Year End Playlist 2016

January - Phantogram - 10,000 Claps
February - Robyn - Fembot
March - Moderat - Sick With It
April - Discovery - Slang Tang
May - Bell - It's Oh So Quiet (Bjork cover)
June - Great Dane - Alpha Dog
July - Moderat - Porc 1
August - DJ Shadow - Mutual Slump
September - Unkle - Restless
October - Dan Deacon - Meme Generator
November - Philip Selway - Coming Up For Air
December - Miracle Fortress - Raw Spectacle

The honorable mentions in very particular order.  The higher up, the closer to the final cut.

Chvrches - Strong Hand
Santigold - L.E.S. Artistes
Lou Reed - Perfect Day
The Cure - Close To Me
Kanye West - Waves

This was a year that was supposed to be a statement of capabilities that flamed out midway and became a statement of resilience.  If you want to find the honorable mentions, they are out there in the woods with their own little fires to gather 'round, each one with different mothmen circling just outside their fire's light.  If you want to talk to them, you can find them.  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 behind your ear at the edge of peripheral vision.  Next time, do not wear sunglasses at night.  You can sense them by the flex of ember light.

I cannot remember the last time I saw every detail of a year coming before it happened.  This past year was close until I realized my map was flat and the Earth was a sphere.  With the year end look and this, the bookend to 2016, the only thing to do is look ahead to two thousand oh one and seven.






///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 same 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 a fire together.

Bonus Track

HOW CAN I PROVE IT TO YOU???  I am just like you.




///U*n*k*l*e - "Follow Me Down"

Hanging Up the Suit

It's an unfortunate, necessary, and beautiful time.  The time is the one to hang up the space suit.  The time to hang orbits closer than circumstance demands.  It's okay.  It's just Spring.  We'll get through it and to the dead and live wires of Summer.  It will be pleasant.

People will travel far and wide and countries will entertain them and landscapes you may never see will splatter across pages and it will be pleasant because they went there for themselves, but they cared enough to go there for you too and that's a neat thing.

Don't say proxy.  It isn't.  Don't get down on yourself for traveling that way though.  There is no shame in approximations.  Never forget that.  You'll have your chance for wanderlust, be it given or taken.  Wait, but in the middle times allow yourself to enjoy.

Laugh as often as possible.  Regardless of what you perceive, it is important.  Do not hesitate.  Explain later.  You'll thank me some day.  Or never.  Regardless, don't waste your time taking things too seriously.  Don't be a naysayer.  Be a slight naysayer.  Half of what is suggested is worth pursuing logically.  Half of that is worth pursuing purely rationally.  Half of that is worth pursuit in dreams and half of that is worth pursuing at the edges of plausible.  Half of that is worth pursuing in extrema and half of that is worth pursuing light out.  What's left is worth an idle thought, and half of that is worth creating in dreamland.

Dreamland is another story.  100% of dreamland is worth dreamland's pursuits, but what manifests inside dreamland,trickled down from perception is worth all dreamland can give.

I guess part of what I'm finding hard to believe is that I am able to be loved.  I am able to love, but I am not familiar with being able to be loved and am distanced enough from the lack of rationale to understand that there may be no actual actionable item or series of actions or stockade behind the signal.  No response found. None adequate to the task.

Formed structures of understanding maybe.  On top of that is the implied threat of compromising integrity.  How far am I, are we, supposed to go into the contract without a full understanding of implied risks?  I dunno.  I have no idea.  Can I be faulted for extreme reluctance, knowing possible outcomes?  It's not like jumping out of a window or spitting into the wind or pissing in an alleyway between two homes I have no part of.  Those variables are known.

It's tremendously difficult to hang up the suit.  I could've watched the last real snow fall for days instead of hours.  It ended.  So many questions.  So many tirades.  So much unrealized fuel and no where to burn it safely.

Are you really happy?

"Happier than I've ever been."

God fucking damnit, just tell me straight.

I still have the kill list (the capable list) for when I've gone as far as I can and I know that I can go no farther, freedom wise.  I look forward to its execution.  I look forward to my own progress too.  As far as it can be taken too.  I am sure, though not limitless, that's foolish, it is farther than I know now.



///Unkle - "The Answer"   days without headache.  I am trying very hard to make up and down of junk experience and important existence and meaningful relationships rendered dead outside of my hands for reasons I don't fucking know and do know and all the time all I really want is to leap from the tallest cliff I could find myself on some run and live to tell you about what it was like to hit the ground and survive.  We're hanging up the space suit for a while.  Not happy about it.  At all.

The Year End Playlist 2013

Everything that went cannonball 12 cylinder 600 horsepower through my heart in 2013:

Dec  Death Grips - Beware Go
Nov Macklemore - White Walls Go
Oct MC Chris- FTW Go
Sept The Knife - One For you Go
Aug The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army (remix) Go
Jul Vyle - Tech Go
Jun Nico Vega - Iron Man Go
May Nico Vega - Beast Go
Apr Nine Inch Nails - The Day the World Went Away Go
Mar Cookie Monsta -Bliss Go
Feb DJ Shadow - Mutual Slump Go
Jan Unkle -  Heaven Go

2013 is officially on the books.  Making a dual appearance is Nico Vego because I ate them that hard. Tis beautiful.  It's kind of strange to see the progression and how 2012 bled in to 2013.  The January selection is my favorite.  Almost put Marnie Stern on the list, but she did not make the year long cut.  Her and Gucci Mane and Killer Mike.  Still got a soft spot in my heart of hearts and Yeah Yeah Yeahs almost made the cut for a second year.  However, almost only counts in hand grenades and government work.

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.

Good Night

It was a productive night. Got some things done. Bits For Flames got an infusion of life. I still have to start composing the page indexes. Gotta do it by hand because there's no Wordpress to do it automatically, but that's okay. I'll start them later today. I feel pretty good about it. I feel calm. Almost undeservedly so. Be back at it later.

///Unkle - "Heaven" like sex with someone who cares more about you than you could ever care about yourself and you put it away in a box for a rainy day, though you can't remember the last time you checked the forecast or opened the pages of a newspaper and read about the rest of your world.

Fruits of a Labor and Where We Left the Bodies

I drew some pictures for you. I like the colors. I was in a kind of bloody soil mood and the taste was not to be denied so I didn't.

I don't know what to say today. It happens. I don't really know what I'm thinking tonight either, but I'm doing it with clothes on. Oh there it is. Found what I was asking for. There really is a certain security in sleeping with clothes on. It's a completely different quality of sleep. I feel a real security in the closeness of the clothing that at the same time can grow to be entrapping. Whatever. That's kind of stupid. When I sleep with clothes on I get hotter and hotter and then my dreamworld flies seriously out of whack and scary things happen in there and, not that I've been able to exercise control over the individuals and things that happen, but what security I do feel in the reality of the landscape dissolves into chaos.

Across the bridge of consciousness, the ground is just as firm and even more comforting in its expansiveness and unrestricted isness. Much more so than here. I prefer to be there. So when things get screwed up there by what happens here it becomes particular upsetting. Especially when the solution is as easy as taking off my pajamas and going back to sleep. Because the only limitation on the place is that I can't be there forever, I can't get stuck there like I get stuck here, its particularly aggravating to end up wasting valuable time. Its enraging.

At any rate, the public transportation there is strange. Not really screwy as much as it is that things come and go on the subway system that I sometimes prefer not to meet or see. Usually everyone minds there own business. I never used the trains there by myself because whenever I do I end up getting lost. Just the other day I spent the entire time I was there lost in the subway system. At one point I got so sick of trying to get the right train I climbed down off of the platform and decided to walk it and I don't know if those trains run at the speed of sound or what, but it took me five hours to walk between train stops and then, of course, by the time I got back to the stop I wanted near the apartment complexes I nearly get my legs cut off by the train I was tired of waiting for. I think that's really my only complaint about the place.

I was thinking about the best way to burn down a house with the people inside it without giving them a way out. It would take a lot of effort. It wouldn't be easy for the logistics of a floor plan and unless they were stone asleep they would probably hear you hoofing around in the grass with your arson kit and caboodle. Definitely low on the list of ways to solve problems.

We're altogether now and I'm happy for that. I hope it lasts forever, but I know it won't. Actually that's not even true. I don't hope it lasts forever. It just felt like the right thing to say to express the glowing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I know things have died up there in my head. But when they die they don't get buried. There's no cemetery up there. I should probably take care of that at some point. I wonder if that's the thing. When you finally die it's because your head is full of bodies and there's no more space for anything else to live. The casualties, relationships, dreams, efforts, ideas, whatever, all the bullshit that mattered to you and no one else that no one, including you, could resurrect with Dr. Frank and a million volts of Earth's pulse pile up and some people bury them one by one and some people have to bury them in mass graves, but they're there. I'm just glad they don't talk too.

The poetry has cut off in a new direction that I'm enjoying. It's stumbled on a rhythm I'm rather liking. Answers are as far away today as they were yesterday, but I'm not really looking for specifics anymore. I'm not sure if I should be. It's not that I want to care about concrete details of living a life, it's that I already care so much about things that so often stand defiant in the face of description and I'm focused on trying anyway because that's what is worthwhile. Maybe it's what I'm here for. That should count as something important. The cats came back. In lesser numbers this time. There was a day I thought I could see individual molecules of air. Turns out it was a whole bunch of blood vessels in my oculars. Is that a word? Things here would probably be so much more important if things across the bridge weren't equally so.



No fruits of the labor yet. Or maybe there is and I just have no idea where it lands. At any rate I'm content to keep doing dream work where the wild things are. Where up is up and down is down and I'm remembered by the people I've seen and I can go anywhere and the only limitation is my body and sometimes not even that.

Still planning the suicide diary. I know right. It is taking forever. I'm not putting it off. I just haven't been here to do it. Promise.

///Unkle feat. Big In Japan - "The Answer" ...perfect weather...

stray cats and dogs

as any stray will tell you "sometimes you eat the city and sometimes the city eats you". orrr well they could also say "sometimes you eat cat and sometimes you eat dog, but the important thing is to ... to uhm... eat ... something?" no that doesnt sound right. okay, starting over.

as any stray will tell you "sometimes you eat cat and sometimes you eat dog and sometimes animal control comes when you least expect it." the thing to remember though is to not use the word though too much cuz it links too many thoughts together into schemes that demand a certain countervailing quality of each other that is not always expressly present and can add a lot of processing time to otherwise simple conjunctions. the thing to really remember is that animal control's existence implies that animals cant control themselves. the challenge is to exert that control. the premise is that being a stray who is more often caged than free to roam can that control be reliably exerted. the conclusion is that it would make an interesting movie. the hook is what happens when the stray is permanently freed from the cage and are the cage wardens aware of what will happen.



well lets not go so far as to say will. every day of roaming is learning to control. where and where not to go. who and who not to talk to. what and what not to talk about. when to arrive and when to leave. and that learning cant happen from inside a room with one window, a floor cot, a bent desk, and more free weights than physical places to take my body with the strength they build. buuut i dunno im getting all muddy... am i really sure what will happen? not totally. but one thing i do know is we cant live if we're too afraid to die.

so i guess fire at will and from all sides. hunt the wounded, slay the dieing, and long live the god of all strays who lives neither by law nor moral. where did that come from? i dont know. in the pantheon of apparitions and visions im pretty sure ive seen him. maybe. philosophy has never been a strong point for me. probably a ticklish point. it smells here. sometimes your free to go, but to where?

how about enjoying the moment for once. there are times when i forget that moments are connected because i fight day and night for freedom from that chain and when i succeed everything turns into a beautiful and savory instant. the hard part is turning off the part of your brain that forces you into remembrance. i thought about crying the other day, but then i couldnt so i didnt. oh well. maybe this week is the week we finally get to meet each other for real?

///unkle - "safe in mind" not to start you off with another unkle track but if you listen to the end there is an excellent quote from the film "fallen" with denzel and john goodman (great movie in my opinion. dont let the budget fool you)


"I like the night. The street. The smells. The sense.. Of another world. Sometimes you come face to face with yourself" i wish i could show you through my eyes that the other world is.


but i still havent really explained where ive been. ive been gone, exploring, tracking, learning in other states. still no new home yet. im sorry i didnt tell you but a lot of bad things happened before i could get a chance to say a proper goodbye. but im back now sooo next time i go out to space ill let you know first.

well what the hell heres another one:

///dj danger mouse - "what more can i say" jayz's lyrics, beatles bricks, and danger's architecture. "we'll see what happens when i no longer exist."