The '10' List 10

10 Verbal Photographs

1. I had a dream that I was lurking through the woods in a forest that was lightly shaded in the color beige. As I come to a clearing in the woods, I noticed there were two moons in the sky, one was the normal white moon and the other was a neon blue moon.
2. There is a sign at a bar that I frequent around my house. The sign reads, “If you are under the bar, then you will not be served another.” I found this to be quite humorous and thought of making it a t-shirt.
3. I recently watched the movie “The Life of David Gale,” and it brought up some interesting ideas: One, is that it is a true story and would serve for a great start off point for an amazing mystery thriller story. Then, Kevin Spacey should write movies more often than he does because it made me want to become that dark, almost iridescent character.
4. As of May, there will be no more smoking in bars. I will not lie, I like to have the occasional cigarette, but when it comes to a bar & grille, I am all for the denial. It makes me wonder how things would be if cigarettes were to never have come around. I bet food would smell much better being made in a restaurant.
5. I was driving to a concert in downtown Detroit in an area of Detroit I have never been before. It was a charming neighborhood in northern Detroit; it still shared the beauty, which many visitors fail to see. It reminded me of the Motown Detroit, when Hitsville USA was the talk of the town. It is to bad that ceases to exist now. If only it could still be like that, just imagine.
6. The concert that I went to in Detroit is a young soul singer by the name of Mayer Hawthorne. He is a Michigan native from Ann Arbor and he brought out some amazing tones from St. Andrews Hall. He was naming off different genres of music and whether the audience knew, and liked, them. It made me think of a music genre that I never thought of before, and am anxious to try to make it work; a fusion of jazz and punk.
7. Blind people tend to use sounds to make up for their lack of sight. I envisioned a blind musician to have that much better of an ear for music.
8. In a drive thru restaurant one night, I saw an employee talking on the phone while doing an order. This infuriated me to the point that I did not touch my phone for days. Imagine a society that was free from the technology we have now. What if they had cell phones that stayed in your car only for emergencies.
9. I once had a dream that there was a heaven and a hell, but they were switched. The hell was actually this area above Canada, which was just a large glowing orb in the sky from the fire. Heaven was actually underground and the only way to get to it was through this large door on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
10. I had a vision of life being raveled around an average age of 200. Do you think life would be miserable at 200? Is that to much time to live?

10 Treasures

1. “I don't even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it.” -J.D Salinger
2. “People always think something's all true.” -J.D Salinger
3. “Women, don't get a tattoo. That butterfly looks great on your breast when you're twenty or thirty, but when you get to seventy, it stretches into a condor.” -Billy Elmer
4. “Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” -Jack Kerouac
5. "[H]owever hard the road, however difficult today, tomorrow things will be..." -Dr. Benjamin E. Mays
6. "Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement." -Charles Kettering
7. "Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens." -J.R.R Tolkein
8. “Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city” -Walter Benjamin
9. “…Houses, passages having no outside. Like the dream” - Walter Benjamin
10. “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are” -Walter Benjamin

I noticed in my verbal photographs that there is a sense of home in my experiences. I frequented Detroit quite often and found myself to be fascinated by the little parts in the city. So the theme of my verbal photographs this week will be the appreciation for home. I was driving through new parts of Detroit that I have never even noticed before and saw a Detroit-made band that really opened my eyes. It is a beautiful thing when you find your appreciation for the things around you; you build an internal respect. It makes me feel much better about the city that is often chastised by many people including citizens of the city. I came across many different types of people in my spiritual walks around the city running into hoboes all the way to blind musicians. Walking through the city can make your mind think of many significant wonders that effect my writing ultimately.
My treasures are a little disarrayed when it comes to a theme. The main theme that I put together, looking at all the treasures, is the sense of want in life and your journey to get there. I used the quotes about the road from Kettering, Tolkien, Kerouac, and Mays because they symbolize a sense of adventure in life. Many people do not follow their own wants in life and stick to the norm of job, family, and death. I thought Salinger’s quote came in perfect cohesion with this statement because Salinger stated that he does not know what he is running for, which sounds great. I want to roam aimless like that in some portion of my life. The beauty of having that exciting euphoria of discovering a new place is almost pure bliss. That’s where Benjamin’s quotes make an interesting insertion into the idea of adventure. Benjamin describes that to be modern is to find the sense of adventure in everything, to really open up your interpretations to everything. Life will take you alive if you let it consume you.