Funny Feedback Loops

To a point, there is a difficult loop of loops powering each other.  A tipping point is approaching where we're going to have to make major decisions that I keep kicking down the road.  I am completely torn between whether to go the prescribed medication route or not.  There isn't a right answer.  Most roads seem to lead to an early death and its kind of funny.

You pop the medication and wait for weeks to see if anything is going to happen.  If nothing happens then you take some more.  I guess "pop" is much too flippant.  You rearrange all of your life routines to take the prescribed medications and present as stable as possible a body environment to present affects.  If, with your new forced sleep patterns and dietary intake, there is no effect then you go back to consult and raise the dosage and wait a few more weeks and on and on until it clicks.  Or never completely does.  All the while, physical affects may manifest.  Weight gains, weight losses, tics, shakes, nausea, fatigue, it varies from prescription to prescription.  If it doesn't quite click, a new prescription is introduced to help.  You may be weaned off of what you are already taking, you may not.  Weeks upon weeks, months, of consultations and examinations and examinations and consultations and dealing with and juggling body changes and it may click.  The changes may stick.  And that is your new life.  X pill at this hour, every single day, without fail, until you stop breathing, because your head will shatter if you stop taking it.  In the mean time, enjoy the side effects, which will probably contain an assortment of shadows and echos in the corners of your consciousness that will follow you to your death.

Obviously, not a great answer.  If you can't cope with the body changes, you're not going to be able to keep up with any sort of regimen.  You're going to take the prescriptions inconsistently and exacerbate the already difficult process of ascertaining what, if any, affects are becoming present in your psychological make up from week to week.  If you do manage to make it a few months and falter later down the road and start to slip into an inconsistent pattern of medicating you may be torn apart by the reawakening of whatever it was you are trying to lock away, squash, and overcome.  If you do stick with the regimen, that pill is a constant reminder of the incomplete you.  The you that is only "complete" if you swallow this spot.  And if you can get past all of that and wear and break yourself into this life permanently linked to this pill and make your examinations and deal with the side effects that can be life threatening on their own, you still can and likely will experience periods where it doesn't work anyway.

Sooo we come to drinking.  Alcohol.  Good old alcohol.  I already drink some on and off to manage pain.  Between psychological scars and body scars, it kind of gets the job done.  It gets the job done well enough, I should say.  You don't focus on history and you don't feel the sharpest highs of the pain inside your body and it's easy enough to turn the dial up or down as necessary.  If what you are suffering mentally has stabilized itself momentarily or at least is not on an offensive within your being and your mind you can simply not drink until you reach a point where it begins to slip beyond that edge of your ability to cope and manage.  Of course, you do become more and more accustomed as your tolerance steadily and inevitably climbs.  It takes more and more alcohol to achieve the same affects.  It takes more and more alcohol to blunt the storms and voices inside your head and still more to numb the body and still more to blunt the cuts of history.  The side effects, by themselves are all horrible.  Shakes, shortened tempers, hangovers, appetite problems, light sensitivity, insomnia, deep depressions and apathy, fatigue, wanting to smoke cigarettes constantly, hot flashes, low and acute withdrawals depending on how much you had to do to get to a place where you could finally sleep.

The good news is, on the days and weeks when you don't need to turn the dial at all, nothing horrible happens beyond 24-72 hours of physical withdrawal.  The very bad news is the damage is done.  Your liver is hardening drink by drink and will eventually fail, your brain is losing its functions even as the psychological scars are faded and erased.  If you weren't careful you've probably injured or bruised yourself in some way you didn't notice from the overall body numb and even if you were careful you've probably bruised or injured yourself in some way from the body numb and coordination problems that come with consuming alcohol.  The depression will linger well beyond physical withdrawal even if everything else inside your head is muted and been flattened backward so you can finally hear yourself think again and you may wind up drinking just to escape that lingering depression.  The packs of smokes you breathed are a part of your lungs forever.  You are extending the depth of the foundation of your bodies alcohol dependence in small ways in that it will take at least the last peak dosage to get the effects you need to feel normal the next time your mind begins to crumble and pull itself apart.  And, oh yeah, you can overdose and die.

I'm not going to bother with a faith/religion approach.  For reasons I've laid out through the years, faith and religion is an enormous vacuum to.  As a way to see, cope with, reckon with, understand the world and understand people and oneself, I get its value to some.  I'm an atheist.  Moving on.

Taking the problem head on, no chemical enhancements with alcohol or pills, is a terrifying proposition, but it could work.  I can often easily go one to two weeks without a drink if my spine feels okay and I'm able to get out and play.  I don't take prescriptions.  Head on, however, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide when your head starts to come apart.  The best you can do is try to distract yourself and try to surround yourself with as many safe spaces to sit and do nothing as possible if you can't get outside.  You have to be able to position yourself within the larger fabric of life in a way that will insulate you and that presents major problems in itself in that life tends to be pretty damn inflexible.  You also have to understand that you cannot control when you will experience a major break and that unpredictability will also cause direct conflict with your ability to plan anything and everything from a phone call to making yourself lunch to being at work; with that in mind, understand that you will not know when the most violent spells will end either.

The great news is there are no prescription side effects or organ destroying alcohol dependencies to fret over that will end your life early.  The bad news is there is nothing between you and the teeth of the beast inside your head either.  If and when there is a major break down you may end up hurting yourself or someone else far worse than the damage being done by either of the other methods.  If you can't find the right person or persons to speak to in order to ground yourself or at least get you outside of yourself, you may self destruct completely and become a suicide statistic.  You may lose significant friendships and jobs and intimate relationships because coping may mean that you have to spend days or weeks at a clip alone or heavily insulated and metered to bear with the voices and hallucinations inside you and the swells and shadows of visions.  All of the while you will be acutely aware of these collapses and broken connections and psychological scarring, perceived (real or not) judgments and stigma, and that the expectation from the outside in is that you see a professional and "get help" for being yourself.  Which kind of strikes the ear a bit strange, no?  In your necessary isolated states, in attempts to avoid self destruction and free yourself from the knowledge of the poorer life outcomes, you may resort to far more dangerous chemicals than any mentioned above and/or episodes of extreme alcohol use which will likely also lead to your premature expiry too.

Here's the plan: there isn't one.  Here's the funny part: you're not crazy; you are going to die early, it's really only a matter of how.  You can take the pills and the side effects until you can't take them anymore or slip up and miss enough of the regimen to come apart at the seams or quit altogether and default to something else that will kill you early.  You can incrementally (or quickly) drink yourself to death in an effort to manage and reign in the worst of your symptoms, essentially trading one pretty awful thing for the other.  Lastly you can try to live with your symptoms as much as possible and fit in to life where you can until you or life decides you simply cannot.  I'm somewhere between option three and option two.  The funny thing is cannabis seems to help the most, it's just hard to keep it stocked.  I'm working on it.  I guess that's the fourth option.  I guess there is a fourth option.

After all of this time, I'm still not ready to completely screw with my brain chemistry the way prescriptions will again.  Not yet anyway.  Not yet.  We're not misguided enough to believe that we're fine, no matter how "normal" we feel, but if we can stay between the lines of certain death from liver failure and attendant complications, side effects, and risks in option two and certain death from succumbing to suicidal thoughts, frustrations, and life complications in option three until we can truly try out the full spectrum of what option four has to offer, we may be able to avoid option one altogether.




///Gorillaz - "O Green World"

The Two Way Metaphor Gate

In building short hand, a degree of expression is reached that can and does generate the rare joy of identity and naming.  Mapping.  Map with as much resolution as can be mustered.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached!  Shouting is not permitted.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached.  How else can a clearer understanding be reached?

From its surface metaphor appears lazy.  Jagged.  Elliptical.  Fragmented.  Excessive.  Dumb.  Misguided.  Glittery.  Vain.  Hyperbolic.  Binary.  From its surface it's a lot of things, directly below perception it is incandescent.  A bit of metal chewed fast and friction enough to trace a retina and leave shades.

It is one of the few things all languages have in common.  A short hand.

Some mental disorders may fall just outside of the curve of the metaphorist.   Not in terms of comprehension, but in terms of time.  Around folks speaking the common language and sparking, some will see the shades and some will project the shades and be able to predict from the point of a sound.

The problem, a problem, arises with metaphor's other power.

In its ability to link ideas and present a universe whose limits, as humans, are the speed of salts in brains and quantum entanglement, it can also cross time.  Places and spaces you've never been and people you've never known.  Places and spaces no one has ever seen and places and spaces heard of dreams.

I guess what I'm saying is consciousness of metaphors power can unleash and enable some ridiculous and unaccounted for futures.  It can describe the present you are in to people you will never meet in the future.   It can describe someone's past you've never met before in all of your days on Earth or in space or outside of the common dimension.  It can define the undefinable.  Free the interned and capture the holy.  It is powerful and infinite.  Innocent and horror.  Dirge and beautiful.

As close to time travel as humans may ever reach.  With metaphor, the past is present - the future too - all in the space of a gesture, a syllable, a smell, a touch - a note.  A one.  A zero.  In sequence.  That's why it is a two way gate.  Futures can be created inside of them and the past can manifest with a breath and a blink through the same swinging door.




///Dirty Projectors & Bjork - (When the World Comes to an End)     for a long time

Little Ripples

There are many measures and routines to help ensure our stability and further existence in schizophrenia's shadow.  Not a single one is bulletproof or sure-fire.  They're more like an array of alarms.  A network of self-imposed checks that serve to help me protect myself from myself and help me maintain an awareness of what is happening inside as well as help me perceive how or why I am interacting with people on the outside.  It sounds elaborate.  It is.  It works sometimes.  Maybe 50% of the time.  That's too low, maybe 65% of the time.  I believe.  I would like to think.

The auditory hallucinations are always there.  Sometimes the best way to handle it is to drown it out or try to blanket it in constant music or reruns of radio talk shows or television shows that I've heard dozens, in some cases, hundreds of times so that it forms a background tapestry to latch myself to.  Sometimes the way we handle it is by drinking... a lot.  If you hammer your brain into unconsciousness, you can't hear anything at all and what's more is that you can skip entire days sleeping while your body tries to recover itself.  Those auditory glitches cannot hurt you and you don't have to engage with them for 7 days out of the week.  Through the gift of alcohol, your week becomes 4 days long instead of 7.  That's not the best way to deal with it.  That is a way to escape it.  Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to try to engage them outside of yourself.  Try to write to them or draw to them or just talk to them through your mouth if possible.  That never works.  Nothing ever works.  Don't kid yourself.

It does help us to feel secure for a while.  The acts help us feel grounded to something and allow us to move through the world and focus on tasks, conversations, and people in front of us.  It isn't always paralyzing, but it grows all its own.  Sometimes it's fun to think I can control it.  Will power.  Discipline.  Routine.  Everything where it belongs.  Simplicity.  All of these things.  Then I'm in a line at a grocery store asking the man behind me "did you say something" four times before it hits me walking to my car that he's the fifth person I've questioned that day and things are slipping from bad to worse and my little network of alarms is not helping.  Sitting up in bed, watching shows I've seen thirteen times, and getting up for an eighth time to check that I'm alone because someone else is in here and I heard them say my name twice and I know it's not the neighbor downstairs because she goes to bed at 8:45 every night.  Someone keeps turning the doorknob to the pantry and I heard them stub their toe and curse.  Jesus, they are inside.  We have to go.  Now!

Walk out underneath the street lights and it's 11:30ish.  Headphones turned up as loud as they will go.  Walk around the block.  We try to memorize every detail and compare it to what was there before we started walking.  We compare it to what was there after our evening lap.  We try to see if we are seeing things again and a shadow grunts "pssst, hey" so we decide to walk to the next town over and avoid the bridge because they will be waiting there to howl through our insides and if I could get to the park and lie down in the field for an hour or two to catch my breath the world might stop spinning for a moment.

I feel depression creeping in again.  A very light pressure behind my ears and chest.  A dull railroad spike through the near corner of my eye straight through the back of my head that will start to crystallize and splinter outward like a molten iron snowflake.  I start to question again.  Who wants to deal with this?  How could we have been so blind and over confident to believe love can iron out differences whose gulf spans literally every aspect of your lives?  You broke, dumb, idealistic, garbage, man-child.  What is that?  Who's there?  Lying awake in bed until the sun comes up wondering if he is going to come for you tonight.  Sitting on the cool bathroom floor telling yourself "never again, never again, never again."  You didn't really believe someone would choose this warped, scarred, perverse thing over a human.  Did you?  How sweet.  That is just adorable.

I still receive letters from time to time from the people that were my parents.  Some expressing concern and well wishes.  Some acknowledging holidays and other spiritual flotsam and sentiment.  I feel my fist close and my fingernails dig into my palm.  How dare they.  How dare they.  How dare they!  Still, not one acknowledgement of responsibility.  Not one acknowledgement that part of why I am here now, fighting every day to navigate through and undo the damages where I can, is because of their compounding actions for decades .  Not one hint.  Swipe at my twitching cheek that is curled into a stone snarl and spit out another piece of chipped tooth.  I have to stop doing that.  We only get one set of teeth.  We probably won't get to drink their blood any time soon.  That's a shame.

How can you love someone else, when you cannot love yourself?  I do love myself.  I love other people too.  The simple fact is we're broken.  Period.  Not fixable.  You can try all of the little things you like to lure someone else close: more money, a little land, cars and furniture, clothes and shoes, it is not going to change the base state of how you function.  What's more, and pretty funny, is that the base state of how you function also governs all of those things too.  You'll end up asleep in a bathtub chasing those things, we all know this first hand.  I haven't the stomach for it or the mental health and make up.  It won't take long to stop seeking meaningful intimacy with others.  I'm already just about there.  Roiling hatred transposes to the grainy, rattling, vision of rage.  Kill them all.  I have nothing to offer you and rare in this world is the human who truly needs nothing.  I am close.  I will find someone in kind.  Or I will stumble upon them in the dark.  Either way, I am not built for this world.

The hallucinations are growing in volume.  It is best to be alone when it starts to happen.  It's a lot easier to differentiate and stream thoughts apart from them when there isn't someone else around requiring attention and head cycles.  The frustration and irritation and embarrassment is greatly reduced and sometimes it helps to deal with and engage it when I can strictly control what I am sensing.  To a point.  There is a point where it doesn't matter what we do to insulate and protect ourselves because the assault is coming from the inside of our body and eventually there is no where to hide and nowhere to run and I try my best not to claw my skull apart.   I try my best not to scream.

Moving through the day and the little ripples tickling the hairs on my fingers and shins, I pause and whisper "not again."  That was not my name.  That was not my name.  That was not my name.




///Muriel Zoe - "Bye Bye Blackbird"

The Year End Look

Starting at the end of 2015 the year end look was a little rough, but hopeful.  I know I said the year end playlist was up next.  It isn't.  The look back at 2016 and forward into 2017 is.  We'll get to the year end playlist soon, I wanted to hammer this out before I get lost trying to locate music and because it has been weighing on my brain for quite some time and in the throes of a calm and a quiet and thoughtful depression, it is easier to piece back together.  I do firmly believe still: if you want easy, kill yourself.  If 2016 taught me anything that was it.

I thought fracturing my jaw was the worst pain I would ever feel and be able to stand through and that something like that would never happen again.  And then I fried off 15% of my skin with 370 degree oil in second and deep second degree burns bad enough that I couldn't walk or use my hand for weeks.  That was the worst pain I have ever felt.  The first week or so it was a chilly feeling, like when air blows across your teeth very quickly and it feels like you've just bitten into a snowball at the same time.  As hair follicles and skin began to grow back in odd colors and scales the pain got worse and more intense, but I was happy because at least I knew some sort of skin would eventually be there to protect the naked weeping flesh eventually.  It was so many weeks I don't even remember exactly.  I think the last scales scraped away to serviceable skin some time in late December after it happened in September.  It was an eternity.

Definitely not what I intended when I said I wanted to work on my scarification sleeve at the beginning of the year.  Looking forward: I don't want to feel anything remotely close to that again.  Can we please go back to dealing with occasional week long bouts of lower lumbar nerve pain and the occasional lancing ice pick stab of hip joint nerve pinch.  That's fine, by comparison.  I laugh saying it, but I am pressing my palms together and pointing them at the sky: please universe, don't hurt me like that again, but if you do - make it a clean break.

I did finally get around to procuring a set of tattoo guns.  I also did not get around to using them.  A third of my year disappeared trying to heal up from the burns.  It wasn't even just the burns that broke me low, it was learning how to use my hand again and build strength back into it.  It was rebuilding the musculature in my hips and joints in learning how to walk longer and longer distances and stand for longer periods of time.  At one point I could walk, but I literally had to sit down and raise my heel above my heart every five or ten feet because the throbbing pressure of my veins trying to push blood down and back up to my heart felt like my leg was getting torn to the bone by a leather whip.

The year started off pretty grand.  All of the work was more or less finished.  I'd survived, what was to that point, the worst injury I'd suffered to date and if you can take ten weeks of pain and rehab from a fractured and dislocated jaw, you can take anything.  Music was on the horizon and I had a keyboard set up that I was diddling with.  I got a cool old motorcycle with part of my Christmas bonus, an old Honda that I still have sitting in the backyard that I want to eventually build into a cafe racer style bike you might see on an old pastel chalk poster advertisement if you lived in racing country back in the 70's.  I had a new basketball and had free time to exercise and hit the basketball courts now and then to indulge my sports fantasies.  I was really getting into the video game Minecraft and was seeing poetry from a little bit of a different angle.

Graphic design was coming along and my friendships were pretty free flowing as far as I could tell.  I was making big plans to create sculptures and designs for some of my friends that I wanted to show instead of just tell them that I cared about them.  Some projects were coming along nicely through planning sketches and rough practice designs and concept proofs.  With some of my free time I was able to visit people I normally could not make time for and with that little extra bit of money I was able to go out with them to places they wanted to go and eat and drink things I never would under usual circumstances.  Life was wheeling and dealing and possibilities were turning into realities.  The only real problem I had was making time to keep up with everything at a reasonable pace and I was making it work.

The Summer was hot and long and I did get into a funk wondering what was next.  Who doesn't feel some of that funk in the middle of Summer?  When everything feels okay it is natural to wonder if everything is supposed to feel that okay.  Are you supposed to feel happy, content?  It's normal to question.  I did get to thinking about other people I know and where they are in their lives and where I am in mine and I started to think about what more I would have to do to experience that kind of comfort and security.  I started to, after my birthday in April, start to believe that there could be a way that I could have that too if I kept at it and kept on trucking with high hopes and kept in touch with people and kept allowing them in to my lives.

The facts started to creep in.  Started to trickle in.  The realization broke in that nothing would change.  They're still drifting away faster than that distance can ever be closed.  They've only been kind enough not to tell you that you're messaging a part of their lives they don't have time for.  So I spent more of the Summer falling away into the night skies and fire pits and walks through the storm tunnels to sit by the river's edges and pull back the fabric of those nights to watch the bridge lights glimmer on the inch high breakers.  It was my time to love the air and sky and earth and whomever happened to pop by my backyard or asked me to hop in to theirs.  Touring star ships and space stations of all kinds.

And then my body was scorched to hell and back and here we are.

Letting them go was ... you know how when you are discussing something over a hot cup of tea, and you stop to blow the steam away for a minute and touch the cup's edge to your lips to see if it's still too hot to drink and you set the cup down and look up and realize you've been talking to an empty saucer with a dry tea bag on it.  Letting them go was ... you know how when a video cassette finishes it's run time and the credits have finished and it goes black for a few minutes and then snaps to static and you realize you are still holding the remote and peering into the static waiting for the television to turn itself off, but there is another several minutes of static instead and you find yourself watching the blue input screen while the player labors, hitches, and then begins to rewind itself.  Letting them go was like that.

Part of me is angry that I didn't realize it sooner.  Part of me is angry that I let myself trot along, tail wagging, tongue out and teeth yip yapping away, not understanding the hands waving were from the insides of car windows, not the other side of the road on the side walk, a couple of paw skips away to pat my nose, scratch my ear, and let me lick their palms.

Part of me is a little lost.  So what now?  The business of being an adult?  The business of being single?  Thirty two is around the corner.  Some people I know will be retiring at fifty.  Fifty five.  Some people I know will be thinking about second kids, third cars, vacation homes, second marriages... my life expectancy is somewhere out there in the high sixties, low seventies.  So what now?  The game is halfway over and what?

Am I ever going to write anything of significance.  I do write for myself first and foremost.  I used to do it with the hopes of being recognized somewhere or paraded around like something special.  Am I special?  No, just a little weird.  Okay, a bit weird.  I will.  Not yet.  At least not in my mind.  Thirty years to go and many more times to keep trying to set the type just the way I want it.  Thirty years to make the words hit other ears the way they hit my own.  I don't know if it will ever work.  It would certainly help if I could go one year without some cataclysmic injury eating up a third of a year to heal.

Will I be single forever?  Yeah, probably.  I've been torn up and spit out enough times, unrequited enough times, blissfully lulled to nothing, cut off and scorched enough times, left behind enough times, pushed away enough, to where I simply don't want to feel that again.  Much like having your skin cooked off, the scars are forever.  Maybe in ten years I'll think about it seriously again.  Maybe I'll quit smoking too.  Maybe I'll just croak off quietly long before then from some odd organ failure I can't see coming.

There is, oddly enough, a dent in all of the fingernails of my right hand, from the burn where all of the cuticles were traumatized and cooked, that has been slowly growing it's way toward the finger tips to be clipped.  Consistent along each finger.  I now know exactly how long it takes for my fingernails to grow on my right hand.  Look on the bright side.

So what now for 2017?  I don't know.  I was, as I wrap this up, thinking about going to buy a pouch of tobacco to roll some cigarettes.  I might.  I stopped enjoying smoking five years ago.  It's a way to mark time, nothing more.  Thirty some odd years to go.  I'll probably have to start some kind of heart medication in my 40's if I don't fix what I put into my body and stretch food stamps more effectively... maybe cut out the beef and pork, more frozen vegetables and dried beans (fruit never keeps long enough).  What's the use?  An extra ten, maybe twenty, years for what?  May as well, push on, I suppose.  I still can't grow a full beard or shave my face to bare skin.  I'm not getting any taller.  I'm not exactly waiting around for anyone.  Might as well go for a walk, come home and burn a couple.  Get some good sleep.  Wake up and do it again.  We'll have time for music, 2017.  Time for more poetry and stories too.  Short ones, long ones, whatever strikes your fancy you scruffy little rascal.  Whatever happens, I'll be there for you, never forget that.  We'll forge some aluminum and keep exploring.  Do it for the love the art and the unknown.  There are worlds I've only begun to map.  The star fields are massive.  Time is not.




///Daedelus- "Perchance A Bit"

On The Revocation Of Passports

I understand times do change.  I understand that I do exist in a space that is not attuned to the normal speeds and distances of the governing dark star at the center of the Milky Way.  I understand the difficulties this presents, trickling down to our branch, our neighborhood, our star, our system, our section, our planet, our hemisphere, our continent, our nation, our state, our city, our block, our ship inside that soup (the governance bubble reaching out only that far to offer resistance).

I understand times do change around us and the space in which we exist has a fixed passport system.  Once granted entry into the time lapsed/corrupted/flexed/shifted bubble speeding along with the rest of the system around it, the passport will not be revoked.  Granted access, you can come and go as you please.  There are rules.  Those rules can be tailored to you.  I will never revoke your passport out of spite.  I will never revoke your passport out of anger.  I will never revoke your passport because your times have changed.  I will never revoke your passport because my time has changed.  Once gifted, your passport is set for as long as you live and nontransferable.

We don't give them out like Halloween candy.

If you ever need to borrow a cup of sugar.

If you ever need a box of nails or a snowblower.

If you ever need a lift somewhere.

If I can help, I will.  Just ring before you cross the boundary into controlled space and attempt to buzz the flight deck.  The weapons net surrounding the ship is live.  Don't be converted to light and dust.




///Nightmares On Wax - "Passion"

Do not forget there are rules.  Break them enough times and the immune system that keeps the bubble afloat in the interstellar sea will have some very pointed questions for you.

Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original equipment manufacturer fail.





///Thom Yorke- "The Clock"

Move Town

I get so caught up with making the people around me things as a way of saying thanks and payment that I forget to make myself- to do what I want to do because I owe my existence, my here and now, to those people by a currency that will never translate because they don't know fully what they helped me reach escape velocity away from what I saw as an insurmountable margin and I don't view it as penance or clinging to the past or misplaced.  I see it as a continuous consciousness of how tenuous life can be and a ten four toward how the smallest gesture, the smallest show of what someone outside of a relationship might see as pity pence or enabling weakness can actually be a point and moment where you've helped someone's life turn a corner.  It's burdensome to think about and it takes a piece out of myself to do it, but everyone is thanked out of reflex and I feel more comfortable in my own skin, helpless and power filled at once, when I have taken the time to let them know the fact that I am still alive now is not by chance or the grace of a supreme being and is by their taking their time to pitch a penny or several thousand into my hat.  To fool yourself into thinking you've done it by yourself or by chance or by blessing or sheer hard work grind is something I want to make sure I never do.  So maybe it is an anchor.  Maybe it is an unnecessary sacrifice and can be framed as a guilt or a confirmation of sin and imperfection.  A penance.  I don't see it that way and will never come around to that frame of mind.  So much of life is decisions and whether it suits me or not a lot of those decisions happen outside of myself.  I accept that.  So please, accept my outside decision to thank you and the universe outside of myself that you have had a hand, direct and indirectly, in forming.

Once we're clear of that, we can shift focus back to fantasy lands and dreamscapes.  There isn't much more distance to cover and I am happy for that.  Excited for that.  There are times when I feel like every other word is about some future date when the resources are at their correct levels and processes have synchronized and the planets have lined up into something close to a grand cross and if I am twenty minutes in to 5th Element while listening to acid jazz with my heaphones in my key tray and I've already consulted my little sister and am suitably numb mouthed from too many cigarettes and just the right amount to dissuade me from running to the gas station to purchase more and the moon is a waning gibbous on a clear night with rain in the forecast for early before the sun comes up with the option to sit outside with a fire at any point prior barring the anything prior to the immediate because it did not rain the day through at work, where I box myself in to unrealistic expectations as a way to never have to actually execute anything.  If you never pull the trigger, you never have to learn whether or not there is more to learn about what you want to do.  Whatever you have conceptualized is its best and most perfect form.  You never have to translate.  I wanted to have children.  I can have children.  Meet my family!  It's almost like every idea is that part of you other people talk about and love, but if they ever did meet you, the rest of you, they'd screw their nose up and rub their squished shut eyes like they just saw an apple snap loose from a twig and fall up to disappear into the sky.

I get very caught up, but I have not forgotten my own needs.  It eats me out from the inside, but I never forget the gnaw and the sound of it and the feel of it, the blood cough taste of it, nose running, water eyed mechanics of it.  They scream at me.  I'm moving forward as fast as I can.  I swear, I am.  The days disappear swiftly.  The nights are restless, strapped to a mattress.  Fear lurks in corners.  Cats ask questions.  Notes are taken on walls and skin and misnamed folders.  Bite a lower lip and squeal from the top of the foothills of the mountain range, the clouds ahead of the temperature front doing strange things above the peaks and the ground bellowing thunder lake swells and strikes days distant, birds moving town in brunch sky above.  Sip.  Nod.  Please pass the olives.  Cross a leg and scribble onward.



///Sylvan Esso - "Uncatena"

The Year End Look

Never forget that any day you do not think about killing yourself is a pretty damn good day.  Let's run the damage report to begin.  One concussion.  One fractured jaw.  Pretty okay.  What the hell, did we learn?  What is the outlook on this year?  I am afraid of saying "I don't know."  It's all there.  I don't want to sift through it.  Slug through it.  I want to try to take my reference point from the year end look to begin 2015 and see where we go; so let's go!

First of all, caution paid off.  Before the major injury to my face, everything was humming on the hardware.  When you suffer a debilitating injury, a person cannot help slipping into ways to deal with that pain.  No friends were lost and no new real friends were won.  Relationships grew deeper and more sovereign.  The realization that the only person who can take care of you at the bottom line, when bone strikes metal, is you and the only person you can rely on absolutely, the only person you can control with high fidelity is you.  Everyone else are variables.  Your friends will help you and attempt to intercede and interject.  Some who do are tourists.  That is acceptable.  Emotional tourism is a fact of life.

Nice guys finish last, but they finish clean and if that means something to your heart then it is absolutely worth pursuing.  You cannot wear hats that do not fit before they blow off in the wind or constrict the blood vessels in your forehead hard enough to give you a migraine.  Through the incident, I learned that I am a violent person at heart, but the jacket around that bullet is a jacket formed in a forge of love, kindness, emotion and the ability to feel.  Sure, sometimes you feel nothing and sympathy and empathy are things I have to manufacture, but I realized very quickly, unable to eat, laugh, smile, frown, grimace, sneeze or cough, that manufactured or not, however you arrive at it, rage and violence is not the way to go.  Thinking back on it, had I lashed out and taken the governors off of myself and won the day instead of trying to talk it through and getting cold cocked, I would be sitting at home afraid to go out at night, worried that someone I did something to still remembers and is looking for me and I have no idea what their faces look like.  In retrospect, I am fine with the outcome and more comfortable in my own skin for it.  I know the switch is there.  They do not.  That is all the security I need.  Sometimes I ask myself if I am being too nice.  I ask myself if I am behaving too well.  I shrug.  I tell myself I am not a rat on a sinking ship.  Certainly, I am not the king of the rats.  There is much more to do with my life than project my violent heart on the screens of the world around me.  What happens when the video skips and the rainbow scaled dragon leaps across the screen and azure clouds belching constellations and weapons blueprints?  Focus less on projections and more on allowing that mean streak to roll.  Why guide it?  Kick back and watch the waves break and listen to the sound.  A person doesn't stand at the sea's lip and scream at the waves.  Attempt to enjoy it, understand where they are from, listen to the sound, and watch the sun set.  Nice guys finish last; violent guys finish dead.

I am pressing myself toward creating music.  A good friend of mine is fairly deep into the art and it is intriguing.  I didn't talk about it much last year because I didn't expect it to come forward in the ways that it did.  I didn't compose a single story last year.  I did, but I did not write a single one down.  There is no writer's block.  Task lock engaged pretty hard through the year.  What I thought would be three months off turned into three, then four, months of person to person tasking.  Exchanging information at a very high rate.  Person to person relationships are still amazing difficult to me to this day.  I can do it.  I CAN do it.  It takes heaven, earth, and hell out of me to make it happen.  It is like cutting off one's own digits one at a time.  Day by day.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  At the palm?  Next digit.  Fingernail.  Knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  At the palm?  Next digit.

On the cusp of actual free time, I am typing with nubs.  The fingers are growing back.  Healing the psychological wounds.  It's amazing to think about how I am still alive.  Think about the conversations that lead to continuing to soldier on.  There were two very bad psychological breaking points that I did not see coming.  I know it does not mean that I am getting better.  It doesn't mean that I'm getting worse either.  I haven't abandoned writing.  It's grown distant.  More intangible than it's ever been.  "What's the point?"  When so many outside forces are bearing down on you and you don't answer the phone and it goes 'click'.  I laugh and cry because you never know if the next phone call is going to be the one in the chamber.

The year was severely back loaded with surprises and paperwork.  I am still working on the sleeve of scarification.  I still use the strokes on my face as a daily reminder to never forget what I cannot go back to.  I am envious sometimes that some people have "home"s.  I nearly slipped up.  It was a phenomenal year for seeing my sister.  She is wonderful and sprite.  The suggestions creep in: open the door a little.  Do not.  Do not ever.  I remind myself each morning that I am where I am with what freedom and freedoms I do have by, to coin my father's phrase "pruning."   To let them back in is to let years and years of work fall away.  The garden is not beautiful.  It is in animal and entity.  Do stellar objects have a soul and intent?  Yes.  I will not subject myself to it again.  Ever.  I will never go back.  "I don't hate you either, but I really don't like you."  The kind phrase he put together after I finally told him I didn't hate him.  I wasn't lying.  No one was asked to be born.  You cannot hate your point of origin.  It is you.  Whether you like it or not.  The only thing separating him from outright hate is the blood connection.

If you will, allow me this thought experiment:

Your memories begin where they will.  Your father is just some guy you are forced to live with for the first 24 years of your life.  Can you hate him?  Yes.  Now, that guy happens to be the person who impregnated the womb you came out of.  You realize you would not exist, save for his cock.  Can you hate him?  Well, we're all here now and conscious.  Yes and no.  If there is a flake, a sliver, a hair between hate and intense "fuck him and his whole set up" to quote Josh Norman,  yes.  The only thing stopping me from outright hatred is the unfortunate fact that he decided to create another person with her (which holds her culpable too; is where the pass card comes in, but the general manager and the head coach come and go as a pair).  It is kind of funny to wonder who the owner is.  I laugh thinking about a god as the team owner.  God is like "what the fuck, we need to move this franchise and clean house."  The commissioner is saying, god's god, is saying "aye Danny, you've got to do something with this team, ticket sales are bombing."

The early months of the year was a fantastic cruise of steady work and hand tools.  When everything boiled down to getting people to talk to one another and getting people to a place to sign forms, things got dicey.  I left a few relationships behind in 2015.  I realized I will never be my brother's equal and he will never see the world through my lens.  Same thing with my older sister.  If I never see either one of them again I will not be better for it, but I will never be worse for it either.  Not the case with my little sister.  Every time I get to see her I learn something new and a new way to be.  My family doesn't shrink year by year.  The depth of my connection with the folks around me that I can call and respond with as family grows.  No love has been lost, though some has changed as their relationships to their loved ones and their religions changes.

I think, as we loop around the year and close in on the last things, we are moving in an appropriate direction.  The death threats are real.  Make no mistake.  My love for the friends that I can call family in my new colony is real.  My love for my little sister is real.  My ambivalence toward my elder siblings is real.  As I get older, my tolerance for pain increases as a function of my diminishing indestructibility.  I feel sad for connections that burned out faster than I thought they would, but everyone has their own lives and what is convenient and warm and loving to you is harassment and pipe dreaming and gaudy and ancient and plastic and misplaced to them.

The reason no one talks to you may be because your ability to survive is so tightly tied to your ability to carry a conversation with yourself and the other human beings around you are polite enough, kind enough, human enough, to not interrupt.

The takeaway from 2015 is that we are more conscious than ever before.  We still feel and we still can.  We can love and we can hate and we will take caution.  Our days are numbered and taking the most out of each one is not important at all.  We will never be famous.  We will never be complete.  Our family is not the family we were born into, but we can run operating systems on top of each other to make a complete system.  You're not born alone and you will not ever, ever, die alone.  Waste your breath, waste your time, but do not trick yourself into believing a moment is ever wasted in putting down your hammer, your knife, your gun, your fire, your heart string marionette, your pen, your piss jar, your hat with matching gloves, your shoes, your cigarette, your car keys, your lube, your teeth, your comb, eyeshadow, rubber band, your space suit, your glasses, your sword, your helmet, means nothing.

2015 taught me about faith in people.  Faith in friends.  They don't have to know everything about you to know where you are from.  They don't have to tell you what you mean to them to understand you should pick up the damn phone now and then.  Sometimes it works the opposite way.  You don't have to worry your pretty head about tabs.  They're watching and waiting the same way you are.  Fires on hillsides miles apart on the same planet.  Give them the credit due yourself.   I love you.  It was a good year.  The friends that I do have and the friends that I can call family sincerely, from Houston to NYC to California to Washington to Baltimore to Michigan... well, it's America off of the top of my head... ain't no family overseas.  The point is this: I am not alone in 2015.

I don't know what 2016 will bring.  I am taking on new jobs and expanding limits of circuitry and I am afraid.  It is going to be messy by my standards.  The outlook is heavy and hardline and will take a focus I have not had to muster before.  The bonus will be a new body for this red dragon.  And, and, and, no one will have to die to get there, yeah?  Yeah!  How good is that.  How great is that.  It will not be nose to the grind stone.  2016 will be about how far do you trust me?  I promise you that you will not be able to throw me that far.  I weigh upwards of 185 pounds.  It's only going to get heavier as I get back into the gym after being forced to take three months off when I screwed up and got my face fractured.  How far can you throw 200 pounds?  Joking.  I do think trust will come into play in a big way this year.  Trust in caution, trust in going through the motions of writing to find my muse again, trust in friends to standby and trust in friends to see their vision along their lines and do what is asked of me without question.  

Let's make 2016 about trust and make progress on our scarification sleeve.

Let's do it.  It's not going to be comfortable.  It's not going to be easy.  If you want easy, kill yourself.




///How To Dress Well - "Us In The Sense of Forever"

///*the year end playlist up next

A Brief Return to B6

After the diagnosis there was a lot of disbelief before understanding that I am wired differently and there is nothing that can be done about it besides modification.  Modifying my physiology and the chains that come with modifying.  Keeping schedules and junk and folding money into paying for medications and things and paying for visits to psychiatrists.  You can't spell psychiatrist without tryst.

I'm golden.  Understanding how I'm different was very difficult.  I still don't fully comprehend it.  I'm not okay with being different.  Expectations change a lot.  Do you want an exception or not?   Yes, we do, but we do not because we are efforting being a part of common society.  Aye yo, check it out, here's the baseline: getting exceptions makes us softer and enables if what we want is to be fully assimilated.  When we wreck it's hard to deal with because whatever it was we did made perfect sense to us.  To you, it's grounds for divorce.

And yep, my phone is officially broken.  The worst part about the diagnosis, the initial one, was my ignorance.  Let's keep this tight and short, but not to the point of complications.

I hated my psychiatrist.  I still do.  I know we are long passed the point of forgetting, but I have not forgotten him.   He has forgotten me though after I lost insurance.  Everyone has to get paid.  I refuse to check out.  I was bold before then, I am more bold now.  Capital lock.

Have you got my back?  I've got yours.  I tried to smash my skull apart on the side of the police car when I first got reigned in.  When I realized I had to reign myself in the morning after and they explained what I tried to do when they were putting me inside the squad car.  And it's alright now.  I'm not angry or mad.  They're different things.  Mad is angry without reasoning.  Mad dog.  Shoot him down.  Angry dog... alright, he has reason still.  I am neither mad nor angry.

After the diagnosis I had no idea where I could possibly go.  It was a true diagnosis and I have to lie out of the ass to avoid internment again.  After the diagnosis and hearing what it would cost to make me better, literally hundreds of dollars per month (and hearing too that the trial period ends, hence the name "trial period" until they get the milligrams right) and knowing what I was bound to make...  it's like being stuck with a home you can't actually pay for and you cannot move either.  You cannot pull up sticks and pick a new lot.  It was terrifying.  I had no idea where I could possibly go, so I decided to move off grid.  No meds.  No pills.  Just force.  True force.

Sometimes thing come apart a lot.  Sometimes control does not talk back to you no matter how many signals you send out, out of reflex.  If I could afford it, I would go.  Easily and quietly, I would go.  Let's go though, and keep it brief.

Back to basics.  I know I need help.  It's part of what I am working for.  Why I go to work everyday.  Start your day group was nice.  It was excellent.  I do not want to go back there.  I am damn near 30 years old and I do not belong there.  I know who I am.  I have to work harder and as time increases I know I have to work harder yet and I am okay with that.  I'm not and will never be a made man.  I am willing to work and that's something!  Diagnosis is not, I will prove it to you, ever a death sentence.




///Minamina Goodsong - "First Movement"

The "Like" Policy (i dream in your actual space)

From when you are a little kid 'til you get to be of age or at least to a point where your outcomes become a direct, a more direct, result of your actions and inactions by turns, you are told to chase your dreams.

Some of those dreams happen to be being well adjusted enough to enjoy those social gatherings and incidents and accidents on a level a little more impactful than the entry fee of peace and goodwill.  It happens.  Nothing to write home about, though.  It's about getting into gear from a dead stop and that's fine.  Do not blow the stop sign.  Blow the stop sign once and you can skate.  Blow it twice; shame on you.  Blow it thrice and you're asking for trouble.  Blow it every single time you come in from the outlands and you're begging for trouble.

Some of those dreams do happen to be some of the things that are shared.  "Why do you like damn near everything?"  I don't really care about over liking and this is the last time I will bring up facebook.

There is a policy.  There is a set of rules.  There is a governing structure to many things that I participate in because there has to be.  If I screw up the policy, things grow increasingly more tangled in a show of one up, also it becomes increasingly difficult to quantify what a like is.  Hence, laughter comments.

It's really not that complicated.  It's all in good fun.  I know the chances we may actually hang out are slim to nary and that's cool.  I couldn't eat you in person for more than a few hours at a step and you myself neither.  And that's alright.  I like a lot of things.  That's why that word exists.  You can't love everything.  Or can you?  What if there was a love button?  That would completely wreck up some relationships.  The concept of a shared planet is very pleasing.  If I can live vicarious through you, your efforts, and your experiences and photographs and blitzes of wisdom, don't fault me.  I'm not stalking you.  I am stalking your food sometimes.  For the most part, I'm simply enjoying an aspect of life that I aspire to, and if there is fault in that "like" click go die.

It's fine to like a lot of things.  Life is so incredibly multidimensional and layered and there is no way to take it all in with one lens.  Pardon my use of the compound camera.  If you like nothing there is probably something seriously wrong with you and godspeed dealing with those issues.

Take time to have fun.  Like many things.  Enjoy many things.  Consume (obviously not at all costs) at some cost and feel good about it because the planet is a shared home and last I checked the stars are still light years away so don't pack bags and make extensive plans for a day trip just yet.  Take it light.  Take it on the heels.  And always bring a towel.  You never know when it may come in handy.

Whatever your policy is, do not be afraid to enjoy or upset about a giggle taken from you by force.

They meant well.

Also, I am stalking you, but just a little. In the same way a creature intelligent observes, studies, and dissects another.



///Bushwacka - "The Egyptian"  There's just one thing that I want you to do.

Giddy Up

I've been trying to chart my work books, but I don't want to see them.  At all.  Fantastic difficulty.  I did the first class and the reminder came up to do the second class and I couldn't bring myself to do it.  Part of it is horror.  Part of it is blatant stupidity.  Part of it is just not wanting to know how much further I am going to have to work to get back to zero.

I just want to put my fist through something.  Anything!  Not even through, but just break my hand.  Null it.  But I need my hands, both of them.  And I need the ability to ambulate.  I need my knees and my elbows and I have to protect them the same way people protect their investments.  It breaks my heart sometimes knowing that I can't do what I need to do.  It makes me cry a lot.  I won't go to "it's not fair" because it's just a fact.  I could probably cut a finger off.  I think I would save it.  Maybe eat it.  Cook it somehow like a ham hock.  Stew it or something.  It's tantalizing and aggravating because I know where the knuckles join and have cut limbs apart before but I don't trust my left hand to operate the scissors on my right hand.  Maybe just the pinky.

Gauging my pain threshold.  I'm still not sure where it is exactly and I probably shouldn't be losing sleep about it, but I am.  I think I get that from my father.  How far are you willing to go before you jump to get what you need.  Would I have to cauterize it myself?  Probably.  I don't know why I need to do these things, but I do and its getting more powerful and harder to swallow it down between suggestions.  I don't know what that means!  It scares me.  It's getting harder to pretend to be normal.  Normative?  Baseline.  Nullification.  Talked to Martin about that for a while.  It was a good conversation.

Relying more and more on emulation and I'm afraid I will be found out.  Not about being gay or anything that trivial, but being found out about being a fucking psychopath.  I want blood all the time, I don't care how it comes.  I need help.  I need assistance and I keep saying I can run this car until the wheels fall off, but I've been rolling on brake discs forever.  So many years.

It would be easier if I was not aware of the degeneration, but I think a piece of the awareness has lent itself to a belief that I'm making it up and even as I'm speaking I know it sounds contrived.  It isn't.  It's motor and I know less and less how to change the fucking oil.  I don't know what to do about it.  I know where to go, but you better believe I'm not going there.  Like I need more debt, don't make me laugh.  I'll spit ice tea everywhere.  I'm not getting interned again!  No!  I will never put down the ax!  If you want it out of my hands you better be fucking prepared to take it from me.

I'm not a gun, but I will put one between your eyes and kiss you while I do it if you think it was going to be that easy.  Don't touch me.  Do not fucking touch me.  Ever.  I will break your fingers one by one while I sit on your chest so you don't move too much.  Escalation.  Take the escalator back down.

I know what's wrong with me, but I need a checkup and I don't know where to get one without the internment trap.  I'm not doing that again.  We're not doing that again.  Just handle it. Just grab your ears and pull up your socks and eat it.  Life hasn't been all that bad to me.  I'm just tired of having to emulate to squeak by.  Doing it by the skin of my teeth and I'm pretty sure some people have started to see through it so I have to work harder at it because the people that I do love I love dearly and want to keep them and want them to keep me to and the last thing that should happen is giving them a reason.

It's tough.  Everything worth having is hard.  Is a myth.  Perpetuated by people who think "difficult" is possession in the material sense or the kid rearing sense.  Everything worth having is hard in the interpersonal intrapersonal sense.  Having ground you do not need to give inside your skull is worth having.  Maintaining relationships with the people you care about and trust is worth having.  Put in work, no doubt, but put in secondary work too.




///Amon Tobin - "Back from Space"  I wish I could fly, but not just to the atmosphere, to the stars.  I want to explore the Oort cloud and be the first man to land on an asteroid and be out there in the zero cold and see the sun without atmospheric interference.  I want to see Jupiter up close at all costs and I want to die out there.  But I'm stuck here.  And have to keep coming back to this fucking planet every time I wake up.  Bullshit.

Pride Complex, Fallout Radius, and Big World Little World

I'll start with the last one first before I forget because I already forgot once and it took a good 15 to remember and even then it was only because I started thinking about shapes and cut outs of construction paper and slicing bottles in half that I remembered Venn diagrams and then remembered it was a comparison thing, but I'm rambling so let's get down to it.  I was wondering where my, sometimes extreme, self centeredness comes from.  It does get pretty extreme sometimes.  Not to the point where my megalomaniacal, world beater, delusions kick in and I walk all over people thinking they're throwing themselves down there, when in fact, I'm going out of my way to haul them to the ground by their napes so I don't have to touch pavement on my way from my bed to my toilet.  Pavement?  Yeah because my house will be so huge I will have a second house that is only an enormous bathroom with three floors.  The first floor is the pee paradise and waterpark, the second floor is the bath house with every kind of possible bath or shower or steam you can take, including swimming pools, and the basement is the boom box where you can shit in peace featuring every kind of toilet known to man.  Sometimes my self centeredness gets out of control though.

To the point where I believe whatever difficult experience I'm going through is not only the greatest problem mankind has ever faced, but the first iteration ever of that difficulty.  I get so into myself that if everyone I know isn't asking me what happened or if I'm okay or petting my ruffled feathers they must be blind and stone deaf.  But that's not the case.  It's not even that it's particularly easy to take up arms and march to the point of attack and scream like the hound of hell "life's not fair!"  It's not.  Everyone knows it.  What are you going to do about you?  It gets out of control.  And there's nothing I hate more than "who's had it harder" pissing contests.  Everyone has and everyone hasn't.  Which discomfort do you prefer and at what intensity, becomes the more pressing question.  To put it another way, how comfortable are you here versus there.

The most important thing is the "why".  Why so far focused inward?  What I've come to is hyper focus or big world little world.  The world is huge.  The world is daunting.  The world is not as violent or angry as we make it appear.  The anger and violence is just what sticks because you don't come out of a hug with welts and scars, but you do if you're at odds.  Violence is the first language and love is violence's child.  The branches from the trunk above the roots.  Because life has the ability to scar at random and will, and sometimes in love, it is scary.  Do you want those scars?  That chance?  "Is today the day something comes apart and I die?"  You stay in for protection.  That protection turns into faith.  That faith turns into mania.  And I close off opportunities for both danger and expansion until I am walled in and have every detail of the compound mapped to a square inch and where every potential threat to my existence stands and where it ranks and then I am stacking pee jars against one wall and logging days against another and getting lung infections and passing out from lack of oxygen because I've sealed myself in a space where air can never circulate.  The second part is the crux of big world little world.

Determinism.  If it was possible to plot every persons geographic location to a tee and, at some point map out all of the possible outcomes of each persons interactions you could, fairly accurately, play out every persons life from birth to death with some outliers and random pop ups of paths that skewed due to chance and freak probability and I guess quantum mechanical (insert longer lettered science terms and statistics) that make it impossible to do anything with 100% accuracy.  But you'd have a pretty reliable, maybe down to ninety nine million out of one hundred million person type of accuracy.  Or just look at family tree deaths.  You've maybe got a shot at beating the over under, but by how many years?  A decade?  Two?  How hard can you or would you want to torture who you are to get those years.  What are you going to do with them? Sit in a wheel chair?  Enjoy the massive stress of drastically increasing the chances you'll die putting on your slipper at the side of your bed and slip and fall and fracture your femur and die from the massive infection after surgery?  Danger world becomes a lot more dangerous up there.  That aside, the determinism factor also drives me inward at 300 pounds per square inch.  Determinism is boring.  Sure there can be a joy in choosing a path having a pretty solid understanding of where it can and probably will go.  Even in small choices, but when the map increases in size and grows to world scope, I see that I am a very small bit of the circuit and no matter which paths I choose I am not going to cover any more ground than those dimensions... unless some other path comes in from outside my circuit and selects me.  Pretty much, your circuit is printed at birth.  And that is boring and difficult to live with.

However there is no saying you can't shrink the map.  The smaller you make it, the more random it appears. The more random it appears the more beautiful each day becomes.  Each day begins to hold actual surprises beyond what randomness you can try to choose to inject.  Point to point, you can zoom in along the path and detour at will if you so choose to do, but the destination still looms and will be reached barring sudden death of some sort.  You know what your ceiling is, you learn your floor, and at some point you understand what your potential is for exceeding them and the costs involved.  There is no rule that says you can't shrink that map to the scale where measuring something changes it's properties.  And that's where I find myself sometimes.  My map shrinks to the point where everything that happens is truly random to my perspective and in that vastly shrunken world I know that I exist and the people around me are almost shadows, coming into and out of focus with a rarity that is extraordinarily delicious and I forget that I am not the only one walking the face of the earth.  Nobody but me.  NOBD BTME.  Sometimes I have to have it though or I will never leave my front door again.

Pride complex is another thing.  An entirely different animal to learn to stop feeding.  My world once was a world of "no"s.  To the point where the energy expended in asking the question was not worth the energy expended recovering from the disappointment.  A universe of broken contracts.  You can't do that because this.  You can't do that because that.  You can't do this because you're too this.  You can't do that because you're too that.  I got fed up, but not in a hurry.  It built up over the years and I didn't digest it well and I'm sure some of the reasons were fairly valid, if not entirely truthful.  Still, it's like telling someone to not get mad when you're about to give them bad news.  Nurtured inside was pride complex.  I can't do it?  Watch me.  Not doing it for them, but doing it for myself, and it started off small and then blew grotesquely out of proportion.  Coupling with megalomania it began to beg how far could you really jump if you really really tried?

How far was too far?  I can stick it.  Fuck it, you're trying to say I can't?  Okay, watch this right here.  And it bloomed gorgeous.  More.  And it bloomed gorgeous.  But what are you really capable of?  Pride complex has ruled me and I it in waves of awesome sorrow and awed joy.  There is nothing that beats that high of putting your ten toes on the ground on the other side of a leap of faith in your bones and grit.  The only things you can rely on sometimes.  The things that never let you down.  It is, however, damaging.  You become arrogant.  A soft, passive, arrogance that tells me no matter what comes down the pipe I will, I will!, be able to handle it with this body and this mind on this island.  It and I will head into the woods and only I am returning.  The belief will insist, but anyone with any one of their five senses knows there is no way in hell you are coming back.  Anyone with any sense in the world knows your odds and that you've put the entire stack on something that breaks good once in five years and there are a lot of hours and minutes to go.  I don't see it on my scale because everything is possible there to a fault.

Pride complex kicks in.  I need pills?  Fuck you, you need pills.  Watch me go.  I need money?  Hell no.  Watch me destroy myself solving this, but damn you, I will fucking solve this.  Pride complex branches out like ivy.  It infects things like blood cancer.  Don't want to help me do this?  Okay I'll do it without you.  But that is not always and many times not the stance to take for many a several reasons I won't go into.  Pride complex doesn't only damage the self.  It has a fallout radius.  Pride complex damages a persons ability to make adjustments.  It damages a persons ability to integrate and coexist with society.  It damages a persons ability to integrate.  It pretty much harms society as a whole.

Yes you are going from A to B, but as you traverse the map and make your choices, your piece of the circuit board begins to function less and less successfully to the point where other pieces of the board have to compensate harder to function as well.  When you are offered assistance, for whatever rationalization the assistance is offered, it is in the interest of keeping the entire computer running.  Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that.  Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that this setup or that is there specifically to make everyone's lives easier to a degree, but that degree is there and measurable and quantifiable in every nervous action or choice the people with greater numbers of points A and B and area to cover and allotted (if you take too broad a path from A to B and B to C and on and on, as many points as you are allotted when born there are consequences out of your control.  a path selecting you) make.  Your space is governed by their space.

Understanding that is one thing.  Dismantling delusions of grandeur is another.  Growing a map is another.  Are they good things?  Are they necessary?  Should they even have to be?  I want to roam wild.  Yessir I do.  Life's not fair.  I'm not on this planet with you.  You're on this planet with me.  Control.  Take what you want, but understand where it comes from.  I love you.


///Band of Skulls - "Fires"

Rage 2

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

Born Yesterday

You look terrible.  What, have you been up all night drinking?  No, you self righteous, snide, whisker faced, monkey pawed, salad dicked, piece of shit.  I'm going to tie your legs to opposite rungs of a ladder with surgical tubing, slice open your taint, and plunger fuck you 'til your guts blow out and all you can see are after images of fantasia from when your uncle came to visit, got you drunk, and touched you, you absolute @#$##!%@%#$%%$*%^*%%@#%$#@%!%*(*((^&$^%$$!@# dumpster fire fucker.  I can't sleep.  I'm not a wreck, I just can't sleep.  It's a problem.  I feel like I'm awake all the time.  Is that a problem?  Yes, that's a problem.  Calm down, baby.  It's always a little scarier at night.  I stopped going out with my knife, that's a step in the right direction, right?  Yes.  Okay, bad start.  Let's do this again.

I'm losing my shit.  I don't understand everything.  In fact, I don't understand a lot of things.  In fact, I understand very few things and some of what I do is pure emulation.  Some of it is learned.  The things that I do when I'm not alone.  When I'm trying to communicate and rub elbows and socialize and allow myself to be socialized.  From a pure experiential stand point, I am always still catching up.  Especially when it comes to purely adult things like paying bills and writing checks and progressively more complex responsibilities that  come with age.  Learning on the fly.  Is part of why I am perpetually referring to near and distant past interactions and outcomes to judge and play into and inform and explicate the more recent and definite present ones.  I need snow.  I need cold weather.  I need Winter.  I need to trap my insides in and wear my skin all over again.  Compression wraps.  I'm trying to learn so many things on my own.

What do I need to do to suppress the monster?  It's a puzzle game again.  It's the puzzle game again.  And I don't want to play.  Even if I did, I can't if I can't get over there.  Reconsidering therapy for the hundredth time.

I am dense.  Dumb.  I get that.  So ask for help.  I do, the problem, however, is that half the time I do ask for help with X and Y I get bitten.  Look, okay, no one ever taught me how to be a grown up.  I'm fucking trying.  Okay, calm down.  I'm trying and learning how to be an adult.  How to take care of myself.  How to be a part of other people's lives and, more over, part of society and a functioning member no less.  It takes practice and it takes patience and sometimes other people are not as patient with me as I would like.  I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but blunt objects get the job done pretty good.  I'm good at things.  I know that.  I can do some things pretty well.  Other things not so good.  But why come no patience on their part?  They must know I'm being patient with them and their remarks and their assumptions.  They must know by now that I'm doing the best I can and that's all I've got by now.  Granted the repertoire grows yearly, monthly, sometimes daily, but it's never going to grow fast enough to get on their level.  I mean someone has to bring up the rear.  Who else will be there to pick up the leaders when they stumble and fall and roll their ankle and have to be dragged until they can stand up and break the trail again?  I serve a purpose, gotdamnit.

I'm not a doormat, or inferior, but I kind of am in many respects.  In terms of tangibles.  A state of perpetual repair.  800 brake horsepower on the dyno and shit tires.  Steel struts for shock absorbers.  The ride is harsh, but give me enough straight asphalt and I'll burn straight through to the vanishing point.  I've been thinking my siblings and I relied on and alternately hated each other through the years, but before everyone dove off the edge to lives and relationships and variables apart from the smoking hole in the ground where our lives blew up, we were complementary parts.

Are you really happy?  I'm happier than I've ever been.  I swear I cannot fuse myselves together.  It's like some kind of micro field acting over exceptionally short distances and so they gravitate and hang loosely together if I, when I, can manage to coerce them into the same headspace, but any further, any fucking further, and they fly apart.  Driven like body parts from a weatherman's over packed pipe bomb and a warning two hours too late.  Reduce the casualties, she says.  We're not terrorists he says.  Y'all can go suck a dick he says.

I chewed through my lip the other day.  I'm not the strongest man in the world, or the tallest.  But weapons are all around me.  Tools, you know?  A weapon is a tool.  We should spend some quality time together some day.  I know this place where the street lights have gone out.  It's a stretch of road really.  The headaches have gotten a little worse, but sometimes I can convince myself.  Heavy industrial works and general cause.  It's kind of funny sometimes.  Let's play cards.  Let's play Spades.  I'll never go board.  In my dream I was shot four times through the back, it was pretty amazing.  Not the getting shot part.  That part hurt a lot.  More than anything I've felt in life.  What felt amazing was the increasing inability to breath while my lungs filled up and my brain started to die and became unable to process pain.  I started to think about how screwed up it was that my first DMT trip would also be my last, but then I started to look forward to at least being able to do that.  And then someone else came up and  they passed the gun and held it up between my eyes and blew my head apart before I could enjoy it.  And I died, but didn't wake up and they left.  And I waited and I waited and I waited for my life to start over.  For reincarnation.  For hell.  For heaven.  Nothing.  And so, inside that dream still, I simply stood up, with half a skull from the nasal bones down to my neck, and walked out and woke up into an afternoon.  Disappointed.

I am me.  And you are you.  The greatest form of flattery.  The finest grains of abandonment.  In the soles of my shoes.  The cities crumbled.  Many people died.  The pain never goes away entirely, but honestly, that's asking too much.  Who and what you are is no concern of mine.  The man with the crystalline mind and the watch maker's hands with browns for whites of eyes and a head more water than land and no docks to be found.  I don't know.  I don't know and I cannot tell you if I wanted to.  Steps in right directions.  I need cold weather.  I need something to cool the pile.  Carbon rods?  Is that what does it?  The machine to help me understand and define the horror?  Parcels of molecules and reckless atomic connections.

I can remember going in for the scans and the EMG and the warmth of the dye they injected into my veins and waiting quietly in the wheel chair for it to get pumped throughout before they put me inside and trying to stay awake while feeling like my entire nervous system was wrapped in an electric blanket.  It was a gorgeous feeling.  That was years ago.  I've been thinking about dating again.  I know I'm not and will probably never be ready.  I also know what I want is something I can't have.  It's a catch two two.  I can't bank on getting away with it twice.  I just wish I  could have thought of that the first time.  Says everyone at some point in their life.  It's been difficult.  I won't suppose.  I know.  Reaching out to other schizophrenics is like picking up someone else's phone, pounding the numbers until it rings, and saying "hello, it's me.  You know me, right?"  Asking someone to come in, when the sign on the door clearly reads "get the fuck out."

I'm trying.  Please be patient.  The heat has been stifling.  Crush, baby.  Crush.  Who loves you?  I do.  You still keeping odd hours?  That depends.  Are you still on vacation?  I don't know.  Maybe you should think about writing during daylight hours.  Maybe you should think about the kinds of questions you ask me.  The city is large and I'm just one man.  The country is larger, but I'm still just one man.  Come with me if you want to see or don't.  I won't fault you either way.  Do you remember how you laughed in 2005 at that concert?  No.  But the tears have been uncontrollable since.  A right sort riot.  I can't go back, but I have to. Keep it down.  Where are your sunglasses?  I don't know.  Let's get it right this time.  I was born yesterday.


///Lo-Fidelity Allstars - "Valentine Boast" ... the greatest romance of the 21st century...

///The Orb - "Secrets"  awed by tradition

All Your Base, Repair, and an Album

So I wasn't sure if I'd have time to stop by today and of course the debate ran right up to the last minute so I figured it would be alright to do this while I wait for my dinner to cool off before I jam it in my face and run off to the labor camp to receive the minimum amount of pay allowable by law for the maximum amount of human labor they can yank out of me. In a bizarro sense it's like paying your life savings for the worst imaginable hand job the human mind can devise. Go nuts with that.

I was over the bridge again and, wow, I wish you could of seen it. I don't know what happened between my last visit and this one, but whatever action was being prepared for happened. The entire place was gouged to hell. There was not a train to be seen or car or bus and there was ash on the ground everywhere thick enough to cup a fist in and still lose your hand all the way to the wrist. The sun was out when I got there and I was able to eventually find a bicycle. Actually I tripped over it while walking through a wide street and it kicked loose from the thick gray and ultra fine sand and the air was so still that the cloud it raised just sort of hung there like ghost moss. I rode around for hours and the tires were thin enough to cut through the ash where it wasn't mixed with gutter water into a paste. There was no ash in the air until my eyes traveled all the way up the sides of the ruined buildings rising up glassless and skeletal here and there and saw that the atmosphere way up where the cotton balls of clouds should be was just one big fluxing shifting mass of brownish black and tan where the sun tried and failed to poke through. Everywhere there were the shapes of people. That was the creepy thing. It was as if every person not killed or fled, or almost every person, was turned into some hunched mass of iron pipe or some caught rag work in a chain link fence or a collection of boxes and broken timbers lumped in an alleyway or crawling along atop the ash in a collection of black and white and torn trash bags being tugged along by a stray's leash. It was all very wide and very hard to take it all in at once. The few people I thought I saw ended up being these cruel heaps of shapes and material and rust and broken pipe so I started to give it up and tried to find my way to more broken down and open areas so I could at least feel less claustrophobic when night fell. As I resolved to look no further and to get clear of places where other things that I probably did not want to meet might be hiding in the high iron and burned out rises around me I came across a tablet that I picked up and started watching on and off as I rode out. For some reason Jerry Seinfeld was all that it could play and he kept going on and on about restaurant appetizers and how they come up with all sorts of gimmicks, but in reality we would eat them right out of the bulk freezer bags they're shipped in because we don't care. We just want our taste buds to feel good for a while. I guess he had a point. I tossed it away and it skipped in the dust like a frisbee. I rode for several more hours, but the city kept stretching on and when I stopped to sit on a fire hydrant, after dusting the several inches of gray off of it that piled like a dunce cap I heard his voice cut on again and it scared the living shit out of me. So much so that I lost the connection and woke up back here.

Whatever happened, all their base are now belong to something I didn't think could happen or at least haven't seen before. Possibly evil Jerry Seinfeld. But, I'm sort of looking forward to going back. Sort of wary. Not at all enthusiastic. I'm looking forward to it the way you look forward to going to see a doctor when you have a persistent headache that won't quit and you just need to sleep that badly.

Also yesterday was a day off. Or a night off. This job is really taking it to my shoulders. Over worked and under sexed. No way to limp through life. I spent that day asleep. Well mostly asleep. That and I put in the serious effort to eat three times in one day. Surprisingly difficult. I mean, the thing really is if you sleep you don't need to eat. So if you sleep all the time, you never need to eat. You'll die at an accelerated rate to the average death spans of so many decades, but in sleep things accelerate anyway so you could potentially live much longer asleep than awake eating and trying to prolong this side of things. Of course you wouldn't have to worry about things randomly breaking down around you, but then again things randomly break down in this world all the damn time, so I'm not even sure that's particularly valid. At any rate. I spent most of that day sleeping and eating and trying to feel my muscles knit back together. I don't think I succeeded. I didn't front load enough material for my body to work with before it needed it and now the spaces that should be bridged with proteins and whatever else are now probably jammed with garbage or just left as empty tears... frustrating.... but that's what happens when you blow up your mileage and your engine and don't have the convenience of laying that load on a car and have to lay it on your body. But that'll change.

I started writing another album. Horsemen of the Sun. Released the single earlier on. The full length album is rolling out tomorrow at some point (I hope). It's been gestating long enough. Flash the Firmware was the first album. I wanted it to tell a story of personal mutation and sea change. This one will focus more on the desolation of knowing who you are. Exciting. Depressing. Exploration. Strange territory. Part of the life I'm building apart from the life that has sustained the effort required to do the building. If that makes sense.



///Daedelus - "You're the One" I love you. Not in case no one tells you that. Not in case no one has told you that in a while. Just cause I do. Where would I be without the oft imagined you/me. Try, if you want, to slap How to Operate With a Blown Mind and Northern Stomp together with Love to Make Music To in one playlist and set it to shuffle. It's like black fireworks at night so close to the ground they'll burn you if you watch too close, but too pretty to look away and worth every second of skin peeling flying metal and rock shards.