Preparing For Changes and the Return of the Painted Dinosaur

We've been drinking a lot.  The nice thing about self medicating is that you can up or down your dosage as needed without the pain or risk of seeing "professionals", though the time elapsed has gifted a pro status to yourself.  That professionalism about the approach can easily get away from you in much the same way an infinite prescription pad can get away from you and the dulling of sensation and thought and process will become a pea beneath a mattress. 

We are going to strip some away.  Artificial feeling.  Artificial sense.  Changes are coming and they're going to be unpleasant, but carrying around the ghosts in the darkness constantly is not possible.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  There is no winning or losing.  There is fear.  You've been normal, you've been good,  you've engaged, you've laughed, you've loved, you've cried, you've walked back and forth three hundred and eight times and you can't push anything new until you open the box. 

So we're going to open the box so we can write our poetry again and stop pretending we're fine.  We're not.  Haven't been for months.  How great a run has it been?  It's been fun.  The muddy boots and gloves, the tools misplaced, the hysterics, the silence, they don't lie.  Eventually it feels like building a carnival atop mass graves and playing the music loud enough to drown out the way foot falls squeeze blood from between the blades of grass and insisting to the patrons it's just part of the show.  I'm looking forward to it.

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"

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.

Little Ripples

There are many measures and routines to help ensure our stability and further existence in schizophrenia's shadow.  Not a single one is bulletproof or sure-fire.  They're more like an array of alarms.  A network of self-imposed checks that serve to help me protect myself from myself and help me maintain an awareness of what is happening inside as well as help me perceive how or why I am interacting with people on the outside.  It sounds elaborate.  It is.  It works sometimes.  Maybe 50% of the time.  That's too low, maybe 65% of the time.  I believe.  I would like to think.

The auditory hallucinations are always there.  Sometimes the best way to handle it is to drown it out or try to blanket it in constant music or reruns of radio talk shows or television shows that I've heard dozens, in some cases, hundreds of times so that it forms a background tapestry to latch myself to.  Sometimes the way we handle it is by drinking... a lot.  If you hammer your brain into unconsciousness, you can't hear anything at all and what's more is that you can skip entire days sleeping while your body tries to recover itself.  Those auditory glitches cannot hurt you and you don't have to engage with them for 7 days out of the week.  Through the gift of alcohol, your week becomes 4 days long instead of 7.  That's not the best way to deal with it.  That is a way to escape it.  Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to try to engage them outside of yourself.  Try to write to them or draw to them or just talk to them through your mouth if possible.  That never works.  Nothing ever works.  Don't kid yourself.

It does help us to feel secure for a while.  The acts help us feel grounded to something and allow us to move through the world and focus on tasks, conversations, and people in front of us.  It isn't always paralyzing, but it grows all its own.  Sometimes it's fun to think I can control it.  Will power.  Discipline.  Routine.  Everything where it belongs.  Simplicity.  All of these things.  Then I'm in a line at a grocery store asking the man behind me "did you say something" four times before it hits me walking to my car that he's the fifth person I've questioned that day and things are slipping from bad to worse and my little network of alarms is not helping.  Sitting up in bed, watching shows I've seen thirteen times, and getting up for an eighth time to check that I'm alone because someone else is in here and I heard them say my name twice and I know it's not the neighbor downstairs because she goes to bed at 8:45 every night.  Someone keeps turning the doorknob to the pantry and I heard them stub their toe and curse.  Jesus, they are inside.  We have to go.  Now!

Walk out underneath the street lights and it's 11:30ish.  Headphones turned up as loud as they will go.  Walk around the block.  We try to memorize every detail and compare it to what was there before we started walking.  We compare it to what was there after our evening lap.  We try to see if we are seeing things again and a shadow grunts "pssst, hey" so we decide to walk to the next town over and avoid the bridge because they will be waiting there to howl through our insides and if I could get to the park and lie down in the field for an hour or two to catch my breath the world might stop spinning for a moment.

I feel depression creeping in again.  A very light pressure behind my ears and chest.  A dull railroad spike through the near corner of my eye straight through the back of my head that will start to crystallize and splinter outward like a molten iron snowflake.  I start to question again.  Who wants to deal with this?  How could we have been so blind and over confident to believe love can iron out differences whose gulf spans literally every aspect of your lives?  You broke, dumb, idealistic, garbage, man-child.  What is that?  Who's there?  Lying awake in bed until the sun comes up wondering if he is going to come for you tonight.  Sitting on the cool bathroom floor telling yourself "never again, never again, never again."  You didn't really believe someone would choose this warped, scarred, perverse thing over a human.  Did you?  How sweet.  That is just adorable.

I still receive letters from time to time from the people that were my parents.  Some expressing concern and well wishes.  Some acknowledging holidays and other spiritual flotsam and sentiment.  I feel my fist close and my fingernails dig into my palm.  How dare they.  How dare they.  How dare they!  Still, not one acknowledgement of responsibility.  Not one acknowledgement that part of why I am here now, fighting every day to navigate through and undo the damages where I can, is because of their compounding actions for decades .  Not one hint.  Swipe at my twitching cheek that is curled into a stone snarl and spit out another piece of chipped tooth.  I have to stop doing that.  We only get one set of teeth.  We probably won't get to drink their blood any time soon.  That's a shame.

How can you love someone else, when you cannot love yourself?  I do love myself.  I love other people too.  The simple fact is we're broken.  Period.  Not fixable.  You can try all of the little things you like to lure someone else close: more money, a little land, cars and furniture, clothes and shoes, it is not going to change the base state of how you function.  What's more, and pretty funny, is that the base state of how you function also governs all of those things too.  You'll end up asleep in a bathtub chasing those things, we all know this first hand.  I haven't the stomach for it or the mental health and make up.  It won't take long to stop seeking meaningful intimacy with others.  I'm already just about there.  Roiling hatred transposes to the grainy, rattling, vision of rage.  Kill them all.  I have nothing to offer you and rare in this world is the human who truly needs nothing.  I am close.  I will find someone in kind.  Or I will stumble upon them in the dark.  Either way, I am not built for this world.

The hallucinations are growing in volume.  It is best to be alone when it starts to happen.  It's a lot easier to differentiate and stream thoughts apart from them when there isn't someone else around requiring attention and head cycles.  The frustration and irritation and embarrassment is greatly reduced and sometimes it helps to deal with and engage it when I can strictly control what I am sensing.  To a point.  There is a point where it doesn't matter what we do to insulate and protect ourselves because the assault is coming from the inside of our body and eventually there is no where to hide and nowhere to run and I try my best not to claw my skull apart.   I try my best not to scream.

Moving through the day and the little ripples tickling the hairs on my fingers and shins, I pause and whisper "not again."  That was not my name.  That was not my name.  That was not my name.




///Muriel Zoe - "Bye Bye Blackbird"

Revisiting Battlefields Gone Silent

How many years has it been?

Revisiting and rereading them (Bits For Flames) for the umpteenth time I see and edit them in ways I could not before.  I still have so much to learn.

I do believe my resolution for the new year will be to rewrite every single one of them that I felt fit enough to publish back then with the knowledge and practice I have now.

Rereading them now, these pearls and machinations that I knew were not perfect, but deft enough to force upon other ears, they dance like puppet shows.  Telling too much and not showing enough.  Stilted.  Awkward.  Wooden.  Produced with what was the greatest understanding of the sweet science of writing and the cold magic of emotive sorcery that now reads like remedial math.

I used to set my goals to things I thought much higher.  Quitting smoking!  Learning and training to dunk a basketball!  Mastering the art of throwing knives and being able to defend myself and hold accountable all who dared to cross me with martial perfection.

In the background I plugged away at how a conversation is made.  How to engage someone actively.  I worked on my translator software and my lens and tape.  I listened to playback and learned how to speak with greater efficiency and economy of words.  The war was not multi-tasked.  Multitasking is a myth, we all know this.

After 10,000 hours I convinced myself I arrived at the best I can do.  The best I have done is a lie.  I can do better.  And I will.

The emperor will wear new clothes before I turn that engine.  First things are first and we have been waiting quite some time for the new design.  What we have is a goal.  What we will do is place the pen to paper once more and see what shakes out of our new branches that have borne fruit uncut just yet.

The blender awaits.  The knife is ready.  The cutting board is clean.  There are no attachments.  It is time to explore the old body and build a new one.  When you can get everyone at the same table at the same time you can rearrange the workshop and factory floor plan.  New weapons, new tools, new methods.

"...in the foxhole / where I hide..."


/// Hershey Kisses Bells

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"

In Consideration of Empathy

You attack and beat yourself up over your inability to see eye to eye with your brother.  Eye to eye about what?  Everything.  Not everything, just things now.  The formation and configuration of our immediate family.  Who funds what and why.  Who goes and does what and where.  Who can.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him on that?  You just watched a video of yourself dancing and you thought it was awesome, but the truth is if bodies could have Tourette Syndrome, you would probably be the poster boy with Elaine Benes as the prom Queen.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him at all?  You are two completely different human beings, down to sexual orientations and the arrangement of your individual eyelashes.  You are not supposed to agree.  You are about as different as they come between siblings.  You do realize this, I hope.  You are a stamped coin.  Do you get it now?  You are never going to see eye to eye about just about everything.  If you want to see the other side, you are probably going to have to bend time and space and, last I heard, that shits pretty difficult with a thousand acre facility so good luck trying to do it with a few cubic inches of fatty gray matter.

You don't have to see anything his way.  He doesn't have to see anything your way.  What is this weird aggression toward a shared emotional experience?  It's not there.  Stop looking.  I don't say that as a warning sign like marking something so damaging and toxic you will die immediately, if not soon after.   I say that as a time saver.  I say that as a wayfarer.  Stop looking.  There is nothing at the end of that ocean.  There is nothing on the other side of that desert.  The globe does not loop around.  It is infinite in the darkness beyond the stars.  Stop looking.  Occasionally whip your binoculars up to your face and take down the range, time, and windage and then duck back down into the reeds.  You do love him, but you do hate him too.  Not for any particular reason.  Just envy.  Change positions.  Skulls, skin, bones, you do know you wouldn't be able to change circuitry.  Can't I?  No.  Mightn't I?  No.  Impossible-r-y-ing I?  No, and that's definitely not a word or fragment.  What the hell is that?   I just stroked off for a minute.  What were you saying?

I was saying, we're never going to see eye to eye, so stop beating yourself up when you try and do not.  You're not a bad person.  You're not a flaming heap of garbage to be kept at arms length all of the time.  Sometimes you cannot control your volatility.  It's a fine problem to have.  You don't have to kill him and you don't have to fight him.  Just let him be himself and you be yourself and the chips will land where they please and are directed.  Your engagement with the world can never be his.  It can be emulated.  Where's the fun in tracing?  Where's the existence in tracing?  Do not get angry with yourself for being irrevocably, irreconcilably, different.  No, you are not stupid for trying.  Anyone in their right mind would see their closest genetic match and want to touch it like a mirror to make sure what they saw was not a reflection.  You are me?  No.  I am me and you are you, and never the two shall meet.




///Dan Deacon - "Feel the Lightning"  polishing the brass on warships that will and need never leave Earth.  Fear is healthy.  A degree of worry is healthy.  Don't take it too far.

The Best Thing

about the mornings is that you survived another night.  The evening is tremendously gorgeous, but I'm not sad to see her go.  Do you believe in ghosts?  The things in the wild waiting for the sun to set?  I do.

One Last Tune Up

The enemy of "good" is "perfection."  Decision time is here again.  The thought of gestation makes me laugh, but it's true.  Poetry is still my best friend.  Fiction is still my mistress.  Still too orchestrated.  This is still my sandbox.  Leafing through notes, it's difficult to not get frantic.  Slide over, bacon.  Let me drive for a while.  Okay?  I promise I will not crash.  Okay?  Okay.  You're still two handing the wheel.  Sorry.  Okay?  Okay.  Let go.  Okay.  Alright, I'll see you soon, you know that, right?  I do.  Good.




///DJ? Acucrack - "Wickerman"

A Joke, a Little Work, a Little Fantasy, and a Little Truth

Maybe that's why I enjoy night so much.  During the day I just want to stare at the sun and dream about going there.  Life without sunglasses was brutal.  I went mad trying to find them and turned my apartment inside out looking for them.  Of course I left them at a job site.  I asked the people there, when I returned and thought I saw them, if they were mine.  And they said "I don't know, are they?"  I don't know!  Are they?!  I thought they were, but they wouldn't tell me and I thought maybe they were playing a game on me to see how long it would take for me to declare that they were and take them.  In my mind, steal them.  I put two and two together (after turning my place upside down searching) and made my declaration.

So, let's open with a joke.  I'd like to.  I know I am no comedian, so let's give it a little go.  What did the manhole cover say to the street?

Give up?

It said "I'm glad I'm not square."

I was speaking to someone and I can't quite remember who.  I don't think it was a friend.  I think it was a random conversation that sparked up between myself and someone else at the gathering, because I'm near certain it was some sort of gathering with friends that I was at, otherwise I would have been on the deck of my starship.  I was speaking to someone and the who is not all that important.  What came out of the conversation was a comment on the work I do, performing maintenance and changing spaces and power tools and heavy tools sometimes when the work is thick and the corrections that need to be made are more intensive than pure oil changes and minor rerouting/replacement of resources.  

The comment was that my job is basically life as we know it and all I have to do is mine plus a little extra whenever it's not intensive.  I must say, I got offended, but I laughed it off.  I got offended.  Deeply offended.  Do you understand how difficult life is?  Do you understand how difficult maintenance is?  Cutting off the infinite hydra?  It has no heart.  It has no organs.  It has no weak points.  It is impossible to kill or destroy.  It will never be complete and it is constantly adapting.  I wanted to break their face when they said that, but I decided to laugh instead which was good for both me and him.

As I backed my mind over the conversation about work after things died down and everyone went their separate ways and I stepped inside my airlock and sealed the door and fired up the engines and set the course back away from the sun and plotted around the minefield of asteriods too big to bounce off the shielding and hull it occurred to me that they were not spot on, but they were right.

When I am not doing heavy work, my job is to perform what I would do for myself, except duplicated.  It is similar to running many instances of one life simultaneously.  Without the extra relationships so you can focus pure on the bones, guts, and vessels.  The blocks and supports that allow relationships to happen.  It's extra relationships to me, but for the constituents its first order relationships.  I maintain my ship to allow me to get the distance I want and know I need, and come and go from the inner system close to at will.  What they use their fighters and runabouts and escorts and carriers and interceptors and cruisers and bombers and liners or whatever you want to call its for is their business.  My business is making sure they run as well as they possibly can so they can do their business and grow their relationships as I do my own.

When it comes to work there are many ways to go about it, but they were right.  I am no longer offended by it.  Yeah, most of my work is life.  Regular life things.  That's about as much job as I can handle.  I'm laughing while I say that, but it's something I've come to know about myself that I didn't really think about more clearly until that particular conversation happened and I got sickly offended.  As much job as I can process is life, is the other connection I am trying to make and I think I made it good.  I'm not offended at all.  I control the timezone and the appointments to a degree.  I set the tempo.  To a degree.  And that's why I love my job.  It is a direct hit to my wheelhouse and not a degree more or less.  

I still have to answer for what I do.  I still have a difficult time performing maintenance on my own craft.  Multiplied over others crafts it's like managing a motor pool and every now and then when one limps into the shipyard and drops anchor I'm happy to see it because I know I am built for it, and yeh it, the task, may be nothing fancy to you.  It may be routine to you.  To me it is approaching maximum output and it gives me joy to know what I work to do, and sweat to do, and bleed to do, I can do for them and theirs too and let them punch their throttles and brakes and when they turn the dual keys and sequence their hyperdrive to go see who they want to or bring their lights up for their party or plug in their laptop in their study or push their coffee table to a spot where they can put their feet up and still be sitting on their couch or activate their weapons without having to think about whether it will work or not. 

Sure, it's regular shit.  As much job as I can take without losing control of my own regular shit.

Alright, I'm going to try to get through this fast so I do not waste your time.  There are few things worse than thieves.

Burn like a tire.  The easy thing to do is burn energy by burning it.  We all get that.  Burn the excess.  Take only what you need.  I think that's the key and the dream to art's pursuit.  The realized and often unrealized dream to art's pursuit and it's main reason for existence.  Without art we are nothing.  We are little entropy machines and we are aware enough to know this.  We build up charge and build up charge and requires expense.  It is not optional.  We are aware that ourselves and environment are constantly approaching disarray at fantastic speed.  Our awareness heightens as we approach great structure.  We would not know structure without disorder built into our make up.

The easy thing to do is burn.  It's not the secret of life.  Each day a person wakes up they are given charge.  Each day a person wakes up, their fortress has trapped free energy from the destruction around them.  Destroy it.  Burn it.  Literally.  Run in circles.  Use it to create more endless fury.  Or battle it.  Make a declaration and take a stand and say "no."  It's not about building a tower to be sent down by time or sent down by someone else.  It's about recognizing that you have recognized that you are different.  You know what's happening and where it ends and offering a beautiful warning.  The game of putting your finger on the tip of your nose to say "not it!"  

I guess I did finally get that I cannot play dumb as often as I would like to.  At the same time though, what gave me pause was, I also know for sure I am not as smart as I think I am sometimes.  A good portion of the time.  So I'm not going to allow myself to get brassy on my own behalf.  S'not playing dumb, but I would rather underestimate the jump and take too much care than overestimate the jump and take too little.

I am an awful liar.  I still sweat horribly when I'm trying to spin a lie.  Does it ever get difficult for you to think about who you would be if you're skillsets were rearranged when it comes to communication?  I am such a bad liar, it's ridiculous.  I would probably enjoy card games and games in general a lot more if I could lie better.  Then again, if I had a talent for it, I would probably abuse it and beat it until the wheels fell off and I wouldn't get caught in a web.  I'd get caught in a world of trouble and the very ground I walked on would be sticky as fuck.

Life without headphones has been brutal.  I didn't realize how much I needed them to help me tune out products of my mind and visions and conversations happening and not actually happening and interpolations happening and not actually happening.  With background I can turn the contrast up a lot higher when I am walking, forced or no, outside of the learned and mastered framework where I know exactly what is and is not imagined without having to look twice unless I have to.  It's been a very rough go and very upsetting.

I went to the gas station again last night because I was very hungry and needed milk.  I didn't want to go, but by the time I convinced myself it was worthwhile I was feeling pretty ready.  I saw it again.  Between two houses, there it was.  Smack dab in front of my face and I almost yelped.  I walked back and forth along the street and it was there, tracking.  I just wished I had my headphones so I could put my head down and forget about it.  I don't want to know it.  I don't want to get to know it.  I don't want it to sniff me out again or get a smell for me.  What the hell were you?

Trespassing is a crime.  I walked all the way up to the fence of their yard between the houses.  When I touched the links and rattled them a little it ran off, but I couldn't see to where.  I'm not looking forward to tonight.  I don't know if I should stay or risk going out.  I just don't know.  I don't know where they come from.  They make my skin prickle.  It was so hard not to pee my underwear.  I don't know what to do about it, but I'll figure something out eventually.  Or hide.  It is entirely possible I'm not the one it's looking for and I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Entirely and absolutely possible.

At any rate.  Our problems are our own and it's passed time to close up shop for a little while.  Shut down hailing frequencies and allow the machines to do their work and hum and try to do some dream work.  I am going to get a replacement set of headphones as soon as possible.  I can't use photoshop effectively for the time being so we will try to change the face of the Auralport and OEM by hand.  We can do it.  I hate waiting for me.  I think you don't like waiting for me too.  Nothing to it, but to do it.  I want to crank out a few short stories too.  There is a pair that have been knocking around my skull for a few months that I've been editing up there and it is, again, passed time that I put the needle to the record and turn up the volume and relax and reread.  

I do not know what's in the backwoods.  I always hope the backwoods do not know me too.

Left Field - "Gussett"  i wish it was raining today

The Year End Look

I am tempted to attack some things there is not time enough yet to tackle.  I am okay with and respect and receive the temptation because the day is nearing and we stand on the cusp of something truly deafening with nothing between us beyond time itself.  Time's only enemy is patience.  The armory is stocked.  Let's knock down time first.

The 2013 year end look is a strange one.  Strange to me.  I crashed a car again.  For the second time in my life totaled an automobile.  The injury was an injury I never knew before and thought I would never return from.  It was probably something near or spot on to a partially herniated disc.  I am used to pain.  Used to adjusting for pain because a voice inside says it'll end eventually if you simply don't do it again.  This pain brought me literally to my knees every time I got out of bed for work or to meet someone or otherwise do anything that did not require lying down.  It was unbelievable.  Literally unbelievable.  It made me tear at myself and my bed sheets and scream in the afternoon and throw fits.  Everything worked fine except standing and walking.  In 2013 I became very aware of my age.

A friend of mine put it best: ten years ago, you hurt your back, you shotgun a beer and a whiskey short, have a smoke, and get on with life.  Now?  You hurt your back and you can drink 'til you cannot feel a damn thing, but that shit comes back as soon as your spine comes back on line.  You can't go through life partially shut down.

It's true.  Another year older, just one year removed from invincibility, or something damn near it, I am aware, acutely aware of physical limitations.  Invincibility has been thoroughly dispelled in 2013.  Respect for the injured and more feeble than I has been reinforced to incredible degrees.  Of course it didn't help falling down multiple flights of stairs after the car accident.  That one is on me.  I should have known where I was standing on the fire escape and not allowed someone to high five me hard enough to push me backward into the night air.  I guess I'm kind of a good fall guy.  I should have broken my neck or an arm or at least a finger on my way down, getting something stuck in the stairs and landing made of iron grating, but all I remember, three days after the car accident, was waking up looking at the top of the fire escape and their back door and the little light and thinking "wait a minute? wasn't I just there?  Why am I here?"

I went to a casino for the first time (with no money) and someone gave me a $100 chip.  I can count the number of times I've held $100 bills in my hands with intent to spend instead of pay on one hand.  Two of the five times were to pay for cars.  I didn't get to use it for fun.  I did get some long standing necessities taken care of though and a bill paid.  One step closer to actual freedom.

I taught myself to drive stick for real in 2013.  On a rear wheel drive truck.  I also learned how to use torque and how to use horsepower.  Yes, they're linked, but now I understand when to use which.  When to use a little work fast and a lot of work slowly.  Of course there's always the golden peak when you can use both at the same time, but high end cars are out of the cards for at least another half decade.  I'm salivating thinking about it.  My dream garage is still the same.  Still stocked up with late 80s Japanese machines and American muscle.  Some day, sweetheart.

2013 also taught me who my friends are and who my friends are not.  For much of the year I tried to be a friend to the world.  A friend to everyone who would have my ear and have my words, however fleeting, but I soon recognized (by soon, I mean it took the entire year) that what I was counting as friendship was not being counted or similarly given weight by the people I was ascribing it too.  It was heart breaking.  Truly heart breaking.  I remember crying on and off for several days as each episode unwound.  The penultimate was a multiple day thanksgiving celebration that was supposed to be fun.  It was, to an extant.  I was too much a different stripe to blend in and it was hurtful to me to be expected to do so, but maybe they didn't really expect me to blend that well.  Maybe they expected me to realize sooner than later that I should've left.  As it stands I only over stayed by a day or two before I recognized where I was and where I could do myself better.  Coming home was beautiful on that day.  

The ultimate was when I was left stranded by people I thought I could count as friends.  My truck died and a true friend bailed me out.  I've grown intimate with my truck of late.  Gotten to know her inside and out.  2013 reminded me of the bullshit premise my birth father put to me about a car that was supposed to be my reward for graduating Carnegie Mellon (which did not happen) that was his vision for us rebuilding a beater BMW (which flew in the face of everything automotive I actually do espouse and believe in) and it's been tremendous and heart stoppingly gorgeous keeping that truck on the road and at the same time by turns puzzling that anyone, let alone the sack of nuts that raised you for 18 years, could miss your values that hard.

It does make me laugh though, because there have been more than a few times I could've used an extra set of hands to get the job done and I thought about the gents and lassies that could call up their dads or moms and schedule a weekend under the hood or chassis without getting violently ill or stomach ulcers.  I appreciate that about people.  Sometimes I ask them about their parents because it's practically porn to me.

In 2013 I learned to slow down scarification.  In tandem with realizing that time is getting on I also realized if I ever do have children or adopt children there will be questions for me to answer too.  Questions I am prepared to answer and questions that will have to be answered as my nose and ears get bigger and nothing else does and my eyes continue to sink and my brow continues to crease.  The reminders still remain necessary and beautiful obelisks and world wonders to human history and I thank us for them always.  I need them.  Some mistakes you can make multiple times.  Some mistakes you cannot afford to retread because lives are in the balance and the house does not always win, but you can never go back.  You will die.  You will be consumed, make no mistake.  Every time I look in the mirror I am reminded and I need to be.  Inside of your skull you are your friend more often than not.  Outside of your skull is a flipped story.

The same problem does abound, though.  My development, my passion for writing, remains far too grounded for my tastes.  There is patience though.  There is gestation.  There is still the thirst for whimsy and dreamland.  There is where I lie and I know it.  I can feel it.  The attack is coming.  The all hail that tells me "forward now!"  I can taste it.  2013 was about defining starting points.  Defining relationships.  Defining the scope of the maintenance necessary for progress.  Did it have to take a year?  Yes.  2013 was about defining severance.  Defining which and what kinds of quests were worth pursuing.  2013 was a very long think.

The funniest part about 2013, it came around the tail end, was realizing that just because you can identify the group of people that you are attracted to does not automatically make them accessible or easily located.  You meet just as many air heads and space cases exploring your same sex as your opposite sex.  The worst, the most lip curling, the most eye squinting, experiences are had when you meet a carbon copy of someone you'd cultivate a relationship with straight, gay.  In my mind I'm thinking ten minutes in to the conversation: "god damn it, not this again.  Really?  You exist here too?  Who dropped you on your head?  Why do you have fifteen pairs of shoes and a $200 dollar love seat in an apartment you're paying $900 a month for?  Why are we going out to a bar downtown when there's one at the corner while you have a fridge full of wine and candy imports?  Three pairs of sunglasses?  Sunglasses??"  

I don't know what 2014 is going to bring.  I think my year to year expectations have grown foggier and foggier so I will add some definition.  I think this year (no resolutions) I will try to fuck a woman for some variety.  The whole "no concussions" thing failed miserably.  I had four in 2013 so I think it's fair to rule that out.  Broke my nose twice too, so that's out.  I want to do more art in 2014 too.  Life's demands put way too much on my plate to really put anything outside of my skull to look at and enjoy, and I'm not saying for you to enjoy, I'm saying for me and we/us to enjoy. 

Now that things have been better defined through thirteen, in fourteen I would like to explore that framework and see what and where it builds to.  New territories and frontiers.  I want a new scar for 2014.  A scar for the turn.  A scar for the "maybe" identified because in twelve the maybe had no identity.  2014 will be a quest for the whimsical.  A seeking out of the imaginary and a protecting of the physical.  We achieved many grown up tasks and came into adulthood through 2013 from its humble beginning in 2012's confusion.  It's time to explore the limits of what that adultness and understanding and thinking and domestication can ring when our bell is rung hard enough.  What music will it make?  Will it make music or fall apart with the strikes?

For the first time, in 2013, I had to shave down my knuckles with a pumice stone.  The scar tissue accumulated so thickly that I couldn't open and splay my fingers easily without fighting against it.  Too much contact.  I cannot fall into the trap of abusing myself in lieu of taking abuse just to feel normal and normalcy.  That's not okay.  It is not okay to do that.  2013, a lot of 2013 was about learning what it is not okay to do.  Platonic spooning was okay.  Talking about platonic spooning to their friends indirectly and accidentally by way of mentioning conversations they were not a part of, but must have happened after they left, later on when we and they met again is not okay.  It should be though.  Don't break my heart that way.  Break it any other way, but that is pure... muffed intent.  I do not have time for that in 2014.

I have accumulated old man hands at the ripe age of 28.  I am a destroyer parked in a lagoon and rusting.  You fucking cowards.  2013 was also about rebuilding my space craft.  I had to tear it apart and rebuild it.  It was gathering too many parts and pieces superfluous and useful once and never again.  When one part failed I hooked and slaved another component to keep it running.  Fourteen is streamlining.  Keep the violence down at all costs.  The love too.   Control.  2014 is focusing on control and dynamics.  It's easy to glass a city.  It's hard to embrace one and construct.  Consider the "what will and what can we build here?"

It does make me laugh though, to consider that I may be at a new base line measurement.  It is enticing.  So many things happened.  So much time spent alone and too much time spent in contact.  It does not add up to my satisfaction.  I will boost literary output in 2014.  It does not matter if you want to do it, it has to be done for your own sake.

2014 is action.  Redesigns are on the table.  Stand up act 9 is on the table.  Before both will come the year end playlist.  Let's go!  No sneak peeks this time.  So much left out too, but we'll get it in later.

///Shiny Toy Guns - "Major Tom"   ...near Earth orbit

Bed Time Story 2 (51 text messages to my sister)

It was a routine take off.  The sun was low and behind, about to tuck itself to bed behind the Monmut mountains edging the salt basin of the Campmine desert

She prepared as usual when her alarm went off at five p.m. playing loud, nudging her out of dreams

It was her favorite song.  Slow jazz but not easy listening.  The woman on the record asked, in her bowling ball tenor rolling across the jazz lounge smoke through flower hats and bow ties "how are youuuu, todaaaaayayeaye.  I came here to playaaaaayeaye"

She didn't light up after her hand swiped the red digited clock off her night stand

Today was the same, but a little different.  The city lights would be on beneath her.  The stars would wink to life above her, but the X-two two four around her was on her maiden record attempt and her nerves were steel.

At the edge, a mistake of any proportion could be fatal.  Nerves were unreliable.  Senses, however, could get her back home

The briefing went well.  She painted her nails a vioently subtle purple while her black coffee steamed in its styrofoam cup while the lieutenant went on and on about the fighter/bombers specifications in front of the touch screen while she tried to find a comfortable way to sit in a plastic folding chair in a room too hot and not think about where in hell the annual budget went

Janice already went over the six hundred page manual twice and knew it backwards and front.   she could've Built the damn thing in the time the briefing took.  

She blew on her fingertips and sipped some more coffee. 

Outside of the bubble canopy, the sun laid deep red and orange streaks across the salt flats, bunkers, and air traffic tower where dinosaur fish hundreds of feet long used to swim.

She whistled her song into her respirator, nodding her head and thinking about how good it would be to touch down and take off her twenty pound helmet.

Glancing left and right, runway lights came to life, she reminded herself she didn't have to wait for the weapons crews to load up the hard points on the X-224s wings.  Her wings.

It was not a weapons test.  It was a dual test of woman and machine and settling in to her cockpit, adjusting her harnesses, she moved her gloved hand to the throttle without a cloud in the sky


"alright, Lionmane, its just you and me today.  Be good.". She toggled her radio switch with a wink to her in helmet display, the dual turbines thrumming quiet as an aeroplane is capable behind  her head.

"This is Rainbow Nugget, ready for all go on your signal Walking Stick."

The control tower came back, the controller chuckling at her call sign despite himself, "Rainbow nugget, you are clear for go.  Be safe out there.  Don't scratch the paint."

"I'll bring him back in one piece, you get the wine cooling.  I'm gonna need a pick me up when this is over." she winked again at her visor display and took a deep breath.

Without the crackle of the radio, the jet engine buzz was too quiet.  Her left hand flew across the dials and switches on her console, yellow lights blinking softly to solid green.

The chime rang through the cockpit.  Lionmane X two two four sighing back "I am ready"

She toggled the brake switch, turned on her wing tip and running lights and hauled on the throttle with her right.

The tower half a mile away tore through her vision as the engines screamed.  Water condensed on the canopy front, capturing the sun at her back in burned gold droplets as she broke the sound barrier once and then twice.

She winked her radio back on and barked against the breast squeezing gee force: "systems stable.  Vertical climb!"

The X-224s landing gear mashed the sand like a drunk through the middle of a street hanging onto their beau for dear life before finally letting go.

The twin tails streaked into the evening sky as she held the throttle at maximum.  The Tower, miles behind, came back.  "Rainbow Nugget, you are clear.  Have you on the board.  You are on pace for time to climb record."

"Systems stable!" she barked back, Earth doing everything it could to collapse her lungs

Over her shoulder, as the engines screamed and the composite alloy frame of the X 224 shook, the sun began to rise over the sloping peaks of the Monmut mountain ridge.

The basin beneath her shrank to a football field and then a coin.  She held the throttle down.  The Tower came back: "Rainbow Nugget, you are clear, you are clear. Looking good."

Janice grit her teeth, "I know!"

The sun shone like mid day.   her visor tinted itself, twin contrails scorching upward.  "Afterburn!" she shouted as her pressure suit began to force circulation through her limbs. 

With all of the strength she could muster she lifted her hand from the throttle, flipped the clear plastic cover from the bright yellow and black deadmans switch and pressed the lime green button at its center

At the base, 30 pounds of TNT went off over their heads.  The control tower shook like a twig in a thunderstorm as the lionmanes engines tore the sky apart and two new stars blazed to life in the evening sky.

The Tower came back, "we have you on visual!" unable to contain their calm.

Janice held her thumb to the switch and touched the stick with the gentleness of a mother cleaning a kitten.

The canopy turned, too quickly at first, and more slowly.  Janice gave a ferocious glance across the console before risking turning her head away.

The canopy spun at her fingertips and as she climbed the sun set again behind the shadow of her wing tip.

The sky began to darken and the lights of Santa Monica, Las angeles, Eugene, San Antonio, Austin, and Denver grew brighter and brighter. "Where's Mexico city," she chuckle rasped to herself.

"Rainbow Nugget, you've got the record, bring him in whenever you're green."  She nodded, tearing her eyes away from the ground. 

"I hear!" she barked, not yet ready.  The sky turned blue and then black and in that midnight blanket the stars came to life in front of her. 

All around they shined with a brilliance that pulled at her heart harder and harder as she held her thumb to the afterburn switch

"Rainbow Nugget, be advised you're running out of air up there."

"Walking Stick, I hear y-" the X- 224s thrashing rumble ceased.

The g forces crushing her body reversed direction and threw her forward hard enough to send her hand through her head up display atop her console, shattering it

"Rainbow we have you losing speed, copy?"

The stars began to spin outside of the canopy.  City lights, then stars, then cities again.  Her eyes raced, cueing the visor display to go to this and that menu, lines of information and diagrams and maps whipping by.  They raced like one hundred horses loosed from their  pens across her in helmet display

Steady green lights turned to flashing yellow and then sharp and solid red.  "Rainbow, do you copy??"

as her eyes raced they picked out pieces of information. "Flame out," she shouted to herself as she rammed the throttle to zero and worked her hands across the dials.

"Come back?" the Tower shouted through her earpiece.

"Flameout!  Walking Stick!  Flameout!" She winked at her visor to close the radio link as her hands continued to work furiously.

The X -  224 no longer arrowed upward.  It spun end over end until momentum could carry it no further and began its descent.  With no more air to feed engines, the lionmane became a  fuel filled 3000 pound free falling bomb

"air brakes," she told herself, "now!"  her hands flew and the lionmanes frame rumbled with the back up hydraulic systems effort beneath her ejector seat

"im not giving up on you!" she shouted at her console, her eyes flying behind her visor as the stars spinning outside her canopy began to wink out and the sun began to rise again.
She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view
She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view

She pulled up her backup head up display inside her helmet and caught her heart in her mouth.  The zeroes on the altimeter were disappearing much too fast.

She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view

"Fire!  You son of a bitch, fire!"  The fuel light blinked from yellow to green.  The main hydraulic light showed solid green. 

She tore her respirator from her face.  "Start!"  she rested her left hand on her ejector lever and hammered the throttle.

Above the tower a roar tore through the late afternoon sky.

Miles up two contrails ran like rails to the east as one and then another sonic boom rattled windows across state lines.

Janice pulled back on the throttle once the lights held and began a slow and looping decent to the salt basin, her heart still pounding.

She winked her radio on.  "This is Rainbow Nugget for Walking Stick"

"Walking Stick here."

"Bringing him in."

"We have you on the board, the field is clear Rainbow Nugget.  You've got the altitude record too"

  The twin turbines thrummed in Janice's ears as she sighed, "glad to hear it," and winked her radio off.

The debriefing was going to be harsh, but no one could ever take the record away from her.

As the tires on the X 224s landing gear hit the salt and sand and rolled the beast along the runway past the control tower, Janice began to whistle and think about sleep.  She sang softly as she shut down the engines "how are you today?" and the sun set behind the Monmut mountains

Gnite. <3 div="" u="">

///Cleveland Lounge - "Drowning (Scuba Mix)"  all the best to you on your sleep swim

Pride Complex, Fallout Radius, and Big World Little World

I'll start with the last one first before I forget because I already forgot once and it took a good 15 to remember and even then it was only because I started thinking about shapes and cut outs of construction paper and slicing bottles in half that I remembered Venn diagrams and then remembered it was a comparison thing, but I'm rambling so let's get down to it.  I was wondering where my, sometimes extreme, self centeredness comes from.  It does get pretty extreme sometimes.  Not to the point where my megalomaniacal, world beater, delusions kick in and I walk all over people thinking they're throwing themselves down there, when in fact, I'm going out of my way to haul them to the ground by their napes so I don't have to touch pavement on my way from my bed to my toilet.  Pavement?  Yeah because my house will be so huge I will have a second house that is only an enormous bathroom with three floors.  The first floor is the pee paradise and waterpark, the second floor is the bath house with every kind of possible bath or shower or steam you can take, including swimming pools, and the basement is the boom box where you can shit in peace featuring every kind of toilet known to man.  Sometimes my self centeredness gets out of control though.

To the point where I believe whatever difficult experience I'm going through is not only the greatest problem mankind has ever faced, but the first iteration ever of that difficulty.  I get so into myself that if everyone I know isn't asking me what happened or if I'm okay or petting my ruffled feathers they must be blind and stone deaf.  But that's not the case.  It's not even that it's particularly easy to take up arms and march to the point of attack and scream like the hound of hell "life's not fair!"  It's not.  Everyone knows it.  What are you going to do about you?  It gets out of control.  And there's nothing I hate more than "who's had it harder" pissing contests.  Everyone has and everyone hasn't.  Which discomfort do you prefer and at what intensity, becomes the more pressing question.  To put it another way, how comfortable are you here versus there.

The most important thing is the "why".  Why so far focused inward?  What I've come to is hyper focus or big world little world.  The world is huge.  The world is daunting.  The world is not as violent or angry as we make it appear.  The anger and violence is just what sticks because you don't come out of a hug with welts and scars, but you do if you're at odds.  Violence is the first language and love is violence's child.  The branches from the trunk above the roots.  Because life has the ability to scar at random and will, and sometimes in love, it is scary.  Do you want those scars?  That chance?  "Is today the day something comes apart and I die?"  You stay in for protection.  That protection turns into faith.  That faith turns into mania.  And I close off opportunities for both danger and expansion until I am walled in and have every detail of the compound mapped to a square inch and where every potential threat to my existence stands and where it ranks and then I am stacking pee jars against one wall and logging days against another and getting lung infections and passing out from lack of oxygen because I've sealed myself in a space where air can never circulate.  The second part is the crux of big world little world.

Determinism.  If it was possible to plot every persons geographic location to a tee and, at some point map out all of the possible outcomes of each persons interactions you could, fairly accurately, play out every persons life from birth to death with some outliers and random pop ups of paths that skewed due to chance and freak probability and I guess quantum mechanical (insert longer lettered science terms and statistics) that make it impossible to do anything with 100% accuracy.  But you'd have a pretty reliable, maybe down to ninety nine million out of one hundred million person type of accuracy.  Or just look at family tree deaths.  You've maybe got a shot at beating the over under, but by how many years?  A decade?  Two?  How hard can you or would you want to torture who you are to get those years.  What are you going to do with them? Sit in a wheel chair?  Enjoy the massive stress of drastically increasing the chances you'll die putting on your slipper at the side of your bed and slip and fall and fracture your femur and die from the massive infection after surgery?  Danger world becomes a lot more dangerous up there.  That aside, the determinism factor also drives me inward at 300 pounds per square inch.  Determinism is boring.  Sure there can be a joy in choosing a path having a pretty solid understanding of where it can and probably will go.  Even in small choices, but when the map increases in size and grows to world scope, I see that I am a very small bit of the circuit and no matter which paths I choose I am not going to cover any more ground than those dimensions... unless some other path comes in from outside my circuit and selects me.  Pretty much, your circuit is printed at birth.  And that is boring and difficult to live with.

However there is no saying you can't shrink the map.  The smaller you make it, the more random it appears. The more random it appears the more beautiful each day becomes.  Each day begins to hold actual surprises beyond what randomness you can try to choose to inject.  Point to point, you can zoom in along the path and detour at will if you so choose to do, but the destination still looms and will be reached barring sudden death of some sort.  You know what your ceiling is, you learn your floor, and at some point you understand what your potential is for exceeding them and the costs involved.  There is no rule that says you can't shrink that map to the scale where measuring something changes it's properties.  And that's where I find myself sometimes.  My map shrinks to the point where everything that happens is truly random to my perspective and in that vastly shrunken world I know that I exist and the people around me are almost shadows, coming into and out of focus with a rarity that is extraordinarily delicious and I forget that I am not the only one walking the face of the earth.  Nobody but me.  NOBD BTME.  Sometimes I have to have it though or I will never leave my front door again.

Pride complex is another thing.  An entirely different animal to learn to stop feeding.  My world once was a world of "no"s.  To the point where the energy expended in asking the question was not worth the energy expended recovering from the disappointment.  A universe of broken contracts.  You can't do that because this.  You can't do that because that.  You can't do this because you're too this.  You can't do that because you're too that.  I got fed up, but not in a hurry.  It built up over the years and I didn't digest it well and I'm sure some of the reasons were fairly valid, if not entirely truthful.  Still, it's like telling someone to not get mad when you're about to give them bad news.  Nurtured inside was pride complex.  I can't do it?  Watch me.  Not doing it for them, but doing it for myself, and it started off small and then blew grotesquely out of proportion.  Coupling with megalomania it began to beg how far could you really jump if you really really tried?

How far was too far?  I can stick it.  Fuck it, you're trying to say I can't?  Okay, watch this right here.  And it bloomed gorgeous.  More.  And it bloomed gorgeous.  But what are you really capable of?  Pride complex has ruled me and I it in waves of awesome sorrow and awed joy.  There is nothing that beats that high of putting your ten toes on the ground on the other side of a leap of faith in your bones and grit.  The only things you can rely on sometimes.  The things that never let you down.  It is, however, damaging.  You become arrogant.  A soft, passive, arrogance that tells me no matter what comes down the pipe I will, I will!, be able to handle it with this body and this mind on this island.  It and I will head into the woods and only I am returning.  The belief will insist, but anyone with any one of their five senses knows there is no way in hell you are coming back.  Anyone with any sense in the world knows your odds and that you've put the entire stack on something that breaks good once in five years and there are a lot of hours and minutes to go.  I don't see it on my scale because everything is possible there to a fault.

Pride complex kicks in.  I need pills?  Fuck you, you need pills.  Watch me go.  I need money?  Hell no.  Watch me destroy myself solving this, but damn you, I will fucking solve this.  Pride complex branches out like ivy.  It infects things like blood cancer.  Don't want to help me do this?  Okay I'll do it without you.  But that is not always and many times not the stance to take for many a several reasons I won't go into.  Pride complex doesn't only damage the self.  It has a fallout radius.  Pride complex damages a persons ability to make adjustments.  It damages a persons ability to integrate and coexist with society.  It damages a persons ability to integrate.  It pretty much harms society as a whole.

Yes you are going from A to B, but as you traverse the map and make your choices, your piece of the circuit board begins to function less and less successfully to the point where other pieces of the board have to compensate harder to function as well.  When you are offered assistance, for whatever rationalization the assistance is offered, it is in the interest of keeping the entire computer running.  Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that.  Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that this setup or that is there specifically to make everyone's lives easier to a degree, but that degree is there and measurable and quantifiable in every nervous action or choice the people with greater numbers of points A and B and area to cover and allotted (if you take too broad a path from A to B and B to C and on and on, as many points as you are allotted when born there are consequences out of your control.  a path selecting you) make.  Your space is governed by their space.

Understanding that is one thing.  Dismantling delusions of grandeur is another.  Growing a map is another.  Are they good things?  Are they necessary?  Should they even have to be?  I want to roam wild.  Yessir I do.  Life's not fair.  I'm not on this planet with you.  You're on this planet with me.  Control.  Take what you want, but understand where it comes from.  I love you.


///Band of Skulls - "Fires"

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.

Dogging It and the Winter Manifesto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so I present to you the Winter manifesto:

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

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

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

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

Redesigns coming soon.


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

A Thought About the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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