers that I have.... I expect a lot out of myself, and the fact that I ... live this amazing lifestyle, I better be pretty damn good at it and try and do some stuff.... If you're not, what the hell else are you doing with your life? You'd better have some passion for things or hold yourself to high standards or you're just getting by. I don't want to just get by.

It's just the challenge of being new at something and actually picking it up quickly and trying to be really good at it, you know? There's a difference between cannon fodder and actually getting a job done. I like applying and challenging myself. And I'm out actually doing something. I mean, I can challenge myself to beat some fucking video game, but what do you get out of that? What are you going to tell the grandkids one day? "I beat level 10 of WitchCraft." Or whatever the fuck it is. At least these are real experiences.

[T]he only guarantee you have in life is that you're going to die. So why can't you accept that that's going to happen and live your life now? Live like every day's your last instead of acting like [you] will be around forever. People get locked into this routine like they will have another opportunity another day. Ever since I was a little kid, I've been aware that I could be gone tomorrow, so I'm taking advantage of it while I can and trying to get some things done.... Everybody wants to pick [how they'll die], but it's not up to me, it's up to God. But I'm not trying to die; I'm trying to live.... I'm a firm believer that God's got my date written down and that's when I'm going. All I can do is make the most of what He's given me until then.... You don't know when you're going to go; you have to make sure that all of your friends and family know you love them... 'cause you might not see somebody again, or you might not be around.

[C]ut the bullshit and be yourself and start living life. Get to the point. Stop beating around the damn bush and get to the point on things.... Stop worrying about what people think of you. Cut loose. Get things done. I just hate seeing fear. Like, everybody has fear, I have fear of all kinds of stuff, I guess, but it's just insidious. It doesn't get you anywhere.... It's just all the crap we learn, like not to trust people, that make us all scared. You get a little older, have some experiences; and... you get all that scar tissue from the world you grow up in and people you're around, bad experiences and good experiences, and we get scared. We need to get back to the human we're created as....

I'm not curing cancer here; I'm paid to surf. I could be doing more noble pursuits than I am now. But hopefully what I do helps inspire somebody to actually live, and get out of their routine, and do what they're put on earth to do.

-- Mark Healey (Surfing magazine) April 2011.

Desire Lines

When you were young, and your excitement showed
But as time goes by, is it outgrown?
Is that the way things go -- forever reaching for the gold?
Forever fades black and comes up cold.

Walking free. Come with me. Far away. Everyday.

When you were young, you never knew which way you'd go.
What once was grace, now undertows.
"Well everyday do what you can,
and if you let them turn you 'round
whatever goes up, must come down."

-- Bradford Cox (Deerhunter) 2010

doubts are traitors

"Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."
-- William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure) c.1604

fight club

"You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet."

"The things you own end up owning you.... It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.... Only after disaster can we be resurrected."

-- Tyler Durden (Chuck Palahniuk / Jim Uhls / David Fincher)

this time

Looking back on my life,
you know that all I see
are things I could have changed,
I could have done.
Where did the good times go?
Good times so hard to hold.
No time for sad lament;
a wasted life is bitter spent.
--Richard Ashcroft (The Verve) 1997

what if this storm ends?

What if this storm ends, and I don't see you
As you are now ever again?
The perfect halo of gold hair and lightning
Sets you off against the planets' last dance.
Just for a minute, the silver-forked sky
Lifts you up like a star that I will follow.
But now it's found us like I have a found you.
I don't want to run -- just overwhelm me.
-- Gary Lightbody (Snow Patrol) 2008

the inner light

"Seize the time. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again."
-- Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) 1992