Four flame outs later and several lives ago.
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 some assembly required. Show all posts
Showing posts with label some assembly required. Show all posts
7/12/19
6/10/17
The Two Way Metaphor Gate
In building short hand, a degree of expression is reached that can and does generate the rare joy of identity and naming. Mapping. Map with as much resolution as can be mustered. How else can a clearer understanding be reached! Shouting is not permitted. How else can a clearer understanding be reached. How else can a clearer understanding be reached?
From its surface metaphor appears lazy. Jagged. Elliptical. Fragmented. Excessive. Dumb. Misguided. Glittery. Vain. Hyperbolic. Binary. From its surface it's a lot of things, directly below perception it is incandescent. A bit of metal chewed fast and friction enough to trace a retina and leave shades.
It is one of the few things all languages have in common. A short hand.
Some mental disorders may fall just outside of the curve of the metaphorist. Not in terms of comprehension, but in terms of time. Around folks speaking the common language and sparking, some will see the shades and some will project the shades and be able to predict from the point of a sound.
The problem, a problem, arises with metaphor's other power.
In its ability to link ideas and present a universe whose limits, as humans, are the speed of salts in brains and quantum entanglement, it can also cross time. Places and spaces you've never been and people you've never known. Places and spaces no one has ever seen and places and spaces heard of dreams.
I guess what I'm saying is consciousness of metaphors power can unleash and enable some ridiculous and unaccounted for futures. It can describe the present you are in to people you will never meet in the future. It can describe someone's past you've never met before in all of your days on Earth or in space or outside of the common dimension. It can define the undefinable. Free the interned and capture the holy. It is powerful and infinite. Innocent and horror. Dirge and beautiful.
As close to time travel as humans may ever reach. With metaphor, the past is present - the future too - all in the space of a gesture, a syllable, a smell, a touch - a note. A one. A zero. In sequence. That's why it is a two way gate. Futures can be created inside of them and the past can manifest with a breath and a blink through the same swinging door.
///Dirty Projectors & Bjork - (When the World Comes to an End) for a long time
From its surface metaphor appears lazy. Jagged. Elliptical. Fragmented. Excessive. Dumb. Misguided. Glittery. Vain. Hyperbolic. Binary. From its surface it's a lot of things, directly below perception it is incandescent. A bit of metal chewed fast and friction enough to trace a retina and leave shades.
It is one of the few things all languages have in common. A short hand.
Some mental disorders may fall just outside of the curve of the metaphorist. Not in terms of comprehension, but in terms of time. Around folks speaking the common language and sparking, some will see the shades and some will project the shades and be able to predict from the point of a sound.
The problem, a problem, arises with metaphor's other power.
In its ability to link ideas and present a universe whose limits, as humans, are the speed of salts in brains and quantum entanglement, it can also cross time. Places and spaces you've never been and people you've never known. Places and spaces no one has ever seen and places and spaces heard of dreams.
I guess what I'm saying is consciousness of metaphors power can unleash and enable some ridiculous and unaccounted for futures. It can describe the present you are in to people you will never meet in the future. It can describe someone's past you've never met before in all of your days on Earth or in space or outside of the common dimension. It can define the undefinable. Free the interned and capture the holy. It is powerful and infinite. Innocent and horror. Dirge and beautiful.
As close to time travel as humans may ever reach. With metaphor, the past is present - the future too - all in the space of a gesture, a syllable, a smell, a touch - a note. A one. A zero. In sequence. That's why it is a two way gate. Futures can be created inside of them and the past can manifest with a breath and a blink through the same swinging door.
///Dirty Projectors & Bjork - (When the World Comes to an End) for a long time
2/16/17
Veggie Tacos
The thought of eating vegetable filled tacos is terrible at first. Once you really start to think about what you like the most about tacos, it becomes more clear that what you like the most about tacos is not the meat. What you like the most is the kaleidoscope of tastes and the sooner you can wean your train of thought off of the "meat must be incorporated into each of the three meals of the day" you can get over it pretty quickly.
I mean, you used to think a day's good eatin' had to have three meals in it for the longest time and how guilty and terrible did you feel about yourself before you finally understood that myth was busted like a car with no tires and four wheels?
Simple changes will save you from cardiac arrest down the road. Bust a few more myths and all you'll have to do is quit smoking (eventually).
///Useless Information
I mean, you used to think a day's good eatin' had to have three meals in it for the longest time and how guilty and terrible did you feel about yourself before you finally understood that myth was busted like a car with no tires and four wheels?
Simple changes will save you from cardiac arrest down the road. Bust a few more myths and all you'll have to do is quit smoking (eventually).
///Useless Information
7/23/16
Thought Experiments
They are wonderful. The down side is they can lock you up with inaction. They can make you distant and untouchable. They can make you a perpetual daydreamer. They are not real. They can bring you to a place, after running over every possible iteration of futures and their trees and branches, nothing will be able to surprise you. Not now, not ever. Everything becomes old faster than you can possibly age without introducing performance enhancing drugs to your body's ability to restore itself. Nothing will ever surprise you if you go down the road. Why choose? Take every fork in mind. Every fork. And the forks beyond them and beyond them too. Die 200 deaths, live 200 lives. Imagine them all!
The up shot is, 24 iterations out, you may land upon a world that is in perfect tune and natural balance so incredible to be immediately discredited. Upon review, it revolves, it sits still, it moves only when touched, and it's gravity is its own and its poles its own. You explore and find an object or idea that defies everything you knew and live in and is contained within itself in eternum. You stumble upon a number that is a number and not at once. A quantity unquantifiable. A thing, brought 24 levels backward in to your three dimensional time locked existence, that will vanish the moment you return home. An idea that only exists in that space.
So hunt. Hunt! Thought experiments are wonderful. Yes, many things will not surprise you. Many things in your "now" will lose their luster and zest, but should you come upon that perfectly imbalanced mirror sphere that only spins counterclockwise that turns the universe if you attempt to put your fingertips or tongue on it to make it move clockwise because gravity and space time need not apply at the door you have to exit before entering, they are worth it. Every second. Every minute. Every hour in dreams.
///The Cure - "Burn"
The up shot is, 24 iterations out, you may land upon a world that is in perfect tune and natural balance so incredible to be immediately discredited. Upon review, it revolves, it sits still, it moves only when touched, and it's gravity is its own and its poles its own. You explore and find an object or idea that defies everything you knew and live in and is contained within itself in eternum. You stumble upon a number that is a number and not at once. A quantity unquantifiable. A thing, brought 24 levels backward in to your three dimensional time locked existence, that will vanish the moment you return home. An idea that only exists in that space.
So hunt. Hunt! Thought experiments are wonderful. Yes, many things will not surprise you. Many things in your "now" will lose their luster and zest, but should you come upon that perfectly imbalanced mirror sphere that only spins counterclockwise that turns the universe if you attempt to put your fingertips or tongue on it to make it move clockwise because gravity and space time need not apply at the door you have to exit before entering, they are worth it. Every second. Every minute. Every hour in dreams.
///The Cure - "Burn"
3/6/16
A Bad Case of the Quits
Think about all the things you can't do. Body lock. Sleeping fourteen hours a day to avoid the giant shadows in my head. Long sleeps and short breaths because there is no way you can get yourself into trouble if you're not there. It's great to imagine a world where everyone is not all home upstairs to feel a little more comfortable around you and less self conscious or conscious of the world around here. Impossible to dodge or sidestep. Autofold.
Or maybe I'm just mapping out new ways to find a path to talk about depressed. Nothing is immediately wrong, but long term is up in the air and the stress of the attempt to figure out where things might land is flat-lining my ability to comprehend channels that run outside of mathematic doubt? I am in a funk. I've seen the rise of the range to climb and am set out with gear and guide and 300 miles and ten days later we are what feels like no closer in the range's foothills. Still, hand cupped to eye, tall grass marched, toward the snowy summit's bouldered base.
It is always difficult thinking about what the point is. To map uncharted territories? To have a point of reference? To exercise the brain and verify its function? To cope? To record history? Attack? Report? Defuse? Modify? Survive? You're bumming me out, man! What is the point? You could simplify things greatly by eliminating yourself from the equation. Speedometer, bruh. Yeah, yeah. There are many and a several reasons to be alive. Number one being that the planet is a phenomenal place all its own.
Number two being that the planet's weather, moods, and neighbors are just as magical. How could you not want to see what happens next? To hell with purpose. Have pleasure in you and your own adventure. To what end? For what purpose? For what reason? Dunno. Just thought it'd be fun. Just thought it'd be a sight. Just thought life alone is not all cupcakes and daydreaming and that's quite alright. Bad hands, bad turns, bad lands... I'm rhyming again. Bad hands and bad turns are just facts of being alive. No reason to quit. No reason to think about disappearing. No matter how absurd the turns get, how unfair the hands go out, stick with it. Don't quit. You never know if the next sunrises colors will be like anything you've ever seen before.
///Moderat - "A New Error"
1/23/16
Year End Playlist 2015
January - MF Doom - Lightworks
February - Beck - Soldier Jane
March - Starkey - New Cities (feat. Hitomi)
April - Big Sean - Paradise (extended)
May - AWOL Nation - Hollowmoon (Bad Wolf)
June - Odesza - Memories That You Call (feat. Monsoonsiren)
July - Dan Deacon - Wham City
August - Dem Gettaway Boyz - Imma G (Memory Tapes remix)
September - Hot Chip - No Fit State
October - Gorillaz - Dracula
November - Drax & Scott - Sublime (Darkstar Mix)
December - JJ Doom - Guv'nor
The honorable mentions in very particular order. The higher up, the closer to the final cut.
Dirty Projectors & Bjork - When the World Comes to an End
Kodak to Graph - Pleistocene
Deltron 3030 - Stardate (feat. Joseph Gordon Levitt)
Kendrick Lamar - Backseat Freestyle
The Knife - Rock Classics
This was the year of the wolf divining new methods of self governance. Rewriting it's own rules and amending it's doctrine. Enjoy. Honorable mentions tell no tales and get no links. If you want to talk to them, you can find them in the clink. A little place where we keep half ideas. Things we fear. Say it three times and they'll appear. The body you thought stayed buried is floating by the pier. Next time, put more concrete in the socks. Everyone stopping by is not a bot.
It was, though, one of the roughest and strangest and smoothest to date. With the year end look and this, the bookend to 2015, the only thing to do is look ahead to two thousand oh one and six.
///the year is written. let it go. thank you for loving me. thank you for being there. one of these days we may be eating at the big table. in the meantime, you know you have a place at mine where the reeds are just high enough and the shade just thick enough for no one to notice we're there by their fire too.
February - Beck - Soldier Jane
March - Starkey - New Cities (feat. Hitomi)
April - Big Sean - Paradise (extended)
May - AWOL Nation - Hollowmoon (Bad Wolf)
June - Odesza - Memories That You Call (feat. Monsoonsiren)
July - Dan Deacon - Wham City
August - Dem Gettaway Boyz - Imma G (Memory Tapes remix)
September - Hot Chip - No Fit State
October - Gorillaz - Dracula
November - Drax & Scott - Sublime (Darkstar Mix)
December - JJ Doom - Guv'nor
The honorable mentions in very particular order. The higher up, the closer to the final cut.
Dirty Projectors & Bjork - When the World Comes to an End
Kodak to Graph - Pleistocene
Deltron 3030 - Stardate (feat. Joseph Gordon Levitt)
Kendrick Lamar - Backseat Freestyle
The Knife - Rock Classics
This was the year of the wolf divining new methods of self governance. Rewriting it's own rules and amending it's doctrine. Enjoy. Honorable mentions tell no tales and get no links. If you want to talk to them, you can find them in the clink. A little place where we keep half ideas. Things we fear. Say it three times and they'll appear. The body you thought stayed buried is floating by the pier. Next time, put more concrete in the socks. Everyone stopping by is not a bot.
It was, though, one of the roughest and strangest and smoothest to date. With the year end look and this, the bookend to 2015, the only thing to do is look ahead to two thousand oh one and six.
///the year is written. let it go. thank you for loving me. thank you for being there. one of these days we may be eating at the big table. in the meantime, you know you have a place at mine where the reeds are just high enough and the shade just thick enough for no one to notice we're there by their fire too.
12/24/15
Prior To the Holidays
I want a tank for Christmas. Or a giant robot decked out in yellow, orange, and pink and black. Or a Gulf blue and orange Z car. Or a plot of land on which to build my miniature fortress.
I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year. He knows what he did. Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus. Robo Claus. I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot. I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa. That dude. That guy. Nuke the North Pole. I am already drawing up the campaign posters. That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny. The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice. It'll save the world. A few decades later, nuke the South Pole. Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time. You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.
It doesn't really feel like Christmas. I haven't talked much about holidays. We live in a different world now. The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds. I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am. It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays. I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time. I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected. A certain amount of migration. Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount. There's a massive difference.
For the first time I have put up evergreens! The sensation and scent is wonderful. Not a tree. I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own. I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window. I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year. Next year we will add some layers to the design. Ornaments too. It will be pretty spectacular. By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.
I think that is what may have been happening this year. A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course. Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them. All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.
The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline. I'm up for the challenge. I believe I am up for the challenge. It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world. It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is. A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.
I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life. It's not my new year. Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31. My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas. An odd alignment of perspectives I guess. I can't help chuckling. It is an odd confluence of parameters. At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.
I do not hate the holidays. All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay. Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated. Actually, I love them. Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least. Those ten years will fly.
///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance" when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.
I am not staying up or threatening Santa again this year. He knows what he did. Imagining a rolling and roiling knife fight with Santa Claus. Robo Claus. I imagine it going something like trying to fight Mad Pierrot. I don't need or want Christmas gifts from Santa. That dude. That guy. Nuke the North Pole. I am already drawing up the campaign posters. That's the only way we can put an end to his tyranny. The light reflected from converting the North Pole and several more latitudes to glass will balance out the weather changes from melting all of the ice. It'll save the world. A few decades later, nuke the South Pole. Just in case he pulled a super villain escape the first time. You have to let the planet rest for a minute or we'll all end up in Fallout 6.
It doesn't really feel like Christmas. I haven't talked much about holidays. We live in a different world now. The changes have crept in and grown to pillars and foundations from cells and seeds. I took a lot of time to see and understand the new world and I still am. It's been a bit of a strange year with a certain amount of disconnection and decoupling from holidays. I am pretty sure I have not delivered a single gift to anyone, including myself, on time. I guess as you get older, a certain amount of disconnection can be expected. A certain amount of migration. Not really a certain amount of migration, but certain migration in a measurable amount. There's a massive difference.
For the first time I have put up evergreens! The sensation and scent is wonderful. Not a tree. I haven't put up a tree since I made my first permanent home all my own. I've begun with a wreath hanging in front of a window. I want to put lights on it, but the hazards to myself and my cats running around with the lights off and finding games and ways to play with them are a little too great and will require more planning than I have put into it for this year. Next year we will add some layers to the design. Ornaments too. It will be pretty spectacular. By the standards of rediscovering Christmas.
I think that is what may have been happening this year. A rediscovery of the holidays, each and every one, and their redefinition as singular life has begun to solidify into a definite, if not unpredictable, course. Redefining relationships and reaffirming others and watching people change and change how they interact with you and how I interact with them. All of the elements of the galaxy and their interdependence is brought forth and thrown into sharp relief over holidays, along with how those elements are measured and quantified.
The year end look will have to be started well before the year actually ends to get everything into something resembling a timeline. I'm up for the challenge. I believe I am up for the challenge. It's not like the holidays bear no significance in this new world. It's that I am trying to better understand what their significance is. A lot like a kid trying to understand what the significance of breaking a lamp is, or drawing on the walls, or going to work, or playing in the street, or not talking to strangers, or the sun coming up, or clouds in the same sky moving in different directions, or being tired the day after staying up all night.
I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit and think about what I want to change and affect in the next year of life. It's not my new year. Calculating what my actual age is (I haven't been celebrating my birthdays like I should): I am 30 going on 31. My thirty first birthday in my 30th iteration of life may actually be the day after Christmas. An odd alignment of perspectives I guess. I can't help chuckling. It is an odd confluence of parameters. At the intersection of sixth street and sixth street, you are at the nexus of the universe.
I do not hate the holidays. All gifts to be sent out are on a four to five week delay. Life has been exceptionally demanding; your patience is appreciated. Actually, I love them. Still ten years out from being a real boy, at the least. Those ten years will fly.
///Peanuts - "The Christmas Dance" when you've got yourself about as together as you possibly can without tampering.
2/22/15
Year End Playlist 2014
January - Run the Jewels - Sea Legs
February - Sleigh Bells - Rachel Remix
March - Run the Jewels - No Come Down
April - Matt and Kim - Lessons Learned
May - The Sabres of Paradise - Smoke Belch
June - Deathgrips - Blackjack you don't pay attention, you're going to get whacked
July - Machinedrum - Loveking
August - Starfucker - Rawnald Gregory
September - Various - Listen to the Animals
October - Nneka - Heartbeats fuck when you want me
November - Miss Kittin - Happy Violentine oscar foxtrot november
December - Sylvan Esso - Hey Mami
Fault of circumstance. Blood blood blood blood blood. Machinedrum almost made it for a two'fer, but Loveking was pushed off of the list for Nneka. The list is in a particular order. I should offer honorable mentions and I will:
in no particular order
Junkie XL - Zero to Nine
Machinedrum - Loveking
Macklemore - Whitewalls
Junkie XL - Blackjack
Goldie - Mother
Meaghan Trainor - All About That Bass
Daft Punk - Giorgio By Moroder
My brother tells me often "love and peace". I appreciate the words. I do. Conscientious objection is not an option for some. Draft dodger maybe. Acceptable? Yes. For another time? Yes.
February - Sleigh Bells - Rachel Remix
March - Run the Jewels - No Come Down
April - Matt and Kim - Lessons Learned
May - The Sabres of Paradise - Smoke Belch
June - Deathgrips - Blackjack you don't pay attention, you're going to get whacked
July - Machinedrum - Loveking
August - Starfucker - Rawnald Gregory
September - Various - Listen to the Animals
October - Nneka - Heartbeats fuck when you want me
November - Miss Kittin - Happy Violentine oscar foxtrot november
December - Sylvan Esso - Hey Mami
Fault of circumstance. Blood blood blood blood blood. Machinedrum almost made it for a two'fer, but Loveking was pushed off of the list for Nneka. The list is in a particular order. I should offer honorable mentions and I will:
in no particular order
Junkie XL - Zero to Nine
Machinedrum - Loveking
Macklemore - Whitewalls
Junkie XL - Blackjack
Goldie - Mother
Meaghan Trainor - All About That Bass
Daft Punk - Giorgio By Moroder
My brother tells me often "love and peace". I appreciate the words. I do. Conscientious objection is not an option for some. Draft dodger maybe. Acceptable? Yes. For another time? Yes.
7/14/14
One Last Tune Up
The enemy of "good" is "perfection." Decision time is here again. The thought of gestation makes me laugh, but it's true. Poetry is still my best friend. Fiction is still my mistress. Still too orchestrated. This is still my sandbox. Leafing through notes, it's difficult to not get frantic. Slide over, bacon. Let me drive for a while. Okay? I promise I will not crash. Okay? Okay. You're still two handing the wheel. Sorry. Okay? Okay. Let go. Okay. Alright, I'll see you soon, you know that, right? I do. Good.
///DJ? Acucrack - "Wickerman"
///DJ? Acucrack - "Wickerman"
5/12/14
Simulations, Run Times and Control
Simulation is an art form. Everyone's guilty. Shut up, you're guilty. Every compromise is another exhibit, another piece of evidence, but you're nothing wrong for it. It means that you are reading and absorbing. Where structure rattling shifts occur are when you've overstepped is all. That's fine. If it's not, it should be. Deception is not an art. Deception is a skill. There's a difference.
Simulation is an art form and a means of communication and should be maintained. Not must be, but should be. It's a token. It's a tipped hat. There is no fault with simulation. To read, to understand, to emulate, to produce circumstances in which the assumed can thrive, with or without the other's knowledge, is an art and, furthermore, to be absorbed in the simulation wholehearted is to complete it, and to find completion being a crime is simply absurd. Refuse crime.
To the larger point, bottling sounds of my thoughts through snippets offered through social media is not whoring. It is simulation refined and semi-successful and semi-failure. I am comfortable with that and uncomfortable at the same time. The act, itself, plays directly into the multifacet self. The concept of conscious faced through planes of a gem cut (or not) through experience and trying to catch the most acceptable light from the most appealing angle not because there is a drive to appeal and appease and assure, because there is, within the contract of citizenship to this planet, a very very important subtext and rule line x, dash alphabet, dot n, that says you can either participate or margin.
The approach to social media is always a tricky one. Not for offering opportunities for criticism; for offering opportunities for connection. There is much less value in not offering a front door and at the same time expecting the line to run from there, down to the sidewalk, and around the corner. A certain amount of simulation must happen. Consider it something akin to taking the temperature of a moment. Consider it too, an argument that specialized and targeted results diminish the quality of the simulation each and every time that impetus is to be obeyed and deviation will be cause for changes not, surface, necessary.
Hunting for ghosts should be saved for television. Things go bump in the night. Dealing with things that go bump in the night should not be necessary, and is. I'm not celebrating it. Have lust for the ones you don't dare. Few things truly scare me in life. It is part production. Part assumption of past fears like putting on clothes so those around you can feel more comfortable being around and talking the same way you can talk and fearing the same way you can fear. If there is a subtext, a foot note, to the experience it is that I saw someone who truly scared me because I never laid eyes on it before and it has me rattled because I never want to see it again.
I saw, for lack of a better term, a ghost. I have no idea how to explain it. It was not a ghost or a spirit. It was not an after image burned onto my retinas so I happened to wake up two hours later and blink a lot and rub the corner of the eye snot away and coughed to make sure I was awake. It was something I hope to never see again and it burned me on the inside simply to lay eyes on it.
I got out of bed and walked around it and it kept saying "you can fly in your sleep" and I do not know what it meant. You can fly in your sleep. You can fly in your sleep. It only came up to near chest height. I kept walking around it to make sure it was three dimensional. I was running tests, mental tests, to be sure that I was not asleep and that it was not a figment and it kept talking and did not hold the usual humanoid, warped and not, shapes or the usual animal, warped and not, shapes.
To pin my psychological misgivings current on its existence feels like a cop out. It's there though, watching me and I desperately would like to do something about it. I don't want to sleep. I don't want to sleep knowing it can enter my apartment with no sound. Where did you come from?! Go away! Go away! I have not seen it since its first appearance, but I feel it. It makes my skin itch. How do I kill you?
I've grown comfortable with some of them to the point where I can say hello, nod, and continue on. They're almost like family or pets or even, I'd go so far as to say, fixtures like lamps or hat racks and sometimes they yap, but it's getting easier to ignore them. Not easier, but second nature through strict training. My breath is still snatched away now and then when they are where they are not supposed to be and the agreement that I assume is broken because they and my own paths cross without warning and my face is not our face and they are.
I don't want to go to sleep. I am afraid it will visit again. I am much more afraid that it is a returned. I'm not prepared to deal with that. My techniques and knowledge have advanced enough to protect against signs and travelers and after images and beckonings and name calling and interpolations and ringers and false alerts and I ... ... don't know it and I cannot be caught engaging it and ......... I should not be talking about it. I have to. For record. To help me better. As far as I go. The lights will be kept on. Fear no man. It is, this I know, no man.
I had an odd dream. I dreamt I had a sex change surgery. Except the Earth, this planet, was so far advanced, or smoothed, that all outward adornment went by the wayside. To the point where nature and tech apexed to an uncomfortable coexistence. To the point where every injury, every modification, needed no bandage and had no boundary for it's obviousness. We were sitting at a hookah bar and passing a cigarette between each of ourselves and someone commented that my penis looked better where it was and we railed for a minute and then got home sick and wished we'd telecommuted to the outing instead because we liked our new body a lot, but no one stuck up for us so we smoked some more instead. Then we blinked and when our eyelids opened we were not on sand world again.
We were walking down a street where each and every person walked too, fully clothed, but the backs of their heads were all torn out, blown out, by something. Grapefruit sized holes. Deer slugs? Their eyes were fine. Their faces for the most part. Whatever went in must have gone through their mouths. Everything smelled like take out food Bronx tenements. It was queasy.
I'm not saying it's the return of the monster. It's not. I am afraid. I am dreaming. I am sleep walking. I am not sleep walking. You are not sleep walking. You are reading this. Pause here. Whatever it was you were thinking about doing, pause here for at least five minutes, but not more than ten. Whatever it was, it will be back. You can handle it. Do not be afraid. No crying. No hiding. If it can get in, it can do more and it has chosen not to. Do not talk to it. Do not engage it. Do not engage it. Do not engage it. Do not name it. Do not listen to it. Listen without hearing. Always remember.
I am trying to remember, trying very hard, to remember the name of the one I gave away to a friend and the price (I do remember that torture) I paid when he called him through text messages. It needn't be repeated. Once was enough. Learn from mistakes. To this day I do not think he realizes how far open I had to be to do that and how stupid I was to do that. Learn from mistakes.
I am trying very hard to remember and I can't and you know what? I am happy it is struck from memory. I am happy I can review the pages of notes and review the eye reel and find no hints. It means I did something right. I remember the weeks and the forced in closeness and needing to give for what I received and splitting cigarettes on the balcony and looking at the enormous clockwork gears ticking over behind the tree line near Bloomfield and the memory tape ends there and I do not want to discover what was buried there ever again.
///The Grid - "Crystal Clear (Clear Water Revival Mix)" Henry remembered his mother and preferred not to.
Simulation is an art form and a means of communication and should be maintained. Not must be, but should be. It's a token. It's a tipped hat. There is no fault with simulation. To read, to understand, to emulate, to produce circumstances in which the assumed can thrive, with or without the other's knowledge, is an art and, furthermore, to be absorbed in the simulation wholehearted is to complete it, and to find completion being a crime is simply absurd. Refuse crime.
To the larger point, bottling sounds of my thoughts through snippets offered through social media is not whoring. It is simulation refined and semi-successful and semi-failure. I am comfortable with that and uncomfortable at the same time. The act, itself, plays directly into the multifacet self. The concept of conscious faced through planes of a gem cut (or not) through experience and trying to catch the most acceptable light from the most appealing angle not because there is a drive to appeal and appease and assure, because there is, within the contract of citizenship to this planet, a very very important subtext and rule line x, dash alphabet, dot n, that says you can either participate or margin.
The approach to social media is always a tricky one. Not for offering opportunities for criticism; for offering opportunities for connection. There is much less value in not offering a front door and at the same time expecting the line to run from there, down to the sidewalk, and around the corner. A certain amount of simulation must happen. Consider it something akin to taking the temperature of a moment. Consider it too, an argument that specialized and targeted results diminish the quality of the simulation each and every time that impetus is to be obeyed and deviation will be cause for changes not, surface, necessary.
Hunting for ghosts should be saved for television. Things go bump in the night. Dealing with things that go bump in the night should not be necessary, and is. I'm not celebrating it. Have lust for the ones you don't dare. Few things truly scare me in life. It is part production. Part assumption of past fears like putting on clothes so those around you can feel more comfortable being around and talking the same way you can talk and fearing the same way you can fear. If there is a subtext, a foot note, to the experience it is that I saw someone who truly scared me because I never laid eyes on it before and it has me rattled because I never want to see it again.
I saw, for lack of a better term, a ghost. I have no idea how to explain it. It was not a ghost or a spirit. It was not an after image burned onto my retinas so I happened to wake up two hours later and blink a lot and rub the corner of the eye snot away and coughed to make sure I was awake. It was something I hope to never see again and it burned me on the inside simply to lay eyes on it.
I got out of bed and walked around it and it kept saying "you can fly in your sleep" and I do not know what it meant. You can fly in your sleep. You can fly in your sleep. It only came up to near chest height. I kept walking around it to make sure it was three dimensional. I was running tests, mental tests, to be sure that I was not asleep and that it was not a figment and it kept talking and did not hold the usual humanoid, warped and not, shapes or the usual animal, warped and not, shapes.
To pin my psychological misgivings current on its existence feels like a cop out. It's there though, watching me and I desperately would like to do something about it. I don't want to sleep. I don't want to sleep knowing it can enter my apartment with no sound. Where did you come from?! Go away! Go away! I have not seen it since its first appearance, but I feel it. It makes my skin itch. How do I kill you?
I've grown comfortable with some of them to the point where I can say hello, nod, and continue on. They're almost like family or pets or even, I'd go so far as to say, fixtures like lamps or hat racks and sometimes they yap, but it's getting easier to ignore them. Not easier, but second nature through strict training. My breath is still snatched away now and then when they are where they are not supposed to be and the agreement that I assume is broken because they and my own paths cross without warning and my face is not our face and they are.
I don't want to go to sleep. I am afraid it will visit again. I am much more afraid that it is a returned. I'm not prepared to deal with that. My techniques and knowledge have advanced enough to protect against signs and travelers and after images and beckonings and name calling and interpolations and ringers and false alerts and I ... ... don't know it and I cannot be caught engaging it and ......... I should not be talking about it. I have to. For record. To help me better. As far as I go. The lights will be kept on. Fear no man. It is, this I know, no man.
I had an odd dream. I dreamt I had a sex change surgery. Except the Earth, this planet, was so far advanced, or smoothed, that all outward adornment went by the wayside. To the point where nature and tech apexed to an uncomfortable coexistence. To the point where every injury, every modification, needed no bandage and had no boundary for it's obviousness. We were sitting at a hookah bar and passing a cigarette between each of ourselves and someone commented that my penis looked better where it was and we railed for a minute and then got home sick and wished we'd telecommuted to the outing instead because we liked our new body a lot, but no one stuck up for us so we smoked some more instead. Then we blinked and when our eyelids opened we were not on sand world again.
We were walking down a street where each and every person walked too, fully clothed, but the backs of their heads were all torn out, blown out, by something. Grapefruit sized holes. Deer slugs? Their eyes were fine. Their faces for the most part. Whatever went in must have gone through their mouths. Everything smelled like take out food Bronx tenements. It was queasy.
I'm not saying it's the return of the monster. It's not. I am afraid. I am dreaming. I am sleep walking. I am not sleep walking. You are not sleep walking. You are reading this. Pause here. Whatever it was you were thinking about doing, pause here for at least five minutes, but not more than ten. Whatever it was, it will be back. You can handle it. Do not be afraid. No crying. No hiding. If it can get in, it can do more and it has chosen not to. Do not talk to it. Do not engage it. Do not engage it. Do not engage it. Do not name it. Do not listen to it. Listen without hearing. Always remember.
I am trying to remember, trying very hard, to remember the name of the one I gave away to a friend and the price (I do remember that torture) I paid when he called him through text messages. It needn't be repeated. Once was enough. Learn from mistakes. To this day I do not think he realizes how far open I had to be to do that and how stupid I was to do that. Learn from mistakes.
I am trying very hard to remember and I can't and you know what? I am happy it is struck from memory. I am happy I can review the pages of notes and review the eye reel and find no hints. It means I did something right. I remember the weeks and the forced in closeness and needing to give for what I received and splitting cigarettes on the balcony and looking at the enormous clockwork gears ticking over behind the tree line near Bloomfield and the memory tape ends there and I do not want to discover what was buried there ever again.
///The Grid - "Crystal Clear (Clear Water Revival Mix)" Henry remembered his mother and preferred not to.
3/17/14
Concepts and Compulsions (the third star on the right)
There was a definite shift from the factory perspective to the machine level perspective. I'm not sure exactly when it happened and I do think it was a shift in the correct direction. It was a shift that granted more personhood, more agency, more personality to what is continuing. Obviously the factory still exists and maybe not as obviously the dreaming door is still there near it's basement and used frequently, but not documented as thoroughly as I would like, but that's a matter of preference and amplitude.
The idea of them being up in an office having meetings without me and being forced to listen in to get news of what direction the committee was going grated on me pretty hard and I was getting very upset about not being included on their decisions so I am taking some agency back because I have to live here too and what they make affects me immediately as soon as it leaves the factory doors because I am the consumer primary and the keeper and owner. The deed's in my name. Just saying. I can't have them wrecking up the place and deciding when and where they want to work inside the building and the child is going to do what he will, and I can't keep stopping everything to go look for him (which is easy to say because he's right in front of me now and he won't hold my hand, but I've got his pinky and his pain tolerance is nowhere near mine and it doesn't need fixing or adjustment, it just needs held), but I will because I can't keep watch all of the time and he knows when to sneak out better than I know when to check on him.
I took the map of the warehouse and exploded it. Took the map of the iron works and exploded it into pieces and came up with a better way to organize and run diagnostics on its ability to function on it's own. Not off any grid, but function as a thing properly connected and fed by mainlines. The concept was lurking in the back of my mind and took a back seat to the foundry, the assembly line, but the stock house allowed far too much space for engineering weapons and tools that built better tools for building war machines. I'm still trying to get the spacing right. Getting to a point where we know what all of the parts are doing at all times is very difficult and throws error messages and blows out the lights sometimes. I would like to believe I am getting close to a master approach.
I've adopted a more mechanical concept. The electric layer and the machine layer. All into a sandwich. It's like a massive circuit board with steam punk getting the outside layer to talk to the inside layer. Communications are still a little bit shoddy, but I think I'm getting the response times right. Or at least more correct and that's more steps in a direction so I'm comfortable with not drowning. Control itself has not been an issue except in extreme cases or cases that I would call extreme sensory nodes. Times and instances of overwhelming input from the outside surface that over powered the gears ability to translate it into valid input to the inside surface. And then it just goes harmonic spitting back weird settings to the machine layer that does not know how to place it in three dimensions that makes sense to the surface and then the surface burps up colors and lights and structures and the entire layout of the city is completely off and the gps sends some bastard down a sidewalk that ends at a cornfield because that road was paved over fifteen years ago and broken up ten years ago and filled in and sodded and there've been 9 annual fairs there and the whole thing smells like carnies and animal poop vaguely to this day.
So now it's all a circuit and machine. Taking Occam to it to a degree. Keep it simple, stupid. It's not a committee, it's a group of parts, pieces, and controllers and they work together at all times. Yes, not all on the same page, but they are in constant communication despite what I thought before. They are in constant communication and the child is a hardware addition with poor pin alignment so as he comes and goes and is present or not, he may not always be detected by the system proper, but he cannot be confirmed or denied. I still do wonder where he goes when he does not register. I wonder if he is listening or not. Prick. WHERE ARE YOU?
Anyway, I can't allow myself to be consumed with his location. I can, but I would prefer not to. I do. We love it when he's around. God, what is he doing now? WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU, I KNOW YOU'RE LISTENING. I'll wait. It's all I can do. All any of us can do. I'll hunt him down. 'S'cool. But basically I took the time to rearrange components into a different, not necessarily new, configuration that allows for greater mobility and flexibility and diminishes destructive passion. Never again. Not yet, anyway. That plan is under double keyed authentication, minimum.
I've gotten away from paper again. I don't know how to feel about it because it's not pure laziness. It's a distaste for the purity to an extant and a feeling of reversion to another extant. I'm not sure where or if the two can be balanced or with what. You must commit to one or the other or both will suffer? No. There is dual dedication. I believe it is a problem of efficiencies and developing a left hand where the right hand has become the left and the left the right and I am partially consumed with teaching the right to do the things the off hand was forced to do. I am okay with that. That is a matter of more practice only, not malfunction. Or to put it another way, no abandonment of duties inside the factory. No idle mills, simply users unaccustomed to their new devices and methods.
I thought back to when I knew something was off with my upbringing. It happened back in elementary school when Mrs. Hymenlokuvar was rubbing my back in kindergarten when I ran from the station wagon, when I was sure it was okay to run after my mom and pop pulled away, all the way to my seat in the classroom. It is one of the few childhood (childhood referencing 2nd grade to birth) memories I can recall that did not end in violence. She rubbed my back for what felt like minutes, but was probably seconds. I remember her being very weirded out that I could show up for class at table three with a healthy sweat going. That was when I began to feel something was off. I liked it though, I remember that. I remember the soothing nature to it and how her hand felt like it was sucking heat off of me so I could run at a much better temperature and it felt terrific.
When I was sure something was off was when I ... was washing dishes at the sink on Taylor street and my parents were going at it about something I cannot remember. Something about Barnabus. Or was his name Barnaby. I don't know. He was the upstairs neighbor and we weren't allowed to play with his kids or something, what I do know, regardless of the details is hearing my dad say "he's listening to us" and then them two leaving the room. It was strange. I wanted to leave the kitchen too, but I had my assignment. Learning all of the creaks in the floor so you could get to the bathroom without disrupting them when you had to pee at night and couldn't hold it or when you wanted to talk to your sisters and you had a whole house to navigate in the dark without bumping into anything too loud.
There is some humor thinking back to how hard I idolized kids when I first broke in to college. "Oh my God, you assholes know everything!" It's a little bit of time compression helping that out. They didn't know everything. Not even close. Well traveled, well heeled? Sure. Capable, adaptable, thorough, and finicky? Sure. Closed and open minded by turns? Also, yes. As time grows longer and leaps of experience compress, it becomes increasingly clear that my peers are just that and no more. No apotheosis necessary. Appreciation yes. I am not just like you, but I will tell you what I fucking am. Closer to your know how than I have any business being given what we are and what you are and where we came from. Fuck you, that's "swagger" and tooth. What's four years to you? I know what it is to me. I wish I knew what it would be to me now eight years ago, though.
I'm a fine pilot, if I may say. I was considering running someone down walking on the side of Will Flynn motorway, but I didn't. Mostly because I was too far from home to be sure I could get home without being pulled over for questioning about the dent in my windshield and the spritz on my hood. Sometimes you have to make business decisions. Plus, I don't have money to get my windshield fixed. That's just silly money management policy!
I embraced metaphor with all my heart through highschool. I think that's when communication fault lines could not be written off anymore as being shy or quiet. I just didn't know how to say it. Didn't know an effective agent to be my stand in for the person between the person that says what I want to say for me. That position was vacant for so long.
Don't mind me if I get weak kneed with words. It's a joy I couldn't experience for a very long time and I am suspect to abuse it.
I wonder sometimes how my Myspace friend DCScompton is doing in Australia. I loved talking to him. Since the migration several years ago we lost touch and I look for him now and then to see if he's still kicking. I would love to move to Canberra. I don't think I would adjust well or I would slot in perfectly. America is not overrated at all, but I think we would have made excellent dual adventurers. I remember asking him about what the compton in his screen name was about and I've been miffed for years because I can't remember. He was a blast to read, but he jumped ship too and somewhere in migrating computers I lost the note that had the address of his page in it, among other things.
Wonder what my therapist is doing? I do too. Jeff is a good guy. He meant well. I do wonder how much of it was general altruism and how much was actual understanding. I never asked him how he was doing or about his family, but I think it was a lot of unspoken understanding that it was none of my business and absolutely off limits for reasons we both knew.
I don't worry about him, but I do wonder about what he kept off the table and why. Why didn't he offer too? Was it because I had to be there? And why did he turn me in that day? Was it concern or was it a matter more akin to protecting job security. I don't think he ever really trusted us. Which is fine. Understandable. I have to understand that we didn't really know each other know each other. He could have, though. I wouldn't have rejected it.
The tracking signal cuts both ways. A ping back is a ping back. Until the signal cuts out. The keys jingling on your pant loop let you know you are traversing reality and they also let reality know that you are crossing space and you have to be prepared to accept that your recognition is also the key not only to an ignition, but to a gate.
It's the third star on the right, straight on 'til morning, can't miss it.
///Steve Miller Band - "The Joker" some people call me a lot of things. there's power in knowing your own name.
The idea of them being up in an office having meetings without me and being forced to listen in to get news of what direction the committee was going grated on me pretty hard and I was getting very upset about not being included on their decisions so I am taking some agency back because I have to live here too and what they make affects me immediately as soon as it leaves the factory doors because I am the consumer primary and the keeper and owner. The deed's in my name. Just saying. I can't have them wrecking up the place and deciding when and where they want to work inside the building and the child is going to do what he will, and I can't keep stopping everything to go look for him (which is easy to say because he's right in front of me now and he won't hold my hand, but I've got his pinky and his pain tolerance is nowhere near mine and it doesn't need fixing or adjustment, it just needs held), but I will because I can't keep watch all of the time and he knows when to sneak out better than I know when to check on him.
I took the map of the warehouse and exploded it. Took the map of the iron works and exploded it into pieces and came up with a better way to organize and run diagnostics on its ability to function on it's own. Not off any grid, but function as a thing properly connected and fed by mainlines. The concept was lurking in the back of my mind and took a back seat to the foundry, the assembly line, but the stock house allowed far too much space for engineering weapons and tools that built better tools for building war machines. I'm still trying to get the spacing right. Getting to a point where we know what all of the parts are doing at all times is very difficult and throws error messages and blows out the lights sometimes. I would like to believe I am getting close to a master approach.
I've adopted a more mechanical concept. The electric layer and the machine layer. All into a sandwich. It's like a massive circuit board with steam punk getting the outside layer to talk to the inside layer. Communications are still a little bit shoddy, but I think I'm getting the response times right. Or at least more correct and that's more steps in a direction so I'm comfortable with not drowning. Control itself has not been an issue except in extreme cases or cases that I would call extreme sensory nodes. Times and instances of overwhelming input from the outside surface that over powered the gears ability to translate it into valid input to the inside surface. And then it just goes harmonic spitting back weird settings to the machine layer that does not know how to place it in three dimensions that makes sense to the surface and then the surface burps up colors and lights and structures and the entire layout of the city is completely off and the gps sends some bastard down a sidewalk that ends at a cornfield because that road was paved over fifteen years ago and broken up ten years ago and filled in and sodded and there've been 9 annual fairs there and the whole thing smells like carnies and animal poop vaguely to this day.
So now it's all a circuit and machine. Taking Occam to it to a degree. Keep it simple, stupid. It's not a committee, it's a group of parts, pieces, and controllers and they work together at all times. Yes, not all on the same page, but they are in constant communication despite what I thought before. They are in constant communication and the child is a hardware addition with poor pin alignment so as he comes and goes and is present or not, he may not always be detected by the system proper, but he cannot be confirmed or denied. I still do wonder where he goes when he does not register. I wonder if he is listening or not. Prick. WHERE ARE YOU?
Anyway, I can't allow myself to be consumed with his location. I can, but I would prefer not to. I do. We love it when he's around. God, what is he doing now? WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU, I KNOW YOU'RE LISTENING. I'll wait. It's all I can do. All any of us can do. I'll hunt him down. 'S'cool. But basically I took the time to rearrange components into a different, not necessarily new, configuration that allows for greater mobility and flexibility and diminishes destructive passion. Never again. Not yet, anyway. That plan is under double keyed authentication, minimum.
I've gotten away from paper again. I don't know how to feel about it because it's not pure laziness. It's a distaste for the purity to an extant and a feeling of reversion to another extant. I'm not sure where or if the two can be balanced or with what. You must commit to one or the other or both will suffer? No. There is dual dedication. I believe it is a problem of efficiencies and developing a left hand where the right hand has become the left and the left the right and I am partially consumed with teaching the right to do the things the off hand was forced to do. I am okay with that. That is a matter of more practice only, not malfunction. Or to put it another way, no abandonment of duties inside the factory. No idle mills, simply users unaccustomed to their new devices and methods.
I thought back to when I knew something was off with my upbringing. It happened back in elementary school when Mrs. Hymenlokuvar was rubbing my back in kindergarten when I ran from the station wagon, when I was sure it was okay to run after my mom and pop pulled away, all the way to my seat in the classroom. It is one of the few childhood (childhood referencing 2nd grade to birth) memories I can recall that did not end in violence. She rubbed my back for what felt like minutes, but was probably seconds. I remember her being very weirded out that I could show up for class at table three with a healthy sweat going. That was when I began to feel something was off. I liked it though, I remember that. I remember the soothing nature to it and how her hand felt like it was sucking heat off of me so I could run at a much better temperature and it felt terrific.
When I was sure something was off was when I ... was washing dishes at the sink on Taylor street and my parents were going at it about something I cannot remember. Something about Barnabus. Or was his name Barnaby. I don't know. He was the upstairs neighbor and we weren't allowed to play with his kids or something, what I do know, regardless of the details is hearing my dad say "he's listening to us" and then them two leaving the room. It was strange. I wanted to leave the kitchen too, but I had my assignment. Learning all of the creaks in the floor so you could get to the bathroom without disrupting them when you had to pee at night and couldn't hold it or when you wanted to talk to your sisters and you had a whole house to navigate in the dark without bumping into anything too loud.
There is some humor thinking back to how hard I idolized kids when I first broke in to college. "Oh my God, you assholes know everything!" It's a little bit of time compression helping that out. They didn't know everything. Not even close. Well traveled, well heeled? Sure. Capable, adaptable, thorough, and finicky? Sure. Closed and open minded by turns? Also, yes. As time grows longer and leaps of experience compress, it becomes increasingly clear that my peers are just that and no more. No apotheosis necessary. Appreciation yes. I am not just like you, but I will tell you what I fucking am. Closer to your know how than I have any business being given what we are and what you are and where we came from. Fuck you, that's "swagger" and tooth. What's four years to you? I know what it is to me. I wish I knew what it would be to me now eight years ago, though.
I'm a fine pilot, if I may say. I was considering running someone down walking on the side of Will Flynn motorway, but I didn't. Mostly because I was too far from home to be sure I could get home without being pulled over for questioning about the dent in my windshield and the spritz on my hood. Sometimes you have to make business decisions. Plus, I don't have money to get my windshield fixed. That's just silly money management policy!
I embraced metaphor with all my heart through highschool. I think that's when communication fault lines could not be written off anymore as being shy or quiet. I just didn't know how to say it. Didn't know an effective agent to be my stand in for the person between the person that says what I want to say for me. That position was vacant for so long.
Don't mind me if I get weak kneed with words. It's a joy I couldn't experience for a very long time and I am suspect to abuse it.
I wonder sometimes how my Myspace friend DCScompton is doing in Australia. I loved talking to him. Since the migration several years ago we lost touch and I look for him now and then to see if he's still kicking. I would love to move to Canberra. I don't think I would adjust well or I would slot in perfectly. America is not overrated at all, but I think we would have made excellent dual adventurers. I remember asking him about what the compton in his screen name was about and I've been miffed for years because I can't remember. He was a blast to read, but he jumped ship too and somewhere in migrating computers I lost the note that had the address of his page in it, among other things.
Wonder what my therapist is doing? I do too. Jeff is a good guy. He meant well. I do wonder how much of it was general altruism and how much was actual understanding. I never asked him how he was doing or about his family, but I think it was a lot of unspoken understanding that it was none of my business and absolutely off limits for reasons we both knew.
I don't worry about him, but I do wonder about what he kept off the table and why. Why didn't he offer too? Was it because I had to be there? And why did he turn me in that day? Was it concern or was it a matter more akin to protecting job security. I don't think he ever really trusted us. Which is fine. Understandable. I have to understand that we didn't really know each other know each other. He could have, though. I wouldn't have rejected it.
The tracking signal cuts both ways. A ping back is a ping back. Until the signal cuts out. The keys jingling on your pant loop let you know you are traversing reality and they also let reality know that you are crossing space and you have to be prepared to accept that your recognition is also the key not only to an ignition, but to a gate.
It's the third star on the right, straight on 'til morning, can't miss it.
///Steve Miller Band - "The Joker" some people call me a lot of things. there's power in knowing your own name.
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.
7/19/13
The Takedown, Hold Overs, Creation, and Airlock to Spacewalk
"That time is now." It's time to tear it all apart and restructure it. The tags no longer make any sense in terms of what they are supposed to be pointers too. They still point to the things they are supposed to point to, but there's no longer the sort of continuity between meanings that there was. Over the years and iterations and expansion, a lot of the growth has been organic save for the bare bones items and the most common of common veins and themes. I'm having a hard time following it and searching and reviewing. I'm sure part of it is to do with my own electromigration and changing processing powers, up and down. Things that used to make sense do not anymore, that which makes sense now does not fit cleanly into what came before.
The main problem is, because I enjoy writing so much, getting other things done becomes tedious and overly difficult. Discouragingly difficult. Task lock kicks in and nothing gets done at all because I have that loop constantly running with no way to put an end to it. "What do you want to do tonight?" Get some writing done, maybe do some doodling. "Okay, go!" Wait, I want to do that first and then- "Okay, go!" But I don't know how what I'm thinking about writing is going to seat next to the last thing I did so I need to find out what I was planning on accomplishing last week that's still in proc- "Okay, go!" You're not hearing me. I'm still trying to lay out the sequence so that when I get to the part where I start to lay down tracks I'll be able to begin to set up the next step into- "Okay, go!" God damn it!! Forget it. I'm going to go jerk off and try to sleep. And sleep refuses to kick in because my mind is still circling a world light years away from planet sleep even though my body arrived days ago. Ghost ship.
There are hold overs. Artifacts. A lot of what I am doing is cataloging artifacts. The overall design, however, is a massive artifact of another time. A thing I've fallen in love with deeply. When the entire interface and blog structure updated to a new design structure a few years ago, was it years, I retained mine because what I wanted to express was inexpressible within the new structure available. The only real issue with doing it, at the time, was being cut off from any possible further updates beyond my own. I liked what I put together. I liked looking at it. I liked making small adjustments here and there and watching it completely change it's feel without losing it's theme. It's time to let go of the tinkering. Save the memory.
Fun in creation. Unique pleasure in drawing resources together into a whole. This piece of code and that drawing on that server together with a banner you put together and stored on another server and watching it all spin to life at the click of a button. Part of the enjoyment in keeping the ship alive after this or that part died or stopped responding was the puzzle of rerouting connections, solving them, and kicking off into space again. One of the reasons why I love writing is pulling the parts and pieces together, memories, fragments, dreams, real and unreal, and at one point I got that same buzz from design, but it's wearing me out trying to do it across multiple platforms. Time to retool and tighten up creation. Focus on what matters the most and let that drive what comes next instead of allowing the platform to drive production. The factory and the caucus and everyone working within should be governing what comes out of the warehouse, not the shape and color and how many windows the warehouse has. Flight inversion.
Airlock to spacewalk, it is. Time to park it in an orbital bone yard and piece together a new ship. Maybe not one that incorporates everything, but one that simplifies so we're not flipping sixteen switches and checking three different read outs before tuning dials to accomplish what could be done in one cycle. I'm looking forward to it. I don't know what I'm going to do about the tag situation. A problem for another day. We'll see what's out there. Never forget the mission. Never forget how beautiful the Earth looks from afar. When you can't see past your own control panel, it's time. "Next time you go out to space, how about leaving yourself a little free time?"
///Plaid - "Air Locked"
The main problem is, because I enjoy writing so much, getting other things done becomes tedious and overly difficult. Discouragingly difficult. Task lock kicks in and nothing gets done at all because I have that loop constantly running with no way to put an end to it. "What do you want to do tonight?" Get some writing done, maybe do some doodling. "Okay, go!" Wait, I want to do that first and then- "Okay, go!" But I don't know how what I'm thinking about writing is going to seat next to the last thing I did so I need to find out what I was planning on accomplishing last week that's still in proc- "Okay, go!" You're not hearing me. I'm still trying to lay out the sequence so that when I get to the part where I start to lay down tracks I'll be able to begin to set up the next step into- "Okay, go!" God damn it!! Forget it. I'm going to go jerk off and try to sleep. And sleep refuses to kick in because my mind is still circling a world light years away from planet sleep even though my body arrived days ago. Ghost ship.
There are hold overs. Artifacts. A lot of what I am doing is cataloging artifacts. The overall design, however, is a massive artifact of another time. A thing I've fallen in love with deeply. When the entire interface and blog structure updated to a new design structure a few years ago, was it years, I retained mine because what I wanted to express was inexpressible within the new structure available. The only real issue with doing it, at the time, was being cut off from any possible further updates beyond my own. I liked what I put together. I liked looking at it. I liked making small adjustments here and there and watching it completely change it's feel without losing it's theme. It's time to let go of the tinkering. Save the memory.
Fun in creation. Unique pleasure in drawing resources together into a whole. This piece of code and that drawing on that server together with a banner you put together and stored on another server and watching it all spin to life at the click of a button. Part of the enjoyment in keeping the ship alive after this or that part died or stopped responding was the puzzle of rerouting connections, solving them, and kicking off into space again. One of the reasons why I love writing is pulling the parts and pieces together, memories, fragments, dreams, real and unreal, and at one point I got that same buzz from design, but it's wearing me out trying to do it across multiple platforms. Time to retool and tighten up creation. Focus on what matters the most and let that drive what comes next instead of allowing the platform to drive production. The factory and the caucus and everyone working within should be governing what comes out of the warehouse, not the shape and color and how many windows the warehouse has. Flight inversion.
Airlock to spacewalk, it is. Time to park it in an orbital bone yard and piece together a new ship. Maybe not one that incorporates everything, but one that simplifies so we're not flipping sixteen switches and checking three different read outs before tuning dials to accomplish what could be done in one cycle. I'm looking forward to it. I don't know what I'm going to do about the tag situation. A problem for another day. We'll see what's out there. Never forget the mission. Never forget how beautiful the Earth looks from afar. When you can't see past your own control panel, it's time. "Next time you go out to space, how about leaving yourself a little free time?"
///Plaid - "Air Locked"
6/11/13
Bed Time Story
A bed time story for you. I'm sorry I missed Friday. Life has been awfully up and down.
There was once a young man who had a goldfish. It lived in a square bowl inside of a white plastic castle with a little submariner who wore a big brass helmet.
Everyday the young man would watch the fish circle around his castle, big fins swirling the water, going about his fishy day and doing his fishy errands and forgetting things as quickly as he could remember to remember them.
The young man watched and chuckled and sometimes wondered about his fish. Was he happy as a fish in a pond or was he sad as a fish in a pond? Did he think about the sea or did the little fish wonder if the sea thought about him?
He'd chuckle and sprinkle little leaves of food and watch him make tiny bubbles on the surface while he ate, before turning in to sleep himself.
One day, the young man had a terrible day, he failed his tests at school, and left his backpack on the city bus. He tied his shoes so well he couldn't get them off and had to cut his favorite orange laces in two. He cried and his dad would not hold his hand and instead sent him to bed with no dinner. He knew his teachers would scream at him tomorrow without his homework in hand. He would try to explain that bad luck was the blame and they would not care nor understand.
That night as he sobbed and went sad to sleep, body sore from too much crying, the fish watched him weep and yawned, wiped his fin feet, and went inside his castle to lie down.
"Mr. submariner," the fish asked I need to cheer up a friend. Do you think you can do me a favor?"
"Sure," said he, all bubbly, "I think I can help you out."
"I need there to be a rainbow outside, when day breaks, near the window beside that bed in the corner way over there."
"Well you see," said the man, bubbles blowing from his brass head, "to do that is not at all easy. Rainbows only come when angels laugh til the cry and those tears fall down on trees. The trees shake in the breeze from the mouths of angel belly laughs and they catch little colds and sneeze. The colors fly up and loop back down and that is the rainbow we see."
"How, Mr. Submariner, how can I tell a joke so funny they'll hear. With all the prayers flying up in the air it will never reach their ears."
"Give me tonight, and I'll give it a thought and I will make a joke for you. But in the meantime, don't you worry a wink. Lay your fins on your pebbles and sleep."
The very next day as the young man woke, tears still dry on his face, he walked to his window, stretched and yawned and a smile began to grow on his face.
He whistled a tune to the summer sky, to the rain soaked air, and to the largest rainbow he ever saw. Inside his heart he knew the day was still young, but he knew too he would be okay.
The fish awoke late, the young man long gone, and rushed to the submariner, in a daze.
"Mr. Submariner! Mr. Submariner! Did it work? Did it work? What on earth did you say?"
"I told the angels, just before dawn, that a fish I knew needed a favor. I told them that if they did me this one favor I would love Jesus until the day I died and they, already shocked that I could talk, split their sides at my wager."
There was once a young man who had a goldfish. It lived in a square bowl inside of a white plastic castle with a little submariner who wore a big brass helmet.
Everyday the young man would watch the fish circle around his castle, big fins swirling the water, going about his fishy day and doing his fishy errands and forgetting things as quickly as he could remember to remember them.
The young man watched and chuckled and sometimes wondered about his fish. Was he happy as a fish in a pond or was he sad as a fish in a pond? Did he think about the sea or did the little fish wonder if the sea thought about him?
He'd chuckle and sprinkle little leaves of food and watch him make tiny bubbles on the surface while he ate, before turning in to sleep himself.
One day, the young man had a terrible day, he failed his tests at school, and left his backpack on the city bus. He tied his shoes so well he couldn't get them off and had to cut his favorite orange laces in two. He cried and his dad would not hold his hand and instead sent him to bed with no dinner. He knew his teachers would scream at him tomorrow without his homework in hand. He would try to explain that bad luck was the blame and they would not care nor understand.
That night as he sobbed and went sad to sleep, body sore from too much crying, the fish watched him weep and yawned, wiped his fin feet, and went inside his castle to lie down.
"Mr. submariner," the fish asked I need to cheer up a friend. Do you think you can do me a favor?"
"Sure," said he, all bubbly, "I think I can help you out."
"I need there to be a rainbow outside, when day breaks, near the window beside that bed in the corner way over there."
"Well you see," said the man, bubbles blowing from his brass head, "to do that is not at all easy. Rainbows only come when angels laugh til the cry and those tears fall down on trees. The trees shake in the breeze from the mouths of angel belly laughs and they catch little colds and sneeze. The colors fly up and loop back down and that is the rainbow we see."
"How, Mr. Submariner, how can I tell a joke so funny they'll hear. With all the prayers flying up in the air it will never reach their ears."
"Give me tonight, and I'll give it a thought and I will make a joke for you. But in the meantime, don't you worry a wink. Lay your fins on your pebbles and sleep."
The very next day as the young man woke, tears still dry on his face, he walked to his window, stretched and yawned and a smile began to grow on his face.
He whistled a tune to the summer sky, to the rain soaked air, and to the largest rainbow he ever saw. Inside his heart he knew the day was still young, but he knew too he would be okay.
The fish awoke late, the young man long gone, and rushed to the submariner, in a daze.
"Mr. Submariner! Mr. Submariner! Did it work? Did it work? What on earth did you say?"
"I told the angels, just before dawn, that a fish I knew needed a favor. I told them that if they did me this one favor I would love Jesus until the day I died and they, already shocked that I could talk, split their sides at my wager."
///Coco O - "Where the Wind Blows" sweet dreams, ghosts.
9/9/11
What Is It All About?
Dreamed I cheated my way to the top of the financial food chain and bought an awesome house in the hills of Nassau county and went on the inspirational speech touring circuit with Roger Staubach.
Then one fateful day while at home alone and drawing up notes for a lecture series at nyu titled "only your successes are successful" and for some trying to cook rice, some of it fell on the floor. No big deal I thought. Went to pick it up and I pull my hand away with a fist sized rat burying it's teeth into my palm.
Naturally I whip it against the wall except it doesn't die. Two more rats climb out of the seams of my red sofa, pause a minute to sniff around in the afternoon, and then they tear the gimp rat apart and then come after me.
Dump the boiling hot rice on them, problem solved. Except Tapirs start climbing out of my trash cans and their heads are just bleeding holes atop their necks, sucking at air like a baby's mouth thats had all of it's undescended teeth ripped out of it's gumbs. Tapirs a lot bigger in person.
Thats when porcupines with no eyes in their sockets start rolling out from under the couch and eating all of my notes scattered everywhere, and I try to smash them with books but every time I swing I get nothing but quills in the backs of my hands and arms and the quills fill with blood and drip it onto my carpet and the stains well up and bubble into more rats.
So I fight my way out of there and I'm in a hotel lobby with late 70s limousines parked everywhere and roger staubach gets out of one and walks past me with nine security guards, and I'm thinking it's a bit excessive when I hear over the radio through one ofthe drivers open windows that Staubach has been implicated in the murder of more than thirty members of a local human trafficking organization operating in the Gulf coast, but only to force them out so his own drug smuggling operation could operate smoother.
The driver I'm standing near just starts laughing his ass off and then, as he's laughing and I'm trying to get my head around the last thirty minutes two of the limousines explode and my life flashes before my eyes, but instead of my whole life it's high school algebra on aday we had class outside.
The teacher is drawing on her board and it's all unreadable text. Bent lines and short half moons and dashes and shes reading and pointing to the symbols and saying numbers and operations and everyone in class is lying in the grass on white mats, all cloud watching and sweating.
I roll over on my back my toes are touching some girls calf and someones knees are at my hip and everything feels taut and slick and sunny and the professor continues to drone on not caring that no one is paying attention.
A breeze blows and I crane my neck all the way back to let the air dry me off and I open my eyes and find I am staring up between a classmates spread legs and skirt and shes got a full on chubby from lying in the grass on her stomach, rolling her hips.
I let myself fall back and go back to cloud watching and the buzzing and someone puts their hand up my shirt on my stomach and all I think is how you can't get in trouble for touching if it isn't sex. And I yawned and stretched, heady and tired with all the sun and math, and let one of my hands rest there over my head against their wet skin.
Then the flash ended and I woke up. Safe and sound, horny, and with a new found respect for tapirs (dangerous beasts), cleaning up after myself when I cook, karma, and roger staubach.
But other than that I have no clue what last night was all about.
8/19/11
Busy on Paper
And by on paper, I suppose I mean with paper. Trying to take care of a promise and make good, because making good is what I do, maybe not best, but I would say it's one of my reasonably positive traits.
It's really time consuming work. Not that I have a problem with that at all. It's what makes these things as gifts so great. If you ever get one from me (only one family ever has - one family and my principal in sixth grade [made him a spanish gallion out of string and 3x5 flash cards) you know it's special. Every seam takes close to a minute to dry. Every cylinder takes roughly twice that. Add in the time to make the paper cuts, apply the glue, plan and execute joints, plus mistakes (they do happen, but not nearly as often as when I first started making things out of manila folders in sixth grade), plus the times when complex surfaces joined to other complex surfaces need hours to set and many applications of glue in between and, depending on the size of the thing you are making, you might be looking at three hours to make a component no bigger than a tennis ball.
I still love doing it. I was thinking at work last night that I don't talk about the things I love all that much. I think that's partly because so much of my life has been defined by people telling me what I can't do, what I'm not allowed to do, what I will not be permitted to do, where I can't go, where I'm not welcome. Is it possible to forget there are things in life that you do enjoy? Not entirely, but it certainly becomes a thing you can quickly overlook like a valley of flowers amid a mountain range gash across the landscape. Sure, nothing great will happen for you lying there for too long, but hell, the stems aren't gonna smell themselves.
I wish I could finish it this week, but I am literally out of time today, so I'll have to see how tomorrow shakes out. When it's done it'll weigh about five pounds and be about a foot and a half tall.
///FC Kahuna - "North Pole Transmission" ...the big bright sky that keeps you wide awake... one of my favorites. I dream of living somewhere the stars are so bright at night I couldn't sleep beneath them if I wanted to
It's really time consuming work. Not that I have a problem with that at all. It's what makes these things as gifts so great. If you ever get one from me (only one family ever has - one family and my principal in sixth grade [made him a spanish gallion out of string and 3x5 flash cards) you know it's special. Every seam takes close to a minute to dry. Every cylinder takes roughly twice that. Add in the time to make the paper cuts, apply the glue, plan and execute joints, plus mistakes (they do happen, but not nearly as often as when I first started making things out of manila folders in sixth grade), plus the times when complex surfaces joined to other complex surfaces need hours to set and many applications of glue in between and, depending on the size of the thing you are making, you might be looking at three hours to make a component no bigger than a tennis ball.
I still love doing it. I was thinking at work last night that I don't talk about the things I love all that much. I think that's partly because so much of my life has been defined by people telling me what I can't do, what I'm not allowed to do, what I will not be permitted to do, where I can't go, where I'm not welcome. Is it possible to forget there are things in life that you do enjoy? Not entirely, but it certainly becomes a thing you can quickly overlook like a valley of flowers amid a mountain range gash across the landscape. Sure, nothing great will happen for you lying there for too long, but hell, the stems aren't gonna smell themselves.
I wish I could finish it this week, but I am literally out of time today, so I'll have to see how tomorrow shakes out. When it's done it'll weigh about five pounds and be about a foot and a half tall.
///FC Kahuna - "North Pole Transmission" ...the big bright sky that keeps you wide awake... one of my favorites. I dream of living somewhere the stars are so bright at night I couldn't sleep beneath them if I wanted to
8/16/11
Odd Dreams, Prior Commitments, New Goals and Mystic River
Woke up, fell asleep, appended more dreaming to the previous dream and then woke again. The first dream was me and a family of strangers. The house was enormous. My mother and father were nowhere to be found inside the house and all of the light bulb sockets were empty. The only things left were bits and parts of things that were going to be abandoned that the parents left to me and my siblings to decide if we were going to take them with us or not. It was up to us to pack them all and be outside with the single suitcase we were each allowed to bring to the new home. So we packed.
As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.
We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.
Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.
Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.
The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.
In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.
All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.
As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.
Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.
Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.
It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.
For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.
There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).
The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.
Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.
Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.
So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.
///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.
As we were packing, I don't know how many of us there were picking over the sharp, nails still in them, pieces of torn up floor boards and wall spars and ratted clothing and finger print greased glass and silver rusted wares, the thought came of making it into a competition. Not from me, but the suggestion itself was a dawned understanding in all of our minds at once and as we dug and tossed things away in the afternoon light that falls flat and dead sober and muzzled in a way only the innards of a house, so far from exterior windows, can fell it, we started to uncover bodies of prostitutes our own age. Not dead, but not alive. The competition was to be the last one to come out of the house before the moving van came back was the winner, but the goal was to be the last one to cum inside the house, that person would be the true winner in the same ballpark as a game of chicken.
We all took our clothes off and hung them in the dusty arms of broken furniture and board until we'd unearthed a suitable body and then began having sex with the limp bags of limbs. I found a female (we each eventually unearthed in the soggy, chigger, beetle gnawed wood, an opposite sex) and I went to work with my eyes on everyone else in the slippery rays of light and motes of dust against the pointed earth of the floor, partially collapsed and compressed by the floor above into the bowl of the basement. Time went on, running steady like ants along a baseboard, each one with a unit of space time in its mouth, and they each finished and laughed and dragged their packed suitcase through the front door off it's hinge but leaning across enough of the light flared entryway to hide what was happening inside from whatever may be happening outside until I was alone.
Nothing I could do to or with the body was getting me on enough to get off and at first I celebrated, but soon realized it would be my failure that would spell out my doom and I worked harder and harder to no success. I gave up. I stood away from the skin of her, now wrapped in cobwebs and crushed insect and pebble sized grains of wood shed and chipped linoleum and tried to dust myself off, but the sweat on my heads only smeared things into a loam of streaked and poorly applied camouflage. If I didn't clean up, the parents would know what I did and punish us all, them for not stopping me and me for not thinking about how they would be beaten if I did something wrong. I tried to find my clothes again. They were gone in the mass of the wreckage without a trace.
Then the panic subsided. In the bathroom I found an old shot glass with white bands on it's inside where old half finished rounds of liquor evaporated and left a dried paste of saliva and skin cells from chapped lips. I also found a crimped blouse. I don't know how young I was, but I was small enough to wear it like a dress and the sleeves hung over the ends of my hands and dangled like a hedge shear cut jump rope. It looked beautiful. Staring at the fabric, the bottle fly brown and gold shining buttonless fabric, all I could think about was how lucky I was to find a piece of clothing that actually fit in the wreck of this home. I went skipping outside. I would lie about the sex and win the competition and the parents would, if anything, be happy that the one thing I wanted to take with me wouldn't even require a suitcase because I could wear it to the new home as is and leave more of the old behind.
The van pulled up just as I bounded out the front door. None of my siblings smiled. The father got out of the truck and took me back inside and beat me to an inch of my life and left me there with the bodies we all buried again. Laying there with my face against the ground I could not understand what I did wrong while I listened to the motor turn over and the thick tires roll away. I thought maybe I could catch up with them later as I bubbled and hovered above unconsciousness, but then I remembered that I had no idea where the new home was and that this was my home now and would be until it was torn down. And then I woke up.
In the second dream I was much older. I wore a trench coat and black snakeskin boots. I took a train to Stratton in a down pour. Stratton was an island on a river, hundreds of miles from the ruined house. I had nothing else on beneath the trench coat besides my lucky blue briefs. I was looking for work. When I arrived it was late morning and I stood in line at the government office to apply for positions as a postal carrier. The line moved very slowly and stretched all through the office and out into the market square mall through the cafeteria. There were dozens of mothers there with their children. The rest of the men did not get off at Stratton. The rest of the men on the train were continuing on south to the industrial complexes and high rise offices where the real money was to be had. I would have gone too, but feeling around inside my pockets along the train ride I realized I did not have enough to get there and back so I got off at Stratton.
All the papers and documents were blue. Many of the women in the cafeteria had on uniforms and I.D. tags from various government departments. The majority of them were employed and single, at least that was my guess. Hours of shuffling brought me to the main kiosk. Several people jumped the line, but I was in no position to raise an issue so I didn't. The woman at the desk politely explained to me that all of the open positions were positions I'd already applied and was on the waiting list for and that the best thing I could do would be to go back to wherever it was I came from and wait for the main office to contact me. I told her I applied to them so long ago that I couldn't even remember filling out the paperwork online. I hadn't been to a library or used an internet connection in years. She told me to deal with it and called for the next in line. I yielded.
As I got ready to leave, gathering my consciousness and checking over the sums in my pocket I stopped a woman in a postal service uniform and asked her how long she had to wait. She told me, after an awkward pause, seeing the anxiety on my face, that she was not made to wait at all. "All you have to do," she said, "was fill out actual hard copies and submit them so that they already have it in their hands and you'll get appointed pretty much instantly." I couldn't understand how that was possible. The paper system was no longer in use and hadn't been for years. Her friends started whispering. They were talking about her talking to so strange a stranger so I left. No one deserves to be talked about like that.
Along the train ride home from Stratton, I realized I didn't have enough to pay the exit fare. The entire trip was a waste. Even if I did land something far enough from home to be appointed instantly (all the local jobs were taken and I didn't have money to commute) I could live in a car until I made enough to pay for an actual home, but I didn't own a car to live in. I pulled the plug. Broke the connection and woke up. A very unpleasant set of trips across the bridge.
Not nightmares, but just not at all what I wanted from alternate space. Lean times crossing boundaries. Bleeding across realities.
It did inspire some concept art. Some new graphic designs I hadn't thought about before that I am looking forward to making, but I have some prior commitments. I already promised myself that I would finish the skeleton of my gift to the greatest friend I've yet known. It's been more than 200 days in the making, but, perhaps only 20 of those days have been spent in actual production. 40 days in conceptualization and redefinition. The hardest thing about it is that it's something that I don't want to end. The closeness of the relationship is long ended. Not really. I'm sure if I ran into her again the auras would mesh like sparks and tinder though minds turning like gears in two radically different housings is, I've learned, unsustainable. At this point it's like two puzzle pieces from two different jigsaws that are discovered to match. What can you do with that knowledge? It doesn't go away. You'll always know of the phenomenon, but you cannot move either puzzle closer to completion if you put the two together, but for the time they are in your hand and aligned and the greater challenges of the puzzlework on hold, you can marvel. The puzzle work is no longer on hold. Has not been on hold for some time.
For a while I thought I had too much to do to work on it, the gift. What I've realized is that the case is more that it's something I want to never finish. A feeling that if I finish it, everything else connected to it will be finished too. The reality, the truth apart from the silliness of so thick an analogy, is that everything else connected is already finished and at this point I am climbing a mountain to whisper secrets into a hole in a hundred year old tree and hide them away forever by not finishing what I promised I would. It's time to take care of the prior commitment. I was going to write, and sleep more, and cross the bridge again to see what the other me is doing now, but I need to move this forward. The gift really is turning out beautifully. I couldn't ask my hands to make something more beautiful for someone I care about.
There are some new goals. Reset goals. Another wonderful ratchet of the machine of downward mobility. In this case it is a good thing. The learning to love the bomb. More like learning to understand where it is, what the ground really feels like, beneath your dreamer's feet so high hovering. The new goal, the new ultimate is to settle farther north. That's at least a dozen, maybe two dozen years distant. I can't take all this sunlight. All these people I don't know. A lot of my work and effort has gone toward limiting the collateral damage of my being. My still discovery. A lot of my work has also gone toward creating an environment where I can be and write and survive myself and the main requirement of that survival is space and enough freedom of movement to handle the whip crack swings of my conscious states. I think both of those requirements will be satisfied, ultimately by moving somewhere a lot of land can be had at minimum costs in the plains and wastes of the middle north, perhaps the desert fields of the southwest (I can learn to deal with long days if they become the biggest of my problems).
The rest of the goals fall into a logical line. Car ownership, to reach more employment opportunities and outlying areas where I can purchase a distressed home in a sequestered area on the cheap and use the money I would otherwise burn on rent to make it a livable space. Working from that staging area to accrue the necessary funds to make the land purchase outright. Then working to accrue the funds to build a small home at it's center and the rain reservoirs and natural generators to live relatively independently depending on the area I settle to. I want to get to a point where the only thing I really need to concern myself with is writing, mental maintenance, and grounds and facility management, and moonshine. Then I will have arrived. New methods. New machines. I suppose it is downward mobile because I thought what I really wanted more than anything, for a time after my most recent flirtation with death, was human connection. As time goes by, though, I know with greater and greater certainty that, in particular, that sort of direct connection is not at all what I was built for. Not at all what I am or will ever be prepared to expose myself to or endure or learn again. You'll still be welcome to visit.
Step backward. Step forward. Engineering futures.
Sorry there's no accompanying artwork. Prior commitments.
So now I'm going to watch Mystic River while I work and hope something cathartic happens with my own memories. Been putting off watching that movie since it came out.
///Diplo - "Sarah" sitting in the parking lot of a truck stop, with the waypoint blues. you're almost home. don't let the sun get to you.
8/3/11
Manifesto (just kidding)
It's tempting to construct manifestos when things don't go your way. Tempting to take the bum raps you keep getting and try to think of a way to correct everything wrong that's happened to you, letter by letter, number by number until you arrive at a list of things and virtues that can correct the world once and for all and make it, not only a place in which your alternate self who experienced all of the positive outcomes you have been deprived truly exists, but a world in which everyone's alternate selves experience every positive outcome they possibly can while only actively subtracting the negative and leaving the ceiling open for the positive (perhaps they won't experience as positive an outcome as they would have previously, but the potential would still be there).
So enough about that shite.
Everybody's different. Some people will never understand how to be people. How to be human. I myself am much closer to being feral, to identifying with the senses and sensibilities of the higher functioning animal kingdoms than the lower functioning partitions of society. I don't know if I'm the right person to ask what it is to be human. I'm comfortable there. I suppose if I had to choose which side of that fence I wanted to stand on, I know what side I'd pick. I can't hold it against the people that have never been down that end of the spectrum if they don't understand how to relate. I can fucking still hate them though. For a little while. And then I get bored because I can howl as hard as I want into that wind coming down from where they are, and they'll never hear me clearly. And then I get back to rooting around my woods for things to eat and things to do and other wolves with which to play.
Ire. It's there. There is no ire extinguisher. I can break all the glass I own, but inside those cases there is only an ax with which to fight the fire. Swing away. Go find a patch of grass that is not burned to crisp ash. Roll around for a bit. Run off into the burning woods again after the scent of the something gorgeous, eyes wilder, mouth drawn back from teeth and hungry for something fat and slow. And happy to feel my lungs beating against my smoke stained ribs. Just break glass.
Don't invite me to your pity party. I'll drink all the liquor and toss back all the punch and go dancing on rooftops singing praises to the moon and starry ash smudged sky. I'm not without compassion. It's just something that's hard for me to understand. To feel and synthesize and give back. Sympathy yes. I can understand that. Sometimes I feel like my heart is the bleeding heart of a broken little girl fallen into a ravine in the Black forests of Germania, but my head is screwed on with steel lag bolts and filled with enough warheads, .50 cals, and trigger happy children to stage a military coup in darkest Africa and enough warpaint to terrify the most elaborate and landed samurai. I do my best to feel. And then I take what's left and make sense of what I read back from the dials and switches.
///El-P - "Love Theme" ...love though, I guess that's one thing that stays the same, but even that... the understanding fractures. As if the symmetry alone is a prescription to live. The world is busted, learn to live in it and treat people right. No manifestos necessary.
So enough about that shite.
Everybody's different. Some people will never understand how to be people. How to be human. I myself am much closer to being feral, to identifying with the senses and sensibilities of the higher functioning animal kingdoms than the lower functioning partitions of society. I don't know if I'm the right person to ask what it is to be human. I'm comfortable there. I suppose if I had to choose which side of that fence I wanted to stand on, I know what side I'd pick. I can't hold it against the people that have never been down that end of the spectrum if they don't understand how to relate. I can fucking still hate them though. For a little while. And then I get bored because I can howl as hard as I want into that wind coming down from where they are, and they'll never hear me clearly. And then I get back to rooting around my woods for things to eat and things to do and other wolves with which to play.
Ire. It's there. There is no ire extinguisher. I can break all the glass I own, but inside those cases there is only an ax with which to fight the fire. Swing away. Go find a patch of grass that is not burned to crisp ash. Roll around for a bit. Run off into the burning woods again after the scent of the something gorgeous, eyes wilder, mouth drawn back from teeth and hungry for something fat and slow. And happy to feel my lungs beating against my smoke stained ribs. Just break glass.
Don't invite me to your pity party. I'll drink all the liquor and toss back all the punch and go dancing on rooftops singing praises to the moon and starry ash smudged sky. I'm not without compassion. It's just something that's hard for me to understand. To feel and synthesize and give back. Sympathy yes. I can understand that. Sometimes I feel like my heart is the bleeding heart of a broken little girl fallen into a ravine in the Black forests of Germania, but my head is screwed on with steel lag bolts and filled with enough warheads, .50 cals, and trigger happy children to stage a military coup in darkest Africa and enough warpaint to terrify the most elaborate and landed samurai. I do my best to feel. And then I take what's left and make sense of what I read back from the dials and switches.
///El-P - "Love Theme" ...love though, I guess that's one thing that stays the same, but even that... the understanding fractures. As if the symmetry alone is a prescription to live. The world is busted, learn to live in it and treat people right. No manifestos necessary.
7/7/11
dear (______):
Dear reviewers of assembly required products,
If your review includes the words "lots of substitutions, but still turned out great" perhaps what you meant to do was post the assembly instructions of a new product. You know, the one you made.
Just saying. When I want to look at a chocolate chip cookie recipe and I want to read opinions of the chocolate chip cookie recipe, the last thing I want is to see or even get a whiff of some other chocolate chip cookie recipe that apparently "still turned out great" with the implication that because it's there in the comments it should also be rated just as highly (without the option, of course to actually rate it, because ITS IN THE FUCKING COMMENTS).
Sorry. =sigh= Just sayin.
A Kitchen Dabbler
If your review includes the words "lots of substitutions, but still turned out great" perhaps what you meant to do was post the assembly instructions of a new product. You know, the one you made.
Just saying. When I want to look at a chocolate chip cookie recipe and I want to read opinions of the chocolate chip cookie recipe, the last thing I want is to see or even get a whiff of some other chocolate chip cookie recipe that apparently "still turned out great" with the implication that because it's there in the comments it should also be rated just as highly (without the option, of course to actually rate it, because ITS IN THE FUCKING COMMENTS).
Sorry. =sigh= Just sayin.
A Kitchen Dabbler
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