Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Success - Ralph Waldo Emerson

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether it be a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived; This is to have succeeded.

God's Debris: A Thought Experiment

Imagine that you meet a very old man who -- you eventually realize -- knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life: quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability -- in a way so simple, so novel and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything? God's Debris isn't the final answer to the Big Questions. But it might be the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what's wrong with the old man's explanation of reality. Share the book with your smart friends then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.

Age of Spiritual Machines

This extraordinary 1999 book by Raymond Kurzweil illustrates the exponential evolution of various technologies in the 21st century, as well as the speeding up of time as order increases. Ray Kurzweil explores a future where the processing power and capacity of the human brain will be inexpensive to purchase, conscious machines demand civil rights, and our ideas of self and spirituality evolve as we merge with technology and extend our lifespans. Can an intelligence create another intelligence more intelligent than itself? Are we more intelligent than the evolutionary process that created us? In turn, will the intelligence that we are creating come to exceed that of its creator?

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an almost effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real difference between apples and oranges (of which there is none).

The Lessons of Terror

In The Lessons of Terror, novelist and military historian Caleb Carr examines terrorism throughout history and the roots of our present crisis and reaches a provocative set of conclusions: the practice of targeting enemy civilians is as old as warfare itself; it has always failed as a military and political tactic; and despite the dramatic increases in its scope and range of weapons, it will continue to fail in the future.

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can we do about it? Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, Demonic Males offers some startling new answers. Dramatic, vivid, and firmly grounded in meticulous research, this book will change the way you see the world. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, it "dares to dig for the roots of a contentious and complicated subject that makes up much of our daily news."

RFK

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. That night, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, just two months away from his own assassination, announced King's death at a political rally in Indianapolis, Indiana. Urging calm, Kennedy fell into quoting the Ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus in an effort to articulate the inexplicable tragedy of King's murder.

"And even in our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us
by the awful grace of God."

NIGHT FALLS FAST

Here's a small excerpt from one of the books I'm reading. It's called Night Falls Fast by Dr. Kay Jamison. It is essentially a psychological and scientific exploration in understanding suicide. While reading, there was a particular passage that struck a chord with me about a young man suffering from manic depression ....

"On january 27, Drew Sopirak left his parent's home in Wilmington and drove to a gun store. The state of Delaware required no waiting period to purchase handguns; the clerk sold him a .38 calibre revolver straightaway. A few hours later, Drew shot himself. The police notified Drew's parents that his body had been found inside his jeep at the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was about forty minutes from home.

"We had been on that turnpike so many times," said Drew's mother. "Both our families live in the Pittsburgh area. That road would have taken him to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins and his brother at Penn State. He just never got on it. He must have run out of hope there."

When hope fails, so does all else.