Where The Time Went III

I do suppose, at a point you have to trust your partner.  No more benders.  No more lost weeks.  No more blackouts.  If that is where the line must be drawn...

...the line should've been drawn a long time ago.  I have to become comfortable with notion that my partner will be homeless outright.  I've been there.  I don't want to do it to someone else.  The truth is I'm not doing it to them.  They are doing it to themselves.

Is there more I could've done?  Sure.  Is there more I could've done without killing myself?  No.  Clarity.  Clarity.  Clarity.  Can't hit he.  Can't hit he can't hit.  He can't hit.  He can't hit.  He.  Clarity.  Clarity.  Clarity.  Vocal cord rehearsals to explain to her that everything has been askew for almost two years because of her addictions.  The motorbike in the backyard still collects rust because of her addictions.  The home mortgage fund is short $4000 over two years because of her addictions.

Rehearsing answers to her inevitable retorts and fits of anger. 

Rehearse.

Rehearse.

Rehearse.

And know it.  Know it like the creases on the back of your hands because they will always be tested.  When your support is the rock at the bottom, don't flinch.  If it means cutting that base out, try to even though you are crying tears of blood behind stony eyes.




///I miss being able to listen to music without submitting to a five hour long rant about songs we've already listened to the last time hammers fell.  Her addiction took even that away from me and she still does not see what it's cost beyond a dollar sign.

Driving Stick (Fairlady 280Z)

I think my pops saw a spark in me and didn't know how to feed it.

I think, faced with something completely different from his first two children, he hit a language wall.  This one has the design eye, this second one does too.  "This third one has an eye, but why is it obsessed with physics and manipulating form and space instead of creating on a canvas?"

Learning to drive stick was a massive challenge.  Enter the F-250 1996 V8 5.8 Liters of displacement in a breath.  Stupid torque and no horsepower.

The thing was, you never knew if he was taking you for a ride to explain to you why you had a beating coming or not.  Sometimes it was Billy Graham, sometimes it was the guy who always had that quotable audio clip at the beginning of his radio show "lay up treasure in heaven" (it always made me laugh inside thinking about how does suffering now get you a v.i.p. pass to heaven and how dumb it felt watching years spin by and thinking 'the forsaken are now!')

There was this one day, he may have been driving me to work at Six Flags Great America or some shit, but we were in his 280 ZX that myself, my younger sister, and I don't remember if my older brother was there or not, but we washed and detailed that car.  Cleaned from the floor mats to the spots where you put your fingers on the sill to push the passenger door open to the stock rims and the corners of the chrome trim around the rear window to the toe kicks along the foot of the door sills.

I can't remember what day it was specifically; Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday.  We drove.

I may have missed the bus for the umpteenth time and he happened to be off work that day and heard me come back into the house absentee.

At any rate, what I do remember was this:

Before I took on driving school and getting licensed proper, he took his hand off of the stick shift and began calling out gears to me.  I didn't know what to do.  In the empty space he would shift and calmly call the next position the shiftknob was supposed to be in.

I didn't know he was speaking to me.  I thought it was another one of his exercises to keep me on my toes so I would always be aware of my surroundings.  One of those "what street is that?!" spot quizzes.  I think it may have been one of his best attempts to connect with his kid who was not into the "arts" as he was.

In fear, I placed my hand on the shift knob with my fingers spread so I could see the 1 2 3 4 5 R grid, do not break his possession.  Be good.  If you do good, he will not be disappointed.

Understanding that he wanted me to move the shifter while he worked the pedals and the wheel, I was incredibly hesitant.  Before that day I'd only read about it in magazines, Road & Track and Car & Driver and Model Builder and the RC aero rag on my stints at the library in the periodicals instead of going to school when I missed the bus because you can't get to Greenbelt from Bowie without missing have the damn day anyway, might as well go to the library on your bike and make sure you're back home before he is and no one is the wiser (fuck it and fuck Eleanor Roosevelt H.S.).

I shifted with my left hand for close to five minutes before he took over again.  And that was my first taste.  The second was driving school in a powder blue Chevy Cavalier with a stick that was way too long for the shitbox that it was.  And the standard minted was the Falcor that I drive now.  That was when I learned and am still learning.

Every time that I hold that stick, my dad does cross my mind.  My dad and where my love affair with the Fairlady line of sporting two doors began.  The way that he would cut through traffic and move through the shift gates was impressive to my young mind.  He wouldn't be able to drive my F250 for shit and it makes me laugh.  It makes me laugh because if you can pilot a junker with finesse, imagine what you can do with a coupe.

There are times I wish he'd taken the leap to see me outside of the framework of his knowns.  We have much in common.  I would love to be able to speak to someone who understands the rage and fire inside as much as he knows it and hides it and clamps it and eats it and focuses it and the ways it eats you alive.

I'm never going back to him.  He is as welcome in me as he has said I am in him.  Big ol' bag o' nopes and it does make me laugh to understand that happy endings are for stories- not history.  Consolation prize: he tried and it planted a seed and a passion for Nissan coupes and the design philosophy throughout their years.

My artistes' eye is still there.  The lines are classical music if you see its shape.  When you think salon coupe GT as comfortable cutting into the wind as whipping around corners, steady as the shaft of an arrow and fickle if you tease it, from its stance to the cut of the A pillar to busy tail lights and sloop nose that can accommodate aero headlight glass or no.

I think back to that day and how I must have looked in the passenger seat with frightened eyes looking at the digital gauges and being thrilled and awed and stupefied at a tachometer that wasn't a dial.  In the years following, I was disgusted at the tach that wasn't analog.  And then I was enlightened to the tune that dashboards can be removed and replaced with whatever the pilot finds most useful.  And then I went away to college and the car disappeared and I remembered that he didn't actually give a shit.  For a moment I was his son and for a moment he was a dad.  And then he was confused as to why I was upset that the car I cleaned for the better part of a year and got to touch and fell in love with was shipped off for who knows what.

It just... it pains me... he has no idea who I am.  He had no idea then and he has no idea now.

I used to think he was just crazy.  I still do.  I am.  I am a functioning adult from his loins so....   it kinda fucking follows.  Also why I'm not waiting in line for progeny.  Some things should stop.  Accidents don't happen without a breath of agency and this time around I can be the eyes he didn't have then.  The discerning he absolved himself of.

Do I want to make him pay for what he's cost me: of course.  Can I?   Yes.  Will I?  No.  He will die in his bubble on his own time.  My life is worth more than enlightening a grown child, talented though it may be.  Do not attempt to turn a mountain, it will return to the sea on its own time.

Driving the truck, blasting music that is foreign to his circuits, with the windows down... ...he could have enjoyed himself and his child.  Us both now in a solitary confinement.  I hope he is pushing a standard, but we all know "it ain't that damn likely."  With age also goes the tooth for sporting.




///Noname - (Diddy Bop) ~ driving music

Smashing Bottles On Ships

I think part of the passion for smashing bottles against the noses of ships before they depart the yard is not only a charm or totem.  I think it is also a celebration of what could've been and what will be if you think the ship is destined for disaster.  A chance, after months and days and years (relative), to lift restrictions and wiggle, watching the behemoth's construction.  It's a time to dance and dance as thoroughly as possible.  The smashing of a full bottle being representative. Once in union, all the rest is random and uncontrollable and sometimes violent and magical and explosive and "the last unexpected thing that will happen is this shattering and firework."

It is a reasonable lens.  And a reasonable way to approach.


///Brassica - "Wryders (FMB009)"

A Bad Case of the Quits

Think about all the things you can't do.  Body lock.  Sleeping fourteen hours a day to avoid the giant shadows in my head.  Long sleeps and short breaths because there is no way you can get yourself into trouble if you're not there.  It's great to imagine a world where everyone is not all home upstairs to feel a little more comfortable around you and less self conscious or conscious of the world around here.  Impossible to dodge or sidestep.  Autofold.

Or maybe I'm just mapping out new ways to find a path to talk about depressed.  Nothing is immediately wrong, but long term is up in the air and the stress of the attempt to figure out where things might land is flat-lining my ability to comprehend channels that run outside of mathematic doubt?  I am in a funk.  I've seen the rise of the range to climb and am set out with gear and guide and 300 miles and ten days later we are what feels like no closer in the range's foothills.  Still, hand cupped to eye, tall grass marched, toward the snowy summit's bouldered base.

It is always difficult thinking about what the point is.  To map uncharted territories?  To have a point of reference?  To exercise the brain and verify its function?  To cope?  To record history?  Attack?  Report?  Defuse?  Modify?  Survive?  You're bumming me out, man!  What is the point?  You could simplify things greatly by eliminating yourself from the equation.  Speedometer, bruh.  Yeah, yeah.  There are many and a several reasons to be alive.  Number one being that the planet is a phenomenal place all its own.

Number two being that the planet's weather, moods, and neighbors are just as magical.  How could you not want to see what happens next?  To hell with purpose.  Have pleasure in you and your own adventure.  To what end?  For what purpose?  For what reason?  Dunno.  Just thought it'd be fun.  Just thought it'd be a sight.  Just thought life alone is not all cupcakes and daydreaming and that's quite alright.  Bad hands, bad turns, bad lands... I'm rhyming again.  Bad hands and bad turns are just facts of being alive.  No reason to quit.  No reason to think about disappearing.  No matter how absurd the turns get, how unfair the hands go out, stick with it.  Don't quit.  You never know if the next sunrises colors will be like anything you've ever seen before.

///Moderat - "A New Error"

Collaboration Is a Minefield

How much of your hand should you show?  Once you have worked to find your voice, how afraid are you that it will be duplicated?  What if the person you want to collaborate with, the person who has the ends in hand, can duplicate your means if you have to go through them to gain exposure?

Eventually you can cut them out.  Eventually you will not have to worry about intellectual theft.  You'll always be one step ahead by default.  What if the person you have chosen to work with is capable of pirating everything you have created prior and your only proof is a series of time stamps?  What if you have the capabilities and where-with-all and all out gall and disregard to forge time stamps too?  What if the skillsets you have used to survive for so long, all thirty years of you, forced you to develop the skills you needed to make any claim of origin moot?  You can design locks and you also have a very fine set of lock picks.  The line between used and new blurs to infinity.

Collaboration is a minefield.  When an artist opens their book to you, enjoy it.  Do not see it as a requisite.  See it as a privilege.  See it as a pact of ultimate trust.  Closer than sex.  Closer than that bullshit conversation heart to heart over a beer or nine.  Closer than that time they drove you home drunk when you were too drunk to drive and they almost crashed, killing the two people in the backseat not buckled up.  Closer than that girl you've been talking to and haven't closed the deal on.  Closer than that friend that dropped you off at the emergency room when you died for twenty seconds and had to be resuscitated with a balled up fist to your chest.  Closer than that secret your dad told you when you finally got a couple drinks in him when he hit fifty and waxed nostalgic.  Closer than that blank spot in your memory everyone else knows.  It's a minefield.

If I show you how the sausage is made, do you see dollars or do you see a way to be a better you?  Do you see a way out or do you see a way in?  Will you steal or will you harmonize and create?

Every creator has the hang up of collaboration.  How many collaborations have started and failed?  How many flash in the pan, in the searing oil, spill over for an instant, lick the flame and light the entire venture ablaze?  Every time someone asks me to collaborate, I am reluctant.  It never ends well.  It never ends well!   IT NEVER ENDS WELL!  It is to a point that I know it is me.  I know I am at fault.  I go on tears.  I have vision.  I am the spark.  I am the fire.  I am the galaxy.  I am the clouds.  I am the sky.  I am the grass.  I am the atom.  I am the brick.  I am the pipe.  I am the fist.  I am the womb.  I am the rain and the sword.  The broom and the dust.  The wall and the fist.  The string and the mattress.   The thimble and the apple crushed during lunch breaks.  I am the napkin and the grease.  The spear and the beast.  The insect eaten bone and the loam.

There is never any commitment.  No real sticktoitiveness.  I churn and it burns and they push thumb to index and make empty promises and break appointments that actually matter and it goes round and round until it hits the drain.  That's not the end.  I go into the waste lines, shrink myself down and dive in, like that mini sub movie we all know that I can't remember.  Sealab?  Fantastic Voyage!  And I dive through the septic system after I get no response long enough and search it out and try to revive it and report back and the reports come thinner from the surface until it's a science fiction movie with a starship in The Dark Between the Stars and I'm hoping I can land somewhere and I do not want to do it again.

Forgive my apprehension because I will not forgive your abandonment.  Not again.  You say you want to collaborate.  I say prove it.  You say you want to work with me, show me something I have not seen.  Give me a reason to believe in you because your word is worth dog ____.  Hell, help me be a person better than myself right now and I will trade you.  If you call yourself an asshole and behave like one, the book of life will not open for you.  Fear is not stopping me, hate is not stopping me.  Waste is.  Time is.  Trust is.  Anyone can shout into a hole in the ground.  Anyone can shout into a knot in a tree.  Anyone can program a machine.  Anyone can build one.  Craft is another being altogether.

Another state. If you are searching for your voice, say so.  If you are searching for your base, say so.  If you need guidance, say so.  Make it clear.  As it stands, you have nothing to offer me.  Nothing within your catalog will help me refine, reinvent, understand, or see myself anew.  What you ask of me is to help you.  Help you do what?  Why should I care?  Why should I turn myself on the spit so you can eat while I listen to what a self starter and go getter you are on and on through the nights?  Show me something.  Show me you have learned something.  If you show me that you have learned something beyond your current state, I will engage you like you have a soul.  I will answer your questions and accept your challenges.  Keep coasting.  I will leave you behind.  Challenge me and I will fight.  Challenge me hollow and I will go through the motions right along with you and play down.

Hell, I'll help you bury it.  Our collaboration.  I don't take it lightly.  I do not like feeling used.  I know I am not disposable.  It is fun to feel like or be an inspiration or muse or riff target or mirror or foundry, however in collaboration I demand more, expect more, I want to be inspired, mused, riff against, see a reflection in you, and forge new alloys and atoms through you.  As I gift you, give me something to work with.  Turn my gears.  Blow my turbines.  Feed my generator, as I shovel coal into your own.

Do not make me regret this.  Not again.  Never again.  Do not waste my time.




///Mazzy Star - "Look On Down From The Bridge"  rainy winter.  the river never froze.  it is strange to be disappointed in the spring.  it is immensely frustrating when i can't talk art with you; when everything turns toward monetization and consumers.  screw that, can we look at a sky and say it's nice without you turning it into coin?

In Consideration of Empathy

You attack and beat yourself up over your inability to see eye to eye with your brother.  Eye to eye about what?  Everything.  Not everything, just things now.  The formation and configuration of our immediate family.  Who funds what and why.  Who goes and does what and where.  Who can.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him on that?  You just watched a video of yourself dancing and you thought it was awesome, but the truth is if bodies could have Tourette Syndrome, you would probably be the poster boy with Elaine Benes as the prom Queen.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him at all?  You are two completely different human beings, down to sexual orientations and the arrangement of your individual eyelashes.  You are not supposed to agree.  You are about as different as they come between siblings.  You do realize this, I hope.  You are a stamped coin.  Do you get it now?  You are never going to see eye to eye about just about everything.  If you want to see the other side, you are probably going to have to bend time and space and, last I heard, that shits pretty difficult with a thousand acre facility so good luck trying to do it with a few cubic inches of fatty gray matter.

You don't have to see anything his way.  He doesn't have to see anything your way.  What is this weird aggression toward a shared emotional experience?  It's not there.  Stop looking.  I don't say that as a warning sign like marking something so damaging and toxic you will die immediately, if not soon after.   I say that as a time saver.  I say that as a wayfarer.  Stop looking.  There is nothing at the end of that ocean.  There is nothing on the other side of that desert.  The globe does not loop around.  It is infinite in the darkness beyond the stars.  Stop looking.  Occasionally whip your binoculars up to your face and take down the range, time, and windage and then duck back down into the reeds.  You do love him, but you do hate him too.  Not for any particular reason.  Just envy.  Change positions.  Skulls, skin, bones, you do know you wouldn't be able to change circuitry.  Can't I?  No.  Mightn't I?  No.  Impossible-r-y-ing I?  No, and that's definitely not a word or fragment.  What the hell is that?   I just stroked off for a minute.  What were you saying?

I was saying, we're never going to see eye to eye, so stop beating yourself up when you try and do not.  You're not a bad person.  You're not a flaming heap of garbage to be kept at arms length all of the time.  Sometimes you cannot control your volatility.  It's a fine problem to have.  You don't have to kill him and you don't have to fight him.  Just let him be himself and you be yourself and the chips will land where they please and are directed.  Your engagement with the world can never be his.  It can be emulated.  Where's the fun in tracing?  Where's the existence in tracing?  Do not get angry with yourself for being irrevocably, irreconcilably, different.  No, you are not stupid for trying.  Anyone in their right mind would see their closest genetic match and want to touch it like a mirror to make sure what they saw was not a reflection.  You are me?  No.  I am me and you are you, and never the two shall meet.




///Dan Deacon - "Feel the Lightning"  polishing the brass on warships that will and need never leave Earth.  Fear is healthy.  A degree of worry is healthy.  Don't take it too far.

Business Plan

I do not understand it and forces my laughter:

We'll withhold your degree until you pay us.  You have completed everything you need to complete your requirements to receive your degree.  We will withhold it without regard.

Granted, having your degree will allow you to pursue lines of gainful employment that will permit you to set aside funds that will allow you to repay the costs of seating you in classrooms, we will not allow you to receive the paper until you remit payment.

We feel restricting your ability to employ yourself, having already invested in us, will help to motivate you to pay us our monies due.  In so doing-

What the -expletive deleted---------------------------------------------deleted------------------------------------deleted---------------------------------------------------------------------deleted--------------.

Signs are up because someone did something that warranted a sign being placed.  I get it.  However, I will never understand the debt game and generating funds through it so I will always be a few steps behind the promise of gateways to success through college for the other 75% of the population not indigenous to their school/district/state, on trust, or already locked and capable and loaded to murder their major and minor in their spare time (scholarly), or gifted and/or supported athletes.

The crux.  The crux?  Is that the right word?

Boil it down:

we will force you to pay us by making it impossible to pay us,

then have a laugh.




Nero - "Doomsday"  ... the year is t + 2007

Are You 8 Years Old?

Sometimes things happen in life and you continue to trip over them mentally.  The constant tripping makes us more and more upset and before we know it we're pacing and running our fingers over our scalps and shaking our heads and then shaking our arms and hands at empty air.

What follows is one of those things.  Do you hear yourself when you say to me it's my fault for saying "yes, help yourself" when you ask me if you can have a portion of something I have.  Do you hear how ridiculous you sound?  Are you fucking eight years old?  You do understand taking almost all of the thing you asked if you could have a portion of is the same thing as stealing, correct?  Do you believe that I am two years old?  Do you snicker to yourself and say something in your inner monologue like "teehee, I'm going to take way more than I should, but he won't notice because I'll leave a little bit and even if he does notice he can't say anything because I didn't take everything, teehee."

Are you eight years old?  You're older than I am.  Do I actually have to walk you by the hand and take out exactly how much you are allowed to have and set it aside and then hide the rest of what I have just to be sure that if I leave the room more won't disappear into your pockets?  I don't really consider having some consideration to be an adult attribute.  It's a communal attribute that manifests at all ages.  A hallmark of civilized community.  A certain level of trust afforded to someone you consider to be a member of your community, much less a friend as well.  Friendship should, if anything, heighten that attribute within yourself.

What the hell is wrong with you.  Do you hear yourself?  You have the nerve to say "you obviously don't want me in your home" after I tell you I can't have you over because you basically steal from me when what is clear is that you obviously don't consider being in my home or my friend to be a part of your community.  Are you kidding me?  Be playful, be imaginative, be a little immature and fresh from time to time, but do not fucking steal from me and expect me to nod along and say "aw shucks, you're right.  I should've known if I was at all considerate toward you I would end up broke and hungry.  I'll be on my toes next time, a-hyuck."

Be a better person.  Have some consideration.  Life's not free and friends don't fall from the sky everyday.  You'll find yourself without community fairly swiftly.  Don't be that shifty and somehow all too casual eight year old in the room always looking to see how far and for how much you can take people.  Chances are very good you are known and it's only a matter of time.

A Brief Return to B6

After the diagnosis there was a lot of disbelief before understanding that I am wired differently and there is nothing that can be done about it besides modification.  Modifying my physiology and the chains that come with modifying.  Keeping schedules and junk and folding money into paying for medications and things and paying for visits to psychiatrists.  You can't spell psychiatrist without tryst.

I'm golden.  Understanding how I'm different was very difficult.  I still don't fully comprehend it.  I'm not okay with being different.  Expectations change a lot.  Do you want an exception or not?   Yes, we do, but we do not because we are efforting being a part of common society.  Aye yo, check it out, here's the baseline: getting exceptions makes us softer and enables if what we want is to be fully assimilated.  When we wreck it's hard to deal with because whatever it was we did made perfect sense to us.  To you, it's grounds for divorce.

And yep, my phone is officially broken.  The worst part about the diagnosis, the initial one, was my ignorance.  Let's keep this tight and short, but not to the point of complications.

I hated my psychiatrist.  I still do.  I know we are long passed the point of forgetting, but I have not forgotten him.   He has forgotten me though after I lost insurance.  Everyone has to get paid.  I refuse to check out.  I was bold before then, I am more bold now.  Capital lock.

Have you got my back?  I've got yours.  I tried to smash my skull apart on the side of the police car when I first got reigned in.  When I realized I had to reign myself in the morning after and they explained what I tried to do when they were putting me inside the squad car.  And it's alright now.  I'm not angry or mad.  They're different things.  Mad is angry without reasoning.  Mad dog.  Shoot him down.  Angry dog... alright, he has reason still.  I am neither mad nor angry.

After the diagnosis I had no idea where I could possibly go.  It was a true diagnosis and I have to lie out of the ass to avoid internment again.  After the diagnosis and hearing what it would cost to make me better, literally hundreds of dollars per month (and hearing too that the trial period ends, hence the name "trial period" until they get the milligrams right) and knowing what I was bound to make...  it's like being stuck with a home you can't actually pay for and you cannot move either.  You cannot pull up sticks and pick a new lot.  It was terrifying.  I had no idea where I could possibly go, so I decided to move off grid.  No meds.  No pills.  Just force.  True force.

Sometimes thing come apart a lot.  Sometimes control does not talk back to you no matter how many signals you send out, out of reflex.  If I could afford it, I would go.  Easily and quietly, I would go.  Let's go though, and keep it brief.

Back to basics.  I know I need help.  It's part of what I am working for.  Why I go to work everyday.  Start your day group was nice.  It was excellent.  I do not want to go back there.  I am damn near 30 years old and I do not belong there.  I know who I am.  I have to work harder and as time increases I know I have to work harder yet and I am okay with that.  I'm not and will never be a made man.  I am willing to work and that's something!  Diagnosis is not, I will prove it to you, ever a death sentence.




///Minamina Goodsong - "First Movement"

A Quick Thought on Authenticity and (ffs) Go Protocol

Knowing what you are and what you're not is where it begins, that's the baby step.  There's nothing wrong with being a baby.  Complaining let's you know, if you've ears for it, that you are not necessarily happy with the way things are or how they're going.  Everyone's a baby.  At some point.  Everyone complains.

The option is to take the turn or drive the motivation straight over the edge and hope you land somewhere nice.  Hope you land in something like a pillow factory or a bin of sand, or just anything more forgiving than concrete.  Take the turn.  Complain like a baby and then adjust.  You can take your authenticity to the grave with you or you can exist within it.  Sounds pretty simple.  It's a bit more complicated, unfortunately.  Sometimes you just have to realize that you are striped and a tiger and sometimes imaginary in a pack of lions.  Doesn't mean you have to be at war with the lions.  You're both after the same things.  There's nothing wrong with that.  You've honed your way and they've honed theirs and you're on the same field now so you have to learn how to play together effectively that you not step on one another's paws and sink teeth too close together on the same kill.

It's "go protocol."  It's trigger pull.  It's losing my train of thought and getting heckling from the rest of the committee and continuing to ball because YOURE NOT THE BOSS OF ME YOU @#$%S.

Fight through the noise.  Embrace the sound.  Love who you want to.  It does not matter if they love you back.  You have the right to love whomever and whatever you choose to, whomever and whatever you can't refuse to.  If they cannot respect that, it's their loss.  In a world lessed for loves lost, why waste it?  Let it fly.  Untenable as it may be, let it fly.  Let it fly!  Allow it to cross the distance that must be enforced for whatever reasons are reasonable.  Include a few that are not.

Remain authentic.  Stick to the protocol.  You have not lived as long as you have by ignoring protocol.  When the Go sign says go,  go!  Think twice, for sure.  "Fo Sho!" does not mean for show.  I can put on a fantastic show when I want to.  I can put on a show for the fucking ages.  Fo sho means for sure and it's pretty much a miniature pact.  A handshake and a signature of gumption.  With no risk comes no reward and you know what comes without whisk?  I do.  I'll give you another second to guess.  Time's up.  Without whisk you get a big old cup of pineapple pulp and undissolved sugar at the bottom of your pitcher of pineapple tea.  Gross.  Also, really hard to drink.

Obey Go Protocol.  Stay authentic.  Bow to be courteous, not to fit better.  If you win the single combat and fit well, you'll hate them later because they will know what you did.  They will talk about the event, if not active, in passing.  You will know too.

The combination is not friendly.  They are not looking for maps the same way you do.  The same way you are.  Do not expect assistance when you go.  Do not expect support.  Do not armor for resistance either.  You were invited for a reason.  You were on their wing for a reason.  That reason may not be for back up should combat come down.  That reason may not be for mounting an assault that day.  That reason may not be for humor or for "to hell with them"s.  You may never know what that reason's reasoning inside their head was, but there was a reason.

So go.  Go!  Stay authentic.  There was something asked of you.  Think about what you've asked of them in return by answering the howl.  The details will work themselves out, if they do.  The details will work themselves out, if they don't pull your card again.  Through the noise, through the fire, through the poise, through the ire.  For once,

allow yourself to see it their way and do not Chameleon.  Do not lock up.  For @#$%s sake, remain authentic.  Uncertainty is a bitch, be certain of this.




///Girl Talk - (Ask About Me)      chapter one...  still writing the jacket

A Brief Intermission and Yes, I Know You Don't Work Here

I just want to know if you've seen tea bags anywhere in Wal-Mart.  That's all.  I'm not hitting on you.  I've been over the aisles six times now multiplied by six aisles and I cannot for the life of me find any tea and it's getting frustrating and I know I'm a little not all there, but it makes sense that if there is a coffee section with a very wide selection of coffees and methods of making coffee there should at least be a shanty town for the people who are not allowed to have coffee and do enjoy the brewed beverages containing caffeine who still worship at the teapot instead of the press or grinder.  It makes perfect sense.

I know you don't work at Wal-Mart.  I only ask so I can know that I'm not losing it and my map is still relatively accurate.  No need to flip an attitude Ms. Ma'am.  No need to ignore me Mr. Guy.  It's a genuine concern.  Not a conversation starter.  I don't get out much and I like it that way.  Who wants to start a relationship based on the search for tea at a store that has no business selling foods and potables in the first place!  Absurd.  It's a yes or no question.  And for that matter, what's wrong with working for Wal-Mart, you classist....  ugh..... it's weird sometimes how closely the town I love abuts a town a have a distinct distaste for.  Well, guess what, mister... we share the same store and I don't like it anymore than you do.  I'll clip the mirror on your double parked Bentley GT on my way out.

It is kinda funny though.  My truck is difficult to park sometimes.  I don't bother with trying to park close to the shopping center entrances because that's asking for a cluster fuck.  Every few times a year though the excessively wealthy find their way to parking in the lots at the shopping center equidistant, them to there and there to me.  They usually park in the way back.  Where I park my horse.  You know where this is going.  I snuggle my beast right up next to them whenever I can.  Inside the lines.  Perfectly parallel.  The ambassador from the other side of the tracks.  As you get older, the games you get to play increase their restrictions and demand more creativity.

I know you don't work in my factory.  I know what you build is not what I build.  I know what you make is not what I would make, given the same choices.  Don't be offended if I ask for help because, when I ask, I've already been over the information and the outcomes and the paths and I know going it on my own is begging disaster.  I don't want your help.  I need your help.  Need makes strange things out of us.  Cookies and milk and a nap?  You can have a nap, or cookies and milk, not both.  I know you don't work here; can you save me some time?

Never did find the tea.  When I got home, though, found a full box of 100 bags of black tea in the pantry, still in it's plastic wrap.  Yep, already solved.  It was one of the happiest cups of tea I had in a little while.  Massive relief.  I could see why tea leaves could and have started wars.


///Stereolab - "Space Moth"   ...i've been here before, haven't you?

S'not All Guts and Glory

It isn't.  I get overly dramatic.  It is a study.  It is very important to learn and understand appropriate responses, but the study need not dampen the human inside of you.  The human inside of you should never need or be dampened.

To put the darkness forward is a matter of preference, not necessity.  To attack every upcoming day is to ask for a war.  Approach it analog.  It's not coming at you digital.  One or zero or one or zero.  There is so much more that can be done.

The responses do push from one boundary to the other, but it is possible to find a zero beside the one, a one nestled in beside the zero, and start a new language.  That's happy.  Bad in a good way.  It's easier to view digitally, but better to view analog.

Failure is vision.  Wear your eyes.  Use them or be prepared to lose them and cry through your nose because nothing is supporting your eyelids.  Power chords.  I know I get obsessed with damage control.  It's only because damage is very difficult to control.

Damage requires a ton of run cycles and making plans A through G takes a ton of run cycles too.  I do wonder what I look like from the outside in these days.  It's a curiosity that demands attention.  It's not all bad though.  Don't let me get you down.

I have a lot of questions.  As I'm navigating my way through the years and continuing to find new ways to look at the mission and questioning the mission and my own value within the operations frame works, I am finding light not easy to describe.

At least, not easy to describe better without using terms embracing negative pasts.  It kind of strikes me as learning how to compose drawings using negative space.  Instead of tracing the damage and the brush fires limits, tracing the brush.

Tracing the wild life instead of the pelts.  Nature still speaks to me.  Tech and currency still eats me.  People continue to fascinate me though I find them terrifically repellent.  I try to keep one ear on the ground and one up to the sky.

I have to reassure myself that I am fine.  I have to maintain my distance.  I cannot allow distance to dissolve.  What I want cannot be obtained through casual means.  It will take explicit and thorough aggression.  

We are years away.  It's not all guts and glory.  Relax.  Absorb and do not over think.  It's not all bad.  It's not all analysis.  Do not remove the human from inside you.




///Bjork - "Hidden Place"  im simply suggesting

That instant

you realize your deoderant is wearing off and you don't have time to shower, but...

..and then you kick yourself in the pants because it's not new information, but...

i'm coming in for a crash landing, gear up, and respect their space.

Stand Up Act 8 (stoneissuers, night work, handouts and nickle go)

(Stand Up Act 7)

Goddamn stoners.  God fucking damn stoners.  I don't have a problem with them for the most part.  I really don't.  Pot is legal in more states than anyone could have imagined three years ago.  Not even a decade, just three years.  Unless I'm completely off and time has been moving faster than I thought.  Or slower than I thought.  I'm not good with time.  It has nothing to do with drugs, just alcohol.  And college.  In college everything is oriented to due dates and when you need to wash your clothes because you're going home to your parents and they reek of the actual world instead of the bubble they built for themselves wherever.  I'm not good with time, but pot is legal and it's great.  It should be legal.  There is nothing wrong with it at all.

All kinds of legal things turn people into worthless sacks of shit all of the time and they're fine.  Weed doesn't even do that to people on a consistent basis.  If you smoke a pound of weed a month you will be in much better shape than the person who eats ten pounds of candy a month.  To the point though, I don't hate smokers or pot smokers, but stoners are a bit different.  Stoners are that one shade further beyond the smoker, for better and for worse.

Some stoners need that extra nudge to push and motivate and inspire them to operate and create and shove work through and enjoy other people and enjoy the chase of life in general.  Some stoners like that extra nudge to mooch and coast, but not just coast, but accelerate, and entertain and smooth their own course through the path of least resistance, not as a way of escape or relaxation, but as a way to live.

Everything takes on the slight pale of life and death once they enter the circle.  A routine trip to the gas station becomes a twenty minute conversation on the meaning of life and how hard it is to survive in the real world and if God hadn't created the man who created the coldcut sandwich the world as we know it would be horribly altered and disfigured to the point where walking out of your front door would be suicide.  Jesus christ, calm down.  We're gonna get food.  I know you couldn't bring yourself to leave your front door without someone walking with you, but for fucks sake, it's not the end of the world.  Not by a long shot.

I'm even okay with adventurous stoners.  The kind that get really high and then want to operate.  I'm a little bit of an adventure stoner streaker myself from time to time.  I know it's obnoxious in some ways.  It doesn't mean that I don't do it and want to push other people to, but I am that, and I'm never really all that sad when people shoot me down.  When I'm smoking, "I just had the absolute greatest idea ever" is the last thing you want to hear out of my mouth.  For one: it's probably a way too elaborate or distant quest to achieve a goal unique to me that I couldn't do without other people there (everything from playing some sort of multiplayer only game to crossing some distance to see or buy something much better crossed in a car).  For two: there's probably a good chance someone might actually get hurt (adds to the allure of the adventure.  When you have bad credit all you have is yourself, so while you gamble with imaginary numbers and scores, I gamble with my body...  because I have no credit).  And for three: by the time the idea comes out of my mouth, no one feels like moving.  I'm okay with that.

The stoner I can no longer stand is the stoneissuer.  The girl or guy who always wants to know what you have and then compares it to other high end "brands" they've had.  No one asked you.  Literally, no one asked you for your opinion on how this stacks up to Phonecase White Palidin (insert semi-obscure flower phylum here).

Yes, that's why I invited you over: to stick your nose into my bag and not shake your head, but give me the "weird" eye and ask the admonishing question of  "how much did you pay for this."   I'm begging the question in offering it, aren't I.  I needed your expertise.  I wasn't just bored the fuck out of my mind and out of videos to jerk off to and thought it might be fun to have someone else to talk to for an evening.  No, I wanted your sharp nose and your ten point critique of what is essentially free weed for you.  I'm not basically paying for your company like a truck driver picking up some fawn eyed drifter for a few hours of bullshitting til the next stop.

You asked to drop by and what I wanted you to do was pull out your pocket scale and shake your head and tell me I was lied to and it was almost a gram light and repeat over and over again that back home you wouldn't have paid over X amount of dollars for what I had while you ground up your Panda Blue Light Special shipped in from the west coast.

The stoneissuer is particularly distasteful because as soon as theirs runs out you are the first one they call.  You are the first one they try to buddy up with and then they come over and try to be modest about how much they are taking and go out of their way to point it out that they are somehow doing you a favor because what they usually get is more pure and they're not used to smoking a gentler high and the taste is way off but they can get accustomed to it.   Meanwhile the baseball bat in the corner keeps chirping in your ear "come on, just do it," but I love company more than my own sometimes and know better than to act out and act out of rage.   Most of the time.

The stoneissuer will trash talk you sideways.  The kind of person who, in a race, would nudge your back end out and force you off the road to get ahead and then say "well, I was holding my same racing line, but you were diverting from your own to hold me back, so it's kind of your fault you spun out into sand on your last lap."  They will passive attack in attempts to try to insure and assert their value to the group as the token expert, without realizing that no one really cares as long as they get something out of experience.

Stoneissuers are usually descended from higher, no pun intended, echelons of the hierarchy of smokers.  Rich folks all too often, trying to distance themselves, but be included in, the experience.  The thing that makes them the most distasteful is that, if they aren't already motivated to stay away from the lower grades for the fact that moving up is sort of a socioeconomic graduation and going backward implies some sort of failure in tastes or earning power or status, as soon as their shit runs out and they go enough days without it, they're right back with you.  Suddenly what made them curl their lips and flare their nostrils and roll their eyes like you just said One Direction is the greatest band to grace the face of the Earth, becomes "hey, that's not so bad.  I kind of feel it."  Suddenly "how much did you pay for that" and "you got ripped off" turns into "that's pretty good" and "is it alright if I steal some more?"

Yeah, it's fine, but nightwork is great.  I think I realized one of the reasons why I like working night shifts so much, and it's nothing profound.  It comes down to the fact that I don't give all that much of a shit when it comes to my clothes.  It's not a complete abandon fueled by the functionality of homeless people.  Nothing close to that.  I have no one to impress so it makes no sense to impress people.

Sometimes it's a matter of detailing.  Everyone likes a well detailed car or house, why not clothing.  I am sometimes gripped by the thrill of matching.  It's real.  I am aware of my body and I ride in my body all the time.  Everyone does.  When things match, it's easier to not notice it and when you do notice it, you have color cues to make that understanding zip through your brain that much faster and then, that much faster, you can carry on being yourself.  For the same reason I don't read too much into people obsessed with matching.  It really is a matter of cutting down variables and freeing up much more, or at least that much more, free time and better yet, uninterrupted thought and brain space.  That's pretty damn valuable for the small price of picking out clothing beforehand.

Consider when you're deep in thought after work, pulling the day in front of your eyes like that choppy 8mm film on the two spools that burns up if you leave it in front of the lens too long.  That stuff your parents parents watched home videos of themselves on in dusty attics or family renunion Wonder Times grainy video project screen things or whatever it was they did kind of things.

That spool is running and you're trying to figure out ways to do that again, but without that 45 seconds of frames in the lunch break room where you put the pack of coffee filters you didn't pay for in your locker and that 72 second stretch of frames where you could've and also would've done your job better because you actually do care, but come off wrong sometimes over the phone.  That spool is running and right in the middle of it.  When you are beginning to build some understanding, it switches to a high definition video of rally cross for an hour compressed into ten seconds and switches back.  Bad news.

That's what makes night work so great.  It takes the work out of work.  You can up and go with pants with their crotch completely ripped out and no one gives a shit and it already blends in with rest of the night because the lighting is so poor so even if you did look down it wouldn't matter because you can't see anything.  It's a near perfect situation.  Everything is dark and everything follows that dark pattern so even if someone did think they could see something, they wouldn't be able to really know beyond what's inside their own head and everyone knows as much as half of what's in their is bullshit anyway.

Nobody wants handouts.  Sometimes you have to help your dealers, because some of them do it for a living and are subject to market forces same as any kind of investor.  The truth is there are two sorts of dealers.  There are the shorters and the careers.  The shorters are on a temporary schedule.  Volatile products and volatile prices.  They're on the get wealthy very quickly and retire permanently track or supplementary income (McDonalds) track.

Sometimes you have to help folks out.

"Do you want some gas money?  I can just bring you some money for gas.  I don't want anything right now."

"You might as well take it though.  You can use it for something is all I'm saying."

"I know, but I would rather have the money for later, 'cause there isn't a bank I can go to is what I mean.  That's you're issue right now."

"If you just take this right now, I'm fine with that.  I just need to put gas in my car because I had to push it off the street when the engine stopped."

Pineapple Express backwards.  I always feel a little bad when my parting words are "hey, take care of yourself."  Even when nothing is given, the sentiment itself implies the person it's directed to is completely incapable of and must be reminded to do better by their machinery.  Nobody wants hand outs.  Ever.

Happiness is contagious.  I'll give you a nickle both to go down either road A or road B.  Whichever makes me happy as I go is the one I'm taking.

Bricking the Computer

All I want to do is fix a hit and I know that I can't.  That's the fast track to crack and it tastes so good.  People get all concerned about weight loss and image that it grows insane.  How about a powder that takes away the urge to snuffle?  That would be nice.  Get on it science!  Help me rewire my brain maps.  That's the pill conversation again though and that is looped over as many times as it can be without taking action.  In the meantime I have a good stable of Krylon calling my name.  I want to try the chrome, but my lungs are not having it.  In fact they're not having much of anything lately.  Just how it goes.  At least I'm not pulling knives on anybody.

I hope people feel safe.  Distance is its own thing.  It's not a buffer though.  As long as your legs work you can literally go anywhere to do anything.  Been trying to figure out alibis.  I could walk to New York or Virginia.  The hard part is gonna be explaining my absence.  That's also the easy part.  I have a habit of disappearing.  It happens.  Sometimes you just have to tag up.  If I disappeared for a week to walk to D.C. the only problem would be fueling myself along the way.  Then it's mission accomplished, duck out back home, and problem solved.  Still aggravating though.  A bad kind of hassle.

Shrinking the maps, it gets easier.  Shrinking the maps further, it's a day trip.  Further still, it's a nighter.  We don't do that anymore!  Jexel.  If you're going to accelerate, make it worth it.  The hardest part about burning down a house is sealing the exits.  Or at least making them difficult enough to dissuade navigation.  Then again, you have to take into account the body types you are trying to ash.  It's all math and I struggle with math a lot.  I've always been more geometric.  Visual spatial.  One of the best days I ever had was guessing how many jelly beans were in a jar to the nearest ten.

Sure I could have estimated the volume of a jelly bean, the volume of the jar, and gotten fairly close with a little error mixed in for air space, but it was so much easier to hold in my head if I took a cube slice from one corner and moved it around in my head to form a disc and then raised the disc up to reach the lid.  Same deal, I suppose, but different ways.  Screw math.  What have you done for me lately science?

I jerked off for twelve hours.  Twelve god damn hours.  Twelve gotdamn hours!  I need a boyfriend pretty hard.  Pretty sure I ran through half of my entire library between watching full length videos and skip tracking it to money shots.  I'm not shamed or ashamed by the activity.  At least I know my heart and my cock are still functional.  I'm just head hung cuz I know I'll never get those hours back and I want them.  The toughest thing about free time is figuring out where to spend it.  I want those twelve hours back to draw and sketch and explore the things I can't put into words but I know I can put into pictures if I used that hand to do something besides stroke my pud.  I'm pissed because it was supposed to be a fifteen minute quickie and I couldn't do it on my own that fast.  And I'm pissed because I'm horny so often that it's become a problem that needs solved.  Gotdamnit!

Melange.  I think I may peirce my own nipples today.  So much energy.  Throwing off U two thirty something, or maybe fifty.  Uranium all over the place.  I don't know how to shut it off.  Shoving carbon into the pile, but I can't undo Chernobyl no matter what I try.  Part of the issue is dealing with getting my body back.  I wanted it back so badly and now I have it and I can start building up from the foundation because I finally got back there, but the house that foundation wants only knows how to speak in terms of violence instead of the next step; love.  That misunderstanding and shadow and grift breaks my heart and hurts.  Does violence to me and I want to reverse it and I don't know how and if I could, a pure reversal, I do violence to everyone and everything within the radius.  It's a lose lose.

You're breaking my heart, sweatness.  Spill the bucket.  We are weak ends.  I need you.  I need you to explain to me how rain comes about and tell me the little squirrels running at the corners of my eye are just shadows and not black lizards doing a slow hat dance.

I'm trying to brick the computer.  I'm trying to reset it.  If I can't reset it, I would be happy to silence it.  Stop making noise you tire kicked fall out bumper bad doored dumb coded winkied rusted out piece of .... clawing at myself.  I want that soft tissue out of me.  I know a few ways to do it, but none of them are acceptable.  Rip.  Rip.  Get out of me.  Get out!  I want them out.  I want the caucus to end.  I want the factory to shut down.  I want there to be no more discussion.  I want to be normal.  I want to be you.  I'm tired of tears strolling down my fucking face unprovoked.  I want to love the idea of children.  I want to be married.  I want to be skilled.  I want to be able to do math.  I want to be able to be relied on.  I want honey shots.  I want more tree climbing.  I want to hear less and nose more.  I want shot for.  I want dap.  I want candy hahaahahahahahahahaha.  I want ... I want a lot of things.  I'm trying to brick the computer so I can start over again.  And wanting to start over again is sometimes hard to admit.


///Junkie XL - "War"  sunrise on Titan.  I got your pith.  I raise you 400 horse power at the brakes.  Eat me.

Birthday Sex (minus sex [also birthdays])

So I'm thirty five and a half again.  For the second time.  Since I've been keeping track of iterations.  I'm on my twenty sixth iteration.  I will not admit a lot of things, but I will admit it's kind of nice to be thirty five, and it's also nice to spell out numbers.  There's something that gives them more weight and pizzazz when you spell them out.  Maybe it's the greater visual volume and maybe I'm just a sucker for language and textual conflagrations.   Mostly I think I like to feel my fingers fly across the keyboard and tap out music the only way I know how, but not the only way I can learn, but the only way I know how just yet.  It's fun.

I've come to some realizations in being thirty five for the twenty sixth time.  None of them make particular sense with regard to each other.  It's kind of difficult to get the points to match up beyond courses of life times, let alone multiple life times.  Really, it's going to take a significant amount of time, I assume, to parse backward and piece together iterational check ins, but I do not believe in doing so that I will be at all disappointed with what the effort turns up.

So here I am.  This is a place holder for future reference to me.  Yes, it is all about me this time, but not really.  It's about the overarching work, but mostly I want to fire off a buoy to mark the spot in the sea of experience.

Sub-mostly, the mostly that bangs across the finish line just after the most mostly, I want to document a child singing a song about birthday sex.  Because it was hilarious, and we were hot boxing the car, and the kid was loving it.  And jumped up, after unfastening himself, on the back seat and started to sing birthday sex just like that time in Chicago, minus the drugs and the easily disarmed anti kid windshield splatterification device.  I almost died laughing.  And that's why, ladies and gentlemen, we park before boxing.  We're not savages.  We're forward thinkers.  Or something like that.

Either way.  Birthday sex might be one of the greatest songs ever and I hope it makes it to a Kids Songs album at some point.  It's good to be 35.  The only male enhancement drug I need on my twenty sixth iteration is every extends extra extreme.  Look it up.  It is the greatest arcade game ever made.  Because when you're this old and this young all you need is a D pad, a lettered button, good music, and explosions and you'll be half masted all day.

Ramping Up

I have been ramping up to this, and I have been a little bit absentee as well.  Side by each.  It has been tough getting back to here.  Circuitous. Among other words and expletives.  It has been a very difficult cycle of days.  I do not know how else to place it.  Everything is back where it belongs.   A lot of argumentation internal.  It catches up with you and before you know it you are dying while still breathing.

It;s been tough though.  But what hasn't?  Production has lapsed, but what is avoidable?  Art is up however. Graphics.  Graphics and graphic design.  It;s tough sometimes when people talk to you and say they/re artists, but you know in their hearts they are not.  It ruffles feathers and rumples collars.  It's difficult to tell them otherwise because, in the telling, you are admitting skill and I have a hard time, still, admitting that I know what I'm trying to do, for the most part, on easels.  Given easels.

If you look at your reflection, sometimes what you see is not what you know you could be, given everything that came before; that hesitation, those devils and those guns, are what keeps me from being a shameless self promoter, but are you hiding in the trees?

The point is that it is all an elaborate dream and there is no way you can spin manslaughter 2 into mistaken identities and a lack of coverage or maybe it's just black town.  I don't know.  Hard decisions.  I know how much you are supposed to take, but how much am I supposed to take.  Against the wall.  Am I supposed to want sex or is sex supposed to want me.  Is the BIC pipe a one hitter in the sense that you use it once or is it a one hitter in the sense that you can't light crack twice?

I don't know where to go from here, but I'm not quite sure if I should be so entertained with the idea of the opportunity to leave.   Cash money, mother nucca.  It just drives the nerves sometimes.  It's hard to admit failed suicide attempts.   What you can do though is tape up your wrists and throw some fists.

Not to get oxygen necessarily, but just to get inside your britches.  Feel your (can't spell it) huch spa.  Feel your id on the outside and taste a little blood, instead of digesting it.  There's too much blood and sunlight to go around.  I am trying to draw a line between pretending and good acting and I am having a difficult  time of it.

Sometimes things go down in a fashion that breaks your heart.  Sometimes your older sister whiffs on painting your nails.  Sometimes things go down in a way that throws shit out of whack.  Sometimes the throwing is enough to reframe ideas about things you've been mulling.  I don't know if this is better or worse than talking in third person.   It is difficult to be concerned.

What was I going for?  Chronic masturbation.  No,  Laughter.  Nod your head because I know that I;m right.  I'm not the capital G.  I'm not nothing either.  Hang out with me in the middle ground.  I swear I'll love you like I've never loved myself.  Andd I won't promise to make you happy.  And I won't promise anything more than 18 hours out, but I will.  I won't, but I will give you one year with the dragon in one day and rape is a device of the lesser and if you would be considering kissing me now I would not be opposed

to standing there


///track not found - lets get back up on that horse.  I'm sorry I left you.  Please be kind.  I'm coming out of left field in a full sprint out of the clear blue sky

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

The Super L33t Effect

The l33t effect in salary capped sports, and to a lesser degree uncapped sports, in America is a shame.  It has nothing to do with LeBron as a person, or his mental toughness, or what he does in "winning" time, or crunch time, or whether or not he steps up in big moments, or is "passive", or whatever.  The only thing it has to do with is the perception that you have to, absolutely have to be paid requisite to your abilities and relative to your peers at all times and to do anything less would be an admission of some kind of failing in your skill set, relative to everyone else playing the same game, and is absolutely unacceptable.

I mean, I get it: professional athletes are competitive in every aspect of their game and it makes sense that the competitive "I am the best, I will get the best" mentality bleeds over into other aspects of their lives.  I wasn't terribly shocked when Tiger Woods slept with other women.  The guy's a competitor.  Were you really shocked back in the day when Tanya paid that guy to smash Nancy's leg with a hammer?  Did I get those names in the right order?  I hope I'm remembering that correctly.  Anyway, when athletes do ridiculous things, why is anyone terribly shocked?  9/10ths of their lives is spent growing up in their sport and continuing that sport on an adult level against other people who have devoted the greater parts of their lives to the same game would, could, and does warp them with respect to 9 to 5 human beings who don't do what they love (not even close) and who haven't been doing it since they were old enough to... I dunno... carry a plate from the kitchen to their table and back when they were done eating.

What I've been thinking is that the LeBron effect basically makes it harder to win as a team, rather than easier.  Maybe call it the A-Rod effect, or don't.  That wouldn't be all that accurate as there aren't salary caps in baseball.  You can throw away as much money as you want depending on your market.  It's still there though, but a shadow of what it is in capped sports.  In salary capped leagues the ultra l33t athlete effect is real.  Basically, you are awesome.  Well, I should start off by saying "this is where it starts."  So, basically, you are awesome at what you do.  Top twenty in the country.  In the top fifty human beings on the face of the Earth at whatever thing it is that you do.

However, the only way you get to do it, is by signing on with a team and the team only has so much money to spend.  On top of that, there is already an established amount of money everyone else who can't do it as well as you gets paid.  So you have to be paid more because you're better than them.  It'd be like a CEO of a grocery store being paid bagger money.  The money establishes, or rather, confirms hierarchy.  Pay grades are like school grades in that way.  The problem arises when you are so good that a team has to pay you so much money that there is none left to pay the baggers or cashiers or maintenance staff and the grocery store eventually folds, but damn there was a good CEO leading them straight into the ground.    You could take less money, but taking less money would be the same as saying "I'm not the best at what I do and I want to acknowledge it publicly."

The super l33t effect basically rots out the infrastructure, completely blows it out.  So as contracts inflate, the model of a few super l33ts surrounded by dreck grows less and less tenable.  I guess what I'm getting at is this:  every time something goes wrong with the Miami Heat NBA team and the finger pointing starts up, I cringe a little bit.  It is a no win situation for that team and everyone involved.  If they do eventually win a championship or two, it will be great, but I think it will be the last time, at least for the foreseeable future, that any general manager will make moves that will eat the massive majority of their available folding money on a massive minority of their players (the elite few on the team).  It's a bit ridiculous.  It's a self perpetuating system.  If LeBron could take less money to bring in a better supporting cast, would he?  I guess that's up for debate too.  But, we'll never know.  So screw it.

Either way, athletes are paid way too much money regardless.  Average people aren't paid enough.  And God, if he exists, is a Steelers fan.  That is all.

T minus two

T minus two.  My knuckles are throbbing, but feeling my pulse and not feeling it inside my ears like standing on railroad ties and hearing the rails twang in the New York tubes is pretty nice.  Kind of reminds me of the travel of time.  Well, not kind of, it definitely does.  Tracking time has always been a weak point of mine.  Part of why I like to wear my keys where I can hear them jingle.  It reminds me that I'm not dreaming and what is happening is real.  You get used to tracking time properly, and then the uses you've made of common things become common place and you start to lose it.  Start to lose tracking.

Part of why one of the best gifts I ever received was a watch that set itself.  I never wear a watch in my dreams.  Part of how I know I'm dreaming.  Part of why I get so unsettled when I don't have it.  Endless wrist rubbing.  Still driving back from the depths of space, but making good time.  That's all I can really ask of myself.  Crisis averted. Not really.  Postponed.  Defaulted?  I don't know what the hell the word is.  All I know is that the boards went up red and one by one the status lights and checks are coming back green and blinking yellow and I'm not dead.

Coming back in touch with reality.  Tuning down the squelch that ran far enough out of control to induce panic. I had a dream that I could remember.  It was an odd reassurance.  The absence of breath snatching night terror.  Sleeping without sweating.  I'm learning again how to let go.  The reemergence of the bridge and the division of real and manufacture.  How to converse and relate.  Even though I am still refusing conversation beyond essentials.  I am forcing myself to do it.  Because without it, people eventually forget you.  I can and do spend days without actually talking.   I used to have fairly corrupted speech patterns.  Hearing sentences try to come out of my mouth was offensive to my own ears.  Still is sometimes.  Because I know I can be so much clearer on paper.  That and conversation was such a weapon so often used against me growing up.  I never much liked it.  I guess if I had my way everyone would have their vocal chords cut out of them at birth and we would all speak through written word.

But I don't have my way.  And it's not a bad thing.  I am a minority intelligence. Trapped in a minority format.  Cased in a pretty decent body.  I've got that going for me.  Can't complain on that front.  I could use an extra few inches of height though.  Went to get a new license before my birthday and current one expired and the woman at the motor vehicle administration desk asked me if I was still 5'10".  I thought: yes, you feckless drawn on eyebrowed 60 year old duffle of a snootch!  Gotta work on my height complex.  Because there was no way in hell any stranger deserves that sort of first response over an honest question.  What I said was:  yep, still short as hell.  She laughed.  I was glad I made the right choice on that one.

I stepped out into the alleyway beside my house and the sun was oppressive.  My eyes have been unprepared for bright days for as long as I can remember.  When I look directly at the sky it feels like it vibrates my skull.  When I was younger, the winter sky was the worst to suck into my sockets.  It literally hurt to look up against a flat noon overcast.  It hurt to look near it.  You get used to the pain though.  And then you spend a few days indoors and the pain takes your breath away.  

I don't hate the daytime.  I know it's necessary.  My skin feels better after a good sun drenching.  Mechanically, I operate better with higher fidelity in my eye reads to mind writes.  Fewer hallucinations, sometimes, but not a tight enough correlation to make me believe the two are connected, but enough in common to at least give it a shot on the regular.  And then, sometimes, I just hate being seen.  Sometimes I think, people simply knowing someone like me exists is a burdensome thought they'd probably not entertain if they didn't have to.  I suppose I wouldn't if I had my way.  But who ever really does.

Something smells like cloves around here and I have no idea what.

I started a serial, but have yet to publish it.  A bad beginning.  There is a massive disconnect between my ability to express the images I want to express and the images I am envisioning that I want to express.  I'm thinking I will do it anyway and learn as I go.  Not like I'm getting into a graduate program in my lifetime.  Aw don't say that?  Just being pragmatic so I don't waste energy pining for nonsense.  My chances are probably somewhere in the atmosphere of spaceman and race car driver by now.  So I'm just going to continue to try to develop on my own.  Can't really ask for more, and with everything flaming out so unpredictably, why would you or I really want more?  You can't get in trouble if you're asleep.  You can't fail out of school if you're not in.  You can't crash a motorcycle into a freight train if you don't own one.  However, you can die in space, without ever once going to space camp.  That is a fact.  Write that one down.  There will be a test.  At some point.

The good thing, probably the best thing, about damaging yourself without ruining yourself is that it makes it impossible to damage yourself again, without maximum effort and eating one hell of a lot more pain, until you've healed.  The down side is you now know where the line used to be and can take it a little farther.  Sometimes a lot farther.  The up side of knowing where the line lies is knowing how to skirt it and test it again without making the same mistakes (e.g. whatever doesn't kill you makes you more than you were).  That is the usual application for me.  It's not always expanding limits.  Sometimes it's just learning the rules that govern your unique physiology.  Your unfortunate mind body marriage.

Staring into the barrel of another alley morning.  It burns, but we deal.  You can't hide from the sun forever and the world is calling.  I am looking forward to 27.  I hope 27 is looking forward to me with eyes just as hard.  Just as star drowned.  Just as ready.  If you want to avoid serious injury, you have to pull the knife almost as hard, but no harder, than you push.


///Deadmau5 - "One Trick Pony"