I Don't Know, Man

It's difficult not to get sucked into a way of thinking that spirals out of control.  When you consider how many of your lines of thinking, projected outward through time, end with a force quit the entire prospect of a future or futures gets dim.  When you consider how many of your avenues end with the phrase "I try not to think about it."

Five years from now, I will still be working for peanuts.  What's the point?  Why bother setting goals at all?  The ones that are attainable are so near and so small they mean next to nothing beside your peers.  Change you can deem actionable is so incremental from outside perspectives as to appear to be no change at all.  Five years from now you'll be able to afford to go out and socialize twice a month instead of once a month.

Life up to now has been heavily geared toward learning how to do more with less.  Learning to deal with scraps and put pieces and parts together to make whole and useful things from what others discard.  Learning to maximize and squeeze potential out of every little thing you find and adopt and consume.  Will you ever get your degree?  By the time you do, will you be able to do anything with it, twenty years behind the curve?  What are your useful skills?  "I can turn a pretty good wrench.  I am terrified of crowds.  I sometimes am paralyzed with depression.  I've been told I cook pretty good chicken.  I don't know, I try not to think about it."

The way of life I am capable of sustaining is far afield of most folks.  Even if I were to "settle down" the undeniable and stark contrast between myself and the environments that have held sway in my engineering and make up will be more than enough to strain just about any relationship to a breaking point, given time.  Love can only cover and suture so many fissures and canyons before a lover will realize my planet is not capable of supporting new life.  So are we protracting our own death?  Killing time and energy and spinning entropy into something beautiful enough that our decades long throes to come can at least bring some light and warm some hearts before it sputters out as the parts steadily fail beyond repair?  "I don't know."

A reminder that you've worked so many years for freedom.  While you are freer than you've ever been, you are still inside the compound.  You still have to trick yourself into believing to keep on running.  Perhaps adopt a belief system or religion.  Not too fast or too far lest you ram headfirst into the bars.  Sitting cross legged, picking at the grass beside the river and skipping a stone now and then, the undeniable scent of wrought iron creeps into the wind and you know the bars are there if you bring yourself to focus your eyes just inside the horizon's line.  I try not to think about it. You've gotten out of the cell and into the yard outside of the yard where you're allowed to roam.  You've earned visitation.  A meal card for better food.  The compound is vast.  I try not to think about it, but I cannot forget.




/// Phantogram - "Running From the Cops"  staring into a still lake of bass

The Fire

Sometimes I get mad, really mad about the fire set in me.  I get so mad that I want to begin blaming other people.

I get mad because I have to deal with fires I had in until I realized I have... to a degree.  The understanding making me no less angry.

I still wonder if people wake up angry.  I still wonder if people wake up on fire or if that is just a "me" sort of thing.

Eventually,no.  m kjl 98y udr y j was a little word inside your ear.  deptrh carfe.
j\hav'e acisc*o$ window.

That Instant

You realize the best way to clean bones is to burn them!  Eureka!  There's no magic soup.  Just burn the fat and protein chains off of them.  Accelerated decay.  Duh!  Free the carbon.  Holy smokes, no pun intended.  Sometimes I over think.  Haha, eureka indeed. HAHAHAHA finally, fire solves something!

Less Than Stellar Habits

I've developed the habit of not breathing while I'm driving.  Cruising down Allegheny boulevard beside the river with a ton of straightaways, I noticed it.  My right hand resting on the stick shift started to go numb.  That was when I realized I wasn't breathing.  That was also when I sucked a breath in at 45 miles per hour on a two lane with a rumble strip.  It's really hard not to process space and time as opportunities to wreck and die.  I'm trying to unlearn it.  Breathing is very important, especially while driving.  I'm not scared of many things.  I thought I'd conquered my fear of the road once I started whipping my horse, but I hadn't.  I have been holding my breath since all this time whenever situations got even remotely hairy.  It makes me a worse driver, not a more cautious one.  Constant silent panic that locks up a body.  The world is terrifying at speed.  But I love speed.  But it's terrifying.  But it's gorgeous.  Wrestling with circumfact.... am I going to die in a flaming ball of twisted metal?  Ignore the landing lights.  They are not landing lights!  Oooh tunnel vision.  Stick your head out of the window and suck it in.  Canyon run. Someday soon.  Don't go too heavy on the gas.  I want driving to be fun again.




///Hotchip - "You Ride, We Ride, In My Ride"

That Instant

you nearly cum in your shorts when you realize you bought the exact materials you needed to make a hula hoop out of pex pipe and couplings and have been walking past it for almost three weeks now when work blizzarded its way in the weeks before and completely forgot about it until you tripped over it walking to the little cowboy's room.  Holy mother of God!  There is a hula hoop!!! Drop down to Willem Dafoe "there was a fire fight" fire fight scream.

Stand Up Act 11

Stand Up Act 10

Some people stick by the words in line with the idea of everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten.  Be nice to each other.  Don't drop your pants in public.  Share.  Be quiet and listen when the time is right.  Take time to make things.  Take naps.  I don't know what the whole NY Times best seller's list was, but you get the point.  Coming to grips with the fact that I will probably never dunk a basketball has brought me an up to date version of that book.  In no particular order:

Everyone gets old and dies and the best you can do is be a little worse than your worst the day before.  That's right.  At some point your body stops growing and starts failing.  Bit by bit.  Part by part.  Sure, you may beat the odds and be one of the few freakish human beings that cannot be destroyed through attrition and must be struck down with sudden and violent illness or circumstance.  The chances are very good that you are not.  Once you hit your mid thirties, that's pretty much it.  The next decade or so, you may hold serve or at least keep even with your physical abilities the day prior, but it all ends in a gutter.  If you haven't dunked a basketball by now, you probably never will without a trampoline or other marvel of engineering.

You can't be whatever you want to be.  You can be a version of what you want to be.  You can be somewhere in the ballpark of what you wanted to be.  You cannot be whatever you want to be.  Well you can be whatever you want to be inside your head.  That is absolutely attainable.  However, you may wake up inside a very welcoming dormitory environment where breakfast always comes at 8:30 and bed time is 9 sharp and a guy keeps pounding his head against the wall loud enough to interrupt your 500 piece puzzling and your pants have no pockets and the shower always smells a little bit off.  You can't be whatever you want to be.  There are always outliers in great numbers because it's a perceptual lens.  Think of the planet as an aircraft carrier.  There are, I dunno, 150 pilots.  There are always 150 or so pilots.  There are 6000 other people doing all of the other stuff to make sure it doesn't crash or sink and feed the people that help the people that help the people that feed the people that help other people make sure it doesnt crash or sink so that the people that fly the planes and fix the planes can fly and fix things and make sure it doesn't get blow'd up.  Chances are really good, if you're born on that carrier, you're not going to be flying anything unless you steal it or are a pilot's kid or pilot's friend's kid.  If you aren't born with the genetic ingredients to Chia pet out into a frame capable of dunking, guess what?  That's right, you can work your ass off and add 6" to your vertical leap, but your wingspan and height have already conspired to make sure the best you'll achieve is a left handed layup with your finger tips grazing the rim.

Allow your passions to lead to your goals.  Your goals cannot kick start your passion.  That element of life is a one way valve.  You may not be able to dunk, but you do enjoy the game.  If you like to play with smash and grab abandon, get good at it.  Embrace it.  Set your goal to being the best slasher in the neighborhood.  Cut defenses to ribbons and bounce off the low block to grab rebounds because your game will never be above the rim... doesn't mean it can't be wicked fast.  When you set goals apart from your passions, your hearts never in it.  Doing things because you want to do them and doing things because you cannot not do them are too very different things.  There is an "I think I can" gray area muddled in there.  A little bit of chicken and egg, what came first, questioning, but for the larger part, save your mind the wear and tear.  Gravity will still be gravity tomorrow, and last I heard, the ability to go from zero to "don't blink" is pretty rare in itself.

The list goes on, but you get the point.  Along those lines, I was considering going back to trying to rip out a poem every day.  Just one.  There's the whole idea that you have to dig through the trash and start tossing things off of the top of the stack to get down to what you really want to weave and work with.  The thought behind it is that every time, every instance, that ends with the idea of "hey, I should write that down" is the lattice of your brain adding a new bit of graph that gets buried and grown in and grown over with the events and experiences that come after it.  And then you hit another branching point where you say to no one in particular "I should write that down".

By the time you actually get to the point of sitting down, all is forgotten.  Not really forgotten.  Buried.  Grab a shovel  You've got two choices.  Try to hammer and chisel all the way back to the fly in the center of the glacier, or sample and blast it apart, while mapping and scaling and measuring and cataloging it.

Eventually you may get all the way back to the granule of the thing you thought you should write down.  Nothing along the way will be known or preserved or brought into consideration to cut the journey or work shorter the next time around.  If you slice it up and hold it up to inspection and hang the samples on slides along the route, you've not only achieved the point of origin- you've possibly stumbled upon data for further examination and perhaps other points of interest that must be investigated before the entire land mass melts into the polar seas of your own consciousness.

Scary as hell, the prospect, no?  Oh yes.  In years of your decaying brain you've lost so much.  It's alright though.  Breath easy.  Release your testicles back out of your stomach and unclench your pelvises.  It's never too late to start getting some exercise and start tagging the fauna living inside your head.

Speaking of things living inside the mind, I've been up late a lot of days thinking about whether or not I should pursue a mate.  You know the whole mating thing.  The whole pairing off with other people to raise other littler people to become good big people to raise more little people to become good big people or horrible little terrors.  That whole thing.  I don't want to do it to raise other little people.  Let's get that out of the way first.  Maybe.  I think I would either be a great father or a horrible father, but there's no gray in there.  Trust me.  I've been over the idea drunk, sober, high, smashed, apotheotic, grounded, slippy, glowing, based, depressed, you name it.  It's going to go one way or another and frankly I don't care to flip a coin everyday hoping I raise someone who doesn't want to kill me every day of its waking life until I do actually die.  That shit is terrifying.

I want to do it for a companion.  A second voice, because the angel and devil on my shoulders like to play dress up so sometimes I glance over and there's a teddy bear and a bowling pin on the other side or a pacman and a doily.  What the hell, indeed.

I don't hate company.  This is how it all boiled down; I'll give you the most obvious that occurred to me last first.

While browsing reviews of Tinder and Grinder, I realized that my apartment, though of a healthy square footage, is laid out like one giant room with a side room (full of weight lifting equipment.... it's essentially a regularly used gym so that I don't have to pay to go to one).  I have enough space to house one person.  Exactly one person.  Trying to pack another person into this space will lead to a violent civil war, ultimately.  I don't live alone.  I'm in my apartment with me and the rest of the machinations and defects and words and whispers and screams and general artifacta of my minds functioning.  It's a packed house already.  Where am I supposed to go to escape if the side room is occupied and I can't go outdoors?

The second thing is there must be sex.  If you live with me, we have to fuck eventually or someone has to go.  Not immediately, but eventually.  If we don't have sex, that's fine, but you'd better be prepared for gratuitous nudity because I cannot stand clothing.  I hate clothes.  Once they've served their function it's time to discard them.  They're uncomfortable.  If I'm wearing something, I probably had to.  If it's something I enjoy wearing it's because if you're going to wear clothes, you may as well wear something you can have fun wearing or need to wear to bring happiness to the act of dressing my pretty innards.

I didn't live to the ripe old age of 30 to hear "don't touch me there" "it's four o'clock in the morning" "I'm tired" "I just ate lunch" "I want to shower first".  I don't care.  You can use me when you want to as well.  It's a two way street.  I damn sure am not going to catch flak for masturbating at midnight when they've turned in early.

I don't care if it's bad sex or the kind of sex you tell your friends about when I'm not around where you know I think I rocked the house, but really I fizzed about as pleasantly as having an ashtray dumped on your tongue, getting to wash it off, and finding grit behind your molars the next morning.  It's gotta be there.  I am a contact person.  When I know I can't touch you, things get weird.  Things get real weird.  Ever found a sheet of a paper folded in half six times inside your purse?  Ever found three razor blades in your wallet?  Ever found your jacket on the same hook except literally inside out?  Ever found everything that could possibly be unplugged unplugged?  Ever found everything you brought over laid out to the level of where your hands might swing as you picked up an item and progressed onward toward the door?  Ever found your car keys behind your head when you woke up?

The point is this:  I realized I don't own enough space to support two people to the point where one person can disappear from the other person's engagement and forget for a time that they are now part of the other person they are living with and dive into their own engagements.  I'd have to add a floor at best and another two rooms at the least so that I or they would not know exactly where to find me, because knowing exactly where someone is hiding is the same as having them immediately present.  You need only to recite the incantation to summon them.  There has to be some mystery and trial and error to at least give them a chance to relocate and make it interesting.

The other point is that I own enough stuff to support exactly one person.  There are enough chairs to support one person and an occasional party.  There are enough dishes and cups and utensils to support one person who makes their own meals and washes their own dishes.  Enough bedding for one.  Enough closet space for one.  Enough food and fridge space for one.  Enough toiletries for one.  Just a matter of fact.

Not that there's been no effort to expand the coffers.  There has been.  Through the strain and the strife and the good and bad times, the covering radar is still only big enough to account for the airspace over a single atoll.  Above and beyond that controlled airspace, all bets are off.  Everyone and everything flying in or out is at its own risk.  There simply is no room in the budget for fighter escorts and first response marines and a space program and, hell, the DPW is backlogged by years, not months or days.  Years.  Bringing someone else into the equivalent of District 9 is not going to end well for anyone who doesn't live somewhere near or lesser than there already.  This may be an open hoodrat invitation.  It's not.

Recognizing where my passions are, we can make this work.  I gotta acquire more space at some point if I want another human being around or, adding another human being, there will very quickly be just one.  We can work out the details after the acres.  Plus it'll be good to have places to bury things and plant growing things to just walk out on my porch and sit down and peer across the field and say to no one in particular "I remember when that tree was a foot tall," kick my feet up on a flat basketball , take a little sip of gin and apple juice, scrawl some notes, and tsk tsk at online dating messages I still receive, setting aside the gems to tell you when dinner rolls around and we play two handed hearts to see who sets the menu and who does the cooking that night.

That Instant

you realize you're going to need a rescue animal too.  Now that you' e committed to life.  /////////// Not necessarily.  Longer term.  ?There is need for a third pilot.  The vetting will be a game of musical chairs.  I need someone who is willing to howl too.  I don't have to agree on the why ... we need someone to laugh at the clock too.  Someone to share the joke of violence with forever.  "Unto Eternia." He-Man.  In all seriousnesssomeonewhoalsocomesback from the dead.  Someone who also knows fire and fears only turtle shell combs and wet sneakers.

Scarification

I am very much looking forward to finishing the bear paw/lens on my left hand.  When I started scarification it was in part a way to feel more complete.  A way to match the inside with the outside and unify the kingdom of my body and mind.  A way to talk without saying a word of the anger and hate that refuses to go out.

Years later, I am happy still to have the daily reminder because without it I would forget and there are things that must never be forgotten or glossed over.  The older ones were there for a warning and also for a reminder.  I do believe I've been familiar enough and known enough that they serve much less in the capacity of a warning and much more in the capacity of a daily reminder to never go back.  No matter how desperate.  No matter how ... imagine a perfect storm of circumstances ... no matter how "that".  And I'm glad because without them I would cycle back.  A daily hard stop.  I'm glad my occasional congeniality shows through too.  85% of the time, I'm alright or able to figure a way back to right 100% of the time.  15% of the time, probably more, the outcomes are not at all acceptable.

I am really looking forward to finishing my paw.  It's going to be a ton of fun slitting things open and the entire attendant processes.  The thing that makes the difference and turns the key over is the performance of the hobby and valve check in a positive light.  Happy reminders.  When I started it, the thing began as a reminder of the power and ability to destroy.  That whenever I picked up my left hand, whenever it touched me, whenever it touched anything, there would be a constant reminder of the terrible abilities it had.

Drawing the tattoo, the scarification in that region, to a close is going to come with a lot of happiness.  Completing the drawing is going to be a constant reminder of the good power can do.  The terrific beast that requires a constant leash can close its teeth to create, not only destroy.

My father still populates my dreams sometimes.  I really did think it could be possible to kill him there and eliminate him completely.  Not entirely true.  Around the fourth time that it happened, him popping up in my dreamscape without reason, want, or control, I realized, snapping awake that my circuits have replaced spiders with his face.  I'm laughing because I used to be an arachnophobe and when I would go prancing in dreamland, more often than not if there was something I was supposed to wake up for, my factory would dump spiders into the dream somehow and I would snap awake.  Until I conquered my fear of spiders.  There's not much that hard lines me to full alert these days beyond him within 10 feet of me.  I suppose I'm stuck with that cardboard cut out flag for hard stops until I stumble upon something else worth fearing.

It's kind of funny the way it happens too.  It's not horror movie sudden.  The wickerman starts appearing and eventually I just get so frustrated that I wake out of dream states.  I wish he was dead already.    Life would be much simpler and free flowing, more so than now.  Patience, lily pad.  Patience.

It's not raining on the pleasure though.  It's going to be a fine afternoon when the stars line up and there's time to make the incisions and time to allow them to heal up enough to make good utility of the hand afterward.  It's gonna be swell, it's gonna be swell.  I'm looking forward to finally starting the smiling portion, the "because it's what I want" portion.




///Basement Jaxx - "Hot & Cold"

The Best Thing

about scrapping and clawing and scratching your way into a weekend with amazing weather is being awake to take in the Spring time sun, and lawn mowers buzzing, and bumble bees getting frisky.

Facebook Birthdays, Selfishness, The Spacetime/Lovetime Continuum, and Death Stalking

Well, I do believe we will kick this off with birthdays and keep it in order.  Maybe not entirely, but we'll give it a shot.

Birthdays are great most of the time.  Essentially it's like having a second New Year celebration, unless your birthday falls on New Year's day.  It's kind of cool that certain days be claimed.  Certain should be claimed.  There are so many of them you have to devote to being part of society it's cool that you can have your own and it's pretty interesting that there are days claimed of themselves where you, as a person, are forced to look up and away from everyone else and recognize that you are all just people and as such part of a single entity (country, nation, religion, belief, or just part of a grander scale of bodies in space rotating, dying off, being born, at a regular and calculable, to a mind demolishing degree, [God bless the collective scientific mind] interval).

When you are small, birthdays are celebrated.  When you get older, birthdays are celebrated.  Good grief I'm already trying to think of a macro I can program to type birthdays.  Let's call them bdays.  It's nearly as fatiguing to type as it is to read.  Where were we, as you get older bdays are celebrated.  Eventually, I think because of the enormous obstacle of longevity ... didn't the average age for death expand massively from like 35 to 65 in a stretch of helter skelter centuries?  Or was it a handful of decades less than a century ... cannot remember the history lessons exactly, but the obstacle of longevity was overcome on a large scale like feeling the X-1 break the sound barrier over a soundtrack stretched out over a week with rumbling bass against the soles of your feet instead of over a fraction of a second.  Are you seeing it?  The soundtrack of the first sonic boom, to scale it perhaps better and with greater accuracy, over a few days instead of a fraction of a few seconds of silence and then THWOOM!

Suddenly people weren't dying when they were supposed to.  The celebration of birthdays continued because you never knew.  Someone, many someones, were still dying viciously early.  If you made it beyond a certain age the birthday party would become a routine thing, but then you still didn't live that long and everyone else knew it even if you didn't so the birthday party would retain significance throughout much of your life because if you made it beyond the beginning the end was not that far away.  The space/time continuum of your existence was a fairly small swatch of fabric in a quilt of human lives demanding not only close contact, close ties.  The bday continued.  The swatches grew larger.

To present day.  I will not bore you with compartmentalized electro society and the kindness of strangers and asynchronous communication.  We're all on the same page, on the same planet, at the same time.  Birthdays are a lot less significant.  The stretch of life between birth and death has become a sea of time and space instead of a droplet.  Living to age five was awesome.  Living to 10 was nearly a miracle.  And on and on until you died at the ripe and tender age of 45 by incurable infection or bodily injury of one sort or another.  Fast forward and communal life ends at 18.  At the most.  If you decide to or are pushed to it ends four years after that.  Same cycle, larger scale.

If you make it to 13 everyone pretty much backs off and says "alright, this one should make it a good stretch."  Birthday parties every year until 13.  Then a few makes and misses.  Things may come up in the schedule or life barring them.  It's fine.  It's no big deal  Essentially you don't need to have another birthday party until you are about to die, but we've been having parties for so many years for so long before because you weren't out of the woods until you were 20 and then at 20 the parties tapered off until 40 when everyone knew you were probably going to drop dead soon and then they came back with a vengeance.   So we still try to have parties through the teens until 20.  We set an arbitrary mark at 20.  Twenty is when you are officially your own problem.  If you want to kill yourself afterwards, no one will blame you.  If anything they'll blame themselves for somehow screwing up a gestation period of 20 years.  Not that it's not impossible to screw up.  I've seen it happen and those people should blame themselves.  Moving on though: after 20.

After 20 the people throwing you parties are the people in that middle ground where it is so ingrained that every step must be a party because every step has been a bday party in the past back when the scale was all shrunk up.  Those people are throwing you parties because people threw them parties and the people they learned to throw parties from had parties thrown for them all the way back to when that party was also a wedding ceremony because you only had a solid 20 ahead of you to try to get a family going before you were killed by a hoof to the face trying to the milk the cow that morning and forgot to warm up your hands first because the whooping cough all night really took you off your morning game.  The parties are meaningless.  They try to flavor them up with "hey, you can drink now" but you could drink before, it was just a little bit harder.

Fast forward to the mid twenties and the only people still celebrating birthdays as celebrations instead of acknowledgements are the people still looking back to when birthdays meant something and desiring to keep them alive as an active denial that the space/time fabric is growing and much faster than originally supposed or hinted at by the people who celebrated your birthdays as iconic moments in everyone you've ever known (it really was everyone you ever knew because your swatch of fabric was very small when you were small too) and sometimes everyone they knew too's lives.  The fabric continues to stretch.  The stretch grows beyond the realm of sight.

The only way you know there is anything out there is if there is a thread you are holding or if the person units and units away is managing to vibrate space and time on your plane and at your level of harmonic excitement.  For all you know they are vibrating as hard as they can, however your lack of synchronized or harmonic phase or anything close to it to at least cause distortion to be investigated further and at most cause perfect reception is obliterating all abilities of detection.  Your birthday strikes.

You jump up and down on your birthday signal and there is one, two, ten harmonies where there were few before.  Not as many as you were young and not as many as when you will be close to death.  You are excited on your enormous swatch of space and time and communicate back.  Quickly though, you realize the distance is so great that nothing you say will bear any significance to the senders.  By the time it arrives much has changed and will continue to change at a fair rate, but absolutely quickly enough that keeping up will be virtually impossible and an occupation unto it's own.  The space/time is so bloated it is enough only to know that you exist in a sea of existence.  The birthdays must be celebrated though!  Every last one of them!

Though, nothing more.  Wholeheartedly, every last birthday must be celebrated, but please do not be upset if you do not receive a facebook birthday message.  It's nothing personal.  It is not selfish.  It is not "well I sent him one and he didn't send me one back so we're not friends anymore and if he sends me one I'm not going to send him one back" ... like no.  Don't be that.  That's trite.

The fabric of the Spacetime/Lovetime continuum is such:  fractal in portions and quilt in others all flexed over a membrane of space/time.  I remember you.  You remember me.  When was the last time we spoke?  A lot has changed since then.  We met each other during core formations.  If we're friends, there's something we liked when we looked at each other then.  Everything that's happened since then has been a branch or tree or fork or formation of adaptations and evolutions and events since then.  If I liked you then I'll probably like you now, but I may need to trace back a little bit to understand the face I'm looking at now.  Within you and myself.  That affinity will still be there.  Fractal.  Some parts are still quilt.  Have not changed at all, only grown larger and harder to see across.  Accentuated, in some respects conflated, but all there as it was when it was 20 and believing death was around the corner because birthdays are a big effing deal, yeah!?

Some sections remain as quilt.  All of relative directions are the same.  My relationship is the same.  My relationship to those directions remain the same as my portion of spacetime/lovetime expands.  The way that I will engage is across signals and waves that no longer ripple the shores of what used to be square plots.  Now they are jagged and hooked and crystaline.  "Why did you not wish me a happy birthday?  I leapt with all of my might to shake the webs and graphs.  I burned out my transmitter dish and everyone answered.  Why didn't you?"  I am bleeding in, but that's alright.  I will take in for a moment: my fractal development has not reached with the same fervor or life that others around me have grown.  Their swatches have been broken apart with year to year modification, willing and driven, while mine, willing and driven as well have been outpaced by the shear stretch of space/time, around which spacetime/lovetime is beholden.

"Why did you not wish me a happy birthday on facebook or in real time?"  Part of the reason is that you know, roughly, where I am, across the stretch.  Is you vibrate hard enough, I will pick it up.  If I vibrate as hard as I can, it will be picked up, maybe, and defuse.  More than that, the additional complications of your growth will require a degree of decoding to whom you also vibrate and I hate being explained.  Also, the time that I am existing in is the same time as the last time we saw each other and spent time together for a very heavy degree.  The characteristics, for all the stationary portion of quilt knows, being referenced, lauded, and celebrated, have very little to do with the current you and in fact may be portions so far back in the space and time we both occupied that they may be abhorred by the current continued people synchronized and harmonizing with your spacetime/lovetime.

I really do hope it does not come across selfish.  It's anything but that.  Who wants a person several iterations behind the rest of their peers appearing on their timeline without any warning beyond the blind celebrations, appearing ne'er before nor after, popping their head in the door to yell at them to live their lives to the fullest or drop a witt or a jab and zip away.   Or message them about a part of their life so incredibly irrelevant that .... well, you get the picture.  If anything, whatever comes of announcing your birthday on facebook is enjoyable.  I used to try to wish a happy birthday to every single person I actually met in person whose notification came up, but I realized I was just diluting the pool of communications they should be receiving and that's far more important than reciprocation.  Reception is a lot more valuable from stationary (as time and space grows and complications continue to thrive [wives, husbands, children, careers, mobilization, freedoms] the unstoppable movement toward greater complication reduces drastically the stationary ability to receive).  Projection, the opposite value shift.  There is no selfishness.  The relationship is appropriate and beneficial and also removes discomfort in bringing out the telescope that can pierce space/time to see a time capsule floating in square space and see from where the current coordinates came.

Since having the birthday though, I've been consumed with thoughts of aging.  Once the party faded, I was struck, over a morning cup of tea, that from here on out, maybe for a few years more there will be time to improve upon my frame, from here on out the best I can do is ward against sudden physical catastrophic failure.  The brain is it's own beast and will be susceptible to its own sudden failures, the much more important part of the aspects of being to protect the muscle and bones.  That prospect is frightening.

I am very quickly approaching the tipping point of being able to self destruct on purpose will be more difficult than waiting for an accidental failure or fault in the normal operation.  The idea that I will start to have to approach my body each day as an explosive device that requires constant disarming instead of as a device I must operate that is occasionally exceptionally demanding to pilot and often prone to conditions that lead to explosions or other massive exothermic failure is a tad frightening.  It's difficult to frame or explain, I will attempt.

My expected life span is 60 to 70 years.  I assume some of the rage inside of me will drive me another decade.  Perhaps reflection will drive me another five.  Desperation could drive me another five and hate could bring me across the finish line at angry, lucid, "where are my !@#$ing hover cars" 100 in the, of course, mind blowing year 2085, yelling at my robot nurse who simply amps my morphine and changes the channel to the meme network that just plays meme generator failures in fastforward with nature wide lens porn shots sprinkled in between and every now and then the base thumper strapped to the base of my skull goes off with a brief thud.

60 is the target with full apparatus to choice.  If I ever lose the ability to choose whether I live or die, put me down.  If I end up in solitary confinement I'll eventually find a way to kill myself.  You're virtually dead.  Just waiting for space to catch up with time as you've been, shall we say, fast forwarded.  Part of why... okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Collect.  Rewind.  Go.

Passing my 30th birthday I realized my body will likely begin, or begin the process of shut down, that will lead to death three to four to five decades from now.  Time flies.  As I sipped my morning die and blew the steam off the top of it and checked up on the news and weather and sports box scores it hit me that some piece of my body my fail at a moments notice in the coming years and perhaps less than that.  It was tremendously frightening.  I was afraid to go to work.  I work alone and have preferred to work alone for many years now.  Suddenly working alone comes with added risks that will compound as time progresses.  If you fall off of a ladder or spear yourself with a section of pipe because that muscle group or nerve system or other simply failed to respond to your intent you will have little to know time to call for help or bring or drag your frame to safety or at least the possibility of survival.  Suddenly your chances of surviving that car accident or freak mechanical accident symptomatic of daily engagement with machines (the more you fly the more likely it is there will be an air catastrophe, but you can't be struck by a bolt out of the blue if you're thirty feet below ground) go down dramatically as you become more frail and susceptible.  That's 100% out of your control

is what I realized.  You cannot suddenly begin hiding inside of a padded safe with provisions and a supply of oxygen.  Everyone dies.  You will more than likely or at least even odds buy the farm by no fault of your own as much as genetics or intent or negligence once you pass 30.  Every day you leave your house with a little less ability is one day slightly more dangerous than the last.  So you will work yourself ragged to try to keep that fraction at zero, even Stevens.  Every morning it will slip a little bit and you have to do a little bit more to push the numerator back over the denominator.  It'll work for a while.  In some cases a good long while until the growth in the denominator comes too fast and too regularly pinging and updating.  When your body let's go, you can still just brute force the math and bend your own time and space to whatever you want to imagine it to be.  The only reason why it will flex is because other people are leaping up and down and the fabric itself has grown so thin it can be distorted through pure force of will from either end of the spectrum of passions love and hate.  Until the stitches sewn when you were born finally snap and every one on facebook wishes you a farewell.

I did get wrapped up in the narrative for a bit, you see why bridging 30 and taking time to throw a few stones skipped on the river is important to me.  I'm not upset.  I'm in love and scared and aware and dreaming all at once and I never want to leave that bridge.  I haven't forgotten you.  For many, though, it is true, I can be spoken with or to, but I cannot speak to you.  On my birthdays I am reminded.

Let's put some Christmas lights on that.



///Kiln - "The Colorfreak"   far enough away from aphex to call it's own