Bonus Track 2

waiting for the button to be pressed for the awesome release of good work to be done, good baby sweet barbecue jesus on a spit, push the damn button that turns that light from red to green, honey bear!




///Django Django - (Wor)  you have to know who you are wearing your leash for and when that alarm goes...  you know you have to go from zero to all in .2 seconds.  i hate waiting.  rumble rumble rumble.   it is not time to ring the bell yet.  i cannot wait for the next project to sink my teeth into.  it's gotten to a point of physical discomfort thinking about it.  i cannot wait to see the next house.  i am going to eat it with great glory by moonlight and teeth large enough to fit a megalodon skeleton

A Quick Thought on Authenticity and (ffs) Go Protocol

Knowing what you are and what you're not is where it begins, that's the baby step.  There's nothing wrong with being a baby.  Complaining let's you know, if you've ears for it, that you are not necessarily happy with the way things are or how they're going.  Everyone's a baby.  At some point.  Everyone complains.

The option is to take the turn or drive the motivation straight over the edge and hope you land somewhere nice.  Hope you land in something like a pillow factory or a bin of sand, or just anything more forgiving than concrete.  Take the turn.  Complain like a baby and then adjust.  You can take your authenticity to the grave with you or you can exist within it.  Sounds pretty simple.  It's a bit more complicated, unfortunately.  Sometimes you just have to realize that you are striped and a tiger and sometimes imaginary in a pack of lions.  Doesn't mean you have to be at war with the lions.  You're both after the same things.  There's nothing wrong with that.  You've honed your way and they've honed theirs and you're on the same field now so you have to learn how to play together effectively that you not step on one another's paws and sink teeth too close together on the same kill.

It's "go protocol."  It's trigger pull.  It's losing my train of thought and getting heckling from the rest of the committee and continuing to ball because YOURE NOT THE BOSS OF ME YOU @#$%S.

Fight through the noise.  Embrace the sound.  Love who you want to.  It does not matter if they love you back.  You have the right to love whomever and whatever you choose to, whomever and whatever you can't refuse to.  If they cannot respect that, it's their loss.  In a world lessed for loves lost, why waste it?  Let it fly.  Untenable as it may be, let it fly.  Let it fly!  Allow it to cross the distance that must be enforced for whatever reasons are reasonable.  Include a few that are not.

Remain authentic.  Stick to the protocol.  You have not lived as long as you have by ignoring protocol.  When the Go sign says go,  go!  Think twice, for sure.  "Fo Sho!" does not mean for show.  I can put on a fantastic show when I want to.  I can put on a show for the fucking ages.  Fo sho means for sure and it's pretty much a miniature pact.  A handshake and a signature of gumption.  With no risk comes no reward and you know what comes without whisk?  I do.  I'll give you another second to guess.  Time's up.  Without whisk you get a big old cup of pineapple pulp and undissolved sugar at the bottom of your pitcher of pineapple tea.  Gross.  Also, really hard to drink.

Obey Go Protocol.  Stay authentic.  Bow to be courteous, not to fit better.  If you win the single combat and fit well, you'll hate them later because they will know what you did.  They will talk about the event, if not active, in passing.  You will know too.

The combination is not friendly.  They are not looking for maps the same way you do.  The same way you are.  Do not expect assistance when you go.  Do not expect support.  Do not armor for resistance either.  You were invited for a reason.  You were on their wing for a reason.  That reason may not be for back up should combat come down.  That reason may not be for mounting an assault that day.  That reason may not be for humor or for "to hell with them"s.  You may never know what that reason's reasoning inside their head was, but there was a reason.

So go.  Go!  Stay authentic.  There was something asked of you.  Think about what you've asked of them in return by answering the howl.  The details will work themselves out, if they do.  The details will work themselves out, if they don't pull your card again.  Through the noise, through the fire, through the poise, through the ire.  For once,

allow yourself to see it their way and do not Chameleon.  Do not lock up.  For @#$%s sake, remain authentic.  Uncertainty is a bitch, be certain of this.




///Girl Talk - (Ask About Me)      chapter one...  still writing the jacket

Coming Back

Your customer service representative will be with you in a moment.  Please stand by.  We are aware that you are having some problems with your account and we very much enjoy your business and you are a valued customer.  Please hold while the next available representative ...

finishes their shit.  I cant slam my phone on the coffee table hard enough without breaking it.  I hate dealing with people.  I love dealing with people.  Nothing happened to me, everything happened to me.

Please hold.  I don't know what songs you like, but here, have this one.  It's an elevator and a stabilizer so enjoy it for a minute while we talk about your request and jump around it for a while and weasel.  Okay, that's fine.  I'm glad I chabbed up on something to munch.  I'll hold.  Please, continue.  It's not like I had something to grind on today.  Not at all.  I'm just blowing in the wind, but okay.  Please hold, please hold.

We are experiencing some technical difficulties, but here, this is the weather for the next nine days and 22 hours.  Here's the news.  In case you were wondering, nothing has changed so here's more of it.  Smile a little?   Here's more junk.  Here's what time it is and here are some pundits and here is some humor.  Here's some tosh and some cartman.  Here's bart and toys turned into cartoons and cartoons turned into toys.  Here's PBS and here's NOVA and here's are you being swerved.

Enjoy.  Here's ducks and hitler and dams and bridges and pawn shops and tits and dicks and marriages and food and chores and nannies and dads and children and scooby fucking doo and courage and beers and beers and beers and liquor and shampoo and lipstick and gloss and appliances and payment plans and retirement and cars and shrimp and outings and beef and socks and shirts and underwear and

I can't take it anymore.  I can't eat anything anymore.  I used to starve myself because I was paranoid about my weight and now I can't eat anymore because everything is getting shoved down my throat.  I can't do it. I can do it.  Everytime they ask me if I want to go out to eat I just fucking can't and I don't know how to explain it.    I can't eat anymore! Fuck.  I'm sorry, I want to and would love to, but I cannot fucking afford it anymore and on top of that I cannot digest it.  Fuck.  Sorry.  No.  No mores.  Can't do it.

Do you want to go to the bar?  No!  Do you want grab lunch?  No!  I'm buying some food at Burger King, do you want anything?  No!  No! No1  Stop asking.  Please!  At the same time, though, I run headlong into a problem.  How will you see them when they're not eating or barring or ... it burns!!!  It's not fair at all.  I'm trooping it and trying to be friends and I'm literally getting eaten.

However, nothing ventured, nothing gained.  I understand that.  At what cost?  At what fucking cost?  I'm coming back and I know I love to laugh and I know things can be easy, but I want what I wants and it's not expensive at all and I don't get why everyone is charging so much sometimes when all I want is a scratch off.  Jesus.  If I can navigate a day, alright.  Sweet.  Stop stomping on me.  I didn't want a fight, but hey, you got one on your hands now.  It turns me inside out sometimes trying to break down differences in understanding.  Yes, no one asked me to.  I get that too.

But if we're going to live on the same planet we better be seeing something close to eye to eye because otherwise you or I got's to go.  I've missed so many people for so long I just can't do it anymore.  I've accidentally estranged and shoved away some people too.  People that I couldn't afford to lose, but I was so wrapped up in being myself I forgot that the planet is a shared one.  I forgot about their knuckles and their dreams and tore my skin up and I'm just now getting back.

Pluto is great.  It's a fine place to stay.  Unlike New York, you can actually Winter over there and not get sick of yourself and population.  I don't care about being the first man on Venus or Titan, but I would volunteer to go if only to be alone and reasonably so.  Not needing a reason to have to be there.  Meltdown much?  I know I have a brain made of glass.   That's probably why she moved on.  Falling asleep in class wasn't an action as much as a symptom.  I wasn't born this morning, but I did stay up all night.

Shadow people.  Courage the cowardly dog.  My favorite color is still yellow.  I'll get there.  I'm coming back.  Out of orbit and nothing but gravity.  This is not my planet, but I live on it sometimes.  This is not my jail, but I walk in it sometimes.




///DJ? Acucrack - "Time For You to Leave"  ... turn the radio on, turn the radio off but you never never...  I don't know if thems the lyrics but this song is close to my heart.

Every Day I'm Shoveling

First of all, why is "every day" not one word by now? Or the various "every" constructions? If we as a people can come to accept "bling" as a word with real meaning, how can we not accept words with real meanings that don't lose those meaning with the space dropped out? A space between words is a fence between neighbors and fences are necessary. I'm not saying take out all the spaces and make every sentence a word, though that would be awesome. You could say what you wanted to say whenever you wanted to say it in like ten words or less every time. But instead of an organized neighborhood of streets and cross walks when you looked at a page you'd see a mosh pit. Every time you spoke to someone it would basically be you sharing your personal rave and trying to combine parties when they spoke back and that would just be... ...awesome. Also awesomely unintelligible. For a generation or two. Ultimately though it would probably make our children smarter, or at least allow them to think differently. It would change politics. It would make it pretty much impossible for foreigners to assimilate and then you really would need to learn other languages because that guy that only speaks Spanish or only speaks Cantonese would not be able to talk to you at all in broken English because the language would be so agglutinated and dense that it would be impossible for anything but an uncreased brain to grasp it with ease and build into it.

Second of all: why can't I sit in a park with a shovel after the sun goes down? That is just unfair. I walk halfway across town because I saw an awesome shovel out for trash and I forgot to go back and get it until the evening and besides my hands were full at the time. I walk halfway across town, granted I live in a pretty small town and get this nice, heavy handled, spade shovel that would be absolutely perfect for some yard work I'll have to do later and on the way home I cut through the local park and it's a pretty nice night out and the hills are all dotted with little Saturday evening fires of people in doors so I sit for a moment on a bench with my new sweet ass shovel, staring up and letting my mind wander over who those people might be and just enjoying the weather cold enough to drizzle the air with the smell of fireplaces. I've never had a fireplace of my own. I like to imagine what it's like. I saw a duraflame log once, one of those fake wood things for people who don't like to burn real wood I guess. Or maybe for people who like fire places, but don't want to do the things that having a fireplace requires you to do. That really is the story of modern America. I want things, but I don't want to do the things having those things will require me to do.

Anyway, I'm sitting there and a car comes rolling up real slow and I don't look back to see who it is. I know it's a car. I know that pebble crunch anywhere. I also know people don't like it when I make sudden moves, and besides I have nothing to hide. I'm just a dude with a shovel. I keep listening to this car rolling closer and then, in the background of my mind because I'm still thinking about the hillsides and the gorgeous night, but my head is also running through all of the sound clips of tires and pebbles and speed equations, I realize the tires are doing police cruiser and/or drive by speed and/or jump out and stuff in the backseat kidnapping speed. So I stand up and I figure one of those three things will happen and sure enough the flashlights come on and the questions start in and why the hell do you have to shine that shit directly in my eye sockets anyway. I have a shovel. I'm not running anywhere with a damned shovel. Or at least not far anyway. So now I know. It is officially not okay with society to just be a dude in a park with a shovel between the hours of 7 PM and 7 AM.

I haven't really been eating. Not my fault though. I have been eating. Because I'm pretty sure I give off this pheromone when I don't eat. I'm kind of obsessed with how I smell. I try to match it with what I've been doing and putting into my body. Not farts. Those are totally easy. I'm pretty sure you can tell how someone's body functions based solely on how their ears smell. Well maybe not solely. And you probably have to lick them like licking a nine volt battery to see if it works to get the full suite of diagnostic information available through smells. What am I talking about? I get lost in theory sometimes. So I have been eating some. Enough to keep things going, but little more. Mainly because my sink doesn't work and I don't want to have to slog all my dishes down six flights of steps to the sink that does work. Naturally the answer to that problem is: don't do anything that requires the use of dishes. So I've been skipping a bunch of meals. I don't really miss them. I do miss them in that it makes it a lot easier to stay awake. Staying awake has become a full time job again. Partly because of the lack of intake and hypermile-ing my body, but also because dreaming has been so incredible I can't help but want to be there constantly. It's becoming less of a second life and more of a single joined seamless in phase existence. You know people that complain about how they "already did that" in a dream and then like have to go to work again? That used to happen to me. Long ago. Now it never happens.

Of course I feel completely unrested because I am basically alive and in phased consciousness for twenty hours a day, but the people I've met and things I do... it's been ridiculous. Also pointless to tell you about it in those terms because you weren't there. Definitely a "dude I saw this movie and it was awesome, you should have been there, but let me continue to talk about the movie in terms of superlative adjectives because if I frame it in enough paper thin hammered gold you will totally be inspired by the blank space inside the frame containing the picture only I can see."

So the dish thing I learned from my dog, Jack, rest his angry, fun loving, visitor hating, best friend for life, little Shelty bones. We would go on weekend road trips and he didn't want to poop in the house so he would basically not eat or drink, though we always left him plenty of food and water, until we got back. Maybe it was equal parts "if I don't eat then I won't have to poo" and vigil for me. "That's giving an animal too much credit," shut your face. I can't give that old bastard enough credit. He was the man. Seriously. Except for his fear of thunder and lightning and his rage toward fireworks he and I were basically two of a kind and alternated top dog roles depending on the situation, but we were basically 1 and 1A. Learned that little trick of no input equals no output, body wise, from him. More bravery per pound than most people who are not also Marines. Probably more stupidity per pound, but we were, again 1 and 1A on that front too. If you are a cat person I don't hate you, but you have no idea what you're missing.

Which is why I should never be a parent. Me and my kids will be the baddest family on the block. Partly because I would be way too fair to them. With my dog, he would bring me a sock for tug of war and being like three times his size, maybe four if I just ate a couple burritos, the only fair thing to do was meet him at his level. I figured his teeth were probably a lot stronger than mine, what with his eating bones from time to time (never understood that, but I do have a propensity for walking around with spoons in my mouth), maybe four or five times so naturally I used my teeth for tug of war. If I lost a couple, no big deal, so we got it on. "I'm a take you down to China town!" That's how we threw down. Gotta be fair. So instead of setting a curfew I would probably tell my kids they can stay out or stay up as late as they want, but they have to fight me for it and if I win then they have to go to bed when I say. I wouldn't kick the crap out of them. I never actually hit Jack. I would scuff 'em a little. More like lioness to cubs kind of stuff. Only minus the breast feeding. Do they even do that? Or do they come out of the womb craving a hearty meal of lightly chewed, but still fresh, Giraffe. Instead of telling my kids not to go set fires, I'll probably stop them at the door and say something like "make sure you bring fireplace matches so you don't have to stand too close to the accelerant, because I'm not driving up to the woods to put you out." Sure, I wouldn't let them blow themselves up. I'm not a monster. But I will make sure they know how to set a charge properly and it would be the best father/son or father/daughter tandem ever. We will be feared. Probably. Anyway. What I'm saying is every day I'm shoveling so don't cause any problems and there won't be any problems. I'm just a dude with a shovel out for a walk.

Trying to get back to writing fiction, but it's been a long and heady road full of potholes. I'm not dawdling as much as I am reflecting. I wrote a fairly long draft of a science fiction short called Scanlon, but I haven't back over it in almost eight days now. I'm trying though. I apologize. I will try harder. Life's too short not to try, so don't spend all of your time "doing".


///Deadelus - "Taking Wing"

Retool and Industry.

I've been task locked, I will admit. Moving on to what? To separate things. I would think. The stars are up tonight. They're mapping me and it's good. I'm thinking about scarification. Or at least a more direct method of production. To accompany. Not so much an accompaniment as a new machine I can introduce to the factory floor and see if they'll pick it up and make good use of it.

I was trying to think of the last time I felt like I was the center of the universe and I can't really remember a time, but that's also probably because my memory basically ends around age 9. Which I'm thankful for. Evening running backward past 11 things basically get so garbled and hazy I'm not really sure if what I'm remembering happened then or earlier. I'm okay with that. If I could wipe everything up through highschool that would just be peaches.

Tomorrow will start a week of industry. I haven't declared one of those in a while, but it's past time. Let's talk about other things. Not to forget, but to make new memories. My time is short. My dreams are long. 4 hours. Not enough. Someone told me I need to get more hours at my job. Honestly, I'm terrified of that. If there's one thing I know about myself it's that we couldn't support that kind of load if we tried. Only so many channels. Let's do some living. Let's turn some metal. Let's not forget our new selves atop the frames still falling.

///Way Out West - "The Gift" the moon and the stars.

Where the Lost Things Go

Is sort of where I've been. In and out of dreams and stuff. I literally woke up in the middle of the night and there were kittens all over the floor so I did what any reasonable person waking up in the middle of the night to find balls of kitty cuteness everywhere: I started flailing around the floor trying to get them off of me. Turns out they weren't real. And it turns out I sleep on the floor. Hopefully that'll change soon.

In other news, the world is a fascinating and gross and scary fun place. I've sort of been in a project gridlock again. Turns out the answer to the gridlock was... I completely missed that. The source of the gridlock was that I've been looking for a place where I can simply spew information and I haven't been able to find one. I feel like my head is so pressurized with stuff that if I were to sneeze I would blow my fucking brains out.



In using google reader I feel there is an obligation to only share the things that you think other people may find interesting or helpful or possess some sort of value to them, be it comedic or otherwise. Therefore, if I am sharing things there, I am basically saying to people who follow me: I think you might like this. I ran into a similar jam when I found myself clicking the "like" button for every single thing I came across. The thing is, I do sincerely like the things that other people are sharing, but is the "like" button supposed to be reserved for the things I cherish?

For the most part it seems a fallout of the amplification syndrome for text based communication. I only type in "lol" when I do laugh out loud. I laugh a lot. Other people don't laugh so much. Am I obligated to adjust my own inputs to help people feel less patronized. I'm not trying to be creepy, but somehow I feel like others might misunderstand that I laugh easily as me buttering them up for ulterior motives. Not true. I just love to laugh and I love to like and I love to share.

To solve this problem I joined twitter. However in joining twitter, where I hoped I would find a fantastic outlet for the bits of things that keep firing off in my head that eventually stifle my ability to focus on anything, I ran into the same problem pretty much instantly. Am I just the guy with no filter? No. At least I don't think so. I filter a lot, it's just that so much more is generated that is interesting to me to say and hear aloud and hear other people say. I don't really want attention or specific responses or responses at all. I just want to see it outside of my head to remind me that my brain is still working and that I am not talking to myself. But therein lies another problem. Is it not okay to talk to myself. I hate talking to myself actually. I prefer to spit it out and then read it somewhere else so that it at least feels like I'm not talking to myself and that way I can sort out who is who upstairs. It keeps things organized. My major concern then, in this rambling analysis is that in being myself I will distance everyone because there is so much chatter and not all of it is important or relevant to them. In fact, probably twenty percent is relevant to other people. You people. The rest is important to me. None of it is garbage. I just don't have enough storage space to keep my mouth shut. And I am a little sorry for being so. A lot sorry.

Well, to help curb the rush I've decided to start a comic:



I have no idea what it will be about specifically, but mostly it'll just be where I talk to myself about all of the things that I don't talk about here (because I want this to be interesting to other people).

Life is full of so many questions and very few easily digestible answers.

with some exceptions. Mainly I was thinking about the whole "when is an artist an artist" question. That's when it struck me just how obnoxious a question that is. To ask for a definite quantitative boundary between the artist and the non-artist is to ask the question of if you cut a distance in half an infinite number of times, when do they touch? People have asked me if they were writers before and I've always said "you're a writer when you know there's nothing else you really want to do." I think a better answer, now that I've mulled it hard over the last few weeks is that you're an artist when you can solve art problems to your own satisfaction. You're a writer when you can solve writing problems to your own satisfaction. Same thing goes for photography.

What I'm saying is, if you wake up one day and you say to yourself "I want to paint a portrait" and then you sit down and paint a portrait and you finish it, if the thing you have when you are done makes you happy and satisfied that it is a portrait then you are a portrait artist. If, when you finish, you look at the thing and you say to yourself "it is like a portrait, but not what I would call a portrait" then you are not an artist yet. If you sit down to write a story and when you are done you yourself cannot without a doubt call it a story of whatever length or genre then you are not a writer yet. If you sit down to write a program or perform some chemical solution or diagram some molecule and when you are finished you are not satisfied with the result then you are not whatever it is you set out to be just yet. Maybe satisfied is the wrong word there. If you are not contented with the fullness of the work, allowing for individual levels of mastery, then you are not whatever it was you set out to be that day.

So now I know. I am an artist, but I am not a photographer. I am a writer, but I am not a scientist or an accountant or a manager. I am an athlete, but I am not in great physical condition. It's made life a lot easier to understand and has helped take the hesitation and judgement out of things. The community be damned, and I mean that in the nicest way, when it comes to personal qualitative judgments. I finally understand that if I keep looking to the community for approval I will never get a defacto answer until I'm dead and gone, and quite frankly I can't really wait all that long.

Anywho, where the lost things go is where I've been. I didn't bring anything back, but hopefully next time I'll spear myself a fine trophy to prove I was there.

///Luke Slater - "Stars and Heroes"

Something has just occurred to me as I close this entry; if I have no followers on twitter I have an infinite jar to pour the excess in. Maybe that's an answer. The funny thing is we're talking this over right now and there's an argument happening and I really just wish I could have a moment of quiet at an hour as late as this.

teh never ending story 02/15/07

Subject : teh never ending story
Posted Date: : Feb 15, 2007 7:36 PM

so. ive recently become acutely aware of the difficulty in ending aim conversations and im pretty sure its just me (so no experiments are planned). Aim conversations continue on and on and when you stop talking its not like you can walk away from the person. they're still 'there' in a metaphysical sort of way. its like having a table for two and you simply decide not to say anything to this person who is sitting two feet from you because there is nothing more to say. not that its a bad thing, but still its pretty awkard. i've literally spent fifteen minutes at a time wondering if i should close the little instant message box or leave it open in case they say something else.

i mean nothing is more rude than getting up in the middle of someone's thoughts and saying 'well, its been fun. bye.' no one wants to be rude. i think im just taking it all too seirously. like body language. i take body language way too seriously. i think its because my dad always comented on my body language as though it were some ultra secret window into what i was actually thinking. not true. body language is just like words. sometimes people gesture what they dont mean and sometimes people mean what they are not gesturing. the whole system is unreliable.

elizabeth is back. my life with her is like an aim conversation that wont quit for the right reasons. its kind of strange, i suppose. i never thought i would be in this position. i never thought this position would be a good one, but it is. the burden of proof is on me this time around and im okay with that. we are still as fiery as ever. we still fight sometimes. argue. yell. all that. but its good. i like it. i love her. she's the kind of opinionated, sometimes petty, sometimes wrong, always beautiful, sometimes moody, better than me at "things that matter" person that i want to be with. red aura and all. i feel kind of weird about the idea that i may marry her (being that i still havent managed to resolve the task of graduating, still do not have a functional resume', and still have absolutely no idea where im going to end up working or how much money i will even have a chance of making) but its a dream that refuses to quit and i like it.

speaking of dreams, i dreamt i killed a fat little boy with a hammer because he was weak willed. more on that later.

///hooverphonic - "pink fluffy dinosaurs" because when you meet someone that makes you do things you never thought you would you know that person means something more to you than your heart may have let on. also because its finally snowing like its supposed to and this song makes waking up to a winter wonderland of ice covered trees magical. as gay as that sounds.