The End of the World Came, The End of the World Went

Do these people know how many times they've completely screwed up other peoples plans by making incorrect predictions about the end of the world?  I get why they do it.  There are a few reasons.  I think the main reason is because who doesn't want to be right about something that absolutely huge?  For the rest of time, what little there is left of it, you will be known and revered as "the one" who truly could see the future.  You will have the satisfaction of knowing that what you believed all of your life was worth it.  And maybe, in a farther reaching sense, the sense of if you are able to predict it correctly from enough years away, maybe you will have changed someone's life for the better.

Every time you get it wrong you really get it wrong.  As unhelpful as cults are, for the few ones that really do help people turn their lives around for the better (for whatever insane reason they're able to convince them to change), what happens when you're wrong prediction produces mass suicides?  I think that was the funny and also frustrating thing about this whole Planet X thing.

For a while, I was absolutely thrilled.  Finally, it's over.  How great is it that I'll be able to die!  We're finally checking out, baby!  Free of all guilt about what'll happen to the people's lives you've touched directly or indirectly and free from all sadness about the people that will actually miss you and free from the anger about the people that never had time for you, but will put on a show because they're emotional tourists.  It's over, it's done!  No more bills, no more trying to fit in or getting pissed off with trying to fit in and having to give the world the finger and go your own way only to be dragged back around to trying to fit in because that life gets exhausting and sometimes you just want a damn hug to get through another week.

All of our hopes were running high and the day came and the day went and nothing.  Just a big fat nothing.  More bills.  More bad deals from companies and services that know you can't really go anywhere else and are going to continue to screw you royally because ... well, where else are you going to go?  More stupid rhetoric from Capitol Hill.  More disappointments in policy making.  More losses.  More frustrations.  More "why the hell am I even bothering with this garbage."  We were all supposed to be reduced to superheated plasma two days ago.  Instead we've got more... more... what do you even call the new "this"?  What is this? 

Well, good talk.  I'm going to go to sleep and wake up, I suppose.  Adventure through dreamland until the sun comes up and those businesses open again and we all get on the road and start jogging toward our graves, or maybe just sit down and run out our clocks doing nothing, or try to mate with each other or ourselves.  Maybe I'll just read something.  Or listen to someone read something.  Another day gone by and the world is still turning.  I want out.  I'll wait my turn.  What's the hurry, right?  Not like anything else is happening in this arm of our galaxy.  Might as well go skip some rocks.




///Daedelus - "Special Re:Quest"  bed time.  but I'm not tired!  you've got to get some sleep sweetie.  try for me, would you?  will you leave the christmas lights on?  sure, nite nite.

Dear (______)

Dear Santa,

I know we've been at odds over the last several years.  It's almost going on a dozen.  I don't hate you and you don't hate me.  I remember that year that I wished for only obtainable shiz.  I remember that other year that I only wished for very specific and obtainable shiiii... and I got what I wished for.  I'm back to setting my bars high.  I hope you're back to singing in four four/

Boiling it down:  I will not.  That's all.  There's no second part to it.  As close as we will get.





///what ive been waiting for all years

At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity

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

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

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

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

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





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

Steady As She Goes

Remember what that used to mean?  I do.  It used to mean taking the highs and lows in stride, but not to so much the taking in stride as cutting straight though the thick of the wave and coming out the back side and surfing her straight into dusk.  Straight into the fall and the winter of the upcoming crest.  It used to mean a lot more than it did before it became a platitude.   Not that it's a platitude now.  I guess what I'm saying is that steady as she goes is a bad way to describe the circuit of this ship.

Right now, I would place it somewhere between an oxygen fire in the vacuum of space and a flat spin dizzying enough to make the sublime a Picasso'd afterthought.  It's terrifying in the same way a car accident is serene in the seconds before contact, except those seconds are stretching out days instead of seconds, weeks instead of days.

Steady as she goes, though.  All flame and wreck and how many souls can she bring down with her as she spirals into a sun?

It's the wanting that is tearing.  Shearing bolts and bulkheads and turning bodies like soil and plow spades, succumb to forces and forced things.  Do not kill.  Do not see.  Do not hear.   The touch of force like a kiss from a stranger who knows your one sided name.  And no why.  No why ever offered.   It's thrilling and numbing and begging.

Waiting for another break and it arrives unannounced and unheralded and reasons for people to question never come up, but choke up like a batter for an infield single and everyone sees it coming except the pitcher.  It's been tough.  Songs for getaway car single shot thirty minute production reels.  Everyone needs commas.  Everyone needs comas.

You want it both ways.  I want it both ways.  I want the privilege of mistake.  I want the forgiveness and the forgiving to see me in the light of a human being flawed by default and on the same hand I want the respect and the conversation granted to the sound.  I want what's coming to me and mine and I want to fight it at the same time.  I want answers.  Sometimes I can't sleep at night because I keep asking myself "why me?"  I keep saying that over and over and it would be so convenient to point to some kind of god or chance or a version of determinism with some kind of optical illusion at it's end.  The best I can point up is some kind of medicated psuedo goodness.  Some kind of hard parsed commonality or functionality.  Is that enough?

What ever is?  Am I going to kill myself is a matter of convenience and circumstance.  When I'm sure I'll be sure,  Is all I can say I won't be able to write some kind of flowery death note.  I hold my loved ones, and they do exist, no more hostage than anything or anyone else anyone or anything else can hold a thing or person dear.  It burns me that things can be that simple.  That simple and that hard.  I guess that's what becomes what burns me so hard.

That a person can want all of the rights, all of the allowances, of personhood and still be counted as damaged and warrant of special circumstance and consideration.  It boils down, a little bit, to I am just like you staring I am nothing like you dead in the face.  Because I want with all of my heart to be just like you.  And I know I'll never be.  Do you know how special you are?

Do you know how special you are now?

How about now?

Okay, well, how about now?


///War - "Me and Baby Brother"  everytime I hear this song I think of fifth grade and all the growing up I had to do and how I took my siblings for granted and how we stole from eachother constantly, but lately I think about all of our adventures and misadventures and I think if I ever have kids there will be a two head minimum because every dog may have its day, but what is a day without some belloved arse you'll be forever linked with to share it with.

///Skrillex - "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"  ...for I am just like you...

Gestating Names

The low line is happening.

slowfluid
fingerslip
sunlance
powerdive
horsemenofthesun
highsequence
memoryanthem
keptaquaintance
throattwine
founderstext

Yes, I spent five hours doing this. Yes, it was hard. Yes, it would have been a lot easier if there weren't fifteen thousand dead blogs with catchy names still alive from 2002 that haven't been posted to in five years. Or, roughly, and my math isn't that great, but fifteen thousand days. Roughly. Probably more. Anyway, there were about three times more names that made it to the final cut. Two thirds were already taken. And five thirds were crappy for various reasons. Too cheap, too easy, too slow, too fast, too complex, too simple, too pandering, too monotone, too soft, too sexual, too written, too base, too serif-ed, too guilded, too quilled, etc, etc. These are the front runners.

The sad thing is, while I'm working on this I come across a ton of dead blogs. A ton of "this is my outlet"s. And they have clearly failed or moved on to other things that distract them or allow them some kind of other outlet or actually physically or maybe emotionally dead or just medicated. Enthralling and disheartening at the same time because I see it and I think "oh my god, I'm just like you, let's be friends" and then I understand they quit or walked away or grew out of it or whatever you want to call it for whatever reason.

The important thing is, the important thing being, the important thing seeing and I will tell you what you see, progress. I already had several design themes in mind and the name that wins out will probably be the one that fits the thema best. I'm not sure that's a word as much as it is a feeling. But yes. Usually it is fairly bad practice to name a color after you identify what color it is, but I am an impressionist and I see definites in swatches and brush strokes and it's much easier to name the thing after it exists instead of creating a name and top downing it.

So I'm thinking saturday will not be a terrible day to launch something new and old and new. It has been a long time coming. It will be fun to get my fingers dirty in adobe again. It's been a while. Too long. Like everything else. Well not even close to like everything else. the important thing is, and i can't stress that enough, the mind work is done. now it's getting down to the actionable items and I am gathering the disparate, the desperate, and the deserters to the factory floor because its not time to make weapons or war. It's time to make... period.


///Kinny and Horn - "Sacred Life" ...love the everything. Just write it all down cuz I don't really care. But I do. And that's why I foster love for the one's I don't dare. Be nice and sacrifice and play nice. Align. The world wasn't won in a day. The world wasn't one in a day. The world wasn't sung in a day. The world wasn't done in day. There's still time. So play.

Space Is the Place

I took some breaths today. It felt good. Space will always be the place for me. She's holding together alright. I'll keep riding her till she does break up across the sky. But in the meantime I'll do other things, between barrel rolls and sky writing. More power. I know I shouldn't, but I also know that the shouldn't is based on... whatever, I'm not going to get into it now. More power. I'm just gonna lean back and enjoy the gravities and the throttle response and watch the stars streak like chalk behind a rocket powered eraser. Watch the memories tail away like headlights in the rain belted to tires breaking loose and for seconds free of the mechanics of purpose and spinning away. Enjoy.




///Mouse on Mars - "Presence" come down, friend. Do I really need to tell you no? Yes. Then no.