Kelli Jae Baeli

“Sully's, on South Prospect, was the quintessential biker-bar, complete with hefty, leather-clad Harley worshippers, and stringy-haired heroin-addicted women who made the rounds among the bikers. Its décor was decidedly Medieval Garage Sale, with a dose of Americana thrown in. An old motorcycle carcass dangled from the vaulted section of the beamed ceiling, and the wood plank floors were littered with butts, scarred by bottle caps and splattered with homogenized bodily fluids. The only light to be had was from neon, dying sconces, and lit cigarettes. Various medieval swords perched on each wall, reminiscent of the times of Beowulf and Fire Dragons on the Barrow.”

“You can bail water 24/7, and no matter how good you are at not sinking, you still have a hole in your boat.”

“You're only responsible for being honest, not for someone else's reaction to your honesty.”

“Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.”

“That's like leaping off a precipice and trying to knit yourself a parachute on the way down.”

“If a UFO did land, and invite me onboard, I'd love to have the balls to go in. So, I search the skies for extra testicles.”

“These thrill seeker people doing extreme sports...they have a hideous accident, go through agonizing recovery, and then go back to that activity that nearly killed them...that's not facing your fear, that's embracing your stupidity.”

“One of my biggest fears is that I'm going to die alone in my home, and my cats will eat me because I am too dead to open their food cans.”

“You have to be able to recognize your truths in the daylight before you can find them in the dark.”

“Am I too much for the world, or is the world too much for me?”

“I'm an open book. But some of the pages are stuck together.”

“I've never seen Salisbury steak on a restaurant menu. It's only in frozen dinners. Is there something we should know about that? What IS Salisbury steak anyway? And where do they hunt or harvest the salisburies?”

“Good communication is less about saying what you mean, and more about defining what you say.”

“The conundrum of sanity and insanity, is that it serves us to be some of each. It's really only a question of degrees. You cannot possibly be 100% adjusted and live in this INSANE world. A little bit of crazy is a coping skill.”

“I want to make the choice that gives an accurate impression of who I am; and who I am is someone who wants to be ethical, evolved, yet not at all an oil pan for the machinations of the morally corrupt.”

“If I say I do not believe in faeries or elves or trolls, does this imply that I have a set of beliefs and a lifestyle that adheres to this lack of belief? NO, IT ONLY IMPLIES that I do not believe in faeries, elves and trolls. So one cannot extrapolate morality, philosophy, cosmology, character, political party, or any other thing of that sort from the mere lack of belief in one other thing.”

“Progress should never be impeded by a need to coddle adults who respond to the world as children.”

“The supernatural worldview is causing a great number of otherwise intelligent people to cling to a collection of atavistic concepts that have not, and never will serve humanity in any ultimately beneficial way. Any benefits that spirituality ostensibly provides to its adherents, can be found equally in the worldview of philosophy and ethics, communities of other kinds, and so on. It's a myth that the only morality, hope, purpose and comfort to be found, resides only in the supernatural.”

“Regarding Christians who feel they have a free pass on being criticized; When the blind worship of an invisible being and the doctrine of millennia-old texts written by ignorant men in another country becomes more important than real, present human beings, then the blind worshiper SHOULD be shunned and criticized. It would be unethical to respond otherwise.”

“I am overweight. But to me, it's fat. I don't have Body Dysmorphic Disorder. When I look in the mirror I don't plunge into a depression and stick my finger down my throat or carve FAT in my arm with a pickle fork. I can appreciate when I look good aside from the weight. Sometimes I might say, Oh, I'm having a good face day.And a few times, after checking my appearance in the mirror before a date, I'd say, Okay. I'd date me. And I know if I ever could get the extra tonnage off, I'd be the first one to parade around in my underwear, or have no qualms about getting naked with a hottie, while the lights were still on in the room.”

“What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger...unless it instead snaps your spine. Then it makes you a paraplegic.”

“Morality comes from religion? There are no Baptist babies or Catholic babies or Muslim babies. Religion is imposed on children by adults and society, and morality is an evolutionary adaptation. Period.”

“Irony of the day: arthritis medication with a cap that old people can't get off, because of their arthritis.”

“When I am alone, my table manners are rather piggish, but i suppose that's because I don't eat at a table, I eat at my desk. Which could be considered a table, except we tend to define things by their function, and this particular surface is a desk, so perhaps piggish is unfair.”

“Some people have goodness and merit buried deep inside and we glimpse it and see its value but ultimately it's covered by so much dirt that it's a 24/7 exercise in archaeology.”

“It's one thing to say you think someone "hung the moon" but that generally means you are blind and deluded, and then the relationship fails because they say you changed, when really, they never saw you at all...The real test is if someone sees all your flaws or blemishes or individual differences, and they still think you hung the moon.”

“Real connection (and if it's LOVE, then real love)--goes beyond those not-so-perfect and superficial and idiosyncratic things that simply make us individuals. The trust and longevity of a relationship between two individuals is established through time and learning each other, and discovering a harmony at the core of their connection. And it becomes powerful because of where it resides--at the center of who we are--the very essence of our being.”

“I will not dumb myself down to make someone else more comfortable with their ignorance.”