Knowing Where You Have No Business and That You Are Expected On Occassion

You don't have to front load everything you say.  You don't have to translate at the end either.  You may be coming across better than you believe.

One of the most hilarious things was the whole "they took our jobs" rhetoric at the last election and the come back that they're doing jobs we do not want to do.  The funny part was my challenge.  It's a matter of geographics and debt.  I took the challenge knowing that.  Just to see.  Because they were taking our jobs here too, right?  What I got back was paperwork.  It's a little bit a lot of bit hilarious.  If you cannot laugh at that, you have no soul.  I still get email updates on it, but I am passed caring.  Yes.  Passed.  English, the most, hands down, complicated language.

My relationship with America?  It's complicated.  And I am dating myself.  And I am dating myself too.  We wreck up sometimes.  Slang for fight, no?  Yes.  I do not agree with everything we do.  I do not.  Sometimes I am on damage patrol.  Some times I am on altitude control.  Sometimes I am just sometimes and I am, having learned, not apologetic because people do get tired of sorrys and start to ask "why the bleep do you not just do it better?"

I will not give you the run around.  I'm just American.  I'm a little gangster circa 1925 and a little modern circa "what's the date today" and a little 90's grunge and a little 80's synth, a little bit of a late 90's "get money" and a little 70's rhythm and blues, a little bit of #$%^'n disco and a little bit of late 80's space rock, a little bit of 1960 fuck you and a little bit of 1950 be easy and every one is working for something greater because no one actually wants to be here, and a little bit of drum and bass tongued in with a little bit of pop talked down through the ages and distilled and reanimated.  I'm just American and I will make no excuses.

And I will fight you.  And then discuss.  And then fight you harder because I only wanted a breather and we may as well butcher language in the mean times.  They only get meaner.

I wish I could get along with people like me.  I cannot.  I am not going to stop trying.  It is a little bit of playing with where you know you have no business being.  And you know it.  You do not understand why you are excluded.  There are the times you are expected though and you do not show up.  To reverse the two would be gold out of lead.  Less cameos.  More booked seats?  I have no idea.  What I do know is this: if they ask you if you can make it, you had better go.




///Pulp - "Like A Friend"

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.

What Makes You Laugh 2

This cracked me the hell up yesterday.  As a kid I always had trouble with math.  I remember sitting in the temporary trailer classroom in my AP history class.  It was near the end of the year and the teacher was taking some of his sick days.  He may have actually been sick.  I don't remember.  He was kind of an intense guy.  Everywhere he walked he walked like he was walking into a steady fifteen mile an hour headwind.  He couldn't have been more than five foot six, so the combination of the fast and choppy gait and the constant forward lean he rocked combined to create this Charlie Chaplin silent film physical comedy that left people giggling in his wake.

Advanced Placement history was hard enough, but he wasn't there he would leave worksheets for the less than competent place holder substitutes.  There was a steady stable of substitutes so the substitute you had for German two would in all likelihood be the same one you had a few weeks later for chemistry.  Their job wasn't to teach, it was to keep order first and foremost.  If you learned anything while they were there it was incidental.  The worksheets were usually word finds and other time killers.  I don't know why they didn't just pass out crayons and blank paper.  Wait, I do know.  The number of people who could keep themselves busy inside of poorly airconditioned trailers without devolving into the chaos of recess could be counted on one hand.  Maybe two.  The worksheets that time around were math problems.

I sat near the front.  Parents orders, and there was the standing threat that they might check up on you at any moment and if you weren't there or sitting where they told you to sit there would be a body tax to pay when you got home.  So I'm sitting near the front with this xerox of math problems that's faded blue because school infrastructure updates itself about as often as government infrastructure.  Are those basically the same thing?  I don't know why I think of them as different things.  Maybe it's just the division of public and private that happens so glaringly once you finish high school and realize there was a private system when you were just a pint too, but you were light years away from it then and student loans come preying as soon as you can make that decision yourself.

Anyway, I'm sitting near the front and getting nowhere.  I got beyond the first few algebra problems because they were easy.  I remember getting stuck on this problem that had X and Y on both sides of the equal sign and I was going crazy trying to figure out who the hell would torture someone with that kind of difficulty.  Just start off with the Xs over here and the Ys over there, but how will the children learn about life's complexities if they can't fit the building in their heads?  I couldn't.  Half the classroom was, by then, devolving into a dozen different conversations and spoon fighting and pencil fighting and laughter everywhere and I'm just trying to think because I was told if the worksheet was finished, I could start my homework.  If I finished my homework I could go outside as soon as I got home and the faster you could get out of the house and go play and ride all afternoon and not be around the dead air in that building and the anxiety couched inside the better off you were.  Can't get into trumped up trouble if you're not around to get pegged on made up charges.

The substitute teacher came over after several minutes and asked me if I was okay.  I said yeah, of course, just trying to think.  Turns out I had my eyes closed and my head on my desk and I was rubbing the worksheet on the short naps of my hair and it was making this paper on velcro loop sound that was loud enough to distract him at his desk.  I liked the sound.  I didn't like being interrupted.  To me it was really soothing.  It was helping me focus and draw away from the noise of being there and the difficulty I was having and it kinda sounded like the noise the wind makes when you're in a car with the window down and it goes fwoosh by your ear.  Beautifully white noise.  As soon as he snapped me out of it I couldn't get back there.  I ended up making little drawings of airplanes for the rest of my answers and turned it in at the end of the day.  The answers didn't matter that much.  Check, check minus, check plus.  It was mostly a way of taking attendance.

Yesterday though, I was in a similar way.  I couldn't get the windows I was working on to stay up.  I spent hours reading up on the product.  I installed them correctly.  Insulated them correctly.  Nothing over tightened, nothing under done.  There was a slight bowing, but it shouldn't be affecting the sashes the way it was and it was driving me crazy.  Every time I adjusted them I had to take the window out of the frame, adjust the settings, put the window back in and test it.  Hours into this I began to zone out and go over all of the steps I covered over the last few days, from demolition to installation to fine tuning to the now.  Going over the entire ocean of knowledge accumulated over that time and evaluating each nodule for a potential mistake.  While I was doing the sun went down.  There were no blinds in the window.

Sometimes to help myself think these days, an extension of my head rubbing habit from yesterday, I rub and cup my dick.  It's not a pleasure thing, but it kind of is.  Hearing the sound of the paper rubbing against my skull and feeling that movement and motion put me in a good place to think straight.  I don't rub things on my skull as much anymore, but I do enjoy rubbing my crotch when I'm trying to figure out and navigate particularly difficult things that require brain power.  I guess when my bodies happy, my head is freer to roam.

So I'm standing in front of this window, staring blankly into space and eyes defocused to the point where all I can see is my vague shilouette, while I pound the details of why the hell nothing I'm trying to do with the window sash springs seems to be working, and one hand all the way down my pants cupping my cock and bulls and giving them a little go, and it comes to me:  it's vinyl!  If the screws won't work and the springs cannot be moved or adjusted manually, just shim the frame in and that'll create the pressure to keep the window from falling on its own.  Eureka!

I break out into this massive grin and my eyes come back into focus and I look through my reflection into the darkness beyond the glass with my dick in my hand and the sixty something year old neighbor two yards over is scowling directly at me with a cigarette in his hand with a look of disgust so intense I have not seen anything remotely like it since the last time I "disappointed" my dad and was there face to face to see his closed mindedness   It was hilarious.  My brain immediately searched its data banks for the universal sign language of "oh my god, I was not jerking off to you just now!" but it came up blank so I just carefully took my hand out of my pants, turned off the light and walked out of the room... into the next room over which also had a light on... so I pretty much hid behind the wall of the door until he finished smoking and went back in his house.  I laughed so hard I almost pissed my pants.  Speaking of which I once pissed my pants outside of a bar and the guy who was my ride wasn't done yet so I had to go back in and sit down at the bar and my pants made this ridiculous squishing sound and I had to explain myself.  Not a single person there was as upset as that guy was standing out in his yard yesterday night.

Cracked me the hell up yesterday.

A Sense of Urgency (or The Real Reason Black Men Don't "Get Ahead")

So I'm at work and I basically kill it every night. Sure I'm a little hyper. Sure they probably think I fire a couple lines into my brain before my shift. Whatever, I don't care all that much. One thing that happens in the disincentivized environment is that the only reward for a days work is the satisfaction you personally derive from putting in a solid days work becomes its own reward. That and the paycheck.

Where was I? Oh yeah... I'm trying to keep this tight... so I basically go in to work with the perspective: I am going to destroy my work load today. I see everything that management does as a direct challenge to my capabilities and every single work day is staked with taking their expectations and ramming them down their throats. "So you think I'm going to struggle with X or Y, well check this shit out: I'm gonna set X on fire with how pro I am and Y is gonna get put in its place like a redheaded step child and go tell its friends about how badly I kicked its ass and its friends will rue the day I show up to work 'cause its gonna be on from the second I walk through that front door."

Which brings me to why black men, aged 18 to 40 will, by and large, never get ahead. They're way too busy trying to convince everyone that they're unruffled. It's beyond "too cool for school" or "too cool for pants that fit" or even "too cool for rules." It's this projection of well in hand that, more than anything else, fires flares of stupidity in all directions. Well, not even that. It's not about being on time, or late, or clothing, or rules, or education. More than anything else it's this projection of such super lensed self consciousness that is so tightly clamped around their throats that you just want to shake them and scream "will you wake the hell up!?"

Maybe it's a symptom of the layers upon layers of stereotypes that are, essentially, the new slavery. Growing up beneath that burden and governance can turn the most capable human being into a club footed clown. I feel bad for them. Well alright, I'm getting loose again and dropping a lot of "wells". Let's refocus. I'm training this kid and the equipment I'm trying to explain to him is located in a lot of different areas and we have to keep criss-crossing to see the things that I'm trying to teach him about and so much time can be killed walking too and fro so I'm walking at a little better than my usual clip. I walk like I need to get somewhere unless I'm just getting lost for the sake of forgetting the world. Time is short already, without adding in the burden of having to stop and explain everything I'm doing, so I'm making tracks and this guy is just lagging.

I have no idea why. There's no one else in the area except him and me. There is no one to judge him or make fun of him for walking fast. There's no one to make fun of his pants if he tightens them up so he can actually use his gotdamn legs for ambulating. Is he worried that he might get made fun of later or that I'm made fun of for moving so quickly and speaking fast and sure? I have no idea what his problem was. I get where I'm going and the whole time I'm thinking, well hell if he would make an attempt to keep up I could explain more shit to him en route instead of having to do it all onsite. So I get there and I have to wait for him to come moseying along.

I'm all for taking time where time is available, but for the love of God when you're on the clock will you pull up your fucking socks for once and act like something more than whatever the hell you fucks are into is worth showing up for? No, I don't always want to be at work. No, I am not always buzzing at 100 miles per hour. No, I am not best friends with management, but fuck my life if someone is paying you to do something then do it right and do it on time and fuck image. At some point you have to just say to yourself "I do not care what the rest of my peers think of what I'm doing because THEY DO NOT WRITE THE CHECKS THAT BUY ME FOOD OR (insert whatever thing it is that sustains your well being).

I don't know. I guess I'm venting. I'm sure there are exceptions because I know some of them. But until we get over this weirding thing we're socialized and typed into we are going to have a black history month that says to the rest of the world "hey, we do stuff sometimes too."

Idiots. Give me two of this guy I'm training and I'll have half the output I need. Disappointing. I'm sure he's a great kid too. But personality by itself does not get shit done.


///Goldfrapp - "Deer Stop" pick them off, one by one. There is no urgency among them.

P.S. it really is just sad how self... self... what's the term... self reciprocating? I sware it's like an entire segment of the population is involved in this recursive loop. I'm no social climber, but how is it that the things I view as standard are viewed among them as exceptional, strange, and ridiculous. So mad. Retards. When the world ends, they're all going to die like lemmings. Worse than lemmings. Like deer before intelligence. Why is intelligence so eschewed???? I need to relax. No I don't. Obviously it's not just them, but I feel among them this weirding thing is most rampant, rooted, and disgustingly viral.

Worst Song Ever, Part 2:

Worst song ever # PKHM8989JJ3QK5 Oliver Lieb - Subraumstimulation:

Imagine, if you will, a computer. On this computer is a sentient piece of software. This software has access to a library of drum sounds. The software's only reason for existence, is to increase the size of the library by recombining the drum sounds playing those sounds, recording the sounds played as new drum sounds, and then recombining them on and on into infinity. Now imagine that the computer on which this software is running has the utterly massive storage capacity of a single floppy disk. Are you seeing where I'm going with this?


Now imagine also that, by sentience, we are only talking about amoebic sentience; something maybe 8 bits more complicated than on and off. But majestic things have been done with tiny processors and tiny storage, you retort. Now imagine that the software has to learn more complex things by doing them. By the time it can even begin to create anything more complex than what is already in the drum sound library its down to its last handful of free space to make anything compelling. You leave it alone to run for a while, much longer than necessary, but who knows, maybe the ghost in the machine might pull something incredible and unforeseen out of its binary ass.

You come back and play what the program made, but the computer itself is so ancient that there was no space in it's memory to code a cue slider, so you have to listen to everything the software made to get to the interesting part. Several minutes later the moment of truth arrives after listening to numbing variations of the stock drum sounds and then in the last 20 seconds of the longest 5 minutes of your life it does it!! One single extra asynchronous beat mashed in.

And then it's over.



The only thing missing from the whole experience was a nice bucket of wind chimes and some vaguely sensual vocals ripped from the Turner library. If the Hal 9000 ever decided to host a dance party, this is what he would have come up with. BPM should not be mistaken for quality. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but they're more often than not pretty damn close to being so.

dear (______):

Dear Savage Garden:

You know that song you made called "I Want You?" Yeah that hit that almost made you into a one hit wonder. That one. So two minutes and forty seconds in, what the hell happened? I know tribal chanty beat breaks were all the rage, but putting one into that song makes about as much sense as female circumcision. Check minus.