That Instant

you look back at the countless system restarts, software downloads, years of physical and programming glitches, migrations from operating system to operating system, hardware failures, compatibility explosions, canyons of anxieties, quits, fear, fiscal shortfalls, bouts of rage, helpful hands, sympathetic ears, crying nights, hate filled days, and continents of time you've put in to trying to get the right graphics tablet with the functions you need that isn't near the end of its service life from the moment you plug it in and the tablet lights open their little firefly eyes, and the pen pressure is natural, and no batteries are required, and a twirl of its balance to bring the eraser to the page is as natural as the pointed tip too and you don't know what to feel because maybe something else terrible is waiting to happen and all will be lost overnight again including the money you could've used to buy so many other things, but damnit, it just works. 

it finally just works the way you've wanted it to, needed it to, and things are going to be a little different now, at least maybe ... the way they were before everything fell apart on you.

Dear (_____)

Dear pain,

You've taken sleep away from me.  The paranoia that breeds across my maps is all rooted to you.  I never know if the next morning is the morning when a swollen disk pokes a nerve or a frayed nerve get's caught in gravity's rotation and snips a cold bolt down one of my legs.  That paranoia, that anxiety, that never knowing if all of the days waking without you are a lead to some sort of crescendo two days long.  pERMANENT INURY BRED Memory. 

You don't scare me often.  I hope, when next you arrive, you bring some frost and ankle deep snow too.

huddled,

Hobbes

The Best Thing

about realizing your sense of humor is directly tied into the belief or disbelief in the supernatural and ghost stories are ghost stories as the starting ground and the turn of the gate always jams backward and that is unfair and that realization nudging you toward a shelf of acceptance...     no...

about realizing your sense of humor is uncommon is that they (some) will laugh with you.  Others will allow it.  Some of the caucus will grip their sides with glee.  Others will hold their chins and wag their horned heads.  And they all will be there to see you.

Dear (_____)

Dear cigarettes,

You got me again.  Another pack gone with nothing to show for it but discolored phlegm, chest pain, and a hole in my wallet where $10 used to be.  Fuck you.  I'm not going to quit quitting.  I know that you never really do finish quitting and that every week you can say no is maybe another day you might get to live when everything starts shutting down and the soul waves a finger "alright, let's wrap this thing up!"  I know childhood trauma already ate decades off the end of my life.  I know my line of work, my station in society, my genetic make up, and just day to day survival stress shaves years off what's left.  If I can avoid it, I'd like to not suffocate inside my own body.  I'd like to die doing something much more interesting.  So I'm not going to quit quitting just because I feel like absolute shit and burned more of my life away.  You'll come knocking again.  I'll turn up the radio and go sit in another room.  The porch light may be on, but don't wait up for someone to come to the door.

Later 'gator.

The Shadowman and the Irrationality of Humans

The common understanding is that humans are irrational.  You can leave off the "beings" part.  Instinctual?  Sure, yes.  Emotional?  Mhm.  Logical?  Ehhhhh... sometimes?  Reasonable?  By turns.  The common understanding is that humans are rational.  It's unfortunate that the base assumption is so.  Where it is born, who knows.  My thought is that the seed of the assumption is formed in the assumption that you are a human and you're decisions and behaviors are rational to you and have furthered your survival and existence so if another human exists their behaviors and decisions must be rational too because they are also surviving.  Something along those lines.  It gets reinforced all over the place from every angle and channel of input.  You get it.  You are rational.  Why would you choose to do something that would jeopardize your very existence?  You don't have a death wish.  You are alive!

Humans are irrational.  Please stop building arguments and drawing lines in the sand from the standpoint of echos reverberating from advertisements and observed actions sculpted into frameworks and canned calls and responses and your pasts and your futures.  We are not rational.  Beings?  Sure.  Yes.  Rational?  No.  Rational some of the time?  Sure, yes.  If you want to make it absolute, one or zero, then we are one.  No being or thing is rational all of the time.  Okay, some things are.  Coins are rational.  Geometry is rational.  Math is rational and even when it's irrational it's rational (I think... I knew mathematicians existed and played at the fringes... pretty sure that foggy math is still relatively...  okay, maybe not... you get the point).  Alright, everything is irrational!

In all seriousness, life has been very frustrating trying to understand why events bring out expressions of concern for well being and continued survival in strange ways.  The most recent shooting is not a tipping point, but mumbling to myself while I worked through the day and the following day was telling.  Enter vice and criminality.

When the argument is made that laws have to stay the way they are because the criminal element will find a way to get what they want regardless of what laws are or are not in place and the citizenry must be able to protect itself from this shadow force, I cringe.  That shadow is being cast from the rational mind inside.

Is there a criminal element in the human population?  Yes.  Is that criminal element rational?  Of course not.  The percentage of the human population that makes up that criminal element is extremely visible and equally small.  It skews perception.  How much of that perceived element is gratified and punched up by the echoed reinforcement of  "I am a rational human being and criminals are humans and therefore also rational."  It is incredibly basic.  If you make laws to prevent something from happening or encourage something to happen to promote survival, a lot of humans will see the outcomes, understand mutual survival, and continue to be.  Those same communal laws will be ignored by some humans for all sorts of reasons and interactions and protein chains and chemical reactions.  We are not rational!  As much as you want to believe it.

Let's bring it to weapons. I need to be able to purchase a weapon capable of defending my life against the criminal element.  The rational criminal will find a way to get the weapon they want.  I need to be able to get one capable of answering whatever challenge that may be and limiting my options is sending me to certain harm.  You're flinching away from your own shadow.  Life is insecure.  Life is irrational.  The penalty for your crime is twenty years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 40 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 80 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is consecutive life sentences.  It's the principle!  The penalty for your crime is death.  You don't understand how much I've been through!  The penalty for your crime - will never be able to influence some humans actions.  That population is a lot smaller than advertised.

So you have to carry a gun because if you were them you would have a gun and you are rational, unlike them, and you follow the law because the law keeps everyone alive and well and they'd have one anyway because that's what you would do.  You have to protect yourself against the irrational ones.  Sometimes it makes me giggle the way people perceive laws because we see their statements about them and wonder how much of their conviction comes from what they've observed and how much comes from the little voices inside their own heads that they mash and thumb down and keep inside because they are reasonable humans doing what's best for human survival instead of slamming the door shut on who they are only to have it pop open a slip with a loud screeeeeeeeaak an inch or two because the bolt didn't quite seat to the strike plate, but the door's hinges are stout.

Getting what you want, when you want it, when you need it, if laws and community prohibit it, is not nearly as easy as television and hearsay and books and articles make it sound.  How many times have you followed an instruction manual to the letter and failed?  How many times have you gone to a holiday office party to be sociable and improve your image and come away exactly the same as you arrived?  How many times have you turned right on a red lit intersection with a dedicated right lane lamp because you were late and the lanes were clear?  How many times did you walk fifteen minutes away from the bar to get a pack of smokes and fire one up on the way back to the bar because they didn't sell them there and disallowed smoking on the premises?  The easy stuff.  The forgivable stuff.

Ramp it up.  Imagine that gas station is thirty miles away.  Imagine that intersection has five cameras pointed at it.  Imagine that party was organized by you and you showed up fashionably late too.  Imagine holding that instruction manual in your hand, closed, as you flipped the switch to "on" and the entire K'nex set whirred, wobbled, and cracked to pieces in seconds.  Getting what you want, when you want it is not an easy task, but it's fun to think hypothetically as a rational human.

"If I were them, I could do that.  I would do that!  If we are to survive we must make sure that if they do that (they are rational because that's what I would do and I am rational) we can stop them."  No, you couldn't.  It's hilarious and frustrating at once.  If I want to do drugs, I will find a way to do drugs!  No, not really.  If it's convenient, why not.  The feeling may pass.  The chemical programming may or may not.  The decision making is tied to the chemicals and past experiences hard coded upstairs.  It may take a while to shift.  It may never shift.  If it's not readily available, fifty one miles is just too damn long to go get it so I'll stew and grind on with my life without it.  The rational addict goes to get it, makes a way, finds someone who knows someone who heard about someone that was seen somewhere once and goes there to meet them for lunch.  The irrational human stumbles on through the next day and the next day and sits down some afternoons to cuss quietly or aloud and does something else with its time until it becomes a little more convenient and sometimes reflects on why its so upset in the first place.  Sometimes it kills itself, sometimes it hurts others, sometimes it decides to drive fifty one miles to ask a question.  Sometimes it decides now is now and another day is another day.

It's guffaw disappointing when the shadowman is invoked as a reason to do or not do something.  The shadowmen are arming themselves, laws be damned; do you want me to die?!  The shadowmen are circulating drugs all over the place; what of the children?  The shadowmen, the shadowmen, the shadowmen!  Without laws keeping step with the threat of the shadows no one is safe!

Yes, no one is safe.  No ones safety is ever guaranteed.  That goes back to when humans had to worry about giant nocturnal multi-legged hunters stealing away their curious young.  People die.  People will be killed.  Someone may murder you.  Someone you know.  Someone you know may murder someone you know.  People find ways to get what they want or need and laws don't stop them no matter how much they have to risk or harm themselves to get it.  The answer isn't lowering the threshold from irrational decision to action.  Raise it.  Otherwise you might as well be trying to fix a hole in a canoe by punching more holes so that everyone is treading water.  If everyone is under threat of drowning we are all safe, right?  Another terrible analogy.  Believing making something proven and observed to be extremely hazardous to other people readily available to everyone to level an imaginary playing field is just flat laughable.

Why are you so afraid of the shadowman?

Who's been whispering in your ear?

How do you not see the upside-down superimposed on what you advocate for and not pause?

We are not rational people.  Hearing arguments bounce back and forth with real ramifications, buoyed by this ghost echo of an assumption of reasonable behavior, it's stupefying.  The invocation of this evildoer for all seasons with no regard for law or just basic basic basic irrational humanness is disheartening.  But we are rational people.  We will survive.



///The Shadow

The Best Thing

about not having your wisdom teeth removed is that the pain stops around 29 and if you chew gum with too much vigor part of it will get caught on a shard of berg and when you pull it forward with your tongue there will be a strand that you will tongue while you scrunch up your nose figuring out by touch where exactly it is because the last thing you want is to brush your teeth in the morning and have grainy chewing gum melding with the paste/saliva froth and you can laugh at 32 that the only hassle will be that.

That Instant

you realize you haven't showered in four days, but you also aren't exactly sure where the time has gone.

The End of the World Came, The End of the World Went

Do these people know how many times they've completely screwed up other peoples plans by making incorrect predictions about the end of the world?  I get why they do it.  There are a few reasons.  I think the main reason is because who doesn't want to be right about something that absolutely huge?  For the rest of time, what little there is left of it, you will be known and revered as "the one" who truly could see the future.  You will have the satisfaction of knowing that what you believed all of your life was worth it.  And maybe, in a farther reaching sense, the sense of if you are able to predict it correctly from enough years away, maybe you will have changed someone's life for the better.

Every time you get it wrong you really get it wrong.  As unhelpful as cults are, for the few ones that really do help people turn their lives around for the better (for whatever insane reason they're able to convince them to change), what happens when you're wrong prediction produces mass suicides?  I think that was the funny and also frustrating thing about this whole Planet X thing.

For a while, I was absolutely thrilled.  Finally, it's over.  How great is it that I'll be able to die!  We're finally checking out, baby!  Free of all guilt about what'll happen to the people's lives you've touched directly or indirectly and free from all sadness about the people that will actually miss you and free from the anger about the people that never had time for you, but will put on a show because they're emotional tourists.  It's over, it's done!  No more bills, no more trying to fit in or getting pissed off with trying to fit in and having to give the world the finger and go your own way only to be dragged back around to trying to fit in because that life gets exhausting and sometimes you just want a damn hug to get through another week.

All of our hopes were running high and the day came and the day went and nothing.  Just a big fat nothing.  More bills.  More bad deals from companies and services that know you can't really go anywhere else and are going to continue to screw you royally because ... well, where else are you going to go?  More stupid rhetoric from Capitol Hill.  More disappointments in policy making.  More losses.  More frustrations.  More "why the hell am I even bothering with this garbage."  We were all supposed to be reduced to superheated plasma two days ago.  Instead we've got more... more... what do you even call the new "this"?  What is this? 

Well, good talk.  I'm going to go to sleep and wake up, I suppose.  Adventure through dreamland until the sun comes up and those businesses open again and we all get on the road and start jogging toward our graves, or maybe just sit down and run out our clocks doing nothing, or try to mate with each other or ourselves.  Maybe I'll just read something.  Or listen to someone read something.  Another day gone by and the world is still turning.  I want out.  I'll wait my turn.  What's the hurry, right?  Not like anything else is happening in this arm of our galaxy.  Might as well go skip some rocks.




///Daedelus - "Special Re:Quest"  bed time.  but I'm not tired!  you've got to get some sleep sweetie.  try for me, would you?  will you leave the christmas lights on?  sure, nite nite.

Dear (_____)

Dear Anyone Writing A News Piece,

If the physical act of slamming someone or something has not taken place, you need to stop using the word.  The are so many ways to describe a difference of opinion or disagreement with nuance and hues.  There's a veritable rainbow of colorations of conflict in the English language.  Use it.  Nuance and shades of disagreements, imagine that.

'The term has been over used to color so many things that it has lost all reasonable semblance of tone regardless of context.  "Local man slams post office for bad service" as the title reads the same as "local man hopes sinkhole opens underneath local post office and entire staff burns in hell while demons eat their flesh"; meanwhile the actual content of the article is more along the lines of "local man doesn't much care for post office service and files gently worded complaint."  

Another headache inducing favorite: "coach slams players."  Just no, okay?  One hundred times no.  Not only was no one physically slammed, but all the coach said was that an appropriate amount of effort wasn't evident on the field or court or whatever and he wants to see more intensity in the next game or match or whatever.  He did not say his players were dog poo, he did not say he couldn't stand them.  I mean, have you ever slammed something?  The point in slamming something is to use enough power to potentially break it and create a powerful clap of noise.  

If we're going to go this route can we go all the way with it?  Can we see headlines like "Mom breaks parent teach association over her knee and sends school board to the hospital with 3rd degree burns" or "politician X works the groin of tax bill with brass knuckles" or "player skins coach alive and proceeds to wear bloody pelt in several later tweets over sexist equal pay remarks." 

I miss when slamming something used to mean something.  Don't you?  Find something else to suck the life out of.  

Thanks,

Fiction

Nine One One Two

"Every year, exactly this time of year."  Well every since and before.  The tension of the holiday season is already cinching.  Where will you go?  Who will you see?  Who can you adopt for family?  It does make me anxious.  Is alone okay?  OF COURSE!  Why all caps?  Am I crazy?  Did you hear that?  We've talked it over several dozen times and dozens of those more through the years.  Yes, of course it is okay.  No, you are not crazy.

"Pitter patter, my little heart."  It races from time to time.  Little panic attacks.  Solitary is the frontier and solitary it will be.  That's where you work best.  You'll still meet people and see families and couples and the like.  It is certainly less than the usual or equal.  Do not believe that holidays with yourself are anything less than their holidays.  They would be miserable in your concept of a holiday and you would be severely uncomfortable in theirs.  It's okay to peek between the slats from time to time.  That is universal.  Their anxieties are the same as yours with different window dressing and frames.  Rest assured, they feel something too and that is fine.

Nine eleven, however many years out, has changed a lot.  The rage of being denied enlistment has faded.  It only took ...  four ... seven ... shut up!  Far enough away to laugh about how I thought that idea could work.  Thinking back to the earliest years, it is funny to think that I thought I might've been able to make it by as a kept man.  Good god, I would've been far too bored.  Seven plus years separated from the bid to enlist, it has been reaffirmed one hundred times over that I would have gone insane trying to make a career out of it.  As a way to form a base and small nest egg, sure it could've worked, but my lack of mental stability would have failed spectacularly.  Maybe not the first year, maybe not the second year; the chances would have increased exponentially from day .0001.

I'm completely over the war on terror.  There are so many things that have come to light in the intervening time domestically that are so incredibly glaring and depressing.  So many more pressing internal wars that reached cease fires and truces without any actual resolution that are winnable & endable.  The fact that they still exist isn't the surprising thing.  It is.  Cultural change moves at a glacial pace.  As interconnectivity and access to information grows and shortens in its difficulty, the pace feels slower and slower because you can give a person a library of five books and a library of five thousand and it won't change how fast or slowly they choose to read.

Thinking about that day, I remember the anniversary that I couldn't remember for two years (was it three?) until I finally got it right.  Being in relationships is hard.  Do you remember the day you asked me if we were dating?  Kind of.  Is that today?  I don't remember the exact day, but I do remember being nervous as all hell and wondering about it for weeks and if I asked you and you said no would I ask you again or storm out or wait a few weeks and ask you again.  The day that you gave me a lollipop or the day of the formal dance?  Laughing thinking about it now.  I still cannot remember which day it was, but I know that it is a day to remember.  Wherever you are, I am glad that you know that you are loved and I am glad that you are with someone who is a part of you.  The years we spent were not for nothing.  The futures opened.  The years to come are their own.

Solitary progressions.  Nine eleven is also walking beside a cemetery.  A museum of displays and marble hand rails and floor tiles laced in sterling grout.  Rose and magenta tinted chrome and glass.  The past brought to life for a single day.  Compressed, labeled, and plaqued.  The westerly wing of the grand mezzanine of leTauran Atu Gothans, a 78 acre compound.  I don't visit there often.  About once a year, I try to look at the exhibits again.  Sometimes the maintenance men are about and they'll open up a case to let me get a close look at the taxidermy.  It is pretty amazing the way hairs are placed and tacked together to form entire swatches of skin that can stretch over the plaster molds.  The lighting isn't always great, but sometimes the exhibits are moved around to different enclosures to light them better.

I'm nowhere near a writing rut.  I can't stop doing it inside my head.  I have to take the time to do it outside of my head.  Part of how I've adjusted to protect myself from myself has been finding other things to do.  "If you can just stay distracted long enough!"  Out of focus.  I've been trying to do a lot in the physical world, however.  Trying to adjust to the modern world of smarter smart phones.  Trying to adjust to larger work loads and responsibility.  Trying to see the world with a larger lens.

Trying to see more possibilities and potential without getting swallowed whole in their ocean.

For some years, I mourned.

Part of me still does.

The deaths I died.

The deaths of possibilities.  So close to another and another friends birthdays and the lives that faded and blew out like candle wicks.  The scent of the smoke still fresh and undeniable and intoxicating in their aroma.  When does smell memory fade?

9,238 cigarettes before you lose your sense of smell, chief.   Oh.  Thank you, statistician?

I know I haven't been keeping track of holidays or birthdays.  I keep telling myself:  "we're just going to backtrack and bang them all out at once and get caught up to the now, piece of cake!"  That philosophy has fallen completely flat.  Of course I am beating myself up over it.  It is important.  Without consistent data points we cannot know where we are.  Holidays are perfect times for evaluation.  How the hell old am I anyway?  I need to take care of the backlog or at least try to ... at least let go of it.  That time cannot be restored.

Projecting a life span of 75 years with maximum outcomes: you live .205 years each day of your life if every birthday is a new beginning and a new iteration of yourself and you will only live a maximum of 75 years in each iteration.

147 days have passed since your birthday.  You are experiencing the rise of a new adult form convulsing through its last growth bursts.  You will not die soon.  200+ days until you return.  This is a strange time for you.  Adolescence continues to shed.  Try.  The carapace will split and you will free yourself for the wind.  The new skin will harden in the Winter.




Nine eleven is a quarter post of sorts.  So many things changed and so many things continue to.  Resolved to death, yes.  Resolved to its exact date, no.  In meta-jail, I have been granted so many larger and larger play grounds and exercise areas.  I've been granted larger and larger libraries and degrees to work and play on while I spend my time in solitary.  The clock is ticking on the next ring of the compound gates to open and I have to be patient while the paperwork runs through the levels of the office's in/out boxes and gets stamped and I have to go in for interviews and hearings and have good composure and appear civilized and remorseful and hopeful and aware and reticent and reflective and playful, but not too much, and deprecating and confident and ... all at once.  I don't have to do any of that.  I have to wait. I don't know how far out the compound goes, but I heard there is another gate over them hills once they fix to open this one.

As the years tick on, I learn how to be more like you and I learn what the differences actually are between us.  I know we are not the same.  Far from it.  It is incredibly reassuring, as we walk, to understand better what those differences are.

The mission: to leave a map for the next person that is at all like me.  "It's a great big universe!"

What helps get me through is knowing that I wasn't rejected as much as cast away.  There wasn't a fault as much as a rift in the known firm of space and time.  Blame dark matter.  "The stories you told were awful."  I hope that the maps will be artful.  You can only live but for so long with someone who is prone to spontaneous combustion before it changes from an endearing parlor trick to a recurring crisis.

Heave away!

Having an extra $200 shouldn't be life changing at age thirty two.  Something's not right.

Are all of your goals set so low that...  ...no.  Maybe?  Crossroads.  Is that all you wanted to accomplish?  Well, yeah.  For now.  It's pretty neat.  Hmm.  Hmm, what?  It's fine.  The door's over there if you need it.  I'm just saying-.  Don't let it goose you on the way out!

There is a lot of work still to be done and I am avoiding it.  Part of the reason why is because there are too many things I want to do at once and part of it is because I can only live for 12 to 16 hours a day without ending up cycling into spirals that will carry me up or down and anything that forces a deviation from that norm starts the engines that link and power chain reactions that will go in either direction and it is absolutely exhausting walking the rope and having to face constant failures because time ran out or constant failures because time drew on toward infinity.

I don't know what normal is to you.

I don't know what normal means to you.

Will I ever be?

Nowadays nine one one is a thermometer.  The potentials continue to cool while the core continues to spin and move plates and generate its own magnetic field. September, we dive through the thin layer of atmosphere and sweep and zip between billows of thunder heads, citywide lightning bolts and liquid metal rain drops against windscreens to land with the grace of a butterfly on the escarpment of a phase three elemental cave patio.  Grab our groceries, suit up, and walk inside to one atmosphere, proper oxygen mix that will not explode granted a match and cigarette, and turn on the satellite linked tele.

As the Septembers progress, I learn better what coming home means and what it means to me.  The distances will continue to grow and I will continue to fail at assimilating to common society, but in the meantime, I will explore more areas of the compound I was locked in when life began inside a cell.  It is a reminder that I am many years behind in my development and there isn't a time machine yet that will bridge that gap.

If this is the beginning of the solo-journey, I know I've spoken enough about being at one with the concept that life will be singular for the seeable future because I cannot ...... remembering the last time I was loved ..... laughing out loud.  Seven years and counting.  It really is dumb to expect to feel that again.  Think about it!  Let's say, one hundred experiences per day.  Five of them new.  Hell, one of them new.  That's 365 times your age.  No weight toward slate and how blank you were when you were young.  Now, to get an idea of the potential, multiply that by the people you've met that you can remember all the way to your earliest memory, just faces, not names.  You've met way more people than you can remember so it's still a gross underestimate.  If you spent the rest of your life meeting one new person a week your chances of recreating that chemistry are pretty much a lottery ticket.  Or you can recreate it.  The only person that will know is you.  That is kind of nice.  Or you can find something new.

The other thing is I really have no idea how to look.  I have some idea of how others look.  I have no idea how to look.  "So put yourself out there!"  Okay.  Sure.  That's the other odd thing: we have no idea if someone is looking.  Would it change anything if we did?  Probably not.  Secrets make terrible stories.

I think I would like to live with someone else.  Another human.  That day is not now, not six months from now, not 24, not 36, not four years, not four years and 14 days from now.  Nothing is wrong with me.

We're never alone.

It has a dual purpose.  In part to map and in part to guide and in part to track.  More of an organic willtuary.  A way to know that you have indeed pinched yourself and you are not dreaming.




///Marnie Stern - "Proof of Life"

Bonus Track

///Imogen Heap - "Daylight Robbery"