Busy Signal and Dedication

I was just a person you would love to love, but then. I went through a week of pretty wild depression. Like depression uncharted. I want this to be up beat and I will try to make it as much so as I can, but sometimes things are unexpectedly gory. So I will make light whenever possible.

I've been in face time mode for a bit. Partly because happiness is contagious and sadness is, well, sadness. Not for any particular reason. Well, for particular reasons, but none of the reasons are valid. I have been experiencing very acute separation anxiety. And it's hard to describe. It's not like losing a mother or father or losing a method to madness and being left with only madness. How can I describe it? Asking myself. Separation anxiety for life? Not a fear of death, but a maddening anxiety for losing life? And then not even that so much as, by turning days, a separation anxiety that has echoed down the years back to my ears for my ex. But that's dead and gone right? Yet it comes swimming back against the current to the bridge and treads water long enough for me to notice, as I'm pitching rocks and counting the skips, to drown again like it was yesterday. Like it was five minutes ago. Panicking. Panicking as though I let myself go to the wave tops, even though I didn't. I made the right call, but the right call is calling me back and leaving messages and I am wishing there was a way to send things not to voicemail, but to nonexistence, and I am knowing that there is a way, but that particular way, in all of it's means, turns the good call into a terrible one.

I was talking to someone about suicide. Indirectly. Talking about the reasons people choose to make their lives matter. The biggest one is always religion. The second biggest one is narcissism. The third is family. And so on. But there is another reason that is a little harder to get at and more valuable than all three. If we accept that there is no god, and there isn't, and that math and science can, given an infinite timeline (or at least from the perspective of human life times, infinite), come to grasp and describe all, and that life is essentially just another system, of which we all are a part, it is clear that there is little actual wiggle room for agency. Not that there is none. The actual sphere of impact is simply a lot smaller for the vast majority of human beings than we are lead to believe. It's not all predetermined, but the actual outcome of my life, your life, is smaller than the bill of warrants would have you believe.

Killing yourself might hurt some people. Those people compose a micro fraction of the total people you could possibly hurt by not killing yourself and killing them instead. More importantly, unless you are part of a very small fraction of the populace, your death will have the chances of winning the local lottery, assassinating a head of a state, and getting struck by lightning later that day when the forecast for rain was less than 1% the hour before, of impacting the future outcomes of the rest of the worlds occupants, let alone the rest of the country's or even the state's outcomes. Probably even the locality's.

The thing that can keep you alive though is knowing that for the local set of outcomes there are a few very much intertwined equations. These equations, known or not, make up your value and you can assign whatever figure you want to your variable. Your variable on the long scheme of the interactions makes up very little of the master equation. The sun will still die. Mankind will still continue to implode and explode by turns until that happens. Science will still advance. Math will continue to prove and disprove itself. Life spans will still extend at increasing marginal cost for every five years gained. People will still be happy and miserable and happy because other people are forced into misery and miserable because other people will have done nothing to be happy except be born into it. You, however, do mean nothing to those final outcomes.

People will be sad for a time. They will be entertained, repelled, satisfied, and disappointed with what you do, or not. Ultimately though, you may never be forgotten but they will be entertained, repelled, satisfied, antagonized, placated, contented, and disappointed by someone else after you. And they will remember them too. The inherent value of you, just you, is your local, temporal, impact. The master calculation will still end up the same, the only thing you do is change how it gets to that final conclusion. Therein lies the value in life. Every time two plus two adds up to three billion and you and those connected to you can see it and laugh and cry about it for a while and forget that the 3 billion will be adjusted for down the road.

What we read as anamolous or some kind of discrepancy is all accounted for ultimately. In the moment, however, it's why you're here. You're here to contribute to the math of life. Not destroy it, not change it necessarily, but just to leave some chalk on the board. And once you are happy to swipe the eraser, and draw faces with a spit soaked fingertip, and scrawl away, you can be happy. That was the conclusion I tried to draw through the conversation. And I hope it came across alright.

The depression was manifold. Part sexual crush on guys I knew I would never actually gain access to. Part anxiety. Part screwed up brain chemistry. Part longing for things I have no right to long for. Part wanting to just fucking be someone, anyone, else. Some months you would trade your skin for anyone else's. But all you can do is wake up and be you again. Part of the sadness was not making time to do this. To talk. To talk with psychiatrists. Part of the sadness was the pain and not being able to express it. I still can't. All I want some days, in terms of expression, is to make someone else hurt as much as I do sometimes so I can know that I am not alone. But I am.

Not in terms of a unique pain, but in terms of identity. No one can hurt the same way you do. It's quantum mechanically impossible. Sure, you can hold up Rorschach tests and see similarities, but no one hurts like you do. No one loves like you do. No one's been there before. No one will go there when you're gone. All I wanted was a day off to mourn for ghosts. How do you request a day off to do that? How do you request a day off to rest your teeth? I don't need them removed. I just need a day off to rest my mouth. How do I express that? I need a day off to not move my body. I need a day off to get back in touch with my heart. I need a day off to talk to my hands and coach them to be better than what they're giving me. How do you express these things and get a valid response? How do you talk to your superiors and tell them that they need to forget the book for a minute, forget the guidelines, forget the established, and understand me for a minute as a human being before opening their mouth to deny me the things that keep me alive? Where do you begin to describe to them that the things essential to them are vestigial to me and things essential to me come across as figments of imagination, but bleed me as real as a brick to a forehead? There are no doctor notes for "love sick". There are no doctor notes for being stalked by your schizophrenic counter parts. There are no doctor notes for being chased by the animals of your dreams that have bled into reality. There are no doctor notes for the things that stop me cold like an engine run so hot it melted into a solid block of steel in seconds.

I'm sorry for giving you the busy signal. I just don't know what else to do. I am trying, though. Trying to get back here and get back to functional. Trying to gather up the caucus. Trying to find the kid, and the chief financial officer. Trying to get the engineer and the interface specialist in the same room, but when I can get them talking over pizza the kid runs out. When I can get the weapons specialist to stop for a minute, the toxicologist starts up again. It's just been absolute chaos on the shop floor and I can't get any of them to work together, let alone spend significant time together and it's a public relations nightmare. Circuits are breaking and many of them are new and unlabeled with poor documentation. Addresses point to places that don't exist. Thing that do exist point to breakers that don't cut power. Switches turn things on that shouldn't exist, things I thought were dismantled or were never actually built, but were. Things change over and I find myself in places I didn't know I was with people I already met, but are new again and I have to reintroduce myself.

Across the bridge everything is in tumult. I'm trying to figure it out as fast as it is happening and when it finally does click it's gone and it's time to wake up again. I just need a week to explore and find out what and who is there and who I am seeing. Who is sneaking in and who is lingering. But I have not had time so things are dangerous again in a way that they have not been since 2004. Not for you, but dangerous for me. I am so scared sometimes. It's a terror with which I am not familiar at all, because it's been so long and I forgot. How do I explain that to people? There are things over here that have no name that do what they please and should not exist, but do. They wait and they follow and they chase and they stalk and they talk and it's all I can do some days to pretend none of it is happening and I took the exceptionally long route to work today because I felt like taking a walk. It's fucking terrifying.

Ultimately though, the busy signal rings loudest. I have to undo that. I think the more I at least talk as an outlet the better off I will be. It's not a key, but it is a hammer to a single bar of the cage that I might find at least a way to get the hell out a little more. And to make that happen I am going to get a dedicated internet line. I am dedicated to you. I am dedicated to your math and your variables and your short lived value. Because it's all I have. Without being a religious nut case. It's not settling. It's understanding. And to make that easier and, in steps, by jumps, help myself I am dumping mobile broadband because rolling the dice every five minutes is nerve racking too and when I finish something, or start something, conversate, image trawl, explore, and in short live, I need to be able to know that I can complete thought. So I consider it less a luxury and more of a necessity. Maybe even a necessary exchange for the grossly inflated cost of medication. A monthly stay of execution. Of sorts. A re dedication and affirmation that I am doing everything I can to not completely self destruct. I want to be with my friends. I want to stay connected. I haven't left you, I promise.


///Unkle - "Heaven" dedicated to being alive until it's time to go.

That Instant

You realize you haven't been keeping up with friends because you have been racing ahead like a dog with no leash.

Push Things Forward, the Trouble with Naming, and Depressing Ass Kids

Well, I have been trying to push things forward. Push myself forward. I have a lot undone. The OEM redesign, the low line poetry space. The lagging artwork. The dream transmission. There is no love lost for any of these things. It's not a lack of discipline as much as it is the trouble with naming things. Putting faces together is no small task. The difference between a great drawing and a forgettable one is in the details or the intentional removal of details. I know I can be painfully impressionistic so maybe you can understand the difficulty. I spent two hours today trying to name the damn low line space. Give it a name I could look at and say to myself and tongue over every day without feeling like a hack putz.

Some of the time was spent rereading things and looking for a glimmer of something that stood out against the rest that captured what it is supposed to be because the obvious name choices are largely taken. Doing so afforded me some options and I know I eventually have to jump. At some point I'm going to have to cross over. Ships not getting any closer. And I know I don't know how to swim so knowing that I have to stick the landing helps and hurts by turns. The point is I found some things. And I have to soup them up into something respectable or at least identifiable. But maybe those two things are one and the same.

I mean, even the most deplorable people. The skanks. The kings and queens of skankification are identifiable because they are such. And there is something respectable about that. So, what I'm saying is, all I'm saying is, that the two are not as independent of each other as people who are identifiable, respectable, or unique would like you to believe if they only possess, overtly, one of the characteristics. They're all in common. Kind of. More in common than any one occupant, formerly ascribing themselves to one category and none of the others, might be inclined to admit.

There is this kid where I work. There is a kid where everyone works. I swear to the lord baby barbecue sauce jesus that this kid is the most depressing human being I have ever met. And sometimes you meet people and you try to cheer them up. Hell, people have tried to cheer me up, and I realize it halfway through and I let myself feel some cheer, because sometimes the only thing making you miserable, really, is you and I am guilty of that sometimes. Life sucks for everyone but the difference is the things that would grant you bliss are the things other people have and experience, but the same goes for them in a kind of ridiculous tail eating Oroboros. It's not that the grass is always greener. Because it actually is. Except that the thing about the lawns is that as soon as you jump the fence, the lawn you left swaps places through an interdimensional doorway so you can't land on the same lawn twice so yes. It actually is greener so keep jumping, but what I'm trying to say is this kid is the most depressing human being I have met, possibly ever.

He's short. He's got a beard like mine except I'm pretty sure I am at least twenty years his senior in general life experience. He's fat. He lives in a rich neighborhood. He goes to rich kid school. And everything he says is drenched in this weird kind of "my life is terrible so go kill yourself" tint. I don't even know how he started hanging on to me. I think it was because I talked to him once in the breakroom while trying to figure out what to do with my last ten minutes since I mowed down my chicken fingers like gun range silhouettes.

He comes up to me and starts talking, because his job is pretty cush and I actually do not have time to talk. Like I literally have to be moving things and boxes around from point A to points B through Z for the next four hours or I won't get done, but he moseys in and starts talking and I feel compelled to at least listen because a lot of people only want to be listened to now and then. He starts complaining. About everything. Everything. His job, his living with his parents, classes (god damn I would kill to get back into class if killing someone did not automatically rule me out of scholastics and enroll me in the penal system), walking to work, his bike that is rusted because he didn't take care of it, his sleeping situation because his bed broke and he did not bother to fix it himself, sleeping on couches, and through it all I am bleeding out of my eyes trying not to set him straight about what the score really is.

Eventually I chime in that maybe he should not even try to look on the bright side. Sometime's there isn't one. This is true. Polyannism only gets you so far before you go crazy, push open ended IVs into your forearms, and go to sleep in a bath tub filled with hot water after downing a handle of Old Grand Dad. I follow it up though. I tell him that though there may not be a bright side that he can see there is definitely something to get up and get out for. I tell him he's in the best school district in Pittsburgh. I tell him his job offers him time to wander around and bullshit way more often (it's not the first time he has complained about free time) than mine does and that I would gladly swap with him as soon as possible (too which he wilted visibly), and that walking is by far not the worst way to get anywhere, and that a lot of people just don't have places to be and people should be happy just to have somewhere to go sometimes. I told him he should be happy to land a paycheck and have adventure in walking a two lane road with no sidewalks and no shoulder at night.

It all rolls off him like water on a greased duck. I cried a little inside. And got horny. And angry. For various reasons. But mostly I just wanted him to shut up. Not just shut up, but realize he still has a stupidly diverse number of options open to him and that all he has to do is man up, go to home depot, buy some one by four planks, and his bed is good as new and he won't have to bitch about it ever again. I think that's what grates me the most about this kid. There is no creativity. No compulsion to create. For me, when I see desolation, when I see desiccation, when I see absence and wanting in my own life, I begin to envision the ways to start over. Not always start over, but ways to modify. Sometimes the best solution is to burn it to the ground and pretend it never it happened.

However even that. The act of the torching, takes a hell of a lot of guts. It is never routine. It can never be a routine thing. The burning down. But how can this kid have no moxy and still be so inclined to lament. It's different when you've burned it all down to the foundation and the foundation itself refuses to yield to new constructions. That's a whole different box when you have to explode the foundation itself. It just. I don't know. I cried a little in the bathroom after he left. I did. Cock out at the urinal, I couldn't hold it back. It broke my heart some.

Knowing that he's not going to miss meals for a week because he can't pay for them. Knowing the worst day of his life will be the day he forgets to charge his music player. Knowing that he doesn't understand that his parents have pretty much kept him from the bonfire of life and he doesn't know it. Knowing that he's fat because he indulges in crappy food on his own. Knowing that he could fix his bed any time he wanted to if he just had an ounce of gumption and that he'll probably never know what it's like to sleep at bus stops because he didn't have the fare to get home or the energy because he walked ten miles in 15 mile an hour darkness just to get there and was too punch drunk with the thought of riding a bus home to check his pocket before he got there.

Kid is just depressing. The worst thing about it is the refusal. The active refusal to be cheered. Not even cheered, but pointed in the right direction. So I got stuck, by my own fault of planning, riding my bike home in the snow. All he did was complain about how it was snowing and his walk would be terrible. And I'm thinking to myself, jesus christos. Walking in snow equates to the worst day of your life? Buck up champ. Be glad your father didn't abuse you until you were nearly 25 years of age. I don't know. I don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes, but I do know that at least as little as I know, he knows even less.


But anyway, trying to wrap this up before I get too late and I'm late for work again. The redesign is coming. The winter design is coming too. I am pushing things forward because If i don't push nothing will pull and where does that leave us. So even if it is all psychological work. Even if none of it shows until it shows, let us push. The factory is hard at work b da and by night. And we will be there. We will always be there for you. No matter how ridiculously depressed you are.


///Daft Punk - "Solar Sailer" drift on

dear (______):

Dear Denver Broncos,

Draft a quarterback.

Yours,

a person tired of hearing about your current maudlin QB's highs and lows

p.s. as a city, Denver already sucks. Lets just go ahead and not continue to shoot ourselves in the face m'kay

That Instant

That instant you've been hanging doors for hours upon hours and you think "man, they should design a machine to do this, because I would buy that machine" and you realize that you are that machine and someone was so kind as to take you off the shelf and take you to their home to hang doors and you realize you really are happy.

dear (______):

Dear Hollywood,

Until you can look yourself in the mirror and say honestly that this script, director, and producer will without a doubt top La Femme Nikita from 1990, STOP MAKING WOMAN ASSASSIN SECRET AGENT MOVIES.

sincerely,

a guy who likes woman assassin secret agent movies

The Ice-stache (grow one for your own safety), Hotwheels, No Age, and Serial Commitment

So I'm taking the next step toward building something to get me closer to making the writing I want to be able to make. Not necessarily the next step toward it as much as a reanimation, reorganization, of the effort. Partly, I want to get more from short stories and I can't expect to get more character development and practice from trying to cram more into small jars. Not that I haven't enjoyed the challenge and sucked at it and succeeded in parts and pieces (by my measure), but it presents problems with having a job and other things to chase after that are life necessities not granted. I have to step into something that won't force me to make endings where they don't belong and rush souls into bodies, and while there are people to animate and worlds to create, I have to give myself time where time is all too often short. And I need the pressure of show and tell to push it forward. The answer? Serials. One chapter at a time. The thing is, I can't even press myself into that old trap (I did once and it worked out well until a stretch of weeks where work overtook time available to chop a story into chapters and commit to staying put at the pen and paper to force out entire chapters, because, let's face it, not all chapters are created equal, so some days I could sit down and bang out a magnificently lengthy, but appropriately so, chapter and others days I couldn't because I had to go to bed at some point or stop to get ready for work, and things simply would not resume the same flow and grip it had when I left it and I ship wrecked myself repeatedly between the start of one and its end.

An organizational thing. Maybe show and tell is not the right motivator. It's hard to systematize it. I guess, part of it is that I don't trust myself to continue. I'm sure I could learn, at least I think I am sure that I need to force myself to learn. Learn the low lines, the high latency, and it's benefits. Put less pressure on myself and shift that strength of worry and fear of failed completion into something more positive, more enduring than the eye crossing, tongue chewing, wind sprint of watch hands across freed hours to produce things less panicked, scattered, and hit and miss spiny. Actually, as I'm talking this over, I think the best commitment to make may not be a serial one, but a commitment to development with fewer showings. Going farther down the rabbit hole is by necessity a thing that divorces a person from constant communication and seeing little dividends every day in views is encouraging. Encouragement is fairly impossible to come by. I envy the people that can get it often. So, in doing this I would be giving myself fewer opportunities to enjoy the little pats on the back, but I would also be putting myself in a position to work longer and more thoroughly on everything.

It's not a question of motivation anymore. At first it was. At first it was overcoming the fear of being connected to the things I do that I am passionate about that people might not agree with or could say "wow, you're terrible." I'm comfortable with that now. Have been for a while. Motivation came up when I lapsed for months and swore off all communication because I didn't feel like it. I couldn't feel it. I lost touch with the worlds in my mind and couldn't care to find them again, until things fell apart and I realized they are one of the few steady states, though changing, one of the few places where I feel myself all of the time. Anywhere can be learned to be home, but within my head everywhere is always home and it's like pulling up a chair with old friends I love and love to hate who know me and talk to me about things and we mull things over and they ask me about you and everyone else and they love and kill and do things I wish I could do and sometimes I do things they wish they could do and it's a back and forth that's so much a part of me I completely took it for granted for a while until I was utterly miserable and realized what was missing. It's not a question of motivation anymore. I have to engage it deeper and add taking care not to let the reduction of constant connection to a couple times a couple months get to me (it's not like I connect with people everyday this side of the bridge). Then again there will still be this in between to keep me company so it's not all bad. Not even half bad. Just not the conclusion I would have drawn this time last year.

Consider it a year end retooling of the factory. The final sessions of congress in a year that's not quite closed yet in my head.

Which takes me up to the ice-stache. So I'm walking home and it's a good 25 minute walk if I'm not running on most of my cylinders and my nose is running. Which is fine. You get used to it. Working in a cooler for hours a day, you can't rub your nose every single time it runs. By the end of the day you would have a red coke nose-ish hole in your face where your nostrils should be and then when you got home you'd have to deal with that junk all night only to go back to work in the cooler to repeat the process and get so nicked up about it that you end up putting a hole in the wall (that you'd have to fix) or putting a fist sized dent in your locker (that would probably get you suspended for a week and assigned to anger management when you got back [not that a week off from that crap would be a terrible thing, but I sat through anger management classes three times before and it's more of a pain than nursing busted knuckles and wrecked up wrist bones). You get used to it in the Winter.

The best thing about letting your nose run though, is that if you don't want to be talked to while you're out and about, letting your nose run is the best way to do it. People either assume you are a badass who does not give a fuck or are too retarded to realize your nose is running and therefore would not acknowledge, understand, or participate in a conflict along understood, predictable, or reasonable manner. Not to say that you wouldn't still get mugged by a coke head or someone not looking for reasonable conflict that sticks to standard rules of engagement. Which is why you can't just let your nose run. You have to make sure you are outside long enough for the snot and the condensation of your breathing against your upper lip and stache crystallize into ice and grow into a full on mustache of icicles. Then you are not just careless, retarded, devil-may-care, but you are also tough enough to be outdoors for long periods of time, possibly under dressed, with people and places you need to be that demand you be there regardless of the mode of transportation and that, potentially, these people will be looking for you if you don't show up when you said you would, and maybe you won't respond to threats and maybe you're late and have already had it up to your eyes with the weather, and walking untold distances, that you will absolutely blow up at the drop of a half smoked cigarette or suspicious footstep or even a "hey you" if you are kind enough to respond at all. So ice-stache it up. Worst comes to worst someone might yap at the back of your head, but all you have to do is turn around with your viking face on for a second and who wants to deal with that at any time of day? And then keep walking, because the only thing more certain to produce a fight, than engaging idle talk, is staring at groups of individuals when the only thing at stake is their bogus sense of pride. And after all, it is half past two A.M. and you still have a ways to go.

Hotwheels are amazing, by the way. Walking through stores and seeing the blue displays doesn't really bring me back to any particular period in my life, but I love cars. I dream about cars. Next to viking ice-staches, cars are awesome and every time I see them I want to know what exactly, which car exactly, is being modeled to scale and whether or not I can add it to my garage someday. Half the time it turns out to be some dopey made up car with ugly body work and funky orange tinted windows for some reason and chrome wheels in enormous flared wheel arches that pretty much touch the apex of the A pillar and the whole thing makes you scratch your head and wonder who thought it was a good idea.

Then every now and then, the thing that makes you stop and look every damn time, you stumble across a model of a DMC-12 DeLorean, or a Boss Mustang, or a bright blue and white Yenko Camaro, and you know you'll never make enough money to own them. You see a 240z in that hotwheels orange and blue blister pack and your eyes go wide because someone thought that fair lady from the 80s deserved to be forever immortalized on some lucky kids shelf and if you had a little less sense, maybe yours. You could have them all, and it's not at all about saving them because they might be worth something later, it's just to have them all in your fantasy garage made real, in a way, and be able to stroke the body work and see the curves from every angle you will never get to see them in person, quite possibly for as long as you live. It could be there, just for you, for a scant two bucks. That Ferrari GTO, right there at your fingertips, right there. You can feel the speed and feel the air slipping by the rear views and splitting away clean across the spoiler. I don't know when I'm going to outgrow hotwheels. Quite possibly never.

So that's it for now. That and there will never be that party that makes me feel my age. At least not in a physical sense where a person is like "oh my god, this hangover is too much. I can't drink like I used to." I already had that sense of that party where I was like "wow my beard is way thicker than the pubes any of these people have ever experienced in their lifetime if they never shaved them at any point between the time of their birth until now" and my beard wasn't even that thick. I definitely had it in terms of "wow the music I remember fondly in the club is all music by artists that stopped making music before these people owned their first discman. Oh wait, they've never even held a discman before. The hell am I doing here?" I also definitely had it in terms of overhearing fights and thinking "really, is it really that serious? Don't they have bills to pay or something?" But in terms of raw "too old to throw down..." never gonna happen. This old panther still has moves that'll make your mullet spin. That's from venture brothers. The best cartoon action series, possibly ever.

Let's work on it as we wrap this year up and catch up with the rest of the Earth. Orbit adjustments aboard the good ship.


///no song today. just some thought.


///just kidding. music is life.


///Paul Murphy - "Soul Call" This jazzy jem from Paul Murphy always makes me happy to be alive to hear it. It was a dead heat between this and Aphex Twin's Girl/Boy Song. Maybe next time around.

You Know When It's Time to Go Home

I always know when it's time to go home. Not always. I do know, sometimes, when I've been somewhere too long. It's when the strangers start to show up. The man in the hat shows up first, but after that it's a grab bag. Not really a grab bag, but something more like "I don't know you. What are you doing here," and the question never gets answered. It makes me afraid. The non-answer. The people that show and I roll through my reality tests and it comes back "not a number." Like today.

Today I was just a working away and having a blast doing so. I cleared the jam in the nail gun without shooting myself in the face. I cleaned things up and did some organization. And then the flickering started. It started off as easy mistakes of perception. Mistakes of light and shadow and I didn't discount them because you have to keep track of what is happening and where and when and reference and double check them against the time key of the day. And then things began to metastasize and balloon and bleed into other things. It wasn't a sudden thing. Not a violent attack. It was a creeping back of the skin from a pin prick. And the pin prick started to tear across my eyes. And I was scared.

Who are you. Why are you here. Why won't you say anything. My mind races against itself. You see them enough times and they get names. For familiarity's sake. Because you can't keep referring to them by description. But, also for tracking. You have to keep track of what is changing and how much. Who is coming. Who is going. Who and what you haven't seen. Who is talking and when. Systematize it as a survival mechanism. As a way to boil the confusion into simple yes and no questions. Not see through the fog as much as teach yourself over and over again that what you are seeing is nothing more than fog. Teach yourself that who you are talking to is a symptom of a malady and nothing more. Work on it. Work on it. And then work on it some more, because you can't afford to slip again. And even if you could afford another mishap in terms of recovery time you couldn't afford it in terms of scar tissue. Mental scar tissue. You don't have that kind of real estate to allow acres to burn and not feel it, not lose the trust of the people who have given you that trust. And it's hard and really fucking scary sometimes.

It's difficult to paint it. Difficult to map out the progression from flickers of black birds and creeping lizards, to the shadowed men in the corners of rooms, to the arrival of the children and the man in the hat, to the free radicals lurking between the bars of the stairwell and the thing that kisses time space like a fist into a pool of still water. The disruptions grow and I can feel the temperature changing. I can feel the movement of the pieces across the board in a way that I know will lead to a break. I can't stop it, but I can leave...

Music Post Script

///Sunlounger - "White Sand ...a summer for your winter...........a spring to your autumn... a love to the hate... a watchman at the gate... a mirror for your wall and a witness to your rise and every fall.

Tail Chaser's Song

I've taken to chasing my tail. It's become a tall order. The getting after it with no reward. Become obsessed with the game. It's made it hard to come back here everyday that I know I should be here. And I should be. Because I know there are those who are gaming the same and I owe it to at least one of them, at least myself, and my plus one to continue to document something about the something. It's become not even a document of the trip, a blueprint of the why, as much as a motive for the maybe. I thing I gotta do.

I've. Been having the most fantastic dreams. I've been recording them via voice, but I have not been recording them with any amount of fidelity and I know the people that find them will not give them the treatment they need. I'm in no fit state or shape to make a record of my life. But I do love the activity. I was in a hot and heavy argument about religiontoday. It went on longer thqan I normally let these things progress largely because I thought I could make friends out of it, but friends made on the battle field of rhetoric are mostly enemies.

I told him religion was largely a communicative virus. A highly virulent and communicative strain of thought virus. difficult to cure and beneficial by turns sort of infection. It was a tough conversation to get through. A tough forty five minutes. But you soldier through. I'm just sorry I've been up to the bad magic that keeps me away from you. I had a great new years.

Iam stepping in stilting steps toward the things i said i would never do again years past. things like bad puncuation and bad spelling. things that make me harder to read and easier on me to communicate. Trying to stand tall in the self inflicted onslaught and become something more beautiful in the meantime. Something more enjoyable. Something more useful. Because I know meeting halfway isn't so much a positive policy as much as it is a mandate of existence. which makes me sad, but I can live with that.

But I think that the thing I understand most clearly is that I am still looking for my foil and havent found it and it makes the universe so much less, the master human equation so much less, without that counter, cross complement, and I feel like I am a minus with no theoretical plus sign that makes as much sense on paper as in action. But I'm doing my damnedest.