Fear

I haven't been scared in a long time.   I know that I am going deaf from blasting music.  I know that I am forgetting things intentionally from my childhood and some of being an adult.  The methods of deletion are bleeding across boundaries and I'm beginning to forget things I'm supposed to remember.  Long term memory redactions are becoming short term memory blanks.

I don't know where it ends.  I do know I forced the process on myself.  I don't know which part of it is engineered and which part is a symptom of myself .

I'm afraid.  I'm afraid that I may have caught the tiger by its tail or if it has sunk its teeth into my arm and I don't know it yet because I can't see it.

What Makes You Laugh 3

What has been cracking me up over the last few days is a thought problem.

Everyone works to advance themselves in one way or another.  What happens when you find yourself in a field you can excel at, but have an Achilles heel for?  I am not a negotiator, but the field that I find myself in and doing very well with does not reward merit.  It rewards negotiation.  You are only worth what people are willing to pay for you.  If you would like to price yourself out of their range, you are more than welcome to do so.

The field does not operate in the same ways the rest of the customer service field operates.  If you want a job you can have one and if they ask what you would like to be paid you are welcome to write down whatever number you choose and they will come back to you with the starting and only number and you either say "yes" or you say "no."  Very simple.  Very straightforward.  Very easy.

I have been laughing trying to gauge what I am worth to other people.  In this field, what you are worth is an algorithm whose nuances run deep, parallel, and cross cut with sudden violence and stark contrast with blood and bone on the line should a miscalculation be made.  There is no room for guesswork.  Or is it that there is infinite room for guesswork because time is money and time is beholden to whom.  For whom does the bell toll these days?  For how long can negotiations continue and if you did get what you wanted, when would you feel armored and steeled and learned enough to ask for more?  To demand more.  Hell, if I know.

Given what I know, where I've been, the way I carry the fire like it is my pants on fire when the client's is, the willingness to tax flesh and artery until the tread falls off to make the date agreed on, I still have no idea what those values register on someone else's Richter scale.  I still have no idea what dialing my number means to them when they want something done right, done thorough, and finished to the dotted "I."  In terms of valuation, I don't know what I'm worth, but I'm pretty, inexactly, sure I am a cost effective means to whatever ends are summoned.

I am well trained and well versed in many modes.  Control is lacking, but only because it is not easy to corral 700 horses in one direction at the same time; we manage.  Adaptable, robust, and the commercial ends.

It does crack me up.  Folks tell you so-and-so should be paying you "X" amount of dollars.   Person "C" should have paid you this-and-that.  What is stopping you from paying me what I'm actually worth?  I'm not going to say no to money.  I'm not going to ask for more.  What's stopping you from returning a smile to me the way I gave one to you that you will enjoy much longer than the life span of the paper that passes from my hands to vendors?  That is what has made me laugh lately.

You hear the same thing from so many different people and it makes us wonder if my asking for more money will actually change anything in the right direction.  You've seen my body of work.  You know what I can and cannot yet do.  You know what you can ask me to do.  I know what I can ask us to do.  We are all familiar with one another and are either friends or thoroughly acquainted to a degree that we can rely on one another to follow through on our word.  Why don't you trust me yet to do what I say I can do and have done?  Why do I have to ask for more?

You've seen me operate enough times.  I've worked with you enough times.  If you believe I am some sort of benchmark to keep, you are mistaken.  I am skewing the market low.  What really, what really, cracked me up (because I had no option beyond cackle laughter) was thinking about all of the over paid clowns you rowd and rail about.  Wondering why this clown is somehow ten times more efficient, ten times more reliable, 60 times more faithful, five times more communicative, 100 times more driven, and ten times more accessible and somehow..............   somehow..........  worth less to you than the other, menial, infantry clowns you employ.

Grade S infantry?  "No, I will settle for grade D and pay them like a scientist apprentice."

Maybe, I'm just not cooperative enough.  Eventually the question will boil over and we will have a discussion to resolve points that our sextants align.  In the face of heartache, the only option is irrational, hysterical, laughter.




///Stereolab - "The Free Design" live

When Is Enough

The difficulty of motivation is obvious to anyone who has bothered to write, or paint, or draw, or work, or invest any part of themselves in an activity or pursuit that is painful, uncomfortable, or plain not easy.

When is enough far enough?  What do I want?  What do I want to accomplish?  What do I need?  What can I disallow myself?  What must I disallow myself?  When I was younger, growing up through early adulthood, I heard so many "no"s.  Everyone and every system telling me what I can not do, where I could not go, who I could not speak to, when I must disappear.  Molded and shaped by the enclosure, dreams fade.  Fade until they're forgotten because it hurt too much to bring it back into consideration every day, every week, every year, to see that not only was I no closer to anything I set out to do to satisfy my soul and mind, but I was further from it than I was the year before.  The mind falling apart.  The costs of keeping it together steadily rising.  People telling you again and again what your ceiling is, not out of a fear of what I could do, but out of a strange compassion for seeing the war fought inside to maintain a level of sanity and "normal" against mental disorders eating away at the fringes of my consciousness.

Can I be content now?  What else do I want?  To be left alone.  There is still a lot of work to do to arrive there.  That may be the only ultimate goal.  To be left alone with the things living inside my head and a few animals to keep me company.  People are out of the question.  They can be trusted, but they are out of the question as quarters draw closer and closer.  There is not enough space now.  That is what I need.  I suppose a bit of both.  Can I be content now?  As long as I can avoid hurting myself too intensely, too viciously, I won't need health insurance.  I will likely only live to 60 or so.  Would it be that far a leap of madness to arrive to that end 15 years early?  No.  Would it be foolish to drag my feet to that end 15, 20, 30 years beyond?  Absolutely.  Don't be absurd.

I can hardly maintain a conscious coherent line of action for 12 hours because I have to lie in bed for 12 hours because I can't sleep for more than two hours at a time before I wake up and need an hour to get back to sleep.  To achieve an eight hour work day, I need four hours to prepare and four to undo the damages, eat, unpack the interactions, bathe, and prepare for sleep.  Every where I look I am losing time in human maintenance that is impossible to make up elsewhere inside the sweep of the clock.  Until I melt down, lose control, and fall apart in a heap of wails, tears, and broken tissue, begging for an end to the insanity of trying to fit myself into these chains of events for money.

How long do you keep smashing your own extremities with a peen hammer before you wake up and decide this is as far as I am willing to go and I am going to learn to live in this tiny cage and make it work because I know I or some around me will die if I try to reach any further.  Life is long.  Many people can race along it's rivers.  I am not one of those people.  I've got no use for your money.  I wish I had no use for your money, is more accurate.  I suppose that is where I am heading.  Retirement is another name for being left alone to leave life in peace and enough isolation to prevent anyone around you from being hurt and to be able to let myself live among the shadows in my head openly and happily with everything I need to survive until my body fails.  Retirement is a pipe dream.  I'll find another way.

When is enough?  When I have my own paid off house in the middle of a thickly wooded wilderness or some cottage at the end of a one lane drive to the vanishing point of a horizon plain?  When I've found a place in the world where I can not be found?  A place to hide and mend and dance with my broken brain and that's all I have to do to continue to see sun's rise?  I don't want to think about it now.  Enough is not yet.  I have to keep chugging along down the damned river, occasionally stopping to fish, at a blisteringly fast (to me) half knot and continue to hope and strive for the best and make due with repairs whenever its engine sputters and dies and hope I don't run out of supplies or the some day passerby who toss me a pipe, wrench, or a handful of wire harness to keep it going until I reach my tributary to one side or the other to glide down and stake claim to a bit of land no one will find for ages after I'm gone.

Who knows when enough is.  I do know I am not close yet and as much as I want now to be that place, it is not.  Wrestling with motivation won't get you killed.  Picking up the hammer eventually will.




///Jon Hopkins - "Candles"

Sequencer

It's been a very long time.  I have no apologies (I do).  The growing distance was daunting and becoming a thing alive all it's own.  Retreating crash zoom, but we're safe again.  Contained.  Able to love and much more importantly to pick up threads of circuits and lay them new against the board and chips that have melted, over heated beyond recovery, and reached the end of their service lives and that's good.  It's a beautiful thing to open the panel and watch sunlight dazzle every which way against the gold and green and know every thing, multicolored, bent, pinched, blackened, and water seized can go directly to the heap for recycling or trash.

What kept me?  What kept you!  We've been here forever.  If you didn't want me to slam reverse for ten feet and then floor it while you sped ahead to the first hairpin, you shouldn't have said the first one to cross the finish line wins.  You could've mentioned...  ah whatever, it's a joke, but I'm not funny.

Control is not my strong point, but I try to make it a stronger point and that's something.  I'm beginning to understand anew that I will never reach a point where we all agree on anything on a consistent basis.  I'm not okay with that.  Are you?

I saw him again today.  I am not happy about it.  I have to be more careful.  I think I may have slipped up before and mentioned him by name to a friend again after I told him it would never happen again.  He was not happy about it.  If I'm not careful we will have to pay for it.  I will be.  Let's kick things forward.  Snap the key off in the ignition.  What are you waiting for?  You creep me out when you stand still.  You look like you're not breathing.  You look like you're drowning and I can't swim, hon'.  I'm sorry.  I should know by now and I don't.  It's not going to be alright.  Can I snap a photo of my face on the water atop your head?  I'll get the angle right so my phone is not visible and it'll be me with Thursday's overcast over my shoulder.  I'll make it look good this time around.  Not like the first time you made my skin crawl away from my ribs like a window shade when I had to touch your face to be sure you were still there and not a fried up bit of my retina.

Let's enter the sequencer.  Let's wind it up.  If not now, when?  Forget the God damned mission for a minute.  Never forget, but do not let it overwhelm you.  These are very key pieces.  These are very important stages in construction and becoming and missteps will cost, but not more than ghost steps.  Engage the sequencer and do not fear yourself.  Fear is the mind killer and aboard a destroyer as capable as yours, fear cannot be afforded safe passage.






///El-P - "A Christmas Fucking Miracle"   they can never take away what you were born with

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.

Plight

The most terrifying thing about disease is that you know the best you can do is stay where you are and maybe pretend to be more than you are upstairs sometimes.  Some things remain intact.  Some things continue to degrade regardless of what you do.  It's not fair at all.

It's difficult.    It's difficult watching everyone else continue to accelerate and knowing you can be as good as you want to be at some things, but other things ... nope.  The best you can do is hold ground.

I want to just say "fuck that."  I can't.  I have to at least try.

Yes it is easy to fit in.  It's easy to stand out for the wrong reasons too.  There is no blame with respect to bad wiring to be laid.  There's some, but it flows both ways.  I acknowledge that.

It is undeniably heart breaking though sometimes trying to externalize what they're saying to me.  So we drunk to dull the blunt force of conversation.  It's an airbag and a stand in for pills that lets me socialize more than I like to, but not less than I need to so I'm not swinging from my neck outside my front window.

It's a trade off.  To tear off the mask is not appropriate at all and will land me..

... I don't know how to describe it.  Rape me once, shame on you.  Rape me twice, I was probably asking for it.

I will say there's nothing to fear because I learned a few several things.

There are many red zones.There is not one me.-000000000000000000000000000888888888qq0--------------211qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq



///Sage Francis - (The Buzzkill)    ...by analyzing the past, Sage can project into the future..,

T minus two

T minus two.  My knuckles are throbbing, but feeling my pulse and not feeling it inside my ears like standing on railroad ties and hearing the rails twang in the New York tubes is pretty nice.  Kind of reminds me of the travel of time.  Well, not kind of, it definitely does.  Tracking time has always been a weak point of mine.  Part of why I like to wear my keys where I can hear them jingle.  It reminds me that I'm not dreaming and what is happening is real.  You get used to tracking time properly, and then the uses you've made of common things become common place and you start to lose it.  Start to lose tracking.

Part of why one of the best gifts I ever received was a watch that set itself.  I never wear a watch in my dreams.  Part of how I know I'm dreaming.  Part of why I get so unsettled when I don't have it.  Endless wrist rubbing.  Still driving back from the depths of space, but making good time.  That's all I can really ask of myself.  Crisis averted. Not really.  Postponed.  Defaulted?  I don't know what the hell the word is.  All I know is that the boards went up red and one by one the status lights and checks are coming back green and blinking yellow and I'm not dead.

Coming back in touch with reality.  Tuning down the squelch that ran far enough out of control to induce panic. I had a dream that I could remember.  It was an odd reassurance.  The absence of breath snatching night terror.  Sleeping without sweating.  I'm learning again how to let go.  The reemergence of the bridge and the division of real and manufacture.  How to converse and relate.  Even though I am still refusing conversation beyond essentials.  I am forcing myself to do it.  Because without it, people eventually forget you.  I can and do spend days without actually talking.   I used to have fairly corrupted speech patterns.  Hearing sentences try to come out of my mouth was offensive to my own ears.  Still is sometimes.  Because I know I can be so much clearer on paper.  That and conversation was such a weapon so often used against me growing up.  I never much liked it.  I guess if I had my way everyone would have their vocal chords cut out of them at birth and we would all speak through written word.

But I don't have my way.  And it's not a bad thing.  I am a minority intelligence. Trapped in a minority format.  Cased in a pretty decent body.  I've got that going for me.  Can't complain on that front.  I could use an extra few inches of height though.  Went to get a new license before my birthday and current one expired and the woman at the motor vehicle administration desk asked me if I was still 5'10".  I thought: yes, you feckless drawn on eyebrowed 60 year old duffle of a snootch!  Gotta work on my height complex.  Because there was no way in hell any stranger deserves that sort of first response over an honest question.  What I said was:  yep, still short as hell.  She laughed.  I was glad I made the right choice on that one.

I stepped out into the alleyway beside my house and the sun was oppressive.  My eyes have been unprepared for bright days for as long as I can remember.  When I look directly at the sky it feels like it vibrates my skull.  When I was younger, the winter sky was the worst to suck into my sockets.  It literally hurt to look up against a flat noon overcast.  It hurt to look near it.  You get used to the pain though.  And then you spend a few days indoors and the pain takes your breath away.  

I don't hate the daytime.  I know it's necessary.  My skin feels better after a good sun drenching.  Mechanically, I operate better with higher fidelity in my eye reads to mind writes.  Fewer hallucinations, sometimes, but not a tight enough correlation to make me believe the two are connected, but enough in common to at least give it a shot on the regular.  And then, sometimes, I just hate being seen.  Sometimes I think, people simply knowing someone like me exists is a burdensome thought they'd probably not entertain if they didn't have to.  I suppose I wouldn't if I had my way.  But who ever really does.

Something smells like cloves around here and I have no idea what.

I started a serial, but have yet to publish it.  A bad beginning.  There is a massive disconnect between my ability to express the images I want to express and the images I am envisioning that I want to express.  I'm thinking I will do it anyway and learn as I go.  Not like I'm getting into a graduate program in my lifetime.  Aw don't say that?  Just being pragmatic so I don't waste energy pining for nonsense.  My chances are probably somewhere in the atmosphere of spaceman and race car driver by now.  So I'm just going to continue to try to develop on my own.  Can't really ask for more, and with everything flaming out so unpredictably, why would you or I really want more?  You can't get in trouble if you're asleep.  You can't fail out of school if you're not in.  You can't crash a motorcycle into a freight train if you don't own one.  However, you can die in space, without ever once going to space camp.  That is a fact.  Write that one down.  There will be a test.  At some point.

The good thing, probably the best thing, about damaging yourself without ruining yourself is that it makes it impossible to damage yourself again, without maximum effort and eating one hell of a lot more pain, until you've healed.  The down side is you now know where the line used to be and can take it a little farther.  Sometimes a lot farther.  The up side of knowing where the line lies is knowing how to skirt it and test it again without making the same mistakes (e.g. whatever doesn't kill you makes you more than you were).  That is the usual application for me.  It's not always expanding limits.  Sometimes it's just learning the rules that govern your unique physiology.  Your unfortunate mind body marriage.

Staring into the barrel of another alley morning.  It burns, but we deal.  You can't hide from the sun forever and the world is calling.  I am looking forward to 27.  I hope 27 is looking forward to me with eyes just as hard.  Just as star drowned.  Just as ready.  If you want to avoid serious injury, you have to pull the knife almost as hard, but no harder, than you push.


///Deadmau5 - "One Trick Pony"  

End of the World, so Plan For It

I have a unique problem.  It's a lot like when you run into the end of the internet regarding a particularly niche topic.  You expect it to go on forever. Porn doesn't just end.  What do you mean there are a fixed number of videos circulating that feature fisting and prolapsed orifices and cake sitting. But thats how it is.  There's a finite anoint of magic out there and eventually you end up with a paid subscription to stuff you saw years ago.
Thats pretty much impossible to plan for.  I have done more planning for the end of the world, in all it's glorious senarios, than I have for the eventuality of getting to the end of sub neighborhoods and niches of the web.  What do you mean the supply of singing dogs can't meet my continuous demand for watching dogs sing songs to cats playing pianos!  What do you mean there's only one video detailing how to break down and reassemble I bicycle cassette using household tools?!

It happens.  My problem is more of the pornographic type.  I have run out of ways to masturbate.  Flat out run out of ways to do it.  Maybe it's just that its overdone, but I think it's more along the line of there are only so many ways to pleasure yourself and I've pretty much exhausted them all.  I've gotten to the end of my intranet and there's nothing else there, but white space.  Of course I could begin inventing.  I am about as creative a blue collar mind as anyone is likely to encounter in their life time.  I could do it.  However, I am very much concerned that things might get dangerously elaborate.  Dangerously elaborate masturbation leads to candidacy for the list of one thousand exceptionally embarrassing ways to die.  That is something, I think, I don't want.  Not yet anyway, as I plan to die in a so grand a fashion that there is literally nothing left of me to bury or put in the ground.  Something fast and fiery and adventurous... something that is not auto-erotic asphyxiation<- which is totally played out anyway.

It's something I never planned for.  Mainly because, like the internet, I never really thought I would traverse all the available avenues and find myself right back where I started.  Figured those streets would and could go on forever.  So I guess I will invent, and plan for the eventually of running out of ways to invent.  Every world ends.  Plan for it.  Would be my advice.  Yet another life lesson learned.

Brush Your Teeth and Father's Day

I realized today that I don't run out of tooth paste as often as I should. I have been running out of soap on a regular basis. Which is a good thing. Spray paint doesn't wash clothing. Infield sand for some reason stains clothing. Maybe it's because it's some kind of clay. I don't really know. I discovered something today, but I can't really remember what it was so I'm pretty sure that doesn't count as an actual discovery. If the only thing remaining is the place holder that says something happened is there and not the actual thing.

I had this great idea for a series of father's day cards. Basically the idea behind the inspiration was regret. The cards would express the difficult to otherwise express regrets some fathers must feel about their children and then there would be a series of cards that express the pains some children must feel toward their fathers. But it would do it in a very cartoonish Aesop's fables sort of theme. Maybe I'll sketch some up and show you instead of telling you about something that is largely visual.

I splurged on spray paint today. I'm going to get big pieces of poster board later. It's not really poster board. It's cardboard that they wrap pallets of warehoused goods in to protect them from stuff. I have anger issues. Like, the next time I see you I'm gonna twist a beer can in half and paint your face with both hands anger issues. I swear I'm a nice person. I just don't like people that are not nice too.

The entire concept of father's day is silly at best. To be indebted to a human being is a fairly miserable experience. To be indebted to a human being and forced, or at least expected, to sing their praises, even once a year, every year, year after year is amazingly centric and unreal. I suppose there is a difference if it is something that you actually want to do. It reminds me of singing god save the queen when you're locked up in London tower. Or god save the Bushes when you're sitting in a cell in the heat of Texas awaiting trial. Or god bless the driver that smashed my legs to splinters, because without them I would never learn to appreciate life's other gifts. I don't need to be stabbed to appreciate what life is like having not been stabbed in the chest. I do appreciate my physical handicap free life and live it as hard as I can, rain or shine. I can appreciate what life without a father would be like. As far as I can envision it, it probably would have been pretty awesome. I'm pretty sure I don't know exactly what I'm talking about. Slant rhyme logic.

I do know that all I want in the shortest term is for father's day to pass without harassment, guilt tripping, or indictment. That would be swell for once. A dawn of a new era of leave me the fuck alone because I'm done with you fucking with my body and my mind. Hopefully some people can respect that. Pushing back out to a safe distance in full afterburn. It's odd. Well not odd. Normal. If anything, just normal. As normal as things get around here in this region of space. Accepting known threats in favor of unknown ones. I still think about Jee. I still worry from time to time, but less frequently than on the hour, that I will die alone in a vacuum. Not that I believe it to be any less undesirable. Corporeal claustrophobia. The panic. And then the reeducation toward the necessity of a thing. Goodbye cruel world. Hello cruel space. I gotta do better at myself.

I think I might be a stronger person. I'm not really sure. More concrete perhaps. More defined, but stronger possibly closer to not. Different certainly. A realignment of the arbitrary rule set the preserves my sanity and integrity as much as possible. I brush my teeth. I wash. I go to a job. I create. All good things. Things a person should be able to do to warrant a continuation of. An extension of. I'm not doing bad things I don't think. Hell, I fucking brush my teeth. That should count for something. Like some sort of minimum civilized score.

I hit 7 the other day. Haven't churned out 7 pieces in a while. Some were campy, but a handful hit the notes I wanted to hit. Got some software to play notes on my computer using my qwerty board. Might actually be able to make some music in Acid pro. Worked through all of the interactive help segments too. Now I just need to learn how music works. Got an ebook on electronic music years ago. One of those Routledge books. Might actually try and get a physical instrument once I work my way through it. I was very excited when I first got it, but then I also had papers due every week so I didn't have much spare time to read and learn it. Not anymore. Well I still have it. But the free time issue is less of an issue. I've taken a little more to reading in the spare minutes while I'm waiting for things to complete so I can move on to what the days hold next. It's probably a good use of time as I'm trying against my better judgement to try and get a second job. My head will probably collapse in on itself when I do, but I have to try if I'm ever going to successfully fight my way across the bullshit obstacles standing between me and becoming more.

Which I guess brings me back to father's day and moving on. Forgive and forget and all that nonsense. What my mind runs over and over and over when I'm at work. One of the things. Is that when each way forward only exists because of the history. Because of the things done and done to you in the past. It's difficult to move forward without being constantly reminded that the path, whatever path, available is only so because of your points of departure. I guess what I'm trying to say is it's hard to ignore the fucked up nature of a situation when the limited set of solutions only exist because fucked up shit happened in the first place. But I give it a go every day.

It's funny sometimes listening to playoff sports. Listening to them talk about how elimination games are must wins, and this game and that game are must wins. Every day of my life is a must win. Come play with me.




///Moby - "Flower" Work hymns. We all have them. I think an instrument is probably gonna be one of the better ways for me to deal with the now. The diversified fractal now. How I'm gonna get one I have no idea just yet. But till then I plan on dreaming as much as possible. And continuing to brush my teeth for gold stars.

I Found

So I had this idea about humor. About genuine humor. Not the niggling humor that munches at the ankle of obviously flawed ideas, but the throated humor that vomits little mountains of spontaneity and thought. I was wondering if I could compose some.

I'm not going to try it here. Partially because I know that I am not intrinsically funny. And partly because I haven't forgotten that I didn't want to try it here. Humor is like singing. It's not so much about talent as much as it is about the construction of a head. Some skulls just have crappy acoustics. Most do. But some don't. The ability to hear yourself outside of what encompasses the space of your higher order functions is key to being a great singer and I think the same holds true for comedy.

Remember when I told you I was going to go look for the hissing? I think I do. I found it last night. It wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. It wasn't scarier either. It just was. It was the heart of a thing, if you can imagine it, a thing large as three story building and as wide as it was tall if not wider. The sound of my teeth grinding woke me up before I could get close enough to really make it out.

It was a strange trip. I didn't close my eyes and there it was. I had to do a ton of foot work, but I avoided the subways because I tend to get lost down there. I stayed above ground and it got darker and darker until it was dusk and I walked for a long time until I reached a great big brick thing. It could have been a wall for all I knew. The city simply stopped and there was this brick wall that could have been a building, but I didn't walk around it because it joined up with the two buildings on either side of the street and it was too dark to see if it terminated at some point above me or if it simply continued on forever.

I went in the door and inside the lights were like setting suns and I went down for several seconds, but I couldn't have gone deeper than ten or twelve feet unless there was some kind of compression happening, which I doubt. I doubt it because - I suppose I actually don't have a reason to doubt it. It's simply been my expectation. It was the feeling. There were no sutures of skips so I assumed. At any rate the staircase ended rather quickly and the floor was so immense that I could see it's curvature, but the light was too low to see anything beyond the immensity of the space. I walked on, directly away from where the stairs landed and after several dozen minutes the darkness began to turn a dull red and then this weird bronze pink and I followed the shifting gradient, keeping the brightest hues front and center, along the curving floor and there was a massive pounding that kicked through the air and thumped inside my lungs so bad that it was starting to hurt and I walked on and on and on until the intensity of the dullness, the sheer missingness of presence was making my head hurt as bad as my chest and I fought to resolve it and it came into focus and then I realized I wasn't breathing and the sound of my teeth grinding woke me up at 5 in the morning. It was awful. I learned nothing.

I'm not afraid tonight though. I guess, a huge part of what makes us fear is the not knowing. I don't need to know what exactly it is, or why it is, all I need to know is where the boundary of safety is. Where the envelope ends. And now I know.

I'll show you tomorrow. Whenever that is.


///Talvin Singh - "Soni" ...and then...

The Fringeness of Earnesty and High Cycles

I'm sort of coming to realize, well first of all I think I've been talking too much again, but I'm sort of coming to realize that I am a fringe personality. I was pretty delusional back in 2004. I thought I was cooler than the other side of the pillow beneath the boss cat's hipster transformers cartoon printed footie pajamas. Then I started to see the full Lawrence of Arabia letterbox landscape of who I was. Then even seeing that I started to believe again. Then I thought maybe the strangeness was the strangeness of perhaps a Kramer and desirable for the sake of its own quirks and prats. Now I'm beginning to understand that what it is really is the quality of fringe. I was beginning to think about what I could do to tear that away and assume a lower charge. No clue. My charge is way too high. By the time I get near to people I'm ravenous for company and traveling at speeds that break bones and all of me wants to talk at once. Not that quiet is a bad thing. I'm a fantastically introverted extrovert. I couldn't live with me. I shouldn't expect other people to. Right?

Well anyway, I'm going to try and keep these shorter. There's no lightness to being. There's no likeness to seeing. I'm camping at the edges of some things I shouldn't be near. Not that they keep calling me, but it's more like a landmark that lets me navigate the rest of the solid world. Or not even that. I have a hard time keeping track of progression. The importance of cause and effect is. I suspect the problem might be that I am difficult to relate to, but with slight effort able to be comprehended and possessing sightlines worth following when I am close to my best, and I am violent, obscure, unpredictable, melancholy, intensely introspective, restless, and largely inchoate and impossible to relate to when I am not near my best. Problematic. But at least I'm starting to understand how or at least why it seems I'm regularly fallen into Kuiper radial movements. I'll stop calling them every weekend. They'll get out the telescopes and rovers and years of planning and clean rooms and staffs of scientists and damage controllers when they're ready to see me blow by along the edges of the perceivable solar system.

I've also realized that my head is most active when I'm turning my motor at work. So now I take notes on my phone. Good. A fine start. Because by the time I'm ready to leave work and I get to my door at home I can't remember half of the things I started in my head while I was there. I'm losing lines. Each object in is another out. So now I can chase the high cycles like dust motes. I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. I guess I thought they'd think I was texting people. Just texting myself. Tracking my information. Taching my spin. My head always seems to run the hottest when I can forget my body or perhaps simply push in the clutch linking it to. Corporeal fault lay line.

Some advances were made at Bits. Not many. I like the layout, but I need to learn how to manipulate the blogger gadgets so I can create my own with proper attribution. Still waiting for the end of the world, but I'm happy to be doing so in a city I love. Let's dance till the sun comes up. I'll bring the scissors. Sometimes they tell me things I don't know.

///Juno Reactor - "Las Vegas Future Past" She runs great. Good idle. Clean title. Half the miles were done a quarter at a time too. Been to Vegas a couple times in it. You ever see one of these wide open on the interstate? It's got a sound like you wouldn't believe.

The Fall and Collective Effort and No Cussing This Time and Craigslist (Again)

Do you ever get the feeling that you're falling and then it changes to a feeling of being pulled into the jet wash of a landing airliner feet first and then you realize that the ground isn't moving, but the sky is and you get sick anyway and you fall face first onto your front lawn and dry heave for ten minutes and then realize that you probably should have just stayed inside to begin with?

I get that feeling sometimes.

So tell me, would you tell me if I had a really bad idea? No? Great. So I was thinking about writing MF Doom a letter and including in that letter a proposal to become his intern. Would that be crazy? I think so. What if I wrote a letter to every artist and writer I admire with a similar proposal. I don't really want to make money as much as I want the opportunity for exposure and guidance.

I was also thinking about using craiglist to find friends. I think I mentioned that before. Maybe I'll meet a murderer. That would be interesting. Probably bad news, but interesting. I mean, I wouldn't be going out specifically to get murdered, but I'm not entirely sure I'd be completely opposed to it either. Maybe I'll try and use it to move my wares.

A friend of mine is kicking my ass to write a novel. I started one. I'm about 8000 words in. I'm not sure I'm going to finish it. No, scratch that. I am going to finish it. The problem is that I don't particularly care about the characters. It doesn't make it that much more difficult to write. It just doesn't make it that much more interesting.

Now that I'm back together I was expecting sunshine to come flooding back in, but it hasn't. I'm not really sure if anything else is really missing. I was thinking about emailing my old professors to show them my work and ask for pointers. I emailed them once before and they basically unanimously panned my plea for assistance. It was shocking. I don't think I've really recovered from that. What lesson could they possibly be trying to teach me by not responding at all? Well, there was one response. The response was essentially a non-response, but a statement of non-response. I can respect that. I think.

I've noticed a warmth in my skin. I can't tell if it's just the sensation of my blood flowing against the temperature difference of my cold muscles or if it's just feeling warm. I can see why they wanted to put me on medication. It's not like I don't need it. I also wonder if 30 will be any different. One thing that has stood out over the last few days is that I've been living in a situation where everyone tells me to do something other than what it is I know I am built to do and do well. I think I will still make the suicide diary and the music hit list. I'm thinking about moving north and the ways in which I can make that happen. I want to order sex toys. Actually, so I was considering posting to craigslist about my thoughts on a cross country migration. I don't want to move to Pittsburgh until I'm completely ready to die there.

I keep talking about craigslist, but I haven't done anything about it have I? Well I will. I did some drawing today. Do you like it? I kind of do. I cleaned up my language today too. I miss the hospital. They were so constructive there. And I earned the right to stay up past 9:30 to watch the video of soothing sounds and star fields by going to start your day group everyday for two weeks. I even put together a jigsaw puzzle. I got a sticker for that. Not even joking, it was a pretty awesome feeling. What day is it? Remember that song that was all about little things the narrator learned through his life? That song got played so much it became sickening.

I sent an accidental email. No response on that either. Maybe I'll shoot an email to my old therapist. He always knows when to shut the hell up. Pardon. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dragging my feet about writing because I know when I have nothing left to say I'll very likely not put up with the hassle of occupying my body. I ran through a handle in 4 days. I'm going to make a terrible father. Well, maybe not. I slept with the lights off after I stiff night of drinking. It was the first time in a while. I've been thinking about winning a writing fellowship for some time. There's a certain validation of efforts that comes from winning. There's a certain confirmation in other people telling you "yes, go forth and do this thing because you've earned it". What I've come to realize is that I'm in one. It's not ideal. It's not glamorous. It's full of distractions. The desk is terrible but, it's my desk, and it's glamor enough, and distractions are inevitable. It's my fellowship.

In my dream last night I got into an argument with someone about the word 'suiterate'. It's not a word, but the guy made a very good case. The odd thing was as we were arguing and for some reason smoking cigars while we walked the streets at midnight near the el trains, a cat, a Tabby, came tearing down the street in a motorized shopping cart that couldn't have been more than a foot tall. The little guy was really moving and the man I was talking to about the possible uses of a word like 'suiterate' had to jump out of the way as this thing came screaming past us and took a hard left. We both stood there for a while and then went on arguing as we walked down the middle of a street. It wasn't all that strange.



At any rate, I should go to sleep and try to eat in the morning. I don't know when I started to hate eating food, but I've lost a ton of weight. Used to be 189 and now I'm 170. It blows and I hate doing it, but I have to make myself eat so I can wake up and do things. I love dreaming. I hate being awake. I love you. That's why I keep on. Hoping for some hokey conclusion to whatever this thing has been.


///Way Out West - "The Fall" I don't know if I listed this track already, but it is close to my heart. "And I miss you most of all, my darling, when Autumn leaves start to fall." To my ex, I do miss you most of all though I realize it was as realistic an expectation for success as gunning for snow in mid August. The lyrics are actually from some other older song, but they play well with the, in my opinion, conservative engineering effort. No deafening use of reverbs. No auto-tones. No wind chimes. It gets a little mundane in the mid stretch, but in the end it rewards the listener with a beautiful vocal break. I look forward so much to the taste of winter air and this song in my headphones and melancholy that is so much sweeter, so much more palatable, than the bitterness of the real and present nothing.

Ladies and gentleman, if you please, I have solved religion.

First thing, (I understand if you don't particularly care, but I have to do this so that I don't forget because this also doubles as my change log) I still plan to replace the red bits still hanging out in the post headers and down next to the tags. They are out of place in the new scheme and quite frankly my skills have grown beyond those first efforts and they're kind of tacky. Not to flatter myself too hard, but who the hell else is going to?

Second thing is this: I have solved why religion is so fiercely defended. I know right? It was so obvious, but I couldn't understand before why a particularly nasty and irrational person I knew was so entrenched in their beliefs. Why were they so inclined to condemn behavior in others that they performed on a regular basis? Why did everything they say start with "if they were Godly people"? Why did different words come out of either side of their mouth every single day and somehow manage to avoid internal conflict?

And then it hit me!



Religion to this person, or at least the particular "Christian" doctrine they adopted was basically a hodge podge of the most comfortable elements in the Christian as it related to them and how they framed the world around them. Their conversion, or anyone's conversion, has nothing to do with miracles, but before I fly off to hell on a thunderbolt and a plume of fire and brimstone and "much gnashing of teeth" or however it goes, hear me out.

As much as the people who believe they're just fine treating people with respect and treating strangers with kindness and compassion and charitably is as much as some Christians say they are simply picking and choosing Jesus's nicer words and they are, apparently going to burn for it. Look a little bit closer at these nay sayers of congeniality and you can see them perpetrating the same behaviors, however with greater subtlety, and often not even that. That's when I realized every single person who has had some "religious" awakening wasn't suddenly seeing THE light. They were seeing A light.

What they would count as religion changing them is really them finally realizing what their ground state of being was. Basically: realizing who they already were. The reason why people defend religions to the death is because religion allows them to defend who they are. The guy who wants to go kill Muslims for Jesus says he is doing it for Jesus, but in his mind, maybe his subconscious mind, maybe not that deeply repressed, he is doing it because it is what he as a person wants to do. Jesus simply gives him an out. Even the people who "suffer" for their faith aren't really suffering for their faith. They are suffering because they've realized the kind of people they want to be and they are pursuing that being the same way a man who wants to smoke a cigarette smokes or a person who enjoys rock climbing goes and climbs rocks. For some of these people penance has intrinsic value in their lives because they want to be held accountable. They want to be rewarded with pain because the pain lends them meaning every Sunday.

Religion is like an old comfortable boot. You put it on and you wear it because it's comfortable to you. That's all. If you think as a husband you should be paid tribute by your wife and kids and they should wait on you hand and foot and defer to you at all times even though legislation in America has essentially made everyone equals, you'll adopt a framework that allows you to live that way. If someone brings you "God's" word and it says the man is awesome and women are second class and should do whatever you tell them to, you'll be on that wagon in no time flat. Do you have to confess Jesus as a savior? Small price to pay for total dominance, don't you think? So spout some nonsense and swear up and down by the ridiculous things you don't actually believe because what you're paying for is the peace of mind of knowing that you are justified in the things that matter to who you are as a person. It cuts the same way for other things too, but most glaringly within religion.

So, what else is new?

This:


The above is going to be the main thematic element in the hateitalready.blogspot.com site I'm planning. I thought to myself, "no one wants to read a blog that spends the entire time ragging on other things, especially things that some people really do like." It would be the same as being a forum troll except condensed to one black singularity of curmudgeonly voice. So, I have revamped the idea and I'm going to put a humorous spin on it to make it much more digestable. If there's one thing I learned from watching movies as a kid it was that a spoon full of sugar is fuggin tasty and will allow you to fly umbrellas when the wind is just right, and I intend to take that knowledge straight to the bank.

///Mathew Dear - "R + S"Tonight we'll ride and find gold in their eyes. It shines so bright. I must have it.

my day with the history channel

the world is going to end in one of ten awesome ways rated by awesomeness.

weapons are cool.

barbarians were psychos, but understandable.

natures is scary.

the west sucked back in the day.

war is science and science is war.

racism is a disease.

sex is great.

gangs are symptoms of progress.

jets rock.

tanks kick ass.

food is super tasty.

the universe is incredibly vast

and we're tiny.




so basically everything i learned from watching animaniacs back in the day. awesome.

///A Man Called Adam vs. Chris Coco - "knots" you know that feeling you get when you finally just run out of rage? well if youre not there yet i hope this song is playing when you get there.