Not Over Yet

A man I love put the war accurately and I will use his description:  it's like kicking water uphill.  Everything that cannot be prepared for.  The degenerating functions and spider glass fractures.  Kicking water uphill.  One more day.  Yes, your shoes will get wet and soak the cuffs of your jeans.  Some will get in your eyes and ruin your belt.  You might drop your hat and slip and fall flat on your bum.  Kicking water uphill.  You cannot quit.  It's going to keep coming.  Just have to try to keep your balance and keep kicking.  A little at a time.  It's okay to rest.




///Amorphous Androgynous - "Rocket Fuel"  and all for the want of a horseshoe nail

Small Victories

Of course I can't help asking myself "what's the point?"  A lot of times I have to remind myself to live life for myself.  Do it for you.  Sure it would be nice to justify your existence on the basis that someone else needs you, like a kid, or dying family member, or very close friend, or lover, but they'll move on or move away (or die) or meet someone even nearer and dearer and that's okay.  Do it for you.

Sure, sometimes it's difficult to love yourself.  Sometimes it is even more difficult to care about yourself because it feels selfish.  No one is going to do it for you.  When we look in the mirror and laugh with ourselves at how strange we are and ask who would want to live with that, the answer is right there: we would!  Do it for you.  It doesn't mean you don't care about anyone else, or couldn't give a damn if society and civilization as we knew it fell apart.  It doesn't mean that we don't empathize and sympathize with oppressed peoples and sufferers of injustices and the caged subsets of this country and all the messed up things happening to them.  It doesn't mean we are wholly callous and willing to say "screw them, I got mine, I'm fine."  Mind that you can't build your life around someone else's fight.  You'll wear down faster than a clutch plate made of wax and find yourself torn apart at your seams every single day.  Give a damn, but give a damn about yourself too.

Lying on the ground, having spent the last of my saved money on a replacement leaf spring hanger for the one that rotted out on my truck (that I will have to saw off since it's riveted to the frame and I can't afford to pay a mechanic regardless), staring up at my ceiling fan I was thinking "what's the point of saving money if it vanishes every few months whenever something bad happens."  The next day, I opened my fists, put my hands behind my head, watching the fan blades go, and it occurred to me that there has been an improvement through the years.  It used to be living paycheck to paycheck and unable to afford food.  Just beans and rice and beans and rice and beans and hotdogs and beans and chicken and rice and hotdogs and PB and J.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, but able to afford better food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, and not having to worry about food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, not having to worry about food, and being able to afford auto insurance.  Then paycheck to paycheck, no food worries, auto insurance, and able to save a little.  Now it's crisis to crisis, no food worries, and auto insurance.  Sure, it's better than paycheck to paycheck and not as good as being able to save for the future in a meaningful way, but life is decent between crisis level events (like having to empty your savings account to pay for bandages or truck parts and specialized tools or new sneakers because the soles fell off your old ones or a car battery).  Small victories, ya know?

It kind of goes back to my ethos behind writing once I realized the industry is basically geared to be self congratulatory in some kind of messed up ways that make any sort of climb outside the construct largely an exercise in blind luck and volume: just do it for you.   What's the point if no one will ever read it, if no one likes it, if it's never impactful, recognized, or coherent.  Do it for you, care about its pursuit because you do.  That's all you really need.

Of course, I'll forget this answer in time.  Toss and turn about the meaning of love, and lost relationships doomed to fail anyway.  I'll slip into self loathing.  The little voices that are easy to ignore when life is fun and in balance will turn into roars and screams and shouts and flying sparks "kill yourself! kill yourself! kill yourself!" and I'll drown them out with music until I can't play music loud enough and I walk out into the woods and scream at the trees "what is the point!  I can't succeed at anything long enough to make anyone's lives better or build a family of my own!"  Then I'll remember, living for other people is not what we're built for.  We are built to be alone, to live alone, to love alone, to ride alone.  Can we live with others?  Sure.  We won't succeed for long, but it's possible, we've seen it, but never expect much from that thread of being.  It hasn't, and may never develop within you.

Do it for you.  Part of me still remembers my cartographer's mandate.  Do it for you and because someone else may be seeing and going through the years you've seen for the first time and may be just as bewildered as you were.  "If only there were some sort of mapular object to help me know what may be coming next."  Most of all, the point is, don't waste your time trying to measure yourself on other people's scales at every turn.  A successful day for some is a nice date, or driving a few hours to see a buddy, or dinner with their spouse, or closing a deal, or a raise, or whatever makes their white picket lawn and dog.  For now, for you, it's taking care of your job, exploring some ideas, taking care of you, having a few laughs, and not killing yourself and that is just fine.  Don't forget that.  Do it for you.




///Phonat - "Ghetto Burnin (Mmmathias Mix)

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.

A Brief Return to B6

After the diagnosis there was a lot of disbelief before understanding that I am wired differently and there is nothing that can be done about it besides modification.  Modifying my physiology and the chains that come with modifying.  Keeping schedules and junk and folding money into paying for medications and things and paying for visits to psychiatrists.  You can't spell psychiatrist without tryst.

I'm golden.  Understanding how I'm different was very difficult.  I still don't fully comprehend it.  I'm not okay with being different.  Expectations change a lot.  Do you want an exception or not?   Yes, we do, but we do not because we are efforting being a part of common society.  Aye yo, check it out, here's the baseline: getting exceptions makes us softer and enables if what we want is to be fully assimilated.  When we wreck it's hard to deal with because whatever it was we did made perfect sense to us.  To you, it's grounds for divorce.

And yep, my phone is officially broken.  The worst part about the diagnosis, the initial one, was my ignorance.  Let's keep this tight and short, but not to the point of complications.

I hated my psychiatrist.  I still do.  I know we are long passed the point of forgetting, but I have not forgotten him.   He has forgotten me though after I lost insurance.  Everyone has to get paid.  I refuse to check out.  I was bold before then, I am more bold now.  Capital lock.

Have you got my back?  I've got yours.  I tried to smash my skull apart on the side of the police car when I first got reigned in.  When I realized I had to reign myself in the morning after and they explained what I tried to do when they were putting me inside the squad car.  And it's alright now.  I'm not angry or mad.  They're different things.  Mad is angry without reasoning.  Mad dog.  Shoot him down.  Angry dog... alright, he has reason still.  I am neither mad nor angry.

After the diagnosis I had no idea where I could possibly go.  It was a true diagnosis and I have to lie out of the ass to avoid internment again.  After the diagnosis and hearing what it would cost to make me better, literally hundreds of dollars per month (and hearing too that the trial period ends, hence the name "trial period" until they get the milligrams right) and knowing what I was bound to make...  it's like being stuck with a home you can't actually pay for and you cannot move either.  You cannot pull up sticks and pick a new lot.  It was terrifying.  I had no idea where I could possibly go, so I decided to move off grid.  No meds.  No pills.  Just force.  True force.

Sometimes thing come apart a lot.  Sometimes control does not talk back to you no matter how many signals you send out, out of reflex.  If I could afford it, I would go.  Easily and quietly, I would go.  Let's go though, and keep it brief.

Back to basics.  I know I need help.  It's part of what I am working for.  Why I go to work everyday.  Start your day group was nice.  It was excellent.  I do not want to go back there.  I am damn near 30 years old and I do not belong there.  I know who I am.  I have to work harder and as time increases I know I have to work harder yet and I am okay with that.  I'm not and will never be a made man.  I am willing to work and that's something!  Diagnosis is not, I will prove it to you, ever a death sentence.




///Minamina Goodsong - "First Movement"

A Quick Thought on Authenticity and (ffs) Go Protocol

Knowing what you are and what you're not is where it begins, that's the baby step.  There's nothing wrong with being a baby.  Complaining let's you know, if you've ears for it, that you are not necessarily happy with the way things are or how they're going.  Everyone's a baby.  At some point.  Everyone complains.

The option is to take the turn or drive the motivation straight over the edge and hope you land somewhere nice.  Hope you land in something like a pillow factory or a bin of sand, or just anything more forgiving than concrete.  Take the turn.  Complain like a baby and then adjust.  You can take your authenticity to the grave with you or you can exist within it.  Sounds pretty simple.  It's a bit more complicated, unfortunately.  Sometimes you just have to realize that you are striped and a tiger and sometimes imaginary in a pack of lions.  Doesn't mean you have to be at war with the lions.  You're both after the same things.  There's nothing wrong with that.  You've honed your way and they've honed theirs and you're on the same field now so you have to learn how to play together effectively that you not step on one another's paws and sink teeth too close together on the same kill.

It's "go protocol."  It's trigger pull.  It's losing my train of thought and getting heckling from the rest of the committee and continuing to ball because YOURE NOT THE BOSS OF ME YOU @#$%S.

Fight through the noise.  Embrace the sound.  Love who you want to.  It does not matter if they love you back.  You have the right to love whomever and whatever you choose to, whomever and whatever you can't refuse to.  If they cannot respect that, it's their loss.  In a world lessed for loves lost, why waste it?  Let it fly.  Untenable as it may be, let it fly.  Let it fly!  Allow it to cross the distance that must be enforced for whatever reasons are reasonable.  Include a few that are not.

Remain authentic.  Stick to the protocol.  You have not lived as long as you have by ignoring protocol.  When the Go sign says go,  go!  Think twice, for sure.  "Fo Sho!" does not mean for show.  I can put on a fantastic show when I want to.  I can put on a show for the fucking ages.  Fo sho means for sure and it's pretty much a miniature pact.  A handshake and a signature of gumption.  With no risk comes no reward and you know what comes without whisk?  I do.  I'll give you another second to guess.  Time's up.  Without whisk you get a big old cup of pineapple pulp and undissolved sugar at the bottom of your pitcher of pineapple tea.  Gross.  Also, really hard to drink.

Obey Go Protocol.  Stay authentic.  Bow to be courteous, not to fit better.  If you win the single combat and fit well, you'll hate them later because they will know what you did.  They will talk about the event, if not active, in passing.  You will know too.

The combination is not friendly.  They are not looking for maps the same way you do.  The same way you are.  Do not expect assistance when you go.  Do not expect support.  Do not armor for resistance either.  You were invited for a reason.  You were on their wing for a reason.  That reason may not be for back up should combat come down.  That reason may not be for mounting an assault that day.  That reason may not be for humor or for "to hell with them"s.  You may never know what that reason's reasoning inside their head was, but there was a reason.

So go.  Go!  Stay authentic.  There was something asked of you.  Think about what you've asked of them in return by answering the howl.  The details will work themselves out, if they do.  The details will work themselves out, if they don't pull your card again.  Through the noise, through the fire, through the poise, through the ire.  For once,

allow yourself to see it their way and do not Chameleon.  Do not lock up.  For @#$%s sake, remain authentic.  Uncertainty is a bitch, be certain of this.




///Girl Talk - (Ask About Me)      chapter one...  still writing the jacket

Gun Barrel

It's hard to play it off.  I'm trying to.  There's only so much research that can be done.  After that it's active study.  Games.  It's not about mercing.  Very much emulation.  That will never cease to be important.  It's very difficult to know though.  Unfortunate maybe.

To see the difference between emulation and actual love the way that I know how.  I have gotten better than a parrot.  A yak bak.  Sometimes I have to force conversation to get a response that is not in the library.

When I get that response, that cherished one, I can take it straight to the cpu and analyze it and that little click where the trap snaps shut and before I burp out some human garbage are the words where I was just me again.  It happens very quickly.  Running down the library of what you're supposed to says and the lists of what you did says and running the numbers between and all the other variables.  I'm trying not to cuss on this one.  Cussing keeps you honest, but it keeps you too blunt.

Long story short, it's hard to play it off and hard to not calls it like I sees it without completely seizing up.  It's hard to play it off and I think people can notice and do not ever give me a flyer on the game.  Please do once in a while.  Whether I admit it or not I need them.  I'm no dummy.  I'm no barrel sucker.  I'm a fighter and a lover.  The two can be combined.  Just know that whatever you try I am trying three times as hard to keep up.




///The White Stripes - "Conquest"

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"

Plight

The most terrifying thing about disease is that you know the best you can do is stay where you are and maybe pretend to be more than you are upstairs sometimes.  Some things remain intact.  Some things continue to degrade regardless of what you do.  It's not fair at all.

It's difficult.    It's difficult watching everyone else continue to accelerate and knowing you can be as good as you want to be at some things, but other things ... nope.  The best you can do is hold ground.

I want to just say "fuck that."  I can't.  I have to at least try.

Yes it is easy to fit in.  It's easy to stand out for the wrong reasons too.  There is no blame with respect to bad wiring to be laid.  There's some, but it flows both ways.  I acknowledge that.

It is undeniably heart breaking though sometimes trying to externalize what they're saying to me.  So we drunk to dull the blunt force of conversation.  It's an airbag and a stand in for pills that lets me socialize more than I like to, but not less than I need to so I'm not swinging from my neck outside my front window.

It's a trade off.  To tear off the mask is not appropriate at all and will land me..

... I don't know how to describe it.  Rape me once, shame on you.  Rape me twice, I was probably asking for it.

I will say there's nothing to fear because I learned a few several things.

There are many red zones.There is not one me.-000000000000000000000000000888888888qq0--------------211qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq



///Sage Francis - (The Buzzkill)    ...by analyzing the past, Sage can project into the future..,

The Year End Look

I am tempted to attack some things there is not time enough yet to tackle.  I am okay with and respect and receive the temptation because the day is nearing and we stand on the cusp of something truly deafening with nothing between us beyond time itself.  Time's only enemy is patience.  The armory is stocked.  Let's knock down time first.

The 2013 year end look is a strange one.  Strange to me.  I crashed a car again.  For the second time in my life totaled an automobile.  The injury was an injury I never knew before and thought I would never return from.  It was probably something near or spot on to a partially herniated disc.  I am used to pain.  Used to adjusting for pain because a voice inside says it'll end eventually if you simply don't do it again.  This pain brought me literally to my knees every time I got out of bed for work or to meet someone or otherwise do anything that did not require lying down.  It was unbelievable.  Literally unbelievable.  It made me tear at myself and my bed sheets and scream in the afternoon and throw fits.  Everything worked fine except standing and walking.  In 2013 I became very aware of my age.

A friend of mine put it best: ten years ago, you hurt your back, you shotgun a beer and a whiskey short, have a smoke, and get on with life.  Now?  You hurt your back and you can drink 'til you cannot feel a damn thing, but that shit comes back as soon as your spine comes back on line.  You can't go through life partially shut down.

It's true.  Another year older, just one year removed from invincibility, or something damn near it, I am aware, acutely aware of physical limitations.  Invincibility has been thoroughly dispelled in 2013.  Respect for the injured and more feeble than I has been reinforced to incredible degrees.  Of course it didn't help falling down multiple flights of stairs after the car accident.  That one is on me.  I should have known where I was standing on the fire escape and not allowed someone to high five me hard enough to push me backward into the night air.  I guess I'm kind of a good fall guy.  I should have broken my neck or an arm or at least a finger on my way down, getting something stuck in the stairs and landing made of iron grating, but all I remember, three days after the car accident, was waking up looking at the top of the fire escape and their back door and the little light and thinking "wait a minute? wasn't I just there?  Why am I here?"

I went to a casino for the first time (with no money) and someone gave me a $100 chip.  I can count the number of times I've held $100 bills in my hands with intent to spend instead of pay on one hand.  Two of the five times were to pay for cars.  I didn't get to use it for fun.  I did get some long standing necessities taken care of though and a bill paid.  One step closer to actual freedom.

I taught myself to drive stick for real in 2013.  On a rear wheel drive truck.  I also learned how to use torque and how to use horsepower.  Yes, they're linked, but now I understand when to use which.  When to use a little work fast and a lot of work slowly.  Of course there's always the golden peak when you can use both at the same time, but high end cars are out of the cards for at least another half decade.  I'm salivating thinking about it.  My dream garage is still the same.  Still stocked up with late 80s Japanese machines and American muscle.  Some day, sweetheart.

2013 also taught me who my friends are and who my friends are not.  For much of the year I tried to be a friend to the world.  A friend to everyone who would have my ear and have my words, however fleeting, but I soon recognized (by soon, I mean it took the entire year) that what I was counting as friendship was not being counted or similarly given weight by the people I was ascribing it too.  It was heart breaking.  Truly heart breaking.  I remember crying on and off for several days as each episode unwound.  The penultimate was a multiple day thanksgiving celebration that was supposed to be fun.  It was, to an extant.  I was too much a different stripe to blend in and it was hurtful to me to be expected to do so, but maybe they didn't really expect me to blend that well.  Maybe they expected me to realize sooner than later that I should've left.  As it stands I only over stayed by a day or two before I recognized where I was and where I could do myself better.  Coming home was beautiful on that day.  

The ultimate was when I was left stranded by people I thought I could count as friends.  My truck died and a true friend bailed me out.  I've grown intimate with my truck of late.  Gotten to know her inside and out.  2013 reminded me of the bullshit premise my birth father put to me about a car that was supposed to be my reward for graduating Carnegie Mellon (which did not happen) that was his vision for us rebuilding a beater BMW (which flew in the face of everything automotive I actually do espouse and believe in) and it's been tremendous and heart stoppingly gorgeous keeping that truck on the road and at the same time by turns puzzling that anyone, let alone the sack of nuts that raised you for 18 years, could miss your values that hard.

It does make me laugh though, because there have been more than a few times I could've used an extra set of hands to get the job done and I thought about the gents and lassies that could call up their dads or moms and schedule a weekend under the hood or chassis without getting violently ill or stomach ulcers.  I appreciate that about people.  Sometimes I ask them about their parents because it's practically porn to me.

In 2013 I learned to slow down scarification.  In tandem with realizing that time is getting on I also realized if I ever do have children or adopt children there will be questions for me to answer too.  Questions I am prepared to answer and questions that will have to be answered as my nose and ears get bigger and nothing else does and my eyes continue to sink and my brow continues to crease.  The reminders still remain necessary and beautiful obelisks and world wonders to human history and I thank us for them always.  I need them.  Some mistakes you can make multiple times.  Some mistakes you cannot afford to retread because lives are in the balance and the house does not always win, but you can never go back.  You will die.  You will be consumed, make no mistake.  Every time I look in the mirror I am reminded and I need to be.  Inside of your skull you are your friend more often than not.  Outside of your skull is a flipped story.

The same problem does abound, though.  My development, my passion for writing, remains far too grounded for my tastes.  There is patience though.  There is gestation.  There is still the thirst for whimsy and dreamland.  There is where I lie and I know it.  I can feel it.  The attack is coming.  The all hail that tells me "forward now!"  I can taste it.  2013 was about defining starting points.  Defining relationships.  Defining the scope of the maintenance necessary for progress.  Did it have to take a year?  Yes.  2013 was about defining severance.  Defining which and what kinds of quests were worth pursuing.  2013 was a very long think.

The funniest part about 2013, it came around the tail end, was realizing that just because you can identify the group of people that you are attracted to does not automatically make them accessible or easily located.  You meet just as many air heads and space cases exploring your same sex as your opposite sex.  The worst, the most lip curling, the most eye squinting, experiences are had when you meet a carbon copy of someone you'd cultivate a relationship with straight, gay.  In my mind I'm thinking ten minutes in to the conversation: "god damn it, not this again.  Really?  You exist here too?  Who dropped you on your head?  Why do you have fifteen pairs of shoes and a $200 dollar love seat in an apartment you're paying $900 a month for?  Why are we going out to a bar downtown when there's one at the corner while you have a fridge full of wine and candy imports?  Three pairs of sunglasses?  Sunglasses??"  

I don't know what 2014 is going to bring.  I think my year to year expectations have grown foggier and foggier so I will add some definition.  I think this year (no resolutions) I will try to fuck a woman for some variety.  The whole "no concussions" thing failed miserably.  I had four in 2013 so I think it's fair to rule that out.  Broke my nose twice too, so that's out.  I want to do more art in 2014 too.  Life's demands put way too much on my plate to really put anything outside of my skull to look at and enjoy, and I'm not saying for you to enjoy, I'm saying for me and we/us to enjoy. 

Now that things have been better defined through thirteen, in fourteen I would like to explore that framework and see what and where it builds to.  New territories and frontiers.  I want a new scar for 2014.  A scar for the turn.  A scar for the "maybe" identified because in twelve the maybe had no identity.  2014 will be a quest for the whimsical.  A seeking out of the imaginary and a protecting of the physical.  We achieved many grown up tasks and came into adulthood through 2013 from its humble beginning in 2012's confusion.  It's time to explore the limits of what that adultness and understanding and thinking and domestication can ring when our bell is rung hard enough.  What music will it make?  Will it make music or fall apart with the strikes?

For the first time, in 2013, I had to shave down my knuckles with a pumice stone.  The scar tissue accumulated so thickly that I couldn't open and splay my fingers easily without fighting against it.  Too much contact.  I cannot fall into the trap of abusing myself in lieu of taking abuse just to feel normal and normalcy.  That's not okay.  It is not okay to do that.  2013, a lot of 2013 was about learning what it is not okay to do.  Platonic spooning was okay.  Talking about platonic spooning to their friends indirectly and accidentally by way of mentioning conversations they were not a part of, but must have happened after they left, later on when we and they met again is not okay.  It should be though.  Don't break my heart that way.  Break it any other way, but that is pure... muffed intent.  I do not have time for that in 2014.

I have accumulated old man hands at the ripe age of 28.  I am a destroyer parked in a lagoon and rusting.  You fucking cowards.  2013 was also about rebuilding my space craft.  I had to tear it apart and rebuild it.  It was gathering too many parts and pieces superfluous and useful once and never again.  When one part failed I hooked and slaved another component to keep it running.  Fourteen is streamlining.  Keep the violence down at all costs.  The love too.   Control.  2014 is focusing on control and dynamics.  It's easy to glass a city.  It's hard to embrace one and construct.  Consider the "what will and what can we build here?"

It does make me laugh though, to consider that I may be at a new base line measurement.  It is enticing.  So many things happened.  So much time spent alone and too much time spent in contact.  It does not add up to my satisfaction.  I will boost literary output in 2014.  It does not matter if you want to do it, it has to be done for your own sake.

2014 is action.  Redesigns are on the table.  Stand up act 9 is on the table.  Before both will come the year end playlist.  Let's go!  No sneak peeks this time.  So much left out too, but we'll get it in later.

///Shiny Toy Guns - "Major Tom"   ...near Earth orbit

Growth Is Hard, the Burna

Growth is hard hard hard.  I don't like change.  Routine is a life saver.  Regulation.  Having to think about what to wear and what to eat and when and how much and how many layers and what's clean and what's not and the questions mount up so damn fast.  Is there gas in the car, is there not, is there enough gas to get to a gas station, is there milk, are there eggs, did you put your socks on before you put shoes on, did you wear a belt, did you need to, are you wearing pants, is your shirt buttoned, tucked, or untucked and should it be.  Did you brush your teeth, did you brush your beard, where are your sunglasses, do you need them, did you check the weather, where are your keys, are your cards in your wallet, did you get back to the people who left you messages, did they message you at all, what's your schedule like, do you have a schedule, where's your cereal, do you need more, what's for breakfast, what's for dinner, did you smoke yet, should you be, what's the month budget for it, did you budget, shouldn't you be quitting, did you make time to draw, did you make time to check up on the engine light, did you do laundry, is your stuff in the dryer, did you vacuum the rugs, have you brushed the cats, did you water the garden, where's the coolant you picked up, have you gathered the scattered spare change, where are your shoes, where are the good jeans, did you hang up your good tees, how are the ice trays, did you take out the trash, did you look into buying fans, where are the new fish hooks you bought, who keeps letting their dog poo at the corner of your house, have you checked the mail, where's the other set of keys, where's your good hat, have you changed your water filter, what's the beer situation, did you buy new brushes for work, have you paid your phone bill, when are you changing your tires, have you washed your hair, have you checked your piercings, did you wash your sheets, have you clipped your nails, did you tie your shoes, is there an undershirt beneath your top, have you looked into ... brain explosion.

Routine really is a life saver.  I'd kill myself without it.  Without routine it is impossible to identify brain shrapnel apart from reality.  Impossible to separate the notes of a song from synapse misfires.  I haven't been slipping too much and I'm proud of that.  I've been doing a good job of managing schizophrenia and delusion.  I've been sharp and on my feet enough to know when control was slipping and intelligent enough to understand when a decent time to step back and lock my body in arrived.  I'm happy for that.  I'm happy that I've been able to not just see my friends and old family, but divide those conversations from the larger dialogues with other people and keep them private.  I am happy that the ones without names can be separated from the ones with.

I've been trying to keep ourselves busy in the factory and it's going good.  The warehouse is buzzing and everyone's happy and still yapping at each other and it's fantastic.  Everyone is accounted for, the first time in a long time.  I can't sit on it though.  They will start to wander away and then we won't be working together for half a damn.

I've been thinking over the last time I was in the hospital when they brought me in and made me intern myself as a bargain.  That night still itches me.  Still makes us furious.  I didn't do anything wrong that day!  I shut my mouth too, but they had us hooked up to a couple machines and I was lying through my teeth the whole time and to this day we're sure my heartbeat gave us up.  I stood up and it jumped real hard from rest to joy panic and the doctor winced and I winced and started sweating and everyone started screaming in my ears and I tried to run, but the door was locked from the outside and that's just plain unfair and I got mad.  Mad as hell.

Routine is a life saver, though.  Do X at Y time.  Z comes after.  A comes first, followed by B.  Sometimes D, but it's okay if C jumps in before D as long as A and B come before and X and Y follow.  Without it, without that, things get jumbled and then dreamland starts to bleed into reality and then things I shouldn't say and people who have no business in my circles start to have conversations with people they have no business meeting and then those people start to get mad at us because we've been talking about them behind their backs and once that check is cashed there's no going back on it.  Then I get burned because they make me pay and there's no way to explain to them because as hard as I try to explain it to them they don't hear me and I've already gone too far and that's far enough.

Growth is hard.  It hurts.  Learning what you can and can't do.  What I can and cannot do.  What is and is not acceptable.  More than anything else I want to meet someone who can sit down with me and them and have a good long coffee conversation.  I know they're not real, I know they are real.  I have to constantly monitor sounds.  I have to consistently monitor their footsteps so I know when and whom I'm looking at.  It's not fair.  It's not fucking fair!  I want you in my world.  I want you in my shoes so you can understand the kind of ...  it's not fucking fair.

I play music so loud so I don't have to hear.  I hope I go deaf.  I wouldn't mind still having eyes because I love to look at nature.  I love looking at nature.  Sometimes we hate what I see because they are there always now and it's terrifying and it's gorgeous.  Seeing where they've been and we talk about it across fields.  Are you hiding from me?  You with the-  I hate it.  I hate it!  Are you alone?  Did you come alone?  No!  Not ever!  I'm never alone!  Do you know what that's like???  Do you know what that's like??????  Get away from me!  Stop lying!!  Stop lying in my ear!!  Just go away!!!  It never happens.  It never happens like I want it to and I try not to take it out on us.  Not to take it out on you.  Growth is hard.  My dad used to assure me it was just angels and devils talking to me and if I chose the path of loving Jesus I would be able to sort them out and I would know which ones it was because "the Bible tells me so."  Goodnight and good luck.

Managing is harder.  It's difficult boxing that part of me away.  Walling and fencing it off so I can still be a part of the rest of 'merica.  Hard not to play into their hands.  The whole thing burns to malfeasance.  Reciprocal engine with no off button.  The only thing you can do is try to avoid putting gas in it.  I want new genes.  I want new genes.  I want new programming.  I've been doing good.  Little star.  Little little skittish star, but I've been doing good.  Been doing good with putting words the right way and conversations the right way, and containing, but it's exhausting and it hurts us on the inside parts.  It hurts a lot.  I want to be alone so badly and I don't know how to get there.  I don't know how to get back to good sleep.

It's not about my parents or the violence pushed way too far or relationships with friends or dating or god or  medicine.  Battling.  Don't celebrate the battles, celebrate the war.  I want nature to stop talking to me.  A billion dollars for silence.   A trillion dollars for blindness.  That's the wager.  Just give me one less eye and blown out ears.  Still no guts to do it myself.  Take it away from me.  Just shut up!  Shut the fuck up!  Growth is hard!  Being adult.  Sometimes I wake up and I know I'm still stunted, but inside a giant robot that has capabilities far beyond what my head is prepared to command.  I didn't want it, but I know I have to deal with it, continue to learn how to use it to become a part of the rest of the structures or destroy it so it doesn't damage the space it occupies and the rest occupying the same space.  It hurts.  It hurts a lot.  It's confusing to us.  I've been doing good though.  I want to keep it going.  I want to blend in better.  I am working on growth, but it's hard as hell.


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

That Instant

you realize you really do wish you could tie yourself to a rocket and shoot yourself into space and don't give a damn if you live to see the exosphere and come back to Earth.  Just want to get yourself out of here.   Out of now.

Now is unforgiving.  Now is now and I don't like it.

Fall back, fall forward, what real difference does it make.  I can't adopt a kid because I'll probably try and put my dick in it.  Jesus.  Fucking sucks.  I want to teach it to play all kinds of ball and drive cars and learn to fly airplanes if its up for it and I know I can't let myself go through it because I'll fuck it up because I've been screwed in my upbringing.

It just sucks so hard knowing the best thing I can do is not do the one thing I really want to do. But....  but..... huge but.... is I will not perpetuate what came before me.  Breaking the cycle.  There's something to be said for that.


///Ulrich Schnaus - "Wherever You Are"  what ive been waiting for all years

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 Year End Look (part two)

Two thousand twelve was a banger.  A lot of truly excellent things happened.  Some truly awful things happened.  Mistakes were made and successes enjoyed.  I thought after the debacle of 2010 I would not be surprised by whatever could come next and 2011 actually ended up being fairly swell.  2012 was jam packed with more change than I could see coming.  I'm pretty sure I didn't write any fiction in 2012.  I don't know why.  2012 was a war with the clock.  I think that's why.  I did sort of rediscover a pair of old friendships that I thought were pretty much blown to flaming kingdom come and that was nice.  My memory fails me pretty regularly.  Too many blows to the head (chemical and otherwise).  Speaking of chemicals, I still haven't gone to get help.  I don't know that I ever will.  I don't know that I'll ever be able to on my own.

I'm trying to think of what the overarching lesson of 2012 was.  Nothing particular comes up.  2012 was very much a blur.  I became a car owner.  That's nice.  I also became quite broke keeping that car on the road and functioning.  I became a paper towel owner.  That was pretty huge.  Do you know how hard it is to justify paper towels?  Pretty damn hard.  Mostly I was using my dirty laundry to clean up floor spills.  Dish rags to clean up counter top spills.  Worked perfectly, really.  It's not like I was going to wipe up spilled floor milk and then put the shirt right back on.  I also became a soap and toilet paper stockpiler.  I used to buy it in four packs and then string it out as far as it would go and then find alternatives already in my apartment when they ran out.  That's not what grown ups do.  I got car insurance for the first time.  My car is better insured than I am now.  I think I did that one wrong.

You know what?  I've got it.  Twenty twelve was about taking steps toward being an adult.  Meshing with other adults.  Not that I succeeded with the meshing at all.  I tried to pay for cat litter with sex. That didn't work out too well.  Especially when I found out there was no cat litter to begin with.  I have to stop being so easily convinced in twenty thirteen.  I am on the tail end of my twenty seventh iteration.  Can't make rookie mistakes like that or I'll end up smoking bath salts and living in the woods.  Which doesn't sound particularly bad on the surface, but try finding a hot shower off of an interstate and you'll end up with a hobo pissing on your back while you sing Disney anthems in the pre dawn light of another Thursday, wondering if the pair of pants you named after your dead dog will ever find their way back to your cardboard shanty town.  That's what 2012 was.  A lot of learning how to do grown up things.

Not just that.  My literary voice changed so much through 2012.  My whimsical spirit did not die well and I think I want to make the effort to rediscover it.  So much of my life became brutally concrete.  There was no time to write down extensive dream logs and what explorations I could do and enjoy across the dream bridge were lost.  There was a massive task lock.  Huge gridlock between where I was and where I was going mentally that suffocated and snuffed out so much of what I wanted to achieve.  Obviously, everyone wants to be loved.  On some level.  A lot of that need was torn out of me.  It's still there, latent and active by turns and expressed and expressible and not in different forms.

I had a final falling out with my birth parents.  Good riddance.  Things were going quite well until they demanded a response and I gave them the one I'd been holding back for years (which was a fairly simple death threat).  Which spiraled out of control and had to be reigned back in to an even simpler "Hi, you've hurt me for the last time and I'm not going to give you the opportunity to ever hurt me again."  Which went over slightly better.  So I do have that peace of mind to look forward to.  The emails have stopped and that's what I wanted.  BKB (bitches know better) than to ever try to contact me again.  Some things can be forgiven.  Some things can only be atoned for.  Some things can only be paid for, and the checks they wrote on my skin in bruises and welts and blood and on my mind in so many lines of unforgettable screams and shouts can only be paid for.  It was good though.  A link so thoroughly destroyed that I will never have to worry about it threading itself around my neck again.

I did find love again, briefly, in twenty twelve.  Online.  I also found that most of the people in BDSM chat rooms are full of themselves and fake.  But I don't even have to go to any other online dating sites to know that it's probably not unique to my bag.  Back to love and friendships.  I'm fairly certain I may have lost a friend I really wanted to keep, but who knows, maybe it'll come back around in thirteen.  2012 saw a pretty severe drop in production in general.  Adult problems.  Remember that three banger I put out of its misery early last year?  That came back to haunt me when one of them got a job at a store I used to frequent (they had good prices, can't argue with that).  Well, that cut my neighborhood in half.  Can't go to that side of town anymore without looking over my shoulder, or occasionally ducking down in my car at red lights.  Like I said, mistakes were made.

My only new years resolution this year is to not get concussed.  I think that might be aiming too high.  Too many bar fights happened last year.  Between the life drama and tracking myself down rage blew off me like sunspot flares.  Yes, you can punch anything with a face, but can and should are two very different things.  I'm not saying I'm going to be a saint, but I am saying the world is only so big and eventually someone is going to recognize you when you least expect it and remember that thing you did the weekend before to one of their friends and they'll even the score and then it's all bad news bears from there.

Style wise, I was lost as 2012 tailed out.  Spun out.  Ate the guardrail and burned it's way to the bottom of a ravine.  Shifting identity.  Events and exchanges, human exchanges external to my brain pan, brought up so many questions I hope to answer to myself in the coming year.  The identity I believed I had was drastically revised.  Am I still a writer?  Am I a poet?  Am I a songstress?  Maybe just a bard?  I don't know.  I've given up on trying to calculate how many hours I've gone in and what mastery means.  Mastery means nothing.  Exposure means nothing.  The new foundation is framed quite simply as passion.  I have a passion for words on paper.  Whatever that makes me to you, I'm down.  To me, I'm a kid with a pen.  That's all.  Calling yourself a writer or not, calling someone else by the same, is like having embossed ink on a business card.  Doesn't mean a damn thing beyond image.  Do I still want a house in the middle of nowhere to invite people to that I might cut them up, eat the good parts, and burn the rest of their remains?  Yeah.  That's kind of the ultimate goal.  That and having a place to write that I only have to pay taxes on.  That'll work.  A wonderful desert compound.  Somewhere near the border.

Twenty twelve taught me that I'm nowhere close to where a lot of my peers are fiscally, mentally, and emotionally.  My concerns are still fringe.  My furniture still sparse.  My needs are still fairly small and my dreams equal and as difficult to access.   I always thought I'd die in Pittsburgh, but maybe that's not good enough.  Last year made me question my capabilities, but not in the way some people down grade themselves.  I'm not a smart cookie.  I'm not brilliant.  I'm not particularly resourceful.  I can, however, create to no end, my only limitation being the cards I have to play with..

It was a strange year.  There were many tears in 2012.  Some earned, many not.  Many involuntary and inappropriate to the subject.  That's not going to change.  I'm crying right now typing this and it's silly.  My weight keeps fluctuating wildly between 155 and 185.  Every month.  It makes no sense.

Gather.  Fads go out of style.  I've had a few of my own.  I realized through the year that they were constructs to help me express concepts that come to me and help me live from week to week and month to month, but also help me relate.  Junior psychologist over here.  There was some real damage in 2012 and I don't know that 2013 will be that much better, but I like to believe it will be.  Maybe we'll get back on the pills this year.  Just to see.  Just to see and stop talking about talking about doing it.  Twelve was also a year of addictions.  I don't know how to fix that.  They were all, largely, necessary.  But at least I know the side effects will or won't do what they do.  Maybe that's the big thing standing guard these days.  This turned pretty dark in a flash.  I used to think I would be a great candidate for surviving the zombie apocalypse, and then I realized I would probably risk everything for a pack of smokes and dozen cans of spray paint.  Unless I have my desert compound by then (I'll pass the time writing poetry and taking head shot breaks with a .50 cal and whiskey on the rocks).

The major issue I want to resolve this year, given last year, is my writing.  Let's do better.  Let's be better for us.  Shooting for late forties.  I want to at least make it to being a weird uncle.

What did 2012 teach me?  What was the takeaway?  Christmas lights are awesome.  People can't be programmed.  My morals and principles don't translate by default and no one else's do either.  God is still a work of fiction.  I am still figuring myself out and trying not to implode.  At least not completely.  Still so far away, only because I have to be.  I am my own best company and my own worst friend.  The things I don't own are things I should not have yet.  The relationships I don't have are relationships I'm not and may never be ready for.  The spaces I occupy, I am grateful for and will continue to be.  The spaces I do not are spaces I have given back to the ones who belong there and will use beyond my ability to and that's okay.  Twenty twelve was strange.  Twenty thirteen is a big old bag of TBD, but I wish it was a big old bag of LSD.  You can't go through life asleep, but a boy can dream.


///TRACK NOT FOUND - year end playlist up next
defining moments of a finest hour?  yeah, something like that.

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.

Born Yesterday

You look terrible.  What, have you been up all night drinking?  No, you self righteous, snide, whisker faced, monkey pawed, salad dicked, piece of shit.  I'm going to tie your legs to opposite rungs of a ladder with surgical tubing, slice open your taint, and plunger fuck you 'til your guts blow out and all you can see are after images of fantasia from when your uncle came to visit, got you drunk, and touched you, you absolute @#$##!%@%#$%%$*%^*%%@#%$#@%!%*(*((^&$^%$$!@# dumpster fire fucker.  I can't sleep.  I'm not a wreck, I just can't sleep.  It's a problem.  I feel like I'm awake all the time.  Is that a problem?  Yes, that's a problem.  Calm down, baby.  It's always a little scarier at night.  I stopped going out with my knife, that's a step in the right direction, right?  Yes.  Okay, bad start.  Let's do this again.

I'm losing my shit.  I don't understand everything.  In fact, I don't understand a lot of things.  In fact, I understand very few things and some of what I do is pure emulation.  Some of it is learned.  The things that I do when I'm not alone.  When I'm trying to communicate and rub elbows and socialize and allow myself to be socialized.  From a pure experiential stand point, I am always still catching up.  Especially when it comes to purely adult things like paying bills and writing checks and progressively more complex responsibilities that  come with age.  Learning on the fly.  Is part of why I am perpetually referring to near and distant past interactions and outcomes to judge and play into and inform and explicate the more recent and definite present ones.  I need snow.  I need cold weather.  I need Winter.  I need to trap my insides in and wear my skin all over again.  Compression wraps.  I'm trying to learn so many things on my own.

What do I need to do to suppress the monster?  It's a puzzle game again.  It's the puzzle game again.  And I don't want to play.  Even if I did, I can't if I can't get over there.  Reconsidering therapy for the hundredth time.

I am dense.  Dumb.  I get that.  So ask for help.  I do, the problem, however, is that half the time I do ask for help with X and Y I get bitten.  Look, okay, no one ever taught me how to be a grown up.  I'm fucking trying.  Okay, calm down.  I'm trying and learning how to be an adult.  How to take care of myself.  How to be a part of other people's lives and, more over, part of society and a functioning member no less.  It takes practice and it takes patience and sometimes other people are not as patient with me as I would like.  I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but blunt objects get the job done pretty good.  I'm good at things.  I know that.  I can do some things pretty well.  Other things not so good.  But why come no patience on their part?  They must know I'm being patient with them and their remarks and their assumptions.  They must know by now that I'm doing the best I can and that's all I've got by now.  Granted the repertoire grows yearly, monthly, sometimes daily, but it's never going to grow fast enough to get on their level.  I mean someone has to bring up the rear.  Who else will be there to pick up the leaders when they stumble and fall and roll their ankle and have to be dragged until they can stand up and break the trail again?  I serve a purpose, gotdamnit.

I'm not a doormat, or inferior, but I kind of am in many respects.  In terms of tangibles.  A state of perpetual repair.  800 brake horsepower on the dyno and shit tires.  Steel struts for shock absorbers.  The ride is harsh, but give me enough straight asphalt and I'll burn straight through to the vanishing point.  I've been thinking my siblings and I relied on and alternately hated each other through the years, but before everyone dove off the edge to lives and relationships and variables apart from the smoking hole in the ground where our lives blew up, we were complementary parts.

Are you really happy?  I'm happier than I've ever been.  I swear I cannot fuse myselves together.  It's like some kind of micro field acting over exceptionally short distances and so they gravitate and hang loosely together if I, when I, can manage to coerce them into the same headspace, but any further, any fucking further, and they fly apart.  Driven like body parts from a weatherman's over packed pipe bomb and a warning two hours too late.  Reduce the casualties, she says.  We're not terrorists he says.  Y'all can go suck a dick he says.

I chewed through my lip the other day.  I'm not the strongest man in the world, or the tallest.  But weapons are all around me.  Tools, you know?  A weapon is a tool.  We should spend some quality time together some day.  I know this place where the street lights have gone out.  It's a stretch of road really.  The headaches have gotten a little worse, but sometimes I can convince myself.  Heavy industrial works and general cause.  It's kind of funny sometimes.  Let's play cards.  Let's play Spades.  I'll never go board.  In my dream I was shot four times through the back, it was pretty amazing.  Not the getting shot part.  That part hurt a lot.  More than anything I've felt in life.  What felt amazing was the increasing inability to breath while my lungs filled up and my brain started to die and became unable to process pain.  I started to think about how screwed up it was that my first DMT trip would also be my last, but then I started to look forward to at least being able to do that.  And then someone else came up and  they passed the gun and held it up between my eyes and blew my head apart before I could enjoy it.  And I died, but didn't wake up and they left.  And I waited and I waited and I waited for my life to start over.  For reincarnation.  For hell.  For heaven.  Nothing.  And so, inside that dream still, I simply stood up, with half a skull from the nasal bones down to my neck, and walked out and woke up into an afternoon.  Disappointed.

I am me.  And you are you.  The greatest form of flattery.  The finest grains of abandonment.  In the soles of my shoes.  The cities crumbled.  Many people died.  The pain never goes away entirely, but honestly, that's asking too much.  Who and what you are is no concern of mine.  The man with the crystalline mind and the watch maker's hands with browns for whites of eyes and a head more water than land and no docks to be found.  I don't know.  I don't know and I cannot tell you if I wanted to.  Steps in right directions.  I need cold weather.  I need something to cool the pile.  Carbon rods?  Is that what does it?  The machine to help me understand and define the horror?  Parcels of molecules and reckless atomic connections.

I can remember going in for the scans and the EMG and the warmth of the dye they injected into my veins and waiting quietly in the wheel chair for it to get pumped throughout before they put me inside and trying to stay awake while feeling like my entire nervous system was wrapped in an electric blanket.  It was a gorgeous feeling.  That was years ago.  I've been thinking about dating again.  I know I'm not and will probably never be ready.  I also know what I want is something I can't have.  It's a catch two two.  I can't bank on getting away with it twice.  I just wish I  could have thought of that the first time.  Says everyone at some point in their life.  It's been difficult.  I won't suppose.  I know.  Reaching out to other schizophrenics is like picking up someone else's phone, pounding the numbers until it rings, and saying "hello, it's me.  You know me, right?"  Asking someone to come in, when the sign on the door clearly reads "get the fuck out."

I'm trying.  Please be patient.  The heat has been stifling.  Crush, baby.  Crush.  Who loves you?  I do.  You still keeping odd hours?  That depends.  Are you still on vacation?  I don't know.  Maybe you should think about writing during daylight hours.  Maybe you should think about the kinds of questions you ask me.  The city is large and I'm just one man.  The country is larger, but I'm still just one man.  Come with me if you want to see or don't.  I won't fault you either way.  Do you remember how you laughed in 2005 at that concert?  No.  But the tears have been uncontrollable since.  A right sort riot.  I can't go back, but I have to. Keep it down.  Where are your sunglasses?  I don't know.  Let's get it right this time.  I was born yesterday.


///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Valentine Boast" ... the greatest romance of the 21st century...

///The Orb - "Secrets"  awed by tradition

Development

I haven't transcended, but, God knows, I've tried.  I will keep head banging.  I will because there's no other way.  Explorations and serial failures.   I did not use to approach writing as work, because I never got paid to do it.

It was a hobby and still is.  What changed inside myself was perspective.  That and doing more reading.  The reading has been tremendous.  Just opportunities to see the constructions in different light.  Not even different light as much as opportunities to see the same constructions spun by other brains in the same kind of light.

It's been ...  refreshing.

Refreshing and disconcerting.  It's been a very thorough, bridge crossed, work in progress.  I can't recall being this high over so extended a period of time without gumming up the workshop.  It has been silly even keeled.  You and I

Where are your papers?  Where is your documentation?   Where is your passport and your photo identification?   Where is your veteran of foreign wars certificate and your color bar?  Where is your jacket and your weapon?  Your cap, your boots, your wares, and your ounces of drug deals and your tears for times only you can relate to?   Where the fuck is your memorial?  Where are your headphones?  Where is your ethic and your lorn and your degrees?  Where did you leave your books and, holy shit, where did you leave your other set of keys?


///Skrillex - "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"    ...you don't need to hide, my friend, cause I am just like you...

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

Bonus Track

///Passion Pit - "Cuddle Fuddle"  ... i love you.   Just in case I haven't said it enough.







... everything goes better when you're with me

Mistakes

You can't let mistakes own you.  There's only so far you can go taking ownership of mistakes that aren't yours to claim.  It's not a witticism.  It's just fact.  At some point you have to stop apologizing and start carrying on and following through and it's so god damn easy to become enraptured in apologetics and turn it into a self sustaining art, but the sustentation of a self through apologetics is about as useful as... all of those words are too big for the facts.  Missing the points.

I was a mistake.  Hatched from a long train of mistakes.  Raised on a book of mistakes. And there has not been or ever will be an apology.  I stopped waiting for one a long time ago.  The thing is, I just have to stop wanting one.  It's hard to do, when you're muscle memory keeps running.  When your boss talks to you and you almost piss your pants thinking he might hit you and you'll take it because that's all you knew growing up.  But you cannot hurt me anymore.  I am not responsible for the equipment I have to work with.  I will see you dead someday.  We'll call it even when that day comes.

I'm done apologizing for my psychological make up.  I am, apparently, as God told my parents to make me.  And apparently it ain't so good.  For the last two years I've been working on undoing all of the bullshit.  I'll get there.  I'm done being sorry.  I just want to be free.


///The Five Corners Quintet - "This Could Be the Start of Something Big"