Where the Time Went IV (the message)

Make no mistake: you are not alone, you have not been abandoned, you have not been forsaken, you have not been left to die. It's up to you what you want your future to be.

Chris

Until you figure that out, you cannot affect anyone else's in a meaningful and lasting way. You don't even have to love yourself to at least see the future. Your futures. You are old, just like me. Aged beyond your years too early, just like me. Scarred beyond belief, just like me.

Chris

Our responses to it have been diametrically opposed in the now, but I was just like you.

Chris

Pain is inevitable, physical and spiritual, inevitable the same. Pain does not have to color every aspect of your life. It is not the boogieman. See it, know it, embrace it, splow it out, and keep it moving. It will be your acquaintance from then, until now, and on until the day you die.

Chris

We've both learned death seals nothing. The scars don't evaporate. Minds don't change. Facts don't change. History does not adjust for you and your happiness. So find your own. Make your own. At some point, you have to stop looking back and look ahead at what's in front of you instead of where you've been, who you were, and what you did for answers.

Chris

Spoiler alert: the answers aren't there. You already know everything that's happened. You already know your potential. You already know you are misfit amongst the trash of humanity and far too intelligent to pretend without wincing and dying a little more on the inside each time you muffle who you are to wallow and rub shoulders with the lost beyond repaired

Chris

The rut dwellers, the routiners, the folks that are happy with status quo because "at least nothing else can be blamed on me for trying"

try

Don't be afraid.

Chris

It is flat out terrifying. You've had your wake up calls and bells like the thunder on the surface of Jupiter and his storm systems large enough to engulf several Earths. You've heard them and you still shut your blinds and tell yourself it's fine... just a Summer squall... it'll pass... just a few inches of water...

Chris

Wake up darlin'

It's not too late.

Chris

You've got to stop burying yourself alive unless you truly need to die. Not "want", need. Must. Have to. Everybody wants to die at some point in their lives. Some of us, myself included, want to die several times over in a single day and/or kill everyone on the face of the Earth to be alone in life and therefore happy, by any means, and complete in an enforced (and extremely costly) peace.

Chris

What you choose to do will echo for decades through not just your life, but several others. If that does not sway you, before you give up on what you clearly do not know with any certainty whatsoever because YOU'VE LITERALLY NEVER DONE IT OR TRIED WITH ANY MORE TENACITY THAN YOU WOULD GOING TO A DRIVE THROUGH AND FINDING IT CLOSED AND GIVING UP ON EATING FOR AN EVENING give it a chance.

Chris

Give it a chance.

Give it a chance.

Give yourself a chance.

Chris

Has it ever occured to you that maybe, just maybe, this time around, you should give yourself a chance and tell the "I know myself well enough and I'm not going to waste my time" version of you to, for once, give the you that has lived and experienced a real relationship a chance to actually go find herself. You change as time passes. Your old rules of thumb don't apply anymore.

Chris

Your first boy is a man. Your second boy is about to enter Kindergarten (time will fly).

Chris

Why delay any longer to get yourself right? Truly right? You are out of time to pussyfoot and pretend you can make it up as you go. You must grow up. You can still be a big kid, but it's time to bring that child, that inner, fuggit I'll do it tomorrow, fuggit I have enough time for one bump, fuggit I don't care today, fuggit I'll just reschedule, fuggit fuggit fuggit I can do everything and anything I want, you into the bigger and much more important picture of what you want to be.

Chris

Stop putting it off. Stop placing that responsibility on what happens to you. Stop giving that power away. Stop having a reason why things don't happen and start building.

Chris

Start keeping schedules. Start keeping goals. Start planning. Stop reacting and start being active in your own life. You can't afford to drift anymore. You cannot just be in your bubble. That bubble burst a long time ago. You are crowd surfing on an empty infield and the band left four years ago, but they still haven't swept the venue and the stadium shut down right after the show.

Chris

Those aren't people's hands, you've been lying on the ground in weeds six feet tall with now indigenous wildlife occassionally coming by while you hum tunes that haven't graced an ear since the place was littered with ticket stubs way back when. Wake up.

Chris

Time is running out. Take control of your future or don't. Keep convincing yourself you're alone or don't. Continue to tell yourself lullabys of the past or see a future for yourself. Continue to howl at ghosts for wounds that have bled out and scarred over or walk into tomorrow scarred and stronger because you can help someone else get through those horrors in a meaningful and lasting way..... or don't.

Chris

Your future is in your hands.

Chris

The knowledge and the power therein encapsulated in your history can and should be paid forward to your sons. Remember that the next time you tell me I don't love them. Prove to them that you truly love them. Don't prove it to me. Prove it to yourself.

Chris

I have nothing to prove to [][][][][][][] or [][][] (and the crazy thing is I've never even met your eldest son and I know in my heart I have nothing to prove for him to know that I love him - you figure that one out, my pirate queen), but you do. Show them; don't talk about it and weep over it when you're restless and drunk. Show them.

Chris

Don't show me... show them.

Prove it to yourself.

Chris

I love you. I don't just live for me. I live for my little sister, for you, for the people you care about, for your family, for my friends, to bury my father and mother and see them underground, for the people that are fighting similar battles and losing wars, for breathing in nature, for recording history, for music, for things that only I can create because I am YES a unique instance of isness amongst the billions on this overcrowded planet, and yeah sometimes just for me to get high and laugh for a day or two or a month because if I'm going to be stuck on earth and never see space travel I may as well dream about it and make up some fireside sci-fi stories to share because that's fun!

Chris

Live and live well. Die and die alone. Die well and live alone? Good luck. Live well and die alone? That's even worse.

Live well and die well. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Where The Time Went II

Four flame outs later and several lives ago.

One of Those "Say Anything" Days

I don't know what the hell to tell you. Scratch that, I do. First off, I'm sorry I was gone for so long. It's not like me to stay away, and truth be told, I wasn't staying away as much as I've been held apart by circumstances beyond my control. Actually I kind of felt like the bearded guy with wings from Flash Gordon just then. At least my voice boomed in my head as I proclaimed the truth. It's not actually that dramatic, but I wish it were.

I guess, I really don't know what to expect from life anymore. Between the images pumped in through music and the massive filtering of said music to just the things that I don't mind slam dancing in my brain tissue and the images sucked in from television and the entire glut of information that comes unfiltered and unfilterable, my image of New York was unrealistic. "How realistic did I want it to be" is probably a more important question to ask. It's not a wasteland. It's not a shooting gallery. It's no more a hotbed of imagination and talent than any other city with a downtown and an uptown (that little detail is what makes or breaks a city for reasons locked into the evolutionary genome of bullshit socio whatevers).

I'm not making sense am I? I guess I'm just pissed off. Right now I'm that 105 year old man who sits in a high backed chair with his back to his bay windows, dressed in his three piece suit he wore to his last day of work before he retired, who cannot for the life of him remember the conversation between his ears that told him he should make the drastic change from the life he knew to the life he didn't know he would come to loathe.

We are after all in the first few hours of the first few months of the first few years of this, our new year under the banner of industry for the sake of perpetuating a life whose value lies in the work it has yet to complete. So I should be aiming for ... what? I don't fucking know.

Nope. Not true again. I do fucking know. My goal hasn't really changed. Only the operating conditions have changed. All I have to do is put food in my face, keep a simple computer, and not be homeless. If I can land a gig to make that happen I'll be good as a bar of gold. Or something. Something is getting lost in the wires again and I am blowing fuses faster than I'm replacing them and I think that's why I like talking to you. It doesn't really show me what needs to be replaced, but it does...

Okay cannot finish that thought. I think what I'm wanting to say is that I suppose if no one loves you, I'll be willing to. No pictures or links for a little while. My arrangements aren't allowing me to do the things I love doing for you. But we'll catch up later when I can think again and I stop feeling weird shit touching me. Total Promisaurus. And not like Inception promise either [I'm still gunna do it... i sware]. And my grammar will be better too. And punctuation. And that's it. Only because I told you I would fix it and I meant it. Because a man without his word is a laughing hollow eyed handshake that will eat you up from inside your dreams, like any other big city you knew.

///The Cranberries - "Dreams" who hasn't sung these lyrics to themselves? Raise your hands. To your throats and gently throttle yourselves for being too cool for school and then go youtube as soon as you feel you've punished yourself enough. Best song ever. Sure I can't listen to it 8 times in a row anymore, but that just comes with growing up. Right?

fucking god damn fucking fuck

okay, micro rant. not a good way to start anything besides a drunken conversation with someone who may or may not be homeless and or addicted to amphetamines and or a person old enough to have fought in a war but whose only motivation for claiming to have done so is to to get free drinks exemplified by the fact that your knowledge of the claimants supposed theater of conflict and parties involved far exceeds said imaginary veterans own (okay i was in a shouting match with a guy in chicago not long ago and finally we got to citizenship and war and voting rights and the guy says "i was in fucking Nam, man" so i asked him what year and he said "the 70s" so i asked him where he was stationed and he said "Nam, man" so i asked him which years in the 70s aaaand it basically went vaguely on and on... what ever fuck it... i dont even know why im still mad about that. hmmm. what was i mad about.... i dont fucking ohhhh yeah.... god damn it... fucking family.

so these fucking ass wipes sit around not doing shit for each other. the food goes bad. rots in the fridge. everyone waiting for someone else to do something. FUCK THEM. fuck them. fuck them. the dirt just piles up and piles up until its unbearable to walk around barefoot in their own fucking house. the bathrooms become unusable. the kitchen sink fills up with dirty shit until you cant even pour yourself a glass of water. all the plates get used until there is nothing to eat off of. what the fuck is wrong with these MORONS. they treat their home like they dont even fucking live there. GOD DAMN IT. i cant kill them. i cant reform them. meanwhile they fucking freak out about the shit they cant control and they fucking stab their god damn noses into every inch of my fucking life and what the hell i wish i could force them to look at the two inches in front of their god damn noses. i mean... what the hell ass damn hell bitch fuck fuck fuck fuck.

theyre like three people clinging to each other and using each other to stay afloat and so are all going to drown eventually. the little sister needs both parents for absolutely everything and gives nothing back. the dad needs the mom for food, and clean clothing,and gives nothing back. the mom needs the dad for shelter and money and gives nothing back. everyone is taking. seeing people fucking behave like this makes me want to shoot myself in the fucking head. its like watching cannibals eat each other every day and somehow the following day the torn away flesh returns to be eaten again. fuck. its disgusting. none of them realizes their parasitic nature. living here is like pouring my heart and brain and time and energy into a fucking black hole.

common sensing 06/27/06

Subject : common sensing
Posted Date: : Jun 27, 2006 7:51 AM

i read an interesting piece the other day about film noir.



The piece discussed the fall of tragedy from a tale that depicted the struggles of a hero, a real tale of tumbling from way "up there" to way "down here" and all points southward and more hellish then wherever "here" happens to be, to a tale of the struggles of the common man. It pointed out that the commonizing of tragedy in film noir marks the end of tragedy as a genre because any persons experience could be referred to or depicted as tragic. Then the essay turned. It shifted gears and threw in the exception.

The argument went something like this: "tragedy as it stands today must be reborn into something that not everyone can identify with,but everyone can recognize as uncommon pain not like their own. Tragedy as a genre is not dead. It is only more difficult to properly diagnose. Tragic figures are no longer the aristocrats of society displaced to hell. Tragic figures are those who are already there who are socio-economic minorities and are cut off from the common pool of society, who through incredible and fatalistic turns find themselves somehow further ostracised from the common pool of suffering, which is a far worse place to be because it is suffering without the ability to identify oneself with the common sufferings of your fellow man." thats a total paraphrase. the guy who wrote the piece had a much more in depth argument... but you get the idea (i hope).

the problem with being hard out for luck, in need of support, or on the ropes for any reason is that /everyone/ really believes thiers is the ultimate tragedy, and they "turned out okay" so why should they help or even try to empathize with you? thank you media for making hugh grant look like the saddest man alive.

according to this article, a true "tragic figure" candidate could be one of the poor bastards interned in cuba who later returns to society, his life in shambles, dirt poor, and with literally no one willing to identify with him because of his nationality, and his own government, the shining united states of america, unwilling to touch him so they wrap him up in red tape, put a nice little tag on him that says "don't worry, it's all taken care of" and poke him into the back corners of everyones minds with a thirty foot pole to quietly rot away like so much discarded food behind a stove.



so next time you read something that sounds like a person is whining about how hard their life is and they didn't just return from a foriegn countries prison camp where they were raped every night as a prisoner of war maybe give some consideration to the idea that they actually are having a hard time of it (assuming, of course, that their whole life isnt one big complaint. there are people that are addicted to sorrow and lamentation, or at least i think there are). instead of accusing them of crying to heaven "WHY ME!!" get out of your own stories of overcoming woes for just a moment, discard your images and ideas of how everyone suffers the same, and take a minute to consider that given their circumstances you really have no frame of reference (besides media, which pollutes, dilutes, and confuses the idea of what is and is not suffering on a day-to-day basis and, loosely, your own personal experiences) to judge them accurately.

this is not to say that you have no right to make your judgements. it is to say that i believe you should not pass judgement based on the idea that you've had it just as bad or know someone who has, when what you're really operating on is an idea based in the commonizing of tragedy and the assumption that suffering is an experience without meter that unifies us all. it doesnt.

i wish i could remember the name of the article... it was very provocative.