My sweet friend the paper

Journal is precious. You have to leave artifacts, you have to leave traces behind or it's gonna get lost. It'll be gone if you're not careful in constructing a map, if you don't write your life's book, somebody else's life's book, it won't exist. You can't trust your mind to the vicious harlot that is time. She will seduce you, a slow burn that turns into an inferno quicker than you can cry for your mama. So write down everything you can. It seems pitiful but it's 2009 now and in 2015 you might be trying to remember something you did with your friends. You might need to. Consider it for insurance purposes, betting against your own memory in the future.

Good idea Bad idea

Good paragraph: I'm the only guy left in the zombie movie who hasn't been infected by the whatever bacteria virus scum when I watch Lost. Good, smart, decent people love this show. And it's...just...awful. It's just about the worst. Even the worst stuff isn't the worst, because the WORST stuff doesn't make any pretension about not being the worst. Lost thinks very highly of itself, indeed it believes itself to be something wonderful and there are legions of intelligent, attractive people that think the same. And these people are accessory to one of the biggest con games I've ever seen in my life. It's profoundly sad. Bad paragraph: I feel hell tonight. That's it, the isolation that it must be. I'm not in hell, my life is not hell, I'm not feeling LIKE hell, but a part of me is taking notice of the fact that right now I feel my soul and my spirit treading dangerously on the edge of what must be like a small, tiny, sliver of hell. I'm begging God for rescue and the worst part of not feeling your prayers answered is not knowing whether they've been answered or not, the uncertainty that comes with being out of touch with the heart of Jesus Christ. What if night was eternity and you couldn't leave? What if you could never leave?

Fist pumps and soul bumps

Time is thief. It comes so hard in the night and infects so blatantly in broad daylight, perhaps even worse. I like it when people live in ignorance to thieves like these. I like when people dance on top of it, in sweet spite of it. These people move me and should move me to higher things. Don't listen to a world screaming "no" at the top of its lungs. Stand on it, take it with you, and ask what's next. Maybe if you press the question hard enough someone will light the way for you, walk with you, and you can find the answer together. Tomorrow remains a possibility, never a promise, so one would wise up to stop acting as such. It's so so easy to get caught in that horrible small in the back of time, pulled stuck between the past's living devils and the future's unknowable darkness. I know I'll be released and catapulted into the flight of NOW if I want to be, if I can let it go and make wisdom today, creation today, love today. And should I reflect but a fraction of the things shone upon me by those who call claim to crowd around in unflinching, uncommon, unbelievable devotion then they will be bathed in the light of God's own eyes. If I were to reflect just a part of that then we'd all be better off, we will be better off. Until those times come, I'll keep reaching as far as outstretched fingers will allow. Last night my downstairs neighbor gave me the 'ol broomstick on the ceiling to keep it down. I was preoccupied. You can't really shake the things you are, and I shouldn't even try to deny them when it means stifling smiles. I don't plan on frowning too much in the future.

We belong to, like, the Monet of heavenly fathers

Love is great. Is there anything greater than love? I'm not, I'll repeat, am NOT enjoying the ecstasies of young romance in this moment and shouting this on a rooftop in rhetorical grandeur. I'm actually asking if there is. If not, then it must be said that all great things are love in different shapes, in different forms. By the way, it's hilarious that this is overlooked, but God is CREATIVE. There isn't a more beautiful artist in heaven or earth. You gotta admit that this whole crazy thing takes more than a little imagination. God is an artist, painting creation on an infinite canvas. When little humans like us pick up the artist's call, we emulate this part of our God. Producing, making, inventing, in these moments we are closer to that unheralded part of God, the infinite artist.

I love my soul and I love the BCS

Truth is lost. I don't understand the people who brandish the word truth as a license to speak rudeness with an insipid tongue. It's a good shtick, it's a nice bit for a piece of literature concerning people who aren't us, but it is really truth? The only truth it speaks to is the darkness in everyone's heart, everyone's heart, everyone's soul and body. So hold your applause for those in the business of shedding darkness on more darkness, as that seems a grand 'ol remedy yet. Reclaim truth from these people. Make it a sword gleaming in the sun again. Bad days are better than days like the one I had two days ago (when I first wrote this junk). Nothing valuable occurs. Bad days stack the deck one way or the other and things change, there is a progression or regression but the narrative flows, the story continues, you get to know what happens next. This is one of the whitest people problems of them all, but this town is a time warp devouring progress oftentimes. You enjoy it only when a moment occurs that hasn't before.

Hi, nice to love you.

Melody is Magic. It's as natural as fire and water, you got 12 notes and a dream, but the lines we make, the patterns drawn on thin air thick, the stories without words to be told. What else can you call that? Maybe when the angels are struck down, they bleed songs and melodies. I can't think of any other legitimate source. It can't be from this world, not this one.

I am filled with despair by nothing. With the minutes unfulfilled, people I haven't met, things unknown, lessons not learned, potential not seized upon. These are the things that terrify me, what I don't know. I can only hope to get a little less scared everday, to know away the fear.

Oprevin's Favorite Things
(2008 Edition)

Da musics

5. Single Ladies / If I Were A Boy
A neverending source of simultaneous shame and joy. The best songs are often the worst songs.

4. Bootlegs
They exist and they can be downloaded with absolute ease by piggybacking on campus broadband. My flash drive is my girlfriend. Through these recordings made by people who love as furiously as I do, I got some unexpected and thoroughly light in my life.

3. Acid Tongue
All of it, everyone of them tunes. It's mine. Thanks, Jenn.

2. Connection
I looked into the eyes of Sharon Jones, Jenny Lewis, and some other men and I could see myself back.

1. Fleet Foxes
Haha, I'm just kidding. Everyone put this on their top whatever music of this year. That's so 2008.

1. (for real) 4/14/08
I already wrote about that crap. Check out the 10k here.

Da TVs and moviefilms

5. SNL -
A dreadfully inconsistent show manages to shine through and get some great things under the radar. That's Kristin Wiig, Bill Hader, Poehler, Forte, and Armisen getting greatness under the wire. Despite the fact it's a genre dinosaur, it still remains part of everyday language and relevance.

4. Forgetting Sarah Marshall -
No, really, one of the best things I saw. Jason Siegel did it and made something entirely personal be entirely personal to everyone. Never was this more evident than the clothing memory montage. He did it, he tapped into the minds of men in America just trying their best to love her. The characters have faith, get hurt, and hurt others. In addition to being hilarious, there's not an ounce of genre whiplash. Thanks Jason.

4. The summer of West Wing with Katie
Talk about a grand rapturous love affair, reigniting the first sparks of passion. The show, not the girl. Don't be silly.

2. Wall-E
Among many peoples there seems to be an aversion to technology, as if the further away we get from things we can do with our bare hands and nothing else the more likely it is to be suffocated by its own prowess. Pixar tells us every year that this simply isn't true and Wall-E ranks one of the more epic examples of such. I even had a few of those dusty-in-the-theater, Fox-and-the-Hound moments.

1. The Colbert Report
It is the best and will be the best until it's gone. Nothing compares.

1/11/42

Sax is soul. Who taught me that?

Happy 67th