The conflict that's always in the background is flaring up again. War remains a staple of the human condition, and there is no atrocity or any number of them that convinces enough of us about war being an optional development and not an intrinsic feature of the human animal. One could argue the animal, with the broadest degree of optionality, has the longest rope, which we do not use to climb and explore ever higher moral and ethical peaks and landscapes, but we use instead to hang our neighbour and ourselves.

The things we already owe owe us and the things we are striving to owe are borrowing from time not yet ours...

Time goes back and forth, collapsing as the tip of the pen presses over the virgin paper, like footprints over an unspoiled patch of sandy beach; destined to disappear the moment they come into existence... Distractions flood the space that I am, and I wonder if I've become more adept at waking from their relentless somnolence. Attention flutters like an anxious bird, threatened by everything, overwhelmed by the faintest of changes in the environment, shifting nebulously. Resting now, ever so briefly...

History needs no refinement and clarifies its intentions as it steamrolls all human contention. All the necessary steps to accomplish a selfish but formless project, testing in the dark...

The waves travel their single trajectory, unmoved and unmotivated, encountering multiple others as time allows one instance to precede another and yet another... Pulses coalesce to give rise to what is perceived as a coherent section of reality; the human tendency to encounter such unrequested intersections begs the first-person perspective to place itself at the centre, not only the business of the madman, as the German neurologist studied, but the very essence of the human experience.

I see her, and I see myself. I see her love in her eyes and feel the grip of the disease through her paralysis. The mind confused and obfuscated by the body's unwillingness to comply with the most minor request. The trivialities of basic functionality were replaced with a sense of significance... Every breath, every meal, every movement permeated with dignified, stoic suffering...

Thoughts on money. No other framework we have devised has allowed for more effective collaboration. Yet, no other layer of reality is thinner and narrower, and there its genius resides: the simplicity that does away with the overwhelming intricacies of the human experience and relationships all encapsulated in coinage. Currency as matter and trade as reality..

Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty makes a claim one must be keenly sociopathic to counter, yet it escapes most people it hurts the most. The carrot is as succulent, and the stick is painfully demeaning as ever, so we mightily push on the wheel of history, the same wheel that crushes everything we value as it also values everything we despise. The wheel needs turning to remain relevant, and as it has gained speed, it has crossed a threshold after which it gives the deceiving impression of constituting the very fabric of reality, the only layer all humans seem to agree on and have access to, the universal unspoken language of transactional love to which we all subscribe—a construct we all have conveniently adopted as unquestionable truth.

Conclusions can be challenged as in all semiotic geographies, it is not only easy but inevitable to mistake the forest for the trees..

The ontological and phonetical lyricism is the gift of a child's boundless mind that refuses to surrender to a claustrophobic destiny.

The mastery of a language marks the end of childhood as the open-ended and fluid ontological barriers collapse into small and narrow constraints to facilitate the transactional dynamics of adulthood.

Humanity seems eager to march its way back to what we like to refer to as normality, even while things are nothing but normal. Normality is an arbitrary term coined by those of us who live comfortable lives to render even the possibility of change an abnormal project.