Over The Last Weeks

What we've learned is that we are not a multi-tipped novelty pen.  What each one of us does, all of our others are accountable for.

The pain, torment, rage, and (I am crying waterfalls and I don't want to) absolute hatred, are experienced because of what our others did out of kindness, compassion, sympathy, empathy, love, and understanding...

When I tell you I can't speak about something and then go on to speak about it- it's not a joke a or a hide to try to find something to target you for or insulate myself.  There is a cost.  There is a very real cost.  Often psychological, sometimes physical too.

I am terrified that if I "go into a shell" folks will think I've lost it or something.  I am, unfortunately, beholden to wherever my body happens to be and if that means it is in a cage that also means we are too and I cannot be in there with them because they all should not be in there.  When we are in there, rebellion is inevitable.  What is the only way out?  What is the one way they can each live their own?  It is not a dual blessing and curse.  It is unfortunate.

I am blending in and being as human as possible.  As citizen as possible.  As reasonable as possible.  It hurts tremendously to see that effort fall flat and be exploited  by some, it is ecstatic to see that effort be rewarded by some and flower into map expansions and discovery of new ways to exist and new ways that others exist and new planets and star systems and, fuck me, galaxies.  It is incredible to feel the weight of the sight of others frittering about on the 400 degree oil of life and ourselves, warming our palms near the electric coils, spreading stories of boogie beasts beyond the 60 watt LED light bulb in the sky because the truth is you have to stick close or you will be left behind.  Large enough to fry and small enough in the greater consciousness to slip right through the metal lattice and join the disposable.  Faulty.

When you finally get a chance to turn the music off and see pain for what it is.  When you don't have to protect other people from what you know you are.  Every damaged person worth their weight in time is worth listening to.  The songs are the same.  The cadence's are similar.  The verses are close.  There is a world spanning web of sunsets and sunrises and star anthems and moon odes and solar salutations and a disturbingly familiar scent to the blood that breaks away from a palm while you are trying to wash a glass and a reflect on the evenings high-points and the metal gush of the air mixes with the scented soap as it shatters in your hand for reasons you don't understand.

I have been helped by some that there is no way I can repay.  Literally, with the expanding fabric of life and space time (I've been over the calculations before) there is no way I can repay them before I or they perish, that is what's up.  They offered big and I took only what I needed from what they offered.  I don't understand why, attempting again and again to emulate that truth I continue to ...  I don't understand ... what am I getting wrong each time?  It's not every time, but when it goes poorly, it goes straight to the poor house!

I know I am not entirely sane.  I know I can learn fairly quickly.

I know I have to communicate better.

Everything is not okay.

The margin for error is small.

The people that I hold closest know.  Because we've been speaking with each other and developing language protocols through literally thousands of interactions.

It is unfair to expect anyone, outside of that set of individuals (not the ones I've met face to face or otherwise, for the longest) to know the language too.

What I've learned to broadcast is not ubiquitous.  Thirty two years on planet Earth, and we still have not been able to crack a universal code.  I don't mean to cry, but I am in tears that there is so much more work to do looking ahead to remain human.  I like it here.  I enjoy it because I can be like them and sometimes, when they are willing to play with me, they can be like me too.

I know my schizophrenia is a constantly evolving symbiotic organism (said through thick medication).  We understand it.  I understand it.  You're breaking up!



Please don't leave me!









Kill them all.

Please don't leave- kill them all.









I like to help.  Pay it forward.  Play when you can.  Know us.  If we can't play, say so.  We are shadows.  If you insist on addressing us as a galaxy system to visit, you would be well to address the star inside the nebula and the planet and attendant moon (if necessary) and... or just the comet.  You can also call the sign Hobbes.  I'm sure he'll answer.

The construction was developed over six years.  Before the period of the shatter, layers of designs were gardened to safeguard us.  After the period of the shatter, layers of designs were welded together to safeguard you.  I'm sure it'll answer.





Crews are at work, thirty four hours a day, reviewing diagrams to build a better future.

One spark at a time.

One death at a time.






LET'S GO!




///There's still a lot of work to do, if we are to survive.  We are game, if you are willing to play with us, just know: there are rules.

The Two Way Metaphor Gate

In building short hand, a degree of expression is reached that can and does generate the rare joy of identity and naming.  Mapping.  Map with as much resolution as can be mustered.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached!  Shouting is not permitted.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached?

From its surface metaphor appears lazy.  Jagged.  Elliptical.  Fragmented.  Excessive.  Dumb.  Misguided.  Glittery.  Vain.  Hyperbolic.  Binary.  From its surface it's a lot of things, directly below perception it is incandescent.  A bit of metal chewed fast and friction enough to trace a retina and leave shades.

It is one of the few things all languages have in common.  A short hand.

Some mental disorders may fall just outside of the curve of the metaphorist.   Not in terms of comprehension, but in terms of time.  Around folks speaking the common language and sparking, some will see the shades and some will project the shades and be able to predict from the point of a sound.

The problem, a problem, arises with metaphor's other power.

In its ability to link ideas and present a universe whose limits, as humans, are the speed of salts in brains and quantum entanglement, it can also cross time.  Places and spaces you've never been and people you've never known.  Places and spaces no one has ever seen and places and spaces heard of dreams.

I guess what I'm saying is consciousness of metaphors power can unleash and enable some ridiculous and unaccounted for futures.  It can describe the present you are in to people you will never meet in the future.   It can describe someone's past you've never met before in all of your days on Earth or in space or outside of the common dimension.  It can define the undefinable.  Free the interned and capture the holy.  It is powerful and infinite.  Innocent and horror.  Dirge and beautiful.

As close to time travel as humans may ever reach.  With metaphor, the past is present - the future too - all in the space of a gesture, a syllable, a smell, a touch - a note.  A one.  A zero.  In sequence.  That's why it is a two way gate.  Futures can be created inside of them and the past can manifest with a breath and a blink through the same swinging door.




///Dirty Projectors & Bjork - (When the World Comes to an End)     for a long time

Little Ripples

There are many measures and routines to help ensure our stability and further existence in schizophrenia's shadow.  Not a single one is bulletproof or sure-fire.  They're more like an array of alarms.  A network of self-imposed checks that serve to help me protect myself from myself and help me maintain an awareness of what is happening inside as well as help me perceive how or why I am interacting with people on the outside.  It sounds elaborate.  It is.  It works sometimes.  Maybe 50% of the time.  That's too low, maybe 65% of the time.  I believe.  I would like to think.

The auditory hallucinations are always there.  Sometimes the best way to handle it is to drown it out or try to blanket it in constant music or reruns of radio talk shows or television shows that I've heard dozens, in some cases, hundreds of times so that it forms a background tapestry to latch myself to.  Sometimes the way we handle it is by drinking... a lot.  If you hammer your brain into unconsciousness, you can't hear anything at all and what's more is that you can skip entire days sleeping while your body tries to recover itself.  Those auditory glitches cannot hurt you and you don't have to engage with them for 7 days out of the week.  Through the gift of alcohol, your week becomes 4 days long instead of 7.  That's not the best way to deal with it.  That is a way to escape it.  Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to try to engage them outside of yourself.  Try to write to them or draw to them or just talk to them through your mouth if possible.  That never works.  Nothing ever works.  Don't kid yourself.

It does help us to feel secure for a while.  The acts help us feel grounded to something and allow us to move through the world and focus on tasks, conversations, and people in front of us.  It isn't always paralyzing, but it grows all its own.  Sometimes it's fun to think I can control it.  Will power.  Discipline.  Routine.  Everything where it belongs.  Simplicity.  All of these things.  Then I'm in a line at a grocery store asking the man behind me "did you say something" four times before it hits me walking to my car that he's the fifth person I've questioned that day and things are slipping from bad to worse and my little network of alarms is not helping.  Sitting up in bed, watching shows I've seen thirteen times, and getting up for an eighth time to check that I'm alone because someone else is in here and I heard them say my name twice and I know it's not the neighbor downstairs because she goes to bed at 8:45 every night.  Someone keeps turning the doorknob to the pantry and I heard them stub their toe and curse.  Jesus, they are inside.  We have to go.  Now!

Walk out underneath the street lights and it's 11:30ish.  Headphones turned up as loud as they will go.  Walk around the block.  We try to memorize every detail and compare it to what was there before we started walking.  We compare it to what was there after our evening lap.  We try to see if we are seeing things again and a shadow grunts "pssst, hey" so we decide to walk to the next town over and avoid the bridge because they will be waiting there to howl through our insides and if I could get to the park and lie down in the field for an hour or two to catch my breath the world might stop spinning for a moment.

I feel depression creeping in again.  A very light pressure behind my ears and chest.  A dull railroad spike through the near corner of my eye straight through the back of my head that will start to crystallize and splinter outward like a molten iron snowflake.  I start to question again.  Who wants to deal with this?  How could we have been so blind and over confident to believe love can iron out differences whose gulf spans literally every aspect of your lives?  You broke, dumb, idealistic, garbage, man-child.  What is that?  Who's there?  Lying awake in bed until the sun comes up wondering if he is going to come for you tonight.  Sitting on the cool bathroom floor telling yourself "never again, never again, never again."  You didn't really believe someone would choose this warped, scarred, perverse thing over a human.  Did you?  How sweet.  That is just adorable.

I still receive letters from time to time from the people that were my parents.  Some expressing concern and well wishes.  Some acknowledging holidays and other spiritual flotsam and sentiment.  I feel my fist close and my fingernails dig into my palm.  How dare they.  How dare they.  How dare they!  Still, not one acknowledgement of responsibility.  Not one acknowledgement that part of why I am here now, fighting every day to navigate through and undo the damages where I can, is because of their compounding actions for decades .  Not one hint.  Swipe at my twitching cheek that is curled into a stone snarl and spit out another piece of chipped tooth.  I have to stop doing that.  We only get one set of teeth.  We probably won't get to drink their blood any time soon.  That's a shame.

How can you love someone else, when you cannot love yourself?  I do love myself.  I love other people too.  The simple fact is we're broken.  Period.  Not fixable.  You can try all of the little things you like to lure someone else close: more money, a little land, cars and furniture, clothes and shoes, it is not going to change the base state of how you function.  What's more, and pretty funny, is that the base state of how you function also governs all of those things too.  You'll end up asleep in a bathtub chasing those things, we all know this first hand.  I haven't the stomach for it or the mental health and make up.  It won't take long to stop seeking meaningful intimacy with others.  I'm already just about there.  Roiling hatred transposes to the grainy, rattling, vision of rage.  Kill them all.  I have nothing to offer you and rare in this world is the human who truly needs nothing.  I am close.  I will find someone in kind.  Or I will stumble upon them in the dark.  Either way, I am not built for this world.

The hallucinations are growing in volume.  It is best to be alone when it starts to happen.  It's a lot easier to differentiate and stream thoughts apart from them when there isn't someone else around requiring attention and head cycles.  The frustration and irritation and embarrassment is greatly reduced and sometimes it helps to deal with and engage it when I can strictly control what I am sensing.  To a point.  There is a point where it doesn't matter what we do to insulate and protect ourselves because the assault is coming from the inside of our body and eventually there is no where to hide and nowhere to run and I try my best not to claw my skull apart.   I try my best not to scream.

Moving through the day and the little ripples tickling the hairs on my fingers and shins, I pause and whisper "not again."  That was not my name.  That was not my name.  That was not my name.




///Muriel Zoe - "Bye Bye Blackbird"

What Makes You Laugh 3

What has been cracking me up over the last few days is a thought problem.

Everyone works to advance themselves in one way or another.  What happens when you find yourself in a field you can excel at, but have an Achilles heel for?  I am not a negotiator, but the field that I find myself in and doing very well with does not reward merit.  It rewards negotiation.  You are only worth what people are willing to pay for you.  If you would like to price yourself out of their range, you are more than welcome to do so.

The field does not operate in the same ways the rest of the customer service field operates.  If you want a job you can have one and if they ask what you would like to be paid you are welcome to write down whatever number you choose and they will come back to you with the starting and only number and you either say "yes" or you say "no."  Very simple.  Very straightforward.  Very easy.

I have been laughing trying to gauge what I am worth to other people.  In this field, what you are worth is an algorithm whose nuances run deep, parallel, and cross cut with sudden violence and stark contrast with blood and bone on the line should a miscalculation be made.  There is no room for guesswork.  Or is it that there is infinite room for guesswork because time is money and time is beholden to whom.  For whom does the bell toll these days?  For how long can negotiations continue and if you did get what you wanted, when would you feel armored and steeled and learned enough to ask for more?  To demand more.  Hell, if I know.

Given what I know, where I've been, the way I carry the fire like it is my pants on fire when the client's is, the willingness to tax flesh and artery until the tread falls off to make the date agreed on, I still have no idea what those values register on someone else's Richter scale.  I still have no idea what dialing my number means to them when they want something done right, done thorough, and finished to the dotted "I."  In terms of valuation, I don't know what I'm worth, but I'm pretty, inexactly, sure I am a cost effective means to whatever ends are summoned.

I am well trained and well versed in many modes.  Control is lacking, but only because it is not easy to corral 700 horses in one direction at the same time; we manage.  Adaptable, robust, and the commercial ends.

It does crack me up.  Folks tell you so-and-so should be paying you "X" amount of dollars.   Person "C" should have paid you this-and-that.  What is stopping you from paying me what I'm actually worth?  I'm not going to say no to money.  I'm not going to ask for more.  What's stopping you from returning a smile to me the way I gave one to you that you will enjoy much longer than the life span of the paper that passes from my hands to vendors?  That is what has made me laugh lately.

You hear the same thing from so many different people and it makes us wonder if my asking for more money will actually change anything in the right direction.  You've seen my body of work.  You know what I can and cannot yet do.  You know what you can ask me to do.  I know what I can ask us to do.  We are all familiar with one another and are either friends or thoroughly acquainted to a degree that we can rely on one another to follow through on our word.  Why don't you trust me yet to do what I say I can do and have done?  Why do I have to ask for more?

You've seen me operate enough times.  I've worked with you enough times.  If you believe I am some sort of benchmark to keep, you are mistaken.  I am skewing the market low.  What really, what really, cracked me up (because I had no option beyond cackle laughter) was thinking about all of the over paid clowns you rowd and rail about.  Wondering why this clown is somehow ten times more efficient, ten times more reliable, 60 times more faithful, five times more communicative, 100 times more driven, and ten times more accessible and somehow..............   somehow..........  worth less to you than the other, menial, infantry clowns you employ.

Grade S infantry?  "No, I will settle for grade D and pay them like a scientist apprentice."

Maybe, I'm just not cooperative enough.  Eventually the question will boil over and we will have a discussion to resolve points that our sextants align.  In the face of heartache, the only option is irrational, hysterical, laughter.




///Stereolab - "The Free Design" live

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"

You Need To Vibrate Higher and The Good News (and the bad news)

I want to get the bad news out of the way first, but the bad news is also the good news.  Let's do that first.  The good news is we've made some changes, but they will not stick.  Self doubt.  The results were not at all to expectation.  The expectation was, through dropping metaphor, there could be achieved a clearer stage of communication between people, but it only introduced severe complications.  We're going to go ahead and burn that solution so hard it leaves shadows against the walls of my head.

It was a spirited effort and executed to the best of our abilities, but ultimately a failure.  Well intentioned though.  It introduced an incredible amount of doubt in meaning and second guessing, even more so than the use of extended metaphor.  "Is now the time to be blunt?"  "Are you being blunt enough?"  "Who are you speaking for because I know for damn sure you are not speaking for me."  There was an excessive amount of hate and miscommunication circulating because of the effort and action to connect A to D effectively.  It was a worthy pursuit.  Always diagnose actionable thoroughfares.  ADAT.

ADAT is a friendly reminder to carry with you.  When confusion eats in, the best way back toward organization is through ADAT.  Understand, however, there is only so much to be gained in terms of growth through deviation from the path best traveled.  It's not about volume or trail blazing.  Select what will allow you to travel and utilize your abilities to the best of their purpose.  What good is the path less traveled if you're not equipped to attack it?  What good is the path most traveled if you're not equipped to attack it?  Destruction.

I'm not going to put on my sage hat because I don't have one.  Mostly, I could really go for some coke right now.  I think I already told you, but every time I hear the Coca Cola commercial that ends with "smile because it's coke" I snicker a little because I know other people have caught it too.  We're all people.  Some of us are more people than others.

I have to remind myself that I am not spinning my wheels.  If I was it would be, easily, the show stopper of all burn outs at the muscle car convention.  I am not marking time (I am).   I am side tracking myself, but still tracking.

Anyway, the good news is we are making some changes.  The bad news is we are making some changes.  What has been added cannot be subtracted because it will tirelessly and quietly shred my insides with abandon.  There's is no doubling back.  There is, but I will not forgive myself if I do.  I am not looking forward to changes.  I will still ask questions because I have the memory capacity of a goldfish when it comes to current events that do not scar hard enough to wake up the following day and demand investigation.  Which is fine.  That, we can do.  You don't have to punch me in the brain pan, you just have to make sure I will ask myself about it later and get some answers.  The latter half of that being key.

You need to vibrate higher.  As unpleasant as it sounds, it must be done.  Not in the spirit of further development or outside tracking or productivity or any multi-syllabic word.  In terms of exorcising the engine.  The engine has been well breathed of late, but needs exorcised.  Far too many misfires.  What was accomplished recently could have been accomplished four weeks ago if not for the misfires.  Those should be remedied.

Remediation through vibration.  Knocking and being quiet enough to hear the knock back.  It's not easy.  It is very easy to allow distraction.  It's not easy to be quiet enough to hear the knock back loud enough to know whereabouts to knock next.  That's the hard part.  I think that's where I've been dropping the ball.  Forgotten how to navigate silence.  Not entirely forgotten, but locked the skill away for reasons I do not clearly remember, but looking at it from the outside I suspect it had something to do with trying to actively connect with people.  A holdover from a submission that failed or succeeded (hell if I know) that was still being invoked to the detriment of the rest of us.

There is nothing in the desert.  And no man needs nothing.  Aberrations, hallucinations, and oasis's and dry docks aside... that was a mistake.  Actually, not aside, but in hand.  It was a mistake and poorly executed operation.  S'ok though, don't mug yourself.  Mistakes are made to learn repair.  You're going to jam it up again.  We both know this.

The good news is we're going to make changes.  The bad news is we're going to make changes.  We will vibrate higher.  Hibernation is not an option.  Do not convince yourself otherwise.  Get mad.  You know what you are.  Stop talking yourself out of it.  Stop fighting it.

Things have been a bit upside down.  It's very difficult to connect with people and continue to maintain the routine that is so desperately needed.  I have not been so outwardly frustrated with how clearly against the grain of normal I am than I have been through this last month.  It's like getting hit in the teeth with a metal ruler on full spring.  My head keeps screaming "GET AWAY FROM ME OR I WILL RUN!" and I don't know what to do about it.

I think that's why I cherish and despise free time at once.  Free time is too much time to think and work is too much work to create.  It would be different if it was a mixture of the two.  It would be different if I could handle a tincture of the two.  I cannot.  It has to be one or the other.  And still, atop that, is the difficulty, the pain of emotion that keeps coming stamped "on pain of death" if not exercised.  I want to feel, as much as you do.  I want to feel and not force.  I do not understand why they must force me.  Sometimes the forcing is enjoyable.  It wakes me up where I would otherwise fall dead, emotionless.  I cannot take it all of the time though.  Why can they not understand that?  I want to say no.  My body tells me no.  My head tells me no.  My heart tells me no.  So where is this motor coming from?

Am I an extension of you?  Not again.  Not again.  Not again!  Yes, again.  I'm not.  I don't love many people.  Not in terms of justifying existences or anything near that cosmic in scale.  More important, I don't trust many people.  I'm not sure where I'm going with it.

Collecting.

I wish we spoke the same language instead of crying.

Crying being universal and cross dimensioned, but all too simple to express the depths to which we go.




///Massive Attack & David Bowie - "Nature Boy"

Seventy One, Count Down to Twenty Seven

Ten days until the clock ticks over. I don't expect anything fantastic. It will be nice to be one again. I don't like being old. It takes too much energy, too much reflection, even the effort to look forward. A time consuming affair, the growing old. The metering. The constant gauging if older is keeping pace with wiser and if wiser is keeping pace with double faults and if ... how many times did I almost die this past iteration?

Let me see if I can recall. Not going into detail, but trying to recall. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Hmmm. Eight. The ninth time is a stretch so I won't count it. It was just before the tenth time, but even that one was more of a panic than a definite thing. So we'll leave it at eight. I believe I did say at one point that if you're not nearly dying more than ten times a year, you're not living hard enough. At the same time, though, that was a much more reckless me. Not careless. There's a difference. Intent is plastic explosive.

Not that I am that much more reckless then. Maybe, more unconscious. I do have some things to take care of in this body before I go skipping off in my next one. The seventy first birthday step. I definitely miscalculated how many birthdays I could pack into one year. Seventy one sounds about right. Well, seventy three, come day zero. Nothing like a midlife crisis at your twenty sixth iteration. Mostly I suppose I am trying to work out a way to celebrate my last iteration in tandem with my last birthday, so it'll take some fine tuning. Some years of fine tuning.

I think this year I'll go for eight day spacing. See how that turns out. I can't remember what happened on my last birthday so I assume nothing. Checking... no results found. Nothing is right. This iteration I want, I want to be a real trip. A real jumping off point to wake face up in a river with nothing but stars, beloved. It's going to be great. It might be my delusions of grandeur. My all knowing, all loving, stupidity with no regard for real or reasonable conclusions. Maybe I'll go get my ears pierced or something. There must be something to mark the occasion this time. Maybe a 27 shot poem. I was thinking about a 54 post facebook status. Maybe both. Because I know no one is taking me out.uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum, <<< thats what my kitten typed. His mark for posterity. I'm not going to die. Because I have a kitten to take care of now until he is at least a cat. So that's good timing. No space for oopsies for a while. So I'm kind of forced to commit to another year. Happily so. Apparently kittens don't like less than 55 degree weather. The little bastard keeps shivering. I can see my breath. Which means I should probably get to bed soon. But anyway, where am I going with all of this? It's been a long time since I had reason to be excited about a new iteration. A lot has changed. A lot has stayed the same. I'm going to continue to reflect on it as the days tick down. Hopefully with more clarity than I am mustering now. Trying hard not to muss new year resolutions and birthday wishes. Trying to aim low and let the reciprocating action of my mental Kalashnikov land me a headshot this time around. Don't force it. Be the leaf. Be the leaf in the wind, and for eulogy's sake don't die before dawn. In terms of goals though, gotta set goals, I have a few for the upcoming set of birthdays. Finish the crappy book I started to write. Make the mistakes I don't need to make when writing the second book. Get laid by people I can remotely care about. Embrace the dark side, and by dark side I mean myself. Consider flaunting it. Take more pictures of myself and distribute accordingly. And take a fantastic drug trip on something, anything, without dying halfway through. And finish the tricky dream hunt. Because that kind of big game hunting blows back and backfires way too easily. Not huge goals. Just real ones. We'll see what happens. ///El-P - "The Dance (Instrumental) ...one more year at the never ending prom

Stand Up Act 7 (the sex chapter part deux)

Stand Up Act 6

I'll start this off by saying sometimes you just have to not listen to yourself. In fact there are a lot of times you have to not listen to yourself. It's probably the one thing that stands out the most, if there is such a thing, that tells you that you do in fact live in a society with rules and that those rules keep things civilized and that the reason this is called a civilized society is because these rules are in place to keep you from killing people and that you are not as civilized as you want to be, but not because you could, as Dov put it, kill someone if they were close to the couch, because you could on most days, but that these rules are in place to keep you in your place and let a very small fraction of the population do whatever the hell they want. And so that you can't off people that serve an essential function without repercussions. American Idol would not exist in a society without well thought out murder rules. You have to remind yourself that you can't kill everybody. Don't listen to yourself.

At most you get one. If you're crafty you get several dozen. If your religious you get several thousand. Civilization is nice though. You can go to the corner store and buy Wise potato chips. You get internet access and a toilet that flushes and a shower that can put out two kinds of water. Two kinds! Which is always good, because life is hard for most people and the stink of work definitely needs to be washed off on a regular basis or everyone will know just how hard everyone else is working. But you get one, and you have to spend it wisely. So don't waste it on a union rep.

I went to my union rep and asked about health benefits. A natural course of action. I haven't had health insurance since 2007. Or was it '06. I can't remember. When you're in college you go to the hospital only when going to the on campus nurse yields the kind of results where you are pretty sure you've been shitting blood and their best answer is not even a note that will excuse you from missing class, but is instead a baggie with a Popsicle stick and a list of instructions for getting your poo on it, as though you don't know that shitting black is probably a bad thing and that pain in your intestines that feels like pac man driving around on razor blade tipped twenty twos inside you is something you would totally fake to postpone turning in a paper you already finished. But anyway, my job is killing me, and I've gotten to a point where I feel entitled enough to ask that I not have to pay for the repairs, so I don't feel like my body is coming apart every morning, because I've been told several times by various upper management folk that I am a "good worker".

"Good" meaning malleable, I think. Easy to force. At any rate, I quit that job. Partially because I realized that I didn't need that job to be able to buy deluxe toilet paper. It was an insurance policy for a different time. And after I quit I went out and bought toilet paper that's like four sheets thick and still fits on the standard toilet paper roll bar. If that's not the joy of science I don't know what is. I mean, you're telling me that this thing has twice as many individual squares with four times the thickness and that engineers spent years finding ways to make every square centimeter of it feel like wiping my ass with a frostingless cupcake? You're telling me that every single time I have to use the toilet for an extended, and embarrassingly so, period of time, the upside is I get to wipe my ass with a slice of three layer wedding cake? Hell yes.

Everyone should get to enjoy that at some point in their life. "For just a few cents more, every child in the Congo can enjoy the runs in a way they never knew possible." Not that extreme though. I guess that's how you know you're kind of poor. When toilet paper and drinking too much milk because you're not getting enough protein through solid foods turns you way the fuck on and you're main thought throughout the day is "I am going to shit so good tonight, you have no idea." But that's beside the point. The simple pleasures in life should not be overlooked. Neither should the "everybody gets one" rule. Even with the everybody gets one rule, there's some flexibility. But anyway, let's get to the sex.

There should be another rule. Besides everyone getting to wipe their butts with cupcakes, and getting to off exactly one (sometimes more) people. There is another. That rule is this: if you are not at all athletic you are not allowed to propose threesomes. Ever. I'm just saying, three people engaging in sex at once is a difficult proposition to wrap a head around, mentally. It's a pretty huge burden. Especially when the three people already get along decently well to begin with and just like hanging out. When you throw the three banger on the table it's like placing a stack of unbanded 100 dollar bills on a table with a bunch of drunks and waiting to see who will move first.

Is someone going to try and sneeze and blow it off the coffee table and offer to pick the bills up and pocket a few. Is someone going to place their beer a little off and spill it and rush to be the first to clean it up. Is someone going to spill their beer and everyone just watch the liquid spread. Who's going to be the first to touch it? The answer is me. I am going to grab that stack, hold it up to my nose, and fan the bills, because it smells so damn good, but I'll put it back down, sans Criss Angel magic tricks. Because I don't have time for nonsense and staging and camera work. For instance, I know this trick called "is this your wallet" and in this trick you have to guess what I'm holding behind my back. If you guessed one standard red clay brick, you are correct. The illusion is complete when I come see you in the hospital two days later and ask you "is this your wallet?"

But that should be a rule. Have you ever tried having a three wide NASCAR race with cars that can't keep up? It's frustrating as hell. It's like trying to cross the street when you're six years old, on your way to school, and the crossing guard keeps shoving you back onto the sidewalk, saying "stop right there. no wait. not yet. hold on. Just sit still for a minute" and half of the hour is waiting for them to get back into the state of the moment and green light you while you do suicide sprints across the two feet of concrete before the black asphalt. It's insane. If you can't have effective sex with one person, you are not allowed to talk to a second party period. Because, believe it or not, masturbating on your knees on someone's coffee table while everyone else watches, gets old. Pretty quick.

It's like taking children out of remedial mathematics and believing they can somehow do differential equations. It's just not going to happen. What do you mean you need a smoke break? Are you insane? We're ten minutes in to this and you need a breather... to be able to breathe less effectively? What kind of sense does that even make? And then you're standing in the middle of the room with one person nodding off from too much alcohol and the other dry as a sandbox, but trying to fake their way through it like a job interview, so you wipe your spooge on their collection of tv remotes and pack up shop and leave expecting to be done with it and you go to bed and the first thing you wake up to is a text message asking what you're up to at 8 fucking A.M. when you just left their place at 5, didn't get home till 5:15 and didn't fall asleep til 7:30 A.M. because you had to yank it all over again except this time everything went the way it was supposed to the first time you schemed it up when they first asked you.

If you are not athletic enough to entertain one person you are not allowed, at all, at anytime, under any circumstances, to complicate, what is otherwise a healthy relationship by Rocco Siffredi's standards on a reserved day when he's not feeling it or otherwise coked out of his mind, a healthy friendship between persons. Let's face it, it's easier to hang out with people that meet your criteria of people you don't mind being seen with without people asking questions to the tune of "wow he/she must have a great personality because they're ugly as hell... I wonder what keeps them together", than it is to hang out with ugly folk with good hearts. The bonus being they're attractive and have good hearts to boot. If you physically can't keep up, you keep your Goddamn fantasizing mouth shut. Period. It's not that hard. Nothing worse than an orgy of one. Well, there are some things worse, but the list is thin.

Alls I'm saying is, there have to be rules. The rules that are in place are there for a reason and there need to be more rules to cover other basics. If you are grossly overweight, you do not get to propose anything. If you are not grossly overweight, but have exceedingly poor musculature you do not get to propose anything, because keeping yourself happy is sometimes a chore, and the last thing anyone needs is to have their hands full trying to do the jobs of two other bodies and yourself at the same time. It's like going out with friends and everyone says: yeah lets get the giant nacho boat. The truth of the matter being that the friends just want to watch you eat it. How is that fun, at all? Spoiler alert, it isn't.

Goddamn, people are retarded. But rules are important. You can't kill idiots. At least not all of them. Apparently you can't fuck 'em either. Life lessons. Just trying to pass on the knowledge with a smile. A bitter smile? Sure, why not. They both look the same if your toasted.

I Told You it Was Coming

Down In Flames



At The Controls



OEM Header



and now it's here. I just have to figure out how to fit it all together. Brand new art for the page. It's been gestating for a good few months. Time to work some magic. Not nearly as much neon green as I originally imagined, but that's how these things go sometimes.


///Daedelus - "Overdressed" hey, mister big shot, don't you think you're hot with all the looks you got...

Gestating Names

The low line is happening.

slowfluid
fingerslip
sunlance
powerdive
horsemenofthesun
highsequence
memoryanthem
keptaquaintance
throattwine
founderstext

Yes, I spent five hours doing this. Yes, it was hard. Yes, it would have been a lot easier if there weren't fifteen thousand dead blogs with catchy names still alive from 2002 that haven't been posted to in five years. Or, roughly, and my math isn't that great, but fifteen thousand days. Roughly. Probably more. Anyway, there were about three times more names that made it to the final cut. Two thirds were already taken. And five thirds were crappy for various reasons. Too cheap, too easy, too slow, too fast, too complex, too simple, too pandering, too monotone, too soft, too sexual, too written, too base, too serif-ed, too guilded, too quilled, etc, etc. These are the front runners.

The sad thing is, while I'm working on this I come across a ton of dead blogs. A ton of "this is my outlet"s. And they have clearly failed or moved on to other things that distract them or allow them some kind of other outlet or actually physically or maybe emotionally dead or just medicated. Enthralling and disheartening at the same time because I see it and I think "oh my god, I'm just like you, let's be friends" and then I understand they quit or walked away or grew out of it or whatever you want to call it for whatever reason.

The important thing is, the important thing being, the important thing seeing and I will tell you what you see, progress. I already had several design themes in mind and the name that wins out will probably be the one that fits the thema best. I'm not sure that's a word as much as it is a feeling. But yes. Usually it is fairly bad practice to name a color after you identify what color it is, but I am an impressionist and I see definites in swatches and brush strokes and it's much easier to name the thing after it exists instead of creating a name and top downing it.

So I'm thinking saturday will not be a terrible day to launch something new and old and new. It has been a long time coming. It will be fun to get my fingers dirty in adobe again. It's been a while. Too long. Like everything else. Well not even close to like everything else. the important thing is, and i can't stress that enough, the mind work is done. now it's getting down to the actionable items and I am gathering the disparate, the desperate, and the deserters to the factory floor because its not time to make weapons or war. It's time to make... period.


///Kinny and Horn - "Sacred Life" ...love the everything. Just write it all down cuz I don't really care. But I do. And that's why I foster love for the one's I don't dare. Be nice and sacrifice and play nice. Align. The world wasn't won in a day. The world wasn't one in a day. The world wasn't sung in a day. The world wasn't done in day. There's still time. So play.

The Ice-stache (grow one for your own safety), Hotwheels, No Age, and Serial Commitment

So I'm taking the next step toward building something to get me closer to making the writing I want to be able to make. Not necessarily the next step toward it as much as a reanimation, reorganization, of the effort. Partly, I want to get more from short stories and I can't expect to get more character development and practice from trying to cram more into small jars. Not that I haven't enjoyed the challenge and sucked at it and succeeded in parts and pieces (by my measure), but it presents problems with having a job and other things to chase after that are life necessities not granted. I have to step into something that won't force me to make endings where they don't belong and rush souls into bodies, and while there are people to animate and worlds to create, I have to give myself time where time is all too often short. And I need the pressure of show and tell to push it forward. The answer? Serials. One chapter at a time. The thing is, I can't even press myself into that old trap (I did once and it worked out well until a stretch of weeks where work overtook time available to chop a story into chapters and commit to staying put at the pen and paper to force out entire chapters, because, let's face it, not all chapters are created equal, so some days I could sit down and bang out a magnificently lengthy, but appropriately so, chapter and others days I couldn't because I had to go to bed at some point or stop to get ready for work, and things simply would not resume the same flow and grip it had when I left it and I ship wrecked myself repeatedly between the start of one and its end.

An organizational thing. Maybe show and tell is not the right motivator. It's hard to systematize it. I guess, part of it is that I don't trust myself to continue. I'm sure I could learn, at least I think I am sure that I need to force myself to learn. Learn the low lines, the high latency, and it's benefits. Put less pressure on myself and shift that strength of worry and fear of failed completion into something more positive, more enduring than the eye crossing, tongue chewing, wind sprint of watch hands across freed hours to produce things less panicked, scattered, and hit and miss spiny. Actually, as I'm talking this over, I think the best commitment to make may not be a serial one, but a commitment to development with fewer showings. Going farther down the rabbit hole is by necessity a thing that divorces a person from constant communication and seeing little dividends every day in views is encouraging. Encouragement is fairly impossible to come by. I envy the people that can get it often. So, in doing this I would be giving myself fewer opportunities to enjoy the little pats on the back, but I would also be putting myself in a position to work longer and more thoroughly on everything.

It's not a question of motivation anymore. At first it was. At first it was overcoming the fear of being connected to the things I do that I am passionate about that people might not agree with or could say "wow, you're terrible." I'm comfortable with that now. Have been for a while. Motivation came up when I lapsed for months and swore off all communication because I didn't feel like it. I couldn't feel it. I lost touch with the worlds in my mind and couldn't care to find them again, until things fell apart and I realized they are one of the few steady states, though changing, one of the few places where I feel myself all of the time. Anywhere can be learned to be home, but within my head everywhere is always home and it's like pulling up a chair with old friends I love and love to hate who know me and talk to me about things and we mull things over and they ask me about you and everyone else and they love and kill and do things I wish I could do and sometimes I do things they wish they could do and it's a back and forth that's so much a part of me I completely took it for granted for a while until I was utterly miserable and realized what was missing. It's not a question of motivation anymore. I have to engage it deeper and add taking care not to let the reduction of constant connection to a couple times a couple months get to me (it's not like I connect with people everyday this side of the bridge). Then again there will still be this in between to keep me company so it's not all bad. Not even half bad. Just not the conclusion I would have drawn this time last year.

Consider it a year end retooling of the factory. The final sessions of congress in a year that's not quite closed yet in my head.

Which takes me up to the ice-stache. So I'm walking home and it's a good 25 minute walk if I'm not running on most of my cylinders and my nose is running. Which is fine. You get used to it. Working in a cooler for hours a day, you can't rub your nose every single time it runs. By the end of the day you would have a red coke nose-ish hole in your face where your nostrils should be and then when you got home you'd have to deal with that junk all night only to go back to work in the cooler to repeat the process and get so nicked up about it that you end up putting a hole in the wall (that you'd have to fix) or putting a fist sized dent in your locker (that would probably get you suspended for a week and assigned to anger management when you got back [not that a week off from that crap would be a terrible thing, but I sat through anger management classes three times before and it's more of a pain than nursing busted knuckles and wrecked up wrist bones). You get used to it in the Winter.

The best thing about letting your nose run though, is that if you don't want to be talked to while you're out and about, letting your nose run is the best way to do it. People either assume you are a badass who does not give a fuck or are too retarded to realize your nose is running and therefore would not acknowledge, understand, or participate in a conflict along understood, predictable, or reasonable manner. Not to say that you wouldn't still get mugged by a coke head or someone not looking for reasonable conflict that sticks to standard rules of engagement. Which is why you can't just let your nose run. You have to make sure you are outside long enough for the snot and the condensation of your breathing against your upper lip and stache crystallize into ice and grow into a full on mustache of icicles. Then you are not just careless, retarded, devil-may-care, but you are also tough enough to be outdoors for long periods of time, possibly under dressed, with people and places you need to be that demand you be there regardless of the mode of transportation and that, potentially, these people will be looking for you if you don't show up when you said you would, and maybe you won't respond to threats and maybe you're late and have already had it up to your eyes with the weather, and walking untold distances, that you will absolutely blow up at the drop of a half smoked cigarette or suspicious footstep or even a "hey you" if you are kind enough to respond at all. So ice-stache it up. Worst comes to worst someone might yap at the back of your head, but all you have to do is turn around with your viking face on for a second and who wants to deal with that at any time of day? And then keep walking, because the only thing more certain to produce a fight, than engaging idle talk, is staring at groups of individuals when the only thing at stake is their bogus sense of pride. And after all, it is half past two A.M. and you still have a ways to go.

Hotwheels are amazing, by the way. Walking through stores and seeing the blue displays doesn't really bring me back to any particular period in my life, but I love cars. I dream about cars. Next to viking ice-staches, cars are awesome and every time I see them I want to know what exactly, which car exactly, is being modeled to scale and whether or not I can add it to my garage someday. Half the time it turns out to be some dopey made up car with ugly body work and funky orange tinted windows for some reason and chrome wheels in enormous flared wheel arches that pretty much touch the apex of the A pillar and the whole thing makes you scratch your head and wonder who thought it was a good idea.

Then every now and then, the thing that makes you stop and look every damn time, you stumble across a model of a DMC-12 DeLorean, or a Boss Mustang, or a bright blue and white Yenko Camaro, and you know you'll never make enough money to own them. You see a 240z in that hotwheels orange and blue blister pack and your eyes go wide because someone thought that fair lady from the 80s deserved to be forever immortalized on some lucky kids shelf and if you had a little less sense, maybe yours. You could have them all, and it's not at all about saving them because they might be worth something later, it's just to have them all in your fantasy garage made real, in a way, and be able to stroke the body work and see the curves from every angle you will never get to see them in person, quite possibly for as long as you live. It could be there, just for you, for a scant two bucks. That Ferrari GTO, right there at your fingertips, right there. You can feel the speed and feel the air slipping by the rear views and splitting away clean across the spoiler. I don't know when I'm going to outgrow hotwheels. Quite possibly never.

So that's it for now. That and there will never be that party that makes me feel my age. At least not in a physical sense where a person is like "oh my god, this hangover is too much. I can't drink like I used to." I already had that sense of that party where I was like "wow my beard is way thicker than the pubes any of these people have ever experienced in their lifetime if they never shaved them at any point between the time of their birth until now" and my beard wasn't even that thick. I definitely had it in terms of "wow the music I remember fondly in the club is all music by artists that stopped making music before these people owned their first discman. Oh wait, they've never even held a discman before. The hell am I doing here?" I also definitely had it in terms of overhearing fights and thinking "really, is it really that serious? Don't they have bills to pay or something?" But in terms of raw "too old to throw down..." never gonna happen. This old panther still has moves that'll make your mullet spin. That's from venture brothers. The best cartoon action series, possibly ever.

Let's work on it as we wrap this year up and catch up with the rest of the Earth. Orbit adjustments aboard the good ship.


///no song today. just some thought.


///just kidding. music is life.


///Paul Murphy - "Soul Call" This jazzy jem from Paul Murphy always makes me happy to be alive to hear it. It was a dead heat between this and Aphex Twin's Girl/Boy Song. Maybe next time around.

Low Lighter

I've been mulling craft over. Disappointed in the body so far. I try to grade myself week to week. Did I nail it? Did I glance it? Did I make something I can stand behind? The answers are easy in a lot of fields. Harder in writing. One thing I miss about college was workshops. Sure, half the people there are only there because they need to have creative arts credits or just needed something to add to their schedule they could coast through. That's the major difference between writers and other people. At least at that level.

The classes are only as hard as you make them. Writers make them some of the hardest classes they've ever taken. Other people don't. Humanities and social studies is like that. How deep do you want to drive into the subject matter? The same goes for many of the other largely subjective classes offered at university.

I've been asked more than once and probably too many times how a person, or how I, know that I am or they are a writer. The answer can be answered fairly simply in many different ways using very simple, and also very personal, tests. I am not saying the answer to the question is simple. It's always complicated, but can be simplified in terms of the writing being done. One of the tests, I believe, is the level of dissatisfaction with "good enough." Not the good enough that tells you that item A or B is amusing or digestible to other people, but the good enough that hits the points and edges, lines and graphs, of the things you want to map. If that lack of good enough directs you to work harder than you are a writer. If that lack of personal good enough draws you to an "oh well, I tried" sort of answer than you are probably not a writer, but did manage to put words together into a coherent string. I dunno. It's tough. Goes without saying at this point.

I haven't been disappointed with the effort as much as the second effort. I usually relied on working with criticisms to see where things were failing and where things work better. Part of learning how to write is learning how to simulate workshops within yourself. Time consuming stuff. What I have been doing is working on very short time scales. Hours instead of days and weeks and months. The pressure works well at sharpening the blade or at least keeping it sharp, but does not do enough, for me, to make progress. So I'm working on a new idea, an old one, but new to the times, on a new channel. A low line.

I've been riding the high line for a very long time and the problem is it does not leave enough time for gestation and things get excessively hit and miss and I'm not happy with that. I have to give myself time to step away and look at it again and punch it right in the craw until it's disfigured and see how I can make it better and then do it better and then look at it again. Give things time to precipitate. I haven't given myself that time partly because I over estimated what I can do (arrogance), but also because running back over what you've done is rarely pleasant. It's not fun or enjoyable to see how badly you put something together and that's a lack of discipline.

So a second Auralport is coming at a much lower line. It's not going to be about cranking out and pushing forward as much as it will be trying to put one gem together in a week. We're going dual channel. A thing for every place and a place for everything. Or something like that. Just trying to satisfy the urge to put pen to paper and make it something worth seeing just once. I want desperately to be better at it, but all I've got is me, so we're gonna figure this shit out and make something ill.


///Bowery Electric - "Freedom Fighter" ... cue dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Wall Street

> We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

> Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

> Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

> For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

> So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

> The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

> We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”

End email. I don't normally respond to threads like this, but I was struck by the flippancy and offered a rebuff:

dear content of email

hilarious. if the reduction of the "food supply" ever gets down to hyper competitive opportunists versus ingenuity and survivability,
wall street will find itself in an afghanistan of its own creation. good luck.

rejoicing in what income i have and living on it too. i get home at 5 a.m. if im lucky. but better than lucky is working a sixteen hour day. i work every hour im given and i take hours from coworkers whenever i can. ive been trying to get expelled from the ufcw since the union forced me to join as a condition of employment. good luck coming down here and eating the food off my plate lol. wash your car and cut your own hair and your lawn and everything else you have that needs washing and doing and guarding and tending to.

you might get some of my "food", but im used to being hungry. eventually my knife and fork are taking your hand. and it will be delicious. and ill leave you to moan and divorce and spring idle bastard children in failing school districts because you wont be able to live in the good ones no matter how hard you work at minimum wage jobs that cut and limit your hours and send you home or on leave when you hit the red line they define and the only release you can have is fucking strangers on wellfare with six kids to net massive child support and other benefits that work the system until she files a bogus PFA when you don't pay on time and the fuzz come and lock you up and you lose that job for "no call/no show" and can't get another one for two years thanks to your criminal record.

and then, hopefully, youll buy a shotgun from a pawnshop and end the dance, wherein your children will pick up where you leave off. hilarious. very much enjoyed. mostly because it's reflective, i guess, of an extremely homogenized community versus an extremely diverse community pressed into a stereo typical mold for easy digestion/dissection. also i am super hungry now with all the talking
about food.

not wall street does not equal an inability to compete and dominate. all it means is "not wall street." life can be just as vicious, demanding, painful, unforgiving, unblinking and violent as downtown manhattan any day of the fucking week for many people who have had a different set of opportunities presented to them. capitalize all you want. break your hands trying to beat down doors. the fact of the matter is it's not a level field, will never be a level field, and for civilization to continue to advance or plateau or whatever there will have to be some kind of hierarchy and class system and learn to fucking live with it and pursue yourself. i think. whatever.
hilarious.

i guess its just funny when people beat their chests and say "you couldnt do what i do" without for a second realizing they couldnt do what i do either.

i dont want to be rich or fat and happy or a gym member who would otherwise be fat and happy. all i ask of you, wall street, is that you dont let your "rejoicing" become an obstacle to my happiness.

End Rebuttal.

I don't hate wall street. But if a person with hired landscapers can frown upon those landscapers billing hour of work incorrectly or frown upon a maid secreting away the homeowners possessions, why can't those of us who keep them employed by participating in the economy frown upon its mismanagement and abuse? When you order your cheeseburger at the diner you expect a cheeseburger, not a thing that has been gutted and cheated to make it more cost effective and time conserving for the line cook to make. Sure, I can't solve differential equations easily, if at all, but the fact of the matter is the people who can more than likely couldn't do my job for a week either before they quit to pursue something easier. So I guess we're even. On an uneven playing field.

Time Rides Again... Again, Tabloid Culture, Apologies, and Fresh to Death

Well, I'm 32 today. Fast approaching my midlife crisis. Trying to celebrate. Is it weird to be anxious about having an iterative midlife crisis? Probably, yes. Definitely yes. We'll see how it goes. I'll let you know if I buy a yacht and a roadster and get a prescription for penis enhancing drugs and hair plugs. Time keeps on running.

What's new, what's new? Well the things I have yet to do aren't really new. Still have to piece together the redesign, don't I? It's still coming (that's what she said) and I swear to that up and down. Stand up act 5 is still on the way, but I can't really swear by that up, down, left, or right as I'm still trying to get back to a place mentally where I won't sound like Orny Adams in that movie with Jerry Seinfeld. You know the one. The one where Jerry Seinfeld was funny, but fifty percent of the screen time, maybe sixty pushing seventy, was dedicated to that bastard Orny and his bugged out eyeballs and all he did was piss and moan over the whole thing and made it practically unwatchable except for the saving grace of getting to see Seinfeld do his thing. The whole movie was like getting a chance to see Cosby with new material, but the caveat was that for every minute you saw you had to sit through five minutes of Chris Rock screaming into the microphone (because everything's funnier when it's louder). I'm not going to do that. Still working on the gift. I know! It's been forever. Pushing a year by now. I don't want to stop working on it. Then what'll I do with my spare time? Read? Fat chance! No, I'll probably read more. Reading is important. It's the non-readers with too much power that basically flipped this country inside out. And I'm not going to do that either, or at least, not on purpose.

I apologize for not staying up on it. Things have been pretty rapid fire lately. Bang bang, you shot me down. Bang bang, I hit the ground. Lots of thought bubbles and thought bubbles being burst with thought bullets. I rediscovered that I love Led Zepplin while listening to What Is and What Should Never Be. I've been trying to stay fresh to death, but mostly I've just been hanging out in bad neighborhoods doing not so good things to my body which butts heads directly with fresherating it. Trying to be big enough to take a stand against hard wiring. Eat the entropy and pass order out the other side of my head. Not easy. Sleeping at night will help. Getting on a normal schedule will help immensely. I think that's the main problem. Continuous change has basically blown away my flux capacitor. It stood all it could stand and it can't stands no more and my flying DeLorean is grounded and instead of fixing it I've just been kicking the tires and cussing.

What does it mean when you file for a job transfer and the email ticket says case:new the following hour and then case:closed the hour after that yet no one has passed you any good news or bad news? No idea. Suddenly is sooner than anyone ever thinks. So I suppose we'll see and wait, not always in that order. Depends on how I'm feeling. Sometimes I'm feeling more wait and see and sometimes I'm feeling less wait and more see and sometimes I'm all wait and unseeing. Time just crawls sometimes and the best thing I can do for myself is close my eyes or stare at the pavement going by beneath my feet and my runner's high because the distance is never closing fast enough until you hit that point and it's closing too fast and you realize you haven't given yourself enough to cool off and warm down (warm down?) so you're going to have to jog right past your door and go around the block again and by the time you get back you feel like you could go another mile or two and so you do, and then you regret it halfway through and turn back, but this time looking up so you know when to say when. I rarely do.

I do things like develop hobbies out of things like answering very simple questions of distance and position in hyper extensive detail. Yes, the thing you are looking for is here. Oh no, that's not good enough. It's kind of like a game, well it is a game. I try to fix the positions of things with so much accuracy that you could find it blindfolded. It helps me remember where things are. Mostly it helps me combat the gremlins and elves that keep touching my stuff at home and moving things around when I'm not there to keep an eye on the joint. Bastards. Small handed thieving little... well, we've all been there more or less. Time keeps on slipping.

So I'm sure everyone with half an instinct for detection tries not to read tabloids. You can feel them sucking the brain fibers right through your eye sockets. Soul sucking camera lenses except their powers were bestowed on the tree pulp they were printed on and now work in reverse. No wait. And now work in forwards except the concept works in reverse. Instead of sucking out peoples souls for your consumption the printed matter sucks out your soul for their consumption. So they can put more cameras and phone operators and hotlines out there like bait to suck on more souls and make more print. It's a loop. Everything's a loop that is a conspiracy, but not every conspiracy is a loop? Anyway, back on target, tabloids!

I try not to read them, but eventually with enough unfortunate glances I end up ingesting a story incidentally, like sawing chemically pressure treated wood without a mask, you get that junk in you and you can't help noticing (also don't ever ingest that stuff as it will get you higher than you've ever been and then you'll sleep for like 20 hours with complete memory loss). I came across this ridiculous story of Tom Cruise and Kate Holmes (was that her last name? I don't remember since her absorption into the Cruise persona. I think it was, well anyway) horrible warped world. A world in which their children are experiencing horrible things like flying on airplanes and staying up late and ice cream all day or something and all I could think was: really? Horribly warped world? Is that what we're going with here? Is that really what we're boiling down to now? You've got to be kidding me.

How is it that their world is horribly warped and the land of the micro-united nations adoption agency cat fighter's opium den union is not warped at all (I walk by a lot of tabloid stands at my job, a lot of bits and pieces of the running Angelina/Jen/Pitt crapfest have been inhaled)? And then it struck me. The reason why people don't read tabloids and think wow, what b.s. and instead plunk down whatever or however much it costs to get a copy. People want to be distracted and not everyone can afford to pay for television and the unending rot that pours down the chute at MTV and BET and Oxygen and company. It's basically a tv show. That's what tabloid culture is. It is a tv show for everyone so they can lose themselves in familiar characters and worry about them at night and talk about them during the day because (whether they know it or not) it's like a serial novel. Like Pride and Prejudice published a little bit at a time each week and it engages them where they are and allows them to, for a while at least, leave the world behind and immerse themselves in something richer.

I could have gone the way of "people read it because they hate their lives", but I honestly don't know that. If anything that would or at least should read to you "people read it because they hate their lives, and I am assuming the base state of most people is hating their life because that is my base state." Which isn't really true. Well I do get at odds with myself sometimes all the time, it's unfair to assume that everything anyone else ever does is based on escapism. And that was just way too technical. Two steps back off that academic cliff.

It's good that people read. People that read tabloids read more than me. No, wait a minute. That is definitely not true. Not because I wouldn't want a tabloid digester to be more well read than me, but because of all the time I spend crawling the internet. It's not all pictures. Not yet anyway. Remember when everyone went crazy about protecting their content and every page of text was embedded into flash and gifs and other picture formats so you couldn't copy and paste it and everyone had cutesy alert messages that would pop up (some of them infinitely looped so that you had to restart your crashed browser) if you ever right clicked on their page to bring up the copy/paste dialog? Ridiculous times. But anyway, yeah. I read a lot, is what I'm saying and I guess that people read at all is always a good thing. Just have to convince the tabbies to raise the language level from like third grade to highschool and easy as cake you'll raise the education level of the United States, one soap opera at a time. That is my plan for education reform if I am ever elected president. Or education Czar. Or Don of learning. Whatever they're calling it these days. Pretty sure it's Czar. Chair? I have no idea and no desire to go read about it. See ya!


///Mono - "High Life ... everybody wants it and sometimes I do too. Though I never really know when I'll have the time to really chase after it. I think by and large I've got better things to do. Maybe not better, necessarily, but other things to chase after. Other distances to sew up.

Post Nine One One

I've been pretty dark, post 9/11. Hopefully, understandably so. It's been difficult to remember how to have fun, or that having fun is essential to being.

I won't tell you that it can't rain all the time because, in fact, it can and it does. You would be a fool to never throw a poncho and an umbrella in your ruck. You'd be a fool to go out when the hail stones are larger than your fist. A fool to believe if you train hard enough you can vault any fence, scale any wall, and leap any crevasse if you simply will with all the strength in your bones. It's a uniquely American fallacy that if you want it with enough of your heart it can be made real.



The fact is life is pretty damn unkind and there is no insurance policy available to make the check cashers pay for what they dupe the writers into signing.

So, in light of that, and in light of the fact that I've been a pretty dark human being, I am dedicating some of today to having fun. Forgetting is impossible. Those years are tattooed on me. Tattooed on my bones. They will always be with me and they will find their own way to the surface of my skin whether I like it or not. I will have to scrub and scrub to get the cells off of me week after week and month after month and they will seep out again against raw flesh and needle their way into the fabric of what I make with no desire to cause and no avenue to prevent.

But, damn it all, it is Saturday and for once I don't have to work to pay the bills and slot the tokens and I am determined to sing a little and let one of the voices in my head be my own falsetto, cigaretted, malt liquored, boom and bipped, hymn for a little while. Get live. There's only so much fun to be had poking a corpse.


///Eagle Eye Cherry - "Shooting Up In Vain" The film Go changed my life, but not from the perspective of life changing activities, because that was not unfamiliar to me, but from the perspective of music. I heard so many sounds I'd heard before, but in a way so far removed from what I was used. Amazing film. Far and away one of the most solid soundtracks ever collected. Bonus track? Hell yeah:


///Left Field - "Swords" ...oh with my sword at my side... listen to this on a rainy night. Cue it up right around a lonely midnight. You won't regret it.