we're all stories in the end

Being in a relationship, that’s something you choose. Being friends, that’s just something you are. I’d pick you. Fuck it, I do pick you. I want you to come over to my house in twenty years with your dude and your adopted kids and I want our fucking kids to hang out and I want to, like, drink wine and talk about the Middle East or whatever the fuck we’re gonna do when we’re old. We’ve been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I’d pick you.

The right to choose who you will live with, sleep with, eat with and possibly raise children with, for the rest of your life, is as basic a right as they come. Violations of this right are not only disastrous for the individuals involved, but they undermine values that are fundamental to British society and Islam itself. The Human Rights Act expressly protects and promotes the right to private and family life, while Islamic history is replete with examples of the Prophet Mohammed dissolving marriages where consent had not been sought. Therefore, any action which removes the element of free and informed consent - effectively treating human beings like chattel - should be roundly condemned.

I exist only when I am writing. I am nothing when I am not writing. I am fully a stranger to myself, when I am not writing. Yet when I am writing, you cannot see me. No one can see me. You can watch a director directing, a singer singing, an actor acting, but no one can see what writing is.

Hazel is wrong about infinite cardinality, but she is right that some infinities are larger than others. I wanted her to be wrong but right because that’s how we muddle through life as observers of the universe. Forging meaning where we can find it, from fact and fiction alike. And as my brain drowned in jet leg, I thought of the months I lived here. So much of that time I was sick and crippled with anxiety, but all I could think about now, as the night fell, was how much you can love made up people. And how much you can miss them.

Poetry is concerned with using and abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.

When I said.

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.

I love being in cities with lots of other people, because I’m reminded that there are billions of people like me, and we are each stuck inside of our minds, feverishly trying to crawl out to make connections with other people.

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.