Collaboration Is a Minefield

How much of your hand should you show?  Once you have worked to find your voice, how afraid are you that it will be duplicated?  What if the person you want to collaborate with, the person who has the ends in hand, can duplicate your means if you have to go through them to gain exposure?

Eventually you can cut them out.  Eventually you will not have to worry about intellectual theft.  You'll always be one step ahead by default.  What if the person you have chosen to work with is capable of pirating everything you have created prior and your only proof is a series of time stamps?  What if you have the capabilities and where-with-all and all out gall and disregard to forge time stamps too?  What if the skillsets you have used to survive for so long, all thirty years of you, forced you to develop the skills you needed to make any claim of origin moot?  You can design locks and you also have a very fine set of lock picks.  The line between used and new blurs to infinity.

Collaboration is a minefield.  When an artist opens their book to you, enjoy it.  Do not see it as a requisite.  See it as a privilege.  See it as a pact of ultimate trust.  Closer than sex.  Closer than that bullshit conversation heart to heart over a beer or nine.  Closer than that time they drove you home drunk when you were too drunk to drive and they almost crashed, killing the two people in the backseat not buckled up.  Closer than that girl you've been talking to and haven't closed the deal on.  Closer than that friend that dropped you off at the emergency room when you died for twenty seconds and had to be resuscitated with a balled up fist to your chest.  Closer than that secret your dad told you when you finally got a couple drinks in him when he hit fifty and waxed nostalgic.  Closer than that blank spot in your memory everyone else knows.  It's a minefield.

If I show you how the sausage is made, do you see dollars or do you see a way to be a better you?  Do you see a way out or do you see a way in?  Will you steal or will you harmonize and create?

Every creator has the hang up of collaboration.  How many collaborations have started and failed?  How many flash in the pan, in the searing oil, spill over for an instant, lick the flame and light the entire venture ablaze?  Every time someone asks me to collaborate, I am reluctant.  It never ends well.  It never ends well!   IT NEVER ENDS WELL!  It is to a point that I know it is me.  I know I am at fault.  I go on tears.  I have vision.  I am the spark.  I am the fire.  I am the galaxy.  I am the clouds.  I am the sky.  I am the grass.  I am the atom.  I am the brick.  I am the pipe.  I am the fist.  I am the womb.  I am the rain and the sword.  The broom and the dust.  The wall and the fist.  The string and the mattress.   The thimble and the apple crushed during lunch breaks.  I am the napkin and the grease.  The spear and the beast.  The insect eaten bone and the loam.

There is never any commitment.  No real sticktoitiveness.  I churn and it burns and they push thumb to index and make empty promises and break appointments that actually matter and it goes round and round until it hits the drain.  That's not the end.  I go into the waste lines, shrink myself down and dive in, like that mini sub movie we all know that I can't remember.  Sealab?  Fantastic Voyage!  And I dive through the septic system after I get no response long enough and search it out and try to revive it and report back and the reports come thinner from the surface until it's a science fiction movie with a starship in The Dark Between the Stars and I'm hoping I can land somewhere and I do not want to do it again.

Forgive my apprehension because I will not forgive your abandonment.  Not again.  You say you want to collaborate.  I say prove it.  You say you want to work with me, show me something I have not seen.  Give me a reason to believe in you because your word is worth dog ____.  Hell, help me be a person better than myself right now and I will trade you.  If you call yourself an asshole and behave like one, the book of life will not open for you.  Fear is not stopping me, hate is not stopping me.  Waste is.  Time is.  Trust is.  Anyone can shout into a hole in the ground.  Anyone can shout into a knot in a tree.  Anyone can program a machine.  Anyone can build one.  Craft is another being altogether.

Another state. If you are searching for your voice, say so.  If you are searching for your base, say so.  If you need guidance, say so.  Make it clear.  As it stands, you have nothing to offer me.  Nothing within your catalog will help me refine, reinvent, understand, or see myself anew.  What you ask of me is to help you.  Help you do what?  Why should I care?  Why should I turn myself on the spit so you can eat while I listen to what a self starter and go getter you are on and on through the nights?  Show me something.  Show me you have learned something.  If you show me that you have learned something beyond your current state, I will engage you like you have a soul.  I will answer your questions and accept your challenges.  Keep coasting.  I will leave you behind.  Challenge me and I will fight.  Challenge me hollow and I will go through the motions right along with you and play down.

Hell, I'll help you bury it.  Our collaboration.  I don't take it lightly.  I do not like feeling used.  I know I am not disposable.  It is fun to feel like or be an inspiration or muse or riff target or mirror or foundry, however in collaboration I demand more, expect more, I want to be inspired, mused, riff against, see a reflection in you, and forge new alloys and atoms through you.  As I gift you, give me something to work with.  Turn my gears.  Blow my turbines.  Feed my generator, as I shovel coal into your own.

Do not make me regret this.  Not again.  Never again.  Do not waste my time.




///Mazzy Star - "Look On Down From The Bridge"  rainy winter.  the river never froze.  it is strange to be disappointed in the spring.  it is immensely frustrating when i can't talk art with you; when everything turns toward monetization and consumers.  screw that, can we look at a sky and say it's nice without you turning it into coin?

What Is and Should Not Be

I'm pretty sure, fairly certain, that what I am is asexual.  Ambivalent to any and all ranges of sexual encounters.  Does that make me some kind of freak animal?  No.  Does that make me open to any and all sorts of encounters?  Yes.  Does that make me bored with sex?  Also yes.

It also makes me very disappointed and disinterested in every and all things involving sexual parts.  Interest peaked?  Sure.  Able to love, again, sure.  Able to participate?  Also, again yes.  With enthusiasm?  Of course.

I understand the artistry of it.  The mechanics of it.  The connection as well.  What I am attempting to define is the isness of sex.  I can no longer participate in the action and experience the subtexts of it in a meaningful way.  Meaningful being defined as a further connection or a connection that helps define a further relationship.  For better or for worse I do believe I am evolving into an asexual state.

Monotone perhaps.  Evolution not necessarily meaning some sort of higher or greater sense, but simply a thing not defining the current state.  Every attraction being a curio and nothing more, but being something and meaning something more than the cellar dweller slut.

Maybe meaning something more like "yes this or that feels good, but if an inanimate object could give me that on occasion I would actually marry it and talk to it and have tea with it and sit and watch television with it and adopt a child with it and help he/she learn how to play baseball with it and introduce it one day and explain the birds and the bees and the birds and the wind to it and disclaim immaculate conception to him/her while it sat on a chair beside us" kind of way.

A relentless pursuit of violence through love.  Where that one is divides the ground by gashes and swathes of earth scorched and the question persists: "can you live on this, because I can go lower?"  The question persists: "I have seen the floor and seen yours, are you ready to hold hands and see how deep that rabbit hole goes?"

It is difficult to rake the years and every time we hang out I cannot understand why you did not let go too.  I wonder for seconds if I did something wrong.  I want some times to attack the people you call home because they know nothing and I read them right and, if not, can at least scream to you that they read me wrong and the only thing protecting them from me is you and the respect therein and the laws they built their bullshit on and the same laws keeping me from spilling guts and skating toward the door on intestine.

No one is as intense in person as they are on paper.  That's simple fact.  Give me one day of freedom.  True freedom.  And everything done on that day will remain inside those 24 hours.  I will make tracks and make tracks, and close loose ends, and if you need more than 24 hours to catch me, tough luck because the statute of limitations says so.

I am plushy.  Everyone needs.  Everyone wants.  Each and everyone has something to forget.  Sometimes it is easier to erase everything else than make edits.




///Fergie - (Clumsy)       "...some day, we'll have a two car garage, a tea nook, and a butcher locker..."

Thinking Around Yourself Is Not Easy (fear)

I have been trying to think around myself.  It has not been easy.  To say the least.  Part of what has made it so difficult is realizing that I am occupying so much of my own space.  Where as space time is largely infinite, I have had a hard time parsing my own space and my own time in that webbing.  Experience is infinite.  Infinitely divergent and convergent on the same scale.  The difference comes when you start to look at a person as fragment or a single stitch, a wave particle behaving more particulate than wave, on the scale of outcomes.  Something that you can cure me of.  No, not really.  Nothing that I wouldn't do for you differently.

I have been trying to think around myself.  I have been trying to dig myself out of the weird hole of self absorption and have experienced some success.  There has been some allure in exploring the dark side of the moon and what have you, but that has come as quite ancillary to everything else I would like to do, but has also occupied so many cycles, it's almost become laughable.

The standoffs between my drawing tablet and my gaming remote have grown to epic proportions.  As they should.  Given the variables.  I knew they would.  There are so many usb ports and only so many preoccupations.  I've grown a little sad though.  Not because I can't get everyone of me to work in concert.  Not because the voices have been so gotdamn loud I can't hear myself think sometimes.  Not because I want time to flow in reverse.  Not because I am stupidly heart broken too often and no amount of huffed paint will make it feel better long enough.  Not because four hour masturbation sessions laden me with enough shame to bury an elephant with no trace of a corpse or burial ground.  

I've grown a little sad, because I know, with the pills available, my outcomes might be entirely different, and I've given them not a lick of a try.  Not that I don't want to.   I absolutely do.  It's not like I'm going to magically lose my creativity or penchant for metaphor.  Might lose some sex drive, but it's not like I'm getting laid every five seconds.  It's a choice and I understand that.  It's a choice I'm not comfortable making.  What if I don't like the new me?

Better question:  what if the new me is less acceptable than the old me.  I don't mean in terms of dalliances and persuasions or anything like that, but how hilarious would it be if the new me was completely straight?  I just don't want, in a big way to rediscover myself.  At some point you get too old for that and I don't want to be in a position where I'm okay with being fucked up constantly and managing, but I also don't want to be in a completely artificial position that I can love because it's artificial and enjoyable and normal, because as much as I love fitting in, I love being genuine.

It has value.  Being genuine.  How far around myself am I supposed to think?  How far around themselves do other people think?  That's the much larger question.  I guess the greater difficulty comes in when I try to measure myself against other points of normalcy and I fail to get a reading.  It breaks my heart.  It really does.  It still does.   Not blaming anyone.  Not finding fault.  It just burns my heart steadily.  Day to day.  Am I that weird?  The answer keeps coming back yes and no.  And everyone gets to go through life, well, the vast majority, with answers to that question.  And I don't.

Maybe I'm not far enough outside myself to answer or maybe I just don't have an answer or maybe the answer is just kind of crappy and I have to deal with it until I die.  I don't know.  I'll still try.  To enjoy what life I got still comin' my way.  What else would you expect me to do.


///RJD2 - "Moonlit Skies"    Sometimes you just want to be right about something.  Just anything.  Just get it and nail it dead on for once.  It stays a luxury you can't afford, all you can do is convince yourself you were close enough.

Proliferation Theory

If you do enough, something is bound to stick favorably.  For a time I approached writing with an arrogance.  I thought, because it was the only thing I got decent marks in, I must be good at it.  And then I got bad grades.  Still got good grades from time to time, but bad grades just as often, usually related to the technical composition and not the ideas.  And then I got good technical marks and bad ones on the formation of ideas.  Sometimes I did well with both.

It was a strange time.  I transitioned from writing on my own time and going to class and writing instead of doing homework to higher grades where writing was my only homework and all I did in classes.  The arrogance of perceived innate talent faded quite a bit with one failed attempt to win awards after another and I blamed closed communities and the like, the department was exceptionally cliquey.  I believed the profs liked what they liked and you liked what you liked and it was your job to jump the gap, not theirs.

I don't know what my problem is exactly, but I do believe it is that the people that I idolize make it look so effortless and what they make feels like hit after hit after God damn hit.  Maybe proliferation theory is failing me.  It's difficult to say either way.  Maybe I am genuinely no good.  It's tough to digest.  Without some kind of schedule.  I rolled up a dollar bill.  It's just strange, I guess.  Proliferation theory.  Asking when is good enough for me good enough for someone else.

The theory begs a lower standard, but how much is compromised in terms of value and personal expansion? Is the cost appropriate to the value of the product, the life time stamp I put my name to?  I don't know.  I do it predominantly for myself, at least that's what I've convinced myself of.  I don't know.  Would I kill to go back to school?  How many people?  Could I plea bargain my way out of life sentences and would the offer still be good when I got out?  I'd have to think about it.  Hypotheticals.

Yeah, it drives me crazy.  A little bit.  I try to think about what else I would be doing, could be doing.  None of it appeals to me the same way.  Everyone, including myself, well maybe not everyone, many people talk about being their harshest critic.  I may be my most passionate lover.  Delusions of grandeur coming with the territory, but I don't always see it so clearly.  The Fantha.  Losing focus on the mission.  I just want to die knowing I was good as I could possibly be, not knowing I was good as I was going to be.  Who wants that?

I think believing that I'm great keeps my engine running.  Keeps the clutch down and a hand on the shift knob for when I come running.  Beyond that, I don't know how much credence I give it.  I butcher language and muddle image on a weekly basis.  I talk like broke nosed sailor all too often and argue like a fifteen time concussed politico's son.  Pretty sure my mental dictionary has "turn to page 345"s on it and on page 345 there is a crayon hand drawn hairy dick in the corner.

Purpose is a fine commodity.  Take a digger.  Fire off the magazine, discharge, and throw it as far as you can.  Sometimes panic can be beautiful.  Never outwardly.  Did I tell you that I was you?  Don't be silly.  Don't be silly little king with your crown.  Let me polish that for you; you dropped it skipping puddles in gutters without your galoshes.  You know the ones with He-Man and Skeletor printed all over?  I'll remember for you.

Just behave, okay?

The project was, the final project was, to make a visual that encompassed everything you believed poetry to be.  Everything you believed poetry to be and the purpose it served.  They came in with their power points and dream catchers and God's eyes and a diorama of a village and someone made a painting and someone made a collage from printed magazines and there were a handful of abstract sculptures and even a figurine, but you made a life sized naval mine with trigger switches and detonators and wires out of empty wine bottles and paint brush handles and spray painted it black.  That was a fun walk across campus with that hugged to your chest.  Cutting across the grass, because the people on the sidewalk could go f--- themselves that early in the morning.  You worked on it all night after thinking about it for a week.  Everyone talked about their things and you talked about yours.  And that's where it ended.

Officially.  I suppose, the project is ongoing.  I hate myself.  I love myself.  I hate myself.  I'm sorry to drag you into it.  I don't know how else anything changes.  Contemplating the validity of ProT.


///Starkey - "Spacewalk" infolatice diver with a bad respirator.  the city is so vast and so uninhabitable so far beneath the waves

from a similar born year and different circumstance, but very little I haven't enjoyed while there: alicja-w-krainie-czarow

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.

Redesign & Sudden Death Memory, and the Equalizer

Been smacking the knobs on my equalizer. Playing with sound things to see what other sound things I can make with them. Playing with sound tracks to see if I can mess with the levels in just such a way to drop the singer's voice right out of the track and hold the rest of it intact. It's been a pretty fun game. A fun way to pass time. Well actually not a fun way to pass time. That's kind of the annoying part. It's time consuming, but such fun. And I will not harp on lost time today. I have more time than most people get to enjoy and keep a roof over their head. Granted it is inconvenient time so its value is probably more accurately expressed in pesos instead of dollars, but creative currency no less.



I still need to get an actual instrument. Probably an electric guitar, but I think I might be more of a bass kinda guy. There is something alluring in the simplicity of bass that lends itself to complication in the way electric guitar can base itself in range and show its beauty in simplification. Plus I love drums, but after four concussions I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to develop the wild coordination required to play them well. Plus there's something soothing to generating and feeling bass ripple through you. Something that counters the days forced aggressions and doses of adrenaline that feels like a hot bath for your brain. A thing restorative.

However that's going to come after I finish saving up for a beater. trying to spend a grand on a car to love and cherish. I figured out that if I spend no more than 300 dollars on it, it only needs to last four months before dying, if it dies, assuming it dies, for it to cover and even come out better than my normal costs of riding the city bus over the course of four months. If I spend a grand it will have to last a lot longer, but the thing is the difference between spending 300 dollars and a grand is that if I spend that extra 700 dollars I will probably get much closer to driving the car I actually want to drive instead of ending up driving someone's rusted out, but still inspected, late 80's minivan. I would love to own a ford probe. The mustang replacement that never was. Or an old Celica. Actually all of the old rally car platforms are just so tempting. As long as I end up with something with as much or preferably more torque than horsepower (or a ford probe) I will be a fantastically happy camper.



Just gotta keep messing with that equalizer until the right sounds come out. I'll get it eventually.

So there's an upcoming redesign of Auralport coming up. It's funny because upcoming things can never not be coming up. Doing it partly because I'm tired of seeing the same thing come up behind new words, so I figure you probably are too and it will be good for me to get the work in with creative suite. Part of what I've been trying to do lately is get the time in to redevelop my lapsing photoshop and illustrator skills. Few things frustrate me as much as having an idea and no mode to express it and right now, with my tool box near empty that is exactly what I've been staring at. I want to take the current design away from nature and into more of a citified urbanized feel for a while. A little darker too. Sunburst forest green is not wearing so well with the current thematic tide all over my poetry corner and I want the images to better reflect the content. I think I'm going to start mock ups of new headers for here too that I'll cycle through every four weeks or so... to keep things interesting when the content is not because, God knows, there are only so many ways life can fall apart and it really helps when the band playing you to the ocean floor knows more than one song.

More than that though, I am also going to make the effort to have my own stuff developed again instead of just linking us off to other folks things. I think that has been something of a friendly crutch in the retardation of my abilities and I've accepted with too much heart.

Some memories have resurged. Memories that I thought were gone forever. I was taking a shower after work and watching the water wheel away between my feet and into the drain. As I traced my fingers between the shoots of my hair against my scalp my mind was ripped back twenty something years to another time on Staten Island when I was doing the same thing in a much younger frame for very different reasons. I remembered being allowed to stay home after a particularly violent episode of punishment and discipline so that I could take some time to recuperate and feel better about myself before going back to school. It took all that time for me to realize that I wasn't being allowed to stay home. I wasn't suddenly the beneficiary of some new found well spring of mercy and kindness. I was wrecked. Visibly, noticeably, physically wrecked and he was just trying to protect himself from the consequences of his actions by keeping me at home until the physical wounds righted themselves enough to raise questions. Standing in the shower it was like being thrust into a sudden death tournament with no preparation. No warning. Needless to say, I lost. I lost it. But now that it's come up from the ocean blacked years of my younger days it's there and I can at least see it coming if it ever rears its head again.

I don't know why those years have all tinted themselves to night. I mean, I know why from the standpoint of survival. The standpoint of self preservation. What I do not know is what the mechanism was for their initial elimination from the body of experiences that have come to define me. So few memories from then. I suppose I am happy to have another one. Just unhappy that it is one so undesirable. Such is life I suppose. Back to the equalizer.


///Fatboy Slim - "The Journey" journeying away from where I was to where I want to be, or maybe just to a place I didn't know I would love to be in. The journey will call my name. One of the few with no real home, no place to be, and so many places still unknown. Plainswalkers. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be good enough at expressing myself through music to link to my own. That's pretty far off. But one more reason to live another day is never a bad thing as far as I care to be concerned :)

why i hate myspace writers 02/08/06

Subject : Why I hate Myspace Writers
Posted Date: : Feb 8, 2006 4:37 PM

on second thought... i dont mind having to click through five levels of bullshit to get to the writing communities.... the REAL issue here is that none of the writers or at least only a select handful of them are actually worth associating with. fuck 'em, they all suck.

there's nothing wrong with being a self styled writer. what makes it wrong as all hell is when someone proclaims themself a writer and all they do is churn out whatever is bubbling on top of their brain without giving it a second thought. i cant count how many times ive asked people if they ever revise and the answer comes back "i revise as i write." what the fuck does that mean! does that mean they never have to do second drafts because its always perfect word for word as it hits the page. jeeeeezus, i hate hobbyist writers because they make career writers that havent made it yet look like assholes. perfectionist, arrogant assholes. which is untrue for at least half of us.

gah!!!! think about it... if you found a way to eliminate every hobbyist and aching heart pre puber and old ass retired wench knob with too much time on his/her hands and an internet connection, you would thin the field down immediately to college students, career writers, and thinking adolescents. this would, over night, eliminate 1599 of the 1605 groups and would improve the quality, be it a niche group or a broad multi-topical group, of the remaining 6 groups drastically.

so fuck 'em. fuck all of them dabblers and shit scrawlers. someone should just hand them a stick and point them to a hole in the ground full of feces and tell them to stir, because thats all they do when they think they're "contributing." theyre just stirring around the same pot of used up pointless crap the person immediately before them shat out in a different color and texture with the words "comments please," or "first post, be nice" or "suggestions welcome."

The second worst part to all of this is the fucking encouragement loop these dabblers have going. when someone writes shit i call it what it is because they need to know that publishing something to the community means that youve done some work on it and its not just a spray of mucus from a brain sneeze that happend the night before. what the dabblers do however is discredit everything i say by immediately patting their fellow/fellette on the back and saying things like "great job", "i really loved that one", "good metaphor." FUCKING SHIT FACE. stop enabling the bastards and lay down some laws of what it means to be a writer!!! shits gotta stop somewhere.

what i hate the most about myspace is the piss poor quality of the writing groups, what i hate second most are the pointless bits of encouragement that keep them going, revolving doors of no talent hacks and their no talent hack readers.