Over The Last Weeks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know I have to communicate better.

Everything is not okay.

The margin for error is small.

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

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

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

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



Please don't leave me!









Kill them all.

Please don't leave- kill them all.









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

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





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

One spark at a time.

One death at a time.






LET'S GO!




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

On The Revocation Of Passports

I understand times do change.  I understand that I do exist in a space that is not attuned to the normal speeds and distances of the governing dark star at the center of the Milky Way.  I understand the difficulties this presents, trickling down to our branch, our neighborhood, our star, our system, our section, our planet, our hemisphere, our continent, our nation, our state, our city, our block, our ship inside that soup (the governance bubble reaching out only that far to offer resistance).

I understand times do change around us and the space in which we exist has a fixed passport system.  Once granted entry into the time lapsed/corrupted/flexed/shifted bubble speeding along with the rest of the system around it, the passport will not be revoked.  Granted access, you can come and go as you please.  There are rules.  Those rules can be tailored to you.  I will never revoke your passport out of spite.  I will never revoke your passport out of anger.  I will never revoke your passport because your times have changed.  I will never revoke your passport because my time has changed.  Once gifted, your passport is set for as long as you live and nontransferable.

We don't give them out like Halloween candy.

If you ever need to borrow a cup of sugar.

If you ever need a box of nails or a snowblower.

If you ever need a lift somewhere.

If I can help, I will.  Just ring before you cross the boundary into controlled space and attempt to buzz the flight deck.  The weapons net surrounding the ship is live.  Don't be converted to light and dust.




///Nightmares On Wax - "Passion"

Do not forget there are rules.  Break them enough times and the immune system that keeps the bubble afloat in the interstellar sea will have some very pointed questions for you.

That Instant

you realized what you wanted to do was write.  Not necessarily the sound of the future, not the sound of the past, a sound.  13 years ago, an idea started to bloom and you did everything you were supposed to do to avoid it and embrace it in other ways.   I went through dark times and bright times.  I shifted blame and the blood edge of the knife and the adventures and the lens.

I switched who could be the protagonist and the anti. I prayed on it and asked for direction and gave up my soul to whomever could be and believed in math and science, chance and luck.  I gave up and forgot and danced like a rhinoceros in the breeze until I couldn't.

And I realized I have a passion for creation.  All paths lead that way, by fire, by ice, by leaf, by wind, by void,  moon & sol, stations & interstellar sea.

you realize I have the misfortune to live at an insterstellar gate-

counting droplets of blood in zero gravity.

Return Of The Painted Dinosaur (New Limit)

To say that it is difficult to talk about is true.  Not an overstatement, not an understatement.  The wounds still feel like they happened in a dream.  When I wake up I feel like I am going to wake up again as soon as start to move my limbs, and I do not.  I wake up once and look at my hand and wrist and wiggle my fingertips and hold it up over my face and pinch myself and poke my eyebrows and sniff it and it is mine.  Check after check comes back positive.  "This belongs to you."  There was not a mistake.  There was not a swap of body parts while you were sleeping.  You are awake.  You are breathing.  The nerves are speaking to each other as they should.  Motor functions have all checked out.  You are indeed occupying the body you went to bed in.  Further damage has ceased.  Necrosis is staved off.  Healing has also ceased.  It is not going to get better or return to mint, though it will also not get worse.  Wake up.  Get up.

Some days I wake up, since it happened, and I scream into my pillow for long pillows for long minutes.  Pound my fists on the mattress.  Cry until I am exhausted.  And then get up and head to the shower, not to take one, but to get the bandages on my leg wet enough to peel off the still reforming skin without damaging it or tearing it because no matter how non-stick bandages claim to be, they will fuse with your newly regenerated skin and tear it off like a fine gossamer contacted with Velcro if you are not careful.  If you stub your toe or brush your shin against a coffee table corner or bump against a chair leg, that newly formed skin will peel free like over ripe peach fuzz and the healing has to begin all over again.

I've wanted to brand myself for some time.  A change of pace between scarification stints and a way to get a different look as I work on tattooing myself to help me mark time between the many different iterations of myself and stages of my life.  The pain brings an acute awareness that helps me cut through the storm swells and confusion and voices and whorls and weirs of manic depression and schizophrenia.  When your nerves are screaming out at you, it can drown out the noise.  When you can touch something concrete and constant it becomes a reference stone and constant reminder of your human elements, your and everyone else's pains and joys and emotional lives.  It allows you to access a reality that opens doors of sympathy and empathy you otherwise would not be able to see or understand.   It clear cuts a path to direct needs and functions.  In small doses, that pain is invaluable and a joy with incredible utility.  In large doses it is a nightmare.

When the deep fryer began to fall over, time did not slow down.  I knew my two cats, rescued from negligent homes some years ago, were both in my efficiency kitchen with me, waiting for me to toss a little food on the floor for them to nose and paw, maybe eat, maybe pass on.  The fryer was in the same space it'd occupied since I bought it and first began using it.  Hundreds of times.  This time, whatever balance struck that slowly shifted through the years made its final move.  It began to fall, my cats looking up at me, and I threw my hands out at full speed to stop it.  From all of the previous times I'd dropped bowls, or a bucket slipped off of a shelf while I was filling it, I knew the cats wouldn't move until it hit the floor and I didn't have time to try to scare them out of the splash radius with words.  The speech centers of my brain were an afterthought.  All I could engage was "protect them!"

Weeks later I can understand why.  I can't afford to take them to a veterinarian to treat them long term for hot oil burns, especially what would likely have been second to third degree burns over 50% or more of their little bodies.  I would have had to put them down or take them to a vet to have them do it.  The whiff, the scent, the lightest breeze of a notion of having to mercy kill them was enough to send me into action because they are two of my mates.  My family in my outpost here in Pittsburgh as I build a life for myself, a single early thirties male permanently estranged from all family save for my immediate siblings, and even they not all as close as siblings are often assumed to be.  They mean the world to me, no matter how often I bellyache about them keeping me up all night with their little paw paw games and wrestling with my feet and ankles with a little too much claw now and then.  They're my shipmates that take care of the place while I am away and while I'm hurtling through the universe, trying to make sense of other people, and maybe stumble upon someone or ones to accompany me, in my hodgepodge, homemade, Tardis.  My companions.

I lunged and the fryer moved along the shelf and slammed against the wall and 367 degree oil rolled up its side like water in a blender.  Below, the skitter scratch of cat claws scrambling against floor boards reached my ears, my leading foot planted against the plastic tile to balance me.  Relief washed over me knowing "they will be safe" as the sheet of amber oil hanging in the air began its descent over where the fryer basin used to be.  Where my hands now were.

I snatched my left hand backward, my right still connected to the arm putting as much force as possible into the basin, now against the wall to drive my body backward.  The oil sloshed over my right hand and, knowing I could not withdraw it without allowing the entireity of my torso to fall into the shower and shelf and further shake the ball of solar flare to catch the rest of its contents on my face, I pushed back and took a shower against the skin's hand.

The thump and tumble of my cats running away collided with the immediate shock of hot oil across my hand and wrist and once my body began traveling backward, the oil beginning to slap and clap against the floor, I began to raise my leg against the back splash.  What splashed and dotted my left leg cooled enough as it dotted my pants to leave no mark.  What landed in the bin turned around its base like a tsunamic rip tide, crushed against the basin's rear wall, curled around as sport, cameras flashing, snap, and teeth bared came for me.

Balanced, I tore my right hand away, the curling aftershock cresting.  It spilled.  The wave covered my knee and washed my shin and right foot and that was when a scream cut loose.  I cried out.  Prime and howl.  I screamed to the skies as the last of it dribbled off of my toes.

The deep fryer, spun with the terror of my flash fried hand, fell backward and spilled the rest of its contents to the floor that I, loosed from protecting cats and certain further was easily, by miles, too far, could leap clear and land against the kitchen sink.  I breathed hard for wasted minutes in a mental gridlock, hips perched on the lip of the kitchen sink, before I ran to the bathroom.

The cold water was turned to its maximum setting with the tub to shower knob turned to full shower.  Water washed all over me and I held my paw up to the chill spray and only brought it down to rinse over every other part of the right side of my body that was vibrating at death levels.  Sometimes when I lose my temper and cannot corral it I will fire off a punch into an inanimate object to pop off steam and that tingle returned is that tingle that tells you every part of your skin that was between flesh and bone and the rock and the hard place you found yourself in to bring ya to a point where the only release was the flood of endorphin and whatever other enzymes cover up disappointment and rage has died and maybe given up a fragment of solace to the rest of the mad house.  That tingle, rushing over the right side of my body and the nerves shouting out for soft words brought me back to the point where I understood I could not put enough cold water on every part of me that needed it.

My leg continued to burn.  For hours afterward.  I was able to wash my arm in enough cold water, enough of it falling into the tub, as it scattered from the shower's head against my hand, to cool my foot.  Second degree burns, superficial as superficial second degree burns can be, set in on my arm and foot as second degree burns ate into my leg, starved of cool.

I got out of the shower and pat dried myself.

Skin came off in palm sized chunks.

It stuck to the towel.

I got back in the shower.

Skin clogged the drain.

I cried.  I grabbed a bar of soap and rubbed.  More skin came loose.  It stuck to the walls of the shower.  It stuck to my own face.  It caught in my chest hair and groin.  Tendrils drifted from my beard.  I shouted "no!"  I shouted "this is not happening" over and over and over.  For many seconds it was all I could say.  Every part of me felt like it was coming unseamed.

I was in shock for two days.

I didn't know what to say to myself or anyone else.  I didn't know what to believe.  I slept.  When I woke I did not move.  While I stayed frozen I tried to sleep until I did.  When I was not sleeping I tried to.  When I was sleeping I waked with a recurring nightmare every handful of minutes I could forget.  Terror stricken.  It was not real.  I was in shock.

Waking, I looked at my hand and it was not mine.  It was a raw thing.  It stank.  The smell of it was raw meat opened two days too late.  Sour and slimy and sticking to everything it touched.  Blood oozed and wept from its every divide.  It was a scene in that movie that you cannot watch start to finish because it turns your stomach just enough to make your eyes cross and tinfoil rattle in your mouth until you are too sick to stand.  For some time, waking and looking at it and having its smell fill my nostrils so close to my face and knowing that if I lifted my blanket enough to look down at my leg I would see a sea monster colored in a sickly greenish yellow full of lint, cat fur, exudate, and blood scab as far as light can carry, I would sweat and convince myself if I just lied still it would heal itself fine like a rug burn.

On the third day I threw up.  60 some odd hours in bed hydrating with only a two litre of Barq's root beer I happened to toss over there before deciding to make food before bed took it's toll.  Waking up the third day for the twentieth time in that period, pain spiking, and the odor of raw flesh beside my head, unable to shake it away and unable to cut it off, took its toll.  I wretched.

Rolls of heaves began working their way along my spine.  I began to scramble with my good left hand to make sure my face was pointed toward empty floor space instead of mattress, pillow, or wall.  I could not walk.  Wherever the projectile went, it had to be somewhere I would be able to lie near without getting it into open wounds.  I succeeded and ralfed, sickened by the furious turbulent grotesquery of my own body parts.

On the fourth day I came to grips with what would become my new modernity.  Without health insurance, there was no one to fix me except me.  I tried to walk and succeeded.  I pissed.  In my own toilet.  Deep brown syrup.  I found my fridge.  There was food,  I walked to my sink.  There was water.  I drank and drank and drank.  I pulled food and food and left arm's full of tupperware and placed on my night stand.  I found my cubby of strange and sudden items and found my scarification kit and breathed a sigh.  Relief, joy, love for the friend who came over prepared for a one time dual scarification incident I ribbed him for (coming over prepared) that he left with me.  With a little improvisation I was able to repurpose the kit to cover the open wounds enough to return to bed on track to recovery instead of on rails to infection.

Days went by like barges trying to force their way over harbor reefs.  The stench of my hand continued to get to me as I left it bare with the kit nearby.  The flesh continued to sweat and the swelling did not go down.  Slicing it off became an option.  I could not sleep with any fidelity.  I could not rest and when I was awake the pain I felt was more than anything near the throb I felt inside my skull when I fractured my jaw.  It was more than anything I felt when I fell down stairs or was in my second car accident or slipped off of the odd side of a hand rail and landed on the concrete bordering the stairs beside a 21 foot decent from a porch to a sidewalk with a hill between us.  I wanted to cut it off as the bare flesh continued to weep that slimy clear goo.  Cut it off!  Cut it off!

I wrapped it.  I wrapped it.  Healing began.  The recurring nightmare, the recurring dream continued.  I was able to make bandages and while it healed I was able to order in specialized products for attending to burns.  I researched for days whiles my leg and hand and arm stuck to my bed sheets.  Every time I tried to move, they stuck to me.  Belief set.  "If I don't move while I'm waiting for these products to arrive, there is no way it can get infected because it is sealed by the plastic fabric so further movement will only create more problems and possible amputation."  I had to figure out a way to urinate.

And I did.  Three weeks in.  My neighbors stopped by to see if I was okay.  I still could not leave the bed for any sort of extended period.  Dropping my burned hand below my heart produced an incredible throbbing pain the likes of I have never felt.  To put the sensation in perspective: do you know when recommendations say to keep the limb elevated?  Imagine that every time you are lying flat on your back that limb crosses a plain.  Now imagine that plain is wherever your heart is located.  Now imagine that every time that limb crosses south of that plain you instantly feel like it is about to burst apart as though a truck tire, connected to a 3/4 ton truck, is rolling over it and if you do not raise it above that plain IT WILL BURST INTO HAMBURGER MEAT.  Yes.  That.  Now imagine that while you are trying to find a comfortable way to lie in bed and sleep.  Now imagine that happens instantly for 18 days to everything from your elbow up and your knee down!

Coming in to something close to normal.  I hope that was coherent.   How else can we survive?

The pain remains.  It feels indescribable though I've done my best.

People you knew before look at you differently.  More so than your scarification. They look at you as though there is something contagious about you.  The root of your being is love for animals.  Perhaps they should.

As I've healed and become a human being again through the last weeks, looking at my hand and my leg, I almost feel like I am wearing a human costume.  All of the skin was flash fried off of my hand save for my palm.  The skin underneath each one of my digits and my palm is original and up to date.  Looking at it, seeing it clinging to the rest of my flesh, it is out of place.  I want to peel it off and it will not go.   It will not go away.  There is no transistion between the old, the original, and the new.  It is stark.  If you shake my right hand you will feel the transition in the form of many tiny spikes where the original skin meets the new.  Where the rough and weathered meets the baby smooth; fingers crossed bounds, hands clasped in a firm grasp.

I still find pieces of skin around my apartment.  It is disgusting.  It is revolting.  Vomit climbs through my body and I know I have to pick that part of me up and put it in a garbage can and it is...   ....   ....    ..... ..........................  I know I can go on.  I know I will.  I know I have to.  It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.  


Fuck.  It hurts so much and I know I have to go on and it just fucking hurts so much.  I want to shake it off.   I want to be able to shake it off.   The pain is .................  ugh.  I know I'll beat it.  I think part of the pain it gives me is that I didn't have a choice.  And now I have to wear a permanent and exceptionally visible reminder of how I didn't have a choice through the 24 years of my life my Dad destroyed myself.  I broke away from that, finally.  It took cutting my face apart to see.  To finally split his noose.  Now I have to wear the scars of chance and love right along with them.   It hurts.  It fucking hurts.  It wasn't supposed to be this way.  I have to wear it.  I will and have and will continue to do so.
















I am happy to close this chapter.  If I didn't talk about it I would still find myself living in it months, maybe years, from now.




At least now,

at least now,

we can get back to comedy, true tragedy (instead of misfortune), and stories untold in fiction.  Close this book and open a new.  Carry on, soldier.  How many times do I have to change?  How many times do I have to be changed?  People already look at me so many different ways from what I am.  And they will look at me differently again.

Ever becoming.

We have been patient.  We will still.

You thought you new hell.  It was one of many.

It was a long month.  Come back home, darling.  The worst is over.  You may have set a new ten.  Many, most, if not all, is lost in translation, however-   -there's still a lot of work to do.  Do not quit on me and I will not quit on you.

/////Bjork x Deathgrips - "Thunderbolt" fourteen birth of the painted dinosaur.   Molt.

Move Town

I get so caught up with making the people around me things as a way of saying thanks and payment that I forget to make myself- to do what I want to do because I owe my existence, my here and now, to those people by a currency that will never translate because they don't know fully what they helped me reach escape velocity away from what I saw as an insurmountable margin and I don't view it as penance or clinging to the past or misplaced.  I see it as a continuous consciousness of how tenuous life can be and a ten four toward how the smallest gesture, the smallest show of what someone outside of a relationship might see as pity pence or enabling weakness can actually be a point and moment where you've helped someone's life turn a corner.  It's burdensome to think about and it takes a piece out of myself to do it, but everyone is thanked out of reflex and I feel more comfortable in my own skin, helpless and power filled at once, when I have taken the time to let them know the fact that I am still alive now is not by chance or the grace of a supreme being and is by their taking their time to pitch a penny or several thousand into my hat.  To fool yourself into thinking you've done it by yourself or by chance or by blessing or sheer hard work grind is something I want to make sure I never do.  So maybe it is an anchor.  Maybe it is an unnecessary sacrifice and can be framed as a guilt or a confirmation of sin and imperfection.  A penance.  I don't see it that way and will never come around to that frame of mind.  So much of life is decisions and whether it suits me or not a lot of those decisions happen outside of myself.  I accept that.  So please, accept my outside decision to thank you and the universe outside of myself that you have had a hand, direct and indirectly, in forming.

Once we're clear of that, we can shift focus back to fantasy lands and dreamscapes.  There isn't much more distance to cover and I am happy for that.  Excited for that.  There are times when I feel like every other word is about some future date when the resources are at their correct levels and processes have synchronized and the planets have lined up into something close to a grand cross and if I am twenty minutes in to 5th Element while listening to acid jazz with my heaphones in my key tray and I've already consulted my little sister and am suitably numb mouthed from too many cigarettes and just the right amount to dissuade me from running to the gas station to purchase more and the moon is a waning gibbous on a clear night with rain in the forecast for early before the sun comes up with the option to sit outside with a fire at any point prior barring the anything prior to the immediate because it did not rain the day through at work, where I box myself in to unrealistic expectations as a way to never have to actually execute anything.  If you never pull the trigger, you never have to learn whether or not there is more to learn about what you want to do.  Whatever you have conceptualized is its best and most perfect form.  You never have to translate.  I wanted to have children.  I can have children.  Meet my family!  It's almost like every idea is that part of you other people talk about and love, but if they ever did meet you, the rest of you, they'd screw their nose up and rub their squished shut eyes like they just saw an apple snap loose from a twig and fall up to disappear into the sky.

I get very caught up, but I have not forgotten my own needs.  It eats me out from the inside, but I never forget the gnaw and the sound of it and the feel of it, the blood cough taste of it, nose running, water eyed mechanics of it.  They scream at me.  I'm moving forward as fast as I can.  I swear, I am.  The days disappear swiftly.  The nights are restless, strapped to a mattress.  Fear lurks in corners.  Cats ask questions.  Notes are taken on walls and skin and misnamed folders.  Bite a lower lip and squeal from the top of the foothills of the mountain range, the clouds ahead of the temperature front doing strange things above the peaks and the ground bellowing thunder lake swells and strikes days distant, birds moving town in brunch sky above.  Sip.  Nod.  Please pass the olives.  Cross a leg and scribble onward.



///Sylvan Esso - "Uncatena"

Giddy Up

I've been trying to chart my work books, but I don't want to see them.  At all.  Fantastic difficulty.  I did the first class and the reminder came up to do the second class and I couldn't bring myself to do it.  Part of it is horror.  Part of it is blatant stupidity.  Part of it is just not wanting to know how much further I am going to have to work to get back to zero.

I just want to put my fist through something.  Anything!  Not even through, but just break my hand.  Null it.  But I need my hands, both of them.  And I need the ability to ambulate.  I need my knees and my elbows and I have to protect them the same way people protect their investments.  It breaks my heart sometimes knowing that I can't do what I need to do.  It makes me cry a lot.  I won't go to "it's not fair" because it's just a fact.  I could probably cut a finger off.  I think I would save it.  Maybe eat it.  Cook it somehow like a ham hock.  Stew it or something.  It's tantalizing and aggravating because I know where the knuckles join and have cut limbs apart before but I don't trust my left hand to operate the scissors on my right hand.  Maybe just the pinky.

Gauging my pain threshold.  I'm still not sure where it is exactly and I probably shouldn't be losing sleep about it, but I am.  I think I get that from my father.  How far are you willing to go before you jump to get what you need.  Would I have to cauterize it myself?  Probably.  I don't know why I need to do these things, but I do and its getting more powerful and harder to swallow it down between suggestions.  I don't know what that means!  It scares me.  It's getting harder to pretend to be normal.  Normative?  Baseline.  Nullification.  Talked to Martin about that for a while.  It was a good conversation.

Relying more and more on emulation and I'm afraid I will be found out.  Not about being gay or anything that trivial, but being found out about being a fucking psychopath.  I want blood all the time, I don't care how it comes.  I need help.  I need assistance and I keep saying I can run this car until the wheels fall off, but I've been rolling on brake discs forever.  So many years.

It would be easier if I was not aware of the degeneration, but I think a piece of the awareness has lent itself to a belief that I'm making it up and even as I'm speaking I know it sounds contrived.  It isn't.  It's motor and I know less and less how to change the fucking oil.  I don't know what to do about it.  I know where to go, but you better believe I'm not going there.  Like I need more debt, don't make me laugh.  I'll spit ice tea everywhere.  I'm not getting interned again!  No!  I will never put down the ax!  If you want it out of my hands you better be fucking prepared to take it from me.

I'm not a gun, but I will put one between your eyes and kiss you while I do it if you think it was going to be that easy.  Don't touch me.  Do not fucking touch me.  Ever.  I will break your fingers one by one while I sit on your chest so you don't move too much.  Escalation.  Take the escalator back down.

I know what's wrong with me, but I need a checkup and I don't know where to get one without the internment trap.  I'm not doing that again.  We're not doing that again.  Just handle it. Just grab your ears and pull up your socks and eat it.  Life hasn't been all that bad to me.  I'm just tired of having to emulate to squeak by.  Doing it by the skin of my teeth and I'm pretty sure some people have started to see through it so I have to work harder at it because the people that I do love I love dearly and want to keep them and want them to keep me to and the last thing that should happen is giving them a reason.

It's tough.  Everything worth having is hard.  Is a myth.  Perpetuated by people who think "difficult" is possession in the material sense or the kid rearing sense.  Everything worth having is hard in the interpersonal intrapersonal sense.  Having ground you do not need to give inside your skull is worth having.  Maintaining relationships with the people you care about and trust is worth having.  Put in work, no doubt, but put in secondary work too.




///Amon Tobin - "Back from Space"  I wish I could fly, but not just to the atmosphere, to the stars.  I want to explore the Oort cloud and be the first man to land on an asteroid and be out there in the zero cold and see the sun without atmospheric interference.  I want to see Jupiter up close at all costs and I want to die out there.  But I'm stuck here.  And have to keep coming back to this fucking planet every time I wake up.  Bullshit.

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.

Cliffside Funeral Wedding Dream

Massive dream.  There was a procession across a hill side and on that hill side there were hundreds of tombstones.  The hill side was a little over grown and as it sloped down the entire thing was cut off at the far edge by a cliff.  There was a procession happening there, the women dressed in gowns with all kinds of frillies and big brimmed hats with white flowers in them and all of the men dressed in tuxedos with black ties and shiny shoes

I was watching it from where the birds sit in the air and I wanted to get a closer look so I dove down and sat on one of the tomb stones to watch them walk.  They were hiking on a narrow trail that led around the curve of the hill top and I couldn't see where they were going or from where they walked.  I noticed some of the men wearing top hats and it was kind of cool.  It made me want to have a top hat of my own, but not enough to actually make one.  There was no music, only the sound of their feet kicking up dirt, but it rained the day before so there was no dust.

Some of the women had really thin canes and used them to help themselves push farther up the hill while they walked.  Everyone there looked so stately and I wanted to be a part of it so I pressed myself into the grid, but I wasn't thinking and ended up there with a football and shorts and a dirty tee once I got the address right.  That was the only hard part.

I kept throwing the football at people, but my resolution wasn't good enough and it kept passing through their bodies like they weren't even there.  It would take a bounce or two and go off the side of the cliff and I felt worse and worse trying to make it happen and every time I kept saying "I'll go get it" and I would hike down the hill, navigating the gray and black and mossed over tombstones to the cliff side and then start the climb down.  The view was incredible.  There were birds flying beneath my feet dipping in and out of the canyon and there were trees growing down there where the cliff would ledge for a few feet and then drop down hundreds.

I fast forwarded the climb and return and clicked back on when I got back to the top.  The procession must have been miles long.  I was doing it all day.  Another pass, another pass through, another climb.  "I'll go get it."  And they kept on walking.  Some of the men had taxidermy turtles on the tops of their hats, spray painted black.  I started to follow the procession to see where it was going.  I liked being up in the air, but I liked being in shorts better and the football felt good to hold and toss even though I couldn't make anyone in the procession catch it.  It felt good to walk.

I got distracted though.  One of the tombs was a mausoleum.  I wandered off of the trail because I was really interested in the iron work of the gates.  They rusted over beautifully and I wondered about the hands that made them so pretty.  The tomb itself was a simple white box of big blocks.  No angels or ridiculous adornments.  No saints.  Nothing grew on it.  The gate was unlocked so I walked inside.

The floor sloped down and into the hill side.  There was nothing inside of it except a stone work tunnel.  Inside of the tunnel there was a waterfall that arched through it.  Thinking back the water probably was blown up from the right side and across the roof to terminate in the left side gutter.  I started walking down it and then running because the air smelled so good and earth filled and wet and oxygen rich and I wanted to blow as much of it down my lungs as I could.  I wanted to take my shirt off so it dissolved in bits of dust, pixel for pixel, and while I was running my friend started running too and caught up to me.  I heard him and his shoes going step for step, but he still caught up to me because his stride was longer and I was thinking I could beat him to the end.  I started off with quick feet, the same tempo, but we both got to our top gears and once you're there the only thing that matters is how far your footfalls can distance themselves from the one coming before.

He said "do you want to race?"  I said "Hell yes."  We booked it toward the light, running underneath the procession.  I still had the football in the crook of my arm.  I beat him out by a step and came to a skidding halt.  The tunnel was a field of gravel on the other side.  All of the pebbles we kicked up stopping went over the other side of the cliff and made little pock pock noises on their way down.  I looked over my shoulder and the hill top was still dotted with tombstones.  Some of them broken and graffiti on them.  The procession was gone though.

Catching my breath I realized I was breathing hard outside of dreamland and it woke me up before I was ready to leave that place.


/// Lionrock - "Packet of Peace (Chemical Brothers Mix)"

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"

A Definition for Addiction

Searching for a definition of addiction, I came to an impasse.

If you think about it every day, are you addicted?

If you think about it sometimes, maybe once a week, are you addicted?

If you run into your dealer and have an exceptionally awkward conversation, are you addicted?

Does it really matter what it is that you're talking about?

If you run into the son of a bitch that sold you crack at the dollar store are you less for not having talked to him while you were buying cereal?

I don't know what the rules are.   I don't pretend to.
Sometimes, however, I do wonder though.  It's not a matter of being clean or dirty or anything along those lines.  It's just a matter of defining what is.

Are you addicted to television?  Are you addicted to the thrill of the mainline, no matter what is?   The surprise of what you get versus what you paid for?   Are you addicted to the cliffhanger of a t.v. show?  Are you addicted to crossing words with people?  Are you addicted to waking up?  Are you addicted to waking up fuzzy?  Are you addicted to waking up next to another body?  Are you addicted to waking up to a body, live or not?

I dunno.  Spending a few days thinking about addiction and definition and words, and most importantly, trying not to try to mimic voice sounds from other people while they're in earshot.  that's all.  a life without definition is no life at all, right?  said a wise someone to a soon to be wise soandso.  Right?


///Ellie Goulding - "Only You"   This one goes out to you McCourghty.  I miss you.  I hope you're not dead. Haven't seen you around in a long ass time, but whatever.  For what it's worth, you were a project to find and a handful to corral and I had an easier time keeping a glass of water in my hand sans glass than it was to keep track of you.  I feel awful cuz I still can't spell your last name right.  Anyway.  Miss you, bro.  Thanks for everything.

On the Muckers

Finished the gift. It's strange to not have to worry about it. I get home and the docket is empty. I kick off the muckers and there's no sadness because there's no where else to walk in them. There are places I need to be and things I still need to do, but there is nothing hanging over. It's good and bad. Like a lot of things. It's a hard feeling to express. There's a pretty gaping gash where it was, the gift, and now that there's nothing in there to hold the tide aside it's washed high and hard. I wasn't expecting that. I probably should have been after working on it for so long. It's a backward empty nest kind of thing.

Not that the writing is unimportant anymore. If anything it is more important than it was as there is territory unoccupied and the last thing I need is to have the hunger for discovery eat me alive. I feel like I've been turned loose all over again. Learning what to do with that, because over the course of the work it was something that I unlearned. The timing was poor. Landed right in the holiday let down between Christmas and New Years, but I'm glad I did it. It had to be done. So it's time to dive in again. Time to shoe up the head saw and cut into myself with renewed abandon.

There's work still to be done. Year end looks. The year end playlist. Resolutions. Drawings. Poetry. Fiction. Sleeping. Games. Theories. Maybe even more stand up (but probably not for a while. I can't get my head around it to save my life) Sorry I've been away for so long. Part of finishing was really turning myself toward it with everything I had left after work days and work weeks. I think I miss the gut of the effort as much as the result. It didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted, but it was as close as I was going to get without getting lost in detail work and shoving the deadline to the horizon of another middle year. So we're back on it. I'm back on it. Time to see where the universe ends. Back from space, and off again into the star blacked banner of dreams.