It's been a long time. It had to be. I had a lot of things I needed to think about and learn an acceptable way to grasp, but I did! That's good. You know what else is good? Coke's slogan. I thought about it all day when I heard the commercial and now I can't remember what the hell it was, but I'm sure it'll come back to me tomorrow when I'm not thinking.
I will think of coke and remember the slogan for Coke that cracked me up because it was so dual apt they couldn't have done it by accident. Look it up. I don't assign homework in general and almost as a rule, but look it up. I was just thinking though, I have never assigned homework unless I had to. I kind of make a bad teacher in that way sometimes. I think that's the way it should be though; if you always come to class and never miss one you should be as well informed as the person who never goes to class, but reads the textbook cover to cover.
Sorry, I got distracted. I didn't know where to start and I've been looking for a way to start again, but nothing has lead back here the way I expected it to and then I was all out for starting points and so far away that I was all in for whatever I could find to begin again and I found what I was not happy to find but I'll throw it off from the edge of the rooftop and watch it fall down and try to make sense of it. Okay? Let's go:
September 11th. The day that changed 'merica. It didn't. America is still what it was. Only a little more paranoid. This day used to have a little more bite. I used to remember the servicemen I know and knew (not because they died, we just stopped being as close as we used to be) and the new ones I've met while fishing the river on a slow Thursday. I used to remember them with incredible reverence. Not so much anymore.
The one's still in are in because they want to be. The ones that are out are out on good terms and very well compensated, on the pay scale I aspire to climb toward that kind of stability, and have awesome resumes. I guess that still burns me a little on this day. Getting near perfect scores on the entrance test and damn near perfect on the physicals and getting bounced on psychological failures. The whole talk my dad gave me about "the family standard of excellence." I didn't want to cry or weep. I just wanted to pop out of existence with a genie wink when going in and making it as an infantryman and working a way up could be viewed as tarnishing "the family standard of excellence." I still makes me laugh out loud today to say it aloud.
Part of what makes me laugh is that, incidentally, he was right. After taking a year or two to think about it a little harder, I can see that I would have been a skittish, trigger happy, blood hungry, question asking, thinking, liability to the cause. I would have gotten myself and other people killed, given a uniform, a weapon, and a theater. That's just coincidence, though, pure coincidence, so it doesn't really count. At all.
Serendipity.
"Are you dead or are you sleeping, God, I sure hope you are dead." Dealing with a little paranoia break, but that's neither here nor there.
September is also the anniversary of the longest intimate relationship I ever was able to be a part of and it was fantastic. I forgot the date the first three years we were together. Finally made the brilliant move to add it to my phone. It stayed there after we broke up. I can vaguely remember some of the gifts, one of the gifts, I gave her. I think the others were holiday related. I can remember trying to figure out how to get flowers delivered to her office and the whole runaround I got. I can also vividly remember the violent times. The times when my brain fractured. The times when truth was too much for me to eat.
I am laughing because it is remembering the times when, more than anything else, I wanted the laws of interpersonal physics to suspend themselves. I do not know, though. Life is long. Who else are you going to travel the spectrum of drugs with when you're too old to work and done everything else and the prospect of shagging is as interesting as scrubbing your bathtub? Blackouts. Retirement is going to be an amazing thing.
So, September 11th used to be like holding a revolver in my mouth and pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked over several times while fingering an empty casing from the gun range. Not anymore. I'm passed it. Nothing's going to change my world, sweetness.
We will modify, sometimes ad hoc, we will destroy and build, we will continue to drive toward some kind of perfect state, but we will mow down no one else along the way. We will remain honest and not overly dramatic, maybe, we will masturbate to idle thoughts of bodily violence, we will maintain course and get to know the new ship, we will cultivate friendship, and build ourselves into better people instead of weapons. We will.
I don't want to spend too much time on this. I've been trying to structure my paragraphs better and slash the blocks into verses. The poet that keeps clawing it's way out of my mouth. I don't want to spend too much time on this and I'm three hours in so let's call it close.
I love you. I do. I shouldn't. If I could bury you each and be the one with the shovel over night, I would cum. It is a strange thing, I know. I love helping people, so much. There is no replacing the feeling of helping someone solve a problem and secure a future outcome 100%. 100% assured that what they wanted was what they were going to get. Nothing replaces that. Wherever you are.
I've been working to dissolve some isolation. It's important. An important thing. Once I finish the project I am working alone I am going to need to be able to interact on a normal basis to get another job to fill the money void. Money drives everything, doesn't it? More than that is learning how to interact with people without a group to diffuse the messy bits to. It's easy to do when there are many other magnetic orientations to diffuse field lines to. Not so much otherwise.
I am approaching a point where isolation will become counterproductive. Flat out. For a time. There are many options for filling the counter point to weigh it into a cantilever support system. Ad hocced. Performing the expense reports in my mind. It's not going to work. I think that is part of growing up. Growing the capacity to do that and know with some certainty what is bound to fail when it comes to tolerable and intolerable acts of personality.
I am getting closer toward dissolving some aspects of isolation. One finger on the trigger that will close fire bulkheads. I don't know what process or loop or instantiation will trigger something terrible, but I am prepared to eject instantaneously. I'm not your project. I am project enough for myself. Here come old flattop.
We are you friends. We are your friends. We are shoving off from the scrap yard brand new in many ways. The new ship is troubleshot and configured. There is nothing more to it than to do it. We are launching. We are reentering circles and seeing what snow will fall and where and what kinds of sculpture we can make of it until the sun comes up and melts it all. We are launching. Granted we were stocked up and manned up a week prior, but we didn't have the heart at the wheel to give chase to open sea. We do know. We are ready. Cobbled together from many different pieces, we are ready to see if it works. Shove off, baby.
Getting back to laughter. Getting back to what makes us laugh. Back to the roots of what made me start in the first place. Gain some understanding. At first it was a reaching out, it became a gps, and now it's a tough out. I don't like to think inwardly. As tough an out as they come. It's still a map. I'm on the far edge of it and it keeps drawing beyond the dark part of the space of influence. I think I am getting back to laughter.
Back to being able to really, really, indulge in the spaces life does afford for taking nothing too seriously and taking everything too seriously. That magical place where living life, at least the way you understand it presently, like it is your last day jives with the fact that, barring absolute worst outcomes in tandem, it probably isn't.
You're going to have to live with, regardless of how you or someone else can spin it, what you did today.
I want to spend that time laughing. We're launching again. We are equipped for combat, need it arise, we are equipped for food, it will arise, and we are equipped to question ourselves and somethings (not everythings) anew. We are equipped to observe and equipped for some closeness. We have an L six two D load out and we are ready to rock.
I am perpetually intermittently disappointed with myself. Lack of ability to grow networks combined with... grows. I wonder if I am some kind of cancer embodied sometimes. A walking carcinogen. You go back to her and I go back to... I feel like I am in a very long race to eliminate myself or as many people as I can take down at once. It's nothing personal. It's sporting. Not immediately but, I don't know.
Some days, walking down the street, I look at myself in the store front windows reflected, and it's a pretty damn cool thing to see that ambulating to wherever and enjoy that remove. There's no vanity there for me. Just trekking and knowing that we're doing it. We're doing it! We are out of doors and doing alright. I don't love the birds looking back sometimes with that "not if you were the last man on Earth" look. What the hell is that about?
We're doing this. I am as over myself as I'll ever be. It's passed time to laugh again. Laugh about little things genuinely. It's easy to see the world as whole. It's passed time to really chew on it again. Launch probes. Explore and navigate from afar or as far as possible, but do not be afraid to take readings from the machines you employ. It's time, however briefly, to try again to square up vision with reality and you'll never know how far off you are, or've been, unless that depleted round sails downrange.
///DJ? Acucrack - "
Allegra" ... this is the soundtrack to stalking yourself. Searching out, the movie score. This is, bassed up, the chase; the quiet chase between functional and passable (between blending and fitting in).
