a customer speaks to you with words they would not use if they met you ninety five feet away and you know it for a fact because you stood up from the cash register and they realized (very quickly) that you were very able to drag and throw them through the sliding door toward the wrong end of pelletized glass over a difference of two dollars.
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label calculations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label calculations. Show all posts
9/10/21
8/2/19
Life With Alcoholism
When your friend says "hey, do you want to dress up and go out to (insert bar here) for an hour" after that friend just got done screaming at you 48 hours earlier for not spending your last dollars to buy them a beer at 4 A.M. when they'd spent their entire day drinking and you immediately feel your stomach turn and your eyes gloss over with dread.
If you say no: they'll just go out anyway, be angry with you all night because "we never go anywhere", probably spend far too much money, call you to pick them up, be further upset with you for not trusting them and for "always being tired", and be irritated that "we never spend time together", be angry with you for "judging" wanting to have a good time.
If you say yes: wherever you go they won't want to leave after an hour, pressure you to drink more than you want (if you decide to drink at all), convince you to spend too much money or spend it themselves, try to get you to bring something back to the house for later (but really that night), go out again anyway if you do get home early, make you feel miserable for going cautiously/reluctantly, be upset with you for thinking about how you'll feel tomorrow, be annoyed with you the entire outing for thinking about the chores & things you still need to do at home.
If you say no: they'll just go out anyway, be angry with you all night because "we never go anywhere", probably spend far too much money, call you to pick them up, be further upset with you for not trusting them and for "always being tired", and be irritated that "we never spend time together", be angry with you for "judging" wanting to have a good time.
If you say yes: wherever you go they won't want to leave after an hour, pressure you to drink more than you want (if you decide to drink at all), convince you to spend too much money or spend it themselves, try to get you to bring something back to the house for later (but really that night), go out again anyway if you do get home early, make you feel miserable for going cautiously/reluctantly, be upset with you for thinking about how you'll feel tomorrow, be annoyed with you the entire outing for thinking about the chores & things you still need to do at home.
2/16/17
The Year End Look
Starting at the end of 2015 the year end look was a little rough, but hopeful. I know I said the year end playlist was up next. It isn't. The look back at 2016 and forward into 2017 is. We'll get to the year end playlist soon, I wanted to hammer this out before I get lost trying to locate music and because it has been weighing on my brain for quite some time and in the throes of a calm and a quiet and thoughtful depression, it is easier to piece back together. I do firmly believe still: if you want easy, kill yourself. If 2016 taught me anything that was it.
I thought fracturing my jaw was the worst pain I would ever feel and be able to stand through and that something like that would never happen again. And then I fried off 15% of my skin with 370 degree oil in second and deep second degree burns bad enough that I couldn't walk or use my hand for weeks. That was the worst pain I have ever felt. The first week or so it was a chilly feeling, like when air blows across your teeth very quickly and it feels like you've just bitten into a snowball at the same time. As hair follicles and skin began to grow back in odd colors and scales the pain got worse and more intense, but I was happy because at least I knew some sort of skin would eventually be there to protect the naked weeping flesh eventually. It was so many weeks I don't even remember exactly. I think the last scales scraped away to serviceable skin some time in late December after it happened in September. It was an eternity.
Definitely not what I intended when I said I wanted to work on my scarification sleeve at the beginning of the year. Looking forward: I don't want to feel anything remotely close to that again. Can we please go back to dealing with occasional week long bouts of lower lumbar nerve pain and the occasional lancing ice pick stab of hip joint nerve pinch. That's fine, by comparison. I laugh saying it, but I am pressing my palms together and pointing them at the sky: please universe, don't hurt me like that again, but if you do - make it a clean break.
I did finally get around to procuring a set of tattoo guns. I also did not get around to using them. A third of my year disappeared trying to heal up from the burns. It wasn't even just the burns that broke me low, it was learning how to use my hand again and build strength back into it. It was rebuilding the musculature in my hips and joints in learning how to walk longer and longer distances and stand for longer periods of time. At one point I could walk, but I literally had to sit down and raise my heel above my heart every five or ten feet because the throbbing pressure of my veins trying to push blood down and back up to my heart felt like my leg was getting torn to the bone by a leather whip.
The year started off pretty grand. All of the work was more or less finished. I'd survived, what was to that point, the worst injury I'd suffered to date and if you can take ten weeks of pain and rehab from a fractured and dislocated jaw, you can take anything. Music was on the horizon and I had a keyboard set up that I was diddling with. I got a cool old motorcycle with part of my Christmas bonus, an old Honda that I still have sitting in the backyard that I want to eventually build into a cafe racer style bike you might see on an old pastel chalk poster advertisement if you lived in racing country back in the 70's. I had a new basketball and had free time to exercise and hit the basketball courts now and then to indulge my sports fantasies. I was really getting into the video game Minecraft and was seeing poetry from a little bit of a different angle.
Graphic design was coming along and my friendships were pretty free flowing as far as I could tell. I was making big plans to create sculptures and designs for some of my friends that I wanted to show instead of just tell them that I cared about them. Some projects were coming along nicely through planning sketches and rough practice designs and concept proofs. With some of my free time I was able to visit people I normally could not make time for and with that little extra bit of money I was able to go out with them to places they wanted to go and eat and drink things I never would under usual circumstances. Life was wheeling and dealing and possibilities were turning into realities. The only real problem I had was making time to keep up with everything at a reasonable pace and I was making it work.
The Summer was hot and long and I did get into a funk wondering what was next. Who doesn't feel some of that funk in the middle of Summer? When everything feels okay it is natural to wonder if everything is supposed to feel that okay. Are you supposed to feel happy, content? It's normal to question. I did get to thinking about other people I know and where they are in their lives and where I am in mine and I started to think about what more I would have to do to experience that kind of comfort and security. I started to, after my birthday in April, start to believe that there could be a way that I could have that too if I kept at it and kept on trucking with high hopes and kept in touch with people and kept allowing them in to my lives.
The facts started to creep in. Started to trickle in. The realization broke in that nothing would change. They're still drifting away faster than that distance can ever be closed. They've only been kind enough not to tell you that you're messaging a part of their lives they don't have time for. So I spent more of the Summer falling away into the night skies and fire pits and walks through the storm tunnels to sit by the river's edges and pull back the fabric of those nights to watch the bridge lights glimmer on the inch high breakers. It was my time to love the air and sky and earth and whomever happened to pop by my backyard or asked me to hop in to theirs. Touring star ships and space stations of all kinds.
And then my body was scorched to hell and back and here we are.
Letting them go was ... you know how when you are discussing something over a hot cup of tea, and you stop to blow the steam away for a minute and touch the cup's edge to your lips to see if it's still too hot to drink and you set the cup down and look up and realize you've been talking to an empty saucer with a dry tea bag on it. Letting them go was ... you know how when a video cassette finishes it's run time and the credits have finished and it goes black for a few minutes and then snaps to static and you realize you are still holding the remote and peering into the static waiting for the television to turn itself off, but there is another several minutes of static instead and you find yourself watching the blue input screen while the player labors, hitches, and then begins to rewind itself. Letting them go was like that.
Part of me is angry that I didn't realize it sooner. Part of me is angry that I let myself trot along, tail wagging, tongue out and teeth yip yapping away, not understanding the hands waving were from the insides of car windows, not the other side of the road on the side walk, a couple of paw skips away to pat my nose, scratch my ear, and let me lick their palms.
Part of me is a little lost. So what now? The business of being an adult? The business of being single? Thirty two is around the corner. Some people I know will be retiring at fifty. Fifty five. Some people I know will be thinking about second kids, third cars, vacation homes, second marriages... my life expectancy is somewhere out there in the high sixties, low seventies. So what now? The game is halfway over and what?
Am I ever going to write anything of significance. I do write for myself first and foremost. I used to do it with the hopes of being recognized somewhere or paraded around like something special. Am I special? No, just a little weird. Okay, a bit weird. I will. Not yet. At least not in my mind. Thirty years to go and many more times to keep trying to set the type just the way I want it. Thirty years to make the words hit other ears the way they hit my own. I don't know if it will ever work. It would certainly help if I could go one year without some cataclysmic injury eating up a third of a year to heal.
Will I be single forever? Yeah, probably. I've been torn up and spit out enough times, unrequited enough times, blissfully lulled to nothing, cut off and scorched enough times, left behind enough times, pushed away enough, to where I simply don't want to feel that again. Much like having your skin cooked off, the scars are forever. Maybe in ten years I'll think about it seriously again. Maybe I'll quit smoking too. Maybe I'll just croak off quietly long before then from some odd organ failure I can't see coming.
There is, oddly enough, a dent in all of the fingernails of my right hand, from the burn where all of the cuticles were traumatized and cooked, that has been slowly growing it's way toward the finger tips to be clipped. Consistent along each finger. I now know exactly how long it takes for my fingernails to grow on my right hand. Look on the bright side.
So what now for 2017? I don't know. I was, as I wrap this up, thinking about going to buy a pouch of tobacco to roll some cigarettes. I might. I stopped enjoying smoking five years ago. It's a way to mark time, nothing more. Thirty some odd years to go. I'll probably have to start some kind of heart medication in my 40's if I don't fix what I put into my body and stretch food stamps more effectively... maybe cut out the beef and pork, more frozen vegetables and dried beans (fruit never keeps long enough). What's the use? An extra ten, maybe twenty, years for what? May as well, push on, I suppose. I still can't grow a full beard or shave my face to bare skin. I'm not getting any taller. I'm not exactly waiting around for anyone. Might as well go for a walk, come home and burn a couple. Get some good sleep. Wake up and do it again. We'll have time for music, 2017. Time for more poetry and stories too. Short ones, long ones, whatever strikes your fancy you scruffy little rascal. Whatever happens, I'll be there for you, never forget that. We'll forge some aluminum and keep exploring. Do it for the love the art and the unknown. There are worlds I've only begun to map. The star fields are massive. Time is not.
///Daedelus- "Perchance A Bit"
I thought fracturing my jaw was the worst pain I would ever feel and be able to stand through and that something like that would never happen again. And then I fried off 15% of my skin with 370 degree oil in second and deep second degree burns bad enough that I couldn't walk or use my hand for weeks. That was the worst pain I have ever felt. The first week or so it was a chilly feeling, like when air blows across your teeth very quickly and it feels like you've just bitten into a snowball at the same time. As hair follicles and skin began to grow back in odd colors and scales the pain got worse and more intense, but I was happy because at least I knew some sort of skin would eventually be there to protect the naked weeping flesh eventually. It was so many weeks I don't even remember exactly. I think the last scales scraped away to serviceable skin some time in late December after it happened in September. It was an eternity.
Definitely not what I intended when I said I wanted to work on my scarification sleeve at the beginning of the year. Looking forward: I don't want to feel anything remotely close to that again. Can we please go back to dealing with occasional week long bouts of lower lumbar nerve pain and the occasional lancing ice pick stab of hip joint nerve pinch. That's fine, by comparison. I laugh saying it, but I am pressing my palms together and pointing them at the sky: please universe, don't hurt me like that again, but if you do - make it a clean break.
I did finally get around to procuring a set of tattoo guns. I also did not get around to using them. A third of my year disappeared trying to heal up from the burns. It wasn't even just the burns that broke me low, it was learning how to use my hand again and build strength back into it. It was rebuilding the musculature in my hips and joints in learning how to walk longer and longer distances and stand for longer periods of time. At one point I could walk, but I literally had to sit down and raise my heel above my heart every five or ten feet because the throbbing pressure of my veins trying to push blood down and back up to my heart felt like my leg was getting torn to the bone by a leather whip.
The year started off pretty grand. All of the work was more or less finished. I'd survived, what was to that point, the worst injury I'd suffered to date and if you can take ten weeks of pain and rehab from a fractured and dislocated jaw, you can take anything. Music was on the horizon and I had a keyboard set up that I was diddling with. I got a cool old motorcycle with part of my Christmas bonus, an old Honda that I still have sitting in the backyard that I want to eventually build into a cafe racer style bike you might see on an old pastel chalk poster advertisement if you lived in racing country back in the 70's. I had a new basketball and had free time to exercise and hit the basketball courts now and then to indulge my sports fantasies. I was really getting into the video game Minecraft and was seeing poetry from a little bit of a different angle.
Graphic design was coming along and my friendships were pretty free flowing as far as I could tell. I was making big plans to create sculptures and designs for some of my friends that I wanted to show instead of just tell them that I cared about them. Some projects were coming along nicely through planning sketches and rough practice designs and concept proofs. With some of my free time I was able to visit people I normally could not make time for and with that little extra bit of money I was able to go out with them to places they wanted to go and eat and drink things I never would under usual circumstances. Life was wheeling and dealing and possibilities were turning into realities. The only real problem I had was making time to keep up with everything at a reasonable pace and I was making it work.
The Summer was hot and long and I did get into a funk wondering what was next. Who doesn't feel some of that funk in the middle of Summer? When everything feels okay it is natural to wonder if everything is supposed to feel that okay. Are you supposed to feel happy, content? It's normal to question. I did get to thinking about other people I know and where they are in their lives and where I am in mine and I started to think about what more I would have to do to experience that kind of comfort and security. I started to, after my birthday in April, start to believe that there could be a way that I could have that too if I kept at it and kept on trucking with high hopes and kept in touch with people and kept allowing them in to my lives.
The facts started to creep in. Started to trickle in. The realization broke in that nothing would change. They're still drifting away faster than that distance can ever be closed. They've only been kind enough not to tell you that you're messaging a part of their lives they don't have time for. So I spent more of the Summer falling away into the night skies and fire pits and walks through the storm tunnels to sit by the river's edges and pull back the fabric of those nights to watch the bridge lights glimmer on the inch high breakers. It was my time to love the air and sky and earth and whomever happened to pop by my backyard or asked me to hop in to theirs. Touring star ships and space stations of all kinds.
And then my body was scorched to hell and back and here we are.
Letting them go was ... you know how when you are discussing something over a hot cup of tea, and you stop to blow the steam away for a minute and touch the cup's edge to your lips to see if it's still too hot to drink and you set the cup down and look up and realize you've been talking to an empty saucer with a dry tea bag on it. Letting them go was ... you know how when a video cassette finishes it's run time and the credits have finished and it goes black for a few minutes and then snaps to static and you realize you are still holding the remote and peering into the static waiting for the television to turn itself off, but there is another several minutes of static instead and you find yourself watching the blue input screen while the player labors, hitches, and then begins to rewind itself. Letting them go was like that.
Part of me is angry that I didn't realize it sooner. Part of me is angry that I let myself trot along, tail wagging, tongue out and teeth yip yapping away, not understanding the hands waving were from the insides of car windows, not the other side of the road on the side walk, a couple of paw skips away to pat my nose, scratch my ear, and let me lick their palms.
Part of me is a little lost. So what now? The business of being an adult? The business of being single? Thirty two is around the corner. Some people I know will be retiring at fifty. Fifty five. Some people I know will be thinking about second kids, third cars, vacation homes, second marriages... my life expectancy is somewhere out there in the high sixties, low seventies. So what now? The game is halfway over and what?
Am I ever going to write anything of significance. I do write for myself first and foremost. I used to do it with the hopes of being recognized somewhere or paraded around like something special. Am I special? No, just a little weird. Okay, a bit weird. I will. Not yet. At least not in my mind. Thirty years to go and many more times to keep trying to set the type just the way I want it. Thirty years to make the words hit other ears the way they hit my own. I don't know if it will ever work. It would certainly help if I could go one year without some cataclysmic injury eating up a third of a year to heal.
Will I be single forever? Yeah, probably. I've been torn up and spit out enough times, unrequited enough times, blissfully lulled to nothing, cut off and scorched enough times, left behind enough times, pushed away enough, to where I simply don't want to feel that again. Much like having your skin cooked off, the scars are forever. Maybe in ten years I'll think about it seriously again. Maybe I'll quit smoking too. Maybe I'll just croak off quietly long before then from some odd organ failure I can't see coming.
There is, oddly enough, a dent in all of the fingernails of my right hand, from the burn where all of the cuticles were traumatized and cooked, that has been slowly growing it's way toward the finger tips to be clipped. Consistent along each finger. I now know exactly how long it takes for my fingernails to grow on my right hand. Look on the bright side.
So what now for 2017? I don't know. I was, as I wrap this up, thinking about going to buy a pouch of tobacco to roll some cigarettes. I might. I stopped enjoying smoking five years ago. It's a way to mark time, nothing more. Thirty some odd years to go. I'll probably have to start some kind of heart medication in my 40's if I don't fix what I put into my body and stretch food stamps more effectively... maybe cut out the beef and pork, more frozen vegetables and dried beans (fruit never keeps long enough). What's the use? An extra ten, maybe twenty, years for what? May as well, push on, I suppose. I still can't grow a full beard or shave my face to bare skin. I'm not getting any taller. I'm not exactly waiting around for anyone. Might as well go for a walk, come home and burn a couple. Get some good sleep. Wake up and do it again. We'll have time for music, 2017. Time for more poetry and stories too. Short ones, long ones, whatever strikes your fancy you scruffy little rascal. Whatever happens, I'll be there for you, never forget that. We'll forge some aluminum and keep exploring. Do it for the love the art and the unknown. There are worlds I've only begun to map. The star fields are massive. Time is not.
///Daedelus- "Perchance A Bit"
5/19/16
That Instant
you remember you left your spare pack of smokes on your desk and run over the cost/benefit analysis of running back up to your apartment versus going on an evening walk without them before closing and locking the door.
2/13/16
That Instant
you can sense the coming out of depression, but it may be the eye of the hurricane, and you look around for what has changed and most everything was where it left off and you wish there was something agent to proclaim.
1/8/16
The Year End Look
Never forget that any day you do not think about killing yourself is a pretty damn good day. Let's run the damage report to begin. One concussion. One fractured jaw. Pretty okay. What the hell, did we learn? What is the outlook on this year? I am afraid of saying "I don't know." It's all there. I don't want to sift through it. Slug through it. I want to try to take my reference point from the year end look to begin 2015 and see where we go; so let's go!
First of all, caution paid off. Before the major injury to my face, everything was humming on the hardware. When you suffer a debilitating injury, a person cannot help slipping into ways to deal with that pain. No friends were lost and no new real friends were won. Relationships grew deeper and more sovereign. The realization that the only person who can take care of you at the bottom line, when bone strikes metal, is you and the only person you can rely on absolutely, the only person you can control with high fidelity is you. Everyone else are variables. Your friends will help you and attempt to intercede and interject. Some who do are tourists. That is acceptable. Emotional tourism is a fact of life.
Nice guys finish last, but they finish clean and if that means something to your heart then it is absolutely worth pursuing. You cannot wear hats that do not fit before they blow off in the wind or constrict the blood vessels in your forehead hard enough to give you a migraine. Through the incident, I learned that I am a violent person at heart, but the jacket around that bullet is a jacket formed in a forge of love, kindness, emotion and the ability to feel. Sure, sometimes you feel nothing and sympathy and empathy are things I have to manufacture, but I realized very quickly, unable to eat, laugh, smile, frown, grimace, sneeze or cough, that manufactured or not, however you arrive at it, rage and violence is not the way to go. Thinking back on it, had I lashed out and taken the governors off of myself and won the day instead of trying to talk it through and getting cold cocked, I would be sitting at home afraid to go out at night, worried that someone I did something to still remembers and is looking for me and I have no idea what their faces look like. In retrospect, I am fine with the outcome and more comfortable in my own skin for it. I know the switch is there. They do not. That is all the security I need. Sometimes I ask myself if I am being too nice. I ask myself if I am behaving too well. I shrug. I tell myself I am not a rat on a sinking ship. Certainly, I am not the king of the rats. There is much more to do with my life than project my violent heart on the screens of the world around me. What happens when the video skips and the rainbow scaled dragon leaps across the screen and azure clouds belching constellations and weapons blueprints? Focus less on projections and more on allowing that mean streak to roll. Why guide it? Kick back and watch the waves break and listen to the sound. A person doesn't stand at the sea's lip and scream at the waves. Attempt to enjoy it, understand where they are from, listen to the sound, and watch the sun set. Nice guys finish last; violent guys finish dead.
I am pressing myself toward creating music. A good friend of mine is fairly deep into the art and it is intriguing. I didn't talk about it much last year because I didn't expect it to come forward in the ways that it did. I didn't compose a single story last year. I did, but I did not write a single one down. There is no writer's block. Task lock engaged pretty hard through the year. What I thought would be three months off turned into three, then four, months of person to person tasking. Exchanging information at a very high rate. Person to person relationships are still amazing difficult to me to this day. I can do it. I CAN do it. It takes heaven, earth, and hell out of me to make it happen. It is like cutting off one's own digits one at a time. Day by day. Another knuckle. Another knuckle. Another knuckle. At the palm? Next digit. Fingernail. Knuckle. Another knuckle. Another knuckle. Another knuckle. At the palm? Next digit.
On the cusp of actual free time, I am typing with nubs. The fingers are growing back. Healing the psychological wounds. It's amazing to think about how I am still alive. Think about the conversations that lead to continuing to soldier on. There were two very bad psychological breaking points that I did not see coming. I know it does not mean that I am getting better. It doesn't mean that I'm getting worse either. I haven't abandoned writing. It's grown distant. More intangible than it's ever been. "What's the point?" When so many outside forces are bearing down on you and you don't answer the phone and it goes 'click'. I laugh and cry because you never know if the next phone call is going to be the one in the chamber.
The year was severely back loaded with surprises and paperwork. I am still working on the sleeve of scarification. I still use the strokes on my face as a daily reminder to never forget what I cannot go back to. I am envious sometimes that some people have "home"s. I nearly slipped up. It was a phenomenal year for seeing my sister. She is wonderful and sprite. The suggestions creep in: open the door a little. Do not. Do not ever. I remind myself each morning that I am where I am with what freedom and freedoms I do have by, to coin my father's phrase "pruning." To let them back in is to let years and years of work fall away. The garden is not beautiful. It is in animal and entity. Do stellar objects have a soul and intent? Yes. I will not subject myself to it again. Ever. I will never go back. "I don't hate you either, but I really don't like you." The kind phrase he put together after I finally told him I didn't hate him. I wasn't lying. No one was asked to be born. You cannot hate your point of origin. It is you. Whether you like it or not. The only thing separating him from outright hate is the blood connection.
If you will, allow me this thought experiment:
Your memories begin where they will. Your father is just some guy you are forced to live with for the first 24 years of your life. Can you hate him? Yes. Now, that guy happens to be the person who impregnated the womb you came out of. You realize you would not exist, save for his cock. Can you hate him? Well, we're all here now and conscious. Yes and no. If there is a flake, a sliver, a hair between hate and intense "fuck him and his whole set up" to quote Josh Norman, yes. The only thing stopping me from outright hatred is the unfortunate fact that he decided to create another person with her (which holds her culpable too; is where the pass card comes in, but the general manager and the head coach come and go as a pair). It is kind of funny to wonder who the owner is. I laugh thinking about a god as the team owner. God is like "what the fuck, we need to move this franchise and clean house." The commissioner is saying, god's god, is saying "aye Danny, you've got to do something with this team, ticket sales are bombing."
The early months of the year was a fantastic cruise of steady work and hand tools. When everything boiled down to getting people to talk to one another and getting people to a place to sign forms, things got dicey. I left a few relationships behind in 2015. I realized I will never be my brother's equal and he will never see the world through my lens. Same thing with my older sister. If I never see either one of them again I will not be better for it, but I will never be worse for it either. Not the case with my little sister. Every time I get to see her I learn something new and a new way to be. My family doesn't shrink year by year. The depth of my connection with the folks around me that I can call and respond with as family grows. No love has been lost, though some has changed as their relationships to their loved ones and their religions changes.
I think, as we loop around the year and close in on the last things, we are moving in an appropriate direction. The death threats are real. Make no mistake. My love for the friends that I can call family in my new colony is real. My love for my little sister is real. My ambivalence toward my elder siblings is real. As I get older, my tolerance for pain increases as a function of my diminishing indestructibility. I feel sad for connections that burned out faster than I thought they would, but everyone has their own lives and what is convenient and warm and loving to you is harassment and pipe dreaming and gaudy and ancient and plastic and misplaced to them.
The reason no one talks to you may be because your ability to survive is so tightly tied to your ability to carry a conversation with yourself and the other human beings around you are polite enough, kind enough, human enough, to not interrupt.
The takeaway from 2015 is that we are more conscious than ever before. We still feel and we still can. We can love and we can hate and we will take caution. Our days are numbered and taking the most out of each one is not important at all. We will never be famous. We will never be complete. Our family is not the family we were born into, but we can run operating systems on top of each other to make a complete system. You're not born alone and you will not ever, ever, die alone. Waste your breath, waste your time, but do not trick yourself into believing a moment is ever wasted in putting down your hammer, your knife, your gun, your fire, your heart string marionette, your pen, your piss jar, your hat with matching gloves, your shoes, your cigarette, your car keys, your lube, your teeth, your comb, eyeshadow, rubber band, your space suit, your glasses, your sword, your helmet, means nothing.
2015 taught me about faith in people. Faith in friends. They don't have to know everything about you to know where you are from. They don't have to tell you what you mean to them to understand you should pick up the damn phone now and then. Sometimes it works the opposite way. You don't have to worry your pretty head about tabs. They're watching and waiting the same way you are. Fires on hillsides miles apart on the same planet. Give them the credit due yourself. I love you. It was a good year. The friends that I do have and the friends that I can call family sincerely, from Houston to NYC to California to Washington to Baltimore to Michigan... well, it's America off of the top of my head... ain't no family overseas. The point is this: I am not alone in 2015.
I don't know what 2016 will bring. I am taking on new jobs and expanding limits of circuitry and I am afraid. It is going to be messy by my standards. The outlook is heavy and hardline and will take a focus I have not had to muster before. The bonus will be a new body for this red dragon. And, and, and, no one will have to die to get there, yeah? Yeah! How good is that. How great is that. It will not be nose to the grind stone. 2016 will be about how far do you trust me? I promise you that you will not be able to throw me that far. I weigh upwards of 185 pounds. It's only going to get heavier as I get back into the gym after being forced to take three months off when I screwed up and got my face fractured. How far can you throw 200 pounds? Joking. I do think trust will come into play in a big way this year. Trust in caution, trust in going through the motions of writing to find my muse again, trust in friends to standby and trust in friends to see their vision along their lines and do what is asked of me without question.
Let's make 2016 about trust and make progress on our scarification sleeve.
Let's do it. It's not going to be comfortable. It's not going to be easy. If you want easy, kill yourself.
///How To Dress Well - "Us In The Sense of Forever"
///*the year end playlist up next
First of all, caution paid off. Before the major injury to my face, everything was humming on the hardware. When you suffer a debilitating injury, a person cannot help slipping into ways to deal with that pain. No friends were lost and no new real friends were won. Relationships grew deeper and more sovereign. The realization that the only person who can take care of you at the bottom line, when bone strikes metal, is you and the only person you can rely on absolutely, the only person you can control with high fidelity is you. Everyone else are variables. Your friends will help you and attempt to intercede and interject. Some who do are tourists. That is acceptable. Emotional tourism is a fact of life.
Nice guys finish last, but they finish clean and if that means something to your heart then it is absolutely worth pursuing. You cannot wear hats that do not fit before they blow off in the wind or constrict the blood vessels in your forehead hard enough to give you a migraine. Through the incident, I learned that I am a violent person at heart, but the jacket around that bullet is a jacket formed in a forge of love, kindness, emotion and the ability to feel. Sure, sometimes you feel nothing and sympathy and empathy are things I have to manufacture, but I realized very quickly, unable to eat, laugh, smile, frown, grimace, sneeze or cough, that manufactured or not, however you arrive at it, rage and violence is not the way to go. Thinking back on it, had I lashed out and taken the governors off of myself and won the day instead of trying to talk it through and getting cold cocked, I would be sitting at home afraid to go out at night, worried that someone I did something to still remembers and is looking for me and I have no idea what their faces look like. In retrospect, I am fine with the outcome and more comfortable in my own skin for it. I know the switch is there. They do not. That is all the security I need. Sometimes I ask myself if I am being too nice. I ask myself if I am behaving too well. I shrug. I tell myself I am not a rat on a sinking ship. Certainly, I am not the king of the rats. There is much more to do with my life than project my violent heart on the screens of the world around me. What happens when the video skips and the rainbow scaled dragon leaps across the screen and azure clouds belching constellations and weapons blueprints? Focus less on projections and more on allowing that mean streak to roll. Why guide it? Kick back and watch the waves break and listen to the sound. A person doesn't stand at the sea's lip and scream at the waves. Attempt to enjoy it, understand where they are from, listen to the sound, and watch the sun set. Nice guys finish last; violent guys finish dead.
I am pressing myself toward creating music. A good friend of mine is fairly deep into the art and it is intriguing. I didn't talk about it much last year because I didn't expect it to come forward in the ways that it did. I didn't compose a single story last year. I did, but I did not write a single one down. There is no writer's block. Task lock engaged pretty hard through the year. What I thought would be three months off turned into three, then four, months of person to person tasking. Exchanging information at a very high rate. Person to person relationships are still amazing difficult to me to this day. I can do it. I CAN do it. It takes heaven, earth, and hell out of me to make it happen. It is like cutting off one's own digits one at a time. Day by day. Another knuckle. Another knuckle. Another knuckle. At the palm? Next digit. Fingernail. Knuckle. Another knuckle. Another knuckle. Another knuckle. At the palm? Next digit.
On the cusp of actual free time, I am typing with nubs. The fingers are growing back. Healing the psychological wounds. It's amazing to think about how I am still alive. Think about the conversations that lead to continuing to soldier on. There were two very bad psychological breaking points that I did not see coming. I know it does not mean that I am getting better. It doesn't mean that I'm getting worse either. I haven't abandoned writing. It's grown distant. More intangible than it's ever been. "What's the point?" When so many outside forces are bearing down on you and you don't answer the phone and it goes 'click'. I laugh and cry because you never know if the next phone call is going to be the one in the chamber.
The year was severely back loaded with surprises and paperwork. I am still working on the sleeve of scarification. I still use the strokes on my face as a daily reminder to never forget what I cannot go back to. I am envious sometimes that some people have "home"s. I nearly slipped up. It was a phenomenal year for seeing my sister. She is wonderful and sprite. The suggestions creep in: open the door a little. Do not. Do not ever. I remind myself each morning that I am where I am with what freedom and freedoms I do have by, to coin my father's phrase "pruning." To let them back in is to let years and years of work fall away. The garden is not beautiful. It is in animal and entity. Do stellar objects have a soul and intent? Yes. I will not subject myself to it again. Ever. I will never go back. "I don't hate you either, but I really don't like you." The kind phrase he put together after I finally told him I didn't hate him. I wasn't lying. No one was asked to be born. You cannot hate your point of origin. It is you. Whether you like it or not. The only thing separating him from outright hate is the blood connection.
If you will, allow me this thought experiment:
Your memories begin where they will. Your father is just some guy you are forced to live with for the first 24 years of your life. Can you hate him? Yes. Now, that guy happens to be the person who impregnated the womb you came out of. You realize you would not exist, save for his cock. Can you hate him? Well, we're all here now and conscious. Yes and no. If there is a flake, a sliver, a hair between hate and intense "fuck him and his whole set up" to quote Josh Norman, yes. The only thing stopping me from outright hatred is the unfortunate fact that he decided to create another person with her (which holds her culpable too; is where the pass card comes in, but the general manager and the head coach come and go as a pair). It is kind of funny to wonder who the owner is. I laugh thinking about a god as the team owner. God is like "what the fuck, we need to move this franchise and clean house." The commissioner is saying, god's god, is saying "aye Danny, you've got to do something with this team, ticket sales are bombing."
The early months of the year was a fantastic cruise of steady work and hand tools. When everything boiled down to getting people to talk to one another and getting people to a place to sign forms, things got dicey. I left a few relationships behind in 2015. I realized I will never be my brother's equal and he will never see the world through my lens. Same thing with my older sister. If I never see either one of them again I will not be better for it, but I will never be worse for it either. Not the case with my little sister. Every time I get to see her I learn something new and a new way to be. My family doesn't shrink year by year. The depth of my connection with the folks around me that I can call and respond with as family grows. No love has been lost, though some has changed as their relationships to their loved ones and their religions changes.
I think, as we loop around the year and close in on the last things, we are moving in an appropriate direction. The death threats are real. Make no mistake. My love for the friends that I can call family in my new colony is real. My love for my little sister is real. My ambivalence toward my elder siblings is real. As I get older, my tolerance for pain increases as a function of my diminishing indestructibility. I feel sad for connections that burned out faster than I thought they would, but everyone has their own lives and what is convenient and warm and loving to you is harassment and pipe dreaming and gaudy and ancient and plastic and misplaced to them.
The reason no one talks to you may be because your ability to survive is so tightly tied to your ability to carry a conversation with yourself and the other human beings around you are polite enough, kind enough, human enough, to not interrupt.
The takeaway from 2015 is that we are more conscious than ever before. We still feel and we still can. We can love and we can hate and we will take caution. Our days are numbered and taking the most out of each one is not important at all. We will never be famous. We will never be complete. Our family is not the family we were born into, but we can run operating systems on top of each other to make a complete system. You're not born alone and you will not ever, ever, die alone. Waste your breath, waste your time, but do not trick yourself into believing a moment is ever wasted in putting down your hammer, your knife, your gun, your fire, your heart string marionette, your pen, your piss jar, your hat with matching gloves, your shoes, your cigarette, your car keys, your lube, your teeth, your comb, eyeshadow, rubber band, your space suit, your glasses, your sword, your helmet, means nothing.
2015 taught me about faith in people. Faith in friends. They don't have to know everything about you to know where you are from. They don't have to tell you what you mean to them to understand you should pick up the damn phone now and then. Sometimes it works the opposite way. You don't have to worry your pretty head about tabs. They're watching and waiting the same way you are. Fires on hillsides miles apart on the same planet. Give them the credit due yourself. I love you. It was a good year. The friends that I do have and the friends that I can call family sincerely, from Houston to NYC to California to Washington to Baltimore to Michigan... well, it's America off of the top of my head... ain't no family overseas. The point is this: I am not alone in 2015.
I don't know what 2016 will bring. I am taking on new jobs and expanding limits of circuitry and I am afraid. It is going to be messy by my standards. The outlook is heavy and hardline and will take a focus I have not had to muster before. The bonus will be a new body for this red dragon. And, and, and, no one will have to die to get there, yeah? Yeah! How good is that. How great is that. It will not be nose to the grind stone. 2016 will be about how far do you trust me? I promise you that you will not be able to throw me that far. I weigh upwards of 185 pounds. It's only going to get heavier as I get back into the gym after being forced to take three months off when I screwed up and got my face fractured. How far can you throw 200 pounds? Joking. I do think trust will come into play in a big way this year. Trust in caution, trust in going through the motions of writing to find my muse again, trust in friends to standby and trust in friends to see their vision along their lines and do what is asked of me without question.
Let's make 2016 about trust and make progress on our scarification sleeve.
Let's do it. It's not going to be comfortable. It's not going to be easy. If you want easy, kill yourself.
///How To Dress Well - "Us In The Sense of Forever"
///*the year end playlist up next
12/24/15
Prior To the Holidays
I want a tank for Christmas. Or a giant robot decked out in yellow, orange, and pink and black. Or a Gulf blue and orange Z car. Or a plot of land on which to build my miniature fortress.
I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year. He knows what he did. Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus. Robo Claus. I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot. I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa. That dude. That guy. Nuke the North Pole. I am already drawing up the campaign posters. That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny. The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice. It'll save the world. A few decades later, nuke the South Pole. Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time. You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.
It doesn't really feel like Christmas. I haven't talked much about holidays. We live in a different world now. The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds. I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am. It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays. I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time. I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected. A certain amount of migration. Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount. There's a massive difference.
For the first time I have put up evergreens! The sensation and scent is wonderful. Not a tree. I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own. I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window. I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year. Next year we will add some layers to the design. Ornaments too. It will be pretty spectacular. By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.
I think that is what may have been happening this year. A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course. Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them. All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.
The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline. I'm up for the challenge. I believe I am up for the challenge. It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world. It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is. A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.
I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life. It's not my new year. Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31. My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas. An odd alignment of perspectives I guess. I can't help chuckling. It is an odd confluence of parameters. At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.
I do not hate the holidays. All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay. Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated. Actually, I love them. Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least. Those ten years will fly.
///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance" when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.
I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year. He knows what he did. Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus. Robo Claus. I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot. I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa. That dude. That guy. Nuke the North Pole. I am already drawing up the campaign posters. That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny. The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice. It'll save the world. A few decades later, nuke the South Pole. Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time. You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.
It doesn't really feel like Christmas. I haven't talked much about holidays. We live in a different world now. The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds. I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am. It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays. I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time. I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected. A certain amount of migration. Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount. There's a massive difference.
For the first time I have put up evergreens! The sensation and scent is wonderful. Not a tree. I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own. I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window. I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year. Next year we will add some layers to the design. Ornaments too. It will be pretty spectacular. By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.
I think that is what may have been happening this year. A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course. Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them. All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.
The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline. I'm up for the challenge. I believe I am up for the challenge. It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world. It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is. A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.
I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life. It's not my new year. Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31. My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas. An odd alignment of perspectives I guess. I can't help chuckling. It is an odd confluence of parameters. At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.
I do not hate the holidays. All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay. Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated. Actually, I love them. Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least. Those ten years will fly.
///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance" when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.
11/6/15
At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity
Looking at my own reflection at the river, a wolf's head mask in the crook of my arm, I wonder how many there are like me. I wonder how many times I can roll the dice with instability before an immovable object meets an unstoppable force again. I try to skip rocks. I try to bat rocks with an aluminum bat given to me as a gift after I left the last one I had at home, bent into the shape of a boomerang. I wonder where I am going and if someone out there is going the same way I am. If we will carpool together and shout at each other, trying to figure out where exactly "there" is while the driver tries to figure how to get two wolves out of his car and regrets being a Samaritan.
Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink. One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud. The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship. Found. Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash! Mid-river. The current continues. I can't see my face, looking down. The angles aren't right. The light is not just so. The sun is not cooperating. Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.
Thinking about how people find their perfect match. At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me. Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic. Impossible. Incredible in its perfection and destruction. Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist. Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.
Happy and satisfied are two different things. The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief. As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true. Doomed. I laugh typing that. The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle. Dooooooomed! Of course not. Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat. I wonder what quantum decay looks like. I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them. Some of them, yes. None of them, also yes. Always at distance. Minding the fence. Minding the facilities. On the off chance they might be me. On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.
A moat. Sometimes the bridge is there. The gates open and ambassadors cross. I don't know what madness is. Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself? Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself? Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere? Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here. This is what I wanted. Few things truly scare me, in life. I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half. Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.
///Groove Armada - "At The River" ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.
Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink. One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud. The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship. Found. Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash! Mid-river. The current continues. I can't see my face, looking down. The angles aren't right. The light is not just so. The sun is not cooperating. Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.
Thinking about how people find their perfect match. At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me. Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic. Impossible. Incredible in its perfection and destruction. Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist. Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.
Happy and satisfied are two different things. The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief. As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true. Doomed. I laugh typing that. The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle. Dooooooomed! Of course not. Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat. I wonder what quantum decay looks like. I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them. Some of them, yes. None of them, also yes. Always at distance. Minding the fence. Minding the facilities. On the off chance they might be me. On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.
A moat. Sometimes the bridge is there. The gates open and ambassadors cross. I don't know what madness is. Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself? Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself? Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere? Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here. This is what I wanted. Few things truly scare me, in life. I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half. Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.
///Groove Armada - "At The River" ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.
5/15/15
I Don't Know, Man
It's difficult not to get sucked into a way of thinking that spirals out of control. When you consider how many of your lines of thinking, projected outward through time, end with a force quit the entire prospect of a future or futures gets dim. When you consider how many of your avenues end with the phrase "I try not to think about it."
Five years from now, I will still be working for peanuts. What's the point? Why bother setting goals at all? The ones that are attainable are so near and so small they mean next to nothing beside your peers. Change you can deem actionable is so incremental from outside perspectives as to appear to be no change at all. Five years from now you'll be able to afford to go out and socialize twice a month instead of once a month.
Life up to now has been heavily geared toward learning how to do more with less. Learning to deal with scraps and put pieces and parts together to make whole and useful things from what others discard. Learning to maximize and squeeze potential out of every little thing you find and adopt and consume. Will you ever get your degree? By the time you do, will you be able to do anything with it, twenty years behind the curve? What are your useful skills? "I can turn a pretty good wrench. I am terrified of crowds. I sometimes am paralyzed with depression. I've been told I cook pretty good chicken. I don't know, I try not to think about it."
The way of life I am capable of sustaining is far afield of most folks. Even if I were to "settle down" the undeniable and stark contrast between myself and the environments that have held sway in my engineering and make up will be more than enough to strain just about any relationship to a breaking point, given time. Love can only cover and suture so many fissures and canyons before a lover will realize my planet is not capable of supporting new life. So are we protracting our own death? Killing time and energy and spinning entropy into something beautiful enough that our decades long throes to come can at least bring some light and warm some hearts before it sputters out as the parts steadily fail beyond repair? "I don't know."
A reminder that you've worked so many years for freedom. While you are freer than you've ever been, you are still inside the compound. You still have to trick yourself into believing to keep on running. Perhaps adopt a belief system or religion. Not too fast or too far lest you ram headfirst into the bars. Sitting cross legged, picking at the grass beside the river and skipping a stone now and then, the undeniable scent of wrought iron creeps into the wind and you know the bars are there if you bring yourself to focus your eyes just inside the horizon's line. I try not to think about it. You've gotten out of the cell and into the yard outside of the yard where you're allowed to roam. You've earned visitation. A meal card for better food. The compound is vast. I try not to think about it, but I cannot forget.
/// Phantogram - "Running From the Cops" staring into a still lake of bass
Five years from now, I will still be working for peanuts. What's the point? Why bother setting goals at all? The ones that are attainable are so near and so small they mean next to nothing beside your peers. Change you can deem actionable is so incremental from outside perspectives as to appear to be no change at all. Five years from now you'll be able to afford to go out and socialize twice a month instead of once a month.
Life up to now has been heavily geared toward learning how to do more with less. Learning to deal with scraps and put pieces and parts together to make whole and useful things from what others discard. Learning to maximize and squeeze potential out of every little thing you find and adopt and consume. Will you ever get your degree? By the time you do, will you be able to do anything with it, twenty years behind the curve? What are your useful skills? "I can turn a pretty good wrench. I am terrified of crowds. I sometimes am paralyzed with depression. I've been told I cook pretty good chicken. I don't know, I try not to think about it."
The way of life I am capable of sustaining is far afield of most folks. Even if I were to "settle down" the undeniable and stark contrast between myself and the environments that have held sway in my engineering and make up will be more than enough to strain just about any relationship to a breaking point, given time. Love can only cover and suture so many fissures and canyons before a lover will realize my planet is not capable of supporting new life. So are we protracting our own death? Killing time and energy and spinning entropy into something beautiful enough that our decades long throes to come can at least bring some light and warm some hearts before it sputters out as the parts steadily fail beyond repair? "I don't know."
A reminder that you've worked so many years for freedom. While you are freer than you've ever been, you are still inside the compound. You still have to trick yourself into believing to keep on running. Perhaps adopt a belief system or religion. Not too fast or too far lest you ram headfirst into the bars. Sitting cross legged, picking at the grass beside the river and skipping a stone now and then, the undeniable scent of wrought iron creeps into the wind and you know the bars are there if you bring yourself to focus your eyes just inside the horizon's line. I try not to think about it. You've gotten out of the cell and into the yard outside of the yard where you're allowed to roam. You've earned visitation. A meal card for better food. The compound is vast. I try not to think about it, but I cannot forget.
/// Phantogram - "Running From the Cops" staring into a still lake of bass
2/12/15
Forgotten Pieces of Processes
One part of the process I always have to remember that is very important in life inside and outside of my heart and my mind is music. Not just music like noises or radio or background so that I can better divide and discern what might be real and what is artifact or relic or error, but actively listening to and pulling apart and submersing myself in music. It's not difficult to forget, but listening to music is incredibly important in my life. Sitting down to paper my pencil or pen or whatever is in my hand and ready to create falls dead. Instant death. Sometimes I can move things along and create a corpse or a rock or a tree or a dancer or lover or a struggle, but it is lifeless. Stale. Imagine being beyond death to a place where everything is dimensionless. I wonder where it comes from and I tinker with my process or my thoughts or turn the idea around to another side and hold it up to the light to see if anything sparks inside. Listening to music and breathing it in helps tremendously. I will run over the same sounds over and over again, picking them clean until the only thing left is a place holder in my music library and my mind settles inside that hole, quite comfortable, stable, and slowly, one replay at a time, dying. It's not easy to forget, but I do forget that a valuable piece of the process is pouring in unfamiliar music to help keep the system turning with any degree of fidelity.
10/17/14
Stresses and Stressors and Life On My Tardis
Life is stressful and full of stressors. That's not news to anyone. Time is money and money can be converted into time. The time it takes you to read this is time you could've spent making money. Or maybe it is time you are spending making money. Getting paid to read blogs. Or maybe getting paid to do something, anything, besides read blogs. Shame on you. The time it takes to write this could have been spent working as a dishwasher at Eat n' Park. Or could've been spent getting shopping carts at Kmart and trying not to completely lose it and burn the place to the ground.
Life has many different stresses to it. Some of those stresses are more intense than others. Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake. You have to answer the bell. Eventually. It's critical to your survival.
The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors. Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world. If the world were not shared. If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge. A single leap from stresses to peace. A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world. There is no single leap and there never will be.
To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors. Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own. The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe. By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder? Hilarious movie. I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it. Came out a while ago. Should be available for rental or something by now. Robert Downey Jr's in it. Tom Cruise to. Surprisingly good.
Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen. It's troubling sometimes. From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge. Return to the two channel direct connection. The single bridge. It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.
Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward. I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at. I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level. A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence. My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging. I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now. It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in? Very little. The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself. "Attaboy, chap! If you work hard enough you'll get there." Eat me.].
At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own. The question is the conversion rate. If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not. Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.
With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living. Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted? How fast is that going to kill you. How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole? My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered. I'll do without, thank you. If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider. Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep. I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end. I am sorry. My mind will not work that way. I wish many nights and days that it did. That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American. It doesn't. I won't get to enjoy that. I won't get to see that. But hey, I could always win the lottery or something. Wouldn't that be a gas.
Life on my Tardis is pretty okay. Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks. I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next. I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means. No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they? I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30. I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count. Besides, that ended in utter disaster too. I will not do it. If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now. Simple as that. Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship. Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel. Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own. "You should have gone to the hospital!" Yeah, right. Of course. It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to. As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out. Life aboard my Tardis. One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.
What day is it? Sunday, 6 P.M. Are you sure? Yeah. No. Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.! What the hell happened? It's Tuesday!? What happened to Monday? Weren't we supposed to be somewhere? It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday. Are you sure? Well, okay. We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything. Yes, that will be Wednesday. I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now. What do you mean we're 5 miles from home. This is a park bench? Come on, man. Get it together. The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius. Except when it doesn't.
Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)" There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music. This is one of my favorites of late. So dark. So playful. So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.
Life has many different stresses to it. Some of those stresses are more intense than others. Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake. You have to answer the bell. Eventually. It's critical to your survival.
The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors. Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world. If the world were not shared. If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge. A single leap from stresses to peace. A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world. There is no single leap and there never will be.
To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors. Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own. The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe. By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder? Hilarious movie. I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it. Came out a while ago. Should be available for rental or something by now. Robert Downey Jr's in it. Tom Cruise to. Surprisingly good.
Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen. It's troubling sometimes. From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge. Return to the two channel direct connection. The single bridge. It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.
Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward. I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at. I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level. A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence. My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging. I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now. It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in? Very little. The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself. "Attaboy, chap! If you work hard enough you'll get there." Eat me.].
At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own. The question is the conversion rate. If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not. Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.
With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living. Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted? How fast is that going to kill you. How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole? My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered. I'll do without, thank you. If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider. Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep. I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end. I am sorry. My mind will not work that way. I wish many nights and days that it did. That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American. It doesn't. I won't get to enjoy that. I won't get to see that. But hey, I could always win the lottery or something. Wouldn't that be a gas.
Life on my Tardis is pretty okay. Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks. I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next. I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means. No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they? I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30. I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count. Besides, that ended in utter disaster too. I will not do it. If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now. Simple as that. Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship. Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel. Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own. "You should have gone to the hospital!" Yeah, right. Of course. It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to. As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out. Life aboard my Tardis. One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.
What day is it? Sunday, 6 P.M. Are you sure? Yeah. No. Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.! What the hell happened? It's Tuesday!? What happened to Monday? Weren't we supposed to be somewhere? It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday. Are you sure? Well, okay. We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything. Yes, that will be Wednesday. I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now. What do you mean we're 5 miles from home. This is a park bench? Come on, man. Get it together. The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius. Except when it doesn't.
Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)" There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music. This is one of my favorites of late. So dark. So playful. So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.
2/24/14
The Difficulty With Plural Being
There is a stark difficulty that faces harsh light when existing on multiple planes, the first being sudden hunger and damn near undeniable sleepiness that strikes at inopportune hours. You can't remember with reliable accuracy the last time you ate, so you make up stories to keep the rest of the story in line. Sometimes, though, they're accurate memories of eating denied with the fullsomeness of passion that denotes some kind of dedication to the farce and the enforced and necessary truth.
Social media contributes to the complication, making sign posts more difficult to spot, but they are there. Multiple accounts in multiple names. A multiplying outlet of personas allowing for better and more extensive development of those personas. When does it operate to a fault? Active contribution toward managing split personalities becoming a game of musical chairs?
Limit the number of chairs? Add definition and resolution? Or take the pills. Fastidious compartmentalization. And further compartmentalization and specialization. To be called upon at will or at least with some prefabrication, editing, summoning, and purpose, because that is the difference between the ill and the capable. The ability to select, observe, compensate, and respond in a reasonable and human fashion.
Everyone is plural, their "plural" being unanimous instead of fractured.
What happens when dominance is completely unpredictable, highly divided, and deeply embattled one against the other and prone, all the while, toward miscommunication? Are there special exceptions? Is there an "out"? When do you have to press the hand dealt and keep the game going, come whatever consequences, and when do you have the right to put the cards down and say "this is what is here, they add up to nonsense in terms of what the rules of the game dictate, and I do not want to play with them, have no heart in them, and would like to be dealt a new set or at least counted out of this particular round, but not necessarily the game."
I think the long sentence is probably the grounds for the answer. No matter how difficult or nonsensical the answer seems to me, the majority is fairly straightforward and a lot easier to comprehend. It does not hurt that they are alike too. I think that is one of the things that continues to vex me.
///The Echo Friendly - "Same Mistakes"
Social media contributes to the complication, making sign posts more difficult to spot, but they are there. Multiple accounts in multiple names. A multiplying outlet of personas allowing for better and more extensive development of those personas. When does it operate to a fault? Active contribution toward managing split personalities becoming a game of musical chairs?
Limit the number of chairs? Add definition and resolution? Or take the pills. Fastidious compartmentalization. And further compartmentalization and specialization. To be called upon at will or at least with some prefabrication, editing, summoning, and purpose, because that is the difference between the ill and the capable. The ability to select, observe, compensate, and respond in a reasonable and human fashion.
Everyone is plural, their "plural" being unanimous instead of fractured.
What happens when dominance is completely unpredictable, highly divided, and deeply embattled one against the other and prone, all the while, toward miscommunication? Are there special exceptions? Is there an "out"? When do you have to press the hand dealt and keep the game going, come whatever consequences, and when do you have the right to put the cards down and say "this is what is here, they add up to nonsense in terms of what the rules of the game dictate, and I do not want to play with them, have no heart in them, and would like to be dealt a new set or at least counted out of this particular round, but not necessarily the game."
I think the long sentence is probably the grounds for the answer. No matter how difficult or nonsensical the answer seems to me, the majority is fairly straightforward and a lot easier to comprehend. It does not hurt that they are alike too. I think that is one of the things that continues to vex me.
///The Echo Friendly - "Same Mistakes"
1/10/14
The Year End Look
I am tempted to attack some things there is not time enough yet to tackle. I am okay with and respect and receive the temptation because the day is nearing and we stand on the cusp of something truly deafening with nothing between us beyond time itself. Time's only enemy is patience. The armory is stocked. Let's knock down time first.
The 2013 year end look is a strange one. Strange to me. I crashed a car again. For the second time in my life totaled an automobile. The injury was an injury I never knew before and thought I would never return from. It was probably something near or spot on to a partially herniated disc. I am used to pain. Used to adjusting for pain because a voice inside says it'll end eventually if you simply don't do it again. This pain brought me literally to my knees every time I got out of bed for work or to meet someone or otherwise do anything that did not require lying down. It was unbelievable. Literally unbelievable. It made me tear at myself and my bed sheets and scream in the afternoon and throw fits. Everything worked fine except standing and walking. In 2013 I became very aware of my age.
A friend of mine put it best: ten years ago, you hurt your back, you shotgun a beer and a whiskey short, have a smoke, and get on with life. Now? You hurt your back and you can drink 'til you cannot feel a damn thing, but that shit comes back as soon as your spine comes back on line. You can't go through life partially shut down.
It's true. Another year older, just one year removed from invincibility, or something damn near it, I am aware, acutely aware of physical limitations. Invincibility has been thoroughly dispelled in 2013. Respect for the injured and more feeble than I has been reinforced to incredible degrees. Of course it didn't help falling down multiple flights of stairs after the car accident. That one is on me. I should have known where I was standing on the fire escape and not allowed someone to high five me hard enough to push me backward into the night air. I guess I'm kind of a good fall guy. I should have broken my neck or an arm or at least a finger on my way down, getting something stuck in the stairs and landing made of iron grating, but all I remember, three days after the car accident, was waking up looking at the top of the fire escape and their back door and the little light and thinking "wait a minute? wasn't I just there? Why am I here?"
I went to a casino for the first time (with no money) and someone gave me a $100 chip. I can count the number of times I've held $100 bills in my hands with intent to spend instead of pay on one hand. Two of the five times were to pay for cars. I didn't get to use it for fun. I did get some long standing necessities taken care of though and a bill paid. One step closer to actual freedom.
I taught myself to drive stick for real in 2013. On a rear wheel drive truck. I also learned how to use torque and how to use horsepower. Yes, they're linked, but now I understand when to use which. When to use a little work fast and a lot of work slowly. Of course there's always the golden peak when you can use both at the same time, but high end cars are out of the cards for at least another half decade. I'm salivating thinking about it. My dream garage is still the same. Still stocked up with late 80s Japanese machines and American muscle. Some day, sweetheart.
2013 also taught me who my friends are and who my friends are not. For much of the year I tried to be a friend to the world. A friend to everyone who would have my ear and have my words, however fleeting, but I soon recognized (by soon, I mean it took the entire year) that what I was counting as friendship was not being counted or similarly given weight by the people I was ascribing it too. It was heart breaking. Truly heart breaking. I remember crying on and off for several days as each episode unwound. The penultimate was a multiple day thanksgiving celebration that was supposed to be fun. It was, to an extant. I was too much a different stripe to blend in and it was hurtful to me to be expected to do so, but maybe they didn't really expect me to blend that well. Maybe they expected me to realize sooner than later that I should've left. As it stands I only over stayed by a day or two before I recognized where I was and where I could do myself better. Coming home was beautiful on that day.
The ultimate was when I was left stranded by people I thought I could count as friends. My truck died and a true friend bailed me out. I've grown intimate with my truck of late. Gotten to know her inside and out. 2013 reminded me of the bullshit premise my birth father put to me about a car that was supposed to be my reward for graduating Carnegie Mellon (which did not happen) that was his vision for us rebuilding a beater BMW (which flew in the face of everything automotive I actually do espouse and believe in) and it's been tremendous and heart stoppingly gorgeous keeping that truck on the road and at the same time by turns puzzling that anyone, let alone the sack of nuts that raised you for 18 years, could miss your values that hard.
It does make me laugh though, because there have been more than a few times I could've used an extra set of hands to get the job done and I thought about the gents and lassies that could call up their dads or moms and schedule a weekend under the hood or chassis without getting violently ill or stomach ulcers. I appreciate that about people. Sometimes I ask them about their parents because it's practically porn to me.
In 2013 I learned to slow down scarification. In tandem with realizing that time is getting on I also realized if I ever do have children or adopt children there will be questions for me to answer too. Questions I am prepared to answer and questions that will have to be answered as my nose and ears get bigger and nothing else does and my eyes continue to sink and my brow continues to crease. The reminders still remain necessary and beautiful obelisks and world wonders to human history and I thank us for them always. I need them. Some mistakes you can make multiple times. Some mistakes you cannot afford to retread because lives are in the balance and the house does not always win, but you can never go back. You will die. You will be consumed, make no mistake. Every time I look in the mirror I am reminded and I need to be. Inside of your skull you are your friend more often than not. Outside of your skull is a flipped story.
The same problem does abound, though. My development, my passion for writing, remains far too grounded for my tastes. There is patience though. There is gestation. There is still the thirst for whimsy and dreamland. There is where I lie and I know it. I can feel it. The attack is coming. The all hail that tells me "forward now!" I can taste it. 2013 was about defining starting points. Defining relationships. Defining the scope of the maintenance necessary for progress. Did it have to take a year? Yes. 2013 was about defining severance. Defining which and what kinds of quests were worth pursuing. 2013 was a very long think.
The funniest part about 2013, it came around the tail end, was realizing that just because you can identify the group of people that you are attracted to does not automatically make them accessible or easily located. You meet just as many air heads and space cases exploring your same sex as your opposite sex. The worst, the most lip curling, the most eye squinting, experiences are had when you meet a carbon copy of someone you'd cultivate a relationship with straight, gay. In my mind I'm thinking ten minutes in to the conversation: "god damn it, not this again. Really? You exist here too? Who dropped you on your head? Why do you have fifteen pairs of shoes and a $200 dollar love seat in an apartment you're paying $900 a month for? Why are we going out to a bar downtown when there's one at the corner while you have a fridge full of wine and candy imports? Three pairs of sunglasses? Sunglasses??"
I don't know what 2014 is going to bring. I think my year to year expectations have grown foggier and foggier so I will add some definition. I think this year (no resolutions) I will try to fuck a woman for some variety. The whole "no concussions" thing failed miserably. I had four in 2013 so I think it's fair to rule that out. Broke my nose twice too, so that's out. I want to do more art in 2014 too. Life's demands put way too much on my plate to really put anything outside of my skull to look at and enjoy, and I'm not saying for you to enjoy, I'm saying for me and we/us to enjoy.
Now that things have been better defined through thirteen, in fourteen I would like to explore that framework and see what and where it builds to. New territories and frontiers. I want a new scar for 2014. A scar for the turn. A scar for the "maybe" identified because in twelve the maybe had no identity. 2014 will be a quest for the whimsical. A seeking out of the imaginary and a protecting of the physical. We achieved many grown up tasks and came into adulthood through 2013 from its humble beginning in 2012's confusion. It's time to explore the limits of what that adultness and understanding and thinking and domestication can ring when our bell is rung hard enough. What music will it make? Will it make music or fall apart with the strikes?
For the first time, in 2013, I had to shave down my knuckles with a pumice stone. The scar tissue accumulated so thickly that I couldn't open and splay my fingers easily without fighting against it. Too much contact. I cannot fall into the trap of abusing myself in lieu of taking abuse just to feel normal and normalcy. That's not okay. It is not okay to do that. 2013, a lot of 2013 was about learning what it is not okay to do. Platonic spooning was okay. Talking about platonic spooning to their friends indirectly and accidentally by way of mentioning conversations they were not a part of, but must have happened after they left, later on when we and they met again is not okay. It should be though. Don't break my heart that way. Break it any other way, but that is pure... muffed intent. I do not have time for that in 2014.
I have accumulated old man hands at the ripe age of 28. I am a destroyer parked in a lagoon and rusting. You fucking cowards. 2013 was also about rebuilding my space craft. I had to tear it apart and rebuild it. It was gathering too many parts and pieces superfluous and useful once and never again. When one part failed I hooked and slaved another component to keep it running. Fourteen is streamlining. Keep the violence down at all costs. The love too. Control. 2014 is focusing on control and dynamics. It's easy to glass a city. It's hard to embrace one and construct. Consider the "what will and what can we build here?"
It does make me laugh though, to consider that I may be at a new base line measurement. It is enticing. So many things happened. So much time spent alone and too much time spent in contact. It does not add up to my satisfaction. I will boost literary output in 2014. It does not matter if you want to do it, it has to be done for your own sake.
2014 is action. Redesigns are on the table. Stand up act 9 is on the table. Before both will come the year end playlist. Let's go! No sneak peeks this time. So much left out too, but we'll get it in later.
///Shiny Toy Guns - "Major Tom" ...near Earth orbit
7/19/13
The Takedown, Hold Overs, Creation, and Airlock to Spacewalk
"That time is now." It's time to tear it all apart and restructure it. The tags no longer make any sense in terms of what they are supposed to be pointers too. They still point to the things they are supposed to point to, but there's no longer the sort of continuity between meanings that there was. Over the years and iterations and expansion, a lot of the growth has been organic save for the bare bones items and the most common of common veins and themes. I'm having a hard time following it and searching and reviewing. I'm sure part of it is to do with my own electromigration and changing processing powers, up and down. Things that used to make sense do not anymore, that which makes sense now does not fit cleanly into what came before.
The main problem is, because I enjoy writing so much, getting other things done becomes tedious and overly difficult. Discouragingly difficult. Task lock kicks in and nothing gets done at all because I have that loop constantly running with no way to put an end to it. "What do you want to do tonight?" Get some writing done, maybe do some doodling. "Okay, go!" Wait, I want to do that first and then- "Okay, go!" But I don't know how what I'm thinking about writing is going to seat next to the last thing I did so I need to find out what I was planning on accomplishing last week that's still in proc- "Okay, go!" You're not hearing me. I'm still trying to lay out the sequence so that when I get to the part where I start to lay down tracks I'll be able to begin to set up the next step into- "Okay, go!" God damn it!! Forget it. I'm going to go jerk off and try to sleep. And sleep refuses to kick in because my mind is still circling a world light years away from planet sleep even though my body arrived days ago. Ghost ship.
There are hold overs. Artifacts. A lot of what I am doing is cataloging artifacts. The overall design, however, is a massive artifact of another time. A thing I've fallen in love with deeply. When the entire interface and blog structure updated to a new design structure a few years ago, was it years, I retained mine because what I wanted to express was inexpressible within the new structure available. The only real issue with doing it, at the time, was being cut off from any possible further updates beyond my own. I liked what I put together. I liked looking at it. I liked making small adjustments here and there and watching it completely change it's feel without losing it's theme. It's time to let go of the tinkering. Save the memory.
Fun in creation. Unique pleasure in drawing resources together into a whole. This piece of code and that drawing on that server together with a banner you put together and stored on another server and watching it all spin to life at the click of a button. Part of the enjoyment in keeping the ship alive after this or that part died or stopped responding was the puzzle of rerouting connections, solving them, and kicking off into space again. One of the reasons why I love writing is pulling the parts and pieces together, memories, fragments, dreams, real and unreal, and at one point I got that same buzz from design, but it's wearing me out trying to do it across multiple platforms. Time to retool and tighten up creation. Focus on what matters the most and let that drive what comes next instead of allowing the platform to drive production. The factory and the caucus and everyone working within should be governing what comes out of the warehouse, not the shape and color and how many windows the warehouse has. Flight inversion.
Airlock to spacewalk, it is. Time to park it in an orbital bone yard and piece together a new ship. Maybe not one that incorporates everything, but one that simplifies so we're not flipping sixteen switches and checking three different read outs before tuning dials to accomplish what could be done in one cycle. I'm looking forward to it. I don't know what I'm going to do about the tag situation. A problem for another day. We'll see what's out there. Never forget the mission. Never forget how beautiful the Earth looks from afar. When you can't see past your own control panel, it's time. "Next time you go out to space, how about leaving yourself a little free time?"
///Plaid - "Air Locked"
The main problem is, because I enjoy writing so much, getting other things done becomes tedious and overly difficult. Discouragingly difficult. Task lock kicks in and nothing gets done at all because I have that loop constantly running with no way to put an end to it. "What do you want to do tonight?" Get some writing done, maybe do some doodling. "Okay, go!" Wait, I want to do that first and then- "Okay, go!" But I don't know how what I'm thinking about writing is going to seat next to the last thing I did so I need to find out what I was planning on accomplishing last week that's still in proc- "Okay, go!" You're not hearing me. I'm still trying to lay out the sequence so that when I get to the part where I start to lay down tracks I'll be able to begin to set up the next step into- "Okay, go!" God damn it!! Forget it. I'm going to go jerk off and try to sleep. And sleep refuses to kick in because my mind is still circling a world light years away from planet sleep even though my body arrived days ago. Ghost ship.
There are hold overs. Artifacts. A lot of what I am doing is cataloging artifacts. The overall design, however, is a massive artifact of another time. A thing I've fallen in love with deeply. When the entire interface and blog structure updated to a new design structure a few years ago, was it years, I retained mine because what I wanted to express was inexpressible within the new structure available. The only real issue with doing it, at the time, was being cut off from any possible further updates beyond my own. I liked what I put together. I liked looking at it. I liked making small adjustments here and there and watching it completely change it's feel without losing it's theme. It's time to let go of the tinkering. Save the memory.
Fun in creation. Unique pleasure in drawing resources together into a whole. This piece of code and that drawing on that server together with a banner you put together and stored on another server and watching it all spin to life at the click of a button. Part of the enjoyment in keeping the ship alive after this or that part died or stopped responding was the puzzle of rerouting connections, solving them, and kicking off into space again. One of the reasons why I love writing is pulling the parts and pieces together, memories, fragments, dreams, real and unreal, and at one point I got that same buzz from design, but it's wearing me out trying to do it across multiple platforms. Time to retool and tighten up creation. Focus on what matters the most and let that drive what comes next instead of allowing the platform to drive production. The factory and the caucus and everyone working within should be governing what comes out of the warehouse, not the shape and color and how many windows the warehouse has. Flight inversion.
Airlock to spacewalk, it is. Time to park it in an orbital bone yard and piece together a new ship. Maybe not one that incorporates everything, but one that simplifies so we're not flipping sixteen switches and checking three different read outs before tuning dials to accomplish what could be done in one cycle. I'm looking forward to it. I don't know what I'm going to do about the tag situation. A problem for another day. We'll see what's out there. Never forget the mission. Never forget how beautiful the Earth looks from afar. When you can't see past your own control panel, it's time. "Next time you go out to space, how about leaving yourself a little free time?"
///Plaid - "Air Locked"
5/13/13
Bricking the Computer
All I want to do is fix a hit and I know that I can't. That's the fast track to crack and it tastes so good. People get all concerned about weight loss and image that it grows insane. How about a powder that takes away the urge to snuffle? That would be nice. Get on it science! Help me rewire my brain maps. That's the pill conversation again though and that is looped over as many times as it can be without taking action. In the meantime I have a good stable of Krylon calling my name. I want to try the chrome, but my lungs are not having it. In fact they're not having much of anything lately. Just how it goes. At least I'm not pulling knives on anybody.
I hope people feel safe. Distance is its own thing. It's not a buffer though. As long as your legs work you can literally go anywhere to do anything. Been trying to figure out alibis. I could walk to New York or Virginia. The hard part is gonna be explaining my absence. That's also the easy part. I have a habit of disappearing. It happens. Sometimes you just have to tag up. If I disappeared for a week to walk to D.C. the only problem would be fueling myself along the way. Then it's mission accomplished, duck out back home, and problem solved. Still aggravating though. A bad kind of hassle.
Shrinking the maps, it gets easier. Shrinking the maps further, it's a day trip. Further still, it's a nighter. We don't do that anymore! Jexel. If you're going to accelerate, make it worth it. The hardest part about burning down a house is sealing the exits. Or at least making them difficult enough to dissuade navigation. Then again, you have to take into account the body types you are trying to ash. It's all math and I struggle with math a lot. I've always been more geometric. Visual spatial. One of the best days I ever had was guessing how many jelly beans were in a jar to the nearest ten.
Sure I could have estimated the volume of a jelly bean, the volume of the jar, and gotten fairly close with a little error mixed in for air space, but it was so much easier to hold in my head if I took a cube slice from one corner and moved it around in my head to form a disc and then raised the disc up to reach the lid. Same deal, I suppose, but different ways. Screw math. What have you done for me lately science?
I jerked off for twelve hours. Twelve god damn hours. Twelve gotdamn hours! I need a boyfriend pretty hard. Pretty sure I ran through half of my entire library between watching full length videos and skip tracking it to money shots. I'm not shamed or ashamed by the activity. At least I know my heart and my cock are still functional. I'm just head hung cuz I know I'll never get those hours back and I want them. The toughest thing about free time is figuring out where to spend it. I want those twelve hours back to draw and sketch and explore the things I can't put into words but I know I can put into pictures if I used that hand to do something besides stroke my pud. I'm pissed because it was supposed to be a fifteen minute quickie and I couldn't do it on my own that fast. And I'm pissed because I'm horny so often that it's become a problem that needs solved. Gotdamnit!
Melange. I think I may peirce my own nipples today. So much energy. Throwing off U two thirty something, or maybe fifty. Uranium all over the place. I don't know how to shut it off. Shoving carbon into the pile, but I can't undo Chernobyl no matter what I try. Part of the issue is dealing with getting my body back. I wanted it back so badly and now I have it and I can start building up from the foundation because I finally got back there, but the house that foundation wants only knows how to speak in terms of violence instead of the next step; love. That misunderstanding and shadow and grift breaks my heart and hurts. Does violence to me and I want to reverse it and I don't know how and if I could, a pure reversal, I do violence to everyone and everything within the radius. It's a lose lose.
You're breaking my heart, sweatness. Spill the bucket. We are weak ends. I need you. I need you to explain to me how rain comes about and tell me the little squirrels running at the corners of my eye are just shadows and not black lizards doing a slow hat dance.
I'm trying to brick the computer. I'm trying to reset it. If I can't reset it, I would be happy to silence it. Stop making noise you tire kicked fall out bumper bad doored dumb coded winkied rusted out piece of .... clawing at myself. I want that soft tissue out of me. I know a few ways to do it, but none of them are acceptable. Rip. Rip. Get out of me. Get out! I want them out. I want the caucus to end. I want the factory to shut down. I want there to be no more discussion. I want to be normal. I want to be you. I'm tired of tears strolling down my fucking face unprovoked. I want to love the idea of children. I want to be married. I want to be skilled. I want to be able to do math. I want to be able to be relied on. I want honey shots. I want more tree climbing. I want to hear less and nose more. I want shot for. I want dap. I want candy hahaahahahahahahahaha. I want ... I want a lot of things. I'm trying to brick the computer so I can start over again. And wanting to start over again is sometimes hard to admit.
///Junkie XL - "War" sunrise on Titan. I got your pith. I raise you 400 horse power at the brakes. Eat me.
I hope people feel safe. Distance is its own thing. It's not a buffer though. As long as your legs work you can literally go anywhere to do anything. Been trying to figure out alibis. I could walk to New York or Virginia. The hard part is gonna be explaining my absence. That's also the easy part. I have a habit of disappearing. It happens. Sometimes you just have to tag up. If I disappeared for a week to walk to D.C. the only problem would be fueling myself along the way. Then it's mission accomplished, duck out back home, and problem solved. Still aggravating though. A bad kind of hassle.
Shrinking the maps, it gets easier. Shrinking the maps further, it's a day trip. Further still, it's a nighter. We don't do that anymore! Jexel. If you're going to accelerate, make it worth it. The hardest part about burning down a house is sealing the exits. Or at least making them difficult enough to dissuade navigation. Then again, you have to take into account the body types you are trying to ash. It's all math and I struggle with math a lot. I've always been more geometric. Visual spatial. One of the best days I ever had was guessing how many jelly beans were in a jar to the nearest ten.
Sure I could have estimated the volume of a jelly bean, the volume of the jar, and gotten fairly close with a little error mixed in for air space, but it was so much easier to hold in my head if I took a cube slice from one corner and moved it around in my head to form a disc and then raised the disc up to reach the lid. Same deal, I suppose, but different ways. Screw math. What have you done for me lately science?
I jerked off for twelve hours. Twelve god damn hours. Twelve gotdamn hours! I need a boyfriend pretty hard. Pretty sure I ran through half of my entire library between watching full length videos and skip tracking it to money shots. I'm not shamed or ashamed by the activity. At least I know my heart and my cock are still functional. I'm just head hung cuz I know I'll never get those hours back and I want them. The toughest thing about free time is figuring out where to spend it. I want those twelve hours back to draw and sketch and explore the things I can't put into words but I know I can put into pictures if I used that hand to do something besides stroke my pud. I'm pissed because it was supposed to be a fifteen minute quickie and I couldn't do it on my own that fast. And I'm pissed because I'm horny so often that it's become a problem that needs solved. Gotdamnit!
Melange. I think I may peirce my own nipples today. So much energy. Throwing off U two thirty something, or maybe fifty. Uranium all over the place. I don't know how to shut it off. Shoving carbon into the pile, but I can't undo Chernobyl no matter what I try. Part of the issue is dealing with getting my body back. I wanted it back so badly and now I have it and I can start building up from the foundation because I finally got back there, but the house that foundation wants only knows how to speak in terms of violence instead of the next step; love. That misunderstanding and shadow and grift breaks my heart and hurts. Does violence to me and I want to reverse it and I don't know how and if I could, a pure reversal, I do violence to everyone and everything within the radius. It's a lose lose.
You're breaking my heart, sweatness. Spill the bucket. We are weak ends. I need you. I need you to explain to me how rain comes about and tell me the little squirrels running at the corners of my eye are just shadows and not black lizards doing a slow hat dance.
I'm trying to brick the computer. I'm trying to reset it. If I can't reset it, I would be happy to silence it. Stop making noise you tire kicked fall out bumper bad doored dumb coded winkied rusted out piece of .... clawing at myself. I want that soft tissue out of me. I know a few ways to do it, but none of them are acceptable. Rip. Rip. Get out of me. Get out! I want them out. I want the caucus to end. I want the factory to shut down. I want there to be no more discussion. I want to be normal. I want to be you. I'm tired of tears strolling down my fucking face unprovoked. I want to love the idea of children. I want to be married. I want to be skilled. I want to be able to do math. I want to be able to be relied on. I want honey shots. I want more tree climbing. I want to hear less and nose more. I want shot for. I want dap. I want candy hahaahahahahahahahaha. I want ... I want a lot of things. I'm trying to brick the computer so I can start over again. And wanting to start over again is sometimes hard to admit.
///Junkie XL - "War" sunrise on Titan. I got your pith. I raise you 400 horse power at the brakes. Eat me.
4/29/13
Pride Complex, Fallout Radius, and Big World Little World
I'll start with the last one first before I forget because I already forgot once and it took a good 15 to remember and even then it was only because I started thinking about shapes and cut outs of construction paper and slicing bottles in half that I remembered Venn diagrams and then remembered it was a comparison thing, but I'm rambling so let's get down to it. I was wondering where my, sometimes extreme, self centeredness comes from. It does get pretty extreme sometimes. Not to the point where my megalomaniacal, world beater, delusions kick in and I walk all over people thinking they're throwing themselves down there, when in fact, I'm going out of my way to haul them to the ground by their napes so I don't have to touch pavement on my way from my bed to my toilet. Pavement? Yeah because my house will be so huge I will have a second house that is only an enormous bathroom with three floors. The first floor is the pee paradise and waterpark, the second floor is the bath house with every kind of possible bath or shower or steam you can take, including swimming pools, and the basement is the boom box where you can shit in peace featuring every kind of toilet known to man. Sometimes my self centeredness gets out of control though.
To the point where I believe whatever difficult experience I'm going through is not only the greatest problem mankind has ever faced, but the first iteration ever of that difficulty. I get so into myself that if everyone I know isn't asking me what happened or if I'm okay or petting my ruffled feathers they must be blind and stone deaf. But that's not the case. It's not even that it's particularly easy to take up arms and march to the point of attack and scream like the hound of hell "life's not fair!" It's not. Everyone knows it. What are you going to do about you? It gets out of control. And there's nothing I hate more than "who's had it harder" pissing contests. Everyone has and everyone hasn't. Which discomfort do you prefer and at what intensity, becomes the more pressing question. To put it another way, how comfortable are you here versus there.
The most important thing is the "why". Why so far focused inward? What I've come to is hyper focus or big world little world. The world is huge. The world is daunting. The world is not as violent or angry as we make it appear. The anger and violence is just what sticks because you don't come out of a hug with welts and scars, but you do if you're at odds. Violence is the first language and love is violence's child. The branches from the trunk above the roots. Because life has the ability to scar at random and will, and sometimes in love, it is scary. Do you want those scars? That chance? "Is today the day something comes apart and I die?" You stay in for protection. That protection turns into faith. That faith turns into mania. And I close off opportunities for both danger and expansion until I am walled in and have every detail of the compound mapped to a square inch and where every potential threat to my existence stands and where it ranks and then I am stacking pee jars against one wall and logging days against another and getting lung infections and passing out from lack of oxygen because I've sealed myself in a space where air can never circulate. The second part is the crux of big world little world.
Determinism. If it was possible to plot every persons geographic location to a tee and, at some point map out all of the possible outcomes of each persons interactions you could, fairly accurately, play out every persons life from birth to death with some outliers and random pop ups of paths that skewed due to chance and freak probability and I guess quantum mechanical (insert longer lettered science terms and statistics) that make it impossible to do anything with 100% accuracy. But you'd have a pretty reliable, maybe down to ninety nine million out of one hundred million person type of accuracy. Or just look at family tree deaths. You've maybe got a shot at beating the over under, but by how many years? A decade? Two? How hard can you or would you want to torture who you are to get those years. What are you going to do with them? Sit in a wheel chair? Enjoy the massive stress of drastically increasing the chances you'll die putting on your slipper at the side of your bed and slip and fall and fracture your femur and die from the massive infection after surgery? Danger world becomes a lot more dangerous up there. That aside, the determinism factor also drives me inward at 300 pounds per square inch. Determinism is boring. Sure there can be a joy in choosing a path having a pretty solid understanding of where it can and probably will go. Even in small choices, but when the map increases in size and grows to world scope, I see that I am a very small bit of the circuit and no matter which paths I choose I am not going to cover any more ground than those dimensions... unless some other path comes in from outside my circuit and selects me. Pretty much, your circuit is printed at birth. And that is boring and difficult to live with.
However there is no saying you can't shrink the map. The smaller you make it, the more random it appears. The more random it appears the more beautiful each day becomes. Each day begins to hold actual surprises beyond what randomness you can try to choose to inject. Point to point, you can zoom in along the path and detour at will if you so choose to do, but the destination still looms and will be reached barring sudden death of some sort. You know what your ceiling is, you learn your floor, and at some point you understand what your potential is for exceeding them and the costs involved. There is no rule that says you can't shrink that map to the scale where measuring something changes it's properties. And that's where I find myself sometimes. My map shrinks to the point where everything that happens is truly random to my perspective and in that vastly shrunken world I know that I exist and the people around me are almost shadows, coming into and out of focus with a rarity that is extraordinarily delicious and I forget that I am not the only one walking the face of the earth. Nobody but me. NOBD BTME. Sometimes I have to have it though or I will never leave my front door again.
Pride complex is another thing. An entirely different animal to learn to stop feeding. My world once was a world of "no"s. To the point where the energy expended in asking the question was not worth the energy expended recovering from the disappointment. A universe of broken contracts. You can't do that because this. You can't do that because that. You can't do this because you're too this. You can't do that because you're too that. I got fed up, but not in a hurry. It built up over the years and I didn't digest it well and I'm sure some of the reasons were fairly valid, if not entirely truthful. Still, it's like telling someone to not get mad when you're about to give them bad news. Nurtured inside was pride complex. I can't do it? Watch me. Not doing it for them, but doing it for myself, and it started off small and then blew grotesquely out of proportion. Coupling with megalomania it began to beg how far could you really jump if you really really tried?
How far was too far? I can stick it. Fuck it, you're trying to say I can't? Okay, watch this right here. And it bloomed gorgeous. More. And it bloomed gorgeous. But what are you really capable of? Pride complex has ruled me and I it in waves of awesome sorrow and awed joy. There is nothing that beats that high of putting your ten toes on the ground on the other side of a leap of faith in your bones and grit. The only things you can rely on sometimes. The things that never let you down. It is, however, damaging. You become arrogant. A soft, passive, arrogance that tells me no matter what comes down the pipe I will, I will!, be able to handle it with this body and this mind on this island. It and I will head into the woods and only I am returning. The belief will insist, but anyone with any one of their five senses knows there is no way in hell you are coming back. Anyone with any sense in the world knows your odds and that you've put the entire stack on something that breaks good once in five years and there are a lot of hours and minutes to go. I don't see it on my scale because everything is possible there to a fault.
Pride complex kicks in. I need pills? Fuck you, you need pills. Watch me go. I need money? Hell no. Watch me destroy myself solving this, but damn you, I will fucking solve this. Pride complex branches out like ivy. It infects things like blood cancer. Don't want to help me do this? Okay I'll do it without you. But that is not always and many times not the stance to take for many a several reasons I won't go into. Pride complex doesn't only damage the self. It has a fallout radius. Pride complex damages a persons ability to make adjustments. It damages a persons ability to integrate and coexist with society. It damages a persons ability to integrate. It pretty much harms society as a whole.
Yes you are going from A to B, but as you traverse the map and make your choices, your piece of the circuit board begins to function less and less successfully to the point where other pieces of the board have to compensate harder to function as well. When you are offered assistance, for whatever rationalization the assistance is offered, it is in the interest of keeping the entire computer running. Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that. Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that this setup or that is there specifically to make everyone's lives easier to a degree, but that degree is there and measurable and quantifiable in every nervous action or choice the people with greater numbers of points A and B and area to cover and allotted (if you take too broad a path from A to B and B to C and on and on, as many points as you are allotted when born there are consequences out of your control. a path selecting you) make. Your space is governed by their space.
Understanding that is one thing. Dismantling delusions of grandeur is another. Growing a map is another. Are they good things? Are they necessary? Should they even have to be? I want to roam wild. Yessir I do. Life's not fair. I'm not on this planet with you. You're on this planet with me. Control. Take what you want, but understand where it comes from. I love you.
///Band of Skulls - "Fires"
To the point where I believe whatever difficult experience I'm going through is not only the greatest problem mankind has ever faced, but the first iteration ever of that difficulty. I get so into myself that if everyone I know isn't asking me what happened or if I'm okay or petting my ruffled feathers they must be blind and stone deaf. But that's not the case. It's not even that it's particularly easy to take up arms and march to the point of attack and scream like the hound of hell "life's not fair!" It's not. Everyone knows it. What are you going to do about you? It gets out of control. And there's nothing I hate more than "who's had it harder" pissing contests. Everyone has and everyone hasn't. Which discomfort do you prefer and at what intensity, becomes the more pressing question. To put it another way, how comfortable are you here versus there.
The most important thing is the "why". Why so far focused inward? What I've come to is hyper focus or big world little world. The world is huge. The world is daunting. The world is not as violent or angry as we make it appear. The anger and violence is just what sticks because you don't come out of a hug with welts and scars, but you do if you're at odds. Violence is the first language and love is violence's child. The branches from the trunk above the roots. Because life has the ability to scar at random and will, and sometimes in love, it is scary. Do you want those scars? That chance? "Is today the day something comes apart and I die?" You stay in for protection. That protection turns into faith. That faith turns into mania. And I close off opportunities for both danger and expansion until I am walled in and have every detail of the compound mapped to a square inch and where every potential threat to my existence stands and where it ranks and then I am stacking pee jars against one wall and logging days against another and getting lung infections and passing out from lack of oxygen because I've sealed myself in a space where air can never circulate. The second part is the crux of big world little world.
Determinism. If it was possible to plot every persons geographic location to a tee and, at some point map out all of the possible outcomes of each persons interactions you could, fairly accurately, play out every persons life from birth to death with some outliers and random pop ups of paths that skewed due to chance and freak probability and I guess quantum mechanical (insert longer lettered science terms and statistics) that make it impossible to do anything with 100% accuracy. But you'd have a pretty reliable, maybe down to ninety nine million out of one hundred million person type of accuracy. Or just look at family tree deaths. You've maybe got a shot at beating the over under, but by how many years? A decade? Two? How hard can you or would you want to torture who you are to get those years. What are you going to do with them? Sit in a wheel chair? Enjoy the massive stress of drastically increasing the chances you'll die putting on your slipper at the side of your bed and slip and fall and fracture your femur and die from the massive infection after surgery? Danger world becomes a lot more dangerous up there. That aside, the determinism factor also drives me inward at 300 pounds per square inch. Determinism is boring. Sure there can be a joy in choosing a path having a pretty solid understanding of where it can and probably will go. Even in small choices, but when the map increases in size and grows to world scope, I see that I am a very small bit of the circuit and no matter which paths I choose I am not going to cover any more ground than those dimensions... unless some other path comes in from outside my circuit and selects me. Pretty much, your circuit is printed at birth. And that is boring and difficult to live with.
However there is no saying you can't shrink the map. The smaller you make it, the more random it appears. The more random it appears the more beautiful each day becomes. Each day begins to hold actual surprises beyond what randomness you can try to choose to inject. Point to point, you can zoom in along the path and detour at will if you so choose to do, but the destination still looms and will be reached barring sudden death of some sort. You know what your ceiling is, you learn your floor, and at some point you understand what your potential is for exceeding them and the costs involved. There is no rule that says you can't shrink that map to the scale where measuring something changes it's properties. And that's where I find myself sometimes. My map shrinks to the point where everything that happens is truly random to my perspective and in that vastly shrunken world I know that I exist and the people around me are almost shadows, coming into and out of focus with a rarity that is extraordinarily delicious and I forget that I am not the only one walking the face of the earth. Nobody but me. NOBD BTME. Sometimes I have to have it though or I will never leave my front door again.
Pride complex is another thing. An entirely different animal to learn to stop feeding. My world once was a world of "no"s. To the point where the energy expended in asking the question was not worth the energy expended recovering from the disappointment. A universe of broken contracts. You can't do that because this. You can't do that because that. You can't do this because you're too this. You can't do that because you're too that. I got fed up, but not in a hurry. It built up over the years and I didn't digest it well and I'm sure some of the reasons were fairly valid, if not entirely truthful. Still, it's like telling someone to not get mad when you're about to give them bad news. Nurtured inside was pride complex. I can't do it? Watch me. Not doing it for them, but doing it for myself, and it started off small and then blew grotesquely out of proportion. Coupling with megalomania it began to beg how far could you really jump if you really really tried?
How far was too far? I can stick it. Fuck it, you're trying to say I can't? Okay, watch this right here. And it bloomed gorgeous. More. And it bloomed gorgeous. But what are you really capable of? Pride complex has ruled me and I it in waves of awesome sorrow and awed joy. There is nothing that beats that high of putting your ten toes on the ground on the other side of a leap of faith in your bones and grit. The only things you can rely on sometimes. The things that never let you down. It is, however, damaging. You become arrogant. A soft, passive, arrogance that tells me no matter what comes down the pipe I will, I will!, be able to handle it with this body and this mind on this island. It and I will head into the woods and only I am returning. The belief will insist, but anyone with any one of their five senses knows there is no way in hell you are coming back. Anyone with any sense in the world knows your odds and that you've put the entire stack on something that breaks good once in five years and there are a lot of hours and minutes to go. I don't see it on my scale because everything is possible there to a fault.
Pride complex kicks in. I need pills? Fuck you, you need pills. Watch me go. I need money? Hell no. Watch me destroy myself solving this, but damn you, I will fucking solve this. Pride complex branches out like ivy. It infects things like blood cancer. Don't want to help me do this? Okay I'll do it without you. But that is not always and many times not the stance to take for many a several reasons I won't go into. Pride complex doesn't only damage the self. It has a fallout radius. Pride complex damages a persons ability to make adjustments. It damages a persons ability to integrate and coexist with society. It damages a persons ability to integrate. It pretty much harms society as a whole.
Yes you are going from A to B, but as you traverse the map and make your choices, your piece of the circuit board begins to function less and less successfully to the point where other pieces of the board have to compensate harder to function as well. When you are offered assistance, for whatever rationalization the assistance is offered, it is in the interest of keeping the entire computer running. Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that. Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that this setup or that is there specifically to make everyone's lives easier to a degree, but that degree is there and measurable and quantifiable in every nervous action or choice the people with greater numbers of points A and B and area to cover and allotted (if you take too broad a path from A to B and B to C and on and on, as many points as you are allotted when born there are consequences out of your control. a path selecting you) make. Your space is governed by their space.
Understanding that is one thing. Dismantling delusions of grandeur is another. Growing a map is another. Are they good things? Are they necessary? Should they even have to be? I want to roam wild. Yessir I do. Life's not fair. I'm not on this planet with you. You're on this planet with me. Control. Take what you want, but understand where it comes from. I love you.
///Band of Skulls - "Fires"
11/26/12
Find Yourself and Redesign Timetable
Well, I think I've finally done it. The act took a very long time. A very, very, long time, but I think I've found myself. I believe I've gotten enough of us back to the table to start working again on creative things. It has been a top priority, it feels like, for far too long. I've been so self absorbed, I have not been able to see past my own nose unless I was dead asleep and dreaming.
Speaking of which, I did have the most fantastic dream that fleshed out into several more characters with unique dialog of their own so far detailed I began to wonder, asleep, of their back stories because all of the interactions were so well and tightly detailed I felt, by four way conversation's end, that I knew them from other lives, even though the quality of the sleep itself lasted less than an hour.
I have finally found myself, although the child is AWOL. I am not happy about that. There is a certain whimsy I've been unable to recapture. Not so much unable as much as it has been a certain amount of flailing in the dark. Bless his screwed up soul. I need him back, both listening and contributing, if I ever intend to get better. That's what has been difficult to deal with the most.
Shooting for the end of December for the redesigns.
Speaking of which, I did have the most fantastic dream that fleshed out into several more characters with unique dialog of their own so far detailed I began to wonder, asleep, of their back stories because all of the interactions were so well and tightly detailed I felt, by four way conversation's end, that I knew them from other lives, even though the quality of the sleep itself lasted less than an hour.
I have finally found myself, although the child is AWOL. I am not happy about that. There is a certain whimsy I've been unable to recapture. Not so much unable as much as it has been a certain amount of flailing in the dark. Bless his screwed up soul. I need him back, both listening and contributing, if I ever intend to get better. That's what has been difficult to deal with the most.
Shooting for the end of December for the redesigns.
7/27/12
Communications Fault: Line 446890-C0-CC1 (circuit a1 >> branch 9)
I've had a very difficult time with communication. The heat hasn't helped. The pressure cooker of my apartment hasn't helped. I know what it's an extension of, and yes, I don't want to talk about it directly because it has been all consuming. Requiring maximum effort to distance myself from and hide from others, but even the lack of communication is telling enough for the people that know me, so even the hiding has been a full time occupation. Let alone maintaining myself. That has also been a full time occupation. Missing too many consecutive days of eating. Not too many in the personal book of what too many days is, as I once went a solid week without eating until a friend intervened. But, I've come to understand that one day of not eating when the option is available, is too many days. A new standard that makes me feel glutinous, but shouldn't by any means do so, but it's a hold over from another time and another segment of my life that refuses to go away.
Communications have been strained. Within myself. Production is down. Simply not happening. Close to zero cooperation from the parties involved, but that happens. Hallucinations are up. Managing them has sucked up a lot of "up" time. Sleep is off the charts.14 to 16 hours. Cross bridge explorations, however have been phenomenal. For quite some time I couldn't remember anything and then I started coming back with pieces and parts. It got to a point yesterday where I woke up and reached for a pocket watch I found after I asked a dead body in a half crushed fully rusted barge (it was an interstate race across a state made up of only islands arranged in a rapids a half continent wide [the waves were high enough to bury the Petronas towers if they were perched on top of the Dover cliffs, and then some], but I got off course and ended up trapped in an island surrounded by weirs that made it impossible to get off it without something with an engine) if there was anything of value and he woke up and pointed to a muddy box with a finger that had a key ring dangling from it. I opened the box and there was a spring loaded clock as big as my fist with a vest fob attached to it, and I was honestly surprised that it wasn't there and I realized I was dreaming again.
There was a very large bear in my room yesterday. A very large, unusually square shaped, bear. Which tipped me off that I was probably dreaming, but then my cat popped up on my pillow and poked me in the face and the bear was still there and I realized I was symptomatic again and so I pulled up my covers, rolled over, and tried to shut it out. The sun came up, though, so everything was resolved well enough. Daylight has its uses. My sleep cycle went completely out of whack. As far as it could possibly go without looping over on itself. And then I got sick. And slept for 36 hours. I needed to. Things have been righting since. A little bit on their own, a little bit through my own efforts to force them to.
What comes next is a re-assumption of some kind of routine to protect the balance. Shield myself from the bad wiring. That's really all I am trying to do. Remake the failsafes. It was one of those rare times when one breaker fail set up the ability for the next one to fault. And the next fault set up the next two to fail. The next two set up the next four. A large part of the mental restructuring is redeveloping the system to avoid that kind of expansion. That kind of breakage leads to zero to atmosphere times that feel like blinks of the eye. I was still talking about today as though today were Sunday. With the understanding that today was Sunday. Functionally that was where I left off. Imagine your body is a car. You jump in after dreaming and turn the key and halfway to your friend's house you realize there are 30,000 more miles on it than the last time you can remember driving it. Not fun. A little scary. Where the hell have I been?
So much unmounted rage. Learning all over again how to deal with it. How to manage it effectively. How to operate within a range of reason and reasonable values. Your base language is either violence or love and the communicator operating system between them either works or it doesn't. 1 or 0. I envy the analog. They really are a different species of human being. A holdover from another time that still procreates and propagates with great success. Us digital human beings still propagate, often despite ourselves. I don't mean digital in the respect of the how our communications are moved between people. We're all digital enough to make that not matter in that respect. The step before digitization though is a separate story. A separate breakdown for another time, but it's there. Digital communication at its root is violence or love. Extreme to extreme and the methods and ways, the words and letters provide the ability to create shades of the experience. For some. For others there is an increasingly fine number of ways to say things and the translation to digital fields is easier to the point of effortlessness. It's like an exam paper. Every paper being different depending on who you are and how you were engineered. Some people receive a paper where every question has twenty boxes. Some people receive a paper with two boxes. They both have the right answer to the question on them. Expressing that answer is a lot easier when you have twenty boxes to choose from instead of two boxes and a bunch of blank space to try to scrawl in explanations and clarifications and other junk to help the twenty boxers understand what you meant.
Established frameworks of communications. No one's to blame. At least I'm not blaming anyone. I'm just frustrated with my machinery. But I already explained, you can't build new machinery with bad tools. Perhaps I didn't. A lot of things do not make it passed the cutting floor, believe it or not. The idea was this: if the tools that make new tools are broken already or offset somehow, the new tools those tools make will be off by even more. And those tools will build structures off by that much more. And those structures will house tools constructed with that offset and be poor to look at to begin with and it just continues rolling up until it all collapses and you start again with the same crappy hammer and chisel and furnace trying to build a lathe to turn some sense out of something and you end up with nothing all over again. So I dunno. I do not know. Maybe just try to enjoy the work more than the product? Maybe? Anthem of my life if I ever had to write one. Probably needs more gunshots. And more cowbell. A little more clap hands and foot stomping and a little less dirge. A little more "remember the mission and all you might do" and a little less "quarterly review for the noble and 'a societal remove' sorts of moves. Nobility, much less nobelity, is passing and as beholden to the eye as anything ever was.
///Bjork - "Pluto" ... a little bit tired, but brand new
Communications have been strained. Within myself. Production is down. Simply not happening. Close to zero cooperation from the parties involved, but that happens. Hallucinations are up. Managing them has sucked up a lot of "up" time. Sleep is off the charts.14 to 16 hours. Cross bridge explorations, however have been phenomenal. For quite some time I couldn't remember anything and then I started coming back with pieces and parts. It got to a point yesterday where I woke up and reached for a pocket watch I found after I asked a dead body in a half crushed fully rusted barge (it was an interstate race across a state made up of only islands arranged in a rapids a half continent wide [the waves were high enough to bury the Petronas towers if they were perched on top of the Dover cliffs, and then some], but I got off course and ended up trapped in an island surrounded by weirs that made it impossible to get off it without something with an engine) if there was anything of value and he woke up and pointed to a muddy box with a finger that had a key ring dangling from it. I opened the box and there was a spring loaded clock as big as my fist with a vest fob attached to it, and I was honestly surprised that it wasn't there and I realized I was dreaming again.
There was a very large bear in my room yesterday. A very large, unusually square shaped, bear. Which tipped me off that I was probably dreaming, but then my cat popped up on my pillow and poked me in the face and the bear was still there and I realized I was symptomatic again and so I pulled up my covers, rolled over, and tried to shut it out. The sun came up, though, so everything was resolved well enough. Daylight has its uses. My sleep cycle went completely out of whack. As far as it could possibly go without looping over on itself. And then I got sick. And slept for 36 hours. I needed to. Things have been righting since. A little bit on their own, a little bit through my own efforts to force them to.
What comes next is a re-assumption of some kind of routine to protect the balance. Shield myself from the bad wiring. That's really all I am trying to do. Remake the failsafes. It was one of those rare times when one breaker fail set up the ability for the next one to fault. And the next fault set up the next two to fail. The next two set up the next four. A large part of the mental restructuring is redeveloping the system to avoid that kind of expansion. That kind of breakage leads to zero to atmosphere times that feel like blinks of the eye. I was still talking about today as though today were Sunday. With the understanding that today was Sunday. Functionally that was where I left off. Imagine your body is a car. You jump in after dreaming and turn the key and halfway to your friend's house you realize there are 30,000 more miles on it than the last time you can remember driving it. Not fun. A little scary. Where the hell have I been?
So much unmounted rage. Learning all over again how to deal with it. How to manage it effectively. How to operate within a range of reason and reasonable values. Your base language is either violence or love and the communicator operating system between them either works or it doesn't. 1 or 0. I envy the analog. They really are a different species of human being. A holdover from another time that still procreates and propagates with great success. Us digital human beings still propagate, often despite ourselves. I don't mean digital in the respect of the how our communications are moved between people. We're all digital enough to make that not matter in that respect. The step before digitization though is a separate story. A separate breakdown for another time, but it's there. Digital communication at its root is violence or love. Extreme to extreme and the methods and ways, the words and letters provide the ability to create shades of the experience. For some. For others there is an increasingly fine number of ways to say things and the translation to digital fields is easier to the point of effortlessness. It's like an exam paper. Every paper being different depending on who you are and how you were engineered. Some people receive a paper where every question has twenty boxes. Some people receive a paper with two boxes. They both have the right answer to the question on them. Expressing that answer is a lot easier when you have twenty boxes to choose from instead of two boxes and a bunch of blank space to try to scrawl in explanations and clarifications and other junk to help the twenty boxers understand what you meant.
Established frameworks of communications. No one's to blame. At least I'm not blaming anyone. I'm just frustrated with my machinery. But I already explained, you can't build new machinery with bad tools. Perhaps I didn't. A lot of things do not make it passed the cutting floor, believe it or not. The idea was this: if the tools that make new tools are broken already or offset somehow, the new tools those tools make will be off by even more. And those tools will build structures off by that much more. And those structures will house tools constructed with that offset and be poor to look at to begin with and it just continues rolling up until it all collapses and you start again with the same crappy hammer and chisel and furnace trying to build a lathe to turn some sense out of something and you end up with nothing all over again. So I dunno. I do not know. Maybe just try to enjoy the work more than the product? Maybe? Anthem of my life if I ever had to write one. Probably needs more gunshots. And more cowbell. A little more clap hands and foot stomping and a little less dirge. A little more "remember the mission and all you might do" and a little less "quarterly review for the noble and 'a societal remove' sorts of moves. Nobility, much less nobelity, is passing and as beholden to the eye as anything ever was.
///Bjork - "Pluto" ... a little bit tired, but brand new
7/15/12
Redesigns and Motions and All Kinds of Crazy S--- (with disclaimers)
The summer redesign of Auralport is coming. It's in the factory works right now, as we speak. It's been autumn way too long over there and frankly the browns are starting to get to me and darken everything I do when I am there. I need some green going on. Some color to reflect the growth and all that. More importantly I need to incorporate some pinks and purples. Yeah, it'll look a little gay, but that's what I am. Sue me. For gayness. Cuz if you try to sue me for anything else you will find pretty quickly that I am, as they say in the business, "judgement proof". Not saying you won't win the case. All I'm saying is what you win will be a big happy bag of nothing. Except maybe self satisfaction. However, you can go home knowing that the only reason I am judgement proof is because I have nothing to take. But more importantly (this just keeps going on, right?) the only reason why I have nothing to take is because of the decisions you made that put me in a position to have nothing. So basically we're even.
Not really though. I got off scott free (where the hell did that saying come from? a reference to free balling in kilts maybe? I dunno) after a fashion. You got to screw me or at least feel like you taught me a life lesson. So we're even right? Nah, I'm going to cut your face off and feed it to you the next time I see you. LOL that is happening. Which is why I can't see you. Because I will make a sincere attempt on your life. Jokes aside. I will kill the weaker of the two of you. Do not come to my house, parents. Because I will kill you. I hope that's clear enough.
So anyway. The redesign is coming and I'm really looking forward to it. The hard part is trying to find a good shot of nature to work with. I'm out there all of the time, but I just have to remember to bring a camera one of these days. So many pictures to take. So little time. I looked into dslr-s and realized pretty quickly there is no way in hell I could afford one. There is a way, I just lied, there is a way, but if I ever ponied up the money I would have to spend it on a car first. Which brings up other mommy daddy issues but I'm not going into that. I am. Just this once. Caps locked. WORST GRADUATION GIFT AND SUBSEQUENT CHAIN OF EVENTS EVER, I HOPE YOU HANG YOURSELVES IN SEPARATE ROOMS OF THAT SHITHOLE YOU LIKE TO CALL A HOUSE.
Okay, so, not to be entirely bipolar on this. I would like to present a motion to do some art. Everyone at the table, yay or nay my friends. Yes, we are taking a vote. All present? Alright then, moving forward on the motion to attempt some cartooning. All in favor, say aye. All opposed? Let the record show that the motion is passed.
I've got my fingers back into poetry and short stories again. God knows I damn near had to handcuff myself and blindfold my eyes to do that. It had to be done though. A life without creation is self destruction. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing with facebook at this point. For me it kind of does well as real time memoirs. It all depends on how far back the record will go. If the timescale ends after so many years, it's pretty much useless in that regard. I hope it doesn't. I'm pretty much writing a book on there, though some probably think I'm just a loon. Which is fine, because I kind of am. I gave up on trying to find the secret of life because I know the guy who knows the guy who has it. It's frustrating because he gave it to me once and knew that I wouldn't remember. So I have to try again, but now he knows that I know so I'm going to have to pull some kind of double fake to get it this time.
So what is the crazy shit. The really really junk that still makes go "wait a minute, what?" There isn't any. Smiley face. Not today. Alright here's one. Just one. I woke up in a trap house again. I used to call them house parties until a friend of mine introduced the concept of the trap house and I had a little revolution in perspective and was like "that makes absolute sense." Mostly because it does. That is exactly what they are. Which explains a lot about how the people in there behave. Yeah, I felt like a nub the first time it happened. But now, it's just like, "alright, got all your shit? okay, time to roll." Where was I going... so yeah I woke up and rolled out and someone said "Hobbes, where you goin?" as soon as I got out the door, and I was like ... yeah, that's my gotdamn name. And I realized alot of the people I used to know, don't know that I changed my name. So I let them call me by my old name, fam aside, because they just don't know. And I'm okay with that, I think. For now. It's not legal, but what is?
///Beck - "Devil's Haircut" pistols are pointing at a poor man's pocket, and he don't give a fuuuuuuuuu
Not really though. I got off scott free (where the hell did that saying come from? a reference to free balling in kilts maybe? I dunno) after a fashion. You got to screw me or at least feel like you taught me a life lesson. So we're even right? Nah, I'm going to cut your face off and feed it to you the next time I see you. LOL that is happening. Which is why I can't see you. Because I will make a sincere attempt on your life. Jokes aside. I will kill the weaker of the two of you. Do not come to my house, parents. Because I will kill you. I hope that's clear enough.
So anyway. The redesign is coming and I'm really looking forward to it. The hard part is trying to find a good shot of nature to work with. I'm out there all of the time, but I just have to remember to bring a camera one of these days. So many pictures to take. So little time. I looked into dslr-s and realized pretty quickly there is no way in hell I could afford one. There is a way, I just lied, there is a way, but if I ever ponied up the money I would have to spend it on a car first. Which brings up other mommy daddy issues but I'm not going into that. I am. Just this once. Caps locked. WORST GRADUATION GIFT AND SUBSEQUENT CHAIN OF EVENTS EVER, I HOPE YOU HANG YOURSELVES IN SEPARATE ROOMS OF THAT SHITHOLE YOU LIKE TO CALL A HOUSE.
Okay, so, not to be entirely bipolar on this. I would like to present a motion to do some art. Everyone at the table, yay or nay my friends. Yes, we are taking a vote. All present? Alright then, moving forward on the motion to attempt some cartooning. All in favor, say aye. All opposed? Let the record show that the motion is passed.
I've got my fingers back into poetry and short stories again. God knows I damn near had to handcuff myself and blindfold my eyes to do that. It had to be done though. A life without creation is self destruction. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing with facebook at this point. For me it kind of does well as real time memoirs. It all depends on how far back the record will go. If the timescale ends after so many years, it's pretty much useless in that regard. I hope it doesn't. I'm pretty much writing a book on there, though some probably think I'm just a loon. Which is fine, because I kind of am. I gave up on trying to find the secret of life because I know the guy who knows the guy who has it. It's frustrating because he gave it to me once and knew that I wouldn't remember. So I have to try again, but now he knows that I know so I'm going to have to pull some kind of double fake to get it this time.
So what is the crazy shit. The really really junk that still makes go "wait a minute, what?" There isn't any. Smiley face. Not today. Alright here's one. Just one. I woke up in a trap house again. I used to call them house parties until a friend of mine introduced the concept of the trap house and I had a little revolution in perspective and was like "that makes absolute sense." Mostly because it does. That is exactly what they are. Which explains a lot about how the people in there behave. Yeah, I felt like a nub the first time it happened. But now, it's just like, "alright, got all your shit? okay, time to roll." Where was I going... so yeah I woke up and rolled out and someone said "Hobbes, where you goin?" as soon as I got out the door, and I was like ... yeah, that's my gotdamn name. And I realized alot of the people I used to know, don't know that I changed my name. So I let them call me by my old name, fam aside, because they just don't know. And I'm okay with that, I think. For now. It's not legal, but what is?
///Beck - "Devil's Haircut" pistols are pointing at a poor man's pocket, and he don't give a fuuuuuuuuu
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