Well, I'm 32 today. Fast approaching my midlife crisis. Trying to celebrate. Is it weird to be anxious about having an iterative midlife crisis? Probably, yes. Definitely yes. We'll see how it goes. I'll let you know if I buy a yacht and a roadster and get a prescription for penis enhancing drugs and hair plugs. Time keeps on running.
What's new, what's new? Well the things I have yet to do aren't really new. Still have to piece together the redesign, don't I? It's still coming (that's what she said) and I swear to that up and down. Stand up act 5 is still on the way, but I can't really swear by that up, down, left, or right as I'm still trying to get back to a place mentally where I won't sound like Orny Adams in that movie with Jerry Seinfeld. You know the one. The one where Jerry Seinfeld was funny, but fifty percent of the screen time, maybe sixty pushing seventy, was dedicated to that bastard Orny and his bugged out eyeballs and all he did was piss and moan over the whole thing and made it practically unwatchable except for the saving grace of getting to see Seinfeld do his thing. The whole movie was like getting a chance to see Cosby with new material, but the caveat was that for every minute you saw you had to sit through five minutes of Chris Rock screaming into the microphone (because everything's funnier when it's louder). I'm not going to do that. Still working on the gift. I know! It's been forever. Pushing a year by now. I don't want to stop working on it. Then what'll I do with my spare time? Read? Fat chance! No, I'll probably read more. Reading is important. It's the non-readers with too much power that basically flipped this country inside out. And I'm not going to do that either, or at least, not on purpose.
I apologize for not staying up on it. Things have been pretty rapid fire lately. Bang bang, you shot me down. Bang bang, I hit the ground. Lots of thought bubbles and thought bubbles being burst with thought bullets. I rediscovered that I love Led Zepplin while listening to What Is and What Should Never Be. I've been trying to stay fresh to death, but mostly I've just been hanging out in bad neighborhoods doing not so good things to my body which butts heads directly with fresherating it. Trying to be big enough to take a stand against hard wiring. Eat the entropy and pass order out the other side of my head. Not easy. Sleeping at night will help. Getting on a normal schedule will help immensely. I think that's the main problem. Continuous change has basically blown away my flux capacitor. It stood all it could stand and it can't stands no more and my flying DeLorean is grounded and instead of fixing it I've just been kicking the tires and cussing.
What does it mean when you file for a job transfer and the email ticket says case:new the following hour and then case:closed the hour after that yet no one has passed you any good news or bad news? No idea. Suddenly is sooner than anyone ever thinks. So I suppose we'll see and wait, not always in that order. Depends on how I'm feeling. Sometimes I'm feeling more wait and see and sometimes I'm feeling less wait and more see and sometimes I'm all wait and unseeing. Time just crawls sometimes and the best thing I can do for myself is close my eyes or stare at the pavement going by beneath my feet and my runner's high because the distance is never closing fast enough until you hit that point and it's closing too fast and you realize you haven't given yourself enough to cool off and warm down (warm down?) so you're going to have to jog right past your door and go around the block again and by the time you get back you feel like you could go another mile or two and so you do, and then you regret it halfway through and turn back, but this time looking up so you know when to say when. I rarely do.
I do things like develop hobbies out of things like answering very simple questions of distance and position in hyper extensive detail. Yes, the thing you are looking for is here. Oh no, that's not good enough. It's kind of like a game, well it is a game. I try to fix the positions of things with so much accuracy that you could find it blindfolded. It helps me remember where things are. Mostly it helps me combat the gremlins and elves that keep touching my stuff at home and moving things around when I'm not there to keep an eye on the joint. Bastards. Small handed thieving little... well, we've all been there more or less. Time keeps on slipping.
So I'm sure everyone with half an instinct for detection tries not to read tabloids. You can feel them sucking the brain fibers right through your eye sockets. Soul sucking camera lenses except their powers were bestowed on the tree pulp they were printed on and now work in reverse. No wait. And now work in forwards except the concept works in reverse. Instead of sucking out peoples souls for your consumption the printed matter sucks out your soul for their consumption. So they can put more cameras and phone operators and hotlines out there like bait to suck on more souls and make more print. It's a loop. Everything's a loop that is a conspiracy, but not every conspiracy is a loop? Anyway, back on target, tabloids!
I try not to read them, but eventually with enough unfortunate glances I end up ingesting a story incidentally, like sawing chemically pressure treated wood without a mask, you get that junk in you and you can't help noticing (also don't ever ingest that stuff as it will get you higher than you've ever been and then you'll sleep for like 20 hours with complete memory loss). I came across this ridiculous story of Tom Cruise and Kate Holmes (was that her last name? I don't remember since her absorption into the Cruise persona. I think it was, well anyway) horrible warped world. A world in which their children are experiencing horrible things like flying on airplanes and staying up late and ice cream all day or something and all I could think was: really? Horribly warped world? Is that what we're going with here? Is that really what we're boiling down to now? You've got to be kidding me.
How is it that their world is horribly warped and the land of the micro-united nations adoption agency cat fighter's opium den union is not warped at all (I walk by a lot of tabloid stands at my job, a lot of bits and pieces of the running Angelina/Jen/Pitt crapfest have been inhaled)? And then it struck me. The reason why people don't read tabloids and think wow, what b.s. and instead plunk down whatever or however much it costs to get a copy. People want to be distracted and not everyone can afford to pay for television and the unending rot that pours down the chute at MTV and BET and Oxygen and company. It's basically a tv show. That's what tabloid culture is. It is a tv show for everyone so they can lose themselves in familiar characters and worry about them at night and talk about them during the day because (whether they know it or not) it's like a serial novel. Like Pride and Prejudice published a little bit at a time each week and it engages them where they are and allows them to, for a while at least, leave the world behind and immerse themselves in something richer.
I could have gone the way of "people read it because they hate their lives", but I honestly don't know that. If anything that would or at least should read to you "people read it because they hate their lives, and I am assuming the base state of most people is hating their life because that is my base state." Which isn't really true. Well I do get at odds with myself sometimes all the time, it's unfair to assume that everything anyone else ever does is based on escapism. And that was just way too technical. Two steps back off that academic cliff.
It's good that people read. People that read tabloids read more than me. No, wait a minute. That is definitely not true. Not because I wouldn't want a tabloid digester to be more well read than me, but because of all the time I spend crawling the internet. It's not all pictures. Not yet anyway. Remember when everyone went crazy about protecting their content and every page of text was embedded into flash and gifs and other picture formats so you couldn't copy and paste it and everyone had cutesy alert messages that would pop up (some of them infinitely looped so that you had to restart your crashed browser) if you ever right clicked on their page to bring up the copy/paste dialog? Ridiculous times. But anyway, yeah. I read a lot, is what I'm saying and I guess that people read at all is always a good thing. Just have to convince the tabbies to raise the language level from like third grade to highschool and easy as cake you'll raise the education level of the United States, one soap opera at a time. That is my plan for education reform if I am ever elected president. Or education Czar. Or Don of learning. Whatever they're calling it these days. Pretty sure it's Czar. Chair? I have no idea and no desire to go read about it. See ya!
///Mono - "High Life ... everybody wants it and sometimes I do too. Though I never really know when I'll have the time to really chase after it. I think by and large I've got better things to do. Maybe not better, necessarily, but other things to chase after. Other distances to sew up.
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
9/24/11
Travels
Do you ever wake up and the first breath you take as you open your eyes is like the end of the beginning of the breath you held loosed in the exhalation last as you closed them hours before? The kind of breath that just draughts and draughts like a mug with its bottom smashed out and a waterfall pouring in through your eyes?
I've been so many places I haven't told you about. It truly has been amazing cities and villages and neighborhoods that I did not know existed in the slightest. It's been like holding up a sliver of pencil graphite and peering at it and into it and trying to see the sliding structures of the molecules that make it able to write and as you focus in harder and harder your eyebrow twitches, your right eye scrunches, your cheek pulls a little bit against the corner of your mouth, and you have a lopsided nostril flare as it curls into a black dot and you sneeze so hard you see the white and gray spots of single blood vessels traveling through the tubes inside your eyes until the white and gray static washes away and as you realize what you felt was probably the hardest sneeze you've felt all year and your vision sharpens and tightens and you go back to the task of focusing in on the little stick of graphite to gain some greater understanding of its whyness the focus of your eyes takes in first the space behind it and you notice for the first time that the entire world has changed and you, through your one tenth orgasmic bending of space and time and through modes absolutely involuntary to your methods, have been transported in the pinched microcosm of a microcosmically microbial micronaut of a micromicrosecond into another state of your known universe. And you're like, "awwww, snap. Wait, where was I just now?"
That's what the cross bridged universe has been like. I've got to find a way to slow down somehow. It's like every step, every step in this phase is approximately three feet (I'm a big stepper, though I live my wake state in little steps, admittedly, not by choice), but sometimes across the bridge it becomes impossible not to cover yards and hundreds of feet to a stride. It's alarming to me. Since the city I traversed and loved deeply, and had fairly close ties to, with it's cats that raced tiny v6 motored shopping carts, and its trams and extensive rail system, its modes and methods, and absolutely stunning, despite the time of day, industrial sector, passed to dust through the extinction level event that literally converted pretty much all living matter there to wind blown drifts of ash, knee and sometimes waist high, the entire world over there was silent for days. Dreams of black empty space.
The passage was probably linked to the discovery of an engine, a massively complex machine, whose only visage, comprehensible to me was red space. I remember traveling in search of the menace. There was so much unrest and power in the air. The kind of power that is impossible to control. The sort of power that raises the hairs on your forearms and makes your skin stand taut at a rally railing against a thing that you don't believe in necessarily, but that is necessarily part of the fabric of who and what you are, and your skin tries to wrench away from the sheer electricity of so many voices and hands raised against the isness of its whatness. The preparations for the event. The siphoning off of resources. It felt like the beginnings of war from the middle portions of textbooks on American history. No pantyhose, no lipstick, no zoot suits, no strip steaks. I don't think they're all related, but they rhymed and made funny notes in my head. All the same, I remember the streets emptying. The saving of fuels. The work stoppages because so many people were leaving and then whatever happened, whatever the engine so utterly complex in it's being and overwhelming in its output to be describable only as the color it left seared into my eyes, everyone died.
Then one day I crossed the bridge again, down the stairwell and through the door, across the water, to enter myself there and I searched farther and farther from the place I'd grown into and I started finding new places untouched by the destruction, by the discovery of a motor vast enough to destroy a population in its breach. It's been simply incredible. The world has been intensely sensory and I know that I am not from there, but a refugee from the city of dust. It's been difficult to blend in. I don't know what it means.
I am anxious for the arms race though. Turning laborers on my factory floors toward positive productions or at least neutral destruction. Admittedly I have been doing my best to live toward lower resolution perception. Perhaps stupidly. However, it has made it much easier to keep track of the caucus. All present for a span of weeks instead of days and hours. Well, mostly all present all the time, but have you ever tried keeping six people at the same table non stop for any length of time. Cellphones down, you assholes! I know it's happening (I've been using those rather interchangeably, but I'm making an effort not to). I haven't been dividing and sub dividing my body like I should be. Increased capabilities are a good thing for the people I work for and cohabitate real space with, but very bad for me because it basically cedes me more idle power, and my insides do not idle well before outlets become too infrequent, necessarily so as there's only so much you can physically do in 24 hours and then I drift toward solid state and forced diffusion through shorter out spouts. The better my conditioning the more of a potential and eventual hazard I become to myself. And who the hell keeps moving my toothpaste.
I guess there's an answer in there somewhere, but I don't remember asking a question. I guess mostly I've just been trying to get a handle on the verdant landscape. The wackness. Seeing through it. I'm used to two or three dreams. Two or three stints in dreamland. I've been having ten to fifteen in the new world. It is strange.
///Linkin Park - "Session" Not trying to create distance, but it's hard to know how far away I travel sometimes because I don't understand how much ground has been covered or how much time passes between what I perceive to be blinks of my eye. Sometimes the days spin by like tracers through sunset skies and it's all I can do not to blink against their rays.
I've been so many places I haven't told you about. It truly has been amazing cities and villages and neighborhoods that I did not know existed in the slightest. It's been like holding up a sliver of pencil graphite and peering at it and into it and trying to see the sliding structures of the molecules that make it able to write and as you focus in harder and harder your eyebrow twitches, your right eye scrunches, your cheek pulls a little bit against the corner of your mouth, and you have a lopsided nostril flare as it curls into a black dot and you sneeze so hard you see the white and gray spots of single blood vessels traveling through the tubes inside your eyes until the white and gray static washes away and as you realize what you felt was probably the hardest sneeze you've felt all year and your vision sharpens and tightens and you go back to the task of focusing in on the little stick of graphite to gain some greater understanding of its whyness the focus of your eyes takes in first the space behind it and you notice for the first time that the entire world has changed and you, through your one tenth orgasmic bending of space and time and through modes absolutely involuntary to your methods, have been transported in the pinched microcosm of a microcosmically microbial micronaut of a micromicrosecond into another state of your known universe. And you're like, "awwww, snap. Wait, where was I just now?"
That's what the cross bridged universe has been like. I've got to find a way to slow down somehow. It's like every step, every step in this phase is approximately three feet (I'm a big stepper, though I live my wake state in little steps, admittedly, not by choice), but sometimes across the bridge it becomes impossible not to cover yards and hundreds of feet to a stride. It's alarming to me. Since the city I traversed and loved deeply, and had fairly close ties to, with it's cats that raced tiny v6 motored shopping carts, and its trams and extensive rail system, its modes and methods, and absolutely stunning, despite the time of day, industrial sector, passed to dust through the extinction level event that literally converted pretty much all living matter there to wind blown drifts of ash, knee and sometimes waist high, the entire world over there was silent for days. Dreams of black empty space.
The passage was probably linked to the discovery of an engine, a massively complex machine, whose only visage, comprehensible to me was red space. I remember traveling in search of the menace. There was so much unrest and power in the air. The kind of power that is impossible to control. The sort of power that raises the hairs on your forearms and makes your skin stand taut at a rally railing against a thing that you don't believe in necessarily, but that is necessarily part of the fabric of who and what you are, and your skin tries to wrench away from the sheer electricity of so many voices and hands raised against the isness of its whatness. The preparations for the event. The siphoning off of resources. It felt like the beginnings of war from the middle portions of textbooks on American history. No pantyhose, no lipstick, no zoot suits, no strip steaks. I don't think they're all related, but they rhymed and made funny notes in my head. All the same, I remember the streets emptying. The saving of fuels. The work stoppages because so many people were leaving and then whatever happened, whatever the engine so utterly complex in it's being and overwhelming in its output to be describable only as the color it left seared into my eyes, everyone died.
Then one day I crossed the bridge again, down the stairwell and through the door, across the water, to enter myself there and I searched farther and farther from the place I'd grown into and I started finding new places untouched by the destruction, by the discovery of a motor vast enough to destroy a population in its breach. It's been simply incredible. The world has been intensely sensory and I know that I am not from there, but a refugee from the city of dust. It's been difficult to blend in. I don't know what it means.
I am anxious for the arms race though. Turning laborers on my factory floors toward positive productions or at least neutral destruction. Admittedly I have been doing my best to live toward lower resolution perception. Perhaps stupidly. However, it has made it much easier to keep track of the caucus. All present for a span of weeks instead of days and hours. Well, mostly all present all the time, but have you ever tried keeping six people at the same table non stop for any length of time. Cellphones down, you assholes! I know it's happening (I've been using those rather interchangeably, but I'm making an effort not to). I haven't been dividing and sub dividing my body like I should be. Increased capabilities are a good thing for the people I work for and cohabitate real space with, but very bad for me because it basically cedes me more idle power, and my insides do not idle well before outlets become too infrequent, necessarily so as there's only so much you can physically do in 24 hours and then I drift toward solid state and forced diffusion through shorter out spouts. The better my conditioning the more of a potential and eventual hazard I become to myself. And who the hell keeps moving my toothpaste.
I guess there's an answer in there somewhere, but I don't remember asking a question. I guess mostly I've just been trying to get a handle on the verdant landscape. The wackness. Seeing through it. I'm used to two or three dreams. Two or three stints in dreamland. I've been having ten to fifteen in the new world. It is strange.
///Linkin Park - "Session" Not trying to create distance, but it's hard to know how far away I travel sometimes because I don't understand how much ground has been covered or how much time passes between what I perceive to be blinks of my eye. Sometimes the days spin by like tracers through sunset skies and it's all I can do not to blink against their rays.
9/23/11
9/17/11
Post Nine One One
I've been pretty dark, post 9/11. Hopefully, understandably so. It's been difficult to remember how to have fun, or that having fun is essential to being.
I won't tell you that it can't rain all the time because, in fact, it can and it does. You would be a fool to never throw a poncho and an umbrella in your ruck. You'd be a fool to go out when the hail stones are larger than your fist. A fool to believe if you train hard enough you can vault any fence, scale any wall, and leap any crevasse if you simply will with all the strength in your bones. It's a uniquely American fallacy that if you want it with enough of your heart it can be made real.
The fact is life is pretty damn unkind and there is no insurance policy available to make the check cashers pay for what they dupe the writers into signing.
So, in light of that, and in light of the fact that I've been a pretty dark human being, I am dedicating some of today to having fun. Forgetting is impossible. Those years are tattooed on me. Tattooed on my bones. They will always be with me and they will find their own way to the surface of my skin whether I like it or not. I will have to scrub and scrub to get the cells off of me week after week and month after month and they will seep out again against raw flesh and needle their way into the fabric of what I make with no desire to cause and no avenue to prevent.
But, damn it all, it is Saturday and for once I don't have to work to pay the bills and slot the tokens and I am determined to sing a little and let one of the voices in my head be my own falsetto, cigaretted, malt liquored, boom and bipped, hymn for a little while. Get live. There's only so much fun to be had poking a corpse.
///Eagle Eye Cherry - "Shooting Up In Vain" The film Go changed my life, but not from the perspective of life changing activities, because that was not unfamiliar to me, but from the perspective of music. I heard so many sounds I'd heard before, but in a way so far removed from what I was used. Amazing film. Far and away one of the most solid soundtracks ever collected. Bonus track? Hell yeah:
///Left Field - "Swords" ...oh with my sword at my side... listen to this on a rainy night. Cue it up right around a lonely midnight. You won't regret it.
I won't tell you that it can't rain all the time because, in fact, it can and it does. You would be a fool to never throw a poncho and an umbrella in your ruck. You'd be a fool to go out when the hail stones are larger than your fist. A fool to believe if you train hard enough you can vault any fence, scale any wall, and leap any crevasse if you simply will with all the strength in your bones. It's a uniquely American fallacy that if you want it with enough of your heart it can be made real.
The fact is life is pretty damn unkind and there is no insurance policy available to make the check cashers pay for what they dupe the writers into signing.
So, in light of that, and in light of the fact that I've been a pretty dark human being, I am dedicating some of today to having fun. Forgetting is impossible. Those years are tattooed on me. Tattooed on my bones. They will always be with me and they will find their own way to the surface of my skin whether I like it or not. I will have to scrub and scrub to get the cells off of me week after week and month after month and they will seep out again against raw flesh and needle their way into the fabric of what I make with no desire to cause and no avenue to prevent.
But, damn it all, it is Saturday and for once I don't have to work to pay the bills and slot the tokens and I am determined to sing a little and let one of the voices in my head be my own falsetto, cigaretted, malt liquored, boom and bipped, hymn for a little while. Get live. There's only so much fun to be had poking a corpse.
///Eagle Eye Cherry - "Shooting Up In Vain" The film Go changed my life, but not from the perspective of life changing activities, because that was not unfamiliar to me, but from the perspective of music. I heard so many sounds I'd heard before, but in a way so far removed from what I was used. Amazing film. Far and away one of the most solid soundtracks ever collected. Bonus track? Hell yeah:
///Left Field - "Swords" ...oh with my sword at my side... listen to this on a rainy night. Cue it up right around a lonely midnight. You won't regret it.
9/15/11
And When I'm Swimming In Through a Tunnel I Shut My Eyes
There was a day when I was fighting substance abuse. A recent day. Joined in combat with myself. The war was being fought on several fronts, less chiefly in my mind, much more so in the fibers of my flesh. A stalemate would have ensued. Had the other side not run out of ammunition.
So I took my body on the road, like I have before. Saddled up the bicycle. Checked the metrics and vitals on it and decided the bike itself would not kill me on its own unless I was the one steeping outside the envelope. And so we went.
For three hours. Half drunk and half possessed to tear myself apart in as constructive a way as I could. The dismemberment of the arms works division exercised in full physical animosity of the frames and walls that house it.
I got back home spent. Phenomenally spent. Phenomenally spent and utterly independent of chemicals. It was beautiful. The only thing that could have made it more so would have been to stumble in doors, deposit my bicycle and fall on the floor gasping only to be collected by a love. A human being who loved my sweating, salted, corporeal, enough to fuck me right then and there in all of my disheveled, half awake, half conscious, and fully realized and exploited self.
To feel waves of pleasure wash over skin and gush from within like the cyclops eye of a New England light house against the north eastern scream of a mental squall that threatens to blot out life like a spilled canteen to an anthill, to feel those waves wash against bones and muscle incapable of putting up protest, to lose oneself in that ocean and sink and curl in the wavering cyclones of tide and circular torridity of thick and hot and cold water, inches above the punishment of coral formation and light days away from consequence, is to feel an absolute lack of control and borderline sexuality that flirts with the recklessness of the passivity of induced rape.
And that's what I wanted that afternoon. That's what I needed. What I needed was you. That's okay though, we've got time to make yet.
///Mum - "Green Grass of Tunnel" ...behind these two hills, there's a pool...
So I took my body on the road, like I have before. Saddled up the bicycle. Checked the metrics and vitals on it and decided the bike itself would not kill me on its own unless I was the one steeping outside the envelope. And so we went.
For three hours. Half drunk and half possessed to tear myself apart in as constructive a way as I could. The dismemberment of the arms works division exercised in full physical animosity of the frames and walls that house it.
I got back home spent. Phenomenally spent. Phenomenally spent and utterly independent of chemicals. It was beautiful. The only thing that could have made it more so would have been to stumble in doors, deposit my bicycle and fall on the floor gasping only to be collected by a love. A human being who loved my sweating, salted, corporeal, enough to fuck me right then and there in all of my disheveled, half awake, half conscious, and fully realized and exploited self.
To feel waves of pleasure wash over skin and gush from within like the cyclops eye of a New England light house against the north eastern scream of a mental squall that threatens to blot out life like a spilled canteen to an anthill, to feel those waves wash against bones and muscle incapable of putting up protest, to lose oneself in that ocean and sink and curl in the wavering cyclones of tide and circular torridity of thick and hot and cold water, inches above the punishment of coral formation and light days away from consequence, is to feel an absolute lack of control and borderline sexuality that flirts with the recklessness of the passivity of induced rape.
And that's what I wanted that afternoon. That's what I needed. What I needed was you. That's okay though, we've got time to make yet.
///Mum - "Green Grass of Tunnel" ...behind these two hills, there's a pool...
No Country, No Courtship. The Noble State.
I don't understand this country. At all. It's not my country. It's goals aren't my goals. It's means aren't my means. It's ends aren't my ends. I suppose "ends" are also covered by "goals", but bear with.
I had a bad day. Everyone has those. Tuning my bicycle has been first and foremost, most recently, because it is the gateway drug to planes of existence I cannot reach and enjoy without it. Tuning the bicycle has been very important. At first tuning it was important because, as hobbies and fascinations go, playing with and exploring the machines performance is a risk/reward, work in/pleasure out, formula that is so often reserved for lesser and greater intellectual pursuits. What you put in is what you get out. What you risk is proportional to how far and away from the initial investment you will potentially succeed. The nice thing about the tuning is being able to feel and play in that sand box with your hands instead of just your head.
Well the bad day ended, or maybe continues to roll beneath the surface like wave functions through deep water, when I realized the tuning was important for other reasons. A machine powered by, and linked so tightly to, your body has to be properly tuned or one or the other will suffer damage at the interface. Well I damaged myself and didn't realize it until taking a shower and swiping at my nether regions to find I was raw as hell, but didn't realize it thanks to how hard I ride and all the adrenaline soaked hours I put in. Seat post is about half an inch too high. High enough to max out my strokes and stride, but too high and high pressured for my nuts. And the gear shifts for the drive sprockets are about a quarter inch to tensed, hence several agonized seconds spent trying to lock in high drive and pull away from a bus that ended with me having to bail and pull the bike up on the sidewalk after stripping the skin of my knuckle trying to engage the shifter. After that I didn't try to do anything else above the call of duty. The requirements of the moment. So maybe the bad beat is over. Maybe the adjustments will work. Maybe I'm just not making any sudden moves so I can't really know if things are tacking the right way or not.
The whole day was a lot like getting ripped out of hyper space with the boards lit up red and having no reason to believe anything should be that wrong. What the hell happened. Why are we stationary? Why now? We haven't gotten to the next destination. Not even close. And all the why trying to remember the lines and lines and lines of information in the manuals that tell you what all the little lights mean and how to fix them and they're related, but it's all over whelming when it strikes thirty at a time. So we troubleshoot and wait, dead in space.
The concept of the noble state struck me today. We are all familiar with solid state being, as I am absolutely obsessed with it. The phase of existence that is pure beingness. Zero wetware. Pure production. Pure interaction. Zero latency. Zero sleep. Zero diversion. This bad day has brought to my table another state. A state with much in common with the noble gases. A state of zero sleep, latency, diversion, and interaction whose mode is one hundred percent wet with zero production. A mode of existence predicated on pure focus to the maintenance requirements of the wetware to keep it functioning and spinning in place and whose pured focus requires the abandonment of all production, whose main symptom is not the decision to interact or not, but the incapability to do so. In the same way noble gases cannot react. A natural cross terminal reaction to the remediation of solid state existence. The "one step too far."
I have been gripped by the noble state recently and I'm trying to break out of it to that happy middle ground of balance. Which brings me back, in circuit, to the titular object. This is a place I cannot understand. Here's why (or at least the most recent example):
My work ethic got my friend promoted. I was happy to be part of it, but I didn't realize until now how large a part I played. My ability to do my job is par infinity. The intensity and strength and focus I brought to my work place is without equal. Literally. There is not a single person in the building who can do what I do, as well as I do it, as often as I do it, to be found anywhere. The manager who is getting deposed, failed to take advantage of what I do. The coworker who is being appointed successfully ascribed his name to what I do and is getting appointed to a higher position that pays double and more. I am, easily, more capable than both of them combined. However, the organization that staffs my place of work prizes seniority, and so my coworker who is half as capable as me but more senior by six months will reap all of the benefits of my toil. Which I was okay with, until the true degree of the leap frogging came to light.
I applied to the program to train managers; an opportunity to enter a phase of employment that would evaluate my ability to manage through an 8 week process. I was denied what amounts to an opportunity to participate in an opportunity to possibly enjoy greater success and use my skills to better the organization as a whole. Because, and as a direct result of my work, my coworker, six months my senior and half as capable, has been called in to fill out paperwork that will assign him to managerial status at another store. So what's wrong with that?
One: he did as little work as the current, temporarily deposed, interim manager. Two: he was the keyholder for the store when the falling temporary manager was not available and I still fulfilled all of the duties with greater fidelity than he did. Three: it was my ridiculous work ethic that got shit done in the face of call offs and short staffing and heavy (1000+ case orders) that made the store immaculate each day. Four: I had to actively manage his incompetence on a regular basis to make sure things ran relatively smoothly (the guy didn't even know how to turn on his two way radio). Five: when the shit hit the fan and there were four people available to put up one thousand cases, more than ten thousand individual items, to shelves, I was the one governing and delegating and executing the processing of the order so that when the peons came to work everything would be laid out correctly for them to do their jobs.
It is just massively aggravating that, in the face of everything that transpired he is instantly appointed, through a few moments of paperwork to a position HE DID NOT EVEN APPLY FOR. I did the paperwork, I went through the three stage interview process. It was something I wanted. I was denied for having "interpersonal issues" that "once resolved and signed off on" would allow me to reapply and be re-evaluated on. He gets to skip all that. Despite constant video surveillance and consistent day to day review of the tapes by the head honcho he still gets credit for "motivating" me? Despite the fact that even with incompetence of the interim manager and the steady output, the steady, ridiculous high numbers I put out, with no direct supervision ever, he gets credit for somehow working magic when it was that morons incompetence that failed to complete the days order after I left?
I don't understand the courtship dance that I'm not doing. I don't know where the "i"s are that I'm not dotting and the "t"s I'm not crossing. Just tired of getting passed up. I would be less jaded if the person skipping all the bullshit I had to go through to get the door close on my foot wasn't white. I would be less jaded if he wasn't ten years older than me. Less jaded if he wasn't six months longer in the bullshit of a union we're forced to join by accepting employment. Less jaded if I didn't do both of their jobs better than them. Less jaded if the only knock on me was having "interpersonal issues". Less jaded if we hadn't been written up the exact same number of times. Less jaded if the videotape, supposedly reviewed daily, didn't show I did twice the amount of work of them both combined. So, I am jaded and disappointed, despite myself.
It was a bad day. Capped off by a lack of harmony between myself and my machine. I don't understand what it is that I have to do to court America. What it is that I have to do to make it a more perfect union. As far as I can tell it is a thing imperfected and continuing on specifically because it is such. Because if the right people are selected to the right posts all the time, capitalism fails because everyone succeeds and in order for it to succeed very talented people have to be made to fail, not because of their talent or their offerings, but because someone can capitalize on their talent and their offerings at cut rates and generate a psuedo free market, a market free of close evaluation for its emulation of its own ideals warped just here and so to generate enough complacency that the end result is the best possible outcome at minimal costs and subterfuge.
I don't know where that last part came from, but it sounds like the start of a fine and provable thesis. Continuity, profit, and production ahead of ability, common sense, and equitable consideration. In the grand scheme, the scheme of things larger than myself I would probably accept that with huzzahs and go get 'ems and fuck yeah Americas. On the scheme of things in which I exist, however, I the words stick in my mouth in favor of "there has to be a better way." So I settle back into a noble state. And preserve myself. Tooth and nail.
///Muse - "Falling Away With You" I think our lives have just begun. You can feel the guitar climb and claw with the vocals and a scissor dogfight for superiority and it is beautiful. Beautiful in the way the fight for conscious can sometimes be.
I had a bad day. Everyone has those. Tuning my bicycle has been first and foremost, most recently, because it is the gateway drug to planes of existence I cannot reach and enjoy without it. Tuning the bicycle has been very important. At first tuning it was important because, as hobbies and fascinations go, playing with and exploring the machines performance is a risk/reward, work in/pleasure out, formula that is so often reserved for lesser and greater intellectual pursuits. What you put in is what you get out. What you risk is proportional to how far and away from the initial investment you will potentially succeed. The nice thing about the tuning is being able to feel and play in that sand box with your hands instead of just your head.
Well the bad day ended, or maybe continues to roll beneath the surface like wave functions through deep water, when I realized the tuning was important for other reasons. A machine powered by, and linked so tightly to, your body has to be properly tuned or one or the other will suffer damage at the interface. Well I damaged myself and didn't realize it until taking a shower and swiping at my nether regions to find I was raw as hell, but didn't realize it thanks to how hard I ride and all the adrenaline soaked hours I put in. Seat post is about half an inch too high. High enough to max out my strokes and stride, but too high and high pressured for my nuts. And the gear shifts for the drive sprockets are about a quarter inch to tensed, hence several agonized seconds spent trying to lock in high drive and pull away from a bus that ended with me having to bail and pull the bike up on the sidewalk after stripping the skin of my knuckle trying to engage the shifter. After that I didn't try to do anything else above the call of duty. The requirements of the moment. So maybe the bad beat is over. Maybe the adjustments will work. Maybe I'm just not making any sudden moves so I can't really know if things are tacking the right way or not.
The whole day was a lot like getting ripped out of hyper space with the boards lit up red and having no reason to believe anything should be that wrong. What the hell happened. Why are we stationary? Why now? We haven't gotten to the next destination. Not even close. And all the why trying to remember the lines and lines and lines of information in the manuals that tell you what all the little lights mean and how to fix them and they're related, but it's all over whelming when it strikes thirty at a time. So we troubleshoot and wait, dead in space.
The concept of the noble state struck me today. We are all familiar with solid state being, as I am absolutely obsessed with it. The phase of existence that is pure beingness. Zero wetware. Pure production. Pure interaction. Zero latency. Zero sleep. Zero diversion. This bad day has brought to my table another state. A state with much in common with the noble gases. A state of zero sleep, latency, diversion, and interaction whose mode is one hundred percent wet with zero production. A mode of existence predicated on pure focus to the maintenance requirements of the wetware to keep it functioning and spinning in place and whose pured focus requires the abandonment of all production, whose main symptom is not the decision to interact or not, but the incapability to do so. In the same way noble gases cannot react. A natural cross terminal reaction to the remediation of solid state existence. The "one step too far."
I have been gripped by the noble state recently and I'm trying to break out of it to that happy middle ground of balance. Which brings me back, in circuit, to the titular object. This is a place I cannot understand. Here's why (or at least the most recent example):
My work ethic got my friend promoted. I was happy to be part of it, but I didn't realize until now how large a part I played. My ability to do my job is par infinity. The intensity and strength and focus I brought to my work place is without equal. Literally. There is not a single person in the building who can do what I do, as well as I do it, as often as I do it, to be found anywhere. The manager who is getting deposed, failed to take advantage of what I do. The coworker who is being appointed successfully ascribed his name to what I do and is getting appointed to a higher position that pays double and more. I am, easily, more capable than both of them combined. However, the organization that staffs my place of work prizes seniority, and so my coworker who is half as capable as me but more senior by six months will reap all of the benefits of my toil. Which I was okay with, until the true degree of the leap frogging came to light.
I applied to the program to train managers; an opportunity to enter a phase of employment that would evaluate my ability to manage through an 8 week process. I was denied what amounts to an opportunity to participate in an opportunity to possibly enjoy greater success and use my skills to better the organization as a whole. Because, and as a direct result of my work, my coworker, six months my senior and half as capable, has been called in to fill out paperwork that will assign him to managerial status at another store. So what's wrong with that?
One: he did as little work as the current, temporarily deposed, interim manager. Two: he was the keyholder for the store when the falling temporary manager was not available and I still fulfilled all of the duties with greater fidelity than he did. Three: it was my ridiculous work ethic that got shit done in the face of call offs and short staffing and heavy (1000+ case orders) that made the store immaculate each day. Four: I had to actively manage his incompetence on a regular basis to make sure things ran relatively smoothly (the guy didn't even know how to turn on his two way radio). Five: when the shit hit the fan and there were four people available to put up one thousand cases, more than ten thousand individual items, to shelves, I was the one governing and delegating and executing the processing of the order so that when the peons came to work everything would be laid out correctly for them to do their jobs.
It is just massively aggravating that, in the face of everything that transpired he is instantly appointed, through a few moments of paperwork to a position HE DID NOT EVEN APPLY FOR. I did the paperwork, I went through the three stage interview process. It was something I wanted. I was denied for having "interpersonal issues" that "once resolved and signed off on" would allow me to reapply and be re-evaluated on. He gets to skip all that. Despite constant video surveillance and consistent day to day review of the tapes by the head honcho he still gets credit for "motivating" me? Despite the fact that even with incompetence of the interim manager and the steady output, the steady, ridiculous high numbers I put out, with no direct supervision ever, he gets credit for somehow working magic when it was that morons incompetence that failed to complete the days order after I left?
I don't understand the courtship dance that I'm not doing. I don't know where the "i"s are that I'm not dotting and the "t"s I'm not crossing. Just tired of getting passed up. I would be less jaded if the person skipping all the bullshit I had to go through to get the door close on my foot wasn't white. I would be less jaded if he wasn't ten years older than me. Less jaded if he wasn't six months longer in the bullshit of a union we're forced to join by accepting employment. Less jaded if I didn't do both of their jobs better than them. Less jaded if the only knock on me was having "interpersonal issues". Less jaded if we hadn't been written up the exact same number of times. Less jaded if the videotape, supposedly reviewed daily, didn't show I did twice the amount of work of them both combined. So, I am jaded and disappointed, despite myself.
It was a bad day. Capped off by a lack of harmony between myself and my machine. I don't understand what it is that I have to do to court America. What it is that I have to do to make it a more perfect union. As far as I can tell it is a thing imperfected and continuing on specifically because it is such. Because if the right people are selected to the right posts all the time, capitalism fails because everyone succeeds and in order for it to succeed very talented people have to be made to fail, not because of their talent or their offerings, but because someone can capitalize on their talent and their offerings at cut rates and generate a psuedo free market, a market free of close evaluation for its emulation of its own ideals warped just here and so to generate enough complacency that the end result is the best possible outcome at minimal costs and subterfuge.
I don't know where that last part came from, but it sounds like the start of a fine and provable thesis. Continuity, profit, and production ahead of ability, common sense, and equitable consideration. In the grand scheme, the scheme of things larger than myself I would probably accept that with huzzahs and go get 'ems and fuck yeah Americas. On the scheme of things in which I exist, however, I the words stick in my mouth in favor of "there has to be a better way." So I settle back into a noble state. And preserve myself. Tooth and nail.
///Muse - "Falling Away With You" I think our lives have just begun. You can feel the guitar climb and claw with the vocals and a scissor dogfight for superiority and it is beautiful. Beautiful in the way the fight for conscious can sometimes be.
9/12/11
Nine Eleven, the Airiness
I have a lot of mixed emotions about that date. September eleventh.
A lot of half resolved, unresolved, emotions. But who doesn't?
I suppose it is a little different for me. Different for everyone.
I guess I don't understand. The price of globalization maybe? The cost of it is having to shake hands with bad people to get good things? How good are the good things we get from rubbing up with bad people? I think that's something I don't understand. Can't fully grasp.
I'm sort of, well definitely filled with some hatred. Some amount. Okay, a lot of. If everyone here basically acknowledges that the American way of life is worth preserving then let's not do it half way. Lets train two million soldiers and go destroy them. I suppose that would work in a vacuum where the only people that existed were us and them. But not the case.
That angers me. The morass of it all. The round about way of. The global village. The ridiculous diplomacy of it.
I'm angry, still. Angry that I was rejected from enlistment despite scoring perfect marks on everything except my mental history. I wanted to enlist because I want to go kill them. I want, in a way similar to what, in some ways, creates terrorism, to be able to voice and exercise the power of the will to be where that power has been removed from me and my voice cut away. Not just them. Everyone who has denied me. Everyone who has made me suffer toward their own advancements and gains. Somebody has to pay. I'm no patriot. Half the days I wake up I wish I could leave this country. The fact that I am trapped here, and was even denied release on the grounds that I kill her enemies saddens me. What do I have to do?
I'm still upset. Upset that telling my father I was going to enlist got nothing but the response "that's not in line with the family standard of excellence". What standard of excellence? Half the family tree is or was in and out of jail. The other half, a bunch of alcoholics and babies having babies. The other half a group of two faced liars and double life livers. And he voted to reelect Bush. Voted against Obama. And calls me a failure for wanting to be somebody. For wanting to be more than the sum of his life and failings. For wanting to be a part of the wars he himself voted to support. How wrong headed can a man be? How fucking screwed up. Death can't come soon enough for him.
It's also the anniversary of the start of a relationship with the last woman I will love that intensely (since embracing who I am as a homosexual). We're still friends. The best five years of my life to date. Chased by the worst two years and still counting (but ticking back to the brighter side) since it unraveled under the undeniable pressures of what was in the face of what could be. The force of fact over riding fiction. If only a handful of things aligned a different way, I might be telling you about graduate school and engagement and house warmings instead. She was the last visitor to the surface of my world. She still sends postcards now and then. I want to tell her I still love her, but I think she knows. The thing that's difficult, well most difficult, is that I can't do anything more than that. I guess that's okay.
A lot of anger. At being abandoned over and over again by my parents. Believing I could trust them. Being convinced I could count on them. Convincing myself. Only to be abandoned once more. Abandoned on 9/11 when planes were falling. Abandoned to let the bottom fall out of my academic career. Abandoned at bus stops with people getting shot by a mass murderer in school parking lots right around the way. That's not what family is supposed to be. Beaten, abandoned, beaten, abandoned, over and over and over.
I'm not numb to nine eleven. Kill them all. I'm saddened and confused. At a loss and at times slightly warmed.
I am loved somewhere.
I'm at times directionless. What am I supposed to do now? What am I supposed to do without you? without a way to make them answer for what they did to me? without a way to put the enemies of an entire nation in the dirt? What am I supposed to tell you when I know that door is closed? Without a real place in a country that feels like it pushes me to its edges at every new juncture?
Nine eleven has me reflect on those things. Reflect on possible answers. And trying to forget. Dull the sharpness.
Somewhere in there, I'm okay.
And I'm just like you, a little and sometimes a lot lost, for a day.
A lot of half resolved, unresolved, emotions. But who doesn't?
I suppose it is a little different for me. Different for everyone.
I guess I don't understand. The price of globalization maybe? The cost of it is having to shake hands with bad people to get good things? How good are the good things we get from rubbing up with bad people? I think that's something I don't understand. Can't fully grasp.
I'm sort of, well definitely filled with some hatred. Some amount. Okay, a lot of. If everyone here basically acknowledges that the American way of life is worth preserving then let's not do it half way. Lets train two million soldiers and go destroy them. I suppose that would work in a vacuum where the only people that existed were us and them. But not the case.
That angers me. The morass of it all. The round about way of. The global village. The ridiculous diplomacy of it.
I'm angry, still. Angry that I was rejected from enlistment despite scoring perfect marks on everything except my mental history. I wanted to enlist because I want to go kill them. I want, in a way similar to what, in some ways, creates terrorism, to be able to voice and exercise the power of the will to be where that power has been removed from me and my voice cut away. Not just them. Everyone who has denied me. Everyone who has made me suffer toward their own advancements and gains. Somebody has to pay. I'm no patriot. Half the days I wake up I wish I could leave this country. The fact that I am trapped here, and was even denied release on the grounds that I kill her enemies saddens me. What do I have to do?
I'm still upset. Upset that telling my father I was going to enlist got nothing but the response "that's not in line with the family standard of excellence". What standard of excellence? Half the family tree is or was in and out of jail. The other half, a bunch of alcoholics and babies having babies. The other half a group of two faced liars and double life livers. And he voted to reelect Bush. Voted against Obama. And calls me a failure for wanting to be somebody. For wanting to be more than the sum of his life and failings. For wanting to be a part of the wars he himself voted to support. How wrong headed can a man be? How fucking screwed up. Death can't come soon enough for him.
It's also the anniversary of the start of a relationship with the last woman I will love that intensely (since embracing who I am as a homosexual). We're still friends. The best five years of my life to date. Chased by the worst two years and still counting (but ticking back to the brighter side) since it unraveled under the undeniable pressures of what was in the face of what could be. The force of fact over riding fiction. If only a handful of things aligned a different way, I might be telling you about graduate school and engagement and house warmings instead. She was the last visitor to the surface of my world. She still sends postcards now and then. I want to tell her I still love her, but I think she knows. The thing that's difficult, well most difficult, is that I can't do anything more than that. I guess that's okay.
A lot of anger. At being abandoned over and over again by my parents. Believing I could trust them. Being convinced I could count on them. Convincing myself. Only to be abandoned once more. Abandoned on 9/11 when planes were falling. Abandoned to let the bottom fall out of my academic career. Abandoned at bus stops with people getting shot by a mass murderer in school parking lots right around the way. That's not what family is supposed to be. Beaten, abandoned, beaten, abandoned, over and over and over.
I'm not numb to nine eleven. Kill them all. I'm saddened and confused. At a loss and at times slightly warmed.
I am loved somewhere.
I'm at times directionless. What am I supposed to do now? What am I supposed to do without you? without a way to make them answer for what they did to me? without a way to put the enemies of an entire nation in the dirt? What am I supposed to tell you when I know that door is closed? Without a real place in a country that feels like it pushes me to its edges at every new juncture?
Nine eleven has me reflect on those things. Reflect on possible answers. And trying to forget. Dull the sharpness.
Somewhere in there, I'm okay.
And I'm just like you, a little and sometimes a lot lost, for a day.
9/9/11
What Is It All About?
Dreamed I cheated my way to the top of the financial food chain and bought an awesome house in the hills of Nassau county and went on the inspirational speech touring circuit with Roger Staubach.
Then one fateful day while at home alone and drawing up notes for a lecture series at nyu titled "only your successes are successful" and for some trying to cook rice, some of it fell on the floor. No big deal I thought. Went to pick it up and I pull my hand away with a fist sized rat burying it's teeth into my palm.
Naturally I whip it against the wall except it doesn't die. Two more rats climb out of the seams of my red sofa, pause a minute to sniff around in the afternoon, and then they tear the gimp rat apart and then come after me.
Dump the boiling hot rice on them, problem solved. Except Tapirs start climbing out of my trash cans and their heads are just bleeding holes atop their necks, sucking at air like a baby's mouth thats had all of it's undescended teeth ripped out of it's gumbs. Tapirs a lot bigger in person.
Thats when porcupines with no eyes in their sockets start rolling out from under the couch and eating all of my notes scattered everywhere, and I try to smash them with books but every time I swing I get nothing but quills in the backs of my hands and arms and the quills fill with blood and drip it onto my carpet and the stains well up and bubble into more rats.
So I fight my way out of there and I'm in a hotel lobby with late 70s limousines parked everywhere and roger staubach gets out of one and walks past me with nine security guards, and I'm thinking it's a bit excessive when I hear over the radio through one ofthe drivers open windows that Staubach has been implicated in the murder of more than thirty members of a local human trafficking organization operating in the Gulf coast, but only to force them out so his own drug smuggling operation could operate smoother.
The driver I'm standing near just starts laughing his ass off and then, as he's laughing and I'm trying to get my head around the last thirty minutes two of the limousines explode and my life flashes before my eyes, but instead of my whole life it's high school algebra on aday we had class outside.
The teacher is drawing on her board and it's all unreadable text. Bent lines and short half moons and dashes and shes reading and pointing to the symbols and saying numbers and operations and everyone in class is lying in the grass on white mats, all cloud watching and sweating.
I roll over on my back my toes are touching some girls calf and someones knees are at my hip and everything feels taut and slick and sunny and the professor continues to drone on not caring that no one is paying attention.
A breeze blows and I crane my neck all the way back to let the air dry me off and I open my eyes and find I am staring up between a classmates spread legs and skirt and shes got a full on chubby from lying in the grass on her stomach, rolling her hips.
I let myself fall back and go back to cloud watching and the buzzing and someone puts their hand up my shirt on my stomach and all I think is how you can't get in trouble for touching if it isn't sex. And I yawned and stretched, heady and tired with all the sun and math, and let one of my hands rest there over my head against their wet skin.
Then the flash ended and I woke up. Safe and sound, horny, and with a new found respect for tapirs (dangerous beasts), cleaning up after myself when I cook, karma, and roger staubach.
But other than that I have no clue what last night was all about.
9/6/11
Money, Cash, Power, 'Spect... it's a Trap
I have been battling. Not the usual demons. Battling the allure of money and respect. The two usually come in a dime pair. And it's nice. I recently realized I was using it's and its in the inverse of how they're supposed to be used because I rememorized a mnemonic device incorrectly. One of those times when you say to yourself "yeah I remember that from elementary school," but your memory is actually completely backwards and remanufactured from parts and pieces of things that actually happened. So I am trying to make an effort to reitify the memorization. Only this time forwards. Comma usage is still playing fast and loose like law dogs in westerns. Anyway, been struggling with the potential for success.
Blowing the costs out of success way out proportion. Thinking things like, well if I am successful how will I be able to live in an apartment that costs more to live in and is slightly smaller than the one I currently occupy? The answer is: the extra money will be what you can apply to owning a runabout and getting out to other places so you'll be spending less time cooped up anyway. But that's not the answer in my head. In my reason, it is the answer. In my head the answer reads more like... well you know. I need not jump it that hard.
I guess with making more money I won't qualify for my hundred dollars of food stamps that has become less a mark of shame and more like "holy shit, it is the eighth of the month and time to buy all the foods I've been dying to buy for the other twenty days out of this month, jesus christ no more peanut butter and jelly and pasta." The truth is I hate eating out. With a passion. Not because it costs more for no reason because for whatever reason tipping motivates service instead of service motivating service (I'm just incorrigibly service oriented) and for some reason getting what you pay for only applies in the food sector. I hate eating out because I hate having people make food for me, as though I am somehow above making my own vittles and prone to being upset if said vittles aren't ready in five minutes or less. I am a creature of patience. Violent, violent patience. I am content to wait very, very, long periods of time to get desired results... ...sometimes quietly, sometimes silently, sometimes very loudly, but at the end of the day I will accept having to fold my hands for a time and wait out results, if not for seeing the fruits of my labor then for the reappearance of opportunities past or yet to come. I did always like the tortoise. Fast hands, slow feet, can't lose.
I practice making fists throughout the day. Throwing fists. I keep an eye on my footwork too. I suppose maybe I am a little obsessive compulsive, but only toward the end of self preservation. It was kind of hilarious, the job application for temporary day to day labor. I believe it asked no less than eleven times if I though fighting was important, or if I thought the ability to win a fight was important, or if I thought the ability to defend one's self in a fight was valuable. I answered the questions honestly and then accidentally scrapped the test (given with an inferior keypad interface, it really was an honest lucky mistake) and then asked the branch manager what was up with all the questions about fighting. He clued me in and told me to answer no, not ever, for all the fighting questions regardless of experience or training or ability. Apparently temp labors brawls are less the exception and more the rule. Regardless, the upside of being conscious of how you place your feet on a moment to moment basis makes you less susceptible to slip and falls when you are focusing on other things.
Just one of those sorts of things I guess having to use your body as the foundation of your livelihood instead of your brain makes you conscious of. I'm kind of inclined to go back to using my body more, but I wouldn't know where to start here. This place kind of frowns on that, hilarious enough as it is probably two cuts above a slum, but I'm not here to argue. One less trap.
Getting back to that though, I'm having some trust issues. Massive ones. Questions bouncing around. "If you were me, with everything you have at your disposal would you say yes to the offer being given you from your mouth to me, me being you?" Questions like that. I don't really know when I'm being used. I damn sure don't know when I'm being abused. The not knowing hurts more than the knowing. The discovery hurts more than both combined. I don't know if people are or aren't, but I wish they would just tell me. That's the upside of selling. It's clean cut. This is what's going to happen, this is why, and this is what it's going to cost you. That is the danger of friends. Nothing is clean cut like that. That's probably why the people I count as friends has thinned so much. That and just being a crazy fuck. Laughing too loud. Neighbors banging on walls. Laughing harder. Sigh. It's good to be live. Better to be alive. I'm working on that.
Money, cash, power, and respect. Everybody wants it. I want to be money so I can get cash and be granted enough power to sway enough respect to buy some land and a home so I will have no need of money, cash, power, or respect and can just be. There's no trap in that.
My stable of friends. Wow. I don't know. That's a lie. I do know. I like to say I don't know so I can imagine it's larger than it is. It's teensy. Oh god, I just tried to rattle it off and got to four, counting family members. Is that even something I can fix? Does it need fixing? To that, I can honestly say I don't know. If I stepped off my spaceship, when I do step off my spaceship, there are essentially four people who can relate to me, but who I can also relate to honestly and semi-openly... on a sit down basis. Everything is open over the waves. You can turn that off. When you're with someone, you can't turn that off. It's there. I am there. I want your eyes. It's very different. Sadly different. World changingly different. I think that's the nice thing that opens me up when I'm talking to you that I don't get to experience otherwise. You can turn me off. Unsubscribe. Break up. All that wonderful shit and I don't have to know and you don't have to know and we're just the same with or without eachother. The beauty of. The fantasia. The crazy fucking nasty wonderful idea sex one night standiness of it all. It's not always that. But sometimes. Whatever, it's fun. Ive nothing to justify. And everything to justify to myself. I assume you realize we are arguing.
We've agreed we'll keep on because the dreams have been to die for. They really have. They've been the sorts of things a body could wish to never wake up from. But, it's a trap, isn't it? Maybe not. Maybe I just have to accept that there are benevolent forces beyond myself. People that don't know me, that don't want to punish me once they do get to know what I am. People that don't want to me punish myself, that are trustworthy beyond a shadow of any doubt and worth more, in fact, than all the trust I could muster if I turned every cell toward the task.
a kid can dream.
///Gorillaz - "On Melancholy Hill" Five hours to get this out. Happy to put my thoughts to good use. Unhappy I couldn't do more. Bed and jobs beckon. can't wait til I'm a housewife with nothing to do but tend after bastards, count my government checks and bide the time until I'm raking in Rowling esque millions when I have nothing to do but write and feeding myself is last on my list of major concerns. So melancholied. So half finished. I wish I was sipping brew on a plastic beach.
Blowing the costs out of success way out proportion. Thinking things like, well if I am successful how will I be able to live in an apartment that costs more to live in and is slightly smaller than the one I currently occupy? The answer is: the extra money will be what you can apply to owning a runabout and getting out to other places so you'll be spending less time cooped up anyway. But that's not the answer in my head. In my reason, it is the answer. In my head the answer reads more like... well you know. I need not jump it that hard.
I guess with making more money I won't qualify for my hundred dollars of food stamps that has become less a mark of shame and more like "holy shit, it is the eighth of the month and time to buy all the foods I've been dying to buy for the other twenty days out of this month, jesus christ no more peanut butter and jelly and pasta." The truth is I hate eating out. With a passion. Not because it costs more for no reason because for whatever reason tipping motivates service instead of service motivating service (I'm just incorrigibly service oriented) and for some reason getting what you pay for only applies in the food sector. I hate eating out because I hate having people make food for me, as though I am somehow above making my own vittles and prone to being upset if said vittles aren't ready in five minutes or less. I am a creature of patience. Violent, violent patience. I am content to wait very, very, long periods of time to get desired results... ...sometimes quietly, sometimes silently, sometimes very loudly, but at the end of the day I will accept having to fold my hands for a time and wait out results, if not for seeing the fruits of my labor then for the reappearance of opportunities past or yet to come. I did always like the tortoise. Fast hands, slow feet, can't lose.
I practice making fists throughout the day. Throwing fists. I keep an eye on my footwork too. I suppose maybe I am a little obsessive compulsive, but only toward the end of self preservation. It was kind of hilarious, the job application for temporary day to day labor. I believe it asked no less than eleven times if I though fighting was important, or if I thought the ability to win a fight was important, or if I thought the ability to defend one's self in a fight was valuable. I answered the questions honestly and then accidentally scrapped the test (given with an inferior keypad interface, it really was an honest lucky mistake) and then asked the branch manager what was up with all the questions about fighting. He clued me in and told me to answer no, not ever, for all the fighting questions regardless of experience or training or ability. Apparently temp labors brawls are less the exception and more the rule. Regardless, the upside of being conscious of how you place your feet on a moment to moment basis makes you less susceptible to slip and falls when you are focusing on other things.
Just one of those sorts of things I guess having to use your body as the foundation of your livelihood instead of your brain makes you conscious of. I'm kind of inclined to go back to using my body more, but I wouldn't know where to start here. This place kind of frowns on that, hilarious enough as it is probably two cuts above a slum, but I'm not here to argue. One less trap.
Getting back to that though, I'm having some trust issues. Massive ones. Questions bouncing around. "If you were me, with everything you have at your disposal would you say yes to the offer being given you from your mouth to me, me being you?" Questions like that. I don't really know when I'm being used. I damn sure don't know when I'm being abused. The not knowing hurts more than the knowing. The discovery hurts more than both combined. I don't know if people are or aren't, but I wish they would just tell me. That's the upside of selling. It's clean cut. This is what's going to happen, this is why, and this is what it's going to cost you. That is the danger of friends. Nothing is clean cut like that. That's probably why the people I count as friends has thinned so much. That and just being a crazy fuck. Laughing too loud. Neighbors banging on walls. Laughing harder. Sigh. It's good to be live. Better to be alive. I'm working on that.
Money, cash, power, and respect. Everybody wants it. I want to be money so I can get cash and be granted enough power to sway enough respect to buy some land and a home so I will have no need of money, cash, power, or respect and can just be. There's no trap in that.
My stable of friends. Wow. I don't know. That's a lie. I do know. I like to say I don't know so I can imagine it's larger than it is. It's teensy. Oh god, I just tried to rattle it off and got to four, counting family members. Is that even something I can fix? Does it need fixing? To that, I can honestly say I don't know. If I stepped off my spaceship, when I do step off my spaceship, there are essentially four people who can relate to me, but who I can also relate to honestly and semi-openly... on a sit down basis. Everything is open over the waves. You can turn that off. When you're with someone, you can't turn that off. It's there. I am there. I want your eyes. It's very different. Sadly different. World changingly different. I think that's the nice thing that opens me up when I'm talking to you that I don't get to experience otherwise. You can turn me off. Unsubscribe. Break up. All that wonderful shit and I don't have to know and you don't have to know and we're just the same with or without eachother. The beauty of. The fantasia. The crazy fucking nasty wonderful idea sex one night standiness of it all. It's not always that. But sometimes. Whatever, it's fun. Ive nothing to justify. And everything to justify to myself. I assume you realize we are arguing.
We've agreed we'll keep on because the dreams have been to die for. They really have. They've been the sorts of things a body could wish to never wake up from. But, it's a trap, isn't it? Maybe not. Maybe I just have to accept that there are benevolent forces beyond myself. People that don't know me, that don't want to punish me once they do get to know what I am. People that don't want to me punish myself, that are trustworthy beyond a shadow of any doubt and worth more, in fact, than all the trust I could muster if I turned every cell toward the task.
a kid can dream.
///Gorillaz - "On Melancholy Hill" Five hours to get this out. Happy to put my thoughts to good use. Unhappy I couldn't do more. Bed and jobs beckon. can't wait til I'm a housewife with nothing to do but tend after bastards, count my government checks and bide the time until I'm raking in Rowling esque millions when I have nothing to do but write and feeding myself is last on my list of major concerns. So melancholied. So half finished. I wish I was sipping brew on a plastic beach.
9/3/11
End of the World, so Plan For It
I have a unique problem. It's a lot like when you run into the end of the internet regarding a particularly niche topic. You expect it to go on forever. Porn doesn't just end. What do you mean there are a fixed number of videos circulating that feature fisting and prolapsed orifices and cake sitting. But thats how it is. There's a finite anoint of magic out there and eventually you end up with a paid subscription to stuff you saw years ago.
Thats pretty much impossible to plan for. I have done more planning for the end of the world, in all it's glorious senarios, than I have for the eventuality of getting to the end of sub neighborhoods and niches of the web. What do you mean the supply of singing dogs can't meet my continuous demand for watching dogs sing songs to cats playing pianos! What do you mean there's only one video detailing how to break down and reassemble I bicycle cassette using household tools?!
It happens. My problem is more of the pornographic type. I have run out of ways to masturbate. Flat out run out of ways to do it. Maybe it's just that its overdone, but I think it's more along the line of there are only so many ways to pleasure yourself and I've pretty much exhausted them all. I've gotten to the end of my intranet and there's nothing else there, but white space. Of course I could begin inventing. I am about as creative a blue collar mind as anyone is likely to encounter in their life time. I could do it. However, I am very much concerned that things might get dangerously elaborate. Dangerously elaborate masturbation leads to candidacy for the list of one thousand exceptionally embarrassing ways to die. That is something, I think, I don't want. Not yet anyway, as I plan to die in a so grand a fashion that there is literally nothing left of me to bury or put in the ground. Something fast and fiery and adventurous... something that is not auto-erotic asphyxiation<- which is totally played out anyway.
It's something I never planned for. Mainly because, like the internet, I never really thought I would traverse all the available avenues and find myself right back where I started. Figured those streets would and could go on forever. So I guess I will invent, and plan for the eventually of running out of ways to invent. Every world ends. Plan for it. Would be my advice. Yet another life lesson learned.
Thats pretty much impossible to plan for. I have done more planning for the end of the world, in all it's glorious senarios, than I have for the eventuality of getting to the end of sub neighborhoods and niches of the web. What do you mean the supply of singing dogs can't meet my continuous demand for watching dogs sing songs to cats playing pianos! What do you mean there's only one video detailing how to break down and reassemble I bicycle cassette using household tools?!
It happens. My problem is more of the pornographic type. I have run out of ways to masturbate. Flat out run out of ways to do it. Maybe it's just that its overdone, but I think it's more along the line of there are only so many ways to pleasure yourself and I've pretty much exhausted them all. I've gotten to the end of my intranet and there's nothing else there, but white space. Of course I could begin inventing. I am about as creative a blue collar mind as anyone is likely to encounter in their life time. I could do it. However, I am very much concerned that things might get dangerously elaborate. Dangerously elaborate masturbation leads to candidacy for the list of one thousand exceptionally embarrassing ways to die. That is something, I think, I don't want. Not yet anyway, as I plan to die in a so grand a fashion that there is literally nothing left of me to bury or put in the ground. Something fast and fiery and adventurous... something that is not auto-erotic asphyxiation<- which is totally played out anyway.
It's something I never planned for. Mainly because, like the internet, I never really thought I would traverse all the available avenues and find myself right back where I started. Figured those streets would and could go on forever. So I guess I will invent, and plan for the eventually of running out of ways to invent. Every world ends. Plan for it. Would be my advice. Yet another life lesson learned.
9/2/11
Awful Music File #tmg4808Ld
Tim McGraw should never be heard on a public address system. The high arching, box rattling, over produced, voice on top of voice thing he's got going on is about as rich sounding as a beaver going under the wheels of a semi tractor trailer.
Can you imagine being at a happy hour and hearing forty dudes belting this out in waves of hot bear and peanut shell breath while all you want to do is lose yourself and early hangover in twelve ounces of what passes for peace in your life. If you had to hear that your head would literally explode. Not figuratively. Literally. Your head would disappear in a mist of bone and brain and the rest of your body would envy it for getting the hell out of there.
On top of that is the fact that the song offers you, the listener, the worst advice on how to live life imaginable. Seriously, if you live like you're dying you'll end up doing all the shit that eventually gets people killed. Idiots. Well, singular. Idiot -> Tim McGraw.
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