AUTHOR.CALHO: If I didn't write it, I would be hitch hiking cross country to Maine and then Alaska in that order. While taking frequent breaks to spread leaflets. And sit in diners. And write on things because I wasn't at a computer. I may still do that in a few years. Writing this also helps me forget about and better understand the limitations of being human, and keeps me busy enough to allow me no free time to burn the world down.

THEMATIC.ABOUT : Collapse often. The things that hold people together and hold them apart and scatter brains. The things that make thoughts go boom. The things that ooh and aah and [expletive deleted]. Sometimes poking around the margins where responsibility ends and the only one to look to is the Original Equipment Manufacturer and say "but, I already pressed 9 for more options and the menus are exactly the same. Can you just replace it?" The answer will be: "please hold." Sometimes hanging out in dark corners. Sometimes following the train tracks. Looking for ways out and ways in and all the while sharing the things seen and heard and done and drawn and written and scorched and healed and teased and caged and dreamed along the way.
Showing posts with label prison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prison. Show all posts

7/10/15

Stay Positive, Opposite Day, Detours, and Paper

How funny would it be to wake up in your own car in the middle of the early morning after accidentally blowing your steering wheel airbag into your face the night before tinkering with the switches and wiring around the wheel?

The thought crossed my mind, walking home from the local store to buy smokes and chips.  Almost as good as chips and ice cream.  When I feel horrible, I prefer cigarettes because they make me feel a little less horrible without making me wish I felt an unsustainable joy derived from ice creams sweet and cooling goodness.  If only anyone could always be that smooth, creamy, and soothing all the way down to the belly.  The thought crossed my mind after walking away from my truck to go buy some comfit after I noticed my fuel gauge was malfunctioning and realizing the problem's solution was going to cost me at least $120 and 10 to 20 hours of labor at worst and 20 to 40 hours of labor, learning, trial and error, and no dollars at best.

I kept chuckling thinking about how angry I felt.  I kept chuckling thinking about reaching under the seat for my hatchet, letting out a bloody war cry, and smashing the wheel to pieces.  Only then, ditching the hatchet, pulling and tearing wires out of it with my bare hands until the airbag exploded and shoved one of my closed fistful of wires straight into my face and I basically ended up knocking myself out cold with a rocket powered fist to the dome.  Then waking up the next day with a deployed airbag, swollen knuckles, one hell of a headache, and one hell of a fist shaped bruise between my eyes.

Part of the reason for the rage is that I finished fixing another small problem with a steep learning curve and dozens of hours of labor and learning rolled inside only days before.  The truck is not falling apart around me, though it feels that way sometimes.  The problems are routine problems and I wish I could take it in for routine maintenance instead of d.i.y. desperation weekends.  The other part of the reason for the anger is that if I were paid more in line with my actual skills and level of higher learning, I could shrug, say "okay", and rent a car tomorrow while my truck sat in a shop for an afternoon.

Living near the bottom of the middle class is deceptive.  Bottom of the middle class, top of the lower class.  Living in the region can be deceptive if you have some imagination, some confidence, some helpful friends, and some ingenuity.  I have a one bedroom apartment with a closet bath/shower and mini kitchen.  If I take away all of the furniture a friend gave, all of the furniture I built, and all of the furniture I found on curbs or being given away by strangers, I have cinder blocks, two folding chairs, one of those university lobby lounge chairs, a sheet of particle board, and an end table.  Remove every worldly possession, so to speak, and there'd be a truck parked outside, a few pots and pans and plates, a desktop and pair of monitors, a console, a found tv, a few books and magazines, some shoes and goodwill clothes and multipack tees, some mechanical gadgets, some home and auto repair tools, and a printer and phone.

Imagination allows me to see what can be and holds the hand of ingenuity to find ways to make it happen.  Call it humility or call it living within your means or call it mining gold or a hobby, thrift stores are one of the keys to forgetting that you are part of the working poor.  The cream of the lower class.  Keeping good friendships is a huge part of the puzzle.  Without them, my life easily fits inside a 10' by 10' cell with a hole in the ground to eliminate and a spigot somewhere to drink and bathe.  Part of the anger stems from those parameters.

I have been heavily detoured.  Charging along the roads as quickly as possible in an effort to get back on some kind of track while wasting as few years as possible is frightening.  I ask myself what will happen if I miss a black on orange florescent sign letting me know my next turn is coming three turns from now and the sign at the third turn was never erected so commit this one to memory.  First and final warning.  The reason why it does not feel fair to me is because it is not fair.

I continue to consider the many branches not followed that have lead here, fighting for time to write.  I began to believe my father was trying to teach me a lesson about his pain all along and I am finally beginning to understand it, but I will not be able to understand until I am 48 or 50 or whatever his age was when I stopped talking to him.  Before that thought grew too large, I remembered he hasn't the subtlety or emotional imagination to allow him to pull that off.  I can see where some of his resentment stemmed from.  Losing all of the prime years of life and talent at the cutting edge of art, design, and martial arts bad-ass-ery to childcare.  Who wouldn't be a lot angry all of the time.  Though extremely dissimilar in their divination (did you see what I did there), the results are similar.  Cut away opportunities, trim an effective gesture here, clip a nudge there, ....

... I don't know.  I do not know why I never got the same support.  It would not have taken much.  Some days I am alright never knowing.  Some days it all comes to a head staring at your broken fuel gauge and doing the right thing and getting the hell out of the car without slamming the door and spinning 180 degrees to put your fist through the window and slash your own tires.  The world could've been miles from now.

I could be writing about my third year working as a librarian somewhere and moaning about coding database systems and dealing with angry patrons and making time for dates between writing short stories and working on my two part novel about warfare and keeping up to date on my space opera hopeful crown jewel I'm still searching out an editor for, however the third poetry anthology is going pretty great.  I'm tearing out the kitchen in parts on my down time when I get tired of writing and it should be finished in another week or two.

Today felt like opposite day.  Loading my truck up with bale after bale of carpet, a refridgerator door, water logged drywall, a cane and broken umbrella, armfuls of empty paint cans, a screen door, and three dozen other pieces of jetsam from the home I'm renovating's previous occupants, it was opposite day.  What I was doing should be my hobby.  I should be putting that sweat and blood and cuss into my own home, not someone else's.  When I go home I should be thinking about what I am going to tear down and visit the hardware store to work on next.  When I go home I should not be thinking about what I can write next that can be packed into the time it takes to shut my body down to hit the hammers and brushes and trash bags and saws again.

As much as I love working with my hands, I could find a way to work with my body in the face of an occupation that demanded I not.

"You're poor!  You're poor!  You're poor!  You're poor!  Do not be deceived; you're poor!"

Independent life is a horror show and funhouse of mirrors broken and whole.  I am staying positive.

What brought me back to a semblance of balance is remembering that the day is still young.  Independent life is 5 years old.  Five.  Five years ago you started stepping outside of your cell.  A year or two later you walked down a hallway and into a cafeteria.  A few months later you learned there was a yard and no time restrictions.  A few months later you found a gate into another yard.  It's getting larger and larger as long as you do not screw it all up and have your privileges revoked.  All of the time you lost will be compounded by the time you spent finding a way back out.

No one pays you what you're worth unless you have the paper to create the market.  Or the portfolio and charisma, in lieu of paper.  Portfolio and charisma is an absolute "and" statement.  The one and not the other turns into a luck base number system.  I will never know my actual value.  Maybe that is the worst of it?  I will never know if I am being over paid or under paid, valued appropriately or not.  The optimist inside, the petitioner, tells me that if and only if we suffer for as much time as we spent pursuing the degree, our penance will be met with paper if and only if we are gracious through our turbulent era.  The eros inside whispers about penance through joyful degradation,   The musician adds another kick drum, knocking over cymbal stands.  The child snaps crayons in half so both hands can draw at once inside the same lines.

It is difficult not to fantasize about getting my degree in the mail, tearing it in half, driving to their house, and suffocating them to death in turn, each by half, with a wad of paper.  That would be thoroughly satisfying.

What are you supposed to do when the toys you want to play with are above the grade you are licensed for?  What are you supposed to do when what you are allowed to do you can do very well, but the ceiling is opaque and the sounds coming through it are not in a language you can or maybe will ever understand?  Maybe I am paid exactly what I am worth.  If I have reached my ceiling and given no indication that I am prepared for or understand in the slightest or am equipped for beyond that ceiling, I am paid exactly what I am worth.

That's frightening.  Also true.  Harrowing.

Sometimes I understand that I'm getting too fixated on true freedom.  I get a taste of working something I can enjoy to support the writing habit and expect everything else to fall in line. There's a luck element to it, that I cannot unlock through work or optimism or faith or trust.  That operates on its own time table.  If I do win the lottery, I will take out full page ads in major cities for the hell of it, but only once.

Part of me continues to say it is not supposed to be this hard to make massive uncertainty and day to day, week to week, at best month to month living a thing of the past.  My state is, however, that fragile.  At the ripe old age of at least 1/3 dead the best I can do for myself is knowing I have at least a month to figure out a new lowline.  Fear the high lines because you know a low line is around the corner... ....what to do when you are following low lines?   High lines have to be engaged.  My spider sense is not tingling.  Shake the wrong tree and a warship mine may fall out of it, let alone a tank or soldier sized one.  The other story of America.  Every body wants to be a cat.  If you have enough money you can do whatever you want to.  Not that much money.  I mean enough money to swap cars, or pick up and move, or add and subtract clothing, or change lighting, or paint colors, flip what you walk on, change shoes when you feel like it, add and subtract channels, modify whatever you want to when the moment strikes you, eat out, order drinks for other people, pay for other peoples gas, buy extra fresh fruit.  It's nice.

I am still going to try to brew my own beer this summer.  Do not give me that horseshit "God works in mysterious ways" because chance does too.  The only thing better than chance is ingenuity, and the only thing more important and better than ingenuity is imagination.

I am trying to stay positive with some success.  Frustration and rage are part of being us.  Born here?  Sure.  From here?  No.  I've missed you.  Don't lose touch.  If you ever need to talk, do not forget my ear.                 I love you.                    I love you.       I love you.  I love you. I love you.I love you.Iluvu.Ilvu.Iu.U.I.

We'll get this thing sorted out.  We have a lot of time ahead of us, like it or not, we do.

Do not quit.

You have the rest of your life to make that decision.

It is opposite day, okay?

It is not wasted time.

Opposite day.

Time becomes more valuable as it accumulates.

Okay.  I am
with you.  Agreeing to never throw hands up in frustration.  Agreeing to ride it as long as there is still track in front.  Agreeing to dance as long as there is a beat to dance to, be it from within or without.  I am okay with you as long as your are
okay.  With me.





///Aesop Rock - (Gun for the Whole Family) ~ i've missed you for a very long time.  things got bad.  things were getting bad.  i had to remember that they weren't as bad as they'd been.  we're working toward a utopia of coexistence.  we're not there yet, but damn sure we're going to keep on trying while helping lay the ground works and maps and blue prints for the next iteration of our being.




/
//
///Alanis Morissette - (Thank You) ~ passive mobile adaptable armor.

4/21/12

T minus two

T minus two.  My knuckles are throbbing, but feeling my pulse and not feeling it inside my ears like standing on railroad ties and hearing the rails twang in the New York tubes is pretty nice.  Kind of reminds me of the travel of time.  Well, not kind of, it definitely does.  Tracking time has always been a weak point of mine.  Part of why I like to wear my keys where I can hear them jingle.  It reminds me that I'm not dreaming and what is happening is real.  You get used to tracking time properly, and then the uses you've made of common things become common place and you start to lose it.  Start to lose tracking.

Part of why one of the best gifts I ever received was a watch that set itself.  I never wear a watch in my dreams.  Part of how I know I'm dreaming.  Part of why I get so unsettled when I don't have it.  Endless wrist rubbing.  Still driving back from the depths of space, but making good time.  That's all I can really ask of myself.  Crisis averted. Not really.  Postponed.  Defaulted?  I don't know what the hell the word is.  All I know is that the boards went up red and one by one the status lights and checks are coming back green and blinking yellow and I'm not dead.

Coming back in touch with reality.  Tuning down the squelch that ran far enough out of control to induce panic. I had a dream that I could remember.  It was an odd reassurance.  The absence of breath snatching night terror.  Sleeping without sweating.  I'm learning again how to let go.  The reemergence of the bridge and the division of real and manufacture.  How to converse and relate.  Even though I am still refusing conversation beyond essentials.  I am forcing myself to do it.  Because without it, people eventually forget you.  I can and do spend days without actually talking.   I used to have fairly corrupted speech patterns.  Hearing sentences try to come out of my mouth was offensive to my own ears.  Still is sometimes.  Because I know I can be so much clearer on paper.  That and conversation was such a weapon so often used against me growing up.  I never much liked it.  I guess if I had my way everyone would have their vocal chords cut out of them at birth and we would all speak through written word.

But I don't have my way.  And it's not a bad thing.  I am a minority intelligence. Trapped in a minority format.  Cased in a pretty decent body.  I've got that going for me.  Can't complain on that front.  I could use an extra few inches of height though.  Went to get a new license before my birthday and current one expired and the woman at the motor vehicle administration desk asked me if I was still 5'10".  I thought: yes, you feckless drawn on eyebrowed 60 year old duffle of a snootch!  Gotta work on my height complex.  Because there was no way in hell any stranger deserves that sort of first response over an honest question.  What I said was:  yep, still short as hell.  She laughed.  I was glad I made the right choice on that one.

















I stepped out into the alleyway beside my house and the sun was oppressive.  My eyes have been unprepared for bright days for as long as I can remember.  When I look directly at the sky it feels like it vibrates my skull.  When I was younger, the winter sky was the worst to suck into my sockets.  It literally hurt to look up against a flat noon overcast.  It hurt to look near it.  You get used to the pain though.  And then you spend a few days indoors and the pain takes your breath away.  

I don't hate the daytime.  I know it's necessary.  My skin feels better after a good sun drenching.  Mechanically, I operate better with higher fidelity in my eye reads to mind writes.  Fewer hallucinations, sometimes, but not a tight enough correlation to make me believe the two are connected, but enough in common to at least give it a shot on the regular.  And then, sometimes, I just hate being seen.  Sometimes I think, people simply knowing someone like me exists is a burdensome thought they'd probably not entertain if they didn't have to.  I suppose I wouldn't if I had my way.  But who ever really does.

Something smells like cloves around here and I have no idea what.

I started a serial, but have yet to publish it.  A bad beginning.  There is a massive disconnect between my ability to express the images I want to express and the images I am envisioning that I want to express.  I'm thinking I will do it anyway and learn as I go.  Not like I'm getting into a graduate program in my lifetime.  Aw don't say that?  Just being pragmatic so I don't waste energy pining for nonsense.  My chances are probably somewhere in the atmosphere of spaceman and race car driver by now.  So I'm just going to continue to try to develop on my own.  Can't really ask for more, and with everything flaming out so unpredictably, why would you or I really want more?  You can't get in trouble if you're asleep.  You can't fail out of school if you're not in.  You can't crash a motorcycle into a freight train if you don't own one.  However, you can die in space, without ever once going to space camp.  That is a fact.  Write that one down.  There will be a test.  At some point.

The good thing, probably the best thing, about damaging yourself without ruining yourself is that it makes it impossible to damage yourself again, without maximum effort and eating one hell of a lot more pain, until you've healed.  The down side is you now know where the line used to be and can take it a little farther.  Sometimes a lot farther.  The up side of knowing where the line lies is knowing how to skirt it and test it again without making the same mistakes (e.g. whatever doesn't kill you makes you more than you were).  That is the usual application for me.  It's not always expanding limits.  Sometimes it's just learning the rules that govern your unique physiology.  Your unfortunate mind body marriage.

Staring into the barrel of another alley morning.  It burns, but we deal.  You can't hide from the sun forever and the world is calling.  I am looking forward to 27.  I hope 27 is looking forward to me with eyes just as hard.  Just as star drowned.  Just as ready.  If you want to avoid serious injury, you have to pull the knife almost as hard, but no harder, than you push.


///Deadmau5 - "One Trick Pony"  

10/21/11

Stand Up Act 6

Stand Up Act 5

I have been dreaming graphic. Memory graphic. It has been difficult to deal with still. A silly concern. Sometimes not silly. Trying to keep track of the comers and the goers cross bridge and who is lingering and who isn't in places they should and should not be. I feel like what would lend them all credibility is if they had names, but none have offered anything close to a name since I left Maryland. Since I left murderland. It's a strange thing. The namelessness. There is the thing in the white and tan ghili suit, man or woman, but definitely humanoid who shows up well in fluorescent lights and little else. The little man in the black trench coat. The woman in the blue dress. The tall and wide man who loves to wear khaki and from head to toe and never talks. The bone spur balls of things I can only really describe as pre sleep sheep skinned and tumbling. The seeing spots in the middle of the day. The thing who offered a name, whose name I cannot record because it would serve it's displeasure at my efforts to disseminate its existence on the crown of my head by day and by night and chew my nerves like dollar a pack gum and suck the insides of my skull like a starved lamprey.

Times have been strange at the cusp of awareness. Maybe not the cusp, but the interface of understanding and the known with the less known and the abstract removed thrice from the models and modes of deduction. The experience of the thing is not even close to ... I don't even know. They're not ghosts. Some are new. Many are old. Some of them change clothing and change sexes, but I can smell them beneath the dressings. I can smell their blood in the marrow of their bones as clearly as they can smell and find mine across state lines. With them it is always a matter of time. Sometimes I have to trick myself into being alone, put on the little blinders and the nose muzzle and slip the bit between my teeth so I don't swallow my tongue while I run so hard and so tuned, but I'm faking it.



and I'm just talking. Trying to talk some things out. Orient myself. I cannot tell if I'm air locked or just cold. It's 58 degrees in my apartment. I should fix that. Six hours later, the temperature is fixed, but my geography is not. There are a lot of things that made me laugh today and I'm trying to remember some of them. Trying to keep my insides in. Browsing my old day time notes. And by daytime I mean work time. And by work time I guess I mean night time.

As a side note though, do you ever get into those odd temperature situations? For instance the break room where I work is already kind of a hole in the wall with some chairs scattered around. Kind of like a refrigerator box behind K-Mart that someone saw and said to themselves "yeah, that would be a cool place to hang out for the next ten years of my life" and then adopted a stray one legged pigeon and fed it corn puffs until it was eaten by a stray cat. That kind of break room. Actually, I don't even believe it would be a stretch to say there are probably better cafeterias in most underfunded high schools than the place where I work. That's not the bad part about it though.

I'm the kind of person who just loves opportunities to eat. Not that I'm fat. Not that I particularly love delicious food, even though I do. Who would really say no to an open flame seared, seasoning rubbed slab of rare beef. Like, bleeding delicious, with buttery asparagus and sesame seeds and I am getting way ahead of myself as I can afford to eat that, maybe, twice a year. Two times out of a year. That's thirty minutes out of 60 minutes multiplied by 24 hours multiplied by three hundred and sixty five days. That's gotta be a tiny fraction. Anyway, I love eating. With a passion. My mouth just needs to have something in it at all times to be truly happy. I would have made a pretty awesome shark in another life. Perhaps a penguin. Also pornstar? That should probably be on the list. But I love food, so any opportunity to sit down and eat is a great thing. Not good, great.

How often do you run into opportunities where someone sits you down and says "if you pass this background check we won't pay you to sit and relax and eat for thirty minutes, but we will pay you to sit and relax and eat for another set of thirty minutes, but there's catch." And you slide to the edge of your seat and get nervous. Am I going to have to kill someone? Am I going to have to whore myself? Am I going to have to drown a family of kittens? And then they come back "the catch is the thirty minutes will be broken up into two fifteen minute blocks and settled at opposite ends of the thirty minutes we will not pay you for." Awesome. So any chance to sit down and eat is a good thing, because there are people with jobs that allow them to sit down and eat zero percent of the time. Literally if they are caught sitting and eating, like humans are wont to do, they will be fired for not being perfectly mechanical.

So the bad thing about this prison break room cafeteria hole in the wall with chairs that were shat out of plastic molding machine once every second and probably as ergonomic a bed a refrigerator box's floor is that it is eighty degrees in there. I bike to work. By the time I get in I am sweating pretty much from chin to ass cheek. Hiking up the stairs to the lockers and the break room after pummeling my body just to get to work is a bother. Not intolerable. Not even difficult. Sometimes tiresome. It is kind of ridiculous that if you were handicapped you would basically be ass out of luck if you wanted to watch tv or have a table in front of you while you took your breaks, but having eighty degree heat bust you in the face is like getting on a bus and having the fattest, sweatiest, cheese smellingest person get on the next stop and not sit next to you. Sitting next to you would be okay. Contact with people is unavoidable on a bus and sharing a bench is just part of the contact contract. However, when people stand next to you it's a whole different set of acknowledged boundaries, and when heavier set, fatties, stand next to you and your ear is two inches away from the bulging gut and you can hear the carnival of their digestion, it gets weird. It gets real weird and uncomfortable is all I'm saying.

Like, weird enough to make your ear hot and tingly for all the wrong reasons. Like having a complete stranger at a party come in really close to you and drop a hand in your lap. Your crotch sends the signals up to your head and your head is like "alright, this is good. We are on the right track here, drunken stranger" and then they bring their lips up close to your ear and you're playing it really cool. You're too cool for blushing. Highschool kids blush not adults (you pedophile), but even with all of your super pro control and James Bond coolness, your ear never does get the memo and all the blood that should be in your cheeks rushes to your prickling ear and then the person whispers something like "I'm so horny I could take a long walk on a beach, and knit for hours, because I really really need to use the bathroom after eating that many tacos and I want you to watch," and you kind of have to step back and rub your eyes because they either actually said that or you are way higher than you thought you were. And that's why I hate riding buses. Shit gets real weird, real fast. That's what it's like walking into this break room most days. It is break room in which it is impossible to relax. Someone basically said "hey, do you know all of the things that can make relaxation impossible? Well let's take all of those things, combine them into a single room with easy to clean floors (because someone is eventually going to throw up their lunch) and then let's put a television in there to lure them in and then a camera to capture the hilarity that ensues."

It's an odd temperatured situation. And I have no idea why. But when you run into a situation where the setting is alright, but the temperature is way off it becomes impossible to do what it is you went there to do. Try having sex at fifty degrees. Ain't going to happen. Sure, maybe you'll get it up, maybe you'll get all warm down there. But unless you've got a blanket, eventually your skin screaming at you "good lord, it is cold as fuck, what the hell are we doing without clothes on" will pretty much trump that. Try playing a sport at a grossly incorrect temperature. Baseball at one hundred degrees? Sure it can be done, but good luck keeping eighteen unpaid individuals in a pick up game when their couches, cold beers, and coldcuts are waiting for them back at their homes. I think that's what I ran into today. Trying to get my thoughts together when it was simply too cold to think.

Situations where you can't hear yourself over your body trying to survive. On a completely unrelated note, is the hallmark of the late eighties generation sarcasm? Maybe not completely unrelated. I was just thinking that maybe with all of the nebulous threats to being and the rise of open sharing and the sense of "what have you got that you have to hide" and the unrelenting standard of interrogation and search and destroy culture has given rise to a survival mechanism. Sarcasm. Sure, some people are beautifully sardonic. Some people try to be. I kind of feel like a lot of the younger people and peers that I am familiar with find a sarcastic, sardonic, dead pan stance to be the most comfortable base state of being. A variation of the poker face. It's like a poker face with burlesque sequined and feathered sunglasses on. A poker face with a little personal flare so not blank, but not telling in a world that has become one not available for questioning, but able and unceasingly questioning of identity and intent.

Like the question "what did you do to your hair." There are many responses that are acceptable. Many responses that are reasonable. I cut it: is one response. I wanted to try something new: is another. But, how many times can you be asked that question in different ways before you wig out and say something like "oh my god, did something happen to my hair? Is it still there? I could have swore I cut it yesterday. Oh god, why? Why could something happening to my hair have ever happened to me!" as you fall to the ground weeping and clutching at your scalp. It's just the nature of the world we live in. Everyone keeps asking you how old and who you are and where you're from and who you know that would also cop to knowing you.

Sure some people still give the standardized responses, but I think a lot of people in our generation who want to be slightly more than a string of numbers and a birth certificate and a photo i.d. and tax form fall into sarcasm as one of the last free forms of interpersonal, globally accepted, expression. Clothing as expression peaks and falls and peaks constantly. There isn't really an age of clothing as expression. Drugs as expression, I think peaked in the seventies. Is that fair? I know new drugs came along later on, or were in development and then came to fruition later on, but that's definitely a negative. People don't look at users of pharmaceuticals and think "wow, man you are seriously expressing your take on life and it's battles." What they think is "wow, man who raped you when you were five," or "wow, can you really not cope with your white bread existence," or "unlike bacon, everything is not better with glow sticks." Pot heads are probably the exception. And amphetamines that do not have to be smoked or injected. Those people aren't users by today's definition. They're modifiers. Suped up. For one reason or another they need to enhance certain abilities or muffle other sensitivities and so aren't really expressive. To say there are expressive is to say that someone who closes their eyes in a horror flick is expressing their inner self. Nope, they, like most normal people not desensitized to acts of brutal violence through television, news media, film, and video games, happen to not enjoy watching someone get their head twisted off. They are modifiers, not necessarily expressive. And that's what's up.

It's not the culture of harder drugs that are a way of life as much as they are a means to continue living. The old adage of "source of and solution to". Maybe if everyone wasn't so sarcastic things would be more straightforward. Hobbled senses of humor being symptomatic of hobbled senses of being maybe? As expression and avenues of expression become more vacant there is the old mainstay of sex. Being utterly personal and completely void of pretense sex still expresses who you are and in that opposite way of expression spread across the surface of being, sex is much more a sense of being spread across pure expression.

I mean think about it, the lady behind the desk at the dmv is in principle a sexual object. She is a vagina with a lot of extra things draped around it that define her self, but in a pure sense she is expressible by her vaginality at her core and everything else is in place to facilitate that expression. Same goes for the guy. It's like the core motive of man is perpetuating itself and everything else is in place to ensure its perpetuation. So if you're sitting on a train in rush hour and all you see are hovering breasts, vaginas, cocks, and balls all around you, you're not tripping. You're seeing through the bullshit. Or you are absolutely tripping your brains out and should probably not be inside a metal sardine can powered by coils of wire and magnetic fields twenty feet below the surface of the earth inside a dark tube. Or you are in highschool and are writing on post-it notes "you smell nice" to the person next to you and you realize you will probably never land that date to the prom because you are expressing yourself backwards, as far as the rest of the population is concerned, but hell, if you don't tell them, who will?