Gauging

I hate being an orphan.  Holidays, so many of them are a myth.  I wish there was a setting on the dial between killing them and existing.  I would suppose you must embrace the indecision each and every day.  24 hours at a time; side by each.




///Beach House - Space Song ~ however lovely it would be to staple their skin to the walls of your domicile, it will never work.  Fantasia will.  Wait.

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)

Nearing the End of the First Week With a Fractured Jaw

The fracture or break is very high up the ramus and very close to my ear.  Every time I poke it hard enough I can hear and feel it flex a little so I try not to touch it or shift my jaw left or right when I do yawn with my teeth locked together.  Of course I didn't go see a doctor.  I have no health insurance.  What's the doctor going to do?  Wire my teeth together and tell me to get plenty of rest and not move my jaw.  I can do that without the wires and the $5000 bill.  Sure there may be other fractures along the side of the jaw bone, but inspection says they're only fractures if they do exist and not clean breaks.  Thanks to wisdom teeth that were never removed growing up because they were so badly impacted the surgery was out of the question for one reason or another by the time I was screened for them, the inside of my cheek took some thick lacerations at the point of impact.  I think one or two of molar roots may have cracked causing swelling and pain in the angle.  Time will tell.  Hell, if my wisdom teeth on that side die and eventually fall out, I'm all for it.  Who am I going to be kissing in the next two- three years anyway.

The first week of a liquid diet and I'm down 17 pounds.  I'm not fat, but I always feel fat, so it's helping my body image issues a great deal, oddly enough.  I keep thinking over the evening last Saturday.  After a great pow-wow with a buddy and his friend who had to leave a little earlier we decided to head out and grab some ice cream and, I was thinking, a pack of smokes on the side for me, happy to be alive and a little agitated, but more than anything else, happy to be out for a walk in the deep night air with a gorgeous moon.  Hopping along, we came across a bunch of teens loitering in a schools front yard and a police van telling them to disperse and we walked on, exchanging glances.  They were obviously doing it wrong.  Mulling in the shadows instead of out beneath the street lights on your way to get some tasty ice cream and smokes and then hop back home to finish the night off with a few beers and your friend.

They were doing it wrong and it was funny and in my happiness and joy with the night and my pal and the prospect of ice cream, I shouted to them so, with a few more curse words and some gestures, but simply poking fun at how they choose to spend their time when they could be walking to get ice cream instead of haunting a schools front lawn.  They shouted back and I shouted back, because there's so much more to life than trying to intimidate people all of the time.  There's friendship, and the moon, and ice cream, and cigarettes, and the fun a Saturday unperturbed by anyone who dares believe they can rain on my happy day with a friend I haven't seen in far too long.  Who cares if a couple of happy travelers don't clutch their purses or speak in hushed voices as they pass you by.  You're a bunch of kids on a schools closed front lawn trying to intimidate and strike fear into the "mean streets of Pittsburgh" from the shadows.  Ooga booga!  It was hilarious.

Those boys took it the wrong way and decided to follow and encircle us.  "All of this happiness must be stomped out!" is what I think they said collectively.  I had no desire to fight.  Those roads are way behind me and ice cream was ahead of me and the police were just up the block a moment ago.  I do not live in a world where I will trade ice cream for police questioning.  Ever!  I figured there'd be some yelling and shoving and they'd go on their merry and moody and belligerent way after pushing us around and we'd continue on ours and get those evening treats and continue our happy Saturday.  It wasn't to be.  I was hit from a blind angle right in the left corner of my jawbone just beneath my ear and dropped like a bag of rocks for a few seconds.  My friend, struck too, was lucky enough to get hit from a direction his head was more or less facing and did not suffer more than cosmetic damage in a black eye and a cut or two.

I didn't realize the discomfort I felt the following day was far more than a bruise on my cheek until the day after when the pain got worse and worse until I couldn't chew anything, much less open my mouth.  I guess those boys won.  My happiness silenced by a fractured jaw bone and quite possibly broken molars inside the bone itself (hoping that's not the case, but we'll know in another week or two or if the violence of them being forcefully shifted a few millimeters out of their homes has caused inflammation that will take some time to heal [or if infection is underway as we write *cue doom music*]).


I keep thinking through that fateful stretch of night.  I keep asking myself why the hell would they do that?  Keep telling myself it was entirely uncalled for.  I know why I was sucker punched.  Their fear.  That moment when my friend was hit and they thought "now or never because if this other larger guy wasn't going to put up a fight before he just may A: decide to put up a fight now, B: shout or call for help, C: both a and b."  I keep wondering why they didn't just yell back and go their separate way.  There was no chance they considered he and I, a couple of drunk 30 year old men out on a walk together, to be a threat to them.  Why would they do that?  Why would they attack us so viciously?

And then it dawned on me.  Thinking back 12 years.  How righteously furious I was then for dozens of reasons, some complex some as simple as I wanted an excuse to pass on the hurt inside of me to anyone who gave me an excuse to.  Ready to fight anyone and any inanimate object that didn't "respect" me no matter how pointless or stupid.  I didn't want to rob you.  I wanted to hurt you as badly as I could get away with.  Year after year after year, getting more angry, more sensitive, more irrational, but always questioning it, breaking it apart, tearing down the engine, trying to figure out what the hell it was making this bomb of my body go tick tick tick.  I still haven't figured it out exactly.

Through years of study, years of violence toward others sometimes warranted, often times not, culminating in things I will never be able to take back, I left those courses behind me.  Thirty years old all I care about is writing, getting home in one piece, spending time with my cats, seeing my friends when I can, and taking care of the only body I have left until my brain breaks apart or my body just will not run anymore.  I could care less who respects me and who doesn't.  I could care less who breaks my jaw and who decides to be merciful.  Save for a handful of very specific, very important, exceptions, if I ever get so mad that the only language I can speak is the original dialect, violence itself, I will speak through breaking my own skin and nerves, not someone else's.  The simpler truth is that for most of those kids, they will never learn or even begin to learn how to learn that things could be different.  Some of them will end up dead.  Others will circle their private drains until their live's dwindle and die out.

Those idiots aren't there yet.  It was stupid of me to believe a 12 year gap in understanding what a good night with a friend really is, and what it can mean in the face of a world, in the face of my world once dominated by violence.  They didn't silence my happiness.  If worst comes to worst and I can never quite use my jaw the way I could before that night again, I have always wanted to learn sign language.

Do I hate them for it?  Of course.  Would I like to find one of them, knock him senseless, wrap him duct tape and put him in the bed of my truck and take him home?  Would I like to duct tape his arm to a sheet of plywood after gagging him with #0 steel wool and use my belt sander grind away the first knuckle of each digit of his immobilized hand and then shatter the wrist of his other?  Would I like to drive down river and dump his body at a drainage gate?  Of course.  That would achieve nothing.  I'd be happy for a while until the next week when the pain set in again and I would need to find another one and that life is not for me as long as I continue to refuse it and allow the rest of myself to flourish.  Maybe they'll learn.  Maybe a few of them will think about and ask themselves essential questions.

Happiness and love are precious and not to be squandered under all but the most extreme circumstances.  Especially not in this world's economy.




///=sigh= I could really go for a slice of pizza right about now.  I'll melt some ice cream instead.

Stresses and Stressors and Life On My Tardis

Life is stressful and full of stressors.  That's not news to anyone.  Time is money and money can be converted into time.  The time it takes you to read this is time you could've spent making money.  Or maybe it is time you are spending making money.  Getting paid to read blogs.  Or maybe getting paid to do something, anything, besides read blogs.  Shame on you.  The time it takes to write this could have been spent working as a dishwasher at Eat n' Park.  Or could've been spent getting shopping carts at Kmart and trying not to completely lose it and burn the place to the ground.

Life has many different stresses to it.  Some of those stresses are more intense than others.  Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake.  You have to answer the bell.  Eventually.  It's critical to your survival.

The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors.  Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world.  If the world were not shared.  If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge.  A single leap from stresses to peace.  A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world.  There is no single leap and there never will be.

To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors.  Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own.  The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe.  By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder?  Hilarious movie.  I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it.  Came out a while ago.  Should be available for rental or something by now.  Robert Downey Jr's in it.  Tom Cruise to.  Surprisingly good.

Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate  highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen.  It's troubling sometimes.  From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge.  Return to the two channel direct connection.  The single bridge.  It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.

Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward.  I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at.  I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level.  A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence.  My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging.  I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now.  It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in?  Very little.  The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself.  "Attaboy, chap!  If you work hard enough you'll get there."  Eat me.].

At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own.  The question is the conversion rate.  If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not.  Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.

With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living.  Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted?  How fast is that going to kill you.  How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole?  My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered.  I'll do without, thank you.  If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider.  Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep.  I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end.  I am sorry.  My mind will not work that way.  I wish many nights and days that it did.  That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American.  It doesn't.  I won't get to enjoy that.  I won't get to see that.  But hey, I could always win the lottery or something.  Wouldn't that be a gas.

Life on my Tardis is pretty okay.  Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks.  I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next.  I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means.  No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they?  I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30.  I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count.  Besides, that ended in utter disaster too.  I will not do it.  If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now.  Simple as that.  Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship.  Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel.  Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own.  "You should have gone to the hospital!"  Yeah, right.  Of course.  It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to.  As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out.  Life aboard my Tardis.  One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.

What day is it?  Sunday, 6 P.M.  Are you sure?  Yeah.  No.  Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.!  What the hell happened?  It's Tuesday!?  What happened to Monday?  Weren't we supposed to be somewhere?  It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday.  Are you sure?  Well, okay.  We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything.  Yes, that will be Wednesday.  I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now.  What do you mean we're 5 miles from home.  This is a park bench?  Come on, man.  Get it together.  The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius.  Except when it doesn't.



Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)"  There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music.  This is one of my favorites of late.  So dark.  So playful.  So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.

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.

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

Strange Ways

I'm sorry I've been away. Life has been strange in many ways. Not really strange as much as just strange in the ways I've come to understand normal. Sea change and all of that. One thing that has been occupying a lot of my time is meeting a couple of people that see me as close to eye to eye as I have ever known any one person to see me. Which has been exciting and ridiculously time consuming. Hard to talk about. Because threesomes aren't exactly normal. Let alone threesomes cemented by violence. Let alone threesomes that are probably on their last legs.

I enjoy belonging to people. That's no secret. I like to know that someone is holding my leash, and I had to revoke that privilege from one member of the threesome so now it's a twosome with occasional benefits for the odd man out. What are you going to do? I mean, I don't particularly enjoy fucking her, but I do enjoy the opportunity to be close to her psychologically so it's like doing dirty work to get the golden egg of her brain and personality because I'm pretty sure she likes fucking me more than what I have to say so it's a perfect fit in terms of what I want and what she wants and the odd piece out is the guy who refuses to kiss me, but wants my dick and nothing else, hence the revocation of leash privileges because if you want to fuck, you better be up for everything that comes with in my book, and I damn near revoked her privileges because she insisted on wearing socks at all times and that's just... ...what?! Seriously? Who does that?

And then there was the conversation where they both referred to me repeatedly as their toy, which is fine. I can accept and appreciate that role, but to then assert that I was worthless without sex, that was the line they crossed and things got violent, but have since settled down. Things and ways were explained to me in the simple terms I understand best and then stabilized into something enjoyable again. We saw fairly close to on the level. Everything since has been delicious. And time consuming. Time oft reserved for writing has been burned in sexual play which is not terrible, but not great either. Lost time in the run up to play and time lost in the run down from play, let alone the play time itself. I dunno. Fucking older people definitely presents problems and issues I never thought about, or even had to think about, before now. It is incredible the difference between older men and older women. Fascinating. It grows frightening sometimes, the potential for breaking their bodies with my own carelessness. At the same time it is deliriously appealing. Being the most capable thing they will likely ever know before they die. Being their first and probably last. I think I love that more than the sex itself. The making of a name. And they are just so adorable together. That's part of it too. The basking in dual praise. The lack of rejection. The fact that they have seen so many people that they can recognize you from one hundred yards out and see right through you and there's nothing to hide because they've seen it all.

I know it's not going to last because he won't fuck unless he's drunk and she won't take her socks off ever and that's just weird and he won't kiss me ever no matter how drunk he gets and she doesn't have a dick and his dick is too small to be anything more than an idle coffee table curiosity and her youngest kid is older than me and she insists that she is the only one allowed to fuck his ass, but until we break up I think this is the best thing to happen to me in a long time. But I also think the strangeness of it is what has been keeping me from talking about it and progressing. Or maybe understanding what kind of flash in the pan it is.

It's been zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds for me. Unbelievable speed. Fuck warp 9, this whole relationship has been warp 12. Engine room ablaze the whole way. More give and take than I've been privy too for better than two years. And yes, I have no idea how to deal with it or any idea of where it's going beyond failure. To top it off I met his daughter and apparently she wants me too. And I don't want sex nearly as much as I want to be useful and used. I play into that more often than I should. It makes me feel like a sociopath, which I don't like. I just enjoy making people feel good. It's a badge of honor. I entertain whatever it is you want to entertain because your happiness and bliss is a kiss upon my heart.

So I want to fuck her. Not because I enjoy women. Not even close. I have been able to love one woman my entire short life. And that is my ex. The rest aren't jetsam, they're just friends at best and confidants when closer. It's just a very odd situation. A very very odd and slowly unraveling situation between a boy a woman and a man who hurts her who wants to use the boy. Sounds like family.

I've been telling people I'm half Scott and half Irish, alternately, because I'm still not sure which. I'm pretty sure it's not half. I'm pretty sure it's a lot less than half. Probably less than quarter. It's fun to be exotic. It's more fun to know exactly where you're from. I always wish to have that, more than anything else. Not just for cheering purposes during the World Cup, but also for tattoo ideas. And also because everyone talks about their extended families on a first name basis and I have never been able to do that. That would be nice. The knowing. The belonging. Life has been strange. The dreams have been stranger and more real than anything else. I slept for 18 hours. It was unbelievably good to do so. I don't know when I'll be able to be awake for more than 13 and not feel like killing myself. An odd pile of ideas. Goodbye for now. Levity to come.


/// The Cardigans - "Heartbreaker" ...no, not again...

A Thought About the World

I was thinking about the end of the world. Again. Not really the end, but the end of my world assuming I tough it out. Which is hilarious. To think that life is something that needs to be "toughed out". Walked off. I sometimes wonder if people who are basically set for life, whose only real decision to make is to go to work or not, or play the links in Carolina this weekend or shuffle off to Amsterdam for a bit to get away from "it all" ever feel like they're going to have to tough out the next few years. I suppose I don't really wonder. I'm sure they do. I like to think that I wonder so I can reflect more kindly on their various dispositions. Instead of wishing them all away to the heaven of hell's brambles. But I was thinking about the upcoming end of my iterations, when there is no more material to make new me's out of what is left of the old me's and no more material available to create new me-ness to replace the wholesale deletions. My thoughts turned, naturally as an American, to war.

When all of the oil runs out, and I hope it does sooner than later, mainly to generate some actual sea change and perhaps restructure the as we've accepted it into the as we've never known, but wished it to be, even if the restructuring ends up being more of a warp and upward mobile in ways I could never be societal metastization, what becomes of middle eastern interest? Do the propped up kings all topple over at once? Does religion come bursting in to fill the holes? Obviously it won't be anarchy. The world is far too connected for that to ever happen. Does america finally walk away from it all like some person stumbling home from a red light district in the morning with a massive hangover to their mattress stuffed with "just in case" money? And then I thought "who fucking cares."

I know I should. For my children's sake. But I'm never having kids. Right now my only claim to fame is that I escaped an abusive home and now have the power to break the cycle of violence and generational human corruption by not perpetuating it the only way I can guarantee the rest of the world will succeed. That's it. So I suppose that probably puts me in the category of people that "want to watch the world burn". Maybe not square in. But close. I don't think I have enough passion to make a sport of it. Which lead me to understand something. A carefree friend is enviable. A careless friend is a headache, but can be desirable in certain doses. A negligent friend is a liability. Well, I understood that before. But it reminded me. I don't know where I fit in there. Where do friends go that are constantly trying to snuff out the fires of their past? Burning their shadows away? Eating their demons.

I don't care how the world is going to end. Maybe the middle east will collapse in fifty years. I'm sure they'll find some way to make it work. They'll tough it out. Some things will change. A lot of things won't. I'll still have to take shit from people making snide remarks in the vein of "break a twenty (whistle) that's a lot of money to be carryin' around on a Tuesday" from asshole managers and foremen who make my monthly net in a couple days of work. I'll still have to deal with nurses asking me seven times if I've been shooting needles into my work scarred arms every time I get up enough money or desperation to see a physician. If it all burns down, I'll be third in line with a lawn chair, a cold beer, and a program to take in the floor show. Which is all fairly grim.

I did not mean to be that grim. Honestly. My life feels like a very long Vertigo shot. Time just keeps on racing away. The farther it stretches, the farther back I have to keep pushing things to stay alive, the more things fall out of focus and break down and it's the least I can do to hold onto the consciousness of here and now and impossible not to choke it to death with the force of the grip needed to keep it safe. I have no real stake in the outcome of the world's wars. I was unceremoniously ushered out of the war fighting arena, the academic arena, the peace keeping arena, the social and society arena, the tax paying arena. I don't know. I don't know where the fuck I'm going with this. Six hundred "no"s and one "yes". Two yeses. It's not that it gets difficult to believe things will improve. It's that it becomes foolish to believe so.

I don't want to believe that's it for me. Not in terms of writing. There's still much to be done and I know this is perhaps the stuttering beginnings of little stars and planets in the blueness of twilight before the moon rise of - what? Shut up. Shut it. Start over. There's still much to be done and I know this is perhaps the stuttering, tottering, beginnings of my flash in the pan in terms of production and development. A multi-year long stuttering to get that one paragraph out that I'll remember myself by. I don't want to believe the best I can hope for is to not get sick and have something to eat and enough to pay for cool in the summer and heat in winter and keep a roof over my fucking head and a cellphone turned on.

Which, I guess, ultimately is to say, space has been both kind and unkind. Kind to the people I care enough not to belabor, but unkind to the glass hearted intrepid nuclear radiant wayfarer. There have been complications. Unmediated things have come undone. I went about a month at one point without thinking about suicide. And then you feel it creeping up the back of your neck. The little worlds threading their way through the nerves in your right ear, across the back of your eyes to your left ear and lacing themselves together tighter and thicker until you feel like the bones of your forehead are going to collapse under the compression and your insides are going to come out like frosting squeezed out between the fingers of a kid crushing a sandwich cookie in his fist. So much time is spent in sorting. This is real. This is not. That is doable. This will kill you. This is tenable. That is not. You said this out of your mouth. You should have said this. Do not say that. This is valid. That will get you interned again. The sorting gets confusing. Frustrating. Makes me angry. And tired. Of many things. So much left to do.

The world as movie: I would have walked out years ago. Myself as movie: I already know how it ends, but I'm not walking out yet. I still haven't seen that one scene where I'm riding down a dirt road in a 240z with my korgy in the passenger seat barking at the rabbits in the brush while the sun sits on the mountains for a nap before the milky way belts across the sky like Beethoven through a concert hall. I don't know if I'll actually make it that far in or what planet that'll happen on. But I'm tryin' to tough it out. It would help if a tollbooth were to appear in my bedroom someday. I would never look back.


///Annie Lennox - "No More I Love Yous" remember this one? I still do. I was in love with Annie Lennox for a long time. All of ten years old and the lyrics to this song felt like she wrote them for me. I used to sit alone in my room and sing nirvana's half the man I used to be. It's funny, I guess. Not that the pain hasn't changed. Funny that the monsters are still outside after all this time.

Compound Eye

You know those weeks where you can swear up and down you own something, but you can't find it because you or someone you know or maybe someone you don't know borrowed it and never returned it to you or it turns out you never actually bought it in the first place because you dreamed the whole thing and woke up so seamlessly that the thought was sewn into the fabric of your memory permanently and you should by all rights, as far as the chemicals and salts zipping around the fatty little lanes and straightaways in your head can tell you, have it somewhere in the place where you live and within reach when you need it. Which is right now. Just a week of "I need this right now. Where is it?" Just wanted to tell you that yeah, you're not crazy. I know those weeks too. For me though, and not to say I'm super more specialer than you, it's been a month.

I can't seem to find my eye for pencil work. I lost it somewhere. I know I had it. I can look back at all the things I did with it and can still sort of fuzz out with the tool that's now occupying the space it used to occupy, but the series of functions and processes that composed my eye hand connection for pencil work have absented themselves from the factory floor. Which leads me to believe that they were taken. There's been another glaring gap in the work force. Physical production has tailed off dramatically. While it is good that I have managed to keep everyone on task doing constructive things instead of building destructive implements of and components to a machine whose sole purpose is a Rube Goldbergian mechanicide. There has been that one missing thing and I think I know the exact face that would have packed something like pencil work into his bag before checking out without notice. Which is fine. I can live with that. Everyone else still comes to the table and as long as I can have dreams that wander and fly with the child and can cross at will and am not building myself into an elaborate and immediate and quite possibly explosive self death, the rest is water under the gravy cake.

Buuut still. It is just a little annoying. I have no idea where they go. As the administrator I usually just have to sit and wait for them to come back. The kid wanders. That's the only one I have to actively chase down, because who the hell knows when he'll get back. Plus I don't even know if it's possible for them to get hurt out where they go and come to and from and with him I take no chances. That's the main member that helps keep everyone else relatively in agreement. But enough about me. I tried to draw some flowers today. Flowers in the shape of a scorpion for an idea for a tattoo. This is what came out:



Frustrating. Not even close to what was laid out in my head. I felt like strangling my hand for it's insolence, but that wouldnt have helped any of us. Well I might have felt better for a few minutes in the same way Stalin felt better for having people shot, but we all know how that ended. Happily ever after. If by happily you mean breathlessly paranoid. And if by ever after you mean with little warning and thankfully not a minute or second longer. So I'm not going to have my hand shot. This time. I'd probably have to hold the gun with my mouth. Maybe rig up some kind foot pedal operated jig, because old lefty can't really be trusted. They've been friends too long. Might give him the tip off and righty might skip town to Istanbul.

Well anyway. What now. Is the main question. I don't know if I can't draw. I think I still can. That drawing I did before did not turn out nearly as I saw it in my head either. I hope this disconnect isn't a sign of some medical nonsense. I'm not going in for that. I got enough medical nonsense to try and ignore without thinking about having to have new medical nonsense to try and ignore on top of that. But enough about me.

I think what could also be happening here. An alternate theory of the origin of man, if you will. Is that our dear escapee is still at work and still down in the factory toodling away at this and that project behind my eyes and ahead of spine, but the actual tools and processes and algorithms he is using have changed without my direct information. Which is possible, I suppose. In fact, I assume. In fact, in fact is one of those things I just try not to use in writing and it always comes up, so I will not use it again in here so I can think about - whatever. The point is, he is still there doing his damnedest to turn plans and prints and raw blank ingots of multi-ton steel and walls of marble into frescoes. Frescoes? Really complicated and beautifully simple objects of vision transmitted from my head to yours through the medium of the manipulation of space, material, and radiata and what I am expecting to see is really him trying to do the job with the new tools and processes and it is amounting to trying to build houses with like a complex multistage artisan bread oven instead of hammers and nails and measuring tape.

So instead of the end product being something that it should be had I not so strictly enforced my vision on myself - a ridiculously awesome bread house, shiny and golden and all crazy twisty gorgeous sitting on my coffee table, it ends up being something close to my vision, but ridiculously not - an impossible to inhabit, but human sized house built with beams of sagging bread and weird warbly walls and a floor you can stand on for about two seconds before you fall through from the upstairs straight on down to the dirt floor basement.

I think my eye for black and whites and penciling and penning is changing, or maybe already changed, to an eye for colors. I thought I lost my eye for color earlier this week because I was trying to see what I wanted to see in terms of line work and then overlay the colors I wanted it to appear in on top of that and I couldn't get past trying to envision the lines. I thought that meant that I was having trouble seeing how the colors would fit and thus couldn't fit the lines to the colors. Now I think the problem might be that I can see the colors without the lines and trying to fit the lines to the colors is something my tools and processes are unprepared to do.

Which is slightly exciting. I don't remember when we talked about it before, but when I first started sharing art I told you I was a pen and pencil guy and usually never screwed around with coloring things because I had no eye for it. I guess I've been working at it long enough to change that and hadn't realized it until now. Unless there is a third explanation. A third theory of space and time and the god particle if you will. I could just have regressed. I might just be worse at drawing and art than I was before. But fuck that. I'm greatness.



///Mouse on Mars - "Circloid Bricklett Sprungli" you know I don't have an ego that big. My ego is so small to understand how small it feels you'd have to feel this song turned up as loud as it'll go and turn the bass up as high as it goes and picture yourself sitting on the nose of a Saturn V booster, tall as a skyscraper, firing the energy output of a dozen Hoover Dams out of it's enormous backside in more flames and vapor than you've ever seen in the widest Arizona sunset you've ever laid eyes on and on top of that tower you look back and there's nothing behind you but the shrinking blue disk of a half moon Earth and the blackness of space so wide it makes you dizzy just to blink. That's how little my ego is as I'm blasting through space, trying to understand the world and teach myself to be okay with the fact that I may never really have a place to land.

Think of the Capacitance, Reconnection, and No More Funny (for now)

I am way too neurotic to be funny. At least for now. Rage is too close to my funny bone, or maybe I just need to drink more and relax. It would be terrific if I was compartmentalized and organized enough to be funny on a whim, but unlike athletes and super brains my insides are all mashed up. It would be a lot like a professional football player who couldn't divide on the field violence and competitiveness from his private life. And then again, that's not really a good example because that happens all the time.

More like a race car driver who, sitting at a lunch table, grabs his plate of food, dumps all the food on the floor, and proceeds to use the plate like a steering wheel as he pilots his five hundred horse power table to victory lane while making car noises and leaning aggressively into the g forces of every nonexistent turn to keep his eye line level with the candy striped rumble strips. So in trying to be funny I stray hard into anger and then can't really get back out of it until I talk about it directly. So let's give it a rest for a little while till I can find the kid again and day dream in the grass and look at the stars without feeling loss.

I do want them dead and to watch them picked over by sand flies, but I've got decades to wait for that release and until then attempting escape by any means is setting myself up for thousands of crest falls. I spent a lot of time, hours, whilst pissing the nights away at a job that is barely wondering what I could do, how long it will take, before I can fully move on from them and the fallout of their actions and I think the answer is never, but once they're gone it'll at least be an exercise in dividing the distance to balance in half until it is, for practical purposes and functions, zero. I can live with that. I just have to not explode into embers of rageous delirium before then.

There's been some safe connection. With people again. Which has been pleasant. A first contact on hailing frequencies. It wasn't easy. I'm still, more or less, in the same orbit and unable to land yet, but am prepared to do so at the earliest convenience. Things just haven't been particularly funny of late. Or maybe they have. When I think about my job I think of how I have to talk myself up to it, talk myself into it, and talk myself safely out of it when my shift is over. It struck me as what some people porn probably have to do before the big scene involving a series of serial and parallel acts degrading enough to make them unconscionable to most human beings if they themselves had to be on the set to see the uncropped and unflattering angles or participate in any capacity. "Come on, you can do this. Just two more hours and it's over."

The connection itself has been fantastic. To be spoken to as a person. A fantastic experience. Addressed as not a liability or wildcard or moron or ass or subordinate or fractured or toxified, but just as another person. It's a good feeling. To be treated without strings. Granted it takes a lot of effort to rejoin that sort of treatment, to flow back the channel and engage on the common field line. It's hard. People take that for granted. Of course there are ten paths and channels extending and entering throughput throughout the exchange, but to choose to engage is worth the effort. So if I ever break out into sweats while I'm talking to you, you now know why. Practice makes more practice.

The poetry has been slacking, but like I said before, I'm only two hands, one pair of eyes, and one mouth to handle my production cue and my hands have been busy at Bits for Flames recently trying to make sense of old rough drafts and fix continuities and cut into the cores of what was trying to be said and expressed and constructed. If I had to call my writing style anything I would call it some kind of impressionism and, while tickling my brain's predilection for flights of romantic picturesque fancy and curly serifed constructions, it doesn't readily lend itself to conflation and linearity. Editing. Frustrating. I spent two hours trying to press reason out of thematic cross signaling before shoving it out there anyway because sometimes I have to shove off of something for a while before I can come back and look at it and see what's not connecting. Maybe that's why I shove off of myself sometimes, but always come back to try and fix me later. I'm 9 today.

I think I'm going to plot out my birthdays through the year to my projected death at 70 in a freak race car driving accident.

I went to a job fair where a woman was telling me that I could be published without having read a single word I'd written or even glancing at my "child born in the heart of blighted Africa" thin resume. She made the comment after I told her I loved writing when she told me that the seminary she represented recently added a one unit course on publishing. I'm pretty sure she was mainly looking to add to her auto mailer sign up sheet. I didn't sign up. She kept telling me how great my personality was. I kept wanting to tell her I was mostly just happy to be in a place where people were happy to see me just because I was there, but I didn't. It was a fun conversation nonetheless. Beats out talking to myself in my kitchen about what the smell coming out of the kitchen sink u trap might have been.

I'm tired and hungry. Resisting the solid state. Meals have slipped again. I had them nice and spread out over 16 hours at reasonable intervals a month ago. They're now back to a huddled mass of desperate consumption over four hours. Whatever I thought I did to fix that has unfixed itself. The unfucked has refucked and I have to power up and use my guts and grit to push it apart again and once more become awesome, because let's face it, only you can make you awesome.

I've accomplished no further work on the paper robot, but it is still on my table alongside my drawing pad that has NOT gathered dust... ...yet and my notebook. I have pages and pages and pages of notes to go through. It's frustrating. My hobby is my work, but my work doesn't let me eat so I have to do fake work to get food tokens so I don't die and then when I come home to do my real work I am too exhausted to engage it fully. It's this odd lockup. Hobbies are supposed to leave you rejuvenated and expanded and more whole as a person and my hobby is awesomely fulfilling and makes me so post coitus contented that I don't want to do anything else, but it is also massively exhausting and time and energy consuming that I can't do it and then run off to fake work to get my damn food and rent tokens, which is why I need to outright buy property. At least that way the amount of money I would be required to earn to stay alive would be drastically reduced. Probably my number one reason to get back into school some day, but buying property will probably be cheaper in the long run. Which is why it is reason number one after the two hundred reasons why it will probably and in all honesty, with the kind of person wired the way that I am, should not happen. Stupid genes.

So here I am. Pinging you and pinging me. Still alive and happily so. The value of life is not the journey. I hope everyone who says things like that gets stabbed in the eye socket. I don't understand how anyone can go through life without creating something and then pursuing further creation. More than anything else that is who I am. Generator. Taking in raw material and constructing. There was something else on the tip of the ax pick of my brain. But I can't remember it. I'm going to go through some old notes and share them if they're interesting. I'm going to get my hands back into my dream housing and tear more words and motions and highs and visions from the fabric and sew them together for me and for you. I miss that. I've missed you in this urgent proofing against premature self destruction. We should hang out sometime.



///Elastica - "Connection" This concludes our broadcast day.

Retool and Industry.

I've been task locked, I will admit. Moving on to what? To separate things. I would think. The stars are up tonight. They're mapping me and it's good. I'm thinking about scarification. Or at least a more direct method of production. To accompany. Not so much an accompaniment as a new machine I can introduce to the factory floor and see if they'll pick it up and make good use of it.

I was trying to think of the last time I felt like I was the center of the universe and I can't really remember a time, but that's also probably because my memory basically ends around age 9. Which I'm thankful for. Evening running backward past 11 things basically get so garbled and hazy I'm not really sure if what I'm remembering happened then or earlier. I'm okay with that. If I could wipe everything up through highschool that would just be peaches.

Tomorrow will start a week of industry. I haven't declared one of those in a while, but it's past time. Let's talk about other things. Not to forget, but to make new memories. My time is short. My dreams are long. 4 hours. Not enough. Someone told me I need to get more hours at my job. Honestly, I'm terrified of that. If there's one thing I know about myself it's that we couldn't support that kind of load if we tried. Only so many channels. Let's do some living. Let's turn some metal. Let's not forget our new selves atop the frames still falling.

///Way Out West - "The Gift" the moon and the stars.

Good Night

It was a productive night. Got some things done. Bits For Flames got an infusion of life. I still have to start composing the page indexes. Gotta do it by hand because there's no Wordpress to do it automatically, but that's okay. I'll start them later today. I feel pretty good about it. I feel calm. Almost undeservedly so. Be back at it later.

///Unkle - "Heaven" like sex with someone who cares more about you than you could ever care about yourself and you put it away in a box for a rainy day, though you can't remember the last time you checked the forecast or opened the pages of a newspaper and read about the rest of your world.

Delays for the Right Reasons

I haven't forgotten your playlist. Well, it's my playlist too. I think this year I will use last.fm to help me make my selections as this is the first year I've used it all the way through. Granted the things that get played the most won't necessarily be the things worth including in a year capper, but it'll at least put me on the trail of what I was feeling when I heard the songs lesser played.

I was going to do it today, but I was sidetracked with picture recovery issues and food issues. I do miss having every single day more or less wide open. Well that's not even close to true. Wow, rose tints. I'm just so contented nowadays I feel like every minute I'm curled up in my bed is the minute just after an awesome orgasm and that kind of feeling can take the desire to make further improvements right out of your system.

Every single day was not wide open when I didn't have a job. It sucked. Job hunting was like trying to walk across a bog while looking for a piece of string that, if you found it and followed it long enough, would eventually lead you to a poorly paved stone pathway. I walked across that suck for so long the stone pathway I ended up finding 400 days and 200+ resume's and cover letters later might as well have been gold.

I don't feel bad that I feel pretty good now that I'm out of that hell system and finally into as close as I've been to what I can call "myself" since I knew there was such a thing as a self, but I can't forget that with a little more effort I can feel even better. Right now I've been eating vienna sausages on bread with cheese because I don't own a refrigerator. That's got to change. Did you know that you can spread Vienna sausages .like stiff butter? How gross is that? Not so bad once it gets into your mouth, but be ready to check your gag reflex mid construction.

The good news? I'm learning how to manage my time with respect to work. Expect poetry output to return to between 5 and 7 a week (though I haven't managed to lay them out daily at Auralport I do compose their bones daily during my 45 minute walks to and from work) and I want to be on here at least thrice a week, but for now it may just be on my two days off (whenever they fall, my schedule is kind of screwed up and changes week in and week out and sometimes midweek). I do really need to get back into Bits for Flames because I've been living some tales of interest (futurama reference) and some new characters are populating the universe and they need their stories told too, plus there's a fetal novel skulking around somewhere and I need to chip at it some more since it's two thirds done. That should be numbers, I know, but I'm working on a laptop sitting on my chest in the dark and I can't see the damn numbers and damnit I miss my desktop. I have go to go get that shit as soon as possible because this is not cool at all. I have fucking post partum depression over this shit.

I had another recurrence, in variable, of the dream where my teeth decay out of my mouth. This iteration was ridiculously graphic. It was so intense that when the rest of my dreamland travel came to a close and I opened my eyes the first thing I did was go to the bathroom and check that my teeth were still in my mouth. I mean it was absolutely that bad. In the dream one of my bottom front teeth was loose so I jiggled it and felt no pain so I pull it out, but the nerve was not separate from my gum, it was only completely numbed. The nerve pulled out with the same feeling of pulling thread out of a stitched wound and because I tugged the tooth so hard, thinking it wasn't connected to anything, I couldn't stop the swing of my arm before the unspooling nerve tore out several other teeth that then let this thick black fungal puss gush out of the sides of my molars which then collapsed like sink holes and my entire face just lit up with pain like fire axes. It sucked. It took hours of rinsing before it stopped hurting and didn't taste like ten kinds of filth and even then I ended up having to wrap my entire jaw closed so that the hollowed and eaten out remains of my bones wouldn't fall off of my skull before I could continue on.

Well anyway, what I mean to say is that I am delayed, but I promise you it's for the right reasons. Things are getting closer to being on track and there'll be more love and thought and things to rage and linger over as they do.

///Amon Tobin - "Bloodstone" this song makes me want to write a script for some science fiction noir, but mostly it punctuates evening walks through foreign and rain soaked suburban streets so well it's a little scary, but the kind of scary that makes you grin a little on the inside and hope that something horrible happens before your eyes just as it ends.

The Locusts Only Took What They Could Carry

I'm here now on the other side of an ongoing experiment that yielded mixed results. I thought for some time about a fun way to combine the word success with the word failure before moving on to more important things. Well, not necessarily important in the sense of urgency as much as important in the sense of size because clearly there is nothing more urgent than finding a way to successfully combine those two words in their most appealing and natural formation and then be the first one to say the new word. The point is this: things have changed.

Life at a higher resolution has had its benefits and its heels. The bridge has dissolved, but has been replaced with something... something else that is difficult to describe. Do you remember televisions with knobs? You might own one now. Well life has become like a television with knobs and there is a hand, no not even a force that centered, but the grooves in the switch that produce the clicking sound and the firm resistance to the turning of the switch are, no not even worn down, they're simply not there. I tune in and every channel, each channel, isn't seated on the face of the tube and its frustrating. But even that isn't really a close enough descriptor. Instead of conversations there are conversations and monitors and levels and time sequencers and gauges and trackers and feedback switches and time code and frame rates and the picture isn't sitting and no ones shutting up and on top of that there are people coming and going at will and moving things and leaving things and at times I can't remember how to walk and I end up spending twenty minutes of a forty minute walk trying to redevelop a comfortable gait and I can't remember how I forgot in the first place.

The ceiling was full of mouths a few days ago. It was disgusting. They weren't people mouths though. Actually they were kind of like meaty valves or something. They kept popping open and closed with these little clicks and it made my skin itch all morning. And then the next night someone ducked their head into my slightly ajar bedroom door and I thought they would leave, but then he saw me and sidled up to my closet against the wall like i wouldn't know he was there. Luckily my phone went off and the light burned him away, but it still left me slightly shaken. There are a pair of women where I work and a man. They're also bad company. The good news is what?

I moved.

Free. Finally free from continuing abuse and shitty fucking family and it is lovely. Pittsburgh is my home now and probably the only place I know of that will have me outright with little or no reservations at all. Well, not entirely true. There is of course the body of people that I want to be connected with who don't feel the same way for whatever reasons, but that's okay because here I actually have friends who actually want to see me along with a context that actually allows that to happen on a regular basis. I have my own place and a bed too. Not much else, but I don't really mind it all that much. I do still need my soul mate computer, but that reunion will have to wait a little while longer. It does mean that my music and drawing will be extremely limited for a while (amongst other things).

I guess I'm still pretty scattered. I saw pictures today of my old friend. I was supposed to send her family a gift, but that was also right around the time I was cold starting my new life so I never had many consecutive hours to dedicate my brain to it. I'm still going to do it. If there's one thing I do every year I would like that to be it. At least until I know they don't really give a shit. Apparently she was here. In this very city only days ago. I wonder sometimes if I'm excluded because I can't be included. It's upsetting. Not in a broken heart kind of way, but in a "what the fuck I thought we were friends" kind of way. Broken heartedness you can get used to, but the former will always cut me fresh and a little deeper with repetition.

I have no idea where to meet people now. I have zero interest in vaginas. Which is also somewhat new. There was some lingering interest even a couple months ago. But I guess I am just gay. Isn't that funny? Well it made me chuckle a little. It's definitely something I never really thought I would say. I still sometimes think back and ask myself "what happened to me?" But maybe it's one of those things like Meyer's Brigs preferences. Just changes over time. Who knows. I'm not really sure where I'm going with that, or most of this.

I suppose I feel like I've escaped from certain destruction in New York and Maryland by cutting off the things the circumstances were latched onto. They've basically fucked me out of 20 years of my life plus however many years it'll take me to reach the earning potential of someone who reached their masters degree and worked in their field for ten years. They've set me back 96k in debt and a five year relationship. I feel like I'm harping, so I'll get to the point.

The point is they smashed and grabbed and smashed and grabbed, but in the end there's only so much they could fit in their clutches and I'm gone away from them for good. Out of reach. Sure my student loans defaulted, but I have nothing that can be taken by the government or a judge. And what I will eventually have will be so small it won't even matter. Sure, they swear they'll cut me off, but I've already been cutoff for the better part of a decade. I didn't escape on my own either. Some friends helped make it happen in a pretty huge way and I owe them each a huge debt of gratitude and dollar bills, but collectively it is quite easy to say they basically saved my life.

I still think about killing myself every other day, but the new potential is so great and unexplored that I can't in good conscience do so and it's been so long since I felt that way. I'm broke, but I'm happy. Life at a higher resolution has its downside and its confusion and its hates and pains and I may need to reaffix filters at some point, but for now I am aware of every passing hour and that awareness is palatable. As a direct result creativity and sanity are suffering, but day to day functionality simply is. I'm proud of myself. A little bit.

I owe you a year end playlist, don't I?

///David Bowie & Philip Glass - "Heroes (Aphex Twin Remix)" We could be. So we were.

Back From Space

Hello world.

I've missed you. <3.


///DJ Hooligan - "Hear You Now (Grand Chillas Mix)" i see you in so many ways.

Whiskey Short and the Newer Braver World and No, Haven't Found Him

My brain has been white washed. There's nothing there. It's like somebody came in for lunch and took the furnishings with them when they left after dinner while I was in the bathroom. Today I kept laughing at the thought of a "race" of Asians. Is that the right nomenclature for that? It just made me think of a race of mole men. A race of super men. And all the other races of things that have graced headlines over the years.

It's amazing really. The only way to honestly cope with this new situation has been to dull my awareness of everything outside of it until the sole focus becomes the situation. If I make myself into this thing that exists for 18 hours out of the day then the thing that exists for the remaining 6 ceases to be and the conflict is resolved. Sure some blood gets shed, but Stalin's cohort put it best about the eggs and omelets and things before they got executed. At least I think I remember them doing that. Is there anything sexy about living in 1984? What about a Brave New World? I think the answers to those two questions are no and yes in no specific order. That's how life becomes manageable. If you think about it the best way to end a struggle is to simply eliminate one half of the combatants. Certainly if the struggle is what perpetuates the combatants lives than you'll end up with genocide by that logic. If you kill off everything you're fighting against you'll have to generate new things to fight against from within you.

In a society more interested in peace than war, I suppose eliminating one half of the disagreeing parties would be a means to an end. If there's no one to argue against then there's no argument. Plain and simple. The hardest part about figuring out where I fit into my own life now that my life is 75% owned by a company that wouldn't give two shits if I died by getting gutted by industrial meat hooks as long as they weren't liable to pay for damages or my funeral is trying to figure out if I'm worth eliminating or if the company is what needs to be eliminated.

Someone sent me a jesus themed text message yesterday. In fact someone else sent me a text message with the words "i hope and pray things turn out." What the fuck does that even mean. I'm sorry, excuse my language. I'm just wretchedly upset right now having recalled that second text message. Here's an idea: lets not hope, lets stop praying, and lets start doing. I am so sick and tired of hearing that bull about hopes and prayers and "I've been there before, I know excatly what you're going through"s. How about we simply appraise the situation from a logical, rational standpoint. How about societal compression. How about GDP that won't quit, but somehow wages don't keep pace with inflation or cost of living (are those the same things). How about getting more bang for your buck and the actual cost of that extra bang you're getting. The bottom lines at companies that somehow don't seem to rise nearly as quickly as profit margins.

I know everyone wants to succeed and somebody will get the short shrift (I'm full of slanted definitions today, but I hope that's the right word). At any rate, I guaran-damn-tee you the bullshit expected of some of the formerly menial jobs that have somehow crept up in demographic from appropriate for teens as a base to appropriate for 40 year olds with 6 years of experience as their base, suck more and leave less humanity in the shells of the bodies daily broken open to sell you your fucking bottle of snapple quickly and efficiently is more than what was required when you, mr. 50 year old been there done that, were punching spring loaded keys on a giant slab of plastic and metal with ink ribbon.

And I haven't found him yet. The motor is still going, but I'm just trying that much harder to hold it down no matter how much it knocks around and wrecks up the place. The week of industry came. The week of industry went. And to show for it, all I have for you is a stilted diatribe about work and a partial understanding of things that don't actually exist and a burning urge to take the steel to good use on the neighbors. Do not fucking talking to me you fucking fuck I will kill you. It's becoming more and more amazing sometimes how thin the tethers can get that hold me to a behavior steps away from thought patterns born into my infrastructure and known better and more intimately than anything learned and what's next. I'll dig them out yet.

That picture. That picture up there? It's a short whiskey. Apple top. Try it. You'll love it too. I want to feel like I should say it's the only thing that makes me feel really warm and fuzzy these days, but I'd be flat lieing if I did. And California totally sucks. Mainly because it's still twilight and happy and balmy there and I hate them for that. That's the real reason why the east coast is more pissed off than the west coast. The east coast knows. The west cost pretends to not know. Screw California.

///Wildchild - "The Wonder Years" I just wish I knew.

Sad Bunny Can't Cum

Welcome to the retrospective (cue Jerry Lewis telethon music).  It's a sort of sad time for me.  I lost my computer this past Friday.  Several outages and a lack of grounded outlets, thanks to antiquated design and moronic neighbors who don't understand that computers are more than idle curiosities and are actually essential to the younger sets way of life, lead to it turning off without warning.  Since I- I promise you this will be a "too much information" packed retrospective- since I usually do most of my writing in the dark, with a short order of bourbon, and nothing else on (electronic or otherwise), I was immediately plunged into darkness.  Dismantled the entire thing and went on a debugging, forensic, junior mortician's foray that lead me to the soul shaking realization that the mother board burned.  And now I'm slightly sad (devastated) because my computer was my best of best friends.  Now I'm stuck with my functionally challenged laptop that was dropped on its head too many times as a kid.

My writing is now inaccessible (fuck) on sata hard drives, my resume is inaccessible (fuuuck), my porn is sitting idle (fuuuuuuuck), and my music collection is essentially in a vault (FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-) till I get a new motherboard or other PC tower to- okay who gives a shit.  I do, but that's boring.  Me talking about this is like listening to someone talk about their dead cousin who you never met and they never really talked about before and trying to pretend like they have your undivided attention when it's fourth and inches in a preseason Steelers game and the gaurd they drafted is about to be put to his first real test and show you whether or not the season is going to be worth pinning playoff hopes to.  Long, long, long sigh while trying to pay attention to what really matters without looking like a complete dick.  Suffice to say, combining a tempermental laptop with a 860 bits per second internet connection and the fact that I have to write in notepad and can throw making after the fact edits squarely out the window has made me a fucking sad bunny.

Maybe I should have talked about that last.  Life has turned into a very long jerk session.  Like "just blew a rail at the bar and the chick I got into the cab with hopped out midway to my place so I blew another rail and tried to watch a movie to console myself, but couldn't get into it so I tried to rub one out and I'm three hours in and nodding off knowing I won't sleep well at all unless I at least get the small victory of cumming and all signs are pointing to a four a.m. photo finish with passing out sitting at my desk with empty cans of Natty cheering me on from the gallery."  But, yeah, you know it's dragging.  Been working hard, but obstacles must have eachother on speed dial the way things have continued to stack and you know it's no good when doing the thing you love to do becomes difficult and all you really want to do is sleep.  Good news is I've pounded enough coffee to start a coca leaf grow operation in my stomach.  Suck on that contra.  I'm not sure how the two are related, but hopefully it's close enough to let you fill in the hilarious gaps.  Personally, I didn't laugh.  Didn't even smirk on that one, but fuck it, it's out there and doing its thing.

So into it (longest intro ever).  Five years in bullets:
-started blog because I was pissed at my boss and had no one to tell about it.
-stopped talking about my boss because it was whiny as all hell.
-planned to start a career as a kept man.
-decided my beard deserved my face like modern pop and R&B singers deserve euthanisation.
-spewed hate toward beard haters.
-realized 99% of myspace writers were hacks.
-left myspace because I hated being connected to people.
-left facebook
-went back to facebook and myspace when my communication anxiety faded.

... God this is boring.  Worst retrospective ever.

I think there's supposed to be a memoir like tone to the narrative that I am completely whiffing on.  I wanted to be a fighter pilot for the longest time.

I guess I'll just skip to what's new.  I'm realizing more and more that the shit surrounding my island is so ridiculously deep that it is fairly realistic to say there is zero chance of any kind of college sweetheart reunion.  Think of it this way: what she has in common with her peers now is like two humans talking to eachother.  What she has in common with me is like a person at a zoo talking to animals.  While one may be more interesting, it's not what you'd want to spend your life doing.  What else.  I guess I'm bi.  Are there rules for that.  I guess I didn't just start one day.  If I look back it's pretty obvious.  Most people don't really give a shit now anyway which has been a massive relief, because what I feared the most was being hated.  Some people look at me differently, maybe, I'm not sure and I don't care all that much to ask them.  I'm still the same person with the same anger management issues and the same scars.  Someone asked me why I would choose to be something that "will make my life more difficult", but to be perfectly honest it's made my life so much easier to live now that I can understand myself that much better.  Even saying what I am feels strange, as though there are brands of people.  But, anyway, sex with guys is fun.  Sex with girls is fun.  Different reasons for both.  Girl cum and guy cum are pretty close in taste to me.  That's probably the only thing the two have in common for the most part.  Guys and girls are attractive for different reasons too.  I guess the oddest thing is most gay men are incredibly obnoxious and unattractive.  On second thought, not really that odd because most women are also unnattractive.  Or maybe, okay further revision: most gay men and women I don't scare away with my being myself are unattractive.  That's the qualifier I was tasting on the tip of my tongue.  Fuck em.  I just wish I was willing to let myself see it sooner and embrace it, but I was so caught up in performing to the rigid framework I grew up in I suppressed and ignored it and raged inwardly and outwardly and not allowing myself to be.  I missed out on the whole "rules and standards committee" meetings in college so now I'm still learning about it, but better late than a repression fueled suicide.  One of the hardest things to get over was feeling like I've somehow failed as a man.  That's actually been the single toughest thing in accepting my sexual self.  So much of socialization is the assumption of roles and rejecting the hetero role that framed and formed and malformed so much of my behavior like fucking foot binding was and continues to be difficult, but it's a difficulty that's building toward true normalcy for me and in so being it is worth every ounce of growing pain.

What else.  I'm bad at keeping secrets.  I've realized that so much of my life has been informed by half truths that propogating them is so extremely distasteful that I just can't do it with believable conviction.  A good thing and a bad thing, but mostly a good thing I think.  A change for the better.  There's still a little voice in my head that talks about dreams of wealth, but there's a louder voice that screams to me to write and ultimately having a nine to five and writing will mean more to me than continuing a foreign quest for status and titles and degrees.  I think that's what helps keep me sane.  I'm still looking for that elusive community of writers.  That still hasn't changed.  I came close to finding one.  Hopefully that'll turn into something.  I think I'm wandering again.  I love you.  Don't be sad.  Life won't drag on forever and that's something we can look forward to, right?  Death is going to be the best orgasm ever.  I'll still be enthusiastic about it when it rolls around.  In the meantime you just have to make the most of the little humps and enjoy the moments you get to spend cumming as much as possible.  Also, don't say that to people in casual settings.  They'll think you're weird.  Also don't tell people you're too depressed to cum.  Even as a metaphor, but especially not literally, unless they're the kind of crazy sexy person who would take it as a standing challenge.  Even then.  You know what, you probably should not be taking advice from me about this.

How's this for some summation of 200 posts:  I was born, I lived for a while not knowing there was a world outside the controlled universe of my home until college, I discovered there was a world, I dated a fantastic girl for a long time, I loved my beard, I planned to get in tight with a cougar before I dated, I revised my life mission once I realized none of that was actually going to work, I realized the only thing really important to me was writing, I accepted my creative self, I accepted my sexual self, I loved, I hated life, I had sex, I learned that I'm a violent person, along the way I learned I had real (actual) mental defficiencies that require maintenance, I learned that the best thing I could do was fight it by living with it constructively, and I realized that I'm not the greatest thing to happen to the world, but maybe a good thing to happen to a handful of people.  So that's it.  Peace.

///Dntel - "Casuals"  Walking down an overcast lane and the air is so cool on your face that you can't help looking to the sky to watch the bits of an almost storm chase eachother over the building tops and forget the shit that turned your eyes red that afternoon and feel the slippage of time and understand that you're still you and that's perfectly alright.