That Instant

you look back at the countless system restarts, software downloads, years of physical and programming glitches, migrations from operating system to operating system, hardware failures, compatibility explosions, canyons of anxieties, quits, fear, fiscal shortfalls, bouts of rage, helpful hands, sympathetic ears, crying nights, hate filled days, and continents of time you've put in to trying to get the right graphics tablet with the functions you need that isn't near the end of its service life from the moment you plug it in and the tablet lights open their little firefly eyes, and the pen pressure is natural, and no batteries are required, and a twirl of its balance to bring the eraser to the page is as natural as the pointed tip too and you don't know what to feel because maybe something else terrible is waiting to happen and all will be lost overnight again including the money you could've used to buy so many other things, but damnit, it just works. 

it finally just works the way you've wanted it to, needed it to, and things are going to be a little different now, at least maybe ... the way they were before everything fell apart on you.

Dear (_____)

Dear pain,

You've taken sleep away from me.  The paranoia that breeds across my maps is all rooted to you.  I never know if the next morning is the morning when a swollen disk pokes a nerve or a frayed nerve get's caught in gravity's rotation and snips a cold bolt down one of my legs.  That paranoia, that anxiety, that never knowing if all of the days waking without you are a lead to some sort of crescendo two days long.  pERMANENT INURY BRED Memory. 

You don't scare me often.  I hope, when next you arrive, you bring some frost and ankle deep snow too.

huddled,

Hobbes

The Best Thing

about realizing your sense of humor is directly tied into the belief or disbelief in the supernatural and ghost stories are ghost stories as the starting ground and the turn of the gate always jams backward and that is unfair and that realization nudging you toward a shelf of acceptance...     no...

about realizing your sense of humor is uncommon is that they (some) will laugh with you.  Others will allow it.  Some of the caucus will grip their sides with glee.  Others will hold their chins and wag their horned heads.  And they all will be there to see you.

Dear (_____)

Dear cigarettes,

You got me again.  Another pack gone with nothing to show for it but discolored phlegm, chest pain, and a hole in my wallet where $10 used to be.  Fuck you.  I'm not going to quit quitting.  I know that you never really do finish quitting and that every week you can say no is maybe another day you might get to live when everything starts shutting down and the soul waves a finger "alright, let's wrap this thing up!"  I know childhood trauma already ate decades off the end of my life.  I know my line of work, my station in society, my genetic make up, and just day to day survival stress shaves years off what's left.  If I can avoid it, I'd like to not suffocate inside my own body.  I'd like to die doing something much more interesting.  So I'm not going to quit quitting just because I feel like absolute shit and burned more of my life away.  You'll come knocking again.  I'll turn up the radio and go sit in another room.  The porch light may be on, but don't wait up for someone to come to the door.

Later 'gator.

The Shadowman and the Irrationality of Humans

The common understanding is that humans are irrational.  You can leave off the "beings" part.  Instinctual?  Sure, yes.  Emotional?  Mhm.  Logical?  Ehhhhh... sometimes?  Reasonable?  By turns.  The common understanding is that humans are rational.  It's unfortunate that the base assumption is so.  Where it is born, who knows.  My thought is that the seed of the assumption is formed in the assumption that you are a human and you're decisions and behaviors are rational to you and have furthered your survival and existence so if another human exists their behaviors and decisions must be rational too because they are also surviving.  Something along those lines.  It gets reinforced all over the place from every angle and channel of input.  You get it.  You are rational.  Why would you choose to do something that would jeopardize your very existence?  You don't have a death wish.  You are alive!

Humans are irrational.  Please stop building arguments and drawing lines in the sand from the standpoint of echos reverberating from advertisements and observed actions sculpted into frameworks and canned calls and responses and your pasts and your futures.  We are not rational.  Beings?  Sure.  Yes.  Rational?  No.  Rational some of the time?  Sure, yes.  If you want to make it absolute, one or zero, then we are one.  No being or thing is rational all of the time.  Okay, some things are.  Coins are rational.  Geometry is rational.  Math is rational and even when it's irrational it's rational (I think... I knew mathematicians existed and played at the fringes... pretty sure that foggy math is still relatively...  okay, maybe not... you get the point).  Alright, everything is irrational!

In all seriousness, life has been very frustrating trying to understand why events bring out expressions of concern for well being and continued survival in strange ways.  The most recent shooting is not a tipping point, but mumbling to myself while I worked through the day and the following day was telling.  Enter vice and criminality.

When the argument is made that laws have to stay the way they are because the criminal element will find a way to get what they want regardless of what laws are or are not in place and the citizenry must be able to protect itself from this shadow force, I cringe.  That shadow is being cast from the rational mind inside.

Is there a criminal element in the human population?  Yes.  Is that criminal element rational?  Of course not.  The percentage of the human population that makes up that criminal element is extremely visible and equally small.  It skews perception.  How much of that perceived element is gratified and punched up by the echoed reinforcement of  "I am a rational human being and criminals are humans and therefore also rational."  It is incredibly basic.  If you make laws to prevent something from happening or encourage something to happen to promote survival, a lot of humans will see the outcomes, understand mutual survival, and continue to be.  Those same communal laws will be ignored by some humans for all sorts of reasons and interactions and protein chains and chemical reactions.  We are not rational!  As much as you want to believe it.

Let's bring it to weapons. I need to be able to purchase a weapon capable of defending my life against the criminal element.  The rational criminal will find a way to get the weapon they want.  I need to be able to get one capable of answering whatever challenge that may be and limiting my options is sending me to certain harm.  You're flinching away from your own shadow.  Life is insecure.  Life is irrational.  The penalty for your crime is twenty years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 40 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 80 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is consecutive life sentences.  It's the principle!  The penalty for your crime is death.  You don't understand how much I've been through!  The penalty for your crime - will never be able to influence some humans actions.  That population is a lot smaller than advertised.

So you have to carry a gun because if you were them you would have a gun and you are rational, unlike them, and you follow the law because the law keeps everyone alive and well and they'd have one anyway because that's what you would do.  You have to protect yourself against the irrational ones.  Sometimes it makes me giggle the way people perceive laws because we see their statements about them and wonder how much of their conviction comes from what they've observed and how much comes from the little voices inside their own heads that they mash and thumb down and keep inside because they are reasonable humans doing what's best for human survival instead of slamming the door shut on who they are only to have it pop open a slip with a loud screeeeeeeeaak an inch or two because the bolt didn't quite seat to the strike plate, but the door's hinges are stout.

Getting what you want, when you want it, when you need it, if laws and community prohibit it, is not nearly as easy as television and hearsay and books and articles make it sound.  How many times have you followed an instruction manual to the letter and failed?  How many times have you gone to a holiday office party to be sociable and improve your image and come away exactly the same as you arrived?  How many times have you turned right on a red lit intersection with a dedicated right lane lamp because you were late and the lanes were clear?  How many times did you walk fifteen minutes away from the bar to get a pack of smokes and fire one up on the way back to the bar because they didn't sell them there and disallowed smoking on the premises?  The easy stuff.  The forgivable stuff.

Ramp it up.  Imagine that gas station is thirty miles away.  Imagine that intersection has five cameras pointed at it.  Imagine that party was organized by you and you showed up fashionably late too.  Imagine holding that instruction manual in your hand, closed, as you flipped the switch to "on" and the entire K'nex set whirred, wobbled, and cracked to pieces in seconds.  Getting what you want, when you want it is not an easy task, but it's fun to think hypothetically as a rational human.

"If I were them, I could do that.  I would do that!  If we are to survive we must make sure that if they do that (they are rational because that's what I would do and I am rational) we can stop them."  No, you couldn't.  It's hilarious and frustrating at once.  If I want to do drugs, I will find a way to do drugs!  No, not really.  If it's convenient, why not.  The feeling may pass.  The chemical programming may or may not.  The decision making is tied to the chemicals and past experiences hard coded upstairs.  It may take a while to shift.  It may never shift.  If it's not readily available, fifty one miles is just too damn long to go get it so I'll stew and grind on with my life without it.  The rational addict goes to get it, makes a way, finds someone who knows someone who heard about someone that was seen somewhere once and goes there to meet them for lunch.  The irrational human stumbles on through the next day and the next day and sits down some afternoons to cuss quietly or aloud and does something else with its time until it becomes a little more convenient and sometimes reflects on why its so upset in the first place.  Sometimes it kills itself, sometimes it hurts others, sometimes it decides to drive fifty one miles to ask a question.  Sometimes it decides now is now and another day is another day.

It's guffaw disappointing when the shadowman is invoked as a reason to do or not do something.  The shadowmen are arming themselves, laws be damned; do you want me to die?!  The shadowmen are circulating drugs all over the place; what of the children?  The shadowmen, the shadowmen, the shadowmen!  Without laws keeping step with the threat of the shadows no one is safe!

Yes, no one is safe.  No ones safety is ever guaranteed.  That goes back to when humans had to worry about giant nocturnal multi-legged hunters stealing away their curious young.  People die.  People will be killed.  Someone may murder you.  Someone you know.  Someone you know may murder someone you know.  People find ways to get what they want or need and laws don't stop them no matter how much they have to risk or harm themselves to get it.  The answer isn't lowering the threshold from irrational decision to action.  Raise it.  Otherwise you might as well be trying to fix a hole in a canoe by punching more holes so that everyone is treading water.  If everyone is under threat of drowning we are all safe, right?  Another terrible analogy.  Believing making something proven and observed to be extremely hazardous to other people readily available to everyone to level an imaginary playing field is just flat laughable.

Why are you so afraid of the shadowman?

Who's been whispering in your ear?

How do you not see the upside-down superimposed on what you advocate for and not pause?

We are not rational people.  Hearing arguments bounce back and forth with real ramifications, buoyed by this ghost echo of an assumption of reasonable behavior, it's stupefying.  The invocation of this evildoer for all seasons with no regard for law or just basic basic basic irrational humanness is disheartening.  But we are rational people.  We will survive.



///The Shadow

The Best Thing

about not having your wisdom teeth removed is that the pain stops around 29 and if you chew gum with too much vigor part of it will get caught on a shard of berg and when you pull it forward with your tongue there will be a strand that you will tongue while you scrunch up your nose figuring out by touch where exactly it is because the last thing you want is to brush your teeth in the morning and have grainy chewing gum melding with the paste/saliva froth and you can laugh at 32 that the only hassle will be that.

That Instant

you realize you haven't showered in four days, but you also aren't exactly sure where the time has gone.

The End of the World Came, The End of the World Went

Do these people know how many times they've completely screwed up other peoples plans by making incorrect predictions about the end of the world?  I get why they do it.  There are a few reasons.  I think the main reason is because who doesn't want to be right about something that absolutely huge?  For the rest of time, what little there is left of it, you will be known and revered as "the one" who truly could see the future.  You will have the satisfaction of knowing that what you believed all of your life was worth it.  And maybe, in a farther reaching sense, the sense of if you are able to predict it correctly from enough years away, maybe you will have changed someone's life for the better.

Every time you get it wrong you really get it wrong.  As unhelpful as cults are, for the few ones that really do help people turn their lives around for the better (for whatever insane reason they're able to convince them to change), what happens when you're wrong prediction produces mass suicides?  I think that was the funny and also frustrating thing about this whole Planet X thing.

For a while, I was absolutely thrilled.  Finally, it's over.  How great is it that I'll be able to die!  We're finally checking out, baby!  Free of all guilt about what'll happen to the people's lives you've touched directly or indirectly and free from all sadness about the people that will actually miss you and free from the anger about the people that never had time for you, but will put on a show because they're emotional tourists.  It's over, it's done!  No more bills, no more trying to fit in or getting pissed off with trying to fit in and having to give the world the finger and go your own way only to be dragged back around to trying to fit in because that life gets exhausting and sometimes you just want a damn hug to get through another week.

All of our hopes were running high and the day came and the day went and nothing.  Just a big fat nothing.  More bills.  More bad deals from companies and services that know you can't really go anywhere else and are going to continue to screw you royally because ... well, where else are you going to go?  More stupid rhetoric from Capitol Hill.  More disappointments in policy making.  More losses.  More frustrations.  More "why the hell am I even bothering with this garbage."  We were all supposed to be reduced to superheated plasma two days ago.  Instead we've got more... more... what do you even call the new "this"?  What is this? 

Well, good talk.  I'm going to go to sleep and wake up, I suppose.  Adventure through dreamland until the sun comes up and those businesses open again and we all get on the road and start jogging toward our graves, or maybe just sit down and run out our clocks doing nothing, or try to mate with each other or ourselves.  Maybe I'll just read something.  Or listen to someone read something.  Another day gone by and the world is still turning.  I want out.  I'll wait my turn.  What's the hurry, right?  Not like anything else is happening in this arm of our galaxy.  Might as well go skip some rocks.




///Daedelus - "Special Re:Quest"  bed time.  but I'm not tired!  you've got to get some sleep sweetie.  try for me, would you?  will you leave the christmas lights on?  sure, nite nite.

Dear (_____)

Dear Anyone Writing A News Piece,

If the physical act of slamming someone or something has not taken place, you need to stop using the word.  The are so many ways to describe a difference of opinion or disagreement with nuance and hues.  There's a veritable rainbow of colorations of conflict in the English language.  Use it.  Nuance and shades of disagreements, imagine that.

'The term has been over used to color so many things that it has lost all reasonable semblance of tone regardless of context.  "Local man slams post office for bad service" as the title reads the same as "local man hopes sinkhole opens underneath local post office and entire staff burns in hell while demons eat their flesh"; meanwhile the actual content of the article is more along the lines of "local man doesn't much care for post office service and files gently worded complaint."  

Another headache inducing favorite: "coach slams players."  Just no, okay?  One hundred times no.  Not only was no one physically slammed, but all the coach said was that an appropriate amount of effort wasn't evident on the field or court or whatever and he wants to see more intensity in the next game or match or whatever.  He did not say his players were dog poo, he did not say he couldn't stand them.  I mean, have you ever slammed something?  The point in slamming something is to use enough power to potentially break it and create a powerful clap of noise.  

If we're going to go this route can we go all the way with it?  Can we see headlines like "Mom breaks parent teach association over her knee and sends school board to the hospital with 3rd degree burns" or "politician X works the groin of tax bill with brass knuckles" or "player skins coach alive and proceeds to wear bloody pelt in several later tweets over sexist equal pay remarks." 

I miss when slamming something used to mean something.  Don't you?  Find something else to suck the life out of.  

Thanks,

Fiction

Nine One One Two

"Every year, exactly this time of year."  Well every since and before.  The tension of the holiday season is already cinching.  Where will you go?  Who will you see?  Who can you adopt for family?  It does make me anxious.  Is alone okay?  OF COURSE!  Why all caps?  Am I crazy?  Did you hear that?  We've talked it over several dozen times and dozens of those more through the years.  Yes, of course it is okay.  No, you are not crazy.

"Pitter patter, my little heart."  It races from time to time.  Little panic attacks.  Solitary is the frontier and solitary it will be.  That's where you work best.  You'll still meet people and see families and couples and the like.  It is certainly less than the usual or equal.  Do not believe that holidays with yourself are anything less than their holidays.  They would be miserable in your concept of a holiday and you would be severely uncomfortable in theirs.  It's okay to peek between the slats from time to time.  That is universal.  Their anxieties are the same as yours with different window dressing and frames.  Rest assured, they feel something too and that is fine.

Nine eleven, however many years out, has changed a lot.  The rage of being denied enlistment has faded.  It only took ...  four ... seven ... shut up!  Far enough away to laugh about how I thought that idea could work.  Thinking back to the earliest years, it is funny to think that I thought I might've been able to make it by as a kept man.  Good god, I would've been far too bored.  Seven plus years separated from the bid to enlist, it has been reaffirmed one hundred times over that I would have gone insane trying to make a career out of it.  As a way to form a base and small nest egg, sure it could've worked, but my lack of mental stability would have failed spectacularly.  Maybe not the first year, maybe not the second year; the chances would have increased exponentially from day .0001.

I'm completely over the war on terror.  There are so many things that have come to light in the intervening time domestically that are so incredibly glaring and depressing.  So many more pressing internal wars that reached cease fires and truces without any actual resolution that are winnable & endable.  The fact that they still exist isn't the surprising thing.  It is.  Cultural change moves at a glacial pace.  As interconnectivity and access to information grows and shortens in its difficulty, the pace feels slower and slower because you can give a person a library of five books and a library of five thousand and it won't change how fast or slowly they choose to read.

Thinking about that day, I remember the anniversary that I couldn't remember for two years (was it three?) until I finally got it right.  Being in relationships is hard.  Do you remember the day you asked me if we were dating?  Kind of.  Is that today?  I don't remember the exact day, but I do remember being nervous as all hell and wondering about it for weeks and if I asked you and you said no would I ask you again or storm out or wait a few weeks and ask you again.  The day that you gave me a lollipop or the day of the formal dance?  Laughing thinking about it now.  I still cannot remember which day it was, but I know that it is a day to remember.  Wherever you are, I am glad that you know that you are loved and I am glad that you are with someone who is a part of you.  The years we spent were not for nothing.  The futures opened.  The years to come are their own.

Solitary progressions.  Nine eleven is also walking beside a cemetery.  A museum of displays and marble hand rails and floor tiles laced in sterling grout.  Rose and magenta tinted chrome and glass.  The past brought to life for a single day.  Compressed, labeled, and plaqued.  The westerly wing of the grand mezzanine of leTauran Atu Gothans, a 78 acre compound.  I don't visit there often.  About once a year, I try to look at the exhibits again.  Sometimes the maintenance men are about and they'll open up a case to let me get a close look at the taxidermy.  It is pretty amazing the way hairs are placed and tacked together to form entire swatches of skin that can stretch over the plaster molds.  The lighting isn't always great, but sometimes the exhibits are moved around to different enclosures to light them better.

I'm nowhere near a writing rut.  I can't stop doing it inside my head.  I have to take the time to do it outside of my head.  Part of how I've adjusted to protect myself from myself has been finding other things to do.  "If you can just stay distracted long enough!"  Out of focus.  I've been trying to do a lot in the physical world, however.  Trying to adjust to the modern world of smarter smart phones.  Trying to adjust to larger work loads and responsibility.  Trying to see the world with a larger lens.

Trying to see more possibilities and potential without getting swallowed whole in their ocean.

For some years, I mourned.

Part of me still does.

The deaths I died.

The deaths of possibilities.  So close to another and another friends birthdays and the lives that faded and blew out like candle wicks.  The scent of the smoke still fresh and undeniable and intoxicating in their aroma.  When does smell memory fade?

9,238 cigarettes before you lose your sense of smell, chief.   Oh.  Thank you, statistician?

I know I haven't been keeping track of holidays or birthdays.  I keep telling myself:  "we're just going to backtrack and bang them all out at once and get caught up to the now, piece of cake!"  That philosophy has fallen completely flat.  Of course I am beating myself up over it.  It is important.  Without consistent data points we cannot know where we are.  Holidays are perfect times for evaluation.  How the hell old am I anyway?  I need to take care of the backlog or at least try to ... at least let go of it.  That time cannot be restored.

Projecting a life span of 75 years with maximum outcomes: you live .205 years each day of your life if every birthday is a new beginning and a new iteration of yourself and you will only live a maximum of 75 years in each iteration.

147 days have passed since your birthday.  You are experiencing the rise of a new adult form convulsing through its last growth bursts.  You will not die soon.  200+ days until you return.  This is a strange time for you.  Adolescence continues to shed.  Try.  The carapace will split and you will free yourself for the wind.  The new skin will harden in the Winter.




Nine eleven is a quarter post of sorts.  So many things changed and so many things continue to.  Resolved to death, yes.  Resolved to its exact date, no.  In meta-jail, I have been granted so many larger and larger play grounds and exercise areas.  I've been granted larger and larger libraries and degrees to work and play on while I spend my time in solitary.  The clock is ticking on the next ring of the compound gates to open and I have to be patient while the paperwork runs through the levels of the office's in/out boxes and gets stamped and I have to go in for interviews and hearings and have good composure and appear civilized and remorseful and hopeful and aware and reticent and reflective and playful, but not too much, and deprecating and confident and ... all at once.  I don't have to do any of that.  I have to wait. I don't know how far out the compound goes, but I heard there is another gate over them hills once they fix to open this one.

As the years tick on, I learn how to be more like you and I learn what the differences actually are between us.  I know we are not the same.  Far from it.  It is incredibly reassuring, as we walk, to understand better what those differences are.

The mission: to leave a map for the next person that is at all like me.  "It's a great big universe!"

What helps get me through is knowing that I wasn't rejected as much as cast away.  There wasn't a fault as much as a rift in the known firm of space and time.  Blame dark matter.  "The stories you told were awful."  I hope that the maps will be artful.  You can only live but for so long with someone who is prone to spontaneous combustion before it changes from an endearing parlor trick to a recurring crisis.

Heave away!

Having an extra $200 shouldn't be life changing at age thirty two.  Something's not right.

Are all of your goals set so low that...  ...no.  Maybe?  Crossroads.  Is that all you wanted to accomplish?  Well, yeah.  For now.  It's pretty neat.  Hmm.  Hmm, what?  It's fine.  The door's over there if you need it.  I'm just saying-.  Don't let it goose you on the way out!

There is a lot of work still to be done and I am avoiding it.  Part of the reason why is because there are too many things I want to do at once and part of it is because I can only live for 12 to 16 hours a day without ending up cycling into spirals that will carry me up or down and anything that forces a deviation from that norm starts the engines that link and power chain reactions that will go in either direction and it is absolutely exhausting walking the rope and having to face constant failures because time ran out or constant failures because time drew on toward infinity.

I don't know what normal is to you.

I don't know what normal means to you.

Will I ever be?

Nowadays nine one one is a thermometer.  The potentials continue to cool while the core continues to spin and move plates and generate its own magnetic field. September, we dive through the thin layer of atmosphere and sweep and zip between billows of thunder heads, citywide lightning bolts and liquid metal rain drops against windscreens to land with the grace of a butterfly on the escarpment of a phase three elemental cave patio.  Grab our groceries, suit up, and walk inside to one atmosphere, proper oxygen mix that will not explode granted a match and cigarette, and turn on the satellite linked tele.

As the Septembers progress, I learn better what coming home means and what it means to me.  The distances will continue to grow and I will continue to fail at assimilating to common society, but in the meantime, I will explore more areas of the compound I was locked in when life began inside a cell.  It is a reminder that I am many years behind in my development and there isn't a time machine yet that will bridge that gap.

If this is the beginning of the solo-journey, I know I've spoken enough about being at one with the concept that life will be singular for the seeable future because I cannot ...... remembering the last time I was loved ..... laughing out loud.  Seven years and counting.  It really is dumb to expect to feel that again.  Think about it!  Let's say, one hundred experiences per day.  Five of them new.  Hell, one of them new.  That's 365 times your age.  No weight toward slate and how blank you were when you were young.  Now, to get an idea of the potential, multiply that by the people you've met that you can remember all the way to your earliest memory, just faces, not names.  You've met way more people than you can remember so it's still a gross underestimate.  If you spent the rest of your life meeting one new person a week your chances of recreating that chemistry are pretty much a lottery ticket.  Or you can recreate it.  The only person that will know is you.  That is kind of nice.  Or you can find something new.

The other thing is I really have no idea how to look.  I have some idea of how others look.  I have no idea how to look.  "So put yourself out there!"  Okay.  Sure.  That's the other odd thing: we have no idea if someone is looking.  Would it change anything if we did?  Probably not.  Secrets make terrible stories.

I think I would like to live with someone else.  Another human.  That day is not now, not six months from now, not 24, not 36, not four years, not four years and 14 days from now.  Nothing is wrong with me.

We're never alone.

It has a dual purpose.  In part to map and in part to guide and in part to track.  More of an organic willtuary.  A way to know that you have indeed pinched yourself and you are not dreaming.




///Marnie Stern - "Proof of Life"

Bonus Track

///Imogen Heap - "Daylight Robbery"

The Best Thing

about the days that nearly run you into the ground at the end of the week is hanging up your truck keys for a while, knowing the engine block outside is ticking sighs of relief, sink washing your groin and slipping into the freshest loosest pajama bottoms you've got, rolling a thunderous spliff, and pouring a two cube three finger whiskey, knowing that you made it to the end of another one with a little luck and a lot of skill.

That Instant

You walk outside to put out the garbage cans, feel a sharp Autumnal breeze on your rear end, and realize it's been six years since you bought fresh sweatpants and your seat is more like a fine screen mesh than any sort of fabric and there is no time like the present.

Dear (_____)

Dear Universe,

You took something from me.  Their isness was severed and I will have them back.

I will take the heads responsible for one of the thefts.  The other, I will scar.

You will not take me by surprise and if I must I will wear it until the day you knock.  I do not forgive you.

sincerely,

a modified heart

The Best Thing

about remembering that you forgot to put the beans on the stove after midnight has come and gone is that you are probably going to be awake for another three hours anyway and it's not too late to sit up and wait for your warm midnight snack in a bowl.  

Dear (_____)

Dear kitty,

I know you can be inscrutable sometimes.  Disinterested or content, tired or lazy, starving on the verge of death or just a little peckish, skittish or playful?  Only you know.  When you are feeling skittish, please try to telegraph it a bit more before I bend down to pat you on the head.  I don't mind the occasional clawing or swipe or surprised bite.  What I would like to avoid is the full powered "I must get out of danger's way right now" leap straight upward, smashing your head into my nose hard enough to make me see spots.

It is always funny once my eyes stop watering, the spots fade, my nose stops running and I can see you're okay too, but damnit we've got to get on the same page on this one before one of us loses an eye or something.  Thanks, pal.

With love,

your shipmate 

Funny Feedback Loops

To a point, there is a difficult loop of loops powering each other.  A tipping point is approaching where we're going to have to make major decisions that I keep kicking down the road.  I am completely torn between whether to go the prescribed medication route or not.  There isn't a right answer.  Most roads seem to lead to an early death and its kind of funny.

You pop the medication and wait for weeks to see if anything is going to happen.  If nothing happens then you take some more.  I guess "pop" is much too flippant.  You rearrange all of your life routines to take the prescribed medications and present as stable as possible a body environment to present affects.  If, with your new forced sleep patterns and dietary intake, there is no effect then you go back to consult and raise the dosage and wait a few more weeks and on and on until it clicks.  Or never completely does.  All the while, physical affects may manifest.  Weight gains, weight losses, tics, shakes, nausea, fatigue, it varies from prescription to prescription.  If it doesn't quite click, a new prescription is introduced to help.  You may be weaned off of what you are already taking, you may not.  Weeks upon weeks, months, of consultations and examinations and examinations and consultations and dealing with and juggling body changes and it may click.  The changes may stick.  And that is your new life.  X pill at this hour, every single day, without fail, until you stop breathing, because your head will shatter if you stop taking it.  In the mean time, enjoy the side effects, which will probably contain an assortment of shadows and echos in the corners of your consciousness that will follow you to your death.

Obviously, not a great answer.  If you can't cope with the body changes, you're not going to be able to keep up with any sort of regimen.  You're going to take the prescriptions inconsistently and exacerbate the already difficult process of ascertaining what, if any, affects are becoming present in your psychological make up from week to week.  If you do manage to make it a few months and falter later down the road and start to slip into an inconsistent pattern of medicating you may be torn apart by the reawakening of whatever it was you are trying to lock away, squash, and overcome.  If you do stick with the regimen, that pill is a constant reminder of the incomplete you.  The you that is only "complete" if you swallow this spot.  And if you can get past all of that and wear and break yourself into this life permanently linked to this pill and make your examinations and deal with the side effects that can be life threatening on their own, you still can and likely will experience periods where it doesn't work anyway.

Sooo we come to drinking.  Alcohol.  Good old alcohol.  I already drink some on and off to manage pain.  Between psychological scars and body scars, it kind of gets the job done.  It gets the job done well enough, I should say.  You don't focus on history and you don't feel the sharpest highs of the pain inside your body and it's easy enough to turn the dial up or down as necessary.  If what you are suffering mentally has stabilized itself momentarily or at least is not on an offensive within your being and your mind you can simply not drink until you reach a point where it begins to slip beyond that edge of your ability to cope and manage.  Of course, you do become more and more accustomed as your tolerance steadily and inevitably climbs.  It takes more and more alcohol to achieve the same affects.  It takes more and more alcohol to blunt the storms and voices inside your head and still more to numb the body and still more to blunt the cuts of history.  The side effects, by themselves are all horrible.  Shakes, shortened tempers, hangovers, appetite problems, light sensitivity, insomnia, deep depressions and apathy, fatigue, wanting to smoke cigarettes constantly, hot flashes, low and acute withdrawals depending on how much you had to do to get to a place where you could finally sleep.

The good news is, on the days and weeks when you don't need to turn the dial at all, nothing horrible happens beyond 24-72 hours of physical withdrawal.  The very bad news is the damage is done.  Your liver is hardening drink by drink and will eventually fail, your brain is losing its functions even as the psychological scars are faded and erased.  If you weren't careful you've probably injured or bruised yourself in some way you didn't notice from the overall body numb and even if you were careful you've probably bruised or injured yourself in some way from the body numb and coordination problems that come with consuming alcohol.  The depression will linger well beyond physical withdrawal even if everything else inside your head is muted and been flattened backward so you can finally hear yourself think again and you may wind up drinking just to escape that lingering depression.  The packs of smokes you breathed are a part of your lungs forever.  You are extending the depth of the foundation of your bodies alcohol dependence in small ways in that it will take at least the last peak dosage to get the effects you need to feel normal the next time your mind begins to crumble and pull itself apart.  And, oh yeah, you can overdose and die.

I'm not going to bother with a faith/religion approach.  For reasons I've laid out through the years, faith and religion is an enormous vacuum to.  As a way to see, cope with, reckon with, understand the world and understand people and oneself, I get its value to some.  I'm an atheist.  Moving on.

Taking the problem head on, no chemical enhancements with alcohol or pills, is a terrifying proposition, but it could work.  I can often easily go one to two weeks without a drink if my spine feels okay and I'm able to get out and play.  I don't take prescriptions.  Head on, however, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide when your head starts to come apart.  The best you can do is try to distract yourself and try to surround yourself with as many safe spaces to sit and do nothing as possible if you can't get outside.  You have to be able to position yourself within the larger fabric of life in a way that will insulate you and that presents major problems in itself in that life tends to be pretty damn inflexible.  You also have to understand that you cannot control when you will experience a major break and that unpredictability will also cause direct conflict with your ability to plan anything and everything from a phone call to making yourself lunch to being at work; with that in mind, understand that you will not know when the most violent spells will end either.

The great news is there are no prescription side effects or organ destroying alcohol dependencies to fret over that will end your life early.  The bad news is there is nothing between you and the teeth of the beast inside your head either.  If and when there is a major break down you may end up hurting yourself or someone else far worse than the damage being done by either of the other methods.  If you can't find the right person or persons to speak to in order to ground yourself or at least get you outside of yourself, you may self destruct completely and become a suicide statistic.  You may lose significant friendships and jobs and intimate relationships because coping may mean that you have to spend days or weeks at a clip alone or heavily insulated and metered to bear with the voices and hallucinations inside you and the swells and shadows of visions.  All of the while you will be acutely aware of these collapses and broken connections and psychological scarring, perceived (real or not) judgments and stigma, and that the expectation from the outside in is that you see a professional and "get help" for being yourself.  Which kind of strikes the ear a bit strange, no?  In your necessary isolated states, in attempts to avoid self destruction and free yourself from the knowledge of the poorer life outcomes, you may resort to far more dangerous chemicals than any mentioned above and/or episodes of extreme alcohol use which will likely also lead to your premature expiry too.

Here's the plan: there isn't one.  Here's the funny part: you're not crazy; you are going to die early, it's really only a matter of how.  You can take the pills and the side effects until you can't take them anymore or slip up and miss enough of the regimen to come apart at the seams or quit altogether and default to something else that will kill you early.  You can incrementally (or quickly) drink yourself to death in an effort to manage and reign in the worst of your symptoms, essentially trading one pretty awful thing for the other.  Lastly you can try to live with your symptoms as much as possible and fit in to life where you can until you or life decides you simply cannot.  I'm somewhere between option three and option two.  The funny thing is cannabis seems to help the most, it's just hard to keep it stocked.  I'm working on it.  I guess that's the fourth option.  I guess there is a fourth option.

After all of this time, I'm still not ready to completely screw with my brain chemistry the way prescriptions will again.  Not yet anyway.  Not yet.  We're not misguided enough to believe that we're fine, no matter how "normal" we feel, but if we can stay between the lines of certain death from liver failure and attendant complications, side effects, and risks in option two and certain death from succumbing to suicidal thoughts, frustrations, and life complications in option three until we can truly try out the full spectrum of what option four has to offer, we may be able to avoid option one altogether.




///Gorillaz - "O Green World"

That Instant

fantasy football ads start to roll across your vision and ears and you grumble and put a pillow over your face because you know with 100% certainty that you are completely over the "thrill" of that entire space and frame of mind.

That Instant

the air conditioner is blowing on the heat sink of your laptop and you haven't burned your knee for the eighty third time.

Dear (_____)

Dear Old Guy,

Yes, you, old guy that sits on your front porch all day harassing people about where they can and cannot park their cars on a public street.  The neighborhood has changed.  It isn't all Italian anymore.  It hasn't been for quite some time. Other people live on this street now.  That is correct.  Other people live on THIS street now, not YOUR street.  If you say one more word to me about where I've parked, I will tear you to pieces.  Your thinly veiled racism is cancerous to everyone.  Your misogyny turns my stomach every time they respond and stop to talk to you out of sheer pity.  The world has left you behind and your ticket is punched.  Do us all a favor and disappear.  You burned my last shred of sympathy for the aging.  You know the card.  That was all you had.  I'm going to say this once so don't let your failing neurons misplace it: other people may find you adorable, a throwback, a mascot, a quirk of the block in an odd town, or harmless, and will continue to shrug you off and entertain your nonsense but you are the physical embodiment of so many things about the past I absolutely despise and if you open your mouth in my direction one more time and it is not a "hello" or "goodbye" I am going to erase you.

Sincerely,

Donefuckingaround

Over The Last Weeks

What we've learned is that we are not a multi-tipped novelty pen.  What each one of us does, all of our others are accountable for.

The pain, torment, rage, and (I am crying waterfalls and I don't want to) absolute hatred, are experienced because of what our others did out of kindness, compassion, sympathy, empathy, love, and understanding...

When I tell you I can't speak about something and then go on to speak about it- it's not a joke a or a hide to try to find something to target you for or insulate myself.  There is a cost.  There is a very real cost.  Often psychological, sometimes physical too.

I am terrified that if I "go into a shell" folks will think I've lost it or something.  I am, unfortunately, beholden to wherever my body happens to be and if that means it is in a cage that also means we are too and I cannot be in there with them because they all should not be in there.  When we are in there, rebellion is inevitable.  What is the only way out?  What is the one way they can each live their own?  It is not a dual blessing and curse.  It is unfortunate.

I am blending in and being as human as possible.  As citizen as possible.  As reasonable as possible.  It hurts tremendously to see that effort fall flat and be exploited  by some, it is ecstatic to see that effort be rewarded by some and flower into map expansions and discovery of new ways to exist and new ways that others exist and new planets and star systems and, fuck me, galaxies.  It is incredible to feel the weight of the sight of others frittering about on the 400 degree oil of life and ourselves, warming our palms near the electric coils, spreading stories of boogie beasts beyond the 60 watt LED light bulb in the sky because the truth is you have to stick close or you will be left behind.  Large enough to fry and small enough in the greater consciousness to slip right through the metal lattice and join the disposable.  Faulty.

When you finally get a chance to turn the music off and see pain for what it is.  When you don't have to protect other people from what you know you are.  Every damaged person worth their weight in time is worth listening to.  The songs are the same.  The cadence's are similar.  The verses are close.  There is a world spanning web of sunsets and sunrises and star anthems and moon odes and solar salutations and a disturbingly familiar scent to the blood that breaks away from a palm while you are trying to wash a glass and a reflect on the evenings high-points and the metal gush of the air mixes with the scented soap as it shatters in your hand for reasons you don't understand.

I have been helped by some that there is no way I can repay.  Literally, with the expanding fabric of life and space time (I've been over the calculations before) there is no way I can repay them before I or they perish, that is what's up.  They offered big and I took only what I needed from what they offered.  I don't understand why, attempting again and again to emulate that truth I continue to ...  I don't understand ... what am I getting wrong each time?  It's not every time, but when it goes poorly, it goes straight to the poor house!

I know I am not entirely sane.  I know I can learn fairly quickly.

I know I have to communicate better.

Everything is not okay.

The margin for error is small.

The people that I hold closest know.  Because we've been speaking with each other and developing language protocols through literally thousands of interactions.

It is unfair to expect anyone, outside of that set of individuals (not the ones I've met face to face or otherwise, for the longest) to know the language too.

What I've learned to broadcast is not ubiquitous.  Thirty two years on planet Earth, and we still have not been able to crack a universal code.  I don't mean to cry, but I am in tears that there is so much more work to do looking ahead to remain human.  I like it here.  I enjoy it because I can be like them and sometimes, when they are willing to play with me, they can be like me too.

I know my schizophrenia is a constantly evolving symbiotic organism (said through thick medication).  We understand it.  I understand it.  You're breaking up!



Please don't leave me!









Kill them all.

Please don't leave- kill them all.









I like to help.  Pay it forward.  Play when you can.  Know us.  If we can't play, say so.  We are shadows.  If you insist on addressing us as a galaxy system to visit, you would be well to address the star inside the nebula and the planet and attendant moon (if necessary) and... or just the comet.  You can also call the sign Hobbes.  I'm sure he'll answer.

The construction was developed over six years.  Before the period of the shatter, layers of designs were gardened to safeguard us.  After the period of the shatter, layers of designs were welded together to safeguard you.  I'm sure it'll answer.





Crews are at work, thirty four hours a day, reviewing diagrams to build a better future.

One spark at a time.

One death at a time.






LET'S GO!




///There's still a lot of work to do, if we are to survive.  We are game, if you are willing to play with us, just know: there are rules.

The Best Thing

about being alive and unmedicated yet is being able to feel the highline and know that laughter coming out of your face is a part of the genuine and honest to goodness you and it is lovely!

That Instant

you've been running all day and get home and are hungry enough that you microwave three individual french fries to nibble on while the rest cycle through the toaster oven.

Rehearsing Language and Opening Up

I am severely conscious of the... I'm not sure what to call it.

Effprglslshsklasl;khkl;sdhl;shl;0o4w90ahrh9poavsnioewjnkl 4w3,m wa4em,. zsvdfvsdab;s vbuio;sdn.sdganm,.asb,.ab;sdfubiosvadfniodsnjk;asdflwsqnio;ewaiofwerinjkfdafiubnl;guio;jkmnsdfdzxc vkBDJZX vsikDJKZB uDKZFGBdfc sadjz
It's easy to fake it.

Having trained for so many years.  Changing the resolution of the lens, I know we are still in metal jail.  How many yards can you be trusted to go out?  Three.  So What's stopping you?  A fifty caliber through the hips.  Oh.  That's a bummer.  I know, right?  I don't know.  A ballistic saw?  Sure.  Yeah.  I know what that is.

Is that what is sawing your mind in half or is that what is stopping you?

What is stopping me is trying to talk around what I cannot say.  Playing with schizophrenia has been an okay proposition.

We were backed into a corner and we nosed our way back to the racing line and that is fine.  It's not sadness, its not depression.  PlEASE  help me.   LOL LOL please help me.  It doesn't hapen all of the time.  Please help me.  No bame.  No face.       No name.  

It told me it's name once.

I couldn't repeat it.  Syllable for syllable.  I just want to know what you are.  Can I ask?

Ask me, I will eat it.  I may be able to sort

I can't

I've already invoked and called by name roundabout. Strength in numbers, right?  Right??

I'm on my own.  I'm on my fucking own again.  I am on my own again.  Shit.  And I have to sleep.  Sleeping is fine.  I actually do not mind most of the things that come back through the dreaming door.  I am already familiar with many of them.  Many of them live with me on a daily basis.  I didn't sign up for this.  "It's all in your head."

Please, shut it off.  

I will not cry today.

















GET BACK

I have been rehearsing conversations and tones and word selection.  My communication skills have been atrophying.  Without constant work, anything can ivy to brick.

I've been playing through conversations and cross table and rhetoric and gusto and light and small talk.  It's been going okay.  It has been passable.  I am learning better when to shut my trap and when to jog along.  Some memories still open while I speak with my siblings.  I don't understand and do at the same time why I locked those memories away.  I am sad and vicious at once.  Sad and joyous at once.  Vicious and joyous and sad and nostalgic and love filled and cuddly and mute and enraged at once.  Is it really too much to ask to hack the crest of your ear off to keep in a box after it has dried in the sun?  I'd give you a portion of mine, equal to or greater than.  I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

glitch********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************




///IV  i opwn my ams ad eh we breathe  thlnd ad seeeeea  werrckkkks nd gleeeeee weee run ddddjjsklttteeeekrrnmmglllllll shh

Part One: Be A Better Lensman

Just because you know you are going to die (at some point) does not mean that everything and anything you talk about is tied to it.  You've learned how to exist without constant diagnostics.    There is no tasklock key.

A lie.

There is.

The tasklock key, is not tied to ...


Oh, for fucks sake, lighten up.  Can you do that for me?




///yes

The Two Way Metaphor Gate

In building short hand, a degree of expression is reached that can and does generate the rare joy of identity and naming.  Mapping.  Map with as much resolution as can be mustered.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached!  Shouting is not permitted.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached?

From its surface metaphor appears lazy.  Jagged.  Elliptical.  Fragmented.  Excessive.  Dumb.  Misguided.  Glittery.  Vain.  Hyperbolic.  Binary.  From its surface it's a lot of things, directly below perception it is incandescent.  A bit of metal chewed fast and friction enough to trace a retina and leave shades.

It is one of the few things all languages have in common.  A short hand.

Some mental disorders may fall just outside of the curve of the metaphorist.   Not in terms of comprehension, but in terms of time.  Around folks speaking the common language and sparking, some will see the shades and some will project the shades and be able to predict from the point of a sound.

The problem, a problem, arises with metaphor's other power.

In its ability to link ideas and present a universe whose limits, as humans, are the speed of salts in brains and quantum entanglement, it can also cross time.  Places and spaces you've never been and people you've never known.  Places and spaces no one has ever seen and places and spaces heard of dreams.

I guess what I'm saying is consciousness of metaphors power can unleash and enable some ridiculous and unaccounted for futures.  It can describe the present you are in to people you will never meet in the future.   It can describe someone's past you've never met before in all of your days on Earth or in space or outside of the common dimension.  It can define the undefinable.  Free the interned and capture the holy.  It is powerful and infinite.  Innocent and horror.  Dirge and beautiful.

As close to time travel as humans may ever reach.  With metaphor, the past is present - the future too - all in the space of a gesture, a syllable, a smell, a touch - a note.  A one.  A zero.  In sequence.  That's why it is a two way gate.  Futures can be created inside of them and the past can manifest with a breath and a blink through the same swinging door.




///Dirty Projectors & Bjork - (When the World Comes to an End)     for a long time

That Instant

the catch tray release on your three-hole-punch hitches and you accidentally release 600 tiny dots of paper into the wild.

Expired Milk

It's only been three days.
Yesterday the cereal tasted fine.
Tomorrow the coffee will be good.
Besides, the heat will destroy the bacteria.
The mold?  Bacteria.  Viruses come from living things.
Living things?  I'm pretty sure.
It's only been six days.
Someone has to smell it.
It's probably still good.
The coffee will be fine tomorrow
and besides, one more day is all
until more cereal is bought
along with another quart of milk.
If it doesn't pass the eye test
We'll toss it.  Sometimes the carton
can make it smell weird.
It's only been nine days.
Yesterday the tea tasted fine
after ten cigarettes
and no one was violently ill.
The shake test will tell us
all we need to know and besides
It's only been ten days.

Not Over Yet

A man I love put the war accurately and I will use his description:  it's like kicking water uphill.  Everything that cannot be prepared for.  The degenerating functions and spider glass fractures.  Kicking water uphill.  One more day.  Yes, your shoes will get wet and soak the cuffs of your jeans.  Some will get in your eyes and ruin your belt.  You might drop your hat and slip and fall flat on your bum.  Kicking water uphill.  You cannot quit.  It's going to keep coming.  Just have to try to keep your balance and keep kicking.  A little at a time.  It's okay to rest.




///Amorphous Androgynous - "Rocket Fuel"  and all for the want of a horseshoe nail

Choices

I am dying because of the choices to soothe schizophrenia.  When it comes down to it the choices are

A: chemical death and blinders

or

B: pills and being able to grow old with the people I love

"A" is okay.  But I will lose everything and everyone in a spiral dance that eats away at everything eventually and turns me toxic.  A slow deletion.  However, I will be me throughout.  "B" is foul and will turn me into something I cannot recognize and will force us back toward something I cannot govern, but will extend life and I don't want to cry.

I know that "B" may give me sleep and normal hours.  It will clip art and expression.  It will dull my eyes.  I don't want ...I have to.  My body is crashing with "A".   Meat cage, right?  

Cornered.

I wanted my medical records.  To at least see where we've been.  I will miss you.  Mister self destruct.  Something has to change.  You shouldn't be able to drink folks under the table.  You shouldn't need shot to fall asleep.  There is another way to manage the voices.  You have to change.  You don't have to hurt all of the time.   You can trust another doctor.


Lies.  Stupid lies.





We have to ask.  We have to at least ask.   How much time do we have?

Time To Shed, Or What They Call Its

Molt.  Molting.  It takes some time.

We have backed ourselves into a new corner.

Bare teeth.  You know I can always see

what you really are!

Scared?  Of course.  Unimaginably so.

Conscious?  Yes.  The pain scale is new.

Familiar?  No.  Unfortunately no.





///to be continued

An Evening With A Friend and Learning What Depression Is

Sitting on a cup cushion chair and listening to.  Days later I understand that.  I understand better that my schizophrenia will run parallel to depression at points and expecting some sort of  bipolar snap to happen and coming back to them to poke them with a "what's wrong" is no way forward.  That's not how it works.  Not even close.  Shadow mimicry.

I have wondered the best way of going about describing the it that governs me.  Is this what you want?  Locked.  Tell me now!  I am afraid that if I do I will be interned again.  I feel small.  I feel frightened.  What is wrong with us?  I want to be bipolar.  I want to be depressed.  I want to be something else without lying about what I am.  Why can't it be that way?  I feel like garbage saying that, knowing the tolls of those pains from meeting them.  The pissing contest cesspool.  The grass is always greener.  Fukkoff.  Listening to each word and understanding dawning, the same loathing and disappointment and anger that froths inside me frothed and boils inside them too (in different ways); similar hiding places and outdoor faces are incorporated to further life.  The panic attacks are the same.

Whenever I talk about it, be the occasion among friends or sibs or to you, I immediately feel defective.  A waste of your time.  How is it you've navigated 32 years of life [28 of them with knowing enough junk to not get run over by a thing called a car out of pure ignorance (22 of them with knowing enough junk to not get run over by a thing called a car out of negligence)] and still fight with normality?  Well, if I knew, I'd put an end to it.

What we are does not need vivisection to be confirmed.  The most frustrating part is being forced to bridge gaps and justify my misgivings and "quirks."

Reality checks and tests.  I don't understand.  Negative!  Negative!  Negative!  Through study, I know how people are supposed to feel when things happen.  That's why I enjoy semaphore so much.  It helps me feel like I am a person too, regardless of what actually is.

Undamaged or compromised, I envy the feeling and find their company saturated and wonderful.  It is selfish.  It is not selfish.  Listening to a good friend helped me learn what actual depression is and what it costs each day.  Listening to a good friend helped me learn the gender multiplier and its complications and callousness.  Between light hearted turns of phrase and spikes of imagination, I grew to understand the true differences between us and I learned more than I ever thought I'd need to know about what that prison is like.  I hope I expressed what the view from inside my bars looks like too.

I am so glad I have the chance to compose this.  I'll try and encapsulate it in a more condensed form:

I try to only project positive.  No I don't LOL.  Can shoot that down in a heartbeat.  I must laugh out loud.  I cannot set the world on fire.  I certainly, however, do not try to project only positive.  The dives are there for the asking.  I do not suffer in silence.  My physical pain tolerance has not kept pace with my mental pain tolerance and that's okay.  I enjoy listening.  It helps me feel more safe and more sane.

I am running.

I am afraid.

The dissimilarities are glaring now.  Punishing heft of ocean swell.  A fair mistake to make?  In speaking with her, traveling the star systems made wonderful sense.  Collapsing interpersonal nonsense into two dimensions, we existed and could map one another in three.  It's kind of weird, bare with me.  Here we go:

For some time, several months, I'd convinced myself I was predominantly bipolar.  Cycling on and off and on and off in stints.  If I could just figure out the timing, I could use it to approach "normal".  Ride with it.  Go with it.  Do not fight it.  Above all, do not try to force the head spaces function and be aware of its gear before you interact with anyone.  I charted up many conversations about mania and engaged in shared tales of its absence in attempts to better understand its dimensions and myself and the loved ones I was engaging with.

Along those veins it became clearer and clearer that I did not know what I thought I knew about them.  What I thought I knew about her.   What I thought I knew about him.  Some beliefs stood pat, many were restructured.  Some were reinforced.  I am susceptible to a high and low line, but the thread that flows through all points on the chart is my schizophrenia.  The simplest and most base way to gauge who I am underneath the layer of my consciousness and awareness is that.  My "it." For her, it is depression.  The hard coded piece of yourself that can not be changed.  That I enjoyed the most about speaking with her is laughing about everyday bullshit.  Seeing the ledge and taking casual portraits for one-another at the edge of the world.  I've known highs and I've known lows, but I've never had to know the tar ocean depression.  I've been and am manic, I've been and am depressed, truth be tolled, I am just schizophrenic. The fabulous shock of the reminder that you are just as much and deserving to be part of the human race as the "normals" is a spark.

I am glad that our worlds have collided.  I will attempt to boil this down later.  I don't have to do this alone.

We are.

We still don't know what our conversion rate is.  We still have no explanation for why we burn so violently and brilliantly and sleeplessly and the only consolation is watching the sun cross the horizon line and light up the atmosphere like a pool of gasoline and scream and sing and howl to it from the highest ground we can find, should we be caught outdoors.  I don't know why.

We are.

I want to heal.  I want to burn. I am understanding depression with greater accuracy than I ever have before.  I am understanding a new kind of helplessness that I've never sensed before in its entirety.  Seeing more of its true scope is deafening and tuning at once.




///there is no replacement for spending time and sharing experience.   The world will never be ready for the damaged.  Us damaged don't have to fight world war prime alone, though.   You do not have to either.  You don't have to either.  Don't understand; do listen.

///El-P & Killer Mike - "Legend Has It"

That Instant

the morning has been too long and you turn the corner on another hour with what you thought was your afternoon second wind and just get absolutely yammed on by the day and have to sit down on the court, underneath the hoop, and just soak it up for a few minutes because there's probably a few more of those to come before the game ends and you're already down there.

That Instant

you lick your oatmeal spoon and put the bowl in the sink to wash later and remember far too late that too much Splenda gives you explosive diarrhea and it's going to be an interesting day.

Dear Cocaine

Dear Railgun,


I know that you know that I know.  I know that you know the nature of our enhancement.  We don't get anything done faster.  I know that you are counter-intuitive.

While it feels like everything is happening faster, the tooth is everything happens slower and from the inside it all feels.  Sped up.

One thing about you remains true: not a day goes by without wondering the glass  What if?  Recently,  a day does where we nose what's up.   A day we know it up tight and everywhere it could and should be.  A day where

that shit holds no water and time a'plenty and none of it for that.




dourly yours,

Mr. Derpow

That Instant

you know enough to know you are in the flat lands and looking at the horizon for the wave because you know it's coming and you know it may have already arrived and you don't know it yet.

Dear (_____)

Dear Malcolm and Norma,

You can't hurt me anymore.  Rory Breaker put it fairly comically so I'll borrow his words for you so that I don't have to explain it again.  If you try to come see me "I'll kill ya."  If you hurt anyone I love to try to get at me  "I'll kill ya."  If you lie to other people to recruit them for your purposes "I'll kill ya."  If you try to insert yourselves into my life again before I say you can "I'll kill ya."  If you touch my sisters or brother again and it isn't a hug or a kiss "I'll kill ya."  If you have a problem or question for me and you continually take it up with someone else  "I'll kill ya."  What I'm trying to say is I'm not 6 anymore.  I'm not afraid of you.  I'm not 22 anymore.  I'm not afraid of you.  I'm not 25 anymore.  I'm not afraid of you.

It's very easy to stay alive.  But, as Rory said, "you're going to have to work very hard to stay alive" and if you don't understand the fuck I've said to you in the past-  I am waiting for you to die.  Please hurry.  Do not make me accelerate the clock on your fading years. Retire.  Your cause is lost.  You have three kids, not four.  That ain't changing anytime soon.

Sincerely

Crx24

Fireflies for the Child In Me

I know I have to get back to writing.  I've been feeling sexual pins and needles, like a blanket in a dry room with a fireplace.  It's been a very confusing sensation.  Electric and warm and immaginary, though sensate.  The land of a half million new pairs of knit socks rubbed along a tightly curled rug by one million feet, except I feel that warmth running through my hips and arm pits and around my nips and ribs and the backs of my knees and my tailbone and right behind my ears.  For days.  I know I have to get back to writing.  I know this isn't what it feels like to not write.  I don't know what this sensation is, but I want to bury my mouth and eyes and nose in it and wrap my whole body up tight in it like a cigarillo, light the end, and pitch myself into a twinkling sunset from the lip of a bridge.  I will get back to writing.  The awareness of sexual solitary confinement is blitzingly real and oddly ember drift.

I want to watch and feel the fireflies depart with the breeze.  Little by one.  One by little.  Until the only light is from the evening sky and the threat of sunrise.  I think it is the only part of that spectrum I'll get to know and share with other people in a reasonable way.

Why not enjoy it?

Will you ever have sex again?  I don't know, but I hope it feels something like this.

That Instant

you can't understand why you are sleepy at 9:04 in the morning until you realize it's 12:46 in the afternoon and you forgot to eat breakfast.  Again.

Smashing Bottles On Ships

I think part of the passion for smashing bottles against the noses of ships before they depart the yard is not only a charm or totem.  I think it is also a celebration of what could've been and what will be if you think the ship is destined for disaster.  A chance, after months and days and years (relative), to lift restrictions and wiggle, watching the behemoth's construction.  It's a time to dance and dance as thoroughly as possible.  The smashing of a full bottle being representative. Once in union, all the rest is random and uncontrollable and sometimes violent and magical and explosive and "the last unexpected thing that will happen is this shattering and firework."

It is a reasonable lens.  And a reasonable way to approach.


///Brassica - "Wryders (FMB009)"

Dear (_____)

Dear Weed,

Smoking you an hour or two before bed has yielded me the most fulfilling sleep I've experienced in quite some time.  I'm not used to waking up at 8, rested and alert.  At first, the sensation was alarming.  I had so many questions and was sure there was no way I would make it through the day on a measly six hours of sleep.  I scoffed at the idea that I could function without at least eight, preferably 10 to 12, hours of sleep.  I'm not going to make a habit of sleeping less than 8 hours, but I was surprised to still be sharp well into the evening.

Imagine that: no pills, no concoctions, not a 12 pack or half a fifth of liquor, not five cigarettes and some herbal tea.  A spliff or two and I slept through the night without waking up to a point where I was inside myself again and had to start all over to try to fall asleep.  I wanted to ask you if that's what most people feel like when they wake up.  Part of me is still amazed.  I know the more I use you, the more tolerant my brain chemistry will be and I'll probably have to up the intake little by little to hunt down and capture that elusive deep rest.  I don't mind.

The sensation reminds me of when we use alcohol to escape the present's grim realities and the past's ghosts that simply will not die and you wake up 3 days after a bender and realize the hangover has finally cleared and you can actually remember anew what it feels like to not be hungover.  So many days in a row, it becomes normal and what should be normal is a shock to the system.  The body's biochemistry is a frustrating, fine, machine.

Thanks for helping me sleep inside all of its damned moving parts for a few hours.  I couldn't do it without you.

ever yours,

     SmokeyDokey

That Instant

you realize your cat is addicted to nicotine and has nic fits too. 

Small Victories

Of course I can't help asking myself "what's the point?"  A lot of times I have to remind myself to live life for myself.  Do it for you.  Sure it would be nice to justify your existence on the basis that someone else needs you, like a kid, or dying family member, or very close friend, or lover, but they'll move on or move away (or die) or meet someone even nearer and dearer and that's okay.  Do it for you.

Sure, sometimes it's difficult to love yourself.  Sometimes it is even more difficult to care about yourself because it feels selfish.  No one is going to do it for you.  When we look in the mirror and laugh with ourselves at how strange we are and ask who would want to live with that, the answer is right there: we would!  Do it for you.  It doesn't mean you don't care about anyone else, or couldn't give a damn if society and civilization as we knew it fell apart.  It doesn't mean that we don't empathize and sympathize with oppressed peoples and sufferers of injustices and the caged subsets of this country and all the messed up things happening to them.  It doesn't mean we are wholly callous and willing to say "screw them, I got mine, I'm fine."  Mind that you can't build your life around someone else's fight.  You'll wear down faster than a clutch plate made of wax and find yourself torn apart at your seams every single day.  Give a damn, but give a damn about yourself too.

Lying on the ground, having spent the last of my saved money on a replacement leaf spring hanger for the one that rotted out on my truck (that I will have to saw off since it's riveted to the frame and I can't afford to pay a mechanic regardless), staring up at my ceiling fan I was thinking "what's the point of saving money if it vanishes every few months whenever something bad happens."  The next day, I opened my fists, put my hands behind my head, watching the fan blades go, and it occurred to me that there has been an improvement through the years.  It used to be living paycheck to paycheck and unable to afford food.  Just beans and rice and beans and rice and beans and hotdogs and beans and chicken and rice and hotdogs and PB and J.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, but able to afford better food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, and not having to worry about food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, not having to worry about food, and being able to afford auto insurance.  Then paycheck to paycheck, no food worries, auto insurance, and able to save a little.  Now it's crisis to crisis, no food worries, and auto insurance.  Sure, it's better than paycheck to paycheck and not as good as being able to save for the future in a meaningful way, but life is decent between crisis level events (like having to empty your savings account to pay for bandages or truck parts and specialized tools or new sneakers because the soles fell off your old ones or a car battery).  Small victories, ya know?

It kind of goes back to my ethos behind writing once I realized the industry is basically geared to be self congratulatory in some kind of messed up ways that make any sort of climb outside the construct largely an exercise in blind luck and volume: just do it for you.   What's the point if no one will ever read it, if no one likes it, if it's never impactful, recognized, or coherent.  Do it for you, care about its pursuit because you do.  That's all you really need.

Of course, I'll forget this answer in time.  Toss and turn about the meaning of love, and lost relationships doomed to fail anyway.  I'll slip into self loathing.  The little voices that are easy to ignore when life is fun and in balance will turn into roars and screams and shouts and flying sparks "kill yourself! kill yourself! kill yourself!" and I'll drown them out with music until I can't play music loud enough and I walk out into the woods and scream at the trees "what is the point!  I can't succeed at anything long enough to make anyone's lives better or build a family of my own!"  Then I'll remember, living for other people is not what we're built for.  We are built to be alone, to live alone, to love alone, to ride alone.  Can we live with others?  Sure.  We won't succeed for long, but it's possible, we've seen it, but never expect much from that thread of being.  It hasn't, and may never develop within you.

Do it for you.  Part of me still remembers my cartographer's mandate.  Do it for you and because someone else may be seeing and going through the years you've seen for the first time and may be just as bewildered as you were.  "If only there were some sort of mapular object to help me know what may be coming next."  Most of all, the point is, don't waste your time trying to measure yourself on other people's scales at every turn.  A successful day for some is a nice date, or driving a few hours to see a buddy, or dinner with their spouse, or closing a deal, or a raise, or whatever makes their white picket lawn and dog.  For now, for you, it's taking care of your job, exploring some ideas, taking care of you, having a few laughs, and not killing yourself and that is just fine.  Don't forget that.  Do it for you.




///Phonat - "Ghetto Burnin (Mmmathias Mix)

That Instant

you realize you must not panic and chances are decent

you are okay

Fear

I haven't been scared in a long time.   I know that I am going deaf from blasting music.  I know that I am forgetting things intentionally from my childhood and some of being an adult.  The methods of deletion are bleeding across boundaries and I'm beginning to forget things I'm supposed to remember.  Long term memory redactions are becoming short term memory blanks.

I don't know where it ends.  I do know I forced the process on myself.  I don't know which part of it is engineered and which part is a symptom of myself .

I'm afraid.  I'm afraid that I may have caught the tiger by its tail or if it has sunk its teeth into my arm and I don't know it yet because I can't see it.

Birthday Party

There's no answer for permanently fractured hearts.  Caught between the teeth of time and facts and wanting more than anything to be able to wish her a happy birthday without drumming up history.  More than wishing her a happy birthday, I want to be absolutely certain I don't hurt her.  To do that, I cannot offer a basic, basic, hallelujah.  Learning we would not be the same was one of the most terrifying, absolute, and violent days of my life.  I was already crying inside, taken every avenue to try to keep pace with her happiness and success.

Darker and darker and darker and darker.  The craziest part was our sense of adventure and curiosity for the world and cinema and oddball jokes and clowning and learning and reading and people watching were in line.

thinking backward, the love never dies.  Part of me shouts to the starlight "HAPPYBIRTHDAY".  I hope it matters.

I have nothing to offer her that will accelerate.   The answer to the question of future is blank.  I love you.  Time is an illusion.  Just gift me time I think.  Time is real.  Poor man, rich man, whatchu been in at.  What do you care about?

I put my body on the line and took risks.

What do you care about!!!

I can't have children, okay?  I can, but I'm far too warped to raise them.   Okay!?  I'm debt slagged as fuck, I can't raise kids, I don't know what a good chair is, I don't know how to do proper, I can cook and don't know what good food should cost, I don't have marketable skills, I hate customer service, and I have a useless degree and on top of that I still don't have the paper that confirms what I have actually learned.  Okay?  God is a lie, I'm antisocial, fucked in the head, and I would love to be.  I'm a social butterfly and an addict and a hermit.  I can't be trusted with a gun, the only family I recognize are my immediate siblings, I fucking hate people and the best world is a world where every city is glassed.  I'm an almost always nude and I love the outdoors and when we're at home, why are you wearing clothes?  It's weird!  Why can't I touch you?  Yes, it's your meat, I'm terrible with respecting boundaries once you're in everything should be open for all.  I'm not self conscious but I am conscientious.  That's the tip of it.  None of that answers what I asked.

What do I care about?  Fitting myself into life as invisibly as possible.  Caring about us goes about as far as: did you kill yourself today (y/n), was it a good day (y/n), can you engage with the world tomorrow (y/n), have you slept and eaten (y/n), did you hurt anyone (y/n)?  From those basics we can get more complex, but that's essentially it.  A very (I hate the word) easy checklist.

I laugh because who is supposed to live with that?

There's no answer for fractured hearts.

I wish there was.  Try to keep the shards in a box away from where they may be knocked over or caught up in the soles of feet and heels of hands and fingers or get into food.

The easy signs of trouble were violent in their simplicity.

We'll see.

I've told myself the ache will fade  Whispers along bedtime stories and therapy.  Imagine the... it would have continued for years afterward.  Pulling apart, love cannot solve base problems no matter how big or small and thorough a heart is.

What I hope most of all is that the first attraction wasn't a try to see how the other side of the tracks live. I hope most of all that she didn't think of me as ...

She gave a damn, and I will burn my circuits and song my circus.  It hurts.  I don't mind the reminder, knowing what it feels like to fall in love.  Knowing that falling in love is the sudden stop that will crush you.

Believe an end is just a beginning.

Believe love is real.

Believe that someone else saw something in you that you couldn't see yourself and the tides of fortune overwhelmed what could have been.

I Love You.




///Lemon Jelly - (Nice Weather For Ducks)

That Instant

you know you could throw sparks off of your fingers if you could snap them hard enough and you remember where your friends live and that light blazes the trees and woods they've built and you know they will not and could not bring the person you fell in love with years ago and you know, anew, the years have treated yourselves differently as recklessly as you knit them the same.

What Makes You Laugh 4

I can't help chuckling, putting the coffee pot on and thinking about where the day is going to go and where this presidency is and that faint fog of dread that crawls along the ground these days.  To be clear, we all know how this story ends, right?  Regardless of if he actually helps a single person that actually needed it or makes lasting, real, improvements to any segment of the country that actually needed improvement, it goes like this:

In the waning days of his presidency, he will declare that he was the greatest president to ever overcome what he had to overcome for you, the hardworking, tax paying, glorious American citizen.  In the face of adversity, mountains of prejudice and discrimination to him and his family, unprecedented and unjustified scrutiny and opposition propaganda, and a congress of Democrats that refused to get out of the way of progress and reform and change, he worked tirelessly to make this country the greatest it has ever been since the days of the revolution and he will further declare that "haters gonna hate" and that history will tell the true testament of his tremendousness long after the fake facts have faded.  He will declare the war on terror to be a He will then proceed to throw absolutely everyone he can't use in his businesses under the bus for anything and everything that blew up in his face or turned out to be completely empty campaign gibberish lies and then walk off to one of his golf courses or towers, hopefully never to be heard from again with a half built, useless to begin with, wall as his lasting legacy.

I can't help chuckling because you know that's how it's going to go, right?  Dear god, please just don't let him end up on the motivational speaking tour... his ego, probably won't let him fade into obscurity though. Another thing that makes me laugh is this visual in my head of Donald as a kid with his arm jammed in the bottom of a vending machine absolutely thrilled he found a way to get what he wants out of it without having to risk tipping the machine over onto himself by rocking it, but not realizing just yet that he is stuck...

That Instant

you can't remember the name of a specific tool that will help you open up the battery box on your motorcycle to fit a larger battery and you discover that "spreader bars" and "spreader clamps" are two very, very, different things.

Dear (_____)

Dear Infectious Laughter,

I'm never sure if I should refer to you by name.  I hope a cure is never found for you.

Sincerely,

a kid trying to catch his breath

That Instant

you realize you've deconstructed your origin forty three thousand, six hundred, and twenty eight ways to Sunday and the fact remains some things cannot and will not be able to be forgiven. 

Proclivities

Why do I enjoy the things that I do?  It cannot all be chance.  The chance of it all being chance is just silly.  Laughing to myself while I compose the thought from hundreds of shards, I understand a little something.  Those somethings follow:

I wouldn't be as into giant robots as I am should I not have seen a manual when I was younger.  I wouldn't be as into mythology and comic books had I not seen so many when I was younger.  I would not be in to so many technical diagrams had I not been presented them when I was younger and I'm not talking about diagrams of machines as much as human bodies.

I probably could have avoided getting beaten as often as I did if I didn't dive into diagrams of the naked form as were provided.  Which is kind of hilarious because I wouldn't be as good as I am at seeing them for the bones they are now if I hadn't seen them when I was a small fry.

I cannot help laughing, explaining it now.  "Why do these things occupy so much of your head's space?"  I don't know.  I'm sure parts of it are generated within myself.  Absolutely.  Why can I not look at someones face and see the wires beneath it?  The bones and structure and frame it in a comic books frame or a films sketch board?  How come I cannot turn that off?

For the same reason that I cannot approach someone without thinking about and forecasting how to defend myself.  "You have to learn how to fight!"

These are questions only your parent can answer.

I've been refused answers.

Wiping saliva from my computer screen, it is true.  That is part of why I laugh hysterically.

The greatest complement, I've heard, is emulation.  Copying.  That is also what I've been taught.  How do you learn?  By emulating.  How do you create?  Learn the rules and then you can make whatever you want to.  OR.  You can feel an audience and play to a crowd.  OR.  You can do what appears to be reasonable and go from there as long as no one dies in the gears of your operation.  As long as no one gets hurt.  There are many rules.

I am sad.   I am thorough.  I am skattered.  I am some original parts and some parts straight from the manufacturer.  I am not thrilled.

The manufacturer insisted.  I argued.  The manufacturer insisted.

I do wonder, if he had it to do over again, would he.  That question will never be answered.

So I draw and I build and I create and I war and sometimes I scuffle and I hold grudges and I love forever and I hate and I draw, I build, I design, and model, and color, and I never quite know exactly why.  I don't know if I'm the best version of myself or if I will never know the answer that I expect to go hand in hand with that question.

Every few days out of a month it enrages me.

I cannot force him to speak on his behalf, as he many times made me do.  I wish that on no one.  By that rule, I do not wish that on him.  The best I can do is detective work and let him know, unless he is willing to open up the book of death, he has no place in my world.

I wasn't asking for my abusive father for an apology.  All I was asking for was accountability, being old enough to talk to him person to person.

I got stonewalled.  And that's that.

Nothing more to do except continue to build my own life, evolve one baby step at a time, and continue to try my damnedest to forget about him and hope he dies sooner than later.  For now that's the best we can do.





///Mos Def - "Umi Says"

Most definitely.