This page will not be your cup of tea, plain and simple.

If I am to start off this blog I will begin with a quote which motivates me everyday. Not that you care. But if you're here, and reading, taking a little piece of my life to enrich or depreciate from your own, then take it.

"The unexamined life is not worth living."- Socrates

Why is this my favorite quote? Why is it the single principle I keep in the back of my mind? Dear reader, it is because encompassed in this quote is everything.

This blog will not be your cup of tea for several reasons. First and foremost is because it will be unapologetically comprised of existential examinations of everyday life. I am not a scholar. I am not a highly educated man. But you will read this, reader, because you, like all other people in this world are inherently inquisitive of life and how it is lived beyond yourself. In the modern age of real-time access to every ounce of bullshit you could ever want, the parameters of a single life have at the same time both exploded and become isolated. You have access to the most dramatically important information available to mankind, and yet, here we sit, both you and I, withering away on meaningless examinations of another's life.

What would Sir Isaac Newton, or Aristotle, or Immanuel Kant think of such mandane activities. All of them would argue that enrichment is the key to a thorough existence. But perhaps the reason I sit here writing this, and you sit here reading this is because we both call bullshit on those supposedly infallible men.

Here in lies the simplicity and beauty of my favorite quote. Socrates, the son of an Ancient Greek equivalent of a construction worker, a champion wrestler, and defiant statesmen came upon a desperate realization one day, after his friend returned from a visit to the wondrous and prophetic Oracle of Delphi. You see upon meeting the Oracle (the Ancient Greek equivalent of a direct phone call with God) you were able to ask one question. Usually poor folks were told to wait outside, and priests would descend into caverns below the Temple of Apollo, covered in billowing smoke, and retrieve the Oracle's answer for you. Usually the answer was so cryptic it really provided no answer worth reflecting upon. The argument was, eventually the answer would become clear. Yet, if you were important enough, you had the ability to descend into the dark, crammed passages below the temple yourself, so that you might meet her face to face.

From personal testimony I can assure you those passages are eerily  tight and dark. This past summer I did a bit of adventuring past some caution tape into the dark underbelly of the Temple of Apollo. Through twists and turns, sans light, and full of putrid smells, passageways no wider than a coffin, lined with marble, open into a chamber directly in between the sacrificial pits adjacent to the temple. There a distinct smell of methane seeps through a roman brick wall (supposedly bricked up by Trajan after he was told he would be the only man to truly rule the world) and two post holes, which would once have held up a chair sit above rivets cut in the marble, where noxious and hallucinogenic fumes would have been inhaled by the poor drugged virgin Oracle who spat out the blessings of Apollo.

It was here in this chamber that Socrates' friend was so graciously invited. This selfless fellow asked his one question which was certainly curious in nature, having traveled weeks to see the Oracle face to face. He asked, "Is there anyone wiser than Socrates?" To which the Oracle replied, "There is none wiser."

Upon hearing this news from his well-traveled and thoughtful friend, the old and tired Socrates pondered the God's answer. He asked others what it must mean. All of them gave him their interpretation. So many different interpretations were given to him in fact that Socrates came upon what he believed to be the meaning of his message. As he explained as he was on trial for his life, a  70 year old man defending the path he had taken since this revelation, the reason the god had said he was wiser than all is because he plainly had no idea what the message meant, and didn't pretend to. He was the only man, it seemed in the world, who did not pretend he knew any solid answers to questions unanswerable. "The only thing I know, is that I know nothing," he would say.

The man took this thought and transcribed it into a life of seeking knowledge through the contradiction of everyone else's hubris. He would certainly surmise things, but not because he had inherently believed them so, arguing for the point out of completely invalidated self-pride. And through this endeavor, of giving up everything, becoming desperately poor, and bullying the most elite of society into recognizing their own logical fallacies, he single handedly changed ethics, logic, and rationality in the world's first great democracy.

His core belief stood as this one statement, the only thing he truly asserted as correct, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

So, reader, you singular ignoramus, as I said, this blog will not be your cup of tea because it will examine, in depth, the realities beyond your ignorant convictions. You're just going to have to read, sit down, shut up, and listen to my own reflections. Argue what you will. Say what you will. Get mad, or come soak up every word. In the end we will be sure of only one thing. Neither you, nor I, have a grasp on what truly is. And you, my wasteful friend are doing the same as I. We are in one way or another examining each other's world. Hopelessly attempting to shore up or change beliefs we have no proof to validate. No one showed up with an empirical text book to life when you pooped out sobbing from you mothers selflessly ripped womb, and you've been justifying each breath since.

So, if you continue to read these musings I ask you one thing, do not simply read, but soak up, stew upon, chew each argument like a succulent meat, until you have broken it apart into every fiber, and come to postulate on the deepest level, not what you decide about it, but what you decided about it, says about you.