Another Way

Another way to think about it is in terms of shows.

How many shows are you willing to play?  If you play 24 shows in a year, you've done well.  If you play 36 shows in one year, it was worth it.  If you play 48 shows in one year it was a blast.  If you play 50 plus shows in a single year, you've gone above and beyond the call of duty.

If you play 100 and more shows of what makes up the bones of you, you've gone beyond what anybody asked you to do.  Everything else is just exploration and





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Dogging It and the Winter Manifesto

Yep, I have been dogging it, for lack of artistic direction.  I've become consumed with the immediate and unable to find the magic, the whimsy.  The press of culture has been stifling.  The pressure of fitting into some kind of God damned role has been palpable, or I should say, more palpable than in past weeks and months and years even.  I keep looking up and asking myself if this is all there is and I have been pounding my fist on the table with six empty chairs around it and rattling nothing more than my own glass.

There is no such thing as a dry spell.  I know it is all still there, still pouring, still palpitating.  What I want to get at, however, is after the flow.  I am storing metaphor and analogy and analysis, but not having tapped the vein I want I have limbs dying for overdose and infection.  "Eating heroin is one thing, but injecting it is another."  Probably the funniest thing I heard this year.  The funniest admonishment.  It burns my ass sometimes to hear people complain about things that are fairly simply resolved.  Hilarious in some ways.  Met up with a friend of mine at the local hole and he told me about another friend who had a fiberglass, nuclear white, road bike.

Turned out the guy was high as fuck on mescaline and out for a joy ride and he rode with him up to his place and the guy just housed the hill there.  Should I feel bad for feeling inspired?

I've (enter apostrophetics) been dogging it none the less.  I can't describe the feeling.  If you've ever read the phantom tollbooth you know what the love affair of language can be like.  Sometimes she wears lace.  Sometimes he wears the same lace the last time you had to suck him off for a solid hour because he lied about not jerking off before he came over and you found out second hand from his other friend he was banging beers back with before he decided to ring you up and now your neck hurts when you tip your head backward to drink water the morning after.

The point is, he doesn't realize you would be more than happy to throttle his neck the same and watch his eyes start to pop out until they turned back and up into his eyelids and the tears ran down your hands because that's what gets you off.

And that just turned way angry and too honest.  I don't know.  I can't speak to human engineering because I don't know enough, but I absolutely believe that engineering can be trumped by training.  The problem and the pitfall is the belief and extrapolation from that idea that training can be unlearned.  Somehow the incorporation, the building of the structure can be as easily or possibly as difficulty and painstakingly deconstructed.  The question arises: if you have 24 years of programming and construction and habituation built into your psyche, how many years will it take to reprogram, reconstruct, repurpose, and rehabilitate those patterns into new ones?  If it takes, just drawing cards from my own deck of experience, twenty minutes to demolish a level 3 Revell GT 500 painstakingly constructed over two weeks, it should be fairly easy.  That's my deck.

It's been hard.  Real hard.  Violently hard.  Violently happy.  To the point where people know me well enough that I have to actively push away opportunities to ...I'm not a destroyer.  But I know I am.  I know I can be a creator too.  I used to be.  I used to create willy nilly and I still do, but the work goes into that.  The creating.  The destruction comes naturally.  I'm not a big guy by any stretch, but I never thought five years ago I would ever be comfortable popping someone's eye with my thumb.  Yeah, it was salty.  Not good salty either.  Like, I do not know how to describe it.  It was like the saline was an afterthought.  I did not realize, at all, how much energy I was burning to be, but I've felt the exhaustion of it, of late.  It's been taxing.  Who to tell what and how much.  I'm rambling.

I know.  I have been dogging it.  Not on the low roads though.  I'm kind of surprised some times how easy it's been.  Violence as language.  I think the Auralport has been a lot of language as violence.  Which is a start, but not enough of a start.  There's no point in conquest you can't talk about.  No entryway.  No friends.  I just laughed saying that out loud.  I am not an animal.  I build models with tweezers.  Still do.  I suppose that is not making me any less creepy.  I have fallen off.  Maybe fallen in to.  Something.  Fighting fair is a sad man's game.

I am not an animal, but I am trying to work my way back to the human side of the master equation.

And so I present to you the Winter manifesto:

Do good.  Do not just be better within yourself, because that is not enough.  Be better within, and for, others sake.  Do not just see stars, but see horses and do not steal them, only enjoy their being and watch and maybe tip a hat to that wilderness, but do not beg to be the center.  Do not fight this winter, for any reason.  Physically.  Because you have one body and one set of knuckles and you have enough years on them to make making it past forty a probability instead of a certainty.  Lose no more fractions of teeth.  Put together your works and compose for compositions sake alone because recognition is fool's gold and the short path to the quitter's raga.  Be bright and not literally, but for light's sake.  Be motivated and train and not for the sake of preparations for conflict, however, be prepared to defend yourself, and only in defense cause a mother fu$$ing ruckus.  Finish the twenty thousand words to your book you left hanging two years ago.  No Damoclesean swords.  Less reference.  Clearer analogy.  And I don't know how much further I should take it because I've already stepped into the boundary between what I know I can do and what I know I know I may not be able to do.

The Winter manifesto is this:  take it head on and do not fear the cool.

The trees talk to me in summer, at night when the moon is out.  I am looking forward to their silence and the peace of the death of the ground beneath my feet.  I am looking forward to reclaiming the night that I leased to the summer and all her passerby and the bullshit.

I survived another season.  I know the next two will be beautiful.

Redesigns coming soon.


///Sneaker Pimps - "How Do"  I grew up on sneaker pimps.  through the conflict years.  them, massive attack, and floyd, and disco.  and the orb.

Busy Signal and Dedication

I was just a person you would love to love, but then. I went through a week of pretty wild depression. Like depression uncharted. I want this to be up beat and I will try to make it as much so as I can, but sometimes things are unexpectedly gory. So I will make light whenever possible.

I've been in face time mode for a bit. Partly because happiness is contagious and sadness is, well, sadness. Not for any particular reason. Well, for particular reasons, but none of the reasons are valid. I have been experiencing very acute separation anxiety. And it's hard to describe. It's not like losing a mother or father or losing a method to madness and being left with only madness. How can I describe it? Asking myself. Separation anxiety for life? Not a fear of death, but a maddening anxiety for losing life? And then not even that so much as, by turning days, a separation anxiety that has echoed down the years back to my ears for my ex. But that's dead and gone right? Yet it comes swimming back against the current to the bridge and treads water long enough for me to notice, as I'm pitching rocks and counting the skips, to drown again like it was yesterday. Like it was five minutes ago. Panicking. Panicking as though I let myself go to the wave tops, even though I didn't. I made the right call, but the right call is calling me back and leaving messages and I am wishing there was a way to send things not to voicemail, but to nonexistence, and I am knowing that there is a way, but that particular way, in all of it's means, turns the good call into a terrible one.

I was talking to someone about suicide. Indirectly. Talking about the reasons people choose to make their lives matter. The biggest one is always religion. The second biggest one is narcissism. The third is family. And so on. But there is another reason that is a little harder to get at and more valuable than all three. If we accept that there is no god, and there isn't, and that math and science can, given an infinite timeline (or at least from the perspective of human life times, infinite), come to grasp and describe all, and that life is essentially just another system, of which we all are a part, it is clear that there is little actual wiggle room for agency. Not that there is none. The actual sphere of impact is simply a lot smaller for the vast majority of human beings than we are lead to believe. It's not all predetermined, but the actual outcome of my life, your life, is smaller than the bill of warrants would have you believe.

Killing yourself might hurt some people. Those people compose a micro fraction of the total people you could possibly hurt by not killing yourself and killing them instead. More importantly, unless you are part of a very small fraction of the populace, your death will have the chances of winning the local lottery, assassinating a head of a state, and getting struck by lightning later that day when the forecast for rain was less than 1% the hour before, of impacting the future outcomes of the rest of the worlds occupants, let alone the rest of the country's or even the state's outcomes. Probably even the locality's.

The thing that can keep you alive though is knowing that for the local set of outcomes there are a few very much intertwined equations. These equations, known or not, make up your value and you can assign whatever figure you want to your variable. Your variable on the long scheme of the interactions makes up very little of the master equation. The sun will still die. Mankind will still continue to implode and explode by turns until that happens. Science will still advance. Math will continue to prove and disprove itself. Life spans will still extend at increasing marginal cost for every five years gained. People will still be happy and miserable and happy because other people are forced into misery and miserable because other people will have done nothing to be happy except be born into it. You, however, do mean nothing to those final outcomes.

People will be sad for a time. They will be entertained, repelled, satisfied, and disappointed with what you do, or not. Ultimately though, you may never be forgotten but they will be entertained, repelled, satisfied, antagonized, placated, contented, and disappointed by someone else after you. And they will remember them too. The inherent value of you, just you, is your local, temporal, impact. The master calculation will still end up the same, the only thing you do is change how it gets to that final conclusion. Therein lies the value in life. Every time two plus two adds up to three billion and you and those connected to you can see it and laugh and cry about it for a while and forget that the 3 billion will be adjusted for down the road.

What we read as anamolous or some kind of discrepancy is all accounted for ultimately. In the moment, however, it's why you're here. You're here to contribute to the math of life. Not destroy it, not change it necessarily, but just to leave some chalk on the board. And once you are happy to swipe the eraser, and draw faces with a spit soaked fingertip, and scrawl away, you can be happy. That was the conclusion I tried to draw through the conversation. And I hope it came across alright.

The depression was manifold. Part sexual crush on guys I knew I would never actually gain access to. Part anxiety. Part screwed up brain chemistry. Part longing for things I have no right to long for. Part wanting to just fucking be someone, anyone, else. Some months you would trade your skin for anyone else's. But all you can do is wake up and be you again. Part of the sadness was not making time to do this. To talk. To talk with psychiatrists. Part of the sadness was the pain and not being able to express it. I still can't. All I want some days, in terms of expression, is to make someone else hurt as much as I do sometimes so I can know that I am not alone. But I am.

Not in terms of a unique pain, but in terms of identity. No one can hurt the same way you do. It's quantum mechanically impossible. Sure, you can hold up Rorschach tests and see similarities, but no one hurts like you do. No one loves like you do. No one's been there before. No one will go there when you're gone. All I wanted was a day off to mourn for ghosts. How do you request a day off to do that? How do you request a day off to rest your teeth? I don't need them removed. I just need a day off to rest my mouth. How do I express that? I need a day off to not move my body. I need a day off to get back in touch with my heart. I need a day off to talk to my hands and coach them to be better than what they're giving me. How do you express these things and get a valid response? How do you talk to your superiors and tell them that they need to forget the book for a minute, forget the guidelines, forget the established, and understand me for a minute as a human being before opening their mouth to deny me the things that keep me alive? Where do you begin to describe to them that the things essential to them are vestigial to me and things essential to me come across as figments of imagination, but bleed me as real as a brick to a forehead? There are no doctor notes for "love sick". There are no doctor notes for being stalked by your schizophrenic counter parts. There are no doctor notes for being chased by the animals of your dreams that have bled into reality. There are no doctor notes for the things that stop me cold like an engine run so hot it melted into a solid block of steel in seconds.

I'm sorry for giving you the busy signal. I just don't know what else to do. I am trying, though. Trying to get back here and get back to functional. Trying to gather up the caucus. Trying to find the kid, and the chief financial officer. Trying to get the engineer and the interface specialist in the same room, but when I can get them talking over pizza the kid runs out. When I can get the weapons specialist to stop for a minute, the toxicologist starts up again. It's just been absolute chaos on the shop floor and I can't get any of them to work together, let alone spend significant time together and it's a public relations nightmare. Circuits are breaking and many of them are new and unlabeled with poor documentation. Addresses point to places that don't exist. Thing that do exist point to breakers that don't cut power. Switches turn things on that shouldn't exist, things I thought were dismantled or were never actually built, but were. Things change over and I find myself in places I didn't know I was with people I already met, but are new again and I have to reintroduce myself.

Across the bridge everything is in tumult. I'm trying to figure it out as fast as it is happening and when it finally does click it's gone and it's time to wake up again. I just need a week to explore and find out what and who is there and who I am seeing. Who is sneaking in and who is lingering. But I have not had time so things are dangerous again in a way that they have not been since 2004. Not for you, but dangerous for me. I am so scared sometimes. It's a terror with which I am not familiar at all, because it's been so long and I forgot. How do I explain that to people? There are things over here that have no name that do what they please and should not exist, but do. They wait and they follow and they chase and they stalk and they talk and it's all I can do some days to pretend none of it is happening and I took the exceptionally long route to work today because I felt like taking a walk. It's fucking terrifying.

Ultimately though, the busy signal rings loudest. I have to undo that. I think the more I at least talk as an outlet the better off I will be. It's not a key, but it is a hammer to a single bar of the cage that I might find at least a way to get the hell out a little more. And to make that happen I am going to get a dedicated internet line. I am dedicated to you. I am dedicated to your math and your variables and your short lived value. Because it's all I have. Without being a religious nut case. It's not settling. It's understanding. And to make that easier and, in steps, by jumps, help myself I am dumping mobile broadband because rolling the dice every five minutes is nerve racking too and when I finish something, or start something, conversate, image trawl, explore, and in short live, I need to be able to know that I can complete thought. So I consider it less a luxury and more of a necessity. Maybe even a necessary exchange for the grossly inflated cost of medication. A monthly stay of execution. Of sorts. A re dedication and affirmation that I am doing everything I can to not completely self destruct. I want to be with my friends. I want to stay connected. I haven't left you, I promise.


///Unkle - "Heaven" dedicated to being alive until it's time to go.

Three Hundred and Eleven, Stupid Fucking Christians, Foreignness, and Musing

I want to have something important to say today, but I don't. Still working on the dream. I'm gonna muse for a minute, well several, as I am mentally drifting. While at work, the pressures of so much unpleasantness force my thoughts into a water jet that cuts steel, but away from those pressures it diffuses and runs easy and slipshod and quiet, or quieter, and my adrenal glands are gonna be shot by the time I'm 30 iterations old because so much of the day, well the night, is spent trying to wrestle control, heart charging, mind racing, all for nothing. There's nothing I can do to undo that. That shit job will still be around long after I leave it. The same people will still be there enforcing backward policy and rewarding incompetence. And that's the way it has to be. Competent people leave. They don't stay there. The only way any sort of structure can be maintained there is to reward stupidity, soft mindedness, weakness, and buffoonery and it is upsetting to me and it should be upsetting. All it means is that I have to leave before my head explodes.

I was working the other day and growing sicker by the moment. Physically sick to my stomach. The sounds being pumped down from the speakers in the ceiling were like ice picks touching my brainstem behind my throat and pricking it over and over and the pain of it was turning my stomach and making me dizzy. I considered after some time asking if I could leave at 3 AM, lunch time, and call it a day, but my stupid loyalty and pride in the work that I do told me to gut it out. Don't be weak and stupid and candy and thin. Gut it out. I don't care what you want, you came in today to do a job so do the job and then, when it's finished, go home and rest. You're not like them, is what I told myself until finally, while kneeling and shelving my body basically rebelled and pulled a knife on me. To which I answered, you wouldn't. And then it did, but it missed. Shattered the blade of the box cutter on the floor tiles taking a blind left handed downward swing at my leg and caught a rebounding shard in my mouth. So I met myself half way and took a long lunch break. It was a shitty day. I gotta get outta there.

So for the anniversary of my initialization my parents sent me a card. One of their signatures said live in peace. Which made me want to immediately purchase the next available train ticket down there to end their lives and burn the house to the ground. But I can't do that. I have too much I need to work on finishing already without the added difficulty of trying to do it in prison where materials would likely be even more scarce though free time would be in abundance so potentially that trade off might become more interesting if scarcity becomes a greater issue out here. It mostly made me question, though, how backward can a human being be. How stupid can a person truly be. To tell someone to live in peace. While simultaneously denying them every single last avenue open toward a life of peace and stability. It just reminds me of so many Christians. So many good Christians. It's in God's hands. She's with God now. He's in God's protection now. What the hell is wrong with you idiots. It's not in God's fucking hands. It's in your fucking hands. It just stymies me that people can be so oblivious. So learnedly oblivious to the obviousness of the impacts their decisions make on other peoples lives, especially, especially when so little effort on their part can make titanic changes for their own flesh and blood. Which is why I no longer consider them to be. They are an unfortunate do while loop that erred and spawned a NaN variable in me, but that has picked up where it left off doing nothing except cancer consuming it's surrounding while time left to live is not equal to or less than zero. I need a new mommy and daddy. Or a used set. Or even just one or the other as I have a pair of glaring vacancies. Apply within.

This is the three hundredth posting. My eleventh birthday is this Saturday. I might take myself out for ice cream. You can come too. I had another attack of something last night. It sucked. I woke up in the middle of it. Maybe it was a siezure. It was kind of funny in retrospect. I tried to get up and my whole body just want stiff and I fell back into my blanket with my face on my pillow. Funny because if someone were just walking by my room they would think I was fast asleep. I suppose if I hadn't woken up I wouldn't be composing this. I wonder sometimes where I am in the alternate reality when that happens. I wonder if maybe I touched something and received some sort of static shock and this state of contraction is how it crosses the bridge and stings me here. I wonder if assaulted by sound here what happens to me over there. I don't think it's just me crossing. Well I know it's not just me crossing. I wonder if I'll ever meet me over there. It is a rather large world.

Just the other day I was there and apparently there were some sweeping changes made while I was away. There concrete viaducts and underpasses everywhere and all biege and everyone was busy moving here and there and it took damn near half an hour to stop someone and ask them what was going on and where I could find the train station, because I hadn't ridden it in some time and I wanted to lose myself for a while. The man I stopped was about my height. Brown leather jacket and a shirt crushed with sweat and what looked like engine oil. He explained to me, after adjusting his glasses, that cars were banned. He wasn't mad at me for asking an apparently obvious question. He told me the upcoming action required that as much crude be saved and that the viaducts and underpasses were all light rails and that everyone pretty much took the light rails or biked where they needed to, but I didn't see a single bicycle or train car pass me while I spoke to him. He left. The city was a mess of design, but clean in the same way a beach is clean after a really bad windstorm. The whole thing was off putting. And then I woke up. No sign of other me. I think if I ever did see him I'd be roundly terrified. I hate talking about him. Any of them. They don't like being talked about behind their backs, but it's not fair because I'm always behind their backs until they show up and then I'm just fucked. I don't know.

Still haven't made the call. Still trying to land. Still no where to touch down if I wanted to. I've gone back to making necessary long term repairs. Things chance. Things change. There are times when things keep fucking up and keep fucking up and keep fucking up no matter what you do. And you know this because it is the same situation that you've approached two dozen different ways and it never ends up mattering by the time your bones hurt and your eyes are pools from finger bloodying attempt after attempt. And times like that force you into a position where the only agency you can really exercise is to fuck it up yourself. It is real. You can do it. It's the only way you'll ever be able to say you did something for yourself. I smashed in that fucking fender. All me. The only control you will be able to revel in is to decide where you want the hammer to touch down instead of letting someone else decide it for you. Something to revel in. Anything to revel in. To feel a part of the inside out and bizarre and upside down world you're in. If you live in a world of systematized counter productivity and human waste long enough, does the opposite become foreign? Absolutely.

I do believe from a civilization spanning viewpoint... well that just sounds cockneyed. Well probably not even cockneyed. Just stupidly grandiose. I do believe from the standpoint of socialization into the fabric of Americanisms that I am more or less feral. Defining feral as undomesticated and domestication as a state of obedient harmony with established standards and practices. But more on the nose I was raised like a dog. The more I think about, well I'm done thinking about, I've gone over the evidence internally through committee several times over and it's all there. I'm still learning to be American and person, but I feel like several of my key behaviors are kanine first and reasoning person second. I should probably make that call sometime. Trying to domesticate myself. To relate to people better. But the thing no one tells you about making sacrifices to relate to people is that none of it will ever matter if the people you are trying to relate to have no interest in rejoining your sweat for connection. Shove away then.



///The Cardigans - "Losers"