Dogging It and the Winter Manifesto

Yep, I have been dogging it, for lack of artistic direction.  I've become consumed with the immediate and unable to find the magic, the whimsy.  The press of culture has been stifling.  The pressure of fitting into some kind of God damned role has been palpable, or I should say, more palpable than in past weeks and months and years even.  I keep looking up and asking myself if this is all there is and I have been pounding my fist on the table with six empty chairs around it and rattling nothing more than my own glass.

There is no such thing as a dry spell.  I know it is all still there, still pouring, still palpitating.  What I want to get at, however, is after the flow.  I am storing metaphor and analogy and analysis, but not having tapped the vein I want I have limbs dying for overdose and infection.  "Eating heroin is one thing, but injecting it is another."  Probably the funniest thing I heard this year.  The funniest admonishment.  It burns my ass sometimes to hear people complain about things that are fairly simply resolved.  Hilarious in some ways.  Met up with a friend of mine at the local hole and he told me about another friend who had a fiberglass, nuclear white, road bike.

Turned out the guy was high as fuck on mescaline and out for a joy ride and he rode with him up to his place and the guy just housed the hill there.  Should I feel bad for feeling inspired?

I've (enter apostrophetics) been dogging it none the less.  I can't describe the feeling.  If you've ever read the phantom tollbooth you know what the love affair of language can be like.  Sometimes she wears lace.  Sometimes he wears the same lace the last time you had to suck him off for a solid hour because he lied about not jerking off before he came over and you found out second hand from his other friend he was banging beers back with before he decided to ring you up and now your neck hurts when you tip your head backward to drink water the morning after.

The point is, he doesn't realize you would be more than happy to throttle his neck the same and watch his eyes start to pop out until they turned back and up into his eyelids and the tears ran down your hands because that's what gets you off.

And that just turned way angry and too honest.  I don't know.  I can't speak to human engineering because I don't know enough, but I absolutely believe that engineering can be trumped by training.  The problem and the pitfall is the belief and extrapolation from that idea that training can be unlearned.  Somehow the incorporation, the building of the structure can be as easily or possibly as difficulty and painstakingly deconstructed.  The question arises: if you have 24 years of programming and construction and habituation built into your psyche, how many years will it take to reprogram, reconstruct, repurpose, and rehabilitate those patterns into new ones?  If it takes, just drawing cards from my own deck of experience, twenty minutes to demolish a level 3 Revell GT 500 painstakingly constructed over two weeks, it should be fairly easy.  That's my deck.

It's been hard.  Real hard.  Violently hard.  Violently happy.  To the point where people know me well enough that I have to actively push away opportunities to ...I'm not a destroyer.  But I know I am.  I know I can be a creator too.  I used to be.  I used to create willy nilly and I still do, but the work goes into that.  The creating.  The destruction comes naturally.  I'm not a big guy by any stretch, but I never thought five years ago I would ever be comfortable popping someone's eye with my thumb.  Yeah, it was salty.  Not good salty either.  Like, I do not know how to describe it.  It was like the saline was an afterthought.  I did not realize, at all, how much energy I was burning to be, but I've felt the exhaustion of it, of late.  It's been taxing.  Who to tell what and how much.  I'm rambling.

I know.  I have been dogging it.  Not on the low roads though.  I'm kind of surprised some times how easy it's been.  Violence as language.  I think the Auralport has been a lot of language as violence.  Which is a start, but not enough of a start.  There's no point in conquest you can't talk about.  No entryway.  No friends.  I just laughed saying that out loud.  I am not an animal.  I build models with tweezers.  Still do.  I suppose that is not making me any less creepy.  I have fallen off.  Maybe fallen in to.  Something.  Fighting fair is a sad man's game.

I am not an animal, but I am trying to work my way back to the human side of the master equation.

And so I present to you the Winter manifesto:

Do good.  Do not just be better within yourself, because that is not enough.  Be better within, and for, others sake.  Do not just see stars, but see horses and do not steal them, only enjoy their being and watch and maybe tip a hat to that wilderness, but do not beg to be the center.  Do not fight this winter, for any reason.  Physically.  Because you have one body and one set of knuckles and you have enough years on them to make making it past forty a probability instead of a certainty.  Lose no more fractions of teeth.  Put together your works and compose for compositions sake alone because recognition is fool's gold and the short path to the quitter's raga.  Be bright and not literally, but for light's sake.  Be motivated and train and not for the sake of preparations for conflict, however, be prepared to defend yourself, and only in defense cause a mother fu$$ing ruckus.  Finish the twenty thousand words to your book you left hanging two years ago.  No Damoclesean swords.  Less reference.  Clearer analogy.  And I don't know how much further I should take it because I've already stepped into the boundary between what I know I can do and what I know I know I may not be able to do.

The Winter manifesto is this:  take it head on and do not fear the cool.

The trees talk to me in summer, at night when the moon is out.  I am looking forward to their silence and the peace of the death of the ground beneath my feet.  I am looking forward to reclaiming the night that I leased to the summer and all her passerby and the bullshit.

I survived another season.  I know the next two will be beautiful.

Redesigns coming soon.


///Sneaker Pimps - "How Do"  I grew up on sneaker pimps.  through the conflict years.  them, massive attack, and floyd, and disco.  and the orb.

Comrade Super Code

Life has been strange. A lot of big boy decisions. Decisions I haven't had to make before. Like what? Like none of your damn business. It's been difficult. Then again, when has it ever been easy. My dreams have been phenomenal. I've taken again to recording them when I can as I wake up. The first thing I do is grab hold of my phone and press record and just talk, sometimes for hours. Sometimes just to hear a voice that I know is real. Sometimes just because there is so much information brought back from there that I know I am going to lose that I know I will need later. I promise I will get back to serials.

The thought of dying has not been as intense as it used to be. I had a conversation with someone about that specifically. Ten iterations ago I was sixteen. I don't know what I was thinking then. The documentation is largely destroyed. The record really begins to come into it's own when I was 18 and really began to apply myself to writing. That's been the literal paper trail. It hasn't been as intense as it used to be. Probably part of the blunting. Which is fine. I can deal with that missing edge. Sometimes you just have to beat yourself in the head with a bat until things quiet down. The kid hasn't been missing. That's not the problem. The problem is that we're all on the factory floor, guns to each other's heads, knives out, and if you say one word, just one, I will cut you so bad they will need your dental records to put a name to your body.

I just have to get them to work together again. They're all here. Just off on different projects. Different passions asking each other to pass the mashed potatoes, but never directly. It's been great hanging out with them on an individual basis, since they're not talking. We've gotten close. Which is nice. Not together. Which is not nice. Variable occupancy. Not healthy. We do drugs. No we don't. Second hand spray. Collusion. You owe me. I have been managing rage. Easier to do when you don't own standoff weaponry. In my life everyone has lied to me. That is not entirely true. Tomorrow is my 67th birthday in my 26th iteration. There is a certain amount of pride to be had in not joining the under 27 club, I think. A certain amount of disappointment, because joining that club is pretty elite in terms of prodigious production, but I have not done enough or come close to where I want to be in terms of body of work to be happy enough to pull that trigger, and a certain amount of relief because I am sure the majority of under thirty something suicides go unheralded and how sad is that? It's off and on. Wires close enough to arc, but the force of the spark and ignition of air shoves them apart until they work their way close again.

The shadows have been crawling. The little faces in door jambs closed. The weeping man in streaks of dry paint laid to a door decades ago. What the hell. Who made that and why. The shadows have been crawling and blooming for lack of a better word. When I'm not looking. When I'm barely looking. When I'm trying not to look. The world is a war zone. A fantastic warzone. I have been imagining the most fantastic weapons to expedite exterminations. If only I had the staff and the means. An angry boy can dream.

The world cross bridge is haunted. By my father. I have to kill him there. If I ever want to enjoy it again. I've had to rip chord out of there more times than I would like to admit in the last seven days and I can't kill him here. Not yet anyway. Still too much to do. He will pay though. Eventually. Matters of course and convenience. There was a word I was supposed to look up and I didn't. It's going to bother. 24 years of compensation. I just have to make sure I don't take it out on the people I love.

I gave women a pretty hard rap sheet yesterday. And I'm sorry for that. Not because it wasn't true, but because it came across so chopping blocked. There's no vendetta. Probably a lot of buried issues with my mother. They come up as I dig into the ground. Trying hard to not be found. I'm not going to go on a serial spree of slaughtering women to make myself feel better about myself. The shadows have been crawling. Actually moving. I don't know what to do about that. If there is anything I can do about that.I had this dream where darkness poured out of light fixtures like little waterfalls and it was gorgeous until the shadows grew so high people started to drown and I looked for days and couldn't find the switch to turn them off. Ghostly swims. Turning off the lights and trying hard not to look back into the rooms and believe there really is nothing there more than what was when the switch turned the other way. The freedom. It's been strange.

Where the hard stops start. Toxic involvements. I do have to clean up the circuitry at some point. My willingness to engage has been the source of certain difficulties. What happened to your face? I can't say, honestly. If I told you, I would sound crazy. And then you wouldn't want me around at all. I swear it's all above board. My boards. Not yours. Your square one, your nothing is different from mine. Maybe connected on some flattened levels. When you pick through them with zero and one forensics. I thought maybe if I scratched my ear hard enough I could pick my brain. No luck. We had this dream, right? About a house made out of cardboard and dried leaves.

I was wondering, you know, if you knew where I'd been. I have this sneaking suspicion someone's been lying to me, but I don't know who. Many loves of the dragon. Maybe I should get a kitten. At some point. I need to draw more. Now that I have the time to. The time to sleep dive almost at will. It's going to be amazing. I'll try to take notes better than I have. I've been gone for some time, but I'm back now. Bolting through space. Hell hound on a thin leash and learning boundaries the while. Dog bites man and man bites dog and dog bites dog and man bites man. And everybody wishes sweet dreams into your head as though there isn't fire filling the coils of your bed.


/// Starkey - "Eris" stoop sitter blues high

And When I'm Swimming In Through a Tunnel I Shut My Eyes

There was a day when I was fighting substance abuse. A recent day. Joined in combat with myself. The war was being fought on several fronts, less chiefly in my mind, much more so in the fibers of my flesh. A stalemate would have ensued. Had the other side not run out of ammunition.

So I took my body on the road, like I have before. Saddled up the bicycle. Checked the metrics and vitals on it and decided the bike itself would not kill me on its own unless I was the one steeping outside the envelope. And so we went.

For three hours. Half drunk and half possessed to tear myself apart in as constructive a way as I could. The dismemberment of the arms works division exercised in full physical animosity of the frames and walls that house it.

I got back home spent. Phenomenally spent. Phenomenally spent and utterly independent of chemicals. It was beautiful. The only thing that could have made it more so would have been to stumble in doors, deposit my bicycle and fall on the floor gasping only to be collected by a love. A human being who loved my sweating, salted, corporeal, enough to fuck me right then and there in all of my disheveled, half awake, half conscious, and fully realized and exploited self.

To feel waves of pleasure wash over skin and gush from within like the cyclops eye of a New England light house against the north eastern scream of a mental squall that threatens to blot out life like a spilled canteen to an anthill, to feel those waves wash against bones and muscle incapable of putting up protest, to lose oneself in that ocean and sink and curl in the wavering cyclones of tide and circular torridity of thick and hot and cold water, inches above the punishment of coral formation and light days away from consequence, is to feel an absolute lack of control and borderline sexuality that flirts with the recklessness of the passivity of induced rape.

And that's what I wanted that afternoon. That's what I needed. What I needed was you. That's okay though, we've got time to make yet.


///Mum - "Green Grass of Tunnel" ...behind these two hills, there's a pool...