Hey Bukowskizzle

Dear Mr. Bukowski,
  You're quite the pessimist, my good sir.  Do you have any faith in humanity, or do you believe the only reason we have existed for so long is our inability to completely eradicate ourselves from the earth?  I feel like humanity will prevail, though it will have incredibly hard trials to face, such as dealing with North Korea and Iran (third-world-istan).  There are already mass efforts of deweaponizing the nations with the most nuclear stockpiles.  Were you hurt as a child?  I find that one's outlook on the world greatly has something to do with one's early developmental years, which i think end at the ripe age of fifteen, which I am yet to acquire.  I feel that once we have had a nuclear war, we cannot forget it.  We have attempted to do this with the Holocaust, but we don't preoccupy ourselves with it.  We can never allow ourselves to not think about nuclear war.  The Holocaust was one of the great blunders of humanity to this day, but nuclear war would be exponentially worse.  Genocide is awful, however human eradication is a step up from that.  I think that humanity has more intellectual power than you credit it for having.  I mean this very respectfully.

Sincerely, Sohrob.
P.S. Humanity is fin-to be hella strong, G.

Father and Son

I believe the relationship between the father and the son in "The Road" is very wholesome, it is replicated very little in our society.  I think that this is bad, but however bad this is, this is the truth.  I personally know more people with weak, bad, or even non-existant relationships with their fathers than people with good relationships with their fathers.  My relationship with my father is very strange.  Both of my parents are married, so I see my father close to a daily basis, him and I have a very good relationship when family members, or his friends are at our house, but when nobody but him, my mother, and I are home, our relationship quickly dwindles.  I get very good grades in school, I have a 4.25 or a 4.0 GPA, but no matter how I do in any of my classes he only cares about my math, which is always my lowest grade.  I am holding a B in my math class currently, with 5 As and one other B, in all honors classes and I am on the verge of house arrest, I mean that sarcastically, not literally.  However at times we have a good relationship regardless of who's at our house, we normally see both poles over the course of a month, from very good, to very bad.  Overall my relationship with my father I would say is above average, but by no means the best.

My disconnection from the physical world.

Many people have items of supreme sentimental value.  Though I, like all other people, have a connection to many of my belongings, none of them do I have an inseverable bond with.  When I was very young everything in my house or that I was close to had sentimental value to me.  I remember crying hysterically when my mother got a new stove.  I was so incredibly sad from the loss of our old one, that I begged the man from Sears to not listen to my mother, all to no avail.  In my bathroom in the first apartment I  lived in there was wallpaper with elephants all over it, and when we moved out, I remember mourning the loss of that wallpaper, taking all of the photographs that I could, even trying to salvage a sample, again, in vain.  Now I am proud to say that none of these losses phase me.  It is much harder to give examples of things you don't care about.  I believe that this is very good for me, leading me to a higher level of wisdom.  If somebody is stripped of all of their belongings and still has direction in their life, they are truly wise, almost enlightened.  I first learned about this philosophy while reading Siddhartha, when Siddhartha lives with Sadhus are a very small group of Indian people who abstain from many worldly pleasures, who wander the country and the wilderness, and live very humbly.  I strive to due this in principal, not so much in practice.

The Moment I realized I was an American

The Moment I realized I was an American is an epiphany I am one hundred percent sure I have had.  When I was younger I hated America, simply because of racism and the atrocities America has committed.  I hated slavery, the fire bombings of Germany, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and America's views on the middle east.  When I was much younger I was very proud to be middle eastern, sadly that has diminished greatly and I loathe that fact.  My hate for America went to the point that I was suspended from school in the 3rd grade for attempting to start a communist revolution.  At some point I realized that America, though not necessarily a great country for the world, is one of the best countries to be a citizen of.  We have freedoms here which much of the world cannot fathom.  We almost have achieved full equality for everyone in almost every part of the country.  I say that because in some places there is still racism, and sexism, but that has been reduced greatly and is actually illegal right now.  America has an incredibly high standard of living, which I, and almost every other American love to indulge in.  I realized I was an American when I realized there was no where in the world I'd rather live in than America.