Where the Time Went V

Banished.

Banished from the lands.  I almost said unfortunately.  Fortune has little to do with what a person decides to do with their present.  Fortune has everything to do with what and who you are up until "now", but maybe fifty percent to do with after.  Fortune has fifty percent or less to do with what happens to you after you realize what the system is and what you're in for and who you are and where you've been with an open eye.  Of course, you've still got to get "lucky" in part for good things to happen to you, but you also have to be prepared to act.

Banished and returned out of sympathy for their survival, them having flailed in the vacuum of space and been over matched by the very things they spat in my face they could handle on their own so often and myself being fed incomplete information (what I call lies and they call "telling the full truth when they're ready").  So now we are trapped into providing shelter for the wayward addict and trying to lay down ground rules in their defiance and abuse of kindness.  Few things feel more alone than living with someone who is not prepared or capable yet of living outside of their own interests, whatever those interests may be.

If you're still in the mindset of "I am a fuck up, I can't do this" and won't even honest to yourself try, you're going to miss it.  Four months long attempts at trying to wake them up to that simplicity.  Trying to be the best person I could be toward the person I loved.  Maximum effort.  Whether I wanted to or not, whether I was upset or not, whether it would cost me or not.  We had a conversation the other evening about what love is.  Is it an emotion?  A feeling?  A pile of chemicals?  An exchange of ideas, ideals, memories, and hopes?  Is it that metaphorical eternal flame of the soul and yadda yadda that keeps everything and everyone connected and relationships blossom where the connections happen to be stronger instead of weaker?  She sort of fumbled around for some time, at points fading into and out of the "a person can fall into and out of love conundrum so it can only be, but so much of this or that and" basically a word salad of chopped up experiences, tossed with a little salt and vinegarette and served halting.

Love at its core is sacrifice.  Love is willfully putting yourself second for the betterment of someone else.  Love is not whispering "I would die for you" while your heads lay on the same pillow and your faces are six inches away from each other.  Every time someone tells me they would die for me I tell them to live for me.

I'm not looking for apologies anymore.  Whatever form they come in, apologies, an acknowledgement that you did something that did not account for that action's, that decision's, that event's happening's impact on my life, or you did and chose to disregard it, or you did and it did not weigh out to enough to sway you, but you cared enough to inform me and help me better understand where I fall in your calculus and explore the otherverses of paths so that we can figure out whether we should or should not cross paths in the future, if it can be avoided.

I am looking for changes in behavior.  Whatever forms the apologies take, if you find yourself offering apologies and sacrifices to the same You, it is vainity at its root.  Isn't it?  As long as you can forgive you, everything should be good with the person you are bowing your head for the knife for.  As long as you're in the loop, you are your own executioner.  And yes, you will die in dramatic fashion.  The applause will rain.  Everyone will believe something was accomplished in the display.  The executioner will go to their home, once the crowd applause fade, and there's some sort of proclamation about sins and wrongs and the pigeons and crows will come to peck up the bits of food the audience left in the courtyard.  The morticians will get to work and the janitors too.  The executioner's phone will buzz a "hey, are you up?  Let's hang out" the following night.  You'll do your make up, cross legged on the floor, and say to yourself you must go meet so-and-so because...

Apologies and "sorry" are not worthless.  They carry some merit on their own, though tacit.

You'll befriend fall guys and walking excuses and you'll apologize later.  Beheading yourself used to mean something.  It used to be painful.  Cognitive dissonance is something for therapy couches, though.  Why respect the opinions of people that have spent their lives studying people, just like you.  With enough repetitions, a person can become anything they want to be.




///Fatboy Slim - "The State We're In" ~

Proclivities

Why do I enjoy the things that I do?  It cannot all be chance.  The chance of it all being chance is just silly.  Laughing to myself while I compose the thought from hundreds of shards, I understand a little something.  Those somethings follow:

I wouldn't be as into giant robots as I am should I not have seen a manual when I was younger.  I wouldn't be as into mythology and comic books had I not seen so many when I was younger.  I would not be in to so many technical diagrams had I not been presented them when I was younger and I'm not talking about diagrams of machines as much as human bodies.

I probably could have avoided getting beaten as often as I did if I didn't dive into diagrams of the naked form as were provided.  Which is kind of hilarious because I wouldn't be as good as I am at seeing them for the bones they are now if I hadn't seen them when I was a small fry.

I cannot help laughing, explaining it now.  "Why do these things occupy so much of your head's space?"  I don't know.  I'm sure parts of it are generated within myself.  Absolutely.  Why can I not look at someones face and see the wires beneath it?  The bones and structure and frame it in a comic books frame or a films sketch board?  How come I cannot turn that off?

For the same reason that I cannot approach someone without thinking about and forecasting how to defend myself.  "You have to learn how to fight!"

These are questions only your parent can answer.

I've been refused answers.

Wiping saliva from my computer screen, it is true.  That is part of why I laugh hysterically.

The greatest complement, I've heard, is emulation.  Copying.  That is also what I've been taught.  How do you learn?  By emulating.  How do you create?  Learn the rules and then you can make whatever you want to.  OR.  You can feel an audience and play to a crowd.  OR.  You can do what appears to be reasonable and go from there as long as no one dies in the gears of your operation.  As long as no one gets hurt.  There are many rules.

I am sad.   I am thorough.  I am skattered.  I am some original parts and some parts straight from the manufacturer.  I am not thrilled.

The manufacturer insisted.  I argued.  The manufacturer insisted.

I do wonder, if he had it to do over again, would he.  That question will never be answered.

So I draw and I build and I create and I war and sometimes I scuffle and I hold grudges and I love forever and I hate and I draw, I build, I design, and model, and color, and I never quite know exactly why.  I don't know if I'm the best version of myself or if I will never know the answer that I expect to go hand in hand with that question.

Every few days out of a month it enrages me.

I cannot force him to speak on his behalf, as he many times made me do.  I wish that on no one.  By that rule, I do not wish that on him.  The best I can do is detective work and let him know, unless he is willing to open up the book of death, he has no place in my world.

I wasn't asking for my abusive father for an apology.  All I was asking for was accountability, being old enough to talk to him person to person.

I got stonewalled.  And that's that.

Nothing more to do except continue to build my own life, evolve one baby step at a time, and continue to try my damnedest to forget about him and hope he dies sooner than later.  For now that's the best we can do.





///Mos Def - "Umi Says"

Most definitely.

Origins

What fascinates me the most was his unwillingness to let me in.

At every turn there was a guard and I got tired of trying to break them down.  It became a fools errand.

I am disappointed in him.  A child should never have to reach a point where it is forced to scorch away it's parent.  I still get the chucks even admitting that I have a father.  Thirty one and seven years out to open life and it's boggling.  When I finally grew enough to understand that he couldn't break me, he didn't want to discuss why we got to that place in the first.  I won't say I'll never be able to understand it, but he made it clear, many years my senior and able to make decisions on a much more vast scale, that he would never come to the table to view my entire history objectively.

"Where are you from?"  I will never know.  I can speak on it, but I will never be granted 360 degree vision.

"What were you before you entered citizenship?"  I will never know.  It's all hearsay from my siblings and I believe them because they would not lie to me.

"Where is he now?"  Rotting, I hope.  I'm waiting for him to die.  I won't be any better for it, I certainly won't be any worse.  I will be better.  The questions will have answers then.  The "I" will be dotted, the "T" crossed, and the pain inflicted, the trauma, accounted for.  The books closed.

"Given the opportunity, would you kill him?"  Yes.

"Why will you not have an audience with him?"  When I reached my own voice and understood I was an individual, he would not have an audience with me and it went on for five years and I had to stop taking refusals because it made me want to kill myself.  I will never return to that state.

Everyone talks big about love.  Demons.  Addiction.  Religion.  Shan and shan.  It's not all bullshit.  I tried my best to love and care for him.  I don't know why he heeled me to the curb at near incalculable turns (I've faded some memories because I couldn't deal with them so they are dungeon locked and will remain that I may live).  I don't want pity.  I don't want his love.  I don't want his ire.  I don't want to hear his voice.

I wanted him to let me in.  His resistance and fortress will be a mystery until the day he dies.  I may go to his funeral to hear the eulogizers put his unsung thoughts on wax.  Not for closure; to get a view into what was behind those brown eyes.  Rose tinted?  Of course.  I can parse with terrible efficiency.

He was the first iron giant I ever knew.  Scaled up to city proportions. I learned not to fear him when I realized I became one.  I've chosen to use my bones differently.  When I reach through the atmosphere, waste is not laid to communities and vessels.  Virus does not spread.  The horsemen do not ride at once.  I'm not ashamed to have been born.  I'm not ashamed to have come from a fire and furnace.  I'm baffled as to the why.  That's all.  I've asked for many things through my life, is it too much to ask for straight answers from your point of origin?  In this world, half created, half designed, the answer will always be yes.

Original equipment manufacturer fail.





///Thom Yorke- "The Clock"

Move Town

I get so caught up with making the people around me things as a way of saying thanks and payment that I forget to make myself- to do what I want to do because I owe my existence, my here and now, to those people by a currency that will never translate because they don't know fully what they helped me reach escape velocity away from what I saw as an insurmountable margin and I don't view it as penance or clinging to the past or misplaced.  I see it as a continuous consciousness of how tenuous life can be and a ten four toward how the smallest gesture, the smallest show of what someone outside of a relationship might see as pity pence or enabling weakness can actually be a point and moment where you've helped someone's life turn a corner.  It's burdensome to think about and it takes a piece out of myself to do it, but everyone is thanked out of reflex and I feel more comfortable in my own skin, helpless and power filled at once, when I have taken the time to let them know the fact that I am still alive now is not by chance or the grace of a supreme being and is by their taking their time to pitch a penny or several thousand into my hat.  To fool yourself into thinking you've done it by yourself or by chance or by blessing or sheer hard work grind is something I want to make sure I never do.  So maybe it is an anchor.  Maybe it is an unnecessary sacrifice and can be framed as a guilt or a confirmation of sin and imperfection.  A penance.  I don't see it that way and will never come around to that frame of mind.  So much of life is decisions and whether it suits me or not a lot of those decisions happen outside of myself.  I accept that.  So please, accept my outside decision to thank you and the universe outside of myself that you have had a hand, direct and indirectly, in forming.

Once we're clear of that, we can shift focus back to fantasy lands and dreamscapes.  There isn't much more distance to cover and I am happy for that.  Excited for that.  There are times when I feel like every other word is about some future date when the resources are at their correct levels and processes have synchronized and the planets have lined up into something close to a grand cross and if I am twenty minutes in to 5th Element while listening to acid jazz with my heaphones in my key tray and I've already consulted my little sister and am suitably numb mouthed from too many cigarettes and just the right amount to dissuade me from running to the gas station to purchase more and the moon is a waning gibbous on a clear night with rain in the forecast for early before the sun comes up with the option to sit outside with a fire at any point prior barring the anything prior to the immediate because it did not rain the day through at work, where I box myself in to unrealistic expectations as a way to never have to actually execute anything.  If you never pull the trigger, you never have to learn whether or not there is more to learn about what you want to do.  Whatever you have conceptualized is its best and most perfect form.  You never have to translate.  I wanted to have children.  I can have children.  Meet my family!  It's almost like every idea is that part of you other people talk about and love, but if they ever did meet you, the rest of you, they'd screw their nose up and rub their squished shut eyes like they just saw an apple snap loose from a twig and fall up to disappear into the sky.

I get very caught up, but I have not forgotten my own needs.  It eats me out from the inside, but I never forget the gnaw and the sound of it and the feel of it, the blood cough taste of it, nose running, water eyed mechanics of it.  They scream at me.  I'm moving forward as fast as I can.  I swear, I am.  The days disappear swiftly.  The nights are restless, strapped to a mattress.  Fear lurks in corners.  Cats ask questions.  Notes are taken on walls and skin and misnamed folders.  Bite a lower lip and squeal from the top of the foothills of the mountain range, the clouds ahead of the temperature front doing strange things above the peaks and the ground bellowing thunder lake swells and strikes days distant, birds moving town in brunch sky above.  Sip.  Nod.  Please pass the olives.  Cross a leg and scribble onward.



///Sylvan Esso - "Uncatena"

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"

In Consideration of Empathy

You attack and beat yourself up over your inability to see eye to eye with your brother.  Eye to eye about what?  Everything.  Not everything, just things now.  The formation and configuration of our immediate family.  Who funds what and why.  Who goes and does what and where.  Who can.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him on that?  You just watched a video of yourself dancing and you thought it was awesome, but the truth is if bodies could have Tourette Syndrome, you would probably be the poster boy with Elaine Benes as the prom Queen.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him at all?  You are two completely different human beings, down to sexual orientations and the arrangement of your individual eyelashes.  You are not supposed to agree.  You are about as different as they come between siblings.  You do realize this, I hope.  You are a stamped coin.  Do you get it now?  You are never going to see eye to eye about just about everything.  If you want to see the other side, you are probably going to have to bend time and space and, last I heard, that shits pretty difficult with a thousand acre facility so good luck trying to do it with a few cubic inches of fatty gray matter.

You don't have to see anything his way.  He doesn't have to see anything your way.  What is this weird aggression toward a shared emotional experience?  It's not there.  Stop looking.  I don't say that as a warning sign like marking something so damaging and toxic you will die immediately, if not soon after.   I say that as a time saver.  I say that as a wayfarer.  Stop looking.  There is nothing at the end of that ocean.  There is nothing on the other side of that desert.  The globe does not loop around.  It is infinite in the darkness beyond the stars.  Stop looking.  Occasionally whip your binoculars up to your face and take down the range, time, and windage and then duck back down into the reeds.  You do love him, but you do hate him too.  Not for any particular reason.  Just envy.  Change positions.  Skulls, skin, bones, you do know you wouldn't be able to change circuitry.  Can't I?  No.  Mightn't I?  No.  Impossible-r-y-ing I?  No, and that's definitely not a word or fragment.  What the hell is that?   I just stroked off for a minute.  What were you saying?

I was saying, we're never going to see eye to eye, so stop beating yourself up when you try and do not.  You're not a bad person.  You're not a flaming heap of garbage to be kept at arms length all of the time.  Sometimes you cannot control your volatility.  It's a fine problem to have.  You don't have to kill him and you don't have to fight him.  Just let him be himself and you be yourself and the chips will land where they please and are directed.  Your engagement with the world can never be his.  It can be emulated.  Where's the fun in tracing?  Where's the existence in tracing?  Do not get angry with yourself for being irrevocably, irreconcilably, different.  No, you are not stupid for trying.  Anyone in their right mind would see their closest genetic match and want to touch it like a mirror to make sure what they saw was not a reflection.  You are me?  No.  I am me and you are you, and never the two shall meet.




///Dan Deacon - "Feel the Lightning"  polishing the brass on warships that will and need never leave Earth.  Fear is healthy.  A degree of worry is healthy.  Don't take it too far.

Nearing the End of the Third Week With a Fractured Jaw

With roughly 75% of the range of motion returning and constant pain beginning to subside for several hours at a time I feel pretty good about not going to a hospital on this one.  Had there been a clear break in the bone I definitely would have gone to get whatever metal was needed implanted and get wired shut.  Sometimes it baffles me how interconnected the bodies musculoskeletal system is and I am constantly reminded of how layered its concert is.

I didn't realize how many different ways and how often I shift my jaw and slide my teeth against each other when I am processing information or thinking through conversation or using my eyes and ears to take information in.  Left, right, backwards, forwards, clenching some sections of teeth and relaxing others at the same time.  Everything from pulling on a door knob, to swinging a hammer, to stretching, sitting down, standing up, turning my head, opening a mailbox, to driving a stick shift is tied to the muscle groups around the neck and jaw.  Suddenly hundreds if not thousands of long memorized motions and activities that you could perform with blindfolded confidence are thrown into doubt.  "Is this going to hurt?"  "How will this affect the healing cracks?"  "Will this pull apart soft scar tissues not yet stabilized and calcified into bone?"  In the third week I am starting to regain some confidence.

For most of the first and second week the pain never felt less than a five or six on a 10 point scale throughout the day from waking to sleep.  Depression became a huge factor.  You are not sad because of what happened or how it happened.  You become depressed because you cannot laugh without shooting pain.  You become depressed because you cannot fall asleep because of sudden spikes of pain that cut through your over the counter pain killers like the barrel of a bat slamming into a light bulb tucked inside a pillow case.  You become depressed because the muscles of your tongue and throat put enough pressure on the angle of your jaw, right on the side of the cracks, to make your eyes tear up when you swallow what you can.  Everything you casually associated with happiness in sleep, smiling, laughter, rest, sustenance, is hot wired and reprogrammed to fear and ache and apprehension and anger and it weighs on you hour after hour after hour until depression becomes crushing.

In week three many self imposed restrictions are beginning to lift.  I can get through the day and night without a single pain pill.  The constant background ache has dropped to an occasionally noticeable two or three.  When I press on the impact site gently, the bone doesn't flex and make crunching sounds.  In the second week I successfully set the condyle back into its natural position.  I couldn't help crying for several minutes afterward.  It was important and necessary as my bite was out of alignment from front to back.  Once I did that the grinding noise right at the ramus's tip finally stopped and when I bandaged my mouth closed with a thick elastic wrap my teeth sat almost as evenly as they did before.  I think that dislocation is probably what saved the angle from snapping clean through.

I can almost yawn again.  I still have to brace my chin when I sneeze.  At the end of this third week I can chew very soft pasta and cheese and drink thick soup relatively pain free, but I am taking it extremely carefully to be absolutely certain I don't retard the healing process or get too enthusiastic about my food choices.  It felt so good to finally be able to scrub my beard again without fireballs of pain shooting through my face.  Nothing changes the complexion of the day like starting it off with a good deep beard scrubbing, good god I missed that.

All of my anger and hatred toward the people that did this to me is gone.  What really makes me happy is not caring what happens to them.  Being able to let their aggression go and not have a second thought about retaliation or feeling like I'm owed something or that I owe them something.  The transaction is over.  What matters is what you decide to do next for yourself.  What matters is that lying in bed your jaw doesn't sag and fall to one side like a screen door with one hinge.  What matters is that you survived and you can physically laugh again without fear of splitting bone apart from the spirited ways in which you normally like to jump on life's comedy.

I still cannot laugh too much or the pain piles up and grows to wince worthy proportions and twists my face sour.  I still can't make some facial expressions.  I still can't sustain hours of conversation, but then again I was never particularly great at making conversation as much as listening to it, but it is still something to get used to realizing that I can only say so many words before I have to rest and close my mouth tightly.  I still can't clench my teeth in consternation.  I can feel some lingering instability and pain in the healing dislocated joint when I run up or down stairs or shake or nod my head too vigorously.  Hopefully these things and instabilities will pass as week four progresses.

I know there is potential for some level of permanent pain in the joint since it was not reset by a professional and was not wired shut to ensure speedy and complete recovery of the fracture site.  There were evenings when I slept and would wake with a start in the second week so abrupt I could feel the joint strain and hear the angle click and flex.  There was a day when I woke to a spider landing on my cheek and a slapped at my face and new before the pain even registered that I screwed up big time in doing so and set myself back all of whatever healing occurred through that day.  Common sense tells me this too, as my back injury from two and a half years ago still bothers me from time to time and sends numb sensations down my right buttock and thigh if the barometric pressure is too far off from my body.

Some of the nerves likely died as well as there is noticeably diminished feeling along the left side of my jaw bone.  I expected as much.  I expected the worst, but progress has been good and some levity has returned to day to day life.  I am not out of the woods yet.  Two to three more weeks to go before I'll try to bite into a piece of meat that hasn't been blended to the consistency of mashed potatoes.  At least three more weeks before I try to bite into an apple.  I think I may attempt a sandwich next Saturday... a grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly.  My tummy can't wait to have fun with food with my mouth.

The food has been spectacular.  At first, the only things I could eat were nutrient shakes and very thin liquids for the first two weeks.  Very finely blended and extremely water heavy meals put through the blender and then only a half cup or so every few hours because the pain was too intense to do much more than that.  Since then the horizons have begun to grow and meals become more intricate.  Right now it's an assortment of pastes and soups of varying composition, from fresh bell peppers ground into bacon pate with rice and spinach soups drizzled all around to sweet bean mashed potatoes with soft sharp chedder shredded over the top alongside peas carrot beef mash and oreos in a little cup on the side blended into a desert syrup.  Nothing makes lunch quite like peanut butter and jelly paste beside a cup of milk.  It has been a little bit of a challenge and through the first two weeks I lost 25 pounds, but as time is getting on, some of the weight has come back.

I still feel weak from not being able to work out or move much, but some strength has returned and will only increase as the healing progresses.  At the end of week 3, I feel alright about the future.  There's a decent chance I will be close to what I was before my jaw was fractured and dislocated.  I know I will never be the same, but I am alive and can continue and I am happy for that.  Happy with that.  It kind of mirrors my mental problems that I deal with and constantly manage without medicine.  I know I will never be better than I was, but I can try to make sure I don't completely unravel and if I can be close to as sound as I was the day before then I have done the best I can.




///Deptford Goth - "Objects Objects"  the bass filled silence between the searing walls of the chaotic