The Best Thing

about realizing your sense of humor is directly tied into the belief or disbelief in the supernatural and ghost stories are ghost stories as the starting ground and the turn of the gate always jams backward and that is unfair and that realization nudging you toward a shelf of acceptance...     no...

about realizing your sense of humor is uncommon is that they (some) will laugh with you.  Others will allow it.  Some of the caucus will grip their sides with glee.  Others will hold their chins and wag their horned heads.  And they all will be there to see you.

Nine One One Two

"Every year, exactly this time of year."  Well every since and before.  The tension of the holiday season is already cinching.  Where will you go?  Who will you see?  Who can you adopt for family?  It does make me anxious.  Is alone okay?  OF COURSE!  Why all caps?  Am I crazy?  Did you hear that?  We've talked it over several dozen times and dozens of those more through the years.  Yes, of course it is okay.  No, you are not crazy.

"Pitter patter, my little heart."  It races from time to time.  Little panic attacks.  Solitary is the frontier and solitary it will be.  That's where you work best.  You'll still meet people and see families and couples and the like.  It is certainly less than the usual or equal.  Do not believe that holidays with yourself are anything less than their holidays.  They would be miserable in your concept of a holiday and you would be severely uncomfortable in theirs.  It's okay to peek between the slats from time to time.  That is universal.  Their anxieties are the same as yours with different window dressing and frames.  Rest assured, they feel something too and that is fine.

Nine eleven, however many years out, has changed a lot.  The rage of being denied enlistment has faded.  It only took ...  four ... seven ... shut up!  Far enough away to laugh about how I thought that idea could work.  Thinking back to the earliest years, it is funny to think that I thought I might've been able to make it by as a kept man.  Good god, I would've been far too bored.  Seven plus years separated from the bid to enlist, it has been reaffirmed one hundred times over that I would have gone insane trying to make a career out of it.  As a way to form a base and small nest egg, sure it could've worked, but my lack of mental stability would have failed spectacularly.  Maybe not the first year, maybe not the second year; the chances would have increased exponentially from day .0001.

I'm completely over the war on terror.  There are so many things that have come to light in the intervening time domestically that are so incredibly glaring and depressing.  So many more pressing internal wars that reached cease fires and truces without any actual resolution that are winnable & endable.  The fact that they still exist isn't the surprising thing.  It is.  Cultural change moves at a glacial pace.  As interconnectivity and access to information grows and shortens in its difficulty, the pace feels slower and slower because you can give a person a library of five books and a library of five thousand and it won't change how fast or slowly they choose to read.

Thinking about that day, I remember the anniversary that I couldn't remember for two years (was it three?) until I finally got it right.  Being in relationships is hard.  Do you remember the day you asked me if we were dating?  Kind of.  Is that today?  I don't remember the exact day, but I do remember being nervous as all hell and wondering about it for weeks and if I asked you and you said no would I ask you again or storm out or wait a few weeks and ask you again.  The day that you gave me a lollipop or the day of the formal dance?  Laughing thinking about it now.  I still cannot remember which day it was, but I know that it is a day to remember.  Wherever you are, I am glad that you know that you are loved and I am glad that you are with someone who is a part of you.  The years we spent were not for nothing.  The futures opened.  The years to come are their own.

Solitary progressions.  Nine eleven is also walking beside a cemetery.  A museum of displays and marble hand rails and floor tiles laced in sterling grout.  Rose and magenta tinted chrome and glass.  The past brought to life for a single day.  Compressed, labeled, and plaqued.  The westerly wing of the grand mezzanine of leTauran Atu Gothans, a 78 acre compound.  I don't visit there often.  About once a year, I try to look at the exhibits again.  Sometimes the maintenance men are about and they'll open up a case to let me get a close look at the taxidermy.  It is pretty amazing the way hairs are placed and tacked together to form entire swatches of skin that can stretch over the plaster molds.  The lighting isn't always great, but sometimes the exhibits are moved around to different enclosures to light them better.

I'm nowhere near a writing rut.  I can't stop doing it inside my head.  I have to take the time to do it outside of my head.  Part of how I've adjusted to protect myself from myself has been finding other things to do.  "If you can just stay distracted long enough!"  Out of focus.  I've been trying to do a lot in the physical world, however.  Trying to adjust to the modern world of smarter smart phones.  Trying to adjust to larger work loads and responsibility.  Trying to see the world with a larger lens.

Trying to see more possibilities and potential without getting swallowed whole in their ocean.

For some years, I mourned.

Part of me still does.

The deaths I died.

The deaths of possibilities.  So close to another and another friends birthdays and the lives that faded and blew out like candle wicks.  The scent of the smoke still fresh and undeniable and intoxicating in their aroma.  When does smell memory fade?

9,238 cigarettes before you lose your sense of smell, chief.   Oh.  Thank you, statistician?

I know I haven't been keeping track of holidays or birthdays.  I keep telling myself:  "we're just going to backtrack and bang them all out at once and get caught up to the now, piece of cake!"  That philosophy has fallen completely flat.  Of course I am beating myself up over it.  It is important.  Without consistent data points we cannot know where we are.  Holidays are perfect times for evaluation.  How the hell old am I anyway?  I need to take care of the backlog or at least try to ... at least let go of it.  That time cannot be restored.

Projecting a life span of 75 years with maximum outcomes: you live .205 years each day of your life if every birthday is a new beginning and a new iteration of yourself and you will only live a maximum of 75 years in each iteration.

147 days have passed since your birthday.  You are experiencing the rise of a new adult form convulsing through its last growth bursts.  You will not die soon.  200+ days until you return.  This is a strange time for you.  Adolescence continues to shed.  Try.  The carapace will split and you will free yourself for the wind.  The new skin will harden in the Winter.




Nine eleven is a quarter post of sorts.  So many things changed and so many things continue to.  Resolved to death, yes.  Resolved to its exact date, no.  In meta-jail, I have been granted so many larger and larger play grounds and exercise areas.  I've been granted larger and larger libraries and degrees to work and play on while I spend my time in solitary.  The clock is ticking on the next ring of the compound gates to open and I have to be patient while the paperwork runs through the levels of the office's in/out boxes and gets stamped and I have to go in for interviews and hearings and have good composure and appear civilized and remorseful and hopeful and aware and reticent and reflective and playful, but not too much, and deprecating and confident and ... all at once.  I don't have to do any of that.  I have to wait. I don't know how far out the compound goes, but I heard there is another gate over them hills once they fix to open this one.

As the years tick on, I learn how to be more like you and I learn what the differences actually are between us.  I know we are not the same.  Far from it.  It is incredibly reassuring, as we walk, to understand better what those differences are.

The mission: to leave a map for the next person that is at all like me.  "It's a great big universe!"

What helps get me through is knowing that I wasn't rejected as much as cast away.  There wasn't a fault as much as a rift in the known firm of space and time.  Blame dark matter.  "The stories you told were awful."  I hope that the maps will be artful.  You can only live but for so long with someone who is prone to spontaneous combustion before it changes from an endearing parlor trick to a recurring crisis.

Heave away!

Having an extra $200 shouldn't be life changing at age thirty two.  Something's not right.

Are all of your goals set so low that...  ...no.  Maybe?  Crossroads.  Is that all you wanted to accomplish?  Well, yeah.  For now.  It's pretty neat.  Hmm.  Hmm, what?  It's fine.  The door's over there if you need it.  I'm just saying-.  Don't let it goose you on the way out!

There is a lot of work still to be done and I am avoiding it.  Part of the reason why is because there are too many things I want to do at once and part of it is because I can only live for 12 to 16 hours a day without ending up cycling into spirals that will carry me up or down and anything that forces a deviation from that norm starts the engines that link and power chain reactions that will go in either direction and it is absolutely exhausting walking the rope and having to face constant failures because time ran out or constant failures because time drew on toward infinity.

I don't know what normal is to you.

I don't know what normal means to you.

Will I ever be?

Nowadays nine one one is a thermometer.  The potentials continue to cool while the core continues to spin and move plates and generate its own magnetic field. September, we dive through the thin layer of atmosphere and sweep and zip between billows of thunder heads, citywide lightning bolts and liquid metal rain drops against windscreens to land with the grace of a butterfly on the escarpment of a phase three elemental cave patio.  Grab our groceries, suit up, and walk inside to one atmosphere, proper oxygen mix that will not explode granted a match and cigarette, and turn on the satellite linked tele.

As the Septembers progress, I learn better what coming home means and what it means to me.  The distances will continue to grow and I will continue to fail at assimilating to common society, but in the meantime, I will explore more areas of the compound I was locked in when life began inside a cell.  It is a reminder that I am many years behind in my development and there isn't a time machine yet that will bridge that gap.

If this is the beginning of the solo-journey, I know I've spoken enough about being at one with the concept that life will be singular for the seeable future because I cannot ...... remembering the last time I was loved ..... laughing out loud.  Seven years and counting.  It really is dumb to expect to feel that again.  Think about it!  Let's say, one hundred experiences per day.  Five of them new.  Hell, one of them new.  That's 365 times your age.  No weight toward slate and how blank you were when you were young.  Now, to get an idea of the potential, multiply that by the people you've met that you can remember all the way to your earliest memory, just faces, not names.  You've met way more people than you can remember so it's still a gross underestimate.  If you spent the rest of your life meeting one new person a week your chances of recreating that chemistry are pretty much a lottery ticket.  Or you can recreate it.  The only person that will know is you.  That is kind of nice.  Or you can find something new.

The other thing is I really have no idea how to look.  I have some idea of how others look.  I have no idea how to look.  "So put yourself out there!"  Okay.  Sure.  That's the other odd thing: we have no idea if someone is looking.  Would it change anything if we did?  Probably not.  Secrets make terrible stories.

I think I would like to live with someone else.  Another human.  That day is not now, not six months from now, not 24, not 36, not four years, not four years and 14 days from now.  Nothing is wrong with me.

We're never alone.

It has a dual purpose.  In part to map and in part to guide and in part to track.  More of an organic willtuary.  A way to know that you have indeed pinched yourself and you are not dreaming.




///Marnie Stern - "Proof of Life"

Bonus Track

///Imogen Heap - "Daylight Robbery"

Collaboration Is a Minefield

How much of your hand should you show?  Once you have worked to find your voice, how afraid are you that it will be duplicated?  What if the person you want to collaborate with, the person who has the ends in hand, can duplicate your means if you have to go through them to gain exposure?

Eventually you can cut them out.  Eventually you will not have to worry about intellectual theft.  You'll always be one step ahead by default.  What if the person you have chosen to work with is capable of pirating everything you have created prior and your only proof is a series of time stamps?  What if you have the capabilities and where-with-all and all out gall and disregard to forge time stamps too?  What if the skillsets you have used to survive for so long, all thirty years of you, forced you to develop the skills you needed to make any claim of origin moot?  You can design locks and you also have a very fine set of lock picks.  The line between used and new blurs to infinity.

Collaboration is a minefield.  When an artist opens their book to you, enjoy it.  Do not see it as a requisite.  See it as a privilege.  See it as a pact of ultimate trust.  Closer than sex.  Closer than that bullshit conversation heart to heart over a beer or nine.  Closer than that time they drove you home drunk when you were too drunk to drive and they almost crashed, killing the two people in the backseat not buckled up.  Closer than that girl you've been talking to and haven't closed the deal on.  Closer than that friend that dropped you off at the emergency room when you died for twenty seconds and had to be resuscitated with a balled up fist to your chest.  Closer than that secret your dad told you when you finally got a couple drinks in him when he hit fifty and waxed nostalgic.  Closer than that blank spot in your memory everyone else knows.  It's a minefield.

If I show you how the sausage is made, do you see dollars or do you see a way to be a better you?  Do you see a way out or do you see a way in?  Will you steal or will you harmonize and create?

Every creator has the hang up of collaboration.  How many collaborations have started and failed?  How many flash in the pan, in the searing oil, spill over for an instant, lick the flame and light the entire venture ablaze?  Every time someone asks me to collaborate, I am reluctant.  It never ends well.  It never ends well!   IT NEVER ENDS WELL!  It is to a point that I know it is me.  I know I am at fault.  I go on tears.  I have vision.  I am the spark.  I am the fire.  I am the galaxy.  I am the clouds.  I am the sky.  I am the grass.  I am the atom.  I am the brick.  I am the pipe.  I am the fist.  I am the womb.  I am the rain and the sword.  The broom and the dust.  The wall and the fist.  The string and the mattress.   The thimble and the apple crushed during lunch breaks.  I am the napkin and the grease.  The spear and the beast.  The insect eaten bone and the loam.

There is never any commitment.  No real sticktoitiveness.  I churn and it burns and they push thumb to index and make empty promises and break appointments that actually matter and it goes round and round until it hits the drain.  That's not the end.  I go into the waste lines, shrink myself down and dive in, like that mini sub movie we all know that I can't remember.  Sealab?  Fantastic Voyage!  And I dive through the septic system after I get no response long enough and search it out and try to revive it and report back and the reports come thinner from the surface until it's a science fiction movie with a starship in The Dark Between the Stars and I'm hoping I can land somewhere and I do not want to do it again.

Forgive my apprehension because I will not forgive your abandonment.  Not again.  You say you want to collaborate.  I say prove it.  You say you want to work with me, show me something I have not seen.  Give me a reason to believe in you because your word is worth dog ____.  Hell, help me be a person better than myself right now and I will trade you.  If you call yourself an asshole and behave like one, the book of life will not open for you.  Fear is not stopping me, hate is not stopping me.  Waste is.  Time is.  Trust is.  Anyone can shout into a hole in the ground.  Anyone can shout into a knot in a tree.  Anyone can program a machine.  Anyone can build one.  Craft is another being altogether.

Another state. If you are searching for your voice, say so.  If you are searching for your base, say so.  If you need guidance, say so.  Make it clear.  As it stands, you have nothing to offer me.  Nothing within your catalog will help me refine, reinvent, understand, or see myself anew.  What you ask of me is to help you.  Help you do what?  Why should I care?  Why should I turn myself on the spit so you can eat while I listen to what a self starter and go getter you are on and on through the nights?  Show me something.  Show me you have learned something.  If you show me that you have learned something beyond your current state, I will engage you like you have a soul.  I will answer your questions and accept your challenges.  Keep coasting.  I will leave you behind.  Challenge me and I will fight.  Challenge me hollow and I will go through the motions right along with you and play down.

Hell, I'll help you bury it.  Our collaboration.  I don't take it lightly.  I do not like feeling used.  I know I am not disposable.  It is fun to feel like or be an inspiration or muse or riff target or mirror or foundry, however in collaboration I demand more, expect more, I want to be inspired, mused, riff against, see a reflection in you, and forge new alloys and atoms through you.  As I gift you, give me something to work with.  Turn my gears.  Blow my turbines.  Feed my generator, as I shovel coal into your own.

Do not make me regret this.  Not again.  Never again.  Do not waste my time.




///Mazzy Star - "Look On Down From The Bridge"  rainy winter.  the river never froze.  it is strange to be disappointed in the spring.  it is immensely frustrating when i can't talk art with you; when everything turns toward monetization and consumers.  screw that, can we look at a sky and say it's nice without you turning it into coin?

Prior To the Holidays

I want a tank for Christmas.  Or a giant robot decked out in yellow, orange, and pink and black.  Or a Gulf blue and orange Z car.  Or a plot of land on which to build my miniature fortress.

I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year.  He knows what he did.  Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus.  Robo Claus.  I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot.  I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa.  That dude.  That guy.  Nuke the North Pole.  I am already drawing up the campaign posters.  That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny.   The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice.  It'll save the world.  A few decades later, nuke the South Pole.  Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time.  You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.

It doesn't really feel like Christmas.  I haven't talked much about holidays.  We live in a different world now.  The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds.  I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am.  It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays.  I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time.  I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected.  A certain amount of migration.  Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount.  There's a massive difference.

For the first time I have put up evergreens!  The sensation and scent is wonderful.  Not a tree.  I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own.  I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window.  I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year.  Next year we will add some layers to the design.  Ornaments too.  It will be pretty spectacular.  By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.

I think that is what may have been happening this year.  A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course.  Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them.  All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.

The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline.  I'm up for the challenge.  I believe I am up for the challenge.  It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world.  It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is.  A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.

I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life.  It's not my new year.  Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31.  My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas.  An odd alignment of perspectives I guess.  I can't help chuckling.  It is an odd confluence of parameters.  At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.

I do not hate the holidays.  All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay.  Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated.  Actually, I love them.  Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least.  Those ten years will fly.




///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance"  when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.

Passports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

The Year End Look

I am tempted to attack some things there is not time enough yet to tackle.  I am okay with and respect and receive the temptation because the day is nearing and we stand on the cusp of something truly deafening with nothing between us beyond time itself.  Time's only enemy is patience.  The armory is stocked.  Let's knock down time first.

The 2013 year end look is a strange one.  Strange to me.  I crashed a car again.  For the second time in my life totaled an automobile.  The injury was an injury I never knew before and thought I would never return from.  It was probably something near or spot on to a partially herniated disc.  I am used to pain.  Used to adjusting for pain because a voice inside says it'll end eventually if you simply don't do it again.  This pain brought me literally to my knees every time I got out of bed for work or to meet someone or otherwise do anything that did not require lying down.  It was unbelievable.  Literally unbelievable.  It made me tear at myself and my bed sheets and scream in the afternoon and throw fits.  Everything worked fine except standing and walking.  In 2013 I became very aware of my age.

A friend of mine put it best: ten years ago, you hurt your back, you shotgun a beer and a whiskey short, have a smoke, and get on with life.  Now?  You hurt your back and you can drink 'til you cannot feel a damn thing, but that shit comes back as soon as your spine comes back on line.  You can't go through life partially shut down.

It's true.  Another year older, just one year removed from invincibility, or something damn near it, I am aware, acutely aware of physical limitations.  Invincibility has been thoroughly dispelled in 2013.  Respect for the injured and more feeble than I has been reinforced to incredible degrees.  Of course it didn't help falling down multiple flights of stairs after the car accident.  That one is on me.  I should have known where I was standing on the fire escape and not allowed someone to high five me hard enough to push me backward into the night air.  I guess I'm kind of a good fall guy.  I should have broken my neck or an arm or at least a finger on my way down, getting something stuck in the stairs and landing made of iron grating, but all I remember, three days after the car accident, was waking up looking at the top of the fire escape and their back door and the little light and thinking "wait a minute? wasn't I just there?  Why am I here?"

I went to a casino for the first time (with no money) and someone gave me a $100 chip.  I can count the number of times I've held $100 bills in my hands with intent to spend instead of pay on one hand.  Two of the five times were to pay for cars.  I didn't get to use it for fun.  I did get some long standing necessities taken care of though and a bill paid.  One step closer to actual freedom.

I taught myself to drive stick for real in 2013.  On a rear wheel drive truck.  I also learned how to use torque and how to use horsepower.  Yes, they're linked, but now I understand when to use which.  When to use a little work fast and a lot of work slowly.  Of course there's always the golden peak when you can use both at the same time, but high end cars are out of the cards for at least another half decade.  I'm salivating thinking about it.  My dream garage is still the same.  Still stocked up with late 80s Japanese machines and American muscle.  Some day, sweetheart.

2013 also taught me who my friends are and who my friends are not.  For much of the year I tried to be a friend to the world.  A friend to everyone who would have my ear and have my words, however fleeting, but I soon recognized (by soon, I mean it took the entire year) that what I was counting as friendship was not being counted or similarly given weight by the people I was ascribing it too.  It was heart breaking.  Truly heart breaking.  I remember crying on and off for several days as each episode unwound.  The penultimate was a multiple day thanksgiving celebration that was supposed to be fun.  It was, to an extant.  I was too much a different stripe to blend in and it was hurtful to me to be expected to do so, but maybe they didn't really expect me to blend that well.  Maybe they expected me to realize sooner than later that I should've left.  As it stands I only over stayed by a day or two before I recognized where I was and where I could do myself better.  Coming home was beautiful on that day.  

The ultimate was when I was left stranded by people I thought I could count as friends.  My truck died and a true friend bailed me out.  I've grown intimate with my truck of late.  Gotten to know her inside and out.  2013 reminded me of the bullshit premise my birth father put to me about a car that was supposed to be my reward for graduating Carnegie Mellon (which did not happen) that was his vision for us rebuilding a beater BMW (which flew in the face of everything automotive I actually do espouse and believe in) and it's been tremendous and heart stoppingly gorgeous keeping that truck on the road and at the same time by turns puzzling that anyone, let alone the sack of nuts that raised you for 18 years, could miss your values that hard.

It does make me laugh though, because there have been more than a few times I could've used an extra set of hands to get the job done and I thought about the gents and lassies that could call up their dads or moms and schedule a weekend under the hood or chassis without getting violently ill or stomach ulcers.  I appreciate that about people.  Sometimes I ask them about their parents because it's practically porn to me.

In 2013 I learned to slow down scarification.  In tandem with realizing that time is getting on I also realized if I ever do have children or adopt children there will be questions for me to answer too.  Questions I am prepared to answer and questions that will have to be answered as my nose and ears get bigger and nothing else does and my eyes continue to sink and my brow continues to crease.  The reminders still remain necessary and beautiful obelisks and world wonders to human history and I thank us for them always.  I need them.  Some mistakes you can make multiple times.  Some mistakes you cannot afford to retread because lives are in the balance and the house does not always win, but you can never go back.  You will die.  You will be consumed, make no mistake.  Every time I look in the mirror I am reminded and I need to be.  Inside of your skull you are your friend more often than not.  Outside of your skull is a flipped story.

The same problem does abound, though.  My development, my passion for writing, remains far too grounded for my tastes.  There is patience though.  There is gestation.  There is still the thirst for whimsy and dreamland.  There is where I lie and I know it.  I can feel it.  The attack is coming.  The all hail that tells me "forward now!"  I can taste it.  2013 was about defining starting points.  Defining relationships.  Defining the scope of the maintenance necessary for progress.  Did it have to take a year?  Yes.  2013 was about defining severance.  Defining which and what kinds of quests were worth pursuing.  2013 was a very long think.

The funniest part about 2013, it came around the tail end, was realizing that just because you can identify the group of people that you are attracted to does not automatically make them accessible or easily located.  You meet just as many air heads and space cases exploring your same sex as your opposite sex.  The worst, the most lip curling, the most eye squinting, experiences are had when you meet a carbon copy of someone you'd cultivate a relationship with straight, gay.  In my mind I'm thinking ten minutes in to the conversation: "god damn it, not this again.  Really?  You exist here too?  Who dropped you on your head?  Why do you have fifteen pairs of shoes and a $200 dollar love seat in an apartment you're paying $900 a month for?  Why are we going out to a bar downtown when there's one at the corner while you have a fridge full of wine and candy imports?  Three pairs of sunglasses?  Sunglasses??"  

I don't know what 2014 is going to bring.  I think my year to year expectations have grown foggier and foggier so I will add some definition.  I think this year (no resolutions) I will try to fuck a woman for some variety.  The whole "no concussions" thing failed miserably.  I had four in 2013 so I think it's fair to rule that out.  Broke my nose twice too, so that's out.  I want to do more art in 2014 too.  Life's demands put way too much on my plate to really put anything outside of my skull to look at and enjoy, and I'm not saying for you to enjoy, I'm saying for me and we/us to enjoy. 

Now that things have been better defined through thirteen, in fourteen I would like to explore that framework and see what and where it builds to.  New territories and frontiers.  I want a new scar for 2014.  A scar for the turn.  A scar for the "maybe" identified because in twelve the maybe had no identity.  2014 will be a quest for the whimsical.  A seeking out of the imaginary and a protecting of the physical.  We achieved many grown up tasks and came into adulthood through 2013 from its humble beginning in 2012's confusion.  It's time to explore the limits of what that adultness and understanding and thinking and domestication can ring when our bell is rung hard enough.  What music will it make?  Will it make music or fall apart with the strikes?

For the first time, in 2013, I had to shave down my knuckles with a pumice stone.  The scar tissue accumulated so thickly that I couldn't open and splay my fingers easily without fighting against it.  Too much contact.  I cannot fall into the trap of abusing myself in lieu of taking abuse just to feel normal and normalcy.  That's not okay.  It is not okay to do that.  2013, a lot of 2013 was about learning what it is not okay to do.  Platonic spooning was okay.  Talking about platonic spooning to their friends indirectly and accidentally by way of mentioning conversations they were not a part of, but must have happened after they left, later on when we and they met again is not okay.  It should be though.  Don't break my heart that way.  Break it any other way, but that is pure... muffed intent.  I do not have time for that in 2014.

I have accumulated old man hands at the ripe age of 28.  I am a destroyer parked in a lagoon and rusting.  You fucking cowards.  2013 was also about rebuilding my space craft.  I had to tear it apart and rebuild it.  It was gathering too many parts and pieces superfluous and useful once and never again.  When one part failed I hooked and slaved another component to keep it running.  Fourteen is streamlining.  Keep the violence down at all costs.  The love too.   Control.  2014 is focusing on control and dynamics.  It's easy to glass a city.  It's hard to embrace one and construct.  Consider the "what will and what can we build here?"

It does make me laugh though, to consider that I may be at a new base line measurement.  It is enticing.  So many things happened.  So much time spent alone and too much time spent in contact.  It does not add up to my satisfaction.  I will boost literary output in 2014.  It does not matter if you want to do it, it has to be done for your own sake.

2014 is action.  Redesigns are on the table.  Stand up act 9 is on the table.  Before both will come the year end playlist.  Let's go!  No sneak peeks this time.  So much left out too, but we'll get it in later.

///Shiny Toy Guns - "Major Tom"   ...near Earth orbit

Manifesto (just kidding)

It's tempting to construct manifestos when things don't go your way. Tempting to take the bum raps you keep getting and try to think of a way to correct everything wrong that's happened to you, letter by letter, number by number until you arrive at a list of things and virtues that can correct the world once and for all and make it, not only a place in which your alternate self who experienced all of the positive outcomes you have been deprived truly exists, but a world in which everyone's alternate selves experience every positive outcome they possibly can while only actively subtracting the negative and leaving the ceiling open for the positive (perhaps they won't experience as positive an outcome as they would have previously, but the potential would still be there).

So enough about that shite.

Everybody's different. Some people will never understand how to be people. How to be human. I myself am much closer to being feral, to identifying with the senses and sensibilities of the higher functioning animal kingdoms than the lower functioning partitions of society. I don't know if I'm the right person to ask what it is to be human. I'm comfortable there. I suppose if I had to choose which side of that fence I wanted to stand on, I know what side I'd pick. I can't hold it against the people that have never been down that end of the spectrum if they don't understand how to relate. I can fucking still hate them though. For a little while. And then I get bored because I can howl as hard as I want into that wind coming down from where they are, and they'll never hear me clearly. And then I get back to rooting around my woods for things to eat and things to do and other wolves with which to play.



Ire. It's there. There is no ire extinguisher. I can break all the glass I own, but inside those cases there is only an ax with which to fight the fire. Swing away. Go find a patch of grass that is not burned to crisp ash. Roll around for a bit. Run off into the burning woods again after the scent of the something gorgeous, eyes wilder, mouth drawn back from teeth and hungry for something fat and slow. And happy to feel my lungs beating against my smoke stained ribs. Just break glass.

Don't invite me to your pity party. I'll drink all the liquor and toss back all the punch and go dancing on rooftops singing praises to the moon and starry ash smudged sky. I'm not without compassion. It's just something that's hard for me to understand. To feel and synthesize and give back. Sympathy yes. I can understand that. Sometimes I feel like my heart is the bleeding heart of a broken little girl fallen into a ravine in the Black forests of Germania, but my head is screwed on with steel lag bolts and filled with enough warheads, .50 cals, and trigger happy children to stage a military coup in darkest Africa and enough warpaint to terrify the most elaborate and landed samurai. I do my best to feel. And then I take what's left and make sense of what I read back from the dials and switches.



///El-P - "Love Theme" ...love though, I guess that's one thing that stays the same, but even that... the understanding fractures. As if the symmetry alone is a prescription to live. The world is busted, learn to live in it and treat people right. No manifestos necessary.

Take it Down a Notch and Classroom Politics

Does the word "it" get capitalized in that title. I'm not totally sure, but I don't think so. So what's new today that was not news yesterday? Not a whole lot. Trying to keep the language clean as a habit. The F word was mingled in there two sentences ago, one sentence before this one, and I had to perform a mental edit. I guess the thing about the mental editing is that while I may be making myself more readable I feel like I am nailing doilies to walls that I have clearly punched holes in to hide the fact that there was an extremely violent outburst and it feels stupid to do. Almost as stupid as dancing with myself in a tutu in the mirror and pretending that I, outside of the mirror, am not wearing one. That was too much.

So the poetry has gotten a little out of hand this week. This is true and entirely my own fault. Or actually, I should say, entirely my chemistry's fault. I had nothing to do with it. I should be so fortunate as to be able to assemble and plan days of literary vomit, and the thing is some of it really is just vomit, but the best thing about throwing up is that the only thing left when your bled out is the thing that matters the most. The thing that giving up in words takes away from your interior and is thus valuable beyond price tags or comparisons or in any other way that value can be assigned except in time and energy lost (the purest value).

I was thinking the other day about models of punishment and something occurred to me (I hate spelling that word). Do you remember in elementary school when the teacher would hold the entire class responsible for some little shits antics? Do you remember how no amount of collective loathing changed his ways and more often than not had the opposite effect on the little shits reasoning? I still do. I still remember not being allowed to line up for recess until everyone shut the hell up and there was always that one bastard who just would not shut his mouth and the teacher would let us go after half of the recess was gone out of sheer pity for what he/she thought the repercussions might be. Sometimes, thinking about that, I wonder if he/she would have ever let us go if she knew that unlike the 40s or 50s or whatever older and more violent and more liberal years he/she grew up in (in terms of acceptable violations of the myth of personal space) the little bastard did not receive any sort of mobocratic beat down. Sometimes the world today feels that way.

Somehow it seems that everyone should be holding someone responsible for their behavior that is damaging everyone's ability to go to recess on time, but no one does. I don't know why that it is. I guess the thing about it might be that "how far is to far" comes into play. If someone bullies you but they never make you cry and then you eventually take the time out of your day to beat the hell out of them and kick their limp body into a puddle of mud is that too far? Your cumulative suffering is still probably greater than their momentary shaming. Isn't that not going far enough. Sorry Brian. I still fucking hate you. If I ever build a time machine rest assured one of my stops will be 6th grade, Maryland, south Bowie, 12:15, my fist, your fucking face. Sorry. I just hate how that whole idea of every member of the group is responsible for every other member of the group has been and continues to be twisted in on itself in perverted ways that make the workplace hell and how it starts at so young an age that it's difficult to imagine any other way for things to be.

I'm taking the poetry down a notch from this week. I basically doubled my output in one night as a result of ... I'm not sure. It happens from time to time. Things just blow out of me like a shotgun to the back at point black range and I actually do apologize. Stability is the cornerstone of something. Just nothing I make. Here's a one liner for your next cocktail party: stability needs capitalism like capitalism needs classim. Haw. Get it? Do you see what I did there? Okay, bye :)

///Aphex Twin - "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" I am playful tonight in ways I wish I could feel every single night of my life and share with the universe and it's bastard long faced serious denizens who think so much of .... wow that turned really angry. I am playful tonight. Stop. Love you, Aphex.

p.s. I'll draw you a picture next time.