Footprints in the dust, ripples through time, when the stars obey our commands, as far as light shines. We are human.

Went out to walk the street and feel the people, hear words that fill me with breath and wonder, to draw inspiration from the crowd. Life.

After a while you admit truth to yourself. You don't have a bad memory, you're just uninterested in remembering many things.

I got nervous when they started leaving me out of trivial office matters. It was as if they were on to the fact that I didn't care.

As humans, we also do our best. Often in the most undesirable and desolate circumstances. Innately we are driven to carry the Light inside us with tenacity as far along the path as possible.

But sometimes living just gets you down. Take this songwriter who was born blind. In some of his most personal lyrics, he touches hearts by letting us know just how much it sucks to be him:

'Someone tell me where I went wrong, so I can find the words to this song. Please tell me how I was born, with no light to write on.'

Jake shakes his head in despair. "If you're serious about becoming a time traveler, you will have to understand the basics. And before you can do that, you're gonna need to forget everything you think you know about the fourth dimension. You think there is a past, a future. You think that one's happened, the other may happen."

Jake speaks with disgust, walking between the aisles of desks. "You think both these things are something different than right now. Sometime before right now you were a bundle of goo goo ga ga at the teat--right. And what about the future, Hunt." Jake says, shouting over the top of the cadets head. The cadet doesn't dare offer a response.

"C'mon, Hunt," Jake taunts. "You've got a bright future, don't you. You're gonna be someone-you're going to fall in love, get married, grow up--isn't that right?"

Cadet Hunt shrivels inside himself, speaking from uncertainty. "Sure--"

"Wrong," Jake scolds. "In Time School, there is no future. There is no past. There is only this moment, there is only this experience. Everything that has or will happen is doing so right now. Remember that. If you cannot remember your name. Remember now-this moment. Think of time in any other way and it will swallow you whole. It doesn't care. As far as time is concerned, you're nothing. Time is. Time exists. And unless you can learn to exist along side it, time will swallow you whole."

-jaebi
Fiction Scientist

No, Santa isn't likely to be bringing any inspiration. Because he doesn't exist. He was created through a series of stories and images that...do exist. Hm. It seems I have confused notions of reality once again. Moving on..

I believe when we're empty we have nothing to give. Intrinsically, I mean, at a very basic level, we are a combination of things we have absorbed. In every way, often in ways we never notice, we somehow give out the ingredients that were put in. In no being is this more prevalent, nowhere is it no more important, than in a creator.

A creator takes the things she sees and tastes, using every bit of her senses to absorb the world she observes, synthesizes it and remixes it as something new and vaguely familiar.

Those things that come in, those inputs we call inspiration. All human creators are inspired in some way by the same experiences. Circumstances vary greatly between individual lives. By definition, those that share the Human Experience do not treat inputs exactly alike.

But no matter the walk of life, certain inputs inspire fight or flight. A Hollywood star is inspired to laugh just like a custodian. A King knows fear just as well as Joe Sixpack. Creators that seek inputs, those motivations and inspirations, in the hopes that they can make something new are artists.

Using life's inspirations to exist in a world exactly the way it is when you arrive is a waste of precious time for true artists. We want nothing more than to be weaving, programming, crafting, and creating or finding inspiration to do so. We're not sure life would be worth it if we couldn't.

Artists that make new artstuff with enormous speed and stark variance from anything known, we call genius. While she who does more of the opposite, we call Hollywood producers. Either way, without those inspirational inputs, there would be nothing to output.

As a literary artist, it's my duty to seek out inspirations, wherever they may be. It just so happens that New York City is one of those places that makes artlife so much easier (beyond a walk down a city street rife with source material). Here's a few on my list for the month of December09:

MoMA : Tim Burton

In 1989, Tim Burton directed a film that forever changed my view of the world, garnered a lifetime of respect for Michael Keaton and inspired my first tattoo. Need I say more. On show through April 2010 (da future)

The MET : The Art of the Samurai.

In the world of, The Guardians, the dominant self defense and warfare tactic very heavily resembles Samurai weaponry and culture. I don't know what I'm more ashamed of, having never visited Japan or not having been to check out this exhibit yet. October 21, 2009-January 10, 2010

Cirque Du Soleil - Wintuk

The woman are extremely flexible, the guys have Gambit like agility and there are pretty colors. And the women are very flexible. October 21, 2009-January 10, 2010