Kickstarter: MyTemple...Go and back this now.

I love the whole concept of Kickstarter and have (arguably) wasted many an hour browsing through the occasionally lame, very often fantastic, in every sense of the word, and sometimes just creepy project there.  Now and then, I come across one that I get really excited about.  As I've been on a big kick this past month to get my health on track as I enter my 30s, this one definitely falls into that category.  Check it out.  Back it.  Share it.  If they hit $100k, it'll be on Android, too.

MyTemple: The Fitness Training Game Read more!

A Thought: On Marriage and Murderous Home Design

I do so love being married to someone who gets excited when I ask if she wants to help me design a mansion of doom.  That's love, right there. Read more!

A Thought: On the Power of Inclusion

There are few things better at motivating one to great change than feelings of loneliness and exclusion. Read more!

A Thought: On Horrible Parenting

Does anyone else remember the days when you could see a horror movie at midnight and not have at least one or two kids under five there?  Anyone? Read more!

To the Grunters...

If you must grunt every time you do a rep, you've either got too much weight or too little attention.  Either way, it feels like a personal problem, so please stop.  Thank you. Read more!

A Thought: On Us and Them

The human mind is exceptional at creating monsters, wired to do so, to make an us and a them.  It is, however, also capable of rising above what are inevitably petty distinctions, of reasoning, finding compromise and, most importantly, of understanding.  It is only by doing so that we have any hope for the future.

If you approach the world expecting to find enemies, you always will.  If you approach it expecting to find allies, well, the same is also true. Read more!

A Thought: On the Efficacy of Placing Blame

Placing blame is an exceptionally effective tool.  The evidence is everywhere.  We use it constantly, as individuals and as a society, to put off actually fixing all sorts of problems.

What it comes down to is this: Placing blame (not to be confused with trying to understand a problem) does nothing but provide a way to keep from having to do the work of fixing a problem.  Hands used to point fingers can't be used to clean up a mess. Read more!

A Thought: On Guns and Immigrants

Okay, folks, here we go again...One of the most valid arguments against banning all guns in the U.S.  (which, mind you, NO ONE has ever actually tried to do with any traction, but that aside) is that the problem simply isn't feasible.  There are just too many guns out there to possibly get rid of them all, so regulation is the only possible way to go and, believe it or not, most reasonable gun advocates support it wholeheartedly.

The thing is, if you swap out the word gun with the word immigrant in that rational, you end up with just as valid a point.  There is no way to, "send them all back," and not just because it would quite literally cripple our already ailing economy.  So give them papers, make them pay taxes like the rest of the working poor and problem solved. 

You only get to use the argument for one if you're willing to accept it for the other.  Read more!

16th Annual Zach's Dead Day

Sixteen years ago, I was in a massive car accident that killed me, which didn't take, and crippled me for life, which, unfortunately, did.  I've officially spent half my life with this pain as a constant companion and, while, of course, I would love to be free of it, I made the choice a long time ago (not immediately, no one does that, despite what they may say) to not allow it to consume me. 

Spending my senior year in high school in a wheelchair, I wasn't so enlightened as that on the first anniversary.  My friends at the time decided, then, to throw me a party in order to keep my spirit's up.  It worked.  I've still got a flyer for the first annual Zach's Dead Day party somewhere.  I was never able to tell them how much it meant, because you don't think to, when you're that age.  I'm grateful, though, because it was a large part of how I began to come to terms with things.  So I'll just put my gratitude out there into the ether and hope that it finds them somehow.

All that being said, Happy Zach's Dead Day! Read more!

A Thought: On Prioritizing the Rights of Our Children

I often wish we expended even half as much effort and outrage on ensuring that our children are able to be well-educated as we do on ensuring that they are able to be well-armed.  Read more!

A Thought: On the Misappropriation of Books

For all the vast and interesting things tutorials all over the internet can show you how to do with books, from making potters for plants to fantastic works of art crafted by slicing into the pages, I find, to my heart's sore ache, that fewer and fewer suggest actually reading them. Read more!

A Thought: On the Goodness of Goodness

Just because you're good at something doesn't mean it's good for you. Read more!

A Thought: On Existentialism's Oft Misunderstood Message

If you believe that the logical conclusion of Existentialism is hopelessness and despair, you've likely got a bit more existing to do. Read more!

Conversations: Hand-licking on the playground

"You licked my hand!"

"You put your hand over my mouth. I don't know what playground you grew up on, but that was the logical conclusion of that action.  Putting your hand over someone's mouth was basically like saying, 'Please lick my hand.'" Read more!

Rules of the Blues

When I was sixteen, I went to Detroit on a school trip.  Wandering around the little neighborhood of Trapper's Alley, where I would later buy a potted ivy that still sits in a window all these years later, I came across an old bluesman sitting on a bench.  He wore an immaculately pressed suit, sharp, if a few decades out of style, a pair of dark glasses, a broad, bright grin and an old guitar that had seen more life than I had, then. 

            I asked if I could sit beside him, listen to him play for a while, and he just laughed and told me that he didn't own the music and I could do as I like.  We sat for a while, he and I, talking and playing, passing the guitar back and forth with its deserved reverence.  Along with the memories, I took away from that night an early education in the blues, as, fittingly, handed down to me from one musician to another.

            "Son," he told me, a slow grin making its way across his face, "you got to remember two things, if you want to play the blues, and God only knows why you would.  First, ain't nobody owns music, so it can't be stolen.  You take a song, change it a little, make it yours and that's what it is, till someone else hears you play it, then it becomes theirs, too."

            "Second, your first guitar can't be new.  It's got to come second, maybe third, hand.  It's got to have stories, got to know the music, cause one of you got to know where to put your hands, and sure as hell ain't gonna be you."  He laughed at that last part.  I laughed with him.

            I never got his name, but I still carry what he told me and I've passed it along, as opportunity or necessity demanded.  I still play the guitar I bought the Christmas after I met that old bluesman, pulled off the rack, a little worn, and I've added some of my own stories to it.  It still knows more than I do, I think, about where to put my hands, but I think I'm okay with that, all things considered, because sometimes, when I close my eyes and I just let the music come, I hear it whisper, let it lead, and it carries me away.

Read more!

A Thought: On Relative Pain

Some mornings, it feels like there's a vice grip on my right side, slowly tightening, grinding the bones to dust.  Other mornings, it's really bad. Read more!

A Thought: On Skepticism vs. Mockery

Skepticism is the mark of the intellectual.  Mockery and derision marks of the foolish. Read more!