AUTHOR.CALHO: If I didn't write it, I would be hitch hiking cross country to Maine and then Alaska in that order. While taking frequent breaks to spread leaflets. And sit in diners. And write on things because I wasn't at a computer. I may still do that in a few years. Writing this also helps me forget about and better understand the limitations of being human, and keeps me busy enough to allow me no free time to burn the world down.
THEMATIC.ABOUT : Collapse often. The things that hold people together and hold them apart and scatter brains. The things that make thoughts go boom. The things that ooh and aah and [expletive deleted]. Sometimes poking around the margins where responsibility ends and the only one to look to is the Original Equipment Manufacturer and say "but, I already pressed 9 for more options and the menus are exactly the same. Can you just replace it?" The answer will be: "please hold." Sometimes hanging out in dark corners. Sometimes following the train tracks. Looking for ways out and ways in and all the while sharing the things seen and heard and done and drawn and written and scorched and healed and teased and caged and dreamed along the way.
10/25/12
Tired, Music, Studio Dust and Weekdays
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"
10/17/12
That Instant
9/3/11
End of the World, so Plan For It
Thats pretty much impossible to plan for. I have done more planning for the end of the world, in all it's glorious senarios, than I have for the eventuality of getting to the end of sub neighborhoods and niches of the web. What do you mean the supply of singing dogs can't meet my continuous demand for watching dogs sing songs to cats playing pianos! What do you mean there's only one video detailing how to break down and reassemble I bicycle cassette using household tools?!
It happens. My problem is more of the pornographic type. I have run out of ways to masturbate. Flat out run out of ways to do it. Maybe it's just that its overdone, but I think it's more along the line of there are only so many ways to pleasure yourself and I've pretty much exhausted them all. I've gotten to the end of my intranet and there's nothing else there, but white space. Of course I could begin inventing. I am about as creative a blue collar mind as anyone is likely to encounter in their life time. I could do it. However, I am very much concerned that things might get dangerously elaborate. Dangerously elaborate masturbation leads to candidacy for the list of one thousand exceptionally embarrassing ways to die. That is something, I think, I don't want. Not yet anyway, as I plan to die in a so grand a fashion that there is literally nothing left of me to bury or put in the ground. Something fast and fiery and adventurous... something that is not auto-erotic asphyxiation<- which is totally played out anyway.
It's something I never planned for. Mainly because, like the internet, I never really thought I would traverse all the available avenues and find myself right back where I started. Figured those streets would and could go on forever. So I guess I will invent, and plan for the eventually of running out of ways to invent. Every world ends. Plan for it. Would be my advice. Yet another life lesson learned.
7/2/11
dear (______):
You've made me late for work for the last time. Seriously. This relationship is getting out of hand.
Yours,
Lefty
6/16/10
progress without masturbation
and sometimes i dont really care. and sometimes its depressing. and sometimes i dont really care. would being able to illustrate and paint and do graphic design make my life easier? sure. so would being able to drive a race car or fly a plane or having tits. its just one of those things you gotta learn to get along with without. thats an odd construction. i guess i meant to say get along without.
i dunno. im tired. i have little to say. the week of industry is behind schedule thanks to a design issue and a general lack of code writing acumen. fuck you college. thanks for taking money i still dont have. i shoulda been a mechanic.
whatever. i can always tell when im tired because chewing gum makes my head hurt.
alright well enough whining. thanks for listening to me bitch. heres something for the road if you've got a minute between fap sessions....
///johnny cash - "sam hall" my name it is sam hall, and i hate you one and all; and i hate you one and all. damn your eyes.
gotta love the cash. the man was a musician and a master story teller to boot. and its not even the language that was particularly masterful as much as it is his ability to touch meaning without needing a step ladder and a reacher grabber.
3/26/10
i broke it
the upside though is that my left hand is slightly smoother than my right... which still makes it the equivalent of low grit sand paper. im not sure when i stopped yankin it with the right hand. probably computers. once i needed the right hand for browsing porn collections (turning pages with a left hand is easy, but mousing over your jerking right arm cuz the mouse wont reach the left side of the desk is torture) it was obvious what had to be done.
but i mean if working the muscles on your body makes them generally bigger does working your nerve endings mean they grow more receptive or is that just the opposite. i guess its the opposite. but wouldnt it be cool if the more drugs you did the fewer you needed to do because it made the receptors more sensitive instead of just more plentiful. or wait... nope. not going there. that is way too much science and i am out of my depth in neuroscience just by saying the word.
in other news however... i need to stop saying however as much as i do... im having trouble starting sentences in story telling that dont start with he, she, it, the, and other pronouns and nouns. i feel like this comes around every few months or so when i just get very conscious of patterns in my own writing and then all of my attention becomes momentarily focused on breaking out of the pattern and then i end up writing horribly stilted trash.
i want to put more sex in my writing. its very unsexy. more sex and more technology. more tits. more guns. i used to be a very technical kind of writer...very much about expa-something. the word starts with ex and i cant think of how it ends but i did that more. but since then i guess ive shifted toward human drama driving my fiction and its an odd feeling to want to do that ex thing about technology and finding it way less interesting the people behind the control panels. i mean dont get me wrong... i still love technology as much as the next guy but for some reason the descriptions just arent there these days. well theyre there i just have to force myself to give them some eye time.
sorry for the scattered nature of this post. actually nope not sorry. i had to do it. ive been beating off waaaay too much and i had to force myself to stop and write this. not that it means i will magically start beating off less, but at least ... at least what. im not sure.
okay had to pause a minute the take away message here is that i have no idea what the fuck im talking about... but at least i didnt have to talk to myself about it. thats the takeaway. orrr that seems cheap. the takeaway message here is that if you haven't fixed the id3 tags on your music you better fix those fuckers cuz i worked on my music library for nearly 4 hours yesterday. it was a pain in the ass. i only got through the A section.thats not it either. maybe ill do a pic of the day. i like pictures. so i will. spruce up the joint. ah here it is... takeaway message of the day is: stop beating off and go do something.
///way out west - "secret" a song so full of potential that is so god damn short. maybe it was supposed to be longer than 3:36. maybe my data transfer fucked up. but i love this song. it makes me wish sunrise and sunset was 11:30 minutes long and day light was 30 minutes and then 12 hours of night. i need to live somewhere that happens. but i mean those crazy scales. yeah that works as a description. no it doesnt. the way the scales (if you can call them that) rise and fall in those skipping steps makes me envision time lapsing headlights and high rise windows winking into bright existence while cars and people speed by below and who really gives a shit cuz im on the roof watching the night sky spin around me with a j and friends and lawn chairs and a box of 40s. those nights always end way too soon.
3/3/10
what we gonna do today
for valentines day i beat off for an hour, watched 30 rock and ate a fat piece of pound cake, then had a cigarette and went to bed at 2 am. guess how fun that was. basically liz lemon got more action than i did. and i dont even mean sexually, cuz you'd have to be a lesbian to find liz lemon attractive (the combat boot, mustache wearing kind, not the hot blonde porno kind), i mean like she had more fun in her own miserable way than i did. which is a really really long aside.
but yeah, the universe is a very pessimistic, bastardly, thing. it has no friends. all it does is ruin peoples lives. with its infinite resources it tries to win at everything and you, with your carpet bag of tricks, try to win at anything. the universe will always win. so its never fun hanging out with just the universe. even when you try to exclude it, it finds a way to crash your private parties.
which in a seriously round about way brings me to my point. what the hell am i going to do today? i have nothing to do. well i have some things to do. actually ihave a ton of things to do.
first off, why ive been gone, again.
lots of shit. lots of anger. but some good has been made out of it. a tiny bubble of winningness that i will savor till the universe pops it and replaces it with a flaming bag of poo.
i formed a production company. bet you didnt do that over the past 30 days. what else... i wrote some stories. good ones i think. happy ones. sad ones. violent ones. i had some conversations. lots of good conversations. what else... nothing else. thats it. got some music. and beat off a lot. not that its bad or shameful. america wants people to be ashamed of all the wrong things. ill never understand that. im not sorry.
today im going to read and fall into worlds different from the one i cant otherwise get out of.
\\\chairlift - "bruises" caroline polachek, if you're reading this please send me a hug. but seriously. i think most of all i miss closeness. i hate talking to no one. thats probably the biggest reason why ive been gone. this song just reminds me of a person that i miss a lot, and we've been drifting apart and it sucks but its irreversible for the foreseeable future. hurray for human relationships and the weapons of heart destruction that are their constitution.
8/20/09
you know what's weird
thats whats weird.
///yeong wook jo - "farewell, my lovely" i wish yeong would work for free so i could have him orchestrate the irreversible and gut twisting moments in my life. the man has an ear for beauty like you can only find in a family photo album that has pictures of you before you found out that not everyone's parents beat them hard enough to miss school.
8/21/08
the big 101 (p2)
Posted Date: : Aug 21, 2008 9:00 AM
achievements... teh greatest hits of all time, so check it...
cut down part of a forty foot tall tree.
drank a thirty pack in one night.
drank a forty in less than ten minutes.
crowned take down champ on high school wrestling team, once.
wrote a seven page paper in two hours, got an A.
got a perfect score on final paper in highschool.
smoked half a pack in three hours.
beat off 9 times in one day.
slept for 22 hours.
dead lifted 315 pounds.
got published 4 times.
won 3rd place in mlk writing contest with poem about dr. king being racist.
had a love story published.
stayed awake for more than fifty hours.
finished a three hundred cig tub of tobacco.
wrote more than 220 poems.
almost finished a 400 page story.
beat super mario 2 in one sitting.
ate an entire can of spam in less than five minutes.
ran a mile in five minutes twenty one seconds.
did 75 push ups at once.
doggy paddled the length of a pool once.
accumulated over 100 gigs of porn.
read the bible cover to cover.
drew a 12 issue run of a 20 page original comic book.
jumped through the cieling twice.
sigh what else...
you know what, these achievements suck. just listing them makes me wanna say, well what the hell have you done that actually mattered? and the answer for now i guess is nothing. thats depressing. this was supposed to be a super happy time... but i guess ive just been down pretty much 24/7 for the past five days. its difficult to find meaning in the daily commercial inundated crap fest. its like trying to walk around in a shit storm with a clean cup of tea. every sip gets worse than last.
then again maybe im just being too hard on everyone and everything. maybe these are pretty awesome things... at least in the right context. the right context can make anything awesome. kind of.
whatever
phat ass track list coming, eventually.
do a shot for me. make it a double.
6/4/07
move your pen 06/04/07
Posted Date: : Jun 4, 2007 11:09 PM
tonight... its too warm to sleep easily and i have a boner that refuses to resolve itself. so instead of trying to pleasure myself till the bright hours of the morning and going to work tired im gonna just try to sweat it out. not really sweat it out persay, but more like lay here till i feel sleepy.
while i wait for sleep i will write some stream of concious stuff that may or may not be true. basically im entertaining myself.
i picked apart my sandwich today while considering the things i like to imagine are important. the seeds in the wheat bread. there were seeds in the wheat bread and they reminded me of gothic homes. kitchen floors dusted with flour. flour that falls deeper. pressed by footsteps between the dulled boards. sprinkling down to the cellar where Tigris died. after birthing her litter. of still borns.
it was tuna fish again. not that i have anything against dolphins. or fishermen. theres a show on called deadliest catch featuring the dancing talents of a thing. i forget which talent im supposed to say. the tuna was old. i could taste it. the can. i could taste the can between bites. and i noticed the refrigerator door was still open.
the cool touch of air around my ankles just like the last time. i showered, but left my bedroom window open. i couldnt help thinking how gorgeous i looked. for the first minutes. before i realized there was a man standing beneath the street lights. just to the left of the oak tree that nearly died last winter. knowing the uncertainty. the measured seconds before my fingers shut the window. was the same.
a mouthful of tin shards and dry oats. mixed and mashed together with the smoked guts of some thing i'd never before laid. eyes on and probably never would. i picked that sandwich. for forty minutes. watching the sun and staring it down till it hid behind the big easy hills. and cast its shadows where my hands couldnt interfere. someone should probably. throw it out.
///the dust brothers - "jacks smirking revenge" not much to say here. the dust brothers are the chemical brothers. i think thats good enough if it matters at all. bbye for now.
2/8/06
taint working 02/08/06
Posted Date: : Feb 8, 2006 4:17 PM
taking an online information design course has taught me one thing... i need to figure out how to edit the code for myspace pages without using one of those retarded ass prepackaged editors because the results are gay. well not gay in the sense of something being homosexual but gay in the .... well fuck, you know what i mean so fuck you. alls im saying is that it taint working out being here. i need more... plus i hate having to click through three and four and fuckin five levels just to get to the writing communities...
maybe ill just go and join the circus and have one suicide act that ill be famous for... or maybe ill just aspire to get a perfect score in pacman. speaking of which it has been discovered that pacman has been played more than 10 billion times around the world and a perfect score has only been achieved ONCE. how's that for hardest game ever created candidate. even harder than super starwars for the snes (which was, if you ask me, just a shitty game to begin with. bankrupt in both character and game play.)
speaking of bankrupt... my relationship is not bankrupt! its just reached a critical mass where it needs to cool off and depressurize to remain productive, fruitful, sexful and functional or chernobylize and take a hundred thousand innocent bystanders with it in a white hot flash of .... whatever it is volatile relationships are made of (probably pheromones, good intentions, and 151).
in summation.... isn't it time you masturbated today?
1/4/06
what happens when you... 1/04/06
Posted Date: : Jan 4, 2006 1:56 AM
everything feels better. seriously. things only get better when you stop jerking your leathery hand over your penis. if you must, make sure you lube. all it takes is one evening of infirmity and lubelessness to ruin the paint job and texture of your "saddle" making it less super fun for all riders you may be involved with. and we all know how much we enjoy SUPER fun.
so remember... dont do it unless you must and if you must, use a toy if available or use your hand if no specially designed devices are readily available. im just trying to look out for you! and if there is no lube then be the bigger man and just let the shift nob go. driving without lube is like jerking without transmission fluid. somethings gonna break down and your gonna get nowhere.
12/5/05
beat off and get some sleep 12/05/05
11/24/05
remember, kids... 11/24/05
yesterday i came within a hairs breadth of killing myself by christmas lights.
i made a very nice ball of christmas lights and hung them for romantic effect over the center of my room. the set up was a little ghetto. I used a wire from my collapsable hamper to make a nicely sprung spherical shape then wrapped the lights around the wire and then wrapped the wire in a corse clothe sheet often used to cover hospital beds, then draped the whole ball of nonsense from the actual light bulbs in the fixture at the center of my cieling.
genius, no? no.
it wasnt bright enough in the room so i turned on the actual light fixture that came with the place. I left and came back to my building 20 minutes later and as soon as I got out of the staircase on my floor it smelled something like someone left a space heater on all day. hot metal. I walk around the corner and come into my room and see that the smell is in here too.
A few hours later im poking around my room because im bored and i see that a piece of the christmas lights leading from the central ball is out. I look closer and see that the entire ring where the ball is tied up to the light fixture is kind of brown.
I untied the ball from the light fixture and on the inside it is charred black. All of the wires have melted and are crossing eachother and shorting eachother out. The paint was beginning to peel and cinder. Had I just gone to bed My cieling probably would have caught fire while I was sleeping... or if i'd stayed out any longer my building couldve burned down.
now i havent had any epiphanies because of this and i will continue to stay out late and do irrational fun things... ill just make sure i turn off the lights before i go. remember kids... before you do anything, be it bang a woman as large as your bed, masterbate to thoughts of your neighbor while at your window, have a naked dance off with your invisible friend, or leave your room because you just ripped ass and it smells like someone died... always always always turn off the lights first!
11/10/05
contentment 11/10/05
so the outlook is bleak. true.
I still enjoy life. I'm not saying everything sucks bleh! all im saying is that with none of the usual things to really look forward to i just focus on the pleasures i do have... like masterbating. whether i have money or not i can still masterbate to my hearts content... and writing... i can still write whenever i want and im glad that i am a literate mutha fucka. so not having money isnt the end of the world. its just not the beginning of a new one.
and when the day ends and everything is over and done with... i'm okay with that.