"A tradition without intelligence is not worth having" T.S. Eliot

As much as I love my homeboy and fellow Leo Churchill, I'm going to have to roll with T.S. Eliot on this one. Only two generations removed from Quechua tribes left over from the Incan empire in Ecuador, I know a thing or two about nonsensical tradition. My grandfather left a tribe in Alausi because he felt things like nose piercings and ear gauges were pointless and barbaric, just to come to America where today my best friend since sixth grade has an inch gauge in each ear and his septum pierced. He traded bone for metal and was simply disappointed. "They call us savages!" he always said as he would walk by St. Marks. "At least in Alausi they wouldn't charge you because it had meaning; You can't put a price on a symbol." I can see now that he's older he'd rather have the bone than the metal, the dirt instead of rock, the handwoven headdress to the Alfani shoes, and the jungles of Ecuador suddenly seem to be bigger than he remembered; Bigger than any skyscraper in the entirety of the concrete jungle. It's sad to see someone so out of place. Maybe it's the jazz music in the other room, maybe it's because we're both Leos, but I think I agree with Churchill after all...

Forgot To Post This

Often times it is better to keep your lips sealed and pen moving than to put your thoughts into play. However, what makes you so sure that one who writes hasn't lived? What can you write about if you've never lived. All fiction is based in life just as all lies are based in truth. That is what makes fraud so dangerous. It is the most difficult sin to call out and according to Dante will land you further in hell than anyone would care to be. Fraud in all its forms is destructive. The cat and mouse between a detective and a suspect, the betrayal of a good friend with a kiss or the lie that now pulls your reigns as you attempt to keep your story straight...

Veins Called Love

“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart o the woman who he may love later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”

Love. The undefined emotion that is one of the mysteries of this world. What, how, when, to whom, why do we love? I love. I love my parents, my sisters, my friends, and my best friends all in different ways and all for different reasons. If you ask me how I know that I love them, I just do. Love should take over the Nike catchphrase of just do it so that others don’t try to search so hard for what it is. When you find love, love. It might bring you feelings of hate , jealousy, confusion, but it also brings you bliss and that reassuring feeling that someone is there for you, that someone cares about you. Now I wish that young men will love who they want and then hold the heart of the one that they love, but I’ve seen to many guys my age discard the hearts of girls that they love like the pen that they’ve used that’s now thrown away because its out of ink. The ink that runs through the veins called love dried out causing the heart to cease purpose, or as it may feel.

~Samantha Dunac

Serious Within Simply Without

“The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without”

Without boarders, no lines drawn in the sand separating you and your needs. You know what you want and that’s when you take yourself seriously. When you live this wy you see the world not in the way that you want to but in a way that you need to. Want. Need. The transition from one to the other is the difference between more maturely. We take what we need from the world we grow. Selfishly taking what we want we remain stunted in our desires. Now that’s not to say that wants such as goals are bad because goals usually turn into passions, but passion shouldn’t be confused as psycosis. When we live more seriously we can make the distinction between wants and needs and at this point our needs become so cultivated, so loved, they disguse themselves as wants and we live more fluently. Things seem easier when we make decisions with a serious breeze because that points our compass in the right direction and as effortless as a breeze turing a compass is so becomes our life. I know. When I started to look at the world with a more serious air being a real citizen of the world was more organic. I started with tending to the needs of others helping underprivileged children to become better than themselves, and I became better myself.

~Samantha Dunac

~~THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE. PEACE IS THE WAY~~

~~Therefore, there isnt a path that leads us to peace? But then, peace is the path that lead us where? Where do we really want to go? Perhaps peace, total peace does not even exist. Not one of us i feel are completely capable of being at peace with oneself or another. We all have the twitching eye that brings doubt. But with doubt comes growth and perhaps with growth the birth of peace welcomes itself. Not universal peace but to be selfishly peaceful in order to go on with our day. What if this peace isnt even organic? What if we are forced to become peaceful in order to remain sane. Peace isnt the way, it is the tool we use to reason with what is already hidden beneath the surface....~~

Journal entry 4/14/2010 Patriotism and Allegiance

I believe the past does bring out our patriotism. when I read about my culture and the history behind my people, I'm filled with a sense of pride. It's not so much that we want to feel allegiance, but the fact that we all do have a history gives us, or at least me, a sense of belonging. Although often times on books our history is glorified or romanticized, depending on the author, we can't believe everything that is written. I think we choose to believe the more heroic accounts of our people rather than facts, but accepting the facts will not make us any less. In fact, it will bring us closer because by accepting the facts, we can truely appreciate the hardships and struggles that they went through and we can look back at all we have accomplished and all we can still further accomplish.



Reymundo Solano

“Everything is compromise”

I wouldn’t necessarily say that absolutely everything is compromise. The thing about compromise is that I think that a large important factor would be another thing, weather it be a person or an event or anything, which without you don’t really have any compromises to make. Unless its like a fight with yourself. Like your sitting there and know that you should start working on your paper due tomorrow, but you just can’t seem to do it. So you compromise with yourself and watch a little more tv and then work on the paper. But the majority of the time you think that you know what you want and you do it. The weird thing is that I guess it is possible for everything to subconsciously be a compromise. I mean sometimes people don’t really know what they want, and they make decisions that they don’t really know what influenced them or drove them to make it, but they did. Is our brain automatically on program to compromise and we don’t even know it? Compromise with ourself. I mean imagine if we had to fight with ourselves to compromise in addition to all the other people. Clearly the brain was smart in making sure that this didn’t happened. But it can’t be. Because if the brain was on the automatic compromise setting then there wouldn’t be any more fights with people about compromise. And if that were the case, well what would there really be to fight about. The thing is that most of the time people don’t even come to a compromise .Yeah, sure if it’s a little thing, but most adults can’t even compromise over something simple without a fight emerging. When it comes to compromises, are we just being stubborn? Well. No. If we were just being stubborn we wouldn’t feel so strongly about our side. But then what about those people who don’t compromise right, not that they overpower, but under power. Those that always give up what they want to make everyone happy and such. Well its their own faults. They can play the victim, but at some point you have to learn to have a little bit of a presence, a little bit of a “don’t mess with me attitude” They are commonly referred as the push over, and although I do salute their good intentions to be the peace keeper and make everyone happy, its just not possible. Giving up beliefs that you have just isn’t worth it in a world full of people trying to get ahead. Most of the time if you keep giving in to other people and not get what you want it will hurt you in many other ways. People are going to take advantage of you, you can’t truly be happy by just pleasing others. So are we wrong for looking down on those who have good intentions to make others happy? To avoid the fight and reality that a compromise isn’t possible in order to be the better person? Hm. I good thing time is way over.

~~Quarter Cento~~

The Dissonance of Music

She sang beyond the genius of the sea
My wife here takes three mortal hours to dress her self
She turned away from the mirror slowly
For she was the maker of the song, she sang
A vague terror seized
I am lying in bed
In praise of love
She came around to my side and took me in her arms
‘you aint never gonna be nothing but a bum”
I was clammy cold with a sweat
I must have loved my wife, I know I did
The room was different now, changing, getting thinner
There is no comfort it seems, in a world of objects
It seems that at that moment she began to inhabit the world
I will not fight, will not interfere
That was her song, for she was the maker
If you could love me, I’d do anything
She left the lit room
She knows. She must know and
There is only this
The clocks in the house about to strike the half hour
She knows she will leave. She is herself
She would prefer that no one ask where she’s going
The close of an ordinary day
I could hear my heart beating, even when the room went dark

Readings used for quarter cento
1. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
2. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours
3. Wallace Steven’s The Idea Of Order at Key West
4. Joyce’s The Dead
5. Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
6. James Baldwin’s Previous Condition: A Story

~~THE WALK~~

Column One Column Two


If I gave my daughter My feet
Not just a walk Would walk
Her own walk Walk any walk
Her own switch Walk with switch
Feet would be her way Walking and I would watch her
And sit behind her Her own walk
She would walk Where she pleases
She would please My eyes
If I gave my sister sight Could see her eyes
Her own vision She sees everything
Would see everything Takes beauty as it ugliness
Around her beauty Her sight that I with no eyes
As it’s ugliness Let her see
Would be her sight And she would see for me

Put a donk on it.. dedicated to my boyfriend Thomas

Matters of the heart, eh? So much comes to mind, none more pleasurable though, as the love kind. It can be an affliciction to feel things from the heart, even good affliction feels uncomfortable. But unrequited goings on of the heart are worse still. And what about the art of replacing hearts - those missing or them that seize up, or those that never worked in the first place? You can carry someone's heart or be carried in another's heart, you can lose heart or have a big heart. Let's get down to the matter of the heart or the heart of things to come. The heart knows it's own reasons - who said that? He's got heart, she's heartfelt. Shot through the heart, love heart, heart attack, heart monitor, BPM...