this is the first day of my life–swear i was born right in the doorway…

This great evil.
Where does it come from?
How’d it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who’s doin’ this?
Who’s killin’ us?
Robbing us of life and light.
Mockin’ us with the sight of what we might’ve known.
Does our ruin benefit the earth?
Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?

san francisco pt. 2 — golden gate bridge.

viewing/walking the golden gate bridge really struck a chord with me and i found myself remembering/writing about it days later…

the city is probably the most pretentious place to call yourself an artist. if you’re pretentious enough to call yourself an artist, or even just enough to be one then the worst place for you is a city. a true artist, a person with a soul open to others and to the world, should never travel. travel to a person who can truly observe the things around them can do more harm than good.
the man who calls himself an artist travels, to the country, to the city, into the ocean and back out again but doesn’t even carry a pen. they rant and rave the beauty of a city, their city or anyone else’s. but a city isn’t the place you see in photographs, read articles about in the paper, listen to ‘artists’ rant and rave about over cocktails. a city is a machine that sucks in artists and weary travelers and either spits them back out differently or swallows them whole. you want to mumble your pity or disgust for the insanity of a man who sleeps on the street–that man is an artist. that is a man broken by the world, swallowed up and savored, never to find a way back out.
of course your city is beautiful–all the postcards say so, but whats to say about its ugliness? the sane men and women who sleep next to grocery carts on the street along side the sane men and women who keep their heads down while they walk past? you can call a city beautiful all you want, i have no doubt that it is. but is it beauty punctuated by ugliness or is the ugliness just punctuated by the beauty.
and how can you stand in a city, on top of a mountain, at the edge of the ocean and not lose all faith in the world around you. watch the things that man destroys so that more men can create.

and men built of the same flesh and bone as you, and everyone around you, can build something so beautiful that the world deems it a ‘wonder’. and if they told you that there were only seven of them–they lied to you. there are thousands of wonders in the world, millions. the panic in a mother’s face when she looses her child’s hand in a crowd, the fake sincerity of someone on a power trip. not just the golden gate bridge but the way it touches the sky, the way it holds it self up despite the weight of people throwing themselves off of it. people question how anyone can want to end their lives while in the presence of something so beautiful. i want to know–how can you not? how can you stand on a man made creation and stare out at the equal beauty of what is, and horror of whats gone, and feel the extravagance under every step you take, and not haul yourself over the edge and then throw yourself off.

s1ngl3 lyf3.