Stand Up Act 12

Stand Up Act 11

Dysfunctional weather is becoming unbearable.  Life is unbelievably unpredictable at its root.  People are the problem.  You can wake up to a fabulous morning and have a wonderful shower and your pets were so well behaved through the morning hygiene routine they've actually made you a fresh sunny side egg on dry toast with a light coffee and a teaspoon of jam with three crackers and a pinch of parsley from the window box.  You can head down to your car where you inexplicably have more gas than you did the night before when you parked it and your mailbox has five dollars in it because why the hell not.  Your watch is five minutes fast, but you're ten minutes ahead of schedule anyway driving down to the metro station to take the train into town because suburban life is where you're at and the sun is beaming right above and slightly to your right along the drive, but clouds are providing enough shade to turn that eyebrow searing ball into a calendar photograph of light and deeper blues like an angel just mowed the sky and crystals of fresh cut sunshine are filling the nostrils of your eyes.  Your parking space is taken, but there's an entire row of empty spaces right at the metro entrance and you glide on in

and slam your hand in your own door and drop your phone and crack the screen.  The year long train pass you just bought is still at home thirty minutes away tucked in your wallet and the teller at the ticket booth inside the station is occupied outside of the booth talking with a police officer to a homeless man who appears to be shouting about how he has a right to sit in the station if he's bought a ticket if he isn't sleeping so you have to squeeze through the turnstile behind another guy who enjoys it a little too much and keeps standing way too close to you on the platform while you wait for the train to come, glancing at you sideways just long enough for you to feel it every time you glance away and you consider, hand throbbing, to turn back and go home before you realize your car keys are not in your pocket.  Which is about when the guy with the baby strapped to his chest and the double wide stroller sidles up to you just in time for the train to arrive and one of his three little mouths to immediately begin wailing with just too little time for you to try to sidle away and hopefully get a more favorable car, but you've hesitated a little too long, with a single step back, to allow a massive crush of other downtown hats to clog the train's entrance and with standing room only your tie gets stuck in a teenager's lattice of straps covering their high country winter-pacolypse knapsack and a cloud of fast-food hash, bacon, and cheese burps.

Just like that, a perfect day, a perfectly normal day goes straight to hell because life is unpredictable and people are the problem.  People are the problem including yourself.  That's fine.  I can deal with that.  I'm an adult and all of the years of dealing with family members and friends and sometimes enemies and strangers and acquaintances has lead me to a place in life where sharing a bus bench with someone who has the worst body odor I have ever had the pleasure of quaffing actually does not phase me so much as it brings me to a place of curiosity.  Is that odor being generated by dark magic?  Were they hexed in another life or did they run over a gypsy in a night of drunken driving a week before and the gypsy's son is still learning how to cast curses and the best he could manage was a stink hex?  How many days do you have to skip showering to reach an all star level of odor like that?  I've had my streaks, but hot damn that stink is transcendent.  Why are you on a bus right now?  I should've walked.  Why didn't I leave earlier so I could walk?  It's only 6 miles.

I can deal with the unpredictability of life due to people.  It's unavoidable.  If you don't get in your own way, someone else eventually will try to, whether they intend to or not.  What I cannot deal with is dysfunctional weather.  Global warming is completely screwing up my life.  Not, you know, in the sense that I have to move because my beach front shack is slowly being swallowed by the sea or out of season hurricanes have destroyed my high rise condos or winter flooding ate my car, but in the sense that I have no idea what to wear or what the hell to do in what order.  Gardening is a big part of my life.  It keeps me calm.  It keeps me peaceful.  I never have moments while gardening where I want to grab a plant by its collar and strangle it with the fabric of its own shirt until its eyes bulge out of its head and then drag it to an open window and hurl into the busy freeway below and cup an ear for the thud and splash.  I've never had the urge to shout at a plant until my vocal cords rupture and blood fires out of my nose and mouth and paints a wall canvas.  Gardening is a wonderful and peaceful and calming elemental thing.  Sliding my fingers through soil and plucking weeds, and wonderful quiet conversation while the wind whispers and maybe a little rain dots us all while the sun shines and we can laugh and smile at each other, but not with this backwards weather running all over everything.

Is it going to snow?  Who the hell knows.  Is it going to freeze tomorrow?  Who the hell knows.  I love sleeping.  Do I try to fall asleep with the windows open or closed?  Is the air temperature going to feel like the actual temperature or should I account for the wind kicking up to gale force speeds for absolutely no reason at all around 2 A.M. and wake me up in a hot sweat underneath too many blankets and then freeze my skin right through to the muscle as soon as I swing the blankets away to dry my body sized wet spot on my mattress.  Do I shower again at 2 A.M. or do I wait an hour and itch and scratch wind blown dry skin all night because I fell asleep again before remembering to close the windows and pull the blankets up tight?  Sleep has gone right down the tubes because even if the windows are closed and the right number of blankets and under sheets are in place there is still the very very good chance that the thermostat is set to the wrong number because it snowed the previous morning, warmed through the day, and then dropped again in the evening, but did not get cold enough to require the use of hot forced air to remain comfortable and now hot air is blasting all over my face and my lips are drying out like Sponge Bob underneath a heat lamp.  What is going on, planet Earth?

I'm getting old.  I've got back problems, man.  My hip hasn't been right for nearly half a year now.  You would think that I would know when the weather is about to start doing strange things simply by putting a stethoscope to my knee and a tuning fork on my elbow and turning around three times.  I should know when a miniature Nor' Easter is on the way down my street simply from all of the accumulated aches and bumps and "shoulda gone to the doctor, but still can't really afford it"s I've sucked up over the years.  I'm getting old, but I'm not old yet so I'm still learning how to listen to all the tiny little signals that hint at things like walking with a hobble all day because the gummy tissues in my ankle are going to be swollen all day because that's just what they do when it's going to be cold and rainy and there's nothing you can do about it except try to smooth it out into a young man's confident strut or at least hope that's what it looks like when people see me from across the street.  I'm a young old person so I don't have the practice yet and with weather spinning every which way I have no clue how I'm going to feel throughout the day or if I'll need to have the pain killers in my night stand for when I wake up or if I'll need four shots before bed to stay asleep because something bizarre is happening outside my window and stabbing knife edge pain will wake me up at some point during the evening without liquor blanketing my nerve endings.

I may not necessarily need stability from people.  Asking for stability from people is a lot like asking a dog to not bark.  Ever.  It may be able to shut up for a while, maybe most of  a day, maybe even a few days straight, but at some point its going to have that dream where a squirrel falls out of a tree and lands dead in its face and they'll lock eyes for a moment to figure out who will make the first move while John Wu doves rise from the long grass and samurai flick wisteria flower petals tumble through the breeze and it will bark so loud it wakes both of you up from a pleasant mid-afternoon nap.  What I do need is stability from nature.  I need to be able to know that I can hang up a jacket or put away a pair of pants or hang up my boots and blankets without fear of some ridiculous blizz-nado howling through the middle of my street at some unreasonable hour after a fine afternoon at the basketball court and catching pneumonia in my sleep.

"Why are you late for work today?"  Well, I left my windows open to listen to the first crickets of the Spring and a thin layer of frost covered my apartment and all of my joint and back injuries from the last four years flared up at once and when I woke up my face was stuck to my pillow with snot and I couldn't get out of bed for half an hour because of shooting pain throughout my body.  I took a good long bath with some Epsom salts and by then I was about an hour late so when I walked out to my car in a jacket and sweatshirt and gloves and scarf I got about halfway there before I started sweating bullets because it was on its way to a high of 65 so I had to walk back up to my apartment and change into something I wouldn't completely sweat through by the time I got here because I haven't showered in two days because its impossible for me to tell when to shower specifically because I never know if it will be a waste of water because I may sweat out a few gallons in my sleep and my pits still stink despite the bath so I had to make sure I wouldn't smell too bad by the time I arrived, because with my nose stuff up the way it is, I can only assume based on the length of time... "the day's half over, go home!"

Come on, nature!  Get it together.  This trickle down effect of dysfunction breeding dysfunction into my life is a no go.  Figure out what you want to do and let me know so I can get things in order in my own life and at least rely on the fact that it will be hot in Summer, cold in Winter, chilly in fall, and crisp in Spring.  Enough with this spin the wheel of seasons nonsense.  I can't get anything done when I have to keep changing things around to accommodate you.

That Instant

you realize you are either seeing up from the bottom of a well or lying on your back on solid ground gazing up at the sky after a tsunamic swell.

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"

Stresses and Stressors and Life On My Tardis

Life is stressful and full of stressors.  That's not news to anyone.  Time is money and money can be converted into time.  The time it takes you to read this is time you could've spent making money.  Or maybe it is time you are spending making money.  Getting paid to read blogs.  Or maybe getting paid to do something, anything, besides read blogs.  Shame on you.  The time it takes to write this could have been spent working as a dishwasher at Eat n' Park.  Or could've been spent getting shopping carts at Kmart and trying not to completely lose it and burn the place to the ground.

Life has many different stresses to it.  Some of those stresses are more intense than others.  Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake.  You have to answer the bell.  Eventually.  It's critical to your survival.

The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors.  Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world.  If the world were not shared.  If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge.  A single leap from stresses to peace.  A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world.  There is no single leap and there never will be.

To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors.  Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own.  The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe.  By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder?  Hilarious movie.  I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it.  Came out a while ago.  Should be available for rental or something by now.  Robert Downey Jr's in it.  Tom Cruise to.  Surprisingly good.

Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate  highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen.  It's troubling sometimes.  From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge.  Return to the two channel direct connection.  The single bridge.  It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.

Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward.  I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at.  I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level.  A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence.  My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging.  I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now.  It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in?  Very little.  The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself.  "Attaboy, chap!  If you work hard enough you'll get there."  Eat me.].

At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own.  The question is the conversion rate.  If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not.  Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.

With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living.  Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted?  How fast is that going to kill you.  How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole?  My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered.  I'll do without, thank you.  If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider.  Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep.  I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end.  I am sorry.  My mind will not work that way.  I wish many nights and days that it did.  That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American.  It doesn't.  I won't get to enjoy that.  I won't get to see that.  But hey, I could always win the lottery or something.  Wouldn't that be a gas.

Life on my Tardis is pretty okay.  Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks.  I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next.  I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means.  No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they?  I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30.  I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count.  Besides, that ended in utter disaster too.  I will not do it.  If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now.  Simple as that.  Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship.  Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel.  Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own.  "You should have gone to the hospital!"  Yeah, right.  Of course.  It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to.  As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out.  Life aboard my Tardis.  One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.

What day is it?  Sunday, 6 P.M.  Are you sure?  Yeah.  No.  Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.!  What the hell happened?  It's Tuesday!?  What happened to Monday?  Weren't we supposed to be somewhere?  It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday.  Are you sure?  Well, okay.  We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything.  Yes, that will be Wednesday.  I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now.  What do you mean we're 5 miles from home.  This is a park bench?  Come on, man.  Get it together.  The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius.  Except when it doesn't.



Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)"  There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music.  This is one of my favorites of late.  So dark.  So playful.  So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.

Note Taking and Big Wednesday and Curtains (Question Mark)

Here we are. All of us together, staring down the barrel of big Wednesday. It feels good to be, all of us, facing the same direction. It's like that scene from Seven Samurai. A rare union. It feels good to be all together. It's like standing on the viewing deck of a skyscraper and the entire city looks like a fold out map with colored streets and little geometric bits of color to show the landmarks and it's even better because all of your friends are there and it's not about getting lost in the moment as much as it is about the moment being an extension of the years you've spent with these people and the fact that together you all see it the same way, but spun enough to make everything everyone is saying worth each second of hearing.

The note taking at work is going well. I do think some people are beginning to assume that I am texting some girl friend somewhere (HAH) and oddly enough, me being the hardest worker there, they've started calling me a slacker. It doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that if I ever tried to explain that I am taking notes to use later in my compositions and poetry and fiction they would laugh, not believe me, and then continue to call me a slacker. So I won't explain until or unless I am directly confronted about my phone activities. Worst comes to worst I'll just have to start using paper. But my handwriting sucks.

Also I bought curtains. And by curtains I mean six bright yellow table cloths on sale in the Easter display for a dollar each. What I plan on doing is writing two inch tall font prose on them from edge to edge, cutting slats into them that are each about two to three inches wide, and then taking them up for window curtains. The way the sun hits my place in the mornings it's going to look amazing, I promise. If you came to visit once they're done, it'll probably take a day or two or maybe even a week to get all that writing done first, you'll love waking up here as much as I do.

Something silly funny happened today though. When I got home from work this morning I went to use the microwave to heat up some wind-myself-down-and-sleep-soundly greasy cheesy yummy food and I couldn't enter the time on the microwave control panel. So I'm jamming the buttons and finally I bend down to see what the little display is saying. Thought process:

"Aw, what the hell?? Who keeps leaving time on the microwave!? I can't use the damn thing if there's time left on it!"

Then I realized that no one could have done it, but me. Then I realized no one could have done it, but me, because I'm the only one who lives here. Then I realized that was a good thing.

I didn't do the whole moment justice there, but there were two paths of discovery that joined up in a single goof troop smile that made the morning pretty enjoyable. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but blunt objects can solve problems pretty good too.

///DJ Adam Freeland - "Big Wednesday" This song makes me wish there was a God. It makes me think of sitting on the sun facing side of a dune by the great lakes and feeling the Earth breathing against the back of my neck like someone in love and I'm killing time and picking grass until I can go play in the water and meet the sun out by the buoys before nightfall. It also makes me think of riding. I need a car or motorcycle. Not necessarily to get where I'm going, but just to go out and drive and feel the veins of highway and the wind up my sleeves and my nose and the motor beneath my seat. I love the rhythm of motion and sea.