"Selling Porn" on Myspace

I've never even played street fighter but both articles were hilarious.

Man, I forgot I wrote those. Hahaha. 2005 or so? Sheesh.

But yeah, I still write essays. I rarely do anything with them. I just like putting observations onto paper sometimes. Or harddrives. If people want to read them, I don't mind posting them. They're likely just inane ramblings, though.

We want to read the entire contents of your brain, ben!

I haven't been home in a while, so I don't have access to most of my writing, but this is something I wrote the other night. I don't really have a point with these. I just get ideas -- often in the shower, when I'm not inventing arguments to win -- and I write them down. I don't even necessarily think it through. But yeah, here's one ...

"Stories"

We are all stories.

Some of us are tragedies, or comedies, or period pieces, or documentations on the withering effects of time, or talking points in the debate of nature versus nurture, or any combination thereof. But when we are no longer within reach, either due to mortality or simple distance, we leave behind our stories – to our loved ones, to our enemies, to anyone who remembers us. And they are not static things. Our stories change with time. They are reduced to their most interesting elements and dressed in brighter clothing than actually exists. With time, many are embellished to the point of fiction. But that's okay. Stories are not historians. They document feeling and sentiment as much as facts and truth, perhaps more so.

Those of us who live loudly, or cleverly, can leave behind stories that can cross the lines of cities and nations, language and culture, and in rare cases are even immune to time. They can become religions, life lessons, aspirations, warnings to be told to children as they're tucked in for bed. They can topple empires and rewrite notions of romance, honor and treachery. It's not so much the actions themselves, but the stories they spawn that change things.

Those of us who live simply have smaller reach, and we're reduced to minor details and summed up quickly. “She was a stern woman,” they might say, with an anecdote or two to exemplify this. In this telling, her sternness will likely be exaggerated for effect, will appear to be her only notable quality, and that will be all.

Most of us will fall somewhere in the middle.

But it's not just people. Even our objects are stories. We grow attached not to the items themselves, but to the tales they have tucked within. We don't value antiques simply because they're old – it's for the stories they've harbored and safeguarded through the dregs of time. They're survivors. They survive wars and cross oceans, persist through neglect and abuse, and somehow stick around long enough to tell us all about it. Experts are employed to tell us their worth, but in truth, they're telling us the value of the stories they contain – of the people who made them, the circumstances of their lives – and how much people are willing to pay for those stories. They're slices of history, time capsules we put around our houses.

I, too, am just a story. Even now, in life. Most people will never know me. Many will only know my story, just with varying degrees of detail depending on how close to me they were. And the accuracy of this is rarely sought. An exciting story has far more power than a truthful one. It is only when the truth becomes the more exciting of the two that it will be accepted and repeated. But I am okay with this. I love stories, and am happy to be one, true or not. I only hope mine is at least something valuable to those I spend my life around. And perhaps when I am gone, it will be embellished in a flattering way. Fingers crossed that it will paint me as more than I really was.