Redesign & Sudden Death Memory, and the Equalizer

Been smacking the knobs on my equalizer. Playing with sound things to see what other sound things I can make with them. Playing with sound tracks to see if I can mess with the levels in just such a way to drop the singer's voice right out of the track and hold the rest of it intact. It's been a pretty fun game. A fun way to pass time. Well actually not a fun way to pass time. That's kind of the annoying part. It's time consuming, but such fun. And I will not harp on lost time today. I have more time than most people get to enjoy and keep a roof over their head. Granted it is inconvenient time so its value is probably more accurately expressed in pesos instead of dollars, but creative currency no less.



I still need to get an actual instrument. Probably an electric guitar, but I think I might be more of a bass kinda guy. There is something alluring in the simplicity of bass that lends itself to complication in the way electric guitar can base itself in range and show its beauty in simplification. Plus I love drums, but after four concussions I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to develop the wild coordination required to play them well. Plus there's something soothing to generating and feeling bass ripple through you. Something that counters the days forced aggressions and doses of adrenaline that feels like a hot bath for your brain. A thing restorative.

However that's going to come after I finish saving up for a beater. trying to spend a grand on a car to love and cherish. I figured out that if I spend no more than 300 dollars on it, it only needs to last four months before dying, if it dies, assuming it dies, for it to cover and even come out better than my normal costs of riding the city bus over the course of four months. If I spend a grand it will have to last a lot longer, but the thing is the difference between spending 300 dollars and a grand is that if I spend that extra 700 dollars I will probably get much closer to driving the car I actually want to drive instead of ending up driving someone's rusted out, but still inspected, late 80's minivan. I would love to own a ford probe. The mustang replacement that never was. Or an old Celica. Actually all of the old rally car platforms are just so tempting. As long as I end up with something with as much or preferably more torque than horsepower (or a ford probe) I will be a fantastically happy camper.



Just gotta keep messing with that equalizer until the right sounds come out. I'll get it eventually.

So there's an upcoming redesign of Auralport coming up. It's funny because upcoming things can never not be coming up. Doing it partly because I'm tired of seeing the same thing come up behind new words, so I figure you probably are too and it will be good for me to get the work in with creative suite. Part of what I've been trying to do lately is get the time in to redevelop my lapsing photoshop and illustrator skills. Few things frustrate me as much as having an idea and no mode to express it and right now, with my tool box near empty that is exactly what I've been staring at. I want to take the current design away from nature and into more of a citified urbanized feel for a while. A little darker too. Sunburst forest green is not wearing so well with the current thematic tide all over my poetry corner and I want the images to better reflect the content. I think I'm going to start mock ups of new headers for here too that I'll cycle through every four weeks or so... to keep things interesting when the content is not because, God knows, there are only so many ways life can fall apart and it really helps when the band playing you to the ocean floor knows more than one song.

More than that though, I am also going to make the effort to have my own stuff developed again instead of just linking us off to other folks things. I think that has been something of a friendly crutch in the retardation of my abilities and I've accepted with too much heart.

Some memories have resurged. Memories that I thought were gone forever. I was taking a shower after work and watching the water wheel away between my feet and into the drain. As I traced my fingers between the shoots of my hair against my scalp my mind was ripped back twenty something years to another time on Staten Island when I was doing the same thing in a much younger frame for very different reasons. I remembered being allowed to stay home after a particularly violent episode of punishment and discipline so that I could take some time to recuperate and feel better about myself before going back to school. It took all that time for me to realize that I wasn't being allowed to stay home. I wasn't suddenly the beneficiary of some new found well spring of mercy and kindness. I was wrecked. Visibly, noticeably, physically wrecked and he was just trying to protect himself from the consequences of his actions by keeping me at home until the physical wounds righted themselves enough to raise questions. Standing in the shower it was like being thrust into a sudden death tournament with no preparation. No warning. Needless to say, I lost. I lost it. But now that it's come up from the ocean blacked years of my younger days it's there and I can at least see it coming if it ever rears its head again.

I don't know why those years have all tinted themselves to night. I mean, I know why from the standpoint of survival. The standpoint of self preservation. What I do not know is what the mechanism was for their initial elimination from the body of experiences that have come to define me. So few memories from then. I suppose I am happy to have another one. Just unhappy that it is one so undesirable. Such is life I suppose. Back to the equalizer.


///Fatboy Slim - "The Journey" journeying away from where I was to where I want to be, or maybe just to a place I didn't know I would love to be in. The journey will call my name. One of the few with no real home, no place to be, and so many places still unknown. Plainswalkers. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be good enough at expressing myself through music to link to my own. That's pretty far off. But one more reason to live another day is never a bad thing as far as I care to be concerned :)

dear (______):

Dear new life in Pittsburgh,

you've given me the short end of the stick. But you know what? I'm okay with that. There's no other place I'd rather be and no other set of human beings I'd rather be around to struggle with.

Yours lovingly,

a bat shit crazy human being

The New Grading System, Thoughts on Construction, and I Hate Flowers

Well, I spent four hours this morning trying to draw that scorpion flower tattoo and failed miserably again. You can sort of start to see it, but personally I hate how it turned out.



It's starting to look like something. Instead of working on it for thirty minutes and getting pissed off and quitting I worked on it for six times as long, but eventually gave up and went to bed to think about it there or at least find success in doing other things. Maybe it's just the brush selection. Or maybe it's that I just hate drawing flowers and have always struggled with drawing them up close. Or maybe it's that I haven't spent enough time looking at flowers before. Really committing them to memory. I've certainly spent, when I think about it, at least 1000 times more minutes looking at schematics, machines, and geometric constructions in general. Perhaps there is porting that can be done. Reduce the organic to the geometric, fix the perspective there and then port it back to the organic. It's bothering me, in case I haven't made that clear. An unscratchable itch that I have to prove to myself is not unscratchable, but merely located in a place that's hard to reach, but reachable. I hate flowers.

So while I was asleep I had the pleasure of grading papers. At the end. Well, not the end. But in the second dream. The first dream was pretty awesome. I went to the pacific rim and started a new life as a bounty hunter in Oceania. It was all well and good. Then things got bloody and did not end well at all, but that's a story for another time. I'm going to talk about the boring epiphany. So I'm sitting there grading these papers and the papers are both written by potheads, except that I already know what happens to them in the future because I've gone back in time to grade their work as college freshman. I already know one of them is going to run off and work for big name companies out of the gate and I already know the other one is going to end up dropping out and moving in with his mother and working for Borders until they go bankrupt.

I'm reading the writing notes and they're both there in the classroom after school waiting to see what their grades are because the papers will make or break both of their years in my class and as I finish up and go back to reread the stories along with my first impression notes I start ticking things off in columns labeled B, S, and N. I have no idea what the labels mean or their relevance to a fiction class so I pull my perspective back out of my head and I ask the me/not me doing the grading what the columns and labels are for and he tells me "B stands for believable, S stands for continuity, and N stands for noticeable." I ask the grader a follow up question: what do you mean by noticeable? He answers, "noticeable means a moment in the story where the reader notices something and commits the action, event, item, whatever the subject or object being read about is, to their active memory reserved for things they would normally encounter, care about, or keep track of in their own lives and for their own sake." Aha, says I and then I climbed back into my head and went back to reading and grading.

I can't remember exactly what the successful pothead's story was about, but it was pretty boring to grade. All of the things that were supposed to be there were there, but it was obvious that he had no interest in writing and was taking the course for required credit so I found myself loosening my standards mainly to avoid having to deal with arguing about it when I handed him his paper, but also because I couldn't bring myself to nail him on finer points when the subject he chose to write about was thin, safe, and bland to begin with. I didn't think about it at the time as rewarding mediocrity or the ultra conservative, "cover your bases", approach that tends to net good grades in Universities, but thinking about it now it was a pretty slanted thing to do.

The second paper was much more interesting. It was a story about a boy who promises to help his mother kill herself before winter after being disgraced by her husband's lascivious activities in the new year that came to light just as the summer began. The husband leaves her in the same week school ends and the boy is home with his mother throughout the summer months and into fall when he finally begins to realize what he's agreed to help her do and it's impact on his life as school begins again. That's when I got to see the new grading system in action. The columns were divided into rows labeled A, B, C, D, and F. For the continuity category an X in a row meant that was the grade earned. For every other category you started the strikes at the bottom of the column and moved upward to an A. So five noticeable moments meant a technical A. Five continuity issues meant a technical F. Five moments of the suspension of disbelief meant a technical A. There was also built in consideration for length. For short stories, one strike was all that was allowed per letter grade. Middle and longer lengths and word counts meant more ground for the student to cover so additional strikes were made available, two then three per letter grade etc. For particularly short papers letters could be knocked off of the scale so that a person couldn't score an F for not packing enough junk into a paper to satisfy the system and help prevent people from playing to the syllabus or the requirements. And of course more columns could be added or eliminated as subject matter, literary devices, and exercises demanded. Though that did not stop me from allowing it to happen despite the mechanisms in place to alert me to it.

There were continuity issues. Lots of continuity issues. Not impressionistic issues, but just hard de facto mistakes of alignment for a five page story. There were also many, many, many believable moments and moments where I was committing pieces of the story to my memory as though I were reading about neighbors or friends that I thought I knew. The first paper did the same thing, albeit with far less subtlety. So I ended up in a situation where the second paper scored two As and an F. Averaged out to a C. From the stand point of "as hard a science as something subjective as grading papers can be." In the end I tuned the C up to a B for the other points of craftsmanship that can't really be covered and agreed upon in the realm of the lowest common denominator of general and identifiable human experience. I probably should have tuned the other paper from an A to a B as well for rote underachievement.

As a grading system it struck me as fairly useful as a starting point for getting a sense of issues, strengths, and weaknesses. But also as a starting point for conversation, discussion, and argument about grades being given out. Using it, I could explain to student A why their paper of X length graded out better than student B's paper of Y length without having to think back to what I was thinking about when I scribbled the notes I scribbled and then have to hunt through the nebulous territory of assigning those thoughts to grades. Now I had a way of saying "everything else aside, this is why you got this score" and "all things considered in concert, this is how my personal opinion and subjectivity changed that score." It was a pretty detailed dream for half an hour of sleeping. Not as ridiculous or action packed as the other dream, but just as good.



I made that this afternoon. Just trying to get away from failure and into a little success. Turned out exactly how I wanted it too. I wish there was a way to make it rain in the summer time. Anything to peel back the heat. Summer really is the most miserable set of months known to man. Gotta move farther north. Since there is no cloud generator available. I'll tell you about the other dream later. I'll try and draw it up a little more. Get back to doing what I love to do when I'm not writing or out getting dirty playing in the sun or at home moping and cringing against the ticks of time. I wanted to do some paper crafts today, but I'm out of time - because I went out to play for three hours instead of working, but I still think I managed to better myself either way. Oh well. Sorry to bore you. I guess not every day is a hustle. Some days are a shuffle. Or maybe just a think. And now I'm tired and I still have to go to work so, let's get it on. And by get it on I mean dive into sleep. Might try to cross the bridge for a little while and see what's going on in Universe B. Or not. Those trips can be just as tiring as walking these planes some days.

See ya later.


///Boards of Canada - "Seeya Later" I have to leave, but wait up for me. I'll be back soon.

A Thought About the World

I was thinking about the end of the world. Again. Not really the end, but the end of my world assuming I tough it out. Which is hilarious. To think that life is something that needs to be "toughed out". Walked off. I sometimes wonder if people who are basically set for life, whose only real decision to make is to go to work or not, or play the links in Carolina this weekend or shuffle off to Amsterdam for a bit to get away from "it all" ever feel like they're going to have to tough out the next few years. I suppose I don't really wonder. I'm sure they do. I like to think that I wonder so I can reflect more kindly on their various dispositions. Instead of wishing them all away to the heaven of hell's brambles. But I was thinking about the upcoming end of my iterations, when there is no more material to make new me's out of what is left of the old me's and no more material available to create new me-ness to replace the wholesale deletions. My thoughts turned, naturally as an American, to war.

When all of the oil runs out, and I hope it does sooner than later, mainly to generate some actual sea change and perhaps restructure the as we've accepted it into the as we've never known, but wished it to be, even if the restructuring ends up being more of a warp and upward mobile in ways I could never be societal metastization, what becomes of middle eastern interest? Do the propped up kings all topple over at once? Does religion come bursting in to fill the holes? Obviously it won't be anarchy. The world is far too connected for that to ever happen. Does america finally walk away from it all like some person stumbling home from a red light district in the morning with a massive hangover to their mattress stuffed with "just in case" money? And then I thought "who fucking cares."

I know I should. For my children's sake. But I'm never having kids. Right now my only claim to fame is that I escaped an abusive home and now have the power to break the cycle of violence and generational human corruption by not perpetuating it the only way I can guarantee the rest of the world will succeed. That's it. So I suppose that probably puts me in the category of people that "want to watch the world burn". Maybe not square in. But close. I don't think I have enough passion to make a sport of it. Which lead me to understand something. A carefree friend is enviable. A careless friend is a headache, but can be desirable in certain doses. A negligent friend is a liability. Well, I understood that before. But it reminded me. I don't know where I fit in there. Where do friends go that are constantly trying to snuff out the fires of their past? Burning their shadows away? Eating their demons.

I don't care how the world is going to end. Maybe the middle east will collapse in fifty years. I'm sure they'll find some way to make it work. They'll tough it out. Some things will change. A lot of things won't. I'll still have to take shit from people making snide remarks in the vein of "break a twenty (whistle) that's a lot of money to be carryin' around on a Tuesday" from asshole managers and foremen who make my monthly net in a couple days of work. I'll still have to deal with nurses asking me seven times if I've been shooting needles into my work scarred arms every time I get up enough money or desperation to see a physician. If it all burns down, I'll be third in line with a lawn chair, a cold beer, and a program to take in the floor show. Which is all fairly grim.

I did not mean to be that grim. Honestly. My life feels like a very long Vertigo shot. Time just keeps on racing away. The farther it stretches, the farther back I have to keep pushing things to stay alive, the more things fall out of focus and break down and it's the least I can do to hold onto the consciousness of here and now and impossible not to choke it to death with the force of the grip needed to keep it safe. I have no real stake in the outcome of the world's wars. I was unceremoniously ushered out of the war fighting arena, the academic arena, the peace keeping arena, the social and society arena, the tax paying arena. I don't know. I don't know where the fuck I'm going with this. Six hundred "no"s and one "yes". Two yeses. It's not that it gets difficult to believe things will improve. It's that it becomes foolish to believe so.

I don't want to believe that's it for me. Not in terms of writing. There's still much to be done and I know this is perhaps the stuttering beginnings of little stars and planets in the blueness of twilight before the moon rise of - what? Shut up. Shut it. Start over. There's still much to be done and I know this is perhaps the stuttering, tottering, beginnings of my flash in the pan in terms of production and development. A multi-year long stuttering to get that one paragraph out that I'll remember myself by. I don't want to believe the best I can hope for is to not get sick and have something to eat and enough to pay for cool in the summer and heat in winter and keep a roof over my fucking head and a cellphone turned on.

Which, I guess, ultimately is to say, space has been both kind and unkind. Kind to the people I care enough not to belabor, but unkind to the glass hearted intrepid nuclear radiant wayfarer. There have been complications. Unmediated things have come undone. I went about a month at one point without thinking about suicide. And then you feel it creeping up the back of your neck. The little worlds threading their way through the nerves in your right ear, across the back of your eyes to your left ear and lacing themselves together tighter and thicker until you feel like the bones of your forehead are going to collapse under the compression and your insides are going to come out like frosting squeezed out between the fingers of a kid crushing a sandwich cookie in his fist. So much time is spent in sorting. This is real. This is not. That is doable. This will kill you. This is tenable. That is not. You said this out of your mouth. You should have said this. Do not say that. This is valid. That will get you interned again. The sorting gets confusing. Frustrating. Makes me angry. And tired. Of many things. So much left to do.

The world as movie: I would have walked out years ago. Myself as movie: I already know how it ends, but I'm not walking out yet. I still haven't seen that one scene where I'm riding down a dirt road in a 240z with my korgy in the passenger seat barking at the rabbits in the brush while the sun sits on the mountains for a nap before the milky way belts across the sky like Beethoven through a concert hall. I don't know if I'll actually make it that far in or what planet that'll happen on. But I'm tryin' to tough it out. It would help if a tollbooth were to appear in my bedroom someday. I would never look back.


///Annie Lennox - "No More I Love Yous" remember this one? I still do. I was in love with Annie Lennox for a long time. All of ten years old and the lyrics to this song felt like she wrote them for me. I used to sit alone in my room and sing nirvana's half the man I used to be. It's funny, I guess. Not that the pain hasn't changed. Funny that the monsters are still outside after all this time.

Time Rides Again

My 18th birthday is tomorrow.

I am two months and 28 days into my 26th iteration.

At maximum effort it will take approximately six more months to save $1000.

Eight days off of chemical mediation.

It has been 12 days since I felt genuine happiness.

20 hours since I last fantasized about cutting someone's face off and eating it.

Twelve hours since I last put something in my mouth that was food.

Two days since I had a dream about flying.

Five hours since I heard crying and could not find the source.

Twenty six hours since I crossed the bridge last.

Ten hours and forty minutes since I felt adrenaline course through me, knifing through traffic.

Sixteen hours since I discovered my downstairs neighbors are the only white people in my building.

Thirty hours and sixteen minutes since the upstairs neighbors were evicted into a thunderstorm.

One year and nine months since I last had sex.

Six months and twenty days since I declared I would not be denied a full time job.

110 days and 14 hours since I started a still undelivered gift for a friend.

24 hours since I found out temp labor is essentially a scam for those over 21.

16 days since I dislocated my knee and broke a tooth.

Fifty three days since I found and did not hang card paper to spray paint.

98 minutes since I opened a book and read for fun.

14 minutes since I bruised my knuckles.

4 minutes since I smiled last.

20 seconds since I entertained my dream of life minus all the fucking bullshit that tears time away from us like sickles to sheep bellies and scatters it confetti and demands you collect it all up again before taking another step forward, or die.

5 seconds since I wished I could go back to sleep and wake with no memory of a single thing from my past again.

Too long since I've been back here. It's a broken watch. In the sense that the watch keeper does so in a broken way. Hello world, the computer says. You won't betray me too, I ask. I would never, the computer says. I am only an epitaph in your pen and thus true well beyond the worm food of you. Awww, come here, I say. Hug. Drop lights. And scene.


///The Future Sound of London - "Dirty Shadows" Sometimes the shadows on the walls crawl on your skin and claw their way in and trace the bends and levies to your stem and throttle you cold to the land of neversleep.

dear (______):

Dear summer,

Can I please hace five fucking minutes without a house fly the size of my fist flying in through the slit between my closed windows.

Compound Eye

You know those weeks where you can swear up and down you own something, but you can't find it because you or someone you know or maybe someone you don't know borrowed it and never returned it to you or it turns out you never actually bought it in the first place because you dreamed the whole thing and woke up so seamlessly that the thought was sewn into the fabric of your memory permanently and you should by all rights, as far as the chemicals and salts zipping around the fatty little lanes and straightaways in your head can tell you, have it somewhere in the place where you live and within reach when you need it. Which is right now. Just a week of "I need this right now. Where is it?" Just wanted to tell you that yeah, you're not crazy. I know those weeks too. For me though, and not to say I'm super more specialer than you, it's been a month.

I can't seem to find my eye for pencil work. I lost it somewhere. I know I had it. I can look back at all the things I did with it and can still sort of fuzz out with the tool that's now occupying the space it used to occupy, but the series of functions and processes that composed my eye hand connection for pencil work have absented themselves from the factory floor. Which leads me to believe that they were taken. There's been another glaring gap in the work force. Physical production has tailed off dramatically. While it is good that I have managed to keep everyone on task doing constructive things instead of building destructive implements of and components to a machine whose sole purpose is a Rube Goldbergian mechanicide. There has been that one missing thing and I think I know the exact face that would have packed something like pencil work into his bag before checking out without notice. Which is fine. I can live with that. Everyone else still comes to the table and as long as I can have dreams that wander and fly with the child and can cross at will and am not building myself into an elaborate and immediate and quite possibly explosive self death, the rest is water under the gravy cake.

Buuut still. It is just a little annoying. I have no idea where they go. As the administrator I usually just have to sit and wait for them to come back. The kid wanders. That's the only one I have to actively chase down, because who the hell knows when he'll get back. Plus I don't even know if it's possible for them to get hurt out where they go and come to and from and with him I take no chances. That's the main member that helps keep everyone else relatively in agreement. But enough about me. I tried to draw some flowers today. Flowers in the shape of a scorpion for an idea for a tattoo. This is what came out:



Frustrating. Not even close to what was laid out in my head. I felt like strangling my hand for it's insolence, but that wouldnt have helped any of us. Well I might have felt better for a few minutes in the same way Stalin felt better for having people shot, but we all know how that ended. Happily ever after. If by happily you mean breathlessly paranoid. And if by ever after you mean with little warning and thankfully not a minute or second longer. So I'm not going to have my hand shot. This time. I'd probably have to hold the gun with my mouth. Maybe rig up some kind foot pedal operated jig, because old lefty can't really be trusted. They've been friends too long. Might give him the tip off and righty might skip town to Istanbul.

Well anyway. What now. Is the main question. I don't know if I can't draw. I think I still can. That drawing I did before did not turn out nearly as I saw it in my head either. I hope this disconnect isn't a sign of some medical nonsense. I'm not going in for that. I got enough medical nonsense to try and ignore without thinking about having to have new medical nonsense to try and ignore on top of that. But enough about me.

I think what could also be happening here. An alternate theory of the origin of man, if you will. Is that our dear escapee is still at work and still down in the factory toodling away at this and that project behind my eyes and ahead of spine, but the actual tools and processes and algorithms he is using have changed without my direct information. Which is possible, I suppose. In fact, I assume. In fact, in fact is one of those things I just try not to use in writing and it always comes up, so I will not use it again in here so I can think about - whatever. The point is, he is still there doing his damnedest to turn plans and prints and raw blank ingots of multi-ton steel and walls of marble into frescoes. Frescoes? Really complicated and beautifully simple objects of vision transmitted from my head to yours through the medium of the manipulation of space, material, and radiata and what I am expecting to see is really him trying to do the job with the new tools and processes and it is amounting to trying to build houses with like a complex multistage artisan bread oven instead of hammers and nails and measuring tape.

So instead of the end product being something that it should be had I not so strictly enforced my vision on myself - a ridiculously awesome bread house, shiny and golden and all crazy twisty gorgeous sitting on my coffee table, it ends up being something close to my vision, but ridiculously not - an impossible to inhabit, but human sized house built with beams of sagging bread and weird warbly walls and a floor you can stand on for about two seconds before you fall through from the upstairs straight on down to the dirt floor basement.

I think my eye for black and whites and penciling and penning is changing, or maybe already changed, to an eye for colors. I thought I lost my eye for color earlier this week because I was trying to see what I wanted to see in terms of line work and then overlay the colors I wanted it to appear in on top of that and I couldn't get past trying to envision the lines. I thought that meant that I was having trouble seeing how the colors would fit and thus couldn't fit the lines to the colors. Now I think the problem might be that I can see the colors without the lines and trying to fit the lines to the colors is something my tools and processes are unprepared to do.

Which is slightly exciting. I don't remember when we talked about it before, but when I first started sharing art I told you I was a pen and pencil guy and usually never screwed around with coloring things because I had no eye for it. I guess I've been working at it long enough to change that and hadn't realized it until now. Unless there is a third explanation. A third theory of space and time and the god particle if you will. I could just have regressed. I might just be worse at drawing and art than I was before. But fuck that. I'm greatness.



///Mouse on Mars - "Circloid Bricklett Sprungli" you know I don't have an ego that big. My ego is so small to understand how small it feels you'd have to feel this song turned up as loud as it'll go and turn the bass up as high as it goes and picture yourself sitting on the nose of a Saturn V booster, tall as a skyscraper, firing the energy output of a dozen Hoover Dams out of it's enormous backside in more flames and vapor than you've ever seen in the widest Arizona sunset you've ever laid eyes on and on top of that tower you look back and there's nothing behind you but the shrinking blue disk of a half moon Earth and the blackness of space so wide it makes you dizzy just to blink. That's how little my ego is as I'm blasting through space, trying to understand the world and teach myself to be okay with the fact that I may never really have a place to land.

dear (______):

Dear reviewers of assembly required products,

If your review includes the words "lots of substitutions, but still turned out great" perhaps what you meant to do was post the assembly instructions of a new product. You know, the one you made.

Just saying. When I want to look at a chocolate chip cookie recipe and I want to read opinions of the chocolate chip cookie recipe, the last thing I want is to see or even get a whiff of some other chocolate chip cookie recipe that apparently "still turned out great" with the implication that because it's there in the comments it should also be rated just as highly (without the option, of course to actually rate it, because ITS IN THE FUCKING COMMENTS).

Sorry. =sigh= Just sayin.

A Kitchen Dabbler

In the Back Woods and Friendship Tugs of War

Well, I've been gone for a minute, but it's been something of a stroll in the backwoods. The creepy backwoods that are often not to be strolled until the circumstances demand some sort of outing and the only reasonable place to go where you can't be bothered is the back 9 of the mind. Keeping a good clip with poetry. A minor defeat of writer's block that has allowed some things to flourish. I haven't used that word in a while, if at all. Flourish. It has a certain pirouette to it that has to be reserved for unique measures of success.

Success in the face of nightmares. Actual nightmares. Actual moments of the involuntary bridging of dream and real states. Of seeing what is there and what isn't or at least shouldn't be in the same instance of breathing and having to close my eyes and repeat after me "you are safe"s. If repeating is believing. I guess that's one of the reasons why I don't believe in heaven or hell. I've seen them both and they're not what anyone says they are supposed to be. I've been to the end of the world and it's nothing like what we've been told is it? Few things ever are. If I smell a little like death it's because we've been bedfellows on and off recently. A flirting couple that knows neither is really committed to anything serious, but when is play ever except when it is?

So we've pumped and ground and made and done and life has gone on for less and worse and better and blood. The organs still pump and the sound still comes in fountains and so I continue. I continue on in the backwoods and little leaps to foregrounds until, I have come to convince myself recently in the train of reasons to reason in, the day when my life transposes from discrete experiences into a singular piece of poesis. A perfect and sustainable solid state. And then I'll happily call it a day. Not in a bid for immortality because immortality is only to memory and human memory will never break the solid state barrier (so even immortals are no more than incarnates), but in a bid to have become. I suppose there are probably many things I am becoming, but to have definitively crossed that boundary of becomingness to the hell pots of posterity is a thing worth aspiring to if there is anything worth shooting for. Call the stars, or the moon, or glory, or whatever. Incarnations of the become be damned. To have is to have in some way shape and form held in hands so often dropped in emptiness. To have gripped, and not let go even in whatever can be termed death.

There have been joys in the backwoods. Joys tasted rarely in and the travel has been hard and light, but worth it in some ways and a waste in many others. And I don't know why I am trying to see this in two points of view. Oh wait I do! Friendship tug of war. You can pick your nose. You can pick your friends. But you can't favor one person over the other though they both know you in pathetically thin terms. What the hell does it matter, you idiots? I mean really. Can we all just grow up a good four years and call this bullshit a day. Not to rant on so silly a topic. It's just aggravating. Neither one of you could really keep pace with what I'm up to so what the hell difference does it make. Both of you would probably have nothing to do with me if you knew me to the fullest possible extent so can we please all just get along by the terms of the established sensibilities of isness? Probably not.

I have got too much to run from to ever fully open to either so what can I possibly be expected to do when I can't even begin to describe what can be reasonably expected of myself. How can you love anybody when you don't love yourself? Well, it's kind of easy if you try. Just kidding, it's impossible, but still- what the hell. Are my choices really to go hang with the one person who always lies to me and makes assertions they can never back up and keep trusting in them and keep getting screwed up worse than I am, or is it to drag myself across town to hang with someone who has no idea who i actually am and will be put in a weird situation when he does. I guess the one thing I do have to consider is that I shouldn't presume to know people I - don't know. Simply stated. So maybe it's worth a shot. Maybe it's time to bend the orbit a little bit and come in close enough to lay some mathematics and calculus to a potential short rendezvous. Haven't used that word in a while either. Generally reserved for important things. Like scenes from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Elegant things. My staff of scientists are not elegant or important. Their idea of a delicate landing is detonating on the surface. They didn't do so well in school, I guess. If shithead A gets a shot, I think it stands to reason that potential decent friend B should also get a shot to play the table and fit into my arbitrary and ridiculous set of rules for friendship that, I swear these people do exist, few people can seem to fit into. I miss those people a ton. I guess the stupid thing is they'll never know who they are. If they did know they probably wouldn't care what it is they accomplished. Alright I'm gonna pipe this down as I'm making myself slightly depressed. And by slightly I mean massively. It's been a tough week. Sorry I've been away.

Well anyway, thought I would drop off some graphics. Because what is a road trip without photographs. There are things that live when you sleep that do not sleep as you are living. They wait for you to come on back. Come on home. One more time. You'll not leave this place alive, but you can try. You can try for old time's sake. We'll give you a fit and running start. See how far you go before we are there, sucking the lengths of string of your calf through your heel like fine noodles through a straw of shredded skin. Don't stay up too late.



///The Black Angels - "Mission District" You can sometimes hear it. You can always feel it when it comes beating on your heart like a death threat. You will write or you will suffer in ways you did not know existed, but will become intimately familiar with. And you do it. And you duck away into the grass and you listen to it beat it's way farther along and then it's gone and you can't really tell if you saved yourself or if maybe the entire thing is coming around again and this time at an angle you did not know was possible and maybe you'll hear it. You'll certainly feel it closing in, but how much less warning will there be next time?

dear (______):

Dear masturbation,

You've made me late for work for the last time. Seriously. This relationship is getting out of hand.

Yours,

Lefty