A Thought About the World

I was thinking about the end of the world. Again. Not really the end, but the end of my world assuming I tough it out. Which is hilarious. To think that life is something that needs to be "toughed out". Walked off. I sometimes wonder if people who are basically set for life, whose only real decision to make is to go to work or not, or play the links in Carolina this weekend or shuffle off to Amsterdam for a bit to get away from "it all" ever feel like they're going to have to tough out the next few years. I suppose I don't really wonder. I'm sure they do. I like to think that I wonder so I can reflect more kindly on their various dispositions. Instead of wishing them all away to the heaven of hell's brambles. But I was thinking about the upcoming end of my iterations, when there is no more material to make new me's out of what is left of the old me's and no more material available to create new me-ness to replace the wholesale deletions. My thoughts turned, naturally as an American, to war.

When all of the oil runs out, and I hope it does sooner than later, mainly to generate some actual sea change and perhaps restructure the as we've accepted it into the as we've never known, but wished it to be, even if the restructuring ends up being more of a warp and upward mobile in ways I could never be societal metastization, what becomes of middle eastern interest? Do the propped up kings all topple over at once? Does religion come bursting in to fill the holes? Obviously it won't be anarchy. The world is far too connected for that to ever happen. Does america finally walk away from it all like some person stumbling home from a red light district in the morning with a massive hangover to their mattress stuffed with "just in case" money? And then I thought "who fucking cares."

I know I should. For my children's sake. But I'm never having kids. Right now my only claim to fame is that I escaped an abusive home and now have the power to break the cycle of violence and generational human corruption by not perpetuating it the only way I can guarantee the rest of the world will succeed. That's it. So I suppose that probably puts me in the category of people that "want to watch the world burn". Maybe not square in. But close. I don't think I have enough passion to make a sport of it. Which lead me to understand something. A carefree friend is enviable. A careless friend is a headache, but can be desirable in certain doses. A negligent friend is a liability. Well, I understood that before. But it reminded me. I don't know where I fit in there. Where do friends go that are constantly trying to snuff out the fires of their past? Burning their shadows away? Eating their demons.

I don't care how the world is going to end. Maybe the middle east will collapse in fifty years. I'm sure they'll find some way to make it work. They'll tough it out. Some things will change. A lot of things won't. I'll still have to take shit from people making snide remarks in the vein of "break a twenty (whistle) that's a lot of money to be carryin' around on a Tuesday" from asshole managers and foremen who make my monthly net in a couple days of work. I'll still have to deal with nurses asking me seven times if I've been shooting needles into my work scarred arms every time I get up enough money or desperation to see a physician. If it all burns down, I'll be third in line with a lawn chair, a cold beer, and a program to take in the floor show. Which is all fairly grim.

I did not mean to be that grim. Honestly. My life feels like a very long Vertigo shot. Time just keeps on racing away. The farther it stretches, the farther back I have to keep pushing things to stay alive, the more things fall out of focus and break down and it's the least I can do to hold onto the consciousness of here and now and impossible not to choke it to death with the force of the grip needed to keep it safe. I have no real stake in the outcome of the world's wars. I was unceremoniously ushered out of the war fighting arena, the academic arena, the peace keeping arena, the social and society arena, the tax paying arena. I don't know. I don't know where the fuck I'm going with this. Six hundred "no"s and one "yes". Two yeses. It's not that it gets difficult to believe things will improve. It's that it becomes foolish to believe so.

I don't want to believe that's it for me. Not in terms of writing. There's still much to be done and I know this is perhaps the stuttering beginnings of little stars and planets in the blueness of twilight before the moon rise of - what? Shut up. Shut it. Start over. There's still much to be done and I know this is perhaps the stuttering, tottering, beginnings of my flash in the pan in terms of production and development. A multi-year long stuttering to get that one paragraph out that I'll remember myself by. I don't want to believe the best I can hope for is to not get sick and have something to eat and enough to pay for cool in the summer and heat in winter and keep a roof over my fucking head and a cellphone turned on.

Which, I guess, ultimately is to say, space has been both kind and unkind. Kind to the people I care enough not to belabor, but unkind to the glass hearted intrepid nuclear radiant wayfarer. There have been complications. Unmediated things have come undone. I went about a month at one point without thinking about suicide. And then you feel it creeping up the back of your neck. The little worlds threading their way through the nerves in your right ear, across the back of your eyes to your left ear and lacing themselves together tighter and thicker until you feel like the bones of your forehead are going to collapse under the compression and your insides are going to come out like frosting squeezed out between the fingers of a kid crushing a sandwich cookie in his fist. So much time is spent in sorting. This is real. This is not. That is doable. This will kill you. This is tenable. That is not. You said this out of your mouth. You should have said this. Do not say that. This is valid. That will get you interned again. The sorting gets confusing. Frustrating. Makes me angry. And tired. Of many things. So much left to do.

The world as movie: I would have walked out years ago. Myself as movie: I already know how it ends, but I'm not walking out yet. I still haven't seen that one scene where I'm riding down a dirt road in a 240z with my korgy in the passenger seat barking at the rabbits in the brush while the sun sits on the mountains for a nap before the milky way belts across the sky like Beethoven through a concert hall. I don't know if I'll actually make it that far in or what planet that'll happen on. But I'm tryin' to tough it out. It would help if a tollbooth were to appear in my bedroom someday. I would never look back.


///Annie Lennox - "No More I Love Yous" remember this one? I still do. I was in love with Annie Lennox for a long time. All of ten years old and the lyrics to this song felt like she wrote them for me. I used to sit alone in my room and sing nirvana's half the man I used to be. It's funny, I guess. Not that the pain hasn't changed. Funny that the monsters are still outside after all this time.

dear (______):

Dear "poor" person,

Please stop talking about how "poor" you are. Please stop citing bogus examples of your destitution. If you own a fucking charge card that starts with "Am" and ends with "ex," you are not poor. If your job pays so much that it would be silly to talk about an hourly rate, you are not fucking poor. If your cold cuts are sliced at the deli counter and your cheese doesn't come individually wrapped with disclaimers on the packaging about its nutritional value, your are probably not fucking poor. Manage your money better. Stop being an asshole. And for the love of grilled cheesus stop talking about it like being poor is some sort of club whose membership somehow qualifies and dignifies your spoon fed existence and gives you "perspective".

I sware to god. If you make one more fucking quip that ends with "...that's how poor I am..." I'm going to come to your house and belt bricks through your fucking windows at 4 AM until I can't feel my fingers anymore.

predetermination? or something worse

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

fuck the news

Subject : fuck the news
Posted Date: : Jul 25, 2009 2:42 PM
the news sucks. ihate watching it. i hate all the networks. i hate all the spins. i hate that i rarely ever get to hear about anything even remotely important. and i hate that its now more or less a source of entertainment, product placement, and spectacle more than it is a source of information, reliable or not. its something to tell you how to think and feel. and it does it with arguments and commentary that wouldnt stand up in a highschool logic and proofs class if people even went that far in high school, let alone college.

watching the news is like a recieving a daily reminder about just how fucking dumb the majority of americans are. which kind of reminds me of something i thought about near the end of a drug policy class. the conclusion was that the war on drugs was an unsustainable war that is not even close to fighting the real source of the drug problem, if you can even call it that. america is a country of wars. we need wars to dominate everyone else and to flex our will on them, but the only sustainable war, in a country that has thrived on war decade after decade, the only war worth fighting that will take care of so many problems that lead to desert storm part 2 in the first place, the only war to potentially end all wars is a war fought against ignorance.

if people werent so god damn stupid and complacent and fucking misguided there wouldnt be unions, we wouldnt need them, classism would fucking die out because it had to, legislation would be reasonable, people would care about public policy, american cars wouldnt suck dicks and would be worth more than the CHILTON manuals printed about them, fossil fuels wouldnt be a crisis, renewalable energy would be a lot more than a pipe dream, the banks wouldnt have gotten so far gone, gore would have been elected, bush wouldnt have been elected twice, a bill wouldnt have passed making it okay to bring guns into bars, all university would be free, homes wouldnt be built ten feet away from hurricane swells, infrastructure would be stable and able to grow, wal mart would be gone, america wouldnt be an exclusionist state, global warming would be under control, 1 percent of the people wouldnt have 50 percent of the wealth, healthcare would be available for everyone, cigarettes would go away, stupid drug laws would never happen, you'd have to be older than 16 to drive, and younger than 21 to drink, politics wouldnt be nebulous, school would teach you how to learn and grow, prison would reform instead of being a self serving industry, campaigning wouldnt mean pandering, the best man would usually win, the f22 would be out of production years ago, we wouldnt be in a consumer/debt driven society, outsourcing would be non-existant, religion wouldnt be law, the free market would be a myth, job security would be real, a life of excess would be considered abhorrent instead of the ultimate goal to work toward, celebrity would shrivel up and die like the wretched pox on humanity it is, tv would be worth watching, homelessness would be a choice, joining the military wouldnt be the only way out of a dead end life, people would be upwardly mobile, stories of courage would be exclusive of any tv or film personality or lifestyle choice, rags to riches stories would never be told, athletes would not command more money than the president, and corn wouldnt be fucking subsidized.

but the news reminds us every day that america is a pretty fucking ignorant place populated and run by sheep with expense accounts and a desire to someday own an escalade and a helicopter and a house so big the electric bill alone would swallow a low class persons monthly paycheck whole with a pool big enough to provide enough water for a small town to drink and a lawn as green as the sky is blue all located in the middle of the fucking driest climate possible with a gate hardy enough and security force reckless enough to keep out the god damn huns and lurking have nots. cuz what is stupidity and excess without that wonderfully american "they said it couldnt be done so i did it" spirit.

fuck the news. i dont need to be reminded.

///lily allen - ldn: because sometimes things get so rediculously sour that all you can really do is smile about it. the scale of disdain only extends so far. and sometimes things are so black they can only be described in shades of white.

do i really want to be a writer? 02/14/06

Subject : do i really want to be a writer?
Posted Date: : Mar 14, 2006 3:20 PM

yes, more than anything in the world. i know ill find success eventually and i know that i have this inexplicable urge to write all of the time. I dont write as much as i probably should because i spend a chunk of time doing other things and another person (which is unfortunate at times, but i just haven't reached that level of eccentricity that would allow me to eshew everyone and everything that might stand in the way of writing eight hours a day, masturbating two hours a day, drinking six hours a day, and sleeping off the hangover and depression for the remaining eight).

wondering everyday about what i will or will not be able to do with my BA in creative writing, shoddy grades (almost across the board), and just about complete lack of experience in writing related fields outside of school, would probably result in me sitting down in the bathroom with a shotgun purchased at Wal-Mart. who's to say what the market is for BAs in CW. I mean, these degree programs exist all across the nation at both private and public instituations... is it designed for those kids with trust funds who don't need employment to support themselves? the people who can "afford" to be eccentric? Ill have to compete with them eventually and theyll have the advantage of little pressure from the day to day struggle of... wait a minute... this is sounding like another "haves and have-nots" rant.

i do really want to be a writer and it does worry me a little bit from time to time... but if i didnt want to be a writer im pretty sure i would drop out and become a serial killer prostitute whose MO involved shotguns, natty light, and ass licking.

obsessing.

sonny chiba will kick you in the face 12/10/05

Subject : sonny chiba will kick you in the face

Posted Date: : Dec 10, 2005 4:52 PM

so the power company informs me that they will discontinue service to my apartment in 72 hours. aint that a larf! in times of getting screwed up the ass like a 10$ dollar hooker by the massive dong of the power company i really wish sonny chiba a.k.a. the street fighter, were my drinking buddy.



why, you ask?

well if sonny chiba were my drinking buddy and i were discussing this whole situation with Duquense Light Co. with him over a couple of brews he would say: "don't worry, pal. I'll take care of everything." And then he would go out the next morning, because sonny chiba never gets hangovers, and kick everyone at Duquense Light in the FACE! and then he and I and chuck norris would all go out to a bar the next night and celebrate our moral victory over big corporations that spit on us little poor people like so many pebbles beneath their boots of tyranny.