That Instant

you realize you've been wearing your plug glass piece like a Faberge egg and forgot it was in all day through the night before and you take it out and sigh like the first time you saw the sun rise on a golf course with a spliff between your lips and you know it was the best 25 dollars you ever spent.

The Unwritten Beard Manifesto and Subsequent Referendum That Never Happened

Here's why:

I'm not against shaving.  I just hate it.  I say that shaving is for pussies.  Its a joke that cuts both ways.  If you don't see the humor in it, you're an idiot.  If you don't see the humor in it, allow me to clarify.  Shaving is for pussies, as in weak people that feel they have to present a certain image of themselves to be attractive.  Beards are awesome.  Lady, if you've got a mustache, the only thing weirder is shaving every morning.  Everyone sees your five o'clock shadow.  I dunno, bleach it or something maybe?  Okay, fine.  Shave it.  Laser it.  Laser the hell out of your face.  It's a complicated issue, I know.  Shaving is for pussies, as in pelvic areas, as in the vulva, is a joke.  It's sarcasm.  Can you imagine walking around with razor burn on your crotch all day, everyday, with the most confining underwear known to mankind?  I can.  I once completely botched a ball shaving job with an electric razor and didn't realize it until my scrotum was on fire in a pair of fine mesh black panties while sitting at a bus stop in the middle of summer.  It was ten o'clock in the morning.  It was one of the worst days I've ever experienced hygienically speaking.  Oddly enough, when I do it right I can shave my crotch with great ease and never have the problems induced when shaving my face.  If I had pubic hair for a beard I could shave every day, easy as pie.  However, I could never grow a beard because I would have pubes on my face and a full forest in my pants and that's just asking for all sorts of smelly sweaty awfulness down there and who wants a pube face?  I mean, than I would absolutely have to shave every day and that's just a hassle on another scale.  Shaving is not for pussies.  Trimming perhaps, but not baby smooth shaving.  That's just weird and hazardous to your health and safety.  Beards are awesome.  They keep the wind off of your face in Winter.  They shimmer in Summer.  They're low maintenance.  They let the world know you are a sexy beast.  They let the world know you are not a child anymore.  They make a statement.  They give you a chin if you don't have one.  They give you something to play with and tug on and snuffle into.  I'm not against shaving.  I just hate it.  I hate it like I hate Nazis.  Okay, I hate Nazis more.  Slightly more.  There should be an extra notch above hate so that I can hate Nazis more, but there isn't so I have to hate shaving slightly less than I hate Nazis.  So I don't actually hate shaving.  I just strongly strongly strongly dislike it.  Why set your face on fire everyday?  I don't like anyone enough to go in for that no matter how much they like a smooth cheek.  How's that working out for you now?  What do you mean you don't want to nuzzle my horribly broken out, bleeding ingrown haired face?  Wasn't that what you wanted?  Aw, go to hell!  You don't know what you want.  I want a nice thick beard, thank you ma'am.  Shaving is not for pussies, its simply not for me.  No need to spark a revolution.  Grow a beard or do not.  I won't love you less, but you may find I love you a little more.

Dear (_____)

Dear Samuel Adams,

Don't you dare try to sell me Spring time beer.  My body has just got  acclimated to Winter and I am not at all ready to look forward to Spring.  Let me have this!  Let me catch a snowflake on my tongue before you shove your next limited edition "tastes like Winter, but hey, there's a citrus note" piece of garbage lager down my throat!

Sincerely,

the Winter us

Dear (_____)

I don't know how it's going to happen or when, but if I ever end up comatose I believe I've left enough bread crumbs to get me conscious again.  Just play Mathew Dear's R+S and if that doesn't work, go down the list and work backward.

Focus Divided by Time and Keeping the Fire (what the hell is the point)

Creeping and creeping and creeping like dawn.  I am a romantic and the world is not fit for romantics.  Then again it may be entirely geared for romantics.  Someone has to balance out the blizzard of the hall of horrors.  Then again, the world is not at all fit for romantics.  Then again it is perfectly suited for romantics.  Romantics survive and thrive despite what comes their way.  The only thing better than the horror are moments of brilliant romance in which romantics thrive; the difference being (I really need to brush up on my grammar) half of the experience becomes imagination and projections overlaid and the other half becomes visceral and inlaid and breathed through existence.

What the hell is the point.  Is it possible to be a furious romantic?  I would like to believe so.  That is beside the point.  My apologies, romanticism is entirely beside the point.

With the onset of a new year and the end of an old one it is clear that it is, barring catastrophic failure, inevitable that you will be one year older.  And it is a little disappointing.  A little disappointing and a lot of frustrating.  What is one more year?

You look at your car and it needs work.  You listen to your body and it needs work.  You hear your head and it needs work.  One more year on the odometers and everything needs work to make it run better than it does, but never as good as it did when it was built.  You look at your insurance and you go through the hundreds of lines of your policies and nothing is actually covered.  You are essentially paying for a card that says you cannot be put in jail for leaving your home because you have paid into a pool that says you acknowledge that if anything happens to your person or your property you are screwed and if you do anything to anyone else or their property with your person or your property to damage them in any way you are more than likely screwed.  These things are difficult to look at and absorb and be okay with.  What the hell is the point?

I think about how many ways so many junctures could have gone differently all the way back to my birth and hate and rage simmer a sideways glance beneath a rolling boil.  A nudge here, a hand there, a push here, tire screeching stop there.

Everyone has a ten year head start on you.  That is not going to change.  There is no way to somehow work so hard that the gap goes away.  Wherever you go, whatever you get up to, everyone else living marginally productively will always be at least ten years ahead of you from a developmental stand point.  If you want the insurance that is more than a "please do not put me in jail for being alive and mobile" card you will have to work twice as hard and twice as long and essentially kill yourself to get it anyway.  What the hell is the point?  Go back to school and get a better job and then extend your retardation to twenty five years to pay everything back for a degree you do not want and a career that will probably end with your body dangling from a rope because you could afford a gun, but forgot to budget for ammunition.  To top off your glass, the time spent at home learning to be an adult was spent largely learning how to avoid pain and punishment heaped out by the bucket for things that beg explanation to this day, and so you are essentially 12 when you should be 30 years old.

The mathematics are overwhelming.  Standing back from the numbers it takes on the shape of a massive impact crater you landed in America inside, the walls high enough to block out the time of day from dawn to 11 A.M. and 2 P.M. to night, with you at its center with a sun dial wondering why people are phoning you at night when in reality the suns been up for 6 hours with no clue otherwise.  A hurricane seen from the bottom of a well.

Staying focused is not easy.  Time continues to multiply.  You do not.  It is an effort and choice and a way of life to maintain focus.  How simple and easy to quit.  Quit is too strong a word.  How simple and easy to decline engagement.  

Problematic situations.  Unsolvable and unreasonable problems will remain so and perhaps, in many cases, get worse over time and you are only responsible for you.  Time will keep doing its thing regardless of you and when your focus, you, divided by time approaches zero, you are failing.  You are dying faster than you should be.  Faster than you have any right to be.  You are committing suicide and that is never acceptable for reasons I do not need to go into here.  Focus will save your life, whatever value you place on it.  Stay away from zero and, if you can, stay as far away from zero as you can.

Forget everyone else.  Forget your starting point.  Acknowledge the nature of your sun dial, the make up of your world, and the existence of a map beyond your own.  Without a balance of forgetfulness and presence, what the hell is the point?

Do not spend all of yourself trying to forget and do not spend all of yourself trying to be present in a world that is not yours.  Both roads amount to declining engagement.

Ten years from now I will be 40.  I will, in all likelihood, be driving the same car.  I will live in the same city.  I may own a house or still be renting an apartment.  I will have health insurance that does nothing for me beyond an occasional check up.  I will probably have all of my teeth.  I will have a few friends and a lot of people I know or can say I have met or worked with.  I will still enjoy fishing.  The lumbar portion of my spine and my hip will still give me problems on extremely cold days or humid days or days when the air pressure or humidity is not right for me.  I will still be romantic and ornery and searching for interfaces.  Time will have multiplied.

Keeping the fire that spawned my consciousness, my awareness that I am different, my awareness of the world outside and the world inside, is not easy and will become a stiffer challenge as the people I know have their children and families and connections.

In the backwoods of civilization, the margin(?), the nights are very long.  There are things and beings and people back there in the darkness, myself occasionally among them, that fire keeps at bay.  Tending the fire and humming songs to us to stay awake, you can hear them, smell them, sometimes see them, drawing near the wavering circle to see if you are asleep yet.  Ten years from now I will still go out during the day to gather more wood, bits of jetsam, refuse natural and not, to keep the fire burning through the night and the days when the sun refuses to rise and the off chance of eclipse. 

I know I am not going to magically get better.  I know I am not going to boot strap myself to prosperity.  I will have a greater distaste for company.  A more combative spirit.  As you grow older in the wild, the things you fear grow older and more capable too.  What the hell is the point?

The point is you.  The point is decay is inevitable.  The point is you have lived a scant 20% of your entire life under what can be deemed more freedom to explore the world, embrace yourself, and see without blinders or taint or outside in corruption than you have ever known.  Do not be swift to let your fire die.  The only thing better than eating is an opportunity to eat you alive.  Time will not change course.  Debts will not evaporate.  Closeness cannot be manufactured or faked.  The people and places you know now are not the extent of everything you will or may know.  

Stay focused.  Remain passionate.  Sing your songs.  Love nature and all that it has to offer.  This thing called you is far from over.  You say you want to make a map?  I present to you the wilderness.

Rereading

I am disgusted with my flash fiction.  It is a house on fire.  Electrical fire with buckets of water.  Perfect is the enemy of good, but ... holy hell they're bad.

The path of best intentions is paved.  That path is raucous.  It is passed time to remake them.




///Air - "Radio #1"

Are You 8 Years Old?

Sometimes things happen in life and you continue to trip over them mentally.  The constant tripping makes us more and more upset and before we know it we're pacing and running our fingers over our scalps and shaking our heads and then shaking our arms and hands at empty air.

What follows is one of those things.  Do you hear yourself when you say to me it's my fault for saying "yes, help yourself" when you ask me if you can have a portion of something I have.  Do you hear how ridiculous you sound?  Are you fucking eight years old?  You do understand taking almost all of the thing you asked if you could have a portion of is the same thing as stealing, correct?  Do you believe that I am two years old?  Do you snicker to yourself and say something in your inner monologue like "teehee, I'm going to take way more than I should, but he won't notice because I'll leave a little bit and even if he does notice he can't say anything because I didn't take everything, teehee."

Are you eight years old?  You're older than I am.  Do I actually have to walk you by the hand and take out exactly how much you are allowed to have and set it aside and then hide the rest of what I have just to be sure that if I leave the room more won't disappear into your pockets?  I don't really consider having some consideration to be an adult attribute.  It's a communal attribute that manifests at all ages.  A hallmark of civilized community.  A certain level of trust afforded to someone you consider to be a member of your community, much less a friend as well.  Friendship should, if anything, heighten that attribute within yourself.

What the hell is wrong with you.  Do you hear yourself?  You have the nerve to say "you obviously don't want me in your home" after I tell you I can't have you over because you basically steal from me when what is clear is that you obviously don't consider being in my home or my friend to be a part of your community.  Are you kidding me?  Be playful, be imaginative, be a little immature and fresh from time to time, but do not fucking steal from me and expect me to nod along and say "aw shucks, you're right.  I should've known if I was at all considerate toward you I would end up broke and hungry.  I'll be on my toes next time, a-hyuck."

Be a better person.  Have some consideration.  Life's not free and friends don't fall from the sky everyday.  You'll find yourself without community fairly swiftly.  Don't be that shifty and somehow all too casual eight year old in the room always looking to see how far and for how much you can take people.  Chances are very good you are known and it's only a matter of time.