There Is Still No Fix For Introversion and Comprehension Skill's Lament

Aloneness means the world to me.

Introversion is a difficult thing to navigate.  This is news to no one.  The people I am around are well aware of my introversion's depths and shallows.  I am occasionally gripped in manic depressive cycles of changing ferocity, but the underlying truth that forms the foundation of my being, core, and interactions is introversion.  It's quiet.  It's private.  I rarely talk simply to talk.  I often spend days without saying a word to anyone beyond the few cat noises I'll make to my pets.  I don't like being around people for much time outside of a few hours, sometimes a half day, rarely a full day, but anxiety creeps in and introversion twists my nerves.  I have to be left alone for regular and frequent stints of time.

Communication is a problem.  Introverts can get trampled easily.  I don't like fighting.  I hate fighting.  I hate arguing.  At times I hate conversation, period.  However, eschewing these things makes it difficult or impossible to express displeasure with people around you.  Behold the reason why I will not go anywhere that I cannot remove myself from.  Why argue, why fight, why bother explaining what and how you are feeling when you can simply leave?  This works fantastically.  When I am finished with you, I leave.  When I have had enough of you, I leave.  When I am bored, tired, happy, have other things to do, errands to run, when I feel like you've mislead me as to what we set out to do, don't like the venue, whatever may come up, I can quite easily say a pleasant goodbye to you and remove myself to my home and it's wonderful.

I'm not forced to be someone that I'm not, you're not forced to try to peer into what is going on behind my eyes and everyone is happy or at least content with the entirety of the interaction.  I'm back home safe in my cocoon, your life goes on, nice and simple.  When you come into my home, that dynamic is destroyed.  When I am relying on you to get me back home or back to my car, that dynamic is destroyed.  When you are in my home I am relying on you to leave in a timely fashion.  When I am out with you, I am relying on you to not continue extending the day farther and farther away from an end point we agreed upon.  Just because I keep acquiescing to your saying "hey, why don't we..." with the promise that we'll relax a little bit and have a little fun before taking me back to my car, doesn't mean that I'm not screaming inside every single time the "relax and have fun" part is pushed back another half hour and another half hour and another half hour.  Eventually I will break.

You must take me home.  You must get out of my house.  And I've been trampled again.  So which one is it?  Are the people that do it not friends?  Have they not known me long enough?  Have they assumed that I've changed over the years?  Do they not care?  Do I put on a pleasant enough facade such that they don't notice until the entire thing breaks down in pieces and my grimace and crying eyes show?  Why do they keep doing it?  Because they can?  I don't know.  What are they not comprehending?

I've spoken to them a few times about it.  What do they keep forgetting about me?  It's strange.  With people I'm not friends with, people I've only just met, circumstances unfamiliar, people I've known and can't trust, I leave nothing up to them to figure out.  I rely on them for nothing.  I believe very little of what they say.  I come prepared for most any possibility and mode of extraction to protect myself from unintentional outside harm.  You are supposed to be my friend, please don't step on me.

And on that note, what I cannot deal with is the friend whose comprehension skills are so incredibly underdeveloped I couldn't have an argument or disagreement with them if I tried with all of the tact, diplomacy, conscientiousness, and kindness I can muster.

We all have that friend who immediately flies off of the handle when you tell them they've done something wrong.  That friend who will tell you that in the subjective world of right and wrong to you is something that they can dictate.  That friend who tells you when they've helped you, regardless of what the actual result of their misguided effort was.  That friend who you specifically instruct not to come over without an invitation from you, who takes it upon themselves to come to your house and scare all of your neighbors into believing something horrible has happened to you to get someone to open your door and enter your apartment because you fell asleep on the phone with them after staying up for 40 hours.  That friend who says they came over to check on you without an invitation because they were not going to let a friend die on their watch, who immediately asks you upon arrival if you have anything to drink, who happens to have brought an overnight bag and their video game remote and parts, and their tiny bottle of liquor, when all you wanted to do and did was fall asleep.  What the hell are you doing here?  No, it's not funny.  No, it's not heroic.  No, it's not friendly.  I was sleeping with my phone on silent because I am tired.  That friend who mooches all of your food and beer over the next two days and destroys what sleep you were hoping to get while managing to leave your place trashed, who you tell not to come over again without an explicit invitation because "you fell asleep while I was talking to you and I had to make sure you weren't dead" is not a reason to invite yourself over to crash at someone's house for two and a half days and make your neighbors think you may die at any moment to trick your way in, that just do not understand that what they did was patently wrong.  Regardless of how they contort their actions to fit some larger narrative of "I helped you."

No comprehension skills.  The funniest part is when, as an introvert, giving yourself time to think the events over, you let them know what they did must not be done again.  You explain to them it is hugely disruptive to your life and takes days of cleaning and rest to recover from and days of explaining and apologizing and discomfort with neighbors who now have no idea if this idiot will pop up on some random day demanding entry because I may be in some ambiguous danger and they've thrown on their hero cape (or just fucking sleeping or maybe just awake with my phone off or not even home) and their response is to get angry at you.  Not only get angry at you, but insist that they will continue to ignore your wishes, disrespect your house, and treat you like a five-year-old who may slip and fall while running with scissors who must be constantly monitored.  No comprehension skills.

You try to lay down very basic information, very basic tenets of how you would like friends to treat you and the space you want them to respect and they scream and yell at you about how wrong you are and how right they were to violate your space and how you'll live to regret and rue the day you told them how you felt and how you want to live your life and then go on to tell you they aren't going to respect your wishes or your space regardless.

So what do you do?  Do you just scream and shout back at them?  No, you're an introvert and they'll out yell you at every turn and out outrage you too.  Do you try to restate your point and your needs?  Nope, they've already shown they are not going to listen.  Don't sweat it.  Leave.  Watch them from afar for a while.  Feel free to leave them alone altogether for some time.  Maybe they need time to understand better.  They can't trample you and your introverted heart and mind if they can't interact with you.  There is no fix for introversion.  There is no fix for introversion.  There is no fix for introversion.

There is no need to fix introversion.  Take care with who you befriend.  It is important to understand that, as an introvert, you can be liable to get hurt pretty badly, whether friends mean to or not.  Relying on other people to learn how to treat you is a losing game.  It's up to you as you grow older and more experienced in navigating introversion, to learn how to maintain proper distance from the people you do call friends.  When it becomes too close, don't drive yourself to death trying to keep it together.  Open up some space and go from there.  You won't be sorry.  You may feel like an awful person who is abandoning people that thought they were your friend.  You may feel like something is wrong with you.  You may feel, at first, that you're hurting people trying to help, but that subsides quickly once you see their blindness to your being for what it is.




///Richard Wagner - "Das Rheingold Prelude"  aloneness still means the world to me.

Nearing the End of the First Week With a Fractured Jaw

The fracture or break is very high up the ramus and very close to my ear.  Every time I poke it hard enough I can hear and feel it flex a little so I try not to touch it or shift my jaw left or right when I do yawn with my teeth locked together.  Of course I didn't go see a doctor.  I have no health insurance.  What's the doctor going to do?  Wire my teeth together and tell me to get plenty of rest and not move my jaw.  I can do that without the wires and the $5000 bill.  Sure there may be other fractures along the side of the jaw bone, but inspection says they're only fractures if they do exist and not clean breaks.  Thanks to wisdom teeth that were never removed growing up because they were so badly impacted the surgery was out of the question for one reason or another by the time I was screened for them, the inside of my cheek took some thick lacerations at the point of impact.  I think one or two of molar roots may have cracked causing swelling and pain in the angle.  Time will tell.  Hell, if my wisdom teeth on that side die and eventually fall out, I'm all for it.  Who am I going to be kissing in the next two- three years anyway.

The first week of a liquid diet and I'm down 17 pounds.  I'm not fat, but I always feel fat, so it's helping my body image issues a great deal, oddly enough.  I keep thinking over the evening last Saturday.  After a great pow-wow with a buddy and his friend who had to leave a little earlier we decided to head out and grab some ice cream and, I was thinking, a pack of smokes on the side for me, happy to be alive and a little agitated, but more than anything else, happy to be out for a walk in the deep night air with a gorgeous moon.  Hopping along, we came across a bunch of teens loitering in a schools front yard and a police van telling them to disperse and we walked on, exchanging glances.  They were obviously doing it wrong.  Mulling in the shadows instead of out beneath the street lights on your way to get some tasty ice cream and smokes and then hop back home to finish the night off with a few beers and your friend.

They were doing it wrong and it was funny and in my happiness and joy with the night and my pal and the prospect of ice cream, I shouted to them so, with a few more curse words and some gestures, but simply poking fun at how they choose to spend their time when they could be walking to get ice cream instead of haunting a schools front lawn.  They shouted back and I shouted back, because there's so much more to life than trying to intimidate people all of the time.  There's friendship, and the moon, and ice cream, and cigarettes, and the fun a Saturday unperturbed by anyone who dares believe they can rain on my happy day with a friend I haven't seen in far too long.  Who cares if a couple of happy travelers don't clutch their purses or speak in hushed voices as they pass you by.  You're a bunch of kids on a schools closed front lawn trying to intimidate and strike fear into the "mean streets of Pittsburgh" from the shadows.  Ooga booga!  It was hilarious.

Those boys took it the wrong way and decided to follow and encircle us.  "All of this happiness must be stomped out!" is what I think they said collectively.  I had no desire to fight.  Those roads are way behind me and ice cream was ahead of me and the police were just up the block a moment ago.  I do not live in a world where I will trade ice cream for police questioning.  Ever!  I figured there'd be some yelling and shoving and they'd go on their merry and moody and belligerent way after pushing us around and we'd continue on ours and get those evening treats and continue our happy Saturday.  It wasn't to be.  I was hit from a blind angle right in the left corner of my jawbone just beneath my ear and dropped like a bag of rocks for a few seconds.  My friend, struck too, was lucky enough to get hit from a direction his head was more or less facing and did not suffer more than cosmetic damage in a black eye and a cut or two.

I didn't realize the discomfort I felt the following day was far more than a bruise on my cheek until the day after when the pain got worse and worse until I couldn't chew anything, much less open my mouth.  I guess those boys won.  My happiness silenced by a fractured jaw bone and quite possibly broken molars inside the bone itself (hoping that's not the case, but we'll know in another week or two or if the violence of them being forcefully shifted a few millimeters out of their homes has caused inflammation that will take some time to heal [or if infection is underway as we write *cue doom music*]).


I keep thinking through that fateful stretch of night.  I keep asking myself why the hell would they do that?  Keep telling myself it was entirely uncalled for.  I know why I was sucker punched.  Their fear.  That moment when my friend was hit and they thought "now or never because if this other larger guy wasn't going to put up a fight before he just may A: decide to put up a fight now, B: shout or call for help, C: both a and b."  I keep wondering why they didn't just yell back and go their separate way.  There was no chance they considered he and I, a couple of drunk 30 year old men out on a walk together, to be a threat to them.  Why would they do that?  Why would they attack us so viciously?

And then it dawned on me.  Thinking back 12 years.  How righteously furious I was then for dozens of reasons, some complex some as simple as I wanted an excuse to pass on the hurt inside of me to anyone who gave me an excuse to.  Ready to fight anyone and any inanimate object that didn't "respect" me no matter how pointless or stupid.  I didn't want to rob you.  I wanted to hurt you as badly as I could get away with.  Year after year after year, getting more angry, more sensitive, more irrational, but always questioning it, breaking it apart, tearing down the engine, trying to figure out what the hell it was making this bomb of my body go tick tick tick.  I still haven't figured it out exactly.

Through years of study, years of violence toward others sometimes warranted, often times not, culminating in things I will never be able to take back, I left those courses behind me.  Thirty years old all I care about is writing, getting home in one piece, spending time with my cats, seeing my friends when I can, and taking care of the only body I have left until my brain breaks apart or my body just will not run anymore.  I could care less who respects me and who doesn't.  I could care less who breaks my jaw and who decides to be merciful.  Save for a handful of very specific, very important, exceptions, if I ever get so mad that the only language I can speak is the original dialect, violence itself, I will speak through breaking my own skin and nerves, not someone else's.  The simpler truth is that for most of those kids, they will never learn or even begin to learn how to learn that things could be different.  Some of them will end up dead.  Others will circle their private drains until their live's dwindle and die out.

Those idiots aren't there yet.  It was stupid of me to believe a 12 year gap in understanding what a good night with a friend really is, and what it can mean in the face of a world, in the face of my world once dominated by violence.  They didn't silence my happiness.  If worst comes to worst and I can never quite use my jaw the way I could before that night again, I have always wanted to learn sign language.

Do I hate them for it?  Of course.  Would I like to find one of them, knock him senseless, wrap him duct tape and put him in the bed of my truck and take him home?  Would I like to duct tape his arm to a sheet of plywood after gagging him with #0 steel wool and use my belt sander grind away the first knuckle of each digit of his immobilized hand and then shatter the wrist of his other?  Would I like to drive down river and dump his body at a drainage gate?  Of course.  That would achieve nothing.  I'd be happy for a while until the next week when the pain set in again and I would need to find another one and that life is not for me as long as I continue to refuse it and allow the rest of myself to flourish.  Maybe they'll learn.  Maybe a few of them will think about and ask themselves essential questions.

Happiness and love are precious and not to be squandered under all but the most extreme circumstances.  Especially not in this world's economy.




///=sigh= I could really go for a slice of pizza right about now.  I'll melt some ice cream instead.

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?

What Scares You

What scares you?  What scares you?  What really fucking scares you?  That he's better than you?  That he's better than you in every way?  That the choice was the right one?  That she's still down there enabling him?  That the paper is still blank?  That the paint has gotten too old to use?  That he might be angry at you instead of with you?  That you are not properly equipped?  That the next gas station may be out of range?  That your keys are at home?  That you are being entertained?  That you're not incorporated?  That the bug may be permanent?  That there is not enough gauze?  That the tuna may run out?  What really scares you?

Don't make me wait.  I am exceptionally patient except when I'm not.  I don't know what really scares me, for what I've compensated for.  I do know what really scares me.  All of the above.  Very long knee jerk reactions.  Knee jerk reactions spanning days and weeks and months and now years.  I'm okay with it, I suppose.  We never do come for money, except when we specifically do.

What scares me is not the not knowing for sure.    What scares me is not knowing how to respond at an appropriate volume.  Of course they can tune you out at will.  Which is nice.  The option takes a bit of the guess work out.  I typed guest work.  It's true, though.  You are a guest.  We are guests.  And they can.  I'm not where the being polite or respectful or conscientious ends and being a good proper guest and friend ends.  Division by addition feels like it works.  The results are wishywashy.  Concernedly so.

Why will you not tell me?  Do you believe that I will somehow be irrevocably shattered by the information?  Do you believe that I will somehow be so shaken that  I cry all of the water out of my body and shrivel up and die?  It makes me laugh the not good laugh to think that may be true.  If you're not a friend, you're not.  Friend is the worst "F" word.  Loaded for no reason.  If you're not an associate, you're not an associate and that's perfectly fine.  You can waste time if you like.  Placate me too, if it twists your earlobe good when you get the itch.  I'm fine with that too.

I think what I'm trying to articulate is that what scares me the most is that I am in hot pursuit of avenues of communication and the way it comes out is a three dimensional graphics sprint into a brick wall, legs chugging, my little arrow on the map, my associates viewing and confused.  What really fucking scares me is not communicating in an understandable and lagoon clear way.

Though I may be a dragon, if you speak lizard, I can talk to you.  We can do dragon business.  Fear doesn't scare me.  Occasionally, day light does.  Police officers and their flashlights too, but I am civil and citizen.

I want to listen to the Penguin Freud orchestra and hear more songs about Easter Island and travel more.  Growing up American.  Straight up fucking American.  The child of explorers.  The child of, perhaps, orphans and seafarers now land locked and fairly domesticated.  The child of pressure and heat and weapons and bombs and "on threat of death."  A child whose fences end where the nuclear powered ships cannot go.  Yeah, I'm good with that.  How long does it take to breed the grit and horizon lust out of the genes?  How long does it take to saw off the hard nosed muzzle and graft in the gatherer for the hunter?  Fuck if I know.



///Seatbelts - "Spokey Dokey"  and they called me old fashioned.  they called me old fashioned!
///

A Thought On Taking Ears

To take an eye is a bit excessive.  I don't care what fight you're in if it's not life and death.  Taking an eye is excessive.  Taking a tooth is, by a stretch, not easy.  By no stretch, 10/10 on the difficulty scale.  Let alone taking the seconds and minutes to pick it up and pocket it after smashing it loose in an uncontrolled environment.

An ear is about right.  It's pretty much a receipt and sensitive if not cauliflowered so it can be an end of itself, sending the "I am not alright with this" signal to their brain.  There is little lost beyond the cosmetic and pride to boot.  Next time you're in a scuff go there.  It's a fine and thoughtful and effective solution.  The chances are very good, after the tangle, it will not be able to be replaced, resewn, or glued back.

Win or lose, a trophy is a trophy and if you're terrible at grappling there is an answer.  An answer a notch below gouging an eye; striking a life long user blind is just sad,  and above clawing their ball sack; we're not savages.  They get the benefit of walking around with one ear and you get the benefit of nothing to collect because it is already in hand and you get to keep it, assuming you did not lose too poorly and were beaten to death by their friends.   It's a fairly fair trade as I see it.




///The Knife - "We Share Our Mother's Health"   ...god damn, do we still come down from the north?  still?  we're going to have to choose eventually.  new york city is garbage.  pittsburgh isn't quite the midwest.  is it?  we come out from the hills.  doesn't have the same ring to it.  we do have the same mother's though.  like it or not.

One Last Tune Up

The enemy of "good" is "perfection."  Decision time is here again.  The thought of gestation makes me laugh, but it's true.  Poetry is still my best friend.  Fiction is still my mistress.  Still too orchestrated.  This is still my sandbox.  Leafing through notes, it's difficult to not get frantic.  Slide over, bacon.  Let me drive for a while.  Okay?  I promise I will not crash.  Okay?  Okay.  You're still two handing the wheel.  Sorry.  Okay?  Okay.  Let go.  Okay.  Alright, I'll see you soon, you know that, right?  I do.  Good.




///DJ? Acucrack - "Wickerman"

Not Again. Yes Again

  I pretty much exploded just about every single breaker on my mind this past weekend.  It was rough.  Massive overload.  Massive violence.  Memory loss.  Found things in my apartment that did not belong to me that were covered in blood that was not mine.  Strange stuff.  Just a complete collapse that was punctuated by a friend in bad straits and there was nothing I could do really to help her, but god damn it I tried and I will try again if it happens again.  Powerlessness.  Is a terrible thing.  Drives me to do and exercise the things I can do.  Which are few.  And most of those things lead to bad circumstances.

I know at some point my luck is going to run out and things will not go anywhere near the way I planned them.  I will be on the wrong end of the violence and rage.  Over my head without even knowing it.  Without realizing it until it happens.  I don't think I'll be all that upset though.  A way out.  Not the way out I would want, but how far I would go to resist is questionable.  I don't think I would, beyond reflex.  I did set out to specifically kill someone.  Ended up in tears and bloodless.  I suppose that was the second time.  I don't remember what happened the first time.  The point is I've got stop letting go like that.  Gotta stop letting myself be provoked.

Control.  Without control there is nothing.  I can't afford to lose like that.  Not yet.  Still too much work to do.  Gotta get my head back on straight if I'm going to live through the bull shit and the slippage and the blow outs and the


///Tosca - "Oscar"  I've had the most fantastic dreams over the last two days about stories I need to write.  I need to do it.  I'm not really afraid of running out of time.  I just know that time is running out of me like blood from a head wound.

Touching Down (t minus four)

I've been, uhm... out of touch. Broke loose for a few days. Had to find myself, and now I'm touching down again. Attempting reentry. Things got bad. Not worse than usual. It's hard to explain. I was walking to the store and I just broke into tears. Uncontrollable tears. The thing about crying is that, sometimes, once you understand why, what it is that drove you there, you can start to turn it off. Start to stand yourself down. I had tears streaming down my face and at the same time the armory was gearing up and my hands were in fists and I bit my lips so hard they started bleeding. I was a mess. I had to blow off so much energy I took it to a brick wall for a while and then came home and took it to my own wall for four hundred reps. The swelling is starting to come down though. Getting most of the feeling back in my forearms. The artifacts living inside my head were screaming at me so loud I couldn't bear wakefulness.

 I'm trying to hold on until my birthday at least. I know I don't owe to myself or anyone to do so. I want to know what tomorrow is. I know this is just a bad burn. A nasty hiccup of circuitry. I can handle it. I can handle it. I can handle it. I've lost control of them. The voices in my head. They just get so loud and the effort blows my mind apart. Parsing the information faster than it comes in. Controlling what goes out. It came apart so fast this time. Over night. And it really is all I can do to isolate myself, because I don't have clear answers to questions.

 

 "How are you?" How can I answer that? I can't seem to remember my dreams lately. They follow me wherever I go. Wherever I am, I am so rarely alone. How am I? I don't know. The question makes me sweat. What am I supposed to say? No one wants to hear that you're so thickly steeped in thoughts of suicide, but still find time to laugh. I don't know. Still looking for my way out. Back in the day, birthdays were the most violent times of the year. Birthdays and holidays. You got a shitty card and, if you were lucky, dodged a beating. I guess that still rolls over in my mind grave. Freezes me, even while my head burns from the inside out. So much chest thumping anxiety. What was I supposed to have been by now? Breaking waves. Burning up on reentry. I must have it.

 I want to live among the stars. I know, it's unreasonable. Untenable. Un everything except a dream. I finally blew apart the three part relationship that owned me. It was a bad thing. Burned it to the ground for good. Flat earth policy. And I miss the ownership. The being needed. Having my leash held. I'm a stray again. But not unloved, I have to learn again. It's gonna take time. Sometimes being alone with your thoughts is a good thing. Sometimes you just unravel and want to take the world apart as you go. Sometimes you'd give your right eye for sleep. Sometimes you break your body apart just to be able to breath again. Bringing myself in for a landing. Coming in hot.


 ///School of Seven Bells - "Love Play" ...bass up.

In the Back Woods and Friendship Tugs of War

Well, I've been gone for a minute, but it's been something of a stroll in the backwoods. The creepy backwoods that are often not to be strolled until the circumstances demand some sort of outing and the only reasonable place to go where you can't be bothered is the back 9 of the mind. Keeping a good clip with poetry. A minor defeat of writer's block that has allowed some things to flourish. I haven't used that word in a while, if at all. Flourish. It has a certain pirouette to it that has to be reserved for unique measures of success.

Success in the face of nightmares. Actual nightmares. Actual moments of the involuntary bridging of dream and real states. Of seeing what is there and what isn't or at least shouldn't be in the same instance of breathing and having to close my eyes and repeat after me "you are safe"s. If repeating is believing. I guess that's one of the reasons why I don't believe in heaven or hell. I've seen them both and they're not what anyone says they are supposed to be. I've been to the end of the world and it's nothing like what we've been told is it? Few things ever are. If I smell a little like death it's because we've been bedfellows on and off recently. A flirting couple that knows neither is really committed to anything serious, but when is play ever except when it is?

So we've pumped and ground and made and done and life has gone on for less and worse and better and blood. The organs still pump and the sound still comes in fountains and so I continue. I continue on in the backwoods and little leaps to foregrounds until, I have come to convince myself recently in the train of reasons to reason in, the day when my life transposes from discrete experiences into a singular piece of poesis. A perfect and sustainable solid state. And then I'll happily call it a day. Not in a bid for immortality because immortality is only to memory and human memory will never break the solid state barrier (so even immortals are no more than incarnates), but in a bid to have become. I suppose there are probably many things I am becoming, but to have definitively crossed that boundary of becomingness to the hell pots of posterity is a thing worth aspiring to if there is anything worth shooting for. Call the stars, or the moon, or glory, or whatever. Incarnations of the become be damned. To have is to have in some way shape and form held in hands so often dropped in emptiness. To have gripped, and not let go even in whatever can be termed death.

There have been joys in the backwoods. Joys tasted rarely in and the travel has been hard and light, but worth it in some ways and a waste in many others. And I don't know why I am trying to see this in two points of view. Oh wait I do! Friendship tug of war. You can pick your nose. You can pick your friends. But you can't favor one person over the other though they both know you in pathetically thin terms. What the hell does it matter, you idiots? I mean really. Can we all just grow up a good four years and call this bullshit a day. Not to rant on so silly a topic. It's just aggravating. Neither one of you could really keep pace with what I'm up to so what the hell difference does it make. Both of you would probably have nothing to do with me if you knew me to the fullest possible extent so can we please all just get along by the terms of the established sensibilities of isness? Probably not.

I have got too much to run from to ever fully open to either so what can I possibly be expected to do when I can't even begin to describe what can be reasonably expected of myself. How can you love anybody when you don't love yourself? Well, it's kind of easy if you try. Just kidding, it's impossible, but still- what the hell. Are my choices really to go hang with the one person who always lies to me and makes assertions they can never back up and keep trusting in them and keep getting screwed up worse than I am, or is it to drag myself across town to hang with someone who has no idea who i actually am and will be put in a weird situation when he does. I guess the one thing I do have to consider is that I shouldn't presume to know people I - don't know. Simply stated. So maybe it's worth a shot. Maybe it's time to bend the orbit a little bit and come in close enough to lay some mathematics and calculus to a potential short rendezvous. Haven't used that word in a while either. Generally reserved for important things. Like scenes from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Elegant things. My staff of scientists are not elegant or important. Their idea of a delicate landing is detonating on the surface. They didn't do so well in school, I guess. If shithead A gets a shot, I think it stands to reason that potential decent friend B should also get a shot to play the table and fit into my arbitrary and ridiculous set of rules for friendship that, I swear these people do exist, few people can seem to fit into. I miss those people a ton. I guess the stupid thing is they'll never know who they are. If they did know they probably wouldn't care what it is they accomplished. Alright I'm gonna pipe this down as I'm making myself slightly depressed. And by slightly I mean massively. It's been a tough week. Sorry I've been away.

Well anyway, thought I would drop off some graphics. Because what is a road trip without photographs. There are things that live when you sleep that do not sleep as you are living. They wait for you to come on back. Come on home. One more time. You'll not leave this place alive, but you can try. You can try for old time's sake. We'll give you a fit and running start. See how far you go before we are there, sucking the lengths of string of your calf through your heel like fine noodles through a straw of shredded skin. Don't stay up too late.



///The Black Angels - "Mission District" You can sometimes hear it. You can always feel it when it comes beating on your heart like a death threat. You will write or you will suffer in ways you did not know existed, but will become intimately familiar with. And you do it. And you duck away into the grass and you listen to it beat it's way farther along and then it's gone and you can't really tell if you saved yourself or if maybe the entire thing is coming around again and this time at an angle you did not know was possible and maybe you'll hear it. You'll certainly feel it closing in, but how much less warning will there be next time?

Amongst Myselves

Trying to parse so much conflict. There are only so many channels available. At work I have to deal with awful music being piped in through the ceiling, physical demands, emotional demands, mental demands, and managing inconsistencies and as the day rolls fatigue takes its toll on the number of channels available. That's an analogy that works sometimes. The problem with channel failure is that things connected and monitored and capped through the channel are left to grow and die on their own. Sometimes its all cross chatter and all I have to do is select and confer or revoke access rights to my mouth parts. Sometimes its active denial and that takes up a channel. It's always monitoring sound as my eyes aren't always trustworthy under physical stresses. Well my eyes are but my vision is not. Sometimes a channel gets eaten up entirely by the effort required to make sure I don't shred my skin on some incorrect call to a memorized movement. Often times a few are taken up by keeping track of how I'm spreading loads and pain responses and how often I'm lifting what and with which muscle group. Today was so long a day that I limped out of there with so many failures it was all I could do to pay attention to how I was placing my feet so not to re-aggravate an ankle rolled earlier in the day. I was thinking if I killed them all then they would all be my friends because if they're dead then they can't not be my friends. I was thinking a lot of other things too, but the rest is lost to the dust on the linoleum tiles. Maybe I'll remember it later. My spine is burning. I did too much again. I have a dysfunctional relationship with my job. I don't hate it. I just wish it could be better. I just wish I could be better. I dropped a case of two liter jugs of bleach today and it exploded. Wasted thirty seconds with conflicting courses of action. It's like everyone put their hands up at once and started talking before I could call on any particular one and half of them had nothing to contribute to the solution which ended up being 'clean it up, dumbass'. I don't know how I feel today. At the end of yesterday I was pretty fucking depressed and I still don't know why. Maybe trust issues? I went running yesterday and some fat sows were outside with their lye ruined hair wrapped up while they killed the afternoon attempting to grill (it smelled terrible) and they were making fun of me for jogging. I have no idea why. I want really badly to explain to the people that I work with the importance of their cooperation and the generation of well knit atmosphere of trust because I am struggling mightily to keep all my parts moving in one direction without the whole thing smashing itself to furious pieces, but I know they wouldn't understand and if anything it would probably end up costing me the job. Maybe that's what's got me blue this afternoon while I'm trying to sleep. There are lots of 'I's in this one and not many returns.

There's one. Because I care. If only everyone cared just a little more. If I were a dictator the options would be friendship or death. Then I thought maybe exile would make it easier for me to make friends or at least delay the assassination attempts that would inevitably come along. And the extermination of the families of the exiled I would have to pursue to end the cycle of retaliation. Because I just want to be friends.

There's two. Am I that fucking hard to get along with? I asked an old woman if she needed help finding anything. She said 'no, but there is something you can do to help me out, champ.' She was adorable. She couldn't reach the back of the top shelf so I grabbed her fruit cereal for her. I guess I'm rooting for the world's current format, or at least America's current format, to completely collapse. Partially so I can finally get to work on my list of people who need to end, and partially so I can travel freely, but also partly so everyone who's security is based on finances and bullshit jobs will be cut loose to die and I can pick their bones for good meat. I walk past a lot of nice homes on my way to work. Outside of a conspicuously wealthy complex of four shared homes was a pile of nice things interleaved with their trash pickup. Why would they not simply donate it to somewhere? Don't most places have a pickup service? Oh well. It was stuff I couldn't use, but I'm sure someone else could.

There's three. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's what I'm training for. That's why I run and work my body till it breaks and stitches and then I break it again. I'm working toward the end of the world. You can come hang out with me when it's over. I'll take care of you. We'll kill lots of zombies, smoke some doobies some afternoons and hike to South America for the winters (the douchebags of America will probably bloat and ruin Cali when it's over). Shit'll be ridiculous, I promise, but stupid fun. For us. Because we've already been to the end of the world. Twice. I guess that's what makes us different.

///El-P "Oxycotin"

The Locusts Only Took What They Could Carry

I'm here now on the other side of an ongoing experiment that yielded mixed results. I thought for some time about a fun way to combine the word success with the word failure before moving on to more important things. Well, not necessarily important in the sense of urgency as much as important in the sense of size because clearly there is nothing more urgent than finding a way to successfully combine those two words in their most appealing and natural formation and then be the first one to say the new word. The point is this: things have changed.

Life at a higher resolution has had its benefits and its heels. The bridge has dissolved, but has been replaced with something... something else that is difficult to describe. Do you remember televisions with knobs? You might own one now. Well life has become like a television with knobs and there is a hand, no not even a force that centered, but the grooves in the switch that produce the clicking sound and the firm resistance to the turning of the switch are, no not even worn down, they're simply not there. I tune in and every channel, each channel, isn't seated on the face of the tube and its frustrating. But even that isn't really a close enough descriptor. Instead of conversations there are conversations and monitors and levels and time sequencers and gauges and trackers and feedback switches and time code and frame rates and the picture isn't sitting and no ones shutting up and on top of that there are people coming and going at will and moving things and leaving things and at times I can't remember how to walk and I end up spending twenty minutes of a forty minute walk trying to redevelop a comfortable gait and I can't remember how I forgot in the first place.

The ceiling was full of mouths a few days ago. It was disgusting. They weren't people mouths though. Actually they were kind of like meaty valves or something. They kept popping open and closed with these little clicks and it made my skin itch all morning. And then the next night someone ducked their head into my slightly ajar bedroom door and I thought they would leave, but then he saw me and sidled up to my closet against the wall like i wouldn't know he was there. Luckily my phone went off and the light burned him away, but it still left me slightly shaken. There are a pair of women where I work and a man. They're also bad company. The good news is what?

I moved.

Free. Finally free from continuing abuse and shitty fucking family and it is lovely. Pittsburgh is my home now and probably the only place I know of that will have me outright with little or no reservations at all. Well, not entirely true. There is of course the body of people that I want to be connected with who don't feel the same way for whatever reasons, but that's okay because here I actually have friends who actually want to see me along with a context that actually allows that to happen on a regular basis. I have my own place and a bed too. Not much else, but I don't really mind it all that much. I do still need my soul mate computer, but that reunion will have to wait a little while longer. It does mean that my music and drawing will be extremely limited for a while (amongst other things).

I guess I'm still pretty scattered. I saw pictures today of my old friend. I was supposed to send her family a gift, but that was also right around the time I was cold starting my new life so I never had many consecutive hours to dedicate my brain to it. I'm still going to do it. If there's one thing I do every year I would like that to be it. At least until I know they don't really give a shit. Apparently she was here. In this very city only days ago. I wonder sometimes if I'm excluded because I can't be included. It's upsetting. Not in a broken heart kind of way, but in a "what the fuck I thought we were friends" kind of way. Broken heartedness you can get used to, but the former will always cut me fresh and a little deeper with repetition.

I have no idea where to meet people now. I have zero interest in vaginas. Which is also somewhat new. There was some lingering interest even a couple months ago. But I guess I am just gay. Isn't that funny? Well it made me chuckle a little. It's definitely something I never really thought I would say. I still sometimes think back and ask myself "what happened to me?" But maybe it's one of those things like Meyer's Brigs preferences. Just changes over time. Who knows. I'm not really sure where I'm going with that, or most of this.

I suppose I feel like I've escaped from certain destruction in New York and Maryland by cutting off the things the circumstances were latched onto. They've basically fucked me out of 20 years of my life plus however many years it'll take me to reach the earning potential of someone who reached their masters degree and worked in their field for ten years. They've set me back 96k in debt and a five year relationship. I feel like I'm harping, so I'll get to the point.

The point is they smashed and grabbed and smashed and grabbed, but in the end there's only so much they could fit in their clutches and I'm gone away from them for good. Out of reach. Sure my student loans defaulted, but I have nothing that can be taken by the government or a judge. And what I will eventually have will be so small it won't even matter. Sure, they swear they'll cut me off, but I've already been cutoff for the better part of a decade. I didn't escape on my own either. Some friends helped make it happen in a pretty huge way and I owe them each a huge debt of gratitude and dollar bills, but collectively it is quite easy to say they basically saved my life.

I still think about killing myself every other day, but the new potential is so great and unexplored that I can't in good conscience do so and it's been so long since I felt that way. I'm broke, but I'm happy. Life at a higher resolution has its downside and its confusion and its hates and pains and I may need to reaffix filters at some point, but for now I am aware of every passing hour and that awareness is palatable. As a direct result creativity and sanity are suffering, but day to day functionality simply is. I'm proud of myself. A little bit.

I owe you a year end playlist, don't I?

///David Bowie & Philip Glass - "Heroes (Aphex Twin Remix)" We could be. So we were.

Best Panel Yet?

How awesome is that?! I love it. It turned out pretty damn sweet for a quick job. Either I'm getting better or illustrator is reading my mind. Okay, enough stroking my feathers (though I sort of needed that) and back to it. One more to go. As a side note, I think I might change those paint strokes to sharp angled sort of cutout comic booky "kaboom" explosions. I think that would look even better.

And, by the way, I think I'm going to make that panel the front for the "contact" and "about me." The only reason why I'm not making it the absolute center piece is because I already have in mind a photo I took in the very early hours of a cool day while I lived in Chicago. I think you might like it too. We'll see.

Alright, moving on: I still owe you an Inception review. It's cooled off a little bit and you've probably read other reviews by now, which is a good thing ("the more you know" and all that jazz) because I want to make sure I- who am I kidding? I just haven't gotten to it yet. Maybe it'll be informative, or at least inciteful. I think I'll be able to muster at least above average incite and skip the all capital lettered rants that begin with words like "must watch twice" and "it blew me away." Most people who review films and say things like "it blew me away" as the lead in are probably blown away for one reason or another by just about everything they see. ;) I at least save it for the second line.

I've got to admit, it feels nice to be buried in getting the facade of Bits done. I'll post up a screen shot later of what the panels might look like altogether. Totally pumped.

///Sage Francis - "Lie Detector Test" Honestly, I still don't know the difference between an MC and a Rapper, but if I had to put money down on whether or not Sage Francis was an MC, I would put my bills on a big ol' hell yes. Looking forward to listening to this on a back porch of my own, with a beer in my right hand, smokes on the table, and a friend or two enjoying a big fat lazy Friday afternoon and loving it.

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..."

Behold Again!!

Pchow Pchow, goes the Buck Rogers laser gun as I fire off good idea after great idea. Seriously though, I am just tired. While it's great to exercise my brain it also makes me tired, especially because the fridge has been particularly short on brain food and good scotch.

Check out that new banner! Is it or is it not the cats pj's. It counterbalances the chaos down that right side bar pretty nicely. I got rid of that text obstructing thing down at the bottom of each post too. See, I listen to you sometimes when I'm not arguing amongst my selves.



Speaking of arguments, I watched 500 Days of Summer recently. Great movie. Great writing in the movie is what I think made it so spectacular. The subtle bias toward the male pro-stagonist/underdog was very well done. It played off of the understood theme's in relationship movies and then flipped it quite handily on its head through- actually, hold on. I was going to talk about something else, but now I can't remember what.

Oh, the banner up there! Yes. So I might tweak it some more later on, and by later on I mean tomorrow. Just to help it blend more seamlessly. On second thought, scratch that. I think I may play up the difference to highlight and cut it off from the rest of the page to give the entire blog a more clearly defined personality instead of a mix mash of boarders and impressionistic pictures.

Ah, yes. Arguments. Today has struck me as something of a frustrating day. The two people I really want to talk to are not talking to me. Petty and self centered of me to say that right? Wrong! I am never wrong! You are wrong for even suggesting I may ever be wrong about anything! Mainly, I wonder what they're doing because I want to be a part of it, but I'm beginning to suspect that the role I thought I played in their lives is actually a tiny forgettable fraction. Or perhaps not so much forgettable as extremely occasion specific. I've niched myself. Or have I. The whole thing is confusing and the most frustrating thing about it all is that its probably almost entirely a product of differences in free time and my own insecurities. God damn it, just answer your phone and tell me you don't want to talk ever. That's what a nice person would do. Or maybe that's what an asshole would do. My interpersonal skills might be regressing, but the plus side is that my amateur psychology is progressing. No, wait, that might be a negative too.

I bet Kanye West thinks he's being a nice person every single time he opens his mouth (old I know). I wonder if he's having fun in India finding his soul. Ha, more like finding his soul's "dear john" letter! Pchow! Buck Rogers. Count it. Look out for the addition of more bells and whistles in the future. This place is always developing. Occasionally moping along like the progress of a blinking light around a string of Christmas lights still on in August of the following year, but like those lights we keep it changing.

///Jay-Z - "Empire State of Mind" maybe I'll move to NYC and seek my fortune there. Or even anywhere else in the state of New York. I think I'm out of options here. Either way, from where I stand the coasts feel like they're glittering.

predetermination? or something worse

okay so lets begin by saying drastic action isnt necessary and probably will never be. its more of a convenience kind of thing and its a convenience that i will likely never be able to afford... since when every day is the worst day of your life pretty much any day could be an improvement on that so you have to hang on for one more day and unfortunately the only thing that matters is asking yourself that question. meanwhile other people get to actually live you have to keep saying to yourself hmmm i guess ill stick around for another day cuz "what if tomorrow is the day?"

well the answer to that question today is no. today was not the day. inevitably the universe threw me a shovel instead of a ladder and things just got uglier. its not worth going into. just imagine a very nasty person, who you know is a bad person, like an actual bad person, and then imagine that this bad person turns out to be even worse than you thought and that this person is in all likelihood even worse than the new information indicates. thats what today was. so not only has nothing improved but things have gone a good distance farther in reverse.

which really makes me ask as my empire of shit continues to somehow lol to somehow get shittier .... is that possible... hahaha... well apparently it is... but anyway ... this makes me ask my fellow man, the world, and the universe "is this predetermination or something waaay shittier?" are people just this bad or am i somehow a magical catalyst that causes people to do shitty things to me. i know there's agency in there. i wont deny that at all. but i try to put out constantly happy vibes. well not happy... but positive vibes. i am genuinely generous with what little shit i do have.... i mean was i just born without the "good fortunate" receiver antenna installed? and i dont mean that nothing good ever happens. or even ever happens to me because good things do happen, but its a lot like this:

there is an ice cream cone with your favorite flavor on top of a stick, but the stick is electrified and licking it will close a circuit that will give you a mildly unpleasant shock even as your enjoying it. and then before and after every lick you have to close your eyes and a person you may or may not know will punch you directly in the face but youll never know because your eyes are closed. what you do know is that the ice cream was soo good. but you lost teeth and got shocked just to taste it.

so is it then a matter of memory. forget the bad and remember the good? maybe. but thinking about how much you love the smell of flowers wont outweigh the experience of standing waste deep in fecies for a day in any persons memory.



its been a pretty steady trajectory. ive fought it, ive at times just gone with it, but that never lasted. i hated knowing that i wasnt doing anything to fight it. fighting it is the only thing i can do. i mean, i hate to even suggest it, because i know its complicated, but maybe people are just on the whole kind of douchey. id like to think i was just like everyone else. i really would. cuz then things would be different, but somehow im not like anyone else. but how do you fix that. does it even matter? probably not in a perfect world but how far away from that are we? we're in like a whole nother evil alternate time line or something. but am i not standing out enough? am i standing out too much? am i too this or not enough that? just be yourself. well thats what ive been doing and it aint working. everything that starts off okay eventually explodes, tears itself apart, gets crashed by me or someone else, or otherwise derails in grand 30s-early-film-head-on-train-collision style. does that mean that i just hate people? what the hell does it mean? nothing? luck isnt real... but ive chased opportunity. every single one. the only limiting factor being my own body's fatigue and geographical considerations and ive thrown that to the wind before too. sooo what the fuck.

lets just say its not predetermination. lets just say that genetics, race, income, and personality have nothing to do with it. that only leaves nurturing and outside forces. so if its not me or at least not entirely me then its them. the parents. they must be the other force like dead planets orbiting a star and altering its celestial corse ever so slightly. if someone suggested this years ago i would have at least made the case for an alternative but now... seeing it happen upclose and receiving details of locked away secrets.... it is. it really is the case. has to be. the world is simply too random to have a 15 year stretch of not so great outcomes.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. what the hell. ive bucked my head against so many walls i should honestly have no brain function left. and yet here i am still. unkillable. i feel like ive already lived forever. i would trade a raging alcoholic for one or both of the people that birthed me. at least then the reasons would be more obvious. and theyd be dead by now.

///school of seven bells - "face to face on high places" the song itself embodies the movement from one life to another. the title just makes me think of meeting up with friends and finally finally Finally!!!! having nothing serious to hide because it would kill the get together if i let it out wrong. and i just relish the thought of hanging out on a hill in a park in the summer with the wind and frisbees and girls and boys and just being. even the lyrics are reflective of the theme and actually poetically pretty engaging from a literary stand point. i dunno. i think im just waxing philosophical. nothing else much to do in the wreckage except poke the cinders now and then to make sure where your sitting is no longer on fire.

for the record, fear, and friends

i was poking my face bones today wondering if the weight ive lost from being starved was showing up in hollow eye sockets or ripped abs (i know right, shits ridiculous, life is awful, and somehow i have to continue laughing because the ridiculousness just continues to grow by leaps and bounds that are unbelievable even as they are coming out of my mouth and mind) and for the record if i ever do have a daughter she's going to have awesome cheekbones.

also "fear is the little death that brings total obliteration." nice quote.

my nerves are shot. i jump when people say hello to me. i jump when my phone rings out loud.

some new friends are coming over. theyre very short friends. well i guess theyre friends.

the thing is i suppose i want everybody to be a friend which, i know, duh, is not possible and is unrealistic and a lot of other things. you know the crest of understanding, that point at which each person can be understood or framed within the context of their experiences relative to your own?, yeah that thing, i think i cant even really begin to understand the future ramifications of everything happening now at the bottom of the well. well not so much understanding but the lacking of the focus of ... uhm... somethings missing there. no, there was something there, but now there is a definite hmm space. black spot. not even but you know hmm well you dont make friends with salad. but i suppose you could theoretically keep friends with salad once they got older and health conscious.



so much changed in two weeks. not even changed as much as grown into worse things, but theyre still the same things. but none of it really for the better. pessimonster lurks. nah but seriously. to even attempt to pursue an optimistic route is like dancing the jitterbug on top of a trench wall in the middle of 1916. yous is asking for trouble.

i used to be scared of a lot of things. nothing scares me anymore. im sure theres still time to learn new fears. but till then the situation is this. fire burns so dont put it in your hand. knives cut so dont stick them up your nose. noise can rupture your ear so dont turn up the music too loud. that kind of stuff. im not afraid of those things. sometimes i cant even convince myself of the why nots beyond making interaction easier. no vacuums. i havent been very useful over the past couple entries. im gonna fix that. im gonna fix you good. real good. heres some bullshit for you. or chicken soup for your cancer. i havent been nice. but the universe started it. im gonna finish it. when i was little my main goal was world annihilation. ive gotten off track. hahahaha. obviously.

my point is though if i ever get to a point where having a kid becomes the right thing to do which it never will that kid is going to have some fucking ridiculously awesome cheekbones cut from a granite cliff face.

thems cliffs mays nots be made from granite to discalamatize. that sentence was stupid. but entertaining to type. so it stays. im a simple guy to please.

///susumu hirasawa - "hawk in my heart, don't take the moon" from the album virtual rabbit. its one of those songs in another language where it doesnt matter if you know the words or not. you know the feeling. if i knew the words the feeling might be completely oppos... well to hell with all of that. it just takes me mentally to the freedom ive yet to enjoy. its the song that would play right when i finally climb to the mouth of the well and over head there are broken clouds and the smell of something besides my own wastes and the dead water and the bricks that have been skinning my knuckles and knees slides across my cheek and i can really genuinely and spontaneously smile. not to be a total downer or anything. lol. thats what im saying. i know it could be worse. but how much worse is honestly approaching a matter of splitting hairs and a couple hundred dollar bills.

oh yeah, i fixed the link situation that hadnt occured to me up till today. now links open in new windows. yay.

what we gonna do today

so what are we about today? i dunno. missing people mostly. missing friends. missing allies. missing the axis. missing the points of interest on the trip through life. when friends clear out and family is sort of worthless (well not worthless, but inaccessible and too far distant from you physically and personally to really have fun with) its just you and the universe staring at each other night after night after night.

for valentines day i beat off for an hour, watched 30 rock and ate a fat piece of pound cake, then had a cigarette and went to bed at 2 am. guess how fun that was. basically liz lemon got more action than i did. and i dont even mean sexually, cuz you'd have to be a lesbian to find liz lemon attractive (the combat boot, mustache wearing kind, not the hot blonde porno kind), i mean like she had more fun in her own miserable way than i did. which is a really really long aside.

but yeah, the universe is a very pessimistic, bastardly, thing. it has no friends. all it does is ruin peoples lives. with its infinite resources it tries to win at everything and you, with your carpet bag of tricks, try to win at anything. the universe will always win. so its never fun hanging out with just the universe. even when you try to exclude it, it finds a way to crash your private parties.

which in a seriously round about way brings me to my point. what the hell am i going to do today? i have nothing to do. well i have some things to do. actually ihave a ton of things to do.

first off, why ive been gone, again.

lots of shit. lots of anger. but some good has been made out of it. a tiny bubble of winningness that i will savor till the universe pops it and replaces it with a flaming bag of poo.

i formed a production company. bet you didnt do that over the past 30 days. what else... i wrote some stories. good ones i think. happy ones. sad ones. violent ones. i had some conversations. lots of good conversations. what else... nothing else. thats it. got some music. and beat off a lot. not that its bad or shameful. america wants people to be ashamed of all the wrong things. ill never understand that. im not sorry.

today im going to read and fall into worlds different from the one i cant otherwise get out of.


\\\chairlift - "bruises" caroline polachek, if you're reading this please send me a hug. but seriously. i think most of all i miss closeness. i hate talking to no one. thats probably the biggest reason why ive been gone. this song just reminds me of a person that i miss a lot, and we've been drifting apart and it sucks but its irreversible for the foreseeable future. hurray for human relationships and the weapons of heart destruction that are their constitution.

so i dont have to fucking talk to myself

well we're back. again. a lot has changed. a lot has stayed the same. no more girl friend, just friend who does not want to talk to me for the depth of our former relationship. yay. sarcasm. living in a very divisive... divided place. pretty sure this is gonna be the last fracture for the parents. fine. seems life is defined by fractures and scars. its a matter of whether or not we want to call them sentimental or call them scars.

so im back on here. so i dont have to fucking talk to myself in my head. nothing good is ever said in there. there are good ideas but they are formed by me. nothing good ever happens in the other dialog. and i hate having to sit and listen to it. eventually you cant distinguish who is telling who to shut the fuck up.

the hardest part about stabbing is the initial shock of breaking the skin. i mean not slashing but stabbing. once you get past that the rest is gravy. or gory. gory gravy? different tools for different jobs. so what do we want to talk about today. im not sure... well lets kick off with projects. where is the other project standing. suspended indefinitely apparently. how about the other project... still working on it? yes. slowly. the third project? when free time strikes so shall it strike me to work on it. half the time. double promise. which actually only means that both promises are half as strong as a regular promise. too much glue spoils the joint. any model builder worth his oats should know that.

any other goals? saving. money. 4000. settle all person to person debts and move somewhere and pay two months rent and find a job. that is all. thats all? yes. i think. i hate you. anything else new? stop burning bridges. setting a fire and walking away is not necessarily burning a bridge. they dont all rage out into holocausts. but you certainly believe they do. paranoia? hardly. okay. buying cigarettes? dunno yet. maybe later. cya.

///bjork - "i miss you (sunshine mix)" yeah i do. its too often difficult to explain, but this time its simple. i like you better than i like me. just that easy.