That Instant

You realize you are pushing your cycles and cams and pistons and engraved toothsets of finished brass over to force change so the person who loves you can see your moss and lichened belly clearly.

Over The Last Weeks

What we've learned is that we are not a multi-tipped novelty pen.  What each one of us does, all of our others are accountable for.

The pain, torment, rage, and (I am crying waterfalls and I don't want to) absolute hatred, are experienced because of what our others did out of kindness, compassion, sympathy, empathy, love, and understanding...

When I tell you I can't speak about something and then go on to speak about it- it's not a joke a or a hide to try to find something to target you for or insulate myself.  There is a cost.  There is a very real cost.  Often psychological, sometimes physical too.

I am terrified that if I "go into a shell" folks will think I've lost it or something.  I am, unfortunately, beholden to wherever my body happens to be and if that means it is in a cage that also means we are too and I cannot be in there with them because they all should not be in there.  When we are in there, rebellion is inevitable.  What is the only way out?  What is the one way they can each live their own?  It is not a dual blessing and curse.  It is unfortunate.

I am blending in and being as human as possible.  As citizen as possible.  As reasonable as possible.  It hurts tremendously to see that effort fall flat and be exploited  by some, it is ecstatic to see that effort be rewarded by some and flower into map expansions and discovery of new ways to exist and new ways that others exist and new planets and star systems and, fuck me, galaxies.  It is incredible to feel the weight of the sight of others frittering about on the 400 degree oil of life and ourselves, warming our palms near the electric coils, spreading stories of boogie beasts beyond the 60 watt LED light bulb in the sky because the truth is you have to stick close or you will be left behind.  Large enough to fry and small enough in the greater consciousness to slip right through the metal lattice and join the disposable.  Faulty.

When you finally get a chance to turn the music off and see pain for what it is.  When you don't have to protect other people from what you know you are.  Every damaged person worth their weight in time is worth listening to.  The songs are the same.  The cadence's are similar.  The verses are close.  There is a world spanning web of sunsets and sunrises and star anthems and moon odes and solar salutations and a disturbingly familiar scent to the blood that breaks away from a palm while you are trying to wash a glass and a reflect on the evenings high-points and the metal gush of the air mixes with the scented soap as it shatters in your hand for reasons you don't understand.

I have been helped by some that there is no way I can repay.  Literally, with the expanding fabric of life and space time (I've been over the calculations before) there is no way I can repay them before I or they perish, that is what's up.  They offered big and I took only what I needed from what they offered.  I don't understand why, attempting again and again to emulate that truth I continue to ...  I don't understand ... what am I getting wrong each time?  It's not every time, but when it goes poorly, it goes straight to the poor house!

I know I am not entirely sane.  I know I can learn fairly quickly.

I know I have to communicate better.

Everything is not okay.

The margin for error is small.

The people that I hold closest know.  Because we've been speaking with each other and developing language protocols through literally thousands of interactions.

It is unfair to expect anyone, outside of that set of individuals (not the ones I've met face to face or otherwise, for the longest) to know the language too.

What I've learned to broadcast is not ubiquitous.  Thirty two years on planet Earth, and we still have not been able to crack a universal code.  I don't mean to cry, but I am in tears that there is so much more work to do looking ahead to remain human.  I like it here.  I enjoy it because I can be like them and sometimes, when they are willing to play with me, they can be like me too.

I know my schizophrenia is a constantly evolving symbiotic organism (said through thick medication).  We understand it.  I understand it.  You're breaking up!



Please don't leave me!









Kill them all.

Please don't leave- kill them all.









I like to help.  Pay it forward.  Play when you can.  Know us.  If we can't play, say so.  We are shadows.  If you insist on addressing us as a galaxy system to visit, you would be well to address the star inside the nebula and the planet and attendant moon (if necessary) and... or just the comet.  You can also call the sign Hobbes.  I'm sure he'll answer.

The construction was developed over six years.  Before the period of the shatter, layers of designs were gardened to safeguard us.  After the period of the shatter, layers of designs were welded together to safeguard you.  I'm sure it'll answer.





Crews are at work, thirty four hours a day, reviewing diagrams to build a better future.

One spark at a time.

One death at a time.






LET'S GO!




///There's still a lot of work to do, if we are to survive.  We are game, if you are willing to play with us, just know: there are rules.

Commercial Pitch A43-1 "Great Day"

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Tow Sow Lax!  Keep on digging (tweezers sold separately, shipping and handling extra, cash and checks are not accepted).

That Instant

you know you're going to yak.

The Difficulty With Plural Being

There is a stark difficulty that faces harsh light when existing on multiple planes, the first being sudden hunger and damn near undeniable sleepiness that strikes at inopportune hours.  You can't remember with reliable accuracy the last time you ate, so you make up stories to keep the rest of the story in line.  Sometimes, though, they're accurate memories of eating denied with the fullsomeness of passion that denotes some kind of dedication to the farce and the enforced and necessary truth.

Social media contributes to the complication, making sign posts more difficult to spot, but they are there.  Multiple accounts in multiple names.  A multiplying outlet of personas allowing for better and more extensive development of those personas.  When does it operate to a fault?  Active contribution toward managing split personalities becoming a game of musical chairs?

Limit the number of chairs?  Add definition and resolution?  Or take the pills.  Fastidious compartmentalization.  And further compartmentalization and specialization.  To be called upon at will or at least with some prefabrication, editing, summoning, and purpose, because that is the difference between the ill and the capable.  The ability to select, observe, compensate, and respond in a reasonable and human fashion.

Everyone is plural, their "plural" being unanimous instead of fractured.

What happens when dominance is completely unpredictable, highly divided, and deeply embattled one against the other and prone, all the while, toward miscommunication?  Are there special exceptions?  Is there an "out"?  When do you have to press the hand dealt and keep the game going, come whatever consequences, and when do you have the right to put the cards down and say "this is what is here, they add up to nonsense in terms of what the rules of the game dictate, and I do not want to play with them, have no heart in them, and would like to be dealt a new set or at least counted out of this particular round, but not necessarily the game."

I think the long sentence is probably the grounds for the answer.  No matter how difficult or nonsensical the answer seems to me, the majority is fairly straightforward and a lot easier to comprehend.  It does not hurt that they are alike too.  I think that is one of the things that continues to vex me.




///The Echo Friendly - "Same Mistakes"

The Silliest Part About Dealing With Parents

You cut ties.  Awesome.  You had to cut ties because they gave you no other recourse.  Not so awesome.  The greatest thing though, the silliest, giggliest, thing about it is that you didn't have to burn their house down to make your own.  One step at a time, sugar sugar.  You're getting old, but you're doing it.  You're doing it.

I still remember winning the spelling bee when no fourth grader at P.S. 19 had beaten a fifth grader and all I got was the apple Ms. Smith gave me after.  I watched my little sister lose her spelling bee bid and they took her to toys r us to buy a doll, batman with the belt buckle that extended out and wrapped around foes and you pushed the button on his back and it would reel them in for a beatdown or snatch him up.  I saw knife bob and wanted it so hard, but she got her batman based on the first movie, was that Tim Burton?, and loved it and every time I saw her playing with hers it made me wonder if I did good enough.

Ain't no thing now.  It is.  I still think about that apple and wonder what they were trying to teach me in not taking me to Toys R Us.  I threw out the medal.  The pewter stunk up my nose and I got sick of looking at it.

P.S. 19, my favorite school.  Kickball and wallball, the two best games ever invented.


///Tom Vek - "If I Had Changed My Mind"    would I be here?  I think that's missing from work, official recess times.

Captions Less Pictures, Bagging, Girls, Cracked Year, and Making Time

I saw a zebra printed Cadillac coupe today.  I saw it coming around the S curve, my favorite turn in the road in the two mile city where I live, and I was in awe from the get.  "Who is so ballsy as to paint their car in zebra camouflage print and rock it like: this is how I always dress" is what was going through my mind.  Then it got closer.  The car had a blacked out grille, but I could see a Cadillac logo nested in there, completely blacked out.  I looked harder while it got closer and I realized it was going, far and away, over the 25 mile-per-hour speed limit for the main road in my city and there was another blue Cadillac in its shadow going just as fast.  That's when it hit me: "its a test mule!"

Sometimes car manufacturers will throw a new suspension geometry and engine and transmission underneath an old cowl and body work to shake it out and make sure it does what its supposed to do.  I thought that might be what it was, so I didn't go for my camera.  There are thousands of pictures of test mules and chasis that won't match when it comes to production or even car shows that are wrapped in zebra camo and it was nothing special, until I started to make out the lines.

The lines did not match up to anything I saw before.  Two doors.  Shorter C pillar.  Thin B.  A really long A.  The thing was going pretty fast, but once I could start to see past the clutter of the zebra print I knew it was something new.  I ripped at my pockets and threw off my backpack to try and find my phone so I could take a picture of it.  It blew past me, with the chase car in tow and I was getting ready to chase it down just in case the streetlight changed.  The lines were awesome.  Way better than the last Cadillac coupe, but the light did not change and it went on.  The exhaust note was kind of weird, but I'm sure they'll fix that in post.  Watching it blow away, I knew I would never see it again.  Possibly never see another prototype in action again, underneath the zebra wrap.  If I do, from whatever distance, I know I should get my camera ready just in case.  I don't know why I love machines so much.  I do.  I envy them.  So damn sexy.  So damn easy.   So damn difficult at the same time.

I was going to tell my friends about it.  The backlog of knowledge was overwhelming.  They're good people, but they wouldn't get it.  They wouldn't get it and on top of it all there was no picture.  What I would be talking about would be a caption without a picture.  I'd ramble on and on and on and in the end I would say something like "whatever, you had to be there." My heart shook watching it slip by like a knife into skin.  The thing itself was so beautiful.  Once my brain resolved the lines of the machine, I felt like a cheetah caught sleeping while a gazelle pranced on by in a giant Sunday flower hat on its way to church.  Missed meals.

I'm not bagging on myself though.  It's the first time that's ever happened.  It wasn't a mule.  It wasn't a prototype.  It was the body design that will probably see production.  I guess part of me just wanted to be as cool as everyone else who breaks photos on the car blogs and magazines.  What it brings me to is bagging on things.  "Baggin."  Where does that come from?  I found myself saying it the other day after thinking about something I said earlier to someone.

It's the writer in me.  When you know you're a writer, you think about what you thought about when you said what you said and why you said it that way instead of another way.  I don't count myself as a writer anymore.  I see myself as a tool.  Sometimes as a tool and sometimes as a tool.  A tool that sometimes produces.  Maybe I'm just a producer.  Hah, no.  I hate producing.  A tool that generates?  Yes.  I'm a generator.  Autonomic generator, that's as far as I can take ya, do you wanna be a part of, oh yes, yeah, I'm on it.

Bagging.  I thought about it way too much.  Bagging.  To bag on someone.  Bag on something.  The Urban Dictionary was no help.  What I think it means, as I've understood it, is to understand that what you are going up against is not at all what you wanted or needed and so you bag.  You bag your street clothes because there's no work to be done.  No actual work.  Bag your street clothes.  Whatever was thought to be done was already done or otherwise not doable, so bag your street clothes because the minute you get there is the same minute you know you didn't need to be there.  Bag your drugs.  The minute you get there and get a feel for what's going on you know you didn't need to be there, but you are, so you might as well enjoy the time you've already set aside.  Get to a good place and everything else will follow for you.  Maybe not for them, for you it's golden.  Bag your expectations.  Bag 'em up.  Bag 'em up.  Take them home with you and flush them down the toilet when you get there.  Bag your lunch.  Remember how they said you were going to eat good when you got there and lunch turned out to be finger sandwiches and punch and sandwich cookies?  Nope, because I brought my own from home and I gotta tell you this chipped ham sandwich with springs and spicy brown mustard and pepperoni tastes so much better than.  Bagging.

Hedging is bagging.   Hedging is bagging with a backhand because everyone knows when you're doing it.  Everyone knows, once you bag, that you came in with low expectations and those expectations played out.  It's not an insult to get bagged on.  If anything, besides an insult, it says your friends love you enough to show up at all and your enemies did too.  To see you fail, maybe.  Faces get scarce the older you get when life changes veins.  We all know that.  Most of us know that.  At least make their ticket fee worthwhile.  It's not easy to bag.  Sometimes you have to take a chance.  Everyone bags sometimes.  Sometimes bagging on someone or something is as simple as making back up plans or coinciding plans so there can be an ejector seat button that lands you somewhere more comfortable.  Nothing wrong with bagging.  Most of the time.

Girls are crazy.  I'll just say it.  They are.  I sat through a very long exposition about how some other girl was going crazy and kicked people out of her house even though it wasn't her house or her right to kick anyone out (I would have felt the same if it was a guy doing it and relating the story).  While she was telling the story,I kept remembering all of the times she went ape shit while we were hanging out.  A diagram.  A verbal diagram.  Ladies take note.  They don't teach you this in college orientation.  They only teach the rape threshold.

1 drink: Guys) alright it's official.  Girls) Did I get my ride home set up?

3 drinks: Guys) what time is it.  Girls) oh my god, why is no one dancing?

6 drinks: Guys) games? how about yes!  Girls) i feel sick.  this is the song I requested!

9 drinks: Guys) game two, muthafucka!  I rule you.  Girls) this is fun. I'm having fun.  Can you see my tits?  I can see my tits.  I bet he can see my tits.

11 drinks: Guys) game two, I'm up!  Girls) what are you guys playing?  Can I play?

14 drinks: Guys) game three, I'm in.  Fugg that.  I'm winning this round.  Girls) You look great, what are you talking about?  Oh my god, I go to the same place!

16 drinks: Guys) hah, no way.  what he should have done in that fight is... Girls) oh please.  That's bullshit.  You're better than that.  Have you seen my shoes yet?  They're discount, but...

22 drinks: Guys) no, let me show you.  Okay, okay, okay, let's finish this.  We're too grown up to fight... unless you want to.  Girls) [throwing up and/or passed out.... if not the latter, forward to the next...] I'm tired/want to go home/what time is it/i'm fine {not fine}.

24 gender war

Girls are crazy.  It was simply hilarious though, hearing a woman rail against another about her behavior at a party and it was a kettle calling the pot black.  I kept snickering while she was relating the story and getting really into it and painting her as this kind of horrible villain.  At the same time, I was thinking about her moments and she's a fiery girl too.  It was beyond me to try to explain to her that she did the exact same things except she was hanging out in my place and there's no way to kick anyone out of my house so she left and tried to kick her boy toy out of my place by proxy, but the attitude and acclimation that I have is: if you want to stay you can stay; if you want to leave you can leave.  It's that simple.  Feel obligated if you want to. If you don't then don't.  If you're invited in, you're in for as long as you want to be.  I'll do what I want and you can do what you want and if you over step I'll let you know.  If you don't over step I'm good too.  It might become uncomfortable for you and that's fine with me.  I'll be comfortable.  Do what makes you.  If you don't like it, cash out.  No one's holding you here so don't feel obligated, because I don't.  Girls are crazy.

I miss my crack year.  It was fun.  A couple bars closed near me.  You'd think they'd have the courtesy to let their patrons know.  I miss the not knowing.  The not knowing where you're going to get it.  Those were the original adventure times... hold on... gotta change to headphones with better bass response... not knowing where you were going to wake up, but knowing who you were going to wake up with because there literally was no one else.  I loved it.  Still do love it.  We're not low lifes.  Don't put us there.  Every night was time well spent.  Now it's like those plastic chatter wind up teeth, except you're sitting on them.  They're in your chair.  All wound up.  Every time you get up to do something, your butt holding them fast shut, they go off.  CHA CHA CHA CHA CHA CHA CHA CHET CHET CHET CHET CHET CHET CHET CHET CHATATATATATARATATARATATATARATATARATARAATARATARAT.  Wish they whispered.  They don't.

They go ritttttereretetetet and I second guess what I'm doing and wonder if I could do it better breathing it, because some things I can.  I don't know if that makes addiction.  I don't want to know the answer.  I just kicked paint.  That was harder than kicking rock.  Bad things, really bad things are still too fresh in my head from kicking it.  At least with paint everything got super buttery.  Like, seeing light, sunlight, made me taste green butter buds with fuzzy tips on my tongue when I saw leaves of plants and leaves of flooring interlocking.  Endless energy came to me like I was whispering into the ear of Zeus himself when I was smoking.  Something above and away beyond cannabis.  There's no replacing that.  I wish I could, but there is no way beyond it past pretending it never happened.  You sit on that set of spring activated teeth and they don't go off until you stand up and then doubts crowds in hard and fast.  Hundred million ----ing strong like a riot where your brain meets your mouth.  How your ears get hot when you're about to fuck except it's right there in the back of your skull where you can't scratch and you know if you did itch it the entire thing you are trying to do will treat you so good you will never troll craigslist again looking for the desparate night flyer fuck to help you feel better without the peace between your lips.  Fuck.

I miss the time I spent already.  Only 4 years removed from abuse.  4 years of being myself.   4 years of knowing how to be and who I am and how to enjoy and how not to be.  Her name came up in my head today.  I was walking.  It came up right after I saw the zebra and I was thinking about one times.  I'll live it down.  I will.  She was nothing.  I like to think  I got lucky.

Growing up fast.  I will give his name that shall never be spoken this one credit: he once said to me "you didn't have time, or you didn't make time" that was before he beat me for not cleaning my room.  It stuck with me for different reasons than.  What it taught me was that sometimes you just have to make what it is that you want.  If you're always short of coke by the end of the week and have to go through the hassle every friday, what you should be doing is budgeting out to double or triple up your order.  If you keep running out of fresh fruit by mid month, you need to buy the unripe fruits and mix them in with the ones ready to eat so that by week three you're golden.

A little planning goes a long way.  You will find a way to make time for the things that you want.  You will make time.  What you do with that time is debatable.  Once you have that time it's a matter of control.  It's a matter of control and liberation because that freedom comes at cost to your doorstep and there's no way to flip it for profit out of the gate.  Photoshoot?  Writing?  Sleeping? Everything that you paid to get that time free bears down guns blazing,  Which bullet strikes your heart is not up to you.  At least not as often as the wounds would love it to be.

Life is viscous.

Life doesn't care.

Life is what you can make out of it.

Life does not turn the other cheek.  Ever.

Don't kid yourself.

Love yourself.

Never.  Ever.

Lock yourself

into fear.




///Hot Chip - "You Ride, We Ride, In My Ride"  its out here I may find my reasons for.  ...  found some distance.  The distance that I needed to be... whatever the hell it is I am supposed to.  Still figuring it out.  Ghosts have returned.  Hallucinations.  I want the simpler times.  But where you're going you never really come back from.  Some of you comes back.  A little bit always stays out there.  I just wonder when the numbers run over years what it is that adds up to.  How far away is it do you have to stay to make sure everyone else is safe.

Steady As She Goes

Remember what that used to mean?  I do.  It used to mean taking the highs and lows in stride, but not to so much the taking in stride as cutting straight though the thick of the wave and coming out the back side and surfing her straight into dusk.  Straight into the fall and the winter of the upcoming crest.  It used to mean a lot more than it did before it became a platitude.   Not that it's a platitude now.  I guess what I'm saying is that steady as she goes is a bad way to describe the circuit of this ship.

Right now, I would place it somewhere between an oxygen fire in the vacuum of space and a flat spin dizzying enough to make the sublime a Picasso'd afterthought.  It's terrifying in the same way a car accident is serene in the seconds before contact, except those seconds are stretching out days instead of seconds, weeks instead of days.

Steady as she goes, though.  All flame and wreck and how many souls can she bring down with her as she spirals into a sun?

It's the wanting that is tearing.  Shearing bolts and bulkheads and turning bodies like soil and plow spades, succumb to forces and forced things.  Do not kill.  Do not see.  Do not hear.   The touch of force like a kiss from a stranger who knows your one sided name.  And no why.  No why ever offered.   It's thrilling and numbing and begging.

Waiting for another break and it arrives unannounced and unheralded and reasons for people to question never come up, but choke up like a batter for an infield single and everyone sees it coming except the pitcher.  It's been tough.  Songs for getaway car single shot thirty minute production reels.  Everyone needs commas.  Everyone needs comas.

You want it both ways.  I want it both ways.  I want the privilege of mistake.  I want the forgiveness and the forgiving to see me in the light of a human being flawed by default and on the same hand I want the respect and the conversation granted to the sound.  I want what's coming to me and mine and I want to fight it at the same time.  I want answers.  Sometimes I can't sleep at night because I keep asking myself "why me?"  I keep saying that over and over and it would be so convenient to point to some kind of god or chance or a version of determinism with some kind of optical illusion at it's end.  The best I can point up is some kind of medicated psuedo goodness.  Some kind of hard parsed commonality or functionality.  Is that enough?

What ever is?  Am I going to kill myself is a matter of convenience and circumstance.  When I'm sure I'll be sure,  Is all I can say I won't be able to write some kind of flowery death note.  I hold my loved ones, and they do exist, no more hostage than anything or anyone else anyone or anything else can hold a thing or person dear.  It burns me that things can be that simple.  That simple and that hard.  I guess that's what becomes what burns me so hard.

That a person can want all of the rights, all of the allowances, of personhood and still be counted as damaged and warrant of special circumstance and consideration.  It boils down, a little bit, to I am just like you staring I am nothing like you dead in the face.  Because I want with all of my heart to be just like you.  And I know I'll never be.  Do you know how special you are?

Do you know how special you are now?

How about now?

Okay, well, how about now?


///War - "Me and Baby Brother"  everytime I hear this song I think of fifth grade and all the growing up I had to do and how I took my siblings for granted and how we stole from eachother constantly, but lately I think about all of our adventures and misadventures and I think if I ever have kids there will be a two head minimum because every dog may have its day, but what is a day without some belloved arse you'll be forever linked with to share it with.

///Skrillex - "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"  ...for I am just like you...

Admissions, Missions, Poor Planning, Hobos, and Caught Out

So I didn't plan this particularly well.  Not as well as I could have.  Given my circumstances and propensity for utter restlessness.  I'm in a position where I'm dying to hit the road and run, but I just finished a six pack and I know if I go outside right now and try to do anything, my judgement will couple up with my reckless streak and I'll end up punching a hobo in the face in a train tunnel by the river and possibly getting shanked.  Nobody wants that.  Especially not the part of me that likes to not get knifed.  All I can think about, well not all, but most of what I can think about is getting out in that humid cool air and sucking lung fulls of it.  Then again I have to keep in mind the mileage I put on last week and make sure I rest my hooves enough to do it all again this week.  So maybe, not poor planning.  Maybe out smarting myself while out out smarting myself.  Or just poor planning.  That's easier to say.  I'm about ready to jump out of a second story window.

More importantly though I had to go in and delete some blogs.  Projects I had a vision for that never panned out.  Sometimes because they were joint efforts with other people and the other people never put in the effort and they metastasized into additional solo projects I couldn't support on my own along with the things I was already doing on the regular (and subsequently killed some of the regular efforts I was bending myself to in the brief time I tried to do both).  It is kind of tough to admit.  Sometimes things just don't work out anywhere near where I expect them to, which is why I am reluctant to do anything with anybody anymore.  Not that their real lives tend to take precedent.  Or maybe they do.  I have no real idea why anyone stops.  I know why I stop and start.  I just don't see those same reasons being relevant to others.  Not that I'm unique or anything like that.  I'm just unique in my limits and strengths.  No, I'm kidding.  Experience has taught me that is the case.  My perceptions of myself, however, may vary.

They went down easy though.  I downloaded the ones with enough content to want to reread them at some point.  Revisit the prisoners of the digital infomatic time capsulator 9000.  I glossed some of them as I downloaded and reviewed and decided yay or nay for axing.   What was lost is not worth going over explicitly.  What survived is a pair of joint efforts with the real j chen.  One not touched in forever and the other edited more recently than I expected, but still a year out from today.  I owe it a call back at least.  Wait and see, maybe.  A wait and see kind of deal.  The other survivors were all things with names I could pick up and immediately begin rebuilding or re-purpose, restructure, and give new life to, in light of new efforts forthcoming.  There's still Fingerslip (the long gestation writing space), there's Hateitalready (which will be repurposed from a place to rant about new products I hate already into an infrequent comic I've been putting off forever, but have wanted to do for easily three years now), there's Simplelongingundertow (which will be about sex and strictly so), and then the Encyclopediamechanica (a store house for made up tech stuff I want to have available to myself and searchable primarily for story construction and resolution of timeline continuity issues, but available to the public because sometimes the best parts of stories are the gadgets and I want that to be documented... assuming I can write and produce something worth reading and reviewing and delving deeper into [adding a richness perhaps I otherwise could not achieve on a short story budget... I dunno]).  Thems the survivors.

The mission becomes not letting myself get as caught out as I have been.  Focus.  Hocus focus were to be the names of my cats if I got a pair, but I didn't.  I have been a little bit caught out.  Caught between reading and reading up on old movies by watching them and reading up on old stories and rewatching (more like studying and breaking down) films I have enjoyed and disliked and plot lines I have enjoyed and passed off as trash and scripts.  A lot of time has been spent plotting and planning to the point of compulsion.  A lot of time has been spent, yes, dreaming still.  That is probably one of my top five primary functions.  Dream composition.  Now it's time to start making the faces and planes and points and lines intersect.  They're all there, even though I'm not always.  I had a thought about the sky being the limit, which is patently false.  What I came to was that the sky is not the limit, but the sooner you understand that, the sooner you can get to working toward putting yourself in a position where that might actually become the case through some luck, coincidence, and connection.  I glass ceiling implies a glass floor somewhere.

Anyway, the point is, what do I have to do to get laid in this town?  And more importantly.... you know, I don't think there's a second part to that.  At what age do you just forget about getting laid altogether.  Cause that shit is distracting.  Can I skip to that age?  That spot in the timeline where it's not even that you forget about it, but it's that your genitals transmogrify from a point of expression and emotion and even, sometimes, source of soul and self into little more than say a plumbing fixture or decorative coaster.  What I do know is that one of these days along my life span I am going to wake up with super powers and the world better hope I die before that day comes because I will be the worst superman ever.  Can superman even do crack?  Does he have to do supercrack to get an equivalent high?  I know there was that one superman movie where he got drunk, but seriously, if he went to a bar he would have to drink the entire bar to get drunk.  Unless his powers only apply to mechanical elements.  musculo skeletal systems.  Worst super power ever.  Or just not a great movie.  I don't know.  The point is, stuff is going to get did.  Because the stuff not getting done is gone.  Also because if things don't get done I will feel terrible and listless and end up down at the docks again fighting hobos.


///Aphex Twin - "Waxen Pith"  think time

The Ice-stache (grow one for your own safety), Hotwheels, No Age, and Serial Commitment

So I'm taking the next step toward building something to get me closer to making the writing I want to be able to make. Not necessarily the next step toward it as much as a reanimation, reorganization, of the effort. Partly, I want to get more from short stories and I can't expect to get more character development and practice from trying to cram more into small jars. Not that I haven't enjoyed the challenge and sucked at it and succeeded in parts and pieces (by my measure), but it presents problems with having a job and other things to chase after that are life necessities not granted. I have to step into something that won't force me to make endings where they don't belong and rush souls into bodies, and while there are people to animate and worlds to create, I have to give myself time where time is all too often short. And I need the pressure of show and tell to push it forward. The answer? Serials. One chapter at a time. The thing is, I can't even press myself into that old trap (I did once and it worked out well until a stretch of weeks where work overtook time available to chop a story into chapters and commit to staying put at the pen and paper to force out entire chapters, because, let's face it, not all chapters are created equal, so some days I could sit down and bang out a magnificently lengthy, but appropriately so, chapter and others days I couldn't because I had to go to bed at some point or stop to get ready for work, and things simply would not resume the same flow and grip it had when I left it and I ship wrecked myself repeatedly between the start of one and its end.

An organizational thing. Maybe show and tell is not the right motivator. It's hard to systematize it. I guess, part of it is that I don't trust myself to continue. I'm sure I could learn, at least I think I am sure that I need to force myself to learn. Learn the low lines, the high latency, and it's benefits. Put less pressure on myself and shift that strength of worry and fear of failed completion into something more positive, more enduring than the eye crossing, tongue chewing, wind sprint of watch hands across freed hours to produce things less panicked, scattered, and hit and miss spiny. Actually, as I'm talking this over, I think the best commitment to make may not be a serial one, but a commitment to development with fewer showings. Going farther down the rabbit hole is by necessity a thing that divorces a person from constant communication and seeing little dividends every day in views is encouraging. Encouragement is fairly impossible to come by. I envy the people that can get it often. So, in doing this I would be giving myself fewer opportunities to enjoy the little pats on the back, but I would also be putting myself in a position to work longer and more thoroughly on everything.

It's not a question of motivation anymore. At first it was. At first it was overcoming the fear of being connected to the things I do that I am passionate about that people might not agree with or could say "wow, you're terrible." I'm comfortable with that now. Have been for a while. Motivation came up when I lapsed for months and swore off all communication because I didn't feel like it. I couldn't feel it. I lost touch with the worlds in my mind and couldn't care to find them again, until things fell apart and I realized they are one of the few steady states, though changing, one of the few places where I feel myself all of the time. Anywhere can be learned to be home, but within my head everywhere is always home and it's like pulling up a chair with old friends I love and love to hate who know me and talk to me about things and we mull things over and they ask me about you and everyone else and they love and kill and do things I wish I could do and sometimes I do things they wish they could do and it's a back and forth that's so much a part of me I completely took it for granted for a while until I was utterly miserable and realized what was missing. It's not a question of motivation anymore. I have to engage it deeper and add taking care not to let the reduction of constant connection to a couple times a couple months get to me (it's not like I connect with people everyday this side of the bridge). Then again there will still be this in between to keep me company so it's not all bad. Not even half bad. Just not the conclusion I would have drawn this time last year.

Consider it a year end retooling of the factory. The final sessions of congress in a year that's not quite closed yet in my head.

Which takes me up to the ice-stache. So I'm walking home and it's a good 25 minute walk if I'm not running on most of my cylinders and my nose is running. Which is fine. You get used to it. Working in a cooler for hours a day, you can't rub your nose every single time it runs. By the end of the day you would have a red coke nose-ish hole in your face where your nostrils should be and then when you got home you'd have to deal with that junk all night only to go back to work in the cooler to repeat the process and get so nicked up about it that you end up putting a hole in the wall (that you'd have to fix) or putting a fist sized dent in your locker (that would probably get you suspended for a week and assigned to anger management when you got back [not that a week off from that crap would be a terrible thing, but I sat through anger management classes three times before and it's more of a pain than nursing busted knuckles and wrecked up wrist bones). You get used to it in the Winter.

The best thing about letting your nose run though, is that if you don't want to be talked to while you're out and about, letting your nose run is the best way to do it. People either assume you are a badass who does not give a fuck or are too retarded to realize your nose is running and therefore would not acknowledge, understand, or participate in a conflict along understood, predictable, or reasonable manner. Not to say that you wouldn't still get mugged by a coke head or someone not looking for reasonable conflict that sticks to standard rules of engagement. Which is why you can't just let your nose run. You have to make sure you are outside long enough for the snot and the condensation of your breathing against your upper lip and stache crystallize into ice and grow into a full on mustache of icicles. Then you are not just careless, retarded, devil-may-care, but you are also tough enough to be outdoors for long periods of time, possibly under dressed, with people and places you need to be that demand you be there regardless of the mode of transportation and that, potentially, these people will be looking for you if you don't show up when you said you would, and maybe you won't respond to threats and maybe you're late and have already had it up to your eyes with the weather, and walking untold distances, that you will absolutely blow up at the drop of a half smoked cigarette or suspicious footstep or even a "hey you" if you are kind enough to respond at all. So ice-stache it up. Worst comes to worst someone might yap at the back of your head, but all you have to do is turn around with your viking face on for a second and who wants to deal with that at any time of day? And then keep walking, because the only thing more certain to produce a fight, than engaging idle talk, is staring at groups of individuals when the only thing at stake is their bogus sense of pride. And after all, it is half past two A.M. and you still have a ways to go.

Hotwheels are amazing, by the way. Walking through stores and seeing the blue displays doesn't really bring me back to any particular period in my life, but I love cars. I dream about cars. Next to viking ice-staches, cars are awesome and every time I see them I want to know what exactly, which car exactly, is being modeled to scale and whether or not I can add it to my garage someday. Half the time it turns out to be some dopey made up car with ugly body work and funky orange tinted windows for some reason and chrome wheels in enormous flared wheel arches that pretty much touch the apex of the A pillar and the whole thing makes you scratch your head and wonder who thought it was a good idea.

Then every now and then, the thing that makes you stop and look every damn time, you stumble across a model of a DMC-12 DeLorean, or a Boss Mustang, or a bright blue and white Yenko Camaro, and you know you'll never make enough money to own them. You see a 240z in that hotwheels orange and blue blister pack and your eyes go wide because someone thought that fair lady from the 80s deserved to be forever immortalized on some lucky kids shelf and if you had a little less sense, maybe yours. You could have them all, and it's not at all about saving them because they might be worth something later, it's just to have them all in your fantasy garage made real, in a way, and be able to stroke the body work and see the curves from every angle you will never get to see them in person, quite possibly for as long as you live. It could be there, just for you, for a scant two bucks. That Ferrari GTO, right there at your fingertips, right there. You can feel the speed and feel the air slipping by the rear views and splitting away clean across the spoiler. I don't know when I'm going to outgrow hotwheels. Quite possibly never.

So that's it for now. That and there will never be that party that makes me feel my age. At least not in a physical sense where a person is like "oh my god, this hangover is too much. I can't drink like I used to." I already had that sense of that party where I was like "wow my beard is way thicker than the pubes any of these people have ever experienced in their lifetime if they never shaved them at any point between the time of their birth until now" and my beard wasn't even that thick. I definitely had it in terms of "wow the music I remember fondly in the club is all music by artists that stopped making music before these people owned their first discman. Oh wait, they've never even held a discman before. The hell am I doing here?" I also definitely had it in terms of overhearing fights and thinking "really, is it really that serious? Don't they have bills to pay or something?" But in terms of raw "too old to throw down..." never gonna happen. This old panther still has moves that'll make your mullet spin. That's from venture brothers. The best cartoon action series, possibly ever.

Let's work on it as we wrap this year up and catch up with the rest of the Earth. Orbit adjustments aboard the good ship.


///no song today. just some thought.


///just kidding. music is life.


///Paul Murphy - "Soul Call" This jazzy jem from Paul Murphy always makes me happy to be alive to hear it. It was a dead heat between this and Aphex Twin's Girl/Boy Song. Maybe next time around.

Cheesus Christ, Does Nothing Work?

I'm sorry I've been away. Less sorry than usual. Only because I've been away because I've been working and not because I've been furiously masturbating. It's been hard. The living. The being aliveness of breathing. Not the breathing part. That part is easy. What's been hard is trying to have a continuous thought when bells go off every fifteen minutes. Remember that book about that society that suppressed creativity by fitting every person with an apparatus that sounded a chime every five minutes to interrupt thought and render it's populace unable to create new ideas? No? Well that's what it's been like. A lot of "gotta put bread on the table" things interrupting the "gotta put bread into my skull so I don't check out of this world on some aneurysm shiz".

I've had one of those days. Not really one of those days, but one of those days stretched across an entire week. One of those days where you come down the break room stairs after sitting for fifteen minutes that flew by in a blink because you fell asleep in your chair watching infomercials about magic brassieres and magic belts that will force your body to do things you haven't taught and practiced or considered that maybe your body just wasn't meant to do for any length of time and you go to get back to work and realize, picking up your box cutter that you left your mug of tea upstairs. And it's going to take you another five minutes to go back and get it and your legs are too dead for yet another trip up those damned stairs, but you are already dead thirsty and have to weigh which death is more unpleasant.

One of those days where the fattest jar of the smelliest pickled peppers in piss yellow juice slips out of your clutches because your hands are cramping and every single paper towel dispenser is empty because the people responsible for keeping them filled never do their jobs as well as you do yours. The mop bucket is at the other end of the store, another five minute round trip on sleeping hooves, and when you get there to fill the mop bucket there is no floor soap and the other fluids available would take up the spill and stink right along with the wax finish. You take the bucket and get halfway across the store before you realize its got a flat and you are utterly baffled as to how a plastic wheeled yellow tank of a bucket could have a flat before you realize a thread of the mop came loose and lodged in the wheel and, instead of plucking it out, the bucket was filled and dragged around for weeks, maybe months until the wheel turned into a plastic orange wedge, and since you were too tired to notice it sooner you've left a scratch on the floor several dozen yards long.

You walk the bucket back and have to pick it up and hug it's black stained, deli grease streaked body to yours because walking it back on the floor would double your error. Selecting a new bucket you walk it across the store to the opposite slop sink and find that while there is cleaning solution appropriate for the task, someone was so kind as to snap off the knob, rendering the sink into something more like a flushless urinal, and so you walk the bucket with soap back to the other end of the store with the working sink and wonder why they would bolt the soap to the wall instead of making it possible for you to take the soap to the working sink and prevent having to do the routine all over again, and why the hell you would need a manager to sign off on throwing out a broken bucket in the first place when they so rarely use them they wouldn't know if it was broken or not and can you really not be trusted to make a simple judgement like "a three wheeled bucket is no longer useful."

=sigh= sometimes nothing's working for ya. And by the time you get back to the shattered jar it's been tracked up and down the aisle. By your coworkers. And you wonder how much time you'd do if you just killed them all and called it a day and a win for humanity.


///The Chemical Brothers - "Surface to Air" take flight and forget the world even exists... what i want to do. but its the only outpost in this sector of the galaxy and my ship can't take me far enough to reach the next one. so we keep in touch.

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.

In the Back Woods and Friendship Tugs of War

Well, I've been gone for a minute, but it's been something of a stroll in the backwoods. The creepy backwoods that are often not to be strolled until the circumstances demand some sort of outing and the only reasonable place to go where you can't be bothered is the back 9 of the mind. Keeping a good clip with poetry. A minor defeat of writer's block that has allowed some things to flourish. I haven't used that word in a while, if at all. Flourish. It has a certain pirouette to it that has to be reserved for unique measures of success.

Success in the face of nightmares. Actual nightmares. Actual moments of the involuntary bridging of dream and real states. Of seeing what is there and what isn't or at least shouldn't be in the same instance of breathing and having to close my eyes and repeat after me "you are safe"s. If repeating is believing. I guess that's one of the reasons why I don't believe in heaven or hell. I've seen them both and they're not what anyone says they are supposed to be. I've been to the end of the world and it's nothing like what we've been told is it? Few things ever are. If I smell a little like death it's because we've been bedfellows on and off recently. A flirting couple that knows neither is really committed to anything serious, but when is play ever except when it is?

So we've pumped and ground and made and done and life has gone on for less and worse and better and blood. The organs still pump and the sound still comes in fountains and so I continue. I continue on in the backwoods and little leaps to foregrounds until, I have come to convince myself recently in the train of reasons to reason in, the day when my life transposes from discrete experiences into a singular piece of poesis. A perfect and sustainable solid state. And then I'll happily call it a day. Not in a bid for immortality because immortality is only to memory and human memory will never break the solid state barrier (so even immortals are no more than incarnates), but in a bid to have become. I suppose there are probably many things I am becoming, but to have definitively crossed that boundary of becomingness to the hell pots of posterity is a thing worth aspiring to if there is anything worth shooting for. Call the stars, or the moon, or glory, or whatever. Incarnations of the become be damned. To have is to have in some way shape and form held in hands so often dropped in emptiness. To have gripped, and not let go even in whatever can be termed death.

There have been joys in the backwoods. Joys tasted rarely in and the travel has been hard and light, but worth it in some ways and a waste in many others. And I don't know why I am trying to see this in two points of view. Oh wait I do! Friendship tug of war. You can pick your nose. You can pick your friends. But you can't favor one person over the other though they both know you in pathetically thin terms. What the hell does it matter, you idiots? I mean really. Can we all just grow up a good four years and call this bullshit a day. Not to rant on so silly a topic. It's just aggravating. Neither one of you could really keep pace with what I'm up to so what the hell difference does it make. Both of you would probably have nothing to do with me if you knew me to the fullest possible extent so can we please all just get along by the terms of the established sensibilities of isness? Probably not.

I have got too much to run from to ever fully open to either so what can I possibly be expected to do when I can't even begin to describe what can be reasonably expected of myself. How can you love anybody when you don't love yourself? Well, it's kind of easy if you try. Just kidding, it's impossible, but still- what the hell. Are my choices really to go hang with the one person who always lies to me and makes assertions they can never back up and keep trusting in them and keep getting screwed up worse than I am, or is it to drag myself across town to hang with someone who has no idea who i actually am and will be put in a weird situation when he does. I guess the one thing I do have to consider is that I shouldn't presume to know people I - don't know. Simply stated. So maybe it's worth a shot. Maybe it's time to bend the orbit a little bit and come in close enough to lay some mathematics and calculus to a potential short rendezvous. Haven't used that word in a while either. Generally reserved for important things. Like scenes from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Elegant things. My staff of scientists are not elegant or important. Their idea of a delicate landing is detonating on the surface. They didn't do so well in school, I guess. If shithead A gets a shot, I think it stands to reason that potential decent friend B should also get a shot to play the table and fit into my arbitrary and ridiculous set of rules for friendship that, I swear these people do exist, few people can seem to fit into. I miss those people a ton. I guess the stupid thing is they'll never know who they are. If they did know they probably wouldn't care what it is they accomplished. Alright I'm gonna pipe this down as I'm making myself slightly depressed. And by slightly I mean massively. It's been a tough week. Sorry I've been away.

Well anyway, thought I would drop off some graphics. Because what is a road trip without photographs. There are things that live when you sleep that do not sleep as you are living. They wait for you to come on back. Come on home. One more time. You'll not leave this place alive, but you can try. You can try for old time's sake. We'll give you a fit and running start. See how far you go before we are there, sucking the lengths of string of your calf through your heel like fine noodles through a straw of shredded skin. Don't stay up too late.



///The Black Angels - "Mission District" You can sometimes hear it. You can always feel it when it comes beating on your heart like a death threat. You will write or you will suffer in ways you did not know existed, but will become intimately familiar with. And you do it. And you duck away into the grass and you listen to it beat it's way farther along and then it's gone and you can't really tell if you saved yourself or if maybe the entire thing is coming around again and this time at an angle you did not know was possible and maybe you'll hear it. You'll certainly feel it closing in, but how much less warning will there be next time?

Po Mo Meta Strikes Again and Lost Keys

I've been busy. Trying to keep up my end of 7 straight days of growing pains and metallurgy and using my brain hard enough to make it cry uncle and develop traumatic locker room bully memories of its own. This is not to say that I haven't had a few moments of quiet and also a few moments of utter emotional seizure that sent me running for cover to ball up under my blanket and rock myself to sleep. Yeah, that happened. But it's okay. We can't all be that bad ass from that one movie all the time. Or even some of the time. I have my flashes.

In one of those moments I was out in the park with a friend (good company is one of the few things that can get me out of my apartment. That and having nothing edible. And even then, that's enough to get me like 150 yards away. Just far enough to nab some eggs and cheese from the store. Good company is rare though. I'll go far for that. Sometimes run. Well we were talking and what I've realized is that the bubble is very large. No wait. The world outside the bubble is very large. I was referencing college and the sheer massiveness of the world outside of a campus and the interlocking experiences and attendant frameworks of interpersonal exchange.

12 hours later was when the brick I threw up came back down and broke my skull open and the idea came running down the side of my face. I'm not free. Still not free. Not even close. In fact I am so deeply chained, what I have understood to be freedom has practically blinded me. I'm not talking about the retarded discussion of citizen's rights, or what it means to be an American, or the bondage of physiological death marching on, or determinism, or fatalism, or any of that super global ridiculously wide in scope stuff. I mean in terms of things as simple as "I want to go to X place at Y time to do Z. So I will." I guess it's been so long since I even had the space to collect and exercise free will at all I lost sight of the scope ... not the scope... the spectrum of freedoms.

It's a different kind of bubble. I'm still learning what I can do. It's like when I have to figure out how to walk again some days except it's a bit bigger than that. Like learning how to make a fist or teaching your left hand to do things to make your right hand's life easier. No, it's not even that. A little bit bigger. When that thought hit I realized that I'm still interned. Still incarcerated. It's just that I'm out of the torture and modification wing of the center and I've broken a window (with a little help) and now I'm in the yard, but there's still a massive gate and fence around the yard and on the other side of that fence are more cells and then a visitors yard. Now I can get access to that visitors yard and its nice to see familiar faces, but I've got so long to go.

It's post modern slavery. Or maybe just meta jail. Kind of like super jail except nothing hilarious or awesome happens. Everyone starts out in meta jail. That's why kids hate being kids. I'm sure part of them knows they're basically post pre modern slaves. The original slave. The adolescent. But eventually as they get older their parents give them the keys, sometimes right off the bat (and then they run out and do a shit load of meth and die and self correct the problem... haha no, just kidding. that's awful. and also not self correcting), to the cell doors and then the yard and then the rec rooms and the visitor center and the white trailer with the rose tinted curtains and the kids keep the keys. I never received my keys. They're lost. Permanently. So by the time I'm supposed to be 40 and in possession of all the sets of keys a 40 year old should have, I will instead have a pair of bolt cutters and a cloth wrapped shiv and maybe a few pilfered i.d. badges and a square of carpet to throw over barbed wire. I'm still in fucking meta jail and I didn't even realize it.



It was a depressing thought. A depressing realization. But that's what industry is for. I just have to keep digging and cutting. Maybe if I do gain actual freedom before this is over I won't shut myself down. I don't know yet. I still have a ways to go on this record before it's complete anyway. Plenty of time to think about it while I work. I thought about people that get to enjoy the luxury of doing what they love so much that they end up hating it some days. That must feel nice. Better than doing what they could care less about so much that that... I just wish I had my fucking keys. It's not that I think things would be different. It's that I know they would.



///Bjork - "Domestica" ... where have I put my keys? Beautiful song. Beautiful lyric. Beautiful time to get some rest and try not to worry too much. The mirrored mirror of po meta anything can be quite claustrophobic sometimes. Which is why you should always keep a brick in your back pocket.

Yikes. Oh Wait, Everything's Still Fine

Well, the hit parade came to a punch drunk halt. And my relationship with my job has also been resolved. It's fallen back into just another place I go and do stuff and wait to come back here and live again. Which is nice. Disappointing, but nice. It was a great honeymoon Both things coincided. It did, however (I'm littering balled up conjunctions), let me see what is possibly the only upside of sending and spending people to University study: it puts them in direct contact with similar people. Even if not similar, people possessing the capacity to understand human complexity, or maybe just ... ah whatever. Universities are full of people who do not have that capacity, but if you need that and have the money, it's where you'll have your best shot of connecting with the world and a purpose and those kinds of people. Which is neat.

I thought the internal interview went awesome, but what I realize now is that not answering the questions with made up situations no more complex than See Spot Run with Little House on the Prairie moral endings means the HR woman, who more than once asked the same question, was not understanding what I was trying to say. I should have picked up on it when she said "I don't understand how the conflict was resolved with the coworker," after I explained that through introspection I understood that my disagreement wasn't between the coworker and I as workers, but between my ethics and her practices and as such only needed an attitude adjustment on my part because, according to the union agreement and policy book, she wasn't technically doing anything wrong by not staying later than her shift regardless of the amount of work still left to be completed.

I've got to learn how to lie on these things. Or learn how to get into situations specifically to create simple answers to questions like "talk about a time you had a disagreement with a co-worker". Possibly both. I think the next time I'm at work I'll just throw cans at the manager and then we can talk about why I disagreed with his right to life and then we'll resolve the conflict by... no that's too complex. I can't even orchestrate the dumb two dimensional conflicts I'm supposed to be getting into. At any rate, it's nice to know this position has gone as far as it will so I can relax and poke around for something that pays a little better and let's me use my brain parts as much as my hands, and what's even nicer is that it's not as ridiculously urgent as when I had to punch out of New York or die.

Waking up today has been alright though. Took a personal day. I can get away with three of them every 90 days without getting written up and having a little sad is as good a reason as any. Also duct taping a butcher knife to your back, going to work, and stabbing the shit out of everyone and then beating them to death with a 15 pound chain and lock while they bleed out is probably a good reason to stay home and have some self reflection too. All of us talked about it and the consensus is that it's their loss, some of me more angrily than other parts. It was kind of funny hearing the collective gasp in my head and the one that said "see told ya" when I opened the email with the bad news. It probably also didn't help my chances that the Ass Mngr butt into the room I was interviewing in over the phone and spent several minutes loud talking at me how he was upset with me for having an interview instead of finishing my shift and banging around the office for several minutes before leaving in a huff. So I'm glad. Yesterday was way too good for too many reasons and I'm still feeling high and it's a thin world out there, but I'm okay with that. I'll find the depth I want eventually. In the meantime I'm gonna lace up and keep loving this Pittsburgh weather.


///David Bowie - "Space Oddity" "...here am I sitting in my tin can far above the Moon / Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do..."