The Year End Look

2014 had many moments I would like to take back, but not too many.  I didn't break my nose again, which is awesome!  Thinking back through it I cannot remember a single concussion, which is also awesome and very good.  Awesome and very good are different things.  Awesome can be tanking on purpose to see if you can get a flat line goose egg.  Awesome is also seeing if you can bust the high score.  Very good is taking care of business and dotting every single "I" and looping to the correct depth of the drop liner each "P".  Very good is washing your hair every time you must do it, but awesome is having a great shampoo without a schedule.

Twenty fourteen saw a battle between myself and a close friend and another close friend and another close friend that required more time to heal than any physical injury.  Fully healed?  Yes.  Full confidence?  No.  The third piece of the puzzle is entirely lost.  As is the fourth piece.  I never believed it was possible to force or be forced beyond the edge of limping the object into a shop and getting blow torches out and suitable scrap, but sometimes, no matter how the repairs go, you can never look at the finished product the same way no matter the lighting.

The year presented no new physical projects in terms of repurposing homes and was difficult in that respect too.  The hardest part about being on call is that you are waiting for something to go wrong.  In that zone it becomes difficult to see everything going right.  By the second quarter of the year I could see better that when I am doing my job well I will not receive calls.  I always strive to do the best work because while I am doing whatever job it is the goal is to never hear from them again.  In the time it takes me to get home I can, and sometimes do, forget that is the primary objective.  I do not work to make friends.  If I make friends after or during a viewing it is business.  Business does not cross over to farming.  Sometimes farming crosses over to business.  I confused the two in 2014.  Because I work a small job for you does not mean we have to be friends for life.

I thought I could make significant repairs to my lower lumbars, but I do believe the back injury is in the nerves.  It's not a structural injury.  It's software, not hardware.  I learned through 2014 that some tissue explosions/implosions cannot be fixed by tending or work or loosening or tightening.  Bring all of the wrenches you choose, unless one of the tools in your kit is a new gold plated circuit board, you are screwed no matter what you plug in, replace, or renew.  It took a year, still feels like yesterday, to figure that out.  I became very aware of my age last year and the limitations that age brings.  The new year will bring a secondary mode.  Caution.  Beside the hatswitch for go is a new button installed to activate precision.   Everything cannot be solved by a hammer.  I knew that before 2014, but the application was aimed outward.  The application will be aimed inward in 2015.

Everyone who shares a drink or breaks bread with you is not your friend.  They may have motives aside from smiling.  Believe it or not, I have better things to do today than laugh and clap my hands.  So do they.  That does not mean that they need to be cut out of your life entirely.  That remained silly through the previous year and that point will remain sharp, if not sharper, through this year.

I performed a great deal of reading through 2014 without any specific schedule.  That should continue.  No books were finished.  There was a boost in output that will take more discipline in 2015.  It is a steep ask, but I am prepared for it.  I do not like that my discipline grew slipshod enough to not finish or even map a new story though they ping ponged around my skull.  It's pathetic.  It's awful.  You screwed up and I am saying it now: we dropped the ball and it hit you in the teeth.  All we had to do was open our hands and we were too busy adjusting our emotions to see.  We do not appreciate that.  At all.  And I want to make sure you know.  "Why am I picking up my teeth?"  Because you were punched in the mouth.  You didn't trip.  You didn't fall out of bed.  You didn't scrap.  You were punched dead in the mouth and didn't have the wherewithal through an entire year to defend yourself.  Do better.  I do not care if it is garbage.  I do not care if it is too rich.  Do you really believe years will keep falling out of the sky?  Ignorance is not a defense.  Do better.  Stop reading, stop audiobooking, stop trawling, start layout.  Start mapping.  Stop talking about "I started this universe in highschool and"... what since then?  I'm sick of hearing about it.  Yes, physically ill.  Begin to finish it and stop spit polishing a trophy no one else can understand.  "But there's no translation..." so translate it!!!  Do you hear me???  Look at me.  Look at me!   Translate it!  Damn it, you are thick skulled.  I want notes out of 2015.  Stop dancing and screw like you dream.

 I began a few tattoos in 2014.  Progress is going very well.  The sleeve will not be completed at the close of 2015 however there is very specific direction and direction is extremely important as they cannot be erased, easily or ever aside from through growth and the normal cycling of skin cells like tectonic plates.  The reminders still remain on my face and are used daily.  They are pretty much worth every second of the process.  We are building a lens on our left hand to remind us of our ability and scope and potential and violence.  That we can and should hold back at time as a window can be opened or closed or screened.  Not zero and not one.  Infinite, yes!  Singular yes!  The real pleasure is in the curve, not the approach either way.

Are we addicted to tea now?  Yep.  Significantly cut down on the drugs through 2014.  Management & things.  One of my cats died.  Actual cats.  Not "cats" cats.  I took it rough.  Too rough.  Harder to deal with than I anticipated, but it reminded me that my pets are closer to me than my cousins or extended family.  I think that's when the extent of my cut off really hit.  My family, direct family, includes my brother and two sisters.  It ends there.  My father is dead to me so that I do not fuck up and go back to Maryland to kill him myself.  I cannot do that.  If I do that everyone will know, no matter how I mask it or plan it or do not plan it or just get in the mood and take the trip and kill him and my mother, because she'll either be in the house or somewhere within ear or eyeshot, no offense but it's best to keep things tidy, because I said it here and it's public record.  I am closing that door, but it's dead bolted from both sides.  Very good.  Not awesome, but very good.  Call it a standing threat if you want to; I call it a restraining order.  If you come into my space I will kill you.  In return, we will do everything we can to stay away.  Deal.  The cat's death was very sad.  I mourned for quite some time.  More than I mourned for any of my extended families deaths through the year.  The sensation was arresting and unexpected and taught me the depths and exhaustion true hate goes.  His death also taught me the danger of dehydration and the ties I have still with local law enforcement and the patience they have with me and the value of a friend who can tap into your nerves in ways we thought we only tapped their structure.  The year heightened my self awareness and heightened my awareness of my emotional footprint.

I cried a lot in the last year.  Much more than usual.  I began to understand the actual details of outcomes through 2025.  There is a lot of potential there and more danger than I would like.  Many of my peers are pairing up and gearing themselves toward producing families and I became acutely aware of timelines.  I'm not sure how to govern the sensation.  I suppose I will have to start graphing... I can't.  It will be the struggle of 2015.  What do you give up, what can I give up, what can we give up, to make a family.  I cannot.  Not for me.  Not for you.  I will get up for a child, not for you.  I will not fight for a child, not for you.  Ever.  I will not crack a beer on an off day for a child, not for you.  It's a strange equation and I'm not sure how to change it.  I'm not sure what is supposed to come on the other side of the equal sign.

One of the other things I realized through twenty fourteen is that I am fiscally trapped.  Free as a mongoose in every way besides the wallet and the wallet is where futures are made when you look at families.  I am damaged goods in that way and can be as free as I want to proclaim, but jailed for quite some time fiscally.  Going for jogs, playing catch, buying food with EBT, unable to hold a credit card, unable to get loans (even though I refuse to, but cooperation will require it) or car notes, impressing other's parents with charisma, buying them shoes, going to dinners and lunches, going on a paint craze, shutting myself in a room for a few days because I cannot listen to anything because it hurts, all of these do not help a child's upbringing at all, but they are instrumental.  I have no idea when or if they will change.  I became acutely aware of the maintenance I require and it made me cry.  Take what it takes for me to relate to other people my age without falling apart like crushed salmon in a frying pan with burnt butter.  Add a marriage.  Add a child.  Desire came in the last year.  Twenty fifteen will include learning how to better understand what exactly that desire is and not consciously or subconsciously destroying it wherever it arises, be it from outside in general or specific environments or from within or side effect to proximity to others.  I will try to be more reliable and predictable and acceptable to your children or child rearing or child bearing circumstances.  Failure to do so will cause increased isolation and we all know where that heads.

2014 taught me that no matter how I feel I have to get up.  2014 taught me who to trust.  2014 taught me to let go a little bit and who to hold on to without hanging on.  It taught me change is inevitable and you cannot wish everyone a happy birthday because at least half them muthas have no idea who you are now and you have no business wishing them well because you have about as much idea of them as they do you, so stay out or at least don't go balls in to their affairs, unless they ask, which gives us a little gray area because it's fun to play even though not everyone would like to play with you.  Understand better when no means no in fifteen. Just because you would like to laugh does not mean everyone else you encounter does too.

Let's draw this to a close.  The last thing I socked away for 2014 was that you still definitely get what you pay for.  That and given enough time anyone can be a mechanic if you study well and stock a good garage.  You get what you pay for and through repairs to my truck I got exactly what I paid for: a running truck.  I love the sound of a "V" layout 8 cylinder more than an inline 6 cylinder engine.  It's really throaty.  It has some gargle and growl and purr to it more than an inline 6.  Sixes sound closer to a four cylinder screech now that I've become accustomed to an 8.  I'm not sure where I was going with getting what you pay for.  I wish a little bit that I was heterosexual.  I envy it a lot and often and at many times intensely.  Even more than perfect sanity.  At least then I'd be married and crazy instead of just crazy.  It makes me cry.  It makes me furious too.  It makes me violent.  I want access.  I don't want to just understand, I want access!  I fucking want access!  What do you do?  Do you fake it?   Do you sleep walk it?  I'm laughing now because I am crying.   I hate my circuitry.  Let's not beat ourselves too hard in 2015 and let's keep that streak of no nose breaks and no concussions going.  I said I will never cut my face again.  That promise will be kept.

XOXO




///Daft Punk - "Giorgio By Moroder"   the year end playlist is up next.  shoot em dahn.

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"

Stand Up Act 5

Stand Up Act 4

So we've come a long way. As always with nothing but love. All I've got is love for yinz. I know I'm not the only one reading this, but I'm most at home believing otherwise. In some ways. Part of me still believes that I am and that's the part of me that says "hey, da fuck you been at?"

Outside the vein of what I originally attempted I actually took four cracks at this. I literally wrote out four different iterations of act 5. There was the act 5 that was a ridiculous racist rant that was so far disposed from who I actually am that I had to leave it in draft. There was the iteration that was absolutely bitter about my ex and the potential situation that she might be having ravenous sex while I am probably borderline asexual at this point, there was the iteration that was racist, bitter, and absolutely obsessed with lambasting my lot in life, and then there was the iteration that was just being a pure cunt. So I had four bad sets before this one. So this time is the real deal.

Not that the previous deals were not real deals. There was still no usage of backspace. Back pedaling? Sure. Lots of that. But I'm fairly certain it was for the best. I even tried to explain previous one hundred forty character twitter rants because I got so defensive. So pencils down. No defense. And no provisos for defenses generation. Keepin it light. Because the opposite of personal is accessible. And that's what I want and I hope you want, so in the words of a film referenced in a song I can't remember the name of: "into it."

No backspacing, per stand up. You can't take that back once it's loosed. So I'm gonna stand up.

Commuting on a bicycle. Great for staying in shape. Awful in practice.

Getting high, however, awful for staying in shape, but great in practice. I had two thoughts before that, but I was way too good to remember what they were. I have two empty seats in my classroom where those two thoughts were and I feel kinda sad that they skipped out. Probably the downside of getting high is exactly that. You get so many gems and it's like that last scene in the Goonies where that kid gets that little satchel of plastic gems and he's like "ah mah sheeeeet" and you think momentarily about all the good he can do for that rundown town that is still somehow susceptible to three man bank heists and prison breaks , but really he's going to buy a sweet ass Camaro with turn out mufflers and a mobile home with central air and the rest he'll blow on lottery tickets and before you know it he'll be on daytime television in one of those "you are not the father" micro telethons. Empty seats suck. It's like losing your baby teeth except they are your adult teeth and forever more, in every gay porn film you shoot because you are financially bankrupt and morals follow dollars, everyone will see you spreading jaws wide and wonder what you did to get a mouth of gold, but the answer won't be anything interesting.

The answer won't be something like "I took a bite out of a shark and killed it with the power of my jaws and also mind bullets." It won't be anything close to "I got into a telekinetic battle with a Sith lord and instead of throwing me out of a window he shifted all of my teeth two inches to the left and then I cut off his head with a flaming sword of laser focused light." The answer will be more akin to what a trailer park owner says when asked if he's living the American dream. I don't know what that answer would be, but I assume I would laugh like a kid who done caught his first fish at the local reservoir.

Actually that's one of those things that's kind of difficult to deal with. Gonna take a jump cut right there as I see the hole and the prize (it's a football analogy, as baseball is basically for sort of athletic obsessive compulsives who couldn't hack it at chess. Baseball is the D.D.S. of sports).

Everybody dreams. I dream, you dream, we dream. Sometimes weird things happen while we're dreaming. Last night was one of those times. It wasn't a weird dream like Abraham Lincoln walked in on me filming cat themed pornography and aliens landed on my front lawn and vaporized the loud ass people with Marvin the Martians disintegrater ray while they shouted at each other because they were crossing the street against the traffic lights and thought it would be a great idea to break out their catwalk stroll while rush hour traffic did the herky jerk trying to get around them.

It was strange because I said some ignorant stuff to a girl at a party I was attending. Sure, not the first time I went ape shit on someone I didn't know. Definitely not the first time I went ape shit on a lady. I was once smoking potent smokables with friends and it was a very chill environment. Everyone was pretty relaxed and happy, but there was this one girl who would not, for the life of her, just shut her mouth for any span of time. I know I talk a lot. I don't get to talk all that often and when I do I tend to err on the side of saying way too much, not because I am actively trying to say more than I want to, but because talking is like water and I'm thirsty as hell most days. Anyway, she was just rattling off and off and I thought my ears were going to catch fire with the rate she was asking me, in a subdued state, to process information so I eventually just screamed at her "would you please shut the fuck up" or something to that effect and long story short I was not included in further get togethers, because I can sometimes be "that guy". But anyway, had this dream where I was in attendance at a party and said some ignorant mean things to a girl.

Optional responses to having mean things said to you are A: devise a bulletproof retort. B: devise a bullet riddled retort that is delivered so well the point can't not be well taken. C: punch the offender in the face. D: engage in sober-esque dialog. D was basically off the table by then. I was expecting an A or a B, because when I'm good with words I am really good. And you can't punch a girl in the face. Or the boob. I don't know which one they dislike more, and frankly I'm not trying to find out.

I got C. In this dream, this girl balled up a technically sound fist and gave my face the business. Not proud of that. It is afterall, my dream. I should have seen it coming. I should have seen her angry little eyes and my smile was way too wide and easy. It didn't deck me, but it still shut me the fuck up and I figured I would be the bigger man and not cry about it. Of course the bigger man would also not just flatten her, but that was already off the table so the list of bigger than the situation things I could do was already pretty limited. I did the biggest thing I could do without looking like a complete fairy and went back to sipping at my sippy cup and then I woke up into 4 PM.

Not that I'm lazy or anything. I could wake up at 8 AM on my day off, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a day off if you're waking up incredibly early for no reason. Granted 8 AM is fantastic if you have a reason to be up then, but why would you intentionally deprive yourself of comfort on your day off? You have the whole rest of your life for people to tell you when you should be awake and the whole rest of your life to have places to be. Seriously, take one day out of the week and burn it. Just burn the fuck out of it. What is that? One seventh of your lifetime? Why does that even matter when you're going to spend some unholy fraction of your life on a toilet? You will probably spend more time eating, pooping, watching television, and deciding what to do next than you will spend asleep so you might as well get it while you can because when you're dead you'll regret that you didn't spend more time dreaming.

To get back into it though, the dream was fairly whack. About as whack as it gets. I wasn't even hitting on her. I think I said something about her hair and her eyeliner. Something to the affect of "did you pay someone to do that to you" or something. And the sad thing is I've probably said that to some girl at some bar who I didn't know, and my propensity for dumbass cutting observations got the best of me and also got me black balled for service because she was also the bartender. True story. I think I say that mostly because I'm entirely immune to similar comments because I so clearly couldn't afford to pay someone to do much of anything to me. It's all self inflicted. Pride badge right there. Did you pick out those clothes or- I can interrupt that thought instantaneously. Yes. The answer is yes, yes I did. I look this awesome for free. Now what? Yes, that's right. Scoff. Scoff because that's all you have because you paid good money to look like a douchebag and I pulled it off at zero cost, but anyway the whack thing about it was when I woke up my face hurt like hell where she laid her fist into the side of my jaw.

Now, the thing is, a normal person would wake up and work their jaw bones and rub their face and think "what the hell, that's not supposed to happen. I'm not supposed to suffer injury in a dream and then wake up with my nerves thinking it actually happened." I woke up and rubbed my tender face and thought "god damn, what a cunt." It wasn't until I was at work many hours later still rubbing my sore cheek that it occurred to me that getting punched in the face in a dream should not by any means carry over into the real world and then I was like "wait a minute, what the fuck? That was the worst dream ever!" So now I have to look out for that. Dreaming is my hobby and like many hobbies that include hard drugs I don't want it to start taking a toll on my body. Or maybe I should just sleep less. Either way, whack ass dream.

The Right One In

This entry was about a thousand words longer, but I thought about it some more and boiled it down beyond harping.

There are people that are there for you and there are people that think they are there for you. People that listen to you talk and try to participate in your dreams and delusions and end up sounding like hollow eyed parrots. People that try to hug you and have no idea how to actually hug another human being. People that think being there means saying "hey come by anytime" when you're not actually able to get there. Or, saying "sure come and stay as long as you need to except we'll have you moved to a homeless shelter if you don't find a place to stay in fourteen days." Amongst other things, it's just galling and conceited of a person to insist that they're "there" for you when they have no concept of what "being there" actually means to you and they believe themselves to be a saint to you when what they're doing is about as useful as giving a homeless man an end table and saying "my work here is done."



Don't tell me we have everything in common because we both had bad parents and should suddenly be bonded for life with endless stories to tell each other. Suffering maybe universal on a general level of human experience, but personal suffering is just that. Exceptionally personal. Never tell someone, after they tell you explicitly that you have nothing in common, that you have everything in common because you both had a bad dad, or wanted to play sports when you were little. How arrogant do you have to be to tell someone that you know them better then they know themselves. It's just plain stupid.

Don't ever tell me you're there for me and I won't let you in or don't want to be your friend because I'm afraid that you're "there for me," and I'm running away. It's a thing I don't want to dignify with a response.

I know myself pretty god damn well (though there's still so much I still learn) and know one knows me better than my former psychiatrist because I've told him things I haven't and will never tell anyone. Don't tell me, ever, that I'm afraid to let you in. Any person can want to be let into your life. Any person can want to be there for you and stand outside the windows of your eyes asking why you treat them so badly because they've been there for you all this time and you never once thanked them. Any person can want to be like you and have everything in common with you. But what it takes to "be there for me", trust, you cannot and have not done. Why should I thank you. When I tell you we have nothing in common, it's because I know myself well enough to be able to say so with certainty. And when it comes to who you let into your life, everything else becomes secondary, as long as you let the right one in, and I'm sorry, but it isn't you.

I'm sorry about that last part. It wasn't written directly to you, but to the person who is causing some problems because they thought and probably still swear to themselves up and down that they are all of those things that I just explained to you, so many people are not. It's grown tiresome, and I just had to get it out of my skull.

Some people really are there for you. Some people can be let into parts of your life. Some people do have things in common with you and me. But most people aren't, can't, and don't and one thing life has taught me through the years is that if you don't let the right one in, it makes it tough to move anything else forward when they start to ask you why you push them away.

Anyway, missed ya. Be back later with more items de arte.


Massive Attack - "Man Next Door" ...from here... onto the night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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