Dear (_____)

Dear chips ahoy,

What happened guys?  Your cookies were practically perfect.  Holding them halfway under the lip of a cup of milk for between nine and ten seconds gave them the perfect amount of saturation... the maximum milk without losing the structural integrity of the cookie itself and dissolving the bonds between component flavor crystals.

You've changed.  You've tinkered too much.  Holding your entire cookie under milk has no effect.  Maybe in the pursuit of the perfect flavor... the perfect crystal nugget lattice... you've created a cookie impervious to milk.  How?  Why?  Half the fun was seeing how close I could get to perfect without pulling back half a cookie and the rest of it settling like fish food to the bottom of the cup.

You took a great thing and perfected the greatness out of it.

boo on you, chips ahoy.  I boo you, sirs.

Sincerely,

a former addict

That Instant

you realize, as far back as the beginning of Spring when that first heat wave came through, a tiny voice inside you has been craving A1 steak sauce and you know what must be done.

Dear (_____)

Dear ghosts,

I will not desert you.  I have to understand that I will not be able to protect you, that's on me.

Sincerely,

the mission.

Dear (_____)

Dear cyclist,

Driving a standard shift automobile involves fifty times the life or death and destruction decisions and judgement calls per 20 feet of road than piloting your bicycle.  Sorry I misjudged two of the literally tens of thousands of judgement calls I had to make today on my way home.

To be honest, diving into an intersection the instant it turned red was not a great call on your part either.  At any rate, next time, as someone who rides bicycles too and has been through several dozen mishaps, I would advise that you brush it off instead of standing astride your frame with your middle finger in the air.  Nothing makes things worse than trying to stage a demonstration of "what the hell, man?!  You all saw how innocent I was, right?! Fuck that guy!" at a busy intersection while everyone tries to make a decision or judgement call to wait or push their thousands of pounds of automobile around your tiny moment in a river of tens of thousands more.

Not everyone is trying  to fuck you.

S'not All Guts and Glory

It isn't.  I get overly dramatic.  It is a study.  It is very important to learn and understand appropriate responses, but the study need not dampen the human inside of you.  The human inside of you should never need or be dampened.

To put the darkness forward is a matter of preference, not necessity.  To attack every upcoming day is to ask for a war.  Approach it analog.  It's not coming at you digital.  One or zero or one or zero.  There is so much more that can be done.

The responses do push from one boundary to the other, but it is possible to find a zero beside the one, a one nestled in beside the zero, and start a new language.  That's happy.  Bad in a good way.  It's easier to view digitally, but better to view analog.

Failure is vision.  Wear your eyes.  Use them or be prepared to lose them and cry through your nose because nothing is supporting your eyelids.  Power chords.  I know I get obsessed with damage control.  It's only because damage is very difficult to control.

Damage requires a ton of run cycles and making plans A through G takes a ton of run cycles too.  I do wonder what I look like from the outside in these days.  It's a curiosity that demands attention.  It's not all bad though.  Don't let me get you down.

I have a lot of questions.  As I'm navigating my way through the years and continuing to find new ways to look at the mission and questioning the mission and my own value within the operations frame works, I am finding light not easy to describe.

At least, not easy to describe better without using terms embracing negative pasts.  It kind of strikes me as learning how to compose drawings using negative space.  Instead of tracing the damage and the brush fires limits, tracing the brush.

Tracing the wild life instead of the pelts.  Nature still speaks to me.  Tech and currency still eats me.  People continue to fascinate me though I find them terrifically repellent.  I try to keep one ear on the ground and one up to the sky.

I have to reassure myself that I am fine.  I have to maintain my distance.  I cannot allow distance to dissolve.  What I want cannot be obtained through casual means.  It will take explicit and thorough aggression.  

We are years away.  It's not all guts and glory.  Relax.  Absorb and do not over think.  It's not all bad.  It's not all analysis.  Do not remove the human from inside you.




///Bjork - "Hidden Place"  im simply suggesting

The Best Thing

about painting is that you know when you're done.  It sticks to a strict schedule.  The worst thing about exterior painting is that eventually you have to simply eat it and take the chance that it may not rain today, though it's in the forecast.  I need to talk to painters and read some insight to become a better painter.

Dear (_____)

Dear Ice Cream,

I know you are the cause of most of my tummy aches.  I know you are the solution to most of my tummy aches.  What I am wondering is why you have to make me sleepy sometimes.  Coffee and ice cream?  I dunno.  That sounds crazy, and quite frankly I'm not ready to make this a threesome.

sincerely,

don't ever change

Served Notice

I have been served notice.  I know I will reread many times over.  I know that is why I serve myself notice.  Not more than ten and not less than five minutes.

There was something I was supposed to remember to start and I think I got down the beginning point.  As long as you've got the beginning you can kind of watershed your way down to the particular and desired stream.

Sometimes when the sun comes up there is a feeling of intense relief.  It's nice.

I know there is something I'm supposed to bang out, I can't .... there's a disconnect between head and mouth I would like to redress, but I can't remember the true course.

That's fine.  I won't dwell on it.  Doesn't mean it won't tear me up on my insidy parts.

You know what I did today though?

I think I got it.  Not to interrupt, but I think I got it this time.  Sometimes I get hot at my footnotes.  Sometimes I remember I would not be without them.  Many shout "tear down the wall!"  Few know why it's there in the first place.

Simulations, Run Times and Control

Simulation is an art form.  Everyone's guilty.  Shut up, you're guilty.  Every compromise is another exhibit, another piece of evidence, but you're nothing wrong for it.  It means that you are reading and absorbing.  Where structure rattling shifts occur are when you've overstepped is all.  That's fine.  If it's not, it should be.  Deception is not an art.  Deception is a skill.  There's a difference.

Simulation is an art form and a means of communication and should be maintained.  Not must be, but should be.  It's a token.  It's a tipped hat.  There is no fault with simulation.  To read, to understand, to emulate, to produce circumstances in which the assumed can thrive, with or without the other's knowledge, is an art and, furthermore, to be absorbed in the simulation wholehearted is to complete it, and to find completion being a crime is simply absurd.  Refuse crime.

To the larger point, bottling sounds of my thoughts through snippets offered through social media is not whoring.  It is simulation refined and semi-successful and semi-failure.  I am comfortable with that and uncomfortable at the same time.  The act, itself, plays directly into the multifacet self.  The concept of conscious faced through planes of a gem cut (or not) through experience and trying to catch the most acceptable light from the most appealing angle not because there is a drive to appeal and appease and assure, because there is, within the contract of citizenship to this planet, a very very important subtext and rule line x, dash alphabet, dot n, that says you can either participate or margin.

The approach to social media is always a tricky one.  Not for offering opportunities for criticism; for offering opportunities for connection.  There is much less value in not offering a front door and at the same time expecting the line to run from there, down to the sidewalk, and around the corner.  A certain amount of simulation must happen.  Consider it something akin to taking the temperature of a moment.  Consider it too, an argument that specialized and targeted results diminish the quality of the simulation each and every time that impetus is to be obeyed and deviation will be cause for changes not, surface, necessary.

Hunting for ghosts should be saved for television.  Things go bump in the night.  Dealing with things that go bump in the night should not be necessary, and is.  I'm not celebrating it.  Have lust for the ones you don't dare.  Few things truly scare me in life.  It is part production.  Part assumption of past fears like putting on clothes so those around you can feel more comfortable being around and talking the same way you can talk and fearing the same way you can fear.  If there is a subtext, a foot note, to the experience it is that I saw someone who truly scared me because I never laid eyes on it before and it has me rattled because I never want to see it again.

I saw, for lack of a better term, a ghost.  I have no idea how to explain it.  It was not a ghost or a spirit.  It was not an after image burned onto my retinas so I happened to wake up two hours later and blink a lot and rub the corner of the eye snot away and coughed to make sure I was awake.  It was something I hope to never see again and it burned me on the inside simply to lay eyes on it.

I got out of bed and walked around it and it kept saying "you can fly in your sleep" and I do not know what it meant.  You can fly in your sleep.  You can fly in your sleep.  It only came up to near chest height.  I kept walking around it to make sure it was three dimensional.  I was running tests, mental tests, to be sure that I was not asleep and that it was not a figment and it kept talking and did not hold the usual humanoid, warped and not, shapes or the usual animal, warped and not, shapes.

To pin my psychological misgivings current on its existence feels like a cop out.  It's there though, watching me and I desperately would like to do something about it.  I don't want to sleep.  I don't want to sleep knowing it can enter my apartment with no sound.  Where did you come from?!  Go away!  Go away!  I have not seen it since its first appearance, but I feel it.  It makes my skin itch.  How do I kill you?

I've grown comfortable with some of them to the point where I can say hello, nod, and continue on.  They're almost like family or pets or even, I'd go so far as to say, fixtures like lamps or hat racks and sometimes they yap, but it's getting easier to ignore them.  Not easier, but second nature through strict training.  My breath is still snatched away now and then when they are where they are not supposed to be and the agreement that I assume is broken because they and my own paths cross without warning and my face is not our face and they are.

I don't want to go to sleep.  I am afraid it will visit again.  I am much more afraid that it is a returned.  I'm not prepared to deal with that.  My techniques and knowledge have advanced enough to protect against signs and travelers and after images and beckonings and name calling and interpolations and ringers and false alerts and I ...  ... don't know it and I cannot be caught engaging it and .........  I should not be talking about it.  I have to.  For record.  To help me better.  As far as I go.  The lights will be kept on.  Fear no man.  It is, this I know, no man.

I had an odd dream.  I dreamt I had a sex change surgery.  Except the Earth, this planet, was so far advanced, or smoothed, that all outward adornment went by the wayside.  To the point where nature and tech apexed to an uncomfortable coexistence.  To the point where every injury, every modification, needed no bandage and had no boundary for it's obviousness.  We were sitting at a hookah bar and passing a cigarette between each of ourselves and someone commented that my penis looked better where it was and we railed for a minute and then got home sick and wished we'd telecommuted to the outing instead because we liked our new body a lot, but no one stuck up for us so we smoked some more instead.  Then we blinked and when our eyelids opened we were not on sand world again.

We were walking down a street where each and every person walked too, fully clothed, but the backs of their heads were all torn out, blown out, by something.  Grapefruit sized holes.  Deer slugs?  Their eyes were fine.  Their faces for the most part.  Whatever went in must have gone through their mouths.  Everything smelled like take out food Bronx tenements.  It was queasy.

I'm not saying it's the return of the monster.  It's not.  I am afraid.  I am dreaming.  I am sleep walking.  I am not sleep walking.  You are not sleep walking.  You are reading this.  Pause here.  Whatever it was you were thinking about doing, pause here for at least five minutes, but not more than ten.  Whatever it was, it will be back.  You can handle it.  Do not be afraid.  No crying.  No hiding.  If it can get in, it can do more and it has chosen not to.  Do not talk to it.  Do not engage it.  Do not engage it.  Do not engage it.  Do not name it.  Do not listen to it.  Listen without hearing.  Always remember.

I am trying to remember, trying very hard, to remember the name of the one I gave away to a friend and the price (I do remember that torture) I paid when he called him through text messages.  It needn't be repeated.  Once was enough.  Learn from mistakes.  To this day I do not think he realizes how far open I had to be to do that and how stupid I was to do that.  Learn from mistakes.

I am trying very hard to remember and I can't and you know what?  I am happy it is struck from memory.  I am happy I can review the pages of notes and review the eye reel and find no hints.  It means I did something right.  I remember the weeks and the forced in closeness and needing to give for what I received and splitting cigarettes on the balcony and looking at the enormous clockwork gears ticking over behind the tree line near Bloomfield and the memory tape ends there and I do not want to discover what was buried there ever again.




///The Grid - "Crystal Clear (Clear Water Revival Mix)"  Henry remembered his mother and preferred not to.

That Instant

you remember a fly at sixty miles per hour looks a lot faster than a boulder at sixty miles per hour, but the energy is inverse.

Love

"I love you so much."  Everyone's heard it before.  Everyone's been there, done that.  The kind of love I feel for you is the sort that forces me to roll up a newspaper and smack myself on the nose and hiss "No!  You are not allowed to do that.  Don't eat them!  And don't you dare try to figure out a loophole to gain the same sensation through different means.  They won't appreciate it and you know better.  NO!"  Smack, smack, smack, smack, smack.  It makes me laugh a little bit when it works out well.  Smack, smack.  Thank the maker for the guy who invented free weights. It helps burn things off.  I wish someone was holding my leash.  I have to keep my ears open for when the rattle of the woven plastic gets noisy and I know I'm moving too fast and am liable to outrun my vision.  If someone were holding the other end of it, problem solved.  Unless they are dragged streetlong behind me.  Problem multiplied.  I love you so much.  I want you inside of me so that I can see you all of the time, whenever I wanted to, and you could see me to.  I can't eat you, though.  Besides, if you were mated to my atoms you could never escape.  Everyone must escape from time to time.  It's for our own good.  I love you so much.  Bring your teeth.  Let's find something beautiful.  I'll roll with you, but let me howl.




///Blind Boys of Alabama - "Amazing Grace"  run run run run run run run run r

You Need To Vibrate Higher and The Good News (and the bad news)

I want to get the bad news out of the way first, but the bad news is also the good news.  Let's do that first.  The good news is we've made some changes, but they will not stick.  Self doubt.  The results were not at all to expectation.  The expectation was, through dropping metaphor, there could be achieved a clearer stage of communication between people, but it only introduced severe complications.  We're going to go ahead and burn that solution so hard it leaves shadows against the walls of my head.

It was a spirited effort and executed to the best of our abilities, but ultimately a failure.  Well intentioned though.  It introduced an incredible amount of doubt in meaning and second guessing, even more so than the use of extended metaphor.  "Is now the time to be blunt?"  "Are you being blunt enough?"  "Who are you speaking for because I know for damn sure you are not speaking for me."  There was an excessive amount of hate and miscommunication circulating because of the effort and action to connect A to D effectively.  It was a worthy pursuit.  Always diagnose actionable thoroughfares.  ADAT.

ADAT is a friendly reminder to carry with you.  When confusion eats in, the best way back toward organization is through ADAT.  Understand, however, there is only so much to be gained in terms of growth through deviation from the path best traveled.  It's not about volume or trail blazing.  Select what will allow you to travel and utilize your abilities to the best of their purpose.  What good is the path less traveled if you're not equipped to attack it?  What good is the path most traveled if you're not equipped to attack it?  Destruction.

I'm not going to put on my sage hat because I don't have one.  Mostly, I could really go for some coke right now.  I think I already told you, but every time I hear the Coca Cola commercial that ends with "smile because it's coke" I snicker a little because I know other people have caught it too.  We're all people.  Some of us are more people than others.

I have to remind myself that I am not spinning my wheels.  If I was it would be, easily, the show stopper of all burn outs at the muscle car convention.  I am not marking time (I am).   I am side tracking myself, but still tracking.

Anyway, the good news is we are making some changes.  The bad news is we are making some changes.  What has been added cannot be subtracted because it will tirelessly and quietly shred my insides with abandon.  There's is no doubling back.  There is, but I will not forgive myself if I do.  I am not looking forward to changes.  I will still ask questions because I have the memory capacity of a goldfish when it comes to current events that do not scar hard enough to wake up the following day and demand investigation.  Which is fine.  That, we can do.  You don't have to punch me in the brain pan, you just have to make sure I will ask myself about it later and get some answers.  The latter half of that being key.

You need to vibrate higher.  As unpleasant as it sounds, it must be done.  Not in the spirit of further development or outside tracking or productivity or any multi-syllabic word.  In terms of exorcising the engine.  The engine has been well breathed of late, but needs exorcised.  Far too many misfires.  What was accomplished recently could have been accomplished four weeks ago if not for the misfires.  Those should be remedied.

Remediation through vibration.  Knocking and being quiet enough to hear the knock back.  It's not easy.  It is very easy to allow distraction.  It's not easy to be quiet enough to hear the knock back loud enough to know whereabouts to knock next.  That's the hard part.  I think that's where I've been dropping the ball.  Forgotten how to navigate silence.  Not entirely forgotten, but locked the skill away for reasons I do not clearly remember, but looking at it from the outside I suspect it had something to do with trying to actively connect with people.  A holdover from a submission that failed or succeeded (hell if I know) that was still being invoked to the detriment of the rest of us.

There is nothing in the desert.  And no man needs nothing.  Aberrations, hallucinations, and oasis's and dry docks aside... that was a mistake.  Actually, not aside, but in hand.  It was a mistake and poorly executed operation.  S'ok though, don't mug yourself.  Mistakes are made to learn repair.  You're going to jam it up again.  We both know this.

The good news is we're going to make changes.  The bad news is we're going to make changes.  We will vibrate higher.  Hibernation is not an option.  Do not convince yourself otherwise.  Get mad.  You know what you are.  Stop talking yourself out of it.  Stop fighting it.

Things have been a bit upside down.  It's very difficult to connect with people and continue to maintain the routine that is so desperately needed.  I have not been so outwardly frustrated with how clearly against the grain of normal I am than I have been through this last month.  It's like getting hit in the teeth with a metal ruler on full spring.  My head keeps screaming "GET AWAY FROM ME OR I WILL RUN!" and I don't know what to do about it.

I think that's why I cherish and despise free time at once.  Free time is too much time to think and work is too much work to create.  It would be different if it was a mixture of the two.  It would be different if I could handle a tincture of the two.  I cannot.  It has to be one or the other.  And still, atop that, is the difficulty, the pain of emotion that keeps coming stamped "on pain of death" if not exercised.  I want to feel, as much as you do.  I want to feel and not force.  I do not understand why they must force me.  Sometimes the forcing is enjoyable.  It wakes me up where I would otherwise fall dead, emotionless.  I cannot take it all of the time though.  Why can they not understand that?  I want to say no.  My body tells me no.  My head tells me no.  My heart tells me no.  So where is this motor coming from?

Am I an extension of you?  Not again.  Not again.  Not again!  Yes, again.  I'm not.  I don't love many people.  Not in terms of justifying existences or anything near that cosmic in scale.  More important, I don't trust many people.  I'm not sure where I'm going with it.

Collecting.

I wish we spoke the same language instead of crying.

Crying being universal and cross dimensioned, but all too simple to express the depths to which we go.




///Massive Attack & David Bowie - "Nature Boy"