That Instant

you realize you have to make choices for your weekend.  You can sell or you can buy X or Y and sell, but you might need it later, but where you're going you will need fuel to get to so do you steal gas or... you realize you've made it when you don't have to choose.

Stand Up Act 8 (stoneissuers, night work, handouts and nickle go)

(Stand Up Act 7)

Goddamn stoners.  God fucking damn stoners.  I don't have a problem with them for the most part.  I really don't.  Pot is legal in more states than anyone could have imagined three years ago.  Not even a decade, just three years.  Unless I'm completely off and time has been moving faster than I thought.  Or slower than I thought.  I'm not good with time.  It has nothing to do with drugs, just alcohol.  And college.  In college everything is oriented to due dates and when you need to wash your clothes because you're going home to your parents and they reek of the actual world instead of the bubble they built for themselves wherever.  I'm not good with time, but pot is legal and it's great.  It should be legal.  There is nothing wrong with it at all.

All kinds of legal things turn people into worthless sacks of shit all of the time and they're fine.  Weed doesn't even do that to people on a consistent basis.  If you smoke a pound of weed a month you will be in much better shape than the person who eats ten pounds of candy a month.  To the point though, I don't hate smokers or pot smokers, but stoners are a bit different.  Stoners are that one shade further beyond the smoker, for better and for worse.

Some stoners need that extra nudge to push and motivate and inspire them to operate and create and shove work through and enjoy other people and enjoy the chase of life in general.  Some stoners like that extra nudge to mooch and coast, but not just coast, but accelerate, and entertain and smooth their own course through the path of least resistance, not as a way of escape or relaxation, but as a way to live.

Everything takes on the slight pale of life and death once they enter the circle.  A routine trip to the gas station becomes a twenty minute conversation on the meaning of life and how hard it is to survive in the real world and if God hadn't created the man who created the coldcut sandwich the world as we know it would be horribly altered and disfigured to the point where walking out of your front door would be suicide.  Jesus christ, calm down.  We're gonna get food.  I know you couldn't bring yourself to leave your front door without someone walking with you, but for fucks sake, it's not the end of the world.  Not by a long shot.

I'm even okay with adventurous stoners.  The kind that get really high and then want to operate.  I'm a little bit of an adventure stoner streaker myself from time to time.  I know it's obnoxious in some ways.  It doesn't mean that I don't do it and want to push other people to, but I am that, and I'm never really all that sad when people shoot me down.  When I'm smoking, "I just had the absolute greatest idea ever" is the last thing you want to hear out of my mouth.  For one: it's probably a way too elaborate or distant quest to achieve a goal unique to me that I couldn't do without other people there (everything from playing some sort of multiplayer only game to crossing some distance to see or buy something much better crossed in a car).  For two: there's probably a good chance someone might actually get hurt (adds to the allure of the adventure.  When you have bad credit all you have is yourself, so while you gamble with imaginary numbers and scores, I gamble with my body...  because I have no credit).  And for three: by the time the idea comes out of my mouth, no one feels like moving.  I'm okay with that.

The stoner I can no longer stand is the stoneissuer.  The girl or guy who always wants to know what you have and then compares it to other high end "brands" they've had.  No one asked you.  Literally, no one asked you for your opinion on how this stacks up to Phonecase White Palidin (insert semi-obscure flower phylum here).

Yes, that's why I invited you over: to stick your nose into my bag and not shake your head, but give me the "weird" eye and ask the admonishing question of  "how much did you pay for this."   I'm begging the question in offering it, aren't I.  I needed your expertise.  I wasn't just bored the fuck out of my mind and out of videos to jerk off to and thought it might be fun to have someone else to talk to for an evening.  No, I wanted your sharp nose and your ten point critique of what is essentially free weed for you.  I'm not basically paying for your company like a truck driver picking up some fawn eyed drifter for a few hours of bullshitting til the next stop.

You asked to drop by and what I wanted you to do was pull out your pocket scale and shake your head and tell me I was lied to and it was almost a gram light and repeat over and over again that back home you wouldn't have paid over X amount of dollars for what I had while you ground up your Panda Blue Light Special shipped in from the west coast.

The stoneissuer is particularly distasteful because as soon as theirs runs out you are the first one they call.  You are the first one they try to buddy up with and then they come over and try to be modest about how much they are taking and go out of their way to point it out that they are somehow doing you a favor because what they usually get is more pure and they're not used to smoking a gentler high and the taste is way off but they can get accustomed to it.   Meanwhile the baseball bat in the corner keeps chirping in your ear "come on, just do it," but I love company more than my own sometimes and know better than to act out and act out of rage.   Most of the time.

The stoneissuer will trash talk you sideways.  The kind of person who, in a race, would nudge your back end out and force you off the road to get ahead and then say "well, I was holding my same racing line, but you were diverting from your own to hold me back, so it's kind of your fault you spun out into sand on your last lap."  They will passive attack in attempts to try to insure and assert their value to the group as the token expert, without realizing that no one really cares as long as they get something out of experience.

Stoneissuers are usually descended from higher, no pun intended, echelons of the hierarchy of smokers.  Rich folks all too often, trying to distance themselves, but be included in, the experience.  The thing that makes them the most distasteful is that, if they aren't already motivated to stay away from the lower grades for the fact that moving up is sort of a socioeconomic graduation and going backward implies some sort of failure in tastes or earning power or status, as soon as their shit runs out and they go enough days without it, they're right back with you.  Suddenly what made them curl their lips and flare their nostrils and roll their eyes like you just said One Direction is the greatest band to grace the face of the Earth, becomes "hey, that's not so bad.  I kind of feel it."  Suddenly "how much did you pay for that" and "you got ripped off" turns into "that's pretty good" and "is it alright if I steal some more?"

Yeah, it's fine, but nightwork is great.  I think I realized one of the reasons why I like working night shifts so much, and it's nothing profound.  It comes down to the fact that I don't give all that much of a shit when it comes to my clothes.  It's not a complete abandon fueled by the functionality of homeless people.  Nothing close to that.  I have no one to impress so it makes no sense to impress people.

Sometimes it's a matter of detailing.  Everyone likes a well detailed car or house, why not clothing.  I am sometimes gripped by the thrill of matching.  It's real.  I am aware of my body and I ride in my body all the time.  Everyone does.  When things match, it's easier to not notice it and when you do notice it, you have color cues to make that understanding zip through your brain that much faster and then, that much faster, you can carry on being yourself.  For the same reason I don't read too much into people obsessed with matching.  It really is a matter of cutting down variables and freeing up much more, or at least that much more, free time and better yet, uninterrupted thought and brain space.  That's pretty damn valuable for the small price of picking out clothing beforehand.

Consider when you're deep in thought after work, pulling the day in front of your eyes like that choppy 8mm film on the two spools that burns up if you leave it in front of the lens too long.  That stuff your parents parents watched home videos of themselves on in dusty attics or family renunion Wonder Times grainy video project screen things or whatever it was they did kind of things.

That spool is running and you're trying to figure out ways to do that again, but without that 45 seconds of frames in the lunch break room where you put the pack of coffee filters you didn't pay for in your locker and that 72 second stretch of frames where you could've and also would've done your job better because you actually do care, but come off wrong sometimes over the phone.  That spool is running and right in the middle of it.  When you are beginning to build some understanding, it switches to a high definition video of rally cross for an hour compressed into ten seconds and switches back.  Bad news.

That's what makes night work so great.  It takes the work out of work.  You can up and go with pants with their crotch completely ripped out and no one gives a shit and it already blends in with rest of the night because the lighting is so poor so even if you did look down it wouldn't matter because you can't see anything.  It's a near perfect situation.  Everything is dark and everything follows that dark pattern so even if someone did think they could see something, they wouldn't be able to really know beyond what's inside their own head and everyone knows as much as half of what's in their is bullshit anyway.

Nobody wants handouts.  Sometimes you have to help your dealers, because some of them do it for a living and are subject to market forces same as any kind of investor.  The truth is there are two sorts of dealers.  There are the shorters and the careers.  The shorters are on a temporary schedule.  Volatile products and volatile prices.  They're on the get wealthy very quickly and retire permanently track or supplementary income (McDonalds) track.

Sometimes you have to help folks out.

"Do you want some gas money?  I can just bring you some money for gas.  I don't want anything right now."

"You might as well take it though.  You can use it for something is all I'm saying."

"I know, but I would rather have the money for later, 'cause there isn't a bank I can go to is what I mean.  That's you're issue right now."

"If you just take this right now, I'm fine with that.  I just need to put gas in my car because I had to push it off the street when the engine stopped."

Pineapple Express backwards.  I always feel a little bad when my parting words are "hey, take care of yourself."  Even when nothing is given, the sentiment itself implies the person it's directed to is completely incapable of and must be reminded to do better by their machinery.  Nobody wants hand outs.  Ever.

Happiness is contagious.  I'll give you a nickle both to go down either road A or road B.  Whichever makes me happy as I go is the one I'm taking.

Dissolving (some) Isolation, September 11th, Launch, and Laughter (touching roots)

It's been a long time.  It had to be.  I had a lot of things I needed to think about and learn an acceptable way to grasp, but I did!  That's good.  You know what else is good?  Coke's slogan.  I thought about it all day when I heard the commercial and now I can't remember what the hell it was, but I'm sure it'll come back to me tomorrow when I'm not thinking.

I will think of coke and remember the slogan for Coke that cracked me up because it was so dual apt they couldn't have done it by accident.  Look it up.  I don't assign homework in general and almost as a rule, but look it up.  I was just thinking though, I have never assigned homework unless I had to.  I kind of make a bad teacher in that way sometimes.  I think that's the way it should be though; if you always come to class and never miss one you should be as well informed as the person who never goes to class, but reads the textbook cover to cover.

Sorry, I got distracted.  I didn't know where to start and I've been looking for a way to start again, but nothing has lead back here the way I expected it to and then I was all out for starting points and so far away that I was all in for whatever I could find to begin again and I found what I was not happy to find but I'll throw it off from the edge of the rooftop and watch it fall down and try to make sense of it.  Okay?  Let's go:

September 11th.  The day that changed 'merica.  It didn't.  America is still what it was.  Only a little more paranoid.  This day used to have a little more bite.  I used to remember the servicemen I know and knew (not because they died, we just stopped being as close as we used to be) and the new ones I've met while fishing the river on a slow Thursday.  I used to remember them with incredible reverence.  Not so much anymore.

The one's still in are in because they want to be.  The ones that are out are out on good terms and very well compensated, on the pay scale I aspire to climb toward that kind of stability, and have awesome resumes.  I guess that still burns me a little on this day.  Getting near perfect scores on the entrance test and damn near perfect on the physicals and getting bounced on psychological failures.  The whole talk my dad gave me about "the family standard of excellence."  I didn't want to cry or weep.  I just wanted to pop out of existence with a genie wink when going in and making it as an infantryman and working a way up could be viewed as tarnishing "the family standard of excellence."  I still makes me laugh out loud today to say it aloud.

Part of what makes me laugh is that, incidentally, he was right.  After taking a year or two to think about it a little harder, I can see that I would have been a skittish, trigger happy, blood hungry, question asking, thinking, liability to the cause.  I would have gotten myself and other people killed, given a uniform, a weapon, and a theater.  That's just coincidence, though, pure coincidence, so it doesn't really count.  At all.
Serendipity.

"Are you dead or are you sleeping, God, I sure hope you are dead."  Dealing with a little paranoia break, but that's neither here nor there.

September is also the anniversary of the longest intimate relationship I ever was able to be a part of and it was fantastic.  I forgot the date the first three years we were together.  Finally made the brilliant move to add it to my phone.  It stayed there after we broke up.  I can vaguely remember some of the gifts, one of the gifts, I gave her. I think the others were holiday related.  I can remember trying to figure out how to get flowers delivered to her office and the whole runaround I got.  I can also vividly remember the violent times.  The times when my brain fractured.  The times when truth was too much for me to eat.

I am laughing because it is remembering the times when, more than anything else, I wanted the laws of interpersonal physics to suspend themselves.  I do not know, though.  Life is long.  Who else are you going to travel the spectrum of drugs with when you're too old to work and done everything else and the prospect of shagging is as interesting as scrubbing your bathtub?  Blackouts.  Retirement is going to be an amazing thing.

So, September 11th used to be like holding a revolver in my mouth and pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked over several times while fingering an empty casing from the gun range.  Not anymore.  I'm passed it.  Nothing's going to change my world, sweetness.

We will modify, sometimes ad hoc, we will destroy and build, we will continue to drive toward some kind of perfect state, but we will mow down no one else along the way.  We will remain honest and not overly dramatic, maybe, we will masturbate to idle thoughts of bodily violence, we will maintain course and get to know the new ship, we will cultivate friendship, and build ourselves into better people instead of weapons.  We will.

I don't want to spend too much time on this.  I've been trying to structure my paragraphs better and slash the blocks into verses.  The poet that keeps clawing it's way out of my mouth.  I don't want to spend too much time on this and I'm three hours in so let's call it close.

I love you.  I do.  I shouldn't.  If I could bury you each and be the one with the shovel over night, I would cum.  It is a strange thing, I know.  I love helping people, so much.   There is no replacing the feeling of helping someone solve a problem and secure a future outcome 100%.   100% assured that what they wanted was what they were going to get.  Nothing replaces that.  Wherever you are.

I've been working to dissolve some isolation.  It's important.  An important thing.  Once I finish the project I am working alone I am going to need to be able to interact on a normal basis to get another job to fill the money void.  Money drives everything, doesn't it?  More than that is learning how to interact with people without a group to diffuse the messy bits to.  It's easy to do when there are many other magnetic orientations to diffuse field lines to.  Not so much otherwise.

I am approaching a point where isolation will become counterproductive.  Flat out. For a time.  There are many options for filling the counter point to weigh it into a cantilever support system.  Ad hocced.  Performing the expense reports in my mind.  It's not going to work.  I think that is part of growing up.  Growing the capacity to do that and know with some certainty what is bound to fail when it comes to tolerable and intolerable acts of personality.

I am getting closer toward dissolving some aspects of isolation.  One finger on the trigger that will close fire bulkheads.  I don't know what process or loop or instantiation will trigger something terrible, but I am prepared to eject instantaneously.  I'm not your project.  I am project enough for myself. Here come old flattop.

We are you friends.  We are your friends.  We are shoving off from the scrap yard brand new in many ways.  The new ship is troubleshot and configured.  There is nothing more to it than to do it.  We are launching.  We are reentering circles and seeing what snow will fall and where and what kinds of sculpture we can make of it until the sun comes up and melts it all.  We are launching.  Granted we were stocked up and manned up a week prior, but we didn't have the heart at the wheel to give chase to open sea.  We do know.  We are ready.  Cobbled together from many different pieces, we are ready to see if it works.  Shove off, baby.

Getting back to laughter.  Getting back to what makes us laugh.  Back to the roots of what made me start in the first place.  Gain some understanding.  At first it was a reaching out, it became a gps, and now it's a tough out.  I don't like to think inwardly.  As tough an out as they come.  It's still a map.  I'm on the far edge of it and it keeps drawing beyond the dark part of the space of influence.  I think I am getting back to laughter.

Back to being able to really, really, indulge in the spaces life does afford for taking nothing too seriously and taking everything too seriously.  That magical place where living life, at least the way you understand it presently, like it is your last day jives with the fact that, barring absolute worst outcomes in tandem, it probably isn't.

You're going to have to live with, regardless of how you or someone else can spin it, what you did today.

I want to spend that time laughing.  We're launching again.  We are equipped for combat, need it arise, we are equipped for food, it will arise, and we are equipped to question ourselves and somethings (not everythings) anew.  We are equipped to observe and equipped for some closeness.  We have an L six two D load out and we are ready to rock.

I am perpetually intermittently disappointed with myself. Lack of ability to grow networks combined with... grows.  I wonder if I am some kind of cancer embodied sometimes.  A walking carcinogen.  You go back to her and I go back to... I feel like I am in a very long race to eliminate myself or as many people as I can take down at once.  It's nothing personal.  It's sporting.  Not immediately but, I don't know.

Some days, walking down the street, I look at myself in the store front windows reflected, and it's a pretty damn cool thing to see that ambulating to wherever and enjoy that remove.  There's no vanity there for me.  Just trekking and knowing that we're doing it.  We're doing it!  We are out of doors and doing alright.  I don't love the birds looking back sometimes with that "not if you were the last man on Earth" look.  What the hell is that about?

We're doing this.  I am as over myself as I'll ever be.  It's passed time to laugh again.  Laugh about little things genuinely.  It's easy to see the world as whole.    It's passed time to really chew on it again.  Launch probes.  Explore and navigate from afar or as far as possible, but do not be afraid to take readings from the machines you employ.  It's time, however briefly, to try again to square up vision with reality and  you'll never know how far off you are, or've been, unless that depleted round sails downrange.


///DJ? Acucrack - "Allegra"  ... this is the soundtrack to stalking yourself.  Searching out, the movie score. This is, bassed up, the chase; the quiet chase between functional and passable (between blending and fitting in).