Or maybe...just maybe this whole process is our training wheels towards something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures.

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.

Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smoky eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's a kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive "let them eat cake" type of chauvinism.

No matter what happens, it’s always now.

If you flee from the things you fear, there's no resolution.

Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things - they save you.