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.
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
9/24/12
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.
9/15/12
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"
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"
9/4/12
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.
9/3/12
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.
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.
9/2/12
Dear (_____)
Dear Summer,
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
sincerely,
Goddamnitihatesummer
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
sincerely,
Goddamnitihatesummer
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