It's difficult not to get sucked into a way of thinking that spirals out of control. When you consider how many of your lines of thinking, projected outward through time, end with a force quit the entire prospect of a future or futures gets dim. When you consider how many of your avenues end with the phrase "I try not to think about it."
Five years from now, I will still be working for peanuts. What's the point? Why bother setting goals at all? The ones that are attainable are so near and so small they mean next to nothing beside your peers. Change you can deem actionable is so incremental from outside perspectives as to appear to be no change at all. Five years from now you'll be able to afford to go out and socialize twice a month instead of once a month.
Life up to now has been heavily geared toward learning how to do more with less. Learning to deal with scraps and put pieces and parts together to make whole and useful things from what others discard. Learning to maximize and squeeze potential out of every little thing you find and adopt and consume. Will you ever get your degree? By the time you do, will you be able to do anything with it, twenty years behind the curve? What are your useful skills? "I can turn a pretty good wrench. I am terrified of crowds. I sometimes am paralyzed with depression. I've been told I cook pretty good chicken. I don't know, I try not to think about it."
The way of life I am capable of sustaining is far afield of most folks. Even if I were to "settle down" the undeniable and stark contrast between myself and the environments that have held sway in my engineering and make up will be more than enough to strain just about any relationship to a breaking point, given time. Love can only cover and suture so many fissures and canyons before a lover will realize my planet is not capable of supporting new life. So are we protracting our own death? Killing time and energy and spinning entropy into something beautiful enough that our decades long throes to come can at least bring some light and warm some hearts before it sputters out as the parts steadily fail beyond repair? "I don't know."
A reminder that you've worked so many years for freedom. While you are freer than you've ever been, you are still inside the compound. You still have to trick yourself into believing to keep on running. Perhaps adopt a belief system or religion. Not too fast or too far lest you ram headfirst into the bars. Sitting cross legged, picking at the grass beside the river and skipping a stone now and then, the undeniable scent of wrought iron creeps into the wind and you know the bars are there if you bring yourself to focus your eyes just inside the horizon's line. I try not to think about it. You've gotten out of the cell and into the yard outside of the yard where you're allowed to roam. You've earned visitation. A meal card for better food. The compound is vast. I try not to think about it, but I cannot forget.
/// Phantogram - "Running From the Cops" staring into a still lake of bass
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label american dream. Show all posts
Showing posts with label american dream. Show all posts
5/15/15
5/9/15
Stand Up Act 11
Stand Up Act 10
Some people stick by the words in line with the idea of everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten. Be nice to each other. Don't drop your pants in public. Share. Be quiet and listen when the time is right. Take time to make things. Take naps. I don't know what the whole NY Times best seller's list was, but you get the point. Coming to grips with the fact that I will probably never dunk a basketball has brought me an up to date version of that book. In no particular order:
Everyone gets old and dies and the best you can do is be a little worse than your worst the day before. That's right. At some point your body stops growing and starts failing. Bit by bit. Part by part. Sure, you may beat the odds and be one of the few freakish human beings that cannot be destroyed through attrition and must be struck down with sudden and violent illness or circumstance. The chances are very good that you are not. Once you hit your mid thirties, that's pretty much it. The next decade or so, you may hold serve or at least keep even with your physical abilities the day prior, but it all ends in a gutter. If you haven't dunked a basketball by now, you probably never will without a trampoline or other marvel of engineering.
You can't be whatever you want to be. You can be a version of what you want to be. You can be somewhere in the ballpark of what you wanted to be. You cannot be whatever you want to be. Well you can be whatever you want to be inside your head. That is absolutely attainable. However, you may wake up inside a very welcoming dormitory environment where breakfast always comes at 8:30 and bed time is 9 sharp and a guy keeps pounding his head against the wall loud enough to interrupt your 500 piece puzzling and your pants have no pockets and the shower always smells a little bit off. You can't be whatever you want to be. There are always outliers in great numbers because it's a perceptual lens. Think of the planet as an aircraft carrier. There are, I dunno, 150 pilots. There are always 150 or so pilots. There are 6000 other people doing all of the other stuff to make sure it doesn't crash or sink and feed the people that help the people that help the people that feed the people that help other people make sure it doesnt crash or sink so that the people that fly the planes and fix the planes can fly and fix things and make sure it doesn't get blow'd up. Chances are really good, if you're born on that carrier, you're not going to be flying anything unless you steal it or are a pilot's kid or pilot's friend's kid. If you aren't born with the genetic ingredients to Chia pet out into a frame capable of dunking, guess what? That's right, you can work your ass off and add 6" to your vertical leap, but your wingspan and height have already conspired to make sure the best you'll achieve is a left handed layup with your finger tips grazing the rim.
Allow your passions to lead to your goals. Your goals cannot kick start your passion. That element of life is a one way valve. You may not be able to dunk, but you do enjoy the game. If you like to play with smash and grab abandon, get good at it. Embrace it. Set your goal to being the best slasher in the neighborhood. Cut defenses to ribbons and bounce off the low block to grab rebounds because your game will never be above the rim... doesn't mean it can't be wicked fast. When you set goals apart from your passions, your hearts never in it. Doing things because you want to do them and doing things because you cannot not do them are too very different things. There is an "I think I can" gray area muddled in there. A little bit of chicken and egg, what came first, questioning, but for the larger part, save your mind the wear and tear. Gravity will still be gravity tomorrow, and last I heard, the ability to go from zero to "don't blink" is pretty rare in itself.
The list goes on, but you get the point. Along those lines, I was considering going back to trying to rip out a poem every day. Just one. There's the whole idea that you have to dig through the trash and start tossing things off of the top of the stack to get down to what you really want to weave and work with. The thought behind it is that every time, every instance, that ends with the idea of "hey, I should write that down" is the lattice of your brain adding a new bit of graph that gets buried and grown in and grown over with the events and experiences that come after it. And then you hit another branching point where you say to no one in particular "I should write that down".
By the time you actually get to the point of sitting down, all is forgotten. Not really forgotten. Buried. Grab a shovel You've got two choices. Try to hammer and chisel all the way back to the fly in the center of the glacier, or sample and blast it apart, while mapping and scaling and measuring and cataloging it.
Eventually you may get all the way back to the granule of the thing you thought you should write down. Nothing along the way will be known or preserved or brought into consideration to cut the journey or work shorter the next time around. If you slice it up and hold it up to inspection and hang the samples on slides along the route, you've not only achieved the point of origin- you've possibly stumbled upon data for further examination and perhaps other points of interest that must be investigated before the entire land mass melts into the polar seas of your own consciousness.
Scary as hell, the prospect, no? Oh yes. In years of your decaying brain you've lost so much. It's alright though. Breath easy. Release your testicles back out of your stomach and unclench your pelvises. It's never too late to start getting some exercise and start tagging the fauna living inside your head.
Speaking of things living inside the mind, I've been up late a lot of days thinking about whether or not I should pursue a mate. You know the whole mating thing. The whole pairing off with other people to raise other littler people to become good big people to raise more little people to become good big people or horrible little terrors. That whole thing. I don't want to do it to raise other little people. Let's get that out of the way first. Maybe. I think I would either be a great father or a horrible father, but there's no gray in there. Trust me. I've been over the idea drunk, sober, high, smashed, apotheotic, grounded, slippy, glowing, based, depressed, you name it. It's going to go one way or another and frankly I don't care to flip a coin everyday hoping I raise someone who doesn't want to kill me every day of its waking life until I do actually die. That shit is terrifying.
I want to do it for a companion. A second voice, because the angel and devil on my shoulders like to play dress up so sometimes I glance over and there's a teddy bear and a bowling pin on the other side or a pacman and a doily. What the hell, indeed.
I don't hate company. This is how it all boiled down; I'll give you the most obvious that occurred to me last first.
While browsing reviews of Tinder and Grinder, I realized that my apartment, though of a healthy square footage, is laid out like one giant room with a side room (full of weight lifting equipment.... it's essentially a regularly used gym so that I don't have to pay to go to one). I have enough space to house one person. Exactly one person. Trying to pack another person into this space will lead to a violent civil war, ultimately. I don't live alone. I'm in my apartment with me and the rest of the machinations and defects and words and whispers and screams and general artifacta of my minds functioning. It's a packed house already. Where am I supposed to go to escape if the side room is occupied and I can't go outdoors?
The second thing is there must be sex. If you live with me, we have to fuck eventually or someone has to go. Not immediately, but eventually. If we don't have sex, that's fine, but you'd better be prepared for gratuitous nudity because I cannot stand clothing. I hate clothes. Once they've served their function it's time to discard them. They're uncomfortable. If I'm wearing something, I probably had to. If it's something I enjoy wearing it's because if you're going to wear clothes, you may as well wear something you can have fun wearing or need to wear to bring happiness to the act of dressing my pretty innards.
I didn't live to the ripe old age of 30 to hear "don't touch me there" "it's four o'clock in the morning" "I'm tired" "I just ate lunch" "I want to shower first". I don't care. You can use me when you want to as well. It's a two way street. I damn sure am not going to catch flak for masturbating at midnight when they've turned in early.
I don't care if it's bad sex or the kind of sex you tell your friends about when I'm not around where you know I think I rocked the house, but really I fizzed about as pleasantly as having an ashtray dumped on your tongue, getting to wash it off, and finding grit behind your molars the next morning. It's gotta be there. I am a contact person. When I know I can't touch you, things get weird. Things get real weird. Ever found a sheet of a paper folded in half six times inside your purse? Ever found three razor blades in your wallet? Ever found your jacket on the same hook except literally inside out? Ever found everything that could possibly be unplugged unplugged? Ever found everything you brought over laid out to the level of where your hands might swing as you picked up an item and progressed onward toward the door? Ever found your car keys behind your head when you woke up?
The point is this: I realized I don't own enough space to support two people to the point where one person can disappear from the other person's engagement and forget for a time that they are now part of the other person they are living with and dive into their own engagements. I'd have to add a floor at best and another two rooms at the least so that I or they would not know exactly where to find me, because knowing exactly where someone is hiding is the same as having them immediately present. You need only to recite the incantation to summon them. There has to be some mystery and trial and error to at least give them a chance to relocate and make it interesting.
The other point is that I own enough stuff to support exactly one person. There are enough chairs to support one person and an occasional party. There are enough dishes and cups and utensils to support one person who makes their own meals and washes their own dishes. Enough bedding for one. Enough closet space for one. Enough food and fridge space for one. Enough toiletries for one. Just a matter of fact.
Not that there's been no effort to expand the coffers. There has been. Through the strain and the strife and the good and bad times, the covering radar is still only big enough to account for the airspace over a single atoll. Above and beyond that controlled airspace, all bets are off. Everyone and everything flying in or out is at its own risk. There simply is no room in the budget for fighter escorts and first response marines and a space program and, hell, the DPW is backlogged by years, not months or days. Years. Bringing someone else into the equivalent of District 9 is not going to end well for anyone who doesn't live somewhere near or lesser than there already. This may be an open hoodrat invitation. It's not.
Recognizing where my passions are, we can make this work. I gotta acquire more space at some point if I want another human being around or, adding another human being, there will very quickly be just one. We can work out the details after the acres. Plus it'll be good to have places to bury things and plant growing things to just walk out on my porch and sit down and peer across the field and say to no one in particular "I remember when that tree was a foot tall," kick my feet up on a flat basketball , take a little sip of gin and apple juice, scrawl some notes, and tsk tsk at online dating messages I still receive, setting aside the gems to tell you when dinner rolls around and we play two handed hearts to see who sets the menu and who does the cooking that night.
Some people stick by the words in line with the idea of everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten. Be nice to each other. Don't drop your pants in public. Share. Be quiet and listen when the time is right. Take time to make things. Take naps. I don't know what the whole NY Times best seller's list was, but you get the point. Coming to grips with the fact that I will probably never dunk a basketball has brought me an up to date version of that book. In no particular order:
Everyone gets old and dies and the best you can do is be a little worse than your worst the day before. That's right. At some point your body stops growing and starts failing. Bit by bit. Part by part. Sure, you may beat the odds and be one of the few freakish human beings that cannot be destroyed through attrition and must be struck down with sudden and violent illness or circumstance. The chances are very good that you are not. Once you hit your mid thirties, that's pretty much it. The next decade or so, you may hold serve or at least keep even with your physical abilities the day prior, but it all ends in a gutter. If you haven't dunked a basketball by now, you probably never will without a trampoline or other marvel of engineering.
You can't be whatever you want to be. You can be a version of what you want to be. You can be somewhere in the ballpark of what you wanted to be. You cannot be whatever you want to be. Well you can be whatever you want to be inside your head. That is absolutely attainable. However, you may wake up inside a very welcoming dormitory environment where breakfast always comes at 8:30 and bed time is 9 sharp and a guy keeps pounding his head against the wall loud enough to interrupt your 500 piece puzzling and your pants have no pockets and the shower always smells a little bit off. You can't be whatever you want to be. There are always outliers in great numbers because it's a perceptual lens. Think of the planet as an aircraft carrier. There are, I dunno, 150 pilots. There are always 150 or so pilots. There are 6000 other people doing all of the other stuff to make sure it doesn't crash or sink and feed the people that help the people that help the people that feed the people that help other people make sure it doesnt crash or sink so that the people that fly the planes and fix the planes can fly and fix things and make sure it doesn't get blow'd up. Chances are really good, if you're born on that carrier, you're not going to be flying anything unless you steal it or are a pilot's kid or pilot's friend's kid. If you aren't born with the genetic ingredients to Chia pet out into a frame capable of dunking, guess what? That's right, you can work your ass off and add 6" to your vertical leap, but your wingspan and height have already conspired to make sure the best you'll achieve is a left handed layup with your finger tips grazing the rim.
Allow your passions to lead to your goals. Your goals cannot kick start your passion. That element of life is a one way valve. You may not be able to dunk, but you do enjoy the game. If you like to play with smash and grab abandon, get good at it. Embrace it. Set your goal to being the best slasher in the neighborhood. Cut defenses to ribbons and bounce off the low block to grab rebounds because your game will never be above the rim... doesn't mean it can't be wicked fast. When you set goals apart from your passions, your hearts never in it. Doing things because you want to do them and doing things because you cannot not do them are too very different things. There is an "I think I can" gray area muddled in there. A little bit of chicken and egg, what came first, questioning, but for the larger part, save your mind the wear and tear. Gravity will still be gravity tomorrow, and last I heard, the ability to go from zero to "don't blink" is pretty rare in itself.
The list goes on, but you get the point. Along those lines, I was considering going back to trying to rip out a poem every day. Just one. There's the whole idea that you have to dig through the trash and start tossing things off of the top of the stack to get down to what you really want to weave and work with. The thought behind it is that every time, every instance, that ends with the idea of "hey, I should write that down" is the lattice of your brain adding a new bit of graph that gets buried and grown in and grown over with the events and experiences that come after it. And then you hit another branching point where you say to no one in particular "I should write that down".
By the time you actually get to the point of sitting down, all is forgotten. Not really forgotten. Buried. Grab a shovel You've got two choices. Try to hammer and chisel all the way back to the fly in the center of the glacier, or sample and blast it apart, while mapping and scaling and measuring and cataloging it.
Eventually you may get all the way back to the granule of the thing you thought you should write down. Nothing along the way will be known or preserved or brought into consideration to cut the journey or work shorter the next time around. If you slice it up and hold it up to inspection and hang the samples on slides along the route, you've not only achieved the point of origin- you've possibly stumbled upon data for further examination and perhaps other points of interest that must be investigated before the entire land mass melts into the polar seas of your own consciousness.
Scary as hell, the prospect, no? Oh yes. In years of your decaying brain you've lost so much. It's alright though. Breath easy. Release your testicles back out of your stomach and unclench your pelvises. It's never too late to start getting some exercise and start tagging the fauna living inside your head.
Speaking of things living inside the mind, I've been up late a lot of days thinking about whether or not I should pursue a mate. You know the whole mating thing. The whole pairing off with other people to raise other littler people to become good big people to raise more little people to become good big people or horrible little terrors. That whole thing. I don't want to do it to raise other little people. Let's get that out of the way first. Maybe. I think I would either be a great father or a horrible father, but there's no gray in there. Trust me. I've been over the idea drunk, sober, high, smashed, apotheotic, grounded, slippy, glowing, based, depressed, you name it. It's going to go one way or another and frankly I don't care to flip a coin everyday hoping I raise someone who doesn't want to kill me every day of its waking life until I do actually die. That shit is terrifying.
I want to do it for a companion. A second voice, because the angel and devil on my shoulders like to play dress up so sometimes I glance over and there's a teddy bear and a bowling pin on the other side or a pacman and a doily. What the hell, indeed.
I don't hate company. This is how it all boiled down; I'll give you the most obvious that occurred to me last first.
While browsing reviews of Tinder and Grinder, I realized that my apartment, though of a healthy square footage, is laid out like one giant room with a side room (full of weight lifting equipment.... it's essentially a regularly used gym so that I don't have to pay to go to one). I have enough space to house one person. Exactly one person. Trying to pack another person into this space will lead to a violent civil war, ultimately. I don't live alone. I'm in my apartment with me and the rest of the machinations and defects and words and whispers and screams and general artifacta of my minds functioning. It's a packed house already. Where am I supposed to go to escape if the side room is occupied and I can't go outdoors?
The second thing is there must be sex. If you live with me, we have to fuck eventually or someone has to go. Not immediately, but eventually. If we don't have sex, that's fine, but you'd better be prepared for gratuitous nudity because I cannot stand clothing. I hate clothes. Once they've served their function it's time to discard them. They're uncomfortable. If I'm wearing something, I probably had to. If it's something I enjoy wearing it's because if you're going to wear clothes, you may as well wear something you can have fun wearing or need to wear to bring happiness to the act of dressing my pretty innards.
I didn't live to the ripe old age of 30 to hear "don't touch me there" "it's four o'clock in the morning" "I'm tired" "I just ate lunch" "I want to shower first". I don't care. You can use me when you want to as well. It's a two way street. I damn sure am not going to catch flak for masturbating at midnight when they've turned in early.
I don't care if it's bad sex or the kind of sex you tell your friends about when I'm not around where you know I think I rocked the house, but really I fizzed about as pleasantly as having an ashtray dumped on your tongue, getting to wash it off, and finding grit behind your molars the next morning. It's gotta be there. I am a contact person. When I know I can't touch you, things get weird. Things get real weird. Ever found a sheet of a paper folded in half six times inside your purse? Ever found three razor blades in your wallet? Ever found your jacket on the same hook except literally inside out? Ever found everything that could possibly be unplugged unplugged? Ever found everything you brought over laid out to the level of where your hands might swing as you picked up an item and progressed onward toward the door? Ever found your car keys behind your head when you woke up?
The point is this: I realized I don't own enough space to support two people to the point where one person can disappear from the other person's engagement and forget for a time that they are now part of the other person they are living with and dive into their own engagements. I'd have to add a floor at best and another two rooms at the least so that I or they would not know exactly where to find me, because knowing exactly where someone is hiding is the same as having them immediately present. You need only to recite the incantation to summon them. There has to be some mystery and trial and error to at least give them a chance to relocate and make it interesting.
The other point is that I own enough stuff to support exactly one person. There are enough chairs to support one person and an occasional party. There are enough dishes and cups and utensils to support one person who makes their own meals and washes their own dishes. Enough bedding for one. Enough closet space for one. Enough food and fridge space for one. Enough toiletries for one. Just a matter of fact.
Not that there's been no effort to expand the coffers. There has been. Through the strain and the strife and the good and bad times, the covering radar is still only big enough to account for the airspace over a single atoll. Above and beyond that controlled airspace, all bets are off. Everyone and everything flying in or out is at its own risk. There simply is no room in the budget for fighter escorts and first response marines and a space program and, hell, the DPW is backlogged by years, not months or days. Years. Bringing someone else into the equivalent of District 9 is not going to end well for anyone who doesn't live somewhere near or lesser than there already. This may be an open hoodrat invitation. It's not.
Recognizing where my passions are, we can make this work. I gotta acquire more space at some point if I want another human being around or, adding another human being, there will very quickly be just one. We can work out the details after the acres. Plus it'll be good to have places to bury things and plant growing things to just walk out on my porch and sit down and peer across the field and say to no one in particular "I remember when that tree was a foot tall," kick my feet up on a flat basketball , take a little sip of gin and apple juice, scrawl some notes, and tsk tsk at online dating messages I still receive, setting aside the gems to tell you when dinner rolls around and we play two handed hearts to see who sets the menu and who does the cooking that night.
2/22/15
Year End Playlist 2014
January - Run the Jewels - Sea Legs
February - Sleigh Bells - Rachel Remix
March - Run the Jewels - No Come Down
April - Matt and Kim - Lessons Learned
May - The Sabres of Paradise - Smoke Belch
June - Deathgrips - Blackjack you don't pay attention, you're going to get whacked
July - Machinedrum - Loveking
August - Starfucker - Rawnald Gregory
September - Various - Listen to the Animals
October - Nneka - Heartbeats fuck when you want me
November - Miss Kittin - Happy Violentine oscar foxtrot november
December - Sylvan Esso - Hey Mami
Fault of circumstance. Blood blood blood blood blood. Machinedrum almost made it for a two'fer, but Loveking was pushed off of the list for Nneka. The list is in a particular order. I should offer honorable mentions and I will:
in no particular order
Junkie XL - Zero to Nine
Machinedrum - Loveking
Macklemore - Whitewalls
Junkie XL - Blackjack
Goldie - Mother
Meaghan Trainor - All About That Bass
Daft Punk - Giorgio By Moroder
My brother tells me often "love and peace". I appreciate the words. I do. Conscientious objection is not an option for some. Draft dodger maybe. Acceptable? Yes. For another time? Yes.
February - Sleigh Bells - Rachel Remix
March - Run the Jewels - No Come Down
April - Matt and Kim - Lessons Learned
May - The Sabres of Paradise - Smoke Belch
June - Deathgrips - Blackjack you don't pay attention, you're going to get whacked
July - Machinedrum - Loveking
August - Starfucker - Rawnald Gregory
September - Various - Listen to the Animals
October - Nneka - Heartbeats fuck when you want me
November - Miss Kittin - Happy Violentine oscar foxtrot november
December - Sylvan Esso - Hey Mami
Fault of circumstance. Blood blood blood blood blood. Machinedrum almost made it for a two'fer, but Loveking was pushed off of the list for Nneka. The list is in a particular order. I should offer honorable mentions and I will:
in no particular order
Junkie XL - Zero to Nine
Machinedrum - Loveking
Macklemore - Whitewalls
Junkie XL - Blackjack
Goldie - Mother
Meaghan Trainor - All About That Bass
Daft Punk - Giorgio By Moroder
My brother tells me often "love and peace". I appreciate the words. I do. Conscientious objection is not an option for some. Draft dodger maybe. Acceptable? Yes. For another time? Yes.
2/1/15
The Year End Look
2014 had many moments I would like to take back, but not too many. I didn't break my nose again, which is awesome! Thinking back through it I cannot remember a single concussion, which is also awesome and very good. Awesome and very good are different things. Awesome can be tanking on purpose to see if you can get a flat line goose egg. Awesome is also seeing if you can bust the high score. Very good is taking care of business and dotting every single "I" and looping to the correct depth of the drop liner each "P". Very good is washing your hair every time you must do it, but awesome is having a great shampoo without a schedule.
Twenty fourteen saw a battle between myself and a close friend and another close friend and another close friend that required more time to heal than any physical injury. Fully healed? Yes. Full confidence? No. The third piece of the puzzle is entirely lost. As is the fourth piece. I never believed it was possible to force or be forced beyond the edge of limping the object into a shop and getting blow torches out and suitable scrap, but sometimes, no matter how the repairs go, you can never look at the finished product the same way no matter the lighting.
The year presented no new physical projects in terms of repurposing homes and was difficult in that respect too. The hardest part about being on call is that you are waiting for something to go wrong. In that zone it becomes difficult to see everything going right. By the second quarter of the year I could see better that when I am doing my job well I will not receive calls. I always strive to do the best work because while I am doing whatever job it is the goal is to never hear from them again. In the time it takes me to get home I can, and sometimes do, forget that is the primary objective. I do not work to make friends. If I make friends after or during a viewing it is business. Business does not cross over to farming. Sometimes farming crosses over to business. I confused the two in 2014. Because I work a small job for you does not mean we have to be friends for life.
I thought I could make significant repairs to my lower lumbars, but I do believe the back injury is in the nerves. It's not a structural injury. It's software, not hardware. I learned through 2014 that some tissue explosions/implosions cannot be fixed by tending or work or loosening or tightening. Bring all of the wrenches you choose, unless one of the tools in your kit is a new gold plated circuit board, you are screwed no matter what you plug in, replace, or renew. It took a year, still feels like yesterday, to figure that out. I became very aware of my age last year and the limitations that age brings. The new year will bring a secondary mode. Caution. Beside the hatswitch for go is a new button installed to activate precision. Everything cannot be solved by a hammer. I knew that before 2014, but the application was aimed outward. The application will be aimed inward in 2015.
Everyone who shares a drink or breaks bread with you is not your friend. They may have motives aside from smiling. Believe it or not, I have better things to do today than laugh and clap my hands. So do they. That does not mean that they need to be cut out of your life entirely. That remained silly through the previous year and that point will remain sharp, if not sharper, through this year.
I performed a great deal of reading through 2014 without any specific schedule. That should continue. No books were finished. There was a boost in output that will take more discipline in 2015. It is a steep ask, but I am prepared for it. I do not like that my discipline grew slipshod enough to not finish or even map a new story though they ping ponged around my skull. It's pathetic. It's awful. You screwed up and I am saying it now: we dropped the ball and it hit you in the teeth. All we had to do was open our hands and we were too busy adjusting our emotions to see. We do not appreciate that. At all. And I want to make sure you know. "Why am I picking up my teeth?" Because you were punched in the mouth. You didn't trip. You didn't fall out of bed. You didn't scrap. You were punched dead in the mouth and didn't have the wherewithal through an entire year to defend yourself. Do better. I do not care if it is garbage. I do not care if it is too rich. Do you really believe years will keep falling out of the sky? Ignorance is not a defense. Do better. Stop reading, stop audiobooking, stop trawling, start layout. Start mapping. Stop talking about "I started this universe in highschool and"... what since then? I'm sick of hearing about it. Yes, physically ill. Begin to finish it and stop spit polishing a trophy no one else can understand. "But there's no translation..." so translate it!!! Do you hear me??? Look at me. Look at me! Translate it! Damn it, you are thick skulled. I want notes out of 2015. Stop dancing and screw like you dream.
I began a few tattoos in 2014. Progress is going very well. The sleeve will not be completed at the close of 2015 however there is very specific direction and direction is extremely important as they cannot be erased, easily or ever aside from through growth and the normal cycling of skin cells like tectonic plates. The reminders still remain on my face and are used daily. They are pretty much worth every second of the process. We are building a lens on our left hand to remind us of our ability and scope and potential and violence. That we can and should hold back at time as a window can be opened or closed or screened. Not zero and not one. Infinite, yes! Singular yes! The real pleasure is in the curve, not the approach either way.
Are we addicted to tea now? Yep. Significantly cut down on the drugs through 2014. Management & things. One of my cats died. Actual cats. Not "cats" cats. I took it rough. Too rough. Harder to deal with than I anticipated, but it reminded me that my pets are closer to me than my cousins or extended family. I think that's when the extent of my cut off really hit. My family, direct family, includes my brother and two sisters. It ends there. My father is dead to me so that I do not fuck up and go back to Maryland to kill him myself. I cannot do that. If I do that everyone will know, no matter how I mask it or plan it or do not plan it or just get in the mood and take the trip and kill him and my mother, because she'll either be in the house or somewhere within ear or eyeshot, no offense but it's best to keep things tidy, because I said it here and it's public record. I am closing that door, but it's dead bolted from both sides. Very good. Not awesome, but very good. Call it a standing threat if you want to; I call it a restraining order. If you come into my space I will kill you. In return, we will do everything we can to stay away. Deal. The cat's death was very sad. I mourned for quite some time. More than I mourned for any of my extended families deaths through the year. The sensation was arresting and unexpected and taught me the depths and exhaustion true hate goes. His death also taught me the danger of dehydration and the ties I have still with local law enforcement and the patience they have with me and the value of a friend who can tap into your nerves in ways we thought we only tapped their structure. The year heightened my self awareness and heightened my awareness of my emotional footprint.
I cried a lot in the last year. Much more than usual. I began to understand the actual details of outcomes through 2025. There is a lot of potential there and more danger than I would like. Many of my peers are pairing up and gearing themselves toward producing families and I became acutely aware of timelines. I'm not sure how to govern the sensation. I suppose I will have to start graphing... I can't. It will be the struggle of 2015. What do you give up, what can I give up, what can we give up, to make a family. I cannot. Not for me. Not for you. I will get up for a child, not for you. I will not fight for a child, not for you. Ever. I will not crack a beer on an off day for a child, not for you. It's a strange equation and I'm not sure how to change it. I'm not sure what is supposed to come on the other side of the equal sign.
One of the other things I realized through twenty fourteen is that I am fiscally trapped. Free as a mongoose in every way besides the wallet and the wallet is where futures are made when you look at families. I am damaged goods in that way and can be as free as I want to proclaim, but jailed for quite some time fiscally. Going for jogs, playing catch, buying food with EBT, unable to hold a credit card, unable to get loans (even though I refuse to, but cooperation will require it) or car notes, impressing other's parents with charisma, buying them shoes, going to dinners and lunches, going on a paint craze, shutting myself in a room for a few days because I cannot listen to anything because it hurts, all of these do not help a child's upbringing at all, but they are instrumental. I have no idea when or if they will change. I became acutely aware of the maintenance I require and it made me cry. Take what it takes for me to relate to other people my age without falling apart like crushed salmon in a frying pan with burnt butter. Add a marriage. Add a child. Desire came in the last year. Twenty fifteen will include learning how to better understand what exactly that desire is and not consciously or subconsciously destroying it wherever it arises, be it from outside in general or specific environments or from within or side effect to proximity to others. I will try to be more reliable and predictable and acceptable to your children or child rearing or child bearing circumstances. Failure to do so will cause increased isolation and we all know where that heads.
2014 taught me that no matter how I feel I have to get up. 2014 taught me who to trust. 2014 taught me to let go a little bit and who to hold on to without hanging on. It taught me change is inevitable and you cannot wish everyone a happy birthday because at least half them muthas have no idea who you are now and you have no business wishing them well because you have about as much idea of them as they do you, so stay out or at least don't go balls in to their affairs, unless they ask, which gives us a little gray area because it's fun to play even though not everyone would like to play with you. Understand better when no means no in fifteen. Just because you would like to laugh does not mean everyone else you encounter does too.
Let's draw this to a close. The last thing I socked away for 2014 was that you still definitely get what you pay for. That and given enough time anyone can be a mechanic if you study well and stock a good garage. You get what you pay for and through repairs to my truck I got exactly what I paid for: a running truck. I love the sound of a "V" layout 8 cylinder more than an inline 6 cylinder engine. It's really throaty. It has some gargle and growl and purr to it more than an inline 6. Sixes sound closer to a four cylinder screech now that I've become accustomed to an 8. I'm not sure where I was going with getting what you pay for. I wish a little bit that I was heterosexual. I envy it a lot and often and at many times intensely. Even more than perfect sanity. At least then I'd be married and crazy instead of just crazy. It makes me cry. It makes me furious too. It makes me violent. I want access. I don't want to just understand, I want access! I fucking want access! What do you do? Do you fake it? Do you sleep walk it? I'm laughing now because I am crying. I hate my circuitry. Let's not beat ourselves too hard in 2015 and let's keep that streak of no nose breaks and no concussions going. I said I will never cut my face again. That promise will be kept.
XOXO
///Daft Punk - "Giorgio By Moroder" the year end playlist is up next. shoot em dahn.
Twenty fourteen saw a battle between myself and a close friend and another close friend and another close friend that required more time to heal than any physical injury. Fully healed? Yes. Full confidence? No. The third piece of the puzzle is entirely lost. As is the fourth piece. I never believed it was possible to force or be forced beyond the edge of limping the object into a shop and getting blow torches out and suitable scrap, but sometimes, no matter how the repairs go, you can never look at the finished product the same way no matter the lighting.
The year presented no new physical projects in terms of repurposing homes and was difficult in that respect too. The hardest part about being on call is that you are waiting for something to go wrong. In that zone it becomes difficult to see everything going right. By the second quarter of the year I could see better that when I am doing my job well I will not receive calls. I always strive to do the best work because while I am doing whatever job it is the goal is to never hear from them again. In the time it takes me to get home I can, and sometimes do, forget that is the primary objective. I do not work to make friends. If I make friends after or during a viewing it is business. Business does not cross over to farming. Sometimes farming crosses over to business. I confused the two in 2014. Because I work a small job for you does not mean we have to be friends for life.
I thought I could make significant repairs to my lower lumbars, but I do believe the back injury is in the nerves. It's not a structural injury. It's software, not hardware. I learned through 2014 that some tissue explosions/implosions cannot be fixed by tending or work or loosening or tightening. Bring all of the wrenches you choose, unless one of the tools in your kit is a new gold plated circuit board, you are screwed no matter what you plug in, replace, or renew. It took a year, still feels like yesterday, to figure that out. I became very aware of my age last year and the limitations that age brings. The new year will bring a secondary mode. Caution. Beside the hatswitch for go is a new button installed to activate precision. Everything cannot be solved by a hammer. I knew that before 2014, but the application was aimed outward. The application will be aimed inward in 2015.
Everyone who shares a drink or breaks bread with you is not your friend. They may have motives aside from smiling. Believe it or not, I have better things to do today than laugh and clap my hands. So do they. That does not mean that they need to be cut out of your life entirely. That remained silly through the previous year and that point will remain sharp, if not sharper, through this year.
I performed a great deal of reading through 2014 without any specific schedule. That should continue. No books were finished. There was a boost in output that will take more discipline in 2015. It is a steep ask, but I am prepared for it. I do not like that my discipline grew slipshod enough to not finish or even map a new story though they ping ponged around my skull. It's pathetic. It's awful. You screwed up and I am saying it now: we dropped the ball and it hit you in the teeth. All we had to do was open our hands and we were too busy adjusting our emotions to see. We do not appreciate that. At all. And I want to make sure you know. "Why am I picking up my teeth?" Because you were punched in the mouth. You didn't trip. You didn't fall out of bed. You didn't scrap. You were punched dead in the mouth and didn't have the wherewithal through an entire year to defend yourself. Do better. I do not care if it is garbage. I do not care if it is too rich. Do you really believe years will keep falling out of the sky? Ignorance is not a defense. Do better. Stop reading, stop audiobooking, stop trawling, start layout. Start mapping. Stop talking about "I started this universe in highschool and"... what since then? I'm sick of hearing about it. Yes, physically ill. Begin to finish it and stop spit polishing a trophy no one else can understand. "But there's no translation..." so translate it!!! Do you hear me??? Look at me. Look at me! Translate it! Damn it, you are thick skulled. I want notes out of 2015. Stop dancing and screw like you dream.
I began a few tattoos in 2014. Progress is going very well. The sleeve will not be completed at the close of 2015 however there is very specific direction and direction is extremely important as they cannot be erased, easily or ever aside from through growth and the normal cycling of skin cells like tectonic plates. The reminders still remain on my face and are used daily. They are pretty much worth every second of the process. We are building a lens on our left hand to remind us of our ability and scope and potential and violence. That we can and should hold back at time as a window can be opened or closed or screened. Not zero and not one. Infinite, yes! Singular yes! The real pleasure is in the curve, not the approach either way.
Are we addicted to tea now? Yep. Significantly cut down on the drugs through 2014. Management & things. One of my cats died. Actual cats. Not "cats" cats. I took it rough. Too rough. Harder to deal with than I anticipated, but it reminded me that my pets are closer to me than my cousins or extended family. I think that's when the extent of my cut off really hit. My family, direct family, includes my brother and two sisters. It ends there. My father is dead to me so that I do not fuck up and go back to Maryland to kill him myself. I cannot do that. If I do that everyone will know, no matter how I mask it or plan it or do not plan it or just get in the mood and take the trip and kill him and my mother, because she'll either be in the house or somewhere within ear or eyeshot, no offense but it's best to keep things tidy, because I said it here and it's public record. I am closing that door, but it's dead bolted from both sides. Very good. Not awesome, but very good. Call it a standing threat if you want to; I call it a restraining order. If you come into my space I will kill you. In return, we will do everything we can to stay away. Deal. The cat's death was very sad. I mourned for quite some time. More than I mourned for any of my extended families deaths through the year. The sensation was arresting and unexpected and taught me the depths and exhaustion true hate goes. His death also taught me the danger of dehydration and the ties I have still with local law enforcement and the patience they have with me and the value of a friend who can tap into your nerves in ways we thought we only tapped their structure. The year heightened my self awareness and heightened my awareness of my emotional footprint.
I cried a lot in the last year. Much more than usual. I began to understand the actual details of outcomes through 2025. There is a lot of potential there and more danger than I would like. Many of my peers are pairing up and gearing themselves toward producing families and I became acutely aware of timelines. I'm not sure how to govern the sensation. I suppose I will have to start graphing... I can't. It will be the struggle of 2015. What do you give up, what can I give up, what can we give up, to make a family. I cannot. Not for me. Not for you. I will get up for a child, not for you. I will not fight for a child, not for you. Ever. I will not crack a beer on an off day for a child, not for you. It's a strange equation and I'm not sure how to change it. I'm not sure what is supposed to come on the other side of the equal sign.
One of the other things I realized through twenty fourteen is that I am fiscally trapped. Free as a mongoose in every way besides the wallet and the wallet is where futures are made when you look at families. I am damaged goods in that way and can be as free as I want to proclaim, but jailed for quite some time fiscally. Going for jogs, playing catch, buying food with EBT, unable to hold a credit card, unable to get loans (even though I refuse to, but cooperation will require it) or car notes, impressing other's parents with charisma, buying them shoes, going to dinners and lunches, going on a paint craze, shutting myself in a room for a few days because I cannot listen to anything because it hurts, all of these do not help a child's upbringing at all, but they are instrumental. I have no idea when or if they will change. I became acutely aware of the maintenance I require and it made me cry. Take what it takes for me to relate to other people my age without falling apart like crushed salmon in a frying pan with burnt butter. Add a marriage. Add a child. Desire came in the last year. Twenty fifteen will include learning how to better understand what exactly that desire is and not consciously or subconsciously destroying it wherever it arises, be it from outside in general or specific environments or from within or side effect to proximity to others. I will try to be more reliable and predictable and acceptable to your children or child rearing or child bearing circumstances. Failure to do so will cause increased isolation and we all know where that heads.
2014 taught me that no matter how I feel I have to get up. 2014 taught me who to trust. 2014 taught me to let go a little bit and who to hold on to without hanging on. It taught me change is inevitable and you cannot wish everyone a happy birthday because at least half them muthas have no idea who you are now and you have no business wishing them well because you have about as much idea of them as they do you, so stay out or at least don't go balls in to their affairs, unless they ask, which gives us a little gray area because it's fun to play even though not everyone would like to play with you. Understand better when no means no in fifteen. Just because you would like to laugh does not mean everyone else you encounter does too.
Let's draw this to a close. The last thing I socked away for 2014 was that you still definitely get what you pay for. That and given enough time anyone can be a mechanic if you study well and stock a good garage. You get what you pay for and through repairs to my truck I got exactly what I paid for: a running truck. I love the sound of a "V" layout 8 cylinder more than an inline 6 cylinder engine. It's really throaty. It has some gargle and growl and purr to it more than an inline 6. Sixes sound closer to a four cylinder screech now that I've become accustomed to an 8. I'm not sure where I was going with getting what you pay for. I wish a little bit that I was heterosexual. I envy it a lot and often and at many times intensely. Even more than perfect sanity. At least then I'd be married and crazy instead of just crazy. It makes me cry. It makes me furious too. It makes me violent. I want access. I don't want to just understand, I want access! I fucking want access! What do you do? Do you fake it? Do you sleep walk it? I'm laughing now because I am crying. I hate my circuitry. Let's not beat ourselves too hard in 2015 and let's keep that streak of no nose breaks and no concussions going. I said I will never cut my face again. That promise will be kept.
XOXO
///Daft Punk - "Giorgio By Moroder" the year end playlist is up next. shoot em dahn.
10/17/14
Stresses and Stressors and Life On My Tardis
Life is stressful and full of stressors. That's not news to anyone. Time is money and money can be converted into time. The time it takes you to read this is time you could've spent making money. Or maybe it is time you are spending making money. Getting paid to read blogs. Or maybe getting paid to do something, anything, besides read blogs. Shame on you. The time it takes to write this could have been spent working as a dishwasher at Eat n' Park. Or could've been spent getting shopping carts at Kmart and trying not to completely lose it and burn the place to the ground.
Life has many different stresses to it. Some of those stresses are more intense than others. Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake. You have to answer the bell. Eventually. It's critical to your survival.
The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors. Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world. If the world were not shared. If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge. A single leap from stresses to peace. A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world. There is no single leap and there never will be.
To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors. Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own. The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe. By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder? Hilarious movie. I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it. Came out a while ago. Should be available for rental or something by now. Robert Downey Jr's in it. Tom Cruise to. Surprisingly good.
Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen. It's troubling sometimes. From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge. Return to the two channel direct connection. The single bridge. It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.
Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward. I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at. I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level. A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence. My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging. I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now. It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in? Very little. The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself. "Attaboy, chap! If you work hard enough you'll get there." Eat me.].
At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own. The question is the conversion rate. If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not. Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.
With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living. Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted? How fast is that going to kill you. How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole? My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered. I'll do without, thank you. If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider. Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep. I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end. I am sorry. My mind will not work that way. I wish many nights and days that it did. That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American. It doesn't. I won't get to enjoy that. I won't get to see that. But hey, I could always win the lottery or something. Wouldn't that be a gas.
Life on my Tardis is pretty okay. Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks. I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next. I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means. No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they? I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30. I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count. Besides, that ended in utter disaster too. I will not do it. If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now. Simple as that. Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship. Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel. Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own. "You should have gone to the hospital!" Yeah, right. Of course. It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to. As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out. Life aboard my Tardis. One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.
What day is it? Sunday, 6 P.M. Are you sure? Yeah. No. Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.! What the hell happened? It's Tuesday!? What happened to Monday? Weren't we supposed to be somewhere? It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday. Are you sure? Well, okay. We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything. Yes, that will be Wednesday. I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now. What do you mean we're 5 miles from home. This is a park bench? Come on, man. Get it together. The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius. Except when it doesn't.
Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)" There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music. This is one of my favorites of late. So dark. So playful. So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.
Life has many different stresses to it. Some of those stresses are more intense than others. Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake. You have to answer the bell. Eventually. It's critical to your survival.
The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors. Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world. If the world were not shared. If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge. A single leap from stresses to peace. A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world. There is no single leap and there never will be.
To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors. Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own. The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe. By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder? Hilarious movie. I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it. Came out a while ago. Should be available for rental or something by now. Robert Downey Jr's in it. Tom Cruise to. Surprisingly good.
Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen. It's troubling sometimes. From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge. Return to the two channel direct connection. The single bridge. It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.
Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward. I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at. I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level. A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence. My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging. I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now. It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in? Very little. The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself. "Attaboy, chap! If you work hard enough you'll get there." Eat me.].
At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own. The question is the conversion rate. If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not. Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.
With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living. Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted? How fast is that going to kill you. How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole? My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered. I'll do without, thank you. If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider. Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep. I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end. I am sorry. My mind will not work that way. I wish many nights and days that it did. That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American. It doesn't. I won't get to enjoy that. I won't get to see that. But hey, I could always win the lottery or something. Wouldn't that be a gas.
Life on my Tardis is pretty okay. Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks. I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next. I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means. No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they? I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30. I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count. Besides, that ended in utter disaster too. I will not do it. If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now. Simple as that. Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship. Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel. Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own. "You should have gone to the hospital!" Yeah, right. Of course. It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to. As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out. Life aboard my Tardis. One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.
What day is it? Sunday, 6 P.M. Are you sure? Yeah. No. Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.! What the hell happened? It's Tuesday!? What happened to Monday? Weren't we supposed to be somewhere? It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday. Are you sure? Well, okay. We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything. Yes, that will be Wednesday. I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now. What do you mean we're 5 miles from home. This is a park bench? Come on, man. Get it together. The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius. Except when it doesn't.
Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)" There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music. This is one of my favorites of late. So dark. So playful. So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.
8/23/14
Knowing Where You Have No Business and That You Are Expected On Occassion
You don't have to front load everything you say. You don't have to translate at the end either. You may be coming across better than you believe.
One of the most hilarious things was the whole "they took our jobs" rhetoric at the last election and the come back that they're doing jobs we do not want to do. The funny part was my challenge. It's a matter of geographics and debt. I took the challenge knowing that. Just to see. Because they were taking our jobs here too, right? What I got back was paperwork. It's a little bit a lot of bit hilarious. If you cannot laugh at that, you have no soul. I still get email updates on it, but I am passed caring. Yes. Passed. English, the most, hands down, complicated language.
My relationship with America? It's complicated. And I am dating myself. And I am dating myself too. We wreck up sometimes. Slang for fight, no? Yes. I do not agree with everything we do. I do not. Sometimes I am on damage patrol. Some times I am on altitude control. Sometimes I am just sometimes and I am, having learned, not apologetic because people do get tired of sorrys and start to ask "why the bleep do you not just do it better?"
I will not give you the run around. I'm just American. I'm a little gangster circa 1925 and a little modern circa "what's the date today" and a little 90's grunge and a little 80's synth, a little bit of a late 90's "get money" and a little 70's rhythm and blues, a little bit of #$%^'n disco and a little bit of late 80's space rock, a little bit of 1960 fuck you and a little bit of 1950 be easy and every one is working for something greater because no one actually wants to be here, and a little bit of drum and bass tongued in with a little bit of pop talked down through the ages and distilled and reanimated. I'm just American and I will make no excuses.
And I will fight you. And then discuss. And then fight you harder because I only wanted a breather and we may as well butcher language in the mean times. They only get meaner.
I wish I could get along with people like me. I cannot. I am not going to stop trying. It is a little bit of playing with where you know you have no business being. And you know it. You do not understand why you are excluded. There are the times you are expected though and you do not show up. To reverse the two would be gold out of lead. Less cameos. More booked seats? I have no idea. What I do know is this: if they ask you if you can make it, you had better go.
///Pulp - "Like A Friend"
One of the most hilarious things was the whole "they took our jobs" rhetoric at the last election and the come back that they're doing jobs we do not want to do. The funny part was my challenge. It's a matter of geographics and debt. I took the challenge knowing that. Just to see. Because they were taking our jobs here too, right? What I got back was paperwork. It's a little bit a lot of bit hilarious. If you cannot laugh at that, you have no soul. I still get email updates on it, but I am passed caring. Yes. Passed. English, the most, hands down, complicated language.
My relationship with America? It's complicated. And I am dating myself. And I am dating myself too. We wreck up sometimes. Slang for fight, no? Yes. I do not agree with everything we do. I do not. Sometimes I am on damage patrol. Some times I am on altitude control. Sometimes I am just sometimes and I am, having learned, not apologetic because people do get tired of sorrys and start to ask "why the bleep do you not just do it better?"
I will not give you the run around. I'm just American. I'm a little gangster circa 1925 and a little modern circa "what's the date today" and a little 90's grunge and a little 80's synth, a little bit of a late 90's "get money" and a little 70's rhythm and blues, a little bit of #$%^'n disco and a little bit of late 80's space rock, a little bit of 1960 fuck you and a little bit of 1950 be easy and every one is working for something greater because no one actually wants to be here, and a little bit of drum and bass tongued in with a little bit of pop talked down through the ages and distilled and reanimated. I'm just American and I will make no excuses.
And I will fight you. And then discuss. And then fight you harder because I only wanted a breather and we may as well butcher language in the mean times. They only get meaner.
I wish I could get along with people like me. I cannot. I am not going to stop trying. It is a little bit of playing with where you know you have no business being. And you know it. You do not understand why you are excluded. There are the times you are expected though and you do not show up. To reverse the two would be gold out of lead. Less cameos. More booked seats? I have no idea. What I do know is this: if they ask you if you can make it, you had better go.
///Pulp - "Like A Friend"
8/23/13
You've Got Some Work To Do, Kiddo
I know. I feel like a fire wrapped in people skin. I borrowed some money to buy toothpaste the other day. Something felt wrong about it. Something felt wrong about the whole thing. Memories came pushing back the days afterward. Things I pushed away only recently and some things I pushed away years ago.
Cut out to Pittsburgh and a boy walking down Main street. I put the last of my money into buying a thermocouple for a water heater I was working on and I remembered the dream I had that morning of my teeth coming apart. My molar broke into quarters and caramel came spurting out in little bits of spray. When I ran my tongue across my front sheets, little white sheets came off and got stuck between them and I would tongue the stuck bits, but rub more off and then all that were left were pink and gray nerve ends and I couldn't close my mouth because the pain was incredible and the caramel made me salivate and it poured down my shirt front in a glistening tan and foaming mess and the heat of it and the wind blowing through the cave of my mouth burned the nerves until my eyes could only see white static and glimmer stars of blood cells pounding through the veins inside them. I remembered that dream and knew I had to find a way to buy some toothpaste.
The other memory that came back was of my dad screaming at me through my old cellular and the ear piece cracking. It was a train of threats and I remember the strength in my knees barely hanging on through it all. I was to change schools immediately or face the violent consequences he would bring my way for my poor performance. The second part of the memory was a part I hadn't recalled or even connected until that day. The school he was demanding I transfer to was one of the schools I originally pointed out and highlighted that I wanted to apply to in the first place two years before. It crashed in on me then. I brought them the list and they had to approve it because it was their money paying for the application fees and this one and that one got shot down and crossed off and shot down for one reason or another in their minds and based on that stupid ass college rankings book that was two years out of date at the time anyway (thanks public library). Remembering it, I simply shook my head. Wastes of brain space. Why? That still pops like a flickered light as the power grid compensates for outages miles away beneath a storm already come and gone from where you sit beneath its glow.
The air vibrates for a moment. The walls flex under the sudden pressure and creak and groan. Nothing happens. Everything doesn't fall apart. A tear came down my cheek from behind my sunglasses and I let it go. It was hot as hell and feeling it evaporate felt wonderful and cooled my skin. "Why?" I don't know. I never will.
There was a period of intense plasticity, three, maybe four, days long. Precipitated by several days of a slow decline in mental activity. It made me wonder if that was what peace felt like. Feeling like internal and external pressures and atmospheres were perfectly attuned. Like striking one face produced the right and singular sound on the other side instead of the rattle tin of snare wires. Confusion began to set. "What is happening to me?" And then it began to break apart like lake shore ice not quite in rhythm with the season turn at sunrise. Interference. I couldn't tell if I was happy or simply depressed to a blank slate or so far disengaged from my head that I could essentially remote pilot this body thing through what it was supposed to do and could dock it at my home address and step outside of the cockpit into dreams.
I don't know what it was, but in greater efforts (always greater and greater as time runs on) to manage myself I will add those sign posts to my warning lights. I don't know what they mean or what they signify, but it was disconcerting and disorienting a series of days as I've seen in a small while.
Spoke to a friend who is dating someone else now and I couldn't help, but wonder how the new was better than old. I gave it a further thought and it was tremendously obvious. I imagined the group photos and holiday visits and it was tremendously obvious. One of these things is not wired like the others. And now it is. I don't think, in fact I am near certain there is ... I want to date again. Do I hate companionship? No, absolutely not. Do you hate companionship? Yes, what kind of stupid question is that! I can't get through two consecutive hours of the day without thinking about breaking a slit into someone's skull with the blunt back end of a hatchet and shoving my penis into the slippery fat. How terrific would that be. I think about killing myself every day. I also think about living in the deep north forest ridges every day, so you sort it out.
Choke it down and hold it there. Inside is still a hidden place. A territory I am still investigating and mapping. Inside me I am snapping my fingers in front of my nose and patting my cheek and whispering "hey buddy, you in there? Can you hear me? Come on back. Come on back, kiddo. Stay with me, okay?" Things blear in and out and then stick for a while. I cannot live with other people for lengths of time. Not yet anyway. Still a lot of work to do. Inside is still a deeply hidden place and for now it has to stay that way.
Walking down that street along the sidewalk and nodding to the old men on their way to fish and spend bits of their pensions at the hole in the wall and smiling at the kids on their little bikes and the folks my age pushing strollers and dogs my little heart fell out of my chest and hit the pavement and rolled. It rolled like a tin can going tink a clink a link and as it went the brass compression ring broke off like a snapped rubber band. Flex tubing went one way, an iron washer went another. A welded chamber came loose and rolled in the chopped way a cube will into the gutter. An adapter slipped off its fitting. More brass tubing came loose and popped up into the air in front of me and a glass stator shattered. Filaments flew into the grass and oil splashed into the cracks of the cement. Rivets popped loose and sheet aluminum peeled away. My heart rolled and rolled until it was a hex nut spinning like a coin until laid flat between the lines of the crosswalk yards away.
I saw myself running and dropping to knees to scoop this piece and that spring and that cam and this bolt and that shard and that curly Q of pipe and with fingernails prying bits of staple and brad from pebbles at the lip of storm drain. What's missing? Haul it all home in the hammock of your T-shirt mid drift. Drop it all on the work bench and goggle up. Sparks chip into the air. The hammer, the drill, the saw, the shears. Open up the drawers of the chest of saved scrap. What's missing? What's missing?! Male to male adapters. Counter sinking threads. Punch sheared nails back through. More sparks. More acetylene. More current. Peen hammer curves. Female to male adapter. Hand tighten. Air hammer drill rusted bolt tops. Replace tubes. Connect battery leads. Respool springs. Adjust valve timing.
The whole thing made me laugh. The whole thing brought to mind the hilariousness of the notion of sewing your heart back together. The whole notion of "look into your heart." The whole highschool nonsense of the swooning "sewing my heart back together." Apparently distance is still a necessary thing. I don't know that it is something that can be outgrown or phasic. Why did you cut up your face? Because, in part, I'm tired of trying to explain it. Remember that Popular Mechanics gloss issue from way back when nuclear energy was front page everything and there was an extensive design study to find a way to warn future men about areas where spent materials were stored in a way that could cross all future language barriers and changes regardless of origin? I do and the whole thing makes me laugh.
The tension between this backwards country and where I want to be pulls apart my consciousness. Are you supposed to be upset with the people that don't know it any other way? Is there a right to be upset? Wrong question entirely. You can feel whatever you want to feel. By being human and conscious at all you are given the right to emotion. Hate has external vectors to it, though. That's the difference. The very important difference. We've got some work to do, I know. Everything has been heavily jammed up. Between questions sparking forest fires of speculation and what ifs and more questions and dead zones and containment and management there has not been a lot of processing power left over to engage with society and decoupling is threatening and I can feel it climbing through the insides of my bones and bleeding into the streams inside my muscles and stable air is gaining turbulence and I am trying to correct. I won't be privilege to some phases of interactions until the work is done and I don't know when that will be. Trust sweetheart, I know. Before you can get back to creating, we've got some work to do. Goddamnit! I know!!!!
///Flying Lotus - "Orbit Brazil" Still building my new ship. Still collecting parts at the orbital yard. Dreaming about the empty space between stars and nothing more than the tick and whir of life support systems to nod my head to sleep to.
Cut out to Pittsburgh and a boy walking down Main street. I put the last of my money into buying a thermocouple for a water heater I was working on and I remembered the dream I had that morning of my teeth coming apart. My molar broke into quarters and caramel came spurting out in little bits of spray. When I ran my tongue across my front sheets, little white sheets came off and got stuck between them and I would tongue the stuck bits, but rub more off and then all that were left were pink and gray nerve ends and I couldn't close my mouth because the pain was incredible and the caramel made me salivate and it poured down my shirt front in a glistening tan and foaming mess and the heat of it and the wind blowing through the cave of my mouth burned the nerves until my eyes could only see white static and glimmer stars of blood cells pounding through the veins inside them. I remembered that dream and knew I had to find a way to buy some toothpaste.
The other memory that came back was of my dad screaming at me through my old cellular and the ear piece cracking. It was a train of threats and I remember the strength in my knees barely hanging on through it all. I was to change schools immediately or face the violent consequences he would bring my way for my poor performance. The second part of the memory was a part I hadn't recalled or even connected until that day. The school he was demanding I transfer to was one of the schools I originally pointed out and highlighted that I wanted to apply to in the first place two years before. It crashed in on me then. I brought them the list and they had to approve it because it was their money paying for the application fees and this one and that one got shot down and crossed off and shot down for one reason or another in their minds and based on that stupid ass college rankings book that was two years out of date at the time anyway (thanks public library). Remembering it, I simply shook my head. Wastes of brain space. Why? That still pops like a flickered light as the power grid compensates for outages miles away beneath a storm already come and gone from where you sit beneath its glow.
The air vibrates for a moment. The walls flex under the sudden pressure and creak and groan. Nothing happens. Everything doesn't fall apart. A tear came down my cheek from behind my sunglasses and I let it go. It was hot as hell and feeling it evaporate felt wonderful and cooled my skin. "Why?" I don't know. I never will.
There was a period of intense plasticity, three, maybe four, days long. Precipitated by several days of a slow decline in mental activity. It made me wonder if that was what peace felt like. Feeling like internal and external pressures and atmospheres were perfectly attuned. Like striking one face produced the right and singular sound on the other side instead of the rattle tin of snare wires. Confusion began to set. "What is happening to me?" And then it began to break apart like lake shore ice not quite in rhythm with the season turn at sunrise. Interference. I couldn't tell if I was happy or simply depressed to a blank slate or so far disengaged from my head that I could essentially remote pilot this body thing through what it was supposed to do and could dock it at my home address and step outside of the cockpit into dreams.
I don't know what it was, but in greater efforts (always greater and greater as time runs on) to manage myself I will add those sign posts to my warning lights. I don't know what they mean or what they signify, but it was disconcerting and disorienting a series of days as I've seen in a small while.
Spoke to a friend who is dating someone else now and I couldn't help, but wonder how the new was better than old. I gave it a further thought and it was tremendously obvious. I imagined the group photos and holiday visits and it was tremendously obvious. One of these things is not wired like the others. And now it is. I don't think, in fact I am near certain there is ... I want to date again. Do I hate companionship? No, absolutely not. Do you hate companionship? Yes, what kind of stupid question is that! I can't get through two consecutive hours of the day without thinking about breaking a slit into someone's skull with the blunt back end of a hatchet and shoving my penis into the slippery fat. How terrific would that be. I think about killing myself every day. I also think about living in the deep north forest ridges every day, so you sort it out.
Choke it down and hold it there. Inside is still a hidden place. A territory I am still investigating and mapping. Inside me I am snapping my fingers in front of my nose and patting my cheek and whispering "hey buddy, you in there? Can you hear me? Come on back. Come on back, kiddo. Stay with me, okay?" Things blear in and out and then stick for a while. I cannot live with other people for lengths of time. Not yet anyway. Still a lot of work to do. Inside is still a deeply hidden place and for now it has to stay that way.
Walking down that street along the sidewalk and nodding to the old men on their way to fish and spend bits of their pensions at the hole in the wall and smiling at the kids on their little bikes and the folks my age pushing strollers and dogs my little heart fell out of my chest and hit the pavement and rolled. It rolled like a tin can going tink a clink a link and as it went the brass compression ring broke off like a snapped rubber band. Flex tubing went one way, an iron washer went another. A welded chamber came loose and rolled in the chopped way a cube will into the gutter. An adapter slipped off its fitting. More brass tubing came loose and popped up into the air in front of me and a glass stator shattered. Filaments flew into the grass and oil splashed into the cracks of the cement. Rivets popped loose and sheet aluminum peeled away. My heart rolled and rolled until it was a hex nut spinning like a coin until laid flat between the lines of the crosswalk yards away.
I saw myself running and dropping to knees to scoop this piece and that spring and that cam and this bolt and that shard and that curly Q of pipe and with fingernails prying bits of staple and brad from pebbles at the lip of storm drain. What's missing? Haul it all home in the hammock of your T-shirt mid drift. Drop it all on the work bench and goggle up. Sparks chip into the air. The hammer, the drill, the saw, the shears. Open up the drawers of the chest of saved scrap. What's missing? What's missing?! Male to male adapters. Counter sinking threads. Punch sheared nails back through. More sparks. More acetylene. More current. Peen hammer curves. Female to male adapter. Hand tighten. Air hammer drill rusted bolt tops. Replace tubes. Connect battery leads. Respool springs. Adjust valve timing.
The whole thing made me laugh. The whole thing brought to mind the hilariousness of the notion of sewing your heart back together. The whole notion of "look into your heart." The whole highschool nonsense of the swooning "sewing my heart back together." Apparently distance is still a necessary thing. I don't know that it is something that can be outgrown or phasic. Why did you cut up your face? Because, in part, I'm tired of trying to explain it. Remember that Popular Mechanics gloss issue from way back when nuclear energy was front page everything and there was an extensive design study to find a way to warn future men about areas where spent materials were stored in a way that could cross all future language barriers and changes regardless of origin? I do and the whole thing makes me laugh.
The tension between this backwards country and where I want to be pulls apart my consciousness. Are you supposed to be upset with the people that don't know it any other way? Is there a right to be upset? Wrong question entirely. You can feel whatever you want to feel. By being human and conscious at all you are given the right to emotion. Hate has external vectors to it, though. That's the difference. The very important difference. We've got some work to do, I know. Everything has been heavily jammed up. Between questions sparking forest fires of speculation and what ifs and more questions and dead zones and containment and management there has not been a lot of processing power left over to engage with society and decoupling is threatening and I can feel it climbing through the insides of my bones and bleeding into the streams inside my muscles and stable air is gaining turbulence and I am trying to correct. I won't be privilege to some phases of interactions until the work is done and I don't know when that will be. Trust sweetheart, I know. Before you can get back to creating, we've got some work to do. Goddamnit! I know!!!!
///Flying Lotus - "Orbit Brazil" Still building my new ship. Still collecting parts at the orbital yard. Dreaming about the empty space between stars and nothing more than the tick and whir of life support systems to nod my head to sleep to.
5/28/13
Sex Sells, and Tolerance Versus Promotion
Sex sells. Everybody know's that. America is becoming a more tolerant place, probably more tolerant than ever before when it comes to homosexuality. It's becoming a little more tolerant when it comes to smoking weed, but that's something for another time. Still, though, a soused conversation I had, a quick back and forth really if not for doing it through twitter drawing it out over a couple hours (if we were speaking face to face it would have been maybe a two minute conversation), brought back to mind that actual tolerance is a long way off and it's kind of annoying.
Sex does sell. Everyday, everywhere you go, everything you watch on television, every fourth commercial on the radio, hetero sex is promoted. It's fired into you constantly. It can't be avoided and as a gay person I don't really have a problem with it. Sure sometimes it gets particularly awkward or annoying when I'm hanging out with straight friends and they want me to comment and I'm completely blank faced because it has nothing to do with me or what actually tips my scales or fires me up. For the most part though, I'll make something up or laugh or do whatever to move on and just like that, it's done and I'm fine and they're fine and the world turns on and everyone is okay. Sex sells. It is promotion of the hetero relationship and it's not the end of the world. I'm tolerant. I don't go grab pitch forks and torches and raise a mob every time some couple gets married or a guy and girl get all kissy touchy feely in front of me. I'm okay with it and it doesn't hurt me, but I also don't go out of my way to express the fact that I could care less.
Back handed tolerance is different. The back handed tolerance is the kind where people do go out of their way to express that "hey, whatever, I don't care, that's your business" sentiment to the point where it becomes obvious that they do care, and it does irritate them, but they are saying what they're supposed to say because they're supposed to say it because it would be a million times worse for their image and relationships with others around them if they did express whatever hate or revulsion they felt. It's better than nothing, but when it happens it makes me want to roll my eyes, yawn, and just walk away from the crap coming out of the person's mouth.
Back handed tolerance comes in other flavors too. It also comes in the "I'm okay with gay people, but you don't have to promote it, come on" flavor. Which is simply silly. If the world is to become a more tolerant place you can't say tolerance and "shut the hell up about it" in the same sentence. That's just asinine. Obviously there is going to be some degree of promotion. There has to be. Sex sells. If sex sells you can't just say you refuse to sell to an entire segment of the population. If you did simply black out promotion that would be pretty intolerant. That sort of behavior would also reduce people's exposure to homosexuality as a normal thing or at least damage their ability to observe and understand it as a normal thing. It's aggravating. It's annoying. And it's pretty back handed.
What does that even mean? To be okay with gay people, but intolerant of them talking about their lives the same way other people do because it's promoting a gay lifestyle? Didn't America finally more or less get beyond the "is it a choice or not debate"? What are these people even worried about? Promoting homosexuality is not going to turn people away from heterosexuality. It's not going to magically revolutionize someone's long held beliefs or belief system. What are they possibly afraid of? If anything it would make life more comfortable or normal for homosexuals. Could you imagine seeing commercials with gay couples selling things like lawn mowers, dinners, dating websites, concerts, and credit cards. Are these promotion haters afraid they'll see a commercial for something they like and refer to it to their straight friends and be made fun of because it was a gay commercial? If they are, I could understand. How hilarious would it be if the major hang up was feeling that tiny pang of discomfort I feel throughout a day, that I'm so used to it barely raises a blip in my mind most of the time.
I don't understand what the big deal is, but I do understand back handed tolerance and I do understand that sex sells. Maybe it's not a bad thing. It's a step in the right direction for people and I'm happy for that. I just wish people walked a little faster. It makes life a little more comfortable for me and people like me to at least know if someone were to openly persecute us, there would be massive support for us, not them. It's tiring and annoying knowing that the newer intolerance is this whole anti-promo sentiment, but at least no ones telling me I'm going to straight to hell and should be killed for my sexual orientation. Don't be scared 'merica, sometimes a little discomfort is part of life.
///Grimes - "Genesis" gots to start somewhere
4/29/13
Pride Complex, Fallout Radius, and Big World Little World
I'll start with the last one first before I forget because I already forgot once and it took a good 15 to remember and even then it was only because I started thinking about shapes and cut outs of construction paper and slicing bottles in half that I remembered Venn diagrams and then remembered it was a comparison thing, but I'm rambling so let's get down to it. I was wondering where my, sometimes extreme, self centeredness comes from. It does get pretty extreme sometimes. Not to the point where my megalomaniacal, world beater, delusions kick in and I walk all over people thinking they're throwing themselves down there, when in fact, I'm going out of my way to haul them to the ground by their napes so I don't have to touch pavement on my way from my bed to my toilet. Pavement? Yeah because my house will be so huge I will have a second house that is only an enormous bathroom with three floors. The first floor is the pee paradise and waterpark, the second floor is the bath house with every kind of possible bath or shower or steam you can take, including swimming pools, and the basement is the boom box where you can shit in peace featuring every kind of toilet known to man. Sometimes my self centeredness gets out of control though.
To the point where I believe whatever difficult experience I'm going through is not only the greatest problem mankind has ever faced, but the first iteration ever of that difficulty. I get so into myself that if everyone I know isn't asking me what happened or if I'm okay or petting my ruffled feathers they must be blind and stone deaf. But that's not the case. It's not even that it's particularly easy to take up arms and march to the point of attack and scream like the hound of hell "life's not fair!" It's not. Everyone knows it. What are you going to do about you? It gets out of control. And there's nothing I hate more than "who's had it harder" pissing contests. Everyone has and everyone hasn't. Which discomfort do you prefer and at what intensity, becomes the more pressing question. To put it another way, how comfortable are you here versus there.
The most important thing is the "why". Why so far focused inward? What I've come to is hyper focus or big world little world. The world is huge. The world is daunting. The world is not as violent or angry as we make it appear. The anger and violence is just what sticks because you don't come out of a hug with welts and scars, but you do if you're at odds. Violence is the first language and love is violence's child. The branches from the trunk above the roots. Because life has the ability to scar at random and will, and sometimes in love, it is scary. Do you want those scars? That chance? "Is today the day something comes apart and I die?" You stay in for protection. That protection turns into faith. That faith turns into mania. And I close off opportunities for both danger and expansion until I am walled in and have every detail of the compound mapped to a square inch and where every potential threat to my existence stands and where it ranks and then I am stacking pee jars against one wall and logging days against another and getting lung infections and passing out from lack of oxygen because I've sealed myself in a space where air can never circulate. The second part is the crux of big world little world.
Determinism. If it was possible to plot every persons geographic location to a tee and, at some point map out all of the possible outcomes of each persons interactions you could, fairly accurately, play out every persons life from birth to death with some outliers and random pop ups of paths that skewed due to chance and freak probability and I guess quantum mechanical (insert longer lettered science terms and statistics) that make it impossible to do anything with 100% accuracy. But you'd have a pretty reliable, maybe down to ninety nine million out of one hundred million person type of accuracy. Or just look at family tree deaths. You've maybe got a shot at beating the over under, but by how many years? A decade? Two? How hard can you or would you want to torture who you are to get those years. What are you going to do with them? Sit in a wheel chair? Enjoy the massive stress of drastically increasing the chances you'll die putting on your slipper at the side of your bed and slip and fall and fracture your femur and die from the massive infection after surgery? Danger world becomes a lot more dangerous up there. That aside, the determinism factor also drives me inward at 300 pounds per square inch. Determinism is boring. Sure there can be a joy in choosing a path having a pretty solid understanding of where it can and probably will go. Even in small choices, but when the map increases in size and grows to world scope, I see that I am a very small bit of the circuit and no matter which paths I choose I am not going to cover any more ground than those dimensions... unless some other path comes in from outside my circuit and selects me. Pretty much, your circuit is printed at birth. And that is boring and difficult to live with.
However there is no saying you can't shrink the map. The smaller you make it, the more random it appears. The more random it appears the more beautiful each day becomes. Each day begins to hold actual surprises beyond what randomness you can try to choose to inject. Point to point, you can zoom in along the path and detour at will if you so choose to do, but the destination still looms and will be reached barring sudden death of some sort. You know what your ceiling is, you learn your floor, and at some point you understand what your potential is for exceeding them and the costs involved. There is no rule that says you can't shrink that map to the scale where measuring something changes it's properties. And that's where I find myself sometimes. My map shrinks to the point where everything that happens is truly random to my perspective and in that vastly shrunken world I know that I exist and the people around me are almost shadows, coming into and out of focus with a rarity that is extraordinarily delicious and I forget that I am not the only one walking the face of the earth. Nobody but me. NOBD BTME. Sometimes I have to have it though or I will never leave my front door again.
Pride complex is another thing. An entirely different animal to learn to stop feeding. My world once was a world of "no"s. To the point where the energy expended in asking the question was not worth the energy expended recovering from the disappointment. A universe of broken contracts. You can't do that because this. You can't do that because that. You can't do this because you're too this. You can't do that because you're too that. I got fed up, but not in a hurry. It built up over the years and I didn't digest it well and I'm sure some of the reasons were fairly valid, if not entirely truthful. Still, it's like telling someone to not get mad when you're about to give them bad news. Nurtured inside was pride complex. I can't do it? Watch me. Not doing it for them, but doing it for myself, and it started off small and then blew grotesquely out of proportion. Coupling with megalomania it began to beg how far could you really jump if you really really tried?
How far was too far? I can stick it. Fuck it, you're trying to say I can't? Okay, watch this right here. And it bloomed gorgeous. More. And it bloomed gorgeous. But what are you really capable of? Pride complex has ruled me and I it in waves of awesome sorrow and awed joy. There is nothing that beats that high of putting your ten toes on the ground on the other side of a leap of faith in your bones and grit. The only things you can rely on sometimes. The things that never let you down. It is, however, damaging. You become arrogant. A soft, passive, arrogance that tells me no matter what comes down the pipe I will, I will!, be able to handle it with this body and this mind on this island. It and I will head into the woods and only I am returning. The belief will insist, but anyone with any one of their five senses knows there is no way in hell you are coming back. Anyone with any sense in the world knows your odds and that you've put the entire stack on something that breaks good once in five years and there are a lot of hours and minutes to go. I don't see it on my scale because everything is possible there to a fault.
Pride complex kicks in. I need pills? Fuck you, you need pills. Watch me go. I need money? Hell no. Watch me destroy myself solving this, but damn you, I will fucking solve this. Pride complex branches out like ivy. It infects things like blood cancer. Don't want to help me do this? Okay I'll do it without you. But that is not always and many times not the stance to take for many a several reasons I won't go into. Pride complex doesn't only damage the self. It has a fallout radius. Pride complex damages a persons ability to make adjustments. It damages a persons ability to integrate and coexist with society. It damages a persons ability to integrate. It pretty much harms society as a whole.
Yes you are going from A to B, but as you traverse the map and make your choices, your piece of the circuit board begins to function less and less successfully to the point where other pieces of the board have to compensate harder to function as well. When you are offered assistance, for whatever rationalization the assistance is offered, it is in the interest of keeping the entire computer running. Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that. Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that this setup or that is there specifically to make everyone's lives easier to a degree, but that degree is there and measurable and quantifiable in every nervous action or choice the people with greater numbers of points A and B and area to cover and allotted (if you take too broad a path from A to B and B to C and on and on, as many points as you are allotted when born there are consequences out of your control. a path selecting you) make. Your space is governed by their space.
Understanding that is one thing. Dismantling delusions of grandeur is another. Growing a map is another. Are they good things? Are they necessary? Should they even have to be? I want to roam wild. Yessir I do. Life's not fair. I'm not on this planet with you. You're on this planet with me. Control. Take what you want, but understand where it comes from. I love you.
///Band of Skulls - "Fires"
To the point where I believe whatever difficult experience I'm going through is not only the greatest problem mankind has ever faced, but the first iteration ever of that difficulty. I get so into myself that if everyone I know isn't asking me what happened or if I'm okay or petting my ruffled feathers they must be blind and stone deaf. But that's not the case. It's not even that it's particularly easy to take up arms and march to the point of attack and scream like the hound of hell "life's not fair!" It's not. Everyone knows it. What are you going to do about you? It gets out of control. And there's nothing I hate more than "who's had it harder" pissing contests. Everyone has and everyone hasn't. Which discomfort do you prefer and at what intensity, becomes the more pressing question. To put it another way, how comfortable are you here versus there.
The most important thing is the "why". Why so far focused inward? What I've come to is hyper focus or big world little world. The world is huge. The world is daunting. The world is not as violent or angry as we make it appear. The anger and violence is just what sticks because you don't come out of a hug with welts and scars, but you do if you're at odds. Violence is the first language and love is violence's child. The branches from the trunk above the roots. Because life has the ability to scar at random and will, and sometimes in love, it is scary. Do you want those scars? That chance? "Is today the day something comes apart and I die?" You stay in for protection. That protection turns into faith. That faith turns into mania. And I close off opportunities for both danger and expansion until I am walled in and have every detail of the compound mapped to a square inch and where every potential threat to my existence stands and where it ranks and then I am stacking pee jars against one wall and logging days against another and getting lung infections and passing out from lack of oxygen because I've sealed myself in a space where air can never circulate. The second part is the crux of big world little world.
Determinism. If it was possible to plot every persons geographic location to a tee and, at some point map out all of the possible outcomes of each persons interactions you could, fairly accurately, play out every persons life from birth to death with some outliers and random pop ups of paths that skewed due to chance and freak probability and I guess quantum mechanical (insert longer lettered science terms and statistics) that make it impossible to do anything with 100% accuracy. But you'd have a pretty reliable, maybe down to ninety nine million out of one hundred million person type of accuracy. Or just look at family tree deaths. You've maybe got a shot at beating the over under, but by how many years? A decade? Two? How hard can you or would you want to torture who you are to get those years. What are you going to do with them? Sit in a wheel chair? Enjoy the massive stress of drastically increasing the chances you'll die putting on your slipper at the side of your bed and slip and fall and fracture your femur and die from the massive infection after surgery? Danger world becomes a lot more dangerous up there. That aside, the determinism factor also drives me inward at 300 pounds per square inch. Determinism is boring. Sure there can be a joy in choosing a path having a pretty solid understanding of where it can and probably will go. Even in small choices, but when the map increases in size and grows to world scope, I see that I am a very small bit of the circuit and no matter which paths I choose I am not going to cover any more ground than those dimensions... unless some other path comes in from outside my circuit and selects me. Pretty much, your circuit is printed at birth. And that is boring and difficult to live with.
However there is no saying you can't shrink the map. The smaller you make it, the more random it appears. The more random it appears the more beautiful each day becomes. Each day begins to hold actual surprises beyond what randomness you can try to choose to inject. Point to point, you can zoom in along the path and detour at will if you so choose to do, but the destination still looms and will be reached barring sudden death of some sort. You know what your ceiling is, you learn your floor, and at some point you understand what your potential is for exceeding them and the costs involved. There is no rule that says you can't shrink that map to the scale where measuring something changes it's properties. And that's where I find myself sometimes. My map shrinks to the point where everything that happens is truly random to my perspective and in that vastly shrunken world I know that I exist and the people around me are almost shadows, coming into and out of focus with a rarity that is extraordinarily delicious and I forget that I am not the only one walking the face of the earth. Nobody but me. NOBD BTME. Sometimes I have to have it though or I will never leave my front door again.
Pride complex is another thing. An entirely different animal to learn to stop feeding. My world once was a world of "no"s. To the point where the energy expended in asking the question was not worth the energy expended recovering from the disappointment. A universe of broken contracts. You can't do that because this. You can't do that because that. You can't do this because you're too this. You can't do that because you're too that. I got fed up, but not in a hurry. It built up over the years and I didn't digest it well and I'm sure some of the reasons were fairly valid, if not entirely truthful. Still, it's like telling someone to not get mad when you're about to give them bad news. Nurtured inside was pride complex. I can't do it? Watch me. Not doing it for them, but doing it for myself, and it started off small and then blew grotesquely out of proportion. Coupling with megalomania it began to beg how far could you really jump if you really really tried?
How far was too far? I can stick it. Fuck it, you're trying to say I can't? Okay, watch this right here. And it bloomed gorgeous. More. And it bloomed gorgeous. But what are you really capable of? Pride complex has ruled me and I it in waves of awesome sorrow and awed joy. There is nothing that beats that high of putting your ten toes on the ground on the other side of a leap of faith in your bones and grit. The only things you can rely on sometimes. The things that never let you down. It is, however, damaging. You become arrogant. A soft, passive, arrogance that tells me no matter what comes down the pipe I will, I will!, be able to handle it with this body and this mind on this island. It and I will head into the woods and only I am returning. The belief will insist, but anyone with any one of their five senses knows there is no way in hell you are coming back. Anyone with any sense in the world knows your odds and that you've put the entire stack on something that breaks good once in five years and there are a lot of hours and minutes to go. I don't see it on my scale because everything is possible there to a fault.
Pride complex kicks in. I need pills? Fuck you, you need pills. Watch me go. I need money? Hell no. Watch me destroy myself solving this, but damn you, I will fucking solve this. Pride complex branches out like ivy. It infects things like blood cancer. Don't want to help me do this? Okay I'll do it without you. But that is not always and many times not the stance to take for many a several reasons I won't go into. Pride complex doesn't only damage the self. It has a fallout radius. Pride complex damages a persons ability to make adjustments. It damages a persons ability to integrate and coexist with society. It damages a persons ability to integrate. It pretty much harms society as a whole.
Yes you are going from A to B, but as you traverse the map and make your choices, your piece of the circuit board begins to function less and less successfully to the point where other pieces of the board have to compensate harder to function as well. When you are offered assistance, for whatever rationalization the assistance is offered, it is in the interest of keeping the entire computer running. Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that. Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that this setup or that is there specifically to make everyone's lives easier to a degree, but that degree is there and measurable and quantifiable in every nervous action or choice the people with greater numbers of points A and B and area to cover and allotted (if you take too broad a path from A to B and B to C and on and on, as many points as you are allotted when born there are consequences out of your control. a path selecting you) make. Your space is governed by their space.
Understanding that is one thing. Dismantling delusions of grandeur is another. Growing a map is another. Are they good things? Are they necessary? Should they even have to be? I want to roam wild. Yessir I do. Life's not fair. I'm not on this planet with you. You're on this planet with me. Control. Take what you want, but understand where it comes from. I love you.
///Band of Skulls - "Fires"
11/11/11
Reinstate Child Labor in America
Getting old doesn't suck. It's the having to be places and do things part of being an adult that sucks. Reinstate child labor. Move the retirement age from 65 to 40. Everyone will appreciate their time more. Less kids having kids because they literally will not have time to fraternize or have idle energy for sex. Less crime because they literally will not have time to learn criminal behaviors. Education is already in the toilet and the vast majority end up in the consumer sector so might as well force them into useful trades before they decide to settle or slip into fast food and department stores for their entire lives. It's all win win. Their dreams won't be crushed. They'll be refined and by the time they reach an age when they know what they want to do, they'll be equipped with the fortitude and determination to get it done, plus they'll have capital in their pocket from years of hard time.
And then they'll have stable hard working families and enough stability and personal knowledge to pursue education without the massive obstacle of trying to "find themselves" standing in the way of learning what they've yearned to learn for decades. I'm not saying throw them into steel mills and whirling machinery that'll tear off their little hands. All I'm saying is, under the right conditions, child labor could probably work wonders for this fucked up country. But it'll never work, because not being able to trust the people at the top of the pyramid is an institution in America and they will find a way to fuck it up if it means they make an extra ten cents in their pocket at the end of the year.
And then they'll have stable hard working families and enough stability and personal knowledge to pursue education without the massive obstacle of trying to "find themselves" standing in the way of learning what they've yearned to learn for decades. I'm not saying throw them into steel mills and whirling machinery that'll tear off their little hands. All I'm saying is, under the right conditions, child labor could probably work wonders for this fucked up country. But it'll never work, because not being able to trust the people at the top of the pyramid is an institution in America and they will find a way to fuck it up if it means they make an extra ten cents in their pocket at the end of the year.
10/30/11
Cheesus Christ, Does Nothing Work?
I'm sorry I've been away. Less sorry than usual. Only because I've been away because I've been working and not because I've been furiously masturbating. It's been hard. The living. The being aliveness of breathing. Not the breathing part. That part is easy. What's been hard is trying to have a continuous thought when bells go off every fifteen minutes. Remember that book about that society that suppressed creativity by fitting every person with an apparatus that sounded a chime every five minutes to interrupt thought and render it's populace unable to create new ideas? No? Well that's what it's been like. A lot of "gotta put bread on the table" things interrupting the "gotta put bread into my skull so I don't check out of this world on some aneurysm shiz".
I've had one of those days. Not really one of those days, but one of those days stretched across an entire week. One of those days where you come down the break room stairs after sitting for fifteen minutes that flew by in a blink because you fell asleep in your chair watching infomercials about magic brassieres and magic belts that will force your body to do things you haven't taught and practiced or considered that maybe your body just wasn't meant to do for any length of time and you go to get back to work and realize, picking up your box cutter that you left your mug of tea upstairs. And it's going to take you another five minutes to go back and get it and your legs are too dead for yet another trip up those damned stairs, but you are already dead thirsty and have to weigh which death is more unpleasant.
One of those days where the fattest jar of the smelliest pickled peppers in piss yellow juice slips out of your clutches because your hands are cramping and every single paper towel dispenser is empty because the people responsible for keeping them filled never do their jobs as well as you do yours. The mop bucket is at the other end of the store, another five minute round trip on sleeping hooves, and when you get there to fill the mop bucket there is no floor soap and the other fluids available would take up the spill and stink right along with the wax finish. You take the bucket and get halfway across the store before you realize its got a flat and you are utterly baffled as to how a plastic wheeled yellow tank of a bucket could have a flat before you realize a thread of the mop came loose and lodged in the wheel and, instead of plucking it out, the bucket was filled and dragged around for weeks, maybe months until the wheel turned into a plastic orange wedge, and since you were too tired to notice it sooner you've left a scratch on the floor several dozen yards long.
You walk the bucket back and have to pick it up and hug it's black stained, deli grease streaked body to yours because walking it back on the floor would double your error. Selecting a new bucket you walk it across the store to the opposite slop sink and find that while there is cleaning solution appropriate for the task, someone was so kind as to snap off the knob, rendering the sink into something more like a flushless urinal, and so you walk the bucket with soap back to the other end of the store with the working sink and wonder why they would bolt the soap to the wall instead of making it possible for you to take the soap to the working sink and prevent having to do the routine all over again, and why the hell you would need a manager to sign off on throwing out a broken bucket in the first place when they so rarely use them they wouldn't know if it was broken or not and can you really not be trusted to make a simple judgement like "a three wheeled bucket is no longer useful."
=sigh= sometimes nothing's working for ya. And by the time you get back to the shattered jar it's been tracked up and down the aisle. By your coworkers. And you wonder how much time you'd do if you just killed them all and called it a day and a win for humanity.
///The Chemical Brothers - "Surface to Air" take flight and forget the world even exists... what i want to do. but its the only outpost in this sector of the galaxy and my ship can't take me far enough to reach the next one. so we keep in touch.
I've had one of those days. Not really one of those days, but one of those days stretched across an entire week. One of those days where you come down the break room stairs after sitting for fifteen minutes that flew by in a blink because you fell asleep in your chair watching infomercials about magic brassieres and magic belts that will force your body to do things you haven't taught and practiced or considered that maybe your body just wasn't meant to do for any length of time and you go to get back to work and realize, picking up your box cutter that you left your mug of tea upstairs. And it's going to take you another five minutes to go back and get it and your legs are too dead for yet another trip up those damned stairs, but you are already dead thirsty and have to weigh which death is more unpleasant.
One of those days where the fattest jar of the smelliest pickled peppers in piss yellow juice slips out of your clutches because your hands are cramping and every single paper towel dispenser is empty because the people responsible for keeping them filled never do their jobs as well as you do yours. The mop bucket is at the other end of the store, another five minute round trip on sleeping hooves, and when you get there to fill the mop bucket there is no floor soap and the other fluids available would take up the spill and stink right along with the wax finish. You take the bucket and get halfway across the store before you realize its got a flat and you are utterly baffled as to how a plastic wheeled yellow tank of a bucket could have a flat before you realize a thread of the mop came loose and lodged in the wheel and, instead of plucking it out, the bucket was filled and dragged around for weeks, maybe months until the wheel turned into a plastic orange wedge, and since you were too tired to notice it sooner you've left a scratch on the floor several dozen yards long.
You walk the bucket back and have to pick it up and hug it's black stained, deli grease streaked body to yours because walking it back on the floor would double your error. Selecting a new bucket you walk it across the store to the opposite slop sink and find that while there is cleaning solution appropriate for the task, someone was so kind as to snap off the knob, rendering the sink into something more like a flushless urinal, and so you walk the bucket with soap back to the other end of the store with the working sink and wonder why they would bolt the soap to the wall instead of making it possible for you to take the soap to the working sink and prevent having to do the routine all over again, and why the hell you would need a manager to sign off on throwing out a broken bucket in the first place when they so rarely use them they wouldn't know if it was broken or not and can you really not be trusted to make a simple judgement like "a three wheeled bucket is no longer useful."
=sigh= sometimes nothing's working for ya. And by the time you get back to the shattered jar it's been tracked up and down the aisle. By your coworkers. And you wonder how much time you'd do if you just killed them all and called it a day and a win for humanity.
///The Chemical Brothers - "Surface to Air" take flight and forget the world even exists... what i want to do. but its the only outpost in this sector of the galaxy and my ship can't take me far enough to reach the next one. so we keep in touch.
10/9/11
Stand Up Act 5
Stand Up Act 4
So we've come a long way. As always with nothing but love. All I've got is love for yinz. I know I'm not the only one reading this, but I'm most at home believing otherwise. In some ways. Part of me still believes that I am and that's the part of me that says "hey, da fuck you been at?"
Outside the vein of what I originally attempted I actually took four cracks at this. I literally wrote out four different iterations of act 5. There was the act 5 that was a ridiculous racist rant that was so far disposed from who I actually am that I had to leave it in draft. There was the iteration that was absolutely bitter about my ex and the potential situation that she might be having ravenous sex while I am probably borderline asexual at this point, there was the iteration that was racist, bitter, and absolutely obsessed with lambasting my lot in life, and then there was the iteration that was just being a pure cunt. So I had four bad sets before this one. So this time is the real deal.
Not that the previous deals were not real deals. There was still no usage of backspace. Back pedaling? Sure. Lots of that. But I'm fairly certain it was for the best. I even tried to explain previous one hundred forty character twitter rants because I got so defensive. So pencils down. No defense. And no provisos for defenses generation. Keepin it light. Because the opposite of personal is accessible. And that's what I want and I hope you want, so in the words of a film referenced in a song I can't remember the name of: "into it."
No backspacing, per stand up. You can't take that back once it's loosed. So I'm gonna stand up.
Commuting on a bicycle. Great for staying in shape. Awful in practice.
Getting high, however, awful for staying in shape, but great in practice. I had two thoughts before that, but I was way too good to remember what they were. I have two empty seats in my classroom where those two thoughts were and I feel kinda sad that they skipped out. Probably the downside of getting high is exactly that. You get so many gems and it's like that last scene in the Goonies where that kid gets that little satchel of plastic gems and he's like "ah mah sheeeeet" and you think momentarily about all the good he can do for that rundown town that is still somehow susceptible to three man bank heists and prison breaks , but really he's going to buy a sweet ass Camaro with turn out mufflers and a mobile home with central air and the rest he'll blow on lottery tickets and before you know it he'll be on daytime television in one of those "you are not the father" micro telethons. Empty seats suck. It's like losing your baby teeth except they are your adult teeth and forever more, in every gay porn film you shoot because you are financially bankrupt and morals follow dollars, everyone will see you spreading jaws wide and wonder what you did to get a mouth of gold, but the answer won't be anything interesting.
The answer won't be something like "I took a bite out of a shark and killed it with the power of my jaws and also mind bullets." It won't be anything close to "I got into a telekinetic battle with a Sith lord and instead of throwing me out of a window he shifted all of my teeth two inches to the left and then I cut off his head with a flaming sword of laser focused light." The answer will be more akin to what a trailer park owner says when asked if he's living the American dream. I don't know what that answer would be, but I assume I would laugh like a kid who done caught his first fish at the local reservoir.
Actually that's one of those things that's kind of difficult to deal with. Gonna take a jump cut right there as I see the hole and the prize (it's a football analogy, as baseball is basically for sort of athletic obsessive compulsives who couldn't hack it at chess. Baseball is the D.D.S. of sports).
Everybody dreams. I dream, you dream, we dream. Sometimes weird things happen while we're dreaming. Last night was one of those times. It wasn't a weird dream like Abraham Lincoln walked in on me filming cat themed pornography and aliens landed on my front lawn and vaporized the loud ass people with Marvin the Martians disintegrater ray while they shouted at each other because they were crossing the street against the traffic lights and thought it would be a great idea to break out their catwalk stroll while rush hour traffic did the herky jerk trying to get around them.
It was strange because I said some ignorant stuff to a girl at a party I was attending. Sure, not the first time I went ape shit on someone I didn't know. Definitely not the first time I went ape shit on a lady. I was once smoking potent smokables with friends and it was a very chill environment. Everyone was pretty relaxed and happy, but there was this one girl who would not, for the life of her, just shut her mouth for any span of time. I know I talk a lot. I don't get to talk all that often and when I do I tend to err on the side of saying way too much, not because I am actively trying to say more than I want to, but because talking is like water and I'm thirsty as hell most days. Anyway, she was just rattling off and off and I thought my ears were going to catch fire with the rate she was asking me, in a subdued state, to process information so I eventually just screamed at her "would you please shut the fuck up" or something to that effect and long story short I was not included in further get togethers, because I can sometimes be "that guy". But anyway, had this dream where I was in attendance at a party and said some ignorant mean things to a girl.
Optional responses to having mean things said to you are A: devise a bulletproof retort. B: devise a bullet riddled retort that is delivered so well the point can't not be well taken. C: punch the offender in the face. D: engage in sober-esque dialog. D was basically off the table by then. I was expecting an A or a B, because when I'm good with words I am really good. And you can't punch a girl in the face. Or the boob. I don't know which one they dislike more, and frankly I'm not trying to find out.
I got C. In this dream, this girl balled up a technically sound fist and gave my face the business. Not proud of that. It is afterall, my dream. I should have seen it coming. I should have seen her angry little eyes and my smile was way too wide and easy. It didn't deck me, but it still shut me the fuck up and I figured I would be the bigger man and not cry about it. Of course the bigger man would also not just flatten her, but that was already off the table so the list of bigger than the situation things I could do was already pretty limited. I did the biggest thing I could do without looking like a complete fairy and went back to sipping at my sippy cup and then I woke up into 4 PM.
Not that I'm lazy or anything. I could wake up at 8 AM on my day off, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a day off if you're waking up incredibly early for no reason. Granted 8 AM is fantastic if you have a reason to be up then, but why would you intentionally deprive yourself of comfort on your day off? You have the whole rest of your life for people to tell you when you should be awake and the whole rest of your life to have places to be. Seriously, take one day out of the week and burn it. Just burn the fuck out of it. What is that? One seventh of your lifetime? Why does that even matter when you're going to spend some unholy fraction of your life on a toilet? You will probably spend more time eating, pooping, watching television, and deciding what to do next than you will spend asleep so you might as well get it while you can because when you're dead you'll regret that you didn't spend more time dreaming.
To get back into it though, the dream was fairly whack. About as whack as it gets. I wasn't even hitting on her. I think I said something about her hair and her eyeliner. Something to the affect of "did you pay someone to do that to you" or something. And the sad thing is I've probably said that to some girl at some bar who I didn't know, and my propensity for dumbass cutting observations got the best of me and also got me black balled for service because she was also the bartender. True story. I think I say that mostly because I'm entirely immune to similar comments because I so clearly couldn't afford to pay someone to do much of anything to me. It's all self inflicted. Pride badge right there. Did you pick out those clothes or- I can interrupt that thought instantaneously. Yes. The answer is yes, yes I did. I look this awesome for free. Now what? Yes, that's right. Scoff. Scoff because that's all you have because you paid good money to look like a douchebag and I pulled it off at zero cost, but anyway the whack thing about it was when I woke up my face hurt like hell where she laid her fist into the side of my jaw.
Now, the thing is, a normal person would wake up and work their jaw bones and rub their face and think "what the hell, that's not supposed to happen. I'm not supposed to suffer injury in a dream and then wake up with my nerves thinking it actually happened." I woke up and rubbed my tender face and thought "god damn, what a cunt." It wasn't until I was at work many hours later still rubbing my sore cheek that it occurred to me that getting punched in the face in a dream should not by any means carry over into the real world and then I was like "wait a minute, what the fuck? That was the worst dream ever!" So now I have to look out for that. Dreaming is my hobby and like many hobbies that include hard drugs I don't want it to start taking a toll on my body. Or maybe I should just sleep less. Either way, whack ass dream.
So we've come a long way. As always with nothing but love. All I've got is love for yinz. I know I'm not the only one reading this, but I'm most at home believing otherwise. In some ways. Part of me still believes that I am and that's the part of me that says "hey, da fuck you been at?"
Outside the vein of what I originally attempted I actually took four cracks at this. I literally wrote out four different iterations of act 5. There was the act 5 that was a ridiculous racist rant that was so far disposed from who I actually am that I had to leave it in draft. There was the iteration that was absolutely bitter about my ex and the potential situation that she might be having ravenous sex while I am probably borderline asexual at this point, there was the iteration that was racist, bitter, and absolutely obsessed with lambasting my lot in life, and then there was the iteration that was just being a pure cunt. So I had four bad sets before this one. So this time is the real deal.
Not that the previous deals were not real deals. There was still no usage of backspace. Back pedaling? Sure. Lots of that. But I'm fairly certain it was for the best. I even tried to explain previous one hundred forty character twitter rants because I got so defensive. So pencils down. No defense. And no provisos for defenses generation. Keepin it light. Because the opposite of personal is accessible. And that's what I want and I hope you want, so in the words of a film referenced in a song I can't remember the name of: "into it."
No backspacing, per stand up. You can't take that back once it's loosed. So I'm gonna stand up.
Commuting on a bicycle. Great for staying in shape. Awful in practice.
Getting high, however, awful for staying in shape, but great in practice. I had two thoughts before that, but I was way too good to remember what they were. I have two empty seats in my classroom where those two thoughts were and I feel kinda sad that they skipped out. Probably the downside of getting high is exactly that. You get so many gems and it's like that last scene in the Goonies where that kid gets that little satchel of plastic gems and he's like "ah mah sheeeeet" and you think momentarily about all the good he can do for that rundown town that is still somehow susceptible to three man bank heists and prison breaks , but really he's going to buy a sweet ass Camaro with turn out mufflers and a mobile home with central air and the rest he'll blow on lottery tickets and before you know it he'll be on daytime television in one of those "you are not the father" micro telethons. Empty seats suck. It's like losing your baby teeth except they are your adult teeth and forever more, in every gay porn film you shoot because you are financially bankrupt and morals follow dollars, everyone will see you spreading jaws wide and wonder what you did to get a mouth of gold, but the answer won't be anything interesting.
The answer won't be something like "I took a bite out of a shark and killed it with the power of my jaws and also mind bullets." It won't be anything close to "I got into a telekinetic battle with a Sith lord and instead of throwing me out of a window he shifted all of my teeth two inches to the left and then I cut off his head with a flaming sword of laser focused light." The answer will be more akin to what a trailer park owner says when asked if he's living the American dream. I don't know what that answer would be, but I assume I would laugh like a kid who done caught his first fish at the local reservoir.
Actually that's one of those things that's kind of difficult to deal with. Gonna take a jump cut right there as I see the hole and the prize (it's a football analogy, as baseball is basically for sort of athletic obsessive compulsives who couldn't hack it at chess. Baseball is the D.D.S. of sports).
Everybody dreams. I dream, you dream, we dream. Sometimes weird things happen while we're dreaming. Last night was one of those times. It wasn't a weird dream like Abraham Lincoln walked in on me filming cat themed pornography and aliens landed on my front lawn and vaporized the loud ass people with Marvin the Martians disintegrater ray while they shouted at each other because they were crossing the street against the traffic lights and thought it would be a great idea to break out their catwalk stroll while rush hour traffic did the herky jerk trying to get around them.
It was strange because I said some ignorant stuff to a girl at a party I was attending. Sure, not the first time I went ape shit on someone I didn't know. Definitely not the first time I went ape shit on a lady. I was once smoking potent smokables with friends and it was a very chill environment. Everyone was pretty relaxed and happy, but there was this one girl who would not, for the life of her, just shut her mouth for any span of time. I know I talk a lot. I don't get to talk all that often and when I do I tend to err on the side of saying way too much, not because I am actively trying to say more than I want to, but because talking is like water and I'm thirsty as hell most days. Anyway, she was just rattling off and off and I thought my ears were going to catch fire with the rate she was asking me, in a subdued state, to process information so I eventually just screamed at her "would you please shut the fuck up" or something to that effect and long story short I was not included in further get togethers, because I can sometimes be "that guy". But anyway, had this dream where I was in attendance at a party and said some ignorant mean things to a girl.
Optional responses to having mean things said to you are A: devise a bulletproof retort. B: devise a bullet riddled retort that is delivered so well the point can't not be well taken. C: punch the offender in the face. D: engage in sober-esque dialog. D was basically off the table by then. I was expecting an A or a B, because when I'm good with words I am really good. And you can't punch a girl in the face. Or the boob. I don't know which one they dislike more, and frankly I'm not trying to find out.
I got C. In this dream, this girl balled up a technically sound fist and gave my face the business. Not proud of that. It is afterall, my dream. I should have seen it coming. I should have seen her angry little eyes and my smile was way too wide and easy. It didn't deck me, but it still shut me the fuck up and I figured I would be the bigger man and not cry about it. Of course the bigger man would also not just flatten her, but that was already off the table so the list of bigger than the situation things I could do was already pretty limited. I did the biggest thing I could do without looking like a complete fairy and went back to sipping at my sippy cup and then I woke up into 4 PM.
Not that I'm lazy or anything. I could wake up at 8 AM on my day off, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a day off if you're waking up incredibly early for no reason. Granted 8 AM is fantastic if you have a reason to be up then, but why would you intentionally deprive yourself of comfort on your day off? You have the whole rest of your life for people to tell you when you should be awake and the whole rest of your life to have places to be. Seriously, take one day out of the week and burn it. Just burn the fuck out of it. What is that? One seventh of your lifetime? Why does that even matter when you're going to spend some unholy fraction of your life on a toilet? You will probably spend more time eating, pooping, watching television, and deciding what to do next than you will spend asleep so you might as well get it while you can because when you're dead you'll regret that you didn't spend more time dreaming.
To get back into it though, the dream was fairly whack. About as whack as it gets. I wasn't even hitting on her. I think I said something about her hair and her eyeliner. Something to the affect of "did you pay someone to do that to you" or something. And the sad thing is I've probably said that to some girl at some bar who I didn't know, and my propensity for dumbass cutting observations got the best of me and also got me black balled for service because she was also the bartender. True story. I think I say that mostly because I'm entirely immune to similar comments because I so clearly couldn't afford to pay someone to do much of anything to me. It's all self inflicted. Pride badge right there. Did you pick out those clothes or- I can interrupt that thought instantaneously. Yes. The answer is yes, yes I did. I look this awesome for free. Now what? Yes, that's right. Scoff. Scoff because that's all you have because you paid good money to look like a douchebag and I pulled it off at zero cost, but anyway the whack thing about it was when I woke up my face hurt like hell where she laid her fist into the side of my jaw.
Now, the thing is, a normal person would wake up and work their jaw bones and rub their face and think "what the hell, that's not supposed to happen. I'm not supposed to suffer injury in a dream and then wake up with my nerves thinking it actually happened." I woke up and rubbed my tender face and thought "god damn, what a cunt." It wasn't until I was at work many hours later still rubbing my sore cheek that it occurred to me that getting punched in the face in a dream should not by any means carry over into the real world and then I was like "wait a minute, what the fuck? That was the worst dream ever!" So now I have to look out for that. Dreaming is my hobby and like many hobbies that include hard drugs I don't want it to start taking a toll on my body. Or maybe I should just sleep less. Either way, whack ass dream.
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