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.

Uncle Scar's Cross Dimensional Fortress

There are days of dread in trying to cross the bridge into dreamland.  Days when I've convinced myself everything will stay stable if I keep my eyes open.  Days when I'm afraid of putting on clothing, because once it's on, it cannot be turned off.

Some nights you just gotta take that slow breath and put on the helmet and close your eyes and wait for the assault craft to crash into the beach.  From the second the floor rumbles and rattles your teeth upon landfall to the instant the long range weapons open up is sleep.  In those moments, that very long blink, listening to the engines hum and forgetting where you are and where you're going, worlds congeal.  Cities twine together like muscles sliding over bones and lives burn into being like veins inside.  And then it all blows apart in the morning.  Crying face down and screaming and laughing at the same time.

Sometimes the most satisfying minutes are those early ones where the tears on cheeks are dried by the heat of combat and flames run high and blood runs.  They're the minutes where you know you know what you know and you know whatever happens next could be the next that changes everything.  I do not want that.  I think there are times people mistake free wheeling for extremely extensively planned.  The back up to the back up back up back up plan allows for flexibility that mimics carelessness.  Walk with the wind on your mind.

I think I'm done trying to be funny.  It never comes off right.  Days of dread.  Open your eyes.  No.  I've been mapping fantasy time lines across several sheets of paper and now there are twelve of them taped end to end.  There were twelve of them.  I got extremely upset about the inefficiency of the entire exercise and tore it apart.  And now there's packing tape everywhere packing tape need not be and a severe longing for a time machine to undo what I did because I did not take the time to think, the time to breath, before I took action.  To die with rage instead of rage is a win.

At some point the alarm goes off that the amount of blood you are losing will have a stiff impact on your ability to continue effective consciousness.  I suppose it was a bit disappointing to have someone I did not know all that well recommend something to me with the caveat "...if you like huffing you will love...".  Irregularities.  An overwhelming desire to remain on schedule.  I will follow you down.  Any deviation is unacceptable.

Protection is invaluable and hard to come by and harder still to compromise for any reason, but compromise is necessary and not without it's own value too.  We need to get back on mission.  An operation unto itself.  Obstacles have been attacked and sent down and the path is clearing to make a good run at the main objective and it feels good.  It feels really damn good.  What are all of those jars of piss for?  If I knew, they would be used already!  And frankly I do not appreciate the line of questioning.

Come play with us, Arthur.  That is not my name.  That is not my name.  That is not my name!  Stop calling me!  I do not know who that is!  We match, don't we?  Leave me the hell alone.  I need a whetstone.  Who doesn't?  I've been dying to put together a new theme tailor made to what I want to see and what I want others to see when they come here.  Sometimes we're struck unexpected again with the death of a friend.  I did not know him that well.  Am I wrong to be violently upset about it?  Years removed.

Sometimes I weigh how well or poorly my brothers and sisters know me.  The now me.  The today me.  Oddly enough, my brother in law may know me better than them.  It's difficult to contemplate.  Processing and it comes back not a number.  What do I actually know, though at the mouth of the bridge.  Do it for you.  I will get it working.  I have to.  Back up back up plans fly well at the interface and through interstice, but nearer toward the core they blow apart like tissue paper origami in a squall.  Get it right.  No will do, can do.  You're having a hard time, aren't you.  Nope, just downloading the patch.  The short that makes the radio turn on without having to turn the key because the battery is still good.

No gods, no kings, no high down, and for christ's sake no god damn rings.  Especially pinky rings.  Boosters on.  It is not me you have to worry about, it is the rest of me.  We have done life by committee pretty satisfactorily going on a decade and a half.  I see no reason to make sweeping changes just yet.  Obviously at some point we will run into the person, faced up, who does not get the joke, but deal with that when it arrives.  And by deal with that I mean make extensive back up plans now.

I am still going to make music this year.  We cannot not do it.  It has been too long already.  "...We're only in the first few minutes of the first of January..." we'll evolve.  Walk with the wind on your mind.  Let go.  Open the gate.  Do not be afraid to walk with the wind on your mind because you are not alone.




///Underworld - "Second Hand" gear up.  slingshot around the sun.

Predictive Power of the Bible, Religious Cunts, and Cowboy Coffee

Being the coffee addict I am today, I've been trying to figure out ways to cut costs from making coffee and ensure that I will never be in a situation where I can't drink coffee if said substance is available in absolutely any form.  Having read Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain I have ingested another serious dose of tough guy-dom the likes of which I haven't shot into my veins since I watched hard boiled noir where every ten minutes a cigarette was being rolled, a shot of whiskey downed, and a strong man got his lights put out with a "you'll find my appointment with your boss under 'screw you', sonny."

Which brings me to cowboy coffee.  Easily on par with "badass things that will probably kill you" that I love, such as Marlboro Red 100s and high proof whiskey on rocks, is cowboy coffee.  From what I've gathered from Cities of the Plain is that they don't use coffee filters at all.  Or at least, they seem to have to throw out the last of their coffee pretty often because of left over grounds, and that got me to thinking that cow hands and outdoorsmen in general probably don't carry coffee filters out into the field.  That's like throwing light bulbs in a ruck sack and somehow believing you'll make it to where you're going without breaking a single one.  At least I think keeping coffee filters dry while being outside in the elements for weeks would be something akin to that kind of challenge.  So it must be possible to drink coffee brewed from grounds with the grounds still in the water if you let them settle to the bottom of whatever you brewed it in.  So that's what I've started doing.  I've always liked the bitter bite of black as night coffee and I've found that throwing the grounds in a big ol' mug and brewing it straight in the mug and letting the grounds settle down to the bottom seems to work out just fine.  Coffee filters are officially for pansies.  Of course drinking it this way might turn my teeth black, but lets hope I have a job and never have to rely on the quality of my smile again long before that happens.  Sure the last sips are grainy and if you swish the mug around too much it takes on the consistency of a snow globe full of pine chips, but if you've got a steady hand, and an iron gut, and like things like whiskey and Marlboro Reds and Ice grade beer, I highly recommend giving it a try.

Plus if you ever find that your co-workers have bought coffee grounds instead of instant coffee and stuck them in the common break room knowing full well that the only coffee machine in the entire god damn building is behind the key coded doors of the administrative wing where lowly salesman and customer service associates are not allowed, you can go ahead and make yourself a cup anyway.  You may not come to work in a tie, or slacks, or a sport coat, but while they look at you from the corner of their eyes in the break room wondering if you're thinking about shanking them all with a hunting knife while you watch your mug spin around in the microwave and they try not to look directly at you and your cowboy coffee sitting at the table across from them, they'll know where the real power sits between them and you.  And they'll know that the only thing keeping them on top of the darwinian bureaucratic food chain is a sheet of paper from a business school and an economy that says you have to play nice if you want to keep your freedom.

I am sick of religious cunts.  I know you are too.  That idiot who is organizing the book burning for the sole purpose of doing unto others is a cunt.  A stupid, sad little man.  All of the people who will take personal religion fueled offense to what he is organizing and proposing to do are cunts.  In this case I am defining cunt as: reactionary imbecile far too pleased with causes to examine effects.  Cunts love cunts and their relatinship simply sucks for everybody, especially when they get together for date nights.  And for the last time, the Bible does not predict the future anymore than Nostradamus or that Chinese book whose name I can't remember.  For every person who raises their child based on precedents set by the Bible, proclaiming it as the ultimate authority on human behavior, can I just say will you please stop reading and start listening to and learning about the human beings in your house that for better and worse have to rely on you for whatever reason.  Stop holding up the Bible to life and looking for answers.  Spoiler Alert: They're not in there.  When you start holding up something you believe to be a map or a blueprint, but still attempt to find you're own way or allow free expression, guess what happens?  If you answered "a shit load of self fulfilling prophecies" you answered correctly.  If you answered "a shit load of pain and suffering for everyone who does not share your special insight from heaven" you also answered correctly.

Well, anyway, sorry I just had to let that go.  I heard about someone being lectured about how their parents believe the Bible says the youngest child will do everything the older children did except ten times worse and so their parents sat them down and gave them an earful for things they've never done and never intend to do and the sheer ridiculousness of it all just pissed me off.  If you spent half as much time taking an actual interest in your children as you did combing through the all knowing scriptures you might find that you actually had a family instead of a brood of complete strangers who don't talk to you because you've become a shell of a human being replaced by selected passages of a book that happened to be relevant to you as an adolescent that grew into a sick and warped crutch as you grew older and quietly refused to mature.  I think I'll still write my own Bible, just to prove a point about the power of that kind of story telling.  Maybe I'll save the project for my twilight years so I'll have a deeper catalog of crap to draw from and smear out into images that can applied to any and all ages that involve fallible people dealing with fallible people in a search for overarching meaning, an incorruptible truth, and the reason, their own tailored to fit reason, for being on this rock.  Maybe that's what my life's work really is.  I'll get back to you about that in 25 years when I'm on my death bed from smoking Reds and pounding cowboy coffee.

///DJ? Acucrack - "Thalidomide"  Our defects are inherited from the ignorance of those that walked before us and are incorporated into our character.  That's still no excuse.  For bringing darkness instead of light.  This song rolls and burns like staring directly into a halogen bulb till your brainstem goes numb with the over powering presence of particulate everything blowing your eyes to pieces.  Only minus the permanent blindness.