Destroy Everything You Touch

A post of personal indulgence.  I'm sorry.  But in my life the above appears to hold true for the things that I value.  It seems the closer I come to achieving them, the more vehement the destruction.  I would say I hope to fix that, if it didn't get me off with the regularity of a perfectly engineered watch.

///Ladytron - "Destroy Everything You Touch"

Post Script.  Today is an exceptional day in that I have decent internet access.  You are blessed with a youtube video.  I use the term ironically.  Fuck you God, and thanks for the ever present dick in my ass.  For the record, I am not happy about it.  I hope I get into heaven just to be the fucking slacker in the back, smoking, pretending to sing, and writing open letters to political dissidents on the bathroom stall walls.

Predictive Power of the Bible, Religious Cunts, and Cowboy Coffee

Being the coffee addict I am today, I've been trying to figure out ways to cut costs from making coffee and ensure that I will never be in a situation where I can't drink coffee if said substance is available in absolutely any form.  Having read Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain I have ingested another serious dose of tough guy-dom the likes of which I haven't shot into my veins since I watched hard boiled noir where every ten minutes a cigarette was being rolled, a shot of whiskey downed, and a strong man got his lights put out with a "you'll find my appointment with your boss under 'screw you', sonny."

Which brings me to cowboy coffee.  Easily on par with "badass things that will probably kill you" that I love, such as Marlboro Red 100s and high proof whiskey on rocks, is cowboy coffee.  From what I've gathered from Cities of the Plain is that they don't use coffee filters at all.  Or at least, they seem to have to throw out the last of their coffee pretty often because of left over grounds, and that got me to thinking that cow hands and outdoorsmen in general probably don't carry coffee filters out into the field.  That's like throwing light bulbs in a ruck sack and somehow believing you'll make it to where you're going without breaking a single one.  At least I think keeping coffee filters dry while being outside in the elements for weeks would be something akin to that kind of challenge.  So it must be possible to drink coffee brewed from grounds with the grounds still in the water if you let them settle to the bottom of whatever you brewed it in.  So that's what I've started doing.  I've always liked the bitter bite of black as night coffee and I've found that throwing the grounds in a big ol' mug and brewing it straight in the mug and letting the grounds settle down to the bottom seems to work out just fine.  Coffee filters are officially for pansies.  Of course drinking it this way might turn my teeth black, but lets hope I have a job and never have to rely on the quality of my smile again long before that happens.  Sure the last sips are grainy and if you swish the mug around too much it takes on the consistency of a snow globe full of pine chips, but if you've got a steady hand, and an iron gut, and like things like whiskey and Marlboro Reds and Ice grade beer, I highly recommend giving it a try.

Plus if you ever find that your co-workers have bought coffee grounds instead of instant coffee and stuck them in the common break room knowing full well that the only coffee machine in the entire god damn building is behind the key coded doors of the administrative wing where lowly salesman and customer service associates are not allowed, you can go ahead and make yourself a cup anyway.  You may not come to work in a tie, or slacks, or a sport coat, but while they look at you from the corner of their eyes in the break room wondering if you're thinking about shanking them all with a hunting knife while you watch your mug spin around in the microwave and they try not to look directly at you and your cowboy coffee sitting at the table across from them, they'll know where the real power sits between them and you.  And they'll know that the only thing keeping them on top of the darwinian bureaucratic food chain is a sheet of paper from a business school and an economy that says you have to play nice if you want to keep your freedom.

I am sick of religious cunts.  I know you are too.  That idiot who is organizing the book burning for the sole purpose of doing unto others is a cunt.  A stupid, sad little man.  All of the people who will take personal religion fueled offense to what he is organizing and proposing to do are cunts.  In this case I am defining cunt as: reactionary imbecile far too pleased with causes to examine effects.  Cunts love cunts and their relatinship simply sucks for everybody, especially when they get together for date nights.  And for the last time, the Bible does not predict the future anymore than Nostradamus or that Chinese book whose name I can't remember.  For every person who raises their child based on precedents set by the Bible, proclaiming it as the ultimate authority on human behavior, can I just say will you please stop reading and start listening to and learning about the human beings in your house that for better and worse have to rely on you for whatever reason.  Stop holding up the Bible to life and looking for answers.  Spoiler Alert: They're not in there.  When you start holding up something you believe to be a map or a blueprint, but still attempt to find you're own way or allow free expression, guess what happens?  If you answered "a shit load of self fulfilling prophecies" you answered correctly.  If you answered "a shit load of pain and suffering for everyone who does not share your special insight from heaven" you also answered correctly.

Well, anyway, sorry I just had to let that go.  I heard about someone being lectured about how their parents believe the Bible says the youngest child will do everything the older children did except ten times worse and so their parents sat them down and gave them an earful for things they've never done and never intend to do and the sheer ridiculousness of it all just pissed me off.  If you spent half as much time taking an actual interest in your children as you did combing through the all knowing scriptures you might find that you actually had a family instead of a brood of complete strangers who don't talk to you because you've become a shell of a human being replaced by selected passages of a book that happened to be relevant to you as an adolescent that grew into a sick and warped crutch as you grew older and quietly refused to mature.  I think I'll still write my own Bible, just to prove a point about the power of that kind of story telling.  Maybe I'll save the project for my twilight years so I'll have a deeper catalog of crap to draw from and smear out into images that can applied to any and all ages that involve fallible people dealing with fallible people in a search for overarching meaning, an incorruptible truth, and the reason, their own tailored to fit reason, for being on this rock.  Maybe that's what my life's work really is.  I'll get back to you about that in 25 years when I'm on my death bed from smoking Reds and pounding cowboy coffee.

///DJ? Acucrack - "Thalidomide"  Our defects are inherited from the ignorance of those that walked before us and are incorporated into our character.  That's still no excuse.  For bringing darkness instead of light.  This song rolls and burns like staring directly into a halogen bulb till your brainstem goes numb with the over powering presence of particulate everything blowing your eyes to pieces.  Only minus the permanent blindness.

dear (______)

Dear Led Zeppelin,

Forty years from now Going to California will still be the greatest song about "the interminable search" ever penned.  Not that rock is dead or anything like that.  It's just that good.  I will learn to play guitar so that I can start a tribute band and this will be the only song that band will ever play.

Sad Bunny Can't Cum

Welcome to the retrospective (cue Jerry Lewis telethon music).  It's a sort of sad time for me.  I lost my computer this past Friday.  Several outages and a lack of grounded outlets, thanks to antiquated design and moronic neighbors who don't understand that computers are more than idle curiosities and are actually essential to the younger sets way of life, lead to it turning off without warning.  Since I- I promise you this will be a "too much information" packed retrospective- since I usually do most of my writing in the dark, with a short order of bourbon, and nothing else on (electronic or otherwise), I was immediately plunged into darkness.  Dismantled the entire thing and went on a debugging, forensic, junior mortician's foray that lead me to the soul shaking realization that the mother board burned.  And now I'm slightly sad (devastated) because my computer was my best of best friends.  Now I'm stuck with my functionally challenged laptop that was dropped on its head too many times as a kid.

My writing is now inaccessible (fuck) on sata hard drives, my resume is inaccessible (fuuuck), my porn is sitting idle (fuuuuuuuck), and my music collection is essentially in a vault (FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-) till I get a new motherboard or other PC tower to- okay who gives a shit.  I do, but that's boring.  Me talking about this is like listening to someone talk about their dead cousin who you never met and they never really talked about before and trying to pretend like they have your undivided attention when it's fourth and inches in a preseason Steelers game and the gaurd they drafted is about to be put to his first real test and show you whether or not the season is going to be worth pinning playoff hopes to.  Long, long, long sigh while trying to pay attention to what really matters without looking like a complete dick.  Suffice to say, combining a tempermental laptop with a 860 bits per second internet connection and the fact that I have to write in notepad and can throw making after the fact edits squarely out the window has made me a fucking sad bunny.

Maybe I should have talked about that last.  Life has turned into a very long jerk session.  Like "just blew a rail at the bar and the chick I got into the cab with hopped out midway to my place so I blew another rail and tried to watch a movie to console myself, but couldn't get into it so I tried to rub one out and I'm three hours in and nodding off knowing I won't sleep well at all unless I at least get the small victory of cumming and all signs are pointing to a four a.m. photo finish with passing out sitting at my desk with empty cans of Natty cheering me on from the gallery."  But, yeah, you know it's dragging.  Been working hard, but obstacles must have eachother on speed dial the way things have continued to stack and you know it's no good when doing the thing you love to do becomes difficult and all you really want to do is sleep.  Good news is I've pounded enough coffee to start a coca leaf grow operation in my stomach.  Suck on that contra.  I'm not sure how the two are related, but hopefully it's close enough to let you fill in the hilarious gaps.  Personally, I didn't laugh.  Didn't even smirk on that one, but fuck it, it's out there and doing its thing.

So into it (longest intro ever).  Five years in bullets:
-started blog because I was pissed at my boss and had no one to tell about it.
-stopped talking about my boss because it was whiny as all hell.
-planned to start a career as a kept man.
-decided my beard deserved my face like modern pop and R&B singers deserve euthanisation.
-spewed hate toward beard haters.
-realized 99% of myspace writers were hacks.
-left myspace because I hated being connected to people.
-left facebook
-went back to facebook and myspace when my communication anxiety faded.

... God this is boring.  Worst retrospective ever.

I think there's supposed to be a memoir like tone to the narrative that I am completely whiffing on.  I wanted to be a fighter pilot for the longest time.

I guess I'll just skip to what's new.  I'm realizing more and more that the shit surrounding my island is so ridiculously deep that it is fairly realistic to say there is zero chance of any kind of college sweetheart reunion.  Think of it this way: what she has in common with her peers now is like two humans talking to eachother.  What she has in common with me is like a person at a zoo talking to animals.  While one may be more interesting, it's not what you'd want to spend your life doing.  What else.  I guess I'm bi.  Are there rules for that.  I guess I didn't just start one day.  If I look back it's pretty obvious.  Most people don't really give a shit now anyway which has been a massive relief, because what I feared the most was being hated.  Some people look at me differently, maybe, I'm not sure and I don't care all that much to ask them.  I'm still the same person with the same anger management issues and the same scars.  Someone asked me why I would choose to be something that "will make my life more difficult", but to be perfectly honest it's made my life so much easier to live now that I can understand myself that much better.  Even saying what I am feels strange, as though there are brands of people.  But, anyway, sex with guys is fun.  Sex with girls is fun.  Different reasons for both.  Girl cum and guy cum are pretty close in taste to me.  That's probably the only thing the two have in common for the most part.  Guys and girls are attractive for different reasons too.  I guess the oddest thing is most gay men are incredibly obnoxious and unattractive.  On second thought, not really that odd because most women are also unnattractive.  Or maybe, okay further revision: most gay men and women I don't scare away with my being myself are unattractive.  That's the qualifier I was tasting on the tip of my tongue.  Fuck em.  I just wish I was willing to let myself see it sooner and embrace it, but I was so caught up in performing to the rigid framework I grew up in I suppressed and ignored it and raged inwardly and outwardly and not allowing myself to be.  I missed out on the whole "rules and standards committee" meetings in college so now I'm still learning about it, but better late than a repression fueled suicide.  One of the hardest things to get over was feeling like I've somehow failed as a man.  That's actually been the single toughest thing in accepting my sexual self.  So much of socialization is the assumption of roles and rejecting the hetero role that framed and formed and malformed so much of my behavior like fucking foot binding was and continues to be difficult, but it's a difficulty that's building toward true normalcy for me and in so being it is worth every ounce of growing pain.

What else.  I'm bad at keeping secrets.  I've realized that so much of my life has been informed by half truths that propogating them is so extremely distasteful that I just can't do it with believable conviction.  A good thing and a bad thing, but mostly a good thing I think.  A change for the better.  There's still a little voice in my head that talks about dreams of wealth, but there's a louder voice that screams to me to write and ultimately having a nine to five and writing will mean more to me than continuing a foreign quest for status and titles and degrees.  I think that's what helps keep me sane.  I'm still looking for that elusive community of writers.  That still hasn't changed.  I came close to finding one.  Hopefully that'll turn into something.  I think I'm wandering again.  I love you.  Don't be sad.  Life won't drag on forever and that's something we can look forward to, right?  Death is going to be the best orgasm ever.  I'll still be enthusiastic about it when it rolls around.  In the meantime you just have to make the most of the little humps and enjoy the moments you get to spend cumming as much as possible.  Also, don't say that to people in casual settings.  They'll think you're weird.  Also don't tell people you're too depressed to cum.  Even as a metaphor, but especially not literally, unless they're the kind of crazy sexy person who would take it as a standing challenge.  Even then.  You know what, you probably should not be taking advice from me about this.

How's this for some summation of 200 posts:  I was born, I lived for a while not knowing there was a world outside the controlled universe of my home until college, I discovered there was a world, I dated a fantastic girl for a long time, I loved my beard, I planned to get in tight with a cougar before I dated, I revised my life mission once I realized none of that was actually going to work, I realized the only thing really important to me was writing, I accepted my creative self, I accepted my sexual self, I loved, I hated life, I had sex, I learned that I'm a violent person, along the way I learned I had real (actual) mental defficiencies that require maintenance, I learned that the best thing I could do was fight it by living with it constructively, and I realized that I'm not the greatest thing to happen to the world, but maybe a good thing to happen to a handful of people.  So that's it.  Peace.

///Dntel - "Casuals"  Walking down an overcast lane and the air is so cool on your face that you can't help looking to the sky to watch the bits of an almost storm chase eachother over the building tops and forget the shit that turned your eyes red that afternoon and feel the slippage of time and understand that you're still you and that's perfectly alright.

Cum, the Internet, Other Disappointments (Plus 200), and Friends

200th entry. Glad I got that announcement out of the way before I forgot. It's been five years with you. That ties the record for the longest relationship I've ever had. They've been pretty good years, but this isn't a retrospective so I won't dwell on it.

You should know I tried to write a poem with the title "Cum", but I couldn't create anything more charged than the title, so I didn't. Sometimes you run into words like that in the English language, words that command so much attention and make people perk up and look for context clues instead of actually reading the text and before you know it you've completely lost them because, for whatever reason,you're content doesn't line up with whatever expectations they've come to harbor in connection with your title. I'll write a retrospective for the next entry mainly because I'm pretty sure I won't have much else to say as I've been gripped by the past recently. Maybe I'll write that poem anyway and just make it light hearted. I think that's a good way to both combat the "must read for juicy bits" response and also reward both the readers and the flybys.

On to my terrible internet connection. It was so bad over the past two days that I literally was not even able to open my email. You know when you get so mad that actually mash your fist into your keyboard hard enough to break the fucking thing. That's how mad I was. If I was not head over heels in love with my computer monitor and also too poor to replace it I probably would have hurled it straight out of the window hard enough to lay a 22" square dent in the door of the shed behind my house. A friend commented that though the speed is slow I "have done a lot with it" and I wanted to say well "for fucks sake, just imagine what I could fucking do if I didn't have to settle for third rate everything in this fucking world." Seriously. I was enraged, not by his efforts to offer encouragement, but by the framing of what has become typical of my life. Ghetto rigs. McGuyver set ups. Pulling magic out of my ass hole. Call it what you will, but I cannot wait for a phase of my life when I actually have the god damn tools I want and need already at hand to do the things I want to fucking do. No more of this having to work a three mile solution out of a 100 yard walk because no one is willing to give me the god damn keys to the front gate.

I've had some really fucked up dreams lately. I'll curb the swear words from here on out, or at least try to.

So the original Cum poem was going to be about how self destruction creeps into life, but is a necessary element of life. Self destruction, I think, prevents wholesale destruction if the person purposefully destroying their self can be isolated or at least properly contained. I'm pretty sure if I left myself to its own devices it would turn into a thing bent on dismantling life and civilization as we know it. To prevent this from happening I have to actively dismantle its constructions through every means necessary. Think of it as an atom bomb. Every single day my brain is refining fissible materials and building detonators and stranding wires and explosive plates and turning bomb housings and working out the science of sending the world to its grave and every day I have to go in and turn out all the filing cabinets and shred the research and trash the labs and sabotage the refineries and explode the stockpiles. My self hasn't gotten it right yet and I'm happy for that, but also ashamed that its even become a necessity. Sometimes continued success is thanks to my own efforts and sometimes it's due to bomb range and laboratory accidents and machine malfunctions. The result is the same though. Furious action leading up to an explosive and small and temporary victory and phenomenally steep come down, because I've both succeeded and failed yet again. I suppose the easiest solution would be to simply have all of the technicians brought before a firing squad and kill them outright, but unfortunately the crew working the device committee and labor union are also responsible for the non-lethal non-destructive life sustaining committees. So when is the need to eliminate a threat greater than the need to preserve a life? I don't have an answer for that, but I'll let you know when I do.

I'm sad now. I don't know why. I do know why. Part of me just left. He was disgusted. I'm disgusted too and angry and now sad that I'm by myself again. He'll be back later. We can't really stay mad at each other. No, wait we can. I just realized that we're usually pretty mad at each other. It just so happens that we're also usually in agreement on most things, with the exception of this and some other stuff. I'm the optimist. He's the deterministic pessimist. The realist. The public relations manager is not in at the moment, but should be back shortly.
I sometimes wish my friends would tell me what they think and why they don't tell me when their visiting, but then I remember that they must have their reasons and that I don't know what those reasons are because no one has ever fucking told me. When I think about the spectrum of existence I get the feeling that there's nothing in the middle of mine and I think that hole is what makes people apprehensive. I don't have a hard time feeling. I have a hard time feeling by degrees.

I dream about things. About tiny rooms and lying in bed with someone and sadism and being awful and being loved regardless and making something, making anything, with another person and being naked and great and taking off the mask that hides the teeth and the showing the smile behind that stretches from ear to ear for all of the reasons that are on their face unacceptable for reasons I'll never agree with and I wake up from the dream and wonder if I will really be single. And then I wonder if the rest of me will allow that to change. I know the answer is no, but can you fault me for wanting it to. I tear myself apart, but they're there. The upside is I'm always in orgy. The downside is none of the attendees are there because they love each other. And I'm rambling so I'll go do something else because I already know I'm running straight for a dead end and I have an irrepressible fear of corners.

///30 Seconds to Mars - "From Yesterday" Sometimes when I fall asleep and wake up into dreaming the world is big and beautiful and unlike the life I left I am moved to a state of utter bliss and so thankful that a thing like sleep is a part of day to day life.

Fifth Grade Word Finds and (Sort of) Free Art

Remember fifth grade and the substitute teachers and their mountains of copies of crossword puzzles with subject themed words to keep all the kids busy and the game all of the smart kids played where they competed to see who could finish all of the copies and win their free time first? Remember the other game the smart kids who didn't give a shit about extra time to do their homework in class because having homework to do was a great excuse to get away from having to spend time around their shitty parents played where instead of finishing crosswords they tried to find legitimate instances of curse words, the more rank the better? That just came to mind as I was thinking about myself (as usual) and I was thinking about the things in me that are different, which led to thoughts about picture finds where you look at two pictures and try to find what's different between them and that lead to thinking about word finds and that led to all of the wonderful hours in fifth and sixth grade I spent doing word find puzzles and circling "ass" instead of being taught anything by anyone because the teacher called in sick again because the kids are a bunch of bastards. They were still passing out crosswords and word finds in 7th grade and 8th grade now that I think about it. I raced through the pile a few times, but it was bullshit. It was not uncommon to have a teacher say "put your head down and take a nap if you like" as though I didn't get sent to bed without dinner often enough. Napping wasn't high on my list of favorite things to work hard for.

There really was no satisfying conclusion to finishing all of the crosswords besides the pride of knowing that I beat the pants of Annette with her stupid times table finger counting trick that I didn't learn until last year and promptly forgot. Fuck you Annette. You looked like Meg Griffin five years before Seth McFarlane dreamt her up. Suck on that coaster thick glasses. I hated her when she beat me at anything because she was a total douche about it. To this day when I beat people at anything I can't help but feel that I should have been more encouraging or at least explain to them why they might have lost and how they could have won. That might be even more annoying than simply sticking a finger in their face and saying a hearty "booyah".

Where was I. Crosswords, check. Annette was really smart, but a total bitch, check. Oh yeah, what's different about me. So here's what's different about me now from the me of five years ago in order of importance to me (sorry, this is so me themed today, but I'm not really, but I'd feel guilty if I didn't say something to acknowledge the fact that I'm being really really narcissistic [sort of]):

1: I don't think of myself as a funny person anymore. I used to think I was funny, but I'm not. I'm easy to laugh at and I think I'm fine with that.

2: I'm weird. No two ways about it. I am one of the weird ones and will probably be thought of as one of the creepy ones when I get too old to be weird and when I'm too old to be creepy I'll be one of the pleasantly eccentric ones you try to ignore, but who somehow end up miles away from their home health aide at a highway rest stop asking you for change so they can buy a colostomy bag from the potato chip vending machine.

3: I will probably never be married or will not have kids of my own. This will happen because I've realized I am impossible to start a family with. No really. I dare you to try. My heart is fucking Thunderdome. Raising kids and being with me will be like trying to keep track of the lost kids of never never land. If you were to combine Bill Cosby's sagely aspects, Peter Griffin's story telling, Homer's scheming, Seinfeld's eye for human interaction, and a middle aged Golden Retriever's eagerness to do everything, with a Bull's eagerness to do nothing except watch the world go by and bone constantly you'd roughly have an approximation of day to day life with me. Throw in "unconventional" tastes in design and home decor and art and general errata and my home probably won't even be a safe place to raise a kid from one hour to the next.

4: I will never be a kept man. I'm too damn old. Missed that boat, but it was fun to imagine what could have been had I really stepped up the training back when I first starting writing this and my biggest concern was beards and whether or not to shave my nuts.

5: I share my work openly. In the past I sat on it because I was somewhat embarrassed by it. Now, even better than simply not giving a fuck what people think of it, I honestly feel that it is worth sharing. It's become worth more time and attention than my own. How much time and attention is absolutely up for debate (whether its 1.01 person's T&A or 100 it's still greater than 1). Why more time is needed is also up for debate. Dear universe: I am at a highly impressionable point in my writing career... send me mentors or something. Jesus does not count as a mentor.

6: I've sort of come to understand that the people I grew up with, by and large, did not grow up "with" me. That's taken a lot of getting used to. How the hell to I grow myself into their circles if, apparently, I didn't do it successfully when they were right next to me. Frustrating. It's like everybody I knew went into a hall of mirrors together and somehow I ended up outside of the building in the alley with the alley cats and half eaten funnel cakes and everyone else went out the exit proper and I have no fucking clue how I ended up on the outside of everything.

7: I don't think there's a seven, but it's there for balances sake.

I've got an idea. Send me your address and I'll send you a handwritten poem on heavy stock plain white paper. Seriously. No scheme. No game. No angle. Just some art that'll only cost you the time and effort it takes to shoot me an email. You're address won't get shared (not just because I have no one to share it with but because if I gave someone my address I would want it destroyed immediately after it was no longer in use by the specific person I loaned it to). You won't suddenly have spam roll into your mailbox. I won't randomly show up your door with a handle of Vodka and tell you to drink as you run out to go to work in the morning. You won't get signed up for... well shit I could go on for another thirty lines about what won't happen.

What will happen: I'll send you a poem. That's it. A new fresh from my mental presses poem and maybe a scribble too. Bam, done. inacinch@gmail.com. and actually, by putting that there I will probably get a ton of spam, but I'm not mad about it. I just like to send people art. It's fun.

Or don't. It's not like I'm going to kill myself or anything if no one does this. I'll just keep doing what I usually do: write poetry, whack off till I fall asleep, wake up in the middle of the night in tears, write a story, knock myself unconscious with five shots of whiskey, wake up at a reasonable hour and repeat. The question is: how much of that is true. The answer is: most of it. Lulz. Anyway. Don't forget to see if you can fill out the crossword puzzle with all expletives. What is life if not a challenge to be more awesome than you were yesterday.

///Cowboy Bebop OST - "Blue" I think my opinion still holds that some of the best music is written and heard and felt in languages that you can't understand specifically because the worst thing anyway can do to some art is make it readily understandable and take away the pleasure of dawning reason and the avenue of organic access each person has to make when no person can make an inroad for the masses. The idea of masslessness comes to mind, but I'm pretty sure that's just more errata and artifice and artifacting. Sometimes I need a good paint chipper for my brain.

dear (______):

Dear Matt LeBlanc,

You were pretty fucking awesome in the Lost in Space remake (still one of my top five favorite Sci-Fi adventure flicks of all time plus the soundtrack killed too). I’m sorry things didn’t blow up for you over the years. Of all the Friends cast members you deserved a lot more than what you got. I know you know Jennifer Aniston is fucking over rated. Just wanted you to know that you’re not the only one who knows she’ll eventually go the way of Sarah Jessica Parker and be prominently featured in family guy skits about cuckolds, frigid vaginas, and bald tires. Lost in Space > her collective body of work. Just wanted to say thanks for the memories, dude.

Think Harder

I take back what I said about New York not being an art hub. If you think about it, the population density is what makes it something of an art hub. If, as I previously suggested, it is no more an art center than any other city because art and art production chiefly exists within the minds of a cities occupants, more occupants means a denser more interleaved art community (not necessarily more interconnected). If we want to value a cities artistic merits based upon production and the potential for creative growth then NYC rightfully ranks high. If we want to assign value to the degree of interleaving and interconnection that produces art like a gene pool than NYC likely won't rank nearly as high as smaller cities and that is because smaller cities possessing the critical mass of community participation that makes increasing densities only marginally more appealing or useful to the community of artists then a smaller city would easily rank higher for the simple matter that the weave will have fewer threads and more contacts between the threads that do exist.

Surely the potential exists for a person who specializes in technical writing to meet up with a fashionista and produce something God awful or God sent, but as the population density grows well beyond the critical (and indeterminate) density of creating minds the chances of that meeting shrinks and the potential for compartmentalization and xenophobic design grows. I think that's what I was trying to get at before. NYC is not what I expected because I hadn't considered the difficulties in meeting with other people across the geographic mass (if you laid out every floor of NYC in a two dimensional plane it would probably be half of the size of New York proper) or the difficulties entailed in navigating the purposeful dilution of the contacts being made by those who aren't actual producing artists, but who seek to participate for lesser motives (if personal motivations can be ranked from the pure artist to the profiteer and name plater). And that is what has been a little bit of a let down.

The upshot of this is that the individuals are statistically "out there". I just have to find them. So I'm going to start actively looking through my terrible internet connection. I doubt I will find many in Queens, not as a generalization of the population's abilities, but absolutely as a generalization of the population's visible activities.

I think there was something else. Was there something else? Well, look, I wanted to do the inception poster and I am fed up with thinking about it and knowing that I can't upload it even if I did do it so check this out:

_h

^^^There's your poster. I was going to draw an old school circa 80s architecture chair falling backward into claw foot tub with geometric water and various aging and weathering appliqués and pastel Pantones. Since I'm on a 56kbps connection you'll have to settle for the low low loooow fi version. Bam, done. Well at least now you have the recipe so you can go do it. Stick with reds and grays for the text and a faded yellow tub with seawater colors in the tub or some combination of those colors with a two or three color palette for that really nice low budget mass distribution feel. At least that's what I think about the matter.

Lastly I hate middlemen. I spent some time today trying to think of a fun way to describe them. The hand shakers. The go betweeners. The thing is, middlemen are essential to civilization, but even in "uncivilized" society they serve fairly critical roles. I tried to find an axiom that painted them honestly without coloring the words with my own misgivings and hatred of where I fall in the relationship of middlemen to the greater contingent. I came up with: "Middlemen: Making Life Easier and More Expensive for Everyone Since the Dawn of Time". I think that about sums it up. They let us all be lazier. They give us opportunities to pay for opportunities to pay for things and it's so difficult to be on the paying side of their equation. If you're on the production side, you love middlemen. Middlemen find you purchasers. Middlemen create your demand where none may otherwise exist. They help you find customers and they help customers find products, but for absolutely everyone involved costs go up. American is the land of the middleman and if you produce anything or buy anything your dollar costs just went through the God damned roof of what they ought to be. Your time and energy costs may have gone down, but that's an artificial deflation. A trick of conversion and magical math and the incomprehensibly tangled relationship of the greenback promise note to what it cost you to get that slip of paper. There's a special hell for the middlemen. And wouldn't it be hilarious if it was managed by middle managers who answered to no one.

No, I suppose it wouldn't be hilarious. It would be Six Flags America.

You know how I know we're not in hell yet? Scratch that. I don't know. Added a story to Bits. Suck on that. Or just read it. Is it bad if you go to a job interview and they don't tell you what the job actually entails, but ask you to come back for an all day interview? I hope it's a boiler room orientation and not the beginning of a real life Battle Royale. Both were good movies, but the main reason why I would prefer Boiler Room to Battle Royale is that I still have writing to do and can't really afford to risk death on an Island. Well, no I take even that back. Lots of take backs today. The thing is, if I die, something is bound to be published. And that's all a body can really ask for. That and a spectacular death.

///Pink Floyd - "Shine on you Crazy Diamond VI" It takes a lot of musicianship to hold a listener for 12 solid minutes. The Red Hot Chili Peppers almost nailed something close in their song Californication, but they fell several hooks short and ended up with something you can nod off to after the first minute and wake up to in the last minute. Floyd nailed it. Experience enhancers optional.

One of Those "Say Anything" Days

I don't know what the hell to tell you. Scratch that, I do. First off, I'm sorry I was gone for so long. It's not like me to stay away, and truth be told, I wasn't staying away as much as I've been held apart by circumstances beyond my control. Actually I kind of felt like the bearded guy with wings from Flash Gordon just then. At least my voice boomed in my head as I proclaimed the truth. It's not actually that dramatic, but I wish it were.

I guess, I really don't know what to expect from life anymore. Between the images pumped in through music and the massive filtering of said music to just the things that I don't mind slam dancing in my brain tissue and the images sucked in from television and the entire glut of information that comes unfiltered and unfilterable, my image of New York was unrealistic. "How realistic did I want it to be" is probably a more important question to ask. It's not a wasteland. It's not a shooting gallery. It's no more a hotbed of imagination and talent than any other city with a downtown and an uptown (that little detail is what makes or breaks a city for reasons locked into the evolutionary genome of bullshit socio whatevers).

I'm not making sense am I? I guess I'm just pissed off. Right now I'm that 105 year old man who sits in a high backed chair with his back to his bay windows, dressed in his three piece suit he wore to his last day of work before he retired, who cannot for the life of him remember the conversation between his ears that told him he should make the drastic change from the life he knew to the life he didn't know he would come to loathe.

We are after all in the first few hours of the first few months of the first few years of this, our new year under the banner of industry for the sake of perpetuating a life whose value lies in the work it has yet to complete. So I should be aiming for ... what? I don't fucking know.

Nope. Not true again. I do fucking know. My goal hasn't really changed. Only the operating conditions have changed. All I have to do is put food in my face, keep a simple computer, and not be homeless. If I can land a gig to make that happen I'll be good as a bar of gold. Or something. Something is getting lost in the wires again and I am blowing fuses faster than I'm replacing them and I think that's why I like talking to you. It doesn't really show me what needs to be replaced, but it does...

Okay cannot finish that thought. I think what I'm wanting to say is that I suppose if no one loves you, I'll be willing to. No pictures or links for a little while. My arrangements aren't allowing me to do the things I love doing for you. But we'll catch up later when I can think again and I stop feeling weird shit touching me. Total Promisaurus. And not like Inception promise either [I'm still gunna do it... i sware]. And my grammar will be better too. And punctuation. And that's it. Only because I told you I would fix it and I meant it. Because a man without his word is a laughing hollow eyed handshake that will eat you up from inside your dreams, like any other big city you knew.

///The Cranberries - "Dreams" who hasn't sung these lyrics to themselves? Raise your hands. To your throats and gently throttle yourselves for being too cool for school and then go youtube as soon as you feel you've punished yourself enough. Best song ever. Sure I can't listen to it 8 times in a row anymore, but that just comes with growing up. Right?

Back To The Emerald City

Heading to NYC. I won't know when I'll get to write for a while until I get my internet situation sorted out or find a library, get a card, and park myself there. Shouldn't be anything too unmanageable. I've been through worse.



In the meantime, I'll miss you more than I can really explain in words or justify with powers of reason.

///Nine Inch Nails - "The Four of Us Are Dying" Give your woofer a good work out and raise the bass a notch or two. It beats against the face like a hot breeze on a hot day, but it feels so good all the same. See you later this week. I'm inclined to promise, but I think we both know what happened to my promise of an Inception themed retro poster (I'm still going to do it, just not today... or tomorrow). Oh, and p.s. I've been sneaking in updates to the fiction at Bits and I enabled comments here since there're no comment forms there. Not that anyone has had anything to say about us, but just in case. You never know when Jesus himself will want to leave you a note and be completely stymied by the lack of a comment form and then you're really fucked. K bye.