Overkill

Having a difficult time taking Is and Yous and Mes out of my poetry.  I wish I had a different face, but apparently I am no longer allowed to hack away at it.  I want to get back to wonder.  I want to get back to visions of enormous dinosaurs, but the real world continues to push back and it's not fair and I can't figure out a way to circumvent the charges.

I will.  Stand up act 9 is coming.  Long dark tunnel.  I conquered my fear of absolute darkness a while back.  Doesn't mean that it's comfortable though.  I want to pick up house and walk away from it all in a bad way.  Maybe a good way.  Tough to think about.  Do you just throw your hard drives in a ruck sack?  I don't know!  I'm asking you!  Who helps you plan that sort of thing out?  I have no clue.

Do ya have to bring an umbrella or something or do you count on finding one along the route?  Could probably thieve one.  Do you really want to do that?  That's not who you are.  You can take whatever you really want, but don't.  Every single time you take you are taking something from someone else and that's no good.  Let someone hold your leash.  They're not holding you back.  They're just checking you.  You have to allow yourself to be checked at the hip.  Take it and bounce off or try to run them over, but whatever you do correct your path.  Not correct, but make adjustments because you have to and understand that it is alright to make adjustments.

Adjusting the dials is okay.  Not everyone likes to hear music at 11, hell you don't either.  Not everyone wants or needs a kiss or needs your face two inches from their own.  Not everyone can be famous and not everyone will remember events the same ways you do.  You're losing your memory and maybe that plays into part of why you are losing connection fidelity with your dream states.  Be okay with working on it.  There's no breaker  to fire off in between where you're going and where you can never go back to and that's perfectly fine.

Do you bring a knife or no?  Do you need to?  Would you need to?  I don't know!  You can take what you want, but you don't have to.  Are you expecting battle?  It's a funky kind of war we fight and I've been seeing some strange things I don't know how to handle off of the top of my head.  I need time.  No picking up sticks.  No running away.  No abuse.  Abuse is shorthand for sadists.  What's short hand for saints?  I want to plow into a wall and obliterate my body in a mist of red and bone.  I want humor.  Get the fuck away from me!  I swear to god I will taste your eye fluid before the night is out, you mother fucker piece of shit, do you not know there is no such thing as a fair fight?

Rules are in place to keep me out of you.  Period.  Maybe it's all a matter of timing?  That may be what I'm getting wrong.

Wanderlust eats away at me and I nibble back.  I almost lit a cat on fire again.  I'm doing good though.  Being on good behavior and going to work almost every time I am supposed to go.  I want to keep it up through the end of the year.  I am not expecting much from Santa.  I still ask him for a 1911 against my better judgement.  No resolutions forthcoming and none will be given.  I think I'll treat myself to a box of ammunition this year.  One step at a time.  Baby steps.  We'll travel, but I'm not pulling up sticks just yet.  I'm trying to monitor my speech.  I've been speaking much too fast and running words together and feeling like I need to apologize inside my head every time someone says "what did you say?"  I said exactly what the hell I said.  It's hyper frustrating.  It's like a stutter, but backwards and difficult to correct and heart stabbing when I notice it flowing out of my damned mouth.  Not fair!

Howling in my head wont stop.  I haven't snorted anything serious in a long time and my sinuses feel like they are about to shatter.  "...turning the music up so ya don't hear the engine falling apart..."  by hook or by crook we are going to fix this thing so it runs smooth.  Chatty Cathy.  Slow the fuck down and take a moment.  The world's not crazy.  It is just you.  Everything does not smell like burning metal.  It is just you.  Space invaders.




///Kelis - "I Don't Think So"     just dont think you're at my speed

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.