I Know It's Going To Be A Rough Day and That's Okay

I've been trying to arrest my emotions for two days and here we are at day three.  I can't allow life to seize up and die.  This morning, poking the tines of my work into the middle of a sunny side up egg on a piece of medium tough toast with a shake of a salt and a dollop of syrup beside it, I am afraid.  I used to call Annie, I used to call Alexis, I used to call my psychiatrist, my therapist, myself, when fear gripped me.  I haven't been able to eat willingly so I am preparing to chop up an egg into a little toast and see where it goes.  Maybe we will cut up a clementine into quarters and have that in lieu of juice.

My emotions are still all over the place.  Stitched together with some will and a little self motivational glue and a little music.  I know I am going to cry today and I won't be able to stop it, but I will make myself go to work as best I can.  There will be a lot of difficult exchanges of conversations today.  "You look awful."  "Are you okay?"  I know and no.  Walking through hardware stores and to the bank and to the grocery to buy more food to force myself to eat.  I cannot allow myself to curl up and die.  I cannot allow myself to see people.  I have to turn everything inward to generate enough power to keep my sun from collapsing into a singularity.

Hysterical laughter tearing through my lungs and tears staining the floor between my boots while I stand in lines.  Eyes red and sunken and lips cracked from grinning and grimacing.  Doubling over in hacking coughs and dry heaves that will not stop.  Questioning, screaming, begging the snowy sky why there is no magic pill, but there is a magic bullet.  It's not going to be easy.   Please don't talk to me.  I know I am a mess and nothing will help more than time alone.  Thank you for understanding.




///Philip Selway - "Coming Up For Air"

What Half The Country Said

I can't stop bursting into tears every few hours.  Food won't stay in me when I do try to force myself to eat.  It's heart rending.  My body is physically rejecting reality like an immune system trying to defeat a bacterial infection.  Half of the country would prefer you don't exist.  Half of the country said that you are what's wrong with the country.  Half of the country said you are worthless.   Half of the country said do us a favor and keep it moving.  Sickening.  Half of the country said your life is good enough, you should be happy no one is tying you to a tree and that should be good enough for you.  Half of the country said we don't want to be bothered with you anymore.  Go away.

I wish I could fucking disappear.  Just evaporate into thin air.  Maybe you voted for him because he had that one campaign promise that you could really get behind.  Maybe you voted for him because Hillary is a woman and you just can't have a woman in an office with that much responsibility.  Maybe you voted for him because you flipped a coin and whatever it landed on was what you were going to vote.  Maybe you voted for him because you truly believe some of what he says or you thought he's a strong leader capable of leading America back to some made up glory from the past.  Whatever reason you found for yourself, whatever mental gymnastics you made yourself do: what you said with that vote was fucking get out of our lives because we are sick of you and this country is not for you, it is for us.  I want to kill myself.

You may continue to justify your vote with "well, I don't believe that and I don't think he really thinks that.  I love minorities.  I'm friends with them.  I love women, they should have the same rights as men and jobs..." oh of course.  "He only said that to get people riled up.  He tells it like it is, but he doesn't mean what he says..." you are so full of insane bile it is nauseating.  If you are willing to overlook everything he stands for to find the one thing you can hold on to and make yourself okay with casting a vote for him you are saying you are okay with everything else about him and can get behind everything he says.  You cannot pick and pull little bits here and there and throw blinders on toward the rest of the hatred and disgust.  That's like riding in a car with some people who are on their way to beat someone to death and shrugging because you're in the car to get a lift from your house to the store.  What the fuck should you care who gets beaten lifeless, it wasn't you holding a chain or bat, hell you didn't even get out of the car and turned the radio up when they stopped.

What you said with your vote was disappear.  I wish I could.  My body will stop convulsing soon.  I'll get back in to the movement of life.  Half of the people I see I will wonder what hatred is hiding underneath that smiley "good day, to you" mask.  What part of his hate speech is inside you word for word that you've managed to mask with "I like his healthcare ideas."  What part of his hate speech is inside you, but with a gentler paraphrase because you would never say it that way exactly.  I will wonder what fears lie behind half of their eyes.  I can't kill myself.  You'll always be there and disappearing won't change how you feel.  My pain will always be there and I'll have to learn to live with this latest greatest example.  I'm just tired of fighting and trying to fit in around the margins near the shadows.  What you said with your vote will never not be disgusting, will never not bring tears to my eyes.  You say get over it, we've come so far since slavery.  What half the country said with their vote with proud chests and big smiles begs to differ.

How To Fast Forward the Next 8 Years

It's quite simple.  The world is not going to end because Donald Trump was elected.  The offices will struggle to accomplish anything because the policies don't work, don't exist, or both.  They'll distract the American public for four years with scary this and that.  Throw in a war on something at home and more involvement in a war somewhere else.  Start the next election cycle highlighting how everything that went wrong was because everyone else screwed it up and the country wasn't ready for real change yet and it would take at least four years to undo nonexistent office corruption and then you have Donald Trump re-elected and nothing gets done again on a platform of "every magical thing  that can't be done or makes no sense, but makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, will get done this time".  Some people get a lot richer.  Most people don't.  Tons of imaginary money changes bank accounts, a bunch of people get sick, some businesses collapse, the environment takes a hit, international relations trip over themselves, segregation gets worse, and then a Democrat is elected again when a few more people jump over to the other side of the aisle because they don't want to be associated with the consequences any more and they're tired of trying to explain how their ideas worked, but didn't, but obviously absolutely did, but actually data can be manipulated to say anything of course, so... you know... allow my colleague to explain.

No need to leave the country.  Just yawn and go back to sleep and wake up 8 years from now.  Things will be worse.  Trying to change them will be impossible until the people holding the levers have to step away and everyone has a fresh, 8 years long, understanding of what is and is not to be feared and challenged instead of what they've been distracted or tricked or worn down into believing.  Yep, 8 years sounds about right for the messaging and programming to finally fade.  Just try to live the best life you can in the meantime and do what you can to keep your life and loved ones from collapsing under the weight of lunacy and if we're all lucky 4 years will be all it takes for folks to snap out of the flash & magic show.

Then with that Democrat, everyone on the other side will start clamoring "what about us" even though their lives under so and so Republican, locally or nationally, didn't get much better because it literally can't get much better without extracting freedoms from other people (liberties and justices have to come from somewhere eventually), but they'll see other lives improving because there is literally that much space for improvement without taking away anything from anyone else.  "Injustice, inequality, we deserve better too" the other side will say and the flash and magic show parade will come crawling over the horizon with their flags and music and swaying tents like a fantastical parade from outer space and it'll start over again and the only thing you can do is hope enough was done before it arrives that much of the work will still be standing when it finally dissipates.




///Paranoia Agent - (Ending Credits) oh, calliope

A Bad Case of the Quits

Think about all the things you can't do.  Body lock.  Sleeping fourteen hours a day to avoid the giant shadows in my head.  Long sleeps and short breaths because there is no way you can get yourself into trouble if you're not there.  It's great to imagine a world where everyone is not all home upstairs to feel a little more comfortable around you and less self conscious or conscious of the world around here.  Impossible to dodge or sidestep.  Autofold.

Or maybe I'm just mapping out new ways to find a path to talk about depressed.  Nothing is immediately wrong, but long term is up in the air and the stress of the attempt to figure out where things might land is flat-lining my ability to comprehend channels that run outside of mathematic doubt?  I am in a funk.  I've seen the rise of the range to climb and am set out with gear and guide and 300 miles and ten days later we are what feels like no closer in the range's foothills.  Still, hand cupped to eye, tall grass marched, toward the snowy summit's bouldered base.

It is always difficult thinking about what the point is.  To map uncharted territories?  To have a point of reference?  To exercise the brain and verify its function?  To cope?  To record history?  Attack?  Report?  Defuse?  Modify?  Survive?  You're bumming me out, man!  What is the point?  You could simplify things greatly by eliminating yourself from the equation.  Speedometer, bruh.  Yeah, yeah.  There are many and a several reasons to be alive.  Number one being that the planet is a phenomenal place all its own.

Number two being that the planet's weather, moods, and neighbors are just as magical.  How could you not want to see what happens next?  To hell with purpose.  Have pleasure in you and your own adventure.  To what end?  For what purpose?  For what reason?  Dunno.  Just thought it'd be fun.  Just thought it'd be a sight.  Just thought life alone is not all cupcakes and daydreaming and that's quite alright.  Bad hands, bad turns, bad lands... I'm rhyming again.  Bad hands and bad turns are just facts of being alive.  No reason to quit.  No reason to think about disappearing.  No matter how absurd the turns get, how unfair the hands go out, stick with it.  Don't quit.  You never know if the next sunrises colors will be like anything you've ever seen before.

///Moderat - "A New Error"

Nearing the End of the Third Week With a Fractured Jaw

With roughly 75% of the range of motion returning and constant pain beginning to subside for several hours at a time I feel pretty good about not going to a hospital on this one.  Had there been a clear break in the bone I definitely would have gone to get whatever metal was needed implanted and get wired shut.  Sometimes it baffles me how interconnected the bodies musculoskeletal system is and I am constantly reminded of how layered its concert is.

I didn't realize how many different ways and how often I shift my jaw and slide my teeth against each other when I am processing information or thinking through conversation or using my eyes and ears to take information in.  Left, right, backwards, forwards, clenching some sections of teeth and relaxing others at the same time.  Everything from pulling on a door knob, to swinging a hammer, to stretching, sitting down, standing up, turning my head, opening a mailbox, to driving a stick shift is tied to the muscle groups around the neck and jaw.  Suddenly hundreds if not thousands of long memorized motions and activities that you could perform with blindfolded confidence are thrown into doubt.  "Is this going to hurt?"  "How will this affect the healing cracks?"  "Will this pull apart soft scar tissues not yet stabilized and calcified into bone?"  In the third week I am starting to regain some confidence.

For most of the first and second week the pain never felt less than a five or six on a 10 point scale throughout the day from waking to sleep.  Depression became a huge factor.  You are not sad because of what happened or how it happened.  You become depressed because you cannot laugh without shooting pain.  You become depressed because you cannot fall asleep because of sudden spikes of pain that cut through your over the counter pain killers like the barrel of a bat slamming into a light bulb tucked inside a pillow case.  You become depressed because the muscles of your tongue and throat put enough pressure on the angle of your jaw, right on the side of the cracks, to make your eyes tear up when you swallow what you can.  Everything you casually associated with happiness in sleep, smiling, laughter, rest, sustenance, is hot wired and reprogrammed to fear and ache and apprehension and anger and it weighs on you hour after hour after hour until depression becomes crushing.

In week three many self imposed restrictions are beginning to lift.  I can get through the day and night without a single pain pill.  The constant background ache has dropped to an occasionally noticeable two or three.  When I press on the impact site gently, the bone doesn't flex and make crunching sounds.  In the second week I successfully set the condyle back into its natural position.  I couldn't help crying for several minutes afterward.  It was important and necessary as my bite was out of alignment from front to back.  Once I did that the grinding noise right at the ramus's tip finally stopped and when I bandaged my mouth closed with a thick elastic wrap my teeth sat almost as evenly as they did before.  I think that dislocation is probably what saved the angle from snapping clean through.

I can almost yawn again.  I still have to brace my chin when I sneeze.  At the end of this third week I can chew very soft pasta and cheese and drink thick soup relatively pain free, but I am taking it extremely carefully to be absolutely certain I don't retard the healing process or get too enthusiastic about my food choices.  It felt so good to finally be able to scrub my beard again without fireballs of pain shooting through my face.  Nothing changes the complexion of the day like starting it off with a good deep beard scrubbing, good god I missed that.

All of my anger and hatred toward the people that did this to me is gone.  What really makes me happy is not caring what happens to them.  Being able to let their aggression go and not have a second thought about retaliation or feeling like I'm owed something or that I owe them something.  The transaction is over.  What matters is what you decide to do next for yourself.  What matters is that lying in bed your jaw doesn't sag and fall to one side like a screen door with one hinge.  What matters is that you survived and you can physically laugh again without fear of splitting bone apart from the spirited ways in which you normally like to jump on life's comedy.

I still cannot laugh too much or the pain piles up and grows to wince worthy proportions and twists my face sour.  I still can't make some facial expressions.  I still can't sustain hours of conversation, but then again I was never particularly great at making conversation as much as listening to it, but it is still something to get used to realizing that I can only say so many words before I have to rest and close my mouth tightly.  I still can't clench my teeth in consternation.  I can feel some lingering instability and pain in the healing dislocated joint when I run up or down stairs or shake or nod my head too vigorously.  Hopefully these things and instabilities will pass as week four progresses.

I know there is potential for some level of permanent pain in the joint since it was not reset by a professional and was not wired shut to ensure speedy and complete recovery of the fracture site.  There were evenings when I slept and would wake with a start in the second week so abrupt I could feel the joint strain and hear the angle click and flex.  There was a day when I woke to a spider landing on my cheek and a slapped at my face and new before the pain even registered that I screwed up big time in doing so and set myself back all of whatever healing occurred through that day.  Common sense tells me this too, as my back injury from two and a half years ago still bothers me from time to time and sends numb sensations down my right buttock and thigh if the barometric pressure is too far off from my body.

Some of the nerves likely died as well as there is noticeably diminished feeling along the left side of my jaw bone.  I expected as much.  I expected the worst, but progress has been good and some levity has returned to day to day life.  I am not out of the woods yet.  Two to three more weeks to go before I'll try to bite into a piece of meat that hasn't been blended to the consistency of mashed potatoes.  At least three more weeks before I try to bite into an apple.  I think I may attempt a sandwich next Saturday... a grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly.  My tummy can't wait to have fun with food with my mouth.

The food has been spectacular.  At first, the only things I could eat were nutrient shakes and very thin liquids for the first two weeks.  Very finely blended and extremely water heavy meals put through the blender and then only a half cup or so every few hours because the pain was too intense to do much more than that.  Since then the horizons have begun to grow and meals become more intricate.  Right now it's an assortment of pastes and soups of varying composition, from fresh bell peppers ground into bacon pate with rice and spinach soups drizzled all around to sweet bean mashed potatoes with soft sharp chedder shredded over the top alongside peas carrot beef mash and oreos in a little cup on the side blended into a desert syrup.  Nothing makes lunch quite like peanut butter and jelly paste beside a cup of milk.  It has been a little bit of a challenge and through the first two weeks I lost 25 pounds, but as time is getting on, some of the weight has come back.

I still feel weak from not being able to work out or move much, but some strength has returned and will only increase as the healing progresses.  At the end of week 3, I feel alright about the future.  There's a decent chance I will be close to what I was before my jaw was fractured and dislocated.  I know I will never be the same, but I am alive and can continue and I am happy for that.  Happy with that.  It kind of mirrors my mental problems that I deal with and constantly manage without medicine.  I know I will never be better than I was, but I can try to make sure I don't completely unravel and if I can be close to as sound as I was the day before then I have done the best I can.




///Deptford Goth - "Objects Objects"  the bass filled silence between the searing walls of the chaotic

The Two Dimensional Garage, Jury Duty, and the Furnace

I continue to not eat.  I don't know why.  Well, I do know why: it's very difficult to do regularly.  In short, it's hard.  That's not a reason.  That doesn't qualify as a reason.  That's an excuse.  It's a reason!  I know it's a reason because I like food.  I like shopping for food.  I like looking at food.  I like cleaning and preparing food.  I simply cannot eat it and I don't know why it is so difficult to get food from in front of me to inside of me.

Eating with people is still so strange and, for the most part, to be avoided.  It's incredibly uncomfortable.  It makes my forearms itch to watch and listen to it.  It's not disgusting, but mechanically it's draining to be around, and then people ask you why you're not eating and it turns into a whole thing and just thinking about it now I want to vomit.  It's difficult to do.  I don't understand it.  I try to do it, the feeding, but even two a day is a break through.  Once is enough.  Get it down and out of the way and forget about it.  Go to bed.  Sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep.  You can't run yourself into trouble if you're asleep.

I'm not sure what.  You can see all of the colors and the sun's light and clouds and birds and it flattens  and smears out to gray.  There are things you have to do.  Things that must be done.  Feeding, washing, resting.  Sometimes it feels like a two dimensional garage.  A plastic play place facsimile of garage where everything is laid out inside white lines.  You get up and everything is numbered in order.  You take this off and put that on, brush this, comb through that, turn knobs here and there, check your fuel gauge, off to work little guy, home, and into bed to lie awake until your brain turns itself off.

There's nothing special.  There's nothing important.  There's nothing pressing.  There's nothing.  The routine is critically important.  The more rigid the better, I used to think.  I'm not so sure.  With familiarity, brutal and starkly lit familiarity, there are fewer opportunities for mistakes, misreadings, miscues, misses.  All of them.  Destructive and damaging misses.  Misses that can affect my relationships with friends or neighbors and strangers.  Fewer opportunities for misses that can lead to depressions and emotional collapses.  Fewer opportunities for problems to arise all across the board, because of something I saw or heard and reacted to or engaged with that later proved to never have existed at all beyond my own eyes.

Brute force coping.  Except even that fails and begins to deteriorate and then you can't be at work and you can't be at home either and you hide from them by sleeping as much as you possibly can and maybe this time when you wake up they'll be gone and they're not and you're quietly terrified and you can't be out of the house for too long, and you can't be awake for too long.  They'll know.  Turn your world into a two dimensional garage and nail the windows shut and paint them black so they can't get inside and they won't be able to tell if anyone is awake at night by candle light.  To be safe and certain.  They'll try to fool you, but you know.  You know what you have to do to live.  It's all laid out by numbers and if something goes missing you know exactly what it is because its outline will be there in its absence.

I've tried for years to understand it.  I say tried, but it is not as though the attempts to understand it have reached their conclusion.  They are ongoing.  It is very difficult to prioritize.  There are many things to complete, and all they all strike me as the same.  Eating or a glass of water are as important as going to work or placing critical phone calls.  As important or as unimportant.  Prioritization has stepped away and I don't know where exactly to.  I want to feel the sensation of hot blood across the surface of my skin.  I am trying to summon the rage that fills and fires the furnace that can push me forward into and through a day or a week.  By the end, there isn't much left.  The weekend or the month's end will be composed of reassembling what is left of the furnace when I have to use it and over use it.  Picking up and bending sections and pieces back into place for having to contain for lengths and lengths of time roiling licks of anger and sheer rage.

I hate myself.  I hate having to force on smiles and eat back tears and shake hands.  I hate that I have so much trouble getting into and keeping jobs.  I'm lucky enough to have a position now that is fairly flexible and accommodating.  I'm afraid of the day the unpredictable nature of my disorder will strike me with no warning with a ferocity and depth of intensity that I.  I just don't want to hurt anyone.  Often I've said my main desire in this life is to be left alone, but that's not because I want to be left alone.

Isolation is the only way.  Every day I know I am going to die alone.  I cannot be married.  I cannot raise children.  I cannot take care of someone else.  I cannot ask someone to help me take care of myself.  I completely understand.  It would not be fair.  Beyond fairness, and the idea that trying to build a home with someone who is afflicted and, for lack of a better word, damaged it would be hazardous on many other levels.  At least isolated there is a very large zone of dead space, neutral space, physically speaking, but isolated there is also a zone of communications that can be closed off and shut down until a time arises when they can be safely used again.  Whatever damage is done is localized and hopefully hidden from those who would be part of relationships tended.  That way when communications and visitations resume they can be pursued with the cues and tips and exchanges of normalcy and proportions near normalcy that govern civil life.

Which brings me to jury duty.  There was the questionaire about all of the reasons why the prosecution or the defense may not want to select you for their trial and I came to the line item of: do you have any mental or physical disabilities that may impair your ability to perform the duties ... to paraphrase.  I don't have a prescription anymore.  That lapsed so long ago I can't remember the specific year.  I don't have paperwork.  I hate saying "what's wrong with me", but I tried to describe, during the interview portion when they ask you about your particular survey answers, what was wrong with me.  It was terribly uncomfortable though they smiled a lot,but it was the evil smile.  Not the understanding smile.  You can't ask everyone to understand.  They won't get it.  If I struggle to grasp it myself, how can I ask someone else to?

Several hours later, we had to sit for all of the interviews even though we knew we weren't going to be selected, I still thought about it.  There are many things I should not be allowed to do and serve on a jury is among them.  It's upsetting.  Feel fractional because you are.  Parts of your mind are missing or maybe it's that there are many more glitches on top of and laced throughout what is supposed to be there, what is standard equipment, and there is no way to clean or tear down and rebuild the system free of them without killing yourself in the process.  Feel and know that you'll never quite be up to par with anyone, as long as you live and know that it probably will not be all that much longer.  Maybe another 30 or so years.  Maybe less.  When you were younger you wanted to die.  Not far removed from then you realize, there's no hurry.  Be patient.  Don't fool yourself.

Or do.  I try to laugh a lot.  The idea is that maybe if I smile and laugh enough it will stick in place and remain.  People will love being around me and I will love being around them because they will love being around me.  Carefully and painstakingly construct it inside your two dimensional garage, piece by piece by piece.   Power it up.  Go through the movements and the timing and conversational spacing.  Practice and memorize so that you can drum up this other self upon demand, slip inside of it and wear it effortlessly and with enough repetitions it will become not only effortless, but a full projection and extension of you to the point that it is you.  Until your body violently rejects it and you blaze apart before your own eyes.  We will see.



///TV on The Radio - "Wear You Out" let me to bed.  please?

Comrade Super Code

Life has been strange. A lot of big boy decisions. Decisions I haven't had to make before. Like what? Like none of your damn business. It's been difficult. Then again, when has it ever been easy. My dreams have been phenomenal. I've taken again to recording them when I can as I wake up. The first thing I do is grab hold of my phone and press record and just talk, sometimes for hours. Sometimes just to hear a voice that I know is real. Sometimes just because there is so much information brought back from there that I know I am going to lose that I know I will need later. I promise I will get back to serials.

The thought of dying has not been as intense as it used to be. I had a conversation with someone about that specifically. Ten iterations ago I was sixteen. I don't know what I was thinking then. The documentation is largely destroyed. The record really begins to come into it's own when I was 18 and really began to apply myself to writing. That's been the literal paper trail. It hasn't been as intense as it used to be. Probably part of the blunting. Which is fine. I can deal with that missing edge. Sometimes you just have to beat yourself in the head with a bat until things quiet down. The kid hasn't been missing. That's not the problem. The problem is that we're all on the factory floor, guns to each other's heads, knives out, and if you say one word, just one, I will cut you so bad they will need your dental records to put a name to your body.

I just have to get them to work together again. They're all here. Just off on different projects. Different passions asking each other to pass the mashed potatoes, but never directly. It's been great hanging out with them on an individual basis, since they're not talking. We've gotten close. Which is nice. Not together. Which is not nice. Variable occupancy. Not healthy. We do drugs. No we don't. Second hand spray. Collusion. You owe me. I have been managing rage. Easier to do when you don't own standoff weaponry. In my life everyone has lied to me. That is not entirely true. Tomorrow is my 67th birthday in my 26th iteration. There is a certain amount of pride to be had in not joining the under 27 club, I think. A certain amount of disappointment, because joining that club is pretty elite in terms of prodigious production, but I have not done enough or come close to where I want to be in terms of body of work to be happy enough to pull that trigger, and a certain amount of relief because I am sure the majority of under thirty something suicides go unheralded and how sad is that? It's off and on. Wires close enough to arc, but the force of the spark and ignition of air shoves them apart until they work their way close again.

The shadows have been crawling. The little faces in door jambs closed. The weeping man in streaks of dry paint laid to a door decades ago. What the hell. Who made that and why. The shadows have been crawling and blooming for lack of a better word. When I'm not looking. When I'm barely looking. When I'm trying not to look. The world is a war zone. A fantastic warzone. I have been imagining the most fantastic weapons to expedite exterminations. If only I had the staff and the means. An angry boy can dream.

The world cross bridge is haunted. By my father. I have to kill him there. If I ever want to enjoy it again. I've had to rip chord out of there more times than I would like to admit in the last seven days and I can't kill him here. Not yet anyway. Still too much to do. He will pay though. Eventually. Matters of course and convenience. There was a word I was supposed to look up and I didn't. It's going to bother. 24 years of compensation. I just have to make sure I don't take it out on the people I love.

I gave women a pretty hard rap sheet yesterday. And I'm sorry for that. Not because it wasn't true, but because it came across so chopping blocked. There's no vendetta. Probably a lot of buried issues with my mother. They come up as I dig into the ground. Trying hard to not be found. I'm not going to go on a serial spree of slaughtering women to make myself feel better about myself. The shadows have been crawling. Actually moving. I don't know what to do about that. If there is anything I can do about that.I had this dream where darkness poured out of light fixtures like little waterfalls and it was gorgeous until the shadows grew so high people started to drown and I looked for days and couldn't find the switch to turn them off. Ghostly swims. Turning off the lights and trying hard not to look back into the rooms and believe there really is nothing there more than what was when the switch turned the other way. The freedom. It's been strange.

Where the hard stops start. Toxic involvements. I do have to clean up the circuitry at some point. My willingness to engage has been the source of certain difficulties. What happened to your face? I can't say, honestly. If I told you, I would sound crazy. And then you wouldn't want me around at all. I swear it's all above board. My boards. Not yours. Your square one, your nothing is different from mine. Maybe connected on some flattened levels. When you pick through them with zero and one forensics. I thought maybe if I scratched my ear hard enough I could pick my brain. No luck. We had this dream, right? About a house made out of cardboard and dried leaves.

I was wondering, you know, if you knew where I'd been. I have this sneaking suspicion someone's been lying to me, but I don't know who. Many loves of the dragon. Maybe I should get a kitten. At some point. I need to draw more. Now that I have the time to. The time to sleep dive almost at will. It's going to be amazing. I'll try to take notes better than I have. I've been gone for some time, but I'm back now. Bolting through space. Hell hound on a thin leash and learning boundaries the while. Dog bites man and man bites dog and dog bites dog and man bites man. And everybody wishes sweet dreams into your head as though there isn't fire filling the coils of your bed.


/// Starkey - "Eris" stoop sitter blues high

Strange Ways

I'm sorry I've been away. Life has been strange in many ways. Not really strange as much as just strange in the ways I've come to understand normal. Sea change and all of that. One thing that has been occupying a lot of my time is meeting a couple of people that see me as close to eye to eye as I have ever known any one person to see me. Which has been exciting and ridiculously time consuming. Hard to talk about. Because threesomes aren't exactly normal. Let alone threesomes cemented by violence. Let alone threesomes that are probably on their last legs.

I enjoy belonging to people. That's no secret. I like to know that someone is holding my leash, and I had to revoke that privilege from one member of the threesome so now it's a twosome with occasional benefits for the odd man out. What are you going to do? I mean, I don't particularly enjoy fucking her, but I do enjoy the opportunity to be close to her psychologically so it's like doing dirty work to get the golden egg of her brain and personality because I'm pretty sure she likes fucking me more than what I have to say so it's a perfect fit in terms of what I want and what she wants and the odd piece out is the guy who refuses to kiss me, but wants my dick and nothing else, hence the revocation of leash privileges because if you want to fuck, you better be up for everything that comes with in my book, and I damn near revoked her privileges because she insisted on wearing socks at all times and that's just... ...what?! Seriously? Who does that?

And then there was the conversation where they both referred to me repeatedly as their toy, which is fine. I can accept and appreciate that role, but to then assert that I was worthless without sex, that was the line they crossed and things got violent, but have since settled down. Things and ways were explained to me in the simple terms I understand best and then stabilized into something enjoyable again. We saw fairly close to on the level. Everything since has been delicious. And time consuming. Time oft reserved for writing has been burned in sexual play which is not terrible, but not great either. Lost time in the run up to play and time lost in the run down from play, let alone the play time itself. I dunno. Fucking older people definitely presents problems and issues I never thought about, or even had to think about, before now. It is incredible the difference between older men and older women. Fascinating. It grows frightening sometimes, the potential for breaking their bodies with my own carelessness. At the same time it is deliriously appealing. Being the most capable thing they will likely ever know before they die. Being their first and probably last. I think I love that more than the sex itself. The making of a name. And they are just so adorable together. That's part of it too. The basking in dual praise. The lack of rejection. The fact that they have seen so many people that they can recognize you from one hundred yards out and see right through you and there's nothing to hide because they've seen it all.

I know it's not going to last because he won't fuck unless he's drunk and she won't take her socks off ever and that's just weird and he won't kiss me ever no matter how drunk he gets and she doesn't have a dick and his dick is too small to be anything more than an idle coffee table curiosity and her youngest kid is older than me and she insists that she is the only one allowed to fuck his ass, but until we break up I think this is the best thing to happen to me in a long time. But I also think the strangeness of it is what has been keeping me from talking about it and progressing. Or maybe understanding what kind of flash in the pan it is.

It's been zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds for me. Unbelievable speed. Fuck warp 9, this whole relationship has been warp 12. Engine room ablaze the whole way. More give and take than I've been privy too for better than two years. And yes, I have no idea how to deal with it or any idea of where it's going beyond failure. To top it off I met his daughter and apparently she wants me too. And I don't want sex nearly as much as I want to be useful and used. I play into that more often than I should. It makes me feel like a sociopath, which I don't like. I just enjoy making people feel good. It's a badge of honor. I entertain whatever it is you want to entertain because your happiness and bliss is a kiss upon my heart.

So I want to fuck her. Not because I enjoy women. Not even close. I have been able to love one woman my entire short life. And that is my ex. The rest aren't jetsam, they're just friends at best and confidants when closer. It's just a very odd situation. A very very odd and slowly unraveling situation between a boy a woman and a man who hurts her who wants to use the boy. Sounds like family.

I've been telling people I'm half Scott and half Irish, alternately, because I'm still not sure which. I'm pretty sure it's not half. I'm pretty sure it's a lot less than half. Probably less than quarter. It's fun to be exotic. It's more fun to know exactly where you're from. I always wish to have that, more than anything else. Not just for cheering purposes during the World Cup, but also for tattoo ideas. And also because everyone talks about their extended families on a first name basis and I have never been able to do that. That would be nice. The knowing. The belonging. Life has been strange. The dreams have been stranger and more real than anything else. I slept for 18 hours. It was unbelievably good to do so. I don't know when I'll be able to be awake for more than 13 and not feel like killing myself. An odd pile of ideas. Goodbye for now. Levity to come.


/// The Cardigans - "Heartbreaker" ...no, not again...

Busy Signal and Dedication

I was just a person you would love to love, but then. I went through a week of pretty wild depression. Like depression uncharted. I want this to be up beat and I will try to make it as much so as I can, but sometimes things are unexpectedly gory. So I will make light whenever possible.

I've been in face time mode for a bit. Partly because happiness is contagious and sadness is, well, sadness. Not for any particular reason. Well, for particular reasons, but none of the reasons are valid. I have been experiencing very acute separation anxiety. And it's hard to describe. It's not like losing a mother or father or losing a method to madness and being left with only madness. How can I describe it? Asking myself. Separation anxiety for life? Not a fear of death, but a maddening anxiety for losing life? And then not even that so much as, by turning days, a separation anxiety that has echoed down the years back to my ears for my ex. But that's dead and gone right? Yet it comes swimming back against the current to the bridge and treads water long enough for me to notice, as I'm pitching rocks and counting the skips, to drown again like it was yesterday. Like it was five minutes ago. Panicking. Panicking as though I let myself go to the wave tops, even though I didn't. I made the right call, but the right call is calling me back and leaving messages and I am wishing there was a way to send things not to voicemail, but to nonexistence, and I am knowing that there is a way, but that particular way, in all of it's means, turns the good call into a terrible one.

I was talking to someone about suicide. Indirectly. Talking about the reasons people choose to make their lives matter. The biggest one is always religion. The second biggest one is narcissism. The third is family. And so on. But there is another reason that is a little harder to get at and more valuable than all three. If we accept that there is no god, and there isn't, and that math and science can, given an infinite timeline (or at least from the perspective of human life times, infinite), come to grasp and describe all, and that life is essentially just another system, of which we all are a part, it is clear that there is little actual wiggle room for agency. Not that there is none. The actual sphere of impact is simply a lot smaller for the vast majority of human beings than we are lead to believe. It's not all predetermined, but the actual outcome of my life, your life, is smaller than the bill of warrants would have you believe.

Killing yourself might hurt some people. Those people compose a micro fraction of the total people you could possibly hurt by not killing yourself and killing them instead. More importantly, unless you are part of a very small fraction of the populace, your death will have the chances of winning the local lottery, assassinating a head of a state, and getting struck by lightning later that day when the forecast for rain was less than 1% the hour before, of impacting the future outcomes of the rest of the worlds occupants, let alone the rest of the country's or even the state's outcomes. Probably even the locality's.

The thing that can keep you alive though is knowing that for the local set of outcomes there are a few very much intertwined equations. These equations, known or not, make up your value and you can assign whatever figure you want to your variable. Your variable on the long scheme of the interactions makes up very little of the master equation. The sun will still die. Mankind will still continue to implode and explode by turns until that happens. Science will still advance. Math will continue to prove and disprove itself. Life spans will still extend at increasing marginal cost for every five years gained. People will still be happy and miserable and happy because other people are forced into misery and miserable because other people will have done nothing to be happy except be born into it. You, however, do mean nothing to those final outcomes.

People will be sad for a time. They will be entertained, repelled, satisfied, and disappointed with what you do, or not. Ultimately though, you may never be forgotten but they will be entertained, repelled, satisfied, antagonized, placated, contented, and disappointed by someone else after you. And they will remember them too. The inherent value of you, just you, is your local, temporal, impact. The master calculation will still end up the same, the only thing you do is change how it gets to that final conclusion. Therein lies the value in life. Every time two plus two adds up to three billion and you and those connected to you can see it and laugh and cry about it for a while and forget that the 3 billion will be adjusted for down the road.

What we read as anamolous or some kind of discrepancy is all accounted for ultimately. In the moment, however, it's why you're here. You're here to contribute to the math of life. Not destroy it, not change it necessarily, but just to leave some chalk on the board. And once you are happy to swipe the eraser, and draw faces with a spit soaked fingertip, and scrawl away, you can be happy. That was the conclusion I tried to draw through the conversation. And I hope it came across alright.

The depression was manifold. Part sexual crush on guys I knew I would never actually gain access to. Part anxiety. Part screwed up brain chemistry. Part longing for things I have no right to long for. Part wanting to just fucking be someone, anyone, else. Some months you would trade your skin for anyone else's. But all you can do is wake up and be you again. Part of the sadness was not making time to do this. To talk. To talk with psychiatrists. Part of the sadness was the pain and not being able to express it. I still can't. All I want some days, in terms of expression, is to make someone else hurt as much as I do sometimes so I can know that I am not alone. But I am.

Not in terms of a unique pain, but in terms of identity. No one can hurt the same way you do. It's quantum mechanically impossible. Sure, you can hold up Rorschach tests and see similarities, but no one hurts like you do. No one loves like you do. No one's been there before. No one will go there when you're gone. All I wanted was a day off to mourn for ghosts. How do you request a day off to do that? How do you request a day off to rest your teeth? I don't need them removed. I just need a day off to rest my mouth. How do I express that? I need a day off to not move my body. I need a day off to get back in touch with my heart. I need a day off to talk to my hands and coach them to be better than what they're giving me. How do you express these things and get a valid response? How do you talk to your superiors and tell them that they need to forget the book for a minute, forget the guidelines, forget the established, and understand me for a minute as a human being before opening their mouth to deny me the things that keep me alive? Where do you begin to describe to them that the things essential to them are vestigial to me and things essential to me come across as figments of imagination, but bleed me as real as a brick to a forehead? There are no doctor notes for "love sick". There are no doctor notes for being stalked by your schizophrenic counter parts. There are no doctor notes for being chased by the animals of your dreams that have bled into reality. There are no doctor notes for the things that stop me cold like an engine run so hot it melted into a solid block of steel in seconds.

I'm sorry for giving you the busy signal. I just don't know what else to do. I am trying, though. Trying to get back here and get back to functional. Trying to gather up the caucus. Trying to find the kid, and the chief financial officer. Trying to get the engineer and the interface specialist in the same room, but when I can get them talking over pizza the kid runs out. When I can get the weapons specialist to stop for a minute, the toxicologist starts up again. It's just been absolute chaos on the shop floor and I can't get any of them to work together, let alone spend significant time together and it's a public relations nightmare. Circuits are breaking and many of them are new and unlabeled with poor documentation. Addresses point to places that don't exist. Thing that do exist point to breakers that don't cut power. Switches turn things on that shouldn't exist, things I thought were dismantled or were never actually built, but were. Things change over and I find myself in places I didn't know I was with people I already met, but are new again and I have to reintroduce myself.

Across the bridge everything is in tumult. I'm trying to figure it out as fast as it is happening and when it finally does click it's gone and it's time to wake up again. I just need a week to explore and find out what and who is there and who I am seeing. Who is sneaking in and who is lingering. But I have not had time so things are dangerous again in a way that they have not been since 2004. Not for you, but dangerous for me. I am so scared sometimes. It's a terror with which I am not familiar at all, because it's been so long and I forgot. How do I explain that to people? There are things over here that have no name that do what they please and should not exist, but do. They wait and they follow and they chase and they stalk and they talk and it's all I can do some days to pretend none of it is happening and I took the exceptionally long route to work today because I felt like taking a walk. It's fucking terrifying.

Ultimately though, the busy signal rings loudest. I have to undo that. I think the more I at least talk as an outlet the better off I will be. It's not a key, but it is a hammer to a single bar of the cage that I might find at least a way to get the hell out a little more. And to make that happen I am going to get a dedicated internet line. I am dedicated to you. I am dedicated to your math and your variables and your short lived value. Because it's all I have. Without being a religious nut case. It's not settling. It's understanding. And to make that easier and, in steps, by jumps, help myself I am dumping mobile broadband because rolling the dice every five minutes is nerve racking too and when I finish something, or start something, conversate, image trawl, explore, and in short live, I need to be able to know that I can complete thought. So I consider it less a luxury and more of a necessity. Maybe even a necessary exchange for the grossly inflated cost of medication. A monthly stay of execution. Of sorts. A re dedication and affirmation that I am doing everything I can to not completely self destruct. I want to be with my friends. I want to stay connected. I haven't left you, I promise.


///Unkle - "Heaven" dedicated to being alive until it's time to go.

On the Muckers

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

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

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

Base Two

On crack everything is more ridiculous. For instnace observe the following quotes:

"She runs her mouth like Jerry Springer guests ON CRACK."

"That athlete gets after the ball like a player ON CRACK."

"That game is intense, like the original Quake first person shooter ON CRACK."

"That qusar throws off radiation like a dwarf star ON CRACK."

Everything is more than it was on crack. Not to say that crack is an enhancer, because it is, but mostly to say that when people ascribe crack to something, no matter how warped it is, it instantly becomes ten times more warped and disproportionate a thing when crack is subscripted. Which is to say I just masturbated for an hour and a half to prove a point to myself. Which isn't a bad thing by itself. It's just part and parcel to the argument that conventional sexual relations are inferior. To what I can be. On crack.

No, but really I'm just desensitized to things. Common things. Which either makes me the best friend with benefits you've ever known or makes me incredibly desensitized. I'm beginning to think the title should have just been desensitization or something to that effect. I'm coming to the cutting floor.

The zone where production turns into product. If everything goes the way it should (it rarely does) I will have benefits. Health benefits. Which means that finally getting the meds I need won't be a faraway dream, but will be an actuality.

The actuality of the matter being that I will sleep on a consistent basis not by choice, not by conniving, not by cunning, not by hook or crook, but because I simply will not have any other options as reasonable courses of action because my body will simply shut itself down whether I am prepared or not. The actuality of the matter being the voices that I loathe, the voices that confuse and inflame and soothe by turns, will be banished and there will only be left a me that I do not and have not had an opportunity to know well enough will be all that is left. The actuality being that if the health benefits come to fruition, I will be plunged into a sea of knowingness that I have not yet known and that scares me.

I know it is something I have to do. Something that I have been substituting for in lieu of proper support. Something I have been, in part, fighting against because I have experienced before in older forays into medicinal remediation. But, medicine, like technology is ever advancing and I would be a fool to believe what happened then will happen again and I would be even more foolish to never try again though I have no hard and fast plans toward living 7 decades. But I am scared.

Though it is not stopping me from trying. The undiscovered country has to be the subtitle to some kind of star trek film. And if anything, I carry the spirit of the united federation of planets. But it leaves me saddened.

I've said goodbye to so many people. Don't make me say goodbye to the people I can and do still hold dear, though some hatefully so. It's necessary. I feel convicted to pursue it. Like, to not pursue it is the same as turning a blind eye to a rape. Except I am the victim and also the enforcing agent who can bring closure. With insurance, the cost of medication drops from 200 dollars a month to like 50. You can't ignore that. I can't ignore that.

So many questions arise. Who will I be on the other side? Will he know me? Will we be the same? What of the caucus?? Is it disbanded? I just want to be like you, but now that it is possibly here /I ama ==asking myself how90 mu4%ch it w@222ill cos..t me.

Why I Hate Coldplay and then Compliments Addressed, the Silence, Birthdays, Ant Eaters

So today is exactly my 43rd birthday in the 26th iteration of my life. Not much bang, but there's not much buck, and, to be honest, how many knife fights with prostitutes is too much? The answer is one. One knife fight with anyone is probably too many. So I'm taking it on a lower key. Partially because I've had enough near death scrapes to make a fine scrap book of uniform crime reports and scars and partially because it sneaked up on me like a cat to a laser pointer's beam. I already had a midlife crisis. I'm still bouncing back from that. And to top it off, my latest scrape with my old friend was less of a scrape and more of a Houdini "how-the-hell-am-I-not-at-least-crippled-from-the-waist-down" kind of event and I'm not clapping my hands for an immediate encore.

43 feels the same as 42. The same as 41. Once you get over the major obstacle of realizing it's half over for all you have to offer, the rest is gravy. Things have been pleasantly silent. But I've been doing a lot of work to make it happen. Soused? Sometimes. The best thing about it is not the damage. Is not even the shortened life span, because I know I will pay for palatable living eventually, be it a massive med crash or the nick and chip of the slower knives offered by off the shelf substances, because all in all the final tally will sort itself out such that you cut years off the suffering (albeit by dying). The best thing about it is the silence. The knowing that you and only you are all present and mostly accounted for. That when people ask what you want to do, only one hand goes up in your head. When you ask yourself what to do next you hear one maybe two voices instead of ten.

I am still an anteater (fuck you). What I've also realized in the words of the illustrious coach Mike Tomlin is that the standard is the standard. I've been imagining Mike Tomlin covering my exploits in a post game/post week/post month press conference. He would probably say something like "an anteater is an anteater is an anteater. If we are anteaters it will show up on film and that film is our resume. Our resume speaks for itself. You either are an anteater or you aren't. There is no middle ground and when we can be anteaters it will show up in the work that we do." But I don't get press conference coverage. Or have coaches like Mike Tomlin, so I basically just tell myself when I don't get the outcome of my action 'dude, you're an anteater, what the hell did you think would happen?"

The silence has been nice though. I've been hanging the back end out there for almost too long though. Too many g's against tires whose grip I can never trust and part of me is waiting for the rubber to dissolve into the cloud of white smoke trumpeting from the rims for the naked rim to bite the asphalt like a starved dragon and flip my whole contraption so many times I'll be reduced to chunky tomato paste by the time it comes to halt on it's crumpled roof atop a sea of pelletized glass and unkempt infield next to the red and white rumble strips marking the path to the apex I should have targeted along the optimal path I could have taken had I the wiring and the vision and the opportunity to do so. So I enjoy the silence and try not to burn the envelope already torn to shreds back in high school when I realized my contents were not the sort of things that the postal service accepted as mail-able, transferable, items without special postage and allowances.

I did, however, receive a complement the other day from an older woman. It wasn't at all creepy. Not like the time I was walking back from the south side because the buses stopped running and I stopped at a bus stop just to read the schedule and make doubly sure and an old man who looked like Morgan Freeman after a bad Vegas weekend bender told me I was cute. That was creepy as hell. Plus I didn't know I was gay at the time so it was creepy and offensive and if I wasn't in a rush to rescue a friend from the clutches of a bad decision, but probably playing into her demand for a declaration of dedicated-ness by crossing town to get her, I probably would have stopped longer and been like "well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean, asshole?"

But anyway, I got a complement from an older lady the other day. She said I had a great smile. Now I have a prominent scar on my face that gashes from my eyebrow, down my cheek, and ends where my beard starts. I have a badly chipped front tooth from taking a dive onto cement. I have another scar from years ago where I took a similar dive, but broke my fall with my orbital bone instead of my mouth. And I have another set of scars from various head butts and several attempts to jump through a hallway's drywall ceiling. To have her see through that to that genuine grin she yanked out of me with her humor and honesty was touching. Because I mean she's got to be pushing 70, so she's seen her share of great smiles over the decades.

What was really touching about it is everyone says you're one in a million. That kind of phrasology, that kind of thought process, basically fires across the deck and no one blinks an eye. No one changes course. No one stands up and says "dear god, you are absolutely right! I must be wholly unique to this planet!" At least no one with half an ounce of sense. To believe that if you were able to gather together one million people, not a single one would have 99% of your interests, foibles, ticks, obsessions, addictions, and deficiencies in common is to be utterly blind to the simple fact that there are only so many configurations of expressibles. What differentiates then is the physical. That's what really makes you unique. So to have her say, whether true or not, off hand or not, that my smile sticks out in her nearly 7 decade long memory was totally awesome. It had me glowing while we made small talk. By the time she sauntered off I wondered if we would have gotten along just as well had she been 26 too, or if I'm the kind of person lovable only over fantastic spans of time and space.

Which is why I hate Coldplay. Not directly why. I hate Coldplay for the handful of fantastically cogent songs they've made. The songs that express the things people feel with uncanny accuracy, levity, and genius song writing. I hate Coldplay because I love their album with the figure of the guy with his head blown off on the cover, but I can't listen to it because of one song called The Scientist because the memories it brings back are still so raw and it describes those memories, the end of the formation of new memories just as good, with an intensity that is horrifically accurate it's like trying to sit down to a Rescue 911 marathon without a vomit bag for the blood, guts, bones, tears, and anguish you are about to see. It's not meant as a slight to them. it's good for them. Good for them for crafting something so intense. Good for them for wading through their own noise to get to the deep water. I guess I'm still doing that in many ways across several subjects. Assuming I don't drown first, but I'll keep kicking.


///Coldplay - "The Scientist" its not melodramatic. you have to put aside some of the common elements of regret to digest it, but those elements are, thankfully, few. but it speaks stories of information where so much pop is a glorified fragment blown out of proportion, chopped, and hashed with tons of loops and over production to fill the passage of time. ...going back to the start...

Cheesus Christ, Does Nothing Work?

I'm sorry I've been away. Less sorry than usual. Only because I've been away because I've been working and not because I've been furiously masturbating. It's been hard. The living. The being aliveness of breathing. Not the breathing part. That part is easy. What's been hard is trying to have a continuous thought when bells go off every fifteen minutes. Remember that book about that society that suppressed creativity by fitting every person with an apparatus that sounded a chime every five minutes to interrupt thought and render it's populace unable to create new ideas? No? Well that's what it's been like. A lot of "gotta put bread on the table" things interrupting the "gotta put bread into my skull so I don't check out of this world on some aneurysm shiz".

I've had one of those days. Not really one of those days, but one of those days stretched across an entire week. One of those days where you come down the break room stairs after sitting for fifteen minutes that flew by in a blink because you fell asleep in your chair watching infomercials about magic brassieres and magic belts that will force your body to do things you haven't taught and practiced or considered that maybe your body just wasn't meant to do for any length of time and you go to get back to work and realize, picking up your box cutter that you left your mug of tea upstairs. And it's going to take you another five minutes to go back and get it and your legs are too dead for yet another trip up those damned stairs, but you are already dead thirsty and have to weigh which death is more unpleasant.

One of those days where the fattest jar of the smelliest pickled peppers in piss yellow juice slips out of your clutches because your hands are cramping and every single paper towel dispenser is empty because the people responsible for keeping them filled never do their jobs as well as you do yours. The mop bucket is at the other end of the store, another five minute round trip on sleeping hooves, and when you get there to fill the mop bucket there is no floor soap and the other fluids available would take up the spill and stink right along with the wax finish. You take the bucket and get halfway across the store before you realize its got a flat and you are utterly baffled as to how a plastic wheeled yellow tank of a bucket could have a flat before you realize a thread of the mop came loose and lodged in the wheel and, instead of plucking it out, the bucket was filled and dragged around for weeks, maybe months until the wheel turned into a plastic orange wedge, and since you were too tired to notice it sooner you've left a scratch on the floor several dozen yards long.

You walk the bucket back and have to pick it up and hug it's black stained, deli grease streaked body to yours because walking it back on the floor would double your error. Selecting a new bucket you walk it across the store to the opposite slop sink and find that while there is cleaning solution appropriate for the task, someone was so kind as to snap off the knob, rendering the sink into something more like a flushless urinal, and so you walk the bucket with soap back to the other end of the store with the working sink and wonder why they would bolt the soap to the wall instead of making it possible for you to take the soap to the working sink and prevent having to do the routine all over again, and why the hell you would need a manager to sign off on throwing out a broken bucket in the first place when they so rarely use them they wouldn't know if it was broken or not and can you really not be trusted to make a simple judgement like "a three wheeled bucket is no longer useful."

=sigh= sometimes nothing's working for ya. And by the time you get back to the shattered jar it's been tracked up and down the aisle. By your coworkers. And you wonder how much time you'd do if you just killed them all and called it a day and a win for humanity.


///The Chemical Brothers - "Surface to Air" take flight and forget the world even exists... what i want to do. but its the only outpost in this sector of the galaxy and my ship can't take me far enough to reach the next one. so we keep in touch.

Worst Song Ever, Part 3:

Worst song ever # GHQQPXC1333298K6 Moby - Whispering Wind:

I suppose I probably shouldn't go as hard on people as I do when it comes to creative production mainly because I am so familiar with the inherent problems in content generation, especially when the requirement of said generation is that there be a certain amount of freshness. In fact I almost feel bad even including this because I know that every artist has a certain thematic vein that runs through their careers and even the widely disparate U.N.K.L.E albums do have a certain genealogy to them that is absolutely traceable from one offering to the next even though the actual sounds appear on their surface to be absolutely different. This song by Moby is almost able to fit itself into that thematic category. Where does it fall short? Everywhere. I even don't even feel the urge to describe so bland a thing here. In fact, even talking about it here has made this entry extremely bland. And now I hate myself for allowing myself to be distracted by so bland a blanding. I've been blanded. God damn it. I have to undo this. Immediately. But how??? Shuffle button. Clicking. Searching.

I once talked to a friend of mine about the symbolism of the search and shuffle buttons in music players and their usage. He basically told me I was complicating what amounts to a human impulse that is no more or less than the urge to stuff our faces when we're hungry and drink when we're thirsty. There's no subtext. It's simply the satisfaction of a basic impulse to feed our brains with variety. I'm inclined to believe him. I took some convincing back then, but I came on board. I still think he's probably correct.

I suppose the main thing is I'm standing at the edge of the abyssal plain again and trying to distract myself from another night of searching, but I know I have to go down there and look for my missing part whether I like it or not. He's still out there. He hasn't come back yet. I feel ridiculous going through the motions as though things are okay when they're not. I don't want to go. I'm lolly gagging. Just come back! I wish I could say that and make it happen, but I have to go and look. What's the plan then? Where do we industrialize? Bits. That's where. Maybe not. That might be shooting too high. I am so fucking angry right now. If I didn't need my face I would cut it up like a ham. Smash my keyboard into it till the keys stuck in my skin. Thinking about carving up my stomach again. It's getting hard to convince myself not to. Not hard as much as its becoming more unreasonable not to. I don't get it. What's inside of there. I want to turn out my pockets so bad.



///The Future Sound of London - "Vit Drowning / Through Your Gills I Breathe"

Sad Bunny Can't Cum

Welcome to the retrospective (cue Jerry Lewis telethon music).  It's a sort of sad time for me.  I lost my computer this past Friday.  Several outages and a lack of grounded outlets, thanks to antiquated design and moronic neighbors who don't understand that computers are more than idle curiosities and are actually essential to the younger sets way of life, lead to it turning off without warning.  Since I- I promise you this will be a "too much information" packed retrospective- since I usually do most of my writing in the dark, with a short order of bourbon, and nothing else on (electronic or otherwise), I was immediately plunged into darkness.  Dismantled the entire thing and went on a debugging, forensic, junior mortician's foray that lead me to the soul shaking realization that the mother board burned.  And now I'm slightly sad (devastated) because my computer was my best of best friends.  Now I'm stuck with my functionally challenged laptop that was dropped on its head too many times as a kid.

My writing is now inaccessible (fuck) on sata hard drives, my resume is inaccessible (fuuuck), my porn is sitting idle (fuuuuuuuck), and my music collection is essentially in a vault (FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-) till I get a new motherboard or other PC tower to- okay who gives a shit.  I do, but that's boring.  Me talking about this is like listening to someone talk about their dead cousin who you never met and they never really talked about before and trying to pretend like they have your undivided attention when it's fourth and inches in a preseason Steelers game and the gaurd they drafted is about to be put to his first real test and show you whether or not the season is going to be worth pinning playoff hopes to.  Long, long, long sigh while trying to pay attention to what really matters without looking like a complete dick.  Suffice to say, combining a tempermental laptop with a 860 bits per second internet connection and the fact that I have to write in notepad and can throw making after the fact edits squarely out the window has made me a fucking sad bunny.

Maybe I should have talked about that last.  Life has turned into a very long jerk session.  Like "just blew a rail at the bar and the chick I got into the cab with hopped out midway to my place so I blew another rail and tried to watch a movie to console myself, but couldn't get into it so I tried to rub one out and I'm three hours in and nodding off knowing I won't sleep well at all unless I at least get the small victory of cumming and all signs are pointing to a four a.m. photo finish with passing out sitting at my desk with empty cans of Natty cheering me on from the gallery."  But, yeah, you know it's dragging.  Been working hard, but obstacles must have eachother on speed dial the way things have continued to stack and you know it's no good when doing the thing you love to do becomes difficult and all you really want to do is sleep.  Good news is I've pounded enough coffee to start a coca leaf grow operation in my stomach.  Suck on that contra.  I'm not sure how the two are related, but hopefully it's close enough to let you fill in the hilarious gaps.  Personally, I didn't laugh.  Didn't even smirk on that one, but fuck it, it's out there and doing its thing.

So into it (longest intro ever).  Five years in bullets:
-started blog because I was pissed at my boss and had no one to tell about it.
-stopped talking about my boss because it was whiny as all hell.
-planned to start a career as a kept man.
-decided my beard deserved my face like modern pop and R&B singers deserve euthanisation.
-spewed hate toward beard haters.
-realized 99% of myspace writers were hacks.
-left myspace because I hated being connected to people.
-left facebook
-went back to facebook and myspace when my communication anxiety faded.

... God this is boring.  Worst retrospective ever.

I think there's supposed to be a memoir like tone to the narrative that I am completely whiffing on.  I wanted to be a fighter pilot for the longest time.

I guess I'll just skip to what's new.  I'm realizing more and more that the shit surrounding my island is so ridiculously deep that it is fairly realistic to say there is zero chance of any kind of college sweetheart reunion.  Think of it this way: what she has in common with her peers now is like two humans talking to eachother.  What she has in common with me is like a person at a zoo talking to animals.  While one may be more interesting, it's not what you'd want to spend your life doing.  What else.  I guess I'm bi.  Are there rules for that.  I guess I didn't just start one day.  If I look back it's pretty obvious.  Most people don't really give a shit now anyway which has been a massive relief, because what I feared the most was being hated.  Some people look at me differently, maybe, I'm not sure and I don't care all that much to ask them.  I'm still the same person with the same anger management issues and the same scars.  Someone asked me why I would choose to be something that "will make my life more difficult", but to be perfectly honest it's made my life so much easier to live now that I can understand myself that much better.  Even saying what I am feels strange, as though there are brands of people.  But, anyway, sex with guys is fun.  Sex with girls is fun.  Different reasons for both.  Girl cum and guy cum are pretty close in taste to me.  That's probably the only thing the two have in common for the most part.  Guys and girls are attractive for different reasons too.  I guess the oddest thing is most gay men are incredibly obnoxious and unattractive.  On second thought, not really that odd because most women are also unnattractive.  Or maybe, okay further revision: most gay men and women I don't scare away with my being myself are unattractive.  That's the qualifier I was tasting on the tip of my tongue.  Fuck em.  I just wish I was willing to let myself see it sooner and embrace it, but I was so caught up in performing to the rigid framework I grew up in I suppressed and ignored it and raged inwardly and outwardly and not allowing myself to be.  I missed out on the whole "rules and standards committee" meetings in college so now I'm still learning about it, but better late than a repression fueled suicide.  One of the hardest things to get over was feeling like I've somehow failed as a man.  That's actually been the single toughest thing in accepting my sexual self.  So much of socialization is the assumption of roles and rejecting the hetero role that framed and formed and malformed so much of my behavior like fucking foot binding was and continues to be difficult, but it's a difficulty that's building toward true normalcy for me and in so being it is worth every ounce of growing pain.

What else.  I'm bad at keeping secrets.  I've realized that so much of my life has been informed by half truths that propogating them is so extremely distasteful that I just can't do it with believable conviction.  A good thing and a bad thing, but mostly a good thing I think.  A change for the better.  There's still a little voice in my head that talks about dreams of wealth, but there's a louder voice that screams to me to write and ultimately having a nine to five and writing will mean more to me than continuing a foreign quest for status and titles and degrees.  I think that's what helps keep me sane.  I'm still looking for that elusive community of writers.  That still hasn't changed.  I came close to finding one.  Hopefully that'll turn into something.  I think I'm wandering again.  I love you.  Don't be sad.  Life won't drag on forever and that's something we can look forward to, right?  Death is going to be the best orgasm ever.  I'll still be enthusiastic about it when it rolls around.  In the meantime you just have to make the most of the little humps and enjoy the moments you get to spend cumming as much as possible.  Also, don't say that to people in casual settings.  They'll think you're weird.  Also don't tell people you're too depressed to cum.  Even as a metaphor, but especially not literally, unless they're the kind of crazy sexy person who would take it as a standing challenge.  Even then.  You know what, you probably should not be taking advice from me about this.

How's this for some summation of 200 posts:  I was born, I lived for a while not knowing there was a world outside the controlled universe of my home until college, I discovered there was a world, I dated a fantastic girl for a long time, I loved my beard, I planned to get in tight with a cougar before I dated, I revised my life mission once I realized none of that was actually going to work, I realized the only thing really important to me was writing, I accepted my creative self, I accepted my sexual self, I loved, I hated life, I had sex, I learned that I'm a violent person, along the way I learned I had real (actual) mental defficiencies that require maintenance, I learned that the best thing I could do was fight it by living with it constructively, and I realized that I'm not the greatest thing to happen to the world, but maybe a good thing to happen to a handful of people.  So that's it.  Peace.

///Dntel - "Casuals"  Walking down an overcast lane and the air is so cool on your face that you can't help looking to the sky to watch the bits of an almost storm chase eachother over the building tops and forget the shit that turned your eyes red that afternoon and feel the slippage of time and understand that you're still you and that's perfectly alright.

Panel 3 and "What Had Happened Was..."

Panel 3 for poetry is above. Panel 3 option is below. Haven't decided which one to go with yet, but that's a good problem to have.

So what happened is there was me and her and now there's just me. And me and her were supposed to be best friends, but that's sort of not happening. Or maybe it is. Maybe I just don't understand what a best friend is supposed to be. So, in the spirit of lolcats, I has a sad. It's distressing and depressing and it's every morning waking up from dreams of being left and having to leave and spending the day working, but in the back of my mind wishing and hoping and yearning for the day not to end and a new one to begin and to have to go to sleep and dream again and wake. All I want is for the night to keep going and my eyes to not close and my mind to not show me things that can't exist.

I saw (500) Days of Summer and, in seeing it, I finally "got it". I suppose, the reason (precipitating from the root cancer eating its way into my life through horrific family ties) for the separation was something along the lines of she really liked me, but as for someone to spend the rest of her life with she simply could not be sure. It would be an unfair gamble for her, and unfair of me to demand that she roll her dice with someone living at the edge of an abyssal plain. I wouldn't want to make anyone have to step into and live in the midst of the daily bullshit that goes on behind the scenes of the farce of my family and I know now that is what I was asking her to do.

It's supremely aggravating and gut punching the way things unfurled because a lot of avoidable things happened through their intent... and then to be constantly asked by the culpable behind the scenes actors who helped orchestrate failure "so how's she doing, do you guys talk?" is particularly galling. I want to stab them in their fat, beady eyed faces and slit their throats. So many awful things happened, caused by their utter lack of support, religious conceit, and selfishness and they'll never take responsibility for their massive role in cutting my legs out from under me with almost super villain frequency. It's funny because there is almost no other way to describe it. It's like James and the Giant Peach, but I still haven't had the benefit of magical intervention.

In another world, an alternate space, where they didn't exist and I did and all the stupid money issues I had nothing to do with never happened and I finished school because I had the support and genuine concern of parents who were not themselves bitter, money grubbing, pathetic shells of themselves locked in a dead end marriage that ate the lives of their children to survive... we're still together.

Where does love go. Who the fuck knows. How do you stay best friends with someone who doesn't talk to you? You send letters and messages and it starts to feel like you're the sorry sumbitch in no man's land waiting for the mail service to get through, but it never does and you'll never know why. I don't think I'll ever be alright with that. As for my romanticized view of the world: it's still there and still tinted Gothic.

I hate when people say things like "it could be worse." Of course it could be worse, but that doesn't exactly make the current unpleasantness any more livable. Anywho. Probably the last time I tag a post with "girlfriend" for a while. I don't think I'll ever be okay, but in time I'll have grown into another person and this person who feels this way will have died and the new person won't remember how the corpse felt, but will see the old photographs and think "oh, how charming. Wonder how that ended". It would be easier if it wasn't glaringly obvious how drastically, positively, different things could have been in my life from the time I was 5 years old to now without them destroying the things I cherished and the things that made me laugh and smile and the people around me and my siblings. They know it too. They'll never admit it though and that's why I will hate them until the day they die and I can sleep knowing they can never hurt me and my relationships with the people I love ever again.





///Dntel - "(This is) The Dream of Evan and Chan" Someday soon, I'll leave it all behind. Sorry for asking you to listen to all of that and thanks if you did.

Golfcart Flamingo Logo

=_= very tired. The state of perpetual collapse that plagues my absolutely fucking retarded family life had me so angry and out of sorts I literally could not function and then the wonderful flip side of that situation was that I've been erased by someone I thought was a best friend (more about that later) so I had the unique pleasure of getting fucked from every direction at once. So its back on the smokes, collar up, stiff upper lip, and into that fucking wind.

This is what I managed to accomplish in a few hours of dedicated work when the bewilderment calmed down.



Three more to go. Dear god, if you're out there... please don't shit on me again today. I like getting work done. You aren't helping so just stay the fuck out of my way, okay? Thanks.

///El-P - "The League of Extraordinary Nobodies" '...and we haven't even gotten to the part where it's a joke..."

lookin good

finally finished the principal of the thing in the benegon project. feels good to be done with fitting pixel A to pixel B. it looks good though. hopefully moving forward will allow me more time for writing and loving and wandering the other side of consciousness. you know, the side where the wild things grow and come and lick and poke at the membrane around where we live.



i can kind of see how the next 5 years is going to play out. spoiler alert: more losses. did i ever tell you district 9 really touched me. like way deep down? yeah. i almost shed a tear at the end. i wrote an email once to all of my old professors asking for any aid they could possibly offer. one responded out of ten or twelve people. one. and that person's main talking point was: sorry.

researching technical schools ive found they are not cheap and id need a car to get to most of them. im in a camp. i am walled in and held apart from my peers. i dont fucking know why. if i did i would fix it. what are they afraid of? why are people so easily upset? i mean im sure my situation probably makes other people uncomfortable because so little cash would make such a massive difference. but the sum is just large enough to be too much to give away. people probably spend more on cigarettes in a year than i spend on everything combined because im just that broke. well still... theres some hand wringing over that im sure. i avoid talking about it most of the time because its so out there i guess. outside the realm of knowing. im so far away from my socioeconomic peers i stand out like a burnt out house in a neighborhood of gated homes. its not that im too lazy to fix my god damn windows, its that the only thing i can afford is a slab of plywood. you try not to let it color your experiences and temper your relationships but it does. its like having a broken pen in your laundry. no amount of balling up the fabric will prevent it from staining. the viciousness of life does not cease to amaze me. the foulness of our fellow man did a long time ago.

whats the fix. whats the fix. whats the fix. how am i supposed to fix this? do i stay? do i leave? to where? my head hurts. i dont want to lose friends, but sometimes i wonder if friends want to lose me. loss and dealing with loss is something that i dont do well. who does? its crushing to live in such a small box and unreasonable to think others should think of you when you yourself are never around. its like im shouting from the bottom of this well and asking what happened in the news today. eventually the people around me get tired of me asking and they wander away. i guess all i can really do is keep talking so i dont forget what my thoughts sound like.

enough of that depressing shit. in other news... now that i have some design time free for a little while im going to redo the poetry page layout over at the auralport.blogspot.com and have it play off of and into this and itll be one big sexy party of thoughts and words and colors and strikes.... and when youre knee deep in rainbow colored vaginas and unicorns and giant robots and mushroom clouds youll weep tears of solid gold and ill say pretty please while a sky diving t rex plays the greatest guitar solo ever heard.



maybe not that awesome. but hopefully itll be close. god damn it while i was drawing that i inevitably came back around to the black hole in the middle of my life. this is what ive realized: normal people dont like hanging out in hospitals. even on star trek no one hung out at sick bay (unless they were simply bat shit crazy or had no friends) sooo i cant really expect people to want to hang out with someone who is constantly on the verge of ... ah fuck it. im too sleepy to get into this shit. when is it alright to ask someone if you'll ever get back together when you already know the answer? it just goes round and round and round and one of these days im just going to smash it into my desk with a claw hammer and shovel the guts out the window. but till then

///the seatbelts - "forever broke" sunset on 8mm film sounds like this.

note to self

make a note later about how shitty guy/girl spy action adventure movies are. also about why jews seem so god damn depressed all the time.

practicing the arts 02/24/08

Subject : practicing the arts
Posted Date: : Mar 24, 2008 9:55 AM

its strange how as you get older you just stop doing certain things. its not so much that im not interested in them anymore. its just that i feel zero compulsion to do them. like playing with g.i. joes or building paper robots. i used to do that all the time but not so much anymore. i think in general i used to be more creative than i am now. i used to write poetry constantly and write stories too. now its starting to become a struggle to practice the arts i do so enjoy. it doesnt help that im medicated now either. i feel much less focused. i mean the medication stops me from feeling other things that i used to feel in the past but it also stops me from feeling the good things that helped me generate ideas for my work. its frustrating. is it more worth it to take the good with the bad or is it more worth it to take niether the good or the bad. how bad does bad have to be before it outweighs the benefits derived from what was so good. i cant remember the last time i went on a writing binge or felt i could focus easily on a task. maybe its time to make some medication adjustments. im really starting to miss the old me.

///bjork - "i see who you are"

I see who you are
Behind the skin
And the muscles

I see who you are, now
And when you get older later