AUTHOR.CALHO: If I didn't write it, I would be hitch hiking cross country to Maine and then Alaska in that order. While taking frequent breaks to spread leaflets. And sit in diners. And write on things because I wasn't at a computer. I may still do that in a few years. Writing this also helps me forget about and better understand the limitations of being human, and keeps me busy enough to allow me no free time to burn the world down.

THEMATIC.ABOUT : Collapse often. The things that hold people together and hold them apart and scatter brains. The things that make thoughts go boom. The things that ooh and aah and [expletive deleted]. Sometimes poking around the margins where responsibility ends and the only one to look to is the Original Equipment Manufacturer and say "but, I already pressed 9 for more options and the menus are exactly the same. Can you just replace it?" The answer will be: "please hold." Sometimes hanging out in dark corners. Sometimes following the train tracks. Looking for ways out and ways in and all the while sharing the things seen and heard and done and drawn and written and scorched and healed and teased and caged and dreamed along the way.

8/30/11

dear (______):

Dear radio,

Thank you for not inundating me with commercials for tampons. If there is one thing to be said for not owning a digital television receiver, it is freedom from the tyranny of Johnson and Johnson's marketing schemes.

8/28/11

Touch and Go, Financial Crisis, Re-Approach the Life Comedic, and Less Important Things

Things have been touch and go. Tough and go. Many opportunities to back down and call it a day long before the newness of the day was fully realized. In many respects that's the only difference between me and the twenty three year old child coworker with two kids by two different women being served an arrest warrant on the job. The ability to say "no, this is not all I was meant for. There is more, and I am going to find it even if the effort breaks me today." Other than that, we probably have a lot in common in terms of measurable attributes. Perhaps not even the thought of the action is what sets me on paths differing as much as the knowledge that what I am about to pursue is going to be painful and is going to stretch my physical endurance and patience and is going to leave some unpleasant marks for days to come and the desire to do it anyway. I was the same way in college. My grades did not show it, because of all the classes (sixty percent) I had no stake in, but within my major I had a three nine.

Life outside of college is vastly different. Everything you do in life, you have a stake in. So I suppose that kind of makes me bad at college, but good at life? I do not know exactly, so I will keep on track instead of figuring that out. Things have been tough. Difficult to do. Difficult to plan for. Even more difficult to execute, but I've been doing it. Taking the hard road. Exercising so much more than the path of least resistance for more than the sake of doing things the hard way and for more reason than the hard way often being the only way forward available.

I don't know, invasion of apostrophe, when I'm going to go back on medication. I don't know when it will ever be feasible again. When the trust will develop, because the desperation never is enough on it's own. For stretches it is. For stretches the frustration with verbal communication, and non, is. The hallucinations are. The trust is gone. Eaten away, I suppose. I offer. Tough it out in space.

I've been listening to myself breath. As a hobby. A pastime? It has been uniquely entertaining. A foil to the difficulty and nuisance of hearing my blood go through my veins. I am very much looking forward to winter and the pressure suit and the space boots. Hopefully I'll have a runabout by then. A little automotive goodness so I don't have to traverse miles of hostile, ankle jarring, shin splinting, terrain on a daily basis for a second year in a row, but if I do, it'll be okay because I've already done it. I'm already doing my snow dance.



I don't get the financial crisis. Is there one or is there not? This doesn't feel like a depression. Not that my textbooks explained to me in grade school. Several people I know comment about it on a regular basis. They cite the comedy of television anchors trying to explain a complex system and failing miserably to do anything besides say which way the stock market arrow happens to be pointing. They remind me of meteorologists who simply read off the wind direction and temperature. "Thank you for the timely news CNN and Fox, but if I'd glanced at a stock ticker I could have cut out the middle man on that one", is the vibe I get.

Maybe it's because I fully intend to never have children that I don't worry about the financial future of the United States. Maybe it's because the hole is so, impossible to fully imagine, deep. Maybe it's because my most pressing issues are making enough tokens to pay rent and eat and I don't have the budget to invest in anything much greater and wide reaching than the ground I stand on and the, bothersome, blood in my veins. I don't think that makes me selfish. Having to focus so tightly on square ones doesn't make me inherently more real or down to Earth than anyone else either. Probably narrows my horizons some, but what is my impact beyond those horizons if not negligible, so what does it really, honest to god and every other being in the universe, really really matter if I have no idea what's happening in Tripoli or the songs being danced to by the dollar in it's face off with the peso and the euro?

Not the I do not care at all. All I'm saying is this: if the Dow goes up to a million points I still have to pay my rent. If the Standard and Poors index falls to zero, my rent is still three hundred and fifty dollars a month more than what's in my bank account now. Putting gas in my car is never going to become significantly, permanently, cheaper. Buying food is never going to do likewise. I have no idea what this financial crisis is at this point. I have no interest in it's nuance and no money in it's markets beyond taxes that are not all of my pay (that I can still afford to have a roof over my head with so who the hell cares) and the occasional goods I buy beyond food, so do pardon me if I mentally check out entirely when conversation turns to Wall Street and labor and the economy in general.

Nothing personal, but the day to day scrap pretty much eclipses the back and forth of news media, spin doctors, hustlers, book keepers, pushers, banks, and policy makers. I should probably have a stake in it, but the stake is driven into the ground so far away from me and has nothing to do with keeping my tent up I'll only make the time to check on it a very once in a while and make the time to understand it even less often. Even so, doesn't it strike anyone as slightly odd, the gap between meaningful swings in the market and meaningful world events. Maybe it's a thing not readily apparent to a layman, such as myself, like, such as, south Africa, and education, but it seems the slightest flicker of anything sends people shoving all their money in or ripping all of their money out with the twitchiness of a light switch, and doesn't that undermine the stability of the real life things, the solid objects, and the lives operating on and employed by those real life things? No clue.

Either way, what I do know is that I would have the same issues and problems around and inside of me now with the economy in the toilet, or not in the toilet, or half in the toilet and the other half holding it's hair back, as I would have if the economy were the opposite of whatever the news said it was. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe I do simply not give a fuck.

I've thought about re-entering the stand up with a sixth entry. I think I am calmed down enough to not goad myself into acts of violence by the words coming out of my own mouth. Calmed down enough to take the pill of neurosis and malaise and turn it into something a little light hearted for other's consumption. I think I can do that again. I'm almost ready. Slightly excited to give it another try. I would hope you are too. Oh wait, I am. So that makes three of us. So the three of us will laugh it up later and look on the bright side of trife.

And last but not least, the less important thing. I forgot what it was. Maybe it was that I am still tasking away at projects. Tasking away at promises. At distance. At finding voice. Away and away and away until it's all done and I am officially retired. I haven't written a story in a long time. I've wanted to, but at the same time I have been nerve racked with questions of time and effort and end products and reception. Must get those ducks in a row so I can restart that branch of the factory. The dust is getting alarmingly thick over there and beginning to take on lives of it's own.


///Boards of Canada - "The Color of the Fire slow Sunday sundown music. It is, after all-

8/19/11

Busy on Paper

And by on paper, I suppose I mean with paper. Trying to take care of a promise and make good, because making good is what I do, maybe not best, but I would say it's one of my reasonably positive traits.



It's really time consuming work. Not that I have a problem with that at all. It's what makes these things as gifts so great. If you ever get one from me (only one family ever has - one family and my principal in sixth grade [made him a spanish gallion out of string and 3x5 flash cards) you know it's special. Every seam takes close to a minute to dry. Every cylinder takes roughly twice that. Add in the time to make the paper cuts, apply the glue, plan and execute joints, plus mistakes (they do happen, but not nearly as often as when I first started making things out of manila folders in sixth grade), plus the times when complex surfaces joined to other complex surfaces need hours to set and many applications of glue in between and, depending on the size of the thing you are making, you might be looking at three hours to make a component no bigger than a tennis ball.

I still love doing it. I was thinking at work last night that I don't talk about the things I love all that much. I think that's partly because so much of my life has been defined by people telling me what I can't do, what I'm not allowed to do, what I will not be permitted to do, where I can't go, where I'm not welcome. Is it possible to forget there are things in life that you do enjoy? Not entirely, but it certainly becomes a thing you can quickly overlook like a valley of flowers amid a mountain range gash across the landscape. Sure, nothing great will happen for you lying there for too long, but hell, the stems aren't gonna smell themselves.

I wish I could finish it this week, but I am literally out of time today, so I'll have to see how tomorrow shakes out. When it's done it'll weigh about five pounds and be about a foot and a half tall.

///FC Kahuna - "North Pole Transmission" ...the big bright sky that keeps you wide awake... one of my favorites. I dream of living somewhere the stars are so bright at night I couldn't sleep beneath them if I wanted to

8/16/11

Odd Dreams, Prior Commitments, New Goals and Mystic River

Woke up, fell asleep, appended more dreaming to the previous dream and then woke again. The first dream was me and a family of strangers. The house was enormous. My mother and father were nowhere to be found inside the house and all of the light bulb sockets were empty. The only things left were bits and parts of things that were going to be abandoned that the parents left to me and my siblings to decide if we were going to take them with us or not. It was up to us to pack them all and be outside with the single suitcase we were each allowed to bring to the new home. So we packed.

As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.

We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.

Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.

Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.

The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.

In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.

All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.

As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.

Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.

Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.

It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.

For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.

There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).

The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.

Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.

Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.

So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.



///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.

8/13/11

dear (______):

Dear adidas,

Your commercials are heart warmingly laid back, and your world cup spots were exceptional, inspiring, and intensely colorful.  However, my life never looks as cool in slow motion as wearing your products lead me to believe.  Any assistance you can provide in the resolution of this matter would be heartily appreciated as the documentation included with recently purchased footwear was unclear with regard to activating time bending, color enhancing, crew acruing, flyness inducing, features.

Sincerely,

a faithful consumer

Juan Carlos

Just remembered the death of my goldfish, Juan Carlos.  Killed by a white cat named Red, back when I was living in a frat house.  Loved that fish.  Happened years ago. Dunno why that came back just now.  He was a good fish.

Those were weird times.  Weird, happy, times

8/12/11

Good Things and Some Updates

I've updated the Auralport. I'm liking it. A little more grimy to fit the tone of what I've been putting out. It's the autumn look.

Header:

teh header. That's right; teh. Trying to capture some urban swell. Some of that urbany grungery.

Background:

the verbal refinery

Summer's gonna hurt you. It hurts me. Pretty much every year. But, insufferable bastards make poor friends. As we all know. I'm glad I put the hours in to make it happen. It was long overdue. And God knows I've been trying to brush up my design language and delivery. There's an aerospace themed remix of oem coming soon as well. I want to say it'll be hammered out this coming Saturday, but there are a lot of things I want to say that never make it to the light of day. I'm workin. Trying not to be some kind of insufferable bastard, because those sorts of people make shitay friends. So looking forward to the cool of day and cooler night.

So much to say that I haven't yet. But I'm composing. Every hour of every waking day is spent, part way, in composition and refinement. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. Maybe that's what makes the job interviewing process difficult. Every time they ask me where I see myself in five years the answer is always "retired to a ranch and spending every waking minute writing and thinking and getting outside to do the things industrial society left behind." I'm a terrible liar.

Anyway, hello as always. Do I really have to tell you I love you after all these months and years? Well I'll do it anyway, because I have so much love and so few faces to spit it to. I love you.
Ciao. Is that how that's spelled? Well, let's safety dance it: chow. Also I'm pretty hungry. My fridge is mostly empty, but I'm happy, so who cares. Not I.


///Gorillaz - "To Binge" ...love yourself some, they're not going to forgive you. You can do another day, but don't be afraid to help yourself make that day a little more "fukyeh". We've all fallen out of favor some way some how. Details are for mooks. Sunshine is for kooks. Moonlight is for spooks. But you, you just are in the sunshine and the moonshine and the details and the broad visions and that is something. Who's really keeping score in this economy?

8/8/11

Lookit, Lookit

The Music That Makes the Living got a redesign today. Now with 200% less headache on the eyeballs. Aren't I awesome? Don't answer that.

This is the new background:



The old background was okay but had way too many colors that demanded a strange set of colors for the text and the whole thing never really worked and it's bothered me since I put it up.

Old background:



I think the new background keeps the visual interest and loses the visual headache. So overall, a win. Not as interesting as visual confetti, but also not as blinding. An answer to a visual problem. It's nice when you can make answers materialize with enough effort fired off. One of those things where, thankfully, production does not mirror life and the end result is a big ol' pot of buttery eye candy. Still trying to restore my skill sets to where they once were and this I think is a step in the right direction. Everybody on the factory floor working towards the same ends. Well, maybe not everybody, but enough of the bodies. To make something worth remembering happen.

Also, Hai :) enough with the coffee. Time for sleep.


///Justice - "DVNO" ...do you really need to know my name, to figure out how cool I am? The bass is so live on this. I can almost feel the fingers smacking the steel. Need something to get your head nodding on a friday pre-game before whatever the hell else you planned on doing later? Answered.

8/3/11

Manifesto (just kidding)

It's tempting to construct manifestos when things don't go your way. Tempting to take the bum raps you keep getting and try to think of a way to correct everything wrong that's happened to you, letter by letter, number by number until you arrive at a list of things and virtues that can correct the world once and for all and make it, not only a place in which your alternate self who experienced all of the positive outcomes you have been deprived truly exists, but a world in which everyone's alternate selves experience every positive outcome they possibly can while only actively subtracting the negative and leaving the ceiling open for the positive (perhaps they won't experience as positive an outcome as they would have previously, but the potential would still be there).

So enough about that shite.

Everybody's different. Some people will never understand how to be people. How to be human. I myself am much closer to being feral, to identifying with the senses and sensibilities of the higher functioning animal kingdoms than the lower functioning partitions of society. I don't know if I'm the right person to ask what it is to be human. I'm comfortable there. I suppose if I had to choose which side of that fence I wanted to stand on, I know what side I'd pick. I can't hold it against the people that have never been down that end of the spectrum if they don't understand how to relate. I can fucking still hate them though. For a little while. And then I get bored because I can howl as hard as I want into that wind coming down from where they are, and they'll never hear me clearly. And then I get back to rooting around my woods for things to eat and things to do and other wolves with which to play.



Ire. It's there. There is no ire extinguisher. I can break all the glass I own, but inside those cases there is only an ax with which to fight the fire. Swing away. Go find a patch of grass that is not burned to crisp ash. Roll around for a bit. Run off into the burning woods again after the scent of the something gorgeous, eyes wilder, mouth drawn back from teeth and hungry for something fat and slow. And happy to feel my lungs beating against my smoke stained ribs. Just break glass.

Don't invite me to your pity party. I'll drink all the liquor and toss back all the punch and go dancing on rooftops singing praises to the moon and starry ash smudged sky. I'm not without compassion. It's just something that's hard for me to understand. To feel and synthesize and give back. Sympathy yes. I can understand that. Sometimes I feel like my heart is the bleeding heart of a broken little girl fallen into a ravine in the Black forests of Germania, but my head is screwed on with steel lag bolts and filled with enough warheads, .50 cals, and trigger happy children to stage a military coup in darkest Africa and enough warpaint to terrify the most elaborate and landed samurai. I do my best to feel. And then I take what's left and make sense of what I read back from the dials and switches.



///El-P - "Love Theme" ...love though, I guess that's one thing that stays the same, but even that... the understanding fractures. As if the symmetry alone is a prescription to live. The world is busted, learn to live in it and treat people right. No manifestos necessary.

8/2/11

The Right One In

This entry was about a thousand words longer, but I thought about it some more and boiled it down beyond harping.

There are people that are there for you and there are people that think they are there for you. People that listen to you talk and try to participate in your dreams and delusions and end up sounding like hollow eyed parrots. People that try to hug you and have no idea how to actually hug another human being. People that think being there means saying "hey come by anytime" when you're not actually able to get there. Or, saying "sure come and stay as long as you need to except we'll have you moved to a homeless shelter if you don't find a place to stay in fourteen days." Amongst other things, it's just galling and conceited of a person to insist that they're "there" for you when they have no concept of what "being there" actually means to you and they believe themselves to be a saint to you when what they're doing is about as useful as giving a homeless man an end table and saying "my work here is done."



Don't tell me we have everything in common because we both had bad parents and should suddenly be bonded for life with endless stories to tell each other. Suffering maybe universal on a general level of human experience, but personal suffering is just that. Exceptionally personal. Never tell someone, after they tell you explicitly that you have nothing in common, that you have everything in common because you both had a bad dad, or wanted to play sports when you were little. How arrogant do you have to be to tell someone that you know them better then they know themselves. It's just plain stupid.

Don't ever tell me you're there for me and I won't let you in or don't want to be your friend because I'm afraid that you're "there for me," and I'm running away. It's a thing I don't want to dignify with a response.

I know myself pretty god damn well (though there's still so much I still learn) and know one knows me better than my former psychiatrist because I've told him things I haven't and will never tell anyone. Don't tell me, ever, that I'm afraid to let you in. Any person can want to be let into your life. Any person can want to be there for you and stand outside the windows of your eyes asking why you treat them so badly because they've been there for you all this time and you never once thanked them. Any person can want to be like you and have everything in common with you. But what it takes to "be there for me", trust, you cannot and have not done. Why should I thank you. When I tell you we have nothing in common, it's because I know myself well enough to be able to say so with certainty. And when it comes to who you let into your life, everything else becomes secondary, as long as you let the right one in, and I'm sorry, but it isn't you.

I'm sorry about that last part. It wasn't written directly to you, but to the person who is causing some problems because they thought and probably still swear to themselves up and down that they are all of those things that I just explained to you, so many people are not. It's grown tiresome, and I just had to get it out of my skull.

Some people really are there for you. Some people can be let into parts of your life. Some people do have things in common with you and me. But most people aren't, can't, and don't and one thing life has taught me through the years is that if you don't let the right one in, it makes it tough to move anything else forward when they start to ask you why you push them away.

Anyway, missed ya. Be back later with more items de arte.


Massive Attack - "Man Next Door" ...from here... onto the night.

8/1/11

Onibaba

If you haven't seen it, hopefully this scene persuades you.


The entire film was flat out menacing and sickeningly beautiful.


///Blur - "Battle (U.N.K.L.E. remix" Black to night in the tall grass. Who is that sleeps well is an it. A shard of a dream come too far to life to rest in peace.