Helmet, Armor, Time, Money, Love.

The kind of love that lasts forever.
The kind of love that outlasts explanation.

Yep, that kind.

The inexplicable kind.  The kind that cannot be explained by an affinity for a God or the affinity for a person.  The everlasting, gut punching kind.

The kind that makes you change your ways even though changing your ways has nothing to do with how you express it, kind of love.  The sort that makes you wish you could be a different person.  The kind of love that makes your heart break when there are no more words to say what it is you had to say when you had to say it.  Hell, the mouth only has so much capability inside of it.

That kind of love.

The kind that changes how and what you do despite the fact that change now has no affect on your outcomes, and you do it anyway.

That kind of love.

The kind that tells you explicitly: SEX IS NOT GOING TO HELP OR HELP FIX THIS. and you do it anyway, because you enjoyed snuffling her private parts and she enjoyed yours, snuffling, just that much.  It turns into a private secret box,  permanent.  Oh, please!  Open it up to more!  To more!  Nope.  That's all you will get to know.  Forever.

Mind, body, and soul.  You are cut off.  Wander the waste lands.  Find an amalgam.   Find a new war to fight.   A new fart to sniff.  The embassy is closed.

Write songs about love and body parts and knowledge and loss and wars won.  Write them to whomever.  You'll find your way.  Eventually.  Eventually, having sex on our grave, I will think about you.  And

how I came
to be here.

Undo Button

You've heard it before.  For this and that.  How about, after 30, you get to hit undo on one impossible to fix character trait?  Just one and it has to be something long established and impossible to undo because it is so far ingrained into the base mechanics of your brain functioning that trying to eradicate it will destroy layers upon layers upon layers of other vital systems and courses and circuitry that are highly desirable.

Consider it an inoperable cancer.  Because that is exactly what it is.  It will be the death of you and you cannot live without its growth.  Its eradication will mean your own extinction as well.  It will die when you do.  That.

If I had an undo button I would use it on my rage and aggression.  The seeds were planted and nursed to seedlings in youth.  Agitated and metastasized through adolescence and bloomed through young adulthood.  Now the tree of might grows in my yard constantly and every season I have to go in and clean up all the rotting stuff that falls.  Stare at them ripening knowing the best way to take care of it is to wait for it to fall.  Knowing I have to, must to, gots to, wait it out and tend to it and if it dies it will only be because my heart stopped too.  @#$% you, tree.  Well after my father dies, I will still have that tree peering in my windows.  Shadowing my kids while they play, picking up bats and swatting the little things every fall.  Kicking them around.  Wondering what they are and if they're edible.  Tasting them anyway.

Myself watching them, if they ever do land.  Firing cusses at him.  My kids will think that tree was always there, because that's all they'll ever have known.  "Doesn't everyone have a rage tree?"  "Why don't you cut it down?  The yard would be so much better without it."  I know.  I know.

I want an undo button for that.  The schizophrenia, the paranoia, the anxiety, depression, mania, twin poles, I can deal with those fairly effectively except when I don't.  The absolute rage is the hardest to bridle and if you screw it up people disappear and then so do you.  Forever.  I can't afford to make that mistake again.   Ever.

One Last Tune Up

The enemy of "good" is "perfection."  Decision time is here again.  The thought of gestation makes me laugh, but it's true.  Poetry is still my best friend.  Fiction is still my mistress.  Still too orchestrated.  This is still my sandbox.  Leafing through notes, it's difficult to not get frantic.  Slide over, bacon.  Let me drive for a while.  Okay?  I promise I will not crash.  Okay?  Okay.  You're still two handing the wheel.  Sorry.  Okay?  Okay.  Let go.  Okay.  Alright, I'll see you soon, you know that, right?  I do.  Good.




///DJ? Acucrack - "Wickerman"

Coming Back

Your customer service representative will be with you in a moment.  Please stand by.  We are aware that you are having some problems with your account and we very much enjoy your business and you are a valued customer.  Please hold while the next available representative ...

finishes their shit.  I cant slam my phone on the coffee table hard enough without breaking it.  I hate dealing with people.  I love dealing with people.  Nothing happened to me, everything happened to me.

Please hold.  I don't know what songs you like, but here, have this one.  It's an elevator and a stabilizer so enjoy it for a minute while we talk about your request and jump around it for a while and weasel.  Okay, that's fine.  I'm glad I chabbed up on something to munch.  I'll hold.  Please, continue.  It's not like I had something to grind on today.  Not at all.  I'm just blowing in the wind, but okay.  Please hold, please hold.

We are experiencing some technical difficulties, but here, this is the weather for the next nine days and 22 hours.  Here's the news.  In case you were wondering, nothing has changed so here's more of it.  Smile a little?   Here's more junk.  Here's what time it is and here are some pundits and here is some humor.  Here's some tosh and some cartman.  Here's bart and toys turned into cartoons and cartoons turned into toys.  Here's PBS and here's NOVA and here's are you being swerved.

Enjoy.  Here's ducks and hitler and dams and bridges and pawn shops and tits and dicks and marriages and food and chores and nannies and dads and children and scooby fucking doo and courage and beers and beers and beers and liquor and shampoo and lipstick and gloss and appliances and payment plans and retirement and cars and shrimp and outings and beef and socks and shirts and underwear and

I can't take it anymore.  I can't eat anything anymore.  I used to starve myself because I was paranoid about my weight and now I can't eat anymore because everything is getting shoved down my throat.  I can't do it. I can do it.  Everytime they ask me if I want to go out to eat I just fucking can't and I don't know how to explain it.    I can't eat anymore! Fuck.  I'm sorry, I want to and would love to, but I cannot fucking afford it anymore and on top of that I cannot digest it.  Fuck.  Sorry.  No.  No mores.  Can't do it.

Do you want to go to the bar?  No!  Do you want grab lunch?  No!  I'm buying some food at Burger King, do you want anything?  No!  No! No1  Stop asking.  Please!  At the same time, though, I run headlong into a problem.  How will you see them when they're not eating or barring or ... it burns!!!  It's not fair at all.  I'm trooping it and trying to be friends and I'm literally getting eaten.

However, nothing ventured, nothing gained.  I understand that.  At what cost?  At what fucking cost?  I'm coming back and I know I love to laugh and I know things can be easy, but I want what I wants and it's not expensive at all and I don't get why everyone is charging so much sometimes when all I want is a scratch off.  Jesus.  If I can navigate a day, alright.  Sweet.  Stop stomping on me.  I didn't want a fight, but hey, you got one on your hands now.  It turns me inside out sometimes trying to break down differences in understanding.  Yes, no one asked me to.  I get that too.

But if we're going to live on the same planet we better be seeing something close to eye to eye because otherwise you or I got's to go.  I've missed so many people for so long I just can't do it anymore.  I've accidentally estranged and shoved away some people too.  People that I couldn't afford to lose, but I was so wrapped up in being myself I forgot that the planet is a shared one.  I forgot about their knuckles and their dreams and tore my skin up and I'm just now getting back.

Pluto is great.  It's a fine place to stay.  Unlike New York, you can actually Winter over there and not get sick of yourself and population.  I don't care about being the first man on Venus or Titan, but I would volunteer to go if only to be alone and reasonably so.  Not needing a reason to have to be there.  Meltdown much?  I know I have a brain made of glass.   That's probably why she moved on.  Falling asleep in class wasn't an action as much as a symptom.  I wasn't born this morning, but I did stay up all night.

Shadow people.  Courage the cowardly dog.  My favorite color is still yellow.  I'll get there.  I'm coming back.  Out of orbit and nothing but gravity.  This is not my planet, but I live on it sometimes.  This is not my jail, but I walk in it sometimes.




///DJ? Acucrack - "Time For You to Leave"  ... turn the radio on, turn the radio off but you never never...  I don't know if thems the lyrics but this song is close to my heart.

Proliferation Theory

If you do enough, something is bound to stick favorably.  For a time I approached writing with an arrogance.  I thought, because it was the only thing I got decent marks in, I must be good at it.  And then I got bad grades.  Still got good grades from time to time, but bad grades just as often, usually related to the technical composition and not the ideas.  And then I got good technical marks and bad ones on the formation of ideas.  Sometimes I did well with both.

It was a strange time.  I transitioned from writing on my own time and going to class and writing instead of doing homework to higher grades where writing was my only homework and all I did in classes.  The arrogance of perceived innate talent faded quite a bit with one failed attempt to win awards after another and I blamed closed communities and the like, the department was exceptionally cliquey.  I believed the profs liked what they liked and you liked what you liked and it was your job to jump the gap, not theirs.

I don't know what my problem is exactly, but I do believe it is that the people that I idolize make it look so effortless and what they make feels like hit after hit after God damn hit.  Maybe proliferation theory is failing me.  It's difficult to say either way.  Maybe I am genuinely no good.  It's tough to digest.  Without some kind of schedule.  I rolled up a dollar bill.  It's just strange, I guess.  Proliferation theory.  Asking when is good enough for me good enough for someone else.

The theory begs a lower standard, but how much is compromised in terms of value and personal expansion? Is the cost appropriate to the value of the product, the life time stamp I put my name to?  I don't know.  I do it predominantly for myself, at least that's what I've convinced myself of.  I don't know.  Would I kill to go back to school?  How many people?  Could I plea bargain my way out of life sentences and would the offer still be good when I got out?  I'd have to think about it.  Hypotheticals.

Yeah, it drives me crazy.  A little bit.  I try to think about what else I would be doing, could be doing.  None of it appeals to me the same way.  Everyone, including myself, well maybe not everyone, many people talk about being their harshest critic.  I may be my most passionate lover.  Delusions of grandeur coming with the territory, but I don't always see it so clearly.  The Fantha.  Losing focus on the mission.  I just want to die knowing I was good as I could possibly be, not knowing I was good as I was going to be.  Who wants that?

I think believing that I'm great keeps my engine running.  Keeps the clutch down and a hand on the shift knob for when I come running.  Beyond that, I don't know how much credence I give it.  I butcher language and muddle image on a weekly basis.  I talk like broke nosed sailor all too often and argue like a fifteen time concussed politico's son.  Pretty sure my mental dictionary has "turn to page 345"s on it and on page 345 there is a crayon hand drawn hairy dick in the corner.

Purpose is a fine commodity.  Take a digger.  Fire off the magazine, discharge, and throw it as far as you can.  Sometimes panic can be beautiful.  Never outwardly.  Did I tell you that I was you?  Don't be silly.  Don't be silly little king with your crown.  Let me polish that for you; you dropped it skipping puddles in gutters without your galoshes.  You know the ones with He-Man and Skeletor printed all over?  I'll remember for you.

Just behave, okay?

The project was, the final project was, to make a visual that encompassed everything you believed poetry to be.  Everything you believed poetry to be and the purpose it served.  They came in with their power points and dream catchers and God's eyes and a diorama of a village and someone made a painting and someone made a collage from printed magazines and there were a handful of abstract sculptures and even a figurine, but you made a life sized naval mine with trigger switches and detonators and wires out of empty wine bottles and paint brush handles and spray painted it black.  That was a fun walk across campus with that hugged to your chest.  Cutting across the grass, because the people on the sidewalk could go f--- themselves that early in the morning.  You worked on it all night after thinking about it for a week.  Everyone talked about their things and you talked about yours.  And that's where it ended.

Officially.  I suppose, the project is ongoing.  I hate myself.  I love myself.  I hate myself.  I'm sorry to drag you into it.  I don't know how else anything changes.  Contemplating the validity of ProT.


///Starkey - "Spacewalk" infolatice diver with a bad respirator.  the city is so vast and so uninhabitable so far beneath the waves

from a similar born year and different circumstance, but very little I haven't enjoyed while there: alicja-w-krainie-czarow

No Country, No Courtship. The Noble State.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Return to Patagonia

I don't know what I want to talk about today, but I do know that if I don't talk then I'll move closer bit by bit to having full blown running arguments with myself and when you do that people think you're crazy.

Something occured to me a long time ago that I never talked about. Not that long ago actually, but long enough to make calling it a long time ago feel appropriate. It occurred to me that maybe my Dad's goal all along was to make sure his kids didn't have kids. Would that mean that he wins if I don't have kids? But then I realized that first of all that is ridiculously complex of a double feint. Then I realized he is not smart enough to orchestrate anything requiring that much vision. Then I realized it didn't really matter anyway because if I do have a kid the lucky bastard will be adopted so he doesn't get my screwed up brain cells all up ins.

I guess I've been thinking about the continental divide a lot lately. I want to go back there. I want to go back to where the earth broke apart and I want to lay my face against the water and stand with my toes on the edges of sheer faces and think about how my heart would explode with bliss in midair if I were to fall and then bask in the glowing here after of a moment so full and heady left undone and swallowed in time.

It's just my day off, but my head is in another country. Not that it went there overnight, but it's been slipping and sneaking farther and farther away, but always coming back just early enough for me not to worry if it may have gotten lost.

I wonder if I'm lucky that I'm not dead. I had a dream about a fantastic geared machine. It was as tall as the side of a small house. Every gear had a photograph inside of it. Not a photograph as much as a photostatic image. Faces burned onto the faces of the gears and to protect them from the wear of the elements, because the entire machine was outdoors and built on the surface of a cathedral turned inside out, the gear faces were coated in slugs of brown glass that cracked under the strain of clinging for so many years. I don't know what it did. I didn't stay there long enough to figure it out, partially because the entire thing was making one hell of a creepy sound (the sound the joints of cockroach legs would make if one were stuck in your ear and flailing against the ear wax and hairs there), but also because the rust was gummy around chest level where someone clearly touched it and caught a sleeve and in all likelihood lost one or several fingers, but at least several centimeters of skin.

I'm not sure where I'm going. I need to see my old poetry professors. I don't think they need to see me though. In fact I'm almost certain they don't want to see me. It wouldn't help either of us to see each other. I feel like that's also true of a former best friend. It doesn't mean that I don't want some proof. I don't know what I would say to Jane. She'd say hello. I'd say hi. She'd ask how I was. I'd tell her how screwed up things have been. She'd apologize for lack of anything else to offer. I'd tell her don't sweat it and well.... fuck.

I'm not smoking. For now. Maybe that's the problem. I figure I'll save my money at the expense of further turning up the heat on my senses. I probably just need a hug and a couple shots. I don't know where my head's at, but it is having a fantastic time without me. It's like I woke up after drinking too much too early and everyone at the houseparty has pulled up sticks and gone off somewhere and no one told me where so ... empty nest? Maybe. More like I had a date with myself and I've somehow managed to stand myself up again and I don't get it. I thought we were in agreement.

=sigh= whatever. It's aggravating. I think I'm just gonna take my clothes off and ball myself up for a couple hours. Maybe get up later and write some more poetry. I had this great idea at work yesterday and I want to see it spin on its own and if it can't spin then I want to break it apart and see what's inside of it. Is it supposed to be so cold that your eyes well up?

I'm going back to new york this month. To get the last of my things. I'm not looking forward to it. But I miss my computer so God damn much, you have no idea. And my sex toys. But mostly my computer. It's hard to explain why I love. Through the years most everything else has been crushed, whipped, and burned out of my emotional spectrum. These days all I can do is love or hate. I sometimes wish there was something in the middle. But there isn't. I'm digital. Sad happy held digital boy whose head has gone back to Patagonia without him. Again. Now I give chase in dreams for want of touch.

///Hugo Maldoro - "I Know a Little Cuban"If Aguas De Marco had hips they would swing like this. If I wander around my mind long enough and find the clubhouse with the low fedoras and dim smoke parlors and enough palm fronds to set a tropic stage in a desert, maybe I'll see him playing dominoes at the usual booth with whiskey ice and cigarillos and a big watch with no batteries. Where did you go?