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"

I Know It's Going To Be A Rough Day and That's Okay

I've been trying to arrest my emotions for two days and here we are at day three.  I can't allow life to seize up and die.  This morning, poking the tines of my work into the middle of a sunny side up egg on a piece of medium tough toast with a shake of a salt and a dollop of syrup beside it, I am afraid.  I used to call Annie, I used to call Alexis, I used to call my psychiatrist, my therapist, myself, when fear gripped me.  I haven't been able to eat willingly so I am preparing to chop up an egg into a little toast and see where it goes.  Maybe we will cut up a clementine into quarters and have that in lieu of juice.

My emotions are still all over the place.  Stitched together with some will and a little self motivational glue and a little music.  I know I am going to cry today and I won't be able to stop it, but I will make myself go to work as best I can.  There will be a lot of difficult exchanges of conversations today.  "You look awful."  "Are you okay?"  I know and no.  Walking through hardware stores and to the bank and to the grocery to buy more food to force myself to eat.  I cannot allow myself to curl up and die.  I cannot allow myself to see people.  I have to turn everything inward to generate enough power to keep my sun from collapsing into a singularity.

Hysterical laughter tearing through my lungs and tears staining the floor between my boots while I stand in lines.  Eyes red and sunken and lips cracked from grinning and grimacing.  Doubling over in hacking coughs and dry heaves that will not stop.  Questioning, screaming, begging the snowy sky why there is no magic pill, but there is a magic bullet.  It's not going to be easy.   Please don't talk to me.  I know I am a mess and nothing will help more than time alone.  Thank you for understanding.




///Philip Selway - "Coming Up For Air"

When Is Enough

The difficulty of motivation is obvious to anyone who has bothered to write, or paint, or draw, or work, or invest any part of themselves in an activity or pursuit that is painful, uncomfortable, or plain not easy.

When is enough far enough?  What do I want?  What do I want to accomplish?  What do I need?  What can I disallow myself?  What must I disallow myself?  When I was younger, growing up through early adulthood, I heard so many "no"s.  Everyone and every system telling me what I can not do, where I could not go, who I could not speak to, when I must disappear.  Molded and shaped by the enclosure, dreams fade.  Fade until they're forgotten because it hurt too much to bring it back into consideration every day, every week, every year, to see that not only was I no closer to anything I set out to do to satisfy my soul and mind, but I was further from it than I was the year before.  The mind falling apart.  The costs of keeping it together steadily rising.  People telling you again and again what your ceiling is, not out of a fear of what I could do, but out of a strange compassion for seeing the war fought inside to maintain a level of sanity and "normal" against mental disorders eating away at the fringes of my consciousness.

Can I be content now?  What else do I want?  To be left alone.  There is still a lot of work to do to arrive there.  That may be the only ultimate goal.  To be left alone with the things living inside my head and a few animals to keep me company.  People are out of the question.  They can be trusted, but they are out of the question as quarters draw closer and closer.  There is not enough space now.  That is what I need.  I suppose a bit of both.  Can I be content now?  As long as I can avoid hurting myself too intensely, too viciously, I won't need health insurance.  I will likely only live to 60 or so.  Would it be that far a leap of madness to arrive to that end 15 years early?  No.  Would it be foolish to drag my feet to that end 15, 20, 30 years beyond?  Absolutely.  Don't be absurd.

I can hardly maintain a conscious coherent line of action for 12 hours because I have to lie in bed for 12 hours because I can't sleep for more than two hours at a time before I wake up and need an hour to get back to sleep.  To achieve an eight hour work day, I need four hours to prepare and four to undo the damages, eat, unpack the interactions, bathe, and prepare for sleep.  Every where I look I am losing time in human maintenance that is impossible to make up elsewhere inside the sweep of the clock.  Until I melt down, lose control, and fall apart in a heap of wails, tears, and broken tissue, begging for an end to the insanity of trying to fit myself into these chains of events for money.

How long do you keep smashing your own extremities with a peen hammer before you wake up and decide this is as far as I am willing to go and I am going to learn to live in this tiny cage and make it work because I know I or some around me will die if I try to reach any further.  Life is long.  Many people can race along it's rivers.  I am not one of those people.  I've got no use for your money.  I wish I had no use for your money, is more accurate.  I suppose that is where I am heading.  Retirement is another name for being left alone to leave life in peace and enough isolation to prevent anyone around you from being hurt and to be able to let myself live among the shadows in my head openly and happily with everything I need to survive until my body fails.  Retirement is a pipe dream.  I'll find another way.

When is enough?  When I have my own paid off house in the middle of a thickly wooded wilderness or some cottage at the end of a one lane drive to the vanishing point of a horizon plain?  When I've found a place in the world where I can not be found?  A place to hide and mend and dance with my broken brain and that's all I have to do to continue to see sun's rise?  I don't want to think about it now.  Enough is not yet.  I have to keep chugging along down the damned river, occasionally stopping to fish, at a blisteringly fast (to me) half knot and continue to hope and strive for the best and make due with repairs whenever its engine sputters and dies and hope I don't run out of supplies or the some day passerby who toss me a pipe, wrench, or a handful of wire harness to keep it going until I reach my tributary to one side or the other to glide down and stake claim to a bit of land no one will find for ages after I'm gone.

Who knows when enough is.  I do know I am not close yet and as much as I want now to be that place, it is not.  Wrestling with motivation won't get you killed.  Picking up the hammer eventually will.




///Jon Hopkins - "Candles"

Collaboration Is a Minefield

How much of your hand should you show?  Once you have worked to find your voice, how afraid are you that it will be duplicated?  What if the person you want to collaborate with, the person who has the ends in hand, can duplicate your means if you have to go through them to gain exposure?

Eventually you can cut them out.  Eventually you will not have to worry about intellectual theft.  You'll always be one step ahead by default.  What if the person you have chosen to work with is capable of pirating everything you have created prior and your only proof is a series of time stamps?  What if you have the capabilities and where-with-all and all out gall and disregard to forge time stamps too?  What if the skillsets you have used to survive for so long, all thirty years of you, forced you to develop the skills you needed to make any claim of origin moot?  You can design locks and you also have a very fine set of lock picks.  The line between used and new blurs to infinity.

Collaboration is a minefield.  When an artist opens their book to you, enjoy it.  Do not see it as a requisite.  See it as a privilege.  See it as a pact of ultimate trust.  Closer than sex.  Closer than that bullshit conversation heart to heart over a beer or nine.  Closer than that time they drove you home drunk when you were too drunk to drive and they almost crashed, killing the two people in the backseat not buckled up.  Closer than that girl you've been talking to and haven't closed the deal on.  Closer than that friend that dropped you off at the emergency room when you died for twenty seconds and had to be resuscitated with a balled up fist to your chest.  Closer than that secret your dad told you when you finally got a couple drinks in him when he hit fifty and waxed nostalgic.  Closer than that blank spot in your memory everyone else knows.  It's a minefield.

If I show you how the sausage is made, do you see dollars or do you see a way to be a better you?  Do you see a way out or do you see a way in?  Will you steal or will you harmonize and create?

Every creator has the hang up of collaboration.  How many collaborations have started and failed?  How many flash in the pan, in the searing oil, spill over for an instant, lick the flame and light the entire venture ablaze?  Every time someone asks me to collaborate, I am reluctant.  It never ends well.  It never ends well!   IT NEVER ENDS WELL!  It is to a point that I know it is me.  I know I am at fault.  I go on tears.  I have vision.  I am the spark.  I am the fire.  I am the galaxy.  I am the clouds.  I am the sky.  I am the grass.  I am the atom.  I am the brick.  I am the pipe.  I am the fist.  I am the womb.  I am the rain and the sword.  The broom and the dust.  The wall and the fist.  The string and the mattress.   The thimble and the apple crushed during lunch breaks.  I am the napkin and the grease.  The spear and the beast.  The insect eaten bone and the loam.

There is never any commitment.  No real sticktoitiveness.  I churn and it burns and they push thumb to index and make empty promises and break appointments that actually matter and it goes round and round until it hits the drain.  That's not the end.  I go into the waste lines, shrink myself down and dive in, like that mini sub movie we all know that I can't remember.  Sealab?  Fantastic Voyage!  And I dive through the septic system after I get no response long enough and search it out and try to revive it and report back and the reports come thinner from the surface until it's a science fiction movie with a starship in The Dark Between the Stars and I'm hoping I can land somewhere and I do not want to do it again.

Forgive my apprehension because I will not forgive your abandonment.  Not again.  You say you want to collaborate.  I say prove it.  You say you want to work with me, show me something I have not seen.  Give me a reason to believe in you because your word is worth dog ____.  Hell, help me be a person better than myself right now and I will trade you.  If you call yourself an asshole and behave like one, the book of life will not open for you.  Fear is not stopping me, hate is not stopping me.  Waste is.  Time is.  Trust is.  Anyone can shout into a hole in the ground.  Anyone can shout into a knot in a tree.  Anyone can program a machine.  Anyone can build one.  Craft is another being altogether.

Another state. If you are searching for your voice, say so.  If you are searching for your base, say so.  If you need guidance, say so.  Make it clear.  As it stands, you have nothing to offer me.  Nothing within your catalog will help me refine, reinvent, understand, or see myself anew.  What you ask of me is to help you.  Help you do what?  Why should I care?  Why should I turn myself on the spit so you can eat while I listen to what a self starter and go getter you are on and on through the nights?  Show me something.  Show me you have learned something.  If you show me that you have learned something beyond your current state, I will engage you like you have a soul.  I will answer your questions and accept your challenges.  Keep coasting.  I will leave you behind.  Challenge me and I will fight.  Challenge me hollow and I will go through the motions right along with you and play down.

Hell, I'll help you bury it.  Our collaboration.  I don't take it lightly.  I do not like feeling used.  I know I am not disposable.  It is fun to feel like or be an inspiration or muse or riff target or mirror or foundry, however in collaboration I demand more, expect more, I want to be inspired, mused, riff against, see a reflection in you, and forge new alloys and atoms through you.  As I gift you, give me something to work with.  Turn my gears.  Blow my turbines.  Feed my generator, as I shovel coal into your own.

Do not make me regret this.  Not again.  Never again.  Do not waste my time.




///Mazzy Star - "Look On Down From The Bridge"  rainy winter.  the river never froze.  it is strange to be disappointed in the spring.  it is immensely frustrating when i can't talk art with you; when everything turns toward monetization and consumers.  screw that, can we look at a sky and say it's nice without you turning it into coin?

I Don't Know, Man

It's difficult not to get sucked into a way of thinking that spirals out of control.  When you consider how many of your lines of thinking, projected outward through time, end with a force quit the entire prospect of a future or futures gets dim.  When you consider how many of your avenues end with the phrase "I try not to think about it."

Five years from now, I will still be working for peanuts.  What's the point?  Why bother setting goals at all?  The ones that are attainable are so near and so small they mean next to nothing beside your peers.  Change you can deem actionable is so incremental from outside perspectives as to appear to be no change at all.  Five years from now you'll be able to afford to go out and socialize twice a month instead of once a month.

Life up to now has been heavily geared toward learning how to do more with less.  Learning to deal with scraps and put pieces and parts together to make whole and useful things from what others discard.  Learning to maximize and squeeze potential out of every little thing you find and adopt and consume.  Will you ever get your degree?  By the time you do, will you be able to do anything with it, twenty years behind the curve?  What are your useful skills?  "I can turn a pretty good wrench.  I am terrified of crowds.  I sometimes am paralyzed with depression.  I've been told I cook pretty good chicken.  I don't know, I try not to think about it."

The way of life I am capable of sustaining is far afield of most folks.  Even if I were to "settle down" the undeniable and stark contrast between myself and the environments that have held sway in my engineering and make up will be more than enough to strain just about any relationship to a breaking point, given time.  Love can only cover and suture so many fissures and canyons before a lover will realize my planet is not capable of supporting new life.  So are we protracting our own death?  Killing time and energy and spinning entropy into something beautiful enough that our decades long throes to come can at least bring some light and warm some hearts before it sputters out as the parts steadily fail beyond repair?  "I don't know."

A reminder that you've worked so many years for freedom.  While you are freer than you've ever been, you are still inside the compound.  You still have to trick yourself into believing to keep on running.  Perhaps adopt a belief system or religion.  Not too fast or too far lest you ram headfirst into the bars.  Sitting cross legged, picking at the grass beside the river and skipping a stone now and then, the undeniable scent of wrought iron creeps into the wind and you know the bars are there if you bring yourself to focus your eyes just inside the horizon's line.  I try not to think about it. You've gotten out of the cell and into the yard outside of the yard where you're allowed to roam.  You've earned visitation.  A meal card for better food.  The compound is vast.  I try not to think about it, but I cannot forget.




/// Phantogram - "Running From the Cops"  staring into a still lake of bass

The Edge of Amazement

I've been told by some that I am easily amused. Well, I am. I spent twenty minutes today laughing at my laughter. I've been told by others that they wished they could be as easily amused and see the world through similarly eager and easily impressed eyes. I don't know about that. Not to harp about money not being able to buy happiness, but it does. Sort of.

What it buys is a buffer. The edge of the reality of situations. Unpleasant. Where you live? You live in a low rent shit hole in a building occupied by wellfare comped degenerates and people that may or may not be wholly insane and or meth addicts. Sometimes it can be difficult to be happy in a situation like that. What you can buy with money. Fantastic appointments. All the little things that will make your low rent apartment much more enjoyable to live in and obscure the reality of the situation. Or enough drugs to fantastically appoint the hardware in your head and buffer it that way. It's not technically, to the T of the definition, happiness, but it's pretty close. Happiness enabler. I'll take some helium.

Pizza isn't special. In and of itself. It is to me. I can't buy it more than once or twice in a month because I have a lot of other things way more important and necessary and life sustaining to buy and try to save for than expensive cheesy and pepperoni speckled and italian sausaged and dipping butter for the crust ridiculously delicious pizza. So I guess when I hear people say I've got it good because simple things amaze and entertain me because I don't have much in the way of a reality buffer it irritates me. The edge of amazement cuts in two directions and the back stroke is serrated. So, don't forget that. I'll trade you places next time you want to be grounded. I'd like to spend some time in flight

... buffering ...


with giant slices of pizza and area rugs two dozen feet wide and ceiling fans and air conditioning and a shower curtain that reaches all the way across my bath tub. That would be amazing. I will probably cream my pants if the day that all of those things come together actually happens.



///Aphex Twin - "Donkey Rhubarb"

Something's New Some Things Old

I've been looking at you all evening and trying not to move. It was putting off the inevitable. Well, I mean, I didn't have much to say before so I wrote what was floating on top because I don't have the equipment to go swimming with any guarantee of safety. Which is what I was worried about. Which is why I was trying not to move. Basically I didn't want to have to open my door. There were some strange happenings earlier and I was waiting for them to die down, but I've spoke too soon again. Unauthorized border crossings, if that makes sense. I don't have a grip on it like I thought I did. It's not something you can be okay or not okay with. It's just something that is and then you learn to live around it. It makes me jumpy during the day. It makes it so that you have to look and hear and make a complete judgement about an entire setting because you don't really have time to work through details in everyday life outside. It's disconcerting. So many times I just need more time to investigate to know.

I used to wear keys everywhere to remind myself that I was awake and moving around and to track time. It's nice to have the option of taking them off and not participating in the movement of time and place. Sometimes though it burns through and it feels like forced induction. I don't like being tracked. Well, not tracked, but followed. Physically. It makes me nervous. Whenever I'm walking and I hear the neighbor walking in the same direction I stop what I'm doing and do something else. It's not bad luck. I just don't want our lines coinciding. It's like using someone elses network. I don't want whatever's over there coming over here. There's enough wildlife over here as it is.

There was something I was supposed to do today that I didn't do while I was avoiding I don't know what it is. I'm trying not to think about it. They don't like being talked about so I'll skip it.

I'm thinking about starting another repository of words. I haven't decided yet. The formulation hasn't struck a critical mass of need, but it's getting there like a bad itch. I'm sorry. I just don't know much today. Something's coming and it's heart breaking because for once all I've been doing is watching the kids play cards on a throw rug and they're playing so well and everybody's home and I don't know why. Well, maintenance has suffered some. I don't want people to be afraid of me. I'm not just like you, but... but what? You don't have to hate being around me. I like being around you? I don't know. I thought I did. Where is it coming from? Something has been built and it's doing work and I don't know where to begin on it. On protecting the rest of me from its function. I don't even know what it does, but I do know its activity is dragging the guts out of the fabric and the stuff back there, inside there, needs to stay over there. It's like waking up and there's a gas leak and the gas has made you sleepy and high and sick and it needs to be fixed, but I'm not a gas specialist. I would look for the hissing, but everything is hissing. I can't leave. I live here. Proximity alarm. But what the hell am I close to? I haven't been paying attention and I ran out of channels.

It's not in the factory. I cleaned that out already. Well, not cleaned out, but repurposed. Actually, I wouldn't even go that far. Just moved some things to the junk yard like Russian submarine pens. I am scared to go to sleep tonight. Not because of tomorrow. Tomorrow will be good. I am scared of what's out there thats creeping through here and I wish I had something that would put me down cold for eight hours. I can option out of waking space sometimes. That's easy. Optioning out of sleep induction can't be done on will alone with any sort of success rate. I don't want to go there. It strikes me, or has struck me, just now how that has flipped. Somethings have come and gone. Just passing through. This one feels different. Whether I want answers or not, I'm going to get some fairly soon. I wish that knowing something is wrong could translate into fixes. Knowing your teeth are bad means you go to a dentist. Ir knowing you're about die of high cholesterol means eating differently. Knowing means nothing. It's like thinking it's about to rain ten pound stones. All you can really do is stay inside or find a bridge to huddle under with the rest of the stray souls till it's over.


///The Orb - "Montagne D'Or"

Why I'd Rather Be Hispanic, Artificial Self Confidence, and a Root

Walking home from a training day for a job I may or may not have a thought occurred to me: I would rather be anything, but black, in today's America.

Sounds ridiculous right? The simple fact is it is still very uncomfortable being black in America. I mean, think about it, people haven't decided whether or not we can even be called black people or if we need to be called African Americans. At least with Latinos and Hispanic people it's not a choice between obviously politically delicate and offensive terms. Or maybe it is, since I've never been Hispanic or a Latino. Seriously though, every time you refer to a black person isn't there a little twinge in the back of your neck that makes you wonder if you're using the right word, or if you would look worse by using a term that throws racial consciousness in the reader's face, even if it's only for a moment?

Think about the stereotypes. If I were to make a mental list of pros and cons with respect to stereotypes, who would come out more favorably? Sure there are local pockets of better and worse viewpoints (border states, places with "little (insert south eastern country)s", and places with very visible very active gang cultures, but across the entire spectrum of America I feel like black people aren't necessarily losing ground, but aren't really improving either whereas other minorities are either receiving more than token attention or are at least viewed more favorably on the whole. I feel a lot like the very "interesting" back story of white America and black America has made the situation a lot like a landlord who needs a renter to pay on time and shut up about the property's needs and a renter who badly needs a place to rent and can't afford anything else. I guess when I think about the stereotypes, I can see positive ones for most other ethnicities that allow some type of positive integration with society beyond sports, music, sex, and street dance (you know, the things people have to do to support families and build generational wealth and own homes and cars and have stable year to year lives and retire) and absolutely none for the blacks in America.

And it's a little discouraging. It's like the problem of integration was never really solved beyond the physical interface and instead of a defacto solution, patches were administered. Patches were slapped on top of patches and policy plaster was slapped on top of the patched patches until people got tired of dealing with it. Or maybe until the job looked done enough from the standpoint of the people outside of it, but as someone who is a part of the structure of black America it's pretty obvious there are gaping holes in perception that continue to lead to gaping holes in... I dunno. I'm getting tired just thinking about it. It's not fixable. I'm not trying to be fatalist or anything like that, I just have to do my part with my kids to let them know that they do belong here.

That's it! I think I just stumbled on an answer. Black history. Being raised with such a heavy bent toward black history and it's burden on modern history and having to live every year with the idea that I'm permanently indebted to a project of acceptance that will be in progress from the day I'm born to the day I die was a mistake. Historical perspective is a good thing. Having historical perspective hammered into me with a distorted and disproportionate focus placed on the "right" and "wrong" expressions of stereotypes within that culture is what has left me with this feeling of malaise. Black history is important, but not more or less important than American history. It's not a separate story. Having the idea that I'm different and special and separated from America by black history has caused much more damage than confidence boosting good. The short term benefit of confidence has been far eclipsed by the long term effect of powerful feelings of isolation.

I guess the simplest branch, the main root of all of this is belonging may not boost individual confidence, but will ease future growth and development of identity. Telling someone they're special artificially boosts their self confidence. Someone learning they are special through time and experience and on their own allows them to build a lasting self confidence that will not be eroded as soon as the encouraging voices are taken away. Not constantly reinforcing a person's specialness and differentiating characteristics may hurt their self confidence in the short term, but will ease their interactions over time because they will have belongingness as the most basic premise of their relationship to the world around them.

If belongingness is the most basic premise of their relationship to the world around them, then they are free to pursue many more avenues of existence without having to consider questions of perception and practice, and while the questions may be there, they will not be central to the person's identity. If a person's most basic premise is that they are permanently different from the world around them they will, when (not if) self confidence fails to motivate action, be forced to constantly answer and ask and re-ask questions of perception and practice in a never ending cascade of attempts to join a world they can never really be a part of basic their most basic premise of existence is that they are permanently outside of and apart from the world at large.

So I guess the root of the problem with black America is really sourced from within every black American home and public classroom in the month of February. But, don't tell them that. They never seem to take criticism well even from "their own people". Trust me, I know. Responsibility is probably the second branch on the tree of stunted potential.

///Four Tet - "You Were There With Me" Just reminds me of thinking about the future sitting at the edge of an apple orchard and watching shafts of sunlight roll like lazy spotlights across empty fields and after the second hour noticing that the little things on the horizon aren't high tension transmission lines, but are the blades of still windmills.

Cherish and Nurture Your Wanderlust

I read an interesting article through one of a bunch of second hand feeds that I sometimes peek through now and then and it talked about the value of boredom and the value of having space to let your mind wander. Technology can be great because it can allow you to do things you otherwise may never be able to try or even imagine possible. At the same time, filling every second of your waking life with it also reduces opportunities to reflect meaningfully, beyond the data points of entertainment and facts you digested or manipulated through technology, and imagine new things.

When you open up a box and read the manual you get ideas for what the thing is capable of and what you can now do with it and while you did not have those ideas before or did not know how to implement those ideas you didn't really imagine them as much as they were fed to you in parts and pieces, and sometimes in their entirety.



Imagination still takes practice and effort and time and while technology can make us all more capable and flexible people it can also limit the ability to imagine by replacing the time and resources spent imagining with technological tinkering and scripted production.

The thing that struck me the most though was the author's approach to children. It struck me as touching and I also felt an acute pain that was the feeling of never really experiencing that growing up, and now that I'm grown up moments like that can't really be fully enjoyed for a long list of reasons. At least not enjoyed yet. Maybe if I ever get married or something. Even then situations like that will probably be more of an ego shaded, priority differentiated, tug of war than anything else.

"We have a new ritual now, and it really has become my favorite part of the day. I put her to bed 15 minutes earlier than before. She crawls into bed and, instead of shushing her, I lie next to her and we just talk. She talks about things that happened that day, things she's worried about, things she's curious or thinking about. I listen and ask her questions. We laugh together. And our minds just wander."

I think, more than many things in life, I want that though I know I can't have it. Can you blame me for trying?

I firmly believe that my imaginative abilities have come primarily from the, sometimes, desperate desire to be someone, anyone, and anywhere in the world, but where I was growing up. I'm not going to retread it, but suffice to say I probably would have had a better childhood as a foster kid with no parents or homeless. Think of it as growing up from birth blind instead of going blind years after birth. Hopefully I'll get some sight back eventually and my dreams about the emerald city and the yellow brick road will be based on optimism instead of a desire to escape a prison of circumstance, history, and context.



In other news, I am creating the theme for the wordpress fiction site as we speak! Yes, I have two sets of hands.

///Ulrich Schnauss - "Wherever You Are" Wherever you are, whatever you're in, wherever you were, and everywhere you're not, Ulrich has composed a moment for you. This is my moment to take a breath before I'm pushed under again.

Ladies and gentleman, if you please, I have solved religion.

First thing, (I understand if you don't particularly care, but I have to do this so that I don't forget because this also doubles as my change log) I still plan to replace the red bits still hanging out in the post headers and down next to the tags. They are out of place in the new scheme and quite frankly my skills have grown beyond those first efforts and they're kind of tacky. Not to flatter myself too hard, but who the hell else is going to?

Second thing is this: I have solved why religion is so fiercely defended. I know right? It was so obvious, but I couldn't understand before why a particularly nasty and irrational person I knew was so entrenched in their beliefs. Why were they so inclined to condemn behavior in others that they performed on a regular basis? Why did everything they say start with "if they were Godly people"? Why did different words come out of either side of their mouth every single day and somehow manage to avoid internal conflict?

And then it hit me!



Religion to this person, or at least the particular "Christian" doctrine they adopted was basically a hodge podge of the most comfortable elements in the Christian as it related to them and how they framed the world around them. Their conversion, or anyone's conversion, has nothing to do with miracles, but before I fly off to hell on a thunderbolt and a plume of fire and brimstone and "much gnashing of teeth" or however it goes, hear me out.

As much as the people who believe they're just fine treating people with respect and treating strangers with kindness and compassion and charitably is as much as some Christians say they are simply picking and choosing Jesus's nicer words and they are, apparently going to burn for it. Look a little bit closer at these nay sayers of congeniality and you can see them perpetrating the same behaviors, however with greater subtlety, and often not even that. That's when I realized every single person who has had some "religious" awakening wasn't suddenly seeing THE light. They were seeing A light.

What they would count as religion changing them is really them finally realizing what their ground state of being was. Basically: realizing who they already were. The reason why people defend religions to the death is because religion allows them to defend who they are. The guy who wants to go kill Muslims for Jesus says he is doing it for Jesus, but in his mind, maybe his subconscious mind, maybe not that deeply repressed, he is doing it because it is what he as a person wants to do. Jesus simply gives him an out. Even the people who "suffer" for their faith aren't really suffering for their faith. They are suffering because they've realized the kind of people they want to be and they are pursuing that being the same way a man who wants to smoke a cigarette smokes or a person who enjoys rock climbing goes and climbs rocks. For some of these people penance has intrinsic value in their lives because they want to be held accountable. They want to be rewarded with pain because the pain lends them meaning every Sunday.

Religion is like an old comfortable boot. You put it on and you wear it because it's comfortable to you. That's all. If you think as a husband you should be paid tribute by your wife and kids and they should wait on you hand and foot and defer to you at all times even though legislation in America has essentially made everyone equals, you'll adopt a framework that allows you to live that way. If someone brings you "God's" word and it says the man is awesome and women are second class and should do whatever you tell them to, you'll be on that wagon in no time flat. Do you have to confess Jesus as a savior? Small price to pay for total dominance, don't you think? So spout some nonsense and swear up and down by the ridiculous things you don't actually believe because what you're paying for is the peace of mind of knowing that you are justified in the things that matter to who you are as a person. It cuts the same way for other things too, but most glaringly within religion.

So, what else is new?

This:


The above is going to be the main thematic element in the hateitalready.blogspot.com site I'm planning. I thought to myself, "no one wants to read a blog that spends the entire time ragging on other things, especially things that some people really do like." It would be the same as being a forum troll except condensed to one black singularity of curmudgeonly voice. So, I have revamped the idea and I'm going to put a humorous spin on it to make it much more digestable. If there's one thing I learned from watching movies as a kid it was that a spoon full of sugar is fuggin tasty and will allow you to fly umbrellas when the wind is just right, and I intend to take that knowledge straight to the bank.

///Mathew Dear - "R + S"Tonight we'll ride and find gold in their eyes. It shines so bright. I must have it.

i owe you one

one sentence about what i do know for certain. i was belly aching about the world, like ya do, and i said that i could probably sum up all of the knowledge i can grasp with certainty. today i give you that sentence in all of its shining glory:

death is freedom.

that's it. i mean, that is the one thing that i know to be a certainty. freedom from what exactly is debatable. whether or not there is an afterlife that will be better or worse than the one you're in is debatable. but the cessation of life, the end of all thought, the end of the never ending struggle of blah blah blah whatever. who cares. i mean every single day we get along with knowing less and less for certain. in fact a lack of certainty seems to make life easier to live for everybody. the less you really know the happier you are unless youre mission in life is to be all knowing. then you're just angry all day.

i guess thats the part of me that is looking forward to getting older when i start to forget the things that have been burned into my skull and the abuses and the filthy bits of history that refuse to quit. age will erase them and thats good for me. and the world. i think as i get older i will feel less apt to mass murder and more apt to napping and enjoying ... something. anything. that is the unlearning. the switching of dream life into real life.



i suppose thats the appeal of avatar really. screw the anti war message. screw the native overtones of history and genocide. the real joy in watching avatar is the possibility and promise of that one day down your road when your brain pumps you full of dmt and everything you really wanted in life, everything you were denied, everything your mind mulled over when the real world wouldnt let it, becomes real.

that, i am looking forward to very much. what else do i owe you? oh yeah... a link:... well no. no link. i didnt find anything particularly fun today. today was not a fun day. but who the hell has time for fun these days anyway. i do. i have time for fun. because i have no job.

okay heres something useful: you pay for what you get when it comes to alcohol up to about the 25 dollar mark. beyond 25 its all a matter of taste preference and taste is imparted by the individual maker's process. case in point? you didnt ask? im talking to myself? well, case in point... i like whiskey/bourbon/scotch whatever you call it. i dont know the subtle differences but i do know what fucking disgusting moonshinerocketfueltotheface tastes like. i wanted a 1.75 of old grandad 101. the shop didnt have it. i was going to settle for some beam than. the shop didnt have the 86 proof beam black. fine. next step down for me was beam white. it cost 25 bucks. little iffy. its only 80 proof and id run through it fast. was it worth the 25 dollars, just fucking tell us already. it was, but i didnt know it till after i bought the bottle of kentucky gentleman, went home, and poured a glass. god awful shit, but it was 7.50 a liter.

why so god awful? the proof was the same. they both said whiskey on the label. well in small fucking print it said on the kentucky gentleman whiskey and "other spirits". enter jet fuel. 51% whiskey. 49% jet fuel. 100% not worth 7.50 a liter. let this be a lesson to ye youths. pay the extra 5 or 10 bucks and get something that only needs a pair of ice cubes to drink.

dont buy this.

///luke slater - "hectic bag" rolling deep bass and a moment of clarity matched only by driving on the interstate from chicago to kansas city and somewhere in between with a train drawing a line between sky and land on your left and empty fields stretching to infinity on your right the overcast sky breaks open and the cars dotting the road slipping away in front of you glisten like the backs of dolphins in an ocean of gray light.