The eternal discovery

The reason why Radiohead are - for me, that is - the best band in the world is quite simple. I can spend weeks, months even, without listening to them. However, when I do pick up one of their songs again, it doesn't feel like a return - but like a beginning. As if I was listening to them for the first time, even when I already know the lyrics (happens a lot). Now this doesn't happen with any other band. Other personal favourites, such as The Arcade Fire, Joy Division, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Muse, just to name a few examples, always feel like a return. A good one, mind you, one that I always do with great pleasure. But a return nonetheless, a trip to a place where I was once happy, so to speak. It doesn't feel like that with Radiohead. Everytime I listen to them, it does feel like a discovery.

And to illustrate the point:

Smallfolk

When kings and lords fight each other, the price of the war is paid by the smallfolk. It's an old rule, yes, and although we live no longer in the age of kings and lords, it is no less true today.

Definitions of beauty

Foothills

Every time someone allows pride to win over reason, one pays the price of recklessness. But seldom alone. Most often than not, one screws oneself up along with many others. Intentions matter not; only the very cruel and the very fool cause harm to others willingly. But even if we do climb the foothills of life without leaving a trail of broken bodies in our asdending wake, we are seldom tossed downhill over verdant grass. When we go down with our pride, we go down violently, and never alone. We go down rolling over a pile of corpses of our own making.

Above reproach

Human beings are not capable of producing something so neat that it is above reproach. If someone wants to find a flaw in something, one merely has to look carefully, and not to waste any opportunity to crack it down. Regardless of what we do, there is always an unwanted speck of dust, a minor spelling mistake, a word said one second too soon - or too late. Nothing human is truly flawless; such is an attribute of the gods alone. We go on living our lives doing the best we can with what we get, holding perfection as an ideal but knowing deep down that sometimes the best we can do is simply not enough.

Something along this line

"One can't talk with you", or something along this line, is usually what someone tells us when we're not telling them what they want to hear, isn't it?

Right in the kisser

There is no possible excuse of being mean and cruel just for the sake of it. The penalty should be a kick in the mouth right on the spot.

To play russian roulette with a fully automatic

I should have learned by now that it is pointless for me to work hard in order to do something right or to achieve something. Everything I got throughout my life was due to blind luck or fantastic improvisation. It is not intentional; it just never works out in any other way.

Two and two

To believe in coincidences doesn't imply the belief that everything that seems to be a coincidence is actually one. Two and two make four for a reason.

On rudeness

Those who cannot tell the difference between rudeness and lack of manners will never be rude, and will always lack manners. A rude person is, by definition, an intelligent person, a fast thinker whose words can be as sharp and accurate as a surgical obsidian blade. Good manners, on the other hand, are a matter of education - we learn them rationally, and by reason we can keep them or not. Without reason and education, we are reduced to savages with little more than sticks and stones.

But then again, there's quite a lot of people out there who seems to have come down from the trees, but barely.

With kindness

Someone once told me "kill them with kindness". It might work in the long run, but if one wants to make it fast, one has to make it rough, and the simultaneously blunt and sharp nature of rudeness makes it the ideal candidate for such job. Of course, rudeness require a considerable degree of brilliance, cynicism and even a touch of sarcasm. Without these attributes, one cannot even pretend to be rude, but to be nothing but mean.

Hell is also full of shit

I know that the road to hell is paved with of good intentions - I've said so countless times myself - but sometimes I can't help wondering if good intentions are actually that meaningless. Of course they alone seldom fix anything, but still.

The beasts

Apart from the optimists, there's also another king of people that I loathe: those who take on innocent bystanders their frustration and despair. No one has to bear with it; as angry as we might feel sometimes, we have more than enough mental capabilities to keep us from lashing out at others for no reason. That might as well be one of the things that defines us as rational animals, and marks the difference between us and the rest of the living creatures. If one willingly and deliberately decides to ignore all this to keep lashing out at everyone, then what exactly is the difference that separates that person from the beasts?

Fire at will

To make assumptions might well be the easiest thing in the world. They don't need to be right, they don't even need to stick to reality in any way. They just need enough leverage. To ignore someone's assumption makes us guilty. To deny it makes us struggle for an excuse. It's a tricky double-bind, and it's not easy (I'd say it is impossible) to get out of it unscathed.

Turn of the tide

Some people fight just for the sake of it. I, for one, could never understand what drives them. It is pointless to start a battle when we know - for sure - that we cannot win. Most often than not, it is better to wait. All tides turn eventually.

Lazarus Long

I suppose I could feed a blog for quite a long time by quoting Robert A. Heinlein only. The fact that so many people dislikes science fiction while they never read any baffles me, but it is truly their loss.

Gone M.I.A.

I remember one of my university teachers explaining how silence is a form of communication. A powerful one, I might add, but so easily misunderstood. People insist on thinking - rather, in believing - that someone's long spells of silence mean that one doesn't care about them anymore. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't; when it comes to me, it usually doesn't, although I've intentionally gone mute with some people. I still like them for the most part, and I wish them the best, but truth be told, I wouldn't have anything to say to them, and I prefer to save the weather topic to the random encounters I cannot avoid. Going missing in action makes perfect sense. If there's no "action" to be had, nothing will be missed anyway.

Hunting lessons

Sometimes the prey can be as vicious as the hunter. They just need the right opportunity.

We all have our flaws

I can bear with stubborn people, arrogant people, mean people, petty people, cruel people, stupid people, silly people, naive people, even hysterical people (to a degree, I reckon). But don't ask me to bear with optimistic people. I can't stand them. I'm not yet sure if their delusional belief that everything will eventually turn out well makes me want to puke or to smack them.

Walk the walk

At any rate, there are paths that once abandoned cannot ever be walked again. And there is something simultaneously sad and reassuring on that though.

Shifting polarities

Everyone is incoherent to a degree, but some people almost seem to take a sadistic pleasure in taking that to such an extreme that it becomes absurd.

Lifeline

Sometimes I wonder if that old dream is really far-fetched, or if it actually included a hint of foreshadowing. Sometimes it just feels so right - sad, yes, but right. As if things couldn't be any other way. Not everyone is meant to carry on into the vicarious eternity called life. Some people are simply meant to be, and to stop being when the lifeline wears itself out and the spires of human memory finally crumble. For they crumble, unlike the other kind.

I wonder...

To wall oneself

A person unafraid of being alone is a person immune to the social blackmail that inevitably comes whenever one decides to make a stand and not to compromise. Someone unafraid of loneliness is socially unbendable, and the great social threat - shunning - has little to no effect. How do you make a pariah out of someone who has already walled himself in?

Whim

There is nothing ever so perfect that cannot be destroyed by a whim.