The Year End Look

Never forget that any day you do not think about killing yourself is a pretty damn good day.  Let's run the damage report to begin.  One concussion.  One fractured jaw.  Pretty okay.  What the hell, did we learn?  What is the outlook on this year?  I am afraid of saying "I don't know."  It's all there.  I don't want to sift through it.  Slug through it.  I want to try to take my reference point from the year end look to begin 2015 and see where we go; so let's go!

First of all, caution paid off.  Before the major injury to my face, everything was humming on the hardware.  When you suffer a debilitating injury, a person cannot help slipping into ways to deal with that pain.  No friends were lost and no new real friends were won.  Relationships grew deeper and more sovereign.  The realization that the only person who can take care of you at the bottom line, when bone strikes metal, is you and the only person you can rely on absolutely, the only person you can control with high fidelity is you.  Everyone else are variables.  Your friends will help you and attempt to intercede and interject.  Some who do are tourists.  That is acceptable.  Emotional tourism is a fact of life.

Nice guys finish last, but they finish clean and if that means something to your heart then it is absolutely worth pursuing.  You cannot wear hats that do not fit before they blow off in the wind or constrict the blood vessels in your forehead hard enough to give you a migraine.  Through the incident, I learned that I am a violent person at heart, but the jacket around that bullet is a jacket formed in a forge of love, kindness, emotion and the ability to feel.  Sure, sometimes you feel nothing and sympathy and empathy are things I have to manufacture, but I realized very quickly, unable to eat, laugh, smile, frown, grimace, sneeze or cough, that manufactured or not, however you arrive at it, rage and violence is not the way to go.  Thinking back on it, had I lashed out and taken the governors off of myself and won the day instead of trying to talk it through and getting cold cocked, I would be sitting at home afraid to go out at night, worried that someone I did something to still remembers and is looking for me and I have no idea what their faces look like.  In retrospect, I am fine with the outcome and more comfortable in my own skin for it.  I know the switch is there.  They do not.  That is all the security I need.  Sometimes I ask myself if I am being too nice.  I ask myself if I am behaving too well.  I shrug.  I tell myself I am not a rat on a sinking ship.  Certainly, I am not the king of the rats.  There is much more to do with my life than project my violent heart on the screens of the world around me.  What happens when the video skips and the rainbow scaled dragon leaps across the screen and azure clouds belching constellations and weapons blueprints?  Focus less on projections and more on allowing that mean streak to roll.  Why guide it?  Kick back and watch the waves break and listen to the sound.  A person doesn't stand at the sea's lip and scream at the waves.  Attempt to enjoy it, understand where they are from, listen to the sound, and watch the sun set.  Nice guys finish last; violent guys finish dead.

I am pressing myself toward creating music.  A good friend of mine is fairly deep into the art and it is intriguing.  I didn't talk about it much last year because I didn't expect it to come forward in the ways that it did.  I didn't compose a single story last year.  I did, but I did not write a single one down.  There is no writer's block.  Task lock engaged pretty hard through the year.  What I thought would be three months off turned into three, then four, months of person to person tasking.  Exchanging information at a very high rate.  Person to person relationships are still amazing difficult to me to this day.  I can do it.  I CAN do it.  It takes heaven, earth, and hell out of me to make it happen.  It is like cutting off one's own digits one at a time.  Day by day.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  At the palm?  Next digit.  Fingernail.  Knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  At the palm?  Next digit.

On the cusp of actual free time, I am typing with nubs.  The fingers are growing back.  Healing the psychological wounds.  It's amazing to think about how I am still alive.  Think about the conversations that lead to continuing to soldier on.  There were two very bad psychological breaking points that I did not see coming.  I know it does not mean that I am getting better.  It doesn't mean that I'm getting worse either.  I haven't abandoned writing.  It's grown distant.  More intangible than it's ever been.  "What's the point?"  When so many outside forces are bearing down on you and you don't answer the phone and it goes 'click'.  I laugh and cry because you never know if the next phone call is going to be the one in the chamber.

The year was severely back loaded with surprises and paperwork.  I am still working on the sleeve of scarification.  I still use the strokes on my face as a daily reminder to never forget what I cannot go back to.  I am envious sometimes that some people have "home"s.  I nearly slipped up.  It was a phenomenal year for seeing my sister.  She is wonderful and sprite.  The suggestions creep in: open the door a little.  Do not.  Do not ever.  I remind myself each morning that I am where I am with what freedom and freedoms I do have by, to coin my father's phrase "pruning."   To let them back in is to let years and years of work fall away.  The garden is not beautiful.  It is in animal and entity.  Do stellar objects have a soul and intent?  Yes.  I will not subject myself to it again.  Ever.  I will never go back.  "I don't hate you either, but I really don't like you."  The kind phrase he put together after I finally told him I didn't hate him.  I wasn't lying.  No one was asked to be born.  You cannot hate your point of origin.  It is you.  Whether you like it or not.  The only thing separating him from outright hate is the blood connection.

If you will, allow me this thought experiment:

Your memories begin where they will.  Your father is just some guy you are forced to live with for the first 24 years of your life.  Can you hate him?  Yes.  Now, that guy happens to be the person who impregnated the womb you came out of.  You realize you would not exist, save for his cock.  Can you hate him?  Well, we're all here now and conscious.  Yes and no.  If there is a flake, a sliver, a hair between hate and intense "fuck him and his whole set up" to quote Josh Norman,  yes.  The only thing stopping me from outright hatred is the unfortunate fact that he decided to create another person with her (which holds her culpable too; is where the pass card comes in, but the general manager and the head coach come and go as a pair).  It is kind of funny to wonder who the owner is.  I laugh thinking about a god as the team owner.  God is like "what the fuck, we need to move this franchise and clean house."  The commissioner is saying, god's god, is saying "aye Danny, you've got to do something with this team, ticket sales are bombing."

The early months of the year was a fantastic cruise of steady work and hand tools.  When everything boiled down to getting people to talk to one another and getting people to a place to sign forms, things got dicey.  I left a few relationships behind in 2015.  I realized I will never be my brother's equal and he will never see the world through my lens.  Same thing with my older sister.  If I never see either one of them again I will not be better for it, but I will never be worse for it either.  Not the case with my little sister.  Every time I get to see her I learn something new and a new way to be.  My family doesn't shrink year by year.  The depth of my connection with the folks around me that I can call and respond with as family grows.  No love has been lost, though some has changed as their relationships to their loved ones and their religions changes.

I think, as we loop around the year and close in on the last things, we are moving in an appropriate direction.  The death threats are real.  Make no mistake.  My love for the friends that I can call family in my new colony is real.  My love for my little sister is real.  My ambivalence toward my elder siblings is real.  As I get older, my tolerance for pain increases as a function of my diminishing indestructibility.  I feel sad for connections that burned out faster than I thought they would, but everyone has their own lives and what is convenient and warm and loving to you is harassment and pipe dreaming and gaudy and ancient and plastic and misplaced to them.

The reason no one talks to you may be because your ability to survive is so tightly tied to your ability to carry a conversation with yourself and the other human beings around you are polite enough, kind enough, human enough, to not interrupt.

The takeaway from 2015 is that we are more conscious than ever before.  We still feel and we still can.  We can love and we can hate and we will take caution.  Our days are numbered and taking the most out of each one is not important at all.  We will never be famous.  We will never be complete.  Our family is not the family we were born into, but we can run operating systems on top of each other to make a complete system.  You're not born alone and you will not ever, ever, die alone.  Waste your breath, waste your time, but do not trick yourself into believing a moment is ever wasted in putting down your hammer, your knife, your gun, your fire, your heart string marionette, your pen, your piss jar, your hat with matching gloves, your shoes, your cigarette, your car keys, your lube, your teeth, your comb, eyeshadow, rubber band, your space suit, your glasses, your sword, your helmet, means nothing.

2015 taught me about faith in people.  Faith in friends.  They don't have to know everything about you to know where you are from.  They don't have to tell you what you mean to them to understand you should pick up the damn phone now and then.  Sometimes it works the opposite way.  You don't have to worry your pretty head about tabs.  They're watching and waiting the same way you are.  Fires on hillsides miles apart on the same planet.  Give them the credit due yourself.   I love you.  It was a good year.  The friends that I do have and the friends that I can call family sincerely, from Houston to NYC to California to Washington to Baltimore to Michigan... well, it's America off of the top of my head... ain't no family overseas.  The point is this: I am not alone in 2015.

I don't know what 2016 will bring.  I am taking on new jobs and expanding limits of circuitry and I am afraid.  It is going to be messy by my standards.  The outlook is heavy and hardline and will take a focus I have not had to muster before.  The bonus will be a new body for this red dragon.  And, and, and, no one will have to die to get there, yeah?  Yeah!  How good is that.  How great is that.  It will not be nose to the grind stone.  2016 will be about how far do you trust me?  I promise you that you will not be able to throw me that far.  I weigh upwards of 185 pounds.  It's only going to get heavier as I get back into the gym after being forced to take three months off when I screwed up and got my face fractured.  How far can you throw 200 pounds?  Joking.  I do think trust will come into play in a big way this year.  Trust in caution, trust in going through the motions of writing to find my muse again, trust in friends to standby and trust in friends to see their vision along their lines and do what is asked of me without question.  

Let's make 2016 about trust and make progress on our scarification sleeve.

Let's do it.  It's not going to be comfortable.  It's not going to be easy.  If you want easy, kill yourself.




///How To Dress Well - "Us In The Sense of Forever"

///*the year end playlist up next

Cause for Concern

There are very real causes for concern.  I didn't want to say anything, but I am getting backed into a corner sooner than I imagined.  I'm having some, many a several, difficulties with normal conversation.  Even trying to meet up with people makes me violently ill.  I'm not used to that.  Who should be?  Introversion is supposed to be a quiet thing.  I'm tired of having to wear sunglasses in grocery stores because the lights vibrate too much and it makes me tear up and then everyone thinks you've gone through some sort of tragedy, but really you just wanted to buy some apples and you had to gut it out beyond your normal radius to get them.

I am a violent person.  I know this.  no matter what we do we always try to do our best to take ownership and clean up our messes.  Something my papa never did.  Or maybe he did do in his own way.  Whatever he did, it was thorough in its reach.  At any rate he never explained so I have license and agency.  Because I asked him.  Passive aggressively.  He made a woman out of me I suppose.  A woman with more power than mama ever had.  And that's good.

I'm losing the war on my chemistry and I do not like.  I do not want it.  Pain is one thing.  Passenger is another.  I do not like not being able to express clearly.  It's taking more and more work to maintain clear communication and it's not the drugs because I've been free and clear of paint and coke and pretty much every sniffable and injectable and I'm not fucking with my chemistry set at all.  That's what's been so frustrating.  No assists.  No boosters.  And still fracturing.  It makes no sense.

That I can do this, type on a keyboard easy peasy, and then struggle mightily with trying to string words together in real time.  And I've been very good about tuning down the violence too.  There is no reward for that.  There should be.  THERE SHOULD BE.  I should fucking be paid for that.  

I keep and will continue to argue that I am not a reject. I am a citizen.  It is not my planet, but I don't just live on it.  I am a part of it.  I do need the means and I will subject you to retribution at some point and these are my life goals and everything is building to it and I have no sex and I am an agent of a movement and you will know me when it's done and I will never place a gun to my own skull and I will be responsible and I will find you and force you to answer for everything you have done because I am not God, but I am me and whether you like it or not I just want to be safe with you.

It's difficult to think and be reasonable.  Reason out the voices.  They must be reasoned with.  They aren't monkeys.  They are to be unnamed and it's very frustrating to know that I get to know them and they can never be ....  it hurts.  It hurts less than naming and that's acceptable.  It's not about ferocity.  They punish me in ways you may understand.  Even with that understanding there is no equivalent exchange.  I know I need to get back on medicine.  I know I have to.  I refuse.

It's not a team effort.  It's just me.  No metaphor.  I refuse.  I will fucking burn this house to the ground before I do that again and I'm not happy about it.  I am furious.  Why does everything boil down to money?  Why did you leave me here?  What kind of advice do you fucking expect me to give that does not play directly back into history or roundabout to the same spot?  I don't understand.  I do.  Normalcy.  I can do normalcy.  I have it, down pat.  What I do not have is normalcy.  There's a difference between the two.

I will not quit the battle.  There is very real cause for concern.  Things are developing faster than expected.

Delusions.   I will not cash out.  I have faced the dragon, but no apotheosis.  There is no way out and it's not a death grip.

I wish you had more time.

I was ill prepared, but armored well.  Armor is no workable substitute.

///Count Basic - "Gotta Jazz"   there are things i have to do.  things that must be done, come hell and high water.  fault me.  these are faults.  they must be done, but i am a citizen and you will not deport me today, or tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that.

"Weed Is For Slackers..."

...a good friend of mine once said a long time ago. I wasn't arguing. I think the fist she drove into her open palm for good emphasis was directed mainly at the "across the hall" neighbor (who ended up working for Microsoft somehow) and their fragrant escapades.

Not that you would ever doubt me (or that I would ever doubt myself... EVER...) this is where Bits is at right now. I have not been slacking:



I'm ironing out the php and creating page templates from scritcha scratch so that they do exactly what I want them to, every single time I ask them to. It makes it a little bit easier since I plan on doing all of the graphics for it, but also it'll be a nice thing to put on my resume when it's done. The wealth of knowledge I'm gaining from this project is enormous. At first it was like trying to bite into an uncut watermelon straight off of the vine, but through ceaselessly kicking that mother fucker I've broken it up into pieces that sort of fit in my mouth (or at least fit in my hands comfortably enough to chuck them at the birds outside my window when I get really frustrated, which is almost as satisfying, but I digress).

I now know more about sql, php, js, and web hosting than I ever thought I would. The best thing about it is that sitting down at my terminal feels less like walking up to the black mouth of a cave belonging to an agitated dragon, and feels much more like going to visit a somewhat grumpy uncle. I guess I'm trying to say that the thing has finally become doable. I can look at the code and csv and the tables and css and I can see what they're doing between the lines.

It's like if Tony Montana did so much coke that he finally became permanently wired and no longer needed coke to become super Tony. Or like Peter Pan smoking so much pixie dust that... I'm not really sure if this is making sense anymore. I've been up way too late.

Onward to the morning star. Well I wanted to do a drawing for you. It was going to be a self portrait. Then I wanted to make a teddy bear face. In the end this is what came out of my head. I'm not happy with it. But more than unhappiness, I don't want to have nothing to show for the past hour of my life, sorry in advance:



Hopefully next efforts will turn out better in that department.

///The Orb - "Vuja De" "It's the way that you hold me."

1976 10/17/07

Subject : 1976
Posted Date: : Oct 17, 2007 11:22 AM

1976 views. been gone for a while. dealing with depression and odd issues hither and thither. at the moment i feel like im biding my time in college. waiting for another year to end so i can finally get on with living my "real" life after graduation. but i mean, except for a handful of things that i know i am desparately wanting to do to advance my personal life to a new stage of stability, love, excitement, and rest what i am essentially looking forward to is going to be another time out session. just another pause along the road. i have to get a masters degree to command the pay i will need to live the kind of life i want to, and in order to do that im going to have to take a year off to study for gre's and find a school and all the rest. so its basically just time out part two.

im exhausted with school. i hate homework. i hate forced reading. i hate a lot of things but i love even more so im okay with that sensation i think. i started smoking again. im not really sure why. maybe its because my football team lost so i dont really have to be in peak condition. why the hell would anyone really need to be able to run five miles? so i dont really care about that. and if i have to hold my breath for a minute i guess ill be ass out in the cold on that count. and if i have to do thirty pull ups to save my life, well, same deal. too bad. its a nice pass time, i think. maybe ill get some pipe tobacco and smoke pipes in my white robe every saturday afternoon. make it a pleasant ritual of aromas and scotch. speaking of which i need to get a more plush robe. for my ass mostly. ill admit it. i like having really furry soft things to sit on and rub myself against. its fun. its relaxing. its flippin awesome is what it is.

stealing. i havent stolen anything aside from digital properties in a long time. im trying to keep it that way. im also making minimum credit card payments. i know i shouldnt, but i dont have the money to pay it down so its better than nothing. and furthermore! nope.... thats it i guess. sorry ive been away so long. ive thought about you everyday and i missed your milestones (1666 view). but im back again. and i tentatively wager i will be writing in you more often than i have. <3

///boards of canada-"constants are changing" this song has helped me end more rough days than i can count. nothing like melting into blankets with blustery old man winter giving you chills and a delicate weave of synth fades and tonal scales washing over you like the tiniest, ever unique, crystals of ice.