dear (______):

Dear twitter,

If I don't instantaneously follow you back, it's not because I don't care. It's because physically opening twitter and balancing my "follow" checkbook is not the most pressing thing on my schedule nine days out of a week.

love,

irrationally guilt ridden twitter user

Every Day I'm Shoveling

First of all, why is "every day" not one word by now? Or the various "every" constructions? If we as a people can come to accept "bling" as a word with real meaning, how can we not accept words with real meanings that don't lose those meaning with the space dropped out? A space between words is a fence between neighbors and fences are necessary. I'm not saying take out all the spaces and make every sentence a word, though that would be awesome. You could say what you wanted to say whenever you wanted to say it in like ten words or less every time. But instead of an organized neighborhood of streets and cross walks when you looked at a page you'd see a mosh pit. Every time you spoke to someone it would basically be you sharing your personal rave and trying to combine parties when they spoke back and that would just be... ...awesome. Also awesomely unintelligible. For a generation or two. Ultimately though it would probably make our children smarter, or at least allow them to think differently. It would change politics. It would make it pretty much impossible for foreigners to assimilate and then you really would need to learn other languages because that guy that only speaks Spanish or only speaks Cantonese would not be able to talk to you at all in broken English because the language would be so agglutinated and dense that it would be impossible for anything but an uncreased brain to grasp it with ease and build into it.

Second of all: why can't I sit in a park with a shovel after the sun goes down? That is just unfair. I walk halfway across town because I saw an awesome shovel out for trash and I forgot to go back and get it until the evening and besides my hands were full at the time. I walk halfway across town, granted I live in a pretty small town and get this nice, heavy handled, spade shovel that would be absolutely perfect for some yard work I'll have to do later and on the way home I cut through the local park and it's a pretty nice night out and the hills are all dotted with little Saturday evening fires of people in doors so I sit for a moment on a bench with my new sweet ass shovel, staring up and letting my mind wander over who those people might be and just enjoying the weather cold enough to drizzle the air with the smell of fireplaces. I've never had a fireplace of my own. I like to imagine what it's like. I saw a duraflame log once, one of those fake wood things for people who don't like to burn real wood I guess. Or maybe for people who like fire places, but don't want to do the things that having a fireplace requires you to do. That really is the story of modern America. I want things, but I don't want to do the things having those things will require me to do.

Anyway, I'm sitting there and a car comes rolling up real slow and I don't look back to see who it is. I know it's a car. I know that pebble crunch anywhere. I also know people don't like it when I make sudden moves, and besides I have nothing to hide. I'm just a dude with a shovel. I keep listening to this car rolling closer and then, in the background of my mind because I'm still thinking about the hillsides and the gorgeous night, but my head is also running through all of the sound clips of tires and pebbles and speed equations, I realize the tires are doing police cruiser and/or drive by speed and/or jump out and stuff in the backseat kidnapping speed. So I stand up and I figure one of those three things will happen and sure enough the flashlights come on and the questions start in and why the hell do you have to shine that shit directly in my eye sockets anyway. I have a shovel. I'm not running anywhere with a damned shovel. Or at least not far anyway. So now I know. It is officially not okay with society to just be a dude in a park with a shovel between the hours of 7 PM and 7 AM.

I haven't really been eating. Not my fault though. I have been eating. Because I'm pretty sure I give off this pheromone when I don't eat. I'm kind of obsessed with how I smell. I try to match it with what I've been doing and putting into my body. Not farts. Those are totally easy. I'm pretty sure you can tell how someone's body functions based solely on how their ears smell. Well maybe not solely. And you probably have to lick them like licking a nine volt battery to see if it works to get the full suite of diagnostic information available through smells. What am I talking about? I get lost in theory sometimes. So I have been eating some. Enough to keep things going, but little more. Mainly because my sink doesn't work and I don't want to have to slog all my dishes down six flights of steps to the sink that does work. Naturally the answer to that problem is: don't do anything that requires the use of dishes. So I've been skipping a bunch of meals. I don't really miss them. I do miss them in that it makes it a lot easier to stay awake. Staying awake has become a full time job again. Partly because of the lack of intake and hypermile-ing my body, but also because dreaming has been so incredible I can't help but want to be there constantly. It's becoming less of a second life and more of a single joined seamless in phase existence. You know people that complain about how they "already did that" in a dream and then like have to go to work again? That used to happen to me. Long ago. Now it never happens.

Of course I feel completely unrested because I am basically alive and in phased consciousness for twenty hours a day, but the people I've met and things I do... it's been ridiculous. Also pointless to tell you about it in those terms because you weren't there. Definitely a "dude I saw this movie and it was awesome, you should have been there, but let me continue to talk about the movie in terms of superlative adjectives because if I frame it in enough paper thin hammered gold you will totally be inspired by the blank space inside the frame containing the picture only I can see."

So the dish thing I learned from my dog, Jack, rest his angry, fun loving, visitor hating, best friend for life, little Shelty bones. We would go on weekend road trips and he didn't want to poop in the house so he would basically not eat or drink, though we always left him plenty of food and water, until we got back. Maybe it was equal parts "if I don't eat then I won't have to poo" and vigil for me. "That's giving an animal too much credit," shut your face. I can't give that old bastard enough credit. He was the man. Seriously. Except for his fear of thunder and lightning and his rage toward fireworks he and I were basically two of a kind and alternated top dog roles depending on the situation, but we were basically 1 and 1A. Learned that little trick of no input equals no output, body wise, from him. More bravery per pound than most people who are not also Marines. Probably more stupidity per pound, but we were, again 1 and 1A on that front too. If you are a cat person I don't hate you, but you have no idea what you're missing.

Which is why I should never be a parent. Me and my kids will be the baddest family on the block. Partly because I would be way too fair to them. With my dog, he would bring me a sock for tug of war and being like three times his size, maybe four if I just ate a couple burritos, the only fair thing to do was meet him at his level. I figured his teeth were probably a lot stronger than mine, what with his eating bones from time to time (never understood that, but I do have a propensity for walking around with spoons in my mouth), maybe four or five times so naturally I used my teeth for tug of war. If I lost a couple, no big deal, so we got it on. "I'm a take you down to China town!" That's how we threw down. Gotta be fair. So instead of setting a curfew I would probably tell my kids they can stay out or stay up as late as they want, but they have to fight me for it and if I win then they have to go to bed when I say. I wouldn't kick the crap out of them. I never actually hit Jack. I would scuff 'em a little. More like lioness to cubs kind of stuff. Only minus the breast feeding. Do they even do that? Or do they come out of the womb craving a hearty meal of lightly chewed, but still fresh, Giraffe. Instead of telling my kids not to go set fires, I'll probably stop them at the door and say something like "make sure you bring fireplace matches so you don't have to stand too close to the accelerant, because I'm not driving up to the woods to put you out." Sure, I wouldn't let them blow themselves up. I'm not a monster. But I will make sure they know how to set a charge properly and it would be the best father/son or father/daughter tandem ever. We will be feared. Probably. Anyway. What I'm saying is every day I'm shoveling so don't cause any problems and there won't be any problems. I'm just a dude with a shovel out for a walk.

Trying to get back to writing fiction, but it's been a long and heady road full of potholes. I'm not dawdling as much as I am reflecting. I wrote a fairly long draft of a science fiction short called Scanlon, but I haven't back over it in almost eight days now. I'm trying though. I apologize. I will try harder. Life's too short not to try, so don't spend all of your time "doing".


///Deadelus - "Taking Wing"

Cheesus Christ, Does Nothing Work?

I'm sorry I've been away. Less sorry than usual. Only because I've been away because I've been working and not because I've been furiously masturbating. It's been hard. The living. The being aliveness of breathing. Not the breathing part. That part is easy. What's been hard is trying to have a continuous thought when bells go off every fifteen minutes. Remember that book about that society that suppressed creativity by fitting every person with an apparatus that sounded a chime every five minutes to interrupt thought and render it's populace unable to create new ideas? No? Well that's what it's been like. A lot of "gotta put bread on the table" things interrupting the "gotta put bread into my skull so I don't check out of this world on some aneurysm shiz".

I've had one of those days. Not really one of those days, but one of those days stretched across an entire week. One of those days where you come down the break room stairs after sitting for fifteen minutes that flew by in a blink because you fell asleep in your chair watching infomercials about magic brassieres and magic belts that will force your body to do things you haven't taught and practiced or considered that maybe your body just wasn't meant to do for any length of time and you go to get back to work and realize, picking up your box cutter that you left your mug of tea upstairs. And it's going to take you another five minutes to go back and get it and your legs are too dead for yet another trip up those damned stairs, but you are already dead thirsty and have to weigh which death is more unpleasant.

One of those days where the fattest jar of the smelliest pickled peppers in piss yellow juice slips out of your clutches because your hands are cramping and every single paper towel dispenser is empty because the people responsible for keeping them filled never do their jobs as well as you do yours. The mop bucket is at the other end of the store, another five minute round trip on sleeping hooves, and when you get there to fill the mop bucket there is no floor soap and the other fluids available would take up the spill and stink right along with the wax finish. You take the bucket and get halfway across the store before you realize its got a flat and you are utterly baffled as to how a plastic wheeled yellow tank of a bucket could have a flat before you realize a thread of the mop came loose and lodged in the wheel and, instead of plucking it out, the bucket was filled and dragged around for weeks, maybe months until the wheel turned into a plastic orange wedge, and since you were too tired to notice it sooner you've left a scratch on the floor several dozen yards long.

You walk the bucket back and have to pick it up and hug it's black stained, deli grease streaked body to yours because walking it back on the floor would double your error. Selecting a new bucket you walk it across the store to the opposite slop sink and find that while there is cleaning solution appropriate for the task, someone was so kind as to snap off the knob, rendering the sink into something more like a flushless urinal, and so you walk the bucket with soap back to the other end of the store with the working sink and wonder why they would bolt the soap to the wall instead of making it possible for you to take the soap to the working sink and prevent having to do the routine all over again, and why the hell you would need a manager to sign off on throwing out a broken bucket in the first place when they so rarely use them they wouldn't know if it was broken or not and can you really not be trusted to make a simple judgement like "a three wheeled bucket is no longer useful."

=sigh= sometimes nothing's working for ya. And by the time you get back to the shattered jar it's been tracked up and down the aisle. By your coworkers. And you wonder how much time you'd do if you just killed them all and called it a day and a win for humanity.


///The Chemical Brothers - "Surface to Air" take flight and forget the world even exists... what i want to do. but its the only outpost in this sector of the galaxy and my ship can't take me far enough to reach the next one. so we keep in touch.

That Instant

That instant you realize you still have no clue where you live and stumble around the block six times before you understand that you didn't land on the wrong block, or the wrong neighborhood, but you, in fact, paid for a forty dollar cab ride thirty minutes ago and hopped out exactly where you told the cabbie to go: the wrong side of the city altogether.

dear (______):

dear diary,

Today was awesome. More of that plz thnx.

love,

your little spaceman

Wall Street

> We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

> Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

> Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

> For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

> So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

> The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

> We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”

End email. I don't normally respond to threads like this, but I was struck by the flippancy and offered a rebuff:

dear content of email

hilarious. if the reduction of the "food supply" ever gets down to hyper competitive opportunists versus ingenuity and survivability,
wall street will find itself in an afghanistan of its own creation. good luck.

rejoicing in what income i have and living on it too. i get home at 5 a.m. if im lucky. but better than lucky is working a sixteen hour day. i work every hour im given and i take hours from coworkers whenever i can. ive been trying to get expelled from the ufcw since the union forced me to join as a condition of employment. good luck coming down here and eating the food off my plate lol. wash your car and cut your own hair and your lawn and everything else you have that needs washing and doing and guarding and tending to.

you might get some of my "food", but im used to being hungry. eventually my knife and fork are taking your hand. and it will be delicious. and ill leave you to moan and divorce and spring idle bastard children in failing school districts because you wont be able to live in the good ones no matter how hard you work at minimum wage jobs that cut and limit your hours and send you home or on leave when you hit the red line they define and the only release you can have is fucking strangers on wellfare with six kids to net massive child support and other benefits that work the system until she files a bogus PFA when you don't pay on time and the fuzz come and lock you up and you lose that job for "no call/no show" and can't get another one for two years thanks to your criminal record.

and then, hopefully, youll buy a shotgun from a pawnshop and end the dance, wherein your children will pick up where you leave off. hilarious. very much enjoyed. mostly because it's reflective, i guess, of an extremely homogenized community versus an extremely diverse community pressed into a stereo typical mold for easy digestion/dissection. also i am super hungry now with all the talking
about food.

not wall street does not equal an inability to compete and dominate. all it means is "not wall street." life can be just as vicious, demanding, painful, unforgiving, unblinking and violent as downtown manhattan any day of the fucking week for many people who have had a different set of opportunities presented to them. capitalize all you want. break your hands trying to beat down doors. the fact of the matter is it's not a level field, will never be a level field, and for civilization to continue to advance or plateau or whatever there will have to be some kind of hierarchy and class system and learn to fucking live with it and pursue yourself. i think. whatever.
hilarious.

i guess its just funny when people beat their chests and say "you couldnt do what i do" without for a second realizing they couldnt do what i do either.

i dont want to be rich or fat and happy or a gym member who would otherwise be fat and happy. all i ask of you, wall street, is that you dont let your "rejoicing" become an obstacle to my happiness.

End Rebuttal.

I don't hate wall street. But if a person with hired landscapers can frown upon those landscapers billing hour of work incorrectly or frown upon a maid secreting away the homeowners possessions, why can't those of us who keep them employed by participating in the economy frown upon its mismanagement and abuse? When you order your cheeseburger at the diner you expect a cheeseburger, not a thing that has been gutted and cheated to make it more cost effective and time conserving for the line cook to make. Sure, I can't solve differential equations easily, if at all, but the fact of the matter is the people who can more than likely couldn't do my job for a week either before they quit to pursue something easier. So I guess we're even. On an uneven playing field.

That Instant

You bang your head so hard your sense of smell goes out of whack and everything smells like burning leaves in paint chipped oil drums and you realize your eyes are no longer tracking anything symmetrically, and in fact are off on individual candy land adventures and won't be back home for dinner. So don't wait up.

Stand Up Act 6

Stand Up Act 5

I have been dreaming graphic. Memory graphic. It has been difficult to deal with still. A silly concern. Sometimes not silly. Trying to keep track of the comers and the goers cross bridge and who is lingering and who isn't in places they should and should not be. I feel like what would lend them all credibility is if they had names, but none have offered anything close to a name since I left Maryland. Since I left murderland. It's a strange thing. The namelessness. There is the thing in the white and tan ghili suit, man or woman, but definitely humanoid who shows up well in fluorescent lights and little else. The little man in the black trench coat. The woman in the blue dress. The tall and wide man who loves to wear khaki and from head to toe and never talks. The bone spur balls of things I can only really describe as pre sleep sheep skinned and tumbling. The seeing spots in the middle of the day. The thing who offered a name, whose name I cannot record because it would serve it's displeasure at my efforts to disseminate its existence on the crown of my head by day and by night and chew my nerves like dollar a pack gum and suck the insides of my skull like a starved lamprey.

Times have been strange at the cusp of awareness. Maybe not the cusp, but the interface of understanding and the known with the less known and the abstract removed thrice from the models and modes of deduction. The experience of the thing is not even close to ... I don't even know. They're not ghosts. Some are new. Many are old. Some of them change clothing and change sexes, but I can smell them beneath the dressings. I can smell their blood in the marrow of their bones as clearly as they can smell and find mine across state lines. With them it is always a matter of time. Sometimes I have to trick myself into being alone, put on the little blinders and the nose muzzle and slip the bit between my teeth so I don't swallow my tongue while I run so hard and so tuned, but I'm faking it.



and I'm just talking. Trying to talk some things out. Orient myself. I cannot tell if I'm air locked or just cold. It's 58 degrees in my apartment. I should fix that. Six hours later, the temperature is fixed, but my geography is not. There are a lot of things that made me laugh today and I'm trying to remember some of them. Trying to keep my insides in. Browsing my old day time notes. And by daytime I mean work time. And by work time I guess I mean night time.

As a side note though, do you ever get into those odd temperature situations? For instance the break room where I work is already kind of a hole in the wall with some chairs scattered around. Kind of like a refrigerator box behind K-Mart that someone saw and said to themselves "yeah, that would be a cool place to hang out for the next ten years of my life" and then adopted a stray one legged pigeon and fed it corn puffs until it was eaten by a stray cat. That kind of break room. Actually, I don't even believe it would be a stretch to say there are probably better cafeterias in most underfunded high schools than the place where I work. That's not the bad part about it though.

I'm the kind of person who just loves opportunities to eat. Not that I'm fat. Not that I particularly love delicious food, even though I do. Who would really say no to an open flame seared, seasoning rubbed slab of rare beef. Like, bleeding delicious, with buttery asparagus and sesame seeds and I am getting way ahead of myself as I can afford to eat that, maybe, twice a year. Two times out of a year. That's thirty minutes out of 60 minutes multiplied by 24 hours multiplied by three hundred and sixty five days. That's gotta be a tiny fraction. Anyway, I love eating. With a passion. My mouth just needs to have something in it at all times to be truly happy. I would have made a pretty awesome shark in another life. Perhaps a penguin. Also pornstar? That should probably be on the list. But I love food, so any opportunity to sit down and eat is a great thing. Not good, great.

How often do you run into opportunities where someone sits you down and says "if you pass this background check we won't pay you to sit and relax and eat for thirty minutes, but we will pay you to sit and relax and eat for another set of thirty minutes, but there's catch." And you slide to the edge of your seat and get nervous. Am I going to have to kill someone? Am I going to have to whore myself? Am I going to have to drown a family of kittens? And then they come back "the catch is the thirty minutes will be broken up into two fifteen minute blocks and settled at opposite ends of the thirty minutes we will not pay you for." Awesome. So any chance to sit down and eat is a good thing, because there are people with jobs that allow them to sit down and eat zero percent of the time. Literally if they are caught sitting and eating, like humans are wont to do, they will be fired for not being perfectly mechanical.

So the bad thing about this prison break room cafeteria hole in the wall with chairs that were shat out of plastic molding machine once every second and probably as ergonomic a bed a refrigerator box's floor is that it is eighty degrees in there. I bike to work. By the time I get in I am sweating pretty much from chin to ass cheek. Hiking up the stairs to the lockers and the break room after pummeling my body just to get to work is a bother. Not intolerable. Not even difficult. Sometimes tiresome. It is kind of ridiculous that if you were handicapped you would basically be ass out of luck if you wanted to watch tv or have a table in front of you while you took your breaks, but having eighty degree heat bust you in the face is like getting on a bus and having the fattest, sweatiest, cheese smellingest person get on the next stop and not sit next to you. Sitting next to you would be okay. Contact with people is unavoidable on a bus and sharing a bench is just part of the contact contract. However, when people stand next to you it's a whole different set of acknowledged boundaries, and when heavier set, fatties, stand next to you and your ear is two inches away from the bulging gut and you can hear the carnival of their digestion, it gets weird. It gets real weird and uncomfortable is all I'm saying.

Like, weird enough to make your ear hot and tingly for all the wrong reasons. Like having a complete stranger at a party come in really close to you and drop a hand in your lap. Your crotch sends the signals up to your head and your head is like "alright, this is good. We are on the right track here, drunken stranger" and then they bring their lips up close to your ear and you're playing it really cool. You're too cool for blushing. Highschool kids blush not adults (you pedophile), but even with all of your super pro control and James Bond coolness, your ear never does get the memo and all the blood that should be in your cheeks rushes to your prickling ear and then the person whispers something like "I'm so horny I could take a long walk on a beach, and knit for hours, because I really really need to use the bathroom after eating that many tacos and I want you to watch," and you kind of have to step back and rub your eyes because they either actually said that or you are way higher than you thought you were. And that's why I hate riding buses. Shit gets real weird, real fast. That's what it's like walking into this break room most days. It is break room in which it is impossible to relax. Someone basically said "hey, do you know all of the things that can make relaxation impossible? Well let's take all of those things, combine them into a single room with easy to clean floors (because someone is eventually going to throw up their lunch) and then let's put a television in there to lure them in and then a camera to capture the hilarity that ensues."

It's an odd temperatured situation. And I have no idea why. But when you run into a situation where the setting is alright, but the temperature is way off it becomes impossible to do what it is you went there to do. Try having sex at fifty degrees. Ain't going to happen. Sure, maybe you'll get it up, maybe you'll get all warm down there. But unless you've got a blanket, eventually your skin screaming at you "good lord, it is cold as fuck, what the hell are we doing without clothes on" will pretty much trump that. Try playing a sport at a grossly incorrect temperature. Baseball at one hundred degrees? Sure it can be done, but good luck keeping eighteen unpaid individuals in a pick up game when their couches, cold beers, and coldcuts are waiting for them back at their homes. I think that's what I ran into today. Trying to get my thoughts together when it was simply too cold to think.

Situations where you can't hear yourself over your body trying to survive. On a completely unrelated note, is the hallmark of the late eighties generation sarcasm? Maybe not completely unrelated. I was just thinking that maybe with all of the nebulous threats to being and the rise of open sharing and the sense of "what have you got that you have to hide" and the unrelenting standard of interrogation and search and destroy culture has given rise to a survival mechanism. Sarcasm. Sure, some people are beautifully sardonic. Some people try to be. I kind of feel like a lot of the younger people and peers that I am familiar with find a sarcastic, sardonic, dead pan stance to be the most comfortable base state of being. A variation of the poker face. It's like a poker face with burlesque sequined and feathered sunglasses on. A poker face with a little personal flare so not blank, but not telling in a world that has become one not available for questioning, but able and unceasingly questioning of identity and intent.

Like the question "what did you do to your hair." There are many responses that are acceptable. Many responses that are reasonable. I cut it: is one response. I wanted to try something new: is another. But, how many times can you be asked that question in different ways before you wig out and say something like "oh my god, did something happen to my hair? Is it still there? I could have swore I cut it yesterday. Oh god, why? Why could something happening to my hair have ever happened to me!" as you fall to the ground weeping and clutching at your scalp. It's just the nature of the world we live in. Everyone keeps asking you how old and who you are and where you're from and who you know that would also cop to knowing you.

Sure some people still give the standardized responses, but I think a lot of people in our generation who want to be slightly more than a string of numbers and a birth certificate and a photo i.d. and tax form fall into sarcasm as one of the last free forms of interpersonal, globally accepted, expression. Clothing as expression peaks and falls and peaks constantly. There isn't really an age of clothing as expression. Drugs as expression, I think peaked in the seventies. Is that fair? I know new drugs came along later on, or were in development and then came to fruition later on, but that's definitely a negative. People don't look at users of pharmaceuticals and think "wow, man you are seriously expressing your take on life and it's battles." What they think is "wow, man who raped you when you were five," or "wow, can you really not cope with your white bread existence," or "unlike bacon, everything is not better with glow sticks." Pot heads are probably the exception. And amphetamines that do not have to be smoked or injected. Those people aren't users by today's definition. They're modifiers. Suped up. For one reason or another they need to enhance certain abilities or muffle other sensitivities and so aren't really expressive. To say there are expressive is to say that someone who closes their eyes in a horror flick is expressing their inner self. Nope, they, like most normal people not desensitized to acts of brutal violence through television, news media, film, and video games, happen to not enjoy watching someone get their head twisted off. They are modifiers, not necessarily expressive. And that's what's up.

It's not the culture of harder drugs that are a way of life as much as they are a means to continue living. The old adage of "source of and solution to". Maybe if everyone wasn't so sarcastic things would be more straightforward. Hobbled senses of humor being symptomatic of hobbled senses of being maybe? As expression and avenues of expression become more vacant there is the old mainstay of sex. Being utterly personal and completely void of pretense sex still expresses who you are and in that opposite way of expression spread across the surface of being, sex is much more a sense of being spread across pure expression.

I mean think about it, the lady behind the desk at the dmv is in principle a sexual object. She is a vagina with a lot of extra things draped around it that define her self, but in a pure sense she is expressible by her vaginality at her core and everything else is in place to facilitate that expression. Same goes for the guy. It's like the core motive of man is perpetuating itself and everything else is in place to ensure its perpetuation. So if you're sitting on a train in rush hour and all you see are hovering breasts, vaginas, cocks, and balls all around you, you're not tripping. You're seeing through the bullshit. Or you are absolutely tripping your brains out and should probably not be inside a metal sardine can powered by coils of wire and magnetic fields twenty feet below the surface of the earth inside a dark tube. Or you are in highschool and are writing on post-it notes "you smell nice" to the person next to you and you realize you will probably never land that date to the prom because you are expressing yourself backwards, as far as the rest of the population is concerned, but hell, if you don't tell them, who will?

Thought Problem

Problem solving: you have to do laundry to go to work later. If you do laundry you won't have energy to work.To get energy you have to floor.  Flooring requires energy which is already low.  You can buy underwear and socks but that will take the energy and time you wanted to use to floor our you could hand wash but the same problem persists.  Plus if you hand wash you won't have time to both floor and cook and will crash at work and if you floor and then cook you won't have time to hand wash and dry so the only answer is floor then cook then eat then go buy underwear and put it on at work?

I don't know.  What I do know is that if sally has two apples and takes two more from mary, mary should probably give her "the peoples elbow" and while she does that the train from cincinnati to new york will be three hours late because electric trains don't smoke no matter which way the wind blows. And ain't nobody gettin no sleep today.

That Instant

You thought you were out of gum, but notice the green clod clinging to the top of a beer can and pluck and place it between your teeth and it's still fresh as fuck. You realize that you still are pretty awesome. Maybe not the most awesome person to walk the face of the Earth, but you've still got some chops.

Stand Up Act 5

Stand Up Act 4

So we've come a long way. As always with nothing but love. All I've got is love for yinz. I know I'm not the only one reading this, but I'm most at home believing otherwise. In some ways. Part of me still believes that I am and that's the part of me that says "hey, da fuck you been at?"

Outside the vein of what I originally attempted I actually took four cracks at this. I literally wrote out four different iterations of act 5. There was the act 5 that was a ridiculous racist rant that was so far disposed from who I actually am that I had to leave it in draft. There was the iteration that was absolutely bitter about my ex and the potential situation that she might be having ravenous sex while I am probably borderline asexual at this point, there was the iteration that was racist, bitter, and absolutely obsessed with lambasting my lot in life, and then there was the iteration that was just being a pure cunt. So I had four bad sets before this one. So this time is the real deal.

Not that the previous deals were not real deals. There was still no usage of backspace. Back pedaling? Sure. Lots of that. But I'm fairly certain it was for the best. I even tried to explain previous one hundred forty character twitter rants because I got so defensive. So pencils down. No defense. And no provisos for defenses generation. Keepin it light. Because the opposite of personal is accessible. And that's what I want and I hope you want, so in the words of a film referenced in a song I can't remember the name of: "into it."

No backspacing, per stand up. You can't take that back once it's loosed. So I'm gonna stand up.

Commuting on a bicycle. Great for staying in shape. Awful in practice.

Getting high, however, awful for staying in shape, but great in practice. I had two thoughts before that, but I was way too good to remember what they were. I have two empty seats in my classroom where those two thoughts were and I feel kinda sad that they skipped out. Probably the downside of getting high is exactly that. You get so many gems and it's like that last scene in the Goonies where that kid gets that little satchel of plastic gems and he's like "ah mah sheeeeet" and you think momentarily about all the good he can do for that rundown town that is still somehow susceptible to three man bank heists and prison breaks , but really he's going to buy a sweet ass Camaro with turn out mufflers and a mobile home with central air and the rest he'll blow on lottery tickets and before you know it he'll be on daytime television in one of those "you are not the father" micro telethons. Empty seats suck. It's like losing your baby teeth except they are your adult teeth and forever more, in every gay porn film you shoot because you are financially bankrupt and morals follow dollars, everyone will see you spreading jaws wide and wonder what you did to get a mouth of gold, but the answer won't be anything interesting.

The answer won't be something like "I took a bite out of a shark and killed it with the power of my jaws and also mind bullets." It won't be anything close to "I got into a telekinetic battle with a Sith lord and instead of throwing me out of a window he shifted all of my teeth two inches to the left and then I cut off his head with a flaming sword of laser focused light." The answer will be more akin to what a trailer park owner says when asked if he's living the American dream. I don't know what that answer would be, but I assume I would laugh like a kid who done caught his first fish at the local reservoir.

Actually that's one of those things that's kind of difficult to deal with. Gonna take a jump cut right there as I see the hole and the prize (it's a football analogy, as baseball is basically for sort of athletic obsessive compulsives who couldn't hack it at chess. Baseball is the D.D.S. of sports).

Everybody dreams. I dream, you dream, we dream. Sometimes weird things happen while we're dreaming. Last night was one of those times. It wasn't a weird dream like Abraham Lincoln walked in on me filming cat themed pornography and aliens landed on my front lawn and vaporized the loud ass people with Marvin the Martians disintegrater ray while they shouted at each other because they were crossing the street against the traffic lights and thought it would be a great idea to break out their catwalk stroll while rush hour traffic did the herky jerk trying to get around them.

It was strange because I said some ignorant stuff to a girl at a party I was attending. Sure, not the first time I went ape shit on someone I didn't know. Definitely not the first time I went ape shit on a lady. I was once smoking potent smokables with friends and it was a very chill environment. Everyone was pretty relaxed and happy, but there was this one girl who would not, for the life of her, just shut her mouth for any span of time. I know I talk a lot. I don't get to talk all that often and when I do I tend to err on the side of saying way too much, not because I am actively trying to say more than I want to, but because talking is like water and I'm thirsty as hell most days. Anyway, she was just rattling off and off and I thought my ears were going to catch fire with the rate she was asking me, in a subdued state, to process information so I eventually just screamed at her "would you please shut the fuck up" or something to that effect and long story short I was not included in further get togethers, because I can sometimes be "that guy". But anyway, had this dream where I was in attendance at a party and said some ignorant mean things to a girl.

Optional responses to having mean things said to you are A: devise a bulletproof retort. B: devise a bullet riddled retort that is delivered so well the point can't not be well taken. C: punch the offender in the face. D: engage in sober-esque dialog. D was basically off the table by then. I was expecting an A or a B, because when I'm good with words I am really good. And you can't punch a girl in the face. Or the boob. I don't know which one they dislike more, and frankly I'm not trying to find out.

I got C. In this dream, this girl balled up a technically sound fist and gave my face the business. Not proud of that. It is afterall, my dream. I should have seen it coming. I should have seen her angry little eyes and my smile was way too wide and easy. It didn't deck me, but it still shut me the fuck up and I figured I would be the bigger man and not cry about it. Of course the bigger man would also not just flatten her, but that was already off the table so the list of bigger than the situation things I could do was already pretty limited. I did the biggest thing I could do without looking like a complete fairy and went back to sipping at my sippy cup and then I woke up into 4 PM.

Not that I'm lazy or anything. I could wake up at 8 AM on my day off, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a day off if you're waking up incredibly early for no reason. Granted 8 AM is fantastic if you have a reason to be up then, but why would you intentionally deprive yourself of comfort on your day off? You have the whole rest of your life for people to tell you when you should be awake and the whole rest of your life to have places to be. Seriously, take one day out of the week and burn it. Just burn the fuck out of it. What is that? One seventh of your lifetime? Why does that even matter when you're going to spend some unholy fraction of your life on a toilet? You will probably spend more time eating, pooping, watching television, and deciding what to do next than you will spend asleep so you might as well get it while you can because when you're dead you'll regret that you didn't spend more time dreaming.

To get back into it though, the dream was fairly whack. About as whack as it gets. I wasn't even hitting on her. I think I said something about her hair and her eyeliner. Something to the affect of "did you pay someone to do that to you" or something. And the sad thing is I've probably said that to some girl at some bar who I didn't know, and my propensity for dumbass cutting observations got the best of me and also got me black balled for service because she was also the bartender. True story. I think I say that mostly because I'm entirely immune to similar comments because I so clearly couldn't afford to pay someone to do much of anything to me. It's all self inflicted. Pride badge right there. Did you pick out those clothes or- I can interrupt that thought instantaneously. Yes. The answer is yes, yes I did. I look this awesome for free. Now what? Yes, that's right. Scoff. Scoff because that's all you have because you paid good money to look like a douchebag and I pulled it off at zero cost, but anyway the whack thing about it was when I woke up my face hurt like hell where she laid her fist into the side of my jaw.

Now, the thing is, a normal person would wake up and work their jaw bones and rub their face and think "what the hell, that's not supposed to happen. I'm not supposed to suffer injury in a dream and then wake up with my nerves thinking it actually happened." I woke up and rubbed my tender face and thought "god damn, what a cunt." It wasn't until I was at work many hours later still rubbing my sore cheek that it occurred to me that getting punched in the face in a dream should not by any means carry over into the real world and then I was like "wait a minute, what the fuck? That was the worst dream ever!" So now I have to look out for that. Dreaming is my hobby and like many hobbies that include hard drugs I don't want it to start taking a toll on my body. Or maybe I should just sleep less. Either way, whack ass dream.

That Instant

The instant you realize your laughter sounds like a fat kid getting tickle tortured at band camp and everyone in the liquor store is looking at you while you crack up at hilariously grandiose labeling on bargain basement grain alcohol laced whiskey.

dear (______):

Dear Commercials,

I have already sold my soul to the devil for a grilled cheese sandwich. Please find enclosed one non-transferable bill of sale of accumulated equities, futures, and licensure of products, ideas, and orginations past and future. Forwarding address of all further inquiries can be found at the addressee therein undersigned. While we do value your patronage, please cease and desist forthwith as ownership of said item and item's value, monetary and otherwise, are no longer within the scope of my stewardship.

Thanks,

the self improvement venture capital council chief executive officer of the brain caucus

p.s. it was frickin delicious.

brought to you by Kraft singles and the ad council