The Best Thing

about remembering that you forgot to put the beans on the stove after midnight has come and gone is that you are probably going to be awake for another three hours anyway and it's not too late to sit up and wait for your warm midnight snack in a bowl.  

That Instant

you've been running all day and get home and are hungry enough that you microwave three individual french fries to nibble on while the rest cycle through the toaster oven.

Expired Milk

It's only been three days.
Yesterday the cereal tasted fine.
Tomorrow the coffee will be good.
Besides, the heat will destroy the bacteria.
The mold?  Bacteria.  Viruses come from living things.
Living things?  I'm pretty sure.
It's only been six days.
Someone has to smell it.
It's probably still good.
The coffee will be fine tomorrow
and besides, one more day is all
until more cereal is bought
along with another quart of milk.
If it doesn't pass the eye test
We'll toss it.  Sometimes the carton
can make it smell weird.
It's only been nine days.
Yesterday the tea tasted fine
after ten cigarettes
and no one was violently ill.
The shake test will tell us
all we need to know and besides
It's only been ten days.

Veggie Tacos

The thought of eating vegetable filled tacos is terrible at first.  Once you really start to think about what you like the most about tacos, it becomes more clear that what you like the most about tacos is not the meat.  What you like the most is the kaleidoscope of tastes and the sooner you can wean your train of thought off of the "meat must be incorporated into each of the three meals of the day" you can get over it pretty quickly.

I mean, you used to think a day's good eatin' had to have three meals in it for the longest time and how guilty and terrible did you feel about yourself before you finally understood that myth was busted like a car with no tires and four wheels?

Simple changes will save you from cardiac arrest down the road.  Bust a few more myths and all you'll have to do is quit smoking (eventually).




///Useless Information 

Nearing the End of the Third Week With a Fractured Jaw

With roughly 75% of the range of motion returning and constant pain beginning to subside for several hours at a time I feel pretty good about not going to a hospital on this one.  Had there been a clear break in the bone I definitely would have gone to get whatever metal was needed implanted and get wired shut.  Sometimes it baffles me how interconnected the bodies musculoskeletal system is and I am constantly reminded of how layered its concert is.

I didn't realize how many different ways and how often I shift my jaw and slide my teeth against each other when I am processing information or thinking through conversation or using my eyes and ears to take information in.  Left, right, backwards, forwards, clenching some sections of teeth and relaxing others at the same time.  Everything from pulling on a door knob, to swinging a hammer, to stretching, sitting down, standing up, turning my head, opening a mailbox, to driving a stick shift is tied to the muscle groups around the neck and jaw.  Suddenly hundreds if not thousands of long memorized motions and activities that you could perform with blindfolded confidence are thrown into doubt.  "Is this going to hurt?"  "How will this affect the healing cracks?"  "Will this pull apart soft scar tissues not yet stabilized and calcified into bone?"  In the third week I am starting to regain some confidence.

For most of the first and second week the pain never felt less than a five or six on a 10 point scale throughout the day from waking to sleep.  Depression became a huge factor.  You are not sad because of what happened or how it happened.  You become depressed because you cannot laugh without shooting pain.  You become depressed because you cannot fall asleep because of sudden spikes of pain that cut through your over the counter pain killers like the barrel of a bat slamming into a light bulb tucked inside a pillow case.  You become depressed because the muscles of your tongue and throat put enough pressure on the angle of your jaw, right on the side of the cracks, to make your eyes tear up when you swallow what you can.  Everything you casually associated with happiness in sleep, smiling, laughter, rest, sustenance, is hot wired and reprogrammed to fear and ache and apprehension and anger and it weighs on you hour after hour after hour until depression becomes crushing.

In week three many self imposed restrictions are beginning to lift.  I can get through the day and night without a single pain pill.  The constant background ache has dropped to an occasionally noticeable two or three.  When I press on the impact site gently, the bone doesn't flex and make crunching sounds.  In the second week I successfully set the condyle back into its natural position.  I couldn't help crying for several minutes afterward.  It was important and necessary as my bite was out of alignment from front to back.  Once I did that the grinding noise right at the ramus's tip finally stopped and when I bandaged my mouth closed with a thick elastic wrap my teeth sat almost as evenly as they did before.  I think that dislocation is probably what saved the angle from snapping clean through.

I can almost yawn again.  I still have to brace my chin when I sneeze.  At the end of this third week I can chew very soft pasta and cheese and drink thick soup relatively pain free, but I am taking it extremely carefully to be absolutely certain I don't retard the healing process or get too enthusiastic about my food choices.  It felt so good to finally be able to scrub my beard again without fireballs of pain shooting through my face.  Nothing changes the complexion of the day like starting it off with a good deep beard scrubbing, good god I missed that.

All of my anger and hatred toward the people that did this to me is gone.  What really makes me happy is not caring what happens to them.  Being able to let their aggression go and not have a second thought about retaliation or feeling like I'm owed something or that I owe them something.  The transaction is over.  What matters is what you decide to do next for yourself.  What matters is that lying in bed your jaw doesn't sag and fall to one side like a screen door with one hinge.  What matters is that you survived and you can physically laugh again without fear of splitting bone apart from the spirited ways in which you normally like to jump on life's comedy.

I still cannot laugh too much or the pain piles up and grows to wince worthy proportions and twists my face sour.  I still can't make some facial expressions.  I still can't sustain hours of conversation, but then again I was never particularly great at making conversation as much as listening to it, but it is still something to get used to realizing that I can only say so many words before I have to rest and close my mouth tightly.  I still can't clench my teeth in consternation.  I can feel some lingering instability and pain in the healing dislocated joint when I run up or down stairs or shake or nod my head too vigorously.  Hopefully these things and instabilities will pass as week four progresses.

I know there is potential for some level of permanent pain in the joint since it was not reset by a professional and was not wired shut to ensure speedy and complete recovery of the fracture site.  There were evenings when I slept and would wake with a start in the second week so abrupt I could feel the joint strain and hear the angle click and flex.  There was a day when I woke to a spider landing on my cheek and a slapped at my face and new before the pain even registered that I screwed up big time in doing so and set myself back all of whatever healing occurred through that day.  Common sense tells me this too, as my back injury from two and a half years ago still bothers me from time to time and sends numb sensations down my right buttock and thigh if the barometric pressure is too far off from my body.

Some of the nerves likely died as well as there is noticeably diminished feeling along the left side of my jaw bone.  I expected as much.  I expected the worst, but progress has been good and some levity has returned to day to day life.  I am not out of the woods yet.  Two to three more weeks to go before I'll try to bite into a piece of meat that hasn't been blended to the consistency of mashed potatoes.  At least three more weeks before I try to bite into an apple.  I think I may attempt a sandwich next Saturday... a grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly.  My tummy can't wait to have fun with food with my mouth.

The food has been spectacular.  At first, the only things I could eat were nutrient shakes and very thin liquids for the first two weeks.  Very finely blended and extremely water heavy meals put through the blender and then only a half cup or so every few hours because the pain was too intense to do much more than that.  Since then the horizons have begun to grow and meals become more intricate.  Right now it's an assortment of pastes and soups of varying composition, from fresh bell peppers ground into bacon pate with rice and spinach soups drizzled all around to sweet bean mashed potatoes with soft sharp chedder shredded over the top alongside peas carrot beef mash and oreos in a little cup on the side blended into a desert syrup.  Nothing makes lunch quite like peanut butter and jelly paste beside a cup of milk.  It has been a little bit of a challenge and through the first two weeks I lost 25 pounds, but as time is getting on, some of the weight has come back.

I still feel weak from not being able to work out or move much, but some strength has returned and will only increase as the healing progresses.  At the end of week 3, I feel alright about the future.  There's a decent chance I will be close to what I was before my jaw was fractured and dislocated.  I know I will never be the same, but I am alive and can continue and I am happy for that.  Happy with that.  It kind of mirrors my mental problems that I deal with and constantly manage without medicine.  I know I will never be better than I was, but I can try to make sure I don't completely unravel and if I can be close to as sound as I was the day before then I have done the best I can.




///Deptford Goth - "Objects Objects"  the bass filled silence between the searing walls of the chaotic

That Instant

you realize you can't store more food until you eat some of the food you've already stored.

Stand Up Act 6

Stand Up Act 5

I have been dreaming graphic. Memory graphic. It has been difficult to deal with still. A silly concern. Sometimes not silly. Trying to keep track of the comers and the goers cross bridge and who is lingering and who isn't in places they should and should not be. I feel like what would lend them all credibility is if they had names, but none have offered anything close to a name since I left Maryland. Since I left murderland. It's a strange thing. The namelessness. There is the thing in the white and tan ghili suit, man or woman, but definitely humanoid who shows up well in fluorescent lights and little else. The little man in the black trench coat. The woman in the blue dress. The tall and wide man who loves to wear khaki and from head to toe and never talks. The bone spur balls of things I can only really describe as pre sleep sheep skinned and tumbling. The seeing spots in the middle of the day. The thing who offered a name, whose name I cannot record because it would serve it's displeasure at my efforts to disseminate its existence on the crown of my head by day and by night and chew my nerves like dollar a pack gum and suck the insides of my skull like a starved lamprey.

Times have been strange at the cusp of awareness. Maybe not the cusp, but the interface of understanding and the known with the less known and the abstract removed thrice from the models and modes of deduction. The experience of the thing is not even close to ... I don't even know. They're not ghosts. Some are new. Many are old. Some of them change clothing and change sexes, but I can smell them beneath the dressings. I can smell their blood in the marrow of their bones as clearly as they can smell and find mine across state lines. With them it is always a matter of time. Sometimes I have to trick myself into being alone, put on the little blinders and the nose muzzle and slip the bit between my teeth so I don't swallow my tongue while I run so hard and so tuned, but I'm faking it.



and I'm just talking. Trying to talk some things out. Orient myself. I cannot tell if I'm air locked or just cold. It's 58 degrees in my apartment. I should fix that. Six hours later, the temperature is fixed, but my geography is not. There are a lot of things that made me laugh today and I'm trying to remember some of them. Trying to keep my insides in. Browsing my old day time notes. And by daytime I mean work time. And by work time I guess I mean night time.

As a side note though, do you ever get into those odd temperature situations? For instance the break room where I work is already kind of a hole in the wall with some chairs scattered around. Kind of like a refrigerator box behind K-Mart that someone saw and said to themselves "yeah, that would be a cool place to hang out for the next ten years of my life" and then adopted a stray one legged pigeon and fed it corn puffs until it was eaten by a stray cat. That kind of break room. Actually, I don't even believe it would be a stretch to say there are probably better cafeterias in most underfunded high schools than the place where I work. That's not the bad part about it though.

I'm the kind of person who just loves opportunities to eat. Not that I'm fat. Not that I particularly love delicious food, even though I do. Who would really say no to an open flame seared, seasoning rubbed slab of rare beef. Like, bleeding delicious, with buttery asparagus and sesame seeds and I am getting way ahead of myself as I can afford to eat that, maybe, twice a year. Two times out of a year. That's thirty minutes out of 60 minutes multiplied by 24 hours multiplied by three hundred and sixty five days. That's gotta be a tiny fraction. Anyway, I love eating. With a passion. My mouth just needs to have something in it at all times to be truly happy. I would have made a pretty awesome shark in another life. Perhaps a penguin. Also pornstar? That should probably be on the list. But I love food, so any opportunity to sit down and eat is a great thing. Not good, great.

How often do you run into opportunities where someone sits you down and says "if you pass this background check we won't pay you to sit and relax and eat for thirty minutes, but we will pay you to sit and relax and eat for another set of thirty minutes, but there's catch." And you slide to the edge of your seat and get nervous. Am I going to have to kill someone? Am I going to have to whore myself? Am I going to have to drown a family of kittens? And then they come back "the catch is the thirty minutes will be broken up into two fifteen minute blocks and settled at opposite ends of the thirty minutes we will not pay you for." Awesome. So any chance to sit down and eat is a good thing, because there are people with jobs that allow them to sit down and eat zero percent of the time. Literally if they are caught sitting and eating, like humans are wont to do, they will be fired for not being perfectly mechanical.

So the bad thing about this prison break room cafeteria hole in the wall with chairs that were shat out of plastic molding machine once every second and probably as ergonomic a bed a refrigerator box's floor is that it is eighty degrees in there. I bike to work. By the time I get in I am sweating pretty much from chin to ass cheek. Hiking up the stairs to the lockers and the break room after pummeling my body just to get to work is a bother. Not intolerable. Not even difficult. Sometimes tiresome. It is kind of ridiculous that if you were handicapped you would basically be ass out of luck if you wanted to watch tv or have a table in front of you while you took your breaks, but having eighty degree heat bust you in the face is like getting on a bus and having the fattest, sweatiest, cheese smellingest person get on the next stop and not sit next to you. Sitting next to you would be okay. Contact with people is unavoidable on a bus and sharing a bench is just part of the contact contract. However, when people stand next to you it's a whole different set of acknowledged boundaries, and when heavier set, fatties, stand next to you and your ear is two inches away from the bulging gut and you can hear the carnival of their digestion, it gets weird. It gets real weird and uncomfortable is all I'm saying.

Like, weird enough to make your ear hot and tingly for all the wrong reasons. Like having a complete stranger at a party come in really close to you and drop a hand in your lap. Your crotch sends the signals up to your head and your head is like "alright, this is good. We are on the right track here, drunken stranger" and then they bring their lips up close to your ear and you're playing it really cool. You're too cool for blushing. Highschool kids blush not adults (you pedophile), but even with all of your super pro control and James Bond coolness, your ear never does get the memo and all the blood that should be in your cheeks rushes to your prickling ear and then the person whispers something like "I'm so horny I could take a long walk on a beach, and knit for hours, because I really really need to use the bathroom after eating that many tacos and I want you to watch," and you kind of have to step back and rub your eyes because they either actually said that or you are way higher than you thought you were. And that's why I hate riding buses. Shit gets real weird, real fast. That's what it's like walking into this break room most days. It is break room in which it is impossible to relax. Someone basically said "hey, do you know all of the things that can make relaxation impossible? Well let's take all of those things, combine them into a single room with easy to clean floors (because someone is eventually going to throw up their lunch) and then let's put a television in there to lure them in and then a camera to capture the hilarity that ensues."

It's an odd temperatured situation. And I have no idea why. But when you run into a situation where the setting is alright, but the temperature is way off it becomes impossible to do what it is you went there to do. Try having sex at fifty degrees. Ain't going to happen. Sure, maybe you'll get it up, maybe you'll get all warm down there. But unless you've got a blanket, eventually your skin screaming at you "good lord, it is cold as fuck, what the hell are we doing without clothes on" will pretty much trump that. Try playing a sport at a grossly incorrect temperature. Baseball at one hundred degrees? Sure it can be done, but good luck keeping eighteen unpaid individuals in a pick up game when their couches, cold beers, and coldcuts are waiting for them back at their homes. I think that's what I ran into today. Trying to get my thoughts together when it was simply too cold to think.

Situations where you can't hear yourself over your body trying to survive. On a completely unrelated note, is the hallmark of the late eighties generation sarcasm? Maybe not completely unrelated. I was just thinking that maybe with all of the nebulous threats to being and the rise of open sharing and the sense of "what have you got that you have to hide" and the unrelenting standard of interrogation and search and destroy culture has given rise to a survival mechanism. Sarcasm. Sure, some people are beautifully sardonic. Some people try to be. I kind of feel like a lot of the younger people and peers that I am familiar with find a sarcastic, sardonic, dead pan stance to be the most comfortable base state of being. A variation of the poker face. It's like a poker face with burlesque sequined and feathered sunglasses on. A poker face with a little personal flare so not blank, but not telling in a world that has become one not available for questioning, but able and unceasingly questioning of identity and intent.

Like the question "what did you do to your hair." There are many responses that are acceptable. Many responses that are reasonable. I cut it: is one response. I wanted to try something new: is another. But, how many times can you be asked that question in different ways before you wig out and say something like "oh my god, did something happen to my hair? Is it still there? I could have swore I cut it yesterday. Oh god, why? Why could something happening to my hair have ever happened to me!" as you fall to the ground weeping and clutching at your scalp. It's just the nature of the world we live in. Everyone keeps asking you how old and who you are and where you're from and who you know that would also cop to knowing you.

Sure some people still give the standardized responses, but I think a lot of people in our generation who want to be slightly more than a string of numbers and a birth certificate and a photo i.d. and tax form fall into sarcasm as one of the last free forms of interpersonal, globally accepted, expression. Clothing as expression peaks and falls and peaks constantly. There isn't really an age of clothing as expression. Drugs as expression, I think peaked in the seventies. Is that fair? I know new drugs came along later on, or were in development and then came to fruition later on, but that's definitely a negative. People don't look at users of pharmaceuticals and think "wow, man you are seriously expressing your take on life and it's battles." What they think is "wow, man who raped you when you were five," or "wow, can you really not cope with your white bread existence," or "unlike bacon, everything is not better with glow sticks." Pot heads are probably the exception. And amphetamines that do not have to be smoked or injected. Those people aren't users by today's definition. They're modifiers. Suped up. For one reason or another they need to enhance certain abilities or muffle other sensitivities and so aren't really expressive. To say there are expressive is to say that someone who closes their eyes in a horror flick is expressing their inner self. Nope, they, like most normal people not desensitized to acts of brutal violence through television, news media, film, and video games, happen to not enjoy watching someone get their head twisted off. They are modifiers, not necessarily expressive. And that's what's up.

It's not the culture of harder drugs that are a way of life as much as they are a means to continue living. The old adage of "source of and solution to". Maybe if everyone wasn't so sarcastic things would be more straightforward. Hobbled senses of humor being symptomatic of hobbled senses of being maybe? As expression and avenues of expression become more vacant there is the old mainstay of sex. Being utterly personal and completely void of pretense sex still expresses who you are and in that opposite way of expression spread across the surface of being, sex is much more a sense of being spread across pure expression.

I mean think about it, the lady behind the desk at the dmv is in principle a sexual object. She is a vagina with a lot of extra things draped around it that define her self, but in a pure sense she is expressible by her vaginality at her core and everything else is in place to facilitate that expression. Same goes for the guy. It's like the core motive of man is perpetuating itself and everything else is in place to ensure its perpetuation. So if you're sitting on a train in rush hour and all you see are hovering breasts, vaginas, cocks, and balls all around you, you're not tripping. You're seeing through the bullshit. Or you are absolutely tripping your brains out and should probably not be inside a metal sardine can powered by coils of wire and magnetic fields twenty feet below the surface of the earth inside a dark tube. Or you are in highschool and are writing on post-it notes "you smell nice" to the person next to you and you realize you will probably never land that date to the prom because you are expressing yourself backwards, as far as the rest of the population is concerned, but hell, if you don't tell them, who will?

Universal Bodies

I had this thought today while running off to make lunch before 6 P.M. rolled around. It was kind of an irrational thought, so rationale being what it is and people being who they are, I had to go back over it and rationalize it or at least understand why my first compunction was this "wait, what a minute" moment.

Beginning, I thought that I had to figure out why making lunch before six was such a big deal. My own busted food schedule aside, I figure it would probably help the rest of my body organize itself if I did adhere more closely to a strict three ring circus of various food stuffs and the thought of organizing that part of myself lead me to lean toward thinking that further organization would probably bleed from that, through my mouth and then back out of my mouth again into positive work gains. Too technical. Losing interest. Start over.

What struck me was (without all the junk that lead up to it) that the spacing of meals is pretty much universally accepted. You eat when you wake up because you haven't eaten while you were sleeping. You eat around the middle of your day because you've been doing stuff and were probably too busy to cut something up, jam a stick from it's gullet to it's anus and throw it over a spit, or gather something, or you haven't eaten since you got up because it's taken you all day to find and kill enough somethings to skewer, fill a basket (and your tummy), or snag in a net of some sort. Then you eat again before you go to sleep because after you ate earlier you had to do other things that made you tired and things that make you tired also tend to make you hungry and you don't want to be kept awake by the sound of your stomach digesting itself.

So by and large everybody eats a few times a day because when you're not an animal with a stomach that can digest anything (fresh, rotten, bones, pure cellulose, tree bark, whatever) it takes energy to pick and choose and being able to pick and choose and possessing delicate (by comparison) faculties also means you have to spend the time and energy to do so and protect your fragile microcosm. It's easy to understand.

In rushing to make lunch I realized that it doesn't matter what you call it or why. Your body knows what's up. You can cram food into your face at 7 P.M. if you want, but your body knows that what it's eating should actually be dinner and will be processed as such. Your mind can convince you that you should eat again before you go to bed, but depending on what you ate you probably shouldn't and your body knows that. You can make breakfast at dinner time, but it's still, in principle, dinner, no matter what you want to call it. Granted it is all bound by your sleep cycle, so if you sleep for ten hours whatever you eat in the three equidistant spaces of the next fourteen hours will be breakfast lunch and dinner. And that's important. So I guess it wasn't as horribly irrational as I originally thought. If I missed the lunch window I would be feeding myself an extremely early dinner and would run the risk of having to eat again before bed and wake up not hungry enough to eat breakfast and basically start on the slippery slope of a digestive apocalypse. Gastrocalypse, I call it.

Then I started thinking about how simple it is to understand something as universal as why and when people eat and it really got my goat that people can understand the need to put food in their mouths, but they can't understand something else as equally simple and universal as basic human rights. Or maybe human rights are not as simple as eating. Oh wait they are. If you deprive someone of food, you should be able to understand what that deprivation does to you and by extension what it likely does to another object of similar mechanical and chemical make up and necessities even if you don't count that object as a person. I mean if kicking a dog with the wrong part of your foot hurts your foot a little, you should be able to assume that a dog, made out of similar material as you, probably felt it too. Not that I would ever kick a dog. I love dogs. Slightly more than people sometimes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's baffling the body of things that are universally understood and the body of things that are still, however many generations and iterations of human beings later, up for debate and challenged and I don't think that my own work will help to make those things that should be universally understood about the collective human organism and illustrated and painted and constructed about it will help to further clarify or cement those universals. My body of work to date is teeny tiny, though larger than it's ever been, and if I want to help (and I do, just a little) I have to not die yet. I'm in the first few thousand hours of work toward mastery well enough to make clear every attempt at expression and the induction of clarity and there's still work to be done if people are going to eat three meals a day with any kind of universality.

Slightly selfishly, if I were to die, I feel like I would be ashamed of my body of work. I feel today like I've only begun to fill a thimble and I need several buckets if I'm ever going to put out the fire inside me, let alone across the borders and city limits of my body's ends.

///Susumu Hirasawa - "Condition Boy" ...delusions of an alternate and terribly grand universe are