dear (_____)

Dear Norman Cook,

Thanks for making it a little more fun.

sincerely,

I still listen to what you do and it brings back some of the best memories of my life

That Instant

you realize there is no amount of coke and no pill that is going to help you unfeel what you felt back in '95.

The Best Thing

The best thing about your worst day, your absolute worst day that you have ever experienced, is that  all you have to do to avoid repeating it is do just one of the thousand things you did slightly differently.

That Instant

you realize you've lost sight of your cat again, but he hasn't lost sight of you and is waiting for you to relax so he can attack your dreadlocks the second you sit back and breath easy.

Communications Fault: Line 446890-C0-CC1 (circuit a1 >> branch 9)

I've had a very difficult time with communication.  The heat hasn't helped.  The pressure cooker of my apartment hasn't helped.  I know what it's an extension of, and yes, I don't want to talk about it directly because it has been all consuming.  Requiring maximum effort to distance myself from and hide from others, but even the lack of communication is telling enough for the people that know me, so even the hiding has been a full time occupation.  Let alone maintaining myself.  That has also been a full time occupation.  Missing too many consecutive days of eating.  Not too many in the personal book of what too many days is, as I once went a solid week without eating until a friend intervened.  But, I've come to understand that one day of not eating when the option is available, is too many days.  A new standard that makes me feel glutinous, but shouldn't by any means do so, but it's a hold over from another time and another segment of my life that refuses to go away.

Communications have been strained.  Within myself.  Production is down.  Simply not happening.  Close to zero cooperation from the parties involved, but that happens.  Hallucinations are up.  Managing them has sucked up a lot of "up" time.  Sleep is off the charts.14 to 16 hours.  Cross bridge explorations, however have been phenomenal.  For quite some time I couldn't remember anything and then I started coming back with pieces and parts.  It got to a point yesterday where I woke up and reached for a pocket watch I found after I asked a dead body in a half crushed fully rusted barge (it was an interstate race across a state made up of only islands arranged in a rapids a half continent wide [the waves were high enough to bury the Petronas towers if they were perched on top of the Dover cliffs, and then some], but I got off course and ended up trapped in an island surrounded by weirs that made it impossible to get off it without something with an engine) if there was anything of value and he woke up and pointed to a muddy box with a finger that had a key ring dangling from it.  I opened the box and there was a spring loaded clock as big as my fist with a vest fob attached to it, and I was honestly surprised that it wasn't there and I realized I was dreaming again.

There was a very large bear in my room yesterday.  A very large, unusually square shaped, bear.  Which tipped me off that I was probably dreaming, but then my cat popped up on my pillow and poked me in the face and the bear was still there and I realized I was symptomatic again and so I pulled up my covers, rolled over, and tried to shut it out.  The sun came up, though, so everything was resolved well enough.  Daylight has its uses.  My sleep cycle went completely out of whack.   As far as it could possibly go without looping over on itself.  And then I got sick.  And slept for 36 hours.  I needed to.  Things have been righting since.  A little bit on their own, a little bit through my own efforts to force them to.

What comes next is a re-assumption of some kind of routine to protect the balance.  Shield myself from the bad wiring.  That's really all I am trying to do.  Remake the failsafes.  It was one of those rare times when one breaker fail set up the ability for the next one to fault.  And the next fault set up the next two to fail.  The next two set up the next four.  A large part of the mental restructuring is redeveloping the system to avoid that kind of expansion.  That kind of breakage leads to zero to atmosphere times that feel like blinks of the eye.  I was still talking about today as though today were Sunday.  With the understanding that today was Sunday.  Functionally that was where I left off.  Imagine your body is a car.  You jump in after dreaming and turn the key and halfway to your friend's house you realize there are 30,000 more miles on it than the last time you can remember driving it.  Not fun.  A little scary.  Where the hell have I been?

So much unmounted rage.  Learning all over again how to deal with it.  How to manage it effectively.  How to operate within a range of reason and reasonable values.  Your base language is either violence or love and the communicator operating system between them either works or it doesn't.  1 or 0.  I envy the analog.  They really are a different species of human being.  A holdover from another time that still procreates and propagates with great success.  Us digital human beings still propagate, often despite ourselves.  I don't mean digital in the respect of the how our communications are moved between people.  We're all digital enough to make that not matter in that respect.  The step before digitization though is a separate story.  A separate breakdown for another time, but it's there.  Digital communication at its root is violence or love.  Extreme to extreme and the methods and ways, the words and letters provide the ability to create shades of the experience.  For some.  For others there is an increasingly fine number of ways to say things and the translation to digital fields is easier to the point of effortlessness.   It's like an exam paper.  Every paper being different depending on who you are and how you were engineered.  Some people receive a paper where every question has twenty boxes.  Some people receive a paper with two boxes.   They both have the right answer to the question on them.  Expressing that answer is a lot easier when you have twenty boxes to choose from instead of two boxes and a bunch of blank space to try to scrawl in explanations and clarifications and other junk to help the twenty boxers understand what you meant.

Established frameworks of communications.  No one's to blame.  At least I'm not blaming anyone.  I'm just frustrated with my machinery.  But I already explained, you can't build new machinery with bad tools.  Perhaps I didn't.  A lot of things do not make it passed the cutting floor, believe it or not.  The idea was this: if the tools that make new tools are broken already or offset somehow, the new tools those tools make will be off by even more.  And those tools will build structures off by that much more.  And those structures will house tools constructed with that offset and be poor to look at to begin with and it just continues rolling up until it all collapses and you start again with the same crappy hammer and chisel and furnace trying to build a lathe to turn some sense out of something and you end up with nothing all over again.  So I dunno.  I do not know.  Maybe just try to enjoy the work more than the product?  Maybe?  Anthem of my life if I ever had to write one.  Probably needs more gunshots.   And more cowbell.  A little more clap hands and foot stomping and a little less dirge.  A little more "remember the mission and all you might do" and a little less "quarterly review for the noble and 'a societal remove' sorts of moves.  Nobility, much less nobelity, is passing and as beholden to the eye as anything ever was.


///Bjork - "Pluto" ... a little bit tired, but brand new

Redesigns and Motions and All Kinds of Crazy S--- (with disclaimers)

The summer redesign of Auralport is coming.  It's in the factory works right now, as we speak.  It's been autumn way too long over there and frankly the browns are starting to get to me and darken everything I do when I am there.  I need some green going on.  Some color to reflect the growth and all that.  More importantly I need to incorporate some pinks and purples.  Yeah, it'll look a little gay, but that's what I am.  Sue me.  For gayness.  Cuz if you try to sue me for anything else you will find pretty quickly that I am, as they say in the business, "judgement proof".  Not saying you won't win the case.  All I'm saying is what you win will be a big happy bag of nothing.  Except maybe self satisfaction.  However, you can go home knowing that the only reason I am judgement proof is because I have nothing to take.  But more importantly (this just keeps going on, right?) the only reason why I have nothing to take is because of the decisions you made that put me in a position to have nothing.  So basically we're even.

Not really though.  I got off scott free (where the hell did that saying come from?  a reference to free balling in kilts maybe?  I dunno) after a fashion.  You got to screw me or at least feel like you taught me a life lesson.  So we're even right?  Nah, I'm going to cut your face off and feed it to you the next time I see you.  LOL  that is happening.  Which is why I can't see you.  Because I will make a sincere attempt on your life.  Jokes aside.  I will kill the weaker of the two of you.  Do not come to my house, parents.  Because I will kill you.  I hope that's clear enough.

So anyway.  The redesign is coming and I'm really looking forward to it.  The hard part is trying to find a good shot of nature to work with.  I'm out there all of the time, but I just have to remember to bring a camera one of these days.  So many pictures to take.  So little time.  I looked into dslr-s and realized pretty quickly there is no way in hell I could afford one.   There is a way, I just lied, there is a way, but if I ever ponied up the money I would have to spend it on a car first.  Which brings up other mommy daddy issues but I'm not going into that.  I am.  Just this once.  Caps locked.  WORST GRADUATION GIFT AND SUBSEQUENT CHAIN OF EVENTS EVER, I HOPE YOU HANG YOURSELVES IN SEPARATE ROOMS OF THAT SHITHOLE YOU LIKE TO CALL A HOUSE.

Okay, so, not to be entirely bipolar on this.  I would like to present a motion to do some art.  Everyone at the table, yay or nay my friends.  Yes, we are taking a vote.   All present?  Alright then, moving forward on the motion to attempt some cartooning.  All in favor, say aye.  All opposed?  Let the record show that the motion is passed.

I've got my fingers back into poetry and short stories again.  God knows I damn near had to handcuff myself and blindfold my eyes to do that.  It had to be done though.  A life without creation is self destruction.  I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing with facebook at this point.  For me it kind of does well as real time memoirs.  It all depends on how far back the record will go.  If the timescale ends after so many years, it's pretty much useless in that regard.  I hope it doesn't.  I'm pretty much writing a book on there, though some probably think I'm just a loon.  Which is fine, because I kind of am.  I gave up on trying to find the secret of life because I know the guy who knows the guy who has it.  It's frustrating because he gave it to me once and knew that I wouldn't remember.   So I have to try again, but now he knows that I know so I'm going to have to pull some kind of double fake to get it this time.

So what is the crazy shit.  The really really junk that still makes go "wait a minute, what?"  There isn't any.  Smiley face.  Not today.  Alright here's one.  Just one.  I woke up in a trap house again.  I used to call them house parties until a friend of mine introduced the concept of the trap house and I had a little revolution in perspective and was like "that makes absolute sense."  Mostly because it does.  That is exactly what they are.  Which explains a lot about how the people in there behave.  Yeah, I felt like a nub the first time it happened.  But now, it's just like, "alright, got all your shit?  okay, time to roll."  Where was I going...  so yeah I woke up and rolled out and someone said "Hobbes, where you goin?" as soon as I got out the door, and I was like ... yeah, that's my gotdamn name.  And I realized alot of the people I used to know, don't know that I changed my name.  So I let them call me by my old name, fam aside, because they just don't know. And I'm okay with that, I think.   For now.  It's not legal, but what is?


///Beck - "Devil's Haircut"        pistols are pointing at a poor man's pocket, and he don't give a fuuuuuuuuu

The Best Thing

about living alone is you can do your own dishes whenever you feel like it.  The worst thing about doing your own dishes is the definition of doing dishes.  If doing dishes means an empty sink, you're probably making it too easy, because your sink will be empty and your bedroom will be full of dirty dishes.  Do your goddamn dishes.  A dirty plate is not a pillow, no matter how you spin it.

That Instant

you realize you can't store more food until you eat some of the food you've already stored.

Crying

Well, I woke up this morning and cried.  No fault of my own, though.  Turned out my new best friend was a figment of my machinations.   That never goes over well, internally.  Well, it never goes well ever, actually.  A little heart breaking.  All of the things we talked about.  The moments shared.  What tipped me off?  The high fidelity appearance across the bridge.  There's always some loss in dreaming.  There is always a little bit of something that goes away in the reanimation, but for him, it was absolutely lossless.  Like, I can't even make myself, or remake myself, over there into a lossless construction.  I've tried.

It's just tough, you know?  When you think you've got it figured out and managed and it turns out everything was simply looping back and back dooring you.  So I woke up with that realization and cried a while.  Not uncontrollable sobbing, but quiet crying.  I thought he was my new best friend, but I had my doubts.  That's why I didn't tell anyone.  I mean, no one wants to introduce a new friend and have that friend turn out to be a serial killer.  Then all the egg is on your face for being so dumb.  But we shared moments.  Real moments of selflessness and inner nakedness, the kind of things that bring people together.

I should have known when there was no exchange of names, but I chalked it up to other times of bonding with other people when I didn't get the names right or at all until the fifth or sixth time we hung out together.  It doesn't dull the loss.  It doesn't dull the pain of heart in being alone again.  That stays real.  That stays scarring.

It's difficult to smile through this.  When things are clearly bad or clearly good it's easy to smile.  It's easy to see the humor and say to yourself "oh yeah, that was pretty hilarious wasn't it?"  It's pretty easy to look on the bright side.  Hell, some of my best laughs I've had at my lowest marks, but when things are blurring that badly it's just alarming.  Hair raising in the purest sense.  Just hurtful.  Difficult to begin to quantify.  To yourself and others.  It's hard to talk about it to other people without feeling judged, but not just by them.  It's difficult to be judged by the rest of the parts and pieces inside your own head that have not gone away.  The parts and pieces that still talk to you.  The parts and pieces that still have the ability to make you hurt, to make you pay.  To occupy you and your space.

I don't want to go back on pills.  I don't want a chemical lobotomy, but I don't want this either.  It's a different kind of pain.  A different kind of fear.  I know I am fooling myself that I can manage it.  I know that.   Part of what makes it so much scarier is that it has crept up so silently that I didn't see it, could not see it, until it was in full swing and that hasn't happened in months.  The full swing.  The carried on conversations.  The making dates to meet with people that don't exist.  The keeping good on those meetings.  Shoving my hands into my face.  Why didn't I see it from the start?  There's no forgetting or shake it off.  Just have to keep it in mind.  A safe with no lock.


///Gouryella - "Walhalla"  hang on for the break.   It's never as terrible as it seems, until it is.  But then you wake up and start again.

how else can we survive?

putting my hand in the ocean again.  thinking about going for a swim sometime real soon.

Dry Motor and What It Is

Creeping creeping.   Creeping up on you like silverfish in your bedspread.  The anxiety has been hilarious.  Awful.  To the place on the scale where it ceases to be funny and "haha, that scared the shit out of me, but now I know I was imagining things, so I can laugh about it because no one was here to see it" and becomes "hahahaholyfuckinggodamnit, just get out of my head."  Balls of string, almost, that get knottier and knottier with each passing sunrise and then a glimpse of something that might have a been a flicker of spider's webbing in daylight is grown into a hunched fistful of glitter black something that makes you stop and look with both your eyes to make sure you are moving and not it and then the words come back in like crowd dialog in vapors and the whole morning there is no fix on what it is that smells like gas.  Get out of my head.

Creeping sense of rage.  A little bit of task lock.  There's no transition between the time fixitive and the free base of writing.  Well, I shouldn't say there is none.  There is none developed.  It's been a very long time since I had to generate one through my own channels.  Normally I hit the mechanical hard lever contacts and everything changes over like a locomotive switch track.  Or has the potential too if I can get the charge high enough to arc the distance (the switch doesn't always close).  What am I talking about?  So I haven't had that.  Oddly enough, or typically enough, smoking grew tightly threaded to production.  I quit smoking.  It is not at all tempting to go back to smoking in a bid to make writing easier.  That's a back blown lock.  Explosive decompression.  Sorted.  A bridge designed into the process I took toward quitting, but a necessary effort at sabotage, because I knew I'd never quit if I didn't hack myself.  I'm not sure if that's coming across, but you get the picture.  Things have been harder to do, is the bullet point.  For good reason is the second bullet.

I find myself outside the gates of my skull, mornings, looking in, trying to smell them out.  Where they've been and where they plan to go next.  Hard pressed not to cut myself.  An inexplicable taste for it, really.  You come to the moment.  To it and then back around to it.  Someone asks if this is it.  Don't be so hard on yourself, you're having a good time, Jack.  Necking with yourselves.  Across from you there is also you and they are talking their way around you like you're not even there.  Don't be so hard on them.  Without us, they would have died a long time ago.  And someone asks if this is it.  What is?  Through space and time, not in that philosophical, flowered hill top, poet staring at the stars nonsense, through actual manipulation of distance and the passage of time there has been an answer.  The distance problem.  Too close and then too far.  With no sense of balance.  The old states.  The newer state is orbit, not quite to deep space.  Where I belong.  A place void enough that violence drives nothing and no one away because there is no one near enough.  Sort of thing.

It's weird.  Wanting closeness.  The other part of what it is.  Mechanical maintenance demanding space to allow for irradiation.    Power on.  Wanting closeness and knowing it is exactly that which has the horsepower to turn the entire engine over in a fraction of a second.  Blow your skull apart.  A finger at a time.  Division, I suppose, is difficult.  Fragments.  It's hard to understand.  To put my thoughts around in a way that cuddles with the chemistry and wraps it up in something cool under force of touch.  Maybe nature.  I have to remind myself to not be alarmed.  Panic buries absolutely.  What it is: I can want it and have it sometimes.  Under specific circumstances.  Limited instances.  Hard wired for... something.  I dunno.  What it is.  Is weird.  Living within it.  All you have to do, if you really think hard about it, is understand enough of what you are to project beyond the black shaped box inside your head.  Before you can count to three you are the same as you and me.  Inside of there.  Developing ways to convert binary emotion into all the flavors of the analog rainbow.   Access rights, never found.

I'm trying though.  Ten days at a time.  One day at a tear.  Three tears ripped off at a clip.  I don't know.  Plus warning.  star streaming.  always always always dreaming.  of a perfect chemistry.  Get out of my head. I still have pictures to make.  Stories to write.  Music to make.  Too much to do.  I am me and you are you.


///Sneaker Pimps - "Water Baby"  sport is love and blood is sport