Last night I dreamt about a butterfly. When you dream about butterflies you expect them to say something profound, like 'I too am but a butterfly dreaming,' or 'A caterpillar cannot recognize the butterfly that it is to become.' So I sat watching those fluttering wings—twin labyrinths of black traced out on canvases of gold—awaiting the wisdom that was sure to come pouring forth from this surreal lepidopteran. Instead, it asked me the question, "Are spiders venemous by nature or must they be taught to be so?" Outraged at being cheated out of my share of mystical insight, I began to lecture it upon the false dichotomy between nature and nuture, and upon the complex dialectic interplay of history and being, the universal and the particular, form and content. But apparently it was not in need of a lesson in the dialectic. Instead it just laughed and alit upon the solitary sunbeam that sundered the clouds of that rainy day.

When we say love

We know

That death is stronger than love

That love is sad

Deathly sad

and cannot be otherwise.

For all love seeks eternity

and that can never be.

- Herbert Marcuse

One heartbreaking moment: Remembering with such clarity I thought that you were here; reaching out to take your hand—and grasping only air.

Today I woke up, read a beautiful novel, went running through the midsummer rain, raced the shadow of a cloud as it sped across the freeway in front of me with my hand out the wide-open window of my car and me remembering what it is like to fly. All in all, it was a good day.

One-word description of our world today: trivial.