You’re caught up in the sexiness of self-sabotage. That someone could purposefully rig the game against themselves is the most beautiful idea you’ve ever seen. You look at the world and ask for punishment.

Taking the route of permanent failure over temporary successes.

Always ups and downs, but never the speed bump ups and downs of everyone else. Only the glacier sized ups and downs, the kind that constantly melt and sink into the edge. Where the up is always coming back down with speed. And when coming back down is a deep sinking.

Other people dream, and you wonder what it is they see from those dreams. Is it you?

We live in the future, we travel to outer space and send a million text messages a second. All to let each other know the same dull shit.

We have the same dull lives.

Living in front of computers, living in constant response to constant streams of constant media. The everything age, really the everything shoved in your face age, so much coming at us all at once.

No room left for silence, no space left for privacy. Just constant pressure to keep up, to produce, to be unique, to be the smartest in an age of everyone knowing a million things at once.

So we can hold the attention of the millions for only a split second. While they’re microwaving dinner and watching tv and listening to music from their new phones.

So we are all the new kings and queens of nothing. Nobody bows before anybody else, nobody respects anyone else, because anything could be anything with enough time and information.

An endless labyrinth of media surrounds us all, wasting our time, wasting our lives with more stupidity piled on top of the old. But we can’t look away. The world is falling apart as we stare into our screens.

This isn’t good for you, you shouldn’t be doing this. We shouldn’t be so obsessed with celebrity, we are dying spiritually, our culture is rotting away from the inside out. We are nothing, we are the generation who will lose it all. Our self absorbed posting and checking, our ADD attention spans. We have no such thing as long term plans, the world changes every night as we sleep.

So it’s coming, so we can’t stop it, we we can only watch with a hundred open windows.

First you’re young, you’re cute, the world works for you.

Then you’re older, you’re uglier, and you work for the world.

When we’re older we all play these little tricks on each other, to see who can get away with not working for a while. It falls apart.

The world wants six pack abs and diet drinks and pills you can swallow that make your dick bigger.

Are you ready to give it to them?

If you could, you’d fix it right, hold a mirror up to it so it could see itself in all its glory, right?

Say:

See, you are ugly and old.

I have the fix. Just one more pill and one more sale. One day only.

But nothing will change, nothing will ever change. You just pick which side of the team you want to play for, the hypnotists or the hypnotised. Those people looking for that final fix out there, or those people pushing another fix, with just one more little twist.

People want nothing more than little distorted universes to live in. We want an up and we want a down. We want that yardstick so we can see:

Who am I better than?

And somebody is waiting with a grin to sell that yardstick. It’s holiness here, it’s money there. It is power here, it is talent there. It’s six pack abs here, it’s a lover there.

It is an endless circle that eats itself.

I have a thing I want to sell you. It enlarges your dick while giving you six pack abs and making you shit hundred dollar bills.

Would you be interested in it?

We have gone so far from an honest economy. Where we could all tell who was getting fucked and who was doing the fucking. Now, nobody has any idea what’s going on. It seems like everyone is getting fucked from all sides, except those people who “speak internet”.

Whatever that means. My ab-roller ab-twister ab-toweller ab-donker broke on the second workout. I’d ask for my money back, but I can’t find the receipt.

If you look closely enough you’ll notice, there’s no market research, there is no focus groups, there is no money back offer. You’ve gotten very little, but you got it and you paid well for it.

If there’s something better than free it’s freedom.

The freedom to be fucked, and the freedom to do the fucking.

You can’t really write until after your head has been cleansed. Of all that junk, of those insecure worries, of those infomercials. I’m going to show up for that interview tomorrow, I’m going to wake up at six, and I’m going to get that job. I’m going to solve all of my financial worries, and it’s going to allow me to be more creative. The more you try to make things happen, the less they do.

The universe senses a gimmick from a mile a way. It’s intelligent, it can sense when you’re being insencere. It can sense when you’re being lazy, and it can sense when you’re in the zone.

Whatever it is, we are here, commited and producing. For the sake of everyone involved, building a beter universe. So here’s where we’ll meet. We’ll meet in the hallway between your mind and mine.

We can both see it now, there’s no room for us in this free market economy of  Taco Bells and Exxon Mobiles. We have to make believe, we have to pretend, we have to build another world we can live in, until it’s real again.

What is accomplishment, what is worthiness? Is it endless practicing, endless drilling, is it 10,000 hours of practice in a closed room? Are we not all born worthy, with something to say?

Then why do we let experts speak for us?

Ten thousand hours studying, before you crack a stab at being honest.

The trees blow, and we work. What all this empty talk does. It keeps us alive.

Truth and justice always win in our little stories. Evil forever loses, good forever triumphs. Details are lost, we always win.

Why are we working these dead beat jobs, why are we paying these bank fees? Aren’t we the stuff the universe is made of? Shouldn’t we be more?

Young girls and fast cars. We’re sold a song from the day we’re born and it goes like this:

I am special I am a winner. I will win in life, and what I will win is beautiful money. Winning is beautiful luxurious money.

We’re all writing a story together.

What is success, but a thousand thank yous? A million people who can’t afford it, saying thank you, you helped us. That we might all become millionaires, that we might all stay honest. The bets are going out, right time is desceding. 30 more seconds, forty more minutes, and we willl no longer be able to keep the straw line open between our minds. We all have that disease. We forget.

Every day I see someone trying to be casual climbing a hill on their bicycle. They’ll sit in their seat, pretend the climb isn’t too hard, but on the inside I know they’re dying. There’s nothing worse than pedaling slowly up a long hill.

So instead, when I see a hill I get out of my seat, stand up, and just push. Push until I’m done, and the hill is climbed. It’s much more intense, and it looks a lot harder from an outsider’s perspective. But it is the fastest, easiest way to get up a hill.

It seems like a bit of a paradox, that an intense attack would be easier than a mellow, slow climb, but that’s just the way it ends up. All that momentum keeps you going; keeps you from the thinking about giving up, or how miserable riding uphill can be. And coincidentally, the sooner the hill is climbed, the sooner you can begin that bonus we get for our hard work in hilly terrain, the descent.

The first couple times you bomb a hill, you don’t know what to expect. You’ll hold on to the brakes for dear life, and even then, you won’t trust the speed you’re descending at. But that’s just part of it. The cars, the potholes, the oncoming traffic, it all adds up, and you become hyperaware. You start to see 360 degrees around yourself, opening up all your senses, listening for cars behind you, looking for potholes in front of you, and looking for cars coming from all directions. It’s pure intensity, but a different kind than most people are used to.

More of an adaptive intensity, bombing hills is all about adapting to what comes. It may seem safer to take those hills down at the slowest speed possible, but that too loses a kind of safety. That encourages you to get distracted, to think about other things, to forget about where you are, what you’re doing. Not the best idea when you’re competing for space with 2,000 pound hunks of metal going 45mph. You want to be aware, you want to be nimble. You want to be able to adapt. You don’t want to be picking a better song on your ipod or thinking about what you’re going to be making for dinner tonight. Complacency and distraction is what gets people hit.

There is a limit, a practical limit, to how fast and how slow you can take that other side of the hill. I’ve taken it as fast as possible a few times, just to feel it, to feel completely out of control. There’s nothing scarier. But the senses get focused incredibly tight. I can see everything, I’m a hundred percent aware of every vehicle around me.

So in the past few months, I’ve learned quickly how to climb and to descend hills, and the lesson hasn’t been lost. The hills are here to teach us; about the way we choose to approach obstacles in life, and about the way we try to control the world around us.

When we’re thrown challenges, it’s best to take them head on, aggressively, and on purpose. There’s nothing to be gained by being casual about challenges, taking them on the head and pushing through them slowly. We must always be aggressive, tackling things as they come and pushing through with momentum. Otherwise, life gets miserable and everything takes forever.

And coming down a hill, we can slow down, trying to stay in complete control, and just get in the way of the traffic as it exists, or we can become a dynamic part of it. Flow in and out in an adaptive manner, or try and fit it into a kind of safety. Ironically, the more we try to slow things down and make them safer, the less safe they become. We must actively engage the world both on our bikes and off. We are always a part of traffic.

Now, when I’m riding, I no longer dread pedaling uphill. I look at hills as challenges, and in doing so, I have conquered them. I don’t fear going down routes that require long pedals, because I know it’s just a game. Turning your big problems into a game, that’s the best way I know to master life. Finding the biggest challenges, the worst routes, the ones nobody wants to pedal down, that becomes the game. And then, when it comes time to bike in groups, I can push everyone else just a little outside of their comfort zone. And that beats it all. That’s what makes us all grow, get a little bit stronger.

i always wondered,
what it’s like
to be the man.
winning it all,
and never losing nothing.

on top of the world,
like the brightest star
on a star spangled banner
of pure muscle and testosterone

lording over everyone
answering to no one,

just straight mackin’ on chicks all day.

Everyone is overweight and lazy and wants to gamble. At the Meijer there was a machine you could buy scratch cards on. On the radio they said they wanted to have online gambling so the state could have the revenue. In the future, nobody works, they just take turns taking out massive mortgages, refinancing on pretend money and declaring bankruptcy. It works beautifully and everybody’s happy and nobody loses, least of all the banks.

The banks are what make us human. The banks are what makes us breathe. The banks are our blood. We could never let them get spoiled with worries of solvency.

And so now we have big fat bailouts and the money just comes. First it was our turn to spend and borrow and spend some more and now it’s the government’s. Soon it will be ours again, soon we’ll have three cars again soon we’ll be able to buy unlimited plastic shit from China again, soon we’ll be all better again.

And the world will breathe a collective sigh of relief. We’ll go back to global warming and pollution and super bad corporations we love to hate but bank our retirements on. We’ll go back to our mean little overlords who keep us fat and dull with a bunch of really nice things. We’ll go back to being ourselves, the world will be saved, and crises will be averted.

Nobody knows this better than me, nobody is longing for equity markets to open up more than me. We can’t stay poor for long, the big cities can’t feel the pain for so long, because all that expertise will go elsewhere. We have a complicated financial system that should reward skill and intelligence and the ability to leverage mortgage bundles into infinity without a conscience.

We need some people with balls, we need people with big old balls so they can teabag the American public like the way the American public needs a big bad teabag.

Wall street is not at fault here. What’s at fault is all those people who thought they could buy homes, when everyone said buy homes damnit. Those people are morons, those people who thought they were entitled to homes. This may be the US and there may be isles of shit just sitting on shelves waiting for you to buy them and throw them away tomorrow, but damnit, you are not going to ever have a home. You are too lazy and your financial situation is unstable. You aren’t getting bailed out, either.

Houses and homes aren’t opinions, not everyone is entitled to them, not everyone gets to have one. Only the elite, only the best are entitled to homes in the US, only the ones who can flip a home in 24 hours while cheating on their wives and listening to Tony Robbins and running a marathon and thinking positive and using The Secret.

You are poor and you don’t have a home because you didn’t follow The Secret. Nothing’s impossible, everything is possible. You can have everything all at once and all right now just call right now. Just think happy thoughts and order now. You can pay later. You will pay later. You will always pay later. Keep paying. Keep praying.

Nothing ever comes, it’s always impossible to see where things go next. Crises are averted, the machine keeps going on, three trillion bajillion dollars later we all have financial stability and no debt and no healthcare. Keep running in circles, it’s your fault you had a baby, you moved, you got sick, you didn’t do your homework, and now you’ve got to pay the prices. Work late work now work tomorrow can you even get a job now? Keep buying. That will fix things.

The only ones who create value are the people at the top. Without them, we would be lost little sheep searching for a meaning, searching for a pain, searching for an emptiness. We must obey immediately and completely, and forever more. It’s the only way we can spare ourselves from beginning that horrid search. That horrid search that begins nowhere, goes inward to loneliness, and ends back where we started from.

So maybe the world is messed up and maybe it isn’t. Microsoft Word is running a virus scan against these words to make sure I’m not writing a virus within a Word document using only words. Maybe there is a virus here, maybe it’s a hidden one, maybe it makes us all sick, maybe it doesn’t matter.

Is that what keeps us at bay, keeps our heads buried in the sand? The idea that maybe it doesn’t matter scares us, that death lingers just ahead as a question mark, and it might be it and it might be nothing?

There’s no such thing as permanence anymore, no time for quality. If quality is supposed to happen, it must all be absorbed within a bunch of action, focused on one thing at a time. Am I chopping wood, or am I building something that matters?

I was sitting and thinking about all the things I’ve done in my life. There’s nobody who’s going to congratulate me for what I’ve done so far, for what I plan to create. It’s just me running my own show with a cast of people I care about. Will they care back, or will they be wrapped up in worrying about themselves too?

Maybe that’s the real teaching we’re supposed to learn. Quit worrying about all that stuff inside your head and look around you. Who needs your help the most?

Getting older is tricky. You’ve got to decide for yourself what you want out of life, and how you’re going to get it. And then once you do decide, you’re going to need to get a bunch of help. And don’t think you’re going to do shit by yourself. Even the crappiest little dreams need a bunch of people involved to make them happen.

So what do you do, how do you get people to care about you? It’s a nice daydream that people will like you if you’re really cool, but then again, they probably won’t. You’ve got to make a big change when you get older; you’ve got to start caring about people other than yourself.

And that can be a really hard thing to do. It sure is for me.

I don’t want to bum you out, but here’s a secret. As you get older, your dreams get covered up by scary realities. You wake up and have rent and a car payment. Your family and your girlfriend and your boss and thousand other things all need your attention at the same time. It gets hard to manage all that and still have time for your watercolor paintings.

But that’s all inevitable, life gets complicated and you pick up responsibilities, mostly on accident. Shit gets thrown upon you, and you’ve got to decide what’s most important.

For me, it’s become a weird balance. I program computers 20 hours out of the week, and write, skate, and shoot photos the other half. I’m not getting rich and I’m not getting famous. But I’m living a life I’m proud of.

What matters to you? Being an adult, getting older, you’ve got to figure that shit out for yourself. Is it getting famous and having your own reality show, or is it writing a novel or is it just buying a house? Nobody’s going to figure that out for you but you.

I shot nine thousand photos last year and none of them were good. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop shooting. I’ve begun to appreciate things for the process, for the distractions. My photos may suck and my writing may be unfocused, and my skating might be shit, but at least I’m still in the game.

And that’s the hardest part of getting older, remembering it’s all a game. We all play a game of make believe called life. Because you and I pretend we need houses with indoor plumbing and electricity, we worry our entire lives about how the hell we’re going to pay for it. But it isn’t the end game. People have lived for thousands of years in mud huts just fine. Why do we need to pretend like a reality show and a record deal make a life worth living? Get out and grab your own experiences, and quit waiting for the stars to align. Your life is happening now. Better make it tight.

You people forget that we’re just clouds of chaotic little particles bouncing around. There’s no eternal and there’s no holy. There’s just us messed up little automatons.

I can respect that you guys want to get people in the kingdom of heaven, but don’t trick them with prizes. You can save a soul any more than you can stop a river. You’ve just got to let things run their course. If they’re paying attention, they’ll get to where they need to go.

Siddhartha learned much among the samanas, he learned to follow many paths away from his ego. He followed the path of unselfing through pain, through the voluntary suffering and overcoming of pain, of hunger, of thirst, of fatigue. He followed the path of unselfing thorugh meditation, through thinking till the mind was empty of all notions… But though the paths led away from the ego, in the end they always led back to the ego.

“What do you think, Govinda,” Siddartha once said during their begging, “what do you think? Have we made progress? Have we reached goals?”

Govinda replied: “We have learned, and we are learning more. You will become a great samana, Siddhartha. You have learned every exercise quickly, the old samanas often admire you. Someday you will become a saint, O Siddhartha.”

“What is meditation? What is abandonment of the body? What is fasting? What is holding of the breath? It is flight from the ego, it is a brief breakout from the torture of ego, it is a brief numbing of pain and of the senselessness of life. The same flight, the same brief numbing is found by the ox driver at the inn when he drinks a few cups of rice wine or fermented coconut milk… Asleep over his cup of rice wine, he finds what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they slip away from their bodies after long exercises and linger in the nonself. That is the way it is, O Govinda.”