Dear (_____)

Dear piercing hip pain,

We've ruled out kidney stones, appendicitis, burst and displaced disks in the spine, and abdominal tears.  Could you please just tell me what you are?  Is that so difficult?  This whole shell game of taped up notes is getting awfully passive aggressive and I can't keep guessing what's wrong every day and adjusting my work schedule on the fly.  I have to work!  I am needed!  There are deadlines to meet.  So what is it today?  Who exactly are you that I'm sharing my body with?  No one even told me you signed a lease.  Tendon inflammation?  Lack of rest?  Too much stretching?  Low pressure swelling?  Tiny chunk of bone?!  Cartiledge tear?!?!  A welcome to old age and the gift is "this is the rest of your life til you die"?!?!?!  Stop me if I guess your name! 

Sincerely,

Occasionally Bed Ridden at 33

Where The Time Went

I haven't been lost.  I've been sitting beside a home made transceiver trying to reach a ship in the vicinity.  I've been on board it a few times with no signs of life.  Each time I return to my junker it goes off and I race to the comms deck to respond.  Each time I do- static.

Each time I board it there are freshly opened meals, a coffee sack still warm, a cigarette drifting with flecks of ash still floating and clouds of smoke swaying in the recycled air.  A saucer and chipped cup and different music playing in the background over the public address.  Breathable 65 degree air.  A few playing cards that weren't there before.  A display still picking up signals from Sol from 1989 when they aren't playing static.  A ghost ship.  I turn off the distress beacon and return to my junker to figure out what to do with it.

I can't turn it over to the scrappers just yet.  Not with people aboard.  Their machines will shred it with no regard for souls.  If someone is on that ship, I can't forgive myself.  If someone is on that ship, I hope to make contact soon.  The trade hub orbiting Europa is still four days journey from our position in the Oort.  Remember how lovely the grass was down on Terra?  If I can bring this thing back in one piece, there'll be a fortune and a vacation waiting for us.

Someone is on that ship.  I will find them.

Captain Jexel Hobbes of the Noway Accel- 10201800278

Time has flown by.  I've missed so many deadlines I wanted to hit.  When was the last time we spoke?

RAM is going to take a serious investment.  I know that the mother board can handle it and I've tried a half dozen times different combinations of chips to blow it to the 16 gigabytes that it can do.  I've allowed the bottleneck to become a road block on producing art.  I fell in love back in March.  Sacrificing and sacrificing over and over to try to bring another person into my world, but most efforts have failed.

I've asked her dozens, but not yet hundreds of times to meet me half way.  She continues to do the same things she does, not because she doesn't love me as much as I love her, but because it is all she knows and has known since she was small.  I do think that it's possible to change, I know it is.  Everyone deserves a chance.  There is a spark in her.  If I can help, I will.  I didn't get to where I am in life without help.  How can a person conscious of this turn away another and another who actually kind of sort of understands you?

I am beginning to wonder if she actually does or if she is a part of my life because I am so different from everything she once knew and cares more about being truly loved as a person than.......  she does love fairly unconditionally.  Maybe that's a part of the problem.  She can't tell the difference between someone who actually cares for her and someone who is using her.  It's a possibility.  It can be solved.

How do you speak to someone who is jammed with ultimatums and unwilling to discern?  How do you speak to someone who cannot see the consequences of their actions beyond a week, beyond a month, beyond 12 hours?  How do you reach an addict?  I am one.  She's not on another level.  She hasn't allowed herself into the terrors of introspection.

She flies away from the heat.  She creates reason mazes.  Responsibility mazes.  Agency dead falls.  I understand the fear.  How can you explain that fear in your own life to someone who hasn't acknowledged it within their own space?  I suppose that goes back to the old adage: how can you love someone, if you cannot love yourself.  I don't know what to do when I see her setting herself up for apologies.  It's how she's gotten by.  The other adage: don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

I never thought that I would fall in love again.  I knew I would.  I did not believe, however, that it would be more than a passing fancy.  Survival is paramount.  Survival comes with its costs.  One of the costs is you do not get to enjoy stable long term relationships because you must survive.  If two survivors meet, there's a match and a stable long term relationship can grow there because there is no dependence.  There is only a mutual companionship.  Do not tell me you would die for me.  Live with me.

I am afraid this will not work and I may have to eject her through an escape pod into the vacuum of space with a few months survival kit, a beacon, and a radio.

The largest red flag wasn't history, or family composition, or addiction.  The largest red flag remains a dearth of creative thought.  A nagging inability to see what's possible instead of what's here.

One year.  One year.  I will gift her one year of my life.  I was given less to reach further and, for some of it, I destructed because I didn't know what and who I was and a heavy portion was out of my control from the outset.  Everyone deserves a chance to grow.  Everyone!  I know she can do it.  We have so much in common and beautifully so.  I do love her after believing that I did not have the capacity to love again after everything my circuits have been sheared through.  I am a part of my ship, incorporated, built, and breathing, designed, redesigned, scrapped, prototyped, burned, and rebuilt anew.

The larger mission is still to build a map for the sojourners after I am long gone and someone else is stumbling upon my space station and docked junker broadcasting songs no one has heard in decades and curious what the hell a space station is doing 15 light years away from Sol in dead space.

I have compassion.  I know that I am a pretty tough ticket 300 out of 365 days, but I can feel and I can be and am conscious of my bipolar schizophrenia.   Occasionally it gets away from me, but not nearly as often as it once did.  I can protect her and my friends from it (it's impossible to protect one's self).

One year from the day we met in March.

Synchronize watches.




///Way Out West - "Northern Lights"   radiata

That Instant

you remember blacking out was a reasonable solution.

Dear (_____)

Dear future self,

You  are going to check in on your parents through approximate channels and they will not have changed since they expressed themselves two decades ago and since you spoke to them last nine years ago. 

It's okay to not be surprised.  Don't waste yourself hoping for bullshit.

sincerely,

feral

P.S. There is no home to go back to.  What was left was not home.

That Instant

you understand you are creating outside of yourself because there remains an enormous gap in language that will not bridge itself.

Driving Stick (Fairlady 280Z)

I think my pops saw a spark in me and didn't know how to feed it.

I think, faced with something completely different from his first two children, he hit a language wall.  This one has the design eye, this second one does too.  "This third one has an eye, but why is it obsessed with physics and manipulating form and space instead of creating on a canvas?"

Learning to drive stick was a massive challenge.  Enter the F-250 1996 V8 5.8 Liters of displacement in a breath.  Stupid torque and no horsepower.

The thing was, you never knew if he was taking you for a ride to explain to you why you had a beating coming or not.  Sometimes it was Billy Graham, sometimes it was the guy who always had that quotable audio clip at the beginning of his radio show "lay up treasure in heaven" (it always made me laugh inside thinking about how does suffering now get you a v.i.p. pass to heaven and how dumb it felt watching years spin by and thinking 'the forsaken are now!')

There was this one day, he may have been driving me to work at Six Flags Great America or some shit, but we were in his 280 ZX that myself, my younger sister, and I don't remember if my older brother was there or not, but we washed and detailed that car.  Cleaned from the floor mats to the spots where you put your fingers on the sill to push the passenger door open to the stock rims and the corners of the chrome trim around the rear window to the toe kicks along the foot of the door sills.

I can't remember what day it was specifically; Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday.  We drove.

I may have missed the bus for the umpteenth time and he happened to be off work that day and heard me come back into the house absentee.

At any rate, what I do remember was this:

Before I took on driving school and getting licensed proper, he took his hand off of the stick shift and began calling out gears to me.  I didn't know what to do.  In the empty space he would shift and calmly call the next position the shiftknob was supposed to be in.

I didn't know he was speaking to me.  I thought it was another one of his exercises to keep me on my toes so I would always be aware of my surroundings.  One of those "what street is that?!" spot quizzes.  I think it may have been one of his best attempts to connect with his kid who was not into the "arts" as he was.

In fear, I placed my hand on the shift knob with my fingers spread so I could see the 1 2 3 4 5 R grid, do not break his possession.  Be good.  If you do good, he will not be disappointed.

Understanding that he wanted me to move the shifter while he worked the pedals and the wheel, I was incredibly hesitant.  Before that day I'd only read about it in magazines, Road & Track and Car & Driver and Model Builder and the RC aero rag on my stints at the library in the periodicals instead of going to school when I missed the bus because you can't get to Greenbelt from Bowie without missing have the damn day anyway, might as well go to the library on your bike and make sure you're back home before he is and no one is the wiser (fuck it and fuck Eleanor Roosevelt H.S.).

I shifted with my left hand for close to five minutes before he took over again.  And that was my first taste.  The second was driving school in a powder blue Chevy Cavalier with a stick that was way too long for the shitbox that it was.  And the standard minted was the Falcor that I drive now.  That was when I learned and am still learning.

Every time that I hold that stick, my dad does cross my mind.  My dad and where my love affair with the Fairlady line of sporting two doors began.  The way that he would cut through traffic and move through the shift gates was impressive to my young mind.  He wouldn't be able to drive my F250 for shit and it makes me laugh.  It makes me laugh because if you can pilot a junker with finesse, imagine what you can do with a coupe.

There are times I wish he'd taken the leap to see me outside of the framework of his knowns.  We have much in common.  I would love to be able to speak to someone who understands the rage and fire inside as much as he knows it and hides it and clamps it and eats it and focuses it and the ways it eats you alive.

I'm never going back to him.  He is as welcome in me as he has said I am in him.  Big ol' bag o' nopes and it does make me laugh to understand that happy endings are for stories- not history.  Consolation prize: he tried and it planted a seed and a passion for Nissan coupes and the design philosophy throughout their years.

My artistes' eye is still there.  The lines are classical music if you see its shape.  When you think salon coupe GT as comfortable cutting into the wind as whipping around corners, steady as the shaft of an arrow and fickle if you tease it, from its stance to the cut of the A pillar to busy tail lights and sloop nose that can accommodate aero headlight glass or no.

I think back to that day and how I must have looked in the passenger seat with frightened eyes looking at the digital gauges and being thrilled and awed and stupefied at a tachometer that wasn't a dial.  In the years following, I was disgusted at the tach that wasn't analog.  And then I was enlightened to the tune that dashboards can be removed and replaced with whatever the pilot finds most useful.  And then I went away to college and the car disappeared and I remembered that he didn't actually give a shit.  For a moment I was his son and for a moment he was a dad.  And then he was confused as to why I was upset that the car I cleaned for the better part of a year and got to touch and fell in love with was shipped off for who knows what.

It just... it pains me... he has no idea who I am.  He had no idea then and he has no idea now.

I used to think he was just crazy.  I still do.  I am.  I am a functioning adult from his loins so....   it kinda fucking follows.  Also why I'm not waiting in line for progeny.  Some things should stop.  Accidents don't happen without a breath of agency and this time around I can be the eyes he didn't have then.  The discerning he absolved himself of.

Do I want to make him pay for what he's cost me: of course.  Can I?   Yes.  Will I?  No.  He will die in his bubble on his own time.  My life is worth more than enlightening a grown child, talented though it may be.  Do not attempt to turn a mountain, it will return to the sea on its own time.

Driving the truck, blasting music that is foreign to his circuits, with the windows down... ...he could have enjoyed himself and his child.  Us both now in a solitary confinement.  I hope he is pushing a standard, but we all know "it ain't that damn likely."  With age also goes the tooth for sporting.




///Noname - (Diddy Bop) ~ driving music

Dear (_____)

Dearest OCD,

No.  Okay?  Enough is enough.  And what the hell is that whispering?  Funcussions, am I right?  But seriously though.  No.




Sincerely,

What in the hell is that whispering???  Damnit, am I hearing things again?  Yep. 

P.S. go home OCD... do not make me go get the hose.  

The Best Thing

about listening to conversations is hearing the notes and seeing the sheet music.

That Instant

your cat enters the room licking his chops like he ate something very toothsome, but his food dish is in the bowl you are in and you're certain there was nothing left out he could've snacked on.

Gauging

I hate being an orphan.  Holidays, so many of them are a myth.  I wish there was a setting on the dial between killing them and existing.  I would suppose you must embrace the indecision each and every day.  24 hours at a time; side by each.




///Beach House - Space Song ~ however lovely it would be to staple their skin to the walls of your domicile, it will never work.  Fantasia will.  Wait.

That Instant

you want to be done with it and cut your leg off just below the knee instead of the solitary confinement of twenty more days healing an ankle sprain and dealing in the grays of "almost".

Dealing With The Roster

Junkie XL

I am furious.  You're really cute when you're mad.

Dear (_____)

Dear TSA Agent,

I realize my laptop is huge by today's standards.  I realized it 45 seconds ago when, glancing to my left and then to my right, no one else appeared to struggle hefting their machines from their backpacks into gray inspection bins.  With this in mind, fuck you and your wrinkled nose.  You don't have to use the laptop, you don't have to carry it, hell you don't even have to look at it as much as see through it, so fuck right the fuck off and keep working that conveyor belt and maybe next time make a half decent joke so I can at least have a chuckle with my techno shaming and body scan.

sincerely,

2011

That Instant

a vendor on eBay manages to steal a dollar from you because you clicked one button too far before checking to see if there were better deals and you can feel it getting vacuumed right out of your wallet to the sound of their giggling greed and you want to wrestle them for it, rolling across a dusty warehouse floor like a scene in a movie gunfight where there is only one bullet left in a single gun between the protagonist and the antagonist, but you'd rather keep your 100% positive seller reviews intact so your chin drops to your chest and you mutter some unflattering language and continue shopping instead.

That Instant

you realize that all of you is awake & engaged sooner than you envisioned and it is indeed time to join the day stream of humans and rearrange whatever plans you made last night, enthusiasm checked at the airlock's warning chime.

Dear (_____)

Dear Arousal,

There is nothing that can be done at this time.  It is the bodies understanding, with the exception of a few dissidents, that it is in fact time to eat some breakfast and go to bed for a few hours before work begins in the cold, wet, and largely miserable weather outside of the windows.  It is also the bodies understanding, with objections noted, that it is absolutely not the time to gratify sexual lusts, especially when those chemical cocktails of senses and emotions can be shared with the bodies partner, or as you so delicately put it "tear one off."  Unfortunately, you will have to wait until such time as the moment can be shared at which juncture you will be free to share it as many times and in as many degrees as you like.  Please vacate the premises immediately.

Thank you,

Executive Officer of Intimate Relations

c.c.

Fluids Exchange Commision

Dear (_____)

Dear Santa,

I know it's a little early and we haven't exactly been best friends.  You ghosted me pretty hard and I didn't take it well and I do still harbor some ill feelings.  We can make it right.  I haven't seriously injured anyone in years and I've been pretty damn good to boot.  I know I've said some things about nuking the human race off of the face of the planet and lining the fringe of my future woodland compound with the heads of my enemies at three yard intervals and designing a super virus that will reset the planet.  That's just talking out of school.  You and I both know I'm not that ruthless and I do care for and can love people.  If you could see your way through to giving me a flamethrower this year, I promise it will only be used for good.  Not even just entertainment, because we both know entertainment falls into so many different categories.  Just one flamethrower.  Good can be entertaining, but entertaining is not always good.  If you can do that, I would be very appreciative and let the past be the past.  If you can't, I understand too.  The future can be fickle.  Just thought I'd lob it up there for you to think about, big guy.  Dig the beard too, man.  Mine is starting to go a little gray myself.

Have a good one,

Child at Heart

P.S. I'll build my own if I have to, but if I blow myself up it's on you

That Instant

you burst into laughter sitting in traffic when you realize people pounding the table pressing merit and skill based immigration because they insist immigrants shouldn't be allowed into the country based on winning a lottery or because they are related to someone already here are completely blind to the fact that their current station in life has a lot more to do with the luck of where and to whom they were born and who they knew and were related to than it did any shining meritocracy or particular honed skill.

Time Locked (meta jail)

As freedoms increased, freedoms increased.  Identities are the easiest way to build a lock.  Layers upon layers of identities.  Make each layer easily identifiable and then nest them.

The only way in, in a timely fashion is to know them all.  You will get in, eventually.  Perhaps the algorithm before.  30 semaphores?  3000 semaphore tumbler.  Vector crossed?   259.

I have to remind myself on a regular basis why being 8 years removed from the day I finally said "no" to being trampled and hidden and displayed and ripped apart by my parents is important.

It's not an "in memorium" for them as much as a "time makes fools of us all."  Things get rose tinted and goofy and it becomes easy to slough details and miss bolts during assembly.  It becomes

natural to see it their way and understand margins and forget why fifteen layers thick gloves are necessary to.  It is scary existing without the safety net of a mom and a dad.

Not even the safety net, but a perspective with something behind that should be automatic.  I never thought the jealousy would grow the way it has.  I hoped cutting them off would be the hardest part.

"There won't be any home to go back to."  The seasons wear on.  Soldier on.  I would still rather a genuine holiday gathering to plastic family photographs and obtuse threats.

It's not rage.  S'not anger or disappointment.  It's slipping my fingers through the links of the farthest fence I've reached inside the meta-jail compound.  Fuck me, seventy acres out from solitary.

Forty-four fucking gates,  six yards,  general population, no armed guards, three muzzles and three mittens, two fields, and one drone called off and still inside the fucking compound.

It is strange to be an orphan by choice.  Well, why don'tcha call 'em?  Have you ever been on the phone with someone who hurt you more times than you could count and it took you

years just to understand that it didn't have to be normal?  That it wasn't normal.  And then to have an outright denial thrown in your face when you do finally fucking get it.

To see so many parts of why you are the way that you are tossed away with a flick of a wrist and rebuild it into some semblance of what you could've been and ...  hell, you know what?

You call them.  I can tell you exactly what they'll say.  And you'll say "aw, man, your parents are funny.  Cool dude.  Your mom had this story about this one time and-"

Okay.  I hate being an orphan.  There's a blackhole where P1 & P2 were supposed to be.  It's the lesser of blades I suppose.  I try not to wear it outright, but I do get jealous sometimes

when I speak to friends and they talk about how they had a conversation with their pops or moms.  I will not do it again.  That territory is radioactive for a reason and I want to make sure

that we don't forget.

That Instant

I was born at the age of 25.

The Best Thing

about the screaming argument that starts with "I'll get dressed when I'm dead!!!" and "I don't fucking feel like it today!!!" and "Well, neither do I!!!" is that it sometimes ends with high fives all around because you've managed to agree on something unanimously and that something just happened to be: getting dressed sucks and yeah people should be a lot less fucked up about nudity, but they aren't and we can't kill them all so we'll get dressed and file our grievances under artistic differences or something, and it's a starting point to key the rest of the day.

Preparing For Changes and the Return of the Painted Dinosaur

We've been drinking a lot.  The nice thing about self medicating is that you can up or down your dosage as needed without the pain or risk of seeing "professionals", though the time elapsed has gifted a pro status to yourself.  That professionalism about the approach can easily get away from you in much the same way an infinite prescription pad can get away from you and the dulling of sensation and thought and process will become a pea beneath a mattress. 

We are going to strip some away.  Artificial feeling.  Artificial sense.  Changes are coming and they're going to be unpleasant, but carrying around the ghosts in the darkness constantly is not possible.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  There is no winning or losing.  There is fear.  You've been normal, you've been good,  you've engaged, you've laughed, you've loved, you've cried, you've walked back and forth three hundred and eight times and you can't push anything new until you open the box. 

So we're going to open the box so we can write our poetry again and stop pretending we're fine.  We're not.  Haven't been for months.  How great a run has it been?  It's been fun.  The muddy boots and gloves, the tools misplaced, the hysterics, the silence, they don't lie.  Eventually it feels like building a carnival atop mass graves and playing the music loud enough to drown out the way foot falls squeeze blood from between the blades of grass and insisting to the patrons it's just part of the show.  I'm looking forward to it.

That Instant (_____)

you want to have a little time to yourself for some slippery self love and an orgasm or two, but you just can't quite get there because there is an alarming number of fake books all along the shelves of the walls surrounding the sense and sexuality at the film shoot's center...  ...like a conspicuously, mind bogglingly, strange amount of fake books... 

That Instant (_____)

you reach the meta level of justifying skipping workouts so that you don't have to feel the disappointment in yourself after you keep it rolling for three months and miss a few weeks because you vegged out and partied and flat didn't feel like it and can still honestly say that you will start again when you're ready but there's not point in starting right now because twelve weeks from now will still play out the same and who wants to feel like a waste of life after their first day back?