The Shadowman and the Irrationality of Humans

The common understanding is that humans are irrational.  You can leave off the "beings" part.  Instinctual?  Sure, yes.  Emotional?  Mhm.  Logical?  Ehhhhh... sometimes?  Reasonable?  By turns.  The common understanding is that humans are rational.  It's unfortunate that the base assumption is so.  Where it is born, who knows.  My thought is that the seed of the assumption is formed in the assumption that you are a human and you're decisions and behaviors are rational to you and have furthered your survival and existence so if another human exists their behaviors and decisions must be rational too because they are also surviving.  Something along those lines.  It gets reinforced all over the place from every angle and channel of input.  You get it.  You are rational.  Why would you choose to do something that would jeopardize your very existence?  You don't have a death wish.  You are alive!

Humans are irrational.  Please stop building arguments and drawing lines in the sand from the standpoint of echos reverberating from advertisements and observed actions sculpted into frameworks and canned calls and responses and your pasts and your futures.  We are not rational.  Beings?  Sure.  Yes.  Rational?  No.  Rational some of the time?  Sure, yes.  If you want to make it absolute, one or zero, then we are one.  No being or thing is rational all of the time.  Okay, some things are.  Coins are rational.  Geometry is rational.  Math is rational and even when it's irrational it's rational (I think... I knew mathematicians existed and played at the fringes... pretty sure that foggy math is still relatively...  okay, maybe not... you get the point).  Alright, everything is irrational!

In all seriousness, life has been very frustrating trying to understand why events bring out expressions of concern for well being and continued survival in strange ways.  The most recent shooting is not a tipping point, but mumbling to myself while I worked through the day and the following day was telling.  Enter vice and criminality.

When the argument is made that laws have to stay the way they are because the criminal element will find a way to get what they want regardless of what laws are or are not in place and the citizenry must be able to protect itself from this shadow force, I cringe.  That shadow is being cast from the rational mind inside.

Is there a criminal element in the human population?  Yes.  Is that criminal element rational?  Of course not.  The percentage of the human population that makes up that criminal element is extremely visible and equally small.  It skews perception.  How much of that perceived element is gratified and punched up by the echoed reinforcement of  "I am a rational human being and criminals are humans and therefore also rational."  It is incredibly basic.  If you make laws to prevent something from happening or encourage something to happen to promote survival, a lot of humans will see the outcomes, understand mutual survival, and continue to be.  Those same communal laws will be ignored by some humans for all sorts of reasons and interactions and protein chains and chemical reactions.  We are not rational!  As much as you want to believe it.

Let's bring it to weapons. I need to be able to purchase a weapon capable of defending my life against the criminal element.  The rational criminal will find a way to get the weapon they want.  I need to be able to get one capable of answering whatever challenge that may be and limiting my options is sending me to certain harm.  You're flinching away from your own shadow.  Life is insecure.  Life is irrational.  The penalty for your crime is twenty years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 40 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 80 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is consecutive life sentences.  It's the principle!  The penalty for your crime is death.  You don't understand how much I've been through!  The penalty for your crime - will never be able to influence some humans actions.  That population is a lot smaller than advertised.

So you have to carry a gun because if you were them you would have a gun and you are rational, unlike them, and you follow the law because the law keeps everyone alive and well and they'd have one anyway because that's what you would do.  You have to protect yourself against the irrational ones.  Sometimes it makes me giggle the way people perceive laws because we see their statements about them and wonder how much of their conviction comes from what they've observed and how much comes from the little voices inside their own heads that they mash and thumb down and keep inside because they are reasonable humans doing what's best for human survival instead of slamming the door shut on who they are only to have it pop open a slip with a loud screeeeeeeeaak an inch or two because the bolt didn't quite seat to the strike plate, but the door's hinges are stout.

Getting what you want, when you want it, when you need it, if laws and community prohibit it, is not nearly as easy as television and hearsay and books and articles make it sound.  How many times have you followed an instruction manual to the letter and failed?  How many times have you gone to a holiday office party to be sociable and improve your image and come away exactly the same as you arrived?  How many times have you turned right on a red lit intersection with a dedicated right lane lamp because you were late and the lanes were clear?  How many times did you walk fifteen minutes away from the bar to get a pack of smokes and fire one up on the way back to the bar because they didn't sell them there and disallowed smoking on the premises?  The easy stuff.  The forgivable stuff.

Ramp it up.  Imagine that gas station is thirty miles away.  Imagine that intersection has five cameras pointed at it.  Imagine that party was organized by you and you showed up fashionably late too.  Imagine holding that instruction manual in your hand, closed, as you flipped the switch to "on" and the entire K'nex set whirred, wobbled, and cracked to pieces in seconds.  Getting what you want, when you want it is not an easy task, but it's fun to think hypothetically as a rational human.

"If I were them, I could do that.  I would do that!  If we are to survive we must make sure that if they do that (they are rational because that's what I would do and I am rational) we can stop them."  No, you couldn't.  It's hilarious and frustrating at once.  If I want to do drugs, I will find a way to do drugs!  No, not really.  If it's convenient, why not.  The feeling may pass.  The chemical programming may or may not.  The decision making is tied to the chemicals and past experiences hard coded upstairs.  It may take a while to shift.  It may never shift.  If it's not readily available, fifty one miles is just too damn long to go get it so I'll stew and grind on with my life without it.  The rational addict goes to get it, makes a way, finds someone who knows someone who heard about someone that was seen somewhere once and goes there to meet them for lunch.  The irrational human stumbles on through the next day and the next day and sits down some afternoons to cuss quietly or aloud and does something else with its time until it becomes a little more convenient and sometimes reflects on why its so upset in the first place.  Sometimes it kills itself, sometimes it hurts others, sometimes it decides to drive fifty one miles to ask a question.  Sometimes it decides now is now and another day is another day.

It's guffaw disappointing when the shadowman is invoked as a reason to do or not do something.  The shadowmen are arming themselves, laws be damned; do you want me to die?!  The shadowmen are circulating drugs all over the place; what of the children?  The shadowmen, the shadowmen, the shadowmen!  Without laws keeping step with the threat of the shadows no one is safe!

Yes, no one is safe.  No ones safety is ever guaranteed.  That goes back to when humans had to worry about giant nocturnal multi-legged hunters stealing away their curious young.  People die.  People will be killed.  Someone may murder you.  Someone you know.  Someone you know may murder someone you know.  People find ways to get what they want or need and laws don't stop them no matter how much they have to risk or harm themselves to get it.  The answer isn't lowering the threshold from irrational decision to action.  Raise it.  Otherwise you might as well be trying to fix a hole in a canoe by punching more holes so that everyone is treading water.  If everyone is under threat of drowning we are all safe, right?  Another terrible analogy.  Believing making something proven and observed to be extremely hazardous to other people readily available to everyone to level an imaginary playing field is just flat laughable.

Why are you so afraid of the shadowman?

Who's been whispering in your ear?

How do you not see the upside-down superimposed on what you advocate for and not pause?

We are not rational people.  Hearing arguments bounce back and forth with real ramifications, buoyed by this ghost echo of an assumption of reasonable behavior, it's stupefying.  The invocation of this evildoer for all seasons with no regard for law or just basic basic basic irrational humanness is disheartening.  But we are rational people.  We will survive.



///The Shadow

Fireflies for the Child In Me

I know I have to get back to writing.  I've been feeling sexual pins and needles, like a blanket in a dry room with a fireplace.  It's been a very confusing sensation.  Electric and warm and immaginary, though sensate.  The land of a half million new pairs of knit socks rubbed along a tightly curled rug by one million feet, except I feel that warmth running through my hips and arm pits and around my nips and ribs and the backs of my knees and my tailbone and right behind my ears.  For days.  I know I have to get back to writing.  I know this isn't what it feels like to not write.  I don't know what this sensation is, but I want to bury my mouth and eyes and nose in it and wrap my whole body up tight in it like a cigarillo, light the end, and pitch myself into a twinkling sunset from the lip of a bridge.  I will get back to writing.  The awareness of sexual solitary confinement is blitzingly real and oddly ember drift.

I want to watch and feel the fireflies depart with the breeze.  Little by one.  One by little.  Until the only light is from the evening sky and the threat of sunrise.  I think it is the only part of that spectrum I'll get to know and share with other people in a reasonable way.

Why not enjoy it?

Will you ever have sex again?  I don't know, but I hope it feels something like this.

Smashing Bottles On Ships

I think part of the passion for smashing bottles against the noses of ships before they depart the yard is not only a charm or totem.  I think it is also a celebration of what could've been and what will be if you think the ship is destined for disaster.  A chance, after months and days and years (relative), to lift restrictions and wiggle, watching the behemoth's construction.  It's a time to dance and dance as thoroughly as possible.  The smashing of a full bottle being representative. Once in union, all the rest is random and uncontrollable and sometimes violent and magical and explosive and "the last unexpected thing that will happen is this shattering and firework."

It is a reasonable lens.  And a reasonable way to approach.


///Brassica - "Wryders (FMB009)"

Rest Is A Cocoon

As we rest and breath over past and history and details.  Knowing more.  Growth is a strong word.  More like molting.  Showing that you have not died.  Showing that the fire, though about you and your skin and your nerve and eating through the marrow of your bone, has birthed, not consumed, you.  In love again.  The moon drives past my house real slow.  I howl out of the window, a scarf around my neck.




///Gold Panda - "Fifth Ave"

Passports

Visitors are always welcome, but those passports expire same day.  It didn't always used to be that way, but the policy has grown out of necessity.  An offshoot of the "protection" arc.  Is it necessary?  Yes.  If you pick up nothing from the course of life you've never lived and one of the things I've picked up is the fact that passports should not be granted on a long term basis.  Complete citizenship.

I'm sure part of the passport policy's origin lies in mental dysfunction and it's many symptoms, but part of it also lies in a love for the ones worth loving and preventing them from being damaged by the many symptoms more numerous expressions.  If you do insist on being issued a passport I can only stand in your way for so long.  I used to go out of my way to issue them, until the activity bit me in the ass so hard I could not deny the recklessness with which I was stamping books.  So I stopped stamping books.

To help me and to help you.  I want nothing to do with you, not because I want nothing to do with you, but because I can have nothing to do with you.  It is, in all actuality, just actually, very simple.  Or not.  At least to me.  I don't understand what I have to offer you.  Further from that understanding, is getting that it is okay to have nothing to offer you explicitly.  I don't get it.  Guilty.  I still have yet to grasp that.  Does that make me wrong to reject closeness?

Fear of change?  Yeah, sure.  That's already established.  I hate change like I hate playing with a board of objects wired to voltage.  Why does this one shock me now when it didn't on the last go round.  Fucking scientists.  Fucking psychologists.  Fucking experiments.  I don't know what I'm supposed to say or what I am to do or is an acceptable response.  So I am myself and I worry if that self at that time is acceptable or not.  After the fact.  Paying forward to increased anxiety.

Everything a study.  Too plodding.  Too thorough.  And knowing letting go is an option.  Still and caged.  Not caged, but trying to figure out how to gift wrap appropriately.  Gift wrap in a way that will be received to expectation.

Visitors from other lands.  No one belongs here except the ones born here.  It's a simple fact that helps me make the most of my interactions.  It's an understanding that helps me make sense of where froms and how tos.  They could never live here and I could never live out there for too long.  The things chasing me to sleep.  Not over thinking it or taking on some stance of god failure or "waaah, no one gets me," just adding up without trying to be ridiculously deterministic.

What shines brightest are those willing to dive in and take the chance that I'm wrong, which is wholly possible, pending my own ability to give them a chance to do so and also pending on my ability to accept a "no" on whatever grounds they find necessary or pertinent or fact.  I'm not sure I'm ready to do the first yet and I damn sure am not ready for the second.

My heart is made of glass.  I know this.  My brain is made of glass too.  Which one is a person to trust less?  Beats the hell out of me.  Let's find out.  "You don't belong here.  What are you doing here?!  What is your objective??""




///Bowery Electric - "Electro Sleep"    a lull in the battle

A Friendly Reminder

I was reminded today of what the creative process actually is and also informed or reinformed of what I've been doing.  Kind of a reanimation of what the mission really is and continues to be:

first and foremost and always foremost

We are a blueprint.  We are a map.  A map of the backwoods to go back to personally and also a map forwards for others in similar circumstances and also others who do not know what their circumstances are just yet, that they may not make the same mistakes again and also for the selves that they may understand each other and cooperate efficiently and do less damage to each other while they make their meetings and gravitas and coalesce instead of collide.

second

we are an outlet so that we do not make mistakes heinous and lesser, but mistakes nonetheless.   Travel comes from the front and history is written from behind.  Collision comes when the head and eyes go sidewinder.  There's nothing wrong with telling a good story.  There is something wrong with living a good story.  There is something very wrong with living the same story twice.  There is something very very wrong with not allowing a pop valve in the schematics so the engine does not burn itself into a solid chunk of slag.

third

is what you believe in.  There must be reminders to guide the way toward belief and above all belief systems is a belief in the fellow man.  There is no reason for extinction, not now, not ever, and I wish I understood that sooner.  Caveat being that there are some lined up for it.  Some exceptions.  Though they are very very few, they still exist.  It's an almost bulletproof belief.  Almost bulletproof is as close as can be had, so we'll take it.

fourth

this and her children are outlets.  The majority of the work is still unsung.  This is a manual and the parts and pieces are still, for the most part, in the parts bin.  This is the parts bin, as are her children.  There may or may not be a masterwork coming down the assembly line, but these are the parts.  These are the parts.  These are the parts.  Say it with me: slag.  This is not a summation.

fifth

the real work is done by day.  By night we are exhaust fumes.  The output of what comes from days of combustion and fire and fuel.  Never forget the process.  Never forget that what comes of work unrelated is a photo album and what comes of work ignited can and must be refined.

sixth

never forget the first.  Never forget where the bounds end and further expansion is absolutely mandatory.  Never forget the jail.  Never forget the cell.  Never forget, however pleasant, the yard still exists and the fences are still there no matter how far off they are and how easy it is to miss them, though you need binoculars to see them.  Never forget why the motor does what it does and that you are connected, whatever disagreement it is, objection you have, to it.  Never forget, but also do not fail to work with it, embrace it, and modify to the best of ability.  Because that will be, that failure will be, the end of the game.

Creation will always come from focus, sweat, a clean mind, organization, a healthy garbage heap, and a clean slate near or far.  However warm the fire is, you've nothing until you've walked away to build a pit of your own.  If it takes days, months, years, take the time to move stones and build that pit.  Until you take that time... it's just another fire.





///Bjork - "Hyper Ballad"  ...we live on a mountain...

A Definition for Addiction

Searching for a definition of addiction, I came to an impasse.

If you think about it every day, are you addicted?

If you think about it sometimes, maybe once a week, are you addicted?

If you run into your dealer and have an exceptionally awkward conversation, are you addicted?

Does it really matter what it is that you're talking about?

If you run into the son of a bitch that sold you crack at the dollar store are you less for not having talked to him while you were buying cereal?

I don't know what the rules are.   I don't pretend to.
Sometimes, however, I do wonder though.  It's not a matter of being clean or dirty or anything along those lines.  It's just a matter of defining what is.

Are you addicted to television?  Are you addicted to the thrill of the mainline, no matter what is?   The surprise of what you get versus what you paid for?   Are you addicted to the cliffhanger of a t.v. show?  Are you addicted to crossing words with people?  Are you addicted to waking up?  Are you addicted to waking up fuzzy?  Are you addicted to waking up next to another body?  Are you addicted to waking up to a body, live or not?

I dunno.  Spending a few days thinking about addiction and definition and words, and most importantly, trying not to try to mimic voice sounds from other people while they're in earshot.  that's all.  a life without definition is no life at all, right?  said a wise someone to a soon to be wise soandso.  Right?


///Ellie Goulding - "Only You"   This one goes out to you McCourghty.  I miss you.  I hope you're not dead. Haven't seen you around in a long ass time, but whatever.  For what it's worth, you were a project to find and a handful to corral and I had an easier time keeping a glass of water in my hand sans glass than it was to keep track of you.  I feel awful cuz I still can't spell your last name right.  Anyway.  Miss you, bro.  Thanks for everything.

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.

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"  

Busy on Paper

And by on paper, I suppose I mean with paper. Trying to take care of a promise and make good, because making good is what I do, maybe not best, but I would say it's one of my reasonably positive traits.



It's really time consuming work. Not that I have a problem with that at all. It's what makes these things as gifts so great. If you ever get one from me (only one family ever has - one family and my principal in sixth grade [made him a spanish gallion out of string and 3x5 flash cards) you know it's special. Every seam takes close to a minute to dry. Every cylinder takes roughly twice that. Add in the time to make the paper cuts, apply the glue, plan and execute joints, plus mistakes (they do happen, but not nearly as often as when I first started making things out of manila folders in sixth grade), plus the times when complex surfaces joined to other complex surfaces need hours to set and many applications of glue in between and, depending on the size of the thing you are making, you might be looking at three hours to make a component no bigger than a tennis ball.

I still love doing it. I was thinking at work last night that I don't talk about the things I love all that much. I think that's partly because so much of my life has been defined by people telling me what I can't do, what I'm not allowed to do, what I will not be permitted to do, where I can't go, where I'm not welcome. Is it possible to forget there are things in life that you do enjoy? Not entirely, but it certainly becomes a thing you can quickly overlook like a valley of flowers amid a mountain range gash across the landscape. Sure, nothing great will happen for you lying there for too long, but hell, the stems aren't gonna smell themselves.

I wish I could finish it this week, but I am literally out of time today, so I'll have to see how tomorrow shakes out. When it's done it'll weigh about five pounds and be about a foot and a half tall.

///FC Kahuna - "North Pole Transmission" ...the big bright sky that keeps you wide awake... one of my favorites. I dream of living somewhere the stars are so bright at night I couldn't sleep beneath them if I wanted to

Compound Eye

You know those weeks where you can swear up and down you own something, but you can't find it because you or someone you know or maybe someone you don't know borrowed it and never returned it to you or it turns out you never actually bought it in the first place because you dreamed the whole thing and woke up so seamlessly that the thought was sewn into the fabric of your memory permanently and you should by all rights, as far as the chemicals and salts zipping around the fatty little lanes and straightaways in your head can tell you, have it somewhere in the place where you live and within reach when you need it. Which is right now. Just a week of "I need this right now. Where is it?" Just wanted to tell you that yeah, you're not crazy. I know those weeks too. For me though, and not to say I'm super more specialer than you, it's been a month.

I can't seem to find my eye for pencil work. I lost it somewhere. I know I had it. I can look back at all the things I did with it and can still sort of fuzz out with the tool that's now occupying the space it used to occupy, but the series of functions and processes that composed my eye hand connection for pencil work have absented themselves from the factory floor. Which leads me to believe that they were taken. There's been another glaring gap in the work force. Physical production has tailed off dramatically. While it is good that I have managed to keep everyone on task doing constructive things instead of building destructive implements of and components to a machine whose sole purpose is a Rube Goldbergian mechanicide. There has been that one missing thing and I think I know the exact face that would have packed something like pencil work into his bag before checking out without notice. Which is fine. I can live with that. Everyone else still comes to the table and as long as I can have dreams that wander and fly with the child and can cross at will and am not building myself into an elaborate and immediate and quite possibly explosive self death, the rest is water under the gravy cake.

Buuut still. It is just a little annoying. I have no idea where they go. As the administrator I usually just have to sit and wait for them to come back. The kid wanders. That's the only one I have to actively chase down, because who the hell knows when he'll get back. Plus I don't even know if it's possible for them to get hurt out where they go and come to and from and with him I take no chances. That's the main member that helps keep everyone else relatively in agreement. But enough about me. I tried to draw some flowers today. Flowers in the shape of a scorpion for an idea for a tattoo. This is what came out:



Frustrating. Not even close to what was laid out in my head. I felt like strangling my hand for it's insolence, but that wouldnt have helped any of us. Well I might have felt better for a few minutes in the same way Stalin felt better for having people shot, but we all know how that ended. Happily ever after. If by happily you mean breathlessly paranoid. And if by ever after you mean with little warning and thankfully not a minute or second longer. So I'm not going to have my hand shot. This time. I'd probably have to hold the gun with my mouth. Maybe rig up some kind foot pedal operated jig, because old lefty can't really be trusted. They've been friends too long. Might give him the tip off and righty might skip town to Istanbul.

Well anyway. What now. Is the main question. I don't know if I can't draw. I think I still can. That drawing I did before did not turn out nearly as I saw it in my head either. I hope this disconnect isn't a sign of some medical nonsense. I'm not going in for that. I got enough medical nonsense to try and ignore without thinking about having to have new medical nonsense to try and ignore on top of that. But enough about me.

I think what could also be happening here. An alternate theory of the origin of man, if you will. Is that our dear escapee is still at work and still down in the factory toodling away at this and that project behind my eyes and ahead of spine, but the actual tools and processes and algorithms he is using have changed without my direct information. Which is possible, I suppose. In fact, I assume. In fact, in fact is one of those things I just try not to use in writing and it always comes up, so I will not use it again in here so I can think about - whatever. The point is, he is still there doing his damnedest to turn plans and prints and raw blank ingots of multi-ton steel and walls of marble into frescoes. Frescoes? Really complicated and beautifully simple objects of vision transmitted from my head to yours through the medium of the manipulation of space, material, and radiata and what I am expecting to see is really him trying to do the job with the new tools and processes and it is amounting to trying to build houses with like a complex multistage artisan bread oven instead of hammers and nails and measuring tape.

So instead of the end product being something that it should be had I not so strictly enforced my vision on myself - a ridiculously awesome bread house, shiny and golden and all crazy twisty gorgeous sitting on my coffee table, it ends up being something close to my vision, but ridiculously not - an impossible to inhabit, but human sized house built with beams of sagging bread and weird warbly walls and a floor you can stand on for about two seconds before you fall through from the upstairs straight on down to the dirt floor basement.

I think my eye for black and whites and penciling and penning is changing, or maybe already changed, to an eye for colors. I thought I lost my eye for color earlier this week because I was trying to see what I wanted to see in terms of line work and then overlay the colors I wanted it to appear in on top of that and I couldn't get past trying to envision the lines. I thought that meant that I was having trouble seeing how the colors would fit and thus couldn't fit the lines to the colors. Now I think the problem might be that I can see the colors without the lines and trying to fit the lines to the colors is something my tools and processes are unprepared to do.

Which is slightly exciting. I don't remember when we talked about it before, but when I first started sharing art I told you I was a pen and pencil guy and usually never screwed around with coloring things because I had no eye for it. I guess I've been working at it long enough to change that and hadn't realized it until now. Unless there is a third explanation. A third theory of space and time and the god particle if you will. I could just have regressed. I might just be worse at drawing and art than I was before. But fuck that. I'm greatness.



///Mouse on Mars - "Circloid Bricklett Sprungli" you know I don't have an ego that big. My ego is so small to understand how small it feels you'd have to feel this song turned up as loud as it'll go and turn the bass up as high as it goes and picture yourself sitting on the nose of a Saturn V booster, tall as a skyscraper, firing the energy output of a dozen Hoover Dams out of it's enormous backside in more flames and vapor than you've ever seen in the widest Arizona sunset you've ever laid eyes on and on top of that tower you look back and there's nothing behind you but the shrinking blue disk of a half moon Earth and the blackness of space so wide it makes you dizzy just to blink. That's how little my ego is as I'm blasting through space, trying to understand the world and teach myself to be okay with the fact that I may never really have a place to land.