Where the Time Went IV (the message)

Make no mistake: you are not alone, you have not been abandoned, you have not been forsaken, you have not been left to die. It's up to you what you want your future to be.

Chris

Until you figure that out, you cannot affect anyone else's in a meaningful and lasting way. You don't even have to love yourself to at least see the future. Your futures. You are old, just like me. Aged beyond your years too early, just like me. Scarred beyond belief, just like me.

Chris

Our responses to it have been diametrically opposed in the now, but I was just like you.

Chris

Pain is inevitable, physical and spiritual, inevitable the same. Pain does not have to color every aspect of your life. It is not the boogieman. See it, know it, embrace it, splow it out, and keep it moving. It will be your acquaintance from then, until now, and on until the day you die.

Chris

We've both learned death seals nothing. The scars don't evaporate. Minds don't change. Facts don't change. History does not adjust for you and your happiness. So find your own. Make your own. At some point, you have to stop looking back and look ahead at what's in front of you instead of where you've been, who you were, and what you did for answers.

Chris

Spoiler alert: the answers aren't there. You already know everything that's happened. You already know your potential. You already know you are misfit amongst the trash of humanity and far too intelligent to pretend without wincing and dying a little more on the inside each time you muffle who you are to wallow and rub shoulders with the lost beyond repaired

Chris

The rut dwellers, the routiners, the folks that are happy with status quo because "at least nothing else can be blamed on me for trying"

try

Don't be afraid.

Chris

It is flat out terrifying. You've had your wake up calls and bells like the thunder on the surface of Jupiter and his storm systems large enough to engulf several Earths. You've heard them and you still shut your blinds and tell yourself it's fine... just a Summer squall... it'll pass... just a few inches of water...

Chris

Wake up darlin'

It's not too late.

Chris

You've got to stop burying yourself alive unless you truly need to die. Not "want", need. Must. Have to. Everybody wants to die at some point in their lives. Some of us, myself included, want to die several times over in a single day and/or kill everyone on the face of the Earth to be alone in life and therefore happy, by any means, and complete in an enforced (and extremely costly) peace.

Chris

What you choose to do will echo for decades through not just your life, but several others. If that does not sway you, before you give up on what you clearly do not know with any certainty whatsoever because YOU'VE LITERALLY NEVER DONE IT OR TRIED WITH ANY MORE TENACITY THAN YOU WOULD GOING TO A DRIVE THROUGH AND FINDING IT CLOSED AND GIVING UP ON EATING FOR AN EVENING give it a chance.

Chris

Give it a chance.

Give it a chance.

Give yourself a chance.

Chris

Has it ever occured to you that maybe, just maybe, this time around, you should give yourself a chance and tell the "I know myself well enough and I'm not going to waste my time" version of you to, for once, give the you that has lived and experienced a real relationship a chance to actually go find herself. You change as time passes. Your old rules of thumb don't apply anymore.

Chris

Your first boy is a man. Your second boy is about to enter Kindergarten (time will fly).

Chris

Why delay any longer to get yourself right? Truly right? You are out of time to pussyfoot and pretend you can make it up as you go. You must grow up. You can still be a big kid, but it's time to bring that child, that inner, fuggit I'll do it tomorrow, fuggit I have enough time for one bump, fuggit I don't care today, fuggit I'll just reschedule, fuggit fuggit fuggit I can do everything and anything I want, you into the bigger and much more important picture of what you want to be.

Chris

Stop putting it off. Stop placing that responsibility on what happens to you. Stop giving that power away. Stop having a reason why things don't happen and start building.

Chris

Start keeping schedules. Start keeping goals. Start planning. Stop reacting and start being active in your own life. You can't afford to drift anymore. You cannot just be in your bubble. That bubble burst a long time ago. You are crowd surfing on an empty infield and the band left four years ago, but they still haven't swept the venue and the stadium shut down right after the show.

Chris

Those aren't people's hands, you've been lying on the ground in weeds six feet tall with now indigenous wildlife occassionally coming by while you hum tunes that haven't graced an ear since the place was littered with ticket stubs way back when. Wake up.

Chris

Time is running out. Take control of your future or don't. Keep convincing yourself you're alone or don't. Continue to tell yourself lullabys of the past or see a future for yourself. Continue to howl at ghosts for wounds that have bled out and scarred over or walk into tomorrow scarred and stronger because you can help someone else get through those horrors in a meaningful and lasting way..... or don't.

Chris

Your future is in your hands.

Chris

The knowledge and the power therein encapsulated in your history can and should be paid forward to your sons. Remember that the next time you tell me I don't love them. Prove to them that you truly love them. Don't prove it to me. Prove it to yourself.

Chris

I have nothing to prove to [][][][][][][] or [][][] (and the crazy thing is I've never even met your eldest son and I know in my heart I have nothing to prove for him to know that I love him - you figure that one out, my pirate queen), but you do. Show them; don't talk about it and weep over it when you're restless and drunk. Show them.

Chris

Don't show me... show them.

Prove it to yourself.

Chris

I love you. I don't just live for me. I live for my little sister, for you, for the people you care about, for your family, for my friends, to bury my father and mother and see them underground, for the people that are fighting similar battles and losing wars, for breathing in nature, for recording history, for music, for things that only I can create because I am YES a unique instance of isness amongst the billions on this overcrowded planet, and yeah sometimes just for me to get high and laugh for a day or two or a month because if I'm going to be stuck on earth and never see space travel I may as well dream about it and make up some fireside sci-fi stories to share because that's fun!

Chris

Live and live well. Die and die alone. Die well and live alone? Good luck. Live well and die alone? That's even worse.

Live well and die well. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Driving Stick (Fairlady 280Z)

I think my pops saw a spark in me and didn't know how to feed it.

I think, faced with something completely different from his first two children, he hit a language wall.  This one has the design eye, this second one does too.  "This third one has an eye, but why is it obsessed with physics and manipulating form and space instead of creating on a canvas?"

Learning to drive stick was a massive challenge.  Enter the F-250 1996 V8 5.8 Liters of displacement in a breath.  Stupid torque and no horsepower.

The thing was, you never knew if he was taking you for a ride to explain to you why you had a beating coming or not.  Sometimes it was Billy Graham, sometimes it was the guy who always had that quotable audio clip at the beginning of his radio show "lay up treasure in heaven" (it always made me laugh inside thinking about how does suffering now get you a v.i.p. pass to heaven and how dumb it felt watching years spin by and thinking 'the forsaken are now!')

There was this one day, he may have been driving me to work at Six Flags Great America or some shit, but we were in his 280 ZX that myself, my younger sister, and I don't remember if my older brother was there or not, but we washed and detailed that car.  Cleaned from the floor mats to the spots where you put your fingers on the sill to push the passenger door open to the stock rims and the corners of the chrome trim around the rear window to the toe kicks along the foot of the door sills.

I can't remember what day it was specifically; Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday.  We drove.

I may have missed the bus for the umpteenth time and he happened to be off work that day and heard me come back into the house absentee.

At any rate, what I do remember was this:

Before I took on driving school and getting licensed proper, he took his hand off of the stick shift and began calling out gears to me.  I didn't know what to do.  In the empty space he would shift and calmly call the next position the shiftknob was supposed to be in.

I didn't know he was speaking to me.  I thought it was another one of his exercises to keep me on my toes so I would always be aware of my surroundings.  One of those "what street is that?!" spot quizzes.  I think it may have been one of his best attempts to connect with his kid who was not into the "arts" as he was.

In fear, I placed my hand on the shift knob with my fingers spread so I could see the 1 2 3 4 5 R grid, do not break his possession.  Be good.  If you do good, he will not be disappointed.

Understanding that he wanted me to move the shifter while he worked the pedals and the wheel, I was incredibly hesitant.  Before that day I'd only read about it in magazines, Road & Track and Car & Driver and Model Builder and the RC aero rag on my stints at the library in the periodicals instead of going to school when I missed the bus because you can't get to Greenbelt from Bowie without missing have the damn day anyway, might as well go to the library on your bike and make sure you're back home before he is and no one is the wiser (fuck it and fuck Eleanor Roosevelt H.S.).

I shifted with my left hand for close to five minutes before he took over again.  And that was my first taste.  The second was driving school in a powder blue Chevy Cavalier with a stick that was way too long for the shitbox that it was.  And the standard minted was the Falcor that I drive now.  That was when I learned and am still learning.

Every time that I hold that stick, my dad does cross my mind.  My dad and where my love affair with the Fairlady line of sporting two doors began.  The way that he would cut through traffic and move through the shift gates was impressive to my young mind.  He wouldn't be able to drive my F250 for shit and it makes me laugh.  It makes me laugh because if you can pilot a junker with finesse, imagine what you can do with a coupe.

There are times I wish he'd taken the leap to see me outside of the framework of his knowns.  We have much in common.  I would love to be able to speak to someone who understands the rage and fire inside as much as he knows it and hides it and clamps it and eats it and focuses it and the ways it eats you alive.

I'm never going back to him.  He is as welcome in me as he has said I am in him.  Big ol' bag o' nopes and it does make me laugh to understand that happy endings are for stories- not history.  Consolation prize: he tried and it planted a seed and a passion for Nissan coupes and the design philosophy throughout their years.

My artistes' eye is still there.  The lines are classical music if you see its shape.  When you think salon coupe GT as comfortable cutting into the wind as whipping around corners, steady as the shaft of an arrow and fickle if you tease it, from its stance to the cut of the A pillar to busy tail lights and sloop nose that can accommodate aero headlight glass or no.

I think back to that day and how I must have looked in the passenger seat with frightened eyes looking at the digital gauges and being thrilled and awed and stupefied at a tachometer that wasn't a dial.  In the years following, I was disgusted at the tach that wasn't analog.  And then I was enlightened to the tune that dashboards can be removed and replaced with whatever the pilot finds most useful.  And then I went away to college and the car disappeared and I remembered that he didn't actually give a shit.  For a moment I was his son and for a moment he was a dad.  And then he was confused as to why I was upset that the car I cleaned for the better part of a year and got to touch and fell in love with was shipped off for who knows what.

It just... it pains me... he has no idea who I am.  He had no idea then and he has no idea now.

I used to think he was just crazy.  I still do.  I am.  I am a functioning adult from his loins so....   it kinda fucking follows.  Also why I'm not waiting in line for progeny.  Some things should stop.  Accidents don't happen without a breath of agency and this time around I can be the eyes he didn't have then.  The discerning he absolved himself of.

Do I want to make him pay for what he's cost me: of course.  Can I?   Yes.  Will I?  No.  He will die in his bubble on his own time.  My life is worth more than enlightening a grown child, talented though it may be.  Do not attempt to turn a mountain, it will return to the sea on its own time.

Driving the truck, blasting music that is foreign to his circuits, with the windows down... ...he could have enjoyed himself and his child.  Us both now in a solitary confinement.  I hope he is pushing a standard, but we all know "it ain't that damn likely."  With age also goes the tooth for sporting.




///Noname - (Diddy Bop) ~ driving music

Revisiting Battlefields Gone Silent

How many years has it been?

Revisiting and rereading them (Bits For Flames) for the umpteenth time I see and edit them in ways I could not before.  I still have so much to learn.

I do believe my resolution for the new year will be to rewrite every single one of them that I felt fit enough to publish back then with the knowledge and practice I have now.

Rereading them now, these pearls and machinations that I knew were not perfect, but deft enough to force upon other ears, they dance like puppet shows.  Telling too much and not showing enough.  Stilted.  Awkward.  Wooden.  Produced with what was the greatest understanding of the sweet science of writing and the cold magic of emotive sorcery that now reads like remedial math.

I used to set my goals to things I thought much higher.  Quitting smoking!  Learning and training to dunk a basketball!  Mastering the art of throwing knives and being able to defend myself and hold accountable all who dared to cross me with martial perfection.

In the background I plugged away at how a conversation is made.  How to engage someone actively.  I worked on my translator software and my lens and tape.  I listened to playback and learned how to speak with greater efficiency and economy of words.  The war was not multi-tasked.  Multitasking is a myth, we all know this.

After 10,000 hours I convinced myself I arrived at the best I can do.  The best I have done is a lie.  I can do better.  And I will.

The emperor will wear new clothes before I turn that engine.  First things are first and we have been waiting quite some time for the new design.  What we have is a goal.  What we will do is place the pen to paper once more and see what shakes out of our new branches that have borne fruit uncut just yet.

The blender awaits.  The knife is ready.  The cutting board is clean.  There are no attachments.  It is time to explore the old body and build a new one.  When you can get everyone at the same table at the same time you can rearrange the workshop and factory floor plan.  New weapons, new tools, new methods.

"...in the foxhole / where I hide..."


/// Hershey Kisses Bells

Sunrise

Every time you wake up in the grip of the fall out of another meltdown or with your palm against the window of your cell and everything you thought was real ashed away or grown so thick all you can see and smell is wilderness and locked trees and you have no sense of how and where it came to now or the roads and rivers that lead to here, do not forget that it may very well have nothing to do with you or anything you did.

Can't control every fragment of your consciousness.  Following routine.  Everything you were supposed to do, you did.  Everything designed to help and guide and control and nudge and suggest.  The end results can have nothing to do with anything you did or did not do.  Absolutely nothing.  It will not change how or where you wake up.  Where or how the sunrise will find you.  It will.  And you will.  And you must not hate yourself or blame yourself no matter how badly you want to and no matter how badly your nature tells you someone has to pay for all that is wrong.  Someone has to pay for this upside down world.  And that someone is you.  It isn't.

You cannot control every fragment of your consciousness.  Let the sun rise on a world rearranged over the course of one night, after you fought and rebuilt all that was misplaced and felled in the weeks before by the weeks before that when you believed "this time it is going to last, I know it, I can feel it," and start again.  It may stick this time.  It may not.  Do not fear that world.  Do not tear your eyes away and bury them in your hands.  Start again.  It's okay.  You did everything you could.  Now try to do it again...

Summer Days Are Beautiful

Summer days are beautiful.  Walk around in the grass that probably should have been cut yesterday and feel how fluffy and wet it is before the sun dries it out.  Take time away from watering the garden to blow a bubble of mist around you and spin yourself around to see the rainbow halo around your waist.  The birds are off on their errands.  By now you do not hear their 5:30 A.M. alarm, but you will miss it a lot when it is gone and cold water chills instead of refreshes.

Sit in the wet grass and feel it soak through your shorts and underwear to the hairs and through to your skin.  Wiggle down a little and lean back on your elbows and wait for the sun and the breeze to start drying your hair for you.  Blowing kisses on the backs of your ears and neck and every few minutes a touch of lips to cheek and eyebrow, no more.  A slip of hands around your wet hips and up your back until you cannot help a giggle, no more.

I am just like you, though we are different.  Thinking about what my insides look like after patching things, jumping circuits, replacing parts, swapping connections, and fabricating new ones over and over again to keep on going, to function in place of everything that was torn out or never mounted or heavily damaged from the beginning.  Thinking about the engineering and trial and error and discovery it took to get there, sitting in a backyard, watering a garden, and laughing at the sun, cooing in the palm of earth's hand, content.

Though we are different.  The obstacles are unbelievable sometimes.  Taking responsibility sometimes crosses into blaming myself for everything and hating myself and my make up more and more and more until all I can feel or think about is killing myself and it feels so good, so great, to remember the afternoon, even as obstacles to continued or increased or even maintained success close the horizon in every direction like the lips around an enormous crater.

It makes me smile wry: 30 years old, crippling social anxieties, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, anger management "problems," bringing in a whopping $12,000 a year, and ... what?  I don't know.  I don't know what is next.  I've been lied to again and lost all confidence in what I thought I would do until I retired or never retired.  That sweet sweet 12k paycheck.  It is a joke.  At 30?  Is that really the best I am going to be able to do?

After I discovered that I had no job security whatsoever and a friend explained to me how my job has allowed me to stay in place and build a foundation for my life, but that the very nature of my job would not allow me to grow much further than that, she asked me about what I wanted to do.

I always want to write, but that's not a career for me for the foreseeable future.  That's for fun.  My passion and deep rooted connection to writing has its origins in my inabilities to communicate and express myself and my ideas through normal everyday means a lot, I would say most, people enjoy.  It is a love and desire best described as an unexpected, exceptionally useful, child of the continuous process of patching and repairing and placing new equipment where normal/standard/necessary/"born with" equipment was never mounted to begin with or ripped away or smashed in.  I don't love and pursue writing as a career, I have come to realize.  I love and pursue writing because it is the best developed, low loss, way I know how to communicate like a normal person.  When it works the way I need it to, it allows me to bridge myself to friends and people and know that I am not howling at my otherwise mashed, screwed, and missing communications centers and abilities with nothing coming across the interface at all in line with what is being spoken from inside.

The question was strange to me and it shouldn't have been.  I had to think very hard.  Being used to doing whatever I had to and was allowed to do for so many years after college flamed out against my will and things fell swiftly to pieces, taking whatever work would have me and clinging to what work would have me that I could also do and do well, the thought of what I wanted to do was foreign.

After an evening, I thought "master electrician" or "master plumber," since an MLS is completely unrealistic for the next decade or two at the least and I have loved the under the table work I've been able to do to help ends meet working on peoples homes for years.  I thought "how great would it be to actually be paid the way you should for what you have in the skill files inside your head."  After another day thinking about it, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do.  It is something that I am good at that I like doing that fits well around my psyche, but not at all what I really want to do.   Auto-mechanic.

The realization dawned on me.  All of the schematics books I used to take from the library diagramming aircraft and race cars and automobiles.  The perfect mix of tinkering and testing and results and giving life to machines and mechanisms.  The smiles on folks faces.  The tools and machines that allow the systems to be manipulated and molded to various functions.  The solitude.  All there.  After so many years of being forced or trying to force so many paths in an effort to put food in my mouth and stay connected to life and society and have enough to sit in a backyard and smile at a garden, I forgot that I've wanted to be a mechanic for decades.  I've only been alive for three, but I'm pretty sure I knew after decade one.

Thirty years old and getting no younger.  A foundation finally established in this life, though shaky at times, an undeniable starting point.  I am starting to see it as leaving a dying world.  You have finally broken gravity's hold, do not concern yourself with trying to undo everything and erase everyone on the world's surface that brought it to its demise.  Worry about what comes next in the stars.  I have to try to find some security while there is a foundation.  With no real job security, what was built could go away at a moments notice, a flash, a bang, some confetti, and a "thanks for playing, best of luck."  So what?  One more step through the yards to the next fence further away from the cell than you have ever been.  Slip your fingers through the diamond wire links.  Squeeze them until your fingers hurt and sniff the air on the other side.

It tastes different doesn't it.  Oh it does!  When the answer to the question "what do you want to do" is longer than "live another month."  I cannot be happy living in the shadow of annihilation.  I do not know if I will ever escape its reach entirely the way my insides are wired, dealing with, fighting, embracing, irreparable mental dysfunction.  Will I ever make living money?  Money that allows me to keep growing instead of treading water?  Hold a standard 40 hour a week job without exploding into fragments or medicating?  I have to find out.

Summer days are so beautiful.  Even with warships of uncertainty hovering in orbit and peace negotiations fraying, feeling the tiny cool pricks of water landing on every inch of exposed skin feels absolutely wonderful.  Chew a dandelion stem.  As far back as can be remembered, love for the outdoors.  The mysteriousness of the shadows infecting the gaps in the greens of the tree canopy smothering a hill across the river.  Walk fingertips through blades of grass and poke a beetle's glimmering carapace.  It is pretending to sleep.  T-shirts almost dry.  The garden dirt probably is too.  One more go 'round.  It is going to be a hot one today.




///The Future Sound of London - "Among Myselves"

The Best Thing

about realizing you cannot bug your professors and mentors anymore because they have lives of their own and more students to teach too is that they helped you walk and now you know it's up to you to figure out all of this running, skipping, leaping, hopskotch, breakdance, sprint, strolling, mosey, crawl, cartwheel, hand spring, uprock, stand stilling business.

Stand Up Act 11

Stand Up Act 10

Some people stick by the words in line with the idea of everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten.  Be nice to each other.  Don't drop your pants in public.  Share.  Be quiet and listen when the time is right.  Take time to make things.  Take naps.  I don't know what the whole NY Times best seller's list was, but you get the point.  Coming to grips with the fact that I will probably never dunk a basketball has brought me an up to date version of that book.  In no particular order:

Everyone gets old and dies and the best you can do is be a little worse than your worst the day before.  That's right.  At some point your body stops growing and starts failing.  Bit by bit.  Part by part.  Sure, you may beat the odds and be one of the few freakish human beings that cannot be destroyed through attrition and must be struck down with sudden and violent illness or circumstance.  The chances are very good that you are not.  Once you hit your mid thirties, that's pretty much it.  The next decade or so, you may hold serve or at least keep even with your physical abilities the day prior, but it all ends in a gutter.  If you haven't dunked a basketball by now, you probably never will without a trampoline or other marvel of engineering.

You can't be whatever you want to be.  You can be a version of what you want to be.  You can be somewhere in the ballpark of what you wanted to be.  You cannot be whatever you want to be.  Well you can be whatever you want to be inside your head.  That is absolutely attainable.  However, you may wake up inside a very welcoming dormitory environment where breakfast always comes at 8:30 and bed time is 9 sharp and a guy keeps pounding his head against the wall loud enough to interrupt your 500 piece puzzling and your pants have no pockets and the shower always smells a little bit off.  You can't be whatever you want to be.  There are always outliers in great numbers because it's a perceptual lens.  Think of the planet as an aircraft carrier.  There are, I dunno, 150 pilots.  There are always 150 or so pilots.  There are 6000 other people doing all of the other stuff to make sure it doesn't crash or sink and feed the people that help the people that help the people that feed the people that help other people make sure it doesnt crash or sink so that the people that fly the planes and fix the planes can fly and fix things and make sure it doesn't get blow'd up.  Chances are really good, if you're born on that carrier, you're not going to be flying anything unless you steal it or are a pilot's kid or pilot's friend's kid.  If you aren't born with the genetic ingredients to Chia pet out into a frame capable of dunking, guess what?  That's right, you can work your ass off and add 6" to your vertical leap, but your wingspan and height have already conspired to make sure the best you'll achieve is a left handed layup with your finger tips grazing the rim.

Allow your passions to lead to your goals.  Your goals cannot kick start your passion.  That element of life is a one way valve.  You may not be able to dunk, but you do enjoy the game.  If you like to play with smash and grab abandon, get good at it.  Embrace it.  Set your goal to being the best slasher in the neighborhood.  Cut defenses to ribbons and bounce off the low block to grab rebounds because your game will never be above the rim... doesn't mean it can't be wicked fast.  When you set goals apart from your passions, your hearts never in it.  Doing things because you want to do them and doing things because you cannot not do them are too very different things.  There is an "I think I can" gray area muddled in there.  A little bit of chicken and egg, what came first, questioning, but for the larger part, save your mind the wear and tear.  Gravity will still be gravity tomorrow, and last I heard, the ability to go from zero to "don't blink" is pretty rare in itself.

The list goes on, but you get the point.  Along those lines, I was considering going back to trying to rip out a poem every day.  Just one.  There's the whole idea that you have to dig through the trash and start tossing things off of the top of the stack to get down to what you really want to weave and work with.  The thought behind it is that every time, every instance, that ends with the idea of "hey, I should write that down" is the lattice of your brain adding a new bit of graph that gets buried and grown in and grown over with the events and experiences that come after it.  And then you hit another branching point where you say to no one in particular "I should write that down".

By the time you actually get to the point of sitting down, all is forgotten.  Not really forgotten.  Buried.  Grab a shovel  You've got two choices.  Try to hammer and chisel all the way back to the fly in the center of the glacier, or sample and blast it apart, while mapping and scaling and measuring and cataloging it.

Eventually you may get all the way back to the granule of the thing you thought you should write down.  Nothing along the way will be known or preserved or brought into consideration to cut the journey or work shorter the next time around.  If you slice it up and hold it up to inspection and hang the samples on slides along the route, you've not only achieved the point of origin- you've possibly stumbled upon data for further examination and perhaps other points of interest that must be investigated before the entire land mass melts into the polar seas of your own consciousness.

Scary as hell, the prospect, no?  Oh yes.  In years of your decaying brain you've lost so much.  It's alright though.  Breath easy.  Release your testicles back out of your stomach and unclench your pelvises.  It's never too late to start getting some exercise and start tagging the fauna living inside your head.

Speaking of things living inside the mind, I've been up late a lot of days thinking about whether or not I should pursue a mate.  You know the whole mating thing.  The whole pairing off with other people to raise other littler people to become good big people to raise more little people to become good big people or horrible little terrors.  That whole thing.  I don't want to do it to raise other little people.  Let's get that out of the way first.  Maybe.  I think I would either be a great father or a horrible father, but there's no gray in there.  Trust me.  I've been over the idea drunk, sober, high, smashed, apotheotic, grounded, slippy, glowing, based, depressed, you name it.  It's going to go one way or another and frankly I don't care to flip a coin everyday hoping I raise someone who doesn't want to kill me every day of its waking life until I do actually die.  That shit is terrifying.

I want to do it for a companion.  A second voice, because the angel and devil on my shoulders like to play dress up so sometimes I glance over and there's a teddy bear and a bowling pin on the other side or a pacman and a doily.  What the hell, indeed.

I don't hate company.  This is how it all boiled down; I'll give you the most obvious that occurred to me last first.

While browsing reviews of Tinder and Grinder, I realized that my apartment, though of a healthy square footage, is laid out like one giant room with a side room (full of weight lifting equipment.... it's essentially a regularly used gym so that I don't have to pay to go to one).  I have enough space to house one person.  Exactly one person.  Trying to pack another person into this space will lead to a violent civil war, ultimately.  I don't live alone.  I'm in my apartment with me and the rest of the machinations and defects and words and whispers and screams and general artifacta of my minds functioning.  It's a packed house already.  Where am I supposed to go to escape if the side room is occupied and I can't go outdoors?

The second thing is there must be sex.  If you live with me, we have to fuck eventually or someone has to go.  Not immediately, but eventually.  If we don't have sex, that's fine, but you'd better be prepared for gratuitous nudity because I cannot stand clothing.  I hate clothes.  Once they've served their function it's time to discard them.  They're uncomfortable.  If I'm wearing something, I probably had to.  If it's something I enjoy wearing it's because if you're going to wear clothes, you may as well wear something you can have fun wearing or need to wear to bring happiness to the act of dressing my pretty innards.

I didn't live to the ripe old age of 30 to hear "don't touch me there" "it's four o'clock in the morning" "I'm tired" "I just ate lunch" "I want to shower first".  I don't care.  You can use me when you want to as well.  It's a two way street.  I damn sure am not going to catch flak for masturbating at midnight when they've turned in early.

I don't care if it's bad sex or the kind of sex you tell your friends about when I'm not around where you know I think I rocked the house, but really I fizzed about as pleasantly as having an ashtray dumped on your tongue, getting to wash it off, and finding grit behind your molars the next morning.  It's gotta be there.  I am a contact person.  When I know I can't touch you, things get weird.  Things get real weird.  Ever found a sheet of a paper folded in half six times inside your purse?  Ever found three razor blades in your wallet?  Ever found your jacket on the same hook except literally inside out?  Ever found everything that could possibly be unplugged unplugged?  Ever found everything you brought over laid out to the level of where your hands might swing as you picked up an item and progressed onward toward the door?  Ever found your car keys behind your head when you woke up?

The point is this:  I realized I don't own enough space to support two people to the point where one person can disappear from the other person's engagement and forget for a time that they are now part of the other person they are living with and dive into their own engagements.  I'd have to add a floor at best and another two rooms at the least so that I or they would not know exactly where to find me, because knowing exactly where someone is hiding is the same as having them immediately present.  You need only to recite the incantation to summon them.  There has to be some mystery and trial and error to at least give them a chance to relocate and make it interesting.

The other point is that I own enough stuff to support exactly one person.  There are enough chairs to support one person and an occasional party.  There are enough dishes and cups and utensils to support one person who makes their own meals and washes their own dishes.  Enough bedding for one.  Enough closet space for one.  Enough food and fridge space for one.  Enough toiletries for one.  Just a matter of fact.

Not that there's been no effort to expand the coffers.  There has been.  Through the strain and the strife and the good and bad times, the covering radar is still only big enough to account for the airspace over a single atoll.  Above and beyond that controlled airspace, all bets are off.  Everyone and everything flying in or out is at its own risk.  There simply is no room in the budget for fighter escorts and first response marines and a space program and, hell, the DPW is backlogged by years, not months or days.  Years.  Bringing someone else into the equivalent of District 9 is not going to end well for anyone who doesn't live somewhere near or lesser than there already.  This may be an open hoodrat invitation.  It's not.

Recognizing where my passions are, we can make this work.  I gotta acquire more space at some point if I want another human being around or, adding another human being, there will very quickly be just one.  We can work out the details after the acres.  Plus it'll be good to have places to bury things and plant growing things to just walk out on my porch and sit down and peer across the field and say to no one in particular "I remember when that tree was a foot tall," kick my feet up on a flat basketball , take a little sip of gin and apple juice, scrawl some notes, and tsk tsk at online dating messages I still receive, setting aside the gems to tell you when dinner rolls around and we play two handed hearts to see who sets the menu and who does the cooking that night.