Another Way

Another way to think about it is in terms of shows.

How many shows are you willing to play?  If you play 24 shows in a year, you've done well.  If you play 36 shows in one year, it was worth it.  If you play 48 shows in one year it was a blast.  If you play 50 plus shows in a single year, you've gone above and beyond the call of duty.

If you play 100 and more shows of what makes up the bones of you, you've gone beyond what anybody asked you to do.  Everything else is just exploration and





///

Over Simplification and the Missing Link and Father's Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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"

Cell By Cell

Had a bad run in with myself.  I'm laughing just saying it and hearing that phrase come out of my mouth and wondering how it is still possible.  Still possible to mount surprise attacks on my own fortress.  Woke up today in a fine mess of pain.  The important thing is the drought is over.  I had to break some ground to get at the well.  Wake myself up again.  The dreaming has been fantastic.  I wish I could sleep forever, but that's unreasonable.  Not irrational.  There's a difference sometimes.  Even in my country.

It is odd, I do suppose.  The sensation of being outside yourself and watching the sublet drive it straight into empty air on the wrong side of a cliff.  It's nice to be back.  It always is, even though I know it won't last and never does.  Pull the circuit board out and wave it in the wind until it stops smoking.  Pop out the fried resistors and solder in some new ones with the same ratings; their the biggest baddest ones you can get on the street.  Slide the board back in and fire it up.  Note the time and date.  Log the lost information and missing sectors.  Build new ones in the virtual environment.  Repopulate.  Repeat as necessary.

Reconstruction.  It's like a gunman went cell by cell through the complex.  Cell by cell through the prison and gunned down every inmate.  It's an unfamiliar quiet.  And then you remember you told someone you were a sociopath trapped in a citizen body.  I wonder what Jeff's doing right now.  I wonder if he'll take my call on a Saturday even though I'm not seeing him anymore.  I don't know what he would have to say.  He said if I ever thought of a good joke I should drop him a line.  Psychiatrists.  I've been trying since our last meeting two years ago to think of one and for the life of me I can't.

He'll laugh anyway, to make me feel less awkward and it'll work.  Maybe I just want to hear him laugh.  He'd be proud of the work I was doing.  He wouldn't entirely get it, but that's fine.  Poetry is a fickle beast.  Half the time I don't get it either.  He'll put it up on his fridge if I wrote him something on the couch.  He'll take it down after I leave and add it to my file.  I wonder if he still has that file. Probably not.  I vaguely remember him telling me, when I told him I was thinking about joining the army, that he is obligated to destroy records older than seven years.

I miss him.  I had a bad run in with myself.  I'm laughing just saying it out loud.  How did this happen?  Why?  I don't understand.  I like to think it's somewhere down that rabbit hole.  I used to wonder if I was color blind.  Then I stopped worrying about it.  I think I scratched my eye ball yesterday.  I miss his note taking.  You might be out of your god damn mind.  Eventually he stopped taking notes.  Which was fine.  It is kind of a tall order getting to know someone that close out of nowhere without taking notes.  I wonder sometimes what he was doing or expecting his week to be like that first Monday I walked in there.  I wonder if he still thinks about me too.  If I still populate his cells.


///El-P - "Stay Down"

Reiterate (Life's a gun that's always pointing in my face)

Starting over.   27 iterations.  Begin again.  Are you now or have you been?  27 shots.  Done deal.  I was much more composed at Carnival this year.  I guess a little distance helps.  Found some closure over Jee.  Found some connection too.

Sometimes all you've got to do is stay the course.  Sometimes the only thing you've got to do is not fuck up.  It was nice seeing people in real life.  It was even nicer being as happy to see them as they were to see you.  Wasn't expecting that at all.  So much mutual love and understanding.  And you feel it and it's like "is this really how the majority of people get to go through life?"

And the answer is an emphatic yes.  Or maybe it's a no.  But for two days it was a big old yes and it was beautiful just to be in it for it a little while.  Just to be in it and forget about all the rest.  It was nice to be a stand up guy and ready to throw down for anybody and not have to.

It sucks going back.  I don't wanna go.  I never do.  I want to be there forever.  I want to be loved and looked after.  I want to wake up naked and happy all of the time.  Driving home the sky accelerates.  Going back out to space.  Giving everyone their due and their distance.  It hurts, but I know I have to.  They're not prepared to be close to me and I them.  A long letting go-ness.  Compressed into hours instead of days.  I'm one years old again.  It feels amazing and stupid.  And amazing all over again.

Nothing has changed, but everything has and I don't want to cry and I can't help myself at the same time.  There's nothing keeping me dry.  Time slicks by like a sinking ship with more passengers than rafts.   Shoving off to pluto and all collected.  Another year older, another year bolder, another year just a little bit colder.  But not alone.  Turbines to speed.  Birthday wishes pending.


///The Postal Service - "Brand New Colony" ... when you're drowning in an open tub and your judgement's on the brink

Redesign & Sudden Death Memory, and the Equalizer

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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


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

the forest for the trees 06/08/06

Subject : the forest for the trees... people still do that?
Posted Date: : Jun 8, 2006 7:48 AM

i conducted an interview of a co worker last month and then converted the interview into a piece of non-fiction for a class. i drafted the piece and then re-drafted the piece and then reinterviewed and then let it sit for a couple of days. then i edited the piece again and then redrafted the whole thing.

not only was the piece recieved to a near standing ovation from my professor, but i personally felt like it was one of the better things i'd written that year. it was long, but not overly so. it had twists and turns. it was not self promoting nor biased. it was brutally honest and uplifting. this piece of biographical non-fiction is so good i am going to submit it to some minor non-fiction journals and see how well (or poorly it does). this piece was art.

at least that was what i and others thought for the past month until about ten minutes ago. the co-worker whom i interviewed and promised to remain true to in giving him a copy of the piece just told me what he thought of it. this is what he had to say:

"okay there were a few things, first of all you should delete all of the quotes because those quotes don't sound anything like me. secondly the books i read are not on any middle school book lists. they are deep and dark works by world renowned authors. thirdly im not gay because its kind of insenuated in there that i am, but im not."

those were his exact words. there were more. in fact he went on about the books and the gay thing for quite some time before he remembered to harangue me some more about the quotes. where he got those problems from i have no idea.

in the paper i say that we share the same sexual preference and im not gay... so i guess he's just a homophobe.
in the paper i say that im jealous of how well read he is and that he didn't just pick books off of an obscure list for the sake of reading obscure authors like other people with no taste in books often do... so he pulled that book shit outta of two or three words i said in the beginning of the piece to set up the revelation of his deep knowledge.

in the paper i quote him word for word... its not my fault if he doesn't believe he actually sounds like that or not. he said the words. i didn't make them up. and its not like i just stuck on a speech impedement or bogus accent either.

in short it is clear to me that he has completely missed the 99% of the paper that is nothing but positive toward him. the man is ugly. i did capture that faithfully as well... but he didn't have issue with that at all. he only found problems with the 99% that was true, honest, accurate, and positive.

yes, people still miss the forest for the trees. im not making any of the changes he asked me to.

i am going to make one change though. his name.