Little Ripples

There are many measures and routines to help ensure our stability and further existence in schizophrenia's shadow.  Not a single one is bulletproof or sure-fire.  They're more like an array of alarms.  A network of self-imposed checks that serve to help me protect myself from myself and help me maintain an awareness of what is happening inside as well as help me perceive how or why I am interacting with people on the outside.  It sounds elaborate.  It is.  It works sometimes.  Maybe 50% of the time.  That's too low, maybe 65% of the time.  I believe.  I would like to think.

The auditory hallucinations are always there.  Sometimes the best way to handle it is to drown it out or try to blanket it in constant music or reruns of radio talk shows or television shows that I've heard dozens, in some cases, hundreds of times so that it forms a background tapestry to latch myself to.  Sometimes the way we handle it is by drinking... a lot.  If you hammer your brain into unconsciousness, you can't hear anything at all and what's more is that you can skip entire days sleeping while your body tries to recover itself.  Those auditory glitches cannot hurt you and you don't have to engage with them for 7 days out of the week.  Through the gift of alcohol, your week becomes 4 days long instead of 7.  That's not the best way to deal with it.  That is a way to escape it.  Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to try to engage them outside of yourself.  Try to write to them or draw to them or just talk to them through your mouth if possible.  That never works.  Nothing ever works.  Don't kid yourself.

It does help us to feel secure for a while.  The acts help us feel grounded to something and allow us to move through the world and focus on tasks, conversations, and people in front of us.  It isn't always paralyzing, but it grows all its own.  Sometimes it's fun to think I can control it.  Will power.  Discipline.  Routine.  Everything where it belongs.  Simplicity.  All of these things.  Then I'm in a line at a grocery store asking the man behind me "did you say something" four times before it hits me walking to my car that he's the fifth person I've questioned that day and things are slipping from bad to worse and my little network of alarms is not helping.  Sitting up in bed, watching shows I've seen thirteen times, and getting up for an eighth time to check that I'm alone because someone else is in here and I heard them say my name twice and I know it's not the neighbor downstairs because she goes to bed at 8:45 every night.  Someone keeps turning the doorknob to the pantry and I heard them stub their toe and curse.  Jesus, they are inside.  We have to go.  Now!

Walk out underneath the street lights and it's 11:30ish.  Headphones turned up as loud as they will go.  Walk around the block.  We try to memorize every detail and compare it to what was there before we started walking.  We compare it to what was there after our evening lap.  We try to see if we are seeing things again and a shadow grunts "pssst, hey" so we decide to walk to the next town over and avoid the bridge because they will be waiting there to howl through our insides and if I could get to the park and lie down in the field for an hour or two to catch my breath the world might stop spinning for a moment.

I feel depression creeping in again.  A very light pressure behind my ears and chest.  A dull railroad spike through the near corner of my eye straight through the back of my head that will start to crystallize and splinter outward like a molten iron snowflake.  I start to question again.  Who wants to deal with this?  How could we have been so blind and over confident to believe love can iron out differences whose gulf spans literally every aspect of your lives?  You broke, dumb, idealistic, garbage, man-child.  What is that?  Who's there?  Lying awake in bed until the sun comes up wondering if he is going to come for you tonight.  Sitting on the cool bathroom floor telling yourself "never again, never again, never again."  You didn't really believe someone would choose this warped, scarred, perverse thing over a human.  Did you?  How sweet.  That is just adorable.

I still receive letters from time to time from the people that were my parents.  Some expressing concern and well wishes.  Some acknowledging holidays and other spiritual flotsam and sentiment.  I feel my fist close and my fingernails dig into my palm.  How dare they.  How dare they.  How dare they!  Still, not one acknowledgement of responsibility.  Not one acknowledgement that part of why I am here now, fighting every day to navigate through and undo the damages where I can, is because of their compounding actions for decades .  Not one hint.  Swipe at my twitching cheek that is curled into a stone snarl and spit out another piece of chipped tooth.  I have to stop doing that.  We only get one set of teeth.  We probably won't get to drink their blood any time soon.  That's a shame.

How can you love someone else, when you cannot love yourself?  I do love myself.  I love other people too.  The simple fact is we're broken.  Period.  Not fixable.  You can try all of the little things you like to lure someone else close: more money, a little land, cars and furniture, clothes and shoes, it is not going to change the base state of how you function.  What's more, and pretty funny, is that the base state of how you function also governs all of those things too.  You'll end up asleep in a bathtub chasing those things, we all know this first hand.  I haven't the stomach for it or the mental health and make up.  It won't take long to stop seeking meaningful intimacy with others.  I'm already just about there.  Roiling hatred transposes to the grainy, rattling, vision of rage.  Kill them all.  I have nothing to offer you and rare in this world is the human who truly needs nothing.  I am close.  I will find someone in kind.  Or I will stumble upon them in the dark.  Either way, I am not built for this world.

The hallucinations are growing in volume.  It is best to be alone when it starts to happen.  It's a lot easier to differentiate and stream thoughts apart from them when there isn't someone else around requiring attention and head cycles.  The frustration and irritation and embarrassment is greatly reduced and sometimes it helps to deal with and engage it when I can strictly control what I am sensing.  To a point.  There is a point where it doesn't matter what we do to insulate and protect ourselves because the assault is coming from the inside of our body and eventually there is no where to hide and nowhere to run and I try my best not to claw my skull apart.   I try my best not to scream.

Moving through the day and the little ripples tickling the hairs on my fingers and shins, I pause and whisper "not again."  That was not my name.  That was not my name.  That was not my name.




///Muriel Zoe - "Bye Bye Blackbird"

Prior To the Holidays

I want a tank for Christmas.  Or a giant robot decked out in yellow, orange, and pink and black.  Or a Gulf blue and orange Z car.  Or a plot of land on which to build my miniature fortress.

I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year.  He knows what he did.  Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus.  Robo Claus.  I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot.  I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa.  That dude.  That guy.  Nuke the North Pole.  I am already drawing up the campaign posters.  That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny.   The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice.  It'll save the world.  A few decades later, nuke the South Pole.  Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time.  You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.

It doesn't really feel like Christmas.  I haven't talked much about holidays.  We live in a different world now.  The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds.  I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am.  It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays.  I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time.  I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected.  A certain amount of migration.  Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount.  There's a massive difference.

For the first time I have put up evergreens!  The sensation and scent is wonderful.  Not a tree.  I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own.  I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window.  I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year.  Next year we will add some layers to the design.  Ornaments too.  It will be pretty spectacular.  By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.

I think that is what may have been happening this year.  A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course.  Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them.  All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.

The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline.  I'm up for the challenge.  I believe I am up for the challenge.  It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world.  It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is.  A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.

I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life.  It's not my new year.  Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31.  My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas.  An odd alignment of perspectives I guess.  I can't help chuckling.  It is an odd confluence of parameters.  At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.

I do not hate the holidays.  All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay.  Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated.  Actually, I love them.  Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least.  Those ten years will fly.




///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance"  when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.

That Instant

you sneeze on your computer screen and everything turns into rainbow dots, but you're "awww, cool" quickly turns into an "aw, gross" when you remember each beautiful rainbow lens of light is just booger sauce and electrons.

Summer Days Are Beautiful

Summer days are beautiful.  Walk around in the grass that probably should have been cut yesterday and feel how fluffy and wet it is before the sun dries it out.  Take time away from watering the garden to blow a bubble of mist around you and spin yourself around to see the rainbow halo around your waist.  The birds are off on their errands.  By now you do not hear their 5:30 A.M. alarm, but you will miss it a lot when it is gone and cold water chills instead of refreshes.

Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin.  Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you.  Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more.  A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.

I am just like you, though we are different.  Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning.  Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.

Though we are different.  The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes.  Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.

It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what?  I don't know.  I don't know what is next.  I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired.  That sweet sweet 12k paycheck.  It is a joke.  At 30?  Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?

After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.

I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future.  That's for fun.  My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy.  It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in.  I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize.  I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person.  When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.

The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been.  I had to think very hard.  Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.

After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years.  I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head."  After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do.  It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do.   Auto-mechanic.

The realization dawned on me.  All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles.  The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms.  The smiles on folks faces.  The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions.  The solitude.  All there.  After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades.  I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.

Thirty years old and getting no younger.  A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point.  I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world.  You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise.  Worry about what comes next in the stars.  I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation.  With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck."  So what?  One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been.  Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links.  Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.

It tastes different doesn't it.  Oh it does!  When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month."  I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation.  I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction.  Will I ever make living money?  Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water?  Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating?  I have to find out.

Summer days are so beautiful.  Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful.  Chew a dandelion stem.  As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors.  The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river.  Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace.  It is pretending to sleep.  T-shirts almost dry.  The garden dirt probably is too.  One more go 'round.  It is going to be a hot one today.




///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"

Less Than Stellar Habits

I've developed the habit of not breathing while I'm driving.  Cruising down Allegheny boulevard beside the river with a ton of straightaways, I noticed it.  My right hand resting on the stick shift started to go numb.  That was when I realized I wasn't breathing.  That was also when I sucked a breath in at 45 miles per hour on a two lane with a rumble strip.  It's really hard not to process space and time as opportunities to wreck and die.  I'm trying to unlearn it.  Breathing is very important, especially while driving.  I'm not scared of many things.  I thought I'd conquered my fear of the road once I started whipping my horse, but I hadn't.  I have been holding my breath since all this time whenever situations got even remotely hairy.  It makes me a worse driver, not a more cautious one.  Constant silent panic that locks up a body.  The world is terrifying at speed.  But I love speed.  But it's terrifying.  But it's gorgeous.  Wrestling with circumfact.... am I going to die in a flaming ball of twisted metal?  Ignore the landing lights.  They are not landing lights!  Oooh tunnel vision.  Stick your head out of the window and suck it in.  Canyon run. Someday soon.  Don't go too heavy on the gas.  I want driving to be fun again.




///Hotchip - "You Ride, We Ride, In My Ride"

Pushed

All I wanted was a front row seat in what feels like a war and looks nothing like it.  I keep reciting the procedure and double and triple checking equipment, and in the mean seconds ticking by the pilot is sweating marbles trying to keep our helicopter away from flak and small arms fire and the occasional rocket, circling where I need to land once I jump off of the side.  I'm sweating too fearful of what happens after I step out into thin air, but I know what happens.  There's nothing to be afraid of.

Walking into my apartment after getting groceries the long fingered man with the reading glasses glances up and turns around and taps the only skin on his arm not flayed away where a watch was.  Time is of the essence.  I know.  There is not much time to waste.  I know, I know, I know.  Where are you going?  Out, don't follow me.  You forgot your wallet.  Thank you.

I suppose, a sort of writer's block for persons who don't get writer's block?

Consider this your gentle, two palmed, straight armed shove.  You know what has to be done.  Pull the trigger.

I worry sometimes that it won't make sense.  I worry now if it's not good.  If the entire pursuit has been a waste.  Why poetry?  What is locking up inside you?  It's nothing.  Absolutely nothing and you know it.  Don't be afraid, you've just had your eyes closed for a few months.  Listening to the air and the land and space and people eating each other alive and giving birth and dying and sleeping and breathing and talking and talking and it's not so bad if you'd only open your eyes standing on the ledge of the gunship.  Make sense out of chaos.  Or chaos out of chaos.  Make sense of it later.  Every thought lost to time is one less beacon, one less point of reference, one less story, one less epic, one less chapter, one less relationship you could have brought into this world from your travels.  One less love.  Do it for you.  Do it because you can love you and that's where it all starts.  Come clapping toward the bright pink smoke flare while the shells fly.  I'll be back to pick you up sooner than you have time to think to ask "where did you go?"




///Sylvan Esso - "Hey Mami"    higher resolution

S'not All Guts and Glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

The Difficulty With Plural Being

There is a stark difficulty that faces harsh light when existing on multiple planes, the first being sudden hunger and damn near undeniable sleepiness that strikes at inopportune hours.  You can't remember with reliable accuracy the last time you ate, so you make up stories to keep the rest of the story in line.  Sometimes, though, they're accurate memories of eating denied with the fullsomeness of passion that denotes some kind of dedication to the farce and the enforced and necessary truth.

Social media contributes to the complication, making sign posts more difficult to spot, but they are there.  Multiple accounts in multiple names.  A multiplying outlet of personas allowing for better and more extensive development of those personas.  When does it operate to a fault?  Active contribution toward managing split personalities becoming a game of musical chairs?

Limit the number of chairs?  Add definition and resolution?  Or take the pills.  Fastidious compartmentalization.  And further compartmentalization and specialization.  To be called upon at will or at least with some prefabrication, editing, summoning, and purpose, because that is the difference between the ill and the capable.  The ability to select, observe, compensate, and respond in a reasonable and human fashion.

Everyone is plural, their "plural" being unanimous instead of fractured.

What happens when dominance is completely unpredictable, highly divided, and deeply embattled one against the other and prone, all the while, toward miscommunication?  Are there special exceptions?  Is there an "out"?  When do you have to press the hand dealt and keep the game going, come whatever consequences, and when do you have the right to put the cards down and say "this is what is here, they add up to nonsense in terms of what the rules of the game dictate, and I do not want to play with them, have no heart in them, and would like to be dealt a new set or at least counted out of this particular round, but not necessarily the game."

I think the long sentence is probably the grounds for the answer.  No matter how difficult or nonsensical the answer seems to me, the majority is fairly straightforward and a lot easier to comprehend.  It does not hurt that they are alike too.  I think that is one of the things that continues to vex me.




///The Echo Friendly - "Same Mistakes"

Giddy Up

I've been trying to chart my work books, but I don't want to see them.  At all.  Fantastic difficulty.  I did the first class and the reminder came up to do the second class and I couldn't bring myself to do it.  Part of it is horror.  Part of it is blatant stupidity.  Part of it is just not wanting to know how much further I am going to have to work to get back to zero.

I just want to put my fist through something.  Anything!  Not even through, but just break my hand.  Null it.  But I need my hands, both of them.  And I need the ability to ambulate.  I need my knees and my elbows and I have to protect them the same way people protect their investments.  It breaks my heart sometimes knowing that I can't do what I need to do.  It makes me cry a lot.  I won't go to "it's not fair" because it's just a fact.  I could probably cut a finger off.  I think I would save it.  Maybe eat it.  Cook it somehow like a ham hock.  Stew it or something.  It's tantalizing and aggravating because I know where the knuckles join and have cut limbs apart before but I don't trust my left hand to operate the scissors on my right hand.  Maybe just the pinky.

Gauging my pain threshold.  I'm still not sure where it is exactly and I probably shouldn't be losing sleep about it, but I am.  I think I get that from my father.  How far are you willing to go before you jump to get what you need.  Would I have to cauterize it myself?  Probably.  I don't know why I need to do these things, but I do and its getting more powerful and harder to swallow it down between suggestions.  I don't know what that means!  It scares me.  It's getting harder to pretend to be normal.  Normative?  Baseline.  Nullification.  Talked to Martin about that for a while.  It was a good conversation.

Relying more and more on emulation and I'm afraid I will be found out.  Not about being gay or anything that trivial, but being found out about being a fucking psychopath.  I want blood all the time, I don't care how it comes.  I need help.  I need assistance and I keep saying I can run this car until the wheels fall off, but I've been rolling on brake discs forever.  So many years.

It would be easier if I was not aware of the degeneration, but I think a piece of the awareness has lent itself to a belief that I'm making it up and even as I'm speaking I know it sounds contrived.  It isn't.  It's motor and I know less and less how to change the fucking oil.  I don't know what to do about it.  I know where to go, but you better believe I'm not going there.  Like I need more debt, don't make me laugh.  I'll spit ice tea everywhere.  I'm not getting interned again!  No!  I will never put down the ax!  If you want it out of my hands you better be fucking prepared to take it from me.

I'm not a gun, but I will put one between your eyes and kiss you while I do it if you think it was going to be that easy.  Don't touch me.  Do not fucking touch me.  Ever.  I will break your fingers one by one while I sit on your chest so you don't move too much.  Escalation.  Take the escalator back down.

I know what's wrong with me, but I need a checkup and I don't know where to get one without the internment trap.  I'm not doing that again.  We're not doing that again.  Just handle it. Just grab your ears and pull up your socks and eat it.  Life hasn't been all that bad to me.  I'm just tired of having to emulate to squeak by.  Doing it by the skin of my teeth and I'm pretty sure some people have started to see through it so I have to work harder at it because the people that I do love I love dearly and want to keep them and want them to keep me to and the last thing that should happen is giving them a reason.

It's tough.  Everything worth having is hard.  Is a myth.  Perpetuated by people who think "difficult" is possession in the material sense or the kid rearing sense.  Everything worth having is hard in the interpersonal intrapersonal sense.  Having ground you do not need to give inside your skull is worth having.  Maintaining relationships with the people you care about and trust is worth having.  Put in work, no doubt, but put in secondary work too.




///Amon Tobin - "Back from Space"  I wish I could fly, but not just to the atmosphere, to the stars.  I want to explore the Oort cloud and be the first man to land on an asteroid and be out there in the zero cold and see the sun without atmospheric interference.  I want to see Jupiter up close at all costs and I want to die out there.  But I'm stuck here.  And have to keep coming back to this fucking planet every time I wake up.  Bullshit.

Redrum and Other Origins and Valuation

Is it wildly addictive, yeah of course.   Does it change you?  No not really.  There's a certain amount of disappointment that comes with it.  A certain amount of asking yourself questions that persist despite the time of day.  It's a pretty weird thing.  A confluence of circumstance and luck so thick I can talk about it now almost a year removed.   Can you imagine sitting on anything for a year?

I tried to talk to my friend about it and she pretty much shut me out.  That sucks.  I did not anticipate at all how I would be re evaluated.  That part of it has been hard to parse and it really has been across the board with each person I've shared it with, chosen to share it with.  It's an odd difficulty but I can understand the rejection.  I can understand it, but I don't have to accept it, I would like to think.

Do I feel better?  Not really.  Not as good as I thought I'd feel.  Kind of reminds me of paint snuffling. Very short lived and very gorgeous and very forgettable, but so far away from everything enjoyable on a common basis.  A rare sadness that presents some unforgettable joy.  It's difficult to talk about.  Because I know there are people missing her and all that.  It's difficult to relate because on top of that there is the knowledge of the missing and maybe that's why I don't sleep so good these last years.  Getting away without really getting away (heart in the floor kinda shit except ...)

The most difficult thing has been trying to relate this story without who I relate it to drastically reevaluating who I am as a person.  I'm still the same.  What's so difficult to understand about needing and finding practice?  I understand that I am a very strange and enchanted boy and eventually luck runs out, but how does that mean love evaporates?  Or should evaporate?  How come once suddenly doesn't mean enough?  I could understand trust lost.  I could understand that.  Total abandonment still stymies me.  I don't care what you did or what you do.  If I love you I love you.  That's it.  Where it starts and ends I guess.  I think that's all I wanted in return.  That's all.  Step by stepped is what I got.  Oh well.  let's explore more.  It's a big world and I've a small heart and there's a hell of a lot of music along the way.  we'll see where this goes, but honestly i want more comedy.  I don't think that's too much to ask.  Trying to increase my value to others, you know?   It is the first and last time I'll talk about it, so enjoy.

The Seatbelts - "Rain"  -  its a strange balance. even to me.  the worst being that i dont know its been struck yet.  knowing how i feel afterward i will try, but i cannot promise anything and i never will.

No Country, No Courtship. The Noble State.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Money, Cash, Power, 'Spect... it's a Trap

I have been battling.  Not the usual demons.  Battling the allure of money and respect.  The two usually come in a dime pair.  And it's nice.  I recently realized I was using it's and its in the inverse of how they're supposed to be used because I rememorized a mnemonic device incorrectly.  One of those times when you say to yourself "yeah I remember that from elementary school," but your memory is actually completely backwards and remanufactured from parts and pieces of things that actually happened.  So I am trying to make an effort to reitify the memorization.  Only this time forwards.  Comma usage is still playing fast and loose like law dogs in westerns.  Anyway, been struggling with the potential for success.

Blowing the costs out of success way out proportion.  Thinking things like, well if I am successful how will I be able to live in an apartment that costs more to live in and is slightly smaller than the one I currently occupy?  The answer is: the extra money will be what you can apply to owning a runabout and getting out to other places so you'll be spending less time cooped up anyway.  But that's not the answer in my head.  In my reason, it is the answer.  In my head the answer reads more like... well you know.  I need not jump it that hard.

I guess with making more money I won't qualify for my hundred dollars of food stamps that has become less a mark of shame and more like "holy shit, it is the eighth of the month and time to buy all the foods I've been dying to buy for the other twenty days out of this month, jesus christ no more peanut butter and jelly and pasta."  The truth is I hate eating out.  With a passion.  Not because it costs more for no reason because for whatever reason tipping motivates service instead of service motivating service (I'm just incorrigibly service oriented) and for some reason getting what you pay for only applies in the food sector.   I hate eating out because I hate having people make food for me, as though I am somehow above making my own vittles and prone to being upset if said vittles aren't ready in five minutes or less.  I am a creature of patience.  Violent, violent patience.  I am content to wait very, very, long periods of time to get desired results...  ...sometimes quietly, sometimes silently, sometimes very loudly, but at the end of the day I will accept having to fold my hands for a time and wait out results, if not for seeing the fruits of my labor then for the reappearance of opportunities past or yet to come.  I did always like the tortoise.  Fast hands, slow feet, can't lose.

I practice making fists throughout the day.  Throwing fists.  I keep an eye on my footwork too.  I suppose maybe I am a little obsessive compulsive, but only toward the end of self preservation.  It was kind of hilarious, the job application for temporary day to day labor.  I believe it asked no less than eleven times if I though fighting was important, or if I thought the ability to win a fight was important, or if I thought the ability to defend one's self in a fight was valuable.  I answered the questions honestly and then accidentally scrapped the test (given with an inferior keypad interface, it really was an honest lucky mistake) and then asked the branch manager what was up with all the questions about fighting.  He clued me in and told me to answer no, not ever, for all the fighting questions regardless of experience or training or ability.  Apparently temp labors brawls are less the exception and more the rule.  Regardless, the upside of being conscious of how you place your feet on a moment to moment basis makes you less susceptible to slip and falls when you are focusing on other things.

Just one of those sorts of things I guess having to use your body as the foundation of your livelihood instead of your brain makes you conscious of.  I'm kind of inclined to go back to using my body more, but I wouldn't know where to start here.  This place kind of frowns on that, hilarious enough as it is probably two cuts above a slum, but I'm not here to argue.  One less trap.

Getting back to that though, I'm having some trust issues.  Massive ones.  Questions bouncing around.  "If you were me, with everything you have at your disposal would you say yes to the offer being given you from your mouth to me, me being you?"  Questions like that.  I don't really know when I'm being used.  I damn sure don't know when I'm being abused.  The not knowing hurts more than the knowing.  The discovery hurts more than both combined.  I don't know if people are or aren't, but I wish they would just tell me.  That's the upside of selling.  It's clean cut.  This is what's going to happen, this is why, and this is what it's going to cost you.  That is the danger of friends.  Nothing is clean cut like that.  That's probably why the people I count as friends has thinned so much.   That and just being a crazy fuck.  Laughing too loud.  Neighbors banging on walls.  Laughing harder.  Sigh.  It's good to be live.  Better to be alive.  I'm working on that.

Money, cash, power, and respect.  Everybody wants it.  I want to be money so I can get cash and be granted enough power to sway enough respect to buy some land and a home so I will have no need of money, cash, power, or respect and can just be.  There's no trap in that.

My stable of friends.  Wow.  I don't know.  That's a lie.  I do know.  I like to say I don't know so I can imagine it's larger than it is.  It's teensy.  Oh god, I just tried to rattle it off and got to four, counting family members. Is that even something I can fix?  Does it need fixing?  To that, I can honestly say I don't know.  If I stepped off my spaceship, when I do step off my spaceship, there are essentially four people who can relate to me, but who I can also relate to honestly and semi-openly... on a sit down basis.  Everything is open over the waves.  You can turn that off.  When you're with someone, you can't turn that off.  It's there.  I am there.  I want your eyes.  It's very different.  Sadly different.  World changingly different.  I think that's the nice thing that opens me up when I'm talking to you that I don't get to experience otherwise.  You can turn me off.  Unsubscribe.  Break up.   All that wonderful shit and I don't have to know and you don't have to know and we're just the same with or without eachother.  The beauty of.  The fantasia.  The crazy fucking nasty wonderful idea sex one night standiness of it all.  It's not always that.  But sometimes.   Whatever, it's fun.  Ive nothing to justify.  And everything to justify to myself.  I assume you realize we are arguing.

We've agreed we'll keep on because the dreams have been to die for.  They really have.  They've been the sorts of things a body could wish to never wake up from.  But, it's a trap, isn't it?  Maybe not.  Maybe I just have to accept that there are benevolent forces beyond myself.  People that don't know me, that don't want to punish me once they do get to know what I am.  People that don't want to me punish myself, that are trustworthy beyond a shadow of any doubt and worth more, in fact, than all the trust I could muster if I turned every cell toward the task.

a kid can dream.





///Gorillaz - "On Melancholy Hill" Five hours to get this out. Happy to put my thoughts to good use. Unhappy I couldn't do more. Bed and jobs beckon. can't wait til I'm a housewife with nothing to do but tend after bastards, count my government checks and bide the time until I'm raking in Rowling esque millions when I have nothing to do but write and feeding myself is last on my list of major concerns. So melancholied. So half finished. I wish I was sipping brew on a plastic beach.

lookin good

finally finished the principal of the thing in the benegon project. feels good to be done with fitting pixel A to pixel B. it looks good though. hopefully moving forward will allow me more time for writing and loving and wandering the other side of consciousness. you know, the side where the wild things grow and come and lick and poke at the membrane around where we live.



i can kind of see how the next 5 years is going to play out. spoiler alert: more losses. did i ever tell you district 9 really touched me. like way deep down? yeah. i almost shed a tear at the end. i wrote an email once to all of my old professors asking for any aid they could possibly offer. one responded out of ten or twelve people. one. and that person's main talking point was: sorry.

researching technical schools ive found they are not cheap and id need a car to get to most of them. im in a camp. i am walled in and held apart from my peers. i dont fucking know why. if i did i would fix it. what are they afraid of? why are people so easily upset? i mean im sure my situation probably makes other people uncomfortable because so little cash would make such a massive difference. but the sum is just large enough to be too much to give away. people probably spend more on cigarettes in a year than i spend on everything combined because im just that broke. well still... theres some hand wringing over that im sure. i avoid talking about it most of the time because its so out there i guess. outside the realm of knowing. im so far away from my socioeconomic peers i stand out like a burnt out house in a neighborhood of gated homes. its not that im too lazy to fix my god damn windows, its that the only thing i can afford is a slab of plywood. you try not to let it color your experiences and temper your relationships but it does. its like having a broken pen in your laundry. no amount of balling up the fabric will prevent it from staining. the viciousness of life does not cease to amaze me. the foulness of our fellow man did a long time ago.

whats the fix. whats the fix. whats the fix. how am i supposed to fix this? do i stay? do i leave? to where? my head hurts. i dont want to lose friends, but sometimes i wonder if friends want to lose me. loss and dealing with loss is something that i dont do well. who does? its crushing to live in such a small box and unreasonable to think others should think of you when you yourself are never around. its like im shouting from the bottom of this well and asking what happened in the news today. eventually the people around me get tired of me asking and they wander away. i guess all i can really do is keep talking so i dont forget what my thoughts sound like.

enough of that depressing shit. in other news... now that i have some design time free for a little while im going to redo the poetry page layout over at the auralport.blogspot.com and have it play off of and into this and itll be one big sexy party of thoughts and words and colors and strikes.... and when youre knee deep in rainbow colored vaginas and unicorns and giant robots and mushroom clouds youll weep tears of solid gold and ill say pretty please while a sky diving t rex plays the greatest guitar solo ever heard.



maybe not that awesome. but hopefully itll be close. god damn it while i was drawing that i inevitably came back around to the black hole in the middle of my life. this is what ive realized: normal people dont like hanging out in hospitals. even on star trek no one hung out at sick bay (unless they were simply bat shit crazy or had no friends) sooo i cant really expect people to want to hang out with someone who is constantly on the verge of ... ah fuck it. im too sleepy to get into this shit. when is it alright to ask someone if you'll ever get back together when you already know the answer? it just goes round and round and round and one of these days im just going to smash it into my desk with a claw hammer and shovel the guts out the window. but till then

///the seatbelts - "forever broke" sunset on 8mm film sounds like this.

collected thoughts

ah, ive done it. collected it into a saucer and sipped at it and dissected the taste and synthesized it again into something even more it than it was.

i know why i dont like them. well not even that i dont like them, but why i must refuse to acknowledge them as connected to me in any positive way. ready?

there is no amount of support, no level of compliment, no amount of money, no measurable magnitude of niceness, no increment of politeness, there is nothing any of them can do as long as i am alive that will ever erase what has been done. and because i live with it incorporated into various parts of my heart, soul, mind, and person (as things heal and scar like an arm you can no longer fully extend because of torn cartilage decades ago) there is literally no forgetting. not to say my life is equally endangered as someone with a life threatening physical ailment, but mentally and emotionally its like a virus or cancer, the elimination of which could only be achieved by destroying vital and healthy tissues. and thats why it upsets me. thats why i cant seem to go a month or sometimes a week without having to exert massive energy to hold myself together.

i look forward to old age, when things inside my head start to collapse and wings of the mental archive are buried in the rubble of time. chemicals are like bad white out at best and a blinded surgeon with a two inch scalpel at worst and they only reach but so far. time's reach is unlimited. time swallows everything. i hope time cures me before im in my grave so i can enjoy 100% of the wonder of being alive.

///yoko kanno - "fish ~ silent cruise" such a sweet beginning. beautiful really. beautiful in the way a storm gathers itself before a warm front so slowly for its scale, reaching up and up into the rafters, before sweeping down onto hot concrete and starved fields. beautiful i guess as a blizzard that forgets itself from time to time. i dont know what my dad wanted to achieve, but he has successfully created a person who hates him with every fiber left at his command. a person who may kill him someday. its a beautiful song.

yeah that flag

yeah that flag...

that one in the previous post...

that one you didnt see cuz you are just joining our program now...

that one in that post just before this one that you havent looked at yet...

that was the picture of the day yesterday.

///yoko kanno - "3.14" a small voice sometimes reminds me that there are beautiful things in this world that are also real.

bearded ladies dont shave 06/12/06

Subject : Bearded Ladies Dont Shave
Posted Date: : Jun 12, 2006 8:00 AM



and neither do i. i mean, come on! im a guy. im entitled to my patchy beard, by virtue of having testicles and a wang. if a bearded lady is entitled to keep her beard and not even get a sideways comment like... "why dont you shave" (obviously she is okay with her facial hair) then why should i?

so there. bleh. on another note... i hate my nose in one of my pictures so im deleting it. even bearded ladies have their bad photo days.

w33d and all things g00d 12/31/05

Subject : w33d and all things g00d
Posted Date: : Dec 31, 2005 1:28 AM

the romance of the plant continues like a salty porn novel. i dont need it. by no means do i actually need anything to feel good about myself. Im already exploding with more confidence than a penis in a vacuum cleaner hose. the connection to the plant goes deeper to a more sensitive area of my brain than simple confidence. the plant touches my emotions like a muse. a muse of warm confusion.

even if im not able to become a writer and my back up plan of being a high paid professional counter culture male "escort" fails i will still have the plant to romance me in the hard times. i may have to move out of the country to get it cheaper, but for my green lady it would be worth it.

in the best case scenario she'll be my one in a moon mistress and will hopefully complete a sweet threesome with me and my girl friend completing the other two points of the love triangle.

they say all good things come to an end, but we'll just have to wait and see. what no one ever talks about is what happens when the good things end... and having thought about it, i really dont care as long as there is something - someone to see/do on the other side - when "all the good things come to an end" i at least hope there will be someone around who has the means to roll a fucking ridiculous joint and that someone has space in their cipher for me.

i am not anna nicole smith 12/02/05

Subject : I am not anna nicole smith

Posted Date: : Dec 2, 2005 6:37 PM

She is white. I am black. Our similarities pretty much end there. She attempted to make a living with her acting and endless breast enhancements (to the point where she could literally use her tits for extra shelving or a convenient t.v. dinner tray holder or even a nice crevase for catching stray crumbs when eating crunch n munch popcorn while jetting through the l.a. freeways), and only ended up alieniating every living person on the face of the earth except maybe david hasselhoff and a few perverted little kids who had no concept of what a beautiful woman really is anyway. then again david hasselhoff isnt really a person so that leaves like .000000001 percent of the population who could look at her and have thoughts other than murder/divine punishment/"retribution-for-womens-rights-though-i-am-a-die-hard-chauvanist" come to mind.

when she realized she couldnt act and no one was interested in seeing her, naked or clothed, she went gold digging with some dude 63 years her senior who died a year or so after they got hitched. I on the other hand am not banking on anything else except my ability to land that hottie who may or may not happen to be 63 years my senior and even if she did die in the year after i got us hitched and my name in the will it would still be the best damn year she ever had, god damn it! yes, i plan on becoming filthy rich through essentially servicing an older woman, but at least its not a dude, and at least i have her pleasure in mind. when you break it down its like any other job: you put in your time until theyre gone and bam! its time to retire to mutha fuckin rio forever and shag all day and drink all night with a view of one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth.

i mean, consider the alternative: i could work in a nursing home and shag the patients and get nothing out of it but a tiny pay check and union security. now you tell me you wouldnt pick the able bodied old lady with a fat wallet and a horny sand box over that poor bed ridden shmoe who will probably get you fired after your night of illicit passion. hmmmm... tabloid super star > washed up nurses assistant any day if you ask me. anna nicole isnt even a tabloid superstar. She's a pathetic example of excess gone awry and, sadly, very well documented through small distribution media that happens to be tabloidal in nature. she is a failure at life, where as i will be a resounding success because i will set out to do what i have always intended to do instead of pretending to be good at something im not by running around with two extra bald heads grafted to my chest.

$$$$ its all about the benjamins. plus i dont need any enhancing. that shits just shallow in that kind of extreme!