Redrum and Other Origins and Valuation

Is it wildly addictive, yeah of course.   Does it change you?  No not really.  There's a certain amount of disappointment that comes with it.  A certain amount of asking yourself questions that persist despite the time of day.  It's a pretty weird thing.  A confluence of circumstance and luck so thick I can talk about it now almost a year removed.   Can you imagine sitting on anything for a year?

I tried to talk to my friend about it and she pretty much shut me out.  That sucks.  I did not anticipate at all how I would be re evaluated.  That part of it has been hard to parse and it really has been across the board with each person I've shared it with, chosen to share it with.  It's an odd difficulty but I can understand the rejection.  I can understand it, but I don't have to accept it, I would like to think.

Do I feel better?  Not really.  Not as good as I thought I'd feel.  Kind of reminds me of paint snuffling. Very short lived and very gorgeous and very forgettable, but so far away from everything enjoyable on a common basis.  A rare sadness that presents some unforgettable joy.  It's difficult to talk about.  Because I know there are people missing her and all that.  It's difficult to relate because on top of that there is the knowledge of the missing and maybe that's why I don't sleep so good these last years.  Getting away without really getting away (heart in the floor kinda shit except ...)

The most difficult thing has been trying to relate this story without who I relate it to drastically reevaluating who I am as a person.  I'm still the same.  What's so difficult to understand about needing and finding practice?  I understand that I am a very strange and enchanted boy and eventually luck runs out, but how does that mean love evaporates?  Or should evaporate?  How come once suddenly doesn't mean enough?  I could understand trust lost.  I could understand that.  Total abandonment still stymies me.  I don't care what you did or what you do.  If I love you I love you.  That's it.  Where it starts and ends I guess.  I think that's all I wanted in return.  That's all.  Step by stepped is what I got.  Oh well.  let's explore more.  It's a big world and I've a small heart and there's a hell of a lot of music along the way.  we'll see where this goes, but honestly i want more comedy.  I don't think that's too much to ask.  Trying to increase my value to others, you know?   It is the first and last time I'll talk about it, so enjoy.

The Seatbelts - "Rain"  -  its a strange balance. even to me.  the worst being that i dont know its been struck yet.  knowing how i feel afterward i will try, but i cannot promise anything and i never will.

Cheeseburger (and the origins)

The cheeseburger.  The curse of curses.  Cheeseburger!  Cheeseburger!  Cheeseburger!  To invoke the cheeseburger three times in a row is to call down all of the thunderbolts of heaven and bring ruin to your foe, and also to yourself, because the Cheeseburger fallout is too long lived and too deadly to dissipate with any amount of speed.  The Cheeseburger is not to be toyed with, not to be thought of, not to be spoken of, under any circumstances and is the last resort of the desparate, the dying, and the backstabber.

The cheeseburger, in and of itself, is a fairly innocent and delicious thing.  However, in it's delicious simplicity it also signifies missing the mark.  It is much easier to screw up what you're trying to achieve, or miss the mark, or any other failure.  It's easy to fail (most of the time).  And when you do you can relax, because you hung it up and won at failing, which has a much higher success rate than succeeding.  You stuffed your face with a Cheeseburger, and it was delicious.  More than that,

the guy in Popeye would always pay Tuesday for a hamburger today.  The term comes primarily from dart games.  When you miss one and then two and then know you're going to miss three and as you walk up to the board you pull the darts out and one thought dominates: I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a mark today.   Cheeseburger!  Cheeseburger!  And that's not all.  A person can Cheeseburger.  A person can also be Cheeseburgered.  Often times the Cheeseburger will be invoked by a sworn enemy or opponent as you are shooting.  At that moment you have been Cheeseburgered.  The Cheeseburger will take over your mind and destroy your shot at success.

Some do succeed, despite the Cheeseburger in the room.  Never for long.  Do not mess with the Cheeseburger.  It will end whatever it touches.

It's a Wash

Albumatic blue wash pending the time to do it.

There's enough love in my heart to make it happen.

The only variable is time.

Torn apart.  Torn together and mended, we are.

A lot of conversation happened in between.

Apparently I still don't know how to talk,

but I still know how to love and that counts for something.

Let's see what we can bang out this week.

I'm looking forward to it.  I don't care who's at
the table.

I just need to do or someone is going to

lose their skin and I don't want it to be me ever again.

Thinking Around Yourself Is Not Easy (fear)

I have been trying to think around myself.  It has not been easy.  To say the least.  Part of what has made it so difficult is realizing that I am occupying so much of my own space.  Where as space time is largely infinite, I have had a hard time parsing my own space and my own time in that webbing.  Experience is infinite.  Infinitely divergent and convergent on the same scale.  The difference comes when you start to look at a person as fragment or a single stitch, a wave particle behaving more particulate than wave, on the scale of outcomes.  Something that you can cure me of.  No, not really.  Nothing that I wouldn't do for you differently.

I have been trying to think around myself.  I have been trying to dig myself out of the weird hole of self absorption and have experienced some success.  There has been some allure in exploring the dark side of the moon and what have you, but that has come as quite ancillary to everything else I would like to do, but has also occupied so many cycles, it's almost become laughable.

The standoffs between my drawing tablet and my gaming remote have grown to epic proportions.  As they should.  Given the variables.  I knew they would.  There are so many usb ports and only so many preoccupations.  I've grown a little sad though.  Not because I can't get everyone of me to work in concert.  Not because the voices have been so gotdamn loud I can't hear myself think sometimes.  Not because I want time to flow in reverse.  Not because I am stupidly heart broken too often and no amount of huffed paint will make it feel better long enough.  Not because four hour masturbation sessions laden me with enough shame to bury an elephant with no trace of a corpse or burial ground.  

I've grown a little sad, because I know, with the pills available, my outcomes might be entirely different, and I've given them not a lick of a try.  Not that I don't want to.   I absolutely do.  It's not like I'm going to magically lose my creativity or penchant for metaphor.  Might lose some sex drive, but it's not like I'm getting laid every five seconds.  It's a choice and I understand that.  It's a choice I'm not comfortable making.  What if I don't like the new me?

Better question:  what if the new me is less acceptable than the old me.  I don't mean in terms of dalliances and persuasions or anything like that, but how hilarious would it be if the new me was completely straight?  I just don't want, in a big way to rediscover myself.  At some point you get too old for that and I don't want to be in a position where I'm okay with being fucked up constantly and managing, but I also don't want to be in a completely artificial position that I can love because it's artificial and enjoyable and normal, because as much as I love fitting in, I love being genuine.

It has value.  Being genuine.  How far around myself am I supposed to think?  How far around themselves do other people think?  That's the much larger question.  I guess the greater difficulty comes in when I try to measure myself against other points of normalcy and I fail to get a reading.  It breaks my heart.  It really does.  It still does.   Not blaming anyone.  Not finding fault.  It just burns my heart steadily.  Day to day.  Am I that weird?  The answer keeps coming back yes and no.  And everyone gets to go through life, well, the vast majority, with answers to that question.  And I don't.

Maybe I'm not far enough outside myself to answer or maybe I just don't have an answer or maybe the answer is just kind of crappy and I have to deal with it until I die.  I don't know.  I'll still try.  To enjoy what life I got still comin' my way.  What else would you expect me to do.


///RJD2 - "Moonlit Skies"    Sometimes you just want to be right about something.  Just anything.  Just get it and nail it dead on for once.  It stays a luxury you can't afford, all you can do is convince yourself you were close enough.

The Best Thing

about realizing you're a day off in terms of what the actual day of the week is, and finding out you're a day fast is knowing you've got that day back in your pocket.

Here's to industriousness.

That Instant

you realize you are going to go do something you've gotten good at but that you do not like to do, and it is no longer optional.  The choice is gone.  And all of your happy songs will have to be learned again and all of your happy places will have to be overtaken again.  Let's make it a short trip.  I just got back to loving myself, I'm not about to give that away for a forgiven debt.

Last times, sugar.

Astral Pain, Curbing Self Absorption, and Re-engagement

A gorgeous thing happens when you wake up and step outside and the world has a luster to it that isn't glass eyed.  The bricks are warm though the air is skin tight cold.  The sun is not screaming, but humming.  The clouds are waiting instead of watching and the trees are content to not say a word as you go about your day.  And it's cool.  The voices are not so loud and the stars at night are not calling you home.  All they say as you hunt in the dark is "we're happy out here as long as you're happy down there, but feel free to visit when you're ready," and it's good.  It's great.  The weapons are collecting dust and the hands are busy again at other operations and no one else has to die and it's a great feeling.  The jail yard feels bigger than it ever has and seeing your breath is so welcome a change you damn near want to cry because Summer hurt you so bad, and you've been waiting so long to see snow again and for a while there you didn't think you'd make it that long.  A strange and gorgeous thing.  The quietude.  The death of everything and the ashes blowing through the grass.  Everything slowing down to a speed your eyes can process again.  Gorgeous.  Everything returning to a temperature more fit for your fusion heart.  The astral pain subsiding.

One of the immediate difficulties plaguing the writing has been an exorbitant amount of self absorption.  Getting beyond it has been difficult.  Spitting out all of the junk on top of the processes.  Kicking out the bad and pointless information, the information occupying a lot of cycles and routines.  Brain space and resources.  Resources that can't be repurposed or freed up until the train is run through the tracks and their opened again.  A necessary thing.  There's a lot on the burners.  In fact the kitchen was pretty much on fire.  Nothing edible was made.  Did manage to make some wicked cool... I don't know.  Lost my train of thought.  Started thinking about huffing paint again, but I'm not too thrilled with the results.  At least, not thrilled enough to go out of my way.  What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, so I've been fairly disappointed with all of the sentences starting with "I" and so many of the themes being things dear to my heart, but unable to touch the rest of the world my head lives in.  It got boring.  You wait and you wait and you wait for the bulb to go off and then you look at the picture and it's another damned self portrait.  You keep calling up your imaginary friends and they answer the phone and you sit down to talk about what you and he talked about and then you hold it up when you're done and it's another god damned self portrait.  I started asking myself how the hell it kept happening.  What the hell was I doing wrong?  The arrow finally pierced my thigh.  Not really.  I just talked and talked and talked until I had nothing left to talk about and I could remember again the things they said too.

They never left.  I was so torn up and wrecked and lost all at once I ended up circling the woods for weeks before something looked familiar again.  I'm reckoning loss again.  Reckoning with.  Minor and major losses of people.  Losing people again.  Dealing with dead channels that I thought would live forever and asking myself what I did wrong and realizing at this point the answer is nothing.  Sometimes there's no explanation.  I'm pretty sure I came to that conclusion before.  Years ago.  The conclusion about a general lack of causality in the humanverse.  Sometimes there is no explanation and I was okay with it then.  I'm learning to be okay with it now all over again.  People out grow you.  You out grow people.  Sometimes friends stay and sometimes friends go, sometimes you get to stay in touch and sometimes you don't.  Sometimes you dance.  They never left.

Curbing self absorption.  Curing self absorption, was a difficult task and not entirely done.  I still have to get back inside the heads of the people and places populating my dreams.  Pierce the fog of internal war.  It's still there, but I have become so unbelievably conscious of it's necessity and it's force of presence that I can begin to work around and work through it.  Begin to retool things that have sat in draft for months.  That's important to me.  It's important to them too.  So many storylines continue on in the background and it's fantastic to be able to sit down and leave myself behind to engage them and when I can't do that the storylines continue to their conclusion and when I finally do look at them again everyone is gone and I can't remember what we were doing there in the first place or where they may have mentioned they were going next.  However, I understand now

that I was standing far too close to the bars and the picket planks to enjoy the space I've earned.  Far too close to the window and hating the feeling of my nose there pressed to see the AUs.  I have to tell you that I love you so much, these days.  I forget to do that too much.  Too often.  A return to the observational side of things and less the actor.  Returning to the maps and the center of the yard where the fences are so far I can barely see them.  It's terribly easy to fall into yourself when you can feel your hands burning inside the diamonds of that twisted wire.

I am re-engaging.  Decoupled for so long.  It's easy to believe that is all there is for you.  Because it is.  If you want more you have to wrestle it away from what has already been determined, if that makes sense.  And I'm trying, have been, and finally succeeding a little bit.  Trying not to over celebrate.  I know the next turn is right around the corner and part of living with paranoid schizophrenia is guarding against yourself.  I accept that.  I don't particularly enjoy it.  I definitely woke up the other day unable to speak because I screamed my lungs out as hard as they would go.  That was a funny one to explain when I went to my temp job and rasped like a 90 year old chain smoker who couldn't break a decibel if his life depended on it.  "I just want you to be okay."  I just wanted you to stop asking about it.  I think I'm raving a little bit so

I'll bring this thing to a close for now and shove off from here, wherever here is, later on.  The astral pain has subsided.  Self absorption has been curbed, but not cured.  I am getting back in touch with the outer planes. I am re-engaging with life, though some parts of life will be or already have disengaged with me.  Most importantly Winter is here.  It feels like a lifetime went by in the months between this time last year and now.  Twisting in the breeze.


///Lionrock - "The Guide" ... the nineties killed it for electronic music.  in a good way.

Find Yourself and Redesign Timetable

Well, I think I've finally done it.  The act took a very long time.  A very, very, long time, but I think I've found myself.  I believe I've gotten enough of us back to the table to start working again on creative things.  It has been a top priority, it feels like, for far too long.  I've been so self absorbed, I have not been able to see past my own nose unless I was dead asleep and dreaming.

Speaking of which, I did have the most fantastic dream that fleshed out into several more characters with unique dialog of their own so far detailed I began to wonder, asleep, of their back stories because all of the interactions were so well and tightly detailed I felt, by four way conversation's end, that I knew them from other lives, even though the quality of the sleep itself lasted less than an hour.

I have finally found myself, although the child is AWOL.  I am not happy about that.  There is a certain whimsy I've been unable to recapture.  Not so much unable as much as it has been a certain amount of flailing in the dark.  Bless his screwed up soul.  I need him back, both listening and contributing, if I ever intend to get better.  That's what has been difficult to deal with the most.

Shooting for the end of December for the redesigns.

Diver

I'mhaving a conflict of personality that I can't put into words, but what else is new.  Take the motorway.  Take the high line.  Get there faster.  Gained ourselves the world and all that.   Been gone for a minute.

I missed this.  I missed you and I just talking things out.  My heart break is deep running.   I've been huffing again.  Trying to deal with multiples of personality and failin.  Failing on a grand scale.  After the maths and all that.  Sad on another scale.  Purely disappointed.  It's gotten gross.  Grown gross.

On the cusp of making bad decision choices.  HAHA.  No there's nothing there.  I haven't been faking it.  Not at all.  I've been genuine.  I've been joying.  My heart has still been breaking, though.  Fragility. The man with the iron hands and the glass brain.  It's difficult.  The suppression.  The temptation to cash it all in.  To not bite the bait.

All I can promise any of us is that I will not turn in early.  Did that ever mean something?  It is so hard to quantify and I've always been so bad with math.  I don't want a second chance or another run at it.  If I had a second chance or a time machine I know I would fuck it up twice.

I've never been to Torrenby, but I hear it's nice this time of year.

I've been crying again.  I wish I knew why, but I don't.  It happens.  There's no punch to be thrown.  No real counter.Sometimes I just have to accept being broken and I'll never be okay with it.

Steady As She Goes

Remember what that used to mean?  I do.  It used to mean taking the highs and lows in stride, but not to so much the taking in stride as cutting straight though the thick of the wave and coming out the back side and surfing her straight into dusk.  Straight into the fall and the winter of the upcoming crest.  It used to mean a lot more than it did before it became a platitude.   Not that it's a platitude now.  I guess what I'm saying is that steady as she goes is a bad way to describe the circuit of this ship.

Right now, I would place it somewhere between an oxygen fire in the vacuum of space and a flat spin dizzying enough to make the sublime a Picasso'd afterthought.  It's terrifying in the same way a car accident is serene in the seconds before contact, except those seconds are stretching out days instead of seconds, weeks instead of days.

Steady as she goes, though.  All flame and wreck and how many souls can she bring down with her as she spirals into a sun?

It's the wanting that is tearing.  Shearing bolts and bulkheads and turning bodies like soil and plow spades, succumb to forces and forced things.  Do not kill.  Do not see.  Do not hear.   The touch of force like a kiss from a stranger who knows your one sided name.  And no why.  No why ever offered.   It's thrilling and numbing and begging.

Waiting for another break and it arrives unannounced and unheralded and reasons for people to question never come up, but choke up like a batter for an infield single and everyone sees it coming except the pitcher.  It's been tough.  Songs for getaway car single shot thirty minute production reels.  Everyone needs commas.  Everyone needs comas.

You want it both ways.  I want it both ways.  I want the privilege of mistake.  I want the forgiveness and the forgiving to see me in the light of a human being flawed by default and on the same hand I want the respect and the conversation granted to the sound.  I want what's coming to me and mine and I want to fight it at the same time.  I want answers.  Sometimes I can't sleep at night because I keep asking myself "why me?"  I keep saying that over and over and it would be so convenient to point to some kind of god or chance or a version of determinism with some kind of optical illusion at it's end.  The best I can point up is some kind of medicated psuedo goodness.  Some kind of hard parsed commonality or functionality.  Is that enough?

What ever is?  Am I going to kill myself is a matter of convenience and circumstance.  When I'm sure I'll be sure,  Is all I can say I won't be able to write some kind of flowery death note.  I hold my loved ones, and they do exist, no more hostage than anything or anyone else anyone or anything else can hold a thing or person dear.  It burns me that things can be that simple.  That simple and that hard.  I guess that's what becomes what burns me so hard.

That a person can want all of the rights, all of the allowances, of personhood and still be counted as damaged and warrant of special circumstance and consideration.  It boils down, a little bit, to I am just like you staring I am nothing like you dead in the face.  Because I want with all of my heart to be just like you.  And I know I'll never be.  Do you know how special you are?

Do you know how special you are now?

How about now?

Okay, well, how about now?


///War - "Me and Baby Brother"  everytime I hear this song I think of fifth grade and all the growing up I had to do and how I took my siblings for granted and how we stole from eachother constantly, but lately I think about all of our adventures and misadventures and I think if I ever have kids there will be a two head minimum because every dog may have its day, but what is a day without some belloved arse you'll be forever linked with to share it with.

///Skrillex - "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"  ...for I am just like you...

Proliferation Theory

If you do enough, something is bound to stick favorably.  For a time I approached writing with an arrogance.  I thought, because it was the only thing I got decent marks in, I must be good at it.  And then I got bad grades.  Still got good grades from time to time, but bad grades just as often, usually related to the technical composition and not the ideas.  And then I got good technical marks and bad ones on the formation of ideas.  Sometimes I did well with both.

It was a strange time.  I transitioned from writing on my own time and going to class and writing instead of doing homework to higher grades where writing was my only homework and all I did in classes.  The arrogance of perceived innate talent faded quite a bit with one failed attempt to win awards after another and I blamed closed communities and the like, the department was exceptionally cliquey.  I believed the profs liked what they liked and you liked what you liked and it was your job to jump the gap, not theirs.

I don't know what my problem is exactly, but I do believe it is that the people that I idolize make it look so effortless and what they make feels like hit after hit after God damn hit.  Maybe proliferation theory is failing me.  It's difficult to say either way.  Maybe I am genuinely no good.  It's tough to digest.  Without some kind of schedule.  I rolled up a dollar bill.  It's just strange, I guess.  Proliferation theory.  Asking when is good enough for me good enough for someone else.

The theory begs a lower standard, but how much is compromised in terms of value and personal expansion? Is the cost appropriate to the value of the product, the life time stamp I put my name to?  I don't know.  I do it predominantly for myself, at least that's what I've convinced myself of.  I don't know.  Would I kill to go back to school?  How many people?  Could I plea bargain my way out of life sentences and would the offer still be good when I got out?  I'd have to think about it.  Hypotheticals.

Yeah, it drives me crazy.  A little bit.  I try to think about what else I would be doing, could be doing.  None of it appeals to me the same way.  Everyone, including myself, well maybe not everyone, many people talk about being their harshest critic.  I may be my most passionate lover.  Delusions of grandeur coming with the territory, but I don't always see it so clearly.  The Fantha.  Losing focus on the mission.  I just want to die knowing I was good as I could possibly be, not knowing I was good as I was going to be.  Who wants that?

I think believing that I'm great keeps my engine running.  Keeps the clutch down and a hand on the shift knob for when I come running.  Beyond that, I don't know how much credence I give it.  I butcher language and muddle image on a weekly basis.  I talk like broke nosed sailor all too often and argue like a fifteen time concussed politico's son.  Pretty sure my mental dictionary has "turn to page 345"s on it and on page 345 there is a crayon hand drawn hairy dick in the corner.

Purpose is a fine commodity.  Take a digger.  Fire off the magazine, discharge, and throw it as far as you can.  Sometimes panic can be beautiful.  Never outwardly.  Did I tell you that I was you?  Don't be silly.  Don't be silly little king with your crown.  Let me polish that for you; you dropped it skipping puddles in gutters without your galoshes.  You know the ones with He-Man and Skeletor printed all over?  I'll remember for you.

Just behave, okay?

The project was, the final project was, to make a visual that encompassed everything you believed poetry to be.  Everything you believed poetry to be and the purpose it served.  They came in with their power points and dream catchers and God's eyes and a diorama of a village and someone made a painting and someone made a collage from printed magazines and there were a handful of abstract sculptures and even a figurine, but you made a life sized naval mine with trigger switches and detonators and wires out of empty wine bottles and paint brush handles and spray painted it black.  That was a fun walk across campus with that hugged to your chest.  Cutting across the grass, because the people on the sidewalk could go f--- themselves that early in the morning.  You worked on it all night after thinking about it for a week.  Everyone talked about their things and you talked about yours.  And that's where it ended.

Officially.  I suppose, the project is ongoing.  I hate myself.  I love myself.  I hate myself.  I'm sorry to drag you into it.  I don't know how else anything changes.  Contemplating the validity of ProT.


///Starkey - "Spacewalk" infolatice diver with a bad respirator.  the city is so vast and so uninhabitable so far beneath the waves

from a similar born year and different circumstance, but very little I haven't enjoyed while there: alicja-w-krainie-czarow

Tired, Music, Studio Dust and Weekdays

I'm tired.  A lot of people are.  Just kind of beat.  It's not the usual beat.  The common beat.  You know the kind of beat I'm talking about.  The beat that runs from Sunday into Monday because you didn't do anything and you got tired near the end of the day because of all the things you didn't do, but didn't spend the energy to not do?  Is that the right way around?  Spent the energy to not do?  It's not that kind.  It's the kind of beat that comes from doing stuff and dreaming stuff with equal gusto.  I was going to say passion, but I feel like passion tends to connote a certain amount of emotional sensitivity that tends to drag meaning away from doing stuff and bend the beat toward a beatnik kind of over sensitivity that screams I spent my day doing nothing because doing nothing was better than doing something I don't believe in.  Whatever that means.  So I'm tired.  Just tired.  Days full of doing and nights full of doing and not enough doing to go around.  What it do?  I don't know?  What does it do?  Give me a few weeks and I'll tell you.

I'm tired though and it gets aggravating.  First world problems or something like that.  I never thought I would find myself whining to myself about transcribing my voice recordings.  I don't want to sit down and type at my computer, but I don't want to sit down and write down notes and write out stories with pen and paper either, but I don't want to transcribe my recordings because, as it turns out, that's kind of harder.  I've never said "what the hell did he just say" in reference to myself so many times in a row.  Doesn't help that I lost my data cable for transferring them to my computer.  And I could buy a card adapter, but I bought a shower curtain instead.  It's weird.  Am I dodging myself?  Probably.  Do you know how hard it is to do that?  Not very.  I'm easily distracted.  Especially when I'm tired.

I have a hard to stifle desire to make music.  Write songs.  Emo guilty.  I don't know the first thing about writing songs, but I can learn.  Task locked after a way.  I would say everyone is, but that's just not true.  Pretty sure I'm not waiting for anything specific.  I'm trying to turn routine into stability, but it feels like the only routine I can maintain with any faith is instability.  It's what makes me a good fighter and a bad fighter at the same time, because even instability can grow predictable.   I kind of had a little crisis mode thought track down on the low lying channels that worked its way up to the high line and caught fire across circuits.  What if I'm not a writer?  What if I've just been fooling myself for a decade?  And then I thought: well, it's been a pretty fun decade, set backs not withstanding.  Maybe all you have to do to live, the secret of life or something like it, is to do what you love and let everything else orbit it and sometimes you spend time on Titan and sometimes you stink up Venus for a little while and sometimes you dig ditches on Earth and go visit friends on Mars before swinging out to Saturn to ogle and then do some time on Io when you know when you can't be trusted to do anyone any good.  Anyway you cut it though the sun of desire still comes up and you put your helmet back on and check the pressure and the panel and kick on the boosters and go.  I don't mind that.  I don't think I don't mind that.

I've been trying to figure out what I need to do to find my music again.  Wherever it is.  It's not on notes between lines and bars and what have you.  I think that ship has sailed for the time being.  Not that I can't do it.  I just get pissed off hearing ridiculous compositions by people years younger and I know I'll just tear it up, spit on it, crumple up the spit on shreds and bean someone on the sidewalk with earbuds in their ears from my window, correcting for wind.  I'm still pretty good at that.  "Hey, douche!"  Smack.  Kind of a counter productive talent.  I can also flick a cigarette with 75% accuracy from two yards.  Bigby would be jealous, if he were real.  In a fight between Bigby and me I would totally win, or at least be the one still able to walk afterwards, cuz I would kick him straight in the dick like five times before he hit the ground.  I've been trying to find my music again though.  I used to play trombone and that little plastic flute thing that could only play eight notes, and that other thing.   Viola!  Not well though.  Music programs in sixth grade didn't teach you how to tune them.  I'm pretty sure my sixth grade music teacher was on pills most of the time.  She just sat at her piano, over weight, with ratty, burned up, lye blonde, wisps of shoulder length hair, playing chords and vaguely answering questions.  Didn't help that I was perpetually terrified of popping my eyeball with a snapped viola string.  For some reason I never got over that fear and the even greater fear of facing my parents who would say something like "this is why we didn't want you playing viola!  and staying after school!"

I don't get why they cashed out when their investment was practically over.  They pretty much took a steaming dump on every extracurricular I chased and then wondered why the scholarships didn't come rolling in like publishers clearing house with ten entrants instead of 10 million, because that is basically what scholarship competitions are.  Do people even realize how much nonsense has to go right to win that crap?  It's gotta be something on the scale of lower tier pro sports or Division three sports.  Is there even a third division in the NCAA?

I have a vague idea of the direction I'm going to have to go.  Samples.   Lots and lots of samples and loops, but also keyboard and MIDI instruments.  I already have some of the tracks laid out in my head.  That's the easy part.  The hard part is the hours and days and weeks it takes to get it laid out on my computer.  I'm going to do it though.  And I'm going to pick up reading music again in a few years.  Or, I should say, a few years after I start doing that because I know the time will come when I can't find the sample I want and the realization will dawn for the second time, dawning first here, that it will ultimately be easier to create the exact sound I'm looking for instead of looking for the sound already out there and bending it to my will of production.

I'm getting behind though.  Behind on the various projects.  Time is at a premium lately and I'm trying to restructure my time expenditures to better reflect the end times of another year.  The heady days of Summer are gone the fuck out the door, nigga.   Time to start burning the winter fat and make something real that I can hold up to my eyes and review and turn over and do better again.  Masturbation is not that thing.  When the hell did I start masturbating so much?  It's gotten to the point where I have to check my hand for excess lotion before I go out in public.  That's not healthy, right?  That's the other problem though.  Two hours a pop is way too long for masturbatory purposes.  The pursuit of the perfect orgasm is a waste of time because I know where it is.   That little switch in my head that says "alright, just pick one and let's get through this," broke a long time ago.  That has teamed up with my easily distractedness and my absolute focus on making the best iteration of an experience or nothing at all to explode my masturbation budget into a time deficit that sucks the rest of my day into it like a hole in the space time continuum.   You've got a problem when you wake up and think "alright let's rub a quick one out before breakfast" and you're washing your hands at lunch time.  Defeats the purpose of waking up, dude.  Get it together grouch.

My studio is accumulating a disconcerting amount of dust.  This needs remedied.   Soon.  The itch to produce something, anything, is getting unscratchable and we are not under any circumstances doing crack again.  With crazy people.  To make up for it.  That's like asking someone to scratch an itch on your knee and they punch you so hard in the cheek they blow one of your wisdom teeth out.  Sure, the itch is gone, but damn.  I would have gone to see a dentist for that shit if I knew you were going to do that.  And second of all, I thought we agreed on "not the face."  It's cool, though.  It's not.  I have got to get my creative hands dirty doing before they turn on me.  Operation Danny's Attic, the Outride missions.

I've been getting excited about weekdays.  For televisions sake.  It's a fine time of the year.  Sports, cartoons, sitcoms.  New episodes of this and that.  And then it occurred to me why other people don't necessarily get as excited.  They're taping it, or catching it later online.  Technology sucking the fun out of life.  The death of the viewing party.  DVR killed the video star, would be an ironic throwback title to it, if ironic is the right word.  Maybe dated fits there too.  Sad times.  Remember when Seinfeld episodes were still new?  People probably had to VHS them and before they could do that they had to master their tape machines and make sure their television was on the right channel.  I wonder how many people taped Friends by mistake and shot themselves in the face in their bath tub with a glass of wine balanced on the side by the bubbles that same night.  I'm not saying Friends was that bad a show or Seinfeld was that good.  They were just that far apart.  After the Seinfeld finale I'm sure Monday night suicides probably spiked for a few weeks and then dropped dramatically.  What do you mean the saga of Kramer has reached it's conclusion???  Can't remember the last time I used three question marks in a row, but I'm sure my computer could tell me.  I've got to clean my studio and fire up the factory.  They may not respond to coaxing, but I'm fed up coaxing with words.  It is time to put the boot to them.

Anyway, the point is, there's a lot of work to do and the work doesn't care how tired you feel or where your identity crisis lies or how you feel about what you think you might be terrible at or good at.    Until you do it, you're going to wish you did and once you've done it you're not going to think back and say something like: "man, I wish I hadn't spent so much time caring about and doing something I care about and enjoy doing."

Call it a cold start.  I don't know how it ends.


///The Flaming Lips - "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung"

Crying and Everybody Gets One

Sometimes I feel like all the tears I did not get to cry from the age where my memory starts in patches, five and sometimes six, to where it starts to form a continuous timeline, ten and on, are coming now.  Balancing books and things.  I've been thinking about it somewhat hard nosed and what I came to was, especially given what came down the pipe at twenty, I'd rather have them now than not at all.  

Playing emotional catch up.  

I'd rather be emo now, however, than be emo at age fifty (assuming I can make it to fifty iterations.  that's a pretty tall order, nah mean?).  Part of what I was taught, in writing classes that were worth their weight in gold when they weren't taught by tenured dick faces and holier than though masters ph.d cock tip cum nuggets whom I would still like to punch in the craw and who prevent me from going back to the English department because I will try to strangle them with their own belt, was that you have to exorcise the junk first and everything else will come with time.

That's what she said.  Still, there's some merit to that.  Problem is I have junk for years.  When did everything turn into a fifteen year plan?

Anyway, when I'm rich and famous I'm going to work out my short list of simple assaults.  When I'm set for life I'll start chipping into my kill list.  First things first.  Gotta lay down the work first.  Get the junk out of the way.  Everything else will come in due time.  I can abide by that principle.  The hard part is not letting other people jump your gun.

///Vangelis - "One More Kiss Dear"

Dear (_____)

Dear Fucks,

It's been hard to give y'all away through the years and I think I'm done giving you away.  From now on you will only be gifted on particular instances of necessity and genuine apology.  Because back  in the day, when people actually gave a fuck, that's what giving a fuck meant.  So, sorry for multi-posts.  Sorry for content or whatever.  Sorry for you name it I'm sorry for it, but ain't no more fucks going to be given about shit that is not immediately demanding rescinding or modification.  Life's too short to just be handing fucks out left and right.

Sincerely,

Don't give a fuck no mo'

Birthday Sex (minus sex [also birthdays])

So I'm thirty five and a half again.  For the second time.  Since I've been keeping track of iterations.  I'm on my twenty sixth iteration.  I will not admit a lot of things, but I will admit it's kind of nice to be thirty five, and it's also nice to spell out numbers.  There's something that gives them more weight and pizzazz when you spell them out.  Maybe it's the greater visual volume and maybe I'm just a sucker for language and textual conflagrations.   Mostly I think I like to feel my fingers fly across the keyboard and tap out music the only way I know how, but not the only way I can learn, but the only way I know how just yet.  It's fun.

I've come to some realizations in being thirty five for the twenty sixth time.  None of them make particular sense with regard to each other.  It's kind of difficult to get the points to match up beyond courses of life times, let alone multiple life times.  Really, it's going to take a significant amount of time, I assume, to parse backward and piece together iterational check ins, but I do not believe in doing so that I will be at all disappointed with what the effort turns up.

So here I am.  This is a place holder for future reference to me.  Yes, it is all about me this time, but not really.  It's about the overarching work, but mostly I want to fire off a buoy to mark the spot in the sea of experience.

Sub-mostly, the mostly that bangs across the finish line just after the most mostly, I want to document a child singing a song about birthday sex.  Because it was hilarious, and we were hot boxing the car, and the kid was loving it.  And jumped up, after unfastening himself, on the back seat and started to sing birthday sex just like that time in Chicago, minus the drugs and the easily disarmed anti kid windshield splatterification device.  I almost died laughing.  And that's why, ladies and gentlemen, we park before boxing.  We're not savages.  We're forward thinkers.  Or something like that.

Either way.  Birthday sex might be one of the greatest songs ever and I hope it makes it to a Kids Songs album at some point.  It's good to be 35.  The only male enhancement drug I need on my twenty sixth iteration is every extends extra extreme.  Look it up.  It is the greatest arcade game ever made.  Because when you're this old and this young all you need is a D pad, a lettered button, good music, and explosions and you'll be half masted all day.

That Instant

You realize you've been trying to figure out if masturbating will help or hurt your chances of sleeping well and better than an hour has gone by in the debate.  You're going to have to choose at some point.

What Makes You Laugh

I was just thinking about unfortunate super powers and I laughed a little bit because of a dream I had.  Not a dream, but a day dream while I was riding.  I was burning down Center Avenue on my bicycle next to a tanker truck that had the high polished aluminum finish that was so glassed I could see my face and helmet and glasses in it when I glanced to my right.  I was going fast enough to pass it, but the light was red so I cruised next to it while we rolled up to the intersection together.

I could of waited, but I was about to pull a right turn at the next light after the stretch of  200 feet, once the next light came up, so I figured (correctly) I would be out of the gate fast enough to beat him there by enough of a long shot and why suck truck exhaust and obstruction when you know what the score already is.  Plus, sometimes it's just fun to flirt with disaster when you know the whale couldn't give two blinks for what you want to do, you being so small and flit a fish.  They know you know if you knew what was good for you, you'll stay away from their fins and wheels, and I for the most part do.  Sometimes I am a reckless jackass, but most of the times, this being one of those times, we both know I'm operating at my own risk and out not to cause trouble and enjoy the sights and speed.  At least that's what I think.

It occurred to me, in day dreaming about it, how awesome it would be to see the tanker explode in slow motion, but not have to actually be there physically, yet have my point of view so close and so slowed down to see it happen.  And then I wondered if, in real time, I would be able to see the flash or if my eyes would be disintegrated and turned to mist before my brain could know what was going on.

The whole thing made me think, in the few seconds before the light turned green, what an awful super power that would be.  The power to make flammable things explode as long as you were close enough to be exploded too.  You wouldn't die, but the one drawback, because super powers with no actual drawback besides responsibility makes you a comic book caricature, would be that you always experience the pain of death even though you are immediately reconstituted and the pain stays fresh.  Furthermore you experience the compounded pain of everyone else who dies in the blast, directly and indirectly, so that even the people that don't immediately die still channel and communicate their living, burn ward, debilitated, living pain for as long as they live directly into your brain beneath the layers upon which drugs can intervene.  So you have to really think about who and what you blow up and when and where, but not necessarily why.

Unfortunate super powers.  Like the power to make yourself drunk.  Like you can think about a specific BAC and put yourself there instantaneously.  Instantaneously.  However, you still get to deal with the health repercussions and you still have to figure out ways around hangovers and you still have to live your life.  But, you get to be as drunk as you feel like, whenever you feel like, because you can call upon a secret power within yourself to generate alcohol directly into your blood stream from your bones.  So, if, for instance, you have painted yourself into a corner and you know you are about to get the ass beating of a lifetime, you can instantly push yourself up to .2 BAC and not feel a thing and then meter yourself when you wake up at a solid .05 and continue to not feel a thing, but still be functional enough to ride a bus to work and do your job and go home.  You could, potentially, never be hung over again, but will likely poop out your foam sponge liver by the time you're 40.  I don't know, man.  Every boring movie would suddenly be interesting.  Every bad hookup would be forgettable, because you could have the power to black out instantaneously.    It would be one hell of an unfortunate super power.

Speaking of explosions, I got an exploding pound today at the gas station.  It was pretty absurd, because it came out of the blue.  From a man who was clearly in his sixties.  I don't know what that means.  I wish I knew why I was attractive to older people.   I have no idea.  And why, of all things, the explosion pound?  Is that what they think we're up to?  Because I have no idea what the kids are up to today being the age that I am, I guess I probably would have no idea what the people my age are up to when I will be his age so I guess I will probably fire shots in the dark after the same fashion when I meet people my age when I am his age so I will probably go for some antiquated (but what I consider timeless) dap and talk about long resolved issues and the merits of industrial music, dub step, and the last relevant artist I knew or maybe go on a good fifteen minute rant about Goldie and underground hip hop by people that sold out decades before.

I have no idea why they love me, but I have no misgivings about loving them back.  I think we ended up talking for a solid five minutes in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes.  When I was walking home I couldn't help snickering a little bit.  Still though, it was nice to connect briefly.  I've been taking some talking point notes in working this up, mostly because I couldn't sleep, still can't, and didn't want to have to comb through my voice recordings to find the parts I wanted to expound upon.

Which brings to the point that people that fire their cum must have a hard time jerking off on short notice.  Not super short notice, but I mean like you just rubbed one out and someone rang your doorbell, but you didn't go get toilet paper because you are almost broke and you're down to your last bit of lotion anyway, and who rings a doorbell at 1 P.M. on Saturday anyway and you're already downstairs opening the door before you realized you spooged four feet away from your computer and your chair is angled in such a way as to avoid spraying your monitor, but is pointed directly into the swatch of sunlight where your cum landed and when your guest comes upstairs to shoot the shit with you it'll be there sparkling like pixie dust on a Pan's head if a Pan's head were floor boards and pixie dust were cum?  Did that turn into a question half way through?  The next time you feel like less of a man for not having rocket cum, just remember it's a two edged talent.  And everything will be okay.

Which is more than I can say about late night commercials.  It seems every commercial after ten at night is about talking to people while jerking off, jerking off better, having sex with strangers, having sex with strangers better, buying cars, buying food that is somehow more expensive than it was last year even though it is in principle the same fucking thing it was the year before, buying cars, buying cars that cost the same for less money somehow and letting strangers jerk you off over the phone if you sit on your hand long enough and download the latest application that lets you download the latest application for getting strangers wet in the pants or making you feel less inadequate in your powers to make strangers wet in the pants.  That and sleep aids that are non-addictive, and what fun is a drug without the blown relationship of all out love?  An excuse, is what that is.  Is what that is?  Nyeh.  Television outside of the hours of ten P.M. and 5 A.M. is garbage anyway, unless it's football.  Plus, we all know commercials are lies.  Sexy, colorful, somewhat intriguing lies.

Kinda sort of brings me to comics.  Comedians.  You like to think that maybe if you met them you'd be good friends, but they actually hate you.  In real life.  Which is in itself a little bit hilarious.  They can't stand you.  But they're so accessible, aren't they?  The trip up is that you get excited and thrilled about the small, obscure, things they don't give two shits about.  Where the common ground lies, they find very little joy because the joy in them is in the spaces where differences are most acute.  I'm kidding.  I'm sure they're nice people in real life if you are a part of the things they don't like.  But they don't like so many things.  Do they do that on purpose?  I suppose this is a bad venue for dissecting comedy.  The dissection simply reminds me of when you tell someone that you're going home, and sometimes suffix that comment with "to jerk off" or "to play some video games and then jerk off" and the person you are talking to comes back with some absurd bullshit like "well, I'm going yachting tomorrow so I should probably turn in."

What the fuck is that?  Number one: I did not ask you what you were doing tomorrow.  Did you decide to throw that in to make me feel worse about what I'm doing for the rest of tonight?  That's kind of fucked up.  It's not like I'm thrilled to say "yeah, my big plans are pretty much encapsulated in two hours of shame followed by sleeping into Saturday until the NCAA games start and then I'll get up and jerk off some more while half watching them and then go back to bed until the bars open and I can thinly veil a little afternoon sousing in catching late afternoon games."  Did you want me to feel bad about myself for not having plans as grand?  Because if you wanted me to feel included in your adventures you could have invited yourself over for the yankfest, but that would have been understandably awkward, but at least give me the chance to say so and decline instead of feeling left out of your life altogether, if that's where we're going.  Because I mean, I only broached the topic of plans so you would know that I know my plans are not as great as yours, but at least you know that I know I'm not leaving the party because I don't want to be there, it's just because I can't over stay my fucking welcome.

I didn't ask you what you were going to go do, and you didn't ask me either, but I'm rolling over.  It's a complement to your party.  Why can't you take a complement?  And that's why comics will never be your friends.  Because you get excited about dumb, irrelevant, shit that is basically the frills and lace on the sides of granny panties to life.  Granted, I'm not going to break into your house, duct tape your wrists together behind your back, drive you out to New England in the middle of the night until dawn, haul you out of the trunk in the middle of nowhere, and shove your face into the leaves by the side of a one lane road and scream "this is Fall!!!  This is what autumn tastes like!!!"  That's just not me.  Plus, who has the time to do that these days?  I don't.  But forgive me if I don't give a !@#$ about the latest tech or music or who's hot on what coast and is performing half price and where.  I'm never going to be in that sphere and the people that are also are not particularly fond of folks like me anyway.

And  that's what's made me laugh these days.

Born Yesterday

You look terrible.  What, have you been up all night drinking?  No, you self righteous, snide, whisker faced, monkey pawed, salad dicked, piece of shit.  I'm going to tie your legs to opposite rungs of a ladder with surgical tubing, slice open your taint, and plunger fuck you 'til your guts blow out and all you can see are after images of fantasia from when your uncle came to visit, got you drunk, and touched you, you absolute @#$##!%@%#$%%$*%^*%%@#%$#@%!%*(*((^&$^%$$!@# dumpster fire fucker.  I can't sleep.  I'm not a wreck, I just can't sleep.  It's a problem.  I feel like I'm awake all the time.  Is that a problem?  Yes, that's a problem.  Calm down, baby.  It's always a little scarier at night.  I stopped going out with my knife, that's a step in the right direction, right?  Yes.  Okay, bad start.  Let's do this again.

I'm losing my shit.  I don't understand everything.  In fact, I don't understand a lot of things.  In fact, I understand very few things and some of what I do is pure emulation.  Some of it is learned.  The things that I do when I'm not alone.  When I'm trying to communicate and rub elbows and socialize and allow myself to be socialized.  From a pure experiential stand point, I am always still catching up.  Especially when it comes to purely adult things like paying bills and writing checks and progressively more complex responsibilities that  come with age.  Learning on the fly.  Is part of why I am perpetually referring to near and distant past interactions and outcomes to judge and play into and inform and explicate the more recent and definite present ones.  I need snow.  I need cold weather.  I need Winter.  I need to trap my insides in and wear my skin all over again.  Compression wraps.  I'm trying to learn so many things on my own.

What do I need to do to suppress the monster?  It's a puzzle game again.  It's the puzzle game again.  And I don't want to play.  Even if I did, I can't if I can't get over there.  Reconsidering therapy for the hundredth time.

I am dense.  Dumb.  I get that.  So ask for help.  I do, the problem, however, is that half the time I do ask for help with X and Y I get bitten.  Look, okay, no one ever taught me how to be a grown up.  I'm fucking trying.  Okay, calm down.  I'm trying and learning how to be an adult.  How to take care of myself.  How to be a part of other people's lives and, more over, part of society and a functioning member no less.  It takes practice and it takes patience and sometimes other people are not as patient with me as I would like.  I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but blunt objects get the job done pretty good.  I'm good at things.  I know that.  I can do some things pretty well.  Other things not so good.  But why come no patience on their part?  They must know I'm being patient with them and their remarks and their assumptions.  They must know by now that I'm doing the best I can and that's all I've got by now.  Granted the repertoire grows yearly, monthly, sometimes daily, but it's never going to grow fast enough to get on their level.  I mean someone has to bring up the rear.  Who else will be there to pick up the leaders when they stumble and fall and roll their ankle and have to be dragged until they can stand up and break the trail again?  I serve a purpose, gotdamnit.

I'm not a doormat, or inferior, but I kind of am in many respects.  In terms of tangibles.  A state of perpetual repair.  800 brake horsepower on the dyno and shit tires.  Steel struts for shock absorbers.  The ride is harsh, but give me enough straight asphalt and I'll burn straight through to the vanishing point.  I've been thinking my siblings and I relied on and alternately hated each other through the years, but before everyone dove off the edge to lives and relationships and variables apart from the smoking hole in the ground where our lives blew up, we were complementary parts.

Are you really happy?  I'm happier than I've ever been.  I swear I cannot fuse myselves together.  It's like some kind of micro field acting over exceptionally short distances and so they gravitate and hang loosely together if I, when I, can manage to coerce them into the same headspace, but any further, any fucking further, and they fly apart.  Driven like body parts from a weatherman's over packed pipe bomb and a warning two hours too late.  Reduce the casualties, she says.  We're not terrorists he says.  Y'all can go suck a dick he says.

I chewed through my lip the other day.  I'm not the strongest man in the world, or the tallest.  But weapons are all around me.  Tools, you know?  A weapon is a tool.  We should spend some quality time together some day.  I know this place where the street lights have gone out.  It's a stretch of road really.  The headaches have gotten a little worse, but sometimes I can convince myself.  Heavy industrial works and general cause.  It's kind of funny sometimes.  Let's play cards.  Let's play Spades.  I'll never go board.  In my dream I was shot four times through the back, it was pretty amazing.  Not the getting shot part.  That part hurt a lot.  More than anything I've felt in life.  What felt amazing was the increasing inability to breath while my lungs filled up and my brain started to die and became unable to process pain.  I started to think about how screwed up it was that my first DMT trip would also be my last, but then I started to look forward to at least being able to do that.  And then someone else came up and  they passed the gun and held it up between my eyes and blew my head apart before I could enjoy it.  And I died, but didn't wake up and they left.  And I waited and I waited and I waited for my life to start over.  For reincarnation.  For hell.  For heaven.  Nothing.  And so, inside that dream still, I simply stood up, with half a skull from the nasal bones down to my neck, and walked out and woke up into an afternoon.  Disappointed.

I am me.  And you are you.  The greatest form of flattery.  The finest grains of abandonment.  In the soles of my shoes.  The cities crumbled.  Many people died.  The pain never goes away entirely, but honestly, that's asking too much.  Who and what you are is no concern of mine.  The man with the crystalline mind and the watch maker's hands with browns for whites of eyes and a head more water than land and no docks to be found.  I don't know.  I don't know and I cannot tell you if I wanted to.  Steps in right directions.  I need cold weather.  I need something to cool the pile.  Carbon rods?  Is that what does it?  The machine to help me understand and define the horror?  Parcels of molecules and reckless atomic connections.

I can remember going in for the scans and the EMG and the warmth of the dye they injected into my veins and waiting quietly in the wheel chair for it to get pumped throughout before they put me inside and trying to stay awake while feeling like my entire nervous system was wrapped in an electric blanket.  It was a gorgeous feeling.  That was years ago.  I've been thinking about dating again.  I know I'm not and will probably never be ready.  I also know what I want is something I can't have.  It's a catch two two.  I can't bank on getting away with it twice.  I just wish I  could have thought of that the first time.  Says everyone at some point in their life.  It's been difficult.  I won't suppose.  I know.  Reaching out to other schizophrenics is like picking up someone else's phone, pounding the numbers until it rings, and saying "hello, it's me.  You know me, right?"  Asking someone to come in, when the sign on the door clearly reads "get the fuck out."

I'm trying.  Please be patient.  The heat has been stifling.  Crush, baby.  Crush.  Who loves you?  I do.  You still keeping odd hours?  That depends.  Are you still on vacation?  I don't know.  Maybe you should think about writing during daylight hours.  Maybe you should think about the kinds of questions you ask me.  The city is large and I'm just one man.  The country is larger, but I'm still just one man.  Come with me if you want to see or don't.  I won't fault you either way.  Do you remember how you laughed in 2005 at that concert?  No.  But the tears have been uncontrollable since.  A right sort riot.  I can't go back, but I have to. Keep it down.  Where are your sunglasses?  I don't know.  Let's get it right this time.  I was born yesterday.


///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Valentine Boast" ... the greatest romance of the 21st century...

///The Orb - "Secrets"  awed by tradition

Dear (_____)

Dear time,

Give me more of you.  Or at least have some nasty good sex and some kids and let me be their godfather so I can hang out with them.  But then it occurs to me they won't necessarily be just time, but might end up being time and space or something altogether worse.  How about this: just light me up once in a while.  I promise I'll answer the phone.

thanks.

Call me, bitch!

Musicality

I'm trying to find the music in common sense.  Not just that, but I'm trying to find the fun.  I believe one of my greatest fears is writing ending being an occupation.   Do what you love and everything else will come is largely a lie.  Taking bobby pins out of my hair.

I don't know what I want to be, but I know I can't be an astronaut or a race car driver or a stuntman.  Well maybe stuntman.  Childhood dreams still haunt me, but at least I know (my third pick) I can be a writer given the right circumstances.  I can be a bass junkie.  That works too.

I know we had a lot of conversations about this

so I will stop there.

All we ever wanted to be was loved.   That's a lie.  Trying to find a good way to coda this.  And I can't find one.  The scrap yard has been busy today.  Train noises.  Bright lights.  I feel I am aging inside beyond my years and I don't like it.  Precipitation begging the clouds, but sometimes you have to look up

My condition is getting worse.  Ghosts in the back room.  And all I have to look forward to is the worsening of my schizophrenia.   Fuck.  I don't know.  I don't know.  I don't know.  It hurts.  I just want others around me to be happy and to kill them at the same time.   I suppose in another life things worked out slightly differently because at this point it is a game of edges.  I cannot imagine how things would have worked out otherwise.  If I got the help I needed when I needed it instead of, no offense, Jesus.

the highs keep getting higher and the lows lower.  There's only so much equipment a frame can carry.  But all in all you just try to stay on the human side of things.

Double tracks pending.


///DJ? Acucrack - "In Yer Mind"  all the pills

dear (_____)

Dear Winter ducks,

I'll feed whoever decides to stick around.  It's no big.  I enjoy your company as much as you enjoy mine.

with love,

Sharpsburg

dear (_____)

Dear adulthood,

You were everything I thought you would not be.

with love,

your cosigner

Dogging It and the Winter Manifesto

Yep, I have been dogging it, for lack of artistic direction.  I've become consumed with the immediate and unable to find the magic, the whimsy.  The press of culture has been stifling.  The pressure of fitting into some kind of God damned role has been palpable, or I should say, more palpable than in past weeks and months and years even.  I keep looking up and asking myself if this is all there is and I have been pounding my fist on the table with six empty chairs around it and rattling nothing more than my own glass.

There is no such thing as a dry spell.  I know it is all still there, still pouring, still palpitating.  What I want to get at, however, is after the flow.  I am storing metaphor and analogy and analysis, but not having tapped the vein I want I have limbs dying for overdose and infection.  "Eating heroin is one thing, but injecting it is another."  Probably the funniest thing I heard this year.  The funniest admonishment.  It burns my ass sometimes to hear people complain about things that are fairly simply resolved.  Hilarious in some ways.  Met up with a friend of mine at the local hole and he told me about another friend who had a fiberglass, nuclear white, road bike.

Turned out the guy was high as fuck on mescaline and out for a joy ride and he rode with him up to his place and the guy just housed the hill there.  Should I feel bad for feeling inspired?

I've (enter apostrophetics) been dogging it none the less.  I can't describe the feeling.  If you've ever read the phantom tollbooth you know what the love affair of language can be like.  Sometimes she wears lace.  Sometimes he wears the same lace the last time you had to suck him off for a solid hour because he lied about not jerking off before he came over and you found out second hand from his other friend he was banging beers back with before he decided to ring you up and now your neck hurts when you tip your head backward to drink water the morning after.

The point is, he doesn't realize you would be more than happy to throttle his neck the same and watch his eyes start to pop out until they turned back and up into his eyelids and the tears ran down your hands because that's what gets you off.

And that just turned way angry and too honest.  I don't know.  I can't speak to human engineering because I don't know enough, but I absolutely believe that engineering can be trumped by training.  The problem and the pitfall is the belief and extrapolation from that idea that training can be unlearned.  Somehow the incorporation, the building of the structure can be as easily or possibly as difficulty and painstakingly deconstructed.  The question arises: if you have 24 years of programming and construction and habituation built into your psyche, how many years will it take to reprogram, reconstruct, repurpose, and rehabilitate those patterns into new ones?  If it takes, just drawing cards from my own deck of experience, twenty minutes to demolish a level 3 Revell GT 500 painstakingly constructed over two weeks, it should be fairly easy.  That's my deck.

It's been hard.  Real hard.  Violently hard.  Violently happy.  To the point where people know me well enough that I have to actively push away opportunities to ...I'm not a destroyer.  But I know I am.  I know I can be a creator too.  I used to be.  I used to create willy nilly and I still do, but the work goes into that.  The creating.  The destruction comes naturally.  I'm not a big guy by any stretch, but I never thought five years ago I would ever be comfortable popping someone's eye with my thumb.  Yeah, it was salty.  Not good salty either.  Like, I do not know how to describe it.  It was like the saline was an afterthought.  I did not realize, at all, how much energy I was burning to be, but I've felt the exhaustion of it, of late.  It's been taxing.  Who to tell what and how much.  I'm rambling.

I know.  I have been dogging it.  Not on the low roads though.  I'm kind of surprised some times how easy it's been.  Violence as language.  I think the Auralport has been a lot of language as violence.  Which is a start, but not enough of a start.  There's no point in conquest you can't talk about.  No entryway.  No friends.  I just laughed saying that out loud.  I am not an animal.  I build models with tweezers.  Still do.  I suppose that is not making me any less creepy.  I have fallen off.  Maybe fallen in to.  Something.  Fighting fair is a sad man's game.

I am not an animal, but I am trying to work my way back to the human side of the master equation.

And so I present to you the Winter manifesto:

Do good.  Do not just be better within yourself, because that is not enough.  Be better within, and for, others sake.  Do not just see stars, but see horses and do not steal them, only enjoy their being and watch and maybe tip a hat to that wilderness, but do not beg to be the center.  Do not fight this winter, for any reason.  Physically.  Because you have one body and one set of knuckles and you have enough years on them to make making it past forty a probability instead of a certainty.  Lose no more fractions of teeth.  Put together your works and compose for compositions sake alone because recognition is fool's gold and the short path to the quitter's raga.  Be bright and not literally, but for light's sake.  Be motivated and train and not for the sake of preparations for conflict, however, be prepared to defend yourself, and only in defense cause a mother fu$$ing ruckus.  Finish the twenty thousand words to your book you left hanging two years ago.  No Damoclesean swords.  Less reference.  Clearer analogy.  And I don't know how much further I should take it because I've already stepped into the boundary between what I know I can do and what I know I know I may not be able to do.

The Winter manifesto is this:  take it head on and do not fear the cool.

The trees talk to me in summer, at night when the moon is out.  I am looking forward to their silence and the peace of the death of the ground beneath my feet.  I am looking forward to reclaiming the night that I leased to the summer and all her passerby and the bullshit.

I survived another season.  I know the next two will be beautiful.

Redesigns coming soon.


///Sneaker Pimps - "How Do"  I grew up on sneaker pimps.  through the conflict years.  them, massive attack, and floyd, and disco.  and the orb.

Dear (_____)

Dear Folgers,

The best part of waking up is going the fuck back to bed.  Stop spreading lies and coffee bean propaganda. 

Sincerely,

Whatever man. You can pick some friends, you can pick some substances, but you can't pick which addictions end up becoming socially acceptable.

Dear (_____)

Dear Summer,

I dunno, baby.  I just do not know.  I've been flirting with someone.  Not to your color palette, however, that is how these things tend to go, year by year.  I thought we had something, but we didn't, and while it has been a torrid coaster of emotion through the hot days, I am looking forward to the cold nights.  I was born hot blooded and it's nothing to say less of you, but I am happy to admit a run on to tell you that I loved you.

Sincerely,

all your fond memos.

That Instant

you realize your summer passport has expired and everything that happens has to be above board or you'll never get back home.

Cell By Cell

Had a bad run in with myself.  I'm laughing just saying it and hearing that phrase come out of my mouth and wondering how it is still possible.  Still possible to mount surprise attacks on my own fortress.  Woke up today in a fine mess of pain.  The important thing is the drought is over.  I had to break some ground to get at the well.  Wake myself up again.  The dreaming has been fantastic.  I wish I could sleep forever, but that's unreasonable.  Not irrational.  There's a difference sometimes.  Even in my country.

It is odd, I do suppose.  The sensation of being outside yourself and watching the sublet drive it straight into empty air on the wrong side of a cliff.  It's nice to be back.  It always is, even though I know it won't last and never does.  Pull the circuit board out and wave it in the wind until it stops smoking.  Pop out the fried resistors and solder in some new ones with the same ratings; their the biggest baddest ones you can get on the street.  Slide the board back in and fire it up.  Note the time and date.  Log the lost information and missing sectors.  Build new ones in the virtual environment.  Repopulate.  Repeat as necessary.

Reconstruction.  It's like a gunman went cell by cell through the complex.  Cell by cell through the prison and gunned down every inmate.  It's an unfamiliar quiet.  And then you remember you told someone you were a sociopath trapped in a citizen body.  I wonder what Jeff's doing right now.  I wonder if he'll take my call on a Saturday even though I'm not seeing him anymore.  I don't know what he would have to say.  He said if I ever thought of a good joke I should drop him a line.  Psychiatrists.  I've been trying since our last meeting two years ago to think of one and for the life of me I can't.

He'll laugh anyway, to make me feel less awkward and it'll work.  Maybe I just want to hear him laugh.  He'd be proud of the work I was doing.  He wouldn't entirely get it, but that's fine.  Poetry is a fickle beast.  Half the time I don't get it either.  He'll put it up on his fridge if I wrote him something on the couch.  He'll take it down after I leave and add it to my file.  I wonder if he still has that file. Probably not.  I vaguely remember him telling me, when I told him I was thinking about joining the army, that he is obligated to destroy records older than seven years.

I miss him.  I had a bad run in with myself.  I'm laughing just saying it out loud.  How did this happen?  Why?  I don't understand.  I like to think it's somewhere down that rabbit hole.  I used to wonder if I was color blind.  Then I stopped worrying about it.  I think I scratched my eye ball yesterday.  I miss his note taking.  You might be out of your god damn mind.  Eventually he stopped taking notes.  Which was fine.  It is kind of a tall order getting to know someone that close out of nowhere without taking notes.  I wonder sometimes what he was doing or expecting his week to be like that first Monday I walked in there.  I wonder if he still thinks about me too.  If I still populate his cells.


///El-P - "Stay Down"

That Instant

you realize you forgot you wrote the coast of baltimore after that amazing two week span of confession and rough housing and video games and case racing and all kinds of shit you will probably never get to do again there with the set of people you knew there and it crushes and elates you that you almost nailed it down for posterity, but mainly you're just glad that your sister manned up and took you there and really all you are is eternally grateful and a little stupefied the whole thing went as well as it did back in that November, years gone.

Burna

I don't know.  That's not true, I do know.  I get scorched sometimes.  Emotionally.   Not by anyone specifically or the selves within myself.  It's that the act of creation is a burner.  I have to crank it up to high and hear the igniter tick over and tap and I do not always know what the igniter will be.  The ignition coil accepts voltage over the course of hours and sometimes days and sometimes months.  It does not always click.  I would go as far as to say that often times, more often than otherwise, it does not click and the ignition coil never accepts enough voltage to arc and I have to hold a lighter down on that gas line and hope it takes before the house burns down and I'm sitting in the backyard smoking with no eyebrows wondering how I got there because the kitchen exploded and I was high off of my ass on fumes well before it happened.  I want it to work every time.  That's wishful thinking.   I get scorched a lot.  I am highly flammable.  Just the way the genes shook out.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of a writer I would be, could be, with greater mental stability, and then I laugh.  Because I would have bored myself to death in high school with pen and paper and I realize I would be the mathematician or the economist or the engineer or the welder who did it because it was something they could do mechanically and do well and do with hi fidelity in a very stable pattern and my interest would've waned and I would have sought out something more dynamic.  No wait.  That's me.  Me now, projecting myself backward and extrapolating to now.  Not what I was trying to describe at all.  I would have done those things and been happy to do them and never would have branched out to something I could be wrong at and still pursue with passion as though I was baseline perfect and sometimes brilliant, but not nearly enough to make that one diamond sparkle to my eye enough to push me to try for something with more cuts and more shine and more heart.  At least that's what I like to think.  Would happen if I were more stable.

Do I want the things that come with stability?  Of course.  You'd have to be a moron not to.  Do I want the things that come with instability?  Of course.  Not all of them, but at least 70% of them.  Maybe closer to 60%.  Thinking back, I never really was a very stable human being.  I remember getting into a spat at a summer camp when I was very young, came back to me today, cannot remember for my life what camp it was or if it was bible camp or something more or less or forced or if I asked to go to it.  It was a moment where myself and my peers were unsupervised and they were making fun of my shoes again because I had very bad knock off shoes.  Very bad.  Not even stylistically speaking.  Simply very poorly engineered shoes.  The soles were made of this weird psuedo plastic, translucent, compound so whenever we played "Duck Duck Goose" or "Steal the Bacon" in gym I would have to work ten times harder than everyone with regular rubber to make cuts and accelerate and slow down because the plastic stuff would glide on the waxed wood floor like skates.  I still won my fair share.  Unfair share?  I should have been undefeated.  It's probably how I got to be so fast early on and kept going from there.  Also probably how I got to be so frustrated when I get a job and don't have the right equipment today.

Anyway, where was I going....  so myself and my peers were unsupervised and I was being teased relentlessly and I didn't do anything for a while except shut up.  Partly because I knew however I spun it I would get the beating of a lifetime up until that point once I got home, and partly because I wanted to go grab a chair and beat him to death.  So I went straight for his throat because the middle ground was dealing with them making fun of you for having dirty nails, them not realizing you were keeping them as long as your mom could stand before digging that hook thing underneath or cutting them specifically for the instance when you may need to claw someones throat out of their neck.  It worked out pretty well.  He bled some and I was not nearly as strong as I thought I was then so he only lost some skin, but he was so freaked out he didn't even tell on me.  Or maybe he did and I've just blacked the aftermath out of my memory.  Anyway, I just remember thinking "awesome, why did I not do that sooner."  Strange days back then.

And now.  I know I can't be, but I believe I can be the greatest of all time.  I get scorched.  I melt down.  I've been so high strung emotionally with human contact.  It's rough.  Parsing things.  Knowing what to tell and what not to.  KNowing who to tell and who not to.  Going over events to parse what happened and what did not happen, but was later re-engineered from memories I didn't have, but took to heart regardless.  People I thought I talked to in depth, but never said one word to.  Real people that I see that I know I will not see again for some time.  Longing and wanting more and knowing I would mismanage it if it did happen.  The things that did happen that are stranger than fiction that I hesitate to retell to anyone because they wouldn't believe it either if they were there.  It's gutting.

A tough road, the feeling it.  The feeling writing.  Taking it beyond exercise to experiment and beyond experiment to theory and beyond theory to intent.  Taking intent back to exercise to ingrain it and then back to experiment to expansion packs.  Managing circuitry.  Without tripping breakers is a 99 by 99 game of Windows 95 vintage Minefield.  I was trying to explain to someone how communication, as I've learned it, is an experience of exchanged violence.  The base set of symbols.  Love growing from that basic set of characters.  Sometimes writing offers no release.  I can deal with that.  It's not so much that it's something that has to get out.  Someone else tried to put it to me that way and I accepted the assessment because I had no rebuff at the time.  To a small degree it is.  To a much larger degree it is conversation, within and without. Some internalized and leaking and some extroverted and speaking.

I'm taken back to the original mission.  The blueprint for the creation as a method of legacy.  I go back and forth often between life and death.  Self extermination versus procreation.  I do not play into it as often as I would like, or maybe, more likely, as often as I would feel comfortable with.  Is there a way to commit altruistic suicide for the greater good?  Yes.  I toy with the idea of dying of natural causes.  Thinking about having children and the million reasons why it would be better for that kid to never meet me.  I toy with big ideas of retirement and doing what I love, but even on that time scale of 60, 70, years, it's a long pipe.  What you want, sucka?  Not much.  I already have most of it.  It's getting to the point of formality and self improvement.  Competitive spirit.  How good can I possibly get?  I think that keeps me awake more often than any other meter.  When I know the answer, I'll rip the chord and bug the fuck out.  Selfish.  It makes me laugh to feel that way sometimes.

I get scorched.  I get thoroughly displeased with the quality of what comes out of me, but I know there's so much psychological garbage to sort through, there is no way I'm going to knock anything out of the park on a regular basis.  I play against myself.  It gets troubling.  Becomes troubling.  When your heckler is you.  Your clown is you.  You are your dealer and your fiend.  I used to do it for other people.  I used to do it for my mom and my dad before I realized the packages of carefully selected works were doing little more than collecting dust as soon as they unwrapped them.  When I realized sending them books for christmas was a waste of money and passion.


One of the best experiences I ever had was taking some of them back one of the times I was back home and never once hearing a single question about where any of them went.  XD.  I still get a rise out of that.  I was hot blooded for so long over it and then I realized it wasn't worth holding against anyone.  I think that's where a lot of my happiness stems from.  The knowing that there are people you can love and people you cannot love.  And I'm okay with that.  I still get scorched sometimes.  The factory floor fire spreads and work stations are abandoned and the fire spreads and the suppression systems kick in and they can't contain a god damn thing on the scale of what you are experiencing because you designed them in good times with hypotheticals and grossly miscalculated how swift and vast the psychotic destruction would advance.

So now I am back again and kicking at embers and trying to reimagine what it all was before the fire broke out.  Gathering the caucus.  Sending the calls and hoping to get a ping back from somewhere.  Anywhere along the rise and fall of consciousness.  Reinstalling routines.  Rebuilding structure.  Recreating from memory the blueprint and it's different every time.

If, at the end of it all, I can assemble something to make a future iteration of myself feel less daunted, or less alone, or less wrecked, or more hopeful for sunrise, or more comfortable with no one to sing to but the moon and the tone deaf clouds, I will be happy.  I don't always do good, but I do the best I can.  I know the cycle will eventually end and I won't be blown clear and the fire will consume, but what is the high worth if you'll never know just how high you could've been?  I'm not talking the highs that come with squared proportions.  False peaks?  I mean, would I trade the 40% bad outcomes for 100% decent outcomes?  No.  I don't think so.  In the worst times, yes.  Of course.  No.  I don't think so.  And it is difficult to wrap my head around.  Difficult to work around.  Difficult to not fall into myself standing on the foundation slab in a wilderness where a home used to stand and not feel something for everything and everyone who died in their beds who would have gotten up to jobs and friends that morning when the leaves were still wet with night and the paper boy was sucking oxygen looking at the weeks rounds on his front porch and the dogs were still dreaming and the shots in the dark were unreported and the spiders still had games to play and the cigarette burns still bled and fuck

As promised:  two pack.



///Five Deez - "So Good"  it's nice to be back.  nice to be feeling something.

///Amon Tobin - "Untangle"  slow verbs.

Dear (_____)

Dear Summer,

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

sincerely,

Goddamnitihatesummer

Circle Back

I am circling back and taking my time to do it.  Care is the order of the day.  I posted some old stories to Bits.  It's funny sometimes looking at how the composition has changed.  How some of the sentence structure has remained the same and some has mutated.

I edited the names out.  Not for protection against embarassment, but because it was a collective effort and the whole idea about collective effort is not knowing who contributed what to make the final product.  More than that though, I was trying to hide my voice.  I want to rework that story.  It's good, thus far, lower case letter t$$$, but seriously, it is a good start and was a good start to something really violent and heavy and it needs a good twenty to thirty thousand more words to make it polished.  I'm willing to do it.  You know I'm willing to do it.  I just have to do it, and that's why I put it out there.  That, and just to say thank you too to an old friend I ain't talked to in far too long who put a good idea in my head and then vanished.  I'm on the hunt for several a thing.  this is one of them.  Chasing my tail.

Development

I haven't transcended, but, God knows, I've tried.  I will keep head banging.  I will because there's no other way.  Explorations and serial failures.   I did not use to approach writing as work, because I never got paid to do it.

It was a hobby and still is.  What changed inside myself was perspective.  That and doing more reading.  The reading has been tremendous.  Just opportunities to see the constructions in different light.  Not even different light as much as opportunities to see the same constructions spun by other brains in the same kind of light.

It's been ...  refreshing.

Refreshing and disconcerting.  It's been a very thorough, bridge crossed, work in progress.  I can't recall being this high over so extended a period of time without gumming up the workshop.  It has been silly even keeled.  You and I

Where are your papers?  Where is your documentation?   Where is your passport and your photo identification?   Where is your veteran of foreign wars certificate and your color bar?  Where is your jacket and your weapon?  Your cap, your boots, your wares, and your ounces of drug deals and your tears for times only you can relate to?   Where the fuck is your memorial?  Where are your headphones?  Where is your ethic and your lorn and your degrees?  Where did you leave your books and, holy shit, where did you leave your other set of keys?


///Skrillex - "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"    ...you don't need to hide, my friend, cause I am just like you...

That Instant

You realize you've been gunning through the years, slipshod, but doing the best you could and it's still not good enough for the people who know you, but good enough for you.

And the qualifier is still hanging.

Ramping Up

I have been ramping up to this, and I have been a little bit absentee as well.  Side by each.  It has been tough getting back to here.  Circuitous. Among other words and expletives.  It has been a very difficult cycle of days.  I do not know how else to place it.  Everything is back where it belongs.   A lot of argumentation internal.  It catches up with you and before you know it you are dying while still breathing.

It;s been tough though.  But what hasn't?  Production has lapsed, but what is avoidable?  Art is up however. Graphics.  Graphics and graphic design.  It;s tough sometimes when people talk to you and say they/re artists, but you know in their hearts they are not.  It ruffles feathers and rumples collars.  It's difficult to tell them otherwise because, in the telling, you are admitting skill and I have a hard time, still, admitting that I know what I'm trying to do, for the most part, on easels.  Given easels.

If you look at your reflection, sometimes what you see is not what you know you could be, given everything that came before; that hesitation, those devils and those guns, are what keeps me from being a shameless self promoter, but are you hiding in the trees?

The point is that it is all an elaborate dream and there is no way you can spin manslaughter 2 into mistaken identities and a lack of coverage or maybe it's just black town.  I don't know.  Hard decisions.  I know how much you are supposed to take, but how much am I supposed to take.  Against the wall.  Am I supposed to want sex or is sex supposed to want me.  Is the BIC pipe a one hitter in the sense that you use it once or is it a one hitter in the sense that you can't light crack twice?

I don't know where to go from here, but I'm not quite sure if I should be so entertained with the idea of the opportunity to leave.   Cash money, mother nucca.  It just drives the nerves sometimes.  It's hard to admit failed suicide attempts.   What you can do though is tape up your wrists and throw some fists.

Not to get oxygen necessarily, but just to get inside your britches.  Feel your (can't spell it) huch spa.  Feel your id on the outside and taste a little blood, instead of digesting it.  There's too much blood and sunlight to go around.  I am trying to draw a line between pretending and good acting and I am having a difficult  time of it.

Sometimes things go down in a fashion that breaks your heart.  Sometimes your older sister whiffs on painting your nails.  Sometimes things go down in a way that throws shit out of whack.  Sometimes the throwing is enough to reframe ideas about things you've been mulling.  I don't know if this is better or worse than talking in third person.   It is difficult to be concerned.

What was I going for?  Chronic masturbation.  No,  Laughter.  Nod your head because I know that I;m right.  I'm not the capital G.  I'm not nothing either.  Hang out with me in the middle ground.  I swear I'll love you like I've never loved myself.  Andd I won't promise to make you happy.  And I won't promise anything more than 18 hours out, but I will.  I won't, but I will give you one year with the dragon in one day and rape is a device of the lesser and if you would be considering kissing me now I would not be opposed

to standing there


///track not found - lets get back up on that horse.  I'm sorry I left you.  Please be kind.  I'm coming out of left field in a full sprint out of the clear blue sky