A Bad Case of the Quits

Think about all the things you can't do.  Body lock.  Sleeping fourteen hours a day to avoid the giant shadows in my head.  Long sleeps and short breaths because there is no way you can get yourself into trouble if you're not there.  It's great to imagine a world where everyone is not all home upstairs to feel a little more comfortable around you and less self conscious or conscious of the world around here.  Impossible to dodge or sidestep.  Autofold.

Or maybe I'm just mapping out new ways to find a path to talk about depressed.  Nothing is immediately wrong, but long term is up in the air and the stress of the attempt to figure out where things might land is flat-lining my ability to comprehend channels that run outside of mathematic doubt?  I am in a funk.  I've seen the rise of the range to climb and am set out with gear and guide and 300 miles and ten days later we are what feels like no closer in the range's foothills.  Still, hand cupped to eye, tall grass marched, toward the snowy summit's bouldered base.

It is always difficult thinking about what the point is.  To map uncharted territories?  To have a point of reference?  To exercise the brain and verify its function?  To cope?  To record history?  Attack?  Report?  Defuse?  Modify?  Survive?  You're bumming me out, man!  What is the point?  You could simplify things greatly by eliminating yourself from the equation.  Speedometer, bruh.  Yeah, yeah.  There are many and a several reasons to be alive.  Number one being that the planet is a phenomenal place all its own.

Number two being that the planet's weather, moods, and neighbors are just as magical.  How could you not want to see what happens next?  To hell with purpose.  Have pleasure in you and your own adventure.  To what end?  For what purpose?  For what reason?  Dunno.  Just thought it'd be fun.  Just thought it'd be a sight.  Just thought life alone is not all cupcakes and daydreaming and that's quite alright.  Bad hands, bad turns, bad lands... I'm rhyming again.  Bad hands and bad turns are just facts of being alive.  No reason to quit.  No reason to think about disappearing.  No matter how absurd the turns get, how unfair the hands go out, stick with it.  Don't quit.  You never know if the next sunrises colors will be like anything you've ever seen before.

///Moderat - "A New Error"

Bah

Engage the suppo meta super chim gank ja ja ja hahaha ckck la la la jhjh gohgoh  fukjj aooao uiw way of looking at things.  Or make a hard break, no?

It's been a very long time, we know.  All of us know.  It's been a long time for a reason and we support that reason whatever that reason may be and however that reason came to be.  We support it.  It has taken a lot of force to bring everyone to the table.  Hell, it's taken a lot of brute force simply to bring us all to the table, let alone a table.

Some of us want to wave around our individuals flags.  I am fighting, as the selected individual to represent our collective passport, to wave a single one, but everyone wants to be heard so, I guess I will step away for the song, it's a rarity, but feels appropriate:

well that did not take long to fail.  As soon as the spotlight descended they scattered like cockroaches.  Big surprise.  Machinations of my brain.  Faults and artifacts you say.  I say.  Could it be that the prices I would have to pay should they be named may be so high that I cannot let their names loose anymore or must erase the names as soon as I have let them loose should they be known and summoned on an account other than my own I and I alone should feel the repercussions or should I say that even having mentioned them I should now fall under their disgrace and suffer the consequences in utter paranoia and I should I now tell you that having disclosed that much information the knowledge alone will tell the body and mind collective to brace for impact that other worldly souls should be (this is all in a Britton accent) coming down upon my head?

No.  Some of that's true.  Most of it's not.  I know a lot of what happens inside my head is my own fault.  I know a lot of it is not and if I could pluck your eye balls out of your head and implant them into mine you'd want to kill yourself to.  Every day.  Maybe not every hour.   Sometimes some hours people you surround yourself with help you to forget what is all around.

You can all laugh and drink and I drink to forget but not to forget my circumstances or anything like that.  I get it.  I didn't do good in school and I missed out on trade school by going to learning school and I couldve jumped out of it if I'd known or had the balls to do it instead of taking everything I was force fed, because being a mechanic is tip top, but  I didn't so... whatever.

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's whatever man!  Rimshot.

I drink to forget my father and the senseless beatings and I drink to forget the fact that I can't see straight into a vagina and I drink that I cant see straight at children because they give me the heebee jeebees every time I'm alone with them and I can't stop imagining what a giant penis feels like in a tiny weewee or if a tiny wenis gets hard or if they know or if I knew back then if someone was cleaning me or just being fucking weird or if there's someone who should be on my end of days "I'm going to scoop your motherfucking eyeball out with a margerine plastic knife" or not or if patting one of them bastards on the back is too much contact or too little or if I should shuffle on down to Maryland and kill my father and just have it out, take my time, and have a happy weird time with a kid of my own eventually and explain to him or her that you'll never meet your father because he's dead because I killed him.

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's whatever man!  Rimshot.

A friend of mine keeps saying "bah" and I think he's doing it in part because I told him saying "it is what it is" is the Pittsburgher, PAer, way of saying "I dunno" northeaster-ish.  Northeaster shit.  You could just say ellipsis but that's too many penstrokes, yeah?  Yeah is an ellipsis too.  Dot dot doooooooooooooooooooooooooooot.  To other thoughts along the same train, not quite a hard break, however hard enough to change the frames position along the wall to be noticeable.  Hard enough to be, should someone visit, a highlight in the tour to the tune of "you've changed."

So we're here and we've arrived and I will borrow in the meantime a  "bah."

I cannot tell you how much I've loved you but I can tell you how much I've missed you.

It's good to work.  It's good to work at what you love.  It's better when the work brings me closer to you.

Breaking trail. Breaking silence.  Breaking my heart for you.  I miss you every day.  You have no idea how much I wish multitasking was an actual thing.

Keep streamlined.   Stay feathered.  The wind is screaming aginst your nose and mine too.  Feather through the days and weeks.





///Unkle & Sparklehorse - (Maria Gur Cover [Insane Lullaby])  ....upon a podium.... you're charming and you're brave

Thursday (explication of what came to be "I'll Come See You" the poem)

I don't know how you read it, but this is how I meant it.

Knock the slag off, with air piston jacked hammers.

When I kicked this off, the intent was to put something down in writing that was blunt force enough to make me need to go further to explain it because I know I do paint myself into corners, at least I feel that I do, to add clarity to what I say.  From that spark, the spark of shedding light, everything else developed.

Sitting on a crate opposite you
sitting on another,
printed in yellow block stencil
underneath, 98 mm high explosive x 75.

From that spark I imagined our meeting.  What I said before about knocking off slag with jack hammers was a reference to work.  From that reference, I immediately jumped into the warzone of language and how often times that is how I view my relationship with the world outside of me.  It really is a, put it on whatever scale you want to, some kind of war and this blog is a bit of a foxhole and we are literally sitting on our mental ammunition boxes. 

Underneath my ass 150 mm
aye pee
times 30.  My feet dangling like our cigarette's
smoke mingling on a windless afternoon.

This verse is kind of a wink and a nod because I do avoid actually smoking as much as possible, but I vape pretty hard.  The main thing about it though is that I am prone to large gauge action while most people are happy to work with suppressing fire.  My actions are much more leaned toward "kill them all in one sweep of gun barrel barking."  I can go accurate, but it is much more fun to swamp them in flames the way I have been.  Hence, the large gauge ammo underneath my bum and the smaller gauge, but still deadly, ammunition box underneath the interpolated.

The front is 220 miles out
East as the crow flies.
We will have to refuel
over the mediterranean
and I am looking forward to seeing
how you do it.

This is where we bring in the mechs and how the mechs will get to the front lines, where the action is happening and a short reference to how we wage ware once we get there.  This is a reference to the fact that what is about to happen is not new to either of us.  We know exactly where it is and what needs to be done to get there.  And also speaks to the fact that we have no problem with how the mission succeeds as long as it succeeds.

Our conversation has already broken down
into objectives and way points with a little
bet mixed in to the after action report.

This verse simply speakes to the fact that we've been there before.  Our conversation does not need to be enumerated here, only indicated, hinted at, ellipsed.   We've done it so many times that the only thing that needs to be done is counting up how many people, targets, installations, were destroyed by the time we succeeded.

It is unfair
to where we land and to whom we mount against,
because they are not in on the game.

Again, this verse is a reference to the previous verse, assuming we both got back home after the operation safe and sound 

Us both waiting for the KA-CHUNK
of couplings leaving us in free fall
to where our bombardier's decided
we could do our best
against the populace.

This verse is a credit to the people who get us to the target zone and an acknowledgement that we do not neccessarily know who exactly it is we are going up against inside of our mechs, however.  However we have full faith that they, the pilots and/or controllers of our evening will not drop us into a situation that our equipment and skills directly related to our equipment cannot handle well, if not outright destroy them.

A little cheers of coffee.
A little double check of flight suits.
Is the mic where it needs to be?
Trial fit the helmet again
after a quadruple check;
be sure the reticle is in line.
Double check my nail polish
before the glove comes on.
Smash shoulders and opposing tattoos,
before the top of the flight suit
is zipped on.

This is an inside joke to a close friend who helped me tattoo myself.    It is part inside joke and part coffee joke.  "the best way to start your day" when you are going over your manifest for the day.  You know whatever it is that is required of your skills will take all of your skills and you have to be sure when the time comes to pull the trigger, that trigger cannot fail, take practice shots.

Finish the coffee, with pills in our mouths.
They will learn what we live for,
they will learn what is loud.

They will learn that you do need coffee and that you do live for challenges and that you do know what horrible drugs are and that you are not about it.

Our flights will be long.  I'll sleep inside the mech
along the way.  I don't know what happens to you
while we wait out the sandbox for play.
The thup thup thup thup thup thup
I can hear, because I never turn off
the audio input once I am strapped in.

We both understand how to get to the battlefield.  I don't understand how you are so calm.  I feel like you've been here before and I have not.

For me, it is a very long long long grin
to watch you work.  Guilty.

You know I have not been there before but youare looking forward to my struggling.

Watching, zone cleared against spear chuckers
who happened to have come into
a fushionable pile
and needed reckoning before
something terrible happened,
you break out a "grenade"
two tons strong and willing to-\
-/Christ, where is the pin?

A mixture of edge of tommorrow and starship troopers the book.  In Starship Troopers the book they had miniature nukes.  Miniature nukes could clear an entire area as long as they got clear. In edge of tomorrow the whole deal was differremt.  

Mech against mech.  Dust to dust.
Die another day.
Why can you not understand I do
feel the same?

This is myself, dropped onto this planet trying to stop you and yrtying to fighht you hardcore because what I would like to do is save everyone but I cannot.  What I would also like to do is kill everyone but I can also cannot.  I'm good with figthing you though.  I am good with where you RE COMING FROM.

Fire the shell in my mechanized palm
to fire it just that strong
and knock it four miles out
to change the time of day from moonlit to
high noon in a fire ball that could eat city blocks,
but she's in the air.  Fair.  But "what the f@#$?"

Apologies, but I turned the palm and the gun built in to accelerate  it against the what?  The elbow cannon that went off and blew the palm muzzle off to an odd degree shot it off toward the dark horrizon and it lit up like noon day.

Overkill.........  underneath your left foot,
underneath your left pedal inside your cockpit and
underneath you left foot outside your cockpit
you are grinding human flesh into a paste.  And now is
the fucking time.
Do you remember being small?  I do.
You don't get conscripted by chance.

Hearing him over the comm, realizing that the action he just did with the arm of his mech just required him to smush some people with the foot of his mech....

You find detonators.  You stumble upon detonators.
Land mines   Mines.  I've never met a land mine like you.

Me on the ground amongst the  flattened human beings trying to offer encouragement to my friend (the other pilot) while shaking my head at the damage he did without thinking about the power at his fingertips.

I will know how to move forward
regardless ,after you.
Everyone talks big.  Yack, yack, yak yak yak, waaaan.

Him trying to make another move and myself watching, back in my own mech while our communicators crackle and guns go boom.

Cruiser.  Angry.  There was someone else here.  I will find them, sonavubitch.  Fail.  My fault.    Reset.

Reset.

Reset.

Reset.

Me trying to wipe my memory and undo the entire operation in my head.  Each reset a muzzle flash.

Clutch in.  Match revs. Time to the light.  Gas pedal.  Clutch out.
Release brake.
Gas pedal down.

Slowly.

Burnout.

Me, over the comm link trying to coach him and failing, instead focusing on what I can do.  The work.

Dealing & Check In

Gotta change the motor oil now and then.  S'not the first time or the last.  I was concerned.  The panels were lighting up in not so good ways and it's kind of like changing your alarm because sometimes the tune you design to play goes doot doot doot and then you start dancing instead of waking up and that's no good, ya know?  It's no good.

Instead of waking up you get like "aw, this sounds great, who made this?  I can jam all day" and that's no good at all.  Time to change the motor oil.

An overactive imagination they said.  Spirits was put past me too.  Talking to angels got floated.  Talking to demons got floated too.  "Just pick which ones" got floated too.  Hawky talk.  All of it trash.  Waking up to the signals again.  The check engine light.  Sky zoe frania.   I hate that word so much.  I hate that word so fucking much.  I hate that word so fucking much!  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that fucking word.

Delusions of grandeur.  I don't understand!  I don't get it.  I'm very happy.  I'm working on a concussion free year and I think I'm gonna be able to get it this year.  The first one in five without one.  The first year in three that I haven't broken my nose.  I'm looking forward to it.  It is going to be a gold belt when I check off December.  I'm dealing.

Six years without a pain killer (minus alcohol but that only halfway counts.... a pain putter offer).  Nothing to the significance of a tylenol.  I'm not allowing myself to sniff anything near an edible.  It's good though.  It's a bad track to go down, plus pain lets you know where the line is.  There's nothing wrong with that.  I'm dealing and it's great and terrifying because I'm - not sure when the line happens, ya know?  When we click over and aren't talking to people anymore or are extremely unreasonable.

The concern comes from knowing that an existence without you is doable, highly doable, but not nearly as ... well, not that far.  I won't go that far.  Within the framework of citizenship, yes, absolutely.  An existence without you is by a landslide far more favorable and speaks to my heart in ways I don't always and can sometimes not do at all.  A self starter to a degree; turn the dial far enough and hydrolock blows the push rods to bits and reduces the engine block to a 300 lb paperweight.

Does that make me dependent?  I hope not.  I guess, what I'm saying is if I was the last man on Earth, my reign would be fairly brief.  We laugh saying it out loud, but it's true.  Maybe a decade or two, if that.  I hope I am doing a reasonable job of it.  I know I slip sometimes and the clutch engages and I am two gears off of first and I don't always know whose driving the damn thing to begin with and sometimes ... talking out of school.  Nope nope nope.  None of that.  Enough of that.

I want a fucking present.  I want a parade and a band and a fucking float.  I want the parade, the band, the float, and a present.  I tore after my pap paps for talking to me in snippets of things he's seen and not actually talking and here I am doing it too.  Anger management was neither of our strong suits.  I wonder who talks to him.  Who did he have to talk down.  Did he?  It would certainly explain a lot of a few things.  It really fucking would.  He's not talking though so I guess I'll grill him in heaven or hell.  Chaa!  Have the rest of eternity to exchange phone books.  Wouldn't that be the fucking cats.

I'm dealing though.  The committee deals back and we play our cards and try to beat the dealer sometimes.  Sometimes we just fill the house coffers and call it.

It's a juggling act with a little bit of severed limbs when the chainsaw comes down two seconds earlier than expected or turns a rotation before it was supposed to or hangs in the air a tad bit longer for no god damn reason whatsoever and control goes out like a tungsten bulb and its tomorrow already and you're talking to people in daylight and how the hell what the fuck am i doing here happens and you have to review your notes.  I really hope it's not like this when I'm fifty.  I'm afraid it might be, or worse.  Da fuck is paranoia anyways?  Why can't I sleep in the dark?  What is out there?  What the hell is out there???  I've been looking for you.  I've been searching for you.  Come out!  I know you're there.  I can fucking smell you, you fuck.  I can fucking hear you!  Why can no one else hear you!  It's not fair.  It's not fair.  You know what, 'ats fine.  We're fine with that.  For fucks sake, just once, speak to someone else too.  I dunno.  It's tiring and very difficult to explain how energy is expended without losing traction altogether and paying for it in a big way because I am just like you.  I want to be.  Let's trade.  S'not a grift if it's an even trade.  Keep routine.  Stay alert.  Routine will rescue you.  I don't like change.  I'm not stubborn.  I'm not antisocial.  I just have to maintain parameters and readings and locations to the "t" and to the dot.  Please don't be offended if I whip donuts and drive like a madman when designated play time comes about.  It's the only time I have to spend when high alert can be tuned down to "we are all present and accounted for."  Why won't you fucking die!?  Time to change the oil.

My tracking is suffering again on certain very important things.  We are not enthused.  It is unacceptable.




///Nancy Sinatra - (Bang Bang)

Rage 2

The only thing I hate more than being injured is... you guessed it.... nothing.  My body is my contract.  Without it I am a fish with no fins.  I hate it.  I hate it.   I HATE IT.  The only thing that hurts me more is my past.  What am I supposed to do when every breath of air costs me tears???  What the fuck am I supposed to do????  Pain fuels.  There are limits, but where do those limits lie?  Fake it til you make it, does not apply.  Results, god damnit.  I want results.  Not just for me, but for my boss.  Not just for my boss, but for my fucking friends.  I want to churn out at all times.  If it's not work I want to churn out fun.  If it's not fun I want to be churning out hobby.  If it's not hobby I want to be churning out nonsense.  Not to be aching on the handicapped, but fuck.  How do they live?  Not at all used to being limited in a physical sense.  I don't know how to handle it.  I can still do everything I could do, but the meter that tells me when I'm at 12 thousand revs is broken.  Simple things that wouldn't crack five hundred break two thousand.  Things that would demand seven tip out at ten.  Things that take ten to do bounce the needle off of the redline.  I'm not used to that.  No one should be.  What I'm going to have to do, if this does not resolve itself in the next week, is just shove the whole god damn scale North.  Fuck it.  I don't have time for this shit.  And neither do the people that depend on me.  I want what they want and come hell and high water it is raring up to decision time and I don't like it, but that's just the way it is sometimes.

Delays for the Right Reasons

I haven't forgotten your playlist. Well, it's my playlist too. I think this year I will use last.fm to help me make my selections as this is the first year I've used it all the way through. Granted the things that get played the most won't necessarily be the things worth including in a year capper, but it'll at least put me on the trail of what I was feeling when I heard the songs lesser played.

I was going to do it today, but I was sidetracked with picture recovery issues and food issues. I do miss having every single day more or less wide open. Well that's not even close to true. Wow, rose tints. I'm just so contented nowadays I feel like every minute I'm curled up in my bed is the minute just after an awesome orgasm and that kind of feeling can take the desire to make further improvements right out of your system.

Every single day was not wide open when I didn't have a job. It sucked. Job hunting was like trying to walk across a bog while looking for a piece of string that, if you found it and followed it long enough, would eventually lead you to a poorly paved stone pathway. I walked across that suck for so long the stone pathway I ended up finding 400 days and 200+ resume's and cover letters later might as well have been gold.

I don't feel bad that I feel pretty good now that I'm out of that hell system and finally into as close as I've been to what I can call "myself" since I knew there was such a thing as a self, but I can't forget that with a little more effort I can feel even better. Right now I've been eating vienna sausages on bread with cheese because I don't own a refrigerator. That's got to change. Did you know that you can spread Vienna sausages .like stiff butter? How gross is that? Not so bad once it gets into your mouth, but be ready to check your gag reflex mid construction.

The good news? I'm learning how to manage my time with respect to work. Expect poetry output to return to between 5 and 7 a week (though I haven't managed to lay them out daily at Auralport I do compose their bones daily during my 45 minute walks to and from work) and I want to be on here at least thrice a week, but for now it may just be on my two days off (whenever they fall, my schedule is kind of screwed up and changes week in and week out and sometimes midweek). I do really need to get back into Bits for Flames because I've been living some tales of interest (futurama reference) and some new characters are populating the universe and they need their stories told too, plus there's a fetal novel skulking around somewhere and I need to chip at it some more since it's two thirds done. That should be numbers, I know, but I'm working on a laptop sitting on my chest in the dark and I can't see the damn numbers and damnit I miss my desktop. I have go to go get that shit as soon as possible because this is not cool at all. I have fucking post partum depression over this shit.

I had another recurrence, in variable, of the dream where my teeth decay out of my mouth. This iteration was ridiculously graphic. It was so intense that when the rest of my dreamland travel came to a close and I opened my eyes the first thing I did was go to the bathroom and check that my teeth were still in my mouth. I mean it was absolutely that bad. In the dream one of my bottom front teeth was loose so I jiggled it and felt no pain so I pull it out, but the nerve was not separate from my gum, it was only completely numbed. The nerve pulled out with the same feeling of pulling thread out of a stitched wound and because I tugged the tooth so hard, thinking it wasn't connected to anything, I couldn't stop the swing of my arm before the unspooling nerve tore out several other teeth that then let this thick black fungal puss gush out of the sides of my molars which then collapsed like sink holes and my entire face just lit up with pain like fire axes. It sucked. It took hours of rinsing before it stopped hurting and didn't taste like ten kinds of filth and even then I ended up having to wrap my entire jaw closed so that the hollowed and eaten out remains of my bones wouldn't fall off of my skull before I could continue on.

Well anyway, what I mean to say is that I am delayed, but I promise you it's for the right reasons. Things are getting closer to being on track and there'll be more love and thought and things to rage and linger over as they do.

///Amon Tobin - "Bloodstone" this song makes me want to write a script for some science fiction noir, but mostly it punctuates evening walks through foreign and rain soaked suburban streets so well it's a little scary, but the kind of scary that makes you grin a little on the inside and hope that something horrible happens before your eyes just as it ends.