That Instant

you realize you hate when you have one of those "must do want have again" kind of nights, but you already know it will be impossible to put that chain of events back into place and you learned that lesson in real life, but only remember it because you saw it in a cartoon last year that stuck with you, so you go straight up about it, cuz, god damn that was fun times.

You've Got Some Work To Do, Kiddo

I know.  I feel like a fire wrapped in people skin.  I borrowed some money to buy toothpaste the other day.  Something felt wrong about it.  Something felt wrong about the whole thing.  Memories came pushing back the days afterward.  Things I pushed away only recently and some things I pushed away years ago.

Cut out to Pittsburgh and a boy walking down Main street.  I put the last of my money into buying a thermocouple for a water heater I was working on and I remembered the dream I had that morning of my teeth coming apart.  My molar broke into quarters and caramel came spurting out in little bits of spray.  When I ran my tongue across my front sheets, little white sheets came off and got stuck between them and I would tongue the stuck bits, but rub more off and then all that were left were pink and gray nerve ends and I couldn't close my mouth because the pain was incredible and the caramel made me salivate and it poured down my shirt front in a glistening tan and foaming mess and the heat of it and the wind blowing through the cave of my mouth burned the nerves until my eyes could only see white static and glimmer stars of blood cells pounding through the veins inside them.  I remembered that dream and knew I had to find a way to buy some toothpaste.

The other memory that came back was of my dad screaming at me through my old cellular and the ear piece cracking.  It was a train of threats and I remember the strength in my knees barely hanging on through it all.  I was to change schools immediately or face the violent consequences he would bring my way for my poor performance.  The second part of the memory was a part I hadn't recalled or even connected until that day.  The school he was demanding I transfer to was one of the schools I originally pointed out and highlighted that I wanted to apply to in the first place two years before.  It crashed in on me then.  I brought them the list and they had to approve it because it was their money paying for the application fees and this one and that one got shot down and crossed off and shot down for one reason or another in their minds and based on that stupid ass college rankings book that was two years out of date at the time anyway (thanks public library).  Remembering it, I simply shook my head.  Wastes of brain space.  Why?  That still pops like a flickered light as the power grid compensates for outages miles away beneath a storm already come and gone from where you sit beneath its glow.

The air vibrates for a moment.  The walls flex under the sudden pressure and creak and groan.  Nothing happens.  Everything doesn't fall apart.  A tear came down my cheek from behind my sunglasses and I let it go.  It was hot as hell and feeling it evaporate felt wonderful and cooled my skin.  "Why?"  I don't know.  I never will.

There was a period of intense plasticity, three, maybe four, days long.  Precipitated by several days of a slow decline in mental activity.  It made me wonder if that was what peace felt like.  Feeling like internal and external pressures and atmospheres were perfectly attuned.  Like striking one face produced the right and singular sound on the other side instead of the rattle tin of snare wires.  Confusion began to set.  "What is happening to me?"  And then it began to break apart like lake shore ice not quite in rhythm with the season turn at sunrise.  Interference.  I couldn't tell if I was happy or simply depressed to a blank slate or so far disengaged from my head that I could essentially remote pilot this body thing through what it was supposed to do and could dock it at my home address and step outside of the cockpit into dreams.

I don't know what it was, but in greater efforts (always greater and greater as time runs on) to manage myself I will add those sign posts to my warning lights.  I don't know what they mean or what they signify, but it was disconcerting and disorienting a series of days as I've seen in a small while.

Spoke to a friend who is dating someone else now and I couldn't help, but wonder how the new was better than old.  I gave it a further thought and it was tremendously obvious.  I imagined the group photos and holiday visits and it was tremendously obvious.  One of these things is not wired like the others.  And now it is.  I don't think, in fact I am near certain there is ... I want to date again.  Do I hate companionship?  No, absolutely not.  Do you hate companionship?  Yes, what kind of stupid question is that!  I can't get through two consecutive hours of the day without thinking about breaking a slit into someone's skull with the blunt back end of a hatchet and shoving my penis into the slippery fat.  How terrific would that be.  I think about killing myself every day.  I also think about living in the deep north forest ridges every day, so you sort it out.

Choke it down and hold it there.  Inside is still a hidden place.  A territory I am still investigating and mapping.  Inside me I am snapping my fingers in front of my nose and patting my cheek and whispering "hey buddy, you in there?  Can you hear me?  Come on back.  Come on back, kiddo.  Stay with me, okay?"  Things blear in and out and then stick for a while.  I cannot live with other people for lengths of time.  Not yet anyway.  Still a lot of work to do.  Inside is still a deeply hidden place and for now it has to stay that way.

Walking down that street along the sidewalk and nodding to the old men on their way to fish and spend bits of their pensions at the hole in the wall and smiling at the kids on their little bikes and the folks my age pushing strollers and dogs my little heart fell out of my chest and hit the pavement and rolled.  It rolled like a tin can going tink a clink a link and as it went the brass compression ring broke off like a snapped rubber band.  Flex tubing went one way, an iron washer went another.  A welded chamber came loose and rolled in the chopped way a cube will into the gutter.  An adapter slipped off its fitting.  More brass tubing came loose and popped up into the air in front of me and a glass stator shattered.  Filaments flew into the grass and oil splashed into the cracks of the cement.  Rivets popped loose and sheet aluminum peeled away.  My heart rolled and rolled until it was a hex nut spinning like a coin until laid flat between the lines of the crosswalk yards away.

I saw myself running and dropping to knees to scoop this piece and that spring and that cam and this bolt and that shard and that curly Q of pipe and with fingernails prying bits of staple and brad from pebbles at the lip of storm drain.  What's missing?  Haul it all home in the hammock of your T-shirt mid drift.  Drop it all on the work bench and goggle up.  Sparks chip into the air.  The hammer, the drill, the saw, the shears.  Open up the drawers of the chest of saved scrap.  What's missing?  What's missing?!  Male to male adapters.  Counter sinking threads.  Punch sheared nails back through.  More sparks.  More acetylene.  More current.  Peen hammer curves.  Female to male adapter.  Hand tighten.  Air hammer drill rusted bolt tops.  Replace tubes.  Connect battery leads.  Respool springs.  Adjust valve timing.

The whole thing made me laugh.  The whole thing brought to mind the hilariousness of the notion of sewing your heart back together.  The whole notion of "look into your heart."  The whole highschool nonsense of the swooning "sewing my heart back together."  Apparently distance is still a necessary thing.  I don't know that it is something that can be outgrown or phasic.  Why did you cut up your face?  Because, in part, I'm tired of trying to explain it.  Remember that Popular Mechanics gloss issue from way back when nuclear energy was front page everything and there was an extensive design study to find a way to warn future men about areas where spent materials were stored in a way that could cross all future language barriers and changes regardless of origin?  I do and the whole thing makes me laugh.

The tension between this backwards country and where I want to be pulls apart my consciousness.  Are you supposed to be upset with the people that don't know it any other way?  Is there a right to be upset?  Wrong question entirely.  You can feel whatever you want to feel.  By being human and conscious at all you are given the right to emotion.  Hate has external vectors to it, though.  That's the difference.  The very important difference.  We've got some work to do, I know.  Everything has been heavily jammed up.  Between questions sparking forest fires of speculation and what ifs and more questions and dead zones and containment and management there has not been a lot of processing power left over to engage with society and decoupling is threatening and I can feel it climbing through the insides of my bones and bleeding into the streams inside my muscles and stable air is gaining turbulence and I am trying to correct.  I won't be privilege to some phases of interactions until the work is done and I don't know when that will be.  Trust sweetheart, I know.  Before you can get back to creating, we've got some work to do.  Goddamnit!  I know!!!!


///Flying Lotus - "Orbit Brazil"    Still building my new ship.  Still collecting parts at the orbital yard.  Dreaming about the empty space between stars and nothing more than the tick and whir of life support systems to nod my head to sleep to.

That Instant

you are kicking the walls in frustration because the ceiling tiles you just put up fell down and shattered and you realize you can't vent that way because the walls are more than thin enough to put your foot through.

Sit and fume.

Geometric Theory and How To Be a Good Ghost

I've been making a greater effort to understand myself.  Took some days to think harder on the subject in attempts to dismantle the motor and find the part tripping warning messages and panel lights.  I didn't get very far.  What I mean is, having many of the larger mechanism in pieces the map looked like a spilled box of lathe shavings and filaments and bits of casings.  Laid out, they said nothing in particular besides a resounding: from this mess comes everything you know.

Isolation is very important.  Two way protection, aside.  Isolation is near critical.  Incredibly important.  I used to tell myself I was not a violent person, but I acknowledge that I am.  Violently dedicated, at times.  Violently emotional.  Violently planted in the physical.  Violently loud and sometimes violently silent.  Many times over and often unnecessarily peaked.  If you graph it though, if you graph me on a smooth curve, I can't be that far away from normal.  I guess that's statistics though.  You can make values say whatever you want if you know the math well enough.  Kind of like paints.  You can draw damn near whatever you want and make it look damn close to your vision when the understanding of what the the colors do is clear to you.

The math is unclear to me.  I imagine, in my geometry, that every person can be represented by a three dimensional shape.  The closer you are to ideal, the more you represent a sphere.  The fields of emotion are painted on this sphere and the boundaries between emotions are all blended smoothly, one into another.  The area the regions occupy on the sphere all project inward to an infinite point of no emotion whatsoever.  A vegetable.  As the rays project away from the vegetable state they gain in intensity until they reach the maximum of what that emotion is and how it can be expressed on the surface.  When the rays intensity does not reach the surface it requires someone interpreting the shape to make some sort of judgement or act of perception to ascertain how exposed or close to nothing the ray terminates.

 The way I've come to understand emotional states, what is normal to me, is point projection.  A region on the surface of the shape, if I am spherical, will be occupied by a single point, not eliminating the possibility for multiple regions to register a single point, and the points add up to what I'm feeling/effusing at maximum intensity.  The entire thing sounds senselessly scientific coming out of my mouth.  I'll draw it later.  Promise.  It'll make more sense once I draw it.  What I think I wanted to say was this: I see people and I see people around me navigating the world with three dimensional emotion and it's difficult to understand and comprehend and that's what's driven me to find a way to help myself understand how it is possible and why it is happening.

Fluid forms.  In talking to them, I see their is as globules, sometimes pointed, inside the "normal" sphere.  I think that's part of what makes some internet communities appealing.  Shapes and occupied head spaces leaning and pointing or bubbled inside the normal (sometimes completely occupying the normal sphere) in ways that make the viewer marvel.  When I cut down and cut apart myself when I reach extroversion I don't see a shape.  I see surface breaches.  I see points on the three dimensional graph.  A series of two dimensional graphs, but no contiguous rays making up a region of space or continuous rays extending from vegetable zero.  Digital emotion.

Not everyone is represented by a sphere at the breach.  Some people are cubes, some people are tetrahedrons, etc and on to the Nth until you meet that perfectly spherical person who occupies spaces inside of it, but who is completely capable of occupying the entire thing or at least an amalgam of the outermost sphere or occupying a spherical space inside of the "normal."  It makes me confused and jealous.  100 percent of each.

A method of control.  Controlling which paints hit the canvas and better controlling where and in what order. How to repair X state: move this point here and that one there and that one there and presto!   It's a notion.

Much more importantly though, I got myself into a conversation about ghosts.  I believe ghosts exist.  The world, my world, is fact enough to push it into the realm of plausibility.  At least that.  The conversation ran on and on for about an hour.  What I, and the company, realized was that it is possible to be a good ghost.  Let's say you knew you were going to die and knew what it was going to feel like when your body was about ready to quit.  Your relatives, or at least you, treated yourself well and the nurse was very helpful to boot, but you were still dead set on haunting someone at some point.  Get high first on whatever makes you happy.

For the sake of argument, let's say that most ghosts that haunt people have unfinished business or died in some horrible way.  That's why they're so mad all of the time.  To prevent this, when you're on your death bed ask for a little weed instead of a last meal or maybe in addition to it.  Get really really high and then die, because however you die is what form you will take so no shotguns to the face.   Could you imagine being high for the rest of eternity?  Yeah, it sounds a bit like some kind of hell, but once the hell syndrome wore off it would be a continuously hilarious experience.  Person: "Are you trying to scare me?"  High Ghost: "yes!  BooooOOOooOOOOoooooooo!"  You'd be the happiest and probably worst ghost ever, but it would be worth it.  What will they do?  Kill you twice?

dear (_____)

Dear notes,

It's been easy taking you when my phone is available, but batteries are fickle things and I'm gone back to pen and paper.  It's nothing personal, but a notebook never runs out of battery.

with love,

Mr. Analog

p.s. it's not a trust issue, it's a must issue.  XOXO

The Silliest Part About Dealing With Parents

You cut ties.  Awesome.  You had to cut ties because they gave you no other recourse.  Not so awesome.  The greatest thing though, the silliest, giggliest, thing about it is that you didn't have to burn their house down to make your own.  One step at a time, sugar sugar.  You're getting old, but you're doing it.  You're doing it.

I still remember winning the spelling bee when no fourth grader at P.S. 19 had beaten a fifth grader and all I got was the apple Ms. Smith gave me after.  I watched my little sister lose her spelling bee bid and they took her to toys r us to buy a doll, batman with the belt buckle that extended out and wrapped around foes and you pushed the button on his back and it would reel them in for a beatdown or snatch him up.  I saw knife bob and wanted it so hard, but she got her batman based on the first movie, was that Tim Burton?, and loved it and every time I saw her playing with hers it made me wonder if I did good enough.

Ain't no thing now.  It is.  I still think about that apple and wonder what they were trying to teach me in not taking me to Toys R Us.  I threw out the medal.  The pewter stunk up my nose and I got sick of looking at it.

P.S. 19, my favorite school.  Kickball and wallball, the two best games ever invented.


///Tom Vek - "If I Had Changed My Mind"    would I be here?  I think that's missing from work, official recess times.

That Instant

You realize you're not not proud of your daddy, but you still want his head on a stake outside of your apartment building because you can still pay him respects and he will not ever explain his actions.

Change, Other Peoples Clothes, Top Down Sun Up, and Attack

I think that's how I got good at defense.  Attacking is an entirely different bag.  Attack, attack, attack!  Get on it!  I don't do call and response all that well.  I do response.  A lot of my growing up and formative whatevers was response, not call.  I was raised not to call and it's been a hedge maze trying to get out of it.  When I do call it's usually over top of what I was calling for and it's blunderbussy.  Killing a fly with a hammer instead of a swatter and then I have to fix the hole in the wall left behind.  It's been fun learning though, learning how to call the right way when calls need to be made and learning that response shouldn't be the only way to integrate myself into lives, because they have lives too and waiting until you're screaming and bleeding out of the eyes is no way to go about inserting yourself into conversation.  I still need distance in a bad way, but a good way.  It keeps them safe and it keeps me safe from misunderstandings and not so shuffle crowds and that's a good thing.  The fewer the things flowing in the better I can handle, and then it's not a frag of choice.  I hate getting hooked on forks.  STOP GIVING ME CHOICES WITHOUT CHANCES TO BREAK UP BAD ONES!  That's my only qualm with the United States of Aye Merica.  The land of one time opportunity for too many of us.  I'd swing less opportunity for more chances any day.

If I could go back in time I wouldn't punch myself in the face or shake myself by the shoulders.  I'd kiss me.  Hard and furious and little me would be like "what the fuck, man!" and then I'd tell him "it gets rougher, harder, longer, and more ridiculous.  You're going to fire a staple through your hand by accident and it's going to suck, but you're going to try to get out of work early and it's going to be one of the worst days post parents that you'll hate.  It'll heal up alright and nearly seamless and your boss will be proud of you for getting things done, but you're gonna wish you took more time on the project.  Just sayin'.  You're gonna hate it for about two minutes, but you're gonna kiss the blood and move on."  Poof!  Time traveling me peaces out and little me scratches his eyebrow and mumbles "no way."

I'm wearing other people clothes from goodwill.  They're great!  Half the stuff I have on makes me wonder what could provoke someone to give them up.  I haven't bought myself a jacket in a long time.  It's been years and I hadn't really thought about it until now.  It was always my mother, well, not always.  Sometimes my dad would pass me one.  I still miss my Bell Atlantic jacket sometimes.  That thing was the tits.  Furry pockets, double layered body and a knit collar.  Loved it.  Don't love how I got it (from my father, I hate saying that, but it's true.  I hate thinking about "I came from that"s cuz it makes me sick and it probably shouldn't, still heated, still gotdamn heated, it's not gonna die, but I actually want it to.  If he wants to apologize, my terms are teeth.  Not all of them.  But give me one of your kanines and apology accepted.  Until then, and only because you outright refused me.... twice, til death), but that jacket was everything you could want in a jacket.  Nice and tough outer with ... aw, it's not leather... trying to think of the word... the outer was made of the stuff good work pants are made of.  The cuffs were knit too, just like the collar.  And you can't beat the Bell Atlantic logo on the chest.  So good!

I'm wearing other peoples clothes and it feels nice.  It feels right.  It feels good to have new things that I bought on my own with my own tastes instead of for all kinds of purpose.  Purposeless clothing rocks.  Why do you have that jacket?  No reasons beyond my own.  It tickles me to say that.  Everything has been so purpose driven toward survival and managing damage and matching in, but this time, this jacket isn't about matching in or history or family or learning how to run with the silverfish, it's just about wearing what I want to wear.  The thing about goodwill though, the darker side, is wondering about if some of my stuff is going to end up at one when for one reason or another, cut short, or left standing still, my things get out of time.  Is someone going to be eyeing my baseball jersey who also loves the number 78?  I'm not mad about it, but I wish I could meet them so we could talk about our affinity for 78 and how it came about.

Top downing it.  I tried to go ground up and I couldn't provoke myself to make the change to oemfail, so I'm taking it from the roof down and it hurts.  Thematics don't work backwards no matter how hard you try to grow them that way.  I do enjoy the brighter motif.  I really do.  We're gonna grow the font into a better color and adjust the images, but sometimes you just have to go into a room and sit down in it to begin to understand where it's coming from.  The same thing goes for people.  You'll never get a good read from afar.  Top downing it because I've been boxed out and there is no other option.  And I'm okay with that.

I don't like change.  Change is stupidly difficult.  Sometimes routine will betray you and catch you not paying attention and I think I like that worse.  I can be manipulated and gulled and switch backed fairly easily, but I like to think of it as a trade off.  A trade off I am willing to take.  Unwillingly at times.  Taking it though.  Brighter and brighter.  Years behind and still in meta jail with my fingers through the fence, but making keys.


///Mackelmore - "White Walls"  .... lean back... the more I listen to his album the more I enjoy it

that instant

you almost poked yourself through your messy parts because you fell into your chair too fast all upset about nothing again.   Take it down a notch, home slice.