The Edge of Amazement

I've been told by some that I am easily amused. Well, I am. I spent twenty minutes today laughing at my laughter. I've been told by others that they wished they could be as easily amused and see the world through similarly eager and easily impressed eyes. I don't know about that. Not to harp about money not being able to buy happiness, but it does. Sort of.

What it buys is a buffer. The edge of the reality of situations. Unpleasant. Where you live? You live in a low rent shit hole in a building occupied by wellfare comped degenerates and people that may or may not be wholly insane and or meth addicts. Sometimes it can be difficult to be happy in a situation like that. What you can buy with money. Fantastic appointments. All the little things that will make your low rent apartment much more enjoyable to live in and obscure the reality of the situation. Or enough drugs to fantastically appoint the hardware in your head and buffer it that way. It's not technically, to the T of the definition, happiness, but it's pretty close. Happiness enabler. I'll take some helium.

Pizza isn't special. In and of itself. It is to me. I can't buy it more than once or twice in a month because I have a lot of other things way more important and necessary and life sustaining to buy and try to save for than expensive cheesy and pepperoni speckled and italian sausaged and dipping butter for the crust ridiculously delicious pizza. So I guess when I hear people say I've got it good because simple things amaze and entertain me because I don't have much in the way of a reality buffer it irritates me. The edge of amazement cuts in two directions and the back stroke is serrated. So, don't forget that. I'll trade you places next time you want to be grounded. I'd like to spend some time in flight

... buffering ...


with giant slices of pizza and area rugs two dozen feet wide and ceiling fans and air conditioning and a shower curtain that reaches all the way across my bath tub. That would be amazing. I will probably cream my pants if the day that all of those things come together actually happens.



///Aphex Twin - "Donkey Rhubarb"

dear (______):

Dear cable television,

I don't miss you for your thousands of hours of HD programming. I miss you because it's the only way I can watch the 24 hours of LeMans and Pike's Peak. And because how else will I ever learn how twinkies are made???

Old and News and Birthdays and Writer's Bowel Abstraction

May 22nd was my 7 year old birthday. My next birthday is coming up on the 27th. I'm gonna be 8 years old. Should be fun. Assuming I will live to experience 73 iterations of my life, I've broken up each iteration into 73 birthdays because I am essentially living a full life through each iteration from reconception to ultimate system failure so I will have a birthday every five days culminating with my death next year on the 21st of April at midnight and my reboot on the 22nd into my 27th iteration of life. So really, I guess the 27th will be star date M.26.8.Y-P221A or something.

I wonder if leaving the country is like entering a parallel universe.

I don't know what I'm going to do for my eighth birthday. Probably nothing. Nothing and videogames. Satisfaction and fulfillment fired directly into the vein and straight to the brain stem. Honestly 73 is probably a bit of a reach. I don't very well expect to land within twenty years of that, but I might as well keep even the unlikely within my model because it does happen.

Recently I've been culling through some of my old complete short stories to see which ones I want to feature on Bits and what I've realized is that some of my old stuff is dreadful. Which is good. I mean abortions are never fun, but sometimes they need to happen and sometimes they don't happen and you have to live with the outcome for better and worse.

In writing, I feel, it's not good to have too many abortions. Eventually you've got to gut it out and finish and seal the deal. I don't think I've ever typed seal the deal. What an odd collection of letters. Visually I think it's the ea's that are looking funny and making me smile to look at them. But anyway, in writing if you are constantly quitting mid-project or mid-composition you'll eventually find yourself staring at a mountain of unfinished work that you know is bad and you'll find it very difficult to pick through for the good pieces that might work in other things because it is a hugely tangled mess of half and full formed ideas.

At least when you gut it out and finish your composition or your project it is all more or less there in front of you in some sort of organized fashion with a start, a middle, and an end and you can, if you so choose, open it up and page through it and find out what's working and what isn't working and what went off the tracks and what sounds too much like X and Y and Z and what should be moved to where and then, after all of that happens, you can decide that "hey maybe this isn't worth opening ever again" and then you can move on with confidence.

That's probably one of the biggest reasons to not abort mid project. The ability to finish is reason two and that is something that I think artist should always cultivate. You should always want to finish and want to get that feeling of completion, regardless of the projects caliber, and you should know what that feeling tastes like when it hits you. You should develop a predilection for the taste of finishing. The number one reason, though, is to be able to have a whole something to look at and be able to close it and shelve it and know, de facto, that you did your due diligence on the idea and it didn't pan out and now you can move on to something different or take another approach at the idea with full confidence that you left nothing to waste and rot and get lost in a junk bin never to be seen again and more important than you first imagined.

Going through some of my old stuff has been a lot reason number one. More than I expected. I feel like that means I've either leveled up in my skill and analytical ability or have taken (without my knowledge) a new creative direction. Or maybe my voice is just taking on more definition and I'm learning what I can say well and what I have trouble expressing and exploring in my fiction and poetry. I think it's a mix, and I don't know the exact details of the tonic, but my ego wants to say "it's cuz yer awesome, d00d!!!" but I know I haven't been doing this long enough to feel comfortable saying that about anything I do. I think the only thing I am capable of producing that I can confidently say I'm awesome at is burps. Maybe turds. Yeah, poops too. I'm pretty good at that.

Which, brings me to something else because I don't want to spend another word of our time on pooping. I discovered that I developed a writer's block. It took about a week to really feel it out. For me, writer's block doesn't descend in a day, but it's like picking up a pen to write down your grocery list or maybe your to do list each morning and finding the pen a little drier and a little drier until your scratching the words into the paper with a dead pen until you've finally torn your pad to shreds and you've got nothing but your ashy skin to try and etch things on and its too painful and time consuming to even bother so you stop bothering altogether. I realized I'd stopped writing my poetry altogether and I spent most of yesterday night at work trying to diagnose the quitting.

Turns out I'd made myself sick of abstraction. Sick of the expression of abstraction. The whole idea about abstraction is that it is difficult to express in concrete terms. So, lo and behold, the difficulty of expressing it in concrete terms translates with high fidelity to writing about it and takes a disproportionately large amount of mental work to cut into and reveal it in the beautiful simple jagged symmetry and music of poetic words and that mountain of effort and work and finishing the unfinished and polishing the dun metal of impotent machinery and ideas mounted and mounted and mounted until I mentally tore up my paper, snapped my pen in half, and walked away from it without even realizing it was happening until I walked on to my idea foundry and saw every single work station was empty and the mills were collected dust and cobwebs.

The solution, you ask? So simple. Work on the concrete. No more talking about feelings and emotions and human complexities and quirks. Talk about places, things, peoples faces and bodies, foods, actions, and mechanisms. Talk about real histories and experiences and tastes and smells. It can be burdensome to define the abstract so even in expressing the expressible, avoid abstractions that demand abstract explanation. Take the trappings away and there will be no traps and words will flow again and you can get back to eating ideas and feeding your head knowing your stomach isn't bloated with dead ones you haven't passed.

I do believe I am done with the old stories I will feature. Old arrays of skeletons and pelts and antlers I've already bagged and shown off in grainy black and whites and time stamped digital camera prints. Time to start in swinging the ax and hammer and pounding the chisel and pulling the trigger and skinning and big game hunting the new ideas that have been lurking. Time to start talking to the new people that have arrived and sat waiting, some patiently, some quietly, some not. There are perhaps a handful of old ones left to cut and trim up and in some cases flesh out and disambiguate for show, but by and large it's time to get started exclusively on the new. I did that with Auralport and good God was it a great feeling to go there to compose knowing full well that there was nothing else in the parts bin to go through and it was all gonna be fresh squeezed. Took me forever to get over the self consciousness of showing things and saying "yep, I made that" because you can never know if people like it or hate it or just see it and say "interesting" or if people don't see it at all, and I'm just now starting to get that feeling with Bits, but it's a feeling with two sides. Part apprehension at the opening of yourself to judgement and knowing someone is going to say "wow that's crap and I wasted my time" and part elation and exhilaration of creative expression and knowing that even if no one says to themselves "that was neat" you still get the pleasure of knowing you fucking did something and it turned out as good as you hoped it would.

I guess the other thing about it is knowing every hour you spend working on it is an hour you've spent getting better at something you love. Which is why I need a new job. A job that I can get better at every day I'm there and not in the sense of "dear God, this is the best filing clerk in the world. He has been filing for so long that he can file the letter A faster than any man living or dead" or "dear God this is the best cashier ever, he's been counting out change for so long he can do it just by feeling the weight of the mixed coins." I mean something that I can literally learn more about every single day because there is actually more to learn and master and not just continue to work and rework and go over the same shit until it's muscle memory in your brain.

Also want to apologize. I used literally in a non literal sense recently and it did not escape me, I was just being lazy. Laziness sucks. No one wins.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I know some of what makes it out of my head is good at the time until I reread it months later and in the context of my expanded skill set and mental library can see it's not so stellar. I'm learning. Promise.


///Bjork - "Oceania (featuring Kelis)" I did not know this existed until today. I love Kelis. I love Bjork. Eargasm. This version is so different from the one on the album. Like night and day and then midway through you feel the epiphany you first struck as a kid when for the first time you were awake to see one turn into the other and the vastness of space became real.

Universal Bodies

I had this thought today while running off to make lunch before 6 P.M. rolled around. It was kind of an irrational thought, so rationale being what it is and people being who they are, I had to go back over it and rationalize it or at least understand why my first compunction was this "wait, what a minute" moment.

Beginning, I thought that I had to figure out why making lunch before six was such a big deal. My own busted food schedule aside, I figure it would probably help the rest of my body organize itself if I did adhere more closely to a strict three ring circus of various food stuffs and the thought of organizing that part of myself lead me to lean toward thinking that further organization would probably bleed from that, through my mouth and then back out of my mouth again into positive work gains. Too technical. Losing interest. Start over.

What struck me was (without all the junk that lead up to it) that the spacing of meals is pretty much universally accepted. You eat when you wake up because you haven't eaten while you were sleeping. You eat around the middle of your day because you've been doing stuff and were probably too busy to cut something up, jam a stick from it's gullet to it's anus and throw it over a spit, or gather something, or you haven't eaten since you got up because it's taken you all day to find and kill enough somethings to skewer, fill a basket (and your tummy), or snag in a net of some sort. Then you eat again before you go to sleep because after you ate earlier you had to do other things that made you tired and things that make you tired also tend to make you hungry and you don't want to be kept awake by the sound of your stomach digesting itself.

So by and large everybody eats a few times a day because when you're not an animal with a stomach that can digest anything (fresh, rotten, bones, pure cellulose, tree bark, whatever) it takes energy to pick and choose and being able to pick and choose and possessing delicate (by comparison) faculties also means you have to spend the time and energy to do so and protect your fragile microcosm. It's easy to understand.

In rushing to make lunch I realized that it doesn't matter what you call it or why. Your body knows what's up. You can cram food into your face at 7 P.M. if you want, but your body knows that what it's eating should actually be dinner and will be processed as such. Your mind can convince you that you should eat again before you go to bed, but depending on what you ate you probably shouldn't and your body knows that. You can make breakfast at dinner time, but it's still, in principle, dinner, no matter what you want to call it. Granted it is all bound by your sleep cycle, so if you sleep for ten hours whatever you eat in the three equidistant spaces of the next fourteen hours will be breakfast lunch and dinner. And that's important. So I guess it wasn't as horribly irrational as I originally thought. If I missed the lunch window I would be feeding myself an extremely early dinner and would run the risk of having to eat again before bed and wake up not hungry enough to eat breakfast and basically start on the slippery slope of a digestive apocalypse. Gastrocalypse, I call it.

Then I started thinking about how simple it is to understand something as universal as why and when people eat and it really got my goat that people can understand the need to put food in their mouths, but they can't understand something else as equally simple and universal as basic human rights. Or maybe human rights are not as simple as eating. Oh wait they are. If you deprive someone of food, you should be able to understand what that deprivation does to you and by extension what it likely does to another object of similar mechanical and chemical make up and necessities even if you don't count that object as a person. I mean if kicking a dog with the wrong part of your foot hurts your foot a little, you should be able to assume that a dog, made out of similar material as you, probably felt it too. Not that I would ever kick a dog. I love dogs. Slightly more than people sometimes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's baffling the body of things that are universally understood and the body of things that are still, however many generations and iterations of human beings later, up for debate and challenged and I don't think that my own work will help to make those things that should be universally understood about the collective human organism and illustrated and painted and constructed about it will help to further clarify or cement those universals. My body of work to date is teeny tiny, though larger than it's ever been, and if I want to help (and I do, just a little) I have to not die yet. I'm in the first few thousand hours of work toward mastery well enough to make clear every attempt at expression and the induction of clarity and there's still work to be done if people are going to eat three meals a day with any kind of universality.

Slightly selfishly, if I were to die, I feel like I would be ashamed of my body of work. I feel today like I've only begun to fill a thimble and I need several buckets if I'm ever going to put out the fire inside me, let alone across the borders and city limits of my body's ends.

///Susumu Hirasawa - "Condition Boy" ...delusions of an alternate and terribly grand universe are

Think of the Capacitance, Reconnection, and No More Funny (for now)

I am way too neurotic to be funny. At least for now. Rage is too close to my funny bone, or maybe I just need to drink more and relax. It would be terrific if I was compartmentalized and organized enough to be funny on a whim, but unlike athletes and super brains my insides are all mashed up. It would be a lot like a professional football player who couldn't divide on the field violence and competitiveness from his private life. And then again, that's not really a good example because that happens all the time.

More like a race car driver who, sitting at a lunch table, grabs his plate of food, dumps all the food on the floor, and proceeds to use the plate like a steering wheel as he pilots his five hundred horse power table to victory lane while making car noises and leaning aggressively into the g forces of every nonexistent turn to keep his eye line level with the candy striped rumble strips. So in trying to be funny I stray hard into anger and then can't really get back out of it until I talk about it directly. So let's give it a rest for a little while till I can find the kid again and day dream in the grass and look at the stars without feeling loss.

I do want them dead and to watch them picked over by sand flies, but I've got decades to wait for that release and until then attempting escape by any means is setting myself up for thousands of crest falls. I spent a lot of time, hours, whilst pissing the nights away at a job that is barely wondering what I could do, how long it will take, before I can fully move on from them and the fallout of their actions and I think the answer is never, but once they're gone it'll at least be an exercise in dividing the distance to balance in half until it is, for practical purposes and functions, zero. I can live with that. I just have to not explode into embers of rageous delirium before then.

There's been some safe connection. With people again. Which has been pleasant. A first contact on hailing frequencies. It wasn't easy. I'm still, more or less, in the same orbit and unable to land yet, but am prepared to do so at the earliest convenience. Things just haven't been particularly funny of late. Or maybe they have. When I think about my job I think of how I have to talk myself up to it, talk myself into it, and talk myself safely out of it when my shift is over. It struck me as what some people porn probably have to do before the big scene involving a series of serial and parallel acts degrading enough to make them unconscionable to most human beings if they themselves had to be on the set to see the uncropped and unflattering angles or participate in any capacity. "Come on, you can do this. Just two more hours and it's over."

The connection itself has been fantastic. To be spoken to as a person. A fantastic experience. Addressed as not a liability or wildcard or moron or ass or subordinate or fractured or toxified, but just as another person. It's a good feeling. To be treated without strings. Granted it takes a lot of effort to rejoin that sort of treatment, to flow back the channel and engage on the common field line. It's hard. People take that for granted. Of course there are ten paths and channels extending and entering throughput throughout the exchange, but to choose to engage is worth the effort. So if I ever break out into sweats while I'm talking to you, you now know why. Practice makes more practice.

The poetry has been slacking, but like I said before, I'm only two hands, one pair of eyes, and one mouth to handle my production cue and my hands have been busy at Bits for Flames recently trying to make sense of old rough drafts and fix continuities and cut into the cores of what was trying to be said and expressed and constructed. If I had to call my writing style anything I would call it some kind of impressionism and, while tickling my brain's predilection for flights of romantic picturesque fancy and curly serifed constructions, it doesn't readily lend itself to conflation and linearity. Editing. Frustrating. I spent two hours trying to press reason out of thematic cross signaling before shoving it out there anyway because sometimes I have to shove off of something for a while before I can come back and look at it and see what's not connecting. Maybe that's why I shove off of myself sometimes, but always come back to try and fix me later. I'm 9 today.

I think I'm going to plot out my birthdays through the year to my projected death at 70 in a freak race car driving accident.

I went to a job fair where a woman was telling me that I could be published without having read a single word I'd written or even glancing at my "child born in the heart of blighted Africa" thin resume. She made the comment after I told her I loved writing when she told me that the seminary she represented recently added a one unit course on publishing. I'm pretty sure she was mainly looking to add to her auto mailer sign up sheet. I didn't sign up. She kept telling me how great my personality was. I kept wanting to tell her I was mostly just happy to be in a place where people were happy to see me just because I was there, but I didn't. It was a fun conversation nonetheless. Beats out talking to myself in my kitchen about what the smell coming out of the kitchen sink u trap might have been.

I'm tired and hungry. Resisting the solid state. Meals have slipped again. I had them nice and spread out over 16 hours at reasonable intervals a month ago. They're now back to a huddled mass of desperate consumption over four hours. Whatever I thought I did to fix that has unfixed itself. The unfucked has refucked and I have to power up and use my guts and grit to push it apart again and once more become awesome, because let's face it, only you can make you awesome.

I've accomplished no further work on the paper robot, but it is still on my table alongside my drawing pad that has NOT gathered dust... ...yet and my notebook. I have pages and pages and pages of notes to go through. It's frustrating. My hobby is my work, but my work doesn't let me eat so I have to do fake work to get food tokens so I don't die and then when I come home to do my real work I am too exhausted to engage it fully. It's this odd lockup. Hobbies are supposed to leave you rejuvenated and expanded and more whole as a person and my hobby is awesomely fulfilling and makes me so post coitus contented that I don't want to do anything else, but it is also massively exhausting and time and energy consuming that I can't do it and then run off to fake work to get my damn food and rent tokens, which is why I need to outright buy property. At least that way the amount of money I would be required to earn to stay alive would be drastically reduced. Probably my number one reason to get back into school some day, but buying property will probably be cheaper in the long run. Which is why it is reason number one after the two hundred reasons why it will probably and in all honesty, with the kind of person wired the way that I am, should not happen. Stupid genes.

So here I am. Pinging you and pinging me. Still alive and happily so. The value of life is not the journey. I hope everyone who says things like that gets stabbed in the eye socket. I don't understand how anyone can go through life without creating something and then pursuing further creation. More than anything else that is who I am. Generator. Taking in raw material and constructing. There was something else on the tip of the ax pick of my brain. But I can't remember it. I'm going to go through some old notes and share them if they're interesting. I'm going to get my hands back into my dream housing and tear more words and motions and highs and visions from the fabric and sew them together for me and for you. I miss that. I've missed you in this urgent proofing against premature self destruction. We should hang out sometime.



///Elastica - "Connection" This concludes our broadcast day.

dear (______):

Dear job fair booths,

Now is not the time to prey on the jobless and their last few fistfuls of dollars. Can we please be honest with those seeking to establish a life for themselves for just two hours? Is that really too much to ask? This is the land of opportunity, but for Christ's sake the land can yield things so much more important than a crap shoot of nebulous promises so let's work her for something more than empty promises.

wanting to be your friend,

the unlanded.

Stand Up Act 4

Act 3

So speaking of sex, I am, like the fraction of people on the face of the Earth that is left when you subtract the fraction of people having sex and the people required for them to be having sex with and the people having sex with inanimate objects and the people having sex with animated objects that are not human, not having any. Not in the sense of Madea, prototypical, big body, big attitude, possibly half black half hispanic chick who is for some reason also part Italian and who speaks just enough Spanish to half mast men between the ages of 15 and 15 at heart "ain't havin that", but more like it's something that just doesn't happen to me. Which is of course not at all my fault.

It's out there. If I could walk around with my fly down all day and not get immediately arrested and or tackled by angry citizens and patriots of so called decency, I probably would. When I was a kid, I've been told I once spent a day naked. Just a-walkin around doin my thing sans robes. I don't remember that at all, but I wish I could because it sounds like the most awesome summer day imaginable. Nothing but deluxe jumbo sidewalk chalk, empty chalk boards, water guns, and G.I. Joes. Or maybe that was just a dream. I may very well have dreamt that.

Not to stray too far, but I just remembered I kissed someone in a dream I had the other night. That's kind of fucked up. Who the hell was it that I kissed? What if they show up in another dream and they're pissed off because I don't remember them from the first one and they try to stab me to death with a snapped off tea cup handle, because we were for some reason having tea on top of an 18 wheeler barreling down a train barreling up the train tracks in the middle of one of those stupid riddles where the answer is that the entire premise is false and you'd know it if you paid attention with more brain cells than you can muster for just about anything at 5 in the afternoon without having to be asked long winded questions about bullshit scenarios you'll never actually have to deal with in real life unless you became a train conducting mad scientist sociopath with a taste for apples, pizzas, and buckets of multicolored marbles.

At any rate, it's not my fault, but if I never had sex again I don't think I would be particularly ticked off. Don't get me wrong. This is not a complaint at all. It is an observation that if I were to offer myself up to women on say death row I would probably get passed over by the entire starting rotation twice before getting picked up by the bench warmer still running her case through the appellate courts because I do not understand how that interaction is supposed to work on a pretty basic level. If however I were to offer myself up to the men on say death row I would probably get passed over by the entire line up too, but probably not twice, because let's face it, when you're staring down the barrel of a death sentence in solitary confinement every person you meet is basically the last man or woman on Earth as far as you'll ever know and "if you give a dog a bone" and so forth... ...I don't know what the chick half of that is... Unless they have tv in there. Then all bets are off. If I watched more television specials about how bad ass the bad asses in Federal "holy fuck that prison is hard core compared to my life" on the Discovery channel I would know the answer to that. But I don't. Life is full of mysteries. I think I do live in a magical and fucked up time. Here's why: by the time I reach a point where I will be desperate to get laid and/or lay someone technology will in all likelihood have created an affordable artificial human being that I can purchase to satisfy my every whim and thus complete the compartmentalization of myself into the American technological socio strata and finally make me utterly oblivious to the larger issues of human existence and thus quite happy. You remember in the Matrix when the humans were all hooked up to that machine? What if the machines found it much easier on processing power to stimulate the body instead of the mind directly with a feed of images through the eyes and attendant nose and mouth nonsense. I bet the crotch uplink to the matrix would be the most awesome piece of technology ever. Go to the future and steal one. Is what I would do. Screw finding the machine city. I was just go steal one of those and go nuts until my brain stroked off from a lack of oxygenated blood.

Like the mystery of why any woman on the face of the Earth would ever complain at any age that no one wants her. I personally do not believe that there is a special one person out there for anyone. I won't say that I know it for a fact, but I will say that I'm pretty damn sure just about every relationship that was a sure fire thing that I've seen up close for an extended period of time has basically become either a business agreement, a perpetual fire drill, or has been blown apart with more permanence and finality than a gross analogy about female plumbing and giving birth to triplets. Or maybe I'm just cynical.

Sad ladies out there who believe for one reason or another that you will never be loved, answer the following two questions: Do you have a vagina? Can you work it? If the answers to either of those questions is "yes" then fear not (knowledge of what "working it" is need not bear particular significance). Someone will take an interest in you to gain access to your vagina and perhaps discover along the way that you're a pretty swell person too. Or maybe the other way around. They might think you're an awesome person and hang out with you for a while and get to know you because you really are great company and then one day they might walk in on you while you're in the bathroom and discover that you have a vagina completely by accident and then stumble backward in disbelief before screaming for the deliverance of Jesus himself and go into shock because their best buddy has been a transvestite all along, but then they'll come out of their coma a few weeks later and have wonderful relations or something equally romantic. So don't sweat it. No need to fret. No need to write brutally long entries in your diaries with the daisies scribbled on them next to the balloons and other squiggly shapes your hands draw because your forearms are about as strong as damp marshmallows wrapped around found twigs. Someone out there in this big world wants to stare deeply into your eyes and whisper those magic words "I want to plow you" when they're fifteen beers in and haven't noticed that you've been sipping the same one for the last four hours.

Kidding. That was pretty harsh. But not as harsh as listening to women bitch about not getting laid or being unlovable. Not my fualt. But seriously, ladies, you're all wonderful most of the time. Some of you are awful all of the time, and some of you I wish were guys so we could hang out all the fucking time, get drunk and play football and videogames and fistfight and get into shit with other people at bars and basically piss excellence 24/7. And some of you are wonderful all the time. Or at least all of the times that I get to interact with you, because human interaction is really not my ultimate forte. At any rate I'm gay anyway so not only am I not interested in hearing about it from a logical standpoint, I'm not interested in hearing about it from a physiological stand point, and that means I'm way serious because the word I just used to expound upon my previous standpoint is twice as big. So it's twice as serious. It's the rules of English. Can't be helped and even if I could change them I wouldn't because changing them that drastically again would be like changing a clown's outfit so many times that he ends up wearing a three piece suit to a children's party, painted in white face, with the red nose and rainbow hair and that would scare the shit out of kids. Imagine if they thought that when they grew up they would have to work with clowns. Never knowing if their stapler had a joy buzzer attached to it. Never knowing if the next filing cabinet they opened would fire spring loaded snakes into their eyeballs or if their boss would mandate the entire office carpool in Fred's Huyndai accent with the seats in the back that aren't large enough to fit a baby folded up into a briefcase. That would be a nightmare for them. Not far from the truth, but a nightmare nonetheless. so I'm not going to do that to you with language. Encouraging irresponsibility is a shameful and hilarious thing that is to be, if anything, encouraged.

So what do I do instead of sex? I punch walls sometimes. Relieves stress in that same way and they both eventually end in tears and sore muscles. The only difference is after punching walls I don't need to take a shower. That and I can punch walls in public. Can't use sex toys in public. They will either lock you up or... ...throw money at you? Life lessons don't mix well with logic. Moving on though, I want to keep this light hearted as I have a habit of falling into myself like a cat into a toilet.

I'm still getting used to living alone. It's not a bad thing, but I was just thinking about it before I got sidetracked. For the majority of my life prior to age 25 I was either forced to live with other people, opted to live with other people, or had a space of my own in which to isolate myself, but could at any point choose to come out of that space and join a close knit public space of human beings. Since I've gotten too old to comfortably hang out in that space without freaking people the fuck out eventually and since I can't force myself to live with other people or force other people to live with me if I wanted to I am in the strange territory of lone man's land. It's been a learning experience.

The biggest thing you have to get used to is having no one around to tell you when you've got an exceptionally terrible idea that should not be pursued any further than it's inception, but much like when you were little and thought maybe if you watched where that little white puff of tree pollen went and followed it to its destination it would help you figure out where it could have come from and why it had the power to catalyze wish making, simply glimpsing the idea is enough to demand a second look. And then a third look. And then a fourth look, but it's drifting out of sight so if you want to make out its details you're going to have to pursue it, but only just a little. Just enough to get a better look. And then before you know it you're building a system of tubes to enable you to water the plants in your bathroom with your urine instead of getting sleep before you have to be at work in four hours.

The second biggest thing you have to get used to, well I should say, the second biggest indicator that you're probably not ready or used to living truly alone yet is when you realize you try to talk your way around the messes you made so that you don't have to clean them up. I don't mean like you tell yourself you'll clean it up later, I mean you hit the full blown "I didn't spill that so I shouldn't have to clean it up" argument. With yourself. Right after you the milk you were pouring on your cereal got a little too enthusiastic and did it's milk dance right over the edge of your bowl. When you're standing in your kitchen on Sunday morning bargaining with yourself and telling yourself that you'll take out the trash, but if you do you'll have to treat yourself with a beer and doggie biscuit for helping out because most of that trash isn't yours anyway and you've been taking out the trash and washing dishes all your life to earn a place to sleep and you shouldn't have to do it here and now in a place you are paying for outright. But you both know there's no chamber boy to lay out your formal shorts and take out the trash so what the fuck have you just been blathering about for the last hour. Just wipe up the milk and get on with your day. And that's when it hits you. You're still not used to getting up in the morning and having a sink full of dirty dishes with no one to blame but yourself and even then the understanding of your culpability escapes in the face of the simple and ridiculously sound reasoning that "maybe someone else did it".

Did I say sound? I meant unsound. About as sound as sex jokes in an STD clinic. Laughing yet? Me neither, but I do feel slightly better about myself so maybe you should too, if it works that way. I don't really know how that rule works.

Stand Up Act 3 (the sex chapter part 1)

Act 2

So I'm stumbling around myself at this point, now that we've formally met, so I figure now is probably the optimal time to get the sex diatribe out of the way, because every comic with some semblance of an edge has a short few thoughts on the matter. I feel a bit reserved here even beginning to begin about something so taboo and my main concern is to keep it from becoming your typical open mic gutter ball nonsense.

Let's begin by observing that every single magazine toting 100 sex moves to get your man off is patently not worth buying for the following reasons:

I'm kidding. Do I really have to go into how 95 of the things those editors tell you to do in the privacy of your own home are things you don't have to do to please a person of the opposite sex? Or maybe they are. I've never been married. I suppose perhaps if your life becomes something like opening up a refrigerator and already knowing what's in there, but gotdamnit a man's gotta eat, maybe you do need 100 tips so that you can discard 99 of them and try one and feel like you're some sort of wild animal because if you were a decent person you wouldn't follow tips outlaid in a magazine distributed nationally and vetted by a committee of people whose only goal in life is to produce something so inoffensive that their jobs would not be jeopardized by its dissemination. I'm crazy. I just followed the advice of something published in the cosmopolitan and it told me to finger my husbands bung hole because that would drive him wild... or something. Hopefully you understand the absurdity of that so I don't have to go backward and break it down. Hopefully you don't read Cosmo because I mean, after all, you're here and I would like to think of myself as very uncosmo by default which is what would have attracted you to an open mic in the first place. Very uncosmo thoughts.

So I have it in my head to lay this out in three parts. Why three parts, you ask? Mainly to give people the opportunity to walk out before things get too hot and heavy for them, as hot and heavy as things can get at an optional survey of sound and life things. I forgot where I was going to begin with in this iteration though so fuck it. Be careful though. Eventually I will stumble on this thread again and have something to say about something and then the jig will be up and not all the tea in China will save you from what is read. What has been seen cannot be unseen. At least not yet, but I hear there's an app for that coming soon. Not as great as zombie edition Playstation 12, but almost as awesome. I was thinking it might be called Iwipe, but that is just way too easy. Maybe Iblack, if African Americans get over themselves by then and see the word play there for getting your game face on in the face of oncoming, body crushing, defeat on the field of verbal mental sport.

I was considering that I will live to see the hundredth anniversary of the Holocaust though. Very unsexy, but I'm sure there will be many an observance and remembrance for something as world changing and visible, because let's face facts it wasn't the absolute worst holocaust to blight mankind and it won't be the last, but it was the most visible and stirring human crisis that I can remember learning about (that has for the shear depth of information blotted out many a closer more painful and relevant crisis since), and that's a lot of qualifiers and hedges in a string. Basically I struck upon the remembrance of the beginnings of American slavery and I wondered why that is not on it's three hundredth or four hundredth or I don't know and don't really care all that much iteration of anniversarial celebration or remembrance. And then I remembered that our diaspora joined us to the fabric of our nation and our world much more closely than theirs because we didn't have a unifying culture, but a diversifying one and then I felt like I was being a racist and then I laughed because I mean really, am I going to live for another forty years anyway? Probably not.

It did make me wonder what the equation for the production, direction, and Cannes entry of Holocaust films was. I think the time is fast approaching when the more current world changing cultural near extinctions will fade into irrelevant obscurity in the face of modern day challenges and changes. Time scars all wounds or something to that effect.

At any rate, sex will still be around so some segment of the car drivin sex havin populace will still be quite content to do what it does and to hell with history. But seriously genocide is bad so I'll make an effort to be sexier and more hilarious because I'm pretty sure I'm depressing myself and that is not funny. Or is it? Cue Sex and the City segue music.

Stand Up Act 2

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One, Two, Three, Four-

Gone for a minute. Task locked again. I wish there was a way to make progress across the board. Sometimes I feel like I'm on that first frustrating and seemingly never ending series of levels in a role playing game where the experience points to level up are far between simply because the power needed to earn them is severely constricted by the lack of experience. You can wander around all you want. Your actual experience has nothing to do with your point registered experience. In fact you've been wandering around so long that you know the game pretty much inside and out, but because you don't have the power to advance you can't earn the power to advance. Well, not can't, but it's the least you can do to keep running around the periphery of the real game performing the time intensive little things to keep earning the game's recognized experience points and stacking up your little levels until you come across a monster and suddenly find that you've actually accumulated enough attack points to make it more than facing imminent destruction and instant death.

Not that writing is instant death. Or working a bad job that cuts your hours down to next to nothing even though you are the best at what you do there. I guess what I'm saying is I've had very few points to spend and I wish sometimes there was a way to get more other than slugging it out every day and for me there isn't. Everything's not okay, but I deal with it and try to move anyway. Move on, sometimes. Other times, just focusing on moving somewhere. Anything besides staying put and curling up into an ass ball.

So where's the progress? Where have the precious points disappeared too? Arts and crafts mostly. Some were spent on getting better at baseball and bike riding. A lot of them were spent on control. Just white knuckle gripping the control panel behind my eyes and making it go. Reorganization is a pretty difficult thing, but worth it. It's sort of sticking. The whole eating three times a day thing has been a huge hassle, but necessary as I learned through the worst pain I've ever felt that not eating and not drinking will send your body into shock and you will die. And I don't want to die alone. Especially not alone and convulsing in a bath tub some random Tuesday afternoon. I just have to deal with the rest of the bullshit attendant with putting food stuffs in my face. There's no patch or workaround for that. It's sticking and slipping. I've already slipped back to two a day. Because of the task locking.

That's what happens when mighty efforts make few gains, I guess. You try to force more effort into the same, largely fixed spans of time and eventually the only way to "make the most" out of your day is to make the least out of routine necessities. Strip it down to the bones and then shave the bones down to filaments. I'm pressing myself into a pure circuit of function. Solid state being. That's not possible yet though. So I have to not do that.

I have phone calls to make that I haven't made. Landing has been harder than I anticipated. I thought I could do it in three weeks, but the the process is in the first few days of what is looking to take better than a month. Not helping is that I'm trying to find more work so I can afford some less than necessary human peripherals and possibly move out of the periphery and closer to the heart of Pittsburgh. That alone would make life easier. Would make progress easier. It would be a definite level up that would increase my ability to earn more commonly accepted experience points. Game recognized points. But if I did start on meds, meds that are, let's face it, necessary if I plan on staying alive (and I do for the foreseeable future), that would require at least 10 days of adjustment and who knows how many days after that of learning to live with the side effects. Last time I tried I ended up throwing up every other day for almost two months which was just a whole big bag of laughs and the last thing I want is to be in a situation where I'm trying to nail down and learn a new job while adjusting to pills.

I guess it's a little funny. How easy it is to set ones self up for failure. I'm managing now through effort, but effort only goes so far when you try to out howl the wind. So I'm choosing. We've a target destination. We're in a decaying orbit that will take us into the atmosphere and ultimate to solid ground, but we can't simply make attitude adjustments and punch it just yet. One: we will break up into a thousand burning pieces if we did that. Two: we are task locked. Three: we haven't made the necessary progress through the shut down sequence to make that even start to be feasible. That's what I've been working through these last weeks. Reorganization. Cataloging of processes and species. Reconnection with the mission. Re-engagement with the real. Human maintenance.

Remember when I said my job was great because it engaged the machine side of my being. Well I've divorced my eating cycle from my workplace and I've divorced machine engagement from it too. I'm cutting my selves free from any critical ties to that place because it really is not. Forcing myself into that breed or reliance has not been helping me in the ways I thought it was. Set up for failure. I wish sometimes I was not such a believer in all things. I am gullible. Tremendously disposed to wonder. I've yet to understand how it will ever be a good thing.

I spent about twenty hours on this:



It's a gift for an old friend that was supposed to be a christmas gift. But we all know how winter made good and basically ate up every free moment I had getting set up for autonomous life. It's turning out good though. Another forty hours and it should be done and mailed. I hope it is enjoyed and loved. Probably shelved and boxed and collecting dust at some point in its future, but I hope when the box is first opened it produces awe and a smile. I don't really know why I am pursuing its completion so doggedly. I think, if there is a reason, that reason would have to be because I said I would. And God damn it I make good to my friends because my word is just about all I've got these days in the way of common currency.

So curtain up. One, two, three, four... Let's make more things happen. Let's take showers and brush our teefs, and go outside, and work ourselves over at our gyms till we get nose bleeds, and let's treat work like the shit job it is and nothing more, and let's eat at home and sleep less than ten hours, and watch the ghosts with careful eyes, and listen not too close, and smile a little harder, and frown with conviction, and be honest, and medicate as necessary, and things aren't going to work out, but that's no reason to... ...to what? What happens when things keep not working out? Dream revision? No. Yes? I guess I just have to remind myself that I do other things. Metajail is real. But, even prisons have libraries. I think. I can't remember. Probably.

I am building a life outside of a life to save my life. That's it! That's what's been eating up my time! HAH! wow. It only took me how many hundreds of words to reach that realization. I'm actually laughing. I think that is what the last three weeks have been. Let's get back to it. Sorry I've been away. But you know I'll never be gone too long- visiting hours in metajail are worth sticking around for almost by themselves.


///Boards of Canada - "Aquarius" Music has the right to children. Sometimes I think every year you are born. You are the child of your previous year in the same way that you are the child of your parents material and experiences and equations. I'm on my twenty sixth iteration. I guess I'm raising my own child now for the teen years of summer and the maturation of fall and the adulthood of another winter. I owe myself a birthday wishlist for next year. Maybe this year will be the year I buy that square of land in North Dakota. I think that's a reasonably lofty and approachable goal. I wonder if I have to go there to buy it or if I can do it from here. Maybe I'll see what's available here first and go from there. Either way I'm glad I'm still alive and closer to touching down. Shit's been turbulent.

dear (______):

Dear "poor" person,

Please stop talking about how "poor" you are. Please stop citing bogus examples of your destitution. If you own a fucking charge card that starts with "Am" and ends with "ex," you are not poor. If your job pays so much that it would be silly to talk about an hourly rate, you are not fucking poor. If your cold cuts are sliced at the deli counter and your cheese doesn't come individually wrapped with disclaimers on the packaging about its nutritional value, your are probably not fucking poor. Manage your money better. Stop being an asshole. And for the love of grilled cheesus stop talking about it like being poor is some sort of club whose membership somehow qualifies and dignifies your spoon fed existence and gives you "perspective".

I sware to god. If you make one more fucking quip that ends with "...that's how poor I am..." I'm going to come to your house and belt bricks through your fucking windows at 4 AM until I can't feel my fingers anymore.