Busy on Paper

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



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

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

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

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

Odd Dreams, Prior Commitments, New Goals and Mystic River

Woke up, fell asleep, appended more dreaming to the previous dream and then woke again. The first dream was me and a family of strangers. The house was enormous. My mother and father were nowhere to be found inside the house and all of the light bulb sockets were empty. The only things left were bits and parts of things that were going to be abandoned that the parents left to me and my siblings to decide if we were going to take them with us or not. It was up to us to pack them all and be outside with the single suitcase we were each allowed to bring to the new home. So we packed.

As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.

We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.

Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.

Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.

The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.

In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.

All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.

As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.

Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.

Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.

It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.

For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.

There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).

The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.

Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.

Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.

So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.



///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.

Teleportation and Flight and Why the Hell am I From Here

I was walking down the street on my way home the other day and there was an exceptionally bright spot in the early morning still dark sky and it couldn't have been the North Star as I was walking almost due East. Is it possible to walk almost due to a cardinal? There's probably a different term I wanted there. Well anyway, walking almost due East and there is this bright point and I'm watching it and trying to figure out if it's flickering because its engines are vibrating and its moving or if its shaking because of the atmospheric interference I read about in that Astronomy class I almost failed because I didn't go to the Mars viewings.

A couple blocks later on down the road, still looking at it while taking in the rest of the sky and being generally happy that the moon went to bed much earlier in the night and I wouldn't have to deal with trying to sleep underneath it (I hate sleeping when the moon is out... it's just weird... I feel like I'm being watched whenever the moon can see me... like being really tired, but ambitious enough to sit in the front of the class... never ends well) I figured it must be a planet. So then I'm going down my mental list of attributes of planets and trying to figure out if the dot is tinged orange or red or brown or if the after image of headlights pouring in the opposite direction towards downtown are fucking with my eyes. Turns out the history channel's lessons about the planets combined with a couple thousand dollars worth of classroom credits taught me nothing retainable about the planets. I figured it's probably Venus. Anyway... where was I going with that, because I'm falling asleep with my head propped against the wall...

I had this idea about teleportation. If it could really work. I was trying to think of what it would look like for a man (or woman, or hamster) to teleport from here to the surface of Venus. This idea lead to another that I had about espestos. I don't think I spelled that right. Asbestos? That looks better. So this was an idea about asbestos. It stops things from burning. But that's not entirely true. It trades the burning. Instead of a speedy reorganization of carbon you get the very slow and meticulous reorganization of your carbon and fat chains in the form of a slow burning cancer. You're still burning, but just ridiculously slowly, which is a reasonable trade off I think. The guarantee of no sudden death by combustion for the guarantee of a slow death by, well you get the picture. So back to teleportation. Imagine teleportation as a similar thing.

A man or woman or hamster sitting zen lotus on a rock on the side of a mountain staring at Venus, well not staring because their eyes would have to be closed to meditate or something like that, and they're teleporting themselves. I kind of had to slap myself on the hand with a ruler because my first thought of what it would look like was this big flourish of streamers of energy and cool colors and aurora borealis out the asshole and spinning star fields and what have you and that's all just computer graphic bullshit that has taken imagination and turned it into rock candy on a stick for ten bucks a pop. I thought about some more and what it would probably look like is what we see when things are decaying.

The man would, sitting there zen buddha downward dog or whatever next to his meditating hamster, waste away atom by atom and cell by cell, decomposing himself and streaming himself invisibly, because the particles would be micro sized bits capable of being radiated photon like across the intervening space of time. Eventually his heart would stop. Consciousness would "leave". He would be pronounced dead, but suppose you just left him there. Eventually there would be nothing left. The argument could be made that all of the evidence of his presence is still there in the dirt he sat on next to his also legally dead hamster and the legally dead lady, but if its like sending a fax, maybe the copying process just takes that long and the original is left behind. And then on Venus because of the order in which things would have to be sent and the lossiness of the transmission of the radiated particles, maybe he doesn't reconstitute perfectly. Maybe he doesn't reconstitute at all accurately and ends up landing as a bunch of bliss filled bacterium that contain all the parts and codes to eventually rebuild himself when the surroundings and materials become available, but not before. Maybe that swatch of bacteria on Venus is some monk from like 200 B.C. who's just been hanging out waiting for the rest of us to get there.

It wouldn't be all that feasible once transportation is established. You'd be talking years to process yourself fully, assuming no one messes with your remains when you're not watching like some punk co-worker tearing the bottom half off of the page you were trying to fax while you're off grabbing a quick cup of coffee (I still haven't forgotten Brendan, it was not funny), and then a thousand year layover for conditions to present themselves that would allow you to finally rebuild yourself, but - yeah actually it seems like something no one should really want to do. I guess what I'm saying is I'll just wait for the rocket ship. I probably need to think about this concept some more. I can't tell yet if it's promising or retarded in terms of value. I might have to short circuit some things to make it appealing enough in terms of science fiction to warrant a suspension of the laws of science for the sake of a good story. But still, could you imagine how awesome that would be. Or gross. If you were on Venus and this fleshy fetus thing randomly started growing in the corner of your room. Would you let it go on for a year or two or would you draw the line at it starting to grow something that looked like a face and scrape it up and dumpster that shit. Oh, I just grossed myself out. I don't think I'm going to so much as look at mold the same way again. Gross.

Well the other thing that happened was in the sky by the big dipper and all of those ice blue glimmering lights there was a contrail and right where it crossed the North Star there was another running perfectly perpendicular to it. It was so beautiful. The kind of beauty that sucks the air out of your mouth like an earnest kiss and staring up at the stars all I could think was "home". It's ridiculous, but so often I feel like 'god damnit why the hell am I from here. I should be from there." 'there' being any other planet besides here. But anyway, the two contrails were catching the starlight and took on this silky translucence that was too delicate to touch and the coldness of night felt more like the coldness of thin atmosphere and I wished so hard that I could just jump and keep going up until I crossed those contrails and could see the moon and where the deep dark blue of sky is swallowed up by vacuum's black and see the star shine and my heart gun, full of weightless adrenaline and shredding and steeling nerve and quantum probability faults streaming wider and wider like ice nine through cement, but it didn't happen and I kept walking to work.

///The Chemical Brothers - "Pioneer Skies" This came on the shuffle in my head phones while I was walking and star gazing and I nearly wilted with longing to get off this rock. Don't get me wrong, I love it here more than anywhere else I've been so far. My heart just loves to wander and my blood runs for adventure. I probably won't be entirely happy or fulfilled until I'm living on the side of a mountain in the wilderness with a gun and a couple dogs and some solar panels and enough night sky and open ground to fill what's left of my lifetime.

Tired, but Still Looking

But I don't want the rest of the world to know I'm ready to call a time out. More movement in the bedroom again. Had to turn all the lights on yesterday to verify there was not a foot and a half tall little round black thing running around the edges of my bed. A face poked through my cigarette smoke. Scared the living shit out of me. Not a human face. Kind of looked like a really big nosed lizardy thing. Where do these bastards keep coming from.

I missed you all week. It sucks that we can't hang out more. On working days I have to chop 10 to 11 hours out of my day. 8 at work plus 2 in transit plus an extra one to two depending on how huge a slacker co-workers are being and how much work has to be made up at the end of the day. Out of the 12 hours left I usually have to spend at least 8 asleep so my muscles can knit up again for the next days work (if I don't I've found fatigue stacks up like bad heartburn and just as suddenly). So I've got 4 hours to handle midweek clerical stuff, working out, showering, making lunch for the next day, making a breakfast, and making a dinner if I want one. It's tough.

Discovered bits for flames is gone yesterday. Apparently the domain lapsed. Bad news. Worse news is I'm pretty sure all the files are lost except for the templates and graphics I saved on my desktop which is still trapped in NYC. So now there's a new one I made on blogger. It won't be as functional, but it'll be the story store house. Bits For Flames. I'm so tired tonight. I got lost again in Edgewood. Not on purpose. Have been doing a lot of traveling in dreams though I can't find the train station I used to use so I got lost and aggravated there too trying to find the bus station. Eventually I gave up and hopped in a car with a jitney who took me down to the industrial complex. I don't know why I wanted to go there. In fact I think I was supposed to be somewhere else, but he took me there anyway. I took some great pictures before I woke up. Wish I could draw them for you. It was breath taking.

///Air - "The Vagabond (featuring Beck)" I do the best I can not to worry about things. It's stupid, but all I want right now is god damn hug before I go take on another day of work instead of writing. I want some scotch. I just want to be a little warmer inside than I am right now.

Worst Song Ever, Part 3:

Worst song ever # GHQQPXC1333298K6 Moby - Whispering Wind:

I suppose I probably shouldn't go as hard on people as I do when it comes to creative production mainly because I am so familiar with the inherent problems in content generation, especially when the requirement of said generation is that there be a certain amount of freshness. In fact I almost feel bad even including this because I know that every artist has a certain thematic vein that runs through their careers and even the widely disparate U.N.K.L.E albums do have a certain genealogy to them that is absolutely traceable from one offering to the next even though the actual sounds appear on their surface to be absolutely different. This song by Moby is almost able to fit itself into that thematic category. Where does it fall short? Everywhere. I even don't even feel the urge to describe so bland a thing here. In fact, even talking about it here has made this entry extremely bland. And now I hate myself for allowing myself to be distracted by so bland a blanding. I've been blanded. God damn it. I have to undo this. Immediately. But how??? Shuffle button. Clicking. Searching.

I once talked to a friend of mine about the symbolism of the search and shuffle buttons in music players and their usage. He basically told me I was complicating what amounts to a human impulse that is no more or less than the urge to stuff our faces when we're hungry and drink when we're thirsty. There's no subtext. It's simply the satisfaction of a basic impulse to feed our brains with variety. I'm inclined to believe him. I took some convincing back then, but I came on board. I still think he's probably correct.

I suppose the main thing is I'm standing at the edge of the abyssal plain again and trying to distract myself from another night of searching, but I know I have to go down there and look for my missing part whether I like it or not. He's still out there. He hasn't come back yet. I feel ridiculous going through the motions as though things are okay when they're not. I don't want to go. I'm lolly gagging. Just come back! I wish I could say that and make it happen, but I have to go and look. What's the plan then? Where do we industrialize? Bits. That's where. Maybe not. That might be shooting too high. I am so fucking angry right now. If I didn't need my face I would cut it up like a ham. Smash my keyboard into it till the keys stuck in my skin. Thinking about carving up my stomach again. It's getting hard to convince myself not to. Not hard as much as its becoming more unreasonable not to. I don't get it. What's inside of there. I want to turn out my pockets so bad.



///The Future Sound of London - "Vit Drowning / Through Your Gills I Breathe"

Out From Somewhere

I've been gone for a spell. I feel like I've been waiting for something that I can't explain. A lot happened recently but the good news is my black box friend is back. Repairs have been made and I can make art again finally. Been a rough few days. I saw something weird in the back yard. I haven't had writer's block as much as things simply halted. To restart though, I found a message on my phone that I have no recollection of leaving myself.

Message follows:

I called you 5 times and you never call me back. Left a video message of you putting french fries in a cup of peanut butter and then another of your spread legs and wet pussy. You blonde pink edgy bitch. Your friend brunette eats right. Hates the gross food we like. Chastises me in front of you. What are you doing. Staring at someone i have no business looking at. The cat can talk. Tells me to im to vervo. He smells like sewage. Tells me that vervo have him his idea that got him elected. Why do you keep flipping me off? Do we still have a thing going? Itll ad a seven game series. Ive seen you eat them like that every week. A toy gun in the library shooting water at perverts. Jim is dead. I killed him but no one knows. I was jealous. His body was destroyed after i pushed him into the machines gears. I ignore her calls until italk to the cat. Now i go out of my way to see her.they go to a club and invite me but dont tell me its collared shirts only they dont let me out of the car until they stop to pick up girls though i try to jump off while the car moves.its the second time. I walk home past the college campus i used to call home and see faces that dont remember me. Its frustrating but freeing. I give up on them.

I don't know when I wrote that. I was trying to sleep the other day and the whole room felt like it was vibrating and all of the blinds opened and this thing walked through the backyard. Freaked me out. I've been sleeping with the lights on since then.

Well anyway. I think the thing is I've gotten so used to watching static in my mind it's been difficult getting up the guts to reach my fingers up to the bare rod where the knob used to be and change the channel, but I'm doing it. Because I'm guts. I'm adventure. I'm the spirit of everything motivated by discomfort and the things unseen. It's not really a question of what's over the next hill as much as it is a question of how long do I have to sit here waiting for my muscles to knit from the last 80 miles I've walked. Speaking of walking I actually got sunburned from all the god damn walking I've had to do while job hunting. I don't think I'm meant to have a job. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. I've still got my wanderlust and between writing and wandering that's all my heart really wants. Trouble is the rest of my body.

///KMFDM - "Last Things"