How funny would it be to wake up in your own car in the middle of the early morning after accidentally blowing your steering wheel airbag into your face the night before tinkering with the switches and wiring around the wheel?
The thought crossed my mind, walking home from the local store to buy smokes and chips. Almost as good as chips and ice cream. When I feel horrible, I prefer cigarettes because they make me feel a little less horrible without making me wish I felt an unsustainable joy derived from ice creams sweet and cooling goodness. If only anyone could always be that smooth, creamy, and soothing all the way down to the belly. The thought crossed my mind after walking away from my truck to go buy some comfit after I noticed my fuel gauge was malfunctioning and realizing the problem's solution was going to cost me at least $120 and 10 to 20 hours of labor at worst and 20 to 40 hours of labor, learning, trial and error, and no dollars at best.
I kept chuckling thinking about how angry I felt. I kept chuckling thinking about reaching under the seat for my hatchet, letting out a bloody war cry, and smashing the wheel to pieces. Only then, ditching the hatchet, pulling and tearing wires out of it with my bare hands until the airbag exploded and shoved one of my closed fistful of wires straight into my face and I basically ended up knocking myself out cold with a rocket powered fist to the dome. Then waking up the next day with a deployed airbag, swollen knuckles, one hell of a headache, and one hell of a fist shaped bruise between my eyes.
Part of the reason for the rage is that I finished fixing another small problem with a steep learning curve and dozens of hours of labor and learning rolled inside only days before. The truck is not falling apart around me, though it feels that way sometimes. The problems are routine problems and I wish I could take it in for routine maintenance instead of d.i.y. desperation weekends. The other part of the reason for the anger is that if I were paid more in line with my actual skills and level of higher learning, I could shrug, say "okay", and rent a car tomorrow while my truck sat in a shop for an afternoon.
Living near the bottom of the middle class is deceptive. Bottom of the middle class, top of the lower class. Living in the region can be deceptive if you have some imagination, some confidence, some helpful friends, and some ingenuity. I have a one bedroom apartment with a closet bath/shower and mini kitchen. If I take away all of the furniture a friend gave, all of the furniture I built, and all of the furniture I found on curbs or being given away by strangers, I have cinder blocks, two folding chairs, one of those university lobby lounge chairs, a sheet of particle board, and an end table. Remove every worldly possession, so to speak, and there'd be a truck parked outside, a few pots and pans and plates, a desktop and pair of monitors, a console, a found tv, a few books and magazines, some shoes and goodwill clothes and multipack tees, some mechanical gadgets, some home and auto repair tools, and a printer and phone.
Imagination allows me to see what can be and holds the hand of ingenuity to find ways to make it happen. Call it humility or call it living within your means or call it mining gold or a hobby, thrift stores are one of the keys to forgetting that you are part of the working poor. The cream of the lower class. Keeping good friendships is a huge part of the puzzle. Without them, my life easily fits inside a 10' by 10' cell with a hole in the ground to eliminate and a spigot somewhere to drink and bathe. Part of the anger stems from those parameters.
I have been heavily detoured. Charging along the roads as quickly as possible in an effort to get back on some kind of track while wasting as few years as possible is frightening. I ask myself what will happen if I miss a black on orange florescent sign letting me know my next turn is coming three turns from now and the sign at the third turn was never erected so commit this one to memory. First and final warning. The reason why it does not feel fair to me is because it is not fair.
I continue to consider the many branches not followed that have lead here, fighting for time to write. I began to believe my father was trying to teach me a lesson about his pain all along and I am finally beginning to understand it, but I will not be able to understand until I am 48 or 50 or whatever his age was when I stopped talking to him. Before that thought grew too large, I remembered he hasn't the subtlety or emotional imagination to allow him to pull that off. I can see where some of his resentment stemmed from. Losing all of the prime years of life and talent at the cutting edge of art, design, and martial arts bad-ass-ery to childcare. Who wouldn't be a lot angry all of the time. Though extremely dissimilar in their divination (did you see what I did there), the results are similar. Cut away opportunities, trim an effective gesture here, clip a nudge there, ....
... I don't know. I do not know why I never got the same support. It would not have taken much. Some days I am alright never knowing. Some days it all comes to a head staring at your broken fuel gauge and doing the right thing and getting the hell out of the car without slamming the door and spinning 180 degrees to put your fist through the window and slash your own tires. The world could've been miles from now.
I could be writing about my third year working as a librarian somewhere and moaning about coding database systems and dealing with angry patrons and making time for dates between writing short stories and working on my two part novel about warfare and keeping up to date on my space opera hopeful crown jewel I'm still searching out an editor for, however the third poetry anthology is going pretty great. I'm tearing out the kitchen in parts on my down time when I get tired of writing and it should be finished in another week or two.
Today felt like opposite day. Loading my truck up with bale after bale of carpet, a refridgerator door, water logged drywall, a cane and broken umbrella, armfuls of empty paint cans, a screen door, and three dozen other pieces of jetsam from the home I'm renovating's previous occupants, it was opposite day. What I was doing should be my hobby. I should be putting that sweat and blood and cuss into my own home, not someone else's. When I go home I should be thinking about what I am going to tear down and visit the hardware store to work on next. When I go home I should not be thinking about what I can write next that can be packed into the time it takes to shut my body down to hit the hammers and brushes and trash bags and saws again.
As much as I love working with my hands, I could find a way to work with my body in the face of an occupation that demanded I not.
"You're poor! You're poor! You're poor! You're poor! Do not be deceived; you're poor!"
Independent life is a horror show and funhouse of mirrors broken and whole. I am staying positive.
What brought me back to a semblance of balance is remembering that the day is still young. Independent life is 5 years old. Five. Five years ago you started stepping outside of your cell. A year or two later you walked down a hallway and into a cafeteria. A few months later you learned there was a yard and no time restrictions. A few months later you found a gate into another yard. It's getting larger and larger as long as you do not screw it all up and have your privileges revoked. All of the time you lost will be compounded by the time you spent finding a way back out.
No one pays you what you're worth unless you have the paper to create the market. Or the portfolio and charisma, in lieu of paper. Portfolio and charisma is an absolute "and" statement. The one and not the other turns into a luck base number system. I will never know my actual value. Maybe that is the worst of it? I will never know if I am being over paid or under paid, valued appropriately or not. The optimist inside, the petitioner, tells me that if and only if we suffer for as much time as we spent pursuing the degree, our penance will be met with paper if and only if we are gracious through our turbulent era. The eros inside whispers about penance through joyful degradation, The musician adds another kick drum, knocking over cymbal stands. The child snaps crayons in half so both hands can draw at once inside the same lines.
It is difficult not to fantasize about getting my degree in the mail, tearing it in half, driving to their house, and suffocating them to death in turn, each by half, with a wad of paper. That would be thoroughly satisfying.
What are you supposed to do when the toys you want to play with are above the grade you are licensed for? What are you supposed to do when what you are allowed to do you can do very well, but the ceiling is opaque and the sounds coming through it are not in a language you can or maybe will ever understand? Maybe I am paid exactly what I am worth. If I have reached my ceiling and given no indication that I am prepared for or understand in the slightest or am equipped for beyond that ceiling, I am paid exactly what I am worth.
That's frightening. Also true. Harrowing.
Sometimes I understand that I'm getting too fixated on true freedom. I get a taste of working something I can enjoy to support the writing habit and expect everything else to fall in line. There's a luck element to it, that I cannot unlock through work or optimism or faith or trust. That operates on its own time table. If I do win the lottery, I will take out full page ads in major cities for the hell of it, but only once.
Part of me continues to say it is not supposed to be this hard to make massive uncertainty and day to day, week to week, at best month to month living a thing of the past. My state is, however, that fragile. At the ripe old age of at least 1/3 dead the best I can do for myself is knowing I have at least a month to figure out a new lowline. Fear the high lines because you know a low line is around the corner... ....what to do when you are following low lines? High lines have to be engaged. My spider sense is not tingling. Shake the wrong tree and a warship mine may fall out of it, let alone a tank or soldier sized one. The other story of America. Every body wants to be a cat. If you have enough money you can do whatever you want to. Not that much money. I mean enough money to swap cars, or pick up and move, or add and subtract clothing, or change lighting, or paint colors, flip what you walk on, change shoes when you feel like it, add and subtract channels, modify whatever you want to when the moment strikes you, eat out, order drinks for other people, pay for other peoples gas, buy extra fresh fruit. It's nice.
I am still going to try to brew my own beer this summer. Do not give me that horseshit "God works in mysterious ways" because chance does too. The only thing better than chance is ingenuity, and the only thing more important and better than ingenuity is imagination.
I am trying to stay positive with some success. Frustration and rage are part of being us. Born here? Sure. From here? No. I've missed you. Don't lose touch. If you ever need to talk, do not forget my ear. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.I love you.Iluvu.Ilvu.Iu.U.I.
We'll get this thing sorted out. We have a lot of time ahead of us, like it or not, we do.
Do not quit.
You have the rest of your life to make that decision.
It is opposite day, okay?
It is not wasted time.
Opposite day.
Time becomes more valuable as it accumulates.
Okay. I am
with you. Agreeing to never throw hands up in frustration. Agreeing to ride it as long as there is still track in front. Agreeing to dance as long as there is a beat to dance to, be it from within or without. I am okay with you as long as your are
okay. With me.
///Aesop Rock - (Gun for the Whole Family) ~ i've missed you for a very long time. things got bad. things were getting bad. i had to remember that they weren't as bad as they'd been. we're working toward a utopia of coexistence. we're not there yet, but damn sure we're going to keep on trying while helping lay the ground works and maps and blue prints for the next iteration of our being.
/
//
///Alanis Morissette - (Thank You) ~ passive mobile adaptable armor.
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 time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
2/4/15
That Instant
the creeping suspicion slips in that there's an extra month lurking in the margins of the calender and everyone and everything is actually 8% percent older than it appears.
10/17/14
Stresses and Stressors and Life On My Tardis
Life is stressful and full of stressors. That's not news to anyone. Time is money and money can be converted into time. The time it takes you to read this is time you could've spent making money. Or maybe it is time you are spending making money. Getting paid to read blogs. Or maybe getting paid to do something, anything, besides read blogs. Shame on you. The time it takes to write this could have been spent working as a dishwasher at Eat n' Park. Or could've been spent getting shopping carts at Kmart and trying not to completely lose it and burn the place to the ground.
Life has many different stresses to it. Some of those stresses are more intense than others. Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake. You have to answer the bell. Eventually. It's critical to your survival.
The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors. Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world. If the world were not shared. If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge. A single leap from stresses to peace. A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world. There is no single leap and there never will be.
To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors. Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own. The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe. By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder? Hilarious movie. I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it. Came out a while ago. Should be available for rental or something by now. Robert Downey Jr's in it. Tom Cruise to. Surprisingly good.
Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen. It's troubling sometimes. From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge. Return to the two channel direct connection. The single bridge. It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.
Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward. I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at. I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level. A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence. My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging. I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now. It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in? Very little. The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself. "Attaboy, chap! If you work hard enough you'll get there." Eat me.].
At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own. The question is the conversion rate. If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not. Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.
With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living. Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted? How fast is that going to kill you. How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole? My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered. I'll do without, thank you. If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider. Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep. I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end. I am sorry. My mind will not work that way. I wish many nights and days that it did. That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American. It doesn't. I won't get to enjoy that. I won't get to see that. But hey, I could always win the lottery or something. Wouldn't that be a gas.
Life on my Tardis is pretty okay. Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks. I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next. I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means. No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they? I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30. I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count. Besides, that ended in utter disaster too. I will not do it. If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now. Simple as that. Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship. Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel. Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own. "You should have gone to the hospital!" Yeah, right. Of course. It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to. As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out. Life aboard my Tardis. One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.
What day is it? Sunday, 6 P.M. Are you sure? Yeah. No. Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.! What the hell happened? It's Tuesday!? What happened to Monday? Weren't we supposed to be somewhere? It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday. Are you sure? Well, okay. We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything. Yes, that will be Wednesday. I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now. What do you mean we're 5 miles from home. This is a park bench? Come on, man. Get it together. The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius. Except when it doesn't.
Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)" There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music. This is one of my favorites of late. So dark. So playful. So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.
Life has many different stresses to it. Some of those stresses are more intense than others. Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake. You have to answer the bell. Eventually. It's critical to your survival.
The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors. Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world. If the world were not shared. If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge. A single leap from stresses to peace. A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world. There is no single leap and there never will be.
To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors. Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own. The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe. By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder? Hilarious movie. I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it. Came out a while ago. Should be available for rental or something by now. Robert Downey Jr's in it. Tom Cruise to. Surprisingly good.
Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen. It's troubling sometimes. From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge. Return to the two channel direct connection. The single bridge. It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.
Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward. I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at. I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level. A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence. My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging. I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now. It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in? Very little. The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself. "Attaboy, chap! If you work hard enough you'll get there." Eat me.].
At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own. The question is the conversion rate. If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not. Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.
With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living. Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted? How fast is that going to kill you. How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole? My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered. I'll do without, thank you. If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider. Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep. I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end. I am sorry. My mind will not work that way. I wish many nights and days that it did. That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American. It doesn't. I won't get to enjoy that. I won't get to see that. But hey, I could always win the lottery or something. Wouldn't that be a gas.
Life on my Tardis is pretty okay. Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks. I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next. I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means. No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they? I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30. I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count. Besides, that ended in utter disaster too. I will not do it. If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now. Simple as that. Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship. Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel. Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own. "You should have gone to the hospital!" Yeah, right. Of course. It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to. As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out. Life aboard my Tardis. One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.
What day is it? Sunday, 6 P.M. Are you sure? Yeah. No. Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.! What the hell happened? It's Tuesday!? What happened to Monday? Weren't we supposed to be somewhere? It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday. Are you sure? Well, okay. We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything. Yes, that will be Wednesday. I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now. What do you mean we're 5 miles from home. This is a park bench? Come on, man. Get it together. The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius. Except when it doesn't.
Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)" There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music. This is one of my favorites of late. So dark. So playful. So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.
3/23/14
Dear (_____)
Dear time,
we should be more discerning in how we meet and leave each other. Not that either one of us is particularly feather fanned in our displays, but we need to have fewer feathers hanging out there in bright colors and more feathers dedicated to flight. Waste makes haste or something like it. Let's do lunch, but not because we're supposed to because we wasted dinner the day before. Let's do lunch, time, because it's available this go 'round.
we should be more discerning in how we meet and leave each other. Not that either one of us is particularly feather fanned in our displays, but we need to have fewer feathers hanging out there in bright colors and more feathers dedicated to flight. Waste makes haste or something like it. Let's do lunch, but not because we're supposed to because we wasted dinner the day before. Let's do lunch, time, because it's available this go 'round.
4/5/13
Ghosts [return]
What's black and white and red all over? Your mother, upside down, wrapped in electrical tape. You on the run. The pain has been astronomical. Mentally shredded. Bringing myself back together. You never want your heart to get too cold, but sometimes enough things pile up together and the fire goes out and it's just you out there, alone in the backwoods, beside a ring of rocks and ash and you can hear them at the tree line cutting under the bushes and between the trunks and leaves would rustle if it wasn't so late a winter, and instead the twigs are snapping and whistling when they breath and more than anything else you want to howl and bring them to you because waiting has you chewing your tongue out of your face, but even if you could draw enough breath to do it, your throat is swollen shut tighter than your shivering eyelids. So you wait for sunrise with the knee quaked temerity of a hangman who knows there are worse things than death.
It's been a while. It's been a long long while. Every minute an exercise, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, in control. Childhood memories know no limits and have no expiration date. They're like veins laid into the skin of your brain that pump that history through your tissues and sockets and bones and every few days or weeks or sometimes, blessed months, they rattle around your cells and locks like blind inmates with worn down kitchen ware for picks. Sometimes, strolling those halls you catch their empty, milky, eyes in little bits of mirror gummed to metal rods watching the sound of your footsteps down the hall. You took them out, one by one, to solitary confinement and punched those brown and blue iris's out with a peen hammer. Each new arrival. Because you could not stand the watching, but you never thought they would keep on looking with their ears, little mirrors still poking between the bars out of habit. Or maybe just to fuck with you. Every few days, weeks, or blessed months, one will get it right, and out of the corner of your eye, too far down the hall to break the hand at play, a cell springs open. Two cells. Three cells. Two more on the upper level. Another in a wing of a branch of your complex you only know because the alarm is thudding through your ears, through the bricks of your skull and you know something has gone very wrong.
The ghosts have been roaming again. To the point where the best thing I can do is lock myself up and pray for rain stiff enough to take the chalk off the attic walls where the roof is worn away. Sometimes I know why it happens. A lot of times I still don't. Managing is a kind word. But you do it to the best of your abilities. At some point it becomes not protecting yourself from others intrusions or exploitation or oversights or abuse or perceptions as much as it becomes protecting other people from yourself. Just because you know and can, to a degree, understand what's happening to you or not always the what, but the why (sometimes not even that) and can feel that something is not in its right place and that knife is not where you left it, and your shoes are covered in mud, but you went to bed early yesterday and it didn't rain until deep into the night, and that math is simply not accurate, does not mean that you can do anything to stop it besides isolate and insulate yourself as much as possible. "Bad things are about to happen."
It shakes you on the inside. The frameworks you've built up to contain and blanket fracture and split apart and you have to force one hand into the other. Force your hands to love each other so they do not tear you to pieces. And sigh "please, not now. Not yet." They will pay someday, but you're not ready yet. The switch turns and you're alone again. The things with names I cannot pronounce are gone, but how far away did they go this time. Are they in the next room? Around the corner of the building? Is he on the windowsill, outside the drawn shade admiring the night air? Check the bathroom. Where did all of this blood come from? The switch turns again. Rusty contacts spark and pain flows like spilled water on live copper. You hold your hands over your ears and go days without saying a word because if you do not know who and what it is that is breathing in your ear, you can never trust a word from between your lips again.
Pain builds and abets and builds in the dark inside your folds. They eat at your body. Snack and taste and tear away this and that. They can hear you crying through the years, sniffing you out. One and then two and then too many to count and all you want is to reach back through that long stairwell, past the cobwebs, to hug your little body and press your round little face into your chest until you stop breathing, but you can't bring yourself to do it, so you hold yourself tight and listen to the echos rising to the floor above and the snick snacking shuffle of their footsteps trying to find their way down to where your body broke all those years ago. They come down those stairs and pull chairs near and wait and watch and some laugh and some pick skin out of their teeth with spare change or a bobby pin. Some draw little things in the dust on the floor with little fingers. Pain builds and you take it and take it until it becomes.
In the pile of ash inside the stone circle in the backwoods you failed to navigate and so made a bed, the weight of ignition is reached. The heart inside you, driven and compacted to a block of solid steel arctic ice, begins to burn again. Focus taken returns. It is only you. Yes, they are near, but it is only you holding the gun to your chest and the hammer falls and you exhale fire. The sun is hanging itself and all you need do is walk toward it to feel its heat. The air is not vibrating anymore, instead holding you the way you tried to hold yourself. Pain destroys until the scale goes so far it can only be described by what it creates. Clarity is a kind word. Control. Management. I know someday it will go somewhere we will not come back from. But that day is not today. Today, everyone is in their cell. Everyone dangerous enough to raise the hairs on my neck and make me piss into my pant leg and fill my left shoe. History never goes away.
Rebuild. Come back to us. There is no reason for this is the biggest lie you'll ever hear. Someday we'll be right and they'll see what it is that steals sleep from our eyes. It's been a long long while, but it feels like no time at all. Someday we'll have a necklace made out of their teeth, little holes drilled in them, fillings and all, with a little pink thread through them and the back ends in fisherman knots tied to silver clasps. That would be nice. Someday sweetheart.
It's been a while. It's been a long long while. Every minute an exercise, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, in control. Childhood memories know no limits and have no expiration date. They're like veins laid into the skin of your brain that pump that history through your tissues and sockets and bones and every few days or weeks or sometimes, blessed months, they rattle around your cells and locks like blind inmates with worn down kitchen ware for picks. Sometimes, strolling those halls you catch their empty, milky, eyes in little bits of mirror gummed to metal rods watching the sound of your footsteps down the hall. You took them out, one by one, to solitary confinement and punched those brown and blue iris's out with a peen hammer. Each new arrival. Because you could not stand the watching, but you never thought they would keep on looking with their ears, little mirrors still poking between the bars out of habit. Or maybe just to fuck with you. Every few days, weeks, or blessed months, one will get it right, and out of the corner of your eye, too far down the hall to break the hand at play, a cell springs open. Two cells. Three cells. Two more on the upper level. Another in a wing of a branch of your complex you only know because the alarm is thudding through your ears, through the bricks of your skull and you know something has gone very wrong.
The ghosts have been roaming again. To the point where the best thing I can do is lock myself up and pray for rain stiff enough to take the chalk off the attic walls where the roof is worn away. Sometimes I know why it happens. A lot of times I still don't. Managing is a kind word. But you do it to the best of your abilities. At some point it becomes not protecting yourself from others intrusions or exploitation or oversights or abuse or perceptions as much as it becomes protecting other people from yourself. Just because you know and can, to a degree, understand what's happening to you or not always the what, but the why (sometimes not even that) and can feel that something is not in its right place and that knife is not where you left it, and your shoes are covered in mud, but you went to bed early yesterday and it didn't rain until deep into the night, and that math is simply not accurate, does not mean that you can do anything to stop it besides isolate and insulate yourself as much as possible. "Bad things are about to happen."
It shakes you on the inside. The frameworks you've built up to contain and blanket fracture and split apart and you have to force one hand into the other. Force your hands to love each other so they do not tear you to pieces. And sigh "please, not now. Not yet." They will pay someday, but you're not ready yet. The switch turns and you're alone again. The things with names I cannot pronounce are gone, but how far away did they go this time. Are they in the next room? Around the corner of the building? Is he on the windowsill, outside the drawn shade admiring the night air? Check the bathroom. Where did all of this blood come from? The switch turns again. Rusty contacts spark and pain flows like spilled water on live copper. You hold your hands over your ears and go days without saying a word because if you do not know who and what it is that is breathing in your ear, you can never trust a word from between your lips again.
Pain builds and abets and builds in the dark inside your folds. They eat at your body. Snack and taste and tear away this and that. They can hear you crying through the years, sniffing you out. One and then two and then too many to count and all you want is to reach back through that long stairwell, past the cobwebs, to hug your little body and press your round little face into your chest until you stop breathing, but you can't bring yourself to do it, so you hold yourself tight and listen to the echos rising to the floor above and the snick snacking shuffle of their footsteps trying to find their way down to where your body broke all those years ago. They come down those stairs and pull chairs near and wait and watch and some laugh and some pick skin out of their teeth with spare change or a bobby pin. Some draw little things in the dust on the floor with little fingers. Pain builds and you take it and take it until it becomes.
In the pile of ash inside the stone circle in the backwoods you failed to navigate and so made a bed, the weight of ignition is reached. The heart inside you, driven and compacted to a block of solid steel arctic ice, begins to burn again. Focus taken returns. It is only you. Yes, they are near, but it is only you holding the gun to your chest and the hammer falls and you exhale fire. The sun is hanging itself and all you need do is walk toward it to feel its heat. The air is not vibrating anymore, instead holding you the way you tried to hold yourself. Pain destroys until the scale goes so far it can only be described by what it creates. Clarity is a kind word. Control. Management. I know someday it will go somewhere we will not come back from. But that day is not today. Today, everyone is in their cell. Everyone dangerous enough to raise the hairs on my neck and make me piss into my pant leg and fill my left shoe. History never goes away.
Rebuild. Come back to us. There is no reason for this is the biggest lie you'll ever hear. Someday we'll be right and they'll see what it is that steals sleep from our eyes. It's been a long long while, but it feels like no time at all. Someday we'll have a necklace made out of their teeth, little holes drilled in them, fillings and all, with a little pink thread through them and the back ends in fisherman knots tied to silver clasps. That would be nice. Someday sweetheart.
10/10/12
Dear (_____)
Dear time,
Give me more of you. Or at least have some nasty good sex and some kids and let me be their godfather so I can hang out with them. But then it occurs to me they won't necessarily be just time, but might end up being time and space or something altogether worse. How about this: just light me up once in a while. I promise I'll answer the phone.
thanks.
Call me, bitch!
Give me more of you. Or at least have some nasty good sex and some kids and let me be their godfather so I can hang out with them. But then it occurs to me they won't necessarily be just time, but might end up being time and space or something altogether worse. How about this: just light me up once in a while. I promise I'll answer the phone.
thanks.
Call me, bitch!
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