Alchemical Reaction

If there's anything I learned from making pizza, it is this: anyone can, but not everyone should.

Anyone can because the technology to make a pizza is designed around the person, not the pizza itself. Our capabilities as human beings, the basic actions refined over many, many generations have defined just what pizza is and what we define as a perfect slice of pie. If you have the aspiration to learn how to make pizza and then to do it well, well, that's really all it takes. The universe will provide you with the keys, the rudimentary tools and you will learn both the best way and your own way. The solution of the remaining and persisting art form is where these two ideas meet. All art is formed simply by combining two, often otherwise incompatible, ideas. If it works, it sticks.

So then, we know what constitutes a perfect slice, and what it takes to make one. This in mind, not everyone in the present universe should pursue such an unified endeavor, for we would probably run out of such finite resources necessary to actually building pizza quite soon. Not to mention, all that pizza, no matter how perfect, would sure get boring soon too if not eventually, it would happen. Believe me, at certain times in my life I've lived on leftover slice pies, but if I didn't have friends to share them with, others more than happy to take them off my hands, I'd probably be a house painter or something by now. 

Anyone can make a pizza, a perfect one, over and over and over. There will be a lot of bad ones, ones you wouldn't make your worst enemy try to eat, these go directly in the garbage. Burned, mangled, beyond any identification. But even if arms were somehow purged from our evolutionary toolbox, if we dissolved into some sort of floating energy field mass and had to manipulate external matter telepathically, the pizza kitchen would still be a familiar, comfortable place designed with us in mind, waiting for us to stoke the fire and ring the bell.

Our own way of seeing things and experiencing them, however detailed and exact, will never account for the whole multitude of never ending possibilities, the ultimate source of diversity, the variety that is the very spice of life. You can make a pizza taste, emulate, look like anything, but it's still pizza. Sometimes you'll want a steak, a cake, a shake or even a salad. If every single person on the face of this planet from now on just decided to only make pizza, well, that's no world, no dream I would want to take part in.

And speaking of dreams, my whole outlook, as a pizza cook first because that's when it happened, changed for good when I realized that I am just a character in someone else's dream, facilitating their deepest desires. It wasn't my choice to make a pizza shop, not consciously anyway, if I somehow am, too, the dreamer indeed. I remember the lights, the music, my hands moving before me and thinking, there is something bigger going on here, bigger than me and bigger than this. I didn't, in that moment, put down what I was doing and just walk away on my own, beginning a new and different quest. This was it, how I got here today. It is all part of the same thing, these events being absolutely transferable as part of this big big life that we all share, making everything better, even perfect, from moment to delicious moment. I only hope that one day soon you will get to experience what it is to be the one who makes dreams, even those of someone you don't know and most likely will never even meet, an entirely new reality for all of us, because that is good.

Expense

Civilization has always been on its way to get somewhere that it will never fully reach, because it isn't a place, it's a state of being. As a part of it, the present state has potential to appear better than others, whether less primitive or oppressive or just more comfortable or free, or destined to be most true. Having grown up in a certain system, one gets attached to a certain way of doing things, with certain expectations within ones own life and for those around and about them. But each occurrence of people working together to make themselves and the world as they see it, no matter their reach, has this in common, the limitless threshold of growth based on the idea of righteousness. 

The opposite of civilization is a form of chaos, either with or without human interaction, in which nature continues to work in mysterious ways. To the civilized mind this would seem like madness or a nightmare, being unrecognizable and without any sense of familiar organization. This realm of being, though, still has the potential for infinite growth of its own sort, one that cannot be harnessed and tamed, but only exists to be smothered and altered. The physics do not change, only the perceived reason and likeness of being do. Potential is not lost or gained; it is replaced.

We have a tendency to start over when things aren't going correctly. Sometimes that means moving on completely, severing all ties with previous ways. This means going back to how things originally were, but not how they were before we got here, rather how things were for us when we first realized them. Before we realized things, they still existed, but beyond our scope of perception. Now we can do things to them and with them, even if that only means thinking about them or leaving them alone entirely. Some of the best things happen when they are left alone so that nature may truly take its course.

Before this happens, we begin to spend our time more and more wisely, having learned our place here and having developed a reason to be and to do things with things and each other or by ourselves. This is good for awhile, but of course we can't go on doing things this way forever. We expect a change, because that's how things are. If they didn't change, they would not be. And so we change them ourselves, and they go on changing and so do we along with them, so things and ourselves become somehow different than it was in the first place. This is reason enough to go back to the first place.

Wealth and identity go hand in hand, as one is the byproduct of the other. As we gain insight we obtain a set of values that remain important as long as that insight persists. An understanding of the tradeoff can be just as valuable as the tradeoff itself, and these are both liquidated into a system of appreciation for all useful things. Still, these things would potentially exist without this value set, but we seem to be able to do more with them within this pretense of development and attainment, rather than sheer appreciation of the things themselves in their natural state. So we often prefer to go on changing for the sake of understanding.

Without understanding, the expectation of doing something within this physical realm is still quite apparent, a cohesive concept kept to ascertain. We have to do something before we can get something or before we can do something else. We were all born into this way of being and as far as we know nobody asked for it or for it to be this certain way, but we go on with it being this way because of our expectation and because of our lack of knowing any other way. At the root of it all, that's just how it is and how it's always been, so that's how it always will be and should be, because it works and nothing more. If it didn't work, we would have the unfamiliar, unrecognizable chaos that would be ugly and we surely would not like it. We would have no reason to go anywhere or do anything, no reason to participate or to get better, to make things, have things or want things, in fact in this case things might very well not even exist to us. That would not mean they don't, just not to us, for us or because of us. They would just exist, like us, and that is all. 

Second Person Quarantine

I was leaving the party, into the cold night air, and I realized there was only one place for me to go, and that was right across the street. As I crossed the yard, and the vibrant activity behind me began to recede, I felt my feet in my shoes and I could hear my breathing. The fence was open, the sound of traffic was only far away, so far that it seemed like lapping currents. The only light before me came from the house that I was now facing, which was not my house, or really belonging to anyone I knew, but I had the sense that they would most certainly welcome me upon my arrival, recognizing me as a natural occupant.
            I did not care about those I was leaving behind, for they would be having fun with or without me, having planned this event for some time, long before I had even been a part of it. It’s not that it was getting out of hand, just that I had nothing to offer, no new insight or resource. It would have been a nice place to wake up, but then I still would have had to find my own way back in the morning. I couldn’t find the one who had invited me, in any of the rooms, among any of the happy faces, the music and dancing. I wasn’t about to spoil their good time sitting by myself working on puzzles, waiting for the right time. I can make it on my own.
            The problem is the fact that these are the only two houses with anything going on, I can see that now as I make my way from one to the other. Everyone else around here must be asleep or away. It’s hard to tell the difference between a sleeping house and an empty one from the outside. Without a reason to be there, a place is just part of the natural environment, taking up space, withering and decaying as fast as it can in the weather, the sun and the rain, the heat and the mold. It is up to us to find in ourselves the proper means of maintenance, caring for and loving this spot that we chose, because we could see our children growing up together here, becoming better than they were and that we could otherwise be.
            Nobody will stop me. It would take a mysterious force, a secondhand phenomenon to slow me upon my current trajectory. But even He doesn’t care to limit my potential, as long as I play within my frame and follow the rules that I have only recently become accustomed to. I am so far beyond any interaction in this kind of thought pattern that I cannot imagine what worth I could be to a single person, let alone all of everyone anywhere. But I am constantly aware that even this level of loneliness is certainly universal, that especially in feeling alone I am more like everyone that I will never meet, speak to, see, or realize. The ones dead long before, born years later, and alive in a space so distant and practically inaccessible from my own.
            My life has become a tragedy, having lost time and again, to the point of not knowing who I am or what I am doing here. All I can do or ask for is to enjoy the moment, to find myself a better way of being, because anything can go on for too long without a proper proportion of control. I am not concerned with what I will find when I get there, because I always have to be in exactly one place, that is the cost that I am giving up for leaving, spending time without any hope of getting there.