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I’m A Poet
November 23, 2014

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”—Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

For the past few months I’ve been miserable at work and, what’s worse, unable to pinpoint the reason.  To be sure, the constant struggle to raise funds and the endless hours seated before a computer screen wading through a sea of tedium expressed in ones and zeros hasn’t helped matters.  Yet it has felt like something deeper is at play.  After all, it isn’t like the nature of my job has suddenly changed.  Sure, the amount I spend with clients has slowly and steadily diminished; and sure, the bigger we get, the more paperwork and reporting there is to do.  But I’m not averse to hard work, and I fully understand that social change is about 1 parts warm and fuzzy to 10 parts roll up your sleeves and get shit done.

Yesterday Bianca and I saw the film Interstellar in IMAX.  This is not a movie review, but suffice it to say that the stunning images of the planet and the stars, the story of our drive to explore and conquer and survive, reminded me of what has been missing. I am neither an entrepreneur, nor an athlete, activist, Jew, atheist, vegetarian or any number of other adjectives.  No, I am a poet and, as such, I need poetry to thrive.

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Musings  / Prose

Games and the Rain
August 15, 2014

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Image Credit: Moyan_Brenn



Games and the Rain

Perhaps because I grew up in the parched atmosphere of Los Angeles, from an early age I came to love rainy days: the refracted glow of streetlights; the way things felt extra warm when you were inside and gazing out into the dampness; the sound of droplets pelting impervious surfaces, a cacophony that enveloped you, contained and focused your thoughts, turned hot chocolate into a sacred drink.

In my parent’s old house we had a little TV connected to a Nintendo.  I would sit on the carpet, a couch to my left, and a glass door leading to a balcony on the right, and play Super Mario Brothers or Sonic the Hedgehog.  But what I savored more than anything were those rare days when I didn’t have school AND it was raining.  On those days I could lean back and see the glow of the screen in the window, make out the clouds drifting across the sky, and hear the sounds of the game muffled by the sound of the storm.

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Musings

Who I Was & Who I Am
April 20, 2014

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On my cross-country bike trip

20 years ago I was on the cusp of turning 10, and I remember virtually nothing about that; 10 years ago I was months away from turning 20, and I was too self-absorbed to contemplate the future; and now I am 29 and may be too absorbed in the day-to-day to really remember what I was like and who I was in the past two decades.  What’s got me thinking about that un-medicated, chaotic and doubt-riddled person is a book I just finished titled Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything, by Barbara Ehrenreich.  In the book, Ms. Ehrenreich uses the journal she kept during her teenage years as a springboard from which to revisit the doubts and dreams she had during that tumultuous time.

As soon as I finished reading—just hours after I began—I decided to look back through my own journal…hundreds of pages of frantic writing covering the years 2002 – 2005, when I was 18-21.  Before I delve into this, let me just review some facts about me during that time.  First, I was around 7 years from finally being diagnosed as, and treated for, mild bipolar disorder; as a result, I found myself jostling back and forth from unbearable bliss to the kind of depression that slows your synapses to a crawl.  Second, I kept this journal while I was an undergraduate at California State University Northridge (CSUN,) meaning that for a time I was living at my parent’s house in Tarzana, CA., and for a year I lived in Granada, Spain (studying abroad), and for several months I rode across the United States on my bicycle and then fought to intergrate that experience in whatever came next.  Third, I spent much of my time reading about Buddhism and philosophy; delving into the works of Romantic poets; and contemplating the nature of my existence and the meaning of it all.  And finally, I was a colossal pain-in-the-ass: self-righteous, pompous, filled with illusions of grandeur, judgmental, and so on.

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Musings

Nothing is Enough
January 21, 2014

“When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.” – Vincent Van Gogh

A mystery consumes me. I pass the morning in ardent search of last night and furrow my brows as though dreams would return in the grooves of my forehead. That is not enough. Nothing is enough. I never can go faster or slower than one second at a time. My enthusiasm teeters between the unbearable and the blissful. I want to scale the heights of human knowledge, to create art, kisses, love, peace…but the next moment carries the enormity of my desire, and I fall upon the ground of my being like an electric charge in a puddle of amino acids. So I continue, neither collapsed nor elevated. Every sight I see, every thought, however subtle, every word I read or write only adds to the fury: nothing is enough.

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Certitude  / Musings  / poetry  / Prose

The Glorious Absurdity of it All
June 15, 2013

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The Pizza That Triggered a Memory

I am seated in a pizza parlor in downtown Chicago, passing the time until my 8 PM flight back to Providence.  The book I’m reading is called ‘American Gods,’ by Neil Gaiman.  Reading makes me want to write, and so I think about the book I should be working on.  Suddenly, a scent handcuffs itself to my neurons and is taken to a memory: I am standing before a lemon tree at my parent’s house, my grandmother next to me.  Baba’s expression is frozen.  I don’t see her, but rather a photograph of her; somehow the scent of lemon and childhood, however, is dynamic, alive.  Now I am holding a rolling pin, helping Baba make Peroshki.  Standing on my tippy-toes, my sight is filled with dough, flour…ingredients on their way to becoming food.  I haven’t thought about my grandmother much since she passed away nearly a year ago.  She was a difficult person and in her last years had lost her eyesight and much of her memory.  Yet a tenderness stabs at me like the knife that splits open an onion, releases its piquant odor.  Life is precious, cyclical, unique, linear, savage, brief, endless.  She is a part of me and I of her.  Just yesterday I could barely reach the table upon which we cooked.  Today I tower over my food.  Today my heart reaches for the slippery hands of greatness.  Tomorrow, whenever tomorrow comes, I will immortalize myself in ice: everything that comprises me will drip, drip, drip until I mix and mingle with everything that comprises the universe, until enough time passes that I re-discover myself among the detritus of the world and laugh at the glorious absurdity of it all.

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Musings

My Personal Manifesto
March 9, 2010

I am presently seated in an office.  Behind me sunlight is banging its fist against a window whose shades are drawn, begging me to notice that Spring is arriving soon.  Perhaps I should be doing work, but instead my mind has turned toward the broader sweep of history, time, philosophy and the role of the individual in the world (it should not be of great surprise that I am embracing such thoughts given that I am reading a biography of one of America’s greatest leaders: John Adams).  I am contemplating the fact that people always seem to “act their age,” that they give in to the demands of “the real world” rather than adhere to the longings of their hearts, and I find myself longing to unfurl my personal manifesto like a flag and plant it deep into the soil of my being.

Poets fight fiercely against the constraints of physics and biology (let’s remember that Dylan Thomas wrote about how we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light) and, on rare occasions, they succeed.  The words of Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca and Robert Frost emanate from their throats and make the earth upon which we stand tremble with their passion; that they are buried deep within that earth only serves to amplify the effect.  And so it is for this reason that I, too, think, and feel, and write, for to take the violent passion that makes my flesh shudder with love and transform it into the sweet music of poetry, of entrepreneurship and of justice, is the greatest of endeavors.

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Musings  / Prose

A Literary Portrait
May 2, 2009

Several months ago I received a request from Helen Mou, a Brown University Junior, to sit down for an interview for a writing class she was taking.  The assignment was to write a literary portrait of a person of interest. I greatly enjoyed the process of being interviewed by Helen, and I think she did a great job of capturing my personality in the portrait.  I want to thank Helen for choosing me and for putting so much care and attention into this work.  Read on for the full-text of what Helen wrote.

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Musings  / Prose

A Fantastic Quote
April 7, 2009

I wanted to share a fantastic quote by Albert Einstein:

The efforts of most human-beings are consumed in the struggle for

their daily bread, but most of those who are, either through fortune

or some special gift, relieved of this struggle are largely absorbed

in further improving their worldly lot. Beneath the effort directed

toward the accumulation of worldly goods lies all too frequently the

illusion that this is the most substantial and desirable end to be

achieved; but there is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who

recognize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying

experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but

are bound up with the development of the individual’s own feeling,

thinking and acting. The genuine artists, investigators and thinkers

have always been persons of this kind. However inconspicuously the

life of these individuals runs its course, none the less the fruits of

their endeavors are the most valuable contributions which one

generation can make to its successors.

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Musings

Thoughts From Austin, Texas
February 14, 2009

I am currently writing from a hotel room in Austin, Texas, where I am visiting for the second annual Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI-U) conference.  Last year I attended with Mike, and this year I am representing the Capital Good Fund, along with two of our other core team members.  On the flight out here I listened to recordings of Martin Luther King speeches, and reflected a great deal on the nature of greatness, the nature of history, and the nature of those that bend history in the direction of justice.  I was amazed–and excited–to learn that from 1964 (after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Bill) and his death in 1968, Dr. King devoted himself tirelessly not only to racial justice but also to poverty alleviation and peace.  In fact, in some of his speeches and sermons, King even talks about the need for black owned financial institutions–something I find tremendously interesting as I work to create a borrower-owned, environmentally focused financial institutions. 

But above all else, what stood out to me about Dr. King as I listened to his voice bellow from the past and pursue the future was the extent to which his entire mental and physical life was absorbed by the pursuit of justice.  Long before he died at the hands of an assassin he had given up his life to his cause, and I began thinking about my own life, my own pursuits.

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Musings  / travel

Who Does not Prefer Peace?
December 28, 2008

As fighting flares in the land of monotheism, soldiers mass along the border between two nuclear states, extremism rages in the cradle of civilization, the stuff of life threatens to overheat the planet that sustains life and a superpower continues down its blind path of bombs, I pause to ask a simple question: who among us does not prefer peace?  In truth, the answer is very, very few of us, but that extreme minority is responsible for fanning the flames that bring nations to war and destabilize the world.  We cannot continue to allow that.  It is time for the so-called “silent majoriy” to speak up against unspeakable acts, to leap forth with ideas, protests, actions that will prevent more madness.  After all, when the dust settles there is still a gem of an orb rotating a mass of energy that provides so much life with sustenance.  The great work of understanding the universe and creating a more just, equitable home for all is held back by weaponry, the people that employ them, and worst of all, the money that finances them.  We live in an age willing to enrich itself by tearing others down, where the mindless pursuit of more comfort obscures the suffering of billions of people so deprived as to be unable to feed or clothe themselves.  We know enough to understand the irrevocable connection between an injustice in one place and an action in another, yet we have yet to summon the courage to act on that knowledge.  Who among us is willing to avoid making money on an investment that is legal, but unjust?  Who among us is willing to forego still more luxury to enable that another may enjoy a meal, an opportunity, a life? 

This New Year, let us commit to a shared responsibility. Let us recognize that if little girls in Afghanistan die while in school, then little girls in America will inherit a world that has lost their beauty, their ideas, their hope.  Let us recognize that where we can we must act and where we cannot we must seek ideas, pressure others, and demand an end to injustice wherever it transpires.  The global economic crisis is yet another sign of the way in which a few selfish people–Wall St. bankers, lax regulators–can cause untold suffering.  But every day the decisions we make have repercussions around the world, like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings that creates a ripple of air that leads to a hurricane.  We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend this is not the case.  Let that be our New Year’s resolution. 

Read on for a poem I wrote on this matter during the run up to the war in Iraq.

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Musings  / poetry

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