Time To Shed, Or What They Call Its

Molt.  Molting.  It takes some time.

We have backed ourselves into a new corner.

Bare teeth.  You know I can always see

what you really are!

Scared?  Of course.  Unimaginably so.

Conscious?  Yes.  The pain scale is new.

Familiar?  No.  Unfortunately no.





///to be continued

That Instant

your cat is biting you and you muse about how it has 5 pointy ends, the sixth its tail, and you enumerate your own being human and the count comes back sharp and blunt solid 43 and you know it's just trying to say hello as best it can to a fortress.

Return Of The Painted Dinosaur (New Limit)

To say that it is difficult to talk about is true.  Not an overstatement, not an understatement.  The wounds still feel like they happened in a dream.  When I wake up I feel like I am going to wake up again as soon as start to move my limbs, and I do not.  I wake up once and look at my hand and wrist and wiggle my fingertips and hold it up over my face and pinch myself and poke my eyebrows and sniff it and it is mine.  Check after check comes back positive.  "This belongs to you."  There was not a mistake.  There was not a swap of body parts while you were sleeping.  You are awake.  You are breathing.  The nerves are speaking to each other as they should.  Motor functions have all checked out.  You are indeed occupying the body you went to bed in.  Further damage has ceased.  Necrosis is staved off.  Healing has also ceased.  It is not going to get better or return to mint, though it will also not get worse.  Wake up.  Get up.

Some days I wake up, since it happened, and I scream into my pillow for long pillows for long minutes.  Pound my fists on the mattress.  Cry until I am exhausted.  And then get up and head to the shower, not to take one, but to get the bandages on my leg wet enough to peel off the still reforming skin without damaging it or tearing it because no matter how non-stick bandages claim to be, they will fuse with your newly regenerated skin and tear it off like a fine gossamer contacted with Velcro if you are not careful.  If you stub your toe or brush your shin against a coffee table corner or bump against a chair leg, that newly formed skin will peel free like over ripe peach fuzz and the healing has to begin all over again.

I've wanted to brand myself for some time.  A change of pace between scarification stints and a way to get a different look as I work on tattooing myself to help me mark time between the many different iterations of myself and stages of my life.  The pain brings an acute awareness that helps me cut through the storm swells and confusion and voices and whorls and weirs of manic depression and schizophrenia.  When your nerves are screaming out at you, it can drown out the noise.  When you can touch something concrete and constant it becomes a reference stone and constant reminder of your human elements, your and everyone else's pains and joys and emotional lives.  It allows you to access a reality that opens doors of sympathy and empathy you otherwise would not be able to see or understand.   It clear cuts a path to direct needs and functions.  In small doses, that pain is invaluable and a joy with incredible utility.  In large doses it is a nightmare.

When the deep fryer began to fall over, time did not slow down.  I knew my two cats, rescued from negligent homes some years ago, were both in my efficiency kitchen with me, waiting for me to toss a little food on the floor for them to nose and paw, maybe eat, maybe pass on.  The fryer was in the same space it'd occupied since I bought it and first began using it.  Hundreds of times.  This time, whatever balance struck that slowly shifted through the years made its final move.  It began to fall, my cats looking up at me, and I threw my hands out at full speed to stop it.  From all of the previous times I'd dropped bowls, or a bucket slipped off of a shelf while I was filling it, I knew the cats wouldn't move until it hit the floor and I didn't have time to try to scare them out of the splash radius with words.  The speech centers of my brain were an afterthought.  All I could engage was "protect them!"

Weeks later I can understand why.  I can't afford to take them to a veterinarian to treat them long term for hot oil burns, especially what would likely have been second to third degree burns over 50% or more of their little bodies.  I would have had to put them down or take them to a vet to have them do it.  The whiff, the scent, the lightest breeze of a notion of having to mercy kill them was enough to send me into action because they are two of my mates.  My family in my outpost here in Pittsburgh as I build a life for myself, a single early thirties male permanently estranged from all family save for my immediate siblings, and even they not all as close as siblings are often assumed to be.  They mean the world to me, no matter how often I bellyache about them keeping me up all night with their little paw paw games and wrestling with my feet and ankles with a little too much claw now and then.  They're my shipmates that take care of the place while I am away and while I'm hurtling through the universe, trying to make sense of other people, and maybe stumble upon someone or ones to accompany me, in my hodgepodge, homemade, Tardis.  My companions.

I lunged and the fryer moved along the shelf and slammed against the wall and 367 degree oil rolled up its side like water in a blender.  Below, the skitter scratch of cat claws scrambling against floor boards reached my ears, my leading foot planted against the plastic tile to balance me.  Relief washed over me knowing "they will be safe" as the sheet of amber oil hanging in the air began its descent over where the fryer basin used to be.  Where my hands now were.

I snatched my left hand backward, my right still connected to the arm putting as much force as possible into the basin, now against the wall to drive my body backward.  The oil sloshed over my right hand and, knowing I could not withdraw it without allowing the entireity of my torso to fall into the shower and shelf and further shake the ball of solar flare to catch the rest of its contents on my face, I pushed back and took a shower against the skin's hand.

The thump and tumble of my cats running away collided with the immediate shock of hot oil across my hand and wrist and once my body began traveling backward, the oil beginning to slap and clap against the floor, I began to raise my leg against the back splash.  What splashed and dotted my left leg cooled enough as it dotted my pants to leave no mark.  What landed in the bin turned around its base like a tsunamic rip tide, crushed against the basin's rear wall, curled around as sport, cameras flashing, snap, and teeth bared came for me.

Balanced, I tore my right hand away, the curling aftershock cresting.  It spilled.  The wave covered my knee and washed my shin and right foot and that was when a scream cut loose.  I cried out.  Prime and howl.  I screamed to the skies as the last of it dribbled off of my toes.

The deep fryer, spun with the terror of my flash fried hand, fell backward and spilled the rest of its contents to the floor that I, loosed from protecting cats and certain further was easily, by miles, too far, could leap clear and land against the kitchen sink.  I breathed hard for wasted minutes in a mental gridlock, hips perched on the lip of the kitchen sink, before I ran to the bathroom.

The cold water was turned to its maximum setting with the tub to shower knob turned to full shower.  Water washed all over me and I held my paw up to the chill spray and only brought it down to rinse over every other part of the right side of my body that was vibrating at death levels.  Sometimes when I lose my temper and cannot corral it I will fire off a punch into an inanimate object to pop off steam and that tingle returned is that tingle that tells you every part of your skin that was between flesh and bone and the rock and the hard place you found yourself in to bring ya to a point where the only release was the flood of endorphin and whatever other enzymes cover up disappointment and rage has died and maybe given up a fragment of solace to the rest of the mad house.  That tingle, rushing over the right side of my body and the nerves shouting out for soft words brought me back to the point where I understood I could not put enough cold water on every part of me that needed it.

My leg continued to burn.  For hours afterward.  I was able to wash my arm in enough cold water, enough of it falling into the tub, as it scattered from the shower's head against my hand, to cool my foot.  Second degree burns, superficial as superficial second degree burns can be, set in on my arm and foot as second degree burns ate into my leg, starved of cool.

I got out of the shower and pat dried myself.

Skin came off in palm sized chunks.

It stuck to the towel.

I got back in the shower.

Skin clogged the drain.

I cried.  I grabbed a bar of soap and rubbed.  More skin came loose.  It stuck to the walls of the shower.  It stuck to my own face.  It caught in my chest hair and groin.  Tendrils drifted from my beard.  I shouted "no!"  I shouted "this is not happening" over and over and over.  For many seconds it was all I could say.  Every part of me felt like it was coming unseamed.

I was in shock for two days.

I didn't know what to say to myself or anyone else.  I didn't know what to believe.  I slept.  When I woke I did not move.  While I stayed frozen I tried to sleep until I did.  When I was not sleeping I tried to.  When I was sleeping I waked with a recurring nightmare every handful of minutes I could forget.  Terror stricken.  It was not real.  I was in shock.

Waking, I looked at my hand and it was not mine.  It was a raw thing.  It stank.  The smell of it was raw meat opened two days too late.  Sour and slimy and sticking to everything it touched.  Blood oozed and wept from its every divide.  It was a scene in that movie that you cannot watch start to finish because it turns your stomach just enough to make your eyes cross and tinfoil rattle in your mouth until you are too sick to stand.  For some time, waking and looking at it and having its smell fill my nostrils so close to my face and knowing that if I lifted my blanket enough to look down at my leg I would see a sea monster colored in a sickly greenish yellow full of lint, cat fur, exudate, and blood scab as far as light can carry, I would sweat and convince myself if I just lied still it would heal itself fine like a rug burn.

On the third day I threw up.  60 some odd hours in bed hydrating with only a two litre of Barq's root beer I happened to toss over there before deciding to make food before bed took it's toll.  Waking up the third day for the twentieth time in that period, pain spiking, and the odor of raw flesh beside my head, unable to shake it away and unable to cut it off, took its toll.  I wretched.

Rolls of heaves began working their way along my spine.  I began to scramble with my good left hand to make sure my face was pointed toward empty floor space instead of mattress, pillow, or wall.  I could not walk.  Wherever the projectile went, it had to be somewhere I would be able to lie near without getting it into open wounds.  I succeeded and ralfed, sickened by the furious turbulent grotesquery of my own body parts.

On the fourth day I came to grips with what would become my new modernity.  Without health insurance, there was no one to fix me except me.  I tried to walk and succeeded.  I pissed.  In my own toilet.  Deep brown syrup.  I found my fridge.  There was food,  I walked to my sink.  There was water.  I drank and drank and drank.  I pulled food and food and left arm's full of tupperware and placed on my night stand.  I found my cubby of strange and sudden items and found my scarification kit and breathed a sigh.  Relief, joy, love for the friend who came over prepared for a one time dual scarification incident I ribbed him for (coming over prepared) that he left with me.  With a little improvisation I was able to repurpose the kit to cover the open wounds enough to return to bed on track to recovery instead of on rails to infection.

Days went by like barges trying to force their way over harbor reefs.  The stench of my hand continued to get to me as I left it bare with the kit nearby.  The flesh continued to sweat and the swelling did not go down.  Slicing it off became an option.  I could not sleep with any fidelity.  I could not rest and when I was awake the pain I felt was more than anything near the throb I felt inside my skull when I fractured my jaw.  It was more than anything I felt when I fell down stairs or was in my second car accident or slipped off of the odd side of a hand rail and landed on the concrete bordering the stairs beside a 21 foot decent from a porch to a sidewalk with a hill between us.  I wanted to cut it off as the bare flesh continued to weep that slimy clear goo.  Cut it off!  Cut it off!

I wrapped it.  I wrapped it.  Healing began.  The recurring nightmare, the recurring dream continued.  I was able to make bandages and while it healed I was able to order in specialized products for attending to burns.  I researched for days whiles my leg and hand and arm stuck to my bed sheets.  Every time I tried to move, they stuck to me.  Belief set.  "If I don't move while I'm waiting for these products to arrive, there is no way it can get infected because it is sealed by the plastic fabric so further movement will only create more problems and possible amputation."  I had to figure out a way to urinate.

And I did.  Three weeks in.  My neighbors stopped by to see if I was okay.  I still could not leave the bed for any sort of extended period.  Dropping my burned hand below my heart produced an incredible throbbing pain the likes of I have never felt.  To put the sensation in perspective: do you know when recommendations say to keep the limb elevated?  Imagine that every time you are lying flat on your back that limb crosses a plain.  Now imagine that plain is wherever your heart is located.  Now imagine that every time that limb crosses south of that plain you instantly feel like it is about to burst apart as though a truck tire, connected to a 3/4 ton truck, is rolling over it and if you do not raise it above that plain IT WILL BURST INTO HAMBURGER MEAT.  Yes.  That.  Now imagine that while you are trying to find a comfortable way to lie in bed and sleep.  Now imagine that happens instantly for 18 days to everything from your elbow up and your knee down!

Coming in to something close to normal.  I hope that was coherent.   How else can we survive?

The pain remains.  It feels indescribable though I've done my best.

People you knew before look at you differently.  More so than your scarification. They look at you as though there is something contagious about you.  The root of your being is love for animals.  Perhaps they should.

As I've healed and become a human being again through the last weeks, looking at my hand and my leg, I almost feel like I am wearing a human costume.  All of the skin was flash fried off of my hand save for my palm.  The skin underneath each one of my digits and my palm is original and up to date.  Looking at it, seeing it clinging to the rest of my flesh, it is out of place.  I want to peel it off and it will not go.   It will not go away.  There is no transistion between the old, the original, and the new.  It is stark.  If you shake my right hand you will feel the transition in the form of many tiny spikes where the original skin meets the new.  Where the rough and weathered meets the baby smooth; fingers crossed bounds, hands clasped in a firm grasp.

I still find pieces of skin around my apartment.  It is disgusting.  It is revolting.  Vomit climbs through my body and I know I have to pick that part of me up and put it in a garbage can and it is...   ....   ....    ..... ..........................  I know I can go on.  I know I will.  I know I have to.  It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.  


Fuck.  It hurts so much and I know I have to go on and it just fucking hurts so much.  I want to shake it off.   I want to be able to shake it off.   The pain is .................  ugh.  I know I'll beat it.  I think part of the pain it gives me is that I didn't have a choice.  And now I have to wear a permanent and exceptionally visible reminder of how I didn't have a choice through the 24 years of my life my Dad destroyed myself.  I broke away from that, finally.  It took cutting my face apart to see.  To finally split his noose.  Now I have to wear the scars of chance and love right along with them.   It hurts.  It fucking hurts.  It wasn't supposed to be this way.  I have to wear it.  I will and have and will continue to do so.
















I am happy to close this chapter.  If I didn't talk about it I would still find myself living in it months, maybe years, from now.




At least now,

at least now,

we can get back to comedy, true tragedy (instead of misfortune), and stories untold in fiction.  Close this book and open a new.  Carry on, soldier.  How many times do I have to change?  How many times do I have to be changed?  People already look at me so many different ways from what I am.  And they will look at me differently again.

Ever becoming.

We have been patient.  We will still.

You thought you new hell.  It was one of many.

It was a long month.  Come back home, darling.  The worst is over.  You may have set a new ten.  Many, most, if not all, is lost in translation, however-   -there's still a lot of work to do.  Do not quit on me and I will not quit on you.

/////Bjork x Deathgrips - "Thunderbolt" fourteen birth of the painted dinosaur.   Molt.

That Instant

you understand sleeping all day and fucking all night is never sustainable and relax because you already wrote that line of code into your free mind and have another sip of bourbon knowing you got one thing right today and every day since.

Facebook

Facebook is funny.  It's obvious as a bunch of gate switches, on and off.  Zero and one. It's funny because there are so many ways to have full conversations using only gate switches.  It's obvious, but it's still funny imagining an ever flipping map of things and you can hit whichever switches you want to in a side scrolling self describing toggle machine.  It's pretty swell and still funny.  Rudimentary, but a chuckle.  All the positions begin at off.  No point fives.  I'm not sure where I'm going with this, oh yeah, just remembered.  And forgot.  It's back, okay, got it, the hook is that with only being able to describe yourself through on or off it becomes possible to predict what's coming next and it grows formulaic.  For a ball of nerve endings that require routine to survive it becomes a joke.  For a ball of nerve endings that are a ball of fat and salt it's very funny to watch and also to participate.  It's fun I think is what I'm getting at.  Fun to create and fun to acknowledge.  The equivalent of a wave to say that I am me and you are you and "hi, how are ya."  Its neat.



///DJ? Acucrack - "Captain's Waterlog"

Dealing & Check In

Gotta change the motor oil now and then.  S'not the first time or the last.  I was concerned.  The panels were lighting up in not so good ways and it's kind of like changing your alarm because sometimes the tune you design to play goes doot doot doot and then you start dancing instead of waking up and that's no good, ya know?  It's no good.

Instead of waking up you get like "aw, this sounds great, who made this?  I can jam all day" and that's no good at all.  Time to change the motor oil.

An overactive imagination they said.  Spirits was put past me too.  Talking to angels got floated.  Talking to demons got floated too.  "Just pick which ones" got floated too.  Hawky talk.  All of it trash.  Waking up to the signals again.  The check engine light.  Sky zoe frania.   I hate that word so much.  I hate that word so fucking much.  I hate that word so fucking much!  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that word.  I hate that fucking word.

Delusions of grandeur.  I don't understand!  I don't get it.  I'm very happy.  I'm working on a concussion free year and I think I'm gonna be able to get it this year.  The first one in five without one.  The first year in three that I haven't broken my nose.  I'm looking forward to it.  It is going to be a gold belt when I check off December.  I'm dealing.

Six years without a pain killer (minus alcohol but that only halfway counts.... a pain putter offer).  Nothing to the significance of a tylenol.  I'm not allowing myself to sniff anything near an edible.  It's good though.  It's a bad track to go down, plus pain lets you know where the line is.  There's nothing wrong with that.  I'm dealing and it's great and terrifying because I'm - not sure when the line happens, ya know?  When we click over and aren't talking to people anymore or are extremely unreasonable.

The concern comes from knowing that an existence without you is doable, highly doable, but not nearly as ... well, not that far.  I won't go that far.  Within the framework of citizenship, yes, absolutely.  An existence without you is by a landslide far more favorable and speaks to my heart in ways I don't always and can sometimes not do at all.  A self starter to a degree; turn the dial far enough and hydrolock blows the push rods to bits and reduces the engine block to a 300 lb paperweight.

Does that make me dependent?  I hope not.  I guess, what I'm saying is if I was the last man on Earth, my reign would be fairly brief.  We laugh saying it out loud, but it's true.  Maybe a decade or two, if that.  I hope I am doing a reasonable job of it.  I know I slip sometimes and the clutch engages and I am two gears off of first and I don't always know whose driving the damn thing to begin with and sometimes ... talking out of school.  Nope nope nope.  None of that.  Enough of that.

I want a fucking present.  I want a parade and a band and a fucking float.  I want the parade, the band, the float, and a present.  I tore after my pap paps for talking to me in snippets of things he's seen and not actually talking and here I am doing it too.  Anger management was neither of our strong suits.  I wonder who talks to him.  Who did he have to talk down.  Did he?  It would certainly explain a lot of a few things.  It really fucking would.  He's not talking though so I guess I'll grill him in heaven or hell.  Chaa!  Have the rest of eternity to exchange phone books.  Wouldn't that be the fucking cats.

I'm dealing though.  The committee deals back and we play our cards and try to beat the dealer sometimes.  Sometimes we just fill the house coffers and call it.

It's a juggling act with a little bit of severed limbs when the chainsaw comes down two seconds earlier than expected or turns a rotation before it was supposed to or hangs in the air a tad bit longer for no god damn reason whatsoever and control goes out like a tungsten bulb and its tomorrow already and you're talking to people in daylight and how the hell what the fuck am i doing here happens and you have to review your notes.  I really hope it's not like this when I'm fifty.  I'm afraid it might be, or worse.  Da fuck is paranoia anyways?  Why can't I sleep in the dark?  What is out there?  What the hell is out there???  I've been looking for you.  I've been searching for you.  Come out!  I know you're there.  I can fucking smell you, you fuck.  I can fucking hear you!  Why can no one else hear you!  It's not fair.  It's not fair.  You know what, 'ats fine.  We're fine with that.  For fucks sake, just once, speak to someone else too.  I dunno.  It's tiring and very difficult to explain how energy is expended without losing traction altogether and paying for it in a big way because I am just like you.  I want to be.  Let's trade.  S'not a grift if it's an even trade.  Keep routine.  Stay alert.  Routine will rescue you.  I don't like change.  I'm not stubborn.  I'm not antisocial.  I just have to maintain parameters and readings and locations to the "t" and to the dot.  Please don't be offended if I whip donuts and drive like a madman when designated play time comes about.  It's the only time I have to spend when high alert can be tuned down to "we are all present and accounted for."  Why won't you fucking die!?  Time to change the oil.

My tracking is suffering again on certain very important things.  We are not enthused.  It is unacceptable.




///Nancy Sinatra - (Bang Bang)

We Were Looking for Highspeed

spent some time in the foundry.  It was important to do.  Part of the importance was simply getting the shakes out.  Along the path of life I managed to convince myself that it was too hard to use my drawing pad to make drawings instead of doing them on paper but what I realized, after weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks of procrastination, was that I was putting it off to do paper because I knew I would never really try to pick up paper the same way I can pick up the convenience of a drawing pad.  Partly because I don't have the pens or pencils I like in my house and at arms reach when I want them, and partly because I don't have scrolls of paper big enough to do what I want to do when I want to do it, and partly because both of those things allow me the saving grace to not have to burden myself with the torture of stepping outside my own skull, and that last one is the big one.

I love living by dreamlight still.  It's a wonderful thing.  Not without it's own limitations, but when you live in there you never have to worry about showing someone else what it was that you saw while you were there.  You never have to do the work.  On top of that you never have to slug your way through misinterpretation when you do try to translate dream code into real code and the circuits short out half way and you get flustered and start sweating because you know they know it didn't really happen but it did I swear if I can just show you how it all went down.  You're never burdened with that.  But it's the same principle as the principle of the fact of the matter and on and on being that you can't get in trouble if you're not conscious.  Which is true.  

How you got to being unconscious is the tricky part, but once you get there you are literally unable to fuck anything up.  There's something to be said for that.  The being comatose. The being asleep.  Part of why I prize it like I do.  The best way to do no wrong is to be unable to do no wrong.  So I spent some time though and made a picture that I like and also do not enjoy looking at because it did not turn out the way I wanted to or the way I saw it in my head and more over it is now subject to other opinions that I can or may not listen to, but it's not like I'm making a career so I care and then I don't off and on and more importantly if I simply went to bed instead of drawing the entire issue would be moot.  That's me.  Butters.

I'm glad I went back inside it though.  I had to.  I couldn't not do it.  Things were gestating for months and needed out.  It was time not spent unwell, and there's something to be said for that and I'm saying it now.  Or at least trying to.  I care because you do.  You care because I do.  We care because the infinite point of no one does not care?  Trying to balance out the word game.  It's funny.  She's funny.  But if you're going to be a recluse, at least try not to be reckless is all I'm saying.  If you're house is going to burn down, at least take good pictures.

Twas' fun though.  

I don't know what it all means with regard to the original mission.  I don't know if I'm gaining or losing ground or if it matters.  I'm still trying to lay down the blueprint, not so much to prevent me from recurring farther along down the line of history, and not so much to cut off what created me, and not so much to bring about some sort of internal change, but just to lay down track so someone like me can at least know what may or may not be ahead of them (but more than likely is).  That's really part of what I do live for.  Delusional or not.  I enjoy going to sleep and laying my head on a pillow knowing that maybe, on down the line, I helped someone not completely self destruct.  Or at least postpone it a day or two.

If what I do and have done tells one boy that it's not necessarily over when it should have been, but it's also written once it's written and the best you can do is operate within that frame and engage and rejoin society to the best you can do and the rest is garbage time and uncontrollable and largely unpleasant, but unavoidable, then I did something right.  Sometimes you get bad gear from the get and that will be how it is.  A perpetual game of catch up if you let yourself be consumed by it.  Personally, I'm still hoping for the off chance of a nuclear apocalypse.  And that's a long, long, long, bet these days.  I also thought, though, with my luck, I'd be the first one to die in an Earth purging event.  The first person shot in the face by some ultimate virus cleansing crew because I happened to develop a bad cough the day before shit hit the fan.  Ha! that would be my luck though.  

Just know, you're not alone.  I tell and believe the same within myself..  We'll meet again some day, sweetheart, and when we do we will tear this planet down to it's foundations by any means available.  And it will be classy as hell.

///Amon Tobin + "Rosies"  so where do you wanna go?

The Year End Look (part two)

Two thousand twelve was a banger.  A lot of truly excellent things happened.  Some truly awful things happened.  Mistakes were made and successes enjoyed.  I thought after the debacle of 2010 I would not be surprised by whatever could come next and 2011 actually ended up being fairly swell.  2012 was jam packed with more change than I could see coming.  I'm pretty sure I didn't write any fiction in 2012.  I don't know why.  2012 was a war with the clock.  I think that's why.  I did sort of rediscover a pair of old friendships that I thought were pretty much blown to flaming kingdom come and that was nice.  My memory fails me pretty regularly.  Too many blows to the head (chemical and otherwise).  Speaking of chemicals, I still haven't gone to get help.  I don't know that I ever will.  I don't know that I'll ever be able to on my own.

I'm trying to think of what the overarching lesson of 2012 was.  Nothing particular comes up.  2012 was very much a blur.  I became a car owner.  That's nice.  I also became quite broke keeping that car on the road and functioning.  I became a paper towel owner.  That was pretty huge.  Do you know how hard it is to justify paper towels?  Pretty damn hard.  Mostly I was using my dirty laundry to clean up floor spills.  Dish rags to clean up counter top spills.  Worked perfectly, really.  It's not like I was going to wipe up spilled floor milk and then put the shirt right back on.  I also became a soap and toilet paper stockpiler.  I used to buy it in four packs and then string it out as far as it would go and then find alternatives already in my apartment when they ran out.  That's not what grown ups do.  I got car insurance for the first time.  My car is better insured than I am now.  I think I did that one wrong.

You know what?  I've got it.  Twenty twelve was about taking steps toward being an adult.  Meshing with other adults.  Not that I succeeded with the meshing at all.  I tried to pay for cat litter with sex. That didn't work out too well.  Especially when I found out there was no cat litter to begin with.  I have to stop being so easily convinced in twenty thirteen.  I am on the tail end of my twenty seventh iteration.  Can't make rookie mistakes like that or I'll end up smoking bath salts and living in the woods.  Which doesn't sound particularly bad on the surface, but try finding a hot shower off of an interstate and you'll end up with a hobo pissing on your back while you sing Disney anthems in the pre dawn light of another Thursday, wondering if the pair of pants you named after your dead dog will ever find their way back to your cardboard shanty town.  That's what 2012 was.  A lot of learning how to do grown up things.

Not just that.  My literary voice changed so much through 2012.  My whimsical spirit did not die well and I think I want to make the effort to rediscover it.  So much of my life became brutally concrete.  There was no time to write down extensive dream logs and what explorations I could do and enjoy across the dream bridge were lost.  There was a massive task lock.  Huge gridlock between where I was and where I was going mentally that suffocated and snuffed out so much of what I wanted to achieve.  Obviously, everyone wants to be loved.  On some level.  A lot of that need was torn out of me.  It's still there, latent and active by turns and expressed and expressible and not in different forms.

I had a final falling out with my birth parents.  Good riddance.  Things were going quite well until they demanded a response and I gave them the one I'd been holding back for years (which was a fairly simple death threat).  Which spiraled out of control and had to be reigned back in to an even simpler "Hi, you've hurt me for the last time and I'm not going to give you the opportunity to ever hurt me again."  Which went over slightly better.  So I do have that peace of mind to look forward to.  The emails have stopped and that's what I wanted.  BKB (bitches know better) than to ever try to contact me again.  Some things can be forgiven.  Some things can only be atoned for.  Some things can only be paid for, and the checks they wrote on my skin in bruises and welts and blood and on my mind in so many lines of unforgettable screams and shouts can only be paid for.  It was good though.  A link so thoroughly destroyed that I will never have to worry about it threading itself around my neck again.

I did find love again, briefly, in twenty twelve.  Online.  I also found that most of the people in BDSM chat rooms are full of themselves and fake.  But I don't even have to go to any other online dating sites to know that it's probably not unique to my bag.  Back to love and friendships.  I'm fairly certain I may have lost a friend I really wanted to keep, but who knows, maybe it'll come back around in thirteen.  2012 saw a pretty severe drop in production in general.  Adult problems.  Remember that three banger I put out of its misery early last year?  That came back to haunt me when one of them got a job at a store I used to frequent (they had good prices, can't argue with that).  Well, that cut my neighborhood in half.  Can't go to that side of town anymore without looking over my shoulder, or occasionally ducking down in my car at red lights.  Like I said, mistakes were made.

My only new years resolution this year is to not get concussed.  I think that might be aiming too high.  Too many bar fights happened last year.  Between the life drama and tracking myself down rage blew off me like sunspot flares.  Yes, you can punch anything with a face, but can and should are two very different things.  I'm not saying I'm going to be a saint, but I am saying the world is only so big and eventually someone is going to recognize you when you least expect it and remember that thing you did the weekend before to one of their friends and they'll even the score and then it's all bad news bears from there.

Style wise, I was lost as 2012 tailed out.  Spun out.  Ate the guardrail and burned it's way to the bottom of a ravine.  Shifting identity.  Events and exchanges, human exchanges external to my brain pan, brought up so many questions I hope to answer to myself in the coming year.  The identity I believed I had was drastically revised.  Am I still a writer?  Am I a poet?  Am I a songstress?  Maybe just a bard?  I don't know.  I've given up on trying to calculate how many hours I've gone in and what mastery means.  Mastery means nothing.  Exposure means nothing.  The new foundation is framed quite simply as passion.  I have a passion for words on paper.  Whatever that makes me to you, I'm down.  To me, I'm a kid with a pen.  That's all.  Calling yourself a writer or not, calling someone else by the same, is like having embossed ink on a business card.  Doesn't mean a damn thing beyond image.  Do I still want a house in the middle of nowhere to invite people to that I might cut them up, eat the good parts, and burn the rest of their remains?  Yeah.  That's kind of the ultimate goal.  That and having a place to write that I only have to pay taxes on.  That'll work.  A wonderful desert compound.  Somewhere near the border.

Twenty twelve taught me that I'm nowhere close to where a lot of my peers are fiscally, mentally, and emotionally.  My concerns are still fringe.  My furniture still sparse.  My needs are still fairly small and my dreams equal and as difficult to access.   I always thought I'd die in Pittsburgh, but maybe that's not good enough.  Last year made me question my capabilities, but not in the way some people down grade themselves.  I'm not a smart cookie.  I'm not brilliant.  I'm not particularly resourceful.  I can, however, create to no end, my only limitation being the cards I have to play with..

It was a strange year.  There were many tears in 2012.  Some earned, many not.  Many involuntary and inappropriate to the subject.  That's not going to change.  I'm crying right now typing this and it's silly.  My weight keeps fluctuating wildly between 155 and 185.  Every month.  It makes no sense.

Gather.  Fads go out of style.  I've had a few of my own.  I realized through the year that they were constructs to help me express concepts that come to me and help me live from week to week and month to month, but also help me relate.  Junior psychologist over here.  There was some real damage in 2012 and I don't know that 2013 will be that much better, but I like to believe it will be.  Maybe we'll get back on the pills this year.  Just to see.  Just to see and stop talking about talking about doing it.  Twelve was also a year of addictions.  I don't know how to fix that.  They were all, largely, necessary.  But at least I know the side effects will or won't do what they do.  Maybe that's the big thing standing guard these days.  This turned pretty dark in a flash.  I used to think I would be a great candidate for surviving the zombie apocalypse, and then I realized I would probably risk everything for a pack of smokes and dozen cans of spray paint.  Unless I have my desert compound by then (I'll pass the time writing poetry and taking head shot breaks with a .50 cal and whiskey on the rocks).

The major issue I want to resolve this year, given last year, is my writing.  Let's do better.  Let's be better for us.  Shooting for late forties.  I want to at least make it to being a weird uncle.

What did 2012 teach me?  What was the takeaway?  Christmas lights are awesome.  People can't be programmed.  My morals and principles don't translate by default and no one else's do either.  God is still a work of fiction.  I am still figuring myself out and trying not to implode.  At least not completely.  Still so far away, only because I have to be.  I am my own best company and my own worst friend.  The things I don't own are things I should not have yet.  The relationships I don't have are relationships I'm not and may never be ready for.  The spaces I occupy, I am grateful for and will continue to be.  The spaces I do not are spaces I have given back to the ones who belong there and will use beyond my ability to and that's okay.  Twenty twelve was strange.  Twenty thirteen is a big old bag of TBD, but I wish it was a big old bag of LSD.  You can't go through life asleep, but a boy can dream.


///TRACK NOT FOUND - year end playlist up next
defining moments of a finest hour?  yeah, something like that.

Thinking Around Yourself Is Not Easy (fear)

I have been trying to think around myself.  It has not been easy.  To say the least.  Part of what has made it so difficult is realizing that I am occupying so much of my own space.  Where as space time is largely infinite, I have had a hard time parsing my own space and my own time in that webbing.  Experience is infinite.  Infinitely divergent and convergent on the same scale.  The difference comes when you start to look at a person as fragment or a single stitch, a wave particle behaving more particulate than wave, on the scale of outcomes.  Something that you can cure me of.  No, not really.  Nothing that I wouldn't do for you differently.

I have been trying to think around myself.  I have been trying to dig myself out of the weird hole of self absorption and have experienced some success.  There has been some allure in exploring the dark side of the moon and what have you, but that has come as quite ancillary to everything else I would like to do, but has also occupied so many cycles, it's almost become laughable.

The standoffs between my drawing tablet and my gaming remote have grown to epic proportions.  As they should.  Given the variables.  I knew they would.  There are so many usb ports and only so many preoccupations.  I've grown a little sad though.  Not because I can't get everyone of me to work in concert.  Not because the voices have been so gotdamn loud I can't hear myself think sometimes.  Not because I want time to flow in reverse.  Not because I am stupidly heart broken too often and no amount of huffed paint will make it feel better long enough.  Not because four hour masturbation sessions laden me with enough shame to bury an elephant with no trace of a corpse or burial ground.  

I've grown a little sad, because I know, with the pills available, my outcomes might be entirely different, and I've given them not a lick of a try.  Not that I don't want to.   I absolutely do.  It's not like I'm going to magically lose my creativity or penchant for metaphor.  Might lose some sex drive, but it's not like I'm getting laid every five seconds.  It's a choice and I understand that.  It's a choice I'm not comfortable making.  What if I don't like the new me?

Better question:  what if the new me is less acceptable than the old me.  I don't mean in terms of dalliances and persuasions or anything like that, but how hilarious would it be if the new me was completely straight?  I just don't want, in a big way to rediscover myself.  At some point you get too old for that and I don't want to be in a position where I'm okay with being fucked up constantly and managing, but I also don't want to be in a completely artificial position that I can love because it's artificial and enjoyable and normal, because as much as I love fitting in, I love being genuine.

It has value.  Being genuine.  How far around myself am I supposed to think?  How far around themselves do other people think?  That's the much larger question.  I guess the greater difficulty comes in when I try to measure myself against other points of normalcy and I fail to get a reading.  It breaks my heart.  It really does.  It still does.   Not blaming anyone.  Not finding fault.  It just burns my heart steadily.  Day to day.  Am I that weird?  The answer keeps coming back yes and no.  And everyone gets to go through life, well, the vast majority, with answers to that question.  And I don't.

Maybe I'm not far enough outside myself to answer or maybe I just don't have an answer or maybe the answer is just kind of crappy and I have to deal with it until I die.  I don't know.  I'll still try.  To enjoy what life I got still comin' my way.  What else would you expect me to do.


///RJD2 - "Moonlit Skies"    Sometimes you just want to be right about something.  Just anything.  Just get it and nail it dead on for once.  It stays a luxury you can't afford, all you can do is convince yourself you were close enough.

Seventy One, Count Down to Twenty Seven

Ten days until the clock ticks over. I don't expect anything fantastic. It will be nice to be one again. I don't like being old. It takes too much energy, too much reflection, even the effort to look forward. A time consuming affair, the growing old. The metering. The constant gauging if older is keeping pace with wiser and if wiser is keeping pace with double faults and if ... how many times did I almost die this past iteration?

Let me see if I can recall. Not going into detail, but trying to recall. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Hmmm. Eight. The ninth time is a stretch so I won't count it. It was just before the tenth time, but even that one was more of a panic than a definite thing. So we'll leave it at eight. I believe I did say at one point that if you're not nearly dying more than ten times a year, you're not living hard enough. At the same time, though, that was a much more reckless me. Not careless. There's a difference. Intent is plastic explosive.

Not that I am that much more reckless then. Maybe, more unconscious. I do have some things to take care of in this body before I go skipping off in my next one. The seventy first birthday step. I definitely miscalculated how many birthdays I could pack into one year. Seventy one sounds about right. Well, seventy three, come day zero. Nothing like a midlife crisis at your twenty sixth iteration. Mostly I suppose I am trying to work out a way to celebrate my last iteration in tandem with my last birthday, so it'll take some fine tuning. Some years of fine tuning.

I think this year I'll go for eight day spacing. See how that turns out. I can't remember what happened on my last birthday so I assume nothing. Checking... no results found. Nothing is right. This iteration I want, I want to be a real trip. A real jumping off point to wake face up in a river with nothing but stars, beloved. It's going to be great. It might be my delusions of grandeur. My all knowing, all loving, stupidity with no regard for real or reasonable conclusions. Maybe I'll go get my ears pierced or something. There must be something to mark the occasion this time. Maybe a 27 shot poem. I was thinking about a 54 post facebook status. Maybe both. Because I know no one is taking me out.uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum, <<< thats what my kitten typed. His mark for posterity. I'm not going to die. Because I have a kitten to take care of now until he is at least a cat. So that's good timing. No space for oopsies for a while. So I'm kind of forced to commit to another year. Happily so. Apparently kittens don't like less than 55 degree weather. The little bastard keeps shivering. I can see my breath. Which means I should probably get to bed soon. But anyway, where am I going with all of this? It's been a long time since I had reason to be excited about a new iteration. A lot has changed. A lot has stayed the same. I'm going to continue to reflect on it as the days tick down. Hopefully with more clarity than I am mustering now. Trying hard not to muss new year resolutions and birthday wishes. Trying to aim low and let the reciprocating action of my mental Kalashnikov land me a headshot this time around. Don't force it. Be the leaf. Be the leaf in the wind, and for eulogy's sake don't die before dawn. In terms of goals though, gotta set goals, I have a few for the upcoming set of birthdays. Finish the crappy book I started to write. Make the mistakes I don't need to make when writing the second book. Get laid by people I can remotely care about. Embrace the dark side, and by dark side I mean myself. Consider flaunting it. Take more pictures of myself and distribute accordingly. And take a fantastic drug trip on something, anything, without dying halfway through. And finish the tricky dream hunt. Because that kind of big game hunting blows back and backfires way too easily. Not huge goals. Just real ones. We'll see what happens. ///El-P - "The Dance (Instrumental) ...one more year at the never ending prom

Comrade Super Code

Life has been strange. A lot of big boy decisions. Decisions I haven't had to make before. Like what? Like none of your damn business. It's been difficult. Then again, when has it ever been easy. My dreams have been phenomenal. I've taken again to recording them when I can as I wake up. The first thing I do is grab hold of my phone and press record and just talk, sometimes for hours. Sometimes just to hear a voice that I know is real. Sometimes just because there is so much information brought back from there that I know I am going to lose that I know I will need later. I promise I will get back to serials.

The thought of dying has not been as intense as it used to be. I had a conversation with someone about that specifically. Ten iterations ago I was sixteen. I don't know what I was thinking then. The documentation is largely destroyed. The record really begins to come into it's own when I was 18 and really began to apply myself to writing. That's been the literal paper trail. It hasn't been as intense as it used to be. Probably part of the blunting. Which is fine. I can deal with that missing edge. Sometimes you just have to beat yourself in the head with a bat until things quiet down. The kid hasn't been missing. That's not the problem. The problem is that we're all on the factory floor, guns to each other's heads, knives out, and if you say one word, just one, I will cut you so bad they will need your dental records to put a name to your body.

I just have to get them to work together again. They're all here. Just off on different projects. Different passions asking each other to pass the mashed potatoes, but never directly. It's been great hanging out with them on an individual basis, since they're not talking. We've gotten close. Which is nice. Not together. Which is not nice. Variable occupancy. Not healthy. We do drugs. No we don't. Second hand spray. Collusion. You owe me. I have been managing rage. Easier to do when you don't own standoff weaponry. In my life everyone has lied to me. That is not entirely true. Tomorrow is my 67th birthday in my 26th iteration. There is a certain amount of pride to be had in not joining the under 27 club, I think. A certain amount of disappointment, because joining that club is pretty elite in terms of prodigious production, but I have not done enough or come close to where I want to be in terms of body of work to be happy enough to pull that trigger, and a certain amount of relief because I am sure the majority of under thirty something suicides go unheralded and how sad is that? It's off and on. Wires close enough to arc, but the force of the spark and ignition of air shoves them apart until they work their way close again.

The shadows have been crawling. The little faces in door jambs closed. The weeping man in streaks of dry paint laid to a door decades ago. What the hell. Who made that and why. The shadows have been crawling and blooming for lack of a better word. When I'm not looking. When I'm barely looking. When I'm trying not to look. The world is a war zone. A fantastic warzone. I have been imagining the most fantastic weapons to expedite exterminations. If only I had the staff and the means. An angry boy can dream.

The world cross bridge is haunted. By my father. I have to kill him there. If I ever want to enjoy it again. I've had to rip chord out of there more times than I would like to admit in the last seven days and I can't kill him here. Not yet anyway. Still too much to do. He will pay though. Eventually. Matters of course and convenience. There was a word I was supposed to look up and I didn't. It's going to bother. 24 years of compensation. I just have to make sure I don't take it out on the people I love.

I gave women a pretty hard rap sheet yesterday. And I'm sorry for that. Not because it wasn't true, but because it came across so chopping blocked. There's no vendetta. Probably a lot of buried issues with my mother. They come up as I dig into the ground. Trying hard to not be found. I'm not going to go on a serial spree of slaughtering women to make myself feel better about myself. The shadows have been crawling. Actually moving. I don't know what to do about that. If there is anything I can do about that.I had this dream where darkness poured out of light fixtures like little waterfalls and it was gorgeous until the shadows grew so high people started to drown and I looked for days and couldn't find the switch to turn them off. Ghostly swims. Turning off the lights and trying hard not to look back into the rooms and believe there really is nothing there more than what was when the switch turned the other way. The freedom. It's been strange.

Where the hard stops start. Toxic involvements. I do have to clean up the circuitry at some point. My willingness to engage has been the source of certain difficulties. What happened to your face? I can't say, honestly. If I told you, I would sound crazy. And then you wouldn't want me around at all. I swear it's all above board. My boards. Not yours. Your square one, your nothing is different from mine. Maybe connected on some flattened levels. When you pick through them with zero and one forensics. I thought maybe if I scratched my ear hard enough I could pick my brain. No luck. We had this dream, right? About a house made out of cardboard and dried leaves.

I was wondering, you know, if you knew where I'd been. I have this sneaking suspicion someone's been lying to me, but I don't know who. Many loves of the dragon. Maybe I should get a kitten. At some point. I need to draw more. Now that I have the time to. The time to sleep dive almost at will. It's going to be amazing. I'll try to take notes better than I have. I've been gone for some time, but I'm back now. Bolting through space. Hell hound on a thin leash and learning boundaries the while. Dog bites man and man bites dog and dog bites dog and man bites man. And everybody wishes sweet dreams into your head as though there isn't fire filling the coils of your bed.


/// Starkey - "Eris" stoop sitter blues high

Time Rides Again

My 18th birthday is tomorrow.

I am two months and 28 days into my 26th iteration.

At maximum effort it will take approximately six more months to save $1000.

Eight days off of chemical mediation.

It has been 12 days since I felt genuine happiness.

20 hours since I last fantasized about cutting someone's face off and eating it.

Twelve hours since I last put something in my mouth that was food.

Two days since I had a dream about flying.

Five hours since I heard crying and could not find the source.

Twenty six hours since I crossed the bridge last.

Ten hours and forty minutes since I felt adrenaline course through me, knifing through traffic.

Sixteen hours since I discovered my downstairs neighbors are the only white people in my building.

Thirty hours and sixteen minutes since the upstairs neighbors were evicted into a thunderstorm.

One year and nine months since I last had sex.

Six months and twenty days since I declared I would not be denied a full time job.

110 days and 14 hours since I started a still undelivered gift for a friend.

24 hours since I found out temp labor is essentially a scam for those over 21.

16 days since I dislocated my knee and broke a tooth.

Fifty three days since I found and did not hang card paper to spray paint.

98 minutes since I opened a book and read for fun.

14 minutes since I bruised my knuckles.

4 minutes since I smiled last.

20 seconds since I entertained my dream of life minus all the fucking bullshit that tears time away from us like sickles to sheep bellies and scatters it confetti and demands you collect it all up again before taking another step forward, or die.

5 seconds since I wished I could go back to sleep and wake with no memory of a single thing from my past again.

Too long since I've been back here. It's a broken watch. In the sense that the watch keeper does so in a broken way. Hello world, the computer says. You won't betray me too, I ask. I would never, the computer says. I am only an epitaph in your pen and thus true well beyond the worm food of you. Awww, come here, I say. Hug. Drop lights. And scene.


///The Future Sound of London - "Dirty Shadows" Sometimes the shadows on the walls crawl on your skin and claw their way in and trace the bends and levies to your stem and throttle you cold to the land of neversleep.

Old and News and Birthdays and Writer's Bowel Abstraction

May 22nd was my 7 year old birthday. My next birthday is coming up on the 27th. I'm gonna be 8 years old. Should be fun. Assuming I will live to experience 73 iterations of my life, I've broken up each iteration into 73 birthdays because I am essentially living a full life through each iteration from reconception to ultimate system failure so I will have a birthday every five days culminating with my death next year on the 21st of April at midnight and my reboot on the 22nd into my 27th iteration of life. So really, I guess the 27th will be star date M.26.8.Y-P221A or something.

I wonder if leaving the country is like entering a parallel universe.

I don't know what I'm going to do for my eighth birthday. Probably nothing. Nothing and videogames. Satisfaction and fulfillment fired directly into the vein and straight to the brain stem. Honestly 73 is probably a bit of a reach. I don't very well expect to land within twenty years of that, but I might as well keep even the unlikely within my model because it does happen.

Recently I've been culling through some of my old complete short stories to see which ones I want to feature on Bits and what I've realized is that some of my old stuff is dreadful. Which is good. I mean abortions are never fun, but sometimes they need to happen and sometimes they don't happen and you have to live with the outcome for better and worse.

In writing, I feel, it's not good to have too many abortions. Eventually you've got to gut it out and finish and seal the deal. I don't think I've ever typed seal the deal. What an odd collection of letters. Visually I think it's the ea's that are looking funny and making me smile to look at them. But anyway, in writing if you are constantly quitting mid-project or mid-composition you'll eventually find yourself staring at a mountain of unfinished work that you know is bad and you'll find it very difficult to pick through for the good pieces that might work in other things because it is a hugely tangled mess of half and full formed ideas.

At least when you gut it out and finish your composition or your project it is all more or less there in front of you in some sort of organized fashion with a start, a middle, and an end and you can, if you so choose, open it up and page through it and find out what's working and what isn't working and what went off the tracks and what sounds too much like X and Y and Z and what should be moved to where and then, after all of that happens, you can decide that "hey maybe this isn't worth opening ever again" and then you can move on with confidence.

That's probably one of the biggest reasons to not abort mid project. The ability to finish is reason two and that is something that I think artist should always cultivate. You should always want to finish and want to get that feeling of completion, regardless of the projects caliber, and you should know what that feeling tastes like when it hits you. You should develop a predilection for the taste of finishing. The number one reason, though, is to be able to have a whole something to look at and be able to close it and shelve it and know, de facto, that you did your due diligence on the idea and it didn't pan out and now you can move on to something different or take another approach at the idea with full confidence that you left nothing to waste and rot and get lost in a junk bin never to be seen again and more important than you first imagined.

Going through some of my old stuff has been a lot reason number one. More than I expected. I feel like that means I've either leveled up in my skill and analytical ability or have taken (without my knowledge) a new creative direction. Or maybe my voice is just taking on more definition and I'm learning what I can say well and what I have trouble expressing and exploring in my fiction and poetry. I think it's a mix, and I don't know the exact details of the tonic, but my ego wants to say "it's cuz yer awesome, d00d!!!" but I know I haven't been doing this long enough to feel comfortable saying that about anything I do. I think the only thing I am capable of producing that I can confidently say I'm awesome at is burps. Maybe turds. Yeah, poops too. I'm pretty good at that.

Which, brings me to something else because I don't want to spend another word of our time on pooping. I discovered that I developed a writer's block. It took about a week to really feel it out. For me, writer's block doesn't descend in a day, but it's like picking up a pen to write down your grocery list or maybe your to do list each morning and finding the pen a little drier and a little drier until your scratching the words into the paper with a dead pen until you've finally torn your pad to shreds and you've got nothing but your ashy skin to try and etch things on and its too painful and time consuming to even bother so you stop bothering altogether. I realized I'd stopped writing my poetry altogether and I spent most of yesterday night at work trying to diagnose the quitting.

Turns out I'd made myself sick of abstraction. Sick of the expression of abstraction. The whole idea about abstraction is that it is difficult to express in concrete terms. So, lo and behold, the difficulty of expressing it in concrete terms translates with high fidelity to writing about it and takes a disproportionately large amount of mental work to cut into and reveal it in the beautiful simple jagged symmetry and music of poetic words and that mountain of effort and work and finishing the unfinished and polishing the dun metal of impotent machinery and ideas mounted and mounted and mounted until I mentally tore up my paper, snapped my pen in half, and walked away from it without even realizing it was happening until I walked on to my idea foundry and saw every single work station was empty and the mills were collected dust and cobwebs.

The solution, you ask? So simple. Work on the concrete. No more talking about feelings and emotions and human complexities and quirks. Talk about places, things, peoples faces and bodies, foods, actions, and mechanisms. Talk about real histories and experiences and tastes and smells. It can be burdensome to define the abstract so even in expressing the expressible, avoid abstractions that demand abstract explanation. Take the trappings away and there will be no traps and words will flow again and you can get back to eating ideas and feeding your head knowing your stomach isn't bloated with dead ones you haven't passed.

I do believe I am done with the old stories I will feature. Old arrays of skeletons and pelts and antlers I've already bagged and shown off in grainy black and whites and time stamped digital camera prints. Time to start in swinging the ax and hammer and pounding the chisel and pulling the trigger and skinning and big game hunting the new ideas that have been lurking. Time to start talking to the new people that have arrived and sat waiting, some patiently, some quietly, some not. There are perhaps a handful of old ones left to cut and trim up and in some cases flesh out and disambiguate for show, but by and large it's time to get started exclusively on the new. I did that with Auralport and good God was it a great feeling to go there to compose knowing full well that there was nothing else in the parts bin to go through and it was all gonna be fresh squeezed. Took me forever to get over the self consciousness of showing things and saying "yep, I made that" because you can never know if people like it or hate it or just see it and say "interesting" or if people don't see it at all, and I'm just now starting to get that feeling with Bits, but it's a feeling with two sides. Part apprehension at the opening of yourself to judgement and knowing someone is going to say "wow that's crap and I wasted my time" and part elation and exhilaration of creative expression and knowing that even if no one says to themselves "that was neat" you still get the pleasure of knowing you fucking did something and it turned out as good as you hoped it would.

I guess the other thing about it is knowing every hour you spend working on it is an hour you've spent getting better at something you love. Which is why I need a new job. A job that I can get better at every day I'm there and not in the sense of "dear God, this is the best filing clerk in the world. He has been filing for so long that he can file the letter A faster than any man living or dead" or "dear God this is the best cashier ever, he's been counting out change for so long he can do it just by feeling the weight of the mixed coins." I mean something that I can literally learn more about every single day because there is actually more to learn and master and not just continue to work and rework and go over the same shit until it's muscle memory in your brain.

Also want to apologize. I used literally in a non literal sense recently and it did not escape me, I was just being lazy. Laziness sucks. No one wins.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I know some of what makes it out of my head is good at the time until I reread it months later and in the context of my expanded skill set and mental library can see it's not so stellar. I'm learning. Promise.


///Bjork - "Oceania (featuring Kelis)" I did not know this existed until today. I love Kelis. I love Bjork. Eargasm. This version is so different from the one on the album. Like night and day and then midway through you feel the epiphany you first struck as a kid when for the first time you were awake to see one turn into the other and the vastness of space became real.