Everything in the world resists ending up in a book.
Writing is the texture of their resistance.

Whenever I have an idea
reality puts me in my place.

Wherever it gets real,
ideally, I'll have a moment.

She believed in balance.

Whenever I found a way to make her life better,
she started looking for ways to destroy mine.

Where are beings?
In becoming.
When do they come?
Eventually.

What is being?
It is what it is.
Who is coming?
You know who.

I think fiction may be a scam.

Philosophy is about what must be true if anything is.

There's nothing like that to poetic justice.

Act, Fact, Artifact

People act; they do things. Facts are things done.

People get together to act. Things brought together are facts.

Things are just lying around. Facts accomplish them.

People make artifacts out of the things they find.

I am sane and,
also, I am not.

All facts are themselves. “Each item can be the case or not the case, while everything else remains the same.”

All acts are collective. A deed may be done by one of us, but is condoned or denounced by everyone else.

"The pain is part of it," she said
and I laughed, because it is
a funny thing to say.
But now I know what she meant.
The sadness in her voice
is a memory, and my tears—
I tell you, the pain is part of it.

Two Things Can Be True

Everyone deserves the love they get.
No one deserves the love they get.

You can't solve the problem
of being
         by becoming
                  a man
            or a woman.

Just be yourself.
That's hard enough.

Wisdom is non-attachment; i.e.,
love is folly.

War Economy

Just before the first Gulf War in 1990, $5 was worth $11 in today's money. Compounded at 5%, you'd have about $22 today. But if you had invested it in Raytheon stock and sold on the day Putin invaded Ukraine you'd have $100 dollars.

Decency is the immediate rightness of conduct given one's desires, as honesty is the immediate rightness of conduct given one's beliefs.

Decency does not guarantee justice, nor does honesty guarantee truth. Indeed, the pursuit of truth sometimes requires dishonesty, and the pursuit of justice sometimes requires indecency.

Science is the pursuit of truth, constrained by honesty, not decency.

Politics is the pursuit of justice, constrained by decency, not honesty.

Art is a scandal.

A conspiracy theorist is not someone who believes that a conspiracy took place. It is someone who thinks it is an empirical question whether it did.

"May God forgive what you have done to me. I cannot."

This sentiment can be perfectly sincere. Indeed, two people who have hurt each other can each pray for the other's forgiveness without themselves being able to forgive.

Two paintings, two harbors,
four years and five hundred
nautical miles apart. Blues
that only eyes have seen.

Philosophy elucidates the logic of assertion.
Poetry aggravates the pathos of injunction.

Two Errors

To seek truth when justice must be done.

To demand justice where the truth is hidden.