Double Post: Movies & Videos Games + Poetry

Movies and video games.  Two of the biggest industries in western culture.  They never seem to falter, never missing a beat.  But why do people continue to come back and buy tickets or games?  Its because they provide a fulfillment of our inner dreams.  I’m never going to play professional football, but I can play madden on my television.  I’m never going to drive a car into a helicopter or sail on the titanic, but I can live my heroic fantasies by watching movies or playing video games.  Who hasn’t dreamt of being a war hero, and saving your country?  You can be that guy in a video game, or you can put yourself in his shoes in a movie.  You can get your fairy tail ending, find your treasure island, win the Stanley cup or die a dramatic death., then hit re-spawn and try again.

I have an entire page filled with haikus.  They got me thinking about poetry.  Poetry is an art form we are slowly losing.  Nobody seems to care enough about modern poets to teach them in school. Or to mention them anywhere in the media or pop culture.  Professions set out to better culture are changing, mostly for the worse.  Art is changing in a way that I cannot comprehend; I have no inclination whether it be good or bad, but its different.  Philosophy is now a stoner’s profession.  Its legitimacy is long gone and any hopes of a big budget sequel are slipping away.  The only jobs taken seriously are purely for money as opposed to bettering a community, or helping yourself.  The world is about making money, and poetry isn’t paying the bills. 


I would love feedback, please comment!  Email me your thoughts on this post at harpestey@yahoo.com

Oceans and Seas

The sun doesn’t seem to set as we sail away form Barcelona.  Back home it would be pitch dark and id be sitting in my room writing this as opposed to sitting on top of a cruise ship without the slightest trace of night at eight p.m.  There’s hardly a trace of anything, surrounded by water with no sight of land for the last hour or so the water seems to stretch from one edge of the world to the other.  The only trace of life at all is our ship barreling through the waves as if mass and weight were just a theory.  Just floating through one of the last truly untouched areas within one hundred miles of mankind.  Its incredible to me how far we’ve come.  To think that a few thousand if not hundred years ago, going out to open sea was as treacherous as going on the front lines. And yet now we pay thousands of dollars to willingly gout to this same sea that so many sailors never returned from.  Yet the water still looks the same.  We still sail through the same waves, through the same waters that played host to some of histories most famed books.  The only thing different from back then is the boats.  Nothing else has change.  We still sail under the same skies, navigate the same passages or routes.  But nobody pays any attention to any of this, looking at the water doesn’t make anyone stare in awe, just hope to catch a glimpse of a fish bigger than their cars.  

Please Comment! Tell me what you think!

Flight

            Since I was a baby I’ve been flying at least twice a year.  Most of the time this was just to and from Florida, but that’s still a lot of flying.  So much so that its become mundane to me.  It’s no big deal anymore.  Flying is just, how you go on vacation nowadays.  Nobody travels by boat anymore and road trips aren’t as typical as they once were.  But we never really think much of flying itself.  Flying is a thing of trust, you trust the pilot knows what he’s doing; you trust them to get you where you’re going without even the slightest hiccup.  You trust your fellow passengers when you get crammed into a tiny cabin without enough personal space for most chimps.  You trust that they’re not sick, or crazy enough to hurt you.  And finally you trust the plane itself, because a giant hunk of metal weighing several thousand tons shouldn’t ever leave the ground. Yet they do, thousands of times a day places take of from the ground and never look back. But all this trust has become so routine that nobody from my generation ever thinks twice about it.  Honestly we missed out. We missed out on the true wonder of flight.  I never stood in my back yard watching bird’s fly and being absolutely mesmerized.  It was cool, but I didn’t give birds flying their truly deserved props. None of us did.  “Man you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will reek of gasoline” 

New Ideas

Hey Everyone, I know I haven't posted in a while, but I plan on starting up again.  Right now I want to try to post every tuesday and thursday at around seven o'clock.  I have some stuff written already and a few ideas but I would love it if you submitted some ideas about what you want me to write about.

You can email me at harpestey@yahoo.com

Or if you'd rather, just submit your idea into my formspring at http://www.formspring.me/follow/stream

What Happens When I Forget My Notebook

            So I had planned on posting something tonight that I had written and worked on at least a little bit, but I went away for Labor Day weekend and forgot to bring along my notebook and I have nothing pre-written to post.  So I’m just going to talk about whatever comes into my head.  For years my family has been coming up here, a small town around a lake.  There’s no TV, and we just recently got Internet.  Thinking about people traveling up here to live like this makes me laugh a little bit.   Not so long ago the big cities were where everyone wanted to be, the places where magic happened.  Now everyone wants to live as they used to, minimalistic.  They want to recapture that magic that still exists in these small patches of society.  They come here to reminisce and remember what it was like as a kid.  They want to escape the adult world and live in their childhood again, and the closest they can get to that is escaping the urban world and just running away from any sort of big city, to get to the place they used to use to escape from their school and social lives over the summer, only when they get there its their children who live that way instead of them, the kids are the ones still living as kids, and we don’t think twice about why we were taken up here as a kid.  We just welcome the fun. 

            

As usual I would love it if you would comment and if you have any thoughts on this post or others you can email them to me at harpestey@yahoo.com. 

Free Will

One of, if not the most important issues throughout mankind’s brief history is freedom. Freedom as a man to do what you please when you please. Commonly referred to as simply free will. Its constantly been taken away, bought, and then taken away again. Even today while we hold truths to be self evident, free will is still monitored and in some places, taken. Especially in religion. God gave man free will, regardless of your religion, yet we are forced to follow so many rules. We are required to do so many things for the church or the synagogue and if we question anything ever so slightly we are dubbed a polytheistic heathen. I know god works in mysterious ways and it is not yours to question why but my only question is, if god gave us free will, why does he expect us to blindly follow him and not question any of his supposed doings? Or does our concept of free will not actually exist. Could the higher power be teasing us with the idea of free will, giving us a taste, but really be controlling every aspect of the story. Life is chock full of these types of situations. You have the convenience of a telephone, yet you lose the charm of distance and your privacy. Food for thought.

Please comment and tell me what you think at harpestey@yahoo.com

The American Dream

When emigrants came to America, they all talked about the American dream. Having money in your pocket, a nice coat on your back and a house on the corner with your family living happily inside of it. They’d talk bout the homes with the white picket fence and the wonderful families they were working for back home. Taking their kids up to a nearby lake for a weekend vacation. And when they were coming over that was al a possibility, maybe a long shot, but they had a chance. Work hard on a ranch, or building a railroad to make your stake and settle down. Millions of people bought into the American dream and a few of them actually found it. Nowadays people buy into that very same dream, but they have no chance of actually getting it. Because that white fence is painted jet black and the lake is covered in oil. That house is in the city and their jobs are as bad if not worse then what the original dreamers had. The American dream still exists, although the American reality is much worse than that dream.

Please comment and tell me what you think at harpestey@yahoo.com