Summer days are beautiful. Walk around in the grass that probably should have been cut yesterday and feel how fluffy and wet it is before the sun dries it out. Take time away from watering the garden to blow a bubble of mist around you and spin yourself around to see the rainbow halo around your waist. The birds are off on their errands. By now you do not hear their 5:30 A.M. alarm, but you will miss it a lot when it is gone and cold water chills instead of refreshes.
Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin. Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you. Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more. A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.
I am just like you, though we are different. Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning. Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.
Though we are different. The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes. Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.
It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what? I don't know. I don't know what is next. I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired. That sweet sweet 12k paycheck. It is a joke. At 30? Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?
After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.
I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future. That's for fun. My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy. It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in. I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize. I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person. When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.
The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been. I had to think very hard. Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.
After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years. I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head." After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do. It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do. Auto-mechanic.
The realization dawned on me. All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles. The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms. The smiles on folks faces. The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions. The solitude. All there. After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades. I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.
Thirty years old and getting no younger. A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point. I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world. You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise. Worry about what comes next in the stars. I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation. With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck." So what? One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been. Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links. Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.
It tastes different doesn't it. Oh it does! When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month." I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation. I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction. Will I ever make living money? Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water? Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating? I have to find out.
Summer days are so beautiful. Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful. Chew a dandelion stem. As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors. The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river. Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace. It is pretending to sleep. T-shirts almost dry. The garden dirt probably is too. One more go 'round. It is going to be a hot one today.
///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label fsol. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fsol. Show all posts
2/1/11
Year End Retrospective 2009-2011
Somewhere in the middle of all the bullshit and heart break and fucked up bullshit heart break that filled the skies of 2010 like a flock of severely underfed ravens wheeling over a field hospital whose tents all blew away in a freak hurricane after the worst days of shelling the war saw since its start left a record number of open flesh wounds and completely overwhelmed the nursing staffs ability to even begin to sanitize them all, let alone beat the rats back... where was I going with that? Sort of lost track along the way in there. It's been a while since I've written any fiction and sometimes all I do is close my eyes and it comes bubbling up like gold oil in a blue toilet bowl.
2010 had its downs and its ups. I learned a lot of things about myself and about other people. I learned that most people are probably not my friends, but they are polite and a lot of times because they have to be. I come back to that a lot don't I? It feels like a lot. It's one of those things that I have to keep reminding myself because I'm not wired to accept it. In my head it's a circuit breaker that keeps opening and I have to keep going down to the basement to close it and it's a big hassle. Or is it the reverse? The reverse conditions being assigned to ... you get the point.
Back to 2010. 2009 was the break. The complete unraveling of the assumed and constructed reality. 2010 was the rabbit hole. More like the ocean. 2009 was the break from land. The acceptance that what I was leaving I will never return to because it is not only out of my control, but under the influence of things set in motion and built and conceived years in advance of my ever setting foot on the place I had the foolishness to plant a flag, however intensely the pole was thrust into the Earth and however proudly the wind took to my banner. The ground fell through as though my stupid ambition, well stupid is actually the wrong word there... my misinformed ambition were a fist and the dirt was the crust of a 99 cent store brand pot pie in a tinfoil bowl.
It's not to say that 2009 was fundamentally flawed well before it arrived. It is to say that through my and others efforts the collapse of 2009 was delayed for as long as it was because we didn't know just how thin and cheap and empty the ground beneath my feet was back in 2006. Or maybe I knew and I just did not want to believe. I think that's what it was. It was coming apart back then and I wanted to will it together and make it mine and not be the kid with a future and family so far out of line from everyone else he knew, but that kind of thinking is a recipe for catastrophe.
It wasn't all terrible. The collapse was, but there were things that happened apart from it and I tried to separate myself and compartmentalize the personal wildfire from the person I thought people enjoyed hanging out with. There was some success in that. I discovered the most intense smile is the smile mustered in the face of pains that refuse to be denied. Things burned off left and right in 2009 and then the descent to the ocean floor of 2010 was just as eye opening and faith demolishing. Not in faith in religion. That was long gone. There were still lingering faiths in parents that were systematically slaughtered, there was faith in decency that was blown away, then there was faith in systematic accountability that failed, followed by faith in language and reason, give and take, compassion, the senses, right on down to ... well, I don't know exactly where that fire ended or if it's still eating away inside of me.
Sorry I got distracted again. Just talking about it I sometimes think I can feel that fire touching the insides of my skin. It's comforting. That's all I have faith in now. The consuming flame of discovery that burns in the heat of destruction.
2010 was touching the void, but more than that it was my throat constricting and me screaming out, in a voice I wish I had 15 years ago, a simple no. 2010 was learning that I didn't have to take it. Learning that what I thought I needed and what I knew I needed were so far from what I was living and what I was living was so close to complete emotional rape mind fucking physical slavery was hard to deal with. Tracing the roots back to the abuse was even harder. Tracing the branches that grew from those roots was the hardest part. Right around there was when I finally found me. I guess I'm still the same, but I'm conscious in ways I didn't know I could be and it's made some things easier and some things harder, but it has also allowed me to move on. It was more than finally waking up to the actual dimensions of the cage. It was waking up to the universe outside of it, it's history, my history, how I got there, who put me there, what happened to me and because of me while I was inside of it, and who I was. It was like seeing for the first time with absolute clarity the person I was supposed to be, right there in the room with me, understanding that I could never be that person because of what came before, and finally being able to begin to let that go.
2010 was rage and heat. 2011 is going back to the soul that burned down to find the valuables left, if any, and started over again with free eyes. I still have a lot of letting go to do. There is still so much rage that still smolders, but I have the ability now to understand where it's come from and to direct it, at least partially, to where it must go. 2010 was also the discovery of who the people I could understand to be friends really are. One of the major reasons why I'm not dead in a basement in Queens is because of them.
The world is a fucked up place.
2011 I'm still on fire inside my head. I'm still learning to manage paranoid schizophrenia. I'm still trying to be human. The witticism of taking life one day at a time comes to mind. That's complete bullshit. Life is nothing without goals. I have some deaths to look forward to, but closer in I have the rest of Pittsburgh to look forward to and talking to you and with everything else burned to the ground I think that is finally enough to make sunrise so much less a spear through my heart.
///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves" I can hear myself. They were drowning me... your tracklist is up next. Three finger promise.
2010 had its downs and its ups. I learned a lot of things about myself and about other people. I learned that most people are probably not my friends, but they are polite and a lot of times because they have to be. I come back to that a lot don't I? It feels like a lot. It's one of those things that I have to keep reminding myself because I'm not wired to accept it. In my head it's a circuit breaker that keeps opening and I have to keep going down to the basement to close it and it's a big hassle. Or is it the reverse? The reverse conditions being assigned to ... you get the point.
Back to 2010. 2009 was the break. The complete unraveling of the assumed and constructed reality. 2010 was the rabbit hole. More like the ocean. 2009 was the break from land. The acceptance that what I was leaving I will never return to because it is not only out of my control, but under the influence of things set in motion and built and conceived years in advance of my ever setting foot on the place I had the foolishness to plant a flag, however intensely the pole was thrust into the Earth and however proudly the wind took to my banner. The ground fell through as though my stupid ambition, well stupid is actually the wrong word there... my misinformed ambition were a fist and the dirt was the crust of a 99 cent store brand pot pie in a tinfoil bowl.
It's not to say that 2009 was fundamentally flawed well before it arrived. It is to say that through my and others efforts the collapse of 2009 was delayed for as long as it was because we didn't know just how thin and cheap and empty the ground beneath my feet was back in 2006. Or maybe I knew and I just did not want to believe. I think that's what it was. It was coming apart back then and I wanted to will it together and make it mine and not be the kid with a future and family so far out of line from everyone else he knew, but that kind of thinking is a recipe for catastrophe.
It wasn't all terrible. The collapse was, but there were things that happened apart from it and I tried to separate myself and compartmentalize the personal wildfire from the person I thought people enjoyed hanging out with. There was some success in that. I discovered the most intense smile is the smile mustered in the face of pains that refuse to be denied. Things burned off left and right in 2009 and then the descent to the ocean floor of 2010 was just as eye opening and faith demolishing. Not in faith in religion. That was long gone. There were still lingering faiths in parents that were systematically slaughtered, there was faith in decency that was blown away, then there was faith in systematic accountability that failed, followed by faith in language and reason, give and take, compassion, the senses, right on down to ... well, I don't know exactly where that fire ended or if it's still eating away inside of me.
Sorry I got distracted again. Just talking about it I sometimes think I can feel that fire touching the insides of my skin. It's comforting. That's all I have faith in now. The consuming flame of discovery that burns in the heat of destruction.
2010 was touching the void, but more than that it was my throat constricting and me screaming out, in a voice I wish I had 15 years ago, a simple no. 2010 was learning that I didn't have to take it. Learning that what I thought I needed and what I knew I needed were so far from what I was living and what I was living was so close to complete emotional rape mind fucking physical slavery was hard to deal with. Tracing the roots back to the abuse was even harder. Tracing the branches that grew from those roots was the hardest part. Right around there was when I finally found me. I guess I'm still the same, but I'm conscious in ways I didn't know I could be and it's made some things easier and some things harder, but it has also allowed me to move on. It was more than finally waking up to the actual dimensions of the cage. It was waking up to the universe outside of it, it's history, my history, how I got there, who put me there, what happened to me and because of me while I was inside of it, and who I was. It was like seeing for the first time with absolute clarity the person I was supposed to be, right there in the room with me, understanding that I could never be that person because of what came before, and finally being able to begin to let that go.
2010 was rage and heat. 2011 is going back to the soul that burned down to find the valuables left, if any, and started over again with free eyes. I still have a lot of letting go to do. There is still so much rage that still smolders, but I have the ability now to understand where it's come from and to direct it, at least partially, to where it must go. 2010 was also the discovery of who the people I could understand to be friends really are. One of the major reasons why I'm not dead in a basement in Queens is because of them.
The world is a fucked up place.
2011 I'm still on fire inside my head. I'm still learning to manage paranoid schizophrenia. I'm still trying to be human. The witticism of taking life one day at a time comes to mind. That's complete bullshit. Life is nothing without goals. I have some deaths to look forward to, but closer in I have the rest of Pittsburgh to look forward to and talking to you and with everything else burned to the ground I think that is finally enough to make sunrise so much less a spear through my heart.
///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves" I can hear myself. They were drowning me... your tracklist is up next. Three finger promise.
4/17/07
"god called, he wants his sandals back" 04/17/07
Subject : "god called, he wants his sandals back"
Posted Date: : Apr 17, 2007 5:45 PM
yes... god is in fact on the line and would like his sandals back. im just passing along the message. he mentioned something about needing to walk on water and tap dance on eggshells... basically save the world from the forces evil while juggling three chainsaws, two penguins, and spinning a plate on a two hundred foot long broomstick with his nose while lobsters hung from his balls by their claws. all of this while winning a fire ant eating competition and shitting out an entire combination brick and extruded, galvanized, steel factory.
he also mentioned that your over the top attitude is entirely uncalled for and that your ability to walk on water, tap dance on eggshells, impregnate people with the mere thought of sex, and fart out entire arms of a galaxy, does not entitle you to belittle everyone. he suggests you take your head off your shoulders and place it on someone elses for a few minutes to see that, though you could make the universe spin around your little finger while wearing his sandals, you really shouldnt because it makes everyone else around you sick to their stomachs.
he kindly pointed out that you were only supposed to borrow the sandals for ten minutes to go to the bodega for another case of OE and to give the guy outside the store front your change. he even said he looked the other way when you whizzed behind the store hard enough to cut your name twenty feet straight down into the ground and then cut the front off the car you recognized as belonging to that guy who told you to shut the fuck up when you talked out of your ass behind his back.
he was really nice about the whole thing. very respectful. he said you were supposed to be back three days ago... and he also says if you dont return them he will remove the concept of collared shirts from mankind forever... and smite the polo player from every swatch of fabric known to man. just between you and me i think he's a little ticked... and besides, everyone really did like you more before you became a complete douchebag. you should really call him back and let him know what's up. later.
///the future sound of london - "the galaxial pharmaceutical" not a great song, not a top ten playlister, not even a really good song. just some down tempo easiness...to ease the business of isness, cuz as we all are quite aware "OMG my life is so hard, you have no idea" is the anthem of too many people's lives. chill the fuck out.
Posted Date: : Apr 17, 2007 5:45 PM
yes... god is in fact on the line and would like his sandals back. im just passing along the message. he mentioned something about needing to walk on water and tap dance on eggshells... basically save the world from the forces evil while juggling three chainsaws, two penguins, and spinning a plate on a two hundred foot long broomstick with his nose while lobsters hung from his balls by their claws. all of this while winning a fire ant eating competition and shitting out an entire combination brick and extruded, galvanized, steel factory.
he also mentioned that your over the top attitude is entirely uncalled for and that your ability to walk on water, tap dance on eggshells, impregnate people with the mere thought of sex, and fart out entire arms of a galaxy, does not entitle you to belittle everyone. he suggests you take your head off your shoulders and place it on someone elses for a few minutes to see that, though you could make the universe spin around your little finger while wearing his sandals, you really shouldnt because it makes everyone else around you sick to their stomachs.
he kindly pointed out that you were only supposed to borrow the sandals for ten minutes to go to the bodega for another case of OE and to give the guy outside the store front your change. he even said he looked the other way when you whizzed behind the store hard enough to cut your name twenty feet straight down into the ground and then cut the front off the car you recognized as belonging to that guy who told you to shut the fuck up when you talked out of your ass behind his back.
he was really nice about the whole thing. very respectful. he said you were supposed to be back three days ago... and he also says if you dont return them he will remove the concept of collared shirts from mankind forever... and smite the polo player from every swatch of fabric known to man. just between you and me i think he's a little ticked... and besides, everyone really did like you more before you became a complete douchebag. you should really call him back and let him know what's up. later.
///the future sound of london - "the galaxial pharmaceutical" not a great song, not a top ten playlister, not even a really good song. just some down tempo easiness...to ease the business of isness, cuz as we all are quite aware "OMG my life is so hard, you have no idea" is the anthem of too many people's lives. chill the fuck out.
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