Change, Other Peoples Clothes, Top Down Sun Up, and Attack

I think that's how I got good at defense.  Attacking is an entirely different bag.  Attack, attack, attack!  Get on it!  I don't do call and response all that well.  I do response.  A lot of my growing up and formative whatevers was response, not call.  I was raised not to call and it's been a hedge maze trying to get out of it.  When I do call it's usually over top of what I was calling for and it's blunderbussy.  Killing a fly with a hammer instead of a swatter and then I have to fix the hole in the wall left behind.  It's been fun learning though, learning how to call the right way when calls need to be made and learning that response shouldn't be the only way to integrate myself into lives, because they have lives too and waiting until you're screaming and bleeding out of the eyes is no way to go about inserting yourself into conversation.  I still need distance in a bad way, but a good way.  It keeps them safe and it keeps me safe from misunderstandings and not so shuffle crowds and that's a good thing.  The fewer the things flowing in the better I can handle, and then it's not a frag of choice.  I hate getting hooked on forks.  STOP GIVING ME CHOICES WITHOUT CHANCES TO BREAK UP BAD ONES!  That's my only qualm with the United States of Aye Merica.  The land of one time opportunity for too many of us.  I'd swing less opportunity for more chances any day.

If I could go back in time I wouldn't punch myself in the face or shake myself by the shoulders.  I'd kiss me.  Hard and furious and little me would be like "what the fuck, man!" and then I'd tell him "it gets rougher, harder, longer, and more ridiculous.  You're going to fire a staple through your hand by accident and it's going to suck, but you're going to try to get out of work early and it's going to be one of the worst days post parents that you'll hate.  It'll heal up alright and nearly seamless and your boss will be proud of you for getting things done, but you're gonna wish you took more time on the project.  Just sayin'.  You're gonna hate it for about two minutes, but you're gonna kiss the blood and move on."  Poof!  Time traveling me peaces out and little me scratches his eyebrow and mumbles "no way."

I'm wearing other people clothes from goodwill.  They're great!  Half the stuff I have on makes me wonder what could provoke someone to give them up.  I haven't bought myself a jacket in a long time.  It's been years and I hadn't really thought about it until now.  It was always my mother, well, not always.  Sometimes my dad would pass me one.  I still miss my Bell Atlantic jacket sometimes.  That thing was the tits.  Furry pockets, double layered body and a knit collar.  Loved it.  Don't love how I got it (from my father, I hate saying that, but it's true.  I hate thinking about "I came from that"s cuz it makes me sick and it probably shouldn't, still heated, still gotdamn heated, it's not gonna die, but I actually want it to.  If he wants to apologize, my terms are teeth.  Not all of them.  But give me one of your kanines and apology accepted.  Until then, and only because you outright refused me.... twice, til death), but that jacket was everything you could want in a jacket.  Nice and tough outer with ... aw, it's not leather... trying to think of the word... the outer was made of the stuff good work pants are made of.  The cuffs were knit too, just like the collar.  And you can't beat the Bell Atlantic logo on the chest.  So good!

I'm wearing other peoples clothes and it feels nice.  It feels right.  It feels good to have new things that I bought on my own with my own tastes instead of for all kinds of purpose.  Purposeless clothing rocks.  Why do you have that jacket?  No reasons beyond my own.  It tickles me to say that.  Everything has been so purpose driven toward survival and managing damage and matching in, but this time, this jacket isn't about matching in or history or family or learning how to run with the silverfish, it's just about wearing what I want to wear.  The thing about goodwill though, the darker side, is wondering about if some of my stuff is going to end up at one when for one reason or another, cut short, or left standing still, my things get out of time.  Is someone going to be eyeing my baseball jersey who also loves the number 78?  I'm not mad about it, but I wish I could meet them so we could talk about our affinity for 78 and how it came about.

Top downing it.  I tried to go ground up and I couldn't provoke myself to make the change to oemfail, so I'm taking it from the roof down and it hurts.  Thematics don't work backwards no matter how hard you try to grow them that way.  I do enjoy the brighter motif.  I really do.  We're gonna grow the font into a better color and adjust the images, but sometimes you just have to go into a room and sit down in it to begin to understand where it's coming from.  The same thing goes for people.  You'll never get a good read from afar.  Top downing it because I've been boxed out and there is no other option.  And I'm okay with that.

I don't like change.  Change is stupidly difficult.  Sometimes routine will betray you and catch you not paying attention and I think I like that worse.  I can be manipulated and gulled and switch backed fairly easily, but I like to think of it as a trade off.  A trade off I am willing to take.  Unwillingly at times.  Taking it though.  Brighter and brighter.  Years behind and still in meta jail with my fingers through the fence, but making keys.


///Mackelmore - "White Walls"  .... lean back... the more I listen to his album the more I enjoy it

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

Old and News and Birthdays and Writer's Bowel Abstraction

May 22nd was my 7 year old birthday. My next birthday is coming up on the 27th. I'm gonna be 8 years old. Should be fun. Assuming I will live to experience 73 iterations of my life, I've broken up each iteration into 73 birthdays because I am essentially living a full life through each iteration from reconception to ultimate system failure so I will have a birthday every five days culminating with my death next year on the 21st of April at midnight and my reboot on the 22nd into my 27th iteration of life. So really, I guess the 27th will be star date M.26.8.Y-P221A or something.

I wonder if leaving the country is like entering a parallel universe.

I don't know what I'm going to do for my eighth birthday. Probably nothing. Nothing and videogames. Satisfaction and fulfillment fired directly into the vein and straight to the brain stem. Honestly 73 is probably a bit of a reach. I don't very well expect to land within twenty years of that, but I might as well keep even the unlikely within my model because it does happen.

Recently I've been culling through some of my old complete short stories to see which ones I want to feature on Bits and what I've realized is that some of my old stuff is dreadful. Which is good. I mean abortions are never fun, but sometimes they need to happen and sometimes they don't happen and you have to live with the outcome for better and worse.

In writing, I feel, it's not good to have too many abortions. Eventually you've got to gut it out and finish and seal the deal. I don't think I've ever typed seal the deal. What an odd collection of letters. Visually I think it's the ea's that are looking funny and making me smile to look at them. But anyway, in writing if you are constantly quitting mid-project or mid-composition you'll eventually find yourself staring at a mountain of unfinished work that you know is bad and you'll find it very difficult to pick through for the good pieces that might work in other things because it is a hugely tangled mess of half and full formed ideas.

At least when you gut it out and finish your composition or your project it is all more or less there in front of you in some sort of organized fashion with a start, a middle, and an end and you can, if you so choose, open it up and page through it and find out what's working and what isn't working and what went off the tracks and what sounds too much like X and Y and Z and what should be moved to where and then, after all of that happens, you can decide that "hey maybe this isn't worth opening ever again" and then you can move on with confidence.

That's probably one of the biggest reasons to not abort mid project. The ability to finish is reason two and that is something that I think artist should always cultivate. You should always want to finish and want to get that feeling of completion, regardless of the projects caliber, and you should know what that feeling tastes like when it hits you. You should develop a predilection for the taste of finishing. The number one reason, though, is to be able to have a whole something to look at and be able to close it and shelve it and know, de facto, that you did your due diligence on the idea and it didn't pan out and now you can move on to something different or take another approach at the idea with full confidence that you left nothing to waste and rot and get lost in a junk bin never to be seen again and more important than you first imagined.

Going through some of my old stuff has been a lot reason number one. More than I expected. I feel like that means I've either leveled up in my skill and analytical ability or have taken (without my knowledge) a new creative direction. Or maybe my voice is just taking on more definition and I'm learning what I can say well and what I have trouble expressing and exploring in my fiction and poetry. I think it's a mix, and I don't know the exact details of the tonic, but my ego wants to say "it's cuz yer awesome, d00d!!!" but I know I haven't been doing this long enough to feel comfortable saying that about anything I do. I think the only thing I am capable of producing that I can confidently say I'm awesome at is burps. Maybe turds. Yeah, poops too. I'm pretty good at that.

Which, brings me to something else because I don't want to spend another word of our time on pooping. I discovered that I developed a writer's block. It took about a week to really feel it out. For me, writer's block doesn't descend in a day, but it's like picking up a pen to write down your grocery list or maybe your to do list each morning and finding the pen a little drier and a little drier until your scratching the words into the paper with a dead pen until you've finally torn your pad to shreds and you've got nothing but your ashy skin to try and etch things on and its too painful and time consuming to even bother so you stop bothering altogether. I realized I'd stopped writing my poetry altogether and I spent most of yesterday night at work trying to diagnose the quitting.

Turns out I'd made myself sick of abstraction. Sick of the expression of abstraction. The whole idea about abstraction is that it is difficult to express in concrete terms. So, lo and behold, the difficulty of expressing it in concrete terms translates with high fidelity to writing about it and takes a disproportionately large amount of mental work to cut into and reveal it in the beautiful simple jagged symmetry and music of poetic words and that mountain of effort and work and finishing the unfinished and polishing the dun metal of impotent machinery and ideas mounted and mounted and mounted until I mentally tore up my paper, snapped my pen in half, and walked away from it without even realizing it was happening until I walked on to my idea foundry and saw every single work station was empty and the mills were collected dust and cobwebs.

The solution, you ask? So simple. Work on the concrete. No more talking about feelings and emotions and human complexities and quirks. Talk about places, things, peoples faces and bodies, foods, actions, and mechanisms. Talk about real histories and experiences and tastes and smells. It can be burdensome to define the abstract so even in expressing the expressible, avoid abstractions that demand abstract explanation. Take the trappings away and there will be no traps and words will flow again and you can get back to eating ideas and feeding your head knowing your stomach isn't bloated with dead ones you haven't passed.

I do believe I am done with the old stories I will feature. Old arrays of skeletons and pelts and antlers I've already bagged and shown off in grainy black and whites and time stamped digital camera prints. Time to start in swinging the ax and hammer and pounding the chisel and pulling the trigger and skinning and big game hunting the new ideas that have been lurking. Time to start talking to the new people that have arrived and sat waiting, some patiently, some quietly, some not. There are perhaps a handful of old ones left to cut and trim up and in some cases flesh out and disambiguate for show, but by and large it's time to get started exclusively on the new. I did that with Auralport and good God was it a great feeling to go there to compose knowing full well that there was nothing else in the parts bin to go through and it was all gonna be fresh squeezed. Took me forever to get over the self consciousness of showing things and saying "yep, I made that" because you can never know if people like it or hate it or just see it and say "interesting" or if people don't see it at all, and I'm just now starting to get that feeling with Bits, but it's a feeling with two sides. Part apprehension at the opening of yourself to judgement and knowing someone is going to say "wow that's crap and I wasted my time" and part elation and exhilaration of creative expression and knowing that even if no one says to themselves "that was neat" you still get the pleasure of knowing you fucking did something and it turned out as good as you hoped it would.

I guess the other thing about it is knowing every hour you spend working on it is an hour you've spent getting better at something you love. Which is why I need a new job. A job that I can get better at every day I'm there and not in the sense of "dear God, this is the best filing clerk in the world. He has been filing for so long that he can file the letter A faster than any man living or dead" or "dear God this is the best cashier ever, he's been counting out change for so long he can do it just by feeling the weight of the mixed coins." I mean something that I can literally learn more about every single day because there is actually more to learn and master and not just continue to work and rework and go over the same shit until it's muscle memory in your brain.

Also want to apologize. I used literally in a non literal sense recently and it did not escape me, I was just being lazy. Laziness sucks. No one wins.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I know some of what makes it out of my head is good at the time until I reread it months later and in the context of my expanded skill set and mental library can see it's not so stellar. I'm learning. Promise.


///Bjork - "Oceania (featuring Kelis)" I did not know this existed until today. I love Kelis. I love Bjork. Eargasm. This version is so different from the one on the album. Like night and day and then midway through you feel the epiphany you first struck as a kid when for the first time you were awake to see one turn into the other and the vastness of space became real.

sometimes < a poetically... 04/16/07

Subject : sometimes
Posted Date: : Mar 16, 2007 1:44 AM

i killed a joke. it was not too long ago. it involved rocco sifreddi and the phrase "you say you dance sometimes." the details aren't important... but what is important is that i have come to really respect that random filler spewing from that porn stars mouth while he makes some excuse to get girls to spread 'em. i dont condone his behavior. im pretty wholesome in that i am attracted to and lucky enough to have what i term a wholesome woman. so anyway, the point (i love to talk) the point is this: the idea of "sometimes" has made the leap from joke, to drunken rant, to killed joke, to mantra, to curiosity, to introspective reflection over the course of the past school year. case in point, the following:

sometimes my arms go numb when i hold books up to read.
my knees hurt sometimes when i slouch on subway cars.
sometimes i dance when everyone is looking.
i like to write sometimes, but sometimes id rather watch a movie.
i change my clothes sometimes, and sometimes i shower.
sometimes i laugh at car accidents.
sometimes i fear for my life all of the time.
i drink sometimes.
etc. etc. etc. the interesting thing is... those phrases carry varying loads of forcefulness, like bows being drawn to different degrees... all because of that word. and it all started with rocco's poddy mouth.



///beastie boys - "and me" the lyric and the tempo of this song counter balance eachother in that magical way that makes a severely trying experience immediately assume the lightness of retrospect. "it's push and pull- the way its got to be..." right now things are pretty difficult. but im dealing reasonably well. i really think everything that has happend up to now has been due preparation for whatever comes next. barring a thermonuclear explosion in my back yard, i'd say im ready to survive anything (except maybe rambo style torture. if anyone cuts my chest open while i am concious i will most likely poo myself and then promptly die).