Not Over Yet

A man I love put the war accurately and I will use his description:  it's like kicking water uphill.  Everything that cannot be prepared for.  The degenerating functions and spider glass fractures.  Kicking water uphill.  One more day.  Yes, your shoes will get wet and soak the cuffs of your jeans.  Some will get in your eyes and ruin your belt.  You might drop your hat and slip and fall flat on your bum.  Kicking water uphill.  You cannot quit.  It's going to keep coming.  Just have to try to keep your balance and keep kicking.  A little at a time.  It's okay to rest.




///Amorphous Androgynous - "Rocket Fuel"  and all for the want of a horseshoe nail

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)

Revisiting Battlefields Gone Silent

How many years has it been?

Revisiting and rereading them (Bits For Flames) for the umpteenth time I see and edit them in ways I could not before.  I still have so much to learn.

I do believe my resolution for the new year will be to rewrite every single one of them that I felt fit enough to publish back then with the knowledge and practice I have now.

Rereading them now, these pearls and machinations that I knew were not perfect, but deft enough to force upon other ears, they dance like puppet shows.  Telling too much and not showing enough.  Stilted.  Awkward.  Wooden.  Produced with what was the greatest understanding of the sweet science of writing and the cold magic of emotive sorcery that now reads like remedial math.

I used to set my goals to things I thought much higher.  Quitting smoking!  Learning and training to dunk a basketball!  Mastering the art of throwing knives and being able to defend myself and hold accountable all who dared to cross me with martial perfection.

In the background I plugged away at how a conversation is made.  How to engage someone actively.  I worked on my translator software and my lens and tape.  I listened to playback and learned how to speak with greater efficiency and economy of words.  The war was not multi-tasked.  Multitasking is a myth, we all know this.

After 10,000 hours I convinced myself I arrived at the best I can do.  The best I have done is a lie.  I can do better.  And I will.

The emperor will wear new clothes before I turn that engine.  First things are first and we have been waiting quite some time for the new design.  What we have is a goal.  What we will do is place the pen to paper once more and see what shakes out of our new branches that have borne fruit uncut just yet.

The blender awaits.  The knife is ready.  The cutting board is clean.  There are no attachments.  It is time to explore the old body and build a new one.  When you can get everyone at the same table at the same time you can rearrange the workshop and factory floor plan.  New weapons, new tools, new methods.

"...in the foxhole / where I hide..."


/// Hershey Kisses Bells

Stand Up Act 11

Stand Up Act 10

Some people stick by the words in line with the idea of everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten.  Be nice to each other.  Don't drop your pants in public.  Share.  Be quiet and listen when the time is right.  Take time to make things.  Take naps.  I don't know what the whole NY Times best seller's list was, but you get the point.  Coming to grips with the fact that I will probably never dunk a basketball has brought me an up to date version of that book.  In no particular order:

Everyone gets old and dies and the best you can do is be a little worse than your worst the day before.  That's right.  At some point your body stops growing and starts failing.  Bit by bit.  Part by part.  Sure, you may beat the odds and be one of the few freakish human beings that cannot be destroyed through attrition and must be struck down with sudden and violent illness or circumstance.  The chances are very good that you are not.  Once you hit your mid thirties, that's pretty much it.  The next decade or so, you may hold serve or at least keep even with your physical abilities the day prior, but it all ends in a gutter.  If you haven't dunked a basketball by now, you probably never will without a trampoline or other marvel of engineering.

You can't be whatever you want to be.  You can be a version of what you want to be.  You can be somewhere in the ballpark of what you wanted to be.  You cannot be whatever you want to be.  Well you can be whatever you want to be inside your head.  That is absolutely attainable.  However, you may wake up inside a very welcoming dormitory environment where breakfast always comes at 8:30 and bed time is 9 sharp and a guy keeps pounding his head against the wall loud enough to interrupt your 500 piece puzzling and your pants have no pockets and the shower always smells a little bit off.  You can't be whatever you want to be.  There are always outliers in great numbers because it's a perceptual lens.  Think of the planet as an aircraft carrier.  There are, I dunno, 150 pilots.  There are always 150 or so pilots.  There are 6000 other people doing all of the other stuff to make sure it doesn't crash or sink and feed the people that help the people that help the people that feed the people that help other people make sure it doesnt crash or sink so that the people that fly the planes and fix the planes can fly and fix things and make sure it doesn't get blow'd up.  Chances are really good, if you're born on that carrier, you're not going to be flying anything unless you steal it or are a pilot's kid or pilot's friend's kid.  If you aren't born with the genetic ingredients to Chia pet out into a frame capable of dunking, guess what?  That's right, you can work your ass off and add 6" to your vertical leap, but your wingspan and height have already conspired to make sure the best you'll achieve is a left handed layup with your finger tips grazing the rim.

Allow your passions to lead to your goals.  Your goals cannot kick start your passion.  That element of life is a one way valve.  You may not be able to dunk, but you do enjoy the game.  If you like to play with smash and grab abandon, get good at it.  Embrace it.  Set your goal to being the best slasher in the neighborhood.  Cut defenses to ribbons and bounce off the low block to grab rebounds because your game will never be above the rim... doesn't mean it can't be wicked fast.  When you set goals apart from your passions, your hearts never in it.  Doing things because you want to do them and doing things because you cannot not do them are too very different things.  There is an "I think I can" gray area muddled in there.  A little bit of chicken and egg, what came first, questioning, but for the larger part, save your mind the wear and tear.  Gravity will still be gravity tomorrow, and last I heard, the ability to go from zero to "don't blink" is pretty rare in itself.

The list goes on, but you get the point.  Along those lines, I was considering going back to trying to rip out a poem every day.  Just one.  There's the whole idea that you have to dig through the trash and start tossing things off of the top of the stack to get down to what you really want to weave and work with.  The thought behind it is that every time, every instance, that ends with the idea of "hey, I should write that down" is the lattice of your brain adding a new bit of graph that gets buried and grown in and grown over with the events and experiences that come after it.  And then you hit another branching point where you say to no one in particular "I should write that down".

By the time you actually get to the point of sitting down, all is forgotten.  Not really forgotten.  Buried.  Grab a shovel  You've got two choices.  Try to hammer and chisel all the way back to the fly in the center of the glacier, or sample and blast it apart, while mapping and scaling and measuring and cataloging it.

Eventually you may get all the way back to the granule of the thing you thought you should write down.  Nothing along the way will be known or preserved or brought into consideration to cut the journey or work shorter the next time around.  If you slice it up and hold it up to inspection and hang the samples on slides along the route, you've not only achieved the point of origin- you've possibly stumbled upon data for further examination and perhaps other points of interest that must be investigated before the entire land mass melts into the polar seas of your own consciousness.

Scary as hell, the prospect, no?  Oh yes.  In years of your decaying brain you've lost so much.  It's alright though.  Breath easy.  Release your testicles back out of your stomach and unclench your pelvises.  It's never too late to start getting some exercise and start tagging the fauna living inside your head.

Speaking of things living inside the mind, I've been up late a lot of days thinking about whether or not I should pursue a mate.  You know the whole mating thing.  The whole pairing off with other people to raise other littler people to become good big people to raise more little people to become good big people or horrible little terrors.  That whole thing.  I don't want to do it to raise other little people.  Let's get that out of the way first.  Maybe.  I think I would either be a great father or a horrible father, but there's no gray in there.  Trust me.  I've been over the idea drunk, sober, high, smashed, apotheotic, grounded, slippy, glowing, based, depressed, you name it.  It's going to go one way or another and frankly I don't care to flip a coin everyday hoping I raise someone who doesn't want to kill me every day of its waking life until I do actually die.  That shit is terrifying.

I want to do it for a companion.  A second voice, because the angel and devil on my shoulders like to play dress up so sometimes I glance over and there's a teddy bear and a bowling pin on the other side or a pacman and a doily.  What the hell, indeed.

I don't hate company.  This is how it all boiled down; I'll give you the most obvious that occurred to me last first.

While browsing reviews of Tinder and Grinder, I realized that my apartment, though of a healthy square footage, is laid out like one giant room with a side room (full of weight lifting equipment.... it's essentially a regularly used gym so that I don't have to pay to go to one).  I have enough space to house one person.  Exactly one person.  Trying to pack another person into this space will lead to a violent civil war, ultimately.  I don't live alone.  I'm in my apartment with me and the rest of the machinations and defects and words and whispers and screams and general artifacta of my minds functioning.  It's a packed house already.  Where am I supposed to go to escape if the side room is occupied and I can't go outdoors?

The second thing is there must be sex.  If you live with me, we have to fuck eventually or someone has to go.  Not immediately, but eventually.  If we don't have sex, that's fine, but you'd better be prepared for gratuitous nudity because I cannot stand clothing.  I hate clothes.  Once they've served their function it's time to discard them.  They're uncomfortable.  If I'm wearing something, I probably had to.  If it's something I enjoy wearing it's because if you're going to wear clothes, you may as well wear something you can have fun wearing or need to wear to bring happiness to the act of dressing my pretty innards.

I didn't live to the ripe old age of 30 to hear "don't touch me there" "it's four o'clock in the morning" "I'm tired" "I just ate lunch" "I want to shower first".  I don't care.  You can use me when you want to as well.  It's a two way street.  I damn sure am not going to catch flak for masturbating at midnight when they've turned in early.

I don't care if it's bad sex or the kind of sex you tell your friends about when I'm not around where you know I think I rocked the house, but really I fizzed about as pleasantly as having an ashtray dumped on your tongue, getting to wash it off, and finding grit behind your molars the next morning.  It's gotta be there.  I am a contact person.  When I know I can't touch you, things get weird.  Things get real weird.  Ever found a sheet of a paper folded in half six times inside your purse?  Ever found three razor blades in your wallet?  Ever found your jacket on the same hook except literally inside out?  Ever found everything that could possibly be unplugged unplugged?  Ever found everything you brought over laid out to the level of where your hands might swing as you picked up an item and progressed onward toward the door?  Ever found your car keys behind your head when you woke up?

The point is this:  I realized I don't own enough space to support two people to the point where one person can disappear from the other person's engagement and forget for a time that they are now part of the other person they are living with and dive into their own engagements.  I'd have to add a floor at best and another two rooms at the least so that I or they would not know exactly where to find me, because knowing exactly where someone is hiding is the same as having them immediately present.  You need only to recite the incantation to summon them.  There has to be some mystery and trial and error to at least give them a chance to relocate and make it interesting.

The other point is that I own enough stuff to support exactly one person.  There are enough chairs to support one person and an occasional party.  There are enough dishes and cups and utensils to support one person who makes their own meals and washes their own dishes.  Enough bedding for one.  Enough closet space for one.  Enough food and fridge space for one.  Enough toiletries for one.  Just a matter of fact.

Not that there's been no effort to expand the coffers.  There has been.  Through the strain and the strife and the good and bad times, the covering radar is still only big enough to account for the airspace over a single atoll.  Above and beyond that controlled airspace, all bets are off.  Everyone and everything flying in or out is at its own risk.  There simply is no room in the budget for fighter escorts and first response marines and a space program and, hell, the DPW is backlogged by years, not months or days.  Years.  Bringing someone else into the equivalent of District 9 is not going to end well for anyone who doesn't live somewhere near or lesser than there already.  This may be an open hoodrat invitation.  It's not.

Recognizing where my passions are, we can make this work.  I gotta acquire more space at some point if I want another human being around or, adding another human being, there will very quickly be just one.  We can work out the details after the acres.  Plus it'll be good to have places to bury things and plant growing things to just walk out on my porch and sit down and peer across the field and say to no one in particular "I remember when that tree was a foot tall," kick my feet up on a flat basketball , take a little sip of gin and apple juice, scrawl some notes, and tsk tsk at online dating messages I still receive, setting aside the gems to tell you when dinner rolls around and we play two handed hearts to see who sets the menu and who does the cooking that night.

Over Simplification and the Missing Link and Father's Day

Something's missing.  I know something is missing because I am not grasping a few concepts correctly.  I can be as small minded as I want to be, sure.  I am a bit frightened of using all that I can produce, see control issue.  I suppose it is easier for me to take as small a perspective as possible.  I can't do whatever I want to do.  If I did whatever I wanted to, this would be a very different world, or I would be stone dead in the ground wishing I had rethought doing whatever I wanted to do.

I had many and, some, long thoughts about my father.  I hate saying that.  That word.  Makes me grind my teeth.  It was a road that had to be reevaluated, and no I am not going to kick cans in anger here.  It was a very positive approach couched mostly in pure analysis and attempting to see it from outside my head and look in at the relationship, while it still existed, from a third party.

What I started to think about and completed was that he may have seen some things from before my memory begins.  My memory begins around preschool, kindergarten.  I can't recall much of anything, virtually nothing, from before that and cannot vouch or insist I was one way or another.  What I came to was that he may have seen something in me and my ways then and made an attempt to push the tracks this way and that way as I got older.  Maybe.  I'll never know because I asked and was refused, flat.  Father's day.  What a hoot.

I do know I am missing something.  Not information.  Yes information.  My history is thoroughly incomplete.  I have to remind myself and update my tabs on who's kicked the bucket.  I'm fine with that.  Less interference.  I am missing something about being a proper citizen and holding down a job and, let's put it blank, growing up.  My concept of growing up is not aligned with what I believe the general population's concept of being growed up is.  But, I do know I can't do whatever I want.  That's wrong.  I can't fish all day, that ones easy to know.  I get that.  I have to wear pants and clothing in general.  I get that too.  I must participate.  That one's clear as well.  I am missing a, on it's outside, simple bridge.  I cannot keep offering disclaimers.  To do that is akin to handing out passports.  Far too reckless.

Rejecting life's intrinsic complexities is not a way forward.  It is a system failure.  Simplification.  Keep it simple, stupid, only gets one so far before the wall of sound and input comes calling and breaks your nose.  The mission for simplicity begins to damage the ability to engage, with necessity and vigor, peers, idols, fam, friends, and the rest of the grid.

Simplification denies and is denial when forced too far.  I understand that better now, but not completely.  No where near completely.  I'm not alright with the concept and it makes me smile to say and hear it from our own mouth.  We are not simple.  We are bright.  We are sharp.  We cannot use simplicity as a device for protection.  A way to consume information at a pace appropriate for us.  A way to do what we want.  Gain access to what we want.  Appropriate.  Unacceptable.  It's neither sly nor sneaky.  Plain dumb.

I suppose I will cut my tongue out one of these days.  It can be a weapon.  A technique.  Believe it or not, I need to learn how to use communication better, more efficiently.  Maybe I'll learn sign language.  I think I'll be better for it.   Better than learning another verbal language.  That way at least when I'm ready to have it removed I'll be prepared to talk in other ways.  I've been using sign language for quite some time, but not the official one, anyway.  I've been using my sign language, exclusive to me and my country and my time zone.  Hello there, and welcome to the rest of the world.




///T-Pain & Early Cuyler - "I Like Driving In My Truck"    ...i like driving in my truck...

Passports

Visitors are always welcome, but those passports expire same day.  It didn't always used to be that way, but the policy has grown out of necessity.  An offshoot of the "protection" arc.  Is it necessary?  Yes.  If you pick up nothing from the course of life you've never lived and one of the things I've picked up is the fact that passports should not be granted on a long term basis.  Complete citizenship.

I'm sure part of the passport policy's origin lies in mental dysfunction and it's many symptoms, but part of it also lies in a love for the ones worth loving and preventing them from being damaged by the many symptoms more numerous expressions.  If you do insist on being issued a passport I can only stand in your way for so long.  I used to go out of my way to issue them, until the activity bit me in the ass so hard I could not deny the recklessness with which I was stamping books.  So I stopped stamping books.

To help me and to help you.  I want nothing to do with you, not because I want nothing to do with you, but because I can have nothing to do with you.  It is, in all actuality, just actually, very simple.  Or not.  At least to me.  I don't understand what I have to offer you.  Further from that understanding, is getting that it is okay to have nothing to offer you explicitly.  I don't get it.  Guilty.  I still have yet to grasp that.  Does that make me wrong to reject closeness?

Fear of change?  Yeah, sure.  That's already established.  I hate change like I hate playing with a board of objects wired to voltage.  Why does this one shock me now when it didn't on the last go round.  Fucking scientists.  Fucking psychologists.  Fucking experiments.  I don't know what I'm supposed to say or what I am to do or is an acceptable response.  So I am myself and I worry if that self at that time is acceptable or not.  After the fact.  Paying forward to increased anxiety.

Everything a study.  Too plodding.  Too thorough.  And knowing letting go is an option.  Still and caged.  Not caged, but trying to figure out how to gift wrap appropriately.  Gift wrap in a way that will be received to expectation.

Visitors from other lands.  No one belongs here except the ones born here.  It's a simple fact that helps me make the most of my interactions.  It's an understanding that helps me make sense of where froms and how tos.  They could never live here and I could never live out there for too long.  The things chasing me to sleep.  Not over thinking it or taking on some stance of god failure or "waaah, no one gets me," just adding up without trying to be ridiculously deterministic.

What shines brightest are those willing to dive in and take the chance that I'm wrong, which is wholly possible, pending my own ability to give them a chance to do so and also pending on my ability to accept a "no" on whatever grounds they find necessary or pertinent or fact.  I'm not sure I'm ready to do the first yet and I damn sure am not ready for the second.

My heart is made of glass.  I know this.  My brain is made of glass too.  Which one is a person to trust less?  Beats the hell out of me.  Let's find out.  "You don't belong here.  What are you doing here?!  What is your objective??""




///Bowery Electric - "Electro Sleep"    a lull in the battle

You've Got Some Work To Do, Kiddo

I know.  I feel like a fire wrapped in people skin.  I borrowed some money to buy toothpaste the other day.  Something felt wrong about it.  Something felt wrong about the whole thing.  Memories came pushing back the days afterward.  Things I pushed away only recently and some things I pushed away years ago.

Cut out to Pittsburgh and a boy walking down Main street.  I put the last of my money into buying a thermocouple for a water heater I was working on and I remembered the dream I had that morning of my teeth coming apart.  My molar broke into quarters and caramel came spurting out in little bits of spray.  When I ran my tongue across my front sheets, little white sheets came off and got stuck between them and I would tongue the stuck bits, but rub more off and then all that were left were pink and gray nerve ends and I couldn't close my mouth because the pain was incredible and the caramel made me salivate and it poured down my shirt front in a glistening tan and foaming mess and the heat of it and the wind blowing through the cave of my mouth burned the nerves until my eyes could only see white static and glimmer stars of blood cells pounding through the veins inside them.  I remembered that dream and knew I had to find a way to buy some toothpaste.

The other memory that came back was of my dad screaming at me through my old cellular and the ear piece cracking.  It was a train of threats and I remember the strength in my knees barely hanging on through it all.  I was to change schools immediately or face the violent consequences he would bring my way for my poor performance.  The second part of the memory was a part I hadn't recalled or even connected until that day.  The school he was demanding I transfer to was one of the schools I originally pointed out and highlighted that I wanted to apply to in the first place two years before.  It crashed in on me then.  I brought them the list and they had to approve it because it was their money paying for the application fees and this one and that one got shot down and crossed off and shot down for one reason or another in their minds and based on that stupid ass college rankings book that was two years out of date at the time anyway (thanks public library).  Remembering it, I simply shook my head.  Wastes of brain space.  Why?  That still pops like a flickered light as the power grid compensates for outages miles away beneath a storm already come and gone from where you sit beneath its glow.

The air vibrates for a moment.  The walls flex under the sudden pressure and creak and groan.  Nothing happens.  Everything doesn't fall apart.  A tear came down my cheek from behind my sunglasses and I let it go.  It was hot as hell and feeling it evaporate felt wonderful and cooled my skin.  "Why?"  I don't know.  I never will.

There was a period of intense plasticity, three, maybe four, days long.  Precipitated by several days of a slow decline in mental activity.  It made me wonder if that was what peace felt like.  Feeling like internal and external pressures and atmospheres were perfectly attuned.  Like striking one face produced the right and singular sound on the other side instead of the rattle tin of snare wires.  Confusion began to set.  "What is happening to me?"  And then it began to break apart like lake shore ice not quite in rhythm with the season turn at sunrise.  Interference.  I couldn't tell if I was happy or simply depressed to a blank slate or so far disengaged from my head that I could essentially remote pilot this body thing through what it was supposed to do and could dock it at my home address and step outside of the cockpit into dreams.

I don't know what it was, but in greater efforts (always greater and greater as time runs on) to manage myself I will add those sign posts to my warning lights.  I don't know what they mean or what they signify, but it was disconcerting and disorienting a series of days as I've seen in a small while.

Spoke to a friend who is dating someone else now and I couldn't help, but wonder how the new was better than old.  I gave it a further thought and it was tremendously obvious.  I imagined the group photos and holiday visits and it was tremendously obvious.  One of these things is not wired like the others.  And now it is.  I don't think, in fact I am near certain there is ... I want to date again.  Do I hate companionship?  No, absolutely not.  Do you hate companionship?  Yes, what kind of stupid question is that!  I can't get through two consecutive hours of the day without thinking about breaking a slit into someone's skull with the blunt back end of a hatchet and shoving my penis into the slippery fat.  How terrific would that be.  I think about killing myself every day.  I also think about living in the deep north forest ridges every day, so you sort it out.

Choke it down and hold it there.  Inside is still a hidden place.  A territory I am still investigating and mapping.  Inside me I am snapping my fingers in front of my nose and patting my cheek and whispering "hey buddy, you in there?  Can you hear me?  Come on back.  Come on back, kiddo.  Stay with me, okay?"  Things blear in and out and then stick for a while.  I cannot live with other people for lengths of time.  Not yet anyway.  Still a lot of work to do.  Inside is still a deeply hidden place and for now it has to stay that way.

Walking down that street along the sidewalk and nodding to the old men on their way to fish and spend bits of their pensions at the hole in the wall and smiling at the kids on their little bikes and the folks my age pushing strollers and dogs my little heart fell out of my chest and hit the pavement and rolled.  It rolled like a tin can going tink a clink a link and as it went the brass compression ring broke off like a snapped rubber band.  Flex tubing went one way, an iron washer went another.  A welded chamber came loose and rolled in the chopped way a cube will into the gutter.  An adapter slipped off its fitting.  More brass tubing came loose and popped up into the air in front of me and a glass stator shattered.  Filaments flew into the grass and oil splashed into the cracks of the cement.  Rivets popped loose and sheet aluminum peeled away.  My heart rolled and rolled until it was a hex nut spinning like a coin until laid flat between the lines of the crosswalk yards away.

I saw myself running and dropping to knees to scoop this piece and that spring and that cam and this bolt and that shard and that curly Q of pipe and with fingernails prying bits of staple and brad from pebbles at the lip of storm drain.  What's missing?  Haul it all home in the hammock of your T-shirt mid drift.  Drop it all on the work bench and goggle up.  Sparks chip into the air.  The hammer, the drill, the saw, the shears.  Open up the drawers of the chest of saved scrap.  What's missing?  What's missing?!  Male to male adapters.  Counter sinking threads.  Punch sheared nails back through.  More sparks.  More acetylene.  More current.  Peen hammer curves.  Female to male adapter.  Hand tighten.  Air hammer drill rusted bolt tops.  Replace tubes.  Connect battery leads.  Respool springs.  Adjust valve timing.

The whole thing made me laugh.  The whole thing brought to mind the hilariousness of the notion of sewing your heart back together.  The whole notion of "look into your heart."  The whole highschool nonsense of the swooning "sewing my heart back together."  Apparently distance is still a necessary thing.  I don't know that it is something that can be outgrown or phasic.  Why did you cut up your face?  Because, in part, I'm tired of trying to explain it.  Remember that Popular Mechanics gloss issue from way back when nuclear energy was front page everything and there was an extensive design study to find a way to warn future men about areas where spent materials were stored in a way that could cross all future language barriers and changes regardless of origin?  I do and the whole thing makes me laugh.

The tension between this backwards country and where I want to be pulls apart my consciousness.  Are you supposed to be upset with the people that don't know it any other way?  Is there a right to be upset?  Wrong question entirely.  You can feel whatever you want to feel.  By being human and conscious at all you are given the right to emotion.  Hate has external vectors to it, though.  That's the difference.  The very important difference.  We've got some work to do, I know.  Everything has been heavily jammed up.  Between questions sparking forest fires of speculation and what ifs and more questions and dead zones and containment and management there has not been a lot of processing power left over to engage with society and decoupling is threatening and I can feel it climbing through the insides of my bones and bleeding into the streams inside my muscles and stable air is gaining turbulence and I am trying to correct.  I won't be privilege to some phases of interactions until the work is done and I don't know when that will be.  Trust sweetheart, I know.  Before you can get back to creating, we've got some work to do.  Goddamnit!  I know!!!!


///Flying Lotus - "Orbit Brazil"    Still building my new ship.  Still collecting parts at the orbital yard.  Dreaming about the empty space between stars and nothing more than the tick and whir of life support systems to nod my head to sleep to.

That Instant

you realize you really do wish you could tie yourself to a rocket and shoot yourself into space and don't give a damn if you live to see the exosphere and come back to Earth.  Just want to get yourself out of here.   Out of now.

Now is unforgiving.  Now is now and I don't like it.

Fall back, fall forward, what real difference does it make.  I can't adopt a kid because I'll probably try and put my dick in it.  Jesus.  Fucking sucks.  I want to teach it to play all kinds of ball and drive cars and learn to fly airplanes if its up for it and I know I can't let myself go through it because I'll fuck it up because I've been screwed in my upbringing.

It just sucks so hard knowing the best thing I can do is not do the one thing I really want to do. But....  but..... huge but.... is I will not perpetuate what came before me.  Breaking the cycle.  There's something to be said for that.


///Ulrich Schnaus - "Wherever You Are"  what ive been waiting for all years

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.

Tired, Music, Studio Dust and Weekdays

I'm tired.  A lot of people are.  Just kind of beat.  It's not the usual beat.  The common beat.  You know the kind of beat I'm talking about.  The beat that runs from Sunday into Monday because you didn't do anything and you got tired near the end of the day because of all the things you didn't do, but didn't spend the energy to not do?  Is that the right way around?  Spent the energy to not do?  It's not that kind.  It's the kind of beat that comes from doing stuff and dreaming stuff with equal gusto.  I was going to say passion, but I feel like passion tends to connote a certain amount of emotional sensitivity that tends to drag meaning away from doing stuff and bend the beat toward a beatnik kind of over sensitivity that screams I spent my day doing nothing because doing nothing was better than doing something I don't believe in.  Whatever that means.  So I'm tired.  Just tired.  Days full of doing and nights full of doing and not enough doing to go around.  What it do?  I don't know?  What does it do?  Give me a few weeks and I'll tell you.

I'm tired though and it gets aggravating.  First world problems or something like that.  I never thought I would find myself whining to myself about transcribing my voice recordings.  I don't want to sit down and type at my computer, but I don't want to sit down and write down notes and write out stories with pen and paper either, but I don't want to transcribe my recordings because, as it turns out, that's kind of harder.  I've never said "what the hell did he just say" in reference to myself so many times in a row.  Doesn't help that I lost my data cable for transferring them to my computer.  And I could buy a card adapter, but I bought a shower curtain instead.  It's weird.  Am I dodging myself?  Probably.  Do you know how hard it is to do that?  Not very.  I'm easily distracted.  Especially when I'm tired.

I have a hard to stifle desire to make music.  Write songs.  Emo guilty.  I don't know the first thing about writing songs, but I can learn.  Task locked after a way.  I would say everyone is, but that's just not true.  Pretty sure I'm not waiting for anything specific.  I'm trying to turn routine into stability, but it feels like the only routine I can maintain with any faith is instability.  It's what makes me a good fighter and a bad fighter at the same time, because even instability can grow predictable.   I kind of had a little crisis mode thought track down on the low lying channels that worked its way up to the high line and caught fire across circuits.  What if I'm not a writer?  What if I've just been fooling myself for a decade?  And then I thought: well, it's been a pretty fun decade, set backs not withstanding.  Maybe all you have to do to live, the secret of life or something like it, is to do what you love and let everything else orbit it and sometimes you spend time on Titan and sometimes you stink up Venus for a little while and sometimes you dig ditches on Earth and go visit friends on Mars before swinging out to Saturn to ogle and then do some time on Io when you know when you can't be trusted to do anyone any good.  Anyway you cut it though the sun of desire still comes up and you put your helmet back on and check the pressure and the panel and kick on the boosters and go.  I don't mind that.  I don't think I don't mind that.

I've been trying to figure out what I need to do to find my music again.  Wherever it is.  It's not on notes between lines and bars and what have you.  I think that ship has sailed for the time being.  Not that I can't do it.  I just get pissed off hearing ridiculous compositions by people years younger and I know I'll just tear it up, spit on it, crumple up the spit on shreds and bean someone on the sidewalk with earbuds in their ears from my window, correcting for wind.  I'm still pretty good at that.  "Hey, douche!"  Smack.  Kind of a counter productive talent.  I can also flick a cigarette with 75% accuracy from two yards.  Bigby would be jealous, if he were real.  In a fight between Bigby and me I would totally win, or at least be the one still able to walk afterwards, cuz I would kick him straight in the dick like five times before he hit the ground.  I've been trying to find my music again though.  I used to play trombone and that little plastic flute thing that could only play eight notes, and that other thing.   Viola!  Not well though.  Music programs in sixth grade didn't teach you how to tune them.  I'm pretty sure my sixth grade music teacher was on pills most of the time.  She just sat at her piano, over weight, with ratty, burned up, lye blonde, wisps of shoulder length hair, playing chords and vaguely answering questions.  Didn't help that I was perpetually terrified of popping my eyeball with a snapped viola string.  For some reason I never got over that fear and the even greater fear of facing my parents who would say something like "this is why we didn't want you playing viola!  and staying after school!"

I don't get why they cashed out when their investment was practically over.  They pretty much took a steaming dump on every extracurricular I chased and then wondered why the scholarships didn't come rolling in like publishers clearing house with ten entrants instead of 10 million, because that is basically what scholarship competitions are.  Do people even realize how much nonsense has to go right to win that crap?  It's gotta be something on the scale of lower tier pro sports or Division three sports.  Is there even a third division in the NCAA?

I have a vague idea of the direction I'm going to have to go.  Samples.   Lots and lots of samples and loops, but also keyboard and MIDI instruments.  I already have some of the tracks laid out in my head.  That's the easy part.  The hard part is the hours and days and weeks it takes to get it laid out on my computer.  I'm going to do it though.  And I'm going to pick up reading music again in a few years.  Or, I should say, a few years after I start doing that because I know the time will come when I can't find the sample I want and the realization will dawn for the second time, dawning first here, that it will ultimately be easier to create the exact sound I'm looking for instead of looking for the sound already out there and bending it to my will of production.

I'm getting behind though.  Behind on the various projects.  Time is at a premium lately and I'm trying to restructure my time expenditures to better reflect the end times of another year.  The heady days of Summer are gone the fuck out the door, nigga.   Time to start burning the winter fat and make something real that I can hold up to my eyes and review and turn over and do better again.  Masturbation is not that thing.  When the hell did I start masturbating so much?  It's gotten to the point where I have to check my hand for excess lotion before I go out in public.  That's not healthy, right?  That's the other problem though.  Two hours a pop is way too long for masturbatory purposes.  The pursuit of the perfect orgasm is a waste of time because I know where it is.   That little switch in my head that says "alright, just pick one and let's get through this," broke a long time ago.  That has teamed up with my easily distractedness and my absolute focus on making the best iteration of an experience or nothing at all to explode my masturbation budget into a time deficit that sucks the rest of my day into it like a hole in the space time continuum.   You've got a problem when you wake up and think "alright let's rub a quick one out before breakfast" and you're washing your hands at lunch time.  Defeats the purpose of waking up, dude.  Get it together grouch.

My studio is accumulating a disconcerting amount of dust.  This needs remedied.   Soon.  The itch to produce something, anything, is getting unscratchable and we are not under any circumstances doing crack again.  With crazy people.  To make up for it.  That's like asking someone to scratch an itch on your knee and they punch you so hard in the cheek they blow one of your wisdom teeth out.  Sure, the itch is gone, but damn.  I would have gone to see a dentist for that shit if I knew you were going to do that.  And second of all, I thought we agreed on "not the face."  It's cool, though.  It's not.  I have got to get my creative hands dirty doing before they turn on me.  Operation Danny's Attic, the Outride missions.

I've been getting excited about weekdays.  For televisions sake.  It's a fine time of the year.  Sports, cartoons, sitcoms.  New episodes of this and that.  And then it occurred to me why other people don't necessarily get as excited.  They're taping it, or catching it later online.  Technology sucking the fun out of life.  The death of the viewing party.  DVR killed the video star, would be an ironic throwback title to it, if ironic is the right word.  Maybe dated fits there too.  Sad times.  Remember when Seinfeld episodes were still new?  People probably had to VHS them and before they could do that they had to master their tape machines and make sure their television was on the right channel.  I wonder how many people taped Friends by mistake and shot themselves in the face in their bath tub with a glass of wine balanced on the side by the bubbles that same night.  I'm not saying Friends was that bad a show or Seinfeld was that good.  They were just that far apart.  After the Seinfeld finale I'm sure Monday night suicides probably spiked for a few weeks and then dropped dramatically.  What do you mean the saga of Kramer has reached it's conclusion???  Can't remember the last time I used three question marks in a row, but I'm sure my computer could tell me.  I've got to clean my studio and fire up the factory.  They may not respond to coaxing, but I'm fed up coaxing with words.  It is time to put the boot to them.

Anyway, the point is, there's a lot of work to do and the work doesn't care how tired you feel or where your identity crisis lies or how you feel about what you think you might be terrible at or good at.    Until you do it, you're going to wish you did and once you've done it you're not going to think back and say something like: "man, I wish I hadn't spent so much time caring about and doing something I care about and enjoy doing."

Call it a cold start.  I don't know how it ends.


///The Flaming Lips - "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung"

Over The River and Through The Woods

It's been a long trip here. Back here. I should say. A lot of different pressures. A lot of losses. One of those peculiar things. Not one, several. I got dumped. Not exactly big news. I also broke up with someone. Two different people. At the same time. In the same span of conversation. And then was propositioned again. By the person I just dumped and the offspring of the person who left me. Mainly all I could think was "how is this even possible." Mainly all I could do was do nothing and ask for some time to think about the entire course of the 48 hours.

A lot of my creative time was damaged leading up to that point, which was part of why I had to leave and be let go. Part of it was biological incompatibilities. Vaginas and tiny dicks. What's a boy to do? The proposition is worse than the original make up. Better in it's emotional make up. Worse in it's biological make up, but closer to normal than the previous one, but altogether worse because the venue is the same, with the same accouterments and attendant chemical problematics and it would be so much less, if it wasn't so much more. Hours to land on the same page, hours to read each other, hours to post script to everyone's satisfaction. Hours and hours of time I would rather spend writing. Hours to spend dreaming spent instead in interaction I need, but don't want.

Tripping round and round town and all the while stalking through my own dreams when I do sleep to find the nemesis. The dreaming has been spectacular in it's depth. And also time consuming. The hunt largely unsuccessful. The body count, however, relatively high. I have found, in there, many things to fear and many things that could bleed that I never thought would until I tried in moments I would normally wake from, but instead followed on. It's hard sometimes when they're the ones hiding from you and there is nothing to do beyond waiting. Sitting and waiting to feel well enough to wake up. Charged enough to support waking hours. Pacing through dreams. I've been over the territories. Every god damn way. Without success. I'm beginning to think he won't show until I stop looking. Like those stupid Super Mario ghosts. I'll get him though. Just a matter of time. Patience.



Things have been scatter formed. Trying to get back on a pace. Any pace. I had a pace you could set an erratic watch to. A watch that was missing some teeth. And had a cracked face. And the watch band was either too tight or too loose, but you could never lose it because the minute it was not on your wrist you knew it because you didn't feel anything at all. I lost my watch. I'm finding it again and I can't fuck it up again.

I mean, I can. I will. Because I've fucked it up at least ten times before. Closer to twenty. But I'm trying. This makes twenty one. Or something around there. The quality of the poetry has been. That is all. It just has been. Not too dark, not too light. So I have to keep doing that. I just wish the erratic and hit and miss was just one long string of things I could stand next to and be proud of instead of a whole lot of things I have to read twenty four hours later to understand and begin to appreciate or begin to hate and then it's like picking up old photographs on a coffee table at grandmother's house and you scratch your chin for a minute and then think oooooh yeah, I was there, wasn't I. God damn that sweater is terrible. What was I thinking. But, damn I looked good then. I hate grandmother's house.

Over the river and through the woods, to dreamland's houses we go. Off to slay the thoughts of the day and retrace my footsteps in snow.

I'm not going to talk about my mental state. There are things in the dark and there are things in the light and all of them would kill you given the chance. Stay alert. Watch the corners. Don't point at the sky, because one day it will point back at you. Don't chase the sounds, unless they are following. Don't chase the splits in the seams of your vision, because people will think you are crazy. Don't listen to the voices. If you ignore them long enough, they'll tell you something special you wouldn't have thought about on your own. And that thing will be so amazing the only way you could relate it to someone who was not there, inside you, is by saying nothing and leaving it all up to the rattle of tree leaves and two A.M. hounds that think they are scrap metal boatswains to rails.


///Mono - "High Life" ... all you live is the high life and never come down... loved this song in high school. still do. Mono always had a sound that completely took me in and I loved them for that.

///Mono - "Life in Mono" I never know exactly what to do, but they never make it easy to walk away. Expectations too great. I want to say. And then the little voice in the back of my head whispers, maybe this is it, for now. So leave nothing on the table.

The New Grading System, Thoughts on Construction, and I Hate Flowers

Well, I spent four hours this morning trying to draw that scorpion flower tattoo and failed miserably again. You can sort of start to see it, but personally I hate how it turned out.



It's starting to look like something. Instead of working on it for thirty minutes and getting pissed off and quitting I worked on it for six times as long, but eventually gave up and went to bed to think about it there or at least find success in doing other things. Maybe it's just the brush selection. Or maybe it's that I just hate drawing flowers and have always struggled with drawing them up close. Or maybe it's that I haven't spent enough time looking at flowers before. Really committing them to memory. I've certainly spent, when I think about it, at least 1000 times more minutes looking at schematics, machines, and geometric constructions in general. Perhaps there is porting that can be done. Reduce the organic to the geometric, fix the perspective there and then port it back to the organic. It's bothering me, in case I haven't made that clear. An unscratchable itch that I have to prove to myself is not unscratchable, but merely located in a place that's hard to reach, but reachable. I hate flowers.

So while I was asleep I had the pleasure of grading papers. At the end. Well, not the end. But in the second dream. The first dream was pretty awesome. I went to the pacific rim and started a new life as a bounty hunter in Oceania. It was all well and good. Then things got bloody and did not end well at all, but that's a story for another time. I'm going to talk about the boring epiphany. So I'm sitting there grading these papers and the papers are both written by potheads, except that I already know what happens to them in the future because I've gone back in time to grade their work as college freshman. I already know one of them is going to run off and work for big name companies out of the gate and I already know the other one is going to end up dropping out and moving in with his mother and working for Borders until they go bankrupt.

I'm reading the writing notes and they're both there in the classroom after school waiting to see what their grades are because the papers will make or break both of their years in my class and as I finish up and go back to reread the stories along with my first impression notes I start ticking things off in columns labeled B, S, and N. I have no idea what the labels mean or their relevance to a fiction class so I pull my perspective back out of my head and I ask the me/not me doing the grading what the columns and labels are for and he tells me "B stands for believable, S stands for continuity, and N stands for noticeable." I ask the grader a follow up question: what do you mean by noticeable? He answers, "noticeable means a moment in the story where the reader notices something and commits the action, event, item, whatever the subject or object being read about is, to their active memory reserved for things they would normally encounter, care about, or keep track of in their own lives and for their own sake." Aha, says I and then I climbed back into my head and went back to reading and grading.

I can't remember exactly what the successful pothead's story was about, but it was pretty boring to grade. All of the things that were supposed to be there were there, but it was obvious that he had no interest in writing and was taking the course for required credit so I found myself loosening my standards mainly to avoid having to deal with arguing about it when I handed him his paper, but also because I couldn't bring myself to nail him on finer points when the subject he chose to write about was thin, safe, and bland to begin with. I didn't think about it at the time as rewarding mediocrity or the ultra conservative, "cover your bases", approach that tends to net good grades in Universities, but thinking about it now it was a pretty slanted thing to do.

The second paper was much more interesting. It was a story about a boy who promises to help his mother kill herself before winter after being disgraced by her husband's lascivious activities in the new year that came to light just as the summer began. The husband leaves her in the same week school ends and the boy is home with his mother throughout the summer months and into fall when he finally begins to realize what he's agreed to help her do and it's impact on his life as school begins again. That's when I got to see the new grading system in action. The columns were divided into rows labeled A, B, C, D, and F. For the continuity category an X in a row meant that was the grade earned. For every other category you started the strikes at the bottom of the column and moved upward to an A. So five noticeable moments meant a technical A. Five continuity issues meant a technical F. Five moments of the suspension of disbelief meant a technical A. There was also built in consideration for length. For short stories, one strike was all that was allowed per letter grade. Middle and longer lengths and word counts meant more ground for the student to cover so additional strikes were made available, two then three per letter grade etc. For particularly short papers letters could be knocked off of the scale so that a person couldn't score an F for not packing enough junk into a paper to satisfy the system and help prevent people from playing to the syllabus or the requirements. And of course more columns could be added or eliminated as subject matter, literary devices, and exercises demanded. Though that did not stop me from allowing it to happen despite the mechanisms in place to alert me to it.

There were continuity issues. Lots of continuity issues. Not impressionistic issues, but just hard de facto mistakes of alignment for a five page story. There were also many, many, many believable moments and moments where I was committing pieces of the story to my memory as though I were reading about neighbors or friends that I thought I knew. The first paper did the same thing, albeit with far less subtlety. So I ended up in a situation where the second paper scored two As and an F. Averaged out to a C. From the stand point of "as hard a science as something subjective as grading papers can be." In the end I tuned the C up to a B for the other points of craftsmanship that can't really be covered and agreed upon in the realm of the lowest common denominator of general and identifiable human experience. I probably should have tuned the other paper from an A to a B as well for rote underachievement.

As a grading system it struck me as fairly useful as a starting point for getting a sense of issues, strengths, and weaknesses. But also as a starting point for conversation, discussion, and argument about grades being given out. Using it, I could explain to student A why their paper of X length graded out better than student B's paper of Y length without having to think back to what I was thinking about when I scribbled the notes I scribbled and then have to hunt through the nebulous territory of assigning those thoughts to grades. Now I had a way of saying "everything else aside, this is why you got this score" and "all things considered in concert, this is how my personal opinion and subjectivity changed that score." It was a pretty detailed dream for half an hour of sleeping. Not as ridiculous or action packed as the other dream, but just as good.



I made that this afternoon. Just trying to get away from failure and into a little success. Turned out exactly how I wanted it too. I wish there was a way to make it rain in the summer time. Anything to peel back the heat. Summer really is the most miserable set of months known to man. Gotta move farther north. Since there is no cloud generator available. I'll tell you about the other dream later. I'll try and draw it up a little more. Get back to doing what I love to do when I'm not writing or out getting dirty playing in the sun or at home moping and cringing against the ticks of time. I wanted to do some paper crafts today, but I'm out of time - because I went out to play for three hours instead of working, but I still think I managed to better myself either way. Oh well. Sorry to bore you. I guess not every day is a hustle. Some days are a shuffle. Or maybe just a think. And now I'm tired and I still have to go to work so, let's get it on. And by get it on I mean dive into sleep. Might try to cross the bridge for a little while and see what's going on in Universe B. Or not. Those trips can be just as tiring as walking these planes some days.

See ya later.


///Boards of Canada - "Seeya Later" I have to leave, but wait up for me. I'll be back soon.

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.

One, Two, Three, Four-

Gone for a minute. Task locked again. I wish there was a way to make progress across the board. Sometimes I feel like I'm on that first frustrating and seemingly never ending series of levels in a role playing game where the experience points to level up are far between simply because the power needed to earn them is severely constricted by the lack of experience. You can wander around all you want. Your actual experience has nothing to do with your point registered experience. In fact you've been wandering around so long that you know the game pretty much inside and out, but because you don't have the power to advance you can't earn the power to advance. Well, not can't, but it's the least you can do to keep running around the periphery of the real game performing the time intensive little things to keep earning the game's recognized experience points and stacking up your little levels until you come across a monster and suddenly find that you've actually accumulated enough attack points to make it more than facing imminent destruction and instant death.

Not that writing is instant death. Or working a bad job that cuts your hours down to next to nothing even though you are the best at what you do there. I guess what I'm saying is I've had very few points to spend and I wish sometimes there was a way to get more other than slugging it out every day and for me there isn't. Everything's not okay, but I deal with it and try to move anyway. Move on, sometimes. Other times, just focusing on moving somewhere. Anything besides staying put and curling up into an ass ball.

So where's the progress? Where have the precious points disappeared too? Arts and crafts mostly. Some were spent on getting better at baseball and bike riding. A lot of them were spent on control. Just white knuckle gripping the control panel behind my eyes and making it go. Reorganization is a pretty difficult thing, but worth it. It's sort of sticking. The whole eating three times a day thing has been a huge hassle, but necessary as I learned through the worst pain I've ever felt that not eating and not drinking will send your body into shock and you will die. And I don't want to die alone. Especially not alone and convulsing in a bath tub some random Tuesday afternoon. I just have to deal with the rest of the bullshit attendant with putting food stuffs in my face. There's no patch or workaround for that. It's sticking and slipping. I've already slipped back to two a day. Because of the task locking.

That's what happens when mighty efforts make few gains, I guess. You try to force more effort into the same, largely fixed spans of time and eventually the only way to "make the most" out of your day is to make the least out of routine necessities. Strip it down to the bones and then shave the bones down to filaments. I'm pressing myself into a pure circuit of function. Solid state being. That's not possible yet though. So I have to not do that.

I have phone calls to make that I haven't made. Landing has been harder than I anticipated. I thought I could do it in three weeks, but the the process is in the first few days of what is looking to take better than a month. Not helping is that I'm trying to find more work so I can afford some less than necessary human peripherals and possibly move out of the periphery and closer to the heart of Pittsburgh. That alone would make life easier. Would make progress easier. It would be a definite level up that would increase my ability to earn more commonly accepted experience points. Game recognized points. But if I did start on meds, meds that are, let's face it, necessary if I plan on staying alive (and I do for the foreseeable future), that would require at least 10 days of adjustment and who knows how many days after that of learning to live with the side effects. Last time I tried I ended up throwing up every other day for almost two months which was just a whole big bag of laughs and the last thing I want is to be in a situation where I'm trying to nail down and learn a new job while adjusting to pills.

I guess it's a little funny. How easy it is to set ones self up for failure. I'm managing now through effort, but effort only goes so far when you try to out howl the wind. So I'm choosing. We've a target destination. We're in a decaying orbit that will take us into the atmosphere and ultimate to solid ground, but we can't simply make attitude adjustments and punch it just yet. One: we will break up into a thousand burning pieces if we did that. Two: we are task locked. Three: we haven't made the necessary progress through the shut down sequence to make that even start to be feasible. That's what I've been working through these last weeks. Reorganization. Cataloging of processes and species. Reconnection with the mission. Re-engagement with the real. Human maintenance.

Remember when I said my job was great because it engaged the machine side of my being. Well I've divorced my eating cycle from my workplace and I've divorced machine engagement from it too. I'm cutting my selves free from any critical ties to that place because it really is not. Forcing myself into that breed or reliance has not been helping me in the ways I thought it was. Set up for failure. I wish sometimes I was not such a believer in all things. I am gullible. Tremendously disposed to wonder. I've yet to understand how it will ever be a good thing.

I spent about twenty hours on this:



It's a gift for an old friend that was supposed to be a christmas gift. But we all know how winter made good and basically ate up every free moment I had getting set up for autonomous life. It's turning out good though. Another forty hours and it should be done and mailed. I hope it is enjoyed and loved. Probably shelved and boxed and collecting dust at some point in its future, but I hope when the box is first opened it produces awe and a smile. I don't really know why I am pursuing its completion so doggedly. I think, if there is a reason, that reason would have to be because I said I would. And God damn it I make good to my friends because my word is just about all I've got these days in the way of common currency.

So curtain up. One, two, three, four... Let's make more things happen. Let's take showers and brush our teefs, and go outside, and work ourselves over at our gyms till we get nose bleeds, and let's treat work like the shit job it is and nothing more, and let's eat at home and sleep less than ten hours, and watch the ghosts with careful eyes, and listen not too close, and smile a little harder, and frown with conviction, and be honest, and medicate as necessary, and things aren't going to work out, but that's no reason to... ...to what? What happens when things keep not working out? Dream revision? No. Yes? I guess I just have to remind myself that I do other things. Metajail is real. But, even prisons have libraries. I think. I can't remember. Probably.

I am building a life outside of a life to save my life. That's it! That's what's been eating up my time! HAH! wow. It only took me how many hundreds of words to reach that realization. I'm actually laughing. I think that is what the last three weeks have been. Let's get back to it. Sorry I've been away. But you know I'll never be gone too long- visiting hours in metajail are worth sticking around for almost by themselves.


///Boards of Canada - "Aquarius" Music has the right to children. Sometimes I think every year you are born. You are the child of your previous year in the same way that you are the child of your parents material and experiences and equations. I'm on my twenty sixth iteration. I guess I'm raising my own child now for the teen years of summer and the maturation of fall and the adulthood of another winter. I owe myself a birthday wishlist for next year. Maybe this year will be the year I buy that square of land in North Dakota. I think that's a reasonably lofty and approachable goal. I wonder if I have to go there to buy it or if I can do it from here. Maybe I'll see what's available here first and go from there. Either way I'm glad I'm still alive and closer to touching down. Shit's been turbulent.

Touching One Half of the Interface, Old Contacts, and Still Making Fire

Well, I finally got up the parts and pieces to contact him. Now I just have to work myself toward opening the response. I'm sure it's nothing. Well nothing more serious than a rejection of any one thing can be.

I found rechargeable batteries for my camera. It's nice to have to use again. It's funny how the good days bleed away like sand. I need an extra set of hands to collect them and keep throwing them in my hair till it get's stuck that way permanent like.



I made a portrait. My head is tired again, but I'm working it somewhat relentlessly. I have a bad personality tick of punishing myself for everything. It's part of what motivates me to operate. I should switch that maybe. I'm not entirely sure how. I should probably get some sleep before I go to work. It's strange. The feeling approaching the punishment breaker. Artifacting. Ridiculous. I'm still and learning. I was discussing the idea of normal. It struck me that there are people who like the burning half baked you because it is. Normal isn't good enough. Or maybe. I just need a little more sleep. I'm not just telling myself that. My self is telling me.

I miss the people I've never met and the people I can never really meet because my head comes apart so easily. It's been raining today. It's been nice. I remember hearing about the water cycle in fifth grade and thinking about how awesome it would be to ride with those molecules through aquifers to the sea. That's not an occupation. It's a preoccupation? I'm thinking about finally giving in to it. I think I've already missed. I'll find out soon enough once I talk to him. We will see if it's the last thing these pupils do. And add it to the blueprint.


///Autechre - "Kalpol Introl"

The fire is still being made and the forge is still powered on, but it's starting to feel like pulling the guts out of the underside of a fish by hauling on it's jawbone. What I'm getting out I can't eat. Still gonna try though. Today is a mess. Was a mess. No vision. No visibility. I've gotta fix these road signs before I get lost again. Must get dressed and put on my face and skins. We ride for dawn. Or some place else as warm.