Ralph Pullins

Eyes black drops of ink, pupils blown out, wide bottomless pits, we lean too close. "I love you man," you tell me.  "I love you too, Dude," I say, but we don't say it enough, you know?"  And off we go, laughing and staggering down the beach.  The world has cracked wide open and the night is filled with false and fleeting magic, and it will wear off, this feeling of interconnectedness, to you and to the ocean and to the earth itself, it will wear off but even in the morning I will remember, and I will agree.  I love you too, man, but we don't say it enough. And now thinking of those times, it feels distant, surreal memories of a different person, the lost and desperate acts of a broken young man, and maybe it was stupid and irresponsible, maybe we shortened our lives, and maybe in the end we will wish we had done things differently- Maybe- ...or maybe not, maybe it was good, a life well lived, and when my liver fails, or my worn out blood throws a clo...

I don't carry a writer's notebook to record ideas and snippets of writing like some authors that I have heard of, my reasoning being that if the idea is good enough it will stick around.  The best ideas harass you when you're trying to think of other things, demand attention while you are trying to sleep, they interrupt all your best shower songs, they prompt your wife to ask you, "Are you even listening to me right now?"  And I have plenty of those kinds rattling around in my skull just begging to be written, and so I don't bother writing them down, because if I'm going to be writing them, I'm going to be writing them, get it?   Plus, I get a lot of stupid-ass ideas.  I sit here and I think, hey what if my mustache became sentient, and maybe my kids are robots, and I bet the reason giraffe's necks are so long is that maybe they were just regular spotted horses, and then one time back in the formation times, they said something insulting to the w...

So I find myself wanting to write about politics, which I hate.  I want to write a scathing review of our political system, and the douchey asshats that we have elected to represent us, because it is something that vexes and frustrates me on the regular, and what I do is write about things that bother me and then I feel a little better.  It has worked well for me and my personal well being; just doing this blog and airing all my personal laundry for all to see has been as cathartic as anything. But I hate politics.  I think that it is intentionally divisive, designed to make us see the world in an "us vs them" mindset, to see the whole world and our place in it as sides in a game, a bloody and terrible game.  It makes it easy to start painting the opposition as something other than we are, which in turn makes it much easier to think terrible things about them, that they are racist idiots, that they are stupid takers, it makes it easy to say awful things to them, es...

I seem to define my life with soundtracks, playlists that encompass epochs or periods of change or development.  My earliest music was my mother's: Van Halen and Judas Priest, Def Leppard and AC/DC.  I remember a friend of hers explaining to second grade Ralph that the big balls that Angus was singing about were parties, but even then I didn't buy it.  My teen years were heavy on grunge, Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, and that was the first time that music ever felt like it was mine , that I discovered by myself or through the radio, or like minded friends, that was the first time that I took it and owned it and loved it, and even now I'll hear Black Hole Sun or Rooster or Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio and back I go. In the fifth grade, I moved to Kelso, Washington. I want to say that it was hard, but what I remember mostly from childhood is just this sense of taking every day as it arrived.  What else do we have except our own experiences to measure th...

I built a table, out of wood.  I made a thing that wasn't there before.  I cut and sanded the wood, I drilled in screws, and now we have a table where we didn't have one before. It is real and solid and you can touch it, you can feel where I cut poorly, see the rough edges where I didn't join the wood correctly, you can lift it, feel its weight.  It is a real thing that I made.  I made a table. This is not a table, this is a nothing, a series of random thoughts that I had in the shower, which is where thoughts come from. What if our souls are soap bubbles, what if we spread ourselves too thin, stretched out and flattened? What happens when it pops, would you even notice, would you even care? What if we are meant for something more? I am already behind schedule this year I've got work to do, I have things to accomplish, friends ask me questions ask for favors and all I say is yes yes yes and- What is this?  What am I hoping to do here writhing I meant to write "writ...

So its been a while huh?  Usually if I spend a long time away from writing, it is because I am either feeling pretty content, or because I have been busy. In this case it is both. I have been busy, both with the holidays and related events, and with the pay job, and also I have been working on a super secret surprise mystery project that I am not quite ready to talk about, but it is cool as hell and I'm stoked to bring it out and wave it around and harass my family and friends to tell me what they think and to tell everyone that they have ever met to check it out. But that is later. It is 2018, folks. Twenty. Eighteen. Since I am so behind in everything, I figured I would just blob everything together in one big-ass beginning of the year/end of the year rant/review/announcement pile of words and see where it goes.  Let's just jump in shall we? --  Unbelievable, but I'm turning forty years old in August, an age that I wasn't sure I was ever going to see, and one that I ...

Something I would have Tweeted today: I saw a wild turkey in flight today.  Not really relevant to anything, just something that I have never seen before. Pretty groundbreaking stuff. So you may or may not have noticed, but I have quit social media. I had a long standing belief that it is poison, and I still believe that. I didn't like the way that it made me feel about others, people that I would normally like and forgive I was judging harshly. I didn't like that it drove divisions between people.  I didn't like that I had pretty much stopped reading books in favor of looking at trash on my phone. Listen.  The things you do and say, even through the anonymity of the internet, matter.  You affect people's lives every day whether you mean to or not.  When you hold the door open for someone or don't hold the elevator, whether you smile to the clerk at the grocery store, it all matters.  We create ripples when we move in the water. Some become nothing, but some become ...