Time Locked (meta jail)

As freedoms increased, freedoms increased.  Identities are the easiest way to build a lock.  Layers upon layers of identities.  Make each layer easily identifiable and then nest them.

The only way in, in a timely fashion is to know them all.  You will get in, eventually.  Perhaps the algorithm before.  30 semaphores?  3000 semaphore tumbler.  Vector crossed?   259.

I have to remind myself on a regular basis why being 8 years removed from the day I finally said "no" to being trampled and hidden and displayed and ripped apart by my parents is important.

It's not an "in memorium" for them as much as a "time makes fools of us all."  Things get rose tinted and goofy and it becomes easy to slough details and miss bolts during assembly.  It becomes

natural to see it their way and understand margins and forget why fifteen layers thick gloves are necessary to.  It is scary existing without the safety net of a mom and a dad.

Not even the safety net, but a perspective with something behind that should be automatic.  I never thought the jealousy would grow the way it has.  I hoped cutting them off would be the hardest part.

"There won't be any home to go back to."  The seasons wear on.  Soldier on.  I would still rather a genuine holiday gathering to plastic family photographs and obtuse threats.

It's not rage.  S'not anger or disappointment.  It's slipping my fingers through the links of the farthest fence I've reached inside the meta-jail compound.  Fuck me, seventy acres out from solitary.

Forty-four fucking gates,  six yards,  general population, no armed guards, three muzzles and three mittens, two fields, and one drone called off and still inside the fucking compound.

It is strange to be an orphan by choice.  Well, why don'tcha call 'em?  Have you ever been on the phone with someone who hurt you more times than you could count and it took you

years just to understand that it didn't have to be normal?  That it wasn't normal.  And then to have an outright denial thrown in your face when you do finally fucking get it.

To see so many parts of why you are the way that you are tossed away with a flick of a wrist and rebuild it into some semblance of what you could've been and ...  hell, you know what?

You call them.  I can tell you exactly what they'll say.  And you'll say "aw, man, your parents are funny.  Cool dude.  Your mom had this story about this one time and-"

Okay.  I hate being an orphan.  There's a blackhole where P1 & P2 were supposed to be.  It's the lesser of blades I suppose.  I try not to wear it outright, but I do get jealous sometimes

when I speak to friends and they talk about how they had a conversation with their pops or moms.  I will not do it again.  That territory is radioactive for a reason and I want to make sure

that we don't forget.

The Year End Look

Starting at the end of 2015 the year end look was a little rough, but hopeful.  I know I said the year end playlist was up next.  It isn't.  The look back at 2016 and forward into 2017 is.  We'll get to the year end playlist soon, I wanted to hammer this out before I get lost trying to locate music and because it has been weighing on my brain for quite some time and in the throes of a calm and a quiet and thoughtful depression, it is easier to piece back together.  I do firmly believe still: if you want easy, kill yourself.  If 2016 taught me anything that was it.

I thought fracturing my jaw was the worst pain I would ever feel and be able to stand through and that something like that would never happen again.  And then I fried off 15% of my skin with 370 degree oil in second and deep second degree burns bad enough that I couldn't walk or use my hand for weeks.  That was the worst pain I have ever felt.  The first week or so it was a chilly feeling, like when air blows across your teeth very quickly and it feels like you've just bitten into a snowball at the same time.  As hair follicles and skin began to grow back in odd colors and scales the pain got worse and more intense, but I was happy because at least I knew some sort of skin would eventually be there to protect the naked weeping flesh eventually.  It was so many weeks I don't even remember exactly.  I think the last scales scraped away to serviceable skin some time in late December after it happened in September.  It was an eternity.

Definitely not what I intended when I said I wanted to work on my scarification sleeve at the beginning of the year.  Looking forward: I don't want to feel anything remotely close to that again.  Can we please go back to dealing with occasional week long bouts of lower lumbar nerve pain and the occasional lancing ice pick stab of hip joint nerve pinch.  That's fine, by comparison.  I laugh saying it, but I am pressing my palms together and pointing them at the sky: please universe, don't hurt me like that again, but if you do - make it a clean break.

I did finally get around to procuring a set of tattoo guns.  I also did not get around to using them.  A third of my year disappeared trying to heal up from the burns.  It wasn't even just the burns that broke me low, it was learning how to use my hand again and build strength back into it.  It was rebuilding the musculature in my hips and joints in learning how to walk longer and longer distances and stand for longer periods of time.  At one point I could walk, but I literally had to sit down and raise my heel above my heart every five or ten feet because the throbbing pressure of my veins trying to push blood down and back up to my heart felt like my leg was getting torn to the bone by a leather whip.

The year started off pretty grand.  All of the work was more or less finished.  I'd survived, what was to that point, the worst injury I'd suffered to date and if you can take ten weeks of pain and rehab from a fractured and dislocated jaw, you can take anything.  Music was on the horizon and I had a keyboard set up that I was diddling with.  I got a cool old motorcycle with part of my Christmas bonus, an old Honda that I still have sitting in the backyard that I want to eventually build into a cafe racer style bike you might see on an old pastel chalk poster advertisement if you lived in racing country back in the 70's.  I had a new basketball and had free time to exercise and hit the basketball courts now and then to indulge my sports fantasies.  I was really getting into the video game Minecraft and was seeing poetry from a little bit of a different angle.

Graphic design was coming along and my friendships were pretty free flowing as far as I could tell.  I was making big plans to create sculptures and designs for some of my friends that I wanted to show instead of just tell them that I cared about them.  Some projects were coming along nicely through planning sketches and rough practice designs and concept proofs.  With some of my free time I was able to visit people I normally could not make time for and with that little extra bit of money I was able to go out with them to places they wanted to go and eat and drink things I never would under usual circumstances.  Life was wheeling and dealing and possibilities were turning into realities.  The only real problem I had was making time to keep up with everything at a reasonable pace and I was making it work.

The Summer was hot and long and I did get into a funk wondering what was next.  Who doesn't feel some of that funk in the middle of Summer?  When everything feels okay it is natural to wonder if everything is supposed to feel that okay.  Are you supposed to feel happy, content?  It's normal to question.  I did get to thinking about other people I know and where they are in their lives and where I am in mine and I started to think about what more I would have to do to experience that kind of comfort and security.  I started to, after my birthday in April, start to believe that there could be a way that I could have that too if I kept at it and kept on trucking with high hopes and kept in touch with people and kept allowing them in to my lives.

The facts started to creep in.  Started to trickle in.  The realization broke in that nothing would change.  They're still drifting away faster than that distance can ever be closed.  They've only been kind enough not to tell you that you're messaging a part of their lives they don't have time for.  So I spent more of the Summer falling away into the night skies and fire pits and walks through the storm tunnels to sit by the river's edges and pull back the fabric of those nights to watch the bridge lights glimmer on the inch high breakers.  It was my time to love the air and sky and earth and whomever happened to pop by my backyard or asked me to hop in to theirs.  Touring star ships and space stations of all kinds.

And then my body was scorched to hell and back and here we are.

Letting them go was ... you know how when you are discussing something over a hot cup of tea, and you stop to blow the steam away for a minute and touch the cup's edge to your lips to see if it's still too hot to drink and you set the cup down and look up and realize you've been talking to an empty saucer with a dry tea bag on it.  Letting them go was ... you know how when a video cassette finishes it's run time and the credits have finished and it goes black for a few minutes and then snaps to static and you realize you are still holding the remote and peering into the static waiting for the television to turn itself off, but there is another several minutes of static instead and you find yourself watching the blue input screen while the player labors, hitches, and then begins to rewind itself.  Letting them go was like that.

Part of me is angry that I didn't realize it sooner.  Part of me is angry that I let myself trot along, tail wagging, tongue out and teeth yip yapping away, not understanding the hands waving were from the insides of car windows, not the other side of the road on the side walk, a couple of paw skips away to pat my nose, scratch my ear, and let me lick their palms.

Part of me is a little lost.  So what now?  The business of being an adult?  The business of being single?  Thirty two is around the corner.  Some people I know will be retiring at fifty.  Fifty five.  Some people I know will be thinking about second kids, third cars, vacation homes, second marriages... my life expectancy is somewhere out there in the high sixties, low seventies.  So what now?  The game is halfway over and what?

Am I ever going to write anything of significance.  I do write for myself first and foremost.  I used to do it with the hopes of being recognized somewhere or paraded around like something special.  Am I special?  No, just a little weird.  Okay, a bit weird.  I will.  Not yet.  At least not in my mind.  Thirty years to go and many more times to keep trying to set the type just the way I want it.  Thirty years to make the words hit other ears the way they hit my own.  I don't know if it will ever work.  It would certainly help if I could go one year without some cataclysmic injury eating up a third of a year to heal.

Will I be single forever?  Yeah, probably.  I've been torn up and spit out enough times, unrequited enough times, blissfully lulled to nothing, cut off and scorched enough times, left behind enough times, pushed away enough, to where I simply don't want to feel that again.  Much like having your skin cooked off, the scars are forever.  Maybe in ten years I'll think about it seriously again.  Maybe I'll quit smoking too.  Maybe I'll just croak off quietly long before then from some odd organ failure I can't see coming.

There is, oddly enough, a dent in all of the fingernails of my right hand, from the burn where all of the cuticles were traumatized and cooked, that has been slowly growing it's way toward the finger tips to be clipped.  Consistent along each finger.  I now know exactly how long it takes for my fingernails to grow on my right hand.  Look on the bright side.

So what now for 2017?  I don't know.  I was, as I wrap this up, thinking about going to buy a pouch of tobacco to roll some cigarettes.  I might.  I stopped enjoying smoking five years ago.  It's a way to mark time, nothing more.  Thirty some odd years to go.  I'll probably have to start some kind of heart medication in my 40's if I don't fix what I put into my body and stretch food stamps more effectively... maybe cut out the beef and pork, more frozen vegetables and dried beans (fruit never keeps long enough).  What's the use?  An extra ten, maybe twenty, years for what?  May as well, push on, I suppose.  I still can't grow a full beard or shave my face to bare skin.  I'm not getting any taller.  I'm not exactly waiting around for anyone.  Might as well go for a walk, come home and burn a couple.  Get some good sleep.  Wake up and do it again.  We'll have time for music, 2017.  Time for more poetry and stories too.  Short ones, long ones, whatever strikes your fancy you scruffy little rascal.  Whatever happens, I'll be there for you, never forget that.  We'll forge some aluminum and keep exploring.  Do it for the love the art and the unknown.  There are worlds I've only begun to map.  The star fields are massive.  Time is not.




///Daedelus- "Perchance A Bit"

I Know It's Going To Be A Rough Day and That's Okay

I've been trying to arrest my emotions for two days and here we are at day three.  I can't allow life to seize up and die.  This morning, poking the tines of my work into the middle of a sunny side up egg on a piece of medium tough toast with a shake of a salt and a dollop of syrup beside it, I am afraid.  I used to call Annie, I used to call Alexis, I used to call my psychiatrist, my therapist, myself, when fear gripped me.  I haven't been able to eat willingly so I am preparing to chop up an egg into a little toast and see where it goes.  Maybe we will cut up a clementine into quarters and have that in lieu of juice.

My emotions are still all over the place.  Stitched together with some will and a little self motivational glue and a little music.  I know I am going to cry today and I won't be able to stop it, but I will make myself go to work as best I can.  There will be a lot of difficult exchanges of conversations today.  "You look awful."  "Are you okay?"  I know and no.  Walking through hardware stores and to the bank and to the grocery to buy more food to force myself to eat.  I cannot allow myself to curl up and die.  I cannot allow myself to see people.  I have to turn everything inward to generate enough power to keep my sun from collapsing into a singularity.

Hysterical laughter tearing through my lungs and tears staining the floor between my boots while I stand in lines.  Eyes red and sunken and lips cracked from grinning and grimacing.  Doubling over in hacking coughs and dry heaves that will not stop.  Questioning, screaming, begging the snowy sky why there is no magic pill, but there is a magic bullet.  It's not going to be easy.   Please don't talk to me.  I know I am a mess and nothing will help more than time alone.  Thank you for understanding.




///Philip Selway - "Coming Up For Air"

At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity

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

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

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

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

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





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

Memories

Designing the fish line and hook system around my notebook in high school.  A marvel of engineering.  Should it get out of my hands for any reason, uncorking it without knowing how the lines were connected led to a four pointed fish hook whipping around it's spine to snag whatever hands held it. I hoped someone would try to open it to hear their wail.  Now it's pretty fun to not have to design ridiculous booby traps.