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.

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"

Knowing Where You Have No Business and That You Are Expected On Occassion

You don't have to front load everything you say.  You don't have to translate at the end either.  You may be coming across better than you believe.

One of the most hilarious things was the whole "they took our jobs" rhetoric at the last election and the come back that they're doing jobs we do not want to do.  The funny part was my challenge.  It's a matter of geographics and debt.  I took the challenge knowing that.  Just to see.  Because they were taking our jobs here too, right?  What I got back was paperwork.  It's a little bit a lot of bit hilarious.  If you cannot laugh at that, you have no soul.  I still get email updates on it, but I am passed caring.  Yes.  Passed.  English, the most, hands down, complicated language.

My relationship with America?  It's complicated.  And I am dating myself.  And I am dating myself too.  We wreck up sometimes.  Slang for fight, no?  Yes.  I do not agree with everything we do.  I do not.  Sometimes I am on damage patrol.  Some times I am on altitude control.  Sometimes I am just sometimes and I am, having learned, not apologetic because people do get tired of sorrys and start to ask "why the bleep do you not just do it better?"

I will not give you the run around.  I'm just American.  I'm a little gangster circa 1925 and a little modern circa "what's the date today" and a little 90's grunge and a little 80's synth, a little bit of a late 90's "get money" and a little 70's rhythm and blues, a little bit of #$%^'n disco and a little bit of late 80's space rock, a little bit of 1960 fuck you and a little bit of 1950 be easy and every one is working for something greater because no one actually wants to be here, and a little bit of drum and bass tongued in with a little bit of pop talked down through the ages and distilled and reanimated.  I'm just American and I will make no excuses.

And I will fight you.  And then discuss.  And then fight you harder because I only wanted a breather and we may as well butcher language in the mean times.  They only get meaner.

I wish I could get along with people like me.  I cannot.  I am not going to stop trying.  It is a little bit of playing with where you know you have no business being.  And you know it.  You do not understand why you are excluded.  There are the times you are expected though and you do not show up.  To reverse the two would be gold out of lead.  Less cameos.  More booked seats?  I have no idea.  What I do know is this: if they ask you if you can make it, you had better go.




///Pulp - "Like A Friend"

What Scares You

What scares you?  What scares you?  What really fucking scares you?  That he's better than you?  That he's better than you in every way?  That the choice was the right one?  That she's still down there enabling him?  That the paper is still blank?  That the paint has gotten too old to use?  That he might be angry at you instead of with you?  That you are not properly equipped?  That the next gas station may be out of range?  That your keys are at home?  That you are being entertained?  That you're not incorporated?  That the bug may be permanent?  That there is not enough gauze?  That the tuna may run out?  What really scares you?

Don't make me wait.  I am exceptionally patient except when I'm not.  I don't know what really scares me, for what I've compensated for.  I do know what really scares me.  All of the above.  Very long knee jerk reactions.  Knee jerk reactions spanning days and weeks and months and now years.  I'm okay with it, I suppose.  We never do come for money, except when we specifically do.

What scares me is not the not knowing for sure.    What scares me is not knowing how to respond at an appropriate volume.  Of course they can tune you out at will.  Which is nice.  The option takes a bit of the guess work out.  I typed guest work.  It's true, though.  You are a guest.  We are guests.  And they can.  I'm not where the being polite or respectful or conscientious ends and being a good proper guest and friend ends.  Division by addition feels like it works.  The results are wishywashy.  Concernedly so.

Why will you not tell me?  Do you believe that I will somehow be irrevocably shattered by the information?  Do you believe that I will somehow be so shaken that  I cry all of the water out of my body and shrivel up and die?  It makes me laugh the not good laugh to think that may be true.  If you're not a friend, you're not.  Friend is the worst "F" word.  Loaded for no reason.  If you're not an associate, you're not an associate and that's perfectly fine.  You can waste time if you like.  Placate me too, if it twists your earlobe good when you get the itch.  I'm fine with that too.

I think what I'm trying to articulate is that what scares me the most is that I am in hot pursuit of avenues of communication and the way it comes out is a three dimensional graphics sprint into a brick wall, legs chugging, my little arrow on the map, my associates viewing and confused.  What really fucking scares me is not communicating in an understandable and lagoon clear way.

Though I may be a dragon, if you speak lizard, I can talk to you.  We can do dragon business.  Fear doesn't scare me.  Occasionally, day light does.  Police officers and their flashlights too, but I am civil and citizen.

I want to listen to the Penguin Freud orchestra and hear more songs about Easter Island and travel more.  Growing up American.  Straight up fucking American.  The child of explorers.  The child of, perhaps, orphans and seafarers now land locked and fairly domesticated.  The child of pressure and heat and weapons and bombs and "on threat of death."  A child whose fences end where the nuclear powered ships cannot go.  Yeah, I'm good with that.  How long does it take to breed the grit and horizon lust out of the genes?  How long does it take to saw off the hard nosed muzzle and graft in the gatherer for the hunter?  Fuck if I know.



///Seatbelts - "Spokey Dokey"  and they called me old fashioned.  they called me old fashioned!
///

Window Shopping

I tried to get happy and fell flat on my face so let's go.  We've tuned up.  We've laid the bones.  It's time to go.  It makes some of myself smile to say it out loud.  Let's go.  The greatest two words in the English language.  Well, one of the greatest pair of words.  Does it count as three?  No.  It does not.  Don't be silly, tripping over imaginary bags trying to catch a bus that left the same hour yesterday.

Count me in.



///Starkey - "Striking Distance"   attitude adjustment in progress.  please wait.

Vicious Paranoia

Saw the opportunity.  Memory songs.

Some days it is difficult to remember that you can piss in your own pot and not avoid windows and keep as erratic as possible a schedule because the truth of the matter really is that no one is coming to get you.  There is a boogie man, but he doesn't live outside the window.

Living by night is great when you are trying to control every aspect of sun up.  You can avoid the grift entirely if you work at it.  If he is trying to get you it'll have to be a crime in broad daylight.  There is a weapon in every corner so grab whichever one you want because, be assured, I have one closer to me than you, day flyer.  And I know where the spares are.

Come in through a window or a front door.  Come on.  It's silly though.  The concept of combat.  Asking for it?  Earned.  It still makes me laugh though, understanding that I damaged some and I wish I knew who exactly I hurt, because you're never the biggest kid on the playground, but you have to act the part or they'll eat you up.

They won't.  You also have to analyze value.  At the same time though... running over recent conversations... it is impossible to really know who any of them knows and who, in that party, is game for leaving things behind and making a decision estranged to you, because, let's face it, you are the extent of your staff and there may or not be an extended staff beneath the person you wronged and or the person you wronged may or may not be connected to a very extended pack of wolves that you may or likely will not be prepared to deal with on one versus one basis.  That's why bar fighting is never good and part of why I quit.  You never really know who they know and it'll come back to bite you, if not now then later.

Mistakes have been made.  Exhaustive turbulence.  Watch your shoulder.  I'm not at all prepared to move up sticks, but I am.  It's difficult.  SR.  That was the gambit though.  Like it or not.  If it ever comes down, as shiii tends to roll, just be ready.   I was born ready.  I wasn't.  If they ever do come in, though, if they ever do.  A battle for the ages.

It'll be a fine night.  And in the mean time?

It's been difficult to keep NORAD going.  Never falter.  We'er not at tying loose ends up yet.  Right now, take your choice when you walk in and I will match metal for metal.




///JDSY - "All Shapes"   ... shadow specifications are...  geometric ghosts are... hallucinations resolve into be ready for anything.