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.
12/31/15
The Best Thing
about age is that as you trade indestructibility for time faster and faster, your tolerance for pain increases at a symmetric enough rate to allow you a buffer of months, sometimes years, to change just enough to continue living, exploring, and modifying against and with the ever changing world around you.
That Instant
you realize the reason the guy you met on your way home from work and had over for some television and a beer and some laughs to help you feel some connection with the everyday world and humanize yourself is not returning your texts to hangout because he stole things from your apartment and figured you were going to notice, albeit 36 hours later.
12/25/15
Dear (______)
Dear Santa,
I know we've been at odds over the last several years. It's almost going on a dozen. I don't hate you and you don't hate me. I remember that year that I wished for only obtainable shiz. I remember that other year that I only wished for very specific and obtainable shiiii... and I got what I wished for. I'm back to setting my bars high. I hope you're back to singing in four four/
Boiling it down: I will not. That's all. There's no second part to it. As close as we will get.
///what ive been waiting for all years
I know we've been at odds over the last several years. It's almost going on a dozen. I don't hate you and you don't hate me. I remember that year that I wished for only obtainable shiz. I remember that other year that I only wished for very specific and obtainable shiiii... and I got what I wished for. I'm back to setting my bars high. I hope you're back to singing in four four/
Boiling it down: I will not. That's all. There's no second part to it. As close as we will get.
///what ive been waiting for all years
12/24/15
Prior To the Holidays
I want a tank for Christmas. Or a giant robot decked out in yellow, orange, and pink and black. Or a Gulf blue and orange Z car. Or a plot of land on which to build my miniature fortress.
I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year. He knows what he did. Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus. Robo Claus. I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot. I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa. That dude. That guy. Nuke the North Pole. I am already drawing up the campaign posters. That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny. The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice. It'll save the world. A few decades later, nuke the South Pole. Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time. You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.
It doesn't really feel like Christmas. I haven't talked much about holidays. We live in a different world now. The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds. I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am. It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays. I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time. I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected. A certain amount of migration. Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount. There's a massive difference.
For the first time I have put up evergreens! The sensation and scent is wonderful. Not a tree. I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own. I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window. I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year. Next year we will add some layers to the design. Ornaments too. It will be pretty spectacular. By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.
I think that is what may have been happening this year. A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course. Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them. All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.
The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline. I'm up for the challenge. I believe I am up for the challenge. It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world. It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is. A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.
I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life. It's not my new year. Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31. My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas. An odd alignment of perspectives I guess. I can't help chuckling. It is an odd confluence of parameters. At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.
I do not hate the holidays. All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay. Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated. Actually, I love them. Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least. Those ten years will fly.
///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance" when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.
I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year. He knows what he did. Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus. Robo Claus. I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot. I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa. That dude. That guy. Nuke the North Pole. I am already drawing up the campaign posters. That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny. The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice. It'll save the world. A few decades later, nuke the South Pole. Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time. You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.
It doesn't really feel like Christmas. I haven't talked much about holidays. We live in a different world now. The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds. I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am. It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays. I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time. I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected. A certain amount of migration. Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount. There's a massive difference.
For the first time I have put up evergreens! The sensation and scent is wonderful. Not a tree. I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own. I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window. I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year. Next year we will add some layers to the design. Ornaments too. It will be pretty spectacular. By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.
I think that is what may have been happening this year. A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course. Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them. All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.
The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline. I'm up for the challenge. I believe I am up for the challenge. It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world. It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is. A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.
I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life. It's not my new year. Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31. My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas. An odd alignment of perspectives I guess. I can't help chuckling. It is an odd confluence of parameters. At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.
I do not hate the holidays. All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay. Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated. Actually, I love them. Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least. Those ten years will fly.
///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance" when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.
That Instant
You realize your air conditioner is still in your window for good reason. Thunder storm downpour on Christmas eve? Sure. I still have to convince my body Winter is around the corner. When that transition actually happens and you have to wear a spacesuit again for the first time, it's going to be epic and the vertigo undeniable.
12/19/15
In Consideration of Empathy
You attack and beat yourself up over your inability to see eye to eye with your brother. Eye to eye about what? Everything. Not everything, just things now. The formation and configuration of our immediate family. Who funds what and why. Who goes and does what and where. Who can. Why do you want to see eye to eye with him on that? You just watched a video of yourself dancing and you thought it was awesome, but the truth is if bodies could have Tourette Syndrome, you would probably be the poster boy with Elaine Benes as the prom Queen. Why do you want to see eye to eye with him at all? You are two completely different human beings, down to sexual orientations and the arrangement of your individual eyelashes. You are not supposed to agree. You are about as different as they come between siblings. You do realize this, I hope. You are a stamped coin. Do you get it now? You are never going to see eye to eye about just about everything. If you want to see the other side, you are probably going to have to bend time and space and, last I heard, that shits pretty difficult with a thousand acre facility so good luck trying to do it with a few cubic inches of fatty gray matter.
You don't have to see anything his way. He doesn't have to see anything your way. What is this weird aggression toward a shared emotional experience? It's not there. Stop looking. I don't say that as a warning sign like marking something so damaging and toxic you will die immediately, if not soon after. I say that as a time saver. I say that as a wayfarer. Stop looking. There is nothing at the end of that ocean. There is nothing on the other side of that desert. The globe does not loop around. It is infinite in the darkness beyond the stars. Stop looking. Occasionally whip your binoculars up to your face and take down the range, time, and windage and then duck back down into the reeds. You do love him, but you do hate him too. Not for any particular reason. Just envy. Change positions. Skulls, skin, bones, you do know you wouldn't be able to change circuitry. Can't I? No. Mightn't I? No. Impossible-r-y-ing I? No, and that's definitely not a word or fragment. What the hell is that? I just stroked off for a minute. What were you saying?
I was saying, we're never going to see eye to eye, so stop beating yourself up when you try and do not. You're not a bad person. You're not a flaming heap of garbage to be kept at arms length all of the time. Sometimes you cannot control your volatility. It's a fine problem to have. You don't have to kill him and you don't have to fight him. Just let him be himself and you be yourself and the chips will land where they please and are directed. Your engagement with the world can never be his. It can be emulated. Where's the fun in tracing? Where's the existence in tracing? Do not get angry with yourself for being irrevocably, irreconcilably, different. No, you are not stupid for trying. Anyone in their right mind would see their closest genetic match and want to touch it like a mirror to make sure what they saw was not a reflection. You are me? No. I am me and you are you, and never the two shall meet.
///Dan Deacon - "Feel the Lightning" polishing the brass on warships that will and need never leave Earth. Fear is healthy. A degree of worry is healthy. Don't take it too far.
You don't have to see anything his way. He doesn't have to see anything your way. What is this weird aggression toward a shared emotional experience? It's not there. Stop looking. I don't say that as a warning sign like marking something so damaging and toxic you will die immediately, if not soon after. I say that as a time saver. I say that as a wayfarer. Stop looking. There is nothing at the end of that ocean. There is nothing on the other side of that desert. The globe does not loop around. It is infinite in the darkness beyond the stars. Stop looking. Occasionally whip your binoculars up to your face and take down the range, time, and windage and then duck back down into the reeds. You do love him, but you do hate him too. Not for any particular reason. Just envy. Change positions. Skulls, skin, bones, you do know you wouldn't be able to change circuitry. Can't I? No. Mightn't I? No. Impossible-r-y-ing I? No, and that's definitely not a word or fragment. What the hell is that? I just stroked off for a minute. What were you saying?
I was saying, we're never going to see eye to eye, so stop beating yourself up when you try and do not. You're not a bad person. You're not a flaming heap of garbage to be kept at arms length all of the time. Sometimes you cannot control your volatility. It's a fine problem to have. You don't have to kill him and you don't have to fight him. Just let him be himself and you be yourself and the chips will land where they please and are directed. Your engagement with the world can never be his. It can be emulated. Where's the fun in tracing? Where's the existence in tracing? Do not get angry with yourself for being irrevocably, irreconcilably, different. No, you are not stupid for trying. Anyone in their right mind would see their closest genetic match and want to touch it like a mirror to make sure what they saw was not a reflection. You are me? No. I am me and you are you, and never the two shall meet.
///Dan Deacon - "Feel the Lightning" polishing the brass on warships that will and need never leave Earth. Fear is healthy. A degree of worry is healthy. Don't take it too far.
12/17/15
That Instant
You get excited that the gadget you ordered from China is absolutely zipping around the globe and is in Connecticut already until you remember the abbreviation for Connecticut is CT, not CN, and also it makes no sense to fly around two continents and an ocean when the Pacific is right there and, yep, it is still making its way through China.
12/13/15
Bonus Track 2
waiting for the button to be pressed for the awesome release of good work to be done, good baby sweet barbecue jesus on a spit, push the damn button that turns that light from red to green, honey bear!
///Django Django - (Wor) you have to know who you are wearing your leash for and when that alarm goes... you know you have to go from zero to all in .2 seconds. i hate waiting. rumble rumble rumble. it is not time to ring the bell yet. i cannot wait for the next project to sink my teeth into. it's gotten to a point of physical discomfort thinking about it. i cannot wait to see the next house. i am going to eat it with great glory by moonlight and teeth large enough to fit a megalodon skeleton
///Django Django - (Wor) you have to know who you are wearing your leash for and when that alarm goes... you know you have to go from zero to all in .2 seconds. i hate waiting. rumble rumble rumble. it is not time to ring the bell yet. i cannot wait for the next project to sink my teeth into. it's gotten to a point of physical discomfort thinking about it. i cannot wait to see the next house. i am going to eat it with great glory by moonlight and teeth large enough to fit a megalodon skeleton
Caps Locked, Similar
I think the biggest thing to get out of the way was talking about how locked up I was becoming. It still governs everything and every choice that I make. The way that my mind works. I don't like to think of it as a disability, it is. Talking to my eternal optimist. The children are in the classroom. It's a bit soggy and untrue, but it is you too!
It really is. Will you dance with me? We can have a fabulous time, a gorgeous time, a wonderfurousfantabugloriousshanannigonkulous time. HAHAHAHA oh yes, oh yes. No bass necessary if you are willing to cut a rug. Down butler street to penn avenue to the point and back up the river trail underneath 40th street bridge and up top on 62nd to watch the sun rise. Kill em, kill em, kill em, ac dc-s? That was a good drum break.
Some things make me smile and I don't want to back everything over it like trying to kill a raccoon you hit at five A.M. If hand outs are coming out lets enjoy them and be one with the weekend. No? Obviously, you have no nerves in your extremities because I defy you to try and find hard drugs that are not spray paint and brick based at this hour.
///Starkey - (Eris) up from the depths
It really is. Will you dance with me? We can have a fabulous time, a gorgeous time, a wonderfurousfantabugloriousshanannigonkulous time. HAHAHAHA oh yes, oh yes. No bass necessary if you are willing to cut a rug. Down butler street to penn avenue to the point and back up the river trail underneath 40th street bridge and up top on 62nd to watch the sun rise. Kill em, kill em, kill em, ac dc-s? That was a good drum break.
Some things make me smile and I don't want to back everything over it like trying to kill a raccoon you hit at five A.M. If hand outs are coming out lets enjoy them and be one with the weekend. No? Obviously, you have no nerves in your extremities because I defy you to try and find hard drugs that are not spray paint and brick based at this hour.
///Starkey - (Eris) up from the depths
Don't Say "No" To Me
Who do you really trust? Who do you believe? Who will actually believe you??? Who just listens and nods and "yeah yeah yeah, tell me more" fuck you. Seriously, who do you trust? Who do you trust who will not try to tamper with your memories later and create new ones because you don't know who they were talking to at that specific time because you were not going out of your way to take down the exact specifics of that particular conversation and the only thing you have to know that it happened are physical artifacts?
Yes, it is weird! It is okay to say that it is weird, because it is! Are you drunk? Are you high? No, I just want to be sure that who you are talking to now gets your message to who will execute is all. Long short story: aye, I can't carry on a conversation one on one if it's more than one sentence. I laugh so hard saying that, but yes, it's getting worse by increments.
I don't know what to do about it. Half empty, half full. Maybe I've gotten so good at it that it sounds seamless. Or maybe a "?". I am deluding myself. It rings as true as a tuning fork struck in a wood. If a tuning fork rings and you are the only one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Where is the line with you? What are you really capable of? I can't help laughing. What you owe me. What you owe me is what I want!
I want to dream all of the time. Sleep all of the time. Sleep to access dreaming. Being awake and alive, breathing, is fantastic; breathing has its perks. I can help people. I can be of use. I can have utility. I can have staying power. I can create memories for other people. Dreaming is beautiful. I cannot create memories or trouble for other folks while I am sleeping and dreaming. In dreams, I can be whatever I want to be, but spiders come as large as television screens when I'm not careful to set their sizes. When I am dreaming I can be as sexual and touchy feely as I want to be without creeping out your friends. In dreams everyone carries a sword. While you sleep, however, your body dies and consumes itself until your dreaming consciousness ceases to exist. I have to be awake to keep my dreaming self alive.
That fact burns my core.
I guess what really keeps us the most uneasy is not being able to know who is taking advantage of your constant disposition. Who is actually helping and who is aiding and abetting the you's you are not aware of that you discover through their paper trail. If you are, I will find out eventually. And there will be questions that will need answers. The pathetic thing is they will probably have answers ready and you will not know the difference.
So what? Sew buttons. Kill them all. Save yourself. For what? Conversation with you? That's a terrible plan. They are using you. It's not symbiotic. Your currency doesn't translate and the currency that does is one to one at best. An unsolvable puzzle. Their currency doesn't convert to yours either. Passing monopoly capital between unmatched sets of Milton Bradley games. I'll be the wheel barrow! Okay, I'll be the millennium falcon! On second thought, I'll be the boot. And I'll be an iron?
Re-establishing the base of trust is one of the hardest parts about attempting to return from a compound fracture of the mind. If what you were doing got so far out of line that you wound up with part of your consciousness sticking out of your skull, you have screwed up badly. Whatever fail safes and flags you put up inside your head to prevent it were somehow run down, knocked over, ignored, or invisible and you may have slowed or performed a rolling stop near them, but all in all the cumulative effect is you blew past them and we are saving you from ultimate destruction with the emergency brake. All fins out. Take it as close to an atmosphere as you possibly can without landing. Slow down and listen. That sound you are hearing is not silence. That sound you are hearing is alarms screaming at the tops of their electronic lungs. Wires burned through carrying too much current. Stop, listen, breath the scent, make some damn corrections.
Yes, we can live like this, but not for long. The clock stopped four days ago. You are still sitting on a volatile warhead. You cannot defuse it without killing yourself, but you can build a new clock. Get to work! We are not easily convinced, but individually each of us is. I won't say "no" to you.
///can you hear the sounds they make when they scratch against the floor?
Yes, it is weird! It is okay to say that it is weird, because it is! Are you drunk? Are you high? No, I just want to be sure that who you are talking to now gets your message to who will execute is all. Long short story: aye, I can't carry on a conversation one on one if it's more than one sentence. I laugh so hard saying that, but yes, it's getting worse by increments.
I don't know what to do about it. Half empty, half full. Maybe I've gotten so good at it that it sounds seamless. Or maybe a "?". I am deluding myself. It rings as true as a tuning fork struck in a wood. If a tuning fork rings and you are the only one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Where is the line with you? What are you really capable of? I can't help laughing. What you owe me. What you owe me is what I want!
I want to dream all of the time. Sleep all of the time. Sleep to access dreaming. Being awake and alive, breathing, is fantastic; breathing has its perks. I can help people. I can be of use. I can have utility. I can have staying power. I can create memories for other people. Dreaming is beautiful. I cannot create memories or trouble for other folks while I am sleeping and dreaming. In dreams, I can be whatever I want to be, but spiders come as large as television screens when I'm not careful to set their sizes. When I am dreaming I can be as sexual and touchy feely as I want to be without creeping out your friends. In dreams everyone carries a sword. While you sleep, however, your body dies and consumes itself until your dreaming consciousness ceases to exist. I have to be awake to keep my dreaming self alive.
That fact burns my core.
I guess what really keeps us the most uneasy is not being able to know who is taking advantage of your constant disposition. Who is actually helping and who is aiding and abetting the you's you are not aware of that you discover through their paper trail. If you are, I will find out eventually. And there will be questions that will need answers. The pathetic thing is they will probably have answers ready and you will not know the difference.
So what? Sew buttons. Kill them all. Save yourself. For what? Conversation with you? That's a terrible plan. They are using you. It's not symbiotic. Your currency doesn't translate and the currency that does is one to one at best. An unsolvable puzzle. Their currency doesn't convert to yours either. Passing monopoly capital between unmatched sets of Milton Bradley games. I'll be the wheel barrow! Okay, I'll be the millennium falcon! On second thought, I'll be the boot. And I'll be an iron?
Re-establishing the base of trust is one of the hardest parts about attempting to return from a compound fracture of the mind. If what you were doing got so far out of line that you wound up with part of your consciousness sticking out of your skull, you have screwed up badly. Whatever fail safes and flags you put up inside your head to prevent it were somehow run down, knocked over, ignored, or invisible and you may have slowed or performed a rolling stop near them, but all in all the cumulative effect is you blew past them and we are saving you from ultimate destruction with the emergency brake. All fins out. Take it as close to an atmosphere as you possibly can without landing. Slow down and listen. That sound you are hearing is not silence. That sound you are hearing is alarms screaming at the tops of their electronic lungs. Wires burned through carrying too much current. Stop, listen, breath the scent, make some damn corrections.
Yes, we can live like this, but not for long. The clock stopped four days ago. You are still sitting on a volatile warhead. You cannot defuse it without killing yourself, but you can build a new clock. Get to work! We are not easily convinced, but individually each of us is. I won't say "no" to you.
///can you hear the sounds they make when they scratch against the floor?
That Instant
you realize you are not ready to reengage with society at large on any scale just yet. The insulation is there not just for their sake, but your own as well.
Schizophrenia
I am afraid to say anything because I am not sure where I am. It's scary as hell. Scary as all get out. Who is listening? Please, do not take me away. Bring everyone because you are going to need them to fill the body bags before I get to you.
I am terrified. It is horrible. Things got very far out of line. Very far out of acceptable lines. And I let them go and part of me is screaming and shouting you deserve this. YOU DESERVE THIS. YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING. How could I? Everything sounded and seemed better and better and more and more and not in the way bipolar can take you down at the backs of your knees like a length of pipe or baseball bat and before I knew it I was running with my head in front of my feet and telling them we can do it and we kept tripping and we've got it and tripping and we've got it and then the best to hope for could have been a solid and well orchestrated face plant. Instead we kept chasing our own head with our feet and doubling over to seem more normal and more joyous and more grateful and happier than what was actual and we chased our dragon of normalcy without acknowledging our unique chemistry and fears and rage and bottled and sold and bought and told our way to a somersault.
Have you ever broken your nose and deserved it? I thought I could pull it off. It was too good to be true. I am in the middle of a hard reboot and I have someone racing up my ass asking if I am okay. I am not. I am horrible. Every other thought through my brain is fucking killing someone or myself. I know you believe you are helping by asking me if I would like to play games or go out or eat food. No. I would like to sit and process what the hell is going through our minds. Because I don't want to play games with you. I want to drive to your house and buddy up for a while and then stab you to death. I want to cut the skin all around the circumference of your face and try to tear it off in one piece and then dangle it in front of a mirror. I don't want to be cheered up. I want to shoot my father dead between the eyes with a single .762 round and then burn his house to the ground. I want to grab my brother's right hand and stick it in garbage disposal and flick the switch and see if he shits himself. I want to laugh until I can't help it and let a fart loose. I want to dislocate someone's elbow again. I want to say hello with a headbutt so dead on we both see stars while exchanging pleasantries. I want to sink my teeth into something. Not that I cannot feel, but if you're going to break my nose, break my damn nose.
I've been over extended. We have been. In ways we could not imagine. The tax is heavy and still you have to smile with it. I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS. Work problems. Choking on the vomit of a successful swallow. Could be a decent way to go.
I am in an unfamiliar place where a physical pain tolerance means nothing against a mental pain tolerance.
The best way I can describe it is being 30 seconds out of sync from everything that is happening around you and that is when you are already clued in from days of study and suspicion against yourself that actually turned out to be true. Once you've finally caught up with your goings and comings and your committee and friends and other friends and put everything together... the closest you can get it is a true time barrier. Inside the moment you cannot see anything. Thirty seconds out you can see the overlap. One second out from thirty you are back in the moment and present.
I know I've burned through a lot of time. In terms of erasure. I'm not sure which one of us is doing the erasing lately. This is very dangerous. Very unacceptable. By lately, we mean in the last months. It's no good. We are not a head case. We're sliding that way. I'm not sure how to correct it.
The last thing I want is to become a danger to folks I know. I think it may have something to do with pressure and trying to fit forms you cannot fit. Entirely possible. It is good to draw distinct lines between never cross and sometimes cross. Without never cross there is no you. And without sometimes cross there is no me. And that is good.
I am terrified. It is horrible. Things got very far out of line. Very far out of acceptable lines. And I let them go and part of me is screaming and shouting you deserve this. YOU DESERVE THIS. YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING. How could I? Everything sounded and seemed better and better and more and more and not in the way bipolar can take you down at the backs of your knees like a length of pipe or baseball bat and before I knew it I was running with my head in front of my feet and telling them we can do it and we kept tripping and we've got it and tripping and we've got it and then the best to hope for could have been a solid and well orchestrated face plant. Instead we kept chasing our own head with our feet and doubling over to seem more normal and more joyous and more grateful and happier than what was actual and we chased our dragon of normalcy without acknowledging our unique chemistry and fears and rage and bottled and sold and bought and told our way to a somersault.
Have you ever broken your nose and deserved it? I thought I could pull it off. It was too good to be true. I am in the middle of a hard reboot and I have someone racing up my ass asking if I am okay. I am not. I am horrible. Every other thought through my brain is fucking killing someone or myself. I know you believe you are helping by asking me if I would like to play games or go out or eat food. No. I would like to sit and process what the hell is going through our minds. Because I don't want to play games with you. I want to drive to your house and buddy up for a while and then stab you to death. I want to cut the skin all around the circumference of your face and try to tear it off in one piece and then dangle it in front of a mirror. I don't want to be cheered up. I want to shoot my father dead between the eyes with a single .762 round and then burn his house to the ground. I want to grab my brother's right hand and stick it in garbage disposal and flick the switch and see if he shits himself. I want to laugh until I can't help it and let a fart loose. I want to dislocate someone's elbow again. I want to say hello with a headbutt so dead on we both see stars while exchanging pleasantries. I want to sink my teeth into something. Not that I cannot feel, but if you're going to break my nose, break my damn nose.
I've been over extended. We have been. In ways we could not imagine. The tax is heavy and still you have to smile with it. I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS. Work problems. Choking on the vomit of a successful swallow. Could be a decent way to go.
I am in an unfamiliar place where a physical pain tolerance means nothing against a mental pain tolerance.
The best way I can describe it is being 30 seconds out of sync from everything that is happening around you and that is when you are already clued in from days of study and suspicion against yourself that actually turned out to be true. Once you've finally caught up with your goings and comings and your committee and friends and other friends and put everything together... the closest you can get it is a true time barrier. Inside the moment you cannot see anything. Thirty seconds out you can see the overlap. One second out from thirty you are back in the moment and present.
I know I've burned through a lot of time. In terms of erasure. I'm not sure which one of us is doing the erasing lately. This is very dangerous. Very unacceptable. By lately, we mean in the last months. It's no good. We are not a head case. We're sliding that way. I'm not sure how to correct it.
The last thing I want is to become a danger to folks I know. I think it may have something to do with pressure and trying to fit forms you cannot fit. Entirely possible. It is good to draw distinct lines between never cross and sometimes cross. Without never cross there is no you. And without sometimes cross there is no me. And that is good.
11/30/15
Dear (_____)
Dear naked sleepers,
I understand the struggle. I understand your frustrations at sleep overs. I understand the hardship when sleeping on a friends couch after a fun night is the only option. I get forgetting you've wriggled out of your clothes under your blanket when you've had a platonic friend spend the evening a few feet away.
Above all, I understand your Winter. I know the fakers are out there. The ones who say they sleep naked, but really only in Summer and really only on some days in Summer and really only under certain circumstances on those days. They don't get it. They've never walked halfway to the kitchen after waking up in the middle of the night and turned back because they would rather be thirsty or go hungry for the rest of the night, then put on pajamas or sweats or clothing of any kind. They've never turned back halfway to the ice cold bathroom because they'd rather try to hold it til morning than dress themselves only to undress again. Once clothes come off for bed, that's it! I will not put them on so long as there is a sleepy cell in my body and not a minute before my alarm demands I do!
naked sleepers, I salute,
Sincerely,
a brother in arms
I understand the struggle. I understand your frustrations at sleep overs. I understand the hardship when sleeping on a friends couch after a fun night is the only option. I get forgetting you've wriggled out of your clothes under your blanket when you've had a platonic friend spend the evening a few feet away.
Above all, I understand your Winter. I know the fakers are out there. The ones who say they sleep naked, but really only in Summer and really only on some days in Summer and really only under certain circumstances on those days. They don't get it. They've never walked halfway to the kitchen after waking up in the middle of the night and turned back because they would rather be thirsty or go hungry for the rest of the night, then put on pajamas or sweats or clothing of any kind. They've never turned back halfway to the ice cold bathroom because they'd rather try to hold it til morning than dress themselves only to undress again. Once clothes come off for bed, that's it! I will not put them on so long as there is a sleepy cell in my body and not a minute before my alarm demands I do!
naked sleepers, I salute,
Sincerely,
a brother in arms
11/20/15
Dear (_____)
Dear gender,
You can be fairly inscrutable sometimes. Naked is power one day and object the next. Homogenous is ideal one day and acidic the next. Every other other week is another other. One day art, one day pornography, one day enslavement, one day revolution, one day torture, and the next day pretension. One day humble strength, then brutality, then "think of the children", then oppression, and the new home dynamic.
I know we can't all agree on what you should be or are, but can you please subscript your presence with over the counter instructions so that people, uninterested in exploring you, looking for an easily bottled, prepackaged consumable, can understand why they are feeling any one of the many particular effects of your consumption in that form and when to seek outside help. Can you at least include a disclaimer?
Otherwise our discourse will, for the rest of human time, be jammed with people wondering why they are pissing blood and going blind & shouting at the sky about it every time someone takes off their clothes, wants to be seen for who they are and their intrinsic value, or does something slightly outside of the bell curve "by and large" norm for whatever gender is inside them.
I know you are impossible to simplify completely, but instructions and a solid list of symptoms could go a ways to help people understand people. Or at least cut down on some of the unnecessary screaming and shouting. I understand the pamphlet will be long. And the people that don't read will continue not to. I think it is fair to hope improvement would be contagious save for the incorrigible, vapid, ever present, tumorous nodules, consistent with a body of seven and change billion cells.
Sincerely,
the internet
You can be fairly inscrutable sometimes. Naked is power one day and object the next. Homogenous is ideal one day and acidic the next. Every other other week is another other. One day art, one day pornography, one day enslavement, one day revolution, one day torture, and the next day pretension. One day humble strength, then brutality, then "think of the children", then oppression, and the new home dynamic.
I know we can't all agree on what you should be or are, but can you please subscript your presence with over the counter instructions so that people, uninterested in exploring you, looking for an easily bottled, prepackaged consumable, can understand why they are feeling any one of the many particular effects of your consumption in that form and when to seek outside help. Can you at least include a disclaimer?
Otherwise our discourse will, for the rest of human time, be jammed with people wondering why they are pissing blood and going blind & shouting at the sky about it every time someone takes off their clothes, wants to be seen for who they are and their intrinsic value, or does something slightly outside of the bell curve "by and large" norm for whatever gender is inside them.
I know you are impossible to simplify completely, but instructions and a solid list of symptoms could go a ways to help people understand people. Or at least cut down on some of the unnecessary screaming and shouting. I understand the pamphlet will be long. And the people that don't read will continue not to. I think it is fair to hope improvement would be contagious save for the incorrigible, vapid, ever present, tumorous nodules, consistent with a body of seven and change billion cells.
Sincerely,
the internet
11/19/15
That Instant
you sneeze on your computer screen and everything turns into rainbow dots, but you're "awww, cool" quickly turns into an "aw, gross" when you remember each beautiful rainbow lens of light is just booger sauce and electrons.
11/7/15
That Instant
you realize your sense of humor has dried up and, while experiencing humorous thoughts, the window has closed and those thoughts are going to land face down on the street below, shoved through that closed window in a spray of glitter and entrails and, though funny to you, the humor is still upstairs inside your room, the end result being a cryptic crime scene and you will have to wait for the window to open again.
11/6/15
At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity
Looking at my own reflection at the river, a wolf's head mask in the crook of my arm, I wonder how many there are like me. I wonder how many times I can roll the dice with instability before an immovable object meets an unstoppable force again. I try to skip rocks. I try to bat rocks with an aluminum bat given to me as a gift after I left the last one I had at home, bent into the shape of a boomerang. I wonder where I am going and if someone out there is going the same way I am. If we will carpool together and shout at each other, trying to figure out where exactly "there" is while the driver tries to figure how to get two wolves out of his car and regrets being a Samaritan.
Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink. One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud. The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship. Found. Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash! Mid-river. The current continues. I can't see my face, looking down. The angles aren't right. The light is not just so. The sun is not cooperating. Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.
Thinking about how people find their perfect match. At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me. Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic. Impossible. Incredible in its perfection and destruction. Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist. Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.
Happy and satisfied are two different things. The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief. As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true. Doomed. I laugh typing that. The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle. Dooooooomed! Of course not. Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat. I wonder what quantum decay looks like. I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them. Some of them, yes. None of them, also yes. Always at distance. Minding the fence. Minding the facilities. On the off chance they might be me. On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.
A moat. Sometimes the bridge is there. The gates open and ambassadors cross. I don't know what madness is. Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself? Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself? Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere? Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here. This is what I wanted. Few things truly scare me, in life. I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half. Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.
///Groove Armada - "At The River" ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.
Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink. One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud. The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship. Found. Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash! Mid-river. The current continues. I can't see my face, looking down. The angles aren't right. The light is not just so. The sun is not cooperating. Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.
Thinking about how people find their perfect match. At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me. Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic. Impossible. Incredible in its perfection and destruction. Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist. Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.
Happy and satisfied are two different things. The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief. As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true. Doomed. I laugh typing that. The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle. Dooooooomed! Of course not. Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat. I wonder what quantum decay looks like. I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them. Some of them, yes. None of them, also yes. Always at distance. Minding the fence. Minding the facilities. On the off chance they might be me. On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.
A moat. Sometimes the bridge is there. The gates open and ambassadors cross. I don't know what madness is. Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself? Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself? Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere? Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here. This is what I wanted. Few things truly scare me, in life. I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half. Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.
///Groove Armada - "At The River" ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.
Dear (_____)
Dear chance,
I never know who exactly it is I am going to meet or where, for that matter. At least, with the drug trade, it is a calculated risk. Alone often? Yes. The benevolence of strangers. I like to believe they are taking a risk too. Each one is a gate to a new network. An interface. Thrilling and horrifying in its own span of minutes. No safety nets. Out of network. Fringe. Where the rubber meets the road, so to speak... or flesh. Every time you walk out that door you may not come back. I hate thinking about it. So many dice rolls. I never thought I'd reach, or understand, a place where high risk, high risk beyond my control, was the way forward. Trying to figure out what's inside the black boxes I meet is tiresome. I worry for the day I read one wrong. I have no idea how that game ends. I don't traffic in violence anymore. I wonder if I had to, if I absolutely had to, would I have enough time to realize I had to and turn the switch inside me, hidden inside a safe inside a safe inside a safe, before the game ended.
Sincerely,
a glass combination lock wired to a dead circuit switch hooked up to fifteen piezoelectric crystals encased in a three inch thick asphalt sealed... beside the infrared lens array connected to... feeding into a phosphorous anti-warship grade mine.
P.S. safety first.
I never know who exactly it is I am going to meet or where, for that matter. At least, with the drug trade, it is a calculated risk. Alone often? Yes. The benevolence of strangers. I like to believe they are taking a risk too. Each one is a gate to a new network. An interface. Thrilling and horrifying in its own span of minutes. No safety nets. Out of network. Fringe. Where the rubber meets the road, so to speak... or flesh. Every time you walk out that door you may not come back. I hate thinking about it. So many dice rolls. I never thought I'd reach, or understand, a place where high risk, high risk beyond my control, was the way forward. Trying to figure out what's inside the black boxes I meet is tiresome. I worry for the day I read one wrong. I have no idea how that game ends. I don't traffic in violence anymore. I wonder if I had to, if I absolutely had to, would I have enough time to realize I had to and turn the switch inside me, hidden inside a safe inside a safe inside a safe, before the game ended.
Sincerely,
a glass combination lock wired to a dead circuit switch hooked up to fifteen piezoelectric crystals encased in a three inch thick asphalt sealed... beside the infrared lens array connected to... feeding into a phosphorous anti-warship grade mine.
P.S. safety first.
11/5/15
Dear (_____)
To whom it may concern,
When I ask you if you heard something while we are sharing leisure time or walking somewhere or simply sharing a common space in a face to face, the preferred response is a simple "yes" or "no."
If you answer "yes," I may have follow up questions for you. If you answer "no," we will carry on about whatever business or pleasure or quietude we are on.
I do not need you to tell me "no, you are hearing things." I know I heard something. That's why I asked. I am asking you if you heard it too. I am not asking you if I heard it. I know I heard it. I need to know if it's from inside my brain or from the outside.
That's all. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Sanity
When I ask you if you heard something while we are sharing leisure time or walking somewhere or simply sharing a common space in a face to face, the preferred response is a simple "yes" or "no."
If you answer "yes," I may have follow up questions for you. If you answer "no," we will carry on about whatever business or pleasure or quietude we are on.
I do not need you to tell me "no, you are hearing things." I know I heard something. That's why I asked. I am asking you if you heard it too. I am not asking you if I heard it. I know I heard it. I need to know if it's from inside my brain or from the outside.
That's all. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Sanity
10/23/15
The Best Thing
about Pittsburgh, after the shimmering emerald castles of summer fade, is the mass of gold and bronze and shining yellow and burned jade flags waving across the hilltops in autumn. I wish I could stop my truck in traffic, get out, stand in the bed and take panoramic photographs for you.
10/22/15
That Instant
you go from knowing nothing about a complete stranger to wanting to know everything about them.
10/16/15
Dear (_____)
Dear writing,
You are death defying. You require a supreme commitment that I cannot always answer back. I am afraid of you. You are the first mirror. The mirror first held up when the first person held up their own hand and asked "did I make you?"
You rival the original language violence and love in terms of origin and yet you have adapted in more ways than I will likely ever live to know.
My absence is not a fault of your own. Of mine. Mine alone.
I get chills thinking about you and awful pains absent of you. Complete me, as I attempt to complete you.
Sincerely,
your son
You are death defying. You require a supreme commitment that I cannot always answer back. I am afraid of you. You are the first mirror. The mirror first held up when the first person held up their own hand and asked "did I make you?"
You rival the original language violence and love in terms of origin and yet you have adapted in more ways than I will likely ever live to know.
My absence is not a fault of your own. Of mine. Mine alone.
I get chills thinking about you and awful pains absent of you. Complete me, as I attempt to complete you.
Sincerely,
your son
Helmet, Armor, Time, Money, Love.
The kind of love that lasts forever.
The kind of love that outlasts explanation.
Yep, that kind.
The inexplicable kind. The kind that cannot be explained by an affinity for a God or the affinity for a person. The everlasting, gut punching kind.
The kind that makes you change your ways even though changing your ways has nothing to do with how you express it, kind of love. The sort that makes you wish you could be a different person. The kind of love that makes your heart break when there are no more words to say what it is you had to say when you had to say it. Hell, the mouth only has so much capability inside of it.
That kind of love.
The kind that changes how and what you do despite the fact that change now has no affect on your outcomes, and you do it anyway.
That kind of love.
The kind that tells you explicitly: SEX IS NOT GOING TO HELP OR HELP FIX THIS. and you do it anyway, because you enjoyed snuffling her private parts and she enjoyed yours, snuffling, just that much. It turns into a private secret box, permanent. Oh, please! Open it up to more! To more! Nope. That's all you will get to know. Forever.
Mind, body, and soul. You are cut off. Wander the waste lands. Find an amalgam. Find a new war to fight. A new fart to sniff. The embassy is closed.
Write songs about love and body parts and knowledge and loss and wars won. Write them to whomever. You'll find your way. Eventually. Eventually, having sex on our grave, I will think about you. And
how I came
to be here.
The kind of love that outlasts explanation.
Yep, that kind.
The inexplicable kind. The kind that cannot be explained by an affinity for a God or the affinity for a person. The everlasting, gut punching kind.
The kind that makes you change your ways even though changing your ways has nothing to do with how you express it, kind of love. The sort that makes you wish you could be a different person. The kind of love that makes your heart break when there are no more words to say what it is you had to say when you had to say it. Hell, the mouth only has so much capability inside of it.
That kind of love.
The kind that changes how and what you do despite the fact that change now has no affect on your outcomes, and you do it anyway.
That kind of love.
The kind that tells you explicitly: SEX IS NOT GOING TO HELP OR HELP FIX THIS. and you do it anyway, because you enjoyed snuffling her private parts and she enjoyed yours, snuffling, just that much. It turns into a private secret box, permanent. Oh, please! Open it up to more! To more! Nope. That's all you will get to know. Forever.
Mind, body, and soul. You are cut off. Wander the waste lands. Find an amalgam. Find a new war to fight. A new fart to sniff. The embassy is closed.
Write songs about love and body parts and knowledge and loss and wars won. Write them to whomever. You'll find your way. Eventually. Eventually, having sex on our grave, I will think about you. And
how I came
to be here.
The Rage Tank
When I see you. When I see myself with you. I wonder: what does he have that I do not.
I see that he has a several few things. A successful family and a family that communicates with itself. A family that loves and is open. Brothers and sisters that can get along. And then I look at myself.
A family with a brother that can get along with one sister. A sister foreign. Another brother that is foreign. Extended family that is all strangers.
I ask myself what I actually have to offer and the answer is pretty stark. Pretty stark and pretty pretty in it's own way. Pretty pretty in it's own way, but damn near not the same.
What do you want to be associated with? By definition, that.
I ask myself every day.
I tell myself 'nough said.
I hate myself more and love myself more.
I ask myself what do I need to do more to be more accessible and then I ask myself what I need to do to be more of a person. I have no idea. In all consuming rage everything makes sense. I think we were working around that. No?
The rage tank is deep and has many chambers. We will explore them soon.
I see that he has a several few things. A successful family and a family that communicates with itself. A family that loves and is open. Brothers and sisters that can get along. And then I look at myself.
A family with a brother that can get along with one sister. A sister foreign. Another brother that is foreign. Extended family that is all strangers.
I ask myself what I actually have to offer and the answer is pretty stark. Pretty stark and pretty pretty in it's own way. Pretty pretty in it's own way, but damn near not the same.
What do you want to be associated with? By definition, that.
I ask myself every day.
I tell myself 'nough said.
I hate myself more and love myself more.
I ask myself what do I need to do more to be more accessible and then I ask myself what I need to do to be more of a person. I have no idea. In all consuming rage everything makes sense. I think we were working around that. No?
The rage tank is deep and has many chambers. We will explore them soon.
At the End of the Seventh Week (damage report)
Out of the fog of wars, asked for and not, comes the final damage report.
The total bill:
1 fractured left jawbone submandibular fossa.
1 dislocated left jawbone condylar process.
1 dislocated left jawbone coronoid process.
The total paid:
1 healed jawbone submandibullar fossa.
1 healed jawbone condylar process.
I don't think the coronoid process will ever heal correctly.
Total bill:
Zero $.
Constant pain in the coronoid process, but bearable and adaptable.
Final result:
No crippling pain.
Unforgettable pain. The kind of pain every morning and every evening and every time I think about eating. However, the kind of pain that will remind me to be a better a person. The kind of pain that is unforgettable and good in its way because it will diffuse further scuff ups and other opportunities to speak my mind whenever I feel like, be it the thrill of getting ice cream or the the assuage of killing off the thrill of murdering someone else because I ... a good deterrent. There are only so many ways to explain so many things. This one is adequate.
I can eat. I can chew. I can tear. I can exercise. I can use the rest of my body. I refuse to incriminate myself. And I will not start here.
The healing has been amazing. I am able to smoke again. I wake up every morning feeling like a railroad spike has been shoved through my skull from the left side, right up through my ear, behind my eye socket and I've never had a migraine by definition, but this must be close to it.
I choose to let it go.
I choose to move on.
I have to.
Head hunters don't lead good lives.
I am furious and love struck and oh so amber and rose and pink in the joy of being able to wake up with 90% of my function back and if that's as good as it gets, hell baby, I got off lucky. I will take that and dance and swing hammers and think about the next time and maybe I will strike first or maybe I will disarm myself before what you are carrying becomes an issues, but for fucks sake, it is good to be able to laugh free again.
The final damage report is this:
Mistakes were made on one side. Mine. I ate it. I came out on the other side, tempered and galvinized. A shorter fuse and a shorter leash too. I expect less of other people and more of myself. And that is flipping pretty good for a prognosis of a wire job.
I've known what it is to not be able to speak for days at a time, not because you couldn't, because you were literally locked closed. A blindness. I've known unprovoked hate in the shade of unbridled happiness. Your spectrum is Roy G, Biv. Mine is unspeakable in its range and color and temperature and length. It has no name yet and I may not be able to give it a convenient one.
I now have the power to teach, and I will not. Unless you press me.
///TV on the Radio - (Lovers Day) of course, there are miracles... the people we think you are. give me the keys to your hiding place
The total bill:
1 fractured left jawbone submandibular fossa.
1 dislocated left jawbone condylar process.
1 dislocated left jawbone coronoid process.
The total paid:
1 healed jawbone submandibullar fossa.
1 healed jawbone condylar process.
I don't think the coronoid process will ever heal correctly.
Total bill:
Zero $.
Constant pain in the coronoid process, but bearable and adaptable.
Final result:
No crippling pain.
Unforgettable pain. The kind of pain every morning and every evening and every time I think about eating. However, the kind of pain that will remind me to be a better a person. The kind of pain that is unforgettable and good in its way because it will diffuse further scuff ups and other opportunities to speak my mind whenever I feel like, be it the thrill of getting ice cream or the the assuage of killing off the thrill of murdering someone else because I ... a good deterrent. There are only so many ways to explain so many things. This one is adequate.
I can eat. I can chew. I can tear. I can exercise. I can use the rest of my body. I refuse to incriminate myself. And I will not start here.
The healing has been amazing. I am able to smoke again. I wake up every morning feeling like a railroad spike has been shoved through my skull from the left side, right up through my ear, behind my eye socket and I've never had a migraine by definition, but this must be close to it.
I choose to let it go.
I choose to move on.
I have to.
Head hunters don't lead good lives.
I am furious and love struck and oh so amber and rose and pink in the joy of being able to wake up with 90% of my function back and if that's as good as it gets, hell baby, I got off lucky. I will take that and dance and swing hammers and think about the next time and maybe I will strike first or maybe I will disarm myself before what you are carrying becomes an issues, but for fucks sake, it is good to be able to laugh free again.
The final damage report is this:
Mistakes were made on one side. Mine. I ate it. I came out on the other side, tempered and galvinized. A shorter fuse and a shorter leash too. I expect less of other people and more of myself. And that is flipping pretty good for a prognosis of a wire job.
I've known what it is to not be able to speak for days at a time, not because you couldn't, because you were literally locked closed. A blindness. I've known unprovoked hate in the shade of unbridled happiness. Your spectrum is Roy G, Biv. Mine is unspeakable in its range and color and temperature and length. It has no name yet and I may not be able to give it a convenient one.
I now have the power to teach, and I will not. Unless you press me.
///TV on the Radio - (Lovers Day) of course, there are miracles... the people we think you are. give me the keys to your hiding place
That Instant
the question "what's he got that I don't have" trails off mid bloom into: "what's he got that I do-" and its hang is so withering in its hot brilliance you have to check to make sure your eyebrows aren't singed stubble.
That Instant
You realize you are not going to get to the bottom of anything until you find a way to turn the giant sci-fi horror pulp novel pitchfork switch that drops your heart out of your chassis like a fried transmission.
10/3/15
That Instant
you realize guns are the problem and the big "and" in the equation may also be the lack of physical harm and being able to identify with physical pain. Emotional pain is very hard to describe and very very difficult to relate. Physical pain is universal and grounds to the primal circuit. Everyone understands. Emotional or mental pain, few will understand or be able to identify with you without deep and lengthy contact. Anyone can fire a gun. Many fewer can speak. Fewer still can converse. The problem is there.
Everyone gets in a tiff about gun control. Fine. If you are not willing to attack and control it from the top, at least allow people to begin walking at the foundation. I don't know if the previous sentence ends with a question mark or a period. Violence and communication can be quite the self reciprocating machine and it's something else to be inside of it and hoping someone would stick a bar into the spokes of the wheel.
Everyone gets in a tiff about gun control. Fine. If you are not willing to attack and control it from the top, at least allow people to begin walking at the foundation. I don't know if the previous sentence ends with a question mark or a period. Violence and communication can be quite the self reciprocating machine and it's something else to be inside of it and hoping someone would stick a bar into the spokes of the wheel.
9/29/15
At the End of the Fourth Week
Stability is restored. The alignment of the bite is still off by a few millimeters. Soft foods are doable. I bit into a cheese-it cracker because I had to know if I could or could not. The pain was not overwhelming.
I can trot up and down stairs and shake my head this way and that without my jaw sliding loose. I think a lot of the muscle function is returning. I can swing a hammer without it shooting back up my arm and across my clavicles and up my neck into the angle of my jawbone. I think I will try to ply the basketball court again this week. Not being able to exercise with vigor or lift free weights has taken its toll. My body feels rusty and delicate. Extremely delicate. I have to be careful with it.
I still do not understand how I weighed 150 pounds through most of college, jumped up to 170 afterward, and then jumped up to stable 185 after that. I chalked it up to a late growth spurt of muscle and I do believe it to still be true. Nothing really changed beyond stints in the weight room and more aggressive behaviors in terms of physical conflict resolution.
I've taken on water and fat since the injury. The muscle tissues are still there, waiting to be awakened and pushed and pulled apart. Sometimes, the ideal of 220 looms. Two hundred and twenty pounds of "thank you kindly" laid over five feet, ten inches, and change of bones and arteries. The ideal power to weight ratio where nothing is impossible and armor is thick and well. Ringing in at 189 and having trouble pumping a bicycle tire is not healthy at all. I think that is the highest cost of dealing with this injury. Knowing you have been set backward by months, chunks of years of hard work, sweat, tears, and shouts of victory and the best you can do is wait and watch it happen and think about all of the time you are losing and all of the training you cannot do.
I cannot help it. I want to fight. My pop was a fighter. It is in my blood. I love it. I love the challenge. I love going knuckle to knuckle. I love putting wear and tear on my frame and I cannot do it again or try to while the soft tissues finish knitting. It is supremely aggravating. That part of me continues screaming: sate me! sate me! sate me! The factory continues churning out weapons that gather dust.
It's not about making someone pay for my misfortune. It's not about spreading pain. It's about the test. It's about hand and eye coordination. It's about enjoying tumbling and rabble rousing and rises and falls. It's about split second decisions. The joy and exhilaration of making the right call in the fraction of the second and then following it up with another one in the split of the next second and knowing, had you been blind, your body knew what to do before your brain did.
I feel sometimes that every persons body has two brains. A machine brain and a quantum one.
I can trot up and down stairs and shake my head this way and that without my jaw sliding loose. I think a lot of the muscle function is returning. I can swing a hammer without it shooting back up my arm and across my clavicles and up my neck into the angle of my jawbone. I think I will try to ply the basketball court again this week. Not being able to exercise with vigor or lift free weights has taken its toll. My body feels rusty and delicate. Extremely delicate. I have to be careful with it.
I still do not understand how I weighed 150 pounds through most of college, jumped up to 170 afterward, and then jumped up to stable 185 after that. I chalked it up to a late growth spurt of muscle and I do believe it to still be true. Nothing really changed beyond stints in the weight room and more aggressive behaviors in terms of physical conflict resolution.
I've taken on water and fat since the injury. The muscle tissues are still there, waiting to be awakened and pushed and pulled apart. Sometimes, the ideal of 220 looms. Two hundred and twenty pounds of "thank you kindly" laid over five feet, ten inches, and change of bones and arteries. The ideal power to weight ratio where nothing is impossible and armor is thick and well. Ringing in at 189 and having trouble pumping a bicycle tire is not healthy at all. I think that is the highest cost of dealing with this injury. Knowing you have been set backward by months, chunks of years of hard work, sweat, tears, and shouts of victory and the best you can do is wait and watch it happen and think about all of the time you are losing and all of the training you cannot do.
I cannot help it. I want to fight. My pop was a fighter. It is in my blood. I love it. I love the challenge. I love going knuckle to knuckle. I love putting wear and tear on my frame and I cannot do it again or try to while the soft tissues finish knitting. It is supremely aggravating. That part of me continues screaming: sate me! sate me! sate me! The factory continues churning out weapons that gather dust.
It's not about making someone pay for my misfortune. It's not about spreading pain. It's about the test. It's about hand and eye coordination. It's about enjoying tumbling and rabble rousing and rises and falls. It's about split second decisions. The joy and exhilaration of making the right call in the fraction of the second and then following it up with another one in the split of the next second and knowing, had you been blind, your body knew what to do before your brain did.
I feel sometimes that every persons body has two brains. A machine brain and a quantum one.
9/26/15
9/25/15
Dear (_____)
Dear writing,
I know I should be spending more time with you. I know it. I know it!
Is it alright that I have to take a break. Is it alright that I feel close to stable and I do not want to deconstruct or explore? Is it alright that I want to view it and enjoy the contours of a planet?
Sometimes what I experience with you is not a block or a dearth of words to say. What I experience is a moment, several increments long, of taking you in. Taking all of you in. Sexually. Biologically. Isness. Contextual. History. Timeways. Can I take you in and breathe and enjoy you?
You are my mate. Every minute and second cannot be sex. Every instant cannot be adventure.
Yes, I did use you to keep me sane and help me mark time, but will you mind if I use time to help me become more intimate with you?
///Prometheus- "Collision"
I know I should be spending more time with you. I know it. I know it!
Is it alright that I have to take a break. Is it alright that I feel close to stable and I do not want to deconstruct or explore? Is it alright that I want to view it and enjoy the contours of a planet?
Sometimes what I experience with you is not a block or a dearth of words to say. What I experience is a moment, several increments long, of taking you in. Taking all of you in. Sexually. Biologically. Isness. Contextual. History. Timeways. Can I take you in and breathe and enjoy you?
You are my mate. Every minute and second cannot be sex. Every instant cannot be adventure.
Yes, I did use you to keep me sane and help me mark time, but will you mind if I use time to help me become more intimate with you?
///Prometheus- "Collision"
9/21/15
9/20/15
Nearing the End of the Third Week With a Fractured Jaw
With roughly 75% of the range of motion returning and constant pain beginning to subside for several hours at a time I feel pretty good about not going to a hospital on this one. Had there been a clear break in the bone I definitely would have gone to get whatever metal was needed implanted and get wired shut. Sometimes it baffles me how interconnected the bodies musculoskeletal system is and I am constantly reminded of how layered its concert is.
I didn't realize how many different ways and how often I shift my jaw and slide my teeth against each other when I am processing information or thinking through conversation or using my eyes and ears to take information in. Left, right, backwards, forwards, clenching some sections of teeth and relaxing others at the same time. Everything from pulling on a door knob, to swinging a hammer, to stretching, sitting down, standing up, turning my head, opening a mailbox, to driving a stick shift is tied to the muscle groups around the neck and jaw. Suddenly hundreds if not thousands of long memorized motions and activities that you could perform with blindfolded confidence are thrown into doubt. "Is this going to hurt?" "How will this affect the healing cracks?" "Will this pull apart soft scar tissues not yet stabilized and calcified into bone?" In the third week I am starting to regain some confidence.
For most of the first and second week the pain never felt less than a five or six on a 10 point scale throughout the day from waking to sleep. Depression became a huge factor. You are not sad because of what happened or how it happened. You become depressed because you cannot laugh without shooting pain. You become depressed because you cannot fall asleep because of sudden spikes of pain that cut through your over the counter pain killers like the barrel of a bat slamming into a light bulb tucked inside a pillow case. You become depressed because the muscles of your tongue and throat put enough pressure on the angle of your jaw, right on the side of the cracks, to make your eyes tear up when you swallow what you can. Everything you casually associated with happiness in sleep, smiling, laughter, rest, sustenance, is hot wired and reprogrammed to fear and ache and apprehension and anger and it weighs on you hour after hour after hour until depression becomes crushing.
In week three many self imposed restrictions are beginning to lift. I can get through the day and night without a single pain pill. The constant background ache has dropped to an occasionally noticeable two or three. When I press on the impact site gently, the bone doesn't flex and make crunching sounds. In the second week I successfully set the condyle back into its natural position. I couldn't help crying for several minutes afterward. It was important and necessary as my bite was out of alignment from front to back. Once I did that the grinding noise right at the ramus's tip finally stopped and when I bandaged my mouth closed with a thick elastic wrap my teeth sat almost as evenly as they did before. I think that dislocation is probably what saved the angle from snapping clean through.
I can almost yawn again. I still have to brace my chin when I sneeze. At the end of this third week I can chew very soft pasta and cheese and drink thick soup relatively pain free, but I am taking it extremely carefully to be absolutely certain I don't retard the healing process or get too enthusiastic about my food choices. It felt so good to finally be able to scrub my beard again without fireballs of pain shooting through my face. Nothing changes the complexion of the day like starting it off with a good deep beard scrubbing, good god I missed that.
All of my anger and hatred toward the people that did this to me is gone. What really makes me happy is not caring what happens to them. Being able to let their aggression go and not have a second thought about retaliation or feeling like I'm owed something or that I owe them something. The transaction is over. What matters is what you decide to do next for yourself. What matters is that lying in bed your jaw doesn't sag and fall to one side like a screen door with one hinge. What matters is that you survived and you can physically laugh again without fear of splitting bone apart from the spirited ways in which you normally like to jump on life's comedy.
I still cannot laugh too much or the pain piles up and grows to wince worthy proportions and twists my face sour. I still can't make some facial expressions. I still can't sustain hours of conversation, but then again I was never particularly great at making conversation as much as listening to it, but it is still something to get used to realizing that I can only say so many words before I have to rest and close my mouth tightly. I still can't clench my teeth in consternation. I can feel some lingering instability and pain in the healing dislocated joint when I run up or down stairs or shake or nod my head too vigorously. Hopefully these things and instabilities will pass as week four progresses.
I know there is potential for some level of permanent pain in the joint since it was not reset by a professional and was not wired shut to ensure speedy and complete recovery of the fracture site. There were evenings when I slept and would wake with a start in the second week so abrupt I could feel the joint strain and hear the angle click and flex. There was a day when I woke to a spider landing on my cheek and a slapped at my face and new before the pain even registered that I screwed up big time in doing so and set myself back all of whatever healing occurred through that day. Common sense tells me this too, as my back injury from two and a half years ago still bothers me from time to time and sends numb sensations down my right buttock and thigh if the barometric pressure is too far off from my body.
Some of the nerves likely died as well as there is noticeably diminished feeling along the left side of my jaw bone. I expected as much. I expected the worst, but progress has been good and some levity has returned to day to day life. I am not out of the woods yet. Two to three more weeks to go before I'll try to bite into a piece of meat that hasn't been blended to the consistency of mashed potatoes. At least three more weeks before I try to bite into an apple. I think I may attempt a sandwich next Saturday... a grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly. My tummy can't wait to have fun with food with my mouth.
The food has been spectacular. At first, the only things I could eat were nutrient shakes and very thin liquids for the first two weeks. Very finely blended and extremely water heavy meals put through the blender and then only a half cup or so every few hours because the pain was too intense to do much more than that. Since then the horizons have begun to grow and meals become more intricate. Right now it's an assortment of pastes and soups of varying composition, from fresh bell peppers ground into bacon pate with rice and spinach soups drizzled all around to sweet bean mashed potatoes with soft sharp chedder shredded over the top alongside peas carrot beef mash and oreos in a little cup on the side blended into a desert syrup. Nothing makes lunch quite like peanut butter and jelly paste beside a cup of milk. It has been a little bit of a challenge and through the first two weeks I lost 25 pounds, but as time is getting on, some of the weight has come back.
I still feel weak from not being able to work out or move much, but some strength has returned and will only increase as the healing progresses. At the end of week 3, I feel alright about the future. There's a decent chance I will be close to what I was before my jaw was fractured and dislocated. I know I will never be the same, but I am alive and can continue and I am happy for that. Happy with that. It kind of mirrors my mental problems that I deal with and constantly manage without medicine. I know I will never be better than I was, but I can try to make sure I don't completely unravel and if I can be close to as sound as I was the day before then I have done the best I can.
///Deptford Goth - "Objects Objects" the bass filled silence between the searing walls of the chaotic
I didn't realize how many different ways and how often I shift my jaw and slide my teeth against each other when I am processing information or thinking through conversation or using my eyes and ears to take information in. Left, right, backwards, forwards, clenching some sections of teeth and relaxing others at the same time. Everything from pulling on a door knob, to swinging a hammer, to stretching, sitting down, standing up, turning my head, opening a mailbox, to driving a stick shift is tied to the muscle groups around the neck and jaw. Suddenly hundreds if not thousands of long memorized motions and activities that you could perform with blindfolded confidence are thrown into doubt. "Is this going to hurt?" "How will this affect the healing cracks?" "Will this pull apart soft scar tissues not yet stabilized and calcified into bone?" In the third week I am starting to regain some confidence.
For most of the first and second week the pain never felt less than a five or six on a 10 point scale throughout the day from waking to sleep. Depression became a huge factor. You are not sad because of what happened or how it happened. You become depressed because you cannot laugh without shooting pain. You become depressed because you cannot fall asleep because of sudden spikes of pain that cut through your over the counter pain killers like the barrel of a bat slamming into a light bulb tucked inside a pillow case. You become depressed because the muscles of your tongue and throat put enough pressure on the angle of your jaw, right on the side of the cracks, to make your eyes tear up when you swallow what you can. Everything you casually associated with happiness in sleep, smiling, laughter, rest, sustenance, is hot wired and reprogrammed to fear and ache and apprehension and anger and it weighs on you hour after hour after hour until depression becomes crushing.
In week three many self imposed restrictions are beginning to lift. I can get through the day and night without a single pain pill. The constant background ache has dropped to an occasionally noticeable two or three. When I press on the impact site gently, the bone doesn't flex and make crunching sounds. In the second week I successfully set the condyle back into its natural position. I couldn't help crying for several minutes afterward. It was important and necessary as my bite was out of alignment from front to back. Once I did that the grinding noise right at the ramus's tip finally stopped and when I bandaged my mouth closed with a thick elastic wrap my teeth sat almost as evenly as they did before. I think that dislocation is probably what saved the angle from snapping clean through.
I can almost yawn again. I still have to brace my chin when I sneeze. At the end of this third week I can chew very soft pasta and cheese and drink thick soup relatively pain free, but I am taking it extremely carefully to be absolutely certain I don't retard the healing process or get too enthusiastic about my food choices. It felt so good to finally be able to scrub my beard again without fireballs of pain shooting through my face. Nothing changes the complexion of the day like starting it off with a good deep beard scrubbing, good god I missed that.
All of my anger and hatred toward the people that did this to me is gone. What really makes me happy is not caring what happens to them. Being able to let their aggression go and not have a second thought about retaliation or feeling like I'm owed something or that I owe them something. The transaction is over. What matters is what you decide to do next for yourself. What matters is that lying in bed your jaw doesn't sag and fall to one side like a screen door with one hinge. What matters is that you survived and you can physically laugh again without fear of splitting bone apart from the spirited ways in which you normally like to jump on life's comedy.
I still cannot laugh too much or the pain piles up and grows to wince worthy proportions and twists my face sour. I still can't make some facial expressions. I still can't sustain hours of conversation, but then again I was never particularly great at making conversation as much as listening to it, but it is still something to get used to realizing that I can only say so many words before I have to rest and close my mouth tightly. I still can't clench my teeth in consternation. I can feel some lingering instability and pain in the healing dislocated joint when I run up or down stairs or shake or nod my head too vigorously. Hopefully these things and instabilities will pass as week four progresses.
I know there is potential for some level of permanent pain in the joint since it was not reset by a professional and was not wired shut to ensure speedy and complete recovery of the fracture site. There were evenings when I slept and would wake with a start in the second week so abrupt I could feel the joint strain and hear the angle click and flex. There was a day when I woke to a spider landing on my cheek and a slapped at my face and new before the pain even registered that I screwed up big time in doing so and set myself back all of whatever healing occurred through that day. Common sense tells me this too, as my back injury from two and a half years ago still bothers me from time to time and sends numb sensations down my right buttock and thigh if the barometric pressure is too far off from my body.
Some of the nerves likely died as well as there is noticeably diminished feeling along the left side of my jaw bone. I expected as much. I expected the worst, but progress has been good and some levity has returned to day to day life. I am not out of the woods yet. Two to three more weeks to go before I'll try to bite into a piece of meat that hasn't been blended to the consistency of mashed potatoes. At least three more weeks before I try to bite into an apple. I think I may attempt a sandwich next Saturday... a grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly. My tummy can't wait to have fun with food with my mouth.
The food has been spectacular. At first, the only things I could eat were nutrient shakes and very thin liquids for the first two weeks. Very finely blended and extremely water heavy meals put through the blender and then only a half cup or so every few hours because the pain was too intense to do much more than that. Since then the horizons have begun to grow and meals become more intricate. Right now it's an assortment of pastes and soups of varying composition, from fresh bell peppers ground into bacon pate with rice and spinach soups drizzled all around to sweet bean mashed potatoes with soft sharp chedder shredded over the top alongside peas carrot beef mash and oreos in a little cup on the side blended into a desert syrup. Nothing makes lunch quite like peanut butter and jelly paste beside a cup of milk. It has been a little bit of a challenge and through the first two weeks I lost 25 pounds, but as time is getting on, some of the weight has come back.
I still feel weak from not being able to work out or move much, but some strength has returned and will only increase as the healing progresses. At the end of week 3, I feel alright about the future. There's a decent chance I will be close to what I was before my jaw was fractured and dislocated. I know I will never be the same, but I am alive and can continue and I am happy for that. Happy with that. It kind of mirrors my mental problems that I deal with and constantly manage without medicine. I know I will never be better than I was, but I can try to make sure I don't completely unravel and if I can be close to as sound as I was the day before then I have done the best I can.
///Deptford Goth - "Objects Objects" the bass filled silence between the searing walls of the chaotic
9/7/15
That Instant
you can't get the protective plastic off of the cap of your new bottle of off-brand Zzzquil and you pull your hand back to smash the neck on the side of your counter-top and realize nothing short of bricking your brain is going to slow you down enough to sleep fitful when you can't even control your breathing.
9/3/15
Nearing the End of the First Week With a Fractured Jaw
The fracture or break is very high up the ramus and very close to my ear. Every time I poke it hard enough I can hear and feel it flex a little so I try not to touch it or shift my jaw left or right when I do yawn with my teeth locked together. Of course I didn't go see a doctor. I have no health insurance. What's the doctor going to do? Wire my teeth together and tell me to get plenty of rest and not move my jaw. I can do that without the wires and the $5000 bill. Sure there may be other fractures along the side of the jaw bone, but inspection says they're only fractures if they do exist and not clean breaks. Thanks to wisdom teeth that were never removed growing up because they were so badly impacted the surgery was out of the question for one reason or another by the time I was screened for them, the inside of my cheek took some thick lacerations at the point of impact. I think one or two of molar roots may have cracked causing swelling and pain in the angle. Time will tell. Hell, if my wisdom teeth on that side die and eventually fall out, I'm all for it. Who am I going to be kissing in the next two- three years anyway.
The first week of a liquid diet and I'm down 17 pounds. I'm not fat, but I always feel fat, so it's helping my body image issues a great deal, oddly enough. I keep thinking over the evening last Saturday. After a great pow-wow with a buddy and his friend who had to leave a little earlier we decided to head out and grab some ice cream and, I was thinking, a pack of smokes on the side for me, happy to be alive and a little agitated, but more than anything else, happy to be out for a walk in the deep night air with a gorgeous moon. Hopping along, we came across a bunch of teens loitering in a schools front yard and a police van telling them to disperse and we walked on, exchanging glances. They were obviously doing it wrong. Mulling in the shadows instead of out beneath the street lights on your way to get some tasty ice cream and smokes and then hop back home to finish the night off with a few beers and your friend.
They were doing it wrong and it was funny and in my happiness and joy with the night and my pal and the prospect of ice cream, I shouted to them so, with a few more curse words and some gestures, but simply poking fun at how they choose to spend their time when they could be walking to get ice cream instead of haunting a schools front lawn. They shouted back and I shouted back, because there's so much more to life than trying to intimidate people all of the time. There's friendship, and the moon, and ice cream, and cigarettes, and the fun a Saturday unperturbed by anyone who dares believe they can rain on my happy day with a friend I haven't seen in far too long. Who cares if a couple of happy travelers don't clutch their purses or speak in hushed voices as they pass you by. You're a bunch of kids on a schools closed front lawn trying to intimidate and strike fear into the "mean streets of Pittsburgh" from the shadows. Ooga booga! It was hilarious.
Those boys took it the wrong way and decided to follow and encircle us. "All of this happiness must be stomped out!" is what I think they said collectively. I had no desire to fight. Those roads are way behind me and ice cream was ahead of me and the police were just up the block a moment ago. I do not live in a world where I will trade ice cream for police questioning. Ever! I figured there'd be some yelling and shoving and they'd go on their merry and moody and belligerent way after pushing us around and we'd continue on ours and get those evening treats and continue our happy Saturday. It wasn't to be. I was hit from a blind angle right in the left corner of my jawbone just beneath my ear and dropped like a bag of rocks for a few seconds. My friend, struck too, was lucky enough to get hit from a direction his head was more or less facing and did not suffer more than cosmetic damage in a black eye and a cut or two.
I didn't realize the discomfort I felt the following day was far more than a bruise on my cheek until the day after when the pain got worse and worse until I couldn't chew anything, much less open my mouth. I guess those boys won. My happiness silenced by a fractured jaw bone and quite possibly broken molars inside the bone itself (hoping that's not the case, but we'll know in another week or two or if the violence of them being forcefully shifted a few millimeters out of their homes has caused inflammation that will take some time to heal [or if infection is underway as we write *cue doom music*]).
I keep thinking through that fateful stretch of night. I keep asking myself why the hell would they do that? Keep telling myself it was entirely uncalled for. I know why I was sucker punched. Their fear. That moment when my friend was hit and they thought "now or never because if this other larger guy wasn't going to put up a fight before he just may A: decide to put up a fight now, B: shout or call for help, C: both a and b." I keep wondering why they didn't just yell back and go their separate way. There was no chance they considered he and I, a couple of drunk 30 year old men out on a walk together, to be a threat to them. Why would they do that? Why would they attack us so viciously?
And then it dawned on me. Thinking back 12 years. How righteously furious I was then for dozens of reasons, some complex some as simple as I wanted an excuse to pass on the hurt inside of me to anyone who gave me an excuse to. Ready to fight anyone and any inanimate object that didn't "respect" me no matter how pointless or stupid. I didn't want to rob you. I wanted to hurt you as badly as I could get away with. Year after year after year, getting more angry, more sensitive, more irrational, but always questioning it, breaking it apart, tearing down the engine, trying to figure out what the hell it was making this bomb of my body go tick tick tick. I still haven't figured it out exactly.
Through years of study, years of violence toward others sometimes warranted, often times not, culminating in things I will never be able to take back, I left those courses behind me. Thirty years old all I care about is writing, getting home in one piece, spending time with my cats, seeing my friends when I can, and taking care of the only body I have left until my brain breaks apart or my body just will not run anymore. I could care less who respects me and who doesn't. I could care less who breaks my jaw and who decides to be merciful. Save for a handful of very specific, very important, exceptions, if I ever get so mad that the only language I can speak is the original dialect, violence itself, I will speak through breaking my own skin and nerves, not someone else's. The simpler truth is that for most of those kids, they will never learn or even begin to learn how to learn that things could be different. Some of them will end up dead. Others will circle their private drains until their live's dwindle and die out.
Those idiots aren't there yet. It was stupid of me to believe a 12 year gap in understanding what a good night with a friend really is, and what it can mean in the face of a world, in the face of my world once dominated by violence. They didn't silence my happiness. If worst comes to worst and I can never quite use my jaw the way I could before that night again, I have always wanted to learn sign language.
Do I hate them for it? Of course. Would I like to find one of them, knock him senseless, wrap him duct tape and put him in the bed of my truck and take him home? Would I like to duct tape his arm to a sheet of plywood after gagging him with #0 steel wool and use my belt sander grind away the first knuckle of each digit of his immobilized hand and then shatter the wrist of his other? Would I like to drive down river and dump his body at a drainage gate? Of course. That would achieve nothing. I'd be happy for a while until the next week when the pain set in again and I would need to find another one and that life is not for me as long as I continue to refuse it and allow the rest of myself to flourish. Maybe they'll learn. Maybe a few of them will think about and ask themselves essential questions.
Happiness and love are precious and not to be squandered under all but the most extreme circumstances. Especially not in this world's economy.
///=sigh= I could really go for a slice of pizza right about now. I'll melt some ice cream instead.
The first week of a liquid diet and I'm down 17 pounds. I'm not fat, but I always feel fat, so it's helping my body image issues a great deal, oddly enough. I keep thinking over the evening last Saturday. After a great pow-wow with a buddy and his friend who had to leave a little earlier we decided to head out and grab some ice cream and, I was thinking, a pack of smokes on the side for me, happy to be alive and a little agitated, but more than anything else, happy to be out for a walk in the deep night air with a gorgeous moon. Hopping along, we came across a bunch of teens loitering in a schools front yard and a police van telling them to disperse and we walked on, exchanging glances. They were obviously doing it wrong. Mulling in the shadows instead of out beneath the street lights on your way to get some tasty ice cream and smokes and then hop back home to finish the night off with a few beers and your friend.
They were doing it wrong and it was funny and in my happiness and joy with the night and my pal and the prospect of ice cream, I shouted to them so, with a few more curse words and some gestures, but simply poking fun at how they choose to spend their time when they could be walking to get ice cream instead of haunting a schools front lawn. They shouted back and I shouted back, because there's so much more to life than trying to intimidate people all of the time. There's friendship, and the moon, and ice cream, and cigarettes, and the fun a Saturday unperturbed by anyone who dares believe they can rain on my happy day with a friend I haven't seen in far too long. Who cares if a couple of happy travelers don't clutch their purses or speak in hushed voices as they pass you by. You're a bunch of kids on a schools closed front lawn trying to intimidate and strike fear into the "mean streets of Pittsburgh" from the shadows. Ooga booga! It was hilarious.
Those boys took it the wrong way and decided to follow and encircle us. "All of this happiness must be stomped out!" is what I think they said collectively. I had no desire to fight. Those roads are way behind me and ice cream was ahead of me and the police were just up the block a moment ago. I do not live in a world where I will trade ice cream for police questioning. Ever! I figured there'd be some yelling and shoving and they'd go on their merry and moody and belligerent way after pushing us around and we'd continue on ours and get those evening treats and continue our happy Saturday. It wasn't to be. I was hit from a blind angle right in the left corner of my jawbone just beneath my ear and dropped like a bag of rocks for a few seconds. My friend, struck too, was lucky enough to get hit from a direction his head was more or less facing and did not suffer more than cosmetic damage in a black eye and a cut or two.
I didn't realize the discomfort I felt the following day was far more than a bruise on my cheek until the day after when the pain got worse and worse until I couldn't chew anything, much less open my mouth. I guess those boys won. My happiness silenced by a fractured jaw bone and quite possibly broken molars inside the bone itself (hoping that's not the case, but we'll know in another week or two or if the violence of them being forcefully shifted a few millimeters out of their homes has caused inflammation that will take some time to heal [or if infection is underway as we write *cue doom music*]).
I keep thinking through that fateful stretch of night. I keep asking myself why the hell would they do that? Keep telling myself it was entirely uncalled for. I know why I was sucker punched. Their fear. That moment when my friend was hit and they thought "now or never because if this other larger guy wasn't going to put up a fight before he just may A: decide to put up a fight now, B: shout or call for help, C: both a and b." I keep wondering why they didn't just yell back and go their separate way. There was no chance they considered he and I, a couple of drunk 30 year old men out on a walk together, to be a threat to them. Why would they do that? Why would they attack us so viciously?
And then it dawned on me. Thinking back 12 years. How righteously furious I was then for dozens of reasons, some complex some as simple as I wanted an excuse to pass on the hurt inside of me to anyone who gave me an excuse to. Ready to fight anyone and any inanimate object that didn't "respect" me no matter how pointless or stupid. I didn't want to rob you. I wanted to hurt you as badly as I could get away with. Year after year after year, getting more angry, more sensitive, more irrational, but always questioning it, breaking it apart, tearing down the engine, trying to figure out what the hell it was making this bomb of my body go tick tick tick. I still haven't figured it out exactly.
Through years of study, years of violence toward others sometimes warranted, often times not, culminating in things I will never be able to take back, I left those courses behind me. Thirty years old all I care about is writing, getting home in one piece, spending time with my cats, seeing my friends when I can, and taking care of the only body I have left until my brain breaks apart or my body just will not run anymore. I could care less who respects me and who doesn't. I could care less who breaks my jaw and who decides to be merciful. Save for a handful of very specific, very important, exceptions, if I ever get so mad that the only language I can speak is the original dialect, violence itself, I will speak through breaking my own skin and nerves, not someone else's. The simpler truth is that for most of those kids, they will never learn or even begin to learn how to learn that things could be different. Some of them will end up dead. Others will circle their private drains until their live's dwindle and die out.
Those idiots aren't there yet. It was stupid of me to believe a 12 year gap in understanding what a good night with a friend really is, and what it can mean in the face of a world, in the face of my world once dominated by violence. They didn't silence my happiness. If worst comes to worst and I can never quite use my jaw the way I could before that night again, I have always wanted to learn sign language.
Do I hate them for it? Of course. Would I like to find one of them, knock him senseless, wrap him duct tape and put him in the bed of my truck and take him home? Would I like to duct tape his arm to a sheet of plywood after gagging him with #0 steel wool and use my belt sander grind away the first knuckle of each digit of his immobilized hand and then shatter the wrist of his other? Would I like to drive down river and dump his body at a drainage gate? Of course. That would achieve nothing. I'd be happy for a while until the next week when the pain set in again and I would need to find another one and that life is not for me as long as I continue to refuse it and allow the rest of myself to flourish. Maybe they'll learn. Maybe a few of them will think about and ask themselves essential questions.
Happiness and love are precious and not to be squandered under all but the most extreme circumstances. Especially not in this world's economy.
///=sigh= I could really go for a slice of pizza right about now. I'll melt some ice cream instead.
The Best Thing
About living with a kitten is that you only get to sleep a few hours at a time, regardless of what's going right or wrong within your own head.
8/28/15
Sunrise
Every time you wake up in the grip of the fall out of another meltdown or with your palm against the window of your cell and everything you thought was real ashed away or grown so thick all you can see and smell is wilderness and locked trees and you have no sense of how and where it came to now or the roads and rivers that lead to here, do not forget that it may very well have nothing to do with you or anything you did.
Can't control every fragment of your consciousness. Following routine. Everything you were supposed to do, you did. Everything designed to help and guide and control and nudge and suggest. The end results can have nothing to do with anything you did or did not do. Absolutely nothing. It will not change how or where you wake up. Where or how the sunrise will find you. It will. And you will. And you must not hate yourself or blame yourself no matter how badly you want to and no matter how badly your nature tells you someone has to pay for all that is wrong. Someone has to pay for this upside down world. And that someone is you. It isn't.
You cannot control every fragment of your consciousness. Let the sun rise on a world rearranged over the course of one night, after you fought and rebuilt all that was misplaced and felled in the weeks before by the weeks before that when you believed "this time it is going to last, I know it, I can feel it," and start again. It may stick this time. It may not. Do not fear that world. Do not tear your eyes away and bury them in your hands. Start again. It's okay. You did everything you could. Now try to do it again...
Can't control every fragment of your consciousness. Following routine. Everything you were supposed to do, you did. Everything designed to help and guide and control and nudge and suggest. The end results can have nothing to do with anything you did or did not do. Absolutely nothing. It will not change how or where you wake up. Where or how the sunrise will find you. It will. And you will. And you must not hate yourself or blame yourself no matter how badly you want to and no matter how badly your nature tells you someone has to pay for all that is wrong. Someone has to pay for this upside down world. And that someone is you. It isn't.
You cannot control every fragment of your consciousness. Let the sun rise on a world rearranged over the course of one night, after you fought and rebuilt all that was misplaced and felled in the weeks before by the weeks before that when you believed "this time it is going to last, I know it, I can feel it," and start again. It may stick this time. It may not. Do not fear that world. Do not tear your eyes away and bury them in your hands. Start again. It's okay. You did everything you could. Now try to do it again...
8/24/15
The Best Thing
and most frightening thing about having a kitten is that you sometimes cannot tell if they are dead or simply sleeping. The kick thrash of panic when they do not stir after you kiss them and put your ear on their belly to listen to them digesting and they do not wake is blown hard and wild by the whip crack of relief when they open their eyes, take a wide yawn, knead the bedsheets like they're rolling dough about to make "biscuits and gravy" and go back to sleep.
Who Are You?
Do you ever make food and stare at it on the plate until your hunger fades and then throw it out?
That Instant
you realize having no secrets means you have no private parts too and nothing goes or comes around if you have no privates.
8/23/15
That Instant
you are not a mad dog about anything, but you want to bite down as hard as you can until your teeth break or push against something until your muscular-skeletal system fails. When you want to taste it and get it all inside your nasal cavities via burst vessels and you know the only reasonable path is sitting still.
8/19/15
Dear (_____)
Do you really want someone else walking around the joint, farting the place up, and leaving crumbs on your coffee table?
Yeah, sometimes.
Then I wake up wedged between two cats and I think one more body in this bed and we're all going to be fighting to the death before sunrise.
Taking turns watching each other sleep, the other lying awake wondering if they should wake the other up and chit chat until they can fall asleep too.
That sounds terrible and romantic and just awful and just lovely.
Aside from time itself, sleep is one of the most valuable components to life.
The farting and crumbs and bed pile I could grow accustomed to- maybe -with occasional bursts of "what is wrong with you!"s.
The sleeping I don't think I would ever get used to.
Yeah, sometimes.
Then I wake up wedged between two cats and I think one more body in this bed and we're all going to be fighting to the death before sunrise.
Taking turns watching each other sleep, the other lying awake wondering if they should wake the other up and chit chat until they can fall asleep too.
That sounds terrible and romantic and just awful and just lovely.
Aside from time itself, sleep is one of the most valuable components to life.
The farting and crumbs and bed pile I could grow accustomed to- maybe -with occasional bursts of "what is wrong with you!"s.
The sleeping I don't think I would ever get used to.
8/10/15
Assimilation
It is a good thing. If I ask you about something I may be trying to learn how to talk about or use your way or style to help me define my own. With respect to citizenry and excellence and capturing the ability to pass on and spread worthwhile attributes. Through assimilation I can help myself at a much faster rate than rote learning. It is envy only because I cannot snap my fingers and erase every other human being on this planet. Call it envy if that helps you sleep at night [it isn't]. Assimilation also lets me acquire skills and abilities that are already spread and common knowledge, abilities and behaviors necessary and very valuable in the advancement of coexistence. If I am mimicking you it is because repetition assists in memorization and modification.
8/4/15
That Instant
you get your pillows out of the dryer and, while they smell great, they are all now shaped like giant freezer bag chicken nuggets.
8/2/15
That Instant
you learn that it is possible to paint glass shards into the fabric of your jeans if you do not use mineral spirits correctly.
Dear (_____)
Dear Karen,
I have been seeing another woman. Aja is pretty great. Kinda like Janis, without the baggage. I know we went over the protocol for these sorts of things and I should have said something sooner because we cannot play well together, a one ride kind of gal and, frankly, there's no rejoinder to it. I hope we can ... what am I saying, I've already packed my bags to come home. I'll see you in a few days.You know I am fooling no one.
xoxo,
fanboy
I have been seeing another woman. Aja is pretty great. Kinda like Janis, without the baggage. I know we went over the protocol for these sorts of things and I should have said something sooner because we cannot play well together, a one ride kind of gal and, frankly, there's no rejoinder to it. I hope we can ... what am I saying, I've already packed my bags to come home. I'll see you in a few days.You know I am fooling no one.
xoxo,
fanboy
7/30/15
The Best Thing
about weighing yourself multiple times a day and writing the numbers down upstairs is that you can better track what is happening inside you by their footprint and raise a food militia/coup before it escalates to the colors of defense condition numbers.
7/29/15
Dear (_____)
Dear pet owners,
It's okay to feel a little guilty when your cat or dog is literally pushing your limbs out of your desk chair and off your computer keyboard and twisting your monitor every which way when they want attention, but you're in the middle of browsing an Instagram feed of baby goats frolicking through meadows. It's okay to feel a little bit like you're cheating on them. Who wouldn't want to own a successful goat farm full of cuteness and handsome and darling older goats? Just explain softly when you do close your laptop or your browser that what you want is not in spite of them, but including them. Your cats would look out for the little baby goats and your dogs will keep the old fellas and ladies in line so they don't wander too far off. It would be a family. Even if you have one cat or just one dog or one turtle, it is not a marriage so it's really not cheating anyway. It's okay to feel a little guilt, the other implication being they're not cute anymore and you are not allowed to say or think it, but the truth is they are.
I just wish I had a goat to raise too.
Sincerely,
an animal lover
It's okay to feel a little guilty when your cat or dog is literally pushing your limbs out of your desk chair and off your computer keyboard and twisting your monitor every which way when they want attention, but you're in the middle of browsing an Instagram feed of baby goats frolicking through meadows. It's okay to feel a little bit like you're cheating on them. Who wouldn't want to own a successful goat farm full of cuteness and handsome and darling older goats? Just explain softly when you do close your laptop or your browser that what you want is not in spite of them, but including them. Your cats would look out for the little baby goats and your dogs will keep the old fellas and ladies in line so they don't wander too far off. It would be a family. Even if you have one cat or just one dog or one turtle, it is not a marriage so it's really not cheating anyway. It's okay to feel a little guilt, the other implication being they're not cute anymore and you are not allowed to say or think it, but the truth is they are.
I just wish I had a goat to raise too.
Sincerely,
an animal lover
Summer Days Are Beautiful
Summer days are beautiful. Walk around in the grass that probably should have been cut yesterday and feel how fluffy and wet it is before the sun dries it out. Take time away from watering the garden to blow a bubble of mist around you and spin yourself around to see the rainbow halo around your waist. The birds are off on their errands. By now you do not hear their 5:30 A.M. alarm, but you will miss it a lot when it is gone and cold water chills instead of refreshes.
Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin. Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you. Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more. A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.
I am just like you, though we are different. Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning. Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.
Though we are different. The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes. Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.
It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what? I don't know. I don't know what is next. I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired. That sweet sweet 12k paycheck. It is a joke. At 30? Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?
After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.
I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future. That's for fun. My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy. It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in. I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize. I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person. When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.
The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been. I had to think very hard. Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.
After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years. I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head." After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do. It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do. Auto-mechanic.
The realization dawned on me. All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles. The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms. The smiles on folks faces. The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions. The solitude. All there. After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades. I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.
Thirty years old and getting no younger. A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point. I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world. You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise. Worry about what comes next in the stars. I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation. With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck." So what? One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been. Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links. Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.
It tastes different doesn't it. Oh it does! When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month." I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation. I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction. Will I ever make living money? Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water? Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating? I have to find out.
Summer days are so beautiful. Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful. Chew a dandelion stem. As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors. The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river. Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace. It is pretending to sleep. T-shirts almost dry. The garden dirt probably is too. One more go 'round. It is going to be a hot one today.
///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"
Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin. Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you. Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more. A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.
I am just like you, though we are different. Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning. Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.
Though we are different. The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes. Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.
It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what? I don't know. I don't know what is next. I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired. That sweet sweet 12k paycheck. It is a joke. At 30? Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?
After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.
I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future. That's for fun. My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy. It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in. I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize. I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person. When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.
The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been. I had to think very hard. Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.
After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years. I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head." After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do. It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do. Auto-mechanic.
The realization dawned on me. All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles. The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms. The smiles on folks faces. The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions. The solitude. All there. After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades. I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.
Thirty years old and getting no younger. A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point. I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world. You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise. Worry about what comes next in the stars. I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation. With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck." So what? One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been. Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links. Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.
It tastes different doesn't it. Oh it does! When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month." I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation. I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction. Will I ever make living money? Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water? Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating? I have to find out.
Summer days are so beautiful. Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful. Chew a dandelion stem. As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors. The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river. Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace. It is pretending to sleep. T-shirts almost dry. The garden dirt probably is too. One more go 'round. It is going to be a hot one today.
///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"
7/24/15
Hook
I've already exceeded him. I've already ... I laugh thinking about Star Wars and Hook and Peter Pan. Thinking about Robbin Hood and Evangelion. I laugh thinking about 0083 and Char and the Endless Waltz and Memories. I laugh thinking about MOAB and dropping concrete bombs because "why spend the money when blocks can and do what we want?" I laugh considering what Thomas said to me that night walking to a gas station to get smokes. You're going to be just like your father.
I am. And I am better. I remember doing his homework for him when I was farting around back home and searching for any sort of feeler to find a job before I took off again. I remember him hovering over my shoulder and him recognizing that I wasn't afraid of him anymore and he could stand behind me as long as he wanted to and I did not give a rip. I think, at that stand off, he realized he wasn't Hook anymore.
If he still thought he was Hook, he knew I was the clock. Do I still want to fight him? No. Do I still want to run him down with my truck? Yes. How dare you tell anyone they are not a person. Who gives you the authority? Who gave you the hook? You never told me about your father. The first I heard was second hand from people I thought you were close to. Burping gasoline puffs. I know you hear me. I know you fucking hear me. What is it going to take to get some fucking answers out of you, silver back? I am going gray and I refuse to repeat the fault line.
I will snuffle the low line. Give us the Hook. Give us the Hook! Give us the Hook! You trained me, you shit. You dog dog dog dog dog! I do not have to fight you now. I am not scared. I have tools. Tools for days. Allow me to take you to my shed. MY shed! Allow me to close the windows so the neighbors do not hear.
I know you know something of cutting up. Did you want a globe trotter? Is that why junior got his name. I almost want to adopt a child to spite you and name it after Andre, but not yours. Where the hell did Malcolm come from in this family to begin with. You never took the time to talk about it and I'm old enough to wonder about and you're lock jawed enough to never speak about it so ... I don't wish hell upon you.
Junior is just like you, yeah? Given the hook. Thinking about washing dishes in Brighton and trying to focus on the soap bubbles while you two argued and hearing your voice again saying "yeah he's listening" while I am looking at the bubbles and their popping and doing my best to twitch my ears as hard as I can so you know that I know I can fucking hear you and hoping you can understand that YES I am hearing everything you say. You fuck.
Yeah, you fucked up. Unfortunately, I am one of the results of your misstep. I would be happy to play roulette with you though. With that turn coat cow of a wife you brainwashed. Good job. Yep, I am firing on 98% of my cylinders. You do the math. She bailed. She bailed. Vicious. We talked about it. Call me crazy. We spoke about it. I did not want to fuck her, I wanted her to be happy and protect her. Fail. Good job, buddy.
WHY DID YOU CUT ME DOWN. I do not understand it. I never will. I cry and I hurt myself to try to make it right. I have and I do and I have and I will not stop until you die. If I could kill you, I would. ......................................... I want to taste your blood so badly. Take a Louisville to you. You might too. As much as I want to take the teeth out of you, I want you to see my teeth before I bite your eyeball out of your head.
I want to blow paint straight through your nostrils.
Get up, get down!
Normal. Hah!
Eventually a person get's tired of getting skull fucked. Tired of being leashed. What else is out there?
Malcolm junior is reaping all of the blessings. Red too. Little one too. I am getting scraps.
If I could get away with it.................................................end the dance. I hate being associated with you with a vigor you do not and never will understand!
Make a bet. You can pop one of my eyeballs if I can pop one of yours. Standing bet.
Wrech.
Hack.... yack......
I am not going to let you fuck this up, pop.
Enjoy.
enjoy enjoy enjoy
///no music selection. Thinking about the satisfaction of strangling my father while my mother watches and makes ape faces
I am. And I am better. I remember doing his homework for him when I was farting around back home and searching for any sort of feeler to find a job before I took off again. I remember him hovering over my shoulder and him recognizing that I wasn't afraid of him anymore and he could stand behind me as long as he wanted to and I did not give a rip. I think, at that stand off, he realized he wasn't Hook anymore.
If he still thought he was Hook, he knew I was the clock. Do I still want to fight him? No. Do I still want to run him down with my truck? Yes. How dare you tell anyone they are not a person. Who gives you the authority? Who gave you the hook? You never told me about your father. The first I heard was second hand from people I thought you were close to. Burping gasoline puffs. I know you hear me. I know you fucking hear me. What is it going to take to get some fucking answers out of you, silver back? I am going gray and I refuse to repeat the fault line.
I will snuffle the low line. Give us the Hook. Give us the Hook! Give us the Hook! You trained me, you shit. You dog dog dog dog dog! I do not have to fight you now. I am not scared. I have tools. Tools for days. Allow me to take you to my shed. MY shed! Allow me to close the windows so the neighbors do not hear.
I know you know something of cutting up. Did you want a globe trotter? Is that why junior got his name. I almost want to adopt a child to spite you and name it after Andre, but not yours. Where the hell did Malcolm come from in this family to begin with. You never took the time to talk about it and I'm old enough to wonder about and you're lock jawed enough to never speak about it so ... I don't wish hell upon you.
Junior is just like you, yeah? Given the hook. Thinking about washing dishes in Brighton and trying to focus on the soap bubbles while you two argued and hearing your voice again saying "yeah he's listening" while I am looking at the bubbles and their popping and doing my best to twitch my ears as hard as I can so you know that I know I can fucking hear you and hoping you can understand that YES I am hearing everything you say. You fuck.
Yeah, you fucked up. Unfortunately, I am one of the results of your misstep. I would be happy to play roulette with you though. With that turn coat cow of a wife you brainwashed. Good job. Yep, I am firing on 98% of my cylinders. You do the math. She bailed. She bailed. Vicious. We talked about it. Call me crazy. We spoke about it. I did not want to fuck her, I wanted her to be happy and protect her. Fail. Good job, buddy.
WHY DID YOU CUT ME DOWN. I do not understand it. I never will. I cry and I hurt myself to try to make it right. I have and I do and I have and I will not stop until you die. If I could kill you, I would. ......................................... I want to taste your blood so badly. Take a Louisville to you. You might too. As much as I want to take the teeth out of you, I want you to see my teeth before I bite your eyeball out of your head.
I want to blow paint straight through your nostrils.
Get up, get down!
Normal. Hah!
Eventually a person get's tired of getting skull fucked. Tired of being leashed. What else is out there?
Malcolm junior is reaping all of the blessings. Red too. Little one too. I am getting scraps.
If I could get away with it.................................................end the dance. I hate being associated with you with a vigor you do not and never will understand!
Make a bet. You can pop one of my eyeballs if I can pop one of yours. Standing bet.
Wrech.
Hack.... yack......
I am not going to let you fuck this up, pop.
Enjoy.
enjoy enjoy enjoy
///no music selection. Thinking about the satisfaction of strangling my father while my mother watches and makes ape faces
7/23/15
That Instant
you realize the act of imagining touches emotion far and away more sweetly and delicious than the act of remembering imagining or forecasting a time to exercise imagination.
7/22/15
Dear (_____)
Dear exhaustion,
I meant to meet up with you later today, but sleepy stopped by this afternoon and we're still playing cards at the moment. I think he's spending the night. Don't wait up for me. Love you!
muah,
;P I'll tell you all about it tomorrow
I meant to meet up with you later today, but sleepy stopped by this afternoon and we're still playing cards at the moment. I think he's spending the night. Don't wait up for me. Love you!
muah,
;P I'll tell you all about it tomorrow
7/21/15
Maybe I'm Missing Something
Enough with the ridiculous headlights, please. Pretty please? Can someone please step in as a voice of reason and say something? Anything? Can we appeal to logic? How about safety? How about simple decency? The idea that hurting other people because "whatever, they can go to hell" is a not good thing.
Yes, we get it. They're very pretty when you're taking pictures of them, or sketching them in a design lab, or walking around them in your garage or someone else's garage or at a car show. Sparkly, shiny, shifting through the spectrum of visible light subtly or standing bold and stark and sudden, so alert and commanding or brilliant, smoldering, and devilish, double daring you to put the key in or press the engine on button. We understand that aspect. That bending and twisting and running of the finger's tips along that silk membrane between machine and animal, animal and man, man and near sentient machine. We understand and we are not asking to tamper with that experience or dull it or snatch it away from you, person driving the car with the tremendously intricate, unreasonably high powered headlights.
Remember when you could replace a headlight bulb yourself for $15? I still can. Is my car less attractive because it runs $15 headlamps? I don't care. I don't love my automobile any less because it doesn't have black bedded lenses that look like a unicorn sneezed a rainbow around the fringes of the beams.
Can we stop with the ultra bright, surface of the sun, "just like driving at noon", lamps? I'm sure you probably need to see six football fields ahead of you when you are blazing down the straightaway portions of LeMans at 220 miles per hour never, can we tone it down a little bit when the longest straight portion of highway in your city is maybe half a mile and the safest speed you can average on it without killing yourself or someone else in your suv is a brisk 80. Not to mention, inside the highway ringing that city, with stoplights, you're probably crushing it a blistering 30 miles per hour. Stop it already.
Every time that chassis hits a bump or a pothole or manhole cover or gentle dip in the road, the angle of that ultra bright, kaleidoscope changes for a split second and my rear view mirror turns into a camera's flash two feet away from my face. It's so pretty. It's so pretty. What could the reason possibly be? Is it just rich people wanting people to know that their car, their status symbol, is out on the road and people had better take notice. It's not the standard model either. The standard model has the LEDs with the white lighthouse grade bulbs. It's the S model so the white lighthouse grade bulbs have been replaced with omni directional plasma discharge tubes powered by nuclear cold fusion. Everyone will know what I drive is better than what they drive because they'll see my headlight's coming from beyond the curvature of the Earth.
Jesus, get over yourself. No one cares. What they will know is that whoever is driving the car behind them deserves to have their headlights caved in with a hatchet for every other motorists sake. I'm not against getting creative or embracing the art of lighting, crystals, lenses, and advancing the technology. I am against taking it way too far. All of the light is practically false security too. It only illuminates, but so far, and if you're a bad driver guess what? You're still going to screw up. You'll have an extra 500 feet though to make the same dumb decision.
Things are seriously getting out of hand out there.
Yes, we get it. They're very pretty when you're taking pictures of them, or sketching them in a design lab, or walking around them in your garage or someone else's garage or at a car show. Sparkly, shiny, shifting through the spectrum of visible light subtly or standing bold and stark and sudden, so alert and commanding or brilliant, smoldering, and devilish, double daring you to put the key in or press the engine on button. We understand that aspect. That bending and twisting and running of the finger's tips along that silk membrane between machine and animal, animal and man, man and near sentient machine. We understand and we are not asking to tamper with that experience or dull it or snatch it away from you, person driving the car with the tremendously intricate, unreasonably high powered headlights.
Remember when you could replace a headlight bulb yourself for $15? I still can. Is my car less attractive because it runs $15 headlamps? I don't care. I don't love my automobile any less because it doesn't have black bedded lenses that look like a unicorn sneezed a rainbow around the fringes of the beams.
Can we stop with the ultra bright, surface of the sun, "just like driving at noon", lamps? I'm sure you probably need to see six football fields ahead of you when you are blazing down the straightaway portions of LeMans at 220 miles per hour never, can we tone it down a little bit when the longest straight portion of highway in your city is maybe half a mile and the safest speed you can average on it without killing yourself or someone else in your suv is a brisk 80. Not to mention, inside the highway ringing that city, with stoplights, you're probably crushing it a blistering 30 miles per hour. Stop it already.
Every time that chassis hits a bump or a pothole or manhole cover or gentle dip in the road, the angle of that ultra bright, kaleidoscope changes for a split second and my rear view mirror turns into a camera's flash two feet away from my face. It's so pretty. It's so pretty. What could the reason possibly be? Is it just rich people wanting people to know that their car, their status symbol, is out on the road and people had better take notice. It's not the standard model either. The standard model has the LEDs with the white lighthouse grade bulbs. It's the S model so the white lighthouse grade bulbs have been replaced with omni directional plasma discharge tubes powered by nuclear cold fusion. Everyone will know what I drive is better than what they drive because they'll see my headlight's coming from beyond the curvature of the Earth.
Jesus, get over yourself. No one cares. What they will know is that whoever is driving the car behind them deserves to have their headlights caved in with a hatchet for every other motorists sake. I'm not against getting creative or embracing the art of lighting, crystals, lenses, and advancing the technology. I am against taking it way too far. All of the light is practically false security too. It only illuminates, but so far, and if you're a bad driver guess what? You're still going to screw up. You'll have an extra 500 feet though to make the same dumb decision.
Things are seriously getting out of hand out there.
7/11/15
Dear (_____)
Dear Cannabis,
You got me through my spine and discs healing in a way I could not have imagined because I cannot remember the last time my lower lumbars gave me trouble. I can with some effort, but I do not want to jinx it. I don't know if it was you or if it was time, but two years and change to the day, I remember how badly and how violently the pain stabbed and since then my mechanical workings have become an afterthought.
No big. I know you helped me through the days when it was raining knives. That is what matters. If the rest is cake, I support it and I'm only there because you made the worst days a little less worse.
Graciously yours,
Tin Man
You got me through my spine and discs healing in a way I could not have imagined because I cannot remember the last time my lower lumbars gave me trouble. I can with some effort, but I do not want to jinx it. I don't know if it was you or if it was time, but two years and change to the day, I remember how badly and how violently the pain stabbed and since then my mechanical workings have become an afterthought.
No big. I know you helped me through the days when it was raining knives. That is what matters. If the rest is cake, I support it and I'm only there because you made the worst days a little less worse.
Graciously yours,
Tin Man
Dear (_____)
Dear Girl,
Dear little girl in your tutu practicing your movements while a poodle and a chihuahua yipped at each other on the side of your porch in Millvale while your mother, maybe a guardian only, looked on clapping: you made my day, driving home from the landfill yesterday. You turned my entire outlook upside down and I thank you for it.
Sincerely,
Dreamer
Dear little girl in your tutu practicing your movements while a poodle and a chihuahua yipped at each other on the side of your porch in Millvale while your mother, maybe a guardian only, looked on clapping: you made my day, driving home from the landfill yesterday. You turned my entire outlook upside down and I thank you for it.
Sincerely,
Dreamer
7/10/15
Stay Positive, Opposite Day, Detours, and Paper
How funny would it be to wake up in your own car in the middle of the early morning after accidentally blowing your steering wheel airbag into your face the night before tinkering with the switches and wiring around the wheel?
The thought crossed my mind, walking home from the local store to buy smokes and chips. Almost as good as chips and ice cream. When I feel horrible, I prefer cigarettes because they make me feel a little less horrible without making me wish I felt an unsustainable joy derived from ice creams sweet and cooling goodness. If only anyone could always be that smooth, creamy, and soothing all the way down to the belly. The thought crossed my mind after walking away from my truck to go buy some comfit after I noticed my fuel gauge was malfunctioning and realizing the problem's solution was going to cost me at least $120 and 10 to 20 hours of labor at worst and 20 to 40 hours of labor, learning, trial and error, and no dollars at best.
I kept chuckling thinking about how angry I felt. I kept chuckling thinking about reaching under the seat for my hatchet, letting out a bloody war cry, and smashing the wheel to pieces. Only then, ditching the hatchet, pulling and tearing wires out of it with my bare hands until the airbag exploded and shoved one of my closed fistful of wires straight into my face and I basically ended up knocking myself out cold with a rocket powered fist to the dome. Then waking up the next day with a deployed airbag, swollen knuckles, one hell of a headache, and one hell of a fist shaped bruise between my eyes.
Part of the reason for the rage is that I finished fixing another small problem with a steep learning curve and dozens of hours of labor and learning rolled inside only days before. The truck is not falling apart around me, though it feels that way sometimes. The problems are routine problems and I wish I could take it in for routine maintenance instead of d.i.y. desperation weekends. The other part of the reason for the anger is that if I were paid more in line with my actual skills and level of higher learning, I could shrug, say "okay", and rent a car tomorrow while my truck sat in a shop for an afternoon.
Living near the bottom of the middle class is deceptive. Bottom of the middle class, top of the lower class. Living in the region can be deceptive if you have some imagination, some confidence, some helpful friends, and some ingenuity. I have a one bedroom apartment with a closet bath/shower and mini kitchen. If I take away all of the furniture a friend gave, all of the furniture I built, and all of the furniture I found on curbs or being given away by strangers, I have cinder blocks, two folding chairs, one of those university lobby lounge chairs, a sheet of particle board, and an end table. Remove every worldly possession, so to speak, and there'd be a truck parked outside, a few pots and pans and plates, a desktop and pair of monitors, a console, a found tv, a few books and magazines, some shoes and goodwill clothes and multipack tees, some mechanical gadgets, some home and auto repair tools, and a printer and phone.
Imagination allows me to see what can be and holds the hand of ingenuity to find ways to make it happen. Call it humility or call it living within your means or call it mining gold or a hobby, thrift stores are one of the keys to forgetting that you are part of the working poor. The cream of the lower class. Keeping good friendships is a huge part of the puzzle. Without them, my life easily fits inside a 10' by 10' cell with a hole in the ground to eliminate and a spigot somewhere to drink and bathe. Part of the anger stems from those parameters.
I have been heavily detoured. Charging along the roads as quickly as possible in an effort to get back on some kind of track while wasting as few years as possible is frightening. I ask myself what will happen if I miss a black on orange florescent sign letting me know my next turn is coming three turns from now and the sign at the third turn was never erected so commit this one to memory. First and final warning. The reason why it does not feel fair to me is because it is not fair.
I continue to consider the many branches not followed that have lead here, fighting for time to write. I began to believe my father was trying to teach me a lesson about his pain all along and I am finally beginning to understand it, but I will not be able to understand until I am 48 or 50 or whatever his age was when I stopped talking to him. Before that thought grew too large, I remembered he hasn't the subtlety or emotional imagination to allow him to pull that off. I can see where some of his resentment stemmed from. Losing all of the prime years of life and talent at the cutting edge of art, design, and martial arts bad-ass-ery to childcare. Who wouldn't be a lot angry all of the time. Though extremely dissimilar in their divination (did you see what I did there), the results are similar. Cut away opportunities, trim an effective gesture here, clip a nudge there, ....
... I don't know. I do not know why I never got the same support. It would not have taken much. Some days I am alright never knowing. Some days it all comes to a head staring at your broken fuel gauge and doing the right thing and getting the hell out of the car without slamming the door and spinning 180 degrees to put your fist through the window and slash your own tires. The world could've been miles from now.
I could be writing about my third year working as a librarian somewhere and moaning about coding database systems and dealing with angry patrons and making time for dates between writing short stories and working on my two part novel about warfare and keeping up to date on my space opera hopeful crown jewel I'm still searching out an editor for, however the third poetry anthology is going pretty great. I'm tearing out the kitchen in parts on my down time when I get tired of writing and it should be finished in another week or two.
Today felt like opposite day. Loading my truck up with bale after bale of carpet, a refridgerator door, water logged drywall, a cane and broken umbrella, armfuls of empty paint cans, a screen door, and three dozen other pieces of jetsam from the home I'm renovating's previous occupants, it was opposite day. What I was doing should be my hobby. I should be putting that sweat and blood and cuss into my own home, not someone else's. When I go home I should be thinking about what I am going to tear down and visit the hardware store to work on next. When I go home I should not be thinking about what I can write next that can be packed into the time it takes to shut my body down to hit the hammers and brushes and trash bags and saws again.
As much as I love working with my hands, I could find a way to work with my body in the face of an occupation that demanded I not.
"You're poor! You're poor! You're poor! You're poor! Do not be deceived; you're poor!"
Independent life is a horror show and funhouse of mirrors broken and whole. I am staying positive.
What brought me back to a semblance of balance is remembering that the day is still young. Independent life is 5 years old. Five. Five years ago you started stepping outside of your cell. A year or two later you walked down a hallway and into a cafeteria. A few months later you learned there was a yard and no time restrictions. A few months later you found a gate into another yard. It's getting larger and larger as long as you do not screw it all up and have your privileges revoked. All of the time you lost will be compounded by the time you spent finding a way back out.
No one pays you what you're worth unless you have the paper to create the market. Or the portfolio and charisma, in lieu of paper. Portfolio and charisma is an absolute "and" statement. The one and not the other turns into a luck base number system. I will never know my actual value. Maybe that is the worst of it? I will never know if I am being over paid or under paid, valued appropriately or not. The optimist inside, the petitioner, tells me that if and only if we suffer for as much time as we spent pursuing the degree, our penance will be met with paper if and only if we are gracious through our turbulent era. The eros inside whispers about penance through joyful degradation, The musician adds another kick drum, knocking over cymbal stands. The child snaps crayons in half so both hands can draw at once inside the same lines.
It is difficult not to fantasize about getting my degree in the mail, tearing it in half, driving to their house, and suffocating them to death in turn, each by half, with a wad of paper. That would be thoroughly satisfying.
What are you supposed to do when the toys you want to play with are above the grade you are licensed for? What are you supposed to do when what you are allowed to do you can do very well, but the ceiling is opaque and the sounds coming through it are not in a language you can or maybe will ever understand? Maybe I am paid exactly what I am worth. If I have reached my ceiling and given no indication that I am prepared for or understand in the slightest or am equipped for beyond that ceiling, I am paid exactly what I am worth.
That's frightening. Also true. Harrowing.
Sometimes I understand that I'm getting too fixated on true freedom. I get a taste of working something I can enjoy to support the writing habit and expect everything else to fall in line. There's a luck element to it, that I cannot unlock through work or optimism or faith or trust. That operates on its own time table. If I do win the lottery, I will take out full page ads in major cities for the hell of it, but only once.
Part of me continues to say it is not supposed to be this hard to make massive uncertainty and day to day, week to week, at best month to month living a thing of the past. My state is, however, that fragile. At the ripe old age of at least 1/3 dead the best I can do for myself is knowing I have at least a month to figure out a new lowline. Fear the high lines because you know a low line is around the corner... ....what to do when you are following low lines? High lines have to be engaged. My spider sense is not tingling. Shake the wrong tree and a warship mine may fall out of it, let alone a tank or soldier sized one. The other story of America. Every body wants to be a cat. If you have enough money you can do whatever you want to. Not that much money. I mean enough money to swap cars, or pick up and move, or add and subtract clothing, or change lighting, or paint colors, flip what you walk on, change shoes when you feel like it, add and subtract channels, modify whatever you want to when the moment strikes you, eat out, order drinks for other people, pay for other peoples gas, buy extra fresh fruit. It's nice.
I am still going to try to brew my own beer this summer. Do not give me that horseshit "God works in mysterious ways" because chance does too. The only thing better than chance is ingenuity, and the only thing more important and better than ingenuity is imagination.
I am trying to stay positive with some success. Frustration and rage are part of being us. Born here? Sure. From here? No. I've missed you. Don't lose touch. If you ever need to talk, do not forget my ear. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.I love you.Iluvu.Ilvu.Iu.U.I.
We'll get this thing sorted out. We have a lot of time ahead of us, like it or not, we do.
Do not quit.
You have the rest of your life to make that decision.
It is opposite day, okay?
It is not wasted time.
Opposite day.
Time becomes more valuable as it accumulates.
Okay. I am
with you. Agreeing to never throw hands up in frustration. Agreeing to ride it as long as there is still track in front. Agreeing to dance as long as there is a beat to dance to, be it from within or without. I am okay with you as long as your are
okay. With me.
///Aesop Rock - (Gun for the Whole Family) ~ i've missed you for a very long time. things got bad. things were getting bad. i had to remember that they weren't as bad as they'd been. we're working toward a utopia of coexistence. we're not there yet, but damn sure we're going to keep on trying while helping lay the ground works and maps and blue prints for the next iteration of our being.
/
//
///Alanis Morissette - (Thank You) ~ passive mobile adaptable armor.
The thought crossed my mind, walking home from the local store to buy smokes and chips. Almost as good as chips and ice cream. When I feel horrible, I prefer cigarettes because they make me feel a little less horrible without making me wish I felt an unsustainable joy derived from ice creams sweet and cooling goodness. If only anyone could always be that smooth, creamy, and soothing all the way down to the belly. The thought crossed my mind after walking away from my truck to go buy some comfit after I noticed my fuel gauge was malfunctioning and realizing the problem's solution was going to cost me at least $120 and 10 to 20 hours of labor at worst and 20 to 40 hours of labor, learning, trial and error, and no dollars at best.
I kept chuckling thinking about how angry I felt. I kept chuckling thinking about reaching under the seat for my hatchet, letting out a bloody war cry, and smashing the wheel to pieces. Only then, ditching the hatchet, pulling and tearing wires out of it with my bare hands until the airbag exploded and shoved one of my closed fistful of wires straight into my face and I basically ended up knocking myself out cold with a rocket powered fist to the dome. Then waking up the next day with a deployed airbag, swollen knuckles, one hell of a headache, and one hell of a fist shaped bruise between my eyes.
Part of the reason for the rage is that I finished fixing another small problem with a steep learning curve and dozens of hours of labor and learning rolled inside only days before. The truck is not falling apart around me, though it feels that way sometimes. The problems are routine problems and I wish I could take it in for routine maintenance instead of d.i.y. desperation weekends. The other part of the reason for the anger is that if I were paid more in line with my actual skills and level of higher learning, I could shrug, say "okay", and rent a car tomorrow while my truck sat in a shop for an afternoon.
Living near the bottom of the middle class is deceptive. Bottom of the middle class, top of the lower class. Living in the region can be deceptive if you have some imagination, some confidence, some helpful friends, and some ingenuity. I have a one bedroom apartment with a closet bath/shower and mini kitchen. If I take away all of the furniture a friend gave, all of the furniture I built, and all of the furniture I found on curbs or being given away by strangers, I have cinder blocks, two folding chairs, one of those university lobby lounge chairs, a sheet of particle board, and an end table. Remove every worldly possession, so to speak, and there'd be a truck parked outside, a few pots and pans and plates, a desktop and pair of monitors, a console, a found tv, a few books and magazines, some shoes and goodwill clothes and multipack tees, some mechanical gadgets, some home and auto repair tools, and a printer and phone.
Imagination allows me to see what can be and holds the hand of ingenuity to find ways to make it happen. Call it humility or call it living within your means or call it mining gold or a hobby, thrift stores are one of the keys to forgetting that you are part of the working poor. The cream of the lower class. Keeping good friendships is a huge part of the puzzle. Without them, my life easily fits inside a 10' by 10' cell with a hole in the ground to eliminate and a spigot somewhere to drink and bathe. Part of the anger stems from those parameters.
I have been heavily detoured. Charging along the roads as quickly as possible in an effort to get back on some kind of track while wasting as few years as possible is frightening. I ask myself what will happen if I miss a black on orange florescent sign letting me know my next turn is coming three turns from now and the sign at the third turn was never erected so commit this one to memory. First and final warning. The reason why it does not feel fair to me is because it is not fair.
I continue to consider the many branches not followed that have lead here, fighting for time to write. I began to believe my father was trying to teach me a lesson about his pain all along and I am finally beginning to understand it, but I will not be able to understand until I am 48 or 50 or whatever his age was when I stopped talking to him. Before that thought grew too large, I remembered he hasn't the subtlety or emotional imagination to allow him to pull that off. I can see where some of his resentment stemmed from. Losing all of the prime years of life and talent at the cutting edge of art, design, and martial arts bad-ass-ery to childcare. Who wouldn't be a lot angry all of the time. Though extremely dissimilar in their divination (did you see what I did there), the results are similar. Cut away opportunities, trim an effective gesture here, clip a nudge there, ....
... I don't know. I do not know why I never got the same support. It would not have taken much. Some days I am alright never knowing. Some days it all comes to a head staring at your broken fuel gauge and doing the right thing and getting the hell out of the car without slamming the door and spinning 180 degrees to put your fist through the window and slash your own tires. The world could've been miles from now.
I could be writing about my third year working as a librarian somewhere and moaning about coding database systems and dealing with angry patrons and making time for dates between writing short stories and working on my two part novel about warfare and keeping up to date on my space opera hopeful crown jewel I'm still searching out an editor for, however the third poetry anthology is going pretty great. I'm tearing out the kitchen in parts on my down time when I get tired of writing and it should be finished in another week or two.
Today felt like opposite day. Loading my truck up with bale after bale of carpet, a refridgerator door, water logged drywall, a cane and broken umbrella, armfuls of empty paint cans, a screen door, and three dozen other pieces of jetsam from the home I'm renovating's previous occupants, it was opposite day. What I was doing should be my hobby. I should be putting that sweat and blood and cuss into my own home, not someone else's. When I go home I should be thinking about what I am going to tear down and visit the hardware store to work on next. When I go home I should not be thinking about what I can write next that can be packed into the time it takes to shut my body down to hit the hammers and brushes and trash bags and saws again.
As much as I love working with my hands, I could find a way to work with my body in the face of an occupation that demanded I not.
"You're poor! You're poor! You're poor! You're poor! Do not be deceived; you're poor!"
Independent life is a horror show and funhouse of mirrors broken and whole. I am staying positive.
What brought me back to a semblance of balance is remembering that the day is still young. Independent life is 5 years old. Five. Five years ago you started stepping outside of your cell. A year or two later you walked down a hallway and into a cafeteria. A few months later you learned there was a yard and no time restrictions. A few months later you found a gate into another yard. It's getting larger and larger as long as you do not screw it all up and have your privileges revoked. All of the time you lost will be compounded by the time you spent finding a way back out.
No one pays you what you're worth unless you have the paper to create the market. Or the portfolio and charisma, in lieu of paper. Portfolio and charisma is an absolute "and" statement. The one and not the other turns into a luck base number system. I will never know my actual value. Maybe that is the worst of it? I will never know if I am being over paid or under paid, valued appropriately or not. The optimist inside, the petitioner, tells me that if and only if we suffer for as much time as we spent pursuing the degree, our penance will be met with paper if and only if we are gracious through our turbulent era. The eros inside whispers about penance through joyful degradation, The musician adds another kick drum, knocking over cymbal stands. The child snaps crayons in half so both hands can draw at once inside the same lines.
It is difficult not to fantasize about getting my degree in the mail, tearing it in half, driving to their house, and suffocating them to death in turn, each by half, with a wad of paper. That would be thoroughly satisfying.
What are you supposed to do when the toys you want to play with are above the grade you are licensed for? What are you supposed to do when what you are allowed to do you can do very well, but the ceiling is opaque and the sounds coming through it are not in a language you can or maybe will ever understand? Maybe I am paid exactly what I am worth. If I have reached my ceiling and given no indication that I am prepared for or understand in the slightest or am equipped for beyond that ceiling, I am paid exactly what I am worth.
That's frightening. Also true. Harrowing.
Sometimes I understand that I'm getting too fixated on true freedom. I get a taste of working something I can enjoy to support the writing habit and expect everything else to fall in line. There's a luck element to it, that I cannot unlock through work or optimism or faith or trust. That operates on its own time table. If I do win the lottery, I will take out full page ads in major cities for the hell of it, but only once.
Part of me continues to say it is not supposed to be this hard to make massive uncertainty and day to day, week to week, at best month to month living a thing of the past. My state is, however, that fragile. At the ripe old age of at least 1/3 dead the best I can do for myself is knowing I have at least a month to figure out a new lowline. Fear the high lines because you know a low line is around the corner... ....what to do when you are following low lines? High lines have to be engaged. My spider sense is not tingling. Shake the wrong tree and a warship mine may fall out of it, let alone a tank or soldier sized one. The other story of America. Every body wants to be a cat. If you have enough money you can do whatever you want to. Not that much money. I mean enough money to swap cars, or pick up and move, or add and subtract clothing, or change lighting, or paint colors, flip what you walk on, change shoes when you feel like it, add and subtract channels, modify whatever you want to when the moment strikes you, eat out, order drinks for other people, pay for other peoples gas, buy extra fresh fruit. It's nice.
I am still going to try to brew my own beer this summer. Do not give me that horseshit "God works in mysterious ways" because chance does too. The only thing better than chance is ingenuity, and the only thing more important and better than ingenuity is imagination.
I am trying to stay positive with some success. Frustration and rage are part of being us. Born here? Sure. From here? No. I've missed you. Don't lose touch. If you ever need to talk, do not forget my ear. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.I love you.Iluvu.Ilvu.Iu.U.I.
We'll get this thing sorted out. We have a lot of time ahead of us, like it or not, we do.
Do not quit.
You have the rest of your life to make that decision.
It is opposite day, okay?
It is not wasted time.
Opposite day.
Time becomes more valuable as it accumulates.
Okay. I am
with you. Agreeing to never throw hands up in frustration. Agreeing to ride it as long as there is still track in front. Agreeing to dance as long as there is a beat to dance to, be it from within or without. I am okay with you as long as your are
okay. With me.
///Aesop Rock - (Gun for the Whole Family) ~ i've missed you for a very long time. things got bad. things were getting bad. i had to remember that they weren't as bad as they'd been. we're working toward a utopia of coexistence. we're not there yet, but damn sure we're going to keep on trying while helping lay the ground works and maps and blue prints for the next iteration of our being.
/
//
///Alanis Morissette - (Thank You) ~ passive mobile adaptable armor.
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