1. Intense heat followed by intense cold inspires clarity
2. Mind-altering is at the nexus of creativity
3. Addiction is problematic
4. Humans are coded to self-destruct
5. All of this will pass
Five Thoughts From a Helsinki Sauna
Reply
Tag Archives: doomed man
Thanks for What?
Leaders never lead. Communicators are never on Communication Committees. If she says, “I am the most loyal person”, you know she isn’t. If he says, “I am wise”, he is the opposite. “My door is always open”, and it never is.
As broad and simple as it sounds, it’s really an ugly thing, the reason for the missiles and executions, the world going to hell all around us. Hope remains the thing. Thanks for nothing.
We Have an Expiration Date
I have blogged on my concerns for the future as of late, a dread that worsens daily. Henri Charriere concludes his opus of astonishing escapes, Papillon, with the following thought: We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life easier and better.
The craving for every scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding and nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people.
Charriere wrote those words in 1970, 53 years ago. And how much worse is it now? And how much worse is it going to get? (HInt: Much fucking worse.)
Sensationalism: the whittling of a word
Warning: This blog is entirely derived from sensationalism
Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers (Wikipedia), such as a horrific event from this week in which a man was pushed onto the tracks and killed by a New York subway train. 
This image of the man’s final moments has led many to ask why no one helped and instead took pictures of his death. This type of imagery dominates the media and has indeed infected my memory. (Or as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road: The things you put in your head are there forever.) I remember well the 1979 murder of ABC journalist Bill Stewart in Nicaragua, played over and over on network television, and obsessed over another image taken in 1988 of a German bank robber threatening to kill his hostage. (He didn’t.)
In the end, I used this as source material for my first novel The Sacred Whore, a sensational story in itself about prostitutes who kidnap a basketball team so that they can broadcast their views on what’s wrong with America.
Sensational (also a horse, album and hip hop artist) is defined as causing great public interest and excitement, as in “Sensational Superstar Vickie looks sensational!”
The 3D tools for Sensational Superstar Vickie
Sensation (also a song, event, film and type of BDSM play) is a style of writing, similar to verisimilitude, which aims to imitate the sensations of experiencing an event.
Christopher Walken experiencing too many sensations in film, “Brainstorm”.
Sensa is Latin for ‘thought’ or ‘teachings” as well as being a weight-loss program.
Rodin’s “The Thinker”
Sens is a commune in Burgundy, in north-central France.
Cathedral in Sens, France
Sen is the name of the protagonist in Miyazaki’s magical Spirited Away.
Sen (Chihiro) in “Spirited Away”.
Se is the internet country code for Sweden and also represents the element Selenium. 
And S is a letter, a series of Tesla cars, the stock identifier for Sprint Nextel and the sound a balloon makes when it’s run out of air.