An Evening With A Friend and Learning What Depression Is

Sitting on a cup cushion chair and listening to.  Days later I understand that.  I understand better that my schizophrenia will run parallel to depression at points and expecting some sort of  bipolar snap to happen and coming back to them to poke them with a "what's wrong" is no way forward.  That's not how it works.  Not even close.  Shadow mimicry.

I have wondered the best way of going about describing the it that governs me.  Is this what you want?  Locked.  Tell me now!  I am afraid that if I do I will be interned again.  I feel small.  I feel frightened.  What is wrong with us?  I want to be bipolar.  I want to be depressed.  I want to be something else without lying about what I am.  Why can't it be that way?  I feel like garbage saying that, knowing the tolls of those pains from meeting them.  The pissing contest cesspool.  The grass is always greener.  Fukkoff.  Listening to each word and understanding dawning, the same loathing and disappointment and anger that froths inside me frothed and boils inside them too (in different ways); similar hiding places and outdoor faces are incorporated to further life.  The panic attacks are the same.

Whenever I talk about it, be the occasion among friends or sibs or to you, I immediately feel defective.  A waste of your time.  How is it you've navigated 32 years of life [28 of them with knowing enough junk to not get run over by a thing called a car out of pure ignorance (22 of them with knowing enough junk to not get run over by a thing called a car out of negligence)] and still fight with normality?  Well, if I knew, I'd put an end to it.

What we are does not need vivisection to be confirmed.  The most frustrating part is being forced to bridge gaps and justify my misgivings and "quirks."

Reality checks and tests.  I don't understand.  Negative!  Negative!  Negative!  Through study, I know how people are supposed to feel when things happen.  That's why I enjoy semaphore so much.  It helps me feel like I am a person too, regardless of what actually is.

Undamaged or compromised, I envy the feeling and find their company saturated and wonderful.  It is selfish.  It is not selfish.  Listening to a good friend helped me learn what actual depression is and what it costs each day.  Listening to a good friend helped me learn the gender multiplier and its complications and callousness.  Between light hearted turns of phrase and spikes of imagination, I grew to understand the true differences between us and I learned more than I ever thought I'd need to know about what that prison is like.  I hope I expressed what the view from inside my bars looks like too.

I am so glad I have the chance to compose this.  I'll try and encapsulate it in a more condensed form:

I try to only project positive.  No I don't LOL.  Can shoot that down in a heartbeat.  I must laugh out loud.  I cannot set the world on fire.  I certainly, however, do not try to project only positive.  The dives are there for the asking.  I do not suffer in silence.  My physical pain tolerance has not kept pace with my mental pain tolerance and that's okay.  I enjoy listening.  It helps me feel more safe and more sane.

I am running.

I am afraid.

The dissimilarities are glaring now.  Punishing heft of ocean swell.  A fair mistake to make?  In speaking with her, traveling the star systems made wonderful sense.  Collapsing interpersonal nonsense into two dimensions, we existed and could map one another in three.  It's kind of weird, bare with me.  Here we go:

For some time, several months, I'd convinced myself I was predominantly bipolar.  Cycling on and off and on and off in stints.  If I could just figure out the timing, I could use it to approach "normal".  Ride with it.  Go with it.  Do not fight it.  Above all, do not try to force the head spaces function and be aware of its gear before you interact with anyone.  I charted up many conversations about mania and engaged in shared tales of its absence in attempts to better understand its dimensions and myself and the loved ones I was engaging with.

Along those veins it became clearer and clearer that I did not know what I thought I knew about them.  What I thought I knew about her.   What I thought I knew about him.  Some beliefs stood pat, many were restructured.  Some were reinforced.  I am susceptible to a high and low line, but the thread that flows through all points on the chart is my schizophrenia.  The simplest and most base way to gauge who I am underneath the layer of my consciousness and awareness is that.  My "it." For her, it is depression.  The hard coded piece of yourself that can not be changed.  That I enjoyed the most about speaking with her is laughing about everyday bullshit.  Seeing the ledge and taking casual portraits for one-another at the edge of the world.  I've known highs and I've known lows, but I've never had to know the tar ocean depression.  I've been and am manic, I've been and am depressed, truth be tolled, I am just schizophrenic. The fabulous shock of the reminder that you are just as much and deserving to be part of the human race as the "normals" is a spark.

I am glad that our worlds have collided.  I will attempt to boil this down later.  I don't have to do this alone.

We are.

We still don't know what our conversion rate is.  We still have no explanation for why we burn so violently and brilliantly and sleeplessly and the only consolation is watching the sun cross the horizon line and light up the atmosphere like a pool of gasoline and scream and sing and howl to it from the highest ground we can find, should we be caught outdoors.  I don't know why.

We are.

I want to heal.  I want to burn. I am understanding depression with greater accuracy than I ever have before.  I am understanding a new kind of helplessness that I've never sensed before in its entirety.  Seeing more of its true scope is deafening and tuning at once.




///there is no replacement for spending time and sharing experience.   The world will never be ready for the damaged.  Us damaged don't have to fight world war prime alone, though.   You do not have to either.  You don't have to either.  Don't understand; do listen.

///El-P & Killer Mike - "Legend Has It"

Little Ripples

There are many measures and routines to help ensure our stability and further existence in schizophrenia's shadow.  Not a single one is bulletproof or sure-fire.  They're more like an array of alarms.  A network of self-imposed checks that serve to help me protect myself from myself and help me maintain an awareness of what is happening inside as well as help me perceive how or why I am interacting with people on the outside.  It sounds elaborate.  It is.  It works sometimes.  Maybe 50% of the time.  That's too low, maybe 65% of the time.  I believe.  I would like to think.

The auditory hallucinations are always there.  Sometimes the best way to handle it is to drown it out or try to blanket it in constant music or reruns of radio talk shows or television shows that I've heard dozens, in some cases, hundreds of times so that it forms a background tapestry to latch myself to.  Sometimes the way we handle it is by drinking... a lot.  If you hammer your brain into unconsciousness, you can't hear anything at all and what's more is that you can skip entire days sleeping while your body tries to recover itself.  Those auditory glitches cannot hurt you and you don't have to engage with them for 7 days out of the week.  Through the gift of alcohol, your week becomes 4 days long instead of 7.  That's not the best way to deal with it.  That is a way to escape it.  Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to try to engage them outside of yourself.  Try to write to them or draw to them or just talk to them through your mouth if possible.  That never works.  Nothing ever works.  Don't kid yourself.

It does help us to feel secure for a while.  The acts help us feel grounded to something and allow us to move through the world and focus on tasks, conversations, and people in front of us.  It isn't always paralyzing, but it grows all its own.  Sometimes it's fun to think I can control it.  Will power.  Discipline.  Routine.  Everything where it belongs.  Simplicity.  All of these things.  Then I'm in a line at a grocery store asking the man behind me "did you say something" four times before it hits me walking to my car that he's the fifth person I've questioned that day and things are slipping from bad to worse and my little network of alarms is not helping.  Sitting up in bed, watching shows I've seen thirteen times, and getting up for an eighth time to check that I'm alone because someone else is in here and I heard them say my name twice and I know it's not the neighbor downstairs because she goes to bed at 8:45 every night.  Someone keeps turning the doorknob to the pantry and I heard them stub their toe and curse.  Jesus, they are inside.  We have to go.  Now!

Walk out underneath the street lights and it's 11:30ish.  Headphones turned up as loud as they will go.  Walk around the block.  We try to memorize every detail and compare it to what was there before we started walking.  We compare it to what was there after our evening lap.  We try to see if we are seeing things again and a shadow grunts "pssst, hey" so we decide to walk to the next town over and avoid the bridge because they will be waiting there to howl through our insides and if I could get to the park and lie down in the field for an hour or two to catch my breath the world might stop spinning for a moment.

I feel depression creeping in again.  A very light pressure behind my ears and chest.  A dull railroad spike through the near corner of my eye straight through the back of my head that will start to crystallize and splinter outward like a molten iron snowflake.  I start to question again.  Who wants to deal with this?  How could we have been so blind and over confident to believe love can iron out differences whose gulf spans literally every aspect of your lives?  You broke, dumb, idealistic, garbage, man-child.  What is that?  Who's there?  Lying awake in bed until the sun comes up wondering if he is going to come for you tonight.  Sitting on the cool bathroom floor telling yourself "never again, never again, never again."  You didn't really believe someone would choose this warped, scarred, perverse thing over a human.  Did you?  How sweet.  That is just adorable.

I still receive letters from time to time from the people that were my parents.  Some expressing concern and well wishes.  Some acknowledging holidays and other spiritual flotsam and sentiment.  I feel my fist close and my fingernails dig into my palm.  How dare they.  How dare they.  How dare they!  Still, not one acknowledgement of responsibility.  Not one acknowledgement that part of why I am here now, fighting every day to navigate through and undo the damages where I can, is because of their compounding actions for decades .  Not one hint.  Swipe at my twitching cheek that is curled into a stone snarl and spit out another piece of chipped tooth.  I have to stop doing that.  We only get one set of teeth.  We probably won't get to drink their blood any time soon.  That's a shame.

How can you love someone else, when you cannot love yourself?  I do love myself.  I love other people too.  The simple fact is we're broken.  Period.  Not fixable.  You can try all of the little things you like to lure someone else close: more money, a little land, cars and furniture, clothes and shoes, it is not going to change the base state of how you function.  What's more, and pretty funny, is that the base state of how you function also governs all of those things too.  You'll end up asleep in a bathtub chasing those things, we all know this first hand.  I haven't the stomach for it or the mental health and make up.  It won't take long to stop seeking meaningful intimacy with others.  I'm already just about there.  Roiling hatred transposes to the grainy, rattling, vision of rage.  Kill them all.  I have nothing to offer you and rare in this world is the human who truly needs nothing.  I am close.  I will find someone in kind.  Or I will stumble upon them in the dark.  Either way, I am not built for this world.

The hallucinations are growing in volume.  It is best to be alone when it starts to happen.  It's a lot easier to differentiate and stream thoughts apart from them when there isn't someone else around requiring attention and head cycles.  The frustration and irritation and embarrassment is greatly reduced and sometimes it helps to deal with and engage it when I can strictly control what I am sensing.  To a point.  There is a point where it doesn't matter what we do to insulate and protect ourselves because the assault is coming from the inside of our body and eventually there is no where to hide and nowhere to run and I try my best not to claw my skull apart.   I try my best not to scream.

Moving through the day and the little ripples tickling the hairs on my fingers and shins, I pause and whisper "not again."  That was not my name.  That was not my name.  That was not my name.




///Muriel Zoe - "Bye Bye Blackbird"

The Ethos of The Project

As projects continue to mount up incomplete the motor pool continues to grow.  The airfield continues to sprawl.  The docks, the compounds, the factories, the underground sites, the developers, the researchers, the caf staff, the janitors, the resource department, the policing, the eateries, the sourcing, the contractors, the licensing, it all sprawls and becomes their own cities.  Their own threaded lives to live each birth to death.  Transportation hubs and power grids.  Interlaced reasons and reasoning.

All of them existing in suspended animation.  Adjusting a blade of grass here.  Striking a cloud there.  Moving the sun a few degrees and running over every detail on that continent's sunsetting side.  Moving the sun a few degrees back and seeing it again for reference before putting it back where it was and tilting its axis a half degree so the flock of early evening moths make a little more sense.  I want to live in them in a universe of suspended animation.  I have to finish them.  As you work on them and take on new ones that universe reaches higher and higher resolutions and once they cross into the realized that's the end.

The generator stops and something new exists.  The snow globe must collapse.  The means must see their end.  Everything that was in there is now in there.  I can't keep joyriding through the suspended animation universe.   It's time for them to go.  Time to take apart the cities that sprang up around them.  There'll be other cities to build and populate.  I tell myself "it'll be fun."




///Nina Simone - "Feeling Good (Bassnectar Remix)"

The Two Dimensional Garage, Jury Duty, and the Furnace

I continue to not eat.  I don't know why.  Well, I do know why: it's very difficult to do regularly.  In short, it's hard.  That's not a reason.  That doesn't qualify as a reason.  That's an excuse.  It's a reason!  I know it's a reason because I like food.  I like shopping for food.  I like looking at food.  I like cleaning and preparing food.  I simply cannot eat it and I don't know why it is so difficult to get food from in front of me to inside of me.

Eating with people is still so strange and, for the most part, to be avoided.  It's incredibly uncomfortable.  It makes my forearms itch to watch and listen to it.  It's not disgusting, but mechanically it's draining to be around, and then people ask you why you're not eating and it turns into a whole thing and just thinking about it now I want to vomit.  It's difficult to do.  I don't understand it.  I try to do it, the feeding, but even two a day is a break through.  Once is enough.  Get it down and out of the way and forget about it.  Go to bed.  Sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep.  You can't run yourself into trouble if you're asleep.

I'm not sure what.  You can see all of the colors and the sun's light and clouds and birds and it flattens  and smears out to gray.  There are things you have to do.  Things that must be done.  Feeding, washing, resting.  Sometimes it feels like a two dimensional garage.  A plastic play place facsimile of garage where everything is laid out inside white lines.  You get up and everything is numbered in order.  You take this off and put that on, brush this, comb through that, turn knobs here and there, check your fuel gauge, off to work little guy, home, and into bed to lie awake until your brain turns itself off.

There's nothing special.  There's nothing important.  There's nothing pressing.  There's nothing.  The routine is critically important.  The more rigid the better, I used to think.  I'm not so sure.  With familiarity, brutal and starkly lit familiarity, there are fewer opportunities for mistakes, misreadings, miscues, misses.  All of them.  Destructive and damaging misses.  Misses that can affect my relationships with friends or neighbors and strangers.  Fewer opportunities for misses that can lead to depressions and emotional collapses.  Fewer opportunities for problems to arise all across the board, because of something I saw or heard and reacted to or engaged with that later proved to never have existed at all beyond my own eyes.

Brute force coping.  Except even that fails and begins to deteriorate and then you can't be at work and you can't be at home either and you hide from them by sleeping as much as you possibly can and maybe this time when you wake up they'll be gone and they're not and you're quietly terrified and you can't be out of the house for too long, and you can't be awake for too long.  They'll know.  Turn your world into a two dimensional garage and nail the windows shut and paint them black so they can't get inside and they won't be able to tell if anyone is awake at night by candle light.  To be safe and certain.  They'll try to fool you, but you know.  You know what you have to do to live.  It's all laid out by numbers and if something goes missing you know exactly what it is because its outline will be there in its absence.

I've tried for years to understand it.  I say tried, but it is not as though the attempts to understand it have reached their conclusion.  They are ongoing.  It is very difficult to prioritize.  There are many things to complete, and all they all strike me as the same.  Eating or a glass of water are as important as going to work or placing critical phone calls.  As important or as unimportant.  Prioritization has stepped away and I don't know where exactly to.  I want to feel the sensation of hot blood across the surface of my skin.  I am trying to summon the rage that fills and fires the furnace that can push me forward into and through a day or a week.  By the end, there isn't much left.  The weekend or the month's end will be composed of reassembling what is left of the furnace when I have to use it and over use it.  Picking up and bending sections and pieces back into place for having to contain for lengths and lengths of time roiling licks of anger and sheer rage.

I hate myself.  I hate having to force on smiles and eat back tears and shake hands.  I hate that I have so much trouble getting into and keeping jobs.  I'm lucky enough to have a position now that is fairly flexible and accommodating.  I'm afraid of the day the unpredictable nature of my disorder will strike me with no warning with a ferocity and depth of intensity that I.  I just don't want to hurt anyone.  Often I've said my main desire in this life is to be left alone, but that's not because I want to be left alone.

Isolation is the only way.  Every day I know I am going to die alone.  I cannot be married.  I cannot raise children.  I cannot take care of someone else.  I cannot ask someone to help me take care of myself.  I completely understand.  It would not be fair.  Beyond fairness, and the idea that trying to build a home with someone who is afflicted and, for lack of a better word, damaged it would be hazardous on many other levels.  At least isolated there is a very large zone of dead space, neutral space, physically speaking, but isolated there is also a zone of communications that can be closed off and shut down until a time arises when they can be safely used again.  Whatever damage is done is localized and hopefully hidden from those who would be part of relationships tended.  That way when communications and visitations resume they can be pursued with the cues and tips and exchanges of normalcy and proportions near normalcy that govern civil life.

Which brings me to jury duty.  There was the questionaire about all of the reasons why the prosecution or the defense may not want to select you for their trial and I came to the line item of: do you have any mental or physical disabilities that may impair your ability to perform the duties ... to paraphrase.  I don't have a prescription anymore.  That lapsed so long ago I can't remember the specific year.  I don't have paperwork.  I hate saying "what's wrong with me", but I tried to describe, during the interview portion when they ask you about your particular survey answers, what was wrong with me.  It was terribly uncomfortable though they smiled a lot,but it was the evil smile.  Not the understanding smile.  You can't ask everyone to understand.  They won't get it.  If I struggle to grasp it myself, how can I ask someone else to?

Several hours later, we had to sit for all of the interviews even though we knew we weren't going to be selected, I still thought about it.  There are many things I should not be allowed to do and serve on a jury is among them.  It's upsetting.  Feel fractional because you are.  Parts of your mind are missing or maybe it's that there are many more glitches on top of and laced throughout what is supposed to be there, what is standard equipment, and there is no way to clean or tear down and rebuild the system free of them without killing yourself in the process.  Feel and know that you'll never quite be up to par with anyone, as long as you live and know that it probably will not be all that much longer.  Maybe another 30 or so years.  Maybe less.  When you were younger you wanted to die.  Not far removed from then you realize, there's no hurry.  Be patient.  Don't fool yourself.

Or do.  I try to laugh a lot.  The idea is that maybe if I smile and laugh enough it will stick in place and remain.  People will love being around me and I will love being around them because they will love being around me.  Carefully and painstakingly construct it inside your two dimensional garage, piece by piece by piece.   Power it up.  Go through the movements and the timing and conversational spacing.  Practice and memorize so that you can drum up this other self upon demand, slip inside of it and wear it effortlessly and with enough repetitions it will become not only effortless, but a full projection and extension of you to the point that it is you.  Until your body violently rejects it and you blaze apart before your own eyes.  We will see.



///TV on The Radio - "Wear You Out" let me to bed.  please?

4 Years Is a Lifetime, Music, and Summer What?

Sometimes I wake up and it's hard to believe it's been four years since I made it clear of the 24 years that came before when it comes to my parents.  When people ask about them, I'm still tempted to say they died. They are dead to me, but just because they're dead in my mind doesn't make them dead in real life, even though it would be great if they were.  It's hard to believe I ever did love them.  I suppose I once did.  My mother anyway.  Is it better to be feared or loved?  They decided it was better to be feared.  It is easy to receive gratitude for putting out a fire.  I suppose it is easy to cling to those firemen and women rescuing you from that fire and believing you owe them a life debt.  A water debt.  A blood debt.

It is easy, until you find out, when the blinders come off, that they set that fire that took your body down to it's foundations.  Then it's not so easy.  When that sun dawns and the city you've been inhabiting in the dark comes into sharp relief and you realize you've been living downtown for 24 years and didn't know it and from the tallest skyscraper there you can't even see the city limits, you cry.  And I did.  For years.  I wanted to jump back then.  Break my heart on the pavement into beads of pomegranate flesh crushed.  I didn't.

I walked.  I ran.  And then I walked some more when my lungs and legs quit.  I camped.  I broke into abandoned homes and raided food and threw it in my back pack and kept going.  I slept on concrete and hid in basements when creatures roamed and cached weapons to defend myself.  Taught myself how to use them, because the day you come face to face with the monsters will be the day you are least prepared to fight for your life and the blood in your veins and your heart beat.  I walked for years until the buildings and bridges grew smaller.  The shells of "civilization" as I knew it grew fewer and far between, and one day I was outside of it all, on a hill top looking back in and I could see the towers so tall back then.  I could see the flag poles and radio towers atop the things so massive they crowded out the sky and blanked the stars at night with their ferocious brilliance.

And it's strange to be outside of it.  Strange to feel myself breathing.  There was a time, right after I took myself away from it all, that it felt odd not to be hurt.  I felt like my skin didn't fit.  My face didn't feel like my face.  It was difficult to walk, like my legs forgot how to do it in this new frame unburdened.  It felt strange to stand up straight.  Strange to deal with my bosses because I was constantly afraid that they might hit me if I messed something up or forgot to do something or did what they wanted, but they changed their minds halfway and did not tell me.  It never occurred to me that people are not supposed to be allowed to do that to other people.  It never occurred to me that people are not naturally inclined to do that necessarily.  It never occurred to me that there would and could be legal recourse for me if they did.  Shedding the things, piece by piece, that I once thought to be absolute truths of power relationships and interchange with "authority".

It was a difficult transition and four years removed from it, it feels like a lifetime away.  The longest four years of my short life.  I've done so much living, it amazes me and I love it.  I love being able to look forward without immediate apprehension.  Some days I wake up and my first thought is "so this is what everyone else has been feeling like all this time."  I wish that I did still retain the good memories from when I was little.  I've spent so much of myself and so much time eradicating the bad ones, but you can't pick and choose when it comes to that.  There are huge blank spaces in my memory now.  Massive expanses that I should have some recall about, but I don't.  Struggle with whether that's a good or bad thing comes up sometimes, but I'd rather recall nothing than wake up sweating at night.

A choice I decided to make.  The most vivid memories still remain, both good and bad; the worst of the worst and the best of the best.  Every time I speak to my siblings something new and minor comes to light for better and for worse and I forget all over again.  Strike it from the library.  Continue on my way.  I feel like, really for the first time in a long time, like I'm going the right way and ... there's no price to put on peace.  Peace at any cost.  Call it selfish.  Call it whatever you want to.  There's beauty in grace and grace is not killing your parents to square your own books.

There's music stored up in there.  I have about 120 tracks and sounds and machine sounds stocked up.  I really do want to do it, I haven't made the time to learn.  Really learn.  I'm passion infused about it.  I need it.  I'm terrified of failure the same way I used to be years ago when I first decided to share and open myself up to criticism.  Not just open myself up, but open myself up to criticism on something I thought I was pretty good at.  Music is an entirely different bucket.  I want to do it, I've taken the first steps, and now I just have to make one foot follow the other.  Never did download that manual for the autoharp.  It's not collecting dust though.  Every few days, I drag it out from under my bed and lay it down and pluck it's strings and see what comes out of it, but I'm happy to be a dabbler.  And unhappy to be just.

Beats, notes, and rhythms in my head and the struggle, I know, will be exhausting.  It's a problem of effort and I know that's a me problem, not an environment problem.  I've had some trouble with scheduling.  Trying to keep yourself out of trouble by sleeping on a max schedule will only drive you so far.  Eventually you have to step out of safety if you want to accomplish anything.  No one ever won a football game by kneeling down in the first quarter.  Crunch time is never convenient and I can't imagine the force of the crush that will drive me to try and I don't want to experience it.  I'll get on it someday.  To do lists grow long like finger nails.  Eventually you have to cut it down or at least paint them.

On another note, you know it's summer when the girls are out in flip flops and the guys are losing their shirts. That's the usual metric.  Everyone is out in their Ed Hardy tees and old men are jogging, red skinned, down the middle of side streets and kids are pushing their strollers and little carnivals with tractor trailer ferris wheels start popping up.  You know it's summer when you can't get a spot to fish on the river shore if you show up any later than noon on a Tuesday.  Opening your car door is like opening an oven door and you sweat from the effort of fixing yourself a bowl of cereal for breakfast.  You know it's summer when you head down to the basketball court and you'd rather stand than sit when you're not playing because the asphalt is just that hot.

The real tell about summer, though, is when the ladies start to come out doors in shorts and Ugg boots.  I have no idea when that nonsense caught on.  What I do know is that every year it happens.  Inevitably.  It makes no sense.  I am a huge fan of form following function, but there is no function to it!  None whatsoever!  I am taking a stand against it.  I was walking down to the gas station in the middle of the day and a nub wearing Uggs and a jean jacket strolled by on the other side of the street and I tried to contain it, but I couldn't.  I guffawed for a second, choked, and then laughed at the top of my lungs.  It's okay though.  She's doing her and I'm going to do me.  No big deal.

Still though, come on!  Really?  Watching it from the corner of my eye all I could think about was gross, stanky, lady feet.  I don't care how pretty your face is, guy or girl, but if your feet stank something awful or are horribly deformed or even noticeably deformed, that's a deal breaker.  Call me shallow.  I don't mind, but there has to be limits.  Still chuckling while I walked into the gas station I was at a loss as to what planet that was considered attractive.

I'm not the style police.  90% of what I wear serves a function and a purpose and if that purpose or function requires something off putting or ugly, hey... go f#$% yourself.  Form will always follow function for me.  If I happen to net up some good form along the way it's just the bonus.  I love summer.  I love the absurdity of it all.  I got into a long back and forth with a girl friend about style.  Sometimes I do make style considerations when it comes to choosing the best function/form ratio.  She was dressed to the nines and I asked her why she would put herself into such nice clothes.  Turned out she just wanted to dress up on a Friday.  I scratched my beard.  She elaborated.  "Sometimes I'm just in the mood to feel a little different."

I got it, then.  When function governs there's less room for expression.  Everything can't be mechanical the way I want it to be or would like it to be.  Input equals output not always and it shouldn't always be.  Reproduction being what it is and kind of necessary.  Hard wiring.  And there I go, back to the mechanical.  I can't help it.  She had a point though.  After the conversation I felt myself starting to want to be a slacks and button up guy.  She explained that even though she was dressed to the teeth with shiny earrings, they were still her play clothes because if anything bad happened to them, they're not her actual dress clothes.  I might try to wear button up shirts more often.  Without buttoning them.  To pull that off I'll probably need pants without latex paint all over them.  That takes money.  Maybe not.  I love function.

I'll have quiet dreams about wearing dumb slacks and ripping the crotch out of them doing what I do.  In the meantime, I'll just do me and wear what I want.  I guess, in very short retrospect, I respect that Ugg jean jacket girl.  If I see her again I'm still going to laugh.  The same way people probably laugh at me strolling down the main drag in clothes with no form, scratching their heads like "did you look at a mirror before you left your house or did you grab the first four garments you could find on your floor and jump out of your door to conquer the world?"

And that's how you know it's Summer.

Kisses.  Later on, kids.


///Ladytron - "Soft Power"  ...daylight is the enemy...  I love the night.  Everything smells wet and good at night.  I want to sleep by the river again and talk to the fish while the fire goes out.

Proliferation Theory

If you do enough, something is bound to stick favorably.  For a time I approached writing with an arrogance.  I thought, because it was the only thing I got decent marks in, I must be good at it.  And then I got bad grades.  Still got good grades from time to time, but bad grades just as often, usually related to the technical composition and not the ideas.  And then I got good technical marks and bad ones on the formation of ideas.  Sometimes I did well with both.

It was a strange time.  I transitioned from writing on my own time and going to class and writing instead of doing homework to higher grades where writing was my only homework and all I did in classes.  The arrogance of perceived innate talent faded quite a bit with one failed attempt to win awards after another and I blamed closed communities and the like, the department was exceptionally cliquey.  I believed the profs liked what they liked and you liked what you liked and it was your job to jump the gap, not theirs.

I don't know what my problem is exactly, but I do believe it is that the people that I idolize make it look so effortless and what they make feels like hit after hit after God damn hit.  Maybe proliferation theory is failing me.  It's difficult to say either way.  Maybe I am genuinely no good.  It's tough to digest.  Without some kind of schedule.  I rolled up a dollar bill.  It's just strange, I guess.  Proliferation theory.  Asking when is good enough for me good enough for someone else.

The theory begs a lower standard, but how much is compromised in terms of value and personal expansion? Is the cost appropriate to the value of the product, the life time stamp I put my name to?  I don't know.  I do it predominantly for myself, at least that's what I've convinced myself of.  I don't know.  Would I kill to go back to school?  How many people?  Could I plea bargain my way out of life sentences and would the offer still be good when I got out?  I'd have to think about it.  Hypotheticals.

Yeah, it drives me crazy.  A little bit.  I try to think about what else I would be doing, could be doing.  None of it appeals to me the same way.  Everyone, including myself, well maybe not everyone, many people talk about being their harshest critic.  I may be my most passionate lover.  Delusions of grandeur coming with the territory, but I don't always see it so clearly.  The Fantha.  Losing focus on the mission.  I just want to die knowing I was good as I could possibly be, not knowing I was good as I was going to be.  Who wants that?

I think believing that I'm great keeps my engine running.  Keeps the clutch down and a hand on the shift knob for when I come running.  Beyond that, I don't know how much credence I give it.  I butcher language and muddle image on a weekly basis.  I talk like broke nosed sailor all too often and argue like a fifteen time concussed politico's son.  Pretty sure my mental dictionary has "turn to page 345"s on it and on page 345 there is a crayon hand drawn hairy dick in the corner.

Purpose is a fine commodity.  Take a digger.  Fire off the magazine, discharge, and throw it as far as you can.  Sometimes panic can be beautiful.  Never outwardly.  Did I tell you that I was you?  Don't be silly.  Don't be silly little king with your crown.  Let me polish that for you; you dropped it skipping puddles in gutters without your galoshes.  You know the ones with He-Man and Skeletor printed all over?  I'll remember for you.

Just behave, okay?

The project was, the final project was, to make a visual that encompassed everything you believed poetry to be.  Everything you believed poetry to be and the purpose it served.  They came in with their power points and dream catchers and God's eyes and a diorama of a village and someone made a painting and someone made a collage from printed magazines and there were a handful of abstract sculptures and even a figurine, but you made a life sized naval mine with trigger switches and detonators and wires out of empty wine bottles and paint brush handles and spray painted it black.  That was a fun walk across campus with that hugged to your chest.  Cutting across the grass, because the people on the sidewalk could go f--- themselves that early in the morning.  You worked on it all night after thinking about it for a week.  Everyone talked about their things and you talked about yours.  And that's where it ended.

Officially.  I suppose, the project is ongoing.  I hate myself.  I love myself.  I hate myself.  I'm sorry to drag you into it.  I don't know how else anything changes.  Contemplating the validity of ProT.


///Starkey - "Spacewalk" infolatice diver with a bad respirator.  the city is so vast and so uninhabitable so far beneath the waves

from a similar born year and different circumstance, but very little I haven't enjoyed while there: alicja-w-krainie-czarow