If you've been following the career(s) of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, then the chances are you've asked yourself the following question (likely framed as an evil koan):

Which, of the two of them, is the hottest (i.e. most striking, beautiful, compelling, absorbing, et al) woman (alive) in the world?

Historically this has been a difficult question to acheive consensus on.  You can see all of this unfold if you click the link.

But now comes a potentially groundbreaking metric to solve this dispute.  It comes boldly, wisely.

The Other Boleyn Girl!!!

Please, for the sake of all sentient beings, when this movie comes out: go and watch it!  Watch it so you can vote with your heart for the truly sexiest woman alive.  Everything could depend on this heart-vote.  Governments, civilizations, colonies of honest-but-strangely-nameless-yet-strangely-intelligent species could be relying on some sort of clear-cut victory here, people.

There is a song in a little movie named Brokeback mountain by the name of A Love That Will Never Grow Old.  If when you listen to it your heart does not break a little, and something a lot like hope doesn't stream in, I am honestly not sure whether to be impressed or not, but in this case I am leaning heavily not.

Go with God.

Step 1: Read the books.  Or Watch the movies.

Step 2:  Consider your loneliness for the moment at bay.

I am wanting a Draft Horse!  And when I get one, I'll play with it every day and write a horsey book.  So... keep an eye out, won't you please, for a draft horse.  In the meantime I'll save money for the Wild Rose Draft Horse Sale in Olds, Alberta.  But before I can save money, of course, I'll need to find a job.

If you want to get the absolute most out of your music follow these steps.

Step 1:  Imagine you have more money than you know what to do with.  (One day you will.)

Step 2:  Imagine you are on a bed beside someone you have paid to have sex with.

Step 3:  Imagine the song you are listening to right now is also the song you are listening to in the post-coital swoon you and your paid lover are experiencing.  (It helps if you imagine the song coming from an iPod.)

Step 4:  Imagine you are both smoking Organic American Spirits and laughing for no reason.  Perhaps at the sheer marvelousness of life.

This is the most beautiful way to enjoy music.

Well, it's perhaps not the most distinguished number—although who can argue that each one of those numbers is a good number?  Well, anyway, I have been breathing—in and out with the air of my body—for almost seventy five hundred days.

To be completely honest I can find no significance in sharing this information or celebrating it.  I mean, granted, I am enormously grateful to still be alive—and measuring things in days is really quite nice—but what does it all mean?  Should I be asking myself if I've used each day to the best of my ability?  Is that even a question that it is possible to answer, given the hale preponderance of variables and all of the unknowns and the un-givens?  Should I be asking myself how many of those days I remember from beginning to end?  Should I be marvelling at the shortness of life or its length?  Should I be going back and picking days—ah, sweet sweet #2889, the day I met Chantelle and we exchanged McDonalds happy meal toys—or should I be looking forward?  To be suspended this way—at #7493—is eery sort of.  Should I perhaps be subverting modern mechanisms of youth restrictions by rendering the legal limits in days instead of years (i.e. in America one must be alive around 7665 days: what gradient of maturity is acquired in the seven thousand six hundred sixty fifth day that was not available or acheived on the seven thousand six hundred and sixty fourthy?)

Well anyway....  as the Gollum's song (performed by Emiliana Torrini) goes:

These tears we cry
Are falling rain
For all the lies you told us
The hurt, the blame!
And we will weep to be so alone
We are lost
We can never go home

So, okay, I'll admit it.  In the fiction I'm doing at the moment I emply a drastically southern grammatical style.  It's kind of tricky, and a little stresstful, but ultimately a neat-o stylistic choice.  But what will happen if my keen syntactical instincts evaporate in the face of this stylitsic choice?  Enter blogging!  With blogging my contractual obligation to flinch in the face of dubiously necessary commas is moot!  I can do all the little necessary things which make myself an acceptable grammatist.  So as long as I free write a few blogs every day, I'll be in the clear in terms of grammar and whatnot.  So you see how important it is.

Hey, friends!  It seems you'll be able to find another of my lovely, charming, sexy, funny stories over at KenWilber.com...  Check it out.  You'll like it.  Posted on Valentine's Day, what's more... Nice touch, eh?

Here are some discussion points for the story:

If humans began giving themselves permission en masse to experience the depths of vulnerability this story represents, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?  How might it translate on a societal level?  What would the minister of transportation think?  Is it actually possible to fall in love with someone who you have barely seen?  How indicative can a video accompanied by a sound bite be?  Would only someone who knew nothing of the referent ‘love’ indicate they were stricken this way?  Did the part where the character spoke of falling in love with the girl ‘in’ his dreams seem apposite to the story’s meaning?  Perhaps it revealed more about the character’s relationship to the opposite sex than the character realized—i.e. they occur in a strictly fantastical dimension?  Do you believe the reference of Youtube will negatively date this story, cause it to be less ‘built to last’ or do you think Youtube will be a permanent enough fixture to warrant an ascription of relative timelessness to this piece?

Did someone say American Spirits?  Well, now that you mention it: I would love one!

    Here's an update on my status folks:  Three weeks into quitting smoking!

Now granted my prediliction for nicotine was always on the mild side, I'm still really jonesing for some gateway beer and some through-the-gateway puffs on a sweet, cool, chocolatey vanilla, totally organic (and thus chemical-free) American Spirit.  Because the truth is, while my memory of all other cigarettes remains terrible—the futile nervous puffing, the septic tang of brand-name chemicals, the bitter and bitterly dry knowledge of the various ways you're plaquing up your body—my memory of American Spirits is distinctly golden.  I recall sweet stoic philosophy filtering directly into my mind, I recall all the particles in my mouth being soothed by the warm envoloping softness of the flavor, I recall, in essence, the best tobacco experience available—inhalation not only allowed but required, and the results nothing but pure tar-enhanced bliss.

Well what can I say?!  I've got no way of buying a pack of American Spirits, and I'm not about to get myself addicted to the cheap shit, so I'll just have to go through the arduous process of quitting smoking right now, and then take it back up when I move to America, and then eventually go through the arduous process of quitting again. 

OKay, friends.  So, I know Nicole knows this, but I'm not the only super awesome Canadian.  In fact, the majority of us are super awesome.  One such super awesome person is Eleasha Chidley, a seventeen year old writer living off the west coast of Vancouver Island who recently published this stunning little piece in the Danforth Review. 

And now for part two:  Been watching any cartoons lately?  May I recommend South Park.  All episodes are available, with the blessings of the show's creators, over at http://allsp.com.  It's cool.  I find South Park to be a pretty entertaining show.  It's very reflexive, and it doesn't shy away from often sophisticated morals.  It's consistently inventive, and its core driver seems to be: anything goes; as opposed to Family Guy's core driver: isn't randomness funny; which, yes, it was, in grade 8.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone have acheived a sort of realism with their cardboard cut-outs, a de-familiarizing realism, and one which is adroitly utilizied as a vehicle for insightful commentary.  You just have to have a thick skin to enjoy it.

And now for part three:  Been smoking cigars lately?  They're not as addictive as nicotine, or in the same way (although they give you mouth cancer) and they make you look cool—not quite as cool as the folks on Lord of the Rings, but still pretty cool.  Step out into a cool winter morning, gather a blanket about your shoulders, and look contemplative as you puff (but not inhale) on a Backwoods Cigar.  My only deal this morning is, 1) I am a little hungover, so I'm wary about the potentially stale nature of my body's reception to this curling odorous trivia, 2) I am still waiting for the requisite trigger—the moment when I say, "this calls for a cigar,"—a moment triggered either by something to celebrate or deliberate over or brood over or recover from.  Still waiting, friends and neighbors.

Okay, so here is my new goal:

To generate two-five thousand dollars a month in a way which does not detract from my work as an author of fiction.  If I can do this, I will be on my way as a writer.  I will be able to create a situation in which I can work tirelessly and honestly.  If I can generate that situation, it will not be long before my first work of published fiction begins to pay for me, if my first published fiction starts paying out I will be able to gradually move up, until at last I am living in a hotel in Las Vegas (thinking something by Sky or MGM), using a G-Class (SUV) Mercedes to transport me to the stable where my horse is boarded—both Dandy and a Gypsy Vanner will be along for this ride—and freely fulfilling what I believe to be my voluntary obligation to Dharma.  Free to do what I was born to do: to help people by writing, and to seek a greater understanding of what that means.  To be a boddhisatvic author.

How can I help people with my fiction?

-by being a pioneer for explictly post-postmodern fiction
-by articulating the essence of humanness and our duties to it
-by communicating a vision in which people give themselves permission to cultivate a more engaged and integral interior life
-and much more

I am committed to this Path.

If you're looking for a particularly sweet-ass read, esp.  if you are an artist of any kind (author, painter, singer, etc..) and are interested in things integral, check out this interview between Michael Garfield and Ken Wilber.  It's excellent!  Topically, it could not be more salient (to me), and the questions were well put, and Michael's annotations were/are stellar.

In Marc Gafni's book, The Mystery of Love, he breaks down the word avoidance into a-void-dance, and uses it to illustrate the qualitative distinctions between actions initiated from a place of empowered giving and fullness, and actions initiated by emptiness and a sense of void.  According to Marc, and I think you'll find most honest folks will resonate with this, humans walk around with two senses of emptiness.  One: the originative, causal emptiness of no qualities from which all things arise; Two: the emptiness of loneliness and consumerism that prevents us from experiencing the fullness of each moment.  I would add that loneliness and being alone are far from execrable phenomenons, but that it is when we become uncomfortable with ourselves and skittish in our flimsy frames when we begin void-dancing or avoiding the implications of our state of mind.  "Void-dancing" can take a vareity of forms from empty sex to violence to a Mars bar.  The key indicator that your activities of late may have been a void dance is the aftertaste.  If the aftertaste is fermented, causes you to feel sick or worthless, you may have been dancing around the void.

If you're down with this kind of thing, it can be fun to challenge your friends.  Be you at the grocery store or at the bar, you might ask, "Is that a void-dance?" in response to the actions of your buds.  The way to keep this from getting out of hand is to bring humor into it.  We are all adults, and all very happy and well-rounded adults, so rarely are our void-dances going to be catastrophic.  Watch as your friend orders a glass of water, raise your eyebrows and ask, "Void-dance?" and in this way keep things light.

Hello friends,

For one month you've got an opportunity to read Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, free, online, over here at this hopefully working link.  It's a pretty terrific novel. 

My first experience with [the novel] was hearing the voice of George Guidall, the best narrator in the world, read the story aloud to me as I lay on my back in my damp basement room.  Highly recommended: to listen to anything by George Guidall; and an audible.com subscription can set you up with Guidall titles aplenty.  But wait... this is about pimping Neil...


Not much to say about American Gods that hasn't already been said.  In case you were unfamiliar, this is the story wherein a certain character makes a certain speech, a speech I think you'd all be down with:

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."