Cause for Concern

There are very real causes for concern.  I didn't want to say anything, but I am getting backed into a corner sooner than I imagined.  I'm having some, many a several, difficulties with normal conversation.  Even trying to meet up with people makes me violently ill.  I'm not used to that.  Who should be?  Introversion is supposed to be a quiet thing.  I'm tired of having to wear sunglasses in grocery stores because the lights vibrate too much and it makes me tear up and then everyone thinks you've gone through some sort of tragedy, but really you just wanted to buy some apples and you had to gut it out beyond your normal radius to get them.

I am a violent person.  I know this.  no matter what we do we always try to do our best to take ownership and clean up our messes.  Something my papa never did.  Or maybe he did do in his own way.  Whatever he did, it was thorough in its reach.  At any rate he never explained so I have license and agency.  Because I asked him.  Passive aggressively.  He made a woman out of me I suppose.  A woman with more power than mama ever had.  And that's good.

I'm losing the war on my chemistry and I do not like.  I do not want it.  Pain is one thing.  Passenger is another.  I do not like not being able to express clearly.  It's taking more and more work to maintain clear communication and it's not the drugs because I've been free and clear of paint and coke and pretty much every sniffable and injectable and I'm not fucking with my chemistry set at all.  That's what's been so frustrating.  No assists.  No boosters.  And still fracturing.  It makes no sense.

That I can do this, type on a keyboard easy peasy, and then struggle mightily with trying to string words together in real time.  And I've been very good about tuning down the violence too.  There is no reward for that.  There should be.  THERE SHOULD BE.  I should fucking be paid for that.  

I keep and will continue to argue that I am not a reject. I am a citizen.  It is not my planet, but I don't just live on it.  I am a part of it.  I do need the means and I will subject you to retribution at some point and these are my life goals and everything is building to it and I have no sex and I am an agent of a movement and you will know me when it's done and I will never place a gun to my own skull and I will be responsible and I will find you and force you to answer for everything you have done because I am not God, but I am me and whether you like it or not I just want to be safe with you.

It's difficult to think and be reasonable.  Reason out the voices.  They must be reasoned with.  They aren't monkeys.  They are to be unnamed and it's very frustrating to know that I get to know them and they can never be ....  it hurts.  It hurts less than naming and that's acceptable.  It's not about ferocity.  They punish me in ways you may understand.  Even with that understanding there is no equivalent exchange.  I know I need to get back on medicine.  I know I have to.  I refuse.

It's not a team effort.  It's just me.  No metaphor.  I refuse.  I will fucking burn this house to the ground before I do that again and I'm not happy about it.  I am furious.  Why does everything boil down to money?  Why did you leave me here?  What kind of advice do you fucking expect me to give that does not play directly back into history or roundabout to the same spot?  I don't understand.  I do.  Normalcy.  I can do normalcy.  I have it, down pat.  What I do not have is normalcy.  There's a difference between the two.

I will not quit the battle.  There is very real cause for concern.  Things are developing faster than expected.

Delusions.   I will not cash out.  I have faced the dragon, but no apotheosis.  There is no way out and it's not a death grip.

I wish you had more time.

I was ill prepared, but armored well.  Armor is no workable substitute.

///Count Basic - "Gotta Jazz"   there are things i have to do.  things that must be done, come hell and high water.  fault me.  these are faults.  they must be done, but i am a citizen and you will not deport me today, or tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that.

Wrecks, Dreamland, and Reconstruction

I went back to the scene of my car accident tonight.  Dreamland has been corrupted.  I keep having a recurring dream about it.  Cruising through dreamland last night I built a house of a little more than normal proportions.  My friend Matt and his buddy Ernie called me up after I finished eating lunch (sardines and fried centipedes... it actually wasn't that bad... all the legs and fish ribs were super crunchy inside the perogies).  Tom was there too.  Finished up eating, and the phone rang so I got up from the indoor beach with the five foot wide tv perched over the far water and went to go let them in.  Put on my fleece robe and tossed Tom the remote.  Walked down to the freight elevator and closed the gate and punched the ground floor.  The elevator went all the way down past the mech garage.  I had my bright red candy shell finished R 29 with extra plate and F990 shoulder mount long barrel with aftermarket cooling fins parked right beside it and it was awesome watching the light glint off of it.  Sometimes I spend days on the scaffold hand polishing it's entire body when I'm not joy riding it through the clear southwest desert night sky.

The elevator went all the way through to the floor and then ten feet below to the car garage and hillside entrance.  It's a short walk to the door and I let Matt and Ernie in.  Ernie asked me if I remembered going to his place the night before and showing up at three in the afternoon.  I said no.  I didn't.  I wasn't lying.  He asked me if someone hacked me, but I told him I wasn't online at all yesterday, but it's possible I might've caught something because I was online the day before pretty much the entire day looking for some rarer copies of an Ultraman graphic novel I used to have when I was a kid, but can't find in my library anymore.  He laughed.  That was probably what might've done it.  Matt offered to hit me up with a few patches to make sure whatever it was that wiped my memory didn't get passed around while they were over.  We took the lift back up and they asked Tom if I was a little off yesterday and he said "definitely."

I don't know why he didn't mention anything to me, but I guess that's what good friends do sometimes, and he's probably used to my oddness and figured it was the usual fare.  Or at least, the Tom I constructed and built into the dream did.  I told them we were out of sardines.  Because we were and if we were going to hit up the bars later it would probably be good not to over do it.  I don't know where the extra beach chairs came from but by the time we got back up to tv room they were already there.  We all started talking about whether or not we would blaze on our way up to the Silver Tusk.  I have a pretty sweet mech garage so there're plenty enough for each of us to blast out to the exosphere and dock at the Silver Tusk space station in geocentric orbit above our heads.

And then a giant tan sedan crashed through the wall behind the flat screen.  It blew it apart and was going so fast it skipped across the water and bit into the beach.  As soon as it touched down it started flipping and parts began whipping off of its underside like a pipe bomb built and stuffed with three foot long aluminum fence posts instead of nails.  I was standing behind them and it rolled right over them and chewed them up into meat before my eyes before a door came zinging off while it spun and I woke up with that door heading straight for my neck.

Every other dream since it happened has been like that.  No matter how I construct it or if I let it play and go along for the ride, they keep ending with cars careening through and killing everyone in one way or another.  So I went back to the place tonight.  It was weird walking up the off ramp.  I tried to think about what that kid could have been thinking that morning walking between the off ramp walls.  There's no where to go on either side.  If you leap off the far side of the corner it's a good ten foot drop.  Off of the inside corner there's some grass, but cars come much closer to the inside of the turn so your chances are much slimmer of even having time to react or think about jumping.  I like to drive in wide and then turn in tight and let the car bleed off speed while it grips in.  He was lucky for that.  If I came inside he would have been through my windshield.

The mark on the far wall when I swerved to avoid him was nothing tremendous.  It was mostly a tire scuff maybe a foot long at most.  It didn't speak at all to the damage done to the car.  There was no traffic tonight.  I walked out to the middle to pick up a piece of my bumper that was still there.  Just a shard.  I don't wonder why he ran away.  I would have too.  Was he daydreaming?  Did he want to die?  Was he just high?  Crouched there I started to remember when I was younger and I walked into traffic trying to get hit on Forbes avenue.  I wasn't particularly upset or anything, but I was ready to let my life go.  No one would hit me.  I did it again a few nights later with my eyes closed and I distinctly remember a bus blowing by me so close it spun me around when it brushed my black hoodie.  I wasn't upset, but I was impossibly trapped at the time and finished trying to figure out how to pick that particular lock.

I'm still putting my body back together.  From the car accident and the fall down the two flights of stairs and the bike accident (which was my own fault, just pushed my bicycle too hard after having it laid up for most of winter and a too cold spring).  Two hours a day of rehab work getting my back right.  A lot of my power comes from my torso and I messed up my hip and tailbone pretty ugly.  Nothing broken, but the deep bruising and muscle strains took their toll, but I'm getting back to a point where I can consider running again and hitting the weight room hard.  The reconstruction, the process of it has become consuming.  I was at a point where I could mess with whomever I wanted.  Sure, I didn't win every scuff, but I had confidence in my bones and tissues that spoke to having a decent shot as long as I wasn't piss drunk.  Not so now.  There's hesitation now.  There's memory tape now of the waking up in pain and not being able to sit up straight even in a well made chair.  Not being able to breath because my sternum hurt so bad.

My body is gathering force though.  Regaining moxy and it's difficult for me to have my limitations still in view.  I keep having internal arguments with myself shouting "don't do that, you're not ready yet."  And myself shouting back "or what?"  But I know what.  Humiliation, failure, more time lost in recovery.  What the reconstruction has also done though, is forced a new view upon me.  A new way of going about conflict. Handling passions I can't always contain effectively.  War bringing peace, in a way.

More than anything, I want so badly to speak to that kid face to face now that I don't want to skin him alive anymore.  I want to know, and I want to tell him I forgive him.


///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Smash and Grab World"  looking to the stars on a fucked up night.  Year end playlist is still in the works.  Just five months late.  No worries.

Circle Back

I am circling back and taking my time to do it.  Care is the order of the day.  I posted some old stories to Bits.  It's funny sometimes looking at how the composition has changed.  How some of the sentence structure has remained the same and some has mutated.

I edited the names out.  Not for protection against embarassment, but because it was a collective effort and the whole idea about collective effort is not knowing who contributed what to make the final product.  More than that though, I was trying to hide my voice.  I want to rework that story.  It's good, thus far, lower case letter t$$$, but seriously, it is a good start and was a good start to something really violent and heavy and it needs a good twenty to thirty thousand more words to make it polished.  I'm willing to do it.  You know I'm willing to do it.  I just have to do it, and that's why I put it out there.  That, and just to say thank you too to an old friend I ain't talked to in far too long who put a good idea in my head and then vanished.  I'm on the hunt for several a thing.  this is one of them.  Chasing my tail.

Travels

Do you ever wake up and the first breath you take as you open your eyes is like the end of the beginning of the breath you held loosed in the exhalation last as you closed them hours before? The kind of breath that just draughts and draughts like a mug with its bottom smashed out and a waterfall pouring in through your eyes?

I've been so many places I haven't told you about. It truly has been amazing cities and villages and neighborhoods that I did not know existed in the slightest. It's been like holding up a sliver of pencil graphite and peering at it and into it and trying to see the sliding structures of the molecules that make it able to write and as you focus in harder and harder your eyebrow twitches, your right eye scrunches, your cheek pulls a little bit against the corner of your mouth, and you have a lopsided nostril flare as it curls into a black dot and you sneeze so hard you see the white and gray spots of single blood vessels traveling through the tubes inside your eyes until the white and gray static washes away and as you realize what you felt was probably the hardest sneeze you've felt all year and your vision sharpens and tightens and you go back to the task of focusing in on the little stick of graphite to gain some greater understanding of its whyness the focus of your eyes takes in first the space behind it and you notice for the first time that the entire world has changed and you, through your one tenth orgasmic bending of space and time and through modes absolutely involuntary to your methods, have been transported in the pinched microcosm of a microcosmically microbial micronaut of a micromicrosecond into another state of your known universe. And you're like, "awwww, snap. Wait, where was I just now?"

That's what the cross bridged universe has been like. I've got to find a way to slow down somehow. It's like every step, every step in this phase is approximately three feet (I'm a big stepper, though I live my wake state in little steps, admittedly, not by choice), but sometimes across the bridge it becomes impossible not to cover yards and hundreds of feet to a stride. It's alarming to me. Since the city I traversed and loved deeply, and had fairly close ties to, with it's cats that raced tiny v6 motored shopping carts, and its trams and extensive rail system, its modes and methods, and absolutely stunning, despite the time of day, industrial sector, passed to dust through the extinction level event that literally converted pretty much all living matter there to wind blown drifts of ash, knee and sometimes waist high, the entire world over there was silent for days. Dreams of black empty space.

The passage was probably linked to the discovery of an engine, a massively complex machine, whose only visage, comprehensible to me was red space. I remember traveling in search of the menace. There was so much unrest and power in the air. The kind of power that is impossible to control. The sort of power that raises the hairs on your forearms and makes your skin stand taut at a rally railing against a thing that you don't believe in necessarily, but that is necessarily part of the fabric of who and what you are, and your skin tries to wrench away from the sheer electricity of so many voices and hands raised against the isness of its whatness. The preparations for the event. The siphoning off of resources. It felt like the beginnings of war from the middle portions of textbooks on American history. No pantyhose, no lipstick, no zoot suits, no strip steaks. I don't think they're all related, but they rhymed and made funny notes in my head. All the same, I remember the streets emptying. The saving of fuels. The work stoppages because so many people were leaving and then whatever happened, whatever the engine so utterly complex in it's being and overwhelming in its output to be describable only as the color it left seared into my eyes, everyone died.

Then one day I crossed the bridge again, down the stairwell and through the door, across the water, to enter myself there and I searched farther and farther from the place I'd grown into and I started finding new places untouched by the destruction, by the discovery of a motor vast enough to destroy a population in its breach. It's been simply incredible. The world has been intensely sensory and I know that I am not from there, but a refugee from the city of dust. It's been difficult to blend in. I don't know what it means.

I am anxious for the arms race though. Turning laborers on my factory floors toward positive productions or at least neutral destruction. Admittedly I have been doing my best to live toward lower resolution perception. Perhaps stupidly. However, it has made it much easier to keep track of the caucus. All present for a span of weeks instead of days and hours. Well, mostly all present all the time, but have you ever tried keeping six people at the same table non stop for any length of time. Cellphones down, you assholes! I know it's happening (I've been using those rather interchangeably, but I'm making an effort not to). I haven't been dividing and sub dividing my body like I should be. Increased capabilities are a good thing for the people I work for and cohabitate real space with, but very bad for me because it basically cedes me more idle power, and my insides do not idle well before outlets become too infrequent, necessarily so as there's only so much you can physically do in 24 hours and then I drift toward solid state and forced diffusion through shorter out spouts. The better my conditioning the more of a potential and eventual hazard I become to myself. And who the hell keeps moving my toothpaste.

I guess there's an answer in there somewhere, but I don't remember asking a question. I guess mostly I've just been trying to get a handle on the verdant landscape. The wackness. Seeing through it. I'm used to two or three dreams. Two or three stints in dreamland. I've been having ten to fifteen in the new world. It is strange.


///Linkin Park - "Session" Not trying to create distance, but it's hard to know how far away I travel sometimes because I don't understand how much ground has been covered or how much time passes between what I perceive to be blinks of my eye. Sometimes the days spin by like tracers through sunset skies and it's all I can do not to blink against their rays.

Year End Retrospective 2009-2011

Somewhere in the middle of all the bullshit and heart break and fucked up bullshit heart break that filled the skies of 2010 like a flock of severely underfed ravens wheeling over a field hospital whose tents all blew away in a freak hurricane after the worst days of shelling the war saw since its start left a record number of open flesh wounds and completely overwhelmed the nursing staffs ability to even begin to sanitize them all, let alone beat the rats back... where was I going with that? Sort of lost track along the way in there. It's been a while since I've written any fiction and sometimes all I do is close my eyes and it comes bubbling up like gold oil in a blue toilet bowl.

2010 had its downs and its ups. I learned a lot of things about myself and about other people. I learned that most people are probably not my friends, but they are polite and a lot of times because they have to be. I come back to that a lot don't I? It feels like a lot. It's one of those things that I have to keep reminding myself because I'm not wired to accept it. In my head it's a circuit breaker that keeps opening and I have to keep going down to the basement to close it and it's a big hassle. Or is it the reverse? The reverse conditions being assigned to ... you get the point.

Back to 2010. 2009 was the break. The complete unraveling of the assumed and constructed reality. 2010 was the rabbit hole. More like the ocean. 2009 was the break from land. The acceptance that what I was leaving I will never return to because it is not only out of my control, but under the influence of things set in motion and built and conceived years in advance of my ever setting foot on the place I had the foolishness to plant a flag, however intensely the pole was thrust into the Earth and however proudly the wind took to my banner. The ground fell through as though my stupid ambition, well stupid is actually the wrong word there... my misinformed ambition were a fist and the dirt was the crust of a 99 cent store brand pot pie in a tinfoil bowl.

It's not to say that 2009 was fundamentally flawed well before it arrived. It is to say that through my and others efforts the collapse of 2009 was delayed for as long as it was because we didn't know just how thin and cheap and empty the ground beneath my feet was back in 2006. Or maybe I knew and I just did not want to believe. I think that's what it was. It was coming apart back then and I wanted to will it together and make it mine and not be the kid with a future and family so far out of line from everyone else he knew, but that kind of thinking is a recipe for catastrophe.

It wasn't all terrible. The collapse was, but there were things that happened apart from it and I tried to separate myself and compartmentalize the personal wildfire from the person I thought people enjoyed hanging out with. There was some success in that. I discovered the most intense smile is the smile mustered in the face of pains that refuse to be denied. Things burned off left and right in 2009 and then the descent to the ocean floor of 2010 was just as eye opening and faith demolishing. Not in faith in religion. That was long gone. There were still lingering faiths in parents that were systematically slaughtered, there was faith in decency that was blown away, then there was faith in systematic accountability that failed, followed by faith in language and reason, give and take, compassion, the senses, right on down to ... well, I don't know exactly where that fire ended or if it's still eating away inside of me.

Sorry I got distracted again. Just talking about it I sometimes think I can feel that fire touching the insides of my skin. It's comforting. That's all I have faith in now. The consuming flame of discovery that burns in the heat of destruction.

2010 was touching the void, but more than that it was my throat constricting and me screaming out, in a voice I wish I had 15 years ago, a simple no. 2010 was learning that I didn't have to take it. Learning that what I thought I needed and what I knew I needed were so far from what I was living and what I was living was so close to complete emotional rape mind fucking physical slavery was hard to deal with. Tracing the roots back to the abuse was even harder. Tracing the branches that grew from those roots was the hardest part. Right around there was when I finally found me. I guess I'm still the same, but I'm conscious in ways I didn't know I could be and it's made some things easier and some things harder, but it has also allowed me to move on. It was more than finally waking up to the actual dimensions of the cage. It was waking up to the universe outside of it, it's history, my history, how I got there, who put me there, what happened to me and because of me while I was inside of it, and who I was. It was like seeing for the first time with absolute clarity the person I was supposed to be, right there in the room with me, understanding that I could never be that person because of what came before, and finally being able to begin to let that go.

2010 was rage and heat. 2011 is going back to the soul that burned down to find the valuables left, if any, and started over again with free eyes. I still have a lot of letting go to do. There is still so much rage that still smolders, but I have the ability now to understand where it's come from and to direct it, at least partially, to where it must go. 2010 was also the discovery of who the people I could understand to be friends really are. One of the major reasons why I'm not dead in a basement in Queens is because of them.

The world is a fucked up place.

2011 I'm still on fire inside my head. I'm still learning to manage paranoid schizophrenia. I'm still trying to be human. The witticism of taking life one day at a time comes to mind. That's complete bullshit. Life is nothing without goals. I have some deaths to look forward to, but closer in I have the rest of Pittsburgh to look forward to and talking to you and with everything else burned to the ground I think that is finally enough to make sunrise so much less a spear through my heart.

///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves" I can hear myself. They were drowning me... your tracklist is up next. Three finger promise.