Where The Time Went

I haven't been lost.  I've been sitting beside a home made transceiver trying to reach a ship in the vicinity.  I've been on board it a few times with no signs of life.  Each time I return to my junker it goes off and I race to the comms deck to respond.  Each time I do- static.

Each time I board it there are freshly opened meals, a coffee sack still warm, a cigarette drifting with flecks of ash still floating and clouds of smoke swaying in the recycled air.  A saucer and chipped cup and different music playing in the background over the public address.  Breathable 65 degree air.  A few playing cards that weren't there before.  A display still picking up signals from Sol from 1989 when they aren't playing static.  A ghost ship.  I turn off the distress beacon and return to my junker to figure out what to do with it.

I can't turn it over to the scrappers just yet.  Not with people aboard.  Their machines will shred it with no regard for souls.  If someone is on that ship, I can't forgive myself.  If someone is on that ship, I hope to make contact soon.  The trade hub orbiting Europa is still four days journey from our position in the Oort.  Remember how lovely the grass was down on Terra?  If I can bring this thing back in one piece, there'll be a fortune and a vacation waiting for us.

Someone is on that ship.  I will find them.

Captain Jexel Hobbes of the Noway Accel- 10201800278

Time has flown by.  I've missed so many deadlines I wanted to hit.  When was the last time we spoke?

RAM is going to take a serious investment.  I know that the mother board can handle it and I've tried a half dozen times different combinations of chips to blow it to the 16 gigabytes that it can do.  I've allowed the bottleneck to become a road block on producing art.  I fell in love back in March.  Sacrificing and sacrificing over and over to try to bring another person into my world, but most efforts have failed.

I've asked her dozens, but not yet hundreds of times to meet me half way.  She continues to do the same things she does, not because she doesn't love me as much as I love her, but because it is all she knows and has known since she was small.  I do think that it's possible to change, I know it is.  Everyone deserves a chance.  There is a spark in her.  If I can help, I will.  I didn't get to where I am in life without help.  How can a person conscious of this turn away another and another who actually kind of sort of understands you?

I am beginning to wonder if she actually does or if she is a part of my life because I am so different from everything she once knew and cares more about being truly loved as a person than.......  she does love fairly unconditionally.  Maybe that's a part of the problem.  She can't tell the difference between someone who actually cares for her and someone who is using her.  It's a possibility.  It can be solved.

How do you speak to someone who is jammed with ultimatums and unwilling to discern?  How do you speak to someone who cannot see the consequences of their actions beyond a week, beyond a month, beyond 12 hours?  How do you reach an addict?  I am one.  She's not on another level.  She hasn't allowed herself into the terrors of introspection.

She flies away from the heat.  She creates reason mazes.  Responsibility mazes.  Agency dead falls.  I understand the fear.  How can you explain that fear in your own life to someone who hasn't acknowledged it within their own space?  I suppose that goes back to the old adage: how can you love someone, if you cannot love yourself.  I don't know what to do when I see her setting herself up for apologies.  It's how she's gotten by.  The other adage: don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

I never thought that I would fall in love again.  I knew I would.  I did not believe, however, that it would be more than a passing fancy.  Survival is paramount.  Survival comes with its costs.  One of the costs is you do not get to enjoy stable long term relationships because you must survive.  If two survivors meet, there's a match and a stable long term relationship can grow there because there is no dependence.  There is only a mutual companionship.  Do not tell me you would die for me.  Live with me.

I am afraid this will not work and I may have to eject her through an escape pod into the vacuum of space with a few months survival kit, a beacon, and a radio.

The largest red flag wasn't history, or family composition, or addiction.  The largest red flag remains a dearth of creative thought.  A nagging inability to see what's possible instead of what's here.

One year.  One year.  I will gift her one year of my life.  I was given less to reach further and, for some of it, I destructed because I didn't know what and who I was and a heavy portion was out of my control from the outset.  Everyone deserves a chance to grow.  Everyone!  I know she can do it.  We have so much in common and beautifully so.  I do love her after believing that I did not have the capacity to love again after everything my circuits have been sheared through.  I am a part of my ship, incorporated, built, and breathing, designed, redesigned, scrapped, prototyped, burned, and rebuilt anew.

The larger mission is still to build a map for the sojourners after I am long gone and someone else is stumbling upon my space station and docked junker broadcasting songs no one has heard in decades and curious what the hell a space station is doing 15 light years away from Sol in dead space.

I have compassion.  I know that I am a pretty tough ticket 300 out of 365 days, but I can feel and I can be and am conscious of my bipolar schizophrenia.   Occasionally it gets away from me, but not nearly as often as it once did.  I can protect her and my friends from it (it's impossible to protect one's self).

One year from the day we met in March.

Synchronize watches.




///Way Out West - "Northern Lights"   radiata

Stand Up Act 10

Stand Up Act 9

Don't be a quitter.  You can say you're not funny, but you are a little funny.  Everyone's a little funny in the head.  Knee slapping toe tapping funny?  Yeah.  I was just thinking about my very confused moment when I thought it was raining while pumping gas because it was overcast and I wasn't paying attention and it's pretty funny.  Imagining the view of someone waiting in line inside the mini mart and the line is eight, maybe nine, people long and it was a pain in the ass to find parking and when you did you still had to watch one of the fueling stalls with a hawk's eye until you realized the car you were watching had someone in the front passenger seat, but not the driver's seat and you knew you may as well go and pay at the register instead of at the pump because chances were good they were in there anyway, it's pretty funny.  Standing in the mini mart, eight bodies deep, and the person you're waiting for four feet in front of you and instead of staring flaming arrows into the back of their head you glance to your left out of the mart front's windows and see me whistling away the afternoon and nodding my head to a killer soundtrack entirely between my ears while gasoline pours all over the ground and my shoes instead of into my car's tank... kind of hilarious.  Until you ask yourself "is he about to commit suicide?  Am I about to witness an act of terror/protest?  Immolation?  Is that the word?  Buddhists aren't violent!  What is going on???"  That's when it becomes semi-not funny.  Still funny though.  Don't be a quitter.  Quitters cannot be relied on for shit.

Quitters tend to be non-showerers.  Soap dodgers.  "Why should I take a shower?  I'm only going to get dirty later."  Yes!  That's it!  That's exactly the point!  You're going to get dirty later, so take a shower!  What is so difficult to comprehend about that?  Why should I change my tires?  They're only going to wear out later.  No!  Terrible logic, sir or madame!  The entire point of changing your tires is so that you can still get to where you need to go without driving on the inside parts of your wheels after your rims melt into white hot vapor and you destroy the infrastructure of society by going to get a loaf of bread.  That's the entire point of changing your tires.

Do you really want to be that person that provokes violent and sudden and detrimental change to the fabric of citizenry itself with the funk emanating from inside your clothing?  That makes you a disease to the American body.  You, person skipping bathing, are literally a disease and what you have made airborne is going to get into someone else's nose and push them right over the edge on what was probably a sub-par day of the office.  That person is going to go home with a little extra essence of pure rage from having to deal with your soap dodging ass and sit and fume for hours, perhaps days.  That rage is going to fester and grow and fall out of that persons brain like lightning bolts while you sit at home and think about not taking a shower while you eat some microwave heated shit dinner that comes in three different flavors, and have you tried the one with the pudding square?

That person is going to slowly fume and every time they smell anything normal, but slightly off, they will squeeze their mental stress ball until it can't be squished any smaller and they will find a board with a nail in it while they're at work and just start cracking peoples brains open.   All over the place.  Brains everywhere.  That person's kids will grow up in a single parent home and become a serial killer.  Not that your spouse didn't try, but fucked up is fucked up, let's be honest.  That serial killer will shut down your cities night life and going to the bar will be a fucking shit show because no one will be there.  You'll have extra time to think about not bathing yourself and I hope you feel terrible because you'll have ruined it for everyone else who does take showers, created a psychopath, and ruined a marriage, and quite possible a necklace of future children who will never have a normal childhood.  All because you didn't take a shower.  Be better than that.

Showering is important.  There's a shower graph.  It's the graph of inward and outward perception.  At the bottom of the graph is zero.  As the "Y" axis goes up, it heads towards an actual physical intervention.  As the "X" axis goes across, it heads toward infinity number of days without washing your body.  The green line is the array of points indicating what people feel about the condition of your dirt suit.  The red line is the array of points indicating what you feel about the of your dirt suit.  Day 1 through 2, depending on your deodorant situation, even at zero.

Day three the green line starts to inch upward.  The red line is still zero.  Day four, you're at "maybe shower, but my clothes are still clean so whatever", the green line is at "I'm pretty sure he's stopped showering."  Day five, the green line is at "does he wipe after number 2?"  The red line is at "I can still tie my shoes without being able to smell my own groin.  We're good."  Day 6, they're asking you if you are okay and if someone has died in your family or has your heart been broken recently.  Day 6, you are realizing your skin has been chipping off pretty easily and no matter what you wear it feels kind of itchy.  On day 7 people are beginning to actively avoid standing near you and it's great because you can't hear their bullshit conversations or are obligated to make conversation because they're out of the range of politeness.

Day seven too, you realize when you dig in your pockets it pulls the waistband of your jeans far enough from your hips to release an ungodly plume of b.o. the world has known only in stories of lore.   It's not that your nose was close either.  The mushroom cloud of violently decaying nuclear fissionic waste rolled up your tummy and chest and hit you right in the chin from underneath your shirt and jacket like NES punch out Tyson.  At a grocery store.  And now that's on camera forever.  They'll be looking at their loss prevention footage and cue you up and point you out when you went to get your wallet out of your pocket and recoiled from yourself like a ghost held it's index finger up to your nose after finger banging someone and said "check this out!"

That's when the graph points match again.  Right at the top of the graph around day 7.  What's crazy is if you hit day 7 and that happens and you're completely unphased you just go back to day zero.  That red line falls straight back down the "Y" axis and the thought process changes from "why not take a bath" to "why take a bath, I'm good with this."

No, don't be good with that.  You're going to ruin someone's life with the way you smell.  Don't be good with that!  The truth is, when you get back to zero, that green line indicating how you are perceived by the world outside your skull goes to infinity.  People start to really consider if they should ask you some deep ass questions.  Maybe you're hiding some sort of extremely deep seated trauma or maybe you did something or something happened to you that you really need to talk about, but can't put the words together.  No.  None of that.  You've just accepted that being a dirty assed human being is acceptable enough to you.  Selfish prick.   Take fucking showers.  Don't be a life ruiner.

Also don't be that guy on public transportation that sits next to whomever to prove that they're fine with all walks of life.  You're not impressing anyone.  Anyone in their right mind knows the old man at the front of the bus in the handicap seat has shit his pants and was not wearing a diaper this afternoon.  Arm sleeve tattoos are not a nose clip.  Everyone on this box on wheels can smell the fact that he has shit his pants and is not at all concerned with the fact.  Join the rest of the green curb at the back of the bus.  It doesn't make you any less of a person.  I'm sure you're a really great person on the inside and a free spirit, but shitting next to.... sitting next to a steaming pile of happily oblivious is still sitting next to a steaming pile.  We live in America, people.  You have the option to object.  Trust us, we're not judging you from the back of the bus.  We are sometimes shaking our heads and wondering what the hell is wrong with your reasoning capabilities, but we are not judging you that harshly.  Come back here where the music is live on cellphone speakers and I am not acknowledging you because we have the same dealer and I remember you from two Saturdays ago, but did not realize we live close enough together to have gotten on the bus within a few stops of each other and you didn't call me back.  Asshole.

Clubs and bars are like giant sleepovers.  The only caveat is that everyone does have to go to sleep eventually, but everyone's sleeping bags are miles apart so that conversation you would normally have while falling asleep get's sent out through text messages and various post outlets instead of mouth to mouth to your friend.  The thing is it would be creepy to send them those messages directly, way too affectionate for society now.  Society is way too sexualized.  Way too sexually charged.  If I send you a text at 2 A.M. there's no sexual connotation to it.  It's just an extension of a conversation I wanted to have earlier, but it took me a while to put the thought together, just like at a slumber party when all you can think about is all the rest of the shit you did that day.  All you can think about is the cookies and the iced tea and the video games and playing tag and hitting that three on the backyard hoop they have and your friend's mom's tits and while you're trying to fall asleep you remember that thing that occurred to you that was kind of poignant and wanted to break it out for conversation and analysis before you forget that the thought ever occurred.  And now you're creepy trying to talk to your 32 year old friend about a ridiculous theory that, though apt given the days events, now sounds like Silence of the Lambs pillow talk.

Social media is a lot like a giant sleepover.  A giant massively multiplayer sleepover.  Think about it.  What did you want to do at every sleepover?  Stay up as late as possible.  Check.  You can stay up as late as you want to whenever you want to, every time.  What else did you want to do?  Drink as much soda as you wanted to?  Check.  Play whatever game you wanted to for as long as you wanted to and cut out the players you did not want to play with at will.  Check and check and check.  Watch movies and talk about them as much as you wanted to?  Check.   Talk about current events?  Check?  That kind of makes you an awful person to have at a sleepover, but whatever floats your boat.  Alright.  It's basically an enormous, wonderful, slumber party that you have to pretend to be asleep during parts to avoid the other people at the sleepover that are not your friends.  It's great!

The best thing is, if you want to get up for a glass of orange juice or something at 3 A.M. you don't have to sneak around.  You can get up like a boss, go get the quart of O.J. and chug that shit straight out of the bottle.

Stand Up Act 9 (dialogues)

Stand Up Act 8


I don't want to go fishing today.

Why not, I was just putting on pants after you called?!

I changed my mind.

Why?

It's gross out.

Seriously?  A little rain??  It's got damn Pittsburgh in Autumn.  It's a perfect day.

Nope, its not.

You're from Pittsburgh!  What the hell is wrong with you?

You're being unreasonable!

It's beautiful outside!

You're being unreasonable!!

Am I?

Yeah.

Okay.............when are you free next?  I'm looking at the ten day forecast right now.




Throwing a rager tonight?

Yeah.

What time?

Sixish.

Nine?

Sixish.

Sixish?

Yes, sixish.

Have you thought about nine?

No.  Well, I did.  For a while.  Then I remembered I had shit to do.  Before.   After I remembered.

Whatever, you know where I live.  Hit me up and we'll combine parties at nine.

Ninish?





We're going to ramble on, because we can, and also why not.  The longest set ever.

Cats have short memories.  They have learned behaviors, but I think it's fair to say they have short memories.  They're beings of routines.  That can make you functional.  If you have a short memory, but a solid routine, you can definitely get by alright.  No harm no foul.  What you have to keep in mind is what really defines getting by.  Do you want to get by as well as a human being does or as well as a cat does?  Granted, cats have it pretty good.

Defining work aside, not to say that it's easy to be a cat.  Can you imagine having to sleep so much?  Yeah, I need to eat lunch, but first I have to take this three hour siesta in this sun beam because it's really god damn warm right here.  Yes, I know your car died on the shoulder of interstate 376 and you cancelled your triple A because there was an order of 30 pounds of catnip you had to get in so that you could ensconce yourself in plant matter on demand for the year, but this sun beam is really really warm and if I get into my car right now I will fall asleep immediately if traffic stops for longer than five minutes and I'm not trying to get stopped by the police with my inspection sticker out of date.  I'll see you in a few hours.  Yes, I'm in the shower right now.  I just ate.  I'll be done when I'm done.  Whether or not I'll be jerking off for the next hour before I take this nap is frankly none of your business.  If you keep talking like an asshole we are definitely brawling when I get there.  What's it to you anyway?  We're not family.  If I could live without a housemate I would!  Well, I didn't touch your snack stash, I just ate all of the food you left after you took off after breakfast.  Yes, including the things you set aside for lunch.  No, I didn't touch your stash or your green.  If I did, I would be too busy not answering the damn phone.

It's a little bit alarming though when you look up from repairing a broken laptop or keeping up with email nonsense and see your cat dangling from the side of the fish tank you specifically perched on top of bookshelf because, the last time you checked, cats couldn't climb bookshelves.

From a purely physics standpoint, it shouldn't work.  There's a reason cat trees are covered with carpeting instead of smooth faced fake wood.  On top of that you've seen them try to climb it before close to forty times.  They jump in three shelves up, the earliest possible landing point and watched them look at and sniff at the fourth shelf like a hardcore dungeon crawling RPG player trying to find the secret entrance to the glitch cave.  As though, if they looked hard enough and poked around long enough, somehow the bookshelf programming would split apart and instantly teleport them to the next level up if they jabbed the right pixel with their nose.

Yet, there he is.  Climbing on top of the fish tank with no lid.  I'm scrambling to find my camera and trying to keep one eye on him to make sure he doesn't fall in, because the only thing worse than a cat soaked to the bone in fish poop filled water is washing that cat.  And somehow he figures out how to step from edge to edge and not fall in AND terrorize the fish dumb enough to come near the surface with a thing twenty times their size looming overhead and thrusting enormous claws through the surface of the water with the only thing in mind being poking one of those two foot long (by scale if fish were people) talons through their itty bitty eye holes.

How the hell did he get up there?  I took him down and watched him attempt it again and again for a good day and a half and he never managed to pull it off again.  Which was kind of disappointing.  It reminded me of how shitty my own memory was.  Not to harp on passwords, but I have made passwords and forgotten them not more than a handful of days later.  The security question is what was the make and model of your first car.  Two days removed, I'm asking myself "the make and model of the first car I ever drove or the first car I ever crashed?"  "The make and model of the first car I can remember riding in or the first car I ever drove myself."  "The make and model of the first car I fell in love with or the make and model of the first car I knew I wanted in my dream garage."  Ending with "your account is locked, please call customer service at 1-800-555" five five, five five.  How are achievements so forgettable?

I want to sit the cat down with translator boxes strapped to our throats so we can understand each other the way it happens in science fiction and go over what exactly went on.  Because maybe he just needs some coaching?  Maybe he did it once and it was a wild success and he got so caught up in the success that he forgot to make mental notes of how he actually got there and now he's broke and sitting on the floor, looking up at the fish tank angrier than ever, and clueless with how to actually deal with it.

I at least wish he had opposable thumbs and manners enough to ask me to pass him the sugar dish so we could sit down at the kitchen table and talk about our short comings.  Or at least sip tea and nod instead of stalking around the apartment in circles mad at things we can't discuss and counter mad at each other for being mad about things we can't talk about and madder that the atmosphere is so hostile when we both have nowhere else to be and nothing else to look at besides our counter counter madness.

So treat yourself.  Nothing cures unhappiness like a good nosh on something yummy.  It makes the world go pretty swell, when at the end of the day you go over the steps that got you to where you were the month before only to find utter soul crushing DMV line wait times to find you never filled out form H-09 and you can't forge the notary stamp in the bathroom anyway so there's no need to explain that you have explosive diarrhea from the fast food joint you never went to and will be back in a moment.

Get out the cat treats and their having pork sauteed with salmon juices and beans and rice so they poop good, and you have bleu cheese buffalo wing flavored butter crackers with nothing but mayonaise to dip them in (if you want to go so far as to dip them in to something).

There are some things, some foods, that have no business here on this green earth.  I don't know how they get passed beyond their developmental stages or who fell asleep at the wheel, but they do enter the realm of otherwise useful, palatable, strange and uncommonly tasty besides the fact, sometimes unassuming, palette expanding digestables.  If it's not broke, don't fix it holds true for most foods.  Sure, stick a turbo charger on there.  Put some bigger rims on there.  Maybe some slicker tires.  Change the paint scheme and put some tint on the windows.  Lower the suspension.  Make that vehicle of flavor crystals sexier to my tongue and I won't complain.

Maybe though, it would be a good idea to take the concept sketchers out of the room when you get down to the nitty gritty of actually putting together the deliverable?  Maybe, instead of a massive grille with chrome highlights, go with a slight variation and make it a few inches bigger instead of a foot and a half bigger with ten inch wings sticking out of the sides?  Consider the Ruffle potato chip.  Let's make the ridges bigger, but just by a few millimeters.  Sure: instantly better.  Let's take the barbecue flavor and make it a little more peppery and a little more salty and a little more savory.  Sure: instantly better.  Let's take the barbecue flavor and make it a million times sweeter and a thousand times more sour and paint it orange!  No.

Part of what makes these x-foods so ridiculously awful is the half commitment.  Case in point: parmesan garlic bread flavored anything.  That never works out.  In every essence lab there's probably some guy or team of people working on distilling the essence of a food that is an experience unto itself.  You will never be able to distill the experience of chomping into a piece of properly toasted, well seasoned, garlic bread.  Ain't gonna happen.  God bless you for trying, and enjoy the pay check in the meantime, but you are trying to get through a brick wall by poking it with a finger tip.  Chicken and waffle potato chips?  Nope.  Gimme the chicken and the waffle and some hot syrup please.  In a bag.  On a shelf.  That I can buy, take home, pull a tab and trigger an exothermic reaction that heats it all up, and then pour it out on a plate with a knife and fork and a little plastic baggie of syrup and a packet of salted butter to bust open on top of it.  I'll pay the extra ten dollars for rehydrated deep fried meat, science, and happiness instead of a $3.50 bag of sadness.

It's tiring.  I keep falling for it and it's tiring.  I imagine the woman at the gas station where these unspeakable abominations of food stuffs keep showing up (am I shopping at one of the test kitchens?  I DON'T KNOW, but I wish I did) sees me stumble in at five in the morning looking for something, nay anything, besides what is already in my pantry or my fridge and watches me walk up and down the aisles and sees my eyes light up at the latest new riff on an old classic and waits for my shoulders to fall.  Waits for the long sigh of defeat because she knows I'll try anything once because we had a long conversation three days after the first time I tried heroin and she eventually came up to me and asked me if she could help me with something and it scared the living daylights out of me to the point where I literally jumped backward from her because I was convinced I was there alone somehow at the time and my brain was still maladjusted to person to person contact in ways far worse than they are now.

I imagine her watching that long breath and knowing I'm going to come to the counter with some Island of Dr. Moreaux shit to put in my gut and she'll check me out and wish me the best of luck again and she knows I could just ask, because she's tried it before, but she knows I won't listen.  "You could've just called."  Instead of waiting to get hammered until two in the morning expecting people to show up and packing an entire evening of inebriation into the three hours before the sun comes up and having to deal with them already completely soused and begging you to slow down because they're already ready for sleep and you're just getting started and they are in no mood to field your thirteen text messages about the things you normally talk about when you party and collaborate and get drunk at the same pace together.

But that's when you know you can die happy.  Assuming your death isn't brought about by being fed feet first into a wood chipper while you're still conscious, you can definitely pass quietly and quite happy into death knowing you did call who you were supposed to, when you were supposed to, and remembered the things you were supposed to remember how to do along the way, and didn't fall for things like a taco shell made of doritos that tasted like hot vagina cheese vomit on the way down and nothing like an electro statically cheese powdered tortilla chip casing taco fixings at all, and everything you did or at least some of what you did was what you were supposed to do.

"Hell, I'm two days and six hours late for work" is never a good feeling.  When you get that sensation that what you're on to is something you can fade out doing and never wake up from, you know it's something good.  Sure, you can get that feeling artificially (see Patton and the suicide drug), but when you've earned your way on to that path toward what you do better than anything else, don't get comfortably confused with doing best because there is very little comfortable about writing or art or whatever keeps the motor spinning when you'd rather have it idle or, better yet, shut down completely, you know you're on to something worth while and pursuing.  Perhaps in vain, but like I said before (not really) vanity is a poor man's occupation.

I can't wait to operate out of ego.  Vanity is sport.  Ego is conquest.The definition of poor being not within the scope of ... being too tired to masturbate.

You really do have to reevaluate your life if you reach a point where you are literally too tired to masturbate.  When you cross that line where the prospect of masturbation puts the same look on your face as when you want a nip of a candy bar, but can't decide which brand or make or model or if it should have ground effects on it, or if the candy bar just has speed holes punched in it or a new paint job, but it'll let you down in the end and even the piss amount of money you spent on it will lead to days of regret later when you are one dollar and 33 cents short of getting the one thing you actually needed later on in the month, you know it's time to make some changes.

No one should ever have to suffer being too tired to masturbate.  It's natures gift to the animal kingdom and as the king of the kingdom you should be and are entitled to, by the mandate of science and creation itself, masturbate.  That's one thing I will never understand about relationships.  The person that gets upset about your masturbating is so clearly in the wrong, it's practically insane.  In terms of pure practicality, absolutely insane.

I'm not cheating on you.  You're not having sex with me.  I need to feel sexually fulfilled nightly so I don't kill you and then all of our children and then my coworkers tomorrow morning and then myself.  What's the big deal?  You're happy, because I did not sexually assault you during the night when my dick got hard and I couldn't sleep for the third night in a row.  You're happy because I wake up in a good mood and feel rested and you feel rested and don't have to wash cum off of your ass and out of your cooter or off your dick and thighs.  I feel fulfilled because I slept well beside you and you feel good because I slept well beside you and enjoyed breathing in your sleep smells.  You feel good because you're not obligated to fuck me and I feel good because you feel good about that.  Who cares what I'm actually thinking about?  Brain space is brain space.  It's no ones property.  It's no man's land.  So it's okay to think about baseball and dismantling an engine block and nun's elbow fat to keep myself from cumming while we fuck, but it's not okay to think about fucking if we're not fucking?  Do you know how ridiculous you sound right now?  Can you see why this might not work for me?

If you're too stressed to masturbate you need to reevaluate your life choices.

I do think I am becoming a bit asexual.  It's getting close to the point where it is impossible to meet a good shag without the baggage.  I don't want to know your life story.  I'll listen.  I'll talk.  I won't ask, but if you ask I'll tell.  I think it comes with moving up the age bracket and getting to that point where everyone begins pairing off and eggs start to get few and far between and people either start to go more and more insane or more and more stable and there is less and less gray area between the extremes because it really does take a good portion of your life just to figure out who and what you are and what the hell you are projecting and how the hell it's actually being perceived.

That moment in middle school at the graduation dance when the dance floor cleared out and the chaperons were busy talking about futures and "oh my gawd, my son..." and "I know, my daughter..."s  and other bullshit parents talk about to stay sane around other parents and not sound weird or give any indication that their little bastards backwards tendencies have anything to do with what goes on after he/she gets home from school, and everyone is in a circle talking to someone or listening to someone and you realize you're looking up at the lights in the ceiling and listening to everyone listening and talking to each other and you're happy there,  happens all over again when you get older.  Except this time around you're fully aware of it.

And that's when you realize you should stop suggesting things to do with other people because they're flat not interested, no matter how enthusiastic about it you try to come across.  Maybe there was an inkling of interest when the topic first came up, but by the fourth phone call and the tenth text message over the course of a month with no success it's time to face facts: they don't want to hang out with you the same way you want to hang out with them and it's only going to get more pronounced as they continue to grow and you continue to grow and you're not growing apart, by no means.  You're just not roll dogs the way you used to be.

Eventually it's going to get creepy and they're going to cut you off entirely so simmer down.  That's hard to do though.  Especially when you get pity-vited to hang out.  That's always the worst.  A pity-vite followed by endless pursuit leads to call off after call off after call off, because, let's be honest, they're trying to let you down easy and if you think about it a little bit, had you met them outside of the circumstances in which you actually met, you never would have known they existed in the first place.  Your blip is over.  The good thing is though, if you do relax the pursuit a little bit, you might get to have a fun pop in/pop up later when you've had enough time away to have something interesting to relay to them and that's nothing to sneeze at.  Unless you sneeze when someone turns on the light.  Then it is something to sneeze at.  Something to sneeze at and explain while you run for some toilet paper and your clothes because finding people that fuck with the lights on is almost as hard as not forcing the issue.

It's kind of like coveralls.  You either understand their value or you don't.  There's a large age divide in understanding the coverall.  There's a large age divide and a large occupation divide too.  When it comes to occupations the idea of the coverall is pretty obvious.  You either have to stay really really clean or you have to get really really dirty.  Either way, any sort of regular clothing is not going to cut it, but whatever job you are doing at either end of the spectrum is absolutely essential to the furthering of civilization.  You're either working at the very top end of technology and physiology or you're working at the machine level where the rubber meets the road.  Either way, if you show up in regular clothes or a suit and tie someone is going to say "what the fuck were you thinking" and/or "go home and change or don't come back at all."

The other area is a little more finicky.  The other area is weather related.  If it's just that damn cold outside it makes sense to wear coveralls.  Plain and simple.  The children in snow suits will nod and nearly high five you up until you hit the tweens and teens and young adults.  That's when you run into the girl still wearing heels in an inch of snow and the guy in all leather skinny jeans and bubble jacket vest with the flat brimmed sports hat that still has its sticker on it.  That's when you have to share the sidewalk with the guy with the vintage belt buckle and man purse shivering at a bus stop and the mom in enormous sunglasses faux studded with diamonds with a stroller.  That is, however, also when you run into the gal in her early thirties who stops you and asks you where you bought those coveralls because waiting at the bus stop at 7 A.M. with a windchill of -5 has had the presence of mind to understand a skirt and leggings with knee high leather boots was a bad idea.

The logic gap from age 13 to 23 is a strange one.  Everything is very obvious after, I dunno, say 26.  After 26 it's just a matter of execution and can do, will do, won't do, can't do, on the books and ready to go, or still thinking it over indefinitely postponed.  It does make me laugh sometimes walking home from work in nice thick coveralls perfectly fine, the wind breaking in front of me and not feeling a thing knowing that I score a 0 on style points and 100% on no regrets or thoughts about "if I lived here, I'd be home already" because I know in coveralls I can walk for days.  Hell, I could curl up and take a nap, but we know how that usually ends (flashlights in the face and "where do you live"s and "this is a public park, you can't sleep here"s, but those days are behind us).

Growing up is a shame but necessary.  I got my first gray hair a few weeks ago.  Right in the middle of my chin.  A friend of mine said "you're going to be one of those creepy 40 year olds with gray hair all over," I told him it's not true.  The preferred term is silver fox.  It's a badge of honor.  I honestly didn't think I'd live long enough to see a gray hair on my head so it's actually a badge I am happy to wear.  I can run with it.  Chicks dig salt and pepper fellas right?  Even though I don't particularly dig chicks.  It's still nice to be prized a little bit.  Let's you know you're not a complete dumpster fire.  If you're not a shock jock, I'm pretty sure not being branded a dumpster fire is a good thing.

Unlike most people, I've been waiting for gray hair for a very long time.  It's welcome.  My hair will finally start catching up to the miles I've put on my brain.  If someone took me home they'd be calling up lawyers about lemon laws and scam artists even though there is still a heart beating 10 years old inside of me.  Flipping through channels you'd be well advised to skip cartoon network because I will start jumping up and down and shouting that we have to stop to watch All Dogs Go to Heaven and Up coming on right after and we can't miss Courage the Cowardly Dog marathon after; Law and Order and the NBA game be damned!

With the kid does come soap dodging.  I still don't shower enough.  Then again, as you get older, the value of washing tends to increase.  Aside from my own OCD showering because...  well... because!  If you shower six times in one day you've either done way too much coke, done something really bad, are absolutely breaking down mentally and can't stop touching your own skin to save your life (if someone pointed a gun at you and sad the next time you rub your forearm I am going to put a bullet inside your fucking brain and you actually had to think long and hard about whether or not that itch right at the crook of your elbow was worth investigating because technically it's not your forearm and besides you really really have gone way too long without checking to make sure you were still inside the skin wrapped around your muscles, veins, arteries, and bones), or you just really like showering.

If I could live in my shower I probably would, Seinfeld style.  It breaks my heart sometimes, making references to things kids have never seen.  By kids, I mean early 20 somethings.  I can live with it.  It still grates my nerves though.

I did realize I was soap dodging the other day.  After I realized my shower fetish was getting out of control I decided to shower as little as possible and went to visit a friend.  I sat down right beside their fan boosted space heater.  Terrible idea, I know, but there was nowhere else to sit.  Let's just say, I got comfortable sitting on the floor beside it and spread my legs a little bit to sit cross legged.  The temperature wasn't particularly high or particularly low, but the fan was boosting airflow continuously and, yeah, it felt great blowing through my paints and airing out my junk because I'd been at work all day and it's nice to get a breeze going when your sack is stuck to your thigh.

I thought I smelled alright.  Ten minutes in, the girl sitting next to me asks me if I want to turn the heater off.  The heater is in passive mode so my answer is no.  The temperature is fine.  Ten minutes later she asks me again and this time we make eye contact and her eyes have that "something is not going well" slit to them.  So I put two and two together and made four.  Whatever funk I thought was contained has been let loose like the dogs of war all up on her face.  It was the nicest way anyone has told me I reeked in a long time.

I respected that, switched to a kneeling pose to pin down the crotch sweat dragon, and turned off the blower.  It's one of those simple things you can do to help other people feel more comfortable without other people being too shame faced.  It's kind of like masturbating in that way.  If you ever masturbate to a particular person, they don't want to hear about so don't say anything about it.  The sentiment will be appreciated, but there's no reason to go as far as treading on graces and enjoying company.  Be easy, be tactful, and they'll respect you for it.  The thing is you won't know they respect you because you'll never bring it up, but understand that given the alternative to not knowing... yeah, they'll respect you for it and take the complement.  Play it out in your head.  Run the dialogues and the dialog trees and superimpose their characteristics on those dialogs to guide the decision forks and you'll always end up at the same conclusion: take more showers, take more time, die happy, and in the meantime don't eat shitty food and keep memories in tow better than a cat can.

What Is and Should Not Be

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

The Super L33t Effect

The l33t effect in salary capped sports, and to a lesser degree uncapped sports, in America is a shame.  It has nothing to do with LeBron as a person, or his mental toughness, or what he does in "winning" time, or crunch time, or whether or not he steps up in big moments, or is "passive", or whatever.  The only thing it has to do with is the perception that you have to, absolutely have to be paid requisite to your abilities and relative to your peers at all times and to do anything less would be an admission of some kind of failing in your skill set, relative to everyone else playing the same game, and is absolutely unacceptable.

I mean, I get it: professional athletes are competitive in every aspect of their game and it makes sense that the competitive "I am the best, I will get the best" mentality bleeds over into other aspects of their lives.  I wasn't terribly shocked when Tiger Woods slept with other women.  The guy's a competitor.  Were you really shocked back in the day when Tanya paid that guy to smash Nancy's leg with a hammer?  Did I get those names in the right order?  I hope I'm remembering that correctly.  Anyway, when athletes do ridiculous things, why is anyone terribly shocked?  9/10ths of their lives is spent growing up in their sport and continuing that sport on an adult level against other people who have devoted the greater parts of their lives to the same game would, could, and does warp them with respect to 9 to 5 human beings who don't do what they love (not even close) and who haven't been doing it since they were old enough to... I dunno... carry a plate from the kitchen to their table and back when they were done eating.

What I've been thinking is that the LeBron effect basically makes it harder to win as a team, rather than easier.  Maybe call it the A-Rod effect, or don't.  That wouldn't be all that accurate as there aren't salary caps in baseball.  You can throw away as much money as you want depending on your market.  It's still there though, but a shadow of what it is in capped sports.  In salary capped leagues the ultra l33t athlete effect is real.  Basically, you are awesome.  Well, I should start off by saying "this is where it starts."  So, basically, you are awesome at what you do.  Top twenty in the country.  In the top fifty human beings on the face of the Earth at whatever thing it is that you do.

However, the only way you get to do it, is by signing on with a team and the team only has so much money to spend.  On top of that, there is already an established amount of money everyone else who can't do it as well as you gets paid.  So you have to be paid more because you're better than them.  It'd be like a CEO of a grocery store being paid bagger money.  The money establishes, or rather, confirms hierarchy.  Pay grades are like school grades in that way.  The problem arises when you are so good that a team has to pay you so much money that there is none left to pay the baggers or cashiers or maintenance staff and the grocery store eventually folds, but damn there was a good CEO leading them straight into the ground.    You could take less money, but taking less money would be the same as saying "I'm not the best at what I do and I want to acknowledge it publicly."

The super l33t effect basically rots out the infrastructure, completely blows it out.  So as contracts inflate, the model of a few super l33ts surrounded by dreck grows less and less tenable.  I guess what I'm getting at is this:  every time something goes wrong with the Miami Heat NBA team and the finger pointing starts up, I cringe a little bit.  It is a no win situation for that team and everyone involved.  If they do eventually win a championship or two, it will be great, but I think it will be the last time, at least for the foreseeable future, that any general manager will make moves that will eat the massive majority of their available folding money on a massive minority of their players (the elite few on the team).  It's a bit ridiculous.  It's a self perpetuating system.  If LeBron could take less money to bring in a better supporting cast, would he?  I guess that's up for debate too.  But, we'll never know.  So screw it.

Either way, athletes are paid way too much money regardless.  Average people aren't paid enough.  And God, if he exists, is a Steelers fan.  That is all.