Have and Half Knots, Making Dead Lines, and Explosive Decompression

So I think I am finally approaching upper lower class. Inching toward car ownership and consistent internet access that doesn't cut off if I watch ten feature length pornographic movies in one month. It only took a year to save up the money for both, but I'm not mad because that was roughly the time span I estimated so many moons ago. Not that I'm some kind of social climber, but it certainly makes life a lot easier for me (being that at least half of my waking time is dependent on connectivity). If I think about it the only reason why I have a job, let alone two, is because of the internet. A major factor in my escape from New York was the internet. My creative outlets, well three out of the five, are internet dependent. Not originally, but since I opened myself up to being read, along with the good and bad that comes from it, that is what they've become. A pair still remain personal and internet independent, and they are my babies, whom I coddle and pet unceasingly. So I'm not quite a "have", but I am the possessor of many knotted ends.

Everyone likes to sew things up. Who doesn't. From the youngest age you can remember some of the most satisfying moments are the moments when you connect one and one and get to bask in the glory of your hard earned, bent spined, but elegant in that way, two. Whatever operand falls between the two slivers of symbols matters little. All that matters is you put in the hard think and the finger fumbles and drew something out of two separate things that ended up being beautiful, simply, the answer. Not just an answer, but the only answer possible within the frames of the rules of everything else that described the world around you. That is clutch. That is what I want to be able to do, but instead of sewing my things up I have ended up with knot after knot, with some fine stitch work in between.

It's not failure. Every time you tried to tie your laces and ended up knotting the threads when you were little, you did not just sit down and cry. Well maybe sometimes I did. Eventually, though, I ended up going outside to play regardless because the fact of the matter was that I was not concerned so much with the ending. I was not so much concerned with the fact that eventually I would have to take the shoes off, as much as I knew, no matter what I did after the episode of frustration, the things were going to do what they were designed to do, and that was stay put. So although I am a possessor of more knots than neat and fixed loops, and although I will sit and cry about it for a while, I know that I can still go out and get it done with the best of them. The difference being when I get home and the game is over I have to cut the laces apart and rethread them.

Making deadlines is hard, in that way. Not that I have to start over every week, but the things people take for granted are things I have to redo every week and make them work like new all over again. I would be more upset about it, if I had not had to live with it for so long. It's the standard. Part of the allure of medication is that it offers the promise of a consistent starting point. It simplifies, to the detriment of other experiences. I alternately accept and reject that promise. It depends on how frustrated I get tying knots when I know and tell my fingers how to do things better and they refuse to respond. When I know and tell my fingers how to do things better and they answer and accept and then absent themselves from the chain of command altogether because it turns out I did not have the con to begin with.

Making deadlines is hard, but having deadlines helps the continuity. I think that's why I hate days off so much. Days off are like being thrust into the airlock of my ship half suited, half relaxed, half giddy just to be there without having a reason, and then the count begins for the hatch release and I realize it is for real. I realize there was something I set out to do when I entered and soon I will be sucking vacuum if I don't get it together and I have to fumble and scramble to abort the entire venture because my helmet is still sitting right where I left it, in the lounge, and there is no way I'm going to manage to make something meaningful out of the next ten seconds (ten hours) besides flailing for molecules.

That analogy was a stretch, but that's what it feels like. Trying to get things done without a hard plan is difficult. Days off are always unplanned. Uncharted and unplannable. The hardest thing about it is going without contact. When I'm down on the surface among people I know what's real for the most part. Well, for the some part. When all I have is time spent with myselves it's a dicey affair. Tremendous amounts of necessary dialog and balance checking and enforcing limitations. I wonder sometimes why I sleep so much. What is wrong with me? And the answer often comes back that I cannot afford not to. A little escapist as the life across the bridge is so damn rich and half the time I am awake I want to go back there, but also because it's so certain there. A is A. B is B. C is C. And D is D. Every time. Not like here. Here person A is sometimes Z. And B is an irrational number. And C is A, but only when Z is B.

Maybe that's why I like to work so much. Formulaic. Math in action. Inactivity through action. Long story shorter, I want to finish the gift for Christmas. A gift of intent. A gift of a promise that I won't stop fighting. Not yet anyway. So game on?

Yeah, I think so.


///luke slater - "Hectic Bag" ...start as you mean to grow on.

Observation Continues Undocumented

Well, I have a mouse now. How swank is that? I'll tell you how swank it is: it is pretty ridiculously cool. I can't tell you how nice it is to not have to use a crappy touch pad. I had to pop one of the buttons off of the laptop and stuff a dime in there because it was malfunctioning so bad. With a mouse though I'm now in version 2.0 of my new technological life. No more will I have to scratch crude horsies on cave walls with burnt sticks. Speaking of horsies I really need to buy a few rolls of heavy paper so I can start writing on the walls. It's where words go. They go on the walls. End of story.

I was telling someone the other day, a friend of mine, we were hanging out and having a pretty good blast, that I'm pretty laid back and I told this rambling story about how I told some girl that I would shank her if she stepped on my ping pong ball and at the end of the story I realized that all it really said about me is that I'm incredibly neurotic and unpredictable in social situations involving alcohol. So I tried to save it. I forgot why I jumped into the story in the first place so I had to mentally talk myself back to the starting point, go back down the segments of the story, and hit the junctures correctly like a choose your own adventure book. Then, having retold the story to myself I realized the entire point of it was that I am laid back through 95% or so of life, but 5% of my life is governed by arbitrary and inflexible rules and I don't entirely understand why.

I know why I have to do certain things. I have to put my t-shirts on like a dolphin diving through a hoop. If I don't hold them and look through the neck holes while I'm putting them on then I run the risk of unknowingly entering an alternate dimension through the shirt hole and not realizing it until it's too late because I didn't see that things were different because the body of the shirt blinded me. That has to be done. No exceptions. If I make food I have to eat it no matter how awful it turns out. If I throw up because of it or get really sick then good for me. How else will I learn to not make bad food? If I cook for other people and portions don't turn out right I am responsible for eating the worst of whatever I prepare as a penalty for being a bad cook. There has to be accountability in the kitchen. A door to a pitch black room cannot be left open for any reason. If you don't divide the lit room from the dark room with some sort of physical boundary you run the risk of invitation of the things of night into the realm of day and the last thing I want is to be trying to do daytime things in a daytime room that happens to be dark and have to deal with nighttime things outside of ... well ... I don't even like talking about that sort of stuff in great detail anyway. It makes me sound crazy, but more importantly they don't like me talking about them and I'm the one who has to deal with their bad feelings so that's all I'm going to say about that, but the point is there are rules for reasons.

So what I don't understand is - people? I understand people. People don't understand how I understand them. People don't understand the rules. I guess the rules are in place so that I can be more socially normal. More functional. That's why they're important. I think. Maybe. This is boring me.

Today I had to get out of bed a bunch and I damn near broke my neck scrambling to accomplish things and get back into my bed to keep the sheets warm. I've got the heat set as low as possible now so the only warmth around is what I'm producing and throwing off into the air.

Someone lied to me the other day. It made me very angry. I wanted to beat her up, but how ridiculously stupid would that have been. It's against the rules to lie. Before, it was against the rules to upset other people. Now those two have flipped places. The only problem with that is, of course, memory bleed. Things disappear and get transposed and interposed and juxtaposed all the time, not to mention out and out manufactured. She said something about me needing to perform some task for her and I'm pretty sure I already did it, but it is also entirely possible that I didn't do it because I went to visit her and her husband at their place in one of my dreams and we had a great time and went out to a parade and they dropped me off at work and it was great, but if I asked her about that later she would have no idea what I was talking about let alone remembering something that she wasn't actually a part of at any point. So maybe I never did explain or perform the thing she needed me to and I just think and remember vividly that I did (because I do). It can't be her fault for not having physically been there to see it.

Life is still stupid. Well, stupid funny though I don't really report on the funny all that much these days. It's probably because I've seen it so much it's stopped being funny and now strikes me as just painfully aggravatingly human. Plus I think I already established that I am nowhere near as funny as I thought I was. If I ever become a stand up comedian I'm going to call my act "talk out the stupid", but - there's probably no need for a but there. I wasn't thinking of any follow up when the sentence ended, but then I got there and it was like hitting a wrong street, but you don't want to look lost, because that's when they mug you and take your laundry money and call you a pussy faggot, so you walk down the street and go another two blocks before doubling back on a side street in a big loop so that you're gone long enough for the porch sitters to think you were just going to the gas station for candy and not wandering around scratching your ass. I hate it when the houses are watching me more than I watch them. They could probably eat us if they wanted to.

I was working on some poetry the other day and I jammed a rhyme scheme into a poem about a feeling and it completely screwed it up and the end result was this gross sort of mannequin looking piece of poetry with a colorful baseball cap on it. I was ashamed, but I shared it to share the shame and the accomplishment hanging around it like a fart of impressive proportions. I don't know, it just felt like the right thing to do. The rules of production dictated action be taken. In a way I had to punish myself for forcing it through to an end and wasting precious time before work in creating so odious a turd. It was a still birth. Sad times.

I'm tired again, but I don't know what rest will help me accomplish in the next few hours. I'll let me know. And by me I mean you. And by you I mean the part of you that.... that is... not really a part of me, but... I am fantastically thirsty. I have a mouse. Maybe I should draw us something?



It's not much but I was already starting to get a mouse cramp by the end of it. I don't know if life is sweet. I had this really strange feeling while I was making dinner that there was no one left to beat me and that made me sad for longer than I thought it would. I dunno. Sometimes improvements take some getting used to I guess. Oh well. Time to try and travel.

=sigh= miss that wacom pad. But at least we have you. Sort of. :)

///Luke Slater - "You Butterfly" "...come, let us walk..."

i owe you one

one sentence about what i do know for certain. i was belly aching about the world, like ya do, and i said that i could probably sum up all of the knowledge i can grasp with certainty. today i give you that sentence in all of its shining glory:

death is freedom.

that's it. i mean, that is the one thing that i know to be a certainty. freedom from what exactly is debatable. whether or not there is an afterlife that will be better or worse than the one you're in is debatable. but the cessation of life, the end of all thought, the end of the never ending struggle of blah blah blah whatever. who cares. i mean every single day we get along with knowing less and less for certain. in fact a lack of certainty seems to make life easier to live for everybody. the less you really know the happier you are unless youre mission in life is to be all knowing. then you're just angry all day.

i guess thats the part of me that is looking forward to getting older when i start to forget the things that have been burned into my skull and the abuses and the filthy bits of history that refuse to quit. age will erase them and thats good for me. and the world. i think as i get older i will feel less apt to mass murder and more apt to napping and enjoying ... something. anything. that is the unlearning. the switching of dream life into real life.



i suppose thats the appeal of avatar really. screw the anti war message. screw the native overtones of history and genocide. the real joy in watching avatar is the possibility and promise of that one day down your road when your brain pumps you full of dmt and everything you really wanted in life, everything you were denied, everything your mind mulled over when the real world wouldnt let it, becomes real.

that, i am looking forward to very much. what else do i owe you? oh yeah... a link:... well no. no link. i didnt find anything particularly fun today. today was not a fun day. but who the hell has time for fun these days anyway. i do. i have time for fun. because i have no job.

okay heres something useful: you pay for what you get when it comes to alcohol up to about the 25 dollar mark. beyond 25 its all a matter of taste preference and taste is imparted by the individual maker's process. case in point? you didnt ask? im talking to myself? well, case in point... i like whiskey/bourbon/scotch whatever you call it. i dont know the subtle differences but i do know what fucking disgusting moonshinerocketfueltotheface tastes like. i wanted a 1.75 of old grandad 101. the shop didnt have it. i was going to settle for some beam than. the shop didnt have the 86 proof beam black. fine. next step down for me was beam white. it cost 25 bucks. little iffy. its only 80 proof and id run through it fast. was it worth the 25 dollars, just fucking tell us already. it was, but i didnt know it till after i bought the bottle of kentucky gentleman, went home, and poured a glass. god awful shit, but it was 7.50 a liter.

why so god awful? the proof was the same. they both said whiskey on the label. well in small fucking print it said on the kentucky gentleman whiskey and "other spirits". enter jet fuel. 51% whiskey. 49% jet fuel. 100% not worth 7.50 a liter. let this be a lesson to ye youths. pay the extra 5 or 10 bucks and get something that only needs a pair of ice cubes to drink.

dont buy this.

///luke slater - "hectic bag" rolling deep bass and a moment of clarity matched only by driving on the interstate from chicago to kansas city and somewhere in between with a train drawing a line between sky and land on your left and empty fields stretching to infinity on your right the overcast sky breaks open and the cars dotting the road slipping away in front of you glisten like the backs of dolphins in an ocean of gray light.