Birthday Party

There's no answer for permanently fractured hearts.  Caught between the teeth of time and facts and wanting more than anything to be able to wish her a happy birthday without drumming up history.  More than wishing her a happy birthday, I want to be absolutely certain I don't hurt her.  To do that, I cannot offer a basic, basic, hallelujah.  Learning we would not be the same was one of the most terrifying, absolute, and violent days of my life.  I was already crying inside, taken every avenue to try to keep pace with her happiness and success.

Darker and darker and darker and darker.  The craziest part was our sense of adventure and curiosity for the world and cinema and oddball jokes and clowning and learning and reading and people watching were in line.

thinking backward, the love never dies.  Part of me shouts to the starlight "HAPPYBIRTHDAY".  I hope it matters.

I have nothing to offer her that will accelerate.   The answer to the question of future is blank.  I love you.  Time is an illusion.  Just gift me time I think.  Time is real.  Poor man, rich man, whatchu been in at.  What do you care about?

I put my body on the line and took risks.

What do you care about!!!

I can't have children, okay?  I can, but I'm far too warped to raise them.   Okay!?  I'm debt slagged as fuck, I can't raise kids, I don't know what a good chair is, I don't know how to do proper, I can cook and don't know what good food should cost, I don't have marketable skills, I hate customer service, and I have a useless degree and on top of that I still don't have the paper that confirms what I have actually learned.  Okay?  God is a lie, I'm antisocial, fucked in the head, and I would love to be.  I'm a social butterfly and an addict and a hermit.  I can't be trusted with a gun, the only family I recognize are my immediate siblings, I fucking hate people and the best world is a world where every city is glassed.  I'm an almost always nude and I love the outdoors and when we're at home, why are you wearing clothes?  It's weird!  Why can't I touch you?  Yes, it's your meat, I'm terrible with respecting boundaries once you're in everything should be open for all.  I'm not self conscious but I am conscientious.  That's the tip of it.  None of that answers what I asked.

What do I care about?  Fitting myself into life as invisibly as possible.  Caring about us goes about as far as: did you kill yourself today (y/n), was it a good day (y/n), can you engage with the world tomorrow (y/n), have you slept and eaten (y/n), did you hurt anyone (y/n)?  From those basics we can get more complex, but that's essentially it.  A very (I hate the word) easy checklist.

I laugh because who is supposed to live with that?

There's no answer for fractured hearts.

I wish there was.  Try to keep the shards in a box away from where they may be knocked over or caught up in the soles of feet and heels of hands and fingers or get into food.

The easy signs of trouble were violent in their simplicity.

We'll see.

I've told myself the ache will fade  Whispers along bedtime stories and therapy.  Imagine the... it would have continued for years afterward.  Pulling apart, love cannot solve base problems no matter how big or small and thorough a heart is.

What I hope most of all is that the first attraction wasn't a try to see how the other side of the tracks live. I hope most of all that she didn't think of me as ...

She gave a damn, and I will burn my circuits and song my circus.  It hurts.  I don't mind the reminder, knowing what it feels like to fall in love.  Knowing that falling in love is the sudden stop that will crush you.

Believe an end is just a beginning.

Believe love is real.

Believe that someone else saw something in you that you couldn't see yourself and the tides of fortune overwhelmed what could have been.

I Love You.




///Lemon Jelly - (Nice Weather For Ducks)

What Makes You Laugh 4

I can't help chuckling, putting the coffee pot on and thinking about where the day is going to go and where this presidency is and that faint fog of dread that crawls along the ground these days.  To be clear, we all know how this story ends, right?  Regardless of if he actually helps a single person that actually needed it or makes lasting, real, improvements to any segment of the country that actually needed improvement, it goes like this:

In the waning days of his presidency, he will declare that he was the greatest president to ever overcome what he had to overcome for you, the hardworking, tax paying, glorious American citizen.  In the face of adversity, mountains of prejudice and discrimination to him and his family, unprecedented and unjustified scrutiny and opposition propaganda, and a congress of Democrats that refused to get out of the way of progress and reform and change, he worked tirelessly to make this country the greatest it has ever been since the days of the revolution and he will further declare that "haters gonna hate" and that history will tell the true testament of his tremendousness long after the fake facts have faded.  He will declare the war on terror to be a He will then proceed to throw absolutely everyone he can't use in his businesses under the bus for anything and everything that blew up in his face or turned out to be completely empty campaign gibberish lies and then walk off to one of his golf courses or towers, hopefully never to be heard from again with a half built, useless to begin with, wall as his lasting legacy.

I can't help chuckling because you know that's how it's going to go, right?  Dear god, please just don't let him end up on the motivational speaking tour... his ego, probably won't let him fade into obscurity though. Another thing that makes me laugh is this visual in my head of Donald as a kid with his arm jammed in the bottom of a vending machine absolutely thrilled he found a way to get what he wants out of it without having to risk tipping the machine over onto himself by rocking it, but not realizing just yet that he is stuck...

That Instant

you've been there before and cannot help visiting again.

The Year End Look

2014 had many moments I would like to take back, but not too many.  I didn't break my nose again, which is awesome!  Thinking back through it I cannot remember a single concussion, which is also awesome and very good.  Awesome and very good are different things.  Awesome can be tanking on purpose to see if you can get a flat line goose egg.  Awesome is also seeing if you can bust the high score.  Very good is taking care of business and dotting every single "I" and looping to the correct depth of the drop liner each "P".  Very good is washing your hair every time you must do it, but awesome is having a great shampoo without a schedule.

Twenty fourteen saw a battle between myself and a close friend and another close friend and another close friend that required more time to heal than any physical injury.  Fully healed?  Yes.  Full confidence?  No.  The third piece of the puzzle is entirely lost.  As is the fourth piece.  I never believed it was possible to force or be forced beyond the edge of limping the object into a shop and getting blow torches out and suitable scrap, but sometimes, no matter how the repairs go, you can never look at the finished product the same way no matter the lighting.

The year presented no new physical projects in terms of repurposing homes and was difficult in that respect too.  The hardest part about being on call is that you are waiting for something to go wrong.  In that zone it becomes difficult to see everything going right.  By the second quarter of the year I could see better that when I am doing my job well I will not receive calls.  I always strive to do the best work because while I am doing whatever job it is the goal is to never hear from them again.  In the time it takes me to get home I can, and sometimes do, forget that is the primary objective.  I do not work to make friends.  If I make friends after or during a viewing it is business.  Business does not cross over to farming.  Sometimes farming crosses over to business.  I confused the two in 2014.  Because I work a small job for you does not mean we have to be friends for life.

I thought I could make significant repairs to my lower lumbars, but I do believe the back injury is in the nerves.  It's not a structural injury.  It's software, not hardware.  I learned through 2014 that some tissue explosions/implosions cannot be fixed by tending or work or loosening or tightening.  Bring all of the wrenches you choose, unless one of the tools in your kit is a new gold plated circuit board, you are screwed no matter what you plug in, replace, or renew.  It took a year, still feels like yesterday, to figure that out.  I became very aware of my age last year and the limitations that age brings.  The new year will bring a secondary mode.  Caution.  Beside the hatswitch for go is a new button installed to activate precision.   Everything cannot be solved by a hammer.  I knew that before 2014, but the application was aimed outward.  The application will be aimed inward in 2015.

Everyone who shares a drink or breaks bread with you is not your friend.  They may have motives aside from smiling.  Believe it or not, I have better things to do today than laugh and clap my hands.  So do they.  That does not mean that they need to be cut out of your life entirely.  That remained silly through the previous year and that point will remain sharp, if not sharper, through this year.

I performed a great deal of reading through 2014 without any specific schedule.  That should continue.  No books were finished.  There was a boost in output that will take more discipline in 2015.  It is a steep ask, but I am prepared for it.  I do not like that my discipline grew slipshod enough to not finish or even map a new story though they ping ponged around my skull.  It's pathetic.  It's awful.  You screwed up and I am saying it now: we dropped the ball and it hit you in the teeth.  All we had to do was open our hands and we were too busy adjusting our emotions to see.  We do not appreciate that.  At all.  And I want to make sure you know.  "Why am I picking up my teeth?"  Because you were punched in the mouth.  You didn't trip.  You didn't fall out of bed.  You didn't scrap.  You were punched dead in the mouth and didn't have the wherewithal through an entire year to defend yourself.  Do better.  I do not care if it is garbage.  I do not care if it is too rich.  Do you really believe years will keep falling out of the sky?  Ignorance is not a defense.  Do better.  Stop reading, stop audiobooking, stop trawling, start layout.  Start mapping.  Stop talking about "I started this universe in highschool and"... what since then?  I'm sick of hearing about it.  Yes, physically ill.  Begin to finish it and stop spit polishing a trophy no one else can understand.  "But there's no translation..." so translate it!!!  Do you hear me???  Look at me.  Look at me!   Translate it!  Damn it, you are thick skulled.  I want notes out of 2015.  Stop dancing and screw like you dream.

 I began a few tattoos in 2014.  Progress is going very well.  The sleeve will not be completed at the close of 2015 however there is very specific direction and direction is extremely important as they cannot be erased, easily or ever aside from through growth and the normal cycling of skin cells like tectonic plates.  The reminders still remain on my face and are used daily.  They are pretty much worth every second of the process.  We are building a lens on our left hand to remind us of our ability and scope and potential and violence.  That we can and should hold back at time as a window can be opened or closed or screened.  Not zero and not one.  Infinite, yes!  Singular yes!  The real pleasure is in the curve, not the approach either way.

Are we addicted to tea now?  Yep.  Significantly cut down on the drugs through 2014.  Management & things.  One of my cats died.  Actual cats.  Not "cats" cats.  I took it rough.  Too rough.  Harder to deal with than I anticipated, but it reminded me that my pets are closer to me than my cousins or extended family.  I think that's when the extent of my cut off really hit.  My family, direct family, includes my brother and two sisters.  It ends there.  My father is dead to me so that I do not fuck up and go back to Maryland to kill him myself.  I cannot do that.  If I do that everyone will know, no matter how I mask it or plan it or do not plan it or just get in the mood and take the trip and kill him and my mother, because she'll either be in the house or somewhere within ear or eyeshot, no offense but it's best to keep things tidy, because I said it here and it's public record.  I am closing that door, but it's dead bolted from both sides.  Very good.  Not awesome, but very good.  Call it a standing threat if you want to; I call it a restraining order.  If you come into my space I will kill you.  In return, we will do everything we can to stay away.  Deal.  The cat's death was very sad.  I mourned for quite some time.  More than I mourned for any of my extended families deaths through the year.  The sensation was arresting and unexpected and taught me the depths and exhaustion true hate goes.  His death also taught me the danger of dehydration and the ties I have still with local law enforcement and the patience they have with me and the value of a friend who can tap into your nerves in ways we thought we only tapped their structure.  The year heightened my self awareness and heightened my awareness of my emotional footprint.

I cried a lot in the last year.  Much more than usual.  I began to understand the actual details of outcomes through 2025.  There is a lot of potential there and more danger than I would like.  Many of my peers are pairing up and gearing themselves toward producing families and I became acutely aware of timelines.  I'm not sure how to govern the sensation.  I suppose I will have to start graphing... I can't.  It will be the struggle of 2015.  What do you give up, what can I give up, what can we give up, to make a family.  I cannot.  Not for me.  Not for you.  I will get up for a child, not for you.  I will not fight for a child, not for you.  Ever.  I will not crack a beer on an off day for a child, not for you.  It's a strange equation and I'm not sure how to change it.  I'm not sure what is supposed to come on the other side of the equal sign.

One of the other things I realized through twenty fourteen is that I am fiscally trapped.  Free as a mongoose in every way besides the wallet and the wallet is where futures are made when you look at families.  I am damaged goods in that way and can be as free as I want to proclaim, but jailed for quite some time fiscally.  Going for jogs, playing catch, buying food with EBT, unable to hold a credit card, unable to get loans (even though I refuse to, but cooperation will require it) or car notes, impressing other's parents with charisma, buying them shoes, going to dinners and lunches, going on a paint craze, shutting myself in a room for a few days because I cannot listen to anything because it hurts, all of these do not help a child's upbringing at all, but they are instrumental.  I have no idea when or if they will change.  I became acutely aware of the maintenance I require and it made me cry.  Take what it takes for me to relate to other people my age without falling apart like crushed salmon in a frying pan with burnt butter.  Add a marriage.  Add a child.  Desire came in the last year.  Twenty fifteen will include learning how to better understand what exactly that desire is and not consciously or subconsciously destroying it wherever it arises, be it from outside in general or specific environments or from within or side effect to proximity to others.  I will try to be more reliable and predictable and acceptable to your children or child rearing or child bearing circumstances.  Failure to do so will cause increased isolation and we all know where that heads.

2014 taught me that no matter how I feel I have to get up.  2014 taught me who to trust.  2014 taught me to let go a little bit and who to hold on to without hanging on.  It taught me change is inevitable and you cannot wish everyone a happy birthday because at least half them muthas have no idea who you are now and you have no business wishing them well because you have about as much idea of them as they do you, so stay out or at least don't go balls in to their affairs, unless they ask, which gives us a little gray area because it's fun to play even though not everyone would like to play with you.  Understand better when no means no in fifteen. Just because you would like to laugh does not mean everyone else you encounter does too.

Let's draw this to a close.  The last thing I socked away for 2014 was that you still definitely get what you pay for.  That and given enough time anyone can be a mechanic if you study well and stock a good garage.  You get what you pay for and through repairs to my truck I got exactly what I paid for: a running truck.  I love the sound of a "V" layout 8 cylinder more than an inline 6 cylinder engine.  It's really throaty.  It has some gargle and growl and purr to it more than an inline 6.  Sixes sound closer to a four cylinder screech now that I've become accustomed to an 8.  I'm not sure where I was going with getting what you pay for.  I wish a little bit that I was heterosexual.  I envy it a lot and often and at many times intensely.  Even more than perfect sanity.  At least then I'd be married and crazy instead of just crazy.  It makes me cry.  It makes me furious too.  It makes me violent.  I want access.  I don't want to just understand, I want access!  I fucking want access!  What do you do?  Do you fake it?   Do you sleep walk it?  I'm laughing now because I am crying.   I hate my circuitry.  Let's not beat ourselves too hard in 2015 and let's keep that streak of no nose breaks and no concussions going.  I said I will never cut my face again.  That promise will be kept.

XOXO




///Daft Punk - "Giorgio By Moroder"   the year end playlist is up next.  shoot em dahn.

A Brief Return to B6

After the diagnosis there was a lot of disbelief before understanding that I am wired differently and there is nothing that can be done about it besides modification.  Modifying my physiology and the chains that come with modifying.  Keeping schedules and junk and folding money into paying for medications and things and paying for visits to psychiatrists.  You can't spell psychiatrist without tryst.

I'm golden.  Understanding how I'm different was very difficult.  I still don't fully comprehend it.  I'm not okay with being different.  Expectations change a lot.  Do you want an exception or not?   Yes, we do, but we do not because we are efforting being a part of common society.  Aye yo, check it out, here's the baseline: getting exceptions makes us softer and enables if what we want is to be fully assimilated.  When we wreck it's hard to deal with because whatever it was we did made perfect sense to us.  To you, it's grounds for divorce.

And yep, my phone is officially broken.  The worst part about the diagnosis, the initial one, was my ignorance.  Let's keep this tight and short, but not to the point of complications.

I hated my psychiatrist.  I still do.  I know we are long passed the point of forgetting, but I have not forgotten him.   He has forgotten me though after I lost insurance.  Everyone has to get paid.  I refuse to check out.  I was bold before then, I am more bold now.  Capital lock.

Have you got my back?  I've got yours.  I tried to smash my skull apart on the side of the police car when I first got reigned in.  When I realized I had to reign myself in the morning after and they explained what I tried to do when they were putting me inside the squad car.  And it's alright now.  I'm not angry or mad.  They're different things.  Mad is angry without reasoning.  Mad dog.  Shoot him down.  Angry dog... alright, he has reason still.  I am neither mad nor angry.

After the diagnosis I had no idea where I could possibly go.  It was a true diagnosis and I have to lie out of the ass to avoid internment again.  After the diagnosis and hearing what it would cost to make me better, literally hundreds of dollars per month (and hearing too that the trial period ends, hence the name "trial period" until they get the milligrams right) and knowing what I was bound to make...  it's like being stuck with a home you can't actually pay for and you cannot move either.  You cannot pull up sticks and pick a new lot.  It was terrifying.  I had no idea where I could possibly go, so I decided to move off grid.  No meds.  No pills.  Just force.  True force.

Sometimes thing come apart a lot.  Sometimes control does not talk back to you no matter how many signals you send out, out of reflex.  If I could afford it, I would go.  Easily and quietly, I would go.  Let's go though, and keep it brief.

Back to basics.  I know I need help.  It's part of what I am working for.  Why I go to work everyday.  Start your day group was nice.  It was excellent.  I do not want to go back there.  I am damn near 30 years old and I do not belong there.  I know who I am.  I have to work harder and as time increases I know I have to work harder yet and I am okay with that.  I'm not and will never be a made man.  I am willing to work and that's something!  Diagnosis is not, I will prove it to you, ever a death sentence.




///Minamina Goodsong - "First Movement"

Prelude

Yesh, we are gaming up toward a pouring out of emotion and bad sets.  Better than bad sets, though, we're gaming out toward a pouring out of hearts and fauxpaux.   Toward an analysis.  It's been a long time coming.  Put offs and put offs and further put off.  Decision time.  Decision time not ready.  One hard month survived can make another, no?  Yes.  If we do not go, what can be said.  If not now, when? Go!

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.

The Silliest Part About Dealing With Parents

You cut ties.  Awesome.  You had to cut ties because they gave you no other recourse.  Not so awesome.  The greatest thing though, the silliest, giggliest, thing about it is that you didn't have to burn their house down to make your own.  One step at a time, sugar sugar.  You're getting old, but you're doing it.  You're doing it.

I still remember winning the spelling bee when no fourth grader at P.S. 19 had beaten a fifth grader and all I got was the apple Ms. Smith gave me after.  I watched my little sister lose her spelling bee bid and they took her to toys r us to buy a doll, batman with the belt buckle that extended out and wrapped around foes and you pushed the button on his back and it would reel them in for a beatdown or snatch him up.  I saw knife bob and wanted it so hard, but she got her batman based on the first movie, was that Tim Burton?, and loved it and every time I saw her playing with hers it made me wonder if I did good enough.

Ain't no thing now.  It is.  I still think about that apple and wonder what they were trying to teach me in not taking me to Toys R Us.  I threw out the medal.  The pewter stunk up my nose and I got sick of looking at it.

P.S. 19, my favorite school.  Kickball and wallball, the two best games ever invented.


///Tom Vek - "If I Had Changed My Mind"    would I be here?  I think that's missing from work, official recess times.

4 Years Is a Lifetime, Music, and Summer What?

Sometimes I wake up and it's hard to believe it's been four years since I made it clear of the 24 years that came before when it comes to my parents.  When people ask about them, I'm still tempted to say they died. They are dead to me, but just because they're dead in my mind doesn't make them dead in real life, even though it would be great if they were.  It's hard to believe I ever did love them.  I suppose I once did.  My mother anyway.  Is it better to be feared or loved?  They decided it was better to be feared.  It is easy to receive gratitude for putting out a fire.  I suppose it is easy to cling to those firemen and women rescuing you from that fire and believing you owe them a life debt.  A water debt.  A blood debt.

It is easy, until you find out, when the blinders come off, that they set that fire that took your body down to it's foundations.  Then it's not so easy.  When that sun dawns and the city you've been inhabiting in the dark comes into sharp relief and you realize you've been living downtown for 24 years and didn't know it and from the tallest skyscraper there you can't even see the city limits, you cry.  And I did.  For years.  I wanted to jump back then.  Break my heart on the pavement into beads of pomegranate flesh crushed.  I didn't.

I walked.  I ran.  And then I walked some more when my lungs and legs quit.  I camped.  I broke into abandoned homes and raided food and threw it in my back pack and kept going.  I slept on concrete and hid in basements when creatures roamed and cached weapons to defend myself.  Taught myself how to use them, because the day you come face to face with the monsters will be the day you are least prepared to fight for your life and the blood in your veins and your heart beat.  I walked for years until the buildings and bridges grew smaller.  The shells of "civilization" as I knew it grew fewer and far between, and one day I was outside of it all, on a hill top looking back in and I could see the towers so tall back then.  I could see the flag poles and radio towers atop the things so massive they crowded out the sky and blanked the stars at night with their ferocious brilliance.

And it's strange to be outside of it.  Strange to feel myself breathing.  There was a time, right after I took myself away from it all, that it felt odd not to be hurt.  I felt like my skin didn't fit.  My face didn't feel like my face.  It was difficult to walk, like my legs forgot how to do it in this new frame unburdened.  It felt strange to stand up straight.  Strange to deal with my bosses because I was constantly afraid that they might hit me if I messed something up or forgot to do something or did what they wanted, but they changed their minds halfway and did not tell me.  It never occurred to me that people are not supposed to be allowed to do that to other people.  It never occurred to me that people are not naturally inclined to do that necessarily.  It never occurred to me that there would and could be legal recourse for me if they did.  Shedding the things, piece by piece, that I once thought to be absolute truths of power relationships and interchange with "authority".

It was a difficult transition and four years removed from it, it feels like a lifetime away.  The longest four years of my short life.  I've done so much living, it amazes me and I love it.  I love being able to look forward without immediate apprehension.  Some days I wake up and my first thought is "so this is what everyone else has been feeling like all this time."  I wish that I did still retain the good memories from when I was little.  I've spent so much of myself and so much time eradicating the bad ones, but you can't pick and choose when it comes to that.  There are huge blank spaces in my memory now.  Massive expanses that I should have some recall about, but I don't.  Struggle with whether that's a good or bad thing comes up sometimes, but I'd rather recall nothing than wake up sweating at night.

A choice I decided to make.  The most vivid memories still remain, both good and bad; the worst of the worst and the best of the best.  Every time I speak to my siblings something new and minor comes to light for better and for worse and I forget all over again.  Strike it from the library.  Continue on my way.  I feel like, really for the first time in a long time, like I'm going the right way and ... there's no price to put on peace.  Peace at any cost.  Call it selfish.  Call it whatever you want to.  There's beauty in grace and grace is not killing your parents to square your own books.

There's music stored up in there.  I have about 120 tracks and sounds and machine sounds stocked up.  I really do want to do it, I haven't made the time to learn.  Really learn.  I'm passion infused about it.  I need it.  I'm terrified of failure the same way I used to be years ago when I first decided to share and open myself up to criticism.  Not just open myself up, but open myself up to criticism on something I thought I was pretty good at.  Music is an entirely different bucket.  I want to do it, I've taken the first steps, and now I just have to make one foot follow the other.  Never did download that manual for the autoharp.  It's not collecting dust though.  Every few days, I drag it out from under my bed and lay it down and pluck it's strings and see what comes out of it, but I'm happy to be a dabbler.  And unhappy to be just.

Beats, notes, and rhythms in my head and the struggle, I know, will be exhausting.  It's a problem of effort and I know that's a me problem, not an environment problem.  I've had some trouble with scheduling.  Trying to keep yourself out of trouble by sleeping on a max schedule will only drive you so far.  Eventually you have to step out of safety if you want to accomplish anything.  No one ever won a football game by kneeling down in the first quarter.  Crunch time is never convenient and I can't imagine the force of the crush that will drive me to try and I don't want to experience it.  I'll get on it someday.  To do lists grow long like finger nails.  Eventually you have to cut it down or at least paint them.

On another note, you know it's summer when the girls are out in flip flops and the guys are losing their shirts. That's the usual metric.  Everyone is out in their Ed Hardy tees and old men are jogging, red skinned, down the middle of side streets and kids are pushing their strollers and little carnivals with tractor trailer ferris wheels start popping up.  You know it's summer when you can't get a spot to fish on the river shore if you show up any later than noon on a Tuesday.  Opening your car door is like opening an oven door and you sweat from the effort of fixing yourself a bowl of cereal for breakfast.  You know it's summer when you head down to the basketball court and you'd rather stand than sit when you're not playing because the asphalt is just that hot.

The real tell about summer, though, is when the ladies start to come out doors in shorts and Ugg boots.  I have no idea when that nonsense caught on.  What I do know is that every year it happens.  Inevitably.  It makes no sense.  I am a huge fan of form following function, but there is no function to it!  None whatsoever!  I am taking a stand against it.  I was walking down to the gas station in the middle of the day and a nub wearing Uggs and a jean jacket strolled by on the other side of the street and I tried to contain it, but I couldn't.  I guffawed for a second, choked, and then laughed at the top of my lungs.  It's okay though.  She's doing her and I'm going to do me.  No big deal.

Still though, come on!  Really?  Watching it from the corner of my eye all I could think about was gross, stanky, lady feet.  I don't care how pretty your face is, guy or girl, but if your feet stank something awful or are horribly deformed or even noticeably deformed, that's a deal breaker.  Call me shallow.  I don't mind, but there has to be limits.  Still chuckling while I walked into the gas station I was at a loss as to what planet that was considered attractive.

I'm not the style police.  90% of what I wear serves a function and a purpose and if that purpose or function requires something off putting or ugly, hey... go f#$% yourself.  Form will always follow function for me.  If I happen to net up some good form along the way it's just the bonus.  I love summer.  I love the absurdity of it all.  I got into a long back and forth with a girl friend about style.  Sometimes I do make style considerations when it comes to choosing the best function/form ratio.  She was dressed to the nines and I asked her why she would put herself into such nice clothes.  Turned out she just wanted to dress up on a Friday.  I scratched my beard.  She elaborated.  "Sometimes I'm just in the mood to feel a little different."

I got it, then.  When function governs there's less room for expression.  Everything can't be mechanical the way I want it to be or would like it to be.  Input equals output not always and it shouldn't always be.  Reproduction being what it is and kind of necessary.  Hard wiring.  And there I go, back to the mechanical.  I can't help it.  She had a point though.  After the conversation I felt myself starting to want to be a slacks and button up guy.  She explained that even though she was dressed to the teeth with shiny earrings, they were still her play clothes because if anything bad happened to them, they're not her actual dress clothes.  I might try to wear button up shirts more often.  Without buttoning them.  To pull that off I'll probably need pants without latex paint all over them.  That takes money.  Maybe not.  I love function.

I'll have quiet dreams about wearing dumb slacks and ripping the crotch out of them doing what I do.  In the meantime, I'll just do me and wear what I want.  I guess, in very short retrospect, I respect that Ugg jean jacket girl.  If I see her again I'm still going to laugh.  The same way people probably laugh at me strolling down the main drag in clothes with no form, scratching their heads like "did you look at a mirror before you left your house or did you grab the first four garments you could find on your floor and jump out of your door to conquer the world?"

And that's how you know it's Summer.

Kisses.  Later on, kids.


///Ladytron - "Soft Power"  ...daylight is the enemy...  I love the night.  Everything smells wet and good at night.  I want to sleep by the river again and talk to the fish while the fire goes out.

Proliferation Theory

If you do enough, something is bound to stick favorably.  For a time I approached writing with an arrogance.  I thought, because it was the only thing I got decent marks in, I must be good at it.  And then I got bad grades.  Still got good grades from time to time, but bad grades just as often, usually related to the technical composition and not the ideas.  And then I got good technical marks and bad ones on the formation of ideas.  Sometimes I did well with both.

It was a strange time.  I transitioned from writing on my own time and going to class and writing instead of doing homework to higher grades where writing was my only homework and all I did in classes.  The arrogance of perceived innate talent faded quite a bit with one failed attempt to win awards after another and I blamed closed communities and the like, the department was exceptionally cliquey.  I believed the profs liked what they liked and you liked what you liked and it was your job to jump the gap, not theirs.

I don't know what my problem is exactly, but I do believe it is that the people that I idolize make it look so effortless and what they make feels like hit after hit after God damn hit.  Maybe proliferation theory is failing me.  It's difficult to say either way.  Maybe I am genuinely no good.  It's tough to digest.  Without some kind of schedule.  I rolled up a dollar bill.  It's just strange, I guess.  Proliferation theory.  Asking when is good enough for me good enough for someone else.

The theory begs a lower standard, but how much is compromised in terms of value and personal expansion? Is the cost appropriate to the value of the product, the life time stamp I put my name to?  I don't know.  I do it predominantly for myself, at least that's what I've convinced myself of.  I don't know.  Would I kill to go back to school?  How many people?  Could I plea bargain my way out of life sentences and would the offer still be good when I got out?  I'd have to think about it.  Hypotheticals.

Yeah, it drives me crazy.  A little bit.  I try to think about what else I would be doing, could be doing.  None of it appeals to me the same way.  Everyone, including myself, well maybe not everyone, many people talk about being their harshest critic.  I may be my most passionate lover.  Delusions of grandeur coming with the territory, but I don't always see it so clearly.  The Fantha.  Losing focus on the mission.  I just want to die knowing I was good as I could possibly be, not knowing I was good as I was going to be.  Who wants that?

I think believing that I'm great keeps my engine running.  Keeps the clutch down and a hand on the shift knob for when I come running.  Beyond that, I don't know how much credence I give it.  I butcher language and muddle image on a weekly basis.  I talk like broke nosed sailor all too often and argue like a fifteen time concussed politico's son.  Pretty sure my mental dictionary has "turn to page 345"s on it and on page 345 there is a crayon hand drawn hairy dick in the corner.

Purpose is a fine commodity.  Take a digger.  Fire off the magazine, discharge, and throw it as far as you can.  Sometimes panic can be beautiful.  Never outwardly.  Did I tell you that I was you?  Don't be silly.  Don't be silly little king with your crown.  Let me polish that for you; you dropped it skipping puddles in gutters without your galoshes.  You know the ones with He-Man and Skeletor printed all over?  I'll remember for you.

Just behave, okay?

The project was, the final project was, to make a visual that encompassed everything you believed poetry to be.  Everything you believed poetry to be and the purpose it served.  They came in with their power points and dream catchers and God's eyes and a diorama of a village and someone made a painting and someone made a collage from printed magazines and there were a handful of abstract sculptures and even a figurine, but you made a life sized naval mine with trigger switches and detonators and wires out of empty wine bottles and paint brush handles and spray painted it black.  That was a fun walk across campus with that hugged to your chest.  Cutting across the grass, because the people on the sidewalk could go f--- themselves that early in the morning.  You worked on it all night after thinking about it for a week.  Everyone talked about their things and you talked about yours.  And that's where it ended.

Officially.  I suppose, the project is ongoing.  I hate myself.  I love myself.  I hate myself.  I'm sorry to drag you into it.  I don't know how else anything changes.  Contemplating the validity of ProT.


///Starkey - "Spacewalk" infolatice diver with a bad respirator.  the city is so vast and so uninhabitable so far beneath the waves

from a similar born year and different circumstance, but very little I haven't enjoyed while there: alicja-w-krainie-czarow

Birthday Sex (minus sex [also birthdays])

So I'm thirty five and a half again.  For the second time.  Since I've been keeping track of iterations.  I'm on my twenty sixth iteration.  I will not admit a lot of things, but I will admit it's kind of nice to be thirty five, and it's also nice to spell out numbers.  There's something that gives them more weight and pizzazz when you spell them out.  Maybe it's the greater visual volume and maybe I'm just a sucker for language and textual conflagrations.   Mostly I think I like to feel my fingers fly across the keyboard and tap out music the only way I know how, but not the only way I can learn, but the only way I know how just yet.  It's fun.

I've come to some realizations in being thirty five for the twenty sixth time.  None of them make particular sense with regard to each other.  It's kind of difficult to get the points to match up beyond courses of life times, let alone multiple life times.  Really, it's going to take a significant amount of time, I assume, to parse backward and piece together iterational check ins, but I do not believe in doing so that I will be at all disappointed with what the effort turns up.

So here I am.  This is a place holder for future reference to me.  Yes, it is all about me this time, but not really.  It's about the overarching work, but mostly I want to fire off a buoy to mark the spot in the sea of experience.

Sub-mostly, the mostly that bangs across the finish line just after the most mostly, I want to document a child singing a song about birthday sex.  Because it was hilarious, and we were hot boxing the car, and the kid was loving it.  And jumped up, after unfastening himself, on the back seat and started to sing birthday sex just like that time in Chicago, minus the drugs and the easily disarmed anti kid windshield splatterification device.  I almost died laughing.  And that's why, ladies and gentlemen, we park before boxing.  We're not savages.  We're forward thinkers.  Or something like that.

Either way.  Birthday sex might be one of the greatest songs ever and I hope it makes it to a Kids Songs album at some point.  It's good to be 35.  The only male enhancement drug I need on my twenty sixth iteration is every extends extra extreme.  Look it up.  It is the greatest arcade game ever made.  Because when you're this old and this young all you need is a D pad, a lettered button, good music, and explosions and you'll be half masted all day.

Retool and Industry.

I've been task locked, I will admit. Moving on to what? To separate things. I would think. The stars are up tonight. They're mapping me and it's good. I'm thinking about scarification. Or at least a more direct method of production. To accompany. Not so much an accompaniment as a new machine I can introduce to the factory floor and see if they'll pick it up and make good use of it.

I was trying to think of the last time I felt like I was the center of the universe and I can't really remember a time, but that's also probably because my memory basically ends around age 9. Which I'm thankful for. Evening running backward past 11 things basically get so garbled and hazy I'm not really sure if what I'm remembering happened then or earlier. I'm okay with that. If I could wipe everything up through highschool that would just be peaches.

Tomorrow will start a week of industry. I haven't declared one of those in a while, but it's past time. Let's talk about other things. Not to forget, but to make new memories. My time is short. My dreams are long. 4 hours. Not enough. Someone told me I need to get more hours at my job. Honestly, I'm terrified of that. If there's one thing I know about myself it's that we couldn't support that kind of load if we tried. Only so many channels. Let's do some living. Let's turn some metal. Let's not forget our new selves atop the frames still falling.

///Way Out West - "The Gift" the moon and the stars.

Something's New Some Things Old

I've been looking at you all evening and trying not to move. It was putting off the inevitable. Well, I mean, I didn't have much to say before so I wrote what was floating on top because I don't have the equipment to go swimming with any guarantee of safety. Which is what I was worried about. Which is why I was trying not to move. Basically I didn't want to have to open my door. There were some strange happenings earlier and I was waiting for them to die down, but I've spoke too soon again. Unauthorized border crossings, if that makes sense. I don't have a grip on it like I thought I did. It's not something you can be okay or not okay with. It's just something that is and then you learn to live around it. It makes me jumpy during the day. It makes it so that you have to look and hear and make a complete judgement about an entire setting because you don't really have time to work through details in everyday life outside. It's disconcerting. So many times I just need more time to investigate to know.

I used to wear keys everywhere to remind myself that I was awake and moving around and to track time. It's nice to have the option of taking them off and not participating in the movement of time and place. Sometimes though it burns through and it feels like forced induction. I don't like being tracked. Well, not tracked, but followed. Physically. It makes me nervous. Whenever I'm walking and I hear the neighbor walking in the same direction I stop what I'm doing and do something else. It's not bad luck. I just don't want our lines coinciding. It's like using someone elses network. I don't want whatever's over there coming over here. There's enough wildlife over here as it is.

There was something I was supposed to do today that I didn't do while I was avoiding I don't know what it is. I'm trying not to think about it. They don't like being talked about so I'll skip it.

I'm thinking about starting another repository of words. I haven't decided yet. The formulation hasn't struck a critical mass of need, but it's getting there like a bad itch. I'm sorry. I just don't know much today. Something's coming and it's heart breaking because for once all I've been doing is watching the kids play cards on a throw rug and they're playing so well and everybody's home and I don't know why. Well, maintenance has suffered some. I don't want people to be afraid of me. I'm not just like you, but... but what? You don't have to hate being around me. I like being around you? I don't know. I thought I did. Where is it coming from? Something has been built and it's doing work and I don't know where to begin on it. On protecting the rest of me from its function. I don't even know what it does, but I do know its activity is dragging the guts out of the fabric and the stuff back there, inside there, needs to stay over there. It's like waking up and there's a gas leak and the gas has made you sleepy and high and sick and it needs to be fixed, but I'm not a gas specialist. I would look for the hissing, but everything is hissing. I can't leave. I live here. Proximity alarm. But what the hell am I close to? I haven't been paying attention and I ran out of channels.

It's not in the factory. I cleaned that out already. Well, not cleaned out, but repurposed. Actually, I wouldn't even go that far. Just moved some things to the junk yard like Russian submarine pens. I am scared to go to sleep tonight. Not because of tomorrow. Tomorrow will be good. I am scared of what's out there thats creeping through here and I wish I had something that would put me down cold for eight hours. I can option out of waking space sometimes. That's easy. Optioning out of sleep induction can't be done on will alone with any sort of success rate. I don't want to go there. It strikes me, or has struck me, just now how that has flipped. Somethings have come and gone. Just passing through. This one feels different. Whether I want answers or not, I'm going to get some fairly soon. I wish that knowing something is wrong could translate into fixes. Knowing your teeth are bad means you go to a dentist. Ir knowing you're about die of high cholesterol means eating differently. Knowing means nothing. It's like thinking it's about to rain ten pound stones. All you can really do is stay inside or find a bridge to huddle under with the rest of the stray souls till it's over.


///The Orb - "Montagne D'Or"

Golfcart Flamingo Logo

=_= very tired. The state of perpetual collapse that plagues my absolutely fucking retarded family life had me so angry and out of sorts I literally could not function and then the wonderful flip side of that situation was that I've been erased by someone I thought was a best friend (more about that later) so I had the unique pleasure of getting fucked from every direction at once. So its back on the smokes, collar up, stiff upper lip, and into that fucking wind.

This is what I managed to accomplish in a few hours of dedicated work when the bewilderment calmed down.



Three more to go. Dear god, if you're out there... please don't shit on me again today. I like getting work done. You aren't helping so just stay the fuck out of my way, okay? Thanks.

///El-P - "The League of Extraordinary Nobodies" '...and we haven't even gotten to the part where it's a joke..."

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.

notes to self 07/20/08

Subject : notes to self
Posted Date: : Jul 20, 2008 7:48 PM

things not to forget in this late hour:

the arts are still largely the realm of the landed gentry... for those with the liesure time (read ain't gotta work all day everyday for a penny to pay their landlords & lenders) to indulge in the creative work it takes to become successful in a lasting impactful way. of course there are exceptions. classism in america is built on accentuating those exceptions so everyone can feel better about their meddling and dabbling. sure some people work at it for years and make it but they are the mutha f kin minority.

the problem with starting from a now state is that all the reference to the past is lost at the blocks. so retreading, albeit in grand and eye popping fashion to some, is still a retread for the ones that were there before the now. should that matter to the starter? probably not. it might be harder to find fresh ground to break. it might take longer. it might never happen. but then again a lot of things might never happen. so let the critics place the position where ever it may fall and keep walking.

being put in a box. to be feared? flaunted? or simply ignored? should a person be worried that the work they are doing is like the work someone else halfway around the globe is doing and that when held up to the general standard, if there is one (i think there has to be), they might get lumped in with people that are not as great as they think they should be considered? i mean, is c.d. wright an elliptical poet? should someone care if they're considered part of a "school" of thought and action or be concerned when they are left free floating and unaffiliated by anyone to any greater human art project? well, it shouldn't make the project any less worthwhile. but maybe it does...

the problem with education in creative writing is that its taught through emulation. if you don't succeed at emulation you must be failing at understanding where the art has come from. i dont like that. historical orientation should not be the function of- there has to be a better way to learn forms. i agree that you cant break rules till you learn them, but god damn it. for fucks sake.

carnegie mellon was recently praised for its "strict disciplinary structure" that somehow, through the magic of perspective and self righteous justification, unites the woefully disparate schools. i dont agree with that. im an example of what inflexible disciplinary structures can do to anyone who doesnt fit the prototypical student mold. you fail. at all classes. despite your knowledge, despite your growth, despite your ability to demonstrate said knowledge, synthesize your own ideas from said knowledge, and create new ones of your own design, its all for nothing because you missed four classes out of the entire semester. its all for nothing because you changed majors and none of the units transferred. its all for nothing because you had to work a part time job to support yourself and it cut in to your ability to produce a paper that regurgitated information from another paper that had nothing to do with your final project (which you subsequently aced) anyway. f l ustration.

take more notes. i lost two ideas today that held promise because i didnt write them down. thats two things i could have added to my co activated knowledge that now leads to dead end neurons.

get more sleep. lack of sleep is where it all starts... you dont want to be back on pills, do you? no. i dont.

posturing 06/17/2007

Subject : posturing
Posted Date: : Jun 17, 2007 11:29 AM

i hate posturing. i hate posturing more than a lot of things in the world.... or at least more than a lot of things in america. posturing is the root of so many problems. think about it. if politicians never postured you'd know exactly what was going on in the world at any given moment. if party people didnt posture you'd know at a party who was there just to have a good time, who was there a flirt a little, and who was there to slut it up. you'd know who you should talk to and who you should avoid talking to. if professors didn't posture you'd know what you needed to do to do well in their classes without having to decipher what they were really saying. you wouldnt have to do bullshit work tacked on to meaningful course work to make their class seem harder than it is. if car companies didnt posture you'd know which cars were the safest, or the best value. if bosses didnt posture you would know that a job was essentially slave labor with a stipend. you could work as hard as you needed to and not an hour more without worrying about getting fired. you would know which business owners were really about the well being of their laborers and which ones would grind you into dust if it meant an extra five dollars in their pocket every week.

posturing makes people idiots but also makes idiots out of other people. its simply not fair to anyone when posturing comes into play. highschool is so miserable for 3/4s of the people who go through it because 1/4 of the people in charge and at the top of the food chains are only concerned with appearances... and its bullshit. dont get me wrong... posturing has its place. in comedy, in sports, and in all things that are performances (even blogs sometimes) posturing plays an enormous and useful role. but life aint one big performance. some of us are more concerned with honestly living it as fully and contentedly as possible than tap dancing our way through it to hollow applause.



///dj rap - "good to be alive" not here to judge. im just sayin shit is fucked up sometimes and it doesnt have to be.