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"

Pushed

All I wanted was a front row seat in what feels like a war and looks nothing like it.  I keep reciting the procedure and double and triple checking equipment, and in the mean seconds ticking by the pilot is sweating marbles trying to keep our helicopter away from flak and small arms fire and the occasional rocket, circling where I need to land once I jump off of the side.  I'm sweating too fearful of what happens after I step out into thin air, but I know what happens.  There's nothing to be afraid of.

Walking into my apartment after getting groceries the long fingered man with the reading glasses glances up and turns around and taps the only skin on his arm not flayed away where a watch was.  Time is of the essence.  I know.  There is not much time to waste.  I know, I know, I know.  Where are you going?  Out, don't follow me.  You forgot your wallet.  Thank you.

I suppose, a sort of writer's block for persons who don't get writer's block?

Consider this your gentle, two palmed, straight armed shove.  You know what has to be done.  Pull the trigger.

I worry sometimes that it won't make sense.  I worry now if it's not good.  If the entire pursuit has been a waste.  Why poetry?  What is locking up inside you?  It's nothing.  Absolutely nothing and you know it.  Don't be afraid, you've just had your eyes closed for a few months.  Listening to the air and the land and space and people eating each other alive and giving birth and dying and sleeping and breathing and talking and talking and it's not so bad if you'd only open your eyes standing on the ledge of the gunship.  Make sense out of chaos.  Or chaos out of chaos.  Make sense of it later.  Every thought lost to time is one less beacon, one less point of reference, one less story, one less epic, one less chapter, one less relationship you could have brought into this world from your travels.  One less love.  Do it for you.  Do it because you can love you and that's where it all starts.  Come clapping toward the bright pink smoke flare while the shells fly.  I'll be back to pick you up sooner than you have time to think to ask "where did you go?"




///Sylvan Esso - "Hey Mami"    higher resolution

Compound Eye

You know those weeks where you can swear up and down you own something, but you can't find it because you or someone you know or maybe someone you don't know borrowed it and never returned it to you or it turns out you never actually bought it in the first place because you dreamed the whole thing and woke up so seamlessly that the thought was sewn into the fabric of your memory permanently and you should by all rights, as far as the chemicals and salts zipping around the fatty little lanes and straightaways in your head can tell you, have it somewhere in the place where you live and within reach when you need it. Which is right now. Just a week of "I need this right now. Where is it?" Just wanted to tell you that yeah, you're not crazy. I know those weeks too. For me though, and not to say I'm super more specialer than you, it's been a month.

I can't seem to find my eye for pencil work. I lost it somewhere. I know I had it. I can look back at all the things I did with it and can still sort of fuzz out with the tool that's now occupying the space it used to occupy, but the series of functions and processes that composed my eye hand connection for pencil work have absented themselves from the factory floor. Which leads me to believe that they were taken. There's been another glaring gap in the work force. Physical production has tailed off dramatically. While it is good that I have managed to keep everyone on task doing constructive things instead of building destructive implements of and components to a machine whose sole purpose is a Rube Goldbergian mechanicide. There has been that one missing thing and I think I know the exact face that would have packed something like pencil work into his bag before checking out without notice. Which is fine. I can live with that. Everyone else still comes to the table and as long as I can have dreams that wander and fly with the child and can cross at will and am not building myself into an elaborate and immediate and quite possibly explosive self death, the rest is water under the gravy cake.

Buuut still. It is just a little annoying. I have no idea where they go. As the administrator I usually just have to sit and wait for them to come back. The kid wanders. That's the only one I have to actively chase down, because who the hell knows when he'll get back. Plus I don't even know if it's possible for them to get hurt out where they go and come to and from and with him I take no chances. That's the main member that helps keep everyone else relatively in agreement. But enough about me. I tried to draw some flowers today. Flowers in the shape of a scorpion for an idea for a tattoo. This is what came out:



Frustrating. Not even close to what was laid out in my head. I felt like strangling my hand for it's insolence, but that wouldnt have helped any of us. Well I might have felt better for a few minutes in the same way Stalin felt better for having people shot, but we all know how that ended. Happily ever after. If by happily you mean breathlessly paranoid. And if by ever after you mean with little warning and thankfully not a minute or second longer. So I'm not going to have my hand shot. This time. I'd probably have to hold the gun with my mouth. Maybe rig up some kind foot pedal operated jig, because old lefty can't really be trusted. They've been friends too long. Might give him the tip off and righty might skip town to Istanbul.

Well anyway. What now. Is the main question. I don't know if I can't draw. I think I still can. That drawing I did before did not turn out nearly as I saw it in my head either. I hope this disconnect isn't a sign of some medical nonsense. I'm not going in for that. I got enough medical nonsense to try and ignore without thinking about having to have new medical nonsense to try and ignore on top of that. But enough about me.

I think what could also be happening here. An alternate theory of the origin of man, if you will. Is that our dear escapee is still at work and still down in the factory toodling away at this and that project behind my eyes and ahead of spine, but the actual tools and processes and algorithms he is using have changed without my direct information. Which is possible, I suppose. In fact, I assume. In fact, in fact is one of those things I just try not to use in writing and it always comes up, so I will not use it again in here so I can think about - whatever. The point is, he is still there doing his damnedest to turn plans and prints and raw blank ingots of multi-ton steel and walls of marble into frescoes. Frescoes? Really complicated and beautifully simple objects of vision transmitted from my head to yours through the medium of the manipulation of space, material, and radiata and what I am expecting to see is really him trying to do the job with the new tools and processes and it is amounting to trying to build houses with like a complex multistage artisan bread oven instead of hammers and nails and measuring tape.

So instead of the end product being something that it should be had I not so strictly enforced my vision on myself - a ridiculously awesome bread house, shiny and golden and all crazy twisty gorgeous sitting on my coffee table, it ends up being something close to my vision, but ridiculously not - an impossible to inhabit, but human sized house built with beams of sagging bread and weird warbly walls and a floor you can stand on for about two seconds before you fall through from the upstairs straight on down to the dirt floor basement.

I think my eye for black and whites and penciling and penning is changing, or maybe already changed, to an eye for colors. I thought I lost my eye for color earlier this week because I was trying to see what I wanted to see in terms of line work and then overlay the colors I wanted it to appear in on top of that and I couldn't get past trying to envision the lines. I thought that meant that I was having trouble seeing how the colors would fit and thus couldn't fit the lines to the colors. Now I think the problem might be that I can see the colors without the lines and trying to fit the lines to the colors is something my tools and processes are unprepared to do.

Which is slightly exciting. I don't remember when we talked about it before, but when I first started sharing art I told you I was a pen and pencil guy and usually never screwed around with coloring things because I had no eye for it. I guess I've been working at it long enough to change that and hadn't realized it until now. Unless there is a third explanation. A third theory of space and time and the god particle if you will. I could just have regressed. I might just be worse at drawing and art than I was before. But fuck that. I'm greatness.



///Mouse on Mars - "Circloid Bricklett Sprungli" you know I don't have an ego that big. My ego is so small to understand how small it feels you'd have to feel this song turned up as loud as it'll go and turn the bass up as high as it goes and picture yourself sitting on the nose of a Saturn V booster, tall as a skyscraper, firing the energy output of a dozen Hoover Dams out of it's enormous backside in more flames and vapor than you've ever seen in the widest Arizona sunset you've ever laid eyes on and on top of that tower you look back and there's nothing behind you but the shrinking blue disk of a half moon Earth and the blackness of space so wide it makes you dizzy just to blink. That's how little my ego is as I'm blasting through space, trying to understand the world and teach myself to be okay with the fact that I may never really have a place to land.