Thought Problem

Problem solving: you have to do laundry to go to work later. If you do laundry you won't have energy to work.To get energy you have to floor.  Flooring requires energy which is already low.  You can buy underwear and socks but that will take the energy and time you wanted to use to floor our you could hand wash but the same problem persists.  Plus if you hand wash you won't have time to both floor and cook and will crash at work and if you floor and then cook you won't have time to hand wash and dry so the only answer is floor then cook then eat then go buy underwear and put it on at work?

I don't know.  What I do know is that if sally has two apples and takes two more from mary, mary should probably give her "the peoples elbow" and while she does that the train from cincinnati to new york will be three hours late because electric trains don't smoke no matter which way the wind blows. And ain't nobody gettin no sleep today.

That Instant

You thought you were out of gum, but notice the green clod clinging to the top of a beer can and pluck and place it between your teeth and it's still fresh as fuck. You realize that you still are pretty awesome. Maybe not the most awesome person to walk the face of the Earth, but you've still got some chops.

Stand Up Act 5

Stand Up Act 4

So we've come a long way. As always with nothing but love. All I've got is love for yinz. I know I'm not the only one reading this, but I'm most at home believing otherwise. In some ways. Part of me still believes that I am and that's the part of me that says "hey, da fuck you been at?"

Outside the vein of what I originally attempted I actually took four cracks at this. I literally wrote out four different iterations of act 5. There was the act 5 that was a ridiculous racist rant that was so far disposed from who I actually am that I had to leave it in draft. There was the iteration that was absolutely bitter about my ex and the potential situation that she might be having ravenous sex while I am probably borderline asexual at this point, there was the iteration that was racist, bitter, and absolutely obsessed with lambasting my lot in life, and then there was the iteration that was just being a pure cunt. So I had four bad sets before this one. So this time is the real deal.

Not that the previous deals were not real deals. There was still no usage of backspace. Back pedaling? Sure. Lots of that. But I'm fairly certain it was for the best. I even tried to explain previous one hundred forty character twitter rants because I got so defensive. So pencils down. No defense. And no provisos for defenses generation. Keepin it light. Because the opposite of personal is accessible. And that's what I want and I hope you want, so in the words of a film referenced in a song I can't remember the name of: "into it."

No backspacing, per stand up. You can't take that back once it's loosed. So I'm gonna stand up.

Commuting on a bicycle. Great for staying in shape. Awful in practice.

Getting high, however, awful for staying in shape, but great in practice. I had two thoughts before that, but I was way too good to remember what they were. I have two empty seats in my classroom where those two thoughts were and I feel kinda sad that they skipped out. Probably the downside of getting high is exactly that. You get so many gems and it's like that last scene in the Goonies where that kid gets that little satchel of plastic gems and he's like "ah mah sheeeeet" and you think momentarily about all the good he can do for that rundown town that is still somehow susceptible to three man bank heists and prison breaks , but really he's going to buy a sweet ass Camaro with turn out mufflers and a mobile home with central air and the rest he'll blow on lottery tickets and before you know it he'll be on daytime television in one of those "you are not the father" micro telethons. Empty seats suck. It's like losing your baby teeth except they are your adult teeth and forever more, in every gay porn film you shoot because you are financially bankrupt and morals follow dollars, everyone will see you spreading jaws wide and wonder what you did to get a mouth of gold, but the answer won't be anything interesting.

The answer won't be something like "I took a bite out of a shark and killed it with the power of my jaws and also mind bullets." It won't be anything close to "I got into a telekinetic battle with a Sith lord and instead of throwing me out of a window he shifted all of my teeth two inches to the left and then I cut off his head with a flaming sword of laser focused light." The answer will be more akin to what a trailer park owner says when asked if he's living the American dream. I don't know what that answer would be, but I assume I would laugh like a kid who done caught his first fish at the local reservoir.

Actually that's one of those things that's kind of difficult to deal with. Gonna take a jump cut right there as I see the hole and the prize (it's a football analogy, as baseball is basically for sort of athletic obsessive compulsives who couldn't hack it at chess. Baseball is the D.D.S. of sports).

Everybody dreams. I dream, you dream, we dream. Sometimes weird things happen while we're dreaming. Last night was one of those times. It wasn't a weird dream like Abraham Lincoln walked in on me filming cat themed pornography and aliens landed on my front lawn and vaporized the loud ass people with Marvin the Martians disintegrater ray while they shouted at each other because they were crossing the street against the traffic lights and thought it would be a great idea to break out their catwalk stroll while rush hour traffic did the herky jerk trying to get around them.

It was strange because I said some ignorant stuff to a girl at a party I was attending. Sure, not the first time I went ape shit on someone I didn't know. Definitely not the first time I went ape shit on a lady. I was once smoking potent smokables with friends and it was a very chill environment. Everyone was pretty relaxed and happy, but there was this one girl who would not, for the life of her, just shut her mouth for any span of time. I know I talk a lot. I don't get to talk all that often and when I do I tend to err on the side of saying way too much, not because I am actively trying to say more than I want to, but because talking is like water and I'm thirsty as hell most days. Anyway, she was just rattling off and off and I thought my ears were going to catch fire with the rate she was asking me, in a subdued state, to process information so I eventually just screamed at her "would you please shut the fuck up" or something to that effect and long story short I was not included in further get togethers, because I can sometimes be "that guy". But anyway, had this dream where I was in attendance at a party and said some ignorant mean things to a girl.

Optional responses to having mean things said to you are A: devise a bulletproof retort. B: devise a bullet riddled retort that is delivered so well the point can't not be well taken. C: punch the offender in the face. D: engage in sober-esque dialog. D was basically off the table by then. I was expecting an A or a B, because when I'm good with words I am really good. And you can't punch a girl in the face. Or the boob. I don't know which one they dislike more, and frankly I'm not trying to find out.

I got C. In this dream, this girl balled up a technically sound fist and gave my face the business. Not proud of that. It is afterall, my dream. I should have seen it coming. I should have seen her angry little eyes and my smile was way too wide and easy. It didn't deck me, but it still shut me the fuck up and I figured I would be the bigger man and not cry about it. Of course the bigger man would also not just flatten her, but that was already off the table so the list of bigger than the situation things I could do was already pretty limited. I did the biggest thing I could do without looking like a complete fairy and went back to sipping at my sippy cup and then I woke up into 4 PM.

Not that I'm lazy or anything. I could wake up at 8 AM on my day off, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a day off if you're waking up incredibly early for no reason. Granted 8 AM is fantastic if you have a reason to be up then, but why would you intentionally deprive yourself of comfort on your day off? You have the whole rest of your life for people to tell you when you should be awake and the whole rest of your life to have places to be. Seriously, take one day out of the week and burn it. Just burn the fuck out of it. What is that? One seventh of your lifetime? Why does that even matter when you're going to spend some unholy fraction of your life on a toilet? You will probably spend more time eating, pooping, watching television, and deciding what to do next than you will spend asleep so you might as well get it while you can because when you're dead you'll regret that you didn't spend more time dreaming.

To get back into it though, the dream was fairly whack. About as whack as it gets. I wasn't even hitting on her. I think I said something about her hair and her eyeliner. Something to the affect of "did you pay someone to do that to you" or something. And the sad thing is I've probably said that to some girl at some bar who I didn't know, and my propensity for dumbass cutting observations got the best of me and also got me black balled for service because she was also the bartender. True story. I think I say that mostly because I'm entirely immune to similar comments because I so clearly couldn't afford to pay someone to do much of anything to me. It's all self inflicted. Pride badge right there. Did you pick out those clothes or- I can interrupt that thought instantaneously. Yes. The answer is yes, yes I did. I look this awesome for free. Now what? Yes, that's right. Scoff. Scoff because that's all you have because you paid good money to look like a douchebag and I pulled it off at zero cost, but anyway the whack thing about it was when I woke up my face hurt like hell where she laid her fist into the side of my jaw.

Now, the thing is, a normal person would wake up and work their jaw bones and rub their face and think "what the hell, that's not supposed to happen. I'm not supposed to suffer injury in a dream and then wake up with my nerves thinking it actually happened." I woke up and rubbed my tender face and thought "god damn, what a cunt." It wasn't until I was at work many hours later still rubbing my sore cheek that it occurred to me that getting punched in the face in a dream should not by any means carry over into the real world and then I was like "wait a minute, what the fuck? That was the worst dream ever!" So now I have to look out for that. Dreaming is my hobby and like many hobbies that include hard drugs I don't want it to start taking a toll on my body. Or maybe I should just sleep less. Either way, whack ass dream.

That Instant

The instant you realize your laughter sounds like a fat kid getting tickle tortured at band camp and everyone in the liquor store is looking at you while you crack up at hilariously grandiose labeling on bargain basement grain alcohol laced whiskey.

dear (______):

Dear Commercials,

I have already sold my soul to the devil for a grilled cheese sandwich. Please find enclosed one non-transferable bill of sale of accumulated equities, futures, and licensure of products, ideas, and orginations past and future. Forwarding address of all further inquiries can be found at the addressee therein undersigned. While we do value your patronage, please cease and desist forthwith as ownership of said item and item's value, monetary and otherwise, are no longer within the scope of my stewardship.

Thanks,

the self improvement venture capital council chief executive officer of the brain caucus

p.s. it was frickin delicious.

brought to you by Kraft singles and the ad council

Time Rides Again... Again, Tabloid Culture, Apologies, and Fresh to Death

Well, I'm 32 today. Fast approaching my midlife crisis. Trying to celebrate. Is it weird to be anxious about having an iterative midlife crisis? Probably, yes. Definitely yes. We'll see how it goes. I'll let you know if I buy a yacht and a roadster and get a prescription for penis enhancing drugs and hair plugs. Time keeps on running.

What's new, what's new? Well the things I have yet to do aren't really new. Still have to piece together the redesign, don't I? It's still coming (that's what she said) and I swear to that up and down. Stand up act 5 is still on the way, but I can't really swear by that up, down, left, or right as I'm still trying to get back to a place mentally where I won't sound like Orny Adams in that movie with Jerry Seinfeld. You know the one. The one where Jerry Seinfeld was funny, but fifty percent of the screen time, maybe sixty pushing seventy, was dedicated to that bastard Orny and his bugged out eyeballs and all he did was piss and moan over the whole thing and made it practically unwatchable except for the saving grace of getting to see Seinfeld do his thing. The whole movie was like getting a chance to see Cosby with new material, but the caveat was that for every minute you saw you had to sit through five minutes of Chris Rock screaming into the microphone (because everything's funnier when it's louder). I'm not going to do that. Still working on the gift. I know! It's been forever. Pushing a year by now. I don't want to stop working on it. Then what'll I do with my spare time? Read? Fat chance! No, I'll probably read more. Reading is important. It's the non-readers with too much power that basically flipped this country inside out. And I'm not going to do that either, or at least, not on purpose.

I apologize for not staying up on it. Things have been pretty rapid fire lately. Bang bang, you shot me down. Bang bang, I hit the ground. Lots of thought bubbles and thought bubbles being burst with thought bullets. I rediscovered that I love Led Zepplin while listening to What Is and What Should Never Be. I've been trying to stay fresh to death, but mostly I've just been hanging out in bad neighborhoods doing not so good things to my body which butts heads directly with fresherating it. Trying to be big enough to take a stand against hard wiring. Eat the entropy and pass order out the other side of my head. Not easy. Sleeping at night will help. Getting on a normal schedule will help immensely. I think that's the main problem. Continuous change has basically blown away my flux capacitor. It stood all it could stand and it can't stands no more and my flying DeLorean is grounded and instead of fixing it I've just been kicking the tires and cussing.

What does it mean when you file for a job transfer and the email ticket says case:new the following hour and then case:closed the hour after that yet no one has passed you any good news or bad news? No idea. Suddenly is sooner than anyone ever thinks. So I suppose we'll see and wait, not always in that order. Depends on how I'm feeling. Sometimes I'm feeling more wait and see and sometimes I'm feeling less wait and more see and sometimes I'm all wait and unseeing. Time just crawls sometimes and the best thing I can do for myself is close my eyes or stare at the pavement going by beneath my feet and my runner's high because the distance is never closing fast enough until you hit that point and it's closing too fast and you realize you haven't given yourself enough to cool off and warm down (warm down?) so you're going to have to jog right past your door and go around the block again and by the time you get back you feel like you could go another mile or two and so you do, and then you regret it halfway through and turn back, but this time looking up so you know when to say when. I rarely do.

I do things like develop hobbies out of things like answering very simple questions of distance and position in hyper extensive detail. Yes, the thing you are looking for is here. Oh no, that's not good enough. It's kind of like a game, well it is a game. I try to fix the positions of things with so much accuracy that you could find it blindfolded. It helps me remember where things are. Mostly it helps me combat the gremlins and elves that keep touching my stuff at home and moving things around when I'm not there to keep an eye on the joint. Bastards. Small handed thieving little... well, we've all been there more or less. Time keeps on slipping.

So I'm sure everyone with half an instinct for detection tries not to read tabloids. You can feel them sucking the brain fibers right through your eye sockets. Soul sucking camera lenses except their powers were bestowed on the tree pulp they were printed on and now work in reverse. No wait. And now work in forwards except the concept works in reverse. Instead of sucking out peoples souls for your consumption the printed matter sucks out your soul for their consumption. So they can put more cameras and phone operators and hotlines out there like bait to suck on more souls and make more print. It's a loop. Everything's a loop that is a conspiracy, but not every conspiracy is a loop? Anyway, back on target, tabloids!

I try not to read them, but eventually with enough unfortunate glances I end up ingesting a story incidentally, like sawing chemically pressure treated wood without a mask, you get that junk in you and you can't help noticing (also don't ever ingest that stuff as it will get you higher than you've ever been and then you'll sleep for like 20 hours with complete memory loss). I came across this ridiculous story of Tom Cruise and Kate Holmes (was that her last name? I don't remember since her absorption into the Cruise persona. I think it was, well anyway) horrible warped world. A world in which their children are experiencing horrible things like flying on airplanes and staying up late and ice cream all day or something and all I could think was: really? Horribly warped world? Is that what we're going with here? Is that really what we're boiling down to now? You've got to be kidding me.

How is it that their world is horribly warped and the land of the micro-united nations adoption agency cat fighter's opium den union is not warped at all (I walk by a lot of tabloid stands at my job, a lot of bits and pieces of the running Angelina/Jen/Pitt crapfest have been inhaled)? And then it struck me. The reason why people don't read tabloids and think wow, what b.s. and instead plunk down whatever or however much it costs to get a copy. People want to be distracted and not everyone can afford to pay for television and the unending rot that pours down the chute at MTV and BET and Oxygen and company. It's basically a tv show. That's what tabloid culture is. It is a tv show for everyone so they can lose themselves in familiar characters and worry about them at night and talk about them during the day because (whether they know it or not) it's like a serial novel. Like Pride and Prejudice published a little bit at a time each week and it engages them where they are and allows them to, for a while at least, leave the world behind and immerse themselves in something richer.

I could have gone the way of "people read it because they hate their lives", but I honestly don't know that. If anything that would or at least should read to you "people read it because they hate their lives, and I am assuming the base state of most people is hating their life because that is my base state." Which isn't really true. Well I do get at odds with myself sometimes all the time, it's unfair to assume that everything anyone else ever does is based on escapism. And that was just way too technical. Two steps back off that academic cliff.

It's good that people read. People that read tabloids read more than me. No, wait a minute. That is definitely not true. Not because I wouldn't want a tabloid digester to be more well read than me, but because of all the time I spend crawling the internet. It's not all pictures. Not yet anyway. Remember when everyone went crazy about protecting their content and every page of text was embedded into flash and gifs and other picture formats so you couldn't copy and paste it and everyone had cutesy alert messages that would pop up (some of them infinitely looped so that you had to restart your crashed browser) if you ever right clicked on their page to bring up the copy/paste dialog? Ridiculous times. But anyway, yeah. I read a lot, is what I'm saying and I guess that people read at all is always a good thing. Just have to convince the tabbies to raise the language level from like third grade to highschool and easy as cake you'll raise the education level of the United States, one soap opera at a time. That is my plan for education reform if I am ever elected president. Or education Czar. Or Don of learning. Whatever they're calling it these days. Pretty sure it's Czar. Chair? I have no idea and no desire to go read about it. See ya!


///Mono - "High Life ... everybody wants it and sometimes I do too. Though I never really know when I'll have the time to really chase after it. I think by and large I've got better things to do. Maybe not better, necessarily, but other things to chase after. Other distances to sew up.

Travels

Do you ever wake up and the first breath you take as you open your eyes is like the end of the beginning of the breath you held loosed in the exhalation last as you closed them hours before? The kind of breath that just draughts and draughts like a mug with its bottom smashed out and a waterfall pouring in through your eyes?

I've been so many places I haven't told you about. It truly has been amazing cities and villages and neighborhoods that I did not know existed in the slightest. It's been like holding up a sliver of pencil graphite and peering at it and into it and trying to see the sliding structures of the molecules that make it able to write and as you focus in harder and harder your eyebrow twitches, your right eye scrunches, your cheek pulls a little bit against the corner of your mouth, and you have a lopsided nostril flare as it curls into a black dot and you sneeze so hard you see the white and gray spots of single blood vessels traveling through the tubes inside your eyes until the white and gray static washes away and as you realize what you felt was probably the hardest sneeze you've felt all year and your vision sharpens and tightens and you go back to the task of focusing in on the little stick of graphite to gain some greater understanding of its whyness the focus of your eyes takes in first the space behind it and you notice for the first time that the entire world has changed and you, through your one tenth orgasmic bending of space and time and through modes absolutely involuntary to your methods, have been transported in the pinched microcosm of a microcosmically microbial micronaut of a micromicrosecond into another state of your known universe. And you're like, "awwww, snap. Wait, where was I just now?"

That's what the cross bridged universe has been like. I've got to find a way to slow down somehow. It's like every step, every step in this phase is approximately three feet (I'm a big stepper, though I live my wake state in little steps, admittedly, not by choice), but sometimes across the bridge it becomes impossible not to cover yards and hundreds of feet to a stride. It's alarming to me. Since the city I traversed and loved deeply, and had fairly close ties to, with it's cats that raced tiny v6 motored shopping carts, and its trams and extensive rail system, its modes and methods, and absolutely stunning, despite the time of day, industrial sector, passed to dust through the extinction level event that literally converted pretty much all living matter there to wind blown drifts of ash, knee and sometimes waist high, the entire world over there was silent for days. Dreams of black empty space.

The passage was probably linked to the discovery of an engine, a massively complex machine, whose only visage, comprehensible to me was red space. I remember traveling in search of the menace. There was so much unrest and power in the air. The kind of power that is impossible to control. The sort of power that raises the hairs on your forearms and makes your skin stand taut at a rally railing against a thing that you don't believe in necessarily, but that is necessarily part of the fabric of who and what you are, and your skin tries to wrench away from the sheer electricity of so many voices and hands raised against the isness of its whatness. The preparations for the event. The siphoning off of resources. It felt like the beginnings of war from the middle portions of textbooks on American history. No pantyhose, no lipstick, no zoot suits, no strip steaks. I don't think they're all related, but they rhymed and made funny notes in my head. All the same, I remember the streets emptying. The saving of fuels. The work stoppages because so many people were leaving and then whatever happened, whatever the engine so utterly complex in it's being and overwhelming in its output to be describable only as the color it left seared into my eyes, everyone died.

Then one day I crossed the bridge again, down the stairwell and through the door, across the water, to enter myself there and I searched farther and farther from the place I'd grown into and I started finding new places untouched by the destruction, by the discovery of a motor vast enough to destroy a population in its breach. It's been simply incredible. The world has been intensely sensory and I know that I am not from there, but a refugee from the city of dust. It's been difficult to blend in. I don't know what it means.

I am anxious for the arms race though. Turning laborers on my factory floors toward positive productions or at least neutral destruction. Admittedly I have been doing my best to live toward lower resolution perception. Perhaps stupidly. However, it has made it much easier to keep track of the caucus. All present for a span of weeks instead of days and hours. Well, mostly all present all the time, but have you ever tried keeping six people at the same table non stop for any length of time. Cellphones down, you assholes! I know it's happening (I've been using those rather interchangeably, but I'm making an effort not to). I haven't been dividing and sub dividing my body like I should be. Increased capabilities are a good thing for the people I work for and cohabitate real space with, but very bad for me because it basically cedes me more idle power, and my insides do not idle well before outlets become too infrequent, necessarily so as there's only so much you can physically do in 24 hours and then I drift toward solid state and forced diffusion through shorter out spouts. The better my conditioning the more of a potential and eventual hazard I become to myself. And who the hell keeps moving my toothpaste.

I guess there's an answer in there somewhere, but I don't remember asking a question. I guess mostly I've just been trying to get a handle on the verdant landscape. The wackness. Seeing through it. I'm used to two or three dreams. Two or three stints in dreamland. I've been having ten to fifteen in the new world. It is strange.


///Linkin Park - "Session" Not trying to create distance, but it's hard to know how far away I travel sometimes because I don't understand how much ground has been covered or how much time passes between what I perceive to be blinks of my eye. Sometimes the days spin by like tracers through sunset skies and it's all I can do not to blink against their rays.

dear (______):

Dear life,

Come at me, bro!

Sincerely,

that guy that won't quit

Post Nine One One

I've been pretty dark, post 9/11. Hopefully, understandably so. It's been difficult to remember how to have fun, or that having fun is essential to being.

I won't tell you that it can't rain all the time because, in fact, it can and it does. You would be a fool to never throw a poncho and an umbrella in your ruck. You'd be a fool to go out when the hail stones are larger than your fist. A fool to believe if you train hard enough you can vault any fence, scale any wall, and leap any crevasse if you simply will with all the strength in your bones. It's a uniquely American fallacy that if you want it with enough of your heart it can be made real.



The fact is life is pretty damn unkind and there is no insurance policy available to make the check cashers pay for what they dupe the writers into signing.

So, in light of that, and in light of the fact that I've been a pretty dark human being, I am dedicating some of today to having fun. Forgetting is impossible. Those years are tattooed on me. Tattooed on my bones. They will always be with me and they will find their own way to the surface of my skin whether I like it or not. I will have to scrub and scrub to get the cells off of me week after week and month after month and they will seep out again against raw flesh and needle their way into the fabric of what I make with no desire to cause and no avenue to prevent.

But, damn it all, it is Saturday and for once I don't have to work to pay the bills and slot the tokens and I am determined to sing a little and let one of the voices in my head be my own falsetto, cigaretted, malt liquored, boom and bipped, hymn for a little while. Get live. There's only so much fun to be had poking a corpse.


///Eagle Eye Cherry - "Shooting Up In Vain" The film Go changed my life, but not from the perspective of life changing activities, because that was not unfamiliar to me, but from the perspective of music. I heard so many sounds I'd heard before, but in a way so far removed from what I was used. Amazing film. Far and away one of the most solid soundtracks ever collected. Bonus track? Hell yeah:


///Left Field - "Swords" ...oh with my sword at my side... listen to this on a rainy night. Cue it up right around a lonely midnight. You won't regret it.

And When I'm Swimming In Through a Tunnel I Shut My Eyes

There was a day when I was fighting substance abuse. A recent day. Joined in combat with myself. The war was being fought on several fronts, less chiefly in my mind, much more so in the fibers of my flesh. A stalemate would have ensued. Had the other side not run out of ammunition.

So I took my body on the road, like I have before. Saddled up the bicycle. Checked the metrics and vitals on it and decided the bike itself would not kill me on its own unless I was the one steeping outside the envelope. And so we went.

For three hours. Half drunk and half possessed to tear myself apart in as constructive a way as I could. The dismemberment of the arms works division exercised in full physical animosity of the frames and walls that house it.

I got back home spent. Phenomenally spent. Phenomenally spent and utterly independent of chemicals. It was beautiful. The only thing that could have made it more so would have been to stumble in doors, deposit my bicycle and fall on the floor gasping only to be collected by a love. A human being who loved my sweating, salted, corporeal, enough to fuck me right then and there in all of my disheveled, half awake, half conscious, and fully realized and exploited self.

To feel waves of pleasure wash over skin and gush from within like the cyclops eye of a New England light house against the north eastern scream of a mental squall that threatens to blot out life like a spilled canteen to an anthill, to feel those waves wash against bones and muscle incapable of putting up protest, to lose oneself in that ocean and sink and curl in the wavering cyclones of tide and circular torridity of thick and hot and cold water, inches above the punishment of coral formation and light days away from consequence, is to feel an absolute lack of control and borderline sexuality that flirts with the recklessness of the passivity of induced rape.

And that's what I wanted that afternoon. That's what I needed. What I needed was you. That's okay though, we've got time to make yet.


///Mum - "Green Grass of Tunnel" ...behind these two hills, there's a pool...