Random Thoughs

Nowadays when I get a phone call I don't say anything until the person that calls me speaks.

I will just sit there and not say anything because I've gotten too many scam phone calls.

Anyone know any good groups ?

Men are simple. That's what they say. Men are simple because you look at them simply.

Then it means you never took a peek below the surface. A man contains multitudes. He is capable of reaching the most transcendent heights and sinking to the most wretched depths.

He is storm and stillness, tyrant and servant, monster and saint. Do not mistake his silence for shallowness, nor his strength for the sum of him.

As a man, I want a panoply of kingly armor and a noble steed to trample my enemies. I want an army of supersoldiers at my beck and call, an armada of ships to blot out the stars. I want a sword fated to smite all who oppose me, a palace of such grandeur it makes the heads of mortals spin at its mere sight.

I want the feeling of the morning sun on my bare skin, to hear the birds sing and the waves roll in. Undisturbed tranquility, forever and ever. I want the icy bite of breath on a frigid Yukon night and the suffocating steam of the deep jungle. I want to share a cigarette with a girl I'll never see again, except when she haunts me in my dreams.

I want the roaring adulation of the crowd and the profound silence of solitude. I want to lift humanity into the heavens or purge it with flame. I want to live forever. I want to die a tragic death and do it all over again. I want vast hoards of gold and nothing but the shirt on my back.

I want to sleep for eons, undisturbed, and to drink and dance the night into ruin. I want a grand hall filled with comrades, and to face the world with only one at my side. I want my lovers, past, present, and future, the ones that never were, and to never love again.

I want monuments and legends carved in my name, and to be swallowed whole by the inexorable crawl of time. I want to laugh, to weep, to love, and to hate. I want to cut my heart out and hurl it into the sun, or seal it away in the bowels of the earth.

I want all of these incongruous, paradoxical things. As a man, I want more than any one person, more than the earth, the cosmos, reality itself, or God himself could ever give me. I want it all, and none of it.

Which was later answered by the Mandalorian saying "This is the way"

The heat stopped at the threshold of the fig's roots. Milton Withers crawled in from the jungle and the jungle let him go.

A bud hung from the ceiling of roots. It pulsed with a soft cyan light, slow as a sleeping heart. He had not eaten in two days. He had crossed the Javari on a raft held together with paracord and prayer. None of that was present in the hollow with him now.

He reached out and touched it.

The petals opened without sound. Magenta. Massive. A golden light came flooding out and Milton went to his knees the way men do when the body understands something before the mind does. The damp earth soaked through to his skin. He did not move.

Inside the bloom, hundreds of bioluminescent filaments swayed in no wind. At the center, something moved.

She pulled herself up slowly from the heart of the light. Her wings were translucent. Her skin was the color of pale green glass. She was small enough to rest in his palm and she moved with the gravity of something that had waited a very long time to do what it was about to do.

She lifted a single orb of pollen from the core. It glowed. She held it with both hands and began to walk.

Milton watched her wings go first. The fine membranes frayed and split as she crossed the disc. Her skin darkened. Her smooth back curved inward. She was shrinking into herself and still she walked. Step by step, the green glass of her became something ancient, something gray and crumbling, something that had already given everything it had.

She reached the edge of the petals and pressed the orb into a small recess in the plant's flesh.

Then she lay down on her side.

Her chest rose once and went still.

The filaments descended over her body the way a mother pulls a blanket to a child's chin. The light took her back. The petals folded closed and the golden light was gone and Milton was alone in total darkness on his knees in the mud of the Amazon floor.

He pressed his forehead to the ground.