Structural Irregularities

Are being hammered out. Trying to front load four hours of creativity into my day and it's been like trying to pack hundred pound boxes into a moving truck with my pants around my ankles. Which is to say, horribly difficult. But I am and will keep trying until I turn from a night owl into a night owl completely out of phase and happy to be so. I won't ask you to stay tuned. That's just selfish. I won't tell you to check back often. That's even worse. So how about this:



///Sarah Vaughn - "Lover Man (Remix)" I'll be thinking of you.

dear (______):

Dear Morning Birds,

I know I give you a lot of shit, but it's only because you never tell me who and what else is on the itinerary and some of your guests and most of your plans are highly suspect.

Anger Blankets and Arguing with Foreigners on Trains

I don't know. Great start right. Actually, what I said specifically was "I dunno." Blanket anger. I've had several arguments with a man from Ghana. It started off innocuous enough. He's only a year old than me, but he looks 18. At any rate, we were going back and forth about the source of American English and whether or not it was rooted in a rebelliousness borne of the revolution that lead to the Declaration of Independence or if it was the symptom of a liberal society. Things got minced and, in my opinion, he started crossing up his own perspectives of unrelated American culture with the point of the argument and rage was subdued by confusion and ill placed seconds of laughter that lead to him chalking up my perspective to general american rambunctiousness and uncouth manners (Ghana's still pretty fresh off of British everything. Boo U.K. and Ghana, but especially the U.K. ............. and especially Bart. Had to throw that in. Sorry (but not really). I don't know. Devolving. Angry. Let's play word associations. Blankets. Anger. Ambiguity. Television. Rage. Work. Time. Dissolution. Anger. Dilution. Failure. Success. Cups. Rates. Money. Failure. Dreams. Existence. Nihilism. Existence. Existentialism. Reading. Alternates. Time. Work. Conflict. Existence. Time. Hate. Distance. Company. Companies. Cigarettes. Industry. Costs. Work. Conflict. Time. Urine. Permission. Silence. Rage. Rage. Rage. Blankets.

I am, in short upset with an omnidirectional upsettedness that is killing my ability to make words and I think sanity is suffering and all I want to do is laugh and the desire is overriding common sense in the placement of that laughter and its ripping out of me like a chainsaw with a broken throttle in hands covered with olive oill and all I want is for the whole thing not to fly out of my grip, but everyday as I'm diving deeper into this new cadence of time I'm becoming increasingly aware of how thin that grip is and it doesn't disturb me as much as it makes me wish for the love and security of involuntary internment with all of my heart and something is shiny in the dark room and its the currency of the long term care I will eventually need when things break with a permanence that defies even the most aggressive modes of corrective medicine. I just have to wait a while. And I don't want to wait anymore and watch the whole thing keep racing like a rabid horse after carrot strapped infants.



///Bjork - "Joga" time out. Please?

dear (______):

Dear Ramen noodles,

Why do we only hang out when I'm drunk?

The (Implied) Conceited Sumbitch in us All and True Love

I had more to say ten minutes ago, but I lost it because I bled out my consciousness into a poem. I laughed out loud to that because it's true. For me, sometimes writing is like a keg that I fill every day and sometimes the keg explodes and the contents are disgusting to even me and sometimes it simply pours and fills glasses so neat and tidy and sometimes it pours one glass and sometimes it pours ten glasses. Consistency is a huge deal to most artists for one reason or another. Some people feel that consistency is next to Godliness or something like that. Some people feel that consistency is simply the mark of some kind of neurosis that does not permit full development of the creative orgasm. I know it's all unverified. Doesn't it grate you when you hear other people talk about what "some people" have said and think and do. It grates me. It grates me a helluva lot. I guess I was just trying to chap you as bad as I'm feeling chapped. I guess I'm just some kind of jaded. I grinned for a while. Jaded is such a lovely and fulsome word. I love that fucking word. There's something about that's a little sexy and rivered and disgusting as vice to a religious heart. I'm jaded. Not because of you though.

I guess I'm just wondering how far I'll have to go to find love. How dorky is that? Pretty God damn dorky I know. Would I go to hell if I knew I was "fuck everything else" loved on this Earth? Fuck yeah, man. I'll go to hell twice. Is it supposed to mean that much to anyone? I guess not. How can I put this to grow understanding instead of revulsion? I think the one thing that I've been since day one, more than anything else, is a romantic. That simply has not ever changed no matter what else has actually changed within me. I'm still looking for the right words. How about a picture instead?




I love you, did I mention that? I don't say it as a grasping for an intangible and thus perfect love. I know you suck. I know you suck because I suck. I know you're terrible and a shitty friend sometimes because I am. I know you steal more than 25$ in office supplies from your jobs every year because I do. But, I guess the point is only the douche bags are keeping score. When you really really put the rubber to the road the only reason to hate the religious right and the religious left and the religious center is because they offer resistance to what you want to do and what you are now with no regard for the nowness of who and what you are. Does that make sense? How about this: love fragments time.

I think we can both agree on that.

Or can't we. Well how about this, I will agree not to fight about that premise. Fair enough? Well fuck you, I think it's fair so I'm leaving it there. Hearts and kisses. Seriously. Maybe I'll draw a penis. Am I allowed to do that? Now I feel like flying off on an analysis of full frontal nudity in cinema, but I won't because I love you and know that you don't have all day to read this and I don't have all night to write it ( I do but God damn it [I use that a lot] I'm keeping to fucking schedule).

How about this. Next time I write I'll be twice as hammered and half as love sick. I think we can both smile about that. No? Yes? There was a time when I never questioned myself. There was a time when I didn't watch my hands type like two figure skaters on a board of ice composed of laminated squares of frictionless steel. There were times when the world didn't sing me to sleep through layer after layer of drywall and pink insulation packed to the gills with muffled screams and there were times when the creaking flooring was the sound of angels walking and not the burden of yearly abuses of the tactile senses. Remember when love was a flower? I want to say I don't but even that smacks of a romance I once knew that is somehow more romantic and honey sweet than the romance to come and I feel like I'm working this God damned keyboard harder than Ray Charles and Blues Traveler on a tour of the Gulf and the rest of the formerly slave supporting sates and I'm dreaming of lines of coke in hotels and two hour stands.

I suppose the end game is that I'm fantastically horny and too tired to proofread anything that involves anything besides penises and vaginas and bare skin and I'm thinking about the hours I've spent on subways trying not to imagine vaginas and floating disembodied breasts and penises surrounding me where bodies should be and the horrendous difficulty in squelching the beads of sweat on my brow and knowing that though my face doesnt sweat my testicles are weeping salty tears into underwear too loose to stop itself from tearing as I walk to another job interview and now I'm still fucking unemployed because some bitches vagina parked itself 6 inches from my god damn face... how the fuck could she be so cruel...

///Master and Commander - "La Musica Noctturna Delle Strade di Madrid No.6 Op.30" If I should die, both feet on the ground, upon foreign soil by the fruits of my own designs I shall have died happier than the richest domestic entrepreneur and more loved than the loveliest architect of words and emotions who ever saw the coast. And balked.

P.S. I wasn't too tired to proofread a smidge. Suck it Hillary Masters, you cock gobbling excuse for a tenured professor's dick.

P.P.S. Yes I know it's straw man slander. I don't care. I hate the man that much.

P.P.P.S. "Master and Commander was a phenomenal film. Please take the time to see it if you haven't. You won't regret it. Plus Russel Crowe is ridiculously hot and also ridiculously awesome. Watch it. While I finish this fifth.

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"

dear (______):

Dear Braylon Edwards,

I don't usually take on things that happen in life this quickly off the bat, but that was absolutely without a doubt the single gayest endzone celebration I have ever seen in the modern era of the NFL. Please add it to your list of things to not do (you've probably got plenty of room on that list since things like "drop passes" and "grow enormous beards" appear to have found permanent residence at the bottom of said list).

love,

a concerned fan of all things NFL

dear (______)

Dear streetball,

No, he did not get dunked on. He was almost two feet away from the person dunking and was not playing any sort of defense to begin with and had the idiot not swung his legs around in the air like some kind of prepubescent gymnast from China there would not have been even remote interaction between the regions of space they each occupied when the ball went through the hoop. So for the last time, please shut the hell up. No one cares. Show me my road racing highlights, damnit.

The Farce of Human Interest

The upside of funemployment is free time. The downside of funemployment is day time television. I won't come out with a blanket statement about the demographic that watches or is available to watch daytime television on a regular basis, but what I will do is call out the insanity of the supposed human interest story featured on daytime television.

In its thinnest guise it is the paternity specials on talk shows and the daily freak shows created from people with actual problems who somehow think taking their children or families on talk shows will provide some kind of lasting solution to whatever it is that ails them on the inside or maybe just to make a buck and get a tv special pitched at them from TLC. In its thicker, more elaborate manifestations it's the two day back to back experience of the "half ton mom" and the expose' on teenage fight club sex parties and alarmist programs highlighting manufactured cultural tensions and real ones.

And I guess I'm just sick of people calling it human interest. Human interest, the term itself, seems to ask a little more of itself than to simply raise emotion and sympathy and "wow" from the viewer. Human interest should denote a desire or interest to view and understand human-ness or humanity. A term as charged as human interest shouldn't stoop to the ridiculous shallows of daytime television for any reason. Human interest should be about introspection and reflection and I guarantee you the people watching human interest stories are as interested in taking in introspection and reflection as a red head at the beach is interested in taking in an afternoon of sun bathing. Having to be around people purporting to enjoy watching human interest stories is like going to a meeting with 30 yes men. All they're doing is soaking up reaffirmation of their pre-existing beliefs. In the end though, I'm sure that's why the shows are on tv. That and to illicit all of the "wows" and "oh my Gods" from the people that are watching purely for the floor show.

Personally I like to take my entertainment from sports arenas and sit coms. Wow, that sounds snooty. You know what, I'm saying it anyway. It only sounds snooty in the context of the ridiculousness of this modern day reversal. So human interest is an enormous farce that people watch so they can say things and feel connected to problems they don't have and feel a conscience they never acknowledge for the other 130 hours of their week and feel reassured that drugs are bad and teens are dangerous and gangs live in every dark corner of every city and know that they're not so bad because "look at the tv, there're worse people than me." So what.

I don't know. I feel dumber for having brought it up. I suppose the takeaway is: at the end of the day, I just wish we could all stop conveniently naming and pretending and applying euphemisms and have lived with a smidge more awareness of ourselves. I guess it grates me to have to listen to the people that talk to each other and while one rests all they say is "yes" "oh yes" "you know, that's what they say" and then they talk and the other turns into the yes man and by conversation's end no one has actually said anything and no ideas or information has been exchanged. The thing that unnerves me the most is that as personal awareness erodes so does creativity and imagination until the person becomes part of the reciprocating cultural wheel, the ultimate feedback loop, and they're lost as though they never existed.

///Amon Tobin - "Straight Psyche"

Why I'd Rather Be Hispanic, Artificial Self Confidence, and a Root

Walking home from a training day for a job I may or may not have a thought occurred to me: I would rather be anything, but black, in today's America.

Sounds ridiculous right? The simple fact is it is still very uncomfortable being black in America. I mean, think about it, people haven't decided whether or not we can even be called black people or if we need to be called African Americans. At least with Latinos and Hispanic people it's not a choice between obviously politically delicate and offensive terms. Or maybe it is, since I've never been Hispanic or a Latino. Seriously though, every time you refer to a black person isn't there a little twinge in the back of your neck that makes you wonder if you're using the right word, or if you would look worse by using a term that throws racial consciousness in the reader's face, even if it's only for a moment?

Think about the stereotypes. If I were to make a mental list of pros and cons with respect to stereotypes, who would come out more favorably? Sure there are local pockets of better and worse viewpoints (border states, places with "little (insert south eastern country)s", and places with very visible very active gang cultures, but across the entire spectrum of America I feel like black people aren't necessarily losing ground, but aren't really improving either whereas other minorities are either receiving more than token attention or are at least viewed more favorably on the whole. I feel a lot like the very "interesting" back story of white America and black America has made the situation a lot like a landlord who needs a renter to pay on time and shut up about the property's needs and a renter who badly needs a place to rent and can't afford anything else. I guess when I think about the stereotypes, I can see positive ones for most other ethnicities that allow some type of positive integration with society beyond sports, music, sex, and street dance (you know, the things people have to do to support families and build generational wealth and own homes and cars and have stable year to year lives and retire) and absolutely none for the blacks in America.

And it's a little discouraging. It's like the problem of integration was never really solved beyond the physical interface and instead of a defacto solution, patches were administered. Patches were slapped on top of patches and policy plaster was slapped on top of the patched patches until people got tired of dealing with it. Or maybe until the job looked done enough from the standpoint of the people outside of it, but as someone who is a part of the structure of black America it's pretty obvious there are gaping holes in perception that continue to lead to gaping holes in... I dunno. I'm getting tired just thinking about it. It's not fixable. I'm not trying to be fatalist or anything like that, I just have to do my part with my kids to let them know that they do belong here.

That's it! I think I just stumbled on an answer. Black history. Being raised with such a heavy bent toward black history and it's burden on modern history and having to live every year with the idea that I'm permanently indebted to a project of acceptance that will be in progress from the day I'm born to the day I die was a mistake. Historical perspective is a good thing. Having historical perspective hammered into me with a distorted and disproportionate focus placed on the "right" and "wrong" expressions of stereotypes within that culture is what has left me with this feeling of malaise. Black history is important, but not more or less important than American history. It's not a separate story. Having the idea that I'm different and special and separated from America by black history has caused much more damage than confidence boosting good. The short term benefit of confidence has been far eclipsed by the long term effect of powerful feelings of isolation.

I guess the simplest branch, the main root of all of this is belonging may not boost individual confidence, but will ease future growth and development of identity. Telling someone they're special artificially boosts their self confidence. Someone learning they are special through time and experience and on their own allows them to build a lasting self confidence that will not be eroded as soon as the encouraging voices are taken away. Not constantly reinforcing a person's specialness and differentiating characteristics may hurt their self confidence in the short term, but will ease their interactions over time because they will have belongingness as the most basic premise of their relationship to the world around them.

If belongingness is the most basic premise of their relationship to the world around them, then they are free to pursue many more avenues of existence without having to consider questions of perception and practice, and while the questions may be there, they will not be central to the person's identity. If a person's most basic premise is that they are permanently different from the world around them they will, when (not if) self confidence fails to motivate action, be forced to constantly answer and ask and re-ask questions of perception and practice in a never ending cascade of attempts to join a world they can never really be a part of basic their most basic premise of existence is that they are permanently outside of and apart from the world at large.

So I guess the root of the problem with black America is really sourced from within every black American home and public classroom in the month of February. But, don't tell them that. They never seem to take criticism well even from "their own people". Trust me, I know. Responsibility is probably the second branch on the tree of stunted potential.

///Four Tet - "You Were There With Me" Just reminds me of thinking about the future sitting at the edge of an apple orchard and watching shafts of sunlight roll like lazy spotlights across empty fields and after the second hour noticing that the little things on the horizon aren't high tension transmission lines, but are the blades of still windmills.