Growth Is Hard, the Burna

Growth is hard hard hard.  I don't like change.  Routine is a life saver.  Regulation.  Having to think about what to wear and what to eat and when and how much and how many layers and what's clean and what's not and the questions mount up so damn fast.  Is there gas in the car, is there not, is there enough gas to get to a gas station, is there milk, are there eggs, did you put your socks on before you put shoes on, did you wear a belt, did you need to, are you wearing pants, is your shirt buttoned, tucked, or untucked and should it be.  Did you brush your teeth, did you brush your beard, where are your sunglasses, do you need them, did you check the weather, where are your keys, are your cards in your wallet, did you get back to the people who left you messages, did they message you at all, what's your schedule like, do you have a schedule, where's your cereal, do you need more, what's for breakfast, what's for dinner, did you smoke yet, should you be, what's the month budget for it, did you budget, shouldn't you be quitting, did you make time to draw, did you make time to check up on the engine light, did you do laundry, is your stuff in the dryer, did you vacuum the rugs, have you brushed the cats, did you water the garden, where's the coolant you picked up, have you gathered the scattered spare change, where are your shoes, where are the good jeans, did you hang up your good tees, how are the ice trays, did you take out the trash, did you look into buying fans, where are the new fish hooks you bought, who keeps letting their dog poo at the corner of your house, have you checked the mail, where's the other set of keys, where's your good hat, have you changed your water filter, what's the beer situation, did you buy new brushes for work, have you paid your phone bill, when are you changing your tires, have you washed your hair, have you checked your piercings, did you wash your sheets, have you clipped your nails, did you tie your shoes, is there an undershirt beneath your top, have you looked into ... brain explosion.

Routine really is a life saver.  I'd kill myself without it.  Without routine it is impossible to identify brain shrapnel apart from reality.  Impossible to separate the notes of a song from synapse misfires.  I haven't been slipping too much and I'm proud of that.  I've been doing a good job of managing schizophrenia and delusion.  I've been sharp and on my feet enough to know when control was slipping and intelligent enough to understand when a decent time to step back and lock my body in arrived.  I'm happy for that.  I'm happy that I've been able to not just see my friends and old family, but divide those conversations from the larger dialogues with other people and keep them private.  I am happy that the ones without names can be separated from the ones with.

I've been trying to keep ourselves busy in the factory and it's going good.  The warehouse is buzzing and everyone's happy and still yapping at each other and it's fantastic.  Everyone is accounted for, the first time in a long time.  I can't sit on it though.  They will start to wander away and then we won't be working together for half a damn.

I've been thinking over the last time I was in the hospital when they brought me in and made me intern myself as a bargain.  That night still itches me.  Still makes us furious.  I didn't do anything wrong that day!  I shut my mouth too, but they had us hooked up to a couple machines and I was lying through my teeth the whole time and to this day we're sure my heartbeat gave us up.  I stood up and it jumped real hard from rest to joy panic and the doctor winced and I winced and started sweating and everyone started screaming in my ears and I tried to run, but the door was locked from the outside and that's just plain unfair and I got mad.  Mad as hell.

Routine is a life saver, though.  Do X at Y time.  Z comes after.  A comes first, followed by B.  Sometimes D, but it's okay if C jumps in before D as long as A and B come before and X and Y follow.  Without it, without that, things get jumbled and then dreamland starts to bleed into reality and then things I shouldn't say and people who have no business in my circles start to have conversations with people they have no business meeting and then those people start to get mad at us because we've been talking about them behind their backs and once that check is cashed there's no going back on it.  Then I get burned because they make me pay and there's no way to explain to them because as hard as I try to explain it to them they don't hear me and I've already gone too far and that's far enough.

Growth is hard.  It hurts.  Learning what you can and can't do.  What I can and cannot do.  What is and is not acceptable.  More than anything else I want to meet someone who can sit down with me and them and have a good long coffee conversation.  I know they're not real, I know they are real.  I have to constantly monitor sounds.  I have to consistently monitor their footsteps so I know when and whom I'm looking at.  It's not fair.  It's not fucking fair!  I want you in my world.  I want you in my shoes so you can understand the kind of ...  it's not fucking fair.

I play music so loud so I don't have to hear.  I hope I go deaf.  I wouldn't mind still having eyes because I love to look at nature.  I love looking at nature.  Sometimes we hate what I see because they are there always now and it's terrifying and it's gorgeous.  Seeing where they've been and we talk about it across fields.  Are you hiding from me?  You with the-  I hate it.  I hate it!  Are you alone?  Did you come alone?  No!  Not ever!  I'm never alone!  Do you know what that's like???  Do you know what that's like??????  Get away from me!  Stop lying!!  Stop lying in my ear!!  Just go away!!!  It never happens.  It never happens like I want it to and I try not to take it out on us.  Not to take it out on you.  Growth is hard.  My dad used to assure me it was just angels and devils talking to me and if I chose the path of loving Jesus I would be able to sort them out and I would know which ones it was because "the Bible tells me so."  Goodnight and good luck.

Managing is harder.  It's difficult boxing that part of me away.  Walling and fencing it off so I can still be a part of the rest of 'merica.  Hard not to play into their hands.  The whole thing burns to malfeasance.  Reciprocal engine with no off button.  The only thing you can do is try to avoid putting gas in it.  I want new genes.  I want new genes.  I want new programming.  I've been doing good.  Little star.  Little little skittish star, but I've been doing good.  Been doing good with putting words the right way and conversations the right way, and containing, but it's exhausting and it hurts us on the inside parts.  It hurts a lot.  I want to be alone so badly and I don't know how to get there.  I don't know how to get back to good sleep.

It's not about my parents or the violence pushed way too far or relationships with friends or dating or god or  medicine.  Battling.  Don't celebrate the battles, celebrate the war.  I want nature to stop talking to me.  A billion dollars for silence.   A trillion dollars for blindness.  That's the wager.  Just give me one less eye and blown out ears.  Still no guts to do it myself.  Take it away from me.  Just shut up!  Shut the fuck up!  Growth is hard!  Being adult.  Sometimes I wake up and I know I'm still stunted, but inside a giant robot that has capabilities far beyond what my head is prepared to command.  I didn't want it, but I know I have to deal with it, continue to learn how to use it to become a part of the rest of the structures or destroy it so it doesn't damage the space it occupies and the rest occupying the same space.  It hurts.  It hurts a lot.  It's confusing to us.  I've been doing good though.  I want to keep it going.  I want to blend in better.  I am working on growth, but it's hard as hell.


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

The Takedown, Hold Overs, Creation, and Airlock to Spacewalk

"That time is now."  It's time to tear it all apart and restructure it.  The tags no longer make any sense in terms of what they are supposed to be pointers too.  They still point to the things they are supposed to point to, but there's no longer the sort of continuity between meanings that there was.  Over the years and iterations and expansion, a lot of the growth has been organic save for the bare bones items and the most common of common veins and themes.  I'm having a hard time following it and searching and reviewing.  I'm sure part of it is to do with my own electromigration and changing processing powers, up and down.  Things that used to make sense do not anymore, that which makes sense now does not fit cleanly into what came before.

The main problem is, because I enjoy writing so much, getting other things done becomes tedious and overly difficult.  Discouragingly difficult.  Task lock kicks in and nothing gets done at all because I have that loop constantly running with no way to put an end to it.  "What do you want to do tonight?"  Get some writing done, maybe do some doodling.  "Okay, go!"  Wait, I want to do that first and then- "Okay, go!"  But I don't know how what I'm thinking about writing is going to seat next to the last thing I did so I need to find out what I was planning on accomplishing last week that's still in proc- "Okay, go!"  You're not hearing me.  I'm still trying to lay out the sequence so that when I get to the part where I start to lay down tracks I'll be able to begin to set up the next step into- "Okay, go!"  God damn it!!  Forget it.  I'm going to go jerk off and try to sleep.  And sleep refuses to kick in because my mind is still circling a world light years away from planet sleep even though my body arrived days ago.  Ghost ship.

There are hold overs.  Artifacts.  A lot of what I am doing is cataloging artifacts.  The overall design, however, is a massive artifact of another time.  A thing I've fallen in love with deeply.  When the entire interface and blog structure updated to a new design structure a few years ago, was it years, I retained mine because what I wanted to express was inexpressible within the new structure available.  The only real issue with doing it, at the time, was being cut off from any possible further updates beyond my own.  I liked what I put together.  I liked looking at it.  I liked making small adjustments here and there and watching it completely change it's feel without losing it's theme.  It's time to let go of the tinkering.  Save the memory.

Fun in creation.  Unique pleasure in drawing resources together into a whole.  This piece of code and that drawing on that server together with a banner you put together and stored on another server and watching it all spin to life at the click of a button.  Part of the enjoyment in keeping the ship alive after this or that part died or stopped responding was the puzzle of rerouting connections, solving them, and kicking off into space again.  One of the reasons why I love writing is pulling the parts and pieces together, memories, fragments, dreams, real and unreal, and at one point I got that same buzz from design, but it's wearing me out trying to do it across multiple platforms.  Time to retool and tighten up creation.  Focus on what matters the most and let that drive what comes next instead of allowing the platform to drive production.  The factory and the caucus and everyone working within should be governing what comes out of the warehouse, not the shape and color and how many windows the warehouse has.  Flight inversion.

Airlock to spacewalk, it is.  Time to park it in an orbital bone yard and piece together a new ship.  Maybe not one that incorporates everything, but one that simplifies so we're not flipping sixteen switches and checking three different read outs before tuning dials to accomplish what could be done in one cycle.  I'm looking forward to it.  I don't know what I'm going to do about the tag situation.  A problem for another day.  We'll see what's out there.  Never forget the mission.  Never forget how beautiful the Earth looks from afar.  When you can't see past your own control panel, it's time.  "Next time you go out to space, how about leaving yourself a little free time?"


///Plaid - "Air Locked"

Cliffside Funeral Wedding Dream

Massive dream.  There was a procession across a hill side and on that hill side there were hundreds of tombstones.  The hill side was a little over grown and as it sloped down the entire thing was cut off at the far edge by a cliff.  There was a procession happening there, the women dressed in gowns with all kinds of frillies and big brimmed hats with white flowers in them and all of the men dressed in tuxedos with black ties and shiny shoes

I was watching it from where the birds sit in the air and I wanted to get a closer look so I dove down and sat on one of the tomb stones to watch them walk.  They were hiking on a narrow trail that led around the curve of the hill top and I couldn't see where they were going or from where they walked.  I noticed some of the men wearing top hats and it was kind of cool.  It made me want to have a top hat of my own, but not enough to actually make one.  There was no music, only the sound of their feet kicking up dirt, but it rained the day before so there was no dust.

Some of the women had really thin canes and used them to help themselves push farther up the hill while they walked.  Everyone there looked so stately and I wanted to be a part of it so I pressed myself into the grid, but I wasn't thinking and ended up there with a football and shorts and a dirty tee once I got the address right.  That was the only hard part.

I kept throwing the football at people, but my resolution wasn't good enough and it kept passing through their bodies like they weren't even there.  It would take a bounce or two and go off the side of the cliff and I felt worse and worse trying to make it happen and every time I kept saying "I'll go get it" and I would hike down the hill, navigating the gray and black and mossed over tombstones to the cliff side and then start the climb down.  The view was incredible.  There were birds flying beneath my feet dipping in and out of the canyon and there were trees growing down there where the cliff would ledge for a few feet and then drop down hundreds.

I fast forwarded the climb and return and clicked back on when I got back to the top.  The procession must have been miles long.  I was doing it all day.  Another pass, another pass through, another climb.  "I'll go get it."  And they kept on walking.  Some of the men had taxidermy turtles on the tops of their hats, spray painted black.  I started to follow the procession to see where it was going.  I liked being up in the air, but I liked being in shorts better and the football felt good to hold and toss even though I couldn't make anyone in the procession catch it.  It felt good to walk.

I got distracted though.  One of the tombs was a mausoleum.  I wandered off of the trail because I was really interested in the iron work of the gates.  They rusted over beautifully and I wondered about the hands that made them so pretty.  The tomb itself was a simple white box of big blocks.  No angels or ridiculous adornments.  No saints.  Nothing grew on it.  The gate was unlocked so I walked inside.

The floor sloped down and into the hill side.  There was nothing inside of it except a stone work tunnel.  Inside of the tunnel there was a waterfall that arched through it.  Thinking back the water probably was blown up from the right side and across the roof to terminate in the left side gutter.  I started walking down it and then running because the air smelled so good and earth filled and wet and oxygen rich and I wanted to blow as much of it down my lungs as I could.  I wanted to take my shirt off so it dissolved in bits of dust, pixel for pixel, and while I was running my friend started running too and caught up to me.  I heard him and his shoes going step for step, but he still caught up to me because his stride was longer and I was thinking I could beat him to the end.  I started off with quick feet, the same tempo, but we both got to our top gears and once you're there the only thing that matters is how far your footfalls can distance themselves from the one coming before.

He said "do you want to race?"  I said "Hell yes."  We booked it toward the light, running underneath the procession.  I still had the football in the crook of my arm.  I beat him out by a step and came to a skidding halt.  The tunnel was a field of gravel on the other side.  All of the pebbles we kicked up stopping went over the other side of the cliff and made little pock pock noises on their way down.  I looked over my shoulder and the hill top was still dotted with tombstones.  Some of them broken and graffiti on them.  The procession was gone though.

Catching my breath I realized I was breathing hard outside of dreamland and it woke me up before I was ready to leave that place.


/// Lionrock - "Packet of Peace (Chemical Brothers Mix)"

That Instant

You realize you need to brace yourself for the next undertaking and without it you will stumble.  Hard.  On your face.  And your only excuse for a bloody chin will be "I didn't pause."  And you will know that it was, without a doubt, a "you" problem.