Nine One One Two

"Every year, exactly this time of year."  Well every since and before.  The tension of the holiday season is already cinching.  Where will you go?  Who will you see?  Who can you adopt for family?  It does make me anxious.  Is alone okay?  OF COURSE!  Why all caps?  Am I crazy?  Did you hear that?  We've talked it over several dozen times and dozens of those more through the years.  Yes, of course it is okay.  No, you are not crazy.

"Pitter patter, my little heart."  It races from time to time.  Little panic attacks.  Solitary is the frontier and solitary it will be.  That's where you work best.  You'll still meet people and see families and couples and the like.  It is certainly less than the usual or equal.  Do not believe that holidays with yourself are anything less than their holidays.  They would be miserable in your concept of a holiday and you would be severely uncomfortable in theirs.  It's okay to peek between the slats from time to time.  That is universal.  Their anxieties are the same as yours with different window dressing and frames.  Rest assured, they feel something too and that is fine.

Nine eleven, however many years out, has changed a lot.  The rage of being denied enlistment has faded.  It only took ...  four ... seven ... shut up!  Far enough away to laugh about how I thought that idea could work.  Thinking back to the earliest years, it is funny to think that I thought I might've been able to make it by as a kept man.  Good god, I would've been far too bored.  Seven plus years separated from the bid to enlist, it has been reaffirmed one hundred times over that I would have gone insane trying to make a career out of it.  As a way to form a base and small nest egg, sure it could've worked, but my lack of mental stability would have failed spectacularly.  Maybe not the first year, maybe not the second year; the chances would have increased exponentially from day .0001.

I'm completely over the war on terror.  There are so many things that have come to light in the intervening time domestically that are so incredibly glaring and depressing.  So many more pressing internal wars that reached cease fires and truces without any actual resolution that are winnable & endable.  The fact that they still exist isn't the surprising thing.  It is.  Cultural change moves at a glacial pace.  As interconnectivity and access to information grows and shortens in its difficulty, the pace feels slower and slower because you can give a person a library of five books and a library of five thousand and it won't change how fast or slowly they choose to read.

Thinking about that day, I remember the anniversary that I couldn't remember for two years (was it three?) until I finally got it right.  Being in relationships is hard.  Do you remember the day you asked me if we were dating?  Kind of.  Is that today?  I don't remember the exact day, but I do remember being nervous as all hell and wondering about it for weeks and if I asked you and you said no would I ask you again or storm out or wait a few weeks and ask you again.  The day that you gave me a lollipop or the day of the formal dance?  Laughing thinking about it now.  I still cannot remember which day it was, but I know that it is a day to remember.  Wherever you are, I am glad that you know that you are loved and I am glad that you are with someone who is a part of you.  The years we spent were not for nothing.  The futures opened.  The years to come are their own.

Solitary progressions.  Nine eleven is also walking beside a cemetery.  A museum of displays and marble hand rails and floor tiles laced in sterling grout.  Rose and magenta tinted chrome and glass.  The past brought to life for a single day.  Compressed, labeled, and plaqued.  The westerly wing of the grand mezzanine of leTauran Atu Gothans, a 78 acre compound.  I don't visit there often.  About once a year, I try to look at the exhibits again.  Sometimes the maintenance men are about and they'll open up a case to let me get a close look at the taxidermy.  It is pretty amazing the way hairs are placed and tacked together to form entire swatches of skin that can stretch over the plaster molds.  The lighting isn't always great, but sometimes the exhibits are moved around to different enclosures to light them better.

I'm nowhere near a writing rut.  I can't stop doing it inside my head.  I have to take the time to do it outside of my head.  Part of how I've adjusted to protect myself from myself has been finding other things to do.  "If you can just stay distracted long enough!"  Out of focus.  I've been trying to do a lot in the physical world, however.  Trying to adjust to the modern world of smarter smart phones.  Trying to adjust to larger work loads and responsibility.  Trying to see the world with a larger lens.

Trying to see more possibilities and potential without getting swallowed whole in their ocean.

For some years, I mourned.

Part of me still does.

The deaths I died.

The deaths of possibilities.  So close to another and another friends birthdays and the lives that faded and blew out like candle wicks.  The scent of the smoke still fresh and undeniable and intoxicating in their aroma.  When does smell memory fade?

9,238 cigarettes before you lose your sense of smell, chief.   Oh.  Thank you, statistician?

I know I haven't been keeping track of holidays or birthdays.  I keep telling myself:  "we're just going to backtrack and bang them all out at once and get caught up to the now, piece of cake!"  That philosophy has fallen completely flat.  Of course I am beating myself up over it.  It is important.  Without consistent data points we cannot know where we are.  Holidays are perfect times for evaluation.  How the hell old am I anyway?  I need to take care of the backlog or at least try to ... at least let go of it.  That time cannot be restored.

Projecting a life span of 75 years with maximum outcomes: you live .205 years each day of your life if every birthday is a new beginning and a new iteration of yourself and you will only live a maximum of 75 years in each iteration.

147 days have passed since your birthday.  You are experiencing the rise of a new adult form convulsing through its last growth bursts.  You will not die soon.  200+ days until you return.  This is a strange time for you.  Adolescence continues to shed.  Try.  The carapace will split and you will free yourself for the wind.  The new skin will harden in the Winter.




Nine eleven is a quarter post of sorts.  So many things changed and so many things continue to.  Resolved to death, yes.  Resolved to its exact date, no.  In meta-jail, I have been granted so many larger and larger play grounds and exercise areas.  I've been granted larger and larger libraries and degrees to work and play on while I spend my time in solitary.  The clock is ticking on the next ring of the compound gates to open and I have to be patient while the paperwork runs through the levels of the office's in/out boxes and gets stamped and I have to go in for interviews and hearings and have good composure and appear civilized and remorseful and hopeful and aware and reticent and reflective and playful, but not too much, and deprecating and confident and ... all at once.  I don't have to do any of that.  I have to wait. I don't know how far out the compound goes, but I heard there is another gate over them hills once they fix to open this one.

As the years tick on, I learn how to be more like you and I learn what the differences actually are between us.  I know we are not the same.  Far from it.  It is incredibly reassuring, as we walk, to understand better what those differences are.

The mission: to leave a map for the next person that is at all like me.  "It's a great big universe!"

What helps get me through is knowing that I wasn't rejected as much as cast away.  There wasn't a fault as much as a rift in the known firm of space and time.  Blame dark matter.  "The stories you told were awful."  I hope that the maps will be artful.  You can only live but for so long with someone who is prone to spontaneous combustion before it changes from an endearing parlor trick to a recurring crisis.

Heave away!

Having an extra $200 shouldn't be life changing at age thirty two.  Something's not right.

Are all of your goals set so low that...  ...no.  Maybe?  Crossroads.  Is that all you wanted to accomplish?  Well, yeah.  For now.  It's pretty neat.  Hmm.  Hmm, what?  It's fine.  The door's over there if you need it.  I'm just saying-.  Don't let it goose you on the way out!

There is a lot of work still to be done and I am avoiding it.  Part of the reason why is because there are too many things I want to do at once and part of it is because I can only live for 12 to 16 hours a day without ending up cycling into spirals that will carry me up or down and anything that forces a deviation from that norm starts the engines that link and power chain reactions that will go in either direction and it is absolutely exhausting walking the rope and having to face constant failures because time ran out or constant failures because time drew on toward infinity.

I don't know what normal is to you.

I don't know what normal means to you.

Will I ever be?

Nowadays nine one one is a thermometer.  The potentials continue to cool while the core continues to spin and move plates and generate its own magnetic field. September, we dive through the thin layer of atmosphere and sweep and zip between billows of thunder heads, citywide lightning bolts and liquid metal rain drops against windscreens to land with the grace of a butterfly on the escarpment of a phase three elemental cave patio.  Grab our groceries, suit up, and walk inside to one atmosphere, proper oxygen mix that will not explode granted a match and cigarette, and turn on the satellite linked tele.

As the Septembers progress, I learn better what coming home means and what it means to me.  The distances will continue to grow and I will continue to fail at assimilating to common society, but in the meantime, I will explore more areas of the compound I was locked in when life began inside a cell.  It is a reminder that I am many years behind in my development and there isn't a time machine yet that will bridge that gap.

If this is the beginning of the solo-journey, I know I've spoken enough about being at one with the concept that life will be singular for the seeable future because I cannot ...... remembering the last time I was loved ..... laughing out loud.  Seven years and counting.  It really is dumb to expect to feel that again.  Think about it!  Let's say, one hundred experiences per day.  Five of them new.  Hell, one of them new.  That's 365 times your age.  No weight toward slate and how blank you were when you were young.  Now, to get an idea of the potential, multiply that by the people you've met that you can remember all the way to your earliest memory, just faces, not names.  You've met way more people than you can remember so it's still a gross underestimate.  If you spent the rest of your life meeting one new person a week your chances of recreating that chemistry are pretty much a lottery ticket.  Or you can recreate it.  The only person that will know is you.  That is kind of nice.  Or you can find something new.

The other thing is I really have no idea how to look.  I have some idea of how others look.  I have no idea how to look.  "So put yourself out there!"  Okay.  Sure.  That's the other odd thing: we have no idea if someone is looking.  Would it change anything if we did?  Probably not.  Secrets make terrible stories.

I think I would like to live with someone else.  Another human.  That day is not now, not six months from now, not 24, not 36, not four years, not four years and 14 days from now.  Nothing is wrong with me.

We're never alone.

It has a dual purpose.  In part to map and in part to guide and in part to track.  More of an organic willtuary.  A way to know that you have indeed pinched yourself and you are not dreaming.




///Marnie Stern - "Proof of Life"

Bonus Track

///Imogen Heap - "Daylight Robbery"

Another Way

Another way to think about it is in terms of shows.

How many shows are you willing to play?  If you play 24 shows in a year, you've done well.  If you play 36 shows in one year, it was worth it.  If you play 48 shows in one year it was a blast.  If you play 50 plus shows in a single year, you've gone above and beyond the call of duty.

If you play 100 and more shows of what makes up the bones of you, you've gone beyond what anybody asked you to do.  Everything else is just exploration and





///

At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity

Looking at my own reflection at the river, a wolf's head mask in the crook of my arm, I wonder how many there are like me.  I wonder how many times I can roll the dice with instability before an immovable object meets an unstoppable force again.  I try to skip rocks.  I try to bat rocks with an aluminum bat given to me as a gift after I left the last one I had at home, bent into the shape of a boomerang.  I wonder where I am going and if someone out there is going the same way I am.  If we will carpool together and shout at each other, trying to figure out where exactly "there" is while the driver tries to figure how to get two wolves out of his car and regrets being a Samaritan.

Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink.  One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud.  The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship.  Found.  Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash!  Mid-river.  The current continues.  I can't see my face, looking down.  The angles aren't right.  The light is not just so.  The sun is not cooperating.  Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.

Thinking about how people find their perfect match.  At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me.  Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic.  Impossible.  Incredible in its perfection and destruction.  Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist.  Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.

Happy and satisfied are two different things.  The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief.  As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true.  Doomed.  I laugh typing that.  The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle.  Dooooooomed!  Of course not.  Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat.  I wonder what quantum decay looks like.  I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them.  Some of them, yes.  None of them, also yes.  Always at distance.  Minding the fence.  Minding the facilities.  On the off chance they might be me.  On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.

A moat.  Sometimes the bridge is there.  The gates open and ambassadors cross.  I don't know what madness is.  Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself?  Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself?  Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere?  Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted.  I am here, this is what I wanted.  I am here.  This is what I wanted.  Few things truly scare me, in life.  I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half.  Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.





///Groove Armada - "At The River"   ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.

Stand Up Act 9 (dialogues)

Stand Up Act 8


I don't want to go fishing today.

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

I changed my mind.

Why?

It's gross out.

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

Nope, its not.

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

You're being unreasonable!

It's beautiful outside!

You're being unreasonable!!

Am I?

Yeah.

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




Throwing a rager tonight?

Yeah.

What time?

Sixish.

Nine?

Sixish.

Sixish?

Yes, sixish.

Have you thought about nine?

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

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

Ninish?





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burna

I don't know.  That's not true, I do know.  I get scorched sometimes.  Emotionally.   Not by anyone specifically or the selves within myself.  It's that the act of creation is a burner.  I have to crank it up to high and hear the igniter tick over and tap and I do not always know what the igniter will be.  The ignition coil accepts voltage over the course of hours and sometimes days and sometimes months.  It does not always click.  I would go as far as to say that often times, more often than otherwise, it does not click and the ignition coil never accepts enough voltage to arc and I have to hold a lighter down on that gas line and hope it takes before the house burns down and I'm sitting in the backyard smoking with no eyebrows wondering how I got there because the kitchen exploded and I was high off of my ass on fumes well before it happened.  I want it to work every time.  That's wishful thinking.   I get scorched a lot.  I am highly flammable.  Just the way the genes shook out.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of a writer I would be, could be, with greater mental stability, and then I laugh.  Because I would have bored myself to death in high school with pen and paper and I realize I would be the mathematician or the economist or the engineer or the welder who did it because it was something they could do mechanically and do well and do with hi fidelity in a very stable pattern and my interest would've waned and I would have sought out something more dynamic.  No wait.  That's me.  Me now, projecting myself backward and extrapolating to now.  Not what I was trying to describe at all.  I would have done those things and been happy to do them and never would have branched out to something I could be wrong at and still pursue with passion as though I was baseline perfect and sometimes brilliant, but not nearly enough to make that one diamond sparkle to my eye enough to push me to try for something with more cuts and more shine and more heart.  At least that's what I like to think.  Would happen if I were more stable.

Do I want the things that come with stability?  Of course.  You'd have to be a moron not to.  Do I want the things that come with instability?  Of course.  Not all of them, but at least 70% of them.  Maybe closer to 60%.  Thinking back, I never really was a very stable human being.  I remember getting into a spat at a summer camp when I was very young, came back to me today, cannot remember for my life what camp it was or if it was bible camp or something more or less or forced or if I asked to go to it.  It was a moment where myself and my peers were unsupervised and they were making fun of my shoes again because I had very bad knock off shoes.  Very bad.  Not even stylistically speaking.  Simply very poorly engineered shoes.  The soles were made of this weird psuedo plastic, translucent, compound so whenever we played "Duck Duck Goose" or "Steal the Bacon" in gym I would have to work ten times harder than everyone with regular rubber to make cuts and accelerate and slow down because the plastic stuff would glide on the waxed wood floor like skates.  I still won my fair share.  Unfair share?  I should have been undefeated.  It's probably how I got to be so fast early on and kept going from there.  Also probably how I got to be so frustrated when I get a job and don't have the right equipment today.

Anyway, where was I going....  so myself and my peers were unsupervised and I was being teased relentlessly and I didn't do anything for a while except shut up.  Partly because I knew however I spun it I would get the beating of a lifetime up until that point once I got home, and partly because I wanted to go grab a chair and beat him to death.  So I went straight for his throat because the middle ground was dealing with them making fun of you for having dirty nails, them not realizing you were keeping them as long as your mom could stand before digging that hook thing underneath or cutting them specifically for the instance when you may need to claw someones throat out of their neck.  It worked out pretty well.  He bled some and I was not nearly as strong as I thought I was then so he only lost some skin, but he was so freaked out he didn't even tell on me.  Or maybe he did and I've just blacked the aftermath out of my memory.  Anyway, I just remember thinking "awesome, why did I not do that sooner."  Strange days back then.

And now.  I know I can't be, but I believe I can be the greatest of all time.  I get scorched.  I melt down.  I've been so high strung emotionally with human contact.  It's rough.  Parsing things.  Knowing what to tell and what not to.  KNowing who to tell and who not to.  Going over events to parse what happened and what did not happen, but was later re-engineered from memories I didn't have, but took to heart regardless.  People I thought I talked to in depth, but never said one word to.  Real people that I see that I know I will not see again for some time.  Longing and wanting more and knowing I would mismanage it if it did happen.  The things that did happen that are stranger than fiction that I hesitate to retell to anyone because they wouldn't believe it either if they were there.  It's gutting.

A tough road, the feeling it.  The feeling writing.  Taking it beyond exercise to experiment and beyond experiment to theory and beyond theory to intent.  Taking intent back to exercise to ingrain it and then back to experiment to expansion packs.  Managing circuitry.  Without tripping breakers is a 99 by 99 game of Windows 95 vintage Minefield.  I was trying to explain to someone how communication, as I've learned it, is an experience of exchanged violence.  The base set of symbols.  Love growing from that basic set of characters.  Sometimes writing offers no release.  I can deal with that.  It's not so much that it's something that has to get out.  Someone else tried to put it to me that way and I accepted the assessment because I had no rebuff at the time.  To a small degree it is.  To a much larger degree it is conversation, within and without. Some internalized and leaking and some extroverted and speaking.

I'm taken back to the original mission.  The blueprint for the creation as a method of legacy.  I go back and forth often between life and death.  Self extermination versus procreation.  I do not play into it as often as I would like, or maybe, more likely, as often as I would feel comfortable with.  Is there a way to commit altruistic suicide for the greater good?  Yes.  I toy with the idea of dying of natural causes.  Thinking about having children and the million reasons why it would be better for that kid to never meet me.  I toy with big ideas of retirement and doing what I love, but even on that time scale of 60, 70, years, it's a long pipe.  What you want, sucka?  Not much.  I already have most of it.  It's getting to the point of formality and self improvement.  Competitive spirit.  How good can I possibly get?  I think that keeps me awake more often than any other meter.  When I know the answer, I'll rip the chord and bug the fuck out.  Selfish.  It makes me laugh to feel that way sometimes.

I get scorched.  I get thoroughly displeased with the quality of what comes out of me, but I know there's so much psychological garbage to sort through, there is no way I'm going to knock anything out of the park on a regular basis.  I play against myself.  It gets troubling.  Becomes troubling.  When your heckler is you.  Your clown is you.  You are your dealer and your fiend.  I used to do it for other people.  I used to do it for my mom and my dad before I realized the packages of carefully selected works were doing little more than collecting dust as soon as they unwrapped them.  When I realized sending them books for christmas was a waste of money and passion.


One of the best experiences I ever had was taking some of them back one of the times I was back home and never once hearing a single question about where any of them went.  XD.  I still get a rise out of that.  I was hot blooded for so long over it and then I realized it wasn't worth holding against anyone.  I think that's where a lot of my happiness stems from.  The knowing that there are people you can love and people you cannot love.  And I'm okay with that.  I still get scorched sometimes.  The factory floor fire spreads and work stations are abandoned and the fire spreads and the suppression systems kick in and they can't contain a god damn thing on the scale of what you are experiencing because you designed them in good times with hypotheticals and grossly miscalculated how swift and vast the psychotic destruction would advance.

So now I am back again and kicking at embers and trying to reimagine what it all was before the fire broke out.  Gathering the caucus.  Sending the calls and hoping to get a ping back from somewhere.  Anywhere along the rise and fall of consciousness.  Reinstalling routines.  Rebuilding structure.  Recreating from memory the blueprint and it's different every time.

If, at the end of it all, I can assemble something to make a future iteration of myself feel less daunted, or less alone, or less wrecked, or more hopeful for sunrise, or more comfortable with no one to sing to but the moon and the tone deaf clouds, I will be happy.  I don't always do good, but I do the best I can.  I know the cycle will eventually end and I won't be blown clear and the fire will consume, but what is the high worth if you'll never know just how high you could've been?  I'm not talking the highs that come with squared proportions.  False peaks?  I mean, would I trade the 40% bad outcomes for 100% decent outcomes?  No.  I don't think so.  In the worst times, yes.  Of course.  No.  I don't think so.  And it is difficult to wrap my head around.  Difficult to work around.  Difficult to not fall into myself standing on the foundation slab in a wilderness where a home used to stand and not feel something for everything and everyone who died in their beds who would have gotten up to jobs and friends that morning when the leaves were still wet with night and the paper boy was sucking oxygen looking at the weeks rounds on his front porch and the dogs were still dreaming and the shots in the dark were unreported and the spiders still had games to play and the cigarette burns still bled and fuck

As promised:  two pack.



///Five Deez - "So Good"  it's nice to be back.  nice to be feeling something.

///Amon Tobin - "Untangle"  slow verbs.

Ramping Up

I have been ramping up to this, and I have been a little bit absentee as well.  Side by each.  It has been tough getting back to here.  Circuitous. Among other words and expletives.  It has been a very difficult cycle of days.  I do not know how else to place it.  Everything is back where it belongs.   A lot of argumentation internal.  It catches up with you and before you know it you are dying while still breathing.

It;s been tough though.  But what hasn't?  Production has lapsed, but what is avoidable?  Art is up however. Graphics.  Graphics and graphic design.  It;s tough sometimes when people talk to you and say they/re artists, but you know in their hearts they are not.  It ruffles feathers and rumples collars.  It's difficult to tell them otherwise because, in the telling, you are admitting skill and I have a hard time, still, admitting that I know what I'm trying to do, for the most part, on easels.  Given easels.

If you look at your reflection, sometimes what you see is not what you know you could be, given everything that came before; that hesitation, those devils and those guns, are what keeps me from being a shameless self promoter, but are you hiding in the trees?

The point is that it is all an elaborate dream and there is no way you can spin manslaughter 2 into mistaken identities and a lack of coverage or maybe it's just black town.  I don't know.  Hard decisions.  I know how much you are supposed to take, but how much am I supposed to take.  Against the wall.  Am I supposed to want sex or is sex supposed to want me.  Is the BIC pipe a one hitter in the sense that you use it once or is it a one hitter in the sense that you can't light crack twice?

I don't know where to go from here, but I'm not quite sure if I should be so entertained with the idea of the opportunity to leave.   Cash money, mother nucca.  It just drives the nerves sometimes.  It's hard to admit failed suicide attempts.   What you can do though is tape up your wrists and throw some fists.

Not to get oxygen necessarily, but just to get inside your britches.  Feel your (can't spell it) huch spa.  Feel your id on the outside and taste a little blood, instead of digesting it.  There's too much blood and sunlight to go around.  I am trying to draw a line between pretending and good acting and I am having a difficult  time of it.

Sometimes things go down in a fashion that breaks your heart.  Sometimes your older sister whiffs on painting your nails.  Sometimes things go down in a way that throws shit out of whack.  Sometimes the throwing is enough to reframe ideas about things you've been mulling.  I don't know if this is better or worse than talking in third person.   It is difficult to be concerned.

What was I going for?  Chronic masturbation.  No,  Laughter.  Nod your head because I know that I;m right.  I'm not the capital G.  I'm not nothing either.  Hang out with me in the middle ground.  I swear I'll love you like I've never loved myself.  Andd I won't promise to make you happy.  And I won't promise anything more than 18 hours out, but I will.  I won't, but I will give you one year with the dragon in one day and rape is a device of the lesser and if you would be considering kissing me now I would not be opposed

to standing there


///track not found - lets get back up on that horse.  I'm sorry I left you.  Please be kind.  I'm coming out of left field in a full sprint out of the clear blue sky

Every Day I'm Shoveling

First of all, why is "every day" not one word by now? Or the various "every" constructions? If we as a people can come to accept "bling" as a word with real meaning, how can we not accept words with real meanings that don't lose those meaning with the space dropped out? A space between words is a fence between neighbors and fences are necessary. I'm not saying take out all the spaces and make every sentence a word, though that would be awesome. You could say what you wanted to say whenever you wanted to say it in like ten words or less every time. But instead of an organized neighborhood of streets and cross walks when you looked at a page you'd see a mosh pit. Every time you spoke to someone it would basically be you sharing your personal rave and trying to combine parties when they spoke back and that would just be... ...awesome. Also awesomely unintelligible. For a generation or two. Ultimately though it would probably make our children smarter, or at least allow them to think differently. It would change politics. It would make it pretty much impossible for foreigners to assimilate and then you really would need to learn other languages because that guy that only speaks Spanish or only speaks Cantonese would not be able to talk to you at all in broken English because the language would be so agglutinated and dense that it would be impossible for anything but an uncreased brain to grasp it with ease and build into it.

Second of all: why can't I sit in a park with a shovel after the sun goes down? That is just unfair. I walk halfway across town because I saw an awesome shovel out for trash and I forgot to go back and get it until the evening and besides my hands were full at the time. I walk halfway across town, granted I live in a pretty small town and get this nice, heavy handled, spade shovel that would be absolutely perfect for some yard work I'll have to do later and on the way home I cut through the local park and it's a pretty nice night out and the hills are all dotted with little Saturday evening fires of people in doors so I sit for a moment on a bench with my new sweet ass shovel, staring up and letting my mind wander over who those people might be and just enjoying the weather cold enough to drizzle the air with the smell of fireplaces. I've never had a fireplace of my own. I like to imagine what it's like. I saw a duraflame log once, one of those fake wood things for people who don't like to burn real wood I guess. Or maybe for people who like fire places, but don't want to do the things that having a fireplace requires you to do. That really is the story of modern America. I want things, but I don't want to do the things having those things will require me to do.

Anyway, I'm sitting there and a car comes rolling up real slow and I don't look back to see who it is. I know it's a car. I know that pebble crunch anywhere. I also know people don't like it when I make sudden moves, and besides I have nothing to hide. I'm just a dude with a shovel. I keep listening to this car rolling closer and then, in the background of my mind because I'm still thinking about the hillsides and the gorgeous night, but my head is also running through all of the sound clips of tires and pebbles and speed equations, I realize the tires are doing police cruiser and/or drive by speed and/or jump out and stuff in the backseat kidnapping speed. So I stand up and I figure one of those three things will happen and sure enough the flashlights come on and the questions start in and why the hell do you have to shine that shit directly in my eye sockets anyway. I have a shovel. I'm not running anywhere with a damned shovel. Or at least not far anyway. So now I know. It is officially not okay with society to just be a dude in a park with a shovel between the hours of 7 PM and 7 AM.

I haven't really been eating. Not my fault though. I have been eating. Because I'm pretty sure I give off this pheromone when I don't eat. I'm kind of obsessed with how I smell. I try to match it with what I've been doing and putting into my body. Not farts. Those are totally easy. I'm pretty sure you can tell how someone's body functions based solely on how their ears smell. Well maybe not solely. And you probably have to lick them like licking a nine volt battery to see if it works to get the full suite of diagnostic information available through smells. What am I talking about? I get lost in theory sometimes. So I have been eating some. Enough to keep things going, but little more. Mainly because my sink doesn't work and I don't want to have to slog all my dishes down six flights of steps to the sink that does work. Naturally the answer to that problem is: don't do anything that requires the use of dishes. So I've been skipping a bunch of meals. I don't really miss them. I do miss them in that it makes it a lot easier to stay awake. Staying awake has become a full time job again. Partly because of the lack of intake and hypermile-ing my body, but also because dreaming has been so incredible I can't help but want to be there constantly. It's becoming less of a second life and more of a single joined seamless in phase existence. You know people that complain about how they "already did that" in a dream and then like have to go to work again? That used to happen to me. Long ago. Now it never happens.

Of course I feel completely unrested because I am basically alive and in phased consciousness for twenty hours a day, but the people I've met and things I do... it's been ridiculous. Also pointless to tell you about it in those terms because you weren't there. Definitely a "dude I saw this movie and it was awesome, you should have been there, but let me continue to talk about the movie in terms of superlative adjectives because if I frame it in enough paper thin hammered gold you will totally be inspired by the blank space inside the frame containing the picture only I can see."

So the dish thing I learned from my dog, Jack, rest his angry, fun loving, visitor hating, best friend for life, little Shelty bones. We would go on weekend road trips and he didn't want to poop in the house so he would basically not eat or drink, though we always left him plenty of food and water, until we got back. Maybe it was equal parts "if I don't eat then I won't have to poo" and vigil for me. "That's giving an animal too much credit," shut your face. I can't give that old bastard enough credit. He was the man. Seriously. Except for his fear of thunder and lightning and his rage toward fireworks he and I were basically two of a kind and alternated top dog roles depending on the situation, but we were basically 1 and 1A. Learned that little trick of no input equals no output, body wise, from him. More bravery per pound than most people who are not also Marines. Probably more stupidity per pound, but we were, again 1 and 1A on that front too. If you are a cat person I don't hate you, but you have no idea what you're missing.

Which is why I should never be a parent. Me and my kids will be the baddest family on the block. Partly because I would be way too fair to them. With my dog, he would bring me a sock for tug of war and being like three times his size, maybe four if I just ate a couple burritos, the only fair thing to do was meet him at his level. I figured his teeth were probably a lot stronger than mine, what with his eating bones from time to time (never understood that, but I do have a propensity for walking around with spoons in my mouth), maybe four or five times so naturally I used my teeth for tug of war. If I lost a couple, no big deal, so we got it on. "I'm a take you down to China town!" That's how we threw down. Gotta be fair. So instead of setting a curfew I would probably tell my kids they can stay out or stay up as late as they want, but they have to fight me for it and if I win then they have to go to bed when I say. I wouldn't kick the crap out of them. I never actually hit Jack. I would scuff 'em a little. More like lioness to cubs kind of stuff. Only minus the breast feeding. Do they even do that? Or do they come out of the womb craving a hearty meal of lightly chewed, but still fresh, Giraffe. Instead of telling my kids not to go set fires, I'll probably stop them at the door and say something like "make sure you bring fireplace matches so you don't have to stand too close to the accelerant, because I'm not driving up to the woods to put you out." Sure, I wouldn't let them blow themselves up. I'm not a monster. But I will make sure they know how to set a charge properly and it would be the best father/son or father/daughter tandem ever. We will be feared. Probably. Anyway. What I'm saying is every day I'm shoveling so don't cause any problems and there won't be any problems. I'm just a dude with a shovel out for a walk.

Trying to get back to writing fiction, but it's been a long and heady road full of potholes. I'm not dawdling as much as I am reflecting. I wrote a fairly long draft of a science fiction short called Scanlon, but I haven't back over it in almost eight days now. I'm trying though. I apologize. I will try harder. Life's too short not to try, so don't spend all of your time "doing".


///Deadelus - "Taking Wing"