Proclivities

Why do I enjoy the things that I do?  It cannot all be chance.  The chance of it all being chance is just silly.  Laughing to myself while I compose the thought from hundreds of shards, I understand a little something.  Those somethings follow:

I wouldn't be as into giant robots as I am should I not have seen a manual when I was younger.  I wouldn't be as into mythology and comic books had I not seen so many when I was younger.  I would not be in to so many technical diagrams had I not been presented them when I was younger and I'm not talking about diagrams of machines as much as human bodies.

I probably could have avoided getting beaten as often as I did if I didn't dive into diagrams of the naked form as were provided.  Which is kind of hilarious because I wouldn't be as good as I am at seeing them for the bones they are now if I hadn't seen them when I was a small fry.

I cannot help laughing, explaining it now.  "Why do these things occupy so much of your head's space?"  I don't know.  I'm sure parts of it are generated within myself.  Absolutely.  Why can I not look at someones face and see the wires beneath it?  The bones and structure and frame it in a comic books frame or a films sketch board?  How come I cannot turn that off?

For the same reason that I cannot approach someone without thinking about and forecasting how to defend myself.  "You have to learn how to fight!"

These are questions only your parent can answer.

I've been refused answers.

Wiping saliva from my computer screen, it is true.  That is part of why I laugh hysterically.

The greatest complement, I've heard, is emulation.  Copying.  That is also what I've been taught.  How do you learn?  By emulating.  How do you create?  Learn the rules and then you can make whatever you want to.  OR.  You can feel an audience and play to a crowd.  OR.  You can do what appears to be reasonable and go from there as long as no one dies in the gears of your operation.  As long as no one gets hurt.  There are many rules.

I am sad.   I am thorough.  I am skattered.  I am some original parts and some parts straight from the manufacturer.  I am not thrilled.

The manufacturer insisted.  I argued.  The manufacturer insisted.

I do wonder, if he had it to do over again, would he.  That question will never be answered.

So I draw and I build and I create and I war and sometimes I scuffle and I hold grudges and I love forever and I hate and I draw, I build, I design, and model, and color, and I never quite know exactly why.  I don't know if I'm the best version of myself or if I will never know the answer that I expect to go hand in hand with that question.

Every few days out of a month it enrages me.

I cannot force him to speak on his behalf, as he many times made me do.  I wish that on no one.  By that rule, I do not wish that on him.  The best I can do is detective work and let him know, unless he is willing to open up the book of death, he has no place in my world.

I wasn't asking for my abusive father for an apology.  All I was asking for was accountability, being old enough to talk to him person to person.

I got stonewalled.  And that's that.

Nothing more to do except continue to build my own life, evolve one baby step at a time, and continue to try my damnedest to forget about him and hope he dies sooner than later.  For now that's the best we can do.





///Mos Def - "Umi Says"

Most definitely.

Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original equipment manufacturer fail.





///Thom Yorke- "The Clock"

In Consideration of Empathy

You attack and beat yourself up over your inability to see eye to eye with your brother.  Eye to eye about what?  Everything.  Not everything, just things now.  The formation and configuration of our immediate family.  Who funds what and why.  Who goes and does what and where.  Who can.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him on that?  You just watched a video of yourself dancing and you thought it was awesome, but the truth is if bodies could have Tourette Syndrome, you would probably be the poster boy with Elaine Benes as the prom Queen.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him at all?  You are two completely different human beings, down to sexual orientations and the arrangement of your individual eyelashes.  You are not supposed to agree.  You are about as different as they come between siblings.  You do realize this, I hope.  You are a stamped coin.  Do you get it now?  You are never going to see eye to eye about just about everything.  If you want to see the other side, you are probably going to have to bend time and space and, last I heard, that shits pretty difficult with a thousand acre facility so good luck trying to do it with a few cubic inches of fatty gray matter.

You don't have to see anything his way.  He doesn't have to see anything your way.  What is this weird aggression toward a shared emotional experience?  It's not there.  Stop looking.  I don't say that as a warning sign like marking something so damaging and toxic you will die immediately, if not soon after.   I say that as a time saver.  I say that as a wayfarer.  Stop looking.  There is nothing at the end of that ocean.  There is nothing on the other side of that desert.  The globe does not loop around.  It is infinite in the darkness beyond the stars.  Stop looking.  Occasionally whip your binoculars up to your face and take down the range, time, and windage and then duck back down into the reeds.  You do love him, but you do hate him too.  Not for any particular reason.  Just envy.  Change positions.  Skulls, skin, bones, you do know you wouldn't be able to change circuitry.  Can't I?  No.  Mightn't I?  No.  Impossible-r-y-ing I?  No, and that's definitely not a word or fragment.  What the hell is that?   I just stroked off for a minute.  What were you saying?

I was saying, we're never going to see eye to eye, so stop beating yourself up when you try and do not.  You're not a bad person.  You're not a flaming heap of garbage to be kept at arms length all of the time.  Sometimes you cannot control your volatility.  It's a fine problem to have.  You don't have to kill him and you don't have to fight him.  Just let him be himself and you be yourself and the chips will land where they please and are directed.  Your engagement with the world can never be his.  It can be emulated.  Where's the fun in tracing?  Where's the existence in tracing?  Do not get angry with yourself for being irrevocably, irreconcilably, different.  No, you are not stupid for trying.  Anyone in their right mind would see their closest genetic match and want to touch it like a mirror to make sure what they saw was not a reflection.  You are me?  No.  I am me and you are you, and never the two shall meet.




///Dan Deacon - "Feel the Lightning"  polishing the brass on warships that will and need never leave Earth.  Fear is healthy.  A degree of worry is healthy.  Don't take it too far.

Love

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




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

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

Rage 2

The only thing I hate more than being injured is... you guessed it.... nothing.  My body is my contract.  Without it I am a fish with no fins.  I hate it.  I hate it.   I HATE IT.  The only thing that hurts me more is my past.  What am I supposed to do when every breath of air costs me tears???  What the fuck am I supposed to do????  Pain fuels.  There are limits, but where do those limits lie?  Fake it til you make it, does not apply.  Results, god damnit.  I want results.  Not just for me, but for my boss.  Not just for my boss, but for my fucking friends.  I want to churn out at all times.  If it's not work I want to churn out fun.  If it's not fun I want to be churning out hobby.  If it's not hobby I want to be churning out nonsense.  Not to be aching on the handicapped, but fuck.  How do they live?  Not at all used to being limited in a physical sense.  I don't know how to handle it.  I can still do everything I could do, but the meter that tells me when I'm at 12 thousand revs is broken.  Simple things that wouldn't crack five hundred break two thousand.  Things that would demand seven tip out at ten.  Things that take ten to do bounce the needle off of the redline.  I'm not used to that.  No one should be.  What I'm going to have to do, if this does not resolve itself in the next week, is just shove the whole god damn scale North.  Fuck it.  I don't have time for this shit.  And neither do the people that depend on me.  I want what they want and come hell and high water it is raring up to decision time and I don't like it, but that's just the way it is sometimes.

Ghosts [return]

What's black and white and red all over?  Your mother, upside down, wrapped in electrical tape.  You on the run.  The pain has been astronomical.  Mentally shredded.  Bringing myself back together.  You never want your heart to get too cold, but sometimes enough things pile up together and the fire goes out and it's just you out there, alone in the backwoods, beside a ring of rocks and ash and you can hear them at the tree line cutting under the bushes and between the trunks and leaves would rustle if it wasn't so late a winter, and instead the twigs are snapping and whistling when they breath and more than anything else you want to howl and bring them to you because waiting has you chewing your tongue out of your face, but even if you could draw enough breath to do it, your throat is swollen shut tighter than your shivering eyelids.  So you wait for sunrise with the knee quaked temerity of a hangman who knows there are worse things than death.

It's been a while.  It's been a long long while.  Every minute an exercise, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, in control.  Childhood memories know no limits and have no expiration date.  They're like veins laid into the skin of your brain that pump that history through your tissues and sockets and bones and every few days or weeks or sometimes, blessed months, they rattle around your cells and locks like blind inmates with worn down kitchen ware for picks.  Sometimes, strolling those halls you catch their empty, milky, eyes in little bits of mirror gummed to metal rods watching the sound of your footsteps down the hall.  You took them out, one by one, to solitary confinement and punched those brown and blue iris's out with a peen hammer.  Each new arrival.  Because you could not stand the watching, but you never thought they would keep on looking with their ears, little mirrors still poking between the bars out of habit.  Or maybe just to fuck with you.  Every few days, weeks, or blessed months, one will get it right, and out of the corner of your eye, too far down the hall to break the hand at play, a cell springs open.  Two cells.  Three cells.  Two more on the upper level.  Another in a wing of a branch of your complex you only know because the alarm is thudding through your ears, through the bricks of your skull and you know something has gone very wrong.

The ghosts have been roaming again.  To the point where the best thing I can do is lock myself up and pray for rain stiff enough to take the chalk off the attic walls where the roof is worn away.  Sometimes I know why it happens.  A lot of times I still don't.  Managing is a kind word.  But you do it to the best of your abilities.  At some point it becomes not protecting yourself from others intrusions or exploitation or oversights or abuse or perceptions as much as it becomes protecting other people from yourself.  Just because you know and can, to a degree, understand what's happening to you or not always the what, but the why (sometimes not even that) and can feel that something is not in its right place and that knife is not where you left it, and your shoes are covered in mud, but you went to bed early yesterday and it didn't rain until deep into the night, and that math is simply not accurate, does not mean that you can do anything to stop it besides isolate and insulate yourself as much as possible.  "Bad things are about to happen."

It shakes you on the inside.  The frameworks you've built up to contain and blanket fracture and split apart and you have to force one hand into the other.  Force your hands to love each other so they do not tear you to pieces.  And sigh "please, not now.  Not yet."  They will pay someday, but you're not ready yet.  The switch turns and you're alone again.  The things with names I cannot pronounce are gone, but how far away did they go this time.  Are they in the next room?  Around the corner of the building?  Is he on the windowsill, outside the drawn shade admiring the night air?  Check the bathroom.  Where did all of this blood come from?  The switch turns again.  Rusty contacts spark and pain flows like spilled water on live copper.  You hold your hands over your ears and go days without saying a word because if you do not know who and what it is that is breathing in your ear, you can never trust a word from between your lips again.

Pain builds and abets and builds in the dark inside your folds.  They eat at your body.  Snack and taste and tear away this and that.  They can hear you crying through the years, sniffing you out.  One and then two and then too many to count and all you want is to reach back through that long stairwell, past the cobwebs, to hug your little body and press your round little face into your chest until you stop breathing, but you can't bring yourself to do it, so you hold yourself tight and listen to the echos rising to the floor above and the snick snacking shuffle of their footsteps trying to find their way down to where your body broke all those years ago.  They come down those stairs and pull chairs near and wait and watch and some laugh and some pick skin out of their teeth with spare change or a bobby pin.  Some draw little things in the dust on the floor with little fingers.  Pain builds and you take it and take it until it becomes.

In the pile of ash inside the stone circle in the backwoods you failed to navigate and so made a bed, the weight of ignition is reached.  The heart inside you, driven and compacted to a block of solid steel arctic ice, begins to burn again.  Focus taken returns.  It is only you.  Yes, they are near, but it is only you holding the gun to your chest and the hammer falls and you exhale fire.  The sun is hanging itself and all you need do is walk toward it to feel its heat.  The air is not vibrating anymore, instead holding you the way you tried to hold yourself.  Pain destroys until the scale goes so far it can only be described by what it creates.  Clarity is a kind word.  Control.  Management.  I know someday it will go somewhere we will not come back from.  But that day is not today.  Today, everyone is in their cell.  Everyone dangerous enough to raise the hairs on my neck and make me piss into my pant leg and fill my left shoe.  History never goes away.

Rebuild.  Come back to us.  There is no reason for this is the biggest lie you'll ever hear.  Someday we'll be right and they'll see what it is that steals sleep from our eyes.  It's been a long long while, but it feels like no time at all.  Someday we'll have a necklace made out of their teeth, little holes drilled in them, fillings and all, with a little pink thread through them and the back ends in fisherman knots tied to silver clasps.  That would be nice.  Someday sweetheart.

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.

Observation Continues Undocumented

Well, I have a mouse now. How swank is that? I'll tell you how swank it is: it is pretty ridiculously cool. I can't tell you how nice it is to not have to use a crappy touch pad. I had to pop one of the buttons off of the laptop and stuff a dime in there because it was malfunctioning so bad. With a mouse though I'm now in version 2.0 of my new technological life. No more will I have to scratch crude horsies on cave walls with burnt sticks. Speaking of horsies I really need to buy a few rolls of heavy paper so I can start writing on the walls. It's where words go. They go on the walls. End of story.

I was telling someone the other day, a friend of mine, we were hanging out and having a pretty good blast, that I'm pretty laid back and I told this rambling story about how I told some girl that I would shank her if she stepped on my ping pong ball and at the end of the story I realized that all it really said about me is that I'm incredibly neurotic and unpredictable in social situations involving alcohol. So I tried to save it. I forgot why I jumped into the story in the first place so I had to mentally talk myself back to the starting point, go back down the segments of the story, and hit the junctures correctly like a choose your own adventure book. Then, having retold the story to myself I realized the entire point of it was that I am laid back through 95% or so of life, but 5% of my life is governed by arbitrary and inflexible rules and I don't entirely understand why.

I know why I have to do certain things. I have to put my t-shirts on like a dolphin diving through a hoop. If I don't hold them and look through the neck holes while I'm putting them on then I run the risk of unknowingly entering an alternate dimension through the shirt hole and not realizing it until it's too late because I didn't see that things were different because the body of the shirt blinded me. That has to be done. No exceptions. If I make food I have to eat it no matter how awful it turns out. If I throw up because of it or get really sick then good for me. How else will I learn to not make bad food? If I cook for other people and portions don't turn out right I am responsible for eating the worst of whatever I prepare as a penalty for being a bad cook. There has to be accountability in the kitchen. A door to a pitch black room cannot be left open for any reason. If you don't divide the lit room from the dark room with some sort of physical boundary you run the risk of invitation of the things of night into the realm of day and the last thing I want is to be trying to do daytime things in a daytime room that happens to be dark and have to deal with nighttime things outside of ... well ... I don't even like talking about that sort of stuff in great detail anyway. It makes me sound crazy, but more importantly they don't like me talking about them and I'm the one who has to deal with their bad feelings so that's all I'm going to say about that, but the point is there are rules for reasons.

So what I don't understand is - people? I understand people. People don't understand how I understand them. People don't understand the rules. I guess the rules are in place so that I can be more socially normal. More functional. That's why they're important. I think. Maybe. This is boring me.

Today I had to get out of bed a bunch and I damn near broke my neck scrambling to accomplish things and get back into my bed to keep the sheets warm. I've got the heat set as low as possible now so the only warmth around is what I'm producing and throwing off into the air.

Someone lied to me the other day. It made me very angry. I wanted to beat her up, but how ridiculously stupid would that have been. It's against the rules to lie. Before, it was against the rules to upset other people. Now those two have flipped places. The only problem with that is, of course, memory bleed. Things disappear and get transposed and interposed and juxtaposed all the time, not to mention out and out manufactured. She said something about me needing to perform some task for her and I'm pretty sure I already did it, but it is also entirely possible that I didn't do it because I went to visit her and her husband at their place in one of my dreams and we had a great time and went out to a parade and they dropped me off at work and it was great, but if I asked her about that later she would have no idea what I was talking about let alone remembering something that she wasn't actually a part of at any point. So maybe I never did explain or perform the thing she needed me to and I just think and remember vividly that I did (because I do). It can't be her fault for not having physically been there to see it.

Life is still stupid. Well, stupid funny though I don't really report on the funny all that much these days. It's probably because I've seen it so much it's stopped being funny and now strikes me as just painfully aggravatingly human. Plus I think I already established that I am nowhere near as funny as I thought I was. If I ever become a stand up comedian I'm going to call my act "talk out the stupid", but - there's probably no need for a but there. I wasn't thinking of any follow up when the sentence ended, but then I got there and it was like hitting a wrong street, but you don't want to look lost, because that's when they mug you and take your laundry money and call you a pussy faggot, so you walk down the street and go another two blocks before doubling back on a side street in a big loop so that you're gone long enough for the porch sitters to think you were just going to the gas station for candy and not wandering around scratching your ass. I hate it when the houses are watching me more than I watch them. They could probably eat us if they wanted to.

I was working on some poetry the other day and I jammed a rhyme scheme into a poem about a feeling and it completely screwed it up and the end result was this gross sort of mannequin looking piece of poetry with a colorful baseball cap on it. I was ashamed, but I shared it to share the shame and the accomplishment hanging around it like a fart of impressive proportions. I don't know, it just felt like the right thing to do. The rules of production dictated action be taken. In a way I had to punish myself for forcing it through to an end and wasting precious time before work in creating so odious a turd. It was a still birth. Sad times.

I'm tired again, but I don't know what rest will help me accomplish in the next few hours. I'll let me know. And by me I mean you. And by you I mean the part of you that.... that is... not really a part of me, but... I am fantastically thirsty. I have a mouse. Maybe I should draw us something?



It's not much but I was already starting to get a mouse cramp by the end of it. I don't know if life is sweet. I had this really strange feeling while I was making dinner that there was no one left to beat me and that made me sad for longer than I thought it would. I dunno. Sometimes improvements take some getting used to I guess. Oh well. Time to try and travel.

=sigh= miss that wacom pad. But at least we have you. Sort of. :)

///Luke Slater - "You Butterfly" "...come, let us walk..."

so what now?

this is more or less the new format. why'd it take so long? fuck you. thats why. but seriously... it was hard. lots of going in and tweaking this and that and then previewing/refreshing and seeing what changed.

i worked so hard on it ive had dreams in xhtml css markup for two nights running. can you picture that? i didnt even know it was possible to do that. ive had dreams in spanish when i was taking a 6week crash course in it... but yeah, apparently its possible to dream in xml while simultaneously dreaming in bad spanish. happened yesterday.



it was trippy. stress really does force your brain to ejaculate some pretty awesome chemicals while you're sleeping.

so, in the words of that smart ass from flowers for algernon... "is that it? it is." like the mutherfuckin buddha i have achieved blogger template enlightenment. i can now write my own classic style template or manipulate the new version template with something resembling ease. well easier than you can. is what i am going to continue to tell myself so i feel relevant and valuable to some segment of the population. because i am, thats why.

well, anyway... i hope you like it, cuz ive worked on it so hard that i can't like it. still a lot to fix on here with regard to ... well who cares. when i fix what needs fixing hopefully you'll notice. if not, get bent.

///Beck-"lord only knows" one of the better songs to work to in the small hours of the morning before you remember you were supposed to be in bed 6 hours ago. also a great song to walk home to at 3 am. learn the lyrics. sing the lyrics with a friend on that walk home. you'll be glad you did. or not.

the starvation diet 05/31/07

Subject : the starvation diet continues
Posted Date: : May 31, 2007 3:39 PM

more and more i ask myself "is it worth it" less and less. kind of a disjoint sentence, but there are worse things, like having your tongue fall out. in the grand mother fucking scheme of things a few months is like a few months. in a decade there are 120 months. three months. one hundred. and twenty. months. three months. 3 months not so big. in lieu of the beautacious anne to bounce my lunacy off of ive taken up reading. you would think that a writer would read a lot, but a writer, namely me, dont necessasarily do that.

dont get me wrong, i read a lot. just not a lot of the things i would prefer to be reading at any given moment in time. im thinking once i finish my american beauty | donnie darko parody i'll post it here.... and then start on a 14 page poem to my lover. yeah thats right. romantic, i know. whats that? not what you were thinking? you put another word in front of the "i know?" well good for you. you should probably congratulate yourself if you haven't already. you have? well, fine job. anyway, i want to do this because i want to mail her something. i've never mailed anything to spain before so this is somewhat of an exhillirating idea for me. probably not so much, you. i also want to get started writing a poem everyday. just because its healthy. in a very healthful way. to be in a very healthful way.

i really reallllly want to go to spain to be with her. i would potentially ride in a crate with a single airhole on a cut rate airline and assuming i didnt get there dead it would all have been worth it. but since i would probably not survive the trip ill just wait for her to come back, possibly twiddle my thumbs, and also possibly get a tatoo and another ear piercing. a tatoo of what is the question. i really wanted a snowflake, but now i feel like there are better symbols to describe myself to people who dont know me who might see me shirtless at the beach or something. im still leaning toward a snowflake but i could also go for animals (real or imagined), other elemental/weather symbols, and possibly man made objects, excluding crosses. i could also go for names... maybe. i should probably wait on names till knots have been tied... which may or may not happen. you never know how things will go when you're just 22. im trying not to over run myself to the point of being delusional about love. im pretty sure my results are mixed.

ive taken to shouting at my guinea pig. he doesnt understand anyway. more on our relationship next time. ill try to include more illegally copied internet pictures too. no one likes a dry martini unless theyre pretending to.

///mum - "there is a number of small things" a classic builder song. elements are added and added as what i would call the chorus... maybe just the chore chords cycle round and round... until the song reaches its peak 4 and a half minutes in. from there it begins to slowly unravel into a number of small things, each one precious and vital as a gem stone in a black velvet pouch. give it a listen on a tuesday night. yes. a tuesday night.