dear (______):

Dear guy friends,

Just because I'm gay does not mean I want to have sex with you. I still like beer, football, guns, Chevy small blocks, video games, and rabble rousing in general. Which is why I like hanging out with you. Fear not.

dear (______):

Dear Miracle Whip,

You're that girl from high school who wore tiny shirts who turned out to be an awful person if you knew anything about her who also chaired the yearbook committee and filled the pages with one hundred photos of her personal fan club with a few token shots of pep rallies sprinkled in.

I will continue to draw mustaches on your face whenever and wherever your ads appear in print.

You're a bad person. And not the good kind of bad person that makes life a little more interesting for everyone else. You're just not good at all.

Brief Epiphany About Art

Well, I don't know where to begin so I'll not bore myself with where I started. It occurred to me today that a huge part of what makes art great is the cost of producing it, or at least the perception of the cost of producing it. Not in terms of money or materials, but in terms of human costs. The universal currency of time, blood, and sweat.

Seeing a nice installation is neat, but if it looks like, with enough money and a stockpile of whatever and a staff of interns, it could have been put together without much blood, sweat, or time, it had better be pretty mentally challenging to perceive to create a feeling of value, regardless of personal tastes. I guess that's what is galling sometimes. In terms of writing. Writing is ridiculously time intensive, but the perception is so often that the hard part is developing some new and insightful perspective. Honestly I think it's the other way around. Before I chase that rabbit though I want to go farther down the art hole.

Everyone has personal tastes and likes and dislikes. Whatever, that's not news. A major component of art appreciation transcends likes and dislikes. People can appreciate monuments, whether they like or dislike what the thing stands for, because they can understand the difficulty of moving a brick so many feet from one point to another point. Maybe not so much now with machines to do things, and construction being a shrinking sector and people growing up not understanding how to use hammers and wrenches and whatnot. And I think the clearer art can demonstrate the intensive effort of it's production the more easily it is appreciated.

Sometimes it means producing things on a huge scale. Sometimes it is fulfilled in creating things with dozens, maybe hundreds, of physical layers. In electronic media it may mean creating something by hand at a ridiculously minute resolution or something that evidences sampling over a huge span of time or archive work that demands exploration of a great span of time units, whatever those units may be. Or maybe selection and hand picking of complex individual components for inclusion into the final composition. Whatever it is, however it demonstrates it, the appeal of art is, I feel, in large part attributable to the perception of the effort required to produce it and entirely apart from the perception of skill, talent, and other addends that went into its development. That's what makes people want these things.

People who can identify the human cost of producing a thing want it, on some level if not entirely (assuming it doesn't fix their fancy to begin with), because they know that such and such an amount of someone's being is in it. Permanently. And they can own that part of that person's being. It's not a bad thing. It does make me wonder if the majority of art owners, if it is even possible to measure something like that, are male. I bet a big part of the art school curriculum explores these topics. I hope art student kids don't think of me as a poseur. "He didn't go to art school, he's not allowed to talk about art stuff." Whatever. The closest some people get to composition is writing their shopping lists for the grocery store and they think they can comment on writing. I wonder if writers, by and large, hate artists? Writing is just systematized art. Art is just codified writing. Poetry is the intersection. Alright, back to what I was doing before. Just wanted to think about art aloud for a few minutes. Can you imagine the cavemen debating over whose cave scrawls made more sense? Nope, neither can I.



///The Eagles - "Take It Easy" It's not a good song, but it is easy to listen to. I would recommend it for filler between things you really want to listen to. Perhaps, play it to fill the minutes you need to go use the bathroom. It really is like highway rest stop atrium music. Can't you hear this echoing on burgundy tile at 9 in the morning a couple hundred miles from your destination in a glassed up rest stop and your ass hurts and you don't really want to eat Roy Rogers for any reason, but you already ate Mcdonalds for dinner and had the worst shits of your life a couple hundred miles before you had to get out and take a leak and realized you were hungrier than a fox fresh out of eggs?

dear (______):

Dear person outside my window shouting someone's name,

THEY OBVIOUSLY CANT FUCKING HEAR YOU. Please shut up.

Thanks.

Good Night

It was a productive night. Got some things done. Bits For Flames got an infusion of life. I still have to start composing the page indexes. Gotta do it by hand because there's no Wordpress to do it automatically, but that's okay. I'll start them later today. I feel pretty good about it. I feel calm. Almost undeservedly so. Be back at it later.

///Unkle - "Heaven" like sex with someone who cares more about you than you could ever care about yourself and you put it away in a box for a rainy day, though you can't remember the last time you checked the forecast or opened the pages of a newspaper and read about the rest of your world.

Note Taking and Big Wednesday and Curtains (Question Mark)

Here we are. All of us together, staring down the barrel of big Wednesday. It feels good to be, all of us, facing the same direction. It's like that scene from Seven Samurai. A rare union. It feels good to be all together. It's like standing on the viewing deck of a skyscraper and the entire city looks like a fold out map with colored streets and little geometric bits of color to show the landmarks and it's even better because all of your friends are there and it's not about getting lost in the moment as much as it is about the moment being an extension of the years you've spent with these people and the fact that together you all see it the same way, but spun enough to make everything everyone is saying worth each second of hearing.

The note taking at work is going well. I do think some people are beginning to assume that I am texting some girl friend somewhere (HAH) and oddly enough, me being the hardest worker there, they've started calling me a slacker. It doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that if I ever tried to explain that I am taking notes to use later in my compositions and poetry and fiction they would laugh, not believe me, and then continue to call me a slacker. So I won't explain until or unless I am directly confronted about my phone activities. Worst comes to worst I'll just have to start using paper. But my handwriting sucks.

Also I bought curtains. And by curtains I mean six bright yellow table cloths on sale in the Easter display for a dollar each. What I plan on doing is writing two inch tall font prose on them from edge to edge, cutting slats into them that are each about two to three inches wide, and then taking them up for window curtains. The way the sun hits my place in the mornings it's going to look amazing, I promise. If you came to visit once they're done, it'll probably take a day or two or maybe even a week to get all that writing done first, you'll love waking up here as much as I do.

Something silly funny happened today though. When I got home from work this morning I went to use the microwave to heat up some wind-myself-down-and-sleep-soundly greasy cheesy yummy food and I couldn't enter the time on the microwave control panel. So I'm jamming the buttons and finally I bend down to see what the little display is saying. Thought process:

"Aw, what the hell?? Who keeps leaving time on the microwave!? I can't use the damn thing if there's time left on it!"

Then I realized that no one could have done it, but me. Then I realized no one could have done it, but me, because I'm the only one who lives here. Then I realized that was a good thing.

I didn't do the whole moment justice there, but there were two paths of discovery that joined up in a single goof troop smile that made the morning pretty enjoyable. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but blunt objects can solve problems pretty good too.

///DJ Adam Freeland - "Big Wednesday" This song makes me wish there was a God. It makes me think of sitting on the sun facing side of a dune by the great lakes and feeling the Earth breathing against the back of my neck like someone in love and I'm killing time and picking grass until I can go play in the water and meet the sun out by the buoys before nightfall. It also makes me think of riding. I need a car or motorcycle. Not necessarily to get where I'm going, but just to go out and drive and feel the veins of highway and the wind up my sleeves and my nose and the motor beneath my seat. I love the rhythm of motion and sea.

Upcoming Projects Outlay and Fewer Made Up Words

As much as I love reassembling language, I'm going to try and cut down on the made up words, no matter how functional they are to me. There's just something about the ring of things like legister, and healspan, and gastronaut, and dreadlot that color things in my head, but make no sense outside of it. I'm not saying they won't come up at all. I'm saying I'm going to try and keep a lid on it (as much as I'm going to try and cap my typing to more reasonable lengths of chained thoughts).

In other news, I'm still trying to work in time for Bits. It's daunting because there are more than thirty short stories that are unedited that were at one time fully edited and since I'm left with the unedited versions by redoing the edits I'm essentially going to end up with stories different from the ones I came to love once I edited them. It's like leaving for work and coming home and all the furniture is moved and because so many things are moved and they all existed relative to one another you can't begin to put things back where they go because by placing one thing you are essentially displacing everything no matter what that first thing is so you get comfortable instead in your weirded home and the weirdness becomes acceptable though deeply irritating and depressingly better than the peak fear of resetting the changes, but ultimately you're rushing toward a breaking point where the peak of the fear of completely inverting the reality and order you originally wanted to induce is broken by the critical mass of foreignness settling daily. So I'm going to do it. There is no way I can't. In short, it's a trap. A glorious trap.

I don't know when my days off will fall week to week so I think I may just settle on Wednesday mornings as Saturdays are dedicated to sewing my realities back together after days of cutting sutures and vision bleeds. That's longer term.

Shorter term outlay:

Finish paper robot and mail it to Boulder.
Go get computer in mid-March so I can do design again without cramping my hand on a mouse using crappy windows xp paint programs.
After I get computer, finish novel on the computer (no seriously, it was 2/3s done... I don't like it, but I told myself I would do it so I have to finish it so I can get that monkey off my neck and get the bullshit devices out of my body and then actually do one I want to do).

I guess that's it. Oh wait-

Need to build a target to punch. My knuckles are way too soft.
And need a big ol' scroll of paper to tape to my wall so I can draw on it and write things.
And then the list of bull required by living on my own like a trash can. And chairs. And a desk. And a lamp.

And of course more poetry. But the kid has been absent. I don't know where the whimsy has gone. The climate in the factory has turned a bit gritty and I want more than anything to be able to write and rhyme about the stars in my sky between the leaves of my dreams of the gray sand castles and tide pools on the shores of a warm hell. It's just hard to find sometimes without a guide. I'll keep looking though. It's strange sometimes. With the bridge gone and slipping across into the unreal only to find the city is abandoned and you're alone to wander the concrete blocks turned over to the trod and glass eyed streets and on slipping back you are quarantined for contamination and failing inside for particulate poisoning and mutation is flowering in your cells, but none of it was supposed to be and was somehow more real than imagined. I wonder sometimes if I did drop acid would anything change. I'll know someday. Till then, there is work yet to be done.

///Goldfrapp - "Utopia" It's a strange day. No colors or shapes.

The Fringeness of Earnesty and High Cycles

I'm sort of coming to realize, well first of all I think I've been talking too much again, but I'm sort of coming to realize that I am a fringe personality. I was pretty delusional back in 2004. I thought I was cooler than the other side of the pillow beneath the boss cat's hipster transformers cartoon printed footie pajamas. Then I started to see the full Lawrence of Arabia letterbox landscape of who I was. Then even seeing that I started to believe again. Then I thought maybe the strangeness was the strangeness of perhaps a Kramer and desirable for the sake of its own quirks and prats. Now I'm beginning to understand that what it is really is the quality of fringe. I was beginning to think about what I could do to tear that away and assume a lower charge. No clue. My charge is way too high. By the time I get near to people I'm ravenous for company and traveling at speeds that break bones and all of me wants to talk at once. Not that quiet is a bad thing. I'm a fantastically introverted extrovert. I couldn't live with me. I shouldn't expect other people to. Right?

Well anyway, I'm going to try and keep these shorter. There's no lightness to being. There's no likeness to seeing. I'm camping at the edges of some things I shouldn't be near. Not that they keep calling me, but it's more like a landmark that lets me navigate the rest of the solid world. Or not even that. I have a hard time keeping track of progression. The importance of cause and effect is. I suspect the problem might be that I am difficult to relate to, but with slight effort able to be comprehended and possessing sightlines worth following when I am close to my best, and I am violent, obscure, unpredictable, melancholy, intensely introspective, restless, and largely inchoate and impossible to relate to when I am not near my best. Problematic. But at least I'm starting to understand how or at least why it seems I'm regularly fallen into Kuiper radial movements. I'll stop calling them every weekend. They'll get out the telescopes and rovers and years of planning and clean rooms and staffs of scientists and damage controllers when they're ready to see me blow by along the edges of the perceivable solar system.

I've also realized that my head is most active when I'm turning my motor at work. So now I take notes on my phone. Good. A fine start. Because by the time I'm ready to leave work and I get to my door at home I can't remember half of the things I started in my head while I was there. I'm losing lines. Each object in is another out. So now I can chase the high cycles like dust motes. I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. I guess I thought they'd think I was texting people. Just texting myself. Tracking my information. Taching my spin. My head always seems to run the hottest when I can forget my body or perhaps simply push in the clutch linking it to. Corporeal fault lay line.

Some advances were made at Bits. Not many. I like the layout, but I need to learn how to manipulate the blogger gadgets so I can create my own with proper attribution. Still waiting for the end of the world, but I'm happy to be doing so in a city I love. Let's dance till the sun comes up. I'll bring the scissors. Sometimes they tell me things I don't know.

///Juno Reactor - "Las Vegas Future Past" She runs great. Good idle. Clean title. Half the miles were done a quarter at a time too. Been to Vegas a couple times in it. You ever see one of these wide open on the interstate? It's got a sound like you wouldn't believe.

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.

dear (______):

Dear Pittsburgh,

I can feel again. Thanks so much. I almost walked into traffic today watching stars on my way home from work while the sun started to come up over the hills just east of Wilkinsburg. The clouds hanging just above the window dotted hills were like thick palette knife stroked oil scarves while the sky began its slow shift from black to spilled ink blue to this tarred aquamarine behind and above them. New York is flat soda in a dixie cup. You're champagne in a green stainless thermos.