Funny Feedback Loops

To a point, there is a difficult loop of loops powering each other.  A tipping point is approaching where we're going to have to make major decisions that I keep kicking down the road.  I am completely torn between whether to go the prescribed medication route or not.  There isn't a right answer.  Most roads seem to lead to an early death and its kind of funny.

You pop the medication and wait for weeks to see if anything is going to happen.  If nothing happens then you take some more.  I guess "pop" is much too flippant.  You rearrange all of your life routines to take the prescribed medications and present as stable as possible a body environment to present affects.  If, with your new forced sleep patterns and dietary intake, there is no effect then you go back to consult and raise the dosage and wait a few more weeks and on and on until it clicks.  Or never completely does.  All the while, physical affects may manifest.  Weight gains, weight losses, tics, shakes, nausea, fatigue, it varies from prescription to prescription.  If it doesn't quite click, a new prescription is introduced to help.  You may be weaned off of what you are already taking, you may not.  Weeks upon weeks, months, of consultations and examinations and examinations and consultations and dealing with and juggling body changes and it may click.  The changes may stick.  And that is your new life.  X pill at this hour, every single day, without fail, until you stop breathing, because your head will shatter if you stop taking it.  In the mean time, enjoy the side effects, which will probably contain an assortment of shadows and echos in the corners of your consciousness that will follow you to your death.

Obviously, not a great answer.  If you can't cope with the body changes, you're not going to be able to keep up with any sort of regimen.  You're going to take the prescriptions inconsistently and exacerbate the already difficult process of ascertaining what, if any, affects are becoming present in your psychological make up from week to week.  If you do manage to make it a few months and falter later down the road and start to slip into an inconsistent pattern of medicating you may be torn apart by the reawakening of whatever it was you are trying to lock away, squash, and overcome.  If you do stick with the regimen, that pill is a constant reminder of the incomplete you.  The you that is only "complete" if you swallow this spot.  And if you can get past all of that and wear and break yourself into this life permanently linked to this pill and make your examinations and deal with the side effects that can be life threatening on their own, you still can and likely will experience periods where it doesn't work anyway.

Sooo we come to drinking.  Alcohol.  Good old alcohol.  I already drink some on and off to manage pain.  Between psychological scars and body scars, it kind of gets the job done.  It gets the job done well enough, I should say.  You don't focus on history and you don't feel the sharpest highs of the pain inside your body and it's easy enough to turn the dial up or down as necessary.  If what you are suffering mentally has stabilized itself momentarily or at least is not on an offensive within your being and your mind you can simply not drink until you reach a point where it begins to slip beyond that edge of your ability to cope and manage.  Of course, you do become more and more accustomed as your tolerance steadily and inevitably climbs.  It takes more and more alcohol to achieve the same affects.  It takes more and more alcohol to blunt the storms and voices inside your head and still more to numb the body and still more to blunt the cuts of history.  The side effects, by themselves are all horrible.  Shakes, shortened tempers, hangovers, appetite problems, light sensitivity, insomnia, deep depressions and apathy, fatigue, wanting to smoke cigarettes constantly, hot flashes, low and acute withdrawals depending on how much you had to do to get to a place where you could finally sleep.

The good news is, on the days and weeks when you don't need to turn the dial at all, nothing horrible happens beyond 24-72 hours of physical withdrawal.  The very bad news is the damage is done.  Your liver is hardening drink by drink and will eventually fail, your brain is losing its functions even as the psychological scars are faded and erased.  If you weren't careful you've probably injured or bruised yourself in some way you didn't notice from the overall body numb and even if you were careful you've probably bruised or injured yourself in some way from the body numb and coordination problems that come with consuming alcohol.  The depression will linger well beyond physical withdrawal even if everything else inside your head is muted and been flattened backward so you can finally hear yourself think again and you may wind up drinking just to escape that lingering depression.  The packs of smokes you breathed are a part of your lungs forever.  You are extending the depth of the foundation of your bodies alcohol dependence in small ways in that it will take at least the last peak dosage to get the effects you need to feel normal the next time your mind begins to crumble and pull itself apart.  And, oh yeah, you can overdose and die.

I'm not going to bother with a faith/religion approach.  For reasons I've laid out through the years, faith and religion is an enormous vacuum to.  As a way to see, cope with, reckon with, understand the world and understand people and oneself, I get its value to some.  I'm an atheist.  Moving on.

Taking the problem head on, no chemical enhancements with alcohol or pills, is a terrifying proposition, but it could work.  I can often easily go one to two weeks without a drink if my spine feels okay and I'm able to get out and play.  I don't take prescriptions.  Head on, however, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide when your head starts to come apart.  The best you can do is try to distract yourself and try to surround yourself with as many safe spaces to sit and do nothing as possible if you can't get outside.  You have to be able to position yourself within the larger fabric of life in a way that will insulate you and that presents major problems in itself in that life tends to be pretty damn inflexible.  You also have to understand that you cannot control when you will experience a major break and that unpredictability will also cause direct conflict with your ability to plan anything and everything from a phone call to making yourself lunch to being at work; with that in mind, understand that you will not know when the most violent spells will end either.

The great news is there are no prescription side effects or organ destroying alcohol dependencies to fret over that will end your life early.  The bad news is there is nothing between you and the teeth of the beast inside your head either.  If and when there is a major break down you may end up hurting yourself or someone else far worse than the damage being done by either of the other methods.  If you can't find the right person or persons to speak to in order to ground yourself or at least get you outside of yourself, you may self destruct completely and become a suicide statistic.  You may lose significant friendships and jobs and intimate relationships because coping may mean that you have to spend days or weeks at a clip alone or heavily insulated and metered to bear with the voices and hallucinations inside you and the swells and shadows of visions.  All of the while you will be acutely aware of these collapses and broken connections and psychological scarring, perceived (real or not) judgments and stigma, and that the expectation from the outside in is that you see a professional and "get help" for being yourself.  Which kind of strikes the ear a bit strange, no?  In your necessary isolated states, in attempts to avoid self destruction and free yourself from the knowledge of the poorer life outcomes, you may resort to far more dangerous chemicals than any mentioned above and/or episodes of extreme alcohol use which will likely also lead to your premature expiry too.

Here's the plan: there isn't one.  Here's the funny part: you're not crazy; you are going to die early, it's really only a matter of how.  You can take the pills and the side effects until you can't take them anymore or slip up and miss enough of the regimen to come apart at the seams or quit altogether and default to something else that will kill you early.  You can incrementally (or quickly) drink yourself to death in an effort to manage and reign in the worst of your symptoms, essentially trading one pretty awful thing for the other.  Lastly you can try to live with your symptoms as much as possible and fit in to life where you can until you or life decides you simply cannot.  I'm somewhere between option three and option two.  The funny thing is cannabis seems to help the most, it's just hard to keep it stocked.  I'm working on it.  I guess that's the fourth option.  I guess there is a fourth option.

After all of this time, I'm still not ready to completely screw with my brain chemistry the way prescriptions will again.  Not yet anyway.  Not yet.  We're not misguided enough to believe that we're fine, no matter how "normal" we feel, but if we can stay between the lines of certain death from liver failure and attendant complications, side effects, and risks in option two and certain death from succumbing to suicidal thoughts, frustrations, and life complications in option three until we can truly try out the full spectrum of what option four has to offer, we may be able to avoid option one altogether.




///Gorillaz - "O Green World"

Proclivities

Why do I enjoy the things that I do?  It cannot all be chance.  The chance of it all being chance is just silly.  Laughing to myself while I compose the thought from hundreds of shards, I understand a little something.  Those somethings follow:

I wouldn't be as into giant robots as I am should I not have seen a manual when I was younger.  I wouldn't be as into mythology and comic books had I not seen so many when I was younger.  I would not be in to so many technical diagrams had I not been presented them when I was younger and I'm not talking about diagrams of machines as much as human bodies.

I probably could have avoided getting beaten as often as I did if I didn't dive into diagrams of the naked form as were provided.  Which is kind of hilarious because I wouldn't be as good as I am at seeing them for the bones they are now if I hadn't seen them when I was a small fry.

I cannot help laughing, explaining it now.  "Why do these things occupy so much of your head's space?"  I don't know.  I'm sure parts of it are generated within myself.  Absolutely.  Why can I not look at someones face and see the wires beneath it?  The bones and structure and frame it in a comic books frame or a films sketch board?  How come I cannot turn that off?

For the same reason that I cannot approach someone without thinking about and forecasting how to defend myself.  "You have to learn how to fight!"

These are questions only your parent can answer.

I've been refused answers.

Wiping saliva from my computer screen, it is true.  That is part of why I laugh hysterically.

The greatest complement, I've heard, is emulation.  Copying.  That is also what I've been taught.  How do you learn?  By emulating.  How do you create?  Learn the rules and then you can make whatever you want to.  OR.  You can feel an audience and play to a crowd.  OR.  You can do what appears to be reasonable and go from there as long as no one dies in the gears of your operation.  As long as no one gets hurt.  There are many rules.

I am sad.   I am thorough.  I am skattered.  I am some original parts and some parts straight from the manufacturer.  I am not thrilled.

The manufacturer insisted.  I argued.  The manufacturer insisted.

I do wonder, if he had it to do over again, would he.  That question will never be answered.

So I draw and I build and I create and I war and sometimes I scuffle and I hold grudges and I love forever and I hate and I draw, I build, I design, and model, and color, and I never quite know exactly why.  I don't know if I'm the best version of myself or if I will never know the answer that I expect to go hand in hand with that question.

Every few days out of a month it enrages me.

I cannot force him to speak on his behalf, as he many times made me do.  I wish that on no one.  By that rule, I do not wish that on him.  The best I can do is detective work and let him know, unless he is willing to open up the book of death, he has no place in my world.

I wasn't asking for my abusive father for an apology.  All I was asking for was accountability, being old enough to talk to him person to person.

I got stonewalled.  And that's that.

Nothing more to do except continue to build my own life, evolve one baby step at a time, and continue to try my damnedest to forget about him and hope he dies sooner than later.  For now that's the best we can do.





///Mos Def - "Umi Says"

Most definitely.

The Two Dimensional Garage, Jury Duty, and the Furnace

I continue to not eat.  I don't know why.  Well, I do know why: it's very difficult to do regularly.  In short, it's hard.  That's not a reason.  That doesn't qualify as a reason.  That's an excuse.  It's a reason!  I know it's a reason because I like food.  I like shopping for food.  I like looking at food.  I like cleaning and preparing food.  I simply cannot eat it and I don't know why it is so difficult to get food from in front of me to inside of me.

Eating with people is still so strange and, for the most part, to be avoided.  It's incredibly uncomfortable.  It makes my forearms itch to watch and listen to it.  It's not disgusting, but mechanically it's draining to be around, and then people ask you why you're not eating and it turns into a whole thing and just thinking about it now I want to vomit.  It's difficult to do.  I don't understand it.  I try to do it, the feeding, but even two a day is a break through.  Once is enough.  Get it down and out of the way and forget about it.  Go to bed.  Sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep.  You can't run yourself into trouble if you're asleep.

I'm not sure what.  You can see all of the colors and the sun's light and clouds and birds and it flattens  and smears out to gray.  There are things you have to do.  Things that must be done.  Feeding, washing, resting.  Sometimes it feels like a two dimensional garage.  A plastic play place facsimile of garage where everything is laid out inside white lines.  You get up and everything is numbered in order.  You take this off and put that on, brush this, comb through that, turn knobs here and there, check your fuel gauge, off to work little guy, home, and into bed to lie awake until your brain turns itself off.

There's nothing special.  There's nothing important.  There's nothing pressing.  There's nothing.  The routine is critically important.  The more rigid the better, I used to think.  I'm not so sure.  With familiarity, brutal and starkly lit familiarity, there are fewer opportunities for mistakes, misreadings, miscues, misses.  All of them.  Destructive and damaging misses.  Misses that can affect my relationships with friends or neighbors and strangers.  Fewer opportunities for misses that can lead to depressions and emotional collapses.  Fewer opportunities for problems to arise all across the board, because of something I saw or heard and reacted to or engaged with that later proved to never have existed at all beyond my own eyes.

Brute force coping.  Except even that fails and begins to deteriorate and then you can't be at work and you can't be at home either and you hide from them by sleeping as much as you possibly can and maybe this time when you wake up they'll be gone and they're not and you're quietly terrified and you can't be out of the house for too long, and you can't be awake for too long.  They'll know.  Turn your world into a two dimensional garage and nail the windows shut and paint them black so they can't get inside and they won't be able to tell if anyone is awake at night by candle light.  To be safe and certain.  They'll try to fool you, but you know.  You know what you have to do to live.  It's all laid out by numbers and if something goes missing you know exactly what it is because its outline will be there in its absence.

I've tried for years to understand it.  I say tried, but it is not as though the attempts to understand it have reached their conclusion.  They are ongoing.  It is very difficult to prioritize.  There are many things to complete, and all they all strike me as the same.  Eating or a glass of water are as important as going to work or placing critical phone calls.  As important or as unimportant.  Prioritization has stepped away and I don't know where exactly to.  I want to feel the sensation of hot blood across the surface of my skin.  I am trying to summon the rage that fills and fires the furnace that can push me forward into and through a day or a week.  By the end, there isn't much left.  The weekend or the month's end will be composed of reassembling what is left of the furnace when I have to use it and over use it.  Picking up and bending sections and pieces back into place for having to contain for lengths and lengths of time roiling licks of anger and sheer rage.

I hate myself.  I hate having to force on smiles and eat back tears and shake hands.  I hate that I have so much trouble getting into and keeping jobs.  I'm lucky enough to have a position now that is fairly flexible and accommodating.  I'm afraid of the day the unpredictable nature of my disorder will strike me with no warning with a ferocity and depth of intensity that I.  I just don't want to hurt anyone.  Often I've said my main desire in this life is to be left alone, but that's not because I want to be left alone.

Isolation is the only way.  Every day I know I am going to die alone.  I cannot be married.  I cannot raise children.  I cannot take care of someone else.  I cannot ask someone to help me take care of myself.  I completely understand.  It would not be fair.  Beyond fairness, and the idea that trying to build a home with someone who is afflicted and, for lack of a better word, damaged it would be hazardous on many other levels.  At least isolated there is a very large zone of dead space, neutral space, physically speaking, but isolated there is also a zone of communications that can be closed off and shut down until a time arises when they can be safely used again.  Whatever damage is done is localized and hopefully hidden from those who would be part of relationships tended.  That way when communications and visitations resume they can be pursued with the cues and tips and exchanges of normalcy and proportions near normalcy that govern civil life.

Which brings me to jury duty.  There was the questionaire about all of the reasons why the prosecution or the defense may not want to select you for their trial and I came to the line item of: do you have any mental or physical disabilities that may impair your ability to perform the duties ... to paraphrase.  I don't have a prescription anymore.  That lapsed so long ago I can't remember the specific year.  I don't have paperwork.  I hate saying "what's wrong with me", but I tried to describe, during the interview portion when they ask you about your particular survey answers, what was wrong with me.  It was terribly uncomfortable though they smiled a lot,but it was the evil smile.  Not the understanding smile.  You can't ask everyone to understand.  They won't get it.  If I struggle to grasp it myself, how can I ask someone else to?

Several hours later, we had to sit for all of the interviews even though we knew we weren't going to be selected, I still thought about it.  There are many things I should not be allowed to do and serve on a jury is among them.  It's upsetting.  Feel fractional because you are.  Parts of your mind are missing or maybe it's that there are many more glitches on top of and laced throughout what is supposed to be there, what is standard equipment, and there is no way to clean or tear down and rebuild the system free of them without killing yourself in the process.  Feel and know that you'll never quite be up to par with anyone, as long as you live and know that it probably will not be all that much longer.  Maybe another 30 or so years.  Maybe less.  When you were younger you wanted to die.  Not far removed from then you realize, there's no hurry.  Be patient.  Don't fool yourself.

Or do.  I try to laugh a lot.  The idea is that maybe if I smile and laugh enough it will stick in place and remain.  People will love being around me and I will love being around them because they will love being around me.  Carefully and painstakingly construct it inside your two dimensional garage, piece by piece by piece.   Power it up.  Go through the movements and the timing and conversational spacing.  Practice and memorize so that you can drum up this other self upon demand, slip inside of it and wear it effortlessly and with enough repetitions it will become not only effortless, but a full projection and extension of you to the point that it is you.  Until your body violently rejects it and you blaze apart before your own eyes.  We will see.



///TV on The Radio - "Wear You Out" let me to bed.  please?

Love

"I love you so much."  Everyone's heard it before.  Everyone's been there, done that.  The kind of love I feel for you is the sort that forces me to roll up a newspaper and smack myself on the nose and hiss "No!  You are not allowed to do that.  Don't eat them!  And don't you dare try to figure out a loophole to gain the same sensation through different means.  They won't appreciate it and you know better.  NO!"  Smack, smack, smack, smack, smack.  It makes me laugh a little bit when it works out well.  Smack, smack.  Thank the maker for the guy who invented free weights. It helps burn things off.  I wish someone was holding my leash.  I have to keep my ears open for when the rattle of the woven plastic gets noisy and I know I'm moving too fast and am liable to outrun my vision.  If someone were holding the other end of it, problem solved.  Unless they are dragged streetlong behind me.  Problem multiplied.  I love you so much.  I want you inside of me so that I can see you all of the time, whenever I wanted to, and you could see me to.  I can't eat you, though.  Besides, if you were mated to my atoms you could never escape.  Everyone must escape from time to time.  It's for our own good.  I love you so much.  Bring your teeth.  Let's find something beautiful.  I'll roll with you, but let me howl.




///Blind Boys of Alabama - "Amazing Grace"  run run run run run run run run r

The Best Thing

about sleep is that you've been looking forward to it all day and fearing it when it's moments away because you know you cannot get in trouble while you're sleeping, but everything can change while you are and the trade off is questionable while you hunt in dreamland the way you cannot do in waking.

Bed Time Story 2 (51 text messages to my sister)

It was a routine take off.  The sun was low and behind, about to tuck itself to bed behind the Monmut mountains edging the salt basin of the Campmine desert

She prepared as usual when her alarm went off at five p.m. playing loud, nudging her out of dreams

It was her favorite song.  Slow jazz but not easy listening.  The woman on the record asked, in her bowling ball tenor rolling across the jazz lounge smoke through flower hats and bow ties "how are youuuu, todaaaaayayeaye.  I came here to playaaaaayeaye"

She didn't light up after her hand swiped the red digited clock off her night stand

Today was the same, but a little different.  The city lights would be on beneath her.  The stars would wink to life above her, but the X-two two four around her was on her maiden record attempt and her nerves were steel.

At the edge, a mistake of any proportion could be fatal.  Nerves were unreliable.  Senses, however, could get her back home

The briefing went well.  She painted her nails a vioently subtle purple while her black coffee steamed in its styrofoam cup while the lieutenant went on and on about the fighter/bombers specifications in front of the touch screen while she tried to find a comfortable way to sit in a plastic folding chair in a room too hot and not think about where in hell the annual budget went

Janice already went over the six hundred page manual twice and knew it backwards and front.   she could've Built the damn thing in the time the briefing took.  

She blew on her fingertips and sipped some more coffee. 

Outside of the bubble canopy, the sun laid deep red and orange streaks across the salt flats, bunkers, and air traffic tower where dinosaur fish hundreds of feet long used to swim.

She whistled her song into her respirator, nodding her head and thinking about how good it would be to touch down and take off her twenty pound helmet.

Glancing left and right, runway lights came to life, she reminded herself she didn't have to wait for the weapons crews to load up the hard points on the X-224s wings.  Her wings.

It was not a weapons test.  It was a dual test of woman and machine and settling in to her cockpit, adjusting her harnesses, she moved her gloved hand to the throttle without a cloud in the sky


"alright, Lionmane, its just you and me today.  Be good.". She toggled her radio switch with a wink to her in helmet display, the dual turbines thrumming quiet as an aeroplane is capable behind  her head.

"This is Rainbow Nugget, ready for all go on your signal Walking Stick."

The control tower came back, the controller chuckling at her call sign despite himself, "Rainbow nugget, you are clear for go.  Be safe out there.  Don't scratch the paint."

"I'll bring him back in one piece, you get the wine cooling.  I'm gonna need a pick me up when this is over." she winked again at her visor display and took a deep breath.

Without the crackle of the radio, the jet engine buzz was too quiet.  Her left hand flew across the dials and switches on her console, yellow lights blinking softly to solid green.

The chime rang through the cockpit.  Lionmane X two two four sighing back "I am ready"

She toggled the brake switch, turned on her wing tip and running lights and hauled on the throttle with her right.

The tower half a mile away tore through her vision as the engines screamed.  Water condensed on the canopy front, capturing the sun at her back in burned gold droplets as she broke the sound barrier once and then twice.

She winked her radio back on and barked against the breast squeezing gee force: "systems stable.  Vertical climb!"

The X-224s landing gear mashed the sand like a drunk through the middle of a street hanging onto their beau for dear life before finally letting go.

The twin tails streaked into the evening sky as she held the throttle at maximum.  The Tower, miles behind, came back.  "Rainbow Nugget, you are clear.  Have you on the board.  You are on pace for time to climb record."

"Systems stable!" she barked back, Earth doing everything it could to collapse her lungs

Over her shoulder, as the engines screamed and the composite alloy frame of the X 224 shook, the sun began to rise over the sloping peaks of the Monmut mountain ridge.

The basin beneath her shrank to a football field and then a coin.  She held the throttle down.  The Tower came back: "Rainbow Nugget, you are clear, you are clear. Looking good."

Janice grit her teeth, "I know!"

The sun shone like mid day.   her visor tinted itself, twin contrails scorching upward.  "Afterburn!" she shouted as her pressure suit began to force circulation through her limbs. 

With all of the strength she could muster she lifted her hand from the throttle, flipped the clear plastic cover from the bright yellow and black deadmans switch and pressed the lime green button at its center

At the base, 30 pounds of TNT went off over their heads.  The control tower shook like a twig in a thunderstorm as the lionmanes engines tore the sky apart and two new stars blazed to life in the evening sky.

The Tower came back, "we have you on visual!" unable to contain their calm.

Janice held her thumb to the switch and touched the stick with the gentleness of a mother cleaning a kitten.

The canopy turned, too quickly at first, and more slowly.  Janice gave a ferocious glance across the console before risking turning her head away.

The canopy spun at her fingertips and as she climbed the sun set again behind the shadow of her wing tip.

The sky began to darken and the lights of Santa Monica, Las angeles, Eugene, San Antonio, Austin, and Denver grew brighter and brighter. "Where's Mexico city," she chuckle rasped to herself.

"Rainbow Nugget, you've got the record, bring him in whenever you're green."  She nodded, tearing her eyes away from the ground. 

"I hear!" she barked, not yet ready.  The sky turned blue and then black and in that midnight blanket the stars came to life in front of her. 

All around they shined with a brilliance that pulled at her heart harder and harder as she held her thumb to the afterburn switch

"Rainbow Nugget, be advised you're running out of air up there."

"Walking Stick, I hear y-" the X- 224s thrashing rumble ceased.

The g forces crushing her body reversed direction and threw her forward hard enough to send her hand through her head up display atop her console, shattering it

"Rainbow we have you losing speed, copy?"

The stars began to spin outside of the canopy.  City lights, then stars, then cities again.  Her eyes raced, cueing the visor display to go to this and that menu, lines of information and diagrams and maps whipping by.  They raced like one hundred horses loosed from their  pens across her in helmet display

Steady green lights turned to flashing yellow and then sharp and solid red.  "Rainbow, do you copy??"

as her eyes raced they picked out pieces of information. "Flame out," she shouted to herself as she rammed the throttle to zero and worked her hands across the dials.

"Come back?" the Tower shouted through her earpiece.

"Flameout!  Walking Stick!  Flameout!" She winked at her visor to close the radio link as her hands continued to work furiously.

The X -  224 no longer arrowed upward.  It spun end over end until momentum could carry it no further and began its descent.  With no more air to feed engines, the lionmane became a  fuel filled 3000 pound free falling bomb

"air brakes," she told herself, "now!"  her hands flew and the lionmanes frame rumbled with the back up hydraulic systems effort beneath her ejector seat

"im not giving up on you!" she shouted at her console, her eyes flying behind her visor as the stars spinning outside her canopy began to wink out and the sun began to rise again.
She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view
She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view

She pulled up her backup head up display inside her helmet and caught her heart in her mouth.  The zeroes on the altimeter were disappearing much too fast.

She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view

"Fire!  You son of a bitch, fire!"  The fuel light blinked from yellow to green.  The main hydraulic light showed solid green. 

She tore her respirator from her face.  "Start!"  she rested her left hand on her ejector lever and hammered the throttle.

Above the tower a roar tore through the late afternoon sky.

Miles up two contrails ran like rails to the east as one and then another sonic boom rattled windows across state lines.

Janice pulled back on the throttle once the lights held and began a slow and looping decent to the salt basin, her heart still pounding.

She winked her radio on.  "This is Rainbow Nugget for Walking Stick"

"Walking Stick here."

"Bringing him in."

"We have you on the board, the field is clear Rainbow Nugget.  You've got the altitude record too"

  The twin turbines thrummed in Janice's ears as she sighed, "glad to hear it," and winked her radio off.

The debriefing was going to be harsh, but no one could ever take the record away from her.

As the tires on the X 224s landing gear hit the salt and sand and rolled the beast along the runway past the control tower, Janice began to whistle and think about sleep.  She sang softly as she shut down the engines "how are you today?" and the sun set behind the Monmut mountains

Gnite. <3 div="" u="">

///Cleveland Lounge - "Drowning (Scuba Mix)"  all the best to you on your sleep swim

Bricking the Computer

All I want to do is fix a hit and I know that I can't.  That's the fast track to crack and it tastes so good.  People get all concerned about weight loss and image that it grows insane.  How about a powder that takes away the urge to snuffle?  That would be nice.  Get on it science!  Help me rewire my brain maps.  That's the pill conversation again though and that is looped over as many times as it can be without taking action.  In the meantime I have a good stable of Krylon calling my name.  I want to try the chrome, but my lungs are not having it.  In fact they're not having much of anything lately.  Just how it goes.  At least I'm not pulling knives on anybody.

I hope people feel safe.  Distance is its own thing.  It's not a buffer though.  As long as your legs work you can literally go anywhere to do anything.  Been trying to figure out alibis.  I could walk to New York or Virginia.  The hard part is gonna be explaining my absence.  That's also the easy part.  I have a habit of disappearing.  It happens.  Sometimes you just have to tag up.  If I disappeared for a week to walk to D.C. the only problem would be fueling myself along the way.  Then it's mission accomplished, duck out back home, and problem solved.  Still aggravating though.  A bad kind of hassle.

Shrinking the maps, it gets easier.  Shrinking the maps further, it's a day trip.  Further still, it's a nighter.  We don't do that anymore!  Jexel.  If you're going to accelerate, make it worth it.  The hardest part about burning down a house is sealing the exits.  Or at least making them difficult enough to dissuade navigation.  Then again, you have to take into account the body types you are trying to ash.  It's all math and I struggle with math a lot.  I've always been more geometric.  Visual spatial.  One of the best days I ever had was guessing how many jelly beans were in a jar to the nearest ten.

Sure I could have estimated the volume of a jelly bean, the volume of the jar, and gotten fairly close with a little error mixed in for air space, but it was so much easier to hold in my head if I took a cube slice from one corner and moved it around in my head to form a disc and then raised the disc up to reach the lid.  Same deal, I suppose, but different ways.  Screw math.  What have you done for me lately science?

I jerked off for twelve hours.  Twelve god damn hours.  Twelve gotdamn hours!  I need a boyfriend pretty hard.  Pretty sure I ran through half of my entire library between watching full length videos and skip tracking it to money shots.  I'm not shamed or ashamed by the activity.  At least I know my heart and my cock are still functional.  I'm just head hung cuz I know I'll never get those hours back and I want them.  The toughest thing about free time is figuring out where to spend it.  I want those twelve hours back to draw and sketch and explore the things I can't put into words but I know I can put into pictures if I used that hand to do something besides stroke my pud.  I'm pissed because it was supposed to be a fifteen minute quickie and I couldn't do it on my own that fast.  And I'm pissed because I'm horny so often that it's become a problem that needs solved.  Gotdamnit!

Melange.  I think I may peirce my own nipples today.  So much energy.  Throwing off U two thirty something, or maybe fifty.  Uranium all over the place.  I don't know how to shut it off.  Shoving carbon into the pile, but I can't undo Chernobyl no matter what I try.  Part of the issue is dealing with getting my body back.  I wanted it back so badly and now I have it and I can start building up from the foundation because I finally got back there, but the house that foundation wants only knows how to speak in terms of violence instead of the next step; love.  That misunderstanding and shadow and grift breaks my heart and hurts.  Does violence to me and I want to reverse it and I don't know how and if I could, a pure reversal, I do violence to everyone and everything within the radius.  It's a lose lose.

You're breaking my heart, sweatness.  Spill the bucket.  We are weak ends.  I need you.  I need you to explain to me how rain comes about and tell me the little squirrels running at the corners of my eye are just shadows and not black lizards doing a slow hat dance.

I'm trying to brick the computer.  I'm trying to reset it.  If I can't reset it, I would be happy to silence it.  Stop making noise you tire kicked fall out bumper bad doored dumb coded winkied rusted out piece of .... clawing at myself.  I want that soft tissue out of me.  I know a few ways to do it, but none of them are acceptable.  Rip.  Rip.  Get out of me.  Get out!  I want them out.  I want the caucus to end.  I want the factory to shut down.  I want there to be no more discussion.  I want to be normal.  I want to be you.  I'm tired of tears strolling down my fucking face unprovoked.  I want to love the idea of children.  I want to be married.  I want to be skilled.  I want to be able to do math.  I want to be able to be relied on.  I want honey shots.  I want more tree climbing.  I want to hear less and nose more.  I want shot for.  I want dap.  I want candy hahaahahahahahahahaha.  I want ... I want a lot of things.  I'm trying to brick the computer so I can start over again.  And wanting to start over again is sometimes hard to admit.


///Junkie XL - "War"  sunrise on Titan.  I got your pith.  I raise you 400 horse power at the brakes.  Eat me.

Ghosts [return]

What's black and white and red all over?  Your mother, upside down, wrapped in electrical tape.  You on the run.  The pain has been astronomical.  Mentally shredded.  Bringing myself back together.  You never want your heart to get too cold, but sometimes enough things pile up together and the fire goes out and it's just you out there, alone in the backwoods, beside a ring of rocks and ash and you can hear them at the tree line cutting under the bushes and between the trunks and leaves would rustle if it wasn't so late a winter, and instead the twigs are snapping and whistling when they breath and more than anything else you want to howl and bring them to you because waiting has you chewing your tongue out of your face, but even if you could draw enough breath to do it, your throat is swollen shut tighter than your shivering eyelids.  So you wait for sunrise with the knee quaked temerity of a hangman who knows there are worse things than death.

It's been a while.  It's been a long long while.  Every minute an exercise, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, in control.  Childhood memories know no limits and have no expiration date.  They're like veins laid into the skin of your brain that pump that history through your tissues and sockets and bones and every few days or weeks or sometimes, blessed months, they rattle around your cells and locks like blind inmates with worn down kitchen ware for picks.  Sometimes, strolling those halls you catch their empty, milky, eyes in little bits of mirror gummed to metal rods watching the sound of your footsteps down the hall.  You took them out, one by one, to solitary confinement and punched those brown and blue iris's out with a peen hammer.  Each new arrival.  Because you could not stand the watching, but you never thought they would keep on looking with their ears, little mirrors still poking between the bars out of habit.  Or maybe just to fuck with you.  Every few days, weeks, or blessed months, one will get it right, and out of the corner of your eye, too far down the hall to break the hand at play, a cell springs open.  Two cells.  Three cells.  Two more on the upper level.  Another in a wing of a branch of your complex you only know because the alarm is thudding through your ears, through the bricks of your skull and you know something has gone very wrong.

The ghosts have been roaming again.  To the point where the best thing I can do is lock myself up and pray for rain stiff enough to take the chalk off the attic walls where the roof is worn away.  Sometimes I know why it happens.  A lot of times I still don't.  Managing is a kind word.  But you do it to the best of your abilities.  At some point it becomes not protecting yourself from others intrusions or exploitation or oversights or abuse or perceptions as much as it becomes protecting other people from yourself.  Just because you know and can, to a degree, understand what's happening to you or not always the what, but the why (sometimes not even that) and can feel that something is not in its right place and that knife is not where you left it, and your shoes are covered in mud, but you went to bed early yesterday and it didn't rain until deep into the night, and that math is simply not accurate, does not mean that you can do anything to stop it besides isolate and insulate yourself as much as possible.  "Bad things are about to happen."

It shakes you on the inside.  The frameworks you've built up to contain and blanket fracture and split apart and you have to force one hand into the other.  Force your hands to love each other so they do not tear you to pieces.  And sigh "please, not now.  Not yet."  They will pay someday, but you're not ready yet.  The switch turns and you're alone again.  The things with names I cannot pronounce are gone, but how far away did they go this time.  Are they in the next room?  Around the corner of the building?  Is he on the windowsill, outside the drawn shade admiring the night air?  Check the bathroom.  Where did all of this blood come from?  The switch turns again.  Rusty contacts spark and pain flows like spilled water on live copper.  You hold your hands over your ears and go days without saying a word because if you do not know who and what it is that is breathing in your ear, you can never trust a word from between your lips again.

Pain builds and abets and builds in the dark inside your folds.  They eat at your body.  Snack and taste and tear away this and that.  They can hear you crying through the years, sniffing you out.  One and then two and then too many to count and all you want is to reach back through that long stairwell, past the cobwebs, to hug your little body and press your round little face into your chest until you stop breathing, but you can't bring yourself to do it, so you hold yourself tight and listen to the echos rising to the floor above and the snick snacking shuffle of their footsteps trying to find their way down to where your body broke all those years ago.  They come down those stairs and pull chairs near and wait and watch and some laugh and some pick skin out of their teeth with spare change or a bobby pin.  Some draw little things in the dust on the floor with little fingers.  Pain builds and you take it and take it until it becomes.

In the pile of ash inside the stone circle in the backwoods you failed to navigate and so made a bed, the weight of ignition is reached.  The heart inside you, driven and compacted to a block of solid steel arctic ice, begins to burn again.  Focus taken returns.  It is only you.  Yes, they are near, but it is only you holding the gun to your chest and the hammer falls and you exhale fire.  The sun is hanging itself and all you need do is walk toward it to feel its heat.  The air is not vibrating anymore, instead holding you the way you tried to hold yourself.  Pain destroys until the scale goes so far it can only be described by what it creates.  Clarity is a kind word.  Control.  Management.  I know someday it will go somewhere we will not come back from.  But that day is not today.  Today, everyone is in their cell.  Everyone dangerous enough to raise the hairs on my neck and make me piss into my pant leg and fill my left shoe.  History never goes away.

Rebuild.  Come back to us.  There is no reason for this is the biggest lie you'll ever hear.  Someday we'll be right and they'll see what it is that steals sleep from our eyes.  It's been a long long while, but it feels like no time at all.  Someday we'll have a necklace made out of their teeth, little holes drilled in them, fillings and all, with a little pink thread through them and the back ends in fisherman knots tied to silver clasps.  That would be nice.  Someday sweetheart.

Fingers Come Back

Hard notes, you know?  Taking hard notes.  Something like that.  Something like that.  Trying to get back into my own head.  With a pick ax.  You get locked out sometimes.  Sometimes never.  And I keep watching it all through the key hole in the wall, but I can't see what's going on.  Eventually you have to kick down the door.  Or something like that.  More than anything you just want to be home.  By home I mean here.  By here I mean creating.

I've missed this dearly.  The cost escalated unexpectedly.  I abandoned the analogy of a fellowship a while ago.  It's not.  It has it's price, just like school.  I haven't won anything and been magically transported to a place where my work is its own reward.  It isn't.  It is, but I still have to do other things while.  That's the problem.  The while.  That's the only reason why I work.  To resolve the "while." It's voluntary homework, in a way, I guess.  Not doing it feels like time thrown away, because it is time thrown away.  Dabbling has its worth too.  Perpetual dabbling is dedication.  My scars itch.

The important thing is the silence is broken.  Silence is like ice.  It floats and cools and makes more silence and then that silence grows larger and cools more efficiently and before you know it silence governs states and the only sustainable state is a block of silence.  I'm not afraid of blank pages as much as I am afraid of animated silence.  It takes on a life of its own.  And there are enough things living inside my head already without the standing invitation of paranoia, paralysis, and perceptual gridlock.  So consider this not some kind of apology as much as a declaration  of continuity of the project to map the constellations before sunrise when everything fades to some kind of cloud stippled blue.

Return of the space oddity.  Just in that cycle.  Sweet dreams to you and yours.  Communications from the farther reaches.  My knuckles have healed nicely.  Considering again the ethics of murder.  Still coming up short, but resolution is.  Something to work for and all that.  Hard notes.  Combing through heaps and heaps of notes and trying to describe what constitutes a soft note.  Still looking.  Money can buy a lot of things, for everything else there are armories?  I dunno.  Wrx in progress.  But at least we can rest easy knowing we are not forgeries.  Not even close.


///Cleveland Lounge - "Drowning (Joshua Ryan Mix)"  ...3:59

T minus two

T minus two.  My knuckles are throbbing, but feeling my pulse and not feeling it inside my ears like standing on railroad ties and hearing the rails twang in the New York tubes is pretty nice.  Kind of reminds me of the travel of time.  Well, not kind of, it definitely does.  Tracking time has always been a weak point of mine.  Part of why I like to wear my keys where I can hear them jingle.  It reminds me that I'm not dreaming and what is happening is real.  You get used to tracking time properly, and then the uses you've made of common things become common place and you start to lose it.  Start to lose tracking.

Part of why one of the best gifts I ever received was a watch that set itself.  I never wear a watch in my dreams.  Part of how I know I'm dreaming.  Part of why I get so unsettled when I don't have it.  Endless wrist rubbing.  Still driving back from the depths of space, but making good time.  That's all I can really ask of myself.  Crisis averted. Not really.  Postponed.  Defaulted?  I don't know what the hell the word is.  All I know is that the boards went up red and one by one the status lights and checks are coming back green and blinking yellow and I'm not dead.

Coming back in touch with reality.  Tuning down the squelch that ran far enough out of control to induce panic. I had a dream that I could remember.  It was an odd reassurance.  The absence of breath snatching night terror.  Sleeping without sweating.  I'm learning again how to let go.  The reemergence of the bridge and the division of real and manufacture.  How to converse and relate.  Even though I am still refusing conversation beyond essentials.  I am forcing myself to do it.  Because without it, people eventually forget you.  I can and do spend days without actually talking.   I used to have fairly corrupted speech patterns.  Hearing sentences try to come out of my mouth was offensive to my own ears.  Still is sometimes.  Because I know I can be so much clearer on paper.  That and conversation was such a weapon so often used against me growing up.  I never much liked it.  I guess if I had my way everyone would have their vocal chords cut out of them at birth and we would all speak through written word.

But I don't have my way.  And it's not a bad thing.  I am a minority intelligence. Trapped in a minority format.  Cased in a pretty decent body.  I've got that going for me.  Can't complain on that front.  I could use an extra few inches of height though.  Went to get a new license before my birthday and current one expired and the woman at the motor vehicle administration desk asked me if I was still 5'10".  I thought: yes, you feckless drawn on eyebrowed 60 year old duffle of a snootch!  Gotta work on my height complex.  Because there was no way in hell any stranger deserves that sort of first response over an honest question.  What I said was:  yep, still short as hell.  She laughed.  I was glad I made the right choice on that one.

I stepped out into the alleyway beside my house and the sun was oppressive.  My eyes have been unprepared for bright days for as long as I can remember.  When I look directly at the sky it feels like it vibrates my skull.  When I was younger, the winter sky was the worst to suck into my sockets.  It literally hurt to look up against a flat noon overcast.  It hurt to look near it.  You get used to the pain though.  And then you spend a few days indoors and the pain takes your breath away.  

I don't hate the daytime.  I know it's necessary.  My skin feels better after a good sun drenching.  Mechanically, I operate better with higher fidelity in my eye reads to mind writes.  Fewer hallucinations, sometimes, but not a tight enough correlation to make me believe the two are connected, but enough in common to at least give it a shot on the regular.  And then, sometimes, I just hate being seen.  Sometimes I think, people simply knowing someone like me exists is a burdensome thought they'd probably not entertain if they didn't have to.  I suppose I wouldn't if I had my way.  But who ever really does.

Something smells like cloves around here and I have no idea what.

I started a serial, but have yet to publish it.  A bad beginning.  There is a massive disconnect between my ability to express the images I want to express and the images I am envisioning that I want to express.  I'm thinking I will do it anyway and learn as I go.  Not like I'm getting into a graduate program in my lifetime.  Aw don't say that?  Just being pragmatic so I don't waste energy pining for nonsense.  My chances are probably somewhere in the atmosphere of spaceman and race car driver by now.  So I'm just going to continue to try to develop on my own.  Can't really ask for more, and with everything flaming out so unpredictably, why would you or I really want more?  You can't get in trouble if you're asleep.  You can't fail out of school if you're not in.  You can't crash a motorcycle into a freight train if you don't own one.  However, you can die in space, without ever once going to space camp.  That is a fact.  Write that one down.  There will be a test.  At some point.

The good thing, probably the best thing, about damaging yourself without ruining yourself is that it makes it impossible to damage yourself again, without maximum effort and eating one hell of a lot more pain, until you've healed.  The down side is you now know where the line used to be and can take it a little farther.  Sometimes a lot farther.  The up side of knowing where the line lies is knowing how to skirt it and test it again without making the same mistakes (e.g. whatever doesn't kill you makes you more than you were).  That is the usual application for me.  It's not always expanding limits.  Sometimes it's just learning the rules that govern your unique physiology.  Your unfortunate mind body marriage.

Staring into the barrel of another alley morning.  It burns, but we deal.  You can't hide from the sun forever and the world is calling.  I am looking forward to 27.  I hope 27 is looking forward to me with eyes just as hard.  Just as star drowned.  Just as ready.  If you want to avoid serious injury, you have to pull the knife almost as hard, but no harder, than you push.


///Deadmau5 - "One Trick Pony"  

Time Rides Again

My 18th birthday is tomorrow.

I am two months and 28 days into my 26th iteration.

At maximum effort it will take approximately six more months to save $1000.

Eight days off of chemical mediation.

It has been 12 days since I felt genuine happiness.

20 hours since I last fantasized about cutting someone's face off and eating it.

Twelve hours since I last put something in my mouth that was food.

Two days since I had a dream about flying.

Five hours since I heard crying and could not find the source.

Twenty six hours since I crossed the bridge last.

Ten hours and forty minutes since I felt adrenaline course through me, knifing through traffic.

Sixteen hours since I discovered my downstairs neighbors are the only white people in my building.

Thirty hours and sixteen minutes since the upstairs neighbors were evicted into a thunderstorm.

One year and nine months since I last had sex.

Six months and twenty days since I declared I would not be denied a full time job.

110 days and 14 hours since I started a still undelivered gift for a friend.

24 hours since I found out temp labor is essentially a scam for those over 21.

16 days since I dislocated my knee and broke a tooth.

Fifty three days since I found and did not hang card paper to spray paint.

98 minutes since I opened a book and read for fun.

14 minutes since I bruised my knuckles.

4 minutes since I smiled last.

20 seconds since I entertained my dream of life minus all the fucking bullshit that tears time away from us like sickles to sheep bellies and scatters it confetti and demands you collect it all up again before taking another step forward, or die.

5 seconds since I wished I could go back to sleep and wake with no memory of a single thing from my past again.

Too long since I've been back here. It's a broken watch. In the sense that the watch keeper does so in a broken way. Hello world, the computer says. You won't betray me too, I ask. I would never, the computer says. I am only an epitaph in your pen and thus true well beyond the worm food of you. Awww, come here, I say. Hug. Drop lights. And scene.


///The Future Sound of London - "Dirty Shadows" Sometimes the shadows on the walls crawl on your skin and claw their way in and trace the bends and levies to your stem and throttle you cold to the land of neversleep.