New Album, but Not The One Slated

I have had this idea for a new album budding alongside the one currently gestating. And it's going to be easier to do, so I thought I would bang it out before the space invaders get by on me. Pull the trigger.

We're all familiar with feeling moments and feeling THE moment so instead of going to sleep and crossing the bridge to fulfill tasks that cannot be accounted for in the realm of the commonly accessed, I am going to dry and bang out nine tracks in this album. I want it to be an lp. But we'll see how the gods of chemistry and passion fight it out. I haven't eaten today. I figure I'll reward myself with some MM...Food if I trot this out the whole gang way. Tag along maybe?


///Rush - "Tom Sawyer" this song makes me think about video games, because I am a huge Futurama fan. However, it also just makes me feel like doing a ton of thankless wonderful things that make me smile and to hell with everyone else's standards of things that should or should not elicit a little lip and tooth action because, gotdamnit, if I don't do some button mashing, no one will. Should I link to the exact episode? Probably. Will I? Probably not. Where's the joy in non-discovery.

Take It Light and Hungry Muffins

I had this thought last night before work. I was foot loosing through some drafts of head poems that were approaching paper semi-permanence and what I was thinking about was a way to make the words more active. One of the problems with poetry is that it lends itself to passive construction, which is not always a bad thing as a starting point, but is a bad thing in the final deliverable. Poetry saddled up high and hard with passive constructions and ideas and sentences and fragments becomes burdensome pretty quickly.

The longer the poem the more noticeable the passive effect becomes and it's frustrating to me. For me it's a major obstacle most of the time. Taking a point of view out of a poem, making it neuter, or making it accessible and multiplicable, I guess open ended comes to mind, can also very quickly take so much focus out of it that it becomes a lot like staring at those damnable 3D art calendars that are supposed to be ships on the canals of Venice if you stare through them hard enough for an hour or two and that's not always what I want to create. Passivity leaves "so what"s dangling in the air afterward. Forgetability is probably the greatest symptom that tells you something bore too many passive structures to mean what it wanted to mean, whether by accident or on purpose. Which made me think some more as I tongued the words over and over to get a better angle.

What I struck on, and it's not new, is the idea that it's easy to write about being hungry, or being depraved, or being happy. The thing that adds in some separation between the people that can do that and the people that can write about hunger, the people that can write about depravity, and the people that can construct happiness is the conversion, successful conversion, of passive to active without losing parallels and loops and flurries of movement in meaning and senses that make words vibrate and condense into what could be considered a poem. Personally my definition of poetry is pretty wide. My professors never took too much of a shine to it, but whatever. They had Ph.Ds to work on or something. Skin tight jeans to squeeze into. Hair to gel. And tattoos to reveal corners of to beg questions from star eyed lyric junkie chicks. I assume. I'm pretty sure one was too busy to help me pass his class because he was way too busy cramming elements of his thesis into our heads to get raw useful material out of us that he could reincorporate later. Also too busy sucking his own cock. Which is beside the point.

I want to write not about being hungry, or being a muffin, or being asleep, but what I want to capture the verb state of hunger, the verbness of the muffin, the sensation of the sleeping and sometimes in the building it's so easy to slip off on passive bubbles and think I've accomplished something when in reality it was forgettable to everyone who wasn't there to see the furious action, the sparks, the welding, the rivet guns, and the workers high in the sky putting it all together and wrecking ballin' it back down and throwing it up again higher and higher and lower and lower.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I need to remember not to beat myself up over the work I love to do. At least not too hard. It is, afterall, my chosen line of work. The rest is just to make sure I have enough to keep on going until it's all done and all over. And that's what counts. So I say right now. From the top of a cresting wave of anti-comedown. From the edges of comfortable space.

Space has been treating me alright. I'm probably about to leave the inner system at some point. The view has been great. Miss the steady contact, but quite frankly it was unsustainable without help and on top of that it was as many parts discomfort as comfort. I don't know if all or nothing is reasonable, but it is a way. And for a plains walking spaceman it's the only way I've come to know for sure that let's me go as I mean to run on. So I take it. Light and sound. I don't really know if I'm gonna try to land again. Probably not. Gravity is for chumps.

On a totally unrelated note: I just realized that if I turn my chapstick all the way down there is virtually no way for it to get screwed up into the cap as it rubs against the sides of my pockets. Why did it take me damn near ten years of using chapsticks to figure that out!? Talk about essential information no one told me EVER. I mean, I'm sometimes not the fastest car on the track, but am I the last person in my peer group to figure this out? I suspect, quite possibly, yes.


///The Orb - "Spanish Castles in Space" After you come home from the longest day of work ever and lock your front door, put this on loud enough to hear it clearly no matter what you're doing. In the time it takes you to take your shoes off, take off your clothes, crack a beer, roll a joint, put on your homey clothes, and start to think about dinner and actually start to breath easy this song will sop it's way right into your brain and you won't even have realized it's whispering in your ear and all the bottom half of your brain can feel is the ocean lapping at your brain stem and your spine unwinding and you haven't done a damn thing to force the issue. It's just there. Actively soothing you.

dear (______):

Dear future self,

Stop moving my stuff around. You daft bastard.

thanks,

the management.

Coming Soon - Art Pending a Day Off to Make It

Predator - tagline: The ultimate rage quit. You know it's coming.

Tom Cruise headliner - tagline: More intense than the trailer suggests.

Kevin Costner headliner - tagline: Thoughtful. Despite the supporting cast.

Danny Glover headliner - tagline: We're all too old, but we want you to say it.

Nicholas Cage headliner - tagline: Better than the script, but what the hell.

Adam Sandler headliner - tagline: We've all felt that pain.

Eva Mendez headliner - tagline: More than breasts, but who's keeping track.

Jay and Silent Bob - tagline: No, he doesn't say anything funny. Again.

House Party - tagline: I don't really know either.

Anything Tyler Perry - tagline: Life sucks, but be loud and colorful.

DiCaprio headliner - tagline: It's a crap shoot. Don't hedge.

Alec Baldwin supporting - tagline: stay classy trumps bad writing. Every time.

Samuel Jackson headliner - tagline: loud beats funny. Tragedy beats funny. Loud complements tragedy. Tragedy complements funny. Win, win, w1n.

Christina Ricci supporting - tagline: you thought you knew, but you already bought the popcorn.

Brad Pitt headliner - tagline: Kevin Costner never had scripts so good.

Edward Norton headliner - tagline: fasten your seatbelt. Or don't. You've been warned.

Gary Oldman supporting - tagline: you have not paid enough to see what you are about to see.

All Your Base, Repair, and an Album

So I wasn't sure if I'd have time to stop by today and of course the debate ran right up to the last minute so I figured it would be alright to do this while I wait for my dinner to cool off before I jam it in my face and run off to the labor camp to receive the minimum amount of pay allowable by law for the maximum amount of human labor they can yank out of me. In a bizarro sense it's like paying your life savings for the worst imaginable hand job the human mind can devise. Go nuts with that.

I was over the bridge again and, wow, I wish you could of seen it. I don't know what happened between my last visit and this one, but whatever action was being prepared for happened. The entire place was gouged to hell. There was not a train to be seen or car or bus and there was ash on the ground everywhere thick enough to cup a fist in and still lose your hand all the way to the wrist. The sun was out when I got there and I was able to eventually find a bicycle. Actually I tripped over it while walking through a wide street and it kicked loose from the thick gray and ultra fine sand and the air was so still that the cloud it raised just sort of hung there like ghost moss. I rode around for hours and the tires were thin enough to cut through the ash where it wasn't mixed with gutter water into a paste. There was no ash in the air until my eyes traveled all the way up the sides of the ruined buildings rising up glassless and skeletal here and there and saw that the atmosphere way up where the cotton balls of clouds should be was just one big fluxing shifting mass of brownish black and tan where the sun tried and failed to poke through. Everywhere there were the shapes of people. That was the creepy thing. It was as if every person not killed or fled, or almost every person, was turned into some hunched mass of iron pipe or some caught rag work in a chain link fence or a collection of boxes and broken timbers lumped in an alleyway or crawling along atop the ash in a collection of black and white and torn trash bags being tugged along by a stray's leash. It was all very wide and very hard to take it all in at once. The few people I thought I saw ended up being these cruel heaps of shapes and material and rust and broken pipe so I started to give it up and tried to find my way to more broken down and open areas so I could at least feel less claustrophobic when night fell. As I resolved to look no further and to get clear of places where other things that I probably did not want to meet might be hiding in the high iron and burned out rises around me I came across a tablet that I picked up and started watching on and off as I rode out. For some reason Jerry Seinfeld was all that it could play and he kept going on and on about restaurant appetizers and how they come up with all sorts of gimmicks, but in reality we would eat them right out of the bulk freezer bags they're shipped in because we don't care. We just want our taste buds to feel good for a while. I guess he had a point. I tossed it away and it skipped in the dust like a frisbee. I rode for several more hours, but the city kept stretching on and when I stopped to sit on a fire hydrant, after dusting the several inches of gray off of it that piled like a dunce cap I heard his voice cut on again and it scared the living shit out of me. So much so that I lost the connection and woke up back here.

Whatever happened, all their base are now belong to something I didn't think could happen or at least haven't seen before. Possibly evil Jerry Seinfeld. But, I'm sort of looking forward to going back. Sort of wary. Not at all enthusiastic. I'm looking forward to it the way you look forward to going to see a doctor when you have a persistent headache that won't quit and you just need to sleep that badly.

Also yesterday was a day off. Or a night off. This job is really taking it to my shoulders. Over worked and under sexed. No way to limp through life. I spent that day asleep. Well mostly asleep. That and I put in the serious effort to eat three times in one day. Surprisingly difficult. I mean, the thing really is if you sleep you don't need to eat. So if you sleep all the time, you never need to eat. You'll die at an accelerated rate to the average death spans of so many decades, but in sleep things accelerate anyway so you could potentially live much longer asleep than awake eating and trying to prolong this side of things. Of course you wouldn't have to worry about things randomly breaking down around you, but then again things randomly break down in this world all the damn time, so I'm not even sure that's particularly valid. At any rate. I spent most of that day sleeping and eating and trying to feel my muscles knit back together. I don't think I succeeded. I didn't front load enough material for my body to work with before it needed it and now the spaces that should be bridged with proteins and whatever else are now probably jammed with garbage or just left as empty tears... frustrating.... but that's what happens when you blow up your mileage and your engine and don't have the convenience of laying that load on a car and have to lay it on your body. But that'll change.

I started writing another album. Horsemen of the Sun. Released the single earlier on. The full length album is rolling out tomorrow at some point (I hope). It's been gestating long enough. Flash the Firmware was the first album. I wanted it to tell a story of personal mutation and sea change. This one will focus more on the desolation of knowing who you are. Exciting. Depressing. Exploration. Strange territory. Part of the life I'm building apart from the life that has sustained the effort required to do the building. If that makes sense.



///Daedelus - "You're the One" I love you. Not in case no one tells you that. Not in case no one has told you that in a while. Just cause I do. Where would I be without the oft imagined you/me. Try, if you want, to slap How to Operate With a Blown Mind and Northern Stomp together with Love to Make Music To in one playlist and set it to shuffle. It's like black fireworks at night so close to the ground they'll burn you if you watch too close, but too pretty to look away and worth every second of skin peeling flying metal and rock shards.

Skyline, Story Telling and How It's Put

Been watching movies. Just saw Skyline and I didn't not like it. As far as alien invasion films go it's nice to see the aliens win sometimes because, honestly, a star faring species would in all likelihood own man kind pretty hard. There were a couple of things that stood out though as I started fast forwarding to the end to see where it was all going.

The story telling struck me as pretty flat. When the guy from Scrubs died I didn't really feel one way or the other about it. I know I was supposed to feel "aw no, the main character's best friend just got eaten and now he's all alone in the world with his pregnant girl friend who seems to get randomly upset about things people are supposed to be upset about when they're pregnant." However, all I could really think about was how he probably could have made it to safety had his friend not body checked him with a bro hug in a weird attempt to pull him to safety that would, had they been playing basketball, have been an offensive foul. Rescue fail. If someone is running from a giant brain eating semi-sentient mech warrior thingy you probably shouldn't run directly into their only path of egress, whatever your intention.

Ultimately, what it came down to, I decided, was that no one in the film had any real motive to do anything they did beyond the fact that they were supposed to. Which sounds like a reasonable reason to do anything at all, but in terms of telling a story it is the worst thing in the world. You could almost see the writer pulling the strings of the puppets and animating the actions and progressions by sheer harm of will. Not unacceptable, but noticeable. I think that is one of the chief challenges of story telling and writing. Making the strings invisible. Growing motives. Building back story and momentum so that actions are not knee jerk responses to chisels and hammers on a blank canvas.

It was an interesting film. The other thing that stood out pretty starkly by the film's close was that the aliens could have been replaced by just about anything. It could have been a movie about tornadoes. Or a tsunami. Or any natural disaster. Or any sort of invasion. Absent the plot device of them needing brains for whatever reason and you basically have an empty template of two dimensional good looking twenty and thirty somethings trying to survive a blank social upheaval. What sets something like Colossus: The Forbin Project or District 9 apart from Skyline is the construction and development of the nemesis and the invader as a character unto itself. If the voiced actors in Skyline are by and large two dimensional, the invaders are one dimensional and that sort of held it back, though the action was interesting. The film could probably have greatly benefited from thirty more minutes of plot development and enrichment of the hero's foil. If the deaths of the characters are to hold weight as lynch pins in the plot, their lives have to hold weight too and if their lives do not then the executioners must.

Which is what I strive to learn how to do. Craft that balance. And I do not believe I succeed often enough. And so I keep working at it, because it is important to me and the stories I want to tell. Too much of the action and dialog in the film was foreseeable from miles away and though interesting and visually entertaining, it was not much more than that. The other thing that sort of stung me a little bit was some of the final scenes. Why do the brains glow at all? Is that really the best way to extract brains from things? Why not harvest animals instead or in addition? Given the difficulty of the operation, why not find somewhere else less developed? If stars can be crossed, why inferior human stock at all? What about when the brain supply runs out, as it seems the brains burn out so quickly with the difficulty and energy required to procure them in the first place? And I think what really annoyed me was that with all of their technology and apparent ability to regenerate themselves, why were they not just synthesizing brain matter in massive orbital laboratories or something? In the end I was sort of hoping for a larger theme to solidify, but it never did and to end the review I think that is what sent me looking for why I felt a little off after watching it in the first place. Plus, I'm pretty sure if, say Donald Trump, wanted to harvest human brains, he could probably find a better way to do it then creating a giant pile and brute force searching each for brain matter. Just gotta put your mind to it.

Story telling isn't easy. It was an okay movie, but I wouldn't watch it twice. So that's part of why I work on writing so much. I want people to want to read my stories twice.

While I was wrapping this up I noticed the tag still on the blinds I put up recently. The warning tag about the cords. "young children can STRANGLE in cord and bead chain loops," it reads. And I thought, yeah they can, but if you wanted it to really hit home it should probably say "young children can be STRANGLED with." But then I thought about it some more. That's probably not what you should say. People are strange. People like suggestions. People sometimes take suggestions they shouldn't. People sometimes file law suits they shouldn't. How weird would it be to have someone murder their children because a dangling tag on a cord gave them the idea. How much stranger would it be to have the family members of the accused sue the company for giving the perpetrator the idea. I'm sure stranger and more ridiculous things have happened. Like movies where everyone does what they do because if they didn't there wouldn't be anything to show and tell. Silly times. A fine diversion.



///Five Deez - "Sexual for Elizabeth" sometimes the best stories are told in sounds that don't make words. It's all in how it's put.

Brush Your Teeth and Father's Day

I realized today that I don't run out of tooth paste as often as I should. I have been running out of soap on a regular basis. Which is a good thing. Spray paint doesn't wash clothing. Infield sand for some reason stains clothing. Maybe it's because it's some kind of clay. I don't really know. I discovered something today, but I can't really remember what it was so I'm pretty sure that doesn't count as an actual discovery. If the only thing remaining is the place holder that says something happened is there and not the actual thing.

I had this great idea for a series of father's day cards. Basically the idea behind the inspiration was regret. The cards would express the difficult to otherwise express regrets some fathers must feel about their children and then there would be a series of cards that express the pains some children must feel toward their fathers. But it would do it in a very cartoonish Aesop's fables sort of theme. Maybe I'll sketch some up and show you instead of telling you about something that is largely visual.

I splurged on spray paint today. I'm going to get big pieces of poster board later. It's not really poster board. It's cardboard that they wrap pallets of warehoused goods in to protect them from stuff. I have anger issues. Like, the next time I see you I'm gonna twist a beer can in half and paint your face with both hands anger issues. I swear I'm a nice person. I just don't like people that are not nice too.

The entire concept of father's day is silly at best. To be indebted to a human being is a fairly miserable experience. To be indebted to a human being and forced, or at least expected, to sing their praises, even once a year, every year, year after year is amazingly centric and unreal. I suppose there is a difference if it is something that you actually want to do. It reminds me of singing god save the queen when you're locked up in London tower. Or god save the Bushes when you're sitting in a cell in the heat of Texas awaiting trial. Or god bless the driver that smashed my legs to splinters, because without them I would never learn to appreciate life's other gifts. I don't need to be stabbed to appreciate what life is like having not been stabbed in the chest. I do appreciate my physical handicap free life and live it as hard as I can, rain or shine. I can appreciate what life without a father would be like. As far as I can envision it, it probably would have been pretty awesome. I'm pretty sure I don't know exactly what I'm talking about. Slant rhyme logic.

I do know that all I want in the shortest term is for father's day to pass without harassment, guilt tripping, or indictment. That would be swell for once. A dawn of a new era of leave me the fuck alone because I'm done with you fucking with my body and my mind. Hopefully some people can respect that. Pushing back out to a safe distance in full afterburn. It's odd. Well not odd. Normal. If anything, just normal. As normal as things get around here in this region of space. Accepting known threats in favor of unknown ones. I still think about Jee. I still worry from time to time, but less frequently than on the hour, that I will die alone in a vacuum. Not that I believe it to be any less undesirable. Corporeal claustrophobia. The panic. And then the reeducation toward the necessity of a thing. Goodbye cruel world. Hello cruel space. I gotta do better at myself.

I think I might be a stronger person. I'm not really sure. More concrete perhaps. More defined, but stronger possibly closer to not. Different certainly. A realignment of the arbitrary rule set the preserves my sanity and integrity as much as possible. I brush my teeth. I wash. I go to a job. I create. All good things. Things a person should be able to do to warrant a continuation of. An extension of. I'm not doing bad things I don't think. Hell, I fucking brush my teeth. That should count for something. Like some sort of minimum civilized score.

I hit 7 the other day. Haven't churned out 7 pieces in a while. Some were campy, but a handful hit the notes I wanted to hit. Got some software to play notes on my computer using my qwerty board. Might actually be able to make some music in Acid pro. Worked through all of the interactive help segments too. Now I just need to learn how music works. Got an ebook on electronic music years ago. One of those Routledge books. Might actually try and get a physical instrument once I work my way through it. I was very excited when I first got it, but then I also had papers due every week so I didn't have much spare time to read and learn it. Not anymore. Well I still have it. But the free time issue is less of an issue. I've taken a little more to reading in the spare minutes while I'm waiting for things to complete so I can move on to what the days hold next. It's probably a good use of time as I'm trying against my better judgement to try and get a second job. My head will probably collapse in on itself when I do, but I have to try if I'm ever going to successfully fight my way across the bullshit obstacles standing between me and becoming more.

Which I guess brings me back to father's day and moving on. Forgive and forget and all that nonsense. What my mind runs over and over and over when I'm at work. One of the things. Is that when each way forward only exists because of the history. Because of the things done and done to you in the past. It's difficult to move forward without being constantly reminded that the path, whatever path, available is only so because of your points of departure. I guess what I'm trying to say is it's hard to ignore the fucked up nature of a situation when the limited set of solutions only exist because fucked up shit happened in the first place. But I give it a go every day.

It's funny sometimes listening to playoff sports. Listening to them talk about how elimination games are must wins, and this game and that game are must wins. Every day of my life is a must win. Come play with me.




///Moby - "Flower" Work hymns. We all have them. I think an instrument is probably gonna be one of the better ways for me to deal with the now. The diversified fractal now. How I'm gonna get one I have no idea just yet. But till then I plan on dreaming as much as possible. And continuing to brush my teeth for gold stars.

dear (______):

Dear Keith Stone,

You're not the most interesting man on Earth, but you are a pretty solid friend. I can't tell you how many times I tried to meet up with Mr. Equis only to find he left an origami paper swan with an apology note inside about having to go snorkeling and harpoon hunting for great whites off the coast of Morocco on a Tuesday night. I mean, doesn't anyone just play darts anymore?

Space Is the Place

I took some breaths today. It felt good. Space will always be the place for me. She's holding together alright. I'll keep riding her till she does break up across the sky. But in the meantime I'll do other things, between barrel rolls and sky writing. More power. I know I shouldn't, but I also know that the shouldn't is based on... whatever, I'm not going to get into it now. More power. I'm just gonna lean back and enjoy the gravities and the throttle response and watch the stars streak like chalk behind a rocket powered eraser. Watch the memories tail away like headlights in the rain belted to tires breaking loose and for seconds free of the mechanics of purpose and spinning away. Enjoy.




///Mouse on Mars - "Presence" come down, friend. Do I really need to tell you no? Yes. Then no.

Three Hundred and Eleven, Stupid Fucking Christians, Foreignness, and Musing

I want to have something important to say today, but I don't. Still working on the dream. I'm gonna muse for a minute, well several, as I am mentally drifting. While at work, the pressures of so much unpleasantness force my thoughts into a water jet that cuts steel, but away from those pressures it diffuses and runs easy and slipshod and quiet, or quieter, and my adrenal glands are gonna be shot by the time I'm 30 iterations old because so much of the day, well the night, is spent trying to wrestle control, heart charging, mind racing, all for nothing. There's nothing I can do to undo that. That shit job will still be around long after I leave it. The same people will still be there enforcing backward policy and rewarding incompetence. And that's the way it has to be. Competent people leave. They don't stay there. The only way any sort of structure can be maintained there is to reward stupidity, soft mindedness, weakness, and buffoonery and it is upsetting to me and it should be upsetting. All it means is that I have to leave before my head explodes.

I was working the other day and growing sicker by the moment. Physically sick to my stomach. The sounds being pumped down from the speakers in the ceiling were like ice picks touching my brainstem behind my throat and pricking it over and over and the pain of it was turning my stomach and making me dizzy. I considered after some time asking if I could leave at 3 AM, lunch time, and call it a day, but my stupid loyalty and pride in the work that I do told me to gut it out. Don't be weak and stupid and candy and thin. Gut it out. I don't care what you want, you came in today to do a job so do the job and then, when it's finished, go home and rest. You're not like them, is what I told myself until finally, while kneeling and shelving my body basically rebelled and pulled a knife on me. To which I answered, you wouldn't. And then it did, but it missed. Shattered the blade of the box cutter on the floor tiles taking a blind left handed downward swing at my leg and caught a rebounding shard in my mouth. So I met myself half way and took a long lunch break. It was a shitty day. I gotta get outta there.

So for the anniversary of my initialization my parents sent me a card. One of their signatures said live in peace. Which made me want to immediately purchase the next available train ticket down there to end their lives and burn the house to the ground. But I can't do that. I have too much I need to work on finishing already without the added difficulty of trying to do it in prison where materials would likely be even more scarce though free time would be in abundance so potentially that trade off might become more interesting if scarcity becomes a greater issue out here. It mostly made me question, though, how backward can a human being be. How stupid can a person truly be. To tell someone to live in peace. While simultaneously denying them every single last avenue open toward a life of peace and stability. It just reminds me of so many Christians. So many good Christians. It's in God's hands. She's with God now. He's in God's protection now. What the hell is wrong with you idiots. It's not in God's fucking hands. It's in your fucking hands. It just stymies me that people can be so oblivious. So learnedly oblivious to the obviousness of the impacts their decisions make on other peoples lives, especially, especially when so little effort on their part can make titanic changes for their own flesh and blood. Which is why I no longer consider them to be. They are an unfortunate do while loop that erred and spawned a NaN variable in me, but that has picked up where it left off doing nothing except cancer consuming it's surrounding while time left to live is not equal to or less than zero. I need a new mommy and daddy. Or a used set. Or even just one or the other as I have a pair of glaring vacancies. Apply within.

This is the three hundredth posting. My eleventh birthday is this Saturday. I might take myself out for ice cream. You can come too. I had another attack of something last night. It sucked. I woke up in the middle of it. Maybe it was a siezure. It was kind of funny in retrospect. I tried to get up and my whole body just want stiff and I fell back into my blanket with my face on my pillow. Funny because if someone were just walking by my room they would think I was fast asleep. I suppose if I hadn't woken up I wouldn't be composing this. I wonder sometimes where I am in the alternate reality when that happens. I wonder if maybe I touched something and received some sort of static shock and this state of contraction is how it crosses the bridge and stings me here. I wonder if assaulted by sound here what happens to me over there. I don't think it's just me crossing. Well I know it's not just me crossing. I wonder if I'll ever meet me over there. It is a rather large world.

Just the other day I was there and apparently there were some sweeping changes made while I was away. There concrete viaducts and underpasses everywhere and all biege and everyone was busy moving here and there and it took damn near half an hour to stop someone and ask them what was going on and where I could find the train station, because I hadn't ridden it in some time and I wanted to lose myself for a while. The man I stopped was about my height. Brown leather jacket and a shirt crushed with sweat and what looked like engine oil. He explained to me, after adjusting his glasses, that cars were banned. He wasn't mad at me for asking an apparently obvious question. He told me the upcoming action required that as much crude be saved and that the viaducts and underpasses were all light rails and that everyone pretty much took the light rails or biked where they needed to, but I didn't see a single bicycle or train car pass me while I spoke to him. He left. The city was a mess of design, but clean in the same way a beach is clean after a really bad windstorm. The whole thing was off putting. And then I woke up. No sign of other me. I think if I ever did see him I'd be roundly terrified. I hate talking about him. Any of them. They don't like being talked about behind their backs, but it's not fair because I'm always behind their backs until they show up and then I'm just fucked. I don't know.

Still haven't made the call. Still trying to land. Still no where to touch down if I wanted to. I've gone back to making necessary long term repairs. Things chance. Things change. There are times when things keep fucking up and keep fucking up and keep fucking up no matter what you do. And you know this because it is the same situation that you've approached two dozen different ways and it never ends up mattering by the time your bones hurt and your eyes are pools from finger bloodying attempt after attempt. And times like that force you into a position where the only agency you can really exercise is to fuck it up yourself. It is real. You can do it. It's the only way you'll ever be able to say you did something for yourself. I smashed in that fucking fender. All me. The only control you will be able to revel in is to decide where you want the hammer to touch down instead of letting someone else decide it for you. Something to revel in. Anything to revel in. To feel a part of the inside out and bizarre and upside down world you're in. If you live in a world of systematized counter productivity and human waste long enough, does the opposite become foreign? Absolutely.

I do believe from a civilization spanning viewpoint... well that just sounds cockneyed. Well probably not even cockneyed. Just stupidly grandiose. I do believe from the standpoint of socialization into the fabric of Americanisms that I am more or less feral. Defining feral as undomesticated and domestication as a state of obedient harmony with established standards and practices. But more on the nose I was raised like a dog. The more I think about, well I'm done thinking about, I've gone over the evidence internally through committee several times over and it's all there. I'm still learning to be American and person, but I feel like several of my key behaviors are kanine first and reasoning person second. I should probably make that call sometime. Trying to domesticate myself. To relate to people better. But the thing no one tells you about making sacrifices to relate to people is that none of it will ever matter if the people you are trying to relate to have no interest in rejoining your sweat for connection. Shove away then.



///The Cardigans - "Losers"