Preparing For Changes and the Return of the Painted Dinosaur

We've been drinking a lot.  The nice thing about self medicating is that you can up or down your dosage as needed without the pain or risk of seeing "professionals", though the time elapsed has gifted a pro status to yourself.  That professionalism about the approach can easily get away from you in much the same way an infinite prescription pad can get away from you and the dulling of sensation and thought and process will become a pea beneath a mattress. 

We are going to strip some away.  Artificial feeling.  Artificial sense.  Changes are coming and they're going to be unpleasant, but carrying around the ghosts in the darkness constantly is not possible.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  Face them.  There is no winning or losing.  There is fear.  You've been normal, you've been good,  you've engaged, you've laughed, you've loved, you've cried, you've walked back and forth three hundred and eight times and you can't push anything new until you open the box. 

So we're going to open the box so we can write our poetry again and stop pretending we're fine.  We're not.  Haven't been for months.  How great a run has it been?  It's been fun.  The muddy boots and gloves, the tools misplaced, the hysterics, the silence, they don't lie.  Eventually it feels like building a carnival atop mass graves and playing the music loud enough to drown out the way foot falls squeeze blood from between the blades of grass and insisting to the patrons it's just part of the show.  I'm looking forward to it.

Small Victories

Of course I can't help asking myself "what's the point?"  A lot of times I have to remind myself to live life for myself.  Do it for you.  Sure it would be nice to justify your existence on the basis that someone else needs you, like a kid, or dying family member, or very close friend, or lover, but they'll move on or move away (or die) or meet someone even nearer and dearer and that's okay.  Do it for you.

Sure, sometimes it's difficult to love yourself.  Sometimes it is even more difficult to care about yourself because it feels selfish.  No one is going to do it for you.  When we look in the mirror and laugh with ourselves at how strange we are and ask who would want to live with that, the answer is right there: we would!  Do it for you.  It doesn't mean you don't care about anyone else, or couldn't give a damn if society and civilization as we knew it fell apart.  It doesn't mean that we don't empathize and sympathize with oppressed peoples and sufferers of injustices and the caged subsets of this country and all the messed up things happening to them.  It doesn't mean we are wholly callous and willing to say "screw them, I got mine, I'm fine."  Mind that you can't build your life around someone else's fight.  You'll wear down faster than a clutch plate made of wax and find yourself torn apart at your seams every single day.  Give a damn, but give a damn about yourself too.

Lying on the ground, having spent the last of my saved money on a replacement leaf spring hanger for the one that rotted out on my truck (that I will have to saw off since it's riveted to the frame and I can't afford to pay a mechanic regardless), staring up at my ceiling fan I was thinking "what's the point of saving money if it vanishes every few months whenever something bad happens."  The next day, I opened my fists, put my hands behind my head, watching the fan blades go, and it occurred to me that there has been an improvement through the years.  It used to be living paycheck to paycheck and unable to afford food.  Just beans and rice and beans and rice and beans and hotdogs and beans and chicken and rice and hotdogs and PB and J.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, but able to afford better food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, and not having to worry about food.  Then it was living paycheck to paycheck, not having to worry about food, and being able to afford auto insurance.  Then paycheck to paycheck, no food worries, auto insurance, and able to save a little.  Now it's crisis to crisis, no food worries, and auto insurance.  Sure, it's better than paycheck to paycheck and not as good as being able to save for the future in a meaningful way, but life is decent between crisis level events (like having to empty your savings account to pay for bandages or truck parts and specialized tools or new sneakers because the soles fell off your old ones or a car battery).  Small victories, ya know?

It kind of goes back to my ethos behind writing once I realized the industry is basically geared to be self congratulatory in some kind of messed up ways that make any sort of climb outside the construct largely an exercise in blind luck and volume: just do it for you.   What's the point if no one will ever read it, if no one likes it, if it's never impactful, recognized, or coherent.  Do it for you, care about its pursuit because you do.  That's all you really need.

Of course, I'll forget this answer in time.  Toss and turn about the meaning of love, and lost relationships doomed to fail anyway.  I'll slip into self loathing.  The little voices that are easy to ignore when life is fun and in balance will turn into roars and screams and shouts and flying sparks "kill yourself! kill yourself! kill yourself!" and I'll drown them out with music until I can't play music loud enough and I walk out into the woods and scream at the trees "what is the point!  I can't succeed at anything long enough to make anyone's lives better or build a family of my own!"  Then I'll remember, living for other people is not what we're built for.  We are built to be alone, to live alone, to love alone, to ride alone.  Can we live with others?  Sure.  We won't succeed for long, but it's possible, we've seen it, but never expect much from that thread of being.  It hasn't, and may never develop within you.

Do it for you.  Part of me still remembers my cartographer's mandate.  Do it for you and because someone else may be seeing and going through the years you've seen for the first time and may be just as bewildered as you were.  "If only there were some sort of mapular object to help me know what may be coming next."  Most of all, the point is, don't waste your time trying to measure yourself on other people's scales at every turn.  A successful day for some is a nice date, or driving a few hours to see a buddy, or dinner with their spouse, or closing a deal, or a raise, or whatever makes their white picket lawn and dog.  For now, for you, it's taking care of your job, exploring some ideas, taking care of you, having a few laughs, and not killing yourself and that is just fine.  Don't forget that.  Do it for you.




///Phonat - "Ghetto Burnin (Mmmathias Mix)

Rest Is A Cocoon

As we rest and breath over past and history and details.  Knowing more.  Growth is a strong word.  More like molting.  Showing that you have not died.  Showing that the fire, though about you and your skin and your nerve and eating through the marrow of your bone, has birthed, not consumed, you.  In love again.  The moon drives past my house real slow.  I howl out of the window, a scarf around my neck.




///Gold Panda - "Fifth Ave"

At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity

Looking at my own reflection at the river, a wolf's head mask in the crook of my arm, I wonder how many there are like me.  I wonder how many times I can roll the dice with instability before an immovable object meets an unstoppable force again.  I try to skip rocks.  I try to bat rocks with an aluminum bat given to me as a gift after I left the last one I had at home, bent into the shape of a boomerang.  I wonder where I am going and if someone out there is going the same way I am.  If we will carpool together and shout at each other, trying to figure out where exactly "there" is while the driver tries to figure how to get two wolves out of his car and regrets being a Samaritan.

Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink.  One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud.  The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship.  Found.  Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash!  Mid-river.  The current continues.  I can't see my face, looking down.  The angles aren't right.  The light is not just so.  The sun is not cooperating.  Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.

Thinking about how people find their perfect match.  At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me.  Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic.  Impossible.  Incredible in its perfection and destruction.  Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist.  Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.

Happy and satisfied are two different things.  The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief.  As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true.  Doomed.  I laugh typing that.  The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle.  Dooooooomed!  Of course not.  Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat.  I wonder what quantum decay looks like.  I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them.  Some of them, yes.  None of them, also yes.  Always at distance.  Minding the fence.  Minding the facilities.  On the off chance they might be me.  On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.

A moat.  Sometimes the bridge is there.  The gates open and ambassadors cross.  I don't know what madness is.  Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself?  Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself?  Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere?  Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted.  I am here, this is what I wanted.  I am here.  This is what I wanted.  Few things truly scare me, in life.  I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half.  Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.





///Groove Armada - "At The River"   ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.

That's That

So, the redesign is done. I don't think I'm going to do anything with the font and link colors until the next iteration. Like holding over the quarter panels on a car between generations. I think it looks alright. I'm happy with it. Now I can get back to doing other things, like fixing this:



well, finishing that to make the new header for a new poetry space. One thing at a time. The pace is plodding, I know, but I'm getting there.

Hope it is to taste. The detail work is tremendous. 2000 pixels wide. It's going to be epic when I can show you the full sized designed, but for now you'll have to settle for squinting and using a little imagination, but I promise you it will be ginormous.

Skyline, Story Telling and How It's Put

Been watching movies. Just saw Skyline and I didn't not like it. As far as alien invasion films go it's nice to see the aliens win sometimes because, honestly, a star faring species would in all likelihood own man kind pretty hard. There were a couple of things that stood out though as I started fast forwarding to the end to see where it was all going.

The story telling struck me as pretty flat. When the guy from Scrubs died I didn't really feel one way or the other about it. I know I was supposed to feel "aw no, the main character's best friend just got eaten and now he's all alone in the world with his pregnant girl friend who seems to get randomly upset about things people are supposed to be upset about when they're pregnant." However, all I could really think about was how he probably could have made it to safety had his friend not body checked him with a bro hug in a weird attempt to pull him to safety that would, had they been playing basketball, have been an offensive foul. Rescue fail. If someone is running from a giant brain eating semi-sentient mech warrior thingy you probably shouldn't run directly into their only path of egress, whatever your intention.

Ultimately, what it came down to, I decided, was that no one in the film had any real motive to do anything they did beyond the fact that they were supposed to. Which sounds like a reasonable reason to do anything at all, but in terms of telling a story it is the worst thing in the world. You could almost see the writer pulling the strings of the puppets and animating the actions and progressions by sheer harm of will. Not unacceptable, but noticeable. I think that is one of the chief challenges of story telling and writing. Making the strings invisible. Growing motives. Building back story and momentum so that actions are not knee jerk responses to chisels and hammers on a blank canvas.

It was an interesting film. The other thing that stood out pretty starkly by the film's close was that the aliens could have been replaced by just about anything. It could have been a movie about tornadoes. Or a tsunami. Or any natural disaster. Or any sort of invasion. Absent the plot device of them needing brains for whatever reason and you basically have an empty template of two dimensional good looking twenty and thirty somethings trying to survive a blank social upheaval. What sets something like Colossus: The Forbin Project or District 9 apart from Skyline is the construction and development of the nemesis and the invader as a character unto itself. If the voiced actors in Skyline are by and large two dimensional, the invaders are one dimensional and that sort of held it back, though the action was interesting. The film could probably have greatly benefited from thirty more minutes of plot development and enrichment of the hero's foil. If the deaths of the characters are to hold weight as lynch pins in the plot, their lives have to hold weight too and if their lives do not then the executioners must.

Which is what I strive to learn how to do. Craft that balance. And I do not believe I succeed often enough. And so I keep working at it, because it is important to me and the stories I want to tell. Too much of the action and dialog in the film was foreseeable from miles away and though interesting and visually entertaining, it was not much more than that. The other thing that sort of stung me a little bit was some of the final scenes. Why do the brains glow at all? Is that really the best way to extract brains from things? Why not harvest animals instead or in addition? Given the difficulty of the operation, why not find somewhere else less developed? If stars can be crossed, why inferior human stock at all? What about when the brain supply runs out, as it seems the brains burn out so quickly with the difficulty and energy required to procure them in the first place? And I think what really annoyed me was that with all of their technology and apparent ability to regenerate themselves, why were they not just synthesizing brain matter in massive orbital laboratories or something? In the end I was sort of hoping for a larger theme to solidify, but it never did and to end the review I think that is what sent me looking for why I felt a little off after watching it in the first place. Plus, I'm pretty sure if, say Donald Trump, wanted to harvest human brains, he could probably find a better way to do it then creating a giant pile and brute force searching each for brain matter. Just gotta put your mind to it.

Story telling isn't easy. It was an okay movie, but I wouldn't watch it twice. So that's part of why I work on writing so much. I want people to want to read my stories twice.

While I was wrapping this up I noticed the tag still on the blinds I put up recently. The warning tag about the cords. "young children can STRANGLE in cord and bead chain loops," it reads. And I thought, yeah they can, but if you wanted it to really hit home it should probably say "young children can be STRANGLED with." But then I thought about it some more. That's probably not what you should say. People are strange. People like suggestions. People sometimes take suggestions they shouldn't. People sometimes file law suits they shouldn't. How weird would it be to have someone murder their children because a dangling tag on a cord gave them the idea. How much stranger would it be to have the family members of the accused sue the company for giving the perpetrator the idea. I'm sure stranger and more ridiculous things have happened. Like movies where everyone does what they do because if they didn't there wouldn't be anything to show and tell. Silly times. A fine diversion.



///Five Deez - "Sexual for Elizabeth" sometimes the best stories are told in sounds that don't make words. It's all in how it's put.