How much of your hand should you show? Once you have worked to find your voice, how afraid are you that it will be duplicated? What if the person you want to collaborate with, the person who has the ends in hand, can duplicate your means if you have to go through them to gain exposure?
Eventually you can cut them out. Eventually you will not have to worry about intellectual theft. You'll always be one step ahead by default. What if the person you have chosen to work with is capable of pirating everything you have created prior and your only proof is a series of time stamps? What if you have the capabilities and where-with-all and all out gall and disregard to forge time stamps too? What if the skillsets you have used to survive for so long, all thirty years of you, forced you to develop the skills you needed to make any claim of origin moot? You can design locks and you also have a very fine set of lock picks. The line between used and new blurs to infinity.
Collaboration is a minefield. When an artist opens their book to you, enjoy it. Do not see it as a requisite. See it as a privilege. See it as a pact of ultimate trust. Closer than sex. Closer than that bullshit conversation heart to heart over a beer or nine. Closer than that time they drove you home drunk when you were too drunk to drive and they almost crashed, killing the two people in the backseat not buckled up. Closer than that girl you've been talking to and haven't closed the deal on. Closer than that friend that dropped you off at the emergency room when you died for twenty seconds and had to be resuscitated with a balled up fist to your chest. Closer than that secret your dad told you when you finally got a couple drinks in him when he hit fifty and waxed nostalgic. Closer than that blank spot in your memory everyone else knows. It's a minefield.
If I show you how the sausage is made, do you see dollars or do you see a way to be a better you? Do you see a way out or do you see a way in? Will you steal or will you harmonize and create?
Every creator has the hang up of collaboration. How many collaborations have started and failed? How many flash in the pan, in the searing oil, spill over for an instant, lick the flame and light the entire venture ablaze? Every time someone asks me to collaborate, I am reluctant. It never ends well. It never ends well! IT NEVER ENDS WELL! It is to a point that I know it is me. I know I am at fault. I go on tears. I have vision. I am the spark. I am the fire. I am the galaxy. I am the clouds. I am the sky. I am the grass. I am the atom. I am the brick. I am the pipe. I am the fist. I am the womb. I am the rain and the sword. The broom and the dust. The wall and the fist. The string and the mattress. The thimble and the apple crushed during lunch breaks. I am the napkin and the grease. The spear and the beast. The insect eaten bone and the loam.
There is never any commitment. No real sticktoitiveness. I churn and it burns and they push thumb to index and make empty promises and break appointments that actually matter and it goes round and round until it hits the drain. That's not the end. I go into the waste lines, shrink myself down and dive in, like that mini sub movie we all know that I can't remember. Sealab? Fantastic Voyage! And I dive through the septic system after I get no response long enough and search it out and try to revive it and report back and the reports come thinner from the surface until it's a science fiction movie with a starship in The Dark Between the Stars and I'm hoping I can land somewhere and I do not want to do it again.
Forgive my apprehension because I will not forgive your abandonment. Not again. You say you want to collaborate. I say prove it. You say you want to work with me, show me something I have not seen. Give me a reason to believe in you because your word is worth dog ____. Hell, help me be a person better than myself right now and I will trade you. If you call yourself an asshole and behave like one, the book of life will not open for you. Fear is not stopping me, hate is not stopping me. Waste is. Time is. Trust is. Anyone can shout into a hole in the ground. Anyone can shout into a knot in a tree. Anyone can program a machine. Anyone can build one. Craft is another being altogether.
Another state. If you are searching for your voice, say so. If you are searching for your base, say so. If you need guidance, say so. Make it clear. As it stands, you have nothing to offer me. Nothing within your catalog will help me refine, reinvent, understand, or see myself anew. What you ask of me is to help you. Help you do what? Why should I care? Why should I turn myself on the spit so you can eat while I listen to what a self starter and go getter you are on and on through the nights? Show me something. Show me you have learned something. If you show me that you have learned something beyond your current state, I will engage you like you have a soul. I will answer your questions and accept your challenges. Keep coasting. I will leave you behind. Challenge me and I will fight. Challenge me hollow and I will go through the motions right along with you and play down.
Hell, I'll help you bury it. Our collaboration. I don't take it lightly. I do not like feeling used. I know I am not disposable. It is fun to feel like or be an inspiration or muse or riff target or mirror or foundry, however in collaboration I demand more, expect more, I want to be inspired, mused, riff against, see a reflection in you, and forge new alloys and atoms through you. As I gift you, give me something to work with. Turn my gears. Blow my turbines. Feed my generator, as I shovel coal into your own.
Do not make me regret this. Not again. Never again. Do not waste my time.
///Mazzy Star - "Look On Down From The Bridge" rainy winter. the river never froze. it is strange to be disappointed in the spring. it is immensely frustrating when i can't talk art with you; when everything turns toward monetization and consumers. screw that, can we look at a sky and say it's nice without you turning it into coin?
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label skill sets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skill sets. Show all posts
12/20/14
A Very Confused Moment
Confuzzlry. It's not bad, but it's not good either. I took my truck for a routine fill up. I've yet to put a full tank in her and I thought the day might be the day to push the needle full to "F". It was not the day.
Traffic was terrible and all of the legal side routes were taken and you can't hop curbs no matter your clearance level. I stared at the curbs. My head up display showed the alternate route and I had to keep pressing cancel, breathe easy, and listen to radio. Clutch out. Clutch in. Clutch out. Clutch in. Clutch out. Oh, wait! No, nothing moving. Clutch out. Clutch out. It was not my day to be had and I was not going to be had on this day. No sir. No thanks. I'll wait.
Get to the pumps and every stall is taken and my baby is thirsty as hell. Even I can taste it. I set it to hover mode and blocked all ways of ingress and egress. Except one. Sure enough that stall cleared out and I took two glances and shot the gap backwards. Full reverse! Aye aye, captain. I can't hear you! Aye aye, captain!
Straight into the path of a little rabbit car. We had a face to mirror to windshield to face show down. One of the times when having a giant rusty hook hitch bolted to your truck frame helps. It's that extra incentive to "do you really want this through the hood of your car?" I slipped her in to the open stall, easy as cake. Or pie. Take your pick. The point is, if you talk to her well, the battleship has hunter killer maneuverability. You have to suss it out though. And know her limits.
Gassing up, my eyes went upward too. I started to day dream while fueling the tank and I really wished for rain or at least snow, but I'll settle for rain. I heard it. Rattle rattle rattle asphalt rattle and I smiled very wide. And then I noticed that it was not raining. The woman on the other side of the pump was staring at me. I smiled and winked back. She kept staring.
That's when I realized gasoline was pouring all over the side of the truck and collecting in a great pool beneath my feet. "Oh?" is what I said. It kept pouring. I looked at her and she wasn't staring anymore. I looked at the sky and it was in fact not raining. I looked at the front tank's hatch and it was indeed pouring gasoline everywhere beginning six dollars ago.
I cut the feed and adjusted the nozzle and gasket. Perfect pour. She started drinking real well with no spills. I cast my eyes around to see who else saw and then I realized everybody gets one. Two fudges in five years is not bad. It's not good, but it's not bad either.
How'd you die? Freak gasoline fight accident. I couldn't help chuckling while I pulled away. A good horse is a happy horse. The things I do for you, truck. You owe me one.
The cockpit reeks of gasoline now. No shoes in the house!
///Miss Kittin - "Happy Violentine" .... do you like me [y] [n]. my truck gets moody. so do i. red aura'd capital underscore night terrors
Traffic was terrible and all of the legal side routes were taken and you can't hop curbs no matter your clearance level. I stared at the curbs. My head up display showed the alternate route and I had to keep pressing cancel, breathe easy, and listen to radio. Clutch out. Clutch in. Clutch out. Clutch in. Clutch out. Oh, wait! No, nothing moving. Clutch out. Clutch out. It was not my day to be had and I was not going to be had on this day. No sir. No thanks. I'll wait.
Get to the pumps and every stall is taken and my baby is thirsty as hell. Even I can taste it. I set it to hover mode and blocked all ways of ingress and egress. Except one. Sure enough that stall cleared out and I took two glances and shot the gap backwards. Full reverse! Aye aye, captain. I can't hear you! Aye aye, captain!
Straight into the path of a little rabbit car. We had a face to mirror to windshield to face show down. One of the times when having a giant rusty hook hitch bolted to your truck frame helps. It's that extra incentive to "do you really want this through the hood of your car?" I slipped her in to the open stall, easy as cake. Or pie. Take your pick. The point is, if you talk to her well, the battleship has hunter killer maneuverability. You have to suss it out though. And know her limits.
Gassing up, my eyes went upward too. I started to day dream while fueling the tank and I really wished for rain or at least snow, but I'll settle for rain. I heard it. Rattle rattle rattle asphalt rattle and I smiled very wide. And then I noticed that it was not raining. The woman on the other side of the pump was staring at me. I smiled and winked back. She kept staring.
That's when I realized gasoline was pouring all over the side of the truck and collecting in a great pool beneath my feet. "Oh?" is what I said. It kept pouring. I looked at her and she wasn't staring anymore. I looked at the sky and it was in fact not raining. I looked at the front tank's hatch and it was indeed pouring gasoline everywhere beginning six dollars ago.
I cut the feed and adjusted the nozzle and gasket. Perfect pour. She started drinking real well with no spills. I cast my eyes around to see who else saw and then I realized everybody gets one. Two fudges in five years is not bad. It's not good, but it's not bad either.
How'd you die? Freak gasoline fight accident. I couldn't help chuckling while I pulled away. A good horse is a happy horse. The things I do for you, truck. You owe me one.
The cockpit reeks of gasoline now. No shoes in the house!
///Miss Kittin - "Happy Violentine" .... do you like me [y] [n]. my truck gets moody. so do i. red aura'd capital underscore night terrors
2/22/14
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.
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.
12/1/13
Overkill
Having a difficult time taking Is and Yous and Mes out of my poetry. I wish I had a different face, but apparently I am no longer allowed to hack away at it. I want to get back to wonder. I want to get back to visions of enormous dinosaurs, but the real world continues to push back and it's not fair and I can't figure out a way to circumvent the charges.
I will. Stand up act 9 is coming. Long dark tunnel. I conquered my fear of absolute darkness a while back. Doesn't mean that it's comfortable though. I want to pick up house and walk away from it all in a bad way. Maybe a good way. Tough to think about. Do you just throw your hard drives in a ruck sack? I don't know! I'm asking you! Who helps you plan that sort of thing out? I have no clue.
Do ya have to bring an umbrella or something or do you count on finding one along the route? Could probably thieve one. Do you really want to do that? That's not who you are. You can take whatever you really want, but don't. Every single time you take you are taking something from someone else and that's no good. Let someone hold your leash. They're not holding you back. They're just checking you. You have to allow yourself to be checked at the hip. Take it and bounce off or try to run them over, but whatever you do correct your path. Not correct, but make adjustments because you have to and understand that it is alright to make adjustments.
Adjusting the dials is okay. Not everyone likes to hear music at 11, hell you don't either. Not everyone wants or needs a kiss or needs your face two inches from their own. Not everyone can be famous and not everyone will remember events the same ways you do. You're losing your memory and maybe that plays into part of why you are losing connection fidelity with your dream states. Be okay with working on it. There's no breaker to fire off in between where you're going and where you can never go back to and that's perfectly fine.
Do you bring a knife or no? Do you need to? Would you need to? I don't know! You can take what you want, but you don't have to. Are you expecting battle? It's a funky kind of war we fight and I've been seeing some strange things I don't know how to handle off of the top of my head. I need time. No picking up sticks. No running away. No abuse. Abuse is shorthand for sadists. What's short hand for saints? I want to plow into a wall and obliterate my body in a mist of red and bone. I want humor. Get the fuck away from me! I swear to god I will taste your eye fluid before the night is out, you mother fucker piece of shit, do you not know there is no such thing as a fair fight?
Rules are in place to keep me out of you. Period. Maybe it's all a matter of timing? That may be what I'm getting wrong.
Wanderlust eats away at me and I nibble back. I almost lit a cat on fire again. I'm doing good though. Being on good behavior and going to work almost every time I am supposed to go. I want to keep it up through the end of the year. I am not expecting much from Santa. I still ask him for a 1911 against my better judgement. No resolutions forthcoming and none will be given. I think I'll treat myself to a box of ammunition this year. One step at a time. Baby steps. We'll travel, but I'm not pulling up sticks just yet. I'm trying to monitor my speech. I've been speaking much too fast and running words together and feeling like I need to apologize inside my head every time someone says "what did you say?" I said exactly what the hell I said. It's hyper frustrating. It's like a stutter, but backwards and difficult to correct and heart stabbing when I notice it flowing out of my damned mouth. Not fair!
Howling in my head wont stop. I haven't snorted anything serious in a long time and my sinuses feel like they are about to shatter. "...turning the music up so ya don't hear the engine falling apart..." by hook or by crook we are going to fix this thing so it runs smooth. Chatty Cathy. Slow the fuck down and take a moment. The world's not crazy. It is just you. Everything does not smell like burning metal. It is just you. Space invaders.
///Kelis - "I Don't Think So" just dont think you're at my speed
I will. Stand up act 9 is coming. Long dark tunnel. I conquered my fear of absolute darkness a while back. Doesn't mean that it's comfortable though. I want to pick up house and walk away from it all in a bad way. Maybe a good way. Tough to think about. Do you just throw your hard drives in a ruck sack? I don't know! I'm asking you! Who helps you plan that sort of thing out? I have no clue.
Do ya have to bring an umbrella or something or do you count on finding one along the route? Could probably thieve one. Do you really want to do that? That's not who you are. You can take whatever you really want, but don't. Every single time you take you are taking something from someone else and that's no good. Let someone hold your leash. They're not holding you back. They're just checking you. You have to allow yourself to be checked at the hip. Take it and bounce off or try to run them over, but whatever you do correct your path. Not correct, but make adjustments because you have to and understand that it is alright to make adjustments.
Adjusting the dials is okay. Not everyone likes to hear music at 11, hell you don't either. Not everyone wants or needs a kiss or needs your face two inches from their own. Not everyone can be famous and not everyone will remember events the same ways you do. You're losing your memory and maybe that plays into part of why you are losing connection fidelity with your dream states. Be okay with working on it. There's no breaker to fire off in between where you're going and where you can never go back to and that's perfectly fine.
Do you bring a knife or no? Do you need to? Would you need to? I don't know! You can take what you want, but you don't have to. Are you expecting battle? It's a funky kind of war we fight and I've been seeing some strange things I don't know how to handle off of the top of my head. I need time. No picking up sticks. No running away. No abuse. Abuse is shorthand for sadists. What's short hand for saints? I want to plow into a wall and obliterate my body in a mist of red and bone. I want humor. Get the fuck away from me! I swear to god I will taste your eye fluid before the night is out, you mother fucker piece of shit, do you not know there is no such thing as a fair fight?
Rules are in place to keep me out of you. Period. Maybe it's all a matter of timing? That may be what I'm getting wrong.
Wanderlust eats away at me and I nibble back. I almost lit a cat on fire again. I'm doing good though. Being on good behavior and going to work almost every time I am supposed to go. I want to keep it up through the end of the year. I am not expecting much from Santa. I still ask him for a 1911 against my better judgement. No resolutions forthcoming and none will be given. I think I'll treat myself to a box of ammunition this year. One step at a time. Baby steps. We'll travel, but I'm not pulling up sticks just yet. I'm trying to monitor my speech. I've been speaking much too fast and running words together and feeling like I need to apologize inside my head every time someone says "what did you say?" I said exactly what the hell I said. It's hyper frustrating. It's like a stutter, but backwards and difficult to correct and heart stabbing when I notice it flowing out of my damned mouth. Not fair!
Howling in my head wont stop. I haven't snorted anything serious in a long time and my sinuses feel like they are about to shatter. "...turning the music up so ya don't hear the engine falling apart..." by hook or by crook we are going to fix this thing so it runs smooth. Chatty Cathy. Slow the fuck down and take a moment. The world's not crazy. It is just you. Everything does not smell like burning metal. It is just you. Space invaders.
///Kelis - "I Don't Think So" just dont think you're at my speed
5/10/13
What Makes You Laugh 2
This cracked me the hell up yesterday. As a kid I always had trouble with math. I remember sitting in the temporary trailer classroom in my AP history class. It was near the end of the year and the teacher was taking some of his sick days. He may have actually been sick. I don't remember. He was kind of an intense guy. Everywhere he walked he walked like he was walking into a steady fifteen mile an hour headwind. He couldn't have been more than five foot six, so the combination of the fast and choppy gait and the constant forward lean he rocked combined to create this Charlie Chaplin silent film physical comedy that left people giggling in his wake.
Advanced Placement history was hard enough, but he wasn't there he would leave worksheets for the less than competent place holder substitutes. There was a steady stable of substitutes so the substitute you had for German two would in all likelihood be the same one you had a few weeks later for chemistry. Their job wasn't to teach, it was to keep order first and foremost. If you learned anything while they were there it was incidental. The worksheets were usually word finds and other time killers. I don't know why they didn't just pass out crayons and blank paper. Wait, I do know. The number of people who could keep themselves busy inside of poorly airconditioned trailers without devolving into the chaos of recess could be counted on one hand. Maybe two. The worksheets that time around were math problems.
I sat near the front. Parents orders, and there was the standing threat that they might check up on you at any moment and if you weren't there or sitting where they told you to sit there would be a body tax to pay when you got home. So I'm sitting near the front with this xerox of math problems that's faded blue because school infrastructure updates itself about as often as government infrastructure. Are those basically the same thing? I don't know why I think of them as different things. Maybe it's just the division of public and private that happens so glaringly once you finish high school and realize there was a private system when you were just a pint too, but you were light years away from it then and student loans come preying as soon as you can make that decision yourself.
Anyway, I'm sitting near the front and getting nowhere. I got beyond the first few algebra problems because they were easy. I remember getting stuck on this problem that had X and Y on both sides of the equal sign and I was going crazy trying to figure out who the hell would torture someone with that kind of difficulty. Just start off with the Xs over here and the Ys over there, but how will the children learn about life's complexities if they can't fit the building in their heads? I couldn't. Half the classroom was, by then, devolving into a dozen different conversations and spoon fighting and pencil fighting and laughter everywhere and I'm just trying to think because I was told if the worksheet was finished, I could start my homework. If I finished my homework I could go outside as soon as I got home and the faster you could get out of the house and go play and ride all afternoon and not be around the dead air in that building and the anxiety couched inside the better off you were. Can't get into trumped up trouble if you're not around to get pegged on made up charges.
The substitute teacher came over after several minutes and asked me if I was okay. I said yeah, of course, just trying to think. Turns out I had my eyes closed and my head on my desk and I was rubbing the worksheet on the short naps of my hair and it was making this paper on velcro loop sound that was loud enough to distract him at his desk. I liked the sound. I didn't like being interrupted. To me it was really soothing. It was helping me focus and draw away from the noise of being there and the difficulty I was having and it kinda sounded like the noise the wind makes when you're in a car with the window down and it goes fwoosh by your ear. Beautifully white noise. As soon as he snapped me out of it I couldn't get back there. I ended up making little drawings of airplanes for the rest of my answers and turned it in at the end of the day. The answers didn't matter that much. Check, check minus, check plus. It was mostly a way of taking attendance.
Yesterday though, I was in a similar way. I couldn't get the windows I was working on to stay up. I spent hours reading up on the product. I installed them correctly. Insulated them correctly. Nothing over tightened, nothing under done. There was a slight bowing, but it shouldn't be affecting the sashes the way it was and it was driving me crazy. Every time I adjusted them I had to take the window out of the frame, adjust the settings, put the window back in and test it. Hours into this I began to zone out and go over all of the steps I covered over the last few days, from demolition to installation to fine tuning to the now. Going over the entire ocean of knowledge accumulated over that time and evaluating each nodule for a potential mistake. While I was doing the sun went down. There were no blinds in the window.
Sometimes to help myself think these days, an extension of my head rubbing habit from yesterday, I rub and cup my dick. It's not a pleasure thing, but it kind of is. Hearing the sound of the paper rubbing against my skull and feeling that movement and motion put me in a good place to think straight. I don't rub things on my skull as much anymore, but I do enjoy rubbing my crotch when I'm trying to figure out and navigate particularly difficult things that require brain power. I guess when my bodies happy, my head is freer to roam.
So I'm standing in front of this window, staring blankly into space and eyes defocused to the point where all I can see is my vague shilouette, while I pound the details of why the hell nothing I'm trying to do with the window sash springs seems to be working, and one hand all the way down my pants cupping my cock and bulls and giving them a little go, and it comes to me: it's vinyl! If the screws won't work and the springs cannot be moved or adjusted manually, just shim the frame in and that'll create the pressure to keep the window from falling on its own. Eureka!
I break out into this massive grin and my eyes come back into focus and I look through my reflection into the darkness beyond the glass with my dick in my hand and the sixty something year old neighbor two yards over is scowling directly at me with a cigarette in his hand with a look of disgust so intense I have not seen anything remotely like it since the last time I "disappointed" my dad and was there face to face to see his closed mindedness It was hilarious. My brain immediately searched its data banks for the universal sign language of "oh my god, I was not jerking off to you just now!" but it came up blank so I just carefully took my hand out of my pants, turned off the light and walked out of the room... into the next room over which also had a light on... so I pretty much hid behind the wall of the door until he finished smoking and went back in his house. I laughed so hard I almost pissed my pants. Speaking of which I once pissed my pants outside of a bar and the guy who was my ride wasn't done yet so I had to go back in and sit down at the bar and my pants made this ridiculous squishing sound and I had to explain myself. Not a single person there was as upset as that guy was standing out in his yard yesterday night.
Cracked me the hell up yesterday.
Advanced Placement history was hard enough, but he wasn't there he would leave worksheets for the less than competent place holder substitutes. There was a steady stable of substitutes so the substitute you had for German two would in all likelihood be the same one you had a few weeks later for chemistry. Their job wasn't to teach, it was to keep order first and foremost. If you learned anything while they were there it was incidental. The worksheets were usually word finds and other time killers. I don't know why they didn't just pass out crayons and blank paper. Wait, I do know. The number of people who could keep themselves busy inside of poorly airconditioned trailers without devolving into the chaos of recess could be counted on one hand. Maybe two. The worksheets that time around were math problems.
I sat near the front. Parents orders, and there was the standing threat that they might check up on you at any moment and if you weren't there or sitting where they told you to sit there would be a body tax to pay when you got home. So I'm sitting near the front with this xerox of math problems that's faded blue because school infrastructure updates itself about as often as government infrastructure. Are those basically the same thing? I don't know why I think of them as different things. Maybe it's just the division of public and private that happens so glaringly once you finish high school and realize there was a private system when you were just a pint too, but you were light years away from it then and student loans come preying as soon as you can make that decision yourself.
Anyway, I'm sitting near the front and getting nowhere. I got beyond the first few algebra problems because they were easy. I remember getting stuck on this problem that had X and Y on both sides of the equal sign and I was going crazy trying to figure out who the hell would torture someone with that kind of difficulty. Just start off with the Xs over here and the Ys over there, but how will the children learn about life's complexities if they can't fit the building in their heads? I couldn't. Half the classroom was, by then, devolving into a dozen different conversations and spoon fighting and pencil fighting and laughter everywhere and I'm just trying to think because I was told if the worksheet was finished, I could start my homework. If I finished my homework I could go outside as soon as I got home and the faster you could get out of the house and go play and ride all afternoon and not be around the dead air in that building and the anxiety couched inside the better off you were. Can't get into trumped up trouble if you're not around to get pegged on made up charges.
The substitute teacher came over after several minutes and asked me if I was okay. I said yeah, of course, just trying to think. Turns out I had my eyes closed and my head on my desk and I was rubbing the worksheet on the short naps of my hair and it was making this paper on velcro loop sound that was loud enough to distract him at his desk. I liked the sound. I didn't like being interrupted. To me it was really soothing. It was helping me focus and draw away from the noise of being there and the difficulty I was having and it kinda sounded like the noise the wind makes when you're in a car with the window down and it goes fwoosh by your ear. Beautifully white noise. As soon as he snapped me out of it I couldn't get back there. I ended up making little drawings of airplanes for the rest of my answers and turned it in at the end of the day. The answers didn't matter that much. Check, check minus, check plus. It was mostly a way of taking attendance.
Yesterday though, I was in a similar way. I couldn't get the windows I was working on to stay up. I spent hours reading up on the product. I installed them correctly. Insulated them correctly. Nothing over tightened, nothing under done. There was a slight bowing, but it shouldn't be affecting the sashes the way it was and it was driving me crazy. Every time I adjusted them I had to take the window out of the frame, adjust the settings, put the window back in and test it. Hours into this I began to zone out and go over all of the steps I covered over the last few days, from demolition to installation to fine tuning to the now. Going over the entire ocean of knowledge accumulated over that time and evaluating each nodule for a potential mistake. While I was doing the sun went down. There were no blinds in the window.
Sometimes to help myself think these days, an extension of my head rubbing habit from yesterday, I rub and cup my dick. It's not a pleasure thing, but it kind of is. Hearing the sound of the paper rubbing against my skull and feeling that movement and motion put me in a good place to think straight. I don't rub things on my skull as much anymore, but I do enjoy rubbing my crotch when I'm trying to figure out and navigate particularly difficult things that require brain power. I guess when my bodies happy, my head is freer to roam.
So I'm standing in front of this window, staring blankly into space and eyes defocused to the point where all I can see is my vague shilouette, while I pound the details of why the hell nothing I'm trying to do with the window sash springs seems to be working, and one hand all the way down my pants cupping my cock and bulls and giving them a little go, and it comes to me: it's vinyl! If the screws won't work and the springs cannot be moved or adjusted manually, just shim the frame in and that'll create the pressure to keep the window from falling on its own. Eureka!
I break out into this massive grin and my eyes come back into focus and I look through my reflection into the darkness beyond the glass with my dick in my hand and the sixty something year old neighbor two yards over is scowling directly at me with a cigarette in his hand with a look of disgust so intense I have not seen anything remotely like it since the last time I "disappointed" my dad and was there face to face to see his closed mindedness It was hilarious. My brain immediately searched its data banks for the universal sign language of "oh my god, I was not jerking off to you just now!" but it came up blank so I just carefully took my hand out of my pants, turned off the light and walked out of the room... into the next room over which also had a light on... so I pretty much hid behind the wall of the door until he finished smoking and went back in his house. I laughed so hard I almost pissed my pants. Speaking of which I once pissed my pants outside of a bar and the guy who was my ride wasn't done yet so I had to go back in and sit down at the bar and my pants made this ridiculous squishing sound and I had to explain myself. Not a single person there was as upset as that guy was standing out in his yard yesterday night.
Cracked me the hell up yesterday.
4/5/13
Ghosts [return]
What's black and white and red all over? Your mother, upside down, wrapped in electrical tape. You on the run. The pain has been astronomical. Mentally shredded. Bringing myself back together. You never want your heart to get too cold, but sometimes enough things pile up together and the fire goes out and it's just you out there, alone in the backwoods, beside a ring of rocks and ash and you can hear them at the tree line cutting under the bushes and between the trunks and leaves would rustle if it wasn't so late a winter, and instead the twigs are snapping and whistling when they breath and more than anything else you want to howl and bring them to you because waiting has you chewing your tongue out of your face, but even if you could draw enough breath to do it, your throat is swollen shut tighter than your shivering eyelids. So you wait for sunrise with the knee quaked temerity of a hangman who knows there are worse things than death.
It's been a while. It's been a long long while. Every minute an exercise, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, in control. Childhood memories know no limits and have no expiration date. They're like veins laid into the skin of your brain that pump that history through your tissues and sockets and bones and every few days or weeks or sometimes, blessed months, they rattle around your cells and locks like blind inmates with worn down kitchen ware for picks. Sometimes, strolling those halls you catch their empty, milky, eyes in little bits of mirror gummed to metal rods watching the sound of your footsteps down the hall. You took them out, one by one, to solitary confinement and punched those brown and blue iris's out with a peen hammer. Each new arrival. Because you could not stand the watching, but you never thought they would keep on looking with their ears, little mirrors still poking between the bars out of habit. Or maybe just to fuck with you. Every few days, weeks, or blessed months, one will get it right, and out of the corner of your eye, too far down the hall to break the hand at play, a cell springs open. Two cells. Three cells. Two more on the upper level. Another in a wing of a branch of your complex you only know because the alarm is thudding through your ears, through the bricks of your skull and you know something has gone very wrong.
The ghosts have been roaming again. To the point where the best thing I can do is lock myself up and pray for rain stiff enough to take the chalk off the attic walls where the roof is worn away. Sometimes I know why it happens. A lot of times I still don't. Managing is a kind word. But you do it to the best of your abilities. At some point it becomes not protecting yourself from others intrusions or exploitation or oversights or abuse or perceptions as much as it becomes protecting other people from yourself. Just because you know and can, to a degree, understand what's happening to you or not always the what, but the why (sometimes not even that) and can feel that something is not in its right place and that knife is not where you left it, and your shoes are covered in mud, but you went to bed early yesterday and it didn't rain until deep into the night, and that math is simply not accurate, does not mean that you can do anything to stop it besides isolate and insulate yourself as much as possible. "Bad things are about to happen."
It shakes you on the inside. The frameworks you've built up to contain and blanket fracture and split apart and you have to force one hand into the other. Force your hands to love each other so they do not tear you to pieces. And sigh "please, not now. Not yet." They will pay someday, but you're not ready yet. The switch turns and you're alone again. The things with names I cannot pronounce are gone, but how far away did they go this time. Are they in the next room? Around the corner of the building? Is he on the windowsill, outside the drawn shade admiring the night air? Check the bathroom. Where did all of this blood come from? The switch turns again. Rusty contacts spark and pain flows like spilled water on live copper. You hold your hands over your ears and go days without saying a word because if you do not know who and what it is that is breathing in your ear, you can never trust a word from between your lips again.
Pain builds and abets and builds in the dark inside your folds. They eat at your body. Snack and taste and tear away this and that. They can hear you crying through the years, sniffing you out. One and then two and then too many to count and all you want is to reach back through that long stairwell, past the cobwebs, to hug your little body and press your round little face into your chest until you stop breathing, but you can't bring yourself to do it, so you hold yourself tight and listen to the echos rising to the floor above and the snick snacking shuffle of their footsteps trying to find their way down to where your body broke all those years ago. They come down those stairs and pull chairs near and wait and watch and some laugh and some pick skin out of their teeth with spare change or a bobby pin. Some draw little things in the dust on the floor with little fingers. Pain builds and you take it and take it until it becomes.
In the pile of ash inside the stone circle in the backwoods you failed to navigate and so made a bed, the weight of ignition is reached. The heart inside you, driven and compacted to a block of solid steel arctic ice, begins to burn again. Focus taken returns. It is only you. Yes, they are near, but it is only you holding the gun to your chest and the hammer falls and you exhale fire. The sun is hanging itself and all you need do is walk toward it to feel its heat. The air is not vibrating anymore, instead holding you the way you tried to hold yourself. Pain destroys until the scale goes so far it can only be described by what it creates. Clarity is a kind word. Control. Management. I know someday it will go somewhere we will not come back from. But that day is not today. Today, everyone is in their cell. Everyone dangerous enough to raise the hairs on my neck and make me piss into my pant leg and fill my left shoe. History never goes away.
Rebuild. Come back to us. There is no reason for this is the biggest lie you'll ever hear. Someday we'll be right and they'll see what it is that steals sleep from our eyes. It's been a long long while, but it feels like no time at all. Someday we'll have a necklace made out of their teeth, little holes drilled in them, fillings and all, with a little pink thread through them and the back ends in fisherman knots tied to silver clasps. That would be nice. Someday sweetheart.
It's been a while. It's been a long long while. Every minute an exercise, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, in control. Childhood memories know no limits and have no expiration date. They're like veins laid into the skin of your brain that pump that history through your tissues and sockets and bones and every few days or weeks or sometimes, blessed months, they rattle around your cells and locks like blind inmates with worn down kitchen ware for picks. Sometimes, strolling those halls you catch their empty, milky, eyes in little bits of mirror gummed to metal rods watching the sound of your footsteps down the hall. You took them out, one by one, to solitary confinement and punched those brown and blue iris's out with a peen hammer. Each new arrival. Because you could not stand the watching, but you never thought they would keep on looking with their ears, little mirrors still poking between the bars out of habit. Or maybe just to fuck with you. Every few days, weeks, or blessed months, one will get it right, and out of the corner of your eye, too far down the hall to break the hand at play, a cell springs open. Two cells. Three cells. Two more on the upper level. Another in a wing of a branch of your complex you only know because the alarm is thudding through your ears, through the bricks of your skull and you know something has gone very wrong.
The ghosts have been roaming again. To the point where the best thing I can do is lock myself up and pray for rain stiff enough to take the chalk off the attic walls where the roof is worn away. Sometimes I know why it happens. A lot of times I still don't. Managing is a kind word. But you do it to the best of your abilities. At some point it becomes not protecting yourself from others intrusions or exploitation or oversights or abuse or perceptions as much as it becomes protecting other people from yourself. Just because you know and can, to a degree, understand what's happening to you or not always the what, but the why (sometimes not even that) and can feel that something is not in its right place and that knife is not where you left it, and your shoes are covered in mud, but you went to bed early yesterday and it didn't rain until deep into the night, and that math is simply not accurate, does not mean that you can do anything to stop it besides isolate and insulate yourself as much as possible. "Bad things are about to happen."
It shakes you on the inside. The frameworks you've built up to contain and blanket fracture and split apart and you have to force one hand into the other. Force your hands to love each other so they do not tear you to pieces. And sigh "please, not now. Not yet." They will pay someday, but you're not ready yet. The switch turns and you're alone again. The things with names I cannot pronounce are gone, but how far away did they go this time. Are they in the next room? Around the corner of the building? Is he on the windowsill, outside the drawn shade admiring the night air? Check the bathroom. Where did all of this blood come from? The switch turns again. Rusty contacts spark and pain flows like spilled water on live copper. You hold your hands over your ears and go days without saying a word because if you do not know who and what it is that is breathing in your ear, you can never trust a word from between your lips again.
Pain builds and abets and builds in the dark inside your folds. They eat at your body. Snack and taste and tear away this and that. They can hear you crying through the years, sniffing you out. One and then two and then too many to count and all you want is to reach back through that long stairwell, past the cobwebs, to hug your little body and press your round little face into your chest until you stop breathing, but you can't bring yourself to do it, so you hold yourself tight and listen to the echos rising to the floor above and the snick snacking shuffle of their footsteps trying to find their way down to where your body broke all those years ago. They come down those stairs and pull chairs near and wait and watch and some laugh and some pick skin out of their teeth with spare change or a bobby pin. Some draw little things in the dust on the floor with little fingers. Pain builds and you take it and take it until it becomes.
In the pile of ash inside the stone circle in the backwoods you failed to navigate and so made a bed, the weight of ignition is reached. The heart inside you, driven and compacted to a block of solid steel arctic ice, begins to burn again. Focus taken returns. It is only you. Yes, they are near, but it is only you holding the gun to your chest and the hammer falls and you exhale fire. The sun is hanging itself and all you need do is walk toward it to feel its heat. The air is not vibrating anymore, instead holding you the way you tried to hold yourself. Pain destroys until the scale goes so far it can only be described by what it creates. Clarity is a kind word. Control. Management. I know someday it will go somewhere we will not come back from. But that day is not today. Today, everyone is in their cell. Everyone dangerous enough to raise the hairs on my neck and make me piss into my pant leg and fill my left shoe. History never goes away.
Rebuild. Come back to us. There is no reason for this is the biggest lie you'll ever hear. Someday we'll be right and they'll see what it is that steals sleep from our eyes. It's been a long long while, but it feels like no time at all. Someday we'll have a necklace made out of their teeth, little holes drilled in them, fillings and all, with a little pink thread through them and the back ends in fisherman knots tied to silver clasps. That would be nice. Someday sweetheart.
8/8/11
Lookit, Lookit
The Music That Makes the Living got a redesign today. Now with 200% less headache on the eyeballs. Aren't I awesome? Don't answer that.
This is the new background:
The old background was okay but had way too many colors that demanded a strange set of colors for the text and the whole thing never really worked and it's bothered me since I put it up.
Old background:
I think the new background keeps the visual interest and loses the visual headache. So overall, a win. Not as interesting as visual confetti, but also not as blinding. An answer to a visual problem. It's nice when you can make answers materialize with enough effort fired off. One of those things where, thankfully, production does not mirror life and the end result is a big ol' pot of buttery eye candy. Still trying to restore my skill sets to where they once were and this I think is a step in the right direction. Everybody on the factory floor working towards the same ends. Well, maybe not everybody, but enough of the bodies. To make something worth remembering happen.
Also, Hai :) enough with the coffee. Time for sleep.
///Justice - "DVNO" ...do you really need to know my name, to figure out how cool I am? The bass is so live on this. I can almost feel the fingers smacking the steel. Need something to get your head nodding on a friday pre-game before whatever the hell else you planned on doing later? Answered.
This is the new background:
The old background was okay but had way too many colors that demanded a strange set of colors for the text and the whole thing never really worked and it's bothered me since I put it up.
Old background:
I think the new background keeps the visual interest and loses the visual headache. So overall, a win. Not as interesting as visual confetti, but also not as blinding. An answer to a visual problem. It's nice when you can make answers materialize with enough effort fired off. One of those things where, thankfully, production does not mirror life and the end result is a big ol' pot of buttery eye candy. Still trying to restore my skill sets to where they once were and this I think is a step in the right direction. Everybody on the factory floor working towards the same ends. Well, maybe not everybody, but enough of the bodies. To make something worth remembering happen.
Also, Hai :) enough with the coffee. Time for sleep.
///Justice - "DVNO" ...do you really need to know my name, to figure out how cool I am? The bass is so live on this. I can almost feel the fingers smacking the steel. Need something to get your head nodding on a friday pre-game before whatever the hell else you planned on doing later? Answered.
7/22/11
The New Grading System, Thoughts on Construction, and I Hate Flowers
Well, I spent four hours this morning trying to draw that scorpion flower tattoo and failed miserably again. You can sort of start to see it, but personally I hate how it turned out.
It's starting to look like something. Instead of working on it for thirty minutes and getting pissed off and quitting I worked on it for six times as long, but eventually gave up and went to bed to think about it there or at least find success in doing other things. Maybe it's just the brush selection. Or maybe it's that I just hate drawing flowers and have always struggled with drawing them up close. Or maybe it's that I haven't spent enough time looking at flowers before. Really committing them to memory. I've certainly spent, when I think about it, at least 1000 times more minutes looking at schematics, machines, and geometric constructions in general. Perhaps there is porting that can be done. Reduce the organic to the geometric, fix the perspective there and then port it back to the organic. It's bothering me, in case I haven't made that clear. An unscratchable itch that I have to prove to myself is not unscratchable, but merely located in a place that's hard to reach, but reachable. I hate flowers.
So while I was asleep I had the pleasure of grading papers. At the end. Well, not the end. But in the second dream. The first dream was pretty awesome. I went to the pacific rim and started a new life as a bounty hunter in Oceania. It was all well and good. Then things got bloody and did not end well at all, but that's a story for another time. I'm going to talk about the boring epiphany. So I'm sitting there grading these papers and the papers are both written by potheads, except that I already know what happens to them in the future because I've gone back in time to grade their work as college freshman. I already know one of them is going to run off and work for big name companies out of the gate and I already know the other one is going to end up dropping out and moving in with his mother and working for Borders until they go bankrupt.
I'm reading the writing notes and they're both there in the classroom after school waiting to see what their grades are because the papers will make or break both of their years in my class and as I finish up and go back to reread the stories along with my first impression notes I start ticking things off in columns labeled B, S, and N. I have no idea what the labels mean or their relevance to a fiction class so I pull my perspective back out of my head and I ask the me/not me doing the grading what the columns and labels are for and he tells me "B stands for believable, S stands for continuity, and N stands for noticeable." I ask the grader a follow up question: what do you mean by noticeable? He answers, "noticeable means a moment in the story where the reader notices something and commits the action, event, item, whatever the subject or object being read about is, to their active memory reserved for things they would normally encounter, care about, or keep track of in their own lives and for their own sake." Aha, says I and then I climbed back into my head and went back to reading and grading.
I can't remember exactly what the successful pothead's story was about, but it was pretty boring to grade. All of the things that were supposed to be there were there, but it was obvious that he had no interest in writing and was taking the course for required credit so I found myself loosening my standards mainly to avoid having to deal with arguing about it when I handed him his paper, but also because I couldn't bring myself to nail him on finer points when the subject he chose to write about was thin, safe, and bland to begin with. I didn't think about it at the time as rewarding mediocrity or the ultra conservative, "cover your bases", approach that tends to net good grades in Universities, but thinking about it now it was a pretty slanted thing to do.
The second paper was much more interesting. It was a story about a boy who promises to help his mother kill herself before winter after being disgraced by her husband's lascivious activities in the new year that came to light just as the summer began. The husband leaves her in the same week school ends and the boy is home with his mother throughout the summer months and into fall when he finally begins to realize what he's agreed to help her do and it's impact on his life as school begins again. That's when I got to see the new grading system in action. The columns were divided into rows labeled A, B, C, D, and F. For the continuity category an X in a row meant that was the grade earned. For every other category you started the strikes at the bottom of the column and moved upward to an A. So five noticeable moments meant a technical A. Five continuity issues meant a technical F. Five moments of the suspension of disbelief meant a technical A. There was also built in consideration for length. For short stories, one strike was all that was allowed per letter grade. Middle and longer lengths and word counts meant more ground for the student to cover so additional strikes were made available, two then three per letter grade etc. For particularly short papers letters could be knocked off of the scale so that a person couldn't score an F for not packing enough junk into a paper to satisfy the system and help prevent people from playing to the syllabus or the requirements. And of course more columns could be added or eliminated as subject matter, literary devices, and exercises demanded. Though that did not stop me from allowing it to happen despite the mechanisms in place to alert me to it.
There were continuity issues. Lots of continuity issues. Not impressionistic issues, but just hard de facto mistakes of alignment for a five page story. There were also many, many, many believable moments and moments where I was committing pieces of the story to my memory as though I were reading about neighbors or friends that I thought I knew. The first paper did the same thing, albeit with far less subtlety. So I ended up in a situation where the second paper scored two As and an F. Averaged out to a C. From the stand point of "as hard a science as something subjective as grading papers can be." In the end I tuned the C up to a B for the other points of craftsmanship that can't really be covered and agreed upon in the realm of the lowest common denominator of general and identifiable human experience. I probably should have tuned the other paper from an A to a B as well for rote underachievement.
As a grading system it struck me as fairly useful as a starting point for getting a sense of issues, strengths, and weaknesses. But also as a starting point for conversation, discussion, and argument about grades being given out. Using it, I could explain to student A why their paper of X length graded out better than student B's paper of Y length without having to think back to what I was thinking about when I scribbled the notes I scribbled and then have to hunt through the nebulous territory of assigning those thoughts to grades. Now I had a way of saying "everything else aside, this is why you got this score" and "all things considered in concert, this is how my personal opinion and subjectivity changed that score." It was a pretty detailed dream for half an hour of sleeping. Not as ridiculous or action packed as the other dream, but just as good.
I made that this afternoon. Just trying to get away from failure and into a little success. Turned out exactly how I wanted it too. I wish there was a way to make it rain in the summer time. Anything to peel back the heat. Summer really is the most miserable set of months known to man. Gotta move farther north. Since there is no cloud generator available. I'll tell you about the other dream later. I'll try and draw it up a little more. Get back to doing what I love to do when I'm not writing or out getting dirty playing in the sun or at home moping and cringing against the ticks of time. I wanted to do some paper crafts today, but I'm out of time - because I went out to play for three hours instead of working, but I still think I managed to better myself either way. Oh well. Sorry to bore you. I guess not every day is a hustle. Some days are a shuffle. Or maybe just a think. And now I'm tired and I still have to go to work so, let's get it on. And by get it on I mean dive into sleep. Might try to cross the bridge for a little while and see what's going on in Universe B. Or not. Those trips can be just as tiring as walking these planes some days.
See ya later.
///Boards of Canada - "Seeya Later" I have to leave, but wait up for me. I'll be back soon.
It's starting to look like something. Instead of working on it for thirty minutes and getting pissed off and quitting I worked on it for six times as long, but eventually gave up and went to bed to think about it there or at least find success in doing other things. Maybe it's just the brush selection. Or maybe it's that I just hate drawing flowers and have always struggled with drawing them up close. Or maybe it's that I haven't spent enough time looking at flowers before. Really committing them to memory. I've certainly spent, when I think about it, at least 1000 times more minutes looking at schematics, machines, and geometric constructions in general. Perhaps there is porting that can be done. Reduce the organic to the geometric, fix the perspective there and then port it back to the organic. It's bothering me, in case I haven't made that clear. An unscratchable itch that I have to prove to myself is not unscratchable, but merely located in a place that's hard to reach, but reachable. I hate flowers.
So while I was asleep I had the pleasure of grading papers. At the end. Well, not the end. But in the second dream. The first dream was pretty awesome. I went to the pacific rim and started a new life as a bounty hunter in Oceania. It was all well and good. Then things got bloody and did not end well at all, but that's a story for another time. I'm going to talk about the boring epiphany. So I'm sitting there grading these papers and the papers are both written by potheads, except that I already know what happens to them in the future because I've gone back in time to grade their work as college freshman. I already know one of them is going to run off and work for big name companies out of the gate and I already know the other one is going to end up dropping out and moving in with his mother and working for Borders until they go bankrupt.
I'm reading the writing notes and they're both there in the classroom after school waiting to see what their grades are because the papers will make or break both of their years in my class and as I finish up and go back to reread the stories along with my first impression notes I start ticking things off in columns labeled B, S, and N. I have no idea what the labels mean or their relevance to a fiction class so I pull my perspective back out of my head and I ask the me/not me doing the grading what the columns and labels are for and he tells me "B stands for believable, S stands for continuity, and N stands for noticeable." I ask the grader a follow up question: what do you mean by noticeable? He answers, "noticeable means a moment in the story where the reader notices something and commits the action, event, item, whatever the subject or object being read about is, to their active memory reserved for things they would normally encounter, care about, or keep track of in their own lives and for their own sake." Aha, says I and then I climbed back into my head and went back to reading and grading.
I can't remember exactly what the successful pothead's story was about, but it was pretty boring to grade. All of the things that were supposed to be there were there, but it was obvious that he had no interest in writing and was taking the course for required credit so I found myself loosening my standards mainly to avoid having to deal with arguing about it when I handed him his paper, but also because I couldn't bring myself to nail him on finer points when the subject he chose to write about was thin, safe, and bland to begin with. I didn't think about it at the time as rewarding mediocrity or the ultra conservative, "cover your bases", approach that tends to net good grades in Universities, but thinking about it now it was a pretty slanted thing to do.
The second paper was much more interesting. It was a story about a boy who promises to help his mother kill herself before winter after being disgraced by her husband's lascivious activities in the new year that came to light just as the summer began. The husband leaves her in the same week school ends and the boy is home with his mother throughout the summer months and into fall when he finally begins to realize what he's agreed to help her do and it's impact on his life as school begins again. That's when I got to see the new grading system in action. The columns were divided into rows labeled A, B, C, D, and F. For the continuity category an X in a row meant that was the grade earned. For every other category you started the strikes at the bottom of the column and moved upward to an A. So five noticeable moments meant a technical A. Five continuity issues meant a technical F. Five moments of the suspension of disbelief meant a technical A. There was also built in consideration for length. For short stories, one strike was all that was allowed per letter grade. Middle and longer lengths and word counts meant more ground for the student to cover so additional strikes were made available, two then three per letter grade etc. For particularly short papers letters could be knocked off of the scale so that a person couldn't score an F for not packing enough junk into a paper to satisfy the system and help prevent people from playing to the syllabus or the requirements. And of course more columns could be added or eliminated as subject matter, literary devices, and exercises demanded. Though that did not stop me from allowing it to happen despite the mechanisms in place to alert me to it.
There were continuity issues. Lots of continuity issues. Not impressionistic issues, but just hard de facto mistakes of alignment for a five page story. There were also many, many, many believable moments and moments where I was committing pieces of the story to my memory as though I were reading about neighbors or friends that I thought I knew. The first paper did the same thing, albeit with far less subtlety. So I ended up in a situation where the second paper scored two As and an F. Averaged out to a C. From the stand point of "as hard a science as something subjective as grading papers can be." In the end I tuned the C up to a B for the other points of craftsmanship that can't really be covered and agreed upon in the realm of the lowest common denominator of general and identifiable human experience. I probably should have tuned the other paper from an A to a B as well for rote underachievement.
As a grading system it struck me as fairly useful as a starting point for getting a sense of issues, strengths, and weaknesses. But also as a starting point for conversation, discussion, and argument about grades being given out. Using it, I could explain to student A why their paper of X length graded out better than student B's paper of Y length without having to think back to what I was thinking about when I scribbled the notes I scribbled and then have to hunt through the nebulous territory of assigning those thoughts to grades. Now I had a way of saying "everything else aside, this is why you got this score" and "all things considered in concert, this is how my personal opinion and subjectivity changed that score." It was a pretty detailed dream for half an hour of sleeping. Not as ridiculous or action packed as the other dream, but just as good.
I made that this afternoon. Just trying to get away from failure and into a little success. Turned out exactly how I wanted it too. I wish there was a way to make it rain in the summer time. Anything to peel back the heat. Summer really is the most miserable set of months known to man. Gotta move farther north. Since there is no cloud generator available. I'll tell you about the other dream later. I'll try and draw it up a little more. Get back to doing what I love to do when I'm not writing or out getting dirty playing in the sun or at home moping and cringing against the ticks of time. I wanted to do some paper crafts today, but I'm out of time - because I went out to play for three hours instead of working, but I still think I managed to better myself either way. Oh well. Sorry to bore you. I guess not every day is a hustle. Some days are a shuffle. Or maybe just a think. And now I'm tired and I still have to go to work so, let's get it on. And by get it on I mean dive into sleep. Might try to cross the bridge for a little while and see what's going on in Universe B. Or not. Those trips can be just as tiring as walking these planes some days.
See ya later.
///Boards of Canada - "Seeya Later" I have to leave, but wait up for me. I'll be back soon.
5/24/11
Old and News and Birthdays and Writer's Bowel Abstraction
May 22nd was my 7 year old birthday. My next birthday is coming up on the 27th. I'm gonna be 8 years old. Should be fun. Assuming I will live to experience 73 iterations of my life, I've broken up each iteration into 73 birthdays because I am essentially living a full life through each iteration from reconception to ultimate system failure so I will have a birthday every five days culminating with my death next year on the 21st of April at midnight and my reboot on the 22nd into my 27th iteration of life. So really, I guess the 27th will be star date M.26.8.Y-P221A or something.
I wonder if leaving the country is like entering a parallel universe.
I don't know what I'm going to do for my eighth birthday. Probably nothing. Nothing and videogames. Satisfaction and fulfillment fired directly into the vein and straight to the brain stem. Honestly 73 is probably a bit of a reach. I don't very well expect to land within twenty years of that, but I might as well keep even the unlikely within my model because it does happen.
Recently I've been culling through some of my old complete short stories to see which ones I want to feature on Bits and what I've realized is that some of my old stuff is dreadful. Which is good. I mean abortions are never fun, but sometimes they need to happen and sometimes they don't happen and you have to live with the outcome for better and worse.
In writing, I feel, it's not good to have too many abortions. Eventually you've got to gut it out and finish and seal the deal. I don't think I've ever typed seal the deal. What an odd collection of letters. Visually I think it's the ea's that are looking funny and making me smile to look at them. But anyway, in writing if you are constantly quitting mid-project or mid-composition you'll eventually find yourself staring at a mountain of unfinished work that you know is bad and you'll find it very difficult to pick through for the good pieces that might work in other things because it is a hugely tangled mess of half and full formed ideas.
At least when you gut it out and finish your composition or your project it is all more or less there in front of you in some sort of organized fashion with a start, a middle, and an end and you can, if you so choose, open it up and page through it and find out what's working and what isn't working and what went off the tracks and what sounds too much like X and Y and Z and what should be moved to where and then, after all of that happens, you can decide that "hey maybe this isn't worth opening ever again" and then you can move on with confidence.
That's probably one of the biggest reasons to not abort mid project. The ability to finish is reason two and that is something that I think artist should always cultivate. You should always want to finish and want to get that feeling of completion, regardless of the projects caliber, and you should know what that feeling tastes like when it hits you. You should develop a predilection for the taste of finishing. The number one reason, though, is to be able to have a whole something to look at and be able to close it and shelve it and know, de facto, that you did your due diligence on the idea and it didn't pan out and now you can move on to something different or take another approach at the idea with full confidence that you left nothing to waste and rot and get lost in a junk bin never to be seen again and more important than you first imagined.
Going through some of my old stuff has been a lot reason number one. More than I expected. I feel like that means I've either leveled up in my skill and analytical ability or have taken (without my knowledge) a new creative direction. Or maybe my voice is just taking on more definition and I'm learning what I can say well and what I have trouble expressing and exploring in my fiction and poetry. I think it's a mix, and I don't know the exact details of the tonic, but my ego wants to say "it's cuz yer awesome, d00d!!!" but I know I haven't been doing this long enough to feel comfortable saying that about anything I do. I think the only thing I am capable of producing that I can confidently say I'm awesome at is burps. Maybe turds. Yeah, poops too. I'm pretty good at that.
Which, brings me to something else because I don't want to spend another word of our time on pooping. I discovered that I developed a writer's block. It took about a week to really feel it out. For me, writer's block doesn't descend in a day, but it's like picking up a pen to write down your grocery list or maybe your to do list each morning and finding the pen a little drier and a little drier until your scratching the words into the paper with a dead pen until you've finally torn your pad to shreds and you've got nothing but your ashy skin to try and etch things on and its too painful and time consuming to even bother so you stop bothering altogether. I realized I'd stopped writing my poetry altogether and I spent most of yesterday night at work trying to diagnose the quitting.
Turns out I'd made myself sick of abstraction. Sick of the expression of abstraction. The whole idea about abstraction is that it is difficult to express in concrete terms. So, lo and behold, the difficulty of expressing it in concrete terms translates with high fidelity to writing about it and takes a disproportionately large amount of mental work to cut into and reveal it in the beautiful simple jagged symmetry and music of poetic words and that mountain of effort and work and finishing the unfinished and polishing the dun metal of impotent machinery and ideas mounted and mounted and mounted until I mentally tore up my paper, snapped my pen in half, and walked away from it without even realizing it was happening until I walked on to my idea foundry and saw every single work station was empty and the mills were collected dust and cobwebs.
The solution, you ask? So simple. Work on the concrete. No more talking about feelings and emotions and human complexities and quirks. Talk about places, things, peoples faces and bodies, foods, actions, and mechanisms. Talk about real histories and experiences and tastes and smells. It can be burdensome to define the abstract so even in expressing the expressible, avoid abstractions that demand abstract explanation. Take the trappings away and there will be no traps and words will flow again and you can get back to eating ideas and feeding your head knowing your stomach isn't bloated with dead ones you haven't passed.
I do believe I am done with the old stories I will feature. Old arrays of skeletons and pelts and antlers I've already bagged and shown off in grainy black and whites and time stamped digital camera prints. Time to start in swinging the ax and hammer and pounding the chisel and pulling the trigger and skinning and big game hunting the new ideas that have been lurking. Time to start talking to the new people that have arrived and sat waiting, some patiently, some quietly, some not. There are perhaps a handful of old ones left to cut and trim up and in some cases flesh out and disambiguate for show, but by and large it's time to get started exclusively on the new. I did that with Auralport and good God was it a great feeling to go there to compose knowing full well that there was nothing else in the parts bin to go through and it was all gonna be fresh squeezed. Took me forever to get over the self consciousness of showing things and saying "yep, I made that" because you can never know if people like it or hate it or just see it and say "interesting" or if people don't see it at all, and I'm just now starting to get that feeling with Bits, but it's a feeling with two sides. Part apprehension at the opening of yourself to judgement and knowing someone is going to say "wow that's crap and I wasted my time" and part elation and exhilaration of creative expression and knowing that even if no one says to themselves "that was neat" you still get the pleasure of knowing you fucking did something and it turned out as good as you hoped it would.
I guess the other thing about it is knowing every hour you spend working on it is an hour you've spent getting better at something you love. Which is why I need a new job. A job that I can get better at every day I'm there and not in the sense of "dear God, this is the best filing clerk in the world. He has been filing for so long that he can file the letter A faster than any man living or dead" or "dear God this is the best cashier ever, he's been counting out change for so long he can do it just by feeling the weight of the mixed coins." I mean something that I can literally learn more about every single day because there is actually more to learn and master and not just continue to work and rework and go over the same shit until it's muscle memory in your brain.
Also want to apologize. I used literally in a non literal sense recently and it did not escape me, I was just being lazy. Laziness sucks. No one wins.
Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I know some of what makes it out of my head is good at the time until I reread it months later and in the context of my expanded skill set and mental library can see it's not so stellar. I'm learning. Promise.
///Bjork - "Oceania (featuring Kelis)" I did not know this existed until today. I love Kelis. I love Bjork. Eargasm. This version is so different from the one on the album. Like night and day and then midway through you feel the epiphany you first struck as a kid when for the first time you were awake to see one turn into the other and the vastness of space became real.
I wonder if leaving the country is like entering a parallel universe.
I don't know what I'm going to do for my eighth birthday. Probably nothing. Nothing and videogames. Satisfaction and fulfillment fired directly into the vein and straight to the brain stem. Honestly 73 is probably a bit of a reach. I don't very well expect to land within twenty years of that, but I might as well keep even the unlikely within my model because it does happen.
Recently I've been culling through some of my old complete short stories to see which ones I want to feature on Bits and what I've realized is that some of my old stuff is dreadful. Which is good. I mean abortions are never fun, but sometimes they need to happen and sometimes they don't happen and you have to live with the outcome for better and worse.
In writing, I feel, it's not good to have too many abortions. Eventually you've got to gut it out and finish and seal the deal. I don't think I've ever typed seal the deal. What an odd collection of letters. Visually I think it's the ea's that are looking funny and making me smile to look at them. But anyway, in writing if you are constantly quitting mid-project or mid-composition you'll eventually find yourself staring at a mountain of unfinished work that you know is bad and you'll find it very difficult to pick through for the good pieces that might work in other things because it is a hugely tangled mess of half and full formed ideas.
At least when you gut it out and finish your composition or your project it is all more or less there in front of you in some sort of organized fashion with a start, a middle, and an end and you can, if you so choose, open it up and page through it and find out what's working and what isn't working and what went off the tracks and what sounds too much like X and Y and Z and what should be moved to where and then, after all of that happens, you can decide that "hey maybe this isn't worth opening ever again" and then you can move on with confidence.
That's probably one of the biggest reasons to not abort mid project. The ability to finish is reason two and that is something that I think artist should always cultivate. You should always want to finish and want to get that feeling of completion, regardless of the projects caliber, and you should know what that feeling tastes like when it hits you. You should develop a predilection for the taste of finishing. The number one reason, though, is to be able to have a whole something to look at and be able to close it and shelve it and know, de facto, that you did your due diligence on the idea and it didn't pan out and now you can move on to something different or take another approach at the idea with full confidence that you left nothing to waste and rot and get lost in a junk bin never to be seen again and more important than you first imagined.
Going through some of my old stuff has been a lot reason number one. More than I expected. I feel like that means I've either leveled up in my skill and analytical ability or have taken (without my knowledge) a new creative direction. Or maybe my voice is just taking on more definition and I'm learning what I can say well and what I have trouble expressing and exploring in my fiction and poetry. I think it's a mix, and I don't know the exact details of the tonic, but my ego wants to say "it's cuz yer awesome, d00d!!!" but I know I haven't been doing this long enough to feel comfortable saying that about anything I do. I think the only thing I am capable of producing that I can confidently say I'm awesome at is burps. Maybe turds. Yeah, poops too. I'm pretty good at that.
Which, brings me to something else because I don't want to spend another word of our time on pooping. I discovered that I developed a writer's block. It took about a week to really feel it out. For me, writer's block doesn't descend in a day, but it's like picking up a pen to write down your grocery list or maybe your to do list each morning and finding the pen a little drier and a little drier until your scratching the words into the paper with a dead pen until you've finally torn your pad to shreds and you've got nothing but your ashy skin to try and etch things on and its too painful and time consuming to even bother so you stop bothering altogether. I realized I'd stopped writing my poetry altogether and I spent most of yesterday night at work trying to diagnose the quitting.
Turns out I'd made myself sick of abstraction. Sick of the expression of abstraction. The whole idea about abstraction is that it is difficult to express in concrete terms. So, lo and behold, the difficulty of expressing it in concrete terms translates with high fidelity to writing about it and takes a disproportionately large amount of mental work to cut into and reveal it in the beautiful simple jagged symmetry and music of poetic words and that mountain of effort and work and finishing the unfinished and polishing the dun metal of impotent machinery and ideas mounted and mounted and mounted until I mentally tore up my paper, snapped my pen in half, and walked away from it without even realizing it was happening until I walked on to my idea foundry and saw every single work station was empty and the mills were collected dust and cobwebs.
The solution, you ask? So simple. Work on the concrete. No more talking about feelings and emotions and human complexities and quirks. Talk about places, things, peoples faces and bodies, foods, actions, and mechanisms. Talk about real histories and experiences and tastes and smells. It can be burdensome to define the abstract so even in expressing the expressible, avoid abstractions that demand abstract explanation. Take the trappings away and there will be no traps and words will flow again and you can get back to eating ideas and feeding your head knowing your stomach isn't bloated with dead ones you haven't passed.
I do believe I am done with the old stories I will feature. Old arrays of skeletons and pelts and antlers I've already bagged and shown off in grainy black and whites and time stamped digital camera prints. Time to start in swinging the ax and hammer and pounding the chisel and pulling the trigger and skinning and big game hunting the new ideas that have been lurking. Time to start talking to the new people that have arrived and sat waiting, some patiently, some quietly, some not. There are perhaps a handful of old ones left to cut and trim up and in some cases flesh out and disambiguate for show, but by and large it's time to get started exclusively on the new. I did that with Auralport and good God was it a great feeling to go there to compose knowing full well that there was nothing else in the parts bin to go through and it was all gonna be fresh squeezed. Took me forever to get over the self consciousness of showing things and saying "yep, I made that" because you can never know if people like it or hate it or just see it and say "interesting" or if people don't see it at all, and I'm just now starting to get that feeling with Bits, but it's a feeling with two sides. Part apprehension at the opening of yourself to judgement and knowing someone is going to say "wow that's crap and I wasted my time" and part elation and exhilaration of creative expression and knowing that even if no one says to themselves "that was neat" you still get the pleasure of knowing you fucking did something and it turned out as good as you hoped it would.
I guess the other thing about it is knowing every hour you spend working on it is an hour you've spent getting better at something you love. Which is why I need a new job. A job that I can get better at every day I'm there and not in the sense of "dear God, this is the best filing clerk in the world. He has been filing for so long that he can file the letter A faster than any man living or dead" or "dear God this is the best cashier ever, he's been counting out change for so long he can do it just by feeling the weight of the mixed coins." I mean something that I can literally learn more about every single day because there is actually more to learn and master and not just continue to work and rework and go over the same shit until it's muscle memory in your brain.
Also want to apologize. I used literally in a non literal sense recently and it did not escape me, I was just being lazy. Laziness sucks. No one wins.
Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I know some of what makes it out of my head is good at the time until I reread it months later and in the context of my expanded skill set and mental library can see it's not so stellar. I'm learning. Promise.
///Bjork - "Oceania (featuring Kelis)" I did not know this existed until today. I love Kelis. I love Bjork. Eargasm. This version is so different from the one on the album. Like night and day and then midway through you feel the epiphany you first struck as a kid when for the first time you were awake to see one turn into the other and the vastness of space became real.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)