Maybe there's less energy to go around in general as people age. I think it has more to do with developing an identity. Fandom is steadily fading year by year. It will never go away entirely. Football Sunday will still be football Sunday. The Steelers will always be fun to watch and their games against the Ravens will always be my favorite games to watch and if they make the playoffs I'll watch those games too. The Pirates are still the Pirates. When I stumble across a game on the radio or on television I'll listen in or sit down for an hour or two to take them in. The Penguins will still be the Penguins. Their games will still be a lot of fun to listen to on the radio, especially on the radio. Listening to hockey on the radio is one of those things that's actually more entertaining and exciting than watching it on television.
Fandom will not completely go away, but as I have more things to get done and have built a life in Pittsburgh I feel connected with the city without needing to feel like I have to embrace and demonstrate that connection through waving a sports flag. Sitting in front of a computer screen, waiting for a fantasy draft to start, I had a moment where I heard a voice in my head say "what the hell am I doing" and I closed the screen. No fantasy sports this year. It's extraneous. It's plastic. I realized I didn't want to spend weekdays keeping an eye on waiver wires and fretting about teams I don't care about at all. I follow the Steelers and that's good enough for me.
There's not much more to enjoy about your local teams besides watching them play once in a while and feeling a little civic pride when they win and a little let down if they lose. However, as you grow into a person with your own loves and affections for the place that you live, your civic pride comes less and less from what happens to your sports teams and more and more from what you do within and around your town and city.
Two years ago, a Steelers loss could make the entire rest of my week until the next game absolutely miserable. Three years ago, it was misery, screaming at the television and throwing things at the walls of my apartment. The following year was screaming misery and jubilation and throwing things. The following year, fandom faded to shouting at the television and occasionally jumping up and down. This year, I'll probably still shout at the t.v. from time to time, but other than that, it'll just be a fun diversion once a week for the Fall and Winter. I know some of the roster, but it's not encyclopedic knowledge the way it used to be. I don't know when they play the Ravens, but I'll find out and probably mark the games on my calendar.
I'll still buy the occasional Black and Gold trinket as years go by. I'll still go out of my way to hear about some sports news every day. I'm going to be a fan for life. As I get older, the fanatic in me fades away and I'm not unhappy to see it go.
/// Jimmy Pol - "Steelers Fight Song"
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label happiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label happiness. Show all posts
11/6/15
At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity
Looking at my own reflection at the river, a wolf's head mask in the crook of my arm, I wonder how many there are like me. I wonder how many times I can roll the dice with instability before an immovable object meets an unstoppable force again. I try to skip rocks. I try to bat rocks with an aluminum bat given to me as a gift after I left the last one I had at home, bent into the shape of a boomerang. I wonder where I am going and if someone out there is going the same way I am. If we will carpool together and shout at each other, trying to figure out where exactly "there" is while the driver tries to figure how to get two wolves out of his car and regrets being a Samaritan.
Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink. One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud. The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship. Found. Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash! Mid-river. The current continues. I can't see my face, looking down. The angles aren't right. The light is not just so. The sun is not cooperating. Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.
Thinking about how people find their perfect match. At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me. Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic. Impossible. Incredible in its perfection and destruction. Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist. Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.
Happy and satisfied are two different things. The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief. As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true. Doomed. I laugh typing that. The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle. Dooooooomed! Of course not. Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat. I wonder what quantum decay looks like. I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them. Some of them, yes. None of them, also yes. Always at distance. Minding the fence. Minding the facilities. On the off chance they might be me. On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.
A moat. Sometimes the bridge is there. The gates open and ambassadors cross. I don't know what madness is. Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself? Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself? Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere? Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here. This is what I wanted. Few things truly scare me, in life. I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half. Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.
///Groove Armada - "At The River" ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.
Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink. One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud. The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship. Found. Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash! Mid-river. The current continues. I can't see my face, looking down. The angles aren't right. The light is not just so. The sun is not cooperating. Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.
Thinking about how people find their perfect match. At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me. Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic. Impossible. Incredible in its perfection and destruction. Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist. Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.
Happy and satisfied are two different things. The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief. As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true. Doomed. I laugh typing that. The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle. Dooooooomed! Of course not. Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat. I wonder what quantum decay looks like. I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them. Some of them, yes. None of them, also yes. Always at distance. Minding the fence. Minding the facilities. On the off chance they might be me. On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.
A moat. Sometimes the bridge is there. The gates open and ambassadors cross. I don't know what madness is. Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself? Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself? Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere? Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here. This is what I wanted. Few things truly scare me, in life. I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half. Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.
///Groove Armada - "At The River" ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.
9/20/15
Nearing the End of the Third Week With a Fractured Jaw
With roughly 75% of the range of motion returning and constant pain beginning to subside for several hours at a time I feel pretty good about not going to a hospital on this one. Had there been a clear break in the bone I definitely would have gone to get whatever metal was needed implanted and get wired shut. Sometimes it baffles me how interconnected the bodies musculoskeletal system is and I am constantly reminded of how layered its concert is.
I didn't realize how many different ways and how often I shift my jaw and slide my teeth against each other when I am processing information or thinking through conversation or using my eyes and ears to take information in. Left, right, backwards, forwards, clenching some sections of teeth and relaxing others at the same time. Everything from pulling on a door knob, to swinging a hammer, to stretching, sitting down, standing up, turning my head, opening a mailbox, to driving a stick shift is tied to the muscle groups around the neck and jaw. Suddenly hundreds if not thousands of long memorized motions and activities that you could perform with blindfolded confidence are thrown into doubt. "Is this going to hurt?" "How will this affect the healing cracks?" "Will this pull apart soft scar tissues not yet stabilized and calcified into bone?" In the third week I am starting to regain some confidence.
For most of the first and second week the pain never felt less than a five or six on a 10 point scale throughout the day from waking to sleep. Depression became a huge factor. You are not sad because of what happened or how it happened. You become depressed because you cannot laugh without shooting pain. You become depressed because you cannot fall asleep because of sudden spikes of pain that cut through your over the counter pain killers like the barrel of a bat slamming into a light bulb tucked inside a pillow case. You become depressed because the muscles of your tongue and throat put enough pressure on the angle of your jaw, right on the side of the cracks, to make your eyes tear up when you swallow what you can. Everything you casually associated with happiness in sleep, smiling, laughter, rest, sustenance, is hot wired and reprogrammed to fear and ache and apprehension and anger and it weighs on you hour after hour after hour until depression becomes crushing.
In week three many self imposed restrictions are beginning to lift. I can get through the day and night without a single pain pill. The constant background ache has dropped to an occasionally noticeable two or three. When I press on the impact site gently, the bone doesn't flex and make crunching sounds. In the second week I successfully set the condyle back into its natural position. I couldn't help crying for several minutes afterward. It was important and necessary as my bite was out of alignment from front to back. Once I did that the grinding noise right at the ramus's tip finally stopped and when I bandaged my mouth closed with a thick elastic wrap my teeth sat almost as evenly as they did before. I think that dislocation is probably what saved the angle from snapping clean through.
I can almost yawn again. I still have to brace my chin when I sneeze. At the end of this third week I can chew very soft pasta and cheese and drink thick soup relatively pain free, but I am taking it extremely carefully to be absolutely certain I don't retard the healing process or get too enthusiastic about my food choices. It felt so good to finally be able to scrub my beard again without fireballs of pain shooting through my face. Nothing changes the complexion of the day like starting it off with a good deep beard scrubbing, good god I missed that.
All of my anger and hatred toward the people that did this to me is gone. What really makes me happy is not caring what happens to them. Being able to let their aggression go and not have a second thought about retaliation or feeling like I'm owed something or that I owe them something. The transaction is over. What matters is what you decide to do next for yourself. What matters is that lying in bed your jaw doesn't sag and fall to one side like a screen door with one hinge. What matters is that you survived and you can physically laugh again without fear of splitting bone apart from the spirited ways in which you normally like to jump on life's comedy.
I still cannot laugh too much or the pain piles up and grows to wince worthy proportions and twists my face sour. I still can't make some facial expressions. I still can't sustain hours of conversation, but then again I was never particularly great at making conversation as much as listening to it, but it is still something to get used to realizing that I can only say so many words before I have to rest and close my mouth tightly. I still can't clench my teeth in consternation. I can feel some lingering instability and pain in the healing dislocated joint when I run up or down stairs or shake or nod my head too vigorously. Hopefully these things and instabilities will pass as week four progresses.
I know there is potential for some level of permanent pain in the joint since it was not reset by a professional and was not wired shut to ensure speedy and complete recovery of the fracture site. There were evenings when I slept and would wake with a start in the second week so abrupt I could feel the joint strain and hear the angle click and flex. There was a day when I woke to a spider landing on my cheek and a slapped at my face and new before the pain even registered that I screwed up big time in doing so and set myself back all of whatever healing occurred through that day. Common sense tells me this too, as my back injury from two and a half years ago still bothers me from time to time and sends numb sensations down my right buttock and thigh if the barometric pressure is too far off from my body.
Some of the nerves likely died as well as there is noticeably diminished feeling along the left side of my jaw bone. I expected as much. I expected the worst, but progress has been good and some levity has returned to day to day life. I am not out of the woods yet. Two to three more weeks to go before I'll try to bite into a piece of meat that hasn't been blended to the consistency of mashed potatoes. At least three more weeks before I try to bite into an apple. I think I may attempt a sandwich next Saturday... a grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly. My tummy can't wait to have fun with food with my mouth.
The food has been spectacular. At first, the only things I could eat were nutrient shakes and very thin liquids for the first two weeks. Very finely blended and extremely water heavy meals put through the blender and then only a half cup or so every few hours because the pain was too intense to do much more than that. Since then the horizons have begun to grow and meals become more intricate. Right now it's an assortment of pastes and soups of varying composition, from fresh bell peppers ground into bacon pate with rice and spinach soups drizzled all around to sweet bean mashed potatoes with soft sharp chedder shredded over the top alongside peas carrot beef mash and oreos in a little cup on the side blended into a desert syrup. Nothing makes lunch quite like peanut butter and jelly paste beside a cup of milk. It has been a little bit of a challenge and through the first two weeks I lost 25 pounds, but as time is getting on, some of the weight has come back.
I still feel weak from not being able to work out or move much, but some strength has returned and will only increase as the healing progresses. At the end of week 3, I feel alright about the future. There's a decent chance I will be close to what I was before my jaw was fractured and dislocated. I know I will never be the same, but I am alive and can continue and I am happy for that. Happy with that. It kind of mirrors my mental problems that I deal with and constantly manage without medicine. I know I will never be better than I was, but I can try to make sure I don't completely unravel and if I can be close to as sound as I was the day before then I have done the best I can.
///Deptford Goth - "Objects Objects" the bass filled silence between the searing walls of the chaotic
I didn't realize how many different ways and how often I shift my jaw and slide my teeth against each other when I am processing information or thinking through conversation or using my eyes and ears to take information in. Left, right, backwards, forwards, clenching some sections of teeth and relaxing others at the same time. Everything from pulling on a door knob, to swinging a hammer, to stretching, sitting down, standing up, turning my head, opening a mailbox, to driving a stick shift is tied to the muscle groups around the neck and jaw. Suddenly hundreds if not thousands of long memorized motions and activities that you could perform with blindfolded confidence are thrown into doubt. "Is this going to hurt?" "How will this affect the healing cracks?" "Will this pull apart soft scar tissues not yet stabilized and calcified into bone?" In the third week I am starting to regain some confidence.
For most of the first and second week the pain never felt less than a five or six on a 10 point scale throughout the day from waking to sleep. Depression became a huge factor. You are not sad because of what happened or how it happened. You become depressed because you cannot laugh without shooting pain. You become depressed because you cannot fall asleep because of sudden spikes of pain that cut through your over the counter pain killers like the barrel of a bat slamming into a light bulb tucked inside a pillow case. You become depressed because the muscles of your tongue and throat put enough pressure on the angle of your jaw, right on the side of the cracks, to make your eyes tear up when you swallow what you can. Everything you casually associated with happiness in sleep, smiling, laughter, rest, sustenance, is hot wired and reprogrammed to fear and ache and apprehension and anger and it weighs on you hour after hour after hour until depression becomes crushing.
In week three many self imposed restrictions are beginning to lift. I can get through the day and night without a single pain pill. The constant background ache has dropped to an occasionally noticeable two or three. When I press on the impact site gently, the bone doesn't flex and make crunching sounds. In the second week I successfully set the condyle back into its natural position. I couldn't help crying for several minutes afterward. It was important and necessary as my bite was out of alignment from front to back. Once I did that the grinding noise right at the ramus's tip finally stopped and when I bandaged my mouth closed with a thick elastic wrap my teeth sat almost as evenly as they did before. I think that dislocation is probably what saved the angle from snapping clean through.
I can almost yawn again. I still have to brace my chin when I sneeze. At the end of this third week I can chew very soft pasta and cheese and drink thick soup relatively pain free, but I am taking it extremely carefully to be absolutely certain I don't retard the healing process or get too enthusiastic about my food choices. It felt so good to finally be able to scrub my beard again without fireballs of pain shooting through my face. Nothing changes the complexion of the day like starting it off with a good deep beard scrubbing, good god I missed that.
All of my anger and hatred toward the people that did this to me is gone. What really makes me happy is not caring what happens to them. Being able to let their aggression go and not have a second thought about retaliation or feeling like I'm owed something or that I owe them something. The transaction is over. What matters is what you decide to do next for yourself. What matters is that lying in bed your jaw doesn't sag and fall to one side like a screen door with one hinge. What matters is that you survived and you can physically laugh again without fear of splitting bone apart from the spirited ways in which you normally like to jump on life's comedy.
I still cannot laugh too much or the pain piles up and grows to wince worthy proportions and twists my face sour. I still can't make some facial expressions. I still can't sustain hours of conversation, but then again I was never particularly great at making conversation as much as listening to it, but it is still something to get used to realizing that I can only say so many words before I have to rest and close my mouth tightly. I still can't clench my teeth in consternation. I can feel some lingering instability and pain in the healing dislocated joint when I run up or down stairs or shake or nod my head too vigorously. Hopefully these things and instabilities will pass as week four progresses.
I know there is potential for some level of permanent pain in the joint since it was not reset by a professional and was not wired shut to ensure speedy and complete recovery of the fracture site. There were evenings when I slept and would wake with a start in the second week so abrupt I could feel the joint strain and hear the angle click and flex. There was a day when I woke to a spider landing on my cheek and a slapped at my face and new before the pain even registered that I screwed up big time in doing so and set myself back all of whatever healing occurred through that day. Common sense tells me this too, as my back injury from two and a half years ago still bothers me from time to time and sends numb sensations down my right buttock and thigh if the barometric pressure is too far off from my body.
Some of the nerves likely died as well as there is noticeably diminished feeling along the left side of my jaw bone. I expected as much. I expected the worst, but progress has been good and some levity has returned to day to day life. I am not out of the woods yet. Two to three more weeks to go before I'll try to bite into a piece of meat that hasn't been blended to the consistency of mashed potatoes. At least three more weeks before I try to bite into an apple. I think I may attempt a sandwich next Saturday... a grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly. My tummy can't wait to have fun with food with my mouth.
The food has been spectacular. At first, the only things I could eat were nutrient shakes and very thin liquids for the first two weeks. Very finely blended and extremely water heavy meals put through the blender and then only a half cup or so every few hours because the pain was too intense to do much more than that. Since then the horizons have begun to grow and meals become more intricate. Right now it's an assortment of pastes and soups of varying composition, from fresh bell peppers ground into bacon pate with rice and spinach soups drizzled all around to sweet bean mashed potatoes with soft sharp chedder shredded over the top alongside peas carrot beef mash and oreos in a little cup on the side blended into a desert syrup. Nothing makes lunch quite like peanut butter and jelly paste beside a cup of milk. It has been a little bit of a challenge and through the first two weeks I lost 25 pounds, but as time is getting on, some of the weight has come back.
I still feel weak from not being able to work out or move much, but some strength has returned and will only increase as the healing progresses. At the end of week 3, I feel alright about the future. There's a decent chance I will be close to what I was before my jaw was fractured and dislocated. I know I will never be the same, but I am alive and can continue and I am happy for that. Happy with that. It kind of mirrors my mental problems that I deal with and constantly manage without medicine. I know I will never be better than I was, but I can try to make sure I don't completely unravel and if I can be close to as sound as I was the day before then I have done the best I can.
///Deptford Goth - "Objects Objects" the bass filled silence between the searing walls of the chaotic
9/3/15
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 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.
5/2/15
Scarification
I am very much looking forward to finishing the bear paw/lens on my left hand. When I started scarification it was in part a way to feel more complete. A way to match the inside with the outside and unify the kingdom of my body and mind. A way to talk without saying a word of the anger and hate that refuses to go out.
Years later, I am happy still to have the daily reminder because without it I would forget and there are things that must never be forgotten or glossed over. The older ones were there for a warning and also for a reminder. I do believe I've been familiar enough and known enough that they serve much less in the capacity of a warning and much more in the capacity of a daily reminder to never go back. No matter how desperate. No matter how ... imagine a perfect storm of circumstances ... no matter how "that". And I'm glad because without them I would cycle back. A daily hard stop. I'm glad my occasional congeniality shows through too. 85% of the time, I'm alright or able to figure a way back to right 100% of the time. 15% of the time, probably more, the outcomes are not at all acceptable.
I am really looking forward to finishing my paw. It's going to be a ton of fun slitting things open and the entire attendant processes. The thing that makes the difference and turns the key over is the performance of the hobby and valve check in a positive light. Happy reminders. When I started it, the thing began as a reminder of the power and ability to destroy. That whenever I picked up my left hand, whenever it touched me, whenever it touched anything, there would be a constant reminder of the terrible abilities it had.
Drawing the tattoo, the scarification in that region, to a close is going to come with a lot of happiness. Completing the drawing is going to be a constant reminder of the good power can do. The terrific beast that requires a constant leash can close its teeth to create, not only destroy.
My father still populates my dreams sometimes. I really did think it could be possible to kill him there and eliminate him completely. Not entirely true. Around the fourth time that it happened, him popping up in my dreamscape without reason, want, or control, I realized, snapping awake that my circuits have replaced spiders with his face. I'm laughing because I used to be an arachnophobe and when I would go prancing in dreamland, more often than not if there was something I was supposed to wake up for, my factory would dump spiders into the dream somehow and I would snap awake. Until I conquered my fear of spiders. There's not much that hard lines me to full alert these days beyond him within 10 feet of me. I suppose I'm stuck with that cardboard cut out flag for hard stops until I stumble upon something else worth fearing.
It's kind of funny the way it happens too. It's not horror movie sudden. The wickerman starts appearing and eventually I just get so frustrated that I wake out of dream states. I wish he was dead already. Life would be much simpler and free flowing, more so than now. Patience, lily pad. Patience.
It's not raining on the pleasure though. It's going to be a fine afternoon when the stars line up and there's time to make the incisions and time to allow them to heal up enough to make good utility of the hand afterward. It's gonna be swell, it's gonna be swell. I'm looking forward to finally starting the smiling portion, the "because it's what I want" portion.
///Basement Jaxx - "Hot & Cold"
Years later, I am happy still to have the daily reminder because without it I would forget and there are things that must never be forgotten or glossed over. The older ones were there for a warning and also for a reminder. I do believe I've been familiar enough and known enough that they serve much less in the capacity of a warning and much more in the capacity of a daily reminder to never go back. No matter how desperate. No matter how ... imagine a perfect storm of circumstances ... no matter how "that". And I'm glad because without them I would cycle back. A daily hard stop. I'm glad my occasional congeniality shows through too. 85% of the time, I'm alright or able to figure a way back to right 100% of the time. 15% of the time, probably more, the outcomes are not at all acceptable.
I am really looking forward to finishing my paw. It's going to be a ton of fun slitting things open and the entire attendant processes. The thing that makes the difference and turns the key over is the performance of the hobby and valve check in a positive light. Happy reminders. When I started it, the thing began as a reminder of the power and ability to destroy. That whenever I picked up my left hand, whenever it touched me, whenever it touched anything, there would be a constant reminder of the terrible abilities it had.
Drawing the tattoo, the scarification in that region, to a close is going to come with a lot of happiness. Completing the drawing is going to be a constant reminder of the good power can do. The terrific beast that requires a constant leash can close its teeth to create, not only destroy.
My father still populates my dreams sometimes. I really did think it could be possible to kill him there and eliminate him completely. Not entirely true. Around the fourth time that it happened, him popping up in my dreamscape without reason, want, or control, I realized, snapping awake that my circuits have replaced spiders with his face. I'm laughing because I used to be an arachnophobe and when I would go prancing in dreamland, more often than not if there was something I was supposed to wake up for, my factory would dump spiders into the dream somehow and I would snap awake. Until I conquered my fear of spiders. There's not much that hard lines me to full alert these days beyond him within 10 feet of me. I suppose I'm stuck with that cardboard cut out flag for hard stops until I stumble upon something else worth fearing.
It's kind of funny the way it happens too. It's not horror movie sudden. The wickerman starts appearing and eventually I just get so frustrated that I wake out of dream states. I wish he was dead already. Life would be much simpler and free flowing, more so than now. Patience, lily pad. Patience.
It's not raining on the pleasure though. It's going to be a fine afternoon when the stars line up and there's time to make the incisions and time to allow them to heal up enough to make good utility of the hand afterward. It's gonna be swell, it's gonna be swell. I'm looking forward to finally starting the smiling portion, the "because it's what I want" portion.
///Basement Jaxx - "Hot & Cold"
4/18/15
That Instant
you realize your desk weighs 250 lbs by itself, not counting the cinder blocks its on top of, and flipping it is not an option and you realize you have to find another way to breathe and regret a little bit building your desk out of a standing piano. Nix!
9/27/13
Stand Up Act 8 (stoneissuers, night work, handouts and nickle go)
(Stand Up Act 7)
Goddamn stoners. God fucking damn stoners. I don't have a problem with them for the most part. I really don't. Pot is legal in more states than anyone could have imagined three years ago. Not even a decade, just three years. Unless I'm completely off and time has been moving faster than I thought. Or slower than I thought. I'm not good with time. It has nothing to do with drugs, just alcohol. And college. In college everything is oriented to due dates and when you need to wash your clothes because you're going home to your parents and they reek of the actual world instead of the bubble they built for themselves wherever. I'm not good with time, but pot is legal and it's great. It should be legal. There is nothing wrong with it at all.
All kinds of legal things turn people into worthless sacks of shit all of the time and they're fine. Weed doesn't even do that to people on a consistent basis. If you smoke a pound of weed a month you will be in much better shape than the person who eats ten pounds of candy a month. To the point though, I don't hate smokers or pot smokers, but stoners are a bit different. Stoners are that one shade further beyond the smoker, for better and for worse.
Some stoners need that extra nudge to push and motivate and inspire them to operate and create and shove work through and enjoy other people and enjoy the chase of life in general. Some stoners like that extra nudge to mooch and coast, but not just coast, but accelerate, and entertain and smooth their own course through the path of least resistance, not as a way of escape or relaxation, but as a way to live.
Everything takes on the slight pale of life and death once they enter the circle. A routine trip to the gas station becomes a twenty minute conversation on the meaning of life and how hard it is to survive in the real world and if God hadn't created the man who created the coldcut sandwich the world as we know it would be horribly altered and disfigured to the point where walking out of your front door would be suicide. Jesus christ, calm down. We're gonna get food. I know you couldn't bring yourself to leave your front door without someone walking with you, but for fucks sake, it's not the end of the world. Not by a long shot.
I'm even okay with adventurous stoners. The kind that get really high and then want to operate. I'm a little bit of an adventure stoner streaker myself from time to time. I know it's obnoxious in some ways. It doesn't mean that I don't do it and want to push other people to, but I am that, and I'm never really all that sad when people shoot me down. When I'm smoking, "I just had the absolute greatest idea ever" is the last thing you want to hear out of my mouth. For one: it's probably a way too elaborate or distant quest to achieve a goal unique to me that I couldn't do without other people there (everything from playing some sort of multiplayer only game to crossing some distance to see or buy something much better crossed in a car). For two: there's probably a good chance someone might actually get hurt (adds to the allure of the adventure. When you have bad credit all you have is yourself, so while you gamble with imaginary numbers and scores, I gamble with my body... because I have no credit). And for three: by the time the idea comes out of my mouth, no one feels like moving. I'm okay with that.
The stoner I can no longer stand is the stoneissuer. The girl or guy who always wants to know what you have and then compares it to other high end "brands" they've had. No one asked you. Literally, no one asked you for your opinion on how this stacks up to Phonecase White Palidin (insert semi-obscure flower phylum here).
Yes, that's why I invited you over: to stick your nose into my bag and not shake your head, but give me the "weird" eye and ask the admonishing question of "how much did you pay for this." I'm begging the question in offering it, aren't I. I needed your expertise. I wasn't just bored the fuck out of my mind and out of videos to jerk off to and thought it might be fun to have someone else to talk to for an evening. No, I wanted your sharp nose and your ten point critique of what is essentially free weed for you. I'm not basically paying for your company like a truck driver picking up some fawn eyed drifter for a few hours of bullshitting til the next stop.
You asked to drop by and what I wanted you to do was pull out your pocket scale and shake your head and tell me I was lied to and it was almost a gram light and repeat over and over again that back home you wouldn't have paid over X amount of dollars for what I had while you ground up your Panda Blue Light Special shipped in from the west coast.
The stoneissuer is particularly distasteful because as soon as theirs runs out you are the first one they call. You are the first one they try to buddy up with and then they come over and try to be modest about how much they are taking and go out of their way to point it out that they are somehow doing you a favor because what they usually get is more pure and they're not used to smoking a gentler high and the taste is way off but they can get accustomed to it. Meanwhile the baseball bat in the corner keeps chirping in your ear "come on, just do it," but I love company more than my own sometimes and know better than to act out and act out of rage. Most of the time.
The stoneissuer will trash talk you sideways. The kind of person who, in a race, would nudge your back end out and force you off the road to get ahead and then say "well, I was holding my same racing line, but you were diverting from your own to hold me back, so it's kind of your fault you spun out into sand on your last lap." They will passive attack in attempts to try to insure and assert their value to the group as the token expert, without realizing that no one really cares as long as they get something out of experience.
Stoneissuers are usually descended from higher, no pun intended, echelons of the hierarchy of smokers. Rich folks all too often, trying to distance themselves, but be included in, the experience. The thing that makes them the most distasteful is that, if they aren't already motivated to stay away from the lower grades for the fact that moving up is sort of a socioeconomic graduation and going backward implies some sort of failure in tastes or earning power or status, as soon as their shit runs out and they go enough days without it, they're right back with you. Suddenly what made them curl their lips and flare their nostrils and roll their eyes like you just said One Direction is the greatest band to grace the face of the Earth, becomes "hey, that's not so bad. I kind of feel it." Suddenly "how much did you pay for that" and "you got ripped off" turns into "that's pretty good" and "is it alright if I steal some more?"
Yeah, it's fine, but nightwork is great. I think I realized one of the reasons why I like working night shifts so much, and it's nothing profound. It comes down to the fact that I don't give all that much of a shit when it comes to my clothes. It's not a complete abandon fueled by the functionality of homeless people. Nothing close to that. I have no one to impress so it makes no sense to impress people.
Sometimes it's a matter of detailing. Everyone likes a well detailed car or house, why not clothing. I am sometimes gripped by the thrill of matching. It's real. I am aware of my body and I ride in my body all the time. Everyone does. When things match, it's easier to not notice it and when you do notice it, you have color cues to make that understanding zip through your brain that much faster and then, that much faster, you can carry on being yourself. For the same reason I don't read too much into people obsessed with matching. It really is a matter of cutting down variables and freeing up much more, or at least that much more, free time and better yet, uninterrupted thought and brain space. That's pretty damn valuable for the small price of picking out clothing beforehand.
Consider when you're deep in thought after work, pulling the day in front of your eyes like that choppy 8mm film on the two spools that burns up if you leave it in front of the lens too long. That stuff your parents parents watched home videos of themselves on in dusty attics or family renunion Wonder Times grainy video project screen things or whatever it was they did kind of things.
That spool is running and you're trying to figure out ways to do that again, but without that 45 seconds of frames in the lunch break room where you put the pack of coffee filters you didn't pay for in your locker and that 72 second stretch of frames where you could've and also would've done your job better because you actually do care, but come off wrong sometimes over the phone. That spool is running and right in the middle of it. When you are beginning to build some understanding, it switches to a high definition video of rally cross for an hour compressed into ten seconds and switches back. Bad news.
That's what makes night work so great. It takes the work out of work. You can up and go with pants with their crotch completely ripped out and no one gives a shit and it already blends in with rest of the night because the lighting is so poor so even if you did look down it wouldn't matter because you can't see anything. It's a near perfect situation. Everything is dark and everything follows that dark pattern so even if someone did think they could see something, they wouldn't be able to really know beyond what's inside their own head and everyone knows as much as half of what's in their is bullshit anyway.
Nobody wants handouts. Sometimes you have to help your dealers, because some of them do it for a living and are subject to market forces same as any kind of investor. The truth is there are two sorts of dealers. There are the shorters and the careers. The shorters are on a temporary schedule. Volatile products and volatile prices. They're on the get wealthy very quickly and retire permanently track or supplementary income (McDonalds) track.
Sometimes you have to help folks out.
"Do you want some gas money? I can just bring you some money for gas. I don't want anything right now."
"You might as well take it though. You can use it for something is all I'm saying."
"I know, but I would rather have the money for later, 'cause there isn't a bank I can go to is what I mean. That's you're issue right now."
"If you just take this right now, I'm fine with that. I just need to put gas in my car because I had to push it off the street when the engine stopped."
Pineapple Express backwards. I always feel a little bad when my parting words are "hey, take care of yourself." Even when nothing is given, the sentiment itself implies the person it's directed to is completely incapable of and must be reminded to do better by their machinery. Nobody wants hand outs. Ever.
Happiness is contagious. I'll give you a nickle both to go down either road A or road B. Whichever makes me happy as I go is the one I'm taking.
Goddamn stoners. God fucking damn stoners. I don't have a problem with them for the most part. I really don't. Pot is legal in more states than anyone could have imagined three years ago. Not even a decade, just three years. Unless I'm completely off and time has been moving faster than I thought. Or slower than I thought. I'm not good with time. It has nothing to do with drugs, just alcohol. And college. In college everything is oriented to due dates and when you need to wash your clothes because you're going home to your parents and they reek of the actual world instead of the bubble they built for themselves wherever. I'm not good with time, but pot is legal and it's great. It should be legal. There is nothing wrong with it at all.
All kinds of legal things turn people into worthless sacks of shit all of the time and they're fine. Weed doesn't even do that to people on a consistent basis. If you smoke a pound of weed a month you will be in much better shape than the person who eats ten pounds of candy a month. To the point though, I don't hate smokers or pot smokers, but stoners are a bit different. Stoners are that one shade further beyond the smoker, for better and for worse.
Some stoners need that extra nudge to push and motivate and inspire them to operate and create and shove work through and enjoy other people and enjoy the chase of life in general. Some stoners like that extra nudge to mooch and coast, but not just coast, but accelerate, and entertain and smooth their own course through the path of least resistance, not as a way of escape or relaxation, but as a way to live.
Everything takes on the slight pale of life and death once they enter the circle. A routine trip to the gas station becomes a twenty minute conversation on the meaning of life and how hard it is to survive in the real world and if God hadn't created the man who created the coldcut sandwich the world as we know it would be horribly altered and disfigured to the point where walking out of your front door would be suicide. Jesus christ, calm down. We're gonna get food. I know you couldn't bring yourself to leave your front door without someone walking with you, but for fucks sake, it's not the end of the world. Not by a long shot.
I'm even okay with adventurous stoners. The kind that get really high and then want to operate. I'm a little bit of an adventure stoner streaker myself from time to time. I know it's obnoxious in some ways. It doesn't mean that I don't do it and want to push other people to, but I am that, and I'm never really all that sad when people shoot me down. When I'm smoking, "I just had the absolute greatest idea ever" is the last thing you want to hear out of my mouth. For one: it's probably a way too elaborate or distant quest to achieve a goal unique to me that I couldn't do without other people there (everything from playing some sort of multiplayer only game to crossing some distance to see or buy something much better crossed in a car). For two: there's probably a good chance someone might actually get hurt (adds to the allure of the adventure. When you have bad credit all you have is yourself, so while you gamble with imaginary numbers and scores, I gamble with my body... because I have no credit). And for three: by the time the idea comes out of my mouth, no one feels like moving. I'm okay with that.
The stoner I can no longer stand is the stoneissuer. The girl or guy who always wants to know what you have and then compares it to other high end "brands" they've had. No one asked you. Literally, no one asked you for your opinion on how this stacks up to Phonecase White Palidin (insert semi-obscure flower phylum here).
Yes, that's why I invited you over: to stick your nose into my bag and not shake your head, but give me the "weird" eye and ask the admonishing question of "how much did you pay for this." I'm begging the question in offering it, aren't I. I needed your expertise. I wasn't just bored the fuck out of my mind and out of videos to jerk off to and thought it might be fun to have someone else to talk to for an evening. No, I wanted your sharp nose and your ten point critique of what is essentially free weed for you. I'm not basically paying for your company like a truck driver picking up some fawn eyed drifter for a few hours of bullshitting til the next stop.
You asked to drop by and what I wanted you to do was pull out your pocket scale and shake your head and tell me I was lied to and it was almost a gram light and repeat over and over again that back home you wouldn't have paid over X amount of dollars for what I had while you ground up your Panda Blue Light Special shipped in from the west coast.
The stoneissuer is particularly distasteful because as soon as theirs runs out you are the first one they call. You are the first one they try to buddy up with and then they come over and try to be modest about how much they are taking and go out of their way to point it out that they are somehow doing you a favor because what they usually get is more pure and they're not used to smoking a gentler high and the taste is way off but they can get accustomed to it. Meanwhile the baseball bat in the corner keeps chirping in your ear "come on, just do it," but I love company more than my own sometimes and know better than to act out and act out of rage. Most of the time.
The stoneissuer will trash talk you sideways. The kind of person who, in a race, would nudge your back end out and force you off the road to get ahead and then say "well, I was holding my same racing line, but you were diverting from your own to hold me back, so it's kind of your fault you spun out into sand on your last lap." They will passive attack in attempts to try to insure and assert their value to the group as the token expert, without realizing that no one really cares as long as they get something out of experience.
Stoneissuers are usually descended from higher, no pun intended, echelons of the hierarchy of smokers. Rich folks all too often, trying to distance themselves, but be included in, the experience. The thing that makes them the most distasteful is that, if they aren't already motivated to stay away from the lower grades for the fact that moving up is sort of a socioeconomic graduation and going backward implies some sort of failure in tastes or earning power or status, as soon as their shit runs out and they go enough days without it, they're right back with you. Suddenly what made them curl their lips and flare their nostrils and roll their eyes like you just said One Direction is the greatest band to grace the face of the Earth, becomes "hey, that's not so bad. I kind of feel it." Suddenly "how much did you pay for that" and "you got ripped off" turns into "that's pretty good" and "is it alright if I steal some more?"
Yeah, it's fine, but nightwork is great. I think I realized one of the reasons why I like working night shifts so much, and it's nothing profound. It comes down to the fact that I don't give all that much of a shit when it comes to my clothes. It's not a complete abandon fueled by the functionality of homeless people. Nothing close to that. I have no one to impress so it makes no sense to impress people.
Sometimes it's a matter of detailing. Everyone likes a well detailed car or house, why not clothing. I am sometimes gripped by the thrill of matching. It's real. I am aware of my body and I ride in my body all the time. Everyone does. When things match, it's easier to not notice it and when you do notice it, you have color cues to make that understanding zip through your brain that much faster and then, that much faster, you can carry on being yourself. For the same reason I don't read too much into people obsessed with matching. It really is a matter of cutting down variables and freeing up much more, or at least that much more, free time and better yet, uninterrupted thought and brain space. That's pretty damn valuable for the small price of picking out clothing beforehand.
Consider when you're deep in thought after work, pulling the day in front of your eyes like that choppy 8mm film on the two spools that burns up if you leave it in front of the lens too long. That stuff your parents parents watched home videos of themselves on in dusty attics or family renunion Wonder Times grainy video project screen things or whatever it was they did kind of things.
That spool is running and you're trying to figure out ways to do that again, but without that 45 seconds of frames in the lunch break room where you put the pack of coffee filters you didn't pay for in your locker and that 72 second stretch of frames where you could've and also would've done your job better because you actually do care, but come off wrong sometimes over the phone. That spool is running and right in the middle of it. When you are beginning to build some understanding, it switches to a high definition video of rally cross for an hour compressed into ten seconds and switches back. Bad news.
That's what makes night work so great. It takes the work out of work. You can up and go with pants with their crotch completely ripped out and no one gives a shit and it already blends in with rest of the night because the lighting is so poor so even if you did look down it wouldn't matter because you can't see anything. It's a near perfect situation. Everything is dark and everything follows that dark pattern so even if someone did think they could see something, they wouldn't be able to really know beyond what's inside their own head and everyone knows as much as half of what's in their is bullshit anyway.
Nobody wants handouts. Sometimes you have to help your dealers, because some of them do it for a living and are subject to market forces same as any kind of investor. The truth is there are two sorts of dealers. There are the shorters and the careers. The shorters are on a temporary schedule. Volatile products and volatile prices. They're on the get wealthy very quickly and retire permanently track or supplementary income (McDonalds) track.
Sometimes you have to help folks out.
"Do you want some gas money? I can just bring you some money for gas. I don't want anything right now."
"You might as well take it though. You can use it for something is all I'm saying."
"I know, but I would rather have the money for later, 'cause there isn't a bank I can go to is what I mean. That's you're issue right now."
"If you just take this right now, I'm fine with that. I just need to put gas in my car because I had to push it off the street when the engine stopped."
Pineapple Express backwards. I always feel a little bad when my parting words are "hey, take care of yourself." Even when nothing is given, the sentiment itself implies the person it's directed to is completely incapable of and must be reminded to do better by their machinery. Nobody wants hand outs. Ever.
Happiness is contagious. I'll give you a nickle both to go down either road A or road B. Whichever makes me happy as I go is the one I'm taking.
10/4/12
Dogging It and the Winter Manifesto
Yep, I have been dogging it, for lack of artistic direction. I've become consumed with the immediate and unable to find the magic, the whimsy. The press of culture has been stifling. The pressure of fitting into some kind of God damned role has been palpable, or I should say, more palpable than in past weeks and months and years even. I keep looking up and asking myself if this is all there is and I have been pounding my fist on the table with six empty chairs around it and rattling nothing more than my own glass.
There is no such thing as a dry spell. I know it is all still there, still pouring, still palpitating. What I want to get at, however, is after the flow. I am storing metaphor and analogy and analysis, but not having tapped the vein I want I have limbs dying for overdose and infection. "Eating heroin is one thing, but injecting it is another." Probably the funniest thing I heard this year. The funniest admonishment. It burns my ass sometimes to hear people complain about things that are fairly simply resolved. Hilarious in some ways. Met up with a friend of mine at the local hole and he told me about another friend who had a fiberglass, nuclear white, road bike.
Turned out the guy was high as fuck on mescaline and out for a joy ride and he rode with him up to his place and the guy just housed the hill there. Should I feel bad for feeling inspired?
I've (enter apostrophetics) been dogging it none the less. I can't describe the feeling. If you've ever read the phantom tollbooth you know what the love affair of language can be like. Sometimes she wears lace. Sometimes he wears the same lace the last time you had to suck him off for a solid hour because he lied about not jerking off before he came over and you found out second hand from his other friend he was banging beers back with before he decided to ring you up and now your neck hurts when you tip your head backward to drink water the morning after.
The point is, he doesn't realize you would be more than happy to throttle his neck the same and watch his eyes start to pop out until they turned back and up into his eyelids and the tears ran down your hands because that's what gets you off.
And that just turned way angry and too honest. I don't know. I can't speak to human engineering because I don't know enough, but I absolutely believe that engineering can be trumped by training. The problem and the pitfall is the belief and extrapolation from that idea that training can be unlearned. Somehow the incorporation, the building of the structure can be as easily or possibly as difficulty and painstakingly deconstructed. The question arises: if you have 24 years of programming and construction and habituation built into your psyche, how many years will it take to reprogram, reconstruct, repurpose, and rehabilitate those patterns into new ones? If it takes, just drawing cards from my own deck of experience, twenty minutes to demolish a level 3 Revell GT 500 painstakingly constructed over two weeks, it should be fairly easy. That's my deck.
It's been hard. Real hard. Violently hard. Violently happy. To the point where people know me well enough that I have to actively push away opportunities to ...I'm not a destroyer. But I know I am. I know I can be a creator too. I used to be. I used to create willy nilly and I still do, but the work goes into that. The creating. The destruction comes naturally. I'm not a big guy by any stretch, but I never thought five years ago I would ever be comfortable popping someone's eye with my thumb. Yeah, it was salty. Not good salty either. Like, I do not know how to describe it. It was like the saline was an afterthought. I did not realize, at all, how much energy I was burning to be, but I've felt the exhaustion of it, of late. It's been taxing. Who to tell what and how much. I'm rambling.
I know. I have been dogging it. Not on the low roads though. I'm kind of surprised some times how easy it's been. Violence as language. I think the Auralport has been a lot of language as violence. Which is a start, but not enough of a start. There's no point in conquest you can't talk about. No entryway. No friends. I just laughed saying that out loud. I am not an animal. I build models with tweezers. Still do. I suppose that is not making me any less creepy. I have fallen off. Maybe fallen in to. Something. Fighting fair is a sad man's game.
I am not an animal, but I am trying to work my way back to the human side of the master equation.
And so I present to you the Winter manifesto:
Do good. Do not just be better within yourself, because that is not enough. Be better within, and for, others sake. Do not just see stars, but see horses and do not steal them, only enjoy their being and watch and maybe tip a hat to that wilderness, but do not beg to be the center. Do not fight this winter, for any reason. Physically. Because you have one body and one set of knuckles and you have enough years on them to make making it past forty a probability instead of a certainty. Lose no more fractions of teeth. Put together your works and compose for compositions sake alone because recognition is fool's gold and the short path to the quitter's raga. Be bright and not literally, but for light's sake. Be motivated and train and not for the sake of preparations for conflict, however, be prepared to defend yourself, and only in defense cause a mother fu$$ing ruckus. Finish the twenty thousand words to your book you left hanging two years ago. No Damoclesean swords. Less reference. Clearer analogy. And I don't know how much further I should take it because I've already stepped into the boundary between what I know I can do and what I know I know I may not be able to do.
The Winter manifesto is this: take it head on and do not fear the cool.
The trees talk to me in summer, at night when the moon is out. I am looking forward to their silence and the peace of the death of the ground beneath my feet. I am looking forward to reclaiming the night that I leased to the summer and all her passerby and the bullshit.
I survived another season. I know the next two will be beautiful.
Redesigns coming soon.
///Sneaker Pimps - "How Do" I grew up on sneaker pimps. through the conflict years. them, massive attack, and floyd, and disco. and the orb.
There is no such thing as a dry spell. I know it is all still there, still pouring, still palpitating. What I want to get at, however, is after the flow. I am storing metaphor and analogy and analysis, but not having tapped the vein I want I have limbs dying for overdose and infection. "Eating heroin is one thing, but injecting it is another." Probably the funniest thing I heard this year. The funniest admonishment. It burns my ass sometimes to hear people complain about things that are fairly simply resolved. Hilarious in some ways. Met up with a friend of mine at the local hole and he told me about another friend who had a fiberglass, nuclear white, road bike.
Turned out the guy was high as fuck on mescaline and out for a joy ride and he rode with him up to his place and the guy just housed the hill there. Should I feel bad for feeling inspired?
I've (enter apostrophetics) been dogging it none the less. I can't describe the feeling. If you've ever read the phantom tollbooth you know what the love affair of language can be like. Sometimes she wears lace. Sometimes he wears the same lace the last time you had to suck him off for a solid hour because he lied about not jerking off before he came over and you found out second hand from his other friend he was banging beers back with before he decided to ring you up and now your neck hurts when you tip your head backward to drink water the morning after.
The point is, he doesn't realize you would be more than happy to throttle his neck the same and watch his eyes start to pop out until they turned back and up into his eyelids and the tears ran down your hands because that's what gets you off.
And that just turned way angry and too honest. I don't know. I can't speak to human engineering because I don't know enough, but I absolutely believe that engineering can be trumped by training. The problem and the pitfall is the belief and extrapolation from that idea that training can be unlearned. Somehow the incorporation, the building of the structure can be as easily or possibly as difficulty and painstakingly deconstructed. The question arises: if you have 24 years of programming and construction and habituation built into your psyche, how many years will it take to reprogram, reconstruct, repurpose, and rehabilitate those patterns into new ones? If it takes, just drawing cards from my own deck of experience, twenty minutes to demolish a level 3 Revell GT 500 painstakingly constructed over two weeks, it should be fairly easy. That's my deck.
It's been hard. Real hard. Violently hard. Violently happy. To the point where people know me well enough that I have to actively push away opportunities to ...I'm not a destroyer. But I know I am. I know I can be a creator too. I used to be. I used to create willy nilly and I still do, but the work goes into that. The creating. The destruction comes naturally. I'm not a big guy by any stretch, but I never thought five years ago I would ever be comfortable popping someone's eye with my thumb. Yeah, it was salty. Not good salty either. Like, I do not know how to describe it. It was like the saline was an afterthought. I did not realize, at all, how much energy I was burning to be, but I've felt the exhaustion of it, of late. It's been taxing. Who to tell what and how much. I'm rambling.
I know. I have been dogging it. Not on the low roads though. I'm kind of surprised some times how easy it's been. Violence as language. I think the Auralport has been a lot of language as violence. Which is a start, but not enough of a start. There's no point in conquest you can't talk about. No entryway. No friends. I just laughed saying that out loud. I am not an animal. I build models with tweezers. Still do. I suppose that is not making me any less creepy. I have fallen off. Maybe fallen in to. Something. Fighting fair is a sad man's game.
I am not an animal, but I am trying to work my way back to the human side of the master equation.
And so I present to you the Winter manifesto:
Do good. Do not just be better within yourself, because that is not enough. Be better within, and for, others sake. Do not just see stars, but see horses and do not steal them, only enjoy their being and watch and maybe tip a hat to that wilderness, but do not beg to be the center. Do not fight this winter, for any reason. Physically. Because you have one body and one set of knuckles and you have enough years on them to make making it past forty a probability instead of a certainty. Lose no more fractions of teeth. Put together your works and compose for compositions sake alone because recognition is fool's gold and the short path to the quitter's raga. Be bright and not literally, but for light's sake. Be motivated and train and not for the sake of preparations for conflict, however, be prepared to defend yourself, and only in defense cause a mother fu$$ing ruckus. Finish the twenty thousand words to your book you left hanging two years ago. No Damoclesean swords. Less reference. Clearer analogy. And I don't know how much further I should take it because I've already stepped into the boundary between what I know I can do and what I know I know I may not be able to do.
The Winter manifesto is this: take it head on and do not fear the cool.
The trees talk to me in summer, at night when the moon is out. I am looking forward to their silence and the peace of the death of the ground beneath my feet. I am looking forward to reclaiming the night that I leased to the summer and all her passerby and the bullshit.
I survived another season. I know the next two will be beautiful.
Redesigns coming soon.
///Sneaker Pimps - "How Do" I grew up on sneaker pimps. through the conflict years. them, massive attack, and floyd, and disco. and the orb.
12/7/11
Moving Pictures
I have been dodging, though I hope artfully. I have been fairly thick into writing as I should be. I had a bad spate of poetry that was sexual frustration pure and simple. It never got resolved but like the urge to work out or smoke it went away with time so I could get back to imagination. It's still there on the back burner crisping up into something unrecognizable, but it's a thing I can at least be okay with.
Had a major identity crisis. Not really a crisis as much as a realization that there is no way I can use somebody or let somebody use me again. Even if it is a mutual causation, a mutual understanding of the fact of the reduction of the human being to object. Basically I came to the understanding that shifting my expectations of what fucking is backward to the level of what someone else understands it to be, successful or not, is a failure on my part. It gets to the point where trying to meet someone halfway, because they don't believe knives should be involved and pretending you think that is okay with you when you are on the hunt for someone at least as open and screwed in the head case as you and also homosexual and who will not turn pale when you describe your dream date, becomes an effort to use someone to fulfill, by most standards, bad fantasies. And I'm a user of many things, but I will never use a human being. Hell, I would never use an animal for that matter.
I don't care two licks for most classes of emotions just because I don't feel many of them as they relate to relationships and friendships fairly often unless they fall into my pretty obscure and unrecognized code of ethics and procedure, but I do care for the idea of the preservation of happiness. I think that should be the governing principle in life. If everyone did everything they possibly could every day to disappoint the least amount of people... who am I kidding. That would be a terrible policy. On an individual level, an isolated level, it works, but scale it up and you don't have to go far before it produces stinging and awful results.
The point is I have been dodging you. At first I was dodging you because I had nothing to show. Then I had something to show, but I was so long away I was ashamed to return. And then I had something to show and was ashamed and then on top of that I was gone so long I felt what I had to show did not justify the length of the absence. And it went around and around and around until I came to be here to face the music, my own music, an orchestration I gestured on my own, all the while missing you and the me that could still make sentences. The worst is over, again. Missed out on health insurance. Not by my own lack of action. I was excluded because of how the time line fell into place. So I don't have to worry about meds in the short term. Which means I do have to worry. It's aggravating. Disparaging? Is that even the right word? No it is not. Disappointing. Anti-soothed.
I did put together a pair of stories. It was difficult. They were souping up and I ended up forcing both endings because I ran out of time. The problem was that the stories still had a few thousand words to go before they reached reasonable clipping points where they would sew themselves up nicely and I jumped the gun. Not an honest mistake. Just a regular mistake, but sometimes being able to move on to other things is a good thing. It's not like I can't go back and reopen the sutures, dig my fingers back in, and get the knife out. That's the best thing about having them out there in the bin. And they're not complete still births. Some things worked well and part of the work is learning what works and then using the structure and pieces later on to make other things better. Same thing with poetry. Anyway. Rearranging some things to get more out of myself without pushing too far over the line and shutting down.
Take care. I'll try to. I've been thinking of what I actually use facebook for. I think at this point my wall is basically an art space. Just one big ball of expression. An interactive art piece of sorts. I think I'm happy with that. I don't really use it for connecting with people. I don't think people use it for connecting with me. Maybe they do. Maybe it's pretty much as close as some people should get. I think I am okay with that too, most of the time, as anger management and interpersonal relations are not exactly fortes these days. Those social skills keep eroding because I hardly use them. Partly my own fault. Circling the camps. Every time I go in I'm reminded of why I shouldn't be there. So I'll keep balling up art.
Later on.
///Tricky - "Excess" I believe in people being.
Had a major identity crisis. Not really a crisis as much as a realization that there is no way I can use somebody or let somebody use me again. Even if it is a mutual causation, a mutual understanding of the fact of the reduction of the human being to object. Basically I came to the understanding that shifting my expectations of what fucking is backward to the level of what someone else understands it to be, successful or not, is a failure on my part. It gets to the point where trying to meet someone halfway, because they don't believe knives should be involved and pretending you think that is okay with you when you are on the hunt for someone at least as open and screwed in the head case as you and also homosexual and who will not turn pale when you describe your dream date, becomes an effort to use someone to fulfill, by most standards, bad fantasies. And I'm a user of many things, but I will never use a human being. Hell, I would never use an animal for that matter.
I don't care two licks for most classes of emotions just because I don't feel many of them as they relate to relationships and friendships fairly often unless they fall into my pretty obscure and unrecognized code of ethics and procedure, but I do care for the idea of the preservation of happiness. I think that should be the governing principle in life. If everyone did everything they possibly could every day to disappoint the least amount of people... who am I kidding. That would be a terrible policy. On an individual level, an isolated level, it works, but scale it up and you don't have to go far before it produces stinging and awful results.
The point is I have been dodging you. At first I was dodging you because I had nothing to show. Then I had something to show, but I was so long away I was ashamed to return. And then I had something to show and was ashamed and then on top of that I was gone so long I felt what I had to show did not justify the length of the absence. And it went around and around and around until I came to be here to face the music, my own music, an orchestration I gestured on my own, all the while missing you and the me that could still make sentences. The worst is over, again. Missed out on health insurance. Not by my own lack of action. I was excluded because of how the time line fell into place. So I don't have to worry about meds in the short term. Which means I do have to worry. It's aggravating. Disparaging? Is that even the right word? No it is not. Disappointing. Anti-soothed.
I did put together a pair of stories. It was difficult. They were souping up and I ended up forcing both endings because I ran out of time. The problem was that the stories still had a few thousand words to go before they reached reasonable clipping points where they would sew themselves up nicely and I jumped the gun. Not an honest mistake. Just a regular mistake, but sometimes being able to move on to other things is a good thing. It's not like I can't go back and reopen the sutures, dig my fingers back in, and get the knife out. That's the best thing about having them out there in the bin. And they're not complete still births. Some things worked well and part of the work is learning what works and then using the structure and pieces later on to make other things better. Same thing with poetry. Anyway. Rearranging some things to get more out of myself without pushing too far over the line and shutting down.
Take care. I'll try to. I've been thinking of what I actually use facebook for. I think at this point my wall is basically an art space. Just one big ball of expression. An interactive art piece of sorts. I think I'm happy with that. I don't really use it for connecting with people. I don't think people use it for connecting with me. Maybe they do. Maybe it's pretty much as close as some people should get. I think I am okay with that too, most of the time, as anger management and interpersonal relations are not exactly fortes these days. Those social skills keep eroding because I hardly use them. Partly my own fault. Circling the camps. Every time I go in I'm reminded of why I shouldn't be there. So I'll keep balling up art.
Later on.
///Tricky - "Excess" I believe in people being.
9/17/11
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.
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.
8/16/11
Odd Dreams, Prior Commitments, New Goals and Mystic River
Woke up, fell asleep, appended more dreaming to the previous dream and then woke again. The first dream was me and a family of strangers. The house was enormous. My mother and father were nowhere to be found inside the house and all of the light bulb sockets were empty. The only things left were bits and parts of things that were going to be abandoned that the parents left to me and my siblings to decide if we were going to take them with us or not. It was up to us to pack them all and be outside with the single suitcase we were each allowed to bring to the new home. So we packed.
As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.
We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.
Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.
Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.
The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.
In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.
All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.
As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.
Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.
Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.
It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.
For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.
There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).
The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.
Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.
Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.
So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.
///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.
As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.
We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.
Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.
Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.
The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.
In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.
All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.
As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.
Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.
Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.
It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.
For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.
There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).
The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.
Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.
Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.
So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.
///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.
6/12/11
Brush Your Teeth and Father's Day
I realized today that I don't run out of tooth paste as often as I should. I have been running out of soap on a regular basis. Which is a good thing. Spray paint doesn't wash clothing. Infield sand for some reason stains clothing. Maybe it's because it's some kind of clay. I don't really know. I discovered something today, but I can't really remember what it was so I'm pretty sure that doesn't count as an actual discovery. If the only thing remaining is the place holder that says something happened is there and not the actual thing.
I had this great idea for a series of father's day cards. Basically the idea behind the inspiration was regret. The cards would express the difficult to otherwise express regrets some fathers must feel about their children and then there would be a series of cards that express the pains some children must feel toward their fathers. But it would do it in a very cartoonish Aesop's fables sort of theme. Maybe I'll sketch some up and show you instead of telling you about something that is largely visual.
I splurged on spray paint today. I'm going to get big pieces of poster board later. It's not really poster board. It's cardboard that they wrap pallets of warehoused goods in to protect them from stuff. I have anger issues. Like, the next time I see you I'm gonna twist a beer can in half and paint your face with both hands anger issues. I swear I'm a nice person. I just don't like people that are not nice too.
The entire concept of father's day is silly at best. To be indebted to a human being is a fairly miserable experience. To be indebted to a human being and forced, or at least expected, to sing their praises, even once a year, every year, year after year is amazingly centric and unreal. I suppose there is a difference if it is something that you actually want to do. It reminds me of singing god save the queen when you're locked up in London tower. Or god save the Bushes when you're sitting in a cell in the heat of Texas awaiting trial. Or god bless the driver that smashed my legs to splinters, because without them I would never learn to appreciate life's other gifts. I don't need to be stabbed to appreciate what life is like having not been stabbed in the chest. I do appreciate my physical handicap free life and live it as hard as I can, rain or shine. I can appreciate what life without a father would be like. As far as I can envision it, it probably would have been pretty awesome. I'm pretty sure I don't know exactly what I'm talking about. Slant rhyme logic.
I do know that all I want in the shortest term is for father's day to pass without harassment, guilt tripping, or indictment. That would be swell for once. A dawn of a new era of leave me the fuck alone because I'm done with you fucking with my body and my mind. Hopefully some people can respect that. Pushing back out to a safe distance in full afterburn. It's odd. Well not odd. Normal. If anything, just normal. As normal as things get around here in this region of space. Accepting known threats in favor of unknown ones. I still think about Jee. I still worry from time to time, but less frequently than on the hour, that I will die alone in a vacuum. Not that I believe it to be any less undesirable. Corporeal claustrophobia. The panic. And then the reeducation toward the necessity of a thing. Goodbye cruel world. Hello cruel space. I gotta do better at myself.
I think I might be a stronger person. I'm not really sure. More concrete perhaps. More defined, but stronger possibly closer to not. Different certainly. A realignment of the arbitrary rule set the preserves my sanity and integrity as much as possible. I brush my teeth. I wash. I go to a job. I create. All good things. Things a person should be able to do to warrant a continuation of. An extension of. I'm not doing bad things I don't think. Hell, I fucking brush my teeth. That should count for something. Like some sort of minimum civilized score.
I hit 7 the other day. Haven't churned out 7 pieces in a while. Some were campy, but a handful hit the notes I wanted to hit. Got some software to play notes on my computer using my qwerty board. Might actually be able to make some music in Acid pro. Worked through all of the interactive help segments too. Now I just need to learn how music works. Got an ebook on electronic music years ago. One of those Routledge books. Might actually try and get a physical instrument once I work my way through it. I was very excited when I first got it, but then I also had papers due every week so I didn't have much spare time to read and learn it. Not anymore. Well I still have it. But the free time issue is less of an issue. I've taken a little more to reading in the spare minutes while I'm waiting for things to complete so I can move on to what the days hold next. It's probably a good use of time as I'm trying against my better judgement to try and get a second job. My head will probably collapse in on itself when I do, but I have to try if I'm ever going to successfully fight my way across the bullshit obstacles standing between me and becoming more.
Which I guess brings me back to father's day and moving on. Forgive and forget and all that nonsense. What my mind runs over and over and over when I'm at work. One of the things. Is that when each way forward only exists because of the history. Because of the things done and done to you in the past. It's difficult to move forward without being constantly reminded that the path, whatever path, available is only so because of your points of departure. I guess what I'm trying to say is it's hard to ignore the fucked up nature of a situation when the limited set of solutions only exist because fucked up shit happened in the first place. But I give it a go every day.
It's funny sometimes listening to playoff sports. Listening to them talk about how elimination games are must wins, and this game and that game are must wins. Every day of my life is a must win. Come play with me.
///Moby - "Flower" Work hymns. We all have them. I think an instrument is probably gonna be one of the better ways for me to deal with the now. The diversified fractal now. How I'm gonna get one I have no idea just yet. But till then I plan on dreaming as much as possible. And continuing to brush my teeth for gold stars.
I had this great idea for a series of father's day cards. Basically the idea behind the inspiration was regret. The cards would express the difficult to otherwise express regrets some fathers must feel about their children and then there would be a series of cards that express the pains some children must feel toward their fathers. But it would do it in a very cartoonish Aesop's fables sort of theme. Maybe I'll sketch some up and show you instead of telling you about something that is largely visual.
I splurged on spray paint today. I'm going to get big pieces of poster board later. It's not really poster board. It's cardboard that they wrap pallets of warehoused goods in to protect them from stuff. I have anger issues. Like, the next time I see you I'm gonna twist a beer can in half and paint your face with both hands anger issues. I swear I'm a nice person. I just don't like people that are not nice too.
The entire concept of father's day is silly at best. To be indebted to a human being is a fairly miserable experience. To be indebted to a human being and forced, or at least expected, to sing their praises, even once a year, every year, year after year is amazingly centric and unreal. I suppose there is a difference if it is something that you actually want to do. It reminds me of singing god save the queen when you're locked up in London tower. Or god save the Bushes when you're sitting in a cell in the heat of Texas awaiting trial. Or god bless the driver that smashed my legs to splinters, because without them I would never learn to appreciate life's other gifts. I don't need to be stabbed to appreciate what life is like having not been stabbed in the chest. I do appreciate my physical handicap free life and live it as hard as I can, rain or shine. I can appreciate what life without a father would be like. As far as I can envision it, it probably would have been pretty awesome. I'm pretty sure I don't know exactly what I'm talking about. Slant rhyme logic.
I do know that all I want in the shortest term is for father's day to pass without harassment, guilt tripping, or indictment. That would be swell for once. A dawn of a new era of leave me the fuck alone because I'm done with you fucking with my body and my mind. Hopefully some people can respect that. Pushing back out to a safe distance in full afterburn. It's odd. Well not odd. Normal. If anything, just normal. As normal as things get around here in this region of space. Accepting known threats in favor of unknown ones. I still think about Jee. I still worry from time to time, but less frequently than on the hour, that I will die alone in a vacuum. Not that I believe it to be any less undesirable. Corporeal claustrophobia. The panic. And then the reeducation toward the necessity of a thing. Goodbye cruel world. Hello cruel space. I gotta do better at myself.
I think I might be a stronger person. I'm not really sure. More concrete perhaps. More defined, but stronger possibly closer to not. Different certainly. A realignment of the arbitrary rule set the preserves my sanity and integrity as much as possible. I brush my teeth. I wash. I go to a job. I create. All good things. Things a person should be able to do to warrant a continuation of. An extension of. I'm not doing bad things I don't think. Hell, I fucking brush my teeth. That should count for something. Like some sort of minimum civilized score.
I hit 7 the other day. Haven't churned out 7 pieces in a while. Some were campy, but a handful hit the notes I wanted to hit. Got some software to play notes on my computer using my qwerty board. Might actually be able to make some music in Acid pro. Worked through all of the interactive help segments too. Now I just need to learn how music works. Got an ebook on electronic music years ago. One of those Routledge books. Might actually try and get a physical instrument once I work my way through it. I was very excited when I first got it, but then I also had papers due every week so I didn't have much spare time to read and learn it. Not anymore. Well I still have it. But the free time issue is less of an issue. I've taken a little more to reading in the spare minutes while I'm waiting for things to complete so I can move on to what the days hold next. It's probably a good use of time as I'm trying against my better judgement to try and get a second job. My head will probably collapse in on itself when I do, but I have to try if I'm ever going to successfully fight my way across the bullshit obstacles standing between me and becoming more.
Which I guess brings me back to father's day and moving on. Forgive and forget and all that nonsense. What my mind runs over and over and over when I'm at work. One of the things. Is that when each way forward only exists because of the history. Because of the things done and done to you in the past. It's difficult to move forward without being constantly reminded that the path, whatever path, available is only so because of your points of departure. I guess what I'm trying to say is it's hard to ignore the fucked up nature of a situation when the limited set of solutions only exist because fucked up shit happened in the first place. But I give it a go every day.
It's funny sometimes listening to playoff sports. Listening to them talk about how elimination games are must wins, and this game and that game are must wins. Every day of my life is a must win. Come play with me.
///Moby - "Flower" Work hymns. We all have them. I think an instrument is probably gonna be one of the better ways for me to deal with the now. The diversified fractal now. How I'm gonna get one I have no idea just yet. But till then I plan on dreaming as much as possible. And continuing to brush my teeth for gold stars.
2/23/11
The Fringeness of Earnesty and High Cycles
I'm sort of coming to realize, well first of all I think I've been talking too much again, but I'm sort of coming to realize that I am a fringe personality. I was pretty delusional back in 2004. I thought I was cooler than the other side of the pillow beneath the boss cat's hipster transformers cartoon printed footie pajamas. Then I started to see the full Lawrence of Arabia letterbox landscape of who I was. Then even seeing that I started to believe again. Then I thought maybe the strangeness was the strangeness of perhaps a Kramer and desirable for the sake of its own quirks and prats. Now I'm beginning to understand that what it is really is the quality of fringe. I was beginning to think about what I could do to tear that away and assume a lower charge. No clue. My charge is way too high. By the time I get near to people I'm ravenous for company and traveling at speeds that break bones and all of me wants to talk at once. Not that quiet is a bad thing. I'm a fantastically introverted extrovert. I couldn't live with me. I shouldn't expect other people to. Right?
Well anyway, I'm going to try and keep these shorter. There's no lightness to being. There's no likeness to seeing. I'm camping at the edges of some things I shouldn't be near. Not that they keep calling me, but it's more like a landmark that lets me navigate the rest of the solid world. Or not even that. I have a hard time keeping track of progression. The importance of cause and effect is. I suspect the problem might be that I am difficult to relate to, but with slight effort able to be comprehended and possessing sightlines worth following when I am close to my best, and I am violent, obscure, unpredictable, melancholy, intensely introspective, restless, and largely inchoate and impossible to relate to when I am not near my best. Problematic. But at least I'm starting to understand how or at least why it seems I'm regularly fallen into Kuiper radial movements. I'll stop calling them every weekend. They'll get out the telescopes and rovers and years of planning and clean rooms and staffs of scientists and damage controllers when they're ready to see me blow by along the edges of the perceivable solar system.
I've also realized that my head is most active when I'm turning my motor at work. So now I take notes on my phone. Good. A fine start. Because by the time I'm ready to leave work and I get to my door at home I can't remember half of the things I started in my head while I was there. I'm losing lines. Each object in is another out. So now I can chase the high cycles like dust motes. I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. I guess I thought they'd think I was texting people. Just texting myself. Tracking my information. Taching my spin. My head always seems to run the hottest when I can forget my body or perhaps simply push in the clutch linking it to. Corporeal fault lay line.
Some advances were made at Bits. Not many. I like the layout, but I need to learn how to manipulate the blogger gadgets so I can create my own with proper attribution. Still waiting for the end of the world, but I'm happy to be doing so in a city I love. Let's dance till the sun comes up. I'll bring the scissors. Sometimes they tell me things I don't know.
///Juno Reactor - "Las Vegas Future Past" She runs great. Good idle. Clean title. Half the miles were done a quarter at a time too. Been to Vegas a couple times in it. You ever see one of these wide open on the interstate? It's got a sound like you wouldn't believe.
Well anyway, I'm going to try and keep these shorter. There's no lightness to being. There's no likeness to seeing. I'm camping at the edges of some things I shouldn't be near. Not that they keep calling me, but it's more like a landmark that lets me navigate the rest of the solid world. Or not even that. I have a hard time keeping track of progression. The importance of cause and effect is. I suspect the problem might be that I am difficult to relate to, but with slight effort able to be comprehended and possessing sightlines worth following when I am close to my best, and I am violent, obscure, unpredictable, melancholy, intensely introspective, restless, and largely inchoate and impossible to relate to when I am not near my best. Problematic. But at least I'm starting to understand how or at least why it seems I'm regularly fallen into Kuiper radial movements. I'll stop calling them every weekend. They'll get out the telescopes and rovers and years of planning and clean rooms and staffs of scientists and damage controllers when they're ready to see me blow by along the edges of the perceivable solar system.
I've also realized that my head is most active when I'm turning my motor at work. So now I take notes on my phone. Good. A fine start. Because by the time I'm ready to leave work and I get to my door at home I can't remember half of the things I started in my head while I was there. I'm losing lines. Each object in is another out. So now I can chase the high cycles like dust motes. I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. I guess I thought they'd think I was texting people. Just texting myself. Tracking my information. Taching my spin. My head always seems to run the hottest when I can forget my body or perhaps simply push in the clutch linking it to. Corporeal fault lay line.
Some advances were made at Bits. Not many. I like the layout, but I need to learn how to manipulate the blogger gadgets so I can create my own with proper attribution. Still waiting for the end of the world, but I'm happy to be doing so in a city I love. Let's dance till the sun comes up. I'll bring the scissors. Sometimes they tell me things I don't know.
///Juno Reactor - "Las Vegas Future Past" She runs great. Good idle. Clean title. Half the miles were done a quarter at a time too. Been to Vegas a couple times in it. You ever see one of these wide open on the interstate? It's got a sound like you wouldn't believe.
8/8/10
Bits for Flames Front Page is Done!
Click the screenshot to see it close up. I am so thrilled and tired and thrilled. The only thing missing is the "about" and "contact" links. I dropped out that entire poor excuse for a nav bar because it was making the page way too long and chunky and it is awesome without it. God damn, if you could see me smiling right now. I almost don't know what to do with myself. I feel like a kid who just finished a macaroni and glue master piece and I want to show everyone my grimy piece of paper. That's how happy I am.
///Aim-"Fall Break" I am looking forward to an Autumn that'll cool summer's misgivings and rages and bruises.
///Aim-"Fall Break" I am looking forward to an Autumn that'll cool summer's misgivings and rages and bruises.
3/30/10
8/20/09
sex laws
heres a quickie for you. youre gonna like this. its that abc family humor we've all come to adore here in america.
chelsea handler.
thats it. thats the joke. get it? shes a train wreck of a human being who has made her fame on drinking fluids like a storm drain and collecting cocks stains on her polymer infused face like ... uhm ... HAH like a sham wow. as seen on tv. look it up. and the best part is shes on late night just in time for you to go to bed and your kids to get up and learn how adults behave. she probably needs to swallow a box of serrated paper clips.
no but the joke... the quickie is... sex laws. right? bear with.
so as guys get to liking a woman more then tend to contain their functions... but as women get to liking men more they tend to release them. so in the final moments before marriage its the guy trying not to rip out the greasiest fart of his life and the girl simply letting the ropey knots of fumes fly faster than cloth coils off a boat chugging out of the hudson bay at full steam and moored at the wrong end.
that analogy was way too long. but i hope it was graphic enough for you to taste the moment. funny, no? no, probably not. i understand. i didnt mean to take you that far along. you probably should have gotten off at chelsea handler. sorry bout that.
///david julyan - "the polaroid fades" that feeling when you notice everyone was laughing minutes ago and now theyre all staring every which way, into every corner of the room, but never at eachother, and you notice your cup has gotten warm from your sweating palm and the room is dingy and its 2.30 in the morning and you dont really know what's keeping you there besides wanting to be a part of someone's life. anyone's life.
chelsea handler.
thats it. thats the joke. get it? shes a train wreck of a human being who has made her fame on drinking fluids like a storm drain and collecting cocks stains on her polymer infused face like ... uhm ... HAH like a sham wow. as seen on tv. look it up. and the best part is shes on late night just in time for you to go to bed and your kids to get up and learn how adults behave. she probably needs to swallow a box of serrated paper clips.
no but the joke... the quickie is... sex laws. right? bear with.
so as guys get to liking a woman more then tend to contain their functions... but as women get to liking men more they tend to release them. so in the final moments before marriage its the guy trying not to rip out the greasiest fart of his life and the girl simply letting the ropey knots of fumes fly faster than cloth coils off a boat chugging out of the hudson bay at full steam and moored at the wrong end.
that analogy was way too long. but i hope it was graphic enough for you to taste the moment. funny, no? no, probably not. i understand. i didnt mean to take you that far along. you probably should have gotten off at chelsea handler. sorry bout that.
///david julyan - "the polaroid fades" that feeling when you notice everyone was laughing minutes ago and now theyre all staring every which way, into every corner of the room, but never at eachother, and you notice your cup has gotten warm from your sweating palm and the room is dingy and its 2.30 in the morning and you dont really know what's keeping you there besides wanting to be a part of someone's life. anyone's life.
7/17/08
sunrise? maybe 07/17/08
Subject : sunrise? maybe
Posted Date: : Jul 17, 2008 3:56 AM
I've been thinking about this entry for quite some time. Not this entry, the one before it. Well the one before and also this one since this entry has everything to do with what came before, in most respects.
I'm not going to degrade the concept of perfect and true happiness. Well actually just in saying that I believe everyone can recognize that there is a difference between perfect happiness and true happiness: the former stemming largely from circumstances and the latter being born exclusively from within the self. What I want to point up is that you are right. Life is not about scrounging for happiness or at least it shouldn't be.
Human's are meant to adapt to their circumstances. Adaptations don't occur in a vacuum. Stimulus is imposed on the static situation of existence and adaptation happens. What happens when the stimulus occurs is what we read as happiness, sadness, pain, insecurity, etc. What we do in respsone, how we adapt is what causes us to change, to remain happy, to lift our spirits, to alleviate pain, to frustrate insecurity etc. No person is static. If they are static then they are in affect dead within... a virtual non-person (as far as im concerned). We are always performing to either maintain our emotional levels against stimulus or to change them.
Life is not /about/ scrounging for happiness. it is about survival over varying spans of time. survival through unremitting waves of stimulus and change. stimulus that may last a moment or that may last decades. change that is destructive or constructive. sometimes it's easier to survive... sometimes it's more difficult.
the sunset moment can be easy for some to survive because it can generate happiness and contentment. but it is also a very short spanning moment. perfect happiness is easy to accept and live in and live through. but to be truly happy in such a short spanning moment one would have to be able to adapt to the stimulus of the coming night... or fall into the possible depression that nightfall may precipitate with the loss of perfect circumstantial happiness.
happiness should not be exogenously determined, but when it is it can be easier to feel true happiness. when life's stimuli are definitively negative it takes a strong sense of self to generate truthful and positive responses to adapt to them.
take me for example. not looking for any pity here, but just for examples sake consider the following:
my stimuli in life are (but are not limited to):
75k of loan debt-
joblessness-
a healthy relationship+
some self esteem+
horrible wardrobe-
satisfying location (chicago)+
hobbies+
and the list goes on. these stimuli act with varying strength over varying spans of time. debt is hugely negative and will haunt me for decades. self esteem is a little positive and comes and goes. i live in a nice city everyday. my interest in hobbies comes and goes. my clothing sucks and i have to face that everyday. and there are other things that come and go for varying spans of time... things like sunsets, a particularyly enjoyable commute to school, a nice long vacation, a visit home, a stubbed toe, a reprimand from a professor that lingers on the mind, etc. All of these things are acting on me from the outside and it is up to me to produce countervailing forces or complimentary forces from within myself to survive the ebb and flow over varying time spans.
so its (in my opinion) correct to say that life isnt about scrounging for happiness, but scrounging for happiness within one's self is a necessary part of human survival and maintenance of the self. if that makes any sense at all.
///mum - "weeping rock" probably the best track on their album summer make good. granted the whole album is a departure from the dream states of their previous work... and that sucks cuz their old stuff was damn good... but i cant fault them for change. who wants to here the same shit 90 times in a row. who even plays songs 90 times these days?
Posted Date: : Jul 17, 2008 3:56 AM
I've been thinking about this entry for quite some time. Not this entry, the one before it. Well the one before and also this one since this entry has everything to do with what came before, in most respects.
I'm not going to degrade the concept of perfect and true happiness. Well actually just in saying that I believe everyone can recognize that there is a difference between perfect happiness and true happiness: the former stemming largely from circumstances and the latter being born exclusively from within the self. What I want to point up is that you are right. Life is not about scrounging for happiness or at least it shouldn't be.
Human's are meant to adapt to their circumstances. Adaptations don't occur in a vacuum. Stimulus is imposed on the static situation of existence and adaptation happens. What happens when the stimulus occurs is what we read as happiness, sadness, pain, insecurity, etc. What we do in respsone, how we adapt is what causes us to change, to remain happy, to lift our spirits, to alleviate pain, to frustrate insecurity etc. No person is static. If they are static then they are in affect dead within... a virtual non-person (as far as im concerned). We are always performing to either maintain our emotional levels against stimulus or to change them.
Life is not /about/ scrounging for happiness. it is about survival over varying spans of time. survival through unremitting waves of stimulus and change. stimulus that may last a moment or that may last decades. change that is destructive or constructive. sometimes it's easier to survive... sometimes it's more difficult.
the sunset moment can be easy for some to survive because it can generate happiness and contentment. but it is also a very short spanning moment. perfect happiness is easy to accept and live in and live through. but to be truly happy in such a short spanning moment one would have to be able to adapt to the stimulus of the coming night... or fall into the possible depression that nightfall may precipitate with the loss of perfect circumstantial happiness.
happiness should not be exogenously determined, but when it is it can be easier to feel true happiness. when life's stimuli are definitively negative it takes a strong sense of self to generate truthful and positive responses to adapt to them.
take me for example. not looking for any pity here, but just for examples sake consider the following:
my stimuli in life are (but are not limited to):
75k of loan debt-
joblessness-
a healthy relationship+
some self esteem+
horrible wardrobe-
satisfying location (chicago)+
hobbies+
and the list goes on. these stimuli act with varying strength over varying spans of time. debt is hugely negative and will haunt me for decades. self esteem is a little positive and comes and goes. i live in a nice city everyday. my interest in hobbies comes and goes. my clothing sucks and i have to face that everyday. and there are other things that come and go for varying spans of time... things like sunsets, a particularyly enjoyable commute to school, a nice long vacation, a visit home, a stubbed toe, a reprimand from a professor that lingers on the mind, etc. All of these things are acting on me from the outside and it is up to me to produce countervailing forces or complimentary forces from within myself to survive the ebb and flow over varying time spans.
so its (in my opinion) correct to say that life isnt about scrounging for happiness, but scrounging for happiness within one's self is a necessary part of human survival and maintenance of the self. if that makes any sense at all.
///mum - "weeping rock" probably the best track on their album summer make good. granted the whole album is a departure from the dream states of their previous work... and that sucks cuz their old stuff was damn good... but i cant fault them for change. who wants to here the same shit 90 times in a row. who even plays songs 90 times these days?
7/30/07
actually this 07/30/07
Subject : actually this
Posted Date: : Jun 30, 2007 7:30 PM
this is how happy i am
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Posted Date: : Jun 30, 2007 7:30 PM
this is how happy i am
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5/27/07
fuck you & hell yes 05/27/07
Subject : fuck you & hell yes | hell no summertime
Posted Date: : May 27, 2007 3:02 AM
fuck you people that do dumb shit like post comments that say things like "hmmm interesting just thought you would want to see this GREAT WEBSITE." if this is you, you should probably not kill yourself. what you should probably not not do is tickle and elephants hind legs until they buckle, causing the elephant to sit on you, possibly asphixiating you with its asshole, but otherwise crushing you to death. it wont be easy finding an elephant... but click HEARE for GRRRREAT WEBSITE where they are giving away 500 dollar tickle sessions. fuck head.
the summer time is awesome. beautiful. depressing. happifying. all that good stuff that reminds you why you love waiting for it, hate it when its ending, and sleep through a lot of it while its here. that being said... my summer time is not awesome. summertime. summer time? who really cares. my summer time is sucking. my lady love is in spain. one of my favorite passtimes (in case it hasnt been made clear yet, masturbation) is not working at all... and i dont have internet access at my desk so my elbows keep going numb cuz im using the half laptop (accidentally ripped the lcd off) i have laying on my bed. the only thing i have to entertain me is my furniture moving job andmy other shit. shit being writing. im going to read a book about narrative design. since i cant seem to win anything at my school narrative wise. they can all go to ... i dont know... fuckin chuckie cheese for all i care. assholes. im just unhappy. not happy with the summer time. i feel like writing some philosophical stories might help me feel less worse. eh. fuck you. hell yes? hell no. i hate summertime.
and one more thing. what the hell is homestyle white gravy anyway! i hate commercials. and bad anime. and i hate how commercials are just taking turns portraying whites and blacks as idiots. what is that racial sparring bullshit. RAWR.
///dj acucrack - "platinum" heavy strobe lights. annoying swells. sore ears. and somehow it keeps feeling good. unlike summer everyday. fucking sound life.
Posted Date: : May 27, 2007 3:02 AM
fuck you people that do dumb shit like post comments that say things like "hmmm interesting just thought you would want to see this GREAT WEBSITE." if this is you, you should probably not kill yourself. what you should probably not not do is tickle and elephants hind legs until they buckle, causing the elephant to sit on you, possibly asphixiating you with its asshole, but otherwise crushing you to death. it wont be easy finding an elephant... but click HEARE for GRRRREAT WEBSITE where they are giving away 500 dollar tickle sessions. fuck head.
the summer time is awesome. beautiful. depressing. happifying. all that good stuff that reminds you why you love waiting for it, hate it when its ending, and sleep through a lot of it while its here. that being said... my summer time is not awesome. summertime. summer time? who really cares. my summer time is sucking. my lady love is in spain. one of my favorite passtimes (in case it hasnt been made clear yet, masturbation) is not working at all... and i dont have internet access at my desk so my elbows keep going numb cuz im using the half laptop (accidentally ripped the lcd off) i have laying on my bed. the only thing i have to entertain me is my furniture moving job andmy other shit. shit being writing. im going to read a book about narrative design. since i cant seem to win anything at my school narrative wise. they can all go to ... i dont know... fuckin chuckie cheese for all i care. assholes. im just unhappy. not happy with the summer time. i feel like writing some philosophical stories might help me feel less worse. eh. fuck you. hell yes? hell no. i hate summertime.
and one more thing. what the hell is homestyle white gravy anyway! i hate commercials. and bad anime. and i hate how commercials are just taking turns portraying whites and blacks as idiots. what is that racial sparring bullshit. RAWR.
///dj acucrack - "platinum" heavy strobe lights. annoying swells. sore ears. and somehow it keeps feeling good. unlike summer everyday. fucking sound life.
5/12/07
and then the telephone started 05/12/07
Subject : and then the telephone started
Posted Date: : May 12, 2007 9:35 PM
the telephone is ringing and im not answering because im busy living at the moment and it requires my attentions.
may 21 i should have more time to do things like sit and ponder. i could have said think but there's something about the word ponder that's reminscent of chucking big smooth rocks into a little lake and hearing the plunk echo off the bottom of a foot bridge while some kid in a wide brimmed twine hat fishes and the sun busies itself with setting.
be back then.
<3
Posted Date: : May 12, 2007 9:35 PM
the telephone is ringing and im not answering because im busy living at the moment and it requires my attentions.
may 21 i should have more time to do things like sit and ponder. i could have said think but there's something about the word ponder that's reminscent of chucking big smooth rocks into a little lake and hearing the plunk echo off the bottom of a foot bridge while some kid in a wide brimmed twine hat fishes and the sun busies itself with setting.
be back then.
<3
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