The Year End Look

Starting at the end of 2015 the year end look was a little rough, but hopeful.  I know I said the year end playlist was up next.  It isn't.  The look back at 2016 and forward into 2017 is.  We'll get to the year end playlist soon, I wanted to hammer this out before I get lost trying to locate music and because it has been weighing on my brain for quite some time and in the throes of a calm and a quiet and thoughtful depression, it is easier to piece back together.  I do firmly believe still: if you want easy, kill yourself.  If 2016 taught me anything that was it.

I thought fracturing my jaw was the worst pain I would ever feel and be able to stand through and that something like that would never happen again.  And then I fried off 15% of my skin with 370 degree oil in second and deep second degree burns bad enough that I couldn't walk or use my hand for weeks.  That was the worst pain I have ever felt.  The first week or so it was a chilly feeling, like when air blows across your teeth very quickly and it feels like you've just bitten into a snowball at the same time.  As hair follicles and skin began to grow back in odd colors and scales the pain got worse and more intense, but I was happy because at least I knew some sort of skin would eventually be there to protect the naked weeping flesh eventually.  It was so many weeks I don't even remember exactly.  I think the last scales scraped away to serviceable skin some time in late December after it happened in September.  It was an eternity.

Definitely not what I intended when I said I wanted to work on my scarification sleeve at the beginning of the year.  Looking forward: I don't want to feel anything remotely close to that again.  Can we please go back to dealing with occasional week long bouts of lower lumbar nerve pain and the occasional lancing ice pick stab of hip joint nerve pinch.  That's fine, by comparison.  I laugh saying it, but I am pressing my palms together and pointing them at the sky: please universe, don't hurt me like that again, but if you do - make it a clean break.

I did finally get around to procuring a set of tattoo guns.  I also did not get around to using them.  A third of my year disappeared trying to heal up from the burns.  It wasn't even just the burns that broke me low, it was learning how to use my hand again and build strength back into it.  It was rebuilding the musculature in my hips and joints in learning how to walk longer and longer distances and stand for longer periods of time.  At one point I could walk, but I literally had to sit down and raise my heel above my heart every five or ten feet because the throbbing pressure of my veins trying to push blood down and back up to my heart felt like my leg was getting torn to the bone by a leather whip.

The year started off pretty grand.  All of the work was more or less finished.  I'd survived, what was to that point, the worst injury I'd suffered to date and if you can take ten weeks of pain and rehab from a fractured and dislocated jaw, you can take anything.  Music was on the horizon and I had a keyboard set up that I was diddling with.  I got a cool old motorcycle with part of my Christmas bonus, an old Honda that I still have sitting in the backyard that I want to eventually build into a cafe racer style bike you might see on an old pastel chalk poster advertisement if you lived in racing country back in the 70's.  I had a new basketball and had free time to exercise and hit the basketball courts now and then to indulge my sports fantasies.  I was really getting into the video game Minecraft and was seeing poetry from a little bit of a different angle.

Graphic design was coming along and my friendships were pretty free flowing as far as I could tell.  I was making big plans to create sculptures and designs for some of my friends that I wanted to show instead of just tell them that I cared about them.  Some projects were coming along nicely through planning sketches and rough practice designs and concept proofs.  With some of my free time I was able to visit people I normally could not make time for and with that little extra bit of money I was able to go out with them to places they wanted to go and eat and drink things I never would under usual circumstances.  Life was wheeling and dealing and possibilities were turning into realities.  The only real problem I had was making time to keep up with everything at a reasonable pace and I was making it work.

The Summer was hot and long and I did get into a funk wondering what was next.  Who doesn't feel some of that funk in the middle of Summer?  When everything feels okay it is natural to wonder if everything is supposed to feel that okay.  Are you supposed to feel happy, content?  It's normal to question.  I did get to thinking about other people I know and where they are in their lives and where I am in mine and I started to think about what more I would have to do to experience that kind of comfort and security.  I started to, after my birthday in April, start to believe that there could be a way that I could have that too if I kept at it and kept on trucking with high hopes and kept in touch with people and kept allowing them in to my lives.

The facts started to creep in.  Started to trickle in.  The realization broke in that nothing would change.  They're still drifting away faster than that distance can ever be closed.  They've only been kind enough not to tell you that you're messaging a part of their lives they don't have time for.  So I spent more of the Summer falling away into the night skies and fire pits and walks through the storm tunnels to sit by the river's edges and pull back the fabric of those nights to watch the bridge lights glimmer on the inch high breakers.  It was my time to love the air and sky and earth and whomever happened to pop by my backyard or asked me to hop in to theirs.  Touring star ships and space stations of all kinds.

And then my body was scorched to hell and back and here we are.

Letting them go was ... you know how when you are discussing something over a hot cup of tea, and you stop to blow the steam away for a minute and touch the cup's edge to your lips to see if it's still too hot to drink and you set the cup down and look up and realize you've been talking to an empty saucer with a dry tea bag on it.  Letting them go was ... you know how when a video cassette finishes it's run time and the credits have finished and it goes black for a few minutes and then snaps to static and you realize you are still holding the remote and peering into the static waiting for the television to turn itself off, but there is another several minutes of static instead and you find yourself watching the blue input screen while the player labors, hitches, and then begins to rewind itself.  Letting them go was like that.

Part of me is angry that I didn't realize it sooner.  Part of me is angry that I let myself trot along, tail wagging, tongue out and teeth yip yapping away, not understanding the hands waving were from the insides of car windows, not the other side of the road on the side walk, a couple of paw skips away to pat my nose, scratch my ear, and let me lick their palms.

Part of me is a little lost.  So what now?  The business of being an adult?  The business of being single?  Thirty two is around the corner.  Some people I know will be retiring at fifty.  Fifty five.  Some people I know will be thinking about second kids, third cars, vacation homes, second marriages... my life expectancy is somewhere out there in the high sixties, low seventies.  So what now?  The game is halfway over and what?

Am I ever going to write anything of significance.  I do write for myself first and foremost.  I used to do it with the hopes of being recognized somewhere or paraded around like something special.  Am I special?  No, just a little weird.  Okay, a bit weird.  I will.  Not yet.  At least not in my mind.  Thirty years to go and many more times to keep trying to set the type just the way I want it.  Thirty years to make the words hit other ears the way they hit my own.  I don't know if it will ever work.  It would certainly help if I could go one year without some cataclysmic injury eating up a third of a year to heal.

Will I be single forever?  Yeah, probably.  I've been torn up and spit out enough times, unrequited enough times, blissfully lulled to nothing, cut off and scorched enough times, left behind enough times, pushed away enough, to where I simply don't want to feel that again.  Much like having your skin cooked off, the scars are forever.  Maybe in ten years I'll think about it seriously again.  Maybe I'll quit smoking too.  Maybe I'll just croak off quietly long before then from some odd organ failure I can't see coming.

There is, oddly enough, a dent in all of the fingernails of my right hand, from the burn where all of the cuticles were traumatized and cooked, that has been slowly growing it's way toward the finger tips to be clipped.  Consistent along each finger.  I now know exactly how long it takes for my fingernails to grow on my right hand.  Look on the bright side.

So what now for 2017?  I don't know.  I was, as I wrap this up, thinking about going to buy a pouch of tobacco to roll some cigarettes.  I might.  I stopped enjoying smoking five years ago.  It's a way to mark time, nothing more.  Thirty some odd years to go.  I'll probably have to start some kind of heart medication in my 40's if I don't fix what I put into my body and stretch food stamps more effectively... maybe cut out the beef and pork, more frozen vegetables and dried beans (fruit never keeps long enough).  What's the use?  An extra ten, maybe twenty, years for what?  May as well, push on, I suppose.  I still can't grow a full beard or shave my face to bare skin.  I'm not getting any taller.  I'm not exactly waiting around for anyone.  Might as well go for a walk, come home and burn a couple.  Get some good sleep.  Wake up and do it again.  We'll have time for music, 2017.  Time for more poetry and stories too.  Short ones, long ones, whatever strikes your fancy you scruffy little rascal.  Whatever happens, I'll be there for you, never forget that.  We'll forge some aluminum and keep exploring.  Do it for the love the art and the unknown.  There are worlds I've only begun to map.  The star fields are massive.  Time is not.




///Daedelus- "Perchance A Bit"

At the End of the Seventh Week (damage report)

Out of the fog of wars, asked for and not, comes the final damage report.

The total bill:

1 fractured left jawbone submandibular fossa.
1 dislocated left jawbone condylar process.
1 dislocated left jawbone coronoid process.

The total paid:

1 healed jawbone submandibullar fossa.
1 healed jawbone condylar process.

I don't think the coronoid process will ever heal correctly.

Total bill:

Zero $.
Constant pain in the coronoid process, but bearable and adaptable.

Final result:

No crippling pain.
Unforgettable pain.  The kind of pain every morning and every evening and every time I think about eating.  However, the kind of pain that will remind me to be a better a person.  The kind of pain that is unforgettable and good in its way because it will diffuse further scuff ups and other opportunities to speak my mind whenever I feel like, be it the thrill of getting ice cream or the the assuage of killing off the thrill of murdering someone else because I ... a good deterrent.  There are only so many ways to explain so many things.  This one is adequate.

I can eat.  I can chew.  I can tear.  I can exercise.  I can use the rest of my body.  I refuse to incriminate myself.  And I will not start here.

The healing has been amazing.  I am able to smoke again.  I wake up every morning feeling like a railroad spike has been shoved through my skull from the left side, right up through my ear, behind my eye socket and I've never had a migraine by definition, but this must be close to it.

I choose to let it go.

I choose to move on.

I have to.

Head hunters don't lead good lives.

I am furious and love struck and oh so amber and rose and pink in the joy of being able to wake up with 90% of my function back and if that's as good as it gets, hell baby, I got off lucky.  I will take that and dance and swing hammers and think about the next time and maybe I will strike first or maybe I will disarm myself before what you are carrying becomes an issues, but for fucks sake, it is good to be able to laugh free again.

The final damage report is this:

Mistakes were made on one side.  Mine.  I ate it.  I came out on the other side, tempered and galvinized.  A shorter fuse and a shorter leash too.   I expect less of other people and more of myself.  And that is flipping pretty good for a prognosis of a wire job.

I've known what it is to not be able to speak for days at a time, not because you couldn't, because you were literally locked closed.  A blindness.  I've known unprovoked hate in the shade of unbridled happiness.  Your spectrum is Roy G, Biv.  Mine is unspeakable in its range and color and temperature and length.  It has no name yet and I may not be able to give it a convenient one.

I now have the power to teach, and I will not.  Unless you press me.




///TV on the Radio - (Lovers Day)  of course, there are miracles... the people we think you are.  give me the keys to your hiding place

Stay Positive, Opposite Day, Detours, and Paper

How funny would it be to wake up in your own car in the middle of the early morning after accidentally blowing your steering wheel airbag into your face the night before tinkering with the switches and wiring around the wheel?

The thought crossed my mind, walking home from the local store to buy smokes and chips.  Almost as good as chips and ice cream.  When I feel horrible, I prefer cigarettes because they make me feel a little less horrible without making me wish I felt an unsustainable joy derived from ice creams sweet and cooling goodness.  If only anyone could always be that smooth, creamy, and soothing all the way down to the belly.  The thought crossed my mind after walking away from my truck to go buy some comfit after I noticed my fuel gauge was malfunctioning and realizing the problem's solution was going to cost me at least $120 and 10 to 20 hours of labor at worst and 20 to 40 hours of labor, learning, trial and error, and no dollars at best.

I kept chuckling thinking about how angry I felt.  I kept chuckling thinking about reaching under the seat for my hatchet, letting out a bloody war cry, and smashing the wheel to pieces.  Only then, ditching the hatchet, pulling and tearing wires out of it with my bare hands until the airbag exploded and shoved one of my closed fistful of wires straight into my face and I basically ended up knocking myself out cold with a rocket powered fist to the dome.  Then waking up the next day with a deployed airbag, swollen knuckles, one hell of a headache, and one hell of a fist shaped bruise between my eyes.

Part of the reason for the rage is that I finished fixing another small problem with a steep learning curve and dozens of hours of labor and learning rolled inside only days before.  The truck is not falling apart around me, though it feels that way sometimes.  The problems are routine problems and I wish I could take it in for routine maintenance instead of d.i.y. desperation weekends.  The other part of the reason for the anger is that if I were paid more in line with my actual skills and level of higher learning, I could shrug, say "okay", and rent a car tomorrow while my truck sat in a shop for an afternoon.

Living near the bottom of the middle class is deceptive.  Bottom of the middle class, top of the lower class.  Living in the region can be deceptive if you have some imagination, some confidence, some helpful friends, and some ingenuity.  I have a one bedroom apartment with a closet bath/shower and mini kitchen.  If I take away all of the furniture a friend gave, all of the furniture I built, and all of the furniture I found on curbs or being given away by strangers, I have cinder blocks, two folding chairs, one of those university lobby lounge chairs, a sheet of particle board, and an end table.  Remove every worldly possession, so to speak, and there'd be a truck parked outside, a few pots and pans and plates, a desktop and pair of monitors, a console, a found tv, a few books and magazines, some shoes and goodwill clothes and multipack tees, some mechanical gadgets, some home and auto repair tools, and a printer and phone.

Imagination allows me to see what can be and holds the hand of ingenuity to find ways to make it happen.  Call it humility or call it living within your means or call it mining gold or a hobby, thrift stores are one of the keys to forgetting that you are part of the working poor.  The cream of the lower class.  Keeping good friendships is a huge part of the puzzle.  Without them, my life easily fits inside a 10' by 10' cell with a hole in the ground to eliminate and a spigot somewhere to drink and bathe.  Part of the anger stems from those parameters.

I have been heavily detoured.  Charging along the roads as quickly as possible in an effort to get back on some kind of track while wasting as few years as possible is frightening.  I ask myself what will happen if I miss a black on orange florescent sign letting me know my next turn is coming three turns from now and the sign at the third turn was never erected so commit this one to memory.  First and final warning.  The reason why it does not feel fair to me is because it is not fair.

I continue to consider the many branches not followed that have lead here, fighting for time to write.  I began to believe my father was trying to teach me a lesson about his pain all along and I am finally beginning to understand it, but I will not be able to understand until I am 48 or 50 or whatever his age was when I stopped talking to him.  Before that thought grew too large, I remembered he hasn't the subtlety or emotional imagination to allow him to pull that off.  I can see where some of his resentment stemmed from.  Losing all of the prime years of life and talent at the cutting edge of art, design, and martial arts bad-ass-ery to childcare.  Who wouldn't be a lot angry all of the time.  Though extremely dissimilar in their divination (did you see what I did there), the results are similar.  Cut away opportunities, trim an effective gesture here, clip a nudge there, ....

... I don't know.  I do not know why I never got the same support.  It would not have taken much.  Some days I am alright never knowing.  Some days it all comes to a head staring at your broken fuel gauge and doing the right thing and getting the hell out of the car without slamming the door and spinning 180 degrees to put your fist through the window and slash your own tires.  The world could've been miles from now.

I could be writing about my third year working as a librarian somewhere and moaning about coding database systems and dealing with angry patrons and making time for dates between writing short stories and working on my two part novel about warfare and keeping up to date on my space opera hopeful crown jewel I'm still searching out an editor for, however the third poetry anthology is going pretty great.  I'm tearing out the kitchen in parts on my down time when I get tired of writing and it should be finished in another week or two.

Today felt like opposite day.  Loading my truck up with bale after bale of carpet, a refridgerator door, water logged drywall, a cane and broken umbrella, armfuls of empty paint cans, a screen door, and three dozen other pieces of jetsam from the home I'm renovating's previous occupants, it was opposite day.  What I was doing should be my hobby.  I should be putting that sweat and blood and cuss into my own home, not someone else's.  When I go home I should be thinking about what I am going to tear down and visit the hardware store to work on next.  When I go home I should not be thinking about what I can write next that can be packed into the time it takes to shut my body down to hit the hammers and brushes and trash bags and saws again.

As much as I love working with my hands, I could find a way to work with my body in the face of an occupation that demanded I not.

"You're poor!  You're poor!  You're poor!  You're poor!  Do not be deceived; you're poor!"

Independent life is a horror show and funhouse of mirrors broken and whole.  I am staying positive.

What brought me back to a semblance of balance is remembering that the day is still young.  Independent life is 5 years old.  Five.  Five years ago you started stepping outside of your cell.  A year or two later you walked down a hallway and into a cafeteria.  A few months later you learned there was a yard and no time restrictions.  A few months later you found a gate into another yard.  It's getting larger and larger as long as you do not screw it all up and have your privileges revoked.  All of the time you lost will be compounded by the time you spent finding a way back out.

No one pays you what you're worth unless you have the paper to create the market.  Or the portfolio and charisma, in lieu of paper.  Portfolio and charisma is an absolute "and" statement.  The one and not the other turns into a luck base number system.  I will never know my actual value.  Maybe that is the worst of it?  I will never know if I am being over paid or under paid, valued appropriately or not.  The optimist inside, the petitioner, tells me that if and only if we suffer for as much time as we spent pursuing the degree, our penance will be met with paper if and only if we are gracious through our turbulent era.  The eros inside whispers about penance through joyful degradation,   The musician adds another kick drum, knocking over cymbal stands.  The child snaps crayons in half so both hands can draw at once inside the same lines.

It is difficult not to fantasize about getting my degree in the mail, tearing it in half, driving to their house, and suffocating them to death in turn, each by half, with a wad of paper.  That would be thoroughly satisfying.

What are you supposed to do when the toys you want to play with are above the grade you are licensed for?  What are you supposed to do when what you are allowed to do you can do very well, but the ceiling is opaque and the sounds coming through it are not in a language you can or maybe will ever understand?  Maybe I am paid exactly what I am worth.  If I have reached my ceiling and given no indication that I am prepared for or understand in the slightest or am equipped for beyond that ceiling, I am paid exactly what I am worth.

That's frightening.  Also true.  Harrowing.

Sometimes I understand that I'm getting too fixated on true freedom.  I get a taste of working something I can enjoy to support the writing habit and expect everything else to fall in line. There's a luck element to it, that I cannot unlock through work or optimism or faith or trust.  That operates on its own time table.  If I do win the lottery, I will take out full page ads in major cities for the hell of it, but only once.

Part of me continues to say it is not supposed to be this hard to make massive uncertainty and day to day, week to week, at best month to month living a thing of the past.  My state is, however, that fragile.  At the ripe old age of at least 1/3 dead the best I can do for myself is knowing I have at least a month to figure out a new lowline.  Fear the high lines because you know a low line is around the corner... ....what to do when you are following low lines?   High lines have to be engaged.  My spider sense is not tingling.  Shake the wrong tree and a warship mine may fall out of it, let alone a tank or soldier sized one.  The other story of America.  Every body wants to be a cat.  If you have enough money you can do whatever you want to.  Not that much money.  I mean enough money to swap cars, or pick up and move, or add and subtract clothing, or change lighting, or paint colors, flip what you walk on, change shoes when you feel like it, add and subtract channels, modify whatever you want to when the moment strikes you, eat out, order drinks for other people, pay for other peoples gas, buy extra fresh fruit.  It's nice.

I am still going to try to brew my own beer this summer.  Do not give me that horseshit "God works in mysterious ways" because chance does too.  The only thing better than chance is ingenuity, and the only thing more important and better than ingenuity is imagination.

I am trying to stay positive with some success.  Frustration and rage are part of being us.  Born here?  Sure.  From here?  No.  I've missed you.  Don't lose touch.  If you ever need to talk, do not forget my ear.                 I love you.                    I love you.       I love you.  I love you. I love you.I love you.Iluvu.Ilvu.Iu.U.I.

We'll get this thing sorted out.  We have a lot of time ahead of us, like it or not, we do.

Do not quit.

You have the rest of your life to make that decision.

It is opposite day, okay?

It is not wasted time.

Opposite day.

Time becomes more valuable as it accumulates.

Okay.  I am
with you.  Agreeing to never throw hands up in frustration.  Agreeing to ride it as long as there is still track in front.  Agreeing to dance as long as there is a beat to dance to, be it from within or without.  I am okay with you as long as your are
okay.  With me.





///Aesop Rock - (Gun for the Whole Family) ~ i've missed you for a very long time.  things got bad.  things were getting bad.  i had to remember that they weren't as bad as they'd been.  we're working toward a utopia of coexistence.  we're not there yet, but damn sure we're going to keep on trying while helping lay the ground works and maps and blue prints for the next iteration of our being.




/
//
///Alanis Morissette - (Thank You) ~ passive mobile adaptable armor.

Breaking the Horse

Sometimes it feels as though I can do no right.  What happened in my past lives to be cursed so?  I lost a cat yesterday.  I gave him everything he wanted.  I gave him everything he needed and then some.  It makes no sense.  I can still feel him.  I can still see bits of him in my vision.  I can still smell him.  His ears smelled like french toast sometimes.  He was only about two years old.  I have to remind myself that I didn't kill him.  I wonder if I did perhaps by accident.  I flushed my fish down the toilet a while back, but that was because I shouldn't have had them to begin with.

I thought I did pretty good with him.  He was my chief officer on board my ship.  The other guy was my first mate.  The first mate has been promoted.  I'm sure he didn't want to get his promotion that way.  He keeps meowing constantly to call up the deceased.  He doesn't understand that our chief officer is gone for good.  I kind of don't understand it either.  As soon as I touched him I knew he wasn't just sleeping.  He was my cooking buddy.  I'd meet him in the mess hall to talk about our course and how to squeeze a little more oomf out of the engines.  He was my napping buddy too.  My sleep in pal.  He'd lay on my phone so I wouldn't have to hear it.

No, no, no, sweetie.  Come back to me.  I need you!  My first mate needs you too.  We had a good crew.  Was the music too loud?  Was the bass too heavy?  Did I not keep the temperature high enough?  I couldn't turn it up any higher.  It made my nose bleed too much.  What did I screw up?  Who's going to wake me up in the morning now?

I thought about burning his body for a very long time.  Give him up to the air and the stars.  I'm giving him back to the city instead.  It's where he came from.  If I gave him to the stars, he wouldn't know what to do with himself.  I am from there.  He is not.  He'll be home.  I am glad our paths crossed.  I do not know how to explain it to my first mate.  If I spoke cat, I might be able to.  I'm not sad.  I am angry.  Why didn't you tell me?  Did you?  Did I kill you?  Involuntary manslaughter? Agent 001 Jack: K.I.A.,  Mr. Morton codename "Lauren": K.I.A., Chief Officer Torus: K.I.A., First Mate Boots "Hatswitch" Mustachio: T.B.D.

I am happy though.  One of the last things I remember doing with him is letting him climb up my jean leg and hook his claws into my hoodie all the way up my back so he could get a good perch on my shoulder and ride around up there while I walked through the ship and pointed out the things he liked to sit on from the view of his colossus.  We were a fabulous team.  I thought we'd have more time to enjoy our voyage.  He loved to sit in my lap while I wrote in my notebooks.  He'd rub his face on the corners of the pages and make little wet nose prints on the backs of my hands and the paper.

Each week, each month, each year, I am trying to break the horse.  I am trying to break myself and exercise control better than I did the year, the month, the week, before.  Sometimes with success.  Sometimes with failure.  Some of the voices scream "somebody has to pay!!!"  It is unreasonable.  It is irrational.  I want to cut you open so badly.  I want to hook my hand into your mouth and press my fingertips underneath your tongue until the break through the skin behind your chin and rip as hard as I can and hear the sucking pop of your jaw breaking away from the rest of your skull and listen to you drown bleeding into your own esophagus.  Somebody has to pay.  I am trying to break that horse.  I am trying not to hurt myself to show you what we want from you.

Happiness is fleeting.  Pain endures.  Pain is infectious as is happiness.  I am not broken.  I am tired of dealing with death.  The horseman that rides with me.  Our ghost army behind us.  Having to continually modify not by choice, but necessity.

I know I have to use my words more.  Not just more, but with greater frequency.  I have to use art more to break the locks and the seizing to escape the killing fields.  I have to pay more respect to the blast radius and recognize that it is not a game and if I take it too lightly, if I lull myself into believing it will sort itself out without careful and constant monitoring I will wake up too late and infection will spread far and wide defeating the entire purpose of closing the cycle of violence began a generation before my birth.  I am trying to break myself.  I am trying to limit myself.  Meta-jail is real and I have to do my part too.  You are there for a reason.  You can manufacture happiness.  The children are always present, do not listen to them, no matter what they say.  While you've been ignoring it, the factory floor has been busy and now coming to that basement and seeing the stockpiles of things you only imagined existed my heart falls.  Where the hell were you when the furnace fired again?  Where the hell were you when the new blueprints were spread out and the flywheels started turning again?  I tried.  Try harder!  This is not a game!

It is good that some mobility has been lost.  There are those you cannot reach and it is good.  It is important.  Remember why you laugh, jackal.  The freedoms you have were hard won, do not give them up easily.  Do not give them up lazily.  Take time.  We have been patient and we will not shed it.  A crew of two instead of three may not be so bad a thing as you imagine.  The first mate will adjust and embrace his promotion, regardless of how it came about.  Know that, do not say it, know it.  You did not skin him.  You do not wear him.  He will be remembered.  Bury the tools and keep an eye on us.  I will.  Somebody has to pay, but not today.

I took a long walk around the city.  A very long walk.  Control rage.  You were born.  Get over it.  I was born on the twenty second of April in nineteen eighty five.  Remember what you are doing.  I was born into conflict.  I was born into violence.  I was born into love too.  I was born onto a battlefield not of my own making and that is okay.  That is alright.  We learned, we grew, we got stronger, we learned how to kill and how to eat, how to feed ourselves, how to breath, how to hide, how to fight, how to see in the dark, how to trap, how to sleep, we learned and we grew.  We learned our genealogy was a lost cause and our history before our time will never be mapped.  We figured out the tree was a hangman's and the damage was already done well before we opened our eyes for the first time on Staten Island.  We understood hunger and the sound of an empty stomach and the shiver.  Do not forget the mission.  Lay a road map for those that are coming after you are gone.  Do not forget what it is you must fulfill.  Even though your heart is kind of small you were built for something more.  Embrace it.  Learn the truth and love your life because you only get one shot at it.

Your shipmates will help you.  Your inmates.  Your internees.  They will help you along the expedition through space and time.  They are part of the fold, jackal.  Use the words, not the weapons.  The child will come and go.  Supernature is simply part of the spectrum you were born with.  They are not demons or angels or phantoms and errors.  They are not only that, please stop crying sweetheart.  You will die and you will take all of them with you and they will be gone for good too.  That's okay.  I don't know if Torus saw them too.  I don't know if he felt them.  I kissed him before I let him go.  I rubbed his fur into my nostrils and ate some of his whiskers before I put him back in the trash where he came from.  I hope you're happy you disparaged him saying he came from a dumpster.  Pluto used to be a planet.  We want to name a constellation after him.

I dislike my bad wiring so much.  I know I cannot increase my strength, my power.  I cannot be allowed to break down the electrified fences and razor wire atop.  I cannot let it go.  I cannot be allowed to make more money, it will turn into more combustion chambers, more cylinders, more lead, more trigger mechanisms, sights, and chemicals.  More wires, dead man switches, boxes of nails and washers, nitrogen, ammonia, and springs.  More casings and pellets and carpet knives.  Bang on the left ear so it all falls out of the right ear.  With greater knowledge comes greater responsibility and I am not sure I am to the task.  We absolutely are.  For the love of God, get the hell away from me.

Who massages your shoulders?  Who plucks your eyelashes?  Who sets your makeup?  One gold tooth.  Break that horse.  Change those shoes.  Wash those gloves.  I need more power.  No, you don't.  I do!  NO YOU DO NOT!  Imagine the kingdom we could have.  No.  Do not lie to me.  I am not lying.

I definitely wanted to become a musician.  A composer.  A librarian.  To get lost in the stacks and get paid for it because alphabetical order never lies.  Growing up, so many have lied to me.  Washing dishes and playing the bubbles like a battlefield always put a smile on my face until standing on a milk crate on Brighton Avenue I heard them screaming at each other and I tried to wiggle my ears to remind them that I was standing there and they started to say he's listening and they took it upstairs, but I could still hear them.  My nose is running again.  No blood though, that's good.  I haven't pissed blood in a while and that's good too.  I know how it ends, I do.  I am halfway home.  Remind ourselves not to do anything stupid.  Remind ourselves the visions are just that, visions only.

Time will fly and before we know it we'll be polishing my skull and looking at the healed fractures and running our fingertips over them like welds on an engine block trying to reverse engineer the forces and machines and hands that made them.  Do you have a torque wrench?  A shoeing hammer?  An arc welder will do in a pinch.  A continuous retrofitting.  We were built for a war, but the war is over.  It is not.  We were built in war time and repurposed.  Built not to feel.  Built to not need to see.   I got out.  I got out.  The horse must be broken.  Distance must be kept.  Do not lose heart.  Finish the deal.

Enjoy the view from the edge of the arm of the Milky Way and do not curse Sol or Terra.  Aboard the ship we are secure and secured.  Take care of the equipment and don't stay long.  Coexist.  Someday you too will shut down, but understand there are many paths to that end and much to be explored before the channels go dead.  Do not forget where you came from, do not be consumed by where you're going.  I am not broken.




///Chairlift - "Guilty As Charged"   ...footprints on the carpet....go on and punish me...

///El-P & Killer Mike - "Early"

Thursday (explication of what came to be "I'll Come See You" the poem)

I don't know how you read it, but this is how I meant it.

Knock the slag off, with air piston jacked hammers.

When I kicked this off, the intent was to put something down in writing that was blunt force enough to make me need to go further to explain it because I know I do paint myself into corners, at least I feel that I do, to add clarity to what I say.  From that spark, the spark of shedding light, everything else developed.

Sitting on a crate opposite you
sitting on another,
printed in yellow block stencil
underneath, 98 mm high explosive x 75.

From that spark I imagined our meeting.  What I said before about knocking off slag with jack hammers was a reference to work.  From that reference, I immediately jumped into the warzone of language and how often times that is how I view my relationship with the world outside of me.  It really is a, put it on whatever scale you want to, some kind of war and this blog is a bit of a foxhole and we are literally sitting on our mental ammunition boxes. 

Underneath my ass 150 mm
aye pee
times 30.  My feet dangling like our cigarette's
smoke mingling on a windless afternoon.

This verse is kind of a wink and a nod because I do avoid actually smoking as much as possible, but I vape pretty hard.  The main thing about it though is that I am prone to large gauge action while most people are happy to work with suppressing fire.  My actions are much more leaned toward "kill them all in one sweep of gun barrel barking."  I can go accurate, but it is much more fun to swamp them in flames the way I have been.  Hence, the large gauge ammo underneath my bum and the smaller gauge, but still deadly, ammunition box underneath the interpolated.

The front is 220 miles out
East as the crow flies.
We will have to refuel
over the mediterranean
and I am looking forward to seeing
how you do it.

This is where we bring in the mechs and how the mechs will get to the front lines, where the action is happening and a short reference to how we wage ware once we get there.  This is a reference to the fact that what is about to happen is not new to either of us.  We know exactly where it is and what needs to be done to get there.  And also speaks to the fact that we have no problem with how the mission succeeds as long as it succeeds.

Our conversation has already broken down
into objectives and way points with a little
bet mixed in to the after action report.

This verse simply speakes to the fact that we've been there before.  Our conversation does not need to be enumerated here, only indicated, hinted at, ellipsed.   We've done it so many times that the only thing that needs to be done is counting up how many people, targets, installations, were destroyed by the time we succeeded.

It is unfair
to where we land and to whom we mount against,
because they are not in on the game.

Again, this verse is a reference to the previous verse, assuming we both got back home after the operation safe and sound 

Us both waiting for the KA-CHUNK
of couplings leaving us in free fall
to where our bombardier's decided
we could do our best
against the populace.

This verse is a credit to the people who get us to the target zone and an acknowledgement that we do not neccessarily know who exactly it is we are going up against inside of our mechs, however.  However we have full faith that they, the pilots and/or controllers of our evening will not drop us into a situation that our equipment and skills directly related to our equipment cannot handle well, if not outright destroy them.

A little cheers of coffee.
A little double check of flight suits.
Is the mic where it needs to be?
Trial fit the helmet again
after a quadruple check;
be sure the reticle is in line.
Double check my nail polish
before the glove comes on.
Smash shoulders and opposing tattoos,
before the top of the flight suit
is zipped on.

This is an inside joke to a close friend who helped me tattoo myself.    It is part inside joke and part coffee joke.  "the best way to start your day" when you are going over your manifest for the day.  You know whatever it is that is required of your skills will take all of your skills and you have to be sure when the time comes to pull the trigger, that trigger cannot fail, take practice shots.

Finish the coffee, with pills in our mouths.
They will learn what we live for,
they will learn what is loud.

They will learn that you do need coffee and that you do live for challenges and that you do know what horrible drugs are and that you are not about it.

Our flights will be long.  I'll sleep inside the mech
along the way.  I don't know what happens to you
while we wait out the sandbox for play.
The thup thup thup thup thup thup
I can hear, because I never turn off
the audio input once I am strapped in.

We both understand how to get to the battlefield.  I don't understand how you are so calm.  I feel like you've been here before and I have not.

For me, it is a very long long long grin
to watch you work.  Guilty.

You know I have not been there before but youare looking forward to my struggling.

Watching, zone cleared against spear chuckers
who happened to have come into
a fushionable pile
and needed reckoning before
something terrible happened,
you break out a "grenade"
two tons strong and willing to-\
-/Christ, where is the pin?

A mixture of edge of tommorrow and starship troopers the book.  In Starship Troopers the book they had miniature nukes.  Miniature nukes could clear an entire area as long as they got clear. In edge of tomorrow the whole deal was differremt.  

Mech against mech.  Dust to dust.
Die another day.
Why can you not understand I do
feel the same?

This is myself, dropped onto this planet trying to stop you and yrtying to fighht you hardcore because what I would like to do is save everyone but I cannot.  What I would also like to do is kill everyone but I can also cannot.  I'm good with figthing you though.  I am good with where you RE COMING FROM.

Fire the shell in my mechanized palm
to fire it just that strong
and knock it four miles out
to change the time of day from moonlit to
high noon in a fire ball that could eat city blocks,
but she's in the air.  Fair.  But "what the f@#$?"

Apologies, but I turned the palm and the gun built in to accelerate  it against the what?  The elbow cannon that went off and blew the palm muzzle off to an odd degree shot it off toward the dark horrizon and it lit up like noon day.

Overkill.........  underneath your left foot,
underneath your left pedal inside your cockpit and
underneath you left foot outside your cockpit
you are grinding human flesh into a paste.  And now is
the fucking time.
Do you remember being small?  I do.
You don't get conscripted by chance.

Hearing him over the comm, realizing that the action he just did with the arm of his mech just required him to smush some people with the foot of his mech....

You find detonators.  You stumble upon detonators.
Land mines   Mines.  I've never met a land mine like you.

Me on the ground amongst the  flattened human beings trying to offer encouragement to my friend (the other pilot) while shaking my head at the damage he did without thinking about the power at his fingertips.

I will know how to move forward
regardless ,after you.
Everyone talks big.  Yack, yack, yak yak yak, waaaan.

Him trying to make another move and myself watching, back in my own mech while our communicators crackle and guns go boom.

Cruiser.  Angry.  There was someone else here.  I will find them, sonavubitch.  Fail.  My fault.    Reset.

Reset.

Reset.

Reset.

Me trying to wipe my memory and undo the entire operation in my head.  Each reset a muzzle flash.

Clutch in.  Match revs. Time to the light.  Gas pedal.  Clutch out.
Release brake.
Gas pedal down.

Slowly.

Burnout.

Me, over the comm link trying to coach him and failing, instead focusing on what I can do.  The work.

That Instant

You realize "If not now, when?" is kind of silly, but you'll forget, you realize, if you don't commit, you'll beat yourself up later for not taking the safety off and that road is kinda something awe more filled than the alternative.

Cause for Concern

There are very real causes for concern.  I didn't want to say anything, but I am getting backed into a corner sooner than I imagined.  I'm having some, many a several, difficulties with normal conversation.  Even trying to meet up with people makes me violently ill.  I'm not used to that.  Who should be?  Introversion is supposed to be a quiet thing.  I'm tired of having to wear sunglasses in grocery stores because the lights vibrate too much and it makes me tear up and then everyone thinks you've gone through some sort of tragedy, but really you just wanted to buy some apples and you had to gut it out beyond your normal radius to get them.

I am a violent person.  I know this.  no matter what we do we always try to do our best to take ownership and clean up our messes.  Something my papa never did.  Or maybe he did do in his own way.  Whatever he did, it was thorough in its reach.  At any rate he never explained so I have license and agency.  Because I asked him.  Passive aggressively.  He made a woman out of me I suppose.  A woman with more power than mama ever had.  And that's good.

I'm losing the war on my chemistry and I do not like.  I do not want it.  Pain is one thing.  Passenger is another.  I do not like not being able to express clearly.  It's taking more and more work to maintain clear communication and it's not the drugs because I've been free and clear of paint and coke and pretty much every sniffable and injectable and I'm not fucking with my chemistry set at all.  That's what's been so frustrating.  No assists.  No boosters.  And still fracturing.  It makes no sense.

That I can do this, type on a keyboard easy peasy, and then struggle mightily with trying to string words together in real time.  And I've been very good about tuning down the violence too.  There is no reward for that.  There should be.  THERE SHOULD BE.  I should fucking be paid for that.  

I keep and will continue to argue that I am not a reject. I am a citizen.  It is not my planet, but I don't just live on it.  I am a part of it.  I do need the means and I will subject you to retribution at some point and these are my life goals and everything is building to it and I have no sex and I am an agent of a movement and you will know me when it's done and I will never place a gun to my own skull and I will be responsible and I will find you and force you to answer for everything you have done because I am not God, but I am me and whether you like it or not I just want to be safe with you.

It's difficult to think and be reasonable.  Reason out the voices.  They must be reasoned with.  They aren't monkeys.  They are to be unnamed and it's very frustrating to know that I get to know them and they can never be ....  it hurts.  It hurts less than naming and that's acceptable.  It's not about ferocity.  They punish me in ways you may understand.  Even with that understanding there is no equivalent exchange.  I know I need to get back on medicine.  I know I have to.  I refuse.

It's not a team effort.  It's just me.  No metaphor.  I refuse.  I will fucking burn this house to the ground before I do that again and I'm not happy about it.  I am furious.  Why does everything boil down to money?  Why did you leave me here?  What kind of advice do you fucking expect me to give that does not play directly back into history or roundabout to the same spot?  I don't understand.  I do.  Normalcy.  I can do normalcy.  I have it, down pat.  What I do not have is normalcy.  There's a difference between the two.

I will not quit the battle.  There is very real cause for concern.  Things are developing faster than expected.

Delusions.   I will not cash out.  I have faced the dragon, but no apotheosis.  There is no way out and it's not a death grip.

I wish you had more time.

I was ill prepared, but armored well.  Armor is no workable substitute.

///Count Basic - "Gotta Jazz"   there are things i have to do.  things that must be done, come hell and high water.  fault me.  these are faults.  they must be done, but i am a citizen and you will not deport me today, or tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that.

A Friendly Reminder

I was reminded today of what the creative process actually is and also informed or reinformed of what I've been doing.  Kind of a reanimation of what the mission really is and continues to be:

first and foremost and always foremost

We are a blueprint.  We are a map.  A map of the backwoods to go back to personally and also a map forwards for others in similar circumstances and also others who do not know what their circumstances are just yet, that they may not make the same mistakes again and also for the selves that they may understand each other and cooperate efficiently and do less damage to each other while they make their meetings and gravitas and coalesce instead of collide.

second

we are an outlet so that we do not make mistakes heinous and lesser, but mistakes nonetheless.   Travel comes from the front and history is written from behind.  Collision comes when the head and eyes go sidewinder.  There's nothing wrong with telling a good story.  There is something wrong with living a good story.  There is something very wrong with living the same story twice.  There is something very very wrong with not allowing a pop valve in the schematics so the engine does not burn itself into a solid chunk of slag.

third

is what you believe in.  There must be reminders to guide the way toward belief and above all belief systems is a belief in the fellow man.  There is no reason for extinction, not now, not ever, and I wish I understood that sooner.  Caveat being that there are some lined up for it.  Some exceptions.  Though they are very very few, they still exist.  It's an almost bulletproof belief.  Almost bulletproof is as close as can be had, so we'll take it.

fourth

this and her children are outlets.  The majority of the work is still unsung.  This is a manual and the parts and pieces are still, for the most part, in the parts bin.  This is the parts bin, as are her children.  There may or may not be a masterwork coming down the assembly line, but these are the parts.  These are the parts.  These are the parts.  Say it with me: slag.  This is not a summation.

fifth

the real work is done by day.  By night we are exhaust fumes.  The output of what comes from days of combustion and fire and fuel.  Never forget the process.  Never forget that what comes of work unrelated is a photo album and what comes of work ignited can and must be refined.

sixth

never forget the first.  Never forget where the bounds end and further expansion is absolutely mandatory.  Never forget the jail.  Never forget the cell.  Never forget, however pleasant, the yard still exists and the fences are still there no matter how far off they are and how easy it is to miss them, though you need binoculars to see them.  Never forget why the motor does what it does and that you are connected, whatever disagreement it is, objection you have, to it.  Never forget, but also do not fail to work with it, embrace it, and modify to the best of ability.  Because that will be, that failure will be, the end of the game.

Creation will always come from focus, sweat, a clean mind, organization, a healthy garbage heap, and a clean slate near or far.  However warm the fire is, you've nothing until you've walked away to build a pit of your own.  If it takes days, months, years, take the time to move stones and build that pit.  Until you take that time... it's just another fire.





///Bjork - "Hyper Ballad"  ...we live on a mountain...

The Year End Look

I am tempted to attack some things there is not time enough yet to tackle.  I am okay with and respect and receive the temptation because the day is nearing and we stand on the cusp of something truly deafening with nothing between us beyond time itself.  Time's only enemy is patience.  The armory is stocked.  Let's knock down time first.

The 2013 year end look is a strange one.  Strange to me.  I crashed a car again.  For the second time in my life totaled an automobile.  The injury was an injury I never knew before and thought I would never return from.  It was probably something near or spot on to a partially herniated disc.  I am used to pain.  Used to adjusting for pain because a voice inside says it'll end eventually if you simply don't do it again.  This pain brought me literally to my knees every time I got out of bed for work or to meet someone or otherwise do anything that did not require lying down.  It was unbelievable.  Literally unbelievable.  It made me tear at myself and my bed sheets and scream in the afternoon and throw fits.  Everything worked fine except standing and walking.  In 2013 I became very aware of my age.

A friend of mine put it best: ten years ago, you hurt your back, you shotgun a beer and a whiskey short, have a smoke, and get on with life.  Now?  You hurt your back and you can drink 'til you cannot feel a damn thing, but that shit comes back as soon as your spine comes back on line.  You can't go through life partially shut down.

It's true.  Another year older, just one year removed from invincibility, or something damn near it, I am aware, acutely aware of physical limitations.  Invincibility has been thoroughly dispelled in 2013.  Respect for the injured and more feeble than I has been reinforced to incredible degrees.  Of course it didn't help falling down multiple flights of stairs after the car accident.  That one is on me.  I should have known where I was standing on the fire escape and not allowed someone to high five me hard enough to push me backward into the night air.  I guess I'm kind of a good fall guy.  I should have broken my neck or an arm or at least a finger on my way down, getting something stuck in the stairs and landing made of iron grating, but all I remember, three days after the car accident, was waking up looking at the top of the fire escape and their back door and the little light and thinking "wait a minute? wasn't I just there?  Why am I here?"

I went to a casino for the first time (with no money) and someone gave me a $100 chip.  I can count the number of times I've held $100 bills in my hands with intent to spend instead of pay on one hand.  Two of the five times were to pay for cars.  I didn't get to use it for fun.  I did get some long standing necessities taken care of though and a bill paid.  One step closer to actual freedom.

I taught myself to drive stick for real in 2013.  On a rear wheel drive truck.  I also learned how to use torque and how to use horsepower.  Yes, they're linked, but now I understand when to use which.  When to use a little work fast and a lot of work slowly.  Of course there's always the golden peak when you can use both at the same time, but high end cars are out of the cards for at least another half decade.  I'm salivating thinking about it.  My dream garage is still the same.  Still stocked up with late 80s Japanese machines and American muscle.  Some day, sweetheart.

2013 also taught me who my friends are and who my friends are not.  For much of the year I tried to be a friend to the world.  A friend to everyone who would have my ear and have my words, however fleeting, but I soon recognized (by soon, I mean it took the entire year) that what I was counting as friendship was not being counted or similarly given weight by the people I was ascribing it too.  It was heart breaking.  Truly heart breaking.  I remember crying on and off for several days as each episode unwound.  The penultimate was a multiple day thanksgiving celebration that was supposed to be fun.  It was, to an extant.  I was too much a different stripe to blend in and it was hurtful to me to be expected to do so, but maybe they didn't really expect me to blend that well.  Maybe they expected me to realize sooner than later that I should've left.  As it stands I only over stayed by a day or two before I recognized where I was and where I could do myself better.  Coming home was beautiful on that day.  

The ultimate was when I was left stranded by people I thought I could count as friends.  My truck died and a true friend bailed me out.  I've grown intimate with my truck of late.  Gotten to know her inside and out.  2013 reminded me of the bullshit premise my birth father put to me about a car that was supposed to be my reward for graduating Carnegie Mellon (which did not happen) that was his vision for us rebuilding a beater BMW (which flew in the face of everything automotive I actually do espouse and believe in) and it's been tremendous and heart stoppingly gorgeous keeping that truck on the road and at the same time by turns puzzling that anyone, let alone the sack of nuts that raised you for 18 years, could miss your values that hard.

It does make me laugh though, because there have been more than a few times I could've used an extra set of hands to get the job done and I thought about the gents and lassies that could call up their dads or moms and schedule a weekend under the hood or chassis without getting violently ill or stomach ulcers.  I appreciate that about people.  Sometimes I ask them about their parents because it's practically porn to me.

In 2013 I learned to slow down scarification.  In tandem with realizing that time is getting on I also realized if I ever do have children or adopt children there will be questions for me to answer too.  Questions I am prepared to answer and questions that will have to be answered as my nose and ears get bigger and nothing else does and my eyes continue to sink and my brow continues to crease.  The reminders still remain necessary and beautiful obelisks and world wonders to human history and I thank us for them always.  I need them.  Some mistakes you can make multiple times.  Some mistakes you cannot afford to retread because lives are in the balance and the house does not always win, but you can never go back.  You will die.  You will be consumed, make no mistake.  Every time I look in the mirror I am reminded and I need to be.  Inside of your skull you are your friend more often than not.  Outside of your skull is a flipped story.

The same problem does abound, though.  My development, my passion for writing, remains far too grounded for my tastes.  There is patience though.  There is gestation.  There is still the thirst for whimsy and dreamland.  There is where I lie and I know it.  I can feel it.  The attack is coming.  The all hail that tells me "forward now!"  I can taste it.  2013 was about defining starting points.  Defining relationships.  Defining the scope of the maintenance necessary for progress.  Did it have to take a year?  Yes.  2013 was about defining severance.  Defining which and what kinds of quests were worth pursuing.  2013 was a very long think.

The funniest part about 2013, it came around the tail end, was realizing that just because you can identify the group of people that you are attracted to does not automatically make them accessible or easily located.  You meet just as many air heads and space cases exploring your same sex as your opposite sex.  The worst, the most lip curling, the most eye squinting, experiences are had when you meet a carbon copy of someone you'd cultivate a relationship with straight, gay.  In my mind I'm thinking ten minutes in to the conversation: "god damn it, not this again.  Really?  You exist here too?  Who dropped you on your head?  Why do you have fifteen pairs of shoes and a $200 dollar love seat in an apartment you're paying $900 a month for?  Why are we going out to a bar downtown when there's one at the corner while you have a fridge full of wine and candy imports?  Three pairs of sunglasses?  Sunglasses??"  

I don't know what 2014 is going to bring.  I think my year to year expectations have grown foggier and foggier so I will add some definition.  I think this year (no resolutions) I will try to fuck a woman for some variety.  The whole "no concussions" thing failed miserably.  I had four in 2013 so I think it's fair to rule that out.  Broke my nose twice too, so that's out.  I want to do more art in 2014 too.  Life's demands put way too much on my plate to really put anything outside of my skull to look at and enjoy, and I'm not saying for you to enjoy, I'm saying for me and we/us to enjoy. 

Now that things have been better defined through thirteen, in fourteen I would like to explore that framework and see what and where it builds to.  New territories and frontiers.  I want a new scar for 2014.  A scar for the turn.  A scar for the "maybe" identified because in twelve the maybe had no identity.  2014 will be a quest for the whimsical.  A seeking out of the imaginary and a protecting of the physical.  We achieved many grown up tasks and came into adulthood through 2013 from its humble beginning in 2012's confusion.  It's time to explore the limits of what that adultness and understanding and thinking and domestication can ring when our bell is rung hard enough.  What music will it make?  Will it make music or fall apart with the strikes?

For the first time, in 2013, I had to shave down my knuckles with a pumice stone.  The scar tissue accumulated so thickly that I couldn't open and splay my fingers easily without fighting against it.  Too much contact.  I cannot fall into the trap of abusing myself in lieu of taking abuse just to feel normal and normalcy.  That's not okay.  It is not okay to do that.  2013, a lot of 2013 was about learning what it is not okay to do.  Platonic spooning was okay.  Talking about platonic spooning to their friends indirectly and accidentally by way of mentioning conversations they were not a part of, but must have happened after they left, later on when we and they met again is not okay.  It should be though.  Don't break my heart that way.  Break it any other way, but that is pure... muffed intent.  I do not have time for that in 2014.

I have accumulated old man hands at the ripe age of 28.  I am a destroyer parked in a lagoon and rusting.  You fucking cowards.  2013 was also about rebuilding my space craft.  I had to tear it apart and rebuild it.  It was gathering too many parts and pieces superfluous and useful once and never again.  When one part failed I hooked and slaved another component to keep it running.  Fourteen is streamlining.  Keep the violence down at all costs.  The love too.   Control.  2014 is focusing on control and dynamics.  It's easy to glass a city.  It's hard to embrace one and construct.  Consider the "what will and what can we build here?"

It does make me laugh though, to consider that I may be at a new base line measurement.  It is enticing.  So many things happened.  So much time spent alone and too much time spent in contact.  It does not add up to my satisfaction.  I will boost literary output in 2014.  It does not matter if you want to do it, it has to be done for your own sake.

2014 is action.  Redesigns are on the table.  Stand up act 9 is on the table.  Before both will come the year end playlist.  Let's go!  No sneak peeks this time.  So much left out too, but we'll get it in later.

///Shiny Toy Guns - "Major Tom"   ...near Earth orbit

Overkill

Having a difficult time taking Is and Yous and Mes out of my poetry.  I wish I had a different face, but apparently I am no longer allowed to hack away at it.  I want to get back to wonder.  I want to get back to visions of enormous dinosaurs, but the real world continues to push back and it's not fair and I can't figure out a way to circumvent the charges.

I will.  Stand up act 9 is coming.  Long dark tunnel.  I conquered my fear of absolute darkness a while back.  Doesn't mean that it's comfortable though.  I want to pick up house and walk away from it all in a bad way.  Maybe a good way.  Tough to think about.  Do you just throw your hard drives in a ruck sack?  I don't know!  I'm asking you!  Who helps you plan that sort of thing out?  I have no clue.

Do ya have to bring an umbrella or something or do you count on finding one along the route?  Could probably thieve one.  Do you really want to do that?  That's not who you are.  You can take whatever you really want, but don't.  Every single time you take you are taking something from someone else and that's no good.  Let someone hold your leash.  They're not holding you back.  They're just checking you.  You have to allow yourself to be checked at the hip.  Take it and bounce off or try to run them over, but whatever you do correct your path.  Not correct, but make adjustments because you have to and understand that it is alright to make adjustments.

Adjusting the dials is okay.  Not everyone likes to hear music at 11, hell you don't either.  Not everyone wants or needs a kiss or needs your face two inches from their own.  Not everyone can be famous and not everyone will remember events the same ways you do.  You're losing your memory and maybe that plays into part of why you are losing connection fidelity with your dream states.  Be okay with working on it.  There's no breaker  to fire off in between where you're going and where you can never go back to and that's perfectly fine.

Do you bring a knife or no?  Do you need to?  Would you need to?  I don't know!  You can take what you want, but you don't have to.  Are you expecting battle?  It's a funky kind of war we fight and I've been seeing some strange things I don't know how to handle off of the top of my head.  I need time.  No picking up sticks.  No running away.  No abuse.  Abuse is shorthand for sadists.  What's short hand for saints?  I want to plow into a wall and obliterate my body in a mist of red and bone.  I want humor.  Get the fuck away from me!  I swear to god I will taste your eye fluid before the night is out, you mother fucker piece of shit, do you not know there is no such thing as a fair fight?

Rules are in place to keep me out of you.  Period.  Maybe it's all a matter of timing?  That may be what I'm getting wrong.

Wanderlust eats away at me and I nibble back.  I almost lit a cat on fire again.  I'm doing good though.  Being on good behavior and going to work almost every time I am supposed to go.  I want to keep it up through the end of the year.  I am not expecting much from Santa.  I still ask him for a 1911 against my better judgement.  No resolutions forthcoming and none will be given.  I think I'll treat myself to a box of ammunition this year.  One step at a time.  Baby steps.  We'll travel, but I'm not pulling up sticks just yet.  I'm trying to monitor my speech.  I've been speaking much too fast and running words together and feeling like I need to apologize inside my head every time someone says "what did you say?"  I said exactly what the hell I said.  It's hyper frustrating.  It's like a stutter, but backwards and difficult to correct and heart stabbing when I notice it flowing out of my damned mouth.  Not fair!

Howling in my head wont stop.  I haven't snorted anything serious in a long time and my sinuses feel like they are about to shatter.  "...turning the music up so ya don't hear the engine falling apart..."  by hook or by crook we are going to fix this thing so it runs smooth.  Chatty Cathy.  Slow the fuck down and take a moment.  The world's not crazy.  It is just you.  Everything does not smell like burning metal.  It is just you.  Space invaders.




///Kelis - "I Don't Think So"     just dont think you're at my speed

Dissolving (some) Isolation, September 11th, Launch, and Laughter (touching roots)

It's been a long time.  It had to be.  I had a lot of things I needed to think about and learn an acceptable way to grasp, but I did!  That's good.  You know what else is good?  Coke's slogan.  I thought about it all day when I heard the commercial and now I can't remember what the hell it was, but I'm sure it'll come back to me tomorrow when I'm not thinking.

I will think of coke and remember the slogan for Coke that cracked me up because it was so dual apt they couldn't have done it by accident.  Look it up.  I don't assign homework in general and almost as a rule, but look it up.  I was just thinking though, I have never assigned homework unless I had to.  I kind of make a bad teacher in that way sometimes.  I think that's the way it should be though; if you always come to class and never miss one you should be as well informed as the person who never goes to class, but reads the textbook cover to cover.

Sorry, I got distracted.  I didn't know where to start and I've been looking for a way to start again, but nothing has lead back here the way I expected it to and then I was all out for starting points and so far away that I was all in for whatever I could find to begin again and I found what I was not happy to find but I'll throw it off from the edge of the rooftop and watch it fall down and try to make sense of it.  Okay?  Let's go:

September 11th.  The day that changed 'merica.  It didn't.  America is still what it was.  Only a little more paranoid.  This day used to have a little more bite.  I used to remember the servicemen I know and knew (not because they died, we just stopped being as close as we used to be) and the new ones I've met while fishing the river on a slow Thursday.  I used to remember them with incredible reverence.  Not so much anymore.

The one's still in are in because they want to be.  The ones that are out are out on good terms and very well compensated, on the pay scale I aspire to climb toward that kind of stability, and have awesome resumes.  I guess that still burns me a little on this day.  Getting near perfect scores on the entrance test and damn near perfect on the physicals and getting bounced on psychological failures.  The whole talk my dad gave me about "the family standard of excellence."  I didn't want to cry or weep.  I just wanted to pop out of existence with a genie wink when going in and making it as an infantryman and working a way up could be viewed as tarnishing "the family standard of excellence."  I still makes me laugh out loud today to say it aloud.

Part of what makes me laugh is that, incidentally, he was right.  After taking a year or two to think about it a little harder, I can see that I would have been a skittish, trigger happy, blood hungry, question asking, thinking, liability to the cause.  I would have gotten myself and other people killed, given a uniform, a weapon, and a theater.  That's just coincidence, though, pure coincidence, so it doesn't really count.  At all.
Serendipity.

"Are you dead or are you sleeping, God, I sure hope you are dead."  Dealing with a little paranoia break, but that's neither here nor there.

September is also the anniversary of the longest intimate relationship I ever was able to be a part of and it was fantastic.  I forgot the date the first three years we were together.  Finally made the brilliant move to add it to my phone.  It stayed there after we broke up.  I can vaguely remember some of the gifts, one of the gifts, I gave her. I think the others were holiday related.  I can remember trying to figure out how to get flowers delivered to her office and the whole runaround I got.  I can also vividly remember the violent times.  The times when my brain fractured.  The times when truth was too much for me to eat.

I am laughing because it is remembering the times when, more than anything else, I wanted the laws of interpersonal physics to suspend themselves.  I do not know, though.  Life is long.  Who else are you going to travel the spectrum of drugs with when you're too old to work and done everything else and the prospect of shagging is as interesting as scrubbing your bathtub?  Blackouts.  Retirement is going to be an amazing thing.

So, September 11th used to be like holding a revolver in my mouth and pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked over several times while fingering an empty casing from the gun range.  Not anymore.  I'm passed it.  Nothing's going to change my world, sweetness.

We will modify, sometimes ad hoc, we will destroy and build, we will continue to drive toward some kind of perfect state, but we will mow down no one else along the way.  We will remain honest and not overly dramatic, maybe, we will masturbate to idle thoughts of bodily violence, we will maintain course and get to know the new ship, we will cultivate friendship, and build ourselves into better people instead of weapons.  We will.

I don't want to spend too much time on this.  I've been trying to structure my paragraphs better and slash the blocks into verses.  The poet that keeps clawing it's way out of my mouth.  I don't want to spend too much time on this and I'm three hours in so let's call it close.

I love you.  I do.  I shouldn't.  If I could bury you each and be the one with the shovel over night, I would cum.  It is a strange thing, I know.  I love helping people, so much.   There is no replacing the feeling of helping someone solve a problem and secure a future outcome 100%.   100% assured that what they wanted was what they were going to get.  Nothing replaces that.  Wherever you are.

I've been working to dissolve some isolation.  It's important.  An important thing.  Once I finish the project I am working alone I am going to need to be able to interact on a normal basis to get another job to fill the money void.  Money drives everything, doesn't it?  More than that is learning how to interact with people without a group to diffuse the messy bits to.  It's easy to do when there are many other magnetic orientations to diffuse field lines to.  Not so much otherwise.

I am approaching a point where isolation will become counterproductive.  Flat out. For a time.  There are many options for filling the counter point to weigh it into a cantilever support system.  Ad hocced.  Performing the expense reports in my mind.  It's not going to work.  I think that is part of growing up.  Growing the capacity to do that and know with some certainty what is bound to fail when it comes to tolerable and intolerable acts of personality.

I am getting closer toward dissolving some aspects of isolation.  One finger on the trigger that will close fire bulkheads.  I don't know what process or loop or instantiation will trigger something terrible, but I am prepared to eject instantaneously.  I'm not your project.  I am project enough for myself. Here come old flattop.

We are you friends.  We are your friends.  We are shoving off from the scrap yard brand new in many ways.  The new ship is troubleshot and configured.  There is nothing more to it than to do it.  We are launching.  We are reentering circles and seeing what snow will fall and where and what kinds of sculpture we can make of it until the sun comes up and melts it all.  We are launching.  Granted we were stocked up and manned up a week prior, but we didn't have the heart at the wheel to give chase to open sea.  We do know.  We are ready.  Cobbled together from many different pieces, we are ready to see if it works.  Shove off, baby.

Getting back to laughter.  Getting back to what makes us laugh.  Back to the roots of what made me start in the first place.  Gain some understanding.  At first it was a reaching out, it became a gps, and now it's a tough out.  I don't like to think inwardly.  As tough an out as they come.  It's still a map.  I'm on the far edge of it and it keeps drawing beyond the dark part of the space of influence.  I think I am getting back to laughter.

Back to being able to really, really, indulge in the spaces life does afford for taking nothing too seriously and taking everything too seriously.  That magical place where living life, at least the way you understand it presently, like it is your last day jives with the fact that, barring absolute worst outcomes in tandem, it probably isn't.

You're going to have to live with, regardless of how you or someone else can spin it, what you did today.

I want to spend that time laughing.  We're launching again.  We are equipped for combat, need it arise, we are equipped for food, it will arise, and we are equipped to question ourselves and somethings (not everythings) anew.  We are equipped to observe and equipped for some closeness.  We have an L six two D load out and we are ready to rock.

I am perpetually intermittently disappointed with myself. Lack of ability to grow networks combined with... grows.  I wonder if I am some kind of cancer embodied sometimes.  A walking carcinogen.  You go back to her and I go back to... I feel like I am in a very long race to eliminate myself or as many people as I can take down at once.  It's nothing personal.  It's sporting.  Not immediately but, I don't know.

Some days, walking down the street, I look at myself in the store front windows reflected, and it's a pretty damn cool thing to see that ambulating to wherever and enjoy that remove.  There's no vanity there for me.  Just trekking and knowing that we're doing it.  We're doing it!  We are out of doors and doing alright.  I don't love the birds looking back sometimes with that "not if you were the last man on Earth" look.  What the hell is that about?

We're doing this.  I am as over myself as I'll ever be.  It's passed time to laugh again.  Laugh about little things genuinely.  It's easy to see the world as whole.    It's passed time to really chew on it again.  Launch probes.  Explore and navigate from afar or as far as possible, but do not be afraid to take readings from the machines you employ.  It's time, however briefly, to try again to square up vision with reality and  you'll never know how far off you are, or've been, unless that depleted round sails downrange.


///DJ? Acucrack - "Allegra"  ... this is the soundtrack to stalking yourself.  Searching out, the movie score. This is, bassed up, the chase; the quiet chase between functional and passable (between blending and fitting in).

That Instant

you realize you really do wish you could tie yourself to a rocket and shoot yourself into space and don't give a damn if you live to see the exosphere and come back to Earth.  Just want to get yourself out of here.   Out of now.

Now is unforgiving.  Now is now and I don't like it.

Fall back, fall forward, what real difference does it make.  I can't adopt a kid because I'll probably try and put my dick in it.  Jesus.  Fucking sucks.  I want to teach it to play all kinds of ball and drive cars and learn to fly airplanes if its up for it and I know I can't let myself go through it because I'll fuck it up because I've been screwed in my upbringing.

It just sucks so hard knowing the best thing I can do is not do the one thing I really want to do. But....  but..... huge but.... is I will not perpetuate what came before me.  Breaking the cycle.  There's something to be said for that.


///Ulrich Schnaus - "Wherever You Are"  what ive been waiting for all years

Wrecks, Dreamland, and Reconstruction

I went back to the scene of my car accident tonight.  Dreamland has been corrupted.  I keep having a recurring dream about it.  Cruising through dreamland last night I built a house of a little more than normal proportions.  My friend Matt and his buddy Ernie called me up after I finished eating lunch (sardines and fried centipedes... it actually wasn't that bad... all the legs and fish ribs were super crunchy inside the perogies).  Tom was there too.  Finished up eating, and the phone rang so I got up from the indoor beach with the five foot wide tv perched over the far water and went to go let them in.  Put on my fleece robe and tossed Tom the remote.  Walked down to the freight elevator and closed the gate and punched the ground floor.  The elevator went all the way down past the mech garage.  I had my bright red candy shell finished R 29 with extra plate and F990 shoulder mount long barrel with aftermarket cooling fins parked right beside it and it was awesome watching the light glint off of it.  Sometimes I spend days on the scaffold hand polishing it's entire body when I'm not joy riding it through the clear southwest desert night sky.

The elevator went all the way through to the floor and then ten feet below to the car garage and hillside entrance.  It's a short walk to the door and I let Matt and Ernie in.  Ernie asked me if I remembered going to his place the night before and showing up at three in the afternoon.  I said no.  I didn't.  I wasn't lying.  He asked me if someone hacked me, but I told him I wasn't online at all yesterday, but it's possible I might've caught something because I was online the day before pretty much the entire day looking for some rarer copies of an Ultraman graphic novel I used to have when I was a kid, but can't find in my library anymore.  He laughed.  That was probably what might've done it.  Matt offered to hit me up with a few patches to make sure whatever it was that wiped my memory didn't get passed around while they were over.  We took the lift back up and they asked Tom if I was a little off yesterday and he said "definitely."

I don't know why he didn't mention anything to me, but I guess that's what good friends do sometimes, and he's probably used to my oddness and figured it was the usual fare.  Or at least, the Tom I constructed and built into the dream did.  I told them we were out of sardines.  Because we were and if we were going to hit up the bars later it would probably be good not to over do it.  I don't know where the extra beach chairs came from but by the time we got back up to tv room they were already there.  We all started talking about whether or not we would blaze on our way up to the Silver Tusk.  I have a pretty sweet mech garage so there're plenty enough for each of us to blast out to the exosphere and dock at the Silver Tusk space station in geocentric orbit above our heads.

And then a giant tan sedan crashed through the wall behind the flat screen.  It blew it apart and was going so fast it skipped across the water and bit into the beach.  As soon as it touched down it started flipping and parts began whipping off of its underside like a pipe bomb built and stuffed with three foot long aluminum fence posts instead of nails.  I was standing behind them and it rolled right over them and chewed them up into meat before my eyes before a door came zinging off while it spun and I woke up with that door heading straight for my neck.

Every other dream since it happened has been like that.  No matter how I construct it or if I let it play and go along for the ride, they keep ending with cars careening through and killing everyone in one way or another.  So I went back to the place tonight.  It was weird walking up the off ramp.  I tried to think about what that kid could have been thinking that morning walking between the off ramp walls.  There's no where to go on either side.  If you leap off the far side of the corner it's a good ten foot drop.  Off of the inside corner there's some grass, but cars come much closer to the inside of the turn so your chances are much slimmer of even having time to react or think about jumping.  I like to drive in wide and then turn in tight and let the car bleed off speed while it grips in.  He was lucky for that.  If I came inside he would have been through my windshield.

The mark on the far wall when I swerved to avoid him was nothing tremendous.  It was mostly a tire scuff maybe a foot long at most.  It didn't speak at all to the damage done to the car.  There was no traffic tonight.  I walked out to the middle to pick up a piece of my bumper that was still there.  Just a shard.  I don't wonder why he ran away.  I would have too.  Was he daydreaming?  Did he want to die?  Was he just high?  Crouched there I started to remember when I was younger and I walked into traffic trying to get hit on Forbes avenue.  I wasn't particularly upset or anything, but I was ready to let my life go.  No one would hit me.  I did it again a few nights later with my eyes closed and I distinctly remember a bus blowing by me so close it spun me around when it brushed my black hoodie.  I wasn't upset, but I was impossibly trapped at the time and finished trying to figure out how to pick that particular lock.

I'm still putting my body back together.  From the car accident and the fall down the two flights of stairs and the bike accident (which was my own fault, just pushed my bicycle too hard after having it laid up for most of winter and a too cold spring).  Two hours a day of rehab work getting my back right.  A lot of my power comes from my torso and I messed up my hip and tailbone pretty ugly.  Nothing broken, but the deep bruising and muscle strains took their toll, but I'm getting back to a point where I can consider running again and hitting the weight room hard.  The reconstruction, the process of it has become consuming.  I was at a point where I could mess with whomever I wanted.  Sure, I didn't win every scuff, but I had confidence in my bones and tissues that spoke to having a decent shot as long as I wasn't piss drunk.  Not so now.  There's hesitation now.  There's memory tape now of the waking up in pain and not being able to sit up straight even in a well made chair.  Not being able to breath because my sternum hurt so bad.

My body is gathering force though.  Regaining moxy and it's difficult for me to have my limitations still in view.  I keep having internal arguments with myself shouting "don't do that, you're not ready yet."  And myself shouting back "or what?"  But I know what.  Humiliation, failure, more time lost in recovery.  What the reconstruction has also done though, is forced a new view upon me.  A new way of going about conflict. Handling passions I can't always contain effectively.  War bringing peace, in a way.

More than anything, I want so badly to speak to that kid face to face now that I don't want to skin him alive anymore.  I want to know, and I want to tell him I forgive him.


///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Smash and Grab World"  looking to the stars on a fucked up night.  Year end playlist is still in the works.  Just five months late.  No worries.

Rage 2

The only thing I hate more than being injured is... you guessed it.... nothing.  My body is my contract.  Without it I am a fish with no fins.  I hate it.  I hate it.   I HATE IT.  The only thing that hurts me more is my past.  What am I supposed to do when every breath of air costs me tears???  What the fuck am I supposed to do????  Pain fuels.  There are limits, but where do those limits lie?  Fake it til you make it, does not apply.  Results, god damnit.  I want results.  Not just for me, but for my boss.  Not just for my boss, but for my fucking friends.  I want to churn out at all times.  If it's not work I want to churn out fun.  If it's not fun I want to be churning out hobby.  If it's not hobby I want to be churning out nonsense.  Not to be aching on the handicapped, but fuck.  How do they live?  Not at all used to being limited in a physical sense.  I don't know how to handle it.  I can still do everything I could do, but the meter that tells me when I'm at 12 thousand revs is broken.  Simple things that wouldn't crack five hundred break two thousand.  Things that would demand seven tip out at ten.  Things that take ten to do bounce the needle off of the redline.  I'm not used to that.  No one should be.  What I'm going to have to do, if this does not resolve itself in the next week, is just shove the whole god damn scale North.  Fuck it.  I don't have time for this shit.  And neither do the people that depend on me.  I want what they want and come hell and high water it is raring up to decision time and I don't like it, but that's just the way it is sometimes.

The Year End Look (part two)

Two thousand twelve was a banger.  A lot of truly excellent things happened.  Some truly awful things happened.  Mistakes were made and successes enjoyed.  I thought after the debacle of 2010 I would not be surprised by whatever could come next and 2011 actually ended up being fairly swell.  2012 was jam packed with more change than I could see coming.  I'm pretty sure I didn't write any fiction in 2012.  I don't know why.  2012 was a war with the clock.  I think that's why.  I did sort of rediscover a pair of old friendships that I thought were pretty much blown to flaming kingdom come and that was nice.  My memory fails me pretty regularly.  Too many blows to the head (chemical and otherwise).  Speaking of chemicals, I still haven't gone to get help.  I don't know that I ever will.  I don't know that I'll ever be able to on my own.

I'm trying to think of what the overarching lesson of 2012 was.  Nothing particular comes up.  2012 was very much a blur.  I became a car owner.  That's nice.  I also became quite broke keeping that car on the road and functioning.  I became a paper towel owner.  That was pretty huge.  Do you know how hard it is to justify paper towels?  Pretty damn hard.  Mostly I was using my dirty laundry to clean up floor spills.  Dish rags to clean up counter top spills.  Worked perfectly, really.  It's not like I was going to wipe up spilled floor milk and then put the shirt right back on.  I also became a soap and toilet paper stockpiler.  I used to buy it in four packs and then string it out as far as it would go and then find alternatives already in my apartment when they ran out.  That's not what grown ups do.  I got car insurance for the first time.  My car is better insured than I am now.  I think I did that one wrong.

You know what?  I've got it.  Twenty twelve was about taking steps toward being an adult.  Meshing with other adults.  Not that I succeeded with the meshing at all.  I tried to pay for cat litter with sex. That didn't work out too well.  Especially when I found out there was no cat litter to begin with.  I have to stop being so easily convinced in twenty thirteen.  I am on the tail end of my twenty seventh iteration.  Can't make rookie mistakes like that or I'll end up smoking bath salts and living in the woods.  Which doesn't sound particularly bad on the surface, but try finding a hot shower off of an interstate and you'll end up with a hobo pissing on your back while you sing Disney anthems in the pre dawn light of another Thursday, wondering if the pair of pants you named after your dead dog will ever find their way back to your cardboard shanty town.  That's what 2012 was.  A lot of learning how to do grown up things.

Not just that.  My literary voice changed so much through 2012.  My whimsical spirit did not die well and I think I want to make the effort to rediscover it.  So much of my life became brutally concrete.  There was no time to write down extensive dream logs and what explorations I could do and enjoy across the dream bridge were lost.  There was a massive task lock.  Huge gridlock between where I was and where I was going mentally that suffocated and snuffed out so much of what I wanted to achieve.  Obviously, everyone wants to be loved.  On some level.  A lot of that need was torn out of me.  It's still there, latent and active by turns and expressed and expressible and not in different forms.

I had a final falling out with my birth parents.  Good riddance.  Things were going quite well until they demanded a response and I gave them the one I'd been holding back for years (which was a fairly simple death threat).  Which spiraled out of control and had to be reigned back in to an even simpler "Hi, you've hurt me for the last time and I'm not going to give you the opportunity to ever hurt me again."  Which went over slightly better.  So I do have that peace of mind to look forward to.  The emails have stopped and that's what I wanted.  BKB (bitches know better) than to ever try to contact me again.  Some things can be forgiven.  Some things can only be atoned for.  Some things can only be paid for, and the checks they wrote on my skin in bruises and welts and blood and on my mind in so many lines of unforgettable screams and shouts can only be paid for.  It was good though.  A link so thoroughly destroyed that I will never have to worry about it threading itself around my neck again.

I did find love again, briefly, in twenty twelve.  Online.  I also found that most of the people in BDSM chat rooms are full of themselves and fake.  But I don't even have to go to any other online dating sites to know that it's probably not unique to my bag.  Back to love and friendships.  I'm fairly certain I may have lost a friend I really wanted to keep, but who knows, maybe it'll come back around in thirteen.  2012 saw a pretty severe drop in production in general.  Adult problems.  Remember that three banger I put out of its misery early last year?  That came back to haunt me when one of them got a job at a store I used to frequent (they had good prices, can't argue with that).  Well, that cut my neighborhood in half.  Can't go to that side of town anymore without looking over my shoulder, or occasionally ducking down in my car at red lights.  Like I said, mistakes were made.

My only new years resolution this year is to not get concussed.  I think that might be aiming too high.  Too many bar fights happened last year.  Between the life drama and tracking myself down rage blew off me like sunspot flares.  Yes, you can punch anything with a face, but can and should are two very different things.  I'm not saying I'm going to be a saint, but I am saying the world is only so big and eventually someone is going to recognize you when you least expect it and remember that thing you did the weekend before to one of their friends and they'll even the score and then it's all bad news bears from there.

Style wise, I was lost as 2012 tailed out.  Spun out.  Ate the guardrail and burned it's way to the bottom of a ravine.  Shifting identity.  Events and exchanges, human exchanges external to my brain pan, brought up so many questions I hope to answer to myself in the coming year.  The identity I believed I had was drastically revised.  Am I still a writer?  Am I a poet?  Am I a songstress?  Maybe just a bard?  I don't know.  I've given up on trying to calculate how many hours I've gone in and what mastery means.  Mastery means nothing.  Exposure means nothing.  The new foundation is framed quite simply as passion.  I have a passion for words on paper.  Whatever that makes me to you, I'm down.  To me, I'm a kid with a pen.  That's all.  Calling yourself a writer or not, calling someone else by the same, is like having embossed ink on a business card.  Doesn't mean a damn thing beyond image.  Do I still want a house in the middle of nowhere to invite people to that I might cut them up, eat the good parts, and burn the rest of their remains?  Yeah.  That's kind of the ultimate goal.  That and having a place to write that I only have to pay taxes on.  That'll work.  A wonderful desert compound.  Somewhere near the border.

Twenty twelve taught me that I'm nowhere close to where a lot of my peers are fiscally, mentally, and emotionally.  My concerns are still fringe.  My furniture still sparse.  My needs are still fairly small and my dreams equal and as difficult to access.   I always thought I'd die in Pittsburgh, but maybe that's not good enough.  Last year made me question my capabilities, but not in the way some people down grade themselves.  I'm not a smart cookie.  I'm not brilliant.  I'm not particularly resourceful.  I can, however, create to no end, my only limitation being the cards I have to play with..

It was a strange year.  There were many tears in 2012.  Some earned, many not.  Many involuntary and inappropriate to the subject.  That's not going to change.  I'm crying right now typing this and it's silly.  My weight keeps fluctuating wildly between 155 and 185.  Every month.  It makes no sense.

Gather.  Fads go out of style.  I've had a few of my own.  I realized through the year that they were constructs to help me express concepts that come to me and help me live from week to week and month to month, but also help me relate.  Junior psychologist over here.  There was some real damage in 2012 and I don't know that 2013 will be that much better, but I like to believe it will be.  Maybe we'll get back on the pills this year.  Just to see.  Just to see and stop talking about talking about doing it.  Twelve was also a year of addictions.  I don't know how to fix that.  They were all, largely, necessary.  But at least I know the side effects will or won't do what they do.  Maybe that's the big thing standing guard these days.  This turned pretty dark in a flash.  I used to think I would be a great candidate for surviving the zombie apocalypse, and then I realized I would probably risk everything for a pack of smokes and dozen cans of spray paint.  Unless I have my desert compound by then (I'll pass the time writing poetry and taking head shot breaks with a .50 cal and whiskey on the rocks).

The major issue I want to resolve this year, given last year, is my writing.  Let's do better.  Let's be better for us.  Shooting for late forties.  I want to at least make it to being a weird uncle.

What did 2012 teach me?  What was the takeaway?  Christmas lights are awesome.  People can't be programmed.  My morals and principles don't translate by default and no one else's do either.  God is still a work of fiction.  I am still figuring myself out and trying not to implode.  At least not completely.  Still so far away, only because I have to be.  I am my own best company and my own worst friend.  The things I don't own are things I should not have yet.  The relationships I don't have are relationships I'm not and may never be ready for.  The spaces I occupy, I am grateful for and will continue to be.  The spaces I do not are spaces I have given back to the ones who belong there and will use beyond my ability to and that's okay.  Twenty twelve was strange.  Twenty thirteen is a big old bag of TBD, but I wish it was a big old bag of LSD.  You can't go through life asleep, but a boy can dream.


///TRACK NOT FOUND - year end playlist up next
defining moments of a finest hour?  yeah, something like that.