January - MF Doom - Lightworks
February - Beck - Soldier Jane
March - Starkey - New Cities (feat. Hitomi)
April - Big Sean - Paradise (extended)
May - AWOL Nation - Hollowmoon (Bad Wolf)
June - Odesza - Memories That You Call (feat. Monsoonsiren)
July - Dan Deacon - Wham City
August - Dem Gettaway Boyz - Imma G (Memory Tapes remix)
September - Hot Chip - No Fit State
October - Gorillaz - Dracula
November - Drax & Scott - Sublime (Darkstar Mix)
December - JJ Doom - Guv'nor
The honorable mentions in very particular order. The higher up, the closer to the final cut.
Dirty Projectors & Bjork - When the World Comes to an End
Kodak to Graph - Pleistocene
Deltron 3030 - Stardate (feat. Joseph Gordon Levitt)
Kendrick Lamar - Backseat Freestyle
The Knife - Rock Classics
This was the year of the wolf divining new methods of self governance. Rewriting it's own rules and amending it's doctrine. Enjoy. Honorable mentions tell no tales and get no links. If you want to talk to them, you can find them in the clink. A little place where we keep half ideas. Things we fear. Say it three times and they'll appear. The body you thought stayed buried is floating by the pier. Next time, put more concrete in the socks. Everyone stopping by is not a bot.
It was, though, one of the roughest and strangest and smoothest to date. With the year end look and this, the bookend to 2015, the only thing to do is look ahead to two thousand oh one and six.
///the year is written. let it go. thank you for loving me. thank you for being there. one of these days we may be eating at the big table. in the meantime, you know you have a place at mine where the reeds are just high enough and the shade just thick enough for no one to notice we're there by their fire too.
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label memories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memories. Show all posts
1/23/16
10/16/15
Helmet, Armor, Time, Money, Love.
The kind of love that lasts forever.
The kind of love that outlasts explanation.
Yep, that kind.
The inexplicable kind. The kind that cannot be explained by an affinity for a God or the affinity for a person. The everlasting, gut punching kind.
The kind that makes you change your ways even though changing your ways has nothing to do with how you express it, kind of love. The sort that makes you wish you could be a different person. The kind of love that makes your heart break when there are no more words to say what it is you had to say when you had to say it. Hell, the mouth only has so much capability inside of it.
That kind of love.
The kind that changes how and what you do despite the fact that change now has no affect on your outcomes, and you do it anyway.
That kind of love.
The kind that tells you explicitly: SEX IS NOT GOING TO HELP OR HELP FIX THIS. and you do it anyway, because you enjoyed snuffling her private parts and she enjoyed yours, snuffling, just that much. It turns into a private secret box, permanent. Oh, please! Open it up to more! To more! Nope. That's all you will get to know. Forever.
Mind, body, and soul. You are cut off. Wander the waste lands. Find an amalgam. Find a new war to fight. A new fart to sniff. The embassy is closed.
Write songs about love and body parts and knowledge and loss and wars won. Write them to whomever. You'll find your way. Eventually. Eventually, having sex on our grave, I will think about you. And
how I came
to be here.
The kind of love that outlasts explanation.
Yep, that kind.
The inexplicable kind. The kind that cannot be explained by an affinity for a God or the affinity for a person. The everlasting, gut punching kind.
The kind that makes you change your ways even though changing your ways has nothing to do with how you express it, kind of love. The sort that makes you wish you could be a different person. The kind of love that makes your heart break when there are no more words to say what it is you had to say when you had to say it. Hell, the mouth only has so much capability inside of it.
That kind of love.
The kind that changes how and what you do despite the fact that change now has no affect on your outcomes, and you do it anyway.
That kind of love.
The kind that tells you explicitly: SEX IS NOT GOING TO HELP OR HELP FIX THIS. and you do it anyway, because you enjoyed snuffling her private parts and she enjoyed yours, snuffling, just that much. It turns into a private secret box, permanent. Oh, please! Open it up to more! To more! Nope. That's all you will get to know. Forever.
Mind, body, and soul. You are cut off. Wander the waste lands. Find an amalgam. Find a new war to fight. A new fart to sniff. The embassy is closed.
Write songs about love and body parts and knowledge and loss and wars won. Write them to whomever. You'll find your way. Eventually. Eventually, having sex on our grave, I will think about you. And
how I came
to be here.
7/29/15
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"
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"
6/12/15
Undo Button
You've heard it before. For this and that. How about, after 30, you get to hit undo on one impossible to fix character trait? Just one and it has to be something long established and impossible to undo because it is so far ingrained into the base mechanics of your brain functioning that trying to eradicate it will destroy layers upon layers upon layers of other vital systems and courses and circuitry that are highly desirable.
Consider it an inoperable cancer. Because that is exactly what it is. It will be the death of you and you cannot live without its growth. Its eradication will mean your own extinction as well. It will die when you do. That.
If I had an undo button I would use it on my rage and aggression. The seeds were planted and nursed to seedlings in youth. Agitated and metastasized through adolescence and bloomed through young adulthood. Now the tree of might grows in my yard constantly and every season I have to go in and clean up all the rotting stuff that falls. Stare at them ripening knowing the best way to take care of it is to wait for it to fall. Knowing I have to, must to, gots to, wait it out and tend to it and if it dies it will only be because my heart stopped too. @#$% you, tree. Well after my father dies, I will still have that tree peering in my windows. Shadowing my kids while they play, picking up bats and swatting the little things every fall. Kicking them around. Wondering what they are and if they're edible. Tasting them anyway.
Myself watching them, if they ever do land. Firing cusses at him. My kids will think that tree was always there, because that's all they'll ever have known. "Doesn't everyone have a rage tree?" "Why don't you cut it down? The yard would be so much better without it." I know. I know.
I want an undo button for that. The schizophrenia, the paranoia, the anxiety, depression, mania, twin poles, I can deal with those fairly effectively except when I don't. The absolute rage is the hardest to bridle and if you screw it up people disappear and then so do you. Forever. I can't afford to make that mistake again. Ever.
Consider it an inoperable cancer. Because that is exactly what it is. It will be the death of you and you cannot live without its growth. Its eradication will mean your own extinction as well. It will die when you do. That.
If I had an undo button I would use it on my rage and aggression. The seeds were planted and nursed to seedlings in youth. Agitated and metastasized through adolescence and bloomed through young adulthood. Now the tree of might grows in my yard constantly and every season I have to go in and clean up all the rotting stuff that falls. Stare at them ripening knowing the best way to take care of it is to wait for it to fall. Knowing I have to, must to, gots to, wait it out and tend to it and if it dies it will only be because my heart stopped too. @#$% you, tree. Well after my father dies, I will still have that tree peering in my windows. Shadowing my kids while they play, picking up bats and swatting the little things every fall. Kicking them around. Wondering what they are and if they're edible. Tasting them anyway.
Myself watching them, if they ever do land. Firing cusses at him. My kids will think that tree was always there, because that's all they'll ever have known. "Doesn't everyone have a rage tree?" "Why don't you cut it down? The yard would be so much better without it." I know. I know.
I want an undo button for that. The schizophrenia, the paranoia, the anxiety, depression, mania, twin poles, I can deal with those fairly effectively except when I don't. The absolute rage is the hardest to bridle and if you screw it up people disappear and then so do you. Forever. I can't afford to make that mistake again. Ever.
8/8/14
A Quick Thought on Authenticity and (ffs) Go Protocol
Knowing what you are and what you're not is where it begins, that's the baby step. There's nothing wrong with being a baby. Complaining let's you know, if you've ears for it, that you are not necessarily happy with the way things are or how they're going. Everyone's a baby. At some point. Everyone complains.
The option is to take the turn or drive the motivation straight over the edge and hope you land somewhere nice. Hope you land in something like a pillow factory or a bin of sand, or just anything more forgiving than concrete. Take the turn. Complain like a baby and then adjust. You can take your authenticity to the grave with you or you can exist within it. Sounds pretty simple. It's a bit more complicated, unfortunately. Sometimes you just have to realize that you are striped and a tiger and sometimes imaginary in a pack of lions. Doesn't mean you have to be at war with the lions. You're both after the same things. There's nothing wrong with that. You've honed your way and they've honed theirs and you're on the same field now so you have to learn how to play together effectively that you not step on one another's paws and sink teeth too close together on the same kill.
It's "go protocol." It's trigger pull. It's losing my train of thought and getting heckling from the rest of the committee and continuing to ball because YOURE NOT THE BOSS OF ME YOU @#$%S.
Fight through the noise. Embrace the sound. Love who you want to. It does not matter if they love you back. You have the right to love whomever and whatever you choose to, whomever and whatever you can't refuse to. If they cannot respect that, it's their loss. In a world lessed for loves lost, why waste it? Let it fly. Untenable as it may be, let it fly. Let it fly! Allow it to cross the distance that must be enforced for whatever reasons are reasonable. Include a few that are not.
Remain authentic. Stick to the protocol. You have not lived as long as you have by ignoring protocol. When the Go sign says go, go! Think twice, for sure. "Fo Sho!" does not mean for show. I can put on a fantastic show when I want to. I can put on a show for the fucking ages. Fo sho means for sure and it's pretty much a miniature pact. A handshake and a signature of gumption. With no risk comes no reward and you know what comes without whisk? I do. I'll give you another second to guess. Time's up. Without whisk you get a big old cup of pineapple pulp and undissolved sugar at the bottom of your pitcher of pineapple tea. Gross. Also, really hard to drink.
Obey Go Protocol. Stay authentic. Bow to be courteous, not to fit better. If you win the single combat and fit well, you'll hate them later because they will know what you did. They will talk about the event, if not active, in passing. You will know too.
The combination is not friendly. They are not looking for maps the same way you do. The same way you are. Do not expect assistance when you go. Do not expect support. Do not armor for resistance either. You were invited for a reason. You were on their wing for a reason. That reason may not be for back up should combat come down. That reason may not be for mounting an assault that day. That reason may not be for humor or for "to hell with them"s. You may never know what that reason's reasoning inside their head was, but there was a reason.
So go. Go! Stay authentic. There was something asked of you. Think about what you've asked of them in return by answering the howl. The details will work themselves out, if they do. The details will work themselves out, if they don't pull your card again. Through the noise, through the fire, through the poise, through the ire. For once,
allow yourself to see it their way and do not Chameleon. Do not lock up. For @#$%s sake, remain authentic. Uncertainty is a bitch, be certain of this.
///Girl Talk - (Ask About Me) chapter one... still writing the jacket
The option is to take the turn or drive the motivation straight over the edge and hope you land somewhere nice. Hope you land in something like a pillow factory or a bin of sand, or just anything more forgiving than concrete. Take the turn. Complain like a baby and then adjust. You can take your authenticity to the grave with you or you can exist within it. Sounds pretty simple. It's a bit more complicated, unfortunately. Sometimes you just have to realize that you are striped and a tiger and sometimes imaginary in a pack of lions. Doesn't mean you have to be at war with the lions. You're both after the same things. There's nothing wrong with that. You've honed your way and they've honed theirs and you're on the same field now so you have to learn how to play together effectively that you not step on one another's paws and sink teeth too close together on the same kill.
It's "go protocol." It's trigger pull. It's losing my train of thought and getting heckling from the rest of the committee and continuing to ball because YOURE NOT THE BOSS OF ME YOU @#$%S.
Fight through the noise. Embrace the sound. Love who you want to. It does not matter if they love you back. You have the right to love whomever and whatever you choose to, whomever and whatever you can't refuse to. If they cannot respect that, it's their loss. In a world lessed for loves lost, why waste it? Let it fly. Untenable as it may be, let it fly. Let it fly! Allow it to cross the distance that must be enforced for whatever reasons are reasonable. Include a few that are not.
Remain authentic. Stick to the protocol. You have not lived as long as you have by ignoring protocol. When the Go sign says go, go! Think twice, for sure. "Fo Sho!" does not mean for show. I can put on a fantastic show when I want to. I can put on a show for the fucking ages. Fo sho means for sure and it's pretty much a miniature pact. A handshake and a signature of gumption. With no risk comes no reward and you know what comes without whisk? I do. I'll give you another second to guess. Time's up. Without whisk you get a big old cup of pineapple pulp and undissolved sugar at the bottom of your pitcher of pineapple tea. Gross. Also, really hard to drink.
Obey Go Protocol. Stay authentic. Bow to be courteous, not to fit better. If you win the single combat and fit well, you'll hate them later because they will know what you did. They will talk about the event, if not active, in passing. You will know too.
The combination is not friendly. They are not looking for maps the same way you do. The same way you are. Do not expect assistance when you go. Do not expect support. Do not armor for resistance either. You were invited for a reason. You were on their wing for a reason. That reason may not be for back up should combat come down. That reason may not be for mounting an assault that day. That reason may not be for humor or for "to hell with them"s. You may never know what that reason's reasoning inside their head was, but there was a reason.
So go. Go! Stay authentic. There was something asked of you. Think about what you've asked of them in return by answering the howl. The details will work themselves out, if they do. The details will work themselves out, if they don't pull your card again. Through the noise, through the fire, through the poise, through the ire. For once,
allow yourself to see it their way and do not Chameleon. Do not lock up. For @#$%s sake, remain authentic. Uncertainty is a bitch, be certain of this.
///Girl Talk - (Ask About Me) chapter one... still writing the jacket
6/17/14
Over Simplification and the Missing Link and Father's Day
Something's missing. I know something is missing because I am not grasping a few concepts correctly. I can be as small minded as I want to be, sure. I am a bit frightened of using all that I can produce, see control issue. I suppose it is easier for me to take as small a perspective as possible. I can't do whatever I want to do. If I did whatever I wanted to, this would be a very different world, or I would be stone dead in the ground wishing I had rethought doing whatever I wanted to do.
I had many and, some, long thoughts about my father. I hate saying that. That word. Makes me grind my teeth. It was a road that had to be reevaluated, and no I am not going to kick cans in anger here. It was a very positive approach couched mostly in pure analysis and attempting to see it from outside my head and look in at the relationship, while it still existed, from a third party.
What I started to think about and completed was that he may have seen some things from before my memory begins. My memory begins around preschool, kindergarten. I can't recall much of anything, virtually nothing, from before that and cannot vouch or insist I was one way or another. What I came to was that he may have seen something in me and my ways then and made an attempt to push the tracks this way and that way as I got older. Maybe. I'll never know because I asked and was refused, flat. Father's day. What a hoot.
I do know I am missing something. Not information. Yes information. My history is thoroughly incomplete. I have to remind myself and update my tabs on who's kicked the bucket. I'm fine with that. Less interference. I am missing something about being a proper citizen and holding down a job and, let's put it blank, growing up. My concept of growing up is not aligned with what I believe the general population's concept of being growed up is. But, I do know I can't do whatever I want. That's wrong. I can't fish all day, that ones easy to know. I get that. I have to wear pants and clothing in general. I get that too. I must participate. That one's clear as well. I am missing a, on it's outside, simple bridge. I cannot keep offering disclaimers. To do that is akin to handing out passports. Far too reckless.
Rejecting life's intrinsic complexities is not a way forward. It is a system failure. Simplification. Keep it simple, stupid, only gets one so far before the wall of sound and input comes calling and breaks your nose. The mission for simplicity begins to damage the ability to engage, with necessity and vigor, peers, idols, fam, friends, and the rest of the grid.
Simplification denies and is denial when forced too far. I understand that better now, but not completely. No where near completely. I'm not alright with the concept and it makes me smile to say and hear it from our own mouth. We are not simple. We are bright. We are sharp. We cannot use simplicity as a device for protection. A way to consume information at a pace appropriate for us. A way to do what we want. Gain access to what we want. Appropriate. Unacceptable. It's neither sly nor sneaky. Plain dumb.
I suppose I will cut my tongue out one of these days. It can be a weapon. A technique. Believe it or not, I need to learn how to use communication better, more efficiently. Maybe I'll learn sign language. I think I'll be better for it. Better than learning another verbal language. That way at least when I'm ready to have it removed I'll be prepared to talk in other ways. I've been using sign language for quite some time, but not the official one, anyway. I've been using my sign language, exclusive to me and my country and my time zone. Hello there, and welcome to the rest of the world.
///T-Pain & Early Cuyler - "I Like Driving In My Truck" ...i like driving in my truck...
I had many and, some, long thoughts about my father. I hate saying that. That word. Makes me grind my teeth. It was a road that had to be reevaluated, and no I am not going to kick cans in anger here. It was a very positive approach couched mostly in pure analysis and attempting to see it from outside my head and look in at the relationship, while it still existed, from a third party.
What I started to think about and completed was that he may have seen some things from before my memory begins. My memory begins around preschool, kindergarten. I can't recall much of anything, virtually nothing, from before that and cannot vouch or insist I was one way or another. What I came to was that he may have seen something in me and my ways then and made an attempt to push the tracks this way and that way as I got older. Maybe. I'll never know because I asked and was refused, flat. Father's day. What a hoot.
I do know I am missing something. Not information. Yes information. My history is thoroughly incomplete. I have to remind myself and update my tabs on who's kicked the bucket. I'm fine with that. Less interference. I am missing something about being a proper citizen and holding down a job and, let's put it blank, growing up. My concept of growing up is not aligned with what I believe the general population's concept of being growed up is. But, I do know I can't do whatever I want. That's wrong. I can't fish all day, that ones easy to know. I get that. I have to wear pants and clothing in general. I get that too. I must participate. That one's clear as well. I am missing a, on it's outside, simple bridge. I cannot keep offering disclaimers. To do that is akin to handing out passports. Far too reckless.
Rejecting life's intrinsic complexities is not a way forward. It is a system failure. Simplification. Keep it simple, stupid, only gets one so far before the wall of sound and input comes calling and breaks your nose. The mission for simplicity begins to damage the ability to engage, with necessity and vigor, peers, idols, fam, friends, and the rest of the grid.
Simplification denies and is denial when forced too far. I understand that better now, but not completely. No where near completely. I'm not alright with the concept and it makes me smile to say and hear it from our own mouth. We are not simple. We are bright. We are sharp. We cannot use simplicity as a device for protection. A way to consume information at a pace appropriate for us. A way to do what we want. Gain access to what we want. Appropriate. Unacceptable. It's neither sly nor sneaky. Plain dumb.
I suppose I will cut my tongue out one of these days. It can be a weapon. A technique. Believe it or not, I need to learn how to use communication better, more efficiently. Maybe I'll learn sign language. I think I'll be better for it. Better than learning another verbal language. That way at least when I'm ready to have it removed I'll be prepared to talk in other ways. I've been using sign language for quite some time, but not the official one, anyway. I've been using my sign language, exclusive to me and my country and my time zone. Hello there, and welcome to the rest of the world.
///T-Pain & Early Cuyler - "I Like Driving In My Truck" ...i like driving in my truck...
1/19/14
Plight
The most terrifying thing about disease is that you know the best you can do is stay where you are and maybe pretend to be more than you are upstairs sometimes. Some things remain intact. Some things continue to degrade regardless of what you do. It's not fair at all.
It's difficult. It's difficult watching everyone else continue to accelerate and knowing you can be as good as you want to be at some things, but other things ... nope. The best you can do is hold ground.
I want to just say "fuck that." I can't. I have to at least try.
Yes it is easy to fit in. It's easy to stand out for the wrong reasons too. There is no blame with respect to bad wiring to be laid. There's some, but it flows both ways. I acknowledge that.
It is undeniably heart breaking though sometimes trying to externalize what they're saying to me. So we drunk to dull the blunt force of conversation. It's an airbag and a stand in for pills that lets me socialize more than I like to, but not less than I need to so I'm not swinging from my neck outside my front window.
It's a trade off. To tear off the mask is not appropriate at all and will land me..
... I don't know how to describe it. Rape me once, shame on you. Rape me twice, I was probably asking for it.
I will say there's nothing to fear because I learned a few several things.
There are many red zones.There is not one me.-000000000000000000000000000888888888qq0--------------211qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq
///Sage Francis - (The Buzzkill) ...by analyzing the past, Sage can project into the future..,
It's difficult. It's difficult watching everyone else continue to accelerate and knowing you can be as good as you want to be at some things, but other things ... nope. The best you can do is hold ground.
I want to just say "fuck that." I can't. I have to at least try.
Yes it is easy to fit in. It's easy to stand out for the wrong reasons too. There is no blame with respect to bad wiring to be laid. There's some, but it flows both ways. I acknowledge that.
It is undeniably heart breaking though sometimes trying to externalize what they're saying to me. So we drunk to dull the blunt force of conversation. It's an airbag and a stand in for pills that lets me socialize more than I like to, but not less than I need to so I'm not swinging from my neck outside my front window.
It's a trade off. To tear off the mask is not appropriate at all and will land me..
... I don't know how to describe it. Rape me once, shame on you. Rape me twice, I was probably asking for it.
I will say there's nothing to fear because I learned a few several things.
There are many red zones.There is not one me.-000000000000000000000000000888888888qq0--------------211qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq
///Sage Francis - (The Buzzkill) ...by analyzing the past, Sage can project into the future..,
1/10/14
The Year End Look
I am tempted to attack some things there is not time enough yet to tackle. I am okay with and respect and receive the temptation because the day is nearing and we stand on the cusp of something truly deafening with nothing between us beyond time itself. Time's only enemy is patience. The armory is stocked. Let's knock down time first.
The 2013 year end look is a strange one. Strange to me. I crashed a car again. For the second time in my life totaled an automobile. The injury was an injury I never knew before and thought I would never return from. It was probably something near or spot on to a partially herniated disc. I am used to pain. Used to adjusting for pain because a voice inside says it'll end eventually if you simply don't do it again. This pain brought me literally to my knees every time I got out of bed for work or to meet someone or otherwise do anything that did not require lying down. It was unbelievable. Literally unbelievable. It made me tear at myself and my bed sheets and scream in the afternoon and throw fits. Everything worked fine except standing and walking. In 2013 I became very aware of my age.
A friend of mine put it best: ten years ago, you hurt your back, you shotgun a beer and a whiskey short, have a smoke, and get on with life. Now? You hurt your back and you can drink 'til you cannot feel a damn thing, but that shit comes back as soon as your spine comes back on line. You can't go through life partially shut down.
It's true. Another year older, just one year removed from invincibility, or something damn near it, I am aware, acutely aware of physical limitations. Invincibility has been thoroughly dispelled in 2013. Respect for the injured and more feeble than I has been reinforced to incredible degrees. Of course it didn't help falling down multiple flights of stairs after the car accident. That one is on me. I should have known where I was standing on the fire escape and not allowed someone to high five me hard enough to push me backward into the night air. I guess I'm kind of a good fall guy. I should have broken my neck or an arm or at least a finger on my way down, getting something stuck in the stairs and landing made of iron grating, but all I remember, three days after the car accident, was waking up looking at the top of the fire escape and their back door and the little light and thinking "wait a minute? wasn't I just there? Why am I here?"
I went to a casino for the first time (with no money) and someone gave me a $100 chip. I can count the number of times I've held $100 bills in my hands with intent to spend instead of pay on one hand. Two of the five times were to pay for cars. I didn't get to use it for fun. I did get some long standing necessities taken care of though and a bill paid. One step closer to actual freedom.
I taught myself to drive stick for real in 2013. On a rear wheel drive truck. I also learned how to use torque and how to use horsepower. Yes, they're linked, but now I understand when to use which. When to use a little work fast and a lot of work slowly. Of course there's always the golden peak when you can use both at the same time, but high end cars are out of the cards for at least another half decade. I'm salivating thinking about it. My dream garage is still the same. Still stocked up with late 80s Japanese machines and American muscle. Some day, sweetheart.
2013 also taught me who my friends are and who my friends are not. For much of the year I tried to be a friend to the world. A friend to everyone who would have my ear and have my words, however fleeting, but I soon recognized (by soon, I mean it took the entire year) that what I was counting as friendship was not being counted or similarly given weight by the people I was ascribing it too. It was heart breaking. Truly heart breaking. I remember crying on and off for several days as each episode unwound. The penultimate was a multiple day thanksgiving celebration that was supposed to be fun. It was, to an extant. I was too much a different stripe to blend in and it was hurtful to me to be expected to do so, but maybe they didn't really expect me to blend that well. Maybe they expected me to realize sooner than later that I should've left. As it stands I only over stayed by a day or two before I recognized where I was and where I could do myself better. Coming home was beautiful on that day.
The ultimate was when I was left stranded by people I thought I could count as friends. My truck died and a true friend bailed me out. I've grown intimate with my truck of late. Gotten to know her inside and out. 2013 reminded me of the bullshit premise my birth father put to me about a car that was supposed to be my reward for graduating Carnegie Mellon (which did not happen) that was his vision for us rebuilding a beater BMW (which flew in the face of everything automotive I actually do espouse and believe in) and it's been tremendous and heart stoppingly gorgeous keeping that truck on the road and at the same time by turns puzzling that anyone, let alone the sack of nuts that raised you for 18 years, could miss your values that hard.
It does make me laugh though, because there have been more than a few times I could've used an extra set of hands to get the job done and I thought about the gents and lassies that could call up their dads or moms and schedule a weekend under the hood or chassis without getting violently ill or stomach ulcers. I appreciate that about people. Sometimes I ask them about their parents because it's practically porn to me.
In 2013 I learned to slow down scarification. In tandem with realizing that time is getting on I also realized if I ever do have children or adopt children there will be questions for me to answer too. Questions I am prepared to answer and questions that will have to be answered as my nose and ears get bigger and nothing else does and my eyes continue to sink and my brow continues to crease. The reminders still remain necessary and beautiful obelisks and world wonders to human history and I thank us for them always. I need them. Some mistakes you can make multiple times. Some mistakes you cannot afford to retread because lives are in the balance and the house does not always win, but you can never go back. You will die. You will be consumed, make no mistake. Every time I look in the mirror I am reminded and I need to be. Inside of your skull you are your friend more often than not. Outside of your skull is a flipped story.
The same problem does abound, though. My development, my passion for writing, remains far too grounded for my tastes. There is patience though. There is gestation. There is still the thirst for whimsy and dreamland. There is where I lie and I know it. I can feel it. The attack is coming. The all hail that tells me "forward now!" I can taste it. 2013 was about defining starting points. Defining relationships. Defining the scope of the maintenance necessary for progress. Did it have to take a year? Yes. 2013 was about defining severance. Defining which and what kinds of quests were worth pursuing. 2013 was a very long think.
The funniest part about 2013, it came around the tail end, was realizing that just because you can identify the group of people that you are attracted to does not automatically make them accessible or easily located. You meet just as many air heads and space cases exploring your same sex as your opposite sex. The worst, the most lip curling, the most eye squinting, experiences are had when you meet a carbon copy of someone you'd cultivate a relationship with straight, gay. In my mind I'm thinking ten minutes in to the conversation: "god damn it, not this again. Really? You exist here too? Who dropped you on your head? Why do you have fifteen pairs of shoes and a $200 dollar love seat in an apartment you're paying $900 a month for? Why are we going out to a bar downtown when there's one at the corner while you have a fridge full of wine and candy imports? Three pairs of sunglasses? Sunglasses??"
I don't know what 2014 is going to bring. I think my year to year expectations have grown foggier and foggier so I will add some definition. I think this year (no resolutions) I will try to fuck a woman for some variety. The whole "no concussions" thing failed miserably. I had four in 2013 so I think it's fair to rule that out. Broke my nose twice too, so that's out. I want to do more art in 2014 too. Life's demands put way too much on my plate to really put anything outside of my skull to look at and enjoy, and I'm not saying for you to enjoy, I'm saying for me and we/us to enjoy.
Now that things have been better defined through thirteen, in fourteen I would like to explore that framework and see what and where it builds to. New territories and frontiers. I want a new scar for 2014. A scar for the turn. A scar for the "maybe" identified because in twelve the maybe had no identity. 2014 will be a quest for the whimsical. A seeking out of the imaginary and a protecting of the physical. We achieved many grown up tasks and came into adulthood through 2013 from its humble beginning in 2012's confusion. It's time to explore the limits of what that adultness and understanding and thinking and domestication can ring when our bell is rung hard enough. What music will it make? Will it make music or fall apart with the strikes?
For the first time, in 2013, I had to shave down my knuckles with a pumice stone. The scar tissue accumulated so thickly that I couldn't open and splay my fingers easily without fighting against it. Too much contact. I cannot fall into the trap of abusing myself in lieu of taking abuse just to feel normal and normalcy. That's not okay. It is not okay to do that. 2013, a lot of 2013 was about learning what it is not okay to do. Platonic spooning was okay. Talking about platonic spooning to their friends indirectly and accidentally by way of mentioning conversations they were not a part of, but must have happened after they left, later on when we and they met again is not okay. It should be though. Don't break my heart that way. Break it any other way, but that is pure... muffed intent. I do not have time for that in 2014.
I have accumulated old man hands at the ripe age of 28. I am a destroyer parked in a lagoon and rusting. You fucking cowards. 2013 was also about rebuilding my space craft. I had to tear it apart and rebuild it. It was gathering too many parts and pieces superfluous and useful once and never again. When one part failed I hooked and slaved another component to keep it running. Fourteen is streamlining. Keep the violence down at all costs. The love too. Control. 2014 is focusing on control and dynamics. It's easy to glass a city. It's hard to embrace one and construct. Consider the "what will and what can we build here?"
It does make me laugh though, to consider that I may be at a new base line measurement. It is enticing. So many things happened. So much time spent alone and too much time spent in contact. It does not add up to my satisfaction. I will boost literary output in 2014. It does not matter if you want to do it, it has to be done for your own sake.
2014 is action. Redesigns are on the table. Stand up act 9 is on the table. Before both will come the year end playlist. Let's go! No sneak peeks this time. So much left out too, but we'll get it in later.
///Shiny Toy Guns - "Major Tom" ...near Earth orbit
5/7/13
Wrecks, Dreamland, and Reconstruction
I went back to the scene of my car accident tonight. Dreamland has been corrupted. I keep having a recurring dream about it. Cruising through dreamland last night I built a house of a little more than normal proportions. My friend Matt and his buddy Ernie called me up after I finished eating lunch (sardines and fried centipedes... it actually wasn't that bad... all the legs and fish ribs were super crunchy inside the perogies). Tom was there too. Finished up eating, and the phone rang so I got up from the indoor beach with the five foot wide tv perched over the far water and went to go let them in. Put on my fleece robe and tossed Tom the remote. Walked down to the freight elevator and closed the gate and punched the ground floor. The elevator went all the way down past the mech garage. I had my bright red candy shell finished R 29 with extra plate and F990 shoulder mount long barrel with aftermarket cooling fins parked right beside it and it was awesome watching the light glint off of it. Sometimes I spend days on the scaffold hand polishing it's entire body when I'm not joy riding it through the clear southwest desert night sky.
The elevator went all the way through to the floor and then ten feet below to the car garage and hillside entrance. It's a short walk to the door and I let Matt and Ernie in. Ernie asked me if I remembered going to his place the night before and showing up at three in the afternoon. I said no. I didn't. I wasn't lying. He asked me if someone hacked me, but I told him I wasn't online at all yesterday, but it's possible I might've caught something because I was online the day before pretty much the entire day looking for some rarer copies of an Ultraman graphic novel I used to have when I was a kid, but can't find in my library anymore. He laughed. That was probably what might've done it. Matt offered to hit me up with a few patches to make sure whatever it was that wiped my memory didn't get passed around while they were over. We took the lift back up and they asked Tom if I was a little off yesterday and he said "definitely."
I don't know why he didn't mention anything to me, but I guess that's what good friends do sometimes, and he's probably used to my oddness and figured it was the usual fare. Or at least, the Tom I constructed and built into the dream did. I told them we were out of sardines. Because we were and if we were going to hit up the bars later it would probably be good not to over do it. I don't know where the extra beach chairs came from but by the time we got back up to tv room they were already there. We all started talking about whether or not we would blaze on our way up to the Silver Tusk. I have a pretty sweet mech garage so there're plenty enough for each of us to blast out to the exosphere and dock at the Silver Tusk space station in geocentric orbit above our heads.
And then a giant tan sedan crashed through the wall behind the flat screen. It blew it apart and was going so fast it skipped across the water and bit into the beach. As soon as it touched down it started flipping and parts began whipping off of its underside like a pipe bomb built and stuffed with three foot long aluminum fence posts instead of nails. I was standing behind them and it rolled right over them and chewed them up into meat before my eyes before a door came zinging off while it spun and I woke up with that door heading straight for my neck.
Every other dream since it happened has been like that. No matter how I construct it or if I let it play and go along for the ride, they keep ending with cars careening through and killing everyone in one way or another. So I went back to the place tonight. It was weird walking up the off ramp. I tried to think about what that kid could have been thinking that morning walking between the off ramp walls. There's no where to go on either side. If you leap off the far side of the corner it's a good ten foot drop. Off of the inside corner there's some grass, but cars come much closer to the inside of the turn so your chances are much slimmer of even having time to react or think about jumping. I like to drive in wide and then turn in tight and let the car bleed off speed while it grips in. He was lucky for that. If I came inside he would have been through my windshield.
The mark on the far wall when I swerved to avoid him was nothing tremendous. It was mostly a tire scuff maybe a foot long at most. It didn't speak at all to the damage done to the car. There was no traffic tonight. I walked out to the middle to pick up a piece of my bumper that was still there. Just a shard. I don't wonder why he ran away. I would have too. Was he daydreaming? Did he want to die? Was he just high? Crouched there I started to remember when I was younger and I walked into traffic trying to get hit on Forbes avenue. I wasn't particularly upset or anything, but I was ready to let my life go. No one would hit me. I did it again a few nights later with my eyes closed and I distinctly remember a bus blowing by me so close it spun me around when it brushed my black hoodie. I wasn't upset, but I was impossibly trapped at the time and finished trying to figure out how to pick that particular lock.
I'm still putting my body back together. From the car accident and the fall down the two flights of stairs and the bike accident (which was my own fault, just pushed my bicycle too hard after having it laid up for most of winter and a too cold spring). Two hours a day of rehab work getting my back right. A lot of my power comes from my torso and I messed up my hip and tailbone pretty ugly. Nothing broken, but the deep bruising and muscle strains took their toll, but I'm getting back to a point where I can consider running again and hitting the weight room hard. The reconstruction, the process of it has become consuming. I was at a point where I could mess with whomever I wanted. Sure, I didn't win every scuff, but I had confidence in my bones and tissues that spoke to having a decent shot as long as I wasn't piss drunk. Not so now. There's hesitation now. There's memory tape now of the waking up in pain and not being able to sit up straight even in a well made chair. Not being able to breath because my sternum hurt so bad.
My body is gathering force though. Regaining moxy and it's difficult for me to have my limitations still in view. I keep having internal arguments with myself shouting "don't do that, you're not ready yet." And myself shouting back "or what?" But I know what. Humiliation, failure, more time lost in recovery. What the reconstruction has also done though, is forced a new view upon me. A new way of going about conflict. Handling passions I can't always contain effectively. War bringing peace, in a way.
More than anything, I want so badly to speak to that kid face to face now that I don't want to skin him alive anymore. I want to know, and I want to tell him I forgive him.
///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Smash and Grab World" looking to the stars on a fucked up night. Year end playlist is still in the works. Just five months late. No worries.
The elevator went all the way through to the floor and then ten feet below to the car garage and hillside entrance. It's a short walk to the door and I let Matt and Ernie in. Ernie asked me if I remembered going to his place the night before and showing up at three in the afternoon. I said no. I didn't. I wasn't lying. He asked me if someone hacked me, but I told him I wasn't online at all yesterday, but it's possible I might've caught something because I was online the day before pretty much the entire day looking for some rarer copies of an Ultraman graphic novel I used to have when I was a kid, but can't find in my library anymore. He laughed. That was probably what might've done it. Matt offered to hit me up with a few patches to make sure whatever it was that wiped my memory didn't get passed around while they were over. We took the lift back up and they asked Tom if I was a little off yesterday and he said "definitely."
I don't know why he didn't mention anything to me, but I guess that's what good friends do sometimes, and he's probably used to my oddness and figured it was the usual fare. Or at least, the Tom I constructed and built into the dream did. I told them we were out of sardines. Because we were and if we were going to hit up the bars later it would probably be good not to over do it. I don't know where the extra beach chairs came from but by the time we got back up to tv room they were already there. We all started talking about whether or not we would blaze on our way up to the Silver Tusk. I have a pretty sweet mech garage so there're plenty enough for each of us to blast out to the exosphere and dock at the Silver Tusk space station in geocentric orbit above our heads.
And then a giant tan sedan crashed through the wall behind the flat screen. It blew it apart and was going so fast it skipped across the water and bit into the beach. As soon as it touched down it started flipping and parts began whipping off of its underside like a pipe bomb built and stuffed with three foot long aluminum fence posts instead of nails. I was standing behind them and it rolled right over them and chewed them up into meat before my eyes before a door came zinging off while it spun and I woke up with that door heading straight for my neck.
Every other dream since it happened has been like that. No matter how I construct it or if I let it play and go along for the ride, they keep ending with cars careening through and killing everyone in one way or another. So I went back to the place tonight. It was weird walking up the off ramp. I tried to think about what that kid could have been thinking that morning walking between the off ramp walls. There's no where to go on either side. If you leap off the far side of the corner it's a good ten foot drop. Off of the inside corner there's some grass, but cars come much closer to the inside of the turn so your chances are much slimmer of even having time to react or think about jumping. I like to drive in wide and then turn in tight and let the car bleed off speed while it grips in. He was lucky for that. If I came inside he would have been through my windshield.
The mark on the far wall when I swerved to avoid him was nothing tremendous. It was mostly a tire scuff maybe a foot long at most. It didn't speak at all to the damage done to the car. There was no traffic tonight. I walked out to the middle to pick up a piece of my bumper that was still there. Just a shard. I don't wonder why he ran away. I would have too. Was he daydreaming? Did he want to die? Was he just high? Crouched there I started to remember when I was younger and I walked into traffic trying to get hit on Forbes avenue. I wasn't particularly upset or anything, but I was ready to let my life go. No one would hit me. I did it again a few nights later with my eyes closed and I distinctly remember a bus blowing by me so close it spun me around when it brushed my black hoodie. I wasn't upset, but I was impossibly trapped at the time and finished trying to figure out how to pick that particular lock.
I'm still putting my body back together. From the car accident and the fall down the two flights of stairs and the bike accident (which was my own fault, just pushed my bicycle too hard after having it laid up for most of winter and a too cold spring). Two hours a day of rehab work getting my back right. A lot of my power comes from my torso and I messed up my hip and tailbone pretty ugly. Nothing broken, but the deep bruising and muscle strains took their toll, but I'm getting back to a point where I can consider running again and hitting the weight room hard. The reconstruction, the process of it has become consuming. I was at a point where I could mess with whomever I wanted. Sure, I didn't win every scuff, but I had confidence in my bones and tissues that spoke to having a decent shot as long as I wasn't piss drunk. Not so now. There's hesitation now. There's memory tape now of the waking up in pain and not being able to sit up straight even in a well made chair. Not being able to breath because my sternum hurt so bad.
My body is gathering force though. Regaining moxy and it's difficult for me to have my limitations still in view. I keep having internal arguments with myself shouting "don't do that, you're not ready yet." And myself shouting back "or what?" But I know what. Humiliation, failure, more time lost in recovery. What the reconstruction has also done though, is forced a new view upon me. A new way of going about conflict. Handling passions I can't always contain effectively. War bringing peace, in a way.
More than anything, I want so badly to speak to that kid face to face now that I don't want to skin him alive anymore. I want to know, and I want to tell him I forgive him.
///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Smash and Grab World" looking to the stars on a fucked up night. Year end playlist is still in the works. Just five months late. No worries.
10/4/12
Dogging It and the Winter Manifesto
Yep, I have been dogging it, for lack of artistic direction. I've become consumed with the immediate and unable to find the magic, the whimsy. The press of culture has been stifling. The pressure of fitting into some kind of God damned role has been palpable, or I should say, more palpable than in past weeks and months and years even. I keep looking up and asking myself if this is all there is and I have been pounding my fist on the table with six empty chairs around it and rattling nothing more than my own glass.
There is no such thing as a dry spell. I know it is all still there, still pouring, still palpitating. What I want to get at, however, is after the flow. I am storing metaphor and analogy and analysis, but not having tapped the vein I want I have limbs dying for overdose and infection. "Eating heroin is one thing, but injecting it is another." Probably the funniest thing I heard this year. The funniest admonishment. It burns my ass sometimes to hear people complain about things that are fairly simply resolved. Hilarious in some ways. Met up with a friend of mine at the local hole and he told me about another friend who had a fiberglass, nuclear white, road bike.
Turned out the guy was high as fuck on mescaline and out for a joy ride and he rode with him up to his place and the guy just housed the hill there. Should I feel bad for feeling inspired?
I've (enter apostrophetics) been dogging it none the less. I can't describe the feeling. If you've ever read the phantom tollbooth you know what the love affair of language can be like. Sometimes she wears lace. Sometimes he wears the same lace the last time you had to suck him off for a solid hour because he lied about not jerking off before he came over and you found out second hand from his other friend he was banging beers back with before he decided to ring you up and now your neck hurts when you tip your head backward to drink water the morning after.
The point is, he doesn't realize you would be more than happy to throttle his neck the same and watch his eyes start to pop out until they turned back and up into his eyelids and the tears ran down your hands because that's what gets you off.
And that just turned way angry and too honest. I don't know. I can't speak to human engineering because I don't know enough, but I absolutely believe that engineering can be trumped by training. The problem and the pitfall is the belief and extrapolation from that idea that training can be unlearned. Somehow the incorporation, the building of the structure can be as easily or possibly as difficulty and painstakingly deconstructed. The question arises: if you have 24 years of programming and construction and habituation built into your psyche, how many years will it take to reprogram, reconstruct, repurpose, and rehabilitate those patterns into new ones? If it takes, just drawing cards from my own deck of experience, twenty minutes to demolish a level 3 Revell GT 500 painstakingly constructed over two weeks, it should be fairly easy. That's my deck.
It's been hard. Real hard. Violently hard. Violently happy. To the point where people know me well enough that I have to actively push away opportunities to ...I'm not a destroyer. But I know I am. I know I can be a creator too. I used to be. I used to create willy nilly and I still do, but the work goes into that. The creating. The destruction comes naturally. I'm not a big guy by any stretch, but I never thought five years ago I would ever be comfortable popping someone's eye with my thumb. Yeah, it was salty. Not good salty either. Like, I do not know how to describe it. It was like the saline was an afterthought. I did not realize, at all, how much energy I was burning to be, but I've felt the exhaustion of it, of late. It's been taxing. Who to tell what and how much. I'm rambling.
I know. I have been dogging it. Not on the low roads though. I'm kind of surprised some times how easy it's been. Violence as language. I think the Auralport has been a lot of language as violence. Which is a start, but not enough of a start. There's no point in conquest you can't talk about. No entryway. No friends. I just laughed saying that out loud. I am not an animal. I build models with tweezers. Still do. I suppose that is not making me any less creepy. I have fallen off. Maybe fallen in to. Something. Fighting fair is a sad man's game.
I am not an animal, but I am trying to work my way back to the human side of the master equation.
And so I present to you the Winter manifesto:
Do good. Do not just be better within yourself, because that is not enough. Be better within, and for, others sake. Do not just see stars, but see horses and do not steal them, only enjoy their being and watch and maybe tip a hat to that wilderness, but do not beg to be the center. Do not fight this winter, for any reason. Physically. Because you have one body and one set of knuckles and you have enough years on them to make making it past forty a probability instead of a certainty. Lose no more fractions of teeth. Put together your works and compose for compositions sake alone because recognition is fool's gold and the short path to the quitter's raga. Be bright and not literally, but for light's sake. Be motivated and train and not for the sake of preparations for conflict, however, be prepared to defend yourself, and only in defense cause a mother fu$$ing ruckus. Finish the twenty thousand words to your book you left hanging two years ago. No Damoclesean swords. Less reference. Clearer analogy. And I don't know how much further I should take it because I've already stepped into the boundary between what I know I can do and what I know I know I may not be able to do.
The Winter manifesto is this: take it head on and do not fear the cool.
The trees talk to me in summer, at night when the moon is out. I am looking forward to their silence and the peace of the death of the ground beneath my feet. I am looking forward to reclaiming the night that I leased to the summer and all her passerby and the bullshit.
I survived another season. I know the next two will be beautiful.
Redesigns coming soon.
///Sneaker Pimps - "How Do" I grew up on sneaker pimps. through the conflict years. them, massive attack, and floyd, and disco. and the orb.
There is no such thing as a dry spell. I know it is all still there, still pouring, still palpitating. What I want to get at, however, is after the flow. I am storing metaphor and analogy and analysis, but not having tapped the vein I want I have limbs dying for overdose and infection. "Eating heroin is one thing, but injecting it is another." Probably the funniest thing I heard this year. The funniest admonishment. It burns my ass sometimes to hear people complain about things that are fairly simply resolved. Hilarious in some ways. Met up with a friend of mine at the local hole and he told me about another friend who had a fiberglass, nuclear white, road bike.
Turned out the guy was high as fuck on mescaline and out for a joy ride and he rode with him up to his place and the guy just housed the hill there. Should I feel bad for feeling inspired?
I've (enter apostrophetics) been dogging it none the less. I can't describe the feeling. If you've ever read the phantom tollbooth you know what the love affair of language can be like. Sometimes she wears lace. Sometimes he wears the same lace the last time you had to suck him off for a solid hour because he lied about not jerking off before he came over and you found out second hand from his other friend he was banging beers back with before he decided to ring you up and now your neck hurts when you tip your head backward to drink water the morning after.
The point is, he doesn't realize you would be more than happy to throttle his neck the same and watch his eyes start to pop out until they turned back and up into his eyelids and the tears ran down your hands because that's what gets you off.
And that just turned way angry and too honest. I don't know. I can't speak to human engineering because I don't know enough, but I absolutely believe that engineering can be trumped by training. The problem and the pitfall is the belief and extrapolation from that idea that training can be unlearned. Somehow the incorporation, the building of the structure can be as easily or possibly as difficulty and painstakingly deconstructed. The question arises: if you have 24 years of programming and construction and habituation built into your psyche, how many years will it take to reprogram, reconstruct, repurpose, and rehabilitate those patterns into new ones? If it takes, just drawing cards from my own deck of experience, twenty minutes to demolish a level 3 Revell GT 500 painstakingly constructed over two weeks, it should be fairly easy. That's my deck.
It's been hard. Real hard. Violently hard. Violently happy. To the point where people know me well enough that I have to actively push away opportunities to ...I'm not a destroyer. But I know I am. I know I can be a creator too. I used to be. I used to create willy nilly and I still do, but the work goes into that. The creating. The destruction comes naturally. I'm not a big guy by any stretch, but I never thought five years ago I would ever be comfortable popping someone's eye with my thumb. Yeah, it was salty. Not good salty either. Like, I do not know how to describe it. It was like the saline was an afterthought. I did not realize, at all, how much energy I was burning to be, but I've felt the exhaustion of it, of late. It's been taxing. Who to tell what and how much. I'm rambling.
I know. I have been dogging it. Not on the low roads though. I'm kind of surprised some times how easy it's been. Violence as language. I think the Auralport has been a lot of language as violence. Which is a start, but not enough of a start. There's no point in conquest you can't talk about. No entryway. No friends. I just laughed saying that out loud. I am not an animal. I build models with tweezers. Still do. I suppose that is not making me any less creepy. I have fallen off. Maybe fallen in to. Something. Fighting fair is a sad man's game.
I am not an animal, but I am trying to work my way back to the human side of the master equation.
And so I present to you the Winter manifesto:
Do good. Do not just be better within yourself, because that is not enough. Be better within, and for, others sake. Do not just see stars, but see horses and do not steal them, only enjoy their being and watch and maybe tip a hat to that wilderness, but do not beg to be the center. Do not fight this winter, for any reason. Physically. Because you have one body and one set of knuckles and you have enough years on them to make making it past forty a probability instead of a certainty. Lose no more fractions of teeth. Put together your works and compose for compositions sake alone because recognition is fool's gold and the short path to the quitter's raga. Be bright and not literally, but for light's sake. Be motivated and train and not for the sake of preparations for conflict, however, be prepared to defend yourself, and only in defense cause a mother fu$$ing ruckus. Finish the twenty thousand words to your book you left hanging two years ago. No Damoclesean swords. Less reference. Clearer analogy. And I don't know how much further I should take it because I've already stepped into the boundary between what I know I can do and what I know I know I may not be able to do.
The Winter manifesto is this: take it head on and do not fear the cool.
The trees talk to me in summer, at night when the moon is out. I am looking forward to their silence and the peace of the death of the ground beneath my feet. I am looking forward to reclaiming the night that I leased to the summer and all her passerby and the bullshit.
I survived another season. I know the next two will be beautiful.
Redesigns coming soon.
///Sneaker Pimps - "How Do" I grew up on sneaker pimps. through the conflict years. them, massive attack, and floyd, and disco. and the orb.
11/23/11
Why I Hate Coldplay and then Compliments Addressed, the Silence, Birthdays, Ant Eaters
So today is exactly my 43rd birthday in the 26th iteration of my life. Not much bang, but there's not much buck, and, to be honest, how many knife fights with prostitutes is too much? The answer is one. One knife fight with anyone is probably too many. So I'm taking it on a lower key. Partially because I've had enough near death scrapes to make a fine scrap book of uniform crime reports and scars and partially because it sneaked up on me like a cat to a laser pointer's beam. I already had a midlife crisis. I'm still bouncing back from that. And to top it off, my latest scrape with my old friend was less of a scrape and more of a Houdini "how-the-hell-am-I-not-at-least-crippled-from-the-waist-down" kind of event and I'm not clapping my hands for an immediate encore.
43 feels the same as 42. The same as 41. Once you get over the major obstacle of realizing it's half over for all you have to offer, the rest is gravy. Things have been pleasantly silent. But I've been doing a lot of work to make it happen. Soused? Sometimes. The best thing about it is not the damage. Is not even the shortened life span, because I know I will pay for palatable living eventually, be it a massive med crash or the nick and chip of the slower knives offered by off the shelf substances, because all in all the final tally will sort itself out such that you cut years off the suffering (albeit by dying). The best thing about it is the silence. The knowing that you and only you are all present and mostly accounted for. That when people ask what you want to do, only one hand goes up in your head. When you ask yourself what to do next you hear one maybe two voices instead of ten.
I am still an anteater (fuck you). What I've also realized in the words of the illustrious coach Mike Tomlin is that the standard is the standard. I've been imagining Mike Tomlin covering my exploits in a post game/post week/post month press conference. He would probably say something like "an anteater is an anteater is an anteater. If we are anteaters it will show up on film and that film is our resume. Our resume speaks for itself. You either are an anteater or you aren't. There is no middle ground and when we can be anteaters it will show up in the work that we do." But I don't get press conference coverage. Or have coaches like Mike Tomlin, so I basically just tell myself when I don't get the outcome of my action 'dude, you're an anteater, what the hell did you think would happen?"
The silence has been nice though. I've been hanging the back end out there for almost too long though. Too many g's against tires whose grip I can never trust and part of me is waiting for the rubber to dissolve into the cloud of white smoke trumpeting from the rims for the naked rim to bite the asphalt like a starved dragon and flip my whole contraption so many times I'll be reduced to chunky tomato paste by the time it comes to halt on it's crumpled roof atop a sea of pelletized glass and unkempt infield next to the red and white rumble strips marking the path to the apex I should have targeted along the optimal path I could have taken had I the wiring and the vision and the opportunity to do so. So I enjoy the silence and try not to burn the envelope already torn to shreds back in high school when I realized my contents were not the sort of things that the postal service accepted as mail-able, transferable, items without special postage and allowances.
I did, however, receive a complement the other day from an older woman. It wasn't at all creepy. Not like the time I was walking back from the south side because the buses stopped running and I stopped at a bus stop just to read the schedule and make doubly sure and an old man who looked like Morgan Freeman after a bad Vegas weekend bender told me I was cute. That was creepy as hell. Plus I didn't know I was gay at the time so it was creepy and offensive and if I wasn't in a rush to rescue a friend from the clutches of a bad decision, but probably playing into her demand for a declaration of dedicated-ness by crossing town to get her, I probably would have stopped longer and been like "well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean, asshole?"
But anyway, I got a complement from an older lady the other day. She said I had a great smile. Now I have a prominent scar on my face that gashes from my eyebrow, down my cheek, and ends where my beard starts. I have a badly chipped front tooth from taking a dive onto cement. I have another scar from years ago where I took a similar dive, but broke my fall with my orbital bone instead of my mouth. And I have another set of scars from various head butts and several attempts to jump through a hallway's drywall ceiling. To have her see through that to that genuine grin she yanked out of me with her humor and honesty was touching. Because I mean she's got to be pushing 70, so she's seen her share of great smiles over the decades.
What was really touching about it is everyone says you're one in a million. That kind of phrasology, that kind of thought process, basically fires across the deck and no one blinks an eye. No one changes course. No one stands up and says "dear god, you are absolutely right! I must be wholly unique to this planet!" At least no one with half an ounce of sense. To believe that if you were able to gather together one million people, not a single one would have 99% of your interests, foibles, ticks, obsessions, addictions, and deficiencies in common is to be utterly blind to the simple fact that there are only so many configurations of expressibles. What differentiates then is the physical. That's what really makes you unique. So to have her say, whether true or not, off hand or not, that my smile sticks out in her nearly 7 decade long memory was totally awesome. It had me glowing while we made small talk. By the time she sauntered off I wondered if we would have gotten along just as well had she been 26 too, or if I'm the kind of person lovable only over fantastic spans of time and space.
Which is why I hate Coldplay. Not directly why. I hate Coldplay for the handful of fantastically cogent songs they've made. The songs that express the things people feel with uncanny accuracy, levity, and genius song writing. I hate Coldplay because I love their album with the figure of the guy with his head blown off on the cover, but I can't listen to it because of one song called The Scientist because the memories it brings back are still so raw and it describes those memories, the end of the formation of new memories just as good, with an intensity that is horrifically accurate it's like trying to sit down to a Rescue 911 marathon without a vomit bag for the blood, guts, bones, tears, and anguish you are about to see. It's not meant as a slight to them. it's good for them. Good for them for crafting something so intense. Good for them for wading through their own noise to get to the deep water. I guess I'm still doing that in many ways across several subjects. Assuming I don't drown first, but I'll keep kicking.
///Coldplay - "The Scientist" its not melodramatic. you have to put aside some of the common elements of regret to digest it, but those elements are, thankfully, few. but it speaks stories of information where so much pop is a glorified fragment blown out of proportion, chopped, and hashed with tons of loops and over production to fill the passage of time. ...going back to the start...
43 feels the same as 42. The same as 41. Once you get over the major obstacle of realizing it's half over for all you have to offer, the rest is gravy. Things have been pleasantly silent. But I've been doing a lot of work to make it happen. Soused? Sometimes. The best thing about it is not the damage. Is not even the shortened life span, because I know I will pay for palatable living eventually, be it a massive med crash or the nick and chip of the slower knives offered by off the shelf substances, because all in all the final tally will sort itself out such that you cut years off the suffering (albeit by dying). The best thing about it is the silence. The knowing that you and only you are all present and mostly accounted for. That when people ask what you want to do, only one hand goes up in your head. When you ask yourself what to do next you hear one maybe two voices instead of ten.
I am still an anteater (fuck you). What I've also realized in the words of the illustrious coach Mike Tomlin is that the standard is the standard. I've been imagining Mike Tomlin covering my exploits in a post game/post week/post month press conference. He would probably say something like "an anteater is an anteater is an anteater. If we are anteaters it will show up on film and that film is our resume. Our resume speaks for itself. You either are an anteater or you aren't. There is no middle ground and when we can be anteaters it will show up in the work that we do." But I don't get press conference coverage. Or have coaches like Mike Tomlin, so I basically just tell myself when I don't get the outcome of my action 'dude, you're an anteater, what the hell did you think would happen?"
The silence has been nice though. I've been hanging the back end out there for almost too long though. Too many g's against tires whose grip I can never trust and part of me is waiting for the rubber to dissolve into the cloud of white smoke trumpeting from the rims for the naked rim to bite the asphalt like a starved dragon and flip my whole contraption so many times I'll be reduced to chunky tomato paste by the time it comes to halt on it's crumpled roof atop a sea of pelletized glass and unkempt infield next to the red and white rumble strips marking the path to the apex I should have targeted along the optimal path I could have taken had I the wiring and the vision and the opportunity to do so. So I enjoy the silence and try not to burn the envelope already torn to shreds back in high school when I realized my contents were not the sort of things that the postal service accepted as mail-able, transferable, items without special postage and allowances.
I did, however, receive a complement the other day from an older woman. It wasn't at all creepy. Not like the time I was walking back from the south side because the buses stopped running and I stopped at a bus stop just to read the schedule and make doubly sure and an old man who looked like Morgan Freeman after a bad Vegas weekend bender told me I was cute. That was creepy as hell. Plus I didn't know I was gay at the time so it was creepy and offensive and if I wasn't in a rush to rescue a friend from the clutches of a bad decision, but probably playing into her demand for a declaration of dedicated-ness by crossing town to get her, I probably would have stopped longer and been like "well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean, asshole?"
But anyway, I got a complement from an older lady the other day. She said I had a great smile. Now I have a prominent scar on my face that gashes from my eyebrow, down my cheek, and ends where my beard starts. I have a badly chipped front tooth from taking a dive onto cement. I have another scar from years ago where I took a similar dive, but broke my fall with my orbital bone instead of my mouth. And I have another set of scars from various head butts and several attempts to jump through a hallway's drywall ceiling. To have her see through that to that genuine grin she yanked out of me with her humor and honesty was touching. Because I mean she's got to be pushing 70, so she's seen her share of great smiles over the decades.
What was really touching about it is everyone says you're one in a million. That kind of phrasology, that kind of thought process, basically fires across the deck and no one blinks an eye. No one changes course. No one stands up and says "dear god, you are absolutely right! I must be wholly unique to this planet!" At least no one with half an ounce of sense. To believe that if you were able to gather together one million people, not a single one would have 99% of your interests, foibles, ticks, obsessions, addictions, and deficiencies in common is to be utterly blind to the simple fact that there are only so many configurations of expressibles. What differentiates then is the physical. That's what really makes you unique. So to have her say, whether true or not, off hand or not, that my smile sticks out in her nearly 7 decade long memory was totally awesome. It had me glowing while we made small talk. By the time she sauntered off I wondered if we would have gotten along just as well had she been 26 too, or if I'm the kind of person lovable only over fantastic spans of time and space.
Which is why I hate Coldplay. Not directly why. I hate Coldplay for the handful of fantastically cogent songs they've made. The songs that express the things people feel with uncanny accuracy, levity, and genius song writing. I hate Coldplay because I love their album with the figure of the guy with his head blown off on the cover, but I can't listen to it because of one song called The Scientist because the memories it brings back are still so raw and it describes those memories, the end of the formation of new memories just as good, with an intensity that is horrifically accurate it's like trying to sit down to a Rescue 911 marathon without a vomit bag for the blood, guts, bones, tears, and anguish you are about to see. It's not meant as a slight to them. it's good for them. Good for them for crafting something so intense. Good for them for wading through their own noise to get to the deep water. I guess I'm still doing that in many ways across several subjects. Assuming I don't drown first, but I'll keep kicking.
///Coldplay - "The Scientist" its not melodramatic. you have to put aside some of the common elements of regret to digest it, but those elements are, thankfully, few. but it speaks stories of information where so much pop is a glorified fragment blown out of proportion, chopped, and hashed with tons of loops and over production to fill the passage of time. ...going back to the start...
8/16/11
Odd Dreams, Prior Commitments, New Goals and Mystic River
Woke up, fell asleep, appended more dreaming to the previous dream and then woke again. The first dream was me and a family of strangers. The house was enormous. My mother and father were nowhere to be found inside the house and all of the light bulb sockets were empty. The only things left were bits and parts of things that were going to be abandoned that the parents left to me and my siblings to decide if we were going to take them with us or not. It was up to us to pack them all and be outside with the single suitcase we were each allowed to bring to the new home. So we packed.
As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.
We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.
Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.
Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.
The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.
In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.
All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.
As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.
Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.
Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.
It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.
For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.
There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).
The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.
Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.
Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.
So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.
///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.
As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.
We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.
Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.
Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.
The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.
In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.
All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.
As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.
Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.
Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.
It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.
For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.
There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).
The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.
Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.
Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.
So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.
///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.
8/13/11
Juan Carlos
Just remembered the death of my goldfish, Juan Carlos. Killed by a white cat named Red, back when I was living in a frat house. Loved that fish. Happened years ago. Dunno why that came back just now. He was a good fish.
Those were weird times. Weird, happy, times
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