Small Victories

Of course I can't help asking myself "what's the point?"  A lot of times I have to remind myself to live life for myself.  Do it for you.  Sure it would be nice to justify your existence on the basis that someone else needs you, like a kid, or dying family member, or very close friend, or lover, but they'll move on or move away (or die) or meet someone even nearer and dearer and that's okay.  Do it for you.

Sure, sometimes it's difficult to love yourself.  Sometimes it is even more difficult to care about yourself because it feels selfish.  No one is going to do it for you.  When we look in the mirror and laugh with ourselves at how strange we are and ask who would want to live with that, the answer is right there: we would!  Do it for you.  It doesn't mean you don't care about anyone else, or couldn't give a damn if society and civilization as we knew it fell apart.  It doesn't mean that we don't empathize and sympathize with oppressed peoples and sufferers of injustices and the caged subsets of this country and all the messed up things happening to them.  It doesn't mean we are wholly callous and willing to say "screw them, I got mine, I'm fine."  Mind that you can't build your life around someone else's fight.  You'll wear down faster than a clutch plate made of wax and find yourself torn apart at your seams every single day.  Give a damn, but give a damn about yourself too.

Lying on the ground, having spent the last of my saved money on a replacement leaf spring hanger for the one that rotted out on my truck (that I will have to saw off since it's riveted to the frame and I can't afford to pay a mechanic regardless), staring up at my ceiling fan I was thinking "what's the point of saving money if it vanishes every few months whenever something bad happens."  The next day, I opened my fists, put my hands behind my head, watching the fan blades go, and it occurred to me that there has been an improvement through the years.  It used to be living paycheck to paycheck and unable to afford food.  Just beans and rice and beans and rice and beans and hotdogs and beans and chicken and rice and hotdogs and PB and J.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, but able to afford better food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, and not having to worry about food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, not having to worry about food, and being able to afford auto insurance.  Then paycheck to paycheck, no food worries, auto insurance, and able to save a little.  Now it's crisis to crisis, no food worries, and auto insurance.  Sure, it's better than paycheck to paycheck and not as good as being able to save for the future in a meaningful way, but life is decent between crisis level events (like having to empty your savings account to pay for bandages or truck parts and specialized tools or new sneakers because the soles fell off your old ones or a car battery).  Small victories, ya know?

It kind of goes back to my ethos behind writing once I realized the industry is basically geared to be self congratulatory in some kind of messed up ways that make any sort of climb outside the construct largely an exercise in blind luck and volume: just do it for you.   What's the point if no one will ever read it, if no one likes it, if it's never impactful, recognized, or coherent.  Do it for you, care about its pursuit because you do.  That's all you really need.

Of course, I'll forget this answer in time.  Toss and turn about the meaning of love, and lost relationships doomed to fail anyway.  I'll slip into self loathing.  The little voices that are easy to ignore when life is fun and in balance will turn into roars and screams and shouts and flying sparks "kill yourself! kill yourself! kill yourself!" and I'll drown them out with music until I can't play music loud enough and I walk out into the woods and scream at the trees "what is the point!  I can't succeed at anything long enough to make anyone's lives better or build a family of my own!"  Then I'll remember, living for other people is not what we're built for.  We are built to be alone, to live alone, to love alone, to ride alone.  Can we live with others?  Sure.  We won't succeed for long, but it's possible, we've seen it, but never expect much from that thread of being.  It hasn't, and may never develop within you.

Do it for you.  Part of me still remembers my cartographer's mandate.  Do it for you and because someone else may be seeing and going through the years you've seen for the first time and may be just as bewildered as you were.  "If only there were some sort of mapular object to help me know what may be coming next."  Most of all, the point is, don't waste your time trying to measure yourself on other people's scales at every turn.  A successful day for some is a nice date, or driving a few hours to see a buddy, or dinner with their spouse, or closing a deal, or a raise, or whatever makes their white picket lawn and dog.  For now, for you, it's taking care of your job, exploring some ideas, taking care of you, having a few laughs, and not killing yourself and that is just fine.  Don't forget that.  Do it for you.




///Phonat - "Ghetto Burnin (Mmmathias Mix)

Scarification

I am very much looking forward to finishing the bear paw/lens on my left hand.  When I started scarification it was in part a way to feel more complete.  A way to match the inside with the outside and unify the kingdom of my body and mind.  A way to talk without saying a word of the anger and hate that refuses to go out.

Years later, I am happy still to have the daily reminder because without it I would forget and there are things that must never be forgotten or glossed over.  The older ones were there for a warning and also for a reminder.  I do believe I've been familiar enough and known enough that they serve much less in the capacity of a warning and much more in the capacity of a daily reminder to never go back.  No matter how desperate.  No matter how ... imagine a perfect storm of circumstances ... no matter how "that".  And I'm glad because without them I would cycle back.  A daily hard stop.  I'm glad my occasional congeniality shows through too.  85% of the time, I'm alright or able to figure a way back to right 100% of the time.  15% of the time, probably more, the outcomes are not at all acceptable.

I am really looking forward to finishing my paw.  It's going to be a ton of fun slitting things open and the entire attendant processes.  The thing that makes the difference and turns the key over is the performance of the hobby and valve check in a positive light.  Happy reminders.  When I started it, the thing began as a reminder of the power and ability to destroy.  That whenever I picked up my left hand, whenever it touched me, whenever it touched anything, there would be a constant reminder of the terrible abilities it had.

Drawing the tattoo, the scarification in that region, to a close is going to come with a lot of happiness.  Completing the drawing is going to be a constant reminder of the good power can do.  The terrific beast that requires a constant leash can close its teeth to create, not only destroy.

My father still populates my dreams sometimes.  I really did think it could be possible to kill him there and eliminate him completely.  Not entirely true.  Around the fourth time that it happened, him popping up in my dreamscape without reason, want, or control, I realized, snapping awake that my circuits have replaced spiders with his face.  I'm laughing because I used to be an arachnophobe and when I would go prancing in dreamland, more often than not if there was something I was supposed to wake up for, my factory would dump spiders into the dream somehow and I would snap awake.  Until I conquered my fear of spiders.  There's not much that hard lines me to full alert these days beyond him within 10 feet of me.  I suppose I'm stuck with that cardboard cut out flag for hard stops until I stumble upon something else worth fearing.

It's kind of funny the way it happens too.  It's not horror movie sudden.  The wickerman starts appearing and eventually I just get so frustrated that I wake out of dream states.  I wish he was dead already.    Life would be much simpler and free flowing, more so than now.  Patience, lily pad.  Patience.

It's not raining on the pleasure though.  It's going to be a fine afternoon when the stars line up and there's time to make the incisions and time to allow them to heal up enough to make good utility of the hand afterward.  It's gonna be swell, it's gonna be swell.  I'm looking forward to finally starting the smiling portion, the "because it's what I want" portion.




///Basement Jaxx - "Hot & Cold"

What Was Meant and What Was Done

I have a hard enough time sleeping at home, let alone sleeping in other places.  Always believing I am going to be raped again for passivity or robbed or worse.  They're coming for you.  They always are, it's just that sometimes you get to see them coming and sometimes you do not.

I'm not afraid of death.  That's silly.  Everyone dies.  Everyone suffers.  I've gifted you the daylight hours so stay out of my evening.  Is simple enough to say.  Much more complicated to live by.  Why is it necessary?  A matter of control?  To an extent.  A matter of provocation?  Also, to an extent.  Consider it a dictation of terms.

If I am to die, let it be beneath a sun.  That's not asking too much.  Constantly hunted, can a body be blamed for wanting a reversal of roles?  Outfoxed the ghosts.... this time.... not really.  Still outside.  Every time I open my front door they're there.  Monsters underneath the bed, if you will.  Acceptable terms of endearment.

I don't understand.  Call me atheist or call me fractured.   Or call me by my name so that I know you are and are not a glitch trip.  I'll appreciate it.  I may not say so, but I'll appreciate it.  I may not say so because I know they're listening too and watching too and it took them some years to be vocal as they are and a division had to come or risk carrying on with, for lack of a better term, phantoms.

Paranoia has been nibbling.  I've been thinking very long and very hard about a reasonable solution.  What we came to was, this year, we will wear a straw woven hat.  It'll look good on me.  And that's something!  Something to roll on with.

No one means to stand watch all night.  Everyone breaths a little easier knowing another one has passed and the weapons can be laid down again because the sun is a very very very reliable and undeniable night light.




///Sneaker Pimps - "Wife By Two Thousand"  mr. noename

What Is and Should Not Be

I'm pretty sure, fairly certain, that what I am is asexual.  Ambivalent to any and all ranges of sexual encounters.  Does that make me some kind of freak animal?  No.  Does that make me open to any and all sorts of encounters?  Yes.  Does that make me bored with sex?  Also yes.

It also makes me very disappointed and disinterested in every and all things involving sexual parts.  Interest peaked?  Sure.  Able to love, again, sure.  Able to participate?  Also, again yes.  With enthusiasm?  Of course.

I understand the artistry of it.  The mechanics of it.  The connection as well.  What I am attempting to define is the isness of sex.  I can no longer participate in the action and experience the subtexts of it in a meaningful way.  Meaningful being defined as a further connection or a connection that helps define a further relationship.  For better or for worse I do believe I am evolving into an asexual state.

Monotone perhaps.  Evolution not necessarily meaning some sort of higher or greater sense, but simply a thing not defining the current state.  Every attraction being a curio and nothing more, but being something and meaning something more than the cellar dweller slut.

Maybe meaning something more like "yes this or that feels good, but if an inanimate object could give me that on occasion I would actually marry it and talk to it and have tea with it and sit and watch television with it and adopt a child with it and help he/she learn how to play baseball with it and introduce it one day and explain the birds and the bees and the birds and the wind to it and disclaim immaculate conception to him/her while it sat on a chair beside us" kind of way.

A relentless pursuit of violence through love.  Where that one is divides the ground by gashes and swathes of earth scorched and the question persists: "can you live on this, because I can go lower?"  The question persists: "I have seen the floor and seen yours, are you ready to hold hands and see how deep that rabbit hole goes?"

It is difficult to rake the years and every time we hang out I cannot understand why you did not let go too.  I wonder for seconds if I did something wrong.  I want some times to attack the people you call home because they know nothing and I read them right and, if not, can at least scream to you that they read me wrong and the only thing protecting them from me is you and the respect therein and the laws they built their bullshit on and the same laws keeping me from spilling guts and skating toward the door on intestine.

No one is as intense in person as they are on paper.  That's simple fact.  Give me one day of freedom.  True freedom.  And everything done on that day will remain inside those 24 hours.  I will make tracks and make tracks, and close loose ends, and if you need more than 24 hours to catch me, tough luck because the statute of limitations says so.

I am plushy.  Everyone needs.  Everyone wants.  Each and everyone has something to forget.  Sometimes it is easier to erase everything else than make edits.




///Fergie - (Clumsy)       "...some day, we'll have a two car garage, a tea nook, and a butcher locker..."

Plight

The most terrifying thing about disease is that you know the best you can do is stay where you are and maybe pretend to be more than you are upstairs sometimes.  Some things remain intact.  Some things continue to degrade regardless of what you do.  It's not fair at all.

It's difficult.    It's difficult watching everyone else continue to accelerate and knowing you can be as good as you want to be at some things, but other things ... nope.  The best you can do is hold ground.

I want to just say "fuck that."  I can't.  I have to at least try.

Yes it is easy to fit in.  It's easy to stand out for the wrong reasons too.  There is no blame with respect to bad wiring to be laid.  There's some, but it flows both ways.  I acknowledge that.

It is undeniably heart breaking though sometimes trying to externalize what they're saying to me.  So we drunk to dull the blunt force of conversation.  It's an airbag and a stand in for pills that lets me socialize more than I like to, but not less than I need to so I'm not swinging from my neck outside my front window.

It's a trade off.  To tear off the mask is not appropriate at all and will land me..

... I don't know how to describe it.  Rape me once, shame on you.  Rape me twice, I was probably asking for it.

I will say there's nothing to fear because I learned a few several things.

There are many red zones.There is not one me.-000000000000000000000000000888888888qq0--------------211qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq



///Sage Francis - (The Buzzkill)    ...by analyzing the past, Sage can project into the future..,

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.

Year End Playlist 2012

The music that made life a little easier to comprehend through 2012.  I told ya I was gonna put it together.  Got my "nyaahhhhhh" face going.  But seriously, this is what brought me through.  Instead of going by statistic logging I decided to go with the actual tracks I flagged through the year.  Sometimes the song you listen to the most is not a real indicator of what hit you the hardest.  I really do believe this is an accurate reflection of what punched my heart in the nuts through last year.

Dec  RJD2 - Moonlit Skies Go
Nov Skrillex - Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites Go
Oct Lo-Fidelity Allstars - Valentine Boast Go
Sept El-P - Stay Down Go
Aug War - Baby Brother Go
Jul Bjork - Pluto Go
Jun Aphex Twin - Waxen Pith Go
May Tosca - Oscar Go
Apr School of Seven Bells - Loveplay Go
Mar Starkey - Eris Go
Feb Kinny and Horn - Sacred Life Go
Jan Paul Murphy - Soul Call Go

This is the official tax return for 2012. The books have been, after a fashion, balanced. Five months late, but better late than never.  I feel pretty good about it.  Making next year's list, I can already bet on it, will be Death Grips.  I know I'm behind the curve of music, but I don't care all that much.  I'm just happy I have time to digest everything that comes across my plate as thoroughly as I care to, and that's what's up.


///Death Grips - "Guillotine"  ace high, chuck

Wrecks, Dreamland, and Reconstruction

I went back to the scene of my car accident tonight.  Dreamland has been corrupted.  I keep having a recurring dream about it.  Cruising through dreamland last night I built a house of a little more than normal proportions.  My friend Matt and his buddy Ernie called me up after I finished eating lunch (sardines and fried centipedes... it actually wasn't that bad... all the legs and fish ribs were super crunchy inside the perogies).  Tom was there too.  Finished up eating, and the phone rang so I got up from the indoor beach with the five foot wide tv perched over the far water and went to go let them in.  Put on my fleece robe and tossed Tom the remote.  Walked down to the freight elevator and closed the gate and punched the ground floor.  The elevator went all the way down past the mech garage.  I had my bright red candy shell finished R 29 with extra plate and F990 shoulder mount long barrel with aftermarket cooling fins parked right beside it and it was awesome watching the light glint off of it.  Sometimes I spend days on the scaffold hand polishing it's entire body when I'm not joy riding it through the clear southwest desert night sky.

The elevator went all the way through to the floor and then ten feet below to the car garage and hillside entrance.  It's a short walk to the door and I let Matt and Ernie in.  Ernie asked me if I remembered going to his place the night before and showing up at three in the afternoon.  I said no.  I didn't.  I wasn't lying.  He asked me if someone hacked me, but I told him I wasn't online at all yesterday, but it's possible I might've caught something because I was online the day before pretty much the entire day looking for some rarer copies of an Ultraman graphic novel I used to have when I was a kid, but can't find in my library anymore.  He laughed.  That was probably what might've done it.  Matt offered to hit me up with a few patches to make sure whatever it was that wiped my memory didn't get passed around while they were over.  We took the lift back up and they asked Tom if I was a little off yesterday and he said "definitely."

I don't know why he didn't mention anything to me, but I guess that's what good friends do sometimes, and he's probably used to my oddness and figured it was the usual fare.  Or at least, the Tom I constructed and built into the dream did.  I told them we were out of sardines.  Because we were and if we were going to hit up the bars later it would probably be good not to over do it.  I don't know where the extra beach chairs came from but by the time we got back up to tv room they were already there.  We all started talking about whether or not we would blaze on our way up to the Silver Tusk.  I have a pretty sweet mech garage so there're plenty enough for each of us to blast out to the exosphere and dock at the Silver Tusk space station in geocentric orbit above our heads.

And then a giant tan sedan crashed through the wall behind the flat screen.  It blew it apart and was going so fast it skipped across the water and bit into the beach.  As soon as it touched down it started flipping and parts began whipping off of its underside like a pipe bomb built and stuffed with three foot long aluminum fence posts instead of nails.  I was standing behind them and it rolled right over them and chewed them up into meat before my eyes before a door came zinging off while it spun and I woke up with that door heading straight for my neck.

Every other dream since it happened has been like that.  No matter how I construct it or if I let it play and go along for the ride, they keep ending with cars careening through and killing everyone in one way or another.  So I went back to the place tonight.  It was weird walking up the off ramp.  I tried to think about what that kid could have been thinking that morning walking between the off ramp walls.  There's no where to go on either side.  If you leap off the far side of the corner it's a good ten foot drop.  Off of the inside corner there's some grass, but cars come much closer to the inside of the turn so your chances are much slimmer of even having time to react or think about jumping.  I like to drive in wide and then turn in tight and let the car bleed off speed while it grips in.  He was lucky for that.  If I came inside he would have been through my windshield.

The mark on the far wall when I swerved to avoid him was nothing tremendous.  It was mostly a tire scuff maybe a foot long at most.  It didn't speak at all to the damage done to the car.  There was no traffic tonight.  I walked out to the middle to pick up a piece of my bumper that was still there.  Just a shard.  I don't wonder why he ran away.  I would have too.  Was he daydreaming?  Did he want to die?  Was he just high?  Crouched there I started to remember when I was younger and I walked into traffic trying to get hit on Forbes avenue.  I wasn't particularly upset or anything, but I was ready to let my life go.  No one would hit me.  I did it again a few nights later with my eyes closed and I distinctly remember a bus blowing by me so close it spun me around when it brushed my black hoodie.  I wasn't upset, but I was impossibly trapped at the time and finished trying to figure out how to pick that particular lock.

I'm still putting my body back together.  From the car accident and the fall down the two flights of stairs and the bike accident (which was my own fault, just pushed my bicycle too hard after having it laid up for most of winter and a too cold spring).  Two hours a day of rehab work getting my back right.  A lot of my power comes from my torso and I messed up my hip and tailbone pretty ugly.  Nothing broken, but the deep bruising and muscle strains took their toll, but I'm getting back to a point where I can consider running again and hitting the weight room hard.  The reconstruction, the process of it has become consuming.  I was at a point where I could mess with whomever I wanted.  Sure, I didn't win every scuff, but I had confidence in my bones and tissues that spoke to having a decent shot as long as I wasn't piss drunk.  Not so now.  There's hesitation now.  There's memory tape now of the waking up in pain and not being able to sit up straight even in a well made chair.  Not being able to breath because my sternum hurt so bad.

My body is gathering force though.  Regaining moxy and it's difficult for me to have my limitations still in view.  I keep having internal arguments with myself shouting "don't do that, you're not ready yet."  And myself shouting back "or what?"  But I know what.  Humiliation, failure, more time lost in recovery.  What the reconstruction has also done though, is forced a new view upon me.  A new way of going about conflict. Handling passions I can't always contain effectively.  War bringing peace, in a way.

More than anything, I want so badly to speak to that kid face to face now that I don't want to skin him alive anymore.  I want to know, and I want to tell him I forgive him.


///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Smash and Grab World"  looking to the stars on a fucked up night.  Year end playlist is still in the works.  Just five months late.  No worries.

Ramping Up

I have been ramping up to this, and I have been a little bit absentee as well.  Side by each.  It has been tough getting back to here.  Circuitous. Among other words and expletives.  It has been a very difficult cycle of days.  I do not know how else to place it.  Everything is back where it belongs.   A lot of argumentation internal.  It catches up with you and before you know it you are dying while still breathing.

It;s been tough though.  But what hasn't?  Production has lapsed, but what is avoidable?  Art is up however. Graphics.  Graphics and graphic design.  It;s tough sometimes when people talk to you and say they/re artists, but you know in their hearts they are not.  It ruffles feathers and rumples collars.  It's difficult to tell them otherwise because, in the telling, you are admitting skill and I have a hard time, still, admitting that I know what I'm trying to do, for the most part, on easels.  Given easels.

If you look at your reflection, sometimes what you see is not what you know you could be, given everything that came before; that hesitation, those devils and those guns, are what keeps me from being a shameless self promoter, but are you hiding in the trees?

The point is that it is all an elaborate dream and there is no way you can spin manslaughter 2 into mistaken identities and a lack of coverage or maybe it's just black town.  I don't know.  Hard decisions.  I know how much you are supposed to take, but how much am I supposed to take.  Against the wall.  Am I supposed to want sex or is sex supposed to want me.  Is the BIC pipe a one hitter in the sense that you use it once or is it a one hitter in the sense that you can't light crack twice?

I don't know where to go from here, but I'm not quite sure if I should be so entertained with the idea of the opportunity to leave.   Cash money, mother nucca.  It just drives the nerves sometimes.  It's hard to admit failed suicide attempts.   What you can do though is tape up your wrists and throw some fists.

Not to get oxygen necessarily, but just to get inside your britches.  Feel your (can't spell it) huch spa.  Feel your id on the outside and taste a little blood, instead of digesting it.  There's too much blood and sunlight to go around.  I am trying to draw a line between pretending and good acting and I am having a difficult  time of it.

Sometimes things go down in a fashion that breaks your heart.  Sometimes your older sister whiffs on painting your nails.  Sometimes things go down in a way that throws shit out of whack.  Sometimes the throwing is enough to reframe ideas about things you've been mulling.  I don't know if this is better or worse than talking in third person.   It is difficult to be concerned.

What was I going for?  Chronic masturbation.  No,  Laughter.  Nod your head because I know that I;m right.  I'm not the capital G.  I'm not nothing either.  Hang out with me in the middle ground.  I swear I'll love you like I've never loved myself.  Andd I won't promise to make you happy.  And I won't promise anything more than 18 hours out, but I will.  I won't, but I will give you one year with the dragon in one day and rape is a device of the lesser and if you would be considering kissing me now I would not be opposed

to standing there


///track not found - lets get back up on that horse.  I'm sorry I left you.  Please be kind.  I'm coming out of left field in a full sprint out of the clear blue sky

Redesign (stealth mode, but not really)

So I'll make this short and sweet.  Some updates (hooray changes).  I haven't been sitting around scratching my bum and picking my nose and wishing for things to change.  Well I have, but that's only half of my day.  I'm on the "wish it, want it, do it" plan from the book of the same title as reviewed by Bill Maher on that show about the dog and the baby and the bad father and their crazy antics.  I don't know why I did that to such detail.  I think it was supposed to be funny.  Progressively funnier as the details got more specific and more vague.  Reverse comedy crash zoom.  What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, so some updates:

The Auralport is wearing it's summer best.  It looks a lot better over there (pictured here it's tinted gray) and the cloud bank drawn inside the letters really pops out bright.  The design actually turned out completely different from the idea I had in my head of summer fields and woodlands.  I wanted it to come out in deep greens and golds and purple and pink and as I was working on it I became more and more consumed with the steeliness of summer skies and the way power lines and telephones poles cut everything up when the sun goes down until it's too dark to see.  And then the links became these bits of flame salmon that kind of reminded me of how the clouds kind of catch fire bit by bit at sunrise and sunset.  So I wanted to capture some of that without making it unreadable.  I'm pretty sure it's borderline unreadable as it is, but it's the right kind of hardness I was looking for.  That same hardness that makes the summer sky hard to stare into some days because it is so bright and black at once.

I'm looking forward to doing the fall redesign though.  I think I just do better with darker pallets and color arrays and lower contrast over there.  OEMFail will always be a high contrast affair.

Bits for Flames received a little infusion of life in the form of two short short stories: The Hills at Wallston Park and Cement Head.  Obvs they're not for kids.  One is drama and the other is curio.  I still want to do more with it, but haven't really had the courage or drive to really sit down and tear something big off there.  I almost toyed with the idea of doing a redesign, but then I remembered I still have to do header art for the various sub sections, not to mention finish populating them from my stock piles of google docs.  Anyway, they're there for your consideration.

Times have been tough.  Times have been fun.  Finally regained the ability to do somethings, and learned to do some new things.  It's never all bad.  It's going to be a tough month though.  Then again, when is it never not a tough month?  I don't know.  Still popping off the works over at Auralport though the traffic stats are down, but I don't particularly mind.  I remember when I first started over there I was afraid someone would see it.  Funny how things flip around.  I'm not particularly happy with the subjects and themes lately, but I'm not sure what I'm turning toward as of yet, so I'm going to keep shaking my head like I've got swimmers ear and writing down what comes out until I hit on what it is I've been trying to say this season.

May be time to just sit down and grind out an album.

Anyway.  Unannounced changes that are now announced so they're stealthy, but not really.  I'm rambling.  Anyway, uhm...  I lived, I loved, I laughed, and then slept for 14 hours.  Gnite :P


///the item you are searching for has been moved.  for no particular reason at all.   because sometimes that happens.  bonus track available next time around.  i promise (maybe).

Reiterate (Life's a gun that's always pointing in my face)

Starting over.   27 iterations.  Begin again.  Are you now or have you been?  27 shots.  Done deal.  I was much more composed at Carnival this year.  I guess a little distance helps.  Found some closure over Jee.  Found some connection too.

Sometimes all you've got to do is stay the course.  Sometimes the only thing you've got to do is not fuck up.  It was nice seeing people in real life.  It was even nicer being as happy to see them as they were to see you.  Wasn't expecting that at all.  So much mutual love and understanding.  And you feel it and it's like "is this really how the majority of people get to go through life?"

And the answer is an emphatic yes.  Or maybe it's a no.  But for two days it was a big old yes and it was beautiful just to be in it for it a little while.  Just to be in it and forget about all the rest.  It was nice to be a stand up guy and ready to throw down for anybody and not have to.

It sucks going back.  I don't wanna go.  I never do.  I want to be there forever.  I want to be loved and looked after.  I want to wake up naked and happy all of the time.  Driving home the sky accelerates.  Going back out to space.  Giving everyone their due and their distance.  It hurts, but I know I have to.  They're not prepared to be close to me and I them.  A long letting go-ness.  Compressed into hours instead of days.  I'm one years old again.  It feels amazing and stupid.  And amazing all over again.

Nothing has changed, but everything has and I don't want to cry and I can't help myself at the same time.  There's nothing keeping me dry.  Time slicks by like a sinking ship with more passengers than rafts.   Shoving off to pluto and all collected.  Another year older, another year bolder, another year just a little bit colder.  But not alone.  Turbines to speed.  Birthday wishes pending.


///The Postal Service - "Brand New Colony" ... when you're drowning in an open tub and your judgement's on the brink

That's That

So, the redesign is done. I don't think I'm going to do anything with the font and link colors until the next iteration. Like holding over the quarter panels on a car between generations. I think it looks alright. I'm happy with it. Now I can get back to doing other things, like fixing this:



well, finishing that to make the new header for a new poetry space. One thing at a time. The pace is plodding, I know, but I'm getting there.

Hope it is to taste. The detail work is tremendous. 2000 pixels wide. It's going to be epic when I can show you the full sized designed, but for now you'll have to settle for squinting and using a little imagination, but I promise you it will be ginormous.

Why I Hate Coldplay and then Compliments Addressed, the Silence, Birthdays, Ant Eaters

So today is exactly my 43rd birthday in the 26th iteration of my life. Not much bang, but there's not much buck, and, to be honest, how many knife fights with prostitutes is too much? The answer is one. One knife fight with anyone is probably too many. So I'm taking it on a lower key. Partially because I've had enough near death scrapes to make a fine scrap book of uniform crime reports and scars and partially because it sneaked up on me like a cat to a laser pointer's beam. I already had a midlife crisis. I'm still bouncing back from that. And to top it off, my latest scrape with my old friend was less of a scrape and more of a Houdini "how-the-hell-am-I-not-at-least-crippled-from-the-waist-down" kind of event and I'm not clapping my hands for an immediate encore.

43 feels the same as 42. The same as 41. Once you get over the major obstacle of realizing it's half over for all you have to offer, the rest is gravy. Things have been pleasantly silent. But I've been doing a lot of work to make it happen. Soused? Sometimes. The best thing about it is not the damage. Is not even the shortened life span, because I know I will pay for palatable living eventually, be it a massive med crash or the nick and chip of the slower knives offered by off the shelf substances, because all in all the final tally will sort itself out such that you cut years off the suffering (albeit by dying). The best thing about it is the silence. The knowing that you and only you are all present and mostly accounted for. That when people ask what you want to do, only one hand goes up in your head. When you ask yourself what to do next you hear one maybe two voices instead of ten.

I am still an anteater (fuck you). What I've also realized in the words of the illustrious coach Mike Tomlin is that the standard is the standard. I've been imagining Mike Tomlin covering my exploits in a post game/post week/post month press conference. He would probably say something like "an anteater is an anteater is an anteater. If we are anteaters it will show up on film and that film is our resume. Our resume speaks for itself. You either are an anteater or you aren't. There is no middle ground and when we can be anteaters it will show up in the work that we do." But I don't get press conference coverage. Or have coaches like Mike Tomlin, so I basically just tell myself when I don't get the outcome of my action 'dude, you're an anteater, what the hell did you think would happen?"

The silence has been nice though. I've been hanging the back end out there for almost too long though. Too many g's against tires whose grip I can never trust and part of me is waiting for the rubber to dissolve into the cloud of white smoke trumpeting from the rims for the naked rim to bite the asphalt like a starved dragon and flip my whole contraption so many times I'll be reduced to chunky tomato paste by the time it comes to halt on it's crumpled roof atop a sea of pelletized glass and unkempt infield next to the red and white rumble strips marking the path to the apex I should have targeted along the optimal path I could have taken had I the wiring and the vision and the opportunity to do so. So I enjoy the silence and try not to burn the envelope already torn to shreds back in high school when I realized my contents were not the sort of things that the postal service accepted as mail-able, transferable, items without special postage and allowances.

I did, however, receive a complement the other day from an older woman. It wasn't at all creepy. Not like the time I was walking back from the south side because the buses stopped running and I stopped at a bus stop just to read the schedule and make doubly sure and an old man who looked like Morgan Freeman after a bad Vegas weekend bender told me I was cute. That was creepy as hell. Plus I didn't know I was gay at the time so it was creepy and offensive and if I wasn't in a rush to rescue a friend from the clutches of a bad decision, but probably playing into her demand for a declaration of dedicated-ness by crossing town to get her, I probably would have stopped longer and been like "well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean, asshole?"

But anyway, I got a complement from an older lady the other day. She said I had a great smile. Now I have a prominent scar on my face that gashes from my eyebrow, down my cheek, and ends where my beard starts. I have a badly chipped front tooth from taking a dive onto cement. I have another scar from years ago where I took a similar dive, but broke my fall with my orbital bone instead of my mouth. And I have another set of scars from various head butts and several attempts to jump through a hallway's drywall ceiling. To have her see through that to that genuine grin she yanked out of me with her humor and honesty was touching. Because I mean she's got to be pushing 70, so she's seen her share of great smiles over the decades.

What was really touching about it is everyone says you're one in a million. That kind of phrasology, that kind of thought process, basically fires across the deck and no one blinks an eye. No one changes course. No one stands up and says "dear god, you are absolutely right! I must be wholly unique to this planet!" At least no one with half an ounce of sense. To believe that if you were able to gather together one million people, not a single one would have 99% of your interests, foibles, ticks, obsessions, addictions, and deficiencies in common is to be utterly blind to the simple fact that there are only so many configurations of expressibles. What differentiates then is the physical. That's what really makes you unique. So to have her say, whether true or not, off hand or not, that my smile sticks out in her nearly 7 decade long memory was totally awesome. It had me glowing while we made small talk. By the time she sauntered off I wondered if we would have gotten along just as well had she been 26 too, or if I'm the kind of person lovable only over fantastic spans of time and space.

Which is why I hate Coldplay. Not directly why. I hate Coldplay for the handful of fantastically cogent songs they've made. The songs that express the things people feel with uncanny accuracy, levity, and genius song writing. I hate Coldplay because I love their album with the figure of the guy with his head blown off on the cover, but I can't listen to it because of one song called The Scientist because the memories it brings back are still so raw and it describes those memories, the end of the formation of new memories just as good, with an intensity that is horrifically accurate it's like trying to sit down to a Rescue 911 marathon without a vomit bag for the blood, guts, bones, tears, and anguish you are about to see. It's not meant as a slight to them. it's good for them. Good for them for crafting something so intense. Good for them for wading through their own noise to get to the deep water. I guess I'm still doing that in many ways across several subjects. Assuming I don't drown first, but I'll keep kicking.


///Coldplay - "The Scientist" its not melodramatic. you have to put aside some of the common elements of regret to digest it, but those elements are, thankfully, few. but it speaks stories of information where so much pop is a glorified fragment blown out of proportion, chopped, and hashed with tons of loops and over production to fill the passage of time. ...going back to the start...

Money, Cash, Power, 'Spect... it's a Trap

I have been battling.  Not the usual demons.  Battling the allure of money and respect.  The two usually come in a dime pair.  And it's nice.  I recently realized I was using it's and its in the inverse of how they're supposed to be used because I rememorized a mnemonic device incorrectly.  One of those times when you say to yourself "yeah I remember that from elementary school," but your memory is actually completely backwards and remanufactured from parts and pieces of things that actually happened.  So I am trying to make an effort to reitify the memorization.  Only this time forwards.  Comma usage is still playing fast and loose like law dogs in westerns.  Anyway, been struggling with the potential for success.

Blowing the costs out of success way out proportion.  Thinking things like, well if I am successful how will I be able to live in an apartment that costs more to live in and is slightly smaller than the one I currently occupy?  The answer is: the extra money will be what you can apply to owning a runabout and getting out to other places so you'll be spending less time cooped up anyway.  But that's not the answer in my head.  In my reason, it is the answer.  In my head the answer reads more like... well you know.  I need not jump it that hard.

I guess with making more money I won't qualify for my hundred dollars of food stamps that has become less a mark of shame and more like "holy shit, it is the eighth of the month and time to buy all the foods I've been dying to buy for the other twenty days out of this month, jesus christ no more peanut butter and jelly and pasta."  The truth is I hate eating out.  With a passion.  Not because it costs more for no reason because for whatever reason tipping motivates service instead of service motivating service (I'm just incorrigibly service oriented) and for some reason getting what you pay for only applies in the food sector.   I hate eating out because I hate having people make food for me, as though I am somehow above making my own vittles and prone to being upset if said vittles aren't ready in five minutes or less.  I am a creature of patience.  Violent, violent patience.  I am content to wait very, very, long periods of time to get desired results...  ...sometimes quietly, sometimes silently, sometimes very loudly, but at the end of the day I will accept having to fold my hands for a time and wait out results, if not for seeing the fruits of my labor then for the reappearance of opportunities past or yet to come.  I did always like the tortoise.  Fast hands, slow feet, can't lose.

I practice making fists throughout the day.  Throwing fists.  I keep an eye on my footwork too.  I suppose maybe I am a little obsessive compulsive, but only toward the end of self preservation.  It was kind of hilarious, the job application for temporary day to day labor.  I believe it asked no less than eleven times if I though fighting was important, or if I thought the ability to win a fight was important, or if I thought the ability to defend one's self in a fight was valuable.  I answered the questions honestly and then accidentally scrapped the test (given with an inferior keypad interface, it really was an honest lucky mistake) and then asked the branch manager what was up with all the questions about fighting.  He clued me in and told me to answer no, not ever, for all the fighting questions regardless of experience or training or ability.  Apparently temp labors brawls are less the exception and more the rule.  Regardless, the upside of being conscious of how you place your feet on a moment to moment basis makes you less susceptible to slip and falls when you are focusing on other things.

Just one of those sorts of things I guess having to use your body as the foundation of your livelihood instead of your brain makes you conscious of.  I'm kind of inclined to go back to using my body more, but I wouldn't know where to start here.  This place kind of frowns on that, hilarious enough as it is probably two cuts above a slum, but I'm not here to argue.  One less trap.

Getting back to that though, I'm having some trust issues.  Massive ones.  Questions bouncing around.  "If you were me, with everything you have at your disposal would you say yes to the offer being given you from your mouth to me, me being you?"  Questions like that.  I don't really know when I'm being used.  I damn sure don't know when I'm being abused.  The not knowing hurts more than the knowing.  The discovery hurts more than both combined.  I don't know if people are or aren't, but I wish they would just tell me.  That's the upside of selling.  It's clean cut.  This is what's going to happen, this is why, and this is what it's going to cost you.  That is the danger of friends.  Nothing is clean cut like that.  That's probably why the people I count as friends has thinned so much.   That and just being a crazy fuck.  Laughing too loud.  Neighbors banging on walls.  Laughing harder.  Sigh.  It's good to be live.  Better to be alive.  I'm working on that.

Money, cash, power, and respect.  Everybody wants it.  I want to be money so I can get cash and be granted enough power to sway enough respect to buy some land and a home so I will have no need of money, cash, power, or respect and can just be.  There's no trap in that.

My stable of friends.  Wow.  I don't know.  That's a lie.  I do know.  I like to say I don't know so I can imagine it's larger than it is.  It's teensy.  Oh god, I just tried to rattle it off and got to four, counting family members. Is that even something I can fix?  Does it need fixing?  To that, I can honestly say I don't know.  If I stepped off my spaceship, when I do step off my spaceship, there are essentially four people who can relate to me, but who I can also relate to honestly and semi-openly... on a sit down basis.  Everything is open over the waves.  You can turn that off.  When you're with someone, you can't turn that off.  It's there.  I am there.  I want your eyes.  It's very different.  Sadly different.  World changingly different.  I think that's the nice thing that opens me up when I'm talking to you that I don't get to experience otherwise.  You can turn me off.  Unsubscribe.  Break up.   All that wonderful shit and I don't have to know and you don't have to know and we're just the same with or without eachother.  The beauty of.  The fantasia.  The crazy fucking nasty wonderful idea sex one night standiness of it all.  It's not always that.  But sometimes.   Whatever, it's fun.  Ive nothing to justify.  And everything to justify to myself.  I assume you realize we are arguing.

We've agreed we'll keep on because the dreams have been to die for.  They really have.  They've been the sorts of things a body could wish to never wake up from.  But, it's a trap, isn't it?  Maybe not.  Maybe I just have to accept that there are benevolent forces beyond myself.  People that don't know me, that don't want to punish me once they do get to know what I am.  People that don't want to me punish myself, that are trustworthy beyond a shadow of any doubt and worth more, in fact, than all the trust I could muster if I turned every cell toward the task.

a kid can dream.





///Gorillaz - "On Melancholy Hill" Five hours to get this out. Happy to put my thoughts to good use. Unhappy I couldn't do more. Bed and jobs beckon. can't wait til I'm a housewife with nothing to do but tend after bastards, count my government checks and bide the time until I'm raking in Rowling esque millions when I have nothing to do but write and feeding myself is last on my list of major concerns. So melancholied. So half finished. I wish I was sipping brew on a plastic beach.

Odd Dreams, Prior Commitments, New Goals and Mystic River

Woke up, fell asleep, appended more dreaming to the previous dream and then woke again. The first dream was me and a family of strangers. The house was enormous. My mother and father were nowhere to be found inside the house and all of the light bulb sockets were empty. The only things left were bits and parts of things that were going to be abandoned that the parents left to me and my siblings to decide if we were going to take them with us or not. It was up to us to pack them all and be outside with the single suitcase we were each allowed to bring to the new home. So we packed.

As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.

We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.

Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.

Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.

The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.

In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.

All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.

As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.

Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.

Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.

It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.

For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.

There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).

The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.

Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.

Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.

So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.



///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.

I Found

So I had this idea about humor. About genuine humor. Not the niggling humor that munches at the ankle of obviously flawed ideas, but the throated humor that vomits little mountains of spontaneity and thought. I was wondering if I could compose some.

I'm not going to try it here. Partially because I know that I am not intrinsically funny. And partly because I haven't forgotten that I didn't want to try it here. Humor is like singing. It's not so much about talent as much as it is about the construction of a head. Some skulls just have crappy acoustics. Most do. But some don't. The ability to hear yourself outside of what encompasses the space of your higher order functions is key to being a great singer and I think the same holds true for comedy.

Remember when I told you I was going to go look for the hissing? I think I do. I found it last night. It wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. It wasn't scarier either. It just was. It was the heart of a thing, if you can imagine it, a thing large as three story building and as wide as it was tall if not wider. The sound of my teeth grinding woke me up before I could get close enough to really make it out.

It was a strange trip. I didn't close my eyes and there it was. I had to do a ton of foot work, but I avoided the subways because I tend to get lost down there. I stayed above ground and it got darker and darker until it was dusk and I walked for a long time until I reached a great big brick thing. It could have been a wall for all I knew. The city simply stopped and there was this brick wall that could have been a building, but I didn't walk around it because it joined up with the two buildings on either side of the street and it was too dark to see if it terminated at some point above me or if it simply continued on forever.

I went in the door and inside the lights were like setting suns and I went down for several seconds, but I couldn't have gone deeper than ten or twelve feet unless there was some kind of compression happening, which I doubt. I doubt it because - I suppose I actually don't have a reason to doubt it. It's simply been my expectation. It was the feeling. There were no sutures of skips so I assumed. At any rate the staircase ended rather quickly and the floor was so immense that I could see it's curvature, but the light was too low to see anything beyond the immensity of the space. I walked on, directly away from where the stairs landed and after several dozen minutes the darkness began to turn a dull red and then this weird bronze pink and I followed the shifting gradient, keeping the brightest hues front and center, along the curving floor and there was a massive pounding that kicked through the air and thumped inside my lungs so bad that it was starting to hurt and I walked on and on and on until the intensity of the dullness, the sheer missingness of presence was making my head hurt as bad as my chest and I fought to resolve it and it came into focus and then I realized I wasn't breathing and the sound of my teeth grinding woke me up at 5 in the morning. It was awful. I learned nothing.

I'm not afraid tonight though. I guess, a huge part of what makes us fear is the not knowing. I don't need to know what exactly it is, or why it is, all I need to know is where the boundary of safety is. Where the envelope ends. And now I know.

I'll show you tomorrow. Whenever that is.


///Talvin Singh - "Soni" ...and then...

Tell Me Why

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Best I Ever Had

Touching my computer and getting misty. Love at first sight all over again. Also, in case I haven't stated it enough already: Pittsburgh > NYC.

So much other stuff to tell you, but I gotta bed down first. Well, first I've got to make out with my computer for a while. Then bed down. Then I'll tell you all about it.


///Junkie XL feat. Saffron - "Beauty Never Fades"

Why I'd Rather Be Hispanic, Artificial Self Confidence, and a Root

Walking home from a training day for a job I may or may not have a thought occurred to me: I would rather be anything, but black, in today's America.

Sounds ridiculous right? The simple fact is it is still very uncomfortable being black in America. I mean, think about it, people haven't decided whether or not we can even be called black people or if we need to be called African Americans. At least with Latinos and Hispanic people it's not a choice between obviously politically delicate and offensive terms. Or maybe it is, since I've never been Hispanic or a Latino. Seriously though, every time you refer to a black person isn't there a little twinge in the back of your neck that makes you wonder if you're using the right word, or if you would look worse by using a term that throws racial consciousness in the reader's face, even if it's only for a moment?

Think about the stereotypes. If I were to make a mental list of pros and cons with respect to stereotypes, who would come out more favorably? Sure there are local pockets of better and worse viewpoints (border states, places with "little (insert south eastern country)s", and places with very visible very active gang cultures, but across the entire spectrum of America I feel like black people aren't necessarily losing ground, but aren't really improving either whereas other minorities are either receiving more than token attention or are at least viewed more favorably on the whole. I feel a lot like the very "interesting" back story of white America and black America has made the situation a lot like a landlord who needs a renter to pay on time and shut up about the property's needs and a renter who badly needs a place to rent and can't afford anything else. I guess when I think about the stereotypes, I can see positive ones for most other ethnicities that allow some type of positive integration with society beyond sports, music, sex, and street dance (you know, the things people have to do to support families and build generational wealth and own homes and cars and have stable year to year lives and retire) and absolutely none for the blacks in America.

And it's a little discouraging. It's like the problem of integration was never really solved beyond the physical interface and instead of a defacto solution, patches were administered. Patches were slapped on top of patches and policy plaster was slapped on top of the patched patches until people got tired of dealing with it. Or maybe until the job looked done enough from the standpoint of the people outside of it, but as someone who is a part of the structure of black America it's pretty obvious there are gaping holes in perception that continue to lead to gaping holes in... I dunno. I'm getting tired just thinking about it. It's not fixable. I'm not trying to be fatalist or anything like that, I just have to do my part with my kids to let them know that they do belong here.

That's it! I think I just stumbled on an answer. Black history. Being raised with such a heavy bent toward black history and it's burden on modern history and having to live every year with the idea that I'm permanently indebted to a project of acceptance that will be in progress from the day I'm born to the day I die was a mistake. Historical perspective is a good thing. Having historical perspective hammered into me with a distorted and disproportionate focus placed on the "right" and "wrong" expressions of stereotypes within that culture is what has left me with this feeling of malaise. Black history is important, but not more or less important than American history. It's not a separate story. Having the idea that I'm different and special and separated from America by black history has caused much more damage than confidence boosting good. The short term benefit of confidence has been far eclipsed by the long term effect of powerful feelings of isolation.

I guess the simplest branch, the main root of all of this is belonging may not boost individual confidence, but will ease future growth and development of identity. Telling someone they're special artificially boosts their self confidence. Someone learning they are special through time and experience and on their own allows them to build a lasting self confidence that will not be eroded as soon as the encouraging voices are taken away. Not constantly reinforcing a person's specialness and differentiating characteristics may hurt their self confidence in the short term, but will ease their interactions over time because they will have belongingness as the most basic premise of their relationship to the world around them.

If belongingness is the most basic premise of their relationship to the world around them, then they are free to pursue many more avenues of existence without having to consider questions of perception and practice, and while the questions may be there, they will not be central to the person's identity. If a person's most basic premise is that they are permanently different from the world around them they will, when (not if) self confidence fails to motivate action, be forced to constantly answer and ask and re-ask questions of perception and practice in a never ending cascade of attempts to join a world they can never really be a part of basic their most basic premise of existence is that they are permanently outside of and apart from the world at large.

So I guess the root of the problem with black America is really sourced from within every black American home and public classroom in the month of February. But, don't tell them that. They never seem to take criticism well even from "their own people". Trust me, I know. Responsibility is probably the second branch on the tree of stunted potential.

///Four Tet - "You Were There With Me" Just reminds me of thinking about the future sitting at the edge of an apple orchard and watching shafts of sunlight roll like lazy spotlights across empty fields and after the second hour noticing that the little things on the horizon aren't high tension transmission lines, but are the blades of still windmills.

Bits for Flames Front Page is Done!

Click the screenshot to see it close up. I am so thrilled and tired and thrilled. The only thing missing is the "about" and "contact" links. I dropped out that entire poor excuse for a nav bar because it was making the page way too long and chunky and it is awesome without it. God damn, if you could see me smiling right now. I almost don't know what to do with myself. I feel like a kid who just finished a macaroni and glue master piece and I want to show everyone my grimy piece of paper. That's how happy I am.



///Aim-"Fall Break" I am looking forward to an Autumn that'll cool summer's misgivings and rages and bruises.