With A Passion

 I refuse to die.  I think about death just about every day.  Who doesn't.  Yes that is a statement.  I refuse to die.  SHOW ME ALL OF MY LABELS.  I will show you a complete set.  A complete-ish set?  I miss my friends.  Am I alone.  I am alone.  I am l onea.  O, am I lone.  A olo nei. 

Destrega.   I have dreams about the end of the world.  They are fun.  Are you?

Dogfights are luscious.

I dreamt about trees falling and bears coming out of the woods across creek where I used to live in southern Maryland and the spider monster came down out of the bear tree limbs in the middle of winter and before the bears could get to the fawns grazing on what grasses were left behind in a mild thaw before the permafrost killed everything the tree sized monsters began swooping down to harvest the bears.

Their force began tipping the old and dead trees over, held up by ivy.

The entire thing began collapsing.

Have you ever heard the sound

of a tree hitting the ground

that was as large as you

can run?

The shadows were enormous.  I ran fast.  As fast as I could... the entire dream collapsed.  The ground collapsed with the bass of the shear air the trunks displaced as they fell.  The spiders were squashed.  The bears became pelts and powdered glistening bone, when I had time to glance back at the pink mist.

I lived.  The animals died.  I panted.  I watched

more trees fall with thick and thicker trunks, torn asunder like toothpicks before the clouds.  

The troposphere.  The fucking fickle thin layer of air that had just a little too much sun.  God, some single batch would probably kill me so I dont have to know

what's coming next.

Where the Time Went V

Banished.

Banished from the lands.  I almost said unfortunately.  Fortune has little to do with what a person decides to do with their present.  Fortune has everything to do with what and who you are up until "now", but maybe fifty percent to do with after.  Fortune has fifty percent or less to do with what happens to you after you realize what the system is and what you're in for and who you are and where you've been with an open eye.  Of course, you've still got to get "lucky" in part for good things to happen to you, but you also have to be prepared to act.

Banished and returned out of sympathy for their survival, them having flailed in the vacuum of space and been over matched by the very things they spat in my face they could handle on their own so often and myself being fed incomplete information (what I call lies and they call "telling the full truth when they're ready").  So now we are trapped into providing shelter for the wayward addict and trying to lay down ground rules in their defiance and abuse of kindness.  Few things feel more alone than living with someone who is not prepared or capable yet of living outside of their own interests, whatever those interests may be.

If you're still in the mindset of "I am a fuck up, I can't do this" and won't even honest to yourself try, you're going to miss it.  Four months long attempts at trying to wake them up to that simplicity.  Trying to be the best person I could be toward the person I loved.  Maximum effort.  Whether I wanted to or not, whether I was upset or not, whether it would cost me or not.  We had a conversation the other evening about what love is.  Is it an emotion?  A feeling?  A pile of chemicals?  An exchange of ideas, ideals, memories, and hopes?  Is it that metaphorical eternal flame of the soul and yadda yadda that keeps everything and everyone connected and relationships blossom where the connections happen to be stronger instead of weaker?  She sort of fumbled around for some time, at points fading into and out of the "a person can fall into and out of love conundrum so it can only be, but so much of this or that and" basically a word salad of chopped up experiences, tossed with a little salt and vinegarette and served halting.

Love at its core is sacrifice.  Love is willfully putting yourself second for the betterment of someone else.  Love is not whispering "I would die for you" while your heads lay on the same pillow and your faces are six inches away from each other.  Every time someone tells me they would die for me I tell them to live for me.

I'm not looking for apologies anymore.  Whatever form they come in, apologies, an acknowledgement that you did something that did not account for that action's, that decision's, that event's happening's impact on my life, or you did and chose to disregard it, or you did and it did not weigh out to enough to sway you, but you cared enough to inform me and help me better understand where I fall in your calculus and explore the otherverses of paths so that we can figure out whether we should or should not cross paths in the future, if it can be avoided.

I am looking for changes in behavior.  Whatever forms the apologies take, if you find yourself offering apologies and sacrifices to the same You, it is vainity at its root.  Isn't it?  As long as you can forgive you, everything should be good with the person you are bowing your head for the knife for.  As long as you're in the loop, you are your own executioner.  And yes, you will die in dramatic fashion.  The applause will rain.  Everyone will believe something was accomplished in the display.  The executioner will go to their home, once the crowd applause fade, and there's some sort of proclamation about sins and wrongs and the pigeons and crows will come to peck up the bits of food the audience left in the courtyard.  The morticians will get to work and the janitors too.  The executioner's phone will buzz a "hey, are you up?  Let's hang out" the following night.  You'll do your make up, cross legged on the floor, and say to yourself you must go meet so-and-so because...

Apologies and "sorry" are not worthless.  They carry some merit on their own, though tacit.

You'll befriend fall guys and walking excuses and you'll apologize later.  Beheading yourself used to mean something.  It used to be painful.  Cognitive dissonance is something for therapy couches, though.  Why respect the opinions of people that have spent their lives studying people, just like you.  With enough repetitions, a person can become anything they want to be.




///Fatboy Slim - "The State We're In" ~

Where The Time Went II

Four flame outs later and several lives ago.

That Instant

You realize you are pushing your cycles and cams and pistons and engraved toothsets of finished brass over to force change so the person who loves you can see your moss and lichened belly clearly.

Where The Time Went

I haven't been lost.  I've been sitting beside a home made transceiver trying to reach a ship in the vicinity.  I've been on board it a few times with no signs of life.  Each time I return to my junker it goes off and I race to the comms deck to respond.  Each time I do- static.

Each time I board it there are freshly opened meals, a coffee sack still warm, a cigarette drifting with flecks of ash still floating and clouds of smoke swaying in the recycled air.  A saucer and chipped cup and different music playing in the background over the public address.  Breathable 65 degree air.  A few playing cards that weren't there before.  A display still picking up signals from Sol from 1989 when they aren't playing static.  A ghost ship.  I turn off the distress beacon and return to my junker to figure out what to do with it.

I can't turn it over to the scrappers just yet.  Not with people aboard.  Their machines will shred it with no regard for souls.  If someone is on that ship, I can't forgive myself.  If someone is on that ship, I hope to make contact soon.  The trade hub orbiting Europa is still four days journey from our position in the Oort.  Remember how lovely the grass was down on Terra?  If I can bring this thing back in one piece, there'll be a fortune and a vacation waiting for us.

Someone is on that ship.  I will find them.

Captain Jexel Hobbes of the Noway Accel- 10201800278

Time has flown by.  I've missed so many deadlines I wanted to hit.  When was the last time we spoke?

RAM is going to take a serious investment.  I know that the mother board can handle it and I've tried a half dozen times different combinations of chips to blow it to the 16 gigabytes that it can do.  I've allowed the bottleneck to become a road block on producing art.  I fell in love back in March.  Sacrificing and sacrificing over and over to try to bring another person into my world, but most efforts have failed.

I've asked her dozens, but not yet hundreds of times to meet me half way.  She continues to do the same things she does, not because she doesn't love me as much as I love her, but because it is all she knows and has known since she was small.  I do think that it's possible to change, I know it is.  Everyone deserves a chance.  There is a spark in her.  If I can help, I will.  I didn't get to where I am in life without help.  How can a person conscious of this turn away another and another who actually kind of sort of understands you?

I am beginning to wonder if she actually does or if she is a part of my life because I am so different from everything she once knew and cares more about being truly loved as a person than.......  she does love fairly unconditionally.  Maybe that's a part of the problem.  She can't tell the difference between someone who actually cares for her and someone who is using her.  It's a possibility.  It can be solved.

How do you speak to someone who is jammed with ultimatums and unwilling to discern?  How do you speak to someone who cannot see the consequences of their actions beyond a week, beyond a month, beyond 12 hours?  How do you reach an addict?  I am one.  She's not on another level.  She hasn't allowed herself into the terrors of introspection.

She flies away from the heat.  She creates reason mazes.  Responsibility mazes.  Agency dead falls.  I understand the fear.  How can you explain that fear in your own life to someone who hasn't acknowledged it within their own space?  I suppose that goes back to the old adage: how can you love someone, if you cannot love yourself.  I don't know what to do when I see her setting herself up for apologies.  It's how she's gotten by.  The other adage: don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

I never thought that I would fall in love again.  I knew I would.  I did not believe, however, that it would be more than a passing fancy.  Survival is paramount.  Survival comes with its costs.  One of the costs is you do not get to enjoy stable long term relationships because you must survive.  If two survivors meet, there's a match and a stable long term relationship can grow there because there is no dependence.  There is only a mutual companionship.  Do not tell me you would die for me.  Live with me.

I am afraid this will not work and I may have to eject her through an escape pod into the vacuum of space with a few months survival kit, a beacon, and a radio.

The largest red flag wasn't history, or family composition, or addiction.  The largest red flag remains a dearth of creative thought.  A nagging inability to see what's possible instead of what's here.

One year.  One year.  I will gift her one year of my life.  I was given less to reach further and, for some of it, I destructed because I didn't know what and who I was and a heavy portion was out of my control from the outset.  Everyone deserves a chance to grow.  Everyone!  I know she can do it.  We have so much in common and beautifully so.  I do love her after believing that I did not have the capacity to love again after everything my circuits have been sheared through.  I am a part of my ship, incorporated, built, and breathing, designed, redesigned, scrapped, prototyped, burned, and rebuilt anew.

The larger mission is still to build a map for the sojourners after I am long gone and someone else is stumbling upon my space station and docked junker broadcasting songs no one has heard in decades and curious what the hell a space station is doing 15 light years away from Sol in dead space.

I have compassion.  I know that I am a pretty tough ticket 300 out of 365 days, but I can feel and I can be and am conscious of my bipolar schizophrenia.   Occasionally it gets away from me, but not nearly as often as it once did.  I can protect her and my friends from it (it's impossible to protect one's self).

One year from the day we met in March.

Synchronize watches.




///Way Out West - "Northern Lights"   radiata

Fireflies for the Child In Me

I know I have to get back to writing.  I've been feeling sexual pins and needles, like a blanket in a dry room with a fireplace.  It's been a very confusing sensation.  Electric and warm and immaginary, though sensate.  The land of a half million new pairs of knit socks rubbed along a tightly curled rug by one million feet, except I feel that warmth running through my hips and arm pits and around my nips and ribs and the backs of my knees and my tailbone and right behind my ears.  For days.  I know I have to get back to writing.  I know this isn't what it feels like to not write.  I don't know what this sensation is, but I want to bury my mouth and eyes and nose in it and wrap my whole body up tight in it like a cigarillo, light the end, and pitch myself into a twinkling sunset from the lip of a bridge.  I will get back to writing.  The awareness of sexual solitary confinement is blitzingly real and oddly ember drift.

I want to watch and feel the fireflies depart with the breeze.  Little by one.  One by little.  Until the only light is from the evening sky and the threat of sunrise.  I think it is the only part of that spectrum I'll get to know and share with other people in a reasonable way.

Why not enjoy it?

Will you ever have sex again?  I don't know, but I hope it feels something like this.

Birthday Party

There's no answer for permanently fractured hearts.  Caught between the teeth of time and facts and wanting more than anything to be able to wish her a happy birthday without drumming up history.  More than wishing her a happy birthday, I want to be absolutely certain I don't hurt her.  To do that, I cannot offer a basic, basic, hallelujah.  Learning we would not be the same was one of the most terrifying, absolute, and violent days of my life.  I was already crying inside, taken every avenue to try to keep pace with her happiness and success.

Darker and darker and darker and darker.  The craziest part was our sense of adventure and curiosity for the world and cinema and oddball jokes and clowning and learning and reading and people watching were in line.

thinking backward, the love never dies.  Part of me shouts to the starlight "HAPPYBIRTHDAY".  I hope it matters.

I have nothing to offer her that will accelerate.   The answer to the question of future is blank.  I love you.  Time is an illusion.  Just gift me time I think.  Time is real.  Poor man, rich man, whatchu been in at.  What do you care about?

I put my body on the line and took risks.

What do you care about!!!

I can't have children, okay?  I can, but I'm far too warped to raise them.   Okay!?  I'm debt slagged as fuck, I can't raise kids, I don't know what a good chair is, I don't know how to do proper, I can cook and don't know what good food should cost, I don't have marketable skills, I hate customer service, and I have a useless degree and on top of that I still don't have the paper that confirms what I have actually learned.  Okay?  God is a lie, I'm antisocial, fucked in the head, and I would love to be.  I'm a social butterfly and an addict and a hermit.  I can't be trusted with a gun, the only family I recognize are my immediate siblings, I fucking hate people and the best world is a world where every city is glassed.  I'm an almost always nude and I love the outdoors and when we're at home, why are you wearing clothes?  It's weird!  Why can't I touch you?  Yes, it's your meat, I'm terrible with respecting boundaries once you're in everything should be open for all.  I'm not self conscious but I am conscientious.  That's the tip of it.  None of that answers what I asked.

What do I care about?  Fitting myself into life as invisibly as possible.  Caring about us goes about as far as: did you kill yourself today (y/n), was it a good day (y/n), can you engage with the world tomorrow (y/n), have you slept and eaten (y/n), did you hurt anyone (y/n)?  From those basics we can get more complex, but that's essentially it.  A very (I hate the word) easy checklist.

I laugh because who is supposed to live with that?

There's no answer for fractured hearts.

I wish there was.  Try to keep the shards in a box away from where they may be knocked over or caught up in the soles of feet and heels of hands and fingers or get into food.

The easy signs of trouble were violent in their simplicity.

We'll see.

I've told myself the ache will fade  Whispers along bedtime stories and therapy.  Imagine the... it would have continued for years afterward.  Pulling apart, love cannot solve base problems no matter how big or small and thorough a heart is.

What I hope most of all is that the first attraction wasn't a try to see how the other side of the tracks live. I hope most of all that she didn't think of me as ...

She gave a damn, and I will burn my circuits and song my circus.  It hurts.  I don't mind the reminder, knowing what it feels like to fall in love.  Knowing that falling in love is the sudden stop that will crush you.

Believe an end is just a beginning.

Believe love is real.

Believe that someone else saw something in you that you couldn't see yourself and the tides of fortune overwhelmed what could have been.

I Love You.




///Lemon Jelly - (Nice Weather For Ducks)

Dear (_____)

Dearest Time,

There was, when anything and anyone could be deleted with absolute prejudice and purest aggression.  Time's have changed.  We must feel emotion to be one and in that emotion understand that their being is not only how we've become, but essential to our continuing survival for many decades to come.  There is no resolution or answer for it.  The war is only beginning.  What you do from here on and hear on is your own choice.  Have vision.  Have mercy.  Have clout.  And have patience.  There are years ahead.  I will be with you.  There are years ahead.

with armor,

Weakness

On The Revocation Of Passports

I understand times do change.  I understand that I do exist in a space that is not attuned to the normal speeds and distances of the governing dark star at the center of the Milky Way.  I understand the difficulties this presents, trickling down to our branch, our neighborhood, our star, our system, our section, our planet, our hemisphere, our continent, our nation, our state, our city, our block, our ship inside that soup (the governance bubble reaching out only that far to offer resistance).

I understand times do change around us and the space in which we exist has a fixed passport system.  Once granted entry into the time lapsed/corrupted/flexed/shifted bubble speeding along with the rest of the system around it, the passport will not be revoked.  Granted access, you can come and go as you please.  There are rules.  Those rules can be tailored to you.  I will never revoke your passport out of spite.  I will never revoke your passport out of anger.  I will never revoke your passport because your times have changed.  I will never revoke your passport because my time has changed.  Once gifted, your passport is set for as long as you live and nontransferable.

We don't give them out like Halloween candy.

If you ever need to borrow a cup of sugar.

If you ever need a box of nails or a snowblower.

If you ever need a lift somewhere.

If I can help, I will.  Just ring before you cross the boundary into controlled space and attempt to buzz the flight deck.  The weapons net surrounding the ship is live.  Don't be converted to light and dust.




///Nightmares On Wax - "Passion"

Do not forget there are rules.  Break them enough times and the immune system that keeps the bubble afloat in the interstellar sea will have some very pointed questions for you.

Fandom Changes With Age

Maybe there's less energy to go around in general as people age.  I think it has more to do with developing an identity.  Fandom is steadily fading year by year.  It will never go away entirely.  Football Sunday will still be football Sunday.  The Steelers will always be fun to watch and their games against the Ravens will always be my favorite games to watch and if they make the playoffs I'll watch those games too.  The Pirates are still the Pirates.  When I stumble across a game on the radio or on television I'll listen in or sit down for an hour or two to take them in.  The Penguins will still be the Penguins.  Their games will still be a lot of fun to listen to on the radio, especially on the radio.  Listening to hockey on the radio is one of those things that's actually more entertaining and exciting than watching it on television.

Fandom will not completely go away, but as I have more things to get done and have built a life in Pittsburgh I feel connected with the city without needing to feel like I have to embrace and demonstrate that connection through waving a sports flag.  Sitting in front of a computer screen, waiting for a fantasy draft to start, I had a moment where I heard a voice in my head say "what the hell am I doing" and I closed the screen.  No fantasy sports this year.  It's extraneous.  It's plastic.  I realized I didn't want to spend weekdays keeping an eye on waiver wires and fretting about teams I don't care about at all.  I follow the Steelers and that's good enough for me.

There's not much more to enjoy about your local teams besides watching them play once in a while and feeling a little civic pride when they win and a little let down if they lose.  However, as you grow into a person with your own loves and affections for the place that you live, your civic pride comes less and less from what happens to your sports teams and more and more from what you do within and around your town and city.

Two years ago, a Steelers loss could make the entire rest of my week until the next game absolutely miserable.  Three years ago, it was misery, screaming at the television and throwing things at the walls of my apartment.  The following year was screaming misery and jubilation and throwing things.  The following year, fandom faded to shouting at the television and occasionally jumping up and down.  This year, I'll probably still shout at the t.v. from time to time, but other than that, it'll just be a fun diversion once a week for the Fall and Winter.  I know some of the roster, but it's not encyclopedic knowledge the way it used to be.  I don't know when they play the Ravens, but I'll find out and probably mark the games on my calendar.

I'll still buy the occasional Black and Gold trinket as years go by.  I'll still go out of my way to hear about some sports news every day.  I'm going to be a fan for life.  As I get older, the fanatic in me fades away and I'm not unhappy to see it go.




/// Jimmy Pol - "Steelers Fight Song"

At the End of the Seventh Week (damage report)

Out of the fog of wars, asked for and not, comes the final damage report.

The total bill:

1 fractured left jawbone submandibular fossa.
1 dislocated left jawbone condylar process.
1 dislocated left jawbone coronoid process.

The total paid:

1 healed jawbone submandibullar fossa.
1 healed jawbone condylar process.

I don't think the coronoid process will ever heal correctly.

Total bill:

Zero $.
Constant pain in the coronoid process, but bearable and adaptable.

Final result:

No crippling pain.
Unforgettable pain.  The kind of pain every morning and every evening and every time I think about eating.  However, the kind of pain that will remind me to be a better a person.  The kind of pain that is unforgettable and good in its way because it will diffuse further scuff ups and other opportunities to speak my mind whenever I feel like, be it the thrill of getting ice cream or the the assuage of killing off the thrill of murdering someone else because I ... a good deterrent.  There are only so many ways to explain so many things.  This one is adequate.

I can eat.  I can chew.  I can tear.  I can exercise.  I can use the rest of my body.  I refuse to incriminate myself.  And I will not start here.

The healing has been amazing.  I am able to smoke again.  I wake up every morning feeling like a railroad spike has been shoved through my skull from the left side, right up through my ear, behind my eye socket and I've never had a migraine by definition, but this must be close to it.

I choose to let it go.

I choose to move on.

I have to.

Head hunters don't lead good lives.

I am furious and love struck and oh so amber and rose and pink in the joy of being able to wake up with 90% of my function back and if that's as good as it gets, hell baby, I got off lucky.  I will take that and dance and swing hammers and think about the next time and maybe I will strike first or maybe I will disarm myself before what you are carrying becomes an issues, but for fucks sake, it is good to be able to laugh free again.

The final damage report is this:

Mistakes were made on one side.  Mine.  I ate it.  I came out on the other side, tempered and galvinized.  A shorter fuse and a shorter leash too.   I expect less of other people and more of myself.  And that is flipping pretty good for a prognosis of a wire job.

I've known what it is to not be able to speak for days at a time, not because you couldn't, because you were literally locked closed.  A blindness.  I've known unprovoked hate in the shade of unbridled happiness.  Your spectrum is Roy G, Biv.  Mine is unspeakable in its range and color and temperature and length.  It has no name yet and I may not be able to give it a convenient one.

I now have the power to teach, and I will not.  Unless you press me.




///TV on the Radio - (Lovers Day)  of course, there are miracles... the people we think you are.  give me the keys to your hiding place

Nearing the End of the First Week With a Fractured Jaw

The fracture or break is very high up the ramus and very close to my ear.  Every time I poke it hard enough I can hear and feel it flex a little so I try not to touch it or shift my jaw left or right when I do yawn with my teeth locked together.  Of course I didn't go see a doctor.  I have no health insurance.  What's the doctor going to do?  Wire my teeth together and tell me to get plenty of rest and not move my jaw.  I can do that without the wires and the $5000 bill.  Sure there may be other fractures along the side of the jaw bone, but inspection says they're only fractures if they do exist and not clean breaks.  Thanks to wisdom teeth that were never removed growing up because they were so badly impacted the surgery was out of the question for one reason or another by the time I was screened for them, the inside of my cheek took some thick lacerations at the point of impact.  I think one or two of molar roots may have cracked causing swelling and pain in the angle.  Time will tell.  Hell, if my wisdom teeth on that side die and eventually fall out, I'm all for it.  Who am I going to be kissing in the next two- three years anyway.

The first week of a liquid diet and I'm down 17 pounds.  I'm not fat, but I always feel fat, so it's helping my body image issues a great deal, oddly enough.  I keep thinking over the evening last Saturday.  After a great pow-wow with a buddy and his friend who had to leave a little earlier we decided to head out and grab some ice cream and, I was thinking, a pack of smokes on the side for me, happy to be alive and a little agitated, but more than anything else, happy to be out for a walk in the deep night air with a gorgeous moon.  Hopping along, we came across a bunch of teens loitering in a schools front yard and a police van telling them to disperse and we walked on, exchanging glances.  They were obviously doing it wrong.  Mulling in the shadows instead of out beneath the street lights on your way to get some tasty ice cream and smokes and then hop back home to finish the night off with a few beers and your friend.

They were doing it wrong and it was funny and in my happiness and joy with the night and my pal and the prospect of ice cream, I shouted to them so, with a few more curse words and some gestures, but simply poking fun at how they choose to spend their time when they could be walking to get ice cream instead of haunting a schools front lawn.  They shouted back and I shouted back, because there's so much more to life than trying to intimidate people all of the time.  There's friendship, and the moon, and ice cream, and cigarettes, and the fun a Saturday unperturbed by anyone who dares believe they can rain on my happy day with a friend I haven't seen in far too long.  Who cares if a couple of happy travelers don't clutch their purses or speak in hushed voices as they pass you by.  You're a bunch of kids on a schools closed front lawn trying to intimidate and strike fear into the "mean streets of Pittsburgh" from the shadows.  Ooga booga!  It was hilarious.

Those boys took it the wrong way and decided to follow and encircle us.  "All of this happiness must be stomped out!" is what I think they said collectively.  I had no desire to fight.  Those roads are way behind me and ice cream was ahead of me and the police were just up the block a moment ago.  I do not live in a world where I will trade ice cream for police questioning.  Ever!  I figured there'd be some yelling and shoving and they'd go on their merry and moody and belligerent way after pushing us around and we'd continue on ours and get those evening treats and continue our happy Saturday.  It wasn't to be.  I was hit from a blind angle right in the left corner of my jawbone just beneath my ear and dropped like a bag of rocks for a few seconds.  My friend, struck too, was lucky enough to get hit from a direction his head was more or less facing and did not suffer more than cosmetic damage in a black eye and a cut or two.

I didn't realize the discomfort I felt the following day was far more than a bruise on my cheek until the day after when the pain got worse and worse until I couldn't chew anything, much less open my mouth.  I guess those boys won.  My happiness silenced by a fractured jaw bone and quite possibly broken molars inside the bone itself (hoping that's not the case, but we'll know in another week or two or if the violence of them being forcefully shifted a few millimeters out of their homes has caused inflammation that will take some time to heal [or if infection is underway as we write *cue doom music*]).


I keep thinking through that fateful stretch of night.  I keep asking myself why the hell would they do that?  Keep telling myself it was entirely uncalled for.  I know why I was sucker punched.  Their fear.  That moment when my friend was hit and they thought "now or never because if this other larger guy wasn't going to put up a fight before he just may A: decide to put up a fight now, B: shout or call for help, C: both a and b."  I keep wondering why they didn't just yell back and go their separate way.  There was no chance they considered he and I, a couple of drunk 30 year old men out on a walk together, to be a threat to them.  Why would they do that?  Why would they attack us so viciously?

And then it dawned on me.  Thinking back 12 years.  How righteously furious I was then for dozens of reasons, some complex some as simple as I wanted an excuse to pass on the hurt inside of me to anyone who gave me an excuse to.  Ready to fight anyone and any inanimate object that didn't "respect" me no matter how pointless or stupid.  I didn't want to rob you.  I wanted to hurt you as badly as I could get away with.  Year after year after year, getting more angry, more sensitive, more irrational, but always questioning it, breaking it apart, tearing down the engine, trying to figure out what the hell it was making this bomb of my body go tick tick tick.  I still haven't figured it out exactly.

Through years of study, years of violence toward others sometimes warranted, often times not, culminating in things I will never be able to take back, I left those courses behind me.  Thirty years old all I care about is writing, getting home in one piece, spending time with my cats, seeing my friends when I can, and taking care of the only body I have left until my brain breaks apart or my body just will not run anymore.  I could care less who respects me and who doesn't.  I could care less who breaks my jaw and who decides to be merciful.  Save for a handful of very specific, very important, exceptions, if I ever get so mad that the only language I can speak is the original dialect, violence itself, I will speak through breaking my own skin and nerves, not someone else's.  The simpler truth is that for most of those kids, they will never learn or even begin to learn how to learn that things could be different.  Some of them will end up dead.  Others will circle their private drains until their live's dwindle and die out.

Those idiots aren't there yet.  It was stupid of me to believe a 12 year gap in understanding what a good night with a friend really is, and what it can mean in the face of a world, in the face of my world once dominated by violence.  They didn't silence my happiness.  If worst comes to worst and I can never quite use my jaw the way I could before that night again, I have always wanted to learn sign language.

Do I hate them for it?  Of course.  Would I like to find one of them, knock him senseless, wrap him duct tape and put him in the bed of my truck and take him home?  Would I like to duct tape his arm to a sheet of plywood after gagging him with #0 steel wool and use my belt sander grind away the first knuckle of each digit of his immobilized hand and then shatter the wrist of his other?  Would I like to drive down river and dump his body at a drainage gate?  Of course.  That would achieve nothing.  I'd be happy for a while until the next week when the pain set in again and I would need to find another one and that life is not for me as long as I continue to refuse it and allow the rest of myself to flourish.  Maybe they'll learn.  Maybe a few of them will think about and ask themselves essential questions.

Happiness and love are precious and not to be squandered under all but the most extreme circumstances.  Especially not in this world's economy.




///=sigh= I could really go for a slice of pizza right about now.  I'll melt some ice cream instead.

Summer Days Are Beautiful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

Stay Positive, Opposite Day, Detours, and Paper

How funny would it be to wake up in your own car in the middle of the early morning after accidentally blowing your steering wheel airbag into your face the night before tinkering with the switches and wiring around the wheel?

The thought crossed my mind, walking home from the local store to buy smokes and chips.  Almost as good as chips and ice cream.  When I feel horrible, I prefer cigarettes because they make me feel a little less horrible without making me wish I felt an unsustainable joy derived from ice creams sweet and cooling goodness.  If only anyone could always be that smooth, creamy, and soothing all the way down to the belly.  The thought crossed my mind after walking away from my truck to go buy some comfit after I noticed my fuel gauge was malfunctioning and realizing the problem's solution was going to cost me at least $120 and 10 to 20 hours of labor at worst and 20 to 40 hours of labor, learning, trial and error, and no dollars at best.

I kept chuckling thinking about how angry I felt.  I kept chuckling thinking about reaching under the seat for my hatchet, letting out a bloody war cry, and smashing the wheel to pieces.  Only then, ditching the hatchet, pulling and tearing wires out of it with my bare hands until the airbag exploded and shoved one of my closed fistful of wires straight into my face and I basically ended up knocking myself out cold with a rocket powered fist to the dome.  Then waking up the next day with a deployed airbag, swollen knuckles, one hell of a headache, and one hell of a fist shaped bruise between my eyes.

Part of the reason for the rage is that I finished fixing another small problem with a steep learning curve and dozens of hours of labor and learning rolled inside only days before.  The truck is not falling apart around me, though it feels that way sometimes.  The problems are routine problems and I wish I could take it in for routine maintenance instead of d.i.y. desperation weekends.  The other part of the reason for the anger is that if I were paid more in line with my actual skills and level of higher learning, I could shrug, say "okay", and rent a car tomorrow while my truck sat in a shop for an afternoon.

Living near the bottom of the middle class is deceptive.  Bottom of the middle class, top of the lower class.  Living in the region can be deceptive if you have some imagination, some confidence, some helpful friends, and some ingenuity.  I have a one bedroom apartment with a closet bath/shower and mini kitchen.  If I take away all of the furniture a friend gave, all of the furniture I built, and all of the furniture I found on curbs or being given away by strangers, I have cinder blocks, two folding chairs, one of those university lobby lounge chairs, a sheet of particle board, and an end table.  Remove every worldly possession, so to speak, and there'd be a truck parked outside, a few pots and pans and plates, a desktop and pair of monitors, a console, a found tv, a few books and magazines, some shoes and goodwill clothes and multipack tees, some mechanical gadgets, some home and auto repair tools, and a printer and phone.

Imagination allows me to see what can be and holds the hand of ingenuity to find ways to make it happen.  Call it humility or call it living within your means or call it mining gold or a hobby, thrift stores are one of the keys to forgetting that you are part of the working poor.  The cream of the lower class.  Keeping good friendships is a huge part of the puzzle.  Without them, my life easily fits inside a 10' by 10' cell with a hole in the ground to eliminate and a spigot somewhere to drink and bathe.  Part of the anger stems from those parameters.

I have been heavily detoured.  Charging along the roads as quickly as possible in an effort to get back on some kind of track while wasting as few years as possible is frightening.  I ask myself what will happen if I miss a black on orange florescent sign letting me know my next turn is coming three turns from now and the sign at the third turn was never erected so commit this one to memory.  First and final warning.  The reason why it does not feel fair to me is because it is not fair.

I continue to consider the many branches not followed that have lead here, fighting for time to write.  I began to believe my father was trying to teach me a lesson about his pain all along and I am finally beginning to understand it, but I will not be able to understand until I am 48 or 50 or whatever his age was when I stopped talking to him.  Before that thought grew too large, I remembered he hasn't the subtlety or emotional imagination to allow him to pull that off.  I can see where some of his resentment stemmed from.  Losing all of the prime years of life and talent at the cutting edge of art, design, and martial arts bad-ass-ery to childcare.  Who wouldn't be a lot angry all of the time.  Though extremely dissimilar in their divination (did you see what I did there), the results are similar.  Cut away opportunities, trim an effective gesture here, clip a nudge there, ....

... I don't know.  I do not know why I never got the same support.  It would not have taken much.  Some days I am alright never knowing.  Some days it all comes to a head staring at your broken fuel gauge and doing the right thing and getting the hell out of the car without slamming the door and spinning 180 degrees to put your fist through the window and slash your own tires.  The world could've been miles from now.

I could be writing about my third year working as a librarian somewhere and moaning about coding database systems and dealing with angry patrons and making time for dates between writing short stories and working on my two part novel about warfare and keeping up to date on my space opera hopeful crown jewel I'm still searching out an editor for, however the third poetry anthology is going pretty great.  I'm tearing out the kitchen in parts on my down time when I get tired of writing and it should be finished in another week or two.

Today felt like opposite day.  Loading my truck up with bale after bale of carpet, a refridgerator door, water logged drywall, a cane and broken umbrella, armfuls of empty paint cans, a screen door, and three dozen other pieces of jetsam from the home I'm renovating's previous occupants, it was opposite day.  What I was doing should be my hobby.  I should be putting that sweat and blood and cuss into my own home, not someone else's.  When I go home I should be thinking about what I am going to tear down and visit the hardware store to work on next.  When I go home I should not be thinking about what I can write next that can be packed into the time it takes to shut my body down to hit the hammers and brushes and trash bags and saws again.

As much as I love working with my hands, I could find a way to work with my body in the face of an occupation that demanded I not.

"You're poor!  You're poor!  You're poor!  You're poor!  Do not be deceived; you're poor!"

Independent life is a horror show and funhouse of mirrors broken and whole.  I am staying positive.

What brought me back to a semblance of balance is remembering that the day is still young.  Independent life is 5 years old.  Five.  Five years ago you started stepping outside of your cell.  A year or two later you walked down a hallway and into a cafeteria.  A few months later you learned there was a yard and no time restrictions.  A few months later you found a gate into another yard.  It's getting larger and larger as long as you do not screw it all up and have your privileges revoked.  All of the time you lost will be compounded by the time you spent finding a way back out.

No one pays you what you're worth unless you have the paper to create the market.  Or the portfolio and charisma, in lieu of paper.  Portfolio and charisma is an absolute "and" statement.  The one and not the other turns into a luck base number system.  I will never know my actual value.  Maybe that is the worst of it?  I will never know if I am being over paid or under paid, valued appropriately or not.  The optimist inside, the petitioner, tells me that if and only if we suffer for as much time as we spent pursuing the degree, our penance will be met with paper if and only if we are gracious through our turbulent era.  The eros inside whispers about penance through joyful degradation,   The musician adds another kick drum, knocking over cymbal stands.  The child snaps crayons in half so both hands can draw at once inside the same lines.

It is difficult not to fantasize about getting my degree in the mail, tearing it in half, driving to their house, and suffocating them to death in turn, each by half, with a wad of paper.  That would be thoroughly satisfying.

What are you supposed to do when the toys you want to play with are above the grade you are licensed for?  What are you supposed to do when what you are allowed to do you can do very well, but the ceiling is opaque and the sounds coming through it are not in a language you can or maybe will ever understand?  Maybe I am paid exactly what I am worth.  If I have reached my ceiling and given no indication that I am prepared for or understand in the slightest or am equipped for beyond that ceiling, I am paid exactly what I am worth.

That's frightening.  Also true.  Harrowing.

Sometimes I understand that I'm getting too fixated on true freedom.  I get a taste of working something I can enjoy to support the writing habit and expect everything else to fall in line. There's a luck element to it, that I cannot unlock through work or optimism or faith or trust.  That operates on its own time table.  If I do win the lottery, I will take out full page ads in major cities for the hell of it, but only once.

Part of me continues to say it is not supposed to be this hard to make massive uncertainty and day to day, week to week, at best month to month living a thing of the past.  My state is, however, that fragile.  At the ripe old age of at least 1/3 dead the best I can do for myself is knowing I have at least a month to figure out a new lowline.  Fear the high lines because you know a low line is around the corner... ....what to do when you are following low lines?   High lines have to be engaged.  My spider sense is not tingling.  Shake the wrong tree and a warship mine may fall out of it, let alone a tank or soldier sized one.  The other story of America.  Every body wants to be a cat.  If you have enough money you can do whatever you want to.  Not that much money.  I mean enough money to swap cars, or pick up and move, or add and subtract clothing, or change lighting, or paint colors, flip what you walk on, change shoes when you feel like it, add and subtract channels, modify whatever you want to when the moment strikes you, eat out, order drinks for other people, pay for other peoples gas, buy extra fresh fruit.  It's nice.

I am still going to try to brew my own beer this summer.  Do not give me that horseshit "God works in mysterious ways" because chance does too.  The only thing better than chance is ingenuity, and the only thing more important and better than ingenuity is imagination.

I am trying to stay positive with some success.  Frustration and rage are part of being us.  Born here?  Sure.  From here?  No.  I've missed you.  Don't lose touch.  If you ever need to talk, do not forget my ear.                 I love you.                    I love you.       I love you.  I love you. I love you.I love you.Iluvu.Ilvu.Iu.U.I.

We'll get this thing sorted out.  We have a lot of time ahead of us, like it or not, we do.

Do not quit.

You have the rest of your life to make that decision.

It is opposite day, okay?

It is not wasted time.

Opposite day.

Time becomes more valuable as it accumulates.

Okay.  I am
with you.  Agreeing to never throw hands up in frustration.  Agreeing to ride it as long as there is still track in front.  Agreeing to dance as long as there is a beat to dance to, be it from within or without.  I am okay with you as long as your are
okay.  With me.





///Aesop Rock - (Gun for the Whole Family) ~ i've missed you for a very long time.  things got bad.  things were getting bad.  i had to remember that they weren't as bad as they'd been.  we're working toward a utopia of coexistence.  we're not there yet, but damn sure we're going to keep on trying while helping lay the ground works and maps and blue prints for the next iteration of our being.




/
//
///Alanis Morissette - (Thank You) ~ passive mobile adaptable armor.

The Power of Discovery

Learning new things changes everything.  Resets the clock.  Burns a bible.  Learning new things resets the clock and burns the bible containing everything there is and ever will be to know about living.

The power of discovery changes lives.  Changes stations.  Changes base mathematics.  Changes chemical interactions.  Discovery revises everything and rips the futures to shreds.  Any futures.  All futures.  Discovery stops time and shatters it like plate sugar.

The power of discovery is never to be underestimated or unaccounted for.  It is impossible to plan for, compensate for, adjust a reticle for.  The longer you live, the higher the power of discovery's power rises.  Perhaps.

Even so, the power of discovery will bring you back to life, no matter how dead in the pool you think you are. No matter how fluent and fluid and deft you think you are in the sea of automation.  You are alive.



///Fatboy Slim - "Praise You"

Less Than Stellar Habits

I've developed the habit of not breathing while I'm driving.  Cruising down Allegheny boulevard beside the river with a ton of straightaways, I noticed it.  My right hand resting on the stick shift started to go numb.  That was when I realized I wasn't breathing.  That was also when I sucked a breath in at 45 miles per hour on a two lane with a rumble strip.  It's really hard not to process space and time as opportunities to wreck and die.  I'm trying to unlearn it.  Breathing is very important, especially while driving.  I'm not scared of many things.  I thought I'd conquered my fear of the road once I started whipping my horse, but I hadn't.  I have been holding my breath since all this time whenever situations got even remotely hairy.  It makes me a worse driver, not a more cautious one.  Constant silent panic that locks up a body.  The world is terrifying at speed.  But I love speed.  But it's terrifying.  But it's gorgeous.  Wrestling with circumfact.... am I going to die in a flaming ball of twisted metal?  Ignore the landing lights.  They are not landing lights!  Oooh tunnel vision.  Stick your head out of the window and suck it in.  Canyon run. Someday soon.  Don't go too heavy on the gas.  I want driving to be fun again.




///Hotchip - "You Ride, We Ride, In My Ride"

Scarification

I am very much looking forward to finishing the bear paw/lens on my left hand.  When I started scarification it was in part a way to feel more complete.  A way to match the inside with the outside and unify the kingdom of my body and mind.  A way to talk without saying a word of the anger and hate that refuses to go out.

Years later, I am happy still to have the daily reminder because without it I would forget and there are things that must never be forgotten or glossed over.  The older ones were there for a warning and also for a reminder.  I do believe I've been familiar enough and known enough that they serve much less in the capacity of a warning and much more in the capacity of a daily reminder to never go back.  No matter how desperate.  No matter how ... imagine a perfect storm of circumstances ... no matter how "that".  And I'm glad because without them I would cycle back.  A daily hard stop.  I'm glad my occasional congeniality shows through too.  85% of the time, I'm alright or able to figure a way back to right 100% of the time.  15% of the time, probably more, the outcomes are not at all acceptable.

I am really looking forward to finishing my paw.  It's going to be a ton of fun slitting things open and the entire attendant processes.  The thing that makes the difference and turns the key over is the performance of the hobby and valve check in a positive light.  Happy reminders.  When I started it, the thing began as a reminder of the power and ability to destroy.  That whenever I picked up my left hand, whenever it touched me, whenever it touched anything, there would be a constant reminder of the terrible abilities it had.

Drawing the tattoo, the scarification in that region, to a close is going to come with a lot of happiness.  Completing the drawing is going to be a constant reminder of the good power can do.  The terrific beast that requires a constant leash can close its teeth to create, not only destroy.

My father still populates my dreams sometimes.  I really did think it could be possible to kill him there and eliminate him completely.  Not entirely true.  Around the fourth time that it happened, him popping up in my dreamscape without reason, want, or control, I realized, snapping awake that my circuits have replaced spiders with his face.  I'm laughing because I used to be an arachnophobe and when I would go prancing in dreamland, more often than not if there was something I was supposed to wake up for, my factory would dump spiders into the dream somehow and I would snap awake.  Until I conquered my fear of spiders.  There's not much that hard lines me to full alert these days beyond him within 10 feet of me.  I suppose I'm stuck with that cardboard cut out flag for hard stops until I stumble upon something else worth fearing.

It's kind of funny the way it happens too.  It's not horror movie sudden.  The wickerman starts appearing and eventually I just get so frustrated that I wake out of dream states.  I wish he was dead already.    Life would be much simpler and free flowing, more so than now.  Patience, lily pad.  Patience.

It's not raining on the pleasure though.  It's going to be a fine afternoon when the stars line up and there's time to make the incisions and time to allow them to heal up enough to make good utility of the hand afterward.  It's gonna be swell, it's gonna be swell.  I'm looking forward to finally starting the smiling portion, the "because it's what I want" portion.




///Basement Jaxx - "Hot & Cold"

Bah

Engage the suppo meta super chim gank ja ja ja hahaha ckck la la la jhjh gohgoh  fukjj aooao uiw way of looking at things.  Or make a hard break, no?

It's been a very long time, we know.  All of us know.  It's been a long time for a reason and we support that reason whatever that reason may be and however that reason came to be.  We support it.  It has taken a lot of force to bring everyone to the table.  Hell, it's taken a lot of brute force simply to bring us all to the table, let alone a table.

Some of us want to wave around our individuals flags.  I am fighting, as the selected individual to represent our collective passport, to wave a single one, but everyone wants to be heard so, I guess I will step away for the song, it's a rarity, but feels appropriate:

well that did not take long to fail.  As soon as the spotlight descended they scattered like cockroaches.  Big surprise.  Machinations of my brain.  Faults and artifacts you say.  I say.  Could it be that the prices I would have to pay should they be named may be so high that I cannot let their names loose anymore or must erase the names as soon as I have let them loose should they be known and summoned on an account other than my own I and I alone should feel the repercussions or should I say that even having mentioned them I should now fall under their disgrace and suffer the consequences in utter paranoia and I should I now tell you that having disclosed that much information the knowledge alone will tell the body and mind collective to brace for impact that other worldly souls should be (this is all in a Britton accent) coming down upon my head?

No.  Some of that's true.  Most of it's not.  I know a lot of what happens inside my head is my own fault.  I know a lot of it is not and if I could pluck your eye balls out of your head and implant them into mine you'd want to kill yourself to.  Every day.  Maybe not every hour.   Sometimes some hours people you surround yourself with help you to forget what is all around.

You can all laugh and drink and I drink to forget but not to forget my circumstances or anything like that.  I get it.  I didn't do good in school and I missed out on trade school by going to learning school and I couldve jumped out of it if I'd known or had the balls to do it instead of taking everything I was force fed, because being a mechanic is tip top, but  I didn't so... whatever.

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's whatever man!  Rimshot.

I drink to forget my father and the senseless beatings and I drink to forget the fact that I can't see straight into a vagina and I drink that I cant see straight at children because they give me the heebee jeebees every time I'm alone with them and I can't stop imagining what a giant penis feels like in a tiny weewee or if a tiny wenis gets hard or if they know or if I knew back then if someone was cleaning me or just being fucking weird or if there's someone who should be on my end of days "I'm going to scoop your motherfucking eyeball out with a margerine plastic knife" or not or if patting one of them bastards on the back is too much contact or too little or if I should shuffle on down to Maryland and kill my father and just have it out, take my time, and have a happy weird time with a kid of my own eventually and explain to him or her that you'll never meet your father because he's dead because I killed him.

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's whatever man!  Rimshot.

A friend of mine keeps saying "bah" and I think he's doing it in part because I told him saying "it is what it is" is the Pittsburgher, PAer, way of saying "I dunno" northeaster-ish.  Northeaster shit.  You could just say ellipsis but that's too many penstrokes, yeah?  Yeah is an ellipsis too.  Dot dot doooooooooooooooooooooooooooot.  To other thoughts along the same train, not quite a hard break, however hard enough to change the frames position along the wall to be noticeable.  Hard enough to be, should someone visit, a highlight in the tour to the tune of "you've changed."

So we're here and we've arrived and I will borrow in the meantime a  "bah."

I cannot tell you how much I've loved you but I can tell you how much I've missed you.

It's good to work.  It's good to work at what you love.  It's better when the work brings me closer to you.

Breaking trail. Breaking silence.  Breaking my heart for you.  I miss you every day.  You have no idea how much I wish multitasking was an actual thing.

Keep streamlined.   Stay feathered.  The wind is screaming aginst your nose and mine too.  Feather through the days and weeks.





///Unkle & Sparklehorse - (Maria Gur Cover [Insane Lullaby])  ....upon a podium.... you're charming and you're brave

Are You My Mommy?

Look for answers and we will give you rush.  Full on the face.  Full b l u s h.  It's very unpleasant.  It's very taken aback.  It's very lyric song.

I think I'm ten kinds of thousand push toward ten kinds of peach blush,
I think I know
what's ten  kind cuz.
I think I know what's ten kind huuuutsch.

Rabbit in the whole.  Bot a fox for a troll.
Got ten kinds of the golden rule
for the scroll.
A shark for lagoon.  Got a mother#$%^er
harp for the wound.  A way to say everything
is tiny violin for fingertips on a spoon.

Flak in the air.
Body bags going home.
How about instead of putting up a plaque
set a gnome.

Light a candle.  Change what you're wearing.
Think about how you'll be dressed
when you're burr9ed.

Are you my mommie?  I know you can't be.  Can you?

Working hard and hardly working.
Are you my mommy?
On top of the junk yard
picking up pieces and putting together a great vinyl.
Are you my mommy?
Ms. Lady, are you my mommy?
Beautiful, no.
Are you my mommy?
No!  Stop!
Are you?
No.
I found something I thought you may like.  No.  I will take a look.  Are you my mommy?  No.  I will see.  Will you see?  Yes, I will see.  Are you my mommy?  No, but I will see.

Pushed

All I wanted was a front row seat in what feels like a war and looks nothing like it.  I keep reciting the procedure and double and triple checking equipment, and in the mean seconds ticking by the pilot is sweating marbles trying to keep our helicopter away from flak and small arms fire and the occasional rocket, circling where I need to land once I jump off of the side.  I'm sweating too fearful of what happens after I step out into thin air, but I know what happens.  There's nothing to be afraid of.

Walking into my apartment after getting groceries the long fingered man with the reading glasses glances up and turns around and taps the only skin on his arm not flayed away where a watch was.  Time is of the essence.  I know.  There is not much time to waste.  I know, I know, I know.  Where are you going?  Out, don't follow me.  You forgot your wallet.  Thank you.

I suppose, a sort of writer's block for persons who don't get writer's block?

Consider this your gentle, two palmed, straight armed shove.  You know what has to be done.  Pull the trigger.

I worry sometimes that it won't make sense.  I worry now if it's not good.  If the entire pursuit has been a waste.  Why poetry?  What is locking up inside you?  It's nothing.  Absolutely nothing and you know it.  Don't be afraid, you've just had your eyes closed for a few months.  Listening to the air and the land and space and people eating each other alive and giving birth and dying and sleeping and breathing and talking and talking and it's not so bad if you'd only open your eyes standing on the ledge of the gunship.  Make sense out of chaos.  Or chaos out of chaos.  Make sense of it later.  Every thought lost to time is one less beacon, one less point of reference, one less story, one less epic, one less chapter, one less relationship you could have brought into this world from your travels.  One less love.  Do it for you.  Do it because you can love you and that's where it all starts.  Come clapping toward the bright pink smoke flare while the shells fly.  I'll be back to pick you up sooner than you have time to think to ask "where did you go?"




///Sylvan Esso - "Hey Mami"    higher resolution