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.

Stand Up Act 12

Stand Up Act 11

Dysfunctional weather is becoming unbearable.  Life is unbelievably unpredictable at its root.  People are the problem.  You can wake up to a fabulous morning and have a wonderful shower and your pets were so well behaved through the morning hygiene routine they've actually made you a fresh sunny side egg on dry toast with a light coffee and a teaspoon of jam with three crackers and a pinch of parsley from the window box.  You can head down to your car where you inexplicably have more gas than you did the night before when you parked it and your mailbox has five dollars in it because why the hell not.  Your watch is five minutes fast, but you're ten minutes ahead of schedule anyway driving down to the metro station to take the train into town because suburban life is where you're at and the sun is beaming right above and slightly to your right along the drive, but clouds are providing enough shade to turn that eyebrow searing ball into a calendar photograph of light and deeper blues like an angel just mowed the sky and crystals of fresh cut sunshine are filling the nostrils of your eyes.  Your parking space is taken, but there's an entire row of empty spaces right at the metro entrance and you glide on in

and slam your hand in your own door and drop your phone and crack the screen.  The year long train pass you just bought is still at home thirty minutes away tucked in your wallet and the teller at the ticket booth inside the station is occupied outside of the booth talking with a police officer to a homeless man who appears to be shouting about how he has a right to sit in the station if he's bought a ticket if he isn't sleeping so you have to squeeze through the turnstile behind another guy who enjoys it a little too much and keeps standing way too close to you on the platform while you wait for the train to come, glancing at you sideways just long enough for you to feel it every time you glance away and you consider, hand throbbing, to turn back and go home before you realize your car keys are not in your pocket.  Which is about when the guy with the baby strapped to his chest and the double wide stroller sidles up to you just in time for the train to arrive and one of his three little mouths to immediately begin wailing with just too little time for you to try to sidle away and hopefully get a more favorable car, but you've hesitated a little too long, with a single step back, to allow a massive crush of other downtown hats to clog the train's entrance and with standing room only your tie gets stuck in a teenager's lattice of straps covering their high country winter-pacolypse knapsack and a cloud of fast-food hash, bacon, and cheese burps.

Just like that, a perfect day, a perfectly normal day goes straight to hell because life is unpredictable and people are the problem.  People are the problem including yourself.  That's fine.  I can deal with that.  I'm an adult and all of the years of dealing with family members and friends and sometimes enemies and strangers and acquaintances has lead me to a place in life where sharing a bus bench with someone who has the worst body odor I have ever had the pleasure of quaffing actually does not phase me so much as it brings me to a place of curiosity.  Is that odor being generated by dark magic?  Were they hexed in another life or did they run over a gypsy in a night of drunken driving a week before and the gypsy's son is still learning how to cast curses and the best he could manage was a stink hex?  How many days do you have to skip showering to reach an all star level of odor like that?  I've had my streaks, but hot damn that stink is transcendent.  Why are you on a bus right now?  I should've walked.  Why didn't I leave earlier so I could walk?  It's only 6 miles.

I can deal with the unpredictability of life due to people.  It's unavoidable.  If you don't get in your own way, someone else eventually will try to, whether they intend to or not.  What I cannot deal with is dysfunctional weather.  Global warming is completely screwing up my life.  Not, you know, in the sense that I have to move because my beach front shack is slowly being swallowed by the sea or out of season hurricanes have destroyed my high rise condos or winter flooding ate my car, but in the sense that I have no idea what to wear or what the hell to do in what order.  Gardening is a big part of my life.  It keeps me calm.  It keeps me peaceful.  I never have moments while gardening where I want to grab a plant by its collar and strangle it with the fabric of its own shirt until its eyes bulge out of its head and then drag it to an open window and hurl into the busy freeway below and cup an ear for the thud and splash.  I've never had the urge to shout at a plant until my vocal cords rupture and blood fires out of my nose and mouth and paints a wall canvas.  Gardening is a wonderful and peaceful and calming elemental thing.  Sliding my fingers through soil and plucking weeds, and wonderful quiet conversation while the wind whispers and maybe a little rain dots us all while the sun shines and we can laugh and smile at each other, but not with this backwards weather running all over everything.

Is it going to snow?  Who the hell knows.  Is it going to freeze tomorrow?  Who the hell knows.  I love sleeping.  Do I try to fall asleep with the windows open or closed?  Is the air temperature going to feel like the actual temperature or should I account for the wind kicking up to gale force speeds for absolutely no reason at all around 2 A.M. and wake me up in a hot sweat underneath too many blankets and then freeze my skin right through to the muscle as soon as I swing the blankets away to dry my body sized wet spot on my mattress.  Do I shower again at 2 A.M. or do I wait an hour and itch and scratch wind blown dry skin all night because I fell asleep again before remembering to close the windows and pull the blankets up tight?  Sleep has gone right down the tubes because even if the windows are closed and the right number of blankets and under sheets are in place there is still the very very good chance that the thermostat is set to the wrong number because it snowed the previous morning, warmed through the day, and then dropped again in the evening, but did not get cold enough to require the use of hot forced air to remain comfortable and now hot air is blasting all over my face and my lips are drying out like Sponge Bob underneath a heat lamp.  What is going on, planet Earth?

I'm getting old.  I've got back problems, man.  My hip hasn't been right for nearly half a year now.  You would think that I would know when the weather is about to start doing strange things simply by putting a stethoscope to my knee and a tuning fork on my elbow and turning around three times.  I should know when a miniature Nor' Easter is on the way down my street simply from all of the accumulated aches and bumps and "shoulda gone to the doctor, but still can't really afford it"s I've sucked up over the years.  I'm getting old, but I'm not old yet so I'm still learning how to listen to all the tiny little signals that hint at things like walking with a hobble all day because the gummy tissues in my ankle are going to be swollen all day because that's just what they do when it's going to be cold and rainy and there's nothing you can do about it except try to smooth it out into a young man's confident strut or at least hope that's what it looks like when people see me from across the street.  I'm a young old person so I don't have the practice yet and with weather spinning every which way I have no clue how I'm going to feel throughout the day or if I'll need to have the pain killers in my night stand for when I wake up or if I'll need four shots before bed to stay asleep because something bizarre is happening outside my window and stabbing knife edge pain will wake me up at some point during the evening without liquor blanketing my nerve endings.

I may not necessarily need stability from people.  Asking for stability from people is a lot like asking a dog to not bark.  Ever.  It may be able to shut up for a while, maybe most of  a day, maybe even a few days straight, but at some point its going to have that dream where a squirrel falls out of a tree and lands dead in its face and they'll lock eyes for a moment to figure out who will make the first move while John Wu doves rise from the long grass and samurai flick wisteria flower petals tumble through the breeze and it will bark so loud it wakes both of you up from a pleasant mid-afternoon nap.  What I do need is stability from nature.  I need to be able to know that I can hang up a jacket or put away a pair of pants or hang up my boots and blankets without fear of some ridiculous blizz-nado howling through the middle of my street at some unreasonable hour after a fine afternoon at the basketball court and catching pneumonia in my sleep.

"Why are you late for work today?"  Well, I left my windows open to listen to the first crickets of the Spring and a thin layer of frost covered my apartment and all of my joint and back injuries from the last four years flared up at once and when I woke up my face was stuck to my pillow with snot and I couldn't get out of bed for half an hour because of shooting pain throughout my body.  I took a good long bath with some Epsom salts and by then I was about an hour late so when I walked out to my car in a jacket and sweatshirt and gloves and scarf I got about halfway there before I started sweating bullets because it was on its way to a high of 65 so I had to walk back up to my apartment and change into something I wouldn't completely sweat through by the time I got here because I haven't showered in two days because its impossible for me to tell when to shower specifically because I never know if it will be a waste of water because I may sweat out a few gallons in my sleep and my pits still stink despite the bath so I had to make sure I wouldn't smell too bad by the time I arrived, because with my nose stuff up the way it is, I can only assume based on the length of time... "the day's half over, go home!"

Come on, nature!  Get it together.  This trickle down effect of dysfunction breeding dysfunction into my life is a no go.  Figure out what you want to do and let me know so I can get things in order in my own life and at least rely on the fact that it will be hot in Summer, cold in Winter, chilly in fall, and crisp in Spring.  Enough with this spin the wheel of seasons nonsense.  I can't get anything done when I have to keep changing things around to accommodate you.

Vicious Paranoia

Saw the opportunity.  Memory songs.

Some days it is difficult to remember that you can piss in your own pot and not avoid windows and keep as erratic as possible a schedule because the truth of the matter really is that no one is coming to get you.  There is a boogie man, but he doesn't live outside the window.

Living by night is great when you are trying to control every aspect of sun up.  You can avoid the grift entirely if you work at it.  If he is trying to get you it'll have to be a crime in broad daylight.  There is a weapon in every corner so grab whichever one you want because, be assured, I have one closer to me than you, day flyer.  And I know where the spares are.

Come in through a window or a front door.  Come on.  It's silly though.  The concept of combat.  Asking for it?  Earned.  It still makes me laugh though, understanding that I damaged some and I wish I knew who exactly I hurt, because you're never the biggest kid on the playground, but you have to act the part or they'll eat you up.

They won't.  You also have to analyze value.  At the same time though... running over recent conversations... it is impossible to really know who any of them knows and who, in that party, is game for leaving things behind and making a decision estranged to you, because, let's face it, you are the extent of your staff and there may or not be an extended staff beneath the person you wronged and or the person you wronged may or may not be connected to a very extended pack of wolves that you may or likely will not be prepared to deal with on one versus one basis.  That's why bar fighting is never good and part of why I quit.  You never really know who they know and it'll come back to bite you, if not now then later.

Mistakes have been made.  Exhaustive turbulence.  Watch your shoulder.  I'm not at all prepared to move up sticks, but I am.  It's difficult.  SR.  That was the gambit though.  Like it or not.  If it ever comes down, as shiii tends to roll, just be ready.   I was born ready.  I wasn't.  If they ever do come in, though, if they ever do.  A battle for the ages.

It'll be a fine night.  And in the mean time?

It's been difficult to keep NORAD going.  Never falter.  We'er not at tying loose ends up yet.  Right now, take your choice when you walk in and I will match metal for metal.




///JDSY - "All Shapes"   ... shadow specifications are...  geometric ghosts are... hallucinations resolve into be ready for anything.

Change, Other Peoples Clothes, Top Down Sun Up, and Attack

I think that's how I got good at defense.  Attacking is an entirely different bag.  Attack, attack, attack!  Get on it!  I don't do call and response all that well.  I do response.  A lot of my growing up and formative whatevers was response, not call.  I was raised not to call and it's been a hedge maze trying to get out of it.  When I do call it's usually over top of what I was calling for and it's blunderbussy.  Killing a fly with a hammer instead of a swatter and then I have to fix the hole in the wall left behind.  It's been fun learning though, learning how to call the right way when calls need to be made and learning that response shouldn't be the only way to integrate myself into lives, because they have lives too and waiting until you're screaming and bleeding out of the eyes is no way to go about inserting yourself into conversation.  I still need distance in a bad way, but a good way.  It keeps them safe and it keeps me safe from misunderstandings and not so shuffle crowds and that's a good thing.  The fewer the things flowing in the better I can handle, and then it's not a frag of choice.  I hate getting hooked on forks.  STOP GIVING ME CHOICES WITHOUT CHANCES TO BREAK UP BAD ONES!  That's my only qualm with the United States of Aye Merica.  The land of one time opportunity for too many of us.  I'd swing less opportunity for more chances any day.

If I could go back in time I wouldn't punch myself in the face or shake myself by the shoulders.  I'd kiss me.  Hard and furious and little me would be like "what the fuck, man!" and then I'd tell him "it gets rougher, harder, longer, and more ridiculous.  You're going to fire a staple through your hand by accident and it's going to suck, but you're going to try to get out of work early and it's going to be one of the worst days post parents that you'll hate.  It'll heal up alright and nearly seamless and your boss will be proud of you for getting things done, but you're gonna wish you took more time on the project.  Just sayin'.  You're gonna hate it for about two minutes, but you're gonna kiss the blood and move on."  Poof!  Time traveling me peaces out and little me scratches his eyebrow and mumbles "no way."

I'm wearing other people clothes from goodwill.  They're great!  Half the stuff I have on makes me wonder what could provoke someone to give them up.  I haven't bought myself a jacket in a long time.  It's been years and I hadn't really thought about it until now.  It was always my mother, well, not always.  Sometimes my dad would pass me one.  I still miss my Bell Atlantic jacket sometimes.  That thing was the tits.  Furry pockets, double layered body and a knit collar.  Loved it.  Don't love how I got it (from my father, I hate saying that, but it's true.  I hate thinking about "I came from that"s cuz it makes me sick and it probably shouldn't, still heated, still gotdamn heated, it's not gonna die, but I actually want it to.  If he wants to apologize, my terms are teeth.  Not all of them.  But give me one of your kanines and apology accepted.  Until then, and only because you outright refused me.... twice, til death), but that jacket was everything you could want in a jacket.  Nice and tough outer with ... aw, it's not leather... trying to think of the word... the outer was made of the stuff good work pants are made of.  The cuffs were knit too, just like the collar.  And you can't beat the Bell Atlantic logo on the chest.  So good!

I'm wearing other peoples clothes and it feels nice.  It feels right.  It feels good to have new things that I bought on my own with my own tastes instead of for all kinds of purpose.  Purposeless clothing rocks.  Why do you have that jacket?  No reasons beyond my own.  It tickles me to say that.  Everything has been so purpose driven toward survival and managing damage and matching in, but this time, this jacket isn't about matching in or history or family or learning how to run with the silverfish, it's just about wearing what I want to wear.  The thing about goodwill though, the darker side, is wondering about if some of my stuff is going to end up at one when for one reason or another, cut short, or left standing still, my things get out of time.  Is someone going to be eyeing my baseball jersey who also loves the number 78?  I'm not mad about it, but I wish I could meet them so we could talk about our affinity for 78 and how it came about.

Top downing it.  I tried to go ground up and I couldn't provoke myself to make the change to oemfail, so I'm taking it from the roof down and it hurts.  Thematics don't work backwards no matter how hard you try to grow them that way.  I do enjoy the brighter motif.  I really do.  We're gonna grow the font into a better color and adjust the images, but sometimes you just have to go into a room and sit down in it to begin to understand where it's coming from.  The same thing goes for people.  You'll never get a good read from afar.  Top downing it because I've been boxed out and there is no other option.  And I'm okay with that.

I don't like change.  Change is stupidly difficult.  Sometimes routine will betray you and catch you not paying attention and I think I like that worse.  I can be manipulated and gulled and switch backed fairly easily, but I like to think of it as a trade off.  A trade off I am willing to take.  Unwillingly at times.  Taking it though.  Brighter and brighter.  Years behind and still in meta jail with my fingers through the fence, but making keys.


///Mackelmore - "White Walls"  .... lean back... the more I listen to his album the more I enjoy it

Wrecks, Dreamland, and Reconstruction

I went back to the scene of my car accident tonight.  Dreamland has been corrupted.  I keep having a recurring dream about it.  Cruising through dreamland last night I built a house of a little more than normal proportions.  My friend Matt and his buddy Ernie called me up after I finished eating lunch (sardines and fried centipedes... it actually wasn't that bad... all the legs and fish ribs were super crunchy inside the perogies).  Tom was there too.  Finished up eating, and the phone rang so I got up from the indoor beach with the five foot wide tv perched over the far water and went to go let them in.  Put on my fleece robe and tossed Tom the remote.  Walked down to the freight elevator and closed the gate and punched the ground floor.  The elevator went all the way down past the mech garage.  I had my bright red candy shell finished R 29 with extra plate and F990 shoulder mount long barrel with aftermarket cooling fins parked right beside it and it was awesome watching the light glint off of it.  Sometimes I spend days on the scaffold hand polishing it's entire body when I'm not joy riding it through the clear southwest desert night sky.

The elevator went all the way through to the floor and then ten feet below to the car garage and hillside entrance.  It's a short walk to the door and I let Matt and Ernie in.  Ernie asked me if I remembered going to his place the night before and showing up at three in the afternoon.  I said no.  I didn't.  I wasn't lying.  He asked me if someone hacked me, but I told him I wasn't online at all yesterday, but it's possible I might've caught something because I was online the day before pretty much the entire day looking for some rarer copies of an Ultraman graphic novel I used to have when I was a kid, but can't find in my library anymore.  He laughed.  That was probably what might've done it.  Matt offered to hit me up with a few patches to make sure whatever it was that wiped my memory didn't get passed around while they were over.  We took the lift back up and they asked Tom if I was a little off yesterday and he said "definitely."

I don't know why he didn't mention anything to me, but I guess that's what good friends do sometimes, and he's probably used to my oddness and figured it was the usual fare.  Or at least, the Tom I constructed and built into the dream did.  I told them we were out of sardines.  Because we were and if we were going to hit up the bars later it would probably be good not to over do it.  I don't know where the extra beach chairs came from but by the time we got back up to tv room they were already there.  We all started talking about whether or not we would blaze on our way up to the Silver Tusk.  I have a pretty sweet mech garage so there're plenty enough for each of us to blast out to the exosphere and dock at the Silver Tusk space station in geocentric orbit above our heads.

And then a giant tan sedan crashed through the wall behind the flat screen.  It blew it apart and was going so fast it skipped across the water and bit into the beach.  As soon as it touched down it started flipping and parts began whipping off of its underside like a pipe bomb built and stuffed with three foot long aluminum fence posts instead of nails.  I was standing behind them and it rolled right over them and chewed them up into meat before my eyes before a door came zinging off while it spun and I woke up with that door heading straight for my neck.

Every other dream since it happened has been like that.  No matter how I construct it or if I let it play and go along for the ride, they keep ending with cars careening through and killing everyone in one way or another.  So I went back to the place tonight.  It was weird walking up the off ramp.  I tried to think about what that kid could have been thinking that morning walking between the off ramp walls.  There's no where to go on either side.  If you leap off the far side of the corner it's a good ten foot drop.  Off of the inside corner there's some grass, but cars come much closer to the inside of the turn so your chances are much slimmer of even having time to react or think about jumping.  I like to drive in wide and then turn in tight and let the car bleed off speed while it grips in.  He was lucky for that.  If I came inside he would have been through my windshield.

The mark on the far wall when I swerved to avoid him was nothing tremendous.  It was mostly a tire scuff maybe a foot long at most.  It didn't speak at all to the damage done to the car.  There was no traffic tonight.  I walked out to the middle to pick up a piece of my bumper that was still there.  Just a shard.  I don't wonder why he ran away.  I would have too.  Was he daydreaming?  Did he want to die?  Was he just high?  Crouched there I started to remember when I was younger and I walked into traffic trying to get hit on Forbes avenue.  I wasn't particularly upset or anything, but I was ready to let my life go.  No one would hit me.  I did it again a few nights later with my eyes closed and I distinctly remember a bus blowing by me so close it spun me around when it brushed my black hoodie.  I wasn't upset, but I was impossibly trapped at the time and finished trying to figure out how to pick that particular lock.

I'm still putting my body back together.  From the car accident and the fall down the two flights of stairs and the bike accident (which was my own fault, just pushed my bicycle too hard after having it laid up for most of winter and a too cold spring).  Two hours a day of rehab work getting my back right.  A lot of my power comes from my torso and I messed up my hip and tailbone pretty ugly.  Nothing broken, but the deep bruising and muscle strains took their toll, but I'm getting back to a point where I can consider running again and hitting the weight room hard.  The reconstruction, the process of it has become consuming.  I was at a point where I could mess with whomever I wanted.  Sure, I didn't win every scuff, but I had confidence in my bones and tissues that spoke to having a decent shot as long as I wasn't piss drunk.  Not so now.  There's hesitation now.  There's memory tape now of the waking up in pain and not being able to sit up straight even in a well made chair.  Not being able to breath because my sternum hurt so bad.

My body is gathering force though.  Regaining moxy and it's difficult for me to have my limitations still in view.  I keep having internal arguments with myself shouting "don't do that, you're not ready yet."  And myself shouting back "or what?"  But I know what.  Humiliation, failure, more time lost in recovery.  What the reconstruction has also done though, is forced a new view upon me.  A new way of going about conflict. Handling passions I can't always contain effectively.  War bringing peace, in a way.

More than anything, I want so badly to speak to that kid face to face now that I don't want to skin him alive anymore.  I want to know, and I want to tell him I forgive him.


///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Smash and Grab World"  looking to the stars on a fucked up night.  Year end playlist is still in the works.  Just five months late.  No worries.

The Best Thing

The best thing about your worst day, your absolute worst day that you have ever experienced, is that  all you have to do to avoid repeating it is do just one of the thousand things you did slightly differently.