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.