Yikes. Oh Wait, Everything's Still Fine

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

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

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

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


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

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.