An Evening With A Friend and Learning What Depression Is

Sitting on a cup cushion chair and listening to.  Days later I understand that.  I understand better that my schizophrenia will run parallel to depression at points and expecting some sort of  bipolar snap to happen and coming back to them to poke them with a "what's wrong" is no way forward.  That's not how it works.  Not even close.  Shadow mimicry.

I have wondered the best way of going about describing the it that governs me.  Is this what you want?  Locked.  Tell me now!  I am afraid that if I do I will be interned again.  I feel small.  I feel frightened.  What is wrong with us?  I want to be bipolar.  I want to be depressed.  I want to be something else without lying about what I am.  Why can't it be that way?  I feel like garbage saying that, knowing the tolls of those pains from meeting them.  The pissing contest cesspool.  The grass is always greener.  Fukkoff.  Listening to each word and understanding dawning, the same loathing and disappointment and anger that froths inside me frothed and boils inside them too (in different ways); similar hiding places and outdoor faces are incorporated to further life.  The panic attacks are the same.

Whenever I talk about it, be the occasion among friends or sibs or to you, I immediately feel defective.  A waste of your time.  How is it you've navigated 32 years of life [28 of them with knowing enough junk to not get run over by a thing called a car out of pure ignorance (22 of them with knowing enough junk to not get run over by a thing called a car out of negligence)] and still fight with normality?  Well, if I knew, I'd put an end to it.

What we are does not need vivisection to be confirmed.  The most frustrating part is being forced to bridge gaps and justify my misgivings and "quirks."

Reality checks and tests.  I don't understand.  Negative!  Negative!  Negative!  Through study, I know how people are supposed to feel when things happen.  That's why I enjoy semaphore so much.  It helps me feel like I am a person too, regardless of what actually is.

Undamaged or compromised, I envy the feeling and find their company saturated and wonderful.  It is selfish.  It is not selfish.  Listening to a good friend helped me learn what actual depression is and what it costs each day.  Listening to a good friend helped me learn the gender multiplier and its complications and callousness.  Between light hearted turns of phrase and spikes of imagination, I grew to understand the true differences between us and I learned more than I ever thought I'd need to know about what that prison is like.  I hope I expressed what the view from inside my bars looks like too.

I am so glad I have the chance to compose this.  I'll try and encapsulate it in a more condensed form:

I try to only project positive.  No I don't LOL.  Can shoot that down in a heartbeat.  I must laugh out loud.  I cannot set the world on fire.  I certainly, however, do not try to project only positive.  The dives are there for the asking.  I do not suffer in silence.  My physical pain tolerance has not kept pace with my mental pain tolerance and that's okay.  I enjoy listening.  It helps me feel more safe and more sane.

I am running.

I am afraid.

The dissimilarities are glaring now.  Punishing heft of ocean swell.  A fair mistake to make?  In speaking with her, traveling the star systems made wonderful sense.  Collapsing interpersonal nonsense into two dimensions, we existed and could map one another in three.  It's kind of weird, bare with me.  Here we go:

For some time, several months, I'd convinced myself I was predominantly bipolar.  Cycling on and off and on and off in stints.  If I could just figure out the timing, I could use it to approach "normal".  Ride with it.  Go with it.  Do not fight it.  Above all, do not try to force the head spaces function and be aware of its gear before you interact with anyone.  I charted up many conversations about mania and engaged in shared tales of its absence in attempts to better understand its dimensions and myself and the loved ones I was engaging with.

Along those veins it became clearer and clearer that I did not know what I thought I knew about them.  What I thought I knew about her.   What I thought I knew about him.  Some beliefs stood pat, many were restructured.  Some were reinforced.  I am susceptible to a high and low line, but the thread that flows through all points on the chart is my schizophrenia.  The simplest and most base way to gauge who I am underneath the layer of my consciousness and awareness is that.  My "it." For her, it is depression.  The hard coded piece of yourself that can not be changed.  That I enjoyed the most about speaking with her is laughing about everyday bullshit.  Seeing the ledge and taking casual portraits for one-another at the edge of the world.  I've known highs and I've known lows, but I've never had to know the tar ocean depression.  I've been and am manic, I've been and am depressed, truth be tolled, I am just schizophrenic. The fabulous shock of the reminder that you are just as much and deserving to be part of the human race as the "normals" is a spark.

I am glad that our worlds have collided.  I will attempt to boil this down later.  I don't have to do this alone.

We are.

We still don't know what our conversion rate is.  We still have no explanation for why we burn so violently and brilliantly and sleeplessly and the only consolation is watching the sun cross the horizon line and light up the atmosphere like a pool of gasoline and scream and sing and howl to it from the highest ground we can find, should we be caught outdoors.  I don't know why.

We are.

I want to heal.  I want to burn. I am understanding depression with greater accuracy than I ever have before.  I am understanding a new kind of helplessness that I've never sensed before in its entirety.  Seeing more of its true scope is deafening and tuning at once.




///there is no replacement for spending time and sharing experience.   The world will never be ready for the damaged.  Us damaged don't have to fight world war prime alone, though.   You do not have to either.  You don't have to either.  Don't understand; do listen.

///El-P & Killer Mike - "Legend Has It"

Small Victories

Of course I can't help asking myself "what's the point?"  A lot of times I have to remind myself to live life for myself.  Do it for you.  Sure it would be nice to justify your existence on the basis that someone else needs you, like a kid, or dying family member, or very close friend, or lover, but they'll move on or move away (or die) or meet someone even nearer and dearer and that's okay.  Do it for you.

Sure, sometimes it's difficult to love yourself.  Sometimes it is even more difficult to care about yourself because it feels selfish.  No one is going to do it for you.  When we look in the mirror and laugh with ourselves at how strange we are and ask who would want to live with that, the answer is right there: we would!  Do it for you.  It doesn't mean you don't care about anyone else, or couldn't give a damn if society and civilization as we knew it fell apart.  It doesn't mean that we don't empathize and sympathize with oppressed peoples and sufferers of injustices and the caged subsets of this country and all the messed up things happening to them.  It doesn't mean we are wholly callous and willing to say "screw them, I got mine, I'm fine."  Mind that you can't build your life around someone else's fight.  You'll wear down faster than a clutch plate made of wax and find yourself torn apart at your seams every single day.  Give a damn, but give a damn about yourself too.

Lying on the ground, having spent the last of my saved money on a replacement leaf spring hanger for the one that rotted out on my truck (that I will have to saw off since it's riveted to the frame and I can't afford to pay a mechanic regardless), staring up at my ceiling fan I was thinking "what's the point of saving money if it vanishes every few months whenever something bad happens."  The next day, I opened my fists, put my hands behind my head, watching the fan blades go, and it occurred to me that there has been an improvement through the years.  It used to be living paycheck to paycheck and unable to afford food.  Just beans and rice and beans and rice and beans and hotdogs and beans and chicken and rice and hotdogs and PB and J.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, but able to afford better food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, and not having to worry about food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, not having to worry about food, and being able to afford auto insurance.  Then paycheck to paycheck, no food worries, auto insurance, and able to save a little.  Now it's crisis to crisis, no food worries, and auto insurance.  Sure, it's better than paycheck to paycheck and not as good as being able to save for the future in a meaningful way, but life is decent between crisis level events (like having to empty your savings account to pay for bandages or truck parts and specialized tools or new sneakers because the soles fell off your old ones or a car battery).  Small victories, ya know?

It kind of goes back to my ethos behind writing once I realized the industry is basically geared to be self congratulatory in some kind of messed up ways that make any sort of climb outside the construct largely an exercise in blind luck and volume: just do it for you.   What's the point if no one will ever read it, if no one likes it, if it's never impactful, recognized, or coherent.  Do it for you, care about its pursuit because you do.  That's all you really need.

Of course, I'll forget this answer in time.  Toss and turn about the meaning of love, and lost relationships doomed to fail anyway.  I'll slip into self loathing.  The little voices that are easy to ignore when life is fun and in balance will turn into roars and screams and shouts and flying sparks "kill yourself! kill yourself! kill yourself!" and I'll drown them out with music until I can't play music loud enough and I walk out into the woods and scream at the trees "what is the point!  I can't succeed at anything long enough to make anyone's lives better or build a family of my own!"  Then I'll remember, living for other people is not what we're built for.  We are built to be alone, to live alone, to love alone, to ride alone.  Can we live with others?  Sure.  We won't succeed for long, but it's possible, we've seen it, but never expect much from that thread of being.  It hasn't, and may never develop within you.

Do it for you.  Part of me still remembers my cartographer's mandate.  Do it for you and because someone else may be seeing and going through the years you've seen for the first time and may be just as bewildered as you were.  "If only there were some sort of mapular object to help me know what may be coming next."  Most of all, the point is, don't waste your time trying to measure yourself on other people's scales at every turn.  A successful day for some is a nice date, or driving a few hours to see a buddy, or dinner with their spouse, or closing a deal, or a raise, or whatever makes their white picket lawn and dog.  For now, for you, it's taking care of your job, exploring some ideas, taking care of you, having a few laughs, and not killing yourself and that is just fine.  Don't forget that.  Do it for you.




///Phonat - "Ghetto Burnin (Mmmathias Mix)

Summer Days Are Beautiful

Summer days are beautiful.  Walk around in the grass that probably should have been cut yesterday and feel how fluffy and wet it is before the sun dries it out.  Take time away from watering the garden to blow a bubble of mist around you and spin yourself around to see the rainbow halo around your waist.  The birds are off on their errands.  By now you do not hear their 5:30 A.M. alarm, but you will miss it a lot when it is gone and cold water chills instead of refreshes.

Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin.  Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you.  Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more.  A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.

I am just like you, though we are different.  Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning.  Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.

Though we are different.  The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes.  Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.

It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what?  I don't know.  I don't know what is next.  I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired.  That sweet sweet 12k paycheck.  It is a joke.  At 30?  Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?

After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.

I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future.  That's for fun.  My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy.  It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in.  I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize.  I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person.  When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.

The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been.  I had to think very hard.  Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.

After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years.  I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head."  After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do.  It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do.   Auto-mechanic.

The realization dawned on me.  All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles.  The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms.  The smiles on folks faces.  The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions.  The solitude.  All there.  After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades.  I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.

Thirty years old and getting no younger.  A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point.  I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world.  You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise.  Worry about what comes next in the stars.  I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation.  With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck."  So what?  One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been.  Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links.  Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.

It tastes different doesn't it.  Oh it does!  When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month."  I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation.  I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction.  Will I ever make living money?  Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water?  Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating?  I have to find out.

Summer days are so beautiful.  Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful.  Chew a dandelion stem.  As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors.  The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river.  Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace.  It is pretending to sleep.  T-shirts almost dry.  The garden dirt probably is too.  One more go 'round.  It is going to be a hot one today.




///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"

A Very Confused Moment

Confuzzlry.   It's not bad, but it's not good either.  I took my truck for a routine fill up.  I've yet to put a full tank in her and I thought the day might be the day to push the needle full to "F".  It was not the day.

Traffic was terrible and all of the legal side routes were taken and you can't hop curbs no matter your clearance level.  I stared at the curbs.  My head up display showed the alternate route and I had to keep pressing cancel, breathe easy, and listen to radio.  Clutch out.  Clutch in.  Clutch out.  Clutch in.  Clutch out.   Oh, wait!  No, nothing moving.   Clutch out.  Clutch out.  It was not my day to be had and I was not going to be had on this day.  No sir.  No thanks.  I'll wait.

Get to the pumps and every stall is taken and my baby is thirsty as hell.  Even I can taste it.  I set it to hover mode and blocked all ways of ingress and egress.  Except one.  Sure enough that stall cleared out and I took two glances and shot the gap backwards.  Full reverse!  Aye aye, captain.  I can't hear you!  Aye aye, captain!

Straight into the path of a little rabbit car.  We had a face to mirror to windshield to face show down.  One of the times when having a giant rusty hook hitch bolted to your truck frame helps.  It's that extra incentive to "do you really want this through the hood of your car?"  I slipped her in to the open stall, easy as cake.  Or pie.  Take your pick.  The point is, if you talk to her well, the battleship has hunter killer maneuverability.  You have to suss it out though.  And know her limits.

Gassing up, my eyes went upward too.  I started to day dream while fueling the tank and I really wished for rain or at least snow, but I'll settle for rain.  I heard it.  Rattle rattle rattle asphalt rattle and I smiled very wide.  And then I noticed that it was not raining.  The woman on the other side of the pump was staring at me.  I smiled and winked back.  She kept staring.

That's when I realized gasoline was pouring all over the side of the truck and collecting in a great pool beneath my feet.  "Oh?"  is what I said.  It kept pouring.  I looked at her and she wasn't staring anymore.  I looked at the sky and it was in fact not raining.  I looked at the front tank's hatch and it was indeed pouring gasoline everywhere beginning six dollars ago.

I cut the feed and adjusted the nozzle and gasket.  Perfect pour.  She started drinking real well with no spills.  I cast my eyes around to see who else saw and then I realized everybody gets one.  Two fudges in five years is not bad.  It's not good, but it's not bad either.

How'd you die?  Freak gasoline fight accident.  I couldn't help chuckling while I pulled away.  A good horse is a happy horse.  The things I do for you, truck.  You owe me one.

The cockpit reeks of gasoline now.  No shoes in the house!




///Miss Kittin - "Happy Violentine"  .... do you like me [y] [n].  my truck gets moody.  so do i.  red aura'd capital underscore night terrors

The Difficulty With Plural Being

There is a stark difficulty that faces harsh light when existing on multiple planes, the first being sudden hunger and damn near undeniable sleepiness that strikes at inopportune hours.  You can't remember with reliable accuracy the last time you ate, so you make up stories to keep the rest of the story in line.  Sometimes, though, they're accurate memories of eating denied with the fullsomeness of passion that denotes some kind of dedication to the farce and the enforced and necessary truth.

Social media contributes to the complication, making sign posts more difficult to spot, but they are there.  Multiple accounts in multiple names.  A multiplying outlet of personas allowing for better and more extensive development of those personas.  When does it operate to a fault?  Active contribution toward managing split personalities becoming a game of musical chairs?

Limit the number of chairs?  Add definition and resolution?  Or take the pills.  Fastidious compartmentalization.  And further compartmentalization and specialization.  To be called upon at will or at least with some prefabrication, editing, summoning, and purpose, because that is the difference between the ill and the capable.  The ability to select, observe, compensate, and respond in a reasonable and human fashion.

Everyone is plural, their "plural" being unanimous instead of fractured.

What happens when dominance is completely unpredictable, highly divided, and deeply embattled one against the other and prone, all the while, toward miscommunication?  Are there special exceptions?  Is there an "out"?  When do you have to press the hand dealt and keep the game going, come whatever consequences, and when do you have the right to put the cards down and say "this is what is here, they add up to nonsense in terms of what the rules of the game dictate, and I do not want to play with them, have no heart in them, and would like to be dealt a new set or at least counted out of this particular round, but not necessarily the game."

I think the long sentence is probably the grounds for the answer.  No matter how difficult or nonsensical the answer seems to me, the majority is fairly straightforward and a lot easier to comprehend.  It does not hurt that they are alike too.  I think that is one of the things that continues to vex me.




///The Echo Friendly - "Same Mistakes"

The "Like" Policy (i dream in your actual space)

From when you are a little kid 'til you get to be of age or at least to a point where your outcomes become a direct, a more direct, result of your actions and inactions by turns, you are told to chase your dreams.

Some of those dreams happen to be being well adjusted enough to enjoy those social gatherings and incidents and accidents on a level a little more impactful than the entry fee of peace and goodwill.  It happens.  Nothing to write home about, though.  It's about getting into gear from a dead stop and that's fine.  Do not blow the stop sign.  Blow the stop sign once and you can skate.  Blow it twice; shame on you.  Blow it thrice and you're asking for trouble.  Blow it every single time you come in from the outlands and you're begging for trouble.

Some of those dreams do happen to be some of the things that are shared.  "Why do you like damn near everything?"  I don't really care about over liking and this is the last time I will bring up facebook.

There is a policy.  There is a set of rules.  There is a governing structure to many things that I participate in because there has to be.  If I screw up the policy, things grow increasingly more tangled in a show of one up, also it becomes increasingly difficult to quantify what a like is.  Hence, laughter comments.

It's really not that complicated.  It's all in good fun.  I know the chances we may actually hang out are slim to nary and that's cool.  I couldn't eat you in person for more than a few hours at a step and you myself neither.  And that's alright.  I like a lot of things.  That's why that word exists.  You can't love everything.  Or can you?  What if there was a love button?  That would completely wreck up some relationships.  The concept of a shared planet is very pleasing.  If I can live vicarious through you, your efforts, and your experiences and photographs and blitzes of wisdom, don't fault me.  I'm not stalking you.  I am stalking your food sometimes.  For the most part, I'm simply enjoying an aspect of life that I aspire to, and if there is fault in that "like" click go die.

It's fine to like a lot of things.  Life is so incredibly multidimensional and layered and there is no way to take it all in with one lens.  Pardon my use of the compound camera.  If you like nothing there is probably something seriously wrong with you and godspeed dealing with those issues.

Take time to have fun.  Like many things.  Enjoy many things.  Consume (obviously not at all costs) at some cost and feel good about it because the planet is a shared home and last I checked the stars are still light years away so don't pack bags and make extensive plans for a day trip just yet.  Take it light.  Take it on the heels.  And always bring a towel.  You never know when it may come in handy.

Whatever your policy is, do not be afraid to enjoy or upset about a giggle taken from you by force.

They meant well.

Also, I am stalking you, but just a little. In the same way a creature intelligent observes, studies, and dissects another.



///Bushwacka - "The Egyptian"  There's just one thing that I want you to do.

Redrum and Other Origins and Valuation

Is it wildly addictive, yeah of course.   Does it change you?  No not really.  There's a certain amount of disappointment that comes with it.  A certain amount of asking yourself questions that persist despite the time of day.  It's a pretty weird thing.  A confluence of circumstance and luck so thick I can talk about it now almost a year removed.   Can you imagine sitting on anything for a year?

I tried to talk to my friend about it and she pretty much shut me out.  That sucks.  I did not anticipate at all how I would be re evaluated.  That part of it has been hard to parse and it really has been across the board with each person I've shared it with, chosen to share it with.  It's an odd difficulty but I can understand the rejection.  I can understand it, but I don't have to accept it, I would like to think.

Do I feel better?  Not really.  Not as good as I thought I'd feel.  Kind of reminds me of paint snuffling. Very short lived and very gorgeous and very forgettable, but so far away from everything enjoyable on a common basis.  A rare sadness that presents some unforgettable joy.  It's difficult to talk about.  Because I know there are people missing her and all that.  It's difficult to relate because on top of that there is the knowledge of the missing and maybe that's why I don't sleep so good these last years.  Getting away without really getting away (heart in the floor kinda shit except ...)

The most difficult thing has been trying to relate this story without who I relate it to drastically reevaluating who I am as a person.  I'm still the same.  What's so difficult to understand about needing and finding practice?  I understand that I am a very strange and enchanted boy and eventually luck runs out, but how does that mean love evaporates?  Or should evaporate?  How come once suddenly doesn't mean enough?  I could understand trust lost.  I could understand that.  Total abandonment still stymies me.  I don't care what you did or what you do.  If I love you I love you.  That's it.  Where it starts and ends I guess.  I think that's all I wanted in return.  That's all.  Step by stepped is what I got.  Oh well.  let's explore more.  It's a big world and I've a small heart and there's a hell of a lot of music along the way.  we'll see where this goes, but honestly i want more comedy.  I don't think that's too much to ask.  Trying to increase my value to others, you know?   It is the first and last time I'll talk about it, so enjoy.

The Seatbelts - "Rain"  -  its a strange balance. even to me.  the worst being that i dont know its been struck yet.  knowing how i feel afterward i will try, but i cannot promise anything and i never will.

T minus two

T minus two.  My knuckles are throbbing, but feeling my pulse and not feeling it inside my ears like standing on railroad ties and hearing the rails twang in the New York tubes is pretty nice.  Kind of reminds me of the travel of time.  Well, not kind of, it definitely does.  Tracking time has always been a weak point of mine.  Part of why I like to wear my keys where I can hear them jingle.  It reminds me that I'm not dreaming and what is happening is real.  You get used to tracking time properly, and then the uses you've made of common things become common place and you start to lose it.  Start to lose tracking.

Part of why one of the best gifts I ever received was a watch that set itself.  I never wear a watch in my dreams.  Part of how I know I'm dreaming.  Part of why I get so unsettled when I don't have it.  Endless wrist rubbing.  Still driving back from the depths of space, but making good time.  That's all I can really ask of myself.  Crisis averted. Not really.  Postponed.  Defaulted?  I don't know what the hell the word is.  All I know is that the boards went up red and one by one the status lights and checks are coming back green and blinking yellow and I'm not dead.

Coming back in touch with reality.  Tuning down the squelch that ran far enough out of control to induce panic. I had a dream that I could remember.  It was an odd reassurance.  The absence of breath snatching night terror.  Sleeping without sweating.  I'm learning again how to let go.  The reemergence of the bridge and the division of real and manufacture.  How to converse and relate.  Even though I am still refusing conversation beyond essentials.  I am forcing myself to do it.  Because without it, people eventually forget you.  I can and do spend days without actually talking.   I used to have fairly corrupted speech patterns.  Hearing sentences try to come out of my mouth was offensive to my own ears.  Still is sometimes.  Because I know I can be so much clearer on paper.  That and conversation was such a weapon so often used against me growing up.  I never much liked it.  I guess if I had my way everyone would have their vocal chords cut out of them at birth and we would all speak through written word.

But I don't have my way.  And it's not a bad thing.  I am a minority intelligence. Trapped in a minority format.  Cased in a pretty decent body.  I've got that going for me.  Can't complain on that front.  I could use an extra few inches of height though.  Went to get a new license before my birthday and current one expired and the woman at the motor vehicle administration desk asked me if I was still 5'10".  I thought: yes, you feckless drawn on eyebrowed 60 year old duffle of a snootch!  Gotta work on my height complex.  Because there was no way in hell any stranger deserves that sort of first response over an honest question.  What I said was:  yep, still short as hell.  She laughed.  I was glad I made the right choice on that one.

I stepped out into the alleyway beside my house and the sun was oppressive.  My eyes have been unprepared for bright days for as long as I can remember.  When I look directly at the sky it feels like it vibrates my skull.  When I was younger, the winter sky was the worst to suck into my sockets.  It literally hurt to look up against a flat noon overcast.  It hurt to look near it.  You get used to the pain though.  And then you spend a few days indoors and the pain takes your breath away.  

I don't hate the daytime.  I know it's necessary.  My skin feels better after a good sun drenching.  Mechanically, I operate better with higher fidelity in my eye reads to mind writes.  Fewer hallucinations, sometimes, but not a tight enough correlation to make me believe the two are connected, but enough in common to at least give it a shot on the regular.  And then, sometimes, I just hate being seen.  Sometimes I think, people simply knowing someone like me exists is a burdensome thought they'd probably not entertain if they didn't have to.  I suppose I wouldn't if I had my way.  But who ever really does.

Something smells like cloves around here and I have no idea what.

I started a serial, but have yet to publish it.  A bad beginning.  There is a massive disconnect between my ability to express the images I want to express and the images I am envisioning that I want to express.  I'm thinking I will do it anyway and learn as I go.  Not like I'm getting into a graduate program in my lifetime.  Aw don't say that?  Just being pragmatic so I don't waste energy pining for nonsense.  My chances are probably somewhere in the atmosphere of spaceman and race car driver by now.  So I'm just going to continue to try to develop on my own.  Can't really ask for more, and with everything flaming out so unpredictably, why would you or I really want more?  You can't get in trouble if you're asleep.  You can't fail out of school if you're not in.  You can't crash a motorcycle into a freight train if you don't own one.  However, you can die in space, without ever once going to space camp.  That is a fact.  Write that one down.  There will be a test.  At some point.

The good thing, probably the best thing, about damaging yourself without ruining yourself is that it makes it impossible to damage yourself again, without maximum effort and eating one hell of a lot more pain, until you've healed.  The down side is you now know where the line used to be and can take it a little farther.  Sometimes a lot farther.  The up side of knowing where the line lies is knowing how to skirt it and test it again without making the same mistakes (e.g. whatever doesn't kill you makes you more than you were).  That is the usual application for me.  It's not always expanding limits.  Sometimes it's just learning the rules that govern your unique physiology.  Your unfortunate mind body marriage.

Staring into the barrel of another alley morning.  It burns, but we deal.  You can't hide from the sun forever and the world is calling.  I am looking forward to 27.  I hope 27 is looking forward to me with eyes just as hard.  Just as star drowned.  Just as ready.  If you want to avoid serious injury, you have to pull the knife almost as hard, but no harder, than you push.


///Deadmau5 - "One Trick Pony"  

Fruits of a Labor and Where We Left the Bodies

I drew some pictures for you. I like the colors. I was in a kind of bloody soil mood and the taste was not to be denied so I didn't.

I don't know what to say today. It happens. I don't really know what I'm thinking tonight either, but I'm doing it with clothes on. Oh there it is. Found what I was asking for. There really is a certain security in sleeping with clothes on. It's a completely different quality of sleep. I feel a real security in the closeness of the clothing that at the same time can grow to be entrapping. Whatever. That's kind of stupid. When I sleep with clothes on I get hotter and hotter and then my dreamworld flies seriously out of whack and scary things happen in there and, not that I've been able to exercise control over the individuals and things that happen, but what security I do feel in the reality of the landscape dissolves into chaos.

Across the bridge of consciousness, the ground is just as firm and even more comforting in its expansiveness and unrestricted isness. Much more so than here. I prefer to be there. So when things get screwed up there by what happens here it becomes particular upsetting. Especially when the solution is as easy as taking off my pajamas and going back to sleep. Because the only limitation on the place is that I can't be there forever, I can't get stuck there like I get stuck here, its particularly aggravating to end up wasting valuable time. Its enraging.

At any rate, the public transportation there is strange. Not really screwy as much as it is that things come and go on the subway system that I sometimes prefer not to meet or see. Usually everyone minds there own business. I never used the trains there by myself because whenever I do I end up getting lost. Just the other day I spent the entire time I was there lost in the subway system. At one point I got so sick of trying to get the right train I climbed down off of the platform and decided to walk it and I don't know if those trains run at the speed of sound or what, but it took me five hours to walk between train stops and then, of course, by the time I got back to the stop I wanted near the apartment complexes I nearly get my legs cut off by the train I was tired of waiting for. I think that's really my only complaint about the place.

I was thinking about the best way to burn down a house with the people inside it without giving them a way out. It would take a lot of effort. It wouldn't be easy for the logistics of a floor plan and unless they were stone asleep they would probably hear you hoofing around in the grass with your arson kit and caboodle. Definitely low on the list of ways to solve problems.

We're altogether now and I'm happy for that. I hope it lasts forever, but I know it won't. Actually that's not even true. I don't hope it lasts forever. It just felt like the right thing to say to express the glowing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I know things have died up there in my head. But when they die they don't get buried. There's no cemetery up there. I should probably take care of that at some point. I wonder if that's the thing. When you finally die it's because your head is full of bodies and there's no more space for anything else to live. The casualties, relationships, dreams, efforts, ideas, whatever, all the bullshit that mattered to you and no one else that no one, including you, could resurrect with Dr. Frank and a million volts of Earth's pulse pile up and some people bury them one by one and some people have to bury them in mass graves, but they're there. I'm just glad they don't talk too.

The poetry has cut off in a new direction that I'm enjoying. It's stumbled on a rhythm I'm rather liking. Answers are as far away today as they were yesterday, but I'm not really looking for specifics anymore. I'm not sure if I should be. It's not that I want to care about concrete details of living a life, it's that I already care so much about things that so often stand defiant in the face of description and I'm focused on trying anyway because that's what is worthwhile. Maybe it's what I'm here for. That should count as something important. The cats came back. In lesser numbers this time. There was a day I thought I could see individual molecules of air. Turns out it was a whole bunch of blood vessels in my oculars. Is that a word? Things here would probably be so much more important if things across the bridge weren't equally so.



No fruits of the labor yet. Or maybe there is and I just have no idea where it lands. At any rate I'm content to keep doing dream work where the wild things are. Where up is up and down is down and I'm remembered by the people I've seen and I can go anywhere and the only limitation is my body and sometimes not even that.

Still planning the suicide diary. I know right. It is taking forever. I'm not putting it off. I just haven't been here to do it. Promise.

///Unkle feat. Big In Japan - "The Answer" ...perfect weather...