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

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

11/28/11

Base Two

On crack everything is more ridiculous. For instnace observe the following quotes:

"She runs her mouth like Jerry Springer guests ON CRACK."

"That athlete gets after the ball like a player ON CRACK."

"That game is intense, like the original Quake first person shooter ON CRACK."

"That qusar throws off radiation like a dwarf star ON CRACK."

Everything is more than it was on crack. Not to say that crack is an enhancer, because it is, but mostly to say that when people ascribe crack to something, no matter how warped it is, it instantly becomes ten times more warped and disproportionate a thing when crack is subscripted. Which is to say I just masturbated for an hour and a half to prove a point to myself. Which isn't a bad thing by itself. It's just part and parcel to the argument that conventional sexual relations are inferior. To what I can be. On crack.

No, but really I'm just desensitized to things. Common things. Which either makes me the best friend with benefits you've ever known or makes me incredibly desensitized. I'm beginning to think the title should have just been desensitization or something to that effect. I'm coming to the cutting floor.

The zone where production turns into product. If everything goes the way it should (it rarely does) I will have benefits. Health benefits. Which means that finally getting the meds I need won't be a faraway dream, but will be an actuality.

The actuality of the matter being that I will sleep on a consistent basis not by choice, not by conniving, not by cunning, not by hook or crook, but because I simply will not have any other options as reasonable courses of action because my body will simply shut itself down whether I am prepared or not. The actuality of the matter being the voices that I loathe, the voices that confuse and inflame and soothe by turns, will be banished and there will only be left a me that I do not and have not had an opportunity to know well enough will be all that is left. The actuality being that if the health benefits come to fruition, I will be plunged into a sea of knowingness that I have not yet known and that scares me.

I know it is something I have to do. Something that I have been substituting for in lieu of proper support. Something I have been, in part, fighting against because I have experienced before in older forays into medicinal remediation. But, medicine, like technology is ever advancing and I would be a fool to believe what happened then will happen again and I would be even more foolish to never try again though I have no hard and fast plans toward living 7 decades. But I am scared.

Though it is not stopping me from trying. The undiscovered country has to be the subtitle to some kind of star trek film. And if anything, I carry the spirit of the united federation of planets. But it leaves me saddened.

I've said goodbye to so many people. Don't make me say goodbye to the people I can and do still hold dear, though some hatefully so. It's necessary. I feel convicted to pursue it. Like, to not pursue it is the same as turning a blind eye to a rape. Except I am the victim and also the enforcing agent who can bring closure. With insurance, the cost of medication drops from 200 dollars a month to like 50. You can't ignore that. I can't ignore that.

So many questions arise. Who will I be on the other side? Will he know me? Will we be the same? What of the caucus?? Is it disbanded? I just want to be like you, but now that it is possibly here /I ama ==asking myself how90 mu4%ch it w@222ill cos..t me.

11/25/11

That Instant

That instant you fly into a panic because someone might have called or text messaged you and you can't remember where you left your phone and search every pair of pants you even thought about wearing over the last two days and then realize your phone is on your desk, right where you left it. Still silent as a five day old dead goldfish.

But at least now you know where it is.

11/23/11

Why I Hate Coldplay and then Compliments Addressed, the Silence, Birthdays, Ant Eaters

So today is exactly my 43rd birthday in the 26th iteration of my life. Not much bang, but there's not much buck, and, to be honest, how many knife fights with prostitutes is too much? The answer is one. One knife fight with anyone is probably too many. So I'm taking it on a lower key. Partially because I've had enough near death scrapes to make a fine scrap book of uniform crime reports and scars and partially because it sneaked up on me like a cat to a laser pointer's beam. I already had a midlife crisis. I'm still bouncing back from that. And to top it off, my latest scrape with my old friend was less of a scrape and more of a Houdini "how-the-hell-am-I-not-at-least-crippled-from-the-waist-down" kind of event and I'm not clapping my hands for an immediate encore.

43 feels the same as 42. The same as 41. Once you get over the major obstacle of realizing it's half over for all you have to offer, the rest is gravy. Things have been pleasantly silent. But I've been doing a lot of work to make it happen. Soused? Sometimes. The best thing about it is not the damage. Is not even the shortened life span, because I know I will pay for palatable living eventually, be it a massive med crash or the nick and chip of the slower knives offered by off the shelf substances, because all in all the final tally will sort itself out such that you cut years off the suffering (albeit by dying). The best thing about it is the silence. The knowing that you and only you are all present and mostly accounted for. That when people ask what you want to do, only one hand goes up in your head. When you ask yourself what to do next you hear one maybe two voices instead of ten.

I am still an anteater (fuck you). What I've also realized in the words of the illustrious coach Mike Tomlin is that the standard is the standard. I've been imagining Mike Tomlin covering my exploits in a post game/post week/post month press conference. He would probably say something like "an anteater is an anteater is an anteater. If we are anteaters it will show up on film and that film is our resume. Our resume speaks for itself. You either are an anteater or you aren't. There is no middle ground and when we can be anteaters it will show up in the work that we do." But I don't get press conference coverage. Or have coaches like Mike Tomlin, so I basically just tell myself when I don't get the outcome of my action 'dude, you're an anteater, what the hell did you think would happen?"

The silence has been nice though. I've been hanging the back end out there for almost too long though. Too many g's against tires whose grip I can never trust and part of me is waiting for the rubber to dissolve into the cloud of white smoke trumpeting from the rims for the naked rim to bite the asphalt like a starved dragon and flip my whole contraption so many times I'll be reduced to chunky tomato paste by the time it comes to halt on it's crumpled roof atop a sea of pelletized glass and unkempt infield next to the red and white rumble strips marking the path to the apex I should have targeted along the optimal path I could have taken had I the wiring and the vision and the opportunity to do so. So I enjoy the silence and try not to burn the envelope already torn to shreds back in high school when I realized my contents were not the sort of things that the postal service accepted as mail-able, transferable, items without special postage and allowances.

I did, however, receive a complement the other day from an older woman. It wasn't at all creepy. Not like the time I was walking back from the south side because the buses stopped running and I stopped at a bus stop just to read the schedule and make doubly sure and an old man who looked like Morgan Freeman after a bad Vegas weekend bender told me I was cute. That was creepy as hell. Plus I didn't know I was gay at the time so it was creepy and offensive and if I wasn't in a rush to rescue a friend from the clutches of a bad decision, but probably playing into her demand for a declaration of dedicated-ness by crossing town to get her, I probably would have stopped longer and been like "well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean, asshole?"

But anyway, I got a complement from an older lady the other day. She said I had a great smile. Now I have a prominent scar on my face that gashes from my eyebrow, down my cheek, and ends where my beard starts. I have a badly chipped front tooth from taking a dive onto cement. I have another scar from years ago where I took a similar dive, but broke my fall with my orbital bone instead of my mouth. And I have another set of scars from various head butts and several attempts to jump through a hallway's drywall ceiling. To have her see through that to that genuine grin she yanked out of me with her humor and honesty was touching. Because I mean she's got to be pushing 70, so she's seen her share of great smiles over the decades.

What was really touching about it is everyone says you're one in a million. That kind of phrasology, that kind of thought process, basically fires across the deck and no one blinks an eye. No one changes course. No one stands up and says "dear god, you are absolutely right! I must be wholly unique to this planet!" At least no one with half an ounce of sense. To believe that if you were able to gather together one million people, not a single one would have 99% of your interests, foibles, ticks, obsessions, addictions, and deficiencies in common is to be utterly blind to the simple fact that there are only so many configurations of expressibles. What differentiates then is the physical. That's what really makes you unique. So to have her say, whether true or not, off hand or not, that my smile sticks out in her nearly 7 decade long memory was totally awesome. It had me glowing while we made small talk. By the time she sauntered off I wondered if we would have gotten along just as well had she been 26 too, or if I'm the kind of person lovable only over fantastic spans of time and space.

Which is why I hate Coldplay. Not directly why. I hate Coldplay for the handful of fantastically cogent songs they've made. The songs that express the things people feel with uncanny accuracy, levity, and genius song writing. I hate Coldplay because I love their album with the figure of the guy with his head blown off on the cover, but I can't listen to it because of one song called The Scientist because the memories it brings back are still so raw and it describes those memories, the end of the formation of new memories just as good, with an intensity that is horrifically accurate it's like trying to sit down to a Rescue 911 marathon without a vomit bag for the blood, guts, bones, tears, and anguish you are about to see. It's not meant as a slight to them. it's good for them. Good for them for crafting something so intense. Good for them for wading through their own noise to get to the deep water. I guess I'm still doing that in many ways across several subjects. Assuming I don't drown first, but I'll keep kicking.


///Coldplay - "The Scientist" its not melodramatic. you have to put aside some of the common elements of regret to digest it, but those elements are, thankfully, few. but it speaks stories of information where so much pop is a glorified fragment blown out of proportion, chopped, and hashed with tons of loops and over production to fill the passage of time. ...going back to the start...

11/20/11

Road Speed Governor

I've been writing dark. Writing dirty. Not nearly as profound as riding dirty. Profound is the wrong word. Provocative? Every day at it has been like riding down a highway in a two place coupe with a devil in the passenger seat. I think it's simple depression. As simple as depression can be. Swallowed whole by history. A bitter course. I don't know if it has to do with a ninth concussion (counting the ones I can remember) or if it's just the holiday press.

It's hard to tell sometimes. Wrecked my bike again a few days ago. It was a pretty bad trip. It made me sad in ways I didn't think it would. Aside from the disappointment of the failure. I just burned. I burned hard over a lot of things. Stutter stepping. Toward understanding. I guess the brush was tougher to swallow than I thought. It was easy to shake off when the adrenaline was coming, but since then it rolls me on and off like a riptide.

It's just,the pain of being, the knowingness of what that being is, can grow hurtful. Explosively so. It's easy to ignore the pain a lot of the time. Life as artifact. But trying to punch it up. I might be a bastard. I might be a jerk off. I might be dumb. I might be obsessive compulsive. But a sour puss, I am not.

Note Dump

Finally got all the notes off of the old phone. It took me two days. Proprietary technologies.

182 attachments — Download all attachments


147 over 72
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12106 woodmore rd bowie 20721
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4345 andover terrace
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828 north ave
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Steve martin banjo
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Forbes to shady to bartlet just past darlington make a right and follow to panther hollow which turns into blvd to bates and left on 2nd and right on hot metal and left on water to 3830
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Im gonna shove this roll of parchment paper so far up your ass youll be baking cookies until christmas
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Whats he doing
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Dogging sunrise
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I bit my lip and it tasted like summer
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Everyone out to make what may be a first impression or maybe make up for weekend bullshit
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You think thats how it works? That we all grow up and we're suddenly friends now that i have the physical tools to take you apart the way i wanted to when i was smaller
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Plant a fist and see if a man grows
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It aint a limmerick and i aint irish
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Do the towel boys get rings too
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Empire of the god head
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She is a cheerleader
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Album titles
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Dumby rounds still hurt
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Youre not the last person ill love but you are the last person ill change my life for and thats why ill never be able to forget
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Dear god just dont let me die sober
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So much teenage poetry on tap
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Waiting to say something significant in pace and caught in the sliding revolving door of waiting for something significant to say
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Gayer than a sunbeam alighting on the arch of a rainbow pouring into a daffodil
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The clarity of 25 years of age
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Buying the things made cheap enough for you to buy because they slashed your income so low that you cant buy anything else
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The thing that feels untouchable walking home with your pants stained with dust from linoleum and not the dirt of real work and all youve done is serve for the least amount of money allowable by law for a company that wont allow you more than one work shirt beaten down and it wouldnt be so bad so shameful and shaming if you didnt have to know your spirit and candor was just as bruised as your knees
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Condom pocket on the sleeve
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Your pockets are retardedly small wtf
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Fuck you, thats some seriously personal shit but thanks for making it awkward enough to bear sympathy
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Ive finally grown into my nose
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Your fake nails are coming off
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I know my coat smells like it hasnt been washed since there were last leaves on the trees. I havent had money for detergent this week so ts.
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Trying to have sex with her and hearing her friend is dead fallen from a bridge in a suicide and the gory details and how they brought her food but did not call the police
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Career links on ardmoore off of penn ave
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Prime and paint
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Learn how to install glass block
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Fishermans friend. Buying ridiculous shit with food stamps instead of block and tackle
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Manson
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A man is fed alcohol and then sent on the road to rescue someone
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The only thing he can create with any conviction is an opinion which is not without its value but he is no artisan creator or imaginative talent
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The countervail
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Crush groove origin of def jam
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All the mess and fuss of exploding you by centimeters at the point of a box cutter
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Peacocks and their hand bags that could service pricks tighter than their own sagging resonalities and broke gate hinged hips on knee knobs turned pin headed with starvation
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A picture i should know little and littler men picking up smaller and smaller stones into infinity
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Its just you me the stars above and the hands of god in hell
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The entire planet goes online its a hollow antenna like entering a water bubble in space one billion dead links and one active
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The width of failures universe
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Whoever described to me the weight
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Zip cups
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Its like kicking a retarded kid in the face
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Once in a life time events
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Dodge beer
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You are as american as humus
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Youre a fifteen comment post
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Youre ruining the joke and its 15 years old
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Posted up on the block like a mailbox munoz
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Bug awareness resistance education
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Always be commenting
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He can build the shit out of a bookshelf
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Trailer park boys
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Feral cognition
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The sex was a watch makers dream.
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Just my fists and what's left of my wits
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Words to be permanently stricken from the r and b dictionary
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Lyrics for appearances sake
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Don't ask for rock stars if you what you really want is nerds with extensive internship experience and a clean history and possibly several years as a summer camp counselor
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The part doesn't haunt
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The simultaneous deletion and write of memory
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Hell in high places
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Jimmy scaleea. Prison coke dealer and turns out a nice guy if you ever got to know him
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The pieces you left inside of me would be proud of the little hurts and winces and inward breaths tap dancing in my footsteps
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The bones in my feet are harder than they've ever been. A set of callouses to match working hands and tired fingers
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There are no fantastically sexy terms for not doing drugs
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Rubbing sleep from eyes that have not
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Going back to campus in my work clothes
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They've taken their shoes off. They've torn their coats.
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Zodiac tesselation
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That sounds extremely egocriminal of you
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Like trying to guess how long you've been walking based on the time when you walk by my widow
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Come hang out in aisle 3
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No one will get in the way of what i feel for you. And i will be a mother fucker if you think that doesn't include you.
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Hamburger helper the bacon mix tapes
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A dream of time travel into a future where i lived on the second floor of a home and scrawled in charcoal on the wooden porch planks.
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When i ask for my blade you will present i sufficiently and you will, brandishing it at the sword smith.
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A402
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Bake it so
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In the immortal words of hans gruber: hit it again.
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Dish Towel laundry horse tweezers dish rack? Chalk!
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7008 fax suffix
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If you cure cancer you can cause aids
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Of
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And for that matter is this bitch calling me a dumb townie like if i foot have the cash for a cab ride from where i was to where im going i just don't deserve to travel at all dumb cunt. You know nothing of where i've been or where i'm going and deserve in yous criticism nothing less than branding
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Is it a felony to strangle someone in self defense. Is it possible to strangle someone in self defense i suppose that's getting into the stun kill territory isn't it. I think it is. The threat would have to be so grave or of a nature so intense that the only solution was the death of the attacker but how can a situation like that arise with the kind of marching inevitability that would force an action like that
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Shut up cunt no one cares if my back pack bumps into your body. Grow a presence and it wont matter if people notice you or not you fucking stupid woman
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A bad thing? Perhaps, but i believe good sir i may be too drunk to care at this juncture but we'll see how we assess things at the next juncture
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I believe in the pursuit of function and form i've erred on the side of homeless folks
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Its not about documenting human experience as much as it matters that its the first or close to a first time common experience or even perhaps common thought is being committed to paper and that is part of what makes the cannon more than relevant but very much important
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A lickist
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34th st get off walk west or south to 31st. Walk west to 9th st. There is no 32nd street if you're in the right place.
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And a normalness confirmed and evinced in its very utterance
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Chicken bone lye
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Halide projector
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To elizer its always great to see you
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Budget banger
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There was a fascination with end points. With segmentation.
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Does that make me a sociopath or a computer?
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Every permutation has a theory but the problem becomes akin to the several string theories
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Violent for creations sake
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Studying each interaction and assimilating and modifying behaviors until each interaction is perfectly human and utterly normal
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An adhoc network of words. Segmented thought that is in every way more complete and encompassing than any grammatical capsule
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Even the soot nastied sand of a dulled beach has something enough to beg an occassion for visitation
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I guess its just funny that people talk about yin and yang but we're really just yin and yin
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I am not a healer im a destroyer in the ranks of entropy and her hench
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Every person is worth having sex with for reasons yet discovered
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Sense dulling road glare. Smoking cigarettes
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Martians in the 50s. Only land in smart places of states. Unaffected. Homeless coworker at grocery store lives in a wrecking yard where i'm rebuilding a panel station wagon. I borrow his hats sometimes. He sleeps over. Wake up in the night to smoke. See the blonde neighbor. Is she a robot. Windy night. See a martian in a mirror at a dark window. Pretend to be dumb and sleep unaffected. Mother is with a friend studying television like a text book. They never did that before
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You see the beginning and don't care how it ends. You send the end and foot care how it began. You see the middle and think man that was wierd
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A man who can see the near future except for what is within his reach to affect or within a certain mile radius of him. He has no friends.
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Sympathy for the treble
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Microwavable crazy glue. Gives off fumes that will kill you
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Drometheus
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The dog star
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Great moments. Time left on the microwave. Wtf. Oh yeah it was me. Because this is my place. And that is my microwave. And this is where i live.
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Birds trying to shake the meat of the bread free
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So much pet food
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Screaming toward a hard fault and dead channels. A red dot reset in the silence of failure and shreds of shattered voices
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A modern day masculine eunuchcowboy homo
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A fixed number of orgasms achievable through opposing sexual relationships at which point you switch
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High country a boy in his dream land
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It came from the high country
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Brick top a growing conspiracy of sounds and voices
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A guilt of sound
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A mouth to mouth infection of sound
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Soap doesnt come in flavors, neither does chef boyardee but i do.
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Spring overture of food friends and drink
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Shrubbery of words and poetry
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Money doesnt buy happiness. Just look at the tax system and the problems people articulate with it. Im just as happy or miserable as him why should i pay more
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Squinting at mulholland drive
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A look to his eye the kind of look you only need to see from a dog once to know it just aint right in the head and aint never gonna be right
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Four piece knock out chicken leg wing thigh and biscuit.
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Start a group gay so i cant hang out with attractive guys? Is it not like hanging out with hot chicks except more awesome? How often do you bang the hot chicks you like to be around
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Just because in gay does not mean hue secretly been in love with you
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The grossness of exception destroys personality at both ends of the spectrum
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Ugly people are nasty first and nice second but they can and are assholes just as often as nice looking people
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Clemency of ones and zeros
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While i am thrilled that you aint sacred of no man woman child or beast could you please shut the fuck up. I mean that as politely as possible. You and your man
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Sedentary complexion
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Shatter your cheek bone and snap the bridge of your nose free clear of your face like a finger nail snapped pried loose with dull pocket knife
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Cabbababababbcabacbabacbabi
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Butter sweet symphony
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You're singing to yourself while you masterbate
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Solving problems one iteration at a time
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Pop a pill yeah.
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Tickle your mouses belly while it uprocks to wake your compy
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How awesome is it to type highly into a phone using auto complete
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Im glad i didnt have nigger in my t9
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How often i hear nigger blaring on radios in cars outside my window
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Students of math and science quantum study work students of literature and human considerations a confluence a continuity of thought as requirement rule not exception differences in study methods and success rates dictated by subject matter the nature of the matter being studied the continuity of human experience comprehensible only in continuous immersion unlike the stagger stepped quantum accruiesssence of number based segmented and interchangeable highly interchangeable knowledge compartmentalized versus nonlinear landscape fractal persuits
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Fried chicken. It happened.
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That buttery tart pressure on the head of your stomach sliding down your throat like you just sucked on a used band aid
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They tell me things i dont know. The voices
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Birth of a race
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End of a world birth of a race. The fragmented pieces of earth spell a message that states in universal words that everyone should know the world was tested and the universe should now know the survivors as the worthy and strongest beings who succeeded the planet and inherited the galaxy through acts of tremendous selflessness and sacrifice worthy of any species. They realize the earth can't be saved but they can survive if they all separate themselves each one of them being the target of a multi directional world breaking attack
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Pointless piece of status symbol shit
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Rest easy knowing full well your music will never be appropriated by christian lyricists
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Things people would buy with my face on them
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And im thinking about lighting cigarettes one end touched to another like cigarettes and dreams of one night stands i had in college
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I called you 5 times and you never call me back. Left a video message of you putting french fries in a cup of peanut butter and then another of your spread legs and wet pussy. You blonde pink edgy bitch. Your friend brunette eats right. Hates the gross food we like. Chastises me in front of you. What are you doing. Staring at someone i have no business looking at. The cat can talk. Tells me to im to vervo. He smells like sewage. Tells me that vervo have him his idea that got him elected. Why do you keep flipping me off? Do we still have a thing going? Itll ad a seven game series. Ive seen you eat them like that every week. A toy gun in the library shooting water at perverts. Jim is dead. I killed him but no one knows. I was jealous. His body was destroyed after i pushed him into the machines gears. I ignore her calls until italk to the cat. Now i go out of my way to see her.they go to a club and invite me but dont tell me its collared shirts only they dont let me out of the car until they stop to pick up girls though i try to jump off while the car moves.its the second time. I walk home past the college campus i used to call home and see faces that dont remember me. Its frustrating but freeing. I give up on them.
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355 to park avenue make a right on park go to stone street and follow the signs.
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Diminutous
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North and austin farmers market
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Citron
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There are some things in there worth pursuing and fleshing out into individual things.

11/14/11

Work and Workarounds

Cued: writing music and word inducing fluids to maybe produce some super fluidity. So lets get through this in one piece, because time is precious and hacks do two takes. I kid. But seriously, there's a lot less to worry about when you know your nose keeps bleeding because you've been snuffling coke. There's a lot more to worry about when your nose keeps bleeding and as far as you know you've kept it clean. So maybe it's just the winter crush I've been sucking into my lungs and things will balance up. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm just prone to nose bleeds. Maybe I've just been sniffing too much paint. Maybe I shouldn't keep sleeping at 48 degrees. Maybe I should stop worrying because at the end of the day, if I finish up with as many body parts and organs as I started with, things are pretty much as good as it gets.

Slugging my way through another work day I got to making conversation. There's only so many times you can walk by the people you don't want to talk to or have anything to do without having to say something. As I walked in the manager shook my hand. Both managers did. And I was immediately accosted by a union lifer suggesting I was buddy buddy with management. By itself laughable. Apparently the managers have never shaken hands with him first thing in the morning in all his 34 years. Which really makes me wonder: am I that much better than them? I've done nothing untoward to provoke a positive response from the high ups. I just do my shit and go home. Apparently having that much work ethic puts me at odds with my fellows and in the good graces of the up and ups. Which is hilarious. When you think about how inefficient things can be, how many times people can spin around in a circle to collect a paycheck instead of doing their jobs, it probably doesn't occur to you that having the ability to walk in a straight line could ever be that much of an asset. I laughed, shrugged, and went on doing my shit. I'm not concerned in the slightest. If anything, I know that if I show up I'm already ahead of most of the pack.

Which brings me to another conversation. I was talking to a guy who is apparently the heir apparent or at least the stop gap when managerial shifts are changing. The guy who's supposed to keep the ship righted, but everyone's been on the ship more than long enough to know what they're supposed to do and get it done without any supervision to speak of. He's "that guy" who's been around long enough to know what's up, but is absolutely incapable of leading effectively for any length of time, and so has been thrown a bone so he doesn't realize he is exactly the same for all of his time and would be better served doing something else entirely that pays better. Probably the reason they don't out right promote me (because I will immediately leverage that shit into a better position elsewhere), but anyway...

...I was talking about a coworker whose name I did not know and talked about him being the guy who makes the dirty jokes. To which, I will refer to him here as the fucking mook, the mook responded before I could finish my thought, "ah yes, you are talking about so and so. I'm the one who makes the good clean jokes." I literally had to stop what I was doing to close and rub my eyes out of frustration and disbelief. The jokes he makes are terrible. I mention off hand that time flies, he rejoins with a long diatribe about scientific principles and a crock of other fragments that essentially end two minutes later with the punch line "time can never actually fly." I had to pause to weigh punching his lights out and the satisfaction that would bring versus the satisfaction of having a job and getting a paycheck. Pros and cons floated around for a few silent moments and I shook my head and walked away.

First of all, the fact that he would not understand that his sense of humor is absolutely terrible and steeped in enough dungeons and dragons dice rolling logic to make me want to hang myself on the hour every hour we occupy the same space is tough to deal with, but I do. Can't get paid if I'm dead. Second of all, the mook didn't even let me finish my thought. I paused for maybe five seconds to move some boxes while he stood around whining about how hard work is, citing examples of exertion fractions of what I did on the regular at my other job (holding my tongue so he could feel good about himself, because I like people to feel good around me), and he chimes in about being more valuable to me because he is the "good joke teller." My thought finished with "and the sex jokes are totally hilarious." They are. That's the thing about associating with older people. They've got smut, slut, muck in the rut down right filthy jokes you've never heard before and hearing these jokes in the family oriented brightly lit grocery store instead of a dark dive bar makes them all the more side splitting. Thirdly, few things pet me the wrong way harder than people that think they're funny. If you've got some albums recorded and played comedy central or some night clubs with success, then maybe you can say that. It's one of those things. How are you going to tell me that you are funny to me? That laugh coming out of my mouth is not directed to what you said, it's directed to what everyone else around me said about what you said. Sometimes it's in line, if you are actually funny to us. But if you are not funny at all, there's a real good chance I'm laughing at their heckling more than anything else.

It just makes me laugh most of all though that this mook tries to posture like he knows whats up. I've been on the new job for a week and already they all know I get shit done faster, more efficiently, and with higher fidelity than anyone there right now who is not also a manager. He asks me to do things and I do them, because I could care less who is actually in charge. I just do my eight and go home. The people I respect are the people that do it as well or better than me. He's not one of them. I'm not trying to start anything. We're breaking down pallets of products to carts and everything is being separated out to the finest scale, wasting huge amounts of time. Things are being left on pallets because "they're too heavy" to move. And I'm laughing the whole way. It takes this dude the entire day to shuffle five pallets. I was doing that in 1 and 2/3 hours where I was working before. People are hunching to catch their breath and rest their limbs and I am dumbfound by how weak they are. Dude is taller and heavier than me, but apparently he just wears his clothes well because he's all dough and his helper is made out of lightly whipped fluff. Tell me this isn't the average fitness level of 22 year olds these days. Seriously, if I got into a fight with someone in the backroom, the entire daytime crew couldn't stop me from killing him if they all fought against me together. I'm not saying I'm super human. I'm saying they're about as functional as cardboard cutouts with souls duct taped to them.

Then he keeps asking me if I need a hand with X and Y and I said yes at first because I thought he wanted to be helpful, until I realized he was using me to dodge doing anything actual. Because I work at a relatively high octane he was basically sucking around in my wake to put in face time. So the next time he asked and said "I would offer to give you a hand but the space you're working in is pretty small" (I intentionally walled myself into the pallets a good foot taller than me with no elbow room so I could get shit done without having to deal with bullshitting this idiot with small talk) I said "you don't need to offer me a hand ever, and yes, there's enough space for me and my thoughts and nothing else." Not trying to be rude, but I get blunt when I'm trying to get things done. Nevertheless, the mook follows me out into the aisles and starts touching the stuff I loaded up and I just walk away. If he wants to work my shit that badly then fine. Have at it. One thing I can't tolerate is people nipping at my work and then claiming it was all them when it's time to hand out kudos. Sure I could step up and say "hey he didn't do shit", but I'm much more the sort of person who prefers to let work speak for itself and hope the people up top can make that distinction on their own: "hey so and so doesnt get a damn thing done when person X isn't here too. Maybe it's all person X?"

Does that actually ever happen? I don't know if they ever do, but I guess I'm just soft spoken. Let the work speak. Like if I get an 85 on my final paper DONT FUCKING FAIL ME BECAUSE I MISSED CLASS TOO MANY TIMES YOU FUCKKKK!@#@##%!!@%!@#. Yeah, that TA phd student who wore the skinny jeans and faux hawk in my media studies class back in 2008 is still on the list of people who are going to be strangled to death with my hands if civilization and law and order give out. Maybe not. Maybe just when I have nothing else to do besides dodge the law and balance the karmic checkbook that is still pretty far out of whack. But thats years off (if I win the lottery, dodging the law is expensive) or decades. Depends on how much I actually get done. Let the work speak for itself.

I realized today that my internal conversations were seeping out when I heard someone say "you unconscionable fat bastard" in my voice while I was walking behind someone. Definitely need to restore some volume control there. People shouldn't have to feel awful just for being coincident with me in space and time. That's just not fair to chance and circumstance. Plus it's not like they made me late for something. Not like the woman driving in front of me on a one lane one way road with cars parked on both sides who cruised at seven miles per hour. I was about ready to ride my bike over her back bumper, right over the roof, and down the hood of her car while flipping her double barreled fuck yous. I was about twenty minutes in to a conversation with myself when I reached the conclusion that I had to go take a dump. What I didn't realize was that I said that out loud, in mumbling tones no less, but someone caught enough of it and absolutely shot me the meanest 60 year old sour face ever. I laughed. At how lemon juiced her face looked. She flipped her cart around and strut away. Point taken, though. Need to guard my gates a little tighter. I can't always control what goes on in the compound, but I can at least try to control who and what goes in and out. Work around it, na mean?


///Four Tet - "A Joy" consciousness is noisy

11/11/11

Reinstate Child Labor in America

Getting old doesn't suck. It's the having to be places and do things part of being an adult that sucks. Reinstate child labor. Move the retirement age from 65 to 40. Everyone will appreciate their time more. Less kids having kids because they literally will not have time to fraternize or have idle energy for sex. Less crime because they literally will not have time to learn criminal behaviors. Education is already in the toilet and the vast majority end up in the consumer sector so might as well force them into useful trades before they decide to settle or slip into fast food and department stores for their entire lives. It's all win win. Their dreams won't be crushed. They'll be refined and by the time they reach an age when they know what they want to do, they'll be equipped with the fortitude and determination to get it done, plus they'll have capital in their pocket from years of hard time.

And then they'll have stable hard working families and enough stability and personal knowledge to pursue education without the massive obstacle of trying to "find themselves" standing in the way of learning what they've yearned to learn for decades. I'm not saying throw them into steel mills and whirling machinery that'll tear off their little hands. All I'm saying is, under the right conditions, child labor could probably work wonders for this fucked up country. But it'll never work, because not being able to trust the people at the top of the pyramid is an institution in America and they will find a way to fuck it up if it means they make an extra ten cents in their pocket at the end of the year.

11/7/11

dear (______):

Dear Baltimore,

i guess the NFL rivalry is officially legit. So I can officially say: suck a bag of dicks. You just might win the division. Kudos. And I hate you. That is all.

sincerely,

steel town.

11/6/11

Cycling, Greyhounds, Inherited Vision and Home

Walking home from the Greyhound station downtown I was sincerely struck by the beauty of the river and my new home town. I haven't really felt homesick for a place as much as I feel homesick for Pittsburgh whenever I'm gone for a long time. It's not like I miss the people. I can count the number of people that I see and know on one hand that's gone through a meat grinder and lost two digits. I get homesick for the atmosphere. The lack of pomp and circumstance. Of course there's the college town part of Pittsburgh, but the part plays a lot bigger than it is. I don't miss that scene or the people that frequent it religiously all that much.

Sure it was great to play drinking games and have laughs and dress up on halloween and all that shit. Sure it was great to get anxious on Sunday when you know papers are due and oh so many tests next week and I haven't studied at all but you know you'll do well enough to get a decent grade, but you need something to worry about so you don't feel like a waste of life and loan money, or trust fund money, or whatever the fuck money has gotten you in there. I do miss the drinking games and the general camaraderie largely absent in life after age twenty two when people decide what they really want to do and the doing of that thing does not include meeting you every weekend to exchange war stories and play fighting and choruses of the songs you have in common and hitting on the birds. Everyone grows up eventually and it makes me sad, because my investment schedule definitely does not include the things people my age are supposed to value which puts me at direct odds with what those people want to do. Not by choice. Everyone inherits vision to some degree and I was fortunate or unfortunate enough to inherit a vision of the future that is not worlds apart, but different enough to make common ground a scratch and tumble affair at best. I don't know where to find the people that share my vision, because I spent all of my time with people who didn't share that vision, but shared temporary past times that I thought would last forever.

People aside I get homesick for the fabric of where it is that I am. The smell of it. The starry sky that just won't quit. The bridges and hills and the chopped sidewalks. The bad architecture and the good and the fact that the people there make it work and shut the fuck up about it. The low rent, maybe low brow, of it all. The fact that I don't have to make 20,000 dollars to live a life with amenities and enough security to know that I won't be ass out on the street living out of bus station rest rooms if I don't pull in 32,000 dollars a year, much less 18,000. I miss that I can go do just about anything I want a couple times a month if it's expensive and most everything else I can do at will when I'm there and working.

As I'm walking home and crossing the last bridge across the river to my town I can see the stars sitting in the water like giants blue white lilly pads looking for frogs and it's the calmest I've seen it in a while and, yeah, it made me misty. No neon lights, no car clogged Saturday night streets. Just hills rising on either side dotted with orange street lights and a few windows and an empty bridge. The moon on my shoulder, the river at my feet. It was beautiful. It is beautiful. I could walk out to that bridge every day and it would never get old. The only thing I wanted more was a joint, a cooler with a couple 40s, and a fishing rod to pass the time til sunrise. I love Pittsburgh. She makes me wicked homesick.

The only downside was the Greyhound ride from Philadelphia. I took the fools gold. I grabbed the open seat with a few open seats around it and sure enough a family sat around me. A couple of fat mothers and their snotty kid and baby and dazed and confused husband. Not a problem. I had headphones. So I thought. Immune to crying stinky children being changed in the aisle. The real problem was the extremely portly mother. Nothing against big girls, but if you can't sleep on a red eye without falling over on the person next to you and wedging your purse into my hip and lolling your arms against my ribs, I will have a problem with you.

The worst part wasn't that she baby talked to the baby for two hours. My problem wasn't that the baby kept smacking my arms and kicking my thighs while I tried to make myself as small as possible. My problem wasn't even that she refused to acknoledge that allowing her baby to run rough shod over a complete stranger was probably a bad idea, as I had to continuously repeat aloud "do not strangle them" to keep myself in my seat and facing away. Verbal reminders keep me in line. My problem was that she kept leaning herself on me with enough perfume to hide a skunk in her vagina and have the world none the wiser.

Honestly, I would rather people smelled like people. People stink. It's part of being human. Everybody has their odor. I can deal with it. Hell, I wrestled in highschool. Ever been in a practically air tight, pad walled, wrestling room for three sweaty, teen funked, hours with unwashed knee pads, shoes, singlets and sweats everywhere? Hell, ever been locked in a 90 degree house with elephantine parents spending entire days sweating into a couch with the windows locked tight and you on the top floor where all the heat and stench gathers regardless of what you do? People stink. I would rather smell your feet after a twenty mile run than stomach whatever essence of flower musk from some far off land synthesized in a lab and sprayed on rabbits. It was hard enough to breath. I had to get out on the rest stop and smoke just to get the odor out of my nostrils for ten minutes before diving back into the air freshened nightmare.

Eventually, between the run amok children, the lolling woman leaning me so hard into the wall I thought I would pop through the emergency window like a turd through a clenched bum hours away from a stall, and the perfume I took the passive aggressive route. I read a book. I was the only one on the bus reading. Got the book out and hit that light switch and within an hour the seat next to me was vacant. Had to pat myself on the back for that act of cunning. And then I put the arm rest down for good measure. I can sleep sitting stock still. Doesn't bother me. Luckily enough it bothered them enough to get every last one of them to piss off.

But anyway, wanted to mention cycling. I almost high sided the other day. A low side fall is alright. You take the shortest path from your seat to the ground. Not terrible usually. High siding is a different story. High siding is flipping over the top of your cycle. Not laying it down and going down with it, but hitting something or wrenching it in such a way that you come over the top and land. Hard.

I was coming down a nice winder. Nice tight sweeps in heavy traffic. It's usually not a problem, but I was coming to a tight sidewinder that I flirted with about a dozen times. I pushed it hard and it took it softer on rainy days, but I felt comfortable enough to give the old all or nothing pass. The pace setter. The pass that would define how I judged my future success or failure navigating it in coming months.

Of course there is a fucking minivan charging up my ass. I don't know what it is about drivers. It's like they feel they aren't driving as well as they can unless they can chase down a bicycle as though the bicycle is somehow superior in grip when in fact it is superior in dense traffic patterns and perhaps marginally more nimble, but on open roads all the advantages go to having more contact patches. And an engine. So I take the turn tight. Too tight. I have too much speed and my apex misses the ideal by several feet and I come wide toward the road's shoulder and I can see the early morning gravel from rain wash the night before not yet cleared by a day of traffic and I am coming straight for it with a big white van charging in behind me expecting me to hold the line.

The gravel and sand are two wheels mortal enemy next to ice which usually equals instant low sides, but I see it coming so I'm sliding and correcting and sliding and correcting trying to slow down enough without taking too much of my tires capacity to steer and grip by over braking and as I basically fish tail the curb is coming up and I feel that sick few seconds when you know someone is about to blind side check you straight into the hockey arena boards. As I'm trail braking and correcting I can see my wheels jamming the curb and me flipping into the fence in what would have been the worst accident I've had to date, but I pull it together and recover about six inches out and get up off my saddle and chug with everything I'm worth to keep the van from pasting me.

It sucked. I damn near shat myself with the effort and nerve racking tension. Why do I mention it? In short, certain turns don't care what you're driving or riding. I'm pretty sure part of the reason the van didn't cream me was because she had to slow down to take the bend too and I didn't think about that. The sharpness of it. Had I been riding or driving anything I'm pretty sure the fastest that hairpin could have been taken was probably ten or fifteen miles an hour without aero package grade downforce keeping you glued. And I need to keep that in mind when I'm riding too. I know I can't out maneuver most cars on open sweepers and pins, but I also need to remind myself not to push too hard, because when the turns get tight enough, they can't out maneuver me either. And I guess that's part of the human experience too. When things get tight enough the only thing that matters is how much downforce you can generate, not what drives you.


///Junkie XL - "War" on the road of life there are drivers and there are the driven

11/3/11

That Instant

The instant you fan out your laundry before throwing it on your laundry horse and the pant leg whips and sends your dildo (that you didn't realize you laundered in the first place) flying through the air to smack against the wall hard enough to knock posters off the wall and you breath a sigh of relief because it hit plaster instead of the back of your roommates head. And you breath another sigh of relief because you don't have a roommate. And then breath a sigh of frustration because you have to put your posters back up yourself, because there's no one to blame but yourself and your overly enthusiastic laundromatic expertise.

Fuck, where's the tape.