With A Passion

 I refuse to die.  I think about death just about every day.  Who doesn't.  Yes that is a statement.  I refuse to die.  SHOW ME ALL OF MY LABELS.  I will show you a complete set.  A complete-ish set?  I miss my friends.  Am I alone.  I am alone.  I am l onea.  O, am I lone.  A olo nei. 

Destrega.   I have dreams about the end of the world.  They are fun.  Are you?

Dogfights are luscious.

I dreamt about trees falling and bears coming out of the woods across creek where I used to live in southern Maryland and the spider monster came down out of the bear tree limbs in the middle of winter and before the bears could get to the fawns grazing on what grasses were left behind in a mild thaw before the permafrost killed everything the tree sized monsters began swooping down to harvest the bears.

Their force began tipping the old and dead trees over, held up by ivy.

The entire thing began collapsing.

Have you ever heard the sound

of a tree hitting the ground

that was as large as you

can run?

The shadows were enormous.  I ran fast.  As fast as I could... the entire dream collapsed.  The ground collapsed with the bass of the shear air the trunks displaced as they fell.  The spiders were squashed.  The bears became pelts and powdered glistening bone, when I had time to glance back at the pink mist.

I lived.  The animals died.  I panted.  I watched

more trees fall with thick and thicker trunks, torn asunder like toothpicks before the clouds.  

The troposphere.  The fucking fickle thin layer of air that had just a little too much sun.  God, some single batch would probably kill me so I dont have to know

what's coming next.

The Two Way Metaphor Gate

In building short hand, a degree of expression is reached that can and does generate the rare joy of identity and naming.  Mapping.  Map with as much resolution as can be mustered.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached!  Shouting is not permitted.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached?

From its surface metaphor appears lazy.  Jagged.  Elliptical.  Fragmented.  Excessive.  Dumb.  Misguided.  Glittery.  Vain.  Hyperbolic.  Binary.  From its surface it's a lot of things, directly below perception it is incandescent.  A bit of metal chewed fast and friction enough to trace a retina and leave shades.

It is one of the few things all languages have in common.  A short hand.

Some mental disorders may fall just outside of the curve of the metaphorist.   Not in terms of comprehension, but in terms of time.  Around folks speaking the common language and sparking, some will see the shades and some will project the shades and be able to predict from the point of a sound.

The problem, a problem, arises with metaphor's other power.

In its ability to link ideas and present a universe whose limits, as humans, are the speed of salts in brains and quantum entanglement, it can also cross time.  Places and spaces you've never been and people you've never known.  Places and spaces no one has ever seen and places and spaces heard of dreams.

I guess what I'm saying is consciousness of metaphors power can unleash and enable some ridiculous and unaccounted for futures.  It can describe the present you are in to people you will never meet in the future.   It can describe someone's past you've never met before in all of your days on Earth or in space or outside of the common dimension.  It can define the undefinable.  Free the interned and capture the holy.  It is powerful and infinite.  Innocent and horror.  Dirge and beautiful.

As close to time travel as humans may ever reach.  With metaphor, the past is present - the future too - all in the space of a gesture, a syllable, a smell, a touch - a note.  A one.  A zero.  In sequence.  That's why it is a two way gate.  Futures can be created inside of them and the past can manifest with a breath and a blink through the same swinging door.




///Dirty Projectors & Bjork - (When the World Comes to an End)     for a long time

Bonus Track 2

waiting for the button to be pressed for the awesome release of good work to be done, good baby sweet barbecue jesus on a spit, push the damn button that turns that light from red to green, honey bear!




///Django Django - (Wor)  you have to know who you are wearing your leash for and when that alarm goes...  you know you have to go from zero to all in .2 seconds.  i hate waiting.  rumble rumble rumble.   it is not time to ring the bell yet.  i cannot wait for the next project to sink my teeth into.  it's gotten to a point of physical discomfort thinking about it.  i cannot wait to see the next house.  i am going to eat it with great glory by moonlight and teeth large enough to fit a megalodon skeleton

Dear (_____)

Dear chance,

I never know who exactly it is I am going to meet or where, for that matter.  At least, with the drug trade, it is a calculated risk.  Alone often?  Yes.  The benevolence of strangers.  I like to believe they are taking a risk too.  Each one is a gate to a new network.  An interface.  Thrilling and horrifying in its own span of minutes.  No safety nets.  Out of network.  Fringe.  Where the rubber meets the road, so to speak...  or flesh.  Every time you walk out that door you may not come back.  I hate thinking about it.  So many dice rolls.  I never thought I'd reach, or understand, a place where high risk, high risk beyond my control, was the way forward.  Trying to figure out what's inside the black boxes I meet is tiresome.  I worry for the day I read one wrong.  I have no idea how that game ends.  I don't traffic in violence anymore.  I wonder if I had to, if I absolutely had to, would I have enough time to realize I had to and turn the switch inside me, hidden inside a safe inside a safe inside a safe, before the game ended.

Sincerely,

a glass combination lock wired to a dead circuit switch hooked up to fifteen piezoelectric crystals encased in a three inch thick asphalt sealed... beside the infrared lens array connected to... feeding into a phosphorous anti-warship grade mine.

P.S. safety first.

Stand Up Act 11

Stand Up Act 10

Some people stick by the words in line with the idea of everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten.  Be nice to each other.  Don't drop your pants in public.  Share.  Be quiet and listen when the time is right.  Take time to make things.  Take naps.  I don't know what the whole NY Times best seller's list was, but you get the point.  Coming to grips with the fact that I will probably never dunk a basketball has brought me an up to date version of that book.  In no particular order:

Everyone gets old and dies and the best you can do is be a little worse than your worst the day before.  That's right.  At some point your body stops growing and starts failing.  Bit by bit.  Part by part.  Sure, you may beat the odds and be one of the few freakish human beings that cannot be destroyed through attrition and must be struck down with sudden and violent illness or circumstance.  The chances are very good that you are not.  Once you hit your mid thirties, that's pretty much it.  The next decade or so, you may hold serve or at least keep even with your physical abilities the day prior, but it all ends in a gutter.  If you haven't dunked a basketball by now, you probably never will without a trampoline or other marvel of engineering.

You can't be whatever you want to be.  You can be a version of what you want to be.  You can be somewhere in the ballpark of what you wanted to be.  You cannot be whatever you want to be.  Well you can be whatever you want to be inside your head.  That is absolutely attainable.  However, you may wake up inside a very welcoming dormitory environment where breakfast always comes at 8:30 and bed time is 9 sharp and a guy keeps pounding his head against the wall loud enough to interrupt your 500 piece puzzling and your pants have no pockets and the shower always smells a little bit off.  You can't be whatever you want to be.  There are always outliers in great numbers because it's a perceptual lens.  Think of the planet as an aircraft carrier.  There are, I dunno, 150 pilots.  There are always 150 or so pilots.  There are 6000 other people doing all of the other stuff to make sure it doesn't crash or sink and feed the people that help the people that help the people that feed the people that help other people make sure it doesnt crash or sink so that the people that fly the planes and fix the planes can fly and fix things and make sure it doesn't get blow'd up.  Chances are really good, if you're born on that carrier, you're not going to be flying anything unless you steal it or are a pilot's kid or pilot's friend's kid.  If you aren't born with the genetic ingredients to Chia pet out into a frame capable of dunking, guess what?  That's right, you can work your ass off and add 6" to your vertical leap, but your wingspan and height have already conspired to make sure the best you'll achieve is a left handed layup with your finger tips grazing the rim.

Allow your passions to lead to your goals.  Your goals cannot kick start your passion.  That element of life is a one way valve.  You may not be able to dunk, but you do enjoy the game.  If you like to play with smash and grab abandon, get good at it.  Embrace it.  Set your goal to being the best slasher in the neighborhood.  Cut defenses to ribbons and bounce off the low block to grab rebounds because your game will never be above the rim... doesn't mean it can't be wicked fast.  When you set goals apart from your passions, your hearts never in it.  Doing things because you want to do them and doing things because you cannot not do them are too very different things.  There is an "I think I can" gray area muddled in there.  A little bit of chicken and egg, what came first, questioning, but for the larger part, save your mind the wear and tear.  Gravity will still be gravity tomorrow, and last I heard, the ability to go from zero to "don't blink" is pretty rare in itself.

The list goes on, but you get the point.  Along those lines, I was considering going back to trying to rip out a poem every day.  Just one.  There's the whole idea that you have to dig through the trash and start tossing things off of the top of the stack to get down to what you really want to weave and work with.  The thought behind it is that every time, every instance, that ends with the idea of "hey, I should write that down" is the lattice of your brain adding a new bit of graph that gets buried and grown in and grown over with the events and experiences that come after it.  And then you hit another branching point where you say to no one in particular "I should write that down".

By the time you actually get to the point of sitting down, all is forgotten.  Not really forgotten.  Buried.  Grab a shovel  You've got two choices.  Try to hammer and chisel all the way back to the fly in the center of the glacier, or sample and blast it apart, while mapping and scaling and measuring and cataloging it.

Eventually you may get all the way back to the granule of the thing you thought you should write down.  Nothing along the way will be known or preserved or brought into consideration to cut the journey or work shorter the next time around.  If you slice it up and hold it up to inspection and hang the samples on slides along the route, you've not only achieved the point of origin- you've possibly stumbled upon data for further examination and perhaps other points of interest that must be investigated before the entire land mass melts into the polar seas of your own consciousness.

Scary as hell, the prospect, no?  Oh yes.  In years of your decaying brain you've lost so much.  It's alright though.  Breath easy.  Release your testicles back out of your stomach and unclench your pelvises.  It's never too late to start getting some exercise and start tagging the fauna living inside your head.

Speaking of things living inside the mind, I've been up late a lot of days thinking about whether or not I should pursue a mate.  You know the whole mating thing.  The whole pairing off with other people to raise other littler people to become good big people to raise more little people to become good big people or horrible little terrors.  That whole thing.  I don't want to do it to raise other little people.  Let's get that out of the way first.  Maybe.  I think I would either be a great father or a horrible father, but there's no gray in there.  Trust me.  I've been over the idea drunk, sober, high, smashed, apotheotic, grounded, slippy, glowing, based, depressed, you name it.  It's going to go one way or another and frankly I don't care to flip a coin everyday hoping I raise someone who doesn't want to kill me every day of its waking life until I do actually die.  That shit is terrifying.

I want to do it for a companion.  A second voice, because the angel and devil on my shoulders like to play dress up so sometimes I glance over and there's a teddy bear and a bowling pin on the other side or a pacman and a doily.  What the hell, indeed.

I don't hate company.  This is how it all boiled down; I'll give you the most obvious that occurred to me last first.

While browsing reviews of Tinder and Grinder, I realized that my apartment, though of a healthy square footage, is laid out like one giant room with a side room (full of weight lifting equipment.... it's essentially a regularly used gym so that I don't have to pay to go to one).  I have enough space to house one person.  Exactly one person.  Trying to pack another person into this space will lead to a violent civil war, ultimately.  I don't live alone.  I'm in my apartment with me and the rest of the machinations and defects and words and whispers and screams and general artifacta of my minds functioning.  It's a packed house already.  Where am I supposed to go to escape if the side room is occupied and I can't go outdoors?

The second thing is there must be sex.  If you live with me, we have to fuck eventually or someone has to go.  Not immediately, but eventually.  If we don't have sex, that's fine, but you'd better be prepared for gratuitous nudity because I cannot stand clothing.  I hate clothes.  Once they've served their function it's time to discard them.  They're uncomfortable.  If I'm wearing something, I probably had to.  If it's something I enjoy wearing it's because if you're going to wear clothes, you may as well wear something you can have fun wearing or need to wear to bring happiness to the act of dressing my pretty innards.

I didn't live to the ripe old age of 30 to hear "don't touch me there" "it's four o'clock in the morning" "I'm tired" "I just ate lunch" "I want to shower first".  I don't care.  You can use me when you want to as well.  It's a two way street.  I damn sure am not going to catch flak for masturbating at midnight when they've turned in early.

I don't care if it's bad sex or the kind of sex you tell your friends about when I'm not around where you know I think I rocked the house, but really I fizzed about as pleasantly as having an ashtray dumped on your tongue, getting to wash it off, and finding grit behind your molars the next morning.  It's gotta be there.  I am a contact person.  When I know I can't touch you, things get weird.  Things get real weird.  Ever found a sheet of a paper folded in half six times inside your purse?  Ever found three razor blades in your wallet?  Ever found your jacket on the same hook except literally inside out?  Ever found everything that could possibly be unplugged unplugged?  Ever found everything you brought over laid out to the level of where your hands might swing as you picked up an item and progressed onward toward the door?  Ever found your car keys behind your head when you woke up?

The point is this:  I realized I don't own enough space to support two people to the point where one person can disappear from the other person's engagement and forget for a time that they are now part of the other person they are living with and dive into their own engagements.  I'd have to add a floor at best and another two rooms at the least so that I or they would not know exactly where to find me, because knowing exactly where someone is hiding is the same as having them immediately present.  You need only to recite the incantation to summon them.  There has to be some mystery and trial and error to at least give them a chance to relocate and make it interesting.

The other point is that I own enough stuff to support exactly one person.  There are enough chairs to support one person and an occasional party.  There are enough dishes and cups and utensils to support one person who makes their own meals and washes their own dishes.  Enough bedding for one.  Enough closet space for one.  Enough food and fridge space for one.  Enough toiletries for one.  Just a matter of fact.

Not that there's been no effort to expand the coffers.  There has been.  Through the strain and the strife and the good and bad times, the covering radar is still only big enough to account for the airspace over a single atoll.  Above and beyond that controlled airspace, all bets are off.  Everyone and everything flying in or out is at its own risk.  There simply is no room in the budget for fighter escorts and first response marines and a space program and, hell, the DPW is backlogged by years, not months or days.  Years.  Bringing someone else into the equivalent of District 9 is not going to end well for anyone who doesn't live somewhere near or lesser than there already.  This may be an open hoodrat invitation.  It's not.

Recognizing where my passions are, we can make this work.  I gotta acquire more space at some point if I want another human being around or, adding another human being, there will very quickly be just one.  We can work out the details after the acres.  Plus it'll be good to have places to bury things and plant growing things to just walk out on my porch and sit down and peer across the field and say to no one in particular "I remember when that tree was a foot tall," kick my feet up on a flat basketball , take a little sip of gin and apple juice, scrawl some notes, and tsk tsk at online dating messages I still receive, setting aside the gems to tell you when dinner rolls around and we play two handed hearts to see who sets the menu and who does the cooking that night.

Facebook Birthdays, Selfishness, The Spacetime/Lovetime Continuum, and Death Stalking

Well, I do believe we will kick this off with birthdays and keep it in order.  Maybe not entirely, but we'll give it a shot.

Birthdays are great most of the time.  Essentially it's like having a second New Year celebration, unless your birthday falls on New Year's day.  It's kind of cool that certain days be claimed.  Certain should be claimed.  There are so many of them you have to devote to being part of society it's cool that you can have your own and it's pretty interesting that there are days claimed of themselves where you, as a person, are forced to look up and away from everyone else and recognize that you are all just people and as such part of a single entity (country, nation, religion, belief, or just part of a grander scale of bodies in space rotating, dying off, being born, at a regular and calculable, to a mind demolishing degree, [God bless the collective scientific mind] interval).

When you are small, birthdays are celebrated.  When you get older, birthdays are celebrated.  Good grief I'm already trying to think of a macro I can program to type birthdays.  Let's call them bdays.  It's nearly as fatiguing to type as it is to read.  Where were we, as you get older bdays are celebrated.  Eventually, I think because of the enormous obstacle of longevity ... didn't the average age for death expand massively from like 35 to 65 in a stretch of helter skelter centuries?  Or was it a handful of decades less than a century ... cannot remember the history lessons exactly, but the obstacle of longevity was overcome on a large scale like feeling the X-1 break the sound barrier over a soundtrack stretched out over a week with rumbling bass against the soles of your feet instead of over a fraction of a second.  Are you seeing it?  The soundtrack of the first sonic boom, to scale it perhaps better and with greater accuracy, over a few days instead of a fraction of a few seconds of silence and then THWOOM!

Suddenly people weren't dying when they were supposed to.  The celebration of birthdays continued because you never knew.  Someone, many someones, were still dying viciously early.  If you made it beyond a certain age the birthday party would become a routine thing, but then you still didn't live that long and everyone else knew it even if you didn't so the birthday party would retain significance throughout much of your life because if you made it beyond the beginning the end was not that far away.  The space/time continuum of your existence was a fairly small swatch of fabric in a quilt of human lives demanding not only close contact, close ties.  The bday continued.  The swatches grew larger.

To present day.  I will not bore you with compartmentalized electro society and the kindness of strangers and asynchronous communication.  We're all on the same page, on the same planet, at the same time.  Birthdays are a lot less significant.  The stretch of life between birth and death has become a sea of time and space instead of a droplet.  Living to age five was awesome.  Living to 10 was nearly a miracle.  And on and on until you died at the ripe and tender age of 45 by incurable infection or bodily injury of one sort or another.  Fast forward and communal life ends at 18.  At the most.  If you decide to or are pushed to it ends four years after that.  Same cycle, larger scale.

If you make it to 13 everyone pretty much backs off and says "alright, this one should make it a good stretch."  Birthday parties every year until 13.  Then a few makes and misses.  Things may come up in the schedule or life barring them.  It's fine.  It's no big deal  Essentially you don't need to have another birthday party until you are about to die, but we've been having parties for so many years for so long before because you weren't out of the woods until you were 20 and then at 20 the parties tapered off until 40 when everyone knew you were probably going to drop dead soon and then they came back with a vengeance.   So we still try to have parties through the teens until 20.  We set an arbitrary mark at 20.  Twenty is when you are officially your own problem.  If you want to kill yourself afterwards, no one will blame you.  If anything they'll blame themselves for somehow screwing up a gestation period of 20 years.  Not that it's not impossible to screw up.  I've seen it happen and those people should blame themselves.  Moving on though: after 20.

After 20 the people throwing you parties are the people in that middle ground where it is so ingrained that every step must be a party because every step has been a bday party in the past back when the scale was all shrunk up.  Those people are throwing you parties because people threw them parties and the people they learned to throw parties from had parties thrown for them all the way back to when that party was also a wedding ceremony because you only had a solid 20 ahead of you to try to get a family going before you were killed by a hoof to the face trying to the milk the cow that morning and forgot to warm up your hands first because the whooping cough all night really took you off your morning game.  The parties are meaningless.  They try to flavor them up with "hey, you can drink now" but you could drink before, it was just a little bit harder.

Fast forward to the mid twenties and the only people still celebrating birthdays as celebrations instead of acknowledgements are the people still looking back to when birthdays meant something and desiring to keep them alive as an active denial that the space/time fabric is growing and much faster than originally supposed or hinted at by the people who celebrated your birthdays as iconic moments in everyone you've ever known (it really was everyone you ever knew because your swatch of fabric was very small when you were small too) and sometimes everyone they knew too's lives.  The fabric continues to stretch.  The stretch grows beyond the realm of sight.

The only way you know there is anything out there is if there is a thread you are holding or if the person units and units away is managing to vibrate space and time on your plane and at your level of harmonic excitement.  For all you know they are vibrating as hard as they can, however your lack of synchronized or harmonic phase or anything close to it to at least cause distortion to be investigated further and at most cause perfect reception is obliterating all abilities of detection.  Your birthday strikes.

You jump up and down on your birthday signal and there is one, two, ten harmonies where there were few before.  Not as many as you were young and not as many as when you will be close to death.  You are excited on your enormous swatch of space and time and communicate back.  Quickly though, you realize the distance is so great that nothing you say will bear any significance to the senders.  By the time it arrives much has changed and will continue to change at a fair rate, but absolutely quickly enough that keeping up will be virtually impossible and an occupation unto it's own.  The space/time is so bloated it is enough only to know that you exist in a sea of existence.  The birthdays must be celebrated though!  Every last one of them!

Though, nothing more.  Wholeheartedly, every last birthday must be celebrated, but please do not be upset if you do not receive a facebook birthday message.  It's nothing personal.  It is not selfish.  It is not "well I sent him one and he didn't send me one back so we're not friends anymore and if he sends me one I'm not going to send him one back" ... like no.  Don't be that.  That's trite.

The fabric of the Spacetime/Lovetime continuum is such:  fractal in portions and quilt in others all flexed over a membrane of space/time.  I remember you.  You remember me.  When was the last time we spoke?  A lot has changed since then.  We met each other during core formations.  If we're friends, there's something we liked when we looked at each other then.  Everything that's happened since then has been a branch or tree or fork or formation of adaptations and evolutions and events since then.  If I liked you then I'll probably like you now, but I may need to trace back a little bit to understand the face I'm looking at now.  Within you and myself.  That affinity will still be there.  Fractal.  Some parts are still quilt.  Have not changed at all, only grown larger and harder to see across.  Accentuated, in some respects conflated, but all there as it was when it was 20 and believing death was around the corner because birthdays are a big effing deal, yeah!?

Some sections remain as quilt.  All of relative directions are the same.  My relationship is the same.  My relationship to those directions remain the same as my portion of spacetime/lovetime expands.  The way that I will engage is across signals and waves that no longer ripple the shores of what used to be square plots.  Now they are jagged and hooked and crystaline.  "Why did you not wish me a happy birthday?  I leapt with all of my might to shake the webs and graphs.  I burned out my transmitter dish and everyone answered.  Why didn't you?"  I am bleeding in, but that's alright.  I will take in for a moment: my fractal development has not reached with the same fervor or life that others around me have grown.  Their swatches have been broken apart with year to year modification, willing and driven, while mine, willing and driven as well have been outpaced by the shear stretch of space/time, around which spacetime/lovetime is beholden.

"Why did you not wish me a happy birthday on facebook or in real time?"  Part of the reason is that you know, roughly, where I am, across the stretch.  Is you vibrate hard enough, I will pick it up.  If I vibrate as hard as I can, it will be picked up, maybe, and defuse.  More than that, the additional complications of your growth will require a degree of decoding to whom you also vibrate and I hate being explained.  Also, the time that I am existing in is the same time as the last time we saw each other and spent time together for a very heavy degree.  The characteristics, for all the stationary portion of quilt knows, being referenced, lauded, and celebrated, have very little to do with the current you and in fact may be portions so far back in the space and time we both occupied that they may be abhorred by the current continued people synchronized and harmonizing with your spacetime/lovetime.

I really do hope it does not come across selfish.  It's anything but that.  Who wants a person several iterations behind the rest of their peers appearing on their timeline without any warning beyond the blind celebrations, appearing ne'er before nor after, popping their head in the door to yell at them to live their lives to the fullest or drop a witt or a jab and zip away.   Or message them about a part of their life so incredibly irrelevant that .... well, you get the picture.  If anything, whatever comes of announcing your birthday on facebook is enjoyable.  I used to try to wish a happy birthday to every single person I actually met in person whose notification came up, but I realized I was just diluting the pool of communications they should be receiving and that's far more important than reciprocation.  Reception is a lot more valuable from stationary (as time and space grows and complications continue to thrive [wives, husbands, children, careers, mobilization, freedoms] the unstoppable movement toward greater complication reduces drastically the stationary ability to receive).  Projection, the opposite value shift.  There is no selfishness.  The relationship is appropriate and beneficial and also removes discomfort in bringing out the telescope that can pierce space/time to see a time capsule floating in square space and see from where the current coordinates came.

Since having the birthday though, I've been consumed with thoughts of aging.  Once the party faded, I was struck, over a morning cup of tea, that from here on out, maybe for a few years more there will be time to improve upon my frame, from here on out the best I can do is ward against sudden physical catastrophic failure.  The brain is it's own beast and will be susceptible to its own sudden failures, the much more important part of the aspects of being to protect the muscle and bones.  That prospect is frightening.

I am very quickly approaching the tipping point of being able to self destruct on purpose will be more difficult than waiting for an accidental failure or fault in the normal operation.  The idea that I will start to have to approach my body each day as an explosive device that requires constant disarming instead of as a device I must operate that is occasionally exceptionally demanding to pilot and often prone to conditions that lead to explosions or other massive exothermic failure is a tad frightening.  It's difficult to frame or explain, I will attempt.

My expected life span is 60 to 70 years.  I assume some of the rage inside of me will drive me another decade.  Perhaps reflection will drive me another five.  Desperation could drive me another five and hate could bring me across the finish line at angry, lucid, "where are my !@#$ing hover cars" 100 in the, of course, mind blowing year 2085, yelling at my robot nurse who simply amps my morphine and changes the channel to the meme network that just plays meme generator failures in fastforward with nature wide lens porn shots sprinkled in between and every now and then the base thumper strapped to the base of my skull goes off with a brief thud.

60 is the target with full apparatus to choice.  If I ever lose the ability to choose whether I live or die, put me down.  If I end up in solitary confinement I'll eventually find a way to kill myself.  You're virtually dead.  Just waiting for space to catch up with time as you've been, shall we say, fast forwarded.  Part of why... okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Collect.  Rewind.  Go.

Passing my 30th birthday I realized my body will likely begin, or begin the process of shut down, that will lead to death three to four to five decades from now.  Time flies.  As I sipped my morning die and blew the steam off the top of it and checked up on the news and weather and sports box scores it hit me that some piece of my body my fail at a moments notice in the coming years and perhaps less than that.  It was tremendously frightening.  I was afraid to go to work.  I work alone and have preferred to work alone for many years now.  Suddenly working alone comes with added risks that will compound as time progresses.  If you fall off of a ladder or spear yourself with a section of pipe because that muscle group or nerve system or other simply failed to respond to your intent you will have little to know time to call for help or bring or drag your frame to safety or at least the possibility of survival.  Suddenly your chances of surviving that car accident or freak mechanical accident symptomatic of daily engagement with machines (the more you fly the more likely it is there will be an air catastrophe, but you can't be struck by a bolt out of the blue if you're thirty feet below ground) go down dramatically as you become more frail and susceptible.  That's 100% out of your control

is what I realized.  You cannot suddenly begin hiding inside of a padded safe with provisions and a supply of oxygen.  Everyone dies.  You will more than likely or at least even odds buy the farm by no fault of your own as much as genetics or intent or negligence once you pass 30.  Every day you leave your house with a little less ability is one day slightly more dangerous than the last.  So you will work yourself ragged to try to keep that fraction at zero, even Stevens.  Every morning it will slip a little bit and you have to do a little bit more to push the numerator back over the denominator.  It'll work for a while.  In some cases a good long while until the growth in the denominator comes too fast and too regularly pinging and updating.  When your body let's go, you can still just brute force the math and bend your own time and space to whatever you want to imagine it to be.  The only reason why it will flex is because other people are leaping up and down and the fabric itself has grown so thin it can be distorted through pure force of will from either end of the spectrum of passions love and hate.  Until the stitches sewn when you were born finally snap and every one on facebook wishes you a farewell.

I did get wrapped up in the narrative for a bit, you see why bridging 30 and taking time to throw a few stones skipped on the river is important to me.  I'm not upset.  I'm in love and scared and aware and dreaming all at once and I never want to leave that bridge.  I haven't forgotten you.  For many, though, it is true, I can be spoken with or to, but I cannot speak to you.  On my birthdays I am reminded.

Let's put some Christmas lights on that.



///Kiln - "The Colorfreak"   far enough away from aphex to call it's own

Dear (_____)

Dear broken nose,

I know you've gotten the short end of the stick more often than either of us would have liked.  You're a bit like a scarecrow with its post askew (you don't really notice the slant until I'm standing next to you), but if you would work with me a little bit we might not feel like got your nose games that end with knuckles pinching our face every time we wear our respirator for hours.

sincerely,

the rest of us.

P.S. come on, just work with us and I will make our snot rockets afterward glorious.

Breaking the Horse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

Over Simplification and the Missing Link and Father's Day

Something's missing.  I know something is missing because I am not grasping a few concepts correctly.  I can be as small minded as I want to be, sure.  I am a bit frightened of using all that I can produce, see control issue.  I suppose it is easier for me to take as small a perspective as possible.  I can't do whatever I want to do.  If I did whatever I wanted to, this would be a very different world, or I would be stone dead in the ground wishing I had rethought doing whatever I wanted to do.

I had many and, some, long thoughts about my father.  I hate saying that.  That word.  Makes me grind my teeth.  It was a road that had to be reevaluated, and no I am not going to kick cans in anger here.  It was a very positive approach couched mostly in pure analysis and attempting to see it from outside my head and look in at the relationship, while it still existed, from a third party.

What I started to think about and completed was that he may have seen some things from before my memory begins.  My memory begins around preschool, kindergarten.  I can't recall much of anything, virtually nothing, from before that and cannot vouch or insist I was one way or another.  What I came to was that he may have seen something in me and my ways then and made an attempt to push the tracks this way and that way as I got older.  Maybe.  I'll never know because I asked and was refused, flat.  Father's day.  What a hoot.

I do know I am missing something.  Not information.  Yes information.  My history is thoroughly incomplete.  I have to remind myself and update my tabs on who's kicked the bucket.  I'm fine with that.  Less interference.  I am missing something about being a proper citizen and holding down a job and, let's put it blank, growing up.  My concept of growing up is not aligned with what I believe the general population's concept of being growed up is.  But, I do know I can't do whatever I want.  That's wrong.  I can't fish all day, that ones easy to know.  I get that.  I have to wear pants and clothing in general.  I get that too.  I must participate.  That one's clear as well.  I am missing a, on it's outside, simple bridge.  I cannot keep offering disclaimers.  To do that is akin to handing out passports.  Far too reckless.

Rejecting life's intrinsic complexities is not a way forward.  It is a system failure.  Simplification.  Keep it simple, stupid, only gets one so far before the wall of sound and input comes calling and breaks your nose.  The mission for simplicity begins to damage the ability to engage, with necessity and vigor, peers, idols, fam, friends, and the rest of the grid.

Simplification denies and is denial when forced too far.  I understand that better now, but not completely.  No where near completely.  I'm not alright with the concept and it makes me smile to say and hear it from our own mouth.  We are not simple.  We are bright.  We are sharp.  We cannot use simplicity as a device for protection.  A way to consume information at a pace appropriate for us.  A way to do what we want.  Gain access to what we want.  Appropriate.  Unacceptable.  It's neither sly nor sneaky.  Plain dumb.

I suppose I will cut my tongue out one of these days.  It can be a weapon.  A technique.  Believe it or not, I need to learn how to use communication better, more efficiently.  Maybe I'll learn sign language.  I think I'll be better for it.   Better than learning another verbal language.  That way at least when I'm ready to have it removed I'll be prepared to talk in other ways.  I've been using sign language for quite some time, but not the official one, anyway.  I've been using my sign language, exclusive to me and my country and my time zone.  Hello there, and welcome to the rest of the world.




///T-Pain & Early Cuyler - "I Like Driving In My Truck"    ...i like driving in my truck...

Stand Up Act 9 (dialogues)

Stand Up Act 8


I don't want to go fishing today.

Why not, I was just putting on pants after you called?!

I changed my mind.

Why?

It's gross out.

Seriously?  A little rain??  It's got damn Pittsburgh in Autumn.  It's a perfect day.

Nope, its not.

You're from Pittsburgh!  What the hell is wrong with you?

You're being unreasonable!

It's beautiful outside!

You're being unreasonable!!

Am I?

Yeah.

Okay.............when are you free next?  I'm looking at the ten day forecast right now.




Throwing a rager tonight?

Yeah.

What time?

Sixish.

Nine?

Sixish.

Sixish?

Yes, sixish.

Have you thought about nine?

No.  Well, I did.  For a while.  Then I remembered I had shit to do.  Before.   After I remembered.

Whatever, you know where I live.  Hit me up and we'll combine parties at nine.

Ninish?





We're going to ramble on, because we can, and also why not.  The longest set ever.

Cats have short memories.  They have learned behaviors, but I think it's fair to say they have short memories.  They're beings of routines.  That can make you functional.  If you have a short memory, but a solid routine, you can definitely get by alright.  No harm no foul.  What you have to keep in mind is what really defines getting by.  Do you want to get by as well as a human being does or as well as a cat does?  Granted, cats have it pretty good.

Defining work aside, not to say that it's easy to be a cat.  Can you imagine having to sleep so much?  Yeah, I need to eat lunch, but first I have to take this three hour siesta in this sun beam because it's really god damn warm right here.  Yes, I know your car died on the shoulder of interstate 376 and you cancelled your triple A because there was an order of 30 pounds of catnip you had to get in so that you could ensconce yourself in plant matter on demand for the year, but this sun beam is really really warm and if I get into my car right now I will fall asleep immediately if traffic stops for longer than five minutes and I'm not trying to get stopped by the police with my inspection sticker out of date.  I'll see you in a few hours.  Yes, I'm in the shower right now.  I just ate.  I'll be done when I'm done.  Whether or not I'll be jerking off for the next hour before I take this nap is frankly none of your business.  If you keep talking like an asshole we are definitely brawling when I get there.  What's it to you anyway?  We're not family.  If I could live without a housemate I would!  Well, I didn't touch your snack stash, I just ate all of the food you left after you took off after breakfast.  Yes, including the things you set aside for lunch.  No, I didn't touch your stash or your green.  If I did, I would be too busy not answering the damn phone.

It's a little bit alarming though when you look up from repairing a broken laptop or keeping up with email nonsense and see your cat dangling from the side of the fish tank you specifically perched on top of bookshelf because, the last time you checked, cats couldn't climb bookshelves.

From a purely physics standpoint, it shouldn't work.  There's a reason cat trees are covered with carpeting instead of smooth faced fake wood.  On top of that you've seen them try to climb it before close to forty times.  They jump in three shelves up, the earliest possible landing point and watched them look at and sniff at the fourth shelf like a hardcore dungeon crawling RPG player trying to find the secret entrance to the glitch cave.  As though, if they looked hard enough and poked around long enough, somehow the bookshelf programming would split apart and instantly teleport them to the next level up if they jabbed the right pixel with their nose.

Yet, there he is.  Climbing on top of the fish tank with no lid.  I'm scrambling to find my camera and trying to keep one eye on him to make sure he doesn't fall in, because the only thing worse than a cat soaked to the bone in fish poop filled water is washing that cat.  And somehow he figures out how to step from edge to edge and not fall in AND terrorize the fish dumb enough to come near the surface with a thing twenty times their size looming overhead and thrusting enormous claws through the surface of the water with the only thing in mind being poking one of those two foot long (by scale if fish were people) talons through their itty bitty eye holes.

How the hell did he get up there?  I took him down and watched him attempt it again and again for a good day and a half and he never managed to pull it off again.  Which was kind of disappointing.  It reminded me of how shitty my own memory was.  Not to harp on passwords, but I have made passwords and forgotten them not more than a handful of days later.  The security question is what was the make and model of your first car.  Two days removed, I'm asking myself "the make and model of the first car I ever drove or the first car I ever crashed?"  "The make and model of the first car I can remember riding in or the first car I ever drove myself."  "The make and model of the first car I fell in love with or the make and model of the first car I knew I wanted in my dream garage."  Ending with "your account is locked, please call customer service at 1-800-555" five five, five five.  How are achievements so forgettable?

I want to sit the cat down with translator boxes strapped to our throats so we can understand each other the way it happens in science fiction and go over what exactly went on.  Because maybe he just needs some coaching?  Maybe he did it once and it was a wild success and he got so caught up in the success that he forgot to make mental notes of how he actually got there and now he's broke and sitting on the floor, looking up at the fish tank angrier than ever, and clueless with how to actually deal with it.

I at least wish he had opposable thumbs and manners enough to ask me to pass him the sugar dish so we could sit down at the kitchen table and talk about our short comings.  Or at least sip tea and nod instead of stalking around the apartment in circles mad at things we can't discuss and counter mad at each other for being mad about things we can't talk about and madder that the atmosphere is so hostile when we both have nowhere else to be and nothing else to look at besides our counter counter madness.

So treat yourself.  Nothing cures unhappiness like a good nosh on something yummy.  It makes the world go pretty swell, when at the end of the day you go over the steps that got you to where you were the month before only to find utter soul crushing DMV line wait times to find you never filled out form H-09 and you can't forge the notary stamp in the bathroom anyway so there's no need to explain that you have explosive diarrhea from the fast food joint you never went to and will be back in a moment.

Get out the cat treats and their having pork sauteed with salmon juices and beans and rice so they poop good, and you have bleu cheese buffalo wing flavored butter crackers with nothing but mayonaise to dip them in (if you want to go so far as to dip them in to something).

There are some things, some foods, that have no business here on this green earth.  I don't know how they get passed beyond their developmental stages or who fell asleep at the wheel, but they do enter the realm of otherwise useful, palatable, strange and uncommonly tasty besides the fact, sometimes unassuming, palette expanding digestables.  If it's not broke, don't fix it holds true for most foods.  Sure, stick a turbo charger on there.  Put some bigger rims on there.  Maybe some slicker tires.  Change the paint scheme and put some tint on the windows.  Lower the suspension.  Make that vehicle of flavor crystals sexier to my tongue and I won't complain.

Maybe though, it would be a good idea to take the concept sketchers out of the room when you get down to the nitty gritty of actually putting together the deliverable?  Maybe, instead of a massive grille with chrome highlights, go with a slight variation and make it a few inches bigger instead of a foot and a half bigger with ten inch wings sticking out of the sides?  Consider the Ruffle potato chip.  Let's make the ridges bigger, but just by a few millimeters.  Sure: instantly better.  Let's take the barbecue flavor and make it a little more peppery and a little more salty and a little more savory.  Sure: instantly better.  Let's take the barbecue flavor and make it a million times sweeter and a thousand times more sour and paint it orange!  No.

Part of what makes these x-foods so ridiculously awful is the half commitment.  Case in point: parmesan garlic bread flavored anything.  That never works out.  In every essence lab there's probably some guy or team of people working on distilling the essence of a food that is an experience unto itself.  You will never be able to distill the experience of chomping into a piece of properly toasted, well seasoned, garlic bread.  Ain't gonna happen.  God bless you for trying, and enjoy the pay check in the meantime, but you are trying to get through a brick wall by poking it with a finger tip.  Chicken and waffle potato chips?  Nope.  Gimme the chicken and the waffle and some hot syrup please.  In a bag.  On a shelf.  That I can buy, take home, pull a tab and trigger an exothermic reaction that heats it all up, and then pour it out on a plate with a knife and fork and a little plastic baggie of syrup and a packet of salted butter to bust open on top of it.  I'll pay the extra ten dollars for rehydrated deep fried meat, science, and happiness instead of a $3.50 bag of sadness.

It's tiring.  I keep falling for it and it's tiring.  I imagine the woman at the gas station where these unspeakable abominations of food stuffs keep showing up (am I shopping at one of the test kitchens?  I DON'T KNOW, but I wish I did) sees me stumble in at five in the morning looking for something, nay anything, besides what is already in my pantry or my fridge and watches me walk up and down the aisles and sees my eyes light up at the latest new riff on an old classic and waits for my shoulders to fall.  Waits for the long sigh of defeat because she knows I'll try anything once because we had a long conversation three days after the first time I tried heroin and she eventually came up to me and asked me if she could help me with something and it scared the living daylights out of me to the point where I literally jumped backward from her because I was convinced I was there alone somehow at the time and my brain was still maladjusted to person to person contact in ways far worse than they are now.

I imagine her watching that long breath and knowing I'm going to come to the counter with some Island of Dr. Moreaux shit to put in my gut and she'll check me out and wish me the best of luck again and she knows I could just ask, because she's tried it before, but she knows I won't listen.  "You could've just called."  Instead of waiting to get hammered until two in the morning expecting people to show up and packing an entire evening of inebriation into the three hours before the sun comes up and having to deal with them already completely soused and begging you to slow down because they're already ready for sleep and you're just getting started and they are in no mood to field your thirteen text messages about the things you normally talk about when you party and collaborate and get drunk at the same pace together.

But that's when you know you can die happy.  Assuming your death isn't brought about by being fed feet first into a wood chipper while you're still conscious, you can definitely pass quietly and quite happy into death knowing you did call who you were supposed to, when you were supposed to, and remembered the things you were supposed to remember how to do along the way, and didn't fall for things like a taco shell made of doritos that tasted like hot vagina cheese vomit on the way down and nothing like an electro statically cheese powdered tortilla chip casing taco fixings at all, and everything you did or at least some of what you did was what you were supposed to do.

"Hell, I'm two days and six hours late for work" is never a good feeling.  When you get that sensation that what you're on to is something you can fade out doing and never wake up from, you know it's something good.  Sure, you can get that feeling artificially (see Patton and the suicide drug), but when you've earned your way on to that path toward what you do better than anything else, don't get comfortably confused with doing best because there is very little comfortable about writing or art or whatever keeps the motor spinning when you'd rather have it idle or, better yet, shut down completely, you know you're on to something worth while and pursuing.  Perhaps in vain, but like I said before (not really) vanity is a poor man's occupation.

I can't wait to operate out of ego.  Vanity is sport.  Ego is conquest.The definition of poor being not within the scope of ... being too tired to masturbate.

You really do have to reevaluate your life if you reach a point where you are literally too tired to masturbate.  When you cross that line where the prospect of masturbation puts the same look on your face as when you want a nip of a candy bar, but can't decide which brand or make or model or if it should have ground effects on it, or if the candy bar just has speed holes punched in it or a new paint job, but it'll let you down in the end and even the piss amount of money you spent on it will lead to days of regret later when you are one dollar and 33 cents short of getting the one thing you actually needed later on in the month, you know it's time to make some changes.

No one should ever have to suffer being too tired to masturbate.  It's natures gift to the animal kingdom and as the king of the kingdom you should be and are entitled to, by the mandate of science and creation itself, masturbate.  That's one thing I will never understand about relationships.  The person that gets upset about your masturbating is so clearly in the wrong, it's practically insane.  In terms of pure practicality, absolutely insane.

I'm not cheating on you.  You're not having sex with me.  I need to feel sexually fulfilled nightly so I don't kill you and then all of our children and then my coworkers tomorrow morning and then myself.  What's the big deal?  You're happy, because I did not sexually assault you during the night when my dick got hard and I couldn't sleep for the third night in a row.  You're happy because I wake up in a good mood and feel rested and you feel rested and don't have to wash cum off of your ass and out of your cooter or off your dick and thighs.  I feel fulfilled because I slept well beside you and you feel good because I slept well beside you and enjoyed breathing in your sleep smells.  You feel good because you're not obligated to fuck me and I feel good because you feel good about that.  Who cares what I'm actually thinking about?  Brain space is brain space.  It's no ones property.  It's no man's land.  So it's okay to think about baseball and dismantling an engine block and nun's elbow fat to keep myself from cumming while we fuck, but it's not okay to think about fucking if we're not fucking?  Do you know how ridiculous you sound right now?  Can you see why this might not work for me?

If you're too stressed to masturbate you need to reevaluate your life choices.

I do think I am becoming a bit asexual.  It's getting close to the point where it is impossible to meet a good shag without the baggage.  I don't want to know your life story.  I'll listen.  I'll talk.  I won't ask, but if you ask I'll tell.  I think it comes with moving up the age bracket and getting to that point where everyone begins pairing off and eggs start to get few and far between and people either start to go more and more insane or more and more stable and there is less and less gray area between the extremes because it really does take a good portion of your life just to figure out who and what you are and what the hell you are projecting and how the hell it's actually being perceived.

That moment in middle school at the graduation dance when the dance floor cleared out and the chaperons were busy talking about futures and "oh my gawd, my son..." and "I know, my daughter..."s  and other bullshit parents talk about to stay sane around other parents and not sound weird or give any indication that their little bastards backwards tendencies have anything to do with what goes on after he/she gets home from school, and everyone is in a circle talking to someone or listening to someone and you realize you're looking up at the lights in the ceiling and listening to everyone listening and talking to each other and you're happy there,  happens all over again when you get older.  Except this time around you're fully aware of it.

And that's when you realize you should stop suggesting things to do with other people because they're flat not interested, no matter how enthusiastic about it you try to come across.  Maybe there was an inkling of interest when the topic first came up, but by the fourth phone call and the tenth text message over the course of a month with no success it's time to face facts: they don't want to hang out with you the same way you want to hang out with them and it's only going to get more pronounced as they continue to grow and you continue to grow and you're not growing apart, by no means.  You're just not roll dogs the way you used to be.

Eventually it's going to get creepy and they're going to cut you off entirely so simmer down.  That's hard to do though.  Especially when you get pity-vited to hang out.  That's always the worst.  A pity-vite followed by endless pursuit leads to call off after call off after call off, because, let's be honest, they're trying to let you down easy and if you think about it a little bit, had you met them outside of the circumstances in which you actually met, you never would have known they existed in the first place.  Your blip is over.  The good thing is though, if you do relax the pursuit a little bit, you might get to have a fun pop in/pop up later when you've had enough time away to have something interesting to relay to them and that's nothing to sneeze at.  Unless you sneeze when someone turns on the light.  Then it is something to sneeze at.  Something to sneeze at and explain while you run for some toilet paper and your clothes because finding people that fuck with the lights on is almost as hard as not forcing the issue.

It's kind of like coveralls.  You either understand their value or you don't.  There's a large age divide in understanding the coverall.  There's a large age divide and a large occupation divide too.  When it comes to occupations the idea of the coverall is pretty obvious.  You either have to stay really really clean or you have to get really really dirty.  Either way, any sort of regular clothing is not going to cut it, but whatever job you are doing at either end of the spectrum is absolutely essential to the furthering of civilization.  You're either working at the very top end of technology and physiology or you're working at the machine level where the rubber meets the road.  Either way, if you show up in regular clothes or a suit and tie someone is going to say "what the fuck were you thinking" and/or "go home and change or don't come back at all."

The other area is a little more finicky.  The other area is weather related.  If it's just that damn cold outside it makes sense to wear coveralls.  Plain and simple.  The children in snow suits will nod and nearly high five you up until you hit the tweens and teens and young adults.  That's when you run into the girl still wearing heels in an inch of snow and the guy in all leather skinny jeans and bubble jacket vest with the flat brimmed sports hat that still has its sticker on it.  That's when you have to share the sidewalk with the guy with the vintage belt buckle and man purse shivering at a bus stop and the mom in enormous sunglasses faux studded with diamonds with a stroller.  That is, however, also when you run into the gal in her early thirties who stops you and asks you where you bought those coveralls because waiting at the bus stop at 7 A.M. with a windchill of -5 has had the presence of mind to understand a skirt and leggings with knee high leather boots was a bad idea.

The logic gap from age 13 to 23 is a strange one.  Everything is very obvious after, I dunno, say 26.  After 26 it's just a matter of execution and can do, will do, won't do, can't do, on the books and ready to go, or still thinking it over indefinitely postponed.  It does make me laugh sometimes walking home from work in nice thick coveralls perfectly fine, the wind breaking in front of me and not feeling a thing knowing that I score a 0 on style points and 100% on no regrets or thoughts about "if I lived here, I'd be home already" because I know in coveralls I can walk for days.  Hell, I could curl up and take a nap, but we know how that usually ends (flashlights in the face and "where do you live"s and "this is a public park, you can't sleep here"s, but those days are behind us).

Growing up is a shame but necessary.  I got my first gray hair a few weeks ago.  Right in the middle of my chin.  A friend of mine said "you're going to be one of those creepy 40 year olds with gray hair all over," I told him it's not true.  The preferred term is silver fox.  It's a badge of honor.  I honestly didn't think I'd live long enough to see a gray hair on my head so it's actually a badge I am happy to wear.  I can run with it.  Chicks dig salt and pepper fellas right?  Even though I don't particularly dig chicks.  It's still nice to be prized a little bit.  Let's you know you're not a complete dumpster fire.  If you're not a shock jock, I'm pretty sure not being branded a dumpster fire is a good thing.

Unlike most people, I've been waiting for gray hair for a very long time.  It's welcome.  My hair will finally start catching up to the miles I've put on my brain.  If someone took me home they'd be calling up lawyers about lemon laws and scam artists even though there is still a heart beating 10 years old inside of me.  Flipping through channels you'd be well advised to skip cartoon network because I will start jumping up and down and shouting that we have to stop to watch All Dogs Go to Heaven and Up coming on right after and we can't miss Courage the Cowardly Dog marathon after; Law and Order and the NBA game be damned!

With the kid does come soap dodging.  I still don't shower enough.  Then again, as you get older, the value of washing tends to increase.  Aside from my own OCD showering because...  well... because!  If you shower six times in one day you've either done way too much coke, done something really bad, are absolutely breaking down mentally and can't stop touching your own skin to save your life (if someone pointed a gun at you and sad the next time you rub your forearm I am going to put a bullet inside your fucking brain and you actually had to think long and hard about whether or not that itch right at the crook of your elbow was worth investigating because technically it's not your forearm and besides you really really have gone way too long without checking to make sure you were still inside the skin wrapped around your muscles, veins, arteries, and bones), or you just really like showering.

If I could live in my shower I probably would, Seinfeld style.  It breaks my heart sometimes, making references to things kids have never seen.  By kids, I mean early 20 somethings.  I can live with it.  It still grates my nerves though.

I did realize I was soap dodging the other day.  After I realized my shower fetish was getting out of control I decided to shower as little as possible and went to visit a friend.  I sat down right beside their fan boosted space heater.  Terrible idea, I know, but there was nowhere else to sit.  Let's just say, I got comfortable sitting on the floor beside it and spread my legs a little bit to sit cross legged.  The temperature wasn't particularly high or particularly low, but the fan was boosting airflow continuously and, yeah, it felt great blowing through my paints and airing out my junk because I'd been at work all day and it's nice to get a breeze going when your sack is stuck to your thigh.

I thought I smelled alright.  Ten minutes in, the girl sitting next to me asks me if I want to turn the heater off.  The heater is in passive mode so my answer is no.  The temperature is fine.  Ten minutes later she asks me again and this time we make eye contact and her eyes have that "something is not going well" slit to them.  So I put two and two together and made four.  Whatever funk I thought was contained has been let loose like the dogs of war all up on her face.  It was the nicest way anyone has told me I reeked in a long time.

I respected that, switched to a kneeling pose to pin down the crotch sweat dragon, and turned off the blower.  It's one of those simple things you can do to help other people feel more comfortable without other people being too shame faced.  It's kind of like masturbating in that way.  If you ever masturbate to a particular person, they don't want to hear about so don't say anything about it.  The sentiment will be appreciated, but there's no reason to go as far as treading on graces and enjoying company.  Be easy, be tactful, and they'll respect you for it.  The thing is you won't know they respect you because you'll never bring it up, but understand that given the alternative to not knowing... yeah, they'll respect you for it and take the complement.  Play it out in your head.  Run the dialogues and the dialog trees and superimpose their characteristics on those dialogs to guide the decision forks and you'll always end up at the same conclusion: take more showers, take more time, die happy, and in the meantime don't eat shitty food and keep memories in tow better than a cat can.

Astral Pain, Curbing Self Absorption, and Re-engagement

A gorgeous thing happens when you wake up and step outside and the world has a luster to it that isn't glass eyed.  The bricks are warm though the air is skin tight cold.  The sun is not screaming, but humming.  The clouds are waiting instead of watching and the trees are content to not say a word as you go about your day.  And it's cool.  The voices are not so loud and the stars at night are not calling you home.  All they say as you hunt in the dark is "we're happy out here as long as you're happy down there, but feel free to visit when you're ready," and it's good.  It's great.  The weapons are collecting dust and the hands are busy again at other operations and no one else has to die and it's a great feeling.  The jail yard feels bigger than it ever has and seeing your breath is so welcome a change you damn near want to cry because Summer hurt you so bad, and you've been waiting so long to see snow again and for a while there you didn't think you'd make it that long.  A strange and gorgeous thing.  The quietude.  The death of everything and the ashes blowing through the grass.  Everything slowing down to a speed your eyes can process again.  Gorgeous.  Everything returning to a temperature more fit for your fusion heart.  The astral pain subsiding.

One of the immediate difficulties plaguing the writing has been an exorbitant amount of self absorption.  Getting beyond it has been difficult.  Spitting out all of the junk on top of the processes.  Kicking out the bad and pointless information, the information occupying a lot of cycles and routines.  Brain space and resources.  Resources that can't be repurposed or freed up until the train is run through the tracks and their opened again.  A necessary thing.  There's a lot on the burners.  In fact the kitchen was pretty much on fire.  Nothing edible was made.  Did manage to make some wicked cool... I don't know.  Lost my train of thought.  Started thinking about huffing paint again, but I'm not too thrilled with the results.  At least, not thrilled enough to go out of my way.  What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, so I've been fairly disappointed with all of the sentences starting with "I" and so many of the themes being things dear to my heart, but unable to touch the rest of the world my head lives in.  It got boring.  You wait and you wait and you wait for the bulb to go off and then you look at the picture and it's another damned self portrait.  You keep calling up your imaginary friends and they answer the phone and you sit down to talk about what you and he talked about and then you hold it up when you're done and it's another god damned self portrait.  I started asking myself how the hell it kept happening.  What the hell was I doing wrong?  The arrow finally pierced my thigh.  Not really.  I just talked and talked and talked until I had nothing left to talk about and I could remember again the things they said too.

They never left.  I was so torn up and wrecked and lost all at once I ended up circling the woods for weeks before something looked familiar again.  I'm reckoning loss again.  Reckoning with.  Minor and major losses of people.  Losing people again.  Dealing with dead channels that I thought would live forever and asking myself what I did wrong and realizing at this point the answer is nothing.  Sometimes there's no explanation.  I'm pretty sure I came to that conclusion before.  Years ago.  The conclusion about a general lack of causality in the humanverse.  Sometimes there is no explanation and I was okay with it then.  I'm learning to be okay with it now all over again.  People out grow you.  You out grow people.  Sometimes friends stay and sometimes friends go, sometimes you get to stay in touch and sometimes you don't.  Sometimes you dance.  They never left.

Curbing self absorption.  Curing self absorption, was a difficult task and not entirely done.  I still have to get back inside the heads of the people and places populating my dreams.  Pierce the fog of internal war.  It's still there, but I have become so unbelievably conscious of it's necessity and it's force of presence that I can begin to work around and work through it.  Begin to retool things that have sat in draft for months.  That's important to me.  It's important to them too.  So many storylines continue on in the background and it's fantastic to be able to sit down and leave myself behind to engage them and when I can't do that the storylines continue to their conclusion and when I finally do look at them again everyone is gone and I can't remember what we were doing there in the first place or where they may have mentioned they were going next.  However, I understand now

that I was standing far too close to the bars and the picket planks to enjoy the space I've earned.  Far too close to the window and hating the feeling of my nose there pressed to see the AUs.  I have to tell you that I love you so much, these days.  I forget to do that too much.  Too often.  A return to the observational side of things and less the actor.  Returning to the maps and the center of the yard where the fences are so far I can barely see them.  It's terribly easy to fall into yourself when you can feel your hands burning inside the diamonds of that twisted wire.

I am re-engaging.  Decoupled for so long.  It's easy to believe that is all there is for you.  Because it is.  If you want more you have to wrestle it away from what has already been determined, if that makes sense.  And I'm trying, have been, and finally succeeding a little bit.  Trying not to over celebrate.  I know the next turn is right around the corner and part of living with paranoid schizophrenia is guarding against yourself.  I accept that.  I don't particularly enjoy it.  I definitely woke up the other day unable to speak because I screamed my lungs out as hard as they would go.  That was a funny one to explain when I went to my temp job and rasped like a 90 year old chain smoker who couldn't break a decibel if his life depended on it.  "I just want you to be okay."  I just wanted you to stop asking about it.  I think I'm raving a little bit so

I'll bring this thing to a close for now and shove off from here, wherever here is, later on.  The astral pain has subsided.  Self absorption has been curbed, but not cured.  I am getting back in touch with the outer planes. I am re-engaging with life, though some parts of life will be or already have disengaged with me.  Most importantly Winter is here.  It feels like a lifetime went by in the months between this time last year and now.  Twisting in the breeze.


///Lionrock - "The Guide" ... the nineties killed it for electronic music.  in a good way.

Communications Fault: Line 446890-C0-CC1 (circuit a1 >> branch 9)

I've had a very difficult time with communication.  The heat hasn't helped.  The pressure cooker of my apartment hasn't helped.  I know what it's an extension of, and yes, I don't want to talk about it directly because it has been all consuming.  Requiring maximum effort to distance myself from and hide from others, but even the lack of communication is telling enough for the people that know me, so even the hiding has been a full time occupation.  Let alone maintaining myself.  That has also been a full time occupation.  Missing too many consecutive days of eating.  Not too many in the personal book of what too many days is, as I once went a solid week without eating until a friend intervened.  But, I've come to understand that one day of not eating when the option is available, is too many days.  A new standard that makes me feel glutinous, but shouldn't by any means do so, but it's a hold over from another time and another segment of my life that refuses to go away.

Communications have been strained.  Within myself.  Production is down.  Simply not happening.  Close to zero cooperation from the parties involved, but that happens.  Hallucinations are up.  Managing them has sucked up a lot of "up" time.  Sleep is off the charts.14 to 16 hours.  Cross bridge explorations, however have been phenomenal.  For quite some time I couldn't remember anything and then I started coming back with pieces and parts.  It got to a point yesterday where I woke up and reached for a pocket watch I found after I asked a dead body in a half crushed fully rusted barge (it was an interstate race across a state made up of only islands arranged in a rapids a half continent wide [the waves were high enough to bury the Petronas towers if they were perched on top of the Dover cliffs, and then some], but I got off course and ended up trapped in an island surrounded by weirs that made it impossible to get off it without something with an engine) if there was anything of value and he woke up and pointed to a muddy box with a finger that had a key ring dangling from it.  I opened the box and there was a spring loaded clock as big as my fist with a vest fob attached to it, and I was honestly surprised that it wasn't there and I realized I was dreaming again.

There was a very large bear in my room yesterday.  A very large, unusually square shaped, bear.  Which tipped me off that I was probably dreaming, but then my cat popped up on my pillow and poked me in the face and the bear was still there and I realized I was symptomatic again and so I pulled up my covers, rolled over, and tried to shut it out.  The sun came up, though, so everything was resolved well enough.  Daylight has its uses.  My sleep cycle went completely out of whack.   As far as it could possibly go without looping over on itself.  And then I got sick.  And slept for 36 hours.  I needed to.  Things have been righting since.  A little bit on their own, a little bit through my own efforts to force them to.

What comes next is a re-assumption of some kind of routine to protect the balance.  Shield myself from the bad wiring.  That's really all I am trying to do.  Remake the failsafes.  It was one of those rare times when one breaker fail set up the ability for the next one to fault.  And the next fault set up the next two to fail.  The next two set up the next four.  A large part of the mental restructuring is redeveloping the system to avoid that kind of expansion.  That kind of breakage leads to zero to atmosphere times that feel like blinks of the eye.  I was still talking about today as though today were Sunday.  With the understanding that today was Sunday.  Functionally that was where I left off.  Imagine your body is a car.  You jump in after dreaming and turn the key and halfway to your friend's house you realize there are 30,000 more miles on it than the last time you can remember driving it.  Not fun.  A little scary.  Where the hell have I been?

So much unmounted rage.  Learning all over again how to deal with it.  How to manage it effectively.  How to operate within a range of reason and reasonable values.  Your base language is either violence or love and the communicator operating system between them either works or it doesn't.  1 or 0.  I envy the analog.  They really are a different species of human being.  A holdover from another time that still procreates and propagates with great success.  Us digital human beings still propagate, often despite ourselves.  I don't mean digital in the respect of the how our communications are moved between people.  We're all digital enough to make that not matter in that respect.  The step before digitization though is a separate story.  A separate breakdown for another time, but it's there.  Digital communication at its root is violence or love.  Extreme to extreme and the methods and ways, the words and letters provide the ability to create shades of the experience.  For some.  For others there is an increasingly fine number of ways to say things and the translation to digital fields is easier to the point of effortlessness.   It's like an exam paper.  Every paper being different depending on who you are and how you were engineered.  Some people receive a paper where every question has twenty boxes.  Some people receive a paper with two boxes.   They both have the right answer to the question on them.  Expressing that answer is a lot easier when you have twenty boxes to choose from instead of two boxes and a bunch of blank space to try to scrawl in explanations and clarifications and other junk to help the twenty boxers understand what you meant.

Established frameworks of communications.  No one's to blame.  At least I'm not blaming anyone.  I'm just frustrated with my machinery.  But I already explained, you can't build new machinery with bad tools.  Perhaps I didn't.  A lot of things do not make it passed the cutting floor, believe it or not.  The idea was this: if the tools that make new tools are broken already or offset somehow, the new tools those tools make will be off by even more.  And those tools will build structures off by that much more.  And those structures will house tools constructed with that offset and be poor to look at to begin with and it just continues rolling up until it all collapses and you start again with the same crappy hammer and chisel and furnace trying to build a lathe to turn some sense out of something and you end up with nothing all over again.  So I dunno.  I do not know.  Maybe just try to enjoy the work more than the product?  Maybe?  Anthem of my life if I ever had to write one.  Probably needs more gunshots.   And more cowbell.  A little more clap hands and foot stomping and a little less dirge.  A little more "remember the mission and all you might do" and a little less "quarterly review for the noble and 'a societal remove' sorts of moves.  Nobility, much less nobelity, is passing and as beholden to the eye as anything ever was.


///Bjork - "Pluto" ... a little bit tired, but brand new

Something's New Some Things Old

I've been looking at you all evening and trying not to move. It was putting off the inevitable. Well, I mean, I didn't have much to say before so I wrote what was floating on top because I don't have the equipment to go swimming with any guarantee of safety. Which is what I was worried about. Which is why I was trying not to move. Basically I didn't want to have to open my door. There were some strange happenings earlier and I was waiting for them to die down, but I've spoke too soon again. Unauthorized border crossings, if that makes sense. I don't have a grip on it like I thought I did. It's not something you can be okay or not okay with. It's just something that is and then you learn to live around it. It makes me jumpy during the day. It makes it so that you have to look and hear and make a complete judgement about an entire setting because you don't really have time to work through details in everyday life outside. It's disconcerting. So many times I just need more time to investigate to know.

I used to wear keys everywhere to remind myself that I was awake and moving around and to track time. It's nice to have the option of taking them off and not participating in the movement of time and place. Sometimes though it burns through and it feels like forced induction. I don't like being tracked. Well, not tracked, but followed. Physically. It makes me nervous. Whenever I'm walking and I hear the neighbor walking in the same direction I stop what I'm doing and do something else. It's not bad luck. I just don't want our lines coinciding. It's like using someone elses network. I don't want whatever's over there coming over here. There's enough wildlife over here as it is.

There was something I was supposed to do today that I didn't do while I was avoiding I don't know what it is. I'm trying not to think about it. They don't like being talked about so I'll skip it.

I'm thinking about starting another repository of words. I haven't decided yet. The formulation hasn't struck a critical mass of need, but it's getting there like a bad itch. I'm sorry. I just don't know much today. Something's coming and it's heart breaking because for once all I've been doing is watching the kids play cards on a throw rug and they're playing so well and everybody's home and I don't know why. Well, maintenance has suffered some. I don't want people to be afraid of me. I'm not just like you, but... but what? You don't have to hate being around me. I like being around you? I don't know. I thought I did. Where is it coming from? Something has been built and it's doing work and I don't know where to begin on it. On protecting the rest of me from its function. I don't even know what it does, but I do know its activity is dragging the guts out of the fabric and the stuff back there, inside there, needs to stay over there. It's like waking up and there's a gas leak and the gas has made you sleepy and high and sick and it needs to be fixed, but I'm not a gas specialist. I would look for the hissing, but everything is hissing. I can't leave. I live here. Proximity alarm. But what the hell am I close to? I haven't been paying attention and I ran out of channels.

It's not in the factory. I cleaned that out already. Well, not cleaned out, but repurposed. Actually, I wouldn't even go that far. Just moved some things to the junk yard like Russian submarine pens. I am scared to go to sleep tonight. Not because of tomorrow. Tomorrow will be good. I am scared of what's out there thats creeping through here and I wish I had something that would put me down cold for eight hours. I can option out of waking space sometimes. That's easy. Optioning out of sleep induction can't be done on will alone with any sort of success rate. I don't want to go there. It strikes me, or has struck me, just now how that has flipped. Somethings have come and gone. Just passing through. This one feels different. Whether I want answers or not, I'm going to get some fairly soon. I wish that knowing something is wrong could translate into fixes. Knowing your teeth are bad means you go to a dentist. Ir knowing you're about die of high cholesterol means eating differently. Knowing means nothing. It's like thinking it's about to rain ten pound stones. All you can really do is stay inside or find a bridge to huddle under with the rest of the stray souls till it's over.


///The Orb - "Montagne D'Or"