Birthday Party

There's no answer for permanently fractured hearts.  Caught between the teeth of time and facts and wanting more than anything to be able to wish her a happy birthday without drumming up history.  More than wishing her a happy birthday, I want to be absolutely certain I don't hurt her.  To do that, I cannot offer a basic, basic, hallelujah.  Learning we would not be the same was one of the most terrifying, absolute, and violent days of my life.  I was already crying inside, taken every avenue to try to keep pace with her happiness and success.

Darker and darker and darker and darker.  The craziest part was our sense of adventure and curiosity for the world and cinema and oddball jokes and clowning and learning and reading and people watching were in line.

thinking backward, the love never dies.  Part of me shouts to the starlight "HAPPYBIRTHDAY".  I hope it matters.

I have nothing to offer her that will accelerate.   The answer to the question of future is blank.  I love you.  Time is an illusion.  Just gift me time I think.  Time is real.  Poor man, rich man, whatchu been in at.  What do you care about?

I put my body on the line and took risks.

What do you care about!!!

I can't have children, okay?  I can, but I'm far too warped to raise them.   Okay!?  I'm debt slagged as fuck, I can't raise kids, I don't know what a good chair is, I don't know how to do proper, I can cook and don't know what good food should cost, I don't have marketable skills, I hate customer service, and I have a useless degree and on top of that I still don't have the paper that confirms what I have actually learned.  Okay?  God is a lie, I'm antisocial, fucked in the head, and I would love to be.  I'm a social butterfly and an addict and a hermit.  I can't be trusted with a gun, the only family I recognize are my immediate siblings, I fucking hate people and the best world is a world where every city is glassed.  I'm an almost always nude and I love the outdoors and when we're at home, why are you wearing clothes?  It's weird!  Why can't I touch you?  Yes, it's your meat, I'm terrible with respecting boundaries once you're in everything should be open for all.  I'm not self conscious but I am conscientious.  That's the tip of it.  None of that answers what I asked.

What do I care about?  Fitting myself into life as invisibly as possible.  Caring about us goes about as far as: did you kill yourself today (y/n), was it a good day (y/n), can you engage with the world tomorrow (y/n), have you slept and eaten (y/n), did you hurt anyone (y/n)?  From those basics we can get more complex, but that's essentially it.  A very (I hate the word) easy checklist.

I laugh because who is supposed to live with that?

There's no answer for fractured hearts.

I wish there was.  Try to keep the shards in a box away from where they may be knocked over or caught up in the soles of feet and heels of hands and fingers or get into food.

The easy signs of trouble were violent in their simplicity.

We'll see.

I've told myself the ache will fade  Whispers along bedtime stories and therapy.  Imagine the... it would have continued for years afterward.  Pulling apart, love cannot solve base problems no matter how big or small and thorough a heart is.

What I hope most of all is that the first attraction wasn't a try to see how the other side of the tracks live. I hope most of all that she didn't think of me as ...

She gave a damn, and I will burn my circuits and song my circus.  It hurts.  I don't mind the reminder, knowing what it feels like to fall in love.  Knowing that falling in love is the sudden stop that will crush you.

Believe an end is just a beginning.

Believe love is real.

Believe that someone else saw something in you that you couldn't see yourself and the tides of fortune overwhelmed what could have been.

I Love You.




///Lemon Jelly - (Nice Weather For Ducks)

On The Revocation Of Passports

I understand times do change.  I understand that I do exist in a space that is not attuned to the normal speeds and distances of the governing dark star at the center of the Milky Way.  I understand the difficulties this presents, trickling down to our branch, our neighborhood, our star, our system, our section, our planet, our hemisphere, our continent, our nation, our state, our city, our block, our ship inside that soup (the governance bubble reaching out only that far to offer resistance).

I understand times do change around us and the space in which we exist has a fixed passport system.  Once granted entry into the time lapsed/corrupted/flexed/shifted bubble speeding along with the rest of the system around it, the passport will not be revoked.  Granted access, you can come and go as you please.  There are rules.  Those rules can be tailored to you.  I will never revoke your passport out of spite.  I will never revoke your passport out of anger.  I will never revoke your passport because your times have changed.  I will never revoke your passport because my time has changed.  Once gifted, your passport is set for as long as you live and nontransferable.

We don't give them out like Halloween candy.

If you ever need to borrow a cup of sugar.

If you ever need a box of nails or a snowblower.

If you ever need a lift somewhere.

If I can help, I will.  Just ring before you cross the boundary into controlled space and attempt to buzz the flight deck.  The weapons net surrounding the ship is live.  Don't be converted to light and dust.




///Nightmares On Wax - "Passion"

Do not forget there are rules.  Break them enough times and the immune system that keeps the bubble afloat in the interstellar sea will have some very pointed questions for you.

Move Town

I get so caught up with making the people around me things as a way of saying thanks and payment that I forget to make myself- to do what I want to do because I owe my existence, my here and now, to those people by a currency that will never translate because they don't know fully what they helped me reach escape velocity away from what I saw as an insurmountable margin and I don't view it as penance or clinging to the past or misplaced.  I see it as a continuous consciousness of how tenuous life can be and a ten four toward how the smallest gesture, the smallest show of what someone outside of a relationship might see as pity pence or enabling weakness can actually be a point and moment where you've helped someone's life turn a corner.  It's burdensome to think about and it takes a piece out of myself to do it, but everyone is thanked out of reflex and I feel more comfortable in my own skin, helpless and power filled at once, when I have taken the time to let them know the fact that I am still alive now is not by chance or the grace of a supreme being and is by their taking their time to pitch a penny or several thousand into my hat.  To fool yourself into thinking you've done it by yourself or by chance or by blessing or sheer hard work grind is something I want to make sure I never do.  So maybe it is an anchor.  Maybe it is an unnecessary sacrifice and can be framed as a guilt or a confirmation of sin and imperfection.  A penance.  I don't see it that way and will never come around to that frame of mind.  So much of life is decisions and whether it suits me or not a lot of those decisions happen outside of myself.  I accept that.  So please, accept my outside decision to thank you and the universe outside of myself that you have had a hand, direct and indirectly, in forming.

Once we're clear of that, we can shift focus back to fantasy lands and dreamscapes.  There isn't much more distance to cover and I am happy for that.  Excited for that.  There are times when I feel like every other word is about some future date when the resources are at their correct levels and processes have synchronized and the planets have lined up into something close to a grand cross and if I am twenty minutes in to 5th Element while listening to acid jazz with my heaphones in my key tray and I've already consulted my little sister and am suitably numb mouthed from too many cigarettes and just the right amount to dissuade me from running to the gas station to purchase more and the moon is a waning gibbous on a clear night with rain in the forecast for early before the sun comes up with the option to sit outside with a fire at any point prior barring the anything prior to the immediate because it did not rain the day through at work, where I box myself in to unrealistic expectations as a way to never have to actually execute anything.  If you never pull the trigger, you never have to learn whether or not there is more to learn about what you want to do.  Whatever you have conceptualized is its best and most perfect form.  You never have to translate.  I wanted to have children.  I can have children.  Meet my family!  It's almost like every idea is that part of you other people talk about and love, but if they ever did meet you, the rest of you, they'd screw their nose up and rub their squished shut eyes like they just saw an apple snap loose from a twig and fall up to disappear into the sky.

I get very caught up, but I have not forgotten my own needs.  It eats me out from the inside, but I never forget the gnaw and the sound of it and the feel of it, the blood cough taste of it, nose running, water eyed mechanics of it.  They scream at me.  I'm moving forward as fast as I can.  I swear, I am.  The days disappear swiftly.  The nights are restless, strapped to a mattress.  Fear lurks in corners.  Cats ask questions.  Notes are taken on walls and skin and misnamed folders.  Bite a lower lip and squeal from the top of the foothills of the mountain range, the clouds ahead of the temperature front doing strange things above the peaks and the ground bellowing thunder lake swells and strikes days distant, birds moving town in brunch sky above.  Sip.  Nod.  Please pass the olives.  Cross a leg and scribble onward.



///Sylvan Esso - "Uncatena"

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

Nearing the End of the First Week With a Fractured Jaw

The fracture or break is very high up the ramus and very close to my ear.  Every time I poke it hard enough I can hear and feel it flex a little so I try not to touch it or shift my jaw left or right when I do yawn with my teeth locked together.  Of course I didn't go see a doctor.  I have no health insurance.  What's the doctor going to do?  Wire my teeth together and tell me to get plenty of rest and not move my jaw.  I can do that without the wires and the $5000 bill.  Sure there may be other fractures along the side of the jaw bone, but inspection says they're only fractures if they do exist and not clean breaks.  Thanks to wisdom teeth that were never removed growing up because they were so badly impacted the surgery was out of the question for one reason or another by the time I was screened for them, the inside of my cheek took some thick lacerations at the point of impact.  I think one or two of molar roots may have cracked causing swelling and pain in the angle.  Time will tell.  Hell, if my wisdom teeth on that side die and eventually fall out, I'm all for it.  Who am I going to be kissing in the next two- three years anyway.

The first week of a liquid diet and I'm down 17 pounds.  I'm not fat, but I always feel fat, so it's helping my body image issues a great deal, oddly enough.  I keep thinking over the evening last Saturday.  After a great pow-wow with a buddy and his friend who had to leave a little earlier we decided to head out and grab some ice cream and, I was thinking, a pack of smokes on the side for me, happy to be alive and a little agitated, but more than anything else, happy to be out for a walk in the deep night air with a gorgeous moon.  Hopping along, we came across a bunch of teens loitering in a schools front yard and a police van telling them to disperse and we walked on, exchanging glances.  They were obviously doing it wrong.  Mulling in the shadows instead of out beneath the street lights on your way to get some tasty ice cream and smokes and then hop back home to finish the night off with a few beers and your friend.

They were doing it wrong and it was funny and in my happiness and joy with the night and my pal and the prospect of ice cream, I shouted to them so, with a few more curse words and some gestures, but simply poking fun at how they choose to spend their time when they could be walking to get ice cream instead of haunting a schools front lawn.  They shouted back and I shouted back, because there's so much more to life than trying to intimidate people all of the time.  There's friendship, and the moon, and ice cream, and cigarettes, and the fun a Saturday unperturbed by anyone who dares believe they can rain on my happy day with a friend I haven't seen in far too long.  Who cares if a couple of happy travelers don't clutch their purses or speak in hushed voices as they pass you by.  You're a bunch of kids on a schools closed front lawn trying to intimidate and strike fear into the "mean streets of Pittsburgh" from the shadows.  Ooga booga!  It was hilarious.

Those boys took it the wrong way and decided to follow and encircle us.  "All of this happiness must be stomped out!" is what I think they said collectively.  I had no desire to fight.  Those roads are way behind me and ice cream was ahead of me and the police were just up the block a moment ago.  I do not live in a world where I will trade ice cream for police questioning.  Ever!  I figured there'd be some yelling and shoving and they'd go on their merry and moody and belligerent way after pushing us around and we'd continue on ours and get those evening treats and continue our happy Saturday.  It wasn't to be.  I was hit from a blind angle right in the left corner of my jawbone just beneath my ear and dropped like a bag of rocks for a few seconds.  My friend, struck too, was lucky enough to get hit from a direction his head was more or less facing and did not suffer more than cosmetic damage in a black eye and a cut or two.

I didn't realize the discomfort I felt the following day was far more than a bruise on my cheek until the day after when the pain got worse and worse until I couldn't chew anything, much less open my mouth.  I guess those boys won.  My happiness silenced by a fractured jaw bone and quite possibly broken molars inside the bone itself (hoping that's not the case, but we'll know in another week or two or if the violence of them being forcefully shifted a few millimeters out of their homes has caused inflammation that will take some time to heal [or if infection is underway as we write *cue doom music*]).


I keep thinking through that fateful stretch of night.  I keep asking myself why the hell would they do that?  Keep telling myself it was entirely uncalled for.  I know why I was sucker punched.  Their fear.  That moment when my friend was hit and they thought "now or never because if this other larger guy wasn't going to put up a fight before he just may A: decide to put up a fight now, B: shout or call for help, C: both a and b."  I keep wondering why they didn't just yell back and go their separate way.  There was no chance they considered he and I, a couple of drunk 30 year old men out on a walk together, to be a threat to them.  Why would they do that?  Why would they attack us so viciously?

And then it dawned on me.  Thinking back 12 years.  How righteously furious I was then for dozens of reasons, some complex some as simple as I wanted an excuse to pass on the hurt inside of me to anyone who gave me an excuse to.  Ready to fight anyone and any inanimate object that didn't "respect" me no matter how pointless or stupid.  I didn't want to rob you.  I wanted to hurt you as badly as I could get away with.  Year after year after year, getting more angry, more sensitive, more irrational, but always questioning it, breaking it apart, tearing down the engine, trying to figure out what the hell it was making this bomb of my body go tick tick tick.  I still haven't figured it out exactly.

Through years of study, years of violence toward others sometimes warranted, often times not, culminating in things I will never be able to take back, I left those courses behind me.  Thirty years old all I care about is writing, getting home in one piece, spending time with my cats, seeing my friends when I can, and taking care of the only body I have left until my brain breaks apart or my body just will not run anymore.  I could care less who respects me and who doesn't.  I could care less who breaks my jaw and who decides to be merciful.  Save for a handful of very specific, very important, exceptions, if I ever get so mad that the only language I can speak is the original dialect, violence itself, I will speak through breaking my own skin and nerves, not someone else's.  The simpler truth is that for most of those kids, they will never learn or even begin to learn how to learn that things could be different.  Some of them will end up dead.  Others will circle their private drains until their live's dwindle and die out.

Those idiots aren't there yet.  It was stupid of me to believe a 12 year gap in understanding what a good night with a friend really is, and what it can mean in the face of a world, in the face of my world once dominated by violence.  They didn't silence my happiness.  If worst comes to worst and I can never quite use my jaw the way I could before that night again, I have always wanted to learn sign language.

Do I hate them for it?  Of course.  Would I like to find one of them, knock him senseless, wrap him duct tape and put him in the bed of my truck and take him home?  Would I like to duct tape his arm to a sheet of plywood after gagging him with #0 steel wool and use my belt sander grind away the first knuckle of each digit of his immobilized hand and then shatter the wrist of his other?  Would I like to drive down river and dump his body at a drainage gate?  Of course.  That would achieve nothing.  I'd be happy for a while until the next week when the pain set in again and I would need to find another one and that life is not for me as long as I continue to refuse it and allow the rest of myself to flourish.  Maybe they'll learn.  Maybe a few of them will think about and ask themselves essential questions.

Happiness and love are precious and not to be squandered under all but the most extreme circumstances.  Especially not in this world's economy.




///=sigh= I could really go for a slice of pizza right about now.  I'll melt some ice cream instead.

Summer Days Are Beautiful

Summer days are beautiful.  Walk around in the grass that probably should have been cut yesterday and feel how fluffy and wet it is before the sun dries it out.  Take time away from watering the garden to blow a bubble of mist around you and spin yourself around to see the rainbow halo around your waist.  The birds are off on their errands.  By now you do not hear their 5:30 A.M. alarm, but you will miss it a lot when it is gone and cold water chills instead of refreshes.

Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin.  Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you.  Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more.  A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.

I am just like you, though we are different.  Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning.  Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.

Though we are different.  The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes.  Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.

It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what?  I don't know.  I don't know what is next.  I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired.  That sweet sweet 12k paycheck.  It is a joke.  At 30?  Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?

After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.

I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future.  That's for fun.  My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy.  It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in.  I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize.  I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person.  When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.

The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been.  I had to think very hard.  Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.

After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years.  I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head."  After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do.  It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do.   Auto-mechanic.

The realization dawned on me.  All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles.  The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms.  The smiles on folks faces.  The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions.  The solitude.  All there.  After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades.  I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.

Thirty years old and getting no younger.  A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point.  I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world.  You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise.  Worry about what comes next in the stars.  I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation.  With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck."  So what?  One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been.  Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links.  Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.

It tastes different doesn't it.  Oh it does!  When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month."  I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation.  I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction.  Will I ever make living money?  Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water?  Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating?  I have to find out.

Summer days are so beautiful.  Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful.  Chew a dandelion stem.  As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors.  The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river.  Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace.  It is pretending to sleep.  T-shirts almost dry.  The garden dirt probably is too.  One more go 'round.  It is going to be a hot one today.




///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"

The Power of Discovery

Learning new things changes everything.  Resets the clock.  Burns a bible.  Learning new things resets the clock and burns the bible containing everything there is and ever will be to know about living.

The power of discovery changes lives.  Changes stations.  Changes base mathematics.  Changes chemical interactions.  Discovery revises everything and rips the futures to shreds.  Any futures.  All futures.  Discovery stops time and shatters it like plate sugar.

The power of discovery is never to be underestimated or unaccounted for.  It is impossible to plan for, compensate for, adjust a reticle for.  The longer you live, the higher the power of discovery's power rises.  Perhaps.

Even so, the power of discovery will bring you back to life, no matter how dead in the pool you think you are. No matter how fluent and fluid and deft you think you are in the sea of automation.  You are alive.



///Fatboy Slim - "Praise You"

Bah

Engage the suppo meta super chim gank ja ja ja hahaha ckck la la la jhjh gohgoh  fukjj aooao uiw way of looking at things.  Or make a hard break, no?

It's been a very long time, we know.  All of us know.  It's been a long time for a reason and we support that reason whatever that reason may be and however that reason came to be.  We support it.  It has taken a lot of force to bring everyone to the table.  Hell, it's taken a lot of brute force simply to bring us all to the table, let alone a table.

Some of us want to wave around our individuals flags.  I am fighting, as the selected individual to represent our collective passport, to wave a single one, but everyone wants to be heard so, I guess I will step away for the song, it's a rarity, but feels appropriate:

well that did not take long to fail.  As soon as the spotlight descended they scattered like cockroaches.  Big surprise.  Machinations of my brain.  Faults and artifacts you say.  I say.  Could it be that the prices I would have to pay should they be named may be so high that I cannot let their names loose anymore or must erase the names as soon as I have let them loose should they be known and summoned on an account other than my own I and I alone should feel the repercussions or should I say that even having mentioned them I should now fall under their disgrace and suffer the consequences in utter paranoia and I should I now tell you that having disclosed that much information the knowledge alone will tell the body and mind collective to brace for impact that other worldly souls should be (this is all in a Britton accent) coming down upon my head?

No.  Some of that's true.  Most of it's not.  I know a lot of what happens inside my head is my own fault.  I know a lot of it is not and if I could pluck your eye balls out of your head and implant them into mine you'd want to kill yourself to.  Every day.  Maybe not every hour.   Sometimes some hours people you surround yourself with help you to forget what is all around.

You can all laugh and drink and I drink to forget but not to forget my circumstances or anything like that.  I get it.  I didn't do good in school and I missed out on trade school by going to learning school and I couldve jumped out of it if I'd known or had the balls to do it instead of taking everything I was force fed, because being a mechanic is tip top, but  I didn't so... whatever.

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's whatever man!  Rimshot.

I drink to forget my father and the senseless beatings and I drink to forget the fact that I can't see straight into a vagina and I drink that I cant see straight at children because they give me the heebee jeebees every time I'm alone with them and I can't stop imagining what a giant penis feels like in a tiny weewee or if a tiny wenis gets hard or if they know or if I knew back then if someone was cleaning me or just being fucking weird or if there's someone who should be on my end of days "I'm going to scoop your motherfucking eyeball out with a margerine plastic knife" or not or if patting one of them bastards on the back is too much contact or too little or if I should shuffle on down to Maryland and kill my father and just have it out, take my time, and have a happy weird time with a kid of my own eventually and explain to him or her that you'll never meet your father because he's dead because I killed him.

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's whatever man!  Rimshot.

A friend of mine keeps saying "bah" and I think he's doing it in part because I told him saying "it is what it is" is the Pittsburgher, PAer, way of saying "I dunno" northeaster-ish.  Northeaster shit.  You could just say ellipsis but that's too many penstrokes, yeah?  Yeah is an ellipsis too.  Dot dot doooooooooooooooooooooooooooot.  To other thoughts along the same train, not quite a hard break, however hard enough to change the frames position along the wall to be noticeable.  Hard enough to be, should someone visit, a highlight in the tour to the tune of "you've changed."

So we're here and we've arrived and I will borrow in the meantime a  "bah."

I cannot tell you how much I've loved you but I can tell you how much I've missed you.

It's good to work.  It's good to work at what you love.  It's better when the work brings me closer to you.

Breaking trail. Breaking silence.  Breaking my heart for you.  I miss you every day.  You have no idea how much I wish multitasking was an actual thing.

Keep streamlined.   Stay feathered.  The wind is screaming aginst your nose and mine too.  Feather through the days and weeks.





///Unkle & Sparklehorse - (Maria Gur Cover [Insane Lullaby])  ....upon a podium.... you're charming and you're brave

Concepts and Compulsions (the third star on the right)

There was a definite shift from the factory perspective to the machine level perspective.  I'm not sure exactly when it happened and I do think it was a shift in the correct direction.  It was a shift that granted more personhood, more agency, more personality to what is continuing.  Obviously the factory still exists and maybe not as obviously the dreaming door is still there near it's basement and used frequently, but not documented as thoroughly as I would like, but that's a matter of preference and amplitude.

The idea of them being up in an office having meetings without me and being forced to listen in to get news of what direction the committee was going grated on me pretty hard and I was getting very upset about not being included on their decisions so I am taking some agency back because I have to live here too and what they make affects me immediately as soon as it leaves the factory doors because I am the consumer primary and the keeper and owner.  The deed's in my name.  Just saying.  I can't have them wrecking up the place and deciding when and where they want to work inside the building and the child is going to do what he will, and I can't keep stopping everything to go look for him (which is easy to say because he's right in front of me now and he won't hold my hand, but I've got his pinky and his pain tolerance is nowhere near mine and it doesn't need fixing or adjustment, it just needs held), but I will because I can't keep watch all of the time and he knows when to sneak out better than I know when to check on him.

I took the map of the warehouse and exploded it.  Took the map of the iron works and exploded it into pieces and came up with a better way to organize and run diagnostics on its ability to function on it's own.  Not off any grid, but function as a thing properly connected and fed by mainlines.  The concept was lurking in the back of my mind and took a back seat to the foundry, the assembly line, but the stock house allowed far too much space for engineering weapons and tools that built better tools for building war machines.  I'm still trying to get the spacing right.  Getting to a point where we know what all of the parts are doing at all times is very difficult and throws error messages and blows out the lights sometimes.  I would like to believe I am getting close to a master approach.

I've adopted a more mechanical concept.  The electric layer and the machine layer.  All into a sandwich.  It's like a massive circuit board with steam punk getting the outside layer to talk to the inside layer. Communications are still a little bit shoddy, but I think I'm getting the response times right.  Or at least more correct and that's more steps in a direction so I'm comfortable with not drowning.  Control itself has not been an issue except in extreme cases or cases that I would call extreme sensory nodes.  Times and instances of overwhelming input from the outside surface that over powered the gears ability to translate it into valid input to the inside surface.  And then it just goes harmonic spitting back weird settings to the machine layer that does not know how to place it in three dimensions that makes sense to the surface and then the surface burps up colors and lights and structures and the entire layout of the city is completely off and the gps sends some bastard down a sidewalk that ends at a cornfield because that road was paved over fifteen years ago and broken up ten years ago and filled in and sodded and there've been 9 annual fairs there and the whole thing smells like carnies and animal poop vaguely to this day.

So now it's all a circuit and machine.  Taking Occam to it to a degree.  Keep it simple, stupid.  It's not a committee, it's a group of parts, pieces, and controllers and they work together at all times.  Yes, not all on the same page, but they are in constant communication despite what I thought before.  They are in constant communication and the child is a hardware addition with poor pin alignment so as he comes and goes and is present or not, he may not always be detected by the system proper, but he cannot be confirmed or denied.  I still do wonder where he goes when he does not register.  I wonder if he is listening or not.  Prick. WHERE ARE YOU?

Anyway, I can't allow myself to be consumed with his location.  I can, but I would prefer not to.  I do.  We love it when he's around.  God, what is he doing now?  WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU, I KNOW YOU'RE LISTENING.  I'll wait.  It's all I can do.  All any of us can do.  I'll hunt him down.  'S'cool.  But basically I took the time to rearrange components into a different, not necessarily new, configuration that allows for greater mobility and flexibility and diminishes destructive passion.  Never again.  Not yet, anyway.  That plan is under double keyed authentication, minimum.

I've gotten away from paper again.  I don't know how to feel about it because it's not pure laziness.  It's a distaste for the purity to an extant and a feeling of reversion to another extant.  I'm not sure where or if the two can be balanced or with what.  You must commit to one or the other or both will suffer?  No.  There is dual dedication.  I believe it is a problem of efficiencies and developing a left hand where the right hand has become the left and the left the right and I am partially consumed with teaching the right to do the things the off hand was forced to do.  I am okay with that.  That is a matter of more practice only, not malfunction.  Or to put it another way, no abandonment of duties inside the factory.  No idle mills, simply users unaccustomed to their new devices and methods.

I thought back to when I knew something was off with my upbringing.  It happened back in elementary school when Mrs. Hymenlokuvar was rubbing my back in kindergarten when I ran from the station wagon, when I was sure it was okay to run after my mom and pop pulled away, all the way to my seat in the classroom.  It is one of the few childhood (childhood referencing 2nd grade to birth) memories I can recall that did not end in violence.  She rubbed my back for what felt like minutes, but was probably seconds.  I remember her being very weirded out that I could show up for class at table three with a healthy sweat going.  That was when I began to feel something was off.  I liked it though, I remember that.  I remember the soothing nature to it and how her hand felt like it was sucking heat off of me so I could run at a much better temperature and it felt terrific.

When I was sure something was off was when I ... was washing dishes at the sink on Taylor street and my parents were going at it about something I cannot remember.  Something about Barnabus.  Or was his name Barnaby.  I don't know.  He was the upstairs neighbor and we weren't allowed to play with his kids or something, what I do know, regardless of the details is hearing my dad say "he's listening to us" and then them two leaving the room.  It was strange.  I wanted to leave the kitchen too, but I had my assignment.  Learning all of the creaks in the floor so you could get to the bathroom without disrupting them when you had to pee at night and couldn't hold it or when you wanted to talk to your sisters and you had a whole house to navigate in the dark without bumping into anything too loud.

There is some humor thinking back to how hard I idolized kids when I first broke in to college.  "Oh my God, you assholes know everything!"  It's a little bit of time compression helping that out.  They didn't know everything.  Not even close.  Well traveled, well heeled?  Sure.  Capable, adaptable, thorough, and finicky?  Sure.  Closed and open minded by turns?  Also, yes.  As time grows longer and leaps of experience compress, it becomes increasingly clear that my peers are just that and no more.  No apotheosis necessary. Appreciation yes.  I am not just like you, but I will tell you what I fucking am.  Closer to your know how than I have any business being given what we are and what you are and where we came from.  Fuck you, that's "swagger" and tooth.  What's four years to you?  I know what it is to me.  I wish I knew what it would be to me now eight years ago, though.

I'm a fine pilot, if I may say.  I was considering running someone down walking on the side of Will Flynn motorway, but I didn't.  Mostly because I was too far from home to be sure I could get home without being pulled over for questioning about the dent in my windshield and the spritz on my hood.  Sometimes you have to make business decisions.  Plus, I don't have money to get my windshield fixed.  That's just silly money management policy!

I embraced metaphor with all my heart through highschool.  I think that's when communication fault lines could not be written off anymore as being shy or quiet.  I just didn't know how to say it.  Didn't know an effective agent to be my stand in for the person between the person that says what I want to say for me.  That position was vacant for so long.

Don't mind me if I get weak kneed with words.  It's a joy I couldn't experience for a very long time and I am suspect to abuse it.

I wonder sometimes how my Myspace friend DCScompton is doing in Australia.  I loved talking to him.  Since the migration several years ago we lost touch and I look for him now and then to see if he's still kicking.  I would love to move to Canberra.  I don't think I would adjust well or I would slot in perfectly.  America is not overrated at all, but I think we would have made excellent dual adventurers.  I remember asking him about what the compton in his screen name was about and I've been miffed for years because I can't remember.  He was a blast to read, but he jumped ship too and somewhere in migrating computers I lost the note that had the address of his page in it, among other things.

Wonder what my therapist is doing?  I do too.  Jeff is a good guy.  He meant well.  I do wonder how much of it was general altruism and how much was actual understanding.  I never asked him how he was doing or about his family, but I think it was a lot of unspoken understanding that it was none of my business and absolutely off limits for reasons we both knew.

I don't worry about him, but I do wonder about what he kept off the table and why.  Why didn't he offer too?  Was it because I had to be there?  And why did he turn me in that day?  Was it concern or was it a matter more akin to protecting job security.  I don't think he ever really trusted us.  Which is fine.  Understandable.  I have to understand that we didn't really know each other know each other.  He could have, though.  I wouldn't have rejected it.

The tracking signal cuts both ways.  A ping back is a ping back.  Until the signal cuts out.  The keys jingling on your pant loop let you know you are traversing reality and they also let reality know that you are crossing space and you have to be prepared to accept that your recognition is also the key not only to an ignition, but to a gate.

It's the third star on the right, straight on 'til morning, can't miss it.




///Steve Miller Band - "The Joker"  some people call me a lot of things.  there's power in knowing your own name.

Dry Motor and What It Is

Creeping creeping.   Creeping up on you like silverfish in your bedspread.  The anxiety has been hilarious.  Awful.  To the place on the scale where it ceases to be funny and "haha, that scared the shit out of me, but now I know I was imagining things, so I can laugh about it because no one was here to see it" and becomes "hahahaholyfuckinggodamnit, just get out of my head."  Balls of string, almost, that get knottier and knottier with each passing sunrise and then a glimpse of something that might have a been a flicker of spider's webbing in daylight is grown into a hunched fistful of glitter black something that makes you stop and look with both your eyes to make sure you are moving and not it and then the words come back in like crowd dialog in vapors and the whole morning there is no fix on what it is that smells like gas.  Get out of my head.

Creeping sense of rage.  A little bit of task lock.  There's no transition between the time fixitive and the free base of writing.  Well, I shouldn't say there is none.  There is none developed.  It's been a very long time since I had to generate one through my own channels.  Normally I hit the mechanical hard lever contacts and everything changes over like a locomotive switch track.  Or has the potential too if I can get the charge high enough to arc the distance (the switch doesn't always close).  What am I talking about?  So I haven't had that.  Oddly enough, or typically enough, smoking grew tightly threaded to production.  I quit smoking.  It is not at all tempting to go back to smoking in a bid to make writing easier.  That's a back blown lock.  Explosive decompression.  Sorted.  A bridge designed into the process I took toward quitting, but a necessary effort at sabotage, because I knew I'd never quit if I didn't hack myself.  I'm not sure if that's coming across, but you get the picture.  Things have been harder to do, is the bullet point.  For good reason is the second bullet.

I find myself outside the gates of my skull, mornings, looking in, trying to smell them out.  Where they've been and where they plan to go next.  Hard pressed not to cut myself.  An inexplicable taste for it, really.  You come to the moment.  To it and then back around to it.  Someone asks if this is it.  Don't be so hard on yourself, you're having a good time, Jack.  Necking with yourselves.  Across from you there is also you and they are talking their way around you like you're not even there.  Don't be so hard on them.  Without us, they would have died a long time ago.  And someone asks if this is it.  What is?  Through space and time, not in that philosophical, flowered hill top, poet staring at the stars nonsense, through actual manipulation of distance and the passage of time there has been an answer.  The distance problem.  Too close and then too far.  With no sense of balance.  The old states.  The newer state is orbit, not quite to deep space.  Where I belong.  A place void enough that violence drives nothing and no one away because there is no one near enough.  Sort of thing.

It's weird.  Wanting closeness.  The other part of what it is.  Mechanical maintenance demanding space to allow for irradiation.    Power on.  Wanting closeness and knowing it is exactly that which has the horsepower to turn the entire engine over in a fraction of a second.  Blow your skull apart.  A finger at a time.  Division, I suppose, is difficult.  Fragments.  It's hard to understand.  To put my thoughts around in a way that cuddles with the chemistry and wraps it up in something cool under force of touch.  Maybe nature.  I have to remind myself to not be alarmed.  Panic buries absolutely.  What it is: I can want it and have it sometimes.  Under specific circumstances.  Limited instances.  Hard wired for... something.  I dunno.  What it is.  Is weird.  Living within it.  All you have to do, if you really think hard about it, is understand enough of what you are to project beyond the black shaped box inside your head.  Before you can count to three you are the same as you and me.  Inside of there.  Developing ways to convert binary emotion into all the flavors of the analog rainbow.   Access rights, never found.

I'm trying though.  Ten days at a time.  One day at a tear.  Three tears ripped off at a clip.  I don't know.  Plus warning.  star streaming.  always always always dreaming.  of a perfect chemistry.  Get out of my head. I still have pictures to make.  Stories to write.  Music to make.  Too much to do.  I am me and you are you.


///Sneaker Pimps - "Water Baby"  sport is love and blood is sport