I watched the movie Crash. It did a good job of painting loving people as racists and racist people as lovers. Showing how we can all be so inhuman and human at the same time, as people in the movie had their paths trip over one another. And then just how connected everything is...how nothing is really random.

The movie made me think of a friend who I met, who is an actor, who also designs websites for actors, and is also writing a script to make a movie, and how randomly I met him at a concert, and how his movie is moving along well, and how I am going to be moving out near where he lives soon, and how he used to live in the town I will probably be moving to, and how his recent success has paralleled mine, and how I just had a cool chat on the phone with him, and how I may be able to help him with his movie.

I also just got an email from a guy who is the complete political opposite of me, who was fun to talk to about a week ago, who bought my ebook, who used to work in the music industry as a sound engineer (who recently got into SEO due to macroeconomic contraction within the music vertical), who has friends who are sound engineers, who toured with Radiohead (the band I recently went to see many times with a cool friend, and always blog about, and recently bought their CDs for another really kick ass friend of mine, who I have yet to meet in person, but talk to all the time, who met me by buying my ebook, who changed my outlook on the world to be much brighter, and who I will meet in under a month in person), and the person I talked to at the start of this paragraph is trying to get me some cool gift from Radiohead. How fucking cool is that? When Radiohead finishes their next CD I hope to go to some of their concerts with the friend I mentioned in this paragraph.

Also on that same Radiohead front, their lead singer backed friends of earth...which is an environmental organization that I gave my ebook to before I knew of that connection. And I would have probably never heard of Radiohead if it was not for my old roommate, who I met while we were both in the Navy (and we both hated each other when we met), which neither of us really wanted to be, and both hated, but after he got out of the navy we moved together to get a place with cheap rent, and when I was down he helped me a bunch, and the same was true in reverse. And I only got into SEO because I despised the navy so much and then a really cool person who believed in me more than I did hired me before I knew I wanted to or was selling anything.

It is just weird how circular so many things are, and how I could be so good at seeing some patterns, yet not notice others, and was able to allow myself to think so negatively for so long.

It is even crazier when you think that you can have month over month 100%+ economic growth rate and can leverage that to help friends quit their jobs and do whatever they want to. One guy in the middle east is going to be able to quit his job and move back home and program for me while I teach him SEO stuff. Another friend works on a website with me full time. Two other friends are also helping to build websites with me. And another friend (who is much better at business than I am) is partnering with me too. And I got an equity stake in another business where a competing business got $3 million in VC funding. Like all these partnerships are from this year alone :) (and that is not even listing all of em...)

SEO and marketing and concerts seem to be my only true social outlets at the moment, but it is quite weird how circular everything is thusfar.

So I watched another movie.

Citizen Kane is a bit long and drawn out perhaps, but it did so to show its depth of character in pieces and make a lot of sense as to its message. A man who can only find love on his own terms who tries to build things, people, and relationships into his vision for how they should be rather than accepting and enjoying people places and things for who and what they are.

Many of his faults are mine and yours, most likely. He just had more opportunity than most, and thus was able to push things further than most.

I think three things that are really hard in life are:

• not passing on bad traits: not passing on bad traits or addictions which heavily influence how you were born or raised (some of these you may not realize how much they hurt your potential)
  
• changing motivation: trusting yourself enough to change your motivations to good positive forces and energies if you have largely been driven by negative forces for an extended period of time
  
• overcompensation: trying not to focus so much on avoiding the bad parts to where you only reinforce them and/or miss out on the good bits

I recently watched 2 movies in 2 days, which is pretty rare for me. I Love Huckabees was about existentialism.

Existentialism tends to view human beings as subjects in an indifferent, objective, often ambiguous, and "absurd" universe in which meaning is not provided by the natural order, but rather can be created, however provisionally and unstably, by human beings' actions and interpretations. - Wikipedia

It seemed to me like he pushed himself closer to self destruction as he spread himself thinner and grew older without getting what he really wanted. Not only was he addicted to speed, but it also seems he was addicted to the controversy it caused. Eventually the self reinforcing cycle caused him to do bad things to justify earlier activity. Being a rich star allows you to get away with living a really fucked up life for a long time.

I also think that the movie well showed some of the problems associated with extreme hard drug usage and / or being a star. The rush associated with finding extremely different perspectives on reality makes normal life seem boring. I think athletes also experience the phenomenon later in life. It is inevitable that most people who live too fast die young or are forced to slow down...and slowing down while curbing whatever addictions and bad tendencies one has is not easy.

Although his style, songs, and sound are uniquely his own, his life story reminds me a bunch of lyrics other singers recently wrote

And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself
- Karma Police by Radiohead

From the first line of the first page
to the end of the last day
from the start in your own way
you just want somebody listening to what you say
- Square 1 by Coldplay

Maybe you get what you wanted
Maybe you'll stumble upon it
- White Shadows by Coldplay

If I could start again
a million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way
- Hurt by Nine Inch Nails

Although he was fucked up for a long time later in his life Johnny got exactly what he wanted, marrying June Carter. They lived happily together for about 35 years and then he died only about 4 months after her. While the Radiohead song Karma Police sounds like it is about losing yourself it really is about finding yourself.

I don't interact with people as much as most "normal" people do, so I love connecting with the emotion trapped in a song...and seeing a biopsy of a bad ass song writer struggling with loss from a young age was cool. Johnny created a video of the song Hurt soon before dying.