Driving Stick (Fairlady 280Z)

I think my pops saw a spark in me and didn't know how to feed it.

I think, faced with something completely different from his first two children, he hit a language wall.  This one has the design eye, this second one does too.  "This third one has an eye, but why is it obsessed with physics and manipulating form and space instead of creating on a canvas?"

Learning to drive stick was a massive challenge.  Enter the F-250 1996 V8 5.8 Liters of displacement in a breath.  Stupid torque and no horsepower.

The thing was, you never knew if he was taking you for a ride to explain to you why you had a beating coming or not.  Sometimes it was Billy Graham, sometimes it was the guy who always had that quotable audio clip at the beginning of his radio show "lay up treasure in heaven" (it always made me laugh inside thinking about how does suffering now get you a v.i.p. pass to heaven and how dumb it felt watching years spin by and thinking 'the forsaken are now!')

There was this one day, he may have been driving me to work at Six Flags Great America or some shit, but we were in his 280 ZX that myself, my younger sister, and I don't remember if my older brother was there or not, but we washed and detailed that car.  Cleaned from the floor mats to the spots where you put your fingers on the sill to push the passenger door open to the stock rims and the corners of the chrome trim around the rear window to the toe kicks along the foot of the door sills.

I can't remember what day it was specifically; Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday.  We drove.

I may have missed the bus for the umpteenth time and he happened to be off work that day and heard me come back into the house absentee.

At any rate, what I do remember was this:

Before I took on driving school and getting licensed proper, he took his hand off of the stick shift and began calling out gears to me.  I didn't know what to do.  In the empty space he would shift and calmly call the next position the shiftknob was supposed to be in.

I didn't know he was speaking to me.  I thought it was another one of his exercises to keep me on my toes so I would always be aware of my surroundings.  One of those "what street is that?!" spot quizzes.  I think it may have been one of his best attempts to connect with his kid who was not into the "arts" as he was.

In fear, I placed my hand on the shift knob with my fingers spread so I could see the 1 2 3 4 5 R grid, do not break his possession.  Be good.  If you do good, he will not be disappointed.

Understanding that he wanted me to move the shifter while he worked the pedals and the wheel, I was incredibly hesitant.  Before that day I'd only read about it in magazines, Road & Track and Car & Driver and Model Builder and the RC aero rag on my stints at the library in the periodicals instead of going to school when I missed the bus because you can't get to Greenbelt from Bowie without missing have the damn day anyway, might as well go to the library on your bike and make sure you're back home before he is and no one is the wiser (fuck it and fuck Eleanor Roosevelt H.S.).

I shifted with my left hand for close to five minutes before he took over again.  And that was my first taste.  The second was driving school in a powder blue Chevy Cavalier with a stick that was way too long for the shitbox that it was.  And the standard minted was the Falcor that I drive now.  That was when I learned and am still learning.

Every time that I hold that stick, my dad does cross my mind.  My dad and where my love affair with the Fairlady line of sporting two doors began.  The way that he would cut through traffic and move through the shift gates was impressive to my young mind.  He wouldn't be able to drive my F250 for shit and it makes me laugh.  It makes me laugh because if you can pilot a junker with finesse, imagine what you can do with a coupe.

There are times I wish he'd taken the leap to see me outside of the framework of his knowns.  We have much in common.  I would love to be able to speak to someone who understands the rage and fire inside as much as he knows it and hides it and clamps it and eats it and focuses it and the ways it eats you alive.

I'm never going back to him.  He is as welcome in me as he has said I am in him.  Big ol' bag o' nopes and it does make me laugh to understand that happy endings are for stories- not history.  Consolation prize: he tried and it planted a seed and a passion for Nissan coupes and the design philosophy throughout their years.

My artistes' eye is still there.  The lines are classical music if you see its shape.  When you think salon coupe GT as comfortable cutting into the wind as whipping around corners, steady as the shaft of an arrow and fickle if you tease it, from its stance to the cut of the A pillar to busy tail lights and sloop nose that can accommodate aero headlight glass or no.

I think back to that day and how I must have looked in the passenger seat with frightened eyes looking at the digital gauges and being thrilled and awed and stupefied at a tachometer that wasn't a dial.  In the years following, I was disgusted at the tach that wasn't analog.  And then I was enlightened to the tune that dashboards can be removed and replaced with whatever the pilot finds most useful.  And then I went away to college and the car disappeared and I remembered that he didn't actually give a shit.  For a moment I was his son and for a moment he was a dad.  And then he was confused as to why I was upset that the car I cleaned for the better part of a year and got to touch and fell in love with was shipped off for who knows what.

It just... it pains me... he has no idea who I am.  He had no idea then and he has no idea now.

I used to think he was just crazy.  I still do.  I am.  I am a functioning adult from his loins so....   it kinda fucking follows.  Also why I'm not waiting in line for progeny.  Some things should stop.  Accidents don't happen without a breath of agency and this time around I can be the eyes he didn't have then.  The discerning he absolved himself of.

Do I want to make him pay for what he's cost me: of course.  Can I?   Yes.  Will I?  No.  He will die in his bubble on his own time.  My life is worth more than enlightening a grown child, talented though it may be.  Do not attempt to turn a mountain, it will return to the sea on its own time.

Driving the truck, blasting music that is foreign to his circuits, with the windows down... ...he could have enjoyed himself and his child.  Us both now in a solitary confinement.  I hope he is pushing a standard, but we all know "it ain't that damn likely."  With age also goes the tooth for sporting.




///Noname - (Diddy Bop) ~ driving music

Funny Feedback Loops

To a point, there is a difficult loop of loops powering each other.  A tipping point is approaching where we're going to have to make major decisions that I keep kicking down the road.  I am completely torn between whether to go the prescribed medication route or not.  There isn't a right answer.  Most roads seem to lead to an early death and its kind of funny.

You pop the medication and wait for weeks to see if anything is going to happen.  If nothing happens then you take some more.  I guess "pop" is much too flippant.  You rearrange all of your life routines to take the prescribed medications and present as stable as possible a body environment to present affects.  If, with your new forced sleep patterns and dietary intake, there is no effect then you go back to consult and raise the dosage and wait a few more weeks and on and on until it clicks.  Or never completely does.  All the while, physical affects may manifest.  Weight gains, weight losses, tics, shakes, nausea, fatigue, it varies from prescription to prescription.  If it doesn't quite click, a new prescription is introduced to help.  You may be weaned off of what you are already taking, you may not.  Weeks upon weeks, months, of consultations and examinations and examinations and consultations and dealing with and juggling body changes and it may click.  The changes may stick.  And that is your new life.  X pill at this hour, every single day, without fail, until you stop breathing, because your head will shatter if you stop taking it.  In the mean time, enjoy the side effects, which will probably contain an assortment of shadows and echos in the corners of your consciousness that will follow you to your death.

Obviously, not a great answer.  If you can't cope with the body changes, you're not going to be able to keep up with any sort of regimen.  You're going to take the prescriptions inconsistently and exacerbate the already difficult process of ascertaining what, if any, affects are becoming present in your psychological make up from week to week.  If you do manage to make it a few months and falter later down the road and start to slip into an inconsistent pattern of medicating you may be torn apart by the reawakening of whatever it was you are trying to lock away, squash, and overcome.  If you do stick with the regimen, that pill is a constant reminder of the incomplete you.  The you that is only "complete" if you swallow this spot.  And if you can get past all of that and wear and break yourself into this life permanently linked to this pill and make your examinations and deal with the side effects that can be life threatening on their own, you still can and likely will experience periods where it doesn't work anyway.

Sooo we come to drinking.  Alcohol.  Good old alcohol.  I already drink some on and off to manage pain.  Between psychological scars and body scars, it kind of gets the job done.  It gets the job done well enough, I should say.  You don't focus on history and you don't feel the sharpest highs of the pain inside your body and it's easy enough to turn the dial up or down as necessary.  If what you are suffering mentally has stabilized itself momentarily or at least is not on an offensive within your being and your mind you can simply not drink until you reach a point where it begins to slip beyond that edge of your ability to cope and manage.  Of course, you do become more and more accustomed as your tolerance steadily and inevitably climbs.  It takes more and more alcohol to achieve the same affects.  It takes more and more alcohol to blunt the storms and voices inside your head and still more to numb the body and still more to blunt the cuts of history.  The side effects, by themselves are all horrible.  Shakes, shortened tempers, hangovers, appetite problems, light sensitivity, insomnia, deep depressions and apathy, fatigue, wanting to smoke cigarettes constantly, hot flashes, low and acute withdrawals depending on how much you had to do to get to a place where you could finally sleep.

The good news is, on the days and weeks when you don't need to turn the dial at all, nothing horrible happens beyond 24-72 hours of physical withdrawal.  The very bad news is the damage is done.  Your liver is hardening drink by drink and will eventually fail, your brain is losing its functions even as the psychological scars are faded and erased.  If you weren't careful you've probably injured or bruised yourself in some way you didn't notice from the overall body numb and even if you were careful you've probably bruised or injured yourself in some way from the body numb and coordination problems that come with consuming alcohol.  The depression will linger well beyond physical withdrawal even if everything else inside your head is muted and been flattened backward so you can finally hear yourself think again and you may wind up drinking just to escape that lingering depression.  The packs of smokes you breathed are a part of your lungs forever.  You are extending the depth of the foundation of your bodies alcohol dependence in small ways in that it will take at least the last peak dosage to get the effects you need to feel normal the next time your mind begins to crumble and pull itself apart.  And, oh yeah, you can overdose and die.

I'm not going to bother with a faith/religion approach.  For reasons I've laid out through the years, faith and religion is an enormous vacuum to.  As a way to see, cope with, reckon with, understand the world and understand people and oneself, I get its value to some.  I'm an atheist.  Moving on.

Taking the problem head on, no chemical enhancements with alcohol or pills, is a terrifying proposition, but it could work.  I can often easily go one to two weeks without a drink if my spine feels okay and I'm able to get out and play.  I don't take prescriptions.  Head on, however, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide when your head starts to come apart.  The best you can do is try to distract yourself and try to surround yourself with as many safe spaces to sit and do nothing as possible if you can't get outside.  You have to be able to position yourself within the larger fabric of life in a way that will insulate you and that presents major problems in itself in that life tends to be pretty damn inflexible.  You also have to understand that you cannot control when you will experience a major break and that unpredictability will also cause direct conflict with your ability to plan anything and everything from a phone call to making yourself lunch to being at work; with that in mind, understand that you will not know when the most violent spells will end either.

The great news is there are no prescription side effects or organ destroying alcohol dependencies to fret over that will end your life early.  The bad news is there is nothing between you and the teeth of the beast inside your head either.  If and when there is a major break down you may end up hurting yourself or someone else far worse than the damage being done by either of the other methods.  If you can't find the right person or persons to speak to in order to ground yourself or at least get you outside of yourself, you may self destruct completely and become a suicide statistic.  You may lose significant friendships and jobs and intimate relationships because coping may mean that you have to spend days or weeks at a clip alone or heavily insulated and metered to bear with the voices and hallucinations inside you and the swells and shadows of visions.  All of the while you will be acutely aware of these collapses and broken connections and psychological scarring, perceived (real or not) judgments and stigma, and that the expectation from the outside in is that you see a professional and "get help" for being yourself.  Which kind of strikes the ear a bit strange, no?  In your necessary isolated states, in attempts to avoid self destruction and free yourself from the knowledge of the poorer life outcomes, you may resort to far more dangerous chemicals than any mentioned above and/or episodes of extreme alcohol use which will likely also lead to your premature expiry too.

Here's the plan: there isn't one.  Here's the funny part: you're not crazy; you are going to die early, it's really only a matter of how.  You can take the pills and the side effects until you can't take them anymore or slip up and miss enough of the regimen to come apart at the seams or quit altogether and default to something else that will kill you early.  You can incrementally (or quickly) drink yourself to death in an effort to manage and reign in the worst of your symptoms, essentially trading one pretty awful thing for the other.  Lastly you can try to live with your symptoms as much as possible and fit in to life where you can until you or life decides you simply cannot.  I'm somewhere between option three and option two.  The funny thing is cannabis seems to help the most, it's just hard to keep it stocked.  I'm working on it.  I guess that's the fourth option.  I guess there is a fourth option.

After all of this time, I'm still not ready to completely screw with my brain chemistry the way prescriptions will again.  Not yet anyway.  Not yet.  We're not misguided enough to believe that we're fine, no matter how "normal" we feel, but if we can stay between the lines of certain death from liver failure and attendant complications, side effects, and risks in option two and certain death from succumbing to suicidal thoughts, frustrations, and life complications in option three until we can truly try out the full spectrum of what option four has to offer, we may be able to avoid option one altogether.




///Gorillaz - "O Green World"

The Best Thing

about the right ear piercing is that you learned how to pierce ears and made your left ear to match and you can remember one of the best gifts you were ever given was the gateway.

Origins

What fascinates me the most was his unwillingness to let me in.

At every turn there was a guard and I got tired of trying to break them down.  It became a fools errand.

I am disappointed in him.  A child should never have to reach a point where it is forced to scorch away it's parent.  I still get the chucks even admitting that I have a father.  Thirty one and seven years out to open life and it's boggling.  When I finally grew enough to understand that he couldn't break me, he didn't want to discuss why we got to that place in the first.  I won't say I'll never be able to understand it, but he made it clear, many years my senior and able to make decisions on a much more vast scale, that he would never come to the table to view my entire history objectively.

"Where are you from?"  I will never know.  I can speak on it, but I will never be granted 360 degree vision.

"What were you before you entered citizenship?"  I will never know.  It's all hearsay from my siblings and I believe them because they would not lie to me.

"Where is he now?"  Rotting, I hope.  I'm waiting for him to die.  I won't be any better for it, I certainly won't be any worse.  I will be better.  The questions will have answers then.  The "I" will be dotted, the "T" crossed, and the pain inflicted, the trauma, accounted for.  The books closed.

"Given the opportunity, would you kill him?"  Yes.

"Why will you not have an audience with him?"  When I reached my own voice and understood I was an individual, he would not have an audience with me and it went on for five years and I had to stop taking refusals because it made me want to kill myself.  I will never return to that state.

Everyone talks big about love.  Demons.  Addiction.  Religion.  Shan and shan.  It's not all bullshit.  I tried my best to love and care for him.  I don't know why he heeled me to the curb at near incalculable turns (I've faded some memories because I couldn't deal with them so they are dungeon locked and will remain that I may live).  I don't want pity.  I don't want his love.  I don't want his ire.  I don't want to hear his voice.

I wanted him to let me in.  His resistance and fortress will be a mystery until the day he dies.  I may go to his funeral to hear the eulogizers put his unsung thoughts on wax.  Not for closure; to get a view into what was behind those brown eyes.  Rose tinted?  Of course.  I can parse with terrible efficiency.

He was the first iron giant I ever knew.  Scaled up to city proportions. I learned not to fear him when I realized I became one.  I've chosen to use my bones differently.  When I reach through the atmosphere, waste is not laid to communities and vessels.  Virus does not spread.  The horsemen do not ride at once.  I'm not ashamed to have been born.  I'm not ashamed to have come from a fire and furnace.  I'm baffled as to the why.  That's all.  I've asked for many things through my life, is it too much to ask for straight answers from your point of origin?  In this world, half created, half designed, the answer will always be yes.

Original equipment manufacturer fail.





///Thom Yorke- "The Clock"

Birthday

Thinking about everything that may or may not be coming your way.  Thinking about everything you have left behind.  Everything you pretend to leave behind.  Everything, born new, you try to make and force people to think you've grown beyond.  You haven't. ?Yoiu are ertarded,-=  /You are retarded.  You have grown and changed, but what you are is still thoroughly flawed.  You did not pass "go."   You fought for it.  Triumphed even.  You did not pass inspection.  I am pissed and in love.
I do not invoke accents.  It bleecx.  It bleeds.  Remind a self that I am just like you.  Horatio!  /
I feel horribly deaf.  Root for.  Poesis.  Root for Poe. Sunrise is a /default.  One eye.  Bumper, crumple, zone5.





///The Postal Service - "We Will Become Silhouettes (remastered)"

Dear (_____)

Dear Cannabis,

You got me through my spine and discs healing in a way I could not have imagined because I cannot remember the last time my lower lumbars gave me trouble.  I can with some effort, but I do not want to jinx it.  I don't know if it was you or if it was time, but two years and change to the day, I remember how badly and how violently the pain stabbed and since then my mechanical workings have become an afterthought.

No big.  I know you helped me through the days when it was raining knives.  That is what matters.  If the rest is cake, I support it and I'm only there because you made the worst days a little less worse.

Graciously yours,

Tin Man

Holdovers and Artifacts

Food is a reward.  It is a fact.  And a holdover from days, years, decades of "discipline" (call it what you will, I've come to understand and know it by it's other name: abuse).  I have managed to unwire many things hard coded into me and I am happy for that.  It is one of the things that has been very difficult to dismantle.  "You can eat when the work is done".  The entire idea of getting caught eating.  Getting caught eating first.  I've been deconstructing why exactly it is I feel so uncomfortable eating around other people and I do know that has something to do with it.

Getting punished for eating or resting before the assignment is done.  Even alone it is still enforced consciously to avoid the unconscious recoil.  Even before cutting weight for the wrestling team and working to the point of exhaustion because getting caught in the house brought severe consequences for quite some time to the point where, and I will grant him this, my father would see me working and tell me it was okay to stop and I would insist on continuing because his word was not too be trusted.  It plays back into the whole he says one thing and waits and watches and waits and then springs the trap the next day or two weeks off or two months off.  Sycophant in a way.  An issue of control.

How he used to strap a governor on my face.  What the hell was he afraid of?  We could've been friends.  Left and right barrels with one trigger.  Ah well.  The point is this: artifacts.  Afterimages that have refused to fade through the years and I have to remind myself there are many more to come and many more erasers to try.  An aversion for food is very unhealthy.  I will strive to continue to dissociate the two.  Food is necessary and vital and has nothing to do with occupation, preoccupation, goals, failure, desertion of duty, breaks in time, success, or operations.  If I am eating it is because I should be, not because I've somehow tricked my way into it or trapped my way to a plate or have let someone down by taking the time.

In the meantime while I try to enforce this very simple principle, I will continue to attempt to escape and nibble when I can.  I understand it may seem strange, but if I ever eat with you heartily it's because it means a lot to me to be able to do so and I hope it comes across that way.  I will be willing to do many other things with you before I will agree to eat with you at a table.  There are still several more relics that need eradicated, raised, and (some) built upon.  This one is the one that needs leveled to rubble first.  A dead heat, but the one I want to focus first and burn away.




///Bonobo - "Pick Up"   ...the loud minority...


///Tricky - "Overcome"  nothing to gift, so ill gift you this, for now

Love

"I love you so much."  Everyone's heard it before.  Everyone's been there, done that.  The kind of love I feel for you is the sort that forces me to roll up a newspaper and smack myself on the nose and hiss "No!  You are not allowed to do that.  Don't eat them!  And don't you dare try to figure out a loophole to gain the same sensation through different means.  They won't appreciate it and you know better.  NO!"  Smack, smack, smack, smack, smack.  It makes me laugh a little bit when it works out well.  Smack, smack.  Thank the maker for the guy who invented free weights. It helps burn things off.  I wish someone was holding my leash.  I have to keep my ears open for when the rattle of the woven plastic gets noisy and I know I'm moving too fast and am liable to outrun my vision.  If someone were holding the other end of it, problem solved.  Unless they are dragged streetlong behind me.  Problem multiplied.  I love you so much.  I want you inside of me so that I can see you all of the time, whenever I wanted to, and you could see me to.  I can't eat you, though.  Besides, if you were mated to my atoms you could never escape.  Everyone must escape from time to time.  It's for our own good.  I love you so much.  Bring your teeth.  Let's find something beautiful.  I'll roll with you, but let me howl.




///Blind Boys of Alabama - "Amazing Grace"  run run run run run run run run r

Passports

Visitors are always welcome, but those passports expire same day.  It didn't always used to be that way, but the policy has grown out of necessity.  An offshoot of the "protection" arc.  Is it necessary?  Yes.  If you pick up nothing from the course of life you've never lived and one of the things I've picked up is the fact that passports should not be granted on a long term basis.  Complete citizenship.

I'm sure part of the passport policy's origin lies in mental dysfunction and it's many symptoms, but part of it also lies in a love for the ones worth loving and preventing them from being damaged by the many symptoms more numerous expressions.  If you do insist on being issued a passport I can only stand in your way for so long.  I used to go out of my way to issue them, until the activity bit me in the ass so hard I could not deny the recklessness with which I was stamping books.  So I stopped stamping books.

To help me and to help you.  I want nothing to do with you, not because I want nothing to do with you, but because I can have nothing to do with you.  It is, in all actuality, just actually, very simple.  Or not.  At least to me.  I don't understand what I have to offer you.  Further from that understanding, is getting that it is okay to have nothing to offer you explicitly.  I don't get it.  Guilty.  I still have yet to grasp that.  Does that make me wrong to reject closeness?

Fear of change?  Yeah, sure.  That's already established.  I hate change like I hate playing with a board of objects wired to voltage.  Why does this one shock me now when it didn't on the last go round.  Fucking scientists.  Fucking psychologists.  Fucking experiments.  I don't know what I'm supposed to say or what I am to do or is an acceptable response.  So I am myself and I worry if that self at that time is acceptable or not.  After the fact.  Paying forward to increased anxiety.

Everything a study.  Too plodding.  Too thorough.  And knowing letting go is an option.  Still and caged.  Not caged, but trying to figure out how to gift wrap appropriately.  Gift wrap in a way that will be received to expectation.

Visitors from other lands.  No one belongs here except the ones born here.  It's a simple fact that helps me make the most of my interactions.  It's an understanding that helps me make sense of where froms and how tos.  They could never live here and I could never live out there for too long.  The things chasing me to sleep.  Not over thinking it or taking on some stance of god failure or "waaah, no one gets me," just adding up without trying to be ridiculously deterministic.

What shines brightest are those willing to dive in and take the chance that I'm wrong, which is wholly possible, pending my own ability to give them a chance to do so and also pending on my ability to accept a "no" on whatever grounds they find necessary or pertinent or fact.  I'm not sure I'm ready to do the first yet and I damn sure am not ready for the second.

My heart is made of glass.  I know this.  My brain is made of glass too.  Which one is a person to trust less?  Beats the hell out of me.  Let's find out.  "You don't belong here.  What are you doing here?!  What is your objective??""




///Bowery Electric - "Electro Sleep"    a lull in the battle

The "Like" Policy (i dream in your actual space)

From when you are a little kid 'til you get to be of age or at least to a point where your outcomes become a direct, a more direct, result of your actions and inactions by turns, you are told to chase your dreams.

Some of those dreams happen to be being well adjusted enough to enjoy those social gatherings and incidents and accidents on a level a little more impactful than the entry fee of peace and goodwill.  It happens.  Nothing to write home about, though.  It's about getting into gear from a dead stop and that's fine.  Do not blow the stop sign.  Blow the stop sign once and you can skate.  Blow it twice; shame on you.  Blow it thrice and you're asking for trouble.  Blow it every single time you come in from the outlands and you're begging for trouble.

Some of those dreams do happen to be some of the things that are shared.  "Why do you like damn near everything?"  I don't really care about over liking and this is the last time I will bring up facebook.

There is a policy.  There is a set of rules.  There is a governing structure to many things that I participate in because there has to be.  If I screw up the policy, things grow increasingly more tangled in a show of one up, also it becomes increasingly difficult to quantify what a like is.  Hence, laughter comments.

It's really not that complicated.  It's all in good fun.  I know the chances we may actually hang out are slim to nary and that's cool.  I couldn't eat you in person for more than a few hours at a step and you myself neither.  And that's alright.  I like a lot of things.  That's why that word exists.  You can't love everything.  Or can you?  What if there was a love button?  That would completely wreck up some relationships.  The concept of a shared planet is very pleasing.  If I can live vicarious through you, your efforts, and your experiences and photographs and blitzes of wisdom, don't fault me.  I'm not stalking you.  I am stalking your food sometimes.  For the most part, I'm simply enjoying an aspect of life that I aspire to, and if there is fault in that "like" click go die.

It's fine to like a lot of things.  Life is so incredibly multidimensional and layered and there is no way to take it all in with one lens.  Pardon my use of the compound camera.  If you like nothing there is probably something seriously wrong with you and godspeed dealing with those issues.

Take time to have fun.  Like many things.  Enjoy many things.  Consume (obviously not at all costs) at some cost and feel good about it because the planet is a shared home and last I checked the stars are still light years away so don't pack bags and make extensive plans for a day trip just yet.  Take it light.  Take it on the heels.  And always bring a towel.  You never know when it may come in handy.

Whatever your policy is, do not be afraid to enjoy or upset about a giggle taken from you by force.

They meant well.

Also, I am stalking you, but just a little. In the same way a creature intelligent observes, studies, and dissects another.



///Bushwacka - "The Egyptian"  There's just one thing that I want you to do.

But Really the Moral Is

The moral of the story is if someone offers to make you french toast and you just met them at a bar, the chances are pretty good that there will be no french toast at any point in the upcoming hours and what they really wanted went so far over your star eyed head to begin with that you probably should have just stayed home and had french toast on your own. And for that matter, why would you even go out if french toast was what you wanted to begin with. And attendant, if you are turning conversation toward food at a bar at 1 A.M., why would you believe anyone would take it any way besides having breakfast for dinner.

I don't know who outsmarted whom. I do know "well, if there's not going to be any food, I think I'm going to go" is probably the most awkward exit line in the history of exit lines. Probably right up there with the food poisoning excuse and the "I'm tired, I think I'm going to go to bed" excuse when there is a bed not ten feet away from you at their place.

It wasn't that strange of a night though. I did a lot of dream hunting. The hard part is disconnecting from yourself to a degree that will allow the prey to make an appearance and still be equipped well enough to make the kill. Like playing chess against yourself. It takes skill to make that sort of divide between consciousness and unconsciousness.

I had the shakes all day. The stupid and silly repetitiousness of motor action. The thing is, it's not stupid or silly, but necessary. Very really necessary. Very nearly. Part of it was tracking time. Part of it was sonar. Part distraction so I wouldn't have to think too much about time and space. The knock knock go of music in lieu of music. It got better and then worse and then better. The never ending search for answers. In lieu of. The important thing is I washed my hair for the first time in a while and that was an achievement because washing my hair takes forever. On the scale of 1/8th of a day dedication.

I am supremely disappointed at the failed hunt. But I will take another crack at it now that I know what I have to do. My scars have been itching more than usual. Someone asked me what happened to my face. It's all history. The local bar opened up again after the drug sting with some new bits and pieces, but it is essentially the same place with some new jerk wads there who saw the sign out front, I guess, and thought "aw yeah, a new bar", but it's the same bar. Exactly the same except for them. I don't think they understand that. Understand that the only thing new about it is them. Which is fine. I just hope they move on sooner than later so I can get a damn game of eight ball in without having to ask to be cued into their relationship roulette.

Things are going to get weird tomorrow. Not because I want them to, but because they're not going to work any other way so you embrace the weirdness, after a fashion. A familiar clip.I'm getting closer to something. I made some art today. I almost started to read a book in my spare time. I am trying to turn that almost into an already. I still have to pierce my ears and my eyebrow. Things aren't stacking up though. Not the way they used to. Now they're just roads waiting to be walked and sometimes I stand still.

Carnival is rolling around. Basically a reunion. I don't know who wants to avoid me. I want to see all of them, but knowing who wants to avoid you helps to make things easier to handle. Expectory. It's like a rectory of memories that maps outcomes over logic trees and points, graphically, to ends. It's not a place any more than a chalk board or map is a place, but it places places.

I don't know what I am going to do when I find him.Not exactly. I am going to try to bring back a trophy, if at all possible. It's a big world in there, though. A lot of places to hide to say the least. I've never been in the active position before. Then again, I've rarely had to be. There was nothing so assiduously beyond my control there to warrant active eradication. There were instances and events there I had nothing to do with (the war, the dust storm, the heart discovery, the mass migration, the shopping cart cats, the end of fossil fuels, the underground train system's metastasis, the rise of loose villainy) that I tried to roll with. Varying levels of success and confusion abiding. This is, this is different. Like getting hacked from the inside. Tampered with. Abused all over again. So we go back to war.

Summer is coming. You can smell it in the air. I want to look forward to it. I don't know when or why summer's prospect began to touch me in a bad way. Summer makes people do untoward things. It's like a full moon that last for four months. And then dies in your arms just when you've gotten to know and appreciate each other. Summer makes everyone want and try to win time. But it's just grass. Grass and leaves and yard work and half faked memories of times that didn't quite materialize the way they do in movies, but everyone thinks that this year is the year they do. The days are long and the nights are short and everything is hot as hell and restless. Restless so bad you would take your skin off if you could.

Everything that should not be alive comes to and slow wakes through spring. Houses start to breath and crack and groan in the night and the trees start to laugh. The ground gets soft and wet and comfortable and everyone brings out there best and worst outfits and nobody where's appropriate footwear and it all makes me so damn nervous. Do I look, do I not look, and for that matter what the hell am I looking at or for. The cattle train does it's dance and everyone wants to mate and sweat soaked nights turn into a search for steel sharp enough to cut through the bullshit bandied. When you're inside you want to be out and when you're out you want to be inside. And you can't wear a spacesuit when it get's that damn hot and you can't hide your face either without sweating harder than a crook at a creek with a dead body in a trash bag and locals fishing, eyes peeled at the water ahead. It's tough to deal. Everything with half an ounce of soul comes alive like it'll get into heaven if it breaths hard enough.

I just have to calm down, you know? Not just say we're going to get through this, but believe the words that I am saying to myself. Believe in the next step. Understand again that, yes, summer is going to maul my heart like a cat with a wad of toilet paper, and tear me up in ways familiar and ways I will learn anew, and not be afraid of the ... pain. Maybe this is the iteration it works out okay? That's always out there too.

I've been shaky all day. Needing to swap bodies. Bad command lines. Bad time code. But not bad everything. Some good, you know? I never know how to answer questions. The shakes. But maybe this is the summer that makes good.


///Dntel - "Rock My Boat" ...I wonder if you were alright...

Redesign & Sudden Death Memory, and the Equalizer

Been smacking the knobs on my equalizer. Playing with sound things to see what other sound things I can make with them. Playing with sound tracks to see if I can mess with the levels in just such a way to drop the singer's voice right out of the track and hold the rest of it intact. It's been a pretty fun game. A fun way to pass time. Well actually not a fun way to pass time. That's kind of the annoying part. It's time consuming, but such fun. And I will not harp on lost time today. I have more time than most people get to enjoy and keep a roof over their head. Granted it is inconvenient time so its value is probably more accurately expressed in pesos instead of dollars, but creative currency no less.



I still need to get an actual instrument. Probably an electric guitar, but I think I might be more of a bass kinda guy. There is something alluring in the simplicity of bass that lends itself to complication in the way electric guitar can base itself in range and show its beauty in simplification. Plus I love drums, but after four concussions I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to develop the wild coordination required to play them well. Plus there's something soothing to generating and feeling bass ripple through you. Something that counters the days forced aggressions and doses of adrenaline that feels like a hot bath for your brain. A thing restorative.

However that's going to come after I finish saving up for a beater. trying to spend a grand on a car to love and cherish. I figured out that if I spend no more than 300 dollars on it, it only needs to last four months before dying, if it dies, assuming it dies, for it to cover and even come out better than my normal costs of riding the city bus over the course of four months. If I spend a grand it will have to last a lot longer, but the thing is the difference between spending 300 dollars and a grand is that if I spend that extra 700 dollars I will probably get much closer to driving the car I actually want to drive instead of ending up driving someone's rusted out, but still inspected, late 80's minivan. I would love to own a ford probe. The mustang replacement that never was. Or an old Celica. Actually all of the old rally car platforms are just so tempting. As long as I end up with something with as much or preferably more torque than horsepower (or a ford probe) I will be a fantastically happy camper.



Just gotta keep messing with that equalizer until the right sounds come out. I'll get it eventually.

So there's an upcoming redesign of Auralport coming up. It's funny because upcoming things can never not be coming up. Doing it partly because I'm tired of seeing the same thing come up behind new words, so I figure you probably are too and it will be good for me to get the work in with creative suite. Part of what I've been trying to do lately is get the time in to redevelop my lapsing photoshop and illustrator skills. Few things frustrate me as much as having an idea and no mode to express it and right now, with my tool box near empty that is exactly what I've been staring at. I want to take the current design away from nature and into more of a citified urbanized feel for a while. A little darker too. Sunburst forest green is not wearing so well with the current thematic tide all over my poetry corner and I want the images to better reflect the content. I think I'm going to start mock ups of new headers for here too that I'll cycle through every four weeks or so... to keep things interesting when the content is not because, God knows, there are only so many ways life can fall apart and it really helps when the band playing you to the ocean floor knows more than one song.

More than that though, I am also going to make the effort to have my own stuff developed again instead of just linking us off to other folks things. I think that has been something of a friendly crutch in the retardation of my abilities and I've accepted with too much heart.

Some memories have resurged. Memories that I thought were gone forever. I was taking a shower after work and watching the water wheel away between my feet and into the drain. As I traced my fingers between the shoots of my hair against my scalp my mind was ripped back twenty something years to another time on Staten Island when I was doing the same thing in a much younger frame for very different reasons. I remembered being allowed to stay home after a particularly violent episode of punishment and discipline so that I could take some time to recuperate and feel better about myself before going back to school. It took all that time for me to realize that I wasn't being allowed to stay home. I wasn't suddenly the beneficiary of some new found well spring of mercy and kindness. I was wrecked. Visibly, noticeably, physically wrecked and he was just trying to protect himself from the consequences of his actions by keeping me at home until the physical wounds righted themselves enough to raise questions. Standing in the shower it was like being thrust into a sudden death tournament with no preparation. No warning. Needless to say, I lost. I lost it. But now that it's come up from the ocean blacked years of my younger days it's there and I can at least see it coming if it ever rears its head again.

I don't know why those years have all tinted themselves to night. I mean, I know why from the standpoint of survival. The standpoint of self preservation. What I do not know is what the mechanism was for their initial elimination from the body of experiences that have come to define me. So few memories from then. I suppose I am happy to have another one. Just unhappy that it is one so undesirable. Such is life I suppose. Back to the equalizer.


///Fatboy Slim - "The Journey" journeying away from where I was to where I want to be, or maybe just to a place I didn't know I would love to be in. The journey will call my name. One of the few with no real home, no place to be, and so many places still unknown. Plainswalkers. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be good enough at expressing myself through music to link to my own. That's pretty far off. But one more reason to live another day is never a bad thing as far as I care to be concerned :)

Under Consideration and Lesser Titles for Greater Things

Having experienced various points of system shock through various psychological breaking points over the last five days there are so many facets of existence to consider. I guess first and foremost is the relationship between- brake fail. Entry point. New thread. Same thread. If I want to enter into steady state society, contiguous existence, beyond the high speed passes, lower the charge without damaging consciousness- skip break. how far can you go. how far are you willing to go to make sure you don't die alone. Found it.

The hole. If the break cannot be controlled and it has been demonstrated that the entry points are getting. Growing in number beyond traceability to a point of trustlessness and protection to enter to ask. We already know we can't ask without. The offer is real isn't it? Standing for the claimant. The ability. To reject the known for the unknown again. To start it over. We did it for her once. For both her and us and now we face ourselves and potentially the division from. And entry into not just the hole, but what lives inside.

I'd forgotten what great company was. For some time. I thought I understood to an extent. And the reality apart from the extent of understanding was more incredible. More fantastic than I could have hoped. I've heard that heaven's gonna burn your eyes, but I didn't believe it. The noises were amazing. Would we still feel it inside. Could we know it if we did.

I'm trying to reconstruct the memories. They are without sensations. The ones from that earlier time and rocky trial of prescriptions. Disconcerting eveness. All things advance. Could it really be any different from the functional calls to operations and sectional being. Yes. It would have to be. Out of the reason that the responses are all. Why not have access to. that's part of the issue. The access is cut apart. But how badly do you not want to die alone. And there's the fear that comes without description. Because there is no description for what exists apart from the ability to describe. But released from what can be described and known though invisible artifacts of the corrupted and tuned highly tuned circuit. Facing a way. A way in. A way out. A way in. To become less and a part of.

So we'll walk into it. And find what has been seen. And see it again. Charting space and spaces. We'll see what happens through this week. Thursday and straight on till morning. Not goodbye. An extended hello. To further modification. Answers. A heaven that will burn your eyes. A start of beginnings. That are loops and waves. On our insides drawing together divisions. Of necessity and being. It will throw our ways. I'll catch you yet. And maybe there really is nothing inside of that hole anymore. Or maybe the only way to deal with it is entry into. We'll find what lies and lower the charge and enter into the gravity of society. Space is just too cold. So I've learned. And it's taken loss to unravel that concept. I'll catch you if you'll wait for me. I don't like to promise much, but just don't leave too soon. I'm gonna drive it straight into the atmosphere. The flames will be gorgeous, but by the time my wheels touch the ground the tiles and plates and cooling vents will be easy on the eyes and ears and to the touch. The runway's not as long as it used to be. I didn't pack a chute when I left.




///Thievery Corporation - "Heaven's Gonna Burn Your Eyes" ...you can't be afraid forever... so I'm going to try a different way to be brave and maybe there will be a hero's welcome yet. Don't wish us luck. Save it for the day I shake your hand. That's when I'll need it. And we'll sit down with some coffee and I can tell you all about where the fuck I've really been and maybe there'll still be something left behind my eyes familiar to you and we both.