How To Fast Forward the Next 8 Years

It's quite simple.  The world is not going to end because Donald Trump was elected.  The offices will struggle to accomplish anything because the policies don't work, don't exist, or both.  They'll distract the American public for four years with scary this and that.  Throw in a war on something at home and more involvement in a war somewhere else.  Start the next election cycle highlighting how everything that went wrong was because everyone else screwed it up and the country wasn't ready for real change yet and it would take at least four years to undo nonexistent office corruption and then you have Donald Trump re-elected and nothing gets done again on a platform of "every magical thing  that can't be done or makes no sense, but makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, will get done this time".  Some people get a lot richer.  Most people don't.  Tons of imaginary money changes bank accounts, a bunch of people get sick, some businesses collapse, the environment takes a hit, international relations trip over themselves, segregation gets worse, and then a Democrat is elected again when a few more people jump over to the other side of the aisle because they don't want to be associated with the consequences any more and they're tired of trying to explain how their ideas worked, but didn't, but obviously absolutely did, but actually data can be manipulated to say anything of course, so... you know... allow my colleague to explain.

No need to leave the country.  Just yawn and go back to sleep and wake up 8 years from now.  Things will be worse.  Trying to change them will be impossible until the people holding the levers have to step away and everyone has a fresh, 8 years long, understanding of what is and is not to be feared and challenged instead of what they've been distracted or tricked or worn down into believing.  Yep, 8 years sounds about right for the messaging and programming to finally fade.  Just try to live the best life you can in the meantime and do what you can to keep your life and loved ones from collapsing under the weight of lunacy and if we're all lucky 4 years will be all it takes for folks to snap out of the flash & magic show.

Then with that Democrat, everyone on the other side will start clamoring "what about us" even though their lives under so and so Republican, locally or nationally, didn't get much better because it literally can't get much better without extracting freedoms from other people (liberties and justices have to come from somewhere eventually), but they'll see other lives improving because there is literally that much space for improvement without taking away anything from anyone else.  "Injustice, inequality, we deserve better too" the other side will say and the flash and magic show parade will come crawling over the horizon with their flags and music and swaying tents like a fantastical parade from outer space and it'll start over again and the only thing you can do is hope enough was done before it arrives that much of the work will still be standing when it finally dissipates.




///Paranoia Agent - (Ending Credits) oh, calliope

That Instant

you walk into a tenants laundry basement, having explained to them when they moved in a year ago that their dehumidifier must be run at all times, and the walls are blotched with slimes and buds of mold in all shapes and sizes and the dehumidifier is turned on, not running, and displaying a humidity percentage in the mid eighties and you cannot, for the life of you, understand what the hell is wrong with people that they did not once think, coming and going with armfuls of laundry into a toxic, jungle, health hazard hell, to press the machine's start button after whatever break in its power supply caused it to reset.

Maybe I'm Missing Something

Enough with the ridiculous headlights, please.  Pretty please?  Can someone please step in as a voice of reason and say something?  Anything?  Can we appeal to logic?  How about safety?  How about simple decency?  The idea that hurting other people because "whatever, they can go to hell" is a not good thing.

Yes, we get it.  They're very pretty when you're taking pictures of them, or sketching them in a design lab, or walking around them in your garage or someone else's garage or at a car show.  Sparkly, shiny, shifting through the spectrum of visible light subtly or standing bold and stark and sudden, so alert and commanding or brilliant, smoldering, and devilish, double daring you to put the key in or press the engine on button.  We understand that aspect.  That bending and twisting and running of the finger's tips along that silk membrane between machine and animal, animal and man, man and near sentient machine.  We understand and we are not asking to tamper with that experience or dull it or snatch it away from you, person driving the car with the tremendously intricate, unreasonably high powered headlights.

Remember when you could replace a headlight bulb yourself for $15?  I still can.  Is my car less attractive because it runs $15 headlamps?  I don't care.  I don't love my automobile any less because it doesn't have black bedded lenses that look like a unicorn sneezed a rainbow around the fringes of the beams.

Can we stop with the ultra bright, surface of the sun, "just like driving at noon", lamps?  I'm sure you probably need to see six football fields ahead of you when you are blazing down the straightaway portions of LeMans at 220 miles per hour never, can we tone it down a little bit when the longest straight portion of highway in your city is maybe half a mile and the safest speed you can average on it without killing yourself or someone else in your suv is a brisk 80.  Not to mention, inside the highway ringing that city, with stoplights, you're probably crushing it a blistering 30 miles per hour.  Stop it already.

Every time that chassis hits a bump or a pothole or manhole cover or gentle dip in the road, the angle of that ultra bright, kaleidoscope changes for a split second and my rear view mirror turns into a camera's flash two feet away from my face.  It's so pretty.  It's so pretty.  What could the reason possibly be?  Is it just rich people wanting people to know that their car, their status symbol, is out on the road and people had better take notice.  It's not the standard model either.  The standard model has the LEDs with the white lighthouse grade bulbs.  It's the S model so the white lighthouse grade bulbs have been replaced with omni directional plasma discharge tubes powered by nuclear cold fusion.  Everyone will know what I drive is better than what they drive because they'll see my headlight's coming from beyond the curvature of the Earth.

Jesus, get over yourself.  No one cares.  What they will know is that whoever is driving the car behind them deserves to have their headlights caved in with a hatchet for every other motorists sake.  I'm not against getting creative or embracing the art of lighting, crystals, lenses, and advancing the technology.  I am against taking it way too far.  All of the light is practically false security too.  It only illuminates, but so far, and if you're a bad driver guess what?  You're still going to screw up.  You'll have an extra 500 feet though to make the same dumb decision.

Things are seriously getting out of hand out there.

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 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?

Reinstate Child Labor in America

Getting old doesn't suck. It's the having to be places and do things part of being an adult that sucks. Reinstate child labor. Move the retirement age from 65 to 40. Everyone will appreciate their time more. Less kids having kids because they literally will not have time to fraternize or have idle energy for sex. Less crime because they literally will not have time to learn criminal behaviors. Education is already in the toilet and the vast majority end up in the consumer sector so might as well force them into useful trades before they decide to settle or slip into fast food and department stores for their entire lives. It's all win win. Their dreams won't be crushed. They'll be refined and by the time they reach an age when they know what they want to do, they'll be equipped with the fortitude and determination to get it done, plus they'll have capital in their pocket from years of hard time.

And then they'll have stable hard working families and enough stability and personal knowledge to pursue education without the massive obstacle of trying to "find themselves" standing in the way of learning what they've yearned to learn for decades. I'm not saying throw them into steel mills and whirling machinery that'll tear off their little hands. All I'm saying is, under the right conditions, child labor could probably work wonders for this fucked up country. But it'll never work, because not being able to trust the people at the top of the pyramid is an institution in America and they will find a way to fuck it up if it means they make an extra ten cents in their pocket at the end of the year.

Cheesus Christ, Does Nothing Work?

I'm sorry I've been away. Less sorry than usual. Only because I've been away because I've been working and not because I've been furiously masturbating. It's been hard. The living. The being aliveness of breathing. Not the breathing part. That part is easy. What's been hard is trying to have a continuous thought when bells go off every fifteen minutes. Remember that book about that society that suppressed creativity by fitting every person with an apparatus that sounded a chime every five minutes to interrupt thought and render it's populace unable to create new ideas? No? Well that's what it's been like. A lot of "gotta put bread on the table" things interrupting the "gotta put bread into my skull so I don't check out of this world on some aneurysm shiz".

I've had one of those days. Not really one of those days, but one of those days stretched across an entire week. One of those days where you come down the break room stairs after sitting for fifteen minutes that flew by in a blink because you fell asleep in your chair watching infomercials about magic brassieres and magic belts that will force your body to do things you haven't taught and practiced or considered that maybe your body just wasn't meant to do for any length of time and you go to get back to work and realize, picking up your box cutter that you left your mug of tea upstairs. And it's going to take you another five minutes to go back and get it and your legs are too dead for yet another trip up those damned stairs, but you are already dead thirsty and have to weigh which death is more unpleasant.

One of those days where the fattest jar of the smelliest pickled peppers in piss yellow juice slips out of your clutches because your hands are cramping and every single paper towel dispenser is empty because the people responsible for keeping them filled never do their jobs as well as you do yours. The mop bucket is at the other end of the store, another five minute round trip on sleeping hooves, and when you get there to fill the mop bucket there is no floor soap and the other fluids available would take up the spill and stink right along with the wax finish. You take the bucket and get halfway across the store before you realize its got a flat and you are utterly baffled as to how a plastic wheeled yellow tank of a bucket could have a flat before you realize a thread of the mop came loose and lodged in the wheel and, instead of plucking it out, the bucket was filled and dragged around for weeks, maybe months until the wheel turned into a plastic orange wedge, and since you were too tired to notice it sooner you've left a scratch on the floor several dozen yards long.

You walk the bucket back and have to pick it up and hug it's black stained, deli grease streaked body to yours because walking it back on the floor would double your error. Selecting a new bucket you walk it across the store to the opposite slop sink and find that while there is cleaning solution appropriate for the task, someone was so kind as to snap off the knob, rendering the sink into something more like a flushless urinal, and so you walk the bucket with soap back to the other end of the store with the working sink and wonder why they would bolt the soap to the wall instead of making it possible for you to take the soap to the working sink and prevent having to do the routine all over again, and why the hell you would need a manager to sign off on throwing out a broken bucket in the first place when they so rarely use them they wouldn't know if it was broken or not and can you really not be trusted to make a simple judgement like "a three wheeled bucket is no longer useful."

=sigh= sometimes nothing's working for ya. And by the time you get back to the shattered jar it's been tracked up and down the aisle. By your coworkers. And you wonder how much time you'd do if you just killed them all and called it a day and a win for humanity.


///The Chemical Brothers - "Surface to Air" take flight and forget the world even exists... what i want to do. but its the only outpost in this sector of the galaxy and my ship can't take me far enough to reach the next one. so we keep in touch.

Wall Street

> We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

> Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

> Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

> For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

> So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

> The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

> We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”

End email. I don't normally respond to threads like this, but I was struck by the flippancy and offered a rebuff:

dear content of email

hilarious. if the reduction of the "food supply" ever gets down to hyper competitive opportunists versus ingenuity and survivability,
wall street will find itself in an afghanistan of its own creation. good luck.

rejoicing in what income i have and living on it too. i get home at 5 a.m. if im lucky. but better than lucky is working a sixteen hour day. i work every hour im given and i take hours from coworkers whenever i can. ive been trying to get expelled from the ufcw since the union forced me to join as a condition of employment. good luck coming down here and eating the food off my plate lol. wash your car and cut your own hair and your lawn and everything else you have that needs washing and doing and guarding and tending to.

you might get some of my "food", but im used to being hungry. eventually my knife and fork are taking your hand. and it will be delicious. and ill leave you to moan and divorce and spring idle bastard children in failing school districts because you wont be able to live in the good ones no matter how hard you work at minimum wage jobs that cut and limit your hours and send you home or on leave when you hit the red line they define and the only release you can have is fucking strangers on wellfare with six kids to net massive child support and other benefits that work the system until she files a bogus PFA when you don't pay on time and the fuzz come and lock you up and you lose that job for "no call/no show" and can't get another one for two years thanks to your criminal record.

and then, hopefully, youll buy a shotgun from a pawnshop and end the dance, wherein your children will pick up where you leave off. hilarious. very much enjoyed. mostly because it's reflective, i guess, of an extremely homogenized community versus an extremely diverse community pressed into a stereo typical mold for easy digestion/dissection. also i am super hungry now with all the talking
about food.

not wall street does not equal an inability to compete and dominate. all it means is "not wall street." life can be just as vicious, demanding, painful, unforgiving, unblinking and violent as downtown manhattan any day of the fucking week for many people who have had a different set of opportunities presented to them. capitalize all you want. break your hands trying to beat down doors. the fact of the matter is it's not a level field, will never be a level field, and for civilization to continue to advance or plateau or whatever there will have to be some kind of hierarchy and class system and learn to fucking live with it and pursue yourself. i think. whatever.
hilarious.

i guess its just funny when people beat their chests and say "you couldnt do what i do" without for a second realizing they couldnt do what i do either.

i dont want to be rich or fat and happy or a gym member who would otherwise be fat and happy. all i ask of you, wall street, is that you dont let your "rejoicing" become an obstacle to my happiness.

End Rebuttal.

I don't hate wall street. But if a person with hired landscapers can frown upon those landscapers billing hour of work incorrectly or frown upon a maid secreting away the homeowners possessions, why can't those of us who keep them employed by participating in the economy frown upon its mismanagement and abuse? When you order your cheeseburger at the diner you expect a cheeseburger, not a thing that has been gutted and cheated to make it more cost effective and time conserving for the line cook to make. Sure, I can't solve differential equations easily, if at all, but the fact of the matter is the people who can more than likely couldn't do my job for a week either before they quit to pursue something easier. So I guess we're even. On an uneven playing field.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

No Country, No Courtship. The Noble State.

I don't understand this country. At all. It's not my country. It's goals aren't my goals. It's means aren't my means. It's ends aren't my ends. I suppose "ends" are also covered by "goals", but bear with.

I had a bad day. Everyone has those. Tuning my bicycle has been first and foremost, most recently, because it is the gateway drug to planes of existence I cannot reach and enjoy without it. Tuning the bicycle has been very important. At first tuning it was important because, as hobbies and fascinations go, playing with and exploring the machines performance is a risk/reward, work in/pleasure out, formula that is so often reserved for lesser and greater intellectual pursuits. What you put in is what you get out. What you risk is proportional to how far and away from the initial investment you will potentially succeed. The nice thing about the tuning is being able to feel and play in that sand box with your hands instead of just your head.

Well the bad day ended, or maybe continues to roll beneath the surface like wave functions through deep water, when I realized the tuning was important for other reasons. A machine powered by, and linked so tightly to, your body has to be properly tuned or one or the other will suffer damage at the interface. Well I damaged myself and didn't realize it until taking a shower and swiping at my nether regions to find I was raw as hell, but didn't realize it thanks to how hard I ride and all the adrenaline soaked hours I put in. Seat post is about half an inch too high. High enough to max out my strokes and stride, but too high and high pressured for my nuts. And the gear shifts for the drive sprockets are about a quarter inch to tensed, hence several agonized seconds spent trying to lock in high drive and pull away from a bus that ended with me having to bail and pull the bike up on the sidewalk after stripping the skin of my knuckle trying to engage the shifter. After that I didn't try to do anything else above the call of duty. The requirements of the moment. So maybe the bad beat is over. Maybe the adjustments will work. Maybe I'm just not making any sudden moves so I can't really know if things are tacking the right way or not.

The whole day was a lot like getting ripped out of hyper space with the boards lit up red and having no reason to believe anything should be that wrong. What the hell happened. Why are we stationary? Why now? We haven't gotten to the next destination. Not even close. And all the why trying to remember the lines and lines and lines of information in the manuals that tell you what all the little lights mean and how to fix them and they're related, but it's all over whelming when it strikes thirty at a time. So we troubleshoot and wait, dead in space.

The concept of the noble state struck me today. We are all familiar with solid state being, as I am absolutely obsessed with it. The phase of existence that is pure beingness. Zero wetware. Pure production. Pure interaction. Zero latency. Zero sleep. Zero diversion. This bad day has brought to my table another state. A state with much in common with the noble gases. A state of zero sleep, latency, diversion, and interaction whose mode is one hundred percent wet with zero production. A mode of existence predicated on pure focus to the maintenance requirements of the wetware to keep it functioning and spinning in place and whose pured focus requires the abandonment of all production, whose main symptom is not the decision to interact or not, but the incapability to do so. In the same way noble gases cannot react. A natural cross terminal reaction to the remediation of solid state existence. The "one step too far."

I have been gripped by the noble state recently and I'm trying to break out of it to that happy middle ground of balance. Which brings me back, in circuit, to the titular object. This is a place I cannot understand. Here's why (or at least the most recent example):

My work ethic got my friend promoted. I was happy to be part of it, but I didn't realize until now how large a part I played. My ability to do my job is par infinity. The intensity and strength and focus I brought to my work place is without equal. Literally. There is not a single person in the building who can do what I do, as well as I do it, as often as I do it, to be found anywhere. The manager who is getting deposed, failed to take advantage of what I do. The coworker who is being appointed successfully ascribed his name to what I do and is getting appointed to a higher position that pays double and more. I am, easily, more capable than both of them combined. However, the organization that staffs my place of work prizes seniority, and so my coworker who is half as capable as me but more senior by six months will reap all of the benefits of my toil. Which I was okay with, until the true degree of the leap frogging came to light.

I applied to the program to train managers; an opportunity to enter a phase of employment that would evaluate my ability to manage through an 8 week process. I was denied what amounts to an opportunity to participate in an opportunity to possibly enjoy greater success and use my skills to better the organization as a whole. Because, and as a direct result of my work, my coworker, six months my senior and half as capable, has been called in to fill out paperwork that will assign him to managerial status at another store. So what's wrong with that?

One: he did as little work as the current, temporarily deposed, interim manager. Two: he was the keyholder for the store when the falling temporary manager was not available and I still fulfilled all of the duties with greater fidelity than he did. Three: it was my ridiculous work ethic that got shit done in the face of call offs and short staffing and heavy (1000+ case orders) that made the store immaculate each day. Four: I had to actively manage his incompetence on a regular basis to make sure things ran relatively smoothly (the guy didn't even know how to turn on his two way radio). Five: when the shit hit the fan and there were four people available to put up one thousand cases, more than ten thousand individual items, to shelves, I was the one governing and delegating and executing the processing of the order so that when the peons came to work everything would be laid out correctly for them to do their jobs.

It is just massively aggravating that, in the face of everything that transpired he is instantly appointed, through a few moments of paperwork to a position HE DID NOT EVEN APPLY FOR. I did the paperwork, I went through the three stage interview process. It was something I wanted. I was denied for having "interpersonal issues" that "once resolved and signed off on" would allow me to reapply and be re-evaluated on. He gets to skip all that. Despite constant video surveillance and consistent day to day review of the tapes by the head honcho he still gets credit for "motivating" me? Despite the fact that even with incompetence of the interim manager and the steady output, the steady, ridiculous high numbers I put out, with no direct supervision ever, he gets credit for somehow working magic when it was that morons incompetence that failed to complete the days order after I left?

I don't understand the courtship dance that I'm not doing. I don't know where the "i"s are that I'm not dotting and the "t"s I'm not crossing. Just tired of getting passed up. I would be less jaded if the person skipping all the bullshit I had to go through to get the door close on my foot wasn't white. I would be less jaded if he wasn't ten years older than me. Less jaded if he wasn't six months longer in the bullshit of a union we're forced to join by accepting employment. Less jaded if I didn't do both of their jobs better than them. Less jaded if the only knock on me was having "interpersonal issues". Less jaded if we hadn't been written up the exact same number of times. Less jaded if the videotape, supposedly reviewed daily, didn't show I did twice the amount of work of them both combined. So, I am jaded and disappointed, despite myself.

It was a bad day. Capped off by a lack of harmony between myself and my machine. I don't understand what it is that I have to do to court America. What it is that I have to do to make it a more perfect union. As far as I can tell it is a thing imperfected and continuing on specifically because it is such. Because if the right people are selected to the right posts all the time, capitalism fails because everyone succeeds and in order for it to succeed very talented people have to be made to fail, not because of their talent or their offerings, but because someone can capitalize on their talent and their offerings at cut rates and generate a psuedo free market, a market free of close evaluation for its emulation of its own ideals warped just here and so to generate enough complacency that the end result is the best possible outcome at minimal costs and subterfuge.

I don't know where that last part came from, but it sounds like the start of a fine and provable thesis. Continuity, profit, and production ahead of ability, common sense, and equitable consideration. In the grand scheme, the scheme of things larger than myself I would probably accept that with huzzahs and go get 'ems and fuck yeah Americas. On the scheme of things in which I exist, however, I the words stick in my mouth in favor of "there has to be a better way." So I settle back into a noble state. And preserve myself. Tooth and nail.



///Muse - "Falling Away With You" I think our lives have just begun. You can feel the guitar climb and claw with the vocals and a scissor dogfight for superiority and it is beautiful. Beautiful in the way the fight for conscious can sometimes be.

Touch and Go, Financial Crisis, Re-Approach the Life Comedic, and Less Important Things

Things have been touch and go. Tough and go. Many opportunities to back down and call it a day long before the newness of the day was fully realized. In many respects that's the only difference between me and the twenty three year old child coworker with two kids by two different women being served an arrest warrant on the job. The ability to say "no, this is not all I was meant for. There is more, and I am going to find it even if the effort breaks me today." Other than that, we probably have a lot in common in terms of measurable attributes. Perhaps not even the thought of the action is what sets me on paths differing as much as the knowledge that what I am about to pursue is going to be painful and is going to stretch my physical endurance and patience and is going to leave some unpleasant marks for days to come and the desire to do it anyway. I was the same way in college. My grades did not show it, because of all the classes (sixty percent) I had no stake in, but within my major I had a three nine.

Life outside of college is vastly different. Everything you do in life, you have a stake in. So I suppose that kind of makes me bad at college, but good at life? I do not know exactly, so I will keep on track instead of figuring that out. Things have been tough. Difficult to do. Difficult to plan for. Even more difficult to execute, but I've been doing it. Taking the hard road. Exercising so much more than the path of least resistance for more than the sake of doing things the hard way and for more reason than the hard way often being the only way forward available.

I don't know, invasion of apostrophe, when I'm going to go back on medication. I don't know when it will ever be feasible again. When the trust will develop, because the desperation never is enough on it's own. For stretches it is. For stretches the frustration with verbal communication, and non, is. The hallucinations are. The trust is gone. Eaten away, I suppose. I offer. Tough it out in space.

I've been listening to myself breath. As a hobby. A pastime? It has been uniquely entertaining. A foil to the difficulty and nuisance of hearing my blood go through my veins. I am very much looking forward to winter and the pressure suit and the space boots. Hopefully I'll have a runabout by then. A little automotive goodness so I don't have to traverse miles of hostile, ankle jarring, shin splinting, terrain on a daily basis for a second year in a row, but if I do, it'll be okay because I've already done it. I'm already doing my snow dance.



I don't get the financial crisis. Is there one or is there not? This doesn't feel like a depression. Not that my textbooks explained to me in grade school. Several people I know comment about it on a regular basis. They cite the comedy of television anchors trying to explain a complex system and failing miserably to do anything besides say which way the stock market arrow happens to be pointing. They remind me of meteorologists who simply read off the wind direction and temperature. "Thank you for the timely news CNN and Fox, but if I'd glanced at a stock ticker I could have cut out the middle man on that one", is the vibe I get.

Maybe it's because I fully intend to never have children that I don't worry about the financial future of the United States. Maybe it's because the hole is so, impossible to fully imagine, deep. Maybe it's because my most pressing issues are making enough tokens to pay rent and eat and I don't have the budget to invest in anything much greater and wide reaching than the ground I stand on and the, bothersome, blood in my veins. I don't think that makes me selfish. Having to focus so tightly on square ones doesn't make me inherently more real or down to Earth than anyone else either. Probably narrows my horizons some, but what is my impact beyond those horizons if not negligible, so what does it really, honest to god and every other being in the universe, really really matter if I have no idea what's happening in Tripoli or the songs being danced to by the dollar in it's face off with the peso and the euro?

Not the I do not care at all. All I'm saying is this: if the Dow goes up to a million points I still have to pay my rent. If the Standard and Poors index falls to zero, my rent is still three hundred and fifty dollars a month more than what's in my bank account now. Putting gas in my car is never going to become significantly, permanently, cheaper. Buying food is never going to do likewise. I have no idea what this financial crisis is at this point. I have no interest in it's nuance and no money in it's markets beyond taxes that are not all of my pay (that I can still afford to have a roof over my head with so who the hell cares) and the occasional goods I buy beyond food, so do pardon me if I mentally check out entirely when conversation turns to Wall Street and labor and the economy in general.

Nothing personal, but the day to day scrap pretty much eclipses the back and forth of news media, spin doctors, hustlers, book keepers, pushers, banks, and policy makers. I should probably have a stake in it, but the stake is driven into the ground so far away from me and has nothing to do with keeping my tent up I'll only make the time to check on it a very once in a while and make the time to understand it even less often. Even so, doesn't it strike anyone as slightly odd, the gap between meaningful swings in the market and meaningful world events. Maybe it's a thing not readily apparent to a layman, such as myself, like, such as, south Africa, and education, but it seems the slightest flicker of anything sends people shoving all their money in or ripping all of their money out with the twitchiness of a light switch, and doesn't that undermine the stability of the real life things, the solid objects, and the lives operating on and employed by those real life things? No clue.

Either way, what I do know is that I would have the same issues and problems around and inside of me now with the economy in the toilet, or not in the toilet, or half in the toilet and the other half holding it's hair back, as I would have if the economy were the opposite of whatever the news said it was. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe I do simply not give a fuck.

I've thought about re-entering the stand up with a sixth entry. I think I am calmed down enough to not goad myself into acts of violence by the words coming out of my own mouth. Calmed down enough to take the pill of neurosis and malaise and turn it into something a little light hearted for other's consumption. I think I can do that again. I'm almost ready. Slightly excited to give it another try. I would hope you are too. Oh wait, I am. So that makes three of us. So the three of us will laugh it up later and look on the bright side of trife.

And last but not least, the less important thing. I forgot what it was. Maybe it was that I am still tasking away at projects. Tasking away at promises. At distance. At finding voice. Away and away and away until it's all done and I am officially retired. I haven't written a story in a long time. I've wanted to, but at the same time I have been nerve racked with questions of time and effort and end products and reception. Must get those ducks in a row so I can restart that branch of the factory. The dust is getting alarmingly thick over there and beginning to take on lives of it's own.


///Boards of Canada - "The Color of the Fire slow Sunday sundown music. It is, after all-

Three Hundred and Eleven, Stupid Fucking Christians, Foreignness, and Musing

I want to have something important to say today, but I don't. Still working on the dream. I'm gonna muse for a minute, well several, as I am mentally drifting. While at work, the pressures of so much unpleasantness force my thoughts into a water jet that cuts steel, but away from those pressures it diffuses and runs easy and slipshod and quiet, or quieter, and my adrenal glands are gonna be shot by the time I'm 30 iterations old because so much of the day, well the night, is spent trying to wrestle control, heart charging, mind racing, all for nothing. There's nothing I can do to undo that. That shit job will still be around long after I leave it. The same people will still be there enforcing backward policy and rewarding incompetence. And that's the way it has to be. Competent people leave. They don't stay there. The only way any sort of structure can be maintained there is to reward stupidity, soft mindedness, weakness, and buffoonery and it is upsetting to me and it should be upsetting. All it means is that I have to leave before my head explodes.

I was working the other day and growing sicker by the moment. Physically sick to my stomach. The sounds being pumped down from the speakers in the ceiling were like ice picks touching my brainstem behind my throat and pricking it over and over and the pain of it was turning my stomach and making me dizzy. I considered after some time asking if I could leave at 3 AM, lunch time, and call it a day, but my stupid loyalty and pride in the work that I do told me to gut it out. Don't be weak and stupid and candy and thin. Gut it out. I don't care what you want, you came in today to do a job so do the job and then, when it's finished, go home and rest. You're not like them, is what I told myself until finally, while kneeling and shelving my body basically rebelled and pulled a knife on me. To which I answered, you wouldn't. And then it did, but it missed. Shattered the blade of the box cutter on the floor tiles taking a blind left handed downward swing at my leg and caught a rebounding shard in my mouth. So I met myself half way and took a long lunch break. It was a shitty day. I gotta get outta there.

So for the anniversary of my initialization my parents sent me a card. One of their signatures said live in peace. Which made me want to immediately purchase the next available train ticket down there to end their lives and burn the house to the ground. But I can't do that. I have too much I need to work on finishing already without the added difficulty of trying to do it in prison where materials would likely be even more scarce though free time would be in abundance so potentially that trade off might become more interesting if scarcity becomes a greater issue out here. It mostly made me question, though, how backward can a human being be. How stupid can a person truly be. To tell someone to live in peace. While simultaneously denying them every single last avenue open toward a life of peace and stability. It just reminds me of so many Christians. So many good Christians. It's in God's hands. She's with God now. He's in God's protection now. What the hell is wrong with you idiots. It's not in God's fucking hands. It's in your fucking hands. It just stymies me that people can be so oblivious. So learnedly oblivious to the obviousness of the impacts their decisions make on other peoples lives, especially, especially when so little effort on their part can make titanic changes for their own flesh and blood. Which is why I no longer consider them to be. They are an unfortunate do while loop that erred and spawned a NaN variable in me, but that has picked up where it left off doing nothing except cancer consuming it's surrounding while time left to live is not equal to or less than zero. I need a new mommy and daddy. Or a used set. Or even just one or the other as I have a pair of glaring vacancies. Apply within.

This is the three hundredth posting. My eleventh birthday is this Saturday. I might take myself out for ice cream. You can come too. I had another attack of something last night. It sucked. I woke up in the middle of it. Maybe it was a siezure. It was kind of funny in retrospect. I tried to get up and my whole body just want stiff and I fell back into my blanket with my face on my pillow. Funny because if someone were just walking by my room they would think I was fast asleep. I suppose if I hadn't woken up I wouldn't be composing this. I wonder sometimes where I am in the alternate reality when that happens. I wonder if maybe I touched something and received some sort of static shock and this state of contraction is how it crosses the bridge and stings me here. I wonder if assaulted by sound here what happens to me over there. I don't think it's just me crossing. Well I know it's not just me crossing. I wonder if I'll ever meet me over there. It is a rather large world.

Just the other day I was there and apparently there were some sweeping changes made while I was away. There concrete viaducts and underpasses everywhere and all biege and everyone was busy moving here and there and it took damn near half an hour to stop someone and ask them what was going on and where I could find the train station, because I hadn't ridden it in some time and I wanted to lose myself for a while. The man I stopped was about my height. Brown leather jacket and a shirt crushed with sweat and what looked like engine oil. He explained to me, after adjusting his glasses, that cars were banned. He wasn't mad at me for asking an apparently obvious question. He told me the upcoming action required that as much crude be saved and that the viaducts and underpasses were all light rails and that everyone pretty much took the light rails or biked where they needed to, but I didn't see a single bicycle or train car pass me while I spoke to him. He left. The city was a mess of design, but clean in the same way a beach is clean after a really bad windstorm. The whole thing was off putting. And then I woke up. No sign of other me. I think if I ever did see him I'd be roundly terrified. I hate talking about him. Any of them. They don't like being talked about behind their backs, but it's not fair because I'm always behind their backs until they show up and then I'm just fucked. I don't know.

Still haven't made the call. Still trying to land. Still no where to touch down if I wanted to. I've gone back to making necessary long term repairs. Things chance. Things change. There are times when things keep fucking up and keep fucking up and keep fucking up no matter what you do. And you know this because it is the same situation that you've approached two dozen different ways and it never ends up mattering by the time your bones hurt and your eyes are pools from finger bloodying attempt after attempt. And times like that force you into a position where the only agency you can really exercise is to fuck it up yourself. It is real. You can do it. It's the only way you'll ever be able to say you did something for yourself. I smashed in that fucking fender. All me. The only control you will be able to revel in is to decide where you want the hammer to touch down instead of letting someone else decide it for you. Something to revel in. Anything to revel in. To feel a part of the inside out and bizarre and upside down world you're in. If you live in a world of systematized counter productivity and human waste long enough, does the opposite become foreign? Absolutely.

I do believe from a civilization spanning viewpoint... well that just sounds cockneyed. Well probably not even cockneyed. Just stupidly grandiose. I do believe from the standpoint of socialization into the fabric of Americanisms that I am more or less feral. Defining feral as undomesticated and domestication as a state of obedient harmony with established standards and practices. But more on the nose I was raised like a dog. The more I think about, well I'm done thinking about, I've gone over the evidence internally through committee several times over and it's all there. I'm still learning to be American and person, but I feel like several of my key behaviors are kanine first and reasoning person second. I should probably make that call sometime. Trying to domesticate myself. To relate to people better. But the thing no one tells you about making sacrifices to relate to people is that none of it will ever matter if the people you are trying to relate to have no interest in rejoining your sweat for connection. Shove away then.



///The Cardigans - "Losers"

Stand Up Act 3 (the sex chapter part 1)

Act 2

So I'm stumbling around myself at this point, now that we've formally met, so I figure now is probably the optimal time to get the sex diatribe out of the way, because every comic with some semblance of an edge has a short few thoughts on the matter. I feel a bit reserved here even beginning to begin about something so taboo and my main concern is to keep it from becoming your typical open mic gutter ball nonsense.

Let's begin by observing that every single magazine toting 100 sex moves to get your man off is patently not worth buying for the following reasons:

I'm kidding. Do I really have to go into how 95 of the things those editors tell you to do in the privacy of your own home are things you don't have to do to please a person of the opposite sex? Or maybe they are. I've never been married. I suppose perhaps if your life becomes something like opening up a refrigerator and already knowing what's in there, but gotdamnit a man's gotta eat, maybe you do need 100 tips so that you can discard 99 of them and try one and feel like you're some sort of wild animal because if you were a decent person you wouldn't follow tips outlaid in a magazine distributed nationally and vetted by a committee of people whose only goal in life is to produce something so inoffensive that their jobs would not be jeopardized by its dissemination. I'm crazy. I just followed the advice of something published in the cosmopolitan and it told me to finger my husbands bung hole because that would drive him wild... or something. Hopefully you understand the absurdity of that so I don't have to go backward and break it down. Hopefully you don't read Cosmo because I mean, after all, you're here and I would like to think of myself as very uncosmo by default which is what would have attracted you to an open mic in the first place. Very uncosmo thoughts.

So I have it in my head to lay this out in three parts. Why three parts, you ask? Mainly to give people the opportunity to walk out before things get too hot and heavy for them, as hot and heavy as things can get at an optional survey of sound and life things. I forgot where I was going to begin with in this iteration though so fuck it. Be careful though. Eventually I will stumble on this thread again and have something to say about something and then the jig will be up and not all the tea in China will save you from what is read. What has been seen cannot be unseen. At least not yet, but I hear there's an app for that coming soon. Not as great as zombie edition Playstation 12, but almost as awesome. I was thinking it might be called Iwipe, but that is just way too easy. Maybe Iblack, if African Americans get over themselves by then and see the word play there for getting your game face on in the face of oncoming, body crushing, defeat on the field of verbal mental sport.

I was considering that I will live to see the hundredth anniversary of the Holocaust though. Very unsexy, but I'm sure there will be many an observance and remembrance for something as world changing and visible, because let's face facts it wasn't the absolute worst holocaust to blight mankind and it won't be the last, but it was the most visible and stirring human crisis that I can remember learning about (that has for the shear depth of information blotted out many a closer more painful and relevant crisis since), and that's a lot of qualifiers and hedges in a string. Basically I struck upon the remembrance of the beginnings of American slavery and I wondered why that is not on it's three hundredth or four hundredth or I don't know and don't really care all that much iteration of anniversarial celebration or remembrance. And then I remembered that our diaspora joined us to the fabric of our nation and our world much more closely than theirs because we didn't have a unifying culture, but a diversifying one and then I felt like I was being a racist and then I laughed because I mean really, am I going to live for another forty years anyway? Probably not.

It did make me wonder what the equation for the production, direction, and Cannes entry of Holocaust films was. I think the time is fast approaching when the more current world changing cultural near extinctions will fade into irrelevant obscurity in the face of modern day challenges and changes. Time scars all wounds or something to that effect.

At any rate, sex will still be around so some segment of the car drivin sex havin populace will still be quite content to do what it does and to hell with history. But seriously genocide is bad so I'll make an effort to be sexier and more hilarious because I'm pretty sure I'm depressing myself and that is not funny. Or is it? Cue Sex and the City segue music.

A Sense of Urgency (or The Real Reason Black Men Don't "Get Ahead")

So I'm at work and I basically kill it every night. Sure I'm a little hyper. Sure they probably think I fire a couple lines into my brain before my shift. Whatever, I don't care all that much. One thing that happens in the disincentivized environment is that the only reward for a days work is the satisfaction you personally derive from putting in a solid days work becomes its own reward. That and the paycheck.

Where was I? Oh yeah... I'm trying to keep this tight... so I basically go in to work with the perspective: I am going to destroy my work load today. I see everything that management does as a direct challenge to my capabilities and every single work day is staked with taking their expectations and ramming them down their throats. "So you think I'm going to struggle with X or Y, well check this shit out: I'm gonna set X on fire with how pro I am and Y is gonna get put in its place like a redheaded step child and go tell its friends about how badly I kicked its ass and its friends will rue the day I show up to work 'cause its gonna be on from the second I walk through that front door."

Which brings me to why black men, aged 18 to 40 will, by and large, never get ahead. They're way too busy trying to convince everyone that they're unruffled. It's beyond "too cool for school" or "too cool for pants that fit" or even "too cool for rules." It's this projection of well in hand that, more than anything else, fires flares of stupidity in all directions. Well, not even that. It's not about being on time, or late, or clothing, or rules, or education. More than anything else it's this projection of such super lensed self consciousness that is so tightly clamped around their throats that you just want to shake them and scream "will you wake the hell up!?"

Maybe it's a symptom of the layers upon layers of stereotypes that are, essentially, the new slavery. Growing up beneath that burden and governance can turn the most capable human being into a club footed clown. I feel bad for them. Well alright, I'm getting loose again and dropping a lot of "wells". Let's refocus. I'm training this kid and the equipment I'm trying to explain to him is located in a lot of different areas and we have to keep criss-crossing to see the things that I'm trying to teach him about and so much time can be killed walking too and fro so I'm walking at a little better than my usual clip. I walk like I need to get somewhere unless I'm just getting lost for the sake of forgetting the world. Time is short already, without adding in the burden of having to stop and explain everything I'm doing, so I'm making tracks and this guy is just lagging.

I have no idea why. There's no one else in the area except him and me. There is no one to judge him or make fun of him for walking fast. There's no one to make fun of his pants if he tightens them up so he can actually use his gotdamn legs for ambulating. Is he worried that he might get made fun of later or that I'm made fun of for moving so quickly and speaking fast and sure? I have no idea what his problem was. I get where I'm going and the whole time I'm thinking, well hell if he would make an attempt to keep up I could explain more shit to him en route instead of having to do it all onsite. So I get there and I have to wait for him to come moseying along.

I'm all for taking time where time is available, but for the love of God when you're on the clock will you pull up your fucking socks for once and act like something more than whatever the hell you fucks are into is worth showing up for? No, I don't always want to be at work. No, I am not always buzzing at 100 miles per hour. No, I am not best friends with management, but fuck my life if someone is paying you to do something then do it right and do it on time and fuck image. At some point you have to just say to yourself "I do not care what the rest of my peers think of what I'm doing because THEY DO NOT WRITE THE CHECKS THAT BUY ME FOOD OR (insert whatever thing it is that sustains your well being).

I don't know. I guess I'm venting. I'm sure there are exceptions because I know some of them. But until we get over this weirding thing we're socialized and typed into we are going to have a black history month that says to the rest of the world "hey, we do stuff sometimes too."

Idiots. Give me two of this guy I'm training and I'll have half the output I need. Disappointing. I'm sure he's a great kid too. But personality by itself does not get shit done.


///Goldfrapp - "Deer Stop" pick them off, one by one. There is no urgency among them.

P.S. it really is just sad how self... self... what's the term... self reciprocating? I sware it's like an entire segment of the population is involved in this recursive loop. I'm no social climber, but how is it that the things I view as standard are viewed among them as exceptional, strange, and ridiculous. So mad. Retards. When the world ends, they're all going to die like lemmings. Worse than lemmings. Like deer before intelligence. Why is intelligence so eschewed???? I need to relax. No I don't. Obviously it's not just them, but I feel among them this weirding thing is most rampant, rooted, and disgustingly viral.

The (Implied) Conceited Sumbitch in us All and True Love

I had more to say ten minutes ago, but I lost it because I bled out my consciousness into a poem. I laughed out loud to that because it's true. For me, sometimes writing is like a keg that I fill every day and sometimes the keg explodes and the contents are disgusting to even me and sometimes it simply pours and fills glasses so neat and tidy and sometimes it pours one glass and sometimes it pours ten glasses. Consistency is a huge deal to most artists for one reason or another. Some people feel that consistency is next to Godliness or something like that. Some people feel that consistency is simply the mark of some kind of neurosis that does not permit full development of the creative orgasm. I know it's all unverified. Doesn't it grate you when you hear other people talk about what "some people" have said and think and do. It grates me. It grates me a helluva lot. I guess I was just trying to chap you as bad as I'm feeling chapped. I guess I'm just some kind of jaded. I grinned for a while. Jaded is such a lovely and fulsome word. I love that fucking word. There's something about that's a little sexy and rivered and disgusting as vice to a religious heart. I'm jaded. Not because of you though.

I guess I'm just wondering how far I'll have to go to find love. How dorky is that? Pretty God damn dorky I know. Would I go to hell if I knew I was "fuck everything else" loved on this Earth? Fuck yeah, man. I'll go to hell twice. Is it supposed to mean that much to anyone? I guess not. How can I put this to grow understanding instead of revulsion? I think the one thing that I've been since day one, more than anything else, is a romantic. That simply has not ever changed no matter what else has actually changed within me. I'm still looking for the right words. How about a picture instead?




I love you, did I mention that? I don't say it as a grasping for an intangible and thus perfect love. I know you suck. I know you suck because I suck. I know you're terrible and a shitty friend sometimes because I am. I know you steal more than 25$ in office supplies from your jobs every year because I do. But, I guess the point is only the douche bags are keeping score. When you really really put the rubber to the road the only reason to hate the religious right and the religious left and the religious center is because they offer resistance to what you want to do and what you are now with no regard for the nowness of who and what you are. Does that make sense? How about this: love fragments time.

I think we can both agree on that.

Or can't we. Well how about this, I will agree not to fight about that premise. Fair enough? Well fuck you, I think it's fair so I'm leaving it there. Hearts and kisses. Seriously. Maybe I'll draw a penis. Am I allowed to do that? Now I feel like flying off on an analysis of full frontal nudity in cinema, but I won't because I love you and know that you don't have all day to read this and I don't have all night to write it ( I do but God damn it [I use that a lot] I'm keeping to fucking schedule).

How about this. Next time I write I'll be twice as hammered and half as love sick. I think we can both smile about that. No? Yes? There was a time when I never questioned myself. There was a time when I didn't watch my hands type like two figure skaters on a board of ice composed of laminated squares of frictionless steel. There were times when the world didn't sing me to sleep through layer after layer of drywall and pink insulation packed to the gills with muffled screams and there were times when the creaking flooring was the sound of angels walking and not the burden of yearly abuses of the tactile senses. Remember when love was a flower? I want to say I don't but even that smacks of a romance I once knew that is somehow more romantic and honey sweet than the romance to come and I feel like I'm working this God damned keyboard harder than Ray Charles and Blues Traveler on a tour of the Gulf and the rest of the formerly slave supporting sates and I'm dreaming of lines of coke in hotels and two hour stands.

I suppose the end game is that I'm fantastically horny and too tired to proofread anything that involves anything besides penises and vaginas and bare skin and I'm thinking about the hours I've spent on subways trying not to imagine vaginas and floating disembodied breasts and penises surrounding me where bodies should be and the horrendous difficulty in squelching the beads of sweat on my brow and knowing that though my face doesnt sweat my testicles are weeping salty tears into underwear too loose to stop itself from tearing as I walk to another job interview and now I'm still fucking unemployed because some bitches vagina parked itself 6 inches from my god damn face... how the fuck could she be so cruel...

///Master and Commander - "La Musica Noctturna Delle Strade di Madrid No.6 Op.30" If I should die, both feet on the ground, upon foreign soil by the fruits of my own designs I shall have died happier than the richest domestic entrepreneur and more loved than the loveliest architect of words and emotions who ever saw the coast. And balked.

P.S. I wasn't too tired to proofread a smidge. Suck it Hillary Masters, you cock gobbling excuse for a tenured professor's dick.

P.P.S. Yes I know it's straw man slander. I don't care. I hate the man that much.

P.P.P.S. "Master and Commander was a phenomenal film. Please take the time to see it if you haven't. You won't regret it. Plus Russel Crowe is ridiculously hot and also ridiculously awesome. Watch it. While I finish this fifth.

Why I'd Rather Be Hispanic, Artificial Self Confidence, and a Root

Walking home from a training day for a job I may or may not have a thought occurred to me: I would rather be anything, but black, in today's America.

Sounds ridiculous right? The simple fact is it is still very uncomfortable being black in America. I mean, think about it, people haven't decided whether or not we can even be called black people or if we need to be called African Americans. At least with Latinos and Hispanic people it's not a choice between obviously politically delicate and offensive terms. Or maybe it is, since I've never been Hispanic or a Latino. Seriously though, every time you refer to a black person isn't there a little twinge in the back of your neck that makes you wonder if you're using the right word, or if you would look worse by using a term that throws racial consciousness in the reader's face, even if it's only for a moment?

Think about the stereotypes. If I were to make a mental list of pros and cons with respect to stereotypes, who would come out more favorably? Sure there are local pockets of better and worse viewpoints (border states, places with "little (insert south eastern country)s", and places with very visible very active gang cultures, but across the entire spectrum of America I feel like black people aren't necessarily losing ground, but aren't really improving either whereas other minorities are either receiving more than token attention or are at least viewed more favorably on the whole. I feel a lot like the very "interesting" back story of white America and black America has made the situation a lot like a landlord who needs a renter to pay on time and shut up about the property's needs and a renter who badly needs a place to rent and can't afford anything else. I guess when I think about the stereotypes, I can see positive ones for most other ethnicities that allow some type of positive integration with society beyond sports, music, sex, and street dance (you know, the things people have to do to support families and build generational wealth and own homes and cars and have stable year to year lives and retire) and absolutely none for the blacks in America.

And it's a little discouraging. It's like the problem of integration was never really solved beyond the physical interface and instead of a defacto solution, patches were administered. Patches were slapped on top of patches and policy plaster was slapped on top of the patched patches until people got tired of dealing with it. Or maybe until the job looked done enough from the standpoint of the people outside of it, but as someone who is a part of the structure of black America it's pretty obvious there are gaping holes in perception that continue to lead to gaping holes in... I dunno. I'm getting tired just thinking about it. It's not fixable. I'm not trying to be fatalist or anything like that, I just have to do my part with my kids to let them know that they do belong here.

That's it! I think I just stumbled on an answer. Black history. Being raised with such a heavy bent toward black history and it's burden on modern history and having to live every year with the idea that I'm permanently indebted to a project of acceptance that will be in progress from the day I'm born to the day I die was a mistake. Historical perspective is a good thing. Having historical perspective hammered into me with a distorted and disproportionate focus placed on the "right" and "wrong" expressions of stereotypes within that culture is what has left me with this feeling of malaise. Black history is important, but not more or less important than American history. It's not a separate story. Having the idea that I'm different and special and separated from America by black history has caused much more damage than confidence boosting good. The short term benefit of confidence has been far eclipsed by the long term effect of powerful feelings of isolation.

I guess the simplest branch, the main root of all of this is belonging may not boost individual confidence, but will ease future growth and development of identity. Telling someone they're special artificially boosts their self confidence. Someone learning they are special through time and experience and on their own allows them to build a lasting self confidence that will not be eroded as soon as the encouraging voices are taken away. Not constantly reinforcing a person's specialness and differentiating characteristics may hurt their self confidence in the short term, but will ease their interactions over time because they will have belongingness as the most basic premise of their relationship to the world around them.

If belongingness is the most basic premise of their relationship to the world around them, then they are free to pursue many more avenues of existence without having to consider questions of perception and practice, and while the questions may be there, they will not be central to the person's identity. If a person's most basic premise is that they are permanently different from the world around them they will, when (not if) self confidence fails to motivate action, be forced to constantly answer and ask and re-ask questions of perception and practice in a never ending cascade of attempts to join a world they can never really be a part of basic their most basic premise of existence is that they are permanently outside of and apart from the world at large.

So I guess the root of the problem with black America is really sourced from within every black American home and public classroom in the month of February. But, don't tell them that. They never seem to take criticism well even from "their own people". Trust me, I know. Responsibility is probably the second branch on the tree of stunted potential.

///Four Tet - "You Were There With Me" Just reminds me of thinking about the future sitting at the edge of an apple orchard and watching shafts of sunlight roll like lazy spotlights across empty fields and after the second hour noticing that the little things on the horizon aren't high tension transmission lines, but are the blades of still windmills.

Predictive Power of the Bible, Religious Cunts, and Cowboy Coffee

Being the coffee addict I am today, I've been trying to figure out ways to cut costs from making coffee and ensure that I will never be in a situation where I can't drink coffee if said substance is available in absolutely any form.  Having read Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain I have ingested another serious dose of tough guy-dom the likes of which I haven't shot into my veins since I watched hard boiled noir where every ten minutes a cigarette was being rolled, a shot of whiskey downed, and a strong man got his lights put out with a "you'll find my appointment with your boss under 'screw you', sonny."

Which brings me to cowboy coffee.  Easily on par with "badass things that will probably kill you" that I love, such as Marlboro Red 100s and high proof whiskey on rocks, is cowboy coffee.  From what I've gathered from Cities of the Plain is that they don't use coffee filters at all.  Or at least, they seem to have to throw out the last of their coffee pretty often because of left over grounds, and that got me to thinking that cow hands and outdoorsmen in general probably don't carry coffee filters out into the field.  That's like throwing light bulbs in a ruck sack and somehow believing you'll make it to where you're going without breaking a single one.  At least I think keeping coffee filters dry while being outside in the elements for weeks would be something akin to that kind of challenge.  So it must be possible to drink coffee brewed from grounds with the grounds still in the water if you let them settle to the bottom of whatever you brewed it in.  So that's what I've started doing.  I've always liked the bitter bite of black as night coffee and I've found that throwing the grounds in a big ol' mug and brewing it straight in the mug and letting the grounds settle down to the bottom seems to work out just fine.  Coffee filters are officially for pansies.  Of course drinking it this way might turn my teeth black, but lets hope I have a job and never have to rely on the quality of my smile again long before that happens.  Sure the last sips are grainy and if you swish the mug around too much it takes on the consistency of a snow globe full of pine chips, but if you've got a steady hand, and an iron gut, and like things like whiskey and Marlboro Reds and Ice grade beer, I highly recommend giving it a try.

Plus if you ever find that your co-workers have bought coffee grounds instead of instant coffee and stuck them in the common break room knowing full well that the only coffee machine in the entire god damn building is behind the key coded doors of the administrative wing where lowly salesman and customer service associates are not allowed, you can go ahead and make yourself a cup anyway.  You may not come to work in a tie, or slacks, or a sport coat, but while they look at you from the corner of their eyes in the break room wondering if you're thinking about shanking them all with a hunting knife while you watch your mug spin around in the microwave and they try not to look directly at you and your cowboy coffee sitting at the table across from them, they'll know where the real power sits between them and you.  And they'll know that the only thing keeping them on top of the darwinian bureaucratic food chain is a sheet of paper from a business school and an economy that says you have to play nice if you want to keep your freedom.

I am sick of religious cunts.  I know you are too.  That idiot who is organizing the book burning for the sole purpose of doing unto others is a cunt.  A stupid, sad little man.  All of the people who will take personal religion fueled offense to what he is organizing and proposing to do are cunts.  In this case I am defining cunt as: reactionary imbecile far too pleased with causes to examine effects.  Cunts love cunts and their relatinship simply sucks for everybody, especially when they get together for date nights.  And for the last time, the Bible does not predict the future anymore than Nostradamus or that Chinese book whose name I can't remember.  For every person who raises their child based on precedents set by the Bible, proclaiming it as the ultimate authority on human behavior, can I just say will you please stop reading and start listening to and learning about the human beings in your house that for better and worse have to rely on you for whatever reason.  Stop holding up the Bible to life and looking for answers.  Spoiler Alert: They're not in there.  When you start holding up something you believe to be a map or a blueprint, but still attempt to find you're own way or allow free expression, guess what happens?  If you answered "a shit load of self fulfilling prophecies" you answered correctly.  If you answered "a shit load of pain and suffering for everyone who does not share your special insight from heaven" you also answered correctly.

Well, anyway, sorry I just had to let that go.  I heard about someone being lectured about how their parents believe the Bible says the youngest child will do everything the older children did except ten times worse and so their parents sat them down and gave them an earful for things they've never done and never intend to do and the sheer ridiculousness of it all just pissed me off.  If you spent half as much time taking an actual interest in your children as you did combing through the all knowing scriptures you might find that you actually had a family instead of a brood of complete strangers who don't talk to you because you've become a shell of a human being replaced by selected passages of a book that happened to be relevant to you as an adolescent that grew into a sick and warped crutch as you grew older and quietly refused to mature.  I think I'll still write my own Bible, just to prove a point about the power of that kind of story telling.  Maybe I'll save the project for my twilight years so I'll have a deeper catalog of crap to draw from and smear out into images that can applied to any and all ages that involve fallible people dealing with fallible people in a search for overarching meaning, an incorruptible truth, and the reason, their own tailored to fit reason, for being on this rock.  Maybe that's what my life's work really is.  I'll get back to you about that in 25 years when I'm on my death bed from smoking Reds and pounding cowboy coffee.

///DJ? Acucrack - "Thalidomide"  Our defects are inherited from the ignorance of those that walked before us and are incorporated into our character.  That's still no excuse.  For bringing darkness instead of light.  This song rolls and burns like staring directly into a halogen bulb till your brainstem goes numb with the over powering presence of particulate everything blowing your eyes to pieces.  Only minus the permanent blindness.

You've Got To Get Mad

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us."



Click here to play in new window if video does not play in embedded player.

The first time I heard this monologue was as the lead in to a track by Evol Intent. It's very stirring. In fact the monologue, to me, was so much more intense and meaningful than the token gesturing of the lyrics that followed I wished that, instead of lyrics, they simply allowed more of the monologue to play. The music track is below, synced (not by me) to the visuals. You might have to click through and view it directly on the youtube website if it doesn't play here.



Click thru

Sometimes seeing and hearing things like these and knowing what my own vision is for music and film, I long for a chance to go back in time and make myself put down the calculators and math books and just do the things that came naturally. I wish I could manipulate music and art well enough to create animated films or produce albums or write music. I'm sure I will at some point, but a head start would have been nice.

At any rate, hearing the monologue was so stirring in part because I feel like I am definitely in agreement. I don't think the people being gutted and ground up and swallowed and shat out into darkness in this country need to write to congress or go to sit ins or vote for people that will represent them for five minutes before succumbing (of no fault of their own) to the massive under currents of commercial/industrial pocket padding politics. If people being shafted by the education system would simply express their disappointment, their anger, at being farmed, and express it with a sustained voice and intensity there would be a positive response. Same for people getting shafted in the work place or anywhere else.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but so many things really need so much more than a drop of oil. The problem is that people are so content to get their drop of oil, their quick pay off, and then they forget that their problem hasn't been solved. Their problem hasn't even begun to be addressed, but staying angry takes so much effort and why stay angry when you can take your hand job to the bank and buy yourself a big tv and fall asleep again until your conditions become unbearable or swallows another member of your family or short changes you once more.

You've got to get mad, and you've got to be willing and committed enough to stay mad, and that's why I love that song, but I love the monologue even more.

///Amon Tobin - "Verbal (Topo Gigio Remix)" The original song, featuring MC Decimal was good, but this version takes that song and makes it an anytime anywhere "listen to it twice in a row 'cause once is never enough" kind of song. The way the bass comes up and swings and swims around your ears you almost feel like you're lying in a river as wide as lake Ontario heading for a waterfall that crashes against rocks so loudly you can't hear it.

life snobs

for a while i was afraid that what education ive pieced together over the years has made me a snob. like a life snob. the kind of person who turns their nose up at everything because of things encapsulated in the following phrases:

"the book was better"

"the original from (insert obscure year) was better"

"i wouldnt buy that if i were you"

"i researched X Y and Z and this is my informed opinion"

"i heard on npr the other day..."

"i read on bbc.co.uk the other day..."

"thats just history repeating itself if you look back to (insert obscure date and event)"

"that was actually a sample from (insert less known band)"

"if you weight the pros and cons of it..."

"i think you are definitely mistaken..."

"well if you think about it, thats what they want you to think..."

"thats how the system works..."

and so on. any one of the above phrases can be exchanged for simpler cruder and more direct and colloquial phrases like "you dumb shit"... and "that is some nigga shit right there" and on and on so the point is.... the point is that normally i would be extremely self conscious about these kinds of things and go home and worry that people think that i must think im some kind of poindexter life snob who knows more than he should about anything and tries to lord it over his peers cuz he has no friends and sleeps with a teddy bear and a dictionary under his pillow.



but the fact of the matter is... haha what an ugly phrase... how about the simpler answer to this conundrum is that all this percieved snobbery is a machination of being American. Simple as that. America encourages simple, muddy, plain as dirt thinking for the masses. Sure schools don't (usually) but the other school, the tv, does and continually. whats more is that any show of discernment, of critical consideration, automatically punts you up to the ugly "elite" class... those people that are too smart for their own good that fuck up the country for everyone, regardless of what your actual income is. im broke as hell most of the time, but im 99% certain that my parents think im some uppity smart ass who doesnt understand the value of a dollar. whatever the fuck that means

so i guess what im trying to say is that the french aint so bad. or the brits. what passes for snobbery now used to just be critical thinking skills and the ability to turn down cheap and instant for slightly more costly and much longer lasting. the desire to turn max profit out of everything has essentially made anything less into snobbery, when in fact most profits should not be measured in dollars despite the thousand dollar bills the tv smacks us with continually. but thats snobbery. dont be a snob. dont make your own sandwiches because they taste better. just shove some mcdonalds in your throat. its cheaper too so you get to put more money in your pocket. no brainer.

everyone has become so obsessed with no brainers when the honest to god truth is the people that keep the brains in their skulls and turned on have a hard time passing in the world of the no brainers. so many things happen and we have to say to ourselves ... wait what the fuck just happened there... but what have to say it internally because if we said it out loud we would sound crazy. if we said half of the things we actually thought about we would probably be called crazy.

i dunno.... maybe the problem here is that my thirst for knowledge has vastly outpaced my station in life. that could be seen as the problem. if i was a lot dumber. like a lot fucking dumber.... i would be happy as a skunk doing whatever it is skunks do the 23 hours and 55 minutes i dont see them walking across my parents back yard. i would be happy to be at home doing nothing. happy to eat food and wash dishes and mow the lawn and happy to listen to my mom talk about her bleeding fucking toes and my dad talk about how he has to beat the sluts off of his fat disgusting body all day while he works as a phone technician. christ... the root of this entire existential crisis is my education.

at least thats what a no brainer might say. and you know what... in the current setting... in this state of the union... they'd be right. fuck them. my brain is strapped on at all times and it might be the death of me, but god damn it, if thats the case then im ready to die.

///four tet - "Untitled [SAW2 CD1 Track1] (Four Tet remix)" this song has brought me nothing but joy. i came across the four tet remix album in the second lowest pit of my life. it wasnt a shovel. it wasnt water in the desert. it was meaning and reason and design written across the formless mass and black and blue of life's crush. and thats why i still like it. and thats why i still love it.