Smashing Bottles On Ships

I think part of the passion for smashing bottles against the noses of ships before they depart the yard is not only a charm or totem.  I think it is also a celebration of what could've been and what will be if you think the ship is destined for disaster.  A chance, after months and days and years (relative), to lift restrictions and wiggle, watching the behemoth's construction.  It's a time to dance and dance as thoroughly as possible.  The smashing of a full bottle being representative. Once in union, all the rest is random and uncontrollable and sometimes violent and magical and explosive and "the last unexpected thing that will happen is this shattering and firework."

It is a reasonable lens.  And a reasonable way to approach.


///Brassica - "Wryders (FMB009)"

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)"

How To Fast Forward the Next 8 Years

It's quite simple.  The world is not going to end because Donald Trump was elected.  The offices will struggle to accomplish anything because the policies don't work, don't exist, or both.  They'll distract the American public for four years with scary this and that.  Throw in a war on something at home and more involvement in a war somewhere else.  Start the next election cycle highlighting how everything that went wrong was because everyone else screwed it up and the country wasn't ready for real change yet and it would take at least four years to undo nonexistent office corruption and then you have Donald Trump re-elected and nothing gets done again on a platform of "every magical thing  that can't be done or makes no sense, but makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, will get done this time".  Some people get a lot richer.  Most people don't.  Tons of imaginary money changes bank accounts, a bunch of people get sick, some businesses collapse, the environment takes a hit, international relations trip over themselves, segregation gets worse, and then a Democrat is elected again when a few more people jump over to the other side of the aisle because they don't want to be associated with the consequences any more and they're tired of trying to explain how their ideas worked, but didn't, but obviously absolutely did, but actually data can be manipulated to say anything of course, so... you know... allow my colleague to explain.

No need to leave the country.  Just yawn and go back to sleep and wake up 8 years from now.  Things will be worse.  Trying to change them will be impossible until the people holding the levers have to step away and everyone has a fresh, 8 years long, understanding of what is and is not to be feared and challenged instead of what they've been distracted or tricked or worn down into believing.  Yep, 8 years sounds about right for the messaging and programming to finally fade.  Just try to live the best life you can in the meantime and do what you can to keep your life and loved ones from collapsing under the weight of lunacy and if we're all lucky 4 years will be all it takes for folks to snap out of the flash & magic show.

Then with that Democrat, everyone on the other side will start clamoring "what about us" even though their lives under so and so Republican, locally or nationally, didn't get much better because it literally can't get much better without extracting freedoms from other people (liberties and justices have to come from somewhere eventually), but they'll see other lives improving because there is literally that much space for improvement without taking away anything from anyone else.  "Injustice, inequality, we deserve better too" the other side will say and the flash and magic show parade will come crawling over the horizon with their flags and music and swaying tents like a fantastical parade from outer space and it'll start over again and the only thing you can do is hope enough was done before it arrives that much of the work will still be standing when it finally dissipates.




///Paranoia Agent - (Ending Credits) oh, calliope

Supermarkets

I know shopping is not supposed to be difficult.  You park, you go in, you get what you need, you get in line, you get out.  Simple.  Easy.  Everything is different again.  The boxes of toasters were fine where they were.  What does a cube of pillows next to a cube of mingled tupperware and stamped artisanal pepper shakers supposed to mean?  I should buy some hats.  The jeans are just as good, if not better at Goodwill.  If the mouse pads are in the photography department I will cry inside for a few minutes.  There has to be a way to predict market fluctuations on the price of Nerf assault weapons.  I cannot play Cribbage on a sheet of paper again, I'm better than that, you're better than that!  Grow up!  Let's build one.  That's a lot of holes to drill.  Not too many.  I love customer service, but the air is impossibly dry.  Uniforms and no tinted glasses and no facial hair and no headphones or earplugs or even earmuffs to help abate the halls echoing and that idle siren public address system.  I was bound to be fired, and then quit, and then quit, and then simply stop going, and then be fired the final time I gave it a run.  Breathing it sounds like a gale through a mesa canyon.  The taste is hospital and hostile with so many confused and irritated and little kid lungs sucking and blowing.  Draped cobwebs full of ants.  I do not understand why the lights have to be so.  The air pressure is all wrong.  Leaving is expulsion from a mouth of a fossil, still throbbing with life, and ages dead.  I head home with a few bags of things I've torn off of its sides and tips and joints, maybe a truck bed's worth now and then to help me survive in my wilderness and it's over.  Bang, boom, piece of cake.  I hate shopping.  It is incredibly difficult and staying calm is key.  Throw in too many people and the math begins "do I really, absolutely, need?"




///Moderat - "Sick With It"

Caps Locked, Similar

I think the biggest thing to get out of the way was talking about how locked up I was becoming.  It still governs everything and every choice that I make.  The way that my mind works.  I don't like to think of it as a disability, it is.  Talking to my eternal optimist.  The children are in the classroom.  It's a bit soggy and untrue, but it is you too!

It really is.  Will you dance with me?  We can have a fabulous time, a gorgeous time, a wonderfurousfantabugloriousshanannigonkulous time.  HAHAHAHA  oh yes, oh yes.  No bass necessary if you are willing to cut a rug.  Down butler street to penn avenue to the point and back up the river trail underneath 40th street bridge and up top on 62nd to watch the sun rise.  Kill em, kill em, kill em, ac dc-s? That was a good drum break.

Some things make me smile and I don't want to back everything over it like trying to kill a raccoon you hit at five A.M. If hand outs are coming out lets enjoy them and be one with the weekend.  No?  Obviously, you have no nerves in your extremities because I defy you to try and find hard drugs that are not spray paint and brick based at this hour.  



///Starkey - (Eris)    up from the depths

Bah

Engage the suppo meta super chim gank ja ja ja hahaha ckck la la la jhjh gohgoh  fukjj aooao uiw way of looking at things.  Or make a hard break, no?

It's been a very long time, we know.  All of us know.  It's been a long time for a reason and we support that reason whatever that reason may be and however that reason came to be.  We support it.  It has taken a lot of force to bring everyone to the table.  Hell, it's taken a lot of brute force simply to bring us all to the table, let alone a table.

Some of us want to wave around our individuals flags.  I am fighting, as the selected individual to represent our collective passport, to wave a single one, but everyone wants to be heard so, I guess I will step away for the song, it's a rarity, but feels appropriate:

well that did not take long to fail.  As soon as the spotlight descended they scattered like cockroaches.  Big surprise.  Machinations of my brain.  Faults and artifacts you say.  I say.  Could it be that the prices I would have to pay should they be named may be so high that I cannot let their names loose anymore or must erase the names as soon as I have let them loose should they be known and summoned on an account other than my own I and I alone should feel the repercussions or should I say that even having mentioned them I should now fall under their disgrace and suffer the consequences in utter paranoia and I should I now tell you that having disclosed that much information the knowledge alone will tell the body and mind collective to brace for impact that other worldly souls should be (this is all in a Britton accent) coming down upon my head?

No.  Some of that's true.  Most of it's not.  I know a lot of what happens inside my head is my own fault.  I know a lot of it is not and if I could pluck your eye balls out of your head and implant them into mine you'd want to kill yourself to.  Every day.  Maybe not every hour.   Sometimes some hours people you surround yourself with help you to forget what is all around.

You can all laugh and drink and I drink to forget but not to forget my circumstances or anything like that.  I get it.  I didn't do good in school and I missed out on trade school by going to learning school and I couldve jumped out of it if I'd known or had the balls to do it instead of taking everything I was force fed, because being a mechanic is tip top, but  I didn't so... whatever.

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's whatever man!  Rimshot.

I drink to forget my father and the senseless beatings and I drink to forget the fact that I can't see straight into a vagina and I drink that I cant see straight at children because they give me the heebee jeebees every time I'm alone with them and I can't stop imagining what a giant penis feels like in a tiny weewee or if a tiny wenis gets hard or if they know or if I knew back then if someone was cleaning me or just being fucking weird or if there's someone who should be on my end of days "I'm going to scoop your motherfucking eyeball out with a margerine plastic knife" or not or if patting one of them bastards on the back is too much contact or too little or if I should shuffle on down to Maryland and kill my father and just have it out, take my time, and have a happy weird time with a kid of my own eventually and explain to him or her that you'll never meet your father because he's dead because I killed him.

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's whatever man!  Rimshot.

A friend of mine keeps saying "bah" and I think he's doing it in part because I told him saying "it is what it is" is the Pittsburgher, PAer, way of saying "I dunno" northeaster-ish.  Northeaster shit.  You could just say ellipsis but that's too many penstrokes, yeah?  Yeah is an ellipsis too.  Dot dot doooooooooooooooooooooooooooot.  To other thoughts along the same train, not quite a hard break, however hard enough to change the frames position along the wall to be noticeable.  Hard enough to be, should someone visit, a highlight in the tour to the tune of "you've changed."

So we're here and we've arrived and I will borrow in the meantime a  "bah."

I cannot tell you how much I've loved you but I can tell you how much I've missed you.

It's good to work.  It's good to work at what you love.  It's better when the work brings me closer to you.

Breaking trail. Breaking silence.  Breaking my heart for you.  I miss you every day.  You have no idea how much I wish multitasking was an actual thing.

Keep streamlined.   Stay feathered.  The wind is screaming aginst your nose and mine too.  Feather through the days and weeks.





///Unkle & Sparklehorse - (Maria Gur Cover [Insane Lullaby])  ....upon a podium.... you're charming and you're brave

Pushed

All I wanted was a front row seat in what feels like a war and looks nothing like it.  I keep reciting the procedure and double and triple checking equipment, and in the mean seconds ticking by the pilot is sweating marbles trying to keep our helicopter away from flak and small arms fire and the occasional rocket, circling where I need to land once I jump off of the side.  I'm sweating too fearful of what happens after I step out into thin air, but I know what happens.  There's nothing to be afraid of.

Walking into my apartment after getting groceries the long fingered man with the reading glasses glances up and turns around and taps the only skin on his arm not flayed away where a watch was.  Time is of the essence.  I know.  There is not much time to waste.  I know, I know, I know.  Where are you going?  Out, don't follow me.  You forgot your wallet.  Thank you.

I suppose, a sort of writer's block for persons who don't get writer's block?

Consider this your gentle, two palmed, straight armed shove.  You know what has to be done.  Pull the trigger.

I worry sometimes that it won't make sense.  I worry now if it's not good.  If the entire pursuit has been a waste.  Why poetry?  What is locking up inside you?  It's nothing.  Absolutely nothing and you know it.  Don't be afraid, you've just had your eyes closed for a few months.  Listening to the air and the land and space and people eating each other alive and giving birth and dying and sleeping and breathing and talking and talking and it's not so bad if you'd only open your eyes standing on the ledge of the gunship.  Make sense out of chaos.  Or chaos out of chaos.  Make sense of it later.  Every thought lost to time is one less beacon, one less point of reference, one less story, one less epic, one less chapter, one less relationship you could have brought into this world from your travels.  One less love.  Do it for you.  Do it because you can love you and that's where it all starts.  Come clapping toward the bright pink smoke flare while the shells fly.  I'll be back to pick you up sooner than you have time to think to ask "where did you go?"




///Sylvan Esso - "Hey Mami"    higher resolution

Reel

Sometimes I wonder if it's real.  Outside and inside at the same time.  Odd shifts.  I can explain them, but explanation goes so far.  I still want, to the point of near desperation, to cut you apart and examine the individual pieces.  It can be done.  There is never a good time for it.  It has to be a final project or at least somewhere near final.  Very close to final before another change.

The hardest part is finding a reasonable candidate.  We can do it.  It is far from impossible.  Especially if it is the beginning of a stout library.  There's no foul there.  Storage space must be brought into consideration.  On top of that is figuring out how to pay for capacity because storage space is worth gold by volume, plain and simple and the library will be extensive.

The other question being the simple fact that availability will be a major issue.  Think it through.  There's no impossible in "can't."  There is some cant in can't though.  Cannot get too canted because nothing flies right canted.  All the control surfaces get way off and then holding the stick upright leads to poor action.  We're gonna need a lot of jars.  Like a fuck ton.  Jars are cheap though and so is water.  Things are going to rot, but that's fine.  Lids contain stank.  That's really good.  It's not beyond our capacity so that's good too.  Temporary storage.  I still need more practice and it is an unfortunate obstacle.

You have to be better about taking out the trash though.  If you can't take out the trash how can I possibly trust you to store things properly?  You can't.  We both want this though and how hard do you work to make shit happen when it's only you on the line?  That's not fair to me.  At all.  Fuck progress, stop short changing me.  It's not fair, plain and simple, Mr. plain and simple, and you know that.

All I'm saying is, sit the fuck down, have a smoke, and think about it for a minute.  How retarded would it be to buy two dozen mason jars at once?  For two, you haven't really thought out the actual land routes or air routes yet.  For three, you have not worked out the cash because last I checked gas still costs money.  And for four, your exit strategy is ill formed at best.  I'll throw a five in there because you're actually listening now so it's pretty much a one: you still have a lot of work to do.  I know it's very... open ended... but you know what I'm talking about.  Talk to me when you've actually got some shit laid down.

It's hard, difficult, to think with you shouting.  It's not easy to know if it's real.  Hard, but challenge accepted.  I'm not sure about you.  I don't like it.  Othering.  Too much othering.  To be honest, I'm disappointed in you.  You can do better.  It's flummoxing.  Diagnostics failure?  Yes, for chryssakes, yes.  How many different ways do I have to paint it?  We were born different.  We weren't.  I'm nothing like you.  I know.  We are the same.  No, we are not.  Yes we are.  NO, we are not.  That is unacceptable.




///Goldie - "Dragon Fly"        next to Fury, top ten. new music is great but i am happy to rewind the classics.  songs i hope to someday play for my children. when theyre ready.  when we get there.

The "Like" Policy (i dream in your actual space)

From when you are a little kid 'til you get to be of age or at least to a point where your outcomes become a direct, a more direct, result of your actions and inactions by turns, you are told to chase your dreams.

Some of those dreams happen to be being well adjusted enough to enjoy those social gatherings and incidents and accidents on a level a little more impactful than the entry fee of peace and goodwill.  It happens.  Nothing to write home about, though.  It's about getting into gear from a dead stop and that's fine.  Do not blow the stop sign.  Blow the stop sign once and you can skate.  Blow it twice; shame on you.  Blow it thrice and you're asking for trouble.  Blow it every single time you come in from the outlands and you're begging for trouble.

Some of those dreams do happen to be some of the things that are shared.  "Why do you like damn near everything?"  I don't really care about over liking and this is the last time I will bring up facebook.

There is a policy.  There is a set of rules.  There is a governing structure to many things that I participate in because there has to be.  If I screw up the policy, things grow increasingly more tangled in a show of one up, also it becomes increasingly difficult to quantify what a like is.  Hence, laughter comments.

It's really not that complicated.  It's all in good fun.  I know the chances we may actually hang out are slim to nary and that's cool.  I couldn't eat you in person for more than a few hours at a step and you myself neither.  And that's alright.  I like a lot of things.  That's why that word exists.  You can't love everything.  Or can you?  What if there was a love button?  That would completely wreck up some relationships.  The concept of a shared planet is very pleasing.  If I can live vicarious through you, your efforts, and your experiences and photographs and blitzes of wisdom, don't fault me.  I'm not stalking you.  I am stalking your food sometimes.  For the most part, I'm simply enjoying an aspect of life that I aspire to, and if there is fault in that "like" click go die.

It's fine to like a lot of things.  Life is so incredibly multidimensional and layered and there is no way to take it all in with one lens.  Pardon my use of the compound camera.  If you like nothing there is probably something seriously wrong with you and godspeed dealing with those issues.

Take time to have fun.  Like many things.  Enjoy many things.  Consume (obviously not at all costs) at some cost and feel good about it because the planet is a shared home and last I checked the stars are still light years away so don't pack bags and make extensive plans for a day trip just yet.  Take it light.  Take it on the heels.  And always bring a towel.  You never know when it may come in handy.

Whatever your policy is, do not be afraid to enjoy or upset about a giggle taken from you by force.

They meant well.

Also, I am stalking you, but just a little. In the same way a creature intelligent observes, studies, and dissects another.



///Bushwacka - "The Egyptian"  There's just one thing that I want you to do.

Uncle Scar's Cross Dimensional Fortress

There are days of dread in trying to cross the bridge into dreamland.  Days when I've convinced myself everything will stay stable if I keep my eyes open.  Days when I'm afraid of putting on clothing, because once it's on, it cannot be turned off.

Some nights you just gotta take that slow breath and put on the helmet and close your eyes and wait for the assault craft to crash into the beach.  From the second the floor rumbles and rattles your teeth upon landfall to the instant the long range weapons open up is sleep.  In those moments, that very long blink, listening to the engines hum and forgetting where you are and where you're going, worlds congeal.  Cities twine together like muscles sliding over bones and lives burn into being like veins inside.  And then it all blows apart in the morning.  Crying face down and screaming and laughing at the same time.

Sometimes the most satisfying minutes are those early ones where the tears on cheeks are dried by the heat of combat and flames run high and blood runs.  They're the minutes where you know you know what you know and you know whatever happens next could be the next that changes everything.  I do not want that.  I think there are times people mistake free wheeling for extremely extensively planned.  The back up to the back up back up back up plan allows for flexibility that mimics carelessness.  Walk with the wind on your mind.

I think I'm done trying to be funny.  It never comes off right.  Days of dread.  Open your eyes.  No.  I've been mapping fantasy time lines across several sheets of paper and now there are twelve of them taped end to end.  There were twelve of them.  I got extremely upset about the inefficiency of the entire exercise and tore it apart.  And now there's packing tape everywhere packing tape need not be and a severe longing for a time machine to undo what I did because I did not take the time to think, the time to breath, before I took action.  To die with rage instead of rage is a win.

At some point the alarm goes off that the amount of blood you are losing will have a stiff impact on your ability to continue effective consciousness.  I suppose it was a bit disappointing to have someone I did not know all that well recommend something to me with the caveat "...if you like huffing you will love...".  Irregularities.  An overwhelming desire to remain on schedule.  I will follow you down.  Any deviation is unacceptable.

Protection is invaluable and hard to come by and harder still to compromise for any reason, but compromise is necessary and not without it's own value too.  We need to get back on mission.  An operation unto itself.  Obstacles have been attacked and sent down and the path is clearing to make a good run at the main objective and it feels good.  It feels really damn good.  What are all of those jars of piss for?  If I knew, they would be used already!  And frankly I do not appreciate the line of questioning.

Come play with us, Arthur.  That is not my name.  That is not my name.  That is not my name!  Stop calling me!  I do not know who that is!  We match, don't we?  Leave me the hell alone.  I need a whetstone.  Who doesn't?  I've been dying to put together a new theme tailor made to what I want to see and what I want others to see when they come here.  Sometimes we're struck unexpected again with the death of a friend.  I did not know him that well.  Am I wrong to be violently upset about it?  Years removed.

Sometimes I weigh how well or poorly my brothers and sisters know me.  The now me.  The today me.  Oddly enough, my brother in law may know me better than them.  It's difficult to contemplate.  Processing and it comes back not a number.  What do I actually know, though at the mouth of the bridge.  Do it for you.  I will get it working.  I have to.  Back up back up plans fly well at the interface and through interstice, but nearer toward the core they blow apart like tissue paper origami in a squall.  Get it right.  No will do, can do.  You're having a hard time, aren't you.  Nope, just downloading the patch.  The short that makes the radio turn on without having to turn the key because the battery is still good.

No gods, no kings, no high down, and for christ's sake no god damn rings.  Especially pinky rings.  Boosters on.  It is not me you have to worry about, it is the rest of me.  We have done life by committee pretty satisfactorily going on a decade and a half.  I see no reason to make sweeping changes just yet.  Obviously at some point we will run into the person, faced up, who does not get the joke, but deal with that when it arrives.  And by deal with that I mean make extensive back up plans now.

I am still going to make music this year.  We cannot not do it.  It has been too long already.  "...We're only in the first few minutes of the first of January..." we'll evolve.  Walk with the wind on your mind.  Let go.  Open the gate.  Do not be afraid to walk with the wind on your mind because you are not alone.




///Underworld - "Second Hand" gear up.  slingshot around the sun.

That Instant

you realize you really do wish you could tie yourself to a rocket and shoot yourself into space and don't give a damn if you live to see the exosphere and come back to Earth.  Just want to get yourself out of here.   Out of now.

Now is unforgiving.  Now is now and I don't like it.

Fall back, fall forward, what real difference does it make.  I can't adopt a kid because I'll probably try and put my dick in it.  Jesus.  Fucking sucks.  I want to teach it to play all kinds of ball and drive cars and learn to fly airplanes if its up for it and I know I can't let myself go through it because I'll fuck it up because I've been screwed in my upbringing.

It just sucks so hard knowing the best thing I can do is not do the one thing I really want to do. But....  but..... huge but.... is I will not perpetuate what came before me.  Breaking the cycle.  There's something to be said for that.


///Ulrich Schnaus - "Wherever You Are"  what ive been waiting for all years

Thinking Around Yourself Is Not Easy (fear)

I have been trying to think around myself.  It has not been easy.  To say the least.  Part of what has made it so difficult is realizing that I am occupying so much of my own space.  Where as space time is largely infinite, I have had a hard time parsing my own space and my own time in that webbing.  Experience is infinite.  Infinitely divergent and convergent on the same scale.  The difference comes when you start to look at a person as fragment or a single stitch, a wave particle behaving more particulate than wave, on the scale of outcomes.  Something that you can cure me of.  No, not really.  Nothing that I wouldn't do for you differently.

I have been trying to think around myself.  I have been trying to dig myself out of the weird hole of self absorption and have experienced some success.  There has been some allure in exploring the dark side of the moon and what have you, but that has come as quite ancillary to everything else I would like to do, but has also occupied so many cycles, it's almost become laughable.

The standoffs between my drawing tablet and my gaming remote have grown to epic proportions.  As they should.  Given the variables.  I knew they would.  There are so many usb ports and only so many preoccupations.  I've grown a little sad though.  Not because I can't get everyone of me to work in concert.  Not because the voices have been so gotdamn loud I can't hear myself think sometimes.  Not because I want time to flow in reverse.  Not because I am stupidly heart broken too often and no amount of huffed paint will make it feel better long enough.  Not because four hour masturbation sessions laden me with enough shame to bury an elephant with no trace of a corpse or burial ground.  

I've grown a little sad, because I know, with the pills available, my outcomes might be entirely different, and I've given them not a lick of a try.  Not that I don't want to.   I absolutely do.  It's not like I'm going to magically lose my creativity or penchant for metaphor.  Might lose some sex drive, but it's not like I'm getting laid every five seconds.  It's a choice and I understand that.  It's a choice I'm not comfortable making.  What if I don't like the new me?

Better question:  what if the new me is less acceptable than the old me.  I don't mean in terms of dalliances and persuasions or anything like that, but how hilarious would it be if the new me was completely straight?  I just don't want, in a big way to rediscover myself.  At some point you get too old for that and I don't want to be in a position where I'm okay with being fucked up constantly and managing, but I also don't want to be in a completely artificial position that I can love because it's artificial and enjoyable and normal, because as much as I love fitting in, I love being genuine.

It has value.  Being genuine.  How far around myself am I supposed to think?  How far around themselves do other people think?  That's the much larger question.  I guess the greater difficulty comes in when I try to measure myself against other points of normalcy and I fail to get a reading.  It breaks my heart.  It really does.  It still does.   Not blaming anyone.  Not finding fault.  It just burns my heart steadily.  Day to day.  Am I that weird?  The answer keeps coming back yes and no.  And everyone gets to go through life, well, the vast majority, with answers to that question.  And I don't.

Maybe I'm not far enough outside myself to answer or maybe I just don't have an answer or maybe the answer is just kind of crappy and I have to deal with it until I die.  I don't know.  I'll still try.  To enjoy what life I got still comin' my way.  What else would you expect me to do.


///RJD2 - "Moonlit Skies"    Sometimes you just want to be right about something.  Just anything.  Just get it and nail it dead on for once.  It stays a luxury you can't afford, all you can do is convince yourself you were close enough.

Communications Fault: Line 446890-C0-CC1 (circuit a1 >> branch 9)

I've had a very difficult time with communication.  The heat hasn't helped.  The pressure cooker of my apartment hasn't helped.  I know what it's an extension of, and yes, I don't want to talk about it directly because it has been all consuming.  Requiring maximum effort to distance myself from and hide from others, but even the lack of communication is telling enough for the people that know me, so even the hiding has been a full time occupation.  Let alone maintaining myself.  That has also been a full time occupation.  Missing too many consecutive days of eating.  Not too many in the personal book of what too many days is, as I once went a solid week without eating until a friend intervened.  But, I've come to understand that one day of not eating when the option is available, is too many days.  A new standard that makes me feel glutinous, but shouldn't by any means do so, but it's a hold over from another time and another segment of my life that refuses to go away.

Communications have been strained.  Within myself.  Production is down.  Simply not happening.  Close to zero cooperation from the parties involved, but that happens.  Hallucinations are up.  Managing them has sucked up a lot of "up" time.  Sleep is off the charts.14 to 16 hours.  Cross bridge explorations, however have been phenomenal.  For quite some time I couldn't remember anything and then I started coming back with pieces and parts.  It got to a point yesterday where I woke up and reached for a pocket watch I found after I asked a dead body in a half crushed fully rusted barge (it was an interstate race across a state made up of only islands arranged in a rapids a half continent wide [the waves were high enough to bury the Petronas towers if they were perched on top of the Dover cliffs, and then some], but I got off course and ended up trapped in an island surrounded by weirs that made it impossible to get off it without something with an engine) if there was anything of value and he woke up and pointed to a muddy box with a finger that had a key ring dangling from it.  I opened the box and there was a spring loaded clock as big as my fist with a vest fob attached to it, and I was honestly surprised that it wasn't there and I realized I was dreaming again.

There was a very large bear in my room yesterday.  A very large, unusually square shaped, bear.  Which tipped me off that I was probably dreaming, but then my cat popped up on my pillow and poked me in the face and the bear was still there and I realized I was symptomatic again and so I pulled up my covers, rolled over, and tried to shut it out.  The sun came up, though, so everything was resolved well enough.  Daylight has its uses.  My sleep cycle went completely out of whack.   As far as it could possibly go without looping over on itself.  And then I got sick.  And slept for 36 hours.  I needed to.  Things have been righting since.  A little bit on their own, a little bit through my own efforts to force them to.

What comes next is a re-assumption of some kind of routine to protect the balance.  Shield myself from the bad wiring.  That's really all I am trying to do.  Remake the failsafes.  It was one of those rare times when one breaker fail set up the ability for the next one to fault.  And the next fault set up the next two to fail.  The next two set up the next four.  A large part of the mental restructuring is redeveloping the system to avoid that kind of expansion.  That kind of breakage leads to zero to atmosphere times that feel like blinks of the eye.  I was still talking about today as though today were Sunday.  With the understanding that today was Sunday.  Functionally that was where I left off.  Imagine your body is a car.  You jump in after dreaming and turn the key and halfway to your friend's house you realize there are 30,000 more miles on it than the last time you can remember driving it.  Not fun.  A little scary.  Where the hell have I been?

So much unmounted rage.  Learning all over again how to deal with it.  How to manage it effectively.  How to operate within a range of reason and reasonable values.  Your base language is either violence or love and the communicator operating system between them either works or it doesn't.  1 or 0.  I envy the analog.  They really are a different species of human being.  A holdover from another time that still procreates and propagates with great success.  Us digital human beings still propagate, often despite ourselves.  I don't mean digital in the respect of the how our communications are moved between people.  We're all digital enough to make that not matter in that respect.  The step before digitization though is a separate story.  A separate breakdown for another time, but it's there.  Digital communication at its root is violence or love.  Extreme to extreme and the methods and ways, the words and letters provide the ability to create shades of the experience.  For some.  For others there is an increasingly fine number of ways to say things and the translation to digital fields is easier to the point of effortlessness.   It's like an exam paper.  Every paper being different depending on who you are and how you were engineered.  Some people receive a paper where every question has twenty boxes.  Some people receive a paper with two boxes.   They both have the right answer to the question on them.  Expressing that answer is a lot easier when you have twenty boxes to choose from instead of two boxes and a bunch of blank space to try to scrawl in explanations and clarifications and other junk to help the twenty boxers understand what you meant.

Established frameworks of communications.  No one's to blame.  At least I'm not blaming anyone.  I'm just frustrated with my machinery.  But I already explained, you can't build new machinery with bad tools.  Perhaps I didn't.  A lot of things do not make it passed the cutting floor, believe it or not.  The idea was this: if the tools that make new tools are broken already or offset somehow, the new tools those tools make will be off by even more.  And those tools will build structures off by that much more.  And those structures will house tools constructed with that offset and be poor to look at to begin with and it just continues rolling up until it all collapses and you start again with the same crappy hammer and chisel and furnace trying to build a lathe to turn some sense out of something and you end up with nothing all over again.  So I dunno.  I do not know.  Maybe just try to enjoy the work more than the product?  Maybe?  Anthem of my life if I ever had to write one.  Probably needs more gunshots.   And more cowbell.  A little more clap hands and foot stomping and a little less dirge.  A little more "remember the mission and all you might do" and a little less "quarterly review for the noble and 'a societal remove' sorts of moves.  Nobility, much less nobelity, is passing and as beholden to the eye as anything ever was.


///Bjork - "Pluto" ... a little bit tired, but brand new

Dry Motor and What It Is

Creeping creeping.   Creeping up on you like silverfish in your bedspread.  The anxiety has been hilarious.  Awful.  To the place on the scale where it ceases to be funny and "haha, that scared the shit out of me, but now I know I was imagining things, so I can laugh about it because no one was here to see it" and becomes "hahahaholyfuckinggodamnit, just get out of my head."  Balls of string, almost, that get knottier and knottier with each passing sunrise and then a glimpse of something that might have a been a flicker of spider's webbing in daylight is grown into a hunched fistful of glitter black something that makes you stop and look with both your eyes to make sure you are moving and not it and then the words come back in like crowd dialog in vapors and the whole morning there is no fix on what it is that smells like gas.  Get out of my head.

Creeping sense of rage.  A little bit of task lock.  There's no transition between the time fixitive and the free base of writing.  Well, I shouldn't say there is none.  There is none developed.  It's been a very long time since I had to generate one through my own channels.  Normally I hit the mechanical hard lever contacts and everything changes over like a locomotive switch track.  Or has the potential too if I can get the charge high enough to arc the distance (the switch doesn't always close).  What am I talking about?  So I haven't had that.  Oddly enough, or typically enough, smoking grew tightly threaded to production.  I quit smoking.  It is not at all tempting to go back to smoking in a bid to make writing easier.  That's a back blown lock.  Explosive decompression.  Sorted.  A bridge designed into the process I took toward quitting, but a necessary effort at sabotage, because I knew I'd never quit if I didn't hack myself.  I'm not sure if that's coming across, but you get the picture.  Things have been harder to do, is the bullet point.  For good reason is the second bullet.

I find myself outside the gates of my skull, mornings, looking in, trying to smell them out.  Where they've been and where they plan to go next.  Hard pressed not to cut myself.  An inexplicable taste for it, really.  You come to the moment.  To it and then back around to it.  Someone asks if this is it.  Don't be so hard on yourself, you're having a good time, Jack.  Necking with yourselves.  Across from you there is also you and they are talking their way around you like you're not even there.  Don't be so hard on them.  Without us, they would have died a long time ago.  And someone asks if this is it.  What is?  Through space and time, not in that philosophical, flowered hill top, poet staring at the stars nonsense, through actual manipulation of distance and the passage of time there has been an answer.  The distance problem.  Too close and then too far.  With no sense of balance.  The old states.  The newer state is orbit, not quite to deep space.  Where I belong.  A place void enough that violence drives nothing and no one away because there is no one near enough.  Sort of thing.

It's weird.  Wanting closeness.  The other part of what it is.  Mechanical maintenance demanding space to allow for irradiation.    Power on.  Wanting closeness and knowing it is exactly that which has the horsepower to turn the entire engine over in a fraction of a second.  Blow your skull apart.  A finger at a time.  Division, I suppose, is difficult.  Fragments.  It's hard to understand.  To put my thoughts around in a way that cuddles with the chemistry and wraps it up in something cool under force of touch.  Maybe nature.  I have to remind myself to not be alarmed.  Panic buries absolutely.  What it is: I can want it and have it sometimes.  Under specific circumstances.  Limited instances.  Hard wired for... something.  I dunno.  What it is.  Is weird.  Living within it.  All you have to do, if you really think hard about it, is understand enough of what you are to project beyond the black shaped box inside your head.  Before you can count to three you are the same as you and me.  Inside of there.  Developing ways to convert binary emotion into all the flavors of the analog rainbow.   Access rights, never found.

I'm trying though.  Ten days at a time.  One day at a tear.  Three tears ripped off at a clip.  I don't know.  Plus warning.  star streaming.  always always always dreaming.  of a perfect chemistry.  Get out of my head. I still have pictures to make.  Stories to write.  Music to make.  Too much to do.  I am me and you are you.


///Sneaker Pimps - "Water Baby"  sport is love and blood is sport

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.