Aloneness means the world to me.
Introversion is a difficult thing to navigate. This is news to no one. The people I am around are well aware of my introversion's depths and shallows. I am occasionally gripped in manic depressive cycles of changing ferocity, but the underlying truth that forms the foundation of my being, core, and interactions is introversion. It's quiet. It's private. I rarely talk simply to talk. I often spend days without saying a word to anyone beyond the few cat noises I'll make to my pets. I don't like being around people for much time outside of a few hours, sometimes a half day, rarely a full day, but anxiety creeps in and introversion twists my nerves. I have to be left alone for regular and frequent stints of time.
Communication is a problem. Introverts can get trampled easily. I don't like fighting. I hate fighting. I hate arguing. At times I hate conversation, period. However, eschewing these things makes it difficult or impossible to express displeasure with people around you. Behold the reason why I will not go anywhere that I cannot remove myself from. Why argue, why fight, why bother explaining what and how you are feeling when you can simply leave? This works fantastically. When I am finished with you, I leave. When I have had enough of you, I leave. When I am bored, tired, happy, have other things to do, errands to run, when I feel like you've mislead me as to what we set out to do, don't like the venue, whatever may come up, I can quite easily say a pleasant goodbye to you and remove myself to my home and it's wonderful.
I'm not forced to be someone that I'm not, you're not forced to try to peer into what is going on behind my eyes and everyone is happy or at least content with the entirety of the interaction. I'm back home safe in my cocoon, your life goes on, nice and simple. When you come into my home, that dynamic is destroyed. When I am relying on you to get me back home or back to my car, that dynamic is destroyed. When you are in my home I am relying on you to leave in a timely fashion. When I am out with you, I am relying on you to not continue extending the day farther and farther away from an end point we agreed upon. Just because I keep acquiescing to your saying "hey, why don't we..." with the promise that we'll relax a little bit and have a little fun before taking me back to my car, doesn't mean that I'm not screaming inside every single time the "relax and have fun" part is pushed back another half hour and another half hour and another half hour. Eventually I will break.
You must take me home. You must get out of my house. And I've been trampled again. So which one is it? Are the people that do it not friends? Have they not known me long enough? Have they assumed that I've changed over the years? Do they not care? Do I put on a pleasant enough facade such that they don't notice until the entire thing breaks down in pieces and my grimace and crying eyes show? Why do they keep doing it? Because they can? I don't know. What are they not comprehending?
I've spoken to them a few times about it. What do they keep forgetting about me? It's strange. With people I'm not friends with, people I've only just met, circumstances unfamiliar, people I've known and can't trust, I leave nothing up to them to figure out. I rely on them for nothing. I believe very little of what they say. I come prepared for most any possibility and mode of extraction to protect myself from unintentional outside harm. You are supposed to be my friend, please don't step on me.
And on that note, what I cannot deal with is the friend whose comprehension skills are so incredibly underdeveloped I couldn't have an argument or disagreement with them if I tried with all of the tact, diplomacy, conscientiousness, and kindness I can muster.
We all have that friend who immediately flies off of the handle when you tell them they've done something wrong. That friend who will tell you that in the subjective world of right and wrong to you is something that they can dictate. That friend who tells you when they've helped you, regardless of what the actual result of their misguided effort was. That friend who you specifically instruct not to come over without an invitation from you, who takes it upon themselves to come to your house and scare all of your neighbors into believing something horrible has happened to you to get someone to open your door and enter your apartment because you fell asleep on the phone with them after staying up for 40 hours. That friend who says they came over to check on you without an invitation because they were not going to let a friend die on their watch, who immediately asks you upon arrival if you have anything to drink, who happens to have brought an overnight bag and their video game remote and parts, and their tiny bottle of liquor, when all you wanted to do and did was fall asleep. What the hell are you doing here? No, it's not funny. No, it's not heroic. No, it's not friendly. I was sleeping with my phone on silent because I am tired. That friend who mooches all of your food and beer over the next two days and destroys what sleep you were hoping to get while managing to leave your place trashed, who you tell not to come over again without an explicit invitation because "you fell asleep while I was talking to you and I had to make sure you weren't dead" is not a reason to invite yourself over to crash at someone's house for two and a half days and make your neighbors think you may die at any moment to trick your way in, that just do not understand that what they did was patently wrong. Regardless of how they contort their actions to fit some larger narrative of "I helped you."
No comprehension skills. The funniest part is when, as an introvert, giving yourself time to think the events over, you let them know what they did must not be done again. You explain to them it is hugely disruptive to your life and takes days of cleaning and rest to recover from and days of explaining and apologizing and discomfort with neighbors who now have no idea if this idiot will pop up on some random day demanding entry because I may be in some ambiguous danger and they've thrown on their hero cape (or just fucking sleeping or maybe just awake with my phone off or not even home) and their response is to get angry at you. Not only get angry at you, but insist that they will continue to ignore your wishes, disrespect your house, and treat you like a five-year-old who may slip and fall while running with scissors who must be constantly monitored. No comprehension skills.
You try to lay down very basic information, very basic tenets of how you would like friends to treat you and the space you want them to respect and they scream and yell at you about how wrong you are and how right they were to violate your space and how you'll live to regret and rue the day you told them how you felt and how you want to live your life and then go on to tell you they aren't going to respect your wishes or your space regardless.
So what do you do? Do you just scream and shout back at them? No, you're an introvert and they'll out yell you at every turn and out outrage you too. Do you try to restate your point and your needs? Nope, they've already shown they are not going to listen. Don't sweat it. Leave. Watch them from afar for a while. Feel free to leave them alone altogether for some time. Maybe they need time to understand better. They can't trample you and your introverted heart and mind if they can't interact with you. There is no fix for introversion. There is no fix for introversion. There is no fix for introversion.
There is no need to fix introversion. Take care with who you befriend. It is important to understand that, as an introvert, you can be liable to get hurt pretty badly, whether friends mean to or not. Relying on other people to learn how to treat you is a losing game. It's up to you as you grow older and more experienced in navigating introversion, to learn how to maintain proper distance from the people you do call friends. When it becomes too close, don't drive yourself to death trying to keep it together. Open up some space and go from there. You won't be sorry. You may feel like an awful person who is abandoning people that thought they were your friend. You may feel like something is wrong with you. You may feel, at first, that you're hurting people trying to help, but that subsides quickly once you see their blindness to your being for what it is.
///Richard Wagner - "Das Rheingold Prelude" aloneness still means the world to me.
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label need. Show all posts
Showing posts with label need. Show all posts
7/29/15
Summer Days Are Beautiful
Summer days are beautiful. Walk around in the grass that probably should have been cut yesterday and feel how fluffy and wet it is before the sun dries it out. Take time away from watering the garden to blow a bubble of mist around you and spin yourself around to see the rainbow halo around your waist. The birds are off on their errands. By now you do not hear their 5:30 A.M. alarm, but you will miss it a lot when it is gone and cold water chills instead of refreshes.
Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin. Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you. Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more. A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.
I am just like you, though we are different. Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning. Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.
Though we are different. The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes. Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.
It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what? I don't know. I don't know what is next. I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired. That sweet sweet 12k paycheck. It is a joke. At 30? Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?
After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.
I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future. That's for fun. My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy. It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in. I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize. I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person. When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.
The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been. I had to think very hard. Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.
After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years. I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head." After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do. It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do. Auto-mechanic.
The realization dawned on me. All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles. The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms. The smiles on folks faces. The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions. The solitude. All there. After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades. I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.
Thirty years old and getting no younger. A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point. I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world. You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise. Worry about what comes next in the stars. I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation. With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck." So what? One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been. Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links. Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.
It tastes different doesn't it. Oh it does! When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month." I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation. I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction. Will I ever make living money? Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water? Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating? I have to find out.
Summer days are so beautiful. Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful. Chew a dandelion stem. As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors. The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river. Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace. It is pretending to sleep. T-shirts almost dry. The garden dirt probably is too. One more go 'round. It is going to be a hot one today.
///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"
Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin. Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you. Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more. A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.
I am just like you, though we are different. Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning. Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.
Though we are different. The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes. Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.
It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what? I don't know. I don't know what is next. I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired. That sweet sweet 12k paycheck. It is a joke. At 30? Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?
After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.
I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future. That's for fun. My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy. It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in. I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize. I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person. When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.
The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been. I had to think very hard. Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.
After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years. I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head." After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do. It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do. Auto-mechanic.
The realization dawned on me. All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles. The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms. The smiles on folks faces. The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions. The solitude. All there. After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades. I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.
Thirty years old and getting no younger. A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point. I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world. You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise. Worry about what comes next in the stars. I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation. With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck." So what? One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been. Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links. Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.
It tastes different doesn't it. Oh it does! When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month." I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation. I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction. Will I ever make living money? Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water? Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating? I have to find out.
Summer days are so beautiful. Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful. Chew a dandelion stem. As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors. The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river. Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace. It is pretending to sleep. T-shirts almost dry. The garden dirt probably is too. One more go 'round. It is going to be a hot one today.
///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"
12/1/13
Overkill
Having a difficult time taking Is and Yous and Mes out of my poetry. I wish I had a different face, but apparently I am no longer allowed to hack away at it. I want to get back to wonder. I want to get back to visions of enormous dinosaurs, but the real world continues to push back and it's not fair and I can't figure out a way to circumvent the charges.
I will. Stand up act 9 is coming. Long dark tunnel. I conquered my fear of absolute darkness a while back. Doesn't mean that it's comfortable though. I want to pick up house and walk away from it all in a bad way. Maybe a good way. Tough to think about. Do you just throw your hard drives in a ruck sack? I don't know! I'm asking you! Who helps you plan that sort of thing out? I have no clue.
Do ya have to bring an umbrella or something or do you count on finding one along the route? Could probably thieve one. Do you really want to do that? That's not who you are. You can take whatever you really want, but don't. Every single time you take you are taking something from someone else and that's no good. Let someone hold your leash. They're not holding you back. They're just checking you. You have to allow yourself to be checked at the hip. Take it and bounce off or try to run them over, but whatever you do correct your path. Not correct, but make adjustments because you have to and understand that it is alright to make adjustments.
Adjusting the dials is okay. Not everyone likes to hear music at 11, hell you don't either. Not everyone wants or needs a kiss or needs your face two inches from their own. Not everyone can be famous and not everyone will remember events the same ways you do. You're losing your memory and maybe that plays into part of why you are losing connection fidelity with your dream states. Be okay with working on it. There's no breaker to fire off in between where you're going and where you can never go back to and that's perfectly fine.
Do you bring a knife or no? Do you need to? Would you need to? I don't know! You can take what you want, but you don't have to. Are you expecting battle? It's a funky kind of war we fight and I've been seeing some strange things I don't know how to handle off of the top of my head. I need time. No picking up sticks. No running away. No abuse. Abuse is shorthand for sadists. What's short hand for saints? I want to plow into a wall and obliterate my body in a mist of red and bone. I want humor. Get the fuck away from me! I swear to god I will taste your eye fluid before the night is out, you mother fucker piece of shit, do you not know there is no such thing as a fair fight?
Rules are in place to keep me out of you. Period. Maybe it's all a matter of timing? That may be what I'm getting wrong.
Wanderlust eats away at me and I nibble back. I almost lit a cat on fire again. I'm doing good though. Being on good behavior and going to work almost every time I am supposed to go. I want to keep it up through the end of the year. I am not expecting much from Santa. I still ask him for a 1911 against my better judgement. No resolutions forthcoming and none will be given. I think I'll treat myself to a box of ammunition this year. One step at a time. Baby steps. We'll travel, but I'm not pulling up sticks just yet. I'm trying to monitor my speech. I've been speaking much too fast and running words together and feeling like I need to apologize inside my head every time someone says "what did you say?" I said exactly what the hell I said. It's hyper frustrating. It's like a stutter, but backwards and difficult to correct and heart stabbing when I notice it flowing out of my damned mouth. Not fair!
Howling in my head wont stop. I haven't snorted anything serious in a long time and my sinuses feel like they are about to shatter. "...turning the music up so ya don't hear the engine falling apart..." by hook or by crook we are going to fix this thing so it runs smooth. Chatty Cathy. Slow the fuck down and take a moment. The world's not crazy. It is just you. Everything does not smell like burning metal. It is just you. Space invaders.
///Kelis - "I Don't Think So" just dont think you're at my speed
I will. Stand up act 9 is coming. Long dark tunnel. I conquered my fear of absolute darkness a while back. Doesn't mean that it's comfortable though. I want to pick up house and walk away from it all in a bad way. Maybe a good way. Tough to think about. Do you just throw your hard drives in a ruck sack? I don't know! I'm asking you! Who helps you plan that sort of thing out? I have no clue.
Do ya have to bring an umbrella or something or do you count on finding one along the route? Could probably thieve one. Do you really want to do that? That's not who you are. You can take whatever you really want, but don't. Every single time you take you are taking something from someone else and that's no good. Let someone hold your leash. They're not holding you back. They're just checking you. You have to allow yourself to be checked at the hip. Take it and bounce off or try to run them over, but whatever you do correct your path. Not correct, but make adjustments because you have to and understand that it is alright to make adjustments.
Adjusting the dials is okay. Not everyone likes to hear music at 11, hell you don't either. Not everyone wants or needs a kiss or needs your face two inches from their own. Not everyone can be famous and not everyone will remember events the same ways you do. You're losing your memory and maybe that plays into part of why you are losing connection fidelity with your dream states. Be okay with working on it. There's no breaker to fire off in between where you're going and where you can never go back to and that's perfectly fine.
Do you bring a knife or no? Do you need to? Would you need to? I don't know! You can take what you want, but you don't have to. Are you expecting battle? It's a funky kind of war we fight and I've been seeing some strange things I don't know how to handle off of the top of my head. I need time. No picking up sticks. No running away. No abuse. Abuse is shorthand for sadists. What's short hand for saints? I want to plow into a wall and obliterate my body in a mist of red and bone. I want humor. Get the fuck away from me! I swear to god I will taste your eye fluid before the night is out, you mother fucker piece of shit, do you not know there is no such thing as a fair fight?
Rules are in place to keep me out of you. Period. Maybe it's all a matter of timing? That may be what I'm getting wrong.
Wanderlust eats away at me and I nibble back. I almost lit a cat on fire again. I'm doing good though. Being on good behavior and going to work almost every time I am supposed to go. I want to keep it up through the end of the year. I am not expecting much from Santa. I still ask him for a 1911 against my better judgement. No resolutions forthcoming and none will be given. I think I'll treat myself to a box of ammunition this year. One step at a time. Baby steps. We'll travel, but I'm not pulling up sticks just yet. I'm trying to monitor my speech. I've been speaking much too fast and running words together and feeling like I need to apologize inside my head every time someone says "what did you say?" I said exactly what the hell I said. It's hyper frustrating. It's like a stutter, but backwards and difficult to correct and heart stabbing when I notice it flowing out of my damned mouth. Not fair!
Howling in my head wont stop. I haven't snorted anything serious in a long time and my sinuses feel like they are about to shatter. "...turning the music up so ya don't hear the engine falling apart..." by hook or by crook we are going to fix this thing so it runs smooth. Chatty Cathy. Slow the fuck down and take a moment. The world's not crazy. It is just you. Everything does not smell like burning metal. It is just you. Space invaders.
///Kelis - "I Don't Think So" just dont think you're at my speed
10/21/13
Giddy Up
I've been trying to chart my work books, but I don't want to see them. At all. Fantastic difficulty. I did the first class and the reminder came up to do the second class and I couldn't bring myself to do it. Part of it is horror. Part of it is blatant stupidity. Part of it is just not wanting to know how much further I am going to have to work to get back to zero.
I just want to put my fist through something. Anything! Not even through, but just break my hand. Null it. But I need my hands, both of them. And I need the ability to ambulate. I need my knees and my elbows and I have to protect them the same way people protect their investments. It breaks my heart sometimes knowing that I can't do what I need to do. It makes me cry a lot. I won't go to "it's not fair" because it's just a fact. I could probably cut a finger off. I think I would save it. Maybe eat it. Cook it somehow like a ham hock. Stew it or something. It's tantalizing and aggravating because I know where the knuckles join and have cut limbs apart before but I don't trust my left hand to operate the scissors on my right hand. Maybe just the pinky.
Gauging my pain threshold. I'm still not sure where it is exactly and I probably shouldn't be losing sleep about it, but I am. I think I get that from my father. How far are you willing to go before you jump to get what you need. Would I have to cauterize it myself? Probably. I don't know why I need to do these things, but I do and its getting more powerful and harder to swallow it down between suggestions. I don't know what that means! It scares me. It's getting harder to pretend to be normal. Normative? Baseline. Nullification. Talked to Martin about that for a while. It was a good conversation.
Relying more and more on emulation and I'm afraid I will be found out. Not about being gay or anything that trivial, but being found out about being a fucking psychopath. I want blood all the time, I don't care how it comes. I need help. I need assistance and I keep saying I can run this car until the wheels fall off, but I've been rolling on brake discs forever. So many years.
It would be easier if I was not aware of the degeneration, but I think a piece of the awareness has lent itself to a belief that I'm making it up and even as I'm speaking I know it sounds contrived. It isn't. It's motor and I know less and less how to change the fucking oil. I don't know what to do about it. I know where to go, but you better believe I'm not going there. Like I need more debt, don't make me laugh. I'll spit ice tea everywhere. I'm not getting interned again! No! I will never put down the ax! If you want it out of my hands you better be fucking prepared to take it from me.
I'm not a gun, but I will put one between your eyes and kiss you while I do it if you think it was going to be that easy. Don't touch me. Do not fucking touch me. Ever. I will break your fingers one by one while I sit on your chest so you don't move too much. Escalation. Take the escalator back down.
I know what's wrong with me, but I need a checkup and I don't know where to get one without the internment trap. I'm not doing that again. We're not doing that again. Just handle it. Just grab your ears and pull up your socks and eat it. Life hasn't been all that bad to me. I'm just tired of having to emulate to squeak by. Doing it by the skin of my teeth and I'm pretty sure some people have started to see through it so I have to work harder at it because the people that I do love I love dearly and want to keep them and want them to keep me to and the last thing that should happen is giving them a reason.
It's tough. Everything worth having is hard. Is a myth. Perpetuated by people who think "difficult" is possession in the material sense or the kid rearing sense. Everything worth having is hard in the interpersonal intrapersonal sense. Having ground you do not need to give inside your skull is worth having. Maintaining relationships with the people you care about and trust is worth having. Put in work, no doubt, but put in secondary work too.
///Amon Tobin - "Back from Space" I wish I could fly, but not just to the atmosphere, to the stars. I want to explore the Oort cloud and be the first man to land on an asteroid and be out there in the zero cold and see the sun without atmospheric interference. I want to see Jupiter up close at all costs and I want to die out there. But I'm stuck here. And have to keep coming back to this fucking planet every time I wake up. Bullshit.
I just want to put my fist through something. Anything! Not even through, but just break my hand. Null it. But I need my hands, both of them. And I need the ability to ambulate. I need my knees and my elbows and I have to protect them the same way people protect their investments. It breaks my heart sometimes knowing that I can't do what I need to do. It makes me cry a lot. I won't go to "it's not fair" because it's just a fact. I could probably cut a finger off. I think I would save it. Maybe eat it. Cook it somehow like a ham hock. Stew it or something. It's tantalizing and aggravating because I know where the knuckles join and have cut limbs apart before but I don't trust my left hand to operate the scissors on my right hand. Maybe just the pinky.
Gauging my pain threshold. I'm still not sure where it is exactly and I probably shouldn't be losing sleep about it, but I am. I think I get that from my father. How far are you willing to go before you jump to get what you need. Would I have to cauterize it myself? Probably. I don't know why I need to do these things, but I do and its getting more powerful and harder to swallow it down between suggestions. I don't know what that means! It scares me. It's getting harder to pretend to be normal. Normative? Baseline. Nullification. Talked to Martin about that for a while. It was a good conversation.
Relying more and more on emulation and I'm afraid I will be found out. Not about being gay or anything that trivial, but being found out about being a fucking psychopath. I want blood all the time, I don't care how it comes. I need help. I need assistance and I keep saying I can run this car until the wheels fall off, but I've been rolling on brake discs forever. So many years.
It would be easier if I was not aware of the degeneration, but I think a piece of the awareness has lent itself to a belief that I'm making it up and even as I'm speaking I know it sounds contrived. It isn't. It's motor and I know less and less how to change the fucking oil. I don't know what to do about it. I know where to go, but you better believe I'm not going there. Like I need more debt, don't make me laugh. I'll spit ice tea everywhere. I'm not getting interned again! No! I will never put down the ax! If you want it out of my hands you better be fucking prepared to take it from me.
I'm not a gun, but I will put one between your eyes and kiss you while I do it if you think it was going to be that easy. Don't touch me. Do not fucking touch me. Ever. I will break your fingers one by one while I sit on your chest so you don't move too much. Escalation. Take the escalator back down.
I know what's wrong with me, but I need a checkup and I don't know where to get one without the internment trap. I'm not doing that again. We're not doing that again. Just handle it. Just grab your ears and pull up your socks and eat it. Life hasn't been all that bad to me. I'm just tired of having to emulate to squeak by. Doing it by the skin of my teeth and I'm pretty sure some people have started to see through it so I have to work harder at it because the people that I do love I love dearly and want to keep them and want them to keep me to and the last thing that should happen is giving them a reason.
It's tough. Everything worth having is hard. Is a myth. Perpetuated by people who think "difficult" is possession in the material sense or the kid rearing sense. Everything worth having is hard in the interpersonal intrapersonal sense. Having ground you do not need to give inside your skull is worth having. Maintaining relationships with the people you care about and trust is worth having. Put in work, no doubt, but put in secondary work too.
///Amon Tobin - "Back from Space" I wish I could fly, but not just to the atmosphere, to the stars. I want to explore the Oort cloud and be the first man to land on an asteroid and be out there in the zero cold and see the sun without atmospheric interference. I want to see Jupiter up close at all costs and I want to die out there. But I'm stuck here. And have to keep coming back to this fucking planet every time I wake up. Bullshit.
9/12/13
Dissolving (some) Isolation, September 11th, Launch, and Laughter (touching roots)
It's been a long time. It had to be. I had a lot of things I needed to think about and learn an acceptable way to grasp, but I did! That's good. You know what else is good? Coke's slogan. I thought about it all day when I heard the commercial and now I can't remember what the hell it was, but I'm sure it'll come back to me tomorrow when I'm not thinking.
I will think of coke and remember the slogan for Coke that cracked me up because it was so dual apt they couldn't have done it by accident. Look it up. I don't assign homework in general and almost as a rule, but look it up. I was just thinking though, I have never assigned homework unless I had to. I kind of make a bad teacher in that way sometimes. I think that's the way it should be though; if you always come to class and never miss one you should be as well informed as the person who never goes to class, but reads the textbook cover to cover.
Sorry, I got distracted. I didn't know where to start and I've been looking for a way to start again, but nothing has lead back here the way I expected it to and then I was all out for starting points and so far away that I was all in for whatever I could find to begin again and I found what I was not happy to find but I'll throw it off from the edge of the rooftop and watch it fall down and try to make sense of it. Okay? Let's go:
September 11th. The day that changed 'merica. It didn't. America is still what it was. Only a little more paranoid. This day used to have a little more bite. I used to remember the servicemen I know and knew (not because they died, we just stopped being as close as we used to be) and the new ones I've met while fishing the river on a slow Thursday. I used to remember them with incredible reverence. Not so much anymore.
The one's still in are in because they want to be. The ones that are out are out on good terms and very well compensated, on the pay scale I aspire to climb toward that kind of stability, and have awesome resumes. I guess that still burns me a little on this day. Getting near perfect scores on the entrance test and damn near perfect on the physicals and getting bounced on psychological failures. The whole talk my dad gave me about "the family standard of excellence." I didn't want to cry or weep. I just wanted to pop out of existence with a genie wink when going in and making it as an infantryman and working a way up could be viewed as tarnishing "the family standard of excellence." I still makes me laugh out loud today to say it aloud.
Part of what makes me laugh is that, incidentally, he was right. After taking a year or two to think about it a little harder, I can see that I would have been a skittish, trigger happy, blood hungry, question asking, thinking, liability to the cause. I would have gotten myself and other people killed, given a uniform, a weapon, and a theater. That's just coincidence, though, pure coincidence, so it doesn't really count. At all.
Serendipity.
"Are you dead or are you sleeping, God, I sure hope you are dead." Dealing with a little paranoia break, but that's neither here nor there.
September is also the anniversary of the longest intimate relationship I ever was able to be a part of and it was fantastic. I forgot the date the first three years we were together. Finally made the brilliant move to add it to my phone. It stayed there after we broke up. I can vaguely remember some of the gifts, one of the gifts, I gave her. I think the others were holiday related. I can remember trying to figure out how to get flowers delivered to her office and the whole runaround I got. I can also vividly remember the violent times. The times when my brain fractured. The times when truth was too much for me to eat.
I am laughing because it is remembering the times when, more than anything else, I wanted the laws of interpersonal physics to suspend themselves. I do not know, though. Life is long. Who else are you going to travel the spectrum of drugs with when you're too old to work and done everything else and the prospect of shagging is as interesting as scrubbing your bathtub? Blackouts. Retirement is going to be an amazing thing.
So, September 11th used to be like holding a revolver in my mouth and pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked over several times while fingering an empty casing from the gun range. Not anymore. I'm passed it. Nothing's going to change my world, sweetness.
We will modify, sometimes ad hoc, we will destroy and build, we will continue to drive toward some kind of perfect state, but we will mow down no one else along the way. We will remain honest and not overly dramatic, maybe, we will masturbate to idle thoughts of bodily violence, we will maintain course and get to know the new ship, we will cultivate friendship, and build ourselves into better people instead of weapons. We will.
I don't want to spend too much time on this. I've been trying to structure my paragraphs better and slash the blocks into verses. The poet that keeps clawing it's way out of my mouth. I don't want to spend too much time on this and I'm three hours in so let's call it close.
I love you. I do. I shouldn't. If I could bury you each and be the one with the shovel over night, I would cum. It is a strange thing, I know. I love helping people, so much. There is no replacing the feeling of helping someone solve a problem and secure a future outcome 100%. 100% assured that what they wanted was what they were going to get. Nothing replaces that. Wherever you are.
I've been working to dissolve some isolation. It's important. An important thing. Once I finish the project I am working alone I am going to need to be able to interact on a normal basis to get another job to fill the money void. Money drives everything, doesn't it? More than that is learning how to interact with people without a group to diffuse the messy bits to. It's easy to do when there are many other magnetic orientations to diffuse field lines to. Not so much otherwise.
I am approaching a point where isolation will become counterproductive. Flat out. For a time. There are many options for filling the counter point to weigh it into a cantilever support system. Ad hocced. Performing the expense reports in my mind. It's not going to work. I think that is part of growing up. Growing the capacity to do that and know with some certainty what is bound to fail when it comes to tolerable and intolerable acts of personality.
I am getting closer toward dissolving some aspects of isolation. One finger on the trigger that will close fire bulkheads. I don't know what process or loop or instantiation will trigger something terrible, but I am prepared to eject instantaneously. I'm not your project. I am project enough for myself. Here come old flattop.
We are you friends. We are your friends. We are shoving off from the scrap yard brand new in many ways. The new ship is troubleshot and configured. There is nothing more to it than to do it. We are launching. We are reentering circles and seeing what snow will fall and where and what kinds of sculpture we can make of it until the sun comes up and melts it all. We are launching. Granted we were stocked up and manned up a week prior, but we didn't have the heart at the wheel to give chase to open sea. We do know. We are ready. Cobbled together from many different pieces, we are ready to see if it works. Shove off, baby.
Getting back to laughter. Getting back to what makes us laugh. Back to the roots of what made me start in the first place. Gain some understanding. At first it was a reaching out, it became a gps, and now it's a tough out. I don't like to think inwardly. As tough an out as they come. It's still a map. I'm on the far edge of it and it keeps drawing beyond the dark part of the space of influence. I think I am getting back to laughter.
Back to being able to really, really, indulge in the spaces life does afford for taking nothing too seriously and taking everything too seriously. That magical place where living life, at least the way you understand it presently, like it is your last day jives with the fact that, barring absolute worst outcomes in tandem, it probably isn't.
You're going to have to live with, regardless of how you or someone else can spin it, what you did today.
I want to spend that time laughing. We're launching again. We are equipped for combat, need it arise, we are equipped for food, it will arise, and we are equipped to question ourselves and somethings (not everythings) anew. We are equipped to observe and equipped for some closeness. We have an L six two D load out and we are ready to rock.
I am perpetually intermittently disappointed with myself. Lack of ability to grow networks combined with... grows. I wonder if I am some kind of cancer embodied sometimes. A walking carcinogen. You go back to her and I go back to... I feel like I am in a very long race to eliminate myself or as many people as I can take down at once. It's nothing personal. It's sporting. Not immediately but, I don't know.
Some days, walking down the street, I look at myself in the store front windows reflected, and it's a pretty damn cool thing to see that ambulating to wherever and enjoy that remove. There's no vanity there for me. Just trekking and knowing that we're doing it. We're doing it! We are out of doors and doing alright. I don't love the birds looking back sometimes with that "not if you were the last man on Earth" look. What the hell is that about?
We're doing this. I am as over myself as I'll ever be. It's passed time to laugh again. Laugh about little things genuinely. It's easy to see the world as whole. It's passed time to really chew on it again. Launch probes. Explore and navigate from afar or as far as possible, but do not be afraid to take readings from the machines you employ. It's time, however briefly, to try again to square up vision with reality and you'll never know how far off you are, or've been, unless that depleted round sails downrange.
///DJ? Acucrack - "Allegra" ... this is the soundtrack to stalking yourself. Searching out, the movie score. This is, bassed up, the chase; the quiet chase between functional and passable (between blending and fitting in).
I will think of coke and remember the slogan for Coke that cracked me up because it was so dual apt they couldn't have done it by accident. Look it up. I don't assign homework in general and almost as a rule, but look it up. I was just thinking though, I have never assigned homework unless I had to. I kind of make a bad teacher in that way sometimes. I think that's the way it should be though; if you always come to class and never miss one you should be as well informed as the person who never goes to class, but reads the textbook cover to cover.
Sorry, I got distracted. I didn't know where to start and I've been looking for a way to start again, but nothing has lead back here the way I expected it to and then I was all out for starting points and so far away that I was all in for whatever I could find to begin again and I found what I was not happy to find but I'll throw it off from the edge of the rooftop and watch it fall down and try to make sense of it. Okay? Let's go:
September 11th. The day that changed 'merica. It didn't. America is still what it was. Only a little more paranoid. This day used to have a little more bite. I used to remember the servicemen I know and knew (not because they died, we just stopped being as close as we used to be) and the new ones I've met while fishing the river on a slow Thursday. I used to remember them with incredible reverence. Not so much anymore.
The one's still in are in because they want to be. The ones that are out are out on good terms and very well compensated, on the pay scale I aspire to climb toward that kind of stability, and have awesome resumes. I guess that still burns me a little on this day. Getting near perfect scores on the entrance test and damn near perfect on the physicals and getting bounced on psychological failures. The whole talk my dad gave me about "the family standard of excellence." I didn't want to cry or weep. I just wanted to pop out of existence with a genie wink when going in and making it as an infantryman and working a way up could be viewed as tarnishing "the family standard of excellence." I still makes me laugh out loud today to say it aloud.
Part of what makes me laugh is that, incidentally, he was right. After taking a year or two to think about it a little harder, I can see that I would have been a skittish, trigger happy, blood hungry, question asking, thinking, liability to the cause. I would have gotten myself and other people killed, given a uniform, a weapon, and a theater. That's just coincidence, though, pure coincidence, so it doesn't really count. At all.
Serendipity.
"Are you dead or are you sleeping, God, I sure hope you are dead." Dealing with a little paranoia break, but that's neither here nor there.
September is also the anniversary of the longest intimate relationship I ever was able to be a part of and it was fantastic. I forgot the date the first three years we were together. Finally made the brilliant move to add it to my phone. It stayed there after we broke up. I can vaguely remember some of the gifts, one of the gifts, I gave her. I think the others were holiday related. I can remember trying to figure out how to get flowers delivered to her office and the whole runaround I got. I can also vividly remember the violent times. The times when my brain fractured. The times when truth was too much for me to eat.
I am laughing because it is remembering the times when, more than anything else, I wanted the laws of interpersonal physics to suspend themselves. I do not know, though. Life is long. Who else are you going to travel the spectrum of drugs with when you're too old to work and done everything else and the prospect of shagging is as interesting as scrubbing your bathtub? Blackouts. Retirement is going to be an amazing thing.
So, September 11th used to be like holding a revolver in my mouth and pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked over several times while fingering an empty casing from the gun range. Not anymore. I'm passed it. Nothing's going to change my world, sweetness.
We will modify, sometimes ad hoc, we will destroy and build, we will continue to drive toward some kind of perfect state, but we will mow down no one else along the way. We will remain honest and not overly dramatic, maybe, we will masturbate to idle thoughts of bodily violence, we will maintain course and get to know the new ship, we will cultivate friendship, and build ourselves into better people instead of weapons. We will.
I don't want to spend too much time on this. I've been trying to structure my paragraphs better and slash the blocks into verses. The poet that keeps clawing it's way out of my mouth. I don't want to spend too much time on this and I'm three hours in so let's call it close.
I love you. I do. I shouldn't. If I could bury you each and be the one with the shovel over night, I would cum. It is a strange thing, I know. I love helping people, so much. There is no replacing the feeling of helping someone solve a problem and secure a future outcome 100%. 100% assured that what they wanted was what they were going to get. Nothing replaces that. Wherever you are.
I've been working to dissolve some isolation. It's important. An important thing. Once I finish the project I am working alone I am going to need to be able to interact on a normal basis to get another job to fill the money void. Money drives everything, doesn't it? More than that is learning how to interact with people without a group to diffuse the messy bits to. It's easy to do when there are many other magnetic orientations to diffuse field lines to. Not so much otherwise.
I am approaching a point where isolation will become counterproductive. Flat out. For a time. There are many options for filling the counter point to weigh it into a cantilever support system. Ad hocced. Performing the expense reports in my mind. It's not going to work. I think that is part of growing up. Growing the capacity to do that and know with some certainty what is bound to fail when it comes to tolerable and intolerable acts of personality.
I am getting closer toward dissolving some aspects of isolation. One finger on the trigger that will close fire bulkheads. I don't know what process or loop or instantiation will trigger something terrible, but I am prepared to eject instantaneously. I'm not your project. I am project enough for myself. Here come old flattop.
We are you friends. We are your friends. We are shoving off from the scrap yard brand new in many ways. The new ship is troubleshot and configured. There is nothing more to it than to do it. We are launching. We are reentering circles and seeing what snow will fall and where and what kinds of sculpture we can make of it until the sun comes up and melts it all. We are launching. Granted we were stocked up and manned up a week prior, but we didn't have the heart at the wheel to give chase to open sea. We do know. We are ready. Cobbled together from many different pieces, we are ready to see if it works. Shove off, baby.
Getting back to laughter. Getting back to what makes us laugh. Back to the roots of what made me start in the first place. Gain some understanding. At first it was a reaching out, it became a gps, and now it's a tough out. I don't like to think inwardly. As tough an out as they come. It's still a map. I'm on the far edge of it and it keeps drawing beyond the dark part of the space of influence. I think I am getting back to laughter.
Back to being able to really, really, indulge in the spaces life does afford for taking nothing too seriously and taking everything too seriously. That magical place where living life, at least the way you understand it presently, like it is your last day jives with the fact that, barring absolute worst outcomes in tandem, it probably isn't.
You're going to have to live with, regardless of how you or someone else can spin it, what you did today.
I want to spend that time laughing. We're launching again. We are equipped for combat, need it arise, we are equipped for food, it will arise, and we are equipped to question ourselves and somethings (not everythings) anew. We are equipped to observe and equipped for some closeness. We have an L six two D load out and we are ready to rock.
I am perpetually intermittently disappointed with myself. Lack of ability to grow networks combined with... grows. I wonder if I am some kind of cancer embodied sometimes. A walking carcinogen. You go back to her and I go back to... I feel like I am in a very long race to eliminate myself or as many people as I can take down at once. It's nothing personal. It's sporting. Not immediately but, I don't know.
Some days, walking down the street, I look at myself in the store front windows reflected, and it's a pretty damn cool thing to see that ambulating to wherever and enjoy that remove. There's no vanity there for me. Just trekking and knowing that we're doing it. We're doing it! We are out of doors and doing alright. I don't love the birds looking back sometimes with that "not if you were the last man on Earth" look. What the hell is that about?
We're doing this. I am as over myself as I'll ever be. It's passed time to laugh again. Laugh about little things genuinely. It's easy to see the world as whole. It's passed time to really chew on it again. Launch probes. Explore and navigate from afar or as far as possible, but do not be afraid to take readings from the machines you employ. It's time, however briefly, to try again to square up vision with reality and you'll never know how far off you are, or've been, unless that depleted round sails downrange.
///DJ? Acucrack - "Allegra" ... this is the soundtrack to stalking yourself. Searching out, the movie score. This is, bassed up, the chase; the quiet chase between functional and passable (between blending and fitting in).
12/4/12
Thinking Around Yourself Is Not Easy (fear)
I have been trying to think around myself. It has not been easy. To say the least. Part of what has made it so difficult is realizing that I am occupying so much of my own space. Where as space time is largely infinite, I have had a hard time parsing my own space and my own time in that webbing. Experience is infinite. Infinitely divergent and convergent on the same scale. The difference comes when you start to look at a person as fragment or a single stitch, a wave particle behaving more particulate than wave, on the scale of outcomes. Something that you can cure me of. No, not really. Nothing that I wouldn't do for you differently.
I have been trying to think around myself. I have been trying to dig myself out of the weird hole of self absorption and have experienced some success. There has been some allure in exploring the dark side of the moon and what have you, but that has come as quite ancillary to everything else I would like to do, but has also occupied so many cycles, it's almost become laughable.
The standoffs between my drawing tablet and my gaming remote have grown to epic proportions. As they should. Given the variables. I knew they would. There are so many usb ports and only so many preoccupations. I've grown a little sad though. Not because I can't get everyone of me to work in concert. Not because the voices have been so gotdamn loud I can't hear myself think sometimes. Not because I want time to flow in reverse. Not because I am stupidly heart broken too often and no amount of huffed paint will make it feel better long enough. Not because four hour masturbation sessions laden me with enough shame to bury an elephant with no trace of a corpse or burial ground.
I've grown a little sad, because I know, with the pills available, my outcomes might be entirely different, and I've given them not a lick of a try. Not that I don't want to. I absolutely do. It's not like I'm going to magically lose my creativity or penchant for metaphor. Might lose some sex drive, but it's not like I'm getting laid every five seconds. It's a choice and I understand that. It's a choice I'm not comfortable making. What if I don't like the new me?
Better question: what if the new me is less acceptable than the old me. I don't mean in terms of dalliances and persuasions or anything like that, but how hilarious would it be if the new me was completely straight? I just don't want, in a big way to rediscover myself. At some point you get too old for that and I don't want to be in a position where I'm okay with being fucked up constantly and managing, but I also don't want to be in a completely artificial position that I can love because it's artificial and enjoyable and normal, because as much as I love fitting in, I love being genuine.
It has value. Being genuine. How far around myself am I supposed to think? How far around themselves do other people think? That's the much larger question. I guess the greater difficulty comes in when I try to measure myself against other points of normalcy and I fail to get a reading. It breaks my heart. It really does. It still does. Not blaming anyone. Not finding fault. It just burns my heart steadily. Day to day. Am I that weird? The answer keeps coming back yes and no. And everyone gets to go through life, well, the vast majority, with answers to that question. And I don't.
Maybe I'm not far enough outside myself to answer or maybe I just don't have an answer or maybe the answer is just kind of crappy and I have to deal with it until I die. I don't know. I'll still try. To enjoy what life I got still comin' my way. What else would you expect me to do.
///RJD2 - "Moonlit Skies" Sometimes you just want to be right about something. Just anything. Just get it and nail it dead on for once. It stays a luxury you can't afford, all you can do is convince yourself you were close enough.
I have been trying to think around myself. I have been trying to dig myself out of the weird hole of self absorption and have experienced some success. There has been some allure in exploring the dark side of the moon and what have you, but that has come as quite ancillary to everything else I would like to do, but has also occupied so many cycles, it's almost become laughable.
The standoffs between my drawing tablet and my gaming remote have grown to epic proportions. As they should. Given the variables. I knew they would. There are so many usb ports and only so many preoccupations. I've grown a little sad though. Not because I can't get everyone of me to work in concert. Not because the voices have been so gotdamn loud I can't hear myself think sometimes. Not because I want time to flow in reverse. Not because I am stupidly heart broken too often and no amount of huffed paint will make it feel better long enough. Not because four hour masturbation sessions laden me with enough shame to bury an elephant with no trace of a corpse or burial ground.
I've grown a little sad, because I know, with the pills available, my outcomes might be entirely different, and I've given them not a lick of a try. Not that I don't want to. I absolutely do. It's not like I'm going to magically lose my creativity or penchant for metaphor. Might lose some sex drive, but it's not like I'm getting laid every five seconds. It's a choice and I understand that. It's a choice I'm not comfortable making. What if I don't like the new me?
Better question: what if the new me is less acceptable than the old me. I don't mean in terms of dalliances and persuasions or anything like that, but how hilarious would it be if the new me was completely straight? I just don't want, in a big way to rediscover myself. At some point you get too old for that and I don't want to be in a position where I'm okay with being fucked up constantly and managing, but I also don't want to be in a completely artificial position that I can love because it's artificial and enjoyable and normal, because as much as I love fitting in, I love being genuine.
It has value. Being genuine. How far around myself am I supposed to think? How far around themselves do other people think? That's the much larger question. I guess the greater difficulty comes in when I try to measure myself against other points of normalcy and I fail to get a reading. It breaks my heart. It really does. It still does. Not blaming anyone. Not finding fault. It just burns my heart steadily. Day to day. Am I that weird? The answer keeps coming back yes and no. And everyone gets to go through life, well, the vast majority, with answers to that question. And I don't.
Maybe I'm not far enough outside myself to answer or maybe I just don't have an answer or maybe the answer is just kind of crappy and I have to deal with it until I die. I don't know. I'll still try. To enjoy what life I got still comin' my way. What else would you expect me to do.
///RJD2 - "Moonlit Skies" Sometimes you just want to be right about something. Just anything. Just get it and nail it dead on for once. It stays a luxury you can't afford, all you can do is convince yourself you were close enough.
8/16/11
Odd Dreams, Prior Commitments, New Goals and Mystic River
Woke up, fell asleep, appended more dreaming to the previous dream and then woke again. The first dream was me and a family of strangers. The house was enormous. My mother and father were nowhere to be found inside the house and all of the light bulb sockets were empty. The only things left were bits and parts of things that were going to be abandoned that the parents left to me and my siblings to decide if we were going to take them with us or not. It was up to us to pack them all and be outside with the single suitcase we were each allowed to bring to the new home. So we packed.
As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.
We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.
Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.
Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.
The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.
In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.
All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.
As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.
Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.
Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.
It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.
For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.
There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).
The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.
Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.
Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.
So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.
///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.
As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.
We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.
Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.
Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.
The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.
In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.
All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.
As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.
Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.
Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.
It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.
For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.
There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).
The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.
Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.
Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.
So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.
///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.
3/30/10
the thing is
i dont want thank yous borne of common courte-fucking-sy. i dont want you to buy me a fucking lunch of cheap ass fucking fuck me in the ass taste like shit fast food. i dont want you to make yourself food and then offer me some as a fucking afterthought cuz im in the kitchen and your fucking eating and you feel like shit cuz i just washed the god damn dishes youre eating off of you worthless fucking shit prick. i dont want you to fucking pay me. and most of all you cock lick shit on a dick stuck so far up satans bloody acidic asshole from which all that is unholy on this earth was dispensed since time immemorial, i dont want your fucking humor and smiles cuz you think its all fucking gravy cuz it aint. fuck your face hard enough to blow your jaw clear off. i hope thats what happens to you. i hope that when, since you could not do a single god damn fucking no strings attached thing out of the non existent kindness of your steaming pile of horse shit heart, when you do die ill still be around to cut the face off of your corpse and throw it in a fucking river for feral dogs to fucking devour after the fish and vultures are done with it. fuck off. when i leave here itll be too god damn soon before i am forced to see you.
6/19/06
spit is not super glue 06/19/06
Subject : spit is not super glue
Posted Date: : Jun 19, 2006 9:26 AM
using saliva to join two surfaces does not work. so it just occured to me that using saliva to join two individuals also will not work, or at least should not be expected to perform as a lasting solution.
the above analogy further reminded me of that time i tried to fix the wiring inside a vibrator that was broken (those things aren't cheap) using super glue. it also did not work... and was discovered for the small phallus of a paperweight it was at its greatest time of need.
moving from disconnected wires, i was struck by how frayed my nerves have recently become. life is hard. ugh. life can feel like a near waterless diet of celery and peanuts on that fifth day when the constipation finally breaks. my nerves are shot. i can literally feel my nerve endings buzzing and firing off little shocks into my muscles, but not returning any relevant information to my brainstem. that odd feeling of nervous, numb energy that makes you feel cold in the face and palms and hot in the belly. there are lots of things i want to do and so many things that need doing.
i need to write about the economy of eccentricity.
i need to write about the 92 / 8 split.
i need to draft lyrics for a friend of mine.
i need to ... need to... need to...
the repitition of this phrase places a person in strange state of paranoia that swells the throat and keeps the fingers clicking back and forth from the email inbox, to the cell phone, to the instant messenger and back. looking for something to do. anything to do. that weird place where the only comfortable view is the one over your shoulder, except that your neck always gets tired and you must turn around. a place where the only rest to be had is in the security of the tasks at hand though the resting isn't what a person is used to calling rest.
i need to write about the restlessness of need.
Posted Date: : Jun 19, 2006 9:26 AM
using saliva to join two surfaces does not work. so it just occured to me that using saliva to join two individuals also will not work, or at least should not be expected to perform as a lasting solution.
the above analogy further reminded me of that time i tried to fix the wiring inside a vibrator that was broken (those things aren't cheap) using super glue. it also did not work... and was discovered for the small phallus of a paperweight it was at its greatest time of need.
moving from disconnected wires, i was struck by how frayed my nerves have recently become. life is hard. ugh. life can feel like a near waterless diet of celery and peanuts on that fifth day when the constipation finally breaks. my nerves are shot. i can literally feel my nerve endings buzzing and firing off little shocks into my muscles, but not returning any relevant information to my brainstem. that odd feeling of nervous, numb energy that makes you feel cold in the face and palms and hot in the belly. there are lots of things i want to do and so many things that need doing.
i need to write about the economy of eccentricity.
i need to write about the 92 / 8 split.
i need to draft lyrics for a friend of mine.
i need to ... need to... need to...
the repitition of this phrase places a person in strange state of paranoia that swells the throat and keeps the fingers clicking back and forth from the email inbox, to the cell phone, to the instant messenger and back. looking for something to do. anything to do. that weird place where the only comfortable view is the one over your shoulder, except that your neck always gets tired and you must turn around. a place where the only rest to be had is in the security of the tasks at hand though the resting isn't what a person is used to calling rest.
i need to write about the restlessness of need.
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