That Instant

You realize you are pushing your cycles and cams and pistons and engraved toothsets of finished brass over to force change so the person who loves you can see your moss and lichened belly clearly.

In Consideration of Empathy

You attack and beat yourself up over your inability to see eye to eye with your brother.  Eye to eye about what?  Everything.  Not everything, just things now.  The formation and configuration of our immediate family.  Who funds what and why.  Who goes and does what and where.  Who can.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him on that?  You just watched a video of yourself dancing and you thought it was awesome, but the truth is if bodies could have Tourette Syndrome, you would probably be the poster boy with Elaine Benes as the prom Queen.  Why do you want to see eye to eye with him at all?  You are two completely different human beings, down to sexual orientations and the arrangement of your individual eyelashes.  You are not supposed to agree.  You are about as different as they come between siblings.  You do realize this, I hope.  You are a stamped coin.  Do you get it now?  You are never going to see eye to eye about just about everything.  If you want to see the other side, you are probably going to have to bend time and space and, last I heard, that shits pretty difficult with a thousand acre facility so good luck trying to do it with a few cubic inches of fatty gray matter.

You don't have to see anything his way.  He doesn't have to see anything your way.  What is this weird aggression toward a shared emotional experience?  It's not there.  Stop looking.  I don't say that as a warning sign like marking something so damaging and toxic you will die immediately, if not soon after.   I say that as a time saver.  I say that as a wayfarer.  Stop looking.  There is nothing at the end of that ocean.  There is nothing on the other side of that desert.  The globe does not loop around.  It is infinite in the darkness beyond the stars.  Stop looking.  Occasionally whip your binoculars up to your face and take down the range, time, and windage and then duck back down into the reeds.  You do love him, but you do hate him too.  Not for any particular reason.  Just envy.  Change positions.  Skulls, skin, bones, you do know you wouldn't be able to change circuitry.  Can't I?  No.  Mightn't I?  No.  Impossible-r-y-ing I?  No, and that's definitely not a word or fragment.  What the hell is that?   I just stroked off for a minute.  What were you saying?

I was saying, we're never going to see eye to eye, so stop beating yourself up when you try and do not.  You're not a bad person.  You're not a flaming heap of garbage to be kept at arms length all of the time.  Sometimes you cannot control your volatility.  It's a fine problem to have.  You don't have to kill him and you don't have to fight him.  Just let him be himself and you be yourself and the chips will land where they please and are directed.  Your engagement with the world can never be his.  It can be emulated.  Where's the fun in tracing?  Where's the existence in tracing?  Do not get angry with yourself for being irrevocably, irreconcilably, different.  No, you are not stupid for trying.  Anyone in their right mind would see their closest genetic match and want to touch it like a mirror to make sure what they saw was not a reflection.  You are me?  No.  I am me and you are you, and never the two shall meet.




///Dan Deacon - "Feel the Lightning"  polishing the brass on warships that will and need never leave Earth.  Fear is healthy.  A degree of worry is healthy.  Don't take it too far.

Summer Days Are Beautiful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

Dissolving (some) Isolation, September 11th, Launch, and Laughter (touching roots)

It's been a long time.  It had to be.  I had a lot of things I needed to think about and learn an acceptable way to grasp, but I did!  That's good.  You know what else is good?  Coke's slogan.  I thought about it all day when I heard the commercial and now I can't remember what the hell it was, but I'm sure it'll come back to me tomorrow when I'm not thinking.

I will think of coke and remember the slogan for Coke that cracked me up because it was so dual apt they couldn't have done it by accident.  Look it up.  I don't assign homework in general and almost as a rule, but look it up.  I was just thinking though, I have never assigned homework unless I had to.  I kind of make a bad teacher in that way sometimes.  I think that's the way it should be though; if you always come to class and never miss one you should be as well informed as the person who never goes to class, but reads the textbook cover to cover.

Sorry, I got distracted.  I didn't know where to start and I've been looking for a way to start again, but nothing has lead back here the way I expected it to and then I was all out for starting points and so far away that I was all in for whatever I could find to begin again and I found what I was not happy to find but I'll throw it off from the edge of the rooftop and watch it fall down and try to make sense of it.  Okay?  Let's go:

September 11th.  The day that changed 'merica.  It didn't.  America is still what it was.  Only a little more paranoid.  This day used to have a little more bite.  I used to remember the servicemen I know and knew (not because they died, we just stopped being as close as we used to be) and the new ones I've met while fishing the river on a slow Thursday.  I used to remember them with incredible reverence.  Not so much anymore.

The one's still in are in because they want to be.  The ones that are out are out on good terms and very well compensated, on the pay scale I aspire to climb toward that kind of stability, and have awesome resumes.  I guess that still burns me a little on this day.  Getting near perfect scores on the entrance test and damn near perfect on the physicals and getting bounced on psychological failures.  The whole talk my dad gave me about "the family standard of excellence."  I didn't want to cry or weep.  I just wanted to pop out of existence with a genie wink when going in and making it as an infantryman and working a way up could be viewed as tarnishing "the family standard of excellence."  I still makes me laugh out loud today to say it aloud.

Part of what makes me laugh is that, incidentally, he was right.  After taking a year or two to think about it a little harder, I can see that I would have been a skittish, trigger happy, blood hungry, question asking, thinking, liability to the cause.  I would have gotten myself and other people killed, given a uniform, a weapon, and a theater.  That's just coincidence, though, pure coincidence, so it doesn't really count.  At all.
Serendipity.

"Are you dead or are you sleeping, God, I sure hope you are dead."  Dealing with a little paranoia break, but that's neither here nor there.

September is also the anniversary of the longest intimate relationship I ever was able to be a part of and it was fantastic.  I forgot the date the first three years we were together.  Finally made the brilliant move to add it to my phone.  It stayed there after we broke up.  I can vaguely remember some of the gifts, one of the gifts, I gave her. I think the others were holiday related.  I can remember trying to figure out how to get flowers delivered to her office and the whole runaround I got.  I can also vividly remember the violent times.  The times when my brain fractured.  The times when truth was too much for me to eat.

I am laughing because it is remembering the times when, more than anything else, I wanted the laws of interpersonal physics to suspend themselves.  I do not know, though.  Life is long.  Who else are you going to travel the spectrum of drugs with when you're too old to work and done everything else and the prospect of shagging is as interesting as scrubbing your bathtub?  Blackouts.  Retirement is going to be an amazing thing.

So, September 11th used to be like holding a revolver in my mouth and pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked over several times while fingering an empty casing from the gun range.  Not anymore.  I'm passed it.  Nothing's going to change my world, sweetness.

We will modify, sometimes ad hoc, we will destroy and build, we will continue to drive toward some kind of perfect state, but we will mow down no one else along the way.  We will remain honest and not overly dramatic, maybe, we will masturbate to idle thoughts of bodily violence, we will maintain course and get to know the new ship, we will cultivate friendship, and build ourselves into better people instead of weapons.  We will.

I don't want to spend too much time on this.  I've been trying to structure my paragraphs better and slash the blocks into verses.  The poet that keeps clawing it's way out of my mouth.  I don't want to spend too much time on this and I'm three hours in so let's call it close.

I love you.  I do.  I shouldn't.  If I could bury you each and be the one with the shovel over night, I would cum.  It is a strange thing, I know.  I love helping people, so much.   There is no replacing the feeling of helping someone solve a problem and secure a future outcome 100%.   100% assured that what they wanted was what they were going to get.  Nothing replaces that.  Wherever you are.

I've been working to dissolve some isolation.  It's important.  An important thing.  Once I finish the project I am working alone I am going to need to be able to interact on a normal basis to get another job to fill the money void.  Money drives everything, doesn't it?  More than that is learning how to interact with people without a group to diffuse the messy bits to.  It's easy to do when there are many other magnetic orientations to diffuse field lines to.  Not so much otherwise.

I am approaching a point where isolation will become counterproductive.  Flat out. For a time.  There are many options for filling the counter point to weigh it into a cantilever support system.  Ad hocced.  Performing the expense reports in my mind.  It's not going to work.  I think that is part of growing up.  Growing the capacity to do that and know with some certainty what is bound to fail when it comes to tolerable and intolerable acts of personality.

I am getting closer toward dissolving some aspects of isolation.  One finger on the trigger that will close fire bulkheads.  I don't know what process or loop or instantiation will trigger something terrible, but I am prepared to eject instantaneously.  I'm not your project.  I am project enough for myself. Here come old flattop.

We are you friends.  We are your friends.  We are shoving off from the scrap yard brand new in many ways.  The new ship is troubleshot and configured.  There is nothing more to it than to do it.  We are launching.  We are reentering circles and seeing what snow will fall and where and what kinds of sculpture we can make of it until the sun comes up and melts it all.  We are launching.  Granted we were stocked up and manned up a week prior, but we didn't have the heart at the wheel to give chase to open sea.  We do know.  We are ready.  Cobbled together from many different pieces, we are ready to see if it works.  Shove off, baby.

Getting back to laughter.  Getting back to what makes us laugh.  Back to the roots of what made me start in the first place.  Gain some understanding.  At first it was a reaching out, it became a gps, and now it's a tough out.  I don't like to think inwardly.  As tough an out as they come.  It's still a map.  I'm on the far edge of it and it keeps drawing beyond the dark part of the space of influence.  I think I am getting back to laughter.

Back to being able to really, really, indulge in the spaces life does afford for taking nothing too seriously and taking everything too seriously.  That magical place where living life, at least the way you understand it presently, like it is your last day jives with the fact that, barring absolute worst outcomes in tandem, it probably isn't.

You're going to have to live with, regardless of how you or someone else can spin it, what you did today.

I want to spend that time laughing.  We're launching again.  We are equipped for combat, need it arise, we are equipped for food, it will arise, and we are equipped to question ourselves and somethings (not everythings) anew.  We are equipped to observe and equipped for some closeness.  We have an L six two D load out and we are ready to rock.

I am perpetually intermittently disappointed with myself. Lack of ability to grow networks combined with... grows.  I wonder if I am some kind of cancer embodied sometimes.  A walking carcinogen.  You go back to her and I go back to... I feel like I am in a very long race to eliminate myself or as many people as I can take down at once.  It's nothing personal.  It's sporting.  Not immediately but, I don't know.

Some days, walking down the street, I look at myself in the store front windows reflected, and it's a pretty damn cool thing to see that ambulating to wherever and enjoy that remove.  There's no vanity there for me.  Just trekking and knowing that we're doing it.  We're doing it!  We are out of doors and doing alright.  I don't love the birds looking back sometimes with that "not if you were the last man on Earth" look.  What the hell is that about?

We're doing this.  I am as over myself as I'll ever be.  It's passed time to laugh again.  Laugh about little things genuinely.  It's easy to see the world as whole.    It's passed time to really chew on it again.  Launch probes.  Explore and navigate from afar or as far as possible, but do not be afraid to take readings from the machines you employ.  It's time, however briefly, to try again to square up vision with reality and  you'll never know how far off you are, or've been, unless that depleted round sails downrange.


///DJ? Acucrack - "Allegra"  ... this is the soundtrack to stalking yourself.  Searching out, the movie score. This is, bassed up, the chase; the quiet chase between functional and passable (between blending and fitting in).

Over The River and Through The Woods

It's been a long trip here. Back here. I should say. A lot of different pressures. A lot of losses. One of those peculiar things. Not one, several. I got dumped. Not exactly big news. I also broke up with someone. Two different people. At the same time. In the same span of conversation. And then was propositioned again. By the person I just dumped and the offspring of the person who left me. Mainly all I could think was "how is this even possible." Mainly all I could do was do nothing and ask for some time to think about the entire course of the 48 hours.

A lot of my creative time was damaged leading up to that point, which was part of why I had to leave and be let go. Part of it was biological incompatibilities. Vaginas and tiny dicks. What's a boy to do? The proposition is worse than the original make up. Better in it's emotional make up. Worse in it's biological make up, but closer to normal than the previous one, but altogether worse because the venue is the same, with the same accouterments and attendant chemical problematics and it would be so much less, if it wasn't so much more. Hours to land on the same page, hours to read each other, hours to post script to everyone's satisfaction. Hours and hours of time I would rather spend writing. Hours to spend dreaming spent instead in interaction I need, but don't want.

Tripping round and round town and all the while stalking through my own dreams when I do sleep to find the nemesis. The dreaming has been spectacular in it's depth. And also time consuming. The hunt largely unsuccessful. The body count, however, relatively high. I have found, in there, many things to fear and many things that could bleed that I never thought would until I tried in moments I would normally wake from, but instead followed on. It's hard sometimes when they're the ones hiding from you and there is nothing to do beyond waiting. Sitting and waiting to feel well enough to wake up. Charged enough to support waking hours. Pacing through dreams. I've been over the territories. Every god damn way. Without success. I'm beginning to think he won't show until I stop looking. Like those stupid Super Mario ghosts. I'll get him though. Just a matter of time. Patience.



Things have been scatter formed. Trying to get back on a pace. Any pace. I had a pace you could set an erratic watch to. A watch that was missing some teeth. And had a cracked face. And the watch band was either too tight or too loose, but you could never lose it because the minute it was not on your wrist you knew it because you didn't feel anything at all. I lost my watch. I'm finding it again and I can't fuck it up again.

I mean, I can. I will. Because I've fucked it up at least ten times before. Closer to twenty. But I'm trying. This makes twenty one. Or something around there. The quality of the poetry has been. That is all. It just has been. Not too dark, not too light. So I have to keep doing that. I just wish the erratic and hit and miss was just one long string of things I could stand next to and be proud of instead of a whole lot of things I have to read twenty four hours later to understand and begin to appreciate or begin to hate and then it's like picking up old photographs on a coffee table at grandmother's house and you scratch your chin for a minute and then think oooooh yeah, I was there, wasn't I. God damn that sweater is terrible. What was I thinking. But, damn I looked good then. I hate grandmother's house.

Over the river and through the woods, to dreamland's houses we go. Off to slay the thoughts of the day and retrace my footsteps in snow.

I'm not going to talk about my mental state. There are things in the dark and there are things in the light and all of them would kill you given the chance. Stay alert. Watch the corners. Don't point at the sky, because one day it will point back at you. Don't chase the sounds, unless they are following. Don't chase the splits in the seams of your vision, because people will think you are crazy. Don't listen to the voices. If you ignore them long enough, they'll tell you something special you wouldn't have thought about on your own. And that thing will be so amazing the only way you could relate it to someone who was not there, inside you, is by saying nothing and leaving it all up to the rattle of tree leaves and two A.M. hounds that think they are scrap metal boatswains to rails.


///Mono - "High Life" ... all you live is the high life and never come down... loved this song in high school. still do. Mono always had a sound that completely took me in and I loved them for that.

///Mono - "Life in Mono" I never know exactly what to do, but they never make it easy to walk away. Expectations too great. I want to say. And then the little voice in the back of my head whispers, maybe this is it, for now. So leave nothing on the table.

Take It Light and Hungry Muffins

I had this thought last night before work. I was foot loosing through some drafts of head poems that were approaching paper semi-permanence and what I was thinking about was a way to make the words more active. One of the problems with poetry is that it lends itself to passive construction, which is not always a bad thing as a starting point, but is a bad thing in the final deliverable. Poetry saddled up high and hard with passive constructions and ideas and sentences and fragments becomes burdensome pretty quickly.

The longer the poem the more noticeable the passive effect becomes and it's frustrating to me. For me it's a major obstacle most of the time. Taking a point of view out of a poem, making it neuter, or making it accessible and multiplicable, I guess open ended comes to mind, can also very quickly take so much focus out of it that it becomes a lot like staring at those damnable 3D art calendars that are supposed to be ships on the canals of Venice if you stare through them hard enough for an hour or two and that's not always what I want to create. Passivity leaves "so what"s dangling in the air afterward. Forgetability is probably the greatest symptom that tells you something bore too many passive structures to mean what it wanted to mean, whether by accident or on purpose. Which made me think some more as I tongued the words over and over to get a better angle.

What I struck on, and it's not new, is the idea that it's easy to write about being hungry, or being depraved, or being happy. The thing that adds in some separation between the people that can do that and the people that can write about hunger, the people that can write about depravity, and the people that can construct happiness is the conversion, successful conversion, of passive to active without losing parallels and loops and flurries of movement in meaning and senses that make words vibrate and condense into what could be considered a poem. Personally my definition of poetry is pretty wide. My professors never took too much of a shine to it, but whatever. They had Ph.Ds to work on or something. Skin tight jeans to squeeze into. Hair to gel. And tattoos to reveal corners of to beg questions from star eyed lyric junkie chicks. I assume. I'm pretty sure one was too busy to help me pass his class because he was way too busy cramming elements of his thesis into our heads to get raw useful material out of us that he could reincorporate later. Also too busy sucking his own cock. Which is beside the point.

I want to write not about being hungry, or being a muffin, or being asleep, but what I want to capture the verb state of hunger, the verbness of the muffin, the sensation of the sleeping and sometimes in the building it's so easy to slip off on passive bubbles and think I've accomplished something when in reality it was forgettable to everyone who wasn't there to see the furious action, the sparks, the welding, the rivet guns, and the workers high in the sky putting it all together and wrecking ballin' it back down and throwing it up again higher and higher and lower and lower.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I need to remember not to beat myself up over the work I love to do. At least not too hard. It is, afterall, my chosen line of work. The rest is just to make sure I have enough to keep on going until it's all done and all over. And that's what counts. So I say right now. From the top of a cresting wave of anti-comedown. From the edges of comfortable space.

Space has been treating me alright. I'm probably about to leave the inner system at some point. The view has been great. Miss the steady contact, but quite frankly it was unsustainable without help and on top of that it was as many parts discomfort as comfort. I don't know if all or nothing is reasonable, but it is a way. And for a plains walking spaceman it's the only way I've come to know for sure that let's me go as I mean to run on. So I take it. Light and sound. I don't really know if I'm gonna try to land again. Probably not. Gravity is for chumps.

On a totally unrelated note: I just realized that if I turn my chapstick all the way down there is virtually no way for it to get screwed up into the cap as it rubs against the sides of my pockets. Why did it take me damn near ten years of using chapsticks to figure that out!? Talk about essential information no one told me EVER. I mean, I'm sometimes not the fastest car on the track, but am I the last person in my peer group to figure this out? I suspect, quite possibly, yes.


///The Orb - "Spanish Castles in Space" After you come home from the longest day of work ever and lock your front door, put this on loud enough to hear it clearly no matter what you're doing. In the time it takes you to take your shoes off, take off your clothes, crack a beer, roll a joint, put on your homey clothes, and start to think about dinner and actually start to breath easy this song will sop it's way right into your brain and you won't even have realized it's whispering in your ear and all the bottom half of your brain can feel is the ocean lapping at your brain stem and your spine unwinding and you haven't done a damn thing to force the issue. It's just there. Actively soothing you.