Nine One One Two

"Every year, exactly this time of year."  Well every since and before.  The tension of the holiday season is already cinching.  Where will you go?  Who will you see?  Who can you adopt for family?  It does make me anxious.  Is alone okay?  OF COURSE!  Why all caps?  Am I crazy?  Did you hear that?  We've talked it over several dozen times and dozens of those more through the years.  Yes, of course it is okay.  No, you are not crazy.

"Pitter patter, my little heart."  It races from time to time.  Little panic attacks.  Solitary is the frontier and solitary it will be.  That's where you work best.  You'll still meet people and see families and couples and the like.  It is certainly less than the usual or equal.  Do not believe that holidays with yourself are anything less than their holidays.  They would be miserable in your concept of a holiday and you would be severely uncomfortable in theirs.  It's okay to peek between the slats from time to time.  That is universal.  Their anxieties are the same as yours with different window dressing and frames.  Rest assured, they feel something too and that is fine.

Nine eleven, however many years out, has changed a lot.  The rage of being denied enlistment has faded.  It only took ...  four ... seven ... shut up!  Far enough away to laugh about how I thought that idea could work.  Thinking back to the earliest years, it is funny to think that I thought I might've been able to make it by as a kept man.  Good god, I would've been far too bored.  Seven plus years separated from the bid to enlist, it has been reaffirmed one hundred times over that I would have gone insane trying to make a career out of it.  As a way to form a base and small nest egg, sure it could've worked, but my lack of mental stability would have failed spectacularly.  Maybe not the first year, maybe not the second year; the chances would have increased exponentially from day .0001.

I'm completely over the war on terror.  There are so many things that have come to light in the intervening time domestically that are so incredibly glaring and depressing.  So many more pressing internal wars that reached cease fires and truces without any actual resolution that are winnable & endable.  The fact that they still exist isn't the surprising thing.  It is.  Cultural change moves at a glacial pace.  As interconnectivity and access to information grows and shortens in its difficulty, the pace feels slower and slower because you can give a person a library of five books and a library of five thousand and it won't change how fast or slowly they choose to read.

Thinking about that day, I remember the anniversary that I couldn't remember for two years (was it three?) until I finally got it right.  Being in relationships is hard.  Do you remember the day you asked me if we were dating?  Kind of.  Is that today?  I don't remember the exact day, but I do remember being nervous as all hell and wondering about it for weeks and if I asked you and you said no would I ask you again or storm out or wait a few weeks and ask you again.  The day that you gave me a lollipop or the day of the formal dance?  Laughing thinking about it now.  I still cannot remember which day it was, but I know that it is a day to remember.  Wherever you are, I am glad that you know that you are loved and I am glad that you are with someone who is a part of you.  The years we spent were not for nothing.  The futures opened.  The years to come are their own.

Solitary progressions.  Nine eleven is also walking beside a cemetery.  A museum of displays and marble hand rails and floor tiles laced in sterling grout.  Rose and magenta tinted chrome and glass.  The past brought to life for a single day.  Compressed, labeled, and plaqued.  The westerly wing of the grand mezzanine of leTauran Atu Gothans, a 78 acre compound.  I don't visit there often.  About once a year, I try to look at the exhibits again.  Sometimes the maintenance men are about and they'll open up a case to let me get a close look at the taxidermy.  It is pretty amazing the way hairs are placed and tacked together to form entire swatches of skin that can stretch over the plaster molds.  The lighting isn't always great, but sometimes the exhibits are moved around to different enclosures to light them better.

I'm nowhere near a writing rut.  I can't stop doing it inside my head.  I have to take the time to do it outside of my head.  Part of how I've adjusted to protect myself from myself has been finding other things to do.  "If you can just stay distracted long enough!"  Out of focus.  I've been trying to do a lot in the physical world, however.  Trying to adjust to the modern world of smarter smart phones.  Trying to adjust to larger work loads and responsibility.  Trying to see the world with a larger lens.

Trying to see more possibilities and potential without getting swallowed whole in their ocean.

For some years, I mourned.

Part of me still does.

The deaths I died.

The deaths of possibilities.  So close to another and another friends birthdays and the lives that faded and blew out like candle wicks.  The scent of the smoke still fresh and undeniable and intoxicating in their aroma.  When does smell memory fade?

9,238 cigarettes before you lose your sense of smell, chief.   Oh.  Thank you, statistician?

I know I haven't been keeping track of holidays or birthdays.  I keep telling myself:  "we're just going to backtrack and bang them all out at once and get caught up to the now, piece of cake!"  That philosophy has fallen completely flat.  Of course I am beating myself up over it.  It is important.  Without consistent data points we cannot know where we are.  Holidays are perfect times for evaluation.  How the hell old am I anyway?  I need to take care of the backlog or at least try to ... at least let go of it.  That time cannot be restored.

Projecting a life span of 75 years with maximum outcomes: you live .205 years each day of your life if every birthday is a new beginning and a new iteration of yourself and you will only live a maximum of 75 years in each iteration.

147 days have passed since your birthday.  You are experiencing the rise of a new adult form convulsing through its last growth bursts.  You will not die soon.  200+ days until you return.  This is a strange time for you.  Adolescence continues to shed.  Try.  The carapace will split and you will free yourself for the wind.  The new skin will harden in the Winter.




Nine eleven is a quarter post of sorts.  So many things changed and so many things continue to.  Resolved to death, yes.  Resolved to its exact date, no.  In meta-jail, I have been granted so many larger and larger play grounds and exercise areas.  I've been granted larger and larger libraries and degrees to work and play on while I spend my time in solitary.  The clock is ticking on the next ring of the compound gates to open and I have to be patient while the paperwork runs through the levels of the office's in/out boxes and gets stamped and I have to go in for interviews and hearings and have good composure and appear civilized and remorseful and hopeful and aware and reticent and reflective and playful, but not too much, and deprecating and confident and ... all at once.  I don't have to do any of that.  I have to wait. I don't know how far out the compound goes, but I heard there is another gate over them hills once they fix to open this one.

As the years tick on, I learn how to be more like you and I learn what the differences actually are between us.  I know we are not the same.  Far from it.  It is incredibly reassuring, as we walk, to understand better what those differences are.

The mission: to leave a map for the next person that is at all like me.  "It's a great big universe!"

What helps get me through is knowing that I wasn't rejected as much as cast away.  There wasn't a fault as much as a rift in the known firm of space and time.  Blame dark matter.  "The stories you told were awful."  I hope that the maps will be artful.  You can only live but for so long with someone who is prone to spontaneous combustion before it changes from an endearing parlor trick to a recurring crisis.

Heave away!

Having an extra $200 shouldn't be life changing at age thirty two.  Something's not right.

Are all of your goals set so low that...  ...no.  Maybe?  Crossroads.  Is that all you wanted to accomplish?  Well, yeah.  For now.  It's pretty neat.  Hmm.  Hmm, what?  It's fine.  The door's over there if you need it.  I'm just saying-.  Don't let it goose you on the way out!

There is a lot of work still to be done and I am avoiding it.  Part of the reason why is because there are too many things I want to do at once and part of it is because I can only live for 12 to 16 hours a day without ending up cycling into spirals that will carry me up or down and anything that forces a deviation from that norm starts the engines that link and power chain reactions that will go in either direction and it is absolutely exhausting walking the rope and having to face constant failures because time ran out or constant failures because time drew on toward infinity.

I don't know what normal is to you.

I don't know what normal means to you.

Will I ever be?

Nowadays nine one one is a thermometer.  The potentials continue to cool while the core continues to spin and move plates and generate its own magnetic field. September, we dive through the thin layer of atmosphere and sweep and zip between billows of thunder heads, citywide lightning bolts and liquid metal rain drops against windscreens to land with the grace of a butterfly on the escarpment of a phase three elemental cave patio.  Grab our groceries, suit up, and walk inside to one atmosphere, proper oxygen mix that will not explode granted a match and cigarette, and turn on the satellite linked tele.

As the Septembers progress, I learn better what coming home means and what it means to me.  The distances will continue to grow and I will continue to fail at assimilating to common society, but in the meantime, I will explore more areas of the compound I was locked in when life began inside a cell.  It is a reminder that I am many years behind in my development and there isn't a time machine yet that will bridge that gap.

If this is the beginning of the solo-journey, I know I've spoken enough about being at one with the concept that life will be singular for the seeable future because I cannot ...... remembering the last time I was loved ..... laughing out loud.  Seven years and counting.  It really is dumb to expect to feel that again.  Think about it!  Let's say, one hundred experiences per day.  Five of them new.  Hell, one of them new.  That's 365 times your age.  No weight toward slate and how blank you were when you were young.  Now, to get an idea of the potential, multiply that by the people you've met that you can remember all the way to your earliest memory, just faces, not names.  You've met way more people than you can remember so it's still a gross underestimate.  If you spent the rest of your life meeting one new person a week your chances of recreating that chemistry are pretty much a lottery ticket.  Or you can recreate it.  The only person that will know is you.  That is kind of nice.  Or you can find something new.

The other thing is I really have no idea how to look.  I have some idea of how others look.  I have no idea how to look.  "So put yourself out there!"  Okay.  Sure.  That's the other odd thing: we have no idea if someone is looking.  Would it change anything if we did?  Probably not.  Secrets make terrible stories.

I think I would like to live with someone else.  Another human.  That day is not now, not six months from now, not 24, not 36, not four years, not four years and 14 days from now.  Nothing is wrong with me.

We're never alone.

It has a dual purpose.  In part to map and in part to guide and in part to track.  More of an organic willtuary.  A way to know that you have indeed pinched yourself and you are not dreaming.




///Marnie Stern - "Proof of Life"

Bonus Track

///Imogen Heap - "Daylight Robbery"

That Instant

you remember the second time you stopped observing holidays was in your clerking past because someone had to stock on the milk on Christmas when you're open 24 hours and someone had to polish floors the night of Thanksgiving and some parts of you do not change because if the world comes to a screeching halt...

and then you remember the first time you stopped observing holidays was in your kid past because they were insufferable exercises in guilt, backhanded shame, and trouble season far too often, and people should just be good to each other and give a shit on a regular basis instead of waiting for a stupid calendar coincidence to make up for welts...

and then you remember it's still a @#$%ing holiday and you're screwed either way so take a little time to treat yourself and carry on.

That Instant

traffic feels suspiciously thin and there is no mail, but somehow neighbors .com packages have appeared and the street sweeping machine didn't wake you up before your phone alarm and half the garbage is out at curbs and the other half is invisible and the grocery store is open while the bank is closed and you realize it is a holiday and your aspirations are cut short dead circuited in their tracks and you literally kick rocks before heading back home.

Dear (______)

Dear Santa,

I know we've been at odds over the last several years.  It's almost going on a dozen.  I don't hate you and you don't hate me.  I remember that year that I wished for only obtainable shiz.  I remember that other year that I only wished for very specific and obtainable shiiii... and I got what I wished for.  I'm back to setting my bars high.  I hope you're back to singing in four four/

Boiling it down:  I will not.  That's all.  There's no second part to it.  As close as we will get.





///what ive been waiting for all years

Prior To the Holidays

I want a tank for Christmas.  Or a giant robot decked out in yellow, orange, and pink and black.  Or a Gulf blue and orange Z car.  Or a plot of land on which to build my miniature fortress.

I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year.  He knows what he did.  Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus.  Robo Claus.  I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot.  I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa.  That dude.  That guy.  Nuke the North Pole.  I am already drawing up the campaign posters.  That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny.   The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice.  It'll save the world.  A few decades later, nuke the South Pole.  Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time.  You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.

It doesn't really feel like Christmas.  I haven't talked much about holidays.  We live in a different world now.  The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds.  I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am.  It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays.  I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time.  I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected.  A certain amount of migration.  Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount.  There's a massive difference.

For the first time I have put up evergreens!  The sensation and scent is wonderful.  Not a tree.  I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own.  I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window.  I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year.  Next year we will add some layers to the design.  Ornaments too.  It will be pretty spectacular.  By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.

I think that is what may have been happening this year.  A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course.  Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them.  All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.

The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline.  I'm up for the challenge.  I believe I am up for the challenge.  It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world.  It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is.  A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.

I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life.  It's not my new year.  Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31.  My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas.  An odd alignment of perspectives I guess.  I can't help chuckling.  It is an odd confluence of parameters.  At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.

I do not hate the holidays.  All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay.  Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated.  Actually, I love them.  Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least.  Those ten years will fly.




///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance"  when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.

Facebook Birthdays, Selfishness, The Spacetime/Lovetime Continuum, and Death Stalking

Well, I do believe we will kick this off with birthdays and keep it in order.  Maybe not entirely, but we'll give it a shot.

Birthdays are great most of the time.  Essentially it's like having a second New Year celebration, unless your birthday falls on New Year's day.  It's kind of cool that certain days be claimed.  Certain should be claimed.  There are so many of them you have to devote to being part of society it's cool that you can have your own and it's pretty interesting that there are days claimed of themselves where you, as a person, are forced to look up and away from everyone else and recognize that you are all just people and as such part of a single entity (country, nation, religion, belief, or just part of a grander scale of bodies in space rotating, dying off, being born, at a regular and calculable, to a mind demolishing degree, [God bless the collective scientific mind] interval).

When you are small, birthdays are celebrated.  When you get older, birthdays are celebrated.  Good grief I'm already trying to think of a macro I can program to type birthdays.  Let's call them bdays.  It's nearly as fatiguing to type as it is to read.  Where were we, as you get older bdays are celebrated.  Eventually, I think because of the enormous obstacle of longevity ... didn't the average age for death expand massively from like 35 to 65 in a stretch of helter skelter centuries?  Or was it a handful of decades less than a century ... cannot remember the history lessons exactly, but the obstacle of longevity was overcome on a large scale like feeling the X-1 break the sound barrier over a soundtrack stretched out over a week with rumbling bass against the soles of your feet instead of over a fraction of a second.  Are you seeing it?  The soundtrack of the first sonic boom, to scale it perhaps better and with greater accuracy, over a few days instead of a fraction of a few seconds of silence and then THWOOM!

Suddenly people weren't dying when they were supposed to.  The celebration of birthdays continued because you never knew.  Someone, many someones, were still dying viciously early.  If you made it beyond a certain age the birthday party would become a routine thing, but then you still didn't live that long and everyone else knew it even if you didn't so the birthday party would retain significance throughout much of your life because if you made it beyond the beginning the end was not that far away.  The space/time continuum of your existence was a fairly small swatch of fabric in a quilt of human lives demanding not only close contact, close ties.  The bday continued.  The swatches grew larger.

To present day.  I will not bore you with compartmentalized electro society and the kindness of strangers and asynchronous communication.  We're all on the same page, on the same planet, at the same time.  Birthdays are a lot less significant.  The stretch of life between birth and death has become a sea of time and space instead of a droplet.  Living to age five was awesome.  Living to 10 was nearly a miracle.  And on and on until you died at the ripe and tender age of 45 by incurable infection or bodily injury of one sort or another.  Fast forward and communal life ends at 18.  At the most.  If you decide to or are pushed to it ends four years after that.  Same cycle, larger scale.

If you make it to 13 everyone pretty much backs off and says "alright, this one should make it a good stretch."  Birthday parties every year until 13.  Then a few makes and misses.  Things may come up in the schedule or life barring them.  It's fine.  It's no big deal  Essentially you don't need to have another birthday party until you are about to die, but we've been having parties for so many years for so long before because you weren't out of the woods until you were 20 and then at 20 the parties tapered off until 40 when everyone knew you were probably going to drop dead soon and then they came back with a vengeance.   So we still try to have parties through the teens until 20.  We set an arbitrary mark at 20.  Twenty is when you are officially your own problem.  If you want to kill yourself afterwards, no one will blame you.  If anything they'll blame themselves for somehow screwing up a gestation period of 20 years.  Not that it's not impossible to screw up.  I've seen it happen and those people should blame themselves.  Moving on though: after 20.

After 20 the people throwing you parties are the people in that middle ground where it is so ingrained that every step must be a party because every step has been a bday party in the past back when the scale was all shrunk up.  Those people are throwing you parties because people threw them parties and the people they learned to throw parties from had parties thrown for them all the way back to when that party was also a wedding ceremony because you only had a solid 20 ahead of you to try to get a family going before you were killed by a hoof to the face trying to the milk the cow that morning and forgot to warm up your hands first because the whooping cough all night really took you off your morning game.  The parties are meaningless.  They try to flavor them up with "hey, you can drink now" but you could drink before, it was just a little bit harder.

Fast forward to the mid twenties and the only people still celebrating birthdays as celebrations instead of acknowledgements are the people still looking back to when birthdays meant something and desiring to keep them alive as an active denial that the space/time fabric is growing and much faster than originally supposed or hinted at by the people who celebrated your birthdays as iconic moments in everyone you've ever known (it really was everyone you ever knew because your swatch of fabric was very small when you were small too) and sometimes everyone they knew too's lives.  The fabric continues to stretch.  The stretch grows beyond the realm of sight.

The only way you know there is anything out there is if there is a thread you are holding or if the person units and units away is managing to vibrate space and time on your plane and at your level of harmonic excitement.  For all you know they are vibrating as hard as they can, however your lack of synchronized or harmonic phase or anything close to it to at least cause distortion to be investigated further and at most cause perfect reception is obliterating all abilities of detection.  Your birthday strikes.

You jump up and down on your birthday signal and there is one, two, ten harmonies where there were few before.  Not as many as you were young and not as many as when you will be close to death.  You are excited on your enormous swatch of space and time and communicate back.  Quickly though, you realize the distance is so great that nothing you say will bear any significance to the senders.  By the time it arrives much has changed and will continue to change at a fair rate, but absolutely quickly enough that keeping up will be virtually impossible and an occupation unto it's own.  The space/time is so bloated it is enough only to know that you exist in a sea of existence.  The birthdays must be celebrated though!  Every last one of them!

Though, nothing more.  Wholeheartedly, every last birthday must be celebrated, but please do not be upset if you do not receive a facebook birthday message.  It's nothing personal.  It is not selfish.  It is not "well I sent him one and he didn't send me one back so we're not friends anymore and if he sends me one I'm not going to send him one back" ... like no.  Don't be that.  That's trite.

The fabric of the Spacetime/Lovetime continuum is such:  fractal in portions and quilt in others all flexed over a membrane of space/time.  I remember you.  You remember me.  When was the last time we spoke?  A lot has changed since then.  We met each other during core formations.  If we're friends, there's something we liked when we looked at each other then.  Everything that's happened since then has been a branch or tree or fork or formation of adaptations and evolutions and events since then.  If I liked you then I'll probably like you now, but I may need to trace back a little bit to understand the face I'm looking at now.  Within you and myself.  That affinity will still be there.  Fractal.  Some parts are still quilt.  Have not changed at all, only grown larger and harder to see across.  Accentuated, in some respects conflated, but all there as it was when it was 20 and believing death was around the corner because birthdays are a big effing deal, yeah!?

Some sections remain as quilt.  All of relative directions are the same.  My relationship is the same.  My relationship to those directions remain the same as my portion of spacetime/lovetime expands.  The way that I will engage is across signals and waves that no longer ripple the shores of what used to be square plots.  Now they are jagged and hooked and crystaline.  "Why did you not wish me a happy birthday?  I leapt with all of my might to shake the webs and graphs.  I burned out my transmitter dish and everyone answered.  Why didn't you?"  I am bleeding in, but that's alright.  I will take in for a moment: my fractal development has not reached with the same fervor or life that others around me have grown.  Their swatches have been broken apart with year to year modification, willing and driven, while mine, willing and driven as well have been outpaced by the shear stretch of space/time, around which spacetime/lovetime is beholden.

"Why did you not wish me a happy birthday on facebook or in real time?"  Part of the reason is that you know, roughly, where I am, across the stretch.  Is you vibrate hard enough, I will pick it up.  If I vibrate as hard as I can, it will be picked up, maybe, and defuse.  More than that, the additional complications of your growth will require a degree of decoding to whom you also vibrate and I hate being explained.  Also, the time that I am existing in is the same time as the last time we saw each other and spent time together for a very heavy degree.  The characteristics, for all the stationary portion of quilt knows, being referenced, lauded, and celebrated, have very little to do with the current you and in fact may be portions so far back in the space and time we both occupied that they may be abhorred by the current continued people synchronized and harmonizing with your spacetime/lovetime.

I really do hope it does not come across selfish.  It's anything but that.  Who wants a person several iterations behind the rest of their peers appearing on their timeline without any warning beyond the blind celebrations, appearing ne'er before nor after, popping their head in the door to yell at them to live their lives to the fullest or drop a witt or a jab and zip away.   Or message them about a part of their life so incredibly irrelevant that .... well, you get the picture.  If anything, whatever comes of announcing your birthday on facebook is enjoyable.  I used to try to wish a happy birthday to every single person I actually met in person whose notification came up, but I realized I was just diluting the pool of communications they should be receiving and that's far more important than reciprocation.  Reception is a lot more valuable from stationary (as time and space grows and complications continue to thrive [wives, husbands, children, careers, mobilization, freedoms] the unstoppable movement toward greater complication reduces drastically the stationary ability to receive).  Projection, the opposite value shift.  There is no selfishness.  The relationship is appropriate and beneficial and also removes discomfort in bringing out the telescope that can pierce space/time to see a time capsule floating in square space and see from where the current coordinates came.

Since having the birthday though, I've been consumed with thoughts of aging.  Once the party faded, I was struck, over a morning cup of tea, that from here on out, maybe for a few years more there will be time to improve upon my frame, from here on out the best I can do is ward against sudden physical catastrophic failure.  The brain is it's own beast and will be susceptible to its own sudden failures, the much more important part of the aspects of being to protect the muscle and bones.  That prospect is frightening.

I am very quickly approaching the tipping point of being able to self destruct on purpose will be more difficult than waiting for an accidental failure or fault in the normal operation.  The idea that I will start to have to approach my body each day as an explosive device that requires constant disarming instead of as a device I must operate that is occasionally exceptionally demanding to pilot and often prone to conditions that lead to explosions or other massive exothermic failure is a tad frightening.  It's difficult to frame or explain, I will attempt.

My expected life span is 60 to 70 years.  I assume some of the rage inside of me will drive me another decade.  Perhaps reflection will drive me another five.  Desperation could drive me another five and hate could bring me across the finish line at angry, lucid, "where are my !@#$ing hover cars" 100 in the, of course, mind blowing year 2085, yelling at my robot nurse who simply amps my morphine and changes the channel to the meme network that just plays meme generator failures in fastforward with nature wide lens porn shots sprinkled in between and every now and then the base thumper strapped to the base of my skull goes off with a brief thud.

60 is the target with full apparatus to choice.  If I ever lose the ability to choose whether I live or die, put me down.  If I end up in solitary confinement I'll eventually find a way to kill myself.  You're virtually dead.  Just waiting for space to catch up with time as you've been, shall we say, fast forwarded.  Part of why... okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Collect.  Rewind.  Go.

Passing my 30th birthday I realized my body will likely begin, or begin the process of shut down, that will lead to death three to four to five decades from now.  Time flies.  As I sipped my morning die and blew the steam off the top of it and checked up on the news and weather and sports box scores it hit me that some piece of my body my fail at a moments notice in the coming years and perhaps less than that.  It was tremendously frightening.  I was afraid to go to work.  I work alone and have preferred to work alone for many years now.  Suddenly working alone comes with added risks that will compound as time progresses.  If you fall off of a ladder or spear yourself with a section of pipe because that muscle group or nerve system or other simply failed to respond to your intent you will have little to know time to call for help or bring or drag your frame to safety or at least the possibility of survival.  Suddenly your chances of surviving that car accident or freak mechanical accident symptomatic of daily engagement with machines (the more you fly the more likely it is there will be an air catastrophe, but you can't be struck by a bolt out of the blue if you're thirty feet below ground) go down dramatically as you become more frail and susceptible.  That's 100% out of your control

is what I realized.  You cannot suddenly begin hiding inside of a padded safe with provisions and a supply of oxygen.  Everyone dies.  You will more than likely or at least even odds buy the farm by no fault of your own as much as genetics or intent or negligence once you pass 30.  Every day you leave your house with a little less ability is one day slightly more dangerous than the last.  So you will work yourself ragged to try to keep that fraction at zero, even Stevens.  Every morning it will slip a little bit and you have to do a little bit more to push the numerator back over the denominator.  It'll work for a while.  In some cases a good long while until the growth in the denominator comes too fast and too regularly pinging and updating.  When your body let's go, you can still just brute force the math and bend your own time and space to whatever you want to imagine it to be.  The only reason why it will flex is because other people are leaping up and down and the fabric itself has grown so thin it can be distorted through pure force of will from either end of the spectrum of passions love and hate.  Until the stitches sewn when you were born finally snap and every one on facebook wishes you a farewell.

I did get wrapped up in the narrative for a bit, you see why bridging 30 and taking time to throw a few stones skipped on the river is important to me.  I'm not upset.  I'm in love and scared and aware and dreaming all at once and I never want to leave that bridge.  I haven't forgotten you.  For many, though, it is true, I can be spoken with or to, but I cannot speak to you.  On my birthdays I am reminded.

Let's put some Christmas lights on that.



///Kiln - "The Colorfreak"   far enough away from aphex to call it's own

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.

low way down

Subject : low way down
Posted Date: : Nov 23, 2006 5:24 PM

laying low on thanksgiving. ill be up tomorrow. then we'll see what's what. some weird shit happend over the past four or five days. weird, weird, weird shit... but kinda cool. the only thing i dont look forward to is composing the words. composing the words will require hindsight thought. if there's anything that can diminish cool, its hindsight.