Collaboration Is a Minefield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

A Thought on Canvases

I made a drawing yesterday.  It was good.  By good I mean I liked it and art is done for you.  The drawing was small and took very little time to compose.  Better than good, it was a pleasure to assemble and even more pleasurable to see outside of my skull.  A nice thing about it is that now that it's free I can compose more.

The thought occurred though, holding the sheet of paper up to a light bulb so that I could see it backward and see if the proportions worked correctly, was that I allowed my canvases to grow bloated.  I allowed the canvases to exceed my ability to fill them.  With time of course, any canvas can be filled.  Tortuously.  Screamingly.  With terrific agony.  I'm not there yet.  I was there and it got very ugly for too long and I gave up.

Everything doesn't have to be bigger, better, bigger!, better!.  It reminded me that I select the canvas.  The canvas does not select me.  The sensation was comforting.  "Why has my art gone to hell?"  Maybe it is you that has gone to hell to doodle?  Feel free to back up.  Circle round.  There is no gun to your head.  Don't forget to stop and enjoy what you can do with a smile.




///Error 641-33067

A Joke, a Little Work, a Little Fantasy, and a Little Truth

Maybe that's why I enjoy night so much.  During the day I just want to stare at the sun and dream about going there.  Life without sunglasses was brutal.  I went mad trying to find them and turned my apartment inside out looking for them.  Of course I left them at a job site.  I asked the people there, when I returned and thought I saw them, if they were mine.  And they said "I don't know, are they?"  I don't know!  Are they?!  I thought they were, but they wouldn't tell me and I thought maybe they were playing a game on me to see how long it would take for me to declare that they were and take them.  In my mind, steal them.  I put two and two together (after turning my place upside down searching) and made my declaration.

So, let's open with a joke.  I'd like to.  I know I am no comedian, so let's give it a little go.  What did the manhole cover say to the street?

Give up?

It said "I'm glad I'm not square."

I was speaking to someone and I can't quite remember who.  I don't think it was a friend.  I think it was a random conversation that sparked up between myself and someone else at the gathering, because I'm near certain it was some sort of gathering with friends that I was at, otherwise I would have been on the deck of my starship.  I was speaking to someone and the who is not all that important.  What came out of the conversation was a comment on the work I do, performing maintenance and changing spaces and power tools and heavy tools sometimes when the work is thick and the corrections that need to be made are more intensive than pure oil changes and minor rerouting/replacement of resources.  

The comment was that my job is basically life as we know it and all I have to do is mine plus a little extra whenever it's not intensive.  I must say, I got offended, but I laughed it off.  I got offended.  Deeply offended.  Do you understand how difficult life is?  Do you understand how difficult maintenance is?  Cutting off the infinite hydra?  It has no heart.  It has no organs.  It has no weak points.  It is impossible to kill or destroy.  It will never be complete and it is constantly adapting.  I wanted to break their face when they said that, but I decided to laugh instead which was good for both me and him.

As I backed my mind over the conversation about work after things died down and everyone went their separate ways and I stepped inside my airlock and sealed the door and fired up the engines and set the course back away from the sun and plotted around the minefield of asteriods too big to bounce off the shielding and hull it occurred to me that they were not spot on, but they were right.

When I am not doing heavy work, my job is to perform what I would do for myself, except duplicated.  It is similar to running many instances of one life simultaneously.  Without the extra relationships so you can focus pure on the bones, guts, and vessels.  The blocks and supports that allow relationships to happen.  It's extra relationships to me, but for the constituents its first order relationships.  I maintain my ship to allow me to get the distance I want and know I need, and come and go from the inner system close to at will.  What they use their fighters and runabouts and escorts and carriers and interceptors and cruisers and bombers and liners or whatever you want to call its for is their business.  My business is making sure they run as well as they possibly can so they can do their business and grow their relationships as I do my own.

When it comes to work there are many ways to go about it, but they were right.  I am no longer offended by it.  Yeah, most of my work is life.  Regular life things.  That's about as much job as I can handle.  I'm laughing while I say that, but it's something I've come to know about myself that I didn't really think about more clearly until that particular conversation happened and I got sickly offended.  As much job as I can process is life, is the other connection I am trying to make and I think I made it good.  I'm not offended at all.  I control the timezone and the appointments to a degree.  I set the tempo.  To a degree.  And that's why I love my job.  It is a direct hit to my wheelhouse and not a degree more or less.  

I still have to answer for what I do.  I still have a difficult time performing maintenance on my own craft.  Multiplied over others crafts it's like managing a motor pool and every now and then when one limps into the shipyard and drops anchor I'm happy to see it because I know I am built for it, and yeh it, the task, may be nothing fancy to you.  It may be routine to you.  To me it is approaching maximum output and it gives me joy to know what I work to do, and sweat to do, and bleed to do, I can do for them and theirs too and let them punch their throttles and brakes and when they turn the dual keys and sequence their hyperdrive to go see who they want to or bring their lights up for their party or plug in their laptop in their study or push their coffee table to a spot where they can put their feet up and still be sitting on their couch or activate their weapons without having to think about whether it will work or not. 

Sure, it's regular shit.  As much job as I can take without losing control of my own regular shit.

Alright, I'm going to try to get through this fast so I do not waste your time.  There are few things worse than thieves.

Burn like a tire.  The easy thing to do is burn energy by burning it.  We all get that.  Burn the excess.  Take only what you need.  I think that's the key and the dream to art's pursuit.  The realized and often unrealized dream to art's pursuit and it's main reason for existence.  Without art we are nothing.  We are little entropy machines and we are aware enough to know this.  We build up charge and build up charge and requires expense.  It is not optional.  We are aware that ourselves and environment are constantly approaching disarray at fantastic speed.  Our awareness heightens as we approach great structure.  We would not know structure without disorder built into our make up.

The easy thing to do is burn.  It's not the secret of life.  Each day a person wakes up they are given charge.  Each day a person wakes up, their fortress has trapped free energy from the destruction around them.  Destroy it.  Burn it.  Literally.  Run in circles.  Use it to create more endless fury.  Or battle it.  Make a declaration and take a stand and say "no."  It's not about building a tower to be sent down by time or sent down by someone else.  It's about recognizing that you have recognized that you are different.  You know what's happening and where it ends and offering a beautiful warning.  The game of putting your finger on the tip of your nose to say "not it!"  

I guess I did finally get that I cannot play dumb as often as I would like to.  At the same time though, what gave me pause was, I also know for sure I am not as smart as I think I am sometimes.  A good portion of the time.  So I'm not going to allow myself to get brassy on my own behalf.  S'not playing dumb, but I would rather underestimate the jump and take too much care than overestimate the jump and take too little.

I am an awful liar.  I still sweat horribly when I'm trying to spin a lie.  Does it ever get difficult for you to think about who you would be if you're skillsets were rearranged when it comes to communication?  I am such a bad liar, it's ridiculous.  I would probably enjoy card games and games in general a lot more if I could lie better.  Then again, if I had a talent for it, I would probably abuse it and beat it until the wheels fell off and I wouldn't get caught in a web.  I'd get caught in a world of trouble and the very ground I walked on would be sticky as fuck.

Life without headphones has been brutal.  I didn't realize how much I needed them to help me tune out products of my mind and visions and conversations happening and not actually happening and interpolations happening and not actually happening.  With background I can turn the contrast up a lot higher when I am walking, forced or no, outside of the learned and mastered framework where I know exactly what is and is not imagined without having to look twice unless I have to.  It's been a very rough go and very upsetting.

I went to the gas station again last night because I was very hungry and needed milk.  I didn't want to go, but by the time I convinced myself it was worthwhile I was feeling pretty ready.  I saw it again.  Between two houses, there it was.  Smack dab in front of my face and I almost yelped.  I walked back and forth along the street and it was there, tracking.  I just wished I had my headphones so I could put my head down and forget about it.  I don't want to know it.  I don't want to get to know it.  I don't want it to sniff me out again or get a smell for me.  What the hell were you?

Trespassing is a crime.  I walked all the way up to the fence of their yard between the houses.  When I touched the links and rattled them a little it ran off, but I couldn't see to where.  I'm not looking forward to tonight.  I don't know if I should stay or risk going out.  I just don't know.  I don't know where they come from.  They make my skin prickle.  It was so hard not to pee my underwear.  I don't know what to do about it, but I'll figure something out eventually.  Or hide.  It is entirely possible I'm not the one it's looking for and I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Entirely and absolutely possible.

At any rate.  Our problems are our own and it's passed time to close up shop for a little while.  Shut down hailing frequencies and allow the machines to do their work and hum and try to do some dream work.  I am going to get a replacement set of headphones as soon as possible.  I can't use photoshop effectively for the time being so we will try to change the face of the Auralport and OEM by hand.  We can do it.  I hate waiting for me.  I think you don't like waiting for me too.  Nothing to it, but to do it.  I want to crank out a few short stories too.  There is a pair that have been knocking around my skull for a few months that I've been editing up there and it is, again, passed time that I put the needle to the record and turn up the volume and relax and reread.  

I do not know what's in the backwoods.  I always hope the backwoods do not know me too.

Left Field - "Gussett"  i wish it was raining today

That Instant

you first realized the drawing could be bigger than the paper and the paper was just a window on the drawing and you had the freedom to be as close to the object or as far away as you wanted and your little eyes went huge and the world you knew as a kid exploded .

Dear (_____)

Dear artists,

Thanks for coloring my world.  Whatever it takes, I'll try to ping back.  Sometimes I feel like the least artistic of my siblings.  Survival consumes so much.  Sometimes I forget life doesn't end at survival.

Redesign (stealth mode, but not really)

So I'll make this short and sweet.  Some updates (hooray changes).  I haven't been sitting around scratching my bum and picking my nose and wishing for things to change.  Well I have, but that's only half of my day.  I'm on the "wish it, want it, do it" plan from the book of the same title as reviewed by Bill Maher on that show about the dog and the baby and the bad father and their crazy antics.  I don't know why I did that to such detail.  I think it was supposed to be funny.  Progressively funnier as the details got more specific and more vague.  Reverse comedy crash zoom.  What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, so some updates:

The Auralport is wearing it's summer best.  It looks a lot better over there (pictured here it's tinted gray) and the cloud bank drawn inside the letters really pops out bright.  The design actually turned out completely different from the idea I had in my head of summer fields and woodlands.  I wanted it to come out in deep greens and golds and purple and pink and as I was working on it I became more and more consumed with the steeliness of summer skies and the way power lines and telephones poles cut everything up when the sun goes down until it's too dark to see.  And then the links became these bits of flame salmon that kind of reminded me of how the clouds kind of catch fire bit by bit at sunrise and sunset.  So I wanted to capture some of that without making it unreadable.  I'm pretty sure it's borderline unreadable as it is, but it's the right kind of hardness I was looking for.  That same hardness that makes the summer sky hard to stare into some days because it is so bright and black at once.

I'm looking forward to doing the fall redesign though.  I think I just do better with darker pallets and color arrays and lower contrast over there.  OEMFail will always be a high contrast affair.

Bits for Flames received a little infusion of life in the form of two short short stories: The Hills at Wallston Park and Cement Head.  Obvs they're not for kids.  One is drama and the other is curio.  I still want to do more with it, but haven't really had the courage or drive to really sit down and tear something big off there.  I almost toyed with the idea of doing a redesign, but then I remembered I still have to do header art for the various sub sections, not to mention finish populating them from my stock piles of google docs.  Anyway, they're there for your consideration.

Times have been tough.  Times have been fun.  Finally regained the ability to do somethings, and learned to do some new things.  It's never all bad.  It's going to be a tough month though.  Then again, when is it never not a tough month?  I don't know.  Still popping off the works over at Auralport though the traffic stats are down, but I don't particularly mind.  I remember when I first started over there I was afraid someone would see it.  Funny how things flip around.  I'm not particularly happy with the subjects and themes lately, but I'm not sure what I'm turning toward as of yet, so I'm going to keep shaking my head like I've got swimmers ear and writing down what comes out until I hit on what it is I've been trying to say this season.

May be time to just sit down and grind out an album.

Anyway.  Unannounced changes that are now announced so they're stealthy, but not really.  I'm rambling.  Anyway, uhm...  I lived, I loved, I laughed, and then slept for 14 hours.  Gnite :P


///the item you are searching for has been moved.  for no particular reason at all.   because sometimes that happens.  bonus track available next time around.  i promise (maybe).

Over The River and Through The Woods

It's been a long trip here. Back here. I should say. A lot of different pressures. A lot of losses. One of those peculiar things. Not one, several. I got dumped. Not exactly big news. I also broke up with someone. Two different people. At the same time. In the same span of conversation. And then was propositioned again. By the person I just dumped and the offspring of the person who left me. Mainly all I could think was "how is this even possible." Mainly all I could do was do nothing and ask for some time to think about the entire course of the 48 hours.

A lot of my creative time was damaged leading up to that point, which was part of why I had to leave and be let go. Part of it was biological incompatibilities. Vaginas and tiny dicks. What's a boy to do? The proposition is worse than the original make up. Better in it's emotional make up. Worse in it's biological make up, but closer to normal than the previous one, but altogether worse because the venue is the same, with the same accouterments and attendant chemical problematics and it would be so much less, if it wasn't so much more. Hours to land on the same page, hours to read each other, hours to post script to everyone's satisfaction. Hours and hours of time I would rather spend writing. Hours to spend dreaming spent instead in interaction I need, but don't want.

Tripping round and round town and all the while stalking through my own dreams when I do sleep to find the nemesis. The dreaming has been spectacular in it's depth. And also time consuming. The hunt largely unsuccessful. The body count, however, relatively high. I have found, in there, many things to fear and many things that could bleed that I never thought would until I tried in moments I would normally wake from, but instead followed on. It's hard sometimes when they're the ones hiding from you and there is nothing to do beyond waiting. Sitting and waiting to feel well enough to wake up. Charged enough to support waking hours. Pacing through dreams. I've been over the territories. Every god damn way. Without success. I'm beginning to think he won't show until I stop looking. Like those stupid Super Mario ghosts. I'll get him though. Just a matter of time. Patience.



Things have been scatter formed. Trying to get back on a pace. Any pace. I had a pace you could set an erratic watch to. A watch that was missing some teeth. And had a cracked face. And the watch band was either too tight or too loose, but you could never lose it because the minute it was not on your wrist you knew it because you didn't feel anything at all. I lost my watch. I'm finding it again and I can't fuck it up again.

I mean, I can. I will. Because I've fucked it up at least ten times before. Closer to twenty. But I'm trying. This makes twenty one. Or something around there. The quality of the poetry has been. That is all. It just has been. Not too dark, not too light. So I have to keep doing that. I just wish the erratic and hit and miss was just one long string of things I could stand next to and be proud of instead of a whole lot of things I have to read twenty four hours later to understand and begin to appreciate or begin to hate and then it's like picking up old photographs on a coffee table at grandmother's house and you scratch your chin for a minute and then think oooooh yeah, I was there, wasn't I. God damn that sweater is terrible. What was I thinking. But, damn I looked good then. I hate grandmother's house.

Over the river and through the woods, to dreamland's houses we go. Off to slay the thoughts of the day and retrace my footsteps in snow.

I'm not going to talk about my mental state. There are things in the dark and there are things in the light and all of them would kill you given the chance. Stay alert. Watch the corners. Don't point at the sky, because one day it will point back at you. Don't chase the sounds, unless they are following. Don't chase the splits in the seams of your vision, because people will think you are crazy. Don't listen to the voices. If you ignore them long enough, they'll tell you something special you wouldn't have thought about on your own. And that thing will be so amazing the only way you could relate it to someone who was not there, inside you, is by saying nothing and leaving it all up to the rattle of tree leaves and two A.M. hounds that think they are scrap metal boatswains to rails.


///Mono - "High Life" ... all you live is the high life and never come down... loved this song in high school. still do. Mono always had a sound that completely took me in and I loved them for that.

///Mono - "Life in Mono" I never know exactly what to do, but they never make it easy to walk away. Expectations too great. I want to say. And then the little voice in the back of my head whispers, maybe this is it, for now. So leave nothing on the table.

Comrade Super Code

Life has been strange. A lot of big boy decisions. Decisions I haven't had to make before. Like what? Like none of your damn business. It's been difficult. Then again, when has it ever been easy. My dreams have been phenomenal. I've taken again to recording them when I can as I wake up. The first thing I do is grab hold of my phone and press record and just talk, sometimes for hours. Sometimes just to hear a voice that I know is real. Sometimes just because there is so much information brought back from there that I know I am going to lose that I know I will need later. I promise I will get back to serials.

The thought of dying has not been as intense as it used to be. I had a conversation with someone about that specifically. Ten iterations ago I was sixteen. I don't know what I was thinking then. The documentation is largely destroyed. The record really begins to come into it's own when I was 18 and really began to apply myself to writing. That's been the literal paper trail. It hasn't been as intense as it used to be. Probably part of the blunting. Which is fine. I can deal with that missing edge. Sometimes you just have to beat yourself in the head with a bat until things quiet down. The kid hasn't been missing. That's not the problem. The problem is that we're all on the factory floor, guns to each other's heads, knives out, and if you say one word, just one, I will cut you so bad they will need your dental records to put a name to your body.

I just have to get them to work together again. They're all here. Just off on different projects. Different passions asking each other to pass the mashed potatoes, but never directly. It's been great hanging out with them on an individual basis, since they're not talking. We've gotten close. Which is nice. Not together. Which is not nice. Variable occupancy. Not healthy. We do drugs. No we don't. Second hand spray. Collusion. You owe me. I have been managing rage. Easier to do when you don't own standoff weaponry. In my life everyone has lied to me. That is not entirely true. Tomorrow is my 67th birthday in my 26th iteration. There is a certain amount of pride to be had in not joining the under 27 club, I think. A certain amount of disappointment, because joining that club is pretty elite in terms of prodigious production, but I have not done enough or come close to where I want to be in terms of body of work to be happy enough to pull that trigger, and a certain amount of relief because I am sure the majority of under thirty something suicides go unheralded and how sad is that? It's off and on. Wires close enough to arc, but the force of the spark and ignition of air shoves them apart until they work their way close again.

The shadows have been crawling. The little faces in door jambs closed. The weeping man in streaks of dry paint laid to a door decades ago. What the hell. Who made that and why. The shadows have been crawling and blooming for lack of a better word. When I'm not looking. When I'm barely looking. When I'm trying not to look. The world is a war zone. A fantastic warzone. I have been imagining the most fantastic weapons to expedite exterminations. If only I had the staff and the means. An angry boy can dream.

The world cross bridge is haunted. By my father. I have to kill him there. If I ever want to enjoy it again. I've had to rip chord out of there more times than I would like to admit in the last seven days and I can't kill him here. Not yet anyway. Still too much to do. He will pay though. Eventually. Matters of course and convenience. There was a word I was supposed to look up and I didn't. It's going to bother. 24 years of compensation. I just have to make sure I don't take it out on the people I love.

I gave women a pretty hard rap sheet yesterday. And I'm sorry for that. Not because it wasn't true, but because it came across so chopping blocked. There's no vendetta. Probably a lot of buried issues with my mother. They come up as I dig into the ground. Trying hard to not be found. I'm not going to go on a serial spree of slaughtering women to make myself feel better about myself. The shadows have been crawling. Actually moving. I don't know what to do about that. If there is anything I can do about that.I had this dream where darkness poured out of light fixtures like little waterfalls and it was gorgeous until the shadows grew so high people started to drown and I looked for days and couldn't find the switch to turn them off. Ghostly swims. Turning off the lights and trying hard not to look back into the rooms and believe there really is nothing there more than what was when the switch turned the other way. The freedom. It's been strange.

Where the hard stops start. Toxic involvements. I do have to clean up the circuitry at some point. My willingness to engage has been the source of certain difficulties. What happened to your face? I can't say, honestly. If I told you, I would sound crazy. And then you wouldn't want me around at all. I swear it's all above board. My boards. Not yours. Your square one, your nothing is different from mine. Maybe connected on some flattened levels. When you pick through them with zero and one forensics. I thought maybe if I scratched my ear hard enough I could pick my brain. No luck. We had this dream, right? About a house made out of cardboard and dried leaves.

I was wondering, you know, if you knew where I'd been. I have this sneaking suspicion someone's been lying to me, but I don't know who. Many loves of the dragon. Maybe I should get a kitten. At some point. I need to draw more. Now that I have the time to. The time to sleep dive almost at will. It's going to be amazing. I'll try to take notes better than I have. I've been gone for some time, but I'm back now. Bolting through space. Hell hound on a thin leash and learning boundaries the while. Dog bites man and man bites dog and dog bites dog and man bites man. And everybody wishes sweet dreams into your head as though there isn't fire filling the coils of your bed.


/// Starkey - "Eris" stoop sitter blues high

Strange Ways

I'm sorry I've been away. Life has been strange in many ways. Not really strange as much as just strange in the ways I've come to understand normal. Sea change and all of that. One thing that has been occupying a lot of my time is meeting a couple of people that see me as close to eye to eye as I have ever known any one person to see me. Which has been exciting and ridiculously time consuming. Hard to talk about. Because threesomes aren't exactly normal. Let alone threesomes cemented by violence. Let alone threesomes that are probably on their last legs.

I enjoy belonging to people. That's no secret. I like to know that someone is holding my leash, and I had to revoke that privilege from one member of the threesome so now it's a twosome with occasional benefits for the odd man out. What are you going to do? I mean, I don't particularly enjoy fucking her, but I do enjoy the opportunity to be close to her psychologically so it's like doing dirty work to get the golden egg of her brain and personality because I'm pretty sure she likes fucking me more than what I have to say so it's a perfect fit in terms of what I want and what she wants and the odd piece out is the guy who refuses to kiss me, but wants my dick and nothing else, hence the revocation of leash privileges because if you want to fuck, you better be up for everything that comes with in my book, and I damn near revoked her privileges because she insisted on wearing socks at all times and that's just... ...what?! Seriously? Who does that?

And then there was the conversation where they both referred to me repeatedly as their toy, which is fine. I can accept and appreciate that role, but to then assert that I was worthless without sex, that was the line they crossed and things got violent, but have since settled down. Things and ways were explained to me in the simple terms I understand best and then stabilized into something enjoyable again. We saw fairly close to on the level. Everything since has been delicious. And time consuming. Time oft reserved for writing has been burned in sexual play which is not terrible, but not great either. Lost time in the run up to play and time lost in the run down from play, let alone the play time itself. I dunno. Fucking older people definitely presents problems and issues I never thought about, or even had to think about, before now. It is incredible the difference between older men and older women. Fascinating. It grows frightening sometimes, the potential for breaking their bodies with my own carelessness. At the same time it is deliriously appealing. Being the most capable thing they will likely ever know before they die. Being their first and probably last. I think I love that more than the sex itself. The making of a name. And they are just so adorable together. That's part of it too. The basking in dual praise. The lack of rejection. The fact that they have seen so many people that they can recognize you from one hundred yards out and see right through you and there's nothing to hide because they've seen it all.

I know it's not going to last because he won't fuck unless he's drunk and she won't take her socks off ever and that's just weird and he won't kiss me ever no matter how drunk he gets and she doesn't have a dick and his dick is too small to be anything more than an idle coffee table curiosity and her youngest kid is older than me and she insists that she is the only one allowed to fuck his ass, but until we break up I think this is the best thing to happen to me in a long time. But I also think the strangeness of it is what has been keeping me from talking about it and progressing. Or maybe understanding what kind of flash in the pan it is.

It's been zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds for me. Unbelievable speed. Fuck warp 9, this whole relationship has been warp 12. Engine room ablaze the whole way. More give and take than I've been privy too for better than two years. And yes, I have no idea how to deal with it or any idea of where it's going beyond failure. To top it off I met his daughter and apparently she wants me too. And I don't want sex nearly as much as I want to be useful and used. I play into that more often than I should. It makes me feel like a sociopath, which I don't like. I just enjoy making people feel good. It's a badge of honor. I entertain whatever it is you want to entertain because your happiness and bliss is a kiss upon my heart.

So I want to fuck her. Not because I enjoy women. Not even close. I have been able to love one woman my entire short life. And that is my ex. The rest aren't jetsam, they're just friends at best and confidants when closer. It's just a very odd situation. A very very odd and slowly unraveling situation between a boy a woman and a man who hurts her who wants to use the boy. Sounds like family.

I've been telling people I'm half Scott and half Irish, alternately, because I'm still not sure which. I'm pretty sure it's not half. I'm pretty sure it's a lot less than half. Probably less than quarter. It's fun to be exotic. It's more fun to know exactly where you're from. I always wish to have that, more than anything else. Not just for cheering purposes during the World Cup, but also for tattoo ideas. And also because everyone talks about their extended families on a first name basis and I have never been able to do that. That would be nice. The knowing. The belonging. Life has been strange. The dreams have been stranger and more real than anything else. I slept for 18 hours. It was unbelievably good to do so. I don't know when I'll be able to be awake for more than 13 and not feel like killing myself. An odd pile of ideas. Goodbye for now. Levity to come.


/// The Cardigans - "Heartbreaker" ...no, not again...

I Told You it Was Coming

Down In Flames



At The Controls



OEM Header



and now it's here. I just have to figure out how to fit it all together. Brand new art for the page. It's been gestating for a good few months. Time to work some magic. Not nearly as much neon green as I originally imagined, but that's how these things go sometimes.


///Daedelus - "Overdressed" hey, mister big shot, don't you think you're hot with all the looks you got...

Concept Space

Feeling out the weight of the concept. I've gone with fingerslip as the title for the high latency, slow poetry, space. I'm conceptualizing the banner and side bar and general feel of it and working out the colors.



so far so good. I whittled the list down in terms of originality and mouth feel and intent and urgency in terms of what I really wanted to connect the content with the most.



And now it's just a matter of getting it all to gel in a web page friendly atmosphere.

Happy times.


///Starkey - "Eris" chasing dreams in a golden forest and night breathing cold on your heels.

Gestating Names

The low line is happening.

slowfluid
fingerslip
sunlance
powerdive
horsemenofthesun
highsequence
memoryanthem
keptaquaintance
throattwine
founderstext

Yes, I spent five hours doing this. Yes, it was hard. Yes, it would have been a lot easier if there weren't fifteen thousand dead blogs with catchy names still alive from 2002 that haven't been posted to in five years. Or, roughly, and my math isn't that great, but fifteen thousand days. Roughly. Probably more. Anyway, there were about three times more names that made it to the final cut. Two thirds were already taken. And five thirds were crappy for various reasons. Too cheap, too easy, too slow, too fast, too complex, too simple, too pandering, too monotone, too soft, too sexual, too written, too base, too serif-ed, too guilded, too quilled, etc, etc. These are the front runners.

The sad thing is, while I'm working on this I come across a ton of dead blogs. A ton of "this is my outlet"s. And they have clearly failed or moved on to other things that distract them or allow them some kind of other outlet or actually physically or maybe emotionally dead or just medicated. Enthralling and disheartening at the same time because I see it and I think "oh my god, I'm just like you, let's be friends" and then I understand they quit or walked away or grew out of it or whatever you want to call it for whatever reason.

The important thing is, the important thing being, the important thing seeing and I will tell you what you see, progress. I already had several design themes in mind and the name that wins out will probably be the one that fits the thema best. I'm not sure that's a word as much as it is a feeling. But yes. Usually it is fairly bad practice to name a color after you identify what color it is, but I am an impressionist and I see definites in swatches and brush strokes and it's much easier to name the thing after it exists instead of creating a name and top downing it.

So I'm thinking saturday will not be a terrible day to launch something new and old and new. It has been a long time coming. It will be fun to get my fingers dirty in adobe again. It's been a while. Too long. Like everything else. Well not even close to like everything else. the important thing is, and i can't stress that enough, the mind work is done. now it's getting down to the actionable items and I am gathering the disparate, the desperate, and the deserters to the factory floor because its not time to make weapons or war. It's time to make... period.


///Kinny and Horn - "Sacred Life" ...love the everything. Just write it all down cuz I don't really care. But I do. And that's why I foster love for the one's I don't dare. Be nice and sacrifice and play nice. Align. The world wasn't won in a day. The world wasn't one in a day. The world wasn't sung in a day. The world wasn't done in day. There's still time. So play.

Good Things and Some Updates

I've updated the Auralport. I'm liking it. A little more grimy to fit the tone of what I've been putting out. It's the autumn look.

Header:

teh header. That's right; teh. Trying to capture some urban swell. Some of that urbany grungery.

Background:

the verbal refinery

Summer's gonna hurt you. It hurts me. Pretty much every year. But, insufferable bastards make poor friends. As we all know. I'm glad I put the hours in to make it happen. It was long overdue. And God knows I've been trying to brush up my design language and delivery. There's an aerospace themed remix of oem coming soon as well. I want to say it'll be hammered out this coming Saturday, but there are a lot of things I want to say that never make it to the light of day. I'm workin. Trying not to be some kind of insufferable bastard, because those sorts of people make shitay friends. So looking forward to the cool of day and cooler night.

So much to say that I haven't yet. But I'm composing. Every hour of every waking day is spent, part way, in composition and refinement. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. Maybe that's what makes the job interviewing process difficult. Every time they ask me where I see myself in five years the answer is always "retired to a ranch and spending every waking minute writing and thinking and getting outside to do the things industrial society left behind." I'm a terrible liar.

Anyway, hello as always. Do I really have to tell you I love you after all these months and years? Well I'll do it anyway, because I have so much love and so few faces to spit it to. I love you.
Ciao. Is that how that's spelled? Well, let's safety dance it: chow. Also I'm pretty hungry. My fridge is mostly empty, but I'm happy, so who cares. Not I.


///Gorillaz - "To Binge" ...love yourself some, they're not going to forgive you. You can do another day, but don't be afraid to help yourself make that day a little more "fukyeh". We've all fallen out of favor some way some how. Details are for mooks. Sunshine is for kooks. Moonlight is for spooks. But you, you just are in the sunshine and the moonshine and the details and the broad visions and that is something. Who's really keeping score in this economy?

Redesign & Sudden Death Memory, and the Equalizer

Been smacking the knobs on my equalizer. Playing with sound things to see what other sound things I can make with them. Playing with sound tracks to see if I can mess with the levels in just such a way to drop the singer's voice right out of the track and hold the rest of it intact. It's been a pretty fun game. A fun way to pass time. Well actually not a fun way to pass time. That's kind of the annoying part. It's time consuming, but such fun. And I will not harp on lost time today. I have more time than most people get to enjoy and keep a roof over their head. Granted it is inconvenient time so its value is probably more accurately expressed in pesos instead of dollars, but creative currency no less.



I still need to get an actual instrument. Probably an electric guitar, but I think I might be more of a bass kinda guy. There is something alluring in the simplicity of bass that lends itself to complication in the way electric guitar can base itself in range and show its beauty in simplification. Plus I love drums, but after four concussions I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to develop the wild coordination required to play them well. Plus there's something soothing to generating and feeling bass ripple through you. Something that counters the days forced aggressions and doses of adrenaline that feels like a hot bath for your brain. A thing restorative.

However that's going to come after I finish saving up for a beater. trying to spend a grand on a car to love and cherish. I figured out that if I spend no more than 300 dollars on it, it only needs to last four months before dying, if it dies, assuming it dies, for it to cover and even come out better than my normal costs of riding the city bus over the course of four months. If I spend a grand it will have to last a lot longer, but the thing is the difference between spending 300 dollars and a grand is that if I spend that extra 700 dollars I will probably get much closer to driving the car I actually want to drive instead of ending up driving someone's rusted out, but still inspected, late 80's minivan. I would love to own a ford probe. The mustang replacement that never was. Or an old Celica. Actually all of the old rally car platforms are just so tempting. As long as I end up with something with as much or preferably more torque than horsepower (or a ford probe) I will be a fantastically happy camper.



Just gotta keep messing with that equalizer until the right sounds come out. I'll get it eventually.

So there's an upcoming redesign of Auralport coming up. It's funny because upcoming things can never not be coming up. Doing it partly because I'm tired of seeing the same thing come up behind new words, so I figure you probably are too and it will be good for me to get the work in with creative suite. Part of what I've been trying to do lately is get the time in to redevelop my lapsing photoshop and illustrator skills. Few things frustrate me as much as having an idea and no mode to express it and right now, with my tool box near empty that is exactly what I've been staring at. I want to take the current design away from nature and into more of a citified urbanized feel for a while. A little darker too. Sunburst forest green is not wearing so well with the current thematic tide all over my poetry corner and I want the images to better reflect the content. I think I'm going to start mock ups of new headers for here too that I'll cycle through every four weeks or so... to keep things interesting when the content is not because, God knows, there are only so many ways life can fall apart and it really helps when the band playing you to the ocean floor knows more than one song.

More than that though, I am also going to make the effort to have my own stuff developed again instead of just linking us off to other folks things. I think that has been something of a friendly crutch in the retardation of my abilities and I've accepted with too much heart.

Some memories have resurged. Memories that I thought were gone forever. I was taking a shower after work and watching the water wheel away between my feet and into the drain. As I traced my fingers between the shoots of my hair against my scalp my mind was ripped back twenty something years to another time on Staten Island when I was doing the same thing in a much younger frame for very different reasons. I remembered being allowed to stay home after a particularly violent episode of punishment and discipline so that I could take some time to recuperate and feel better about myself before going back to school. It took all that time for me to realize that I wasn't being allowed to stay home. I wasn't suddenly the beneficiary of some new found well spring of mercy and kindness. I was wrecked. Visibly, noticeably, physically wrecked and he was just trying to protect himself from the consequences of his actions by keeping me at home until the physical wounds righted themselves enough to raise questions. Standing in the shower it was like being thrust into a sudden death tournament with no preparation. No warning. Needless to say, I lost. I lost it. But now that it's come up from the ocean blacked years of my younger days it's there and I can at least see it coming if it ever rears its head again.

I don't know why those years have all tinted themselves to night. I mean, I know why from the standpoint of survival. The standpoint of self preservation. What I do not know is what the mechanism was for their initial elimination from the body of experiences that have come to define me. So few memories from then. I suppose I am happy to have another one. Just unhappy that it is one so undesirable. Such is life I suppose. Back to the equalizer.


///Fatboy Slim - "The Journey" journeying away from where I was to where I want to be, or maybe just to a place I didn't know I would love to be in. The journey will call my name. One of the few with no real home, no place to be, and so many places still unknown. Plainswalkers. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be good enough at expressing myself through music to link to my own. That's pretty far off. But one more reason to live another day is never a bad thing as far as I care to be concerned :)

Compound Eye

You know those weeks where you can swear up and down you own something, but you can't find it because you or someone you know or maybe someone you don't know borrowed it and never returned it to you or it turns out you never actually bought it in the first place because you dreamed the whole thing and woke up so seamlessly that the thought was sewn into the fabric of your memory permanently and you should by all rights, as far as the chemicals and salts zipping around the fatty little lanes and straightaways in your head can tell you, have it somewhere in the place where you live and within reach when you need it. Which is right now. Just a week of "I need this right now. Where is it?" Just wanted to tell you that yeah, you're not crazy. I know those weeks too. For me though, and not to say I'm super more specialer than you, it's been a month.

I can't seem to find my eye for pencil work. I lost it somewhere. I know I had it. I can look back at all the things I did with it and can still sort of fuzz out with the tool that's now occupying the space it used to occupy, but the series of functions and processes that composed my eye hand connection for pencil work have absented themselves from the factory floor. Which leads me to believe that they were taken. There's been another glaring gap in the work force. Physical production has tailed off dramatically. While it is good that I have managed to keep everyone on task doing constructive things instead of building destructive implements of and components to a machine whose sole purpose is a Rube Goldbergian mechanicide. There has been that one missing thing and I think I know the exact face that would have packed something like pencil work into his bag before checking out without notice. Which is fine. I can live with that. Everyone else still comes to the table and as long as I can have dreams that wander and fly with the child and can cross at will and am not building myself into an elaborate and immediate and quite possibly explosive self death, the rest is water under the gravy cake.

Buuut still. It is just a little annoying. I have no idea where they go. As the administrator I usually just have to sit and wait for them to come back. The kid wanders. That's the only one I have to actively chase down, because who the hell knows when he'll get back. Plus I don't even know if it's possible for them to get hurt out where they go and come to and from and with him I take no chances. That's the main member that helps keep everyone else relatively in agreement. But enough about me. I tried to draw some flowers today. Flowers in the shape of a scorpion for an idea for a tattoo. This is what came out:



Frustrating. Not even close to what was laid out in my head. I felt like strangling my hand for it's insolence, but that wouldnt have helped any of us. Well I might have felt better for a few minutes in the same way Stalin felt better for having people shot, but we all know how that ended. Happily ever after. If by happily you mean breathlessly paranoid. And if by ever after you mean with little warning and thankfully not a minute or second longer. So I'm not going to have my hand shot. This time. I'd probably have to hold the gun with my mouth. Maybe rig up some kind foot pedal operated jig, because old lefty can't really be trusted. They've been friends too long. Might give him the tip off and righty might skip town to Istanbul.

Well anyway. What now. Is the main question. I don't know if I can't draw. I think I still can. That drawing I did before did not turn out nearly as I saw it in my head either. I hope this disconnect isn't a sign of some medical nonsense. I'm not going in for that. I got enough medical nonsense to try and ignore without thinking about having to have new medical nonsense to try and ignore on top of that. But enough about me.

I think what could also be happening here. An alternate theory of the origin of man, if you will. Is that our dear escapee is still at work and still down in the factory toodling away at this and that project behind my eyes and ahead of spine, but the actual tools and processes and algorithms he is using have changed without my direct information. Which is possible, I suppose. In fact, I assume. In fact, in fact is one of those things I just try not to use in writing and it always comes up, so I will not use it again in here so I can think about - whatever. The point is, he is still there doing his damnedest to turn plans and prints and raw blank ingots of multi-ton steel and walls of marble into frescoes. Frescoes? Really complicated and beautifully simple objects of vision transmitted from my head to yours through the medium of the manipulation of space, material, and radiata and what I am expecting to see is really him trying to do the job with the new tools and processes and it is amounting to trying to build houses with like a complex multistage artisan bread oven instead of hammers and nails and measuring tape.

So instead of the end product being something that it should be had I not so strictly enforced my vision on myself - a ridiculously awesome bread house, shiny and golden and all crazy twisty gorgeous sitting on my coffee table, it ends up being something close to my vision, but ridiculously not - an impossible to inhabit, but human sized house built with beams of sagging bread and weird warbly walls and a floor you can stand on for about two seconds before you fall through from the upstairs straight on down to the dirt floor basement.

I think my eye for black and whites and penciling and penning is changing, or maybe already changed, to an eye for colors. I thought I lost my eye for color earlier this week because I was trying to see what I wanted to see in terms of line work and then overlay the colors I wanted it to appear in on top of that and I couldn't get past trying to envision the lines. I thought that meant that I was having trouble seeing how the colors would fit and thus couldn't fit the lines to the colors. Now I think the problem might be that I can see the colors without the lines and trying to fit the lines to the colors is something my tools and processes are unprepared to do.

Which is slightly exciting. I don't remember when we talked about it before, but when I first started sharing art I told you I was a pen and pencil guy and usually never screwed around with coloring things because I had no eye for it. I guess I've been working at it long enough to change that and hadn't realized it until now. Unless there is a third explanation. A third theory of space and time and the god particle if you will. I could just have regressed. I might just be worse at drawing and art than I was before. But fuck that. I'm greatness.



///Mouse on Mars - "Circloid Bricklett Sprungli" you know I don't have an ego that big. My ego is so small to understand how small it feels you'd have to feel this song turned up as loud as it'll go and turn the bass up as high as it goes and picture yourself sitting on the nose of a Saturn V booster, tall as a skyscraper, firing the energy output of a dozen Hoover Dams out of it's enormous backside in more flames and vapor than you've ever seen in the widest Arizona sunset you've ever laid eyes on and on top of that tower you look back and there's nothing behind you but the shrinking blue disk of a half moon Earth and the blackness of space so wide it makes you dizzy just to blink. That's how little my ego is as I'm blasting through space, trying to understand the world and teach myself to be okay with the fact that I may never really have a place to land.

In the Back Woods and Friendship Tugs of War

Well, I've been gone for a minute, but it's been something of a stroll in the backwoods. The creepy backwoods that are often not to be strolled until the circumstances demand some sort of outing and the only reasonable place to go where you can't be bothered is the back 9 of the mind. Keeping a good clip with poetry. A minor defeat of writer's block that has allowed some things to flourish. I haven't used that word in a while, if at all. Flourish. It has a certain pirouette to it that has to be reserved for unique measures of success.

Success in the face of nightmares. Actual nightmares. Actual moments of the involuntary bridging of dream and real states. Of seeing what is there and what isn't or at least shouldn't be in the same instance of breathing and having to close my eyes and repeat after me "you are safe"s. If repeating is believing. I guess that's one of the reasons why I don't believe in heaven or hell. I've seen them both and they're not what anyone says they are supposed to be. I've been to the end of the world and it's nothing like what we've been told is it? Few things ever are. If I smell a little like death it's because we've been bedfellows on and off recently. A flirting couple that knows neither is really committed to anything serious, but when is play ever except when it is?

So we've pumped and ground and made and done and life has gone on for less and worse and better and blood. The organs still pump and the sound still comes in fountains and so I continue. I continue on in the backwoods and little leaps to foregrounds until, I have come to convince myself recently in the train of reasons to reason in, the day when my life transposes from discrete experiences into a singular piece of poesis. A perfect and sustainable solid state. And then I'll happily call it a day. Not in a bid for immortality because immortality is only to memory and human memory will never break the solid state barrier (so even immortals are no more than incarnates), but in a bid to have become. I suppose there are probably many things I am becoming, but to have definitively crossed that boundary of becomingness to the hell pots of posterity is a thing worth aspiring to if there is anything worth shooting for. Call the stars, or the moon, or glory, or whatever. Incarnations of the become be damned. To have is to have in some way shape and form held in hands so often dropped in emptiness. To have gripped, and not let go even in whatever can be termed death.

There have been joys in the backwoods. Joys tasted rarely in and the travel has been hard and light, but worth it in some ways and a waste in many others. And I don't know why I am trying to see this in two points of view. Oh wait I do! Friendship tug of war. You can pick your nose. You can pick your friends. But you can't favor one person over the other though they both know you in pathetically thin terms. What the hell does it matter, you idiots? I mean really. Can we all just grow up a good four years and call this bullshit a day. Not to rant on so silly a topic. It's just aggravating. Neither one of you could really keep pace with what I'm up to so what the hell difference does it make. Both of you would probably have nothing to do with me if you knew me to the fullest possible extent so can we please all just get along by the terms of the established sensibilities of isness? Probably not.

I have got too much to run from to ever fully open to either so what can I possibly be expected to do when I can't even begin to describe what can be reasonably expected of myself. How can you love anybody when you don't love yourself? Well, it's kind of easy if you try. Just kidding, it's impossible, but still- what the hell. Are my choices really to go hang with the one person who always lies to me and makes assertions they can never back up and keep trusting in them and keep getting screwed up worse than I am, or is it to drag myself across town to hang with someone who has no idea who i actually am and will be put in a weird situation when he does. I guess the one thing I do have to consider is that I shouldn't presume to know people I - don't know. Simply stated. So maybe it's worth a shot. Maybe it's time to bend the orbit a little bit and come in close enough to lay some mathematics and calculus to a potential short rendezvous. Haven't used that word in a while either. Generally reserved for important things. Like scenes from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Elegant things. My staff of scientists are not elegant or important. Their idea of a delicate landing is detonating on the surface. They didn't do so well in school, I guess. If shithead A gets a shot, I think it stands to reason that potential decent friend B should also get a shot to play the table and fit into my arbitrary and ridiculous set of rules for friendship that, I swear these people do exist, few people can seem to fit into. I miss those people a ton. I guess the stupid thing is they'll never know who they are. If they did know they probably wouldn't care what it is they accomplished. Alright I'm gonna pipe this down as I'm making myself slightly depressed. And by slightly I mean massively. It's been a tough week. Sorry I've been away.

Well anyway, thought I would drop off some graphics. Because what is a road trip without photographs. There are things that live when you sleep that do not sleep as you are living. They wait for you to come on back. Come on home. One more time. You'll not leave this place alive, but you can try. You can try for old time's sake. We'll give you a fit and running start. See how far you go before we are there, sucking the lengths of string of your calf through your heel like fine noodles through a straw of shredded skin. Don't stay up too late.



///The Black Angels - "Mission District" You can sometimes hear it. You can always feel it when it comes beating on your heart like a death threat. You will write or you will suffer in ways you did not know existed, but will become intimately familiar with. And you do it. And you duck away into the grass and you listen to it beat it's way farther along and then it's gone and you can't really tell if you saved yourself or if maybe the entire thing is coming around again and this time at an angle you did not know was possible and maybe you'll hear it. You'll certainly feel it closing in, but how much less warning will there be next time?

Coming Soon - Art Pending a Day Off to Make It

Predator - tagline: The ultimate rage quit. You know it's coming.

Tom Cruise headliner - tagline: More intense than the trailer suggests.

Kevin Costner headliner - tagline: Thoughtful. Despite the supporting cast.

Danny Glover headliner - tagline: We're all too old, but we want you to say it.

Nicholas Cage headliner - tagline: Better than the script, but what the hell.

Adam Sandler headliner - tagline: We've all felt that pain.

Eva Mendez headliner - tagline: More than breasts, but who's keeping track.

Jay and Silent Bob - tagline: No, he doesn't say anything funny. Again.

House Party - tagline: I don't really know either.

Anything Tyler Perry - tagline: Life sucks, but be loud and colorful.

DiCaprio headliner - tagline: It's a crap shoot. Don't hedge.

Alec Baldwin supporting - tagline: stay classy trumps bad writing. Every time.

Samuel Jackson headliner - tagline: loud beats funny. Tragedy beats funny. Loud complements tragedy. Tragedy complements funny. Win, win, w1n.

Christina Ricci supporting - tagline: you thought you knew, but you already bought the popcorn.

Brad Pitt headliner - tagline: Kevin Costner never had scripts so good.

Edward Norton headliner - tagline: fasten your seatbelt. Or don't. You've been warned.

Gary Oldman supporting - tagline: you have not paid enough to see what you are about to see.

Space Is the Place

I took some breaths today. It felt good. Space will always be the place for me. She's holding together alright. I'll keep riding her till she does break up across the sky. But in the meantime I'll do other things, between barrel rolls and sky writing. More power. I know I shouldn't, but I also know that the shouldn't is based on... whatever, I'm not going to get into it now. More power. I'm just gonna lean back and enjoy the gravities and the throttle response and watch the stars streak like chalk behind a rocket powered eraser. Watch the memories tail away like headlights in the rain belted to tires breaking loose and for seconds free of the mechanics of purpose and spinning away. Enjoy.




///Mouse on Mars - "Presence" come down, friend. Do I really need to tell you no? Yes. Then no.

Stand Up Act 2

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One, Two, Three, Four-

Gone for a minute. Task locked again. I wish there was a way to make progress across the board. Sometimes I feel like I'm on that first frustrating and seemingly never ending series of levels in a role playing game where the experience points to level up are far between simply because the power needed to earn them is severely constricted by the lack of experience. You can wander around all you want. Your actual experience has nothing to do with your point registered experience. In fact you've been wandering around so long that you know the game pretty much inside and out, but because you don't have the power to advance you can't earn the power to advance. Well, not can't, but it's the least you can do to keep running around the periphery of the real game performing the time intensive little things to keep earning the game's recognized experience points and stacking up your little levels until you come across a monster and suddenly find that you've actually accumulated enough attack points to make it more than facing imminent destruction and instant death.

Not that writing is instant death. Or working a bad job that cuts your hours down to next to nothing even though you are the best at what you do there. I guess what I'm saying is I've had very few points to spend and I wish sometimes there was a way to get more other than slugging it out every day and for me there isn't. Everything's not okay, but I deal with it and try to move anyway. Move on, sometimes. Other times, just focusing on moving somewhere. Anything besides staying put and curling up into an ass ball.

So where's the progress? Where have the precious points disappeared too? Arts and crafts mostly. Some were spent on getting better at baseball and bike riding. A lot of them were spent on control. Just white knuckle gripping the control panel behind my eyes and making it go. Reorganization is a pretty difficult thing, but worth it. It's sort of sticking. The whole eating three times a day thing has been a huge hassle, but necessary as I learned through the worst pain I've ever felt that not eating and not drinking will send your body into shock and you will die. And I don't want to die alone. Especially not alone and convulsing in a bath tub some random Tuesday afternoon. I just have to deal with the rest of the bullshit attendant with putting food stuffs in my face. There's no patch or workaround for that. It's sticking and slipping. I've already slipped back to two a day. Because of the task locking.

That's what happens when mighty efforts make few gains, I guess. You try to force more effort into the same, largely fixed spans of time and eventually the only way to "make the most" out of your day is to make the least out of routine necessities. Strip it down to the bones and then shave the bones down to filaments. I'm pressing myself into a pure circuit of function. Solid state being. That's not possible yet though. So I have to not do that.

I have phone calls to make that I haven't made. Landing has been harder than I anticipated. I thought I could do it in three weeks, but the the process is in the first few days of what is looking to take better than a month. Not helping is that I'm trying to find more work so I can afford some less than necessary human peripherals and possibly move out of the periphery and closer to the heart of Pittsburgh. That alone would make life easier. Would make progress easier. It would be a definite level up that would increase my ability to earn more commonly accepted experience points. Game recognized points. But if I did start on meds, meds that are, let's face it, necessary if I plan on staying alive (and I do for the foreseeable future), that would require at least 10 days of adjustment and who knows how many days after that of learning to live with the side effects. Last time I tried I ended up throwing up every other day for almost two months which was just a whole big bag of laughs and the last thing I want is to be in a situation where I'm trying to nail down and learn a new job while adjusting to pills.

I guess it's a little funny. How easy it is to set ones self up for failure. I'm managing now through effort, but effort only goes so far when you try to out howl the wind. So I'm choosing. We've a target destination. We're in a decaying orbit that will take us into the atmosphere and ultimate to solid ground, but we can't simply make attitude adjustments and punch it just yet. One: we will break up into a thousand burning pieces if we did that. Two: we are task locked. Three: we haven't made the necessary progress through the shut down sequence to make that even start to be feasible. That's what I've been working through these last weeks. Reorganization. Cataloging of processes and species. Reconnection with the mission. Re-engagement with the real. Human maintenance.

Remember when I said my job was great because it engaged the machine side of my being. Well I've divorced my eating cycle from my workplace and I've divorced machine engagement from it too. I'm cutting my selves free from any critical ties to that place because it really is not. Forcing myself into that breed or reliance has not been helping me in the ways I thought it was. Set up for failure. I wish sometimes I was not such a believer in all things. I am gullible. Tremendously disposed to wonder. I've yet to understand how it will ever be a good thing.

I spent about twenty hours on this:



It's a gift for an old friend that was supposed to be a christmas gift. But we all know how winter made good and basically ate up every free moment I had getting set up for autonomous life. It's turning out good though. Another forty hours and it should be done and mailed. I hope it is enjoyed and loved. Probably shelved and boxed and collecting dust at some point in its future, but I hope when the box is first opened it produces awe and a smile. I don't really know why I am pursuing its completion so doggedly. I think, if there is a reason, that reason would have to be because I said I would. And God damn it I make good to my friends because my word is just about all I've got these days in the way of common currency.

So curtain up. One, two, three, four... Let's make more things happen. Let's take showers and brush our teefs, and go outside, and work ourselves over at our gyms till we get nose bleeds, and let's treat work like the shit job it is and nothing more, and let's eat at home and sleep less than ten hours, and watch the ghosts with careful eyes, and listen not too close, and smile a little harder, and frown with conviction, and be honest, and medicate as necessary, and things aren't going to work out, but that's no reason to... ...to what? What happens when things keep not working out? Dream revision? No. Yes? I guess I just have to remind myself that I do other things. Metajail is real. But, even prisons have libraries. I think. I can't remember. Probably.

I am building a life outside of a life to save my life. That's it! That's what's been eating up my time! HAH! wow. It only took me how many hundreds of words to reach that realization. I'm actually laughing. I think that is what the last three weeks have been. Let's get back to it. Sorry I've been away. But you know I'll never be gone too long- visiting hours in metajail are worth sticking around for almost by themselves.


///Boards of Canada - "Aquarius" Music has the right to children. Sometimes I think every year you are born. You are the child of your previous year in the same way that you are the child of your parents material and experiences and equations. I'm on my twenty sixth iteration. I guess I'm raising my own child now for the teen years of summer and the maturation of fall and the adulthood of another winter. I owe myself a birthday wishlist for next year. Maybe this year will be the year I buy that square of land in North Dakota. I think that's a reasonably lofty and approachable goal. I wonder if I have to go there to buy it or if I can do it from here. Maybe I'll see what's available here first and go from there. Either way I'm glad I'm still alive and closer to touching down. Shit's been turbulent.